The Spoils of Shame

The Spoils of Shame:

Queer Affect in the Works of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce,

Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf

Dominique D. Groeneveld

Dissertation

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at Brown University

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY, 2011

This dissertation by Dominique D. Groeneveld is accepted in its present form

by the Department of English as satisfying the

dissertation requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date ______Prof. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______Prof. Ellen Rooney, Reader

Date ______Prof. Tamar Katz, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Prof. Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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Curriculum Vitae

Dominique D. Groeneveld attended the University of Amsterdam, the

Netherlands, where she earned a Master‟s degree (Cum Laude) in the Department of

Comparative Literature in 1995. Her Master‟s thesis interrogates critical constructions of the law in Continental modernist writing. Between 1997 and 1999, she has taught in the courses in English literature at Houston Community College and the University of

Houston. As a graduate student in the Department of English Literature at Brown

University, she has specialized in the fields of Anglophone literature from 1900-1945, literary theory, and the study of gender and sexuality; on the latter, she has designed and taught a number of undergraduate seminars at Brown. She was the recipient of the

Florence Harnish Dissertation Fellowship and the Graduate Fellowship to the 2003-2004

Pembroke Seminar. She has also served as Graduate Coordinator of the Mellon Graduate

Workshop “Genealogies of Knowledges” and, from 2001 to 2005, has been the Graduate

Representative on the Brown Faculty Committee for Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender

Affairs. She has presented conference papers on Emily Dickinson, Henry James, James

Joyce, modernist affect, and queer shame at, among others, the 2001 and 2004 James

Joyce Conferences (London, UK; Dublin, Ireland), the 2002, 2003, and 2005 conferences of the Modernist Studies Association (Houston, US; Birmingham, UK; Chicago, US) and the 2006 NEMLA Conference in Philadelphia.

Acknowledgments

In the course of writing this dissertation, I have acquired a number of different, happy debts. Barbara Herrnstein Smith has taught me—through her work and, importantly, through her persistently giving engagement with that of my own—the value of critical practices that remain open to the possibility that one may not find what one was looking for—or find what one wasn‟t looking for. Her insistence that ideas and feelings can (and do) unfold complexly inspires the interrogations of shame in this project. I am indebted to her intellectual generosity, her more than capacious support, and for offering a model for the kind of thinker and teacher I can only aspire to become. I also thank Ellen Rooney and Tamar Katz for their crucial feedback, especially in the dissertation‟s initial stages of framing its literary and conceptual scope.

I have been sustained, throughout the past years, by the truly enabling commitments of queer kin, persons whose lives and works enact singular and, at times, invisible ties that lie beyond those of the biological family or oppositely gendered coupleship. From Stephen Barber, I have received the vital gifts—lessons, really, at once personal, pedagogical, and philosophical—of doing sisterhood well; danke, meine

Schwester. W.R. Duell and James Faubion are in, this respect, eminent Foucauldians, having elevated the latter‟s notion of “friendship as a way of life” into the art of loving generously; as such, they are the finest of artists. To Colleen Lamos, finally, I owe more than I can say. I thank her, most of all, for her confidence in what are deemed to be sub- human, or even non-human, states of mind that, she frequently emphasizes, encompass potentially surprising affective and other capacities—perhaps precisely

because those states of minds are closer to those of other species than to those of

“normal” humans.

Mijn bijzondere dank gaat verder uit naar Coen and Annamieke die, ondanks wat soms een uitzichtsloze en ondoorgrondelijke onderneming leek te zijn, op ontelbare manieren (en met zoveel liefde) hun steun en buitengewone loyaliteit hebben getoond— steun voor een voor hen ongetwijfeld mysterieus werk. Dat werk had evenwel nooit het daglicht gezien zonder deze prachtige mensen; met hun, de wereld is eenvoudigweg een stukje beter. Dit proefschrift is het eindpunt van een lange geschiedenis die begon met mijn moeders dagelijkse lees-lessen toen, op de leeftijd van zes, mijn specifieke vorm van linkshandigheid-gerelateerde leesblindheid aan het licht kwam. Het is een bijzondere ironie in deze dat dit proefschrift zich in belangrijke mate buigt over de vaak verbazingwekkende wendingen binnen cognitive processes. Haar toewijding—elke middag twintig minuten lezen—heeft ertoe geleid dat lezen, in plaats van een probleem, een grootse bezigheid werd, een toegang tot fantastische personages, verre tijden, nieuwe werelden. Mijn diepe dank aan Femie voor het feit dat ze nooit twijfelde dat haar dochter zou kunnen lezen en dat, decennia later, ze ook zou kunnen promoveren—mijn dank ook voor zo veel meer. Moeders zijn wonderlijke wezens.

Dit proefschrift is opgedragen aan mijn vader, die het helaas niet meer heeft kunnen lezen, en aan Joep, die het wellicht in de toekomst wel zal lezen.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Uneasy Dispositions: Modernism‟s Bad Feelings 1-25

Chapter One: Divas Falling Down: 26 -63 Shame in the Later Writings of Oscar Wilde and Eve Sedgwick

Chapter Two: “Theories” of Shame and Sophistication in Joyce‟s Dubliners 64-105

Chapter Three: Inverted Feelings: 106-161 The Well of Loneliness, Gay Shame and Male Honor

Chapter Four: Making Scenes: 162-245 Woolf's Experimental Affects in Three Guineas and Between the Acts

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i n t r o d u c t i o n

Uneasy Dispositions: Modernism’s Bad Feelings

For all its hauteur and sophistication, its cool impersonality, irony, and distancing experimentalism, modernism feels badly, a lot. In terms of its emotional disposition, modernism appears to be quite “low,” full of negative feelings, dysphoric sentiments, and other affective unpleasantness: jealousy and melancholia, for example (so capaciously combined in Proust); or envy and ressentiment (prominent in, among others, the worlds of Prufrock and Anderson‟s Ohioans); isolation and apathy (point of destination for most of Rhys‟s heroines, many of the characters in Barnes‟s Nightwood); irritation and discontent (of Joyce‟s artist as a young man), and abjection and disillusionment (of Mann‟s artist as an old man); alienating boredom (staged in the plays of Beckett); paranoia (think of Pound, Conrad, Lewis); and depression, disgust, as well as infinite permutations and combinations of the above (just turn to Kafka). Moreover, and this only intensifies modernism‟s affective malaise, modernists seemed to have had bad feelings about feeling, most influentially expressed by T.S. Eliot‟s call to “escape from emotion.” In his theory of an aesthetics of impersonality, he classifies and re-classifies feelings versus emotions, then new versus usual emotions, complex versus ordinary ones to finally arrive at the proposition that the modern poet rework the latter kind of emotion into “feelings which are not in actual emotions at all”—as if, by taking “actual” emotions 1

out of feelings, the latter become less, well, touchy-feely.1 To be sure, Eliot is envisioning a modernism that is devoid of the alleged excessive emotionality of Victorian literature, but his awkwardly articulated ideas also announce, even enact, an affective repertoire that is uneasy in and about feeling. And yet, as Suzanne Clark argues, the legacy of Eliot‟s impersonal aesthetics, especially in the New Critical emphasis on formalist and objective evaluations of modernist texts, has mostly resulted in the notion of an unfeeling, rather than an ill-feeling modernism.2

When scholars do address this “low” mood, they do so often in very general terms, attributing it to the fast and furious philosophical, scientific, socio-economic, and political changes of the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike the grand feelings of nineteenth-century fiction, such as sympathy and pity, modernism‟s dysphoric temperament thus appears to be more suited to relativist attitudes toward truth, belief, and perception (Einstein, Heisenberg, Bergson, Fleck, James), to more deterministic notions

1 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920), The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, David H. Richter, ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin‟s, 1998), 501. 2 Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 2-10. My point here is not to dismiss Eliot‟s underlying critique of the expressive model in interpreting and evaluating literature, of the tendency, that is, to confuse the literary text with the articulation of the feelings of its author. To be sure, Eliot‟s ideas (as well as John Dewey‟s subsequent definition of “aesthetic emotion” and “objectified emotion,” Wimsatt and Beardsley‟s concept of the affective fallacy, and the New Critical practice of close reading) aimed toward the formation and institutionalization of a virile modernism, distinct from popular (“low”) culture. Since the late eighties, though, feminist, postcolonial, and queer scholars, as well as those working in cultural studies, have radically reconfigured this monolithic version of modernism, so that such distinctions as high versus popular, masculine versus feminine, or civilized versus primitive are no longer operative, at least not in any straightforward way, in understanding modernist writing. However, Eliot‟s attempt, however awkward, to define the right kind of feeling for modern poetry already seeks to find ways to think about feelings in literature outside the expressive model, and, although from a very different set of motivations, this project ventures to do something similar. A departure from the expressive model seems to me particularly pertinent in light of the recent cognitive turn in literary studies, or, rather, the application of evolutionary psychology to literary texts in order to, for instance, explain how readers can feel what literary characters feel through a putatively ingrained “theory of mind,” as if there is no longer such a thing as language. See, for instance, Lisa Zunshine‟s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 2

of sexuality, subjectivity, and history (Darwin, Freud, Marx), to increasingly slippery distinctions between original and copy (or even between human and machine) brought on by modern technological changes, and to such horrid events as WWI and the rise of fascism.3 In his genealogy of the various strains of modernism, Astradur Eysteinsson argues that the poetics of impersonality and the more subjectivist aesthetic programs of

Woolf and Proust, for example, both problematize “the traditional relation of the subject to the outside world”; by way of such negative affects as alienation and distractedness,

Eysteinsson notes, they investigate the altered relationship of self to other, of the private to the public.4 To Theodor Adorno, finally, modernism‟s uneasy disposition is not the result of the modern crisis of the subject, but of the modern crisis of art itself. He writes that, in a capitalist society increasingly differentiated and segmented, art has acquired such a degree of autonomy that it is no longer able to effect any social changes, and it is the very awareness of its own “powerlessness and superfluity in the empirical world” that then, solipsistically, becomes the privileged object of art‟s “guilty” self-reflection.5 To

Sianne Ngai, however, modern art‟s very obsession with its own inadequacy and powerlessness (itself an affective and conceptual stance) is precisely that which “makes it

[uniquely] capable of theorizing social powerlessness;” it “may in fact be the ideal space to investigate ugly feelings,” she notes, “since the situation of restricted agency from which all of them [ugly feelings] ensue is one that describes art‟s own position.”6

3 See, for instance, Malcolm Bradbury‟s introduction to Modernism, 1890-1935 (London: Penguin, 1991). 4 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 28. 5 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge, 1984), 104, 225. 6 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2. 3

This project examines a particularly uneasy, yet highly prevalent affect in

Anglophone writing from the end of the Nineteenth Century until WW II: shame. A superficial glance at the mainstays of modernist literature already yields plenty of shame, and its affective relatives, including embarrassment and humiliation. In Mrs Dalloway, for instance, Woolf evokes the burning shame of Septimus Smith and follows its various articulations and inarticulations into her hero's death. Conrad's Lord Jim is another text deeply preoccupied with shame; it even wonders whether its eponymous protagonist—a man who abandoned a sinking ship—feels sufficiently ashamed. There is Joyce's Shem

(Shame?) the Penman, for whom the affect invites very perverse pleasures, and Proust's

Marcel with his rather exquisite nose for the embarrassments of others. The list goes on.

My inquiry here centers on the relationship between shame and what Michel

Foucault has theorized as the emergence of the modern homo/heterosexual distinction, of the discursive solidification of homosexuality and heterosexuality as separate and mutually exclusive identities. As such, this project is indebted to a now substantial body of scholarship that examines the charged ways in which literary texts of the first half of the Twentieth Century have responded to the lure and the threat of this new “species” of the homosexual.7 A number of scholars have identified Oscar Wilde‟s 1895 trials and conviction for “gross indecencies” as one of the pivotal moments in this shift, for, at that point, Wilde‟s effeminate self-fashioning came to signify, as Alan Sinfield argues, as the sign and symptom of his homosexuality and no longer designated a mixture of idleness,

7 See, for instance, the works by Joseph Litvak, Christopher Craft, Laura Doan, Anthony Lane, Colleen Lamos, Joseph Boone, and, of course, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick‟s formative Epistemology of the Closet, in which she writes that “an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition (Berkeley: University of Carolina Press, 1990, 1). 4

luxury, insouciance, and decadence.8 As a consequence, Wilde‟s literary work, especially its aestheticist sensibilities and Hellenistic ideals, posed particular challenges to twentieth-century writers.9 Gregory Woods summarizes the legacy of Wilde‟s conviction as follows: “pleasure and shame go together more or less automatically in post-Wilde trial references to male-male relationships: if the prospect of inevitable shame does not put a man off seeking pleasure altogether, his pleasures will be paid for with shame.”10

While the effects of Wilde‟s humiliation undoubtedly deepened the connection between shame and same-sex love, that connection is, I would argue, by no means “automatic” or

“inevitable.” Wood‟s assertion that shame has somehow become the affective content of homosexual pleasure, or, at least, is, since Wilde, inextricably linked to those pleasures is certainly not borne out by the texts I consider, namely Oscar Wilde‟s De Profundis,

James Joyce‟s Dubliners, Radclyffe Hall‟s The Well of Loneliness, and Virginia Woolf‟s

Three Guineas. Together, these works offer subtle analyses of the complexities with which queer subjects negotiate and understand the shaming discourses the encircle them as well as their own feelings of shame. As I will explore further below, such complexities do not register within Freud‟s drive-centered model of psychic life, nor do they signify

8 Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 9 Joseph Bristow shows, for instance, how Ronald Firbank and E.M. Forster are haunted by Wilde; the former inflates Wilde‟s empurpled style to the point that it both obscures and articulates same-sex desires, while the latter resorts to an emphatically masculine model of male intimacy, often involving working-class virility (Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1895 [New York: Columbia Press, 1995). In a similar vein, Christopher Craft argues that Tennyson‟s “In Memoriam” and Wilde‟s The Portrait of Dorian Gray felicitously exploit the slippage between male-male desire and identification, whereas the very possibility of such a slippage leads, in D.H. Lawrence‟s Women in Love, to the transposition of homoeroticism onto a “demonic” heterosexual plot (Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 189). For a historical account of the significance of Wilde‟s trials in homophobic and anti-German discourses in the years immediately following WWI, see Philip Hoare‟s Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century (New York: Arcade, 1997). 10 Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 220. 5

within the highly moralizing 21st century psychological discourses of self-help and self- improvement around gay shame. The works I examine in this project stand at a great distance from the latter discourses, but also from Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to affects.

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century theoretical discourses, in anthropology and biology, primarily focus on shame in an effort to identify distinctly human characteristics or to explore the civilized/primitive distinction. In “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872), for instance, Charles Darwin aims to demonstrate physiologically that blushing is an inherent attribute that distinguishes humans from other creatures. Havelock Ellis‟s 1903 Studies in the Psychology of Sex opens with a chapter on the evolution of modesty, in which he argues that, compared to

Victorian Westerners, “primitive” peoples have a “healthier” sense of modesty and shame with regard to nudity.11 In this century, anthropological investigations have, to a significant degree, fallen into disgrace, especially after Ruth Benedict‟s publication of

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patters of Japanese Culture (1945), which posited the distinction between Western and non-Western cultures as that between “guilt cultures” and “shame cultures,” and implied that the latter were therefore organized around more primitive affective ties than the former.12 This tacit privileging of guilt over

11 See also Carl Schneider, Shame, Exposure, and Privacy (Boston: Beacon, 1977) on nineteenth-century deployments of shame as justification for the “civilizing” burden of slavery and colonialization. 12 Cultural anthropologist have, recently, begun to study Benedict‟s work again and produced more nuanced interpretations of her ideas. A number of feminist anthropologists, moreover, have argued for the importance of considering the operations of shame and honor particular to certain societies and the complex gender dynamics those operations effect there. See, for instance, Nancy Lindisfarne‟s compelling essay on shame and honor in the Mediterranean and Middle East, “Gender, Shame, and Culture: An Anthopological Perspective,” Shame: Interpersonal Behavior, Psychopathology, and Culture. Paul Gilbert and Bernice Andrews, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 246-260. 6

shame actually also operates in Freudian psychoanalysis, which conceives of shame as a regressive or primitive affect and of guilt as the product of internalized values: the former emerges through disapproval from the outside, whereas the latter is based upon self- reflexivity. Implicit in this external-internal distinction between the two affects is also a gendered opposition. In fact, in his essay on “Femininity,” Freud mentions, as an afterthought, “a few more peculiarities of mature femininity, namely vanity and shame.“13 Subsequent psychoanalysts, such as Helen Block Lewis and Leon Wurmser, have further examined the association of shame with femininity, investigating this link around their putatively shared notions of falseness and concealment.14 Their revisionist studies essentially advocate a reversal of Freud‟s privileging of guilt over shame, since, they argue, the presumably social or external causes of shame render this affect more, rather than less, meaningful to psychoanalytic inquiries into processes of socialization and subjectivation. In my inquiry into the relations between shame and homosexuality in early twentieth-century literature, I have found these evaluations, and re-evaluations, of shame of limited relevance, on account of their generalizing scope (suggesting that shame—of what? for what?—works the same in all contexts, to all persons) and their static notions of psychic life (whereby what is considered a person‟s shameful difference from the norm must therefore automatically mean that he or she himself feel ashamed about that difference).

13 Sigmund Freud, “Lecture 13,” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Transl. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1933), 292. 14 Helen Block Lewis, The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1987); Leon Wurmser, The Mask of Shame (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1985). See also Francis Broucek, who argues that Freud related “shame not so much to the need to hide and protect the genitals, but to conceal genital deficiency. Shame thus became a feminine characteristic par excellence” (Shame and the Self [New York: Guilford Press, 1991], 12). 7

In her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, for instance, Radclyffe Hall draws a clear distinction between, on the one hand, the stigmatized status of her heroine as an unmistakable “invert“ (the sexological term Hall borrowed from Havelock Ellis to designate masculine lesbians) and, one the other hand, her heroine‟s own feelings of shame, which involve, if anything, her shame of not being inverted enough. As I argue in the third chapter, Hall‟s thick portayal of gay shame and humiliation—even the status of the novel as itself an embarrassment—requires a careful differentiation between the various objects of that shame, a differentiation that allows us the discern within the shame felt by Hall‟s protagonist her affective and erotic investments in enacting a distinct mode of masculine honor. Moreover, critical attention to the multiple and differing operations of shame in The Well (as experienced through the butch‟s interrupted attachments to particular norms of honorable masculinity she refuses to relinquish, as injurious interpellations of “inverts,“ as a rhetorical address) foster capacious evaluations of the relation between shame and homosexuality, evaluations that do not easily translate into a particular politics.

In this respect, this project engages with certain conceptual limitations that ensue from the post-Stonewall discourse of gay pride. Unquestionably, assertions of gay pride did and continue to do important and necessary political work; they establish queer publics and communities of belonging, and constitute crucial rebukes to the social and psychiatric pathologization of non-normative sexual and gendered subjects. However, the rhetoric of gay pride, especially in its implied juxtaposition to gay shame, also carries certain valuations of, among others, (gay) mental health, modes of individual and

collective emancipatory performances, and the workings of heterosexist ideologies.

Within such valuations, gay shame often signifies as indicative of a person‟s inadequate self-acceptance, internalized homophobia even self-hatred. They tend to reduce gay shame, in other words, to the status of psychic property, the sign and symptom of an individual's (defective) subjective make-up, or false consciousness.15In a number of recent popular and psychological works on gay shame, that shame thus becomes an obstacle to achieving mental health and modes of appropriate emancipation—an obstacle, that is, to achieving a set of assimilationist ideals simply not available or desirable to a great number of queer persons.16

Take, for instance, Kaufman and Raphael's 1996 study, entitled Coming Out of

Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives, and Alan Down's 2005 The Velvet Rage:

Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World. The authors of

15 See Daniel Wickberg's insightful analysis of the term “homophobia” (coined in 1972) as part of a larger shift in postwar American social thought, which examined social inequalities as psychological problems (“Homophobia: On the Cultural History of an Idea,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27: Autumn 2000, 42-57). In Pamela Fox‟s study on late nineteenth and early-twentieth working-class fiction, she shows powerfully how such constructions of shame—in this case, the shame of being a working-class subject—in terms of false consciousness can actually engender highly counter-productive tactics of working-class resistance. Fox demonstrates, for instance, that strategies that insist on unmasking false class-consciousness often result in “an overly determined act of „exposure‟” (Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working Class Novel, 1890-1945 [Durham: Duke University Press, 1994], 17). She also stresses the variety of sources of shame operative around class; for example, within the ideology of class-based resistance, working-class subjects are often shamed because of their bourgeois aspirations and desires, not because of their subaltern status.

16 The “gay shame” movement initiated in San Francisco in the late nineties by a number of queer activists entails, in many ways, a critical engagement with the assimilationist thrust of contemporary articulations of gay pride in American mainstream culture. Through a website and a number of happenings, these activists agitated against the capitalist appropriation of lesbian and gay emancipator y politics: the commerce of expensive gay-only cruises, the marketing of financial products to gays (rainbow credit cards), and even advertisements in which Ellen Degeneres proudly praises her recently purchased pick-up truck. Acts of gay and lesbian empowerment, the “gay shame” activists argued, have thus devolved into acts of capitalist consumption and, as such, have entered into the mainstream a non-threatening representation of gay and lesbians as bourgeois subjects, middle-class home and car owners, who are, needless to say, normatively gendered, and mostly white. 9

these popular works argue that what they perceive as the self-loathing and destructive behaviors of gays and lesbians are caused by and express internalized shame. Kaufman and Raphael advise their readers that the difficulties they have as gays and lesbians are the result of their unacknowledged shame, but promise them that by breaking through that shame, and the silences it produces, they will no longer be affected by it. In their utopian and somewhat circular logic, Kaufman and Raphael appear to have forgotten that heteronormative violence does not disappear when gays and lesbians shed their sense of shame. For Downs, it is pertinent that gay men to begin to admit that shame lies at the root of their “validation seeking behaviors,” and, once they have successfully applied that insight, they will, according to Downs, no longer be inclined to live in urban centers, have extravagant parties in extravagant houses, or be promiscuous. At that point, Downs writes, “[a gay man's] visibility in the gay community often diminishes. He is no longer a regular at gay clubs, nor is he active in high gay society. He may, in fact, no longer feel the need to visit the gay ghetto.” Downs concludes that “[t]his is unfortunate for young

[gay] men, for they are unable to see [in this] the healthy progression from shame to freedom.”17 Apart from the ridiculousness of Downs's proposal—the supposedly healing embrace of suburban, Bourgeois respectability is for many individuals just not an option—his analysis of gay shame demonstrates, if anything, the facility with which shame can be attributed to practices that have absolutely no necessary or causal relation to shame. Moreover, within this volatile logic of shame attribution, locating it as the psychic source of unhealthy or improper behavior, we could quite easily unveil an even deeper shame, namely Downs's own motivations for this restorative project. After all,

17 Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage (New York: Da Capo Press, 2005), 110-1. 10

what he celebrates as a gay man's achievement of freedom could, to other gay men (and women), signify as a deplorable demonstration of Downs's own gay shame. 18

I take these two works as examples of the very dubious consequences of a logic within which facile identifications of gay shame serve to legitimize denunciations of queer practices, interests, and styles that have, in principle, no relation to shame; in this respect, Kaufman, Raphael, and Downs effectively separate the good queers from the bad ones. To be sure, members of minority groups in particular may be embarrassed by the less-representative or overtly stereotypical performances of some of their fellow members, but that does not follow that those performances are themselves motivated by shame. There are, likewise, many aspects of Hall's representation of lesbians that from a number of perspectives (feminist, marxist—there are quite a few) are considered undesirable and highly problematic, yet that does not render those aspects automatically instances of gay shame, either that of the author or that of her protagonist.

In her 1995 essay “Shame and Performativity: Henry James‟s New York Edition

Preface,“ Eve Sedgwick presents a reading of shame in relation to same-sex desires (such as James‟s “fisting-as-écriture“) that undoes impressively such reductive and moralizing uses of gay shame.19 In fact, like Sedgwick, scholars such as Judith Butler, Michael

Warner, Douglas Crimp, Joseph Litvak and D.A. Miller have explored shame as a central, if not paradigmatically, queer kind of feeling. Contemplating the political

18 My point here is not to suggest that Downs's ideas are indeed motivated by gay shame, but to show that his logic is so comprehensive that it applies to virtually all practices or interests that, from a particular political or moral perspective, can be seen as unattractive or unhealthy.

19 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame and Performativity: Henry James‟s New York Edition Prefaces,” Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. David McWhirter, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 223. 11

efficacy of the term “queer,” for instance, Butler notes the term‟s importance in its ability to invoke a history of stigma as well as its promise to re-imagine and resignify “its constitutive history of injury.”20 This aligns closely with Sedgwick‟s understanding of

“queer.” She writes: “If queer is a politically potent term, which it is, that‟s because, far from being capable of being detached from the childhood scene of shame, it cleaves to that scene as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy.”21 To Warner, the experience of shame not only marks queer pasts but also structures a quintessentially queer form of ethics within gay and lesbian communities—“a relation to others,” he explains, “which begins in an acknowledgement of all that is most abject and least reputable in oneself […] Queer scenes are the true salons des refusés, where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they now recognize as false morality.”22 D.A. Miller‟s moving account of the affective intensities that Broadway musicals afforded pre-Stonewall gay men and boys emphasizes the continuity, rather than the disappearance, of shame in the lives of gay men and women. According to

Miller, the pains and peculiar pleasures of shame—“its senseless joy”—continue to structure queer lives, despite or perhaps because of post-Stonewall affirmations of gay pride: “No man could possibly regret the trade, could do anything but be grateful for it— if, that is, it were actually a trade, and his old embarrassments (including that of whatever

20 The term “queer,” Butler observes, “has operated as one linguistic practice whose purpose have been the shaming of the subject it names, or rather, the producing of a subject through that shaming interpellation” (Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” [New York: Routledge, 1993], 223, 228). 21 Sedgwick, “Shame and Performativity,” 210. 22 Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and thee Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), 3. 12

gratification he was able to find through them) has not been retained, well after the moment of coming out, in the complex, incorrigible, rightly called fatal form of character.”23

These valuations of queer shame have troubled a number of critics, since the theoretical stress on queer affective lives reinstitutes, according to Lauren Berlant, the bourgeois subject, in possession of a privileged interiority, and thus insulates the queer project from its radial, political critique of social and cultural formations.24 To Heather

Love, the Sedgwickian celebration of the transformational potential of queer shame—“its experimental, creative, performative force”—overlooks the sheer painfulness of a past

(and a present) mired in degradation and stigma. Love argues that queer individual and collective histories are marked by debilitating shame, which continues to traumatize gay people, so that the theoretical insistence upon the subversive qualities restricts rather than furthers the work of queer historiography and queer memory. “[This] redemptive approach to history,” she claims,“is informed by a need to shore up our own identity in the present; it is this a close relative of what I have called affirmative history, which seeks to confirm contemporary gay and lesbian identity by searching for moments of pride and resistance in the past.”25 While these critics raise valuable questions regarding the relationship between shame and power—or, more generally, between affect and politics—their objections to current queer theoretical valuations of shame amount to a

23 D.A. Miller, Place for Us: Essays on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 26. 24 Berlant makes this argument on a number of occasions, including in her essay “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” in which she questions why “the project of queerness [must] start „inside‟ the subject and spread out from there?” (Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark, eds. [New York: Routledge, 2002], 74). 25 Heather Love, “Spoiled Identity: Stephen Gordon‟s Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History,” GLQ 7.4 (2001), 496-7. 13

curious paradox. On the one hand, the focus inward divests queer politics of its potency as a radical, social critique while, on the other hand, the very commitment to an affirmative queer politics attributes too much potential to the experience of shame. To

Berlant, in other words, shame promises too little transformation of queer reality; to

Love, shame promises too much.

This dissertation proceeds from an approach to shame—as this affects relates in various and, at times, unpredictable ways to queer bodies, practices, pleasures, and interests—that tries to bypass, to some extent, such inquiries into shame as either a politically or ideologically subversive or reactionary force, or even as one that does some of both. Like Love and Miller, I am wary of appreciations of post-Stonewall queer culture as one beyond or post-shame, and my analyses of the “spoils” of shame in early twentieth-century Anglophone writing presume the continuous, though historically and discursively highly contingent, relevance of shame. Moreover, contrary to Love‟s claim,

Sedgwick‟s focus on shame as a “source of transformational energy” does not automatically suggest that the affect, to Sedgwick, therefore also functions to resist or subvert dominant regimes. If anything, as I argue in the first chapter, her ambition is to seek out conceptualizations of shame, and of affects in general, that circumvent the limitations of the repressive hypothesis but also the “massive intellectual blockage” she finds in Foucault‟s critique of that hypothesis.26 In her introduction to Novel Gazing, as well as in her subsequent work on Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein, she argues that both Freudian psychoanalytic models (the exemplary articulation of the repressive

26 Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106: 3. Summer 200, 635. 14

hypothesis) and Foucauldian ones mobilize critical gestures of demystification that leave out what she calls “the middle ranges of agency.”27 Within these middle ranges,

Sedgwick argues, we can distinguish not how people ought to feel, but how they do feel—how affects can qualitatively differ and change.

Herein also lies the importance of her work on Tomkins, whose singular explorations of shame stand out for their distinctly a-moralizing attitudes toward the affect. For instance, Tomkins‟s defines shame as a “specific inhibitor of continuing interest or enjoyment”—a definition I work with throughout this project—and, considering the “inherent freedom of the affect system” that makes that, according to

Tomkins, any affect, such as interest or enjoyment, can have any object, normative regimes will not themselves predict well what causes shame in one person and not in another. Moreover, Tomkins‟s qualification of “interest or enjoyment” as “continuing” implies that shame involves an interruption of positive affects that nevertheless stay in play. In light of this peculiarly tenacious structure of shame—it is attached to objects that refuse to detach—Sedgwick proposes that shame might thus also operate as an occasion for (re-)cognizing, or even “theorizing,” those “interest[s] or enjoyment[s].” Shame, she suggests, “can be a switch point for the individuation of imaging systems, of consciousness, of bodies, of theories, of selves, an individuation that decides not necessarily an identity, but a figuration, or mark of punctuation.”28 Intriguingly, Oscar

Wilde uses very similar terms in relation to shame when he, in De Profundis, writes that his address to “Dear Bosie” might “scorch” the boy‟s face, “as though by a furnace-blast,

27 Ibid., 631. 28 Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds., Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 22-3. 15

with shame”—that shame, Wilde remarks, might “prove […] a crisis and turning point.”29

In the second chapter, I read James Joyce‟s “A Little Cloud” from his 1914

Dubliners. Joyce‟s story centers on the encounter between Ignatius Gallaher and Thomas

Chandler when the former has returned for “a bit” of “dear dirty Dublin,” after having left

Ireland years ago to find his success in journalism on the Continent. Their conversation entails a series of shaming gestures, or, more specifically, Gallaher‟s performances of sexual and literary self-aggrandizement at the expense of Chandler; the latter, repeatedly referred to as “little Chandler,” thus emerges as an insufficiently masculine, sexually naïve colonial with pedestrian literary tastes. Critics have read Chandler‟s blushes to indicate these apparent deficiencies. By way of Tomkins‟s understanding of shame, however, we can glean Chandler‟s particular interests and enjoyments which involve, I content, a particular erotics of effeminacy. Moreover, throughout the narrative, Joyce‟s protagonist turns out to be a remarkably “weak shame theorist,” to use another one of

Tomkins‟s concepts through which he explores how affects operate by way of their own thresholds and feedback mechanisms as they interact, or “co-assemble,” with other (more and less permanent) physical, perceptual, and cognitive states and abilities. Tomkins asserts that affects function within variable and hypothetical “theories” that are comprised of a person‟s accumulated experiences and other acquired knowledges about affects and their occasions. Such “theories,” then, are not simply a set of personal beliefs or ideas about shame; rather, in the case of shame, a negative affect, these “theories” provide rules and strategies for recognizing and then reducing (occasions for) shame.

29 Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde. Rupert Hart-Davis, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 177. 16

Paradoxically, the strength of such a shame “theory” bears an inverse relation to one‟s ability to avoid shame; the very sophistication of a shame “theory,” after all, allows it to detect a large number of potential situations or sources of shame that, within a less comprehensive “theory,” might not be recognized and thus experienced. That Chandler‟s weak shame “theory” lacks the self-reinforcing operations of a strong “theory” thus renders it a highly efficacious one—efficacious in that it offers him a continued and continuing enjoyment of his particular interests. This is also part of the narrative strategy of this text to render invisible, in a way, the potentially shocking nature of those interests, for by, for instance, representing Chandler‟s nightly encounters with anonymous figures in dark alleys as innocent walks—as acts, that is, that do not occasion shame for this character—we can, likewise, read them innocently, so to speak.

Finally, in Joyce‟s negative portrayal of Gallaher, the journalist always keen to unearth other people‟s supposedly shameful secrets, we can see a particular aspect of

Joyce‟s engagement with shame in his subsequent work, The Portrait of an Artist as a

Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), as well as in his writings on Wilde. In these works, as Margot Backus argues, he “both makes use of and savagely parodies the sensationalizing techniques of the London-based „scandal journalism‟” or, what Matthew

Arnold called, the New Journalism.30 Backus writes that central to the operations of this

New Journalism was what she terms “a scandal fragment,” that is, “a reference to or evidence of some private act that, owing to its reconstitution as evidence in a trial or

30 Margot Gayle Backus, “‟Odd Job‟: James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and the Scandal Fragment,” Joyce Studies Annual. Volume 2008, 105. 17

other empirical investigation, becomes superlatively public.”31 She examines how Joyce, in Ulysses, where he connects the sex scandal with political martyrdom, “capitalized on the new relations of private to public that the New Journalism enabled, while vigorously contesting the New Journalism‟s scandalizing of collective, public identities through the publication of decontextualized private acts.”32 Thus, in the “Circe” section, Leopold

Bloom is dragged into court on the charge that he has defiled the sheets of Philip

Beaufroy‟s prizewinning story, Matcham’s Masterstroke, by smearing them with “the hallmark of the beast.” This recalls Wilde‟s position of having to defend himself in court in what the papers referred to as “the Savoy Hotel evidence,” a chambermaid‟s testimony that Wilde‟s sheets were stained with excrement. By invoking the public display of “shit- marked „sheets,‟” Backus notes, “the proceedings in „Circe‟ clearly gestures toward the ways in which Wilde‟s own writings, both public and private, were also transformed into

„shit-marked sheets‟ when they were used against him in court.”33

Backus further examines Joyce‟s essays on Wilde, including his “Oscar Wilde:

The Poet of „Salomé‟,” in which he discusses Wilde‟s singular aesthetic practices that include, importantly, also practices of aesthetic self-fashioning. To Joyce, this self- commodification rendered Wilde both famous and an object of cultural hostility, so that his public fall, Joyce writes, “was greeted with a howl of puritanical joy.”34 Through the figure of Gerty McDowell, who herself risks ridicule for her efforts at glorious self- invention, Joyce appropriates Wilde‟s aestheticist tropes of flowers (those rose-red lips

31 Ibid., 107. 32 Ibid., 105. 33 Ibid., 107. 34 Cited in Backus, 139. 18

and hyacinths) that designate desire. After her sexual encounter with Bloom, Gerty remembers his last glance through “an image [of a flowerlike face] that recalls Wilde‟s saccharine hyperbole, which,” Backus explains “is always at its sweetest when it is closest to raw sexual desire.”35In his essay on Wilde, finally, Joyce also seeks out strategies to undo the sensationalizing insertion of a private detail into the public realm, where it becomes an over-determined and decontextualized scandal trigger. He does so, as Backus shows, by citing (again) passages from Wilde‟s letters that were cited in court, but does so through “a symbolic re-appropriation of this material back into the realm of the personal and the aesthetic from which its recontextualization as evidence originally and shamingly dislodged it.”36

In De Profundis, as I explore in the first chapter, Wilde responds in complex ways to the scandalous operations around and within his trials. He actually comments, with great loathing, on Queensbury‟s procurement of what are exactly the scandal fragments Backus describes—Wilde‟s letters to Douglas, among others. Wilde clearly grasps the over-determined signifying operations that get mobilized when such allegedly revealing private secrets enter into the public court. He writes, for instance, that:

Had I cared to show that the Crown witnesses—the three most important—had been carefully coached by your father and his solicitors, not in reticences merely, but in assertions, in the absolute transference, deliberate, plotted, and rehearsed of actions and doings of someone else than me, I could have had each of them dismissed from the box by the Judge […] I could have walked out of Court with my tongue in my cheek, and my hands in my pocket, a free man.37

35 Ibid., 139. 36 Ibid., 140. 37 Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, 180. 19

While one could legitimately question if Wilde‟s envisioned disclosures of Queensbury‟s behind the scenes manipulations of the evidence against Wilde would have actually reversed the course of his trials, Wilde does point here to the centrality of the scandal fragment. His stated refusal to deploy it himself might signify a claim to the moral high road, but it also indicates Wilde‟s understanding of the silences and invisibilities produced by the “truths” these scandal fragments so overwhelmingly and publically claim.

I read Wilde‟s letter from prison as a compelling attempt to counter that silencing, for his conviction for “gross indecencies” and the concomitant interpellation as

“somdomite” [sic] did precisely that: it forever rendered invisible, because distortingly visible, his particular understanding and practice of the love of an elder for a younger man, a love that was never a private secret, but complexly and felicitously fashioned through a public personae. In De Profundis, Wilde seeks out a discursive space within which he can articulate a love outside of the violently stigmatizing discourses within which it had become “unspeakable.” He does so by deploying a strategy Sedgwick calls

“shaming and smuggling,” the complex—and tricky—simultaneous practice on inserting modes of visibility (smuggling) into the very process of disclosing the processes that turn them invisible. For this reason, I examine Wilde‟s letter alongside Sedgwick‟s “Interlude,

Pedagogic,” the essay in which she recounts her own acts of “shaming and smuggling” in a demonstration protesting Public Television‟s collusion with the exclusion of persons black and queer from mainstream representation. She describes how the demonstration, through its strategic use of the presence of the media, meant to smuggle the

representation of black queer bodies into the very site (public television) in which such a representation was denied. Within the “shaming and smuggling” dynamics of the demonstration, however, Sedgwick also observes how further unstable “circuits of representation” came into play—of non-black, queer bodies referencing black ones, of voices referencing slogans on t-shirts and placards. In De Profundis, I find in Wilde‟s act of smuggling a similar displacement of representation through the figure of Christ, a distinctly queer, even decadent “leader of all lovers,” who thus comes to reference

Wilde‟s “unspeakable” love. This displacement, though, from Wilde to Christ—whom the former describes as an outcast—is not a process of identification, but one that bears witness to what Sedgwick terms “a certain magnetic queerness” she herself experienced when she fainted in the midst of the demonstration. This magnetism, so “productive of deviance,” resides, she argues, in the particular pedagogies that come with those displacements; the latter involve occasions of learning from others—Sedgwick learning from gay man living AIDs lessons for living with her cancer—how to live more

“powerfully” with one‟s own “stigmata.” Through the displacement of Christ—who thought “that to be unpractical was a great thing” and “mocked at the „white sepulchres‟ of respectability”—Wilde, likewise, draws on that queer magnetism, suggesting to

Douglas that he might learn “the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.”38

In my final chapter, I return to the works of Tomkins and argue that his ideas on affect stand in an early twentieth-century philosophical tradition of what I call vitalist approaches to affective life, notably those of William James and Henri Bergson. While their individual works unquestionably carry the marks of their times, together they offer

38 Ibid., 240. 21

rich alternatives to the Freudian model and its limiting preoccupation with repression and oedipality. The centrality of the operations of the drives within psychoanalysis, which imagines psychic live through the hydraulics of the dual drives of eros and thanatos, reduces virtually every affect—or, for that matter a range of interests, behaviors, even creative acts—to the status of both manifestation and proof of those drives. Freud‟s monolithic conception of the drives, in other words, can not conceive of affective qualities that may be particular to those affects themselves. Within the vitalist models we find in the writings of Bergson, James, and Tomkins, moreover, we can also situate

Virginia Woolf‟s explorations of affect, especially those in her later writings—Three

Guineas, A Sketch of the Past, and Between the Acts. While Woolf was, throughout her career, highly skeptical of psychoanalysis‟s explanatory value—or its curative one--, in her work of the late thirties she sets out to radically critique the deployment of Freudian discourses, as they effectively work the maintain male privilege in the nation‟s public institutions. By way of her witty exploration of the discursive deployments of Freud‟s notion of “infantile fixation,” for instance, Woolf investigates the affective work this

Freudian concept actually accomplishes, namely the tautological project whereby certain ideals (of gender, nationality, character, etc.) are modeled upon certain bodies (male, propertied, white) who then get to feel pride in personifying the very ideals already modeled upon them. Moreover, to Woolf, Freudian psychoanalysis betrays its most harmful limitations in its evaluation of war and aggression as inevitable unconscious forces, thus constricting history and life to a repetition of the same. Writing under a darkening cloud of yet another war, Woolf‟s last two works nonetheless insist, I would

argue, on thinking modes of relative freedom and, relatedly, on imaging life in which, as yet, unpredictable new forms of kinship and community emerge.

With Bergson, Tomkins shares a preoccupation with precisely such modes of becoming; with James, he shares a highly dynamic and multi-layered model of mental life. Tomkins‟s understanding of affects as sub-systems that function according to mechanisms particular to themselves bring to mind James‟s notions of the various “laws”

(of “logic, of fancy, of wit, of taste,” etcetera) that work relatively independently from each other; the cognitive determination of facts, James argues, is but one “species of mental activity,” operating according to different laws than, say, the affection for one‟s pet, which would be, in Tomkins‟s terms, another sub-system.39 That those sub-systems

(perceptual, cognitive, affective, motoric) maintain relative independence--in their particular feedback mechanisms and thresholds—also means that, when they do interact, they do so along non-predictable and uneven lines. As a result of their “great combinational capacity,” then, affects thus engage both endogenous and exogenous states and events, and, as such, explain the virtually infinite ways in which people can feel about a virtually infinite numbers of objects, persons, memories, places, even other affects. This constitutes, according to Tomkins, a person‟s “essential freedom,” the freedom, that is, not of the autonomous subject (free from history, ideology, biology, and environment), but the freedom with which her of his affects relate to the contingencies

39 William James: The Essential Writings. Bruce W. Whilshire, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 10. 23

that “cause” them and that makes that the former (affects) can not be reduced to or predicted by the latter (their “causes”).40

This also links Tomkins‟s ideas to those of Bergson‟s theorization of life as the emergence of radical novelty. Bergson‟s philosophy of individual experience, and of evolutionary processes in general, is explicitly directed against at once mechanistic and finalist accounts of life, whose very presuppositions of living processes as either following a pre-given plan or as the directed toward a telos established in advance can not conceive of the emergence of radically novel and unpredictable forms of life and experience. Yet, what it means, for living beings, to exist is, according to Bergson, precisely the experience of time as the always open possibilities of the emergence of the new. In Tomkins, we encounter a similar openendedness when he discusses “the relative independence of sub-systems within the personality which makes it a perpetually open system whereby the past may be attenuated through the initiation of new perceptual experiences, new affective experiences, new ideas, new decisions, and new actions.”41

Within this vitalist genealogy—a genealogy that is, admittedly. odd, starting as it does with the work of a turn-of-the century allegedly mysticist French philosopher and arriving at the cybernetics informed studies of a post-WW II American psychologist—we can also place Woolf‟s experiments in thinking and writing affects in ways that foster new modes of belonging, such as the kinship between women and gay men, kinships that, if anything, register as mere pathologies in Freudian psychoanalysis. By way of her

40 Shame and Its Sisters, 45-6. For this reason, I use the term “affect,” rather than “emotion” to refer to shame, since “emotion” is generally understood to reside within the confines of a stable identity, whereas affects introduce qualitative differences that occur as change. For more on the emotion-affect distinction, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 41 Ibid., 175. 24

multiple uses of the notion of “making scenes” through which she retains both senses of the phrase—designating the denounced performances of inappropriate affects and acts of literary creation—I explore how Woolf, in A Sketch of the Past and Between the Acts, stresses the importance of contemplating future modes (and moments) of being that can not, as yet, be anticipated.

In 1920, Bergson gave a lecture at Oxford, entitled “The Possible and the Real,” in which he systematically critiques the concept of “the possible” and, instead, privileges the concept of what Gilles Deleuze has since termed “the virtual.” In this lecture,

Bergson recalls a question posed to him by a journalist some years earlier about his view about the future of literature. He writes:

I shall always remember my interlocutor‟s surprise when I answered, “If I knew what was to be the great dramatic work of the future, I should be writing it.” I saw distinctly that he conceived the future work as being already stored up in some cupboard reserved for possibles… “But,” I said, “the work of which you speak is not yet possible.”—“But it must be, since it has to take place.”—“No, it is not, I grant you, at most, that it will have been possible.”—“What do you mean by that?”—“It‟s quite simple. Let a man of talent or genius come forth, let him create a work: it will then be real, and by that very fact it becomes retrospectively or retroactively possible. It would not be possible, it would not have been so, if this man had not come upon the scene. That is why I tell you that it will have been possible today, but that is not yet so.”42

In contemplating future scenes that are not already “stored up in some cupboard reserved for possible,” Woolf gestures, in her final writings, toward their virtuality of becoming possible today. In Three Guineas, she writes that “there is a model in being,” which evokes a model of becoming, but, more importantly, one yet to come—perhaps.

42 Cited in Paola Marrati, “Time, Life, Concepts: The Newness of Bergson,” MLN 120 (2005), 1108. 25

c h a p t e r o n e

Divas Falling Down:

Shame in the Later Writings of Oscar Wilde and Eve Sedgwick

Almost exactly a century after Wilde‟s spectacular rise as a playwright and dazzling wit, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and his subsequent conviction for “gross indecencies” in 1895, Sedgwick published Between Men (1988), Epistemology of the

Closet (1990), and Tendencies (1993)—together, these works announced a new, exhilaratingly rich, complex, and imaginative mode of anti-homophobic inquiry that has since acquired the status of a theory, (a) queer theory. Not only do Wilde and Sedgwick stand a neat century apart, they differ in innumerable ways: in the particular contexts within which their writings emerged (Sedgwick worked within—and, at times, against— the institutional space of the Anglo-American academy; Wilde‟s journalistic, literary, and dramatic writings appeared within the turbulent terrain of the London literary marketplace); in the particular sexual politics that framed and informed their texts (Wilde wrote under a regime of increasing legal and medical scrutiny of “homosexuality,” while

Sedgwick engaged forcefully with the lethal, state-sanctioned silencing of the AIDS epidemic); in the cultural traditions and concomitant intellectual gestures on which they drew (by way of the late ninetheenth-century discourses of Aestheticism and Decadence

Wilde‟s style turns heavily upon the trope of inversion—privileging the underprivileged

term of a binary—whereas Sedgwick‟s deployment of poststructuralist and deconstructive strategies often effect a dissipation of the binary itself, especially in the abovementioned works); and, finally, in their disparate positions vis-à-vis nationality, ethnicity, and religiosity (the Irish Wilde who, upon his move to the imperial centre, professed to have “forgot[ten] his Irish accent at Oxford” and, on his deathbed, converted to Roman Catholicism; Sedgwick, an American born secular Jew who sought out

Buddhist concepts and practices to re-think modes of loving, living and dying in the face of a terminal cancer). These are just a few of the historically and otherwise highly contingent contexts within which their works—and lives—signify. Without question,

Wilde and Sedgwick inhabit worlds of their own, singular and remote.

In this chapter, I would nevertheless venture to read these figures alongside each other as both have, in their distinct idioms and styles, also opened up highly enabling modes of reading, thinking, desiring, and dissenting for sexual minorities. In a way, both

Wilde and Sedgwick have come to function as complex queer icons in the sense that their work and their biographies have rendered them “available for [queer] identifications,” whereby such identifications are, more often than not, predicated upon mis-recognitions than upon discoveries of the same, the identical. They have occasioned modes of queer self- fashioning and visibility, however compromised, and evoked richly imaginative possibilities of queer belonging—to families were aunties (“tantes”), uncles, not to mention daddies, do not designate biological ties of kinship, but relations of queer nurturing and cross-generational initiation; to a frayed history marked by the simultaneously violent and felicitous emergences of gay visibilities and invisibilities.

In Who Was That Man? A Present for Oscar Wilde, Neil Bartlett poignantly explores and enacts this function of Wilde, as the double meaning of “present” in his title suggests, evoking both the offer of a gift and the question of the presence (and presentism) of the figure of Wilde in late twentieth-century gay life.1 Of his attempt to summon a sense of belonging to queer “lives [that] were, like ours, supposed to be impossible,” Bartlett writes that “from [history‟s] gallery of its „characters‟ we choose the heroes who exert the greatest erotic or intellectual attraction—Saint Oscar, or the hardest, most anonymous boy.” He adds, however, that for all his research on Wilde, “I can‟t say of [the latter] that I got to know him […] I read all night, but he‟s gone in the morning.

Entering history like this can feel entering a bar for the first time; it takes your breath away.”2 Bartlett‟s encounter with Wilde (his writings, his biography), then, is one—a one night stand—with an elusive stranger; the record of the latter‟s absence in the morning is Bartlett‟s own breathtaking work through which he offers his readers a

“gallery” of “characters” (queer “heroes” of “the greatest erotic and intellectual attraction”) who, in all their obscurity and radical alterity, nevertheless accompany us/them to that particular bar for the first time.3

1 I take this reading from Stephen Barber and David Clark‟s observation of “the multiple ways […] in which the term „present‟ signifies” in the title of Bartlett‟s work. Barber and Clark find in this multiplicity a corollary to the complex temporalities in Sedgwick‟s work, which they locate, among others, in her highly layered and dense (in the good sense) prose (Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory [New York: Routledge, 2002], 41-2). 2 Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent‟s Tale, 1988), 216-7. 3 My point here is emphatically not an argument for contemporary constructions of a” gay Wilde” through the application of historically inappropriate identity categories, but an argument for what happens when we refrain from precisely such constructions. Sedgwick‟s own reading of “The Importance of Being Earnest” exemplifies such a alternative search for, as she puts it, “angles from which it might be possible to perceive the less theorizable resistances that Wilde may […] have been offering to these homogenizing modern(ist) interpretative projects” (Tendencies, 55). She proceeds to show how the “Name of the Family,” as the central signifier organizing meaning within the play, occludes the play‟s play with the late nineteenth- 28

In the 2002 collection of essays, entitled Regarding Sedgwick, a number of critics reflect on the impact of Sedgwick‟s thinking and writing on the academy, on contemporary queer politics, and on their own intellectual, personal, erotic itineraries.

That impact is frequently imagined in terms of the transformational intellectual and erotic generosity of her work. In “Capacity,” for instance, Judith Butler writes of “the experience of having one‟s thought remade on the occasion of reading Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick”.4 The latter‟s capacity, Butler explains, is that it “has made me more capacious;” “it has demanded that I think in a way that I did not know thought could do.”5 Moreover, Sedgwick‟s particular mode of reading, in which she often daringly explores and performs her overlapping identifications with and desires for an author/text

(Proust, James, Tomkins), has also incited her readers to, in turn, open themselves up their transferential and transformational investments in reading “Sedgwick.” In “Eve‟s

Queer Child,” for example, Kathryn Bond Stockton imagines a series of scenes of queer

(re-)production by way of Henry James‟s “The Pupil,” a story in which she discerns, among other things, Sedwick‟s portrait of (herself as) the masochistic child as “the quintessential pupil,” but also fantasizes that the latter—“mother to avuncular texts”—is the “real” author of James‟s story.6 Further blurring the lines of queer filiation and instruction, Stockton then situates herself as Sedgwick‟s pupil whose “mental [and masochistic] delights” lean “on a pedagogue whom one admires,” a pedagogue whose

century “gay-marked meanings” of “uncle” and “aunt,” non-biological avuncular relations, that is, that simply “don‟t add up to two complementary male roles” (59). 4 Barber and Clark, Regarding Sedgwick, 109. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 196. 29

“queer child” Stockton also promises to parent.7 Reflecting on the “peculiar combination of Eve and Henry James” as “my fantasy of academic parents,” Stockton‟s concludes that

“if asked, I will have her child.”8 With less bravura, but no less poignancy, Annamarie

Jagose comments on Sedgwick‟s gift to her readers of “a new license for what can be held thinkable.” To read Sedgwick‟s prose, her sentences, Jagose writes, “is to apprehend an uncommon sense: the pedagogical at the moment of its transubstantiative purchase. It is to register, beyond or behind the specificity of what is being read, the alchemy of one‟s own being made smarter.”9

What renders Sedgwick and Wilde of particular interest here, though, is their respective engagements with shame—in Wilde‟s post-conviction writings, “The Balad of

Reading Goal” (1898) and, especially, De Profundis, as well as the letters he wrote after his release; in Sedgwick‟s 1995 essay on James and performativity, her introduction, along with Adam Frank, to the Sylvan Tomkins Reader (1995), and her foreword to Novel

Gazing (1997), works on which she elaborates in her 2003 collection of essays Touching

Feeling which features, among others, a short piece entitled “Interlude, Pedagogic.” This essay opens with the startling sentence: “The most dramatic thing that happened to me in the summer of 1991 was when I passed out for television.”10 Sedgwick‟s turn to shame constituted an intervention in post-Stonewall political and psychological discourses whose propagation of gay pride, however necessary in certain times and contexts, also effected, as Stephen Barber and David Clark phrase it, highly “moralistic understandings

7 Ibid., 182. 8 Ibis., 196. 9 Annamarie Jagose, “Thinkiest,” PMLA 125.2 (2010), 380. 10 Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 28. Further references will appear parenthetically, indicated by TF. 30

of the nature of shame, understandings that are coarsely bipolar; either shame is the poisonous affect that disables the self-assertion at the heart of identity or it is the disciplining milieu in which immoral and criminal subjects are encouraged to come to their senses.”11 To Sedgwick, the implied notions of mental health, psychic life, and the operations of power in this moralist (and moralizing) conception of shame enact the debilitating circular dynamics of explanatory regimes governed by the repressive hypothesis, such as Freudian psychoanalysis. Within such regimes, something like gay shame signifies as the sign of an insufficiently liberated, psychically immature subjectivity. Even Foucault‟s powerful disassembly of the repressive hypothesis fails, according to Sedgwick, to offer an alternative account within which to think about affective life. In fact, she expresses her “inveterate impatience” with the exhausting routines of Foucauldian critical work.12 Foucault‟s analysis of “the whole range of

Western liberatory discourses,” she writes, argues powerfully that:

the main performative effects of these centuries-long anti-repressive projects may be the way they function as near-irresistible propaganda for the repressive hypothesis itself. Perhaps inevitably, Foucault in turn seems to me far more persuasive in analyzing this massive intellectual blockage than in finding ways to obviate it.13

11 Regarding Sedgwick, 25-6. 12 Eve Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106: 3. Summer 2007, 635. In this essay, Sedgwick turns to the work of Melanie Klein of the mid and late nineteen thirties whose ideas on affective positions she explores in order to sidestep the conceptual impasses she finds in Foucauldian analyses. She thus elaborates on her introduction to Novel Gazing in which she argues for readings from a reparative, rather than paranoid, position, readings, that is, that proceed “from the nonsensical but seemingly uncircumnavigable question of how people should feel, to the much harder ones of how they do and how feelings change” (“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or. You‟re So Paranoid. You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” Novel Gazing [Durham: Duke University Press, 1997], 2--emphasis in the text). 13 Ibid., 635. 31

To Sedgwick, Foucault‟s overpowering critique of the repressive hypothesis propels principally paranoid understandings of power and knowledge—those that rehearse the logic of „it takes one to know one‟—and thus effectively mirrors classic Freudian psychoanalysis in an “all-or-nothing understanding of agency.”14 What she misses in

Foucault‟s work, in other words, is a theory of psychic life that bypasses the centrality of repression (although one may legitimately question such expectations from a scholar whose primary focus, in The History of Sexuality, is to offer an analysis of the rhetorical structures of Western liberatory discourses).15 Such a theory of “the middle ranges of agency,” Sedgwick finds, instead, in the writings of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein, whose explorations of affective life avoid the “harmful assumptions” that inform psychoanalysis, including:

the defining centrality of dualistic gender differences; the primacy of genital morphology and desire; the determinative nature of childhood experience and the linear teleology toward a sharply distinct state of maturity; and especially the logic of zero-sum games and the excluded middle term, where passive is the opposite of active and desire is the opposite of identification, and where one person‟s getting more love means a priori than another is getting less.16

14 Ibid., 631. 15 In his later work, and especially in his later essays and interviews on friendship, Foucault does gesture toward the importance of thinking affective live in relation to the political and to possibilities that arise within “a multiplicity of relationships,” possibilities which render homosexuality “not a form of desire but something desirable.” Foucault then stresses that the discomforting potential of homosexuality does not reside in the sexual act itself, but in the fact that “that individuals are beginning to love one another.” “Homosexuality,” he writes, “is a historic occasions to reopen affective and relational virtualities, no so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the „slantwise‟ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light” (“Friendship as a Way of Life,” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Vol.1. Paul Rabinow, ed. [New York: The New Press, 1997], 135, 137, 138). 16 Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” 631. 32

While Sedgwick has written on a number of occasions on Wilde, in “Some

Binarisms (II)” in Epistemology of the Closet and in “Tales of the Avunculate” in

Tendencies, she only briefly comments, in the former piece, on the De Profundis and The

Balad of Reading Gaol in terms of the dynamics of sentimentality centered around the image of the crucified male body. She discusses Nietzsche‟s famous denunciation of “the seemingly irreversible relations of pity, desire, vicariousness, and mendacity instituted in the mass response to that image” and, yet, she concludes that those relations may actually be all too reversible.17 A denunciation of sentimentality may, after all, engender the attribution of an underlying sentimentality, along the lines, again, of “it takes one to know one.” “It may be,” Sedgwick writes, “only those who are themselves prone to these vicariating impulses who are equipped to detect them in the writing or being of others; but it is also they who for several reasons tend therefore to be perturbed in their presence.”18

In De Profundis, Wilde actually appears to perform this intractable logic. While he repeatedly summons the figure of Christ as an exemplary artist and “palpitating centre of romance” in whose orbit Wilde places himself, he also ascribes to Douglas the much less laudable vicariating gesture of submitting to the “infant Samuel theory,” that is, of reaping the moral benefits of being regarded as “the good young man who was nearly tempted into wrong-doing by the wicked and immoral artist, but was rescued just in

17 Epistemology of the Closet, 148. 18 Ibid., 153. 33

time.”19 He thus identifies Douglas as “a typical sentimentalist,” for the latter “is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it” (229). Wilde‟s wry reproof here of Douglas‟s self-serving sentimentalism recalls, to a certain extent, his critiques, in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1890) of philanthropic and charitable approaches to the problem of the poor, and those, in his letters on similar approaches toward the incarcerated. Such charity, he argues, may provide those who bestow it the luxury of pity or sympathy, but they do nothing to address the conditions that cause poverty, nor do they effect any changes in the structure of the prison system.20 Yet, in these works, Wilde focuses on the discourse of sentimentality as a highly problematic attitude to, and ineffectual model for, social change; reading De Profundis as itself a sentimental text, even in the most rehabilitative manner, does not, to my mind, allow for an inquiry into the particularity of Wilde‟s engagement with shame, and with affects in general.

In its language of feelings, De Profundis is distinctly pre-Freudian, and Wilde‟s references to his “soul,” his “sins” as well as his “moments of submission and acceptance” seem to stand far apart from his prose in his previous works in which his irreverent wit effects reversals and subversions (privileging surfaces above depths, art above life, pleasure above duty, artifice above sincerity, etcetera) and which, for that

19 Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde. Rupert Hart- Davis, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 211, 226-7. Further references to De Profundis and Wilde‟s letters will be from this edition and will appear in parentheses in the text. 20 Of philanthropists, he writes that with “misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.” Exemplary of such insidious altruism are, according to Wilde, the “slave-owners […] who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it” (“The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [New York: Harper & Row, 1989], 1079). 34

reason, has been so amenable to the critical operations of deconstructive and post-modern theory. Thus, Jonathan Dollimore regards De Profundis as “a conscious renunciation by

Wilde of his transgressive aesthetic,” an aesthetic he finds in The Portrait of Dorian Gray and in Wilde‟s plays. Wilde‟s prison letter, however, registers to Dollimore as:

tragic in the materialist sense of the world: a kind of defeat of the marginal and oppositional which only ideological domination can effect; a renunciation which is experienced as voluntary and self-confirming but which is in truth a self-defeat and a self-denial massively coerced through the imposition, by the dominant, of incarceration and suffering and their “natural” medium, confession. 21

While the content and style of De Profundis are unquestionably marked by the conditions under which (and against which) he wrote it, Dollimore‟s assessment of Wilde‟s

“experience” as “voluntary” and “self-confirming” as a mere effect of ideology ascribes to the latter a hegemonic force that leaves no room for, in Sedwick‟s terms, “the middle ranges of agency.” I wonder about Dollimore‟s presupposition that Wilde “experienced”

(misguidedly) his “renunciation of his transgressive aesthetic” as an act of free will, since

Wilde makes it quite clear—and correctly so—that his highly publicized fall had rendered it impossible to return to his previous life, his milieu, and the quintessentially

Wildean aesthetics that, since his trial, had become synonymous with an immoral sexuality and that, consequently, would find few, if any, publishers.22 The choice, so to speak, had been made for him. In an attempt to rescue Wilde‟s letter from readings, such as Dollimore‟s, that discern in De Profundis a sincere subjectivity absent from earlier

21 Jonathan Dollimore, “Different Desires: Subjectivity and Transgression in Wilde and Gide,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. HenryAbelove, Michele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 640. 22 Already during his second trial, Wilde‟s name was removed from the billboards of the theaters in which his plays were being performed, performances that, upon his conviction, were permanently cancelled . In the subsequent two decades, British theaters continued to shun his work. 35

works, Ellis Hanson‟s praises the letter as “a fine example of the Foucauldian reverse discourse.”23 Hanson argues that Wilde‟s particular deployment of the confessional mode is more a continuation of, than a departure from, Wilde‟s earlier contention that, if one has no sins to confess, one must invent them. Wilde, according to Hanson, self- consciously plays upon the performativity of the confession, upon the idea that the confession, rather than revealing a pre-existing self, constructs one. In De Profundis, he writes, “Wilde renews my faith in his contention that, even through confession, the romantic artist is the author of his own personality.”24 From this recognition of the constructedness or “artistry” of Wilde‟s confessional personae, however, follows

Hanson‟s argument that De Profundis is therefore a performance of an exuberance of pleasures. He claims, for instance, that “Wilde‟s highest moment—when he kneels in the dust, beats his breast, and tells his sins—is also a moment of consummate performative pleasure in which sensual indulgences are discursively reinvented as the splendid sins of the soul.” Hanson explains that these “sins are merely symptoms of a far more exquisite indulgence, namely the aesthetic pleasure of penitence.”25 To be sure, the rhetoric of the confession mobilizes the dual incitements of power and pleasure, but those incitements

23 In his critique of Dollimore, Hanson presents the latter‟s argument in, at best, an incomplete fashion. He cites Dollimore‟s claim that “in effect [….] Wilde repositions himself as the authentic, sincere subject which before he had subverted.” But Hanson then conveniently omits Dollimore‟s important qualification that “this [Wilde‟s repositioning] may be seen as suffering into truth, that redemptive knowledge that points beyond the social to the transcendent realization of self […] I see it differently—as tragic”—the explanation that follows I have cited above (The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 640—emphasis mine). Hanson does not explore Dollimore‟s point about the material and discursive contingencies that produced Wilde‟s “authentic, sincere” self, but, instead, arrives at a portrayal of Dollimore as a critic with insufficient Foucauldian credentials. One the one hand, Hanson wonders “how Dollimore, an anti-essentialist, comes upon an essential self that can „in truth‟ be defeated and denied is not altogether clear,” while Hanson, on the other hand, professes not to “understand how Wilde‟s letter, which is a fine example of Foucauldian reverse discourse, could possibly be dismissed along such Foucauldian lines” (Decadence and Catholicism [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997], 294). 24 Decadence and Catholicism, 293. 25 Ibid., 296. 36

are circular, at least if we follow Foucault‟s thinking, whereby the pleasures disclosed feed back into the power that questions and monitors them which, in turn, generates further spirals of “capture and seduction.”26 This critic might indeed be said to engage in a tireless pursuit of Wilde‟s pleasures, and we could read Hanson‟s exultant language

(“splendid indeed are sins he recounts” and “sin never gets much better than this”) to signal an itself pleasurable power to find behind the pleasure confessed an even “more exquisite” pleasure.27 This nevertheless does not address the more fundamental problem in Hanson‟s reading, which is that he effectively subsumes Wilde‟s anger, despair, shame, and resentment under the apparently monolithic operations of the latter‟s pleasure, as if the various affects Wilde displays in De Profundis can have just one object: pleasure. I would argue though that affects bear no such necessary relation to their objects; affect differ in their duration and come with their own thresholds and feedback mechanisms, which render them different from each other, as well as from the stimuli that initiate them.28 Without a close consideration of the particularity of the affects at play within Wilde‟s letter, in other words, Hanson may avoid interpreting De

Profundis in terms of a putatively authentic subjectivity, but, instead, suggests a remarkably monochromatic psychic model that leaves little room for qualitative differences between affects.

This becomes especially problematic when Hanson turns to what he calls “the dialectic of shame and grace” in Wilde‟s writings. He remarks on Wilde‟s intensified

26 /Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1978). 27 Decadence and Catholicism, 295. 28 I further elaborate on this what I call “vitalist” conception of affects in the chapter on Woolf, although, throughout this project, my exploration of affects aims to foreground their dynamicism, their habits, that is, of drawing on both endogenous and exogenous states and events. 37

preoccupation with shame in “The Ballad” and De Profundis; “the word shame,” he writes, “already closely associated in [Wilde‟s] mind with homosexuality, begins to burn on the page with increasing frequency.”29 It is, according to Hanson, “only the most polished gems in a constellation of synonyms,” a constellation which includes, among others, “humiliation,” “disgrace,” “guilt,” “ruin,” and “pariah.” Are these really synonyms though? In his examination of shame, Hanson fails to distinguish between the various ways in which Wilde deploys the term. As I will explore more fully below,

Wilde uses shame to refer to his vanquished social status, i.e. that of an outcast, as well as to his own feeling of shame, but also frequently resorts to the performative “shame on you.” The first refers to the shame of having been assigned what Ervin Goffman calls a

“spoiled identity,” an identity, that is, which falls short of or transgresses reigning norms; in Wilde‟s case, those would include sexual and gender norms as well as aesthetic and class norms.30 However, persons thus stigmatized need not necessarily also feel ashamed of that stigma for, as Goffman also points out, it is not so much an ineradicable sign as a

“virtual” category whose appearance depends on a person‟s ability to control and distribute strategically public knowledge about one‟s stigma. Considering the widespread and sensational press coverage of his trial and subsequent conviction, that ability was, of course, limited for Wilde. Yet, as Hanson himself notes, in Wilde‟s eyes,

“homosexuality per se is not shameful” and in De Profundis he does indeed never express

29 Decadence and Catholicism, 99. 30 Wilde jokingly insisted that “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” be submitted for publication to Reynold’s Magazine since it “circulates widely among the criminal classes, to which I now belong, so I shall be read by my peers—a new experience for me” (Collected Letters,313). 38

any shame about his love for young men.31 However, the shame that Hanson does find in this text and in “The Ballad” is “eminently performative” as it “is assigned, enacted, and rehearsed as an intense discipline and punishment of the body”; it is “more physical,” he adds, “since it refers to an affect,” which entails “the painful laceration of the self under the gaze of another.” Hanson thus seamlessly shifts from the attribution of shame to the feeling of shame, from the shamed body to the ashamed self, as if they are one and the same. It is also often unclear what the particular object is of the shame Hanson invokes-- when he, for instance, asserts that “in De Profundis [Wilde] wants dearly for the boy

[Douglas] to share in his shame” and leaves unspecified to what norms or acts that shame relates.32 Hanson‟s diffuse use of shame reflects, perhaps, the ways in which Wilde himself swiftly moves between displays of his own shame and assignations of shame

(and blame) to others.33 In fact, Wilde wryly comments on this very practice, noting that

“it may seem strange to you that one in the terrible position in which I am situated should find a difference between one disgrace and another” (157).

Wilde wrote his letter to Douglas between January and March 1897 when the newly appointed governor of Reading, Major James Osmond Nelson, gave him permission to have a greater number of books as well as writing materials at his disposal.

In a letter to Robert Ross of April 1st 1897, Wilde discusses what he calls his Epistola: In

Carcere et Vinculis and it is evident that the work was intended not for Douglas‟s eyes only. It contains, he writes

31 Decadence and Catholicism, 103. 32 Ibid., 100. 33 Hanson appears to suggest as much when he comments that, in Wilde‟s letter, “shame is revealed to be a highly unstable performance […] it is not a force of nature so much as a social frame of reference” (ibid.). 39

the psychological explanation of a course of conduct that from the outside seems a combination of absolute idiocy with vulgar bravado. Some day the truth will have to be known: not necessarily on my lifetime or in Douglas‟s: but I am not prepared to sit in the grotesque pillory they put me into for all time. (240)

The work, in other words, was to also be an address to “the outside” of a “truth” that would, posthumously, clear his name, or, to be precise, no longer “allow that name to be the shield and catspaw of the Queensburys” (240). In the same letter to Ross, he also insists that multiple copies be made of the manuscript befor it is sent to Douglas. Ross actually kept the manuscript and sent the latter a copy, though, interestingly, Douglas always maintained never having received it. In 1905, Ross published an extract of

Wilde‟s letter and titled it De Profundis. By removing all references to Douglas and his father, Lord Queensburry, Ross effectively excised the crux of Wilde‟s argument, for it is precisely through his particular address to “Dear Bosie” that he, seemingly paradoxically, works to remove “the shield and catspaw of the Queensburys.”

De Profundis is, I would argue, in an important way an exercise in what Sedgwick calls “shaming and smuggling,” the complex double gesture of inserting modes of visibility (smuggling) in the very process of disclosing the processes that render them invisible (shaming). In “Interlude, Pedagogic,” Sedgwick writes about this process in the context of “the complexly choreographed agendas and effects” of the contemporary demonstration, more specifically of the 1991 demonstration she attended, which was a protest against the refusal of the University of North Carolina‟s local PBS station to broadcast Marlon Rigg‟s Tongues Untied, “the first film on the almost genocidally underrepresented topic of black gay men in the United States” (TF, 28). By way of a

strategic use of the media, and of television in particular, the demonstration aimed to claim a representational space for black queer presence at the very site of its denial. She writes:

With the force of our words—referentially, that is—our object was to discredit the pretense at representing the public maintained by our local “public” broadcasting station, to shame them into compliance […] With the force of our bodies, however, and in that sense performatively, our object was not merely to demand representation, representation elsewhere, but ourselves to give, to be representation, somehow to smuggle into the prohibitive airwaves some version of the apparently unrepresentably dangerous and endangered conjunction queer and black. (TF, 31)

In his letter to Douglas, which was, importantly, also to be a public address—i.e. a work he meant, at some point in time, to have published—Wilde resorts to these dual ambitions of shaming and smuggling in a very similar fashion, although, of course, he does so under very different historical and cultural conditions. Wilde is quite explicit about the aim of his lengthy account of his relationship with Douglas and, in particular, of his scathing portrayal of the Queensbury family dynamics. “Your pale face used to flush easily with wine or pleasure,” he writes, and “if, as you read what is here written, it from time to time becomes scorched, as though by a near furnace-blast, with shame, it will be all the better for you” (177). This shaming works constantively in the sense that it refers to Douglas‟s highly instrumental use of Wilde in the “hideous games of hate” he played with his father: “you had thrown the dice for my soul,” Wilde observes, “and you

[Douglas] happened to have lost” (176-7). While you claimed you wanted to protect reputations, he continues, “you thought simply of how to get your father into prison. To see him „in the dock,‟ as you used to say: that was your one idea” (172). Wilde points to

Douglas‟s “fancy that it would have been an absolute delight and joy to your mother if

you had managed through me to get your father in prison” (173—emphasis in the text).

Wilde then advises the young man “to write to his wife” if “you want to know what a woman really feels when her husband, and the father of her children, is in prison dress, in a prison cell” (ibid.).

Wilde insistently foregrounds the ways in which he became a convenient instrument in the fight between father and son, who bolstered their mutual hatred through increasingly public “scenes,” flights of “epileptic rage,” and a flurry of notes and telegrams “of which even the commonest street-boy would have been ashamed” (175).

The purpose of Douglas‟s attacks on Queensbury and the latter‟s assaults on Wilde was not, he argues, to defend or to denounce his friendship with the young man (or the putatively noble or perverse nature of that friendship), but to further the antagonism that, ironically, clutched Queensbury to his son. “You scented the chance of a public scandal,”

Wilde tells Douglas, “and you flew to it” (179); the possibility, for instance, that the latter‟s father might “lose a few hundred pounds […] filled you with ecstatic joy” (ibid.).

Queensbury entertained similar ambitions for, as Wilde notes, “what your father wanted was not the cessation of our friendship, but a public scandal” (225). There was nothing, he tells his lover, of which “you drank” or “ate […] that did not feed your Hate and make it fat” (174). Wilde‟s assessment of the “blindness” (a term he repeatedly uses) and the escalating nature of this hatred actually recalls Sylvan Tomkins‟s description of the anger and its particular “abstractness.” According to Tomkins, anger is abstract in the sense that it does not “inform us of the particularities” of that which activates it. He argues that

“in anger, we need not know its activator to know that something is toxically stimulating, whatever else is happening.”34

Wilde‟s shaming of Douglas, which takes up the greater portion of De Profundis, might perhaps carry with it the equally self-fulfilling display of, depending on one‟s perspective, self-righteousness or self-pity, especially considering the note of doom and inevitability that attaches to Wilde‟s narrative of “the hideous tragedy” of which “you

[Douglas] are the true author” (177). Yet, this suggestion of inevitability also points us to

Wilde‟s assessment of the dynamics of the scandal, and a certain degree of path dependency those dynamics carry.

Ari Adut‟s work of “scandal theory” provides a useful conceptual framework here. Adut approaches the dynamics of scandals in terms of strategic interactions between a number of parties, including the transgressors, their associates, the authorities, and audiences. According to Adut, decisions to resort to scandal (or scandalous revelations) are, like those that aim to avoid it, based upon strategic calculations of the costs inflicted on the various parties involved. The avoidance of scandal, or what he calls the “under- enforcement of norms” may, for instance, aim to insulate associates of the offender, or the public, from becoming contaminated by the scandal.35 In fact, those very

34 Shame and its Sisters: A Sylvan Tomkins Reader. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 198-9—emphasis in the text. 35 Air Adut, On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 40. Further references will be includes parenthetically in the text. A telling instance of Adut‟s notion of the under-enforcement of norms is Lord Desart‟s successful appeal to a proposed provision against female homosexuality in 1921. “You are going to tell the whole world,” Desart argued, “ that there is such an offense, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamt of it. I think this is a very great mischief” (Adut, 43-4). The converse, of course, also holds, in the sense that, as Adut explains, “authorities or associates of offenders often sanction transgressions that they would otherwise accommodate only because publicity of the transgressions 43

considerations (as well as Britain‟s strict libel laws) explain, according to Adut, the relative “under-reinforcement of homosexuality norms in Victorian England,” compared to which the zealous prosecution of Wilde is “ostensibly inconsistent” (39), especially considering the playwright‟s influential friends and the weakness of the evidence presented against him. While Adut, a sociologist, draws on a thoroughly naturalized conception of homosexuality, his analysis of the three trials indicates that their eventual outcome reflected not so much “the consensus of a society regarding the offensiveness of

[Wilde‟s] transgressions” (41), but that it (Wilde‟s eventual conviction for “gross indecendies”) was the result of a chain of strategic moves, by Wilde as well as well as the authorities, to curtail the spreading contamination the Queenburys threatened to effect.

Wilde himself says as much when he entertains, to Douglas, the rhetorical question: “do you think I am here [in prison] on account of my relations with the witnesses on my trial? My relations, real or supposed, with people of that kind were matters of no interest to either the Government or Society. They knew nothing of them, and cared less. I am her for having tried to put your father in prison” and the latter

“completely turned the tables on me.” Adut shows how Queensbury‟s lawyer, Carson, portrayed Wilde as corrupting—and thus homosexually contaminating—the wholesome minds (and bodies) of the nation‟s youth. As proof of his depraved influence over young men, Queensbury‟s lawyer introduced Wilde‟s writings, including his allegedly perverting novel, Dorian Gray, as well as the works of undergraduate authors published challenges or contaminates them in the eyes of the public. Sanction functions more as signals of resolve or rectitude to the audience than as direct reactions to the offender” (Adut, 56).

in Chameleon, a magazine with which Wilde was associated and whose writers apparently betrayed his noxious sway over them. Carson further underscored Wilde‟s class transgressions, focusing on his relations with working class (rent) boys, and the age disparity between him and Douglas.36 Adut also maintains that Wilde‟s self-presentation and witticisms—his quip to Carson, for instance, that “I do not believe that any book or work of art ever had any effect whatever on morality”—increasingly signaled an attitude of imperviousness; he came across, according to Adut, “as an elite who was abusing his high status (and the artistic license that such a status conferred on him) by impudently, bare-facedly debauching the youth” (59).37Facing an increasingly hostile press, Wilde dropped the libel charges, even before witness were heard.

During the libel trial, however, Wilde‟s lawyer had recited from one of

Queensbury‟s letters in order to present evidence of the man‟s unhinged mind. In it, the

36 In his study of the sensational press coverage of Wilde‟s trials, Ed Cohen, examines the particular strategies with which journalists represented his “unspeakable vice.” Since libel laws prohibited the explicit mentioning of sexual acts, newspapers deployed, Cohen writes, “a virtually interchangeable series of euphemisms” (“disgraceful charges,” “wicked acts,” “terrible offense”) and focused obsessively on Wilde‟s transgressions of age, class, even nationality—transgressions that signified as metonyms for his sexual ones (Talk on the Wilde Side [New York: Routledge, 1993], 184). The National Observer, for instance, depicted Wilde as “an obscene imposter whose prominence has been a social outrage ever since he transferred from Trinity Dublin to Oxford his vices, his follies and his vanities” (cited in Adut, 63). By calling it an Irish vice, the newspaper thus summoned the specter of homosexuality as a perilous foreign influence, but could simultaneously claim to evoke a number of other vices habitually attributed to the Irish. 37 This shift in signification of Wilde‟s conversational style, his mannerisms, and professed affectations— from a marker of his aestheticist sensibilities to the symptomology of a depraved sexuality—is also what distinguishes his trials from other scandals, such as the Lewinsky one, Adut discusses. To Adut, Wilde‟s trials merely operate in terms of the scandalous operations by which a man‟s homosexuality became public. Yet, scholars of sexuality have argued that these trials should be situated within the late nineteenth-century epistemic shift through which “the homosexual” as, to use Foucault‟s terms, a “type” and a “species” emerged. Alan Sinfield, for instance, identifies Wilde‟s trials as a discursive turning point when male effeminacy came to signify homosexuality and no longer merely designated an idiosyntantic combination of luxury, insouciance, and decadence (The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Similar explorations of these transitive and transformative effects of Wilde‟s trials include Richard Dellamore‟s Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) and Linda Dowling‟s Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 45

marquess calls Wilde a “dammed cur and coward of the Rosebury type” and, in the process, accuses the latter of having instigated the “lifelong quarrel between my son and

I” (62). Queensbury refers here to his oldest son, Viscount Drumlanrig, who worked as the private secretary of Lord Rosebery at the time the latter was Britain‟s foreign secretary. Queensbury became convinced that Rosebery had seduced his son into a sexual relationship and, through incendiary letters to the Queen, Gladstone, even his own son, endeavored to publically discredit the secretary. In August 1893, he followed Rosebery to

Homberg, Germany, threatening to horsewhip him; it required the intervention of the

Prince of Whales to persuade the marquess to desist. Drumlanrig died shortly after— apparently in a shooting accident.

The reference to Drumlanrig worked greatly to Queensbury‟s advantage in that it reinforced the image of a protective father who, already having suffered the loss of one son, was now fighting to save his youngest one from the dangers Wilde allegedly posed.

Moreover, as Adut explains, it was the enunciation in court of the name of Lord

Rosebery, now prime minister and someone about whom sotto voce whispers of homosexuality were circulating, that, for a great part, determined the course of the subsequent criminal trials. The suggestion, uttered in public, of a possible Rosebery-

Wilde link, after all, “contaminated the authorities,” who were thereby compelled to prosecute Wilde with unmistakable zeal, so as to shield the prime minister and his high placed associates from further implication in the scandal and to counter suspicions that

Wilde‟s own elite connections were influencing the prosecution. Adut notes that it was on account of these “third party effects,” rather than the putative nature of Wilde‟s

trespasses, that “the costs of not punishing [him] dramatically increased” (61).38 In De

Profundis, Wilde frequently alludes to the effects of these efforts to minimize the scandal‟s contamination, when he remarks, for instance, that “in London [I] was naturally much bigger game […] than a Secretary for Foreign Affairs at Homburg” (174). By drawing this connection between himself and Lord Rosebery, he points to the structuring role of this linkage in his prosecution—that is, by situating Rosebery geographically at a distance from Britain (though this is precisely where the latter was then residing), Wilde evokes Rosebery‟s insularity as a consequence of which he “in London” became available as a target.

Moreover, the determination on the part of the authorities to, what Adut calls,

“signal rectitude” engendered a further, self-reinforcing dynamic between prosecutorial fervor and public outrage; in “their asperity,” he explains, the authorities “unwittingly authorized the press‟s ire against the dramatist which, in turn, only spurred the authorities to be more fervent” (66).39 They were thus highly motivated to uphold, as Wilde puts it,

“the account your father had put forward through the Council for the edification of a

Philistine world” (185). Queensbury benefitted from, and in part manipulated, the particular self-reinforcing mechanisms involved in scandal containment, though which he emerged as the respectable pater familias who rescued his son from a corrupting

38 Wilde was given the opportunity to flee the country shortly before his arrest—no doubt because no trial was still preferable to a trial whose contaminating potential required anxious management. That he chose not to join the sudden exodus of many men to the Continent may appear, in retrospect, an act of hubris, and many scholars have interpreted it thus. We might consider, though, that his decision to stay, however miscalculated. was informed by forces more complex than mere recklessness. 39 Consequently, the judge allowed highly dubious and prejudicial evidence, witnesses who were paid to testify, and provided the jury with leading instructions. When the jury on the first criminal trial was nevertheless unable to reach a verdict, the prosecution quickly proceeded with a second trial. For a full account of the trials, see Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 479-524. 47

influence. “Such was the irony of this,” Wilde writes, “that your father would live to be the hero of a Sunday-school tracts; that you [Douglas] should rank with the infant

Samuel” (85).

Wilde reflects in particular on the overdetermined discursive effects of this

Dickensian construction of his love for the young man. He observes with “some bitterness” that this “version [of that love] has now actually passed into serious history: it is quoted, believed, and chronicled; the preacher has taken it for his text, and the moralist for his barren theme” (184). The consequence of his trials and its outcome, in other words, is that it has transferred upon that “version” that status of “serious” fact that, thus legitimized as the “truth,” will be “quoted, believed, and chronicled” as part of the historical record. Moreover, within the prevailing legal, moral, and medical categories, a different “version” of the love of an elder for a younger man can now only be heard in a way that actually sanctions the validity of the already established one. Those categories,

Wilde repeatedly insists, can not possibly render intelligible the singularity of his love for

Douglas, or, for that matter, that of his love for rent boys. The discursive imperatives “of

Respectability in conduct, of Puritanism in life, and of Morality on Art,” after all, are

“dull lifeless mechanical systems that treat people as if they were things, and so treat everybody alike: as if anybody, or anything for that matter, was like aught else in the world” (213). Shame on you, he tells Douglas, for using their relationship in precisely such an instrumental fashion, for “in your war of hate with your father I was at once shield and weapon to each of you” (183).

And, yet, alongside this elaborate shaming of his addressee, Wilde also ventures to smuggle into a public space, circumscribed by the criminalizing and pathologizing discourses of moral corruption and degeneracy, a version of that apparently unrepresentable because “unspeakable” “affection [such] as there was between David and

Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy.”40 That smuggling involves a representation of or, rather, an act to himself represent that “affection.” “I have to write of your life and mine,” he tells Douglas, “of sweet things changed into bitterness,” but also “of bitter things that may be turned into joy” (153). We can fashion that joy (again), he proposes, in and through the realm of art, for that is the proper realm within which love between men resides. Art, after all, is predicated upon “wonder” and

“the imagination” rather than “habits;” it draws on “the dynamic forces of life,” not on

“the blind mechanical forces of Society;” and it “does not travel in the marketplace,” but is “useless” (216, 220, 181).41 Perhaps most importantly, though, art, according to Wilde, seeks out the new, the different, and shuns the flat conformity of the same. The qualities he attributes to art here, incidentally, appear to rehearse aestheticism‟s putative doctrine of art‟s autonomy from society, yet I would suggest that they actually signal art‟s potential to critically engage with the social and political so as to explore new, more enabling modes of self-fashioning. In fact, in Wilde‟s 1890 “The Soul of Man under

Socialism,” he assigns to art the very same qualities in postulating both it and socialism as complementary projects in their departure from a homogenizing mainstream. Art, he

40 This is one of the phrases Wilde used in court when asked to explain “the love that dare not speak its name.” Cited in Ellman, 463. 41 “How I loathed,” Wilde declares, “your regarding me as a useful person, how no artist wishes to be so regarded or treated; artists, like art itself, being of their essence quite useless” (228—emphasis Wilde‟s). 49

argues in this essay, partakes in the socialist dream, “for what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to a machine.”42 He also emphasizes the orientation of the aesthetic impulse toward difference, against similitude, thus figuring it a form of disobedience, as it refuses the leveling, legislative mediations of the State to in order to attain a “true” freedom that

“will not always be meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love then because they are different.”43

In De Profundis, Wilde introduces Christ as at once an exemplary figure for the artist (of, importantly, the Romantic kind as opposed to the Realist one) and the

“palpitating center of romance” (211).44 He sees Christ as “the true precursor of the

Romantic movement” as his “place indeed is with the poets” (205). To him we owe,

Wilde asserts, “Hugo‟s Les Misérables, Baudelaire‟s Fleurs du Mal” as well as “Verlaine and Verlaine‟s poems, the troubled romantic marbles of Michel Angelo” and “the love of flowers and children” (210).”The most supreme of individualists” (207), Christ was, according to Wilde, the first to tell “people that they should live „flower-like‟ lives”

(213). Moreover, “the very basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the

42 Oscar Wilde, The Collected Work of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997), 909. Wilde‟s language in both “The Soul” and De Profundis sounds, at times, remarkably Bergsonian, in its critique of mechanical conceptions of life in favor of an understanding of life as a dynamic force (the very argument Bergson makes in Time and Free Will and Creative evolution). In De Profundis, Wilde also refers to the eye and the ear as “channels for the transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense-impressions.” “It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.” Again, this recalls Bergson‟s explorations, in Matter and Memory, how the human perceptual apparatus conditions experiences of color, smell, etc. in their qualitative differences. It is, however, not established that Wilde studied Bergson‟s work. For a fuller discussion of Bergson‟s philosophy, I refer to the fourth chapter. 43 Ibid., 903. 44 Wilde describes the moment when his lover left “the morning dawn of boyhood with its delicate bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence and joy” as Douglas‟s passage “from Romance to Realism” (153), as a passage, in other words, into a discursive domain antithetical to their love. 50

artist, an intense and flamelike imagination” (205). After all, he explains, Christ “felt that life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form was death” (213). In Christ‟s impatience with “the dull mechanical systems” and “laws,” “he is just like a work of art himself. He does not really teach one something, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something” (215).

The Jesus that thus emerges in Wilde‟s portrayal bears more resemblance to the decadent artist than to the son of god; his followers are literary and artistic men—

Michelangelo, Baudelaire, Verlaine—whose works celebrate the beauty of the male body, the flâneur, the love of an older poet for a younger one, respectively. Endowed with a Pateresque, “flamelike imagination,” his sensibilities are those of an aesthete, privileging a “flower-like” life over a useful one, since he felt, as Wilde points out, “that to be unpractical was a great thing” (213) and therefore “mocked at the „white sepulchres‟ of respectability” (214). Emphatically departing from the deadening strictures of respectability, Christ‟s impractical fashioning of himself as “a work of art” recalls the dandy‟s aestheticist riposte to the productivity and industry of the Bourgeois ethos, of, in short, the respectable gentleman. “The dandy,” Regina Gagnier explains, “showed the gentleman what he had sacrificed: eccentricity, beauty, camaraderie […]. „Art‟ was the magical, fetishized term dandies deployed to replace the losses of the age of mechanical reproduction—mechanical in advertising practices as well in the production of the public- school-stamped boy.”45 Wilde‟s Christ exemplifies these very qualities, a “supreme

45 Regina Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 98. 51

individualist,” averse to “dull mechanical systems” and whose “whole life,” according to

Wilde, with its “Sorrow and Beauty […] is really an idyll” (206).

In the process of summoning this dandyish figure, as the representative of an ideal, aestheticized life, moreover, Christ appears, to Wilde, not only as “the supreme

Romantic type,” but also as himself “the palpitating center of Romance” (211), as, in other words, a figure at once desirable and desiring. “One always thinks of him,” he writes, “as a young bridegroom with his companions,” “as a lover,” as, indeed, “the leader of all lovers” (206-7). A few pages further, Wilde imagines Jesus as himself a boy bride “always ready for the coming of the Bridegroom, always waiting for the voice of the lover” (214—emphasis mine). He expresses his “pleasure” at the thought that Christ spoke in Greek: “It is a delight to me to think that as far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides might have listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him, and

Plato understood him” (211, 212).46 Through this language of seduction and affection,

Wilde thus constructs a Hellenistic Christ, always “ready” for his lovers to be loved. He has arrived, as Richard Ellman assers, at the conclusion that “Christ ha[s] become a boy lover.”47

In many respects, Wilde writes himself into this queer Christ he constructs; like

Christ, he is an “Individualist” who, similarly, repudiates “the Philistine element” and, instead, seeks out the company of “panthers” and “gilded snakes” (220-1). Christ, for his part, was drawn to a comparable crowd “sinners,” “thieves,” “outcasts”. In Wilde‟s portrait of Christ‟s aestheticist conception of life and (as) art, moreover, we could easily

46 Charmides is the beautiful young man and the central character in Plato‟s eponymous dialogue. 47 Ellman, 76. 52

recognize a portrait of the author himself. Even his account of his act of sacrificing himself for the sake of his lover appears to imply an analogy with Christ‟s sacrifice for the the sake of mankind. Yet, I would suggest that this entails not so much Wilde‟s identification with Christ—or with the latter‟s martyrdom—but an attempt to embody elsewhere his silenced voice, his “unspeakable” love. His imprisonment had, after all, subjected him to a harshly prohibitive silencing regime, even reducing his name, as he points out, to a mere “figure and letter in a long gallery” (172). “I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame” (186).

During Wilde‟s imprisonment, as Regina Gagnier demonstrates, the prison system was governed by “‟the Du Dane Regime,‟ which imposed extreme uniformity on prison life for purposes of deterrence, not rehabilitation.”48 Du Cane advocated for hard, non- industrial labor and instituted the practice of enforced silence and solitary cellular confinement for the reason that it would, Gagnier explains, “prevent the prisoners from contaminating each other” and “would separate the hardened criminal from the first offender.”49 In Wandworth Prison and, subsequently, in Pentonville and Reading Gaol,

Wilde was subjected to a strict and inflexible regimentation of his days, the mind- numbing effects of which he describes, in his letter, as “the paralyzing immobility of a life, every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and walk […] according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula,” so that

“in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more” (186).50

48 Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 182. 49 Ibid. 50 Gagnier argues that, in De Profundis, Wilde remains some of his “prison habits,” in particular in measuring his relationship with Douglas in neat three month intervals, “the largest unit of measure 53

He was allowed to send and receive one letter per quarter, but only to keep up with

“respectable friends,” “not that [he] may be kept informed of public events.”51 His access to visitors was highly restricted and his letters from prison betray his profound sense of isolation, often in panicky professions of his inability to ascertain what action are undertaken on his behalf. The injunction against speech between the prisoners not only worked to silence him literally, but also, in a more profound sense, evacuated a personality of which gifted conversational skills had been a constitutive part.52 When, during his last six months at Reading, the restrictions on reading and writing were lifted, at least to a certain degree, Wilde composed his lengthy letter to his lover which he opens with the observation that his “two long years of imprisonment” passed “without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even” (153).

In De Profundis, then, Wilde invokes the devastatingly silencing effects of his incarceration, effects on the materialist level of the prison‟s disciplinary evacuation of language as well as those on the discursive level where his “version” of the love of an elder for a younger man had become unrepresentable. It is the figure of Christ who comes to represent and to embody that version, because “for him,” Wilde writes, “there were no laws: there were exceptions merely” (213). Endowing this Christ with the capacious imagination of the Romantic artist, Wilde puts him to the service of giving voice to those operative in the official prison regulations posted in his cell;” “the three-month unit,” Gagnier asserts, “functions heavily to order experience” (188). Accounts by Wilde‟s friends also indicate that the highly regimented prison regime had its lasting effects, as he was, after his release, still incapable of allowing common objects to rest without comparable ordening. 51 Ibid., 185. 52 A number of times, Wilde was actually caught and disciplined for talking with other prisoners. In April 1897, shortly before his release, Thomas Martin arrived as a new warder at Reading and, though him, Wilde managed to get information on other prisoners. In may 17, for instance, he wrote to Martin asking him to “please find out the name of A.2.11 [a mentally ill man]. Also: the names of the children who are in for the rabbits and the amount of the fine” (260). 54

“who are numb under oppression,” “who are shut up in prisons” (208). Through the

“width and wonder of [his] imagination,” he writes, Christ took to “the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain” and “made himself its eternal mouthpiece”—“he sought to become eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a cry on the lips of those whose tongue had been tied” (209). Wilde emphasizes, though, that such an orientation toward the outcast should not be understood in terms of Christian charity; in fact, the attraction of this Christ to the silenced is quite antithetical to that practiced by “dreadful philanthropists,” whose acts of facile pity for those less privileged amount, in Wilde‟s view, to mere self-serving gestures and deplorable efforts to reduce the singular to the same. Christ, he insists, was not an “ordinary Philanthropist” (nor an extraordinary one) for “his primary desire was not to reform people […] To turn an interesting thief into a tedious honest man was not his aim. He would have thought little of the Prisoner‟s Aid

Society and other modern movements of the kind” (215).53 Wilde imagines Christ‟s engagement with the silenced, instead, in terms of the formation of relationalities organized around alterities; it is those who are outcast, he asserts, whom “he chose as his brothers” (209). This characterization of Christ‟s love as that for the unfamiliar—or as that for the familial not predicated upon sameness—recalls the kind of relationality

Derrida terms “heteroaffection,” the tendency, that is, toward the entirely other. “It was

53 In the two letters Wilde sent to the Daily Chronicle, subsequent to his release, he himself takes up this task and levels a harsh critique against the philanthropist approach to prison reform. Such an approach, he argues, does nothing to alter the structural conditions of the penal system and the severely disciplining effects such conditions engender. In his letter of 27 May 1891, which appeared under the title “The Case of Warden Martin, Some Cruelties of Prison Life,” he writes, for instance, of the treatment of three children incarcerated for stealing rabbits. He emphasizes the “bad influence [on these children] of the prison system itself” (272)—of the regulation, for example, that “every child is confined to its cell for twenty three hours out of the twenty four” (270). He stresses the panoptic reach of this regime, noting that” most warders are very fond of children. But the system prohibits them from rendering the child any assistance” (271). 55

only through love,” Wilde writes, that he sought out “the heart of the leper” (207).

Through this figuration of Christ as “bridegroom” to his “companions” who is also himself a “lover” “ready for the coming of the bridegroom,” Wilde carves out a complex representational space for love between men; by way of this dissident Christ figure, he smuggles, so to speak, his version in, a version in which differences are attractive as such. Indeed, what perhaps most marks Wilde‟s understanding of his own love of men are precisely those differences—of age, physique, class, even of degrees of sexual initiatedness. Moreover, he offers an image of a family in which brothers are (also) lovers and in which one can be bridegroom to multiple persons and still be available to become someone else‟s bridegroom. As such, Wilde implicitly counters the impoverishing dictates of the heterosexual family governed by the imperatives of monogamy and the oedipal dymanics, whereby, to use Sedgwicks phrase, “one person‟s getting more love means a priori that another is getting less,” the very logic, after all, of the paternal “love” that informed Queensbury‟s persecution of Wilde.54

Finally, the figure of Christ also functions, for Wilde, as a figure through which to imagine a future for himself, “a man disgraced, ruined, and in prison,” having lost his fortune, his children, his books, and more. Facing a life as a “pariah” and exile, he nonetheless wants not “to arrest one‟s own development” and aspires to become “free from all resentment, hardness, and scorn.”55 Wilde‟s queer Christ provides a particular

54 Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference that Affect Makes,” 631. 55 He writes, somewhat brazenly, that “if one is ashamed of being punished, one might as well never have been punished” (198). But a few pages later tells himself that he “must learn not to be ashamed of having been punished” (211). Throughout the letter, he expresses at once the necessity and difficulty of such affective repair, and the text is punctuated with sentences that begin with “I must try to”; “I have to attempt”; “I must learn these lessons here,” etcetera. 56

model of self-fashioning, for “out of his own imagination entirely did Jesus of Nazareth create himself” (211). Christ, after all, represents life‟s “dynamic forces” that are, quoting

Shakespeare, “like the wind that „bloweth where it listeth and no man can tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.” Against a mechanistic conception of life, governed by predictability and repetition, Wilde proposes Jezus‟s life and mode of living as an act of continuous creation, a work of art with “all the colour-elements of life: mystery, strangeness, pathos, suggestion, ecstasy, love” (210). And in all splendid works of

Romantic art, he finds, “there somehow, and under some form […] the soul of Christ”

(210).

Wilde‟s discussion of the “soul,” his own, that of Christ, even that of Douglas, actually resonates with the particular significance of the term within the late nineteenth- century speculative science of theosophy. As Richard Dellamora shows, “within theosophy, soul is the term used for that aspect of the self which enables it to self- differentiate. One could almost use the nineteenth-century term for self-culture, becoming, as a synonym of soul in this sense.”56 Dellamore further explains that in theosophical myth-making, the soul transcends the boundaries of time and space, allowing the self to become actualized in different egos, different genders, different places. He argues quite correctly, I think, that the latter dimension is quite absent from

Wilde‟s use of the term, though certainly not “the idea that the self can differ from itself, can become other to itself, so to speak.”57 Wilde refers, for instance, to the “nutritive functions” of the soul that “transform” what “itself is base, cruel, and degrading” into

56 Richard Dellamore, “Productive Decadence:‟The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought‟: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde,” New Literary History, 2005, 35, 541—emphasis in the text. 57 Ibid. 57

“noble moods of thought, and passions of high import”—a process of becoming he compares to ways in which “the body absorbs all kinds of things, things common and unclean” and “converts” them into things that are very different from them: “beautiful muscles” or “fair flesh,” or “the curves and colours of the hair.” (198). We may read the figure of Christ, then, as he appears in De Profundis, not as a figure for the instruction of redemption through sin—for, as Wilde himself notes, “sins of the flesh are nothing”

(180)—but as a figure representing the possibility of becoming other than oneself, of becoming other than the disciplining public constructions of Wilde‟s self.

* * *

In her discussion of the shaming and smuggling deployed in protesting the invisibility of queer black men, of which PBS‟s refusal to air a film on this very topic was both an instance and enactment, Sedgwick writes of the “processes of reference” that attended the demonstration. There were dual gestures of shaming a public television station by revealing its exclusion of part of the public and of smuggling into that representational space (television) bodies—black and queer—it had excluded. Organized by an Ad Hoc Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays and ACT UP-Triangle, the protest‟s

“‟smuggling‟ activity of embodiment,” however, extended into further unstable “circuits of representation,” of bodies “themselves not black” referencing “other bodies standing beside [them],” of voices referencing “the words on our placards” (TF, 32). These circuits of embodiment, representation, displacement acquired a “magnetic queerness,” Sedgwick writes, when she, in the middle of the protest, suddenly fainted. With a remarkable

detachment, she describes “that image, of a mountainous figure, supine, black-clad, paper-white, weirdly bald (my nice African hat had pitched to a distance), Silence =

Death emblazoned, motionless, apparently female, uncannily gravid with meaning (but with what possible meaning? what usable meaning?)” (TF, 32-3). The meaning of “that sprawling body” she finds in the testimony it offered to “a certain magnetic queerness,” magnetic in that it is “productive of deviance” (TF, 33). That testimony, in others words, was a testimony of the powerful displacements subtending the protest event, displacements she locates in:

the white skin of someone to whom black invisibility had come to feel— partly through representational work like Tongues Untied, partly in the brutalities of every day‟s newspaper, partly through the transferentially charged interactions with students—like an aching gap in the real; the legible bodily stigmata not of AIDS but of “female” cancer whose lessons for living powerfully I found myself, at that time, learning largely from men with AIDS; the defamiliarization and indeed gaps of de-recognition toward my “own” “female” “white” body, experienced under the pressure of amputation and prosthesis, of drugs, of the gender imploding experience of female baldness. (TF, 33)

These displacements—from the white skin to black invisibility, from living with a

“female” illness to men living with AIDS, from a self-possessed (“own”) and recognizably gendered body to a chemically and surgically shaped, more or less gender- less one—have little to do with identification, with the other, say. They draw on the magnetic force of highly differing deviances from highly differing stigmatizing regimes

(around blackness, around AIDS, breast cancer, the female body); as such, those deviances function pedagogically, in the sense that they are capable of teaching others how they themselves can live, as Sedgwicks shows, more “powerfully” with their own

“stigmata.” This is the magnetism of queerness.

I am reminded here of Max Nordau‟s complaint that degenerates are inclined to form groups. In Degeneration, he identifies as one of the “stigmata,” or symptomatic signs of degeneracy, the tendency to form associations with each other. “There is,” he writes, “yet another phenomenon highly characteristic in some cases of degeneracy, in others of hysteria. This is the formation of close groups or schools.” Healthy persons, according to Nordau, “in possession of minds in a condition of well-regulated equilibrium, will never think of grouping them selves into [such] an association, which may at pleasure be termed a sect of band.”58 In Wilde, Nordau discerns one of the most pronounced exemplars of degeneracy, and we might indeed see in Wilde that dangerous tendency toward group formation—or, more adequately, the magnetism of his queerness.59 In De Profundis, perhaps more than anywhere else in his work, he presents, by way of his highly singular Christ (and his band of companions), a deviant performance of a love that, simply, dares. His letter to his lover, after all, does not stop at the shaming and smuggling it performs; in its conclusion, Wilde actually gestures toward the work‟s further potential, as he writes in the final sentences to his lover: “You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty” (240). He thus opens up a space for the very displacement Sedgwick discusses, displacements that, in this case, have offered sexual and gender dissidents radically differently situated (across time, nationality, gender, class) some kind of knowledge, affective and otherwise, about

58 Max Nordau, Degeneration, transl. from the second German edition by George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Press, 1993), 17, 29. 59 In Nordau‟s condemnation of Wilde‟s flamboyant garb, he also denounced the latter for doing the opposite; he critizes Wilde‟s sartorial style as “a sign of anti-social mania to irritate the majority unnecessarily, only to gratify vanity, or an aesthetic instincts of small importance” (318). 60

possibilities, to paraphrase Sedgwick, of living more powerfully, especially more powerfully with the complexly shaming operations that besiege these subjects.

Wilde and Sedgwick, especially in their respective personifications and enactments of a magnetizing queerness, have become queer icons, though, of course, within their own particular historical moment and national and intellectual locations. As such, they have also become objects of sustained homophobic attacks, often articulated in the vocabulary of anti-elitism and the sexual pollution of the aesthetic. Thus, in 1990,

Camille Paglia carps that “critics drift toward apologia, tediously extolling Wilde‟s humanity or morality, things utterly nonexistent in his best work. The time has past when it is necessary to defend a homosexual genius.” “Wilde was not,” Paglia concludes, “a liberal, as modern admirers think.”60 In Lee Siegel‟s 1998 article in The New Republic, entitled “Literary License: How „Queer Theory‟ mindlessly sexualizes Henry James,

William Shakespeare, and just about everything else,“ Sedgwick is, likewise, denounced for her putatively elitist promotion of a set of aesthetic/sexual values Siegel regards as antithetical to the humanist values literature is supposed to instill, including a “refusal to privilege pleasure over morality.”61 Siegel holds Sedgwick, as well as other queer theorists, responsible for “the sexualization of reality” he finds nowhere “so intensely and so relentlessly as in the seminar room.”62 In fact, on account of these putative effects,

State Representatives in Georgia undertook to eliminate the teaching of queer theory in

Georgia‟s universities, as recently as last year. As the Athens Banner-Herald of February

60 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London: Yale Univeristy Press, 1990), 512. 61 I am citing here from Vincent Quinn‟s “Loose Reading? Sedgwick, Austin and critical practice,” Textual Practice, 14:2, 317. Quinn‟s essay analyzes Siegel‟s critique of Sedgwick. 62 Ibid., 306. 61

7, 2009, reported, in an article salaciously entitled “Steamy Sex Courses Fire GOP‟s Ire,”

Representative Charlice Byrd had “announced a „grassroots‟ effort to out professors with expertise in subjects like male prostitution, oral sex and „queer theory.‟” The article cites one of Byrd‟s supporters, who asserts that “our job is to teach our people in science, business, math;” Byrd and others “were incensed” to learn that at Georgia‟s universities graduate courses in queer theory were taught and that their faculties list “experts in oral sex” and “experts in male prostitution.”

This apparent threat posed by queer theory of what it might teach its students, of what they might learn from it, seems to stand quite on its own; no one would argue that courses in criminality, say, teach students to become criminals. The force of Sedgwick‟s work, and in particular her powerful explorations of shame, is that it enacts that magnetic and magnetizing queerness that teaches how to learn from others ways in which to imagine and live modes of relative empowerment, whereby power need not operate as a zero-sum game, and whereby a love for the one need not necessarily mean less love for the other. Both Sedgwick and Wilde, in their own ways, perform that magnetic queerness of divas falling down—deviantly.

c h a p t e r t w o

“Theories” of Shame and Sophistication

in Joyce’s Dubliners

If the lowering of the eyelids, the lowering of the eyes, the hanging of the head is the attitude of shame, it may also be that of reading—reading maps, magazines, novels, comics, and heavy volumes of psychology.

Eve Sedgwick, Shame and Its Sisters

When Sedgwick imagines that “the attitude of shame […] may also be that of reading,” she invokes shame as a rather sophisticated physio-psychological disposition, enveloping a plenitude of involvements and interests, rather than a simple corrective reaction. Shame, in Sedgwick‟s scenario, appears to be a sign of inhabiting worlds

(“maps”) and current fashions (“magazine”); it involves matters of the heart (“novels”), the gut (“comics”), and the mind (“psychology”). As in a Proustian scene of reading, the introverted solitude of shame—the downcast eyes and head—discloses a consciousness other than itself, an “inner life” that also encloses other or outer lives.

Sedgwick‟s analogy between shame and reading emerges from her study of the writings of Silvan Tomkin. In his inquiries into the affective structuration of modes of

knowing and learning, the latter attributes a central role to shame and its various composite forms (such as shame-humiliation). He argues that affects function within variable and hypothetical “theories” (Tomkins‟s term) which are comprised of a person‟s past experiences and other acquired understandings of affects and their occasions: in the case of negative affects, especially shame, these “theories” provide rules and strategies for perceiving and then reducing (occasions for) these affects. These “theories,” then, are not merely a set of individual beliefs or ideas about shame. They constitute particular ways in which individuals, and groups of individuals, negotiate the norms to which they are subject and, thus, experience greater or lesser degrees of shame when they transgress those norms.

In this respect, Tomkins‟s exploration of shame as a “theory” resembles Erving

Goffman‟s focus on stigma as a way to examine the relationship between certain kinds of shameful differences and the informational strategies these deviations require in social interaction. Goffman argues that the production of a non-stigmatized “social identity”— to pass for “normal”—depends upon the ability to control and distribute strategically public knowledge about one‟s stigma. Moreover, the specific discourses that operate within a particular social context, rather than the stigma itself, determine the kinds of strategies individuals employ to manage information about themselves and, thereby, to manipulate the epistemological status of their stigma. This variable mode of stigma suggests, according to Goffman, that it is primarily a discursive or, in his terms, a

“virtual” category; rather than a non-negotiable mark of shame, stigma structures the

informational strategies of all individuals, even those who do not visibly belong to a stigmatized group.1

Goffman‟s notion of “virtual” stigma and Tomkins‟s concept of shame “theories” share the idea that shame does not simply happen to a person; both Goffman and

Tomkins stress that shame depends upon and is informed by varying discursive contexts and differing cognitive habits, respectively. Moreover, by focusing on the variability and manipulability of shame, their ideas allow for inquiries into the particular conditions under which individuals, and groups of individuals, experience greater or lesser degrees of shame, or even manage not to be ashamed at all. In this regard, Tomkins introduces an interesting paradox around the comprehensiveness of shame “theories” and their success in warding off shame. He argues that the breadth of a shame “theory” is inversely related to its ability to avoid shame, since the very scope of such a “theory”—its wide hermeneutic reach, so to speak—generates a large number of potential situations or sources of shame that, within a less comprehensive “theory,” might not register and thus not give rise to shame. What distinguishes, in Tomkins‟s terms, a strong shame “theory” from a weak one is the high frequency with which it anticipates, and thus identifies, grounds for shame; a weak shame “theory,” by comparison, is relatively limited in its ability to detect and predict occasions for shame and, as such, lacks the self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing dynamic of a strong “theory.” The efficacy of a shame “theory” (at least in avoiding the affect), then, lies in its weakness, not in its strength.2

1 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1963). 2 Precisely because of his stress on cognitive processes, Sedgwick draws heavily on Tomkins‟s work in her explorations of affects in literary scholarship. Most prominently, she uses Tomkins‟s notions of strong and 66

Underlying Tomkins‟s ostensibly counter-intuitive formulation of an effective shame “theory” is his equally provocative definition of this affect as “a specific inhibitor of continuing interest or enjoyment.”3 Without the engagement of pleasures, intellectual or otherwise, he notes, there can be no shame. Tomkins‟s specification of “interest or enjoyment” as “continuing” suggests that the blush announces a temporary interruption of positive affects that nevertheless remain operative. “Shame is characterized,”

Sedgwick explains, “by its failure ever to renounce its object cathexis, its relation to the desire for pleasure as well as the need to avoid pain.”4 Because of this peculiarly stubborn structure of shame—it has as its objects attachments that refuse to become detached—Sedgwick suggests that shame might be understood as a mode of

(re)cognizing or even “theorizing” those very “interest[s] or enjoyment[s].” “It can be a switch point,” she writes “for the individuation of imaging systems, of consciousnesses, of bodies, of theories, of selves, an individuation that decides not necessarily an identity, but a figuration, distinction, or mark of punctuation.”5

weak “theory” to articulate the distinction between paranoid and reparative modes of reading in literary criticism. Paranoid readings are organized around the hermeneutics of suspicion; they employ methodologies that ostensibly expose and demystify the hidden truths in texts and, thus, produce hermetic interpretations whose explanatory force forecloses or appropriates in advance their critiques. As instances of such readings, Sedgwick points to psychoanalytic criticism as well as to Foucault‟s “drop-dead elegant diagrams of spiraling escapes and recaptures” (Novel Gazing [Durham: Duke University Press, 1997], 11). Reparative readings, on the other hand, abandon such totalizing models in favor of more local and fragmentary modes of interpretation which, precisely because of their explanatory “weakness,” foreground questions of language and history as problems yet to be theorized. The New Critical skill of “close reading” is an example of this reparative mode. Sedgwick calls for a more intricate interplay of these “strong” and “weak” hermeneutic positions in critical theory, since it fosters readings that are more responsive to the literary and theoretical equivalents of what Lyotard calls differends, i.e. situations of structural discursive imcommensurability, whereby one discourse excludes another. My examination of shame in this chapter touches upon moments of such discursive silencing, of, as Lyotard calls them, “phrases in dispute” that are impossible to adjudicate under the available discursive regimes. 3 Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, vol. 2, 213. 4 Sedgwick, Shame and Its Sisters, 23. 5 Ibid., 22. 67

It is, in other words, precisely because of the fact that shame involves an interruption, but not an abandonment of one‟s interests and enjoyments, that it impels a re-negotiation of those interests and of the discourses that interrupt them. Helen Merrell

Lynd observes, for instance, that shame “initially felt as revealing one‟s own inadequacies, may also confront one with unrecognized desires of one‟s own and the inadequacy of society in giving expression to those desires.”6 Lynd thus sees in shame the potential for a social critique. In a certain way, her conceptualization of shame resembles that of Sedgwick‟s notion of shame as a “switch point” in that both focus on the productivity of shame. These scholars underline the particular ways in which interests and enjoyments are sustained and examine the kinds of reparative gestures that can accompany shame‟s interruption.

In this chapter, I will read James Joyce‟s Dubliners (1914) by way of these ideas, especially Tomkins‟s concept of shame “theories,” Sedgwick‟s notion of shame as a

“switch point,” and Goffman's emphasis on the the social and discursive modalities of shame. In crucial ways, this chapter finds its counterpart in the subsequent one on

Radcylyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928); they are the productively odd couple of this project, for the dissimilarities between the evocations of shame, and of gender and sexual shame in particular, in these two texts work well to map out the particular cognitive and heuristic dimensions of shame, to readers in these texts and readers of these texts. While shame operates very differently in these works, interrupting interests and enjoyments in different directions with different consequences, the protagonists of both these works are singularly flushed with shame (and shyness, timidity, humiliation); their

6 Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York: Harcourt, 1958), 231. 68

shame signals their inability to relinquish their pleasures, or rather their object cathexes, as well as their particular pains. Equally compelling in Joyce‟s “little Chandler” and

Hall‟s Stephen Gordon is the respective shamelessness of these protagonists—that is, their notable lack of shame around acts, tastes, desires, and ideals one would expect to almost inevitably to activate shame but don‟t.

***

The now famous Joycean epiphanies that conclude the individual stories in most of Joyce‟s Dubliners structure the characters‟ shame as retroactive recognitions of the abnormality or ridiculousness of their previously innocently entertained interests and enjoyments. At times, such epiphanic insights are rendered quite explicitly as moments of anagnorisis, as in the end of “The Dead,” the collection‟s concluding story, when

Gabriel is suddenly “assailed” by “[a] shameful consciousness of his own person.”7 “He saw himself as a ridiculous figure,” the narrative voice explains “acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.

Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she [his wife] might see the shame that burned upon his forehead” (210). Gabriel‟s realization of his folly involves the putative failure of his literary ambitions (he delivered his carefully crafted Christmas speech to an audience incapable of appreciating “the lines from Robert Browning”[170]) mapped onto that of his sexual desires (his wife‟s story of her lost childhood love has

7 James Joyce, Dubliners (1914) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 210. All further references will be to this edition and appear parenthetically. 69

interrupted his phantasmatic construction of their erotic life). He concludes that “while he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another” (210). Gabriel‟s painful epiphany here mimics that of the young narrator of “Araby” for whom the darkness functions as a screen, instead of a mirror, for an altered self-reflection. “Gazing up into the darkness,” he remarks, “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish”(32). This young man joins Gabriel and a host of other

Dubliners, including Jimmy Doyle in “After the Race,” Mr. Doran in “The Boarding

House” and Thomas Chandler whom we find with “cheeks suffused with shame” (79) at the end of “A Little Cloud.” The shame that so dramatically creeps up on these characters constitutes a perceptual and cognitive “switch point,” transforming supposedly naïve impulses—interests and enjoyments--into an acknowledgement of their naiveté as naiveté. Joyce thus represents shame as a move from innocence to insight and complicity, as a function, in other words, of what Sedgwick calls “ignorance effects.” This kind of shame one could term revelatory shame in that it depends upon a belated and retroactive realization, very much like the metaleptic paradox whereby the present occurrence constitutes the proof that the present sign was always already there.

I am using the term revelatory shame in this chapter in order to explore the ways in which these texts render visible—or invisible—subjects that are, in a word, queer.

What, for instance, do Joyce‟s instances of revelatory shame really reveal? Whose ignorance is revealed, whose cathexes are interrupted, and what does that tell us about the narrative and textual function of shame in this work? Moreover, in what way does

Joyce‟s reliance upon revelatory shame affect the representation—or visibility—of the object of that shame? While Hall‟s novel features a single, lonely kind of sexual transgression, Joyce‟s Dubliners hosts a series of sexually deviant behaviors, including pederasty, masturbation, voyeurism, and prostitution. How does Joyce‟s use of revelatory shame render visible—or invisible—such practices? Could the belated insights that accompany his characters‟ painful epiphanies also point to their relatively sophisticated management of their transgressions and to their abilities to “theorize” their interests and enjoyments in ways that suspend, though clearly not altogether avoid, the rupturing surprise of shame?

An inquiry into the different modalities of shame in these texts could furthermore reflect on the critical evaluations of these works in terms other than high/low or experimental/conventional. As I indicated earlier, Dubliners’ distinction as a high modernist text compared to The Well’s status as a popular work of fiction does not amount to the difference between the former‟s supposed lack of shame, or shamelessness, and the latter‟s shamefulness—a difference that in any case does not signify the absence of shame versus its presence. Rather, the very prominent, and distinct, deployment of shame in these texts suggest that the affect does significant literary work, that Joyce's revelatory shame shapes and is shaped by the narrative and hermeneutic strategies of this texts.

Compared to the readerly unease that Hall‟s novel has produced and continues to produce, Joyce‟s Dubliners has become a respectable, even elevating, work of fiction,

despite “the special odour of corruption which,” Joyce hoped, “floats over my stories.”8

Critics mostly focus on the text‟s formal qualities, its complex intratextual and intertextual web, and its rejection of realist codes of representation. Moreover, scholars do not read the embarrassments of Joyce‟s characters, including their epiphanies, as instances of shame, but view them generally as “painful lessons in Dublin life.”9

According to Fritz Senn, for instance, the Joycean epiphanies invite readers to learn what the characters are forced to learn: to “interpret, supplement, learn from errors and mistakes, extract meaning.”10 Dubliners’ epiphanies thus signify as hermeneutic incitements, prompting the readers to accompany Joyce‟s characters in improving their interpretative skills.

When Joyce first offered his stories for publication, however, they were nervously rejected, and it took the author a decade of soliciting publishers and editors to finally see his work in print. In 1914, Grant Richards decided that the social and sexual mores had sufficiently loosened that Dubliners would no longer affront the public. That Joyce‟s work was promptly praised by critics perhaps proves Richards‟s assessment, yet the fate of Hall‟s novel fourteen years later—a work that is by no means more sexually non- conformist than that of Joyce—suggests that Dubliners itself manipulates the visibility of the sexual transgressions it depicts. As such, the text not only encourages readers to, in

Senn‟s words, “extract [sexual] meaning,” but also questions their ability to do so, as is evident from Joyce‟s initial 1904 negotiations with Richards. At that time, Richards

8 Richard Ellman, ed. Letters of James Joyce, vol. II (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 123. 9 James Joyce’s Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition, With Annotations, John Wyse Jackson & Bernard McGinley, eds. (London: St. Martin‟s Press, 1993), 27. 10 Fritz Senn, “Dubliners: Renewed Time After Time” in: New Critical Perspectives on Dubliners, Mary Power and Ulrich Schneider, eds. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 32. 72

agreed to publish Dubliners but then encountered objections from the printer; the latter took offense to the word “bloody” in a number of stories and to the reference of “two establishments to keep up” in “Counterparts.” Replying to Richards‟s request for alterations, Joyce wrote “that these objections seem to me illogical. Why do you not object to the theme of An Encounter, to the passage „he stood up slowly saying that he had to leave us for a few moments &c…‟?”11 Joyce was referring to his account of two truant boys who encounter “a queer old josser,” who seduces and scares them with his views on reading and whipping. At one point, the man excuses himself and walks off to masturbate, while still in eyesight of the two youngsters. Interestingly, the sexual content of this story—which Joyce‟s friend Thomas Kettle is reported to have considered

“beyond anything in its outspokenness he had ever read”—was not recognized by

Richards (or his fastidious printer, for that matter) until Joyce drew his attention to it.12

As the latter remarked, “the more subtle inquisitor will denounce An Encounter, the enormity of which the printer cannot see because he is, as I said, a plain blunt man.”13

The “enormity” of this story, Joyce suggests, depends on a strategic kind of invisibility.

“Many of the passages and phrases over which we are now we are now disputing escaped you: it was I who showed them to you,” Joyce wrote Richards in 1905,”and do you think that what escaped you (whose business it is to look for such things in the books you consider) will be surely detected by a public which reads the books for quite another reason?”14

11 Richard Ellman, ed. Letters of James Joyce, vol. II (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 137. 12 Ibid., 329. 13 Ibid., 88. 14 Ibid., 88. 73

What renders visible the pederastic content of “An Encounter” is, of course, not simply the degree of literary or sexual sophistication of its readers, as Joyce would have it. In fact, the stories in Dubliners themselves, especially in their narrative strategies, manipulate the “outspokenness” of the various sexual transgressions they treat, often by way of seemingly innocent focalisors--young boys, naïve women, dreamy men—who thus implicate the narratee or reader of Joyce‟s stories as similarly innocent. Such strategic innocence encourages readings that are blind to but then also shocked by the text‟s sexual content, as was the case with Richards.15

In my reading of Dubliners, I am particularly interested in its use of shame as a heuristic device through which its sexual content becomes a possible object of recognition, to the readers in the text and to readers of the text. Moreover, how does

Dubliners’ reliance upon revelatory shame serve to render visible—or invisible—the

“interests and enjoyments” of its protagonists? The shame in Joyce‟s work often seems to question the ability of its protagonists (and thus, implicitly, also that of its readers) to recognize the shamefulness of their “interests and enjoyments”—or, at least, their ability to do so beforehand. Below, I will explore this more fully by way of “A Little Cloud,” a

15 In her reading of “An Encounter,” Margot Norris argues that the narrator of the story is, in fact, not the inexperienced young boy recounting an adventure the sexual implications of which he is unable to comprehend. Considering his sophisticated vocabulary and diction , Norris writes, the narrator is actually the “adult storyteller who knows the adventure‟s outcome in advance, and understands the „enormity‟ of its possible impact, yet who deliberately defers information that would leave protected us against shock and trauma.” As the clever manipulator of sexual knowledge, the narrator, then, mirrors the “queer old josser‟s” performance whose benign chit chat about books and the weather “is jolted by an indecent exposure” and a subsequent discussion of “nice warm whipping[s].” According to Norris, “this disturbing discursive surprise has a similar effect on the young boy and the reader: a feeling of betrayal, anger, and resentment at having been manipulated into complicity, verbally assaulted, and subjected to a form of sexual aggression” (“A Walk on the Wild(e) Side: „An Encounter” in Quare Joyce, Joseph Valente,ed. [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998], 24). I am not sure that the conclusion of “An Encounter” effects all of this in all readers, but the surprise ending does operate as an instance of what I have called revelatory shame, encouraging a recognition of perversion as perversion as well as a retroactive realization of one‟s previous naïveté. 74

Dubliners’ story with a subject even more sexually transgressive, or rather more shameful, than that of “An Encounter,” namely male effeminacy.16 To my knowledge, however, scholars have never read this story as one about male effeminacy, although in various ways they have addressed the embarrassments of its protagonist. “A Little

Cloud” is one of the last stories Joyce included in Dubliners and the author seems to have been quite taken with it. Upon its completion in 1906, Joyce wrote to his brother that “a page of „A Little Cloud‟ gives me more pleasure than all my verses;” in his negotiations with Richards, he noted that about this particular story “there has been no difficulty.”17

Effeminate Manners in “A Little Cloud”

“A Little Cloud” is a story of belittlement. The first of the four „mature life‟ stories in Dubliners, it stages and enacts a series of belittling gestures between men, or—

16 The texts central in this chapter and the following one thus involve two non-normatively gendered subjects: an effeminate man in “A Little Cloud” and a masculine woman in The Well. This thematic symmetry also serves a conceptual purpose in the sense that the very visibility of such individuals—or rather, the fact that their deviantly gendered bodies are the putative manifestations of their homosexuality— subjects them to the most violent forms of shaming and humiliation, ranging from the everyday interpellative force of terms like “dyke” and “faggot” to various acts of physical denigration. Since my focus here is on shame, I prefer to retain the linkage between gender non-normativity and homosexuality, because it is precisely as a result of that linkage that shame operates so prominently in the lives of butches and femmes. To be sure, gender theorists have made a very powerful case for the theoretical separation of the categories of gender identity and sexuality and, in doing so, have fostered subtler, more affirmative notions of queer politics, thought, and erotics. But the fact that there is no causal or inherent relation between gender identity and sexual orientation does not mean that to visibly gender dysphoric individuals like Stephen Gordon this distinction is always a socially feasible one, or even a desirable one. In fact, too great an insistence on severing the complex connections between gender and sexuality runs the risk, as Sedgwick has noted, of invoking a set of effeminophobic, gynophobic, and pedophobic notions about effeminate men and masculine women whose difference from normatively gendered gays and lesbians delegates them to the terrain of the pathological (“arrested development,” “gender identity disorder”) or the politically retrograde (“stereotypical,” “essentialist”) {“How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay” in: Tendencies [London: Routledge, 1994], 154-164). 17 Letters of James Joyce, Vol. II, 182, 178. 75

to be more precise—acts of sexual and literary self-aggrandizement by one man, Ignatius

Gallaher, at the expense of another, Thomas Chandler. The latter, who is not coincidentally referred to as “Little Chandler,” emerges as quite the looser in his rendezvous with his old friend, who has left Ireland eight years ago to pursue a career in journalism on the Continent and has now returned for “a bit of holiday […] in dear dirty

Dublin”(69). During their meeting, Gallaher boasts loudly of his literary successes abroad and of the sexual insights and experiences he has gained there. “He summarized the vices of many capitals,” we learn “and seemed inclined to award the palm to Berlin”

(72). These salacious exposures punctuate Gallaher‟s bravura performance of hardy masculinity and sexual worldliness at the same time that they patronizingly point to

Chandler‟s supposed lack of them: “Ah, well,” the former remarks “here we are in old jog-along Dublin where nothing is known of such things” (72). As Gallaher‟s game of one-upmanship proceeds, Chandler‟s blushes appear increasingly frequent, especially when the conversation turns around to his only “manly” accomplishment over Gallaher— his “connubial bliss” and young son—and is met with yet another not so subtle debunking: “Must get a bit stale, I should think” (“tying [oneself] up to one woman,” that is). And, thus, this timid clerk, who can only dream of becoming a minor poet, is left thoroughly emasculated, a little man, if that, whose sensitive “equipoise” and

“melancholy” force him to suffer passively the painful humiliations of Gallaher‟s masculinist bonhomie. “Gallaher was only patronizing him by his friendliness,” he observes “just as he was patronizing Ireland by his visit” (75).

“A Little Cloud” concludes with Chandler‟s return home—a place with rented furniture and no hired help—where his lack of proper manhood (of agency, authority, and self-possession) reaches a particularly disillusioning crescendo. He ends up yelling at his baby to stop crying, whereupon his wife walks in and leaves him standing back with

“cheeks suffused with shame,” while “the paroxysms of the child‟s sobbing” echo

Chandler‟s “tears of remorse”(79). The spectacularity of this final scene—as well as the specularity of the crying man and his crying son—marks it as the nadir of Chandler‟s abject failures to assume adult masculinity or, rather, of his continuous subjection to the regimes of gender and sexuality that surround him. Even in the context of petit bourgeois domesticity, Joyce‟s story seems to suggest, this little man is incapable of mobilizing his relative authority as pater familias.

It is not surprising, then, that most critics have interpreted “A Little Cloud,” especially its disturbing ending, in terms of Chandler‟s “lack,” “failure,” and

“immaturity.” Jackson and McGinley, for instance, stress that, at the story‟s end,

“Chandler is shamed, not ashamed, and it is this, rather than shyness, drink, or anger, as previously, that reddens his face;” they understand the man‟s flushed cheeks, in other words, as the consequence of his emasculation at the hands of his wife.18 From a different perspective, Christine van Bohemen-Saaf sees Chandler as one of the many examples of “failed masculinity” in Dubliners. She writes: “Men disenfranchised in the public realm become more tyrannical at home.”19 Be it as a result of the structural

18 James Joyce’s Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition, With Annotations. John Wyse Jackson & Bernard McGinley, eds. (London: St. Martin‟s Press, 1993), 74. 19 Christine van Bohemen-Saaf, “Postcolonial Masculinity and Gender Trauma” in Masculinities in Joyce: Postcolonial Constructions, Christine van Bohemen-Saaf, ed. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 227. 77

emasculation of male colonial subjects, as Van Bohemen-Saaf argues, or as the consequence of Chandler‟s identification with “the namby-pamby, cloying, sentimental imitation of Yeats‟s worn-out coat […] the Celtic Twilight,” as Torchiana asserts,

Chandler‟s gendering figures negatively to most scholars.20 Chandler‟s shame and humiliation thus signify as both the cause and the confirmation of his gender, sexual, or literary deficiency. As an emasculated man, the shame is on him—or so it seems.

Besides, or alongside, these negative—indeed, belittling—evaluations of

Chandler‟s supposed inability to assume mature masculinity stands also another account of this man‟s “littleness”—one that depicts a distinctly felicitous practice of effeminacy.

Already the diminutive reference to Joyce‟s protagonist as “Little Chandler” signals catachrestically his effortful effeminacy, seeing that he actually “was but slightly under the average stature.” He is called Little Chandler, the narrator informs us, on account of his delicate appearance and gestures: “[h]is hands were white and small, his frame was fragile, his voice quiet and his manners refined.” These refined manners—products as much of education as aspiration—accompany a set of equally refined personal habits, including Chandler‟s careful grooming of his “fair silken hair and moustache,” his immaculate manicure (“the half-moons of his nails were perfect”) and his habit of

“us[ing] perfume discreetly on his handkerchief”(65).

Chandler further cultivates his (“discrete”) femininity by way of his aesthetic tastes and sensibilities. Like Cather‟s character Paul, Joyce‟s protagonist aims for a life of beauty and sophistication and he negotiates his quotidian existence by seeking out

20 David T. Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 131.

moments of poetic splendor in the less than pretty reality of Dublin life. Looking out of his office window onto “the untidy nurses and the decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches,” for instance, Chandler notices how the sun “cast a shower of kindly dust on” them; “it flickered upon all the moving figures” (65). Through such aestheticizing gestures (the radiant language of the image recalls Pater‟s “gem-like [golden?] flame”),

Chandler reconfigures scenes of ordinary life into opportunities to write, or rather, to be

“touched” by poetry. Unlike Gallaher, who is “always hurry[ing] and scurry[ing], looking for copy” (69), Chandler waits to receive, to be overtaken by “the poetic moment.” The image of the sun‟s golden dust eventually takes “possession of him” (65) and, a little later, when he imagines “the poor stunted houses” along the quays to be “a band of tramps,”he is thrilled by “the thought that a poetic moment had touched him”

(italics mine); it “took life within him like an infant hope”(67-8—emphasis mine).21

This vocabulary of being “touched,” “possessed,” and then being penetrated thus produces quite a model of literary production that is, in fact, one of non-production. John

Gordon argues that this passage represents Chandler as “a sensitive vessel whose function it is to gratefully receive, nourish, bear, and bring to term whatever poetic chance may

21 The homoerotic implications of this dynamic of being touched and then possessed return more explicitly, but also more ambivalently, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the context of the disciplinary rituals at Clongowes. Joseph Valente argues that Stephen Deadalus‟s “erotic preoccupation with his masters‟ hands” trigger “a full blown if displaced sexual fantasy” of being beaten by those very hands. Valente cites, among others, the passage in Portrait which describes how Stephen “trembled with…fright to think of the cruel long nails…and of the chill you felt at the end of your shirt when you undressed yourself yet he felt a feeling of queer pleasure inside him” (Portrait, 45). Valente argues that Stephen‟s vision of being touched and taken by the “prefect‟s fingers” ultimately marks “the uncanny impact of the homoerotic upon Stephen, his mixture of fear and fascination, attraction and repulsion, which is the recipe for a „panic‟ born of „proximate-ness‟” (“Thrilled by His Touch” in Quare Joyce, Joseph Valente, ed. [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998], 55). 79

grant it.”22 Considering the fact that Chandler‟s literary aspirations do not bear fruit, so to speak, Gordon extends the metaphor of poetic production as pregnancy to his reading of the story as a whole. “A Little Cloud,” he writes, is “about the poem not written, the poem which in the course of the evening was conceived, pondered, nurtured, matured, brought to the point of fulfillment, then cruelly aborted.”23 In light of Chandler‟s stress on the act of receiving and being “possessed” by poetry, though, I wonder if this heteronormative teleology is à propos here. Gordon‟s metaphor of pregnancy oddly literalizes Chandler‟s effeminacy, whereby the latter‟s receptivity actually makes him a woman, though not a very fertile one. The notion of heterosexual coupling and its reproductive prospects really does not capture the erotics that underlie Chandler‟s aesthetic sensibilities. As an erotics of effeminacy, it seems much closer to what Freud identified as “the mechanism of many perversions,” especially of the “infantile fixations” of homosexuality, “which consists in lingering over the preparatory acts of the sexual process.” When, according to Freud, “the motive for proceeding further with the sexual act […] disappears, the whole path is cut short, and the preparatory act in question takes the place of the normal sexual aim.”24 Indeed, Chandler‟s poetic inspirations never result in anything, except that they provide him with reveries that “he pursued […] so ardently

[…] that he passed his street and had to turn back.” “Possessed” by “the poetic moment,”

Chandler fails to arrive at his destination, a telling incident that reinforces the erotics of his aesthetics as a preference for lingering over arriving, for dreaming over doing—

22 John Gordon, “‟A Little Cloud‟ as a Little Cloud” in New Perspectives on Dubliners: European Joyce Studies, No. 7 (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1997), 175. 23 Ibid., 174. 24 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. 4th ed. (New York: Basic, 1962), 77. 80

indeed, for fore-pleasures over end-pleasures. In his insistence on fore-pleasure (for pleasure), moreover, Chandler sidesteps the normative teleology in which the satisfaction of libidinal energy coincides with its extinction, or, to paraphrase Leo Bersani, in which the end of pleasure, the goal of pleasure also announces its end, its disappearance.25

While Freud would no doubt attribute this to Chandler‟s pathology of arrested development and many scholars have read Joyce‟s story in terms of Chandler‟s childishness, my aim here is to read the latter‟s lingering desires—or desire to linger—as a consequence of his rather sophisticated circumvention of the obstacles to these desires which, in his case, amount to the pressures to complete those very desires, to end them.

Thus, Chandler never actually does write a poem, but instead indulges in delicious dreams of doing so, so that “men would listen. He could never be popular, he saw that

[…] but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds” (68). This recognition by the like-minded, Chandler adds, may require inserting his mother‟s “more Irish looking” name before his surname.26

The fact that these literary fantasies have little relation to Chandler‟s actual opportunities for a literary career further underscores the particularly queer charge of his dreaming. After all, Chandler‟s “poetic prettifications,” as Gordon calls them, serve primarily to phantasmatically map out alternative worlds in which effeminacy engenders deroutinized experiences (the erotics of poetry‟s possessive touch) and forms of queer

25 Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 33. 26 Interestingly, Chandler intends to ask Gallaher for advise in this matter, since the latter ostensibly knows his way around the literary world. But Chandler never raises the issue during their meeting, an omission that suggests that Gallaher‟s connections may not exactly coincide with the circle Chandler has in mind. 81

belonging (not popularity, but recognition by “a little circle of kindred minds”).27 To other generations of effeminate men (and sissy boys) such worlds are represented by

Broadway, Hollywood, or Greenwich Village; “they beckon,” as Joseph Litvak so well describes it, “not as a simple escape from the everyday but as a vision of everyday life transfigured.” “Many gay people,” Litvak writes, “do have at their disposal, or in their usable pasts, typically in late childhood or early adolescence, the highly Proustian experience of falling, if not, at first, for some other person, then for some other place, some other world, magically different from the world of family and school, from a heterosexual everyday more banal, and more oppressive” 28 To Chandler, who has only traveled as far as the Isle of Man, that other world is the world of refined manners and tastes, of the sophistication of le beau monde in its most cosmopolitan, Eurocentric sense.

Corless‟s, the establishment where he is meeting Gallaher, becomes such a world—even though “he had never been [there] he knew the value of the name” (66). And, as if himself part of the society that frequents the place, he constructs an elaborate fantasy about the “people who [go there] after the theatre to eat oyster and drink liqueurs”; in exquisite detail, he contemplates the worldliness of this scene, where the waiters speak

French and German and “the richly dressed ladies, escorted by cavaliers, [catch] up their dresses, when they touch earth, like alarmed Atlantas”(66).

The classical allusion here, of course, foregrounds the discursive origins of

Chandler‟s fantasy world (“he had always passed [Corless‟s] without turning his head”).

In fact, Chandler‟s romantic reveries are thoroughly traversed by imperial discourses and

27 Gordon, “‟A Little Cloud‟ as a Little Cloud,” in New Perspectives on Dubliners, 161. 28 Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory and the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 83. 82

their economies of taste and distinction; they constitute, according to Vincent Cheng, “a culturally constructed desire for „culture‟—high culture in its Eurocentric essence.”29

From this perspective, his longing for such cultural capital signifies as the naïve desire of the subject who lacks it, of the colonized subject who, at best, mimics the colonizer‟s aesthetics and, at worst, is left to perform the native. Chandler‟s self-orientalizing fantasy of conjuring up authentic Irishness in his verse so that “the English critics, perhaps, would recognize him as one of the Celtic school by reason if the melancholy of his poems” (68) appears to do precisely that; it enacts his abject lack of the very sophistication he covets. In certain ways, Joyce‟s narrative strategies encourage such a reading (as I will explore in the section below). 30 And, yet, the peculiar thing about

Chandler‟s claims to sophistication is that their inefficacy anything but evacuates their erotic valence. His refined manners and cultural aspirations, in spite, or perhaps because, of their naïveté, operate very persistently and very perversely as erotic cathexes throughout the story. Chandler‟s receptivity to the “touch” of poetry does exactly that, as

I suggested earlier, and his sensibilities repeatedly afford a particular practice of queer desires.

This is most explicit in the passage when Chandler evokes the “high” world of

Corless‟s as he is walking “swiftly” through the city to his meeting, which is, the narrator

29 Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 118. 30 Joyce himself was famously dismissive of the poets of the Celtic Revival whose folkloric invocations of a more authentic, pre-colonial Ireland he considered sentimental and retrograde. In his 1904 poem, “The Holy Office,” for instance, he depicts Yeats, one of the luminaries of the Celtic Revival, catering to “his giddy dames‟ frivolities” while distancing himself from “that mumming company”: “…But I must not be accounted/ One of that mumming company-/ With him who hies him to appease/ His giddy dames‟ frivolities/ While they console him when he whinges/ With gold-embroidered Celtic fringes…” (quoted in Jackson and McGinley, 75) Joyce‟s insistence that he not be associated with the feminine aesthetics of the Celtic poets is practically a caricature of modernism‟s identification with masculinity, with the cosmopolitan (as opposed to the rural) and with the avant-garde (as opposed to popular culture). 83

stresses, the same “habit” (to walk swiftly) that also brings him into a very “low” world.

“Whenever he [finds] himself in the city late at night,” the narrative voice notes, “he hurrie[s] on his way apprehensively and excitedly” (66). Then, as if feasting with panthers, Chandler “court[s] the causes of his fears”:

He chose the darkest and narrowest street and, as he walked boldly forward, the silence that was spread about his footsteps troubled him, the wandering, silent figures troubled him; and at times the sound of low fugitive laughter made him tremble like a leaf. (67)

On these nocturnal walks Chandler seeks out “the darkest and narrowest streets,” back alleys where he chases (“courts”) “feelings of delicious terror,” in Garry Leonard‟s apt phrase.31 There, in the dark amidst faceless, nameless strangers, he cruises along

“apprehensively and excitedly”—at once afraid of being apprehended and turned on by the thought of it. “[T]he silence that spread[s] about his footsteps” is answered by the silence of the “wandering figures” around him and suggests that Chandler not only courts but also partakes in this nightly traffic. The silent interaction between straying anonymous figures evokes the choreography of cruising, and, however much those echoing silences “trouble” Chandler (the narrative mentions it twice), they also offer an exquisite thrill when “the sound of fugitive laughter” transforms those troubling silences into trembling sensations.

Leonard interprets these nightly outings as visits to prostitutes, a suggestion he takes from Chandler‟s “later rather fervid and circumspect questioning of Gallaher on the subject of prostitutes.” “The low fugitive laughter than frightens and excites him,”

Leonard writes “comes from women anxious to encourage him to stop awhile and pay

31 Garry M. Leonard, Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 150. 84

them for their services,” although it is unlikely, Leonard adds, “that Little Chandler will ever respond.”32 While the language of both danger and desire in this passage surely points to an activity at once illicit and erotic, even sexual, the semblance between

Chandler‟s movements and those of the figures around him (the silence around both

“trouble him”) indicates to me that he is there to do what they do, that Chandler and his fellow wanderers—whose gender, incidentally, is left uncertain—“court” similar pleasures. For someone who discretely perfumes his handkerchief and whose solitary, night-time ventures lead him into “the darkest and narrowest streets”—a topography, that is, of anality—it seems that one ought not automatically presume the heterosexual explanation here.33

Chandler‟s easy movement from the imaginary glamour of Corless‟s to this dark netherworld also further underscores the contingency of his aesthetic and erotic tastes, if not their continuity. (The text literally transitions from a discussion of Chandler‟s “swift” walk to Dublin‟s uppercrust locale to a discussion of his “swift” walks to the city‟s back alleys). In a way, Chandler is at his most sophisticated here, in the sense of the term‟s older meaning of “corruption” and “adulteration” (derived from the Latin “sophisticare”) that still underlies its current significance. Unlike Bourdieu‟s concept of distinction, a

32 Ibid., 150. 33 This passage actually bears remarkable similarities to a section in Proust‟s Recherche in which he describes his hero‟s nocturnal wanderings through Venice. Like Joyce, Proust stresses the narrowness of the back streets Marcel explores: “I plunged into a network of little alleys…packed tightly together” only to suddenly open up onto “a strange and spacious piazza of which no guidebook, no tourist had even told me.” While, by day, Marcel visit female sex workers, at night, he experiences the pleasures of going through “tight” alleys and finding unexpected open spaces—a movement that allegorizes anal sex. Also, like Joyce, Proust imagines those parts of the city as mysterious worlds, known to insiders only: “I found myself in the middle of strange purlieus like a character in the Arabian Nights… whither mysterious agents convey by night a person who, brought back home before daybreak, can never find his way back to the magic dwelling” (Remembrance of Things Past. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, transl. [New York: Random House 1982] 3:665). 85

concept based on the assumption that distinguished tastes do not involve vulgar, i.e. bodily ones, sophistication is never far from the above mentioned trembling sensations.

It “arouses much more quickly,” Litvak explains, “the suspicion that it is impure, contaminated from the onset by the desiring, and thus disgusting, body in which it lives and moves.”34 In the case of Chandler, one need not be suspicious to recognize in his naïveté sophistication‟s perverse dynamic of muddling the distinction between class and sex; it is too impure, too full of desire to coolly differentiate between good object- choices—be they cultural or sexual—and bad object-choices. As a performance (and theory) of taste, moreover, sophistication has, in Western modernity at least, been the terrain of gay people—think of Proust‟s exquisite snobbery, Wilde‟s dazzling wit, or even the elegant and fashionable thought of Foucault—although that has rendered queers, and effeminate men in particular, as vulnerable as distinguished.35

Joyce wrote “A Little Cloud” just over a decade after Wilde‟s conviction for

“gross indecencies” and the latter‟s legacy shadows this and a number of other stories in

Dubliners. In fact, around the time he finished writing “A Little Cloud,” Joyce was reading Wilde‟s The Picture of Dorian Gray “the central idea” of which he found

34 Litvak, Strange Gourmets, 6. 35 While sophistication is certainly not reducible to gayness, queer scholars have underlined the ambivalent implications of this knot. Litvak, in particular, writes insightfully on the function of gay people “as subjects of sophistication” and, simultaneously, “objects of such distinguished aggressions as urbanity and knowingness.” In contemporary Anglo-American popular culture, he notes, gayness figures in the knowing shorthand of trendiness, pretentiousness, and (in the case of queer academics) elitism and, as such, affords homophobia the more proper stance of “sophistophobia,” of the violent normativity and “common sense” that proudly announces its lack of sophistication while it denounces elitism or intellectualism (a gesture that itself requires a degree of sophistication). Litvak provides the example of the ubiquitous and “perennially unpopular figure of the snooty (i.e. gay) salesman in the upscale boutique,” an image that, however parodic, rehearses the loathsomeness of gay investments in sophistication. “It is hard to tell which is worse,” he continues “having sophistication or wanting it. Not that anyone can have it, any more than the phallus in Lacanian theory is simply there to be had. Say, rather, that sophistication has us—that it has some of us, seizes some of us, more conspicuously, than others “(Strange Gourmets, 4-5). 86

“fantastic,” although he also confessed to be troubled by what he saw as Wilde‟s “wish to put himself before the world.” “I can imagine,” he remarked, “the capital which Wilde‟s prosecuting counsel made out of certain parts of it. It is not very difficult to read between the lines[…] the book is rather crowded with lies and epigrams. If he had the courage to develop the allusions in the book it might have been better.”36

Joyce‟s assessment of Wilde‟s work, and in particular his claim that the homosexual content of Dorian Gray is fairly transparent is, of course. largely due to his historical vantage point. In a way, “A Little Cloud” constitutes Joyce‟s inquiry into the strategies by which effeminacy—after Wilde, so to speak—fails to become visible as the homosexual sign. How is it, in other words, that scholars read the effeminacy of Joyce‟s protagonist almost exclusively in terms of his littleness or naïveté, and Chandler‟s supposed lack of cultural sophistication implicitly figures as a lack of sexual sophistication? Perhaps this focus on Chandler‟s shame (and shaming) as the sign of the immaturity of his cathexes fails to register the relative lack of shame with which he enjoys the queer pleasures afforded by those cathexes.

Could Joyce‟s representation of Chandler then also be understood as a case study in the deflecting, indeed clouding, effects of shame? After all, Chandler is not exactly shameless, as his frequent blushes readily indicate, but his queer transgressions do not appear to signify as shameful to him and, therefore, perhaps, do not signify at all to readers of this story. This raises, first of all, the question of the scope of the revelatory shame in Joyce‟s story, and, in particular, of the narrator‟s role in deploying this modality of shame. As I will explore more fully below, critical interpretations mostly follow what

36 Letters of James Joyce, 150. 87

Joyce‟s narrator reveals to be shameful or embarrassing about Chandler: his bad literary tastes, his childish impressionability, his nervous manners. The narrative reliance on revelatory shame suggests that Joyce‟s Dubliners have to be jolted by sudden, painful insights to become aware of their abject failures and inadequacies. In the figure of

Chandler, however, Joyce‟s work also posits a different, less interruptive relation between shame and non-normative “interests and enjoyments,” whereby a lack of shame does not automatically imply a lack of awareness of those interests as non-normative.

More specifically, I am interested in examining the ways in which Chandler‟s particular kind of sophistication (which, as I have tried to show, is not a position of having cultural capital but a performance of queer effeminacy) could also be understood as a weak shame

”theory,” that is, as a series of gestures that more or less successfully stave of the interruption of his “interests and enjoyments.” What thus, on one level of the text, registers as Chandler‟s embarrassing lack of literary and sexual sophistication may, on another level of the text, involve a particularly astute reading of the perverse possibilities of that very lack, especially in countering the abjecting strategies by which effeminacy

(in its queerest sense) becomes identified and made visible.

Joyce’s Secret Seductions

Far from signaling the death of desire. demystification may represent desire’s most ingenious ruse.

Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets

Like all stories in Dubliners, the narration of “A Little Cloud” is highly unreliable and, therefore, presents a tricky read. Joyce‟s frequent use of free indirect speech and the accompanying impure focalizations make it hard to distinguish the narrative voice and perspective from those of the characters in the story. The narrator‟s omissions and numerous elliptical dots further contribute to what Phillip Herring has called “Joyce‟s uncertainty principle”; they incite readers to fill in the gaps, to complete the narrative.

Margot Norris, who of all critics is the most attuned to the effects of this narrative elusiveness—or “scrupulous meanness,” as Joyce put it—, cautions against the dangers of readerly collusion with the deceptive narrative voices in this text. She observes, for instance, that the epithet “Little Chandler” is actually never used by any of the characters in the story (Gallaher refers to him as “Tommy” and “old hero”) but is only employed in the narrative discourse. “[H]e is called „Little Chandler,‟” she writes “only behind his back and without his consent.” It is a narrative gesture that, according to Norris, invites the reader‟s complicity “in a patronizing form of unkind gossip about this man” and, as such, has also “inflected critical discourse.”37 Warren Beck, for example, compares

37 Margot Norris, Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 111. While my reading of “A Little Cloud” diverges significantly from Norris‟s, I am 89

Chandler to “many a wavering little man” and refers to him as “this little fellow” and

“childish, effeminate Little Chandler.”38 Norris is therefore quite correct to insist on a suspicious approach to Dubliners in order to avoid such spillovers of its narrative voices into scholarly discourse. Interestingly, in her reading of “A Little Cloud,” this resistance leads to an interpretation of Chandler as “worth more as a man and a human being than

Gallaher,” with “an attractive, well-run home and family life. “39 While I share Norris‟s unease with the masculinist belittling of Chandler (on both narrative and scholarly levels), I am also wary of restoring Joyce‟s protagonist to a degree of masculinity that is both “manly” and “humane”—of the effort, in other words, to make him a better man.40

By normalizing Chandler‟s effeminacy as a gentler, more moral version of straight masculinity, the “femme” at the heart of this story is rendered invisible and his deviations from gender and sexual norms thus merely signify as the man‟s innocence or innocuousness, not as the perversions they are.

To be sure, the narrative strategies in “A Little Cloud” are highly deceptive and they frequently introduce multiple, often competing modes of perception and evaluation, so that readers are steered in one direction, then in another. In the opening paragraph, for example, the narrative voice depicts Chandler‟s impressions of how “Gallaher had got on” in his eight years on the Continent—“you could tell that at once.” In Chandler‟s

indebted to her analysis of the various cognitive and perceptual horizons operative in this story, and in Dubliners as a whole. 38 Warren Beck, Joyce’s “Dubliners”: Substance, Vision, Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 1969), 163, 175, 176. 39 Norris, Suspicious Readings, 114, 118. 40 Beck understands Chandler in slightly different terms, but with similarly normalizing implications, as someone so average that he comes to stand in for every man: “That Chandler is such an ordinary little man, except for a certain daintiness, and with perhaps more than average secret dreaminess, makes his example the more representative” (Substance, Vision, Art, 182). 90

eyes, his friend appears to have “remain[ed] unspoiled by his success” and “had deserved to win.” Only later in the narrative does it become clear that these observations, euphemistically termed “Little Chandler‟s thoughts,” are in fact imaginary. When he actually meets Gallaher, the latter‟s boldness, “unhealthy pallor” and ugly “orange tie”

(69) contrast starkly with Chandler‟s fantasy of Gallaher‟s “traveled air, well-cut tweed, and fearless accent” (65). The lewd and misogynist remarks of Gallaher further demonstrate that the man has remained anything but “unspoiled by his success,” a success that itself is to be doubted. Chandler‟s dreamy assessment of his friend is thus revealed to be painfully off-base; the person he imagined as elegant, worldly, with “a heart […] in the right place” (65) is really just a gauche braggart. The narrative strategy of first inhabiting Chandler‟s “thoughts” and subsequently showing those “thoughts” to be solipsistic reveries, entirely out of touch with reality, thus positions Chandler as a questionable source of perception and evaluation in the story. By staging this surprise revelation, the narration further stresses the discrepancy between Chandler‟s fantasy and reality, a gesture that does indeed encourage a particularly belittling reading of Chandler.

After all, his glamorous construction of Gallaher also displays Chandler‟s investment in himself as a man of culture, who can recognize the signs of worldly sophistication in others and evaluate them appropriately (“Gallaher has got on. You could tell that at once by….”). When Chandler then encounters his rather crass friend, this supposed cultured knowledgeability (that leads him, among others, to the erroneous conclusion that “[i]t was something to have a friend like that”) is exposed as a silly self-delusion, as a sign of

Chandler‟s lack of the very discerning tastes he aspires to. This belated disclosure of his

naïveté works as a kind of “shaming effect”: it interrupts Chandler‟s claims to sophistication and holds them up for the reader‟s recognition and evaluation.

Sean Latham has argued that these moments of insight operate as performative claims to narrative sophistication in that they serve to allocate, in his words, “disgust” to

Joyce‟s clueless protagonists, trapped in their pedestrian tastes. On the occasions when their lack of cultural refinement is revealed—as in the scene described above, or in the more dramatic closing of “A Little Cloud”—Joyce‟s characters are being punished, according to Latham, for their difference from the sophisticated narrative and readerly tastes. “Above these horrifying scenes,” he claims, “presides the text‟s narrator, who joins in a conspiratorial pact with the reader to gape in petulant disgust at these […] moments of subjection.”41

The “shaming effects” employed by the narrator of “A Little Cloud,” however, may produce a set of insights about, and “disgusted” readings of Chandler, but those insights do not necessarily coincide with the cognitive and affective “reality” of the story‟s protagonist. Latham‟s supposition that the demystification effected by those

“shaming effects” leads to disgust on the part of readers actually proceeds from an authoritative understanding of sophistication, as a set of gestures, that is, that have the power to distribute disgust. Since Chandler clearly lacks such authority, Latham assumes that Chandler‟s cultural aspirations are necessarily ineffectual and offer the man no pay off, so to speak. Yet, while the narrator‟s distribution of shame certainly places

Chandler‟s “interests and enjoyments” in a painful light, such a demystification (on the

41 Sean Latham, “A Portrait of a Snob,” Modern Fiction Studies 47.4 (2001), 774. 92

part of Joyce‟s narrator), as Joseph Litvak writes, “doesn‟t necessarily mean decathexis

[on the part of Joyce‟s protagonist]”42

Note, for instance, how Chandler‟s fantasized version of Gallaher, and by implication of himself, stands easily side by side with his subsequent recollection of

Gallaher‟s “wild” past. In naturalistic mode, Chandler remembers how the latter “used to mix with a rakish set of fellows […], drank freely and borrowed money on all sides” and how he finally “got mixed up in some shady affair, some money transaction; at least, that was one version of his flight” (67). What is remarkable about this account is, first, that it establishes Chandler‟s familiarity with the “real” Gallaher (the gambler, the drinker, etc.) and thus with the less sophisticated, less successful aspects of the man, and, secondly, that it represents Gallaher‟s flaws and eventual exit from Ireland in a way that counteracts the narrative insistence on demysticification. Chandler, in other words, is quite content to introduce “one version of [Gallaher‟s] flight” [emphasis mine] and, in doing so, signals both his acknowledgement of Gallaher‟s transgressions and his resistance to narrativize them as a revelatory exposé. Rather than reflecting on the “real” cause of the scandal that drove his friend abroad, Chandler continues to recall how “[t]here was always a certain…something in Ignatius Gallaher that impressed you in spite of yourself”(67).

The latter always “kept up a bold face,” Chandler muses “when he was in a tight corner” and “used to say lightheartedly „Where‟s my considering cap?‟ That was Ignatius

Gallaher all out and, damn it, you couldn‟t but admire him for it”(67). Instead of detailing the particulars of how Gallaher eventually got caught in a scandal, Chandler‟s

42 Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets, 79. . 93

recollection lingers fondly over Gallaher‟s adeptness at avoiding scandals—“[t]he remembrance brought a slight flush of pride to Chandler‟s cheek”(67).

The obvious pleasure with which Chandler recalls the “wild” Gallaher of his bachelor days further suggests that this version of Gallaher primarily articulates

Chandler‟s cathexes; he is not interested in, though not necessarily ignorant of, the nitty- gritty of Gallaher‟s transgressions, but instead is titillated by his friend‟s ability to find ways out, so to speak. As Bernard Benstock remarks, “Chandler prefers to write his own version of various aspects of Ignatius Gallaher, especially the version that would fit his own flight.”43 Moreover, in Chandler‟s reddened cheeks—the bivalent semaphore signifying pleasure and proprietary pride (as is the case in this instance) but also shame and embarrassment (at other moments in the text)—we can further recognize his own reparative attitude to shame‟s implicit imperative to be witnessed. Rather than occupying the position of distanced witness of Gallaher‟s embarrassment, Chandler places himself, blushingly, in close proximity to his friend‟s shame, and shame-management—as one of the “‟boys” addressed by Gallaher in the face of shame (“‟boys,‟ he used to say lightheartedly. „Where is my considering cap?‟”)

43 Bernard Benstock, Narrative Con/Texts in Dubliners (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 133. Chandler‟s flight, as I noted earlier, constitutes a flight from the normative, the mundane—not simply a physical escape from Dublin. Chandler‟s particular version of “Gallaher” and the latter‟s “talent,” in other words, does not primarily function to nostalgically revisit the pleasures of his homosocial past, but instead serves to insinuate Chandler into future spaces of queer sophistication as he imagines that “every step [toward meeting Gallaher] brought him nearer London, farther from his sober inartistic life.” As he is thinking back to the “wild” Gallaher, Chandler notices that “his soul revolt[s] against the dull inelegance of Capel Street” and he proceeds to construe the “poor stunted houses” along the quays as “a band of tramps, huddled together along the riverbanks.” Chandler‟s imaginative attention to this scene of poverty underlines that his revolt targets not the low, but the “dull” and “inelegant” middle between the high and the low. The sophistication Chandler so desires, then, emerges once again as a perverse movement from high to low (from London‟s rich literary milieu to Irish squalor) that circumvents the middle, the norm, indeed the normative. 94

In his years on the Continent, Gallaher appears to have shifted his position as a subject continuously under the threat of shame to one who quite literally deals in the shame of others, effects it and lives of it. As a tabloid journalist (“always hurry and scrurry, looking for copy”), he reveals and exposes transgressions, apparently mostly sexual, to a reading audience who can imaginatively and deliciously partake in those transgressions without being touched by the shame of them. Thus, as if submitting copy,

Gallaher provides Chandler with “a sketch [of] some pictures of the corruption which was rife abroad. He summarized the vices of many capitals […] He revealed many of the secrets of the religious houses on the Continent and described some of the practices which were fashionable in high society and ended by telling, with details, a story about an English duchess—a story which he knew to be true”(72).44 Implicit in Gallaher‟s discursive bravura, here, is the assurance that this display of his knowledge of these perverse worlds does not implicate him, but, instead, affords him the privilege of an unproblematic (straightforward?) witness to sexual others, and their shaming. For

Chandler, however, the experience of his shame and that of others has remained much more capacious and complicated. For instance, when, at the start of their conversation,

Gallaher presses Chandler about the particulars of the downfall of their old friend,

O‟Hara (“O‟Hara seems to be in a bad way […] Boose, I suppose?”), Chandler replies

44 The stress on the truth of the last story—a dubious emphasis for supposedly true revelations made in “a calm historian‟s tone”—surely indicates that, to Gallaher, the telling of it serves primarily performatively, that is, to demonstrate his own sexual knowledge and his ability to acquire, even produce that knowledge. After all, his revelations come in the form of a “sketch” with “pictures” and of “stories” with “details,” an idiom belonging as much to fiction as to fact. 95

“shortly”: “Other things, too” (70).45 This response not only positions the latter as a subject in the know of worldly (read: sexual) knowledge, but also demonstrates his absorbing, even retentive relation to the shame of others—an attitude that, in certain contexts, signifies as discretion.46

Interestingly, throughout their conversation, Gallaher continuously construes this discretion as indicative of Chandler‟s lack of sexual experience and, like Joyce‟s narrative voice, stresses the man‟s supposed immaturity, referring to Chandler as “my boy” (69). When Chandler does not cough up the details about O‟Hara, Gallaher remarks on his friend‟s arrested development and concomitant naïveté: “you‟re the very same person that used to lecture me on Sunday mornings when I had a sore head and fur on my tongue. You‟d want to knock about a bit in the world” (70). A little later, when boasting

45 Ingersoll writes that “Little Tommy is too scrupulous to do more than suggest that O‟Hara has been consorting with prostitutes” (Engendered Tropes in Joyce’s Dubliners [Carbondal: Southern Illinois U. P., 1996], 118). 46Compared to normatively raced, classed, and gendered subjects, deviant subjects of all kinds have, as Sedgwick phrases it, a “far less complacent relation to the witness of others,” and, we should add, a more complicated relation to witnessing (the shame of) others. The normative discourses that serve to individuate restrictively—and abjectly—these subjects also withhold them the authority of the performative “Shame on you/him/her.” Naturally, as a performative speech act, the phrase is iterable in multiple context, by multiple speakers, with multiple consequences, but the efficacy of this particular performative depends upon the disappearance of the speaker‟s subjectivity and agency behind the authority and anonymity of collective norms. Blacks, jews, queers, and other “spoiled identities” have fewer opportunities, or less dominant collective norms, to become de-individuated mouthpieces articulating normative regimes. Sedgwick writes that the truncated grammar of “Shame on you/her/him,” lacking both a verb and a subject (at least an explicit one), “marks it as the product of a history out of which an I, now withdrawn, is projecting shame—toward another I, an I deferred, that has yet and with difficulty to come into being, if at all, in the place of the shamed second [or third] person.” In the identity-less and face-less narrator of “A Little Cloud” we find that withdrawn I, whose projection of shame onto Chandler individuates the latter in pronounced ways—i.e. as infantile, sexually ignorant, and culturally naïve—at the same time that other subjective shapes remain deferred—queer, effeminate.

about his visits to “Bohemian cafes” in Paris, Gallaher notes that such “[h]ot stuff” is

“[n]ot for a pious chap like you, Tommy” (71). On the subject of these and other “spicy bits in Paris,” such as the cocottes, Gallaher even doubts if his friend knows of the phenomenon: “You know what they are?”(71) In this respect, Gallaher‟s sordid travelogue parallels the narrator‟s discourse in that it persistently serves to interpellate

“little Chandler” as a sexually unsophisticated—indeed, “abstemious”—colonial whose erotic life consists of marital “spooning and mooning,” as Gallaher puts is.

At stake in Gallaher‟s emasculating representation of Chandler is, of course, also his own masculinity—one that is supposed to stand in emphatic contradistinction to that of Chandler. Gallaher insists, for instance, that, unlike Chandler, he will not “tie

[him]self up to one woman”(76), referring to Chandler‟s wife but also to Ireland itself, which is figured as feminine.47 Instead, he “mean[s] to marry money.” “She‟ll have a good fat account in the bank,” he proclaims, “or she won‟t do for me”(75) and reassures

Chandler that “[t]here are hundreds—what am I saying—thousands of rich Germans and

Jews, rotten with money, that I‟d be only too glad too…You wait a while, my boy”(75-

6). Like his exoticizing constructions of European women as wanton and sexually ravenous, these remarks aim to demonstrate the sexual worldliness Gallaher acquired on the Continent. Not very subtly, Gallaher thus stresses that his departure from Ireland has also extricated him from contemporary conceptions of the effeminacy of the Irish and he

47 In Gaelic mythology, for instance, Ireland is personified as a maternal figure devouring her native sons. W.B. Yeats‟s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, most famously, recast this myth in Irish nationalist terms. 97

performs this “emancipation” by inscribing those very effeminizing discourses onto

Chandler and “dear, dirty Dublin.”48

The irony here is, of course, that such assertions of manliness demonstrate the extent to which Gallaher himself is bound to the very discursive regimes within which he situates Chandler. His masculinity, in other words, emerges in relation to and, at times, even as the effeminacy associated with colonized subjectivities, as when he admits that, in Europe, “they have a great feeling for the Irish […] When they heard I was from

Ireland they were ready to eat me, man”(71). Moreover, as Ingersoll notes, Gallaher‟s announcement that he plans to marry one of those rich Jews or Germans “that I‟d be only too glad too…” concludes with a telling ellipses. According to Ingersoll, readers are encouraged to fill out this phrase by supplying thoughts such as „to pay for my sexuality.‟

In the end, Ingersoll writes, Gallaher‟s “recognition of relative „poverty‟ in contrast to a world of women „rotten with money‟ confines him just as tightly to a „feminized‟ position as Chandler.”49

This does not take away, however, from the fact that Gallaher‟s misogynist and heterosexist remarks subject Chandler to a set of masculinist norms of which the latter clearly falls short. And, thus, when, toward the end of their conversation, Chandler‟s cheeks are permanently reddened, his blush appears to signal Chandler‟s painful

48 The gendering of Ireland and the Irish emerged through multiple discourses and often times from politically opposite directions. While 19th century racial discourses conceived of the Irish as a dirty and essentially feminine race, both British imperialist and Irish nationalist discourses imagined their respective projects in explicitly gendered terms to the extent that these projects also operated as a politics of gender. See Joseph Valente, James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1995) and D. Cairns and S. Richards, Writing Ireland (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1988), 42-57. 49 Ingersoll, Engendered Tropes in Joyce’s Dubliners, 120. 98

acknowledgement of his shortcomings. This is how the narrative voice represents

Chandler‟s flustered response:

The blush which had risen to his face a few moments before was establishing itself [...] The adventure of meeting Gallaher after eight years, of finding himself with Gallaher in Corless‟s surrounded by light and noise, of listening to Gallaher‟s stories and of sharing for a brief space Gallaher vagrant and triumphant life, upset the equipoise of his sensitive nature. He felt acutely the contrast between his own life and his friend‟s, and it seemed to him unjust […] What was it that stood in his way? His unfortunate timidity? He wished to vindicate himself in some way, to assert his manhood. (74-5)

Moving from the exterior sensations of hot cheeks, disorienting lights and noises, to the interior space of Chandler's “sensitive nature,” the narrative voice depicts Chandler's embarrassment as revealing the man's fragile manhood. Not only is it rather unmanly,

Joyce's narrator implies, to blush so openly in the company of other men, but Chandler's

“upset equipoise” forces him to recognize, to “fe[el] acutely” the “contrast” between

Gallaher's “triumphant life” and that of his own. He too wishes to “assert his manhood” but, instead, has to ponder his “unfortunate timidity.” Read as a moment of revelatory shame, then, Chandler's “timid” reaction to Gallaher's emasculating remarks “proves” the very lack of manhood attributed to him in the first place.

There is, however, another way to interpret Chandler's embarrassed stance to

Gallaher's discursive maneuvers; after all, the former's shame indicates the social authority and pervasiveness of the discourses Gallaher deploys, but not necessarily their heuristic value. In a way, one could even argue that, by blushing, Joyce's protagonist conforms to the masculinist sexual and gender norms articulated by Gallaher. As Erving

Goffman has explained, social conformity demands that individuals, who fail to live up to

the norms governing a particular context, display embarrassment (or feign it). “A person who fails to present a proper self,” Goffman writes, “but acts embarrassed is considered a conforming member of the group, albeit he probably loses some status in the process.”50

Chandler's blushes, then, present an example of shame and embarrassment as a social imperative; rather than somatically signifying the “truth” of the normative discourses

Gallaher voices; in other words, those blushes suggest the deftness with which Chandler negotiates those discourses. Indeed, “[h]e saw behind Gallaher's” condescension, for

“Gallaher was only patronising him [...] just as he was patronising Ireland by his visit”

(75). Chandler furthermore observes “the vulgar something in his friend” as well as the latter's “new gaudy manner” (71). “Gallaher's accent and way of expressing himself did not please him” (ibid.). Yet, in spite or, rather, because of Gallaher's “way of expressing himself,” Chandler is forced to show his embarrassment on this occasion, or as the narrator phrases it, to have “his unfortunate timidity”--which is, according to Tomkins, one of shame's attitudes—stand in the way of “his manhood.” What is truly unfortunate, in other words, is not Chandler's lack of manhood, but the demand that he express shame for not having it.

By approaching Chandler's constant blush here as a form of social shame and, in doing so, countering the hermeneutic claims of revelatory shame, we can further a more expansive and, at the same, time a more specific model of shame. After all, the affect often figures within a kind of one-directional model, whereby a subject‟s shame (about being disabled, poor, black, Jewish, woman, gay, etc) is the result of a psychic

50Erving Goffman, “Embarrassment and Social Organization” in The American Journal of Sociology,Vol. LXI (1956), 269. 100

internalization of a set of norms to which he or she fails to live up. Implicitly, then, subordinated subjects are seen to endorse the very standards that subject them to shaming which, as Cheshire Calhoun argues, “encourages us, at best, to seek psychological explanations for these irrational shame responses; and at worst, to chastise the subordinated for feeling ashamed and to exhort them to buck up, think for themselves

[…] and spur public opinion.”51 The revelatory shame in “A Little Cloud” works to do exactly that; by way of his free indirect discourse, Joyce's narrator represents Chandler's shame as issuing from a deficient psychological landscape (“delicate” with a “sensitive nature” easily “upset” and “confused”)--too immature, in other words, to “buck up”--and as unconsciously endorsing the very standards from which he deviates.

There is, however, a difference between recognizing the authority or social weight of certain stigmatizing discourses (and responding to them in shame) and actually conceding the truth of those stigmatizing discourses. As is the case when Chandler‟s meets his friend in Corless's homosocial environment, certain social contexts are governed by certain discourses that demand of certain subjects to be shamed, or to show embarrassment, since those discourses carry social authority, not necessarily heuristic weight. “It is indeed a lacuna in our moral theories,” Calhoun writes, “that makes it seem that in order for an opinion to have shaming weight, we must at some level accept it to be true.”52 Gallaher's masculinist put downs, in other words, may shame his friend, but that does not suggest that the latter actually identifies with the norms articulated by Gallaher, or unconsciously agrees with them.

51Chesire Calhoun, “An Apology for Moral Shame,” The Journal for Political Philosophy. Vol 12, Number 2, 2004, p. 140. 52Ibid., 139. 101

Sophistication’s queer ignorance effects

As I have argued earlier in this chapter, the narrator of “A Little Cloud” is a seductively demystifying one, a voice that with seemingly neutrality represents the painful shortcomings of the story's protagonist. Moreover, precisely because the narrator stresses the naïvété of Chandler's tastes and desires, it becomes hard to read how those tastes and desires also operate as forms of queer sophistication—if we merely follow the narrator's “shaming effects,” that is. When, on the narrative level, shame accompanies the revelation of “little Chandler's” immaturity, parochialism, etcetera, it appears as if we are given privileged insight into this character, and his blushes at the end of his meeting with

Gallaher only confirm what we already know to be true.

In a way, this supposedly knowledgeable narration is the opposite of that in “An

Encounter” in that the narrator of the latter story appears to be quite ignorant. Ostensibly,

“An Encounter” is narrated from the perspective of its young protagonist, although, as

Margot Norris has pointed out, the narrator's “good accent”—to use one of his own phrases—betrays a sophisticated vocabulary and diction quite beyond even the brightest of pre-adolescent boys. Yet, in presenting the narrator as innocent, Joyce's story also situates its reader in an equally ignorant position, a strategy that ensures at least the jolt of embarrassment when, toward the end of “An Encounter,” the old man suddenly exposes himself to the boys. Precisely by maintaining his “privilege of unknowing,” the narrator sets the stage for the surprise revelation of the “queer old josser's” mastubatory

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performance, at which point the boy's shame indicates his forced and sudden acknowledgement of perversion as perversion. Even though, upon a second reading, it becomes apparent that the storyteller is not quite the inexperienced child, his reliance on a series of “ignorance effects” allows for shame to function as a heuristic device through which pederasty becomes a possible object of recognition.

This strategy also explains the curious reception of “An Encounter.” The fact that the readers of Joyce's story at first overlooked the “enormity” of its content and subsequently were shocked by it mimics the narrative movement from innocence to sexual knowledge. In other words, even though Joyce's narrator gives an account of “his adventure” after the fact—and understands “its enormity”—his ostensible youthful ignorance serves to defer information about the “queer old josser” that would have produced more suspicious readings. And through the staged revelation at the end—a gesture not unlike that of the “old josser” himself—the narrator surprises the reader with sexual perversions one is supposed to always keep an eye out for.

Curiously, though, the narrator's use of “ignorance effects” also allows us to see

Joyce's young protagonist as quite an astute reader of the old pervert; this is a peculiar consequence of a number of narrative ellipses that initially merely signify as “ignorance effects.” One such ellipsis occurs when the old man goes off and appears to behave indecently. We only get Mahony's exclamation: “I say! Look what he is doing!”(24)

The boy's response is that he “neither answered nor raised my eyes.” In other words, the boy appears or, at least, acts unsurprised. His averted eyes symptomize a knowledge that the narrative elsewhere shields, and the quickly contrived disguise—“In case he asks for

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our names...let you be Murphy and I'll be Smith”(18)—signals the boy's understanding that the old man's provocative behavior is intended for his and Mahony's benefit. The narration of “An Encounter” is repeatedly punctuated by such ocular moments, by moments, in other words, in which its protagonist averts his eyes, lowers his head, a gesture signifying shame, not the shame that comes with surprise, but the one that comes with reading.

The narration of “A Little Cloud” accomplishes something quite different. By continuously disclosing Chandler's embarrassing naïveté, the narrator implicitly establishes his superior grasp on “reality,” his “privilege of knowing” one might say.

Joyce's story thus presents us with a reassuringly knowledgeable narrative voice whose representation of “Little Chandler” insistently anticipates the latter's embarrassment. In a way, one could argue that this narrator operates as a strong “shame-theorist” for whom

Chandler's relatively weak “shame theorizing” signifies as a sign of this character's immaturity. Thus, Chandler's shame and his failure to be ashamed—about his literary aspirations, for instance—confirm the scope of the narrator's scrutiny. Ironically, this renders visible the extent to which Chandler fails a set of sexual and cultural norms, not the success—indeed, the sophistication--with which he circumvents them.

“A Little Cloud” ends disturbingly, with Chandler's violent reading of his wife's photograph (her “cold” eyes “repelled and defied him”[78]) and his harsh treatment of his child, precipitated by his inability “to read” (Byron‟s poetry). The story's conclusion is difficult to interpret and I do not want to force it into a queer-affirmative reading so as to somehow legitimate my effeminophilic approach to Chandler. Nor do I want to see the

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concluding scene in negative terms of a failed masculinity lashing out in an attempt to assert authority, agency, even though Joyce‟s text does solicit this interpretation. After all, “A Little Cloud” precedes “Counterparts,” featuring the clerk Farrington and his frantic though futile struggles against humiliations—at work, in the bar with his friends, and with strange women. Once at home, Farrington whips his little son, transferring his own humiliation onto the buttocks of his child. What I have been trying to do with

“Little Cloud” is not so much to develop a kind of deterministic psychology of shame, especially in relation to gender and sexuality, whereby shame operates as the affective or interior consequence of a set of violent epistemic configurations, without any possibility of negotiation, except through the violence of those very configurations. In Chandler, we can recognize a much more mobile engagement with shame, one that also allows for the possibility of counter-discursive positions that intervene or even, at times, circumvent normalizing procedures of subjectivation. Chandler's embarrassments, in other words, not only represent instances of being read—and thus of being restrictively individuated— but also constitute occasions for reading, gestures that imagine, “theorize,” the continuation of “interests and enjoyments,” rather than their interruption.

Perhaps this can also begin to account for the domestic drama at the end of “A

Little Cloud.” For, at this point, the possibility for such reparative gestures seems to escape Chandler when he concludes, in response to his wailing son, “It [is] useless. I can't read.” Thus, he sets in motion a chain of interruptions, starting with his attempt to interrupt his child's cries (yelling “Stop!”) and its hiccupping response; his wife's sudden return and her angry questions that, again and again, interrupt his already stuttering

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attempts to explain. This heaps shame on shame, so to speak, and most certainly lacks the sophistication of Chandler's previously weak “shame-theorizing.”

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c h a p t e r t h r e e

Inverted Feelings

The Well of Loneliness, Gay Shame and Male Honor

“The moon and Pleiades have set, Midnight is nigh The time is passing, passing—yet alone I lie.” Sappho

“What is this love we have for the invert, boy or girl? It was they who were spoken of in every romance we ever read. The girl lost, what is she but the Prince found? The Prince on the white horse that we have always been seeking...in the girl it is the prince, and in the boy it is the girl that makes a prince a prince-- and not a man. They go far back in our lost distance where what we have never had stands waiting...” Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Since the publication of Radclyffe Hall‟s The Well of Loneliness (1928) readers have noted—with varying degrees of (dis-)pleasure—the novel‟s emphasis on bad feelings. Compared to the other Anglophone works on Sapphic love that appeared in the same year (Virginia Woolf‟s gender- and genre bending Orlando; Djuna Barnes‟ frolicking, satirical Ladies’ Almanac), The Well does indeed present a particularly sorrowful account of lesbian love and life. Stephen Gordon, Hall‟s protagonist, is subjected to painfully frequent episodes of despair, sadness, frustration, anger, loneliness—and, of course, shame. She is publically humiliated, gets exiled from her

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beloved Morton, and, toward the end of the novel, suffers the tragic loss of her lover to, of all people, her best friend Martin. The Well further stands out as a text with explicitly emancipatory aims; unlike Woolf and Barnes, say, Hall intended for her work to garner greater sympathy for and acceptance of gay persons—or, to use Hall‟s term, inverts.1 As a consequence, the critical reception of the novel consists for a significant part of evaluations of Hall‟s stress on her heroine‟s negative affects in terms of its political efficacy. Not surprisingly, the scholarly verdicts on this point have, over the course of the last eight decades, shifted according to prevailing liberatory models, political and sexual styles, as well as aesthetic tastes. I begin this chapter by sidestepping—for the moment, at least—such evaluations of The Well and will argue that the novel‟s thick trajectories of negative affect—and of shame in particular—might not be immediately translatable into political agendas of whatever direction. The Well persistently explores the paradoxical condition in which the lives of homosexuals continue to be shaped by what they fail to reproduce, in which—to put it differently—they transgress a set of norms and beliefs they nevertheless share, at least to a certain extent. The novel pursues this exploration, moreover, by way of a heterogeneous set of languages, sexological, psychological, religious, and literary. In doing so, The Well presents a model of

1 With her novel Hall “hoped,” she wrote, “that it would encourage the inverted in general to declare themselves […] with dignity and courage.” She further aimed to “spur[…] all classes of inverts to a mighty effort to make good through hard work, faithful and loyal attachments […] and, above all, to sober and useful living.” Hall also referred her novel to school teachers, welfare workers, physicians, and psychologists to enlighten them to the fact that the “physically and psychologically unfit” inverts they encounter “cannot thus be considered fair examples of the inverted as a whole.” By way of The Well, finally, Hall “hoped that […] those parents who had chanced to breed male or female inverts would cease from tormenting and condemning their offspring and thus—as is only too often the case—doing irreparable harm to the highly sensitized nervous system that is characteristic of inversion.” “Why I Wrote The Well of Loneliness.” Letter by Radclyffe Hall, 1932. Lesbian Herstory Archives, cited in: American Queer Now and Then. David Shneer and Caryn Aviv, eds. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 171-2. Throughout this chapter, I will use the term “invert” to retain the historical and conceptual specificity of Hall‟s work; that specificity, I will argue, is instrumental for an understanding of the particular connections between same-sex love and shame in The Well. 108

homosexual feeling that is quite distinct from the hydraulic model of Freudian depth- psychology in which the oedipal theater of an individual‟s unconsciousness directs and explains her or his particular social and sexual investments. In Hall‟s work, we encounter instead a model that is at once more biological and social: biological in the sense that it proceeds from the notion that affects are by their very nature capable of being invested in any number of objects (including inappropriate, prohibited, or undeserving ones);2 social in the sense that affects structure beliefs and perceptions and shape and are shaped by particular relationships (between lovers and loved ones, parents and children, readers and texts). The Well of Loneliness presents an emotional map of inverts and, at the same time, examines, in rather a melancholic manner, how social privileges (of class, nationality, etc.) also involve, and are buttressed by, unequal claims to “having” certain affects. As the novel proceeds, it increasingly makes a distinction between the outcast status of homosexuals and their particular psychological negotiations of this status. I argue that the notion of masculine honor and its concomitant practice of self-sacrifice are elemental to an understanding of the multi-layeredness of shame in this text. Along the way, The Well even suggests that the shame of homosexuality may not necessarily or only “belong” to the homosexual in this text.

2 This is what Silvan Tomkins later would term “the object freedom of the human affect system” and which, according to Tomkins, accounts for the incorrect conception of emotions as irrational. The fact that a particular affect is not dependent upon the nature of a particular stimulus, but has the ability to become invested in a wide range of object does not, as Tomkins argues, point to its irrationality, but rather to the presence of mechanisms “which determine affect thresholds and which generate endless affect investments” (cited in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds. [Durham: Duke University Press, 1995], 54) 109

By featuring a visibly non-normatively gendered protagonist—Stephen Gordon is born with “narrow hips, wide shoulders” and “masculine instincts”3—Hall articulated a sexual identity distinct from the one represented by the previous two generations of

“New Women.” By way of the figure of the invert, as Esther Newton has noted, Hall broke away from models of Romantic Friendship which, on account of their supposed a- sexuality, had operated as more of less socially sanctioned forms of female intimacy.4

The sexological concept of inversion—that is, the idea of female homosexuals as possessing a man‟s soul trapped in the body of a woman—provided Hall with an idiom within which to foreground the particularity of women-who-desire-women as well as the stigma of lesbianism. Locating female homoseuality in gender reversal, in other words, renders it visible and, given the congenital nature of the invert‟s masculinity, ineradicable—a permanent marker. Thus Stephen Gordon “symbolizes,” as Newton puts it, “the stigma of lesbianism (just as the effeminate man is the stigma-bearer for gay men).”5

The Well further explores—and re-casts—the stigma of inversion through other languages of wounding, including the Catholic idioms of saints and martyrs and the WWI

3 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Doubleday, [1928] 1990), 13. Further references to this text are to this edition and will appear in the text parenthetically. 4 Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman” in: Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Lesbian and Gay Past. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr., eds. (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 283. 5 Ibid., 283. Laura Doan provides a further socio-historical context for Hall‟s stress on the stigmatized status of homosexuals. In Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), she examines the post-WWI emergence of boyish and masculine sartorial styles among British women, which initially occupied a broad semantic terrain ranging from fashionability, upper-class elegance, bohemian eccentricity, even heterosexual availability. By the end of the twenties, however, masculine fashions had given way to the “new feminine” style and, as Doan argues, women‟s masculine self-presentation (the butchy look Hall, for instance, continued to sport) acquired increasingly the unambiguous sign of lesbianism. The publication of The Well, its very public obscenity trial as well as the popular dissemination and consumption of the sexual sciences, contributed to a significant degree to the production of a distinctly legible lesbian look or, in Doan‟s terms, “the newly stigmatized „look‟ of the lesbian”(7). Doan further emphasizes that this shift represents both a “closing down” and an “opening up” of models of self-presentation and interpellative possibilities. 110

psychiatric discourses of traumatized masculinity and shellshock. Thus, long before the war actually occurs in the novel, Stephen already belongs to Britain‟s beleaguered inverts, a member of that “miserably army” fighting in “the no-man‟s-land of sex” (77).

When she acquires an actual wound, on her cheek, she considers it to be her “mark of

Cain.” Years earlier, upon “discovering” her identity in a sexological textbook, she already referred to herself as bearing the mark of Cain. Now, that mark has become a literal scar, an actual war wound. “The scar constitutes,” as Jodie Medd argues, “a nearly parodic literalization of Foucault‟s account of the nineteenth-century medicalization of sexual identity, in which the homosexual‟s shameful sexuality is „written immodestly on his face and body‟ as a „lesion […] or as a symptom—on the surface of the skin.‟”6 The scar also figures, I would add, as the crux of the text where Hall‟s claims about the shame and the honor of her protagonist come to converge.

By way of these and other languages, Hall‟s project is also one of rendering the invert intelligible by mapping her emotional life, her particular sensibilities, and affective dispositions. As Hall herself stated, The Well of Loneliness focuses on “certain fundamental emotions that are characteristic of the inverted” and her narrator refers repeatedly to the high strung nerves that go along with inversion, as well as particular sensibilities and investments. Such a project then presupposes that inversion involves a particular emotional life, that there are certain feelings that belong to certain bodies.

Hall‟s novel, in other words, makes the case that inverts are marked by, among other

6 Jodie Medd, “War Wounds: The Nation, Shell Shock, and Psychoanalysis” in: Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness (New York: Columbia U.P., 2001), 232-254. See also Susan Kingsley Kent‟s essay in the same collection on The Well as a WWI novel. 111

things, a particular set of feelings that distinguishes them from heterosexuals; in doing so,

The Well explores the feelings of queers but also the queerness of feelings.

Proud Parents

The Well of Loneliness opens with a depiction of the milieu into which its protagonist is born. The Morton estate, the seat of generations of Gordons, could not be a more perfect example of the living arrangements of the British aristocracy: it is “well- timbered, well-cottaged, well-fenced and well-watered, having, in this latter respect, a stream that forks in exactly the right position to feed two large lakes in the grounds”(11).

As such, Morton represents the kind of privilege that is perfectly equipped to sustain and reproduce itself; it is built to last (“well-timbered”), maintained by a serving class (“well- cottaged”), closed off to inappropriate influences (“well-fenced”), and supplied by natural resources to sustain its fertile grounds (“well-watered” by “a stream that forks in exactly the right position”—emphasis mine). Hall‟s narrator stresses that the Gordons‟ country seat functions not only as the latter‟s comfortably equipped residence, but also as the seat of civilization itself; what the Gordons have, the logic goes, is also what they are. Thus, rather than actually describing the house, the narrator depicts the place in terms of the dispositions of its inhabitants: “The house itself […] has dignity and pride without ostentation, self-assurance without arrogance, repose without inertia; and a gentle aloofness that, to those who know it, but adds to the value as a home” (11). The house, in other words, personifies the kind of people the Gordons are, the kind of people who carry their privilege as much in their pocketbooks as in the nobility of their characters—and 112

that nobility “but adds to [their] value.” By way of this troping of the qualities of Morton in terms of the qualities of the Gordons (and vise versa), then, Hall‟s narrator underscores already early in the narrative the perfect seamlessness between this milieu and its subjects. “Indeed,” Hall‟s narrator notes, “the house […] is like certain lovely women who, now old, belong to a bygone generation—women who in youth were passionate but seemly; difficult to win but, when won, all-fulfilling”(ibid.). Lady Anna Gordon is, not surprisingly, one such lovely woman, “having that in her bearing that betokened quiet pride [mirroring her home‟s „pride without ostentation‟], having that in her eyes that betokened great longing [„passionate but seemly‟], having that in her body that betokened the happy promise [„all fulfilling‟]—the archetype of the very perfect woman, “whom creating God has found good” (ibid.). Just like the fertile grounds of Sir Philip‟s estate

(perfectly situated to reproduce their riches) and the homestead (troped as a “passionate” and “all-fulfilling” woman), his wife “betoken[s] the happy promise” of the reproduction—and continuation—of this ideal milieu. And when Anna conceives— bringing “[the] complete fulfillment […] for which they had both been waiting”(12)—she attributes “new meaning” to the “swelling slopes” of the Malvern Hills surrounding

Morton. “They [the hills] were like pregnant women, full-bosomed, courageous, great green-girdled mothers of splendid sons!”(13) Even nature itself, it seems, serves to reflect and reinforce the charmed life of the Gordons in which ideal subjects “naturally” reproduce the very ideals they posit in the first place. Like the Malvern Hills, the pregnant Anna will produce splendid sons.

This idealizing representation of the upper-class privileges of the Gordons revolves, in important ways, around the idealization of the coupling of Sir Philip and

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Anna Molloy. The latter a “perfect woman,” to whose “bosom” Sir Philip “had flown

[…] as a spent bird will fly to its nest” (11); the former an equally perfect man whose qualities and character bespeak his noble birth. He “was a tall man and exceedingly well-favoured, but his charm lay less in feature than in […] a tolerant expression that might almost be called noble, and in something sad yet gallant in his deep-set hazel eyes”(12). His “wide-nostrilled nose” and “well-modelled lips […] revealed him as a dreamer and a lover” (ibid.). Their eventual union could not be a more perfect one:

“seldom had two people loved more than they did; they loved with an ardour undiminished by time; as they ripened, so their love ripened with them” (ibid.). That the narrator repeatedly notes Anna‟s Irishness is, in this respect, no insignificant detail.

By the time Hall wrote The Well, the racial and evolutionary taxonomies of eugenicists and sexologists had entered popular discourses, where they served as both the cause of and explanation for the perception of the English aristocracy as degenerated, weakened by centuries of in-breeding and in need of rejuvenation from outside stock. As

Seamus Deane writes:

in Renan, in Arnold, in Havelock Ellis, in the career of George Bernhard Shaw— it was quite suddenly revealed that the English national character was defective and in need of the Irish, or Celtic, character in order to supplement it and enable it to survive. All the theorists of racial degeneration [shared] the conviction that the decline of the West must be halted by some infusion or transfusion of energy from an “unspoiled” source. The Irish seemed to qualify for English purposes….7

By stressing Anna‟s Irishness—“she was as lovely as only an Irish woman can be”

(11)—Hall emphasizes that the Gordons‟ marriage is poised for proper breeding, for

7 Seamus Deane, “Introduction.” Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, and Edward W. Said, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 12. 114

racial progression. Anna‟s “unspoiled” Celtic origins provide the “fresh” blood that will ensure the health of the Gordon descendants, and it is through Anna‟s “foreign” influence that, paradoxically, her child will be endowed with the best of the British aristocratic qualities. In this respect, The Well performs, as Margot Backus argues, the Anglo- colonial fantasies about the Irish that circulated vigorously by the 1920s; the text fetishizes Anna‟s Irishness, as beautiful, perfectly feminine, sensual, but also attributes to her other traits linked to Irish identity, including “irrational ingratitude, treachery and factiousness”.8 These contradictory valences of Irishness reflect, of course, the contradictory functions of this category in the British popular imagination—as both seductive “natives” and threatening racial others. In The Well, however, Stephen inherits only the positive qualities of the Celtic soul: a deep appreciation of beauty, a love of nature, and an almost uncanny empathy with animals. As such, I would suggest that

Anna‟s Irishness functions primarily to stress the racially healthy stock from which

Stephen descends and from whom she receives “a fine constitution.”

Through the representation of the Gordon parents as of optimal racial make-up, moreover, the novel also counters the sexological logic of, among others, Krafft-Ebbing which posits inversion as the consequence of ancestral degeneracy; Stephen‟s inversion is emphatically not the result of hereditary backwardness.9 In fact, insofar as the text

8 Margot Backus, “Sexual Orientation in the (Post)Imperial Nation: Celticism and Inversion Theory in Radclyffe Hall‟s The Well of Loneliness,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15 (1996): 261. 9 While Hall relied heavily on sexological discourses in her depiction of Stephen, she did so selectively, combining concepts from a variety of sources; “her handling of the sexual science was,” as Laura Doan argues, “at best, haphazard and, at worst, wildly eclectic” (Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness. Laura Doan & Jay Prosser, eds. [New York: Columbia University Press, 2001], 163). For further examinations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century discourses linking homosexuality to notions of racial and evolutionary degeneracy and progression, see Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebbing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Siobhan Somerville, “Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body” The Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1999): 243-66. 115

provides any etiology of Stephen‟s inversion at all, it resides in its capacious conception of nature, or, to be more precise, in the idea of an infinite variability of divine creation.

When Anna gives birth to a daughter, rather than the much longed for son, Hall‟s narrator concludes that “Man proposes—God disposes” (13). Stephen‟s inversion is of a particular design, a design that, though unknown to man, is purposeful and certainly not errant.

Stephen is simply one of “those whom nature has sacrificed to her ends—her mysterious ends that often lie hidden” (146). Her sexuality does not signify as one of those perversions caused by the unnatural acts of her ancestors, but should be read, the text suggests, as on a plane with other healthy biological processes, “an inevitable thing, as much part of herself as breathing” (ibid.). As such, she is entitled to lay claim to her distinguished bloodline:

she belonged and would always belong by right [to] those past generations of Gordons whose thoughts had fashioned the comeliness of Morton, whose bodies had gone to the making of Stephen. Yes, she was one of them, those bygone people; they might spurn her—the lusty breeders of sons they had been—they might even look down from Heaven with raised eyebrows, and say: „We utterly refuse to acknowledge this curious creature called Stephen.‟ But for all that they could not drain her of her blood […]—they were one in their blood. (108)

Stephen, in other words, does represent a legitimate and proper—read: not degenerated— descendant of the Gordons of Morton; while her ancestors may not recognize her as one of them, The Well insists that its heroine is nevertheless made out of the blood, bodies, and thoughts of those fertile forefathers—she is the fruit of generations of Gordons and the world they inhabited. “She belonged,” Hall‟s narrator insists, “to the soil and the fruitfulness of Morton, to its pastures and paddocks, to its farms and its cattle, to its quiet and gentlemanly ordered traditions, to the dignity and pride of its old red brick house, that was yet without ostentation” (ibid.). 116

Yet, already in its opening paragraphs, The Well also intimates that Stephen not only inherits but also halts the Gordons‟ bloodline: her birth interrupts the expected order of aristocratic procreation (“it never seemed to cross [Sir Philip‟s] mind for a moment that Anna might very well give him a daughter; he saw her only as a mother of sons”

[12]) and, as an invert, Stephen herself will never become a “breeder of children” (108).

With her arrival, moreover, the world of Morton itself—as arrangements for living and loving and as a set of entitlements and assets that, together, signify as a form of civilization—is destined to disappear. The qualities of the Gordons‟ home (“dignity and pride,” “self-assurance,” “a gentle aloofness,” etcetera) are tellingly compared to those of

“lovely women” from “a bygone generation” (11), suggesting a link between the pending dissolution of that lovely home and the passing of a certain kind of proud femininity, to be replaced, presumably, by a generation of women with very different qualities, such as those of Stephen. The tragic fact that Stephen‟s birth also announces the loss (her loss) of Morton in a way only adds to the valorization of that milieu as an ideal one.

The novel‟s idealizing invocation of the upper-class privileges of the Gordons pivots, as I mentioned earlier, around its idealization of the differently gendered couple.

As such, The Well actually explores heterosexuality as itself a process of idealization, a process that not merely works through ideals about which bodies one may legitimately approach as lovers, but also shapes the affective relations of those bodies to the worlds they inhabit. Heterosexuality, as Sarah Ahmed argues, operates according to the logic that “all arrangements will follow from the arrangement of the couple: man//woman.”10 It functions as a script that connects the “familial” to the “global”: “the coupling of man

10 Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 147. Further references will appear parenthetically in the text. 117

and woman,” Ahmed writes, “becomes a kind of “birthing,” a giving birth not only to new life, but to ways of living that are already recognizable as forms of civilization”(144). The self-reinforcing quality of heterosexuality, then, works by way of an ideal that constructs sexual conduct as also other forms of conduct; to follow the rules of heterosexuality, in other words, is to be at ease in a world that reflects back the couple form one inhabits as ideal. As such, heterosexuality—or rather its normativity—operates, according to Ahmed, “as a form of public comfort” as it “allow[s] bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape. Those shapes are lived as comfortable as they allow bodies to fit in; the surfaces of social space are already impressed upon by the shape of such bodies (like a chair that acquires its shape by the repetition of some bodies inhabiting it…)” (148). This self-reinforcing process whereby the coupling of certain bodies fit an ideal already modeled upon that coupling recalls, of course, adjacent constructions of evolutionary “fitness” and the notion that certain genitals naturally “fit” each other.

In The Well, the comfortable and comforting effect of heteronormativity is figured quite literally. As I explored earlier, Sir Philip and Anna make a seamless fit with their environment; their bodies, especially that of Anna, extend into the spaces of Morton (the shape of her pregnant body is mirrored by the shape of the hills around her) and those spaces extend into their bodies (the qualities of their home express the qualities of the

Gordons). That these normative bodies represent a particular set of social ideals also accounts for the particular pride of the Gordons, a pride that is, Hall‟s narrator repeatedly mentions, “without ostentation.” That pride, especially Anna‟s, serves not merely to register the extent to which they live up to an ideal, but actually attributes a particular

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content to the ideal in the first place. After all, the ideal of the ideal couple (and, within it, of Anna‟s “all-fulfilling” femininity) is, as Ahmed puts it, “shaped by taking some bodies as its form and not others” (109—emphasis mine). The pride the Gordons get to feel, then, operates tautologically in that they feel pride at embodying an ideal that has already taken their shape.11

When Anna gives birth to Stephen, a screaming “narrow-hipped, wide- shouldered” girl and not the anticipated “man-child” imagined as a “gallant male creature,” that dynamic becomes contorted. Before her arrival, the Gordons could lay claim to the pride and dignity of embodying the very ideals upon which Morton was already modeled: white, upper-class, heterosexual and normatively gendered subjects— the women “chaste but all-fulfilling” and “mothers of sons”; the men “honorable,”

“upholder[s] of home [and] careful and diligent steward[s] of pastures.” In Stephen, the

Gordons can no longer recognize themselves as ideal subjects; she fails to reproduce their normative bodies and, in doing so, ruptures the comfort with which the Gordons had inhabited a world already shaped in their very image. The ways in which the Gordons negotiate that rupture provides a poignant picture of the complex affective investments in the ideal of heteronormativity and its reproduction.

To Anna, for instance, Stephen‟s difference signifies primarily as a threat to her pride. As she increasingly comes to notice her daughter‟s likeness to her husband, she resents the child on account of its dissimilarity to her: “looking gravely at her daughter, noting the plentiful auburn hair, the brave hazel eyes that were so like her father‟s, as

11 Ahmed examines this function of pride in relation to the construction of national ideals that are modeled upon certain bodies to the exclusion of others. She shows that the national pride of some subjects not only confirms that these subjects live up to these ideals, but also structures the actual content of those ideals— ideals of, for instance, “the nation as being white, or heterosexual, or even as being tolerant”(The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 109—emphasis in the text). 119

indeed were the child‟s whole expression and bearing, [Anna] would be filled with a sudden antagonism that came near to anger” (15). Even though she acknowledges “that the child was handsome,” her daughter increasingly becomes “a blemished, unworthy maimed reproduction” of her father. In Anna‟s eyes, Stephen represents an “outrageous caricature of Sir Philip”(15-6), a likeness that not only maims Stephen, but also threatens to maim reproduction itself, the reproduction, that is, of the ideal gendering of the particular upper-class bodies from which she descends. While she “came of a race of devoted mothers,” “there were times when the child‟s soft flesh would be almost distasteful to her; when she hated the way Stephen moved or stood still, hated a certain largeness about her, a certain crude lack of grace in her movements…” (16) Anna resents the fact that her daughter has deprived her of experiencing her motherhood as the expression (and extension) of her womanhood, as it ideally should, a fact Anna perceives as a “most unnatural and monstrous injustice” (ibid.). What actually makes this injustice unjust, then, is the fact that it has taken her pride away: “Anna would think: „I ought to be proud of the likeness, proud and happy and glad when I see it. Then would come flooding back that queer antagonism that amounted almost to anger” (15).

In her discussion of the “queer antagonism” between mother and daughter, Hall thus begins to unfold the complex affective dynamic between the two.12 That dynamic is

12 The mother-daughter dynamic in relation to female inversion is a frequent preoccupation in Hall‟s work. In The Unlit Lamp (1924), Hall describes the suffocating relationship between Joan Ogden and her widowed mother whose manipulations eventually cause Joan to abandon her professional ambitions and a life with her mentor and lover, Elizabeth. In her subsequent novel, A Saturday Life (1925), Hall explores, much more lightheartedly, the relationship between Lady Shore, also a widow, and her eccentric daughter Sidonia from the perspective of the lesbian Lady Frances. For a comparative analysis of the mother- daughter relationships in Hall‟s oeuvre, see Inez Martinez, “The Lesbian Hero Bound: Radclyffe Hall‟s Portrait of Sapphic Daughters and Their Mothers,” Literary Visions of Homosexuality (New York: The Haworth Press, 1983), 127-137.

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truly a queerly antagonistic one in the sense that it is not a straightforward exchange of anger, resentment, or disappointment between the two. Rather, this “strangely shy” relationship revolves around the ironic fact that what signifies to Anna as an outrage and a blemish—Stephen‟s resemblance to her father—also involves Stephen‟s profound adoration of Anna. After all, Stephen not only bears a physical resemblance to Sir Philip; she also reproduces her father‟s gallant love and veneration of Anna. Stephen loves her mother in the manner of a protective, idolizing gentleman, “acutely responsive to

[Anna‟s] beauty” with “feelings almost amounting to worship” (15). She performs her love for her mother by assuming the role of the heroic male; by idealizing her mother‟s femininity (“a goddess like Anna”), instead of embodying it herself, Stephen gets to occupy the equally ideal (i.e. upper-class, genteel, noble) masculine position, a position she continues to assume with her subsequent lovers. What functions to Stephen as a display of her love for her mother, then, signifies to Anna as a source of bad feelings (of her discomfort, displeasure, and, eventually, shame).

When her mother takes her shopping, for instance, Stephen behaves in the manner of the noble knight, relishing the honor of accompanying “a goddess like Anna.” While

“Stephen loathed these occasions,” as they “meant dressing up [,] she bore them because of the honour which she felt to be hers when escorting her mother through the streets”

(33). She admires her mother‟s feminine graces (“comparing [Anna‟s] slim and elegant shoulders to the toil-thickened back of old Mrs. Bennett”) and insists on ferrying her around puddles and through “imaginary traffic.” “Anna would feel the small hand at her elbow, and would think that the fingers were curiously strong; strong and efficient they would feel, like Sir Philip‟s, and this always vaguely displeased her” (ibid.). In this

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particularly painful portrait of the relationship between Anna and Stephen, Hall stresses the intensity of the invert‟s attachment to reproducing the norms and ideals that have shaped her, even though she reproduces them with different effects. By embodying her father‟s archaic masculinity (protective, noble, etcetera), for instance, Stephen effectively re-organizes the Gordon‟s little nuclear family into a liaison between one woman and her two admirers.13 She is not the daughter who goes shopping for frocks with her mother, but the courteous lover who carefully protects “his” lady against the dangers of the world: not even Stephen‟s “queer shyness could prevent her protecting, nor could Anna‟s own shyness save her from that protection” (34).

Moreover, the fact that Stephen reproduces, in mind and body, her father‟s masculinity also fashions the particularly knotty circuits of shame and honor in the

Gordon household. In fact, to the extent that Stephen‟s inversion makes her feel ashamed, it involves the shame of not being inverted enough, of not being enough of an honorable man. Stephen‟s shame works primarily to signal her identification with a particular masculinity; it is not associated with inversion as such, as Sally Munt for instance asserts, but rather with her inability to fully claim the desired privileges of masculinity—in a word, its honor.14 The shame that troubles Stephen registers her sense of honor lost, though never the loss of her honor.

13 “Stephen‟s eyes invariably followed her father‟s, so that she too would stand looking at Anna, and sometimes she must catch her breath in surprise as the fullness of that calm beauty. She never got used to her mother‟s beauty, it always surprised her each time she saw it; it was one of those queerly unbearable things, like the fragrance of meadowsweet under the hedges”(36). 14 Though she explores the religious underpinnings as well as the “push-pull dynamic of shame” in The Well, Munt sees Stephen‟s shame primarily in terms of the shame of the latter‟s homosexuality. See Munt‟s “The Well of Shame,” Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 199-215. 122

In an illustrative scene, Stephen is accosted by Roger Antrim, the neighbor‟s son of similar age, who ridicules Stephen‟s riding skills. “‟I say, you’ he began, with his mouth very full, „what about a certain young lady out hunting? What about a fat leg on each side of her horse like a monkey on a stick, and everybody laughing!‟” (51— emphasis in the text) And Roger proceeds to tell her that her riding astride (“squatting on a pony”), her male riding outfit (“with your new riding breeches and your black velvet cap”), and her masculine assumptions (“you thought they‟d suppose you looked like a boy, just because you were trying to be one”) had made everybody laugh, “bustling their sides […] at your looking so funny on that rotten old pony” (51). What constitutes

Roger‟s biggest insult, however, is his insinuation that the masculinity of Stephen‟s equestrian performance reflects badly on Anna‟s propriety: “‟my mother said […] that your mother must be funny to allow you to do it; she said it was horrid to let girls ride that way; she said she was awfully surprised at your mother; she said that she‟d have thought that your mother had more sense; she said that is wasn‟t modest…‟” (52).

Stephen is enraged at the suggestion that Anna is somehow inadequate as a mother (and immodest as a woman) and seizes the opportunity to defend her mother‟s honor. Rolling up her sleeves, she challenges Roger to a fight—“[s]he stood there, an enraged and ridiculous figure in her Liberty smock, with her hard, boyish forearms”(ibid.)—but Roger refuses to fight a girl, a fact that accounts for the biggest insult of all, for the shame, that is, of not being allowed to defend Anna‟s honor. At home, she “pour[s] out the shame and humiliation, telling all that Roger had said about her mother, telling all that she,

Stephen, would have done to defend her, had it not been that Roger would not fight a girl”(53).

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Stephen‟s sense of shame here operates primarily as a loss of honor; the object of that shame and humiliation, in other words, is not so much Roger‟s ridicule of her riding skills, but the fact that she is prevented from doing the thing any honorable man would do, namely, to defend the honor of his beloved. In a way, Stephen‟s tearful display of shame exposes her sense of having failed a loved one, a failure that, in turn, exposes and shows her love for Anna, who is, ironically, unable to read that love as such. “Anna listened bewildered and dumbfounded” and, when Stephen, in her “orgy of grief,” rejects her mother‟s consoling gestures, infantilizing gestures that only further undermine

Stephen‟s claims to the self-sufficiency of the honorable male, Anna “feel[s] that the child d[oes] not want her”(53). On these and other occasions, Stephen‟s performance of a particular masculinity (a masculinity that is itself so traditional, almost as if taken from medieval romances) renders her an unintelligible subject to her mother. When Anna is

“forced to submit to [Stephen‟s] quiet supervision that was painstaking, gentle but extremely persistent,” she wonders, “was this love?” (34) Anna is increasingly uncomfortable with not knowing “what [Stephen]‟s feeling and thinking”(ibid.) and she concludes that Sir Philip has unsuccessfully “managed the child”: “[y]ou have treated

Stephen as though she were a boy […] I know it‟s not good, and at times it frightens me,

Philip […] I can‟t tell you why, but is seems all wrong—it makes me feel strange with the child”(53-4).

Hall unfolds in detail this affective incommensurability between mother and daughter as the latter grows up. She juxtaposes the shame of Stephen‟s difference—the fact that she fails to embody Anna‟s ideal femininity—to Stephen‟s own sense of shame, which is produced by her failure to sufficiently perform the masculinity that positions her

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in a particular relationship to that femininity, namely as protector and chivalrous admirer.

To be able to perform the masculinity that is, according to The Well‟s particular sexological logic, a natural expression of her masculine soul thus figures distinctly in terms of honor.15 Throughout the novel, Hall depicts Stephen‟s masculine pursuits and abilities (her athletic endeavors, her war-time service, her literary accomplishments) as honorable ones and underscores the fact that her protagonist, as her inversion renders her increasingly an object of ridicule and shaming, continues—even intensifies—her investment in masculine honor. That Stephen‟s sense of honor also structures Anna‟s misapprehension of her daughter suggests, moreover, that The Well is also making a claim about the inefficiency, even errancy, of affects as modes of social interaction and communication; while Anna‟s maternal administrations offend Stephen‟s sense of her masculine self-sufficiency, Stephen‟s gallant manners confuse and displease Anna.

Their respective displays of affection, in other words, fail to convey that affect(-ion), but instead lead to misperceptions that, in turn, evoke further bad feelings between the two.

Through her omniscient narrator, moreover, Hall renders her characters fully transparent subjects, providing the reader with knowledge the characters themselves lack. As a result, the reader is presented with the tragic spectacle of honorable gestures that misfire within this familial circle. As Stephen reproduces her father‟s masculine ideal to love by honor, the latter‟s sense of honor also dupes his daughter.

15 This representation of Stephen‟s masculine performance as naturally aligned with her male soul has led Jay Prosser to argue that the inversion of Hall‟s protagonist actually refers to a transsexual, rather than lesbian identity. Reading Stephen‟s desire to be interpellated as male as a desire for a male biology, however, flattens out her particular affective investements in masculinity; after all, she insists on performing a particular kind of masculinity, the heroic, noble kind embodied by gentlemen such as Sir Philip—she does not want be just any man. See Prosser‟s Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 125

Sir Philip‟s knowledge, gleaned from the sexological writings of Karl Heinrich

Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebbing, would presumably have allowed his child to more capably negotiate her world or, at least, to recognize, as she does only many years after her father‟s death, that “there are many of us—thousands”(204). By sharing his insights and thus rendering public Stephen‟s stigmatized identity, however, Sir Philip would also have subjected Anna to the shame of having an inverted child, to the contagion, really, of the latter‟s stigma. Inasmuch as the novel condemns Sir Philip‟s secrecy as “the first cowardly action in his life“—“he sinned very deeply and gravely against Stephen, by withholding from that mother his own conviction that her child was not as other children”—The Well portrays this sin as the tragically inevitable consequence of the nobility of this man: “he who would not have spared himself pain, could not bear to inflict it on Anna” (54).

Acting on the knowledge he has gained from the sexological texts locked away in his desk, Sir Philip allows, even accommodates his daughter‟s pursuit of masculine interests. He provides her with a fencing teacher, buys her horses to ride in hunts, and engages “a blue-stocking” from Oxford to give her “the same education […] as [he]‟d give to a son”(61), all the while ensuring that the difference of Stephen‟s development signifies as, at most, an innocuous deviation from that of her female peers. This particular stigma management on the part of Sir Philip functions somewhat in the manner of what

Goffman has termed “courtesy stigma,” that is, the assumption of some of the burden of an individual‟s stigma as a result of close association, in this case relatedness, to that stigmatized person. “Persons with a courtesy stigma, “Goffman writes, “provide a model of „normalization‟, showing how far normals could go in treating the stigmatized person

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as if he didn‟t have a stigma.”16 Sir Philip performs this normalization by actually denying the existence of that stigma. Tellingly, he insists that, in spite of his unconventional rearing methods, he has not “spoilt” his daughter, echoing Goffman‟s later designation of stigmatized identities as “spoiled identities.” Sir Philip manages his daughter‟s difference with the aim of preventing that difference from acquiring the stain, the spoil of that stigma. While the particular masculine privileges that Sir Philip‟s affords his daughter do benefit her later in life, The Well ultimately argues that Sir Philip‟s stigma management, however courteous, fails miserably.17 After all Stephen‟s inversion, however stigmatized, also accounts for her particular masculine sense of honor, which is,

Hall claims, at once a potentially transformative engagement with the world and a deeply erotic practice.

The distinction between the affective costs of taking on the socially repudiated identity of the invert, on the one hand, and the practice of inverted love, on the other hand, coalesces when Stephen‟s affair with Angela Crossby becomes public and she is

“shamefully wounded by Angela Crossby, shamefully soiled and defiled by her mother”(203). Motivated by her desire to cover up her adulterous affair with Roger

Antrim, Angela has contrived to pass on to Anna the letter in which Stephen declares her

16 Ervin Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), 30-1. 17 The frequent references to Sir Philip as “wise” then do not necessarily indicate the novel‟s sanction of his use knowledge/secrecy, but represent his daughter‟s perception of her father as “wise” in the way homosexuals have used the term. Wise persons are themselves not stigmatized but their special situation has made them intimately privy to the secret life of the stigmatized individual and sympathetic with it. Goffman gives the examples of nurses and therapists, and “gentile employees in delicatessen”; “wise persons,” he notes, “are the marginal men before whom the individual with a fault need feel no shame nor exert self-control, knowing that in spite of his failing he will be seen as an ordinary other” (Stigma , 28). There is “a deep sense of friendship” between Sir Philip and Stephen, “a deep sense of mutual understanding”(25). At times, Stephen confides in her father, “tell[ing] him how much she longed to be different, longed to be some one like Nelson […] „Do you think I could be a man, supposing I thought very hard—or prayed, Father?‟”(26). 127

love for Angela. Anna‟s response to this outing rehearses the general ostracizing notions of inversion (she calls her daughter “unnatural,” “a sin against creation,” “vile,” “filthy”

[200] and so on) as well as the more particular gesture that secures her own normativity:

“All your life I‟ve felt very strangely towards you […] I‟ve felt a kind of physical repulsion, a desire not to touch or to be touched by you—a terrible thing for a mother to feel—it has often made me deeply unhappy. I‟ve often felt that I was being unjust, unnatural—but now I know that my instinct was right; it is you who are unnatural, not I…”(200)

The fact that, as a parent, Anna does not see her own ideals reproduced in (and by) her inverted child gets reconfigured as Stephen‟s introduction of bad feelings into the familial scene. Stephen has brought “great shame” to the Gordons; to Anna, Stephen‟s inversion signifies as a “deadly insult […] to the memory of the father who bred you, the father whom you dare to resemble” and as the “unspeakable outrage” of asking her, Anna

Gordon, to “endure this great shame”: “I would rather see you [Stephen] dead at my feet than standing before me” (200). As the origin of her mother‟s shame, moreover, Stephen is also expected to take it away again, to absolve her mother of the latter‟s shame by leaving the Gordon home. It is, paradoxically, her very inversion, her masculine sense of honor that makes Stephen take up this burden: “quite suddenly [she] found her manhood and said: „I understand. I‟ll leave Morton‟” and she arranges with Anna how “this thing might be accomplished” so as to “cause the least possible scandal” (ibid.).

Stephen nevertheless makes a clear distinction between, on the one hand, her assumption of an identity and a life that is read by others as shameful and, on the other hand, inverted love itself. In fact, she resolutely rejects Anna‟s denunciation of her love for Angela as shameful; after all, she may have failed to embody the heteronormative ideals of her parents, she has done so by embodying them diagonally, queerly, so to

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speak. Thus when Anna asserts that only cross-gendered relations are legitimate forms of love—“I loved your father, and your father loved me. That was love” (201—emphasis in the text)—, Stephen passionately rejects this dismissal, this “terrible slur upon her love.”

She points out that her way of loving is in fact produced by, and modeled upon, the love between her parents: “as my father loved you [Anna], I loved. As a man loves a woman, that was how I loved—protectively, like my father” (ibid.). In her love for Angela,

Stephen insists, she performed her masculinity in the same honorable manner as her father:

I wanted to give all I had in me to give. It made me feel terribly strong… and gentle. It was good, good, good—I‟d have laid down my life a thousand times for Angela Crossby. If I could have, I‟d have married her and brought her home—I wanted to bring her home here to Morton.(ibid.)

While she recognizes that she lacks the masculine entitlements of her father (of, among others, bringing a bride home to Morton), Stephen nevertheless maintains that her love for Angela embodies and enacts what she perceives as the most honorable qualities of her self:

it was you and my father who made this body—[and] I will never forgive your daring to try to make me ashamed of my love. I‟m not ashamed of it, there‟s no shame in me […] Good and—and fine it was […] the best part of myself—I gave all and asked nothing in return—I just went on hopelessly loving. (ibid.)

Stephen‟s thus construes her love for Angela as endlessly, “hopelessly” selfless and, as a consequence, refuses to be ashamed of it, or to conceive of it as shameful. If anything, her love represents and reflects the most estimable, “the best,” aspects of herself, since it is practiced through repeated acts of self-sacrifice. The Well very much sanctions this notion of self-sacrifice on the part of the invert, though it ultimately advocates, as I will

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discuss below, even more capacious acts of self-sacrifice, acts that exceed the intimate space of the romantic couple. Moreover, the particularity of Stephen‟s non-normativity prompts a multi-layered shame-honor dynamic which allows her to distinguish between various shaming interpellations, even to reject her mother‟s “slur upon her love” (201).

This is not to say though that Hall does not elaborately invoke the painful feelings associated with the stigmatized status of inversion—the anger, despair, frustration, etcetera. In fact, immediately after the operatic scene of her mother‟s denunciation of her, Stephen encounters several knowledges that construe her difference as a stigma, that is, as a socially discredited difference. In her father‟s study, she finds her name written in the margins of Krafft-Ebbing‟s Psychpathia Sexualis—the catalogue of sexual deviants that includes a comprehensive portrait of the sexual invert—and “recognizes” that her type is of the degenerate kind or, at least, is understood as such: “there are so many of us—thousands of miserable, unwanted people, who have no right to love, no right to compassion, because they‟re maimed, hideously maimed and ugly” (204).18 Krafft-

Ebbing‟s notion of inversion as degeneracy is followed by the biblical notion of sin: “the

Bible fell open [and Stephen] read: „And the Lord set a mark upon Cain…‟” (205).

Stephen thus finds herself doubly marked. By superimposing Christianity onto the sexual sciences, Hall underscores the breadth of society‟s stigmatization of inversion, positioning her heroine as tragically, but inevitably, captured by it: Stephen “sank down completely hopeless and beaten” (ibid.).

Yet, through the figure of Stephen‟s tutor, Puddles, Hall also introduces a third, redemptive source of knowledge. Herself an invert, Puddles argues that Stephen‟s fate is

18 Note the shift here from first person plural to third person plural, which might already indicate a subtle distinction between the embodiment of inversion and its stigmatization. 130

ultimately an honorable one: “just because you are what you are, you may actually find that you‟ve got an advantage” (ibid.), the advantage, that is, of being in the vanguard of social change. Puddles insists on the purposeful naturalness of inversion—“nothing‟s misplaced or wasted, I‟m sure of that—and we‟re all part of nature. Some day the world will recognize this”—and claims that Stephen is poised to accomplish “a really great life- work”: “For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps, many of them, it‟s up to you to have the courage to make good” (ibid.).

Stephen‟s inversion, in other words, positions her to perform brave acts of self-sacrifice for the sake of the greater good, thereby re-signifying her stigma into a demonstration of her honorability. While Stephen initially understands herself as “[l]ike Cain […] marked and blemished,” that mark is subsequently re-located to her facial scar, turning the blemish of her markedness into a symbol of her honor: “she will,” as her doctor predicts,

“carry an honourable scar as a mark of her courage” (293).

Super-nerves, Red-hot Talents, and Thrilling Wounds

Through the character of Puddles, The Well articulates a set of redemptive notions of inversion held by Havelock Ellis, the sexologist, and, in particular, by Edward

Carpenter, socialist and gay advocate. Drawing on their findings, Hall attributes to her heroine, as Mandy Merck puts is, “a degree of moral sensitivity in direct proportion to

[her] homosexual predisposition.”19 Both Ellis and Carpenter espoused a theory of

19Mandy Merck, Perversions (New York: Routledge, 1993), 88. On Hall's eclectic use of the sexual sciences, see, among others, Sonja Ruehl's “Inverts and Experts: Radclyffe Hall and Lesbian Identity,” in Feminism, Culture, and Politics, Rosalind Brent and Carolyn Rowan, eds (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 131

homosexuality with associated cross-gender characteristics whereby those characteristics are not only physical, but also, importantly, emotional. Hall's depiction of Stephen's affective nature—of her “super-nerves,” for instance, “that are always lying in wait”

(155) or her “endless capacity for suffering” (146)--echoes in particular with Ellis's and

Carpenter's claims that the unusual temperaments of homosexuals provide them with certain advantages.

In his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, for example, Ellis insists on the high occurrence of extreme nervousness, sensitivity, and “hyperesthesia” among inverts, affective qualities he attributes to their “marked emotional tendencies to affection and self-sacrifice.”20 While Ellis's inventory of the “physical” characteristics of the invert is tentative and often contradictory, he frequently stresses their qualitatively different

“psychic” natures, which, he argues, account for the fact that the accomplishments of inverts are of disproportionally “high intellectual [cultural, and moral] value” (266). He writes, for instance, that “inversion is as likely to be accompanied by high intellectual achievement in a woman as in a man” (196). The fact that, in the field of literature, inverts “find the highest degree of success and reputation” shows, according to Ellis, that such talents are innately related to their inversion. Inverts' “artistic aptitudes,” he writes, should “be regarded as part of their organic tendencies [rather] than as a reaction against those tendencies” (295). After all, Ellis explains, their “congenital nervous

1982) and Jean Radford's “An Inverted Romance: The Well of Loneliness and Sexual Ideology,” in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, Jean Radford, ed. (London: Routledge, 1986). For a comprehensive discussion of the heterogeneity of sexological discourses, see Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science, Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 20Havelock Ellis, “Sexual Inversion,” in Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol. I. Part Four. (New York: Random House, 1915 [third edition]), 269. All further references are to this edition. The notion that gay people are nervous people is a persistent one; in fact, to “be nervous” has long been a phrase to designate homosexuality, especially in British colloquial speech. 132

predisposition[s]” may be an inevitable part of their sexual natures, but such predispositions also equip them with the very qualities and aptitudes required for great cultural achievements, not to mention moral ones.

Indeed, as is the case with Stephen whose literary talents are “real red-hot” but whose nature has also “endowed [her] with a vast will to loving” (146), Ellis also reserves for the inverted soul a greater moral capacity. “Inverts are less prone than normal persons to regard caste and social position” (28), he writes, and it is “this innately democratic attitude” that accounts for the fact that they make formidable “moral leaders” and “beyond possibility of doubt, that they have been prominent in religion”(ibid).21

Among such “moral leaders and persons with strong ethical instincts,” Ellis further discovers “a tendency toward the more elevated forms of homosexual feeling”(ibid.); the great moral sensibilities of inverts makes them not just more morally competent or insightful but, it seems, also better homosexuals. “It is fairly evident why this should be so, “Ellis explains:

Just as the repressed love of a woman or a man has, in normally constituted persons, frequently furnished the motive power of an enlarged philanthropic activity, so the person who sees his own sex also bathed in sexual glamour, brings to his work of human service an ardor wholly unknown to the normally constituted individual; morality to him has become one with love. (ibid.)

Like Ellis's notion that sexual inversion is accompanied by exceptional sensibilities if not abilities, Hall's portrait of Stephen stresses the latter's physical and

21Ellis emphasizes that this “democratic attitude” is an “emotional attitude,” not so much a set of political views as a particular affective stance with transformative consequences. “This innately democratic attitude renders it easier for them than for ordinary people to rise to what Cyples has called the 'exstacy of humanity,' the emotional attitude, that is to say, of those rare souls of whom it might be said, in the same writer's words, that 'beggars' rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for kissing because humanity had touched the garb.'” Like veritable Christ figures, Ellis's inverts use their kisses to elevate mankind, and, in doing so, they achieve “the exstacy of humanity,” rather than a mere personal one. 133

intellectual gifts as well as her extraordinary sensitivity, those “terrible nerves of the invert” that account for her unusual susceptibility to at once the beauties of nature and the cruelties of society. “Those whom nature has sacrificed to her ends—her mysterious ends that often lie hidden--,” Hall‟s narrator notes, “are sometimes endowed with a vast will to loving, with an endless capacity for suffering also, which must go hand in hand with their love”(146). Indeed, Stephen “would gladly have given her body over to torment, have laid down her life if need be, for the sake of [the] woman whom she loved”

(ibid). However modern a type, then, Stephen appears to be closer to the archaic figure of the knight errant, whose sense of honor compels him to sacrifice himself for his love, thereby displaying, what Ellis calls, that “higher” homosexual feeling, “finely sublimated from any gross physical manifestation” (Studies, 28).

Laura Doan argues that Hall was even more indebted to the evolutionary ideas of

Carpenter than to the “congenitalist” ones of Ellis.22 Carpenter's works, especially his

1908 The Intermediate Sex, were widely read, and Carpenter's characterization of what he calls “the intermediate type” certainly does resemble Hall's protagonist. Hall's insistence on Stephen's special future role listens closely to Carpenter's claim that the “intermediate sex”—bearers, that is, of the sexual characteristics of one sex and many of the emotional ones of the other—will play a key part in the evolution of the sexes. Precisely because they are poised between the sexes, intermediates have a privilege; according to Carpenter, they form a “respectable and valuable class” and with their “extraordinary gifts for, and experience in, affairs of the heart [...] it is not difficult to see that these people have a

22Laura Doan, “'The Outcast of One Age Is the Hero of Another': Radclyffe Hall, Edward Carpenter, and the Intermediate Sex” in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 162-178. 134

special work to do as reconcilers and interpreters of the two sexes to each other.”23

Puddles‟s notion of Stephen‟s “niche in creation” (154) clearly echoes this. She lectures her pupil on the latter‟s special purpose: “You may actually find that you've got an advantage. You may write with a curious double insight—write both men and women from a personal knowledge” (205).24 Alongside “the intuition of those who stand midway between the sexes” (83), Stephen also possesses many of the other superior attributes Carpenter lists, including a “healthy […] and well-developed body,” a

“powerful brain,” and “high standard[s] of conduct”; she is in splendid physical form and her conduct, as Hall repeatedly underlines, follows her high moral (and class) standards.25

To Doan, Stephen‟s resemblance to Carpenter‟s exceptional intermediate suggests that

Hall‟s protagonist will be “a new kind of savior”; she is, Doan argues, “not the tragic or pathetic invert-victim [...] or doomed to lonely outcast existence, but an exceptional woman in possession of an array of extraordinary gifts,” including “the fabulous vantage point of those lucky few who stand between the sexes.”26

Apart from Doan‟s somewhat reductionist reading of Carpenter‟s ideas, it seems to me that her valorization of Stephen‟s exceptionalism as “not tragic” but “fabulous” and

“lucky” does not quite capture the unique position Hall attributes to her protagonist.27

23Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types in Men and Woman (London: George Allen and Urwin, 1908), 14. 24 Carpenter's privileging of the perspective of the “intermediate” sex and what Hall/Puddles refers to as Stephen's “curious double insight” can be traced back to the Greek idealization of dually gendered beings, such as the male/female figure of Tiresias and his supreme truth-telling abilities. 25Ibid., 23. Hall's narrator asserts that “the sooner the world came to realize that fine brains frequently went with inversion, the sooner it would withdraw its ban, and the sooner would cease this persecution”(416). Stephen‟s overt masculinity, however, does depart from Carpenter‟s typology of intermediates “with nothing abnormal or morbid of any kind observable in their physical structure or constitution” (ibid., 23— emphasis mine). 26Doan, “Outcast of One Era,” 173. 27 Carpenter‟s vision of the edifying function of intermediates signifies within his multi-faceted project of radical socialism, a particular late nineteenth-century project encompassing anti-imperial politics, animal 135

While Stephen may be situated in-between the sexes, she is, as I have argued, thoroughly invested in embodying a particular masculinity. Moreover, Stephen‟s sense of male honor does not stand apart from her socio-economic privileges; by performing that honor she also enacts those privileges. The Well features a number of inverts—such as the impoverished Barbara and Jamie, the “gloomy” Pat, Margaret Roland (“a congenital poacher”), and Wanda (“a rudderless bark” [356])—who quite literally can not afford the luxury of living honorable lives. Hall‟s representation of these inverts as sad or morally compromised subjects rehearses the classist logic of elevating socio-economic privilege into subjective privilege, reifying the ethics afforded by capital as superior attributes of character. Finally, the particular acts of self-sacrifice through which Stephen stakes her claim to male honor also function as deeply erotic acts—not so much instances of Ellis‟

“higher homosexual feeling” sublimated from sexuality, but thrilling acts of self-inflicted wounds for the sake of the loved one. The novel actually traces the trajectory of the ways in which Stephen‟s erotic investments learn; that is to say, it also provides an account of

Stephen‟s erotic bildung, whereby acts of self-sacrifice as erotic acts move outside the space of the same-sex couple to the public realm where they effect more capacious relationalities.

From her earliest crush on the maid Collins, Stephen is aroused by the thought of self-sacrifice, even self-wounding, through which she performs the fantasy of a male hero

rights activism, prison reform, alongside homosexual advocacy. Carpenter‟s work, as Leela Gandhi shows so persuasively, is preoccupied with undoing the various hierarchies (between races, civilizations, genders, species, etc) that subtend imperialist, anthropocentric, and heteronormative discourses. See Gandhi‟s Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 136

or martyr who suffers in order to absolve that of her lovers.28 With Collins, she enters “a completely new world […] full of constant exciting adventures; of elation, of joy, of incredible sadness” (18). Stephen‟s infatuation with Collins occasions fantastic fantasies of honorable pursuits and sacrifices; she “long[s] to be William Tell, or Nelson, or the whole charge of Balaclava” and she literally enacts those fantasies by dressing up as

Nelson and “stalk[ing the maid] to the basement” (19). Collin‟s “housemaid‟s knee” allows Stephen the thrilling prospect of becoming the ultimate savior. “I wish I'd got your housemaid's knee,” she tells Collins; “I'd like to be awfully hurt for you […] the way that Jesus was hurt for sinners […] supposing I rub my knee against yours?”(21).

She imagines increasingly dramatic acts of self-sacrifice that supposedly entitle her to

Collin‟s love, dreaming that “in some queer way she was Jesus, and that Collins was kneeling and kissing her hand, because, she, Stephen, had managed to cure her by cutting off the knee with a paper-knife and grafting it onto her own”(22). Through this christ- like suffering, Stephen demonstrates her love for Collins, but also displays her erotic investments in that suffering itself; she believes that “it was really fine be suffering” as she engages “in a veritable orgy of prayer” for Collins (21). Ideas of sacrificing, even wounding herself operate as deeply erotic fantasies for Stephen in that those self-inflicted wounds render her love public. Contemplating the heroic ways in which she will save

28 Within the large body of scholarship on The Well, there is not a single critic to have noticed the audacious fact that Hall begins her protagonist‟s erotic career at the tender age of seven. While this is in itself not an unusual account—there are many sociological and psychological studies of queer subjects who report very early experiences of having “known” of, if not erotically explored, their difference—Hall‟s depiction of her heroine‟s particularly physical attraction to Collins presents a daring vignette of queer childhood erotics. Readers‟ blindness to this rehearses Collins‟s “innocent” response to Stephen‟s courtship. The Stephen/Collins affair also stands in a tradition of upper-class subjects practicing their sexuality on their servants, who, in turn, get to be positioned as the promiscuous, if not inherently licentious subjects, whose unbounded sexuality is responsible for seducing their masters into performing certain sexual acts. Upon Stephen‟s discovery of Collins‟s unfaithfulness, the latter is quickly dismissed. 137

Collins makes Stephen “go hot down her spine” (18). Some years later, “her physical passion for Angela Crossby” is articulated through her desire to “give her body over to torment, [to lay] down her life if need be” (146). When she recognizes that she might lose Angela to a male suitor, Stephen “long[s] to maim [her] ardent yet sterile body that must worship yet never be worshiped in return” (187); by wounding her own body, in other words, she will mark her passion for Angela, a gesture that is itself a highly erotic one to Stephen. Not performing this gesture signifies to her as a loss of erotic possibilities, as a reduction to lonely self-pleasuring: “she begun to grieve over [her body], touching her breast with pitiful fingers, letting her hands slip along her straight thighs...” (189).

While Hall‟s representation of Stephen‟s erotic investments may strike some readers as excessively melodramatic, it is also the case that notions of self-sacrifice, selfless submission and wounds that bind actually constitute a significant part of butch/femme erotic practice as, for instance, explored by Leslie Feinberg in her 1993

Stone Butch Blues. Feinberg depicts how the stigmatization, not to mention the beatings, that butches undergo effect in complex ways both the public and private erotic repertoire of butch/femme relations. Precisely the insistence of butches not to submit to the “fact” of their gender and their willingness to pay for that insistence also create erotic possibilities. In an imaginative reading of The Well alongside Feinberg's novel The Well and the work of Genet, Kathryn Bond Stockton examines queer acts of self-sacrifice and self-debasement around the notion of cloth wounds. Of the scenes of humiliation brought on by Stephen's feminine garb, she asks if they do not point to “the shame some women have historically felt (not the discomfort, not the displeasure, but, really, the shame) in

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having to wear women's clothing, a kind of psychic debasement that runs so deep in excess of a simple preference for wearing men's clothes.”29 Stockton suggests that, to butches like Stephen, “what may be desperately alluring at arm's length—women's clothing and their acknowledged beauty—may be debasing if put upon oneself.”30 The refusal to wear women's clothing also signifies, according to Stockton, as acts of self- sacrifice, on the part of butches, through which erotic and social relations become possible. By cross-dressing, butch lesbians give themselves up to the law and to their

(potential) lovers; their clothes subject them to public humiliations, if not punishment, and also enact the not so politically correct fantasy of differential gender relations between women. In Feinberg's work, Stockton writes:

[it is] the social nature of self-debasing acts [...] that make[s] debasements possible, bearable, pleasurable and creative, even in their darkness. These are social actions (these self-debasements) that do not create harmonious communities of similarly identified same-sex queers. They create, instead, a kind of social solitude for people who are set, in some deep measure, apart from each other—but in an apartness they create together and in which they are 'held' (sometimes sexually by a lover, sometimes mentally in someone's mind, in any case materially).31

With regard to The Well, however, Stockton interprets the degradation and martyrdom of Stephen to merely bring loneliness and exile. Hall's “logic of wounding,” as Stockton puts it, ultimately closes off the possibility that her protagonist's stigmas

(sartorial or otherwise) can also occasion queer relationalities that revolve around

29Kathryn Bond Stockton, “Cloth Wounds, or When Queers Are Martyred to Clothes: The Value of Clothing's Complex Debasements,” in: Women: A Cultural Review, Vol.3. No 3. (2002), 293-4. 30Ibid., 294. This actually captures Stephen‟s overall investment in gender ideals, not just her investment in sartorial norms. As I have argued, normative femininity functions as an object of desire, distinctly not as an object of identification, and being interpellated as a woman registers to Stephen as profound debasements of her masculine honor. For instance, when her best friend Martin Hallam proposes to her (“he saw her suddenly there as a woman”), Stephen feels “the deepest repulsion—terror and repulsion” (98). As with women‟s clothing, it is deeply alluring to have a wife, deeply humiliating to be one. 31Ibid., 291. 139

performances or fantasies of gender difference. Instead of exploring the “social nature” of

Stephen's self-debasements, including the erotic promises these debasements hold, Hall uses, according to Stockton, her protagonist's final act of self-wounding (her renunciation of her lover) to suggest not just the impossibility of Stephen‟s “marriage” to Mary, but the impossibility of all forms of queer relation. “Sacrifice fails,” Stockton writes, because

“fantasy fails.”32

Following Stockton fine analysis I arrive at the opposite conclusion and would argue that sacrifice does succeed. Stephen‟s final act of self-wounding actually succeeds in imagining and producing queer relations within a community more capacious than that of the romantic couple. In the final section of The Well, which traces the development and eventual dissolution of Stephen‟s relationship with Mary, Hall actually makes the argument that inverts such as Stephen should exercise what Stockton refers to as the

“social nature” of their self-debasements—in other words, that Stephen‟s sense of masculine honor requires a more public engagement with the world, not just with a wife.

Stephen‟s relationship with Mary begins during their wartime service as ambulance drivers, when inverts benefit from the temporary suspension of strict gender roles. Their masculine uniforms signify their loyalty to the nation, no longer their transgressive sexualities: “they had no stigma to live down in the war, no need to defend their right to respect. They rallied to the call of their country superbly” (271).

Immediately after the war, Stephen and Mary travel to Tenerife where they consummate their love. A luscious island, Tenerife is defined as a primitive Eden, unaffected by

32Ibid., 295. 140

modernity, where Stephen and Mary can essentially “go native.” 33 Hall thus situates the onset of this relationship in a time and place unaffected by the 20th century stigmatizing discourses on homosexuality, implying that this is somehow a condition of possibility for their love. Indeed, when Stephen and Mary set up house in Paris, Stephen organizes their lives in such a way so as to avoid most interactions with a world she perceives as “hostile

…thoughtless…unjust” (378). She restricts their lives to the domestic—she writes; Mary runs the household—and she deploys her financial resources to further protect her lover against injurious interpellations: “[v]ery splendid it seemed to her now to have money, because of what money could do for Mary” (328).

Hall clearly does not endorse this mode of assimilation, withdrawal really, as a feasible way for her protagonist to live and love. Not only do Stephen‟s efforts to insulate her lover fail miserably—Mary is nevertheless spurned by respectable peers such as Lady Massey—they also deprive the couple of all forms of sociality. As Brockett, the playwright, argues, Stephen is “not playing fair with” Mary and they need to establish social connections that will buttress their “marriage.” “If you were a man,” he points out,

“it would be rather different; you‟d have dozens of friends, as a matter of course. Mary might even be going to have an infant” (346). Since she is not a man, she should, according to Brockett, seek out a supportive community, not by befriending “the so- called normals” but by establishing kinship relations with other inverts, many of whom do not “live out crucified lives” (299). “You shun your own ilk,” Brocket claims, “as though they were the devil” (346).

33 For more on Hall‟s orientalist construction of Tenerife as a space of “the primitive,” see Sarah E. Chinn, “‟Something Primitive and Age-Old as Nature Herself‟: Lesbian Sexuality and the Permission of the Exotic,” Palatable Poison, 300-315. 141

As an engagement with the world, however, merely associating with her “own ilk” is ultimately also not what Hall envisions for her heroine. At the salon of Valérie

Seymour, the character modeled after Natalie Barney, Stephen and Mary do meet and befriend a number of inverts, yet the “freedom” and “protection” this cultured space offers inverts is predicated upon its privacy. As an essentially public presentation of a self, Stephen‟s sense of honor propels her out of this safe community. Valérie Seymour actually comments on this; calling Stephen “a bird of passage,” Valérie explicates the former‟s “terrible combination”:

You‟ve the nerves of the abnormal with all that they stand for—you‟re appallingly over-sensitive, Stephen—well, and then we get le revers de la médaille; you‟ve got all the respectable county instincts of the man who cultivates children and acres—any gaps in your fences will always disturb you. (407)

The dual sides of Stephen—two sides of the same coin really—are drawn out most dramatically at Alec‟s, a not very upscale gay bar. There she encounters a young, effeminate man, with “a grey, drug-marred face [and] a mouth that trembled incessantly,” who addresses her as “ma soeur.” In response, Stephen wants “to strike that face with her naked fist, to obliterate it” (388-9). While she does eventually address the young man as

“mon frère,” the violence of her response suggests the tension between her inversion and her “respectable county instincts.” In much the same fashion, Heather Love interprets this scene as an instance of what Goffman describes as the “identity ambivalence” that may occur “when [a stigmatized individual] obtains close sight of his own kind behaving in a stereotyped way, flamboyantly or pitifully acting out the negative attributes imputed to them.” 34 “Throughout the novel,” Love writes, Hall‟s protagonist “tries to differentiate

34 Goffman, Stigma, 107-8. 142

herself from such „battered remnants of men‟” so as to increase “her sense of strength and well-being.”35

Love‟s reading is a fine one, especially inasmuch as it proceeds from a sense of the complexities and contradictions with which marginalized groups negotiate normative regimes. The scene also demonstrates, I would add, the classist values that frame

Stephen‟s perception of “the miserably army” at Alec‟s. Stephen‟s disavowal of her kinship with these inverts is predicated upon her perception of their weak moral constitutions. To Stephen, these inverts are “[b]ereft of all social dignity”; they have been abhorred, spat upon from their earliest days” in response to which they have sunk “even lower than their enemies kn[ow]” (388). In other words, Stephen abhors the clientele at

Alec‟s because, in her view, they are insufficiently autonomous subjects who have come to enact society‟s denunciation of them: “covered with shame, called unholy and vile, so gradually they themselves had sunk down to the level upon which the world placed their emotions” (ibid.). By attributing to these inverts debased emotional lives, she skirts the possibility that their conduct, including their drug-taking and prostitution, may be more indicative of their socio-economic marginalization, that it is not their lack of inherent dignity that motivates their non-normative ways of being but, rather, that it is their non- normativity that subjects them to humiliation—being catalogued by Monsieur Pujol, for example.

The Well as a whole repeatedly attempts to effect a differentiation between honorable--read: upper-class--inverts, such as its protagonist, and morally weak—read:

35 Heather Love, “Spoiled Identities: Stephen Gordon‟s Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History” in: GLQ 7.4 (2001), 489. 143

lower-class—inverts, such as those “veriest dregs of creation” at Alec‟s (388).36 By way of that differentiation Hall also sets the stage for the novel‟s infamous conclusion: the dissolution of Stephen‟s “marriage” to Mary and her subsequent vision of being possessed by “the lost and terrible brothers from Alec‟s” (436). Stephen‟s decision to send her lover into the arms of Martin Hallam, who can provide Mary with a respectable marriage, is represented as the painful, but inevitable expression of her moral fiber:

“[a]nd now she must pay very dearly indeed for that inherent respect of the normal which nothing had ever been able to destroy, not even the long years of persecution” (430).

Unlike the inverts at Alec‟s, Stephen is apparently endowed with core qualities that give her no choice but to do the honorable thing. “Handed down by the silent and watchful founders of Morton” (ibid.), that inherent respect is at once her “burden” and a sign of her privileged subjectivity. The idea of offering her lover “the gift of Martin” appeals to

Stephen‟s “instinct which, in earliest childhood, had made her feel something akin to worship for the perfect thing which she had divined in the love that existed between her parents” (ibid.).

It is not surprising, then, that Stephen's renunciation of her lover has chagrined many critics, since it can be read as a painful submission to heteronormativity, as a sign, in other words, of The Well’s misguided ideological investments.37 The suggestion that

36 Hall further draws a radical distinction between the stigma of Stephen‟s difference and that of racial difference so as to not compromise the whiteness of her protagonist. See Jean Walton, “‟I Want to Cross Over into Camp Ground‟: Race and Inversion in The Well of Loneliness,” Palatable Poison, 227-299. 37 The fact that Mary seems to have no say in Stephen's decision to marry her off, or that she in general is assigned little or no agency in the novel, has further led scholars to comment on Hall's misogyny. The marginality of the character of Mary is also, I would add, the structural consequence of Hall's reliance on the inversion model, which understands female homosexuality exclusively in terms of gender inversion and can therefore not conceptualize femininely gendered lesbians. As a result, Hall portrays Mary as a “normal” woman. For more on the role of femmes in The Well, see Leslie J. Henson, “'Articulate Silence[s]': Femme Subjectivity and Class Relations in The Well of Loneliness,” in: Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls, Laura Harris and Elizabeth Crocker, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 61-73; 144

lesbian relationships can not indefinitely withstand the force of the normal furthers indeed a near convention in the representation of lesbian love and, in this respect, Hall's

“narrative of damnation,” as Catherine Stimpson has called it, is part of a gloomy tradition that extends into the lesbian pulp novels of the Fifties and Sixties. To a certain extent, Hall and the subsequent pulp writers do share the belief in the necessity to endorse, if not advocate, heteronormativity as a condition for the publication of a

“lesbian” novel.38 Yet, I would nevertheless argue that The Well’s ideological self- positioning is never really straightforward and in its final scenes the novel also imagines alternative modes of queer life. Critics‟ denunciation of the work is, to a certain extent, the result of its polemical thrust which promises to solve, or at least to ameliorate, problems that lie outside the text—problems experienced within history and social life.

Stimpson‟s critique of The Well’s damning effects that “give the homosexual, especially the lesbian, riddling images of pity, self-pity, and terror—in greater measure than it consoles” voices a readerly desire invited by the text itself. That desire, however, sidesteps the narrative logic of the novel.39

and Clare Hemmings, “'All My Life I've Been Waiting For Something...': Theorizing Femme Narrative in The Well of Loneliness,” in: Palatable Poison, 179-198. 38Although not all pulp novels have equally sorry endings—some even have ambiguously hopeful conclusions--, the majority close with anything from the heroine's abandonment, her conversion to heterosexuality, her death, or even her murder. In a recently published collection of lesbian pulp fiction, entitled Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novel 1950-1965, Katherine Forest points out that popular authors as Ann Bannon and Vin Packer found that such plots were more or less required in their writings about sexual relations between women and that, when they attempted less miserable outcomes for their heroines, it would be “the jacket copy writers [...] who did society's work of any censorship/obscenity scrutiny” (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2005, xvi). The notion that lesbian relationships are causes of deep misery, if not death and decay, is not something the American writers of this genre took from The Well, for that notion goes back to the decadent verse of Swinburne and Baudelaire's infamous “femmes damnées.” 39 Catherine Stimpson, “Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 369. 145

The fact that The Well does not reproduce the happy endings of heterosexual romances, for instance, indicates the imaginative, erotic, and practical limitations of such happy endings, as they proceed from notions of the sexually monogamous couple, nuclear kinship structures, etcetera. While Stephen may worship her parents‟ marriage, the form of the romantic couple is, to her, ultimately not a feasible form of existence.40

When she attempts to enclose her “marriage” to Mary within the privacy of domesticity, she not only makes a miserable husband, but also fails to recognize that her inversion is always already public. By giving Mary up, Stephen actually claims the public fact of her inversion, as a form of desire and as itself desirable. Indeed, the prospect of sacrificing herself in order to “release [Mary] from the world‟s persecution” comes to her as a “kind of dream…immensely compelling”—“she could not have acted otherwise, nor could she have made a false step” (430). Marrying her lover off to a man, in other words, constitutes the unapologetically public assertion of her sense of masculine honor; it is not a false step, on her part, but proceeds from her fantasy, a compelling dream, to publically lay claim to the practice of love by honor. The sacrifice of her lover, though tremendously painful, signals Stephen‟s recognition that performances of male honor require a public if these performances, especially on the part of inverts, are to have effect.

Contrary to Stockton‟s argument, then, I do see Hall‟s protagonist as eventually performing self-sacrifice as an eminently social act, as an engagement with the world through which alternative socialities become possible. After all, the consequence of

40 Not coincidentally, Hall dedicated The Well to “Our Three Selves,” a reference to her own triangulated relationship with Una Troubridge (her current lover) and Mabel Batten (her deceased lover). During her relationship with Batten, twenty-three years her senior, Hall began an affair with Troubridge; after a fight with Hall about that affair, Batten suffered a debilitating stroke and died a fortnight later. In response to this, Hall insisted that her union with Troubridge should always include Batten. When Hall subsequently fell in love with a young Russian nurse, Evguenia Souline, she attempted to insert her into that threesome by trying to adopt Souline as her child. 146

Stephen‟s self-sacrifice is the formation of queer forms of kinship; the “miserable army” of inverts from Alec‟s return to her as her “brothers” (436). The latter assert their intimate ties to Stephen and, in an orgy of agony, she hallucinates that these brothers come to “possess” her—and she them: “[h]er barren womb became fruitful—it ached with its tearful and sterile burden. It ached with the fierce yet helpless children who would clamour in vain for the right to their salvation” (437). Positioning Stephen as a queer mother indeed, the fierce inverts from Alec‟s announce a futurity she is poised to deliver.

A Novel is Being Written

The invocation of Stephen‟s very queer conception in the concluding scene gestures, of course, to the role of the novel as a whole. After all, Stephen's effort on behalf of those less fortunate inverts is to write (to deliver) a literary work, which is, presumably, the novel we are reading—or, at least, a similar work of fiction that, like The

Well, claims to be the first in literary history to discuss the subject of inversion. This particular self-reflexivity is further underscored by Hall's superimposition of her own literary career onto that of her protagonist. Before she began writing The Well, Hall was a celebrated author and winner of two prestigious literary prizes (the James Tait Black prize and the Prix Femina for Adam's Breed), much like Stephen Gordon who has made fame with her first novel, The Furrow, a title reminiscent of Hall's 1924 debut novel, The

Forge. Interestingly, The Well makes no mention of the content of The Furrow, but does

147

point out that its famous author is known for her close cropped hair, male attire, and her

“voracious smoking”—again, Hall could have been portraying herself.41

Through this mirroring of the authorial figure in The Well and the author of The

Well and by inscribing into the novel the announcement of its own arrival, Hall provided her work with its own self-justification. It is conceived in and as an act of noble sacrifice.

By writing The Well, Hall did indeed offer herself up to public condemnation and legal prosecution, although she went to great lengths to reduce these risks. She solicited

Havelock Ellis to write a preface for her novel so as to give it the legitimacy of Ellis‟ expert endorsement. Hall also explicitly distanced her work from what Michael Baker calls “the 'spicier' French Sapphic tradition,”42 the supposedly titillating representations of lesbians by male authors such as Baudelaire, Zola, Flaubert, De Maupassent, and

Pierre Louÿs, as well as the explorations of Sapphic eroticism in the writings of Natalie

Barney, Liane de Pougy, the novels of Collette, and the poetry of Renée Vivien. 43 On the level of the text, The Well actually performs its dissociation from that tradition, especially from prurient, male-authored portrayals of lesbian sexuality, by juxtaposing Stephen's mode of literary production to that of Jonathan Brockett, the successful playwright. The

41Stephen final turn to literature also exits the novel out of the genre of the romance novel to that of the Kunstlerroman. For more on The Well and Hall‟s earlier works as Kunstlerromans, see Claudia Stillman Franks, Beyond The Well of Loneliness: The Fiction of Radclyffe Hall (London: Avebury, 1982). 42 Michael Baker, Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985), 220. 43 Hall was actually well acquainted with Sapphic writing in the French as well as in the Anglo tradition (Clemence Dane's The Regiment of Women; Rosamond Lehmann's Dusty Answer; Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel). While it goes beyond the scope of my inquiries, it would be worthwhile to trace the ways in which The Well is nevertheless indebted to this tradition. When she was writing The Well, for example, Hall was living in Paris where she studied the life and work of Vivien. Vivien understood female same-sexuality as a Romantic/Decadent sensibility, not as gender inversion, and portrayed Sapphic love as a tragic, yet absolutely uncompromising passion. In “The Nut-Brown Maid,” for instance, Vivien features a female character, Nell, who “wasn‟t a real woman” and who responds to male sexual advances with “wild horror.” When her male hunting companion tries to kiss her, she tells him that she “would prefer to swallow a toad than to let you kiss me” (The Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories. Karla Jay & Yvonne M. Klein, transl. [New York: Gay Presses of New York, 1983], 82-3). In Vivien‟s work, as in The Well, lesbian sexuality is wildly intense, wildly absolute. 148

latter informs Stephen that “people are the food that we writers live on; get out and devour them, squeeze them dry” (272); for Stephen, however, it is writers who are to be sacrificed and devoured. Whereas Brockett is a “carnivorous genius”—“he fed his genius on live flesh and blood”—, Stephen's pen is “dipped in [her own] blood […] with every word she wrote, she was bleeding!”(428) Moreover, the reason why “Brockett wrote such fine plays” and is a more accomplished writer than Stephen is that his “sharp eyes [...] were glued to other people's keyholes” (234). In The Well, there are no keyholes to be peeped through, no indiscretions to be sought, and Hall's reference to

Brockett's shameless voyeurism alludes to the exploitative uses of lesbian sexuality, such as Louÿs‟s pseudo-pornographic Chansons de Bilitis.44 The Well, by contrast, does not concern itself with lesbian sexual acts—or, at least, claims not to do so—as its focus is, instead, on the identity of inversion as a stigmatized one. It discusses the particular injuries caused by that stigmatization through an invert who bears it all in public: “the outward stigmata of the abnormal—verily the wounds of one nailed to a cross” (245-6).

While Brockett writes by devouring people, Stephen, and implicitly Hall herself, does so by “bleeding,” inflicting further wounds on her already wounded self. Through this contrast, then, The Well writes its own emergence as a selfless act of sacrifice for the sake of a marginalized community. In the process, Stephen/Hall emerge as queer martyrs, in

44 Hall wrote that “hitherto the subject has been treated as pornography, or introduced as an episode, or veiled. I have treated it as a fact of nature—a simple, though at present tragic fact” (Unpublished diaries, cited in Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall [New York: Doubleday, 1999], 186). The distinction between authentic lesbian works and mala vide ones poses a number of definitional difficulties--what makes a work authentically lesbian: the identity of the author, the manner and extent of its treatment of lesbian sexuality, the work‟s celebration or condemnation of lesbian sexuality, etcetera. For a discussion of the shifting boundaries of the lesbian canon, see Gretchen Schultz, “Daughters of Bilitis; Literary Genealogy and Lesbian Authenticity,” GLQ 7:3 (2001), 5-19. 149

the tradition of Jesus, Saint Sebastian, Jeanne d‟Arc, whose theatrical displays of suffering may solicit the discomfort of some and the erotic affection of many others.

For a text famously indebted to the sexual sciences, The Well ultimately claims for literature the persuasive efficacy to address average readers, including heterosexual ones. The latter—“ thoughtless […] happy people”—will not read the studies by sexologists, who themselves “must work in the dark” (389-90). In the prophetic words of

Adolphe Blanc, fellow invert and “learned Jew,” “the whole truth is known only to the normal invert. The doctors cannot make the ignorant think, cannot hope to bring home the sufferings of millions; only one of ourselves can some day do that…” (390). Yet, insofar the text privileges literary representations of inversion (exemplified, of course, by

The Well itself) as providing epistemologically (“the whole truth”) and phenomenologically (“bring home the suffering”) authentic accounts of inversion, Hall‟s novel does not in fact accomplish this verisimilitude. Even though Hall models Stephen‟s authorship after that of herself, The Well is certainly not “the thinly disguised story of

Radclyffe Hall‟s own life,” as the blurb to the 1990 American edition states.45 In fact, the text performs the more compelling gesture of representing the identity of inversion as itself produced through the work of fiction. Within and against the idiom of sexology,

Hall‟s inverted heroine emerges as the result of a complex textual genealogy.

The character of Stephen Gordon is based not on Hall herself but on Krafft-

Ebbing‟s portait of the Hungarian Countess Sarolta Vay/Count Sandor Vay, presented in his Psychopathia Sexualis as case 166, the exemplification of “Gynandry.” Here, Krafft-

45 The life-work distinction is in fact quite radical, as a number of scholars have noted. Halberstam, for instance, points out that Hall did not lead a tortured existence and was part of a “flourishing [lesbian] community” (Female Masculinities [Durham: Duke University Press, 1998], 96. 150

Ebbing details a case of inverted life that could well be a miniature version of The Well.

Like Stephen Gordon, Count Vay was the product of “an ancient noble and highly respected family”; she was raised by her father as a boy—he “called her Sandor, allowed her to ride, drive and hunt, admiring her muscular energy”; throughout her life, “S. had a passion for masculine sports and was a skillful fencer.”46 Like Hall‟s heroine,

Sandor/Sarolta “received a careful education” and, when “a young gentleman,” became of independent means and established herself as a successful author. Sandor/Sarolta also shares with Stephen Gordon an exclusive erotic preference for women and an adamant rejection of all accoutrements of femininity, for herself that is, not for those whom she desires. Krafft-Ebbing cites Sandor when she explained her “indescribable aversion for female attire—indeed, for everything feminine, but only in as far as it is concerned me; for, on the other hand, I was all enthusiasm for the beautiful sex.”47 Besides the similarities in their biographies, personalities, and preferences, Krafft-Ebbing‟s subject and Hall‟s protagonist also resemble each other in their masculine physique: muscular build, no waist, movements “masculine and lacking in grace.”48

In 1889, Vay became the defendant in a widely publicized trial as a result of charges of fraud brought against her by the father of Marie E., the woman whom Vay, passing as a man, had married.49 After an extensive examination of Vay, including interviews with her and her relatives, a detailed inquiry into the mechanics of her sexual relations with Marie as well as research into ancestral degeneration, the Viennese court

46 Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Special Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct. Transl. S. Klaf. New York: Arcade Publishing, [1892] 1998, 285 47 Ibid., 285. 48 Ibid., 290. 49 Note that Stephen‟s lover and “wife” is also named Mary and, like Marie E., is depicted as rather naïve about her romantic arrangements. 151

found her mentally ill and released her to a hospital. The trial of Count V. actually represents a significant historical shift from earlier prosecutions of women who passed for men. As Geertje Mak shows, the latter were predicated on the corrective function of the trial, unmasking the real woman behind the masquerade of male attire and, subsequently, returning her to the proper side of the sexual divide, so to speak. During

Vay‟s trial, however, her male impersonation came to signify as the revelation of her essentially male nature; rather than a misleading disguise, her male performances constituted the presentation of her authentic self.50

In Krafft-Ebbing‟s catalogue of sexual typologies, Sandor/Sarolta Vay figures as the prototype of the congenital invert, yet, in contrast to the rigidly pathologizing thrust of his other case studies, he provides an unusually sympathetic portrait of Count V. Of her literary accomplishments, he asserts, for instance, that “her writings betray a wonderfully wide rage of reading in classics of all languages, in citations from poets and prose writers of all lands.”51 Unlike the other cases in Psychopathia’s inventory, moreover, the account of Count V. was not the result of Krafft-Ebbing‟s encounter with or “treatment” of Vay. Instead, case 166 emerged from his reading of the report by the psychiatrist C. Birnbacher, entitled “Ein Fall von Konträren Sexualempfindung vor dem

Strafgericht” (“A Case of Contrary Sexual Subjectivity before the Criminal Court”—my translation).52 Thus Krafft-Ebbing cites Birnbacher who cites Vay, when she “explains” herself:

50 Geertje Mak, “Sandor/Sarolta Vay: From Passing Woman to Sexual Invert.” Journal of Woman’s History. Vol. 16: 1 (2004), 54-77. 51 Psychopathia, 287. 52 Birnbacher‟s report appeared in the Austrian professional journal for forensic medicine: Friedrichsblätter für die Gerichtliche Medizin 42, no.1 (1891), 2-42. Birnbacher‟s report is a relatively unorganized compilation of statements by Vay‟s family, colleagues, and lovers, medical reports, summaries of Vay‟s 152

Gentlemen, you learned in the law, psychologists, and pathologists, do me justice! Love led me to take the step I took; all my deeds were conditioned by it. God put it in my heart…Only God is just. How beautifully does Victor Hugo describes this in his Légendes du Siècle! How sad do Mendelssohn‟s words sound to me: „Nightly in dreams I see thee‟!53

Vay‟s passionate speech challenges the codifications of the taxonomies in which it is embedded by juxtaposing them to the authority of the literary. At the same time, however, the complex textual genealogy within which her words emerge render those words the product of an near-infinite regress of scenes of reading. What Krafft-Ebbing displays here, in other words, is not the “true” voice of the invert, but the production of that identity itself through his reading of Brinbacher, who reads Vay, who reads Hugo and Mendelssohn. The fact that Hall modeled her inverted heroine on the case of Count

V. thus furthers this dazzling mise en abyme. When Stephen finds her name written in the margins of her father‟s copy of Krafft-Ebbing‟s Psychopathia, Hall presents us with a scene of Stephen reading her father‟s reading of Krafft-Ebbing‟s reading of Birnbacher‟s reading of the words of Vay, who reads Hugo and Mendelssohn. Through this intricately intertextual construction of Stephen‟s identity, The Well inscribes that identity within a near-infinite chain of textual/fictional identifications; rather than an emergence from the real into representation, the invert comes into view as a discursive construction that itself relies upon further (mis-)constructions.

The sequence of textual identifications through which Stephen‟s identity emerges does pause, though certainly not halt, at the realm of the literary—with Mendelssohn‟s melancholic words of longing: “Nightly in dreams I see thee.” According to Laura Green, literary and journalistic work as well as an account of his own interactions with and examination of Vay. Onto this material, Krafft-Ebbing imposed the narrative ordering of a medical case study, starting with his chronological construction of a life, followed by a physical examination of the subject, and a diagnosis at its conclusion. 53 Psychopathia, 287. 153

this points to The Well‟s advocacy of “the emotional authority of fictional representation.”54 That authority lies not, I would suggest, in literature‟s ability to ground that identity, but in its ability to stage the desire for that ground. In other words, by positing the identity of inversion as in need of further, literary fictions—notably, its own fiction—The Well articulates also the longing for that identity as never quite yet attained, much like Mendelssohn‟s longing for the figure he encounters in his dreams. The identity of Hall‟s heroine may never really leave the overdetermined taxonomies of sexology, the conclusion of the novel argues nonetheless that that identity still needs to be written.55

This is also the very quality of The Well that accounts, I would argue, for its popularity among audiences that share very little with its protagonist. In Boots of

Leather, Slippers of Gold, for instance, Kennedy and Davis document the elemental role of Hall‟s novel in the establishment of a working-class lesbian community in Buffalo from the mid 1930s to the early 1960s. To this day, The Well is still one of the most widely read and translated works of lesbian fiction as it presents a site of readerly identifications that are not necessarily based on similarity. Stephen‟s identity emerges through a series of readings that stress the “not yet” of that identity; she may exemplify that identity but only insofar she is called upon, at the end of the novel, to fashion that identity.

54 Laura Green, “Hall of Mirrors: Radclyffe Hall‟s The Well of Loneliness and Modernist Fictions of Identity,” Twentieth-Century Literature 49. 3 (Fall 2003), 287. 55 The longing for what one can never quite approximate or have is, of course, itself a recurrent literary theme, especially in representations of queer love. I cite two examples at the top of this chapter, including Djuna Barnes‟ Nightwood which features that love as “go[ing] far back in our lost distance where what we have never had stands waiting.”

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The Shame of The Well and Mental Hygiene

Despite the currency maintained by Hall‟s work, the novel‟s critical reception has been notoriously bivalent. As a “normal invert,” Stephen Gordon does indeed display conservative investments in class, nation, race, and gender, and her predicament is depicted within a thick composite of disparate languages: modern sexological discourses, archaic martyrology, post WWI psychological accounts of traumatized masculinity, and the 19th century literary discourse of sentimentality. Especially The Well‟s sentimental aesthetics, as a particularly full affective register and a rhetorical strategy, has shifted scholarly attention away from examinations of the shame-honor dynamic in the text to the status of the text as itself an object of critical embarrassment. From Hall‟s contemporary readers to 21st century queer scholars, critical reflections on The Well's gothic sentimentality mostly display embarrassment about the novel, rather than explore the embarrassments in the novel.56 Apart from the question of the efficacy of such self- explicating gestures, the latter tell us little about the particular operations of shame within this text and more about the political and aesthetic devaluation of sentimentality itself.

This devaluation of the sentimental as “arch,” “kitsch,” and “feminine” is, of course, in no small part the consequence of the self-fashioning of a particularly “virile” modernism

(Pound, Lewis, Eliot) and the subsequent New Critical institutionalization of such “hard,”

“cerebral” aesthetics.57 Yet, within the presently much more capacious construction of modernism as multiple (Sapphic modernism, Latin-American modernisms, etc) and as

56 The works by Heather Love and Kathryn Bond Stockton are notable exceptions. For a survey of The Well’s critical reception, see Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, “Introduction: Critical Perspective Past and Present,” Palatable Poison, 1-31. 57 For more on this trajectory, see Suzanna Clark‟s Sentimental Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1-4. 155

less tightly defined by high/low and masculine/feminine hierarchies, sentimental aesthetics continue to trouble scholars of modernism. This holds in particular for The

Well, a distinctly modern work of lesbian fiction that is flush with sentimentalism's florid idioms.

A case in point is Terry Castle‟s “Afterword” to Palatable Poison, the most recent collection of critical essays on The Well. Castle writes about the many hours of her adult life she has spent “making jokes” about the novel. “After all,” she explains, “it is quite possibly the worst novel ever written, crammed full with so many ghastly passages one is hard-pressed to choose one's favorite hideousness among them.”58 Castle cites some of

Hall's purplest passages—“bad, bad, bad” (emphasis hers)—and then concludes her examination of these “mortifications” to also address her love of the book, a love that is itself “embarrassing, possibly adolescent.” She writes that “only by an avowal of [this] love I find can I counter an aesthetic shame-reflex so fierce and heavy-breathing—nay positively glandular—as to make my computer screen fog up as I write these words.”59

Castle's description of her “aesthetic shame-reflex” tellingly indicates the blinding effects of that particular shame—it literally clouds her very examination of the novel. Moreover, as a particular engagement with The Well's sentimental aesthetics, Castle's reflexive disdain is indicative of the dynamic by which, in the context of reading modernist texts, a work's sentimentality incites (almost automatically, it seems) gestures of anti-sentimental denunciation. The category of the sentimental, in other words, serves here primarily to indicate Castle's “knowing” relation to the supposed affectedness, manipulativeness, and morbidity of this text. As Sedgwick explains, the very force of such an attribution lies

58 Palatable Poison, 394-5. 59 Ibid., 398. 156

less in particular textual qualities and more in “its ability to delineate a chain of attributive angles of increasing privilege and tacitness,” i.e. in establishing implicit yet incontestable grounds for judgment.60 This also suggests a further difficulty with attempts to rehabilitate the sentimental, as such a project could easily invite “discoveries” of an even more profound sentimentality elsewhere—in the discerning critic, for example. Thus, when Castle “counters” her “aesthetic shame-reflex” with an avowal of her “embarrassing, possibly adolescent love” for Hall's novel, she illustrates this very problem, shifting the attribution of sentimentality from the aesthetics of the text to the immaturity of her own investments in the text.61

In this chapter, my interest has been not so much in The Well's sentimentality itself, or even in rehabilitating it, which, as I suggested earlier, poses its own difficulties.

In fact, considering that sentimentality's devalued status is largely due to its association with women and queers, it might be productive, in this particular context, to refrain from efforts to recuperate it.62 By way of the thematics and iconography sentimentality offers,

Western gay and lesbian life has, since the middle of the nineteenth century, effected varying degrees of visibility. Stephen‟s sad, yet inevitable loss of her lover, for instance, recalls the courtly figure of the noble knight as well as the theme of the tragic, impossible love we find in Romantic poetry, Verdi‟s operas, most of Henry James's novels, and in

60 Sedgwick, Epistemology, 152. 61 Palatable Poison, 398. 62 This is not to say that a revaluation of sentimentality could not be, in other contexts, tremendously fruitful politically, aesthetically, and otherwise. Feminist scholars of nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction in particular have produced significant studies to this effect (Jane Tomkins, Nancy Armstrong, among others), although the status of the sentimental within modernism remains unexplored, Suzanne Clark‟s work excepted. I should further add that the construction of the sentimental as feminine by nno means suggests that the sentimental, as a particular structure of feeling, has been soly the terrain of women or other faint-hearted souls; by the end of the Eighteenth Century, the sentimenta lbecame central to literary and philosophical inquiries, such as Thomas Hume‟s Treatise of Human Nature, into public feelings and private experiences, sympathy and vice. See Adela Finch‟s Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 16-111. 157

Eliot's elegiac images of beautiful, drowned sailors. Likewise, Stephen's spectacular pain and exile provides her a status similar to that of other queer icons of suffering outcasts—

Saint Sebastian, Joan of Arc, Oscar Wilde. Considering that these figures and themes are widely circulated in Western culture, we might even ask if it is not their very appropriation in a project of queer self-fashioning that signifies as sentimental, rather than the thematics themselves.

The discourse of sentimentality, moreover, also operates as a rhetorical strategy, predicated upon the association between the incitement of powerful moral feelings in readers (sympathy, pity) and political action. The Well is emphatically an address to heterosexual audiences and offers them the display of the invert‟s suffering and, through that, the position of sentimental spectatorship. In her particularly full, over-flowing exhibition of Stephen‟s pain, Hall lays bare the shame and humiliation of being an outcast, the shame of bringing shame to loved ones, as well as the shame of not attaining masculine honor, alongside the other bad feelings caused by this manifold shame—the sadness, despair, anger, resentment, and so forth. With sentimental sincerity, the novel thus invites the reader to witness, or to experience vicariously, the affective burdens borne by the invert, burdens that escape the confines of Stephen‟s psyche, almost spilling out from the pages of the text. Through this spectacular emotionality, moreover, The Well fails quite dramatically to follow what Goffman has called “the mental hygiene injunction,” the injunction, that is, that stigmatized persons not only manage their stigma, but do so within a sanitized affective repertoire. As a rhetorical stance, the stigmatized should display the affective qualities—maturity, dignity, reasonableness—that supposedly demonstrate their well-adjusted inner recourses. “The stigmatized,” Goffman

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writes, “should make an effort at the sympathetic re-education of the normal, showing him, point for point, quietly, and with delicacy, that in spite of appearances the stigmatized individual is, underneath it all, a fully human being.” 63 Goffman points out that, even though such performances of “good adjustment” may garner a degree of acceptance by “normals,” that acceptance nevertheless retains its structuring conditionality. In other words, the more a stigmatized deviates from the norm, the more artfully she may have to express the possession of the standard subjective self and the more normals demand that she provides them with a model of what an ordinary person is supposed to feel about herself. The “good-adjustment line,” as Goffman calls it, is defined by and for “normals”:

It means that the unfairness and pain of having to carry a stigma will never be presented to them; it means that normals will not have to admit to themselves how limited their tactfulness and tolerance is; and it means that normals can remain relatively unthreatened in their identity beliefs. It is from just these meanings, in fact, that the specifications of a good adjustment derive.64

The Well departs quite gloriously from this “good-adjustment line”: instead of presenting the stigma of inversion in a reasonable manner, the novel flaunts the pains

(and pleasures) of carrying that stigma. By way of its sentimental idiom, it exhibits the very intemperate, very messy emotional landscape of its inverted protagonist; rather than presenting a hygienic mind, to paraphrase Goffman, The Well stages the excessive, compulsive, traumatized self of its protagonist. As a discourse directed at “normals,” then, the novel‟s sentimentality works as an “in your face” address; its attempt at educating heterosexual audiences does not tend to the delicacies of the latter‟s

63 Stigma, 108. 64 Ibid., 121. 159

sensibilities and, instead, stresses angrily the shame and honor of its stigmatized heroine.

As such, the text acts much in the same manner as the queer brothers and sisters from

Alec‟s; their performances incite gestures of embarrassed disidentification but also solicit the prurient pleasures of the entirely non-committal identification with the invert‟s terrible affliction (i.e. the straight reader weeping over the sorry plight of the invert). That

The Well thus undermines its objective of fostering acceptance for inverts among

“normals” is not exactly remarkable. After all, as Philip Fisher has demonstrated, the dirty secret behind the sentimental novel is that it never really accomplishes the political changes it envisions.65 As a grotesque rhetorical performance, moreover, The Well’s sentimentality undercuts the argument it makes on the diegetic level of the text. There it insists that there is “little of the true pioneer about Stephen” (108); she is a “normal invert” who, in spite of her difference, is an utterly wholesome, or least honorable human being. As Hall biographer Michael Baker writes: “Stephen is a traditionalist at heart. Had she not been homosexual, she would have become much like her country neighbors.”66

Stephen‟s eventual assumption of her kinship with her inverted sisters/children from

Alec‟s, however, does imply that the latter‟s transgressive performances may be incorrectly construed as indicative of their moral failings; instead, their upfront displays of their non-normativity may be courageous contestations of the heteronormative injunction to mental hygiene that privileges the already privileged sensibilities of heterosexuals.

65 Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 22. 66 Michael Baker, Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985), 197. 160

As a tone and a language of and about feelings, The Well’s sentimental, melodramatic register renders it a challenging work to assess. The various modalities of shame that Hall distinguishes stand conceptually far apart from the analyses of gay shame offered by post-Stonewall emancipatory and psychological discourses. In the introduction to this project, I discuss a number of recent psychological and popular works on gay shame that essentially argue for the eradication of that shame through very questionable assimilationist practices. Questionable, because assimilation is for butches like Stephen and other alternatively gendered persons (leather men, sissy boys, drag kings, trannies) simply not an option; to this day, their non-normative bodies subject them to various forms of shaming. By placing Stephen‟s feelings of shame in relation to honor, Hall also attends to the divergent social and erotic consequences of her protagonist‟s identification with itself very conventional masculine values. As such, The

Well might offer ways to re-think the Anglo-American discourse of “gay pride” and its implicit construction of gay shame as indicative of an individual‟s ideological failure, as, in other words, an inadequate acceptance of one‟s homosexuality. Historically, the celebration of gay pride has served very legitimately to counter the pathologizing of homosexuals; in the process, however, the notion of gay pride has also constructed its supposed opposite, gay shame, to merely signify the submission to that pathologization.

Finally, Hall‟s representation of the complex links between shame and same- sexuality does not fit neatly within political assessments of the novel as either a repressive or progressive work, or even as one that does a little bit of both. As I have tried to show, The Well explores critically the stigmatization of Stephen‟s transgressive gender and sexuality at the same time that the novel endorses, even idealizes, the

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normativity of the norms Stephen reproduces, even as she embodies those norms queerly.

Being shamed on account of the discredited status of homosexuality operates here alongside, yet distinct from, being ashamed over the inability to enact masculine honor.

Stephen‟s melancholic appropriation, even idealization of conventional gender norms

(masculine honor, noble self-sacrifice, differently gendered coupleship, etc) suggests the extent to which many queer lives remain shaped by what they fail to reproduce; those failed or imprecise reproductions can nevertheless inaugurate deeply queer forms of life and love. Thus, as The Well rebuffs the fantasy of freedom from norms, it also does not exactly participate in homophobic repudiations of homosexuality. Whether this renders

The Well a conservative or a libratory text, I can not say. It is, however, the case that

Stephen‟s shame of being stigmatized never gets transformed into a proud assumption of a queer identity, nor will she ever relish, what Douglas Crimp terms, “the negativity of shame, an enjoyment of what has been designated shameful by normative culture.”67 This

Hall‟s heroine shares with many queer subjects, past and present, who are not in a position—socially, economically, physically, religiously, geographically—to claim their gay pride or flaunt their anti-normativity. This does not make them less queer, just less free.

67 Douglas Crimp, “Mario Montez, For Shame,” Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2002), 66. 162

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c h a p t e r f o u r

Making Scenes:

Woolf's Experimental Affects in Three Guineas and Between the Acts

“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”

“The Humane Art,” 8 June 1940

In 1920, Virginia Woolf wrote a review of The Letters of Henry James, edited by

Percy Lubbock. Few scholars have taken note of this essay (perhaps due to the sheer breadth of Woolf‟s critical oeuvre), yet it presents a remarkable genealogy of James‟s literary career. It is remarkable in that she attributes the emergence of the “complex figure of the artist”—that is, James‟s “gathering together and superb welding into shape of all the separate strands, alien instincts, irreconcilable desires”—to a series of literary failures, culminating in James‟s abysmal flop in the theater, in 1895, with Guy Domville.1

From this point on, Woolf argues, James developed a much more spacious authorial self, not as a result of his increasing literary mastery but, rather, of his on-going engagement with that humiliated playwright, suffering the jeers of his audience. As I will explore more fully below, Woolf foregrounds how James, in his letters subsequent to his

1 Virginia Woolf, “The Letters of Henry James” (1920), The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1942), 152. Further references will appear parenthetically as DM followed by page number. 164

theatrical debacle, draws on that shame to produce—to compose—a new authorial practice that is simultaneously an erotic one. In doing so, moreover, she gestures toward a psychology, and an aesthetics, that is quite averse to a notion of a core self or subjectivity, especially as the putative location of sexual identity. To Woolf, James‟s shame doe not figure in relation to any truth, sexual or other, nor exactly in relation to the transgression of normative regimes.

I begin this chapter with Woolf‟s essay on James‟s letters since it provides a foretaste, so to speak, of her more comprehensive and complex attention to affects in her writings of the late thirties, notably Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts (1941).

While the latter works emerged within a much altered historical and political moment and were written by a by then established voice in British literary circles, they share with that early 1920 review a dedication to thinking affects outside of, or at least to the left of, the

Freudian hydraulic model of psychic life. It is well-established that Woolf, throughout her life, was skeptical, if not dismissive, of Freudian psychoanalysis, both as a descriptive project and a particular medical practice. Some scholars have attributed this to her lack of familiarity with Freud‟s work, yet, as Elizabeth Abel documents, Woolf‟s letters and diaries frequently and knowledgeably discuss Freud‟s writings on dreams, sexual repression, even creativity.2 She was introduced early on to Freud‟s ideas by members of her close circle, who were instrumental in disseminating Freud‟s work in Britain. In

2 See Elizabeth Abel‟s Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 16-19. Abel further notes that Woolf‟s critique of psychoanalysis pertained specifically to the Freudian version; the psychoanalytic work of Melanie Klein was of great interest to Woolf for, according to Abel, “many of [Woolf‟s] objections to Freudian theory do not apply to the discourse launched by Klein, which de-emphasizes sexuality, values the aesthetic, and, perhaps most importantly, calls into question the prevailing hierarchy of gender” (19). 165

1914, Leonard Woolf enthusiastically reviewed The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and, in 1919, Woolf‟s brother, Adrian Stephen, and his wife Karin begun training as psychoanalysts. James and Alix Strachey were key figures in the British Psychoanalytic

Society; their translations of Freud‟s writings were published by the Hogarth Press and eventually became the Standard Edition. In 1920, the same year Woolf reviewed James‟s letters, she published an essay entitled “Freudian Fiction,” which, like that on James, appeared in The Times Literary Supplement. In “Freudian Fiction” Woolf reviews J. D.

Bereford‟s An Imperfect Mother—a novel about a young man‟s inability to marry his beloved as a result of his fraught relationship with his mother—and she comments critically on “the new psychology,” especially in its literary applications. As a particular cure, she points mockingly to the comprehensive scientific aspirations of psychoanalysis as she envisions the case of a patient who falls down in a fit at the sound of a canary singing, but “now can walk through an avenue of cages without a twinge of emotion since he has faced the fact that his mother kissed him in his cradle.”3 By way of this reduction ad absurdum, Woolf portrays the talking cure as, at most, an imaginative, though predictable, (tauto)logical enterprise—“the triumphs of science,” she quips, “are beautifully positive.”4 In the field of literature, however, she finds the introduction of

Freudian concepts utterly deplorable as they reduce the complexity of human beings, and especially that of their emotional lives, to the scenarios that supposedly govern their unconsciousness. To Woolf, psychoanalysis provides “keys” through which “all the

3 “Freudian Fiction,” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 3 (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 197. 4 Ibid. 166

characters become cases” and this “simplifies rather than complicates, detracts rather than enriches.”5

What Woolf refers to as the simplification performed by psychoanalysis consists,

I would argue, of Freud‟s reduction of affects---fear, anxiety, envy, guilt—to the function of the libidinal drives. Thus affects are keys to, or manifestations of, the mechanics of the unconsciousness, the submerged theater of a psychosexual familial drama featuring the son‟s desire for his mother or, in a less leading role, the daughter‟s desire to acquire the paternal phallus. Woolf‟s witty vignette of the Freudian cure of a man‟s terror of birds‟ song by unearthing the fact that his mother kissed him in his crib—an act that parents quite commonly perform with their babies—satirizes psychoanalysis‟s deterministic conception of affects whereby those affects merely signify as the eruptions of an oedipally structured unconsciousness. The Freudian presupposition, in other words, of the psyche as the stage of repressed sexual desires allows for the identification of virtually every affect—or, for that matter, of a range of interests, behaviors, even creative enterprises—as both a manifestation and proof of those desires.6 Within such a model of psychic life, affects thus lack any qualities particular to themselves.

5 Ibid.

6 It is, in this respect, telling that Woolf‟s objections to the Freudian reduction of affects to symptoms of the unconscious are themselves read symptomatically. Hermione Lee, who is otherwise one of the most subtle and astute scholars of Woolf, interprets “Freudian Fiction” as a “powerful, funny” piece, but also a “self-defensive case against the reductive effects of analysis.” Why self-defensive? Lee explains that “judging from such comments” (about the man and his fear of canaries singing), Woolf “was afraid [analysis] would stop her writing” (Virginia Woolf [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998], 193). But what is the connection here between Woolf‟s criticism of the transposition of Freudian psychoanalysis onto literary works and her putative fear that doing such a thing herself would be the end of her own literary production? It seems to me that Woolf regarded Freud‟s conception of psychic life as inadequate—turning characters into cases—for the particular explorations of the complexity of subjectivities (those often cited “flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain” [“Modern Fiction,” CE 2, 106]) she 167

In her discussion of James‟s shame as well as her explorations of, among others, anger, fear, and pride in her later works, Woolf „s sustained interest is in what one could term the vitalism of affects, or, what Silvan Tomkins has called “the basic freedom […] of the affect system.”7 Tomkins distinguishes the drives from affects in terms of the latter‟s high degrees of freedom in duration and objects. Whereas the drives (breathing, eating, etc.) are more or less restricted with regard to their duration and objects (within a relatively set period one must take another breath again and one must breath oxygen), affects have significantly greater flexibility in their duration (fear can occupy a mere moment or structure a lasting attitude toward the world) and in the objects toward which they are oriented. “Any affect,” Tomkins argues, “may have any „object.‟ This is the basic source of complexity of human motivation and behavior” (SS, 19). Unlike the drives, who bear an instrumental relationship to their objects, affects can attach to events, perceptions, memories, ideas, things, persons, relationships, even other affects.8 In this respect, Tomkins faults “psychology” which “has exaggerated the dependence of the affects upon their activating stimuli” (SS, 54). To Tomkins, affects operate autotelically in the sense that negative affects are self-punishing and positive ones are self-rewarding.

While the drives are directed toward a limited set of objects (oxygen, water, etc.), affects

envisioned to be the purview of her work, in particular, and of modern writing in general. In “Freudian Fiction,” then, her concern is not that the imposition of psychoanalysis onto the literary realm would make her stop writing novels, but, rather, that it would make her write bad novels.

7 Shame and Its Sisters: A Sylvan Tomkins Reader. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 45. Hereafter referred to as SS. 8 “There is literally no kind of object which has not historically been linked to one or another of the affects. Positive affect have been invested in pain and every kind of human misery, and negative affect has been experienced as a consequence of pleasure and every kind of triumph of the human spirit.[…] The same mechanisms enable [a person] to invest any and every aspect of existence with the magic of excitement and joy or with the dread of fear or shame or distress” (SS, 54). 168

can not be reduced to that what triggers them or to the objects they enjoy. The latter,

Tomkins writes, “are separate mechanisms, involving […] responses quite different from the responses they are supposed to amplify” (SS, 22). Affects function by way of their own thresholds and feedback mechanisms as they interact—or, in Tomkins‟s term, co- assemble—with (more and less permanent) physical, perceptual, and cognitive states and abilities. Tomkins likens these dynamic properties of the affects to carbon, the organic element, “which is responsible for increasing the complexity of organic matter by virtue of its great combinational capacity” (SS, 45). As a result of their interactive dynamics, and of the concomitant ability of affects to learn (and to err), then, affects actually involve both internal and external events; they are not mere translations of input into output. The complexity and unpredictability with which affects draw on endogenous and exogenous states and events, moreover, explains why things matter in different ways to different people at different times in different situations. “The capacity of the individual,” Tomkins notes, “to feel strongly of weakly, for a moment, or for all his life, about anything under the sun and to govern himself by such motives constitutes his essential freedom” (SS 45-6). Crucially, this freedom is not that of the autonomous subject (free from history, ideology, biology, environment), but it is rather the freedom with which her or his affects relate to the contingencies that “cause” them and that makes that the former (affects) can not be reduced to or predicted by the latter (their causes).

This non-teleological and dynamic model of affects registers quite capaciously with Woolf‟s thinking about affects, particularly in her emphasis on the complexity of affective life. To be sure, Tomkins‟s ideas bear the marks of a postwar intellectual

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moment; his writings on affect, published in the US in the 1960s, rehearse such strange concepts as “density of neural firing” and “affective amplification” and, as such, may signify oddly, if not anachronistically, in relation to Woolf‟s work. Yet, I would nevertheless maintain (reservedly) that it is also the very strangeness of Tomkins‟s affect theory, especially in its unexpected departures from established practices and knowledges in contemporary psychology that makes for its potentially happy encounter with Woolf‟s explorations of affect.

As Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank observe, Tomkins‟s ideas markedly resist one of psychology‟s dominant presuppositions, namely “the presupposition of a core consolidated personality”; they (those ideas) do so “by such another disciplinary mobilization as that of cybernetics and systems theory, or, also pervasively, ethology, neuropsychology, perception and cognition, social psychology, and a prescient series of rereading of Freud, Paul Goodman, Gregory Bateson” (SS, 6). Moreover, Tomkins‟s approach to affects is quite averse to heterosexist teleologies and, relatedly, to the construction of sexuality as structured by oedipality and repression. Sedgwick and Frank explain that this is “a concomitant to distinguishing in the first place between an affect system and a drive system that it analogically amplifies” (SS, 7). Tomkins posits the drives and the affects as two distinct systems whereby the latter interact—or co- assemble— with the former in complex ways; in doing so, affects add phenomenological qualities (qualitative differences) to the drives that do not inhere in the drives. He defines the sexual drive as “the one drive which is the least imperious of all drives, the drive in which the affective component plays the largest role, the drive in which activation of the

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drive even without consummation has a rewarding rather than punishing quality” (SS,

60). Sexuality, in other words, is the most plastic of the drives since it interacts most intensively with affects which, as I mentioned earlier, are highly flexible in their duration, object choice, and aim. Unlike, say, hunger, sexual excitement is itself pleasurable, regardless of its aim or object (be that a memory, a photograph, the sight of a whip, or the feeling of an embrace).

It is precisely the emphasis on the affective component in the functioning of the sexual drive that provides Tomkins‟s model with the descriptive subtlety to attend to the heterogeneity and the contingencies (biological, environmental, cultural, historical) of sexual interests, practices, motivations, etc.9 Tomkins comments in this respect on the limitations of the Freudian model which surrenders the specificity of the affects to the universality of the drives. He maintains that Freud, by “smuggl[ing] some of the properties of the affect system [its freer, more flexible attributes] into his conception of the drives,” introduced the notion of the drives as “transformable,” i.e. capable of changing their objects or aims, yet “how one could transform the need for oxygen and food Freud never said” (SS, 50). As a result of this “drive centeredness,” Freud thus reduced very divergent affective investments to the supposedly trans-historical demands of the libido, so that the category of the sexual explained at once too much and too little.

Yet, Tomkins argues, the sexual drive does not operate that monopolistically and it is, in

9 Sedgwick and Frank view this as Tomkins‟s characteristic habit of layering digital (on/off) and analog (“graduated and/or multiply differentiated”). They write: “What appears to be a diminution in the power assigned to the sexual drive nonetheless corresponds to a multiplication—a finite and concrete multiplication, it will emerge—of different possibilities for sexual relevance.” Sexuality, in other words, does not merely switch between the dual modes of expression and repression. “As a drive [it] remains characterized by a binary (potent/impotent); yet its link to attention, motivation, or indeed to action occurs only through co-assembly with an affect system described as encompassing several more, and more qualitatively different, possibilities than on/off” (SS, 8). 171

fact, the affect of interest or excitement that primarily governs that drive; after all, “one‟s sexual drive can be no stronger than one‟s excitement about sexuality […] Anything which impairs such excitement about sexuality strikes also at the heart of the drive. If an erection evokes fear or shame, then excitement may be inhibited, and with it the possibility of intercourse” (SS, 76). As an affect, interest actually occupies a central role in the development of a range of mental and physical abilities. Tomkins explains that “the function of this very general positive affect is to „interest‟ the human being in what is necessary and in what it is possible for him to be interested in” (SS, 76). Thus, while interest is “the major source of the drive amplification,” it is no less compelling in the development of perception, memory, thought, and action. “To think,” he writes, “as to engage in any human activity, one must care, one must be excited, must be continually rewarded” (SS, 77).

By way of this dynamic approach to affects, finally, Tomkins offers not only a vivid alternative to the teleologies of the Freudian model, but also to the flat input-output approach of Behavorism as well as to the long-standing cognivist preoccupation with the localization of feelings in the brain. His work implies a notion of the mind as a homogeneous mass characterized by an ability to produce qualitative differences.

Moreover, Tomkins‟s concept of “the relative independence of sub-systems” (perceptual, affective, motoric, cognitive)—which, he admits, is really a reformulation of the

“commonplace and nineteen-century-ish distinctions […] between the „faculties‟” (SS,

175)—engenders a non-linear understanding of human development and experience and, in particular, an emphasis on the emergence of novel thoughts, novel affective

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investments, and novel actions. After all, since those sub-systems operate with relative independence (according to their own thresholds and feedback mechanisms), their interactions, or relative dependencies, will proceed along non-predictable and uneven lines.

These aspects of Tomkins‟s work actually situate him, I would argue, in the philosophical tradition of William James and Henri Bergson, Woolf‟s contemporaries.

Both present distinctly embodied approaches to knowledge, perception, and, in doing so, abandon the positivist presumption of instrumental reason (whose trans-historical categories ensure mastery over reality) in favor of more multi-layered and dynamic models of mind. James‟s pragmatist ideas stress the variety of the modes (including, importantly, affective ones) with which humans relate to their environment. He argues that cognitive judgments, i.e. “the ascertainment of outward fact” constitute but one

“species of mental activity” as mental lives involves, what he calls, “an immense number of emotional judgments.” According to James:

We can not laugh at a joke, we cannot go to one theater rather than another, take more trouble for the sake of our own child than our neighbor‟s; we cannot long for a vacation, show our best manners to a foreigner, or pay our pew rent, without involving in the premises of our action some element which has nothing whatever to do with simply cognizing the actual […] In a word, „mind,‟ as we actually find it, contains all sorts of laws—those of logic, of fancy, of wit, of taste, decorum, beauty, morals, and so forth, as well as of perception of fact.10

10 William James, “Spencer‟s Definition of Mind as Correspondence” (1878), William James: The Essential Writings, Bruce W. Wilshire, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 10. In this early piece, James critiques Herbert Spencer‟s Synthetic Philosophy which proposes a biological theory of knowledge, according to which human concepts are formed by a process of adaptation to the environment. Spencer views the human as the apogee of evolutionary development and argues that, as a consequence, the human mind maintains the greatest correspondence between its (internal) processes and the external world (objective relations). In his 1907 Creative Evolution, Bergson explicitly critiques Spencer‟s teleological ideas about the human mind. 173

James‟s examples here foreground the important role of what Tomkins terms the affective sub-system in human motivation as well as the relative independence of that system; after all, the greater attachment to one‟s own child or the longing for a vacation have relatively little to do with the perception of fact, i.e. another sub-system. James‟s notion of the various “laws” (of logic, fancy, etc.) also recalls Tomkins‟s assertion that the various sub-systems function according to mechanisms particular to themselves. “The quantal jumps from one moment to the next,” Tomkins writes, “are not likely to influence every sub-system with equal force. One will be more influenced in his modes of thinking when one is learning logic in a classroom than at the action and feeling level, as when one is mountain climbing” (SS, 175). Like Tomkins, moreover, James privileges the role of interest as “an all essential factor” in development and change; he claims that those interests that are “accented with pleasure” (i.e. those that are self-rewarding) motivate development: “pleasant or interesting items are singled out, dwelt upon, developed into their farther connections, whilst the unpleasant or insipid ones are ignored or suppressed.”11 One can not change, James concludes, unless one‟s interest is awakened.

With Bergson, finally, Tomkins shares a preoccupation with modes of becoming, or, to use Bergson‟s phrase, with the emergence of radical novelty. Bergson argues that mechanistic (Neodarwinism) and finalist (Neolamarckism) accounts of individual development, and of evolution in general, are incapable of theorizing new and unpredictable experiences and life forms. The former reduces change to the unfolding of a pre-given program, while the latter views it as the achievement of a finality established in advance; both accounts effectively assume that all is given. In Time and Free Will

11 Ibid., 13. 174

(1889) and Matter and Memory (1896), he discusses what it means, for human beings, to exist; for Bergson, this means the experience of time as constant change, as an endless flow of changes into which we can only artificially distinguish clear-cut states. Our existence is thus made of duration (Bergson‟s term for this dimension of time), whereby our experience of the continuity of time as a continuity of change implies the always open possibility of the emergence of the new. Tomkins envisions a similarly openendedness when he discusses “the relative independence of sub-systems within the personality which makes it a perpetually open system whereby the past may be attenuated through the initiation of new perceptual experiences, new affective experiences, new ideas, new decisions, and new action” (SS, 175).

Woolf was undoubtedly privy to Bergson‟s ideas which were, until the 1930s, highly influential among European intellectuals and writers, and, due to William James‟s advocacy of Bergson‟s work in the Anglo-saxon world, among British thinkers as well.12

T.S. Eliot attended Bergson‟s lectures in Paris and introduced the latter‟s thought to his modernist colleagues across the channel. In 1922, Karin Stephen, Woolf‟s sister-in-law, published a substantial study on Bergson, entitled The Misuse of Mind: A Study of

Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism, for which Bergson himself wrote the introduction.

During the time Stephen was compiling her work, she, along with her husband Adrian, shared the lease of 50 Gordon Square with Woolf‟s sister, Vanessa, and her partner, Clive

Bell. Bergson received the Nobel prize for literature in 1927, and, in Orlando, published

12 In James‟s Hibbert Lectures, delivered at Oxford in 1909 and subsequently published as A Pluralistic Universe he enthusiastically promoted Bergson‟s work. “New horizons,” he argued, “loom on every page you read,” and readers of Bergson can, according to James, “never return to their ancient attitude of mind.” (Cited in Tom Quirk, Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens [Chappell Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976], 45). 175

the following year, we find Woolf quite explicitly alluding to Bergson‟s most well- known (and most frequently simplified) distinction between mechanical time and duration:

Time […] has no simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the time piece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time on the mind is less known that it should and deserves fuller investigation.13

In that same novel, Woolf also attributes to “the present moment” a mutli-layered and non-linear consciousness; there are, her narrator observes,“sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system […] The true length of a person‟s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.”14 The idea that temporality is experienced differently by different individuals, but also the idea that our memories and affects travel along different speeds and, in their interlacings, are capable of producing qualitatively different experiences are

Bergsonian ones. In its insistence on this “élan vital,” moreover, Bergson‟s philosophy is one articulation of what is now identified as the second scientific revolution of the first couple of decades of the 20th century when physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and philosophers replaced mechanical models of the universe and of the human with theoretical approaches that privileged uncertainly principles, relativity, indeterminacy, even chaos and mystery.15

13 Orlando (1928), 68. 14 Ibid., 211. 15 Gillian Beer notes, in this regard, also the influence of Einstein, one of Bergson‟s most prominent interlocutors on the nature of time, She argues that “Woolf, like most educated people in the 1920s, were 176

In the 1930s, Bergson‟s ideas were increasingly replaced by the philosophy of

Hegel, in particular through the lectures of Andre Kojève which were as popular as those of Bergson once had been. Bertrand Russell became one of the most committed critics

(alongside George Lukács and the Catholic Church) of Bergson whom he depicted as an enemy of rational thought, referring to the latter‟s work as mediocre poetry, not philosophy. Increasingly, this criticism enacted a gendering of Bergson‟s thought as feminine—Russell dismissed his work as “a heaving sea of intuition”—in contrast to the virility of Cartesian paradigms and the hard truths of science.16 In this decade in which, in the realm of philosophy, but also in that of politics and the arts, discourses that were deemed masculinist and virile prevailed, the thinker whose work Julian Benda portrayed as “a philosophy of democracy” (a qualification intended as an insult) effectively became an outsider to the world of ideas.17 Over the course of the same period, Woolf was working on The Partigers, a project out of which The Years and Three Guineas emerged, works that, each in a different fashion, are deeply concerned with thinking novel becomings—within individuals, families, collectivities—against a historical backdrop of masculinist and militarist discourses merely rehearsing the inevitability of yet another war. There is, to be sure, no direct relation between Woolf‟s later works and Bergson‟s philosophy, or that of William James, but together they do figure within a genealogy of vitalist conceptions of the human, and of life in general, endowed with the qualities to generate truly novel interests, actions, relations, forms—a genealogy within which we

well aware of Einstein as an intellectual presence” (“Physics, Sounds and Substance: Later Woolf” in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996], 117). 16 Cited in Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 12. 17 Ibid. 177

can also place, as I suggest above, the provocatively odd work of Sylvan Tomkins.

Bergson died in Paris, during the German occupation, in 1941, the year also of Woolf‟s death.

Scenes of Shame

From 1906 on, Woolf wrote about Henry James on a number of occasions, but in

1920 she used her review of his Collected Letters, edited by Percy Lubbock, to also reflect upon his authorial transformations over the course of his career. She takes as a particular turning point James‟s ill-received play, Guy Domville, which he wrote subsequent to The Bostonians and Princess Casamassima, works that also failed to garner much popular acclaim. Woolf suggests that Guy Domville, as the work that would bring James the literary recognition that had thus far escaped him, was almost doomed to fail. “It was chiefly,” she writes “a desire to retrieve the failure of his novels that led him to strive so strenuously and in the end so disastrously, for success upon the stage” (DM,

149). She adds, however, that “[s]uccess and failure upon the lips of a man who never for a moment doubted the authenticity of his genius or for a second lowered his standard of the artist‟s duty have not their ordinary meaning” (ibid.). To Woolf, the extra-ordinary meaning of James‟s shame lies in the unforeseeable effects of that shame. He did not relinquish his literary aspirations, as one would expect after such repeated rejections by the reading public; instead, his shame lingered on and actually found new objects. In her account of this shift, Woolf thus focuses on what Tomkins‟s defines as “the relative freedom of the affect system,” or, what Woolf calls, James‟s “irrepressible fund of

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vitality“(DM, 153-4). She further shows that, as a result of that shift, James quite fundamentally altered his relation to his work, his audience, and, ultimately, to his authorial persona which was to become self-different, complex, even seductive.

Prior to James‟s painful failure, Woolf figures him as “a cosmopolitanized

American who recounts his seeing and doing, his dinners out and meetings, his country house visits, like a guest too well-bred to show surprise, even if he feels it” (DM, 144) In the records of his journeys across Europe, his entry into “great occasions” and closeness to “famous names” (the Gladstones, the Tennysons), Woolf notes “resentfully” that his

“mind is elsewhere“ (DM, 146). She objects to the notion that the act of writing and, by implication, the act of observing merely records reality, as if those acts do not come with their own principles of ordering, signification, interpretation. What she misses in these writings, she says, “is any body of resistance to the impression, any warrant for thinking that the receiving mind is other than a stretched white sheet. If the whole field of human activity is only a prospect and a pageant, then we cannot help asking, as the store of impressions heaps itself up, what is the aim of the spectator, what is the purpose of his hoard” (DM, 147). And yet, she remarks “when we look for that purpose, to see the material in the act of transmutation…we are blindly waived aside” (DM, 148). Woolf thus draws a connection between James‟s representation of the mind as a passive, blank slate and a purposeless accumulation of impressions—purposeless, because those impressions, as purportedly transparent recordings, do not seem to be affected by the transformations and resistances of a mind that forms them; as such, they fail to surprise.

She explains that such “mind-less” impressions can only conceive of “human activity” in

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static terms, as a particular panorama (“a prospect”) or as a replay of the past (“a pageant”); they negate processes of change, transformation, and the emergence of the new. Consequently, Woolf argues, these writings by James “might have sprung as silently and spontaneously as daffodils in the spring. No notice is taken of their birth”

(MB, 148).

The fiasco of James‟s play, however, compellingly dislodged this kind of uninvolved impersonality, according to Woolf. Guy Domville premiered on January 23,

1895, in London. The play is set in the 1780s England and concerns the travails of Guy

Domville, a tutor who is planning to become a catholic priest but, upon learning that he is the last of his family, decides dutifully that he will marry and carry on the family line.

When the widow Mrs. Peveral, whose son is tutored by Domville, rejects Frank

Humber‟s proposal of marriage, the latter suspects that she is in love with Domville.

Domville, meanwhile, has decided to marry Mary Brasier, but learns that she really loves

Lieutenant George Round and, subsequently, facilitates their elopement. He also convinces Mrs. Peveral and Frank Humber of their love for each other, which leaves

Domville free to enter the monastery after all.

James did not attend the premiere performance of Guy Domville; instead, he went to see Oscar Wilde‟s An Ideal Husband at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and only returned to see the concluding moments of his own play. When he went onstage to take his bow, James realized too late that a large section of the audience actually jeered loudly; his friends and acquaintances did applaud vigorously, although, in a way, their

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support only underscored the painful spectacle of the publically humiliated author.18

James himself wrote about that, in his words, “abominable quarter of an hour” when “I faced the yelling barbarians”: “I learned what could be the savagery of their disappointment that one wasn‟t perfectly the same as everything else they had ever seen,” and, Woolf adds, “he went home to reflect” (DM, 149-150—emphasis mine). James bought a house, a typewriter, shut himself up, with furniture of the right period, and was, according to Woolf, “able, by the expenditure of a little capital, to ensure that certain hideous cottages did not deface his point of view” (DM, 150-1). This appears to be an act of haughty self-seclusion—Woolf “admits to a momentary malice”—yet James‟s arrangements for a writerly life also point to the strangely optimistic relation shame holds to certain cathexes. After all, without the engagement of pleasures, literary or otherwise, there can be no shame, for this particular affect works, to recall Tomkins‟s formulation, as “a specific interruption of continuing interests or enjoyments” (SS, 134). Tomkins‟s specification of those “interests and enjoyments” as “continuing,” moreover, underscores that shame announces a temporary interruption of interests that nevertheless remain operative. Shame, in other words, may puncture one‟s interests and pleasures, but not one‟s willingness to enjoy, or to continue, them in the future. This is also what Woolf

18 This episode in James‟s career is the subject of Colm Tóibin‟s The Master and David Lodge‟s Author, Author; both novels were published in 2004 and attempt to imagine the consequences of James‟s theatrical flop on his private life. Tóibin is pleasantly nuanced in his representation of James‟s relations with younger men. I should further note the ironic confluence between Oscar Wilde‟s theatrical career and that of James. Guy Domville; which was directed by George Alexander, who went on to direct Wilde‟s The Importance of Being Earnest a few weeks later, with great success. An Ideal Husband, the play James attended on opening night of Guy Domville, had opened at the beginning of the year and was a box office hit. One could speculate that Wilde‟s prominence on the theatrical scene might, to some extent, have shaped the expectations or tastes of London audiences. Wilde‟s plays, like that of James, are marriage plots, yet with its emphasis on self-sacrifice and renunciation Guy Domville contrasts starkly with the shimmering wit and irony with which Wilde renders marriage also a topic of amusement. 181

touches upon when she repeatedly portrays James as a man who, in spite of the lack of popular acclaim and a disastrous flop in the theater, never really relinquishes his literary ambitions, or the particular pleasures that writing affords him. She emphasizes that

James “never for a moment doubted the authenticity of his genius or for a second lowered his standard of the artist‟s duty” and, again, that he, after Guy Domville, still “had no doubt about his genius” (DM, 150). Once comfortably settled in Lamb House, James did indeed resume his literary endeavors and wrote a number of stories, including “The

Figure in the Carpet” and “The Next Time,” which he published, in 1896, under the telling title Embarrassments. Perhaps not surprisingly, this volume features a number of failed authors.

Woolf observes that James‟s continuing preoccupation with that shameful episode also effected, in a more prodigious sense, a very different authorial self, less busy with observing others, more involved with observing his own otherness—with the fact indeed that, as James himself concluded, “one wasn't perfectly the same.” This is no longer the disinterested observer, she argues, nor, for that matter, a more authentic because supposedly more solidified voice. In James‟s writings following that fateful play, she finds, instead, an authorial subject traversed by “all the separate strands, alien instincts, irreconcilable desires,” a “mighty flowering” of a highly textured and heterogeneous mind (DM, 152). To this subject, she writes, “there is nothing too little, too large, too remote, too queer for it not to flow round, float off and make its own” (DM, 153); it encompasses the most divergent (little, large, remote, queer) ideas, experiences, observations in its ability to transform those ideas, experiences, etc. Woolf further

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emphasizes that this dynamic subject is as much a written as it is a writing subject, a self- consciously discursive construct made up in and through language. “In this impersonality,” she notes, “the maker himself desired to share—„to take it‟ as he said”— and here Woolf is quoting James—“‟to take it wholly, exclusively with the pen and absolutely not at all with the person,‟ to be „the mask without the face,‟ the alien in our midst” (DM, 154-5). This authorial subject does not waive us aside, but desires to share a written, indeed penned, self that, rather than masking a deeper personal and supposedly more authentic self, shows itself to be a stranger, an alien in our midst.19 In her privileging of this altered authorial personae of James‟s, finally, Woolf does not exactly suggest that that personae bears a closer mimetic relation to the real operations of the mind or the psyche and, as such, entails a superior psychological realism; rather her preference for this more dynamic personae over that of a passively registering “eye” has to do, I would argue, with her particular interest in non-linear processes that foster novelty in unpredictable ways. She claims, for instance, that in James‟s “gathering together and superb welding into shape of all the separate strands, alien instincts, irreconcilable desires […] the field of human activity is brought into fresh focus, revealing new horizons, new landmarks, and new lights upon it” (DM, 152).

Such new horizons also unfold fortuitously in and through James‟s shame. Woolf notes that James, subsequent to his realization that “one wasn‟t perfectly the same,”

19 Intriguingly, Woolf herself would, later in her career, come to employ an almost identical idiom to articulate her own “impersonal” construction of authorship. In 1940, for example, when she ponders the strangeness [she uses the term “queer” here] of yet another book “coming out,” she notes that each new publication “accumulates a little of the fictitious Virginia Woolf whom I carry like a mask around the world.” As with James‟s mask, that of Woolf is composed—a composite, one might say—not in the first instance so that it will shield a less fictitious Virginia Woolf, but to display and carry around the world a writing subject that is, emphatically and complexly, a strange compilation of written subjects, fictions even.

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began to fashion a particularly capacious attitude to (and interest in) generationality and, more specifically, generational difference. She quotes James as he reflects upon his theatrical fiasco and concludes: “I have felt that I have fallen upon evil days—every sign and symbol of one‟s being in the least wanted, anywhere or by anyone, having so utterly failed. A new generation, that I know not, […] has taken universal possession” (DM,

150). This, James seems to say, is my time of shame, referring not only to the shame of

“having so utterly failed” (as a playwright), but also to the shame of being outdated, no longer in step with the “wants” of a new generation. This is a remarkable assertion, as there is no inherent or causal relation between James‟s short-lived humiliation onstage and his insurmountable distance from the young and the indifferent. There is no indication that the catcalls came from the younger members of the audience, nor does the announcement of his obsolescence exactly coincide with James‟s actual age (at this point, he was in his mid-forties and still to write his major works). In this surprising construction of his own awkward age, then, James extends and shifts his shame in a way that signals the relative freedom of the affect, the freedom, that is, to find objects that exceed any “actual” input.

In fact, James‟s conjuring of this figure of an older, dejected author overtaken by a new generation does not betray any self-same identity. Woolf observes that his speaking (or writing) self, here and elsewhere, does not gesture toward an identification with the shaming and shamed figuration of the aged and awkward author—its aim, rather, is to recognize him lovingly. The persistence, in other words, with which James‟s shame affords the repeated conjuration of the abashed, older writer is matched with the

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persistence with which, in turn, James describes himself as cathecting or eroticizing the object of that shame—as a way of coming into a tender relation with a compromised, awkward elder. Thus, Woolf envisions James “at midnight…alone on the threshold of creation” engaging with that very same elder and—citing James himself—“‟the prospect clears and flushed and my poor blest old genius pats me so admirably and lovingly on the back that I turn, I screw around, and bend my lips to passionately, in my gratitude, kiss its hands‟” (DM, 155). James‟s eagerness to recognize—or, in his words, to screw and kiss passionately—this old man thus redirects his shame toward the homoeroticism of the younger author being lovingly patted on the back by an older one. Woolf further argues that this pederastic circuit would, in the end, also move outward and downward, when

James, in the late nineties, began to develop a series of intensely pleasurable relationships with young men. She admires the magnanimity in his letters to them—how he “with flying hand addressed himself fully and affectionately to friend after friend” (DM, 154).

In a way, James got back in touch with that very “next generation” that had embarrassed him.

To be sure, Woolf‟s argument here is proto-Sedgwickian. Like Woolf, Sedgwick foregrounds the pederastic scenario in which the flush of shame becomes an affecting and eroticized form of mutual display across generations. Both perform a similar critical gesture, reversing the expected relation between shame and same-sex desires, whereby the former occasions, rather than follows upon, the latter. While Woolf focuses mostly on

James‟s letters of the years following his humiliation, though, Sedgwick turns to his

Prefaces to the New York Edition, written almost a decade later. At this point, Sedgwick

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argues, James positively basks in his embarrassment when contemplating his younger, slightly compromising self and the latter‟s awkward literary output. In relation to both,

James assumes the role of the affectionate parent, who recognizes that, however embarrassing, even monstrous, these younger creatures/creations are, they have to be nurtured, loved, and, indeed, padded on their backs. To Sedgwick, James's embarrassment, at this point, betrays “the sign of a tenderly strengthened and now irresistible bond between the writer of the present and the abashed writer of the past, between either of them and the queer little conceptus.”20

A week after Woolf‟s review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the critic Arthur Bingham Walkley discussed her article in The Times and claimed to detect some of the master‟s “least amiable mannerisms” in her prose. He also wrote that: “Even the most immaculate of women will sentimentalize their men friends… Well, if any of these ladies had edited Henry James‟s letters or reviewed them, wouldn‟t each of the others have said „She never understood him poor dear‟?”21 Woolf read Walkley‟s piece and responded, as she puts it, “blushingly …to his hint that I was a sentimental lady friend.” But on the matter of her mannerisms, she insists that “the disease is my own, not caught from Henry James.” In that same diary entry of April 15, she adds: “I wish one could make out some rule about praise and blame. I predict that I‟m destined to have shame in any quantity.” 22 Thus, while she quite resolutely rejects Walkley‟s

20 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James‟s The Art of the Novel,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 41— emphasis in the text. 21 Cited in The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol.2. Nigel Nicholson, ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 29.. 22 Ibid. 186

identification of her style as somehow Jamesian, she nevertheless appears to be taken by surprise (she is unable to predict praise or blame) by his suggestion that she is “a sentimental lady friend.” Of course, this portrayal by Walkley draws upon that convenient convergence of misogyny and homophobia which, in the current Anglo-

American world, is captured by the disturbing term “fag hag.”23 He insinuates that the author, in her review of James‟s Collected Letters, was motivated by her sexually naïve disposition toward this bachelor whose letters she reads sentimentally, rather than critically. That sentimentality, he implies, resides in her claim to exclusive intimacy with

James; Walkley even imagines with smug superiority how she will compete with other

“ladies” over the privilege of really understanding James. This is an utterly unfounded representation, were it not that it works to suggest that the closeness Woolf supposedly asserts is, in fact, a sign of her sexual ignorance or immaturity vis à vis James. After all, the pernicious logic subtending Walkley‟s remarks is that men who are erotically attracted to other men can therefore not love women, and that the latter‟s affections for such men are thus sadly misguided.

Douglas Crimp advances the notion of “taking on someone else‟s shame;” he argues that “in taking on [that] shame, I do not share in the other‟s identity. In this operation, most importantly, the other‟s difference is preserved; it is not claimed as my own. I put myself in the place of the other only insofar as I recognize that I too am prone to shame.” I find this too general a formulation to be conceptually useful. The recognition that one too is prone to shame is about the same as the assertion that, as a living being, one too is prone to breathe. The fact that someone else‟s shame can be embarrassing should, likewise, not surprise any social creature. While I appreciate Crimp‟s qualification that the contagiousness of shame is not necessary a result of identificatory processes, his notion of “taking on someone else shame” lacks any specificity as to the particular context of such shame, the particularity of the shaming gestures or discourses in question (who is being shamed for what and in what manner) and so forth. Thus, while Woolf‟s review led Walkley to shame her by way of a very particular insult, Woolf did not therefore take on James‟s shame. 23 Since reviews in the TLS were unsigned, it is unlikely that Walkley, in his derogatory depiction of the author, could be alluding to Woolf‟s association with the notoriously homosexual Bloomsbury set. 187

Surely, Walkley‟s response to Woolf‟s review is not unique in the superimposition of misogynist notions onto homophobic ones. In fact, the debates about

English culture during the inter-war period revisited this superimposition with a vengeance. Responding to the alleged “feminization” of culture in general, and literature in particular, modernist writers, such as D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, and critics

(most markedly F.R. Leavis and his set) argued for the need to discipline the aesthetic domain through their assertion of a set of distinctly masculinist values predicated upon the mastery over nature, the irrational, the feminine which, together, had supposedly brought about the degeneration of British culture. Within this gendered conception of culture, Woolf‟s work became this perceived threat‟s singular example. “There is, of course, a very much closer connection than people suppose,” Lewis warns in 1934,

“between the aesthetic movement presided over by Oscar Wilde, and that presided over in the first post-war decade by Mrs Woolf.”24 What constitutes Woolf‟s pernicious hold over the era following WWI, then, is her insidious affiliation—a connection “much […] closer than people suppose”—with the queer Irishman whose “movement” she somehow carries on behind the scenes. Lewis‟s depiction of Woolf‟s “connection” to Wilde, in other words, renders her complicit with a project that Lewis, in his appropriation of the revelatory scrutiny of the homosexual closet, discloses to be aesthetically and sexually perverted—and perverting. Everybody, it appears, should be afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Walkley‟s pathologizing response to her review of James‟s Letters and Lewis‟s alarmed revelation of Woolf‟s corrupting influence actually do not stand alone in their invocations of the specter of the male homosexual, and of the effeminate gay man in

24 Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (London: Cassell, 1934), 170. 188

particular, when assessing her work. They could even be said to precede, in this regard, a significant strain in feminist re-evaluations of Woolf‟s writing decades later, which, again, draw on homophobic discourses in evaluating her work. As Stephen Barber writes, scholars such as Hèléne Cixous have “consigned Woolf to an orbit that unwittingly associates her with gays in a dominant cultural logic that construes as death- wish both gay sexual pleasure and Woolf‟s narrative drive.”25 Within Anglo-American feminist scholarship, Barber further finds a different, though no less influential critical tradition that “almost unanimously represents Woolf and gay men as necessary antagonists.” Jane Marcus‟s 1987 Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy provides, according to Barber, a particularly “pernicious instance of [this] homophobic feminism.”26

In her work of the thirties, Woolf is, to be sure, deeply and complexly concerned with friendships between women and gay men. Barber compellingly explores this concern as simultaneously a textual and an ethical practice, both of which signify as queer in their “preoccupation with social codifications or regulatory labeling.” 27

“Beginning with The Pargiters [the earlier version of The Years],” Barber writes,

Woolf invariably represents queer novelistic subjectivities in the defamiliarizing light of conspiratorial relationships between women and gay men. “I am writing about sodomy at the moment […]”she reveals about this work in 1934 […]; significantly, immediately following this remark, Woolf emphasizes the relation between her writing „I‟ and queer. “How far,” she wonders, “can one say openly what is the relation of a woman to a sod?”28

25 Stephen Barber, “Lip-Reading: Woolf‟s Secret Encounters,” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ed. (Durham: Duke University Press), 438-9. 26 Ibid., 439. 27 Ibid., 402. 28 Ibid., 403-4. 189

Barber argues for the instrumentality of gay figures for women to achieve “positions of self-agenting” in Three Guineas as well as in her last two novelistic experiments. These works feature, according to Barber, “such Woolfian encounters between women and gay men [that] invariably allow for a transition from ventriloquism to (possibilities for) a critical awareness or a political ontology by means of which „being despised‟ becomes a position to be affirmed in efforts both to trace the prudent administration and policing of bodies and desires, as well as to ignite novel ethical possibilities.”29 In Three Guineas, for example, such novel ethical possibilities reside in the deliberate assumption (by daughters of educated men) of poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties, which, together, Woolf defines as positions of being despised (and which led her, for a while, to title the work On Being Despised). This particular proposition, Barber notes, we already find advanced by Nicholas in The Pargiters when the latter observes

(to and about Eleanor): “Not to earn money; not to have power, not to be famous— obscurity, inferiority, to be despised—not to possess; that‟s the finest education in the world.”30 Barber argues that Woolf “critically and vitally identified with this position [of being despised]” through “the political philosophy advanced by Three Guineas, but in the narrative drive of The Years and Between the Acts, as well. In these latter works,

Woolf „finds‟ or cathects in her gay characters a mode of joyful experimentation.”31

By way of “queer,” as a critical term, Barber thus provides a rich account of

Woolf‟s singular negotiations of what Foucault has termed “power/knowledge.” In his

29 Ibid., 405. 30 Barber cites here from Grace Radin‟s Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 73. 31 “Lip Reading,” 405. 190

reading of Woolf‟s later works, he finds instances of “a queer rapport à soi” when subjects critically deploy “the very subjectifying processes that „initially‟ obstruct ethics.”32 In following Barber‟s provocative work, I would like to shift the critical frame from “queer” to what I earlier referred to as the vitalism of affects, as my interest here lies less in modes of self-agenting and more in the particular affective dynamics through which Woolf explores the emergence of new (though not necessarily revolutionary or even effectual) ideas, interests, relations. Her reading of the particular transformations of

James‟s shame does not, as I suggested above, signify within the polarity of compulsion versus voluntarity—or even as some combination of both. In her review of James‟s

Collected Letters, and more pressingly so in Three Guineas and Between the Acts, Woolf seeks out unforeseeable becomings of qualitative differences (affective, experiential, relational) and, insofar she contemplates an idea of freedom, it is not, in her words,

“freedom in the sense of license,”33 but the freedom that primarily entails, I would argue, the non-teleological dynamics of affects. Through this attention to the relative freedoms of affects, Woolf thus arrives at her account of the unpredictable trajectory of James‟s shame, as eventually encompassing the latter‟s pederastic pleasures. In doing so, moreover, she resists the teleological valorization of heterosexuality which is precisely what Walkley, in his critique of her review, fails to do. After all, he reads Woolf‟s focus on James‟s affective investments as a manifestation of her supposed heterosexual desires which are (blindly) compelled toward a male object, any male object; this reviewer might be, in Walkley‟s suggestive euphemisms, “the most immaculate of women,” but she will

32 Ibid., 406. 33 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938; New York: Harcourt & Company, 1966), 138. Further referred to in the text as TG. 191

inevitably “sentimentalize” her bachelor friend and claim him as hers. Somehow, then, a woman‟s relationship with a gay man is still organized by her heterosexual investments awaiting their return. Walkley‟s dismissal is, in this respect, exemplary of the all too common constructions of such relationships in their inability to distinguish affective attachments from the operations of the sexual drives, so that friendships between women and gay men—or, for that matter, all cross-gender friendships—merely signify as odd versions of the heterosexual couple. To phrase this in Tomkins‟s terminology, the fact that the sexual drive, compared to the other drives, carries the greatest affective component—sadness or shame may significantly enhance or decrease one‟s sexual arousal, but hardly one‟s breathing—does not mean that, as psychoanalysis assumes, it also works the other way around, i.e. that affect always and necessarily co-assemble with the sexual drives. Sadness or shame may no less significantly influence one‟s intellectual endeavors.

In Three Guineas and Between the Acts, Woolf experiments, in different ways, with the difficult project of thinking relationships between women and gay men, as well as those between brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, by way of a similar distinction between affects and the libido. In the depressing years leading up to and into a second world war, she turns to “the free action of the human faculties” (TG, 114) and the experiments those faculties may engender. How can we think about affective life outside the teleological (and heterosexist) dictates of Freudian psychoanalysis and the patriarchal dictates they serve? “Happily,” she writes, “there is a model in being,”

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suggesting both a model of becoming and one to come, “[that] far from sitting still to be painted, dodges and disappears” (TG 115).

Infantile Fixations

If there are free actions, or, at the very least, partially free ones, they can only belong to beings who are able to fix becoming from afar, the becoming to which their own becoming attaches, beings who are able to solidify it into distinct moments, to condense its matter in this way, and, by assimilating it, to digest it in movements of reaction that will slip through the mesh of natural necessity.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Woolf‟s 1931 chronicle of the Pargiter family, The Years, looks, at certain telling moments, toward a different world yet to be imagined. Upon Eleanor‟s encounter with

Nicholas, for instance, she experiences something “unknown within her.” “When, she wanted to ask him, when will this new world come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not cripples in a cave? He seemed to have released something in her; she felt not only a new space of time, but new powers, something unknown within her.”34 The novel even concludes with a glimpse of future possibilities:

“The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace” (Y, 435). In Three Guineas, the work that emerged out of an early

34 Virginia Woolf, The Years (1931; London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 282-3. Hereafter cited in the text as Y. 193

version of The Years, however, Woolf evokes, again and again, the forces that reduce the future to a repetition of the past. In “black night that now covers Europe,” she hears “the clamour, the uproar” of the fathers at home and abroad, voicing “not a new cry” but the

“very old cry” that “man must be obeyed in little things and great, in just and unjust” and that “[w]e must support the cause of order” (TG, 141). She argues that the present overwhelming perception of war as inevitable entails a return to the same discursive gestures, the same affective habits that lead to the same conclusions, the same exclusions.

The voices on the wireless demanding a return to the separation of spheres rehearse,

Woolf writes, “the very ancient and obscure emotions which we have known ever since the time of […] Creon at least, which St. Paul himself seems to have felt, but which the

Professors have only lately brought to the surface and named „infantile fixation,‟

„Oedipus complex‟ and the rest” (130). Looking at the pictures of the ravages of the

Spanish civil war, she concludes that “things repeat themselves, it seems. Pictures and voices are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago” (141). Moreover, considering their replicative economies, these voices are ill-equipped to generate alternative speech and tend to cancel out dissent; “the uproar that infantile fixation is making,” she remarks,

“is such that we can hardly hear ourselves speak; it takes the words out of our mouths; it makes us say what we have not said” (ibid.). In light of the “disastrous unanimity” with which patriotic discourses sanction the “tyranny of fathers” in Britain and on the

Continent, Woolf thus appears to announce the futility of her anti-war views—or, at least, to anticipate that her critique would register as an irrational and unreasonable argument, not pertinent to the political realities (TG, 59). Tellingly, she opens Three Guineas with

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the qualification that the work is her “attempt” at aiding the cause of preventing war

“even if it is doomed to failure” (TG, 3).

Alex Zwerdling argues that to many of Woolf‟s contemporaries Three Guineas did indeed signify as a failure in that it articulated an inappropriate and inefficacious pacifism. The political realities in Europe had changed in such ways that, according to

Zwerdling, “the pacifist fashion of the mid-thirties […] had come too late” and “no longer [provided] a useful paradigm for understanding contemporary events.” 35 The pacifist assumption that nations essentially desired peace was effectively crushed by the aggressive militarism of Hitler and Mussolini; the latter had declared that Fascism

“believes neither in the possibility nor in the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism.”36 In Three Guineas, Woolf rejects the militarism and patriotic vigor such belligerence engendered in her countrymen, even in those who resisted war.37

She did so, I would argue, not because she continued to cling to an outdated pacifist agenda, as Zwerdling suggests, but because she sought out less reactive positions to the alleged realities of the present.

When Three Guineas appeared, it did in fact receive the kind of critical responses

Woolf anticipated, although a number of readers also praised and were impressed by her work, including a soldier and “a distracted middleclass woman” who became inspired “to

35 Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 286. 36 Ibid., 287. Benito Mussolini, The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, trans. Jane Soames (London: Hogarth Press, 1933), 11. Zwerdling argues that Woolf must have been familiar with these ideas, since the essay was published by the Hogarth Press. 37 The younger generation of war-resisters, among whom Woolf‟s nephew Julian Bell, took their pacifism in a much more militant direction; “the war-resistance movements of my generation,” Bell wrote, will “hit back as hard and shrewdly as possible” and “will in the end succeed in putting down war—by force if necessary” (“Introduction,” We Did Not Fight: 1914-1918 Experiences of War Resisters [London: Cobden- Sanderson, 1935), xv, xix. 195

start an outsiders‟ society among the women of Yeovil.” 38 Reviews in Time & Tide and the Times Literary Supplement were also quite laudatory; the former referred to the work as a “revolutionary bomb of a book” and the latter called Woolf “the most brilliant pamphleteer in England,” although it insisted on the erroneousness of her anti-war stance for, according to the TLS, war was as inevitable “as long as there is flesh aware of flesh.”39 At the same time, though, many contemporaries of Woolf denounced her work with scornful hostility, such as Graham Greene, writing in The Spectator, who described it as “provincial” and “shrill,” and Nigel Nicholson, who termed it “neither sober nor rational.” In a particularly vicious attack, Q.D. Leavis claimed that Three Guineas was

“not merely silly and ill-informed” but also contained “some preposterous claims and nasty attitudes”; it is, she concluded, “Nazi dialectic without Nazi conviction.”40 Woolf‟s intimi mostly ignored the work in an attempt to dissociate themselves from what many of them saw as Woolf‟s special pleading. Apart from Leonard‟s tepid praise, the notoriously non-conformist Bloomsbury circle remained awkwardly silent. “Not a word of it by any of my family and intimates” (D5, 133), she notes in her diary, except by Lydia Lopokova who remarked to Woolf that her friends “all put up with you” (D5, 163). That most people close to Woolf ignored her work signified, according to Minow-Pinkney, their

“embarrassment at a radicalism whose implications they dared not face.”41 To her friends

38 Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman, eds. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 6 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 375. Subsequent citations from The Letters and from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Beel and Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953-1980) will appear in the text, abbreviated as L and D, respectively, followed by volume number and page number. 39 Robin Majumdarm and Allen McLaurin, eds. Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 401. 40 Ibid., 407, 410. 41 Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 188. 196

and relatives for whom a second world war had become inevitable, in other words, Woolf had taken an unsettling, if not utterly inappropriate stance. As Quentin Bell would later conclude, Woolf had committed a political and ethical faux pas “to involve a discussion of women‟s rights with the far more agonizing and immediate question of what we were to do to meet the ever-growing menace of Fascism and war.”42 With Three Guineas, it seems, Woolf had made a scene.

The notion of making scenes recalls, of course, the familiar denunciation of the affective performances of children, women, queers as those of spoiled, hysterical, melodramatic, or masochistic subjectivities. In this sense of the phrase, „to make a scene‟ involves the embarrassing display of compulsive, immature, or otherwise psychically defective speech and, as such, its simultaneous capture by disciplinary regimes. When feminist scholars in the seventies turned to Three Guineas, they re-evaluated the work in terms of the more honorific sense of making a scene—as Woolf‟s visionary, defiant critique of patriarchy. They did so in particular, and importantly, by focusing on the persistent critical constructions of the putative anger of Three Guineas and, by implication, that of its author. In “The Authority of Anger,” Brenda Silver examines the recurrent disqualifications of the work that identify its anger as indicative of Woolf‟s inability to meet proper standards of reasoning, even intelligibility. (By positing Woolf‟s anger as a marker of the distorted, biased nature of her claim, readers also, of course, lay claim to the evenhandedness and objectivity of their own judgments.) Such critical gestures exemplify, according to Silver, “how the reigning discourses in our century, whether political, critical, or psychological, have constructed truths that condemn anger,

42 Quentin Bell. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. Vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 204-5. 197

43 at least women‟s anger, and with it feminist critique as destructive of truth.” Not surprisingly, then, feminist readers of Three Guineas have insisted that its anger functions instead as a ground for valid knowledges and astute social analyses. Within this feminist recuperation of Woolf‟s work, Silver writes, “Three Guineas emerges as a carefully crafted and radical analysis of Western culture, a text that used art to give voice to righteous and prophetic anger.”44

Silver‟s essay attends pointedly to the ways in which certain constructions of

Woolf‟s tone constitute rhetorical strategies that serve to undercut or to sanction the legitimacy of her argument. Unlike Silver, though, I am hesitant to proceed from the fact of the anger of Three Guineas, let alone from the assumption that that anger properly belongs to Woolf, the author. This is not to say that I would argue that the work does not articulate anger—or, for that matter, a range of other affects, such as fear, despair, embarrassment—but that those affects should be situated in the address of Woolf‟s speaker, who is a fictional one (though from a milieu similar to that of Woolf), to her equally fictional correspondents.45 The pre-text of the work is a letter written by a

43 Brenda Silver, “The Authority of Anger: Three Guineas as Case Study” Signs 6, 2 (Winter 1991): 341. 44 Ibid., 362. It should be noted that subsequent feminist have questioned the connection between anger, authenticity, and political efficacy. Poststructuralist feminists, such as Toril Moi,, have preferred to read the feminist politics of Three Guineas on the level of its irony and satire (Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1985); Lili Hsieh even argues that Woolf performs her political critique from a position of indifference and immunity, not anger (“The Other Side of the Picture: The Politics of Affect in Virginia Woolf‟s Three Guineas,” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 36.1 (Winter 2006), 20-52. Moreover, the legitimacy of anger also traversed the intra-feminist academic debates of the nineties, when black, non-Western, lesbian, and Marxist feminists began to identify the analytical and political limitations of white, Anglo-American feminism. Within these debates, feminist anger functioned (and continues to function) complexly in conflicting claims to critical authority. For an interesting analysis of the role of antagonistic affects in these polemics, see Sianne Ngai, “Who Killed Feminist Criticism,” Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 130-138. 45 Silver does acknowledge that this approach to Three Guineas by way of Woolf‟s tone invokes “what Foucault calls „the author function‟ and locates tone within the battle for truth and power at work even within literary criticism” (346-7). Yet, despite this caveat, Silver insists on the necessity of reclaiming 198

professional man, son of an educated father, to his “sister”—Woolf‟s speaker likewise descends from educated men—in which he asks her for her aid in the cause of preventing war. Three Guineas consists of her reply into which she inserts two other replies to requests from an honorary treasurer of a women‟s college and an “honorary treasurer of a society for helping the daughters of educated men to enter the professions” (TG, 984), respectively. By writing her addresses to these to women into her address to her male correspondent, she situates the latter not only as the addressee of her letter, but also as the reader or the audience of her letters to other daughters of educated fathers. Within this formal frame, Woolf‟s speaker, who mostly assumes the first person plural, presents her facts, analyses, and demands to these women, but also invokes their responses and objections to her claims. My point here is that interpretations of Three Guineas in terms of Woolf‟s putative anger (as indicative of either the irrationality or the accuracy of her views) merely focus on the work‟s representational efficacy (whether or not it accurately represents its historical context) and thus overlook Woolf‟s complex explorations of affects, such as anger, in the text as well as the formal qualities of that text.

In Three Guineas, Woolf examines the relationship between the patriarchal organization of society and the privileging of certain affects, such as pride and jealousy, that work to sustain that organization. Writing two decades after middleclass women have gained access to the public realm—to some universities, some professions—she argues that their entry into these institutions has not fundamentally altered the mechanisms that legitimize claims to male privilege in these institutions. She shows, for anger as a legitimate production of critical knowledges. My own references here to “Woolf” in relation to Three Guineas’s argument should be read as a shorthand for the work‟s fictional speaker.

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instance, how the professions maintain male power by positing standards of professional competence and capability in terms of supposedly inherently male attributes, especially psychological ones.46 The many centuries of patriarchy have, according to Woolf, not passed without consequences. She explains that “the public relationship of brother to sister [as it existed] for many centuries” (TG, 105), whereby the latter‟s delegation to the private realm facilitated and funded the educational and professional privileges of the former, has shaped the disparate dispositions of these men and women. “We,” she writes, referring to the daughters of educated men, “must still differ in some essential respects from „you‟ whose body, brain, and spirit have been so differently trained and are so differently influenced by memory and tradition” (TG, 18). As a result of this profound difference in training, the sons and daughters of educated fathers perceive the world with

“bod[ies], brain[s] and spirit[s]” so dissimilar that they actually see two different worlds.

They might belong to the same class, she argues, but when “we look at the same things, we see them differently” (TG, 5). On the matter of war, for instance, Woolf explains that

“to fight has always been the man‟s habit, not the woman‟s. Law and practice have developed that difference, whether innate or accidental” (TG, 6). Men‟s monopoly on warfare, in other words, has not only provided them with experiences that women lack, but has also trained the very ways (“habits”) through which men perceive and value war itself. Considering that “scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman‟s rifle” (TG, 6), that women loose their nationality when they marry a foreigner,

46 Again, Woolf‟s provisional titles are illustrative here; besides One Being Despised she also considered The Open Door and A Knock [or Tap] on the Door. The latter titles deploy the frequently used metaphor of the opened door or gate that figures emancipation as merely a matter of gaining entry; yet, as Woolf points out, women‟s access to, say, public education has not fundamentally altered the mechanisms governing that institution that marginalize, even disqualify women‟s intellectual labor. 200

Woolf asks, “what does „patriotism‟ mean” to the educated man‟s sister; “[h]as she the same reasons for being proud of England, for loving England, for defending England?”

(TG, 9) “It is difficult to judge,” she tells her correspondent, “what we do not share” (TG,

6). In fact, she adds, “there is no absolute point of view,” which really means that there is no stable ground upon which to judge what is true or valuable (TG, 9).

Woolf thus suggests a distinctly situated or embodied model of the mind whose abilities and processes evolve in dynamic relation to their environment. “[T]he reasons, the emotions, the loyalties” that determine middleclass women‟s attitude toward war do not reflect the inherent, and always already present, nature of their gender, but have emerged as a result of the particular (though not necessarily inevitable or natural) contingencies to which their gender confined them. She points to “history and biography” that “show that [the educated man‟s daughter‟s] position in the home of freedom has been different from that of her brother‟s,” and concludes that “that history is not without its effect upon mind and body” (TG, 9). As she tries to find “some more energetic, some more active method of expressing our belief that war is barbarous,” she does so emphatically with a “mind and body” that are shaped by that particular history

(TG, 12).47 In her analysis of “the tyranny of the patriarchal state and the tyranny of the

47 The often voiced criticism of Three Guineas that its emancipatory project only concerns white, upper- middleclass women implicitly demands of the text what it itself announces as being unable to do. Woolf emphasizes that her views are relative to her very particular social-economic position in British society—a position with a distinct history, its distinct traditions and manners. We should not take such a relative approach, though, to also mean that one‟s class (or racial, sexual, religious, national) position automatically and necessarily predicts one‟s politics. The openness Woolf maintains in expressly not taking the latter stance also suggests that we can never quite know what, say, a lesbian reader in South Africa might or might not take from this text. 201

Fascist state,” then, Woolf does not resort to the idea of a disinterested reason whose supposed impartiality can counter the irrational forces of tyranny.48

She performs this departure from Enlightenment thought through what Alex

Zwerdling calls her “impersonal technique,” that is, her heavy reliance on facts and figures, her elaborate citations and 124 footnotes as well as her use of the first person plural. Zwerdling asserts that Woolf, motivated by her “fear of letting her book demonstrate any of the characteristics men have traditionally claimed to find in women,” deployed such an academic format as a strategy to ensure that her work would be read as an impartial, scholarly inquiry. 49 I would propose, though, that Woolf‟s argument also anticipates the possibility that that strategy might fail. She surveys, after all, how, in a range of social arenas (education, religion, the professions, the military), the claims that count as reasonable or true are most often determined by the interests of those who make those claims. When she resorts to such “impersonal and impartial authorit[ies]” as

Whitacker’s Almanack and “the white light of [their] facts,” she invariably illustrates how the interests of those who deploy these facts determine what these facts prove.50

48 The opposition of reason versus emotion predominates the treatises on the rise of fascism published in the thirties. In Quack, Quack! (1931), for example, Leonard Woolf ascribes the emergence of fascism to the fallacious delusions of people‟s feelings against which he proposes the enlightening powers of reason. He argues that: “[e]very rational and civilized man is aware that not very far below the surface of his mind, there lurks a savage, primitive instinct of self-glorification. One‟s own family, house, village, county, nation, school, university are all felt to be in some way superior to those of other people. Reason, if it be used, teaches us that the feeling must be a delusion and a superstition. Even the most patriotic can hardly believe that every other family is superior to every other family and every other tribe or nation superior to every other tribe or nation…. (quoted in Natania Rosenfeld, Outsiders Together [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000], 153—emphasis in text) The faculties of reason will, according to Leonard Woolf, reveal that feelings of superiority are just that—feelings—and, as such, are incapable of adequately understanding reality. Virginia Woolf clearly did not share this certainty. 49 Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, 257. 50 She writes that “facts, as facts often do, prove double-faced, for though they establish the value of education, they also prove that education is by no means a positive value; it is not good in all circumstances, and good for all people; it is only good for some people and for some purposes. It is good if 202

For example, she discusses the 1936 report on the ministry of women commissioned by the Church of England. She cites extensively from this report, which refers to, among others, the “fact that in the thoughts and desires of [the female] sex the natural is more easily made subordinate to the supernatural, the carnal to the spiritual than is the case with men” (TG, 161). Woolf concludes that “[i]n the opinion of the

Commissioners, therefore, Christian woman are more spiritually minded than Christian men—a remarkable, but no doubt adequate, reason for excluding them from the priesthood” (ibid.). The issue, then, is not whether women are actually more spiritually minded than men—a claim she wryly identifies as “remarkable”—but that that claim works to support men‟s monopoly on the priesthood and that it is, in this respect, an

“adequate reason.” The alleged spiritual superiority of women thus signifies as a fact in the sense that it sanctions the authority of those who already hold it.51

A certain turn to the category of the psychological is, in this respect, of particular interest to Woolf. She notes, for instance, that the abovementioned report was authored by a theologian, professor Grensted (“the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the

Christian Religion in the University of Oxford”) who was “asked „to summarize the relevant psychological and physiological material‟” (TG, 125). It is not clear what exactly qualifies a theologian to enter into this altogether different discipline; in fact, it is it produces a belief in the Church of England; bad if it produces a belief in the Church of Rome; it is good for one sex and for some professions, but bad for another sex and for another profession” (TG, 26). 51 This is also why Woolf, already on the opening pages of Three Guineas, argues that middleclass women, on the matter of war, lack “the weapons” (in every sense of the word) to enforce their opinions. Since these women do not occupy positions of authority in the relevant public arenas (the political, the military, etc.), they do not have the power to affect public opinion according to their interests. “[A]ll the weapons with which the educated man can enforce his opinions,” she observes, “are either beyond our grasp or so nearly beyond it that even it we used them we would scarcely inflict any scratch” (TG, 112).

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not entirely clear to the man himself what exactly “the psychology of the sexes” says about the sexes, except that it remains “a matter for specialists.” “Now,” Woolf remarks,

“psychology is not theology; and the psychology of the sexes, as the Professor insisted, and „its bearing upon human conduct, is still a matter for specialists … and … its interpretation remains controversial and in many respects obscure‟” (ibid.). Grensted‟s report, which concludes that women should not be admitted to the “Holy Orders,” thus provides “an admirable example of a profession in its purest state; and [has] shown us how a profession bases itself upon mind and tradition” (TG, 127). What constitutes at most a mixture of professional expertises, then, represents, to Woolf, a profession in its

“purest” form in that it demonstrates that the knowledges generated by that profession are not necessarily germane to that profession, but depend “upon mind and tradition.”

Grensted‟s recommendation against the admission of women is essentially based on “the strength of feeling” (TG, 126) such an entry allegedly produces in men of the cloth. He insists that “it is really a fact of the very greatest practical importance that strong feeling is aroused,” and he turns to the “Oedipus complex” and “castration complex” as explanations for the psychic persistence of “infantile conceptions” of “male dominance” and “still more of feminine inferiority […] as „man manque‟” (ibid.). These conceptions “survive in the adult, despite their irrationality, and betray their presence, below the level of conscious thought, by the strength of the emotions to which they give rise” (ibid.). Even though “there is no theoretical reason why this Christian priesthood should not be exercised by women as well as men and in exactly the same sense,”

Grensted finds that men‟s “non-rational sex-taboo,” as it always and necessarily triggers

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their strong emotions, presents an insurmountable obstacle to women‟s entry. Indeed, precisely because he attributes men‟s feelings (about a proposition articulated at a very particular historical moment in a white, British, upper-middleclass milieu) to the seemingly universal and unchanging mechanics of the male unconsciousness, Grensted essentially excludes the possibility of social change, or any other kind of change. His report does what it says, and it is in this respect that Woolf finds it particularly illuminating.

She writes that what Grensted has discovered is what middleclass women have already known, namely that “strong feeling, [they] can corroborate the Professor, is undoubtedly shown should [women] ask to be admitted” and “it matters not to which priesthood; the priesthood of medicine or the priesthood of science or the priesthood of the Church” (TG, 127). In her deconstructive elaboration of Grensted‟s argument, Woolf returns, again and again, to his assertion that such strong feeling must therefore be “clear evidence of the presence of powerful and subconscious motive” (ibid.); through this repetitive gesture, she performs, on the level of the text, the very return of the same that such an assertion accomplishes.52 In a way, she is not exactly ironic when she points out

52 Three Guineas is traversed by repetition on all levels of the text, including the formal (Woolf responds to similar requests for financial support from a treasurer of the woman‟s college and a treasurer of an organization for the women‟s professional advancement, both treasurers find themselves again in a position in which they have to collect funds in this manner), the syntactical (sentences and phrases recur throughout the text, such as the itself already repetitive nursery rhyme “Here we go round the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree” ) and the dictional (“Almost the same daughters ask almost the same brothers for almost the same privileges. Almost the same gentlemen intone almost the same refusals for almost the same reasons” [66]). These stylistic and other repetitions work to foreground the self-reinforcing dynamics of the reigning discourses since those discourses serve to legitimize the privileges of the already privileged as necessary, inevitable, logical; “it seems,” Woolf remarks, “as if there is no progress in the human race, but only repetition” (66). The qualification that it seems to be that way suggests that there might be ways to think of individual and collective development as processes of unpredictable change, rather than repetition, although she also acknowledges that such alternative conceptualizations may not be heard as such within a discursive regime that seeks to confirm the truths it already holds. 205

that Grensted‟s use of the relatively recent Freudian concept of “infantile fixation” quite accurately explains men‟s privileged positions in the Church, but also in other public institutions, such as the parliament. “As Professor Grensted gave his evidence,” she remarks that:

we, the daughters of educated men, seemed to be watching a surgeon at work—an impartial and scientific operator, who […] dissected the human mind by human means laid bare […] Its scientific name is “infantile fixation.” We, being unscientific, have named it wrongly. An egg we called it; a germ. We smelt it in the atmosphere; we detected its presence in Whitehall, in the universities, in the Church. (TG, 127)

Woolf thus proposes that Grensted‟s dissection of “the human mind” also pertains to areas beyond his consideration, such as government and higher education. After all, the attribution of inherent and supposedly fixed qualities to a particular gender, even (or especially) if those qualities are “non-rational,” underpins the legitimization of male privilege in those institutions—“infantile fixation,” she writes, pervades them, like a

“germ.” Through her admittedly “unscientific” language of disease carrying particles and odors that fill the “atmosphere” of these public institutions, moreover, Woolf relocates

“infantile fixation” from the dark recesses of the male psyche to a particular quality in the air traversing the public realm where it affects those who operate in it.53 In doing so, she

(mis-)appropriates Grensted‟s argument to also point to the structural, institutional

53 Surely, there is Woolfian irony at play here, for the qualification of her term “germ” as an “unscientific” one indicates its metaphoric function, but also draws attention to the putatively scientific status of Grensted‟s “infantile fixation.” The evidence the latter provides for the existence of “infantile fixation” (the strength of the feelings it causes) compares poorly to the detailed descriptions of the causal relations between particular germs and particular deceases by such late nineteenth-century bacteriologists as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. While their discoveries of certain germs quite accurately and verifiably explain why and how certain deceases occur, the discovery of men‟s infantile fixations insufficiently accounts for their strong feelings about their privileges (although “infantile fixation” is an effective discursive instrument through which to maintain those privileges). Woolf thus intimates that “some motives [might] have escaped” Grensted in his endorsement of male clerical privilege—“the money motive,” for example (TG, 127-8). 206

mechanisms that cultivate such affects as pride, competitiveness and possessiveness. In the public schools and universities, for instance, she detects an “elaborate machinery for mind-training and body-training” which “far from teaching the educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions […] in their own hands, that they will not use force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them” (TG, 29-30). In similar terms, Woolf assesses the professions and their “undeniable effect upon the professors.” “They make,” she writes,

“the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement of their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them” (TG, 66). That a history of male privilege in the universities, the military, the professions, the church has organized these institutions in ways that legitimize and sustain that privilege is, of course, not terribly surprising—nor is the fact of the creativity of these self-sanctioning mechanisms (as exemplified by Grensted‟s singular use of Freudian psychology). But Woolf also makes a number of more particular points about the function of affects, and in particular of pride and shame, in the public realm.

Firstly, she discusses men‟s investments in their public (and private) privileges in terms of the particular tautological dynamics of pride--“pride of nationality” but also

“religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them” (TG, 80). That men, or at least some men, feel proud to be, say, British is an effect of their approximation of a national ideal that has already taken their shape (white, heterosexual, propertied, male). The national, the academic, or the masculine ideal, in other words, are modeled upon some bodies to the exclusion of

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others. Of the latter, for instance, Woolf writes that it seems that “courage and pugnacity are still among the prime attributes of manliness” and that, considering the

“disproportionate effects” on men to the suggestion that they lack such attributes, they

“still wish to be admired for possessing them” (TG, 182). Thus, while there is nothing inherently ideal about courage and pugnacity, the fact that the masculine ideal has come to include such qualities makes that their display has become affectively rewarding. Such circularity becomes apparent when we compare, as Woolf does, “the pleasure of a country walk” to “the pleasure of dominance”; since the latter is “still closely allied with the pleasures of wealth, social and professional prestige” it follows that this pleasure [of dominance] would therefore seem to be derived not from the feeling itself but from the reflection of other people‟s feelings” (TG, 181-2). Even though dominance over others and a stroll in the hill are not necessarily more or less pleasurable, the evaluation of dominance as prestigious (i.e. its idealization) offers those in dominant positions the affective pay-off, the pride really, of embodying the ideal.

Woolf also indicates that such pride involves a display or address to others, whereby the possession of an ideal becomes a performance of “character,” so that having an ideal signifies as a sign of being an ideal subject. For instance, she cites C.K.

Chesterton‟s contention that “[w]e have never known a man who was not, openly or secretly, proud of being able to support women; whether they were his sisters or his mistresses” and she identifies such pride in one‟s economic independence as “the manhood emotion,” as the display, that is, not only of the wealth a man has, but also of his very manhood (TG, 182). She adds that since “the support [of] wife and children […]

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is connected with manhood itself—a man who could not support his family failed in his conception of manliness” (TG, 138). Woolf concludes that there can be no doubt, then, that the opposition of educated men to the emancipation of their sisters and daughters is

“inspired by that sense of shame which, as Professor Grensted says, „cannot be regarded in any other light than as a non-rational sex-taboo‟ [infantile fixation]” (TG, 139).

Shame indeed. While there is, of course, no necessary reason why men such feel ashamed about women joining the professions, the military etc., the affective economy that fosters pride in the approximation of an ideal modeled upon a very distinct body (to the exclusion of all other bodies) can quite easily turn into shame when that approximation fails. Woolf repeatedly mentions the susceptibility of men to shame (to the “gift” of a white feather, for instance) and refers to “the fear of ridicule which the great psychologists, like Sophocles, detect in the dominator; who is also peculiar susceptible according to the same authority either to ridicule or defiance on the part of the female sex” (TG, 181). She suggests, in other words, that men‟s patriarchal privileges provide them not only with educational, economic and other material privileges, but also with singular affective rewards which, even when interrupted, they are reluctant to give up. Woolf observes, for instance, that “directly [when] the priest‟s right to practice his profession is challenged […] infantile fixation develops […] to an aggravated and exacerbated emotion to which the name sex taboo is scientifically applied” (TG, 139).

What is labeled a “sex taboo” and “infantile fixation,” then, refers really to the particular stubborn dynamics of shame. After all, to revisit Tomkins‟s formulation, shame works as

“a specific interruption of continuing interests or enjoyments” (SS, 134). Interests and

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enjoyments may be temporarily interrupted, but they nevertheless remain operative; one may have to renounce them at present, but will not do so indefinitely. Thus the sense of shame Woolf detects in privileged men, when their privileges are challenged, demonstrates that these men see their interests suspended and that they continue their attachment to those interests.54 That these affective mechanisms structure the organization of the nation‟s institutions accounts, she informs her correspondent, for

“those inhibitions and persuasions which make it harder for your sex to experiment freely in altering our current values than for ours” (TG, 117).

This also explains why, according to Woolf, middleclass women, as relative outsiders to the nation, enjoy a “comparative freedom from [those] inhibitions and persuasions” (ibid.). She points out that “‟our‟ country […] has denied me education or any share in its possessions. „Our‟ country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner.

„Our‟ country denies me the means of protecting myself” (TG, 108). Since she holds no stakes in her nation (the relation is, at best, tenuous), she does not share her brother‟s affective investments in that nation, as her use of quotation marks indicates. Since the nation posits as its ideal subjects white, heterosexual, educated fathers and their sons, their daughters and sisters are “immune,” to use Woolf‟s term, to the push and pull of pride and shame that comes with the interpellative processes of approximating—and not quite or not yet approximating—an ideal already fashioned in one‟s image. That image, in other words, simply does not encompass middleclass women, which makes that they are “able to take a more purely disinterested view than their brothers, without for a

54 She observes that the voices on the wireless (be they British, Italian, or German) appeal to those very attachments and cites, for instance, Hitler‟s distinction between “a nation of pacifists and a nation of men,” (TG, 186) which works, of course, to shame the former. 210

moment claiming […] that they are by nature more disinterested” (TG, 100).55 In a way, this also counts for other groups who, as a result of their structural positioning vis a vis the nation, can not recognize themselves in the figure of the national subject— homosexuals, for instance, or immigrants.

Woolf‟s now famous proposition for a Society of Outsiders is thus really an elaboration of those “freedoms” that “are largely ensured [middleclass women] by the law of England,” such as the freedom from what she disapprovingly calls the “stigma of nationality”—with the important exception that they “earn enough to live on” (TG, 82).

A living wage will, she claims, transform “the forced experiments” that these outsiders have made with their lives into free ones. Among those experiments are experiments in

“derision and freedom from unreal loyalties,” two of “the great teachers of the daughters of educated men” (TG, 79). To Woolf, those actions, ideas, feelings, and relations that are

“the objects of scorn and ridicule” are preferable to those that garner “fame and praise”

55 Woolf does acknowledge that middleclass women have long been subject to a different, though interrelated, process of idealization whereby their particular delegation to the private realm, lack of formal education, and financial dependence upon their fathers and husbands constituted their “ladyhood.” She shows how efforts by these women to, for instance, earn their own living signified as a failure to their sex and class, and thus gave rise to that “conflict of emotions,” best explained, “if we compare it with the confused conflict of emotions that is roused in you, Sir, should a woman hand you a white feather” (TG, 139). This is, of course, the conflictedness of the shame of departing from an ideal one nevertheless appreciates as such. Interestingly, Woolf regards the emancipation of middleclass women as a project of re-negotiating these affective dynamics, as a project, that is, not of repairing pride by giving the ideal a different content (of what or who the emancipated woman is), but of letting go of such ideals altogether— “it was the lady who could not earn money,” she writes, “therefore the lady must be killed” (TG, 133). Woolf further calls these women‟s engagement with being shamed “a force […] so strong […] that it is much to be hoped that the psychologists will find some name for it,” though it is clear to her that “that force had behind it many different emotions, and many that were contradictory” (TG, 137). Behind the tears of one daughter was the “frustrated” longing “to learn chemistry;” behind those of another was “the desire for an open and rational love” and behind those of still other daughters the desire “to lead a rational existence without love,” the desire to “dig in Greece and Palestine,” or the desire “paint, not ivy-clad cottages, but naked bodies” (TG, 137-8). That force, I would suggest, entails the ability of affects to have any object, even to shift their objects, in ways that cannot be predicted by what causes those affects, so that the shame of not being a lady can become the shame of not being allowed to learn chemistry and, as such, allows for a re-fashioning of one‟s interests. 211

for, while the former are by no means inherently more revolutionary or even efficacious, they do at least depart from the latter in that they are not directed toward already established ideals (TG, 95).56 After all, she argues that one must think about change in the most radical fashion, which can therefore not involve such repetitions of the same. As with most experiments, those undertaken by Woolf‟s Outsiders have no predictable outcomes and do not unfold according to an already given plan; they are not merely

“critical” (i.e. concerned with that what is), but also, importantly, “creative” (i.e. oriented toward novel relations between affects and actions, brothers and sisters, the private and the public, the nation and its citizens). “[T]he power to change and the power to grow,”

Woolf argues, “can only be preserved in obscurity,” in the effortful abandonment, that is, of any ground, program, or goal for change; “if we wish to help the human mind to create, and to prevent it from scoring the same old rut repeatedly, we must do what we can to shroud it in darkness” (TG, 114).57

56This also accounts for the fact that, in spite of their agreement on “the barbarity” of war, Woolf declines to join her correspondent‟s anti-war society. She intimates that his opposition to war may depart from the present patriotic clamor, but that his society, as a public undertaking, might nevertheless rehearse the very affective and discursive habits men have acquired in running the affairs of the public. After all, as a particular mode of opposing war, such a society could easily become invested in an even superior national ideal—for example, of Britain as a genuinely civilized and morally advanced nation, compared to the barbaric aggressiveness of the Fascist states. His society could thus offer its members the opportunity to reclaim their national pride in that they, by opposing war, show themselves to be truly and properly British. Woolf questions this link between anti-war politics and the performance of a national ideal. She explains that such an identification with—or, rather idealization of—one‟s nationality suggests that politics are necessarily predicated upon a particular kind of subjectivity. Therefore, as sisters of educated men, “we look upon societies as conspiracies that sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially” (TG, 105).. 57 See also, in this regard, Deleuze and Guattari‟s discussion of what they call Woolf‟s “molecular politics,” which encompass “the mobile, active and ceaseless challenge of becoming” (A Thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Transl. Brain Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994], 276). Deleuze and Guattari write that, for tactical reasons, women may have to deploy and “molar politics,” which would be concerned with a specifically female subjectivity, but they do not advocate that a women‟s movement be grounded in or limited to or the female subject; such a foundational scheme would, 212

In the third chapter of Three Guineas, finally, Woolf makes a second more particular point about the relation between affects, such as pride and shame, and actions—a point that, in the manner of an Outsider‟s experiment, involves at once a critical act and a creative one. In contemplating her answer to her “brother‟s” request, she must first, she says, turn to “these very ancient and obscure emotions which we have known ever since the time of Antigone and Ismene and Creon at least; which St. Paul himself seems to have felt; but which the Professors have only lately brought to the surface and named „infantile fixation,‟ „Oedipus complex,‟ and the rest (TG, 130).58 She then reviews a number of famous and less famous “case[s] of infantile fixation,” such as

“the case of Mr. Barrett of Wimpole street” and “the case of Rev. Patrick Brontë” that appear to demonstrate the unconscious forces, in play since centuries, that underlie the relations between the sexes and, in particular, the relations of educated fathers to their daughters (TG, 130-1). The infantile fixations of these Victorian patriarchs, she argues, drove them to tie their daughters to the home, denying them financial independence,

according to Deleuze and Guattari, lead to “the slavish subordination of action to some high ideal” (277). In Woolf‟s work, they find the necessarily double politics of the molar and molecular, whereby the “assertion of women as a subject must not simply oppose man, but must affirm itself as an event in the process of becoming” (ibid.). 58 It is remarkable that Woolf scholars almost without exception read her use of Freudian terminology here at face value. For instance, in her compelling biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee interprets Woolf‟s analysis of the analogous tyrannies of the patriarchal and the fascist state as an argument about the persistence of primal or primitive instincts in the individual and in society. While Woolf, according to Lee, did choose to “rewrite [Freud‟s] relentlessly deterministic diagnosis of civilization and the individual,” she did adopt his belief that the aggressive instincts in the human species were essentially male instincts and that therefore “the fight for liberty in the present war could only be won if we destroy the male attributes” (Virginia Woolf, 711-2). But Lee conveniently overlooks a footnote in which Woolf discusses the military prowess of Amalia Bonilla whose example (of having “killed five men—but [is] not sure about the sixth”) shows “that if sanctioned the fighting instinct easily develops,” that it is, in other words, not inherent to men (only) (TG, 178, 177). Moreover, Woolf‟s representation of war as the recurrence of the same “ancient and obscure emotions” refers, as I have argued above, not to the return of the murderous male instincts, but to the circular incitements of pride whereby only certain subjects (white, heterosexual, educated, Christian men) get to perform a national ideal that is already modeled upon them. 213

sometimes even husbands. Moreover, when women began to vote and assume professional lives, “the fathers in private [...] yielded; but the fathers in public, massed together in societies, in professions, were even more subject to the fatal disease than the fathers in private” (TG, 138).

No Woolf scholar has, to my knowledge, taken note of her unorthodox, if not downright incorrect, use of the Freud‟s concept of infantile fixation. For Freud, after all, the term designates an arrested development whereby an individual has not matured from infantile oral and anal phases to assume a mature genitally oriented (hetero)sexuality.

Ideally, the sexual instincts pass through a complicated course of development at the end of which they, according to Freud, attain “the primacy of the genital zone.” When the libido fails to reach its destination, however, and becomes fixated on any of these earlier, infantile phases, individuals will develop the particular neurotic disorder, infantile fixation, whereby their libido fails to be directed toward the genitals of the opposite sex.

To Woolf, however, the concept of infantile fixation does not involve such a notion of arrested sexual development; she uses it, instead, to refer to fathers‟ fixations on their infants, their female infants, to the paternal efforts, in other words, to fixate their infants in infancy. This is something different than the Freudian definition of infantile fixation, which is infantile in nature, whereas that of Woolf is infantile in its object. She refers, for instance, not to the fathers (“the Rev. Patrick Brontë” or “Mr. Barrett”) but to their daughters (Charlotte and Elizabeth) as “the victims of infantile fixations in the nineteen century [when] the disease, though unnamed, was rampant” (TG, 135). She observes that:

Whatever biography we open we find almost always the familiar symptoms—the father is opposed to his daughter‟s marriage; the father is

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opposed to his daughter‟s earning her living. Her wish either to marry, or to earn a living rouses strong emotion in him; and he gives the same excuses for that strong emotion; the lady will de debase her ladyhood; the daughter will outrage her womanhood. (TG, 135-6)

Surely, for such a meticulous and erudite thinker as Woolf, this has to be a purposeful mistake; her own reading and research as well as the psychoanalytic interests of many of her Bloomsbury associates provided ample opportunity for the elucidation of

“infantile fixation.” However, by turning the Freudian concept inside out (from the operations of the male unconscious to the display of male pride) and upside down (from the infantility of these fixations to the fixation on infants), she gestures toward the work the concept does in sanctioning the claims educated fathers make on their daughters— and, thus, illustrates the extent to which Freudian psychoanalysis (or, at least, some uses of it) is both a product of patriarchy and its instrument. She notes, in this regard, that

“[s]ociety it seems was a father, afflicted with the infantile fixation too” (TG, 135).

Woolf‟s metaphor of universal affliction here also points to her more particular objection to the Freudian reduction of affects (such as pride, anger, possessiveness) as the necessary and inevitable manifestation of the male unconscious, for such a mechanical model of affects—one in which input predicts output—essentially denies what she sees as

“the free action of the human faculties,” the freedom, that is, “not in the sense of license” but in the sense of the capacity of those faculties to engender new and unforeseeable actions, ideas, interests (TG. 114, 138). This limitation of Freud‟s concept, Woolf explains, is a result of its reliance upon the idea of nature as static: “nature it was claimed

[…] is not only omniscient but unchanging” so that “whatever the brain might do […] the

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body remained” (TG, 139, 140); men‟s infantile fixations thus signify as the expression of the universal and trans-historical attributes of their gender.

Such a reifying logic thus works to erase the contingencies of gender norms and, consequently, severely limits the forms kinship can take, or, at least, limits the kinds of kinship relations that can signify as viable. This becomes especially apparent in Lacan‟s elaboration of Freud‟s project which raises kinship positions to the order of the symbolic, the order, that is, that determines the conditions under which the communicability of all language becomes possible. Within the symbolic, the father occupies the paradigmatic position, since he possesses the phallus and, with it, the indisputable and incontestable laws of signification. Lacanians emphatically maintain the distinction between the symbolic position (of the father, the mother, the son) and the socially constituted and varying practices of, say, male parenthood throughout the centuries; yet, by insisting on such a distinction, Lacanian psychoanalysis effectively evacuates the conceptual space within which to think kinship relations away from the Oedipal scene. By transporting kinship positions to the realm of linguistic positions without which signification can not occur, it thus renders many reconfigurations of kinship relations simply unintelligible.

But, as Butler explains, the distinction “does not quite hold, for in each instance we are still referring to social norms, but in different modes of appearance.” She argues that symbolic positions are, in fact, “ideal forms” (forms which, I have tried to show above, structure the affective operations of pride, and, as such, tend to maintain themselves), but are nevertheless “contingent norms [and] whose contingency has been rendered

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necessary.”59 Norms, however, have a temporality, andWoolf gestures towards their susceptibility to transformation and, thus, toward a future that cannot be fully anticipated.

Following her discussion of the “case” of Rev. Patrick Brontë and Mr. Barrett, for example, she asks, how we are then to understand “the case of Mr. Leigh Smith […] a father who was completely immune from the diseases [of infantile fixation]” (TG, 136)?

Leigh Smith “held the unusual opinion that daughters should have an equal provision with sons,” hired “masters” to teach his sons and daughters, even “took [his children] with him on long journeys yearly all over England” (ibid.). He did, moreover “not adopt the ordinary plan of paying his daughter‟s bills and giving her an occasional present, but when Barbara came of age in 1848 he gave her an allowance of £300 a year.” There is, however, nothing about this man that would account for his difference from his peers.

Woolf explains that he was a contemporary of the abovementioned Mr. Brontë and Mr.

Barrett “and came of the same social caste. He, too, has property in Sussex; he, too, had horses and carriages; and he, too, had children” (ibid.). She underlines, moreover, that it is unknown what particular qualities, ideas, or motivations made him care for and about his daughter in this singular fashion; “like so many experimentalists,” she writes, “Mr.

Leigh Smith remains obscure” (TG, 136). What his “case” reveals, then, is not so much an alternative model for the relations between educated fathers and their daughters

(predicated upon certain pedagogical, philosophical, or political convictions), but testifies to the capacity of any individual, to use Tomkins‟s words, ““to feel strongly of weakly, for a moment, or for all his life, about anything under the sun and to govern himself by

59 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 21. 217

such motives” (SS 45-6). It “remains obscure” what exactly motivated Smith to raise his daughter the way he did, but the fact that he did so shows that one‟s interests and enjoyments can have any object, including an egalitarian upbringing of one‟s sons and daughters. While the nation‟s institutions are organized in such ways that they incite men‟s pride in their gender, universities, nationality, it does not follow that all men necessarily and inevitably must enact that pride.—for how else can we ever conceive of actual change. Mr. Leigh Smith enjoyed the same benefits as other gentlemen of his

“social caste” (property in Sussex, horses, etc.), yet he was somehow motivated to deploy them differently. His, as Woolf phrases it, was one of those “endeavors of an experimental kind to discover what are the unwritten laws; that is, the private laws that should regulate certain instincts, passions, mental and physical desires” (TG, 184).

Smith‟s particular experiment, in other words, discloses how a body and its attributes (“instincts”), its affective investments (“passions”) and cognitive and bodily orientations (“mental and physical desires”) can, in their interactions, unfold in multiple and unforeseeable directions; the “private laws” that govern what a body and mind are capable of are, after all, “unwritten” ones. “They were not,” Woolf clarifies, “laid down by „God,‟ who is now very generally held to be a conception, of patriarchal origin, valid only for certain races, at certain stages and times” (ibid.). A person‟s affective and other capabilities do not develop according to a pre-determined divine plan and, insofar as they are directed by nature, it is, she argues, by a “nature, who now known to vary greatly in her commands,” by natural processes that are themselves complexly variable. Such

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private and unwritten laws, she concludes “have to be discovered afresh by successive generations” (ibid.).

Barbara Leigh Smith used her allowance to start “an outsiders‟ school,” open to all races, sexes, classes, and creeds, and, then, Woolf writes “one thing led to another;”

Barbara began “a cooperative evening class for ladies” to draw from the nude, and, in

1871, had the law changed so that married women could own their own property, and went on to become co-founder of Girton. Unlike other educated fathers, Mr. Leigh Smith did not use his money and property to direct his daughter‟s life; Barabara‟s allowance came with no conditions as to how she should spend it, so that the money became a condition of possibility for her to engage in experiments with her own private and as yet unwritten laws, so to speak, regardless of the nature or outcome of those experiments. By way of this entirely free endowment, then, her father performed that singular and

“obscure[d]” affective gesture that repudiates the alignment along the already secured axes of father-daughter filiation to seek expression outside, and against, possessive relations of belonging.

Free Gifts

If Three Guineas proposes any particular ethical model, it is, I would suggest, the ethical model of the free gift, such as that of Mr. Leigh Smith, the experimentalist.

Woolf‟s work stages a request by a man from the educated classes to a woman from the educated classes for her aid in the cause of preventing war. She (Woolf‟s speaker)

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decides to support him with her donation of one guinea—“would that it were a million!”—which is “given freely,” meaning that “no right or privilege is asked in return;” it is “given without fear, without flattery, without conditions” (TG, 100-1). By way of such open-endedness, she departs—critically and creatively—from the material and affective claims that have subtended “the society relationship of brother to sister for centuries” (TG, 105). Through her gift (not so much its monetary content as its radical unconditionality), she emphatically gestures away from the instrumentality that has structured the relations between middleclass men and women (whereby the latter functioned as the means to the former‟s public entitlements, possessions, pride) toward as yet unscripted modes of non-assimilationist co-laboration. She will not stipulate to her brother how he should spend her guineas in his anti- war efforts, while she will work toward the same cause with her own means, thus preserving her “difference [for] different we are, as facts have proved, both in sex and education. And it is from that difference […] that our help can come, if help we can, to protect liberty, to prevent war”

(TG, 103-4).

To some extent, the formal structure of Three Guineas already enacts such a novel partnering of middleclass women and men. As a letter written by a daughter of an educated father to a son from the same milieu replying to the latter‟s request for her support in his anti-war endeavors, the text invokes a hitherto unimaginable alliance between them. “For the first time in English history,” Woolf announces, “an educated men‟s daughter can give her brother a guinea of her own making at his request […] without asking anything in return.” She adds that it “is so momentous an occasion in the

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history of civilization that some celebration seems called for” and she proposes that they celebrate by “destroy[ing] an old word [that is] now obsolete” (TG, 101). Throughout

Three Guineas, Woolf actually repeatedly advises that old and no longer meaningful terms, including “feminism,” be “burned.” She expresses the hope that some day new concepts will emerge that attend to the singularities of the moment. In doing so, she points to the historicity of reason, suggesting that concepts (philosophical, psychological, political, and so on) are not given frameworks with trans-historical relevance. When entirely new modes of living and loving emerge, after all, they require the invention of new concepts, or an open-ended expansion of old ones, in order to grasp the singularities of these unprecedentedly new facts of life.60

Through its mixed discursive registers, moreover, Three Guineas further reconfigures the traditional position of daughters of educated men vis à vis their brothers.

Woolf appropriates the traditionally masculine discursive modes of academic writing

(carefully researched, with annotations and citations from authoritative sources) as well as that of the public tribunal; she accumulates “facts” and consults “precedents” in order, for instance, “to try the important case of Baldwin v. Whitaker” (TG, 39). By addressing her correspondent—whom she identifies as a member of the bar—in a letter, however, she also draws him into the traditionally private and feminine realm of the epistolary.

Since that letter contains two other letters directed to two other “sisters,” Woolf‟s male

60 Woolf‟s argument here resonates with Bergson‟s understanding of the human intellect as an effect of local evolutionary processes. “If,” he argues, “evolution is creation unceasingly renewed, it creates, as it goes on, not only the forms of life, but the ideas that will enable the intellect to understand it, the terms which will serve to express it. That is to say that it future overflows its present, and cannot be sketched out in an idea” (Creative Evolution [New York: Dover Publications, 1988), 103. 221

addressee thus comes to share this epistolary space with women whose professional occupations exist only uncertainly in the public realm.

This impurity or in-betweenness of the private and public registers, finally, also marks the particular transgression performed by Antigone in Sophocles‟s play, Three

Guineas most prominent intertext.61 By way of her repeated trespasses of Creon‟s law— she twice tries to bury her brother and nephew Polyneices—Antigone not only enters into a realm, the public, not proper to her gender, but in that realm also approximates Creon‟s language of sovereignty, where she acts according to her own “unwritten law” in order to assert a filial loyalty that, conventionally, must subtend but not intrude upon the public sphere. While Woolf is careful to stress that Sophocles‟s work not be reduced to “anti-

Fascist propaganda” as it “easy to squeeze [its] characters into up-to-date dress,” it is nevertheless richly suggestive that she repeatedly alludes to Antigone and never to her father, Oedipus, psychoanalysis‟s founding figure (TG, 169, 170). Antigone‟s tragic story is, of course, a story about one woman‟s exceptional relation to the state (she does not marry, does not breed sons to become soldiers and lead the nation, does not want her brother to engage in war), but it is also the story of a singular love between brother and sister. She buries her brother and asks, can not ask, anything in return; it is gift of love, for which, she knows, she will be buried alive. Antigone‟s willful embrace of her living death does not so much entail the hubris of a tragic heroine, nor is it a manifestation of the supposedly irrepressible and thus revolutionary force of her incestuous desire for

61 For The Years, out of which Three Guineas evolved, Woolf imagined a similarly central intertextual role for Sophocles play. The scene in which Sara Partiger reads Antigone was “the scene I‟ve had in my mind ever so many months…It‟s the turn of the book” (cited in M.A. Leaska, “Virginia Woolf, the Partiger: A Reading of The Years,” Bulletin of New York Public Library [nr 80, Winter 1977], 263). 222

Polyneices. Rather, her death signifies in Woolf‟s work in a manner akin to Butler‟s reading in which the latter approaches Antigone‟s fate in terms of the living death of kinship formations that can not attain viability, even intelligibility. The central issue here is, according to Butler, the function of the incest taboo which is “to prohibit sexual exchange among kin relations, or, rather, to establish kin relations precisely on the basis of those taboos.”62 Yet, she asks, is it also not the case that the incest taboo “has been mobilized to establish certain forms of kinship as the only intelligible and livable ones,” that, in other words, only exogamic, heterosexual couplings and their off-spring constitute kinships, to the exclusion of all other forms kinship relations (such as the close consensual affiliation between a gay man and a heterosexual woman).63 Through her very lineage, Antigone already profoundly confounds kinship lines, as she is the product of an incestuous union between her brother and her mother, which makes her both sister and child of Oedipus. Butler observes, moreover, that Antigone refers to her tomb as a “bridal chamber” and, as such, gestures at once to her love for her “most precious brother” and its negation; “if she is dead in some sense and yet speaks,” she writes, “she is precisely the one with no place who nevertheless seeks to claim one within speech, the unintelligible as it emerges within the intelligible, a position within kinship that is no position.”64 While the incest taboo did not preclude Antigone‟s love for her brother, nor that between her parents, it did preclude the living of that love. “When the incest taboo works in this sense to foreclose a love that is not incestuous,” Butler asks, “what is

62 Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 70. 63 Ibid. (emphasis Butler‟s). 64 Ibid., 76, 77, 78. 223

produced is a shadowy realm of love, a love that persists in spite of its foreclosure in an ontologically suspended mode?”65

When, in Three Guineas, Woolf discusses “the private relationship between brother and sister,” she cites Anne Clough‟s adoring description of her brother, William

Wordsworth (he is “the comfort and joy of my life”) and the latter‟s equally exultant portrait of her (“she gave me […] a heart, the fountain of sweet tears; and love, and thought, and joy”) of his sister. Wordsworth, Woolf writes, is “speaking of his sister but answering [her] as if one nightingale called to another in the forests” (TG, 104). She also refers to the possibly incestuous love between St. Paul and his sister Lydia, citing Renan who queries: “est-il cependant absolument impossible que Paul ait contracté avec cette sooeur une unioin plus intime? On ne saurait l‟affirmer” (TG, 167). This is not, I would propose, Woolf disclosing dirty secrets or even advocating for the abandonment of the incest taboo. She uses these filial romances to point to the limitations, within the social norms governing the public sphere, of the kind of kinship relations that can signify as viable. In Antigone, Woolf finds a figure who publically—and catachrestically—enacts a singular kinship. Or, as Butler writes, “when she buries her brother, it is not simply that

[Antigone] acts from kinship, as if kinship furnishes a principle for action, but that her action is the action of kinship, the performative repetition that reinstates kinship as a public scandal.”66 What unsettles Creon and, with him, the state is, in other words, not so much Antigone‟s incestuous love itself, but her public insistence that kinship is not a form of being, but a form of doing. In doing so, she made a formidable scene.

65 Ibid., 78. 66 Ibid., 58. 224

Interruptions

Life at these intensities clearly became “scenes,” but the great thing, the immense illumination, was that we could make them or not as we choose.

Henry James, A Small Boy and Others

In Between the Acts, Woolf‟s last novel, she returns to the notion of making scenes in a more literal sense. Set on a June day in 1939 in a “remote village in the very heart of England,” the work features the acts on of and off the impromptu stage on the grounds of Pointz Hall where the annual village pageant is put on.67 As in the previous seven years, Miss LaTrobe has written the play or, rather, the multiple plays within the play—“a medley” of dramatic forms and genres, including a Chaucerian prologue, a

Medieval song, a tableau of Elizabeth I, a scene from a play after the manner of

Shakespeare, a Restoration drama allegorizing Reason, even an act that, in 21st century parlance, would be termed a performance piece whereby the actors hold up mirrors to the audience; together they present, as Mrs. Manresa announces, “scenes of English history”

(BA, 81).

Woolf began drafting Pointz Hall, the novel‟s working title, on 1 April, 1938, “to relieve myself of Roger,” her biography of her friend and art critic Roger Fry, who had

67 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, Inc., [1941] 1970), 16. Further references will appear parenthetically. In this description of the locale of Three Guineas, Woolf renders indeterminate the relation of the village to the nation, and to Englishness, for the village is at once “remote” and “in the very heart of England,” suggesting, in the very least, that its community and its traditions (past and present) are representative in a slanted and imprecise fashion. 225

passed away in 1934. This project, which eventually appeared in 1940 as Roger Fry: A

Biography, had become a burdensome undertaking for Woolf, for, in addition to the overwhelming amount of reading and research it required, she increasingly felt constricted by its generic constrains (squeezing a dense life into a linear account of facts and accomplishments) as well as by the demands of propriety (“how does one,” she grumbled, “euphemize twenty different mistresses” [L6, 106]). In contrast to the imposed coherence and comprehensiveness of the biographical, she envisioned Pointz

Hall to be, in her phrase, “unformal writing” in which “‟I‟ [would be] rejected: „We‟ substituted […] „We‟ composed of many things… we all life, all art, all waifs and strays

[…] a perpetual variety & change” (D5, 133-4). In this composite work, to which I will return below, Woolf sought out a “new method” (D5, 340) of thinking vital modes of being in a historical moment that seemed to be coursing toward the destruction of life—a challenging method for, as one of the novel‟s characters questions, “if one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes?” (BA 199)

In the Spring of 1939, Woolf embarked upon a second experiment in “unformal writing” in order to, once again, allay the strains of working on Fry‟s biography; “I am sick of writing Roger‟s life,” she confesses in A Sketch of the Past, in which she turns to her own life to contemplate the capricious trajectories of memory, the “spasmodic” and

“surprising” sensations of being as well as the question what shape a memoir of such a life should take.68 Over the course of the next one and a half year, Woolf returned intermittently to this project—its last entry is dated 15th November 1940—and the

68 Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1985), 64, 93. Subsequent references will be to this edition, abbreviated parenthetically as MOB.. 226

various sections do not proceed along chronological lines, but often include different accounts or assessments of the same events and episodes, such as the untimely death of her mother, described in adjoining sections. That they all begin with the date of their composition and, almost invariably, with a few comments on current events—“the

French have stopped fighting. Today the dictators dictate their terms to France” (June

19th 1940); “Yesterday (18th August 1940) five German raiders passed so close over

Monks House that they brushed the tree at the gate”; “I continue (22nd September 1940) on this wet day—we think of weather now as it affects invasions, as it affects raids”;

October 11th 1940: “a mild Autumn day (London battered last night)”—suggests the extent to which the turns of present events press upon this sketch of her past. “The past is much affected by the present moment,” Woolf remarks, and “[w]hat I write today I should not write in a year‟s time” (MOB, 75). The memories she collects in this text thus bear a highly relative relation to the historical contingencies of the act of collecting them.

By way of this seemingly minor gesture of situating her own “life-writing” in “the present moment,” she opens up a complex structure in which the (autobiographical) self is not a unity—either through time or in opposition to the passage of time—but is constituted, unevenly so, by the layerings of time impinging, in disparate ways, upon that self.

Moreover, in light of the “immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and from class to class,” she maintains that “I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place, but cannot describe the stream” (MOB, 80). From this distinctly situated perspective, Woolf thus proceeds to

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experiment with a mode of “life writing” that departs from conventional memoirs, many examples of which she considers to be failures as “they leave out the person to whom things happened” (MOB, 65). When people “write what they call „lives‟ of other people,” she argues, “they collect a number of events, and leave the person to whom it happened unknown” (ibid.). The problem here is not only the imposed linearity of summarizing a life in terms of a succession of events, but also the presupposition that the nature of these events can explain or render intelligible such a life. Turning to some of her own “first memories,” for instance, Woolf admits that they involve events that might not at all be an event representative of her youth—“as an account of my life they are misleading”—and she is, at this point, not even sure anymore if those memories came from “a dream, or if

[they] happened” (MOB, 69). “Why remember,” she asks, “the hum of the bees in the garden going down to the beach, and forget completely being thrown naked by my father into the sea? (Mrs Swanwick says she saw that happen)” (MOB, 70). What one remembers or forgets, temporarily or permanently, can not be predicted by the particular objects of those memories (or forgettings); there are “many things,” Woolf explains, “that must have been, one would have thought, more memorable than what I do remember”

(ibid.). That she is profoundly and lastingly affected by the sound of bees humming and not at all by being tossed into the sea, then, suggests to Woolf “a little of my own psychology” and that “of other people‟s” (ibid.). Here she introduces her distinction between “moments of being” and “moments of non-being”; the latter involve the “sudden shocks” that rupture “the cotton wool of daily life” and confirm her “philosophy […] that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are

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connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art” (MOB, 72).

The significance of these seemingly transcendental or mystical “moments of being” has come to preoccupy, even characterize, Woolf scholarship, and it falls beyond the scope of my inquiry here to survey this long-standing critical preoccupation. Most interpretations, however, presuppose that “moments of being” operate epistemologically, that they, in other words, primarily function as instances in which knowledge is acquired

(either by Woolf or about her).69 Yet, what are the most distinct qualities of such

“moments of being” is that they involve affective sensations that bear no predictable or representative relation to their external stimuli and, as such, interrupt the automatized habits by which a body navigates its world. Woolf describes, for example, one such moment when at night in the garden at St. Ives she was “walking on the path by the apple

69 Modernist scholars, such as Morris Beja, view Woolf‟ “moments of being” in terms of the revelatory operations of Joycean epiphanies, while many feminist readers value them as privileged modes of feminine knowledge (against the instrumentality of masculinist reason). Jane Marcus, for example, approaches them through the Stephen legacy of Quaker theories of “inner illumination,” although she admits that she “had [long] avoided to subject of Virginia Woolf‟s mysticism […] feeling that acknowledging her as a visionary was a trap that would allow her to be dismissed as another female crank, irrational and eccentric” (“The Niece of a Nun: Virginia Woolf, Caroline Stephen, and the Cloistered Imagination,” Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant. Jane Marcus, ed. [Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983], 27, 35). Stephanie Pauliel compares Woolf‟s “moments of being” to the visionary experiences of medieval mystics and the authority those experiences held—these moments are “glimpses into the real and the lasting” and “make her sensitive to what is false and temporary” ( “Writing and Mystical Experience in Marguerite d‟Oingt and Virginia Woolf,” Comparative Literature, Summer 1992; 44 (3): 251, 263.) Psychoanalytically informed interpretations work mostly to demystify Woolf‟s “moments of being” in order to lay bare the psychological conflicts, traumas etc, that structured her life and work. See the work of Françoise Defromont, Elizabeth Abel, Mary Jacobus, as well as the remarkably reductive studies by Louise De Salvo (Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work [London: The Women‟s Press, 1989) and Mark Spilka (Virginia Woolf’s Quarrel with Grieving [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980]). I mention these particular works as examples of the persistent critical gestures within which “moments of being” signify either in transcendental or psychic terms, resulting in the very truth claims about A Sketch that, in my opinion, do not attend to the reluctance Woolf herself expresses in this text about the very possibility of such truth claims in autobiography.

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tree,” and that apple tree suddenly became “connected with the horror of Mr. Valpy‟s suicide” (the Valpys had in the past visited St. Ives):

I could not pass it [the apple tree]. I stood there looking at the grey- green creases of the bark—it was a moonlit night—in a trance of horror. I seemed dragged down, hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape. My body seemed paralysed. (MOB, 71)

With a sense of wonderment, she stresses the utter unpredictability of her feeling of despair, for there is nothing about a moon lit apple tree that would necessarily engender this particular affective response. The tree bears no symbolic or representative relation to

Woolf‟s paralyzing despair, or, to be more precise, that despair is not a subjective intensification or extension of her perception of that tree to which it is, she notes, nevertheless “connected.” It is tempting to attribute such a response to an extraordinarily sensibility or her sympathetic understanding of “the horror of Mr Valpy‟s suicide,” but

Woolf explains that, until the news of Mr Valpy‟s death, she had not known of him—

“some people called Valpy had been staying at St Ives, and had left”—and that she overheard her parents discussing his suicide when she was “waiting for dinner one night”

(ibid.). Her “absolute despair” about this death, then, occurred not upon hearing about it, but, later, upon seeing an apple tree. Like Woolf‟s other “moments of being” —such as the sudden pleasure of the sight of a flower bed (“That is the whole” [MOB, 71])—it thus betrays that particular vitality through which a living being (re-)acts in and to its environment.

In A Sketch—itself an interrupted and interruptive account of a live—Woolf concentrates on “moments of beings”—those “sudden shocks […] I still have the

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peculiarity [to] receive” (MOB, 71) that break into “non-being,” the more or less automatic mechanisms that are required (and acquired) to attend to the pragmatics of life.

Since those mechanisms (motoric, perceptual, affective, etc.) function to efficiently negotiate one‟s needs in encountering the world. They operate, Woolf argues, on an unconscious level. They are, she writes, “not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding” (MOB, 70). However, neither the ordinariness of “non-being” nor the “shocks” of being involve lesser or greater access to reality or knowledge; rather, they constitute different modes of interacting with the world, whereby “moments of being” suspend the particular habits that work to function efficiently—and therefore function unconsciously—in one‟s world.

By way of the distinction between “being” and “non-being,” Woolf engages in a project remarkably resonant with Bergson‟s vitalist philosophy. The latter articulates the idea of “attentive recognition” which, like Woolf‟s “moments of being,” involves the temporary suspension of the sensori-motor reflexes of “automatic recognition”—of the particular perceptual and affective mechanisms that, precisely on account of their habitualization, allow for the efficient pursuit of one‟s interests (to perform, for instance, the complex physical, perceptual, affective operations required to drive a car). “Attentive recognition,” on the other hand, “implies a turning back of the mind which gives up pursuing any useful end of the present perception: there will be at first an inhibition of movement, a pause. But rapidly, other, more subtle, movements will graft themselves

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onto this attitude.”70 The significance of Bergson‟s notions of “attentive” and

“automatic” recognition is that it opens up the conceptual space to think life in terms of novel becomings; “attentive recognition,” he argues, involves “the consciousness we have of incipient movements, movements which begin to take place, that are sketched out in these states, and which would have followed their free course if nature had made us automatons and not conscious beings.”71 The very ability to interact in non-mechanistic ways with the world, moreover, resides in what Bergson terms “the zone of indeterminacy” within a body‟s complex sensory and perceptual apparatus whose differing registers and rhythms can thus interfere with automatic reactions to stimuli.72

Woolf‟s “moments of being” constitute precisely such interferences, which, in

Bergson‟s thinking, also announce “the beginning of freedom,” the possibility, that is, of acting/feeling otherwise. She describes, for instance, the occasion when she “was fighting with Toby on the lawn” and, shortly before her fist was to hit him, suddenly

“felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling […] of hopeless sadness […] I slunk off, feeling horribly depressed” (MOB, 71). The startling interjection of this sudden sadness arrests the wrestling motions and, as such, comprises that particular interference through which potentially novel acts and feelings emerge—of, for instance, not returning one‟s brother‟s

70 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory: Essay on the Relation Between the Body and the Mind. Transl. by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, [1896], 1990), 101. 71 Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Date of Immediate Consciousness. Transl. by F.L. Pogson (London: Dover Publications, 2001), 35. 72 Ibid., 39. Tomkins idea of the co-assembly of the various subsystems (cognitive, perceptual, affective, etc) stands very much in this Bergsonian tradition of thinking human life and development in distinctly non-mechanistic terms. After all, Tomkins argues that since those sub-systems operate with relative independence (according to their own thresholds and feedback mechanisms), their interactions, or relative dependencies, will travel along non-predictable lines. 232

punches.73 Woolf also recalls how the sound of “the blind draw[ing] its little acorn across the floor” in her nursery brought about the “feeling of the purest ecstacy” as well as the occasion when she was taken up to her deceased mother‟s bedside and “noticed that one nurse was sobbing and a desire to laugh came over me” (MOB, 65, 92). That she concentrates primarily on these memories or, rather, that these are the moments she remembers and not, as she herself admits, moments that might be much more representative of her life, is a consequence of the interruptive dynamics that mark these moments. After all, the automatized habits and reflexes that work to attend proficiently to the necessities of life are, according to Woolf, lived “unconsciously”; the instrumentality of these “moments of non-being” actually require that do so. “Moments of being,” on the other hand, suspend these unconscious mechanisms and introduce affects, sensations, perceptions that have no necessary utilitarian aim and, as a consequence, are not only affects of something (of sudden ecstasy, for example), but also, and especially, affects of someone; since they are qualitatively different from their external causes, in other words, they feel as if belong to the person experiencing them, not to the stimuli that cause them.74

Woolf‟s memoir is dominated by the tragic deaths of her mother in 1895 and that of her half-sister, Stella Duckworth a mere two years later. Contemplating the effects of

73 Louise DeSalvo argues, in regard to this incident, that Woolf “had already internalized the fact that she should not fight back, that she should, simply, take it” (Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work [Boston: Beacon, 1989], 106). Such a reading misses Woolf‟s very point that her response did not involve an already accomplished relocation of the external into the inner space of her psyche. 74 Proust‟s exploration of voluntary and involuntary memories builds, of course, upon a similar Bergsonian distinction between habituated , useful and non-mechanistic, seemingly spontaneous responses, although Bergson does not use these terms and, instead, distinguishes between the automatic and virtual functions of memory. Proust‟s involuntary memories, moreover, are highly affectively charged and could thus also be explored in terms of the freedom Tomkins ascribes to the “affect system.” 233

her mother‟s untimely death, she notes, with a sense of wonderment, “how immense must be the force of life which turns a baby, who can just distinguish a great blot of blue and purple on a black background, into the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt on May 5th 1895—now almost exactly to a day, forty-four years ago—when my mother died” (MOB, 79). The immensity of that life force is nearly “indescribable,” rendering

“all images too static”—“somehow,” she writes, “into that picture must be brought […] the sense of movement and change” (ibid.). To Bergson, such a picture would be impossible, because language, on account of its iterative structure, is incapable of capturing the vitality of life, of its contingent processes of perpetual change. He defines language, and discursive thought, as an essentially pragmatic tool whose static categories organize the world so that we can act upon it and control it. To Woolf, however, language encompasses the same vitalism she discerns in subjective life (or consciousness), the force, that is, of contingent differentiation.75

In her 1937 BBC lecture, entitled “Craftmanship,” she refers to “one of the most mysterious properties of words […] the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words” (DM, 203). Like Derrida‟s

75 Bergson discusses, for example, the distinction between light and brightness. He situates light as a quality in the world, measurable in units of kilowatts and attributable to a particular source (a candle, a desk lamp, the sun), qualities that quite adequately fit the immobile categories of language. Brightness, however, entails the experience we have of that light, the experience whose contingent dynamism can not be captured by language, which, according to Bergson, merely quantifies things. Thus, he explains, the same source of light can engender varying degrees of brightness depending on the sensitivity of one‟s eyes at a particular moment; certain eye drops, for instance, bring about sensations of such intense brightness that sunglasses are required, even though the quantity of light may have remained unchanged. Like Bergson, Woolf acknowledges that subjective states, as they emerge from the contingencies of a body‟s encounter with the world, possess singular textures and qualities, but she does not believe that language is inherently incapable of conveying the quality of those states. Already in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill” she explores illness as a state through which new sensations, perceptions emerge, revealing in each person “a virgin forest.” She proposes, therefore, that literature should therefore attend much more to such bodily states as an occasion to seek out a “new language…subtle, sensual, obscene” for “a new hierarchy of passions; love must be deposed in favor of a temperature of 104” (E 4, 319)., 234

notion of différance, which locates meaning in the contingent operations of language,

Woolf points to “the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence” (ibid). She emphasizes, moreover, that, when it comes to using them, when it comes to writing, there are no rules or laws for “putting them in the right order”; “[a] few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them” (DM,

205). The relative lack of constraints is due to the fact, she repeatedly insists, that “they live in the mind” where they live “much as human beings live”—“variously and strangely, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together” (ibid.).76

Words thus possess the ability to engender unforeseen alliances, forever acting in utterly unpredictable—“most irresponsible, most unteachable”—ways, because, she stresses, “it is their nature to change” (DM, 205, 206).

This vitalism—or, to continue the metaphor, this promiscuity—Woolf finds in language, finally, explains why she, in A Sketch of the Past, connects the “shocks” of her

“moments of being” to her “scene making,” a phrase that signifies at once a literary practice and affective performances deemed psychologically or morally aberrant. She stresses though that her “scene making” does not literally constitute a particular method—“a means of summing up and making a knot out of innumerable little threads”

(MOB, 142). Woolf‟s scenes do not encapsulate that what already is, but, instead, herald new becomings: “a scene always come to the top” and “confirms me in my instinctive notion […] that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what is convenient to call reality”

76 “Royal words mate with commoners, English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady‟s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid” (DM, 205). 235

(ibid.) At these moments, “without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene” (ibid.). While the “shocks” of “moments of being” are, at times painful, she regards them as “particularly valuable” for, by putting them into words, by “making the scene come right” she arrives at her “philosophy that […] the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art” (MB, 72). In writing, she thus locates the very creativity she discerns in life. She explains that “Hamlet or a

Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no

Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words, we are the music” (ibid.). Life, like Woolf‟s scenes, does not unfold according to a divine plan nor is it the result of an aesthetic design, but is a process of contingent changes and, like the vitality through which words and sounds can combine in unpredictable ways, capable of fostering novelty. This is not to say, though, that she suggests that her “scene making” somehow amounts to a more realistic representation of life, but that, to cite Deleuze‟s words, “writing is inseparable from becoming.”77

Dodgings

In Between the Acts, the scenes on and off the stage are marked by interruptions:

Mrs Manresa and William Dodge‟s unannounced visit to Pointz Hall, Bart‟s harsh disruption of his grandson‟s musings, and the newspaper account of a rape in Whitehall that disrupts the conversation Lucy and Bart have had “every summer, for seven summers now […] would it be wet or fine” (BA, 22). Miss La Trobe‟s pageant, moreover, is

77 Gilles Deleuze, “Literature and Life.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Transl. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1. 236

punctuated by a series of events (the bellowing of cows, a sudden rain shower, airplanes flying over, the sputterings of the gramophone) that appear to interrupt her play, although some of these interruptions leave the audience wondering whether they are not in fact part of La Trobe‟s design—such as the moment when “the hindquarters of the donkey, represented by Albert the idiot, became active. Intentional was it, or accidental?” (BA,

171) This uncertainty is actually indicative of the particular role the playwright occupies in the text.

Like the setting of Between the Acts (see footnote 67), the figure of Miss La Trobe is “at the very heart” of the text, but also “remote” to it, for she is the author of the novel‟s central action, the village play, of which she also the director, though one who insists on remaining behind the scenes, working “down among the bushes” (BA, 150).

She is, moreover, not quite of this village, where it is rumored that “with that name she wasn‟t presumably pure English. From the Channel Islands perhaps?” and “that she had kept a tea shop at Winchester; that had failed” and that “she had bought a four-roomed cottage and shared it with an actress” (BA, 57-8). In short, “very little was actually known about her,” except, perhaps, that “she wasn‟t altogether a lady” and that, for sure,

“she had a passion for getting things up” (ibid.). With her impure national affiliations, shady past, and Sapphic inclinations, La Trobe is “an outcast,” always “cut [by] the women in the cottages” (BA, 211). And, yet, this “swarthy, sturdy and thick set” lesbian—who strides “about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth, often with a whip in her hand”—imagines for the villagers and inhabitants of

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Pointz Hall a series of scenes in which they all play “our parts,” as Bart Oliver notes;

“she makes everyone do something,” Isabella explains.

On a more structural level, though, the personae of Miss La Trobe structures, I would argue, the textual back and forth movement between inside and outside—between acts on the stage and acts off the stage, between the play and its audience, between individual memories and collective histories, even between readers in the text and readers of the text. She obtains this particular significance not because she is, as Gillian Beer asserts, “a loner […] separate, pugnacious, imaginative; the one who can imagine community because she is cast out.”78 La Trobe‟s dissident status (as a sexual outsider, a possible foreigner) does not automatically endow her with a vision of or better perspective on what or who that community is, or should be. If anything, her play actually omits the military and the “Grand Ensemble,” the conventional bulwarks of

British pageantry and loci of collective identification. Mrs. Mayhew, for one, is disappointed: “why,” she asks, “leave out the Army, as my husband was saying, if it‟s history?” (BA, 178) Rather than soliciting a sense of communal belonging to the nation and its achievements, La Trobe‟s play involves, as Beer acknowledges, “an extraordinary liquidation of the expected triumphalist summary” that conventionally marks a pageant‟s ending.79 This playwright does not represent the present moment through the usual, patriotic celebration of church, state, and the military, but, instead, has her actors hold up

78 Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 146. 79 Ibid., 145. The lead up to the final scene thus exasperates some members of the audience: “‟What‟s she keeping us waiting for?‟ Colonel Mayhew asked irritably…Mrs. Mayhew agreed. Unless of course she was going to end with a Grand Ensemble. Army; Navy; Union Jack; and behind them perhaps—Mrs. Mayhew sketched what she would have done had it been her pageant—the Church. In cardboard” (BA, 179). 238

mirrors to the audience, thereby unsettling and dispersing the latter: it was “so distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair […] the audience saw themselves, not whole by any means” (BA 184, 185).

What renders Miss La Trobe a pivotal figure in this text is, I propose, the fact that she brings the generic and narrative registers of the novel itself off kilter. The final lines—“Then the curtain rose. They spoke”—, after all, intimate that the dramatic arts are not entirely contained within the generic frame of the novel (BA, 219). The “they” here refers to Isa and Giles Oliver, who, on the day of the pageant, have not spoken to each other, but now, at midnight, are “left alone for the first time together that day,” at which point also “the house had lost its shelter” and transforms these two inhabitant into

“dwellers in caves [watching] from some high place among the rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke” (ibid.). This is also the very scene La Trobe imagines when, a few pages earlier, she muses on her next play featuring two people at midnight, unprotected by the shelter of the manor house, merely and partially by rocks. “I should group then,”

La Trobe pictures, “here. It would be midnight; there would be two figures, half concealed by a rock. The curtain would rise. What would the first words be? The words escaped her” (BA, 210). That the first words between Isa and Giles are not included in

(escape?) the novel further enmeshes its narrative discourse with that of Miss La Trobe for whom “another plays always lay behind the play she had just written” (BA, 63). Are we then, in fact, reading the play that La Trobe has “just written”—or the one that lies behind it? 80 The indeterminacy of the location and identity of the text‟s narrative voice

80 This is not to suggest that the authorial figure of Miss La Trobe, the playwright, is thus somehow a stand- in for the author of Between the Acts. Pageants became quite a vogue during the thirties and a number of 239

implies, in any case, that the play contained within the framework of the novel may also contain it. It is, Woolf announces in her dairy, “to become in the end a play,” ambiguously predicting that Between the Acts will, upon its completion, be a play and that the novel will conclude as the becoming of a play (D5, 139).

La Trobe‟s invitation, at the conclusion of the pageant, to consider “the orts, scraps and fragments” that make up “this wall, this great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization” also describes the particular disjointedness of the novel‟s narrative voice—at the same time that is also captures the work‟s citational practice. In regard to the latter, Between the Acts is probably Woolf‟s most densely allusive works, referencing a wide range of literary works (La Trobe‟s “orts, scraps and fragments” is itself a citation from Shakespeare‟s Troilus and Cressida) as well as non-literary texts, such as

Trevelyan‟s History of England and the writings of Darwin, Eddington, and Jeans.81 “The book,” as Gillian Beer puts it, “is not so much studded with quotation and allusion as combed through.” Its dense citationality, in other words, lacks the coherence to intertextually anchor (“stud”) the work in a particular literary tradition, but traverses the text like “waifs & strays” (to cite Woolf herself when she contemplated “the many different things” of which the novel should be “composed” [D 5, 135]). Literary fragments are frequently misremembered or misquoted in the musings of the individual

Woolf‟s acquaintances, including E.M. Forster, used the form to invoke Englishness from a range of perspectives, nostalgic, critical, etc. In early 1940, Woolf herself was solicited to compose a pageant; she had become, she wrote, “an active member of the Women‟s Institute, who‟ve just asked me to write a play for the villagers to act. And to produce it myself” (L5, 391). She declined, though at that point she had already created Miss La Trobe and the latter‟s play so that, if anything, fiction preceded life. 81 Both Eddington and Jeans introduced contemporary scientific developments to a popular audience; Eddington focused on Einstein‟s theory of relativity, while Jeans explained modern mathematical physics in, among others, his 1929 The Universe Around Us, one of the works Woolf read as she was working on Between the Acts. In it, Jeans writes that “the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a machine” (cited in Lee, 611-2). 240

characters or in the conversations between them. In fact, Miss La Trobe‟s play is itself frequently cited by her audience, when, for instance, William Dodge and Isa, upon encountering each other during the interval, playfully rehearse to last lines of the scene just performed: “‟Hail, sweet Carintha. My love. My life,‟ he quoted. „My lord, liege,‟ she bowed ironically” (105).

This exchange between a gay man and an older woman in the saccharine language of heterosexual romance, scripted by Miss La Trobe, also points us to the ways in which the playwright herself critically engages with heterosexuality. After all, with the exception of the final act, her pageant consistently puts heterosexuality to the service of the restoration of subjects to their proper identity and class (Carintha is revealed to be a

Princess and falls in love with the beggar Fernando when he turns out to be the long lost heir); in another playlette, heterosexual romance is the romance of Britain‟s imperial, colonial aspirations (Edgar and Eleanor fall in love when they discover their sharing

“long[ing] to convert the heathen” [166]); and in the scene representing the Victorian age, the guardian of “respectability, and prosperity, and the purity of Victoria‟s land” is the patriarch who, at night, returns to his ideal family, the edifying “fire of „Ome” (172). La

Trobe‟s satirical depictions of these heterosexual romance plots underscore the fictionality of their conventions, although that fictionality renders them no less powerful.

Thus when Isa looks at the picture of her husband, she contemplates the “love for her husband”—“‟The father of my children,‟ she added, slipping into the cliché conveniently provided by fiction” (14). A little later she repeats the same phrase: “the father of my children. It worked, that old cliché; she felt pride” (39). While this cliché may give her

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the momentary affective reward of pride, Isa is nevertheless impatient with the plot of heterosexuality. “Did the plot matter?” she wonders; after all, “it was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love; and hate” (90).

The plot of her marriage with Giles, as it unfolds between the acts of La Trobe‟s pageant, involves indeed these mere two emotions. As a seemingly ideal couple, with two fine children, they embody the love “conveniently provided by fiction”—they resemble, in other words, a love already constructed as ideal. Throughout the day, however, the couple entertains a hostile silence; their relations, as Dodge observes, are “as people say in novels „strained‟” (79). By way of Isa‟s scorn for her husband, Woolf traces the particular violences through which men exert their heterosexuality—through their misogynist possessiveness (according to which, among others things, “his infidelity” made no difference—“but hers did” [110]), and through their homophobic aggressions leveled at other men. Within this straight regime, the affective economy of love and hate is stultifyingly rigid and predictable, so that when, for instance, Isa‟s father-in-law scares her son frightfully, he declares the child a “coward.” When Giles discerns in Dodge “not a man to have straightforward love for a woman,” “a teaser and a twitcher,” he finds

“another peg on which to hand his rage as one hangs a coat on a peg” (60)—a response to a gay men presumably just as fitting as a coat on a peg. A little later, as Giles glances at

Dodge, the latter, again, produces the same affect: “He [Giles] knew not what his left hand was doing. It was a bit of luck—that he could despise him” (111). Isa, for her part, can not bear her husband‟s masculine assertions: “‟No,‟” she says, “as plainly as world could say it. „I don‟t admire you,” and looked, not at his face, but at his feet. „Silly little

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boy, with blood on his boots‟” (ibid.) Gilles‟ tennis shoes are bloodstained from killing a snake choking on a toad it had swallowed, a “monstrous inversion,” in Gilles‟s eyes, and killing “was action” (99).

“This brutality against the toad-engorged snake,” Stephen Barber argues,

“operates as a metaphor for the siting of homosexuality in an instant of murderous homophobia” and “is „recognized‟ [as such] by Dodge.”82 In an earlier scene, after all, he refers to himself as “a flickering, mind-divided little snake in the grass […]; as Giles saw” (73). While Dodge‟s sighting of Giles violent interpellation does not, in fact, constitute an event on the narrative level of the text, it nonetheless, as Barber points out, effects “an outing and opening of another kind by the novel.” For by citing “Giles‟s

„seeing‟” as the “sociocultural citation” that it is, Between the Acts also dislodges— indeed, dodges—it. Barber explains: “While the Freudian narrative arguably construes homosexuality as a failure of teleology, Woolf‟s novel raises this „half-man,‟ this „half- breed,‟ to the noble height of a gaiety that cuts (with) teleology and figures Dodge the misfit as an emancipatory instance of catachrestical homosexuality.”83

Moreover, the scene within which this takes places further underscores, I would argue, Woolf‟s evacuation of psychoanalysis‟s teleologies. Dodge‟s confession happens—or actually does not happen—in the context of his encounter with Lucy

Swithin, Isa‟s aunt, who has invited him up to view the private upstairs of Pointz Hall.

There, “truants” (72) together, “he wished to kneel before her, to kiss her hand, and to say

[…] So he wished to say; but said nothing” (73). As a disclosure of a sexual truth, his

82 Barber, “Lip Reading,” Novel Gazing, 419. 83 Ibid.—emphasis in the text. 243

sexual truth, it indeed says nothing; it is, rather, an account of the consequences of the

Freudian reduction of very divergent affective investments to the monolithic demands of the sexual drives, so that it can not conceive, as I have argued above, of affects

(interestedness, attraction, affection) between men and women—at least those that are not biologically related—in any other way than as somehow a manifestation of the libido.

This frames Dodge‟s account of the degrading and disgraceful consequences of such heterosexualizing imperatives: “At school they held me under a bucket of dirty water,

Mrs. Swithin; when I looked up, the world was dirty; so I married; but my child‟s not my child, Mrs. Swithin” (73). However, Dodge repudiates the shame (and shaming) of his putatively inadequate love for women, of not having produced a child in his marriage, by refusing to articulate it. Against this phobic regime, he “wishe[s] to kneel before [Lucy], to kiss her hand,” enacting a relationality that radically refuses the mobilization of male homosexuality in the service of misogyny. Indeed, the suggestion here is one of a marriage, but one that counters its compulsive teleologies, for, like Dodge, Lucy herself represents, quite gloriously, a failure of psychosexual development on account of her supposed naïveté and childlike disposition. Thus, in her conversation with Dodge, “she smiled a ravishing girl‟s smile” (72) at him; “Mrs Swithin,” he contemplates, “you‟ve healed me” (73). By way of this encounter, as well as the subsequent one between Isa and

Dodge (“when they talked as if they had know each other all their lives,” perhaps because, as Dodge observes, “we‟ve never met before, and never shall again” [114]),

Woolf offers a way of thinking affective economies outside the teleological demands of the Freudian drives—outside that, in Isa‟s words, repetitive “plot” of “love; and hate”

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(90) according to which, Woolf‟s narrator/La Trobe concludes, husband and wife “must fight” and “after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born” (219).

Lucy and Miss La Trobe represent, in this respect, alternative forces of vitality through which Woolf explores a more dynamic model of affective life. Lucy‟s brother,

Bart, frequently ridicules what he dismisses as his sister‟s naïveté and irrational religious beliefs, yet her mind appears to re-work such input in quite unexpected ways. “What an angel she was,” Isa marvels, “the old woman! Thus to salute the children; to beat up against those immensities and the old man‟s [Bart‟s] irreverences her skinny hands, her laughing eyes! How courageous to defy Bart and the weather” (24). The latter can not understand why, “in Lucy‟s skull […] there existed a prayable being” (25). Yet, she doesn‟t “invest it [god] with hair, teeth or toenails,” we read, but figures it as “a force or a radiance” through which “the thrush and the worm; the tulip and the hound” emerge. The villagers have nicknamed her “Old Flimsy,” an act of condescension that, unlike Lucy‟s

“fancies,” bears “indelibly the print of some three hundred years of customary behaviour”

(27). She reads “an Outline of History” as an occasion for her own acts of “imaginative construction of the past”; to her, reading offers opportunities for “flights into past or future; or sidelong down corridors and alleys” (9).84 Miss La Trobe pageant is thus to

Lucy an utter delight, for, while she is “unsure of what it meant,” she has found in the

84 These non-linear imaginative flights into visions of “rhododendron forests in Piccadilly” populated by “elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters” also make that “it took [Lucy] five seconds in actual time, in mind time, ever so much longer, to separate Grace [the maid] herself, with blue china on a tray, from the leather-covered grunting monster who was about, as the door opened, to demolish a whole tree” (9). In this description, there are distinct echoes of both Bergson‟s and William James‟s conceptions of perceptual dynamics. 245

playwright‟s creation an occasion for becoming, for becoming different from her-self.

She congratulates La Trobe, informing the playwright that “‟you‟ve made me feel I could have played… Cleopatra‟”—“‟You‟ve stirred in me my unacted part,‟ she meant” (153).

With La Trobe, who has “cut the knot in the centre” of the plot, Lucy shares a vision of life as a dynamic force of creation, which Woolf captures through the imagery of the murky and unpredictable operations of aquatic life (91). After the conclusion of the pageant, Lucy stands gazing at the pond and, in it, discerns her “vision” of

“ourselves” as, to her surprise, “her favorite fantail” surfaces: “The golden orfe followed.

Then she had a glimpse of silver—the great carp himself, who came to the surface so very seldom. They slid on, in and out between the stalks, silver; pink; gold; splashed; streaked; pied. „Ourselves,‟ she murmured” (205). This “vision” of unpredictable emergences, a “fluidity” Lucy “protected […] for herself, every morning, kneeling”

(206) contrasts with the linearity of the plot “of love, then of hate” Isa, earlier on, so despises. Tellingly, when she contemplates “the bars of [this] prison […] of love, then of hate,” Isa is parched and longs for water, longs even to be emerged within it.85 This is also what La Trobe desires—“what she wanted, like that carp […] was darkness in the mud” (203)—and indeed accomplishes, for, unlike Isa, who met her husband when he caught her a fish, La Trobe enters this fruitful realm.86 Drinking in the pub, the playwright sinks “down into the mud” and it “became fertile. Words rose […] Words

85 “Love and hate—how they tore her asunder! Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out of the bushes…”(215) 86 Woolf‟s announcement that Between the Acts was to be composed of, among other strays, “waifs” (see D5, 135) betrays her stress on the unpredictability and contingencies involved in (literary) processes of creation. After all, according to the O.E.D., a “waif” is not only a homeless or helpless person, often a child, but also denotes “an ownerless object or animal, a thing cast up by or drifting in the sea brought by an unknown agency.” 246

without meaning—wonderful words” (212). Whereas Isa hides her poems in “an account book in case Giles suspected,” La Trobe finds the first scenes of her next play in a public watering hole, where words rise for a new plot that has still to acquire meaning.

247