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Theories of Non-Productivity in Victorian Contexts This Dissertation

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Theories of Non-Productivity in Victorian Contexts This Dissertation 1 Chapter One Impossible Economies: Theories of Non-Productivity in Victorian Contexts This dissertation is about a set of key paradoxes in Victorian thought. In general terms, it defines a series of interlocking mental habits at mid-century, and maps the diverse deployments of those habits in contemporary locations of knowledge. My focus resides with several formative scientific studies that I read alongside parallel developments in the realist novel, moral philosophy, and social critique. But my main purpose in doing so is not to re-construct the lines of a distinct disciplinary formation so much as to recover a richer range of cultural confluences and epistemic patterns. More precisely, I discuss the ways in which major Victorian texts understood the shifting boundaries between the individual and the group—and, namely, the breakdown of cooperative bonds. Whereas older norms of natural explanation had emphasized the reciprocal relationship between part and whole, in keeping with the watch-like regularities promulgated by natural theology, these texts turned time after time to the function of the prodigal part--the exception that failed to signify within the larger life of the group. This emphasis held equally true in theories of human bodies, of communities, and of the created cosmos at large. To inquire into the natural order, in this context, was to note the recurrence of those elements which were wasteful or otherwise non- productive within the orderly operations of the whole. The paradoxes that emerged 2 among this state of affairs, and their relation to the formal and perspectival patterns of the novel, form my central concerns in the chapters to follow. In particular terms, then, the dissertation deals with a distinctive epistemological turn: the emergence of non-productive or "diffusive" systems in British prose. Far from productively re-incorporating waste, such systems were defined by patterns of insuperable disorder over time. I situate these models of non-productivity in terms of science (in the developing domains of natural inquiry) and aesthetics (in the patterns and purposes of the multiplot novel). To be sure, these texts turned upon figures which were counter to the productive operations of an organism. But with routine regularity, those figures provided the very grounds for more roundabout routes of influence and inspiration. The effect, I argue, was to destabilize many structuring oppositions in Victorian thinking: between fertility and infertility, progress and postponement, order and dispersion. Displacing patterns of perfect reciprocity, these texts suggested how forms of systemic breakdown might actually release the potential for positive improvement. Thus conceived, the dissertation questions a commonplace myth about Victorian thought: that novelists invoked naturalistic notions of order against the specter of social disaggregation. Much to the contrary, I argue, models of non-productivity provided a new foundation for imagining moral and social progress. I turn to three particular points of scientific inquiry within this context. First, I consider the paradoxical persistence of non- reproductive sexualities (the evolution of sterile organisms). Second, I turn to the quantification of sensory delay (the measurement of the exact velocity of the nerves). Third and finally, I analyze the discovery of cosmic dissipation (the ineluctable loss of energy in the universe). These theories emphasized phenomena that appeared prodigal 3 and purposeless, in every case contrary to ordinary physical and life processes. Yet, I want to resist the impulse to read these theories as symptoms of larger social anxiety, for such concepts were absolutely central to the Victorians' efforts to imagine a regenerated society. As writers explored the meanings in non-productivity, they were drawn to several specific paradoxes at the heart of British society, relating to sexual, economic, cognitive, and affective characteristics. Why, as Charles Darwin would ask in the 1840s and after, did nature preserve and in fact foster sexually infertile figures? In other words, how could these individuals make social contributions without recourse to the powers of personal legacy? Likewise, in the realm of cognition and sensation, the discovery of sensory delay in 1852 posed new problems and produced new possibilities for social thinking, especially as medical authorities began to characterize delay as a distinctive new problem in industrial life. How could physiological postponement serve as a basis for more expansive, fully realized relations in society, rather than function as an impediment to them? A third paradox involved the erosion of energy itself—that is, the theory of entropy. While energy lost its capacity to perform productive work, scientists found, it continued to circulate within the universe at large. To what extent could the fact of cosmic decay become consistent with organic growth? It is central to my purposes to show how the symbolic potentials of non- productivity, in Victorian science, were bound up with the formal and political premises of the realist novel. In particular, all of the novels that I address are linked by a common concern with the individual exception—that is, the aberration which failed to fit within the productivist logic of the group. Whereas older organicist thinkers held that no 4 individual could be abstracted from the larger life of the whole, these fictions enlisted new scientific theories to show the very value of such anomalous agents themselves. As I shall show, these exceptions served to render that logic visible and available for critique. In my readings of Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, then, I focus upon characters who fail to contribute to the group and appear antithetical to its progress. So, for instance, chapter two traces a common constellation of ideas about sexual non-productivity in Dickens and evolutionary biology, focusing upon Dickens's representation of the bachelor in Dombey and Son (1848) and Darwin's developing interest in the recurrence of sterile subjects. While these subjects failed to find reproductive partners, their sexual renunciations released the potential for more mediated and roundabout routes of influence within the community at large. To be sure, Dickens's bachelors appear in ostensible opposition to the main marriage plot, and do not produce progeny of their own. But the major work of the novel is to undo this apparent polarity between reproductive and non-reproductive relationships, positioning these exceptional figures as vital to the union of the romantic couple--and, with them, to the future life of the community as a whole. These exceptions appeared apart from the reproductive logic of the group, but, as Dickens and Darwin would suggest, they preserved their traits of sympathy and self-sacrifice through the preservation of close relations. Like Jarvis Lorry, who serves as a personal friend to Doctor Manette and his daughter Lucie in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the two bachelors in Dombey and Son prove paradoxically productive to the future life of the community. Defined as evolutionary "dead ends" and devoid of personal legacies, they still possess powerful vitality at the level of the greater aggregate. The trajectory of my argument begins with the intellectual legacies of natural 5 theology in the later 1840s, and with writers' declining faith in the essential stability, intelligibility, and coherence of the cosmic order. Concentrating upon the writings of the Anglican minister and reformer Charles Kingsley, and his social protest novel Alton Locke (1850), I attend to the tensions latent within established Christian cosmologies at the time. While working to reveal God's laws to ordinary workers, Kingsley's sympathy with the plight of the poor led him towards a different view, so as to stress the very inefficiencies and flaws in natural design. Even as his novel seeks to affirm the integrity of God's plan, then, it turns out to emphasize precisely its failures of fit. Alton Locke serves as a point of origin for my larger purposes insofar as it implies both the horizons of natural theology and a simultaneous shift toward new notions of excess and exceptionality in natural design. Departing from earlier accounts that could comprehend signs of disorder only as indications of greater coherence, subsequent British thinkers took up the nature and effects of such signs everywhere in the world. The subsequent chapters chart the vicissitudes of this shift, and show how, for many Victorians, the very imperfections and flaws in natural forms could create the conditions for moral and political amelioration. In its account of non-productivity in Victorian fiction, the dissertation offers a larger contribution to the history of aesthetics, specifically by showing how the realist novel laid a foundation, at mid-century, for subsequent aestheticist theories about the purposelessness of art at the fin de siècle. For example, chapter three discusses the ways in which the endlessly hesitating hero of Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1866) provided a way of positioning the novel in contrast to emergent epistemologies of efficient labor, just as the two bachelor figures in Dickens's Dombey and Son suggested alternatives to 6 established economies of patriarchal (re)production. Taken together, the following chapters argue that discourses of non-productivity presented powerful stimuli for new, Arnoldian assumptions about the autonomy of art
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