Struck: the Victorian Female Novelist and Male Pain

Home , Marie Corelli, Pain (musical project), The Sorrows of Satan, Violence in art

Struck: The Victorian Female Novelist and Male Pain

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Colleen Morrissey, MA

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2018

Dissertation Committee:

Robyn Warhol, Advisor

Amanpal Garcha

Jill Galvan

Sandra Macpherson

Colleen Morrissey

2018 Abstract

Feminists and gender theorists need a better way of thinking about what it means for a

Victorian male character to be in pain. Because we’ve thoroughly codified the reduction of female characters to vulnerable bodies, we’ve ended up with an essentialist association between pain, femininity, and disempowerment. Male characters’ pain doesn’t result from disempowerment or oppression, and so its representation enables female novelists to explore suffering to various political and aesthetic ends. This dissertation illuminates how three Victorian women novelists use this same figure—the suffering man—to highlight different intersections between pain, gender, and the novel form. In Wuthering Heights

(1847), Emily Brontë does not imagine a just world in which men’s violence is punished but rather creates an aesthetic space in which pain becomes a spiritualized artistic medium. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), on the other hand, rejects the political expedience of a sensationless industrial masculinity and advocates instead for the pains of erotic love. Finally, Marie Corelli foments aesthetic and political heresy in her bestselling novel The Sorrows of Satan (1895), which combines Satan and Christ into a tortured outcast genius who both desires and rejects the approval of establishment authorities. Because critics have shown how commonly Victorian female characters in pain are figured either as self-sacrificing martyrs or justly punished sinners, critics have tended to refer to male characters’ pain as “feminization,” which they have conflated with reformation. Ultimately, however, I show that rather than merely weaving fantasies of ii punishing patriarchs, these three novelists reconfigured the relationship between torture, gendered justice, and the novel in unexpected and uncomfortable ways.

iii Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my family, who have always supported my education, and to my fiancé Sean Kamperman.

iv Acknowledgements

This dissertation was an effort that would not have been possible without the support of many people in my life. I would like to take a moment to thank them for their role in my graduate education.

First, so many thanks to my soon-to-be husband, Sean Kamperman, for his unfailing love and for taking such good care of me, our home, and our cat while I’ve finished this dissertation. I thank my family, especially my parents, who have given me so much, and Aunt Patty and Aunt Carolyn, who, as PhDs, have offered advice, perspective, and commiseration.

I consider myself unspeakably lucky to have such an amazing adviser in Robyn

Warhol. Robyn’s stunning generosity has made completing this degree so much more rewarding. She has spent innumerable hours counseling me, responding to my work, and encouraging my professional and personal goals. I could not envision a better mentor. I consider her my true friend, and I cannot thank her enough.

So many sincere thanks also go to my committee members. Jill Galvan, who provided guidance from the very first moments of this dissertation in her literature and dissertation-writing courses, has always given me a perspective I knew I would get nowhere else. She has clarified so many tangles in my ideas. Amanpal Garcha was there for me whenever I needed options. He not only provided multiple ways to move forward,

v he also provided the down-to-earth advice that I really needed amid all of the abstraction.

Sandra Macpherson’s insight blows me away. She was the person who showed me the

true theoretical stakes of what I was trying to say.

Thanks, too, goes to the steadfast support of my English A-team friends, who have offered the best distractions as well as the best support: Caitlyn “Gam” McLoughlin,

Zach “bbz” Harvat, Pritha “PP” Prisad, Lou “Louise Marie” Maraj, and Drew “just

Drew” Sweet. Untold credit goes to my “perverse dissertation” exchange group: Michael

Harwick, whose genius has made my own ideas sound so much smarter, and Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman, whose style and insight made me see nineteenth-century literature in a whole new light.

Finally, thanks goes to all of my teachers, colleagues, friends, and students at

OSU and also at the University of Kansas, who all contributed to this accomplishment in many, many ways.

Vita

2006...... Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart

2010...... Bachelor of Arts, English, University of

Iowa

2012...... Master of Arts, English, University of

Kansas

2013 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of English, The Ohio State University

Publications

“A Genealogy of Collision: Robyn Schiff’s A Woman of Property,” Review Essay. Iowa

Journal of Cultural Studies 17.1 (Spring 2017): 54-58.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

vii Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………… v

Vita ...... vii

Table of Contents ...... viii

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1. “The Colours of the Rainbow”: Blood, Bruising, and the Painful Artistry of Wuthering Heights ...... 43

Chapter 2. Alive to Distant, Dead to Near: Masochism, Suicide, and Masculinity in

North and South ...... 98

Chapter 3. Rewriting the Romantic Satan: Marie Corelli, Our Lady of Perpetual Pain

…………………………………………………………………………………………..149

Conclusion & Coda ...... 191

Bibliography ...... 199

viii Introduction

Foreword: “No Pain, No Gain”

For a good four years in my early twenties, I was lost in the gym. An initially

modest fitness regimen that shaved a few pounds from my body became, slowly, a

grueling regimen of self-punishment. As my fat shrunk and my limbs hardened, I relished

the way I looked, yes, but I grew to relish more the constant ache of exhausted, overworked muscles. Perhaps this was not so unexpected a turn from a cradle Catholic, educated from kindergarten to twelfth grade in Catholic schools where I was taught to emulate the suffering of Christ and the saints. Working out began to feel like a holy

penance. First I was punishing myself for all those years of preteen and teenage

indulgence in mozzarella sticks, in ramen noodles, in peanut butter. Then I continued to

hurt myself, exercising to the point of injury and denying myself enough food, because I

knew that self-betterment and self-control required pain. That’s the hokey slogan of all

athletes and gym-rats, after all—no pain, no gain.

Some time into my gym days, I became convinced that the real path to perfection

lay not in running on the treadmill or slaloming on the elliptical but in lifting heavy

weights. Cardio is all very well, but strength training is the real deal, a much more precise

and visible measure of one’s discipline. Over the years, a woman lifting heavy weights 1 has become a commoner sight, but when I started down that path, every gym I walked into was segregated by gender. Women occupied the treadmills, ellipticals, and bikes.

Men occupied the weight room. So I was usually the only woman in that particular area of the gym, lifting quietly among the jacked men who groaned or screamed every time they bench-pressed or squatted. Strength training was, and still is, men’s domain. When working out, women are told not to “bulk up” lest we lose our feminine curves and softness.

I felt a strange combination of hostility and solidarity with the men in the weight room. I began to read and internalize slogans from the active online lifting community, overwhelmingly written by and for men:

Better sore than sorry.

Pain is weakness leaving the body.

I saw these slogans over and over again as I researched how to tone my arms or abs. I even saw them on t-shirts at the gym. My favorite was, I don’t stop when I’m tired.

I stop when I’m finished. It encapsulated my total control over my body which, in turn, was proof of my discipline, my virtue. One of the many things I did not realize at the time was that I was, in some ways, coopting a “masculine” standard of virtue. Women’s self- control was supposed to look like a thin, slightly toned but not too muscular body. It was supposed to look like abstinence. It wasn’t supposed to look like swollen muscles and explosive strength.

The men in the weight room let me know, in a thousand small ways, that I did not belong there. They would approach me to ask if I was “done” with machines and weights

I was obviously still using. They wouldn’t wipe their own sweat off the machines after 2 they’d used them, even though they could see me waiting to use the machine after them.

Most infuriating of all, they wouldn’t rerack their weights. They would leave several

forty-five-pound plates on the squat bars, making any person who wanted to lift less

painstakingly remove all those plates themselves before they could use the bar. Anyone

who hadn’t cultivated the upper body strength to lift forty-five pounds with ease would

struggle awkwardly to remove the plates. I’ve witnessed several women stagger under

plates left on bars by careless or hostile (hostilely careless) men. The gendered nature of

lifting is even amusingly apparent in the aggressive meme that has arisen out of men

challenging the rigor of each other’s routines: Do you even lift, bro?

Though the environment in the weight room marginalized me, in many ways I

wanted the same thing that these men did. I wanted to prove, through painful physical

feats, the power of my will and the strength of my character. In this world, my strain, my

soreness, even my injuries, only heightened my achievement. During this period, I pulled

one of the sacral muscles in my lower back while doing deadlifts. I was in pain for

weeks. I still came to the gym. Pain is weakness leaving the body.

This is a dissertation about pain. But even more than that, this is a dissertation about stories and how those stories shape what we see as the meaning behind experiences as fundamental as pain. The slogans I internalized during those obsessive gym years are little stories unto themselves, stories I would tell myself about how the pain was transforming me. Pain is weakness leaving the body. In one sentence, a moral causal agent appears behind the sensory experience, and the pain becomes the sign of my moral and physical strengthening. I hurt becomes the story: I hurt because I am doing 3 something good. The more I hurt, the better my workout and thus, the better person I am

for exhibiting the willingness to endure it, enjoy it, even desire it.

This kind of story is everywhere.

Struck: An Introduction

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Prussian-born Eugen Sandow

became the Anglophone world’s “first” and most famous body builder. His new approach

to physical fitness “permanently transformed the Western ideal of the male body, and

made the achievement of that ideal a matter of individual will” (Scott 91-92). The

“Sandow system” of bodybuilding was a drastic departure from the earlier “muscular

Christian” standard of masculinity, to say nothing of its backlash against the

contemporary languid, Aesthetic masculinity of Oscar Wilde and his ilk. In both the

muscular Christian and the new Sandow standards, a man’s physical fitness did indeed

denote moral worth, but lifting weights is not the same as playing a rousing game of

rugby, which, in muscular Christian proponent Charles Kingsley’s mind, cultivated

toughness, competitiveness, and a sense of fairness. Lifting weights is a solitary exercise;

it “focuses on individual determination and strength” (Scott 91-92). Even framing

weightlifting as preparation for service to the empire is merely a hypothetical pretext,

since most Englishmen in imperial service positions filled the decidedly cerebral roles of

clerks, secretaries, etc.1 Sandow’s approach reframed the nature of masculine exercise from one of team-oriented, chivalric sport—in which enjoyment and play are important

1 See Stoler for more on colonial administration. 4 factors—to solo feats in which one’s entire body becomes the triumphant sign of past pain endured.

There’s an uncanny kinship, a kind of inversion and yet similitude, between the

built-up male body whose muscles are the signs of his moral fortitude and the martyred

male body whose wounds, the breakdown of his body, signal the same. Rather than polar

opposites of bodily integrity and bodily permeability, the male bodybuilder and the male

martyr in fact communicate the same moral standard endemic to a Western Christian

society: that willingly undergone pain, pain desired and realized in the name of self-

punishment or self-betterment (often amounting to the same thing) is the paramount

experience of an ethical human life. Furthermore, this standard has been underexplored as

a prime mover in Victorian society and art, particularly in the novels written by women,

whose works, as I will detail further, have frequently been categorized as agents of

“sympathy” whose effects are seen to alleviate social and personal pain.

Both of these masculine images and conditions—strength and martyrdom—

coexisted and comingled in nineteenth-century England, dotted as it was with the Roman

Catholic Relief Act of 1829, the Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 40s, the Muscular

Christian movement in the 1850s and 60s, Spiritualism and the mystical revival in the last

decades of the century, and the proliferation of dissenting religions throughout Britain.

Victorian studies has offered us many explorations into gender, morality, and religion,

particularly when it comes to the Victorians’ infamous propensity to uphold the holiness

of self-sacrifice. Andrew H. Miller, for instance, has examined the powerful drive for

“moral perfectionism” within “a period and place in which the desire to improve was expressed with revealing intensity and subjected to especially acute pressures” (A. Miller 5 2). More recently, Ian M. Blumberg has tracked mid-century Victorian novelists’ struggle

“to commandeer the cultural and religious potency of the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice in order to negotiate a transition from the conventionally religious English past to a secularizing but still faithful modernity” (1-2).2

Victorian novels’ female characters’ “self-sacrifice” and self-effacing submission to duty has frequently been the subject of criticism, but since the 1990s, the growing field of masculinity studies has shown us that self-sacrifice was a masculine ideal too. James

Eli Adams has argued, for instance, that male writers modeled, through their heroic male characters, “an ascetic regimen, an elaborately articulated program of self-discipline” that reframed “masculinity [itself] as a virtuoso asceticism” (2). Similarly, John Kucich has argued that male imperialists’ willing self-sacrifice for Britannia was sanctified by British culture; that “sanctification transformed pain and finality of death or defeat into pleasurable fantasies of ecstatic rebirth or resurrection” (Imperial Masochism 5). These examinations of male characters’ affective ethics have been invaluable, but they tend almost exclusively to feature that characterization at the hands of male writers.

Miller, for instance, admits to beginning work on his book with the assumption that, in addressing moral perfectionism, he was dealing with “a predominantly masculine dynamic, an exclusive narrative in which men stood as exemplars for one another in homosocial pairings” (13). He goes on to say that although he is now “not so sure” of the purely masculine nature of this British impulse, he grounds his study in the work of male writers—Dickens, James, Mill, and Carlyle, to name a few—with two exceptions for Jane

Austen and George Eliot. Though Kucich devotes a chapter to Olive Schreiner’s

2 See note 15, below, on “secularization.” 6 “fundamentally masochistic dynamic,” his model too is primarily extrapolated from male

writers (Imperial Masochism 97). His references to female writers such as the Brontës

and Elizabeth Gaskell tend to point out counter-examples of the kind of “imperial

masochism” he’s talking about.3 In Kucich’s exploration of a fantasy dreamed for the

most part by men, Schreiner is exceptional, not emblematic. Turning the critical lens to

masculinity is a positive development in Victorian studies, ensuring that women are no

longer the sole objects of scrutiny, found always to be lacking or in excess, but as

Halberstam has reminded us, if male writers, artists, and critics are the only ones allowed

to define masculinity or have a hand in its shaping, we are not truly engaging in non-

hegemonic scholarship.4

The field of nineteenth-century British literary studies proliferates with critical accounts of how women’s gendered identity, real and fictional, is defined by and through suffering. Feminist and gender scholars of the 1980s and 90s, in their work to uncover the devalued female authorial tradition and theorize the female experience, emphasized the physical and mental pain of the female subject—a “natural,” even necessary tactic to infiltrate a cultural and academic discourse that degraded, objectified, or ignored women.

However, because twentieth-century feminists and gender theorists have thoroughly

codified patriarchy’s reduction of women to their bodies’ and minds’ supposed

vulnerabilities, critical thought on the Victorian era has tended to ally pain with the

feminine. When we talk about male characters in Victorian novels by women, we often

talk about how pain and suffering reform them. Many have accepted, for instance, Gilbert

3 See his comments on Jane Eyre, Cranford, and Daniel Deronda (Imperial Masochism 6-8). 4 See Halberstam’s Female Masculinity. 7 and Gubar’s thesis that Rochester’s dispossession, blindness, and other injuries at the end of Jane Eyre (1847) punish him for his misdeeds and compromise his patriarchal power so that he and Jane may at last relate to each other as “equals” (“A Dialogue…” 368).5

Similarly, Nancy Armstrong has influentially argued that female-authored domestic novels like Jane Eyre strip male characters of “political identity” through painful processes: “It is only by thus subordinating all social differences to those based on gender that these novels bring order to social relationships” (Desire and Domestic Fiction 4). In an enactment of reparative fantasy on the part of the woman author, the infliction of pain upon the guilty man (often accompanied by a more-or-less coincidental granting of sudden wealth to the woman) removes the patriarchal threat from the heroine’s love interest, thus paving the way for a (somewhat) egalitarian union. More recently, with

Rochester continuing his run as a famous example, Cora Kaplan has argued that just as disability and “deformity” mark the degradation of Bertha Mason, they reform the morally-degraded Rochester (308). The blustery, powerful Rochester becomes a softer, dependent, vulnerable—to wit, a more “feminine”—character by being put through a painful, debilitating injury.

Because critics have shown how commonly Victorian female characters in pain are figured either as self-sacrificing martyrs or justly punished sinners, scholars have tended to understand male characters’ pain as this same process of “feminization,” which they have conflated with reformation. But feminists and gender theorists need a better

5 Gilbert and Gubar insist that punishment is not the only motivation for Rochester’s injuries; rather, though “apparently mutilated, he is paradoxically stronger than he was when he ruled Thornfield, for now, like Jane, he draws his powers from within himself, rather than from inequity, disguise, deception” (369). In essence, Gilbert and Gubar argue that Rochester is reformed by becoming more like Jane, i.e. becoming more like a Victorian woman rather than a Victorian man—finding power “within” rather than from the patriarchy. 8 way of thinking about what it means for a Victorian male character to be in pain. We’ve

ended up with an essentialist association between pain, femininity, and disempowerment.

Kucich has noted that this idea of “feminizing” the hardened man in fact plays into the

same Victorian cult of the domestic which casts women or femininity as the ultimate

source of moral regulation (“Transgression…” 188-189). Even more importantly, in

critical discourse, both “physical vulnerability” and “emotional awakening and turmoil”

have been problematically equated to femininity.6 Now, despite decades of criticism

addressing the complex political, social, and sexual dynamics associated with self-

sacrifice, sadomasochism, and other cultural practices associated with pain, scholarship

about Victorian novels has steadfastly maintained this simplistic equation of pain with

“feminine” disempowerment. In doing so, that scholarship reproduces an essentialist view of gender and the ways in which pain has become linked, through patriarchal oppression, to femininity.

My dissertation illuminates how three Victorian women novelists use this same figure—the suffering man—to highlight different intersections between pain, gender, and the novel form. Male characters’ pain doesn’t result from disempowerment or oppression, and so its representation enables female novelists to explore suffering to various political and aesthetic ends, not simply subjection. In Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë does not imagine a just world in which men’s violence is punished but rather creates an aesthetic space in which pain becomes a spiritualized artistic medium. Elizabeth

6 In arguing for this “feminization” trope in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), Catherine Barnes Stevenson insists, “From the moment when Margaret’s blood substitutes for his, John Thornton’s sensations, emotions, values, and social position are ‘feminized.’ The male rags-to-riches story… is intersected by a plot of physical vulnerability, emotional awakening and turmoil, financial dependence, uncertainty, and finally marriage” (13-14). 9 Gaskell’s North and South (1855), on the other hand, rejects the political expedience of a sensationless industrial masculinity and advocates instead for the pains of erotic love.

Finally, Marie Corelli foments aesthetic and political heresy in her bestselling novel The

Sorrows of Satan (1895), which combines Satan and Christ into a tortured outcast genius who both desires and rejects the approval of establishment authorities. I bring together these seemingly very different women writers to show how their shared figure, the man in pain, transforms across genres and modes, from Gothic domesticity to industrial realism to neo-Gothic, phantasmagoric melodrama.

Through my explorations of these authors’ representations of male characters in pain, I will uncover strains of political progressivism as well as strains of conservatism, or at least non-radicalism. My aim is neither to uncover “feminist” principles in the writings of these nineteenth-century women nor to prove that even when they attempted to be progressive, they were actually quite conservative. (This latter methodology has been popular in studies of Elizabeth Gaskell’s works.) Rather, I advocate for a feminist literary criticism whose project is not to track how feminist foremothers created and then punished male tyrants between their pages, but rather to understand these women writers’ writing as possessing all kinds of political and aesthetic inclinations that sometimes do but sometimes decidedly do not align with a straightforwardly “feminist” agenda.

As Tamara S. Wagner has recently put it,

Traditional feminist “recovery work” has been crucial in unearthing

numerous, once intensely popular, and subsequently largely forgotten

works, yet women writers not directly invested in—or averse to—specific

10 agendas have thus additionally been marginalised for disproving an

evolutionary model of progressive female self-representation. (6)

In addition to accepting non-progressive women writers as worthy objects of study (one

could describe Marie Corelli as such a writer), I also reexamine a woman writer whose

masterpiece has been an ur-text for twentieth-century feminist literary criticism: I will be approaching the violence in Wuthering Heights not from a position of its harrowing effects upon female characters but from a position that seeks to understand the way that pain itself functions within the context of the novel; specifically, I will explore how

Heathcliff’s practice of spiritualized, “artistic” bruising and bloodletting acts as the dark shadow of the economy of pain he sets up to acquire social and racial privilege. I do not disregard the patriarchal nature of the violence Heathcliff commits, just as I do not disregard the way that male privilege operates as an undercurrent to all of these subjects’ characterizations, but I choose mindfully to interrogate the aesthetics of the bruising and bloodletting that Heathcliff inflicts upon himself and others in order to understand Emily

Brontë’s questioning of the way that being marked or unmarked by pain determines human subjectivity. As for Gaskell, my approach elucidates what others have understood as her “failure” to achieve class reconciliation by establishing sympathy between industrialists and their employees through an application of middle-class moral values.

When instead we understand the change undergone by her male protagonist as a change from insensate, sterile self-deprivation to the full-hearted pain of erotic love, we see that

Gaskell’s aim is not to attempt, naively, to “solve” capitalism’s problems but rather to redefine what kind of sensations and mindsets are valued by industrialist masculinity.

Gaskell’s advocacy of erotic pain over capitalist numbness is necessarily perverse, and in 11 showing the perverse side of a writer whose reputation has, even still, been determined by her supposed obedience to middle-class feminine norms, I seek to shake up our picture of

“Mrs. Gaskell.”

Ultimately, as I show, these writers’ representations of men in pain reveal the non-essentiality and possible multiplicity of cultural constructions of gender, power, bodily identity and pain itself. In this way, writers with such diverse styles and politics as

Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Marie Corelli share the same process. The outcomes of their various novels may not be remotely similar and, by that token, may not be “feminist,” but this shared process of depicting men in pain, I argue, is feminist.

Rather than merely weaving fantasies of punishing patriarchs, these three novelists reconfigure the relationship between torture, gendered justice, and the novel in unexpected and uncomfortable ways.

Pain

It might perhaps be incumbent upon me to clarify here whether I mean “physical” or

“mental” or “emotional” pain, or even to answer the question, What is pain? That last question is, of course, a notoriously difficult if not impossible one to answer, and the supposed indefinability of physical pain in language is Elaine Scarry’s central thesis in her influential book The Body in Pain (1985). Rachel Ablow has pointed out that “even utilitarianism, the philosophy of pleasure and pain, provides no definitive account of what pain is, but instead consistently falls back on the notion that pain is defined by the experience of it” (Victorian Pain 10). Joanna Bourke has cited Victorian physician Peter

Mere Latham’s pithy definition of physical pain, which amounts essentially to “I know it 12 when I see it,” or rather, “I know it when I feel it,” for all humankind knows pain but

experiences it uniquely (3). Scarry claims that physical pain gives us “the most vibrant

example of what it is to ‘have certainty,’” since it is so “effortlessly grasped,” impossible

to be denied or not felt.7 Yet we find it impossible to communicate physical pain to

another because it has no necessary referent; we have love and anger for something, but

pain has no for or of, and this is why it resists language, because pain has no object (5).

As such, Scarry says, physical pain graphically demonstrates the “absolute split between

one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons,” and the split between

conscious articulation and unconscious physical sensation (4). Scarry’s assertion that

“[p]sychological suffering, though often difficult for any one person to express, does

have referential content, is susceptible to verbal objectification, and is so habitually

depicted in art that... there is virtually no piece of literature that is not about suffering”

(11, emphasis original), articulates her assumption that physical and psychological pain

can in fact be separated. The entirety of Scarry’s study of pain depends on this duality as

old as philosophy itself, debated and reframed by the likes of Plato and Descartes, and

which has been reproduced not simply as mind/body but language/material,

constructed/real, culture/nature, and so on.

Critics in various fields have offered rejoinders to this dualism by embracing

monist methodologies like materialism. For a long moment in the late twentieth-century

academy, “the body” became the privileged site of criticism, an answer to the

7 Ablow notes, however, that Scarry’s “equation of pain with certainty… has been called into question by sufferers from chronic pain and phantom limb: for those whose pain resists medical visualization, in particular, self-doubt can be as common a concomitant of pain as certitude” (Victorian Pain 6). She also adds her own critique: “Scarry’s model of pain assumes a subject that is self-conscious, exists prior to the social, and is private; and it assumes a model of sociality mediated by a language that seeks, yet inevitably fails, to reflect preexisting states of affairs” (Victorian Pain 7). 13 dematerializing arguments of poststructuralists like Foucault, Kristeva, and Lacan, who

almost made the body “disappear entirely” from discourses of sexuality and society

(Laqueur 12). “[T]he flesh,” Laqueur warned, “like the repressed, will not long allow

itself to remain in silence” (13). Joining in this reemphasis on the body, trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth and Ruth Leys also note how “in our present culture, especially in the United States... biological paradigms are on the ascendant in psychiatry,” manifested in a turn of “the focus of research from the mind back to the body by explaining traumatic

memory in neurobiological terms” (Leys 16, 6, emphasis original). Other critics like

Peter Brooks have reclaimed the body, so to speak, in order to flip the usual dualist

hierarchy of mind over matter, arguing that “the body furnishes the building blocks of

symbolization, and eventually of language itself, which then takes us away from the

body, but always in a tension that reminds us that mind and language need to recover the

body, as an otherness that is somehow primary to their very definition” (xii-xiii).

To determine the “correct” cohesion (or lack thereof) of mind and body vis-à-vis

pain is not my object. Rather, my intent is to examine how the women writers under my

purview understood and played with these ideas through narrative. Thus, Joanna

Bourke’s critique of Scarry resonates with me; Bourke insists that the idea that pain is a

destroyer of language makes pain into an outside entity, a separate, abstract thing from

oneself that attacks, infects, or invades the body/mind (4).8 Instead, Bourke proposes

thinking of pain more as a “pain-event,” an occurrence that “always belongs to the individual’s life; it is a part of her life-story” (5). Beyond the “ontological fallacy” of a

8 Ablow helpfully surveys other objections to Scarry’s assertion of pain’s obliteration of language and the separability of physical and psychological pain (Victorian Pain 6). 14 theory that characterizes pain as an entity separate from the self, understanding pain as an

event that is part of a story is an eminently appropriate model for the study of fictional,

narrative representations of pain (Bourke 5).9 This understanding also prevents my study

from unraveling into semantic quibbles, which would trap my line of inquiry into fruitless

questions over whether a character is technically in pain or rather in distress, depressed,

mourning, or any number of similes. I am not simply word-searching for “pain.” Instead,

I seek out moments within these fictional stories in which pain is identified as such by the

narrative, either directly (by the narrator or the character’s dialogue) or indirectly (by

context).

As such, there will be moments that fall under my scrutiny in which “pain” is

named explicitly as “pain.” But there will also be moments in which the word “pain”

never appears or in which the context includes only similes (“agony,” “suffering,” etc.) or

even in which something painful is happening (Bourke calls this a “pain-event”) but

which the narrative does not “name” explicitly or implicitly and yet in which the reader

may still infer pain (5). If a character is bashing his head against a tree but neither the

narrator nor the character refers to this as painful, we may still infer that this is a pain-

event.10 This is not to say that I consider any particular kind of event as being inherently

painful—even bashing one’s head against a tree—because, as Bourke contends, “There is

9 Ablow says that this description of pain “threatens to make pain seem like something that involves only sufferers rather than something in which their interlocutors also participate,” offering instead the term “transaction” to emphasize the dual personal and social nature of pain (Victorian Pain 21). I believe that “event” better describes the narrative affordances of depictions of pain, but “transaction” helps capture the rhetorical nature of those fictional depictions when they are encountered by readers. 10 Following Wittgenstein, Bourke uses “naming,” when a sufferer communicates her suffering, as a way of identifying pain, and claims that even though “pain is generally regarded as a subjective phenomenon… ‘naming’ occurs in public realms” (6). Rachel Ablow’s Victorian Pain is concerned with how Victorian writers and thinkers interrogated “what Wittgenstein would call the language game of pain, a formulation that suggests that even the solitude we so often associate with pain is necessarily enmeshed in social life” (3). 15 no decontextual pain-event. After all, so-called ‘noxious stimuli’ may excite a shriek of distress (corporal punishment) or a squeal of delight (masochism)” (8). I do not seek to identify pain by the bodily harm it may cause or even by whether it is categorized as a negative or “aversive” occurrence, since just as bodily harm is not a necessary referent of pain, nor is negativity or aversiveness an inherent quality of pain, “as any zealous saint or

(indeed) keen sadomasochist will tell you” (Bourke 15).11 Indeed, as Veronica Kelly and

Dorothea Von Mücke have said, “Psychoanalysis has drawn our attention to the difficulty

of maintaining a clear and simple distinction among pain, pleasure, and desire... Scarry

makes it impossible to acknowledge that in many cases we might not be able to isolate

pain in the ‘hurt body’ or to reduce the ‘hurt body’ to the experience of pain” (9). As I

show in my first chapter on this particular scene in Wuthering Heights, the head-bashing

operates within the novel’s overall context of injury and blood-letting, and Heathcliff’s

preternatural imperviousness to pain is a significant element of his success in upending

his society’s structures of power and testing his existence’s uncertainties. Thus the lack of

“naming” the head-bashing as painful fits in with the novel’s overall pattern.

In essence, my methodology as well as my object lies in understanding how these

authors in their individual cases represented pain, including but not limited to the

question of the body/mind relationship. For my purposes, then, it doesn’t matter if the

actual (so to speak) sensation(s) of the character fall away under my scrutiny, because my

object is to parse the sociocultural meaning made through narratives of pain, not to create

a taxonomy of the phenomenon of pain itself. Since I am adopting Bourke’s

understanding of pain as a kind of contextually-defined event, I am naturally interested in

11 Scarry characterizes pain as an essential “aversiveness” (28). 16 the social context that these women writers draw upon in order to tell these stories of pain. However, I emphatically do not contend that pain is solely socially constructed, that

there is no physical dimension. Rather, I am interested in the ways these authors portray a

confluence of psyche and soma, the degree to which they show body and mind mutually

constitutive in the experience of pain. It is Bourke’s contention that “mental pain always

involves physical events—neurochemical, muscular, nervous, and so on—and physical

pain does not exist without a mental component... The body is mind-ful and the mind is

embodied” (25). Rather than privilege either mental or physical pain, rather than attempt

even to draw lines between them, in this dissertation I am interested in the way that these

authors show gender tropes and tropes about pain collaborating to make narrative

meaning.

In the Victorian period, these tropes were determined by particular

historical/cultural and aesthetic contexts, three of which I will elaborate: sexuality,

Christian martyrdom, and the role of “sympathy” in the novel form. This is not by any

means an exhaustive list. Neither are the list’s individual components totally distinct from

one another. Indeed, they bleed into each other. These contexts are, however, the primary

ones which I see as contributing in the most significant way to these authors’ depictions

of men in pain, and for the sake of clarity I will briefly individuate them.

1. Sexuality

One cannot write a dissertation about pain without beginning with Michel Foucault’s

famous theories about the “deployment of sexuality” and the shift from physical

punishment to carceral discipline. The influence of Foucault’s ideas has come to 17 determine the way we talk about the body and about sexuality, particularly since one of his primary arguments regards the bourgeoisie’s cathexis of sexuality onto the body: beginning in the eighteenth century, the deployment of sexuality results in “the intensification of the [bourgeois] body” through the rejection of aristocratic “blood” (the ancestral pedigree) and the hyper-concentration on the cultivation of the vigorous body, healthy and fit for reproduction and proliferation (Foucault, The History of Sexuality 123,

124-125). In creating its sexuality in the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie actually built an abstract “‘class’ body” to assert political and economic power; through “the autosexualization of its body, the incarnation of sex in its body,” the middle class endowed its material, its “health, hygiene, descent, and race” with immaterial value

(124). The deployment of sexuality reaches its zenith with Sigmund Freud at the fin-de- siècle. Freud’s cast of human civilization as dependent upon “reaction formations and sublimations that result from psychic transformations and displacements of sexual aims and interests” continues to have an overwhelming influence on scholars’ approach to embodiment (Freud ix).

Even as late 20th-century critics moved away from Freudian formulations, sexuality remained (and often still remains) the “privileged category of analysis”

(McClintock 7). Even critics attempting to “reclaim the body” from the poststructuralists did so in a way that actually reclaimed the body’s erotic appetites specifically, making

“the body” and “sexuality” or “desire” synonymous. “The desire to know,” Peter Brooks argues, “is constructed from sexual desire and curiosity” (4). Brooks even goes so far as to posit sexuality as “possibly the foundation of all intellectual activity” (xiii). Others have critiqued this Foucauldian focus on sexuality for varying reasons, not least of which, 18 as Anne McClintock has pointed out, is its failure adequately to account for other,

intersecting axes of identity such as race and class (7). Robyn Warhol has also noted this

theoretical mode’s tendency to collapse categories, arguing that “‘sexuality’ has come to

be almost interchangeable with ‘gender’ in its academic usage, as if the libidinal

connotations of ‘sex’ spilled over the boundaries of the sex/gender opposition and

flooded both terms” (3). Lauren Berlant and other scholars have challenged sexuality’s

status as “privileged category of analysis” by emphasizing the body’s affect, asserting

that to possess a body is not only to be sexual but, more fundamentally, to feel—and to

feel pain: “If body, pain. If body, misery. If body, attrition, vulnerability, wearing out. If

body, bound to life. If body, fabric, hair, prosthesis, and surfaces that are grounds and

backgrounds too. If body, other bodies: unseen and in proximity, abstract and touchable”

(Berlant 265). For Berlant, pain, attrition, and vulnerability are what bind us to life, are

what underlie the material (of fabric, hair, etc.) that compose existence.

All the case studies I will present in this dissertation deal in some way with

sexuality, but my approach to understanding the intersections of masculinity and pain is

not defined by sexuality. This is not a dissertation (only) about S/M.12 I will deal with

gendered pain in a way that explores the sexual as one of many dimensions, not a sole

explanatory framework. For my investigation of Wuthering Heights, sexuality is almost

null. As I show, Heathcliff’s “sadism,” if that’s what it ought to be called, is devoid of the

erotic except insofar as he uses it to test (in very un-sexy ways) the physical/spiritual

12 I use the term “S/M” to refer to the practice of deliberately inflicting and experiencing pain for the purposes of erotic gratification. Though “BDSM” is a more contemporary and wider-used term among practitioners, my interest has less to do with erotic practices and much more to do with the concepts of sadism and masochism as historically-understood and not necessarily erotic orientations, ergo I will use the terms linked most closely with psychoanalytical lineage: sadism, masochism, and sadomasochism. 19 presence of his lover. In my chapter on North and South, I do explicitly engage with S/M in order to help in a recent critical effort, led by John Kucich, to redefine how we understand masochism. As I will explain in greater depth in Chapter 2, for Kucich, masochism can also describe behaviour and attitudes oriented toward nationalism rather than eroticism. While Kucich explores late-nineteenth-century British men’s self- sacrificial fantasies in service to the empire, I examine an earlier point in British history: the mid-century zenith of British industrialism. Gaskell portrays her male protagonist’s masochistic attitude toward work as harmfully sterile in that it is void of sensual pleasures like good food and that it is sexually non-productive, as though Thornton’s singleness and childlessness were the direct result of him having unnaturally funnelled all of his energy into the market. My chapter on The Sorrows of Satan might be the most sexually-engaged, since it deals with martyrdom, the iconography and tropes of which always bear an erotic tinge. Much of the suffering of Corelli’s Satan, however, has to do with the pain of rejection by the masculinist publishing establishment. The eroticism of the martyr is secondary to the martyr’s exalted, elect rebellion.

2. Christian Martyrdom

The descriptive tropes of hagiography and the visual tropes of Christian iconography demonstrate how the body in pain has been represented in Western culture as inherently lashed with metaphysical meaning, bloody fingers and rolling eyes pointing up toward the intangible grace of God. As Robert Mills has aptly put it in his analysis of martyrdom in medieval art, “Abjection and sublimation thus come together in the body of the martyr... [T]he tortured body of the saint is the point at which doctrine, violence, and 20 imagination coalesce” (120). On one level, depictions of martyrdom denigrate the body in favor of the soul, with saints and those who would imitate them “conceiv[ing] of their bodies as prison-houses from which they desire to escape” (Mills 156). This is a concept as old as Christianity itself. Because early Christians believed that Christ had broken the entire previous order of humanity and was set to return imminently to render final judgment, they renounced of the body as a tie to the doomed animal world. By renouncing the body—specifically through complete sexual abstinence, as I will explore later—one could break free of the animal order (Brown 32). But at the same time, the corporeal sensation of pain is painted as the best access to the divine:

In the realm of the martyr, suffering—whether “mental” or “physical”—is

transformed through torture into a palpable sign of God’s present

existence… Pain, experienced as delight by the saints, is not a symbol of

the fleshliness that they wish to disavow so much as a symbol of their

willingness to embrace the flesh as a source of power and subjectivity.

(Mills 157-158)

For a religion based on divine Incarnation, the body could be reshaped through pain into something perfect, holy.

The concept of pain as an instructive, divine tool persisted well into the nineteenth century and beyond. (No pain, no gain.) In the Victorian religious ethos, pain was seen as a cornerstone of fallen humanity, possibly even the biggest riddle at the heart of creation.

Some theologians and philosophers whose works bore great significance to nineteenth- century British Christendom believed that pain was both the diffuse result of original sin as well as the wages of one’s individual sins. If not a punishment for Adam and Eve’s 21 transgressions or one’s personal failings, then pain was a paternal God’s instructive rod,

used to correct the wayward, to test one’s faith, or to teach one any number of virtues like

patience or humility. John Wesley, founder of Methodism, asserted that before the fall of

Adam, humanity knew no pain (Bourke 93). Natural theologians believed that God had

constructed the human body in such a way that it acted, through pain, as a sort of

barometer of the individual’s righteousness; if the individual experienced pain, then they

knew they had gone astray (Bourke 95-96).13 Furthermore, within God’s plan, pain could

also serve a pro-social function, “serv[ing] to consolidate human communities,”

engendering the fellow-feeling commanded by Jesus (Ablow, Victorian Pain 13). Even

secular nineteenth-century commentators used metaphorically religious language when

explicating pain as a kind of warning system and protective alarm for any “violations” of

the body, teaching the fingers to stay away from the flame or the knife that would

damage the flesh (Bourke 97).

Yet many still puzzled over the nature of pain, Cardinal Newman among them;

sin could not be the only explanation for pain, Newman fretted, since animals, who have

no capacity for sin, are also afflicted (Bourke 91). Even more disconcerting, the invention

of the first modern anesthetics during this period threw previous moral attitudes toward

pain into confusion. Rachel Ablow’s Victorian Pain paints a vivid picture of

contemporary moral discourse concerning pain: “Both medical and religious

13 By the later years of the nineteenth century, most physicians disagreed with this assessment, the consensus becoming that “pain is no simple utilitarian signaling system, designed to indicate problems subject to remedy. Instead, it is often in great excess of any conceivable function” (Ablow, Victorian Pain 14). However, the widespread acceptance of the theory of evolution indicated that pain’s “function” could be understood in terms of the good of the human race rather than the good of the individual, signaling a kind of continuity from Christian to scientific discourse in that both emphasized the pro-social potential of pain (14-15). 22 professionals struggled with the problem of how to maintain faith in a benevolent God

when one generation is made to suffer what another is able to remediate” (2). If pain was

potentially “eradicable, it also comes to seem superfluous—and hence, too, potentially

incompatible with a loving God” (2). At the same time, surgeons and doctors were

“concerned about suppressing the potential benefits of pain” through the use of

anesthetics, even if they weren’t sure what those benefits were or how they worked (11).

Catholics and Protestants alike “debated whether pain relief was more likely to enable or

inhibit religious devotion” (12). Furthermore, the theories of Thomas Malthus and

Charles Darwin added to the dread the question of whether or not one suffered pain might

amount to “historical accident”; the concepts of overpopulation and natural selection

inspired pessimism about whether pain really could be eradicated or if it was humanity’s

doom to be “checked” by nature (2-3).

At this impasse, many turned once more to the central concept of martyrdom— that pain could be a pathway to greater holiness, even for the already righteous or saintly.

Pain was not just a chastising teacher, using agony as an aversive stimulus, but also an experience or event which in and of itself was desirable, attractive rather than aversive.

This early Christian understanding seeped into secular meditations, even medical treatises. Surgeon Charles Bell remarked in 1824 that pain “‘rouses the faculties both of the body and of the mind, and from a dormant state gives us consciousness and real existence’” (Bourke 96). Indeed, the literature of the period bears this out, with an inordinate number of deathbed scenes showing characters who, in the throes of their dying pains, “could achieve a heightened bodily, even sensual, awareness, experience an

23 ecstatic, profound and epiphanic transformation” (Barecca 7).14 Pain could be seen in certain contexts as a sort of “higher” state of existence that lifts one out of the torpor of the mundane. This elevating understanding of pain is what this dissertation will be referring to when referring to “martyrdom,” whether explicitly religious or seemingly secular.15

Martyrdom and its perfecting pain is, of course, both gendered and sexualized.

The holy status of female martyrs was often tied up with the saint’s virginity, her

suffering rendered all the more divine if her body had been penetrated only by her

torturers’ weapons. According to this same logic, male martyrs “are visually de-

phallicized by being decapitated, disemboweled and flayed,” their bodies riddled with

“phallic instruments (in [Saint] Sebastian’s case, arrows), in order to symbolize their

figurative transformation from wielders of earthly power to tortured purveyors of divine

presence” (Mills 173). In the Christian ethos, pain is an inherently feminine experience in

which the Christian, in imitatio Christi, surrenders and submits totally to God. The

eroticism of many images of martyrdom, therefore, depends on this gendering: divine

ecstasy and empowerment reward the (male or female) bride of Christ’s total submission

to His will.

14 Barecca’s argument casts deathbed scenes as substitute sex scenes, noting that the deathbed is one of the only times in fiction Victorian fiction we have access to the bedroom (5). Although I do not see scenes of pain as necessarily erotic, I appreciate Barecca’s assertion that “Affliction, not affection, was the Victorian construct of passion” (6). 15 Many recent critics have questioned the narrative of Victorian “secularization,” arguing that Modern (that is, post-Victorian) religiosity is not “secular” in the sense of having disappeared, but rather having been diffused beyond its original institutions; in the Modern era, religiosity now “informs the assumptions of secularism, which in turn influence domestic jurisprudence and international policy” (Goodwin 329). Alex Owen similarly argues against the notion that Victorian culture trended toward collective disillusionment with religion and bourgeois morality in the latter half of the nineteenth century, insisting instead that “enchantment” (that is, the spiritual, the “the magical, the numinous”) actually remained a steadfast element of British culture well into the Modern period (12). 24 This feminine model of martyrdom finds countless echoes throughout Victorian

literature. Many of the most influential works of nineteenth-century gender studies dissect the proliferation of the good, suffering woman in the works of authors like

Dickens and Eliot. Because of the influence of Christianity’s concept of human subjectivity as a body in pain, for many Victorians, pain and embodiment were seen as synonymous conditions. And if pain is a feminine experience, then women are extra- bodied, extra-vulnerable to pain. In other words, beginning in the Enlightenment and culminating in the nineteenth century, Western culture “embodied” women in a way that it did not men—that is, ascribed a greater biological determination to women’s psyches and behavior. As Mary Poovey argues in Uneven Developments, the biologically-based

bifurcation of the body into either male or female became the dominant organizing

principle of sociological thought in the nineteenth century. Beginning in the eighteenth

century, the idea of sexual difference as a binary supplanted a “hierarchically ordered

range of similarities” in which the male was the standard and the female was actually just

a defective male (6).16 No longer understood to be in the same biological strata as men,

women were seen as defined entirely by their femaleness—and their femaleness was

inherently weaker, more vulnerable and susceptible to pain by very definition. And since,

as I have spelled out, there existed a powerful cultural link between femininity and pain,

mental and bodily pain in the nineteenth century, pain began to seem like something to

which men could not succumb lest they lose their manliness.

16 Laqueur tracks this evolution from hierarchy to binary in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Nancy Armstrong also notes how, in the nineteenth century, gender difference began to be seen as a psychological difference or differing “qualities of mind” (Desire and Domestic Fiction 4). 25 This might seem strange since, as I have asserted above, the pain of martyrdom

was seen to be a sublime, elevating experience. The idea goes hand in hand, however,

with the popular early-Victorian notion, headed by thinkers such as Carlyle, that the

“energy that powers and empowers masculinity is dangerous, that the very source of male

identity is unclean, diseased” (Sussman, Victorian Masculinities… 20). If masculinity is

predicated on taming a dangerously hedonistic and violent internal energy, then hyper

self-control is the mandate of all men who wish to be more than animals (Sussman,

Victorian Masculinities… 11). This includes controlling one’s reaction to pain or any

other stimulus, an explicit rejection of an earlier nineteenth-century “man of feeling”

ideal.17 Denying one’s inherent hedonism and violence meant building a wall against

sensual stimulation, which meant making oneself even more invulnerable to pain than

one was naturally by dint of one’s maleness. Giving in to suffering, even acknowledging

it, threatened the integrity of that masculine wall. As Ellen Bayuk Rosenman puts it, “If suffering implies weakness and femininity, men must repudiate it in order to retain their claim to masculinity” (30). Women, on the other hand, could embrace their pain and suffer visibly, because they had different gendered strictures of behavior. In the eighteenth century, the notion of woman-as-Eve, as “willful flesh” representing the appetite of man, transformed into the domestic ideal, the opposite of man, “his moral hope and spiritual guide” (Poovey, Desire and Domestic Fiction 10). Thus, the reason we

find so many suffering women in Victorian fiction: their suffering, if done for another’s

17 As Amanda K. Henderson has noted, “the British Romantic-era sufferer makes a display, not of his or her capacity to endure privation, but of his or her sensitivity to suffering” (11). Henderson sees Romantic sensibility as a kind of pleasurable pain, a masochistic style that created pleasure out of frustrated desire. Henderson’s concept differs from eighteenth-century sensibility because the latter “focused on sympathy with rather than desire for another, located pain not in frustration but in communion” (22). 26 sake, was sanctioned by their bodies’ and minds’ “natural” vulnerability as well as by

dominant nineteenth-century gender ideals. A woman in pain was simply a sign of the

world being as it should be. Not only was the male body/mind seen as inherently less

susceptible to pain; post-Enlightenment masculinity itself was defined by men making

themselves into effectually unembodied, rational creatures of thought and spirit.18 Thus,

an ascendant style of masculinity in the Victorian period defined itself in large part by

ignoring pain, or, to use an anachronistic phrase, by “walking it off.”

But, of course, we see suffering men in nineteenth-century fiction all the time, and

we do not necessarily see their pain as unmanning them. Even the concept of “walking it

off” or the more historically appropriate “stiff upper lip” centralizes and theatricalizes

pain through its very pretense at disavowal. Today, when an athlete hurts himself on the

field but continues to play, we only applaud because we know he’s in pain. The pain

gives the further play its value, ergo the disavowal is only a pretense.19 This is the

underlining principle of the midcentury religio-social phenomenon of “Muscular

Christianity,” a term coined in response to Charles Kingsley’s reclamation of what he

saw as a “feminized,” too-peaceful English Christianity. Muscular Christianity insisted

on the holiness of conflict, as is graphically spelled out in Thomas Hughes’s ode to

“fighting” in his novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) (281). Rosenman uses Tom

18 For detailed explications of this idea, see for instance, Poovey (Uneven Developments), Armstrong (Desire and Domestic Fiction), and Gallagher (“The Body Versus the Social Body… ix). 19 I am reminded, for instance, of Michael Jordan’s 1997 “flu game,” in which Jordan insisted on playing in an NBA finals game despite extreme dehydration and exhaustion from “flu-like symptoms,” which made him stagger and necessitated that he lean on teammate Scottie Pippen to leave the court. Afterward, Jordan’s coy remark highlighted the way in which his self-infliction of extreme pain is supposed to be laudable: “I almost played myself into passing out just to win a basketball game” (“Top NBA finals moments…”). The game is commemorated by various sports news outlets as one of the “top moments” in NBA history, significant enough to warrant its own “20th anniversary” commemoration in 2017. 27 Brown’s Schooldays, that manual for maintaining the stiff upper lip, as the exemplar for

the supposed cultural imperative for men and boys to measure their “success by a lack of

what the novel calls ‘evident pain’” (30). Rosenman focuses on a scene in which Tom

relates how distressed and afraid he is at being hazed by his schoolmates, but he

ultimately earns their respect by showing them only a blank face. He “perform[s] the

absence of pain,” compelled by the Muscular Christian principle of masculine stoicism

(Rosenman 30).

But the medium of the novel makes the performance of the “absence of pain” merely a fictional conceit. Hughes showcases in his writing the very pain that Rosenman

says must be hidden. Thus, pain, not its absence, is still performed rather than hidden or

disavowed through the novel itself. Our readerly access to Tom’s psyche allows us to

witness all his pain, and the novel itself exhibits it for us on the page the way an actor

struts and sighs upon the stage. Yet we are clearly not meant to apprehend Tom’s

masculinity as anything but vigorous for this narrative display. In fact, there is no

difference between us applauding what we see has been covered up and the schoolboys’

applause for what they have not seen. When it comes to pain in fiction, to see the cover-

up is to see the hidden thing itself.

So, strange as it may seem, what is actually being valued and lauded, both in this

scene and in this interchange between novel and reader, is the pain itself. It’s the same

masculine ideal vis-à-vis pain that Sandow would later individualize: “the disciplined

body” acting as “an outward expression of moral character” (Markovits 480, Deane 692).

Rather than denying the existence of pain as a kind of masculine test, Tom Brown and his

cohort seek it out, desire it, because only in the presence of pain does the performance of 28 stoicism make sense as an admirable behavior. Like the medieval martyr, just as often

depicted with a serene or smiling face as with a twisted expression of agony even as his

head is cleaved with an axe, pain takes on meaning when the one experiencing it

performs a certain reaction in a certain context.

The Tom Brown-esque “ascetic regimen” became a commonplace Victorian

masculine trope, and James Eli Adams admirably tracks the way that male authors

presented virtuous male pain: “The ‘parades of Pain’ that Tennyson rehearses in In

Memoriam and the martyrdom of Sydney Carton in Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities are just two instances in which masculine identity is realized through a regimen of solitary but emphatically visible suffering” (2, 16). In the Victorian era, he argues, the social and economic transformations of industrialization and Evangelicalism incited a need

to claim new forms of status and construct new hierarchies of authority…

In this context, the energetic self-discipline that distinguished manly

‘character’ offered not only economic utility but also a claim to new forms

of status and privilege within an increasingly secular and industrialized

society. (Adams 5)

He concludes, then, that the urge for men to perform “ascetic self-presentation to an audience” confirms that “[t]he masculine, in short, is as much a spectacle as the feminine” (Adams 12). Falling in line with the strain of early Christianity that demonized the body as a demanding prison, reforming a bestial male sexuality through physical discipline was also an object of this ascetic masculinity. In the final chapter of his immensely influential 1859 book Self-Help, Samuel Smiles “argues that the character of the ‘True Gentleman’ contrasts with the base, potentially degenerate, demands of the 29 male body” and that “the theatrical dimensions of gentlemanly behaviour are therefore necessary in order to quell the insistent, baser demands of the body’s appetites” (A. Smith

19, 20). “The virtuous [male] body” in nineteenth-century England, therefore, is always

theatrical, “only seen in action when it is working, exercising, or fighting. It is never a

private body, because for Smiles the gentleman must never be off-script even during

unwitnessed moments” (A. Smith 20). In this way, Andrew Smith poignantly quips,

“Self-help is really self-denial” (21). Muscular Christianity turned “secular” activities

like sport and recreational fighting into a nineteenth-century version of martyrdom, one

which attempted to “masculinize” the role by making the martyr his own scourge. It was

not simply God who demanded his pain but his own conscience and, indirectly, his

homosocial circle.

3. Sympathy, or, Pain and/in the Novel

Much academic criticism of nineteenth-century masculinity in literature has fallen into the two camps I’ve described above. While doing as much justice as I can to these camps’ contributions to the field, this dissertation elucidates the gap left between them.

First, there is the classic feminist interpretation of suffering male characters in novels by

women. The suffering of these men supposedly feminizes them and thus improves them.

Second, there is the by-now classic masculinities studies interpretation of male characters

in novels by men. The suffering of these men seems to have the opposite effect: Their

willingly-undergone, even desired pain makes them a “true man,” their orientation

toward pain proof of their virtuous masculinity, sometimes by way of sublimating their

30 wayward sexual desires. As I’ve demonstrated, neither of these interpretive lines can

account for the complexity of what’s going on when a woman writes about a man in pain.

Since the 1980s and ’90s, scholars have seen the Victorian period as a time in

which female authors in particular established the novel as a vehicle for sympathy.

Sympathy, in turn, has been defined variously as either a kind of fellow-feeling, in which

a reader feels for the suffering depicted in the novel (like feeling sorrow for a character’s

physical pain), or as a process of entering-into-feeling, in which the reader “matches” the character’s apparent feeling. Much ink has been spilled over whether to ascribe the terms

“sympathy” or “empathy” to either of the above two definitions. As Suzanne Keen notes,

“Some influential commentators on the social impact of the realist novel persistently refer to its empathy-inducing qualities... It must be acknowledged, however, that to the perpetual bedevilment of those who would distinguish empathy from sympathy, the terms have often been conflated or reversed” (“Intersectional Narratology…” 133). Catherine

Gallagher, in her 1995 study of the rise of the realist novel, adopts the latter definition, arguing that sympathy is

not an emotion about someone else but is rather the process by which

someone else’s emotion becomes our own. It is the conversion of the idea

of someone else’s passion into a lively impression of that passion, which

is indistinguishable from actually feeling the passion oneself. (Nobody’s

Story 169)

According to Keen, however, in more contemporary narratological discourse, this

understanding of readerly emotion would be better described as “empathy” while

“sympathy” is more “other-oriented than... motor mimicry, emotional contagion, or 31 feeling-matching...” (“Intersectional Narratology…” 133).20 I am more inclined to

Keen’s distinction, since I am less interested in the idea of a reader “matching” a character’s suffering and much more interested in the idea, implicit in many critical accounts of sympathy, that a reader’s “feeling for” a character leads naturally to social action with a view toward alleviating real-world suffering.

Rachel Ablow has noted that Scarry, in The Body in Pain, declares that pain “is in its essential nature ‘aversiveness’…” and therefore, “‘if [one] person does not perceive

[another’s] distress, neither will he wish it gone; conversely, if he does not wish it gone, he cannot have perceived the pain itself’” (Scarry 28 qtd. in Ablow, “Tortured

Sympathies…” 1153). Ablow casts this “insistence that the knowledge of the existence of pain necessarily generates the desire to relieve it is deeply Victorian” (“Tortured

Sympathies…” 1153). The Victorian-ness of the desire for alleviation is part of Ablow’s central thesis in The Marriage of Minds and persists in her more recent Victorian Pain.21

Though she breaks with Gallagher, Raymond Williams, and Thomas Laqueur in their

assertions that sympathy is a process of feeling which necessarily spurs to social amelioration, Ablow upholds the idea that when a sympathetic subject is shown to be in pain in the Victorian novel, it is supposed to elevate the reader beyond his or her selfishness by way of identification; the reader “enters” into the fictive pain, and then,

“many writers insisted, fellow-feeling is likely to take the place of hostility, suspicion,

20 “Many philosophers,” Keen notes, “regard sympathy as an ethical expression of what begins as empathy, a more mature” iteration of the process of appropriating a character’s represented feeling in the way Gallagher describes (“Intersectional Narratology…” 133). 21 Nancy Yousef has proposed an alternative mode which she contends the Romantics put forth: “intimacy” rather than “sympathy” captures the tension between the ideas that humans can communicate inward things to each other and that one can also preserve a private self (1). Unlike sympathy, intimacy doesn’t depend on identification or a recognition of similitude between one and another, nor a feeling of reciprocity (2). 32 judgment, or simple unconcern” (Marriage of Minds 2, “Tortured Sympathies…” 1151).

By portraying the fictive pain and suffering of the oppressed on the page and letting readers experience an “existence” beyond themselves (which, as Gallagher has articulated, is actually “nobody’s” existence and is thus open to appropriation), women writers supposedly instruct readers either to improve themselves or, more directly, to

alleviate real-world pain (especially the pain of the poor and of women) through social

action.22

Indeed, this theory of sympathy is one of the main justifications for the novel’s

continued existence in our own day—that, like a good Victorian wife, the contemporary novel also takes on “an implicitly feminized set of responsibilities” that not only change its reader for the better but also give “delight, companionship, amusement, hope, and so forth...” (Marriage of Minds 5).23 Keen has pointed out that the question of whether or

not readerly sympathy for fictional suffering actually causes altruism is as yet unresolved

(134, 139-141). Both Scarry and Ablow, however, argue that, if the reader enters into

sympathetic feeling with a “human” subject in fiction, and that subject experiences pain,

that reader will at least desire the pain’s end. Otherwise, either the reader is apprehending

something other than pain or the suffering subject is unsympathetic or “inhuman” in

22 The sentimental novel predates the realist novel as a supposed vehicle for sympathetic feeling. As Maureen Harkin notes, “The assumption in sentimental literature is that life and literature are linked, not through imitation, but through the belief that literature can shape and direct the way we live and teach its readers what kind of response to produce in reaction to distress” (24). Natania Meeker provides a fascinating study of how the Marquis de Sade defied sentimental attachment in his corpus in her book Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment. 23 Suzanne Keen has extensively explored “narrative empathy,” writing, “... [W]hen narrative empathy reaches across boundaries of difference, geographical and temporal distance, to evoke shared feeling, what—if anything—happens as a result? Propositions, derived from the science of real-life empathy, include changed attitudes, greater tolerance, reduced fear of the other, and increased helping behavior or altruism” (“Intersectional Narratology…” 125). 33 some way.24 But what about strange pains, pains that are not meant to be alleviated but are rather desired, treasured, celebrated in the ways I’ve outlined above?

When we talk about sympathy and the nineteenth-century novel, we often cite the

authors’ own intentions for their work. George Eliot, for instance, is frequently quoted on

this subject; she wrote that

a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the

trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves,

which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment… Art… is a

mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-

men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. (qtd. in Keen Empathy and the

Novel 54).

We have tended to make Eliot a spokeswoman of other women authors in this regard and

have operated under the assumption that because some Victorians believed in some cases

that novels provoked sympathy, we should therefore understand the suffering depicted in

novels as sympathetic scenes, regardless of whether or not the altruistic effect is factually supported. But my counter-proposal, and the thought experiment underlying this entire dissertation is not that Victorian women authors did not see sympathy as a goal, but rather: What if that wasn’t always (or only) what they were up to? And, on a meta-critical

level: What if we allow ourselves to look for other motivations, besides sympathy and

punishment, for women writers’ depictions of suffering male characters?

24 Ablow offers a fascinating take on the portrayal of torture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century television and its kinship with the infliction of pain in the Victorian novel. See “Tortured Sympathies…” for more on what constitutes an “unsympathetic” or “inhuman” subject. 34 Even if we don’t think of novelistic sympathy as the novel’s ability to influence a

sympathetic feeling, but rather as “the encounter between minds,” this framework doesn’t

explain the pain depicted a novel like Wuthering Heights (Ablow, Marriage of Minds 8).

If the encounter between the reader and the novel is meant to enact a relationship based on moral instruction that is also pleasant, entertaining, even comforting (as many nineteenth-century thinkers, including Ruskin, conceived of it), how do we account for a novel like Wuthering Heights, whose characters have been noted to baffle sympathetic feeling or identification in some readers but engender deep sympathy in others?25 Whose suffering, in Wuthering Heights, are we supposed to sympathize with, and thus whose suffering do we want to end? Is reading Wuthering Heights supposed to be instructive, enjoyable, comforting, or elevating? Different readers will no doubt offer different answers.

Wuthering Heights is just one example of a Victorian novel written by a woman which, I contend, challenges this link between femininity, pain, and sympathy. Even more supposedly straightforward “sympathetic” social-problem novels like Gaskell’s

North and South cannot only be understood in terms of their supposed efforts to alleviate social or personal pains. While this might certainly be a part of the author’s intention or the novel’s purpose, identifying the alleviation of real-world pain as the key point of

North and South or any nineteenth-century novel is, I argue, to oversimplify fictive pain’s role in the novel form. Sandra Macpherson has challenged the notion that the novel form is founded, as Ian Watt and D.A. Miller separately asserted, on “privacy, interiority, and

25 Joyce Carol Oates argues that Wuthering Heights mocks our tendency, like Isabella Linton, to want to find sympathy with the abuser and the tyrant, and to dissociate from his victims (444). By contrast, many feminist critics like Gilbert find Catherine, for instance, intensely sympathetic, and still others like Eagleton and Nussbaum find Heathcliff a sympathetic victim. 35 companionate affiliation” (Macpherson 2). Often, Macpherson points out, characters in

novels are connected not by kinship or conjugality but through accidents that cause

bodily harm. Further, those accidents precipitate the conjugal ties which had been seen by

critics as the origin points of the modern “person.” “Affection,” Macpherson asserts,

“leads to and is conceived of as injury” (3). Macpherson goes on to lay out the ways in which “liability,” not the conjugal contract, provides the framework for the novel’s

“realism” (4). Macpherson’s argument provides an important foundation for my own in that she makes an “obsessive focus on bodily injury” a defining aspect of the novel form

(3). Taking a cue from Macpherson’s reassessment of the rise of the novel, my mostly- thematic exploration of pain in the novel also leads me to believe that feminist

Victorianists have overemphasized narrative resolution—or attempted resolution—as the nineteenth-century novel’s key formal component, particularly in novels written by women.

For every one of the three novels I take on in this dissertation, a significant corner of the critical landscape is devoted to assessing the so-called “success” of their individual resolutions. This is particularly true for Gaskell, whose North and South has been subjected to a barrage of disappointment from critics running the gamut from Marxists to feminists who profess the novel’s ending a maladroit attempt to resolve class conflict through a marriage-plot resolution.26 Gallagher, for instance, finds a “falseness” to the idea, which she credits to Gaskell, that class warfare can be resolved through interpersonal relationships (Industrial Reformation 147-148). Many critics make a similar

26 For a detailed description of Marxist and feminist critics’ complaints about the ending of North and South, see Minogue. 36 complaint about the ending of Wuthering Heights, expressing disbelief that the kind of

damage Heathcliff wreaks on the microcosmic world could simply die out and be

replaced by picnics and young love.27 Even Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan, which has in

the last decade only just begun to garner proper critical attention, is frequently accused of

foisting a dubious resolution on its readers. Martin Hipsky claims that “Corelli has

generated an impossibly virtuous heroine and has offered a fantasy resolution to the

novel’s governing antinomy” (86). This focus on resolution in the woman-authored

nineteenth-century novel, I believe, stems from the influential theory that Victorian

women writers were indeed attempting to resolve real-world problems in their fiction, an

assumption which limits our critical scope. Even in cases where women authors

professed that their intention was to inspire altruism, I propose that we self-consciously

pay less attention to these novels’ resolutions—which, after all, have been well-

covered—or their supposed eradications of pain and pay more attention to the other ways

that pain can operate within these narratives.

Ultimately, it is my contention that if we only understand the female-authored

nineteenth-century novel as an agent of sympathy, we are missing an important aspect of

these novels’ rhetorical communications. This dissertation’s chapters will not often

address narrative theory, but my argument nonetheless has implications for narratology.

Pain itself is not an element of narrative, but it can certainly play a large part in what

various narrative theorists have deemed the “eventfulness,” “instability,” or even the

27 See, for instance, Oates, who argues, “The canny physicality of Wuthering Heights distinguishes it at once from the gothic and from Shakespeare’s tragedies as well, where we are presented with an exorcism of evil and an implied (but often ritualistic) survival of good but never really convinced that this survival is a genuine and not merely a thematic possibility” (442-443). 37 “narrativity” of narrative.28 For my purposes, however, the most productive associated term is “conflict” or agon, which H. Porter Abbott has called the thing that structures narrative (Cambridge Introduction to Narrative 55). Conflict is seen to be so integral that

Marie-Laure Ryan lists it among five essential elements that define narrative: “Narrative is about conflict” (24).29 Indeed, in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, when one

looks up “conflict” in the index, the only reference beside it is “see narrative” (Herman,

Cambridge Companion to Narrative 295). David Herman has provided an overview of

conflict as “a minimal condition of narrative,” acknowledging that though “its source,

manifestations, and relative pervasiveness will vary from story to story,” “conflict is

constitutive of narrative” (“Conflict” 83).30 Abbott argues that conflict is the vehicle

through which we understand a narrative, the thing that arouses our readerly “desire”; the

closure or non-closure of the conflict determines our “satisfaction” or “frustration” with

the narrative:

If the object [of narrative] is to satisfy this desire—which is often the

case—it can’t be satisfied too quickly, because we seem also to enjoy

being in the state of imbalance or tension that precedes closure. In fact,

narrative is marked almost everywhere by its lack of closure. Commonly

called suspense, this lack is one of the two things that above everything

else give narrative its life. The other is surprise. (Cambridge Introduction

to Narrative 57)

28 See Hühn, Phelan (90), and Abbott (“Narrativity”). 29 In their entirety, Ryan claims that, “Narrative is about” “problem solving,” “conflict,” “interpersonal relations,” “human experience,” and “the temporality of existence” (24). 30 Herman provides a useful gloss of Propp’s, Todorov’s, and Brooks and Warren’s approaches to “conflict” (“Conflict” 83). 38 It is no coincidence, I believe, that Abbott casts conflict and closure in such masochistic

terms.31 Post-Freudian critics have long since recognized that masochism is not as simple

as the taking of pleasure in pain; it is, rather taking pleasure in a state of suspense, of

finding pleasure in the denial of an end or of closure.32 Robert Mills, in his work on

martyrdom, centers suspense as the central characteristic of Christian iconography’s

portrayal of torture.33 Indeed, one of agon’s colloquial definitions is “martyrdom.”34

If conflict is a cornerstone structuring element of narrative, and if conflict’s

“pleasure” comes from suspense just as much as from closure, we as feminist literary

critics must attend more to the suspended elements of the woman-authored Victorian

novel. We must not only think of the pains contained within the narrative as problems

that either the characters or the readers fix; or, put another way, we must not only think of

pain in terms of its closure or ending. Even if we understand sympathy as the reader’s

emotional/mental encounter with another “mind” contained in the novel, such a process

often depends upon the spectacle of fictive pain laid out in the novel’s conflict as well as

the reader’s painful/pleasurable experience of the novel’s suspense. I suggest that what

we see in the rise of the novel as a form and the rise of the female-authored novel as a

31 Claire Jarvis emphasizes suspense in her recent study of erotically masochistic scenes in Victorian literature: “Stasis, in these scenes, is not a lack of movement but a movement curtailed—a thrum that signals tension while also marking a body’s lively vitality” (11). 32 See, for instance, the definitive Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. 33 Mills argues that the proliferation of religious and secular images representing suspense—either temporal or physical, as in an image freezing the moment before a centurion pierces Christ’s side with a spear or in an icon of Christ literally hanging, suspended, from the cross—indicates the degree to which continual deferral operates in the Christian worldview and gives those images of pain their power. Suspended in moments when they’re about to be tortured or, if in mid-torture, about to die, iconographic martyrs’ deaths are continually deferred. The masochism that may be expressed in such artworks, he insists, is not so much a finding of pleasure in pain but rather a “suspended pleasure” in and of itself—that is, the perception that pleasure is only reached after a process of pain. “[I]t could be said,” he remarks, “that all Christians adopt an attitude of moral masochism to the extent that they live in perpetual suspense of the Second Coming” (Mills 159). 34 See “agon, n.” in the OED, cited below. 39 dominant iteration of that form is that stories about pain’s meaning, its social function as

well as its aesthetic and narrative function, come greatly to bear in myriad ways that

reach beyond alleviation. This is not to deny that many women authors professed social

uplift as a major goal of their artistic lives, nor is it to essentialize diverse women’s

approaches across diverse genres. On the contrary, I propose an anti-essentialist notion of

why women write, because in our understanding of sympathy and the novel, we’ve

inadvertently practiced an essentialist methodology. I propose that Victorianists, feminist

scholars, and gender theorists free ourselves of the idea that seeing a sympathetic subject

in pain in the novel must facilitate readerly desire to end that pain and begin to see the

other ways that female authors framed pain as a painful/pleasurable suspense, as a stance

of privilege, as a means of testing ontology, even as a gateway to glory, to name a few poignant possibilities.

Understanding the nuances of female authors’ depictions of male pain allows us to rethink not only accepted theories about the novel as a “sympathetic” form but also accepted narratives about the social meaning of pain. If we can revise the notion that female authors were always out to fix subalterns’ pain or punish patriarchs by torturing a fictive representation of them, then we can understand the novel as more than a wishful triage for social problems. We can also then see how Victorian women writers were in a unique position to break the hegemony of women and femininity as the subjects of patriarchal scrutiny by depicting male pain. In these novels, women writers interrogate the way that pain uniquely produces opportunities for culture to define and redefine meaning. In an era that pathologized women’s minds (as in “hysteria”) and demanded women’s physical subjection to torturous instruments from the corset to the speculum, 40 social contracts like the law and marriage demanded and then denigrated women’s pain.

In writing about men experiencing pain that is neither a humiliation, nor a test of

fortitude, nor a punishment, these female authors critique the cultural association of vulnerability (i.e. femininity) with inferiority. The quality of the pain each of these male

characters experiences reveals crucial truths about the nature of embodiment within the

physical world and within Anglo culture, truths which are unshackled from the over-

determination of femaleness that associates living women and female characters alike

with defectiveness, hyper-sensitivity, and lack.

Furthermore, if we can locate roots of our current theories about gender and pain

(and gendered pain) in the Victorian era, then we can understand key truths about our

current moment. I do not espouse a presentist methodology, but neither do I espouse a

purely historicist one either. Currently, the field of Victorian studies has been engaged in

debate over the dominance of new historicism as an analytical approach. A vocal faction

of scholars has critiqued what they see as the field’s propensity toward antiquarianism or a “positivist historicism: a mode of inquiry that aims to do little more than exhaustively describe, preserve, and display the past.”35 They insist instead that strategic presentism,

including applying insights gained from Victorian studies to contemporary sociopolitical

issues, be embraced as a legitimate methodology. This dissertation is grounded primarily

in historical specificity—I argue that these novels’ treatment of men in pain reveal certain

unexplored truths about nineteenth-century British culture and art—but my whole reason

for taking on this topic is its relevance to my own lived experience and, I believe, the

twenty-first-century Anglo-American zeitgeist.

35 See the “Manifesto of the V21 Collective.” 41 Therefore, I will cap off this dissertation with a coda that briefly applies some of the ideas I’ve unearthed in these Victorian novels to our current Anglo-American

moment. My motivation stems not only from a desire to show my argument’s

implications for fields beyond Victorian studies but also because I believe that these

“Victorian” ideas are not exclusively Victorian—they are alive, well, and active today.

The nineteenth century saw many of the English-speaking world’s dominant habits of

thought about the body, sexuality, gender, and science take hold. Many of our

contemporary stigmas and hang-ups about pain coalesced during this historical

flashpoint, and the novel was the dominant cultural medium in which these stigmas and

hang-ups were reflected, reinforced, subverted, and created. Uncovering these writers’

preoccupations with gendered pain provides necessary insight into so-called

“contemporary” issues like the opioid epidemic, the notion of “work/life balance,” and

popular attitudes about the physiological determinants and effects of mental disorders.

The way we gender stories of pain continues to make martyrs of many of us, for good, for

ill, or for art.

Chapter 1. “The Colours of the Rainbow”: Blood, Bruising, and the Painful Artistry

of Wuthering Heights

“And yet, although there is a want of air and light in the picture we cannot deny its truth: sombre, rude, brutal, yet true. The fierce ungoverned instincts of powerful organizations, bred up amidst violence, revolt, and moral apathy, are here seen in operation; such brutes we should all be, or the most of us, were our lives as insubordinate to law...” — Review of the 1850 Wuthering Heights36

One of the things that Lockwood, the much-maligned narrator of Wuthering

Heights, first notices about the eponymous house is the “grotesque carving lavished over the front” of the door (Brontë, Wuthering Heights 4).37 Many critics have also made note of this carving, which reads “Hareton Earnshaw 1500,” identifying it as one of the most important images in a novel which makes so much of the written word. The two traditional streams of criticism on Wuthering Heights—the “formalist critics who emphasize its narrative structures and Marxist or sociological critics who emphasize its involvement with the laws of private property”—seem to join over the written word and

36 From the Leader, December 28, 1850 (Brontë, Wuthering Heights 348). 37 Hereafter, quotes from the novel will be cited as Wuthering Heights. 43

its ability to proscribe legal and economic power (Parker 99).38 The carving above the

door at Wuthering Heights, then, has been seen as a telling example of the method of

textual inscription to ascribe ownership over physical property, or even the failure of

textual inscription to achieve that end (or any end beyond self-reference). Tantalizingly,

the “Hareton Earnshaw” inscription serves both as an ironic, unreadable rebuke to the

illiterate, dispossessed, flesh and blood Hareton Earnshaw and as a foreshadowing

assertion (perhaps) of his reclamation of his ancestral property after Heathcliff’s death. A

favorite novel of deconstructionists, Wuthering Heights seems to offer many such

examples of text’s inability to establish non-referential realities, demonstrating that marks

on paper or on stone inevitably fail to achieve their purpose. Marks on the flesh, however,

prove much more fruitful.

In Lockwood’s very first visit to the Heights, which opens the novel, we see his

ridiculous attempts to mirror Heathcliff’s threatening demeanor within minutes of

meeting him. When Lockwood blunderingly incites a pack of Heathcliff’s dogs to attack

him, Lockwood snaps, “‘If I had been [bitten], I would have set my signet on the biter’”

(Wuthering Heights 6). The threat is an empty one at which Heathcliff jeers, but, as is

generally his ironic function throughout the novel, Lockwood’s turn of phrase naively

initiates the reader into the language that will undergird the novel’s portrayal of violence.

He describes striking the offending dog explicitly in terms of leaving a mark—and not

just any mark, but a “signet,” an identifying brand.39 It is no coincidence that, when not

used to beat dogs, a signet (on a ring, for instance) could stand in place of a signature on

38 Wuthering Heights is also a favorite of classic Freudian, Lacanian, and even Jungian psychoanalytic critics. See, for instance, Punter. 39 Lockwood also dreams of a hellfire preacher, suggestively named Branderham, who calls for his congregation to beat Lockwood to death. The blows on Lockwood’s body not only mark but bring into being his status as “excommunicated” (Wuthering Heights 18-20).

a legal document and could act as an official seal that guaranteed the privacy and

authenticity of a written communication. In Wuthering Heights, it is the mark of violence,

not the mark of the letter, that affirms social realities and confers real power. Violence is

Heathcliff’s economy, law, and language.

Violence does not replace the money economy, the law of England, or language in Wuthering Heights, nor is it, per se, the “true” signified reality underneath these

systems of signifiers. Heathcliff works with these systems, particularly the law, in order to enact a violence that is both acquisitive and aesthetic. Heathcliff, I argue, embodies the power of pain to shape realities and change identities within the sanction of the law— both as victim and persecutor. Unlike any of the other characters in Wuthering Heights,

Heathcliff seems aware of the malleability of the body’s significations, its openness to

manipulation. He is also the most capable of enacting those violent manipulations.

Heathcliff possesses a unique ability to interpret the underlying mechanisms of his own

childhood abuse, then seize control of those mechanisms and thereby redefine the entire

shape of the microcosmic society he inhabits. The fact that he uses violence as a means

not only of revenge but of making his mark in a more personally satisfying, even

aesthetic way sends an unnerving message: Pain amounts to more than a vehicle or means

of control. In Wuthering Heights, pain and its visible signs can be communication,

emotion, evocation, even art.

Many marks of pain exist in Wuthering Heights—cuts, emaciation, bullet

wounds—but the bruise, the liminal blotch that shows the coalescence of blood just

beneath the surface of the skin, is the most salient. The bruise is the in-between

phenomenon between bloodshed and its lack (or, as I will show, “bloodlessness”).

Blood’s appearance, semi-appearance (as in the bruise), or nonappearance is the telling

phenomenon when it comes to understanding the function of pain in Wuthering Heights.

Blood is the thing which is not usually seen and whose appearance, out of the context of

menstruation, means that something has gone seriously wrong with one’s body. Forcing

another’s blood to appear is to force his or her body to change without that person’s

consent. Even eliciting a blush of modesty after a compliment is to induce a person’s

body involuntarily to show something hidden—literally, the hidden blood inside the

cheeks, but also hidden thoughts.40 Even more so, to bruise or to break the skin is to

create a more serious uncovering of what is hidden; it is an aggressive, nonconsensual

evocation.41

Throughout the novel, Heathcliff’s manipulation of the abstractions of the law and economic power demonstrate how marks of pain like bruises materialize otherwise immaterial changes in status and even the aspects of the social fabric that are seen to make up an individual’s identity. Summarizing Thomas Hobbes, Rachel Ablow notes that all laws and contracts are built upon the existence of pain: “Social life is premised on the

fact that we exist as vulnerable, embodied subjects” (Victorian Pain 4). Heathcliff

recognizes as a child that violence is often the enforcer of tenuous power differentiations

based on these determinant aspects such as race, class, and gender. In Wuthering Heights,

40 I will not be delving further into the blush since it is a mark[ing] of blood that doesn’t involve pain as we might normally conceive of it (in the way that a bruise or a cut would). I leave such explorations to the wealth of fascinating full-length studies such as Mary Ann O’Farrell’s Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush; Elspeth Probyn’s Blush: The Faces of Shame; and, more generally, the contributions of affect studies as a field, such as Sarah Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 41 Heathcliff as a “vampire,” either in a figurative or supernatural sense, is an area well-covered by critics. My interest in Heathcliff’s blood-drawing does not involve interrogating Heathcliff’s supernatural status as a devourer of blood or his “vampiric” quality as a drainer of life-force from other characters. My picture of Heathcliff is predatory but not so parasitic. For more on Heathcliff as vampire, see Oates, Simpson, and S. Smith. Nancy Armstrong also explores vampirism as “precisely that notion of kinship as one that reproduces itself at the expense of the human species,” which, she argues, Victorian novelists strove to undermine (“Feminism…” 10).

violence is most often enacted over property. Patricia Parker’s deconstructionist study of

Wuthering Heights centers on property, primarily “in the sense of the establishment of

boundaries” and their crossings, particularly through proper names (99). The novel’s

marginal texts (Catherine’s “diary” and carvings, the hellfire sermon that Lockwood

reads), the confusion of proper names, and the multitude of “competing” narrators create

a novel whose point, Parker argues, is its own unraveling (97). Terry Eagleton, on the

other hand, takes a Marxist view of property relations in the novel, seeing the story as the

playing-out of a struggle between the ascendant middle class and the decaying

aristocracy. Heathcliff, a free agent who has no set place in the social structure of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, supposedly offers Catherine the only

“authentic” way of living in a world of exploitation and inequality (397). When Catherine rejects him, Heathcliff becomes a predatory capitalist himself; the promise of a “natural” life outside of society crumbles as an illusion. In Eagleton’s view, the violence in the novel stems from Heathcliff’s presence as a wildcard thrown into the “dominative system of the Heights” (399). Ultimately, Eagleton’s structuralist analysis is based on this premise: that Heathcliff is perverted by the inherently perverse economic and social structure of pre-industrial and industrial England; but to argue as such, he must disregard

Heathcliff’s violence prior to Catherine’s rejection as the product of Nelly’s bias, a conclusion that I do not find that the text itself supports.

Wuthering Heights distinguishes itself from many other Victorian literary depictions of violence enacted on the bodies of the working class in the sense that the novel does not limit its treatment of violence to a purely social context. Unlike more straightforward mid-Victorian depictions of classed, raced, and gendered pain, Emily

Brontë is not only out to create representative or metaphorical violence that functions to

expose social ills. By way of contrast, think, for instance, of John Reed in Jane Eyre

(1847); his violence toward Jane and his eventual suicide act, respectively, as a proof of

the injustice of bourgeois male privilege and the irredeemable emptiness therein. For that

matter, think of the third Brontë sister’s violent man, Arthur Huntingdon of Ann Brontë’s

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall both depict these male characters’ violence and subsequent suffering as an indictment of the system that allowed them such impunity in the first place; Reed’s and Huntingdon’s self- destructions, then, are well-deserved punishments for their misdeeds, a doubling-back of the pain they’ve cause others. Charlotte’s and Anne’s novels ally themselves with other contemporary authors’ like Dickens in that their fictional violence often serves as a direct commentary on “real-world” injustice.

But violence doesn’t work like this in Wuthering Heights—or, rather, it doesn’t only work like this. The tension between structuralist and post-structuralist interpretations of the novel attest to its engagement with pain as both social symptom and aesthetic tool.

Understood systemically, if violence leaves a visible mark on its victim, that inscription makes the assertion of the violence more enduring and portable. Whether a love bite or a black eye, bruises always speak—through them and in them, pain becomes readable. The danger of this, of course, is that bruises and other marks of pain are floating signifiers open to multiple readings, even contradictory ones. Heathcliff’s success results from his preternatural canniness in harnessing the fluidity of these markers, getting out ahead of their changing significations or completely upending them. Heathcliff creates a system of

violence that turns the marks of pain into exchanges of property and, by way of property,

exchanges of legal power.

But just as the bruise shows the moment of pain upon the skin, Heathcliff’s drive

to violence is both actualizing and aesthetic. In the same way that the brand or signet

provides the material seal on an abstract contract, Heathcliff methodically bruises and

bleeds others, creating an economy of pain that facilitates the exchange of property and

falls within the purview of a legal system already set up to empower men. However,

Heathcliff’s violence is not purely systematic or economic—that is, the pain he causes does not always get him something that can be held or touched like money, a wife, a child, or a house. His aesthetic violence, the pain that doesn’t acquire property or goods but rather serves as a means to satisfy some kind of emotional urge, amounts to something more like a religious invocation. When I say “aesthetic,” I don’t mean

“beautiful.” Rather, I mean “aesthetic” in the sense of art’s quasi-religious ontological affirmation, its means of providing personal purpose, satisfaction, expression, and self- definition divorced from practical use. Kant famously called this “purposefulness without purpose,” Hegel rather dualistically referred to it as “Spirit,” and Denis Dutton has called it “non-utilitarian pleasure” (Graham, “Art and Religion” 510, Dutton 273). While Kant and Hegel were concerned with the supposed higher function of art beyond use or religious instruction, the early-20th century aestheticist R.G. Collingwood explored “the

rituals and symbols of public ceremony” such as funerals and marriages, which he called

“art as magic” (Graham, “Art and Religion” 517). The purpose of this kind of art is not to

be beautiful but rather, as Gordon Graham adds, to be “fitting.” In this schema, art does

not effectuate something (like an emotion) but rather constitutes it (like a hymn

worshipping God) (518). 42

Heathcliff’s aesthetic violence, violence he undertakes for non-economic motives,

can be conceived of as “art as magic,” a kind of cross between religious ritual and

performance art that is distinguished by its excess. Ritual violence, particularly artful

bloodshed or other painful body markings, takes its root in religious practice and legend

long before Christianity. In Homer’s Odyssey, for instance, Odysseus cannot get his

mother’s shade in the underworld to remember or speak to him until he offers a blood

sacrifice and allows her to drink.43 Ritual bloodshed as a means of penetrating the veil between the living and the dead or even defying death itself is, of course, the central idea behind the Christian sacrament of Communion, and for adherents Christ’s wounds are not only the potent proofs of but the very means by which a God-human has overcome death.

But Emily Brontë’s world, as many have said, is just as much pagan as it is Christian. I

use “aesthetic,” then, to distinguish between the more straightforward idea of a spiritual

blood sacrifice and the idea of invoking or testing some kind of ontological truth through

the marks of pain. Rather than simply finding relief through inflicting pain, as a cutter

might do when deliberately opening the skin to alleviate his or her own emotional

turmoil, Heathcliff uses spiritualized aesthetic violence to establish or affirm (with

ambiguous results) a link between life and death. Since blood is the threshold between

life and death, bloodletting and bruising become the inventive methodology that tests

ontological status. One could call this the Gothic shadow of the novel’s realist depiction

42 Furthermore, Collingwood upholds art’s “expressivism,” its ability to “be expressive of” an emotion (Graham, “Expressivism…” 112). In this way, “‘Every utterance and every gesture that each of us makes is a work of art’” (Graham, “Expressivism…” 110). Unfortunately, since so little of Emily Brontë’s writings survive, we have no direct evidence of her artistic taste or theory “except by inference” (Ingham 91). 43 For more on blood ritual in The Odyssey, see Heath.

of economic violence; whereas Heathcliff’s acquisitive violence is defined by exchange,

his aesthetic violence is creative in the sense that it makes new openings and new

possibilities for being. Heathcliff’s bruises on Isabella Linton, for instance, mark her

degradation from fine lady to chattel.

Heathcliff’s treatment of Isabella Linton represents best not only how the

economy of pain works but also how Heathcliff plays aesthetically within it. When Nelly

pays a visit to the Heights after Heathcliff and Isabella are married and sees the bruises

with which Heathcliff has branded his new wife, Heathcliff enjoins Nelly: “‘But tell him

[Edgar], also, to set his fraternal and magisterial heart at ease, that I keep strictly within

the limits of the law. I have avoided, up to this period, giving her the slightest right to

claim a separation...’” (Wuthering Heights 118)44 At first, the only recourse for Isabella

seems to be to turn Heathcliff into a murderer: “‘I just hope, I pray, that he may forget his

diabolical prudence, and kill me!’” But of course, in a system whose terms only

Heathcliff understands, this plays into his hands: “‘If you are called upon in a court of

law, you’ll remember her language, Nelly! …No, you’re not fit to be your own guardian,

Isabella, now; and I, being your legal protector, must retain you in my custody...’”

(Wuthering Heights 119) As Kristin Kalsam observes, “Her rage works only to make her

appear more in need of his ‘protection’” (31). Isabella’s suicidal threat feeds into

Heathcliff’s hypothetical legal defense, one common enough to be a Victorian trope: that his wife is mad.45

44 As Judith E. Pike puts it, “Heathcliff’s account not only clearly reveals that Brontë had a keen awareness of the marriage laws and coverture, but also, more surprisingly, it shows her very incisive understanding of the legal grounds by which a husband could incarcerate his wife as well as the legal grounds by which a wife might be granted a legal separation” (351-352). 45 For more on coverture as well as women novelists’ interventions into the law, see Kalsam’s In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature (2012). And for a thorough exploration of Heathcliff’s legal maneuvering vis-a-vis his marriage to Isabella, see Pike.

So far, this is somewhat well-trod territory. Critics usually interpret Heathcliff’s

abuse of Isabella either as a form of proxy revenge against Edgar or confuse the abuse

itself with the acquisition of Isabella’s (read: Edgar’s) property, which is achieved

through the marriage, not the abuse.46 Isabella does tell Nelly, “He [Heathcliff] told me

of Catherine’s illness, and accused my brother of causing it; promising that I should be

Edgar’s proxy in suffering till he could get a hold of him” (Wuthering Heights 114). But

the reduction of Isabella to a mere proxy for Edgar disregards the fact that all the

economic utility of the marriage is achieved the moment they become man and wife; as

soon as the marriage license is signed, Heathcliff owns all of Isabella’s property and

becomes the de facto heir of the as-yet childless Edgar. His infliction of pain on Isabella

certainly allows Heathcliff to, in some ways, twist the screws on Edgar, but he seems

equally, perhaps more motivated by his own aesthetic “satisfaction.”

Before their marriage, when Catherine scolds Heathcliff for toying with Isabella,

Heathcliff retorts, “‘The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him,

they crush those beneath him. You are welcome to torture me to death for your own

amusement, only allow me to amuse myself a little in the same style...’” (Wuthering

Heights 88) Then, when Catherine teases him about Isabella’s infatuation, Heathcliff

says, “‘You’d hear of odd things, if I lived alone with that mawkish, waxen face; the

most ordinary would be painting on its white the colours of the rainbow, and turning the

blue eyes black” (107). He discursively casts Isabella’s face as a blank canvas, a waxen

lump begging for color and reshaping at his hands. For Heathcliff, torturing Isabella is at

46 For instance, I find Hancock’s explanation of Heathcliff’s violence against the women of his house—as a “signal [of[ the transfer of ownership from Linton to himself”—more reductively homosocial than the full scope of Heathcliff’s violent behavior actually suggests (64). For other examinations of the Heathcliff/Isabella relationship in terms of marriage law, coverture, and domestic abuse, see Pike and Kalsam.

times a release valve for his own emotional suffering at Catherine’s hands, and at other

times it is an “experiment” to find out how much Isabella can endure and still maintain

the infatuation that so disgusts him. He even claims to have experienced artist’s block in

trying to find new ways to destroy what he casts as her hypocritical affection for him:

“But no brutality disgusted her. I suppose she has an innate admiration of

it, if only her precious person were secure from injury! Now was it not the

depth of absurdity—of genuine idiocy—for that pitiful, slavish, mean-

minded brach [bitch] to dream that I could love her? ...I’ve sometimes

relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she

could endure, and still creep shamefully cringing back!” (Wuthering

Heights 118)

With Isabella, Heathcliff’s reciprocal “revenge” against Edgar and perhaps even Cathy

ends at the altar. After that, he “creates” with violence rather than “pays back.” He

transforms an aristocrat into a creature that desires his violence while at the same time

providing himself “amusement.”47 Nelly affirms his success: “So much had

circumstances altered their [Heathcliff’s and Isabella’s] positions, that he would certainly

have struck a stranger as a born and bred gentleman, and his wife a thorough little

47 Whether or not Isabella actually continues to desire Heathcliff after he abuses her is a matter of some controversy. Joyce Carol Oates calls Isabella “masochistic” and claims that she may have “enjoyed, and even provoked, her husband’s experimental sadism” (443, 444). Pike takes issue with Oates’s interpretation, claiming it portrays “Isabella as the deluded romantic with an infantile mind who seeks to win the affections of her husband at any cost” (366). Pike’s characterization of masochistic desire as “infantile” overcorrects what Pike sees to be Oates’s erasure of domestic abuse and ends up oversimplifying the Isabella/Heathcliff relationship. While it is important to keep in mind that Isabella’s masochism may be an invention of Heathcliff’s, Brontë allows for the possibility that he may yet be telling the truth as a way of critiquing Isabella’s hypocrisy when it comes to “brutality” or, on a broader scale, the tendency for Romantic literature to heroize violent men, as Heathcliff explicitly says. In any case, Brontë’s secondhand (or third- or fourth-hand) narration deliberately allows us to imagine all these possibilities at the same time.

slattern! … Her appearance is changed greatly, her character even more so” (138).48

Heathcliff boasts to Nelly about the fulfillment of his promise thoroughly to bruise

Isabella’s face: “‘Take a good look at that countenance—she’s near the point which

would suit me’” (142). Nelly’s words reinforce Heathcliff’s methods: By bruising

Isabella, by changing her “appearance” through violence, he has changed Isabella’s

“character” from advantaged daughter of a wealthy household to slatternly wife. The

bruising brings into being what their marriage certificate only legitimizes: Heathcliff’s

total domination over Isabella Linton and everything she owns, his ability, simply by

striking her body, to redefine her entire identity. If Heathcliff’s aim were only to seize

property and usurp the Linton line of descent, both of these goals are achieved through

marriage and the conception of their son. The gratuitous violence raises the stakes, brings

their relationship into a different dimension, aestheticizes it by casting it in terms of color

changes, experimentation, and personal satisfaction. It is fitting (so to speak), then, that

Heathcliff commemorates their elopement by hanging Isabella’s dog. It’s overkill,

unnecessary. It’s excess. It’s his version of art.

Written (on the) Body: Sadism, Sex, and the Creative Possibilities of Violence

In arguing that the Isabella/Heathcliff relationship shows both domestic abuse and

the potential for violence as aesthetic experimentation, I come up against two strains of

48 Von Sneidern understands the Isabella/Heathcliff relationship in distinctly racial terms, insisting that, “stripped of the prerogatives of her race, class and gender, Isabella is vulnerable, and the racialist and misogynistic commentary about the lasciviousness of black women… are cathected onto her” (182). Von Sneidern attributes Isabella’s racialization to a taint acquired through proximity to Heathcliff, deeming his purpose in abusing her as “experimentation” with the abstract notion of “oppression itself, to see what can happen when a human is turned into a thing” (184). Thus, Von Sneidern characterizes Heathcliff’s actions as, if not directly vengeful, then at least motivated by a desire to make a white woman experience the brutality of racism. Fully allowing racialized master-slave dynamics as salient components of this scene, I insist that the aesthetic motivation of Heathcliff not be discounted, since so much of Heathcliff’s violence does not follow the script of subaltern revolt.

feminist thought on the novel: a more recent denunciation of Heathcliff as an unambiguous patriarch and wife-beater (cited above) and an earlier, second-wave feminist interpretation of Heathcliff’s violence as a cleansing fire to burn down an oppressive system. Sandra M. Gilbert has famously deemed Heathcliff Catherine’s

“whip,” that is, her male tool (indeed, her surrogate phallus) for asserting her own wishes and desires: “Heathcliff’s is the body that does her will...” (“Looking Oppositely…”

265). Gilbert argues that Heathcliff’s maleness is even overwritten through his closeness with Catherine in their childhood, a gender-sameness that Hindley, the “new father,” reinforces when he reduces Heathcliff to a state of “female powerlessness” (267, 277).

Even when Heathcliff marries Isabella and proceeds to abuse her, in Gilbert’s words

Heathcliff is more a carrier of patriarchy than its agent: His return to Wuthering Heights carries with it “the germ of a terrible dis-ease with patriarchy that causes women like

Catherine and Isabella to try to escape their imprisonment in roles and houses by running away, by starving themselves, and finally by dying” (280).

Gilbert holds Heathcliff somewhat to blame for his behavior, but others do not.

Martha Nussbaum finds him the hero of the novel: “Heathcliff can give back what he gets,” she insists, “but he is not the initiator of violence...” (371). Even further:

Heathcliff—despite the vindictiveness forced into his character by abuse

and humiliation—is not only the only living person among the dead, the

only civilized man among savages, he is in a genuine if peculiar sense, the

only Christian among the Pharisees, and—with respect to the person he

loves—a sacrificial figure of Christ himself, the only one who sheds his

own blood for another. (374)

Feminist interpretations of Heathcliff along this line—that whatever atrocities Heathcliff

commits are solely the fault of his abusers and that he, like Frankenstein’s monster, is the

comparatively innocent avenging answer to his creators’ sins—seem to me to find their root in

the image of Emily Brontë as a cultural revolutionary whose feminist, even anti-imperialist novel

could not therefore glorify or at least ambiguate a violent, cruel man. But do feminist avenging

angels hang puppy dogs?

The novel does not cast all of Heathcliff’s violence as unequivocally, morally bad.

Though speaking of Wuthering Heights as a whole, John Bowen’s words nonetheless capture

Heathcliff’s character as both revolting and fascinating: “Wuthering Heights is a strangely joyful, even ecstatic book, despite—or perhaps because of—the suffering and death that permeate it...

Annihilation is the most positive, affirmative force in the book—desire’s twin” (209, 210). As I

argue concerning the other female authors in this dissertation (perhaps particularly with Marie

Corelli), it is my contention that feminist criticism must expand to allow for the complications of

female authors’ multifaceted, even contradictory politics. Does Emily Brontë critique patriarchy,

empire, and other oppressive social systems? Yes, certainly. But does she also imbue a violent

male character with style and—dare we admit—glamor? Yes.

Heathcliff’s style plays an essential role in Brontë’s exploration of the nature of

pain and violence, and therefore should not be explained away as mere flourishes on the

just punishment of imperialist patriarchs. And, I would argue, Heathcliff’s glamor does

not make Wuthering Heights any less feminist. On the one hand, as I will show, Brontë

creates a veritable horror show of what happens when a ruthless, brilliant, and literate

man takes full advantage of the inborn injustices of England’s law. Wuthering Heights

functions partially as a woman’s critique of different varieties of masculinity in contest—

Heathcliff’s ruthless legal expertise versus Edgar Linton’s feeble aristocratic sensibility,

for instance. And this is often the way that Brontë’s narration specifically but also female

authorship writ large is interpreted: as a kind of “cross-dressing” in the guise of male

narrators “as the most inward and telling method to explore the waywardness of men’s

desires” (Bowen 211). But this idea that Brontë or any female author’s narration of the

interiority of a male character is “cross-dressing,” reaching outward to put on and “wear”

the trappings of maleness, precludes the very real existence of female masculinity and

essentializes women’s authorship of male experience as necessarily defined by their own

experience of gender oppression; the result is predetermined and thus grossly

oversimplified.

Rather than seeing Brontë’s depiction of Heathcliff’s violence as either

exclusively condemnation of or “complicity” with patriarchy, I argue that Brontë uses a

male character to explore an elemental question about what it means to live in a

paradoxically immaterial/material world mediated through the body, which itself has an

elusive, ambiguous relationship to selfhood and subjectivity.49 It is essential to recognize

that a female author’s representation of violence can operate on more than one level—on

the level of literal critique of social problems, certainly, but also on the level of human

ontology. What does it mean not only to have a body, but to be able to change that body

and the bodies of others through pain?

In his influential reading of Wuthering Heights, Eagleton asserts that Heathcliff’s

style of violence signals backward into pure primitivism; whereas Thrushcross Grange

disguises the systematic violence upon which it is built, Heathcliff’s “undisguised

49 For a fascinating exploration of female authors’ “complicity” with patriarchy as “daddy’s girls,” see Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace’s Their Father’s Daughters.

violence, like the absolutism of his love, come to seem features of a past more brutal but

also more heroic than the present...” (405). But as more recent critics have shown,

deliberate violence need not always be understood according to the Foucauldian scheme

of discipline and punishment, with the brutal past succumbing to a less violent, more

carceral present; rather, we can understand pain (and the representations thereof) as a

creative redefinition of the body. Biman Basu, in his exploration of sadomasochism in

African American literature, has persuasively argued that the “discursive formation of

discipline” has pacified “the body” and essentially drained it of sensation (6). The

practice of S/M, he asserts, is not only “against the pacification of the body and its

affective diminution” but also inscribes the body through pain, creating meaning that is

not metaphorical but “real” (7).50 Contra Deleuze, who separated S/M into two

supposedly incompatible categories of sadism and masochism, Basu insists that, in

practice, the two “are not mutually exclusive,” and, in fact, “are both affirmations of

affect” in a Western society that has “psychologized” human experience and

monopolized violence (162, 6). And, contra Foucault, who conceived of the violent

inscription of the body as a metaphor, Basu insists that, for brutalized groups like African

Americans, the whip, the flog, and other apparatuses have literal significance. Ergo,

the reading of whipping in corporal punishment as scripting is not merely

a writerly or academic indulgence in metaphor. The literalization of

scripting in the practice of whipping draws attention to the palimpsestic

50 I use the term “S/M” to refer to the practice of deliberately inflicting and experiencing pain for the purposes of erotic gratification. Though “BDSM” is a more contemporary and wider-used term among practitioners, my interest has less to do with erotic practices and much more to do with the concepts of sadism and masochism as historically-understood and not necessarily erotic orientations, ergo I will use the terms linked most closely with psychoanalytical lineage: sadism, masochism, and sadomasochism.

relation between the historical text and the body, to the close relationship

between discursive practice and the formation of the body. (8)

S/M, in short, “is not an inarticulate response to the historical progression from

punishment to discipline; rather, it is constitutive of a disarticulation of these discursive

formations and regimes of power” (12). It creates a “new body” and a new morality free

of these regimes (26).51

Basu acknowledges the utopianism of his stance but unabashedly claims utopia as

“the impossible but indispensable object of human endeavor, of all ethics and aesthetics,

an endeavor without which imagination is impoverished” (27). The utopia which Basu

envisions as the object of S/M practice, however, seems based upon its practitioners’

sharing that goal or at least agreeing on what that utopia should be. By another name, we

could call this mutual consent, but Basu astutely points out that actual S/M practice

features a great deal of necessary consent “play.”52 Still, even if the dom’s job is to push

the sub’s boundaries, there is an a priori agreement that this is in fact the dom’s job and

that the safe word, in fact, means stop. We might call Heathcliff’s violence in Wuthering

Heights, then, classically sadistic in the sense that it aligns most closely with Deleuze’s

notion of the Marquis de Sade’s libertines, who like their violence like they like their

51 As Ariane Cruz points out, “Foucault recognizes the productive somatic potential of BDSM in ‘inventing new possibilities of pleasure;’ however, he rejects the kind of psycho-somatic historical register of BDSM—the premise that it is linked to an ‘uncovering of S&M tendencies deep within our unconscious’” (434). In other words, Foucault rejects the historicity that Cruz insists exists in S/M practice but Which she reconciles by citing the paradox of S/M as both utopian and inflected by “historical trauma and/or memory” (435). 52 Practitioners refer to this as “edgeplay” (Basu 170). The ubiquity of the safe-word may appear to delineate the sub’s non-negotiable boundary, thereby leading to the conclusion (reached by Deleuze, for instance) that the sub in fact has all the power. In actual practice, the safe-word is highly contentious for this very reason; subs can be consumed and distracted by the question of when to use the safe-word, and overzealous use subverts the power dynamic that is actually supposed to be occurring (i.e. the sub is supposed to surrender control). As practitioners become better acquainted, Basu observes, the safe-word tends to fade out of use (165-166). For more on the ambiguities of consent in S/M practice, see Cruz (416- 417).

language: pure, “demonstrative, [and] instituting” rather than (as in classic masochism

via Masoch’s Venus in Furs) “dialectical, mythical, and persuasive” (Deleuze 22).53

Heathcliff’s violence is not metaphorical but literal; the marks of that violence themselves create their subject’s change in accordance to his would-be omnipotence.

This might indeed sound like Sade, whose libertines are commonly remarked upon for their verbosity; it is a critical commonplace to say that these libertines’ real weapons and their real pleasures lie in their speech, in their excessively precise explanations of their philosophies.54 Much more than ravishing their victims, “they ravish

the discursive structures of reason as the Enlightenment traditionally conceived it”

(Dipiero 255). Even if taken literally instead of metaphorically, Sade’s sexual violence

supposedly reveals his “originality… in placing the body at the centre of his atheistic

philosophy, in siting philosophy in the boudoir, in making sex the driving force of all

human action, more than a century before Freud” (Phillips xxiii).55 In many ways, this

reading of the libertines’ violence is also utopian, since it dematerializes the body and de-

literalizes violence in order to make rapists and murderers into iconoclast-philosophers;

as Thomas Dipiero has pointed out, Sade’s most famous victim Justine “never retains a

trace of the violence done to her” on her body, recovering miraculously from each

atrocity until her deus ex machina death by lightning strike (248).

There is no such philosophical carnivalesque operating in Wuthering Heights.

Heathcliff seems supremely unconcerned with being understood and spouts no nihilistic

53 To my knowledge, only Joyce Carol Oates has also seen an affinity between Emily Brontë and Sade, but only to the extent that she references Sade in passing when describing Wuthering Heights’s “magnanimity” rather than its narrowness: “Where else might we find a tough-minded lyricism evoking the mystical value of nature contiguous with a vision of the possibilities of erotic experience very like that of the decadents, or of de Sade himself?” (438) 54 See Dipiero 254 for a concise breakdown of this critical history on Sade’s libertines. 55 Phillips here collapses sex and the body—a common collapse which I discuss in my introduction.

or countercultural justifications for his behavior. Even overwhelming sexual desire does

not offer a satisfying explanation. Critics have unearthed titillating strains of S/M in

Charlotte Brontë’s men, which reconcile the cruelty of Edward Rochester and M. Paul

and, indeed, the cruelty of Jane Eyre and ice queen Lucy Snowe, but the same kind of

two-way redemptive erotic play does not exist in Emily Brontë’s novel. Heathcliff and

Catherine’s psychological torturing of each other doesn’t excite them like Jane’s and

Rochester’s mind games excite. Rather, Heathcliff and Catherine are caught up in a tragic

series of one-upmanship gestures, scrambling to rebalance the childhood equilibrium

Catherine first disturbs when she meets Edgar Linton. Heathcliff’s occasional cruelty

toward Catherine involves coldness or defiance of her wishes, not violence. As Catherine

attests on her deathbed: “‘You never harmed me in your life!’” (Wuthering Heights

125)56 What’s more, Catherine dies halfway through the book, and if unity with

Catherine is the alpha and omega of Heathcliff’s motivation, why doesn’t he kill himself

after her death to join her in the afterlife, in which he explicitly believes?57 Indeed, after

Catherine’s death, the doctor attests that Heathcliff is “‘blooming... He’s rapidly

regaining flesh since he lost his better half’” (Wuthering Heights 143). Rather than doing

away with himself, for decades Heathcliff thrives without Catherine.

I do not mean to claim that sexuality plays no role in Wuthering Heights or even

that Heathcliff’s violence does not sometimes take a sexual form. Rather, I mean that sex

is not with Emily Brontë as it is with Sade, “the driving force of all human action.”

Heathcliff’s sadism is almost always applied in ways that seem desexualized, even with a

56 In the same scene, however, Heathcliff does bruise Catherine with his hard grip on her arm, a unique moment which I discuss further below. 57 See my explication of Wuthering Heights 130, below.

woman like Isabella Linton who seems willing and eager (at first) to be ravished. Even when sex is involved, as it is with a conjugal contract, Heathcliff’s violence is more about actualizing his own visions, and any pleasure he derives resembles much more the pleasure of the artist in his creation than the pleasure of the (momentarily) sated libertine standing over Justine’s violated body. Heathcliff does not seek sexual gratification from violence, nor does he desire “complete physical sensation totally removed from the confines of representation” as a libertine would (Dipiero 258). Rather, Heathcliff uses pain—inflicted on himself and upon others—first as a way of waging a structured war against his enemies, but also as a way of providing himself aesthetic “satisfaction” by playing with ontological, existential uncertainty and ambiguity. But the novel leaves us no assurance that this violent play provides anything beyond momentary satisfaction.

Whereas Basu cites the utopic possibilities of dialogic violence in its “endless creativity” and reassertion of the body and its sensations within a sterilized, cerebral modern life,

Heathcliff’s violence leaves us in between the realms of dystopia and utopia, teasing and torturing us (and him) with the possibility of existential reassurance but always leaving it just out of reach (164).

The fact that Heathcliff aesthetically harms himself as well as harms others demonstrates this principle best. In a haunting scene following Catherine’s death, Nelly finds Heathcliff under a tree on the Grange’s grounds. Upon hearing of Catherine’s fate,

Heathcliff utters arguably his most famous speech:

“Why, she’s a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—

not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings!

And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine

Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed

you—haunt me, then! …I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be

with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me

alone in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” (Wuthering Heights 130)

After this plea, “He dashed his head against the knotted trunk… I observed several

splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead were both stained;

probably the scene I witnessed was a repetition of others acted during the night” (130).

The violence Heathcliff enacts upon himself in this scene demonstrates his general

motive in marking through pain: signs of pain like bruises and cuts function in Wuthering

Heights as visible inscriptions of the invisible—or, in the case of something like

Heathcliff’s race, as inscriptions of the dubiously visible. It is especially ritualistic here in

that Heathcliff is quite literally attempting to conjure a ghost. His confusion and

uncertainty about her presence or absence (“Where is she? Not there… not perished—

where?”), about her materiality or immateriality (“take any form”) leads him to hurt

himself in an assertion of the presence and materiality of his own body, to spill his own

blood, the thing usually invisible now made visible. Elaine Scarry has claimed that the

feeling of pain gives us “the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty,’” since it is so “effortlessly grasped,” impossible to be denied or not felt (4). In the face of this most existential of uncertainties, in which Heathcliff asserts that he “cannot live” without

Catherine and can no longer sense her presence, he turns to pain and blood-spilling. If he

and Catherine both share the conceit that they are ontologically united and

interdependent, as the two of them both attest in the novel, then the assertion of

Heathcliff’s own sensation and materiality is an assertion of Catherine’s continued

existence. It is an enactment of the bond that constitutes their being.

Pain shares a quality with the written word in its ability to manifest physically

(like ink upon paper) life’s intangibles, but unlike the written word, pain does more than

only refer to itself. It makes a literal impression upon bodies, and as the novel’s

preoccupation with ghosts attests, the question of what constitutes a sensation and a body

and therefore what constitutes an existence obsesses Heathcliff and, indeed, obsesses the

novel itself. As Wuthering Heights shows over and over again, changing a body through pain changes the world. The signet of a bruise or cut asserts a will, declares an intent, creates an offering, a ritual, a contract. In Wuthering Heights, the body is the paper and pain the ink on which fates are written and sealed.

I argue that Brontë intriguingly chose to explore this question of the ontology of pain through a male character in a much more protracted way than through the female character that many have identified as the novel’s representative of woman’s pain—

Catherine the elder. Feminist critics have, understandably, focused on the two Catherines and especially the elder as the novel’s primary sympathetic subjects and have thus cast

Heathcliff either as the tragic, anti-patriarchal extension of Catherine the elder or the representative woman abuser. But Heathcliff does not need to be innocent or sympathetic in order to be representative of a human condition (to experience and inflict pain) that

Brontë casts as a central concern of the novel. There is room in feminist criticism to regard the novel as both a historical/cultural and an aesthetic object in this way, just as there is room to understand Heathcliff’s violence as cultural (patriarchal) and

aesthetic/amoral.58 This is not to say that Catherine does not represent important truths

about inhabiting a female body, but that her embodied experience is so limited by her

gender, as many like Gilbert have influentially shown, as to be entirely defined by it. As

is the case with so many Victorian female authors, getting to a human experience that is

not dominated by biological sex requires the deployment of a male character, maleness

being—in the Victorian era and often still today—so assumed and unexamined that it is

almost unsexed. Indeed, it is only the male body that can use the law as its instrument

rather than be the instrument of the law.

Painting the House-Front in Blood: The Art of the Bruise and the Legal Economy of Pain

The determination and transfer of power in Wuthering Heights happens according

to several well-established patriarchal scripts or contracts, quite literally: Primogeniture,

wills, marriages, and mortgages. Heathcliff’s agenda becomes the acquisition of these legal scripts which endow him with white, patriarchal authority and thereby allow him to change bodies through violence unhindered. The ease with which he works within the boundaries of the law to commit at times horrific acts of violence accounts for some of

Emily Brontë’s caustic indictment of patriarchy. N.M. Jacobs argues, “Most of the

violence and abuse in this fictional world is made possible by the vestiture of total power

in the patriarch” (78). Ian Ward tracks Heathcliff’s “use and abuse of the law,” cataloging

58 Yet, unlike Sade, whose novels create “a structure built around preventing and destroying sentimental identifications with persons” (Meeker 193), Brontë’s writing does not disallow readerly identification and, in this way, engenders readerly ambivalence through identification just as much as she challenges us with extremes. Sade refuses to make his characters sympathetic, “since, as Sade recognizes, the sentimental cultivation of similarities between character and reader underpins not just the ‘conventional’ technique of the novelist but a political and religious culture itself organized around the propagation of sympathetic identities in its subjects” (Meeker 202-203). As many of Brontë’s critics have noted, however, part of the power of Wuthering Heights is its ability for its violence to shock but not alienate, to fascinate through repulsion from and identification with the tyrant/victim Heathcliff. See, for instance, Oates.

the numerous ways in which the law “fails” to protect first the child Heathcliff and then

his eventual victims (56).59 Made up of webs of abstract edicts, regulations, and

assurances, the law almost never comes to bear upon the lived experiences of the

characters in the way it’s “supposed” to. For instance, Catherine the younger accuses

Heathcliff of stealing her land and money, but

of course, it was never really her land, but rather a fictive jurisprudential

interest which was passed, by the terms of the settlement, from her father

to her husband, and on the effective possession of her deceased husband’s

father. The impotence and the complicity of the law have been laid bare...

English property law was written to help men like Heathcliff consolidate

estates. (Ward 60-61)

Ward notes that although the law was made for men, it was not “supposed to be” for men like Heathcliff, “nameless dark-skinned orphans,” and so Heathcliff’s ability to “abuse” the law renders the novel “all the more terrifying” (61, 56). But Heathcliff’s appropriation of the privileges of a white patriarch simply demonstrate the abstraction or, in Ward’s terms, fictiveness of legal conscripts.

This is where the indeterminacy of Heathcliff’s race, due, notably, to his lack of

documented parentage, becomes crucial.60 Heathcliff’s “actual” coloration teeters between white and nonwhite. His skin, hair, and eyes are often referred to in terms of their darkness, but he shares these characteristics with an unambiguously white man,

59 Foucault, of course, would question whether the law is even supposed to protect anyone or anything besides the centralized power/tower of the panoptic state. 60 Brontë’s narrative offers Heathcliff numerous racial identities—gypsy, (Native) American, African, Chinese, and Indian, to name only a few. Several critics such as Abby Bardi, Elsie Michie, and Maja-Lisa von Sneiden have explored the implications of these numerous potential identities upon the story of Wuthering Heights. Bardi claims Heathcliff is Romani, Michie characterizes him as simianized Irish or Oriental despot, and von Sneiden argues that he is an African slave. Susan Meyer has influentially cast Heathcliff as a rebellious colonial or “reverse imperialist” who turns the tables on white oppressors (102).

Hareton Earnshaw, whom Lockwood even mistakes for Heathcliff’s son, calling him

“Heathcliff, junior” (Wuthering Heights 11). Ian F. Haney López has pointed out that

what we have historically understood to denote “race”—something natural,

unchangeable, and visible on the body—actually relies upon an undependable notion of

morphology and shared ancestry, a notion which falls apart under close examination

(969).61 In the context of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff appears with enough “natural,”

visible justification to allow others to label him nonwhite, but as we see with Hareton,

who is degraded by Heathcliff but never racialized, racial epithets don’t function without

the corollary of violence. It’s debatable whether Heathcliff’s racial difference from the

other characters “exists” prior to others’ labeling, but if it does, it is reified through

violence. Race cannot reliably be determined by morphology, but the person you beat as

though he were a “gipsy brat” effectively becomes a “gipsy brat” through your beating

(Wuthering Heights 29).62

Heathcliff shows us, however, that there is a great deal of space between the blow

and its intended signification, a space through which one can escape and even reroute the

conduit through which violence exchanges power. Threatened by old Earnshaw’s

affection for Heathcliff (and the potential that Heathcliff may even be his father’s bastard

son), Hindley takes every opportunity to rescript difference onto Heathcliff through

beating.63 But Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights possessing an uncanny ability to

61 Meyer argues that, through the Lintons’ behavior in particular, Wuthering Heights “satirizes the British desire to contain and control the ‘dark races’ through a reductive and predictive reading of physiognomy” (100). 62 As I will show with my exploration of “bloodlessness” below, a literal reading of the bruise’s darkening effect on the skin as a mode of racialization is insufficient to explain the way that violence works in Wuthering Heights. After all, blackness is not the only coloration of a bruise, and bruises in the novel do not always racialize. 63 Heathcliff is, after all, named after an “[Earnshaw] son who died in childhood” (Wuthering Heights 52).

drain pain of its referents and thus its effectiveness.64 As Nelly reports, “he would stand

Hindley’s blows without winking or shedding a tear, and my pinches moved him only to

draw in a breath, and open his eyes as if he had hurt himself by accident, and nobody was

to blame” (Wuthering Heights 30). All the actuating effectiveness of pain lies in its

receiver’s acknowledgment of the intent behind it. Pinches meant to show a newcomer

how unwelcome he is become meaningless if the pinched boy won’t accept that that’s

what the pinch means. Heathcliff, instead, dispossesses the inflictor of his or her power

by reassigning the pain’s source to himself and to mere accident.65

In an emblematic scene, Heathcliff makes a play for favored son by demanding

that Hindley switch horses with him when Heathcliff’s is lamed. Hindley refuses at first,

but Heathcliff threatens to reveal to old Earnshaw the “three thrashings you’ve given me

this week, and show [Earnshaw] my arm, which is black to the shoulder” (Wuthering

Heights 31). “‘If I speak of these blows,” Heathcliff threatens, “you’ll get them again

with interest.’” Heathcliff’s threat casts pain as an economic transaction, a reciprocal

process that can even accrue “interest.” And it works. Hindley gives in with the cry of,

“‘Take my colt, gipsy, then!’” and hurls an iron weight which strikes and bruises

Heathcliff anew (31). The “gipsy” epithet, combined with Hindley’s responsibility for

Heathcliff’s blackened arm and the reassertion of that blackening from the thrown

64 Critics both Victorian and 20th-century have found Heathcliff’s sadism to be a classic result of childhood trauma. As more recent studies on S/M have established, however, it has proven impossible to find one traumatic formulation to account for all sadomasochisms; explanations run the gamut from “preconflictual automatic repetitions of destructive and self-injurious behavior” to the reproduction of witnessed or experienced abuse, to the “self-destructiveness associated with unconscious guilt” (Grossman 127). It would be a disservice to Emily Brontë to suggest that the entirety of her novel amounts to a warning about the dangerous results of child abuse. 65 He uses this method into his adulthood. When Catherine the younger attempts to free herself from her imprisonment in Wuthering Heights by getting the house key from Heathcliff, she tries to pry open his hand, but “finding that her nails made no impression, she applied her teeth pretty sharply” (Wuthering Heights 206). Heathcliff seems not only impervious to being scratched by nails, but he also does not react to the bite except to calmly administer to her “a shower of terrific slaps on both sides of the head” (Wuthering Heights 207).

weight, show how, for Hindley, violence is a way to mark his domination—by way of

racialization—over Heathcliff. Heathcliff is his competitor for his birthright on the macro

and micro level: his property (the horse and Wuthering Heights) and his privilege (as

favorite son and as heir). Heathcliff may have Hindley’s horse and Hindley’s father’s

affection, but Heathcliff must also bear Hindley’s marks upon his body.66

However, if Heathcliff possesses the property of the heir and can indeed compel the heir to do Heathcliff’s own will, Hindley’s racial epithets and his violence have no signifying effect. In threatening to reveal his bruises to old Earnshaw, Heathcliff undermines the racializing dark marks of Hindley’s violence and frustrates the intended effect of the bruises. Heathcliff sees (as Hindley doesn’t anticipate) that Earnshaw would not read Heathcliff’s bruises as the rightful brands of Heathcliff’s low place but rather as the evidence of Hindley’s bad temper, even perhaps Hindley’s unfitness to be heir.

Bruises were meant to dispossess Heathcliff, but instead they pass Hindley’s property over to him. Afterward, Nelly “persuaded him [Heathcliff] easily to let me lay the blame of his bruises on the horse; he minded little what tale was told since he had what he wanted” (Wuthering Heights 32). As with the earlier example of the pinches which

Heathcliff reclaims away from Nelly by attributing them to his own accidental self-

infliction, here Heathcliff disregards pain qua pain and views its marks in terms of how

expediently he can rewrite their meaning to acquire what he wants, which not

coincidentally consist of the apparatuses of Hindley’s primacy.

66 Hancock interprets the scene similarly, asserting, “Although Heatchliff’s bruises are a visible manifestation of Hindley’s dominion, Heathcliff transforms these marks of humiliation into a weapon he uses against Hindley and thus diminishes Hindley’s power within the Earnshaw family” (61). Hancock’s study focuses on teaching the “language” of the novel’s violence to students, and she does not expand beyond this upon the issue of bruising or other marks of pain.

In the absence of a birth certificate to prove ethnicity and ancestry, Heathcliff’s enemies assign a nonwhite race to him as justification for their abuse, but that very absence of documentation enables Heathcliff to wrest white privilege back his way. As

Nelly assures him, he is not so dark-skinned that he could be pegged as a “regular black”

(Wuthering Heights 67). His not-too-dark coloration allows him just enough wiggle room to go unchallenged on the grounds of race once he gains ownership of Wuthering

Heights. Like Bhabha’s hybrid, Heathcliff manipulates the unrealities of both race and legal boundaries to facilitate his real work of marking others with pain.67 And as

Catherine the younger discovers, for women, insistence upon legal right matters little when your abuser knows how to handle the lawyers as well as how to break your bones.

In an ominous passage after the Lintons take in the injured Catherine, Heathcliff begins forming plans for Hindley’s complete dispossession sealed by pain and fantasizing about the satisfying aesthetics of violence. He plots how to “‘pay Hindley back,’” mulling over what would be “‘the best way… Let me alone, and I’ll plan it out: while I’m thinking of that, I don’t feel pain’” (Wuthering Heights 38). Heathcliff’s strategy combines pragmatism with a view toward personal satisfaction by way of creating blood- scapes, declaring that he would love “‘the privilege of flinging Joseph off the highest gable, and painting the house-front in Hindley’s blood!’” (38) More than the simple desire for his abusers’ deaths, the flourishes of Heathcliff’s fantasy betray an attitude toward violence that depends as much on artistry as it does on actualization.

In particular, the desire to paint the house-front in Hindley’s blood invokes the peculiar dance between the law and ritual artistry. To say nothing of the verbiage of

“paint,” which denotes degrees of intention and inspiration that another word like

67 See Bhabha 1167-1184.

“splash,” “douse,” or “cover” would lack, the entire image bears Biblical significance.

Heathcliff’s imaginary gesture mimics Yahweh’s commandment, in Exodus, that

enslaved Hebrews paint their door frames with ram’s blood in order to spare their

firstborns from the ravages of a divine massacre.68 Heathcliff seems to want to recreate

the literal blood ritual that breaks a tyrannical hold and creates a new covenant, a new

rule of law, but with a blasphemous inversion of God’s saving will. Instead of saving the

firstborn, in this blood pact the firstborn will die. The brutal, frightening poetic beauty of

the Passover story finds its echo in Heathcliff’s understanding and implementation of

pain and violence.69 Heathcliff does not deny God’s existence or justice when he says, in

response to Nelly’s chides to leave Hindley to God, “‘God won’t have the satisfaction

that I shall…’” (Wuthering Heights 47) Rather, he means that he won’t surrender the

pleasure of painting the house-front in blood to God.

This dual approach to pain—bruising for pleasure and profit—cannot work for

Catherine the elder due to the simple fact of her gender. Aligning with Lévi-Strauss’s

classic formulation of exchange, Catherine, as a woman, is not an actor in the economic

environment of Wuthering Heights. Unlike Heathcliff and Hindley, she does not possess the leverage of maleness to give her access, and thus her canvas is limited to her own

body rather than the bodies of others. She tries, at first, to physically hurt others to get what she wants, but it doesn’t work. Nelly reports, “In play, she liked, exceedingly, to act the little mistress; using her hands freely, and commanding her companions: she did so to

68 See Exodus 12 (New Oxford Annotated Bible). 69 Intriguingly, it is Catherine’s blood, not Hindley’s, which literally ends up on the house-front. When Lockwood encounters Catherine’s ghost, which takes hold of his arm as she begs to be let inside, he “pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed- clothes...” (Wuthering Heights 20-21). The fact that Lockwood saws Catherine’s ghostly wrist atop a broken windowpane means that her blood would have, even if momentarily or minutely, adorned the house-front as it drips down on either side of the glass shard. The idea of Catherine, a ghost, having blood to spill in the first place is in and of itself worth much more attention, which I give below.

me, but I would not bear slapping and ordering; and so I let her know” (Wuthering

Heights 33). During Catherine and Edgar’s courtship, Catherine pinches Nelly behind

Edgar’s back, and Nelly raises a fuss to mortify her attacker. When Catherine insists that

Nelly is lying about the pinch, Nelly retorts, “‘What’s that, then?’…showing a decided

purple witness to refute her” (55). After stamping her foot and “waver[ing] a moment,”

Catherine flies into a violent rage, slapping Nelly on the face; when Edgar begins to cry,

“greatly shocked at the double fault of falsehood and violence which his idol had

committed,” Catherine shakes him (56). Only When Edgar threatens to leave forever,

asking, “‘Can I stay after you have struck me?’”, does Catherine realize that her violence

has not worked to assert her control as it would have for her brother in this context (56).

Nelly easily uses her bruise to “witness” against Catherine, and Catherine’s only success

comes in turning the violence against herself: “‘And now I’ll cry—I’ll cry myself sick!’”

(56) Unlike Heathcliff, who discovers power in the reinscription of the pain others inflict

upon him in a kind of perverse endurance, Catherine’s power lies in overt resistance: “she

was never so happy as when we were all scolding her at once, and she defying us with

her bold, saucy look, and her ready words” (33). Due to her class and gender, Catherine is

very rarely, if ever, physically attacked by another. She is never able to learn how to

reinscribe pain like Heathcliff because the pain she does endure at the hands of others is

defined by her position as daughter of the house: when disciplined, Heathcliff is beaten

while Catherine is starved.70 The way Catherine asserts her will through pain is by

hurting herself, primarily through self-deprivation (notably self-starvation), but, as

Gilbert and other feminist scholars have noted, this has tragic consequences for Catherine

70 In a scene which Brontë paints as typical for the Earnshaw household, when Heathcliff and Catherine defy Joseph’s Sabbath edicts, Hindley “ordered Heathcliff a flogging, and Catherine a fast from dinner or supper” (Wuthering Heights 36).

rather than triumphant ones.71 She is an item of exchange, not an exchanger in the

economy of pain. Her only recourse is to damage herself—that is, to damage the goods.

The only time Hindley is successful in thwarting Heathcliff’s upending of

violence’s intended signification is, naturally enough, when he doesn’t use violence or,

rather, he cuts off the exchange of pain by using a Foucauldian mode of discipline rather

than punishment: He puts Heathcliff in solitary confinement. After the incident at

Thrushcross Grange in which Catherine is injured by a dog and taken in by the Lintons,

Hindley does not beat Heathcliff for trespassing but instead attacks Heathcliff’s and

Catherine’s bond: “Heathcliff received no flogging, but he was told that the first word he

spoke to Miss Catherine should ensure a dismissal...” (Wuthering Heights 41). Hindley

doesn’t completely change tactics (he will continue to flog Heathcliff on other

occasions), but this nonviolent tack proves to be his most effective because it denies

Heathcliff a way of rerouting the power exchanges that occur through violence. In cutting

off communication, disallowing physical proximity between the pair when he can, and

encouraging Edgar’s suit, Hindley drives the Lintons between Heathcliff and Catherine

like a wedge. Perhaps Hindley’s tragedy, if it can be called such, is that he is not

consistent in this method; one must be able continuously to keep the bigger picture in

mind when using imprisonment and disenfranchisement against one’s enemies, because

these disembodied, abstracted methods do not provide the one-to-one reciprocity of an eye for an eye. Hindley’s need to feel this kind of Old Testament “justice” eventually destroys him. In attempting to get Isabella to collude with him in murdering Heathcliff,

Hindley asks,

71 Barbara Gates notes the inadvertency of Catherine’s suicide as a result of her inability to control her own body completely: “totally breaking her own body and heart” is Catherine’s means to influence others, but her “body only partially cooperates with her will...” (131).

“Are you willing to endure [Heathcliff’s abuse] to the last, and not once

attempt repayment?”

“I’m wearing of enduring now,’ I [Isabella] replied, “and I’d be glad of a

retaliation that wouldn’t recoil on myself; but treachery and violence are

spears pointed at both ends—they wound those who resort to them, worse

than their enemies.”

“Treachery and violence are a just return for treachery and violence!”

cried Hindley. (Wuthering Heights 136)

Like Hindley, other characters refer to pain given and pain received in terms of payment and debt, even proxy payment and debt. The child Hareton, for instance, whom

Heathcliff raises in his own image, explains that he likes Heathcliff because “he pays Dad back what he gies [gives] to me” in physical abuse (Wuthering Heights 86). After she escapes Heathcliff, Isabella changes her tune regarding violence’s potential for doubling back and responds to Nelly’s insistence that she ought to be satisfied with God’s justice by saying,

“In general, I’ll allow that it would be, Ellen... But what misery laid on

Heathcliff could content me, unless I have a hand in it? ...Oh, I owe him so

much. Only on one condition can I hope to forgive him. It is, if I may take

an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; for every wrench of agony, return a

wrench, reduce him to my level.” (Wuthering Heights 140)

Isabella insists that she “owes” Heathcliff an exact, one-to-one debt for the pain he has caused her, echoing his insistence on claiming satisfaction for himself before allowing

God’s claim to the role of remunerator. However, when anyone tries to pay Heathcliff

back, Isabella’s aphorism about violence being a double-edged spear proves true. In the

height of irony, the confrontation between Hindley and Heathcliff that immediately

follows the aphorism proves it: Hindley’s gun, which contains a spring knife, ends up

gravely wounding its owner. In the struggle over the gun, “The charge exploded, and the

knife, in springing back, closed onto the owner’s wrist. Heathcliff pulled it away by main

force, slitting up the flesh [of Hindley] as it passed on... His adversary had fallen

senseless with excessive pain and the flow of blood that gushed from an artery, or a large

vein” (Wuthering Heights 138). Hindley’s impulsive, explosive violence literally doubles

back on him, demonstrating the tight constraints upon how violence must be executed in

the system of Heathcliff’s creation: a delicate balance between satisfaction and restraint,

legality and privilege.

In other words, Heathcliff’s succeeds where other men fail because he

understands violence’s economic and aesthetic limitations and payoffs. With

“preternatural self-denial,” Heathcliff refrains from killing the wounded Hindley for an

obvious economic reason: he does not want Hindley’s property to pass to Hareton before

Heathcliff can win it away from Hindley through gambling. But Heathcliff finds, within

the boundaries of the law, a means of expressing his hatred of Hindley nonetheless: he

“kicked and trampled on him, and dashed his head repeatedly against the flags” in alleged

self-defense. When Joseph threatens to go to the law, Heathcliff makes Isabella recount everything that occurred to convince Joseph that “Heathcliff was not the aggressor,” and then he actually bandages Hindley’s wound (Wuthering Heights 139). The real difference

between Hindley and Heathcliff, between these two violent men, is that one understands

the bigger economic picture—the network of pain—and is thus preternaturally careful to

work within the bounds of the law that sustains that network. Hindley, on the other hand, maintains a primitive and limited view of pain as pure payback, pure reciprocity, instead of a commodity/currency that itself transfers assets and accrues interest. No wonder, then, that for Hindley the only way out seems to be suicide. At one point, Joseph hints that

Hindley has attempted suicide to frame Heathcliff for murder, and that Heathcliff nearly lost a finger preventing Hindley from “sticking hisseln loike a cawlf [calf]” (Wuthering

Heights 81). Heathcliff’s superior understanding thus not only allows him to escape the reciprocal trap that captures others (an eye for an eye) but also allows him to play with aesthetic violence often at the same time that he’s working within the economy of pain.

In essence, Heathcliff’s violence creates a dizzying system of exchange out of which seemingly no one can escape but Heathcliff himself without complete social withdrawal and disempowerment, as Isabella’s case demonstrates.

Isabella only escapes Heathcliff when she too gains the ability to re-signify the marks of pain; she exercises her own “diabolical prudence” and takes pleasure in inciting

Heathcliff to murderous violence in order to wrench legal privilege her way (Wuthering

Heights 119). She tells Nelly,

“I had succeeded in rousing his rage a pitch above his malignity. Pulling

out the nerves with red hot pincers requires more coolness than knocking

on the head. He was worked up to forget the fiendish prudence he boasted

of, and proceeded to murderous violence. I experienced pleasure in being

able to exasperate him: the sense of pleasure woke my instinct of self-

preservation, so I fairly broke free…” (Wuthering Heights 134)

How does she rouse his rage? By changing the signification of the marks of pain that

Heathcliff has left upon Hindley, verbally transforming them from assertions of

dominance into a proof of the insincerity of Heathcliff’s love for Catherine. She tells him,

“‘Hindley has exactly her eyes, if you had not tried to gouge them out and made them

black and red... But then... if poor Catherine had trusted you, and assumed the ridiculous,

contemptible, degrading title of Mrs. Heathcliff, she would soon have presented a similar

picture!’” (Wuthering Heights 141) At this, Heathcliff “snatched a dinner knife from the table and flung it at my head. It struck beneath my ear...” so hard that Isabella has to pull

it out (141). Heathcliff’s assault with a deadly weapon pushes past the bounds of legal

wife-beating, and Isabella can now flee without Heathcliff pursuing her, since she can

now conceivably claim to be in mortal danger in his custody.72 Her life at Wuthering

Heights is appropriately bookended by the sight of “Hareton... hanging a litter of puppies

from a chair-back...” (Wuthering Heights 141) But Isabella’s newfound ability to redefine

the marks of pain has gained her freedom, nonetheless, and has transformed her: her

“white face scratched and bruised” is no longer the mark of her degradation but rather the

mark of her freedom, acquired as she tumbles through the moors away from Heathcliff.

Even the knife wound is prevented from bleeding by the nocturnal cold (132). The price,

however, is complete removal from the world of the Heights—in other words, from the

economy of pain—a fate which is strictly gendered. Isabella survives, unlike Catherine

the elder who escapes only through death, but Isabella possesses nothing and retains

access to nothing. Even mastering the signifying power of the bruise is not enough for a

72 However, as Pike points out, Isabella’s own violent retaliation—she apparently throws the knife right back at Heathcliff—might have “invalidat[ed] her claims of abuse, given how rigid the double standards of the courts were and its expectations of female propriety” (377).

woman to become an agent or artist within the economy of pain rather than its victim.

Isabella chooses effective oblivion and banishment over taking “an eye for an eye” (140).

“A Strange Change”: From Blood to Bloodlessness

When Isabella arrives at the Grange after escaping from Heathcliff, Nelly notes that the knife wound in her neck had been prevented from bleeding by the cold of the moors. Once she gets inside and begins to warm up, Isabella begins to feel the wound sting and reopen, the blood once again flowing (Wuthering Heights 132). The activity of

Isabella’s blood in this scene demonstrates the novel’s investment in the link between life itself and the interdependent phenomena of blood and pain. The experience of pain, accompanied by the visibility of blood (either via bruising or open bleeding) together are changeable signifiers of intangible identities and concepts like race, class, and property possession, but they are also—perhaps perversely—assertions of life. While the experience of pain and the presence of blood can be made to signify almost anything in canny hands (that is, Heathcliff’s hands), lacking blood/pain, in the novel’s world, is universally interpreted to signify non-life; those who are bloodless are either not lively, in a metaphorical sense, or they are literally ill or dying.

As critics concerned with race in the novel have shown, the Lintons are characterized by their whiteness. Prior to developing his methodological violence,

Heathcliff wishes he “‘had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he [Edgar] will be!’” (Wuthering Heights 44-

45) The way that the characters interpret the skin’s literal color, however, when it does not refer explicitly to race, paradoxically values greater color—that is, the visibility of

blood under the skin—over whiteness or bloodlessness. When characters are in positions

of fear, for instance, they are often noted to be “white,” as the child Heathcliff is

“breathless and white” when Hindley throws a weight at him (54).73 When describing a

general lack of liveliness, too, the narrative notes the characters’ colorlessness by way of

bloodlessness. Nelly characterizes Isabella and Edgar as “both lack[ing] the ruddy health

that you will generally meet in these parts” (147-148). “Ruddiness,” redness, refers

specifically to the showing of blood underneath the skin, and so this ultimate sign of

health bears close resemblance to a bruise. Indeed, “ruddy” can be used interchangeable

with “bloody” in English colloquialism.74 In effect, the bruise and the ruddy cheek become discursively confused in the novel and result in the association of weakness with being unmarked by pain.

For instance, only the bruises that Heathcliff leaves on Catherine’s skin as she lies dying provide a lively contrast to her bloodless deterioration: “Her present countenance had a wild vindictiveness in its white cheek, and a bloodless lip... and so inadequate was his [Heathcliff’s] stock of gentleness to the requirements of her condition, that on his letting go, I saw four distinct impressions left blue in the colourless skin” (Wuthering

Heights 124). Yet, only a page later, Catherine says to him, “‘You never harmed me in your life!’” (125). Catherine does not consider the pain that left these bruises as having harmed her; rather, these bruises signify something else. To Nelly, they signal the inadequacy of Heathcliff’s “stock of gentleness,” but this seems an instance where we are invited to read beyond the unreliable narrator’s assessment. The meaning of these bruises,

73 In this moment, Heathcliff is intriguingly both “white” and yet also marked by blood—his arm is “black to the shoulder” with bruises. The moment of pain—Hindley’s thrown weight—has affected Heathcliff and whitened him, but Heathcliff has denied Hindley the desired, extracorporeal outcome of that pain. 74 See definition c in “ruddy, adj., n., and adv.” in the OED, cited below.

then, becomes clearer when we realize that they will likely endure as she is being laid to

rest in her grave, having no chance to heal. If we suspend our disbelief and accept the

Gothic implausibility of Catherine’s dead face being “‘hers yet.’” When Heathcliff

exhumes her some fifteen years later, we might also accept the possibility that these

bruises indeed remain the only mark on Catherine’s otherwise “colourless” corpse,

meaning that Heathcliff’s possessive grip persists across death, uniting Heathcliff and

Catherine beyond the grave as the pain of that grip lives on, ghostly (220).

By contrast, Edgar Linton’s unwillingness to fight Heathcliff and risk injury allies

him with the flimsy, abstract shadows of disembodied legal power.75 His assertions take

the ineffective form of letters to lawyers (who never respond) or threats to change his will

(which he never does). David Punter has categorized these legal, patriarchal, and

patrician machinations as doomed denials of death and pain itself: “within the family

system that dissemination of riches is figurable only as a response to death… and

simultaneously as a denial of pain…” (132).76 Edgar’s reliance on paper contracts and his

concomitant denial of pain lose him the respect of his wife. Before Linton can leave The

Grange’s kitchen to gather a gang of manservants rather than fight Heathcliff one-on-one,

Catherine locks the door and declares, “‘I wish Heathcliff may flog you sick, for daring

to think an evil thought of me!’” But, as Nelly observes, “It did not need the medium of a

75 It is worth noting that Wuthering Heights eschews phallocentric notions of lack. Characters, men and women, are marked by blood or unmarked by its absence. Susan Gubar has shown “how the predominant Western cultural metaphor of writing on the body is one in which the woman is envisioned as the blank page awaiting inscription by the male writer. The dilemma for the woman artist is thus how to reconceive this metaphor to achieve artistic agency” (Mascia-Lees and Sharpe164-165). In Wuthering Heights, a male character is the master inscriber, but he himself is inscribed by the female author. In defining the body’s marked/unmarked condition in relation to blood (and pain) rather than sex, Brontë escapes the trap of post- structuralist thought which “embodies” men but only after “the body” itself is reclaimed as purely cultural rather than natural (and thus, dissociated from the feminine). 76 Punter only tantalizes with this idea of contracts like wills, endowments, marriages, and so forth as “denial[s] of pain.” He does not elaborate further.

flogging to produce that effect on the master... his countenance grew deadly pale”

(Wuthering Heights 90). Here, the ultimate effect of a flogging and of terror are one and

the same—sickness—with the only difference being that an actual flogging would leave

bruises and cuts, whereas Edgar’s cowardice leaves him pale and uncolored. This

unwillingness to experience pain disgusts Catherine, and she sarcastically comforts him,

“‘Cheer up, you shan’t be hurt!’” (91) Invoking an image that will be used to this effect

repeatedly in the novel, Heathcliff scoffs, “‘I wish you joy of the milk-blooded coward,

Cathy!’” (91)77 In this declaration, Heathcliff casts blood as both the source and sign of

valor, and the milk that runs in Edgar’s veins proves his inferiority through his unmarked

paleness. In this way, the signifying value of blood becomes tied to the admirable (at

least to Heathcliff and Catherine) willingness to undergo pain just as it is a sign of pain.

The replacement of milk for blood also characterizes Linton Heathcliff, whose

bloodlessness/colorlessness similarly signify, through lack of mark, his own bad nature

and physical weakness. Nelly shows how the blood-color-pain matrix is not solely

Heathcliff and Catherine’s construction when she deems him “a pale, delicate, effeminate

boy” with “a sickly peevishness in his aspect” (Wuthering Heights 179).78 She “survey[s]

with regret the white complexion and slim frame” (159). When he meets his son for the

first time, Heathcliff demands whether “‘they reared it on snails and sour milk’” (160).

77 Heathcliff adds, “‘By God, Mr. Linton, I’m mortally sorry that you are not worth knocking down! …I would not strike him with my fist, but I’d kick him with my foot and experience considerable satisfaction’” (Wuthering Heights 90-91). His hierarchization of different kinds of violence and the effort that they are worth, as well as his assertion of a kind of “priceless” satisfaction to be found in causing pain, speak both to the economic way in which he understands pain on the one hand as well as his valuation of its potential for personal pleasure—by nature invaluable, like art, as something outside of the economic schema—on the other. 78 While Jules Law’s The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel provides a fascinating look into the metaphorical as well as literal use of these named fluids, his book deals almost exclusively with breast milk rather than animal milk. Wuthering Heights’s milk images are exclusively animal milk.

He addresses Linton, “‘You are my son, then, I’ll tell you; and your mother was a wicked

slut to leave you in ignorance of the sort of father you possessed. Now, don’t wince, and

colour up! Though it is something to see you have not white blood’” (160). Heathcliff’s

dialogue suggests that he has pinched Linton’s cheek, admonishing him not to wince (just

as he did not wince when Nelly pinched him as a child) and to “colour up,” then

sarcastically remarking on the resulting bruise/blush that it is good to see the redness of

Linton’s blood. In a final reinforcement of the blood-color-pain connection epitomized in

Linton’s pitiful person, Heathcliff laments, “‘If I wished any blessing in the world, it was

to find him a worthy object of pride, and I’m bitterly disappointed with the whey-faced

whining wretch!’” (161, emphasis added) While Edgar has milk for blood, Linton is

saturated with milk, inside and out.

Whereas Edgar’s aversion to pain and its resultant colorlessness expose him to

Heathcliff and Catherine’s ridicule, Linton is the more reviled figure because he is always

feigning pain without showing any of the proving marks.79 The housekeeper gripes to

Nelly that

he was constantly getting coughs, and colds, and aches, and pains of some

sort. “And I never knew such a faint-hearted creature,” added the woman;

“nor one so careful of hisseln [sic]. He will go on, if I leave the window

open, a bit late in the evening. Oh! it's killing, a breath of night air! ...I

believe the master would relish Earnshaw’s thrashing him to a mummy, if

he were not his son; and I’m certain he would fit to turn him out of doors,

79 Linton Heathcliff’s manipulative behavior makes it clear that he is not suffering from what the Victorians would have understood as hypochondria, which, according to Rachel Ablow, was more akin to a nerve disorder and “not simply that the hypochondriac thinks she is ill when she is not, but instead that she feels ill… in the absence of any verifiable cause” (Victorian Pain 18).

if he knew half the nursing he gives hisseln. But then, he won’t go into

danger of temptation...” (Wuthering Heights 163)

In an intriguing (and gendered) difference from the elder Catherine’s method of getting her way by deliberately harming herself, Linton persuades others that they have hurt him when they actually haven’t.

When Linton taunts the younger Cathy that her mother was in love with his father, Cathy pushes the chair on which Linton sits, and he affects to be gravely hurt:

“‘Hareton never touches me, he never struck me in his life. And I was better to-day—and there—’ his voice died in a whimper” (Wuthering Heights 184). At first Cathy protests,

“‘I didn’t strike you!’” but then, “racked beyond endurance,” she cries, “‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Linton! …But I couldn’t have been hurt by that little push; and I had no idea that you could, either—you’re not much, are you, Linton? Don’t let me go home thinking I’ve done you harm!’” (184) Linton uses his feigned pain as the result of Cathy’s “strike” to get her to come back and visit him: “‘You must come, to cure me… You ought to come because you have hurt me. You know you have, extremely! I was not as ill when you entered, as I am at present—was I?’” (185) Unlike Catherine to elder, who literally hurt herself and had the marks (emaciation and illness) to prove it, Linton blatantly claims the privilege of pain without visible proof.

As with Hindley and Isabella, Heathcliff resists the “temptation” of thrashing

Linton, even by proxy, in order to achieve a legal goal of luring Catherine the younger into marriage with the boy. Like his mother (but without her canniness), however, Linton threatens to push Heathcliff’s endurance too far—another mawkish, waxen face begging

to be reshaped. The housekeeper is convinced that the way Linton coddles himself and

affects to be pained at little things would cause Heathcliff to boil over. Still, Heathcliff manages to evince the same result in Linton Heathcliff as his withholding of violence did for Edgar Linton, leaving his subject unmarked in order to achieve an end. There is some ambiguity about whether or not Heathcliff ever abuses Linton, but if such abuse happens, it is never shown on the page except in one indirect incident—the implied pinch, cited above. Rather, the threat of violence is enough to manipulate Linton and, through him,

Cathy. “‘[L]eave me and I shall be killed!’” Linton beseeches Cathy. “[M]y father threatened me... and I dread him—I dread him!’” (Wuthering Heights 2040) When

Heathcliff appears during this rendezvous, he insists, “‘[Y]ou’ll force me to pinch the baby, and make it scream, before it moves your charity’” (205). And, of course, Cathy complies. Heathcliff’s violence toward Linton only half-materializes. He speaks the threat, and Linton (in Cathy’s words) “trembles, as if I were really going to touch him!’”

(203) He relates to Nelly how he has accomplished this sort of haunting:

“I brought him [Linton] down one evening, the day before yesterday, and

just set him in a chair, and never touched him afterwards. I sent Hareton

out, and we had the room to ourselves. In two hours, I called Joseph to

carry him up again; and, since then, my presence is as potent on his nerves

as a ghost; and I fancy he sees me often, though I am not near.” (218)

Heathcliff wracks Linton’s nerves without touching him, and even manages to relay the potency of his presence without physical proximity. Supposedly, violence and pain necessitate touch, but with Linton, Heathcliff has, to his own partial chagrin, managed to leap over the touch and thus leap over bruising and bloodshed to achieve his desired end.

But this “success” with Linton ironically upends the very economic system that

Heathcliff has put in place. If a non-blow will do the same thing as a blow, if unblemished flesh will do the same thing as bruised flesh, what does violence, what does touch even mean? What actually constitutes pain, then? What constitutes proximity, intimacy, touch, and, by way of all these things, what actually constitutes life?

The Gothic mode’s treatment of death has been described as a creeping, disenchanted suspicion, a terror “that death might really be death—that is, to die means one thing only: to become material, an object” (Lutz 79). But the terror of death’s reality is more complex in Wuthering Heights. Immediately after relaying his “haunting” of

Linton, Heathcliff recounts how he attempted to open Catherine the elder’s grave when she was first buried, almost determined to lie down with her and die himself, when he senses her nearby: “‘I relinquished my labour of agony, and turned consoled at once, unspeakably consoled. Her presence was with me...’” (Wuthering Heights 221). But the relief turns into “anguish” as he can sense her but not physically apprehend her by sight or touch: “‘And, since then, sometimes more, sometimes less, I’ve been the sport of that intolerable torture! ... It racked me! ... It was a strange way of killing, not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breaths...’” (221-222). It recalls his initial demand, after he calls on

Catherine to haunt him, “‘Where is she? Not there… not perished—where?’” (130)

Throughout the novel, Heathcliff operates under the same logic of pain as a marker and mover, but the agony, the slow death that he claims to be enduring, has neither marker nor any apparent result other than Heathcliff’s internal torment. Once he gains total possession of both houses, the sight of their “representatives,” Hareton and Catherine the younger, cause him “‘pain, amounting to agony’” (247). He keeps looking for what this pain is supposed to signify or achieve or evoke, what manner of life it is supposed to

assert, but he finds worse than nothing: He finds the uncertain. He is given neither the

assurance of oblivion if Catherine really is now only the material lying in her grave, nor

the assurance of Catherine’s discernable presence as a ghost.80

A Poor Conclusion, an Absurd Termination

One of the aspects of Wuthering Heights that its original Victorian reviewers

found most disturbing is the fact that Heathcliff’s violence does not stop because of any

triumph of good over his evil. The spritely defiance of Catherine the younger does not

best him, and the simple, animal benevolence of Hareton does not convert him. In a turn

that drains some of the satisfaction from the idea that Heathcliff’s violence is the

subaltern’s vengeance against oppressors, Heathcliff simply gets tired. He says to Nelly,

“It is a poor conclusion, is it not... An absurd termination to my violent

exertions? ...I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My

old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to

revenge myself on their representatives; I could do it, and none could

hinder me. But where is the use? I don’t care for striking, I can’t take the

trouble to raise my hand! ...I have lost the faculty of enjoying their

destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.” (Wuthering Heights

247)

80 J. Hillis Miller, in a classic deconstructionist interpretation of the novel, argues that Heathcliff acquires the properties and relations that are the “significations” of Catherine in order to acquire Catherine herself, and then finds them to be a barrier rather than a path to her; he must therefore destroy those significations only, tragically, to find Catherine’s “absence” (67). As I argue below, rather than pure absence, the frustration of Heathcliff’s final days amounts to the infuriating lack of surety about whether Catherine is absent or present.

The only thing that stops Heathcliff is that he no longer enjoys violence; on the brink of accomplishing every end he might achieve by way of breaking the two families, he loses his zest, like an elderly man who no longer enjoys his hobby.81 At the same time, he begins to allow his own bodily destruction but seemingly without meaning to kill himself.

He eats only once a day and then not at all, apparently due to distraction rather than intentional self-starvation; he can “‘hardly remember to eat, and drink,’” and when he sits down to eat, he gets lost in a reverie and wanders away from the table (247, 249-250). Far from a mimicry of Catherine the elder’s self-harm in order to manipulate others,

Heathcliff has no object or audience for this self-inflicted violence. His pain is not supposed to lead to his death, and it’s not supposed to move anyone to action. As Nelly points out, if his death through “obstinate fast” were declared a suicide, he would be unable to be buried next to Catherine, and Heathcliff bristles at the idea (255).82 She ends the story “persuaded he did not abstain on purpose; it was the consequence of his strange illness, not the cause” (257).83 This is no triumph of a “feminine” self-harm over a

“masculine,” externalized violence.84 Rather, the ultimate endlessness of aesthetic violence asserts itself upon Heathcliff.

81 This is one of those moments that Oates might see as one of the novel’s mocking indictments of the reader’s tendency, like Isabella, to want to find sympathy with the tyrant and to dissociate from his victims, for “is he not, with his beloved gone, the life-force gone wild?” (444) Brontë is especially masterful, then, in rendering Heathcliff’s loss of wild zest as tragic, even though his art has been beating and imprisoning women, terrorizing weak men, and graverobbing. In a more classic psychoanalytical analysis, Thomas Moser argues that Heathcliff represents the id, and so when he leaves the novel, all vitality and power exit the novel as well (4). 82 For more on suicide in Wuthering Heights, particularly Heathcliff’s death/suicide, see Gates. 83 Granted, Nelly is a consummately unreliable narrator. She conceals from the doctor “the fact of his having swallowed nothing for four days, fearing it might lead to trouble,” but Heathcliff would not have been able to rely on Nelly concealing his suicide, nor does he ask her to (Wuthering Heights 257). Yet, I believe that the uncharacteristic forgetfulness and distraction that occupies Heathcliff in his final days attest to a general non-intentionality in his self-starvation. 84 Guiliana Giobbi claims that Heathcliff’s “anorexia” is “masculine” in that it “is marked by a will power and determination which denote a demonic stubbornness and absolute idealism… differentiat[ing] Heathcliff from the female victims of anorexia” (140). According to this inaccurate notion of anorexia,

This brings us back to the Marquis de Sade, who infamously could not wrap

things up. His novels are a series of repetitious encounters that could literally go on

forever, because, as I pointed out above, the victims are either impervious to lasting harm

or are of an endless number. Sade compulsively kept writing, even in prison. His libertine

imagination—and the imaginations of his libertines—are endlessly creative, dreaming up

and then executing with tireless delight a limitless combination of violations that yet all

somehow have the same Sisyphean object of sating an insatiable desire. Sadism has no

end game, and neither has art. This was not a problem for Sade and, in fact, for him this

endless insatiability made artistic composition the most rewarding activity in life.85 But

Heathcliff not only runs out of satisfying bodies on which to practice his art (the

remaining bodies are mere “representatives” of his real enemies), but he also loses the

drive to practice at all. “In Sade, time never passes, in endless bliss or endless pain...”

(Orban 20) but in Wuthering Heights, endlessness and circularity result in agonizing

intangibilities rather than prolonged erotic iterations. The novel begins with Catherine’s

ghost, which Heathcliff begs, “‘Cathy, do come. Oh, do—once more! Oh! my heart’s

darling, hear me this time—Catherine, at last!’” (Wuthering Heights 23, emphasis

original) Somehow, Catherine has already “come” (Heathcliff begs her to “once more”)

and yet has not come (“this time… at last!”). She is both present and absent, both living

body who can be held by Lockwood and made to bleed and yet a fleshless ghost.

whereas anorexic women have an “inner emptiness” and “lack an integrated ego,” Heathcliff’s death signals his “self-reliance” (140). Not only is this an essentialist interpretation that associates so-called “feminine” qualities with histrionics and “masculine” qualities with virtue, it is also a misreading of Heathcliff as intentionally appropriating Catherine’s anorexic behavior. 85 For instance, in his novel Juliette, the eponymous heroine advocates an elaborate routine for composing narrative ideas as a means to “unpent” one’s bottomless, boundless fantasies (qtd. Meeker in 215).

The bloody ghost of Catherine, which opens the novel, (dis?)embodies the paradox that eventually leads Heathcliff to his own death when he fails to reconcile it:

What constitutes an existence? How can a ghost bleed? How can Catherine be both absent and present, both material and immaterial? Heathcliff’s own death embodies these paradoxes as well—in a reversal of Catherine, the ghost with flesh and blood, Heathcliff is a living man who has been stripped of flesh (through his fasting) and drained of blood.

In his final days, Nelly notes a persistent “bloodless hue” to his face and then, again, “a ghastly paleness,” which makes him appear as “a goblin” (Wuthering Heights 250, 251).

When Nelly finds his corpse, she observes: “The lattice, flapping to and fro, had grazed one hand that rested on the sill; no blood trickled from the broken skin...” (256). In contrast to Linton’s and Edgar’s milk-for-blood, Heathcliff, by the end, has no blood at all. The substance that Heathcliff has manipulated into signifying marks through the administration of pain, is no longer inside his own body. For the majority of his life,

Heathcliff makes the inherent fluidity of pain’s relationship to the flesh and its socially signifying power work for him, but in the end that very fluidity means that pain, when divorced from a manipulator’s hand, leads nowhere. Heathcliff has won everything that he once lacked, but when his art no longer satisfies, when its very relative aimlessness beyond fulfilling his fancy becomes frustrating rather than enabling, the infliction of pain upon bodies is meaningless. “‘It’s unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear,’” he says, “‘even mine’” (255). This is not a pacifist message but rather a testament to the power of pain to enact material and abstract change while ultimately retaining its paradoxical literalness.

For all of the critical protestations that the world of Wuthering Heights is cauterized and sanitized by the novel’s ending, what with its picnics and its reincarnated lovers, the fact remains that Heathcliff’s methods of violence were remarkably, disturbingly successful. If the wind hadn’t left Heathcliff’s sails, if he hadn’t simply gotten too tired to go on, there’s no indication that his ravenous campaign could be stoppable. And we are by no means certain that the changes with which Heathcliff’s violence has marked the world are not permanent; violence has not left the moors with

Heathcliff’s death. The first time we see Catherine the younger and Hareton as a happy couple, she threatens to pull his hair if he doesn’t read something correctly, and then, when his attention wanders from the book to her own hand, she “recalled him by a smart slap on the cheek” (Wuthering Heights 234). Even if we read this moment as more playful than violent (though it was a smart slap), the novel’s final lines, with Lockwood’s litotical anxiety about the “unquiet slumbers” of the dead, suggest that Heathcliff might still be at large and still threatening. Joyce Carol Oates reads the novel’s trajectory as adulthood and civilization’s eventual ambivalent triumph over childhood and primitive passion, as the “exorcism of evil and an implied (but often ritualistic) survival of good but [we are] never really convinced that this survival is a genuine and not merely a thematic possibility” (442-443). In this way, the novel’s final message may really be as disturbing as Charlotte Brontë found it and tried to explain away in her introduction to the book’s second edition by describing her sister’s genius as something like possession86: Pain and its marks are agentive, both economically and aesthetically, and the changes resulting from its agency may, for good or evil, be permanent.

86 Patricia Ingham cautions us not to take Charlotte’s word in this introduction as absolutely representing her own views on literature, since her personal letters frequently contradict the aesthetic beliefs she

A common theme in the contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights (which

Emily herself read and saved) is the assertion that the violence portrayed within the novel

cannot be called art since that violence does not provide a clear moral message or lesson.

A reviewer for the Examiner in 1848 wrote, “We are not disposed to ascribe any

particular intention to the author in drawing the character of Heathcliff, nor can we

perceive any very obvious moral in the story” (Wuthering Heights 286).87 An Atlas

review called it “a strange, inartistic story” (Wuthering Heights 282). A Britannia

reviewer found the rendering of the “grotesque” characters “entirely without art” and, in

the writing itself, “neither the grace of art nor the truth of nature, but only the vigour of

one positive idea,—that of passionate ferocity” (Wuthering Heights 289). A Palladium

reviewer imagines the anonymous writer (whom he nevertheless believes to be a woman)

as having written the novel in “the flight of an impatient fancy... written for oneself in

solitude, and thrown aside...”; hardly the work of a careful, trained artist (Wuthering

Heights 294). In all of these reviews there exists a common premise that the depiction of

violence like the kind seen in Wuthering Heights has a great deal of “power” or “truth”

but that it is not a fit subject for art; or, if violence is to be portrayed, it ought to be

portrayed according to an undefined code of taste, a “better account” or “best advantage”

to which the novel could have been “turned” (Wuthering Heights 285, 283).88 Some

suggest that plausibility is the standard, but even those who protest the implausibility of

expresses in that introduction. “Her conception of what she really believed a novel should do is evident not in such ad hoc and defensive remarks but in her discussion of writers other than her sisters” (93). See Charlotte Brontë’s “Editor’s Preface” to the 1850 edition (Wuthering Heights 313-316). 87 The reviewer in Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, January 1848, adds, “What may be the moral which the author wishes the reader to deduce from his work, it is difficult to say; and we refrain from assigning any...” (Wuthering Heights 285). 88 Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, January 1848 and Atlas, January 1848, respectively. The Atlas reviewer wrote, “There are evidences in every chapter of a sort of rugged power—an unconscious strength—which the possessor seems never to think of turning to the best advantage” (Wuthering Heights 282-283).

Heathcliff’s behavior praise Brontë’s convincing rendering.89 The Atlas reviewer

considers with bewilderment, “Inconceivable as are the combinations of human

degradation which are here to be found... the vraisemblance is so admirably preserved;

there is so much truth... The reality of unreality has never been so aptly illustrated...”

(Wuthering Heights 283) H.F. Chorley, writing for the Athenaeum, acknowledges the

vraisemblance but insists on the tastelessness of the depiction: “They [the Bells] do not

turn away from dwelling upon those physical acts of cruelty which we know to have their

warrant in the real annals of crime and suffering,—but the contemplation of which true

taste rejects” (Wuthering Heights 281). The Palladium reviewer that imagined Brontë tossing off Wuthering Heights as though scribbling a fever dream nevertheless muses,

“What an unobtrusive, unexpected sense of keeping in the hanging of Isabella’s dog”

(Wuthering Heights 295).90 Collectively, the reviewers acknowledge the artistic power and capability behind the novel but find the execution—that is, its “impression of pain and horror”—without art (Wuthering Heights 290).91

Emily Brontë’s own sisters’ ambivalence regarding the consequence-free, amoral

violence of Wuthering Heights is infamous. Juliet Barker’s definitive biography of the

Brontës even provides evidence that Emily did in fact write a second novel before her death but that Charlotte burned the manuscript because she “believed very strongly that there were certain subjects which were not suitable for novelistic treatment” (631).

Charlotte objected strongly to Heathcliff, and “[i]f the central character of Emily’s

89 While Charlotte Brontë defended her dead sister’s novel by insisting that Emily only represented what she herself had witnessed, in other writings she railed against vraisemblance as the highest calling of the novelist and instead upheld a more abstract, essential notion of “truth” rather than mere mimesis (Ingham 93-99). 90 The reviewer’s use of “keeping” here is along the lines of “in keeping,” meaning that he finds the hanging of Isabella’s dog appropriate, in keeping with the character and the world of the novel. 91 The reviewer from the Britannia wrote, “Generally we are satisfied there is some radical defect in those fictions which leave behind them am impression of pain and horror” (Wuthering Heights 290).

second novel was similarly unredeemed, Charlotte had her justification for preventing its

publication” (Barker 631).92 Setting aside this tantalizing possibility, Charlotte’s preface

to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights capitulates to the critics who insist that the

novel came from unconscious or semi-conscious, wild instinct rather than careful

artistry.93 The alternative is too appalling to contemplate. The idea of a writer—a woman, for that matter—as having deliberately painted the house-front with blood merely for the artistic satisfaction of it is horrifying. It would mean that, in writing Wuthering Heights and putting it into the world, Emily Brontë herself is taking part in a kind of sadistic enterprise, for, as the Atlas reviewer puts it, “[t]he general effect [of reading it] is inexpressibly painful” (Wuthering Heights 283). But there remains a difference between

Brontë and Sade, one which helps articulate what I have identified as a shortcoming in the feminist interpretation of Wuthering Heights, which is that the portrayal of pain and violence in art can indeed serve as a critique of itself, but it can also act as a meditation on the nature of embodiment—what it means to have and to exist within or as a body and, indeed, what the body actually is vis-à-vis its relationship to subjectivity. Heathcliff’s violence is twofold in this way: the infliction of pain is a means to control others using his white(ish) male privilege, but it is also a means of manifesting and questioning something elemental about existence.

The pain in Wuthering Heights challenged critics of Brontë’s day and continues to challenge twenty-first century critics. Mid-Victorian critics questioned whether this

92 The fact that there are no other manuscript fragments from the time period between the publication of Wuthering Heights and Emily’s death, Barker argues, suggests that Emily was working on a large project like a novel. After Emily’s death, rather than deny its existence, Charlotte was totally silent on the possibility of her sister’s having written a second novel. See Barker 631-635. 93 In the preface to the 1850 edition to the novel, Charlotte asked readers to forgive her sister, for she knew not what she did: “Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done” (Wuthering Heights 314). For Anne Brontë’s objections to Wuthering Heights, see Barker’s biography and Chitham (275).

truthful, powerful depiction of inflicting and receiving pain could be called art if it did

not coalesce into a Christian or at least a humanist moral ethos. Twentieth and twenty-

first century feminist critics seem driven by a similar question, only instead of asking if

Wuthering Heights can be art, the question is whether or not it is “feminist.” In claiming

Emily Brontë as a radical foremother, critics have tended to focus on Catherine’s pain as a willful woman trapped in patriarchy, but it is an inescapable fact that Heathcliff not only receives more page space (as he outlives Catherine by decades) but that his campaign of violence, however repugnant, yet somehow captivates. As a reviewer of the

1850 reprint put it, “Heathcliff, devil though he may be, is drawn with a sort of dusky splendour which fascinates…”94 The same reviewer marveled that this writer, as well as

the writer of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were women; “the coarseness apparently of

violent and uncultivated men—turn[ed] out to be the productions of two girls living

almost alone...” (Wuthering Heights 349). The questions of what is appropriate for art and what is appropriate for a woman to write coalesce into one in the case of Wuthering

Heights, and much feminist criticism of the novel turns Heathcliff into Catherine’s

instrument or into a proxy woman (by casting his initial disempowerment and closeness

with nature as “feminine”) to make sense of the fact that a woman who wrote about a

woman’s death by domesticity also wrote this fascinating, brutal man who treats pain as

an aesthetic tool.

It is my ultimate contention, however, that Wuthering Heights serves as a

powerful example of women’s writing about men that squirms free of a straightforwardly

feminist agenda yet retains feminist threads as part of its overall ethos. In writing about

Heathcliff’s viciousness, Brontë certainly critiques the patriarchal contracts that enable

94 Leader, December 28, 1850 (Wuthering Heights 348).

him to abuse Isabella and kidnap Nelly and Catherine the younger. But she also critiques

Hindley’s tyranny, Edgar’s passivity, Linton’s peevish delicacy, and the latter two’s

bloodlessness. What makes or breaks all of these men are the legal contracts of

inheritance, marriage, and property ownership. Only Heathcliff, however, seems to see

beyond the trappings of the strictly metaphorical, abstracted power of paper contracts; he

learns to deal with them and use them, as is necessary in patriarchal society, but unlike

Edgar he never relies on them to enact his will. Rather, the characters in Wuthering

Heights are changed and marked much more by bruises and blood than by the shifting

structures of the law. How frightening but how fascinating to think of a woman writer

casting pain like this, as a more powerful force than patriarchy.

To understand fully how this works, we must turn, finally, to genre—a loaded

topic for discussion of Wuthering Heights. The twofold nature of the violence in this

novel is mirrored in the famous debate over whether Wuthering Heights is a realist novel

or a Gothic romance. My argument suggests that it is, necessarily, both. The economy of

pain as an organizing system within the novel adheres to the realist mode’s “tendency to

see all people and things within large containing social organizations” (Levine 15). The

spiritualized aestheticization of pain in all its “excesses” seems to align with the realist

novel’s “natural” antecedent, the romance, since the realist novel, according to Levine,

“defines itself against the excesses” of the passion and violence found in the Gothic (5,

9). Yet, as so many critics have argued, Brontë’s portrayal of the plight of women, the

complexities of property law, and the social prejudices of her time show a novel deeply

invested in representing some “real” human experience.95 Lukács pinpoints the year

1848, the year after Wuthering Heights was published, as the year of the “inward turn” in

95 See, for instance, Pike (351-352) on Brontë’s knowledge of contemporary marriage law.

which writers of realist fiction abandoned an earlier mission of maintaining the pro-social link between the private and the social in favor of indulging the “excesses of sentimentalism,” attempting to change the world through changing a heart (Armstrong,

“Feminism…” 6).96 If both the Gothic romance and the realist novel are characterized by some degree of excess (of passion or of sentimentalism), then these distinctions, as they are so often wont to do, break down. But my point is not to retread that path. Rather, my point is that the generic duality of Wuthering Heights can be explained better when we realize that Emily Brontë refuses to choose between a utopian aesthetics and a utopian politics.

Nancy Armstrong sees Heathcliff and Catherine as examples of the failure of

Victorian novels to envision “alternative kinship practices,” arguing that since they are

“incestuously similar” they portray the monstrosity of dissolved gender differences

(“Feminism…” 10). According to her formulation, it is “the job of the nineteenth-century gothic… to turn any formation that challenges the nuclear family into a form of degeneracy so hostile to modern selfhood as to negate emphatically its very being”

(“Feminism…” 10). But this is only the case if we read the violence of Wuthering

Heights as solely hostile and destructive rather than also creative. I addressed earlier how theorists have shown the utopic potential of S/M to create a “new body” and a new morality free of the regimes of industrial capitalism and the carceral state (Basu 26). The tripwire in this theory, however, lies in the fact that this S/M utopia relies on complete cooperation and consent between practitioners, between the one holding the whip and the one receiving the blows—a very unreliable if not impossible situation, no matter how

96 Lukács points to the European Revolutions of 1848 as the catalyst for this change (171-250).

tight the contract.97 And, certainly, the kind of violence Heathcliff inflicts upon others in

Wuthering Heights is almost exclusively nonconsensual. However, the utopian potential of pain and bloodshed to create new possibilities and pathways to truths both

“transcendental” (romantic) and “humanist” (realist) can be created in the space of the novel (Levine 11). Perhaps only in the novel, in its mimetic/aesthetic slipstream, can violence serve both an economic/social function and an ontological one, both morally condemned and amorally transcendental. Brontë’s world is utopic, then, not because it represents an idealized reality but because, through its trans-generic and fictive nature, it allows for this paradox, which, after all, is the paradox that the novel plays out so thoroughly: the simultaneous presence and absence of blood extant in the bruise, which is in turn emblematic of the unknowable and ineffable presence/absence of life.

97 For more on the ambiguities of consent in S/M practice, see Basu (165-166) and Cruz (416-417).

Chapter 2. Alive to Distant, Dead to Near: Masochism, Suicide, and Masculinity in

North and South

“Senseless and purposeless were wood and iron and steam in their endless labours; but the persistence of their monotonous work was rivalled [sic] in tireless endurance by the strong crowds, who, with sense and with purpose, were busy and restless in seeking after—What?” (North and South 379)98

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), cotton mill “master” John

Thornton begins the novel with a firmly-held conception of his own identity based on a

tenuous class contrast between himself and his employees. The “softening” of Thornton’s

rigid, isolated, stereotypical identity as “Captain of Industry” is a topic well-covered by

the novel’s critics. The general consensus has been that Margaret Hale, the novel’s

female protagonist, negotiates the class warfare in the fictional Manchester surrogate

Milton-Northern. It is said that, through her intercession, she helps bring “master” and

“men” together in a dubious accord of mutual understanding.99 Within this industrial romance, it is necessary for Thornton to acknowledge interdependence, and Margaret

98 Further references to the novel will be cited as North and South. 99 Catherine Gallagher, speaking for a prominent strain of criticism on North and South, finds a “falseness” in the novel’s ending (The Industrial Reformation… 147-148) 98

supposedly “softens” him, “feminizes” him, teaches him sympathy.100 It is my

contention, however, that critics have relied too much on this script of “feminization” in

interpreting female-authored nineteenth-century novels. Because twentieth-century

feminists and gender theorists have thoroughly codified patriarchy’s reduction of women

to mere bodies, critical thought on the Victorian era tends to ally affect with the feminine.

Critics have tended, consequently, to taut “feminization” as the way to conceive of those

male characters’ emotional journeys. Catherine Barnes Stevenson, for instance, claims

that Thornton begins the novel “scorning the female world of emotion,” and thus Gaskell

supposedly punishes him by “unmann[ing]” him, “forc[ing] him into suffering and

dependence” (11).101

This line of thinking, which has remained steadfast in criticism of male characters

in novels written by women, casts suffering and vulnerability as “feminine” states,

resulting in a conflation of disempowerment, reformation, and “feminization.”102 In

misreading Margaret’s role and Thornton’s character along these lines, we’ve misread the

novel’s most important exploration of gender as well as class. I argue that Gaskell’s

characterization of Thornton in North and South unearths a social-psychological barrier

deeper than a lack of sympathy. Namely, Gaskell indicts a strain of masochism in what

Herbert Sussman has called the “economic man,” an ethos which she shows as the root of

100 For arguments about the power of “female influence” and “feminization” in North and South, see, for instance, Antinucci, Gallagher (The Industrial Reformation…), Kestner, Elliott, Harman, Matus, and Johnston. 101 Patsy Stoneman interprets North and South and all of Gaskell’s oeuvre as a continued assertion that learning to care for others—mothering, as she calls it—is the gateway to sympathy. Following Nancy Chodorow, she claims that Gaskell wants to “open motherhood to men,” meaning Gaskell wants men to adopt the traditionally feminine task of caring for dependents (Elizabeth Gaskell 166). See my further thoughts on Stoneman, below. 102 John Kucich has noted that this idea of “feminizing” the hardened man in fact plays into the same Victorian cult of the domestic which casts women or femininity as the ultimate source of moral regulation (“Transgression…” 188-189). 99

many of the injustices of industrial society (Masculine Identities 81). Many critics,

including Sussman, have explored “the definition of [Victorian] manhood as self-

discipline, as the ability to control male energy and to deploy this power not for sexual

but for productive purposes” (Victorian Masculinities 11).103 I argue that Gaskell’s

rejection of certain tenets of industrial masculinity amounts to more than just a rejection

of masculine isolation or economic authoritarianism in favor of a kinder, gentler

paternalism. Rather, Gaskell casts the self-control of the “economic man” as a kind of

self-inflicted masochistic violence which reverberates outward onto the working class

and onto women.

Thus, the “physical and mental affliction” Thornton suffers from Margaret’s

initial rejection is not a punishment out of which he will transcend a better man, one newly capable of “compassion for the women and the workers in [his life]” due to a purgative female influence (Malay 51, Stevenson 12). Indeed, Thornton begins the novel as a feeling man whose most notable feature is his intimate relationship with his mother:

“The very daringness with which mother and son spoke out unpalatable truths, the one to

the other, showed a reliance on the firm centre of each other’s souls” (North and South

87).104 Indeed, the narrative often compares him favorably to a mother; for instance, after

a tense exchange with Margaret, he likens his feelings to that of a mother who has been

scolding her child and then is detained before being able to reassure the child of her love

(North and South 305-306). Later, Thornton takes pleasure in the thought of consoling

103 With regard specifically to the control of “violent male energy” in North and South, see Malay (50). 104 There is, of course, the issue of Mrs. Thornton’s somewhat sexual attachment to her son; she jealously bucks at what she believes to be Margaret’s advances toward John. John Thornton’s reliance upon his mother, however, is never cast as a flaw in his character. Rather, it is Mrs. Thornton’s failing that she is so overly attached to her son. 100

the grieving Margaret with “much the same kind of strange passionate pleasure which

comes stinging through a mother’s heart, when her drooping infant nestles close to her,

and is dependent upon her for everything” (North and South 246). Critics like John

Kucich have asserted that Gaskell’s aim is not only to soften the unfeeling Thornton but

also to demonize the “sexual inversion” of “weak, indecisive, cowardly men and

tyrannical, headstrong, indiscreet women” like Mr. Hale and Mrs. Thornton, respectively

(“Transgression…” 189). On the contrary, in writing a male character who acknowledges

dependence upon his mother, whose “soul” is akin to hers, and who compares his own

feeling unabashedly to a mother’s, Gaskell creates from the very start of her novel what

others have argued to be the novel’s endpoint: an emotionally literate “new gentleman”

who has proven himself in possession of tenderness and susceptible to female influence

and can therefore act as a fit partner in a (somewhat) egalitarian relationship with the

novel’s heroine.105 Despite the many criticisms of the novel’s abrupt proposal ending,

however, Gaskell’s portrayal of Thornton shows that marriage itself is not the panacea for

social conflict. Rather, Gaskell portrays the suspended pain of erotic love as a far

preferable state to Thornton’s benumbed, masochistic self-denial in pursuit of a

“manliness” grounded in “individual self-interest” (Sussman, Masculine Identities 81).

105 Jill L. Matus devotes much attention to Thornton’s powerful emotions and argues that the novel implicitly critiques excessive “emotional control” and thus “suggests that the social injunction to keep strong feelings in check is a class convention, which may be as bad in its way as the tendency to surrender to excessive emotion” (37). Unlike Matus, I’m not concerned with the way the novel invokes emotional pain as an “undoing [of] the self” (39); rather, I’m concerned with the specifically gendered ways that pain, pleasure, or lack thereof are characterized. For more on the “new gentleman,” see MacDonald (3). Holly Furneaux has also insisted that “physical tenderness [was] an integral part of that most quintessential figure of nineteenth-century masculinity, the Gentleman, [who appears] in some of the most commercially successful and widely read novels of the high-Victorian period” (111). See also, Tosh. 101

The core problem of Thornton’s character at the novel’s start, then, lies not in his lack of

sympathy but in his gendered orientation toward pleasure, pain, and suspense.

This is not to say that Margaret’s role is not important—the novel was, after all,

originally titled Margaret Hale—but instead that Gaskell is just as concerned with uprooting and interrogating men and masculinity as she is with liberating women.

Throughout North and South, one burden after another is placed on Margaret’s shoulders—to be calm when others are frantic or grieving, to deliver bad news, to keep secrets for others’ sake and at her own expense—such that she is in a near-constant state of exhaustion. To borrow a useful anachronism, Margaret performs almost all of the emotional labor in her family and even in the Higgins family. In looking to define

Margaret’s “agency,” we have overlooked the fact that Margaret’s freedom comes, at the end, from being given less to be responsible for, not more—or, rather, what emancipates

Margaret is receiving appropriate (and legal) recognition of her role as supporter when she becomes the notarized owner of and primary investor in Thornton’s mill. I am not devaluing Margaret’s role in the novel’s economic conflict but rather turning the lens to the homosocial, which, I argue, Gaskell interrogates as a way of understanding the damage done to women by male industrialists.

As Halberstam has told us, masculinities studies need not (and should not) consist of projects that maintain easy equivalences between masculinity and male power.

Keeping in mind that masculinities studies has all too often lacked “any real investment in the project of alternative masculinities,” I self-consciously examine a female writer’s unmasking of the harmfulness of bourgeois industrial masculinity and its concomitant structures of power (Halberstam, Female Masculinity 18). Recognizing Thornton as the 102

center of the marketplace drama of North and South illuminates Gaskell’s arraignment of

a masculinity that trades political and economic privilege in exchange for masochistic

abnegation drained of both pleasure and real pain. Gaskell does not attempt to excuse

Thornton’s behavior but rather exposes its roots as well as the harmful homosocial

competition it engenders; ergo, even though she portrays Thornton’s pathos, she does not court “sympathy for the devil” in the way which Halberstam claims some scholars of masculinities studies do (“The Good…” 352). The damage of the masochistic work ethic adopted by new captains of industry, she shows, is widespread, doubling back on bourgeois men but wreaking exponential pain on women, children, and working-class

men.

In offering this criticism, Gaskell presents a much more nuanced and incisive

portrait of the iconic mill-owner than she does in her earlier novel, Mary Barton (1848),

which her industrialist Mancunian neighbors condemned as a slanderous caricature.106 In

an 1850 letter, prior to the writing of North and South, Gaskell defended herself against

the charge of being anti-business and biased against mill-owners, writing:

I can not imagine a nobler scope for a thoughtful energetic man, desirous of doing good to his kind, than… as the master of a factory… And I should like some man, who had a man’s correct knowledge, to write on this subject, and make the poor intelligent work- people understand the infinite anxiety as to right and wrong-doing which I believe that riches bring to many. (Gaskell, “Letters” 399-400)107

106 For details on Manchester manufacturers’ reactions to Mary Barton, see Foster (34-37). 107 References to this text will hereafter appear as “Letters.” 103

Thornton’s complexity is clearly at least the partial result of Gaskell’s attempt to address

this perspective which is missing from Mary Barton, and other critics have identified

potential real-world models for this thoughtful master.108 I’m interested less in Gaskell’s

faithful representation of real men, however, and more in her personification of the

trappings of a masochistic masculine ethic brought on by the clash of Protestantism and

industrialism.109

In a speech much discussed by critics, Thornton condemns his poverty-stricken

workers:

“My mother managed so that I put by three out of these fifteen shillings

[of wages] regularly… This taught me self-denial. Now… I thank her

silently on each occasion for the early training she gave me. Now when I

feel that in my own case it is no good luck, nor merit, nor talent,—but

simply the habits of life which taught me to despise indulgences not

thoroughly earned,—indeed, never to think twice about them,—I believe

that this suffering, which Miss Hale says is impressed on the countenances

of the people of Milton, is but the natural punishment of dishonestly-

enjoyed pleasure…” (North and South 78, emphasis added)

108 Foster, for instance, names James Nasmyth, “self-made engineer and inventor of the steam-hammer...” (23) or Samuel Greg, a Manchester mill-owner who, Gaskell thought, “might... be made the hero of a fiction on the other side of the question [of Mary Barton]” due to his charitable schemes (109). 109 Silvana Colella’s illuminating examination of Victorian business manuals and memoirs shows, in important contrast with prevailing notions of work as the Victorians’ panacea for wayward impulses, is that real men in the thick of the business world recognized and harbored grave reservations about the self- destructive underbelly of the masculine culture rising out of industrialism. These manuals and memoirs are “markedly oriented by the need to warn readers of all ages against the snares, the ruses, and even the destructive potential of a disproportionate dedication to business,” offering a “depiction of the ailing body and softened mind of stressed-out men [which] jars against the more conventional representations of the gospel of work as a bulwark of masculinity, old and new” (359, 362). 104

Emblematizing a typical industrial middle-class attitude toward his own social ascension,

Thornton both acknowledges interdependence (regarding his mother) and denies it

(regarding his workers).110 As Stallybrass and White have influentially attested, “the

marketplace gives the illusion of independent identity, of being a self-sustaining totality,

and this illusion is one of separateness and enclosure,” and John Tosh has additionally

shown that, in industrialized Victorian England, “manly” work necessitated a rejection of

servility or patronage (Stallybrass and White 27-28; Tosh, Manliness 37). Thus, Thornton

disavows his reliance on his worker’s labor and maintains that he alone is in control of

his business. This contradiction, in which Thornton acknowledges his debt to his mother

but not his debt to his employees, has been repeatedly identified by critics as the source

of the economic conflict that makes up the framework of the novel. Even more than the

notion of interdependence and sympathy, however, an examination of the discourse of

pleasure and pain is crucial for understanding the “political economy” at work in

Thornton’s philosophy. Thornton locates the cause of his success as “self-denial,” which

he positions as the opposite of the “dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure” of his workers. Instead

of pain, the opposite of pleasure is an emptiness, a negation. His mother has taught him to

“despise indulgences,” to despise pleasures, when he has not “earned” them through that

negation.

The suggestive moral language of Thornton’s speech links economics with

religion in the by-now-familiar reframing of the Protestant work ethic to suit the demands

of free-market capitalism. Puritan asceticism, founded in Calvinism, has long been

110 See Kestner on the “assimilation to respectability” trope found in depictions of self-made industrialists in social reform fiction written by women (76). 105

acknowledged as a bedrock of modern Anglo civilization.111 As Sussman puts it, the

influence of Calvinism transformed the Christian attitude toward wealth: “the elect were

marked by worldly success in business attained by hard work and frugality. Thus,

committed labor with its resulting commercial achievement became a sign of being

chosen by God” (Sussman, Masculine Identities 84). Through Thornton, Gaskell shows that by the 1850s, “frugality” had morphed into the much more slippery “self-denial,”

and Thornton bases his entire masculine worth on denying himself the kind of indulgent

pleasures which he accuses his workers of “dishonestly” enjoying—that is, the transient

pleasures of drink, food, and (implicitly) sex in favor of future financial reward and,

supposedly, safety from the vicissitudes of the market.

Gaskell’s novel unmasks this deceptively simple system of religio-economic

reciprocity that presented working men with a contract, as it were, of deferred reward but

failed to deliver in just proportion. Much has been made of Gaskell’s Unitarian vision for

class and gender reconciliation, but this often leads to casting her as more ameliorative,

more compromising, and indeed more cerebral in a Cartesian sense than her books show

her to be. We are not used to considering the author who was until rather recently

referred to by critics as “Mrs. Gaskell” to be so sensual, but I argue that, for Gaskell,

hunger and sex—arguably the two foremost human experiences of pain and pleasure—

figure crucially into the political economy of industrial England as determined and

111 Max Weber and his contemporary nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophers influentially claimed to identify “Protestant asceticism as the foundation of modern vocational civilization (Berufskultur)” (Roth 3, Nipperdey 77). Kucich claims that masochism must be differentiated from “the pleasure-deferring, pragmatic emphasis on productivity described by the Weberian tradition” even though “masochistic fantasy might intrude parasitically on such behaviors” (Imperial Masochism 26), but I do not believe that these two concepts can so cleanly separated, as though masochism were an independent outside force “intruding” into the industrialist work ethic. 106

enforced by men in power. In North and South, Gaskell’s critique of England’s spiritual hangover from Calvinism takes the elemental shape of the body and its sensations (or lack thereof).

In this way, she anticipates by some ten years Matthew Arnold’s condemnation of

Puritanism and the Philistine culture (or anti-culture) of acquisition. Arnold’s Culture and

Anarchy (1868) famously shouldered the question of the spiritual precursors and consequences of English economic activity. He reprimanded what he saw as the

Puritans’ “successors and representatives,” the “Nonconformists,” for “develop[ing] one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and have become incomplete and mutilated men in consequence” (192-193). In short, the British, having been established in a pattern of “Hebraic” practicality and severe discipline founded by the Puritans, now value beauty and art too little and thus “[fall] short of harmonious perfection” (192, emphasis original). Whereas Arnold abstracts the battlegrounds of the industrial question into such incorporeal entities as Hellenism, Hebraism, and “sweetness and light,”

Gaskell’s earthy narratives get right down into the guts and organs—literally, the stomach and the genitals. Mrs. Thornton’s “training” is so effective that Thornton claims no longer even to think of “indulgences” when he has not first gone through a period of self-denial, and these “indulgences” bear a distinctly sensual character. Denial of the body to perfect the soul is a system that works well enough for the rich, Gaskell shows, since the rich body is not starving and, more interestingly, is an abstinent body, one which does not reproduce. Self-denial, then, becomes a position of privilege rather than of earnest self-improvement. The masculine work ethic that was once a method for the inception of and the provision for family (both nuclear and communal) has become a 107

permanent lifestyle of endless, self-perpetuated struggle. This new system, built upon

older and—Gaskell would argue—healthier, more orthodoxly Christian masculine values,

revises pleasure as something contingent upon its denial and deferral, an equation which

is essentially masochistic.

In calling these phenomena “masochism,” I am proposing an alternate view of the

usual way that we understand both Victorian masculinity and masochism itself. Mindful

of Gayle Rubin’s caution against treating masochism like “a unitary phenomenon whose

singular psychodynamic, text, aesthetic, or narrativity are not only knowable but known,”

it is my contention that “masochism” offers us a way to understand certain gendered

Victorian attitudes towards work, leisure, pleasure, and pain (306). Taking a cue from

John Kucich, who has advocated for freeing “masochism” from the exclusivity of

psychoanalysis’s sexual framework, I suggest that masochism can describe a subject’s

ideological orientation toward pain in a way that is potentially erotic insofar as

masochism may dictate some sexual behavior, but it can also dictate other activities like

work, leisure, and food and drink consumption (Imperial Masochism 12). This is what

makes the term and the dynamic not only appropriate but useful for understanding a novel like North and South. It gives us an entry point to understanding Gaskell’s critique of Thornton’s representative attitude toward the moral discipline of the body rather than the “conscience,” as Arnold would have it. In Gaskell’s novel, the same masochistic attitude applies to hunger and eating as well as sex.

The central characteristic of this brand of masochism is its suspense, its

frozenness, its waiting. Post-Freudian critics have long since recognized that masochism

is not as simple as the taking of pleasure in pain; it is, rather a state of suspended 108

pleasure, of finding pleasure in suspense of an end.112 Many have found that writers use

this kind of suspense as a narrative affordance, for example, allowing sex to appear

covertly on the page or even acting as “a negotiating tool in which pain is the price of a

chosen desire that violates a moral or ideological norm” (Rosenman 23-24).113 But again

and again, the perversion for which the masochist supposedly pays through his or her

suffering is seen to be marginal, unspeakable, unnarratable for one reason or another. I

propose, however, that Gaskell’s North and South points toward the mainstreaming of a

masochistic masculine stance arising out of the convergence of Protestantism and

industrialization.

Masochism: The “Perversion,” the Subversion, and the Social Symptom

Kucich has recently contended that the psychoanalytic tradition established by

Freud and carried forward by Deleuze has put into place a set of “rigid” erotic

associations which confine inquiry regarding masochism. Kucich revises this approach

by turning to 21st-century clinicians who have claimed “that sexual practices are among

the rarest forms of what they would describe as masochistic behavior” and proposing a

“better metaphorics for masochism, one less confined to an analysis of sexual domination

and submission and more determinate in its decoding of masochism’s ideological

significance” (Imperial Masochism 21, 22). What’s more, Kucich’s reorientation of

masochism within a nationalistic/economic schema rather than an exclusively sexual one

opens up avenues of alternative exploration into male masochism.

112 See, for instance, Deleuze. For a more recent reaffirmation of masochism-as-suspense, see Jarvis. 113 Jarvis argues that scenes of “exquisite masochism” proliferate the nineteenth-century British novel both as a way of having sex by perversely withholding it, “dispers[ing] physicality throughout the scene, minimizing sex’s risk while accentuating its thrill” (ix, xi). 109

We are accustomed to thinking of masochism as a feminine erotic, owing to the

enduring influence of Victorian sexologists like Krafft-Ebing, who invented the term

“masochism” in his 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis. He insisted that male masochism was a

perverse expression of feminine characteristics aroused early in life by witnessing or

taking part in flagellation (Gibson 42). Ergo, masochism could not be seen as a

perversion in women, “for nature had given to women ‘an instinctive inclination to

voluntary subordination’” (Felski, Gender of Modernity 101-102). Freud’s work

continued this alliance of masochism with femininity, declaring in his 1905 “Three

Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” that sadomasochism as a unified “perversion”

manifests at parallel “with the opposing masculinity and femininity which are combined

in bisexuality” (26). Even though Deleuze influentially separated Freud’s sadomasochism

into sadism and masochism, in 1967 he interpreted masochism in the same way that

Freud did, as a reorientation of masculine sexual aggression “turned round upon the

subject’s own self” (“Three Essays…” 24). In Deleuze’s view, the eponymous Sacher-

Masoch’s portrayal of male masochism in Venus in Furs is really an inverted form of

male control: “the masochistic hero appears to be educated and fashioned by the

authoritarian woman whereas basically it is he who forms her, dresses her for the part and

prompts the harsh words she addresses to him” (21). In this narcissistic formulation,

“woman occupies the space of the Other onto which the man projects his own narcissistic

ideal” (Stewart 5).114

114 Other twentieth-century psychoanalytic critics continued to see the relationship between a dominatrix (or an abstraction of the “Cruel Woman” like Sacher-Masoch’s statue of Venus) and the male masochist as a configuration of sublimated masculine aggression against the Father, in which a contract with the pre- Oedipal Mother bypasses the law of the Father, eliminating him and thus creating a “liberated ego” (Stewart 4). Slavoj Žižek understands courtly love as inherently masochistic, with “woman occup[ying] the 110

Feminist critics unsurprisingly have found this understanding of masochism—

which turns woman into a blank statue for man’s Oedipal conflict—unsatisfying. As the

late twentieth-century “sex wars” and their aftermath have shown, much critical ink has

been spilled determining whether female masochism can be transgressive or whether it is

merely an eroticized, sublimated expression of internalized patriarchal domination.115

Much of these debates boiled down (and continue to boil down) to the question of

whether or not the political/social can be delineated from the personal. A contingent of

late-twentieth century feminists insisted that “[a]ttitudes and behaviors that have been

labeled masochistic” can be explained by women’s socialized self-sacrifice and self-

denial under the patriarchy (Caplan qtd. in Felski, “Redescriptions…” 132).116 In her

defense of S/M, Rubin rejects the “automatic correspondence between sexual preference

and political belief,” but not the inevitability of politics’ penetration of private sexual

encounters (126, emphasis added). Allowing ourselves to conceive of masochism’s social

existence, beyond the sexual, helps us achieve what Carol Siegel called for as the means

of escape from the sexual “deadlock” which ultimately paints masochism as “nothing but

an attempt to rewrite the traditional love story into a tale of man’s failure to achieve

space of the Other onto which the man projects his own narcissistic ideal” (Stewart 5). Thus, “it is man who… stages in its most theatrical possibilities his own servitude” (Stewart 5). Classic Lacanian psychoanalysis perpetuates Freud’s initial claim, then, that male masochism is not really masochism at all but a man’s channeling of “feminine passivity” in order to enact a narcissistic fantasy of annihilating the Father. 115 As Rita Felski notes, the “transgressive” potential of S/M is often seen to lie primarily, if not exclusively, in queer relationships, particularly lesbian relationships: “[I]nsofar as lesbian S/M occurred between women, it could be safely distinguished from earlier images of female submission. No one was likely to mistake a lesbian being whipped by her leather-clad girlfriend for a docile housewife of the 1950s” (133-134). 116 In her picture of the current state of feminist and queer studies’ debate over masochism, Felski rejects Caplan’s theory on the grounds that it will not “concede any possible link between humiliation, pain, and erotic excitement” (“Redescriptions…” 132). Felski claims that most twenty-first-century critics no longer hold Caplan’s view and tend to separate sexual desire from political or social investments. 111

sufficient masculine mastery over woman in order to make them both happy” (qtd. in

Stewart 8).

Kucich’s study of masochism in nineteenth-century British literature embraces the

social in addition to the sexual as a way of understanding masochism, eschewing the

Deleuzian objectified dominatrix and substituting the ideal of British imperial triumph.117

Just as Sacher-Masoch’s prostration at the feet of the Venus in Furs was an iconoclastic

pose that obscured its hegemonic motive, imperialists’ willing self-sacrifice for Britannia,

Kucich contends, was actually sanctified by British culture. That “sanctification

transformed pain and finality of death or defeat into pleasurable fantasies of ecstatic

rebirth or resurrection” (Imperial Masochism 5). In this way, Kucich recuperates what

was important about a disavowed strain of late twentieth-century feminist critique, which is, first, that defining masochism in terms purely of erotic preference is not always the path to understanding its intricacies and, second, that masochistic behaviors can be both a

“psychic symptom” of and a conscious or unconscious “response to social circumstances” (Felski, “Redescriptions…” 132).

Though Kucich devotes a chapter to Olive Schreiner’s “fundamentally masochistic dynamic,” his model is primarily extrapolated from male writers (Imperial

Masochism 97).118 In an imperialist fantasy dreamed for the most part by men, Schreiner

is exceptional, not emblematic. Imperial Britain lays out for men “a preoedipal

117 Jarvis has found that the Cruel Woman, as she appears in the Victorian novel, can work to reveal “the shortcomings of patriarchal and more equitable, companionate construction of marriage” (vii-viii). These dominant women can “highlight the volatility inherent in marriage while also demonstrating the importance of sexual compatibility in ideal marriage” and also “persistently disturb the desexualizing, companionable impulses traditionally thought to be central to the conventional marriage plot” (3, 4). 118 Kucich’s references to female writers such as the Brontës and Gaskell tend to point out counter- examples of the kind of imperial masochism he’s talking about. See his comments on Jane Eyre, Cranford, and Daniel Deronda (Imperial Masochism, 6-8). 112

economy… in which self-imposed suffering produces narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence” which act, in turn, as “the primary narcissistic compensation that masochism provides” (Imperial Masochism 32, 33). In this way, Kucich shows how male writers’ portrayal of “imperial masochism” corresponds with what Suzanne R. Stewart has seen as fine-de-siècle male aesthetes’ appropriation of the margin; men posing themselves after Sacher-Masoch “viewed themselves as always already wounded or fragmented,” and so the supposed “subversions” of this so-called masochism “remained politically ambiguous at best, for they were predicated on the silencing of women whose positions as victims of a sexual hierarchy had been triumphantly usurped by a male claim to the margin that, once so claimed, became the new center” (Stewart 14). Male writers in the late nineteenth century, from aesthetes to adventures, apparently engaged with male masochism only insofar as it afforded the masochists the compensation of omnipotence, the power to claim the glory of a martyr or the power to reorient social hierarchies so that the man can simultaneously claim the positions of victim and master.

For a mid-century woman writer like Elizabeth Gaskell, the actual compensation for male masochism is not a fantasy of omnipotence but a fantasy of the market’s, and indeed the (divinely-instituted) world’s, fairness, justice, and reciprocity—one which has no bearing in the realities of industrial England and which thus creates a shield of denial for the middle-class men who run the economy. It is this masculine fantasy which, she shows in North and South, creates the widespread damage brought on by class conflict.

Rather than the “existential grandeur” lent by a martyr’s death, Gaskell portrays middle- class men’s masochism as no less than self-destruction drained of the compensating

113

erotics of either pain or pleasure (Imperial Masochism 25). “Self-denial” demands a

deferral of reward so asymptotic that, in reality, it amounts to total negation.

Eating and Drinking, Deferral and Death (and Variations)119

In the same speech in which Thornton lauds his mother for teaching him this

system, he insists, “Now I am able to afford my mother such comforts as her age, rather

than her wish, requires... Now… I have my mother safe in the quiet peace that becomes

her age, and duly rewards her former exertions” (North and South 78-79).120 The

Thornton household, however, is not comfortable at all, nor is Mrs. Thornton quiet or

peaceful. Thornton buys his mother a carriage, “but she refused to let him keep horses for

it...” (86) She spends her time in the dining room rather than the drawing room in order to

keep the latter pristine.121 When Margaret sees the Thornton house for the first time, she marvels at how the chandelier is covered, how the ornaments are kept “safe from dust under their glass shades,” and how “netting or knitting… veil” each piece of furniture.

It seemed as though no one had been in it since the day when the furniture was bagged up with as much care as if the house was to be overwhelmed with lava, and discovered a thousand years hence… Wherever she looked there was evidence of care and labour, but

119 Gaskell once joked (?) to her editor, Charles Dickens, “I think a better title than N. & S. would have been ‘Death & Variations’” (“Letters” 402). 120 The fact that it is a woman who teaches Thornton how to be masochistic deserves its own study. 121 John Paul Kanwit makes note of the purely ornamental books in the Thornton home. He theorizes that “household taste is Gaskell’s primary way of differentiating between those who have the perception to solve social problems and those who do not,” and that Thornton’s “serious attempt to elevate his taste and culture… help[s] him learn to read the complexities of Milton’s social problems” (201, 208). I contend Thornton’s study with Mr. Hale smacks more of enjoyment than self-improvement. Thornton himself says, “Now that I have my mother safe in the quiet peace that becomes her age, and duly rewards her former exertions, I can turn to all that old narration [Homer, etc.] and truly enjoy it” (North and South 79). 114

not care and labour to procure ease, to help on habits of tranquil home employment; solely to ornament, and then to preserve ornament from dirt or destruction. (103)

The Thornton household’s state of deferral to a distant, hypothetical future reflects its occupants’ misguided “labour” to preserve rather than enjoy even though enjoyment can be afforded. As Margaret observes, “the trouble that must be willingly expended to secure that effect of icy, snowy discomfort” ironically stultifies the healthy “home employment” that could be achieved if the Thorntons weren’t stuck in a mindset that makes them behave as though they were still impoverished. The virtues of thrift have transformed into a useless self-denial to secure a future that never arrives and which, as

Margaret’s image of volcanic immersion captures, spells out tragedy, petrifaction, and death.

The Thorntons’ ascension to wealth and their enactment of this masochistic lifestyle showcases the Victorians’ moral struggles with the massive social and economic changes underway in England in the earlier half of the nineteenth century. Ilana M.

Blumberg characterizes mid-century writers’ emphasis on self-denial as their attempt to reconcile the values of Protestantism with industrial capitalism. Novelists strove for a sense of “equilibrium” between the two poles of Christian altruism and a new laissez- faire economic system based on self-interest (Blumberg 15).122 Self-denial became, arguably, the Victorian characteristic and gave birth to a new work ethic built upon the old Calvinistic principles: a coalition of the similarities between Protestantism and capitalism, that is, their shared insistence upon “labor, self-control, and self-denial in pursuit of a deferred, increased reward” (Blumberg 16, emphasis added).

122 See also Sussman (Masculine Identities 81-98). 115

This ethic forms the cornerstone of Victorian middle-class masculinity such that

“[t]he compulsion to labor” through a practice of “self-discipline, self-denial and hard work” was “made an integral part of normative masculinity” (Danahay 7). For the first time in history, labor took on an exclusively masculine character, with middle-class women becoming “economically and spatially separated from the site of work” (Capuano

75). As industrialization eliminated many of the skill-based positions held by the working class, it simultaneously created unprecedented opportunities for middle-class men to enrich themselves without breaking a sweat. Industrialization separated middle-class men from the field and the workshop and pushed them into the office, where the same proofs of physical exertion could no longer be found. As Martin A. Danahay points out, “it is of course easier to measure physical activity than contemplative studies that may look

‘inactive’ on the physical level” (7). Suddenly, middle-class men found themselves engaged in work that appeared “valueless in this schema of physical laborm” in which

“manual labor [was]… represented as the preeminent symbol of manly industry”

(Danahay 7, 5). Because capitalist acquisition is, for the most part, incorporeal or intellectual work, earlier masculine standards of work needed to shift, otherwise middle- class men would find themselves unmanned by the office. In short, industrialism disembodied work, and so middle-class men substituted the pains and pleasures of manual labor with the non-pleasure and non-pain of duty and deferral. Self-denial came to perform the double function of compensating for the dubious acquisition of money and acting as the mark of masculinity. Sydney Carton’s one-and-done beheading may redeem his wasted, indulgent life, but not all men could expect the same kind of opportunity to die like a martyr. This is masochism without pain but also without pleasure, without the 116

glory of self-sacrifice, a strange negation arising out of the cultural backwash of

Calvinism and the uproar of industry.123

John Thornton begins life impoverished but not starving, and so the self-denial his

mother teaches him to practice is appropriate for his circumstances. But once he acquires

great wealth and local power, he doesn’t stop. The moral practice that has delivered him

and his family from poverty doesn’t have an explicit endpoint, doesn’t take changed

circumstance into account, and therefore Thornton cannot—and this is a key word for

Gaskell—“enjoy” his wealth. Late in the novel, Mr. Bell jocosely questions Thornton

about “when you Milton men intend to live. All your lives seem to be spent in gathering

together the materials for life.” If Thornton won’t use his money for “enjoyment,” Bell

asks, “What do you want it for?” Thornton replies, after a silence, that he doesn’t know,

but that money is not his ultimate object. When pressed, Thornton demurs, “It is a home

question” (North and South 303). Thornton seems to hedge because he doesn’t want to

mention the possibility of providing for a wife and family in front of Margaret, who has

spurned him. But since Thornton was already wealthy before he met Margaret, and since

his mother and sister are both well set-up, the motive of masculine provision remains an

unsatisfactory explanation. What Thornton does not or cannot voice is that he must

continue, masochistically, to work and live in discomfort because to enjoy his wealth

would be immoral and unmanly, even unpatriotic.

Later in this exchange with Mr. Bell, Thornton makes the rather Arnoldian

assertion that the British are a “Teutonic” race; the Greeks, whom scholars like Mr. Bell

123 Robert M. Kachur has called Thornton “a stereotypical Calvinist… who embraces the Protestant work ethic and the sanctity of the free market system...” (22) This interpretation of Gaskell’s religious critique is a convincing one, but Kachur does not reckon with the complications that industrialization adds to classic Calvinism. 117

revere, created “‘a life of leisure and serene enjoyment, much of which was entered in

through their outward senses.’”124 Thornton says he doesn’t “despise” such sensuality,

but that “‘we [Teutonics] do not look upon life as a time for enjoyment, but as a time for

action and exertion’” (North and South 304). Thornton rejects Mr. Bell’s “Greek” model

of masculinity, which is defined by sensual enjoyment (although not, apparently, “mere

pleasure”) for a model of “action and exertion,” but still cannot provide the endpoint or

even the goal of that action and exertion. Like the “[s]enseless and purposeless… wood

and iron and steam” of the Milton machinery enacting its “endless labours,” Thornton

himself works on in “tireless endurance… busy and restless in seeking after—What?”

(379) Thornton insists that he “‘would rather be a man toiling, suffering—nay, failing and successless—here, than lead a dull prosperous life’” because to him sensuality, enjoyment, and leisure are morally inferior states (75, emphasis added).

It makes perverse sense, then, that Thornton believes the “suffering” of the working class in Milton to be “the natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure” and their “careless, wasteful improvidence” (North and South 78, 80). Thornton has bought into the promise he labels as “one of the great beauties of our system, that a working-man may raise himself into the power and position of a master by his own exertions and behaviour; that, in fact, every one who rules himself to decency and sobriety of conduct, and attention to his duties, comes over to our ranks...” (78). Only the suspense of pleasure, the willing giving up of pleasure, is moral in Thornton’s privileged position. Thornton goes on, “‘I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of

124 Gaskell stages her own discussion of “Hellenism and Hebraism” here in North and South a good ten- plus years before Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. 118

my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character’” (79).

In his masochistic moral schema, any pleasure at all becomes indulgent, and sensual

pleasures are the most blameworthy.

Thornton’s workers don’t “exert” themselves to accumulate money, save it, or

invest it. Rather, they spend it on their bodies: namely, on food and alcohol, in literal

opposition to the “sobriety” Thornton touts. Nicholas Higgins, for instance, drinks to

excess. Gaskell takes care, however, to recast this “sensual self-indulgence” in the light

of an understandable coping mechanism. Bessy Higgins explains the motive of the poor

to spend any extra cash on physical, momentary experiences:

“There are days… when yo’ get up and go through th’ hours, just longing

for a bit of a change—a bit of a fillip [stimulus] as it were... I’ve longed

for to be a man to go spreeing... It’s little to blame to them if they do go

into th’ gin-shop for to make their blood flow quicker, and more lively,

and see things they never see at no other time—pictures, and looking-

glass, and such like... at times o’ strike there’s much to knock a man

down, for all they start so hopefully; and where’s the comfort to come

fro’?” (North and South 125)

This passage bears a striking similarity to one found in Engels’s 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England:

The worker comes home tired and exhausted from his labours… He

urgently needs some stimulant; he must have something to recompense

him for his labours during the day and enable him to face the prospect of

the next day’s dreary toil… It is greatly aggravated by the circumstances 119

in which he finds himself—the uncertainty of his job, his lack of resources

to fall back on, his state of insecurity... Moreover, his need for company

can be satisfied only in the public house, for there is nowhere else he can

meet his friends. (116)125

Engels identifies physical stimulus as a psychological need for the worker as well as a coping mechanism, saying that “spirits are virtually his [the worker’s] sole form of pleasure…” (115).126 For Bessy, one of the novel’s spokespeople for her class, physical stimulation staves off despair, just as it does in Engels’s view.127 She translates

“spreeing” into freedom and novelty, not binging or indulging.

After Bessy’s death, Margaret does not condone Nicholas’s attempt to “drown care” with alcohol but neither does she blame him (North and South 207). In a moment of free indirect discourse that collapses Margaret’s viewpoint with Gaskell’s, the narrator asks, “In fact, where was he to look for comfort?” Instead of castigating, Margaret offers him “some comfortable food” at her own home (204). When Margaret brings Higgins home, Mr. Hale wants to read Higgins a chapter from Job which urges stoicism in the face of suffering, but Margaret knows that this is the wrong course: “‘Not yet, papa, I

125 For Engels’s specific observation about workers’ drinking in Manchester, see 142-143. 126 It should be noted, of course, that Gaskell’s representation of the poor working class’s habits of consumption does not necessarily reflect historical reality. It may not even necessarily reflect Gaskell’s own perception of the poor but rather, perhaps, what she imagined (with cause) the middle class thought of the poor. 127 Indeed, much study has been done in recent years of the spending habits of the impoverished. Many of these studies find a similar present-orientation in those who struggle to make ends meet and suggest that, in an environment in which future happiness or even future life is by no means assured and even present survival is precarious, it actually makes the most sense to maximize on present survival first, present pleasure second, and long-term goals third. “Self-destructive” behavior, such as choosing present over delayed gratification, can therefore be seen as an evolutionarily adaptation rather than a character flaw (Ellis et al. 9). Elizabeth Gaskell could not have had the institutional rigor or the resources to make these kinds of studies of the psychology of poverty; all she had were her personal observations. But it is all the more remarkable that a woman in 1855 came, through fiction, to the same ideas that it took scientific inquiry until the late twentieth and early twenty-first century to reach. 120

think. Perhaps not at all’” (210). Through exposure to Higgins’s suffering, Margaret has learned that stoicism is an unreasonable value to ask in a man who is hungry and grief- stricken. Gaskell insists on the alleviation of physical need rather than the pious extolling of endurance.

For Thornton, the consumption of food and drink could not be more different.

Instead of administering to the body, Thornton’s consumptive practices are fiduciary. The

Thorntons give an annual dinner party, not to enjoy the pleasures of good food and good company but to “kill off” all of the acquaintances to whom they “owe” a dinner (North and South 86, 133). Mrs. Thornton does not “enjoy” society; rather, she takes

“satisfaction” in “dinner-giving, and… criticising other people’s dinners” (88-89). Lavish dinners seem, at their face, to denote sensual enjoyment, but the Thorntons use them only as occasions to convey status and enact social competition. The slang phrase “kill off” for reciprocating dinner invitations is suggestive enough itself, sapping any enjoyment that could come from socialization and turning the gathering into aggressive retribution.

Margaret notes the excess and the “sumptuousness of the dinner-table and its appointments...” and feels “the number of delicacies to be oppressive; one half of the quantity would have been enough, and the effect lighter and more elegant” (146). Even in this moment when self-denial seems decadently thrown aside, the overwhelming number of rich foods abstract those very foods into signifiers of wealth—not meant to be enjoyed or even consumed but to be admired. The shadow of masochism is not absent, even from this feast: “Careless to abstemiousness in her daily habits, it was part of her [Mrs.

Thornton’s] pride to set a feast before such of her guests as cared for it. Her son shared this feeling... even now, though he was denying himself the personal expenditure of an 121

unnecessary sixpence...” (146). The Thorntons’ “abstemiousness” simply finds its other

side in paying back a dinner debt with interest. Even when Thornton lingers over

choosing the most exquisite fruits on offer to give to the ailing Mrs. Hale, the gesture is

made to spite Margaret, who has rejected his marriage proposal, to show her and to prove

to himself that he will not be prevented from “doing a kindness” for his friends “for fear

of a haughty girl” (197). Dr. Donaldson wishes Thornton would attend in the same way

to every one of his patients and “all their wants,” but the narrator points out that Thornton

“had no general benevolence,—no universal philanthropy” (197). His gift of delicacies

for Mrs. Hale acts not so much as a provision for her hunger or delectation but rather to signify his defiance. For Thornton, food delivers a message rather than sustenance or pleasure.

Bessy Higgins articulates the perversity of the Thorntons’ dinner party in the middle of the strike: “Food is high [expensive],—and they [working-class mothers] mun have food for their childer, I reckon. Suppose Thorntons sent ’em their dinner out,—th’ same money, spent on potatoes and meal, would keep many a crying babby [sic] quiet,

and hush up its mother’s heart for a bit!’” (North and South 137) For the Thorntons,

eating is a purely social act and not an act of sustenance because the Thorntons do not

experience hunger—not in the sense that denotes an unwillingly undergone, prolonged

period without eating. When food and drink lose their neutrality as biological necessities,

they become defined only by “sensuality” and “indulgence.” Hunger, real hunger, will

become a cornerstone of Gaskell’s dismantling of this privileged worldview. Unlike other

“pleasures,” eating cannot be endlessly deferred, because, as the workers of Milton know,

122

death is a quick result. The death of providing fathers and the subsequent orphaning of children becomes the issue that shakes Thornton out of his masochistic pose.

Suicide and the Masculine Work Ethic

Thornton pinpoints age fifteen as the moment he had to “become a man,” when his father commits suicide (North and South 78). Thornton’s father was once a working man himself who practiced “speculation” or dubious investment to pull himself and his family out of debt. When the organizers of the speculation vanish along with Thornton’s father’s investment, he commits suicide. Thornton verbally disowns his father and cleaves to his mother, “a woman of strong power, and firm resolve” who teaches the teenage Thornton all the “manly virtues,” especially self-discipline (78). But Thornton’s disavowal of his father’s disgraceful suicide only papers over an ominous association between men’s work, masochism, and death. After the suicide, Mrs. Thornton pulls her son out of school and procures for him a position as a “shop boy.” Together, they set aside one-fifth of his fifteen-shilling weekly wage (the family’s only income) (80). This system of “self-denial” therefore takes on a meaning that supersedes a simple road out of poverty; it also becomes a system for warding off the grim specter of a failed provider’s ignominious self-destruction.

Despite the literature of the era’s notorious penchant for advocating self-sacrifice, many Victorians were cognizant of, even preoccupied with, the unstable distinction between sanctioned self-denial on the one hand and “perverse” self-destruction—

123

suicide—on the other.128 As Gates notes, “Victorian society was harsh in its judgments of men who were pronounced felo-de-se [self-murderers], placing them among its least redeemable members” (69). “Becoming lower in the world” either through the loss of a breadwinner or a breadwinner’s own failure at providing was frequently seen to lead to the so-called temporary insanity that many Victorians believed prompted most suicides.

The famous suicide of middle-class, unmarried Margaret Moyes, who died by throwing herself from the London Monument in 1839, was attributed in broadsheets to the prospect of her “lowered circumstances” at the death of her father (Gates 45). One broadsheet implores its readers, in verse, therefore to “be content” “[i]n their station,” “[t]ho’ reduc’d to poverty” (Gates 45). The law also guaranteed the close link between a family’s economic situation and the suicide of a husband or father. Felo de se remained a crime in

England until 1961, one which was punishable by forfeiture of the suicide’s property to the crown (Gates xiv, 39). Unless insanity was proved, a man’s suicide could deprive his family of their home, goods, and money. Thus, his family “faced the awful dilemma of choosing the lesser of two evils: hereditary insanity as a future stigma, or poverty as an immediate prospect” (Gates 39). This apparent accident of the law, in which men’s social and economic primacy collides with the ignominy attributed to suicide, renders men’s suicides infinitely more significant and damaging than women’s.

“Suicide; its Motives and Mysteries,” published in 1857 in the Irish Quarterly

Review, opens with a proof of this disproportionate significance: the unparalleled public

128 Émile Durkheim’s influential Le Suicide (1897) would, almost half a century after Gaskell, insist that the causes of suicide are sociological. Those with stronger binds to society, particularly the familial unit, were less likely to commit suicide. As such, Durkheim argued, suicide was more likely in Protestant than Catholic countries, since the former was supposedly more individualistic, permitting “free inquiry to a far greater degree” and therefore more prone to individual maladjustment (157). See Durkheim 152-170 and 208-216 for more on the Catholic/Protestant question of suicide. 124

“astonishment and dismay” at the suicide of the celebrated John Sadleir, whose

fraudulent business dealings plunged “establishments, undertakings, and a host of

individuals, in irretrievable ruin” (Bourquelot 49).129 Sadleir’s friends apparently tried to

prove insanity in court (and thus avoid a pronouncement of felo de se) by pointing to his

agonized letters and his feverish expressions of remorse prior to his death, but the writer

of the Irish Quarterly article takes those very expressions of remorse as signs of sanity.

Victorian intellectual and medical discourse about suicide persistently acknowledged the

rational nature of a man’s suicide as a response to economic circumstance. If suicide can

be rational, then anyone is vulnerable, not just the insane. And if suicide is related closely

with work in its potential for humiliation and disappointment, and if work is the realm of

men, then men in particular are vulnerable to suicide.130

Men’s suicide as a result of financial ruin became a frequent trope in fiction at

this time, persisting well into the twentieth century and producing the myth (believed by

many to this day) that hundreds of Wall Street investors leapt to their deaths in the stock

market crash of 1929 (Henry 163). Nineteenth-century writers often portrayed the

suicidal businessman’s fate as the natural consequence of engagement with an amoral

marketplace that plays fast and loose with thousands of pounds and hundreds of

livelihoods. Indeed, we find “speculation”—what had sealed Thornton Sr.’s fate—to be

the deadliest of all commerce in Victorian fiction; as a disembodied and abstract

endeavor, in which a man will never see or touch the overseas railroads or mines in

129 The article is translated from the French, Recherches sur les Opinions et la Législation en Matière de Mort Volantaire Pendent le Moyen Age by M.H. Bourquelot, which appeared in 1840. 130 Gates points out that most contemporary documents on suicide were written by “male professionals— doctors, lawyers, essayists, novelists, and poets,” but “[m]iddle-class men, in particular, tended to make suicide the province of other selves—of men belonging to other times or places, of make-believe monsters, or of women” as a way, perhaps, of displacing and distancing a close threat (Gates xv, xiv). 125

which he’s invested, the speculator is so far removed from masculine manual labor that

his work cannot be conceived of as honorable or even as work at all. Here we find our

Merdles, our Melmottes. In fiction, the ease with which the disgraced and ruined

financier disposes of himself mirrors the ease with which he disposed of “money so

insubstantial it can fly away in an instant” (Henry 169). But in the suicides of North and

South, we find something quite different. They still result from the cruel mechanics of the

masculine marketplace, but they are not portrayed as the result of their perpetrators’

selfish freewheeling or their greedy acquisitiveness.

Out of the seven deaths described in the novel, only two are suicides—Thornton’s

father’s and Thornton’s employee, Boucher’s. Both result from their victims’ inability to

provide for their families. Reduced to desperation to get himself out of debt, Thornton Sr.

attempted a series of “wild, hopeless struggles, made with other people’s money, to

regain his own moderate portion of wealth” (North and South 80). John Boucher,

prevented from working by his own labor union whose strike pay is not enough to feed

his six children, takes part in a riot that inadvertently injures Margaret. Both the mill-

owners and the union subsequently blacklist him. Ostracized and forced to witness his

wife and children starve, he drowns himself by lying face down in the shallow brook the

Milton factories use to dye their cotton. His corpse is symbolically stained by the dye,

and, in an ironic inversion of the starvation that drove him to the deed, his dead face is

“swollen” (North and South 269). Boucher’s self-murdered corpse, I argue, catalyzes socioeconomic change in the novel; Gaskell’s target is not only the gap between the female middle-class ambassador and the working man but also that between the middle- class man and the working man, a gap maintained by a masochistic work ethic, which, in 126

turn, demands that Thornton devalue working class men’s suffering. To complete his

transformation, Thornton must allow himself intimacy and connection with a group of

men who carry the taint of immoral pleasure as well as the fearful specter of suicide.

Mothers and Fathers, Masters and Men

Nicholas Higgins is often seen as Thornton’s working-class double, and indeed

their similarities of temperament invite this view, but often when critics make this

connection they also shut out a much more subtle and powerful double for Thornton—

namely, Boucher. Thornton’s importation of Irish workers to replace the strikers prompts

the workers’ riot, in which Thornton meets a reflection, or, rather, an extension of

himself, his degraded and denied other, embodied by Boucher. Boucher is the only

individual man identified in the crowd, spotted by Margaret:

She knew how it was; they were like Boucher,—with starving children at

home… and enraged beyond measure at discovering that Irishmen were to

be brought in to rob their little ones of bread. Margaret knew it all; she

read it in Boucher’s face, forlornly desperate and livid with rage. (North

and South 162)

The working class collapses into one man, Boucher, just as the industrialist class

collapses into Thornton.131 Of course, this scene is the novel’s ultimate expression of

disempowered want meeting empowered privilege, but the fact that this meeting is

colored in such masculine terms is crucial yet critically overlooked. Patsy Stoneman and

131 This is a typical Gaskell move. Mary Poovey sees the same individualizing trope in Mary Barton (143- 154). Amanpal Garcha, on the other hand, argues that Gaskell’s individualizing efforts “assert a more profit-minded ideology that critics often ignore” (Making a Social Body 172-173). 127

others have argued that in this novel and elsewhere in Condition-of-England literature,

working-class men are portrayed as a “feminine” group because they are emotional and

relational instead of stoic and isolated like middle-class men (Elizabeth Gaskell 3).132

Economic powerlessness supposedly explains why working-class men are, in Stoneman’s

words, more feminine and thus better at “mothering” their children. Building from Nancy

Chodorow’s psychoanalytical theory of “maternal thinking,” Stoneman has argued that

Gaskell’s novel advocates for “the opening of motherhood to men” in the sense that she

considers “mothering” to mean emotionally caring for others, regardless of gender

(Elizabeth Gaskell 166-167). Gallagher makes a similar assertion when she says that,

“Margaret believes Mr. Thornton should be a mother to his workmen; he should give

them the same kind of moral training his mother gave him” (The Industrial Reformation...

168-169). I argue, however, that the overlooked theme of suicide in North and South

shows that Gaskell is decidedly concerned with fatherhood, that is, the socially-

determined role of the father, and that the gendered differences between fatherhood and

motherhood are an important element of her class commentary.

This is borne up by the fact the rioters are exclusively male: they are an “angry

sea of men,” “hundreds of infuriated men and reckless boys” with nary a working woman

in sight (North and South 137, 162). When Margaret arrives in Milton, it is clear that

women as well as men work in the cotton factories. It is made explicit, in fact, that most

working women prefer the independence and higher wages of factory work to the

demands and lower wages of domestic service, making the search for a good servant

132 See also Malay 42-44 on contemporary literature’s portrayal of the working-class man as particularly volatile. 128

difficult for the Hale family (North and South 63). Margaret’s first rambles in Milton

prove upsetting because she often accidentally “falls in” with mixed crowds going to and

from work, and the women explicitly make bold to comment upon her appearance and

clothing (North and South 66). And, needless to say, Margaret’s closest female friend in

Milton, Bessy Higgins, is a factory worker. Yet in the moment of the riot, the zenith of cross-class tension, all these working women who populated the novel up to this point are nowhere in sight. The disappearance of laboring women syncs with the discursive marginalization of women from sites of labor, despite the fact that women composed 60-

80% of the labor force for British industries like cotton (Johnson Hidden Hands 1).133

Instead of merely reflecting the historical masculinization of the workplace brought on by

industrialization—as it would be rather strange only to do so in this single moment in the

novel—I argue that Gaskell is making a pointed criticism of the bourgeois masochism

Thornton exercises, the damaging potential of which is dramatized in this scene.

As we can see from the way Margaret “knew it all” by “read[ing]” in Boucher’s

face all the men’s desperation, the workers’ “rage” is a justifiable manifestation of a

crisis of masculine providing, unable as they are to feed their “starving children” (North

and South 162). Thornton’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of their pain, which he

regards as a self-inflicted result of their failure to suspend sensual pleasure, amounts to a

133 Patricia E. Johnson has remarked on this erasure of working women in industrial literature in particular. Drawing on Poovey and Armstrong’s theorization of gender’s ascendancy in the early nineteenth century to the main form of cultural difference in the Western world, Johnson points out how the gender binary, in replacing “a hierarchically ordered range of [sexual/biological] similarities,” disempowered the lower class by dividing it along gender lines, but also, conversely, benefited working class men by forcing working women back into the home and thus reducing job competition for men (Johnson Hidden Hands 10-11). Along these same lines, Capuano argues that the backdating to 1811-12 of Chalotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849)—a novel against which many critics have compared North and South—provides “a historical, social, and economic genealogy by which to explain how the gendered spheres became so rigidly separated later on…” (75-76). 129

disavowal of his privileged position. Childless himself and free from the threat of starvation, he can afford to be virtuously masochistic and thus meets their righteous fury first with “stony silence” and then with open, reckless defiance. He verbally attempts to reassert his difference from his employees by accusing them with repeated injunctions of

“you”: “You do well! … You come to oust the innocent stranger. You fall—you hundreds—on one man; and when a woman comes before you, to ask you for your own sakes to be reasonable creatures, your cowardly wrath falls upon her! You do well!”

(North and South 165, 163) Yet he ironically maintains a strong homosocial tie to the working men by attempting to prove his manhood to them when they accuse him of being

“sheltered behind a woman” (North and South 163). Contradicting his own earlier assertion to Margaret that a man is understood in terms of isolation like the hermit St.

John of Patmos, Thornton’s call for his men to kill him—“Now kill me, if that is your brutal will!”—happens as he unchivalrously leaves the bleeding and unconscious

Margaret on the doorstep and places himself “right into the middle of the crowd” of men

(North and South 150, 163-164).

For Gaskell, Thornton’s call for his men to kill him is not a noble self-sacrifice à la Sydney Carton. Thornton’s willingness to sacrifice his own life is not stemmed by concern for the wellbeing of others, which many Victorians considered the necessary difference between self-sacrifice and self-destruction; indeed, the narrator insists that he

“could not sympathize with” the wounded Margaret, the woman he is incumbent to protect (North and South 164).134 Rather, his call to be killed is an attempt to regain masculine standing, which Margaret threatens when she uses her body to shield him, and

134 On the distinction between self-sacrifice and self-destruction, see Blumberg (27) and Gates (69-72). 130

to stand upon a flawed and now obviously self-destructive ethic that has goaded him into a willingness, for a fleeting moment, to embrace death. This suicide-by-mob gesture is the ultimate, sinister conclusion of Thornton’s masochistic ethos. The industrial-capitalist contract, which is supposed to stave off economic ruination and thus protect men from the humiliation and poverty that lead to suicide, nevertheless ironically points asymptotically toward self-destruction. The extreme negation practiced by Thornton as a way of making himself invulnerable to circumstance—denial of pleasure, denial of comfort, denial of happiness, denial of bodily need or desire—is actually a voluntary suspension of life that, Gaskell shows, leads to death.135 For Deleuze, the contract is the hallmark of masochism: “The sadist is in need of institutions, the masochist of contractual relations” (20). As with an unfathomable heaven promised to those who suffer in this life, the apparent reward for the industrialist’s suspense is designed to be so distant and ineffable that it cannot be defined or accessed except through death.136 This,

Gaskell shows, is felo de se, self-murder, and Thornton’s impulse towards it during the riot betrays its true nature. By contrast, Margaret’s behavior during the riot is an actual

135 Lauren Berlant has identified a similar stance of “cruel optimism” endemic in twenty-first-century life; that is, confidence in “enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work”—in the face of all the evidence of the “instability, fragility, and dear cost” of these things in a post-9/11 world (1). Berlant’s primary genre of “cruel optimism” is the “impasse,” that is, stuck-ness, suspense, the “prolonged present.” Old genres such as realism, she maintains, indicate “archaic expectations about having and building a life” (6). Although Berlant locates eating and sex as adjustments against cruel optimism, the “cushions of enjoyment” scrabbled together by “the 99%” of our day are markedly different from the pejorative “enjoyments” which are condemned by North and South’s industrialist hero (3). Berlant proposes an embrace of “the middle,” in which subjects can provide solidarity to each other while coping within a precarious state. Elizabeth Gaskell would advocate a similar embrace of the present in terms of administering to the needs of the body (one’s own and others’) but also a correction of the future-orientation shown my Thornton and his ilk. 136 This bargain can’t be explained in Freudian terms either by the pleasure principle or by the death drive, since what is being offered is a state of suspense between pleasure (reward) on one side and death on the other. It is interesting, however, that in his investigation of the death drive, Freud admits that even though he earlier asserted in “Three Essays” that masochism was essentially secondary sadism, after all “masochism could also very possibly be a primary phenomenon—a notion I then sought to dispute” (94). 131

act of self-sacrifice instead of suicide, since she throws herself in the fray to shield

Thornton. The starving fathers are acting to save their starving children. Thornton,

meanwhile, has only abstract principle to protect.

The indirect involvement of children in this confrontation shows how, in

Malthusian terms, hunger goes hand in hand with another, unspoken sensual experience

caught up in the politics of self-denial: sex. The existence of children proves an equally

potent motivation behind the working-class men’s revolt. If starvation is a curb to endless deferral, the starvation of children is even more arresting and all the more ironic:

Thornton’s masochistic stance points toward the future, but children, the personification of the future, are dying before his closed eyes. Thornton sacrifices the present for the future, but by so doing, he figuratively destroys the future. For much of the novel,

Thornton acts as though children do not exist when he discusses the working conditions in Milton and condemns charity as nothing more than a prolongation of the wrong- headed strike: “‘Mr. Thornton... said, those were no true friends who helped to prolong the struggle by assisting the turn-outs’” (North and South 144). Sex remains unspoken

but is strongly implied in Thornton’s talk of sensual self-indulgence. For him, the six

Boucher children, all of them under legal working age, symbolize their parents’ inability

to control their sexual impulses and prevent themselves from producing more children

than they can feed.

Parts of the narration given from Margaret’s point of view also seem to take this

perspective. After Boucher’s suicide, Margaret accepts the onerous task of informing

Mrs. Boucher, whom the narrator paints as an animalistic and ignorant although generally

good woman. The “selfishness” she displays in reaction to her husband’s suicide, the 132

narrative suggests, played a part in the excess of children which led to this dire state of

affairs on the first place (North and South 274). Gaskell’s dehumanization of Mrs.

Boucher here is hard to swallow—even more so when Margaret speculates that the

Bouchers “had Irish blood in them”—and she seems patently unfair to the mourning

woman. Who, after all, should Mrs. Boucher be thinking of besides “herself and her own

position,” having been indeed “ill-used” by a husband who, although in despair, has left

her with six children they couldn’t even feed with their combined incomes (North and

South 274)? But even as Gaskell maintains a paternal stance toward Mrs. Boucher (and

even Nicholas Higgins, at times), she also grants the “germ of truth” in Mrs. Boucher’s

complaint.137 In contemplating Boucher’s suicide, Margaret reasons that both the city

poor and the country poor “must find it hard to realise a future of any kind,” leading them

“to revel in the mere sense of animal existence, not knowing of, and consequently not

caring for any pungency of pleasure, for the attainment of which he can plan, and deny

himself and look forward” (North and South 275). Though she reaches the conclusion on

the road of condescension, Margaret does arrive at the truth: It is pointless to practice

self-denial when poverty makes “realizing a future” difficult or even impossible. The fact

that Margaret’s representative poor person is a “he” is noteworthy; she has just come

from the Boucher house, missing its father and overrun with children. The self-denial

Margaret refers to is not specified, but it is easy to read, due to its juxtaposition, as sexual

self-denial.

137 We must also keep in mind how thoroughly the critics routed Gaskell for being too sympathetic to the poor in Mary Barton, at the expense (they argued) of the mill-owners and the middle class in general (Foster 34-35). It is easy to envision Gaskell having a reactive purpose in her characterization of the Bouchers, determined as she was to be more balanced in this novel and show a good, just master along with showing that the poor can also have faults. For more on Gaskell’s personal reactions to her critics and other possible influences for North and South, see Foster 34-41, 108-112. 133

Yet for Gaskell, sex among the poor is not simply an inevitable, fatalistic fact;

rather, it is the right of “love.” Bessy says of Boucher, “‘He’s but a weak kind o’ chap, I

know, but he’s a man for a’ that; and tho’ I’ve been angry, many a time afore now, wi’

him an’ his wife, as knew no more nor him how to manage, yet, yo’ see, all folks isn’t

wise, yet God lets ‘em live—ay, an gives ‘em some one to love, and be loved by, just as

good as Solomon’” (North and South 142). When Margaret comes to inform Mrs.

Boucher of her husband’s suicide, Mrs. Boucher’s laments focus on her husband’s

paternal and husbandly affection: “‘[H]e loved us a’... He loved this babby [sic] mappen

[perhaps] the best on us; but he loved me and I loved him...’” (270-271). Both Bessy’s

assertion and Mrs. Boucher’s insistence on Boucher’s love for his family attest that,

although Boucher may not be wise, he is “a man for a’ that” and is still capable of and

entitled to love and marriage, which entails sex and (in a time without widespread

knowledge or availability of reliable birth control) children. In North and South, Gaskell

insists that marriage and procreation are human rights, not signs of failed discipline.

Margaret comes to this realization in the aftermath of a father’s suicide, and this suicide—impelled by the same deadly desperation that gripped Thornton’s own disavowed father—orchestrates Thornton’s change of heart. After the riot and after

Boucher’s suicide, Higgins asks Thornton for work. Higgins tells Thornton that he wouldn’t have bothered to ask him, “‘But it’s winter, and th’ [Boucher] childer will clem

[starve]… I’d take any wage they thought I was worth, for the sake of those childer’”

(North and South 291-292). Thornton retorts, “‘You’d be a knobstick [scab]... all for the sake of another man’s children... I won’t say, I don’t believe your pretext for coming and asking for work; I know nothing about it. It may be true, or it may not. It’s a very 134

unlikely story, at any rate’” (292). Thornton refuses to contemplate the reality of a group

of six orphaned, hungry children without a provider, but later he comes to regret this,

feeling that “he had been unjust.” When starving children become more immanent than

an unfortunate product of parental profligacy, it exposes the hidden “tenderness in his

heart—‘a soft place’” which he has kept concealed (295). Thornton admires Higgins’s

“patience” and “the simple generosity” of fostering the Boucher children. In contrast with

Boucher and with Thornton’s own father, Higgins takes on responsibility during a crisis

of masculine provision; he self-sacrifices (swallows his pride and offers to work for

reduced wages) rather than self-destroys.

Granted, the Boucher orphans’ loss of father and then mother, combined with their “we are too many” numbers, render them in an even more precarious position than the half-orphaned, fifteen-year-old John Thornton. Thornton never explicitly acknowledges the parallels between Boucher’s fate and his father’s; his change of heart happens “as if by some spell,” guided by “divine instinct” (North and South 296). Many

critics have interpreted this moment as proof of Margaret’s softening influence, and while

that might be partially true—Thornton ambiguously “dreaded the admission of any

thought of her, as a motive to what he was doing solely because it was right”—I believe

critics have, in making this point about the female protagonist’s agency, discounted the

impact of Boucher’s suicide and Thornton’s witness of Higgins’s foster-fatherhood in

forging cooperation between master and employee (North and South 295).138 The

138 In examining this scene, Gallagher asserts that “Thornton’s love for Margaret, his moral judgment of her, and his treatment of his workmen are three disconnected phenomena” (The Industrial Reformation 176). 135

parallels between Boucher’s fate and Thornton’s father’s allow Thornton to connect

himself to the scene of circumstantial victimhood before him.

Indeed, the only Boucher child named by the narrative, the one who is “his

father’s darling,” is named “Johnnie,” and the only other two characters named John are

John Boucher Sr. and John Thornton Jr. (271).139 Through this connection among

orphans-by-suicide, Gaskell shows that not only must employees and employers relate to

each other better, but that, more subtly and more crucially, without a revision to the way

men relate to work, pain, pleasure, and their own masculinity, the suicidal cycle

continues. Their shared, rather universal male first name attests to this: John Thornton,

John Boucher, and Johnnie Boucher are each victims of that cycle. Boucher’s last name

in French literally translates to “butcher,” the verb assigned to “butchery,” as in

“carnage.” It also translates into a verb meaning “to block,” clog, stop up, obstruct.140

Boucher’s self-murdered corpse is both a picture of butchery itself but also a

demonstration of the butchery perpetuated upon men’s bodies en masse by an industrial

system that crushes their limbs in machinery and demands their constant, restless

motion.141 Furthermore, Boucher’s corpse and the mode of death it embodies symbolize

the obstruction preventing social reconciliation. Boucher’s orphaned children are akin to

Margaret’s senseless body, struck by the thrown stone in the riot: Both are evidence of

the collateral damage done to women and children when bourgeois men buy into a social

contract that requires them to perform a work-centered (and thus necessarily homosocial)

masochism that defines their lives in direct opposition to and exclusion of a life that

139 It seems significant, too, that Thornton holds up the monasticism of St. John of Patmos as a manly ideal (North and South 150). 140 See “boucher,” cited below. 141 See Capuano and Sanders on factory accidents and injuries. 136

prioritizes familial care, for the self as well as for others. For Gaskell, if a man does not

care for himself—and especially if he actively harms himself, as he must do in

business—then he cannot care for those who depend on him. Self-destruction is never

merely destruction of the self.

Of course, it is quite telling that Thornton’s transformation happens over the

corpse of a workman. The same process that Johnson notes as the alliance between

middle-class woman (Margaret) and working-class man (Higgins), occurring “literally

over the corpse of the factory girl,” seems to take place over Boucher’s body between

Higgins and Thornton, only in this instance the working-class corpse is male (Johnson

39). This “grotesque body,” which “stands in opposition to the bourgeois individualist

conception of the body” because of its permeability via “openings and orifices,” decay

and deterioration, emphasizes the self as “mobile, split, multiple” and prevents all those

who gaze upon it from denying their own multiplicity (Stallybrass and White 22).142

Mike Sanders sees Boucher’s death as enacting “an ideological move from the real to the

ideal” in that it supposedly “accuses a fellow workman rather than a master,” removing

blame from middle-class shoulders and placing it onto the workers’ union and its

representative, Higgins (Sanders 326). But Boucher’s suicide pushes Thornton to accept

some responsibility for the working class’s physical wellbeing—thus, his instigation of

the whole-sale dining room at his mill and his interest in the Boucher children (North and

South 309). It also leads him to reevaluate his gendered conceptions of the morality of

sensual pleasure and physical pain. Instead of blaming workers for their tendency to

142 Mary Elizabeth Hotz points out that in North and South “the corpse [in general] draws a community of mourners from all ranks and provides an instance in which individuals may be transformed to act in the best interests of society” (168). 137

“spree,” Thornton uses his power to provide the apparatus for fulfilling a physical necessity: food. He shifts from abstraction to real, lived experience, turning his attention from the will (and the willfulness) of the workers to their bodies. Where once he distanced and abstracted his workers’ needs, he now provides and becomes intimate by way of physical proximity in the Higgins home and in the dining room. He becomes present, literally and figuratively: present-oriented rather than future-oriented. He had been “alive to distant, and dead to near things… [I]t had taken him long silent years to come even to a glimmering of what he might be now, to-day, here in his own town, his own factory, among his own people” (North and South 380).

This might sound like we’re back to the original idea of Thornton as someone who, by novel’s end, has been taught to care. But I argue that his character arc is not about “teaching” any particular affect but rather about revising the cultural valuation of

“manly” pain and pleasure. Thornton’s acceptance of the disempowered pain of his loss at the end of the novel is the cornerstone of the social reform project of North and South.

Rejecting the unfeeling, illusory safety of the isolated mill owner whose position of power is supposedly justified by how few rewards he allows himself, Thornton instead exposes himself to the vicissitudes of the marketplace by shouldering responsibility for his workers and refusing to gamble their wages in a spurious investment—which, we must remember, was the prompt for his father’s suicide. Thornton’s refusal to speculate causes him to lose his mill and, thus, his means of providing for his own family. Yet this loss is no punishment, and this new state of suspense—in which the Thorntons do not know what will become of them—makes for a fundamentally different experience of pain than the static, under-glass stagnancy of Thornton’s previous life. 138

Thornton mourns his mill, of course, but in lieu of seeking out a new position, he

journeys to Helstone, Margaret’s beloved home village, to experience the bittersweet

pleasure of a place that bears her traces alongside the pain of knowing that he may have

lost her forever. “‘I wanted to see the place where Margaret grew to what she is, even at

the worst time of all, when I had no hope of ever calling her mine’” (North and South

395). This is a new kind of suspense, the suspense of indulgence instead of denial. In a

moment of crisis, visiting Helstone has no utilitarian purpose, but rather amounts to an

acceptance, even an embrace of vulnerability and pain. Thornton pauses any process of

finding work or recovering the mill in favor of smelling the Helstone roses. Whereas the

narrative condemns the South’s eternal stillness, Gaskell resolutely differentiates between the “retrograde” suspense of “ease” and the rejuvenating suspense of “peace,” a line she draws sharply in the novel’s latter chapters which detail Margaret’s dissatisfaction with the “inactivity” of London and her disillusionment with the stagnant

Helstone (North and South 364, 340). Thornton’s and Margaret’s evolutions are thus mirror images of each other; whereas Margaret learns to recognize that languor is not the same as peace, Thornton learns that conscientious inactivity can be a virtue. Pain and vulnerability are preferable to benumbed deferral without end. Instead of committing suicide at the loss of his means to provide, the reformed Thornton embraces his disempowerment not for the sake of a faceless ideal but for the sake of, in Gaskell’s eyes, his soul.

139

The Revised Masochistic Contract

Gaskell condemns a male masochism that subjects itself to economic abstractions,

but she offers an alternative: the pain of erotic love. Thornton defines love as “a sharp

pang, a fierce experience,” and indeed one would be hard-pressed to find a description of

Thornton’s love for Margaret in terms that do not denote pain (North and South 306). Not

only is love an agony, it is a masochistic agony, in which Thornton torments himself or

longs for the queenly Margaret to torment him: he “rather liked” Margaret’s tendency to

“irritate” him with arguments; during their first meeting alone, he is “unready,”

“impatient,” “ashamed,” “mortified,” and “more awkward and self-conscious in every

limb than he had ever [been] in all his life before” and yet walks away from the encounter

“with an admiration [for her] he could not repress, [while] she looked at him with proud

indifference” (113, 58-59). He sees his impulse to propose marriage as submission to her:

“‘I shall put myself at her feet—I must’” (171). After she rejects him, Thornton feels as though she had physically beaten him “with her fists. He had positive bodily pain…”

(191). In his desolation, he begins to set himself self-flagellating tests, “lash[ing] himself into an agony” either by depriving himself of her presence or forcing himself to face her; he finds his “greatest comfort was in hugging his torment... He loved her, and would love her; and defy her, and this miserable bodily pain” (282, 191). Even though he believes her “indifferent and contemptuous to him,” he takes perverse pleasure in doing Margaret an unrewarded service by covering up her lie about being out after dark with another man

(255). Thornton is subject to a masochistic love that persists even in the face of what appears to be Margaret’s sexual impropriety and continues to survive, in the form of self- 140

torture, past hope of reciprocation. “For all his pain, he longed to see the author of it... He

was in the Charybdis of passion, and must perforce circle and circle ever nearer round the

fatal centre” (246-247). In stark contrast to the unfeeling masochism of Thornton’s

socioeconomic behavior, in love he relishes vulnerability, pain, and the suspense of

Margaret’s indifference, rejection, or absence.

Margaret, in turn, is cast as a woman to whom others apparently love submitting themselves. Dixon, the Hale family servant, explicitly admires Margaret for her imperiousness; when Margaret scolds Dixon for speaking disrespectfully of her father and then deprives Dixon of the privilege of helping Margaret undress, she secures

Dixon’s loyalty: “From henceforth Dixon obeyed and admired Margaret... Dixon, as do many others, liked to feel herself ruled by a powerful and decided nature” (North and

South 46). Dixon later tells Margaret, who has been short with her, “I like to see you showing a bit of spirit” (119).143 Servants aren’t the only people who like to “feel ruled”

by Margaret. Mr. Bell refers to himself as “her slave. I went, a willing old victim,

following the car of the conqueror” (318). Mr. Bell tends toward rhetorical exaggeration,

but even the staid and respectable Dr. Donaldson thinks to himself, after meeting

Margaret, “What a queen she is! With her head thrown back at first, to force me into

speaking the truth... That girl’s game to the back-bone... And the very force of her will

brought her round. Such a girl as that would win my heart, if I were thirty years younger”

143 Julie Nash has argued that Gaskell proposes the intimate master/servant relationship as a model for labor relations: “… in the manufacturing community the relationship between the workers and masters is difficult because it lacks intimacy, whereas the relationship between Dixon and the Hales is difficult because it is so intimate.” Nash claims, however, that, “As the novel progresses, both Dixon and Margaret must learn to shed their ongoing power struggle and replace it with mutual understanding,” but I don’t see any evidence that Dixon and Margaret have given up a power struggle (33). Rather, Dixon has ceased to struggle and has (rapturously) acceded all the power to Margaret. 141

(116-117). Margaret’s “sweetest moments” in London after her parents’ deaths are the

times when her cousin’s toddler son Sholto “burst into one of his stormy passions,” upon

which Margaret

would carry him off into a room, where they two alone battled it out; she

with a firm power which subdued him into peace, while every sudden

charm and wile she possessed, was exerted on the side of right, until he

would rub his hot and tear-smeared face all over hers, kissing and

caressing till he often fell asleep in her arms or on her shoulder. These

were Margaret’s sweetest moments. They gave her a taste of the feeling

that she believed would be denied to her for ever. (North and South

368)144

It’s telling that Margaret’s “sweetest moments” are in subduing a passionate boy, who

becomes all the more affectionate toward her for having been subdued by her. The

eroticism of his rubbing “his hot and tear-smeared face all over hers” and Margaret’s

relish of this “taste” of motherhood-as-dominance sheds light on Gaskell’s earlier conflation of Thornton’s love for Margaret with a mother’s love. Gaskell emphasizes the power and the erotics of motherhood and womanhood rather than holding up the sacrificial, self-erasing mother.145

144 Edith Lennox’s son is named after his father, whom Gaskell calls “Cosmo” in some parts of the novel and “Sholto” in other parts. She uses “Sholto” most frequently, however, so hereafter I will refer to the boy as Sholto. 145 Indeed, Mrs. Thornton is another example of just such a powerful, erotically-charged mother, who makes a show of unstitching her initials from the family linen to replace them with Margaret’s when she learns of the romantic aspirations of “her son, her pride, her property” (North and South 193). Without a doubt, however, Gaskell portrays Margaret’s dominant pre-motherhood as more balanced than the possessive Mrs. Thornton’s. 142

In comparison with the working class, the middle class in North and South is strangely childless and non-procreative. The only child who is not working-class is

Sholto Lennox. The starkness of this difference, one which looks quite curious and even unrealistic, may be read as Gaskell’s subtle indictment of the erotics (or lack thereof) of industrialism. Thornton is thirty-one years old at the novel’s beginning and thirty-three at the novel’s end, and he determines not to marry after Margaret’s initial rejection of his proposal: “He had known what love was… but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,—all the richer and more human for having known this great passion” (North and South 306). In his abandonment of any plans for marriage and children, Thornton betrays the self-interested motivation behind his labor.

He does not work to provide for dependents, not even for future dependents; he works to maintain a sense of privilege which shields him, he believes, from the contingencies of impoverished life. Thus, Thornton’s abstinence is just as flawed, if not more so, as

Boucher’s profligacy. The Thornton line will die out with him—genealogical suicide.

The marriage ending, therefore, is not merely Gaskell’s naive upholding of representational cooperation and intimacy as a panacea for socioeconomic discord.

Instead, the embrace of the sensual and, thus, the vulnerable, is her necessary answer to the abstraction and negation of Thornton’s misshapen masculinity. Gaskell aligns her heroine’s allure with her interpersonal power, a power that reaches beyond feminine influence and enters a more traditionally masculine realm of leadership with an erotic twist. In the novel’s resolution, Margaret is the one responsible for drawing up the new contract to which the representative industrialist can submit, one in which the man treasures the pain of love instead of the senseless, masochistic industrial work ethic: a 143

business/marriage contract written in the service of others’ needs instead of bourgeois

men’s control. This is not to say that Margaret is a dominatrix and Thornton her

submissive—he remains “yet a master,” as Gaskell intended, retaining some erotic power

(he warns Margaret he will “claim you as my own in some strange presumptuous way”)

but having surrendered the cold socioeconomic power of abnegation (“Letters” 401,

North and South 394). Whereas earlier literary models of ideal masculinity such as Jane

Austen’s heroes embrace the “awful weathering” of “the dual profession—to a work, to a

woman,” by the time the nineteenth century reached its peak, Gaskell shows, Captains of

Industry have lost the woman in favor of devotion to work alone, and the rewards for this

kind of negating devotion are illusory (Wilt 75).146 Unlike Carlyle, for Gaskell, healthy

masculinity favors erotic and sensual expression and enjoyment rather than erasure and

denial.147 Gaskell’s contract does not eschew business, but it does subordinate business to

the needs of women and children—and, indeed, the needs of men, the real, tangible needs

of men, not the desire for wealth or invulnerability. It does not eschew the utility of pain

or self-denial, but it does portray them as useful only when they are motivated by

provision for life—its literal sustenance and its grounding in the present.

146 For Austen’s pre-industrial men, particularly aristocratic men, an orientation toward suspense and immediacy were signals of a “man without a future, tied to a spiritually empty heirship just out of reach: suspended in time and space and prey to the Nausea of directionless motion...” (Wilt 72) 147 See Sussman (Victorian Masculinities 16-72). Sussman considers the ending of North and South to be a “short-circuit[ing]” of a Carlylean ideal of homosocial community; Thornton establishes a dining room for his workers but finds manly fulfillment in marriage. Rather than an expression of “anxiety” about an all- male community, I believe that Gaskell’s ending castigates the tendency for mid-century industrial masculinity to deny sensuality in favor of capitalistic productivity (65-66). 144

Postscript: The Gaskell-Dickens Contract

Understanding Gaskell’s focus on the gendered, bodied, and sexed quality of the work contract furthermore sheds new light on her own professional position as a woman writer working under the auspices of a strong-minded and competitive male editor,

Charles Dickens. The contention between Gaskell and Dickens over North and South is infamous among scholars. In brief, Gaskell’s capaciousness and her lack of speed frustrated Dickens, her editor at Household Words, where North and South first appeared in serial increments from 1854-55. In an August 1854 letter to Gaskell, Dickens expresses surprise and irritation that Gaskell has returned a proof of what would become

Volume 1, Chapter 4 without the “compression” to which Dickens believes Gaskell had agreed. At the end of the letter, Gaskell annotated, “I’ve not a notion what he means”

(“Letters,” 412). If her letters to Dickens and others are any indication, Gaskell tried to follow his editorial suggestions, but she nevertheless found many of them overbearing and damaging to the story, particularly its ending. She describes her attempt to fit the narrative into Dickens’s length allotments as a story “crammed & stuffed,” “spoilt to suit the purposes of Household Words” (“Letters” 402, 405). By the end of writing North and

South, Gaskell wanted to wash her hands of the entire project. To Dickens, she wrote, “I dare say I shall like my story, when I am a little further from it; at present I can only feel depressed about it, I meant it to have been so much better” (“Letters” 402). To a friend, she wrote of the physical toll her collaboration with Dickens had taken: “I’ve been as nearly dazed and crazed with this c—, d— be h— to it, story as can be… Moreover I have had to write so hard that I have spoilt my hand, and forgotten all my spelling.

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Seriously it has been a terrible weight on me and has made me have some of the most

felling headaches I ever had in my life...” (“Letters” 402, 403)

The bitterness of this brief partnership between Gaskell and Dickens has been

well covered, but what I wish to emphasize is that the source of their conflict was a

disagreement about the terms of their professional agreement and what it meant to do

good work—their work contract. Dickens invited Gaskell to contribute to Household

Words, to write a story that would appear concurrently with and then outpace his own industrial drama Hard Times. What he seemed to expect was a serialized novel with a very similar structure to his own novel—essentially, a companion piece. After several installments which did not correspond to Dickens’s expectations, Dickens wrote to an associate, “It is perfectly plain to me that if we put in more, every week, of North and

South than we did of Hard Times, we shall ruin Household Words. Therefore it must at all hazards be kept down” (“Letters” 411). To be fair to Dickens, his idea of “ruining”

Household Words in this way may simply refer to making the publication appear lopsided, with one story significantly longer than another, concurrent story. But the hyperbole of “ruin” accentuates the chauvinistic undertone of his insistence on keeping someone else’s story down “at all hazards.” In insisting that North and South be more diminutive than—indeed, subordinate to—Hard Times (ironically his shortest completed novel), Dickens reveals the gendered nature of his contract with Gaskell. Never absent from their correspondence is the sense that this is a man talking to a woman, and echoes of the marriage contract are intermixed more than once with the editorial contract.

When Dickens first began an editorial relationship with Gaskell in 1850, he cast it in erotic terms: “I do not know what your literary vows of temperance or abstinence may 146

be, but… I venture to ask you whether you can give me any hope that you will write a short tale…” (“Letters” 406, emphasis original).148 Dickens rhetorically mimics a suitor come courting, hoping that Gaskell has not taken a nun-like vow of “abstinence” and asking her to “give him any hope.” He tells her that her “modesty can hardly imagine” the value he would set on their collaboration. We can only infer many of Gaskell’s responses to Dickens’s overtures, since he destroyed much of his correspondence before his death, but in a letter to her in July 1854 he begins, “I merely confined myself to the business-part of our communication, because you seemed a little to resent my doing anything else. Your pleasant letter blows all that seeming, away in a breath” (“Letters”

410). Already, early in their collaboration over North and South, Dickens and Gaskell seem to have different ideas about the nature of their intimacy. Dickens transposes contractual obligations resembling courtship and marriage onto their business obligations; in his view, his interest (in Household Words) incorporated Gaskell’s (doing justice to her own artistic vision), making their professional relationship one resembling coverture.

But Gaskell didn’t consider herself as having agreed to such terms. She wrote to friends complaining of “a half-promise… to Mr Dickens, which he understood as a whole one...” and her editors’ insistence that she “‘keep her word’” to the public, “a word which they had passed, not I” (“Letters” 403, 405, emphasis original). Her complaint that her story has been “spoilt to suit the purposes of Household Words” makes it clear that

Gaskell did not consider herself as having agreed to subordinate her writing to its venue of publication. In her mind, North and South was not couvert under Household Words.

148 In response to this solicitation, Gaskell wrote Lizzie Leigh (“Letters” 410). 147

When their relationship began to sour over North and South, Dickens vented his frustration to a colleague in marital terms: “If I were Mr G., Oh Heaven how I would beat her” (Chapple and Sharps 129). As though to ward off this overstepping of the bounds of editor into those of husband, Gaskell eventually invoked the actual “Mr G” and used his authority to countermand Dickens’s accusations of messiness. “Mr Gaskell has looked this piece well over,” she warns, “so I don’t think there will be any carelessness left in it… therefore I never wish to see it’s [sic] face again…” (“Leters” 402). Gaskell’s revolt against Dickens, in a word, amounts to a refusal to cathect gender or sexuality onto her novel’s publication or her dealings with him as her editor.

With all this in mind, the ending of North and South takes on new light. Like

Thornton, Gaskell’s work contract failed when the abstract needs of the marketplace

(length, frequency) outweighed her physical and emotional wellbeing. Prior to her ascension into a fully-fledged, autonomous agent, Margaret is endowed with money and bereft of the family that drew on all of her reserves; Gaskell was a mother of four when she began North and South and famously struggled with balancing her need for artistic fulfillment with providing for the needs of her family.149 Significant indeed, then, that her heroine has not only shed all her dependents but that in the work/marriage contract struck between her and her lover, she sets the terms. She does not deprive her husband/business partner of erotic potency, nor does she “unman” him. Rather, she breaks the accepted associations of power with invulnerability, of erotic harmony with female submission and male dominance, and success with masochism.

149 For more on Gaskell’s multifaceted identity (her “many mes [sic]”), see D’Albertis. 148

Chapter 3. Rewriting the Romantic Satan: Marie Corelli, Our Lady of Perpetual Pain

“And so I again say—the sorrows of Satan! Sorrows immeasurable as eternity itself,— imagine them! To be shut out of Heaven!,—to hear, all through the unending æons, the far-off voices of angels whom once he knew and loved!,—to be a wanderer among deserts of darkness, and to pine for the light celestial that was formerly as air and food to his being,—and to know that Man’s folly, Man’s utter selfishness, Man’s cruelty keep him thus exiled, an outcast from pardon and peace! Man’s nobleness may lift the Lost Spirit almost within reach of his lost joys,—but Man’s vileness drags him down again,— easy was the torture of Sisyphus compared with the torture of Satan!” (The Sorrows of Satan 320)

If, after she has achieved her success, sold her scores of thousands, and avenged herself to her heart’s content upon her critics, she would then be so good as to take the book, tone it down, omit her superlatives, and cut out of it every solitary word that relates to reviews, reviewers, and other women novelists, she will have produced a book which will live long after much of the ephemeral literature of the day is forgotten. Otherwise ‘The Sorrows of Satan’ will be sunk by the sorrows of Marie Corelli, which, however interesting they may be to our little contemporary world, cannot be expected to be entertaining or edifying to posterity. – W.T. Stead, Review of Reviews, 12 October 1895

Each piece of the small but growing pool of critical writing on fin-de-siècle writer

Marie Corelli almost always begins with the same gestures. First, the critic pulls out

Corelli’s staggering sales figures, known well by Corelli scholars but unfamiliar to much

of the rest of the nineteenth-century British studies field: Routinely outstripping the sales

of contemporaries like Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle by tens of thousands of

yearly book sales, her magnum opus, a novel called The Sorrows of Satan, broke all

149

previous English records during its initial sale in 1895 (Federico 6). As Annette R.

Federico puts it, “It was the first modern bestseller, and it was read by everyone, from

noblemen to scullery maids” (6,7).150 Queen Victoria, the Corelli critic likes to inform the

reader, ordered all of Corelli’s books to be sent to Buckingham. These facts and figures,

the critic hopes, do the work of justifying scholarly attention to a writer of bizarre

spiritual psychodramas who was forgotten by the public after her death in 1924 and

remained long un-resurrected by the academy.

Corelli should be a feminist academic’s dream. Her immense international popularity gave her vast influence; she frequently packed lecture halls for her addresses on culture and art, and she was on friendly terms with the Prince of Wales. She is credited with inventing the names “Mavis” and “Thelma.” She exercised tight control over her public image and her money, frequently using the latter to enact charitable schemes and help the careers of other writers and artists. She was, if not single-handedly, then at least primarily responsible for the preservation of several Shakespearean-era buildings in her home of Stratford-upon-Avon. She remained unmarried and lived with another woman for her entire adult life. She was not afraid to take her detractors and enemies to court or to eviscerate them in her writing. Her critic-baffling bestselling status gave her unprecedented editorial control over her work, allowing her nearly free reign to play with space exploration, astral projection, reincarnation, and time travel in her

150 Corelli’s ability to achieve such massive sales owes something to Mudie’s Subscription Library, which announced in 1894 (the year prior to the release of The Sorrows of Satan) that it would no longer continue its original model of issuing triple-deckers to be followed in a year or so by cheaper editions for mass consumption. Instead, they would issue cheaper, one-volume editions without delay. This greatly changed the publishing landscape; intellectually elite writers suffered while popular writers made great gains. Teresa Ransom also attributes Corelli’s historic success to the greater leisure time and rising literacy rate of the British public, along with Corelli’s litigious propensities, which kept her in the public eye (80-81, 35). 150

writings.151 She was, by far, the most financially successful and most widely-read female

author of the nineteenth century, despite being detested and derided by the coterie of

male literary critics who saw her work as “utterly silly,” the feelings within them “all

twaddle.”152 Marie Corelli, in other words, was a woman of great power and savage

independence who suffered under the perpetual lashes of a patriarchal society that

attempted to puncture her offensive self-assurance and economic sway. Her position was

one of profound popularity and, simultaneously, of professional isolation and personal

rejection. As popular literary forms have gained greater scholarly standing, critics have

begun to recognize the cultural importance of Marie Corelli. But how did we let her slip

through our fingers for so long?

“The sorrows of Marie Corelli,” as W.T. Stead dubbed her complaints, earn her

the capstone place in my dissertation. The record-breaking novel mentioned above, The

Sorrows of Satan, is perhaps the Corelli novel most frequently written about by twenty-

first-century scholars. Critics have focused on this novel not only because of its massive

popular success but because the narrative’s preoccupation with the politics of the literary

marketplace shows us so much about being a female author in a male-dominated field.153

Many of these same scholars have seen the novel’s authoress character, Mavis Clare, as

Corelli’s narcissistic mouthpiece, her tool for lambasting her critics and setting herself up as the high priestess of morally-upright art. I contend, however, that Corelli actually

151 Corelli’s first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), which features many of these fantastic tropes, was accepted for publication in the same year that H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine was released, making Corelli’s generic innovation concurrent with Wells’s, an example of simultaneous invention (Ransom 36). 152 I take much of my biographical information from two excellent biographies: Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture by Annette R. Federico (2000) and The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli by Teresa Ransom (1999). The information in this paragraph is taken from Ransom (64-65, 41, 3, 106-107) and Federico (62, 145). 153 See, for instance, Felski and Cvetovich. 151

appropriates the suffering male archetype of Satan as her avatar in the novel in order to

interrogate the interrelated problems of Christianity and patriarchy. As a direct portrayal

of female authorship, Mavis Clare is too hemmed in by gender and literary market

constrictions to make the kind of existential critique Corelli wanted to voice at this point

in her career as a bestseller loved by the public yet rejected by the literati. Corelli’s

revision of the figure of Satan, however, reveals the double-voice with which she

operated, articulating through refracted and complex circuits the pain of an outcast

soothsayer.

A character whose literary tradition enables heterodoxy, Satan provides an

unexpected but highly effective lens through which Corelli can rehabilitate her own

outcast status. Rather than employing the Gothic trope of the demonic human character,

Corelli invokes the fantastical Satanic archetype as a way to tap into a simultaneously

empowered-yet-martyred, self-screening-yet-egoistic persona. In the rest of her oeuvre,

Corelli frequently features female characters with supernatural powers, such as the astral-

projecting narrator in her debut A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). Corelli’s revisions of

the classic Satanic figure, however, provide a lens which these female characters

cannot—a perspective that is cynical, even perverse, but still sanctified. The necessary

double-speak and contradictions of Satan allow Corelli to maintain a connection to

mainstream Christianity while also espousing views more heterodox than the occultist

heterodoxy of Theosophy and spiritualism.154 Rather than ally herself with what she

154 Spiritualism and Theosophy both emerged in the “mystical revival” of the latter half of the nineteenth century. While spiritualism is a broader term referring to an occult practice based on communication with the dead, Theosophy here refers to the specific esoteric philosophy of the Theosophical Society, founded in part by Helena Blavatsky (or “Madame Blavatsky”) in the 1870s (Owen 39). Members of the Theosophical Society professed themselves to be non-sectarian seekers of truth, particularly through studying ancient 152

derisively refers to as “Blavatskyism, Besantism and hypnotism” and thus lose the opportunity to build a cult centered on her beliefs exclusively, Corelli remakes and then claims the position of the outcast authority (Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan 36).155

In addition to rejecting other fin-de-siècle alternative spiritualities, Corelli refused communion with the very New Woman novelists the academy would later canonize.

Unwittingly forecasting how the twentieth-century academy would, until recently, all but ignore her in favor of her more radical contemporaries, Corelli deplored the critical and commercial “success” of the likes of Ouida and George Sand, whose books she considered morally damaging (Letters [26 March 1887]).156 She castigated New Women as “unsexed” and partially blamed what she saw as the downfall of society on women’s supposed sexual impurity (Sorrows 160). Yet she also condemned the boy’s club of literary culture and the abuse of women by individual men and masculinist institutions; these institutions, in turn, rejected Corelli. She saw herself, like the neo-Romantic Satan she created, as totally alone—and remarkable in her singularity.

and/or Eastern religions (Owen 39-41). As Alex Owen explains, “All occultists argued that science had not yet plumbed the mysteries of natural law,” but Theosophists espoused a “far more sophisticated” belief system than spiritualists, professing adherence to an entire, unique cosmological order (39). 155 Parenthetical references to this text will hereafter be referred to as “Sorrows.” Corelli would profess many different heterodox views in her books, which a number of readers treated like theology. For instance, her treatise on “The Electric Principle of Christianity,” in the text of A Romance of Two Worlds, which, in her own words, “attach[es] scientific possibility to the perfect doctrines of the New Testament” won Corelli a not insignificant number of religious followers (Letters [15 November 1886]). She included several pieces of fan mail in an appendix to the second edition of Romance, whose writers profess to have been converted to the belief system Corelli lays out therein. One letter lauds Corelli for transcending the spiritualist and Theosophical dogmas though “combining… occult knowledge with… firm believe in the Christian religion” (Corelli, Romance 312). Another letter even claims to have originated from a clergyman in the Church of England who had been on the brink of suicide. Having succumbed to “modern scientific atheism,” the clergyman attests he was “saved” by the doctrine of A Romance of Two Worlds (314). 156 Corelli would later soften toward Ouida after corresponding with her, and they shared their own complaints about a young upstart named Rudyard Kipling, who was getting a lot of attention despite his writing being “very twaddly” (Letters [23 May 1890]). 153

Her frustration with her status as an outcast from the literary elite was notably

demonstrated in her refusal to send The Sorrows of Satan to reviewers, who had proven

that they would eviscerate her work no matter what. Though she merited praise from

some, many critics had made a sport of “slashing” the seven novels that appeared before

Sorrows, calling her spiritual ideas “ridiculous” and her writing itself “tedious and exaggerated,” even “repulsive” (Ransom 36, 60). “Members of the press,” Corelli wrote in a special notice at the beginning of Sorrows, “will therefore obtain it [the novel]… in the usual way with the rest of the public” (Sorrows 1). She did not need good reviews; the masses loved her: “[E]ven if I had written trash,” she wrote to her first publisher, “the public would still demand it…” (Letters [14 March 1889]). It was the overwhelmingly male literary press who scorned her, and she declared that she felt it “impossible for a woman-writer ever to receive justice from men-critics…” (Letters [15 November 1890]).

Her Satan articulates not only the pain of the rejected genius but also the pain of gender discrimination. Corelli thereby refashions the ultimate rebel who has been oft- appropriated by male writers as the symbol of their tortured genius and rehabilitates him to articulate her own perverse position. Speaking through Satan, the critic of Christianity par excellence, not only grants Corelli the support of a prestigious literary tradition built to accommodate heterodoxy but also lends her the rhetorical leeway and ambiguity unique to the Father of Lies.157 Furthermore, her rewrite of the Satan origin myth

highlights a truly existential cynicism about God’s universal order.

157 In John 8:44, Jesus calls Satan “a murderer from the beginning, who does not stand in the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (New Oxford Annotated Bible). Jesus proclaims that Satan was the originator or “father” of lies, and therefore lying is part of Satan’s nature. 154

In essence, understanding Corelli’s refashioning of the War in Heaven, in which

Satan leads an angelic rebellion against God, allows us to understand the position of a

popular woman writer at the fin-de-siècle whose life and views were not represented by

New Woman fiction.158 Corelli lampooned fellow women writers, opposed women’s suffrage for most of her life, and often endorsed traditional femininity in her fiction by celebrating classically beautiful, modest, and serene women. Unraveling her complicated

politics and morality, however, allows us to understand how a woman author disowned

by the avant-garde saw her truly exemplary situation, which, in turn, reveals previously-

unexplored truths about woman creators at this point in history. As Elizabeth Kowaleski-

Wallace puts it in Their Fathers’ Daughters, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female

authors who don’t cleanly represent feminist ideals still matter, regardless of the attention

we’ve failed to give them in canon reformation. They are “our unacknowledged

godmothers,” and understanding them “can enhance and enrich our understanding of

what it means to live under patriarchy” (5, 12).

Corelli’s revision of the predominantly male literary tradition of the Romantic

Satan sheds light on the patriarchal bent of religious and literary discourse and

complicates our conceptions of the temptation story and, indeed, the cornerstone

narratives of Christianity itself. In the male guise of a suffering Satan, Corelli can claim

the glory of the wronged martyr and express the wealth of anger and pain roiling

underneath the closely controlled public presence of a female author isolated from and by

158 Unlike other female authors, Corelli’s use of doublespeak is not necessarily the sign of veiled radicalism, and it certainly does not correspond to the blood-sister kinship between female authors laid out in Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977). Showalter does not make the claim that every female author must fit into her progressive phases of nineteenth-century female authorship, but considering the fact that Corelli was one of the most popular, best-selling female novelists of her age, that framework might need even further reassessment. Others have already begun to do so; see, for instance, Wagner. 155

her peers. This cover also allows a practicing Christian who professed belief in God’s

justice and mercy to express deep pessimism about the redemptive potential of an unjust

universe. Finally, Corelli’s revision of the Romantic Satan enables her, an individual with

a deep sense of moral purpose, to speak what she believed to be a divinely-compelled truth to an artistic and religious community who found her beliefs heterodox and far- fetched. Uncovering Corelli’s philosophy reveals the existential hopes and fears roiling underneath some of Anglo society’s most foundational stories about pain and redemption.

The Gendered Genealogy of the Literary Satan

The notion that Satan’s painful outcast position is a perversely glamorous one did not arise with the dawn of Christianity but rather in the early modern period. Milton’s

Paradise Lost (1667) breaks with previous representations of Satan/demons in literature such as those in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592) by rendering Satan not only a central character but a subject of readerly sympathy and even desire. Unlike earlier images of

Satan in art and literature, which depict a bestial character divorced almost entirely from humanity, Milton psychologizes Satan and thus highlights Satan’s own pain. Medieval iconography of Hell depicted devils and Satan as monster-tormentors rather than tormented, human-like subjects themselves; their various physical tortures perpetrated upon sinners are rendered in excruciating detail. Satan himself only becomes centralized in iconography of Hell after a certain point, in a trope that “assimilates damnation itself with the terrors of bodily consumption” and “demonstrate[s] a peculiar interest in bodily processes and the transgression of corporeal boundaries” (Mills 99). From the fourteenth century onward, “Last Judgement scenes show hell dominated by the image of Satan, 156

stuffing sinners into his greedy gob before expelling them from his backside” (Mills 99).

Dante’s portrait of Satan in Inferno (1320) marks a turning point. Rendering Satan frozen up to his chest and weeping a “bloody foam,” Dante refocuses attention from the suffering of the damned to the suffering of Satan himself. This Satan is inhuman and monstrous, with three faces and bat wings; his isolation from God is imagined as an explicitly physical pain (380-381). Milton, by contrast, in his modernization of the epic form also modernizes the myth of Satan’s fall by making its painful result a profound

“sense of inner loss. Milton’s Satan has several important phases of self-discovery or self-fashioning before he becomes simply the enemy of mankind” (Forsyth 55). Although

Hell remains a place of physical torment, Milton adds psychological torment to Satan’s characterization.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Romantics rediscovered

Milton and, in their reading, “shifted the focus of interest from Adam and Eve to the

Satanic sublime… This Satan was a Romantic hero, politically admirable—and good to look at” (Forsyth 2, 3). Many male Romantics like Blake, Shelley, and Byron seized on this image of the alienated divine rebel as a representation of their own countercultural genius. For them, Satan was a symbol of political and poetic revolution, “[o]ne who,” as

Percy Bysshe Shelley put it, “perseveres in some purposes which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture” and, in this way, is superior to a cold and vengeful God (qtd. in Steadman 259). William Blake, the author of his own Satanic poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), famously said, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (qtd. in 157

Steadman 258). Despite Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s warnings against the allure of

“Satanic heroes” and Robert Southey’s castigation of the “Satanic School” of poetry, the

embrace of the Satanic proliferated among the male Romantics, culminating in the

notorious Byronic hero.159

For Byron, it is Satan’s very “intensity of consciousness… that constitutes the

alienated self: knowledge as alienation” (Parker 1-2). Satan’s alienation was recast as

proof of his possession of ultimate, painful truth, while his coterie of fellow demon-rebels

“are fallen creatures…but tremendous in their fallenness: they can neither altogether

regret what they have become, because of the dark knowledge which they now possess,

nor reconcile themselves to their condition” (Parker 2). Byron was, in his own words,

“‘much struck’” by Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1802 Faust, whose devil Mephistopheles embodies “ironic consciousness” (Parker 4). Mephistopheles’s consciousness is one “of unrelieved negativity, which sees life as worthless and aspiration as vain, and expresses that vision in a voice of irresistible dry, ironic mockery, of unamused amusement at the state of unfulfillment and self-deception which is human life” (Parker 4). Ewan Fernie defines “the demonic” as the way we “define ourselves by our difference—not just from each other and the wider world, but even from our own established personalities” (7). In post-Milton Satanic lore, a lore so powerful that many Christians today mistakenly

159 In The Statesman’s Manual, Appendix C, Coleridge writes of the “Satanic Hero”: “This is the character which Milton has so philosophically as well as sublimely embodied in the Satan of his Paradise Lost. Alas! too often has it been embodied in real life! Too often has it given a dark and savage grandeur to the historic page! …Nay, whole nations have been so far duped by this want of insight and reflection as to regard with palliative admiration, instead of wonder and abhorrence, the Molocks of human nature, who are indebted for the far larger portion of their meteoric success, to their total want of principle, and who surpass the generality of their fellow creatures in one act of courage only, that of daring to say with their whole heart, ‘Evil, be thou my good!’” (Coleridge 504-505) For Coleridge, romanticizing lone evildoers, no matter how appealing their genius might be, leads to tyranny of the Napoleonic kind. 158

believe that the War in Heaven originates in the Scriptures, Lucifer is the angel who

rejects his angelic status (Forsyth 66). If God defines himself as “I am that I am,” the

Devil defines himself as “I am not what I am.” Part of the allure of the demonic, of Satan, therefore, is the allure of self-abstraction as well as detachment from the world. After the

French Revolution devolved into the Reign of Terror, Romantic Satanism seemed a particularly appropriate vision of the world. In the hands of the male Romantics, Satan became a character who epitomized righteous isolation and intellectual pessimism. He offered a vessel to embody their rage against the establishment.

Like the Romantics two generations before her, Corelli considered herself a cast- out genius with the wounds to show for it. However, unlike the male Romantics, Corelli’s position was constrained by her gender. Instead of being persecuted by Philistines, as they saw themselves, Corelli felt persecuted by jealous male writers who punished her for the high regard she had for her own work but also for the sins of being unsubtle and

“hyperfeminine” yet successful (Federico 5). Nineteenth-century women writers frequently evoked the demonic as a trope of the Gothic tradition, but the use of Satan himself in the way the male Romantics envisioned him as a magnificent iconoclast is rare. Adriana Craciun has pointed out that, “beyond the Satanic masculinity in the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë, scholars have largely neglected women’s writings on Satan” (700). However, most female Romantics like

Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith tended to feminize the Satanic story, recounting the demise of “the Fallen Pleiad” rather than embracing identification with Satan himself. In this parable, one of the heavenly nymphs “los[es] her celestial purity through love of mortal masculinity,” thus becoming a “vision of outcast female genius, hurled from the 159

celestial sphere for having claimed equality” (Craciun 707, 700). As the Fallen Pleiad,

woman’s martyrdom is a tragic fate rather than a darkly glorious rebirth like the Miltonic

Satan’s self-fashioning after his fall from Heaven (Craciun 707).

In Gothic literature written by women, the demonic is often harmful at worst and

ambiguous at best, usually conflated either with masculine violence or the frightening

specter of feminine madness.160 While the Brontës portray arguably “demonic” women in their novels, these characters’ aberrations are often punished rather than celebrated in the way the Romantics celebrated Satan’s rock-star rebellion. The demonic interpositions of

Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (1847) and Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights (1846)

are purged by novel’s end. Christina Rossetti’s poems similarly “imagined many

scenarios in which demon lovers promise, at least initially, to save women from sterile

lives,” only to defile or destroy them (Waldman 5). In The Sorrows of Satan itself,

another demonic woman, Sybil, is dragged down to Hell as punishment for being a

materialist, idolater, and would-be adulteress. Per Faxneld has recently traced how some

radical feminists in the late nineteenth century “performed counter-readings of Christian

misogynist traditions” in which “Lucifer became reconceptualized as a feminist liberator

of womankind[,]… an ally in the struggle against a patriarchy supported by God the

Father and his male priests” (2). Even these rebellious re-imaginings position Satan “as

woman’s helper” rather than her vessel (Faxneld 8).

160 Kristen Guest claims that Corelli separates the male and female characters of Sorrows into the Gothic and the tragic, respectively: “Corelli’s female protagonists offer a counterpoint to the Gothic horrors of male egotism in the female qualities of love, faith, and self-sacrifice. She therefore aligns female experience with the impulse toward transcendence evident in Romantic conceptions of tragedy” (152). This categorization, I believe, ignores Lucio’s tragedy and too easily aligns him with the violent and oppressive “Satanic masculinity” of the Gothic. In The Sorrows of Satan, the “Gothic horrors of male egotism” are certainly at play, but Lucio himself is an enforcer of punishment against male egotism. He is more victim than victimizer. 160

The dearth of Satanic alter egos for female writers can easily be explained by the

way that the “historically dominant gender” has claimed Satan as a masculine literary

type (Fernie 143).161 Like the masculine Godhead, the Devil has been cast as essentially

male, and so most iterations of the “feminine demon” in literature such as the femme

fatale, the witch, and the succubus tend either to personify women’s dissociated fears or

act as vessels for masculine anxieties about female sexual power (Andriano 18).162 And

the “feminine demon” is no Satan. The witch, for instance, only borrows the Devil’s

power. The male “demonic protagonist falls prey to the Devil, but not before in an

important sense he becomes the Devil. Faustus tastes the bliss and the sorrows of Satan

for himself” (Fernie 143). The female demon or demonic woman never becomes Satan,

never gains the same kind of superior, self-sufficient power; usually, she is subordinate to

Satan, if not acting under his instruction then drawing her abilities from him.

Textual authority, as Susan Lanser points out, is granted through rhetorical

practices related to white maleness. Rather than possessing an “essence” defined by

biology, the “female voice” consists of “grammatical” and rhetorical maneuvers that

reveal women’s unique social situations at various points in history. These privileged

rhetorical practices can be appropriated by others, and so adopting a male character or

161 Fernie’s The Demonic: Literature and Experience (2013), by the author’s own admission, surveys an almost entirely male lineage of writers who explicitly or indirectly engage with the Devil, from expected figures like Luther, Marlowe, Goethe, and Milton to unexpected others like Kirkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Huxley. He makes only two exceptions, a chapter on mystic Jane Leade and one the 1986 film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, adapted from the novel by Fay Weldon. 162 Some feminists have located the “demonic feminine” as a primeval, prehistoric, pre-Judeo-Christian feminine entity. Camille Paglia portrays the female demon as a symbol of a chthonic feminine religion which she sees as the antithesis of a masculine sky-religion, i.e. Judeo-Christianity. Nina Auerbach explores the female demon as a foil for the angel in the house and as a tool for reinforcing gender norms in the Victorian age. Per Faxneld’s recent Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2017) provides a fascinating look at the history of “Satanic feminism,” that is, the radical feminist reimagining of Satan as a feminist figure. 161

narrator can provide female authors the credibility denied to them by their social realities

(Lanser 6-7). Using the voice of a male character who is also imbued with supernatural

power and a tradition of stylishly bucking authority should prove even more empowering.163 Yet, curiously, very few nineteenth-century women writers embraced

Satan himself as a figure of identification, even among the revolutionary Romantics

(Craciun 702-703). In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft asserts that to deny women’s darker impulses is to deny them souls; “innocence” is “but a civil term for weakness” (50).164 Milton’s Eve, the epitome of men’s view of ideal

womanhood, is “formed for softness and sweet attractive grace” but is therefore, in

Wollstonecraft’s mind, bestial and soulless (50). “I cannot comprehend his [Milton’s]

meaning,” she writes, “unless[…] he meant to deprive us of souls… How grossly do they

insult us who advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!” (50) The

language of perfect tranquility masks men’s desire for women to become servile pack

animals, mute and unintellectual (50). If this is Heaven, Wollstonecraft wants none of it.

She turns away from the stifling domesticity of Eden and turns to the Satanic: “Instead of

envying the lovely pair [Adam and Eve], I have with conscious dignity, or Satanic pride,

turned to hell for sublimer objects” (57). If Heaven is so suffocating for women, then the

“outcast” is by contrast “the grandest of all human sights,” and Hell is the place for

freedom and self-determination. “Milton’s pleasing picture of paradisaical [sic]

163 It should be noted that Lucio, though his race is not dwelled upon in the novel, is Orientalized. His full name is Prince Lucio Rimânez, and his surname brings to mind “Ahriman, the Prince of Demons in Persian/Iranian mythology” (Kuehn, The Sorrows of Satan 335). Throughout her career, Corelli appropriated many Asian and African religious customs, names, and stories in her psycho-spiritual romances. For more on Corelli’s Orientalism, see Hartnell. 164 For a thorough examination of the way Wollestonecraft embraces Satan as a figure of identification, see Craciun. 162

happiness” keeps women in a state of immature obedience which, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, turns them into the very petulant children which men claim must be ruled (57).

Wollstonecraft prefers the explicitly Satanic state of “solitary recess,” where, “rising superior to passion and discontent” a woman can become a true, complex adult (57).

Wollstonecraft offers the first revision of Satan that specifically reflects female experience, but her revision is predicated upon a deliberate “turn” away from the world,

“rising superior to passion and discontent” (57). Looking forward nearly a hundred years,

Marie Corelli’s Satan is also an isolated outcast, a misunderstood figurehead for female genius which has been rejected and derided by male peers.165 Unlike Wollstonecraft’s,

however, Corelli’s Satan does not choose isolation as a repudiation of a philistine

Heaven, does not rise “superior to passion and discontent,” and does not find Hell

sublime. For Corelli’s Satan, the true Hell is on earth, the space to which man’s sin has

banished him. There is no defiant determination to rule in Hell rather than serve in

Heaven; in fact, in a major revision of the Miltonic tradition, Corelli’s Satan is

perpetually trying to get back into Heaven’s good graces. Ergo, Corelli’s Satan embodies

the isolated suffering of a commercially successful, non-radical female artist under the patriarchy. Wollstonecraft’s Satan is seen as “feminist” because of his radical rejection of the Father that rejected him (Craciun 702-703). Her Satan is something of a feminist separatist, characterizing Hell as the realm outside of the patriarchy. But Corelli’s Satan is a despairing Satan who lingers in the sorrow of rejection at the same time as he shakes his fist because there actually is no other world, outside of the Father’s purview, where he

165 This direct link with Wollstonecraft shows us that kinship between women writers is not reliant upon subversion, not even upon explicitly feminist politics. 163

can rule.166 In this way, Corelli’s Satan is a pragmatic pessimist; her Satanic vision is an

enraged, estranged cry from a wronged innocent who no longer dares to hope for justice

and yet who longs to be embraced by his persecutors.167

But if Corelli was seemingly going to reject the iconoclasm that makes the

Romantic Satan Romantic, if she’s going to make her Satan more saint-like than Satanic

in his long-suffering quest for Heaven, why choose Satan at all? And if Corelli’s purpose

in taking up the War in Heaven story is to identify with the suffering of the outcast, why

choose a male sufferer instead of a female one, like the fallen Mother Eve? And if she

must choose a male avatar, why Satan and not Christ? Some critics have argued that,

indeed, Corelli constructs an idealized female martyr as her own self-representation in the

angelic authoress Mavis Clare, who, Christlike, is even directly tempted to abandon her

evangelical purpose by Satan himself. I argue, however, that this common interpretation

of Mavis Clare misses Corelli’s entire purpose in breaking with traditional literary

depictions of Satan post Paradise Lost, and thus misses Corelli’s major commentary

about gender, religion, and art.

Angel or Devil: The Authorial Constraints of Mavis Clare

In pinpointing Mavis Clare as Marie Corelli’s “idealized self-dramatization,”

critics like Federico identify Clare as a kind of Romantic outcast genius but Clare’s

position as a female novelist compromises the very issues Corelli wants to tackle

166 This separates Corelli not only from Wollestonecraft but also from more conservative, “complicit” women writers of the eighteenth century who embraced the metaphorical “father” for the fact that he owns language and his is the realm of literary heritage (Kowaleski-Wallace). 167 “I feel it a trifle hard,” Corelli wrote, “that when others who do less good work can get high praise, that I should not also win a trifle of honest recognition” (Letters [15 November 1890]). 164

(Federico 83). In the story, Clare bears obvious similarities to Corelli herself: Clare is a best-seller who infuriates the literary establishment, including would-be author and protagonist Geoffrey Tempest, because her morally upright books continue to sell wildly despite the disparagement of the literary establishment. Mavis Clare even shares her author’s initials. Tempest’s unknowing entrance into a pact with Satan (disguised as foreign prince Lucio Rimânez) provides him money to bribe publishers and reviewers who then “boom” or shower his book with praise in order to drive up sales (Sorrows 11).

Initially triumphant, Tempest soon finds himself dissatisfied with the fleeting fame brought on by his tepid book and all the more envious of Clare’s innocent popularity, which is attributed to her “tenaciousness” and emotional honesty as well as to her avowed mission of public uplift (Sorrows 73). According to critics like Christiane Gannon and Jill

Galvan, Corelli situates her female novelist as a Christ-like “ministrant” who, through her writing, communicates God’s divine love (Gannon 378; Galvan, “Christians, Infidels…”

91). If Clare is the novel’s savior, Tempest is only redeemed when he learns how to appreciate and follow the teachings of this “morally actuated woman artist” who stands

“at the gate of a lost Paradise, whose Sword of Genius, turning every way, keeps me

[Tempest] back from all approach to my forfeited Tree of Life!” (Galvan, “Christians…”

91, Sorrows 168) In short, it is now commonplace for critics, in looking at The Sorrows of Satan, to conclude that Corelli saw herself and her own writing personified respectively in Mavis Clare’s character and career; in other words, Corelli creates a female spiritual leader to herald of divinely-inspired truths to a public not properly comforted or ministered to by a male clerical system. Mavis Clare succeeds in occupying this role, while Tempest learns, in the end, to step up to its challenge. 165

The similarities between Mavis Clare and the real M.C. who wrote her are indeed

suggestive. Like the fictional publisher who identifies Mavis Clare’s appeal, critics have

long identified Corelli’s stylistic hallmark as her supposed “utter sincerity” (Federico 34).

Rita Felski calls Corelli’s work “antithetical to the ironical and critical stance of the

avant-garde” (118). In this view, any aberration from a bourgeois ethic in Corelli’s works

is chalked up to a loss of control on Corelli’s part—her texts strain against her intentions,

undermine and elude her. R. Brandon Kershner, for instance, actually finds kinship

between Corelli and James Joyce in that they both construct larger-than-life self-portraits in their novels, but he dismisses many of Corelli’s “technical ironies” as the “blundering” results of “incompetence” (“Joyce and Popular Culture…” 56, 54). The supposed transparency of Mavis Clare as Marie Corelli’s avatar, then, is explained as the product of

Corelli’s inability to achieve enough critical “distance” from her “megalomania” in the way that Joyce does with Stephen Dedalus (Kershner, “Joyce and Popular Culture…”

57). Corelli herself, however, “angrily denied ‘being so conceited as to draw my own picture in that ideal conception’” of Mavis Clare (qtd. in Federico 35). Even if we treat

Corelli as an unreliable authority on her own work, many critics have noted her savvy when it came to crafting her public image.168 If Corelli intended to create a

straightforward self-portrait in Mavis Clare, she would have committed a “‘serious

indiscretion’” antithetical to her “strict defense and preservation of a carefully designed

image” (Federico 35, 16). The persistent tendency to read Corelli as helplessly sincere in

spite of her skillful image control—a reading which is exemplified in the near-universal

168 See Federico, Chapter 2 of Idol of Suburbia, “The Queen of Bestsellers and the Culture of Celebrity” for more on Corelli’s canny maneuvers and frustrations with regard to her public persona. 166

interpretation of Clare-as-Corelli—springs from a limited interpretation of Corelli’s apparently paradoxical politics.

These crossed signals in Corelli’s works actually demonstrate the way that

“‘women’s language’ becomes a calculated response to alienation and censorship,” threats that Corelli uniquely experienced as an international star who outsold more canonical writers (Lanser 11). What other scholars have seen as confusion or contradiction within her politics really amounts to her vexed, fluid, and reactionary disruptions within an inescapable patriarchy to gain the artistic reputation she thought she deserved as the system punished and rewarded her according to its flawed values. Corelli repeatedly declared herself, in all her writing, a fervent Christian, but her anti- establishment critique ran just as strong as her conservative streak, and men were often the subject of her righteous indignation. Her later essays such as “Coward Adam” (1905) confront head-on what she saw as the sins of men (Corelli, Free Opinions… 182-183).169

In this essay and its companion piece “Accursëd Eve,” she insists that the idea that “Eve and all the descendants of her sex should be compelled to suffer centuries of torture” because the first woman was “beguiled” by Satan and then blamed “by Coward Adam” is

“manifestly cruel and arbitrary” (Free Opinions 171). When Adam points the finger at

Eve after God confronts the new humans for eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge,

Corelli says that, in effect, Adam

at once transfers the fault of his own lack of will and purpose to the

weaker, more credulous, more loving and trusting partner;—how he leaves

her defenceless [sic] to brave the wrath which he himself dreads,—and

169 Parenthetical references to this text will hereafter be referred to as “Free Opinions.” 167

how he never for one half second dreams of admitting himself to be the

least in the wrong! But there is always one great satisfaction to be derived

from the perusal of the strange old Eden story, and this is that ‘Mister

Sarpint’ [Satan] was of the male gender. (Free Opinions 160)

This is essentially an anti-patriarchal interpretation of original sin, and Corelli offers it

only on her own authority. She goes on to assert that Genesis itself is a misogynistic

work: “Man has taken the full license allowed him by the old Genesis story (which, by

the way, was evidently invented by man himself for his own convenience)” (Free

Opinions 171).

In “The ‘Strong’ Book of the Ishbosheth,” she hurls similar charges at the male

literary establishment, accusing them of promoting novels “in which women are depicted

at the lowest kickable depth of drabism to which men can drag them, while men are

represented as the suffering victims of their wickedness” (Free Opinions 275).170 At the

same time, Corelli spent her entire career in a Sisyphean quest for acceptance by this

same establishment, leading her to adopt certain principles apparently antithetical to

progressive feminism. Kowaleski-Wallace explains that the “hostility against patriarchal

restriction” even in radical women’s writings can often “mask some equally strong

longing for the father’s sanction” (9). In the same vein, Federico spells out the way that

Corelli’s “valorization of the true feminine” is not straightforwardly anti-feminist,

for the politics and poses or female reformers are dangerous precisely

because these women are romanticizing masculinity… [S]he views the

170 For a recent, enlightening analysis of “Ishbosheth” and Corelli’s condemnation of the literati’s association of artistic merit with realism and masculinity, see Galvan, “Corelli’s Caliban in a Glass: Realism, Antirealism, and The Sorrows of Satan.” 168

New Woman’s apparent betrayal of feminine culture as a misguided

allegiance with men rather than a commitment to women… for a woman

cannot combat patriarchal oppression if she longs to be a patriarch herself.

(103-104)171

Corelli’s strategic preoccupation with appearing young and beautiful, combined with her incensed insistence on being taken seriously as an artist who wrote, she believed, with

“masculine power,” brought forth repeated torrents of laughter in the press (Letters [15

November 1890]).172 She was considered too feminine and too masculine, simultaneously—too feminine in her wild effusions of sentiment and too masculine in her dark, often violent and sexually-coded subject matter, both of which tendencies made her repulsive to the literati. Oscar Wilde, for instance, admired her early novels but would later join in the pastime of “slashing” Corelli, commenting in 1898, “‘Half of the success of Marie Corelli is due to the no doubt unfounded rumour that she is a woman’” (qtd. in

Federico 127). Radical women writers were ostracized for their convictions that rejected traditional marriage and motherhood, but Corelli was ostracized despite and because of her conformity to certain “feminine” standards.

171 In this way, Corelli’s views seem intriguingly to align with certain tenets of third-wave feminism or “choice feminism,” which seeks (controversially) to reclaim “the feminine” from its abject status by promoting conscious engagement with traditionally feminine pursuits like knitting and cooking. Tamara S. Wagner writes that “women writers not directly invested in—or averse to—specific agendas have… been marginalised [by the academy] for disproving an evolutionary model of progressive female self- representation” (6). Felski’s persuasive explanation for scholars’ neglect of Corelli is that Corelli’s work “cannot be easily recuperated into a critical apparatus which simply equates the popular with the radical” (141). For another challenge to the idea that popular literature must be subversive in order to be worthy of study, see also Cvetovich. 172 After meeting Corelli, Mark Twain wrote of her: “‘She is about fifty years old but has no gray hairs; she is fat and shapeless; she has a gross animal face; she dresses for sixteen, and awkwardly and unsuccessfully and pathetically imitates the innocent graces and witcheries of that dearest and sweetest of all ages; and so her exterior matches her interior… she is the most offensive sham, inside and out, that misrepresents and satirizes the human race today’” (qtd. in Federico 34). 169

As the direct representative of female authorship in the novel, a profession Corelli

felt incumbent to defend, Mavis Clare is therefore bound to the same image of

“feminine” sweetness as her creator. Tellingly, Clare’s studio is a shrine to male genius;

its walls are decorated with bas-reliefs of Keats, Shakespeare, Byron, and Shelley, and

she quotes their own resentment of critics (Sorrows 174, 167).173 A copy of the Apollo

Belvedere (not, notably, his twin sister Artemis, goddess of virginity and protector of

girls) stands in the corner, teaching “in his inscrutable yet radiant smile, the lesson of

love and the triumphs of fame” (Sorrows 171). Though she wraps herself in the ethos of

these recognized male geniuses, and indeed, in the divine personification of male genius,

she does not enjoy the protection to which their gender entitled them. Lest Clare fulfill

the stereotype of embittered spinsterhood, she must not only turn the other cheek but give

the impression of being above such pettiness: “‘You really don’t suppose I was hurt by

your critique, do you? Dear me, no! Nothing of that kind ever affronts me,—I am far too

busy to waste any thought on reviews or reviewers’” (Sorrows 165). She even loves her

enemies: “‘I am not a press favorite—and I never get good reviews,—but—’ and she

laughed again—‘I like my reviewers all the same!’” (Sorrows 167).

Mavis Clare’s violent streak, which others have found puzzlingly incongruous

with her otherwise angelic role in the novel, betrays the inability of the female author

character to contain both rage and despair in a way that doesn’t double back. Belying her

insistence that bad press doesn’t bother her, Clare names a coterie of ridiculous birds

after various periodicals and magazines who have “slashed” her and makes a ritual of

173 Clare also reverences another significant male writer: “‘Milton’s conception of Satan is the finest… A mighty Angel fallen!—one cannot but be sorry for such a fall, if the legend were true!’” (Sorrows 174) 170

giving her bad reviews to her dogs to savage. With such behavior, Clare seems to justify

the literati’s picture of her as an angry “‘blue-stocking’” (Sorrows 162). It’s a trap, and

Corelli recognized it. The fact that so many contemporary (and even twenty-first century)

critics still thought that she fell into it shows just how deadly the trap is.

Satanic Affordances

Clare’s deviations from feminine respectability demonstrate the pitfalls of using

female characters as vessels for the anger of female authors, calling to mind the

dissociation of the paradigmatic “madwoman in the attic.”174 As Nancy Armstrong puts

it,

an author-heroine has to represent herself as rational, consistent, durable,

and personally resourceful before she can argue against some form of

bias… and gain recognition within a community that appears progressive

for thus extending the limits of acceptable feminine behavior.

(“Feminism…” 3)

If a female character understood to represent the female author’s position cannot prove herself consistently perfect in this way, if she exhibits any weakness or anger, then the trap springs and whatever anti-prejudice message she wishes to deliver is lost. If Corelli wanted to communicate the unique pain of the outcast who doesn’t find refuge but rather further torture in Romantic isolation and detachment—in order to escape the rhetorical trap that Wollestonecraft characterized as gentle, domestic brutishness and against which

174 I refer here to Gilbert and Gubar’s essential 1979 book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 171

Clare’s deviations seem to lash out—Corelli needed to appropriate a male figure and

voice, one which comes with unique affordances that reach beyond male privilege.

The parallels between Prince Lucio’s position with Corelli’s own are clear. As a

morally conservative Christian woman, Corelli neither rejects and detaches from the

world like a Byronic Satan, nor does she embrace a radical reevaluation of the sublimity

of the outcast’s status like a Wollstonecraftian Satan. The mythological Satan, however,

provides other affordances as a self-representation for a female author. For one, his

traditional maleness, as Lanser has shown, imbues him with a certain worldly authority

and deflects the gendered criticisms directed at a female character like Mavis Clare. In

Lanser’s equation, using the “personal voice” of a male narrator like Geoffrey Tempest

would allow Corelli “access to ‘male’ authority by separating the narrating ‘I’ from the

female body,” lending herself a synthetic homosociality (18). The fact that it is Tempest

who casts Lucio’s suffering in such desirable terms, as I will explore later, further creates

a complex autoerotic dynamic that borrows from the “Hellenic,” homoerotic model of the

male pairs that frequent the works of Oscar Wilde and others at this time.175 As Sedgwick

has shown us, patriarchal culture is structured upon power relations between men,

relegating women to metonymic tools or tokens of exchange. If Corelli’s voice is

channeled through a “male” narrator and if, as I have argued, she portrays her own

suffering through another male character who is described in these erotically charged

175 The homoerotic nature of Tempest’s and Lucio’s relationship has been well tread by Corelli scholars. Federico persuasively analyzes the scene in the novel in which Lucio’s piano-playing and singing inspires in Tempest “strange emotions that were neither wise, nor worthy of a man” (Sorrows 111). “Tempest’s humiliation,” Federico writes, “at having unworthy emotions resonate in a novel published just six months after the notorious trials of Oscar Wilde” (79). For more on Hellenism and sexuality in the works of Wilde and other fin-de-siècle authors, see Heacox. 172

ways by the narrator, Corelli supercharges the authority of that description and thus doubles down on the power of her Satanic icon.

Corelli accesses male authority by separating her voice not only from her female body but from Mavis Clare’s female body, going so far as to make Clare in truth a very peripheral character in the grand scheme of the novel, especially when we take into account the centrality of artistic heroines in her other novels like A Romance of Two

Worlds.176 Clare appears very scantily and is often only referred to by other characters in passing, a distant standard of goodness against which they compare themselves.177 And although Tempest is the narrator, he is not the novel’s central authority, since Tempest- the-character spends much of the novel submerged in ignorance and narrow-sighted sin.178 Tempest-the-narrator only provides occasional references to the knowledge he

“now” possesses after the events of the novel; these references are often lamentations of his own naiveté: “Alas, Lucio!—if I had only known then what I know now!” (Sorrows

56) In contrast to Clare and to Tempest, Lucio’s centrality and his Satanic status as the

176 Federico also spends some time exploring Corelli using the “male voice” of Geoffrey Tempest but predicates her interpretation on the idea that Mavis Clare is the genuine authorial avatar, concluding that “one could say ‘Marie Corelli’ appears in this novel discursively as both a man and a woman… Thus instead of constituting sexual binarisms, the fluidity and constructedness of these identities ride out the indeterminacies the novel ostensibly fears” (Federico 83). 177 Only Hartnell and Kershner acknowledge Lucio’s centrality to the text. Hartnell calls him the “Gothic hero” of the story and acknowledges his role as disregarded truth-teller, but her focus on the Gothic form concentrates necessarily on the “images of a more ‘traditional’ Satan and hell,” arguing that “it is these almost conventional images that yield the most dramatic effects,” and she does not evaluate Mavis Clare at all (292, 293). Kershner calls Lucio Corelli’s “most attractive and interesting male figure” and recognizes his “seriously divided personality,” but does not go much farther beyond these brief touches except to say that the scene where Sybil offers herself to Lucio is “sadomasochistic” (“Modernism’s Mirror” 76, “Corelli’s Religious Trilogy” 600). 178 Even though Tempest is the first-person narrator of The Sorrows of Satan, Corelli occasionally overlays her own authorial voice. For instance, she interrupts the flow of the first-person narrator with a footnote where she comments upon the practice of editors only hiring their friends to write book reviews (Sorrows 73). The novel’s infamous foreword, in which she declares that if reviewers want to read the novel they can purchase it themselves just like anybody else, is another strong imposition of her own authorial voice, right from the beginning. 173

ultimate, powerful outcast provides automatic gravity and a ready-built basis for heterodoxy. His is the privileged perspective within the novel, since he possesses that world-weary knowledge of humankind’s true nature as well as the supernatural secrets of the universe, and it is this privileged perspective that Corelli primarily inhabits. Only through Lucio’s mouth can Corelli spout invective, drastically revise religious doctrine, and inhabit a position of moral authority without being accused of holier-than-thou snobbery, professional jealousy, or personal self-consciousness.

Lucio enables Corelli’s critique not only because he is male but because he is

Satan. The attributes of the Satanic mythos double down on the “double voice” that enables female writers to “call into question the very authority they endorse or, conversely, endorse the authority they seem to be questioning” (Lanser 8). As Fred

Parker points out in his analysis of Byron’s Biblical drama Cain (1821), the Satanic voice results in an inevitable paradox. Even when the Devil, to all indications, seems to express his author’s own beliefs, we can never be certain that Satan means what he says— because, after all, he is Satan (16). If Corelli’s Satan espouses heterodoxy, then the author cannot be blamed, since it is essentially Satan’s job to be heterodox. This selective doublespeak is eminently workable for Corelli, since it provides a screen for her on multiple levels. When we remember that Corelli condemned the “horrible lasciviousness” of Decadent and Naturalist novels like those of Zola who are responsible for Sybil’s

“soul-corrupti[on]” and damnation, it may be surprising that she herself would offer similar images of sexualized violence (Sorrows 296). For instance, in a passage of The

Sorrows of Satan often discussed by scholars, Corelli reproduces verbatim four stanzas of

Charles Algernon Swinburne’s poem, “Before a Crucifix,” italicizing the lines she finds 174

the most objectionable, including a line which she capitalizes whereas Swinburne’s

original poem does not: “Carrion Crucified” (Sorrows 296).179 Many critics have

attributed this supposedly unwitting hypocrisy to Corelli’s trademark naiveté.180 But writing through Lucio—if not via his dialogue then simply through his demonically contaminating presence in the text—allows Corelli to indulge in Decadent tropes by way of tying them to Satan, thus implicitly condemning them. Through Lucio, Corelli even pens her own very Swinburnian poem, writing,

Sleep, my Belovëd, sleep!

Be patient!—we shall keep

Our secret closely hid

Beneath the coffin-lid,—

[…]

Sin’s sweetness is too sweet, and if the shame

Of love must be our curse, we hurl the blame

Back on the gods who gave us love with breath

And tortured us from passion into death! (Sorrows 114)

These are Satan’s words, not Corelli’s. Writing through Satan allows her to inhabit the

positions both of authoritative spiritual leader and uncensored artist, who at one point

wrote to her publisher in a letter marked “Private,” that she would never dare to publish

such things as appear in George Sand’s books, “And yet I can frankly say there are no

179 In “Accursëd Eve,” Corelli actually commends Swinburne for acknowledging Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a poetic master when other supposedly more respectable men of culture won’t give Browning’s memory its due (Free Opinions 176). 180 See, for instance, Federico 78. 175

limits to my imagination—, to let my pen run riot would be my joy…” (Letters [26

March 1887]).

Even when Lucio seems quite sincere (which he often does) in his scathing

analyses of masculine establishments like publishing and the Church, Corelli nonetheless

gains plausible deniability, allowing her to inhabit the position of authoritative spiritual

leader while simultaneously criticizing patriarchal Christianity itself. Corelli’s

heterodoxy, however, was not the revolutionary one of the Romantics. Rather, her

worldview betrays a disgusted cynicism regarding the worth of mankind (particularly the

men of mankind) and an existential doubt about the justness of God’s universal order— an order which seems all too much to resemble a Faustian pact in which an unfair bargain struck between an ignorant humanity and a supernatural being leads to humanity’s damnation.

The Gospel According to Lucifer

Unlike Milton’s Lucifer and his other literary descendants, Prince Lucio has a

serious conflict of interest: he must embody the dual but opposed roles of tempter and

intercessor. In other words, it is Lucio’s task to tempt and thereby damn souls, but his

tragedy is that only his failure in that task will redeem him. Corelli’s mythology begins

orthodoxly: “Lucifer, Son of the Morning,” is an archangel, “supreme, at the right hand

of the Deity itself,” but when Lucifer sees that the Father’s new “slight poor creature”

Man is endowed with the ability to rise into “the Angelic likeness,” he protests that the

176

creature is unfit for such an honor (Sorrows 46). 181Lucifer declares that he will destroy

these creatures who do not deserve to share with him “‘the splendours of Thy Wisdom,—

the glory of Thy love!’” (Sorrows 46). But God’s subsequent punishment, enforcing an

implicit law of complete honesty in the divine presence, takes us into the realm of

heterodoxy. God declares, “‘[F]ull well dost thou know that never can an idle or wasted

word be spoken before Me… therefore what thou sayest, thou must needs do! Fall, proud

Spirit from thy high estate!’” (Sorrows 46-47). God casts Lucifer and his companions out

of Heaven before Lucifer even has the chance to lead an angelic civil war. God’s

preemptive strike here bears remarkable similarity to a Faustian pact. In Corelli’s

Faustian scenario, God creates an everlasting Hell for Lucifer, in which he must

repeatedly recommit the very sin that damned him:

Fall, proud Spirit… and return no more till Man himself redeem thee!

Each human soul that yields unto thy tempting shall be a new barrier set

between thee and heaven; each one that of its own choice doth repel and

overcome thee, shall lift thee nearer to thy lost home! When the world

rejects thee, I will pardon and again receive thee,—but not till then.

(Sorrows 47).

Despite what God says about humankind redeeming Satan, Satan’s eternal self-

wounding culminates, optimally, in proof of humanity’s redemption. Lucio must do his

utmost to tempt souls, but God is willing to give him a reward for services rendered in

assuming humanity’s pain: one hour in heaven for every soul he fails to damn (Sorrows

181 As Biblical scholars have pointed out, the name “Lucifer,” meaning “light-bearer” is first used scripturally in Jerome’s Latin Bible and was not, in Hebraic tradition, meant to refer to “the Devil” (Forsyth 36). The Christian Lucifer/Satan is an amalgamation of several different biblical and mythical figures. For more on the origins of the Satan mythos, see also Parker. 177

344). Ironically, Christ’s one-time sacrifice in this schema merely underwrites the continual grace Satan himself must reaffirm.182 Rather than reenter Heaven through a one-time Passion like Christ does, Lucio must paradoxically work against his reunification with God in order to reunite with God. Lucio’s torture and sacrifice, then, one-ups Christ’s. No wonder Lucio declares, “‘easy was the torture of Sisyphus compared with the torture of Satan!’” (Sorrows 320).183

This divinely-ordained state of perpetual sacrificial torment illustrates how Corelli saw her own place as a Christian writer—a moral authority compelled to speak truth to the sinful, only to find every new attempt met with rejection from the gatekeepers of culture. The conditions of Lucio’s rather sadistic bargain with God suggest a world so fallen that anyone who would attempt to save or even improve it faces nothing but self- sacrifice. In the world of The Sorrows of Satan, humankind is irrevocably flawed, its transcendence near-impossible. “‘Everything in the Universe is perfect…’” Lucio says,

“‘except that curious piece of work—Man. Have you never thought out any reason why he should be the one flaw,—the one incomplete creature in a matchless Creation?’”

(Sorrows 61) Humanity is the blight upon the universe, the source of Satan’s suffering.

182 Hartnell touches upon this, showing how, elsewhere, Corelli seems to promote the idea that Christ did not die as redemptive recompense for humanity’s sins but rather as a gesture of intimacy from God the Father toward humanity, and thus responsibility for salvation rests entirely upon an individual’s shoulders rather than being the purview of a self-sacrificing deity (286). However, Hartnell reaches a different conclusion, interpreting Lucio not as an alternative savior but as a more classically evil tempter: “For, though Christ cannot save us by faith, Satan is on hand to hinder our efforts should we give him the slightest encouragement” (287). 183 This sophisticated theological maneuver of Corelli’s was acknowledged but diminished by her contemporary critics. Reviewer W.T. Stead wrote, “Marie Corelli, having glorified Barabbas and whitewashed Judas, probable felt she had nothing else to do except to take in hand the enemy of mankind himself” (453). George Bernard Shaw’s anonymous review was not so tepid: “A sniveling, remorseful devil, with his heart in the right place, sneaking about the railings of heaven in the hope that he will presently be let in and forgiven, is an abomination to me” (Weintraub 166). Yet, Weintraub asserts, aspects of Corelli’s novel find their echoes in the Don Juan in Hell episode of Shaw’s 1903 play Man and Superman. Like Kershner with his argument for Corelli’s influence on Joyce, Weintraub’s article makes a claim for Corelli’s lasting influence upon the “high art” that appeared alongside and followed her. 178

“‘Every sin of every human being adds weight to my torture,’” he declares, “‘and length

to my doom’” (Sorrows 339).

For the Romantics, the answer to this mass malevolence would have been

separatism, reclusion within a coterie of the like-minded, as Milton’s Satan enacts in Hell with his demons. But for Corelli—at least at this point in her career—there is nothing to be gained by embracing isolation, and, indeed, to do so would be to defy God’s order.184

In her fiery early years as an author, she wrote to her publisher, “[T]o alter my work is to

alter myself—to become a servant to the public taste, instead of the expressor [sic]of

instinctive thought;—I cannot do this—neither for fame nor money” (Letters [13 March

1189]). Furthermore, she insisted, “[M]y work is part of my soul...” (Letters [12 June

1887]).185 As someone who saw moral critique and self-expression as the highest calling

of a writer—indeed, the moral mandate of a writer—Corelli found she had no choice but

to evangelize.

Yet even at this zenith of her career, Corelli found that evangelization bore only

the smallest possibility of reward, and the reward itself was predicated on pain. We can

see this idea reflected in her reconceptualization of Hell itself in addition to her

reconceptualization of its ruler. In The Sorrows of Satan, Hell is both a fixed place and a cycle of purgative reincarnation, a perpetual return to a hellish existence, the despair that results from immobility despite Herculean effort. In the climactic scene where a sea of

184 In a later novel, Corelli would get as close as she ever came to depicting a more Faustian female demonic protagonist in the titular character of The Young Diana (1918). In this novel, supernaturally ageless Diana uses her powers of attraction to torment the society that once rejected her, but as time goes on, Diana becomes more and more divorced from humanity and secludes herself in an unknown location for the rest of time—a truly dark ending for a tale of female revenge and empowerment. Written only six years before Corelli’s death, The Young Diana offers the kind of weary withdrawal the author would have rejected twenty years before, when The Sorrows of Satan found her at the height of fame and influence. 185 For more on Corelli’s refusal to separate her life from her art, see Federico. 179

damned souls is revealed to Tempest, Lucio declares, “‘My worshipers live on through a

myriad worlds, a myriad phases, till they learn to shape their destinies for Heaven!

…when they return to God cleansed and perfect, so shall I return!—but not till then!”

(Sorrows 338) In her essay “A Question of Faith,” Corelli in fact disavows the idea of

Hell as a permanent sentence: “the Roman hell, full of large snakes and much brimstone,

is a satisfactory place to consign one’s enemies to, when we have quite put aside Christ’s

command, ‘Love one another’” (Free Opinions 55). Corelli’s Hell may not be permanent,

but it still isn’t pleasant. Rather than a one-time reciprocation of one’s sins, Hell means

painfully spinning one’s wheels to no effect, an ouroboros of compulsive self-destruction.

Yet, like the traditional martyr whose compensation for torture and self-

destruction is the ecstasy of sharing in Christ’s Passion, Lucio’s torments have the

curious effect of making him all the more beautiful. Tempest notes in their first meeting

that Lucio’s eyes possess “a curious and wonderfully attractive look of mingled mirth and

misery” (Sorrows 14). Many scenes in the novel luxuriate in Lucio’s beautiful pain, frequently evoking the iconography of saints and martyrs. When Tempest’s wife Sybil offers herself sexually to Lucio, Lucio cries out, “‘—and yet again I hear the barring of the gates of Paradise! O infinite torture! O wicked souls of men and women! ... and will ye make my sorrows eternal!’” (Sorrows 264). Moonlight streams through a picture

window portraying St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and illuminates “a great and

terrible anguish in his [Lucio’s] eyes” (Sorrows 264). Robert Mills has argued that, “In the realm of the martyr, suffering—whether ‘mental’ or ‘physical’—is transformed

through torture into a palpable sign of God’s present existence” (157). Indeed, the potent

eroticism of martyrdom iconography, with its proliferation of stripped-down or even nude 180

youths captured mid-writhe, renders torment as a desired spectacle. Iconography of male

sufferers, it can be said, reinforce the erotic empowerment of their subjects, since these

men are

visually de-phallicized by being decapitated, disemboweled and flayed...

subjected to a proliferation of phallic instruments... in order to symbolize

their figurative transformation from wielders of earthly power to tortured

purveyors of divine presence… In the world of the martyr, to be

penetrated is not to abdicate power. (173, 171, emphasis original)

Corelli’s descriptions of Lucio employ all the beatification of saintly suffering, and in this way she creates a similarly potent yet sanctified object of desire whose desirability is accentuated by and even predicated on his pain.

In his only moment of reprieve, when Tempest finally rejects Lucio’s mastery and thus affords Lucio an hour in heaven, Lucio’s pain remains the standard of his glory: “He

[Lucio], supreme, majestic, wonderful, towered high above them all, a very king of splendor… his eyes, twin stars, ablaze with such great rapture as seemed half agony! [...]

Once more…yet once… the Angel-visage bent its warning looks on me,… I saw the anguished smile,… the great eyes burning with immortal sorrows!” (Sorrows 344-345, emphasis added).186 Here, Lucio’s disempowerment—that is, his surrender to God’s

punishment—enables his return to his original angelic position of power as “king of

splendor.” Like Christian artists’ accentuation of Christ’s naked torso and St. Sebastian’s

youthful handsomeness as he is penetrated by phallic arrows, the transformation of the

186 The ellipses in this passage, except when marked by brackets (like so: […]) are original to Corelli’s novel. 181

sufferer into “exhibited, eroticized flesh” arises out of a “completely orthodox” disavowal

of the self in favor of God’s will (166). In this way, Corelli draws upon the hagiographic

tradition to create an avatar who is not simply an outcast genius; she creates an avatar

whose pain and vitiation equal ecstasy, beauty, and divine sanction rather than abjection.

The fact that her Satan is an even better martyr than Christ himself pushes this perverse

revision into even more audacious territory.

Conclusion: The Satanic Self in an “Un-beautiful” Universe

Corelli’s suffering Satan is, as we have seen, a unique composite of saint, martyr,

and demon. The implications of this hybridity thus distinguish Corelli from the Satanic

literary tradition in the following ways. First, for the Romantics (including

Wollstonecraft), a fantasy of supernatural empowerment, that is, ruling in Hell,

compensated for societal rejection. For Corelli, a woman who considered it her calling to

preach even to deaf ears, this was not an option. Her Satan is disempowered, not when it

comes to his sway over humankind but when it comes to his subordination to God’s will.

Second, Lucio does not espouse a radical detachment. No, he feels, and mostly, he feels

pain. Satan’s supernatural capabilities remain—he changes shape, controls reincarnated souls, and conjures ghostly spectacles—but unlike Byron’s or even Wollstonecraft’s

Satan, he is also a martyr. Ultimately, Corelli takes over this masculine power fantasy embodied in Satan, alters the figure’s traditional backstory to take away his Romantic detachment, and instead makes him into a sacrificial lamb to show that martyrdom

(whether at the hands of pagans or the press) does not mean defeat but rather glory, even desirability. The professional pillorying Corelli endures, by proxy, only beautifies and 182

glorifies her. A moral rewriting of disempowerment and rejection, a rehabilitation of

pain, is in itself a spectacular literary gesture from a female author, whose biological sex

has historically been construed as lacking, inferior because supposedly more vulnerable

and sensitive, and whose work and public image were dismissed and degraded on this

pretext.

This terrible but clear-eyed Satan, then, is the figure Corelli chooses both to

personify her own suffering and to voice her biting insight into human nature. Despite the

clear pessimism of this stance, Corelli’s so-called “utopianism” has remained a significant through-line permeating scholarship on her life and works. Felski finds Corelli exemplary of the “utopian,” transcendental, and “idealist” “popular sublime” (118).187

Building off of Felski and taking a more psychoanalytic tack, Julia Kuehn sees Corelli’s

art as an attempt to create a religious ethos that is “pre-oedipal,” “primordial and

inclusive, engulfing” (203). In this utopian vision of a feminine sublime, Kuehn would

have it that Corelli creates a Kristevan “chora,” “a mystical and blessed mode of

wholeness before separation and of pleasure without pain” (205).188 Indeed, many of

Corelli’s novels (like Mavis Clare’s) contain extra-bodily transports of religious ecstasy

and provide uplifting tales of the soul’s immortality, of good triumphing over evil.

However, if Corelli is “utopian,” it is not in the sense that she weaves “escapist

fantas[ies]” (Felski 120). Corelli is a pessimistic Christian with more fire and brimstone

187 This line of thinking is based, of course, on Andreas Huyssen’s argument about the inscription of a threatening femininity onto mass culture at the turn of the century. 188 Kuehn’s argument refers to Corelli’s first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds. By the time The Sorrows of Satan, her fifth book, was released, Corelli had been a celebrity for a decade and had experienced enough of the world’s stings to form a much more pessimistic viewpoint. For illustration, look at the relationship between the two titles: A Romance of Two Worlds suggests possibility, touch, relationship, and reciprocation, whereas The Sorrows of Satan suggests isolation, non-reciprocation, and, well, sorrow, all of which are symbolized in her depiction of Hell as a frozen wasteland in the novel’s climax. 183

in her than good news. Her earth is a scorched one, “converted into a bloody theatre of discord and robbery” (Free Opinions 123). Society is hypocritical and unproductive; describing an aristocratic dinner party she attended, Corelli declared that “a heavy demon brooded over the brave outward show of the feast,—a demon with sodden grey wings that refused to rise and soar,—the demon of a hopeless, irremediable Stupidity!” (Free

Opinions 105) Her picture of the Christian establishment is apocalyptic, condemning modern churches for creating a “pagan” population through their “Romanized” empty ritual and their employment of selfish clerics (Free Opinions 32). Corelli sees wrongdoing wherever she looks, claiming that if England were really a Christian society, neither the rampant factory labor abuse nor the disastrous Boer War would have happened (Free Opinions 54). And indeed, much of this injustice is suffered by women at the hands of men, a pattern which was instigated by Adam—or at least by the writer of

Genesis.

Lucio, then, carrying both traditional Satanic characteristics and specific Corellian attributes, articulates the limitations the patriarchy places upon Corelli’s reformatory zeal and creative talent. Her oeuvre is full of elect, misunderstood heroes and heroines who alone can see the sinfulness of their fellow creatures yet who feel that they cannot make a dent in their brethren’s hard-headedness. Humankind’s “greed” and “egotism” are

“incurable,” making the world “a hell” (qtd. in Federico 149). True artistry is no longer possible. “England’s last great poet,” Corelli insists, “was Tennyson,—since his death we have had no other” (Free Opinions 98). Indeed, “The beautiful and poetic ideals that made such work possible are, if not quite dead, slowly dying, under the influence of the

‘blight’ which infects the social atmosphere… And those who see it slowly 184

darkening…will surely pray for a Storm!” (Free Opinions 99). Martin Hipsky claims that

“the grace of Mavis Clare restores meaning and spiritual order [at the end of The Sorrows

of Satan]. In this manner, Corelli has generated an impossibly virtuous heroine and has

offered a fantasy resolution to the novel’s governing antinomy” (86). When we locate

Lucio as Corelli’s real avatar, we do see the paradox of existence but we do not see its

redemption.

In the end, Tempest is saved, but he receives no closure—he concludes with his

marital designs on Mavis Clare unfulfilled and consoles himself only with his future-

oriented determination to improve himself in order to deserve her (which, it is hinted, he

never will). Guest interprets Tempest’s fate as a kind of bleak revision of Faust: “Unlike

Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy, which ends with the hero’s punishment, or Goethe’s,

which ends with his salvation, Corelli’s retellings end with a series of compromises that

gesture toward a possible future even as they make clear the tragic sacrifice required in

the present” (169). More importantly, Lucio’s self-wounding mission goes on without

any sign of abatement: The last lines of the novel show Geoffrey Tempest watching

Lucio walk arm-in-arm “with a well-known Cabinet minister… I saw them ascend the

steps, and finally disappear within the House of England’s Imperial Government,—Devil

and Man,—together!” (Sorrows 353-354)189 Mavis Clare does not redeem the fallen

189 I find it significant that Lucio’s next human object seems to be a politician involved in the maintenance of the British Empire. Corelli’s personal politics are so idiosyncratic that it is difficult to give a solid assessment of how she felt about imperialism. She declares in one essay, in self-contradictory and jingoistic fashion, “Speaking personally as a woman, I have no politics, and want none. I only want the British Empire to be first and foremost in everything...” (Free Opinions 173). She opposes American expansion seemingly only because it encroaches upon the British Empire (Free Opinions 113-114). But in several other essays, she is vehemently critical of the violent acquisition of riches, professes a stance against free- acquisition capitalism, and indicts Cecil Rhodes’s behavior in South Africa and the way the Boer War in general was conducted (Free Opinions 123, 115-119). This last scene showing the Devil’s influence in England’s Imperial Government seems rather a damning picture on Corelli’s part. 185

world portrayed in the novel. No one does. As Lucio says, “‘Eternal justice has spoken,—

Humanity, through the teaching of God made human, must work out its own

redemption,—and Mine!’” (Sorrows 339).

Thus, in The Sorrows of Satan, Corelli turns the classic Satanic temptation

story—a “combat myth” of good versus evil—into a myth of immense personal

responsibility in a weighted game. Neil Forsyth interprets the “Satanic epic” tradition as a

millennia-long reiteration of this powerful, Manichean “combat myth.” The Biblical

Satan arises out of an “apocalyptic tendency… to polarize moral issues into black and

white opposites, and so to demonize ‘the Other’” (Forsyth 36).190 The polarization of a

previously “amoral nationalistic deity,” the Yahweh of the Old Testament, into a good

God and a bad Devil transforms inward ambiguity into outward battle (Forsyth 36). One

no longer bears sole responsibility for one’s faults if a Devil is at large, determined to

topple as many souls as possible; one can always claim, The Devil made me do it.191 This myth, which is responsible for the evolution of the Old Testament “adversary” into the rebel archangel Satan, is the lynchpin of Christianity. It shows how “the apparent defeat of the Crucifixion was in fact a cunning victory, and was in any case annulled by the

Resurrection, which thus became the triumph characteristic of the last episode in the combat myth” (Forsyth 43). The combat myth reorients abuse and excruciating pain, such as that of the crucifixion, into the signifier of spiritual triumph.

190 For more of Forsyth’s theory of how the creation of the Christian Satan is a product of early Christian infighting, see The Satanic Epic (24-76). 191 Forsyth suggests that Milton “was a close and accurate reader of the Christian tradition when he put Satan and his war with Christ, an explicit version of the [combat] myth, so close to the structural center of his poem... In a wider sense, the whole poem is informed by the meanings of the myth” (26). 186

The Sorrows of Satan, while nominally following the classic temptation narrative, deviates significantly not only in the rehabilitation of Satan but also in its reversal of the

Satanic epic’s foundational combat myth. Since Corelli’s Satan is not evil, instead of defeating an outward evil force, Tempest’s character arc consists in his coming to grips with the weight of his personal responsibility for his own soul. Similar to the revelations in Byron’s Cain, “We learn that… to see the Devil as the cause of our unhappiness is a psychological projection, the enlarged shadow thrown by human weakness…” (Parker

15). Tempest repents and returns to a life of poverty, but heavenly reward seems truly far off. His abjection at the end of the novel must be interpreted as his redemption, just as it must be for Lucio. So even though Corelli retains orthodox Christianity’s revision of pain as glory, the glory is found in the pain itself rather than the pain’s ability to transport the sufferer to Heaven. Our one glimpse of Heaven in The Sorrows of Satan bears its own pains, with Lucio’s “eyes burning with immortal sorrow” even as he rises into the divine presence (Sorrows 345). Lucio’s battle, too, is not with God but with humankind, which really amounts to humankind’s own battle against what Corelli casts as its inherent evil.

Lucio’s circumstances testify to an entire universe which seems bent toward injustice. In

Corelli’s hands, Satan’s primary characteristic is not so much his rebellion against God but his rejection by God—that is, God’s withholding of His mercy and justice in punishing Lucio in excess of his unrealized crime. In the arguably autobiographical Open

Confessions, her last book, Corelli’s first-person narrative voice expresses at every turn a sense of betrayal, of dreams denied for no conceivable reason: “Looking back through the vista of past years I can but smile at the folly of my dreams! …Sometimes I wonder why we are permitted to thus ‘visualise’ possibilities of happiness that never come? Except, as 187

a cynic has said, that ‘Life is a cheat, designed to trick us from the beginning to the end.’

Yet why the trick? In what consists the joke?” (120-121) Dystopic indeed.

But even dystopian visions are, to some extent, utopias. The upshot of Corelli’s miserable Satan is the fantastical alternative he offers to material and social limitations—

not an escape from the pain brought by those limitations but a radical embrace of it. The

damnation of a Faustian pact becomes the salvation of a self-transforming martyrdom,

one which is executed through the strength of one’s own will rather than through reliance

on outward justice. Throughout her career, Marie Corelli lamented being willfully

misunderstood by her critics and even her once-closest friends, who judged her writing

“twaddle” and her personality a sham upon youth and beauty. Any time Corelli wrote

about herself, directly or indirectly, her message was: I am not what they say I am.

Satan’s modus operandi is to be contrary, to be not what he seems.192 Only the demonic

allows this disavowal of the self while maintaining a powerful ego, and only Satan—not

the witch, the succubus, or the femme fatale—can transcend the facts of biological sex

which turn to fetters within a patriarchal world. Satan offers his creator a screen for

unspeakable cynicism and anger at an unjust, “un-beautiful” universe (Corelli, Open

Confessions… 130). The demonic itself is the domain in which such contraventions can

be explored. Fernie explains our desire for the demonic as the “urgent sense that what we

really are may be quite opposite to what we appear to be and even have become” (3).

Corelli’s widely-noted efforts to make herself look younger and thinner in dress and in

192 At their first meeting, Lucio says, “‘I like you, Geoffrey Tempest. And because I like you… I am going to make you what you may perhaps consider rather a singular proposition. It is this,—that if you don’t like me, say so at once, and we will part now… [I]f there is the smallest aversion to me lurking in the depths of your nature… in God’s name give it full way and let me go,—because I swear to you in all sober earnest that I am not what I seem!” (Sorrows 27-28) 188

photographs while professing extreme disgust for fat and/or “masculine” women, betray

not just that her conception of “reality” was not allied to strict “realism,” as others have suggested, but also that she experienced a dissociation between her material, biological, bodily experience and her spiritual truth.193 Corelli’s writing shows how far from her

fiercely-held ideals her material and social existence often was, how seriously

mischaracterized she found herself in the press and how different her private life was

from the condition of “imaginary love” she envisioned. “Imaginary love,” this unmarried

woman wrote, “is the unspeakable outcoming of human emotion and sympathy too great

to be contained within itself,—the tremulous desire,—half vague and wholly innocent,—

of the human soul for its mate” (Free Opinions 180). Marriage is not the panacea;

“Strange and cruel as the fact may seem, Marriage appears to put an end to it

[‘imaginary’ love] altogether” (184). While she gestures toward communion with the

divine as an answer to this fundamental state of unending, unanswerable, painful

suspense, there is no actual satisfaction; it is imaginary, after all (187). As Dyan Elliot puts it, “The distance between the pure ideal and the inevitability of an impure reality— the pure being constantly impugned by transgressions in both deed and thought—was the space within which the symbolic terrain of the demonic world was constituted” (2).

Corelli wrote, “The fact is, the times are evil—and there is an instinctive sense in everyone that something is wrong, something that will have to be set right, probably at a

193 As Galvan has shown, Corelli does not summarily eschew realism in her own works, as other critics before Galvan have concluded. Rather, Corelli’s objection to the realism of writers like Wilde consists in a conflation of “Reality” with materialism, surface, and the sensual. “What emerges in The Sorrows of Satan,” Galvan insists, “is a perspective that points up a real reality, so to speak, beyond the usual reach of the sensory world… Counterintuitive as it may seem, Corelli offers a romance as a way to grasp ‘Reality.’ Yet this seems less counterintuitive once we consider that the romance opens up an opportunity to imagine, and thus conceptualize, an existence unperceivable beyond life’s material façade” (“Corelli’s Caliban…” 346). 189

frightful cost of trouble and sorrow” (Letters [27 March 1889]). The disavowal of the evil

materiality of this world in favor of the glory of spiritual agonies and ecstasies is how

Corelli constitutes her fantastical utopia/dystopia. All of Corelli’s writings wrap

themselves in the armor of the angelic but possess a demonic heart, and the space

between what is and what should be is where Corelli’s Satan is born. He can hold the contradiction that she, to her frustration, could not hold in her own life. More fundamentally than I am not what I seem, Corelli was saying: I am not what I am.

190

Conclusion & Coda

These writers—Brontë, Gaskell, and Corelli—produced drastically different novels, divided by decades and by generic boundaries. If these three can be drawn together through their utilization of the suffering man, if we can identify this figure as a through-line in women’s fiction at this time in history, who else might be included in this strange sisterhood?

A conversation between the three Brontë sisters on this topic seems necessary. I briefly alluded to Jane Eyre (1848) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in Chapter 1, offering the portrayals of John Reed and Arthur Huntingdon as contrasts to Heathcliff’s portrayal. The more salient Brontë characters, I believe, are M. Paul of Villette (1853) and his earlier prototype William Crimsworth of The Professor (1857). The sadism of

Charlotte’s men, in contrast to Emily’s, seems unambiguously infused with the erotic, as has been explored at length by other critics. But is there more going on in Villette, The

Professor, and even Jane Eyre than games of S/M? My argument calls for a reexamination of what has seemed straightforward about M. Paul’s Catholic pain,

Crimsworth’s fraternal brawling, and even perhaps Rochester’s infamous injuries.

Dinah Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) was published one year after

Gaskell’s North and South (1855) appeared in volume form. In both novels, industrial 191

capitalism—and the moral system on which it is built—require bourgeois men’s self-

destruction. However, Craik seems to endorse what Gaskell subverts: the industrial

market’s call for men to practice masochistic, even suicidal self-denial. In John Halifax,

Gentleman, the disabled narrator Phineas Fletcher masochistically disappears into a nearly-disembodied narrative voice. Phineas’s emotional and financial patronage enables the titular Halifax’s rise out of poverty and illiteracy, but Phineas’s physical presence fades into the background until characters cease even, apparently, to acknowledge his existence, carrying on conversations before him without ever once addressing him. In other words, he commits slow narrative suicide. Interestingly, Phineas’s physical disability fades along with his presence as a character; he “gets better” as he recedes.

Phineas’s suffering makes his presence at the beginning of the novel much more meaningful and pronounced, whereas his “wellness” is proportional to his disappearance in favour of Halifax’s achievement of patriarchal power.

While Craik’s novel seems a direct answer to Gaskell’s, Corelli’s The Sorrows of

Satan (1895) may have been an answer to an earlier novel published by sensational novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon: her Satanic temptation tale Gerard, or the World, the

Flesh and the Devil was published in 1891. Both stories portray a destructive pact

between the Devil and a male protagonist. As Chapter 3 suggests, women’s portrayals of

Satan can show us a great deal about the authors themselves as well as how they view the

gendered position of the outcast. This dissertation has not endeavored to directly compare

the novels under its examination. Since my argument concerns the interrelations of

dominant narratives about pain and gender, applying a directly comparative methodology

to women’s portrayals of men in pain would allow a more wide-reaching and detailed 192

explication of the way writers during specific historical and social moments in the

nineteenth century offered competing or diverse literary approaches to this topic.

In proposing this new lens through which to examine Victorian women’s novels, I

am in essence proposing a new lineage of women’s writing. Rather than a hereditary

string based on a progressive march forward through time, or based on direct

representation of women characters with radical vision, we can use my approach to

reconceive of artistic kinship between female novelists. My approach can also allow us to

reconceive of the relationship between individual female novelists and their art, and, finally, between female novelists and gender itself. This might produce what seems, at first, to be strange bedfellows like Marie Corelli and Mary Wollestonecraft, and Emily

Brontë and the Marquis de Sade. But this new direction will enable a truly expansive and non-essentialist picture of the Victorian female novelist, and, as my introduction suggests, a more accurate view of the Victorian novel as a form built just as much upon narrative suspense as it is upon resolution.

An article that appeared on the leftist magazine Jacobin’s website in 2016

declared that “the Victorian ethos is not dead, not by a long shot.” The central claim

made by Jason Tebbe in “Twenty-First Century Victorians” is that contemporary

“wellness” practices like “spin classes” and eating “artisanal food” have “replaced

Sunday promenades, evening lectures, and weekly salons” as the bourgeoisie’s method of

“transforming class privilege into individual virtue, thereby shoring up social

dominance.” Furthermore, Tebbe claims, “contemporary fitness culture perfectly

embodies the nineteenth-century ethos of improvement and discipline,” with marathon 193

running acting as “the ultimate signifier: competitors can post photos on social media to prove to everyone that they have tortured their bodies in a highly virtuous—and not at all kinky—fashion… Instead of being repulsed by the ‘great unwashed,’ the modern

Victorians blanch at the ‘great overfed.’” Though Tebbe tips his hat to the fact that the term “Victorian” and the actual Victorians themselves are complex and multifaceted, his article nevertheless tends to use the term “Victorian(s)” as a way of indicting what he constructs as a simplified moralistic ethos, ending the article by asking readers to imagine

“what our world would look like if socialist values—not Victorian ones—dominated.”

Making the “Victorian” into the causal scapegoat of contemporary problems is an activity as old as the Victorian’s children, the Modernists. And the perspectives produced by Jacobin are necessarily class-preoccupied, and so Tebbe’s primary focus on the

“torture” of modern fitness culture amounts to his interpretation of it as a performance of

“class dominance.” But many of Tebbe’s points are salient. His observation of the way that middle-class leisure activities like walking or biking along a nature trail are drained of their pleasure in favor of self-discipline jives, for instance, with my interpretation of

North and South. Tebbe’s Marxist critique, however, doesn’t attempt to dig into the cultural roots that could explain what else besides “class dominance” could motivate the middle-class urge to practice this old-but-new form of Bildung. In short, he only explores one interpretation of contemporary middle-class America’s attitude towards pain—that it is both instructive and a way of performing social status. There’s one highly significant complication to this straightforward idea of “the way we live now”: the ravages of what has been called “the opioid epidemic.”

194

New York Times reporter Barry Meier has tracked how, in the 1990s, the growing

influence of pharmaceutical companies combined with a push in the medical community

to treat patients’ pain more aggressively. One anecdote from Meier’s book, Pain Killer: A

“Wonder” Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death, is particularly telling: In 1981, Dr.

Russell K. Portenoy, while touring a teaching hospital, asked for the teaching staff’s

specialties. One of them answered that his specialty was treating chronic pain. Portenoy

replied, “You can’t do pain. Pain isn’t a disease. It’s a symptom” (Meier 50). “Two

decades later,” Meier writes, “Russell Portenoy would rank among this country’s most

respected specialists in the treatment of severe chronic pain and be the leading advocate

for the use of strong, long-lasting narcotics in its treatment” (50). Portenoy’s reversal on

the subject of chronic pain encapsulates the reversal that took place in the medical

community at large in the eighties and nineties, when prescriptions of pain-killers such as

OxyContin (the “wonder” drug of Maier’s title) rose exponentially, leading us to the

point where sales of prescription drugs have quadrupled since 1991 and “more than

200,000 people have died in the U.S. from overdoses related to prescription opioids”

(Centers for Disease Control).

For the medical community, the story of pain changed in the late twentieth

century. Pain was no longer, as Portenoy initially claimed, merely a symptom but a disease-like foe in and of itself, and since doctors had the means to alleviate or even eradicate their patients’ pain, they were incumbent to do so. As in Tebbe’s class- conscious critique, journalists who seek out the causes behind the current trend of opioid abuse in America seem preoccupied with exposing the pharmaceutical industry’s greed and even perhaps the post-recession economic depression in the areas hit hardest. The 195

shift in what many American doctors perceived as pain’s role in medical treatment, and, what’s more, what they perceived as an acceptable level of pain weighed against the threat of addiction, has been relatively underreported.

By the mid-nineteenth century, doctors understood that opium and its constituent morphine caused addiction and began mitigating treatment against that risk (Maier 57).

As Ablow has explained, Victorian doctors also had other qualms about painkillers— wondering whether pain might itself serve some positive purpose for the patient’s wellbeing, and thus whether attempting to eradicate the pain might actually “harm” that patient (Victorian Pain 11-12). If doctors and legislators in the eighties and nineties had had a more “Victorian” skepticism of painkillers, would the news out of the Rust Belt look different?

Though some research has indicated that individual women may be more likely than individual men to abuse an opioid prescription, men abuse opioids in greater numbers than women; in 2010, about 27 men died every day from overdosing on painkillers compared to 18 women per day (National Institute on Drug Abuse). It is no coincidence that doctors also tend to treat their male patients’ pain more seriously than their female patients’ pain and thus may be less likely to prescribe opioids to women.194

Conversely, doctors’ greater reluctance to treat female pain of all kinds, physical or psychological, may explain why individual “women are more likely to misuse prescription opioids to self-treat for other problems such as anxiety or tension” (National

Institute on Drug Abuse). In my introduction, I wrote of the Victorian era, “A woman in pain was simply a sign of the world being as it should be.”

194 See, for instance, Joe Fassler’s “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously.” 196

The campus gym I used to frequent was built like an elaborate theater, with

catwalks going up four stories that allowed other gym users and even tour groups to stare

down at all of us running or biking or lifting on the ground floor. I began to hate every

moment I was there.

Last summer, I performed an experiment: I didn’t go to the gym at all and instead

went only to yoga class four or five times a week. In stark contrast to the weight room, in

which I was usually one of the few women present, it was a rare day indeed that a man

joined us for our yoga class. Once, a member of our local professional men’s soccer team

came to class. He was a patent athlete, tall, sinewy, in excellent shape. He told us that his

coach had encouraged him to do yoga on his days off. As the class went on, I observed

him struggling to hold downward-facing dog, one of the most basic poses. He didn’t

come back to class again.

A photograph of young, mostly-white people doing yoga accompanies Jacobin’s

“Twenty-First Century Victorians.” Though every one of the other discernable people in

the photo are women, a shirtless man is front and center. Tebbe’s article only mentions

yoga insofar as he refers to “yoga pants” being one item in the bourgeoisie’s current

costume. Yoga in the West has a fraught history, part of which is its forefront position in

the performative arsenal of middle-class purity politics. Many of the most prominent

popularizers of yoga in the West have been men, from Henry David Thoreau to today’s

Bikram Choudhury, the “creator” of the popular “Bikram yoga.”195 Yet many of Western

195 See Syman (37-61). Significantly, Bikram Choudhury has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by multiple women students. See Wallace. 197

yoga’s practitioners are white women. White women make up the vast majority of students at the studio I attend.

In 2013, I re-injured my back—an injury I’d originally caused while doing deadlifts at the gym—during a yoga class. When my doctor asked me how I’d done it, I’d admitted that I’d been attempting to impress a man whose mat lay beside mine in yoga class. “No more doing yoga to impress guys,” the doctor said, more exasperated than amused. “That’s not what yoga’s for.”

This white American man’s declaration of what yoga is “for” bears all the complications of a practice that ultimately may be impossible to define, its “real” or

“authentic” roots obscured by time and a thousand transformations across continents. My yoga teacher, an Indian woman in her sixties, teaches her own synthesis of multiple different varieties of yoga, and insists that yoga is not exercise and should not hurt.

Bikram Choudhury, on the other hand, has said, “I try to kill them [my students]. They don’t die. I own—I torture them.”196

Like the soccer player who never returned, I too would not have attended this kind of class a few years ago, either. I would have found it frustratingly un-punishing. I do not come away sore. I am never in any pain.

196 See Andrea Kremer’s interview with Choudhury for HBO. 198

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