Feeling Capitalism: the Victorian Novel As Affective Response to Social Transformation

Feeling Capitalism: The Victorian Novel as Affective Response to Social Transformation

Thomas Anthony Laughlin

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

Feeling Capitalism: The Victorian Novel as Affective Response to Social Transformation

Thomas Anthony Laughlin

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2016

Abstract

This dissertation argues that Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles

Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2) constellate the affective dimensions of life under advancing capitalism around three dominant emotions: desire, guilt, and disappointment. In each case, the focalizing emotion, I argue, is not only specific to this or that character, but also a dominant structuring affect of the work as a whole, which, in turn, has historical specificity to the decade of the novel’s production. Chapter 2 relates Brontë’s depiction of Heathcliff and

Catherine’s insatiable desire to the romantic-libertarianism of the 1840s and the autonomization of desire in the newly privatized space of the bourgeois family, which, I argue, widened its symbolic valences, making it available for Brontë’s mythologization of history as the struggle of desire against repression. Chapter 3 explores Dickens’s sense of society’s inexorable guilt in relation to the “liberal guilt” that followed in the years after the failed proletarian revolutions of 1848, attaching negative connotations to individual “great expectations,” which now appear to be necessarily at the cost of the less fortunate. Such negative connotations ironize Dickens’s title providing it with its

dominant “structure of feeling.” Chapter 4 connects Eliot’s sense of inescapable disappointment and resignation to the lowered expectations of the 1870s, when the millenarian spirit of the former decades subsided into what, for many, felt like a Victorian

“end of history.” Disappointment, however, comes with a new clarity—a realism that now grasps society as an evolving historical totality. Against theorists like Brian

Massumi, who posit affect as ahistorical and nonrepresentational, this dissertation argues instead for the centrality of affect to a historicizing literary criticism that attempts to forge a connection between a novel’s narrative style and what Fredric Jameson calls its

“political unconscious.” In so doing, I put forward a theory of affect as a mediatory category, bringing together novelistic representations and lived historical experience in such a way that allows us to interpret Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, and

Middlemarch as three affective responses to social transformations wrought by capitalism in the nineteenth century—three different ways of feeling capitalism.

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Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge financial support received while writing this dissertation from a Ruth E. and Harry E. Carter / Ontario Graduate Scholarship; a University of Toronto Fellowship; a Dorothy Louise Ellison, 4T8 / Ontario Graduate Scholarship; and a Joseph- Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships, Doctoral Scholarship.

This dissertation has had many comrades. In many ways it began before it started. If it weren’t for meeting Duncan Clegg, Zach Gaviller, and Joel Irwin at Trent University, where I did my Bachelor’s degree, I likely would not have continued on to graduate studies. Our conversations, which spilled over from the classroom to the Pig’s Ear Tavern and then often into the wee hours of the morning, made it clear to me that I could not live a life that did not have intelligent conversation and serious question-asking in it. Later Tristana Rubio became a vital part of this conversation and helped us carry on the dialogue in Toronto. I still see myself as trying to understand and formulate adequate answers to the questions we were asking ourselves back then. And, in that sense, all of you, despite the borders that divide us, are still my interlocutors and, of course, for this and other reasons, my dear friends. I am also indebted to the many friends I have had while at the University of Toronto, too many in fact to list all of them. But I do want to single out Tara McDonald, Miriam Novick, Abi Dennis, Dave Ritter, Tim Harrison, Jason Peters, Alpen Razi, Noa Reich, and Corey Ponder for being buds in various ways. Whether it was helping me with my writing, going to the gym and reading Heidegger together, going to shows, staying at the pub for “one more” after everyone else left, helping me move, or simply offering a kind word when sometimes it all seemed like too much, it was always much appreciated. Being a Teaching Assistant for Nick Mount was a formative part of this intellectual journey as well; I hope I have been able to put some of the spark and vitality that he puts into his lectures into the pages of this dissertation. I want to thank especially Alexander Eastwood and Simon Reader for their particular flair for conversation and their support and encouragement throughout this whole thing. You both really kept me going. I am, of course, indebted as well to my brilliant supervisory committee: Audrey Jaffe and Christine Bolus-Reichert. Without their expert feedback, the dissertation would not be what it is now, in either form or content. Particularly

inspiring for this project was a course I took with Franco Moretti on the figure of the bourgeois and a chance to meet (very briefly) Fredric Jameson and see him speak on a few occasions. Elaine Freedgood was my external examiner and Paul Downes my internal examiner; both offered generous commentary on the final product that has left me with much to think about, especially should I find myself reprising any of these ideas in the future. An extra special thank you is in order for my supervisor, Cannon Schmitt, who read over countless drafts of this project, from its most inchoate and nonsensical articulations to its present form. Whatever clarity it has is thanks to his help. The errors, however, are all my own. I met my “co-bro” Malissa Phung well over halfway through this degree, but she’s been one of my biggest champions ever since (we started from the bottom, now we’re here!). When my confidence and motivation were starting to wane, I got an incredible boost from the amazing friends and colleagues I was able to meet through the Marxist Literary Group: Norman Mack, Brent Bellamy, Jeff Diamanti, Melissa Macero, Kate Lawless, David Janzen, Jen Phillis, Teresa Jimenez, Emilio Sauri, Nicholas Brown, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Imre Szeman, Ericka Beckman, Anna Kornbluh, and so many more. If it wasn’t for the Hen House and Unlovable, my time writing this would have been a much more somber affair, more work and less play. Dr. Kasra Koochesfahani helped me stay mentally healthy when times were tough. Anyone who has written a dissertation knows that it’s basically impossible to do if you don’t have good things in your life and, in that sense, Cassel Busse provided the conditions of possibility that made completing this dissertation a reality. Thank you for everything. The camaraderie of the Robarts 13th-floor crew—Dhruv Jain, Parastou Saberi, and Erin Mandzak—also helped enormously with the final push that got this done (let’s go Raptors!). This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Jenna Schick and Ted Laughlin, who have supported and encouraged me now through many years of education. I am grateful for everything you have given me. Love you both. I also dedicate this dissertation to the members of the Teaching Assistants’ union, CUPE 3902, who went on strike in 2015, and to the ideal of a university that is free and accessible to everyone, where education, not administration, is the priority.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... vi

1. Introduction: How to Historicize Affects ...... 1 1.1 Desire ...... 5 1.2 The Liberal Subject ...... 8 1.3 Guilt ...... 13 1.4 Disappointment ...... 14 1.5 Affect: Immediate or Mediated Phenomenon? ...... 16 1.6 Sianne Ngai and the Subjective/Objective Dialectic of Emotions ...... 21 1.7 From the Particular to the General: Lauren Berlant and Cruel Optimism ...... 24 1.8 Breaking with the New Historicism: Affect Against the Linguistic Turn ...... 28 1.9 Fredric Jameson, Narrative, and the Desire for History ...... 32 1.10 Affect and the Political Unconscious ...... 37 1.11 Raymond Williams: From Mediation to Structures of Feeling ...... 39 1.12 Character, Theme, Worldview ...... 44

2. History as Desire: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the Birth of Capitalism .....46 2.1 The Fetishism of the Family and Its Secret ...... 52 2.2 Of Other Worlds, or, the Geology of Love ...... 62 2.3 Catherine and “the Beautiful Soul” ...... 73 2.4 Heathcliff, or, the War Machine ...... 79 2.5 History and Melodrama ...... 85

3. The Dickens Guilt Machine: Great Expectations and the Crisis of Liberalism ...... 89 3.1 After 1848: Cruel Optimism and the Crisis of Liberalism ...... 94 3.2 First as Tragedy… ...... 101 3.3 …Then as Farce ...... 106 3.4 Dickens’s Tragi-Comic Conception ...... 114 3.5 Guilt and Class Society ...... 118 3.6 Links ...... 127 3.7 Work and the Dickensian Imagination ...... 131

4. George Eliot’s Low Expectations: Realism and the Imagined Community at the End of the Age of Capital ...... 140 4.1 Thinking the Nation, Mapping Totality ...... 146 4.2 “Incarnate History” ...... 151 4.3 From Politics to Self-Culture ...... 157 4.4 Narrating Gesellschaft ...... 164 4.5 Low Expectations ...... 181

5. Conclusion: A Feeling for Totality ...... 191 5.1 Fredric Jameson, Affect, and the Dissolution of Realism ...... 194 5.2 Affect and Totality ...... 199

Works Consulted ...... 203

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1 Introduction: How to Historicize Affects

“Is it something in the style or something in the thought? An element of form or an element of feeling?” – Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet”1

Feeling Capitalism argues that Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2), when read together, constellate the affective dimensions of life under advancing capitalism around three dominant emotions: desire, guilt, and disappointment. “I am Heathcliff,” Catherine proclaims as testament to her desire, but in blatant contradiction of empirical fact.2 Pip guiltily confesses, “I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality.”3 Having contemplated Lydgate’s failed union with Rosamund, Eliot’s narrator concludes, in a characteristically generalizing bit of wisdom: “life must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation, as it is by men who have lost their limbs.”4 In each case, the focalizing emotion, I will argue, is not only specific to the character or scene, but also a dominant structuring affect of the work as a whole, one that has historical specificity, tying the text to the decade of the novel’s production: Brontë’s insatiable desire to the libertarian romanticism of the revolutionary era as well as the separation of the public and private spheres in the transition to capitalism; Dickens’s inexorable guilt to the “liberal guilt” that followed in the years after the failed proletarian revolutions of 1848, attaching negative connotations to individual “great expectations,” which must now appear to be at the cost of the less fortunate; and, lastly, Eliot’s inescapable disappointment and resignation to the lowered expectations of the 1870s, when the millenarian spirit of the former decades had subsided in what, for many, felt like a Victorian “end of history.”

The first half of this introduction offers a summary of the dissertation’s larger argument as developed in each of the following chapters, as well as a brief discussion of the

1 Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet,” in Complete Stories 1892-1898 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 581. 2 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Peterborough: Broadview, 2007), 103. 3 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Charlotte Mitchell (New York: Penguin, 2003), 23. 4 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (London: Penguin, 1994), 652.

1 2 embattled concept of the liberal subject that lurks behind these different ways of feeling capitalism. The remainder is devoted to addressing methodological and theoretical questions about what it means to treat a literary work as an affective response of social transformation and how one goes about doing that.

My methodological inquiry begins by addressing the debate in affect theory about whether affect is an unmediated, precognitive phenomenon distinct from the more social and cultural phenomenon we call emotion. I explore the terms of this distinction as first articulated by Brian Massumi in Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002). Here, I argue that, rather than maintain Massumi’s steadfast distinction between affect and emotion, it is more productive for literary criticism to focus on the way in which precognitive affects (if they do exist) are always anyways in a process of becoming historical, that is, of being freighted with cognitive content and cultural meanings. I turn instead to Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005) and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) for models of how to historicize affect. Ngai and Berlant both develop theoretical vocabularies for addressing the way in which the literary work of art responds to and is conditioned by its context, overlaying the objective conditions of experience with the subjective language of the literary artwork, which provides its “affective structure.”5 Their hermeneutic practices, although not identical, are both oriented towards uncovering the cognitive in the affective.

I argue that Ngai and Berlant’s affect theories break with the lingering orthodoxies of New Historicism and the culturalist turn, in which all experience, personal and collective, is reduced to a cultural text. Like Ngai’s and Berlant’s (although Berlant’s to a lesser degree), my work draws authority instead from the heuristic, or depth model, of cultural analysis put forward by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). Jameson’s theory of different layers and circumferences of meaning offers a useful model for an affect theory that strives to reconnect affects with their historical backgrounds, which can be obscured or elided if affects are treated as

5 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 11. Hereafter cited in parentheses as CO.

3 precognitive or intensely personal and subjective. Dwelling on those famous lines in The Political Unconscious—that “History is what hurts … what refuses desire”6—I suggest that Jameson’s Marxist literary theory is already to some degree an affect theory, as it proposes to get at history through the mediums of pain and suffering that result from the refusal of desire. These, after all, are essentially affective mediums of experience.

The penultimate section of the introduction takes up Raymond Williams’s notion of a “structure of feeling” so as to situate both his concept and my appropriation of it within the Marxist problematic of the relationship between base and superstructure. Here, I use his discussion of “structures of feeling” to argue that the historicization of affect is not an exercise in reflection theory, not a simple matter of discovering in literature the representation and imitation of real-life experiences and emotions. Surely, there is some of this mimetic content in the Victorian novel, and Feeling Capitalism deals with it from time to time. But the aim of my project is directed primarily at uncovering the ways in which affects permeate and structure the worldview of the novels I discuss, in a manner that is mediatory and not mimetic. Desire, guilt, and disappointment are thus construed in my interpretation as ways of feeling something other than just these emotions—namely, the social and political history of capitalism. I conclude by isolating three levels of the literary artwork that are permeated and structured by affect: character, theme, and worldview. In this respect, my analysis of these novels charts a movement from the particular to the general, in which a character’s feelings start to transcend his or her own interiority, becoming the theme of the novel, and eventually structuring the novel’s projected worldview, which together mediate a relationship with the novel’s own historical moment.

Aside from Raymond Williams’s work on Victorian literature, there are not to my knowledge many critical projects that attempt to treat the Victorian novel as a “structure of feeling.” Literary criticism on the Victorian novel, although it often deals with representations of emotions, almost always does so by flattening out emotion, examining

6 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 102. Hereafter cited in parentheses as PU.

4 it for the way it is formalized and staged in its representation, and then parsing it for its representational logic and the way its representation manipulates and enlists the reader. This tendency to flatten emotion is on display in three recent books of criticism on representations of sympathy in Victorian literature. For Rae Greiner, sympathy is, in fact, always representational: “sympathetic imagining,” she says, “follows from aesthetic principles. Sympathy is formal. Its formal properties could thus be analyzed irrespective of whatever emotions were (or were not) produced or shared.”7 This is also true for Audrey Jaffe. The Victorian novel’s many “scenes of sympathy,” she says, “document modern sympathy’s inseparability from representation: both from the fact of representation, in a text’s swerve toward the visual when the topic is sympathy, and from issues that surround representation, such as the relation between identity and its visible signs.”8 For both Greiner and Jaffe, the sympathetic subject is constituted and produced in representation itself. This is sympathy, then, not as a feeling, but, as Rachel Ablow puts it in her study of Victorian sympathy, “as a psychic structure through which the subject is produced, consolidated, or redefined.”9 For Ablow and Greiner, the fact that representations of sympathy can produce and consolidate sympathetic subjects gives its representation an ethical, humanist value. Jaffe, however, argues more persuasively that, since sympathy requires the feeling subject to be in a position of relative superiority to the suffering subject, “[w]hat circulates in Victorian representations of sympathy—what these representations both circulate and reveal as constituted in that circulation—are social identities; in particular,” she says, “scenes of sympathy in Victorian fiction mediate and construct middle-class identities.”10 These three studies, then, are interested primarily in the way in which the representation of emotion produces feeling subjects and how representation manipulates the reader, bending him or her to its influence, producing ethical humanist readers or, more ambivalently for Jaffe, consolidating middle-class identities.

7 Rae Greiner, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1 8 Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 2-3. 9 Rachel Ablow, The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 2. 10 Jaffe, 9.

Feeling Capitalism does not deny the validity of any of these claims, but my interest in emotion is decidedly different. My aim is not to show how representation constructs and consolidates feeling subjects but to map a relationship between a social-political reality and literary representation that is constituted and mediated in literature at the affective level, overlaying the objective and the subjective, the larger historical horizon of experience (capitalism) and the aesthetic art form. For simplicity’s sake, then, the difference between my own project and those outlined above could be thought of as the difference between the depth model associated with Marxism, where what is sought is the social-political reality behind the aesthetic form, a reality which informs and determines it in diverse ways and which the aesthetic form then reflects in however distorted a fashion, versus the Foucauldian model, where what is sought is the social-political phenomenon that follows from representation, that is produced and is brought into being by it. In my interpretation of desire, guilt, and disappointment, my interest lies not so much with the characters that feel these emotions, or even with how readers might feel them, but with how these affects ultimately detach from their subjects and become ways of allegorizing a different story, that of social transformation in the nineteenth century.

1.1 Desire Chapter 2 interprets Wuthering Heights as a story about the freeing of desire from the social. This argument evolves in three parts, corresponding to roughly three stages of the plot’s development.

The first examines Brontë’s penetration to the core of the family in Wuthering Heights, where we see the family not as a naturalized and harmonious entity, but as a volatile one whose boundaries are constantly being contested, drawn and re-drawn. Here, the orphan Heathcliff provides a kind of litmus test for the family’s inclusive potential: first adopted and incorporated into the yeoman family by Mr. Earnshaw and then expelled by Mr. Earnshaw’s heir, Hindley. Heathcliff’s childhood drama, I argue, is allegorical of two enclosures. The first is the enclosure of the commons, which threw populations off the land and forced them to migrate to cities like the one where Mr. Earnshaw finds the abandoned Heathcliff. The second is the enclosure of domestic space as a private sphere

6 separate from the public sphere. When Heathcliff is expelled from the Earnshaw home, he is expelled alongside the other servants, as Hindley and his new wife try to distinguish the home as a place of leisure, modeled on the luxury of the Grange which they envy, and thus separate from any reminders of communal labour. This disruption of the organic community at the Heights, based in shared (even if unequal) labour, will ironically be completed by Heathcliff in the final pages of the novel, when he gets his revenge on Hindley by appropriating the Heights as bourgeois private property, ready to lease to any willing tenant, who (lucky for us) arrives in the form of Mr. Lockwood and commits what he sees and learns about at the Heights to the words that fill the pages of Wuthering Heights.

The second part of my argument focuses on what happens to desire when Heathcliff and Catherine are estranged from each other as a result of Hindley’s banishment of Heathcliff. Once the two are separated from one another, Catherine and Heathcliff’s desire takes on a mystical life of its own, separate from the earthly events that follow, and indeed becoming a kind of compensation for the earthbound everyday world that forces them apart. “I am Heathcliff,” Catherine proclaims; “he is more myself than I.”11 Catherine’s assertion—“I am Heathcliff”—holds in abeyance, I will argue, the ideal of some ultimate reconciliation of Catherine and Heathcliff as equals cordoned off from the contradictions of empirical reality and lived experience that make their union an impossibility.

In the third and final part of my argument, I show how this excess of desire which haunts the first pair of would-be lovers allows us to read the second generation of lovers, Cathy and Hareton, as a further incorporation of this unearthly desire into the reality of the novel, at the same time that the pacific nature of the second romance suggests that the passion of the first must still await its full incorporation at some as of yet unrepresented stage of history. The alienation of desire from the social thus frees up desire for an allegorical re-writing of history as a story about desire, which now codes the erosion of

11 Brontë, 102-3.

7 the rural vestiges of yeoman self-sufficiency replaced at the end of the novel with Catherine and Hareton as the prototype of a future bourgeois domesticity.

My interpretation of the novel proposes that Wuthering Heights is symptomatic of a new social order in which, increasingly, desire has the power to organize and inform a whole worldview or, as Jameson calls it, a whole new metaphysic, which rewrites history as itself a story about desire.12 This is born out in the twin process of atomization and reification under capitalism: on the one hand, the separation of individuals from traditional communities as well as the land and the means of production and, on the other, the increasing commodification of the social markers of success and status, of property and leisure. Significantly, Catherine’s desperate assertion, “I am Heathcliff,” is not only a utopian solution to their physical separation, but also a metaphysical solution to their poverty, which makes their union a real-world impossibility since neither (but especially Heathcliff in the first half of the novel) is wealthy enough to support the other. The problem for Catherine and Heathcliff—and indeed for all the Victorian heroes and heroines that I discuss in Feeling Capitalism (Pip, especially; but also the plurality of characters in search of vocations in Middlemarch)—is that in this new social order ambition is necessary not just for survival, but also for the subject’s sense of self-worth. In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill proclaims, “The term duty to oneself, when it means anything more than prudence, means self-respect or self-development, and for none of these is anyone accountable to his fellow creatures.”13 From John Milton to John Stuart Mill, the liberal subject is presumed “sufficient to have stood” but also and necessarily “free to fall.”14 Such a fall, though, is no longer merely a fall from grace; it is the fall of lowered expectations, a diminishing of self-respect, and the downward spiral of self-defeating actions, which are figured as personal betrayals of what was supposed to be an “inherent” self-sufficiency and potential. How could there not now be this excess of desire leftover to take on quasi-mythical attributes and become a whole new way of thinking—and feeling—about history and one’s relation to it?

12 I will discuss Jameson’s argument about the rewriting of history as a story about desire at greater length in Chapter 2. 13 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 77. 14 John Milton, Paradise Lost, The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 349-710, 3.100.

1.2 The Liberal Subject Such inherent self-sufficiency, however, is a myth, as is the liberal subject who is supposed to possess it: that self-realizing individual whose freedom of choice in worldly pursuits allows him or her to create and preserve a life of his or her own fashioning with the single caveat that such freedom of choice not encroach on the freedom of others to do the same. But just because one believes in the individual’s capacity for self-realization does not ipso facto guarantee one’s success. Embedded in the history of the Victorian novel, Feeling Capitalism proposes, is the history of a budding dissatisfaction with this liberal subject and the modern world in which the subject was meant to realize his or her full potential. If we are to understand why such liberal subjectivity was such an elusive goal and punishing ambition for the Victorians, we need to understand the way that different aspects of the Protestant work ethic and political liberalism conspired with nineteenth-century capitalism to produce an idealized concept of subjectivity that was markedly different from the lived reality of most—a difference that appears like the return of the repressed in the plottings of the novels examined in Feeling Capitalism.

It is worth noting in this context that there are two Mills: the libertarian Mill who defends our bad actions, our freedom to fall, since, as he rightly observes, “An objection which applies to all conduct can be no valid objection to any conduct in particular,” and a progressivist Mill who says that, “Among the works of man which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself.”15 Implicit in the latter—in this imperative to perfect—is also a progressivist view of history, which, at times, though not always, becomes more explicit in Mill’s writing: For what is the peculiar character of the modern world—the difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of time long past? It is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their

15 Mill, On Liberty, 18, 36.

faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.16 But, as Andrew H. Miller points out in his study of Victorian moral perfectionism, fittingly entitled The Burdens of Perfection, that “there is a best self to be discovered … also implies that this self needs discovering; we are not readily apparent to ourselves or to others but must be called forth and given support.”17 This imperative to perfect is, as Jameson might say, “ideology and Utopia all at once,” for it takes the existence of a self- perfectible individual for granted without guaranteeing him or her the means of doing so in advance (PU, 237). For Marx, though, the question of means is a particularly vexed one under capitalism, where “[i]t is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker.”18 The British prophets of perfectionism are thus susceptible to the same charges Marx and Engels launched at the Young Hegelians in The German Ideology: “The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.”19 With this reversal, the self-perfectible individual inheres only as a quasi- theological belief to which all would-be perfectionists must prostrate themselves.

Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), published just after the turn of the century, offers unique insight into how this quasi-theological belief in the self-sufficient and therefore self-perfectible individual came to be enshrined in the ideology of capitalism. His study traces “the influence of certain religious ideas on the development of an economic spirit, or the ethos of an economic system,” which, for him, suggests a “connection of the spirit of modern economic life with the rational ethics of ascetic Protestantism.”20 As R. H. Tawney explains in his Foreword to Weber’s study,

16 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 488. 17 Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 8. 18 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin—New Left Review, 1976), 425. 19 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988), 29. 20 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Minola, NY: Dover, 2003), 27. Hereafter cited in parentheses as PE.

The central idea to which Weber appeals … is expressed in the characteristic phrase “a calling.” … To the Calvinist, Weber argues, the calling is not a condition in which the individual is born, but a strenuous and exacting enterprise to be chosen by himself, and to be pursued with a sense of religious responsibility. From this perspective, Protestants came to view “the pursuit of wealth as, not merely an advantage, but a duty.” 21 The reason for this duty was, as Weber explains, a complex and somewhat contradictory attempt to provide Protestants who believed in predestination a practical method of convincing themselves and others of their salvation, which, significantly, was no longer available to them through confession or purchase. “In practice,” Weber explains, “this means that God helps those who help themselves” (PE, 115). In other words, “if the God, whose hand the Puritan sees in all the occurrences of life, shows one of His elect a chance of profit, he must do it with a purpose. Hence the faithful Christian must follow the call by taking advantage of the opportunity” (PE, 162).

That the logic of such thinking is incredibly flawed, however, does not matter to Weber; in fact, it makes more convincing the ease with which he says the theological import of “a calling” was eventually abandoned by the spirit of capitalism without our noticing and left us all unconsciously labouring after salvation from a God we no longer believed in, crucifying ourselves in the process, as we pursued that strange new God—Work. As he puts it in that now famous conclusion: The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the

21 R. H. Tawney, Foreword to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 2.

shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (PE, 181) Weber’s argument provides a useful addition, then, to what is the now more familiar Marxist narrative about the alienation of labour under the capitalist modes of production, since it begins to explain why the liberal subject puts faith in the individual’s “inherent” self-sufficiency to a degree that to betray it is felt as to betray something that is, for lack of a better term, God-given. “Waste of time,” Weber explains, “is thus [made] the first and in principle the deadliest of sins” (PE, 157). As “every hour lost is lost to the labour for the glory of God,” “unwillingness to work is [therefore] symptomatic of the lack of grace” (PE, 159). The Victorian novel, I will argue, did not openly contest this religion of work, of salvation through work, but rather questioned the availability of such avenues for self-capitalization by asking with bitter earnestness: “what work and where do we find it?” If we are to understand what was the Victorians’ felt-experience of modern subjectivity, I propose, we need to theorize what it must have felt like to cling to the abstract ideal of liberal subjectivity even as one was simultaneously and unconsciously forming negative feelings about the efficacy of that ideal to deliver what it promised: the agency to self-create.

Progress and failure, it seems, go hand in hand. Only the latter can make the former tangible. Even Samuel Smiles, the great nineteenth-century advocate of self- improvement, understands this: “Failure is the best discipline of the true worker, by stimulating him to renewed efforts, evoking his best powers, and carrying him onward in self-culture, self-control, and growth in knowledge and wisdom.”22 Progress and failure thus form a dialectic that contains a “bad infinity”; each cannot help but raise the spectre of the other. There is, in these liberal fables of self-culture, an intense desire to have one’s character determine one’s fate, which, figured in such a way, ought to turn individual success into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

22 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance, ed. Peter W. Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.

For example, in Thomas Carlyle’s epoch-defining work, Sartor Resartus, he proclaims, A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible. Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees it natural lineaments. Hence, … the folly of the impossible Precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at.23 “[T]ill it be translated into this partially possible one”: this, however, is a subjunctive and, at best, only partial solution. Really self-certainty cannot get any more uncertain than this. Nonetheless, the failure to ascertain and maintain self-improving labour is still sensed to be the ultimate form of self-betrayal.

In The Burdens of Perfection, Miller defines Victorian moral perfectionism as the imperative “that we turn from our ordinary lives, realize an ideal self, and perfect what is distinctly human in us—and that we do so in response to exemplary others.”24 Feeling Capitalism, however, delineates a counter-narrative to the one outlined by Miller that attests to an equally persistent attraction to bad examples in Victorian literature—an attraction to those who seem doomed to betray their “inherent” self-sufficiency and potential (Catherine, Pip, Dorothea, to name only three), who are incapable of making a so-called latent-self manifest. My project, then, is concerned less with the qualified optimism that Miller identifies in moral perfectionism and more with what Ngai calls the “ugly feelings” of modernity, by which she names those “affective gaps and illegibilities, dysphoric feelings, and other sites of emotional negativity” that accompany artistic representations of “suspended agency”—feelings, which she argues, are “explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release. In fact, most of these feelings tend to interfere with the outpouring of other [less ambiguous] emotions.”25 Unlike typical treatments of the emotions in literary criticism on the Victorian novel, which tend to focus on the circulation of positive, ameliorating affects like sympathy and happiness, Feeling

23 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, eds. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 126. 24 Miller, 3. 25 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2005), 1, 6-7. Hereafter cited in parentheses as UF.

Capitalism focuses on recessive negative feelings, feelings related to what Thomas Hardy’s narrator in Tess of the D’Urbervilles calls the “the ache of modernism”—that characteristic frustration and disappointment that is concomitant with an inability to actively shape one’s lived reality.26

1.3 Guilt This frustration and disappointment is tracked in Chapter 3 through an examination of the guilt that haunts Dickens’s hero in Great Expectations (1861). The hero’s guilt is a long- standing source of fascination for critics of the novel. This criticism, however, tends to privatize guilt, eventually locating it in the hero himself: in some cases, treating the novel as a moral parable about a social guilt which the hero must claim and take on in order to expiate and atone; in others, treating that guilt as existential guilt, in which the guilt felt by the hero is the significance of choice compelled in the face of necessity; and, more recently, in a Foucauldian approach to the novel, treating that guilt as constitutive of a subjectivity produced by the new technologies of discipline and punishment that operate by exposing the individual to the ever-suspicious and panoptic gaze of modern, institutional power.27 This latter approach is closest to my own in that it treats the hero’s guilt as an effect of structure, or rather as a symptom of society as a whole. In my own interpretation, that guilt is not the effect of power, though, but of capitalism itself, whose exploitive relationships are conjured in the image of a social machinery that endlessly produces and proliferates guilt through complicity. Here, in what I call the Dickens guilt machine, all the characters share equally in this guilt, which, like capital itself, remains in constant circulation. As with desire in Wuthering Heights, guilt here becomes the basis for a whole metaphysical worldview and phenomenological world projected by the novel. It should be noted as well that guilt follows logically on the heels of desire, a new feeling that mingles now with the disappointment of the old.

26 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. Tim Dolin (New York: Penguin, 1998), 124. 27 See respectively: Dorothy Van Ghent, “On Great Expectations,” in The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Rinehart and Co1953), 125-138; J. Hillis Miller, “Great Expectations,” in Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 249-278; Jeremy Tambling, “Prison-bound: Dickens and Foucault,” Essays In Criticism: A Quarterly Journal in Literary Criticism 36.1 (1986): 11-31. For a pioneering application of the Foucauldian approach to the Victorian novel more broadly, see D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

This way of feeling capitalism, I argue, is symptomatic of the post-1848 environment, in which, after the revolutionary hopes of that year’s proletarian uprisings had been dashed, liberalism could no longer maintain that it was the political ideology of the working class and emerging bourgeoisie united against the aristocracy and “Old Corruption.”28 The result of that fateful year in Britain, although the country did not have its own revolution, was the stark revelation that bourgeois and proletarian demands were opposed and that those of the former and not the latter were now directing the national project. I take as emblematic of this feeling the words of Christian socialist F. D. Maurice quoted by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958): there came that awful year 1848, which I shall always look upon as one of the great epochs of history…. I do say that when I think how it has affected the mind and the heart of the people of England; yes, of all classes of Englishmen…. I hear one intelligent man and another confessing; “Ten years ago we thought differently. But all of us have acquired since that time, a new sense of our relation to the working-class.”29 This “new sense of our relation,” as I will argue, meant that the realization of liberal subjectivity was now tinged with acknowledgement of guilt and complicity in an exploitive society. This guilt is processed in a highly allegorical fashion in Dickens’s novel through the notion of the hero’s Great Expectations, which come to represent, among other things, enthusiasm about individual success and merit in a competitive society, an enthusiasm which the novelist represents as being in the need of serious chastening.

1.4 Disappointment

28 See Eric Hazan, A History of the Barricade, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), 79: By the end of March 1848, the popular movement—and its barricade—seemed … to have triumphed in Germany and the Austrian empire. But everywhere … the armies of absolutism withdrew before the movement without having been weakened. From the month of May onward—and above all after the crushing of the Paris proletariat in June— reaction would strike…. By the end of 1848, the absolutist order had been restored. 29 F. D. Maurice qtd. in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 112-3.

Chapter 4 deals with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Following in the footsteps of the previous chapter, I argue here that this chastening of enthusiasm for individual and collective projects led from guilt to disappointment. In Middlemarch, this is represented above all else by the tone of the omniscient narrator, who situates her characters in a larger historical arch, stretching from the political idealism that characterized the buildup to the First Reform Bill to the more sober years following the Second, from which she now writes this epic story of everyday provincial life. There is a sharp disparity between the idealism of her characters and the skepticism of the narrator, who frequently interjects to use her historical vantage point to admonish the shortsightedness of her characters’ idealism and the deluded egoism that lurks behind it, encouraging her readers instead to embrace more modest sentiments and a greater willingness for compromise and resignation. This maturity—what I call Eliot’s “low expectations”—is justified by the narrator’s repeated gestures to an evolutionary account of social development in which individuals and even the collective are displaced as meaningful agents in a larger historical narrative, which now seems to move on without a subject.

In Middlemarch, this pessimism is nonetheless tied to enormous developments in the realist novel’s cognitive potential. Eliot’s narrator is able to grasp society as a totality in a way that neither Wuthering Heights nor Great Expectations is capable; but the insight comes at a cost: the disappointed fate of the individual as a meaningful agent of change. The whole apparatus of the novel thus turns on a dialectical unity of opposites, between the sublime (the steadfast vision of History marching forward) and the bathetic (the displacement of any discernible subject leading the march of History): hence the middlemarch of the title, which seems to broker a compromise. Eliot’s dialectic of the sublime and the bathetic, I argue, is encoded at the very level of her sentences, in which her narrator philosophizes in baroque syntax about the inevitability of disappointment in which ambitions and idealism, like her own extended metaphors, must come to an anti- climatic conclusion—ending halfway between where they started and the grandeur they projected. Desire, guilt, and disappointment, in my interpretation, thus form something like the holy trinity of affective life under advancing capitalism in the Victorian period.

Such an approach to the Victorian novel thus strives to tell two related and imbricated stories at once. The first is that of the development of English capitalism in the nineteenth century, starting from the period of the French Revolution (roughly contemporaneous with the events of Wuthering Heights) to the beginning, in 1875, of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the Age of Empire. The second is the story of how the novel—“the predominant art form of modern bourgeois culture,” as Georg Lukács called it30—developed as a response to and representation of the new dynamism unleashed by capitalist transformation, ordered and arranged around three dominant affective responses, three ways of feeling capitalism.

1.5 Affect: Immediate or Mediated Phenomenon? By treating desire, guilt, and disappointment as affects that are freighted with social and cultural meanings and therefore suggestive of certain felt experiences in response to social transformation in the nineteenth century, Feeling Capitalism puts forward a theory of affect that proposes to treat affect as a mediatory category, shuttling between historical experience in the raw and its expression and representation in the Victorian novel. However, mediation, as I will be arguing throughout this introduction, does not necessarily imply mimesis—a one-to-one reflection, or imitation, of reality. Affective mediation is perhaps better thought of as a kind of re-coding in which elements of personal, felt experience are subsumed into larger representational strategies and made to vehiculate or allegorize cognitive content, which is not self-identical with the affect doing the mediating. So, for example, in my argument, desire, guilt, and disappointment are interpreted not so much as subjective emotions, reflective of some interior feeling subject, but rather as inherently social emotions or affects, which point back to some larger collective experience or Victorian lifeworld particular to the capitalist mode of production itself. In this sense, Feeling Capitalism charts a dialectical movement from subjective to objective horizons of meaning that is immanent to Victorian representations

30 Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Howard Fertig, 2002), 2. However, just because the novel achieves cultural dominance in bourgeois society, doesn’t not mean that it should be understood as expressing in an undiluted way bourgeois attitudes or that its creators are themselves bourgeois in their own class affinities and perspectives. The relationship of the novel to “bourgeois society” is, as I will argue, much more complicated. See also, Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (New York: Verso, 2013).

17 of affect, whereby the merely personal and subjective dimensions of emotional experience are transcended and replaced with properly historical or “objective” coordinates, giving the affect socio-cultural meaning.

There is much debate, however, within the burgeoning field of affect theory, about whether affects move in this direction, from the subjective towards the objective, or if they are even subsumable to a theory of mediation in the way that I have just proposed. Brian Massumi, for example, famously theorizes affect as the immediate: as raw sensation, pre-cognitive and therefore also always pre-representational. In Massumi’s words, affects are “unassimilable” intensities.31 They are in this sense different from what Jameson in his recent book on affect calls “named emotion”—emotions such as “love, hatred, anger, fear, disgust, pleasure and so forth.”32 These named emotions are rather second-level affects that have gone through stages of psychological elaboration and meaning-making so as to become emotions now imbued with recognizable personal and cultural content. As Massumi writes in his field-defining work: An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the convention, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. (PV, 28)

This can be clarified by reference to Williams James’s famous dictum, “We don’t cry because we are sad. We are sad because we cry.” James is, in many ways, an antecedent of contemporary affect theory like Massumi’s. What he is getting at in this seemingly illogical assertion is that sadness is a secondary interpretation of something that happens first in the body before cognition can make sense of it. The body responds to something

31 Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke, 2002), 27. Hereafter cited in parentheses as PV. According to Ruth Leys, Massumi, who is “widely credited with emphasizing that distinction, defines affect as a nonsignifying, nonconscious ‘intensity’ disconnected from the subjective, signifying, functional-meaning axis to which the more familiar categories of emotion belong.” “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011), 441. 32 Fredric Jameson, Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 29. I will discuss Jameson’s contribution to discussions of affect in my conclusion.

18 that stimulates it in such a way that causes tearing. The mind then recognizes this and calls it sadness. It is perhaps for this reason that crying often seems involuntary, and that we might excuse our tears by saying something like, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that telling this story was going to make me so sad.” According to affect theory, it is this moment of realization that makes the affect—crying—into the emotion sadness. The crying itself is merely the body’s response to an unidentified stimulus. At this pre- linguistic, pre-cognitive moment of tearing, all we have is affect. In this sense, affect is unrepresentable for once we try to represent it we’ve already passed into a secondary level of interpretation where the affect becomes an emotion imbued with personal and cultural meaning.

For affect theorists, especially those, who, like Massumi, have been influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, affect represents a virtual realm of potentialities: 33 The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are in-folded…. The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt—albeit reduced and contained. (PV, 30) The interpretation and transformation of affect into emotion is the passing of the virtual or potential into the actual. As Massumi states, “Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture—and of the fact that something has always and again escaped.” However, at the same time, “Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective.” Affect is “this two-sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other” (PV 35). At the

33 It is a matter of some contention whether the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari is accurately represented by the work of Massumi and his followers. My own position is that while there is certainly much in Deleuze and Gauttari that can be made to substantiate Massumi’s position, their project is much larger than a meditation on affect, including a theory of the larger historical of dynamic of Western civilization and the development of capitalism (see for example, section three of their Anti-Oedipus entitled, “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men”) and therefore cannot be reduced to Massumi’s narrow focus on affect.

19 level of this virtual, affective body, which isn’t so much a body as it is an abstract bundle of nerves (or what Deleuze and Guattari call the Body without Organs), there is a fundamental indeterminacy, or chaos, in which all potentialities exist all at once in a virtual realm awaiting their expression which will also be their capture and eventual naming, as they enter into the cultural sphere as identifiable, named emotions.34

For Massumi affect is an ever-present destabilizing element in our lives. The virtual and actual planes exist side by side, in a constant feedback loop or in a series of folds, or what Massumi calls “infolds.”35 Affect, although unrepresentable properly speaking, is always there, challenging representation and coherence not as a force of negation, but rather as the potential emergence of something else. As Massumi asserts, there is a “quantum indeterminacy” to affect that makes it similar to “that same undecidability fed forward into thought, as evidenced in the deconstructability of every structure of ideas (as expressed, for example, in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and in Derrida’s difference).” For Massumi, “[e]ach individual and collective human level has its own peculiar ‘quantum’ [of affect]” that challenges and undermines from within the stability of the molar structure that currently contains and captures it: “emotion on the psychological level, resistance on the political level, the specter of crisis haunting capitalist economies and so forth. The modes are fed back and fed forward into one another, echoes of each other one and all” (PV, 37).36 It remains to be said, then, that affect, for theorists like

34 For their discussion of the Body without Organs, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 9-17, and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 149-66. 35 For his discussion of infolding, see Massumi (PV, 39-40 and 43). 36 For her devastating critique of affect theory’s appeal to neuroscience to evidence its claims, see Leys, 436: what motivates these scholars is the desire to contest a certain account of how, in their view, political argument and rationality have been thought to operate. These theorists are gripped by the notion that most philosophers and critics in the past (Kantians, neo- Kantians, Habermasians) have overvalued the role of reason and rationality in politics, ethics, and aesthetics, with the result that they have given too flat or ‘unlayered’ or disembodied an account of the ways in which people actually form their political opinions and judgments. The claim is that we human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensities and resonances that so decisively influence or condition our political and other beliefs that we ignore those affective intensities and resonances at our peril—not only because doing so leads us to underestimate the political harm that the deliberate manipulation of our affective lives can do but also because we will otherwise miss the potential for ethical creativity and transformation that

Massumi, is in a sense a transhistorical category, or rather—to allow for greater complexity—that which is always in a process of becoming historical, but which in and of itself lacks history.37 But insofar as Massumi’s affect theory is able to create a conceptual language capable of theorizing the emergence of this (supposedly) unrepresentable thing, it is theorizing immediacy, not mediation.38

The theory of feeling capitalism that I put forward here certainly presupposes the idea that literature, treated as an “affective structure,” is responding in some way to the external stimulus of history, which is, at least at first, immediate and perhaps precognitive. I am not, however, interested, as Massumi is, in developing a theoretical vocabulary that can recuperate for discussion such elusive, precognitive affects, nor am I interested in mobilizing affect, as a kind of “unassimilable” intensity, to act as a destabilizing force against various power structures. In fact, I am willing to allow that such precognitive moments, if they truly are precognitive, are largely a lost referent that can only be recuperated retrospectively, in a highly mediated fashion, whether it is through mediatory tools of science, Massumi’s theoretical discourse, or Victorian literature. Feeling Capitalism is much more invested in the other side of the affect/emotion dichotomy that Massumi models, what I prefer to think of as the becoming-historical of affect—the way in which affect, once “captured” and recognized, becomes freighted with cognitive content and cultural meaning and further circulated and structured in literary works of art. My dissertation draws inspiration, then, from affect theorists like Sianne Ngai and Lauren Berlant, who are much more ambivalent about the distinction between emotion and affect and, like me, are invested in developing a hermeneutic that is capable of accessing the cognitive content and cultural meanings that become encoded in “affective structures.”

‘technologies of the self’ designed to work on our embodied being can help bring about. 37 This transhistoricality is what Massumi calls the “autonomy of affect”: “The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognition fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect” (PV, 35). 38 Hence Massumi: “At the fundamental physical level [as opposed to the cognitive level of perception], there is no such mediation [between the virtual and the actual]. The place of physical nonmediation between the virtual and the actual,” he says, “is explored by quantum mechanics,” which he proposes relating to the study of affect (PV, 37).

1.6 Sianne Ngai and the Subjective/Objective Dialectic of Emotions

Ngai’s Ugly Feelings offers an incredibly useful model of how to historicize affects and access the coded meanings for which they become conduits. The whole argumentative arc of her book is directed towards what could productively be thought of as the de- subjectivization of emotion. Over and over again, she shows how emotions, once aestheticized and represented, take on certain literary qualities and indices of meaning, which are not limited to the individual feelings of authors, readers, or even characters, but rather form a dialectic unity of subjective and objective qualities, which are then refracted through the literary work of art. Just as I propose to do, Ngai examines the way these represented emotions, once dissociated from the subject, can become allegorical vehicles for the representation of a capitalist lifeworld.

Ugly Feelings, Ngai’s writes, “presents a series of studies in the aesthetics of negative emotions, examining their politically ambiguous work in in a range of cultural artifacts produced in what T. W. Adorno calls the fully ‘administered world’ of late modernity.” Ngai uses the example of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, who famously responds, “I would prefer not to,” when anything is asked of him. “What, if anything,” she asks, “is this inexpressive character feeling? Is Bartleby’s unyielding passivity, even in the polemical act of withholding his labor (‘I prefer not to’), radical or reactionary? Should we read his inertness as part of a volitional strategy that anticipates styles of nonviolent political activism to come, or merely as a sign of what we now call depression?” For Ngai, the point is not to decide, but to “dwell” in the ambiguity, examining and cataloguing these “affective gaps and illegibilities, dysphoric feelings, and other sites of emotional negativity in literature, film, and theoretical writing, to explore similarly ambivalent situations of suspended agency” (UF, 1).

Ngai’s affect theory, despite what appears to be an initial fascination with surfaces, is actually a depth-discovering hermeneutic. Her literary criticism is directed not solely towards the identification and naming of the “ugly feelings” listed in her table of

22 contents, whose aesthetic, she says, is traced from “the circumscribed standpoint of the literary,” but additionally the “problems whose greatest import arguably lies beyond the sphere of the aesthetic per se” (emphasis mine).39 She thus proposes that the “ugly feelings” represented in the literature of late modernity—for example, “Bartleby’s powerful powerlessness”—“can also be thought of as exemplified by literature or art itself, as a relatively autonomous, more or less cordoned-off domain in an increasingly specialized and differentiated society.” Quoting Adorno, she explains, “one could argue that bourgeois art’s reflexive preoccupation with its own ‘powerlessness and superfluity in the empirical world’ is precisely what makes it capable of theorizing social powerlessness in a manner unrivaled by other forms of cultural praxis.” Thus, she concludes, “literature may in fact be the ideal space to investigate ugly feelings that obviously ramify beyond the domain of the aesthetic proper, since the situation of restricted agency from which all of them ensue is one that describes art’s own position in a highly differentiated and totally commodified society” (UF, 2).

Ngai’s is a meditation on emotion rather than affect, then (at least as Massumi defines the latter).40 What Ngai is discussing is not the shimmering and ever-diverse potentiality of the virtual affective body, but the way in which emotions, nameable and identifiable, become the conduits of historical attitudes and reference points: emotions, in other words, “charged with political meaning” (UF, 3). “Each of the feelings explored” in her book, she says, “can thus be thought of as a mediation between the aesthetic and the political” (UF 2-3, emphasis mine). For Ngai, feelings are “fundamentally ‘social’” (UF, 25).

In Ngai’s model of affect theory, the difference between emotion and affect merely distinguishes between first-person and third-person standpoints, the subjective and objective, in the sense that I have been using these terms. Emotion is the personal experience; affect is the same thing, but viewed objectively from the outside. As she observes, “The affect/emotion split originated in psychoanalysis for the practical purpose

39 Chapters 2 through 7 are named after an “ugly feeling”: “Animatedness”; “Envy”; “Irritation”; “Anxiety”; “Stuplimity” (an emotion combining stupefaction and the sublime, which she gives her own name); “Paranoia”; and an afterword entitled, “On Disgust.” 40 However, Ngai, as I will show, complicates Massumi’s easy distinction between the emotion and affect, opting instead for dialectical model of their unity in opposition.

23 of distinguishing third-person from first-person representations of feeling, with ‘affect’ designating feeling described from an observer’s (analyst’s) perspective, and ‘emotion’ designating feeling that ‘belongs’ to the speaker or analysand’s ‘I’” (UF, 25). The depersonalization associated with the word “affect” opens the emotional life of the subject up to analysis and interpretation, such that a certain logic can be shown to be at work in its formation that might otherwise escape the subject’s knowing. As she points out: “At the end of the day the difference between emotion and affect is still intended to solve the same basic and fundamentally descriptive problem it was coined in psychoanalytic practice to solve: that of distinguishing first-person from third-person feeling, and, by extension, feeling that is contained by an identity from feeling that is not” (UF, 27).

This tension between first and third-person standpoints that undergirds the affect/emotion problematic becomes increasingly important as Ngai develops her argument: “Rather than … trying to dissolve this subjective/objective problematic by creating two distinct categories of feeling, this study aims to preserve it for its aesthetic productivity” (UF, 27- 8). Her primary example of aesthetic preservation of the “subjective/objective” problematic is tone. When we speak of a literary text’s overall tone as being, say, “‘euphoric’ or “melancholic’” (UF, 28), we are not necessarily identifying a subjective representation of these emotions in, for example, the form of a character who is said to feel them (although that might be true as well). Neither are we necessarily identifying our own affective response to the literary art work, since, insofar as we can identify euphoria or melancholy as a tone belonging to the text and not ourselves, we are discussing its objective qualities and not our own projections: as Ngai observes, “tone is never entirely reducible to a reader’s emotional response to a text or reducible to the text’s internal representations of feeling (though it can amplify and be amplified by both)” (UF, 29-30). Thus, Ngai refers to a text’s overall tone as “its global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation towards its audience and the world” (UF 28). For her, “Tone is the dialectic of objective and subjective feeling that our aesthetic encounters inevitably produce” (UF, 30). In Ngai’s hands, then, “affect” becomes a way of mediating the subjective and objective on many different levels, at the aesthetic level

24 of tone, but also between history and the text, as demonstrated in her comments on art’s frustrated sense of suspended agency in the highly-administered world of late modernity, which its “ugly feelings” allegorize. For Ngai, then, affects are, pace Mussami, fundamentally social phenomena, in which subjective and objective registers are overlaid, linking the singular to the universal and vice versa, in ways that are more allegorical than mimetic. The hermeneutic developed in Feeling Capitalism similarly understands affects as social phenomena and seeks, through a dialectical procedure, to uncover the objective in the subjective: the ways in which an emotion’s horizon of meaning, once aestheticized and represented, widens beyond the characters and ultimately the work itself, preserving, in some mediated fashion, a relationship to a larger historical context which need not appear directly in the work of art at the mimetic level.

1.7 From the Particular to the General: Lauren Berlant and Cruel Optimism

Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism also turns on this “dialectic of objective and subjective feelings,” examining the way in which our present moment is registered affectively— which is to say subjectively—before it can then be processed and translated into an objective historical event, which we can look back on with the confidence and sense of concreteness that only the past can bestow: “One of this book’s central claims,” Berlant writes, “is that the present is perceived, first, affectively; the present is what makes itself present to us before it becomes anything else, such as an orchestrated collective event or an epoch on which we can look back” (CO, 4). To a certain degree, what Berlant is describing here is the same dialectic between the virtual and the actual, the affective and the emotional, with which Massumi is concerned. Something happens; I am affected; and then, after a delay, I narrativize that response through recognition and naming: for example, I am crying because I am sad. Here, it is the “because” that makes crying into the stuff of narrative, projecting temporality and causality—first sadness, then as a result crying. But, as we saw for Massumi and for William James before him, such a projection reverses and represses the enduring virtual primacy of the affective body from which all affects are said to appear and disappear again. Where Berlant differs from Massumi, and where her own affect theory becomes useful for my own approach to

25 interpreting affect, is when she argues that these immediate “affective responses,” insofar as they have historical and cultural significance to us as literary critics, are never available to us in an unmediated fashion. Surely we all have private “affective responses” to any variety of different stimuli and these responses may be caught up in precisely the delayed loop of recognition and cognitive reversal that Massumi describes. But insofar as these affective responses are interesting to us as something other than the merely private stuff of affective/emotional existence, they must first be represented and mediated as part of a shared culture.

This, in effect, is Berlant’s answer to the question she poses in her opening pages: “But how can it be said that aesthetically mediated affective responses exemplify a shared historical sense?” (CO, 3). The critic’s task, for Berlant, is to reconstruct the historical context to which such emotional responses can be indexed so as to give “aesthetically mediated affective responses” a kind of socio-cultural legibility. Berlant’s book is primarily focused on one affective response—what she calls “cruel optimism.” “A relation of cruel optimism exists,” she says, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (CO, 1). These relations of “cruel optimism,” like Ngai’s ugly feelings, are examined from the “the circumscribed standpoint” of the aesthetic (UF, 2), but they are indexed to changes occurring more broadly in the contemporary. Her books, she says, considers relations of cruel optimism ranging from objects or scenes of romantic love and upward mobility to the desire for the political itself. At the center of the project, though, is the moral-intimate-economic thing called “the good life.” Why do people stay attached to conventional good- life fantasies—say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work—when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds? Fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world “add up to something.” What happens when those fantasies start to fray…? (CO, 2) For Berlant, “fantasies that are fraying” in contemporary, neoliberal society “include

26 particularly, upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy,” and, more broadly, “meritocracy, the sense that liberal-capitalist society will reliably provide opportunities for individuals to carve out relations of reciprocity that seem fair and that foster life as a project of adding up to something and constructing cushions for enjoyment” (CO, 3). This fraying is, for Berlant, sociological and historical in origin and represented and registered in the cultural sphere by a new predominance of narratives depicting (and subtly critiquing) “cruel optimism” by admitting that “something you desire”—particularly the “good life” as formerly defined and realized—might now be “an obstacle to your flourishing” (CO, 1).

Berlant’s theory of “cruel optimism”—although aimed very specifically at diagnosing the “affective structure” of present-day neoliberal society—has ramifications for how we might understand the Victorian novel’s relationship to the liberal ethos of the nineteenth century. As I’ve already suggested above, the novels I discuss in Feeling Capitalism are in no way clearly for or against liberalism, even if all of them engage to some degree with liberal ideas: specifically those that figure the individual as someone for whom the securing of personal freedoms and self-determination is of the utmost importance. The introduction of these ideas into the novel, however, generates certain narrative challenges and contradictions. Since, in the context of the nineteenth century, liberalism is very specifically an attack on the entrenched social and political privileges of the aristocracy and landed gentry, or “Old Corruption,” such freedoms can in no way be guaranteed in advance. In fact, it is taken for granted, especially in the first half of the century, that the “inherent” rights of the individual require populist agitation and, ultimately, political and social reform to secure. But as capitalism develops in tandem with political liberalism, the revolutionary potential of the former begins to surpass that of liberalism itself, producing unaccounted for class dynamics, particularly between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which begin to contradict the liberal values of universal brotherhood and equal progress.41 In this context, a liberalism that privileges and foregrounds the

41 See, for example, Raymond Williams comments about the literature of the 1840s: “The confident assertions of the social character, that success followed effort, and that wealth was the mark of respect, had to contend, if only unconsciously, with a practical world in which things were not so simple. … Debt and

27 individual as a site of inherent creative potential and self-determination can become a form of “cruel optimism” insofar as it gets in the way of rationally viewing the dynamics of actually existing liberal society—in other words, of laissez-faire capitalism. I explore this more fully in relation to Pip’s guilt, which, in my interpretation, codes a recognition of these contradictions at the core of the liberal ethos even if the novel itself doesn’t represent them explicitly. This guilt, which follows from the coded recognition that success is contingent on and relative to someone else’s exploitation and oppression, thus mediates a relationship between the novel and the larger dynamics of capitalism as a whole.

What becomes noticeable in Berlant’s project, however, is that for her there is a weak literalism or mimetic similarity between representation and reality: “cruel optimism” is predominant in the literature and film she discusses because it is also predominantly experienced and felt in neoliberal societies. There is no sense of a constitutive gap here which affect mediates: affect is “aesthetically mediated,” as she says, but it still ends up looking like what it was before it was aestheticized. This, then, is a somewhat different position from my argument that guilt in Dickens is not just reflective of guilty feelings that run throughout the wider society, but also a way of aesthetically grappling with and mediating something other than itself—namely, the dynamics of capitalism that are in contradiction with the ideal of liberal subjectivity. In this respect, my approach is more similar to Ngai’s argument that art’s “ugly feelings” can be read back to the marginalization and autonomization of the aesthetic itself under capitalism. Ngai’s position, like my own, is indebted to a style of symptomatic reading, whereby an aesthetic effect is re-connected with a deep structural cause, which is able to re-write the meaning of the surface effect, such that, for example, desire, guilt, and disappointment can be interpreted as mediating an experience of something else: the social transformations wrought by capitalism in the nineteenth century.

Despite my reservations about the weak literalism in Berlant, which elides the

ruin haunt this apparently confident world, and in a majority of cases simply happen to the characters, as a result of a process outside of them.” The Long Revolution (Cardigan: Parthian, 2011), 87.

28 constitutive gap between reality and its representation, Cruel Optimism nonetheless offers a useful model for charting affect’s trajectory from the singular to the general and for indexing negative feelings to moments of social and historical change not contained or particular to a single feeling subject, but shared and therefore collective. “I am extremely interested in generalization,” Berlant asserts, counter to conventional wisdom in current literary criticism: how the singular becomes delaminated from its location in someone’s story or some locale’s irreducibly local history and circulated as evidence of something shared. This is part of my method, to track the becoming general of singular things, and to give those things materiality by tracking their resonances across many scenes, including the ones made by nonverbal but still linguistic activities, like gesture. (CO, 12) Ngai’s and Berlant’s models, if taken together, thus provide strong examples of what can be gained by treating affect as a category mediating between personal and collective experiences, the individual and society, representation and history. They allow us to treat a literary work of art not only as vehicle for the representation of affect, but also as an “affective structure” in itself. In so doing, they offer a much needed alternative to the lingering tenets of New Historicism that have exerted a pervasive influence over literary study and criticism, becoming a kind of literary-critical orthodoxy that has survived even after the name of New Historicism has largely receded in popularity.

1.8 Breaking with the New Historicism: Affect Against the Linguistic Turn

Perhaps one of the more exciting results of the affective turn in literary studies is its revitalization of the literary work of art as a kind of extension of lived human experience: a virtual Body without Organs, always responding and recovering, fragmenting and regrouping, from any variety of stimuli and lived experience. Such an approach to literature emphasizes the need of art and culture, as much as anything else (for example, therapy and politics), for organizing and communicating these confusing and discombobulating experiences, which need making sense of. Massumi’s approach, however, by trying to deploy affect in its most immediate and always vanishing moment

29 of precognitive intensity against ossified power structures, normalized epistemologies, and social hierarchies, seems to disallow any serious investigation of the other side of his affect/emotion dichotomy, which I have renamed the becoming-historical of affect. Ngai and Berlant offer much more useful models of affect theory, in which affect is a mediatory category, the interpretation of which can connect us with vital and important historical horizons of meaning, which are, to reverse the old watchword of poststructuralism, outside the text. In this respect, their theories and my own developed in Feeling Capitalism are incompatible with the more extreme manifestations of the linguistic turn in New Historicism, in which reality itself is often construed as a product of discourse, of textuality.

For New Historicism everything is cultural and everything cultural is a text. There is thus never any possibility within this paradigm of charting the kind of movement between the particular and the general, the singular and the universal, or between representation and some larger historical context or reference point, which is so important to the interpretation of the Victorian novel that I pursue in Feeling Capitalism. By treating everything as cultural, New Historicists, like Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, constantly and unrelentingly question and challenge the nature/culture binary, “treating all of the traces of an era … as a single cultural formation,” that is, as a single, and seemingly, inexhaustible text (PNH, 7-8).42 They relish provocative, counterintuitive question asking: “To what extent,” for example, Gallagher and Greenblatt write, “can bubonic plague, infant mortality, or venereal disease be regarded as cultural?” (PNH, 8, emphasis mine).

For New Historicists, history is one great archive of cultural texts. As Gallagher and Greenblatt explain, “[t]he notion of culture as text” is appealing because “it vastly expands the range of objects available to be read and interpreted. Major works of art remain centrally important, but they are jostled now by an array of other texts and

42 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 7-8. Hereafter cited in parentheses as PNH. On inexhaustibility, see their comment that, “The unsettling of the relation … between representation and bodily reality gives rise to a sense of archival and interpretive inexhaustibility” (PNH, 15).

30 images.” Here, in the vast archive that is history, the New Historicist focuses in on the fine grain of the language used in the documents they analyze. They comb these for patterns of representation that confirm the emergence of certain historical tropes and figures, which are then parsed for their internal logic, for the subjects that language appears to consolidate and those it is seen to expel. In this respect, New Historicism is fiercely critical: “Where traditional ‘close reading’ tended to build toward an intensified sense of wondering admiration, linked to the celebration of genius, new historicist readings are more often skeptical, wary, demystifying, critical, and even adversarial” (PNH, 9). New Historicism is as a result obsessed with the limits of language, the places at which representation seems to strain most, overcompensating and thus undermining itself. New Historicism is fascinated with the politics of representation, or rather representation as a kind of politics.43

Although influenced by Marxist ideology critique, New Historicism rejects the notion that there is a constitutive gap between history and representation that can be demystified to reveal the way in which history conditions ideational structures and how those ideational structure in turn mediate, but also distort or code, the material conditions that inform them.44 Instead New Historicists prefer “discourse analysis,” which seeks to understand how language itself regulates our perception of what is real and what is not, what counts and what does not. For the New Historicist, real reality is discourse’s sublime other, encountered only at the further most limits of that which seems to resist or challenge it. There is then never any hope within the paradigm of New Historicism of putting the literary work of art into a dialectical relationship with history, as a force of determination or as an object of representation. Gallagher and Greenblatt write,

43 Referring to the journal, Representations, which they helped found and which would become one of the major vehicles of the New Historicist method, they write, “After considerable debate, we settled on representation as the central problem in which all of us … were engaged” (PNH, 4). 44 As Gallagher and Greenblatt observe, This hermeneutical aggression was initially reinforced for many of us by the ideology critique that played a central role in the Marxist theories in which we were steeped, but, as we were from the beginning uncomfortable with such key concepts as superstructure and base or imputed class consciousness, we have found ourselves, as we will discuss at some length in this book, slowly forced to transform the notion of ideology critique into discourse analysis. (PNH, 9)

If a whole culture is regarded as a text—if all the textual traces of an era “count” as both representation and event—then it is increasingly difficult to invoke “history” as censor. That is, for new historicism, history cannot easily exercise that stabilizing and silencing function it possessed in analyses that sought to declare the limits of the sayable and thinkable. The New Historicist, thus, becomes, in a manner of speaking, fixated with the rule of exceptions, not exceptions found in history itself, but exceptions in language’s determination by history, which always exceeds the latter’s grasp: “Against the determinism that attempts to insist that certain things in a given period were beyond conception or articulation, new historicism invokes the vastness of the textual archive, and with that vastness an aesthetic appreciation of the individual instance” (PNH, 16).

The only thing New Historicism can put the literary artwork in touch with then are other texts, in which the critic traces a network of relationships, confirming the emergence of discursive patterns of thinking, new literary tropes and figures in the great textual archive of the past, which are then counterpoised to the places in the archive where such cultural/linguistic regulation is resisted or breaks down, confronting its own limitations.45 But even here the power of the word remains sacrosanct and unquestionable: If an entire culture is regarded as a text, then everything is a least potentially in play both at the level of representation and the level of event. Indeed, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a clear, unambiguous boundary between what is representation and what is event. At the very least the drawing or maintaining of that boundary is itself an event. (PNH, 15) This is the world reduced to the word, and history to one great inexhaustible text, to which the only kind of resistance imaginable is synonymous with the inarticulable exceptions that language must confront at its limit point. New Historicism is in a sense bizarrely ahistorical, then, often exaggerating the power of the word to shape reality in its

45 “That is, our work has always been about resistance as well as replication, friction as well as assimilation, subversion as well as orthodoxy” (PNH, 16).

32 own image, such that fictions become reality, or else reveling in counterfactuals, what was almost, but never was.46

Counter to the critical models of Ngai and Berlant and my own project, New Historicism tracks a movement that can be broadly construed as the movement from the general to the particular, the universal to the singular, the latter of which becomes a space of destabilizing exceptionality, typically located in an abstract body which escapes and therefore challenges representation.47 It is therefore conceivable that New Historicism could be married to a Massumian interest and investment in the affective body as a constant destabilizing force, troubling existing forms of representation and the knowledge structures attached to those representational forms. However, to treat the literary work of art as an “affective structure,” mediating the universal and singular, history and representation, necessarily involves developing a hermeneutic that strives to establish a relationship between a concrete reality and its encoding in a literary-aesthetic form that is prohibited by New Historicism’s culturalist turn. Affect theories like Ngai and Berlant’s, and especially my own honed in Feeling Capitalism, instead draw their authority from Jameson’s groundbreaking The Political Unconscious.

1.9 Fredric Jameson, Narrative, and the Desire for History Although The Political Unconscious was not written as a rebuttal to New Historicism (which was, in 1981, only in its infancy), and even though the book shares many of the assumptions of New Historicism, he provides drastically different solutions to the problem of representation that distinguishes him in important ways from the former. The Political Unconscious is in many ways both an early articulation and, to some degree, symptom of this thwarted desire for history as a stable referent. Jameson famously begins his book with the battle cry “Always historicize!,” which he refers to as, “the one

46 “[W]e mine what are sometimes called counterhistories that make apparent the slippages, cracks, fault lines, and surprising absences in the monumental structure that dominated a more traditional historicism” (PNH, 17). 47 “The way bodies are understood to function, the difference between men and women, the nature of the passions, the experience of illness, the border line between life and death are all closely bound up with particular cultural representations, but they cannot simply be reduced to those representations. The body functions as a kind of ‘spoiler,’ always baffling or exceeding the ways in which it is represented” (PNH, 15).

33 absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought” (PU, 9). How Jameson proposes we historicize, however, becomes a rather complicated matter, which takes roughly one hundred of the book’s three hundred pages to explain before he provides concrete examples of his methodology (and even then there is a strong sense that Jameson’s “case studies” are additive—more theories in their own right than examples as such). It is not necessary to paraphrase here the entirety of Jameson’s notoriously complicated explanation of his theory, routed as it is through numerous other people’s theories in his own brand of metacommentary.48 Instead I move directly to one of its more pointed and pertinent conclusions: his polemical jab at what he calls “a host of contemporary post-structuralisms and post-Marxisms, for which History, in a bad sense—the reference to a ‘context’ or a ‘ground,’ an external real world of some kind, the reference, in other words, to the much maligned ‘referent’ itself—is simply one more text among others.” Against this, he “propose[s] the following revised formulation: that history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious” (PU, 35).

History in the raw (not unlike Massumi’s affect) is unrepresentable for Jameson. Insofar as we grasp it, we are already grasping on to one of its effects and not the thing itself. This is a kind of Marxist agnosticism then, not in the sense that the truth of history itself is undecidable, but merely that it is inaccessible to us in any direct, unmediated fashion. It is here that the appropriation from Freud of the theory of the unconscious becomes most meaningful in Jameson’s introduction of his notion of a political unconscious and his claim that History (for Jameson always with a capital H to signify that were are dealing with a properly unrepresentable absolute) always and only becomes accessible to

48 For Jameson, texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions. This presupposition then dictates the use of a method (which I have else where termed ‘the metacommentary’) according to which our object of study is less the text itself than the interpretation through which we attempt to confront and to appropriate it. (PU, 9-10)

34 us by “pass[ing] through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious” (PU, 35).

As we know, for Freud, every dream is shaped by two contradictory “psychic forces (tendencies or systems), one of which forms the wish expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship over this dream-wish, thereby enforcing on it a distortion.”49 The first strives to represent a deep-seated desire or wish originating in childhood as fulfilled and the second to censor or disguise that representation. As Freud writes, The [latent] dream-thoughts [i.e. the wish] and the [manifest] dream- content present themselves as two descriptions of the same content in two different languages; or, to put it more clearly, the dream-content appears to us as a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose symbols and laws of composition we must learn by comparing the origin with the translation. … The dream-content is, as it were, presented in hieroglyphics, whose symbols must be translated, one by one, into the language of the dream-thoughts. (ID, 174). The point, for Freud, is that nowhere in the dream are the “dream thoughts,” or infantile desires, represented directly or named explicitly. As he says, “The dream is, as it were, centred elsewhere; its content is arranged about elements which do not constitute the central point of the dream-thoughts” (ID 196). The elusive “dream-thoughts” are recoded in the unconscious, which is also to say that they are recoded unconsciously so as not to alert the pre-conscious censor. The finished “product” the dreamer recounts to the analyst has thus—to make the connection with Jameson explicit now by using some of his language quoted above—already “pass[ed] through its prior … narrativization in the … unconscious” (PU, 35). The dreamer narrates to the analyst what has itself already undergone a process of re-narrativization. The analyst’s job is to reconstruct the original narrative that has been disguised—in other words, to reconstruct the proper context of childhood experience that will give the seemingly nonsensical images of the dream meaning.

49 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 52. Hereafter cited in parentheses as ID.

As Freud observes, “The first thing that becomes clear to the investigator when he compares the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that a tremendous work of condensation has been accomplished. The dream is meager, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream-thoughts” (ID, 175). Moreover, “one can never be really sure that one has interpreted a dream completely…. Thus the degree of condensation is—strictly speaking—indeterminable” (ID, 176). The dream- thoughts, then, are never available directly, only retrospectively and through analysis. But that this larger horizon of meaning can be recreated is Freud’s wager: “All the dream-content that has been lost by forgetting can often be recovered by analysis; in a number of cases, at all events, it is possible to discover from a single remaining fragment, not the dream, of course—which, after all, is of no importance—but the whole of the dream-thoughts” (ID, 375). The smallest fragment or detail in the dream may be enough to recreate a whole version of the larger personal history through interpretation. Even the most recessive infantile desires and traumas can, through interpretation, be reconnected with the larger historical narrative of which they form but a part or symptom. This is essentially the same structure that Jameson proposes for the political unconscious of a text, which, through interpretation can reconnect an aesthetic structure to a larger, but this time collective, historical narrative that will shed light on its obscurities and mysteries.

For Jameson, this privileged hermeneutic is not Freudian psychoanalysis per se, but, as he famously argues, Marxism: “Only Marxism,” he says, “can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it.” For Jameson, though, “This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; … only if, in however, disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity” (PU, 19).50 Finally he concludes: “It is in detecting the traces of that

50 This is the diametric opposite of the New Historicist claim that, “There is no longer a unitary story, supreme model of human perfection, that can be securely located in a particular site” (PNH, 5).

36 uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity” (PU, 20).

What Jameson appropriates from Freud, then, is first and foremost a heuristic model that relies on the metaphoric possibilities of discussing different “levels” of meaning, in which some meanings can be construed as superficial (or manifest) and others as hidden and deep (or latent). What he also borrows is the notion that these “deep” meanings can only be recuperated retrospectively by analysis or interpretation. Here, completeness is at once an ideal and an impossibility. For both Freud and Jameson, what is deep is historical: for Freud, the infantile wish, formed and thwarted in childhood; for Jameson, simply desire itself, not some abstract universal desire, but that which, in any locally and temporally specific place and time, has been denied its fulfillment for political reasons. In those now famous words that conclude his first chapter: “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversal of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force” (PU, 102). It is from this standpoint—that “History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly”—that Jameson defends the Marxian ideal of totalization to which poststructuralism (and later New Historicism) so strongly objects, while working at once within and against the dominant current of poststructuralism.

Critics often equate Jameson’s practice of totalization with a vulgar act of reduction in which the plentitude of the work of art is diminished by being reduced to an effect of its historical-economic determinants, which it is then said to reflect or express.51 Jameson, however, insists that the opposite is true: namely, that totalization is not necessarily at odds with those “very post-structural philosophies which explicitly repudiate such ‘totalization’ in the name of difference, flux, dissemination, and heterogeneity,” which,

51 As Jameson observes: “Lukács’ notion of totality (outlined in History and Class Consciousness) and Sartre’s methodological ideal of totalization (described in the Critique of Dialectical Reason) have generally been condemned by association with Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, a space in which all contradictions are presumably annulled, the gap between subject and object abolished, and some ultimate and manifestly idealistic form of Identity [i.e. similarity] is established” (PU, 50).

37 he says, must anyways be provoked “by some initial appearance of continuity, some ideology of unification already in place, which it is their mission to rebuke and to shatter” (PU, 53). For example, the Marxist “outline of totality” that we get in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, he argues, is merely that of “a methodological standard,” the overall thrust of which is “essentially critical and negative, demystifying” (PU, 52). “[S]uch an approach,” he continues, “posits ideology in terms of strategies of containment, whether intellectual or (in the case of narrative) formal. Lukács’ achievement was to have understood that such strategies of containment … can be unmasked only by confrontation with the ideal of totality which they at once imply and repress” (PU, 52-3). Thus, he concludes, “In this sense, Hegel’s great dictum, ‘the true is the whole,’ is less an affirmation of some place of truth which Hegel himself (or others) might occupy, than it is a perspective and method whereby the ‘false’ and the ideological can be unmasked and made visible” (PU, 53). Insofar, as the literary work of art projects its own internal completeness at the level of both its plot and the various ideological naturalization it perpetuates—its “strategies of containment”—totalization actually destabilizes that internal completeness, opening the text on to a much wider field of historical determination against which the text’s own closure is radically destabilized and opened up to wider circumferences of meaning, namely the historical and political.

1.10 Affect and the Political Unconscious It precisely to the end of achieving this widening of literary-aesthetic meaning—what Jameson calls “totalization”—that my own project intends to deploy affect as mediatory category, locating the universal in the singular, the objective in the subjective, in short, the political unconscious in literary representation. Before I proceed to establish more concretely a model for linking affect to the political unconscious, there are a few things that I want to highlight about these concluding maxims offered by Jameson. The first is that Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious is already to some degree an “affect theory.” If history is what hurts (an affect!), and if it can never be grasped in any unmediated fashion, then Jameson himself is also in a sense treating the literary work of art as an “affective structure,” mediating the universal (the political unconscious) and the singular (the aesthetic form). In his analysis, historical suffering—an affective response

38 to social transformation—structures the literary work of art, but in unconscious and highly coded ways that require interpretation and excavation, so as to realign the literary form with its repressed historical background. The shifting squares on the cover of the Cornell University Press edition of his book are symbolic of these shifting fields of reference, the widening of the text’s meaning from the singular drama of the story’s plot, to the collective drama of a historical people or class, and, at last, to the historical mode of production itself, which for Jameson becomes a kind of ultimate ground of meaning and place of determination.

The second thing to note is that Jameson’s pain of history is the result of the refusal of desire, the latter of which is another and perhaps more primal affect. Here, Jameson, of course, means to appropriate for his own purposes the Freudian theory of desire to make it commensurable with his theory of the political unconscious. Given the explicit and uncompromising Marxist statements that come earlier in the book, we are clearly intended to understand “desire” in a political sense, as a kind of avatar or shorthand for class struggle, that is, as the desire/struggle for a classless society: “the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity” (PU, 19). But already by using the shorthand of “desire,” Jameson, perhaps unintentionally, demonstrates the power of affective experience and affective language (desire and the pain of its refusal) to code and structure a historical imaginary. It is precisely this kind of coding and structuring effect of affect and affective language that Feeling Capitalism aims to isolate and analyze in the Victorian novel.

My own project too begins with desire, which I position with the help of Jameson as a kind of foundational affect for capitalist experience, one born of the separation of people from the land and the privatization of the desire that is concomitant with the atomization of the family from the social, both of which I explore via Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I do not deal directly with pain, with history as what hurts, but pain is implicit in all my chapters. In Wuthering Heights desire survives as an autonomized mythical force precisely because we are made to feel that it never achieves its full realization, but is rather thwarted and refused at various stages. Pip’s Great Expectations are mortified

39 when he realizes the legacy of pain and violence to which they connect him, the universal guilt in which he is unwittingly partaking by enjoying them. That guilt can be acknowledged; but it can never be adequately transcended. It persists as an organizing force in the novel, structuring its fictional world and worldview. The disappointment and lowered expectations I explore in Middlemarch are similarly related to pain: the crushing of idealism that accompanies disappointment and the warding off of further anguish that comes with lowered expectations. The challenge, however, of treating the literary work of art as an “affective structure” is not simply to analyze the representation of affect— how its orders, organizes, and generally permeates, the structure of a novel—but also to establish a relationship between some larger horizon of meaning and experience and that “affective structure” which is a response to it. In my dissertation that larger horizon of meaning and experience is, as my title Feeling Capitalism suggests, the political and historical advancement of capitalism in the nineteenth century. What I hope to avoid, by adopting a theory of mediation to discuss affect is the drawing of a crude mimetic verisimilitude, or reflection, between this larger horizon of meaning and representation in the literary work of art. The theory of mediation instead establishes a connection between object and subject—for me, capitalism and the Victorian novel—which it also asserts and maintains as different and therefore distinguishable. Thus, in Feeling Capitalism, I attend not only to the mimetic content of the Victorian novel—its reflection of some historical reality, in the case of the novels I discuss, pre-Victorian society—but also the levels of mediation whereby, as in a metaphor, one thing comes to stand in for another as a means for grappling with and making sense of the first. Put more simply, I am not just interested in the representation/reflection of affect—desire, guilt, and disappointment—but how the representation of these affects becomes a way of thinking about, or indeed feeling, something other than they immediately suggest: capitalism.

1.11 Raymond Williams: From Mediation to Structures of Feeling

The so-called reflection theory of early Marxist literary criticism—often dismissively referred to as “vulgar”—is probably the most denigrated legacy of the Marxist method, especially after poststructuralism’s and New Historicism’s problematization of

40 representation. To its opponents, “reflection” seems to suggest self-identity, or doubling: what is out there in the world is reflected in the mind and literary representation as mimesis (imitation of reality). However, as both Jameson and Raymond Williams have argued, while the concept of “reflection” can be literalized to produce vulgar results, its original and more productive meaning is metaphorical. This is how Jameson puts it in Marxism and Form (1971): The figure of the reflection of reality in thought is therefore simply a kind of conceptual shorthand designed to mark the presence of [a] type of mental operation … namely the setting in contact with each other of two distinct and incommensurate realities, one in the superstructure and the other in the base, the one cultural and the other socio-economic.52 “Reflection” then is a process through which one tries to negotiate and bring together for thought and criticism two seemingly “distinct and incommensurate realities.” Even though a mirror presents an inverted version of reality, that reflection nonetheless helps me negotiate and bring together how I experience my self and how others perceive me even if that inverted image of my self is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. The literary “reflection” of reality thus transcodes “two distinct and incommensurate realities”: the subjective, interior world of the novel held in the mind of the author and the objective, external world of the socio-historical context in which it is written. The result is both aesthetic—that is, pleasurable—but also, according to the wager of so-called reflection theory, cognitive, in that it contains and conveys something of objective reality as well.

The metaphoric possibilities of “reflection,” however, have serious limitations when it comes to explaining how this datum of objective reality is contained and conveyed in the aesthetic form, which is probably why the reflection trope leads so easily to vulgar literalization. Because of this, Williams says in Marxism and Literature (1977), the Marxist theory of reflection has evolved, particularly through the work of the Frankfurt School, into a theory of mediation. For Williams, the concept of mediation is still metaphorical. But it has the advantage of diminishing the connotations of self-identity

52 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 189.

41 between reflector and reflected and figuring their relationship as an active instead of passive process.53 For Jameson, the theory of mediation “thus recognizes an obligation to transcend the limits of specialized analysis at the same time that it respects the object’s integrity as an independent entity. It presupposes a movement from the intrinsic to the extrinsic in its very structure, from the individual fact or work toward some larger socio- economic reality behind it.”54

The dialectical relationship the concept of mediation implies—inside/outside, foreground/background, and so on—is thus one way of understanding the problematic relationship in Marxism between what gets called “base” and “superstructure.” The fact that this relationship is problematic, however, is not made better by attempts to simplify the relationship—as it is claimed “vulgar” Marxists have tried to do—as a unidirectional sequence in which the economic base determines a cultural “superstructure.” “Base” and “superstructure” are rather two more metaphors in the Marxist anthology of tropes: what they figure is precisely the problem of the relationship between culture and the economy itself that needs to be established, particularly under advancing capitalism, when culture begins to appear as something separate from society, but when in actuality it is drawn with increased regularity into the circulation of commodities and exchange values that produces capital.

The point then is not that the economic base is the only determining factor, but that it is a determining factor, which sets inexorable limits that cannot be ignored. To understand the truth of a cultural institution means grappling with the socio-economic reality in which its practices and ideology emerge. In Jameson’s words, “the very term superstructure already carries its own opposite within itself as an implied comparison, and through its own construction sets the problem of the relationship to the socio- economic base or infrastructure as the precondition for its completeness as a thought.”55 The problem figured by the terms “base” and “superstructure” is thus not just a problem

53 For Raymond Williams discussion of this, see Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 97-100. Hereafter cited in parentheses as ML. 54 Jameson, Marxism and Form, 4. 55 Jameson, Marxism and Form, 4.

42 to which Marxist criticism addresses itself, but also one immanent to the literary text itself and thought in general. As Williams explains, for the theory of mediation, all active relations between different kinds of being and consciousness are inevitably mediated, and this process is not a separable agency—a “medium”—but intrinsic to the properties of the related kinds. “Mediation is in the object itself, not something between the object and that to which it is brought” [Adorno]. Thus mediation is a positive process in social reality, rather than a process added to it by way of projection, disguise, or interpretation. (ML, 98-9)

However, Williams goes on to note in Marxism and Literature that the theory of mediation itself loses sight of the material base of cultural production and the fact that a novel is the particular labour of the novelist to produce—and that, therefore, the author’s subjective experience of the material conditions under which the literary text is produced will also be “reflected” in the process of mediation. These subjective experiences include the classic details of biography—family relations, social class, political commitments, geographic location, and so on—but, also importantly, the mode of the text’s dissemination, which increasingly in the nineteenth century becomes mass production and circulation for a blossoming literary market. The author’s experience of these material conditions affects his or her literary representation; the objective, external world is filtered through her unique artistic language and stylistic signature, which Williams proposes we examine as what he calls a “structure of feeling.”

Some have come to question the coherence and usefulness of the concept. However, with the rise in popularity of affect theory (charted above), the concept is again beginning to be used and appropriated quite regularly. I, for one, find the concept persuasive and useful; but my feeling is that it needs to be explained within the framework of the Marxist problematic of the relationship between the “base” and “superstructure” that Williams was trying to address with it in Marxism and Literature. Here, Williams offers “structure of feeling” as an Aufhebung (or sublation) of the older conceptual language he takes to task: namely, ideology, reflection, and mediation. For Williams, the term “structure of

43 feeling,” while conceptually similar to a “world-view” or “ideology,” is meant to emphasize “a social experience which is still in process”—a creative response and solution to the lived experience of tension or contradiction, rather than the subordination of such tensions and contradictions to any of the available preexisting answers or possible solutions: “We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationship: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity” (ML, 132). For Williams, “The hypothesis [of the structure of feeling] has a special relevance to art and literature,” as it preserves, and highlights, the creative and intuitive side of cultural production without handing it over wholesale to “the specializing categories of ‘the aesthetic’, ‘the arts’, and ‘imaginative literature.’” It is thus “a way of defining forms and conventions in art and literature as inalienable elements of a social material process: not by derivation from other social forms and pre-forms, but as social formation of a specific kind” (ML, 133). For Williams “structures of feeling” are pre-figurative—related to the “emergent” rather than what is “dominant” or “residual” in culture (ML, 134). Although “structures of feeling” seem to be marked by subjective experience, namely the artist’s, they are—as lived solutions to real epistemological and social problems—responses that are shared and “which may in turn be seen as the articulation (often the only fully available articulation) of structures of feeling which as living processes are much more widely experienced” (ML, 133). They are thus solutions—soon to be recognizable as predictable aesthetic and ideological solutions—still in the process of being formed and not yet with a name: “Yet this specific solution is never mere flux. It is a structured formation which, because it is at the very edge of semantic availability, has many of the characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific articulations—new semantic figures—are discovered in material practice” (ML, 134).

Feeling Capitalism draws on the suggestiveness of Williams’s notion of a “structure of feeling” as a cognitive solution to an epistemological problem that is “at the very edge of semantic availability” as well as Ngai and Berlant’s approach to the literary work of art as an “affective structure.” In particular, as I have already suggested, I am interested in

44 whether dominant affects circulating in the nineteenth-century novel can be indexed to the particularity of their historical moments via a complicated process of mediation, in which the raw, unmediated lived experience of an author’s own society is narrativized (“captured” in a Massumian sense) and freighted in the process with epistemological and cognitive content. Such a theory of mediation, in my opinion, has the advantage of not requiring us to treat the novel as an exercise in mere mimetic reflection (whatever its putative realism), but rather enables a discussion and historicization of affect on many different textual levels at the same time.

1.12 Character, Theme, Worldview There are, of course, obvious instantiations of affect at the level of character: for example, Catherine and Heathcliff’s impossible desire for one another in Wuthering Heights; Pip’s sense of inescapable guilt in Great Expectations; and the many characters that individually experience disappointment and lowered expectations in Middlemarch. But these affects exist at a structural level, too, in that they acquire a certain thematic weight and universality such that one could easily say that Wuthering Heights is a novel about desire, Great Expectations about guilt, or Middlemarch about disappointment. It’s not just that the characters in these novel feel these emotions, but importantly that the social relationships of a wider society are also depicted as producing them: for example, the social inequalities that force Catherine and Heathcliff apart, fanning the flames of their unconsummated desire; the poverty that Pip is born into, which feeds his guilt and then later his vanity; or the petty provincial prejudices that hem Eliot’s characters in, crushing their dreams and youthful idealism. In all three novels, affect has a certain explanatory power, providing a way of making sense of a central social problem for liberal, bourgeois culture—how to ascertain individual success and self-realization in a competitive society. Affect helps narrativize this problem and at the same time subsumes its intractability to a certain “affective structure,” which does not require the transcendences of the problem, but rather maintains it. Desire is hypostatized as a non- personal and thematically structuring affect precisely because Catherine and Heathcliff can never be together: that is why their desire becomes larger than life. The same is true of Pip’s guilt, which is not expunged even when he renounces his Great Expectations; it

45 persists, but now as a symbolic avatar of an exploitive society based on competition and exploitation, which one single character’s remorse can never resolve. Eliot’s disappointment is more noticeable as a structuring affect because it is not only an affect experienced by her characters, but also evident in the very tone of the narrator herself. Here, disappointment becomes a way of making sense of and containing the limited successes of not just her characters but of the various millenarian projects and ambitions that, when she takes a panoramic view of history, seem tragically incomplete and under- realized. For all three novels, the dominant, structuring affect, pertains not only to character and theme, then, but also colours the worldview projected by the novel—its unique approach to understanding the world—which finds a certain adequacy and efficiency of a particular emotional response to capturing the complexity and contradictoriness of life under advancing capitalism in the nineteenth century.

The aim of Feeling Capitalism is not to dismiss these emotional responses as ideological, although they are surely that too at times, but rather to analyze them for the way in which they organize and structure these novels at many different levels and to mine these “affective structures” once uncovered for the cognitive content they convey as well. It is in this latter sense that Feeling Capitalism maintains an allegiance to The Political Unconscious and Jameson’s search for an explanatory and historicizing hermeneutic, for which my dissertation proposes to make affect a central and mediatory category.

2 History as Desire: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the Birth of Capitalism

“Toning down makes things worse. Subtlety pleads for barbarism.” – Jean-Luc Godard, For Ever Mozart1

Wuthering Heights is a story about an impossible passion: Catherine’s desire for Heathcliff, and Heathcliff’s desire for Catherine.2 Social inequalities and prejudices, however, force them apart, condemning their desire to existence on a spiritual plane, where it starts to take on a virtual life of its own. Reality conspires against them and they against it: “I am Heathcliff,” Catherine famously exclaims in contradiction to empirical fact.3 But to equate her very essence with someone from whom she is also physically estranged is, in effect, to separate her very soul from her own body: to be alienated from Heathcliff is to be alienated from herself and vice versa. This is a moribund dialectic, then—a bad infinity. For if neither can be distinguished from their opposite, then each, as Hegel says, “is solely through the other, and what each thus is it immediately no longer is, since it is the other. They have thus, in fact, no substance of their own which might support and maintain them.”4 For these would-be lovers, reality becomes a kind of “disreality.”5 Something has been withheld from the world, and, as a result, “everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”6 “I am Heathcliff” is the novel’s fantastical solution to the problem of opposites and, at the same time, guarantees its recurrence: the central

1 For Ever Mozart, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1996; Port Washington, NY: Entertainment One Film, 2014), DVD. 2 Using similar language, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar call the novel “an enigmatic romance of metaphysical passion.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 249. Hereafter cited in parentheses as MA. There will be much else to agree with in Gilbert and Gubar; but their interest in the novel’s “romantic” elements (its symbolism, archetypes, and proto-psychoanalytic plumbing of the unconscious) tend to blind them to the novel’s more concretely sociological content, which will here also be of concern. 3 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Peterborough: Broadview, 2007), 103. Hereafter cited in parentheses at WH. 4 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 86. Hereafter cited in parentheses as PS. 5 I borrow the term “disreality” from Roland Barthes, who defines it as the “[s]entiment of absence and withdrawal of reality experienced by the amorous subject, confronting the world,” in which his beloved cannot be found. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill, 1978), 87. 6 Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper,” in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings Volume Two, ed. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2010), 299.

46 47 motif around which its drama revolves, spirals deliriously in its line of flight, until any linearity can be sorted out.

In this respect, the novel’s structure is melodramatic. In the melodramatic novel, Peter Brooks explains, “the force of desire [is] caught in a death struggle with the life force. The novel is constantly tensed to catch this essential drama, to go beyond the surface of the real to the truer, hidden reality, to open up the world of spirit.”7 But ultimately, the novelist’s true subject is hidden and masked. The site of his drama, the ontology of his true subject, is not easily established…. We might say that the center of interest and the scene of the underlying drama reside within what we could call the “moral occult,” the domain of operative spiritual values, which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality. (MI, 5) Here, on the surfaces, though, everything becomes contingent and relative—guilty of being entangled in contradictions of which it would rather be innocent. We hope against hope that the truth will out, that desire will, at last, penetrate “the surface of the real.” But it won’t. The world of the melodramatic novel, and of Wuthering Heights particularly, is restless and stagnant at the same time.

The novel attends critically to those social factors that it implies have created such a repressive atmosphere: namely the class and gender inequalities of nascent capitalism and bourgeois patriarchy. But, in lieu of viable solutions to these social problems, the novel pursues a narrative in favour of desire’s transcendence of the social—its persistence in the face of these inequalities and in spite of them. The novel thus takes on the difficult task of balancing realism with romance, juggling a sociological argument alongside a metaphysical one.8 Much of the novel’s melodrama hinges on this uncertain relationship

7 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 2. Hereafter cited in parentheses as MI. 8 See also Terry Eagleton’s comment that, “Wuthering Heights fastens thematically on a near-absolute antagonism between these modes [realism and romance] but achieves, structurally and stylistically, an astonishing unity between them. … Wuthering Heights … confronts the tragic truth that the passion and society it presents are not fundamentally reconcilable.” Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës, anniversary ed. (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 100. Hereafter cited in parentheses as MP. There is an argument to be made for Wuthering Heights as a gothic fiction. My use of melodrama here,

48 between these two modes. Not surprisingly the novel is at pains to contain both these arguments—the sociological and the metaphysical—within its narrative structure. Like all fiction, it requires a conceit. Since it cannot solve sociological problems in the real world, it must limit itself to a fictional world. Brontë chooses a curiously small world: the family, or, more specifically, two neighboring families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, who intermarry, and one outsider, Heathcliff.

Wuthering Heights, as these problems of socio-familial relationships make clear, is an impassioned dream about individuation and incorporation, about what it takes to be an individual and to have others acknowledge and affirm that individuality in a way that is also social—a double-task of trading sameness for difference and difference for sameness in a way that compromises neither the individual nor the society of which it is to be a part. But that’s no easy task. Normalcy reigns in the family. To break out from under its rule means also falling out with the society whose affirmation one sought; but giving in to the tyranny of the “normal” also means sacrificing the individuality upon which one had hoped to stake one’s life. This is the wretched position in which Heathcliff and Catherine find themselves—lifelessly trapped on the inside, or doomed to the outside. But that impossibility of their being otherwise than apart, which we are made to feel in such an agonizingly exaggerated way, is nothing less than a not-so tacit admission that desire is historically conditioned. The cry for liberty (revolution, reform, radicalism, Chartism: from 1789 to 1848 it’s all we hear about) raises the spectre of oppression anew. The more “freedom” there is out there, the more local and personal forms of oppression are felt and become imbued with significance. As Raymond Williams observes, We need not look only, in a transforming history, for direct or public historical event and response. When there is real dislocation it does not however, is meant to underscore what is for me the novel’s realist dimension: its grounding in the everyday dramas particular to domestic fiction, which are then exaggerated to melodramatic proportions. It is true that the presence of the supernatural in the novel—Catherine’s ghost—does link the novel to a genealogy of the gothic; but it is important to note that the hauntings of the traditional gothic are typically tied to legacies of feudal-aristocratic violence and repression and thus stage a spiritual conflict between the emerging bourgeoisie and “Old Corruption,” whereas the source of violence and repression in Brontë’s novel is the Heathcliff of the second half of the novel, who is not aristocratic, but proto-bourgeois. Melodrama, as an identifier, thus works better to draw out the novel’s modernity and its unresolved tension between realism and romance, which makes the novel itself symptomatic of the mid-nineteenth-century passage from Romanticism to Victorianism.

have to appear in a strike or in machine-breaking. It can appear radically and as authentically in what is apparently, what is actually personal or family experience. Any direct reference of Wuthering Heights to that transforming social crisis [industrialization, agrarian revolt, etcetera] seems to me then displaced, for this exact reason: its real social experience is then explicitly reduced.9

“I am Heathcliff” is Cahterine’s solution to this problem of personal and familial dislocation described by Williams; and it’s more than just a metaphor: it’s a bold leap, a “line of flight,” as Deleuze and Guattari would say, that wants to do away with inside- outside oppositions, and bring together what need not be apart. Such a bold proposal— although it preserves in abeyance the ideal of some hitherto unknown form of mutual existence—is fraught with contradictions, which are never resolved. The love of Heathcliff and Catherine is left unrealized, sacrificed to the ineluctable march of time: a desperate plea to which history has no response, except to carry on. The domestic happiness that the second generation of lovers (Hareton and Cathy) achieve invokes the love of the original pair only to remind us of the intensity of their passion, which is now banished to the ruins of a mythical past.

Between these two generations, however, lies a whole narrative of the transformation of rural class relations in miniature: on the one hand, the weakening of the landed gentry’s political hegemony and hold on the land represented by the Linton family legacy and, on the other hand, the erosion of yeoman autonomy represented by Earnshaw self- sufficiency and small property—both of which are collapsed and appropriated as new forms of bourgeois property by Heathcliff in the second half of the novel. For Heathcliff, the first and foremost obstacles to desire are the lack of property and a family name that would preserve one’s right to it. Once Catherine dies—and, with her, the ideal of some alternate pole of existence in which the would-be lovers are spiritually the same— Heathcliff sets himself to destroying everything that had opposed the realization of this

9 Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: The Hogarth Press, 1970), 65.

50 ideal: namely the family ties and feudal class relations that had excluded him from the property relationships that populate Wuthering Heights. Once freed from the earth-bound social relations of the novel in Catherine’s wild figuration, “I am Heathcliff,” desire now returns via Heathlciff as the motor of history, revolutionizing the family and property relations in the countryside, breaking up and “freeing” the property of the landed gentry and small-owners alike and, at last, ushering in a new bourgeois epoch of possessive individualism. Desire, in its wild overturning of tradition, thus comes to plays the role that Spirit plays in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and the eponymous Capital in Marx’s unfinished masterwork.10

This is desire, as Fredric Jameson would say, “less [as] an interpretive mode than a whole world-view, a genuine metaphysic,” comparable to “its most extreme and grandiose version, such as that, rich with death and the archaic, of Freud’s own late metapsychology, with its vision of the immortal struggle between Eros and Thanatos.” For Jameson, such a worldview transforms history into an “allegory whose master narrative is the story of desire itself, as it struggles against a repressive reality, convulsively breaking through the grids that were designed to hold it in place or, on the contrary, succumbing to repression and leaving the dreary wasteland of aphanasis behind it.” Thus, he continues, “At this level, it is to be wondered whether we have to do with a mere interpretation any longer, whether it is not a question here of the production of a whole new aesthetic object, a whole new mythic narrative.”11 However, Jameson

10 The intention behind such a comparison—of desire to both Spirit and Capital—is meant neither to lower Marx’s particular narrative of the origins of modernity to the level of mere ideology, by equating it with these other properly “metaphysical” narratives of the march of history, nor to elevate these latter to the same stature of Marx’s master narrative. The intention is rather to view the metaphysical and mythic as stopgap solutions to problems of cognitive dissonance that arise from lived experience and contradiction. As Fredric Jameson observes: Absolute Spirit is little more than a symptom of a historical situation in which [Hegel’s] thinking could go no further: less an idea in its own right than an attempt to resolve an impossible historical contradiction, and to project some impossible third term beyond the alternative of romantic reaction and bourgeois utilitarianism. Rather than diagnosing some irremediable vice of “idealism” in Hegel’s thought, we must more modestly accuse him of not having been able, in his historical moment, to become Marx. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 51. For a tour-de-force reading of Capital, Volume One as a rewriting of The Phenomenology of Spirit with Capital as its hero, see Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 125. 11 Jameson, 67.

51 emphasizes, “the precondition for the articulation and analysis of mechanisms of desire according to such key themes or signifiers … lies in the preliminary isolation of sexual experience, which enables its constitutive features to carry a wider symbolic meaning.” Thus, he concludes axiomatically, “as long as sexuality remains as integrated into social life in general as, say, eating, its possibilities of symbolic extension are to that degree limited, and the sexual retains its status as a banal inner-worldly event and bodily function. Its symbolic possibilities are dependent on its preliminary exclusion from the social field.”12

Wuthering Heights offers us then not just an early version of Jameson’s “whole new mythic narrative,” but also an allegory for its very emergence in the final stages of the transition to capitalism and the consolidation of separate private and public spheres. By associating her desire with Heathcliff, who is excluded from the limited society the family can offer, Catherine ultimately alienates her desire not just from herself, but from “the social field,” privatizing and reifying her desire in the process. “I am Heathcliff” is the mythical consolidation of desire’s autonomy in the novel, which at last frees up its “symbolic possibilities,” allowing it to return in the second half of the novel as the force of history itself, struggling to break free from the yoke of repression. But, as Jameson notes, the conditions necessary for such a mythical widening of desire’s “symbolic possibility” must be found first in “the autonomization of the family as a private space within the nascent public sphere of bourgeois society.”13 In this light, Wuthering Heights’ focus on the family and its transformations no longer seem narrow at all, but rather deeply penetrating and apropos of a whole worldview or “structure of feeling” provoked by the transformation of English countryside that would produce the family as an atomized, private unit.

As Silvia Federici has persuasively argued, the normalization of separated private and public spheres was facilitated, not only by the disciplining of sexuality in the eighteenth century that Michel Foucault says made it easier to confine sex to the domestic sphere by

12 Jameson, 64. 13 Jameson, 64.

52 making sex an object of knowledge that could then be policed, but also by the long and often violent process of enclosure, which severed self-sustaining agrarian communities (like the Earnshaws in Wuthering Heights) from their land and access to the Commons.14 These self-sustaining, pre-capitalist communities, Federici argues, often shared the work of social reproduction together, men and women alike, and did not yet know the melancholy of the bourgeois sexual division of labour. The loss of the means of self- reproduction, however, compelled a separation of spheres, whereby increasingly men sought work in the labour market while women stayed at home to care for the family.15 The production and normalization of the bourgeois private property and private domestic space are thus as deeply tied to the transformation of social relationships in the countryside as is the “freeing” of desire’s symbolic possibilities that Jameson says resulted from “the autonomization of the family as a private space within the nascent public sphere of bourgeois society.”16 From this double enclosure—first of the land and then of women in the home—is thus born a whole new hermeneutic and secular mythology that takes desire as its master code: a hermeneutic generalized by Freud, but rooted first, this chapter will argue, in a nineteenth-century affective response to experiences of dislocation and separation wrought by the transition to capitalism in the English countryside—a desire, in other words, originating in and out of the disappearing heath.

2.1 The Fetishism of the Family and Its Secret “The world is a family in Wuthering Heights.”17

14 “As for Foucault’s theory, the history of primitive accumulation offers many counter-examples to it, proving that it can be defended only at the price of outstanding historical omissions.” Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 16. 15 Federici, 25. Federici’s historical narrative concludes at the end of the seventeenth century and must therefore be taken not as the immediate context for Wuthering Heights, but rather as the deep history haunting the final moments of the transition to capitalism before industrial “take off.” Such a haunting would seemed to be confirmed by the fact the social relations represented would already be waning by the time of novel’s setting and certainly archaic by the time of the novel’s publication. 16 Jameson, 64. 17 Leo Bersani, Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 201. Hereafter cited in parentheses as FA.

The family is integral to the story that Brontë wants to tell in Wuthering Heights. Everything is confined to it and developed within it. The problematic of individuation and incorporation, to which Catherine and Heathcliff’s desire gives rise, must be resolved within it, or not at all. Their desire thus introduces a foreign element into the novel that triggers the driving force behind all its action, but which manifests itself in two opposite directions: the drive to consummate their desire in something like a sexual union (something more physical than the spiritual ideal “I am Heathcliff” will admit) and the drive to expel that desire at all costs. As Leo Bersani observes, desire can be “a threat to the form of realistic fiction. Desire can subvert social order; it can also disrupt novelistic order. The nineteenth-century novel is haunted by the possibility of these subversive moments.” Its formal integrity “depends, for its very existence, on the annihilation or, at the very least, the immobilizing containment of anarchic impulses [to which desire gives rise]” (FA, 66-7). Wuthering Heights, however, is a novel famously at war with what we might call after Freud its “reality principle,” which ought to keep less realistic and socially acceptable desire in check. The reemergence of Catherine’s ghost, who terrorizes Lockwood at the beginning of the novel, is a drastic and violent transgression of such a principle and points instead to a whole world of libidinal energies pulsating behind the scenes. Ultimately the novel would like to incorporate these alienated desires into the family and the domestic novel that eulogizes it; but the question of whether it can do so or not looms large over the narrative and, indeed, becomes the very source of its suspense and the reader’s interest.

When Lockwood arrives at the Heights in 1801 to take up tenancy at the Grange, undisclosed events have severed appearance from reality, producing this melodramatic world of uncertainties and quasi-hallucinatory effects. After a snowy night prolongs an unwelcome visit to the Heights into an overnight-stay, Lockwood discovers a clue to the mystery of how things got to be the way they are. On the ledge of the oak casement that doubles as his bedroom, he notices “writing scratched on the paint”: “This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small— Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton” (WH, 50). This incantatory repetition of family names (Earnshaw,

Heathcliff, Linton) pulls Lockwood into a phantasmagoric reflection where the “glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as specters” and “the air swarmed with Catherines” (WH, 50-51). It is as if, momentarily, Lockwood has been invited into the occult realm, which the family preserves and obscures, and is invited to commune with the spirits that reside there. The occult status of the family and the mystery its lineages conceal is further confirmed by his discovery of Catherine’s library (also on the ledge), which consists of a New Testament and other religious tracts. Her name is scrawled on the flyleaf of the bible and while another book contains, in its margins, a kind of diary masquerading as textual commentary. Here, personal and family narratives form together in a kind of palimpsest with biblical exegesis, overlaid in a way that suggests both continuity and confusion. The family text, like the biblical text, is oracular and gospel, but only to the initiate: “An immediate interest kindled within me [Lockwood] for the unknown Catherine, and I began, forthwith, to decipher her faded hieroglyphics” (WH, 51).

The family in Wuthering Heights is, as Marx might say, “a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”18 Here, within the family, we are very much within the space that Brooks ascribes to the melodramatic, where “things cease to be merely themselves, gestures cease to be merely tokens of social intercourse whose meaning is assigned by a social code; they become the vehicles of metaphor whose tenor suggest another kind of reality” (MI, 9). But the metaphor’s tenor, along with God and the legible moral universe, have disappeared: “the body of the ethical has become a sort of deus absconditus which must be sought for, postulated, brought into man’s existence through the play of the spiritualist imagination” (MI, 11). In the grips of the “spiritualist imagination,” the family becomes a kind of secret code and quasi- religious language unto itself—all-important, but opaque and little understood despite its primacy. For the characters in the novel, understanding the world into which they are thrown means, above all else, penetrating the mystery that is both contained and concealed within the family. Like Lockwood who arrives only in time for the conclusion

18 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin—New Left Review, 1976), 163.

55 of the drama, the reader must piece together the family puzzle retrospectively. Wuthering Heights, as J. Hillis Miller observes, “is written backwards, like a detective story. First the reader encounters the corpse of a dead community. Then the novel explains, by a process of retrospective reconstruction, how things came to be as they are [through] glimpses, indirect and fragmentary.”19 But what the novel’s many repetitions of the family begin to reveal is that desire is not foreign to the family and the domestic novel that eulogizes it (pace Bersani). Desire is rather the alienated byproduct of the way the family is increasingly reproduced under capitalism, the result of its historical and political atomization and separation from the public sphere. Like Marx, whose Capital gradually demystifies the fetishism of the commodity form to reveal the hidden organization and exploitation of labour that went into its production, Wuthering Heights slowly leads the reader, via Lockwood, to the hidden site of the family’s reproduction, which is occulted behind this baffling incantation of family names.

What Catherine’s dairy narrates once Lockwood starts to decipher its “hieroglyphics” is a grim reversal of the biblical narrative—“‘An awful Sunday!’ commenced the paragraph” (WH, 51)—and a mise en abyme of the greater narrative of Wuthering Heights. It represents a world in which “the time is out of joint,” where a father’s place has been usurped by a brother who disrupts the “natural” order of things, which both the patriarchal and biblical text ought to uphold. In the absence of the children’s natural father, Catherine and her foster-brother Heathcliff are placed under the charge of their older brother, Hindley, who, in Catherine’s words, is “a detestable substitute” (WH, 51). While the tyrannical brother-turned-patriarch and his wife bask “down-stairs before a comfortable fire, doing anything but reading their bible” (WH, 51), the children are

19 J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 178. See also Gilbert and Gubar’s more provocative proposal that “Wuthering Heights has the puzzling self-containment of a mystery in the old sense of that word—the sense of mystery plays and Eleusinian mysteries” (MA, 257). This would seem to make better sense of the weird intractability of the mystery, since the missing piece of the puzzle would be supplied in the form of the reader’s subjective experience and initiation in the rites of its mystery. And, indeed, reading Wuthering Heights is quite an experience, usually undergone at a young age, especially for modern readers (I read it when I was 13), as it prophesies a world of adult drama that must still be cloaked in esotericism for the child: in other words, the intuition of a sexual life to come, but not the signifier of it. Still, for the purpose of this chapter, I reverse the revelatory trajectory: the esoteric core of the novel for which I seek revelation is, not personal and subjective, nor merely sexual, but ultimately social and historical.

56 subjected to the evangelical teachings of their maniacal servant Joseph—“the wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a bible to rake the promises to himself, and fling the curses on his neighbours” (WH, 69). Here, the seventh day, which concludes God’s creation and which He sanctifies as a day of rest, is made to begin Catherine’s narrative, not as a day for peaceful repose and spiritual reflection, but for overzealous discipline and unjust punishment.

Catherine and Heathcliff rebel, respectively throwing and kicking their prayer books into the doghouse, for which Hindley banishes them to the back-kitchen, “where, Joseph asseverated, ‘owd Nick’ [Satan] would fetch us as sure as we were living; and, so comforted, we each sought a separate nook to wait his advent” (WH, 53). Catherine, unable to imagine any space outside the Heights to which they might escape, turns the family into the whole world. But since the family is supposed to be holy, and they have transgressed the law of the father (God’s substitute, as “detestable” as he may be), hell will have to be their heaven now.20 The transmogrified family becomes a terrible and ineluctable force from which only death can guarantee escape. Changing this requires changing the whole order of events that have conspired together to turn the world off its axis—a change to which the novel aspires only after Heathcliff is buried in the ground. The occult status of the family in Wuthering Heights—which the novel raises to the level of a kind of master code capable (we hope) of containing and provisionally resolving the

20 This idea that hell becomes a heaven for the would-be lovers is central to Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist interpretation of the novel and probably their most important contribution to the body of criticism that surrounds it: “Emily Brontë … is … Blakean in a tough, radically political commitment to the belief that the state of being patriarchal Christianity calls ‘hell’ is eternally, energetically delightful, whereas the state called ‘heaven’ is rigidly hierarchical, Urizenic, and ‘kind’ as a poison tree” (MA, 255). For them, this accounts for a number of otherwise bizarre and ambivalent conflations in the novel: The world of Wuthering Heights … is one where what seem to be the most unlikely opposites coexist without, apparently, any consciousness on the author’s part that there is anything unlikely in their coexistence. …. People with decent Christian names (Catherine, Nelly, Edgar, Isabella) inhabit a landscape in which also dwell people with strange animal or nature names (Hindley, Hareton, Heathcliff). Fairy tale events … are given local habitation and a real chronology in … [the] historical present. Dogs and gods (or goddesses) turn out to be not opposites, but, figuratively speaking, the same words spelled in different ways. Funerals are weddings, weddings funerals. And of course, … hell is heaven, heaven hell…. (MA, 259). I think, though, that this is, for Brontë, an unfortunate corollary of her keen perception that patriarchal “heaven” is a kind of “hell,” especially for women. The novel, as I’ve already suggested, would like to find a third option, or alternative, that would undo the tyranny of this dichotomy and the ambiguities in produces in women’s lives.

57 novel’s central problematic of individuation and incorporation—is, however, purely ideological. The family is symptomatic of the problem and not its elusive cure, not the key to the obscured moral universe of the novel, but rather the lock.

Until we sort out these lineages of error and misconduct contained within the family and correct them, we will be doomed, the novel suggests, to repeat variations of a terrible trial already once endured. Both Brooks’s comments on melodrama and Miller’s analysis of Wuthering Heights in The Disappearance of God, however, are overconfident in the novel’s fateful march to revelation and restoration. There is a palpable fear in the novel that, to quote Bersani, repetition is merely derivative; it simply proves our incapacity to produce new scenes of desire. Our fate, from this perspective, is to perpetuate the same: the son can only reenact the father, the present can only reproduce the past, an individual’s behavior in time is doomed to be nothing more than the obsessive if disguised performances of a repressed but all- pervasive inner “text.” (FA, 11) The novel’s reiterated scenes of family drama thus demonstrate an implicit ambition to break through or transcend the very repression to which repetition may itself give rise.

As such, the novel’s progression is not so much linear as it is permutational, composing and recomposing the available pieces of its limited “world” in an attempt to compensate for what has been withheld from it—the ideal of Catherine and Heathcliff’s mutual existence. The problem is that, with such an integral piece missing, the other pieces cannot align without creating a sense of disharmony and general atmosphere of confusion. Hence, the reader’s, and his or her proxy Lockwood’s, desire to have the Heights mystery dispelled. As Miller observes, “Once the reader catches sight of this wavering away from the literal in one detail, he becomes suspicious of every detail. He must reinterrogate the whole, like a detective. … The reader is … coaxed into taking the position of interpreting spectator by the presentation in the novel of so many models of

58 this activity.”21 This endeavour, I would argue, is even more Gestalt-like than Miller allows. The whole apparatus of the novel—in all the manifold ways that it produces meaning—seeks in vain a structure to accommodate Catherine’s otherworldly love for Heathcliff: if not to affirm it, at least to explain why it can’t be so. In Bersani’s words, “Wuthering Heights documents a frenetic attempt to create family ties—or, to put it in another way, to tie the self up in an unbreakable family circle.” Significantly, though, Bersani points out, this doesn’t mean “any of the characters is explicitly engaged in this project. Rather, it is the project behind the novel’s organization” (FA, 202). But throughout the novel’s many drawings and re-drawings of the family’s borders, we are left not with a lasting sense of the family’s inclusive potential, but instead with the sense that the family’s hegemonic force is fundamentally linked to its power to exclude. It is the liminal character of Heathcliff—who, as Jameson points out, is both a “mediator” and “catalyst” for the narrative’s shifting fields of reference22—that brings to light this contradiction in the family’s inclusive potential and helps us see that, in the novel’s many reduplications of the family, what we are glimpsing is an allegory of the reorganization of the family according to the logic of separate private and public spheres, which will at last unmoor desire from the social and allow it to take on mythical proportions.

In order to make Heathcliff the prism through which we view this story about the redrawing of the family’s borders, Brontë is careful to identify him as both insider and outsider: “they [the Earnshaws] had christened him ‘Heathcliff.’ It was the name of a son who died in childhood, and it has served him ever since, both for christian and surname” (WH, 66). Heathcliff, though not related by blood, takes the name of a child that once was and becomes his placeholder—and, in the process, an uncanny son and brother to the rest of family. Here, we have the beginnings of that alternative version of the story that would spin a moral tale out of the family’s ability or inability to incorporate the gypsy boy into the family and treat him as a son and brother even though he is neither (a case of the children learning to follow the example of the generous Mr. Earnshaw without, at the

21 J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 43. 22 Jameson, 126.

59 same time, alienating the other members of family). But it is decided, in advance, that more than morality is at stake in Brontë’s narrative.

Before the family drama gets well underway it passes into what it really is, a political drama: “from the very beginning, he [Heathcliff] bred bad feeling in the house; and at Mrs. Earnshaw’s death, … the young master [Hindley] had learnt to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and Heathcliff as a usurper of his parent’s affections” (WH, 67). The son, who feels he deserves paternal affection and care by right of name, is displaced by one without that right. What Hindley perceives as a violation of the family’s economy of care travesties the familial roles and turns his father against him, as “oppressor rather than a friend.” If Heathcliff has usurped Hindley’s position as petted son, Hindley too will become a kind of “usurper” of the paternal role. Establishing himself as the man of the house in his father’s wake, Hindley claims his right as the eldest son, but at the same time, rebels against the beneficent paternalism with which his father governed the household. As Catherine explains in her diary after her father’s death, “[Hindley] has been blaming our father (how dared he?) for treating [Heathcliff] too liberally; and swears he will reduce him to his right place” (WH, 53). Hindley becomes a disciplinary force in the novel, rejecting the charitable actions of his father and enforcing clear distinctions between family members and non-family members. As his father’s substitute, Catherine says, “Hindley became tyrannical” (WH, 73).

The son sets to work demolishing the organic community at the Heights, projecting (somewhat prematurely) an image of the family home as a space separate from labour and drudgery. His first action as the new patriarch is to confine the servants to their own quarters (“we [Joseph and Nelly] must thence forth quarter ourselves in the back kitchen, and leave the house for him” [WH, 72]) and, along with them, Heathcliff, who is now treated “like the other servants” (WH, 79). Under his management, the Earnshaws’ become a grim parody of the domestic family—a political state, the borders of which are now policed and rigorously maintained. There is no longer anywhere for Catherine and the de facto outsider, Heathcliff, to commiserate together. Each room of the house becomes as unwelcoming as the next. Nowhere are they made to feel at home. The

60 house, uncannily, becomes synonymous with their alienation, the symbol of its very structure, which continuously and repeatedly alienates instead of incorporates. As Terry Eagleton points out, “One of Wuthering Heights’ more notable achievements is ruthlessly to de-mystify the Victorian notion of the family as a pious, pacific space within social conflict” (MP, 106).

It is thus possible to read the family in Wuthering Heights as a political allegory about the challenges of democratic enfranchisement raised by the Chartists and other radicals in the years leading up to the 1840s, which weighed heavily on the minds of the Victorians.23 But, while such an allegorical interpretation is both appropriate and encouraged by the novel’s very themes of individuation and incorporation, it leaves the role of the family in the consolidation of separate public and private spheres ultimately untouched. As Slavoj Žižek observes, “Numerous treatises have been written about the perception of a historical Real in the terms of a family narrative as a fundamental ideological operation: a story about the conflict of larger social forces (classes and so forth) is framed into the coordinates of a family drama.”24 However, for Žižek, such allegorical treatments of “family drama” fail to grasp the political function of the family itself under capitalism. Thus he concludes, “The lesson … is not that one should bypass the family myth and turn directly to social reality; what one should do is something much more difficult: to undermine the family myth from within.”25 Wuthering Heights, even more so than most Victorian novels, enables such a “deconstruction” of the family by showing how the family is not just an allegorical substitute for the political drama, but part and parcel of a large-scale reorganization of social relationships under capitalism. To show this, it is necessary, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest it might be, “to open sexuality and libidinal investment onto the determination of a sociohistorical field,” and not view them only as

23 Nancy Armstrong rightly reminds us that, “We should recall that Wuthering Heights was written against the background of selling industrial centers and Chartist uprisings that had reached alarming proportions by the forties, as had the hoards of migrant workers who were newly arrived on the English social scene.” Nancy Armstrong, “Emily Brontë In and Out of Her Time,” in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2007), 93. 24 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 52. 25 Žižek, 81.

“the derivates of mommy-daddy.”26 Such a shift in heuristic lenses, encouraged by Brontë’s novel, exposes in the family an explicit political function in the reorganization of society, which is otherwise obscured by Oedipal treatments of the family that take for granted the bourgeois organization of social reproduction according to the logic of separate spheres.

Brontë’s penetration to the political core of the family, however, is unconscious, or, at most, intuitive—the result of her making the family always the most immediate context of her story. All the narrative’s dramatic action—as well as its moral, metaphysical, psychological, and sociological insights—must be achieved through the repetition of familial and inter-familial relationships. But, as Freud famously argued, “repetition of the same” can give rise “to uncanny feelings,” which sense, on an intuitive level, “a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it.”27 The repetition of the family in Wuthering Heights returns to the family its repressed socio- political dimensions: the truth that the family is not a universal category, but a historically determined one. As Engels writes, According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This … is of a two fold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of the labour on the one hand and of the family on the other.28

26 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 183. 27 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” Collected Papers, Volume Four, trans Alix Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 401, 399. 28 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. Alick West (New York: Penguin, 2010), 35-6.

Wuthering Heights is, then, not just a melodramatic novel, but a thoroughly uncanny one, in the purest sense of the word. It is the drama of a home—a centre of ostensible stability and meaning—that slips perpetually and unrelentingly into a state of unhomeliness and decentredness. It is one of the first domestic fictions that is also not a domestic fiction, for it exposes the family not as the natural container of desire, but rather the source of desire’s alienation, which also “frees” up its symbolic possibilities and makes it available for imaginative free-play.

2.2 Of Other Worlds, or, the Geology of Love “H. and I are going to rebel.” (WH, 51)

Catherine is only too aware of how untenable a relationship between herself and Heathcliff is in the eyes of her family and their neighbours. At the time Brontë was writing, a good marriage was increasingly associated with the middle-class family. A middle-class income was, by definition, enough that the mother of the family could live out her days as a devoted housewife without lowering herself to the status of a proletarianized wage earner, thus maintaining the home’s relative autonomy as a private sphere, separated from the otherwise ruthless competition of the market.29 However, at the time Catherine and Heathcliff’s story is set (1775-1801), capitalist class relations and bourgeois socio-sexual values have not fully permeated the countryside. There were still in the late eighteenth century vestiges of a fiercely independent class of yeomen that valued their self-sufficiency as farmers who owned and worked their land together, acquiring their wealth from their own labour rather than renting their land to tenant farmers or paying an increasingly proletarianized peasantry to do the work for them (although they would often have had a few servants who lived and worked alongside

29 See also Nancy Armstrong’s comments that, in the early nineteenth century, the novel alongside “new kinds of writing—sociological studies of factory and city, as well as new theories of natural history and political economy—established modern domesticity as the only haven from the trials of a heartless economic world.” Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8.

63 them).30 Moreover, for the yeomanry, the bourgeois sexual division of labour had not yet taken hold; the reproduction of the family remained predominately a shared labour. The clash of Heights and Grange values thus represents neither the conflict between aristocratic and bourgeois values, nor even bourgeois and working-class values, but rather the narrative of how this vestige of the feudal era—the small property and self- sufficient agrarian production of the yeomanry—was broken up and subsumed into the reorganization of class relationship under agrarian capitalism. For this dwindling class of yeomen, the transition to a capitalist mode of production meant that their sons and daughters would have to marry into the ranks of landed gentry, here represented by the Lintons, or else the emerging bourgeoisie, who will eventually manifest in the figure of the adult Heathcliff, if they wanted to maintain any semblance of the independence to which they had grown accustomed.

Since, as Eagleton observes, “by the early 1830s a depleted yeomanry were often forced to sell their land either to a large landowner, or to a local tradesman who would put a tenant in” (MP, 116), marriage into a family with a more stable class position would be one of the surest ways of warding off the embarrassment and degradation of disenfranchisement that yeomen and their children would experience as a result of forfeiting their property for cash. Catherine’s decision to marry into the Lintons is thus not a free one. It is socially coerced not just by the petty forces of moral obligation (it’d be unchristian to marry the dirty heathen Heathcliff), but by those more ephemeral forces of historical determination,31 which turn the marriage plot not surprisingly into a struggle

30 It is no secret that the novel is, to some degree, an elegy to hardy, old Yorkshire “self-sufficiency”: “The Earnshaws are gentlemen yet they work the land: they enjoy the freedom of being their own masters, but that freedom moves within the tough discipline of labour” (MP, 105). 31 I find this a more satisfactory explanation of Catherine’s fate than the one offered by Gilbert and Gubar, which limits its explanation to the sphere of culture: “Just as Milton’s Eve, … being already fallen, had no meaningful choice despite Milton’s best efforts to prove otherwise, so Catherine has no real choice. Given the patriarchal nature of culture, women must fall—that is, they are already fallen because doomed to fall” (MA, 277). Yes, patriarchal culture is biased: its mythologies often enforce institutionalized inequalities by producing consent; but it is not only because of cultural attitudes that women are “doomed.” It must also have something to do with the fact that they were, and sometimes still are, denied the means of reproducing themselves (money, trade skills, property, etc.). See Richard Dellamora’s incisive assessment of Catherine’s wretched position: “Catherine is denied integrity and autonomy by the fact that she has no legal right to her family’s property. … [S]he is economically dependent on men. Similarly, she has no access to self-formation through gainful employment. In other words, the route to economic self-improvement open

64 for survival: not just in the sense of escaping the threat of poverty and other life- threatening situations, but also, ironically, escaping the destruction wreaked by forces of progress and development, which often claim the greater good in a period of social transformation.

Such a struggle for survival thus coerces Catherine into a position that runs counter to her heart. “I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton,” she says, “than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there [Hindley] had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now” (WH, 102). But the moral degradation implicit in her marrying Heathcliff is secondary to the class one—“if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars” (WH, 103)—which cannot be ignored but at the risk of increasing the challenges to survival. In Catherine’s forced rationalization, love is metaphysical, something that can be intimately felt, but also contemplated from a distance; marriage, on the other hand, is crudely “financial.” Its transactions force themselves into everyday accounting that can’t be put off, or as Catherine puts it: “He [Edgar] is now; and I have only to do with the present” (WH, 100). But what’s good for keeping up appearances proves bad for the soul: “Your brother will be pleased; the old lady and gentleman [the Lintons] will not object, I think; you will escape from a disorderly, comfortless home [Wuthering Heights] into a wealthy, respectable one [Thrushcross Grange]; and you love Edgar, and Edgar loves you. All seems smooth and easy—where is the obstacle?” “Here! and here!” replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast. “In whichever place the soul lives— in my soul, and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong!” (WH, 101)

Catherine’s socially coerced decision to marry Edgar alienates her from both head and heart—“whichever place the soul lives.” The pragmatic decision to marry Edgar, made for the purposes of survival, already bears the fruit of a strange corollary: the alienation

to Heathcliff by virtue of his gender is closed to her.” “Earnshaw’s Neighbor/Catherine’s Friend,” ELH 74 (2007), 540. Patriarchal culture makes this appear “natural.” Of course, it’s not.

65 of spirit from the body, both of which now persist in disunity. Catherine is only where Heathcliff is, which is also contradictorily where they are apart, even if they happen to be bodily together. They unite in spirit, not in body: “he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire” (WH, 102, emphasis mine). But this is rhetoric. Heathcliff and Catherine are not the same. As Bersani points out, Both in situation and in temperament, Catherine and Heathcliff are profoundly different from each other. She is sociable, high-spirited, indeed often manic; he is quiet, closed, and he hoards his feelings in a way dramatically opposed to Catherine’s wild display of feelings. If … Catherine’s assertion that she is Heathcliff is enormously important, she is by no means like Heathcliff. (FA, 204) The reason, I claim, that it is “enormously important” is not just, as Bersani argues, because of the way that it subjects the mythology of self-identity to a deconstruction,32 but also because in the process of that deconstruction it preserves, in figural form (“I am Heathcliff”), the ideal of a different way of selves and others relating to one another, diametrically opposed to marriage, and thus out of touch with social reality, but no less real to Catherine for being so. As Eagleton astutely observes, If Catherine is Heathcliff—if identity rather than relationship is in question—then their estrangement is inconceivable, and Catherine can therefore turn to others without violating the timeless metaphysical idea Heathcliff embodies. She finds in him an integrity of being denied or diluted in routine social relations; but to preserve that ideal means reifying him to a Hegelian essence, sublimely untainted by empirical fact. (MP, 102) To bring this back to Bersani, it is useful to remember his assertion, that “metaphor … is an invitation to metamorphosis. The second term of a comparison doesn’t illuminate the first term; rather, it proposes that we forget it, that we almost literally jump away from it”

32 “In Wuthering Heights … we no longer have coherent, individuated, intelligible structures of personality; in a sense, we no longer even have a locatable self. … [Catherine and Heathcliff] provide us with our purest examples so far of desire to which personality is irrelevant” (FA, 190).

(FA, 196). But this line of flight figured in the metaphor (“I am Heathcliff”) is not without its own dangers. In its struggle to escape the social reality that denies it status as empirical fact, it risks also vanishing itself, as expressed by Heathcliff’s when he later asserts, “it is unutterable” (WH, 175). “I am Heathcliff” is a delirious figuration— borderline suicidal. It preserves what should not exist in a liminal form and thus acts as a kind of limited, stopgap solution for the time being.

As such, the metaphor (“I am Heathcliff”) is provisional, at best—a sublating device that cannot, in reality, fully subsume either Catherine into Heathcliff or vice versa. The life of the metaphor thus requires a whole new conceptual apparatus—the self-invocation of a new “plane of consistency”—to sustain itself: a reterritorialization to ward off the suicidal tendencies of the radical deterritorialization of identity from the self: I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? … If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love of Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees—my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being—so don’t talk of our separation again—it is impracticable…. (WH, 103) Since Catherine and Heathcliff’s love has no social reality, Catherine gives it meaning by ascribing it to a different (asocial) temporality: the geological time frame of eons, the endurance of change stretched to infinitesimal degrees of development, containing all of history and even so-called prehistory (“the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight but necessary”)—a time frame that is essentially invisible when subject to the parallax of minutes and hours, days and weeks, months and years, which measure survival when it is experienced as an always present concern (“He [Edgar] is now; I have

67 only to do with the present”). Catherine and Heathcliff, as co-conspirators against the family, thus enter into a special relationship with the land in something like a Deleuzo- Guattarian “becoming-animal”: “it was their chief amusement to run away to the moors in the morning and remain there all day, … the after-punishment grew a mere thing to laugh at” (WH, 73).33 On the moors, which become the symbolic avatar and natural habitat of their rebellious desire, it is as if they experience, in some limited form, Catherine’s ideal of spiritual equality—a shared essence which transcends their molar identities as differently classed and gendered subjects.

But how to maintain then this alternative existence on the moors that survives for a while on the “line of flight”? For Deleuze and Gauttari, “It is a question of speed,” of moving fast enough to escape capture, to really break with oppression for good.34 But elsewhere Deleuze writes: “A true break may be extended in time, it is something different from an over-significant cut, it must constantly be protected not merely against its false imitations, but also against itself, and against the reterritorialization which lie in wait for it.”35 This is the problem that Catherine faces, and it is one that she cannot solve but in this limited and desperate way (“I am Heathcliff”), for the moors provide only a limited, temporary escape. Hence the stagnation, the oppressive atmosphere, and the arrested development: as Dorothy Van Ghent observes, all that we can really imagine for the grown-up Catherine and Heathcliff, as “characters” on the human plane, is what the book gives of them—their mutual destruction by tooth and nail in an effort, through death, to get back to the lost state of gypsy freedom in childhood.36 But such a return cannot be forced without also loosening one’s ontological security in the real world: hence also Catherine’s alarming flights of fancy and the vestigial encroachment of a fairy-tale world into the novel—that “becoming-child” with which

33 As for this “becoming-animal,” see also Dorothy Van Ghent’s suggestive question-raising, “As ‘characters,’ what are they? As lovers, what kind of love is theirs? They gnash and foam at each other.” The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Rinehart and Co, 1953), 158. 34 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 187. 35 Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, revised ed., trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 39. 36 Van Ghent, 159.

Catherine reproaches reality at her most desperate: “I see in you, Nelly … an aged woman—you have grey hair, and bent shoulders. This bed is the fairy cave under Penistone Crag, and you are gathering elf-bolts” (WH, 138). “Madness is a definite danger,” admit Deleuze and Guattari: “Is it by chance that schizos lose their sense of the face, their own and others’, their sense of the landscape, and the sense of language and its dominant signification all at the same time?”37 But why this danger in the assertion of similarities where there are none?

For Raymond Williams, What happens is that this central affirmation [“I am Heathcliff”]—not desire for another but desire in another; a depth of relationship around which an idea of oneself and literally then of the universe forms—is both stated and taken for granted: the taken for granted is the profound, the dislocating error. “A source of little visible delight but necessary”: but if it is necessary it can’t be assumed or taken for granted, however deep it may lie. It has to be lived. (final emphasis mine)38 In other words, desire becomes a question of praxis: in theory they are always together; but in practice they are forever apart. But for the ideal even to survive qua ideal, they must remain forever apart until theory can be transformed into practice.

For Deleuze, the infamous “I am Heathcliff” assertion presents us with the problem of “reconciling two originals but thereby also in reconciling the original with secondary humanity, the inhuman with the human”39—in other words, a problem of affirming two originals as equals in a way that is non-hierarchical, that is indifferent to distinctions between class, gender, familial roles, and even species (it is not for nothing that Heathcliff is metaphorized in ways that travesty all these distinctions).40 “But,” asks

37 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 188. 38 Williams, 66-7. 39 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 85. 40 He is, and is not, Catherine’s brother, just as later he both is and is not a gentleman. As for the other categorical determinations he seems to evade, Gilbert and Gubar argue: Uniting human and animal traits, the skills of culture with the energies of nature, Heathcliff’s character tests the boundaries between human and animal, nature and

Deleuze, “how can the biggest problem be resolved? But is it not already resolved, by itself, precisely because it is not a personal problem, but a historical, geographic, or political one?”41 The solution, for Deleuze, is encompassed not by history then, but by ontology, which, as is especially the case in Heidegger, is as invested as Catherine is in supporting its claims in deference to what is said to be primordial (“my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath”). It seems premature, though, to suggest, as Deleuze does, that the problem is resolved simply because “it is not a personal problem.” Rather, it should be said in the opposite way, that history, geography, and politics are perpetually resolving what isn’t, or, at least, shouldn’t be, a personal problem into one. It is something about the way the world is organized—historically, geographical, and politically—that makes the statement, “I am Heathcliff,” fly in the face of empirical fact. And, as literal statement, it does; but, as figurative language, it express an ideal, a dream for the future, that is shared by many of us—for example, the dream of individuality expressed in democracy and the dream of solidarity expressed in communism, or what Rachel Ablow calls, “a form of sympathetic mutuality that appears to be immune to competition or selfishness.”42 Hence Deleuze’s statement that, “Even in his [or her!] failure, the writer remains all the more the bearer of a collective enunciation, which no longer forms part of literary history and preserves the right of a people to come, or of a human becoming.”43 But insofar as it is a failure, that is, insofar as the novel qua novel necessarily presents “I am Heathcliff” as imaginative solution to a real-life problem and, insofar as, at the level of plot, “I am Heathcliff” persists as an metaphysical bond instead of a physical one, it leads desire not into the world of earthly pleasure and gratifications, but out of it: a love that dare not, but more importantly cannot, speak its name—“it is unutterable,” Heathcliff says.44

culture, and in doing so proposes a new definition of the demonic. What is important for our purposes here, however, is the fact that, despite his outward masculinity, Heathcliff is somehow female in his monstrosity. … [O]n a … associative level, Heathcliff is ‘female’—on the level where younger sons and bastards and devils unite with women in rebelling against the tyranny of heaven. (MA, 293-4). 41 Deleuze, Essays, 85. 42 Rachel Ablow, The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 53. 43 Deleuze, Essays, 89-90. 44 This, then, would seem to be the limitation of classic Deleuzian readings of Wuthering Heights (his own and others’), which see Catherine and Heathcliff’s spiritual union as a proper becoming rather than the

What Eagleton fails to see then in his otherwise persuasive interpretation of the novel is that Catherine’s rejection and at-times tortuous treatment of Heathcliff is absolutely necessary to the preservation of this ideal. For much of the nineteenth century a married woman was legally the property of the man. Marriage is thus diametrically opposed to the ideal of equality expressed in the assertion “I am Heathcliff.” It offers no solution to the impossibility of the lovers’ desire for one another as equals, but rather guarantees their hierarchization into superior and inferior beings (first and secondary humanity, in Deleuze’s terminology). However, by not marrying the two characters, Brontë’s novel is able to hold in abeyance the ideal of some different way of selves relating to one another, a people still to come.45 Richard Dellamora proposes that, “Catherine and Heathcliff’s friendship results in a betrayal conditioned by the definition of each in relation to property” since Catherine at last rejects him on the grounds of his poverty.46 For Dellamora, friendship, unlike marriage, “can occur only between autonomous and equal subjects. Such autonomy, however, is an achievement not a given.”47 Thus, “Brontë’s novel,” he says, “calls for an equality that would permit the existence of friendship in marriage.”48 But the suspense of this emergent possibility must manifest itself in certain contradictory behaviour since it can only be included in the novel as a negative: a melodramatic theatre of antagonisms in lieu of scenes of mutual care and recognition, a masochistic coupling in lieu of a democratic one. As Ian Buchanan succinctly puts it, “Their love is practiced like a black art on a plane of mutual betrayal.”49

rhetorical figure and placeholder of a “becoming” that is still to come. See, for example, Daniel W. Smith’s uncritical comment that, “In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for example, Catherine and Heathcliff are caught up in a double becoming (‘I am Heathcliff’) that is deeper than love and higher than lived experience, a profound passion that traces a zone of indiscernibility between the two characters and creates a block of becoming that passes through an entire series of intensive affects.” Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 206. 45 It is in this sense that Ian Buchanan is absolutely correct to say, “Marriage, ironically, is Brontë’s foremost weapon against conjugality. Catherine marries Linton and cuts herself off from marrying Heathcliff, so their love must live on another plane.” Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 106. 46 Dellamora, 540. 47 Dellamora, 544. 48 Dellamora, 552. 49 Buchanan, 106.

Catherine, Nelly explains, “liked exceedingly to act the little mistress, using her hands freely, and commanding her companions” (WH, 70). And, although Nelly “would not bear slapping and ordering,” Catherine’s “insolence … had more power over Heathcliff…—how the boy would do her bidding in anything” (WH, 70). But why this the strange submissiveness from the novel’s otherwise most dominant character? Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 tale, Venus in Furs, offers peculiar insight. The novella’s protagonist Severin (who is a masochist, the expression is derived from the author’s name) explains to his lover: Marriage can only be founded on equality and mutual understanding… But in such relations one person [ends up being] the hammer, the other, the anvil. I choose to be the anvil: I cannot be happy if I must look down on the woman I love. I want to be able to worship a woman, and I can only do so if she is cruel to me.50 Severin’s solution is essentially a melodramatic one. All or nothing, hammer or anvil: the hyperbole admits no third term. The solution is counterintuitive: to create an alternative by submitting to the law that one opposes, but in a humorous reversal. The man will become the slave and the woman the master, because the masochist, Deleuze explains, “does not believe in negating or destroying the world nor in idealizing it: what he does is to disavow and thus to suspend it, in order to secure an ideal which is itself suspended in fantasy.”51 Catherine can only be Heathcliff’s equal so long as he submits to her abuses and takes a minimal of masochistic pleasure in them. In so doing, the masochist (here Heathcliff) ensures that he will be beaten; [but] what is beaten, humiliated and ridiculed in him is the image and the likeness of the father, and the possibility of the father’s aggressive return. It is not a child but a father that is being beaten. The masochist thus liberates himself in preparation for a rebirth. (“CC,” 66)

50 Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 171-2. 51 Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty” in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 33. Hereafter cited in parentheses as “CC.” There are many ways in which Wuthering Heights is not like Venus in Furs. I have isolated only the parts of Deleuze’s argument that I think are transferable.

For Deleuze, then: Waiting and suspense are essential characteristics of the masochistic experience. … The masochist is morose: but his moroseness should be related to the experience of waiting and delay. … The anxiety of the masochist divides therefore into an indefinite awaiting of pleasure and an intense expectation of pain. (“CC,” 71) There is therefore “a progression from disavowal to suspense, from disavowal as a process of liberation from the pressures of the superego to suspense as incarnation of the ideal” (“CC,” 127). A melodramatic dialectic: the precarious ideal of the non-patriarchal male (the hoped for guarantor of equality between the genders and the only suitable partner for the de-feminized female [“I am Heathcliff”]) hangs in the balance; but, until he emerges, the precarious balance is transformed into a placeholder for the ideal itself whose longevity can only be sustained by reiterative submission by the male: “repetition runs wild,” says Deleuze, “and becomes independent of all previous pleasure” (“CC,” 120). Thus, the masochistic relationship, so long as it is maintained, even in hostility towards one another (Catherine’s abuse and rejection of Heathcliff and Heathcliff’s always willing, but not always indifferent, submission to her will), in fact, honours the ideal expressed in Catherine’s outrageous claim (“I am Heathcliff”). The ideal is sealed in their disunion: the hammer plays at being anvil and vice versa until the terms need no longer apply. But while they do, it is as if behind the aggression—the dominance and subservience—shines the sublime of some other interaction of selves and others, of men and women (Deleuze’s “people to come”), which, as of yet, have no earthly existence.52

52 For a complementary reading of the novel organized around Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-woman,” see Buchanan, 103: It seems clear that becoming-woman in psychotic form is a way of warding off the necessity of making a choice (one becomes-woman so as not to have to be either a man or a woman); whereas, becoming-woman in its artistic form points up the unbearableness of such choices as society forces us to make (one creates a becoming-woman so as to illustrate the suffering such choices as having to decide between being a man or a woman induce). The strength of Buchanan reading is his willingness to do what Deleuze himself does not do and highlight the properly utopian dimension of such a “becoming,” since, as he says, “in neither case is it possible for this variance in function to be simply lifted off the page, as it were, and put into evidence.”

Thus Catherine refers to her confession to Nelly about her love for Heathcliff and her coerced decision to act against it—and in opposition to the metaphysical bond she presupposes between them—as her “secret” (WH, 101). But this is a strange category of secrecy, for the “secret” (“I am Heathcliff”), in a sense, has no content. It cannot be divulged; it is “unutterable” even when spoken, for it cannot be explained sufficiently. Desire’s truth is its secrecy. It is a lie that metamorphoses into a kind of virtual reality— a utopia, in the purest sense of the word, a no-place that is characterized by its otherworldliness, but has nonetheless made it into human discourse as an identifiable, and hopefully not too fantastical, version of reality in which one could, in theory, reside. Desire, if it is to obey the logic, or rather illogic, of the assertion “I am Heathcliff,” can only be preserved in a “spiritual” world of equivalents at the cost of their bodily separation. But this incursion of otherworldly love into the otherwise earthbound world of the novel, even as just a secret, will turn out to be the stone in the snowball that does all the damage. It is not its revelation that hurts, but the fact that it was hidden and remained so. Detached from the social, desire now takes on a life of its own, leaving Catherine to suffer a metaphorical death-in-life.

2.3 Catherine and “the Beautiful Soul” “Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do.” (PS, 19)

The alienation of spirit from body, which disembodies and spiritualizes desire, proves fateful for both Catherine and Heathcliff—“fateful” in the double-sense of the word, both fatal and full of fate, destined-to-be. For Nancy Armstrong, Wuthering Heights “demonstrates that fiction could no longer be written from the Romantic viewpoint and still be considered a novel.”53 Therefore the novel’s representation of Romanticism’s failure to project its imaginative ideals on to the world and thereby transform it must, she rightly insists, be understood as a fated historical impasse. As such, Wuthering Heights constitutes not so much a critique of Romanticism as a lamentation of its historical failure and waning. Hence the melodramatic crisis of existence undergone by its characters, which are torn between two irreconcilable poles of being, the imaginative and the social,

53 Armstrong, “Emily Brontë,” 91.

74 to which the former must, at last, be sacrificed. Armstrong argues that, “Out of this dilemma, we might imagine, came Heathcliff, who, in participating in both literary traditions [Romanticism and Victorianism], actually reveals the limitations of each.”54 There is some truth to this claim; but Heathcliff, it must be admitted, finds a practical (albeit also brutal) outlet for his libidinal energies in the destruction he wreaks towards the end of the novel (which will also, in turn, exhaust him and chase him to the grave). Catherine, on the other hand, is totally consumed in her imaginative existence and incapable of living any longer in the real world. Romantic individualism becomes, for her, a deathly prison of inaction. Rather than Heathcliff, Catherine, like Hegel’s “beautiful soul,” more properly demonstrates the crises of Romanticism in an increasingly capitalistic universe of competition between atomized individuals.

If “I am Heathcliff” preserves in metaphor a love that otherwise has no earthly form, it also effectively alienates desire—the labour of love—by attributing it to an elsewhere temporality that is ambiguously before and after, but manifestly not present. As Nelly observes, Catherine’s pursuit of a relationship with Edgar, in spite of her love of Heathcliff, “led her to adopt a double character without exactly intending to deceive anyone” (WH, 90). But in believing that such a double-life will be the solution to her problems, she actually deceives herself. As Eagleton explains, “Catherine trades her authentic selfhood for social privilege”—an “attempt to compromise [that] unleashes … contradictions which will drive both her and Heathcliff to their deaths” (MP, 101, 102). Social pressure coerces her into this double-life; but her social milieu also refuses such a brazen and transparent enactment of that duplicity on her part. Edgar gives her an ultimatum: “Will you give up Heathcliff hereafter, or will you give up me? It is impossible for you to be my friend, and his at the same time; and I absolutely require to know which you choose” (WH, 134). Catherine, having identified Heathcliff with her soul, cannot answer: to deny Linton would leave her financially destitute, unless she took up with Heathcliff, which would make her into an outcast and violate the sanctity of her love for Heathcliff (preserved in the impossible equality of the assertion “I am Heathcliff”), but to renounce, with finality, her otherworldly love for Heathcliff and

54 Armstrong, “Emily Brontë,” 90.

75 remain with Linton would, to her mind, condemn her also to a kind of death-in-life without her soul. Both alternatives are wretched and threaten the stability of Catherine’s being, which rests precariously in the delicate balance of her divided selves. Her refusal to answer Edgar’s ultimatum, however, becomes also a refusal to keep those divided selves from canceling each other out. As soon as she no longer struggles to contain the contradiction at the core of her being, she is moved, as if by some invisible force, towards a fateful death. As Bersani explains, Once literature approaches noninterpretable being, it begins to show suicidal tendencies. … the intuition of desires or states of being unassimilable to the structural designs of a story or a self leads to a loss of novelistic energy and life energy. Original desire either becomes the secret of death … or creates a deathlike stillness in life which is really the renunciation of all desire…. (FA, 195)

Linton’s rejection of Catherine’s compromise (“I am Heathcliff”) makes an existence founded on such a compromise not just untenable, but also negates what semblance of life compromise had formerly sustained. Catherine’s being is now wholly claimed by that elsewhere that had once made life at the Grange acceptable—the impossible supplement now makes for an impossible reality. As such, Catherine becomes mentally unstable and permanently alienated from herself: “she refused to eat, and now she alternately raves, and remains in a half-dream, knowing those about her, but having her mind filled with all sorts of strange ideas and illusions” (WH, 144). The doctor who diagnoses her confides to Nelly that, “the threatening danger was not so much death, as permanent alienation of intellect” (WH, 145). In the world of Wuthering Heights, though, “permanent alienation” leads inexorably towards “death”—a metaphoric conflation, implying that the former is tantamount to the latter. But before death comes a kind of serenity, a blessing conferred from the otherworld upon those who no longer struggle to be in this one: those “beautiful souls” which, for Hegel, possess “pure knowledge of pure inwardness … not only the intuition of the Divine but the Divine’s intuition of itself,” but who, “lacking an actual existence,” are also “entangled in the contradiction between [the soul’s] pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself and change itself into an

76 actual existence” (PS, 483, 406). The “beautiful soul” represents being “intensified to its pure abstraction and is pure being or empty nothingness,” but is also, as a result, “disordered to the point of madness, wastes itself in yearning and pines away in consumption” (PS, 407). Hence the strange beauty that halos Catherine in her madness and on her deathbed: “Her appearance was altered…. There seemed unearthly beauty in the change” (WH, 166, emphasis mine). Her eyes “no longer gave the impression of looking at the objects around her; they appeared always to gaze beyond, and far beyond—you would have said out of this world. … She had [a] vague, distant look, … which expressed no recognition of material things either by ear or eye” (WH, 166).

For Catherine’s “beautiful soul,” the earthly drama of her adult life becomes weirdly immaterial. Self-sequestered in her room at the Grange, she explains to Nelly, “I thought … that I was enclosed in the oak-panelled bed at home …and most strangely, the whole last seven years of my life grew a blank! I did not recall that they had been at all. I was a child … [but] then, memory burst in” (WH, 140). Catherine’s experience of both spatial and temporal dislocation is disorienting, as it produces within her the unnerving sense of having passed immediately from innocence to the wretched position she now occupies: But, supposing at twelve years old, I had been wrenched from the Heights, and every early association, and my all in all, as Heathcliff was at that time, and been converted at a stroke into Mrs. Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger; and exile, and outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world—you may fancy a glimpse of the abyss where I groveled! (WH, 140) Although Catherine was not “wrenched from the Heights” at age twelve, the exaggerated description of her predicament does give us, and her interlocutor, “a glimpse of the abyss” in which she has sunk as a result of her dutiful life as “the lady of Thrushcross Grange,” which, even if it conferred any of the social privileges that were desired, led also to the alienation of spirit from body—a figurative death that is now literalized as a real one: “she was fated, sure to die” (WH, 167). “I am Heathcliff” is an impossible figuration of identity to sustain. The lovers’ spiritual conspiracy against societal strictures is undermined by its own radicalness: their spiritual bond is not for this world.

Hence the novel’s melodramatic reiteration of the impossibility of Catherine doing anything other than rejecting Heathcliff as a suitor. Catherine’s decision is coerced out of her. To live and survive in the world of Wuthering Heights, it is Edgar or Heathcliff, all or nothing, which doesn’t really represent a choice, rather a necessity. As Brooks explains, What we most retain from any consideration of melodramatic structures is the sense of fundamental bipolar contrast and clash. The world according to melodrama is built on an irreducible Manichaeism, the conflict of good and evil as opposites not subject to compromise. Melodramatic dilemmas and choices are constructed on the either/or in its extreme form as the all- or-nothing. Polarization is both horizontal and vertical: characters represent extremes, and they undergo extremes, passing from heights to depths, or the reverse, almost instantaneously. The middle ground and the middle condition are excluded. (MI, 36)

The assertion “I am Heathcliff” thus turns out to have been only just a bold proposal—a strange dream—but it is one from which the novel cannot recover having once indulged in it. The fantasy survives in spectral form, lurking always just beyond what the family can accommodate. The ideal represented in the assertion “I am Heathcliff” makes sense out there on the moors; but it doesn’t exist at the Heights or at the Grange, but between them, in the middle. But it also longs to collapse both the terrible divide between the two homes and the false alternatives they represent. Catherine, in her “half-dream,” conflates her room at the Grange with her “oak-panelled” bed at the Heights and, in so doing, collapses the spatial divide that separates the two houses and also the temporal difference between these two episodes in her life. Then, ostensibly awakened from her dream-state, she looks out her window at the Grange, over the now-mythical heath, and all of sudden imagines (again) that she sees the very bedroom of which she was just dreaming: “Look!” she cried eagerly; “that’s my room, with the candle in it, […] and the other candle is in Joseph’s garret … Joseph sits up late, doesn’t he? He’s waiting till I come home that he may lock the gate … Well, he’ll wait

a while yet. It’s a rough journey, and a sad heart to travel it […]. We’ve braved its ghosts often together, […] but Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I’ll keep you. […] but I won’t rest still you are with me—I never will!” (WH, 141) But Catherine’s imagined return to the Heights and her reunion with Heathcliff is never acted out. The novel, however, is haunted by its possibility, as if her spirit had indeed escaped out the Grange window to endlessly wander the moors and rap at the windows of the Heights in search of her other half, who clung to life, and not death. “The windowpane is,” in Van Ghent’s words, “the medium, treacherously transparent, separating the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside,’ the ‘human’ from the alien and terrible ‘other.’”55 First Heathcliff wanted in—into the Heights and into Catherine’s heart—then Catherine left for the Grange and discovered she wanted out. The two are never on the same side: one is always the other’s alien other, and personal ghost. Desire haunts and halos Brontë’s characters; but it is never more than momentarily embodied in them. Having been reified into a mythical entity, it now lies outside of history, its hidden engine, always driving towards the fateful moment of its penetration and irruption into the real.

In 1801, roughly seven years after Catherine’s death, Lockwood lies asleep in the oak- paneled bedroom at the Heights (the same one Catherine imagined on her deathbed). Influenced by his tracing of the “hieroglyphic” writing in her diary, the ghost of Catherine permeates his thoughts, and, while he is absorbed in his half-dream state (similar to Catherine’s half-dream state at the Grange), her ghost tries violently and gruesomely to enter back into the world from which she vanished. At first thinking he has been awakened by a branch rapping at the window, Lockwood attempts to snap the “importunate” branch in half: The intense nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed: “Let me in—let me in!”

55 Van Ghent, 161.

“Who are you?” I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. “Catherine Linton,” it replied…. (WH, 56) In a world so fiercely opposed to the kind of passion expressed in Catherine and Heathcliff’s desire for one another, the very suggestion of such love cannot but appear as a violent intrusion, in a ghoulish form and as a fantasmatic threat. The search for “non- derivative” forms of repetition that could actualize desire has produced a bad infinity, an endless cycle of repression: a love for Heathcliff that cannot be enacted in life or a love for Edgar that is devoid of life, of vigor and vitality. Desire now haunts the novel. Barred entry by the novel’s tedious repetition of the same, it tries to force its way in by other means.

2.4 Heathcliff, or, the War Machine “One cannot think of primitive societies … without at the same time thinking about war.”56

Heathcliff, like Catherine, is a fated character. The alienation of desire from the social, the disunion of spirit and body, is unsustainable and leads ineluctably to non-existence for him as well. But where Catherine had gone over to the side of spirit, becoming more and more disembodied in her commitment to the spectral ideal, Heathcliff persists in the physical, as the embodied and material force of desire’s autonomy, which now becomes an acquisitive force, empty in and of itself, which must lay hold of everything if it is to give itself content.

Heathcliff’s function is that of the war machine as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: a force from the “outside,” a representative of the disenfranchised and nondenumerable, capable of moving freely across the striated space of the novel, which otherwise subjects its other characters to delimited localities and classes. The expression “war machine” is somewhat misleading, though. It’s not that the war machine’s sole aim is the perpetuation of war. Its aggression is the aggression of movement: “The celerity of the

56 Pierre Classtres, Archeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010), 279.

80 war machine against the gravity of a State apparatus.”57 “There are,” Deleuze and Guattari argue, many reasons to believe that the war machine is of a different origin … than the State apparatus. It is of nomadic origin and is directed against the State apparatus. One of the fundamental problems of the State is to appropriate this war machine that is foreign to it and make it a piece in its apparatus…. War, it must be said, is only the abominable residue of the war machine, either after it has allowed itself to be appropriated by the State apparatus, or even worse, has constructed itself a State apparatus capable only of destruction. When this happens, the war machine no longer draws mutant lines of flight, but a pure, cold line of abolition.58 The line of flight transforms into “a pure, cold line of abolition” when the war machine aligns itself with the State apparatus, which enforces of social hierarchization and striation. What a perfect way to describe Heathcliff’s betrayal of the freedom he represents for Catherine and the reader when he turns against the families of Wuthering Heights to enact his revenge—a revenge which seems only to re-enforce the law of non- contradiction that he initially rebelled against in a new and even more total and authoritarian fashion than before. For his revenge comprises nothing less than a total breakdown in the old kinship lines that had formerly entangled his and Catherine’s love for one another. Now everyone is a perfect capitalist individual, free from family ties and the traditions they preserve. The Heights and the Grange are now the same. The force from the outside vanishes back to whence it came: out of the void, into the void.

As Bersani notes, “Heathcliff embodies the … fantasy of existence without origins” (FA, 204). The mystery surrounding his birth and his repeated association with nomadic gypsies all seem to confirm this. As such, Heathcliff is a doubly uncanny resident of the Heights. He is not only a non-familial relation to the other children, but also, in essence, a foreigner to sedentary life—a child of the wilderness. This connection to nature and the wild is further affirmed in the dual-image of the name Mr. Earnshaw gives him (heath +

57 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 289. 58 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 230.

81 cliff) and the fact that, as I have already mentioned, the surname Earnshaw is withheld from him, emphasizing his connection to the earth and not the family. Running across the moors, uncomplainingly defending himself against Hindley’s attacks on his freedom, his general love of autonomy: all come naturally to him. He is the representative par excellence of the “half-savage and hardy, and free” life that Catherine associates with her childhood friendship with him (WH, 140).

Thus, insofar as Heathcliff represents something “outside” of civilization, he represents a kind of freedom from it as well—this is especially the case for Catherine. The emancipatory power of the assertion “I am Heathcliff” depends on this distinction. The freedom of the “outside” is the freedom to be always on the move, to go where the sedentary cannot go, and thus escape the tyranny of civilization’s either/or constructions—the double-binds of de-limited place and time, where Deleuze and Guattari argue, “[e]very being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live.” These are the freedoms of the war machine: “Another justice, another movement, another space-time.”59

By not belonging properly to anywhere, Heathcliff is able to negotiate the imaginary geography of the novel more freely than the other characters. He is the only one to break out from the tedium of Heights-Grange existence. In this absence, he becomes a self- made man and aspiring capitalist individual. When he returns, he uses these new assets to enact his revenge on the families that formerly excluded him. Cleverly, though, he stays within the law to do so. At first, his intention was, as he explains to Nelly, to “settle my score with Hindley; and then preventing the law by doing execution on myself” (WH, 116). His new plan, however, is far more devious: instead of killing himself to prevent the law from punishing him, he works within the law to prevent it from punishing him, and, in so doing, reveals the shadow-side of the law—the appropriation of the war machine it requires, and thus also the violence that it sanctions, not that it prevents. Heathcliff’s new plan for revenge thus combines, as Eagleton notes, “Heights violence with Grange methods to gain power over both properties” (MP, 115).

59 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 353.

He gambles with a now drunkenly reckless Hindley, who bets the farm (literally), making Heathcliff the owner of the Heights and foster-father of Hareton when Hindley passes. As Joseph puts it in his succinctly garbled dialect, Catherine’s “fathur’s goold runs intuh [Heathcliff’s] pocket, and her fathur’s son gallops down t’ Broad road, while he flees afore tuh oppen t’ pikes” (WH, 122). He marries Isabella, inserting himself into the Grange entail, and subjects her to extreme abuse all while “keep[ing] strictly within the limits of the law” (“I’ve avoided,” he explains, “giving her the slightest right to claim a separation”) (WH, 162). After Isabella dies in self-exile, he exercises his rights as the father, claiming custody of the child (Linton) he had never seen before. He then encourages the spiritless boy to pursue a marriage with his cousin Cathy. As soon as Edgar is made aware of this “he divined that one of his enemy’s purposes was to secure the personal property, as well as the estate, to his son, or rather himself” (WH, 266). When Edgar tries to alter his will to prevent his property from going to his daughter’s husband, Heathcliff buys off Edgar’s lawyer and prevents him from making the necessary alterations before he dies.60 When the consumptive Linton dies almost immediately after his father, Heathcliff has effectively manipulated his son’s will to become the master of Grange: Heathcliff went up once, to show her [Cathy] Linton’s will. He had bequeathed the whole of his, and what had been her moveable property, to his father. The poor creature was threatened, or coaxed into that act, during her week’s absence, when his uncle died. The lands, being a minor, he could not meddle with. However, Mr. Heathcliff has claimed and kept them in his wife’s right, and his also—I suppose legally; at any rate Catherine, destitute of cash and friends, cannot disturb his possession. (WH, 276)61

60 “He had sold himself to Mr. Heathcliff, and that was the cause of his delay in obeying my master’s summons” (WH, 268). 61 For an assessment of the incredible accuracy with which Brontë describes the way someone of Heathcliff’s persuasion could exploit the law to exact such a revenge, see Charles Percy Sanger, “The Structure of Wuthering Heights,” in Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, revised ed., ed. William M. Sale, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co, 1972), 286-98.

But having exploited the law to exact his revenge, he has not, in fact, overturned the law—supported by the same engrained social prejudices that had kept him and Catherine apart (the mutual reinforcement of capitalist atomization and private property). Instead he becomes an even more powerful agent of that law. As such, the energies of Heathcliff’s war machine have unwittingly been appropriated by the family-state apparatus, which alienates him from even his own acts of violence. For whom has Heathcliff been waging war? Who remains victorious when all is said and done? Not Heathcliff, his revenge only accelerates the gradual domination of “Grange methods” over Heights “self-sufficiency” that was already occurring. Heathcliff’s violence effectively makes him traitor to himself and his former freedom as a “wild child”—a freedom which now becomes the bad freedom of capitalist individualism.62 As Eagleton explains, “Heathcliff the adult is the atomic capitalist to whom relational bonds are nothing, whose individualism is now enslaving rather than liberating,” who “knows only the delusory freedom of exploiting others” (MP 111). For Heathcliff, the realization of this self-negating behaviour is enervating: “It is a poor conclusion, is it not?” he observed, … “An absurd termination to my violent exertions! I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready, and in my power 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! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time, only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case—I have the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.” (WH, 300)

62 Gilbert and Gubar argue that, “Heathcliff pursues a murderous revenge against patriarchy” (MA, 296). To a certain degree, this is true. But in “killing off” the vestiges of a feudalistic patriarchy, he seems to prepare the way for a capitalist-bourgeois patriarchy. Cathy will still be Hareton’s property by law. A period of transparent domination of women by men has merely been replaced by the pretense of a “peaceable” domination—equal but not equal. So, if, as they suggest, “to kill patriarchy, he must first pretend to be a patriarch,” he does so more successfully by also and actually becoming a capitalist (MA, 297).

Alienated from self-assertive and life-affirming actions, even alienated from his own acts of violence, Heathcliff becomes a being-for-death, desire autonomized as death drive, first as the harbinger of destruction and then as one visible claimed by death in his devotion to violence without end. Captured, he is condemned to obsolescence.

It is not entirely appropriate, then, to view Heathcliff as the hero of Wuthering Heights, not even a Byronic hero-villain. He is more properly a function than a character—an anarchic, and more specifically revolutionary, force, complete with all the ambiguities that come with the insurrectional. He is not so much the Napoleon of Byronic Romanticism as he is Robespierre of the Reign of Terror, who was both “glorious and terrible,” pivotal and necessary, to the revolutionary drama, but also condemned by many then and now, and executed (ironically) by other revolutionaries for, amongst other things, his zeal for executions. In the same way that historian Eric Hobsbawm argues that the Reign of Terror, terrible as it was, kept the revolution alive, prevented the nation from disappearing into a morass of unorganized violence, and guaranteed the significance of a change to come, even if, in the end, it excluded Robespierre and the Jacobin cause for a more “bourgeois” revolution, Heathcliff’s “reign of terror” also keeps the movement of the novel alive (especially in the latter half when our interest starts to flag) and effectively clears the way for the tranquil resolution that will be achieved in Hareton’s marriage to Cathy once Heathcliff is in the grave.63 In Miller’s words, it is as if, “The love of Hareton and the second Cathy appears to be possible only because Heathcliff and the first Cathy have broken through life into death, and have liberated energies from the region of boundless sympathy into this world.”64 But on a more literal level, there is also no longer anything left to prevent the two from marrying now that Heathcliff has abolished all the obstacles that formerly stood in the way of Heights and Grange relationships. In both cases, though, this reversal is achieved, first by the introduction of a violent revolutionary force and then by its expulsion.

63 See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (London: Abacus, 1962), 89-94. 64 Miller, Disappearance of God, 209.

Many critics have noted the bathos of the novel’s conclusion—how static it is. Hareton and Cathy seem like a more acceptable, domesticated Heathcliff and Catherine, but also stripped of all the passion and intensity that made the former interesting.65 For example, Bersani argues, “The first Catherine asserts her identity to someone outside the family and whose being is incomparable to hers, while the second Catherine loves in Hareton a kind of legitimized Heathcliff, a cousin who resembles her mother. In Hareton, Heathcliff is transformed from the other into the same” (FA, 222). There is then something false, or rather uncanny, about this resolution, as we are made to feel that it represses, instead of gratifying, or even, at minimum, effectively cathexing, the libidinal energy of the original pair. On the surface, then, it seems nothing has really changed to warrant a sense of gratifying denouement.

2.5 History and Melodrama “Haunting is historical.”66

The bathos of the novel’s conclusion, in which desire’s long adventure appears merely to peter out once Heathcliff is in the grave, however, actually hides a fundamental change, one that resists either categories of “good” or “bad,” but possesses all the ambiguities of history once stripped of any vestiges of the ideology of progress. As Miller points out, “the peace of civilization and the irrational violence of Heathcliff’s transgressions are not irreconcilable opposites.”67 Heathcliff, having destroyed at last the division between the Grange and the Heights in his appropriation of the two properties towards the end of the novel, effectively collapses the class distinction that had abided there as well. As the new patriarch of the Heights, he no longer represents the “primitive” gypsy freedom he previously enjoyed as a boy or the yeoman self-sufficiency of the late Mr. Earnshaw. His new “gentlemanly” status as proprietor of the Heights and the Grange makes him instead

65 For example, Bersani argues, “It’s as if Emily Brontë were telling the same story twice, and eliminating its originality the second time” (FA, 222). Miller similarly states, “The love of the second Cathy pales beside the intensity of the first story, and the novel, in the very space and emphasis it gives to the first Cathy, seems to indicate that her kind of love is more valuable, more heroic.” Disappearance of God, 206. 66 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 3. 67 Miller, The Disappearance of God, 210.

86 into a rentier just like the late Mr. Linton and gives him that kind of freedom that is contingent on the exploitation of others—the renting out of the Grange to Lockwood, and presumably the rest of the Linton estate to tenant farmers. As Jameson succinctly puts it, Heathcliff is the locus of history … his mysterious fortune marks him as a protocapitalist, in some other place, absent from the narrative which then recodes the new economic energies as sexual passion. The aging of Heathcliff then constitutes the narrative mechanism whereby the alien dynamism of capitalism is reconciled with the immemorial (and cyclical) time of the agricultural life of a country squiredom; and the salvational and wish-fulfilling Utopian conclusion is bought at the price of transforming such an alien dynamism into a benign force which, eclipsing itself, permits the vision of some revitalization of the ever more marginalized countryside.68 It is not possible then to see this corruption of Heights self-sufficiency as a momentary aberration embodied in Heathcliff and thus corrected by the restoration of the Heights to Hareton. The elision of yeoman self-sufficiency persists and is even completed in the novel’s conclusion. When Lockwood returns in 1802 to settle his account with Heathcliff, unaware of his death, Nelly informs him that, “it is with Mrs. Heathcliff you must settle … or rather, with me. She has not learned to manage her affairs yet” (WH, 288). Catherine and Hareton are destined not to continue the Earnshaw legacy of self- sufficiency, but to become the new landlords of the Linton properties, its rentiers and managers alike. The completeness of this transition is even confirmed by the projected closing of the Heights and the couple’s relocation to the Grange.69 Thus Cathy and Hareton, even if they inherent a legacy of brutality and inter-familial antagonisms, also eventually and unwittingly collapse those divisions which separate Heights values from Grange values and, in the process, establish the bourgeois home as the novel’s final arbiter of “good” values and the inevitable site of desire’s resolution, however deliriously it might rail against it.

68 Jameson, 128. 69 “‘They are going to the Grange then?’ I said. [¶] ‘Yes,’ answered Mrs. Dean, ‘as soon as they are married…. [Joseph and “a lad”] will live in the kitchen, and the rest will be shut up’” (WH, 312).

The antagonisms and struggle that this image of a new bourgeois domesticity glosses over at the end of the novel, however, would not be apparent in the beginning if it were not for Heathcliff, who, I would argue (pace Jameson) does not so much represent the force of change itself—Jameson’s history—as he becomes the prism through which change is brought to light: the Hegelian “middle term … which presents the two extremes to one another, and [mediates] each in its dealings with the other” only to vanish again along with the “essential moment of splitting into extremes,” which now collapse “into a lifeless unity which is split into lifeless, merely immediate, unopposed extremes … an abstract negation” (PS, 136, 114-5). For it is only by introducing this third party (Heathcliff) as an object for Catherine’s impossible passion that the opposition between the Heights and the Grange is made both real and then, also, in the end, false—merely “abstract.” For if each household represents a particular class essentialism (Heights vitality and self-sufficiency versus Grange exploitation and opulence; yeoman autonomy versus the ennui of the landed gentry), Heathcliff, as “vanishing mediator,” ultimately collapses this distinction by breaking up large and small property alike into new forms of bourgeois property in a supreme act of “accumulation by dispossession,” so that no “concrete” distinction abides there any longer.70 The authority, and restoration, brought about by Cathy and Hareton’s marriage is achieved not by inclusion of this third party, then, but by his receding—in other words, by an even more complete and, in a sense, now-intrinsic exclusion of the “foreign” element and the death-driven desire that he momentarily embodied when he returns to seek his revenge on the two families. The temporary inclusion of this third party (Heathcliff), though, makes apparent the violence with which the process of the family’s separation from the social must be completed before bourgeois domesticity becomes sacrosanct.

This resolution is achieved, however, by way of a metaleptic reversal of cause and effect, which places the new bourgeois family at the end of the narrative as the final home and

70 “Accumulation by dispossession” is David Harvey’s renaming of the Marxist concept of “primitive accumulation,” which eschews the connotation “original” in “primitive” that would confine “accumulation by dispossession” always to an archaic, first stage of capitalism; Harvey instead allows for “accumulation by dispossession” to be a recurring and contemporary dynamic of capitalism. See his A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010), 310. Heathcliff’s appropriation of the Heights and Grange are more literally examples of Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession,” but also, I am arguing, symbolic of an “original” transformative stage in the revolution of rural class relations.

88 destination of alienated desire when it was actually the separation of desire from the social that was caused by the reorganization of socio-sexual relations in the transition to capitalism and the consolidation of the atomic bourgeois family, which had the effect of “freeing” desire in the first place. Heathcliff is not “the locus of history”; desire is rather the proper avatar of history in the novel, searching restlessly for its realization and advancement, endlessly reconfiguring the alignment of characters and property. Like the Yorkshire natives at the end of novel who believe Catherine and Heathcliff’s ghosts still chase each other across the moors, we, as readers, tend to believe that there is a residue (or even an excess!) of unincorporated desire that still haunts the novel and destabilizes its closure, despite Lockwood’s overconfident sense of ultimate resolution.71

This leftover and properly unearthly desire, which never fully makes it into the world of the novel, but which is shadowed forth in the statement “I am Heathcliff,” is what allows us to rewrite the story—and, with it, its historical contents as well—as an allegory of desire’s unfinished adventure. The thinness of the ending and the unconvincingness of its closure are in fact what authorize this reading and are integral to the novel’s central melodrama, in which, as Brooks says, “the force of desire [is] caught in a death struggle with the life force” (MI, 2). Here, melodrama presents itself as the aesthetic proper of the rewriting of history as a story about desire. In Brontë’s novel, “I am Heathcliff” is not only a way of reconciling opposites that cannot be together, but also, in the end, a way of conflating desire and history, such that desire becomes the “hidden” protagonist of that deeper and still unfinished plot, which is human history.

71 “I … wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (WH, 312).

3 The Dickens Guilt Machine: Great Expectations and the Crisis of Liberalism

“[B]y assuming the unity of humanity to have been already realized in principle, the liberal thesis serves as an apology for the existing order.” Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment1

What happens when one bases a whole worldview and personal identity around the struggle to realize one’s desire for those quintessential liberal freedoms that are part and parcel of the process of social atomization charted in the previous chapter: freedom of movement, to love and marry who one wants, to work at what one chooses, and, from time to time, not to work at all, to recede into a cloistered private life?2 Desire, if placed at the centre of one’s worldview, easily becomes autonomized, transformed into a quasi- mythical force working behind history, where each and every episode becomes judged for the amount of desire it was able to realize—realized or repressed, the inexorable alternatives of desire’s worldly progress in bourgeois society. One judges history by asking a simple question: more or less? Here, “more” signifies good, and “less” bad.

But what happens if one comes to doubt the ethicalness of the means by which any of these desires and freedoms might at last be ascertained and secured in a competitive society, where the realizations of these desires will necessarily be unequal and contingent on that inequality? Now, “more” becomes less and “less” becomes more. But, for those who cannot let go of the desire, or who are compelled to desire all the same, the result is an all-consuming guilt: not just personal guilt, but the guilt of society as a whole in its arrangement of the social relations that condition and limit choice—what Marxism calls “the totality.” It is precisely the confounding revelation of this universal guilt that

1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 138. 2 These freedoms, or rather the desire for them, provide to a large degree both the content and the form of the novel and define it to large degree as the art-form particular to a post-feudal society and nascent industrial capitalism. Geoffrey Thurley, for example, argues, “The necessary prerequisites for the existence of the novel are social mobility, technological and economic expansionism, and political libertarianism.” The Dickens Myth: Its Genesis and Structure (St. Lucia, QSL: University of Queensland Press, 1976), 21.

89 90 provides the affective structure of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and which also gives the title its putative irony.

As Carolyn Lesjak argues, Great Expectations is structured by a dialectical unity of and contradiction between essence and appearance.3 Her interpretation of the novel’s representation of the increasingly globalized space of nineteenth-century capitalism borrows from classic Marxism the notion that, although capital appears to be the result of the circulation of commodities for money on the market, it is actually in essence generated through the exploitation of the worker in the production process.4 As Lesjak astutely observes, Pip, in the stage of his Expectations, is totally cut off from this site of production and the worker’s exploitation. He lives cozily ensconced in the world of appearances, the world of money exchanged for goods. Where that money comes from and how it ends up in his pocket is (for the majority of the novel) a mystery to him. However, as his narrative proceeds, the novel, like a detective story retracing the obscure origins of a crime already committed, proceeds to uncover the essence of the capitalist system when Pip discovers that Magwitch is the source of his wealth: a transported convict who has generated it by laboring first as a farm hand and then as a farmer in New South Wales. For Lesjak, this secret relationship between Pip and Magwitch maps the overall dynamics of imperialism, which, by extending the boundaries of capitalist accumulation beyond the nation, simultaneously makes it harder for whole sections of the public (especially the bourgeois consumer, here Pip) to recognize the essence of capitalism based in the exploitation of labour. For Lesjak, this obscure referent— imperialism—is incorporated into the world of the novel via the allegorical figure of Magwitch, who stands for the globalized proletariat and turns the novel as a whole into a highly coded recognition and mapping of imperialism: In Great Expectations, the spatial history mapped by Britain’s relationship to its penal colony, Australia, and figured in Magwitch’s relationship to Pip complete the temporal history of Pip’s Great Expectations: by

3 Carolyn Lesjak, Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 101. 4 For an authoritative discussion of the essence/appearance dialectic in Marx, see Norman Geras, “Essence and Appearance: Aspects of Fetishism in Capital,” New Left Review 1.65 (1971), 69-85.

positioning imperial labor as central to the text, this spatial history enlarges the linear biography of Pip’s development and thus substantially rewrites Pip’s history and the history of modernity more generally.5

My own interpretation of the novel does not seek to contradict any of these claims, which strike me as both cogent and apropos. However, by going directly for the allegorical content—imperialism—coded in the novel’s spatial dynamics and its play of essence and appearance, Lesjak misses an important stage in the novel’s process of mediating this abstract totality. After all, if one wanted to paint a clear picture of the dynamics of capitalism, even as it becomes ever more global, there are more straightforward ways of doing so than writing a novel about it. Thus, it is my argument that Great Expectations deals with capitalism not in any direct way but rather in a heavily mediated fashion as a parable about guilt and the desire for atonement. Capitalism, I will argue, is treated primarily as a kind of ineffable machinery, producing and proliferating complicity and guilt. Here, guilt is posited as both primordial and inescapable, or, I will argue, tragic. As the novel follows Pip into the world of appearance, this essential guilt follows him both literarily and metaphorically as the undisclosed secret of his Great Expectations, such that guilt begins to permeate his reality, structuring and distorting it, becoming the shadow side of his existence, which casts a grotesque light on the otherwise comic world of the novel.6 As the novel works towards the revelation of this universal guilt, it recodes the existential guilt of Being as an escapable dimension of class society, such that the affective structure becomes a way of grappling with the abstract totality—capitalism— albeit from the perspective of a subject who no longer sees any alternative to its continuation or the proliferation of guilt under it.

The novel posits this guilt as both hidden and universal, which requires its representation to repeatedly stage the dialectical unity and opposition of appearances and this hidden (essential) reality. This dialectic is managed in Great Expectations primarily at the level

5 Lesjak, 91. 6 Throughout this chapter I use the word “grotesque” to refer to Dickens’s technique of drawing out the sinister in the comic. For a thorough examination of Dickens’s works in relation to the tradition of the grotesque more broadly, see Michael Hollington, Dickens and the Grotesque (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984).

92 of voice and narrative tense, by the first-person narrator, Pip, who tells the story of his Expectations retrospectively from a period in time at which he no longer views them as great or expects them at all. For the overlaying of tenses to work, for the period of illusions and the period after which they were lost to be compacted into a single syntactical expression, the narrative must, for the most part, be told straight. That is, Pip must tell his story as if he doesn’t know what he now knows, all the while insinuating in the most subtle ways clues that prepare the reader (or even enable her to guess at) the essential reality the narrator is avoiding: namely, his guilt.

For the revelation of guilt, when it does come (“All the truth of my position came flashing on me”7), to be felt as truly universal, not just Pip’s guilt, but the guilt of the totality, the reader must sense as strongly as possible that all scenes are connected at the most fundamental level. It is in this sense that opening events in the graveyard by the marshes serve as what Peter Brooks calls a “primal scene,” establishing the basic coordinates of the novel’s world and worldview, which is then continuously restaged and re-concealed as Pip’s adventure progresses, or rather regresses, moving backwards, not forwards, to discover that the obscure origins of his Expectations were already present in the first scene of the novel.8 Here, all alone contemplating his parents’ gravestones, Pip meets his secret benefactor, the escaped convict Magwitch, who later haunts his existence throughout the long middle of the novel. But since the “primal scene” can never itself be transcended, only repeated, and since the guilty identity that it stages between the orphan and the criminal is turned into an absolute and unresolvable guilt, the story’s emplotment works not towards the realization of Pip’s Expectations, but rather their undoing, which, at last, reveals their spiritual poverty (the “more” that when looked at from a different angle becomes “less”). At stake in this parable of disillusionment—of “Expectations Well Lost”9—however, are not just the dreams and fantasies of a fictional individual, but, at the allegorical level, the dreams of a whole nation that is, on the one hand, increasingly

7 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Charlotte Mitchell (London: Penguin, 2003), 319. Hereafter cited in parentheses as GE. 8 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 122. 9 On the theme of disillusionment, see G. Robert Stange, “Expectations Well Lost: Dickens’ Fable for His Time,” College English 16.1 (1954), 9-17.

93 wedded to the liberal ideals of social mobility and history as the steady march of progress, but, on the other hand, refuses to alter its image of what success looks like in a dynamic, competitive society. At the individual level, success is still imagined by and large via the figure of “the gentleman,” albeit a democratized gentleman, no longer requiring the ancient right of a family name.

As I will argue in this chapter, this image of aristocratic gentility and privilege as a democratized and attainable ideal for all (male) citizens ultimately leads to a kind of imaginative deadlock, in which one either white-washes over the “failures” that contradict the ideal or else renounces the ideal itself and embraces contradictory reality (perhaps the defining gesture of naturalism and the novels of George Gissing in particular). Great Expectations, however, does both and therefore neither: the novel contradicts the ideal of democratized gentility and clings to it all at the same time. It is in this light that I intend to elaborate the novel’s “affective structure” not just as any ordinary guilt, but specifically as “liberal guilt,” the tacit acknowledgment that the political and economic development of England is actually at odds with the liberal values it is supposed to reflect: the recognition that—in the words of Daniel Born, from whom I borrow the expression—“liberal and capitalist systems of value do not easily merge.”10 Liberalism under crisis, and held on to in the face of crisis, starts to look an awful lot like a variety of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism”: “A relation of cruel optimism exists,” she says, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing,” “when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.”11 Here, what is impeded, I will argue, is, not only “flourishing,” in the sense that it becomes hard to preach the values of self-help in a society with an increasingly

10 According to Daniel Born: Victorian and Edwardian writers as diverse as Dickens, Gissing, Forster, and Wells recognize that liberal and capitalist systems of value do not easily merge: the endurance of poverty in London’s streets will not be explained away. On this score, their voices loudly contradict the confidence of first generation classic liberal theory. The enduring visibility of the poor must be addressed specifically, in detail. This alteration of the liberal voice from confidence to despair, from prescription to guilt, might be read as a sign of liberalism’s decline but also signals an enlargement and maturation of liberal concern. The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to H. G. Wells (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 28-9. 11 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1.

94 rigid and rigged class structure, but also perception. Insofar as one clings to the liberal thesis that history leads steadily towards greater equality and freedom, one fails to grasp the contradictions of it in present-day reality: perception and knowledge are both blocked.

In one respect, guilt is a symptom of this deadlock; but the affect, I will argue, is already freighted with cognitive content. Since guilt implies that the belief system—liberalism— is no longer defensible, it tacitly acknowledges what the belief rejects. Here, social reality is mediated by the feeling of guilt, which now seems to permeate it and structure its representation in the novel. But to interpret Great Expectations in this way requires us not to get ahead of ourselves. We must see the eponymous Great Expectations from both sides of the coin, so to speak: first optimistically and then, as the novel gradually teaches us, guiltily.

3.1 After 1848: Cruel Optimism and the Crisis of Liberalism As George Orwell famously observed of Dickens’s novels, The ideal to be striven after … appears to be something like this: a hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals, the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming- pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man’s bluff; but nothing ever happens, except the yearly child-birth. The curious thing is that it is a genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it appear. The thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him. This alone would be enough to tell one that more than a hundred years have

passed since Dickens’s first book was written. No modern man could combine such purposelessness with so much vitality.12 “[I]t is a genuinely happy picture”: it’s an important point that Orwell is making. The fantasy—as ridiculous as it appears to “modern man,” who, hating not so much stability as repetition, has become inured to his own restlessness—is actually (in Dickens’s time) a protest against the status quo of the new industrial society: a nostalgic one, to be sure, but made, and this is the significant part, by a subject not born into these conditions of existence, looking up the social ladder for an image of the ideal to be sought in the new, dynamic society that capitalism is creating. It is a bourgeois ideal, then, but modeled largely on a feudal-aristocratic lifeworld. And that is the crippling contradiction of the fantasy and the source of the “cruel optimism”: social mobility in laissez-faire society necessarily requires work, yet the fantasied image of success is still one in which, as Orwell says, there is “no work.” This is leisure no longer as a natural part of life, as it maybe could be said it was for feudal society, but rather as an abstracted and commodified object of desire. If the world of leisure described by Orwell is taken for granted by Jane Austen and her novels’ characters (despite their money problems one never sees them work), it is certainly no longer the case with Dickens. Now the happy ending must be restlessly sought: the whole long-winded apparatus of the serial novel invested in its attainment and the unlikelihood of the happy ending dramatized just as equally as the happy one so as to establish the novel’s putative realism and the fact the leisure is now a necessarily contingent pleasure. The reader must be made to feel this contingency (the fact that it could all go wrong), while also, at the same time, believing in the fatedness of the happy couple, who squares the circle of the Victorian novel’s many false starts and new beginnings.

Again, it is very easy to dismiss this image of happiness, but it is important to remember the relative barbarity that inaugurates capitalism as a full-blown competitive society, chasing people off the land into city centres and onto labour markets, where if they fail to sell their labour, their fate will likely be in the poor house or the prison, and, if not the

12 George Orwell, “Charles Dickens,” in Essays (New York: Penguin, 1994), 67.

96 prison, then the insane asylum or the penal colony. As Marx famously put it, “capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”13 The incredible forces unleashed by the leveling spirit of capitalism are directed as much to raising the middle classes up as they are at tearing down the paternalism of the older feudal society, which (however imperfectly) made the lower orders of society the responsibility of the higher. It was not until the Reform movement that roughly corresponds with the Victorian-era that bourgeois society would begin to develop methods and institutions for managing the destructive dynamics of this competitive society.

Great Expectations, however, turns its attention back to those pre-Victorian days. As Robin Gilmour observes in his excellent study The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel, “Pip comes to awareness in what is still essentially an eighteenth-century environment, and it is a world observed with literal as well as moral and symbolic fidelity: the Hulks, the gibbet, the blacksmith’s forge, the red-coated soldiers, the chaotic human misery of Newgate and the ‘Bloody Code.’”14 What Gilmour isolates here is the barbarity of the early nineteenth century from which Victorian “civilization” seemed to emerge as a corrective: a violent past, however, to which the present was still inextricably tied in ways that someone Dickens’s age could not help but notice. Thus, for Gilmour, The historical setting of the novel provides the important clue to the nature of Pip’s much-discussed guilt. His predicament is representative of a social class in the act of emergence; specifically, of the Victorian middle class in its emergence from primitive origins. He needs civilization because he is so acutely aware (as the born gentleman Herbert cannot be) of its opposite, and consequently he overvalues it, purging his advance into gentility from all associations with the physical brutality which had

13 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin—New Left Review, 1976), 926. 14 Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 135.

formed his “first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things.”15

As Gilmour observes in these two quotations, the backwards-looking perspective is truly unironic: for those exposed to the open violence of the transition to the capitalist mode of production and the consolidation of a bourgeois way of life, the promise of “civilization” and the new ideology that anyone, through their own self-help, could become a member of “civilized” society, could seem truly utopian. It is only from the perspective of the present, that is, after a period of normalization, that the promises of “civilization” seem muted: comically optimistic and tragically under-realized. That Great Expectations straddles these two temporalities, overlaid by the affective structure of guilt, is perhaps the logical outcome of Dickens’s intellectual and political development.

As G. K. Chesterton reminds us, Dickens was, like so many of his literary contemporaries, a liberal.16 As such, he was an advocate of the 1830s Reform movement: The reforms of the Whig government included the abolition of slavery in British possessions (1833), the first effective Factory Act (1833), the first government grants in support of elementary schooling (1835), the criminal justice system, at last reserving hanging almost exclusively for murder, and municipal government (1835). All of these were issues that Dickens would engage with. But the reform that most concerned him was the reform of the Poor Law achieved in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.17 However, as Hugh Cunningham goes on to observe in his informative essay “Dickens as a Reformer,” “his responses to [these] particular issues were shaped by his abiding concern for decency and humanity, not by any coherent doctrine of the proper role of the

15 Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman, 137-8. 16 G. K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1911), 171. 17 Hugh Cunningham, “Dickens as a Reformer,” in A Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. David Paroissien (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 163.

98 state.”18 “[A]t the back of his mind,” Orwell writes, “there is usually a half-belief that the whole apparatus of government is unnecessary. Parliament is simply Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle.”19

Although Dickens, like many other urban, petty bourgeoisie, was suspicious of government and state intervention, he was also not interested in, or sympathetic to, working-class movements that actively challenged the authority of parliament. For these working-class radicals, “the idea of organizing a general strike—ubiquitous during this period—was inherently political, with its aim of realizing ‘far-reaching, even revolutionary political and social reform’ by establishing a national congress or convention to rival parliament itself.”20 If Dickens was a reformer then, he was not necessarily a radical and certainly not a revolutionary. He abhorred the thought that a French-style revolution might repeat itself in Britain and showed (particularly in Barnaby Rudge21) a marked dislike for the “mob action” that characterized the Chartist movement, which “from 1838 to 1848 was the most organized attempt in his lifetime to bring about a more democratic system of government.”22

Thus, by and large, Dickens accepted capitalism as the unalterable horizon of social progress. He argued that “capital and labour are not opposed, but are mutually dependent and mutually supporting” and simply reconciled himself to the internal contradictions of capitalism and the fact that, in his own words, “great contrasts of rank, great contrasts of wealth, and great contrasts of comfort must, as every man of sense was aware[,] exist among all civilized communities.”23 His political activism, with its emphasis on

18 Cunningham, 159. 19 Orwell, 50. 20 Matthew Roberts, Political Movements in Urban England, 1832-1914 (Houndsmills: Palgrave- Macmillan, 2009), 38. 21 See Patrick Brantlinger, “Two Responses to Chartism: Dickens and Disraeli,” in The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). 22 On the same page, Cunningham continues: “Fear of the mob was deep rooted in respectable British society, and Dickens feared it as much as anyone else. He never aligned himself with those reformers or radicals who were willing to pit numbers out on the streets, against government.” Cunningham, 161. 23 Dickens qtd. in Cunningham, 173.

“decency and humanity,” thus essentially amounted to a cleaning-up of the mess that “progress” left behind.24

In the years after the 1830s, and especially after the violent, but failed, European, proletarian revolutions of 1848, Dickens’s tone becomes increasingly one of guilt and resignation. In a speech he gave on June 27, 1855, to the Administrative Reform Association, of which he was also a member (“the first political meeting I have ever attended,” he claimed), he states: “The great, broad, true case that our public progress is far behind our private progress, and that we are not more remarkable for our private wisdom and success in matters of business than we are for our public folly and failure, I take to be as clearly established as the existence of the sun, moon, and stars.”25 Here, the use of the first-person plural should be emphasized, as Dickens includes himself and the whole Reform Association in the damning conclusion: “that our public progress is far behind our private progress.” The realization is that Dickens’s success, like that of other middle-class reformers, is part and parcel of the same capitalist economy that leaves the less fortunate behind.26 The liberal project, for Dickens, and more than a century of liberal reformers that will follow him, is thus no longer the revolutionary struggle with “Old Corruption”—the collusion of the aristocracy with the landed gentry—for the rights of individual self-determination, particularly as expressed through the widening of the franchise, but rather, now, an attempt to restore humanity to an “inhuman” social order that atomizes individuals by placing them in a direct competition with one another where only a minority will succeed.

24 As Raymond Williams observes, “His positives do not lie in social improvement, but rather in what he sees as the elements of human nature—personal kindness, sympathy, and forbearance. It is not the model factory against the satanic mill, nor is it the humanitarian experiment against selfish exploitation. It is, rather, individual persons against the System.” Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 94-5. 25 Dickens qtd. in Cunningham, 171. Dickens’s opinion was not off the mark; describing the predominant attitudes mid-Victorian period, historian Asa Briggs writes, “Self-help came first; government, except as an agency for dealing with foreign relations and for facilitating self-help, came very low on the list of daily preoccupations.” Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851-67, revised and illustrated ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), 24. 26 Gilmour Robin, for example, argues that, “Dickens is concerned with the lower reaches of the middle class in its most anxious phase of self-definition, struggling out of trade and domestic service and clerical work into the sunshine of respectability. His own background is almost a paradigm of that process…. He discovered for himself how thin and precarious was the partition that separated a lower-middle-class family from the abyss of urban poverty in the early nineteenth century.” The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel, 106-7.

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Unlike, say, Balzac or Stendhal, Dickens avoids looking the existing capitalist order directly in the eye. He perpetually whitewashes over it instead with what Orwell condemned as the “enormous platitude” that, “If men would behave decently the world would be decent.”27 The contradictions of capitalist development are, to Dickens’s mind, not inherent to the system of production, but rather to the hearts of the men (and occasionally the women) involved in it. It is this that distinguishes Dickensian realism from the Balazacian realism praised by Georg Lukács.28 Where the latter strives to realistically represent its hero’s struggle with the forces of the society of which he is himself a part, the former turns that struggle inward, transforming it into the moral struggle that plays out in the heart of the hero who seeks out ethical choice in a backwards society.

In Great Expectations, this inward struggle with the forces of Good and Evil takes the form of the main character Pip’s attempt to ethically resolve contradictions in his identity that result when he tries to view his rise from his lowly station as an apprenticed craftsmen into the upper echelons of society as a guiltless and predestined recognition of his inner merit. At first Pip takes it for granted that he will follow in the footsteps of his brother-in-law and become a blacksmith. However, when he is invited, by a chance occurrence, to Satis House to play with Estella, the adopted daughter of the wealthy spinster, Miss Havisham, he starts to loathe this calling. A secret inheritance seems to right this wrong, giving him the life he now desires most. His fantasy of a merited, and therefore guiltless, social ascendancy that comes as a result of his inheritance, however, is mortified by an ugly revelation about the true source of his new fortune, which ultimately leads him back to that earlier traumatic experience in his life, when he was assaulted by the escaped convict Magwitch, desperate to secure “wittles” and his freedom (GE, 4). Afraid for his life, Pip helps Magwitch and, in return, Magwitch later becomes his secret benefactor.

27 Orwell, 38. 28 See Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Howard Fertig, 2002).

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This initial meeting establishes the basic coordinates of the novel’s phenomenological world, where everything, even the uppermost of achievements of Pip in the phase of his Expectations, can be tied back to the universal guilt of these two orphaned and impoverished wretches who grapple in this metaphorical wasteland like an early Vladimir and Estragon. All the scenes of comfort and privilege that follow are falsified and hollowed out as so many false appearances by the “primal” truth staged in this opening, which connects the world of Pip’s Expectations, his life as a gentleman, back to this marshy primordial violence and universal guilt—an enduring reference point circulating throughout the novel that creates a contingency and relativity between essence and appearance, between an essentially tragic world and worldview and the comic exterior that contains and conveys it.

3.2 First as Tragedy… The hero of Great Expectations always straddles these two worlds.29 The first belongs to the graveyard by the marshes where we are introduced to Pip and, shortly after, to Magwitch. This world of the graveyard is tragic. Suggestively dark and marshy, the graveyard symbolizes an intractable, engulfing human condition—that “transcendental homelessness” of which the young Lukács says “the novel is, like no other, an expression.”30 Here, Pip stands alone, orphaned from a family he never knew, contemplating the lives of his dead parents and the “five little brothers of [his]—who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle” (GE, 3). Pip’s world, as he begins to realize it, is a world in which the need to discover self-realizing action, or, in his own words, “get a living,” is of the utmost importance. Idleness and self-contentment, it is implied, are inherently guilty and lead ineluctably to the grave; they are thus already in essence the equivalent of death. Alone in the churchyard, Pip is

29 Edmund Wilson’s essay, “Two Scrooges,” in The Wound and the Bow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), represents an early attempt to ground an understanding of the Dickensian universe in an analysis of the author’s predilection for dualism. This chapter argues for the continued relevance of dualism to understanding Dickens’s representational strategies, but complicates Wilson’s thesis, by showing how dualism is not limited to the author’s characterological system, which produces good and bad versions of the same social type, but can also be found, for example, in Great Expectations in the overlaying of literary modes or genres. 30 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 41.

102 literally and metaphorically abandoned “to … the wilderness,” as Anny Sardin says, “a king without a kingdom, as helpless as Lear on the heath, as vulnerable as little Oedipus exposed on the mountain.”31 But he is “exposed” in a double sense, not just to the natural and existential wilderness represented by his immediate surroundings (the marshes), but also to those dehumanizing forces of society, figured in that “universal struggle” to which his unknown brothers were earlier sacrificed.

The first words of the narrator to the reader are: “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip” (GE, 3). The abbreviated nickname is a metaphor for the hero’s isolation and alienation from both his family and the external world, a metaphor that is literalized and reinforced by the austerity of his surroundings. “Pip” is not a proper name, but rather the name for a name, another way of saying, “Call me Ishmael.” The bungled result of an unintentional tongue twister (Philip Pirrip), “Pip” suggests and encodes a fateful disserving of the self from the patronymic, symbolizing at a nominal level the fate of the social outcast, who exists without law or right, both of which are sanctioned and protected by the name of the father. “Pip” therefore identifies an excrescence grown out of a monadic seed (or pip!) cast away before it budded and came to consciousness. As Sardin succinctly puts it, “the name belongs to the father, the father belongs to the son, and the son belongs nowhere.”32 Pip, like all tragic heroes, discovers that he exists outside the circumference of what is protectable under name of the father. He is outside the law. It is here, on the appropriately desolate marshes, and in the lonely churchyard, that Pip foresees the extent of his own wretched position in the world: “My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening” (GE, 3). At which point, he realized with finality, as he stood before his family’s tombstones, that his parents and his siblings were “dead and buried” without his ever knowing them and that “the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip” (GE, 3-4).

31 Anny Sardin, Great Expectations (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 116. 32 Sardin, 114.

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Pip, as a kind of tragic hero, is forced to live out his life without guidance or protection from the gods, or, in Pip’s case, the social institutions which become the gods’ substitute in modern, “rational” society: As to me, I think my sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom an Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over to her, to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law. I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends. (GE, 23) Such all-inhering guilt expresses the fatedness of the tragic hero, which, far from securing the hero’s destiny, is actually what undermines his security and exposes him to the harsh elements of his society.

In an essay by Walter Benjamin that distinguishes tragedy from comedy via the categories of fate and character, he explains, “There is … no relation of fate to innocence.” “Is happiness,” he asks, “as misfortune doubtless is, an intrinsic category of fate? Happiness is, rather, what releases the fortunate man from the embroilment of the Fates and from the net of his own fate.” 33 For Benjamin, innocence and happiness are qualities possessed by those literary figures who escape “the embroilments of the Fates,” who are secure from the start, in the way that, for example, Oliver Twist is secure from the beginning of the novel that bears his name because of the ending Dickens has already prepared for him. Happiness may be Oliver Twist’s destiny (his final destination), but it is not his fate. For Benjamin, fate is inseparable from misfortune, which does not secure one’s destiny, but fundamentally undermines it, leaving one exposed.

Significantly, for Benjamin, the tragic hero’s fate is not, as in typical interpretations of tragedy, punishment from the gods for a law transgressed. The misfortune that the hero experiences is merely the common denominator of life left tragically to its own devices:

33 Walter Benjamin, “Fate and Character,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings: Volume One: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 203. Hereafter cited in parentheses as “FC.”

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“Fate is the guilt context of the living” (“FC,” 204), he says, or, as he puts it in “Critique of Violence,” it is the guilt of “mere life”—a bare existence, totally vulnerable, and without protection from sacred or secular laws.34 Like Pip, the tragic hero, is abandoned to a loathsome world that offers no guarantee of his success or survival—in fact, his abandonment endangers both.

“Western humanity,” George Kateb writes, “is and has always been at war with given reality. The world, as given, is disliked; it is disliked in large part just because it is given.”35 This is the case in Great Expectations. The world is given first. Then the hero slowly comes to consciousness in it, finds himself already in the midst of action: a “small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry.” Magwitch, the story’s other existential orphan, tells a similar tale of delayed self-identification: “I’ve no more notion where I was born, than you have,” he tells Pip; “I first became aware of myself, down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living” (GE, 346). In the phenomenological world of Dickens’s novel, one discovers that one is guilty a priori, automatized, already predisposed towards certain types of behaviour and action because of one’s upbringing and social milieu. All Great Expectations’ characters are shaped in this grotesque way by the world they are born into, by the people that have raised them and by those that continue to influence them in their adult life. When Pip asks Magwitch, “What were you brought up to be?” (meaning, of course, before being a criminal), the answer is logical enough, but not what Pip expects: “‘A warmint [varmint], dear boy.’ [¶] He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted some profession” (GE, 330). For Magwitch, being a “warmint” is not an aberration, but a logical outcome, a kind of vocation in its own right, for the social milieu of which he is apart: the lumpen, surplus populations, which as Marx argues, are as much a product of the capitalist mode of production as is the proletariat.36

34 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, 250. My interpretation of Benjamin’s concept of “mere life” is influenced by Giorgio Agamben’s reading of it in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 63-7 and passim. 35 George Kateb, “Technology and Philosophy,” Social Research 64.3 (1997), 1241. 36 “The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a

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This dehumanizing force that each character, and society as a whole, brings to bear on other characters is driven home by the violence of the Tickler, which is Dickens’s grotesque euphemism for the rod with which Pip’s sister beats him when “raising him up by hand” in a double sense—not just in lieu of his birth parents (the true meaning of the phrase), but also in a physically abusive manner: “Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks” (GE, 63). Pip, however, is not the only one manipulated thus, literarily and metaphorically mauled and jerked around: Magwitch is driven to crime by hunger and poverty, then chased, deported, and sentenced to death by the law; Miss Havisham uses Estella vindictively to break the hearts of men (Pip among them), as revenge for being jilted at the altar herself, and, in turn, dehumanizes Estella, turning her into her own personal Tickler; and Orlick beats Pip’s sister, the wielder of the Tickler, into mute insensibility, with what is left of Magwitch’s leg iron after it has been sawn off. The reappearance of the leg iron in this context, then, is not only a suggestive reminder of Pip’s first meeting with Magwitch and the guilty bond that was formed then, when he was frightened into stealing a file to help him saw it off; the leg iron also symbolizes a recurrent legacy of brutality in the novel and the characters’ literal and metaphorical imprisonment by the social forces of their society that perpetuate this violence.

This symbolic valence of the leg iron is reinforced when Orlick, who confesses his guilt to Pip, mentions it again towards the end of the novel. His confession, though, is paradoxical: “I giv’ it her!” he says, “But it warn’t Old Orlick as did it; it was you” (GE, 426). There is any number of ways this can be interpreted that would uncover some essential truth in Orlick’s otherwise contradictory statement. The one I want to draw out here is the most literal. If Pip had not helped Magwitch get the file to saw off the leg

consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.” Marx, Capital, 798.

106 iron, Orlick would not have had such an efficient weapon to use; and, in that sense, Pip has been complicit in the series of events that prepare the way for his sister’s attacker. The first, preserving his own life and freeing Magwitch, leads to a second, unintended result, which is the harming of a close relative with the old tool of imprisonment, the leg iron. Here, as in the overall structure of the novel, the patterning of events exceeds the intentions of the actors in their final result, subsuming and imprisoning them in a regressive circularity.

All the characters’ exaggerated tics and gestures suggest this kind of dehumanizing “manipulation” by external forces, as if they were all harried and tortured by some invisible Tickler, each caught up in the net of their own particular fates. Brooks, then, is not entirely correct when he says the opening scene in the churchyard “establishes Pip as an existence without a plot.”37 To the contrary, it is here in the metaphysical graveyard that Pip realizes the fatedness of his situation (in Benjamin’s sense): the fact that, though he has been a blind and passive actor in his infancy, plot is already underway for him and left him sublimely exposed and unprotected, one of those who share equally in the “the guilt context of the living.”

3.3 … Then as Farce In the same essay, Benjamin contrasts his interpretation of fate in tragedy to the role that character plays in comedy. In tragedy, fate robs the hero of ethical action, of properly delimited choices between good and evil and, in so doing, problematizes any easy distinction between good and bad characters. Is Oedipus good or evil? The question seems counter to the spirit of the drama and, in any case, produces no conclusive answer. “Comedy,” on the other hand, Benjamin says, “shows the true sphere to which … pseudo-moral character descriptions are to be confined.” Yet, he goes on to observe, “At [comedy’s] centre, stands … an individual whom, if we were confronted by his actions in life instead of by his person on the stage, we would call a scoundrel. On the comic stage, however, his actions take only the interest shed with the light of character, and the latter is … the subject not of moral condemnation but of high amusement.” In comedy, we

37 Brooks, 117.

107 enjoy seeing how, “[c]haracter develops in [this individual] like a sun, in the brilliance of its single trait, which allows no other to remain visible in its proximity.” This is, in part, because comedy “excludes psychological analysis” (“FC,” 205). Character, as Benjamin is discussing it, points not to an inward depth, but merely to an external reality that transcends all interiority and internalizing gestures. Such a world, Benjamin argues, thus responds to the tragic “dogma of the natural guilt of human life” with “a vision of the natural innocence of man.” Here, “[t]he character trait is not … the knot in the net. It is the sun of individuality in the colorless (anonymous) sky of man, which casts the shadow of the comic action.” Although this “vision of character,” Benjamin says, is “linked to freedom,” it is a pedestrian freedom: the freedom of being an individual like everyone else in “the colorless (anonymous) sky of man” (“FC,” 206).

In tragedy, then, fate expresses the common denominator of “mere life” that all of humanity is subject to regardless of their actions—a universal guilt without a crime, which is existential and ontological in origin, a priori to the law—whereas, in comedy, character expresses the common denominator of humanity in its social existence, which is the shadow the comic actor casts across the more subterranean depths of existential being. It is, I think, in this way that Benjamin says it is appropriate to make sense of Hermann Cohen’s “dictum that every tragic action, however sublimely it strides upon its cothurnus, casts a comic shadow” (“FC,” 206). It is as if, for Benjamin, tragedy and comedy form two sides of the same coin, but never touch.

It is immediately clear from Benjamin’s definition and description of comedy and character that his hard and fast distinction between tragedy and comedy will not hold for Great Expectations. Dickens, after all, is one of the more remarkable creators of comic characters, whose actions, no matter how sinister, delight and entertain, when consumed in the security and quiet comfort of the reader’s skull. And, his comic characters precisely confirm in us a belief in an essential human solidarity, expressed in terms of a fundamental averageness, a democratizing “vision of the natural innocence of man,” as Benjamin says, where each is forgiven for being no better or worse than the other. In fact, if it weren’t for the tragic dimension of the graveyard scene, Great Expectations

108 could more confidently be classified as comedy in the terms that Benjamin provides. The novel, however, violates the mutual exclusivity of the two worlds that Benjamin wants to reassert and maintain, anchoring Pip firmly and contradictorily in both tragic and comic worlds. The tragic world of the graveyard scene, after it recedes in the chronological ordering of the narrative events, nonetheless persists as a metaphor for a fundamental engulfing human condition—a universal guilt—even as Pip is making his debut in London as an ascendant gentleman and parvenu.

This second world that Pip straddles is what Trollope called Vanity Fair, or what Edmund Wilson in his celebrated essay on Dickens calls “Society, in the capitalized sense.”38 This is the world to which Pip’s Great Expectations lead him; it is where he hopes to realize what he believes is his inner potential in the outward appearance of the true gentleman. It is comic, whereas the former was tragic: it is the proper arena of Dickens’s satire, a world of appearances, usually hollow ones, comprised of all those the laughable gestures of the various pretenders and play actors who populate the novel. Here, perhaps, the definitive, self-serving hollow gesture is Pumblechook’s ingratiating “May I?”, with which he repeatedly asks to shake Pip’s hand once he has come into his Expectations (GE, 153-6). Each time what is honoured, however, is the Expectations themselves, not the boy who has received them, the hope being that, in the process, some of that new- found wealth might be claimed through the performance of good will and be exchanged with a handshake.

The reader’s full initiation into this world of appearances comes at the same time as Pip’s, when the born-gentleman Herbert Pocket corrects and modifies his behaviour during their first dinner in London: … and that while the fork is reserved for that use, it is not put further in than is necessary. It is scarcely worth mentioning, only it's as well to do as other people do. Also, the spoon is not generally used over-hand, but under. This has two advantages. You get at your mouth better (which after

38 “His behavior toward Society, in the capitalized sense, was rebarbative to the verge of truculence; he refused to learn its patter and its manners; and his satire on the fashionable world comes to figure more and more prominently in his novels.” Wilson, 40.

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all is the object), and you save a good deal of the attitude of opening oysters, on the part of the right elbow. … Take another glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose. … [M]y dear Handel, … a dinner napkin will not go into a tumbler. (GE, 179-81) It is important to remember that in this scene Pip has already acquired the clothes of the gentleman, but not the mien; the outward appearance of the gentleman is contradicted here by seemingly irrepressible activity on the part of an actor who both should and wants to know better: “Why I was trying to pack [the napkin] into my tumbler, I am wholly unable to say. I only know that I found myself, with a perseverance worthy of a much better cause, making the most strenuous exertions to compress it within those limits” (GE, 181). The comedy arises not just from the irrepressible activity (observed first by Herbert, not Pip, to heighten the reader’s sense of Pip’s being caught off his guard), but also by the arbitrariness of the social code according which one is supposed to shape one’s actions, but which otherwise lacks any rational explanation for its adherence: “it's as well to do as other people do” and “society as a body does not” are all the amiable Herbert can say to his new friend. The implication is that far from distinguishing one’s inner superiority, “good manners” actually conceal a fundamental lack or absence of distinguishing markers, a shared existential poverty for which each tries to compensate.

The norms of “Society, in the capitalized sense” are a goad, another Tickler, contorting and distorting the characters’ actions into grotesque performances of some barely understood social ritual. When Joe meets Miss Havisham, he insists on addressing Pip when she asks him a question, as if it were somehow impolite to respond to her directly. But, in spite of this clever evasion, he still subjects his speech, as he does in many other places in the novel, to vain revisions and qualifications (“which I meantersay”), searching futilely for the proper idiom of polite discourse in which to express himself, such that very little more is communicated in the end which was not already half-said in the first

110 sally (GE, 100-101). As Dorothy Van Ghent observes in her influential interpretation of the novel, Dickens’ soliloquizing characters, for all their funniness (aloneness is inexorably funny, like the aloneness of the man who slips on a banana peel, seen from the point of view of togetherness), suggest a world of isolated integers, terrifyingly alone and unrelated. … Technique is vision. Dickens’ technique is an index of a vision of life that sees human separatedness as the ordinary condition, where speech is speech to nobody and where human encounter is mere collision.39 Dickens’s characters are together in their aloneness, each trying to be part of Society in their own way; but the result is not a community in the conventional sense. Rather, as Michael Hollington puts it, “Society as a whole … is represented as an exhibition of freaks.”40

Later when Joe meets Pip in his London apartment, we are made to feel this tragic separation of individuals again; this time between him and his best friend. Meeting Pip in his gentlemanly abode and attire, Joe feels the weight of social obligation arbitrarily manifest in the need to find a proper way of disburdening himself of his hat: he “looked all round the room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat—as if it were only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could find a resting-place—and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals” (GE, 221). Turning his hat into the bearer of a social responsibility he little understands (although it appears largely a social ritual of his own invention—his own projected idea of what good manners are), he gives his hat a certain comic gravitas, which is then literalized for comedic effect when it repeatedly falls to floor as if not deposited in a resting place that could bear its “weightiness.” Joe’s performance of social obligation ultimately fails, creating awkwardness rather than smoothness in his and Pip’s intercourse. The novel repeatedly stages such shoddy performances, which expose the

39 Dorothy Van Ghent, “On Great Expectations,” in The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Rinehart and Co, 1953), 126-7. 40 Hollington, 221.

111 individual to ridicule and embarrassment, revealing an impoverished “human condition” underneath the surface of things.

When Pip returns to his village for a visit, his tailor’s assistant, Trabb’s boy, acts as if shaken to his very core by the power and prestige Pip now appears to posses: “the knees of Trabb’s boy smote together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace, ‘Hold me! I’m so frightened’ feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance” (GE, 245). Trabb’s hyperbolic performance of fear and trembling is clearly meant to undermine Pip’s sense of social superiority. Sensing Pip’s attempt to ignore the meaning of his performance, Trabb’s boy then switches roles and plays the part of Pip, which proves easy enough: “He wore the blue bag in the manner of my great- coat, and was strutting along the pavement toward me on the opposite side of the street, attended by a company of delighted young friends to whom he from time to time exclaimed with a wave of his hand ‘Don’t know yah!’” (GE, 246). His exaggerated enactment of Pip’s snobbery makes clear the transparency of Pip’s own performance, a sham exclusiveness based on equal parts imitation of one’s social superiors and intimidation of one’s inferiors.

In Great Expectations, such disguises, though, are always seen through. As Sardin notes, when Pip and Joe go to see Wopsle perform the role of Hamlet, they and the rest of the audience cannot repress their laughter, as all they see is Woplse rather poorly performing the character and not the character, Hamlet, brought to life on the stage (GE, 253-5).41 More alarmingly, when Pip tries to disguise Magwitch after he has returned to England illegally, the dissimulation fails with ghastly effect: “It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder…. But I can compare the effect of it, when on, to nothing but the probable effect of rouge upon the dead; so awful was the manner in which everything in him that it was most desirable to repress, started through that thin layer of pretence, and seemed to come blazing out” (GE, 338). This last failed performance is the most

41 “Wopsle never ever creates the illusion of otherness in his impersonations and, whenever Pip goes to the theatre to see his ‘gifted townsman’ … play, it is ‘Mr Woplse’ he sees exhibiting himself from beginning to end.” Sardin, 209.

112 significant as it leads us back to the graveyard scene and the ontological poverty staged there that can never wholly be glossed over or forgotten, the only true performance in the novel as it were, the other side of this shadow-world of false appearances.

In Dickens, this critique of false appearances—of bourgeois society’s insatiable hungering after titles and wealth—develops, by logical extension, into a critique of money itself, which comes to represent the ultimate false appearance and provides the novel with one of its more potent metaphors: forgery. In a particularly candid and rare moment, Pip foreshadows his future disillusionment with his Great Expectations, albeit in cryptic economic metaphors, All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else’s manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money! An obliging stranger, under the pretence of compactly folding up my bank-notes for security’s sake, abstract the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes! (GE, 225) Here, the forged coin of “somebody else’s manufacture,” which first stands in for an absent value (it is a forgery after all), is nonetheless “reasonable enough” for the receiver to accept as a plausible representation of value. The forged coin, however, is then substituted, as the Dickensian metaphor compounds, for more abstract, because literally less weighty and concrete, banknotes (which in the Victorian era did indeed mediate real absent value—the gold against which the banknotes’ value was indexed). But now the unnamed giver of the banknotes, suddenly loath to part with these tokens of value, secures them for himself, when, seeming to fold them up to secure them for the receiver, he “abstracts the notes” and substitutes empty nutshells in their place, thus literalizing the metaphorical emptiness of the initial notes and false coin. The receiver is swindled and now knows it too: nutshells aren’t banknotes and never will be. But, then in a reversal of the metonymies compounded in the metaphor of the false coin, the receiver participates

113 in the deception and passes the nutshells themselves off as real currency! Past lies are repackaged and re-presented again for circulation.

Implicit, then, in the metaphor of the false coin to describe Pip’s own nutty form of self- forgery is the idea that such forgeries are never individual fictions, but, in fact, mediate larger social dynamics, which they help to create. As Paul Sheenan observes in his excellent, “Marx, Money, and Monstrosity in Great Expectations,” Such alliances [mediated by money] may be secret (Magwitch/Pip, Pip/Herbert), not-so-secret (Pip/Miss Havisham, the “money” marriage of Estella and Drummle), or hypocritical (Pip/Pumblechook—“May I?”). Yet all, obvious or subtle, come to suffer because of their dependence. Thus money is not so much a source (of anguish or accident, chaos or contingency) as a secret accomplice. It forces the novel’s characters into unwitting pacts with their social others, bringing them to the limits of their roles as free agents.42 Following the money in Great Expectations take us (and Pip too!) a long way from the graveyard scene, where those two penniless orphans grapple in the primordial sludge of the marshes. But again that’s just the point. Money, wealth, status, and so on promise to elevate, to make everything that came before a regrettable prehistory to the subject’s social ascendancy and embourgeoisement. And yet the many “secret accomplice[s]” that money makes in the novel reminds us of that entangling secret companionship formed for the purposes of survival between those two wretches in opening scene. So, far from elevating Pip from his traumatic encounter with the convict, money is actually what brings him full circle, suggesting a metaphorical complicity between the world of appearance and “the guilt context of the living.” In fact, the more “forgeries” that circulate in the novel the more the existential guilt of the opening starts to permeate the world of the novel even as Pip passes from poverty into the phase of his Great Expectations.

42 Paul Sheenan, “Marx, Money, and Monstrosity in Great Expectations,” Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures, & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 9 (1999), 98.

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It is perhaps notable in this context that when capitalism is referenced explicitly in the novel via Herbert’s professed desire to be a capitalist, Pip’s own lack of understanding of what it actually takes to “get on” in the world, that is, the hidden truth behind his Great Expectations, is comically mirrored in his friend Herbert, who announces himself a capitalist before he is one. When pressed to elaborate, he confesses, “I haven’t begun … yet. … I’m in a counting-house, and looking about me” (GE, 184). When Pip then questions the profitability of such an enterprise, he protests, “But the thing is … that you look about you. That’s the grand thing. You are in a counting-house, you know, and you look about. … Then the time comes … when you see your opening. And you go in, and you swoop upon it and you make your capital, and then there you are!” (GE, 185). The comic effect of such naivety is, as often is the case with Dickens’s world of appearances, cast in a grotesque light when juxtaposed with Magwitch’s narrative of pauperization by the mechanisms of the same mysterious and impersonal system. In Dickens’s novel, relations of oppression and exploitation confront both those who hope to benefit from them and those who suffer from them as an alien force, operating beyond their individual grasp and agency. Capitalism is something like an absent centre to the novel, then, never represented concretely (if that is even possible), but grasped and identified first through its symptoms, namely the guilt and complicity that give the novel its “affective structure,” allowing the novel to link high and low equally in a similar situation of existential poverty, which, when monetized, becomes something like the original sin of capitalist society for which all social aspirants are guilty.

3.4 Dickens’s Tragi-Comic Conception The mechanism of the secret inheritance is what connects these two disparate “worlds” of the novel, leading Pip from the tragic world of the graveyard by the marshes into the comic world of Society. It is perhaps for this reason that Dickens himself referred to the idea of making the convict Pip’s secret benefactor as “the grotesque tragi-comic conception that first encouraged me” (emphasis mine).43 The crux of the novel’s drama comes from this recursion of the tragic in the comic, linking Pip and also the rest of

43 Dickens qtd. in J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 250.

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Society back to the graveyard scene by the marshes, such that it becomes a kind of underground point of reference, imbuing the comic actions of Society’s actors with a hidden, tragic significance and, at the same time, problematizing and gradually undoing the narrative of Pip’s ascendancy, such that narrative becomes its unraveling rather than its fulfillment. As Brooks argues in his Freudian interpretation of the novel, “Repetition in the text is a return, a calling back or a turning back,” signaling that the “the buried past … must be repeated, reenacted, worked through in the present.”44 This recursion of the past in the present does not entail only the overlaying in the narrative of two temporalities of consciousness (the period of illusions and the period of lost illusions), but also two generic modes or codes, the tragic and the comic, which lead to certain irregularities in Dickens’s representation of pre-Victorian society which cannot be said to be realist exactly. This comic world of appearances is far from innocent for Pip, but rather seen through his eyes is menacingly suggestive of the “guilt context of the living” and “the embroilment of the Fates” in which he is now caught up. The effect for Pip is wholly alienating; the world of appearance starts to take on a life of its own, separate from the individual perceiving it.

Having stolen a piece of bread for Magwitch from his sister’s table, Pip inadvertently gets her husband—the angelic simpleton Joe—into trouble as well. He is torn; he cannot get Joe his pardon without, at the same time, confessing his connection to the criminal lurking somewhere out on the marshes. “Conscience,” he confesses to the reader in one of those asides that straddle a temporal gap, “is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret burden down the leg of his trousers [the bread], it is (as I can testify) a great punishment” (GE, 13). The guilt of which he already suspects himself is seemingly confirmed now by all variety of chance circumstances, which he interprets as signs reminding him of his transgression: “as the marsh winds made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard the voice outside, of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn me to secrecy, declaring that he couldn’t and wouldn’t starve until to-morrow but must be fed now” (GE, 13). “The iron on his leg” recalls the bread down Pip’s own pant leg, and turns it into a

44 Brooks, 125, 128.

116 metaphorical shackle, tying the child and the criminal prophetically and symbolically to a shared fate.

Like the reader of a novel, Pip sees patterns in the texture of his lived experience that seem to point over and over again to a primal cause and an inescapable eschaton—the revelation of his guilty “companionship” with the criminal (GE, 147). The more he learns about the world in which he lives and about himself, the more his suspicion about his fate is confirmed. “[W]hat’s Hulks [prison ships]?” he asks his sister when the subject of the escaped convicts is brought up (GE, 14). Mrs. Joe responds, “People are put in the Hulks because they murder, and because they rob, and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking questions” (GE, 15). The naïve child interprets her words literally. A fatalism begins to dominate his thoughts, in which he begins to view his share in “the guilt context of the living” as necessarily leading to his fateful imprisonment on those same Hulks: “I went upstairs, with my head tingling—from Mrs. Joe’s thimble, having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words—I felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the Hulks were handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe” (GE, 15). Pip believes that he cannot escape the fate of which his criminal encounter is now felt to be a sign. His decision to help Magwitch, even though its was coerced, is too portentous in its meaning to be ignored. Such a superstition is Puritanical. If the world is given in advance, so too, Pip thinks, is life on it. Everything transpires according to plan. The hero can only endeavor to decipher the clues of his destiny in the patterns of lived experience.

The belief is alienating, however, further separating his internal life—rich with feelings, dreams, and ambitions—from his external life, which seems unreflective of his inner identity. “I and my conscience showed ourselves,” he says (GE, 22): there is a sense that the two no longer need to correspond. The result is a tacit disavowal of reality, which now becomes ominous and portentous in its meanings. When Pip takes the stolen “wittles” and file back to Magwitch, he says,

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The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me. This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dykes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, “A boy with Somebody-else’s pork pie! Stop him!” The cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils, “Holloa, young thief!” One black ox, with a white cravat on—who even had to my awakened conscience something of a clerical air—fixed me so obstinately with his eyes, and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved round, that blubbered out to him, “I couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t for myself I took it!” (GE, 17) The inanimate and mute take on an uncannily human aspect in the boy’s mind when they appear to confirm the guilty conscience he is already working hard to repress. “Reality” will continue to haunt him into his adult life, taking on portentous meanings that insinuate into the phase of his Expectations various reminders of his guilty connection to the tragic, existential drama staged on the marshes, connecting not only him, but the whole of society back to this authentic aloneness—Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness” of the guilty who exist outside the law.

When Pip relocates to London, his nearness to Newgate becomes especially portentous in its meaning, suggesting a symbolic proximity between Society and its criminal underworld, constantly reminding Pip of his own criminal taint. When Pip first goes to meet the lawyer Mr. Jaggers in Little Britain, he notices, “two odious casts” of executed criminals with a “twitchy leer upon them” hanging on Mr. Jaggers’s wall (GE, 200). In addition to the matter-of-fact barbarity of displaying such casts, they appear, like most things in the Dickensian universe, semi-animated, twitching and leering at Pip, as if still tormented after death by the unpleasant Tickler deployed by the law and recalling Pip’s guilt-tormented frame of mind and concern about his fate, which remains embroiled in some ambiguous connection to crime and punishment (“What’s Hulks?”). Newgate is to his London life as the Hulks were to his marsh life—a constant reminder of the “guilt context of the living.”

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When he first lets Wemmick take him to Newgate, he immediate regrets it, fearing that by merely visiting it he has now somehow been containment by it: “I wished … I might not have had Newgate in my breath and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust off my feet as I sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel” (GE, 264). The tainting-effect of Newgate speaks volumes about Pip’s own guilty conscience and his unacknowledged memories of that fateful encounter with Magwitch in the graveyard. But the effect is not limited to him alone; Mr. Jaggers is seen repeatedly washing his hands as if he too were contaminated by proximity to it and by involvement with its inmates. Newgate is symbolic of a fundamental component of the novel’s world, which no matter how much characters or Society as a whole try to distinguish or separate from it are nonetheless tainted by it. The aura of guilt that surrounds Newgate hypostasizes and circulates in the very air the characters collectively breathe. This cloud of guilt that permeates the novel is similarly suggested by the numerous hanging figures that haunt novel, symbolizing a general condition of suspended animation, asphyxiation, and arrested development: all which run prophetically counter to Pip’s forward-looking Expectations.

3.5 Guilt and Class Society So far what I have been discussing is the overlaying in Dickens’s novel of two literary modes or registers, identified via Benjamin as tragedy and comedy, which lead to a complex and complicated worldview. On the hand, Great Expectations lays out in its opening chapter a kind of existentialist blueprint, in which Being is represented as inherently guilty by virtue of the fact that it exists, a priori, outside of the law and its protection. Here, guilt and vulnerability go together. The truth of Being is allegorized as a fundamental aloneness in the world. The secret bond that Pip and Magwitch share is not just that of co-conspirators, but of internal exiles, isolated and marginalized by the society that surrounds them. They are identical in their spiritual aloneness and isolation from the rest of the world and even from each other; after all, they conspire together against the law not because of any real human understanding or communication between them, but merely out of necessity—for the purposes of survival.

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On the other hand, there is an undeniable comic dimension to the novel as well. The characters are more often than not caricatures with bizarre tics and mannerisms, expressing themselves in peculiar dialects, which provoke laughter and readerly delight. And, as Benjamin suggests in his definition of comedy, it is precisely this comic quality that preserves even the more sinister or manipulative characters (for example, Pip’s sister, Pumblechook, and Havisham, to name just a few) from our moral judgments. There is a democratic quality to the comic representation. Each character is represented as a being no better than their peers; each is imprisoned in their own monadic existence, with a limited point-of-view and reference of judgment, which, when seen from the outside, seems comically narrow and single-minded. It is this democratic leveling of the representation that allows us to laugh at each equally.

However, because of the ordering and sequencing with which these tragic and comic registers are overlaid, there is a sense that this comic exterior, in fact, conceals or provides a kind of partial compensation for the tragic core of the novel. What is comic about the narrow, individual self-interestedness of the characters is after all their hollowness when juxtaposed to the universal guilt of the tragic mode, which causes the comic world of appearances to take on a hallucinatory quality, making the mute vocal, the inanimate animated, and, very often, the vital mechanical. As for the last, Van Ghent observes, People are described by nonhuman attributes, or by such an exaggeration of or emphasis on one part of their appearance that they seem to be reduced wholly to that part, with an effect of having become “thinged” into one of their own bodily members … Jaggers’ huge forefinger which he bites and then plunges menacingly at the accused, or Wemmick’s post- office mouth, or the clockwork apparatus in Magwitch’s throat that clicks as if it were going to strike.45 It is precisely these grotesqueries that cast a shadow on Dickens’s comic representation of Society, imbuing it with tragic significance.

45 Van Ghent, 129-30.

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What is notable, though, is that, as Pip matures, the poles of the novel’s representation, the tragic and the comic, are increasingly re-coded in terms of class. When Miss Havisham first invites Pip to Satis House and introduces him to Estella, the two play a card game called “Beggar My Neighbour.” The name of the card game echoes that of the “universal struggle” which Pip earlier imagines as having claimed the lives of his siblings. The card game becomes a metaphor for social relations based on competition and inequality. Here, Estella wins in more senses than one: “‘He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!’ said Estella with disdain. ‘What coarse hands he has. And what thick boots!’” (GE, 60). Her observations awaken in Pip a new understanding of his class position relative to Miss Havisham and Estella. It is as if all of sudden he grasps his and his family’s relative poverty and their social inferiority. The moment is epiphanic and transformative for him: “I took the opportunity of being alone in the court-yard, to look at my coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was not favourable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages” (GE, 62). Here, again, the effect is alienating. Where Pip’s first fledging moments of self-consciousness were part and parcel of his existential aloneness, which was represented in the literalized metaphor of the desolate graveyard by the marshes, he is here alienated from his own body, which, now inscribed with a class position that is intolerable to him, becomes an obstacle to his desires. As such, his own body is now abhorrent to him. He views his “coarse hands” as “vulgar appendages” suggestive of his own reification or transformation into a thing to be played with by the dynamics of a class society in which people use other people to their own ends, just as in this scene he is being used and manipulated, set up by Miss Havisham to have his heart broken by Estella as revenge for Havisham’s own heartbreak.

This revelation of his class position furthers his self-loathing and deepens his resentment towards what fate has allotted him. “[T]he smart without a name,” he calls it, highlighting the arbitrariness with which poverty now seems to squash his dreams just as quickly as they are formed, damning himself all over to the wretched existence he cannot escape (GE, 63). The namelessness of the “smart” also suggests a metaphorical connection to

121 primordial and nameless existence staged in the first chapter and the inescapable fate that Pip is thrown into before he can even comprehend what is going on around him.

Estella, however, enchants Pip; her name itself seems to reflect the status that he attributes to her in his imagination—that of a guiding star. His love for her, however, is both mixed and mediated by guilty feelings about class. When Estella gives him a kiss as a reward for beating Herbert Pocket in an ostensibly friendly boxing match (another example of competition staged and normalized as a game roughly homologous to the dynamics of class society), his sense of social inferiority prevents him from taking pleasure it: “I felt that the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing” (GE, 93). Pip’s attraction to Estella is also an attraction to an idealized image of himself as her equal or even superior. Later when Pip is made aware of Estella’s “fallen” position as a wife to the abusive Drummle, he fantasizes of being her knight in shining armour, swooping to her rescue and avenging her—a fantasy which, while noble on the one hand, is also a clear reversal of the class and power dynamics that frame their first encounter. His desire for Estella is an avatar of his desire for a better position in his society: his alienation from himself and his longing to be someone else. Unlike Catherine and Heathcliff’s spiritual desire for one another which places them, at least metaphorically, on an extra-social plane of existence, Pip’s desire for Estella is crass and material, suggesting something fundamentally flawed, or guilty, about his origins, which needs compensation or correction through improvement and social ascendancy, for which it is hoped Estella will be a vehicle.

Naturally he begins to dream of another life. “I want to be a gentleman,” he confesses to his childhood friend and social equal, Biddy, “I am not at all happy as I am. I am disgusted with my calling and with my life. I have never taken to either, since I was bound. … I never shall or can be comfortable—or anything but miserable … unless I can lead a very different sort of life from the life I lead now” (GE, 127-8). His existential alienation, “the guilt of context” of “mere life” which he first felt on that “memorable raw afternoon towards evening,” when mixed with these new feelings and desire for self-

122 improvement and social mobility, have the effect of further hollowing reality for him. Even his own home now seems inauthentic to him: Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had believed in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon; I had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single year, all this was changed. Now, it was all coarse and common…. (GE, 106-7)

Instead of trying to understand the structural limitations of a society divided by class, or even his own role in it, Pip quickly adopts a pseudo-aristocratic distaste for labour and thus his own calling and life. Like Gramsci’s proletarian “man-in-the-mass,” His theoretical consciousness [is] historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.46 His business is in the forge with Joe; but his heart and mind are now with Estella in the fairy tale world of pseudo-aristocratic pretension at Satis House. In desiring to bring the two together, he raises the problem of his own existence to melodramatic proportions, as that which is caught between two all-or-nothing alternatives: the life of a gentleman or a thankless life of toil and alienation. This is the source of the tragedy that lurks behind the shadow world of comic caricatures and hollow self-interested gestures, suggesting an actual poverty of existence, which the characters’ comically transparent performances of social superiority strive to conceal.

46 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. and eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 333.

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Here, the peculiarity of Pip’s divided consciousness—an apprenticed craftsman aware of his own social standing, but with urban and aristocratic sensibilities, or, at least, ambitions—is also reflective of a certain peculiarity in the social development of Britain around the turn of the eighteenth century. As Perry Anderson has shown, although the economic structure of Britain drastically changed with the advent of industrial capitalism, placing hitherto unseen wealth and power into the hands of the bourgeoisie, society still, by and large, retained a feudal character as a result of a continued “delegation of power by the bourgeoisie to the aristocracy, to do its governing for it.”47 The consequence of all this, Anderson explains, was a society “notoriously characterized by a seemingly ‘feudal’ hierarchy of order and ranks”: The deferential pattern of social relations in the countryside, at the height of [the aristocracy’s] economic power, lingered on as a normative reference after industrialization…. If the mythologies of rank captivated the middle class, producing a notorious social-climbing and craving for titles, they also powerfully mystified real social relations for the working class as well. … In general the hierarchical, pseudo-feudal coloration of English society, expression and instrument of the hegemony of an (ancestrally agrarian) aristocracy, operates as perhaps the most successful of all camouflages of class structure: by simultaneously intensifying and displacing class consciousness, it tends to render it politically inoperative and socially self-perpetuating.48 This self-perpetuation of “politically inoperative” class consciousness turned labourers and bourgeoisie alike into little pretenders of the kind Dickens and other English novelists liked to satirize. For Marx, what the English novel made clear was that to be middle class, or even aspire to be middle class, was to be just as “full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance [as one’s aristocratic counterparts]; and the civilized world has confirmed [the] verdict [of these novelists] with the damning epigram that it has fixed to this class that ‘they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those

47 Perry Anderson, English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), 124. 48 Anderson, 130-31.

124 beneath them.’”49 It is in this same ethos that we ought to place the famous mid- nineteenth-century myth of “the career open to talent”—that promise of so-called bourgeois individualism in post-revolutionary Europe, where social advancement seemed merely the trick of earnest hard work and diligent application now that formal titles ostensibly presented no obstacles in the way of one’s success.

However, complicating this narrative of the self-made man, so appealing to the aspiring individuals of the period, Eric Hobsbawm argues, is the fact that, even if titles are no longer the requisites of influence and wealth, “[s]ocieties built on individual careerism [still] welcome such visible and established marks of success.”50 This is borne out in the shifting meanings of the word “gentleman.” In The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, de Tocqueville writes, “if we follow the mutations in time and place of the English word ‘gentleman’…, we find its connotation being steadily widened in England as the classes draw nearer to each other and intermingle. In each successive century we find it being applied to men a little lower in the social scale.”51 From the end of the French revolution to mid-nineteenth century, “gentleman” is increasingly dissociated from property and given, instead, a moral definition. In his chapter entitled “Character— The True Gentleman” from Self-Help, Samuel Smiles writes, Riches and rank have no necessary connexion with genuine gentlemanly qualities. The poor man may be a true gentleman—in spirit and in daily life. He may be honest, truthful, upright, polite, temperate, courageous, self-respecting, and self-helping,—that is, be a true gentleman. The poor man with a rich spirit is in all ways superior to the rich man with a poor spirit. … Only the poor in spirit are really poor. He who has lost all, but retains his courage, cheerfulness, hope, virtue, and self-respect, is still rich.52

49 Karl Marx, “The English Middle Class,” Karl Marx, Fredric Engels, Collected Works, Volume Thirteen (New York: International Publishers, 1980), 664. 50 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (London: Abacus, 1962), 224. 51 Quoted in Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman, 3. 52 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance, ed. Peter W. Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 327-8.

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For Smiles, the most potent sign of man’s virtue is his industry, which, regardless of the fruits it bares, becomes its own reward: “Labour is not only a necessity and a duty, but a blessing: only the idler feels it to be a curse.”53 In the self-help ideology, then, “character is destiny,” as Gilmour puts it, and therefore guarantees in advance the title of “gentleman,” which previously only property had done.54 The problem, however, was that even if “[t]he theorists of self-help might extol the innate moral worth of the self- made man, … in the real world his status as a gentleman was not self-evident and was often measured by more traditional standards”—namely, wealth and property, and, in some cases still, birth.55 Since the self-made man’s “status as a gentleman was not self- evident,” his entire recognition as such required conspicuous displays of “character,” which could often force other considerations—for example, questions about the ethicalness of capitalist accumulation—into the background. Like Weber’s Calvinist, the most damning trait to be discovered in the self-made man was his own doubt, his lack of self-confidence. Believing oneself to be one of the “elect” thus required ever renewed efforts to convince oneself of the fact so as to also, at the same time, convince one’s peers, else all doubters be damned.56

Pip’s self-reassuring pretentiousness, and the pleasure he takes in believing that his Expectations are well deserved even though he hasn’t earned them through his own labour, points to the contradiction at the heart of a nineteenth-century bourgeois society, where, as Immanuel Wallerstein puts it, even the bourgeoisie believe “it is somehow ‘better’ or more desirable to be an aristocrat.”57 Wallerstein goes on to argue that even if, according to the Weberian doctrine, “self-denial and eternal hard work” are the natural ethos and logical prerequisite of capitalism, “[t]he psycho-logic of capitalism, where money is the measure of grace more even than power, calls for the display of wealth and

53 Smiles, 37. 54 Robin Gilmour, “Dickens and the Self-Help Idea,” in The Victorians and Social Protest: A Symposium, eds. J Butt and I. F. Clarker (Hamden, CT: David and Charles—Archon Books, 1973), 78. 55 Gilmour, “Dickens and the Self-Help Idea,” 77. 56 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt examine the novel for the ways in which its Pip’s drama revolves around themes of doubt and suspended disbelief. See “The Novel and Other Discourses of Suspended Disbelief, in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 163-210. 57 Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality,” New Left Review 1.167 (1988), 94.

126 thus for ‘conspicuous consumption.’”58 Thus, “the primary objective of every ‘bourgeois’ is to become an ‘aristocrat,’” by turning the ever renewed quest for profit into the more secure extraction of “rents.”59 Because of the feudal aspect of this kind of capital accumulation, the aristocrat’s “character” is truly a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way that the bourgeois’ “character” can never be. The latter’s profits are always and only renewed by his own renewed efforts to pursue them. For the bourgeois, as for the Protestant with whom he shares so much in common, character is always at stake.

For Pip, this does nothing to lessen his guilt or alienation, but leads him rather towards even more repressive denials of the truth. For if character is fate, he must actively deny anything that would reverse that order, namely the whole of his life leading up to his Expectations. The result is an all-consuming snobbery. When he announces his Expectations to Joe and Biddy, he says that, “After a pause, they both heartily congratulated me; but there was a certain touch of sadness in their congratulations, that I rather resented” (GE, 143). Their sadness over his leaving already becomes a source of resentment for him: he will not be tied to the old place not even by his friend’s most tender feelings. Nonetheless, in his more conscious moments, he is deeply troubled by the distance he now imposes between himself and them for the sake of keeping up appearances: As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to notice their effect upon myself and those around me. Their influence on my own character, I disguised from my recognition as much as possible, but I knew very well that it was not all good. I lived in a state of chronic uneasiness respecting my behaviour to Joe. My conscience was not by any means comfortable about Biddy. (GE, 272) Being a gentleman, however, requires him to repress any qualms he might have about the authenticity of his “character” as a gentleman, just as he had formerly suppressed the dirty secret of his criminal bond. But here again the repressed returns in manifold forms to accuse him of being other than he pretends to be.

58 Wallerstein, 101, 103. 59 Wallerstein, 101.

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3.6 Links In order to reinforce his belief in his gentlemanly status, Pip assumes Miss Havisham has bestowed his Expectations on him as a reward for recognized merit. In other words, he assumes that his Expectations follow “logically” from his character: She had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it could not fail to be her intention to bring us together. She reserved it for me to restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks a going and the cold hearths a blazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy the vermin—in short, do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. (GE, 231) The idea that character determines fate is a reassuring “romance” for a number of reasons. For one—and this is particularly important for the leveling-spirit of liberal, bourgeois ideology in its struggle with “Old Corruption”—if character determines fate, then a lack of titles cannot be an impediment to one’s worldly success; in fact, as I explored above, “character” instead becomes a way of raising oneself into the world of titles. But, once this is done, character also becomes a way of justifying one’s success and another’s failure. If character determines everything, then failure is a sign of one’s own internal weaknesses and shortcomings. Those who remain poor remain so because their “character” is lacking. However, those who have strong “character” will be magically rewarded.

Interestingly, it is precisely this contorted logic that Benjamin wrote his essay on tragedy and comedy entitled “Fate and Character” to challenge. Here, he writes, Fate and character are commonly regarded as causally connected, character being the cause of fate. The idea underlying this is the following: if, on the one hand, the character of a person, the way in which he reacts, were known in all its details, and if, on the other, all the events in the areas entered by that character were known, both what would happen to him and what he would accomplish could be exactly predicted. That is, his fate would be known. (“FC,” 201)

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The reason for this, Benjamin argues, is because “[c]ontemporary ideas do not permit immediate logical access to the idea of fate, and therefore modern men accept the idea of reading character from, for example, the physical features of a person, finding knowledge of character as such somehow generally present within themselves” instead of reading fate from external, and ostensibly arbitrary, signs as, say, an oracle would do. For Benjamin, however, such logic is “nonsensical.” Neither character nor fate is directly “accessible”; both are mediated phenomena. They “signify a relationship … that is never accessible except through signs” (“FC,” 201). Although fate and character seem to “coincide,” “they do not in either system signify … on the basis of causal connections” (“FC,” 202). They represent instead, Benjamin argues, two generically distinct ways of representing subjectivity. The former, fate, Benjamin traces back to classical tragedy and the latter, character, to Early Modern comedy.

However, the fact that Great Expectations overlays these two genres in its “tragi-comic conception” does not put it at odds with Benjamin’s thesis. In fact, it is precisely towards this critique of character as determining fate that the novel’s satire is directed. Pip believes that his Great Expectations are meant to reward the quality of his character and led him ineluctably up the social ladder and into Estella’s embrace. And they do lead him up the ladder; but they do not lead him away from his fateful encounter with Magwitch in the opening scene. In fact, they further entangle their twin destinies: not only does his inheritance connect him back to his first contact with Magwitch, but other parts of his fantasy do as well, namely his desire for Estella, who is later revealed to be Magwitch’s estranged daughter. Again, part of the art of Dickens’s narrative strategy is to overlay, in addition to the tragic and comic registers, the twin temporalities of his illusions and disillusionment, such that at all points the false appearances of the comic world can be traced (retrospectively) back to the graveyard and “the guilt context of the living,” which casts them in a grotesque light.

When Pip first meets Estella, he informs us, That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and

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think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day. (GE, 72) Ostensibly, Pip is describing Estella’s enchanting effect on him, but read retrospectively after the novel’s concluding revelations, the passage acquires noticeable double meanings, particularly in the rhetoric of bondage (“the chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link”). For Pip, it is worth noting, chains of gold often become chains of iron and flowers are usually revealed to be rather thorny at the base. Moreover, the symbolism of “links” in a chain, echoes the novel’s images of circulating “forgeries,” which enlist more and more people in a collective deception, including the forger himself, and, of course, also Magwitch’s leg iron (another “link” of sorts), connecting or linking the world of appearance to the “guilt context of the living,” high society to criminality, Pip to Magwitch, and both of them to Orlick and the latter’s attack on his sister.

The effect of such reinforcing imagery is to project an image of an entangling web of connections—Benjamin’s “net of … fate”—from which it becomes not just impossible to extricate oneself, but actually possible to further entwine oneself even as one thought one was doing the opposite (“what is [another’s] sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!”). Notably, when Pip asks Miss Havisham why she let him believe that she was his benefactor, she retorts, “You made your own snares. I never made them” (GE, 360). Pip, unbeknownst to him, is caught up in a trap of his own making. At one point, by way of analogy, Pip describes his situation by referring to an “Eastern story” in which an elaborate booby trap is set up for the enemy of a sultan, such that all the sultan has to do is sever a rope which distantly connects to a concrete slab “that was to fall on the bed of state,” crushing his enemy. In Pip’s retelling of the tale, however, it is no longer the sultan that does the cutting, but rather the sultan (here, Pip) that gets crushed: “in my case; all the work, near and afar, that tended to the end, had been accomplished [to set up the booby trap]; and in an instant the blow was struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me” (GE, 312). In

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Pip’s retelling, the agent who does the cutting is almost totally absent, suggesting that Pip has become the victim of circumstances, which he has unconsciously helped to create, rather than of some avenging spirit. Magwitch is, after all, no villain, merely a figure for an ineluctable series of events, “a tragi-comic conception,” connecting the parvenu and the lumpen criminal, Society and guilt.

And, like the slab of concrete which descends on its victim as if the result of some inexorable logic, signs and traces of Pip’s criminal past ominously reappear to remind him of the true source of wealth, until at last Magwitch himself appears in Pip’s apartment announcing himself as the father of his Expectations (GE, 319). The secret whose business it had become his life to repress and the Great Expectations that were to be its salve now together bind him to a secret of which he can no longer bear the burden. This wretched position has become a personal hell from which he cannot escape: “The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me” (GE, 339). Pip’s vanity, his affected mien of the gentleman, makes his would-be father Magwitch repellent to him, as he is reluctant to accept that the life he has been playing at and the secret which he has been hiding reconfirm his existential poverty, even if they also fill his pockets with gold. The persona he has taken on is Magwitch’s monster and not his own. When at last Pip accepts this, he discovers, as W. David Shaw argues, that he is “redundant”: “Like Oedipus, [he] finds his lifeline no longer exists.”60 His long adventure has only been a detour through an imaginary person’s life and not his own. Now that it is over, nothing, in a sense, has happened to Pip. His sense of a tragic, a- priori guilt has not been processed or overcome; it merely subsides in a kind of bathetic exhaustion. Pip, as the endless reversibility of his name suggests, has only returned to where he started—the guilt of “mere life.” A pure tautology: a Pip is a Pip, always and forever. The myth of bourgeois individualism, which the inheritance trope was supposed

60 W. David Shaw, Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 43.

131 to guarantee as a self-fulfilling prophecy, is exposed as a lie, another illusory form of Great Expectations.

3.7 Work and the Dickensian Imagination Orwell observes, “What [Dickens] does not noticeably write about … is work”; and (later in the same essay) “one comes upon something which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens…—that he had no ideal of work.”61 For Dickens, Orwell concludes, Home life is always enough. And, after all, it was the general assumption of his age. The “genteel sufficiency,” the “competence,” the “gentleman of independent means” (or “in easy circumstance”)—the very phrases tell one all about the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century bourgeoisie. It was a dream of complete idleness.62 The only thing is that, finally in Great Expectations, home life is not enough. In fact, there is no hearth. There is, in this novel, instead a desperate desire to form an “ideal of work.” But it can’t be done, not even imagined. Self-improving work is mysteriously occluded. It’s not that Dickens doesn’t know how the bourgeoisie make their money or how one actually raises oneself into another class. It’s that he doesn’t want to say it, at least, vulgarly. Thus, Dabney notes, It is true that Pip rises through class lines, but to equate him … with young men like Julien Sorel, who drive upward on nerve and talent is quite misleading. The word “expectations” is explicit and appropriate; in the circle of gentility where Pip has been placed on waits for one’s destiny and accepts it. Money is what counts, but making money is vulgar; a genteel young man must have wealth to begin with or acquire it passively. This is one reason for the recurrent fables in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century fiction of discovered identities and suppressed wills—one gets the inheritance, but actually one had it all along.63

61 Orwell, 60, 64. 62 Orwell, 65. 63 Ross H. Dabney, Love and Property in the Novels of Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 137-8. Franco Moretti, having quoted the above passage in his discussion of the novel, then adds,

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But here again the paradox of Great Expectations: Pip’s Expectations, unlike, say, Jane Eyre’s, are not deserved. Far from facilitating closure, they stand in the way of it until at last they are renounced. Guiltless self-culture is impossible without a boost; and yet, still, nothing is so morally repugnant in a competitive, laissez-faire society as an undeserved boost. One could climb the social ladder on one’s own, and in earnest, like Julien Sorel; but to depict this realistically, both hero and author would require the ironic detachment of a Julien and Stendhal that neither Pip nor Dickens can muster, for to do so would be to acknowledge that very contradiction about social advancement in a competitive society from which the liberal qua liberal must actively distance himself by the 1860s if he wants to still be able to speak on behalf of the masses. In Great Expectations, there are only the inexorable alternatives, opulence or drudgery. What noticeably absent is any direct mediation on the nature of work or the relations of production under capitalism. In the world of Dickens’s novel, we get merely the moral that one cannot play forever at what one is not.

Unable to bear the deceitfulness any longer and frightened by the willingness with which he had continued to live on Magwitch’s money, Pip renounces his wealth and stoically commits himself to helping Magwitch escape the law again. When this fails, he stands loyally by his adopted father during his trial and at his deathbed. At last freed from his criminal counterpart, he has a nervous breakdown and descends into a feverish delirium, from which he recollects, “that I was a brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered off” (GE, 462). Pip’s dream

It is true, the recognition-inheritance pattern, virtually non-existent in European narrative, is instead the most typical form of the English happy end. Through it, the bourgeois theme of social mobility is given explicitly aristocratic features; for its goal, often enough, but above all for the form imparted to the entire process. Although the bourgeoisie has always taken excellent care of its wills and inheritances, the idea that wealth par excellence is something to be passed on from generation to generation, rather than being produced ex novo, is certainly far more typical of the landed aristocracy. This is why the hero is given rather faded bourgeois features: the more neutral his social identity, the easier will he “fill” the role which awaits him, and which takes him back to his birth—one more reason to slight whatever can be accomplished during youth. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, new ed., trans. Albert Sbragia (London: Verso, 2000), 205.

133 images recall his own individualist ambitions and their mortification—his absolute failure to stand apart from or above the norm. What needs also to be emphasized, though, is that where in the beginning he had stood tragically apart from the crowd, vulnerably alone, outside of any divine or legal protection, he is now inextricably a part of a world that was once alien to him—another brick in the wall, another part of the machine, another individual “in the colorless (anonymous) sky of man.” Here, we confront the darker side of Dickens’s comedy, which is not just the way “[c]haracter develops in [the actors] like a sun, in the brilliance of its single trait, which allows no other to remain visible in its proximity” (“FC,” 205), but the strange “reification” of existence that is suggested by these perfectly automatized individuals that occupy Benjamin’s stage, and the cruel, but morally unsuspicious and psychologically unmotivated, machinations to which they subject one another. If this is only hinted at in Benjamin, it is very properly the status quo of Dickens’s universe. Van Ghent links the strangeness of this vision to the period of which Dickens was a product: Dickens lived in a time and environment in which a full-scale demotion of traditional values was going on, correlatively with the uprooting and dehumanization of men, women, and children by the millions—a process brought about by industrialization, colonial imperialism, and the exploitation of the human being as a “thing” or an engine or a part of an engine capable of being used for profit. … Dickens’s intuition alarmingly saw this process in motion….64

Against this reification of everyday life, bourgeois individualism, the famous “career open to talent,” seemed to promise a glimmer of autonomy and a partial abstraction from the backbreaking operations of the capitalist machine. But bourgeois individualism, for contradictory reasons—in no small part because of its repressed aristocratic ambitions and love of titles, but also for its declared love of liberty and private property—offered no real alternative. Not only was the bourgeois, like every one else in this quasi-feudal society, “servile to those above, and tyrannical to those beneath them;” but, like Hegel’s Lord, he quickly found himself slavishly tied to his “bondmen”—the workers whose

64 Van Ghent, 128.

134 exploitation was the real source of his wealth. Whatever freedom Pip enjoys as a result of his Expectations, it has been purchased by Magwitch, so he can vicariously enjoy what life had denied him, and by the confidence of Miss Havisham, who uses Pip to torment her greedy family members by lavishing her attention on him instead of them. Far from being an individual, Pip is merely a chess piece moved by different players, who are themselves moved by other forces to their own particular destiny—Magwitch’s ineluctable movement to Newgate and Miss Havisham’s inextricability from the increasing entropic sterility of Satis House.

In Dickens’s universe, the Self straddles an enormous gulf, separating self-consciousness on the one side and real and appropriate self-realizing action on the other, “the theme of the search for a true and viable identity,” as J. Hillis Miller calls it.65 The challenge is to collapse the terrible divide, or, at least, form an adequate bridge between the two, so that one may travel easily from self-consciousness to self-realizing activity. The problem is that there are many false substitutes along the way, premature declaration of autonomy and freewill, which subject the aspiring individual to a (potentially endless) series of tragicomic pratfalls. The most serious impasse on the would-be hero’s quest towards himself is perhaps the very concept of the bourgeois individual, and the “cruel optimism” which spurned him on in the first place. For Dickens’s thing-like people too quickly put on airs as little men and women of influence without considering if they are indeed no longer merely wooden caricatures, parts of the infernal machine. Such commodities- cum-people are subject to the same misgivings about themselves as Marx’s table in Capital: The form of wood … is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of

65 J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), x.

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its wooden brain grotesque ideas far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.66 Pip’s Great Expectations, not the actual money, but his belief that his Expectations are a reward for his inner merit, is a “grotesque idea” evolved out of his own “wooden brain.”

There is no compensation for the existential guilt of “mere life” in a laissez-faire society nor any escape from life in the “colorless (anonymous) sky of man” except for the paper- thin theodicy with which Dickens tries to wrap up his loose ends when he has Pip at last renounce his Great Expectations and embrace his unworthiness by earnestly praying for the criminal from whom he had once tried so hard to distinguish and distance himself: “O Lord, be merciful to him, a sinner!” (GE, 406). It is Dickens’s version of the myth of the prodigal son who returns, restoring order to the home and familial relations he had driven apart by wasteful itinerancy: “My heart,” Pip says, “was softened by my return, and such a change had come to pass, that I felt like one who was toiling home barefoot from distant travel, and whose wanderings had lasted many years” (GE, 477). By a process that Van Ghent calls “reciprocal exchange,” the world’s guilt is made Pip’s guilt: his atonement will also be atonement for the world’s guilt, since, all things being equal, he and Magwitch are the same, both symptoms of the same society that has created them.67 The closure the novel desires for itself is merely formal, though, and, because of that, also ideological. The utopian promise of “reciprocal exchange,” whereby the individual can rectify all that is bad in his world through abstract and personal acts of piety and humiliation, actually conceals an equally strong affirmation of the status quo, which is made evident in what is probably best thought of as the novel’s “coda.”

Pip’s wanderings have not actually ceased; like capital itself, it is his fate to remain transcendentally homeless. He must reinvent himself again, but this time without illusions. No longer belonging properly to the village he left behind nor to his calling in a craft that industrial production is gradually replacing anyway, he takes up with Clarriker and Co., the insuring company in Cairo that Pip had used his brief wealth and influence to establish Herbert in as a partner—“the only good thing I had done,” he says (GE, 416).

66 Marx, Capital, 163-4. 67 Van Ghent, 133.

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And so, at last, pace Orwell, work is found, even if the ideal of it is not. “Man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relation with his kind,” write Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. And no sooner has “he” done this than “[t]he need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.” 68 So, far from resolving the internal contradictions of social-ascendancy in a laissez-faire society, the novel, as if fatigued from all this frenzied activity, merely overlooks problems at home by widening the sphere of advancing capitalism. “In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up,” says Foucault.69 The machine keeps running, but now with significantly less glamour than before. Even where the fiction of Pip’s Great Expectations recedes, the necessity of the myth remains. But really, short of developing a revolutionary class-consciousness, and even then, it’s hard to say “no” to Great Expectations (to all kinds of “cruel optimism” that lie in wait for even the most cynical). Adorno, in Minima Moralia, articulates this double bind admirably: it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home. … But the thesis of this paradox leads to destruction, a loveless disregard for things which necessarily turns against people too; and the antithesis, no sooner uttered, is an ideology for those wishing with a bad conscience to keep what they have. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly. 70 The same is true for Pip. The ontological guilt of “mere life” in a laissez-faire society is merely staved off, not overcome, or even adequately contained in the performance of good “character.” Since good “character” requires the denial of “mere life,” the guilt of poverty, it leads immediately to the bad conscience, with which one begins to desire again the things and privileges belonging to the very wealth that one, for ethical reasons, had wanted to do without.

In a philosophical fragment entitled, “Capitalism as Religion,” Benjamin writes, “Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. … A

68 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings Volume One, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2010), 70-71. 69 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16.1 (1986), 27. 70 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 39.

137 vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind.”71 The ostensible moral of Dickens’s novel is that, faced with ubiquity of this guilt in nineteenth-century society, one ought to seek more modest and honest livelihoods, while remaining honest to oneself about one’s inability to fully extricate oneself from the infernal operations of the machine—a moral which in no way resolves the ethical paradoxes of capitalism or life under it. It is rather the capitalist morality par excellence, in which guilt, far from being atoned for, is merely generalized so as to be made less of a burden for each individual.

The relationship between the aspirants of bourgeois individualism and the criminal are thus not actually transcended, but rather reconfirmed. It’s not just, as Van Ghent says, that “Magwitch, from a metaphysical point of view, is not outside Pip but inside,” but also from a dialectical perspective, that they become identical, equally representative of the guilt of “mere life” and “getting on,” not “the ideal of work” (that Orwell desired), but just work, which will be Pip’s fate once he has abandoned his Great Expectations. But the work that is found is a compromise: not the great self-raising work of the industrial entrepreneur nor the mere extraction of rents and financial speculation perpetuated by the gentry, but rather the new work of a petty-bourgeois clerkdom.

That clerkdom seemed to escape the ethical ambiguities of social advancement in a developing capitalist society is because, as Richard Sennett notes, it was “a class engaged in activity of distribution rather than production,” and because it lacked “a clear class identity”: One explanation for this absence of proclamations of “who we are” is that the mercantile classes had perhaps yet to move from confidence to smugness. Another is that secure self-definitions were difficult given the economic formation of this class. It was a class into which people

71 Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Selected Writings, 289.

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stepped, a new and expanding class; it was a matter of mobility rather than inheritance.72 “[Y]et to move from confidence to smugness”; “matter of mobility rather than inheritance”: a perfect solution to society’s waning Great Expectations about entrepreneurship, on the one hand, and the landed gentry, on the other, but also a new precariousness: clerical workers administering the distribution of products rather than production itself, follow the flows of Capital, like Pip, from London to Cairo and back. The novel, then, at last finds a home, and work, for Pip, in the very contours of capital’s flows, in which he will be totally mobile and urban, in which his aristocratic education will not be a waste, but in which his total lack of definition—of the character that fate was supposed to safeguard—will actually be an advantage. But in this Dickens merely secures the viability of his own petty-bourgeois position in Victorian society and reconfirms his doubts of any real meaningful transformation of industrial society beyond what is merely “added” to it by the small bourgeoisie. By being small, the clerical, petty bourgeoisie avoids the problems of being big, and can continue to sympathize with the masses through their own position of class ressentiment. But the fact that the novel, set in the pre-Victorian years, and published in 1860-1, essentially occludes the whole history of the Industrial Revolution is telling. The blind spot is symptomatic of a repression. We sense the importance of work in the novel because it is the one thing Dickens does not talk directly about, for to do so would be also to directly address the very contradiction in liberal narratives of social progress and upward mobility to which Dickens—although he is beginning to have doubts—is still cruelly attached. However, the all-or-nothing, melodramatic alternatives that confront Pip—oppressor or

72 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1976), 57. On the same page, Sennett observes: Socially, the growth of trade created jobs in the financial, commercial, and bureaucratic sectors of city society. To speak of the “growth of the bourgeoisie” … is to refer to a class engaged in activities of distribution rather than production. The young people coming to the city found work in these mercantile and commercial pursuits; in fact, there was something of a labour shortage, for there were more posts that demanded literate workers than there were people who could read. Like the balance of density in a city, the balance of jobs in it behaves like a crystal: The new trade activity in the 18th Century capitals was not added onto what had been there before; the whole economic structure of the city recrystallized around it. Shop space on the quais became too dear for small-time artisans, for instance; they began moving out of the center, and thence out of the capital itself, as the commercials moved in.

139 oppressed—raise the spectre of Dickens’s doubts all on their own and point to his bourgeoning sense of “liberal guilt” in the early 1860s, when the exciting years of the 1830s Reform movement were fading and when liberal fantasies about social mobility were compromised by what, after 1848, looked to be the hegemony of a class alliance, between the big bourgeoisie of industrial and financial capital and the old aristocracy who remained in positions of political authority.

4 George Eliot’s Low Expectations: Realism and the Imagined Community at the End of the Age of Capital

“Really, universally, human relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” – Henry James, Preface to Roderick Hudson1

“[C]artography is not the solution, but rather the problem.” – Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism”2

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that George Eliot’s Middlemarch “is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”3 Rather than interpret Woolf’s statement as merely a judgment of its literary merits (there is little doubt Eliot’s were immense), this chapter asks what else there is about the novel’s “structure of feeling,” as Raymond Williams would call it, that maturity would seem to name.

As I noted in the Introduction, for Williams, the term “structure of feeling,” while conceptually similar to a “world-view” or “ideology,” is meant to emphasize “a social experience which is still in process”—that is, a creative response and solution to a lived experience of tension or contradiction, rather than the subordination of such tensions and contradictions to any of the available preexisting answers or possible solutions: “not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought.”4 “Structures of feeling” are thus lived solutions—many soon to be recognizable as predictable aesthetic and ideological solutions—still in the process of being formed and not yet with a name: “Yet this specific solution is never mere flux. It is a structured formation which, because it is at the very edge of semantic availability, has many of the characteristics of a pre-

1 Henry James, Preface to Roderick Hudson, in Literary Criticism: French Writer, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Editions (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 1041. 2 Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), 158. 3 Virginia Woolf, “George Eliot,” in The Common Reader, First Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (Orlando: Harvest Book—Harcourt Inc, 1984), 168. 4 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

140 141 formation, until specific articulations—new semantic figures—are discovered in material practice.”5

Eliot’s “maturity” understood as a “structure of feeling” is thus, I will argue, a half- willed, half-spontaneous solution (aesthetic and cognitive6) to the problem of trying to imagine Britain’s historical and political past in the midst of a liberal-centrist hegemony that denies the radical and conflictual political history that founded the modern nation and the contemporary political economy.7 “Maturity” thus provides a critical distance that can behold the past objectively, but also coolly, without becoming entangled in any of its political battles that “maturity” invariably sees itself as rising above. Such a “structure of feeling” is developed out of the dialectical relationship that the novel establishes between the historical content of its representation and the modern form of its expression.

Eliot’s novel, published serially from 1871 to 1872, appeared at the end of the most important years of industrial-capitalist development in Britain, in the wake of the Second Reform Act of 1867, and in the midst of a transition from a national laizze-faire economy to one increasingly of monopoly on a world-scale—from what Eric Hobsbawm calls the Age of Capital to the Age of Empire. This is a moment it makes sense for anybody looking back on the nineteenth century to characterize as “mature.” Yet, Eliot’s novel takes as its historical content and setting the period of the so-called industrial revolution and the tumultuous political landscape leading up to the First Reform Act of 1832 (the English half of Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution). Between these two periods lies a gulf.

When Henry James wrote in 1876 that “[r]eally, universally, human relations stop nowhere,” he expressed it as an eternal truth; but really this had only been felt to be the case for the previous 25 years or so. A hundred years earlier it would have sounded

5 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 134. 6 This being, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, “[t]he originality of the concept of realism”—“its claim to cognitive as well as aesthetic status,” “Reflections in Conclusion,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), 198. 7 For more on this particular dialectic of nationalism see “Memory and Forgetting” in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 187-206.

142 metaphysical, not axiomatic. “When we write the ‘world history’ of earlier periods,” says Eric Hobsbawm, “we are in fact making an addition of the histories of the various parts of the globe, but which, in so far as they had knowledge of one another, had only marginal and superficial contact.”8 For Hobsbawm, “the great boom of the 1850s” is what actually “marks the foundation of a global industrial economy and single world history.”9 The novelist’s effort to “draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which [human relations] shall happily appear” to end somewhere had thus only really become a problem for those novelists of the latter half of nineteenth century and early twentieth century, like George Eliot and Henry James, who set themselves the special task of representing the totality of those relations (however narrow and limited each author’s grasp of that totality might prove to be in the end). As Georg Lukács observes, economic reality as a totality is itself subject to historical change. But these changes consist largely in the way in which all the various aspects of the economy are expanded and intensified, so that the totality becomes ever more closely-knit and substantial. After all, according to Marx, the decisive progressive role of the bourgeoisie in history is to develop the world market, thanks to which the economy of the whole world becomes an objectively unified totality.10

The challenge Eliot encountered in her effort to draw the totality of these new relations into “a geometry” of her own fictional making was then not only one of recording and representing a historical phenomenon, but of making sense of its totality as a world process as well: a representational challenge which provoked her to new experiments in the novel form. This process of totalization on an ever larger scale finds its figurative mirror not only in the novel’s multi-plot structure without a central protagonist, but in the production of sentences, which, in the author’s narratorial asides, reach higher levels of complexity, as she seeks out more nuanced ways of drawing her characters together and representing them simultaneously as a social organism obeying laws and logics beyond the aims or intentions of any of her characters. In Middlemarch, this becomes a search

8 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (London: Abacus, 1975), 64. 9 Hobsbawm, 88. 10 Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Aesthetics and Politics, 31.

143 for different metaphors of simultaneous, but largely invisible interrelationality. These metaphors are not so much stated as they are enacted in the production of what Fredric Jameson would call “dialectical sentences,” which pull together disparate materials under the command of a single syntactical logic, which itself drives towards ever larger expansions of meaning and interrelationality.11 The structure of these sentences thus mirrors, albeit in a purely formal way, the dialectical logic of capitalism’s own inner workings and advancement. Eliot’s metaphors, however, I will argue, point us back to the social organism they were originally meant to convey and allow us to equate the purely formal structure of the dialectical sentence with the metaphor’s tenor as well, thus giving us a glimpse of the recessive totality of capitalism, which is the social process of production itself. Such stylistic markers now distinguish Middlemarch from the other novels of its period as a landmark achievement: a “mature” or even proto-modernist work of art. Franco Moretti goes so far as to proclaim in his influential study of the European Bildungsroman: “George Eliot … and everything changes”—“so far, in fact, as to bring this genre to its natural conclusion.”12

The decisive shift that I want pinpoint in this chapter is Eliot’s turn away from the atomized, but also the necessarily central, individual of the classic European Bildungsroman examined by Moretti to what is now a kind of social group, or Gestalt, in Middlemarch, in which we encounter a plurality of characters, each operating on the basis of her or his own imagined centrality, and in pursuit of her or his own individual aims, but locked in a kind of unconscious entanglement and competition by virtue of the “web” of their sometimes hidden, sometimes open, relationships to one another in the social totality. While Middlemarch preserves “the individual,” that all-significant category of bourgeois political philosophy and economy, the individual is now perpetually displaced by the omniscient narrator’s invocation of a system of relations so vast and dynamic as to reveal any one character’s imagined centrality as a delusion

11 I am inspired here by Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Theodor W. Adorno’s sentences, “in which the actual machinery of sentence structure is itself pressed into service, in all its endless variety, and mobilized to convey meaning far beyond its immediate content as mere communication and denotation.” Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 64. 12 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, new ed., trans. Albert Sbragia (London: Verso, 2000), 214.

144 bordering on the pathological: “Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world,” asks the narrator, “and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”13 No longer then is Britain imagined—as the bourgeois economists of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century once imagined it— as a community of free-standing individuals working on their self-development in an arena where financial gain and personal growth are mutually reinforcing. Now, I will argue, it is represented as a community of incredibly fallible individuals, who desire to extricate themselves from the ethically compromised sphere of market exchanges, but are drawn back by egoism and tragic necessity.

At stake in Eliot’s literary experimentation, however, is not just the re-orientation of the individual within this newly categorized social group, but now also that of the social group within the larger totality of the world-historical process that forms it: the “subtle movement” and “less marked vicissitudes” of “Old provincial society,” as the narrator calls them, that are changing it and bringing it ineluctably to its contemporary moment (M, 96). One might interpret Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume One (published in the original German just four years before Middlemarch) as one of the first—and most lasting— efforts to theorize this process under a definitive name and concept. For Marx, “capital” is the magic word that conjures the totality. For Eliot, however, this world-historical process still lacks such definitive terminology. Her representational challenge is thus twofold: to grasp the totality at work and, at one and the same time, create a new novelistic idiom capable of sustaining the expression of that totality as it threatens to evade her representation and slip from view.14 This twofold representational challenge, however, becomes doubly problematic, as the more concretely the totality of this process is grasped and represented by her narrator, the more it seems to undermine the coherence of the social group itself, liquidating it and dissolving it in the flow of an on-going social- evolutionary process in which its momentary appearance must now be understood as a

13 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (London: Penguin, 1994), 418-9. Hereafter cited in parentheses as M. 14 Any investigation of Marx’s creative metaphors and highly literary language will show that this search for an appropriate idiom to express the totality was also Marx’s, but, unlike Eliot, he could confidently and continuously remind the reader that what the new idiom was describing was capitalism in its historical itinerary and contemporary particularity.

145 temporary stage which only has the external appearance of internal, organic coherence. Such temporariness is identified as early as the opening paragraph of the Prelude when the narrator identifies the topic of her introductory remarks as nothing less than a meditation on “the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time” (M, 3).

Representation in Middlemarch resolves itself into antinomies, pulling its raison d’être in two contradictory directions: on the one hand, I will argue, a nationalistic and Romantic representation of the British social group or “imagined community”—its organic continuity with a historical and traditional past; its budding modern sensibility; and its gradual, evolutionary maturation towards democratic inclusiveness and tolerance —and, on the other hand, the realist’s “cognitive mapping” of the world process that has brought such a group into being, cultivated its modern sensibility and made possible the conditions of its being.

Eliot’s manages this contradiction in Middlemarch with the invention of an omniscient, controlling narrator, who intrudes to eke didactic—“mature”—lessons out of this contradiction and, in so doing, reconciles the contradictory poles of her representation by arguing that a Romantic national continuity with the past and the natural evolution of the group to a mature democratic inclusiveness and tolerance must be won largely by submitting to the impersonal movement of the totality, and making small preparatory modifications to one’s behavior: “the growing good of the world,” as the narrator says, “is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (M, 838). No sooner is the march of History channeled in its all grandeur, than its image is transformed from a sublime one into a bathetic one, when the narrator intrudes again to caution against anything that moves too far beyond a dutiful submission to History’s will and telos. For Eliot, as Terry Eagleton puts it, “The suffering abnegation of the ego offers itself as the answer to the riddle of history.”15

15 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 2006), 121.

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Such a “mature” position to the historical problem of what Marxists would call praxis is one that conveniently suppresses the problem of the political as such, which it now characterizes as an immature and shortsighted vocation, at the same time that it affords itself the authority that age bestows to comment on the political without practicing it. There is in the narrator’s pronouncements something of the insinuating sense of anachronism of the modern scientist who judges the pre-Copernican philosopher for believing in a geocentric model of the universe. On the one hand, such a “mature” distance gives the story a poignant, dramatic irony, a sense and proportion of human tragedy, as, for example, when any one character realizes too late their error, the way in which, seeking what they thought was best, they gained the worst (Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon is emblematic in this sense). But, on the other hand, such tragic irony is then generalized and turned into a didactic lesson against striving towards any kind of transformative project or knowledge in the present that has not, by an abstract calculus only known to the author figure, achieved its appointed hour (as famously, it is worth remembering, was Eliot’s excuse for not supporting the female suffragettes).16 The end result is, invariably, the chastening of any revolutionary enthusiasm in her characters or reader: a strategic lowering of expectations, which can be understood as the point at which the conservative dimension of Eliot’s politics overlaps with her aesthetic realism. Low expectations: what else could there be when the narrator tells us in language we are not given the option of refusing, “We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves” (M, 211), even “the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity” (M, 194)? The characters’ struggle, of course, is to overcome such stupidity, and to some degree they do. But the rhetorical effect of such narratorial asides is to lower our expectations in advance and prepare us, like Dorothea, to be reconciled with the status quo of a middling way of life.

4.1 Thinking the Nation, Mapping Totality

16 For more on Eliot’s conflicted relationship to the suffragettes, see Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 178-83.

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I take the terms “imagined community” and “cognitive mapping” from the influential Marxist critics Benedict Anderson and Fredric Jameson respectively. I do not intend to position these two concepts as polar opposites, but rather as two dimensions of Eliot’s representation that happen at one and the same time.

For Anderson, the nation—any nation—is an “imagined community.” “It is imagined,” he says, “because members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion.”17 Nation then is an ideological construct, but necessarily so. There is no possibility of thinking the nation without some form of mediation since the modern conjuncture in which the nation form becomes the most frequent “imagined community” was one in which increasingly the historical process was driving ever more people together so that their totality—becoming an ever finer and more intricate web of interrelations—was now also harder to grasp. To imagine this totality in the projected image of a community, however, was to imagine this totality as something holistic and, in so doing, ideologically erase the various conflicts and tensions of the new class society that dictated how most often strangers in this larger society actually confronted one another (worker and employer becoming at this point the dominant social relationship of the modern nation). As Anderson observes, the nation “is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”18

Anderson famously gives both language and literary representation an enormous role in the crafting of this national imaginary of “horizontal comradeship.” In particular, he argues that the rise of the novel is directly connected to its ability to grapple with and mediate the new temporality of modern social space within nation, which has to do now with the coincidence of simultaneity rather the teleological and unitary time of pre- secular societies: a distinction, he draws, via Walter Benjamin’s concepts of “homogenous, empty time” and “messianic time.” In the former, which it is his primary

17 Anderson, 6. 18 Anderson, 7.

148 concern to elaborate, he says, “simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.”19

The characters of the new national literature are thus depicted as acting in ignorance of each other’s acts, which leads them, usually by turns, to grave and unfortunate misunderstandings and accidents, and then to happy coincidences, until, at last, resolution can be achieved with some sense of realistic plausibility. However, their connection to one another, outside of these fateful encounters—which, by the time of Victorian realism, are even fewer and farther between (think of how many characters in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House don’t actually meet each other)—is largely imagined: they exist together by virtue of the fact the author has brought them together in her book and made the reader think them simultaneously; their lived-connection to one another is as tenuous as it is obvious, the product of an arbitrary confluence of time and space. Their simultaneous existence, however, becomes an adequate way of thinking the nation. The reader imagines their simultaneity as an allegorical vehicle for her or his own simultaneity with a national population far vaster then the repertoire of characters represented.

Thus, if on the one hand imagining the nation as community means excising its conflicts and tensions to imagine “a deep, horizontal comradeship,” on the other hand, the representational machinery that a novel like Eliot’s deploys in order mediate these “horizontal” relationships in “homogenous, empty time” often means treating totality as something impersonal, bringing people together regardless of their private wills and intentions. There is thus an internal contradiction, both ideological and productive, in trying to imagine the nation as a community since imagining a society of strangers as a holistic “organic community”—what Eagleton defines as “the supposedly spontaneous unity of natural life-forms” and their “harmonious interdependence”20—means also, by necessity, figuring some cognate placeholder of the system of their alienation since that is the only thing that actually connects them in the new society of the modern nation. This

19 Anderson, 24. 20 Eagleton, 103.

149 is the famous difference and rupture between community and society, or Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, theorized by Ferdinand Tönnies. Where “the theory of Gemeinschaft starts from the assumption of perfect unity of human wills as an original or natural condition,” “Gesellschaft,” he says, “is to be understood as a multitude of natural and artificial individuals, the wills and spheres of whom are in many relations with and to one another, and remain nevertheless independent of one another and devoid of mutual familiar relationships.”21

What confronts us in Middlemarch then—in the sheer magnitude of its pages, the complexity of its multi-plot narrative and metaphors, and, above all, in its sprawling hypotactic sentence construction—is thus an attempt to “square the circle” of the new problem of the waning centrality of the individual in the everyday experience of selfhood, which attempts to preserve the individual at the cost of repositioning it within the ever- widening context of a totality that now threatens to take its place. Middlemarch thus constitutes a transitional stage in what Jameson has called “the construction of the bourgeois subject in emergent capitalism and its schizophrenic disintegration in our own time.”22 It is in this sense that I argue that Eliot’s metaphors of the “web” of social relationships—although they eclipse and mortify the imagined centrality of any of her characters—are themselves a willed attempt to give a kind of form and content, or “cognitive mapping,” to the object that threatens to displace them: the totality itself.

For Jameson, cognitive mapping is that which “enable[s] a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.” It is thus for Jameson neither

21 Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society, trans. and ed. Charles P. Loomis (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002), 37, 76. 22 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 22. Here, I am also in agreement with Jameson when—about “the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual”—he writes elsewhere that: Of the two possible formulations of this notion—the historicist one, that a once-existing centered subject, in the period of classical capitalism and the nuclear family, has today in the world of organizational bureaucracy dissolved; and the more radical poststructuralist position, for which such a subject never existed in the first place but constituted something like an ideological mirage—I obviously incline toward the former; the latter must in any case take into account something like a “reality of appearance.” Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 15.

150 representational nor ideological in the way that we conventionally understand those terms, since although it is both inaccurate, i.e. non-mimetic, and in that sense, also false or “ideological,” cognitive mapping is nonetheless functional—“involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place”—and, in so being, bears a certain relation to the reality that it negotiates. To this end, he compares it to “the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as ‘the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.’” Cognitive mapping, for example, is how we are able not to lose our bearings in a large metropolitan city, where often knowing simply that an extremely visible landmark, say Toronto’s CN Tower, is south, and not north, will be enough to help us navigate a vast unfamiliar urban space; however, if we lose sight of that coordinate, our cognitive mapping evaporates and all of a sudden we are lost. For Jameson, cognitive mapping “becomes extraordinarily suggestive when projected outward onto … larger national and global spaces”—“in terms of the way in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national, and international class realities.”23

What this cognitive impulse maps (as the other side of any attempt to think the nation in all its arbitrary simultaneity) is thus predominately an impersonal system of relationships and historical process—tinged, as I will show, in Eliot’s idiom with telling economic metaphors—that actually breach the imaginary boundaries of the nation and undermine the Romantic content of its group identity, or “organic community,” pointing instead to a

23 Jameson, Postmodernism, 51-2. For Jameson, cognitive mapping is the aesthetic of postmodernism, what he calls elsewhere “a geopolitical aesthetic,” in which he argues the Western artist’s position in the world is always-already a relational one in which—with advent of multinational, or late, capitalism— Anglo-European centrality no longer obtains. The “cognitive mapping” of a novel like Middlemarch is then obviously a much different thing, which it is one of the purposes of this chapter to elaborate. It should also be observed here, though, that where Jameson’s theorization of “cognitive mapping” is both a kind of apologia and renovation of “old-fashioned” Marxian “reflection theory” for a postmodern context, Jameson’s theory would be much less controversial in the Victorian period. Indeed Eliot herself in the famous “In Which the Story Pauses a Little” chapter from Adam Bede would seem to theorize a similar compromise between sheer mimesis (the imitation of reality), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, some more partial form of representation that is nonetheless still cognitively useful: my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath. Adam Bede, ed. Margaret Reynolds (London: Penguin, 2008), 193.

151 different socio-economic reality (that of developing industrial-capitalist social relations), which is other than the “holistic” totality claimed by Romantic nationalism and more often than not associated with an always-already receding rural past, or Gemeinschaft.

4.2 “Incarnate History” Eliot’s vision of this historical process is a complicated, if not contradictory, one. As Patrick Brantlinger observes, she combines a Comtean vision of gradual and inevitable progress towards enlightenment and scientific rationality with an Arnoldian “sadness … in progressing beyond such comforting illusions as God and immortality” and “a Burkean respect for the greatness of what is being superseded.”24 From the Young Hegelians that she translated—David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach—she borrows the idea that what progress could be achieved by the species was won by revolutions in thought that spread from individual to individual until they reached the collective.25 The individual’s best preparation for such a new dawn was to begin “modifying” his or her own thought processes.26 The idea of adaptability through modification over time found further support in her reading of natural history, although she could never fully countenance the Darwinian notion of evolution, or advancement, through struggle (the so-called “survival of the fittest”), which for her negated the mystery of history—a mystery that, for Eliot, still pointed to a kind of generalized Comtean teleology of development through successive stages of darkness and enlightenment.27 Still, the influence of the natural sciences was strong enough to give her interpretation of history pretensions of scientific objectivity. Although Eliot, as I’ve already shown, retains the individual—so important to the liberalism of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—as a sort of litmus test for the progressiveness of any one epoch in the historical narrative (one of many plausible answers to the question, “why always Dorothea?” [M, 278]), there is a noticeable turn away from the individual to the collective—to the social group and,

24 Patrick Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 228. 25 See A. S. Byatt, Introduction to Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, by George Eliot, ed A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (London: Penguin, 1990), xxvi-xxvii. 26 On “the principle of modification” in Eliot, see Graver, 61. 27 “[T]o me the Development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the process.” George Eliot qtd. in Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 44.

152 behind it, the totality configuring it—that distinguishes her from many of her British predecessors and contemporaries.

Eliot’s intellectual formation is thus markedly similarly to that of Marx—ranging as it does from Comtean sociology to German Higher Criticism to natural history and bourgeois economics—and yet she reaches an altogether different conclusion about the nature of historical development. Instead of synthesizing these at-times contradictory sources into a grand theory of history (or “metanarrative”), as Marx did in his vision of history as an on-going struggle between oppressor and oppressed moving dialectically, by fits and starts, to an Utopian end of oppression altogether, Eliot’s intellectual reference points often stand in naked opposition to one another, bridging, but not closing, a gap in her work between what Neil McCaw identifies as a liberal-Whig interpretation of history as steady progress and a conservative, Carlylean interpretation of history as on-going cycles of decline and regeneration, in which the present has become arrested in a period of decline.28

The contradictoriness of Eliot’s interpretation of history, however, acquires more coherence if thought of not as an idiosyncratic ambivalence, but as an attempt to foreclose, in advance, the very possibility of theorizing the necessity of radical politics in the present—of revolution and structural transformation. As Brantlinger observes, the central notion of gradual, but also inevitable, development over a long period of time, to which Eliot unwaveringly committed herself, is anathema to revolutionary, or even, for that matter, reformist, politics, such that “the idea of progress gradually emerges in liberal thinking as the antithesis of the idea of reform, even though they appeared to many to be nearly synonymous.”29 Thus, by insisting that historical process is a gradual one, in which change is slow, brought about by the most minute of modifications in the social, Eliot is able to maintain an altruistic, liberal position towards humanity and, at the same

28 Neil McCaw, George Eliot and Victorian Historiography: Imagining the National Past (Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 2000), 32. For more on this negative “conservative” side of Eliot’s interpretation of History, see John Rignall, “European Landscapes and the History of Violence,” in George Eliot, European Novelist (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). 29 Brantlinger, 5.

153 time, argue against any large-scale human intervention in the historical process that would attempt to accelerate or redirect it and so change the status quo.

This is the conclusion drawn towards the end of her affirmative assessment of Wilhelm von Riehl’s sociological system in “The Natural History of German Life,” published in 1856, roughly one year before she would embark on her career as a fiction writer with Scenes of Clerical Life. Riehl, she says, “sees in European society incarnate history, and any attempt to disengage it from its historical element must, he believes, be simply destructive of social vitality. What has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws.”30 What is incarnated in history then is a generalized, universal will, or telos, pointing, in a tautological way, to the present necessity of each of its own stages to some greater developmental arc and eschaton-to-come, but still unknown (what Jacques Derrida has more recently theorized under the concept-sign of l’avenir or “the future,” whose homophone in French, à venir, means “to come,” and thus adds conceptual connotations of a future-yet-to-come—in other words, Utopia). But significantly Eliot’s Utopia is one that cannot be built. It must be waited for instead—allowed its proper time of development. Thus, Eliot concludes, “[t]he nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of development is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which carries with it a life independent of the root.”31

Eliot finds this “social-political- conservatism” preferable to “the notable failure of revolutionary attempts conducted from the point of view of abstract democratic and socialistic theories,” which, for her, are “the practical demonstration of the evils resulting from a bureaucratic system which governs by an undiscriminating, dead mechanism,” or, as in the final words she quotes from Riehl on “communistic theories,” “the despair of the

30 Eliot, “Natural History of German Life,” in Selected Essays, 127. 31 Eliot, “Natural History of German Life,” 129.

154 individual in his own manhood, reduced to a system.”32 This conflation of democratic and socialistic theories to a “dead mechanism” is, of course, reactionary; and, indeed, the position being elaborated here is, at least at first glance, the classically conservative distinction between an “organic” (read: natural and traditional) community or Gemeinschaft, in which hierarchical relationships between higher and lower orders are seen as symbiotic, and a liberal laissez-faire society or Gesellschaft, in which hierarchies are arbitrary and relationships therefore antagonistic and competitive. While such a position has the advantage of offering a persuasive critique of laissez-faire society as it was then developing, it is a critique made with a backwards-looking glance to the supposed glories of a disappearing feudal order or “Golden Age.”33 Towards the end of her review of Riehl’s work, however, Eliot attempts to save both Riehl and herself from such reactionary nostalgia: Riehl’s conservatism is not in the least tinged with the partisanship of a class, with a poetic fanaticism for the past, or with the prejudice of a mind incapable of discerning the grander evolution of things to which all social forms are but temporarily subservient. … He is as far as possible from the folly of supposing that the sun will go backward on the dial, because we put the hands of our clock backward; he only contends against the opposite folly of decreeing that it shall be mid-day, while in fact the sun is only just touching the mountain-tops, and all along the valley men are stumbling in the twilight.34 What is being embraced here then is not only Riehl’s critique of radicalism, but also, for Eliot, “the grander evolution of things to which all social forms are but temporarily subservient”—what, as I already noted, she will later refer to in the opening pages of Middlemarch as “the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiment of Time” (M, 3). In order to grasp the subtleties of this movement, society and the world-historical process that produces it are interpreted as a totality with

32 Eliot, “Natural History of German Life,” 127, 129, 139. That this new appreciation for Riehl’s “social- political-conservatism” was somewhat at odds with the earlier enthusiasm Eliot’s expressed in her letters for the 1848 revolutions will be discussed later. 33 Points made respectively (and exhaustively) in the dual arguments of Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 34 Eliot, “Natural History of German Life,” 139.

155 various contributing factors and undetermined possibilities and tragedies, in which past and present are layered, the present entwined with the past, which contains the seeds of the future, “a life independent of the root.”

This is a vision of the world-historical process not, on the surface, dissimilar from the one Leon Trotsky, building on Marx, would theorize later as “combined and uneven development,” except for the important fact that where Trotsky’s theory was aimed at dismantling the vulgar, evolutionist stagism of “orthodox” Marxism—Menshevik and “Old Bolshevik”—to argue for a praxis of “permanent revolution,” which combined old and new tasks of the revolution (i.e. fighting for a bourgeois-democratic revolution at the same time as a proletarian one), Eliot here attacks the vulgar stagism of Liberal and Radical Reformers (“democratic doctrinaires” and “the communistic theories”35), with their “Whiggish” ideas about successive stages of social improvement, to argue for a gradualist, social evolutionism instead of permanent revolution.36 In other words, Eliot was a revisionist before such a thing existed. But in both cases, what is being grasped is the world-historical process as a totality in which past, present, and future are “combined and uneven” and dialectically interrelated in the world process. In the words of Middlemarch’s omniscient narrator, “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. … [T]he fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval” (M, 832).

The ideological maneuver—or strategy of containment—of Eliot’s proto-revisionism adopted under the influence of Riehl, however, is to subsume what is initially grasped as a social phenomenon—a social history—into a “natural history” with its own immanent laws and trajectories, which any form of organized struggle or reform cannot alter, in which the “real” must always be coextensive with the present, the status quo enshrined as always the most rational activity for humanity in its present stage of development. It is

35 Eliot, “Natural History of German Life,” 139. 36 My understanding of Trotsky’s theory is drawn from Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010).

156 here that Eliot’s realist aesthetic becomes coterminous with the brand of ethical realism she came to espouse.

Indeed, as John Rignall argues, it was in the wake of the failed 1848 revolutions that a briefly-held “revolutionary enthusiasm” faded in Eliot and she began to seek a new “realist” world-view—what I have been calling “maturity” as a “structure of feeling”— that could embrace the “awkward fact and uncomfortable truth” of the failures of the century’s early revolutionary and idealist projects.37 For Rignall: “The failure of the revolutions thus plays a part in the development of an understanding of society that is essentially conservative but at the same time one that will serve as the basis of a realistic aesthetic,” in which, he says, “there is still perhaps a faint echo of the spirit of 1848” in that her realism is equally hostile to “the conventions with which middle-class society is all too ready to console itself.”38

This definition of realism as politically conservative and at the same time critical of the present organization of society is similarly expressed by Brantlinger in The Spirit of Reform: Realism in a political sense means a rejection of reform idealism, although not necessarily an affirmation of the status quo. It seeks to maintain a balance or stalemate between radicalism and conservatism. It identifies truth if not goodness with the given, with “facts” alone, and substitutes either worldly toleration or a scientific-seeming objectivity for critical ideals. And it tends to displace the responsibility for social change from human agency to “laws” of evolution and organic growth.39 “[N]ot necessarily an affirmation of the status quo,” though, means that sometimes it is also just that. Still, this political disappointment in the transformative projects of the past—which, I will argue, structures Eliot’s novel and plays into her narrator’s all-

37 John Rignall, “From Revolutionary Enthusiasm to Realism: A. H. Clough’s and George Eliot’s Responses to the Revolutions of 1848,” in Formen der Wirklichkeitserfassung nach 1848: Deutsche Literature und Kultur vom Nachmärz bis zur Gründerzeit in europäischer perspective, Vol. 1, eds. Helmut Koopmann and Michael Perraudin (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2003), 103 38 Rignall, “From Revolutionary Enthusiasm to Realism,” 101, 103. 39 Brantlinger, 207.

157 consuming cynicism, what Williams calls her “sad resignation”40—must, I think, be thought of as a kind of tragic heroism on the part of the artist: a willed attempt to view the world, at last, without illusions, which, in the end, will also take its toll on the political imagination of the Victorian novel and late-nineteenth-century liberalism in general, which now increasingly will pose political problems as cultural ones.

4.3 From Politics to Self-Culture Between 1831-1832 and 1870-71, the past and present of Middlemarch, there lies an enormous gulf.

In particular, this in-between period witnessed a weakening allegiance between the liberal bourgeoisie and working-class radicals which was a common feature of the political landscape leading up to the First Reform Act of 1832, but which, by the time of the 1848 revolution, had disappeared.41 The subsequent years saw the liberal bourgeoisie move towards the centre, as they sought, as the conservatives now also did, to grant the demands of the working classes gradually, in such a way that the power and influence of the state could be re-legitimatized after having been thrown into moments of revolutionary suspense in the previous decades.42

40 Williams, The Country and the City, 173. 41 See Imannuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 16: in the period from the French Revolution to the revolutions of 1848, the “only clear cleavage” for contemporaries was between those who accepted progress as inevitable and desirable, thus “were globally favourable” to the French Revolution, and those who favored the Counter-Revolution, which took its stand against this disruption of values…. Thus the political struggle was between liberals and conservatives; those who called themselves radicals or Jacobins or republicans or socialist were regarded as simply a more militant variety of liberals. 42 See David Fernbach, Introduction to Surveys from Exile, Political Writings Volume 2, by Karl Marx (London: Verso , 2010), 23-4: Two decades later, when it became clear to the ruling class that working-class suffrage was not a threat but that the great majority of workers would vote for the ruling-class parties, the Second Reform Bill enfranchised the bulk of the male working class. The Chartist demands, revolutionary had they been won by force, proved recuperative when they were given by grace of the ruling classes who allowed the workers into the hallowed pale of the British Constitution.

158

As Carolyn Steedman argues in her essay on Middlemarch and the history of the Reform Acts, by the time the second Reform Act was passed in 1867, the bourgeois intelligentsia had turned the conversation away from politics and enfranchisement (which now seemed an inevitable, even if gradual, process) and redirected it to the topic of “culture.” This was the same year after all that Mathew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy began to see publication in Cornhill Magazine. The topic of passionate discussion and moral hand- wringing was now no longer how to incorporate the masses, but how to educate and, in so doing, pacify the masses that were gradually being incorporated anyway. “Culture,” in other words, was the strategy by which the ruling classes would suppress the anarchy that besieged the newly divisive class-based society at the end of the Age of Capital without the apparently violent intervention of the state. The movement from politics to culture as the idealized solution to Britain’s social problems is one, however, that must be made sense of historically. It is not the result of a sudden, or spontaneous, shift in attitude.

From the mid-eighteenth century to 1832, the push for parliamentary reform in Britain had aligned at different moments the interests of the lower and middle classes of society, both of which were systematically shut out of the British electoral system and subject to the rule of the landed aristocracy, whose vested interests earned the latter the title of “Old Corruption.” As Steedman notes, “Fifty years of proposals to reform the Parliamentary system preceded the First Reform Bill; ‘Old Corruption’ had been attacked for at least half a century before 1832, during the long formation of ‘the industrial bourgeoisie,’ … who [were] voteless under England’s ancient regime.”43 While the First Reform Act went some way to incorporating elements of this formative bourgeoisie (most notably, those heads of households whose property was valued at £10 per annum), it held back the lower-class strata of the reform movement, whose petitions for enfranchisement were characterized as too extreme or premature. In Steedman’s succinct words: “The Reform Bill was a party measure, carried by one section of the ruling elite (the Whigs) in

43 Carolyn Steedman, “Going to Middlemarch: History and the Novel,” Michigan Quarterly Review 40.3 (2001), 538.

159 opposition to the other (the Tories) against a background of great popular turmoil throughout the country and riots in many towns.”44

The example of the French Revolution had, according historian E. P. Thompson, galvanized working-class radicals in England, who agitated for reform and, in some cases, for social revolution as well. The example of the French Revolution, however, provoked panic in the middle and higher orders of society, who began to fear, with some justification, the out-right insurrection of the lower orders of society, or “the mob.” As Thompson claims in his influential The Making of the English Working Class, “In the 1790s something like an ‘English Revolution’ took place,” which “was strangled in its infancy.”45 The result was a “flood-tide of counter-revolutionary feeling and discipline,” which “coincided with the flood-tide of the Industrial Revolution; as new techniques and forms of industrial organization advanced, so political and social rights receded. The ‘natural’ alliance between an impatient radically-minded industrial bourgeoisie and a formative proletariat was broken as soon as it was formed.”46 For Thompson, “The twenty-five years after 1795 may be seen as the years of the long counter-revolution…. Hence … the mildest measure of reform to meet the evident irrationalities of Old Corruption, was actually delayed, by the resistance of the old order on the one hand, and the timidity of the manufacturers on the other.”47

From Marx’s perspective the passing of the First Bill was only the disingenuous attempt of the predominately aristocratic Whig party to maintain their political hegemony by granting concessions to the new middle classes before they were turned to the side of revolt, or worse, revolution: “In 1831 they [the Whigs] extended the political portion of reform as far as was necessary in order not to leave the middle class entirely dissatisfied…. [T]hey took the movement in hand in order to prevent its forward march, and to recover their own posts at the same time.”48

44 Steedman, 533-4. 45 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1980), 194. 46 Thompson, 195. 47 Thompson, 888. 48 Marx, Surveys from Exile, 260.

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This would not have been done at all, though, if it were not for the popular support given to the Reform Movement by non-electors and the influence of the French “contagion,” which once again reasserted itself in the wake of the 1830 revolution in France—an event which only gets passing mention in Middlemarch when an anxious Mr. Brooke worries out loud that “it’s going on a little fast” in France while at the same time lamenting English “backwardness”: “they're in the next century, you know, on the other side of the water” (M, 382).

In “English Rural and Urban Disturbances on the Eve of the First Reform Bill, 1830- 1831,” George Rudé examines a series of riotous upheavals and demonstrations that followed in the wake of the July Revolution leading many historians to aver that England had been on the brink of its own revolution.49 These disturbances, which moved from the rural periphery to the urban centre, culminated with the Bristol Riot—“the last great urban riot in English history,” according to Rudé—after Grey’s second Bill was rejected. However, “what followed,” Rudé claims, “was something of an anti-climax”:50 The middleclass leaders, and certain of the liberal aristocrats as well, were not averse, in order to win their Bill, to playing with fire or even toying with revolution. But the Bristol events … had a sobering effect on both sides. On the one hand, they chastened the aristocratic and Tory opposition, making it more amenable to relinquishing entrenched positions. On the other hand, they discouraged all but the most radical of the Reform leaders from making any attempt to drive a harder bargain with the support of the streets. For Rudé, England was brought back from the brink of Revolution “[m]ainly because the middle classes, who called the tune, had no need of one.”51 “Still,” as Imannuel Wallerstein reminds us, “reform might never have come, any more in Great Britain than in France or Belgium, had there not been a popular push.”52 In the words of Middlemarch’s Will Ladislaw, the country “wants to have a House of Commons which is

49 Georges Rudé, “English Rural and Urban Disturbances on the Eve of the First Reform Bill, 1830-1831,” Past and Present 37.1 (1967), 87. 50 Rudé, 98. 51 Rudé, 102. 52 Wallerstein, 73.

161 not weighted with nominees of the landed class, but with representatives of other interests. And as to contending for a reform short of that, it is like asking for a bit of an avalanche which has begun to thunder” (M, 460).

What is notable about Eliot’s Middlemarch, though, is that while the passing of the First Reform Act “punctuates and structures Eliot’s text,” as Steedman argues, any suggestion of these disturbances, so central to the struggle for Reform, are—with the exception of “Middlemarch’s extremely low-key election riot”—largely absent from Eliot’s narrative.53 In Jerome Beaty’s memorable phrase, Eliot’s technique is “history by indirection.” References to struggles from below (rick-burning [M, 26], machine breaking [M, 26, 353, 460, and 504], election riots [M, 504-5], and so on) as well as references to more properly “world-historical” events (the death of King George [M, 357], the dissolution of Parliament [M, 353, 357, and 487], and the July Revolution [M, 382]), all appear in passing, or else, where they seem to “obtrude” into the narrative, they are, Beaty says, “so closely followed by … momentous fictional ‘news,’ that the reality itself is overshadowed,” as, for example, when Mr. Brooke learns about the Lords’ rejection of the Bill at the same time that he is trying to process the news of Dorothea’s engagement to Will Ladislaw.54

Middlemarch is thus a paradoxical novel: no one would deny that it is some way about Reformism and politics, but how is properly a question for interpretation since so little of that history—fictionalized or fact-based—actually appears on the surface of its narrative. In the words of Steedman: “While Middlemarch is quite plainly a novel about political representation, in interesting ways it embodies the extreme difficulties that the English have inherited from the moment of Culture and Anarchy, of representing the political. … [Eliot] has nothing to say about it but through the lens of ‘culture.’”55 Eliot’s “culturalization” of politics turns Reform into a Romanticist-Idealist “Spirit,” or Geist, that is detectable behind all social forms—“incarnate history”—through which we can

53 Steedman, 534, 541-2. 54 Jerome Beatty, “History by Indirection: The Era of Reform in ‘Middlemarch,’” Victorian Studies 1.2 (1957), 178. 55 Steedman, 547.

162 now interpret the struggle of Geist to fulfill itself.56 The problem is not that Reform was a very particular thing that cannot, or should not, be generalized into a cultural attitude. The opposite is probably true: it makes only too much sense to talk about a culture of reform as Brantlinger’s The Spirit of Reform has persuasively shown. The problem is that the general, cultural attitude is reified in the form of certain characters—what Daniel Cottom calls “social figures” (“a figure turned into the ideal of society as a whole”57)— that now stand in for a myriad of other more local and complex struggles: it is thus that the political struggle for the franchise is allegorized in Middlemarch, as Steedman puts it, “through the lens of ‘culture,’” as the struggle of a cast of characters from the middling classes to contribute to the common good in ways that are often not about widening the franchise at all, but about their own spiritual self-improvement or self-culture. This is the way in which, according to Steedman, “Eliot reads class, class conflict, political struggle, and questions of political agency through the filter of ‘culture’”—“the way in which everything has to be told in terms of something else.”58

Dorothea, for example, toys with the idea of setting up a worker’s colony. Lydgate and Casaubon, for their part, seek reforms in the respective fields of medical science and mythography. Mr. Brooke even stands for parliament. But these pet projects are characterized not so much as forms of political altruism, but bungled attempts at self- development: in fact, they are bungled, it is implied, because they are too altruistic. What is desired is not so much transformative action but the avoidance of the encroaching market relations of a laissez-faire society that was rapidly advancing through industrialization. As Alan Mintz argues in George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation, “George Eliot is interested in applying the idea of vocation to pursuits which are in the world but not altogether worldly—that is, pursuits that take place in the context of human

56 Brantlinger defines “the Spirit of Reform” as “the belief that social improvement, and especially the improvement of the condition of the working class, can be brought about by some form of political action, whether through legislative and administrative channels or through social work and private charity.” Brantlinger, 1. Here, it is Brantlinger’s indecisive “or” that rhetorically performs the work of “spiritualization,” which makes Reform discussable as a general cultural attitude in his study. 57 Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 146. 58 Steedman, 547-8.

163 affairs but that do not make profit their chief aim.”59 Such Utopian, or “not altogether worldly,” vocations, however, must now be tested against reality: they must be able to exist within the current status quo and not subvert it, but march with it.

For Hans Ulrich Seeber, the realist novel, especially Eliot’s, with its “actions and characters operating in a fictional equivalent of actual society, seems admirably suited to explore the friction between Utopian ideas and experience.”60 However, once “Utopian thinking … is no longer protected by barriers of space and time as in Utopian fictions, but exposed to the complexities of ‘real’ life,” a “shadow of melancholy failure looms large over Utopian attitudes and projects.”61 Thus, he says, “In the course of his or her life the hero or heroine acquires maturity and satisfaction by an act of renunciation, by partly making peace with society,” rather than, as evidenced in Middlemarch, trying to alter it.62

It is therefore between the fictional past and present that the narrator’s “maturity”—as a “structure of feeling”—begins to take shape, often in the form of a kind of “saying” or sententious expression of wisdom, expressed in such a way that bars refusal. “[L]ife must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation, as it is by men who have lost their limbs,” says the narrator. The specific context is Lydgate’s realization that if his marriage to Rosamond is going to survive its various tensions and disappointments, then “the tender devotedness and docile adoration of the ideal wife must be renounced” (M, 652). But the “saying,” the wisdom proffered by the narrator, comes at the end of the sentence and is thus detached and therefore detachable, aspiring to a level of generality that seeks to surpass and transcend the context that had seemingly inspired it, but which now appears as a mere “motivation of the device.” Not just marriage, but life in general “must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation.”

59 Alan Mintz, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 18. 60 Hans Ulrich Seeber, “Utopian Mentality in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871/72) and in D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915),” Utopian Studies 6.1 (1995), 32. 61 Seeber, 31, 35. 62 Seeber, 36.

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As Isobel Armstrong observes, Eliot’s “sayings,” which “emerge from the narrative with a delicate, oracular dogmatism,” create so many “bridges, not between our world and the world of the novel”—which, she says, would typically be the purposes of such omniscient asides in the Victorian novel—“but between the world of the novel and our world, for … George Eliot’s procedure depends upon the constant corroboration and assent of the reader to her sayings.”63 To this it should be added that the bridge she creates is also between our past (real or imagined) and our present, a bridge which is then effectively collapsed since, if the lessons of the past hold also for the present, there are therefore no new contexts from which to learn or that will change the nature of the old problems in entirely new and unpredictable ways. Such a “structure of feeling,” captured and condensed in these “sayings,” can vulgarly be described then as the elevation of the fact of a historical disappointment, of desire delayed, into a generalized and eternalized ontological present.64

From a political perspective—which the novel’s many references to political reform suggest ought to be, at least, one of this novel’s allegorical registers—all that is left over from these transformative projects of the past after such a “structure of feeling” is erected as a defense against their historical disappointment is a “diffusive” sympathy and tolerance. It is as if, with that momentary flash of totality (of capitalism on a steady course to world domination) liberalism and its various mouthpieces—Eliot included— had once and for all abandoned liberalism’s long struggle to reconcile its social ideals with its political economy and ended up inadvertently endorsing the status quo, for virtue of the fact that its historical contours now seemed inconvertible and unchallengeable.

4.4 Narrating Gesellschaft The realist aesthetic and ethic thus begin alike with representation, by trying to grasp and, in so doing, represent the historical contours of society as a whole, which condition and

63 Isobel Armstrong, “‘Middlemarch’: A Note on George Eliot’s ‘Wisdom,’” Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge and Kegan Pual, 1970), 116, 118. 64 The tendency of the developmental arc of the realist novel to dissolve itself into an eternalized ontology of the present is examined exhaustively in Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), which contains a chapter on Eliot.

165 delimit choice in the present. To grasp society in its totality, however, requires the narrator to bring ever more disparate materials and individuals together into a complex web of interrelationship. Hence begins Eliot’s early project of representing the “history of unfashionable families” in Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and Mill on the Floss, which strive in different ways to make a continuous whole of a variety of different social existences. 65 The problem is that the more that something like a totality is grasped the less holistic the union of the different entities perceived becomes.

Middlemarch thus begins the other way around: a meditation on Gesellschaft that starts with the presupposition of a shared isolation and a frustrated struggle to overcome it, rather than the representation of “the history of unfashionable families,” which had necessarily begun by taking the fact of some erstwhile community for granted. In the earlier novels, the struggle was to individuate and then to survive and grow by having done so. In Middlemarch, however, the struggle is now to survive already as an individual, which—insofar as being an individual means being on one’s own—Eliot’s characters come uncomfortably to discover they are, but also that, in so being, they are less remarkable than they had hoped. Such a preexisting society—or Gesellschaft—of unremarkable individuals is thus something much different than the “knowable community”—or Gemienschaft—that Raymond Williams famously identified as the Romantic content of Eliot’s early fiction.66

Society cannot be “knowable” in the way that community can. What connects the seemingly arbitrary cluster of individuals that comprise Gesellschaft must be imagined for the same reasons that Anderson says the modern nation must be imagined. Where Gemeinschaft is easily condensed in romanticizing fictions of a receding “Golden Age,” or, for the realistically inclined, subjected to the kind of scrutiny and “objective” documentation that historical distance affords (two modes famously combined and uneven in Eliot’s early fiction), Gesellschaft now can only name the conceptual

65 George Eliot, Mill on the Floss, ed. A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 1979), 305. 66 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 165.

166 placeholder of the ever-evolving here and now of a society that increasingly, and necessarily, understands itself in abstract terms.

Eliot’s particularly ingenious solution to the problem of representing totality is to frame her representation from the beginning as a representation of the very problem of representation itself, which dramatizes this internal tension between the novel’s chosen form and content, as articulated in the famous opening lines of the Prelude: Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill- matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. (M, 3) This parabolic encapsulation of the modern subject’s struggle “to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement” is repeatedly characterized in this passage as an obstacle to the appropriate matching of literary form to content and vice versa. The content of heroic longing—that desire to do right and effect change—is present (“[m]any Theresas have been born”) and also palpable for “the ardently willing soul," but the form of realizing such action in the modern world is not given in advance: it lacks a genre; its form is absent. First in the lack of available means: “a certain spiritual grandeur,” as she says, “ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity.” But then also we are told form is lacking in the sense of a shared knowledge that could communicate and pinpoint the appropriate outlets for realizing such “far-resonant action” to begin with—what the narrator refers to as the marked absence of a “coherent social faith and order”—in other words, the Gemeinschaft, or “organic community,” of the romanticized past, which, she says, “could perform the function of the knowledge for the ardently willing soul” and

167 thus prescribe, a priori, meaningful and rewarding ways for such would-be Theresas to contribute to the commonweal.

The narrator’s metaphors imply that this is as much a literary problem as an existential one: “Many Theresas have been born who found … no epic life … perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.” As Seeber observes, Just like the Catholic reformer Theresa, Dorothea seeks self-realization and fulfillment in the world of action. The epic is used as a metaphor to designate individuals for whom action was in fact still possible. The demise of the epic signals the transformation of society from a feudal and intensely religious to a bourgeois and partially secularized order which, in Victorian England, confined women to a very restricted role in the home. There is, however, also a crippling lack of generally accepted models which prevents epic action.67 Eliot thus frames the problem of action—ethical and political—within the same existential coordinates of the romanticist critique of the present with which Lukács famously opens his Theory of the Novel. 68 There was once a time when fiction and reality formed a unity and described the same thing, but now there has been a fatal dissevering of the two so that all the inherited stories of the past, even the most recent past, can now only be collected as so-many ancient myths to which any Casaubon-like effort to restore their meaning, and, in so doing, re-illuminate them, must inevitably fail.

67 Seeber, 33. 68 Here, Georg Lukács writes, Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet is like a home, for the fire burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light. Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality: complete in meaning—in sense—and complete for the senses; rounded because the soul rests within itself even while it acts; rounded because its action separates itself from it and, having become itself, finds a centre of its own and draws a closed circumference round itself. Unfortunately, he continues, “Kant’s starry firmament now shines only in the dark night of pure cognition, it no longer lights any solitary wanderer’s path… No light radiates any longer from within into the world of events, into its vast complexity to which the soul is a stranger. And who can tell … the fitness of the action to the nature of the subject.” The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 29, 36.

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The remnants of the cultural past now confront us, as the ruins of Rome confront Dorothea, as “gigantic broken revelations” (M, 193).

The disjunction between “thought and deed,” and the corresponding disjunction between content and form that pigeonholes the modern storyteller, border on a “bad infinity”—or repetition of the same—when reconfirmed in the final paragraphs of the Finale: “A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone” (M, 838). However, these claims made in the Prelude and Finale—claims, on the surface, essentially for the impossibility of both meaningful action and its representation in the present—actually provide immanent criteria whereby we as readers are encouraged to judge the fulfillment of both by the experimental strategies of representation introduced into the novel, albeit after the omniscient narrator’s enforced and strategic lowering of our expectations to accord with what the narrator implicitly insists are the actual conditions of possibility for representation in the present.

According to the narrator what impinges most on her ability to represent Gesellschaft in all its complexity are the newly felt exigencies of an increasingly complex modern spatiotemporal order: in particular the new borderless “homogenous, empty time” of industrial-capitalist modernity. Distinguishing herself from her predecessor Henry Fielding, she writes, A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books in his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our

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needs) when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. (M, 141) The historical conditions under which representation is made have changed irrevocably. No longer is there time, as now “time, like money, is measured by our needs,” for the chronicler of the past (novelist and historian in Fielding’s day it seems form an unquestioned unity) to “bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English.” And, in any case, the narrator asserts, the totality of what must be captured by the chronicler is now too vast and complicated for such a “linear” approach to succeed anyway: We belated historians must not linger after his example…. I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. (M, 141)

The historically sensitive novelist must focus her attention instead on a “particular web,” or cross-section, within the larger pattern of cosmic “relevancies,” which are now too large for full description and “lusty ease” of narration. Instead the narrator is forced to jump back and forth from one centre of consciousness to another, and thus across different narrative threads, “zooming” in and out, as it were, on the various webs of connection that would seem to connect these different centres of consciousness, but which cannot, because of a kind of cognitive parallax, be seen when we focus only on one character at a time.

The literary artist’s compromise, though, is not just one between experimentation and conformity, but also between the ends and means of her representation whose object—the process of historical transformation itself—now needs more time to elaborate than the social history to which her literary predecessor had confined himself, for once again “time, like money is measured by our needs.” Here, as always, Eliot’s reference to money is a pointed one, which gives the comparative analogy a whole new index of meaning, whereby the enlargement of monetary needs brought about by the Enclosure

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Acts and the subsequent dissolution and subsumption of the old self-sustaining agrarian communities into the ranks of the proletariat (which her novel prophesies with the coming of the railroad) is therefore concomitant, if not in some way actually identical, with the formation of the hourly wage which erodes the leisure time that Fielding’s narrator could enjoy “when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.” This comment is made bitterly ironic when we note that that once slow-ticking clock, which will now be used to calculate the periods of necessary and surplus labour time in the working day, not to mention Benjamin and Anderson’s “homogenous, empty time” of the modern nation, was also being manufactured in Eliot’s native Coventry, which she took as the basis for her representation of provincial life in Middlemarch.

What should be concluded from all this then is that, far from being a more economical method of representation than Fielding’s, as this passage would seem to suggest on first glance, Eliot’s dense comparative analogies and complicated syntax actually forestall and delay the very object they are put in the service of conveying—historical transformation—so as to multiply indexes of meaning that dramatize on an ever larger scale a more “total” depiction of that historical process in motion, which any one cross- section in the web of her narrative events can be made into an opportunity for her sentences to elaborate. The period between the switch in narrative requirements and protocols described by the narrator is thus also the period in which the historical transformations of Middlemarch-society are slowly, as the narrator says in a passage to be analyzed later, “presenting new aspects in spite of solidity” (M, 96).

The social totality it seems can only be reached in this roundabout way then, by constant recourse to such closed examples and comparisons (such as the one between her method of representation and Fielding’s), which provide the narrator with convenient models for discussing the hypothesized characteristics of the larger social transformation that she wants to take as the primary object of her novel’s representation. These narrative asides thus seek out metaphors that project a kind of third-space between the narrator and the object of her representation, which is then analogically related to the absent-presence of

171 the determining force of History in the novel. This third-space provides a kind of placeholder for the more properly collective drama of the historical narrative Eliot wants to tell, but which the novel, as an inherited form with a strong predilection for individual over collective drama, is ill equipped to represent even when it adds more characters to the mix. Instead the random materials of everyday life, which, as Anderson argued, had once adequately allegorized the nation, must now—if they are to continue reflecting back to the reader an image of his or her own spatiotemporal reality—cognitively map, or somehow metaphorically vehiculate, a spatial, temporal, and economic relationship to a larger totality, which, already by the time of the novel’s composition and what will soon become the imperialist “scramble for Africa,” must now extend beyond the metropolis to unobserved regions of the globe. For Jameson, it is the discovery of “modernist or proto- modernist language”—for example that of a Henry James or Virginia Woolf, whose circumlocutions trace the rise and fall of affective intensities, frustrating linguistic expression and verging on the purely virtual—that at last affords the literary artist “some space, some third term, between the subject and the object alike” that can mediate the lost part of the metropolis’s life world: that whole segment of the process of production now located elsewhere.69 Eliot’s sentences are precisely those of a prefigurative proto- modernism, mapping, by hypotactic additions and metaphoric redoubling, the totality of a social body already on the cusp of an impenetrable global diffuseness at the end of the Age of Capital.

Eliot thus turns even the most obscure actions or chance events in the plot into renewed opportunities for her narrator to project these images of interrelationship, which have the effect of attributing more and more agency to the system of relationships itself than to any of the parties involved. Middlemarch is not, as Williams would have it in The Country and the City, “a novel of a single community.”70 It is rather “a novel of a single community” set against the backdrop of some vast “web” of social relationships, extending far beyond the lives of any one of the novel’s cast of characters, who are

69 Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” 159-60. 70 Williams, The Country and the City, 174.

172 nonetheless made to “stand in” for this larger social process in formation, which we only glimpse here and there in the omniscient narrator’s asides.

This is especially the case whenever the topic is that of historical transformation itself, as in the famous passage about “the double change in self and beholder”: Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rock firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder. (M, 96) Omniscient asides, like this one, force into view an image of the flow of history as it goes on behind the backs of the novel’s characters, shaping them and the horizon of their choices without their knowing. The artist’s struggle is to find an appropriate method of telling this dual narrative, of dramatizing at once the blinding egoism of any one character and also the flow of history to which their egoism blinds them. The recurring method is to turn “old provincial society”—in other words, Middlemarch and its surrounding neighbourhoods—into an impersonal organism with its own “subtle movements” and “less marked vicissitudes,” which can then be foregrounded for description and analysis. These small but significant changes are apprehended, as I will show in a moment, by a metaphorical switching back and forth between “weaker” and “stronger” lenses of microscopic inspection, the first focusing, we could say, on the level of character and plot—the ethical domain of choice and action—and the second on spatiotemporal setting, which, when magnified to such a degree by the narrator, is

173 revealed, as if in the flash of some new scientific discovery, as the very process of history itself.

The fabric of this totality is thus one, as the above passage already makes clear, of perpetual weaving and unweaving, of various rises and falls in economic fortunes, some happy and others tragic, which are perpetually shaping and reshaping “the boundaries of the social intercourse.” Eliot’s narrator, however, adds to these images of the simultaneous rise and fall shades of the dialectic whereby the quantity of changes themselves begin to produce qualitative differences in the social fabric, which mark, at least figuratively speaking, the advancement of history in the novel, “begetting new consciousness of interdependence”: Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connection—gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct, while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gather the faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from distant counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive advantage in cunning. (96)

Capitalism is here the absent-present force driving down the esteem of the aristocracy in the eyes of the rising bourgeoisie, transforming individual savings into finance capital, leading to the extinction of the “solar guinea” with the introduction of the sovereign, and driving more and more people into urban centres. What is particularly poignant about this passage is that it demonstrates that the problem of representing the totality of capitalist relations is not a representational problem that is freely chosen, but one that asserts itself in the artist’s very attempt to develop a realist aesthetic capable of managing (and, to a certain degree, resolving by way of some form of ideological closure) the paradoxical nature of capitalism, which, by creating an ever more tightly knit fabric of social relationships, makes relation itself ever more subtle and therefore harder to detect. These projected images of Gestalt-being, borrowed from the laboratory experiments of the sciences, however, mix metaphors that return us to both the social and historical.

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When, for example, the rector’s wife and town gossip Mrs. Cadwallader surprises Sir James Chettam with the news of Dorothea’s engagement to Casaubon, instead of merely interjecting to tell us that Mrs Cadwallader had no ulterior motives in so doing, the narrator digresses in what becomes one of the novel’s most potent metaphors of Gestalt- being that points as much towards an implied natural history of human relations as, by way of a dialectical cancellation and elevation of the original metaphor, to a social and economic history of the same: Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs Cadwallader’s matchmaking will show a ply of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed. (M, 59-60) Here, the narrator’s allusion to the mini-world of the water drop and the living organisms it contains—while on the surface a metaphorical way of explaining Mrs Cadwallader’s relative innocence within the larger machinations of the novel’s plot which she nonetheless puts in motion—deploys a repertoire of dialectical maneuvers, which herald ever more extraneous content into the structure of one mammoth sentence, pointing, as this material accrues, well beyond the closed world of the water drop. The initial metaphor of this microscopic world—which originally linked the social sphere of the gossip to that of a predatory organism passively contributing to the kill-or-be-killed law of nature by the simple virtue of its inherited traits—is then expanded and re-grounded by the narrator’s reference to “so many animated tax-pennies” and the “receipt of custom,” which point now to both economic and historical indexes of meaning whereby the circulation of gossip that the organisms’ interrelationship was meant to convey is likened also to the circulation of tax money (and therefore also that other side of taxation: the

175 flow of wealth, or capital) as well as the passing down of custom, by which any system, natural or economic, also comes to be “naturalized” and thought of, however mistakenly, as just the kind of closed natural organism being metaphorically examined here.

Such a metaphor operates dialectically then, turning the initial tenor—gossip—first into an opportunity for a meditation on the natural world and then, in due course, into an opportunity for the narrator to discuss the secret machinations of the natural organism under “a stronger lens” as if they might vehiculate—or animate like so many “animated tax-pennies”—the social and economic totality as well. For a moment, the contained, and particular, world of the water drop is elevated to the categorical position of the universal—the totality itself—only for that register of meaning to pass from view as Eliot’s sentence dialectically reverses back to its original “motivation of the device,” which was Sir Chettam’s discovery of Dorothea’s engagement to Casaubon through Mrs. Cadwallader.

The metaphor’s momentary reflection of the social totality thus dramatizes its own impossibility. First with the warning against “coarse” interpretations—of which Eliot’s own metaphor, by the force of its sheer expansiveness and totalizing nature, is surely one—and then again, this time more pointedly, by the narrator’s deployment of an “as if” qualification, which deprives the metaphor of its would-be copular yoking of vehicle to tenor, transforming it instead into a mere similitude that can only allude to the thing to which it is compared by establishing this “third-space” between the subject and the object of its definition by way of a third term, which it is neither/nor. This third term—the contained world of the water drop—thus offers neither a wholly accurate nor necessarily imprecise representation of either the social world of gossip or money, but, in both instances, something somewhere in between.

It would, however, be a mistake to attribute to Eliot, as a result of this bathetic deflation of her own metaphorical way of speaking, a kind of poststructuralist skepticism, which denigrates any form of conceptuality including its own. Rather Eliot’s dialectical tropes are better thought of as closed models meant, if not to convey the ever elusive thing-in-

176 itself (the totality), then at least the condensation of its characteristics, which here is the very movement of the dialectic in both its natural and social manifestation, represented as much by those “certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for [their] victims” as by the very shape and feel of the sentence itself, which its own metaphorical terminology seems as apt to describe as anything else.

It is worth recalling here Marx’s comments in the Grundrisse about the important role that conceptual models of circulation play in mapping totality from a trans-individual perspective: “Circulation, because a totality of the social process,” he says, “is also the first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value [“so many animated tax- pennies”!], but extending to the whole of the social movement itself.”71 Middlemarch’s deployment of such metaphorical models of circulation thus achieves for Eliot the properly non-individual plane of the sociological system in which she wants to place the drama of Middlemarch, to which she significantly adds the more sociological subtitle, A Study of Provincial Life.

The unfettered movement of Eliot’s metaphoric “hairlets which make vortices for [their] victims,” which furnish the novel with its first conceptual model of a trans-individual circulation system, acquires even greater specificity, when echoed later in the novel’s figuration of the encroaching railroad (that strong signifier of capitalist development and harbinger of “technological modernity”) as the very force and pull of History itself: As [Caleb Garth] said, “Business breeds.” And one form of business which was beginning to breed just then was the construction of railways. A projected line was to run through Lowick parish where the cattle had hitherto grazed in a peace unbroken by astonishment; and thus it happened that the infant struggles of the railway system entered into the affairs of Caleb Garth, and determined the course of this history with regard to two persons who were dear to him. (M, 553)

71 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin—New Left Review, 1973), 196-7.

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What business breeds, it is hoped of course, is more business, that is, more surplus value or capital, which must then be reinvested in technological innovations like the railway that will expand and support the circulatory system Marx calls Money-Commodity- Money’, or M-C-M’—“where M’ = M + ∆M, i.e. the original sum advanced plus an increment,” such that “[m]ore money is finally withdrawn from circulation than was thrown into it at the beginning.”72

Although Eliot’s narrator limits the determining-force of the railway here to “two persons who were dear to him,” Caleb Garth later invokes technologization as a process ineluctably pulling the entire collective being, including those not so “dear,” into the force field of capital’s technological expansion. When he and Fred Vincy surprise some enraged agricultural workers, who have set about destroying the railroad tracks that signify a threat to their way of life, he is exasperated by what he can only interpret as their backwardness: “Now, my lads,” he says, “you can’t hinder the railroad: it will be made whether you like it or not. And if you go fighting against it, you’ll get yourselves into trouble” (M, 559). The contradiction in Garth’s naturalization of development, however, is inescapable: technologization is both ineluctable—“you can’t hinder the railroad”—but also protected by law, and so not really in the end inevitable, but simply the logic of a certain mode of production legally protected from external impediments, be it the current division of land, machine-breaking, or rick-burning. These, coincidently, are all legal protections close to the heart of the self-fashioned “progressive” and would- be liberal parliamentarian, Mr. Brooke, who proclaims on the hustings (with the dramatic irony of one who exaggerates for rhetorical effect not knowing that history will prove his exaggerations right, but not necessarily in the way imagined): “It won’t do, you know, breaking machines, everything must go on—trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples—that kind of thing—since Adam Smith, that must go on. We must look all over the globe” (M, 504).

72 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin—New Left Review, 1976), 251.

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The railway—as both a concrete thing and also the marker of some larger system—is thus a properly “sublime object” insofar as for Immanuel Kant, Nicholas Brown reminds us, “The sublime … requires the capacity to recognize that the sublime object is conceptually totalizable—in fact, it positively requires that we do so totalize it—at the same time as we fail to totalize it aesthetically,” since what is ostensibly condensed in that object must also surpass it in order to produce that emotion called the sublime.73 The railroad thus serves as a local and concrete manifestation of industrialization and capitalist development within the closed world of Middlemarch, but also conveys its global march of capital’s circulation prophesied by Mr. Brooke with more prescience then he would have guessed. It is in this sense, as with the microscopic world of the water drop previously discussed, that the title Middlemarch names, at one and the same time, a specific site and location in the “web,” or totality, of those relationships that Eliot wants to represent and a closed laboratory experiment in which the characteristics of the totality as whole will be hypothesized, examined, and then, by the permutations of Eliot’s dialectical sentences, sublimed.

The sublime, for Eliot, though, is no longer as it was for Kant merely the mind’s self- satisfaction with its ability to grapple with the infinite.74 That self-satisfaction, where it can be found, no longer pertains to the individual mind which experiences the totality through the concept of infinity, but rather to the apprehension of the “social body” that has created totality now as a concrete product of its own embodied labour. This, in other words, is Eliot’s way of getting at the totality of the relationships behind whatever object

73 Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 17. 74 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 106: [What happens is that] our imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while our reason demands absolute totality as a real idea, and so [the imagination,] our power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that idea. Yet this inadequacy itself is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have within us a supersensible power; and what is absolutely large is not an object of sense, but is the use that judgment makes naturally of certain objects so as to [arouse] this (feeling), and in contrast with that use any other use is small. Hence what is to be called sublime is not the object, but the attunement that the intellect [gets] through a certain presentation that occupies reflective judgment.

179 serves at the moment as its placeholder and which Middlemarch allegorizes through its various figures of circulation.

In Caleb Garth’s “mental associations,” this becomes the circulation of labour itself, or what Marx would call “human labour in the abstract”:75 Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labour by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled- up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poet, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labour, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of “business.” (M, 250-51) “Sublime labour”: what is grasped here is not just individual labour, but a continuous, abstract labour that is in the process of being “congealed,” to use Marx’s metaphor, in the development of the various machinery of the increasingly cooperative production of industrial capitalism and the “piled-up produce in warehouses” that is its ultimate result. “Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour,” says Marx: “There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity.” The commodity, for those who will contemplate it, raises the specter of a sublimely abstracted labour, bestowing upon its commodities a “phantom-like objectivity,” as so many “merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended

75 Marx, Capital, 128.

180 without regard to the form of its expenditure.”76 What is lacking from Garth’s romantic vision of this “sublime labour,” though, is precisely the image of those “hairlets which make vortices for [their] victims,” deployed in the earlier passage, which here would have had to vehiculate the force of capital itself as “the swallower [who now] waits passively at his receipt of custom”—the surplus value generated by the worker—when all that congealed labour is incorporated back into the circulation of MCM’ via exchange value. Such exploitation is glimpsed only briefly in Mrs Cadwallader’s implicit comparison of Mr Vincy to a vampire (“one of those who suck the life out of the wretched handloom weavers in Tipton and Freshitt. That is how his family look so fair and sleek” [M, 327]) and in Caleb’s final bathetic reduction of this whole sublime process of production to the name of “business,” which, as Alan Mintz reminds us, means simply “the replacement of labour value by money value.”77

So, while Eliot’s dialectical sentences mirror rather perfectly the voracious appetite of capital as it was pulling ever more raw material and people within its grasp and repurposing them—“axiomizing” them as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would say— and in the process transforming the social fabric of “[o]ld provincial society,” Eliot fails at the same time to dramatize in any precise way the consolidation of society into those two productively antagonistic forces, capital and labour, which were the ultimate result of the social transformation of her native Coventry which she takes up as the object of her representation in Middlemarch. As John Prest writes in The Industrial Revolution in Coventry, In 1830 Coventry still epitomized the old order, in which there were many ranks and conditions of men within a single, homogeneous society. But Coventry could not stand still while England moved, in the end Coventry succumbed to the standards of the nineteenth century all the more painfully for her long resistance to them. By 1865 the old, compact, ordered society of 1830 had broken up: in its place were the pieces, labelled capital and labour. There was an increased awareness of class,

76 Marx, Capital, 128. 77 Mintz, 136.

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less deference to birth, and business was conducted on the principle of individual interest without reference to the feelings of the community.78

That capital and labour remain divided in Eliot’s projected images of totality, however, is likely true to her lived experience and observations of both as a petty-bourgeois literary artist and intellectual living at a removal from industrialized production and class struggle, which was particularly pronounced in those months leading up to the First Reform Bill, but is barely glimpsed in the novel. This is likely the unconscious reason why such third-spaces had been sought in the first place to round out the novel’s representation of totality and thus bridge the gulf between the standpoint of the petty- bourgeois author and that of the historical and economic reality she takes as her object of representation. So while Eliot’s projected third-space is not quite that of the modernists that Jameson discusses in “Modernism and Imperialism,” for whom the relationship between capital and labour has become necessarily global and therefore even harder to cognitively map, we can already see in the writing of Eliot’s sentences traces of a proto- modernist or “mature” Victorian syntax, which tries to give shape and expression to the experience of social transformation already so fine and total as to necessitate abstraction. But to find the proper scale in which such literary experimentation can appear as an aesthetic solution to the real-life problem of trying to cognitively situate oneself and one’s readership within a larger spatiotemporal reality.

4.5 Low Expectations Middlemarch thus stands out from so much of the literature of the time, and also the modernist works whose stylistic tics it prophesies, in its refusal of the “providential ideology,” whereby, Jameson argues in “Modernism and Imperialism,” the typical national allegories of Western literature in the Age of Empire imaginatively solve the problem of the lost meaning of their life-worlds—that “significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole” which “is now located elsewhere”—by projecting an image of “self-subsisting totality … which transforms the chance contacts, coincidence,

78 John M. Prest, The Industrial Revolution in Coventry (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), xi.

182 the contingent and random encounters between isolated subjects, into a Utopian glimpse of achieved community.”79

“The irony of Middlemarch,” as Eagleton observes, “is that it is a triumph of aesthetic totalisation deeply suspicious of ideological totalities,” particularly those propagated by her characters.80 The inevitable tragedy of her characters’ endeavor to grasp totality is most explicitly dramatized by Casaubon’s doomed search for “the key to all mythologies”—“he had undertaken to show … that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed” (M, 24)—and Lydgate’s scientific quest for “the primitive tissue” of all organic beings (M, 148). The problem as Eliot’s omniscient narrator so carefully words it is that, while“[s]igns are small measurable things, … interpretations [of those signs] are illimitable” (M, 25). For the narrator the most damaging interpretations stem from human Egoism and the drive to derive providential meanings from random occurrences and events: An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive selection. These things are a parable. These scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent. (M, 264)

79 Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” 157, 163. Jameson has E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End in mind here; but in the Victorian context, almost any Dickens novel could serve as an example of this aesthetic practice. 80 Eagleton, 119.

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As Eliot’s extended metaphor suggests, her characters inevitably get ahead of themselves. They believe that beneath the surface of reality there are meaningful patterns in the fabric of existence that steer them towards the destiny they believe is theirs: Lydgate in addition to believing he will discover the “primitive tissue” of all organic life, believes that he has found true love in Rosamund; Rosamund, in turn, believes that Lydgate is a great physician and aristocrat who will raise her social status and wealth; Dorothea believes the solution to her restlessness and intellectual inactivity will be to marry Casaubon and help with him with his studies; Bulstrode believes he belongs to the Church of the elect; Fred Vincy believes that Featherstone will leave him Stone Court when he dies thus allowing him to become the idle gentleman he already feels himself to be; Will Ladislaw meanwhile feels no calling, but still naively believes that the universe will provide him with one eventually. All of them couldn’t be more wrong. The universe, in Middlemarch, doesn’t have such meaningful patterns, tracing fruitful destinies for each individual soul: “Among all forms of mistakes,” the narrator says, “prophecy is the most gratuitous”; however, “all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them” (M, 84-5).

Thus, J. Hillis Miller, in his deconstructionist reading of Eliot’s novel, argues, In each case the character is shown to be mystified by a belief that all the details he confronts make a whole governed by a single center, origin, or end. In each case the narrator demystifies the illusion and shows it to be based on an error, the fundamental linguistic error of taking a figure of speech literally, of assuming that because two things are similar they are equivalent, sprung from the same source, or bound for the same end, explicable by the same principle.81 And later: “Exactly parallel to all these forms of mystification is the belief that history is progressive, teleological. This illusion is deconstructed along with the rest, perhaps even more explicitly.”82 But it’s not just the progressive, or stagist, vision of history that is at stake (the “deconstruction” of which Miller uses to win Middlemarch over to the side of

81 J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative and History,” ELH 41.3 (1973), 464. 82 Miller, 466.

184 good, postmodernist-style artistic production83). What is at stake is also politics—the Spirit of Reform—and liberalism’s historical investment in teleological narratives of progress, in History as a redemptive category, which, by 1871, are substantially contradicted. It is thus not the text that deconstructs history, but history that deconstructs the text.

Moreover, Miller seems to forget that Eliot’s characters have noble intentions: they may be thwarted by vanity and Egoism, as he argues; but many of them are also motivated by a genuine desire to add to the common good. In George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation, Mintz argues that, In a series of complex fictional characters George Eliot examines both how far the condition of the age made it possible for the impulse toward self-aggrandizing ambition and the impulse toward selfless contribution to society to be united in a single life, and in addition, how that union is supported by the secularized version of older Protestant ideas about a man’s calling in the world.84 “The lineaments of this secularization,” he says, “are clear: instead of God doing the calling, it is society or duty which beckons; … if in the classical vocational ethos a man is ambitious both for his own salvation and for the glory of God, in the new scheme he is ambitious both for his own self-realization and for the betterment of society.”85 But, for Mintz, the conclusion reached by Eliot’s literary experiment is a tragic one: “Ultimately, vocation is viewed as a desire that by definition cannot be fulfilled”; “In order to restore to vocation its authority, to renew the health of the social life, and to reverse the exhaustion of the novel, vocation would have to be purged of its contamination by capital.”86 That ultimately can’t be done. Money—or more specifically the kind of “getting on” we associate with finding a career and settling into a convenient marriage— ultimately diverts the novel’s would-be reformers from their goals: Dorothea from her

83 “The example is perhaps a good one because Middlemarch is not in any obvious way part of that tradition of the anti-novel to which I alluded above in invoking the names of Cervantes, Sterne, and Borges.” Miller, 462. 84 Mintz, 2. 85 Mintz, 18. 86 Mintz, 7, 63.

185 initial plan to improve the cottages on her uncle’s land as well as her later plan to start a workers’ colony; Lydgate from his plan to reform the medical profession; and Will from his plan to reform the franchise—all are abandoned for some reason combining marriage and money. What we are made to feel, then, in these flashes of the social totality—of a Gestalt-like, collective being that is somehow greater than their combined existence, which moves and acts with or without their awareness—is that the organization of society is such that these goals are implausible. That is not the fault of the vision of history as progress, but of history as it is felt and lived (under a certain mode of production), as that which, Jameson says, “refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis”—in other words, History as disappointment.87

In The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, Williams draws an important distinction between the metaphoric language of networks and webs that so often colours the way we interpret Middlemarch: The network, we might say, connects; the web, the tangle, disturbs and obscures. To discover a network, to feel human connection in what is essentially a knowable community, is to assert … a particular social value: a necessary interdependence. But to discover a web or a tangle is to see human relationships as not only involving but compromising, limiting, mutually frustrating. And this is of course a radically different consciousness: what is … a modern consciousness; in fact the first phase of a post-liberal world: a period between cultures, in which the old confidence of individual liberation has gone and the commitment to social liberation has not yet been made.88 A “modern consciousness; in fact the first phase of a post-liberal world”: it is, in other words, a feeling of “[w]andering between two worlds: one dead / The other powerless to be born” (Arnold). The feeling of a lost community that is, no longer known because it is lived, but merely knowable, as a fact is knowable, is very clearly the result of industrialization and what it did to the countryside and the people that lived off it in

87 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 102. 88 Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: The Hogarth Press, 1970), 88.

186 common. The sense of a lost futurity, however, is the result of something more than just industrialization, which taken by itself could be viewed as a necessary precondition for modern, utopian imaginings of the future. The feeling that the future has somehow been sacrificed, though, is, I propose, the added result of a kind of sapping of political will, of the revolutionary energies that came with industrialization and from the people—working class and middle class—it consolidated at the bottom of a newly emergent industrial class system who had once rallied under the banner of liberalism together. This sapping of liberalism’s political energies is the result of both ideology and politics: on the one hand, in the new scientific theories of progressive evolution, or, more specifically, gradualism (in which, as Brantlinger says, “progress is inevitable, but gradual; individuals cannot expect to have much influence on it”89), and, on the other, in the hegemony achieved by the bourgeoisie, whose interests now become conservative instead of progressive. The result is both an intellectual and political stalemate in which the new status quo of industrial class relations is naturalized as a lasting inevitability.

The first symptom of this “post-liberal world,” then, must be the inevitable waning of the centrality of the individual, the loss of the “world-historical” characters and “ideal” types that could once personify history.90 Historical forces still persist, but now over and above the novel’s heroes and heroines as that which mortifies their ambitions, which it had previously been the vocation of the novel to eulogize, and turns them instead into the grey lump of the average: We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman’s ‘makdom and her

89 Brantlinger, 5. 90 See Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Howard Fertig, 2002), 6: The central category and criterion of realist literature is the type, a peculiar synthesis which organically binds together the general and the particular both in characters and situations. What makes a type a type is not its average quality, not is mere individual being, however profoundly conceived: what makes it a type is that in it all the humanly and socially essential determinants are present on their highest level of development, in the ultimate unfolding of the possibilities latent in them, in extreme presentation of their extremes, rendering the concrete the peaks and limits of men and epochs.

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fairnesse’, never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of ‘makedom and fairnesse’ which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as perceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly; you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we utter our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance. (M, 144-5) So it’s not exactly as Audrey Jaffe argues that “the novel’s more interesting characters are ‘set off’ against the more commonplace or ordinary.”91 Eliot’s characters in Middlemarch are not appraised and judged against the average, but rather fall into the grey lump of the average after having (falsely) assumed they were better than others. Where previously the egoistic drive of the Victorian hero or heroine had to be mortified for the purposes of moral improvement, for learning humility and modesty, before desire could be gratified (as in Dickens’s Great Expectations), in Middlemarch there is no problem with the protagonists’ ambitions, which are noble and selfless from the start, here the problem is instead the inescapable reality of something much larger than the

91 Audrey Jaffe, The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 18.

188 individual that displaces their idealistic ambitions. There are no longer in Middlemarch, then, any “ideal types,” or “world-historical” figures representing the major forces and movements of their historical period because Eliot has found a new language in which she is now able to express these movements and forces, albeit metaphorically, in all their non-humanness, which after all is how industrial capitalism was most often coming to be felt.

The clarity of the vision and the lack of illusion is remarkable, but that Eliot then backs away seeking solace for characters in “unhistoric acts” and projecting her cynicism about individual accomplishment on to the collective projects of the past amounts to a cry of defeat rather than the heralding of Utopian will to complete the unfinished work of previous democracy-building projects. The novel’s didactic treatment of human sympathy and fellow-feeling, in short, the pursuit of “culture”—which is the novel’s only rebuttal to the dehumanizing ethos of a laissez-faire society—is not, however, properly a politics, but rather a replacement for one. Sympathy’s aims seek no longer, as politics had once done, to be socially or globally transformative, but to act as a kind of compensation for what is felt now to be unchangeable, so that humans can live in confusion better, but sill in confusion, and also prolonged obscurity under the shadow of a mechanized world that now appears to run on without them and their “unhistoric acts.”

The Utopian impulse thus seeks its gratification not within the field of representation, in plot, but over it, in the mastering of the materials of representation and in representation itself, in that sententious omniscience, at once stylish and precise in its description of both objective and subjective worlds—“a control, precisely, based on sad resignation,” Williams says, “a maturity [again that word!] constructed as that exact feeling”92—with which the narrator can tell us that “all of us are born in moral stupidity” and make it feel like a revelation, a penetrating insight. Thus Moretti concludes in his examination of Eliot’s work: in Eliot’s novels the representative of humour and maturity is—the narrator. … [M]aturity is no longer within the story, but only in the

92 Williams, The Country and the City, 173.

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disembodied universe of discourse. And the relationship between the two levels of the text is inversely proportional: the more devastating the characters’ failure, the more impressive the narrator’s self-mastery. It is the discontinuity between maturity and life that is stressed here, not their amalgam. … [M]aturity is no longer entrusted to “actions”….93 The imagined community in Middlemarch is one that by 1871, in order to be believable, has to project a certain proneness to error onto the field of action, which the novel’s metaphoric codification of the social totality suggests has been usurped by a seemingly ineluctable process of production that is beginning to circumscribe the globe. Eliot’s “maturity,” however, offers no alternative, only that there remains a “perfect liberty of misjudgment,” an ideal difficult to trust as anything universally accessible as this bit of wisdom comes not from the narrator but from Sir Chettam, who will later judge Dorothea for her remarriage to Ladislaw (M, 71).

Influenced by the gradualism of Darwinian evolutionary theory, with its emphasis on the slow process of variation through the “natural selection” of accidental traits over time, Eliot thus turns her realism into both an aesthetic and ethic: there is no grand narrative of progress; no Utopian projects can be completed in a lifetime; all that matters is that we embrace our limited options and weigh our decisions thoughtfully, all while accepting that we are still likely to err before we succeed. The pragmatism of such pessimism is as admirable as it is without illusions; but it is also symptomatic of a bourgeois culture and liberal ideology that no longer has any confidence in its superiority. There are no longer any “great expectations,” or for that matter “lost illusions.” The maturity of the novel’s “structure of feeling”—maturity as a “structure of feeling—thus marks a break with the millenarian hopes for Europe-wide transformation, which characterized the years from 1789 to 1848, and allows only the possibility that, with much deliberation, interpersonal conflicts may be resolved on a local level and within a “single community” (Williams). But, the more the fabric of the totality that binds these disparate actors together in their isolation is glimpsed and given some form of linguistic-rhetorical representation, the more such hopes for large-scale reconciliation or transformation are expressed, from the

93 Moretti, 222.

190 beginning now, with low expectations: “Many Theresas have been born who found no epic life….”

5. Conclusion: A Feeling for Totality

In Feeling Capitalism, I have argued for the centrality of affect in a historicizing literary criticism that attempts to forge a connection between a novel’s narrative style and what Fredric Jameson calls its “political unconscious.” According to Jameson, every literary text responds in some way to the historical conditions under which it is produced. How it does so, though, is not always readily apparent. The author and, indeed, the text itself are often in an unconscious dialogue with History, the latter of which is reworked and recoded through the work of narrative. The challenge of the literary critic is to find some point of entry into the text that can give access to the text’s “political unconscious,” reconnect the text to its lost (or suppressed) historical referent, and, in so doing, uncover its unconscious relationship to the politics of its day.

As Jameson’s subtitle to The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act already suggests, his own point of entry to the “political unconscious” of the texts he discusses is to treat their narratives symbolically, whereby “the individual narrative, or the individual formal structure, is to be grasped as the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction.”1 While my own approach has not entirely eschewed this symbolic treatment of narrative, I have argued for affect as a category mediating between novelistic representations and lived historical experience, which can be enlisted in the literary- critical project of historicization whereby the critic reconnects the text to its “political unconscious.” It is worth re-emphasizing here that my preoccupation with affect has not been simply with an analysis of the ways in which characters feel emotions (desire, guilt, and disappointment) but with how these emotions exist simultaneously on many different levels of their literary representations, becoming dominant themes and shaping and organizing the worldviews of the novels in which they appear. Here, the critical challenge has been twofold: on the one hand, the identification of an “affective structure” that organizes a novel and, on the other, the identification of a larger horizon of historical experience that the “affective structure” mediates.

1 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 77.

191 192

Thus, while it is interesting to me that desire, guilt, and disappointment are each thematically important to the novels in which they appear (Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, and Middlemarch respectively), the more crucial point is that they can be read, with the right hermeneutical approach, as clues to the novels’ (and novelists’) relationship to history more broadly and to the social transformations wrought by capitalism in the nineteenth century more particularly. So, for example, I have interpreted the thematic centrality of desire in Wuthering Heights as symptomatic of the autonomization of desire in the new privatized space of the bourgeois family, a privatization that also widens its symbolic valences, making it available for a Romantic- libertarian mythologization of history as the struggle of desire against repression and death. Turning to Charles Dickens, I have interpreted his representation of guilt and especially its ubiquity in the novelistic universe of Great Expectations as an “affective structure,” mediating the crisis of liberalism after 1848, when its struggle with “Old Corruption” began to wane and increasingly the proponents of liberalism turned their attention instead to ameliorating the social backlash of the laissez faire ideology they had helped put in place. I have approached the thematic prevalence of disappointment in Middlemarch in a similar fashion, linking it to the sapping of millenarian ambitions that framed the Age of Revolution, on to which its backward-looking glance now projects a certain fatalism. However, I have argued, Eliot’s disappointment and “low expectations” were also part and parcel of a new clarity, in which social transformations wrought by capitalism are not seen as the byproduct of something else (for example, the mythical journey of desire towards it self-realization or the inescapable tragedy of an inherent guilt) but as what they really are: the product of a socially evolving totality.

It should be emphasized that my approach to diagnosing these different ways of feeling capitalism has not been that of the typical ideology critique practiced in the humanities, whereby works of art are critiqued (and sometimes denounced) for perpetuating certain myths about society and its various facets (the economy, the classes, social groups, and so on). Here, the typical demystifying gesture is to show the methods by which stereotypes or “common sense” ways of thinking are naturalized in works of fiction and perpetuated on their readership. Surely, the “affective structures” I have discussed are

193 ideological. Insofar as they are fictions, this must obviously be the case (that is, if what is ideological, regardless of what nuances one gives the definition of ideology itself, is always somehow opposed to the truth). Moreover, it is implicit in my interpretation of these “affective structures” that I do not share or endorse the worldviews shaped and informed by desire, guilt, and disappointment in these novels, and that to a certain degree I view them as “false consciousness.” That said, my intention is not to “critique” (in the sense of denouncing) these worldviews, but rather to construct some sense of the historical experiences, individual and collective, that have conditioned or determined them and, in so doing, afford each of these “affective structures” its own moment of truth in my re-construction of some the ways the Victorian novel responded to the development of the capitalist mode of production in its own time.

It is in this sense that I have found Raymond Williams’s conceptualization of literature as comprising so many “structures of feeling” incredibly useful. For here what is at stake is “not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought.”2 The idea being that, although the literary work of art may be responding to history at an affective level, the work of art, by representing that affective response, also starts to structure historical experience, giving shape and discernable content to it. From this perspective, the study of ideology becomes a more positive practice: the unmasking of the literary artwork’s truth content, rather than its “false consciousness.”

As discussed in my introduction, and evidenced throughout these pages, this is a hermeneutic that, for all it borrows from discussions of affect in Williams, Sianne Ngai, and Lauren Berlant, is deeply indebted to the literary theories of Jameson. I find myself, however, in the awkward position of having embarked on a project that would bring Jameson’s theories to bear on a discussion of affect in nineteenth-century literature at the same time that, unbeknown to me, Jameson was doing the same thing. His The Antinomies of Realism, published in 2013 while I was in the midst of this project, makes the discovery and codification of affective experience central to the development and dissolution of realism in the nineteenth century. He, however, reaches much different

2 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

194 conclusions than I do in Feeling Capitalism, largely as a result of his acceptance of the Deleuzian/Massumian definition of affect as unnameable intensity. I will therefore devote this rest of this conclusion to a short summary of the arguments in this new major work so as to briefly demonstrate how my own project now connects and also diverges from his. I end by proposing a sublation (cancellation, preservation, and transcendence) of Jameson’s conclusions about the ultimate ahistoricity of affect, emphasizing instead the specificity of affect’s “codification” to the realist novel in the period of nineteenth- century capitalism—a specificity which, far from emptying affect of its content (as some kind of unnameable intensity), actually gives it its own historicity even as, for Jameson, it to becomes more indeterminate and nameless.

5.1 Fredric Jameson, Affect, and the Dissolution of Realism Antinomies opens with a casual observation that turns out to be the book’s central claim and argument about realism. “I have observed,” writes Jameson, a curious development which always seems to set in when we attempt to hold the phenomenon of realism firmly in our mind’s eye. It is as though the object of our meditation began to wobble, and attention to it to slip insensibly away from it in two opposite directions, so that at length we find we are thinking, not about realism, but about its emergence; not about the thing itself, but about its dissolution.3 Since the phenomenon—realism—is itself always forming and dissolving before our very eyes, literary critics have felt the need to pin it down, says Jameson, by way of comparing it to something that it is not. The problem is that any number of not-realisms readily appear as valid and tend to force their authors into “a passionate taking of sides,” in which realism is either “elevated to the status of an ideal” or else “denounced” in favour of its opposite number, which is variously identified as romance, epic, melodrama, idealism, naturalism, critical or socialist realism (as opposed to bourgeois realism), or, for the more diachronically minded—simply modernism (AR, 3). The accumulative effect of such oppositional approaches to defining realism has not been more clarity, but more

3 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 2. Hereafter cited in parentheses as AR.

195 confusion. Rather than seeking to stabilize realism by opposing it to something which it is not, Jameson chooses to treat it as an inherently unstable category with its own internal contradictions, which always threaten to undo its coherence as a subject itself and as an object for critical analysis: My experiment here claims to come at realism dialectically, not only by taking as its object of study the very antinomies themselves into which every constitution of this or that realism seems to resolve: but above all by grasping realism as a historical and even evolutionary process in which the negative and the positive are inextricably combined, and whose emergence and development at one and the same time constitute its own inevitable undoing, its own decay and dissolution. (AR, 6) Jameson goes on to identify the twin sources of realism’s composition and simultaneous dissolution as “the narrative impulse,” or, in French, the récit, and “the scenic impulse,” which he associates with “Affect, or, the Body’s Present.” For Jameson, “the narrative impulse” is the persistence within realism of the older genre of the tale and the temporal dimension of storytelling itself, which, taken at its most rudimentary, constitutes the “tripartite temporal system of the past-present-future.” This tripartite system can be further refined, he says, to “the before and after” (AR, 10), since, for the tale’s beginning, middle, and end to be narratable, we must always be dealing anyway with a future-past: “The time of the récit is then a time of the preterite, of events completed, over and done with, events that have entered history once and for all” (AR, 18).

What realism combines with the “narrative impulse” of the tale—and indeed what begins to distinguish it from the tale—is a new “scenic impulse,” in which narrative is momentarily suspended in the elaboration of a scene, those innumerable banal details of realist description, which test our patience and, as Roland Barthes once argued, give off a certain “reality effect” (signifiers, not so much of reality per se, but of our encounter with a reality being simulated in the text by the presence of just such mundane details). It is always, then, when narrative progression is at its slowest and description at its richest that we can be most confident that what we are reading is realism, as if the text’s very provocation to exhaust the reader, to bore her with such innumerable details, were also

196 somehow a guarantor of its authenticity. This latter “scenic impulse” Jameson associates, in a surprising turn of argument, with the “realm of affect,” which he defines via Alexander Kluge as the “insurrection of the present against the other temporalities.” Thus, Jameson claims, “we now have in our grasp the two chronological end points of realism: its genealogy in storytelling and the tale, its future dissolution in the literary representation of affect” (AR, 10).

But what exactly does Jameson mean by “affect”? Indeed many have been thrown off by Jameson’s sudden use of the concept and taken it to mean (as some thought it meant when all of a sudden the famous Marxist started to write about Postmodernism) that he has changed uniform and started batting for another team. However, the strength of Jameson’s dialectical approach has always been its ability to subsume concepts from other theoretical schools, sometimes hostile to Marxism, and assign them their own moment of truth in his philosophical Darstellung (presentation/representation) before he then historicizes them and dramatizes their conceptual limitations. Thus, anticipating a certain hermeneutic anxiety on his reader’s behalf, he introduces the term “affect” as, a technical term which has been strongly associated with a number of recent theories which alternately appeal to Freud or to Deleuze and which, like the theory of postmodernity, also take this phenomena as evidence for a new turn in human relations and forms of subjectivity (including politics). I do not here mean to appropriate it for a different theory of all these things, nor do I mean to endorse or to correct the philosophies of which it currently constitutes a kind of signal or badge of group identity. Indeed, I want to specify a very local and restricted, practical use of the term “affect” here by incorporating it into a binary opposition which historicizes it and limits its import to questions of representation and indeed of literary history. (AR, 29) What Jameson retains from the so-called affect theorists—especially Gilles Deleuze and, by association, Brian Massumi—is the notion of affect’s resistance to language, to its being named (AR, 31). Jameson thus distinguishes between what he calls “named emotions”—“love, hatred, anger, fear, disgust, pleasure, and so forth”—and “unnamed

197 emotions,” or simply “affect,” which, he says, “eludes language and its naming of things (and feelings)” (AR, 29). This distinction, he then reminds us, is an essentially Kantian one in which “affects” are treated as “bodily feelings, whereas emotions (or passions, to use their other name) are conscious states.” Realism’s “discovery” and, as I will discuss in a moment, its “codification of affect,” will thus mark the insertion into literature of a whole new bodily sensorium, particular to—and indeed inseparable from—modern, secular experience: if the positive characteristic of the emotion is to be named, the positive content of an affect is to activate the body. … And therefore, alongside a crisis of language, in which the old systems of emotions [the passions] come to be felt as a traditional rhetoric, and an outmoded one at that, there is also a new history of the body to be written, the “bourgeois body” as we may now call it, as it emerges from the outmoded classifications of the feudal era. (AR, 32)

This “new history of the body,” then, is one that is coextensive with all those new sites of modern experience that enter into literature for the first time: the sights and delights of the urban capital being the most infamous and obvious. In fact, it is precisely such secular “affects” that Jameson will argue are being codified in those long and seemingly unnecessary descriptions of the city, which can keep an author of Charles Dickens’s or Émile Zola’s caliber occupied for pages (the latter’s descriptions serve as Jameson’s privileged example of just such a “codification of affect”). For, as Jameson will point out, if one of the peculiar characteristics of affect is its resistance to being named, its representation “must somehow achieve independence from the conventional body itself” if its expression is to be codified by something other than a system of names (AR, 38). This representational challenge thus propels realism, against the “narrative impulse” of the récit, to search for an ever-refined language capable of expressing the various modifications of bodily sensations that make up the “modern experience,” or what Jameson calls “the sliding scale of the incremental, in which each infinitesimal moment differentiates itself from the last by a modification of tone and an increase or diminution of intensity.” It is in this sense that we are to understand the “scenic impulse”—those

198 descriptions, for example, of the city as a barrage of various sights, sounds, and smells— as just such a codification of affect, which, for Jameson, “becomes the very chromaticism of the body itself” (AR, 42) and marks “the coming into being of bourgeois daily life” (AR, 5).

Realism’s “discovery” of affect and its development of the “scenic impulse,” however, threatens to dissolve the temporal “linearity” of the tale, or récit, into the ever-expanding, existential present of free-floating sensations and intensities, which now remain forever variable. Narrative increasingly becomes less an end goal in itself, than the “motivation of the device,” whereby more and more existential data is accumulated for the codification of affect (something that Jameson explores more fully in a chapter on “distraction” in Leo Tolstoy). The “scenic impulse” in realism thus wages a subtle, molecular war against the structures of plot, namely, Jameson argues, against the novel’s “protagonicity,” such that increasingly it no longer makes sense to speak of heroes or, for that matter, villainy. Pérez Galdós and George Eliot serve here as Jameson’s respective examples of this dual tendency: the waning of protagonicity and therefore also villainy.

Importantly, for Jameson, what is at stake in this historical narrative and dialectical understanding of realism’s own internal dissolution, then, is not only the disappearance of plot in the new modernist novel, which now becomes realism’s logical heir, but also, with the ever-widening realm of affect, the gradual eclipse of History itself—as, for example, in the new novels of a single day such as Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, which appear briefly in Antinomies to illustrate this point. It is here that Jameson’s argument starts to reconnect with his now familiar argument about Postmodernism and “the end of temporality,”4 a question to which Jameson returns in Antinomies in the book’s final chapter, provocatively titled, “The Historical Novel Today, or, Is it Still Possible?”

Generally speaking, Jameson’s Antinomies pits affect—Deleuze and Massumi’s unnameable intensity—against what Georg Lukács famously identified as the classic

4 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991) and “The End of Temporality,” in Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008).

199 realist novel’s vocation to represent totality, not just the internal subjectivity of the hero, but his or her external struggle for self-identity in a society organized around competition and the reproduction of the labour/capital class relation.5 The more these unnameable affects enter into the realist novel and the preoccupations of its codifying apparatus, the more the historical scope of the novel narrows and the subject-object relationship of realism (valorized by Lukács) turns into a lopsided subjectivism. The affect thus leads, in Jameson’s interpretation, to a representational crisis that signals the transition from realism to modernism.

5.2 Affect and Totality This, then, is an interpretation of affect and the nineteenth-century novel that, on the surface, is wholly at odds with my theory of feeling capitalism, in which the “codification of affect” in the novel is precisely what enlists such affects in the mediation of some larger totality or horizon of meaning: for me, the social transformations wrought by nineteenth-century capitalism. There are, however, certain elements of Jameson’s literary history of affect and realism that can be preserved and subsumed to my own theory of feeling capitalism.

The first is to point out that, insofar as affects “must somehow achieve independence from the conventional body itself” (AR, 38), their representation already implies a second-degree removal from bodily immediacy and therefore also a process of mediation. Thus, while Jameson’s unnameable affects looks at first an awful lot like Massumi’s unnameable intensities, the process of codification actually detaches affect from its “virtual” immediacy in the body and begins to associate its increase and diminution with something other than itself, which mediates it. Jameson explores this more fully in a chapter on Zola, which turns largerly on a reading of Le Ventre de Paris (1873). Here, he argues the narrator’s incessant cataloguing of the sights, sounds, and smells of the urban market, Les Halles, has the effect of autonomizing or liberating affect from the body. As

5 See Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), 33: “If a writer strives to represent reality as it truly is, i.e. if he is an authentic realist, then the question of totality plays a decisive role.”

200 the narrator’s lists accrue more and more details, naming and cataloguing the many goods on display, the narrative takes on the quality of a detached camera eye, which has left the human body behind, and, in a kind of panning shot, starts to take in all Les Halles has to offer. Here, “the realm of the visual begins to separate from that of the verbal and conceptual and to float away in a new kind of autonomy.” It is “[p]recisely this autonomy [that] will create the space for affect” (AR, 55). As Jameson observes, the goods of the market—particularly the seafood and, in one scene especially, the cheeses— conjure up for the reader not just the sights of the marketplace, but also the smells, which now, because of the roving camera-eye quality of the narrative, become weirdly detached from any identifiable smelling subject or body. Thus, even as the many different names of seafood and cheeses are being rattled off by the narrator, there is a secondary effect, or rather affect, which escapes the specificity of any of these names and creates, alongside this on-going inventory of wares, a subterranean current of rising and diminishing affective intensities without a name: “a tremendous fermenting and bubbling pullulation in which the simplicity of words and names is unsettled to the point of an ecstatic dizziness by the visual multiplicity of the things themselves and the sensations that they press on the unforewarned observer” (AR, 54).

For Jameson, the “codification of affect” always requires it to detach from the body as a site of circumscribed meaning and reattach to something outside the body, which will become its representational vehicle: “the registration of affect,” he says, “must become allegorical of itself, and designate its own detached and floating structure within itself” (AR, 65). It is in this sense that he compares it to “the invisible materiality of light”: a transparency capable at certain moments of thickening into an object in its own right, with its own kind of visibility, as with certain hours of the day in Los Angeles or Jerusalem, where light can be perceived in and for itself, and where the surfaces of the buildings are best observed as sheets whose pores and rugosities capture the new element and hold it for a moment. (AR, 68) Light, as Jameson observes here, can only take on a kind substantiality for the human eye when it is reflected off something other than itself, particularly a shiny surface of some

201 kind, whose shininess is itself a secondary effect of the light mirrored in it. For Jameson, it is this kind of “autonomization” that empties affect of any representational content beyond its own self-reflection, associating it, for him, with Deleuze’s and Massumi’s unnameable intensity.

It is undeniable that the affects that circulate in Zola’s novel are unnamed and perhaps even eternally unnameable. Whatever the affect that the naming of cheeses produces, it certainly isn’t so clearly identifiable as, say, desire, guilt, and disappointment are. However, I remain skeptical that such nameless affective intensities remain without content, reflective of nothing other than themselves. In fact, they seem rather precisely indexed to “the piles and well-nigh infinite variety of commodities” (AR, 61) that circulate in the urban marketplace and therefore symptomatic also of that very particular capitalist infrastructure created to facilitate consumption—the shopping mall! And even if the commodities themselves remain on the shelf as the disembodied camera eye swoops by to catalogue them, the circulation of that narratorial eye as well as the free- floating circulating affective intensities it generates seem to conjure that other disembodied “real abstraction” that circulates in the marketplace: “exchange-value,” which, as Marx says, resides in neither the commodity nor the money that represents its value but in their ceaseless exchange, a “change of form” that then “becomes an end in itself”—in other words, autonomized.6

Jameson’s “codification of affect” in nineteenth-century realism is thus, I would aver, actually a transcodification of affect and totality, a feeling-for-totality, which persists even as Jameson’s History seems to disappear and, in fact, can become a compensation for that very disappearance. Thus, even if Zola’s “affective structure” escapes the more precise emotional cataloguing that I have been able to bring to bear on Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, and Middlemarch by associating them with desire, guilt, and disappointment respectively, Jameson’s interpretation of Le Ventre de Paris would seem nonetheless to open the world of Zola’s novels to just the kind of theory of

6 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin—New Left Review, 1976), 228.

202 capitalist affects that I have put forward here, making them identifiable as yet another way of feeling capitalism in the nineteenth century.

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