DETECTIVE NARRATIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS IN 19TH CENTURY ENGLAND by Amy Rebecca Murray Twyning Bachelor of Arts, West Chester University, 1992 Master of Arts, West Virginia University, 1995 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The English Department in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2006 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH This dissertation was presented by Amy Rebecca Murray Twyning It was defended on March 1st, 2006 and approved by Marcia Landy, Distinguished University Service Professor, English Department, Film Studies, and the Cultural Studies Program James Seitz, Associate Professor, English Department Nancy Condee, Associate Professor, Slavic Languages and Literature and Director of the Program for Cultural Studies Dissertation Director: Colin MacCabe, Distinguished University Professor, English Literature, Film Studies, and the Cultural Studies Program ii Copyright © by Amy Rebecca Murray Twyning 2006 iii DETECTIVE NARRATIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS IN 19TH CENTURY ENGLAND Amy Rebecca Murray Twyning, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2006 Working with Fredric Jameson’s understanding of genre as a “formal sedimentation” of an ideology, this study investigates the historicity of the detective narrative, what role it plays in bourgeois, capitalist culture, what ways it mediates historical processes, and what knowledge of these processes it preserves. I begin with the problem of the detective narrative’s origins. This is a complex and ultimately insoluble problem linked to the limits of historical perspective and compounded by the tendency of genres to erase their own origins. I argue that any critical reading of the detective story beginning with the notion that real crime and working class unrest are the specters that the detective story seeks to exorcise misapprehends the real class struggle that is evidenced in, but also disguised by, the detective story: the struggle between the ascendant (though never assuredly so) bourgeoisie and the receding (though, again, never assuredly so) aristocratic and post-feudal ruling classes. Instead, I argue that it is this class struggle that is apparent in the detective narrative’s special structure—the double structure by which it can pose any-origin-whatever as a moment of history and construct that history forward while appearing to uncover it backward. The detective narrative erases precisely the problem of the bourgeoisie’s lack of origins (from a feudal perspective) and counterfeits history. For this reason, I locate the detective narrative’s beginnings in specific sites where the transfer of power from traditional institutions to bourgeois institutions or institutions reformed by the bourgeoisie, including the Chancery court (in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House), the construction of the New Poor Laws of 1834 (in Wilkie Collins’ The Dead Secret), and marriage and inheritance in Bleak House and Collins’ The Moonstone. Ending with a study of the commonly acknowledged first detective novel, The Moonstone, I conclude that this novel and the generic paradigm of the detective narrative it exemplifies succeed in encrypting the historical discontinuity between post-feudal modes of production and capitalism and that, ultimately, crime is just an alibi for the work of historical reconstruction that the detective narrative carries out. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For sharing with me his imaginative power, for lighting so many unexplored passages with his incandescent intellect, and for living out with me the contraries by which we progress, I owe the deepest thanks to John Twyning. For her apparently inexhaustible generosity with her time, her perspicuity, and her genius, I am so grateful to Juli Parrish; she could always see the figure in the carpet. For teaching me Capital, for having faith in me, for respecting and yet never ceasing to argue with me, and for all the many other things that make him quintessentially himself and, therefore, an inspiration, I can only imperfectly express my thanks to Colin MacCabe. I thank Jean Grace for reading so many drafts with such attentiveness, for understanding the importance that one sentence or word can make to the process of creating, and for offering such encouragement. I thank Marcia Landy who may not know how important were the intellectual standards she set and the theoretical possibilities she illuminated to the creation of this project; I thank Marcia, also, for giving me Gramsci and Deleuze. I thank Jim Seitz for his generous support and his camaraderie and have learned from him what it means to love literature and writing. I thank Nancy Condee for her simultaneously generous and rigorous turn of mind, for the way she helped sharpen my thinking, and for the revelations I owe to her incisive wit. Geeta Kothari and Mark Kemp I thank for being my rock and my hard place. Thanks also go to Chris Boettcher for thinking along with me and being so imaginative and challenging. I also want to thank Mariolina Salvatori and Jonathan Arac, both of whom taught me how to read. Other professors whom I want to thank for their intellectual patronage are Tom Miles, Cheryl Torsney, and Dennis Allen at WVU. And to one of my earliest professors, Tim Newcomb, I am indebted for being so encouraging. For reading, charting, drawing diagrams, coming up with crazy analogies, and whatever else it took to understand the first two chapters of Cinema 1 with me, I cannot forget Phil Mikosz. My students, especially those from the 2006 Spring semester of Critical Reading and Literature and the Contemporary, have kept me going and kept me interested. I wrote the very first words of this dissertation to Nikki Twyning in a letter describing my dissertation, a little trick she thought up to get me writing—without her my courage would have flagged. And finally, I am ever grateful to my family for believing in me. v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS ................................................................................. 1 1.1 GENRE AND THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS................................................ 1 1.2 “KNOWING WHERE TO LOOK”?............................................................... 19 1.3 INVENTING CRIME ....................................................................................... 42 2.0 THE DETECTIVE NARRATIVE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF HISTORY IN BLEAK HOUSE ..................................................................................................................... 53 2.1 COPYING AND HISTORICAL CRISIS........................................................ 66 2.2 MYSTERY AS ORIGIN ................................................................................... 91 2.3 THE DETECTIVE NARRATIVE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF HISTORY.......................................................................................................................... 104 3.0 SECRETS AND THE ENCLOSURE OF DOMESTIC SPACE IN WILKIE COLLINS’ THE DEAD SECRET ........................................................................................... 114 3.1 ENCLOSURE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE PATRIARCHAL FAMILY ........................................................................................................................ 138 3.2 NARRATING ENCLOSURE......................................................................... 149 3.3 NARRATING, EXPLOITING THE FEMALE LEGACY ......................... 167 4.0 DETECTING INNOCENCE IN THE MOONSTONE ......................................... 172 4.1 CRIME AS ORIGIN ....................................................................................... 187 4.2 DETECTING INNOCENCE.......................................................................... 199 4.3 “HOW MUCH ALIKE”?................................................................................ 216 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................... 223 vi 1.0 THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS Origin, though an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and re-establishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete. There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history. -- Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama1 1.1 GENRE AND THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS There is no simple way to begin an investigation into the detective narrative’s place in bourgeois consciousness and the bourgeois cultural imagination. The goal of this study is to discover the 1 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 45-46. 1 ideological nature of the detective narrative, what role it plays in bourgeois or capitalist culture, what ways it mediates real historical processes, and what knowledge of these processes it preserves.