Expert Modernists, Matricide and Modern Culture: Woolf, Forster, Joyce

Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture Woolf, Forster, Joyce Lois Cucullu Expert Modernists, Matricide, and...

Author: Lois Cucullu

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Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture Woolf, Forster, Joyce

Lois Cucullu

Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture

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Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture Woolf, Forster, Joyce Lois Cucullu

© Lois Cucullu 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3531–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cucullu, Lois. Expert modernists, matricide, and modern culture : Woolf, Forster, Joyce / Lois Cucullu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–3531–9 (cloth) 1. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Women in literature. 3. Forster, E.M. (Edward Morgan), 1879–1970— Characters—Women. 4. Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941—Characters— Women. 5. Joyce, James, 1882–1941—Characters—Women. 6. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. 7. Matriarchy in literature. 8. Mothers in literature. 9. Family in literature. 10. Home in literature. I. Title. PR888.W6C83 2004 823′.912093522—dc22 10 13

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Gordy and Michèle


Contents viii

Acknowledgments 1

Modern Hordes: Women, Modernism, and the Cult of Experts 2 Retailing the Female Intellectual 3 Sacred Cows: Modernism, Woolf, and Her Fictive Seraphs 4 Queer Couplings: Forster’s Hellenic Pastoralism and Modern Masculinity 5 Putting Rouge on the Corpse: Cosmopolitan Joyce and Modern Culture Afterword

120 155

Notes

170

Bibliography

206

Index

219

vii

1 31 58 91

Acknowledgments The intellectual debts for a book on expert culture that is also a first book are bound to be numerous and great. To begin, let me first express my appreciation for the permissions that have allowed me to include sections of the work on Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster that have been published elsewhere. I accordingly thank the editors and publishers for permission to reprint ‘Retailing the Female Intellectual’, in differences: A Journal of Feminism and Cultural Studies, Volume 9, No. 2, pp. 25–68, Copyright, 1997, Brown University, differences: A Journal of Feminism and Cultural Studies and Duke University Press; and to excerpt ‘Shepherds in the Parlor: Forster’s Apostles, Pagans, and Native Sons’, in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Volume 32, No. 1, Fall 1998, pp. 19–55, Copyright Novel Corp. © 1998; and to excerpt ‘Exceptional Women, Expert Culture and the Academy’, in Signs: A Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Volume 29, No. 1, Fall 2003, pp. 27–54, Copyright, 2003, Signs and the University of Chicago Press; and to excerpt ‘“Only Cathect”: Queer Heirs and Narrative Desire in Howards End’, in Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature edited by Philip Holden and Richard Ruppel (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 195–222, Copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Press. For the support that enabled me to research and complete this project, I also gratefully acknowledge the following: the University of Minnesota’s Graduate School for a Grant-in-Aid Fellowship and for McKnight and Faculty Summer Research Fellowships; the College of Liberal Arts for a single semester leave; The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas and its support of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship; the Modern Archive Centre of King’s College, Cambridge and the Centre’s archivists Jacqueline Cox and Rosalind Moad for their invaluable assistance during my visit and after; and The Huntington Library and its support of a W.M. Keck Foundation and Mayers Fellowship. To begin a more personal recitation of intellectual debts means recognizing Nancy Armstrong, whose Desire and Domestic Fiction made scholars and critics, regardless of ideological stamp, acknowledge the decorous elephant in the room that was the domestic woman. No less did the argument of this book take shape from the impress of that figure. But even more than that engagement, I owe its author profound thanks for viii

Acknowledgments

ix

great generosity and judicious advice, imparted with a wit that ever enlivened the intellectual work informing our profession. To Ellen Rooney and Elizabeth Weed, I extend warm thanks for their astute and prescient reading of the manuscript in its early stages that helped me identify the contours and consequences of the argument taking shape. I likewise here remember the late Roger Henkle for his humane teaching and for his interdisciplinary commitment to contextualizing literature that I hope this book may in some measure honor. My intellectual debts extend as well to Devon Hodges and Eileen Sypher, who first led me to consider the maven Woolf and to theorize her literary production beyond pathology. Coming forward, I extend my thanks to the present and past faculty and students at Minnesota, but especially to Paula Rabinowitz and Andrew Elfenbein for their incisive readings of the manuscript that helped me to sharpen the argument in its final drafting, and to Jani Scandura and Rita Raley for the intellectual climate their work created that supported me at crucial stages of my writing. To invoke intellectual climate is also to express my gratitude to Robert C. Ritchie, Director of Research at The Huntington, for the year spent in research among the library’s collections and in colloquy with the scholars gathered under his aegis. Of friends, fellow travelers, backers, and accomplices, I must not fail to recognize Julia Flanders, Caroline Reitz, John Marx, Jennifer Campbell, Nick Daly, Lorraine Mazza, Jan Schrader, Susan Davis, Deb and Bob Petersen, Tim Wager, Elyse Blankley, Carola Kaplan, Maria Lepowsky, Dolora Wojciehowski, Thadious Davis, Cynthia Herrup, Coppélia Kahn, Susi Krasnoo, Mona Noureldin Shulman, Donna and Warren Brown, Roberto Alvarez, and, lastly, Steve Nolan for his ever sound counsel. Finally, to my family but principally to my children, Gordy and Michèle Cucullu, for their humor and for humoring me over the course of the project – theirs is the advocacy I most credit.


1 Modern Hordes: Women, Modernism, and the Cult of Experts

For the first time in our hist.[ory] middle-class young w.[omen] were out in the world on their own. Mr Grundy was being flouted, by many of them on principle. For the first time there was an alternative to prostitutes. Dorothy Richardson, Windows on Modernism We have no written pedigrees; we have to make our community of descent by resemblance of any kind. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species The question is not only, who owns the means of reproduction, but what are the means of reproduction? Adam Phillips, ‘Waiting for Returns: Freud’s New Love’ A cultural product – an avant-garde picture, a political manifesto, a newspaper – is a constituted taste, a taste which has been raised from the vague semi-existence of half-formulated or unformulated experience, implicit or even unconscious desire, to the full reality of the finished product, by a process of objectification which, in present circumstances, is almost always the work of professionals. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction a profession is always defined by its elites. Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism In the now famous scene of Totem and Taboo, a primal horde of randy brothers, taking a cue from Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, sets upon the 1

2 Expert Modernists, Matricide, and Modern Culture

monopolistic father and overmasters him. In the insurgents’ capitulation to primal desire and in their subsequent renunciation, Sigmund Freud locates the foundation of society, morals, and religion that at its core pivots on a new secular understanding of woman. The Oedipal Complex, which the lusty horde’s melee demonstrably proves and thereby ordains, transforms the mother, the domestic woman of the early twentieth century, into the locus of absolute desire. How odd a fabulation this presents is evident if we attempt to fit the nineteenth-century grand dame of British domesticity and royal brood mare par excellence to the thrones of Europe, Queen Victoria, into the torrid geometry of this twentieth-century love triangle. Thus while the parricide perpetrated by the troupe stands as a blatant and foul deed that all must condemn and repent, what is less conspicuous and, by comparison, seems to occur by sleight of hand is the transformation of the mother into a universal lust object. It was the women the horde desired, Freud explains after the fact, that was ‘their chief motive for dispatching their father’ and, I suggest, for dispatching traditional motherhood as well (179). With the passage of nearly a century, it becomes possible to put Freud’s myth on different footing and to see in it not what it proposed of the past but what it enabled of Freud’s historical moment and of the late modern period more generally. From this perspective, it is not the genesis narrative of moral and religious society that stands out, but a document and an especially hegemonic one in hindsight that displaces onto a mythic and primitive past the founding of modern culture.1 For Freud’s locus classicus consists of making what was radically new at the turn of the century over into something very old by historicizing the domestic woman as desire incarnate. In this way, Freud reorganizes the family and reorients human desire by having it ever refer back to this contrived original object. The repackaged modern family, put under a libidinal mandate, is then recalled to the home where it is driven, we should not fail to notice, by a cultural, and not biological or even social, imperative. Reproduction will henceforth depend on offspring finding substitutes for the first desired object. 2 As messy as it is singular, Freud’s design uses the apparatus of the extant household to make cultural reproduction – the copying of an original – appear both compulsory and natural. With his modern twist on supply and demand capitalism, he gives fresh impetus to the romantic idiom ‘made for each other’. Understood this way, what also stands out in Totem and Taboo is less the insurgency of the unruly primal horde of Freud’s fertile imagination, and more the insurgency of a modern horde of experts, in this instance, of psychoanalysts, who overmaster prevailing social and moral authority in order

Women, Modernism, and the Cult of Experts

3

to supplant it with knowledge of desire derived from their own selfnominated discipline. 3 Rotating Freud’s myth on its axis allows us to perceive that his myth of primal flux in a remote and shadowy past is subordinate to his preoccupation with the flux of the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury society. The flux of the modern metropolis, abetted by a new episteme of desire and an economy increasingly defined by replicative technologies and disposed to the promiscuous dispersal of things, was nowhere more evident or its consequences more immediate and potentially subversive than with the increased mobility of women. As Dorothy Richardson’s epigraph discloses of metropolitan London, the late nineteenth-century diaspora in which young bourgeois women came out of the home and onto the streets in unprecedented numbers makes visible one of the most profound social changes of the last century – middle-class women’s historical emergence out of the home and into the public sphere.4 Their presence on the street, which reigning assumptions had hitherto linked to prostitution and pauperism and which ensuing wisdom would neatly convert to consumerism and mass culture, or, more obligingly, subsume under franchise reform, underscores the wholesale social renovation their numbers occasioned. And as considerable as are the epiphenomena from shopping to voting just cited, they obscure the broader grounds of emancipation that Richardson’s remark more tellingly references: the departure of women from a domain deemed natural and private and from a position foundational and indispensable to institutionalized monogamy and the bourgeois family on which the telos of Western nation-states and empires had come to depend. In effect, the female transit from household to street compromises the separation of spheres and of sexes and the very gendered and classed terms by which women and men had accounted for themselves and for one another. Thus it is no mere accident or aberration that such great modernist liberation narratives as Freud’s materialize at the threshold of the home – what Mikhail Bakhtin has termed ‘the chronotope of crisis and break in life’ – and over the disposition of its female occupants.5 As Freud’s myth implies, whereas paternal authority could be subsumed and sublimated, the domestic woman and the moral authority she exercised in the home over biological reproduction and the social reproduction of the family could not be so easily discharged or swiftly absorbed. Her cultural transformation required a much more radical transaction that had to appear as no transformation at all. And it is not only the psychologist and his expert disciples who concoct this radical appropriation and displacement or who obey its cultural logic. By way


of example, let me briefly offer the case, appearing some 15 years later, of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover that effects a similar transaction in one telling scene. When widow and town gossip Ivy Bolton moves into the Chatterley manor house to look after the war-disabled Sir Clifford, a momentous cultural breach is acknowledged by Lawrence’s most graphic novel, but as in Totem and Taboo, with little apparent fanfare. Indeed, so acculturated are most novel readers to the commonplace of domestic attendance that Mrs Bolton’s appearance there, which crucially installs a spousal proxy, might have gone unremarked had it not provoked the narrator’s ire over the imperiled state of the novel. Instead, not long into service, Ivy and her desultory chatter, which leaves the immobile Clifford transported and left unchecked ‘would have run to dozens of volumes’, precipitate an alarum for the novel and censure of what most afflicts the novel form, all strikingly discerned through the intelligence of Constance Chatterley (101). Overhearing Mrs Bolton’s recital regaling Clifford, Connie is reminded of ‘Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled into one, with a great deal more, that these women left out’ (100). As her regard turns from awe to aversion, the narrator interrupts Connie’s thoughts to equate the prattling busybody with the prolix woman’s novel and to neither’s advantage. ‘[The] novel, like gossip’, the narrator expostulates, ‘can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche’ (101). When reduced to gossip, the novel becomes a ‘vicious, conventional channeling of sympathy’ (101). What precipitates the narrator’s animus are the affectional orthodoxy and its mawkish blandishments found in woman’s talk and books that numb the psyche and corrupt conjugal and familial attachments. 6 The antidote, according to the narrator, is ‘the novel, properly handled, [that] can reveal the most secret places of life; for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening’ (101, original emphasis). And this remedy Lawrence undertakes not only on behalf of the novel but locally on behalf of Lady Chatterley. By contrasting hegemonic domesticity, as represented by Ivy’s numbing prolixity, with a counterhegemonic somatic discourse uncovered in Connie, Lawrence’s narrative stages in essence a bloodless coup that liberates Connie’s body and the novel form. He deftly turns domestic agency on its back, as it were, by laying bare the authentic longings of Constance’s desiring body as her ‘true’ nature. Thus Lady Chatterley, excused by the pelvic paralysis of Wragby’s patriarch and released from wifely ministrations by the surrogate Bolton, is freed from her connubial


5

duties to idle away in that more salubrious alliance with the gamekeeper Mellors. Their adulterous liaison replaces the failed traditional couple, the Chatterleys, with the genital couple, John Thomas and Lady Jane, Lawrence’s preferred title for the novel, that puts in motion a conjugal fable of modern heterosexuality whose cultural reverberations have outlasted the twentieth century. 7 Lawrence’s modern fable, no less than Freud’s primitive one, offers revelatory moments about the social renovation of the household and the cultural reproduction thus enabled that bear significantly on the story I propose to tell here of expert modernists in the late modern period. For the argument of this book holds that modernism as a movement and cultural practice cannot be understood without reference to the transformation it carries out on the body of the domestic woman and the household spaces she managed – especially as it is female modernists as much as their male cohorts who undertake this evacuation and replacement of domestic ideology. Jointly implicated, they suggest that gender and modernism are not the polar opposites that critical wisdom would have us believe. Indeed, the ambit of this study is to reconsider what arguably remains the most intractable of modernism’s separatist myths – its repute as an exclusively male or male-identified movement and thus anti-woman. 8 To rework this fraught relationship, I show in successive chapters how early twentieth-century Anglo-novelists succeed in elevating their novels above middlebrow fare by denigrating Victorian domestic fiction and the brand of sentimentalism associated with the maternal. In the process, modernist innovations become the basis of new expert authority and the measure of a modern cultural class, as cultural reproduction assumes the centrality once accorded biological reproduction and the bourgeois family. Taking Virginia Woolf as a model, my reading will demonstrate that modernists of whatever gender stripe gained in cultural standing by denigrating and replacing the moral and social authority of ‘woman’, as defined by Victorian society, with their own expert narratives more synchronous with a mobile and worldly metropolitan aggregate.9 In short, this book demonstrates what the cultural logic of modernism begins to look like once we consider a female modernist like Woolf exemplary of the movement rather than an exception to the modernist rule. This radical act of displacement and the cultural logic it observes are not, however, something Woolf cooks up in that famously solitary room of her own. Instead, the answer I develop makes clear that a continuing discrepancy between women and ‘woman’ is an overdetermined one. It cannot be explained away, as it conventionally is in Woolf’s case, as


a result of the class standing and social values she inherits from her high Victorian relations. Although inherited class entitlements clearly advantage her, they are neither decisive in themselves nor do they explain the discrepancy. What is decisive and what does have explanatory power is that female modernists, like Woolf, attain credibility only when they place themselves in opposition to Victorian social and moral standards. Neither capitulation to a male ideal nor tantamount to male identification, their opposition rather represents the refusal of a historically contingent and gendered position and of the ideology that made marriage and family appear as a vital and obligatory commission. Indeed, it is this refusal and what Woolf makes of it that I trace in her fiction and polemics as she increasingly identifies herself as a modernist intellectual and correspondingly sloughs off the claims of domestic ideology. What results is the conversion of the Victorian domestic sphere into an aesthetic sphere that authorizes this female modernist by placing her among a new cast of experts who now assume responsibility for ensuring the quality of everyday life, as they also redefine the boundaries and terms of the aesthetic encounter. Indeed, we can observe the cultural syntax of Woolf’s expert accreditation when, after the critical and commercial successes of the 1920s from Mrs Dalloway to Orlando, she turns to entreat educated women to become independent writers in A Room of One’s Own, and, thereupon, in ‘Professions for Women’, to join her in the professions. What I will argue then is that the manipulation of gender becomes the literary means of distinguishing elite writers as a group from their Victorian precursors. This move of displacement and accreditation, whether executed by Freud, Lawrence, or Woolf, signals the modernist cultural moment. Indeed, whether or not we agree that the domestic woman was the first modern subject, she was, as Emma Bovary fatally proved, modernism’s first casualty. This book will thus insist that one persistent and signature feature of literary modernism from Flaubert to Beckett, from Woolf to Kristeva, is the specter of mors matris.10 Her demise, be it figurative or discursive, protracted or precipitant, subtle or flagrant, signifies the Victorian woman’s institutional eviction. Her derogation affects everything from the biological reproduction of the family to the social reproduction propagated through her oversight of wooing and wedlock down to and including her custody of moral piety and affective literacy. Her expulsion makes space for a revised social calculus and new cultural formations consistent with the increased mobility, urbanization, and concentration of wealth in the metropolis. How to treat these changed circumstances becomes the challenge that experts, to include literary modernists, not only confront but also summon and manage.


7

Thus rather than treat literary modernism as a separate preserve of sacred icons or aesthetic truths to be defended, I propose to treat it as a historical position to be understood. Considered as a part of its time and not apart from it places literary modernism more properly within the secularization of knowledge underway with emergent disciplines in the natural and human sciences and the more established ones from medicine to law. Indeed, modernists’ ‘truth’ claims for the novel, whether of modern consciousness or of sexual and lineal ties, bespeak singular expertise and modern knowledge creation as much as their contemporary Freud and his followers in the nascent field of psychology. One specific reason I begin with Freud’s primitive fable and Lawrence’s modern one is to suggest that we view literary modernism not simply as coincident with the discursive network we associate with knowledge production and the expert class, but rather as part of that larger cultural formation. I argue that literary modernism’s extraordinary designs on redefining the modern imaginary and reshaping quotidian experience may be better understood situated within the broader movement of expert culture in which the special knowledge of the modern expert class became increasingly valued in the nineteenth century and ultimately indispensable in the twentieth across an ever-widening spectrum of discursive fields. These fields took the private domains of self, affect, and consciousness, over which literature, but especially the novel, enjoyed historical precedence as fundamental objects of analysis. Contextualized in this manner, we might say that literary modernism, as it gained in reputation in the early decades of the 1900s, obeys the same cultural logic as do those disciplines that formally professionalize themselves in order to establish its literary expertise as an autonomous and valuable domain of knowledge and its practitioners as the specialists who determine and dispense their esoteric knowledge as the universal truth of humankind. Accordingly, we might more accurately classify these artist practitioners – with their conceit of an elite and secular caste ministering to learned and lay reader alike – as modernist experts whose secular knowledge would form the basis of a modern cultural class. 11 Instructive of this group’s elitism and its imbrication within the expert class that I am claiming here is Pierre Bourdieu’s study of ‘the field of cultural production’ and his broad explanatory category of ‘“charismatic” ideology’. According to his analysis, ‘[i]n every field, the dominant have an interest in continuity, identity, and reproduction, whereas the dominated, the newcomers, are for discontinuity, rupture and subversion’ (The Field of Cultural Production 275n33). When applied to modernism’s miscellany of charismatic authors, Bourdieu’s explication


usefully describes the process by which these writers asserted their literary prowess. Using declarations of their own uniqueness and manifestoes of their technical or aesthetic ingenuity, they distinguished themselves from knowledge producers in other fields as well as from rival contemporaries and their literary styles; and even more, they challenged outright the standing of those authors ascendant in literature, a field that lacks the obvious institutional controls, legal guarantees, and hereditary legacies – all gate-keeping protocols – by which election to an elite may be bestowed and acknowledged (Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production 60–73).12 Bourdieu’s hermeneutics is also particularly well suited to literature as a field and not merely because of its late advent. Rather, because the boundaries that separate it from other disciplines and from its lay audience tend to be, as Terry Lovell has noted, highly porous, its knowledge is continually being absorbed by other experts and by readers – and no more so than when it is the most compelling, at which point literary expertise is transferred from the domain of its specialists into the domain of commonplace wisdom (Consuming Fiction 143–44). Uncredentialed though the cast of experts I study here may be, their aesthetic model, pioneering techniques, elite ethos, and the subsequent capital and celebrity these obtained do not just fortuitously arise in the approximate moment that literature emerges as a modern subject. In fact, they are instrumental in transforming literature into an autonomous field within the university where their credentialed followers would ultimately profess it. Literature as a twentieth-century discipline is, for better or worse, inconceivable without the expertise and cult of literary modernists. 13 And, however we may come to regard the cultural agency of this throng from our own privileged positions as experts, it is likely that most of us, without necessarily being aware of it, subscribe in our everyday lives to such fables as Freud’s or Lawrence’s even though we may never have read Totem and Taboo and may only know Lady Chatterley by reputation. Emphasizing modernism’s relevance as a cultural and historical instance of modernity is not, however, to argue that it is the consummation of modernity. Neither is to insist on literary modernism’s connection to expert culture and to the field of literature to accede to a monolithic version of modernism. The imbrication with expert culture that I argue for in this study becomes instead a means to rethink the former commonplaces of totalizing and monolithic modernism, especially as my study argues for a different understanding of modernism’s relation to gender.14 The convergence of modernists and the expert class and their interventions in family and kinship relations constitute a remarkably


9

rich and complex site of knowledge and commodity formation and of the gender, national, and class divisions informing cultural production and consumption. Aware as I am of the social and historical conformation of modernism, I should stress here that a focus on the female intellectual Woolf will not entail narrating a sociology of female intellectuals or a straightforward history of their thought; nor will it offer a recounting of women’s changing status in the professions in the early decades of the twentieth century. Important as are these topics (evident in the later section, which cites such studies), my purpose is structurally a different one and so is the architecture of the argument. I first make the case for the epistemic and economic shift that systematically undermined Victorian institutions, which in turn made the expert class and modern disciplinarity ever more necessary. I then pursue these changes through the exemplar Woolf before applying her model to the practice of her male peers E.M. Forster and James Joyce. To begin to limn in, then, exactly how it was that literary modernists, along with the expert class, constituted themselves so as to realize the modernization that I claim Woolf makes visible requires an explanation of the epistemological, historical, and economic transformation that the prevailing Enlightenment bourgeois paradigm and its classificatory system were undergoing. To put in the most general terms that which later sections develop in closer detail, a system organized politically around the nation-state and whose paradigm by the nineteenth century had become chiefly Protestant, productionist, rational, and procreative in composition had to accommodate by the twentieth century one that was increasingly secular, consumerist, desiring, and sexual. The older bourgeois model of political economy handed down from John Locke and Adam Smith that had been ideal for producing a national polity of hard-working, god-fearing, law-abiding, thrifty-in-expenditure, and prolific-in-offspring citizens was gradually challenged by another model. The new one engendered a collection of individuals who were, in contrast, decidedly secular and worldly in outlook, more prodigal in spending habits and considerably less sedulous about propagation, and increasingly acculturated to urban technology and markets to realize the material progress we now collapse under the idiom ‘lifestyle’. Writing before World War I for Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft, Max Weber would draw this distinction as one between classes ‘stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods’, and ‘“status groups” stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special “styles of life”’ (From Max Weber 193,


original emphasis). 15 The emergent model of ‘styles of life’ revised the social topography by blurring the distinction between public and private, by encouraging female mobility and eroding male privilege, by de-emphasizing production in relation to consumption, and, in consequence, by requiring new knowledges, taxonomies, and groups of specialists to manage. No longer could the dominant orders of the nation-state (statesmen, merchants, industrialists, clergy) claim responsibility for overseeing the public good on their own, indeed as the very notions of ‘public’ and ‘good’ were diverging. 16 Nor could they count on the household to convey its traditional rituals of courtship and matrimony safely to their hegemonic terminus of the procreative couple in more or less rapt missionary embrace. Instead, the altered paradigm made the expertise of specialists more and more necessary in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and notably across the transactional spaces of street and domicile. With these transactional spaces, marked by the convergence of a cultural and no longer, strictly speaking, propertied bourgeoisie and a modern expert class, I locate the female and male modernist experts and their innovative versions of the novel form. To grasp this movement’s legacy, we need to understand its pursuit of expert accreditation and its censure of Victorian institutions in line with other disciplines. Given the scene from Freud’s Totem and Taboo that opened this chapter, I hardly need to stipulate that literary modernists were not the lone intruders onto the household scene or renovators of family romance. The intervention of other specialists intruded on the home, as those who study the sociology of the family and professions have belatedly affirmed. 17 The affective literacy that during the nineteenth century had accumulated in the middle-class household and left through its portals was by its end, as Anita Levy has alerted us, brought increasingly into the home by outside experts from disciplines as diverse as domestic science and sexology, transforming it and the social and sexual exchanges under its tutelage.18 This brief explanation is intended to suggest the two distinct but related challenges that intellectuals and artists faced by the end of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, they needed to claim a form of expertise or risk forfeiting their standing as cultural interpreters to specialists of other disciplines. Coupled with this, they also had to bring a social matrix in flux into their cultural orbit if their knowledge was to continue to carry any import. Modernists, however, proceeded without acknowledging their affiliation with specialists who subscribe to a logic that ensures the formation of elites and without acknowledging that

Women, Modernism, and the Cult of Experts 11

their knowledge stood on the very domestic ideology they debased. Literary modernists preferred instead to regard their highbrow esotericism as sui generis and their self-professed autonomy as the aesthetic entitlement of the artist caste. Subjugating the social realm and countering other specialists with their own expert knowledge were the incentives for male and female modernists and their successors to promote the value of their literary productions and their own prestige. The payoff was considerable. Constituted in and empowered by knowledges that classify desire, interpret human behavior, regulate consumption, and assign aesthetic value, these modernist experts came to produce the cultural capital preeminent in the arts that emerged as an exemplary medium of exchange and against which bourgeois identity would thereafter be judged. The intervention this book undertakes is to rethink the emergence of literary modernism in terms of the consolidation of the expert classes that led to their arrogation of the social order. What my reading will demonstrate is that modernist innovations in the novel became one singular means to oversee modern consciousness and to renovate the social matrix. In step with the expert class as it moves from dominated to dominant culture, these literary experts not only gained social consequence but also became the measure of cultural reproduction – of its own literary constituency and, more broadly, of the laity. To explain how this elite’s cultural capital came to prominence, I focus on the model of the female modernist that provides singular insight into the ascent of this surly band of experts and, perhaps more tellingly, makes clear that the social divide of public and private and, with it the old sexual apartheid, male and female, would henceforward never be the same.

I

Darwin’s garden and modern culture

In order to relate the changing position of women to the intellectual model and knowledge production I see immanent in modernist practice, I must first provide a sense of the altered Enlightenment paradigm that literary modernists confronted at the end of the nineteenth century and helped to actualize in the twentieth. To do so, I turn first to the evolutionary theories of the natural sciences coalescing around Charles Darwin’s name in the second half of the nineteenth century, theories that profoundly affected the Western imaginary and the direction of modernity. The simplest way to recapture the shaken perspective evolutionary thinking provoked is to recall that in Darwin’s garden – or more properly swamp – there are no Adams and Eves. Genealogical leveling


in evolutionary doctrine overturned the supernatural basis of separate creation, the divine imperative for human generation, and, just as unsettling, the division of the sexes that remained foundational to Enlightenment thinking. 19 These theories presented no original design to kinship, descent, or sexual division. Instead nature’s processes, viewed as both dynamic and unpredictable, worked unconsciously over time. Key to this evolutionary leveling was, moreover, the extraordinary contention that desire was the common force driving all living creatures to include humans, a contention all the more consequential since its absence or attenuation might well presage decline or, worse yet, extinction. With its new emphasis, Darwinism essentially turned humankind roughly on its head, making it equivalent to other species and making it subject to primal appetites, human or otherwise, that evolutionary theories could describe but neither anticipate nor answer for.20 In overwriting a divine and transcendent explanation of life with a scientific narrative based on the absolutism of desire and on a natural world that was both promiscuous and prodigal and not accountable for either, evolutionary thinking and methodology accelerated the production of knowledge and its secularization well beyond the field of the natural sciences. I will have more to say about this proliferation in a moment. For now, let me focus attention on the effect evolutionism had on sexual difference, for upon it rested Enlightenment thinking, gender ideology, and the bourgeois family, all of which are of special interest to this study. So ‘denaturalizing’ was Darwin’s theory of evolutionary monism in The Origin of Species to the model of absolute difference that the naturalist himself felt compelled to reinsert the division of the sexes as a natural category back into the evolutionary process in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex with his disquisition on sexual selection.21 Yet even this palliative could not entirely override the dysteleology integral to an evolutionary narrative and its effacement of separate sexes. As Cynthia Russett explains in Sexual Science, ‘difference had become a matter of degree not of kind’ (63). Evolutionary science reformulated absolute difference, the cornerstone for the dyad male and female, to a difference conditioned on divergence. And at the core of this divergence was idiosyncratic desire, nature’s lower-case synecdoche. Equally transformative then was the tacit construction of a new ontologically desiring subject that had no predetermined gender or sex. If one radical effect of evolutionism was upending sexual difference and declaiming desire as naturally constitutive, then, as Lawrence Birken notes in Consuming Desire, this epistemic change, whose shorthand might be expressed as the shift from mankind to humankind, encouraged


a whole host of new socioeconomic formations. The most revolutionary in his estimation is newly enfranchising women as subjects, which coheres, as all subjects are necessarily desiring ones. The counterpart of this shakeup is the undoing of the prevailing gendered model of economic rationality. Birken’s study perceptively connects the destabilization of sexual difference in evolutionary theory to the weakening of the beau ideal of the Enlightenment polity and its classificatory epistemology – the rational and propertied male, homo economicus – which was then being rethought in neoclassical economics. Convergent with and crucial to Darwinism’s secularizing metamorphosis in the natural sciences is the system of transience that marks the incipient consumer model in economic theory which would recast commercial capitalism in the 1870s and beyond. As evolutionary theories come to speculate on the subjective or unconscious forces underlying human nature, so too do marginal economic theories speculate on similar forces underlying the political economy, with both arriving at strikingly similar narratives that posit desire as innate to humankind. Regenia Gagnier has also focused on this correspondence in The Insatiability of Human Wants in which she documents the shift away from production and labor as the prime determinants of value, as Adam Smith had put forward, to the reconsideration of value based on demand theorized by the marginalists W. Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger. Demand or self-interest was certainly a motivation in classical economics, as Gagnier points out and as Albert Hirschman makes clear in his history of the gradual semantic transformation of avarice and vice in intellectual thought into the less-offensive concept of enlightened self-interest. 22 Political economists led by Smith rationalized raw demand by finding in it a moral end. If left unhindered, Smith held, individual or group interests would compete in equilibrium so that one interest would not only balance another but in concert would also produce wealth for the nation and thereby advance the public good. When the emphasis in economics shifts away from the staples of labor and the production of wealth to a stricter focus on demand and consumption, crucially stripped away, according to Gagnier, is the balancing of multiple interests, however tenuous the logic, and the collective good that resulted. Marginal economists radically upset Smith’s rational, mechanistic, and self-governing universe and the moral component of commercial nationalism to focus attention instead on the inconstant and changeable habits of discrete individuals who desire and consume. What remains in the absence of Smith’s classical


equilibrium appears strikingly like Darwin’s monistic universe of promiscuous desire. This renovated system converts Smith’s balancing act into one based on a ratio of pleasure to pain, which pivots not on a moral order but on the disorder of opposing appetites. ‘Pleasure and pain’, wrote Jevons in The Theory of Political Economy, ‘are undoubtedly the ultimate objects of the Calculus of Economics [ . . . ] – to procure the greatest amount of what is desirable at the expense of the least that is undesirable – in other words, to maximize pleasure, is the problem of Economics’ (37, original emphasis). Accordingly, when pleasure exists in greater proportion to pain, value accrues no matter the labor or the quality, intensity, or duration required for production. Moreover whatever affords pleasure, whether immediate, anticipated, or even illusory, forthwith constitutes a commodity: ‘By a commodity’, Jevons explains, ‘we shall understand any object, substance, action, or service, which can afford pleasure or ward off pain’ (38, original emphasis). The emphasis on a quantifiable ratio between the pleasure promised by a commodity, versus the amount of labor or pain expended to acquire it, enormously expanded what could be categorized as a commodity, so that labor too becomes classed as a commodity. Even more, the changed emphasis also effectively hierarchized value. Demands easily satisfied have less worth, so the reasoning goes, as do the commodities that cater to them, and, conversely, demands not easily satisfied and commodities that are scarce have greater worth and become more desirable. Here is the important insight of Gagnier’s study – marginalists discursively justify a hierarchy of value constituted in and by an aesthetics of enjoyment. As Jevons articulated it: ‘The highest grade in the scale of wants, that of pleasure derived from beauties of nature and art, is usually confined to men who are exempted from all the lower privations. Thus the demand for, and the consumption of, objects of refined enjoyment has its lever in the facility with which the primary wants are satisfied’ (42–43). With the individual’s ever-improving tastes then is to be found the good life to be lived and the surviving vestige of the public good. ‘Modern man’, observes Gagnier, ‘would henceforth be known by the insatiability of his desires, and Others on the road to modernity needed only to be inspired by envy to desire his desires, to imitate his wants to be on the road to his progress and his civilization. His nature, insatiability, was henceforth human nature itself. His mode, consumer society, was no longer one stage of human progress but its culmination and its end’ (94, original emphasis). The valuation and elevation of taste, in effect, become the impetus for a class organized around pleasure, commodity display, and consumption. We see in gestation here both the necessity


for new knowledge production and the formation of the civilized class who will be its prime beneficiary. A hedonistic calculus of desire that claims to objectify individual desire and to subject it to mathematical rigor, Gagnier thus points out, belies the subjective criteria and finite focus at its center. 23 What appears to emerge then is a renovated individual organized within a complex economic system based on the insatiate urge to consume, and where possible more and more tastefully, and a nexus of desires expressive of a dynamic natural world. Evolutionism, we might say, works to legitimate the very desire-driven individual that commodity capitalism seeks out, and neoclassical economics lends credence to the scientific theories premised on a desiring subject. One singular manifestation of this new epistemic and economic concordance lies with a discourse that Gagnier references in her text. 24 I refer here to the language of choice that proliferates within the social lexicon under consumerism. Its vocabulary, now so ubiquitous as to be hypervisible, animates the measures of economic vitality and informs everything from mundane merchandise and brand names to human reproduction, love objects, and, even of late, death itself under an explanatory structure grounded in idiosyncratic desire. A culture of choice, whether for product, procreation, partner, profession, or for a painless finish to the foregoing, depends, however, on desire being understood as fundamental to the individual and on choice as a constitutive natural exercise. Two of the most voluble formulations of ‘choice’ idiom and logic reside, I suggest, in Darwin’s theories: the aforementioned natural selection and sexual selection. In both instances, choice, cloaked in a scientific argot, appears as a biological device that governs first species’ potency and then more blatantly affirms an individual’s or group’s preeminence or fitness to thrive.25 In making a discourse of choice fundamental to evolutionary doctrine, the natural sciences, I suggest, helped to validate an economy of the desiring individual native to markets organized around the display and consumption of goods. Choice in evolutionism legitimates the choice in consumerism that we have come to experience as a tenet of modern culture, and, indeed, evolutionism might even be read as its epistemic prolegomenon. 26 Yet in making this point, I should also not fail to observe the vestige of sexual dimorphism that returns in Darwin’s theory of sexual selection in Descent of Man, however skewed its rhetoric. In effect, evolutionism’s abrading of absolute sexual difference is mitigated and the diluted sexual hierarchy is rehabilitated with the invidious results that researchers and scholars have been at pains to document over the past 50 years.27 With


a scientific foundation, the revived asymmetry of the sexes functioned by biologizing ‘others’ on two distinct but complementary levels – one of the individual and one of the community – that refigured the contours of the old sexual division with these conspicuous results. The male bourgeoisie of Western nations could now be esteemed as the more developed form evolved from a common base. The nations, classes, races, populations, or sex alleged to be ‘un’ or ‘under’ developed were systematically classified as inferior specimens occupying a less advanced stage of the same common base, while, conversely, those construed as ‘over’ or ‘hyper’ differentiated were by turns judged degenerative or in decline. Darwin’s ‘horizontal’ great chain of being restructured the two-tiered sex system into a continuum stretching from the primitive to the degenerate, leaving the normative middle to the bourgeois male. 28 In the process, Darwin, his contemporaries, and their successors in biology and in the new disciplines of psychology, sociology, and anthropology thereby necessitated proliferative regimes and languages of control, as Michel Foucault has theorized, in which bodies were stigmatized and then systematically singled out for coercive and invasive practices that ensured they remained, but at the periphery.29 Still and all, the architecture of this refiguration and its epistemological logic fundamentally dislodge, as Birken makes clear, the last remaining bulwark of difference. That it has taken 50 years to challenge the normative middle, not to mention the classifications ranked on either side of it, suggests just how radical a refiguration evolutionism initiated. Male and female are ever more changed in the Western imaginary as a consequence. There are two repercussions missing in Birken’s democratizing history of the enfranchisement of women and the dissolution of homo economicus that warrant attention as they bear directly on the argument of this book. Replacing the Enlightenment’s rational producer with the desiring or sexualized individual meant also dislocating the economic male’s ideological consort, the domestic woman and her standing in sexual difference. While his privileged realm may have provided the reason, self-interest, and production that drove a capitalist economy, hers was, by contrast, the social realm of the family that structured identity, socialized the individual, regulated courtship, and reproduced the family. These were no small matters for their aggregate enabled the reproduction and nurture of a labor force, the seemly transfer of property between families and generations, and the social stability necessary for industrial development, imperial expansion, and national cohesion. The upshot of the middle-class woman’s post-Darwinian emancipation


as a desiring subject then is no less momentous, though nowhere present in Birken’s intellectual history. Its effects were experienced on both sides of drawing-room doors that had long contained under an emotive rubric the class conflicts and imperial aggression that enabled national and imperial hegemony. Cashier the domestic woman, and the net effect is to compromise the stability that held the nation-state together. Commingle public with private, and the net effect is a new amalgam of modern culture and of sexual differentiation, an amalgam that requires new knowledges and classes to manage its social reproduction. This brings me to the second consequence missing in Birken’s intellectual history. The liberatory narrative, enabled by the modern permeability of the sexes with all its radical potential and with the onerous effects referenced above, remains incomplete if we do not likewise acknowledge the enfranchisement of the expert only tacit in Birken’s and Gagnier’s studies. Experts will produce the knowledges that codify and regulate the new engine of desire, its reign, and its aesthetic expression. Their expertise provides the basis for the formation of a new cultural class.30 The class of specialists that materializes then within a professional and not a social milieu, which arises in response to the epistemic and economic transformation I am calling modern culture, will nonetheless take the private arenas of home and human consciousness as prized loci of its disciplinary mandate. Understand this, and we can begin to appreciate more fully what the dispossession of the domestic woman from orthodox monogamy and a household economy entailed, as well as the far-reaching consequences evolutionary thought occasioned.

II

The expert mandarinite and the culture of desire

The putative democratization that toppled the old bourgeois couple and their consensual parturition of public and private in favor of modern culture’s polymorphously desiring individual has, more often than not, been derisively termed the dystopia of the all-consuming woman, to paraphrase Rita Felski’s pointed coupling of gender and modernity at the turn of the nineteenth century (Gender of Modernity 88). Notwithstanding this belittling figure and its persistence, there is another way to frame this succession that may partly exculpate its negative associations if not recuperate woman’s categorical signification outright. Birken’s substitution of desire and consumption for the prior differentials of enlightened self-interest and wealth fails to credit the logical inference subtending them both that in turn occludes that


which grounds Enlightenment ideology, its deployment and efficacy. A reexamination should help make clear the logic common to both. As noted earlier, the convergence of evolutionism and economics signals to Birken a revision of the Enlightenment polity by superseding its old paradigm of homo economicus founded on the separation of the sexes. Under its dominion, all men were deemed equal on the grounds of their rationality and productivity. Yet it nonetheless distinguished among men on the basis of what they produced and amassed. The amount of property men accumulated tempered the principle of male equality. Wealth provided the mechanism for differentiating among men or groups of men that in turn spurred the formation of economic classes. Such differentiation produced and then kept intact the power of prosperous elites.31 Because material variations were quantitative, however, rather than qualitative, and hence neither permanent nor absolute, they could be ascribed a transience that concealed the structural disparity in their accretion. So in theory at least, the boundaries that separated one man from another or one class of men from another were not fixed but permeable. Paradoxically, however, even though the wealth acquired was quantitative, it nevertheless acquired qualitative status by providing ostensibly objective evidence of such qualities as merit and respectability. While these attributes were never categorical, wealth nevertheless came to measure not simply a man’s worth but, more significantly, a man’s worthiness. In this way, the earthly emancipation that equality promised every individual male could be continually idealized and at the same time indefinitely deferred by the measurable criteria of wealth and property – so, in short, the wealthier the man, the more he counted and vice versa. This privileging of quantity is surely what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have in mind when they assert in their seminal work: ‘number became the canon of the Enlightenment’ (7). Individuals were not so much granted equality as made equivalent by ‘reducing [the dissimilar] to abstract quantities’ (7). Horkheimer and Adorno even go so far as to define the bourgeoisie as ‘ruled by equivalence’ (7). It is this logic of equivalence, I argue, that is latent in constructions of the individual and that continues to undergird the class system. Understood this way, class bias, the effluvium of a wealthy elite, was and remains the underside of Enlightenment commonalty. Under a universalist rhetoric of equality that masks a logic of equivalence, Enlightenment ideology in essence promotes the formation of elites that acquire and assert ascendancy by a complex process of conversion, appropriation, and displacement. Every apparent extension of equality leads not to the


purported outcome of greater inclusiveness but rather to a redefinition of equivalence and the replacement of existing elites. Enlightenment thinking may be regarded as remarkable, therefore, not for the ideals it professes, but for its supple logic and the elites such logic enables, whether the collectivity is mankind or its subsequent dilation under evolutionism, humankind. This extension is the context in which to begin to assess the postindustrial ephebe of the Enlightenment polity previously referenced. To recap, when the Enlightenment homo economicus that designated property and rationality as the exclusive domains of the male was abraded by epistemic and economic changes, the sexual division that had buttressed the ideology was likewise compromised, so that sex and desire became folded into the economy in an unprecedented way. In principle, the division of the sexes became as permeable as the division of the classes, and women became newly enfranchised as individuals. Whereas the industrial economy, according to Birken, had produced man as its exemplary subject and rational producer, the new economy, that which he terms a ‘sexonomy’, appointed woman its incipient subject, rendering her, I suggest, both the excrescence of desire and the agent of choice.32 A society that redefines individuality on the basis of ubiquitous desire, and not exclusively on the acquisition of property, grants the female sex (and her offspring a potentia) the status of full subjects. What had previously been limited to male wealth and enlightenment is now extended to female sex and desire, and modern culture yields a domain in which sex, desire, choice, and consumption are axial. Yet, this later instance of ostensibly greater equality also carries with it a recharacterization of Enlightenment equivalence. Reading from Darwinian evolutionism to aesthetic modernism, what Noel Annan, the biographer of the Victorian Leslie Stephen, has called the ‘secularization of public life’, let me suggest that the course of thought which advances the all-consuming woman as the prototype of the new economic and social alloy of modern culture also instates the model for a new elite and middle-class: the modern expert and the cultural bourgeoisie. 33 The establishment of this cadre and class has already received considerable scholarly treatment at the hands of those who study the sociology of the professions, Harold Perkin, Magali Sarfatti Larson, Pierre Bourdieu, Alvin Gouldner, John Guillory, Burton Bledstein, John Carey, and Barbara and John Ehrenreich.34 They corroborate that the consolidation of an expert class of intellectuals and technocrats, whose service to the propertied classes of merchants and industrialists had gradually broadened over some three centuries, made


possible the secularism manifest at the end of the nineteenth century. As Perkin importantly observes, these specialists made themselves increasingly essential to governance to such an extent that their knowledges and disciplines eventually assumed the status of property – so-called ‘cultural capital’ established their authority, repaid them liberally, and granted them prestige (Professionalism 5–11). According to Gouldner: The special privileges and powers of the New Class [of experts] are grounded in their individual control of special cultures, languages, techniques, and of the skills resulting from these. The New Class is a cultural bourgeoisie who appropriates privately the advantages of an historically and collectively produced cultural capital. (19, original emphasis) Particularly telling about Perkin’s and Gouldner’s ‘New Class’ is that its knowledges become transformed into material assets. Though imparted as objective social or scientific verities, these knowledges are ultimately quantified as types of property that yield yet another mechanism for differentiation, another apparatus for division into ‘elect’ and ‘nonelected’ that is characteristic of the logic of equivalence. Knowledge converts experts into ‘knowledge proprietors’, and confers upon them authority and prestige over those lacking such knowledge – and not only those below them in power or status, it should be noted, but those above them as well. Even Matthew Arnold, the evangelist of the cultural bourgeoisie, acknowledged the split of the middle-class into a business and expert class as early as 1868, though he significantly, as Perkin records, ‘left the professional class out of his tripartite division of society into “barbarians”, “philistines”, and “populace”’ (Professionalism 4–5n8). Despite the omission, the cultural property that its acquired knowledge and expertise amounted to became, according to Perkin, ‘more tangible than corporate shareholdings, less destructible than many forms of material property, and capable of self-renewal and improvement in skills and expertise’ ( Professionalism 12). Expertise yielded, in brief, income, autonomy, and independence. 35 Of utmost importance to my argument, however, is what this capital enabled. The knowledge-based mandarinate became responsible at all levels for the social reproduction of the nation-state: by the growing dependence on its cultural and technical tutelage of both the dominant and the dominated classes; by the training that it organized and regulated to reproduce its class of experts; and, significantly, by the insertion of its special knowledge into workplace and household. Among this list


of particulars over which experts assumed responsibility, we should not fail to note, is the one over which the domestic woman had formerly exercised near exclusive office – the institution of the family and the socialization of the individual. One especially striking aspect of the insertion of knowledge into private and public domains is experts’ claimed exemption from the contested arena of narrow class interests that recalls the domestic woman’s own alleged immunity from conflict and public scrutiny within the confines of the home. As we now know, however, her apolitical control of emotional, reproductive, and social transactions effectively screened political conflicts and class friction from social consciousness for the benefit of her own class of propertied bourgeoisie. So too does such misdirection appear to serve the special interests of the modern expert class. Indeed, Mary Poovey contends that the separate sphere model that supported the cult of domesticity is the same structural form on which the expert class bases its exclusionary prerogative (149). 36 Congruent with the domestic household, experts’ professed autonomy and neutrality insulates them from the classes differentiated by their relations to production, making expert social and technical knowledges appear resistant to external review and regulation. To take one literary assertion of exemption, we have T.S. Eliot’s famous dodge on class relations when he averred that ‘[t]he cleric himself should be partly, though not altogether, emancipated from the class into which he is born; an out-caste’ (‘On the Place’ 243). To this, Eliot noted the advantage that the ‘out-caste’ position allowed the literary expert ‘to be critical of, and subversive of, the class in power’ (241). Eliot appears to recognize that the pivotal position of objective analyst or counselor meant that the expert class could legitimately criticize and instigate reform of those above and below it in power and wealth, as Perkin notes, and still claim to be apolitical itself (Professionalism 13). Put another way, if we understand knowledge to be a social or cultural construction, then its implementation gave this secular elite authority over the ruling classes and their subordinates that in turn validated its position and rewarded it with a status that accorded it a measure of dominance. When we add to this process the claim of literary modernists to be the arbiters and interpreters of aesthetic and emotional truth, then Eliot’s assertion of out-caste privilege becomes more compelling, and the parallel to the cult of domesticity all the more credible. As later chapters will demonstrate, literary modernists take the domestic woman’s ideological con of screening her social disciplinary apparatus under the cover of subjective truth into new territory with their artistic innovations such


as the aestheticization of interiority that asserts knowledge of modern consciousness and makes it available for a cultural constituency. And we can chart the maneuver because, despite their esoteric language and creative innovations, they unwittingly announce this legerdemain by their conspicuous management of maternal signification that invariably makes the domestic woman’s expiration a central trope of their narratives, almost as if in parting obeisance to their deposed precursor. This postmaternal ploy of what I earlier referred to as the spectral mors matris turns up with such regularity in the middle of Anglo-modernist narratives – Mmes Henderson, Wilcox, Moore, Dedalus, and Ramsay notably and precipitately expire; Mrs Dalloway’s health is in decline, and Mrs Bolton, as previously noted, is a dated fill-in – that it well-nigh forms a veritable sign of the household’s evacuation, ideological and material, and of modernists’ ambitions to supplant its agency with their own and the domestic woman’s social knowledge with their more worldly cultural knowledge. To put these readings in the context developed above, while the Darwinian republic of desire was all-inclusive, its administration and stewards were not. Mediators to the other classes, monitors of their own autonomy and standards, and possessors of intellectual and cultural capital, observes Gouldner, made this new class, as I suggested earlier, fundamentally anti-egalitarian (20). This new republic, the latest extension of the Enlightenment logic of equivalence, gave rise to a privileged elite based on the production and control of knowledge. 37 In this capacity, the expert class oversaw the dominion of desire and fashioned and dispensed the very languages of desire that we can distinguish in discourses of law, medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and in media from the arts to commercial advertising, all of which helped constitute a cultural bourgeoisie. Yet there is another critical dimension to expert ascription that requires our attention. No matter how powerful, the authority of this secular elite was never absolute but limited in several material respects that bear significantly on my argument. For one, this new class of specialists came to prominence in part because, the Ehrenreichs reason, of a surplus of capital (14), or, as Daniel Cottom has more practically characterized it, because money got turned into culture (9). In other words, commercial and industrial wealth financed its knowledges but with this added complication. These knowledges were not of themselves productive. Experts, despite their professed aloofness (their invisibility, objectivity, and neutrality), were by their very construction vulnerable because dependent on the worth granted their knowledges. The vitality


of the expert classes was contingent on their knowledges being judged both relevant and generative. This contingency made for a kind of congenital transience that not only disclosed experts’ vulnerability but also made apparent that their knowledge had to be continually updated, renewed, and justified. Such contingency likewise suggests that any knowledge, in spite of its lofty truth-telling office, also functioned as a commodity to be traded on the market with other consumables, which is the vulgar obverse of its privilege as intellectual or cultural capital (Gouldner 34). As John Guillory has put the matter: ‘knowledge, like money, is only capital when it is capitalized, when it produces the effect of embourgeoisement; and conversely, that knowledge can be devalued in such a way that its possessors become indistinguishable from wage-labor’ (125, original emphasis). Jevons too classed knowledge among his list of commodities. Following neoclassical economic nomenclature, class status derives then not from experts’ knowledge per se but rather from their knowledge being deemed valuable, which leads me to the next point. Anxiety over the worth of expertise and over the necessity for innovation only exaggerated what was already intrinsic to this class: the desire to establish its place within the socioeconomic hierarchy. Serviceoriented and income-dependent experts were under more pressure than their betters, the propertied bourgeoisie, to convert their salaries into vendibles that would affirm their rank, making experts, like the common consumer, reliant not so much on property and investment but, as Birken contends, on credit and income stream (123–24). These were the precise bases of exchange closest at hand for an expert class and the ones best suited for an economy organized around the disaccumulation of income for the accumulation of things and status. So as part of its occupational position, the expert classes aimed at acquiring, according to Gouldner, ‘both incomes and quality objects’ (20, original emphasis). Lacking the property of the dominant class or the crafts and skills of the laboring class, experts disposed their income and used their credit to accumulate objects that would in turn verify their power and prestige. Their commodity display confirms status in an economy in which, as Rosalind Williams aptly explains, ‘objects of consumption no longer related to a social hierarchy externally defined; instead, they became themselves the hierarchy’ (184). And ‘quality things’ meant not only obtaining the authentic or rare object but also included everything, in Magali Sarfatti Larson’s view, from acquiring the proper accent to choosing the correct attire. Thus, ironically, to solidify their status involved the same processes of reification, that is, status gained through commodity


purchase, that many of these same experts were directly responsible for provoking. In this respect, far from being the ‘out-caste’, above or outside other classes as Eliot perceived, experts were utterly enmeshed in the cultural world of vendibles and the republic of desire that they chartered both for their livelihood and for their identity. Their occupations and occupational standing depended on it. In consequence, the arts to include the literary arts, whose material effects Eliot dubs ‘clerical produce’, were precisely situated to gratify and stimulate what can best be described as experts’ cultural dependency.38 Thus the dystopia of consumption, that aspersion Felski so rightly discerns, was hardly unique to women. The denigration of consumption might be better understood as the defensive stratagem of the cultural bourgeoisie used by elites, to include modernists and experts, to deflect their own entanglement in commerce and consumption onto the collectivity woman, and, through disavowal, to promote their own ‘untainted’ class interests. The incitement to consume, I suggest, is as evident in the modernist credo ‘faire nouveau’, the exemplary imperative of a modern culture driven by innovation and harried by obsolescence, as it is in modernists’ unabashed self-promotion of the timeless and universal properties of the art objects that they offered for sale to wealthy patrons and their own knowledgeable cohorts. Ultimately, the dystopia of consumption is too pervasive to be reduced to the signifier ‘woman’. This corrective requires another. I should specify at this juncture that women’s role in the formation of the expert class, while momentous, was made tenuous, as was their role in literary modernism, by virtue of the recalcitrant asymmetry of the sexes. Here I must acknowledge the apparent paradox of claiming both the end of sexual difference and the enfranchisement of women by stipulating that epistemic and economic shifts do not eliminate outright long-followed material practices and formerly ascendant ideological orthodoxies of biological reproduction and social nurturing. These practices and systems persist, but they should not divert attention away from recognizing and articulating the numerous ways in which old verities, such as sexual difference, no longer apply, and, moreover, why and how this is so. Having acknowledged this apparent contradiction, I must also acknowledge the commonplace that, on the whole, the expert class was institutionally gendered male. Its members, however, were not only the descendants of the well-to-do classes whose wealth and prestige, not to mention influence over recruitment and promotion protocols, would lend them distinct advantage. Aspirants also came from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie in which, as quoted of Gouldner earlier, ‘both incomes and quality objects’ would be occupational incentives. 39 Yet


this upward spiral of class advancement still left women at a decided disadvantage. Even when they attempted to gain entry through those domains in which they had a proprietary interest or prior claim, by taking advantage, for example, of the social authority formerly granted to them in the household, they met encumbrance. Fields like teaching or nursing identified with the home did not garner the same status as those fields in which men were preponderant, but on the contrary, the Ehrenreichs explain, came to be regarded as auxiliary disciplines, further evidence of the depreciation of the household economy (27). The marginalization of these fields then, which Poovey regards as intrinsic to professional ascendancy, directly affected women who attempted to transform their local specialties into expert knowledge. 40 Moreover, not until the twentieth century were the established professions – law, medicine, the university – fully opened to women. Even after, middleclass women who gained entrance were regularly regarded with suspicion or disdain, since their very presence made palpable the tensions between the sexes and spheres that had been intensifying from the latter half of the nineteenth century forward as Victorian social cohesion weakened. 41 Indeed, the impediments aspiring women faced within their families and without in admission, training, accreditation, and employment have been carefully documented and serve as an ongoing caveat.42 Notwithstanding, in the opening decades of the last century, as the expert classes were erecting the standards that would define their autonomy and grant their specializations authority in the decades to come, we can note a perceptible shift in the attitudes and expectations among female applicants that distinguish them from a domestic antecedent. 43 Whereas the women of the previous generation had represented their aspirations in the austere terms of service to long hours, low wages, slow promotions, of male colleagues’ jealousy and contempt, and of family rejection, the generations of the new century coded their ambitions differently. While hardships and barriers persisted, the familiar Victorian tropes of service, altruism, modesty, self-restraint, and toil gave way to the more assertive ones of independence, autonomy, status, income, and choice. Though women’s circumstances may have improved only incrementally, their ambitions and expectations underwent a dramatic alteration. In place of the previous generation’s perception of self-sacrifice, the subsequent one’s expectation was self-fulfillment. This shift in women’s motivation – the claim to individual status, the desire for achievement, the pursuit of self-interest, and the right to refuse or postpone marriage and family – is characteristic of the changed paradigm of the desiring subject and its republican elect, the cultural bourgeoisie. 44


Absolutely crucial to women’s changed prospects, as Birken allows, was the fact that sex was naturalized differently in the post-Darwin epoch – with difference being, as I indicated above, no longer absolute and with choice gaining prominence as the fundamental exercise of innate human desire. It remains to recall that women, in order to win admission, were perforce required to distinguish themselves by acceding to new hierarchies of differentiation, if not of absolute difference – such as intelligence or aptitude, for instance – that all too easily, implicitly or explicitly, worked to conceal or naturalize other differentials such as race or class privilege. In this respect, incipient female experts did not differ from their white and middle-class male peers. Expert accreditation placed selected women in a class of their own separated from nonselected women, which demonstrates once more how overdetermined is the collectivity woman. 45 Women, I am suggesting, became experts by the same logic as that which produced men, making both complicit with structures of domination active over the past century. When this correspondence is enfolded into the genealogy of modern professionalism, we might say that male and female experts were empowered by a logic of equivalence that worked by establishing new protocols of exclusion around the production and dissemination of knowledge to compensate for the equality occasioned by the erosion of the sexual hierarchy. 46 To follow the Ehrenreichs’ line of argument, this ascendance of the expert classes worked by ‘the suppression of skills and functions which had been indigenous to working class women and men’ – that specialists then appropriated (319). Larson describes the process still more blatantly as one in which ‘producers of special services sought to constitute and control a market for their expertise’ (xvi, original emphasis). For her, expert culture ‘inaugurated a new form of structured inequality’, the implementation of which ‘prefigure[d] the general restructuring of social inequality in contemporary capitalist societies’. Expert ascription, in her view, is the structure of ‘modern inequality’ (xvii). Monopoly of expertise, structured inequality, confiscation and suppression of local knowledges, such logic and terms surely describe the ethos of literary modernism, not only by my calculation but by its own, with its elitism, claims of technical and aesthetic mastery, insistence on autonomy and rupture with the past, and an experimental practice patterned on scientific inquiry. All of the preceding suggest that the modernist elite, men and women alike, consistent with other experts, operated by assimilating and subjugating less knowledgeable groups in order to assert its own authority. And it is the argument of this book that,


because of its importance to social reproduction, the social space of the middle-class household became one significant target of expert appropriation.

III

Modernist expertise and the novel

Putting the foregoing together, I want to propose that the expansion of an expert class and of a culture increasingly defined by consumption comes together most markedly in the person of the female modernist. Her figure is ideally positioned to make legible the imbrication of the modernist Eliot’s ‘out-caste’ elite and its professed other, the putative dystopic consumer culture, the destination of his ‘clerical produce’. In spite of considerable obstacles, material and ideological, the female intellectual provides a singular means to apprehend the extraordinary impression made on the public imaginary by what critics and scholars would subsequently come to esteem as ‘high-end’ modernism. This female figure, as the ‘natural’ heir of the bourgeois matriarch, supplies a critical missing term in understanding the attenuation of sexual difference and the proliferation of sexualities, the derogation of domestic ideology and the reorganization of social spaces, the secularization of knowledge and the enfranchisement of experts, and the emergence of a worldly and metropolitan culture, all of which, I contend, characterize literary modernism. To make these connections visible, this study first considers the experimental works of the intellectual Woolf that expressly treat the effects of Victorian domestic dispossession and the emergence of women in spaces outside of the bourgeois household. Over two chapters I trace the measures that Woolf undertakes to establish her credentials as a modernist and her prestige in the field of literature, from which she then summons a rising generation of women to join her. I begin with her most overlooked manifesto of modernity that willfully violates household autonomy, the founding of Hogarth Press with spouse Leonard in the drawing room of their home. With the means of literary production in house, as it were, she pointedly abandons both the New Woman aesthetic of early novels and a flirtation with franchise reform as instruments of emancipation. In the experimental Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse that follow, Woolf makes manifest her new aesthetic and feminist allegiances by nostalgizing the domestic realm that, in effect, transforms the usurped parlor into a literary exhibition of domestic reliquary that signals its decease. By turning her aestheticized domestic heroines (Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay) into commodified relics of a past epoch, Woolf also signally invites women tout court into


the production and consumption of culture – a process she whimsically pursues in her pseudo-biography Orlando, in which manor house changes into an intellectual palace and an aristocratic-versifying youth metamorphoses into a modern female artist, a process she explains polemically in A Room of One’s Own. From the logic of the expert it is but a short step to the cult of the expert as her 1931 speech ‘Professions for Women’ demonstrates. Here Woolf baldly, if belatedly, murders the Angel in the House, the paradigm of the Victorian household, and thereby bids farewell to the domestic governance under the old Enlightenment division of gendered spheres. With her next breath, she urges the descendants of the deposed matriarch to join her in the professions. From the demise of the domestic woman arises the authority of the modernist intellectual. This figurative execution announces Woolf’s command over the emotional domain as an innovator of the novel and graphically asserts that one form of local know-how has now been superseded by a more worldly form, her own aesthetic knowledge. These moves suggest an awareness of where power now resides and how cultural reproduction will function in the decades to come. The moment of modernist expertise I locate in Woolf’s intellectual model is turned to different purposes by E.M. Forster and James Joyce, as I demonstrate in a separate chapter on each. Here I resume the claim begun with Woolf that the modernist novel inaugurated a new sensorium of body and consciousness that in effect offered both cognoscenti and common readers a modern language to learn, a new way of knowing themselves as discrete individuals and as a cultural aggregate. For Forster, the model of the female intellectual offers insight into the way the novelist can at once disown, appropriate, and then master the feminine. In examining his early fiction, especially his bildungsroman The Longest Journey, I show that Forster takes the aesthetic pairing of the sexual and affective from the Classical Studies that socialized him at Cambridge out of the social space of the university and with it hellenizes the domestic novel. He effectively traduces the romanticized social contract of institutionalized monogamy and the domestic woman’s power over it with a same-sex amative and affective alliance. Thereafter in his two most celebrated novels, Howards End and A Passage to India, and most clearly in his one ‘out’ novel, Maurice, this alliance instates what I term an erotic genealogy that legitimates his literary credentials and beckons those who share his sexual passion and cultivation to a queered cultural class. In the case of Joyce, immigration to the Continent, consistent with the modernist diaspora, triggers the exilic allegory of his accreditation


as an artist and occasions the mythifying apparatus that allows him to master domestic governance and the literate culture of two empires, British and Roman, to produce a third more cosmopolitan culture. In his fictional experiments in Dubliners, but most fully in Ulysses, Joyce establishes the primacy of this Irish male modernist by corporealizing the Anglo middle-class woman’s social power as Irish lower-class woman’s libido in order to assert his subaltern Bloom’s humanity as the new aestheticized sensibility of metropolitan culture. Bloomian humanism, Joyce’s politics of affect, in essence, reterritorializes the social realm so that the everywoman Molly Bloom, the avatar of desire, need not quit her bed. Under this new sexual and affective regime, even visual media (plastic arts, photography, and cinema) will have to account for this ‘universal’ language of interiorized motivation. Deploying the same logic as the expert class – to wit the logic of assimilating and subjugating less knowledgeable groups to assert the authority of its expertise over the social realm – this modernist elite helps to put in perspective the aesthetic language, technical innovation, and signifying system that enable the cultural reproduction of desiring subjects into desirable objects, which returns me to the opening and to Freud’s and Lawrence’s concupiscent narratives. Given the cult of the expert and the epistemic and economic changes that motivated them, we are now perhaps better positioned to discern that modernists were not the victims of an overbearing Victorian society as their works relentlessly aver, but, pace Foucault’s hypothesis, were rather producers of a repressive tropology that justified their interventions in household autonomy and sanctioned their expert remedies. 47 Scorning the domain of the feminine, modernists also magnified and appropriated it – the emotional field, physical body, courtship rituals, conjugal and familial relations – not because it emotionally inhibited some truer ontological or more natural self but because its discursive range supported paradigms that were deemed obsolete, among them the propertied and procreative bourgeois couple and their ideological limit of the two-sphered and sexed divisions. Over these, modernists would write their own narratives of human agency that effectively transformed epistemology (special know-how) into ontology (subject identification). That Freud’s myth of the Oedipus Complex turns up in our everyday language or that Lawrence’s novel has lost its shock value as a steamy bourgeois romance of heterosexual incontinence should not lead us to lose sight in this new century of the contest over meaning in which modernists patently participated in the last. The renovated social matrix in which difference is no longer strictly a matter of kind, to paraphrase


Cynthia Russet’s observation quoted earlier, but a matter of degree, and the prospect of pleasure no longer a secondary entitlement suggest the charge that experts, to include those who wrote novels, confronted and sought to narrate in the early decades of the past century and thereafter. To flag these introductory remarks to their close, we might say that whichever gamekeeper we choose to privilege, Oliver Mellors or his more junior predecessor, Alec Scudder of Maurice, it is clear that modern individuals, under a lately fashioned continuum of desire, looked to new narratives of self and humankind by which to know themselves and one another. To this commission, expert modernists, loitering at the doorway of the home as they were with others of their kind, were only too eager to step forward. With the model of the female intellectual, this book thus encourages a reassessment of modernism and the modernist novel, the function of difference in the formation of elites, and the representation of modern spaces infused with new referents for sexuality, humanity, and emotional truth – and this to understand how it was that modernist expertise came to operate centrally in what emerged as the dominant language and culture of the twentiethcentury subject.

2 Retailing the Female Intellectual

‘Our press arrived on Tuesday’, Virginia Woolf writes to her sister Vanessa Bell in April 1917. ‘We unpacked it with enormous excitement, finally with Nelly’s help, carried it into the drawing room, set it on its stand’ (Letters 2: 150). Consider, if you will, the import. Well before the Mmes Brown, Dalloway, or Ramsay, well before A Room of One’s Own, ‘Women and Fiction’, and ‘Professions for Women’, Woolf violates the sanctity of the drawing room, that symbolic locus of middle-class domesticity, by installing a printing press. The inkpot hurled at the Angel in the House some 14 years later in ‘Professions for Women’ seems, by comparison, positively quaint. Indeed, the angel’s death recorded there, ‘The Angel . . . so tormented me that at last I killed her’, ought to be read as a rather belated habeas corpus (CE 2: 285). The founding of the press, I argue, is an act at least as lethal as the angel’s figural strangulation and, in effect, is more empowering. Yet here this press has sat under our collective critical noses, so to speak, these many years, in the middle of the Woolfs’ parlor. What critics have long observed is that the printing press freed this female novelist to pursue her artistic experiments unfettered by the marketplace. What they have overlooked is the modernist’s sanctified artistic autonomy ensconced with art’s commodification at the epicenter of domesticity. This is no small oversight. The putative distance between the technology of crass capitalism and the artist’s garret studio is breached in 1917, in, of all places, the drawing room. So thoroughly has the explanatory power of Woolf’s fictive murder of the Angel in the House been naturalized within the literary canon that it has obscured the logic by which this nascent modernist published within her home domestic novels that aestheticize and commodify the very space she confiscated. 1 To trace this logic requires attention to the historical moment in which Woolf 31


was writing as well as to her actions, explanations, and creative fictions. For if, as the novelist would later insist, ‘[k]illing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer’ (‘Professions’ 286), then the press effectively advances literary production at the expense of domestic autonomy. More than figural death threat, by issuing the new literary art of aesthetic modernism, Hogarth Press provides the material means to replace domestic governance. The decision to establish the press in the parlor is part of Woolf’s active engagement in constructing a successor, one who will broker the social reproduction that was for so long the Victorian angel’s privileged office. In fact, scholarship on the early twentieth century has begun to point precisely in this direction – the disintegration of domestic hegemony. Anita Levy’s study of female anxiety over fissures in domestic autonomy in ‘Gendered Labor, the Woman Writer and Dorothy Richardson’ documents how quickly the traditional housewife was becoming an extinct class by the turn of the century, due in large measure, Levy shows, to incursions by the expanding knowledge-based class of experts. Experts from domestic science to sexology targeted the household and women’s knowledge as one significant arena for their intervention and renovation. As Levy explains, ‘[they] rendered the body of nineteenth-century female knowledge and skills as mere sentiment, and thus instantly obsolete’ (51). Two consequences were that many women looked to experts outside of the home for training while others quit the household altogether in search of work to compensate for their lost financial security and social stability. Arguing from a quite different perspective, Friedrich Kittler implies in his concluding chapter of Discourse Networks that impersonal technology is what augurs the collapse of the sexed economy of the Victorian century: ‘Machines do away with sexual difference and their symbols’ (351). ‘The typewriter’, he observes, ‘brought about (Foucault’s Order of Things overlooks such trivialities) “a completely new order of things”’ (352). This new order, what Kittler considers ‘the second industrial revolution’, consists of the technology of data dispersal (369–72). Technology, whether typewriting or book printing, makes possible the dissemination of the very peremptory knowledges Levy identifies with the trespass of the expert class into domestic plentitude. Printed works are not merely discursive media; in Kittler’s view, they are also technological media. In other words, technology is essentially a knowledge system and, therefore, can also function as a means of social reproduction. The effects of these emergent technologies, according to Kittler, are apparent by the end of the nineteenth century in that mechanical apparatuses not only eliminate

Retailing the Female Intellectual

33

sexual polarity, but, in the process, they draw women from the home and into the public workplace. One crucial ramification is that women’s operation of machines outside of the home further undermines the social cohesion and control once maintained by the household as the primary bursar of sexual difference for society at large. These two very distinct but complementary analyses then – Levy’s invasive disciplinarity on the one hand and Kittler’s dispersive technologies on the other – put in relief the import of Woolf’s experiment of installing a printing press in the drawing room and for this additional reason: both critiques link domestic women’s divestiture to female entry into the public sites of production. They cannot, however, account for what transpires when an intellectual woman brings disciplinarity and technology together at the center of the home. The answer, I will insist, is modernism. The founding of Hogarth Press signals Woolf’s commitment to the transformation underway in the arts by the second decade of the new century. More tellingly, the technological disciplinarity that the press helps to organize provides the means by which this female intellectual successfully markets Anglomodernism to and also for the coterie of writers and artists as part of the broader cultural transformation I am locating with the expert class. This marketing had a profound impact on the development of this artistic elite and on English letters as a discipline, one that well exceeds the traditional scholarship on Woolf and modernism that has for so long operated within an interpretative system immanent to the institution of art itself. By contrast, my reading will extend recent critical interventions that have begun to challenge modernism’s institutional autonomy by linking art to knowledge creation and commerce. 2 In the pages that follow, I will recast the novelist and her contemporary artists as cultural capitalists who used the marketplace to advance aesthetic innovations that carry with them new narratives of consciousness and identity – and this to gain symbolic agency and cultural status. The argument I want to begin here is that the intellectual Woolf, with the support of her spouse, develops under the roof of their Richmond house the discipline we call literary modernism, and along with it develops the mechanical apparatus to commodify and market her creations to the discerning consumers who will make up the cultural bourgeoisie. While the Woolfs worked as tirelessly at their publishing venture as J.H. Willis’s and Paul Delany’s studies of Hogarth suggest, the press more than compensated their labors, and more precisely Virginia’s, in assembling and disseminating her modernism. Indeed, to appreciate the cultural literacy it promoted and the prestige it in turn granted the couple demands


that we attend to the kinds of cultural work their admixture of art, knowledge, technology, and commerce performs, particularly as it is staged on drawing-room boards. What this matrix of parlor, press, commerce, expertise, and the arts suggests is the complex and labile space that Hogarth Press opens up within the privacy of the Woolf home. The angel’s expulsion and the drawing room’s transformation make possible a new structure of authority, one that Woolf will come to define as androgynous. Androgyny, as Woolf performs it, does not rely on sexual difference to mediate the social reproduction the Angel in the House once supervised. 3 Nor is its economy materialized by production alone, as Levy and Kittler seem to envision. While the angel may be cashiered, the bourgeois home as the site of leisure, beauty, affect, and pleasure is expropriated and aesthetically reterritorialized. Installing in the parlor a commercial press that markets aesthetic literature, arcane pamphlets, scholarly treatises on psychology and economics, and the popular genres of biography and travel writing points to a mixture of categories – and not merely discursive categories of genre but tectonic, technological, and economic ones, so that public and private functions come to overlap, commerce and art fortuitously commingle, and production and consumption blend. It is this androgynous structure, I will argue, that the intellectual Woolf advances in her polemic A Room of One’s Own and narrates in her exuberant biography Orlando with far-reaching implications for herself, for modernism, and for modern culture. As a reading of these fables of androgyny will demonstrate, Woolf authorizes intellectual agency by connecting the creative imagination to the refined consumption located in the aristocratic cradles of Oxbridge and Great House. Whether modern professional or titled patrician, intellectual pursuits are supported in both instances by the consumption of fine things, so that these texts portray consumption not as a female and frivolous occupation but as constitutive of intellectual acuity itself. Woolfian androgyny, as structure and sign, thus makes something productive and positive of gender and desire as part of and not apart from the world of vendibles that she and Anglo-modernists, in general, so resolutely deplored in lesser lowbrow milieux. Her treatment of androgyny discloses that the intellectual arises out of an institutional culture that combines what one creates with what one consumes, production with consumption. What all of this signifies has everything to do with a new model of authority for the bourgeoisie, male and female, a model which importantly supersedes the domestic woman’s regulation of the social order as it encourages middle-class women’s entry into public culture and the expert class.


35

Indeed, Woolf lends intelligibility to the advent of the modern expert by modeling this changed structure herself. As intellectual, modernist, novelist, critic, publisher, Bloomsberrie, sapphist, hostess, spouse, and woman, Woolf inhabits spaces, crosses boundaries, and engages in discourses that blur distinctions not only between male and female but also between economic production and consumption. This second categorical crossing portends a merger of labor and leisure that ultimately privileges the latter. Together these shape the identity of this female modernist and, in large measure, our own cultural identities as gendered subjects, identities that academic feminists are still untangling as we engage with a new millennium. Woolf’s connections to technology, production, commerce, knowledge, and consumerism suggest that modernism’s most enduring contribution may have been to put in relief what is most distinctive about bourgeois modernity and culture in the last century. Androgyny and the enfranchisement of the female modernist and intellectual are meaningful, however, beyond Woolf’s literary innovations, or the gender entanglement, or even the angel’s institutional plummet. For I will also argue that the paradigm of the modernist expert, incongruous as it may first appear, is likewise to be found, as the case with the printing press, where we least expect to find it: with the intellectual that Woolf exemplifies and theorizes. Her model not only delineates the means for female accession to the expert class but also serves as a blueprint for tracing the logic of the expert inherent in modernism as a literary movement. She makes clear my larger claim that modernists obey the same cultural logic as do experts of disciplines that systematically professionalize themselves. And modernists do so in order to guarantee their truth-telling office as an autonomous and indispensable domain of modern culture. 4 In the most general terms, I am suggesting then that neither literary modernism nor its practitioners can be understood without recourse to Woolf’s intellectual model. Woolf, I contend, is not the modernist with a difference but the exemplary modernist.

I

‘Non Angeli sed Angli’5

One striking demonstration of Woolf’s covenant with modernism is her retreat from the other movements vying with Hogarth Press for her allegiance and for space in her drawing room during the second decade of the century, namely, female suffrage and New Woman politics. Her involvement with experimental art and other modernists eventually takes precedence over these and signals a decisive shift away from the


nineteenth-century model of reform politics as the most efficacious means of achieving female enfranchisement and toward the one more synchronous with the expert culture of the new century. As her fiction becomes increasingly innovative and as the press grows into a sound commercial partnership, Woolf’s advocacy of these female-denominated movements wanes. 6 Woolf’s loyalties become clearer when we compare her halfhearted response to female suffrage with the more fervid espousal of two of her older acquaintances, Janet Case and Margaret Llewelyn Davies. These two unmarried women, both educated at Cambridge and both staunch pacifists and suffrage advocates, developed out of a nineteenth-century moral and liberal tradition of active munificence. They located their political and professional paradigms within the familiar Victorian tropes of vocation, toil, service, altruism, and self-denial. As such, their political views, especially as they carried over into art, were quite at variance with Woolf’s, so that she regularly chafed at their moral zeal. After one animated discussion of literature with Case, Woolf complains of ‘the depressing effect of talking to someone who seems to want all literature to go into the pulpit’ (Diary 1: 213). In Davies, she finds the same sermonic inclination and bristles: ‘So you go on preaching humanity when you’ve withdrawn, & preserve only the conventional idea of it’ (Diary 1: 313). Still, from 1916 until 1920, approximately the same period during which Hogarth was growing into a competitive enterprise, Woolf hosted at her home the meetings of the Richmond branch of The Women’s Co-operative Guild, arranging speakers and organizing support. While her efforts on behalf of less educated women and men are indisputable in her guild work or, for example, in her teaching from 1905 to 1907 at the evening institute, Morley College, she was skeptical of the volunteerism and philanthropy that compelled Case and Davies. 7 In a letter to Davies in 1919, Woolf concludes: ‘You’ll never like my books, but then shall I ever understand your [women’s] guild? Probably not’ (Letters 2: 399). Her own political and literary allegiances took a different form. Put simply, they were not figured in moral terms but articulated instead in the secular and public ones of career and profession. For Woolf, the means of women’s emancipation lay not through duty, philanthropy, or the vote. Instead of the dominant values of the nineteenth century, Woolf chose independence, autonomy, self-fulfillment, and choice. Where self and choice are foremost, whether in career choice, commodity choice, or reproductive choice, we have entered a cultural moment altogether distinct from that of the Victorians and the middle-class woman, righteous activist or dutiful wife. These


37

new priorities are apparent later when in A Room of One’s Own, on receiving news of her inheritance from an aunt and the news of the suffrage extension, the novelist admits: ‘Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely more important’ (37). In the final analysis, modernism, the printing press, and the market prevailed, a fact that her fiction of the period also bears out. With her first two novels, both published by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth and linked frequently with the subgenre of the New Woman novel, we can make out a growing disaffection with the polarizing politics of female enfranchisement, with New Woman aesthetics, and with realist fiction. In The Voyage Out, for example, Woolf’s diffidence is manifest in her treatment of the novel’s heroine Rachel Vinrace. While Rachel’s representation seems to herald the freedom and pleasures associated with the New Woman at the turn of the century, these never materialize. Indeed, her illness and delirium from a tropical disease disturb even the closure promised by her prospective marriage to Terence Hewet, so that the novel appears to stumble over the very conflict it organizes: exactly what is this New Woman heroine to do if not to marry, and what is the novel to do if she desists? While the text demurs, the heroine expires. The second novel, Night and Day, is less equivocal and even implies an alternative. The pointed mockery directed by the text at the suffrage society where the 25-year-old protagonist Mary Datchet volunteers and at the socialist organization where she is later hired as secretary mirrors Woolf’s own ironic disengagement from suffrage politics and New Woman independence. 8 How different by comparison is the treatment the professions receive, as the heroine Katharine Hilbery’s disclosure to Mary intimates early in the novel. At a meeting Mary hosts at her flat to discuss literature with other educated young men and women, Katharine artlessly inquires of her new acquaintance: ‘I suppose you’re one of the people who think we should all have professions’, [Katharine] said, rather distantly, as if feeling her way among the phantoms of an unknown world. ‘Oh dear no’, said Mary at once. ‘Well, I think I do’, Katharine continued, with half a sigh. ‘You will always be able to say that you’ve done something, whereas, in a crowd like this, I feel rather melancholy . . . . Don’t you see how many different things these people care about? And I want to beat them down – I only mean’, she corrected herself, ‘that I want to assert


myself, and it’s difficult, if one hasn’t a profession . . . . Ah, but I want to trample upon their prostrate bodies!’ (54) While Katharine chooses matrimony over treading on ‘prostrate bodies’, she marries significantly outside of her social class and appears to choose for a mate one who embodies her own inchoate professional ambitions, the promising law clerk Ralph Denham. In this text, neither domestic sphere nor suffrage society is deemed an institution of female empowerment, as Mary’s predicament further illustrates. Although enamored of Ralph and attracted to Katharine, Mary receives no obvious rewards by the terms of the novel despite all her public sacrifice and suffrage activism – not even the affection of Katharine’s cast-off suitor, the priggish Rodney, whose attentions are instead transferred to her cousin. The novel proposes instead that a drawing-room successor and emancipated female can be found, even if in this case a male, within the expert class. The fact that the successor is male, I suggest, is secondary to what his example demonstrates, namely, the mobility that expertise makes possible. Expertise offers the means of advancement, respectability, status, and power. It is the mechanism for enfranchisement. After all, it is Ralph’s legal knowledge that quite literally opens the doors to the Hilberys’ drawing room and their refined social circle. There he gains Katharine’s acquaintance and ultimately her hand in marriage, and, just as significant, he gains acceptance into Katharine’s more cultured and belletristic family. Assimilation, the merging of labor and leisure, the mixing of disciplines, of professional expertise and literary art, all ‘marry’ in the Hilberys’ renovated drawing room. This outcome, I suggest, was not lost on its creator. For if the professions could offer these compensations to one reckoned an outsider by class, might it not offer similar ones to those proscribed by gender? Put differently, does not the form of social reproduction implied by the law clerk’s professional introduction into the Hilberys’ private residence suggest an efficacy greater than the one conventionally determined by the teleology of marriage and biological reproduction? Might not inference further suggest that workings of this sort were party to Virginia’s own choice of a marriage partner? By the second decade of the century, the novelist’s answer appears to be ‘yes’: in her parlor, commerce and art, disciplinarity and technology, creation and recreation, as well as the sexes blend to become the profession of her modernism and the structure of androgyny. With Night and Day, Woolf abandons new realism, new women, suffrage politics, and the Duckworth firm for the experimental fiction ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and later Jacob’s Room, the forerunners of her successful


39

modernist works of the 1920s, and the first story and the first novel of hers to be published by Hogarth Press.9 The technological potency Hogarth offers and the disciplinary method her new fiction engenders enable the novelist to go beyond merely occupying the space once monopolized by the Angel in the House. Ultimately, they empower her to reterritorialize the domestic realm and to create there her own literary exhibitions of artistic reliquary. These exhibitions, which she entitles Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, not only aestheticize the domestic woman but also commodify her death as book. They in turn authorize the modernist, valued alike by literary establishment and cultural marketplace. To make comprehensible the model that organizes this complementary process, let me now take up A Room of One’s Own.

II

N’oubliez pas les professeurs

Woolf initially considered A Room of One’s Own to be a disquisition on fiction that would account for her mimesis of interiority. Based on two lectures at Girton and Newnham Colleges and reworked on several drafts, her essay importantly leads to a concern with the creative imagination and an excursus on androgyny. This commentary begins, however, quite ordinarily by observing a London street scene in which a young woman walking from one direction and, from another, a young man arrive beneath her window, get into a taxi, and glide off down the street. This figure becomes the means to describe a mind infused, according to Woolf, with masculine and feminine qualities equally, one in which no single sex dominates. Thus she famously insists, ‘it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. And fatal is no figure of speech’ (104). The creative imagination, once granted such sexual dexterity, is concurrently incandescent, porous, and fluid. To this ideal of incorporeality she adds a distinctly material dimension: the sexually agile imagination requires ‘500 a year and a room with a lock on the door’, she advises her readers (105). She then defensively anticipates readers’ skepticism by declaring, ‘you may object that in all of this I have made too much of the importance of material things’ (106). Still later, she insists: ‘Intellectual freedom depends upon material things’ (108). The material and the intellect are for Woolf codependents. The ostensibly ethereal aspect of androgyny should not lead us, therefore, to overlook the urban conceit that captures it, the sexual fluidity that distinguishes it, and the material perquisites that support it. We have to be attentive to the figure of the two


well-dressed and paying customers seated in the back of a cab that flows through city traffic. As a start, we might consider her vision of androgyny as organizing a gender-neutral site for the production and exchange of creative and intellectual property, which requires, according to Woolf, capital and sanctuary. While her emphasis on ‘room and board’ might be construed as a socialist’s advocacy of basic necessities, Woolf’s promotion of the material goes well beyond this. An example from the text will clarify this distinction. Ironically noting early in her essay that novelists are more apt to recall epigrams at dinner than courses offered, she proceeds to serve up the luncheon enjoyed, presumably on a regular basis, by Oxbridge scholars, as a culinary tour de force in the most lush, indeed, savory prose: the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges . . . with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. (10–11) Fat content aside, her hyperbole is purposeful. Material largesse is emphasized from the procession of rich sauces to the choice game birds to the humble potato newly minted as specie. The contrast with the dinner at the women’s college of Fernham is telling: Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes – a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and women with string bags on Monday morning. (17) The meal above, while more than adequate and, by today’s standards, probably healthier, is not in the least appealing, as food or as presentation, to palate or to eye, ‘nothing to stir the fancy’. The staccato of simple declarative sentences that catalogues the thin soup and bland main course and ends with thrifty women with string bags haggling over


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wilting greens suffers by comparison with the generous prose and courses lavished on the gentlemen scholars, who apparently need not bother about how things come to be courses à table. So while the sex of the diners is at issue, so is their affluence or lack of it as registered by what they consume. What is clear is that Woolf wants a seat for herself and for her female collegiates at the table on which the lavish is standard fare and for this reason: if the imagination is to be fecund, if it is to produce, it must consume fine things. In fact, Woolf’s brand of fecundity is both declared and described throughout the essay, in the drafts of the essay, in the diary entries made about the lectures, which become the basis of the printed text, and, also, in subsequent forays into the subject. For example, in her diary she records the referents of the two meals described in A Room of One’s Own: the simple one she and Leonard shared with female students at Newnham College on the night of her lecture and the elegant luncheon enjoyed the next day with fellow Bloomsberries at George Rylands’s rooms at King’s College, a luncheon, incidentally, that Rylands maintains was textually embellished by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (Woolf, Women and Fiction xv).10 Yet even if one were exaggerated and the other understated, Woolf’s preoccupation with the imagination and consumption persists, as her diary account of the second lecture at Girton indicates: I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women – that’s my impression . . . . I blandly told them to drink wine & have a room of their own. Why should all the splendour, all the luxury of life be lavished on the Julians & the Francises, & none on the Phares & the Thomases [female students at Girton]? (3: 200) In each, Woolf is not arguing for basic essentials but for the young women to acquire ‘the luxury’ their male contemporaries enjoy as right. One’s sex should not be an impediment to such everyday pleasures like lavish dinners, for consumption of these meals seems to determine later achievement or lack of it in the public sphere. In the same diary entry, she describes the female students of her audience as ‘[i]ntelligent, eager, poor; & destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals’. In other words, greatness cannot be achieved by the creative intelligence or by intellectual labor alone. Excellence must be well cultivated. It depends on the material goods one is served and one consumes. Within the enclave of the university then, it is the men and not the women whose extravagance


is indulged. Their refined consumption marks them as members of an elite. Rather than a reward or a privilege, the luxury they enjoy defines who they are. Their affluence indexes their intellectual acuity. The old bourgeois dream of rising to the ranks of the aristocracy takes on new cultural currency when adopted by the intellectual class matriculating at these venerable institutions in the twentieth century.11 Yet, it is Woolf who points out that the dream world this male elite inhabits is one structured in and around consumption. At Oxbridge, the conspicuous consumers are all men. How different by comparison is the standard treatment of female consumption, which is typically portrayed dystopically. When practiced by middle-class women, consumption signals neither the prestige nor the precocity of an elite but rather the ‘natural’ narcissism of an entire sex.12 Woolf even addresses the distortion when she declares in A Room of One’s Own: ‘Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial”’ (74). The professional and productive female in potentia, however, when conceived as an artist or intellectual of Bloomsbury or Oxbridge as Woolf does, is cleansed of any taint of the vulgarity of the marketplace. The female intellectual requires luxuries as part of her education and station, no less than her male counterparts do. In thus making refined consumption a material requisite, really prerequisite of excellence for the intellectual and artist, Woolf rescues consumption from its association with vulgar consumerism and makes it constitutive of intellectual agency. Intellectual labor and creative production depend on consumption. Indeed, the female canon she envisions in A Room of One’s Own rests on a female culture of refined consumption, for her genealogy can make sense only if an educated female elite exists or will soon exist to whom it may be addressed. Woolf carries the relation between achievement and consumption a step further in ‘Professions for Women’. Here, she acknowledges that she exchanged her first paycheck as a journalist for a Persian cat. ‘I have to admit that instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher’s bills, I went out and bought a cat’ (285). The cat, however, does not satisfy: ‘A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motor-car. And it was thus that I became a novelist’ (287). As she drolly recalls it, her creativity is absolutely entwined with modern acquisitiveness and urbane consumption. The rewards of journal writing can be exchanged for a pedigree cat; novel writing for a private automobile – which the Woolfs in fact acquired in 1927, their first, necessitated in part by their house in the country, the one necessitating the other, and these in turn


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necessitating other emblems of status and leisure. Even more revealing is her admission that the motor car turned the journalist into a novelist, a version of the transformative powers of the lavish dinner in which consumption again begets production. Consumption is not only continuous and elastic, but also transformative, reciprocal, and reifying: journalists acquire cats, and motor cars acquire novelists. Objects engender subjects as subjects engender objects. In A Room of One’s Own, the tropes of desire and consumption are spatially confined: the sanctuary of the university, the repository of the library, the elegant dining hall, the private room, the well-fed body, the latter suggesting a connection between the androgynous intellect and the consuming body to which I shall shortly return. It should be noted that the consumption of fine cuisine and the consumption of great literature, to follow Woolf’s other product line in A Room of One’s Own, are ones befitting an educated elite of women. As I have already indicated, whether food or books, these objects cannot be of ordinary fare if they are to have the desired effect. That the quality of mind is dependent upon the quality of what one consumes may well be the motto of Bloomsbury, if not Anglo-modernism itself, an argument that Jennifer Wicke has advanced in her essay on shopping in Mrs Dalloway by disclosing the group’s systematic marketing and consumption of modernism. Wicke observes that Bloomsberries not only produced the art that beautified the reputed ugliness of Victoriana but consumed it as well.13 Woolf’s £500, the equivalent of intellectual freedom, is significant as aggregate capital and as a means ‘to such higher ends as cultural appreciation or friendship’ (Delany 8). She says as much in the conclusion to ‘Women and Fiction’, the companion piece to A Room of One’s Own: ‘But in this, to be sure, one is looking ahead to that golden, that perhaps fabulous, age when women will have what has so long been denied them – leisure, money, and a room to themselves’ (148). This prospect, familiar to female intellectuals by the end of the twentieth century, was still very much a novelty for Woolf and a rather recent entitlement for her male peers, the educated bourgeoisie of the 1920s. Capital, monetary and cultural, the private space to produce it, and the leisure to enjoy it merge in the room Woolf fashions for educated women. It is no mere coincidence that, by the end of the decade, she would boast in her diary of earning £3020 for the year of writing, the equivalent, she notes, of a civil servant’s salary (3: 285). In keeping with her argument in A Room of One’s Own and her spending habits in ‘Professions for Women’, she decided to have a new room of her own added to her country house at Rodmell and began to decorate it in the manner befitting her new status.


III

‘Clerical produce’14

It is no accident, given my argument about the reciprocity between discipline and machine, art and commerce, production and consumption, that Woolf’s artistic achievement as a modernist in the 1920s would be matched with Hogarth’s success as a press. In fact, as Laura Marcus has recently reminded us, the early success of Kew Gardens in 1919 made clear their interdependence (126). The surge of orders that followed its very favorable review in the Times Literary Supplement not only marked the advent of Woolf as an experimental writer, it also marked the first real commercial success of Hogarth, so that Leonard would later claim in his autobiography that it turned the press into a legitimate enterprise (Downhill All the Way 240–41). As the press professionalized, so did Woolf’s modernism. Her literary art depended on and benefited from the dispersal the press offered by promoting and guaranteeing the circulation of her works to paying customers. If one crucial trait of disciplinarity is the ability of a given knowledge system to make itself into an inexhaustible field, then the press surely made this inexhaustibility materially possible in several important ways. Hogarth made it possible for her to publish and market her work and to recuperate and reinvest the profits in additional literary productions. The press gave substance to Woolf’s contention in A Room of One’s Own that ‘[i]ntellectual freedom depends upon material things’ (108). During this decade then, Virginia and Leonard became fully engaged in publishing and marketing creative and intellectual property, not the least of which was Virginia’s, issuing her new work and reissuing her earlier work. Given their aesthetic alliances, the press also disseminated the work of the Bloomsbury circle and their modernist cohorts to the cultivated readership they most valued and to the readership they hoped to educate. Here too art and commerce commingled, for the Woolfs looked after their Bloomsbury and Cambridge friends, who, in fact, made up most of the authors they published and who designed most of the art work they commissioned. 15 The Woolfs willingly published manuscripts and translations that appealed to limited audiences – Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude (1918), and Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923), for example, and also Russian translations such as Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoi (1920) and Tolstoi’s Love Letters (1923), as well as Freud’s Collected Papers (1924–25). But they also made a point of publishing the more marketable genres of biography, education, and travel writing, in which profit and reader interest were more certain.


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Although a small enterprise by industry standards, Hogarth likewise capitalized on the marketing shift from supplying lending libraries with multiple copies to selling them singly to consumers. The demise of the triple-decker novel in the 1890s and the subsequent collapse of the circulating library’s virtual monopoly on the book trade early in the century made publishing more competitive.16 So, like their larger and more established competitors, the couple peddled their books (expect no complimentary copies from the Woolfs, we are told) to bookstores, libraries, subscribers, and individual consumers, as well as to fellow Bloomsberries and family members. In 1927, they even considered expanding their investment by acquiring a bookstore, though this plan never materialized (Letters 3: 320, 327n.). By the end of the decade, the press had evolved from a fledgling private venture into a respected and profitable enterprise. In the same year that A Room of One’s Own appeared in the bookshop windows of metropolitan London, the Woolfs could boast that Hogarth had earned its own £500.17 Over the course of the 1920s (and since), Hogarth came to stand for a commercial publishing house and not for the Woolfs’ onetime residence in Richmond. The press had so come to dominate the home that, on the decision to vacate it, Virginia tellingly recalled: ‘nowhere else could we have started the Hogarth Press, whose very awkward beginning had rise in this very room, on this very green carpet. Here that strange offspring grew & throve; it ousted us from the dining room, which is now a dusty coffin; & crept all over the house’ (Diary 2: 283).18 Woolf’s morbid figure makes clear the decisive effect the press had on the household economy. Once established, it transgressed other domestic boundaries, infringing on private comforts and overlapping artistic pursuits. Remain in the home it did, however, and it prospered there despite moves from Richmond to Tavistock Square in 1924 and to Mecklenburgh Square in 1939. Its success signaled an alliance between art and market, between elitist modernism and consumer capitalism that was openly and actively pursued within and without the Woolfs’ home. Lest we persist in thinking that the Woolfs looked upon their enterprise as anything less than a business or understood their products as something finer than commodities, I should point to a revealing exchange about the print industry that Leonard Woolf initiated as editor of The Nation & Athenaeum in the winter and spring of 1927. In a series of articles that he solicited from notables such as Basil Blackwell and John Maynard Keynes and that included his own two contributions, Leonard makes it clear that his primary interest is in selling more books. Keynes’s column, ‘Are Books Too Dear?’, puts the problem most succinctly: ‘Are


enough books bought? Do books play the part in occupying our leisure hour which they ought to play?’ he asks on 12 March 1927. Linking leisure to commodity, Keynes concludes that the answer to each question is unfortunately ‘no’; and, in characteristic fashion, he demonstrates that by purchasing more books, consumers would cause prices to fall and thus would make books more affordable. This would increase in turn the cultural wealth of the nation, not to mention the wealth of the book trader. To boost sales, Basil Blackwell even quite earnestly suggests in his 23 April contribution that a mass psychology expert might develop an advertising scheme so that ‘a happy phrase oft repeated in a number of popular papers might well catch fire and fix a million minds at once on the respectability of books in the home’. Leonard Woolf, who, as editor and publisher, understood quite well commodity culture’s covenant with the advertising industry, observes equally that better advertising might cure the public’s ‘pernicious habit of not buying books’ (‘On Advertising’). Thus, these correspondents in The Nation & Athenaeum do not mourn the commodification of books (and hence of knowledge or of art) but rather promote greater consumption. The collective charge here is to make books more desirable as commodities. Surely it is illuminating that Leonard’s inquiry is undertaken as Hogarth enters its most profitable period. The Woolfs published not only for art’s sake but also for profit’s. They actively encouraged a culture of consumption. Given their enmeshment in print culture and commodity promotion, we have to regard as more than a little ironic Woolf’s contention that a press of her own freed her artistic practice from the taint of the marketplace.19 While owning the press certainly spared her the scrutiny of an outside editor, specifically that of her publisher and half-brother Gerald Duckworth, ownership did not spare her contact with the print industry but made that relationship more intimate and intense. The Woolfs saw themselves along with the Bloomsbury coterie as part of the Anglo ‘intellectual aristocracy’, to borrow Noel Annan’s phrase, and Virginia saw herself as part of an artistic avant-garde as well, under whose tutelage civilized life would prosper.20 As such, they were materially bound to the very consumer-based economy against which both the idea of an aristocratic way of life and the aesthetic practices of an avant-garde defined themselves. At issue here is not simply Woolf’s, Bloomsbury’s, Oxbridge’s, or, for that matter, modernism’s disavowal of consumerism. At issue is the relationship of the foregoing to consumer culture, which, however disowned, has helped define the cultural bourgeoisie in the particularly gendered ways that Woolf’s model manifests. What I want to suggest is a reciprocal relationship between economic and social


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organization and between gender and identity that we can locate at a microlevel within the redesigned domestic space of Hogarth House, a relationship that was also prevalent in the intellectual and artistic circles Woolf traversed. Consider, for example, Woolf’s routine on a given day: standing at her desk to write; setting type; wrapping a parcel of books; receiving Bloomsbury friends at tea; reviewing the art designs for an upcoming publication; redecorating a room; reading manuscripts; conferring with Hogarth staff. Where might we draw the boundaries between private and public, between art and market, between leisure and labor? That such lines are indistinct suggests how far this interior architecture is removed from the idealized Victorian home of the last century. More to the point, this blurring of functions and the blurred gendering of these functions within the household correspond to the fluidity of the sexes that Woolf promotes in A Room of One’s Own, where ‘[i]t is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple’ (104). Both fall within the compass of Woolf’s structure of androgyny. If, as I argued earlier, the material and the imagination are codependents, then I would further suggest that they are correlatives. Androgyny does not merely express changed economic and social relations, it also structures these changed relations. This blurring of architecture and gender indicates that there is no clear separation between labor and leisure and no necessary difference between male and female. Indeed, what comes to distinguish the labor of the modern intellectual and artist, whether male or female, is an amalgam of the discursive and material practices we associate with the refined consumption of feminized leisure, as a reading of A Room of One’s Own in relation to its companion text, Orlando, will demonstrate.

IV

‘Ultra culture’21

Just before A Room of One’s Own was published, Woolf expressed uncertainty in her diary over its reception. ‘It is a little ominous that Morgan [E.M. Forster] wont [sic] review it’, she confesses. Of its general reception, she feared she ‘shall be attacked for a feminist & hinted at for a sapphist’ (3: 262). These concerns proved unfounded and were replaced several weeks later with a record of its sales: ‘By the way, the sales of A Room are unprecedented – have beaten Orlando; feels like a line running through ones fingers; orders for 100 taken as coolly as 12’s used to be. We have sold, I think, 5500; & our next years income is made’ (3: 272–73). Consistent with its eponymous subject, then, this one book provided both room and income for the next year.


Several reasons for its success are particularly germane to my argument. The book sold in part because of Woolf’s reputation as a novelist; and it sold because of her reputation as the novelist of Orlando in particular. Leonard observed in his piece on publishing in The Nation & Athenaeum that a highly successful book guarantees the marketing of the next, and Orlando was Woolf’s first commercial success.22 Its publication in 1928 put her in the limelight, bringing her more requests for manuscripts and lectures than she could possibly satisfy. Indeed, because the invitations to lecture at Newnham and Girton were among those she accepted, one could say that Orlando’s popularity was partly responsible for A Room of One’s Own being written in the first place.23 Its reception was also enhanced by the endorsement of Vita Sackville-West. As Orlando became known as a kind of roman à clef in which Sackville-West played the lead character, the novel’s popularity only increased. Thus, when Sackville-West touted A Room of One’s Own in her bimonthly BBC broadcast, sales took off, a fact Woolf gratefully acknowledged in her diary (3: 264). The two books are linked in other ways that ensured their popularity. More than one critic has noted their thematic similarity, the androgynous poet Orlando, in one, and the androgynous artist, in the other, suggesting that Orlando narrates what A Room of One’s Own subsequently theorizes. On one level Orlando can be read, as Nigel Nicolson’s epithet states on the cover of the American edition, as ‘the longest and most charming love letter in history’. In the youthful and handsome figure of Orlando, Woolf textualizes her desire for Sackville-West, whose amatory and carnal liaisons were well-known to her circle of friends and leaked to a more general readership. One effect of Woolf’s ‘charming love letter’ is to circulate androgynous desire, Sackville-West suggesting as much in a letter to Woolf: ‘you have invented a new form of Narcissism, – I confess, – I am in love with Orlando – this is a complication I had not foreseen’ ( Letters 289). It is this self-adulation, reconcentration of desire, its proliferation and circulation in both Orlando and A Room of One’s Own that most inform my reading of the text. From the outset, androgyny is the condition of Orlando, the aristocratic and aspiring poet, as it is the necessary condition of the contemporary artist in A Room of One’s Own. Although Orlando’s sex is openly declared in the first sentence, the gratuitous fillip, ‘for there could be no doubt of his sex’, undermines its certainty, suggesting that desires will be both plentiful and broad (13). These ‘he’ pursues with singular abandon over the progress of some four centuries. The young noble, in satisfying his bachelor whims, can as easily go whoring as an adolescent in the shipyard


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haunts of Wapping Old Stairs as he can woo and desert eligible maidens of the court. Orlando’s unhindered desires even lead him to pursue one apparently disqualified by sex. When he spies a young visitor from Moscow, whose party has been stranded by the frozen Thames, he is immediately infatuated: he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person . . . . When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be – no woman could skate with such speed and vigour – swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear out his hair with vexation that this person was of his own sex, and thus embraces were out of the question. (37–38) Youth or ingénue, Orlando is smitten. His advances may have been circumscribed by his sex; his desires are not. In fact, the allure appears to be the very puzzle over whether prince or princess. Rather than sexed essence, gender ambiguity is prized. As the exotic becomes eroticized, desirability is determined by surface appearances – ‘loose tunic and trousers’ in the Russian style and ‘the seductiveness of the whole person’ – and not by sexual appendages. When, later in the novel, Orlando returns to the England of the Restoration as a woman, the narrator instructs: ‘Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being, a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above’ (189).24 Sexual fluidity or intermixture is the natural, perpetual, and desirable condition. Poses may vary, but Orlando’s identity as a desiring and desirable aristocrat does not. In other words, desire, and not gender or sex, is naturalized in the figure of Orlando. His aristocratic appetite knows no bounds or boundaries. What changes, when Orlando marries and bears a child, is explained variously as ‘fashion’ or ‘the spirit of the age’. Skirts and wedding bands are as much the mere transient protocols of different periods as swords and breeches or epics and lyrics. These shifts in fashion have real consequences to be sure – crinolines impede walking and wedding rings produce progeny – but they are nonetheless ephemera.


The law, too, is represented as ‘fashion’ in that it responds to change and can, as a result, even change its subjects. This is in fact what occurs when it overturns Orlando’s paternity, and subsequently his sex, by disinheriting the three sons he fathered with the gypsy Rosina Pepita. It thereupon certifies the aristocrat to be indisputably female. The resolution of this impediment introduces yet another. With Orlando now legally a noble woman, the inheritance of ‘her’ ancestral castle is put in jeopardy, but, since this is a campy fable, she bears her spouse Shelmerdine a son, by fiat, or so it appears, and this male heir guarantees her income and estate.25 The changing fashions (law, sex, birthright) and the broad appetite of Orlando support this aristocrat’s rich (and long) imaginative life, first as a budding writer of the sixteenth century and then as an honored poet of the twentieth. The published and celebrated Orlando of 1928, who shops for sheets and boots at a department store, motors expertly through London streets, expostulates at errant motorists and pedestrians, and strides through the rooms of her ancestral hall in trousers and leather jacket, this Orlando is the avatar of both bourgeois writer and consumer of A Room of One’s Own, as well as an object of desire in his or her own right. In other words, the social and material spaces represented in the novel through which Orlando strides and motors are as labile as are the sexual proclivities of the eponymous lord or lady – with the result that aristocratic privilege is dowered to the cultural bourgeoise in the form of one rather persevering female writer. With the pseudo-biography Orlando, Woolf uses androgyny to eroticize aristocratic agency, transforming it into a modern aesthetic practice and patronage that is as remarkable for its sexual fluidity as for the consumables that augment it. Biological reproduction is made over into cultural reproduction. The androgynous and urbane artist emerges as the noble’s rightful heir. Aristocrat becomes artistocrat, if you will, and the castle becomes the intellectual palace of modern culture – a museum, university, library, literary salon, publishing house, room of one’s own, creative imagination, ‘luminous halo’. 26 This palace, however, is as much concerned with gratifying pleasure as it is with literary production, and by the twentieth century its occupant is more middle-class female than pedigreed male. These are no mere coincidences. The young Orlando, who begins life as a desiring and desirable aristocrat, is not able to complete his life’s work, the poem ‘The Oak Tree’, until he has mastered that other art. As with A Room of One’s Own, aristocratic consumption precedes, legitimates, and enables production. The novel concludes with the protagonist, now expert in both refined consumption and production, transformed into the text’s most successful version – a woman, the


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modern 36-year-old author. Of Orlando’s success, the literary peerage lining the walls of the Great House look upon with favor, especially when backed by the coin of the realm: ‘Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison, regarded her demurely at first as who should say Here’s the prize winner! but when they reflected that two hundred guineas was in question, they nodded their heads approvingly’ (315).27 Orlando for all its playfulness – rather, because of its playfulness – documents and allegorizes the changing social and economic relations between spheres and sexes and the cultural class who is heir apparent. The social realm of 1928 appears as plastic as the periods through which the now professionalized artist has journeyed. Within these redesigned spaces – where play and imagination are as much valued as work and reason, where woman is as much valued as man, and where gender and sex, as much as literature and dress, are represented as fashion – we have entered the moment of modern culture. The love letter Orlando is also a paean to this cultural formation, with its disregard of the gendered social and economic barriers that had separated spaces into strictly public and male versus private and female in the preceding age. This modern formation tacitly grants the female heirs of the domestic bourgeois woman, now her educated daughters, access to the arts and professions. It is in this context of bourgeois female empowerment that Orlando instructs us to read first A Room of One’s Own and then ‘Professions for Women’ and finally the angel’s death. This is not, of course, the way in which modern female enfranchisement is conventionally coded. If this domain of pleasure and production is presided over by the female Orlando at the close of the novel rather than by the male Orlando, it is partly by default – the result of the continued disdain by the most influential cultural critics of the last 100 years, critics such as Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer to name only a handful. When Gustave Flaubert identifies with his eponymous heroine and declares ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’, it is not, after all, out of deference to her cultural tastes. According to Andreas Huyssen, Flaubert’s identification is no likeness at all: ‘woman (Madame Bovary) is positioned as reader of inferior literature – subjective, emotional, passive – while man (Flaubert) emerges as writer of genuine, authentic literature – objective, ironic, and in control of his aesthetic means’ (46). Closer to the interpretation of Bovary may be Jean Baudrillard’s observation that the consumer is only ‘a new kind of serf’ (85). Yet, as I shall momentarily insist, as unlikely as the foursome may appear, Emma, Flaubert, Orlando, and Woolf have more in common than has been rightfully acknowledged.


In contrast to the figure of serf, however, the desiring Orlando is nowhere represented as outside of history or, more specifically, outside of literate history, even when in self-imposed exile following the gash by Nick Greene’s rapier pen or when encamped with the gypsies in Turkey. Instead the noble is portrayed as engaged in experiencing and producing history, being fashioned by it and fashioning it in return. In fact, in the culture of Orlando, as in A Room of One’s Own, and ‘Professions for Women’, the artist is represented as an ever more discriminating subject rooted in desire. In following its dictates, the artist consumes desirable things (princesses and lavish dinners) that enable eventually the production of other cultured things (novels or poems), for which the artist, after an extended apprenticeship, is rewarded with proofs (literary prizes, Persian cats, motor cars) of her merit. In the androgynous spaces Woolf imagines, the female, more precisely the intellectual female, is not the degraded constituent of commodity capitalism. Indeed, Orlando consumes both as man, just as Oxbridge male scholars do, and as woman. In the circuitry of this consumption, English culture is enhanced and civilization prospers. This is the trajectory of Annan’s concept of an ‘intellectual aristocracy’ and Eliot’s of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, as it is the professed aim of Bloomsberries, their socialism, their pacifism, and their art. Woolf’s artist represents the privileged equivalent of the desiring and consuming individual that Lawrence Birken in his Consuming Desire maintains is characteristic of the century’s Western democracies with this important caveat.28 To his thesis, I would add that consumption and desire are more precisely paradigmatic of the elites that consolidate their power in the same decades when Woolf comes to prominence as a modernist. Here, I want to suggest that androgyny and Woolf’s model offer the structural matrix of the century’s elite of producers and consumers, not the least of whom are her modernist peers.

V

Fashion literate

Over the course of Orlando, what stands out as most enduring is the desire for fashion and the desire to fashion, that is to say, the desire to consume and to produce the individual through fashion. In tracing the attenuated life of this highborn writer across several centuries, Woolf’s whimsical biography suggests that production and consumption are the reciprocal and overlapping practices that make up identity. According to the novel’s logic, consumption involves the production of signs and the production of signs consists in consuming them, so that identity is


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produced through consumption.29 As Woolf’s narrator puts it, ‘there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking’ (188). As fashion is regarded more and more as an expression of one’s true character instead of mere external ornamentation, the more value it acquires, and the more critical becomes the ability to discriminate among signs of fashion, in reading, consuming, producing, and reproducing them. Class status and personal reputation and identity depended on the ability to do so. By the beginning of the twentieth century, fashion had become an essential element in the formation of the identity with the significant distention from fashion qua fashion to fashion as essence. Moreover, as Rosalind Williams, quoted earlier, has explained the condition of consumer capitalism: ‘objects of consumption no longer related to a social hierarchy externally defined; instead, they became themselves the hierarchy’ (184). And as Ann Bermingham has argued in her study of the picturesque, a propensity for fashion, more accurately, selffashioning may indeed be the most characteristic and enduring trait of the Western bourgeoisie.30 Though modernists would define themselves against these inducements of capitalism, they nonetheless developed a distinctive fashion of their own. Whether we discuss Woolf and her novel Orlando, or Flaubert and his Madame Bovary, or their respective main protagonists, we are dealing with real and imaginary individuals intent on fashioning an identity through aesthetics variously expressed in a novel, a poem, a drawing room, or a body. To take Madame Bovary, Flaubert and his heroine each transform Bovary’s body into an aesthetic text to be read and consumed as a means to create an identity and to gain social consequence. The sensational trial that preceded publication of the novel puts in relief their differing fashion consciousness. The legal wrangle the novel aroused was partly motivated by public fears that Emma’s fondness for fashion might fatally undermine traditional femininity by replacing it with a seductive, self-fashioned one.31 What assuaged official disquietude in the short term and, perhaps, saved the publication of the novel may well have been Emma’s evident flaw in terms of Flaubert’s narrative – her provincial aping of refined consumption.32 Put simply, her self-fashioning, taken to be second-rate imitation, was rendered less threatening and thus did not impede the novel’s publication. Flaubert’s imitation was treated otherwise. His representation of Emma’s second-rate impersonation was judged singular and aesthetic and ultimately granted him recognition as a true artist. It is not fashion consciousness per se that


distinguishes author from protagonist but the value accorded the fashion. The success of the novel Madame Bovary thus testifies to this male writer’s imbrication with modern culture – his acuity at reading and reproducing the lesser art of decoration that was allegedly a female art and at mastering it as an aesthetic representation of a higher art. In the long run, the fears provoked by Flaubert’s representation of female fashion were not groundless. The threatening prospect Bovary represented at mid-nineteenth century became with Orlando a playful romp that richly suggests numerous ways to fashion identity, only some of which are gendered. Yet, as Flaubert’s novel attests, feminizing reification does alter women’s relation to the symbolic systems of representation and to the value accorded women within them. These systems of signification are precisely the ones Woolf challenges in the texts I have been reading in terms of androgyny. Indeed, women’s doubled relation within representational systems helps to explain the seeming paradox in Orlando, in which Woolf promotes the mobility androgyny allows and yet represents her protagonist’s most successful embodiment as that of a celebrated and urbane female poet. In actuality, this is the recognition the educated bourgeois woman of the metropolis most merits in the twentieth century, the one that most closely approximates the scope of consumer culture, the development of the middle-class cultural classification system, and modern intellectual agency. In the various capacities of the poet Orlando, Woolf offers us the model of one who is both producer and consumer, subject and object, signifier and signified, a model that serves the modern incarnation of the female as well as the male. All are paradigmatic and constitutive of a cultural class putatively based on merit and expertise. That male modernists such as Pound, Lewis, Forster, Eliot, Conrad, Freud, Lawrence, and Joyce acknowledge only half of this equation – producer, subject, signifier – and that they disavowed the other half do not lessen their enmeshment in this cultural class, however. Of Woolf’s text, it is remains to point out that this cosmopolite is only the most modern incarnation of Orlando and not by any stretch the ultimate or absolute one. In this sense, the novel Orlando is itself a fashion of its time.33 Indeed, Orlando might be more accurately described as the autobiography of an androgynous imagination that understands history as a discursive costume ball. According to the text, each period produces and consumes its own fashion. Orlando offers us then a history of these fashions: the fashions of literature, gender, dress, sex, courtship, marriage, law, and politics. To conclude, let me draw two important implications from this discussion that should change the way we read Woolf’s great domestic


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novels of the 1920s, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, in relation to the novels of her fellow modernists. First, to acknowledge Orlando as both a fashion of its time and a history of fashion is to begin to apprehend what the structure of androgyny involves for Woolf as novelist and what it suggests more generally for modernism as knowledge production.34 The logic that structures Orlando’s periodized fashioning registers this significant dilation: individual fashioning is also historical fashioning. Not only is the individual materialized through the goods he or she consumes and produces, but the ages of history are conceived in similar terms. In representing past epochs as changes in literary or legal or social styles, Orlando rewrites history as fashion. The novel, in other words, abandons the idea that history is a series of political acts carried out by discrete, most often male, individuals. Just as fashion no longer behaves as the mimesis of an individual’s essence but gives material essence to the individual, so too does Orlando grant fashion a kind of historical agency, so that there is no telos outside of fashion. The result, in effect, is to empty history of political content and to substitute fashion or, as it comes to be known within modernist practice, ‘style’ in its place.35 That style might succeed in transforming history and its agents into mere surface decorations is precisely what scholars from Max Nordau to Walter Benjamin, from Georg Lukács to Fredric Jameson have found so troubling.36 In Marxism and Form, Jameson understands ‘style’ as an historically contingent category that arises with the middle-class rather than as the universal and transhistorical category of cultural value which the arts of the last century have advertised. ‘[Style] comes into being along with the middle-class world itself’, he notes. ‘[It] is essentially that which in modern middle-class culture replaces the rhetoric of the classical period’ (333–34). Emblematic of middle-class culture, style comes to express in his view ‘the physiological uniqueness of the body and of bodily sensation’ (334). It distinguishes the middle-class and at the same time renders its members into distinct persons. In other words, style as discourse not only demarcates the members of a particular status group, but it also, according to Jameson, comes to ‘embody’ that which most differentiates one individual from another within the group and within the culture at large. His understanding of bourgeois discourse follows a logic similar to Ann Bermingham’s of the picturesque in its fashioning of middle-class femininity and to Orlando’s fashioning of protagonists and eras. 37 Together they point to a redefinition of sociopolitical agency, unnoticed by Jameson, one that has significance for Woolf’s artistic practice and, by extension, that of other modernists. For what Woolf playfully represents in Orlando, she systematically performs


in her earlier experimental works of the 1920s. In the shift noted at the opening of this chapter from The Voyage Out and Night and Day to the modernist experiments ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and Jacob’s Room, the novelist rids her artistic practice of the politics of the New Woman and of suffrage and in their place substitutes the politics of modernism – style. This introduces the second and final point. It is with this politics of style that Woolf reterritorializes the Victorian drawing room, the domestic space that she seized and transformed with the founding of Hogarth Press. In its place, she refashions the genteel drawing rooms of Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay and markets them as books. What makes her style, indeed modernism’s as a whole, so effective as discourse is that it appears to aestheticize rather than politicize or commercialize its textual objects, to make art into a category unto itself and its practitioners into disinterested experts. As a result, Woolf can at once distance herself from the domestic ideology of the Angel in the House even as she represents it. At the same time, she can disavow the commodification of the ‘sacred’ objects of her labor even as she publishes and retails them. And finally, she can claim for them a truth value not to be found in any other discourse. The reification of Dalloway and Ramsay, the transformation of their households into aesthetic exhibitions of Victorian reliquary, separates Woolf from domestic ideology, from the marketplace, and, just as significantly, from other forms of expertise, as it establishes her cultural capital as an expert in her own right.38 Style, these vendibles, and the logic that subtends them produce her as a modernist. This new paradigm of agency – angel replaced with androgynous artist and expert – is the political result of the reformulated urban household that Woolf superintends. It is also the politics that intellectuals, in particular feminist intellectuals, have inherited and from which all professional women in some measure derive. Art and her unique style importantly screen Woolf’s class interest as an expert as they also screen her commercial entanglement. What I am suggesting is the ideological correspondence between modernism and the professionalization of other disciplines in the opening decades of the century. The modernist elite, whether female or male practitioner, accedes to this position by the same logic that produces the expert class, that is, by assimilating and then rendering obsolete older and more established forms of knowledge and authority. In reifying these older forms through a unique style, a Woolf, or an Eliot, or a Forster, or a Joyce becomes part of the expert classes responsible for cultural reproduction – whether of the middle-class household, modern culture, bourgeois masculinity, or English


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letters. A transformation of agency into a politics of style is precisely, I argue, what modernism, in establishing the conditions of its institutional status and practice, characteristically performs. Indeed, style is modernism’s disciplinary language. Through its articulation and technological dissemination, modernism, no less than its sister disciplines of anthropology, medicine, law, and psychology, strives to make its esoteric knowledge the measure of modern culture.

3 Sacred Cows: Modernism, Woolf, and Her Fictive Seraphs

As millennial fever began heating up the media in the late 1990s with rankings of every conceivable category from greatest painters and scientists to musical compositions and military campaigns, the front page of the New York Times Sunday Book Review carried a composite sketch of 27 ‘Great Book’ authors. Of the literati who appear to pose for a group portrait on the steps of Columbia University Library, Virginia Woolf is unmistakable. Pictured just above Shakespeare, she stands as one of only three women, only two modernists, and the single twentieth-century ‘Great Book’ representative. 1 This chapter takes as its ambit to make comprehensible her speedy ascendance within English letters and her preeminent stature among her female and modernist peers, a rise measured not in centuries after all but in decades and, more precisely, in the decade of the 1920s. It is my contention that, in analyzing Woolf’s ascent and in particular her model of the female intellectual, we can better grasp how literary modernism came to function as an elite movement of the arts and how its practitioners gained in status as they competed with other experts for influence over the public imagination in the late modern period. The all too familiar story in which the monolith called modernism both ruptures tradition and yet paradoxically serves as its apogee, a story repeated by artists and scholars from T.S. Eliot to Ezra Pound, from I.A. Richards to Cleanth Brooks, has long obscured the movement’s enmeshment in the ongoing consolidation of the expert classes and the proliferation of new knowledges. In the following pages, I argue that this story of rupture and apogee served as an enabling myth that allowed modernists to assert the primacy of their symbolic property and their legitimacy as an elite by mystifying the process of literary production and their truth-telling function. How Woolf exploits this narrative and 58

Modernism, Woolf, and Her Fictive Seraphs

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then screens her literary efforts under the cover of an aesthetics of style offers an exemplary case study of modernist logic and workings. Under the guise of perfecting her experimental fiction in the 1920s, this female modernist systematically destroys the Victorian household that helped produce her and next refashions the domestic novel into modernist art in order to gain status as an innovator of the form and expert of emotional truth. If killing off the proverbial angel in the house authorizes Woolf as a cultural producer, then resurrecting the angel in her domestic fiction, the metropolitan novel Mrs Dalloway and its sequel, the familial requiem To the Lighthouse, revives the destroyed world of Victorian domesticity as the cultural center for which modernist literature must henceforth account and compensate. This then is the conceptual hinge between her expropriation of the domestic novel and her polemic of A Room of One’s Own: Woolf aestheticizes the bourgeois household to subjugate it and gains cultural legitimacy or symbolic agency as intellectual and artist in the process. She transgresses, in effect, the social authority of the household and makes the modernist intellectual a key player among the experts now responsible for reproducing the social order. She first maps this strategy in the pivotal essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. For if we allow, as scholars who have studied the rise of the expert class have demonstrated, that each field produces the exact knowledge it needs to solidify its position as an autonomous domain and additionally stipulates the criteria needed to fulfill its socioeconomic role of reproducing its members, then her 1924 essay provides for both circumstances. 2 In the railway drama that pits the matronly Mrs Brown against a trio of Edwardian novelists, Woolf draws up her plan to establish herself as an intellectual and modernist. Despite all the attention bestowed on her travel companion, her primary objective is not to enfranchise the Mrs Browns of public transportation. It is rather to authorize her own modernist style of representation as a specialized domain of knowledge by creating fitting objects of study for her modernist expertise. Control of domestic ideology and investiture in literary modernism demand as much.

I

Railroading Mrs Brown

Ensconced in a railway car by her modernist progenitor, unaware of the scrutiny her person is about to attract from her several literary suitors, or thus of her impending serendipitous celebrity, sits tidy but heroic Mrs Brown. What ostensibly piques Woolf’s interest in this passenger


and occasions her representation in the essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ is the radical transformation asserted in the now famous passage – that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’ – and to this Mrs Brown gives proof (320). 3 If we put aside the significance of the date, which has long occupied critics, the more crucial endeavor becomes to be precise about what changes Mrs Brown epitomizes in this post-Victorian moment and how these changes come about. Here Woolf tells us that, circa 1910, the cook comes up from the basement kitchen, the murderess Clytemnestra’s sentence is finally commuted, and women of genius stop scouring pots and start producing books. In short, the bourgeois home as institution undergoes a severe revamping in both its productive and reproductive capacities: the division of labor within it is reconstituted and its traditional familial, sexual, and affective functions are made problematic. Faced with this domestic upheaval and with the household itself under siege, novelists incur a special responsibility, in Woolf’s view, to account for these changes. This the novelist sets out to do and, consonant with the tenor of the changes, in an apparently egalitarian manner. All of the foregoing – cook, mythic protagonist, and genius domestic – are given to modest Mrs Brown to shoulder. But can the unsuspecting matron traveling in a railway car convey a diverse household renovated from bottom to top? Can she bear the representational weight of such a charge? While the novelist’s advocacy would seem to advance Mrs Brown’s agency in this endeavor, her representation inaugurates a quite different moment of cultural formation. What appears initially to be an egalitarian and emancipatory gesture by Woolf – saying in effect, after 1910, we are all Mrs Browns traveling together – indicates on closer examination an imposition of power by this aspiring modernist over a representative of the very domestic quarters she finds at risk. Her intent becomes clearer when we contextualize her encounter with Mrs Brown on board that all too mundane means of public transportation, the railroad. This mechanized technology altered habits of travel and displaced modes of understanding as it ushered in a new sensorium that Woolf is able to capitalize on in her narrative, however obliquely. This she can do because the ubiquity of motorized transit rendered the effects of this technology so commonplace by the opening of the twentieth century as to be virtually invisible, a circumstance Michel de Certeau’s critique of the railway as ‘travelling incarceration’ (111) and Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s sociological study of the introduction of rail travel have done much to recover at the end of the century. These offer an explanatory logic that, when applied to the journey of Woolf’s essay, helps make clear the


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novelist’s design for her rail companion in particular and for the household in general. The first point to bear in mind is that the technological equality that rail travel organizes does not constitute, as Schivelbusch points out, a new moment of social equality. 4 Woolf and Brown may share a rail carriage, but they share little else. Despite the essayist’s chummy tone of camaraderie, their backgrounds, social position, education, and occupations register their many differences. Rail technology does not abolish but only suspends for the length of the journey the disparity between travelers such as Woolf and Brown. It is this suspension, this illusion of equality, however, that Woolf’s narrative not only depends on but also exploits. The utter contingency of her encounter with Mrs Brown within the public space of rail car (Woolf’s claim, ‘I was late for the train and jumped into the first carriage I came to’ [321]) coupled with the utter ordinariness of the event that unfolds belie then a carefully scripted mise en scène that stations Mrs Brown before Woolf’s modernist gaze. Indeed, the decisive moment of the matron’s inspection is so orchestrated as to appear entirely ingenuous. The author’s aside to her audience that ‘everyone in this room is a judge of character’ allows in turn her subsequent assertion that novelists are extreme in this pursuit, even ‘[w]hen all practical business of life has been discharged. The study of character becomes to them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession’ (320–21). In both cases, Woolf implies that everyone is a botanizer on pavement, or rather now on railway cars, subways, elevators, and airplanes of the human species, and that all important relations – marriage, friendships, business – depend on this ability. 5 Acknowledging this is not, however, to grant that judging character is the natural function Woolf pretends, or to see an obsession with it as the involuntary and inevitable outcome of a natural predisposition. Both views legitimize her conduct especially on motorized public transportation where this form of secular literacy – reading one’s fellow travelers – is deemed socially indispensable urban intelligence. Situating their encounter on a train allows Woolf then to temporize the disparity between her and her matronly companion and to pass off her scrutiny of Mrs Brown as instinctive behavior. Woolf’s privileged access to Mrs Brown is furthered by two other significant consequences of train travel that serve to compromise the elder passenger’s autonomy. Railways, as Schivelbusch remarks, put an end in essence to the traveler’s agency (73). In contrast to the stagecoach of the pre-industrial age, in which travelers saw themselves actively moving through the landscape, the railroad occasioned a very different sensation.


Railway passengers began to perceive themselves as little more than freight – more akin to parcels being shipped from one point to another, such as, for instance, from Richmond to Waterloo station. By staging this drama on board a train, Woolf takes advantage of this new sensorium to discredit Mrs Brown’s agency even as she appears to sponsor it as fellow passenger and sympathetic observer. Loss of agency is compounded by one additional condition of rail travel that Schivelbusch points to – the loss of shared communication among travelers. 6 The silence that descends upon passengers of mechanized mass conveyances, which in fact ensues when the tardy Woolf bounds into the car, likewise undermines Mrs Brown’s autonomy. With Brown virtually silenced in compliance with rail etiquette, the novelist is given the pretext, socially condoned, to become her observer and, thereafter, the judge of and spokesperson for her character. Without any hint of indecorum, Woolf can invade, if you will, the matron’s personal space and appropriate her authority of self-representation.7 Given the increased reliance on mechanized mass transportation, it is hardly surprising that the private act of observing passengers and the private act of reading fictional characters would become parallel and reciprocal public skills, and make novel literacy (and later screen literacy) so indispensable to national and metropolitan culture. For Mrs Brown, silencing is exactly what transpires and what is enabled is a new form of cultural expertise. Yet even more portentous is Woolf’s evasion of Mrs Brown’s loss of agency. For though the novelist is the perpetrator of this spectacle, she assigns the silenced Mrs Brown’s dispossession neither to herself nor to train culture, but instead to their fellow passengers who are made the villains of the essay. First, the ‘bigger, burlier, less refined’ Mr Smith bullies Mrs Brown, then angrily and precipitously detrains. His departure musters a troika of Edwardian authors. They board at Woolf’s invitation, occupy Smith’s place, and behave in less vocal but still abrasive ways. Indeed, their combined incivility becomes the pretext for a still more skillful stratagem, one that gains the novelist the lasting credit of feminists, especially academic feminists. Woolf plays the ‘sex card’. By placing the Edwardians alongside the brutish Smith, she tacitly aligns herself as a woman with the besieged Mrs Brown against this all-male alliance. In the well-known scenes that follow, H.G. Wells snubs Mrs Brown (‘There are no Mrs Browns in Utopia’, Woolf concludes); John Galsworthy reduces her ‘to a pot broken on a wheel and thrown into the corner’; and Arnold Bennett, who alone of the three ‘would keep his eyes in the carriage’, amasses details of Mrs Brown’s circumstances but never looks directly at her (327–28). None of them gives the elderly matron her due.


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The Edwardians’ lack of perspicacity makes Woolf, by default, Mrs Brown’s agent. The all too convenient binary (a female ‘us’, which links Brown and Woolf, in opposition to a male ‘them’, the Edwardian novelists) constructs the previous generation’s literary failure as one that is singularly male-authored, so that Woolf can now assert and insert her own aesthetic under the guise of a feminized, if not feminist, model of representation. ‘At whatever cost to life, limb, and damage to valuable property’, Woolf exhorts, ‘Mrs Brown must be rescued, expressed, and set in her high relations to the world before the train stopped and she disappeared for ever’ (333). Exactly what this representational deliverance entails Woolf indicates when, vexed at Bennett’s depiction, she ironically protests: ‘And old women of course ought to be made of freehold villas and copyhold estates, not of imagination’ (333).8 We can now begin to assess what Woolf has in mind for this essay. With the proper tools, she will give us not Mrs Brown’s property holdings, not her economic exploitation, but the matron’s imagination – what the elderly woman imagines, her innermost thoughts, her secret convictions, her deepest desires, her dreams and ambitions – the truth of Mrs Brown in short. Woolf will excavate the consciousness of Mrs Brown and aesthetically ‘liberate’ her very essence. Character then is not the transparent medium as previously portrayed by the realist mode of the Edwardians, but one that is hidden from these novelists and from the laity. To be a modern judge of character, it turns out, requires specialized knowledge and an aesthetic sensibility, training and ability, which both Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown lack. By cleverly managing the representation of this domestic traveler whose vulnerability is marked by her class, education, age, and sex, and exacerbated by silent confinement to a rail compartment, Woolf creates the exact subject she needs in order to advance her modern aesthetics of interiority – a solitary passenger, unable and unqualified to represent herself. Mrs Brown is restrained not merely within railway car but also, in essence, within the disciplinary aesthetics the novelist promotes for the field of domestic representation. Woolf thus plays and discards the sex card. Her aesthetics of the imagination and her alignment with fellow modernists will take precedence over any other politics that critics, especially feminist critics, infer from this essay and from her sponsorship of Mrs Brown. There may indeed be no Mrs Browns in Well’s Utopia, but nor are there any in Woolf’s fiction. 9 While the gendered terrain of the domestic household, its authority and knowledge, will prove the locus of Woolf’s disciplinary and unique style, it is at Mrs Brown’s expense rather than her unqualified enfranchisement.


Contrary to Woolf’s claims, the novelist is less invested in Mrs Brown qua Mrs Brown than in the domestic scene her person makes available as an object of study. A return to this site of representation, however, a site Woolf revisits in her fiction of the 1920s, one that I shall take up in a moment, does not signal a return to some pre-1910 status quo. The sexual and social contracts are being renegotiated and herein repose Woolf’s interests. What ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ documents is Woolf’s plan to acquire cultural agency, her means of representational production, and the field of study. All three are perfectly consistent with the process experts undertake in acquiring legitimacy for their disciplines. At stake in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ is the representational space that will legitimate Woolf’s standing as a modernist. Her investment in the Mrs Browns and their imaginations charts the gendered territory of the bourgeois household, from the external relations of its occupants to the depths of their interiority, from the particular (a single female) to the general (human nature), from the most modest to the most auspicious, from, as she avers, ‘the cook to Clytemnestra’.10 In so doing, the intellectual Woolf maps a generous area of expert specialization – laterally over the classes of domestic space and vertically over the collective and individual consciousness of those who inhabit this space. If she accedes to the proprietorship of the representational arts and succeeds with her public, the rewards are considerable: through her fiction, she is positioned to superintend the reproduction of social differentiation. Control over this process will gain her not only expert status but authority over the household and its occupants with the power to modernize them both, to effect their future embodiments. As Woolf correctly grasps, character reading is the compulsion of the novelist and a most necessary leisured activity of the laity for just these reasons. A mimesis of consciousness embedded in the novels which circulate as objects of refined consumption within the literary marketplace not only instructs readers on how to make silent determinations about their fellow indigenes of the metropolis, but, of even greater import, it trains them to recognize and make these determinations of themselves – to ‘discover’ their secret desires, hidden motivations, affective relations, social ambitions. Desire and ambition – indeed, humanity itself – are no longer structured exclusively in the social order but buried instead within the psyche, as the new disciplines of sexology and psychology insist. 11 Woolf wants the female intellectual and artist to be included in the excavation of the unconscious and the subsequent reterritorialization of the body and the body politic. ‘The novel’, as she explains, ‘is a very remarkable machine for the creation of human


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character’. 12 These are the stakes of the argument she wages in the early 1920s, locating them on board that other machine of modernity, the railway. Woolf’s bid for representational control over the body politic in tandem with other modernists, however, has yet to be fully analyzed in the context of modern knowledge production, which leads me to a still greater claim. Critics have rightly examined the effects the emergent expert class had on the gendered institutions of public and private late in Victoria’s reign. Yet, because modernism in particular has not been seen as part of expert culture and specialized knowledge, but regarded more often in opposition to them, modernism’s complicity in the reorganization of these domains has largely been underestimated. Thus, for example, Nancy Armstrong’s signal work on the representational power of the domestic novel, which put in relief the institutional control the middle-class woman exercised through marriage and family over the modern political order, can trace the destabilization of the bourgeois woman’s authority over the incursions of the new expert class and, at the same time, exempt a modernist such as Woolf who, I will presently argue, performs a similar office. At the conclusion of Desire and Domestic Fiction, Armstrong argues that the twentieth-century struggle for control over female representation pits the professional expert against the female artist. Indeed, she illustrates this by pinpointing the conflict as one between the male physician Freud and the modernist Woolf. As she observes, Freud’s Dora and Woolf’s Mrs Brown ‘came into existence as writing at the very moment when the authority granted for over a century to the record of women’s feelings was undergoing revision’ (249). With Freud’s ultimate triumph of this revision, Woolf comes to signify the literary trace of the domestic women whose superintendence over the middle-class household was once uncontested. According to Armstrong, ‘[Freud’s] mythology rendered the woman’s authority over sexual desire – whether it was manifested in Dora’s nineteenth-century sensibility or in Woolf’s self-consciously verbal displays – instantly anachronistic’ (250). Anita Levy, to offer another example, comes to a similar conclusion about the opposition over the domestic realm between modernism and the expert classes. In ‘Gendered Labor, the Woman Writer, and Dorothy Richardson’, Levy tries to elucidate the continuing bias against Richardson’s incipient modernism of Pilgrimage through an analysis of the writer’s literary double Miriam Henderson. Richardson’s character details, Levy explains, ‘the break-up and refiguration of the household in new professional terms’ and shows ‘what happens when the middleclass female is forced out of the household where little gratification


remains, into the equally ungratifying male world of work’ (51). Miriam Henderson is frustrated in first the private, then the public sphere, and finally in her attempt to find an alternative. Her dispossession, though artfully rendered through stream of consciousness, mirrors the neglect of her modernist creator. Despite the novelist’s visionary modernism, Levy concludes: Richardson’s working woman cum intellectual – Miriam Henderson – simply can’t compete with Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay, Molly Bloom, or Lady Chatterley, for that matter. This because none of these female figures represent the radical attempt to preserve gender outside of the institutions that previously materialized it, as does the figure of Miriam Henderson. (69–70) In their assessments of modernism and the professions, Armstrong and Levy are both partly right. They accurately document that modern experts appropriate the authority the bourgeois woman once selflessly exercised over the household. Where their analyses go astray is in understanding modernism as a separate enclave, an artistic preserve, if you will, that resists the expert knowledge in Armstrong’s view or, in Levy’s, that reverts to an antiquated domestic scene. If we understand Woolf’s model not as a failed challenge nor as a stylized relapse but as the plan to grant herself expert status as an artist, and modernism, by extension, as part of the larger movement of the expert class, then a different narrative emerges about intellectual and institutional culture, about modernism and expertise, and, more specifically, about their female incarnations. 13 When we place modernism in the context of the secularization of knowledge, a more complex account of the authority that female intellectuals and modernist artists wield over this period unfolds and over the very field of representation central to Armstrong’s and Levy’s analyses. In Levy’s case, because she does not regard modernism as an instance of modern knowledge production, she is destined to restate Richardson’s error of plotting thematically the reorganization of public and private spheres through a single female character’s consciousness. As the protagonist’s labor remains peripheral to both domestic and public production, so does Richardson’s remain marginal to modernism. Thematic inscription, especially Richardson’s self-inscription through her double Henderson, cannot grant the novelist either the cultural authority or the status she seeks. Mistakenly, Richardson makes this incipient female intellectual into an object of study instead of an agent of knowledge. So like Mrs Brown, Henderson remains trapped


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within the narrative of the text and, to the extent Richardson identifies her modernism with this single character, the novelist does as well. Woolf’s model, by contrast, does not, and this distinction is crucial to understanding the logic at work here and the means by which authority over the bourgeois household is recast. Let me make my point by reference to a study of modernism and Woolf by Jennifer Wicke. In ‘Mrs Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern Markets’, Wicke observes: ‘There is no Bloomsbury depicted in Mrs Dalloway, no character who could “be” a Bloomsberrie’ (14).14 Nor, would I add, is there one in To the Lighthouse. There is no need to thematize Bloomsbury nor to plot the journey of a Bloomsburyesque character in the novel because its ethos, Wicke shows, is conveyed through Woolf’s mimesis of consciousness. This mode of representation replaces, in short, thematic plotting or character identification. Representing consciousness through a language of interiorized motivation cancels the need for a character named consciousness. Hence, no Bloomsberrie character need be present because Bloomsbury is already and everywhere represented. To take Wicke’s argument one step further, we might see that this mode of representation – lyrically rendering a dynamic metropolis through the consciousness of Clarissa’s diurnal circuit – as nothing less than a highly stylized means of feminized mapping and penetration of aesthetic containment and of recuperation. All the foregoing operations, with the exception of the aesthetic, are of a kind that other experts routinely perform in their specializations. These procedures grant experts autonomy and authority by ensuring the necessary critical distance from their objects of study. The modernist artist’s specialized knowledge effects a similar distance over the representational field with similar results. This is the distance that Richardson’s aesthetic of consciousness lacks and the same one that Woolf’s yields. Having the domestic woman, whether a Mrs Dalloway or a Molly Bloom, and her authority enclosed within the borders of a text is precisely the narrative advantage and distance that Woolf and her fellow modernists want to secure as artist-experts, albeit for different political purposes, not the least of which concern gender. An aesthetic of consciousness, the very means that Woolf adumbrates in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, does not unconditionally enfranchise the Mrs Browns or the Molly Blooms. It more completely enfranchises a new class of experts – modernist writers. It grants them autonomy and establishes their dominion over an institutional culture in flux.15 Yet, this positional superiority, it should be pointed out, whether with Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Mrs Ramsay, or Joyce’s Molly Bloom, or Lawrence’s Constance Chatterley, does not lead


to a continuation of the gendered relations of earlier domestic fiction, as Levy argues, but suggests, instead, assimilation and reterritorialization of domestic knowledge to new ends. Woolf and fellow modernists subjugate through new disciplinary modes of representation that which Richardson fails to resolve thematically with one female protagonist. This returns us to Armstrong’s contrast of physician/analyst Freud and artist/writer Woolf. They do oppose one another. In this, Armstrong is correct. 16 Indeed, let us grant her contention that Freud’s narrative of sexuality in due course prevails over Dora’s and Woolf’s, and, what is more, defines Woolf’s personal history as an artist, as ‘more than one generation of readers filter[s] her fiction through the grid of Freudian mythology’ (Desire 249). My approach to Woolf’s domestic novels will demonstrate that it is finally her agency as intellectual and her capital as literary producer that procure the institutional space where the founding narratives of the psychology industry can be analyzed and ultimately contested. In other words, it is because the intellectual Woolf establishes herself, like Freud, as a modern expert, one who both produces and interprets institutional culture, that his hegemony can eventually be disputed and disputed by experts of other disciplines. In short, the expert Woolf produces the very logic and context that allows artists, scholars, and critics (feminists and others) to critique Freud in the first place, and, more important, to expose his truth claims as fiction. Put simply, I am arguing that Woolf is more like Freud and his male colleagues in her deployment of knowledge than different from them on the basis of gender. Linking Freud and Woolf as modernist experts implicitly raises the issue then of how the representational relation of Woolf to Brown differs from Freud’s to Dora. If Freud is criticized for the power differentials of sex, class, age, and knowledge that he brought to bear in his ‘fictive’ representation of Dora, are there not, granting their different disciplines, similar grounds to criticize Woolf and particularly for her manipulation of sexual division to obtain a kind of privileged access to her fellow passenger Mrs Brown? The beleaguered woman in her isolated and silent progress from Richmond to Waterloo has virtually no chance of escape until the train reaches its appointed destination. Only then, like Dora, can she leave.

II

Clarissa Dalloway’s open house

More than one feminist critic has objected to the apparent inconsistency in which Woolf, promising to inaugurate the feminized, egalitarian aesthetic of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, produces instead novels about


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a society matron and a faculty wife. 17 Others have complained that either feminine sensibility is best expressed by the new generation of male practitioners, Joyce, Strachey, and Eliot, or that Woolf is the female exemplar of a literary coterie that remains largely male. In both instances, the male writer is recuperated as the cultural dominant. Despite these criticisms, I contend that ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ functions equally as Woolf’s covenant with modernism and as the prolegomenon to Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, both being consistent with the logic of expert culture. Acknowledging this may not make Woolf’s tactics in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ acceptable, but it does at least make them comprehensible. And what is more, such tactics do not by default point to male cultural dominance. On the contrary, while there is an important gender component in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, it is not as conventionally reasoned out. If we allow that each discipline produces the exact knowledge it needs to establish its autonomy and additionally specifies the criteria needed to reproduce its members, then Woolf’s essay anticipates both and in a way that is inclusive of the female intellectual. ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ does this first for modernism, by distinguishing its specialized aesthetic of interiority, and second for the Georgians, by designating them the expert practitioners of this aesthetic, but with this important supplement. Where the expert class as part of the public sphere was institutionally gendered male, Woolf introduces female knowledge and folds into the public realm of art and commerce that which had previously been designated as private and domestic. Her essay in effect ‘publicizes’ the domestic realm and asserts the female novelist cum critic’s expertise over it and precisely by the public inspection of the sequestered Mrs Brown in a rail car. This is surely one other consequence of Mrs Brown’s open scrutiny in a public conveyance after all. The engine of Woolf’s critical discourse clears a space, if you will, a public representational space, by secularizing the household, its constituents, its knowledges, for her own intellectual and artistic practice. This she performs in her novels and, as her subsequent polemics A Room of One’s Own and ‘Professions for Women’ make manifest, not merely to procure symbolic agency and social status for herself, but also to obtain it for other female intellectuals and professionals – for the educated female bourgeoisie. In this way, she elevates the female intellectual and artist as worthy competitors of other experts and specialists. It is with this public institutional space that we can see the difference between Freud’s use of Dora and Woolf’s of Brown. Where Freud and his male colleagues psychologize the domestic realm with their analyses


of kinship in order to preserve it as a separate entity under their narrative control, Woolf probes its interiors in order to dismantle it. 18 Both are exploitations and appropriations of a kind, for in each case, expert or intellectual agency is gained by the trespass on the bourgeois home. Freud’s is a cultural defense to maintain it, Woolf’s, an intervention to supplant it.19 Thus, having traded the privacy of her own domicile for the public enterprise Hogarth Press, Woolf now brings the exchange full circle by publicly trading her domestic legacy, represented in her novels Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, in the urban arena of art and commerce. In successive steps she will first put Clarissa out on the streets and then put Mrs Ramsay on canvas, marketing both as objects of refined consumption that elegize their passing. This reification of domesticity is the complement implicit in the founding of Hogarth Press in the drawing room of the home. The merger of labor and leisure within the Woolf’s household is repeated outside of it, sundering the boundaries between private and public that identified and authorized middle-class men and women for over a century. In effect, the intellectual Woolf appropriates their authority for reproducing the social order as a new cultural center. Because the critical method of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ succeeds in the novels Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Orlando can whimsically codify in 1928, the androgyny of the modernist intellectual and artist, who is both male and female, consumer and producer, and can thus codify the androgyny of the metropolis where gender and sex are no longer understood as distinguishing markers of the discrete realms, private and public, but as intermixing and commingling. Let me support my argument by turning first to the eponymous heroine of Mrs Dalloway. The ambivalence about her representation expressed by many, including Woolf, is perhaps nowhere better articulated than in Lytton Strachey’s pointed critique of the novel. ‘What he says’, the novelist records in her diary, ‘is that there is a discordancy between the ornament (extremely beautiful) and what happens (rather ordinary – or unimportant). This is caused, he thinks, by some discrepancy in Clarissa herself; he thinks she is disagreeable and limited, but that I alternately laugh at her and cover her, very remarkably, with myself’ (Diary 3: 32). There are numerous examples to support Strachey’s assessment of Clarissa. Even Woolf is forced to acknowledge its merit: ‘I think there is some truth in it, for I remember the night at Rodmell when I decided to give it up, because I found Clarissa in some way tinselly’ (Diary 3: 32). A ‘tinselly’ Clarissa is evident from Woolf’s first representation of her in The Voyage Out to the later one in the short story ‘Mrs Dalloway


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in Bond Street’, published before the novel and later collected with several other fictional pieces under the title Mrs Dalloway’s Party.20 In the cameo appearance in The Voyage Out, Clarissa and spouse Richard are stranded tourists taken on board the Euphrosyne, where her charms enliven the ship’s passengers, all her social inferiors. Her political convictions, on the other hand, strike an insincere and superficial chord. For instance, there is her advocacy of the poor, ironically declaimed in the dining cabin. ‘I go out into the streets’, she declares at dinner, ‘and the first child I meet with its poor, hungry, dirty little face makes me turn round and say, “No I can’t shut myself up – I won’t live in a world of my own”’ (45). Receiving no sympathetic response from the dinner party, she confesses to a chill and calls for her fur wrap, then smoothly launches a new topic of conversation, the tragedy Antigone, which concerns what else but a heroine being fatally, if heroically, shut up. With a similar want of insight, she describes to Richard her feelings of national pride that distill empire into the London metropolis the couple inhabit. Being on this ship seems to make it so much more vivid – what it means to be English. One thinks of all we’ve done, and our navies, and the people in India and Africa, and how we’ve gone on century after century, sending out boys from little country villages – and of men, like you, Dick, and it makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear not to be English! Think of the light burning over the House, Dick! When I stood on deck just now I seemed to see it. It’s what one means by London. (50–1, original emphasis) In postwar London, Clarissa’s complacency and street excursions are little altered. The short story ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, the precursor to Mrs Dalloway, depicts Clarissa out buying French kid evening gloves for her party rather than the flowers that open the novel. She recalls her Uncle William’s adage that ‘[a] lady is known by her gloves and her shoes’, then proves it by her discriminating selection (26). When the shop clerk apologizes for the decline in quality with the war and the narrator sardonically observes, ‘[t]housands of young men had died so that things might go on’, it is clear that the ‘things might go on’ referenced are none other than white gloves above the elbow to be slipped on for evening parties of the London season (28). In the novel, Woolf’s solution is to offset Clarissa’s superficiality by endowing her with interiority. Acknowledging the validity of Strachey’s complaint, she notes: ‘Then I invented her memories’ ( Diary 3: 32). Or as she describes earlier at Rodmell in her diary: ‘I should say a good


deal about my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think it gives exactly what I want: humanity, humour, depth’ (Diary 2: 263). For Woolf, Clarissa’s ‘beautiful cave’ ultimately justifies her recuperation. The disciplinary style of producing, then carving out the imagination and of coding it an aesthetic of consciousness grants the society hostess the psychological agency promised by dowdy Mrs Brown. In Mrs Dalloway, the rewired Clarissa is set in motion in a narrative delivered, it hardly seems necessary to point out, not by rail but on foot, by pedestrians following their separate but overlapping courses through the streets of 1923 metropolitan London on a certain spring morning. How different is the register then of Clarissa’s shopping at the opening of Mrs Dalloway as gloves and avuncular maxims are superseded by flowers: ‘There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes – so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell’ (13). Instead of selfish ornamentation, a love of nature and unaffected generosity motivate consumption. Clarissa volunteers to buy the flowers to save her servant the chore, ‘[f]or Lucy had her work cut out for her’ (3). The morning upon which she embarks is linked to a sunny day at the beach, and the doors to the drawing room, being removed for her party, rapturously swing open onto a memory of her country home of Bourton and the former Miss Parry at 18. The urban topography of postwar London is momentarily eclipsed nostalgically by linking it to flowers, springtime, youthful beauty, and a country estate that functions in the vernacular of the Anglo-imaginary as every city dweller’s mythic childhood home. By the time Clarissa salutes her longtime friend Hugh Whitbread, ‘I love walking in London. Really it’s better than walking in the country’ (6), her artifice has been naturalized and urban London gentrified. By aestheticizing the imagination, Woolf’s ‘beautiful cave’, Clarissa becomes in effect what was not thought possible of her sex and class, an urban promeneur out for a country walk on city streets. In return, the London that greets Clarissa is fluid and dynamic; its pedestrians circulate, intersect, and are entwined in a flux of shopping and of introspection such that social and political relations exceed the boundaries that demarcate the private from the public. In effect, political life is domesticated and the domestic is politicized. In all of this, Clarissa is accorded power over and gratification from the social sphere she embodies. Indeed, her representation dominates the text, and the urban household is portrayed as an alternate site of power, one that overlaps with other institutions of the metropolis, intermittently represented


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by the parliamentarian Richard, her spouse; royal attendant Hugh Whitbread, lifelong friend; colonial official Peter Walsh, jilted wooer; and medical expert William Bradshaw, physician to the decorated war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. As the text elevates Clarissa’s humanity and transforms her social knowledge into political art, it discredits and demonizes male professional elites in turn. Indian magistrate Peter Walsh with his pocketknife compulsion is usually singled out by critics for his incompetence and irresolution. Such, in fact, is the combined but silent assessment of Walsh at the luncheon Millicent Bruton hosts for Richard and Hugh Whitbread. Peter had ‘gone to India; come a cropper; made a mess of things’ (107). Walsh aside, the luncheon itself, from which Clarissa is notably excluded, trivializes the male professional class. The redoubtable Lady Bruton, heir to England’s martial and aristocratic heritage, presides over the midday gathering, whose pretext quickly dissolves when it becomes clear that Bruton has engaged these two public servants to counsel her, not on the fine points of a legal issue or state matter, but rather on the wording of a letter to the editor of the Times. At the stroke of their pen, masculine Lady Bruton manages to emasculate her luncheon companions. The situation becomes even more ludicrous when the letter’s contents are disclosed. Her scheme is ‘for emigrating young people of both sexes born of respectable parents and setting them up with a fair prospect of doing well in Canada’ (108). One obvious irony of Bruton’s Ark is its complete indifference to the loss of a generation of young men in the recent war (the traumatized Smith soon to join them), not to mention the widespread public concern covered in the press, no less, over the depopulation of the nation, the declining birthrates of which we have since come to associate with a consumer economy. Notwithstanding, Whitbread sedulously drafts the letter while Richard sits idly by in tacit approbation. This letter offers the only political act, if it can be called that, that either is represented performing all day. If that were not enough, on leaving Bruton to couch and nap, the pair do what nearly all major characters in Dalloway do, as Jennifer Wicke points out, they go shopping, naturally, and together. In this novel, consumption and leisure are neither stigmatized nor marginalized. They are not joined as strictly female pursuits. Where Clarissa is first represented leaving the house, spouse Richard’s first sighting is entering Bruton’s. Consumption and sociality (lunch and shopping) blend easily with business and politics. Public figures and elected officials have no greater agency, indeed, a good measure less, it would seem, than hostesses Bruton and Clarissa. In the metropolitan


precincts depicted here, conventional boundaries blur as female influence is masculinized and male authority is feminized, emblematic of the androgynous metropolis later imagined in A Room of One’s Own and Orlando.21 While the expertise of public officials is banalized at the hands of the aristocrat Bruton, physician Sir William Bradshaw’s is explicitly demonized. 22 The text may scoff at government toadies, but it takes Bradshaw and the medical profession quite seriously and demonstrates it thematically. Besides Clarissa’s, his is the rival axis of power portrayed in the text, and quite literally at its center. What we confront in Bradshaw is an unfeeling medical professional whose specialized knowledge colonizes the body, in this instance the male body, to cure affective disorders his practice appears to engender. Illness is coded as loss of status and agency, and its profession as accumulation of both. As Mrs Dalloway reveals, his protocol entails the physician’s absolute control over the patient, to appropriate, in effect, the patient’s sovereignty and sovereignty over the home. The doctor removes and sequesters the ill in what are euphemistically termed ‘rest homes’, there to be infantilized with constant feeding and coerced inactivity until health is restored. In sum, the doctor supervises the complete reeducation of the patient. This is Bradshaw’s prescription for Smith, ‘ “One of my homes, Mr. Warren Smith”, he said, “where we will teach you to rest”’ (97). Other critics have documented Bradshaw as the doppelganger of S. Weir Mitchell whose rest cure, first inaugurated in the 1870s for soldiers suffering from battle fatigue, was widely prescribed for some 50 years and included Woolf among its conscripts. 23 As Woolf’s narrator archly comments: Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they often do, to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months’ rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve. (99) The doctor’s regimen continues to exercise control over the household even on the patient’s return to health and home. The activities permitted, in essence, leave the very order of the household under the doctor’s strict supervision. In effect, Bradshaw’s professional invasion of the household radically redefines their relation, with the physician acquiring


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the social agency to reproduce healthy subjects fit for the nation-state that was once the clear province of the bourgeois home. As Smith’s outcome suggests, however, the fitness of these new subjects is questionable. Bradshaw’s model of compelled convalescence in the country – abstinence, inactivity, silence, rest – utterly departs from a metropolis in flux – ever changing, dynamic, ludic, motile – offered by the text and manifest in Clarissa’s salubrious morning excursion. It is hardly an overstatement to conclude that, with a rest cure model that is coercive, invasive, and isolating, Bradshaw and his alienist colleagues would preserve a therapeutic version of the Victorian domicile and at any cost. The cultural defense of the bourgeois household cited above of Freud is present here and contested in Mrs Dalloway.24 That rest comes at a hefty price is captured equally in the status differentials and in amassed wealth that mark this successful medical practitioner’s Harley Street practice: ‘Bradshaw’s motor car; low, powerful, grey with plain initials interlocked on the panel, as if pomps of heraldry were incongruous ...grey, so to match its sober suavity, grey furs, silver grey rugs were heaped in it’ (94). His wife has also achieved the status of trophy, as caught by her framed photograph in courtdress on the physician’s desk. While the doctor attends his case load, she waits patiently in the car ‘thinking sometimes about the patient, sometimes, excusably, of the wall of gold, mounting minute by minute while she waited; . . . [of] large dinner-parties every Thursday night to the profession; an occasional bazaar to be opened; Royalty to be greeted’ (94–95). In contrast to the generosity that motivates Clarissa’s consumption and that of Richard and friend Whitbread who shop for gifts for their spouses and for pleasure, the Bradshaws’ consumption returns us to the selfish ornamentation that marked Clarissa’s previous incarnations. The effect on Lady Bradshaw is telling. ‘Once, long ago, she had caught salmon freely: now, quick to minister to the craving which lit her husband’s eye so oilily for dominion, for power, she cramped, squeezed, pared, pruned, drew back, peeped through’ (101). In the oft quoted passage: ‘Fifteen years ago she had gone under’ (100). She becomes in substance affectless, an exemplar of her husband’s medical practice and more like an automaton than a fully differentiated and desiring individual. By the terms of the novel then, Bradshaw’s patient, Septimus Smith, is doubly exploited and victimized: first by the state’s legal violence in war and then by the medical profession’s invasive and expensive cure. One intended irony is that Bradshaw’s disciplinary regime of rest is designed to repair affective relations of which the doctor is personally and professionally devoid. It is on this level of affect that the shell-shocked


Smith’s representation connects with Mrs Dalloway’s and most forcefully through illness. 25 Clarissa’s recent battle with influenza, signified by her whitened hair and weakened heart, has made her subject to a similar regimen, one in which her spouse Richard is markedly complicit. In the reorganization of her household, there are now restrictions on her socializing, a forced midday rest, and, more telling, her conjugal separation from spouse. Clarissa’s illness (as Millicent Bruton mentally notes on more than one occasion as an unhappy event for Richard’s professional career) signals a loss of agency for her person but, in contrast to Smith, it also signals a loss of potency over the domain she governs, a domain that formerly helped to produce men like Smith. Authority over familial affiliations and subjective relationships, once her special knowledge, ‘her gift’, as she puts it, which grants her agency and status, as had been the case for the middle-class married woman for over a century in domestic novels, is being transferred from her. It is now under the medical profession’s strictures that she remains, as Woolf describes the Angel in the House in ‘Professions for Women’, ‘immensely charming’, ‘utterly unselfish’, and ‘excel[ling] in the difficult arts of family life’ (285). In spite of her convalescence and medical regulation, it is Clarissa who smoothly orchestrates the preparations for the party, shops for flowers, mends an evening dress, effortlessly puts Peter at ease on his impromptu visit, receives Richard’s gift bouquet for the unspoken declaration of love he intends, and escorts ‘her Prime Minister’ about at the climatic evening gathering. Even so, her authority is undermined. Ostensibly, it is the professional class Bradshaw represents that challenges her considerable power and special knowledge. At issue is her authority over affective relations, the household, and even over the domesticated metropolis of London, in short the social charge to form subjects that for a century had been located in the family. The consequences of this rivalry are brought home, so to speak, not only in Richard’s and Clarissa’s separate bedrooms, but also in the tension between Clarissa and her daughter Elizabeth who, in fraternizing with the pinched Miss Kilman and in thinking of becoming a professional, a doctor in fact, shows no interest in acceding to her mother’s position. 26 Finally, and most pointedly, they reveal themselves in Smith’s death. When the Bradshaws arrive late to the party and indelicately introduce the news of his patient’s suicide in its midst, it is this abuse of her power that initially appalls Clarissa. Shortly thereafter, it is an awareness of the doctor’s crushing of desire and usurpation of agency that causes her to empathize with the promising clerk’s demise. She thinks of Smith being attended by Bradshaw, and significantly singles out artists and intellectuals and


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links them to Smith. ‘[T]here were the poets and the thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil . . . forcing your soul’ (184). And again, ‘they make life intolerable, men like that’ (185). In such circumstances, Septimus’s suicide becomes the ultimate gift or form of consumption, or so the text appears to say: to throw oneself away, to spend oneself is preferable to being ‘owned’ by Bradshaw, as the diminished Lady Bradshaw illustrates. In her bonding with Septimus, Clarissa thinks instead that ‘[s]he had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away’ (184). Shortly thereafter: ‘She felt somehow very like him. . . . She felt glad that he had done it; thrown himself away’ (186). 27 Beyond identification with Smith’s misfortune, she even confesses to take responsibility for his act. ‘Somehow it was her disaster – her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress’ (185). Hostesses in evening gowns are apparently no longer viable agents of social differentiation. For what the text seems to suggest is that there is more being mourned than Smith’s passing and that the challenge to Clarissa’s social legitimacy is not confined to medical experts. Even after we acknowledge Woolf’s personal vendetta against the rest cure regimen, Bradshaw’s despotism remains overdetermined in the novel. An inkling of the text’s investment becomes apparent in the extended diatribe delivered against Sir William’s passion for proportion in which the narrator asserts: For there was in Sir William, whose father had been a tradesman, a natural respect for breeding and clothing, which shabbiness nettled; again, more profoundly, there was in Sir William, who had never had time for reading, a grudge, deeply buried, against cultivated people who came into his room and intimated that doctors, whose profession is a constant strain upon all the highest faculties, are not educated men. (97) What Bradshaw lacks is the cultivation that is Clarissa’s estate as the doyenne of the Victorian domicile. The text makes clear that her gifts, her local knowledge, were not acquired through professional training but produced within the domestic economy as the nostalgic scenes of the country home of Bourton insinuate. Yet the novel also suggests that the Victorian domicile, now colonized by the likes of Bradshaw, is likewise deficient, and this because of limitations hinted of Clarissa that cannot


be attributed solely to her recent viral infirmity. She comes from, as Miss Kilman notes, ‘the rich, with a smattering of culture’ (123). As the text details, she cannot distinguish Turks from Armenians; her interest in William Morris is all but forgotten as adolescent whimsy; and ‘to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know’ (122). For all the humanity psychologically invested in Clarissa, her excavation via Woolf’s ‘beautiful cave’ in other words, and all the malice directed at Bradshaw, it is rather her ignorance and intellectual apathy that are to blame for the decline of her authority over the social order. This failure makes Smith’s death her burden as well as Bradshaw’s and the state’s; and, by extension, the war her offense, as her unthinking exaltation of empire and metropolis quoted above from The Voyage Out augured. The war and influenza that mingle together and darken the novel imply that the Victorian household, for all its beauty, generosity, grace, and status, is ill-equipped to reproduce on its own the heterogeneous polity of the new century’s metropolis. In the novel then, both models, the bourgeois household and physician class that transgresses it, are suspect. Their deficiency is reflected in Smith’s latency. The nostrum for Bradshaw’s and Clarissa’s failures is to be found in the training that Smith, the clerk who aspired to cultural uplift, pursued in the cultivation of his taste and knowledge, eroticized in the narrative by its association with ‘Miss Isabel Poole, lecturing in Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare’ (85) – pursued, that is, until the state and the war intervened. On his return to England, the literary tradition of Shakespeare, Dante, Aeschylus now connotes ‘loathing, hatred, and despair’ (88). Yet it is the special knowledge of literature, the cultivated erudition of the intellectual and artist, that is the needed palliative for Bradshaw’s lack of affect and culture and for Clarissa’s naiveté and intellectual atrophy. Ultimately, it is not Smith’s passing that is eulogized at the conclusion of the novel but Clarissa’s, and it is clearly not Bradshaw whom the text appoints as successor. The issue of the ‘discordancy’ between ornament and action that Strachey so correctly intuits cannot, in the final analysis, be localized as a flaw in Clarissa’s character. The society matron’s lack of intellectual acuity is symptomatic of a still greater project of the novel. The discrepancy lies instead in Woolf’s modernist rewiring. The real discordancy is the ideological tension between Woolf’s mode of representation and her object of representation – digging out a ‘beautiful cave’ for an admittedly ‘tinselly’ protagonist made ambulant in a dynamic metropolis. For all the motility, fluidity, and interiority by which Woolf engenders the London metropolis and its senior hostess, her ultimate


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objective is to produce a mode of containment. While there is no optical coherence, no totalizing point of view offered of London (we look up after all to the aeroplane circling overhead with its enigmatic message, along with the pedestrians in the park), we should not discount the significance of this psychogeography of London and of metropolitan household. Mapping takes place on two distinct but overlapping representational levels in Mrs Dalloway. Woolf maps the urban space of London and the psychological space of its indigenes and conceals this ideological containment under the cover of her lyrical prose and of her censure of the medical profession. In aestheticizing the consciousness of her characters in a distinctly poetic language, Woolf rewrites affective relations and, in so doing, provides a new mechanism by which readers can view fictional characters and, more significantly still, can recognize themselves as discrete individuals and as a modern social aggregate. Not only does Woolf’s technology of aesthetic interiority, her ‘dig[ging] out beautiful caves’ (Diary 2: 263), help to secularize the household, but this technology, in pulsing along apparently unfettered through London streets in Mrs Dalloway, also hollows out an imaginary public space as the authentic private space of consciousness for the laity to read in novels such as hers. This portable technology, ideally suited for what one critic has termed ‘the homeless mind’, operates as a kind of black box of consciousness, ever ticking away, in daydreams and sleep, recording that innermost babble, that ineffable hum of the psyche.28 It is thus held to record our most secret desires and fantasies, hidden motivations and fears, innermost ambitions and inhibitions – and to this apparatus, literary modernists have given a distinctive, if esoteric, language that functions as an innovative form of emotional literacy. As such, this consciousness contraption comes to instruct educated and common readers alike, whether male or female, on how to make silent determinations about their fellow pedestrians of the metropolis and, of even greater consequence, to make silent determinations of themselves, suggesting that they no longer need, nor can they rely on, the angel in the house whispering in their ears what they should or should not feel or do or think. Instead, modernist technology hardwired us all. So naturalized has this technology become that we no longer recall its history or recognize how our individual consciousnesses daily reproduce it. It is the identification with Woolf’s mimesis of consciousness then, and not with a specific character, that marks her modernist expertise as it will also mark Joyce’s. ‘The novel’ as Woolf avers, ‘is a very remarkable machine for the creation of human character.’ The difficulty is that the


character whose social knowledge Woolf renders obsolete is the principal instrument of her innovative technique. What the nostalgic valuation of Clarissa and her flawed artistry over the affective domain shows along with the deflation of ‘obscurely evil’ Bradshaw and his disciplinary regime is that the urban household is a contested terrain. Not shown is Woolf’s own confiscation. ‘For there she was’, the final cryptic declaration, transforms the energy of the metropolis into stasis as the text holds up Clarissa, her aging beauty, her failing political art, her antiquated gift of party, as a rarefied species of literary bibelot for the admiration of readers that in turn confers cachet and distinction on its artificer, Woolf. Clarissa’s stylized representation synecdochely eulogizes the metropolitan household and mystifies the transfer of its governance to the female modernist through the commerce of literary production.29 The reification of Dalloway, the transformation of her household into a public exhibition of Victorian reliquary, separates Woolf from domestic ideology as it establishes her specialized knowledge as intellectual and artist over this domain, but with this significant addition. Because Woolf maps London as well as household, Mrs Dalloway can circulate as an aesthetic artifact of refined consumption within a now feminized and gentrified metropolis. Woolf thus makes good on her covenant with modernism implicit in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. An aesthetic of the imagination in secularizing the household not only digs out ‘beautiful caves’ for its protagonists but also hollows out a public institutional and commodified space for these to be traded as symbolic property. 30 Her payoff, of course, is the cultural capital of an expert modernist. Yet, successful as this transaction is, there is another aspect of this mode of containment that finds fuller realization in the domestic novel that follows Mrs Dalloway. In To the Lighthouse, there is no discordancy between ornament and action.

III

Lily’s idyll

The efflorescent postwar metropolis of Mrs Dalloway, its flux and vitality, is abandoned in To the Lighthouse for an evanescent island setting where bourgeois sovereignty is caught on a September afternoon in two static and entrenched emblems of power: lighthouse and summer house. This pair dominates the textual landscape and the lives of the Ramsay family and their houseguests poised between them, a polarity then localized in the figures of Mr and Mrs Ramsay themselves. This novel sets as its interpretive horizons what was begun in Mrs Dalloway: the failure of Victorian institutions to fulfill their traditional covenant and functions,


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signaled initially by the aborted trip to the lighthouse and then extended to include all assembled at the summer house. Along with Mrs Ramsay and her contrivances to bring together the young couple Paul and Minta, the maturing maiden cum budding artist Lily Briscoe and widower Bankes, we are presented with the overbearing university don Mr Ramsay, caught in the maze of his alphabet quest (‘stuck at Q. On, then, on to R’) and shadowed by his heir presumptive, the splenetic Charles Tansley, a kind of Miss Kilman in drag, for whom even the family dog Badger has registered affront (55, 12–13). Despite the Ramsays’ differences of temperament and institutional authority, which feminist critics have in the last 20 years emphasized, the couple separately acknowledge their complicity in and responsibility for reproducing the social order. The morose logician Ramsay fairly glows with the prospect of his family’s future: The father of eight children – he reminded himself. And he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single thing altered. Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole – his eight children. They showed he did not damn the universe entirely. (106) While contrary to outward cheer, Mrs Ramsay privately broods over the trials her family will undergo and her sense of duty in spite of misgivings: And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through it all. To eight people she had said relentlessly that . . . . And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be perfectly happy. And here she was, she reflected, feeling life rather sinister again, making Minta marry Paul Rayley; because whatever she might feel about her own transaction, she had had experiences which need not happen to every one (she did not name them to herself); she was driven on, too quickly she knew, almost as if it were an escape for her too, to say that people must marry; people must have children. (92–93) That the interlude ‘Time Passes’ reveals outcomes different from what was demanded, it hardly seems necessary to enumerate: Mrs Ramsay’s sudden death after an illness, Prue’s in childbirth, Andrew’s in war, the Rayleys’ failed marriage, and Bankes’s and Briscoe’s stubborn celibacy. These events make Mr Ramsay’s booming recital over the terrace lawn


of Tennyson’s line of fatal leadership, ‘some one had blundered’, herald not only what one historian would later call the guns of August but also the impending collapse of Victorian social dominance, represented here, as in Mrs Dalloway, by the entwined and flawed modern institutional culture of nation and household. It is little wonder then that Woolf, in mentally composing this novel as the sales of Mrs Dalloway exceeded 1500 copies in late June 1925, would confide in her diary, ‘I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant “novel”. A new________by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?’ (3: 34). The argument I want to continue and expand here is the connection between Woolf’s increasing stature as an intellectual and artist (evident in her musing that her novels merit sui generis) and the increasing dominion she exercises as a specialist over the field of representation. The more visible her success, the more certain her status, the more concentrated her aesthetic control – all apparent as Mrs Dalloway’s psychogeography of London and of party is reduced to a single canvas in To the Lighthouse. This text, more transparently than Mrs Dalloway, concerns the power to represent – who exercises this power, through which mode, and over which objects. While the novel begins by posing the latter two questions thematically – which, it asks, will prevail: the male epic in miniature implied by the novel’s title and by the journey the young James dreams of, or the domestic narrative of the drawing room? – ultimately it chooses neither lighthouse nor summer house but artist’s painting. As modeled in the drama of the railway car and as expressed in Mrs Dalloway, male expertise will be undermined and demonized, and domestic governance shown to be insufficient. This text imposes more exactly what the essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ professed: putting objects in their proper place and determining whose knowledge of these objects will dominate. On a thematic level, male epic is quickly remanded and significantly by the two philosophers: first Mr Ramsay’s callous interruption of mother and James to forecast bad weather, ‘[b]ut it won’t be fine’ (10), seconded by the fawning Tansley’s, ‘[t]here’ll be no landing at the Lighthouse tomorrow’ (15), and for this reason. The text suggests that, at 60, the patriarch Ramsay has outlasted his powers, intellectual and physical, and that grand adventures in the Homeric tradition have come to an end. Of Mr Ramsay it notes: Finally, who shall blame the leader of a doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now


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perceives by some prickling in his toes that he lives . . . . Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by window and gazes at his wife and son. (57) With authorial dexterity, epic is grounded as a weather delay effectively thwarts the quest. Domestic romance mocks Homeric odyssey. In the lull, the preoccupation of the assembly, who, except for James and Lily, careen about the terrace like bantam knights choreographed by Lewis Carroll, becomes gazing at Mrs Ramsay. In lieu of epic, metaphysical and otherwise, the principal focus is the representation of this Penelopelike figure knitting socks at the window. Here the text repeatedly reminds us that in Mrs Ramsay’s household the windows are to be opened but the doors shut. Unlike Mrs Dalloway, there will be no unhinging of doors in this novel as prelude to shopping expeditions and evening gala that symbolically sundered the barrier between street and domicile. The ideological discord instanced in Strachey’s critique of Mrs Dalloway, the discrepancy between ornament and action, is set right and gendered here, and the female ‘sentimental’ (a qualifier that consistently harried Woolf in her composition) narrative prevails at the outset by the conspicuous disqualification of the male. 31 This female narrative centers then around Mrs Ramsay, ‘this mania of hers for marriage’ (261), her talent like Clarissa Dalloway’s of bringing things together, her ‘making of the moment something permanent’, an artist manqué who attempts coherence over the chaotic life Mrs Dalloway celebrated (241). While the men, young and old alike, would have Mrs Ramsay remain where and as she is, the beautiful ballast of the domestic sphere, Woolf has a different project in mind and her use of the sentimental is one important key. To the Lighthouse simultaneously encodes and decodes domestic ideology. What the novel serves up, as Woolf insinuates with her new genre ‘elegy’, is the Victorian pastoral hinted in Mrs Dalloway’s nostalgic divagations of the country home of Bourton. In To the Lighthouse, however, the pastoral can now be fully implemented by iconographically textualizing the sequestered figure of matriarch Ramsay with son framed at the window of the island household she supervises. To understand the ideological containment that Woolf devises in this modernist experiment requires, however, recourse to a more recognizably expert field of representation and of knowledge, one that has in recent decades come under considerable scrutiny. Postcolonialist discourse energized by Edward Said’s Orientalism has made eminently visible the social construction of knowledge in the


rationalization of empire. More specifically, it has demonstrated the particular ways in which the imposition of knowledge extended empire’s grip on the peoples and territories under its dominion by transforming them into representable objects within a seemingly apolitical context. Representation legitimized and regulated subordination. Encoded variously as geography, philology, anthropology, and so on, these knowledge-based disciplines not only elaborated imperial power over indigenous subjects but also granted cultural status and authority to the agents who professed them. One especially lucid account of the ideological effects of empire’s symbolic technology that aptly explicates Woolf’s ‘elegy novel’ is Renato Rosaldo’s ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’. In his critique and memoir of imperial ventures in the Philippines, Rosaldo describes a notably efficient means by which empire’s agents negotiate their dominance. According to Rosaldo, a discourse of nostalgia allows colonial trespassers, of whatever ilk – anthropologists, missionaries, constabulary officers, ethnographers – to proclaim their innocence by mourning the demise of the culture they are responsible for destroying. The colonial interlopers’ complicity in hegemonic practices prompts nostalgic texts, argues Rosaldo, to disguise the imposition of power inherent in their enterprises and the subsequent inequality that these colonial relationships impel. Imperialist nostalgia occurs alongside a peculiar sense of mission, the white man’s burden, where civilized nations stand duty-bound to uplift so-called savage ones. In this ideologically constructed world of ongoing progressive change, putatively static savage societies become a stable reference point for defining (the felicitous progress of) civilized identity. ‘We’ valorize innovation and then yearn for more stable worlds, whether these reside in our past, in other cultures, or in the conflation of the two. (108, emphasis added) Idealizing the lost object, which they themselves have displaced, absolves the guilt of the transgressors but noticeably leaves their dominion intact. Equally important, nostalgia produces another space, that of a suspended past, which the transgressors use as a palliative to a present they have worked to disfigure. This mythic space helps to conceal the hegemony of the transgressors and to represent the target culture in the present ‘fallen’ moment as forever needful of further intervention and remediation as it is pushed toward an ever-receding limit of modernity. In one movement, nostalgic discourse both hides


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the ideological operations of imperial dominance and then enables, in fact, justifies their continued implementation. While this hegemonic exercise, that which Rosaldo defines as nostalgia’s disguise of domination, pertains to disciplines such as ethnography and anthropology, it is my contention that it explains the logic operating in Woolf’s modernist experimentation over the localized terrain of the middleclass household. What is more, it is a practice intrinsic to modernism itself; indeed as suggested at the outset, its practice is narrated as one of rupture and apogee. For modernists equally ‘valorize innovation’, as Rosaldo contends, ‘and then yearn for more stable worlds, whether these reside in [the] past, in other cultures, or in the conflation of the two’. As I will demonstrate in the next chapter on Forster and as Woolf’s model amply suggests, modernism is the name we give the symbolic technology of the arts whose implementation attempts the same hegemonic dominion that other competing forms of expertise methodically enact over their objects of study. Rosaldo’s explication of nostalgic domination offers insight into the dominion that Woolf carries out in her domestic epic To the Lighthouse. To begin with, what better means of disguising authorial subjugation of domestic production than by enlisting as subaltern one whose modest ambitions and abilities will neither interfere with nor outclass the artist Woolf’s lyrical prose that pervades the text and organizes domestic containment. The diffident, 33-year-old Lily Briscoe – ‘an independent little creature’, thinks matriarch Ramsay, ‘she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously’ (29) – functions as both witness and chronicler and is thus ideally situated to perform the tasks, first, of observing and venerating domestic ideology and, then, of aestheticizing and innocently mourning for Mrs Ramsay. 32 So well suited is Lily in fact that she is as much cipher as artist-naïf. She is also resilient. In spite of repeated attempts at her effacement, each of which undermines her ability – Mr Ramsay’s complete indifference, nearly knocking down her painting on the terrace, and scowling at her canvas; Tansley’s mantra ‘[w]omen can’t paint, women can’t write’ (75) that rebuffs her art; Bankes’s wondering whether ‘mother and child . . . might be reduced to a purple shadow without irreverence?’ (81), thus undermining her technique; Mrs Ramsay’s condescension, ‘Lily’s picture!’ (29) – despite all of these, she persists over 10 years to complete her portrait in the end. Against such disabling and protracted scrutiny, it is what Lily sees and what she refuses in the masculinist gazes of the experts about her that organize and further enlarge the scopic economy of the novel.


For her gaze is the one that ultimately provides the nostalgic containment described by Rosaldo. Among the male perspectives arrayed against Lily’s, there is, for example, the sycophant Tansley, who, unmarried and socially inferior, swells with pride just by being seen with ‘the most beautiful person he has ever seen’, the matron Mrs Ramsay (25). Her beauty gratifies his masculinity, granting him the confidence he otherwise lacks. With the botanist Bankes, a childless widower, there is rapture at the sight of mother and son at the window, such that he ‘rested in the contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued’ (74). His reverie relocates Mrs Ramsay’s beauty in maternity in which her fecundity (of no fewer than eight children) is charmingly, if somewhat leguminously, domesticated. Great though their admiration, Tansley’s and Bankes’s championing is non-threatening because contained within bourgeois propriety and maternal idealization. The narrator also participates in this adulation by juxtaposing mother and son with a Michelangelo painting, thereby pointedly aestheticizing maternal munificence even further. Mrs Ramsay herself registers the power of her beauty over domestic governance, elevating it to the status of a symbol: ‘She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and shrink form the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent’ (64–65). Her increasing legibility in the descriptions of those around her and in her own self-awareness enhances her attractiveness and desirability. So affecting is her aura, that even the diffident Lily nearly succumbs to the lure of her domestic benevolence: ‘[Lily] had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs Ramsay’s knee and say to her – but what could one say to her? “I’m in love with you?” No, that was not true. “I’m in love with this all”, waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children’ (32). The scopic framing, to include Lily’s repressed yearning, is so focused on heightening Mrs Ramsay’s symbolic and aesthetic value in this pastoral setting of summer holiday that it obscures the textual containment it also effects that points to the matriarch’s decline. Contrary to all the desirability Mrs Ramsay excites as beauty, helpmate, hostess, mother, and matchmaker, her objectification by the text effectively cancels any corresponding increase in her agency. As rich as this scopic economy and its prose are, the economy in this novel is otherwise decidedly flat. Though the text obsesses over Mrs Ramsay


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as representation, the matriarch’s art and the labor of household are by contrast systematically devalued and shown to be not merely defective but also enervating, especially when compared with Mrs Dalloway. True, Mrs Ramsay is, like all of the major characters, granted psychological depth, but there is no motivating principle beyond this as there was in Mrs Dalloway. Where desire in that novel conferred agency on Clarissa and her fellow pedestrians, in To the Lighthouse, its lack in Mrs Ramsay utterly forecloses it. There is no window-shopping, no glove browsing, no frock consciousness, no adolescent kiss stolen by a Sally Seton, no gift bouquets of carnations or roses exchanged. Instead of an effulgence of flowers, Mrs Ramsay worries over repairing the greenhouse. She lets her children Rose and Jasper choose the jewelry for a black dinner dress that hints at mourning. The dinner of Boeuf en Daube, Mildred’s specialty, is overcooked and ruined. Mrs Ramsay’s one spontaneous pleasure comes in admiring the table centerpiece Rose has arranged upon which she and the quiescent poet Carmichael separately ‘feast’ their eyes (146). As she serves the soup, she laments ‘a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything’ (125).33 It is due to these deficiencies, the fundamental absence of Mrs Ramsay’s own animating desire, that Lily can finally refuse to join the bourgeois household. Indeed, Briscoe’s contemplation confirms as much at the dinner table. When Lily correctly reads Mrs Ramsay’s pitying glance at Bankes, she mentally counters: ‘He is not in the least pitiable. He has his work’ (128). Yet, only moments before she comments to herself of Mrs Ramsay, ‘[h]ow old she looks, how worn she looks’ (127), without any compensating recognition of the value of her work supervising the household or deference to her position as hostess seeing to her guests. While Bankes is not pitiable because his work sustains him, Mrs Ramsay is pitiable because her work exhausts her. At one point, the hostess even reduces herself to an empty shell: ‘So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent’ (60). The consumption that invigorated metropolitan London is here represented as devitalizing. Rather than domestic production enabling consumption or pleasure, Mrs Ramsay’s labor annuls it, though ironically the novel is situated within the leisured space of a summer vacation. Where Clarissa was accorded power over and gratification from the domestic sphere in spite of her illness, with Mrs Ramsay, the domestic sphere, in this case a house full of children and guests, becomes the source of her illness. Arcadian fecundity and munificence literally oppress her. Consumption leads


to depletion in this novel and not to increase. Domestic production encoded within the Victorian tropes of service and vocation is devalued and shown to be debilitating. By contrast, the work of botanist Bankes or that of the aspiring artist Lily, not to mention the two philosophers, is valuable and validating, even when its practitioners are caustic and dictatorial, or its practice dilatory, as is the case of Lily and Carmichael. What all this suggests is that well before the interlude ‘Time Passes’, which pointedly gothicizes the deserted and crumbling house left to aging Mrs McNab’s care, it and Mrs Ramsay are hollowed out even as they are being simultaneously elevated to the status of revered objects. Mrs Ramsay is effectively destroyed by the same text that putatively mourns and venerates her and significantly in the first section of the novel. It is for this reason that the conclusion of the novel – in which the diminished Ramsay party and Lily with her unfinished canvas return to the family enclave after a 10-year absence – risks anticlimax: not because of Mrs Ramsay’s sudden death at the center of the novel, but rather because her textual demise was prematurely concluded in ‘The Window’. What screens this precipitant death is the indirect discourse and lyrical prose of the middle section ‘Time Passes’, which, in elegizing Mrs Ramsay’s decease, diffuses its effects and enables the novel’s denouement.34 Put differently, this agentless passage aesthetically contains the domestic realm as it exculpates Woolf from any direct responsibility for the death of Mrs Ramsay, whom the novel sanctimoniously eulogizes as the beautiful incarnation of domesticity. Woolf’s linguistic strategy thus preserves her artistic detachment and effects her representational authority over the site of domestic ideology. The passage thus signals the end of domestic surveillance and its cultural replacement. Moreover, by aesthetically rendering the matron’s preternatural death and the unraveling of her domestic accomplishments obliquely in this agentless hiatus, Woolf deflects textual liability so that Mrs Ramsay’s portrait can be guilelessly consummated as the artist Lily’s uninhibited vision in the closing scenes. And this is precisely what transpires. Lily’s reverie, and not the voyage the chastened Mr Ramsay leads, significantly dominates and concludes ‘The Lighthouse’. The amateur Lily and her painterly representation prevail over epic and domestic diegesis. In the final section, then, in revisiting the opening scene, Lily mourns for the deceased matriarch and innocently wills her back into existence: ‘“Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!” she cried, feeling the old horror come back – to want and want and not to have’ (300). Until finally, ‘Mrs Ramsay – it was part of her perfect goodness – sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking’ (300).


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In this revived pose now unequivocally located within the creative imagination, the subaltern Lily executes the painting, completes her vision, and preserves her innocence. She thus both sustains the illusion of artistic purity and performs the nostalgic recuperation of the Victorian household. Mrs Ramsay as lost object is nostalgically recovered in art and becomes in her aesthetic afterlife even more consecrated. The elegized matriarch confined wholly to canvas, which Lily meekly thinks might be rolled up in some attic, is rather exchanged into novel form that circulates as a modernist work of art within the literary marketplace and, contrary to attic moldering, has done so for over 75 years.35 What Lily, no matter her diminutive stature, chronicles then is the shift among intellectual and artistic women who deny Mrs Ramsay’s moral authority but who value, indeed, elegize her as a lost object. On the thematic level, the Victorian social order disintegrates under the weight of the demands of family, men and children, hastened by the guns of August; on the ideological level, it is the repudiation of domestic superintendence by the women (in particular) of Woolf’s class, the educated bourgeoisie, who, as Rosaldo notes of colonial interlopers, bring about its destruction, then mourn its passing. These women, under the tutelage of Woolf’s model, are poised to return to the household but only as intellectuals, artists, and experts. In Lily’s final act of mystification and sedition, she draws a line through the center of the canvas that would, in today’s lexicon of warning signs, brazenly signify ‘no domestics allowed’. Mrs Ramsay’s portraiture, even after we factor in Woolf’s identification of her protagonist with her own mother, is as overdetermined in this text as Bradshaw’s despotism was in Mrs Dalloway. Of course, what I am implying is that there is a corollary between Woolf’s strategic recuperation of summer house and Bradshaw’s of rest home through nostalgic containment. It is no coincidence that both situate their therapeutic domestic models not in an urban but in a pastoral locale. While I would not want to push the comparison too far (Bradshaw is after all a character of Woolf’s own making), I do suggest that each serves the important ideological function of authorizing intervention in the bourgeois household and authorizing a particular form of knowledge to supplant and gain dominion over it. For Woolf, the hollowed-out Victorian household survives but only as cultural icon. Masked by formalist techniques and a self-professed elegiac mode, both Mrs Dalloway and especially To the Lighthouse function as nostalgized texts that disguise Woolf’s appropriation of domestic culture and expiate her culpability in destroying and supplanting it. In the process, her heroines, the mourned and


commodified domestic relics Dalloway and Ramsay, become new referents. As literally and figuratively angels ministering to a forsaken present, they not only invite further interventions in domestic ideology by intellectuals and artists such as Woolf, but also invite those of other modernist and professional women. As Woolf’s model demonstrates, modernists of whatever gender stripe gain in cultural authority by denigrating and replacing the moral authority of ‘woman’, as defined by Victorian matron and society hostess, with their own expert narratives more synchronous with a mobile and worldly aggregate. In the process, modernist innovations become the basis of new expert authority and the measure of a modern cultural class, as cultural reproduction assumes the centrality once accorded biological reproduction and the bourgeois family. The Mmes Dalloway and Ramsay, whether we understand them as timeless symbols fit for a college course on ‘Great Books’ or as the consecrated objects by which Pierre Bourdieu has recently reclassified symbolic property, are transformed and exchanged in the literary marketplace as domestic artifacts, whose dominion the intellectual Woolf at once venerates, ousts, and usurps.

4 Queer Couplings: Forster’s Hellenic Pastoralism and Modern Masculinity

The central question of Howards End, ‘Who shall inherit England?’, offered some 40 years ago by Lionel Trilling, might be better understood as the central preoccupation of Forster’s modernism (Trilling 118). How Forster attempted to answer this dilemma has long been overshadowed by critical commentary that has assigned the novelist to the periphery of modernism and the arts, of metropolitan and masculine culture, even of Bloomsbury. His contemporaries and later scholars and critics, while conceding the popularity of his work, have been more inclined to focus on the writer as an equivocal figure, variously emphasizing his artistic diffidence, dated politics, maternal deterrence, or sexual frustration.1 So accepted is this characterization that it has become a virtual companion text to Forster’s realist fiction. Even the novelist’s use of realism as a narrative device has played a part in his ranking. In the circuitry of this syllogism, the modality of realism, as it declined in aesthetic value, serves to corroborate his minor standing. Forster is both read and judged by the very mode he practiced. Rather than query the soundness of this narrative in the way that realism is challenged as a meaningful convention, critics instead logically conclude that Forster never realized his potential as an artist or that his art never measured up to his modernist cohorts’. With his persona and fiction held up as transparent texts, Michael Levenson can classify the novelist, without contradiction, as ‘occupy[ing] an ambiguous position in the history of modern fiction’, and Jeremy Tambling can wonder at the paucity of new analytical approaches to his work compared to Virginia Woolf’s or to James Joyce’s.2 91


What this critical commonplace and its paradoxical logic significantly elide is how integral the position of the outsider is to modernist claims of legitimacy and expert knowledge. Like other experts, literary modernists assert authority by appearing above the fray as the objective and disinterested dispensers of their specialized knowledge of human relations and emotional states. The outsider and the cluster of appellatives it attracts might thus be more productively understood as the ethos and tropes that mystify modernists’ assertion of expertise in the arts and their uniqueness within the field of representation, which are requirements of sociopolitical accreditation, according to Pierre Bourdieu, in the virtual absence of clear-cut institutional controls, legal guarantees, or hereditary legacies.3 Whether declaimed diffidently in Forster’s case or brazenly in Joyce’s, as the next chapter will show, this tropological move grants nascent modernists’ autonomy and enables them to rhetoricize the move from dominated to dominant culture – which they in effect do in critiquing and thereby dictating to the institutions that award distinction, even as they discount their own integration into dominant culture. Disclaimers aside, expert knowledge and practice put modernist experts in the enviable position of being both producer and recipient of modern change. In good order, they promote, but disavow, the professionalization of the arts to assert its privileged status over the mundane realms of politics and commerce and the rival disciplines of the human and natural sciences. Artistic license in hand, they then master human subjectivity by aestheticizing it, usurp domestic jurisdiction through reification, and market their aesthetic products as the sure means to advance the civilized culture they themselves best exemplify. Trilling caught the general drift of this transformation in Howards End when he observed the conflict in the novel: ‘The class struggle is not between the classes but within a single class, the middle class’ (118). Forster’s contribution to modernism, under the guise of the outsider, betrays, I argue, the very logic of authorization, disavowal, displacement, mastery, reification, and cultivated consumption, but with consequences for modern culture that remain unappreciated. His literary career, more than any Anglo-modernist’s with the exception of the immigrant Eliot’s, foregrounds the emergence of the expert that coheres as English literature moves from the modernist production of literary art to its institutionalization as an autonomous field of study. By the terms of my reading, it is no coincidence that as English literature develops into a discrete discipline within the university with the reciprocal missions of gaining status and of shaping social differentiation, so would the reputed perennial outsider Forster become in his last 25 years ‘institutionalized’ as an

Forster’s Hellenic Pastoralism and Modern Masculinity

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honorary don of King’s College. His early success as a novelist, reconfirmed by A Passage to India, provides him the platform from which to lecture the cognoscenti and the laity on the proper study of the literary arts, as Aspects of the Novel, the 1926–27 Clark Lectures at Trinity College of Cambridge, pointedly indicates. 4 Yet, his earlier association with this institution had an even greater impact on his development. Under Cambridge tutelage that imbues psychosexual identity with institutional privilege within an aristocratic tradition, Forster validates his middle-class and gender entitlements with a new affective and virile version of Anglo-masculinity. His reformulation of masculine identification and of emotional relations in the novel traduces the romanticized social contract of institutionalized monogamy and the domestic woman’s power over it in favor of a same-sex affective alliance relocated to native soil. Forster takes the aesthetic pairing of the sexual and the affective privileged within a classical studies curriculum, which circulated among the elite Cambridge circle of the Apostles, out of the social space of the university and with it hellenizes narratives of courtship and domestic romance. He attempts nothing less than sundering the gendered spheres of public and private in order to replace them with a naturalized male culture set in a pastoral landscape that blatantly incorporates traditional hierarchies of property and propriety – and with this, tellingly answers the question – who shall inherit England. Rather than experiment, like Woolf and Joyce, with a mimesis of consciousness that encodes desire and propels the individual through metropolitan spaces, Forster resorts, as does Lawrence, to a spatial model to engender the subject as natural product, backed, in Forster’s case, by native and cultural capital. Before either Woolf’s or Joyce’s experiments with interiority then, Forster makes the novel form relevant for an educated male elite by producing what I will term an erotic genealogy for a queered cultural class. While Woolf, as argued earlier, offers us the exemplar of expert modernism, Forster proves to be, contrary to received wisdom, modernism’s ultimate insider.

I

Domestic conceit

In October 1910, the same month in which the novel Howards End appeared, the commercial success that secured his credentials as a writer, Forster presented a paper to the Apostles on the English novel that begins by alerting this all male clique: ‘We are going to talk about women, and very fortunately, none of them are in the room’ (Feminine Note 16).5 In the very year that Woolf would later famously stipulate as


the moment in which character forever changed, Forster stages a comparable claim for new authority over the novel form but, unlike Woolf, locates artistic deficiency not with male Edwardians but with the female practitioners of the Victorian novel. His talk, The Feminine Note in Literature, his argument against the received affective relations of the novel genre, his select Cambridge audience, and his nervous allowance of women’s exclusion capture the competing complex of allegiances that point to his appropriation and recharacterization of the gendered sphere of private and public circulated by novels. Long overlooked among his writings, it provides a template for reading Forster’s work from his earliest essays and fiction to his last success, the posthumously published Maurice. The 40th anniversary of the publication of J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women offers Forster the pretext to challenge what he sees as women’s dominance of the novel form. He thus disputes Mill’s contention that there is no singularly feminine literature but only literature writ large that transcends any classification by sex, and he does so on the basis of his superior literary expertise. Though recognizing Mill’s intent, as when he extrapolates from the Victorian that Emma and Tartuffe ‘are the creations of the great artist who created them, and we do not stop to enquire whether the artist was male or female’, Forster argues that the liberal’s position is circumscribed by his forensics (19). Mill’s careful and meticulous reasoning based solely on fact traps him in the debilitating logic of the legal profession. For how can legal discourse treat a subjective economy, and thus Forster observes: ‘[Mill] only thought of arguing it out, and never of feeling for it’ (21).6 Lacking emotional truth, Forster’s reasoning runs, neither law nor science, the discipline he gratuitously interjects in the critique, is capable of comprehending the affective knowledge of which the novel is the exemplary cultural source. What is needed is not legal or scientific but literary expertise. Asserting the special knowledge and greater culture of the literary expert, Forster takes aim at ‘the woman’s book’. By ‘feeling for it’, he determines that a feminine note in the English novel does in fact exist, becoming ever more pronounced in the Victorian era of the post-Austen novel and consisting of what he calls ‘a preoccupation with personal relative worthiness’ (32). As he explains, ‘the characters in a woman’s book try not so much to be good as to be worthy of one of the other characters. One character is presented as a standard, and by him or by her the others are measured’ (32). The female novelist, in obligating her protagonists to a personal attachment instead of objective standards, inevitably binds them to the emotional domain the novel form organizes, of which Forster suggests, the female novelist, much less her protagonists,


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seems hardly cognizant. Goodness in a female novel, lacking any overarching ideal, is embodied within and satisfied by a value system that is local, relational, and didactic. 7 In Forster’s view, ‘the woman’s book’ ties characters to this flawed value system and, in effect, constructs a readership who, bound by its identificatory politics, unconsciously assents to it as well.8 The novelist appears to anticipate here that which we have since come to identify as the social or heterosexual contract the novel transmits and, further, to argue against the apparatus of social reproduction that the domestic novel is sometimes credited with having put in place. One obvious target is the feminine imaginary of domestic romance; the other is the conjugal and familial regime that ‘the woman’s book’ then promotes. To illustrate his point, Forster observes of Brontë’s Villette: ‘we care that Lucy Snowe should learn to love Emanuel’, and concludes, ‘[t]o Charlotte Brontë a man is the standard’ (32). Because Villette fails to offer any larger understanding, the feminine or sentimental note must be considered an artistic weakness. Forster locates the antidote to the feminized Victorian novel in Joseph Conrad’s imperial adventure Lord Jim. Conrad’s tale, prized not only in ‘that the action takes place in wild countries, and that all the actors are men’, but also in ‘that the values are masculine’, is more pleasing and ethical, or so the novelist claims, because the youthful Jim must answer to a standard superior to ‘personal relative worthiness’ (32). Hence, where atoning to peers and loved ones would suffice for a George Eliot, a more resolute Conrad requires his boy hero ‘to expiate [his failed heroism] in his own eyes, he cannot do this, and he perishes’ (32). When Conrad has his young mariner sail past the marriage plot in order ‘to celebrate’, as Charlie Marlow intones, ‘his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct’, he earns Marlow’s final benediction: ‘He is one of us’ ( Lord Jim 419). To Forster, Conrad’s character is more advanced and the novel more artful because it refuses to be bound by the parochial or relational sentiments (read sentimentality) that characterize domestic novels. Yet, its abstract worthiness makes the novel one most women misprize, in Forster’s view, since they ‘feel the ethical standards to be false that can tear the hero from the arms of a comprehending wife’ (32). Forster thus concludes: ‘Men have an unembodied ideal. Women embody their ideal in some human being, be it a woman or man’ (33).9 The psychocultural implication is apparent. Forster connects the emotional domain of the domestic novel (the aspect inaccessible to Mill’s forensic discourse) to an abstract system of ethics and claims that ‘the woman’s book’, lacking this system, fails as art and diminishes the relevance of the novel genre overall. Whereas the lawyer Mill is dismissed


for not feeling sufficiently, the female novelist is disqualified for feeling too much. Unfeeling logic complements unthinking attachments. At stake in Forster’s ethical prescription for the novel is whose literary expertise and whose cultural authority is better equipped to represent affective knowledge and construct social reproduction and to what ends. Of this there can be little doubt. Forster identifies a distinct feminine sensibility, holds it up for examination, and, on finding it wanting, replaces it with his own ethical aesthetic, what he calls ‘the masculine note in literature’. In lieu of women’s fiction and sentimentality, Forster strikingly draws on Conrad’s adventure fiction in which, we may observe, a homosocial bond not only persists as a licit relation of postWildean masculinity but also carries with it the homoerotic suit of Tuan Jim’s allure. In twin moves of assimilation and reterritorialization, Forster shrewdly confiscates ‘the woman’s book’ as part of the male modernist’s ethical intelligence and deftly asserts aesthetic control over the emotional realm of the domestic novel and the social reproduction that it circulates to create a new standard of manly and ethical behavior. Viewed against its tacit rescission of the Victorian Mill’s advocacy of female enfranchisement, The Feminine Note in Literature does not appear to be the work of a nescient or reticent novelist uncertain about his standing and marginal to the systems of cultural production. Rather it seems a highly dexterous attempt to ratify an aesthetic practice over a novelistic domain reckoned as feminine to a group termed, without hyperbole, the Apostolic Ring, at the moment when Howards End is enjoying widespread critical acclaim and when the contest for national women’s suffrage is entering its most militant phase. In the midst of these cultural references, Forster appropriates ‘the woman’s book’ and, indeed, bourgeois women’s power within it and claims them for himself and for a sympathetic elite of Cambridge cohorts. The emotive and amative realm he abstracts he projects onto, not English women, but the bodies of native sons and Eastern men whose virility will liberate his inchoate desires and those of the Englishmen of his educated class. To understand how these narrative desires are deployed requires, however, that we first comprehend the relation of his ethical aesthetic to his sexual emancipation, and to do this, we need to turn to the institution most responsible for shaping Forster’s desires and art.

II

Tutor erotics

‘Cambridge was the first place where he had ever been consciously and continuously happy. How can any boy fail to feel an ecstasy of pleasure


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on first finding himself in rooms which he knows for the next few years are to be his castle? . . . I need not however describe them, as the life of a quiet steady-going undergraduate has been told in a score of novels better than I can tell it’ (171–72). What the narrator of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh recalled of the mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge could just as easily be applied to Cambridge a half century later. The Oxbridge romance of aristocratic acculturation materialized during a protracted adolescence persists in the modern English imaginary, and nowhere more markedly than in Forster’s era of matriculation. 10 Its mythos permeated Bloomsbury, if not all of Anglo-modernism, and continues to surface even in contemporary scholarship, but with the difference that Linda Dowling’s analysis of classical study at Oxford makes manifest. Here in the hellenic movement that coalesced during the Victorian century, she locates a paradigmatic shift in male affiliation at Oxford that flourished in the last decades of the century under the sign of masculine love. In its revived reverence for the classics, Oxford hellenism organized new modes of thinking and feeling in a thoroughly secular context that permeated university orthodoxy by the 1890s. 11 At Cambridge as well, hellenism performed its work of secularizing pedagogy and curricula and eroticizing collegial socialization – all within, as stated above, an institutional frame historically grounded in aristocratic privilege and ritualized stratification. Indeed, the linchpin of this ascriptive process in Magali Sarfatti Larson’s view was classical education, which functioned ‘as a gate-keeping mechanism for the most prestigious professional roles’ (89). Given the university’s system of patronage, hellenism not only shaped social processes within the institution but also eroticized the cultural desires to succeed outside of it. While Dowling contends that the criminalization of Oxford alumnus Oscar Wilde damaged hellenistic acculturation at his alma mater and within national culture, it nonetheless survived at Cambridge and with Bloomsbury. One singular site of convergence was the Apostles and the ethical philosophy of its illustrious member G.E. Moore. His realist philosophy recast hellenic values into the secular discourse of a moral science that served Forster’s brand of modernism as well as his Cambridge cohorts’. Moore’s philosophy, published as Principia Ethica in 1903, provided strong inducements to the Apostles who regarded the Cambridge corps as a sect apart from the philistines that supervised the empire’s commercial interests, and who saw themselves as the elite best entrusted with its intellectual capital. For one, his philosophical discourse supported anew the language of refined consumption and the ethos of male love, identified with Oxford hellenism, during and even after the sensational decade of


Wilde’s notoriety. In Principia, Moore, himself a product of classical education, promoted the virtue of a good that is self-referential, expressed in the beautiful, located in art and nature, and fully present to the observer.12 By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves . . . . What has not been recognised is that it is the ultimate and fundamental truth of Moral Philosophy. (237–38, original emphasis) Allegiance to friends and beauty, their pursuit and cultivation, the individual’s right to judge and choose from among them led to second motivation. These private and secular values implicitly reinforced the integrity of a cogito when all other disciplines were defining its collapse. Elaborated, moreover, during the epoch in which the sciences were vigorously expropriating Christianity’s historical truth-telling function, Moore’s ethical system assumed precedence over any other claim on the individual. The good occupied a domain beyond the reach of science or religion, or even the nation, which was another compelling enticement to embrace it. Goodness as art, its immediacy as real and true, the autonomy of the individual, the communion of consumers, these values that Moore imparted were by inference conferred on the Apostles as their secular and aesthetic knowledge. The appeal of his system lay in the intellectual justification of affective values latent in the Oxbridge romance and heightened by the exclusivity of the Apostles, where, as Richard Dellamora points out, ‘the line into this group was affective’ (Apocalyptic Overtures 96). That the group should find Moore’s ethics of friendship, pleasure, and art propitious is hardly surprising in view of their object choices in amatory and aesthetic transactions. The hellenic spirit that survived at Cambridge in his moral science thus helped to promote the cosmopolitan mien of Anglo-modernism. The objectified good Moore promulgated, in validating same-sex intimacy, on one hand, and the worthiness of art and refined consumption, on the other, points to a deeper level of cultural formation taking place in the richly textured discursive field around the aesthetic modernism in which Forster figures. This field coexists with the highly charged one that Wilde’s prosecution and detention galvanized at the end of the


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century and the more austere aesthetic championed by Roger Fry. For Forster, social standing, manful affiliation, and erotic liberation became the fantasy his Cambridge education inculcated, imbued with Moorean values and augmented by his study of the classics. The status conferred by Cambridge and by the Apostles eroticized his homophilia as the university’s institutional culture defined his professional ethos as an artist. Cultural desire, for success, prestige, and power however disavowed, consistent with the demeanor proper to the elite educated at Oxbridge, was entwined with what Forster would later recognize as homosexual desire.13 The two desires not only became inseparable, they were also mutually enabling. Any critical judgment then about Forster’s literary merit or his variously defined marginality ought to be screened through his assimilation into an elite culture that socialized male relations within a domain of same-sex desire.

III

Hellenic sublime

Forster’s early essays and fiction reveal the importance of hellenism to his ethical and libidinal proclivities that would become the controlling aesthetic of his modernism. What becomes apparent in his early work is the implicit claim that the homoerotic and homosocial economy of the Greeks is the uncorrupted state of masculinity itself. Hellenistic expertise offers the means to reinvigorate modern masculinity and to legitimate male same-sex desire by transferring it from a mythical Greek to an idealized English landscape. As was the case with The Feminine Note in Literature, the recovery of this purportedly lost relation rests on removing its principal impediment, the domestic ideology that unnaturally stifles nature’s design. However risky the hellenic claim of camaraderie and same-sex desire as the real components of masculinity may appear in the post-Wilde decades, this is precisely the tact Forster pursues in his work. Two examples, an early travel essay and a short story, illustrate how the writer used hellenism to naturalize male love under the sign of reviving English masculinity. In the essay ‘Macolnia Shops’ from his post-graduation tour of Italy, Forster not only tweaks Baedeker’s faculty as tourist guide, a subtle disparagement of the feminine picturesque that recurs in Forster’s fiction and coheres with the feminine note in fiction (171),14 he also demonstrates how the expertise of a knowledgeable critic can restore an unwittingly feminized art object to its proper station as an emblem of masculine comradeship and beauty. Led by his guidebook to the Kirchner Museum to avoid the tourists crowding the more renown collections of Rome, Forster is singularly struck by the beauty of the last


of only three objects said to warrant attention, but for reasons different from the guidebook’s assessment. The prized object, which predates both imperial London and Rome, is a bronze dressing case found at Praeneste and believed to have been purchased in the century before Christ by one Dindia Macolnia as a gift for her daughter. In contrast to the commission of the unknown artisan who crafted the bronze container, ‘Dindia Macolnia’, Forster tells us, ‘was there to shop’, insinuating that highborn women do not make culture but only circulate it, and, worse, circulate it erroneously within a feminine economy. The veiled accusation is confirmed when he identifies the artifact as a manly one adorned with the episode from the Argonauts in which Pollux the boxer first binds Amycus naked to a tree for refusing his island’s springs to the parched sailors, then bids the mariners enjoy the water feast that ensues. To Forster’s keen eye, the motif of desire and satiation, with the men arranged in various poses, hurrying ashore to drink, filling their jars, reclining contentedly (172), is supported by a second and stronger one – the friendship this company of men exchange. ‘As the heroes are refreshed, their faculties awake in their fulness, and strong and vivid is the love they bear and have borne for each’, captured most handsomely in the couple ‘standing together, leaning on their spears, with the knowledge that they have passed through one more labour in company’ (172–73). The sensual and affective alliance that Forster discovers in this Greek handiwork reauthorizes hellenic manly love once celebrated in legend by its dominant culture. Filched from its male libidinal economy and relegated to a feminized circuit of refined consumption as a gift exchange between female generations circa 100 BC, its debasement persists, according to Forster, by its ‘burial’ in the Kirchner Museum. Linking the object once admired by a wealthy Etruscan shopper to its display at a select museum for affluent Western tourists in the former imperial capital enumerates its continued divestiture, manful and aesthetic. Buried in a museum, it is cataloged as an ornamental case for female grooming and thus comes to exemplify not male friendship, beauty, and gratification, but female devotion (as motherly gift) and elegance (as daughter’s cosmetic box) to undiscerning museum goers. Forster’s real objection here, somewhat ironic, is the consumption of local Greek art by untutored outsiders. What his reappraisal narrates then is an allegory of native male dispossession (domestic, sexual, theistic, and museal) of the hellenic virtues of ennobling self-gratification and fellowship depicted on this ancient artifact, all ones that Oxbridge sought to reclaim in his time, and to which he subscribed on going down from Cambridge and touring the continent.


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Forster’s short fiction ‘The Story of a Panic’ dramatizes what should properly transpire with a hellenic revival and who should rightly profit with the redress of Macolnia’s theft. In the short story, the 14-year-old English youth Eustace Robinson, who is visiting Ravello with his two maiden aunts, is launched with the help of the Greek god Pan and a youthful hotel hire into an adolescence that is purged of his aunts’ excessive pampering. Coddled by overindulgent aunts, Eustace is first belittled for lacking the robustness of a proper English boy, and then chided for the exuberance he manifests on being transformed at a hillside picnic overlooking Ravello. The inexplicable panic that seizes and scatters the picnic party, and which gives the story its title, has an altogether salubrious effect on Eustace. Every allusion suggests that his shrill piping from the reed he innocently fashions, a thinly disguised penile evocation, revives the spirit of the Greek god Pan who evidently descends upon the picnic spot or, more precisely, upon the lad.15 When the shaken party reassemble, they are amazed to discover the adolescent lying on his back in the unmistakable repose of post-coital lassitude. On reawakening, Eustace suddenly bounds about ‘like a real boy’, strangely rolls in goat tracks lying nearby, and is said to scale the pathway with the agility of a goat, all evidence of the playful god’s assignation and the youth’s seduction. More significantly, his Pan-initiation leads Eustace to befriend the puckish Italian fisher boy Gennaro working at the hotel, who instantly intuits and responds to the erotic metamorphosis of his new English chum. For the Italian, the liaison proves short-lived and fatal as he is killed trying to aid the schoolboy’s escape from the overbearing and anxious adults. Eustace’s panic, however, propels him into a manhood that is at once sensual, bountiful, gratifying, and apparently endemic to the ancient world. The event inaugurates what the sanctimonious narrator terms in hindsight the youth’s ‘career, if career it can be called’, which leads the adult Eustace to early celebrity in the illustrated newspapers (18, 25). His occupational success is evidently as extraordinary as is his sexual one. 16 The two effects, cultural and libidinal, meld – but noticeably without attending to the historical, geographical, and class alignments that are conveniently redrawn under the sign of Anglo-male desire. In effect, the implied symbolic equivalencies – between past and present, ancient Greece and modern Italy, Greek mythology and English homophilia, and a poor Italian youth and a middle-class English schoolboy – notably efface their many differences. That these symbolic alignments are thoroughly contingent and overdetermined is evident in that the astute Italian boy dies and the naive Eustace deserts Italy for


England.17 Any malfeasance in the text is directed, however, against the spinster aunts, English prigs, and an invasive tourist industry. Significantly, their arraignment does not dampen but heightens the cultural attraction of a hellenic sublime that connects classical Greece to modern England. In fact, this hellenic entente between ancient and modern worlds is the mythic means Forster constructs to promote a cultural class over that which he portrays as enervating domesticity and base philistinism. We can trace the effects of this entente in his major novels, though it is most clearly plotted in those novels that unfold on English soil – his bildungsroman The Longest Journey, the novel he later recollects as the sincerest expression of his art, the critical and commercial success Howards End, and his posthumously published Maurice. Their proleptic invitations, in which a mythified maternal grounds an erotic genealogy for a remasculinized racial and national alliance, will exceed the textual ambitions of rescuing native masculinity from feminized consumption or of procuring an English boy’s sexual initiation abroad. They stake their claim for symbolic agency on scopic and pedagogic economies that demonize domestic governance and demean its overrefinement in the metropolis in order to idealize native masculinity as a homegrown product fit for the consumption of Forster’s cultural class.

IV

Courting arcady

In a letter to Cambridge crony Edward Dent on The Longest Journey’s publication, Forster expresses pleasure in Dent’s appreciation of Stephen Wonham, the exemplary hellenized male in the novel, and admits: ‘There was actually a long “Panic” chapter about him – rather jolly I thought – but I soon cut it out, for it shifted the vision too far round. So, probably only students of Master’s Juvenilia will now twig what he’s driving at’ (Selected Letters 1: 87). The cancelled chapter, reminiscent of Eustace’s liberating panic, is the naked Stephen’s insensate ramble through the Wiltshire woods like ‘Seigfried or Adam’ (Selected Letters 1: 88). With Stephen, as with the character Eustace in ‘The Story of a Panic’, Forster’s hellenic aesthetics serve to engender a protagonist who, to rephrase Richard Dellamora’s suggestive comment, is no longer adduced to think Greek but to be Greek.18 The cultural address to apprehend beauty, evident in Forster’s appreciation of the Argonauts on Macolnia’s case, becomes an invitation in The Longest Journey to assume its essence. The novelist replaces coldness of abstract contemplation, for which he would continually deride the fin de siècle aesthete as evinced in this novel,


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with intimacy of being and for reasons that make clear the cultural correspondence between male desire and literary expertise. 19 Such is the transit of Forster’s hellenism that he discursively retextualizes intellection of the classics into mimetic narratives of a ‘hellenized’ occidental who comes to embody classical aesthetics in particularly nativist ways. The orientalism of an imperial gaze is turned inward and acted out on English soil with local indigenes. Put another way, in The Longest Journey, the native son Stephen Wonham unconsciously embodies hellenic masculinity so that Forster may eroticize an English one. The pleasures of thinking Greek are thus transformed into local desires to be and behold Greek without having to explain their ideological processional from ancient Greece via elitist Cambridge to the Wiltshire downs.20 To accentuate Stephen’s naturalness, the novel employs the highly conventional form of the pastoral that safely situates the spaces he inhabits in a classless realm beyond the dynamic and stratified orbit of metropolitan culture. Yet, while Forster may retreat to this static form, the pastoral is anything but stable or natural as Raymond Williams persuasively demonstrated in The Country and the City. It manifests such a lively motility in content and history in fact that Williams, in mock frustration, gives up his chronology with Eden, but not without suggesting quite seriously that each idyllic instance follows a logic peculiar to its own historical moment. As he reminds us, for example, Sidney’s Arcadia ‘was written in a park which had been made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants. The elegant game was thus only at arm’s length – a rough arm’s length – from a visible reality of country life’, whose purpose served to legitimate the new authority of the country manor (22). The appropriation and displacement that Williams observes of Sydney’s pastoral is no less true of Forster’s in that certain Englishmen, property, and relationships will be authorized as this novel reconcentrates cultural energy away from social institutions and civic spaces and towards an allegedly old organic order made to appear as England’s natural estate. Against the landscape of the Wiltshire countryside embodied in the strapping untutored Stephen is its apparent opposite, the intellectual and insular Cambridge, which the other main protagonist epitomizes, the cripple and delicate nascent artist Rickie Elliot. The journey the novel invokes is set up dialectically as a reconciliation of these two spaces – down and gown – rather overdetermined dialectics in that Stephen turns out to be the bastard half-brother of Rickie. Yet even without their blood kinship, Stephen’s authenticity as a natural son of the land is certified by his identification as the living incarnation of


Cambridge’s hellenist aesthetics. His one competitor in the text, the handsome and athletic philistine Gerald Dawes, betrothed to Agnes Pembroke and destined for an Army career, is summarily and ironically dismissed early on when he falls fatally ill in the middle of a local rugby match. The imperial erotic of manliness that was the staple of the fictional universes of adventure writers from Rudyard Kipling to H. Rider Haggard – that is, before the Boer War and a handful of entrenched Dutch farmers in South Africa put in question the playing fields of Eton and British martial potency – is nimbly dispatched as the text seems to defer to Thomas Hardy’s idiom of reinvigorating English manhood on tilled rather than athletic fields. 21 Gerald’s conventional type, his athleticism, careerism, and impending marriage, and hence heterosexualism, gives way to Stephen’s unconventional one. That we do not mistake the country youth’s scopic status, there is this assessment volunteered by the Cambridge philosopher, Stewart Ansell, student of classical Greece and Moorean metaphysics and Rickie’s college friend. As Stephen smokes a pipe, Ansell records: he gazed at the wreaths that ascended from bowl and stem, and how, when the stem was in his mouth, he bit it. He gave the idea of an animal with just enough soul to contemplate its own bliss. United with refinement, such a type was common in Greece. It is not common today, and Ansell was surprised to find it in a friend of Rickie’s. (228) The philosopher’s approving gaze falls on Stephen at the critical juncture following his disinheritance and dismissal from the Cadover estate by the half-brothers’ aunt, Emily Failing, who discloses to her 20-year-old ward his illicit parentage. The youth’s prospect, if not prospects, improves as Ansell’s preliminary impression deepens: Certain figures of the Greeks, to whom we continually return suggested [Stephen] a little. One expected nothing of him – no purity of phrase nor swift edged thought. Yet the conviction grew that he had been back somewhere – back to some table of the gods, spread in a field where there is no noise, and that he belonged for ever to the guest with whom he had eaten. (230) Ansell’s assessment enlarges the text’s homoerotic yield. His classical knowledge verifies the radiant translocation of the ancient Greeks to one without such training, and he communicates it to an audience so that they too may recognize what Greek-like nobility native English


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masculinity may bear. Added to this scopic economy is the narrator’s testimony of Stephen’s natural inheritance by imagining the countryside around Salisbury that produced him: Lamps flickered, but in the outer purity the villages were already slumbering. Salisbury is only a Gothic upstart beside these. For generations they have come down to her to buy or to worship, and have found in her the reasonable crisis of their lives; but generations before she was built they were clinging to the soil, and renewing it with sheep and dogs and men, who found the crisis of their lives upon Stonehenge. The blood of these men ran in Stephen; the vigour they had won for him was as yet untarnished; out on those downs they had united with rough women to make the things he spoke of as ‘himself’. (264–65) In such an arcadian landscape the representation of Stephen’s body as beautiful, his knowledge and sentiment as instinctual, his being as unmediated, arising from a national and historical unconscious innately good and virtuous, are so overdetermined that even his Aunt Emily can call the coarse adolescent a natural philosopher and hero (98, 110). Socialized neither by drawing room nor school room, Stephen’s attachment to the land is so unshakable that he rejects out-of-hand attempts at his deracination. When offered an allowance and paid passage to the colonies to prevent the scandal of his illegitimacy becoming known, he resolutely refuses. While the handsome youth dominates the novel’s erotic geography, its pedagogy is openly mobilized against domesticity, and, by implication, against the novel form that helped empower the Victorian middle-class woman. What stands between the reinvigorated masculinity that Rickie and Stephen’s reconciliation promises is the domestic household and its narrow-minded piety and cloying conventionality.22 The text holds this institution accountable for ostracizing Stephen and for trapping Rickie in a passionless marriage. Yet, domestic narrow-mindedness is implicitly predicated on a lack of the very classical training that the educational system reserves as the exclusive province of a male elite. Holding domestic women accountable for the ignorance of classical Greek virtues or Moorean values systematically denied to them or ennobling the privileged few for what is taught them begs the question, however, of Stephen’s knowledge. In replacing domestic with hellenic knowledge naturalized in an English landscape and impressed on a racialized male body, Forster ironically creates a male character in Stephen


who apparently needs no remediation, no formal education, no special knowledge – a male character who is not obliged to think Greek, but only appear Greek, who simply exists Greek-like on English downs. The education, the want of which determines bourgeois women’s bigotry and surfeit that insures their opposite’s magnanimity, is apparently unnecessary for this ‘natural philosopher’ who simply embodies it. Let me tease out what is implied here. Being, as unmediated or unreflective essence, is not obliged either to apprehend or to justify its existence. Where knowledge must do both, indeed, where knowledge in fact means both, being is exempt. Thus in ‘The Story of a Panic’, the would-be-goat-boy Eustace, invigorated after his inexplicable hillside assignation, need not understand or explain his transformation. He is simply and fortuitously changed. At the level of plot, the absence of exegesis obliquely signals without incrimination the stigmatized love or, more correctly, passion that cannot be named as it confirms the obtuseness of his English interlocutors. When the self in question is of an incriminating nature, even if only fictionalized, the public denial of knowledge would seem justified. Yet more than self-protection is served by this refusal to know. Not only does the refusal of knowledge shield the identity coalescing around the sign ‘homosexual’, whose eventual emergence would be outlawed a priori, but it likewise screens the ideological processes of identity formation. Ontology effectively overrides epistemology. Being without knowing means for Forster’s story not having to account for the knowledge and affective relations brought to bear to launch the English schoolboy’s sensuality. It can ignore without liability, as earlier indicated, the Italian boy Gennaro’s unwarranted death, the evacuation of the Ravello countryside into a pastoral haunt for pagan gods pranking English tourists, and the erasure of modern and, apparently, meretricious, Italy by its illustrious, mythic, and ancient antecedent. All go unrecognized when the future manhood of a youth of the British polity is at stake. Forster’s brand of ‘natural selection’ obviates any requirement to explain what criteria hellenism establishes or how it arrives at its criteria for selection. It frees Eustace, in other words, from the history and the class that produced him just as surely as it frees him from the domestic supervision (his spinster aunts’ unnatural coddling) that repressed his incipient manhood. These point to what being Greek as opposed to solely thinking Greek can accomplish for a sympathetic educated male elite. Such are the dispensations pressed into Forster’s hellenic contract, ones not different in purpose from those of the ‘woman’s book’. Forster’s dispensations are susceptible in this way to the same charge of unthinking attachments that he would


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later level against the Victorian novel. In both, the politics of identity and social reproduction come to screen the politics of knowledge. Whereas The Longest Journey excuses and, moreover, glorifies Stephen’s denseness, it vigorously denigrates domestic ideology for its insufficiencies on two distinct but related levels: first, the dramatized disparagement of female administration at Cadover in the figure of Aunt Emily and at Sawston in the figure of wife Agnes; and, second, the narrated disparagement of refined cultivation in the figure of the decadent aesthete Frederick Elliot, Rickie’s father. Dialectically, the conformity of the first and the deformity of the second forestall the realization of Stephen and Rickie’s brotherly bond. Only by disqualifying their prestige, one social, the other urbane, will there be space for a new robust and affective model of masculinity to take hold.23 The pair most culpable in the real time of the novel are the half-brothers’ Aunt Emily and Rickie’s wife Agnes. Emily Failing, the spoiled widow of Cadover, uses Stephen as a boisterous diversion to the country serenity that quite bores her, and then, on Agnes’s provocation, expels him when his coming of age makes him a social liability. More invidious are the actions of Agnes. First, fearful that Stephen’s illegitimacy will disgrace her marriage to Rickie and their position at Sawston, a model of deadening bourgeois conformity in the text, she stops her husband from acknowledging his half-brother when Emily reveals their kinship in a fit of petulance. Then, anxious that Rickie remains his aunt’s sole heir, Agnes conspires with the other women in the family for Stephen’s dismissal and disinheritance. Against their deceit, the text organizes the second attack on the drawing room, the one narrated against Rickie’s father, Frederick – cultivated, cruel, cold, and also crippled. Of the aesthete Frederick, who in selecting Mrs Elliot performs the one act that grants him any textual relevance, the narrator comments: ‘He passed for a cultured man because he knew how to select, and he passed for an unconventional man because he did not select quite like other people. In reality he never did or said or thought one single thing that had the slightest beauty or value’ (27). Mrs Elliot’s judgment confirms the narrator’s Moorean rebuke: ‘What had [the Elliots] ever done, except say sarcastic things, and limp, and be refined?’ And of Frederick himself: ‘He did not like her, he practically lived apart, he was not even faithful or polite. These were grave faults, but they were human ones: she could even imagine them in a man she loved. What she could never love was a dilettante’ (251–52). Along with Frederick’s character defects is the congenital one of lameness from which all the Elliots suffer – his sister Emily, his son Rickie, even Rickie and Agnes’s daughter who dies prematurely, we are led to infer, from


complications of the ailment. The scopic economy of the Elliots’ disability is as abased as Stephen’s virile one is exalted. We might take the commentary on urbanity by Tony Failing, the respected former master of Cadover, Emily’s deceased husband, as a judgment on Rickie’s father and, indeed, on the fin de siècle aesthete in general: ‘There is no such thing as a Londoner’, he once observed. ‘He’s only a country man on the road to sterility’ (264). The barren realm of the metropole frames Frederick’s sterility – sexual, affective, spiritual, and moral. Acknowledging this, we should not, however, rush to read this inherited deformity of the decadent Frederick as an allegory of homosexual abjection.24 To be sure, the link between degeneracy and the aesthete was commonplace enough by 1907, what with the substantial medical testimony put forth by experts such as Max Nordau.25 Yet to accept these representations at face value does not satisfy the amative economy of the novel. The ready explanation fails to take into account the way that the pastoral convention, set against metropolitan decadence and conventional femininity, functions. For the novel observes this logic: for the country to appear robust, the city must appear depraved. Once we begin to see aesthete and domestic as enabling the binary of artificial versus natural, of enfeebled versus hardy, it becomes clear that the success of Forster’s modern pastoral depends on an overly desultory urbanity and domesticity being encoded as unnatural and debased realms. Representing them as aberrant also draws attention away from the highly artificial form of nature the pastoral organizes. In other words, urban and suburban artificiality makes the pastoral of Stephen’s development and of reinvigorated English manhood appear the natural and necessary therapeutic. To summon the organic community of rural Old England, which Stephen’s representation is meant to galvanize and justify, the erotic genealogy depends on exposing its impediments – the depravity of the modern metropolis and the duplicity of the drawing room. The undeniable tension between their cunning artificiality and Stephen’s genuine openness duplicates that earlier tension Forster portrayed between the profane and the pure in ‘Macolnia Shops’. What the narrative desires is to reverse feminine dominion over the household and its vitiating effect on masculinity and to replace it with the purer affective realm encapsulated by the virile Argonauts on Macolnia’s case or, in this instance, by their naturalized modern descendant, Stephen Wonham, the native son personified. By aligning orthodox femininity with its perversion, as defective outcomes of unnatural overcultivation, the novelist positions the text to assimilate and reterritorialize domestic governance with this agrarian fable. Forster achieves this by declaring


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domesticity, suburban and urban, de trop the deformed and artificial cul-de-sacs of English society, and robust Stephen, the heir apparent of a mythified common ancestry. The crippled Frederick safely interred before the novel opens, and his sister and son destined to join him before the novel’s close, creates a space for the genesis of a new cultural formation of male identity and romance. Yet, Forster’s homoerotic eugenics has one added component that guarantees both the textual erotics invested in Stephen and the dismantling of domestic agency that links Forster’s literary practice to the logic of expert modernism I have been tracing. To gain control over the affective realm under domestic supervision requires not only the debasement of female governance but also its symbolic assimilation. And this Forster accomplishes by reification of the maternal. For arrayed against the callous dominion of Emily Failing and Agnes Pembroke is the mythic maternal, captured most concisely in the icon of the earth goddess Demeter whose likeness in painting swings from the ceiling of Stephen’s Cadover bedroom. This idealized figure is materialized in the half-brothers’ real mother from whom the two young men’s inchoate camaraderie literally springs. Her affability and warmth contrast with the other women’s deceit and cruelty. Where demonizing them deprives the household of traditional authority, mythifying the pair’s dead mother – known only in the novel as Mrs Elliot – reconstructs the affective domain as the new cultural center that the novelist can position himself to administer. Here then is the conceptual hinge between Forster’s appropriation of the domestic novel and his polemic The Feminine Note in Literature. The Cambridge novelist usurps the maternal ideal in order to assert artistic control over domestic jurisdiction.26 He confiscates and mythifies the maternal function and reterritorializes it under the aegis of male literary expertise with an emotional economy of same-sex desire to realize the social reproduction, cultural standing, and Anglo-male alliance that make up the common terminus this ‘longest journey’ methodically pursues. This course the narrative demonstratively confirms. Mrs Elliot’s want of judgment in marrying up, in other words, into the Elliot family, a rash capitulation to institutionalized monogamy, is redeemed when, humiliated by her husband, she breaks with social conventions and deserts her domestic station with Robert, the congenial and able farmer who woos and wins her affection. Overcome by amorous passion, she and paramour flee England for Sweden, where they consummate their relationship in what might be best characterized as a fit of anadromic coupling, in which Robert successfully implants the requisite seed from


which the hero Stephen will issue, and then after their lovemaking quite decorously drowns. Stephen’s conception in the genealogical headwaters of Scandinavia appears no less self-consciously mythic than his English manhood on the Wiltshire downs as seemly for the founding of a modern and refurbished Anglo-Saxon race of men. This romance of natural selection further dictates that the lame son, the budding writer Rickie, must perforce perish, and this Forster orchestrates even more dramatically by having him die saving the intoxicated Stephen from an onrushing train. In their stagy final embrace, the brothers are rather belatedly and brutally united in common kinship. Thereafter each attains his proper circuit: the hellenized Stephen survives as the avatar of a refurbished Anglo-Saxon masculinity; and the deceased Rickie survives culturally through his literary work that presumably codifies the values Stephen embodies. The narrative and cultural desires apparent in the trouble the novel takes to bring about Stephen’s conception and deliverance and Rickie’s death and posthumous prestige are amply but obliquely gratified. A mature and fatherly Stephen successfully negotiates the publication of his brother’s fiction as the executor of Rickie’s literary estate and, quite significantly, thinks to himself of recovering the real property of Cadover.27 Though Aunt Emily’s manor has gone on her death to other family relatives, the Silts, Stephen revealingly muses: ‘“However, if Lawrie Silt’s a Cockney like his father, and if my next is a boy and like me – – ” A shy beautiful look came into his eyes, and passed unnoticed’ (305). 28 While he remains at the bucolic fringes of respectable country society (a farm five miles from Cadover), Stephen anticipates that the London metropolis will draw its Cockney son away, and Cadover will fall into his surer hands or, just as desirable, into his future son’s. One way or another a new dynasty based on landed and cultural property has fallen into place.29 This closure has one further complication when we factor in Stewart Ansell’s presence in Stephen’s household at the end of the novel, a fact that compounds the import of Stephen’s likely succession at Cadover and one that critics have overlooked. With Stephen’s offhand comment to his wife that ‘Stewart’s in the house’ (307), the text beckons to the erotic merger of intellectual with yeoman farmer captured in the epigraph ‘Fratribus’ that forms the subtext of Forster’s novel and its desires. While a manly attachment between the two men mitigates Rickie’s violent death and anticipates the homosexual passion in the novel Maurice 10 years hence, their affinity more palpably resolves the amative and material alliance of Cambridge and Wiltshire. The elite educated for social


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advancement within a highly stratified and classed society has arranged to trespass on a bucolic synergy predisposed to social stability amid a seemingly unchanging feudal plenitude. To the bourgeois fantasy of assimilation into the aristocratic class that Cambridge traditions engender is joined the equally potent bourgeois romance of retiring to the simple country life on the order of an Edward Carpenter retreat, or, where I suggest the real libidinal energy is directed, the romance of acceding to the manor house as Sidney’s Arcadia artfully illustrates. Nor is this beyond the realm of possibility should Stephen come to possess Cadover. In this all male rapprochement, hellenized Cambridge intellectual courts rural Anglo-Saxon. Such a courtship conceals its national, class, and race biases to democratize homoeroticism but on behalf of a cultural male elite. Hellenized homophilia becomes classless Anglophilia. This is the invitation, homosocial and homosexual, the text extends to the Anglo-cultural class of Forster’s acquaintance, one that prepares the way for what a dysfunctional family and providential offspring will amplify at Howards End.

V

The cultural romance of homespun homosexualism

If Forster aimed his expertise at legitimating the non-heteronormative subjects of the educated male bourgeoisie, then Howards End qualifies as a pivotal work in taking up the homoerotic address of his first novel, The Longest Journey, and making possible its elaboration as a bona fide identity in Maurice. Yet more than either of these, this novel produces a literary model to replace domestic romance with a queered cultural romance under the spectral oversight of another expeditiously dispatched maternal figure. Set in a nostalgized country house of rural England, the novel attempts to hollow out an institutional space from which can issue a new version of masculinity in which same-sex affiliation, contrary to much of the expert knowledge of its time, is salubrious, affective, erotic, and generative. More efficient than the homegrown Stephen’s overdone representation as an erotic object of a hellenic gaze, this masculinity will emerge as both natural and cultivated. By combining Stephen’s robustness and Rickie’s intellect into one character under one roof, Howards End solves the material problem that the mere spiritual reunion of the half-brothers had left unsettled. Founded imaginatively on a mythical organic England but propagated independent of monogamous marriage; cultivated and learned but not so urbane as to be bereft of human passion and empathy; and, finally, robust and manly but forswearing the masculine model of imperial aggression in favor of a cultural


savoir-faire, Howards End conceives of a new stylized account of space to the benefit of the men who share Forster’s amative and cultural allegiances. The territorial imperatives of the novel thus become finding and installing the proper male heir for the estate Howards End and emptying the house of its dated ideological furniture. The impediment in both instances is the hegemonic couple Ruth and Henry Wilcox, who epitomize the material, affective, and ideological bases of domestic and imperial romance. Undermining each in turn, the text systematically mythifies Ruth in order to appropriate her authority and unmans Henry in order to loosen his acquisitive grasp. The novel thus importantly turns on Ruth’s idealization and abrupt demise, on Leonard Bast’s fabled umbrella courtship and fatal coup de livres, and finally on the emasculation tout court of the Wilcox men. Coded as the embodiment of Victorian domesticity nonpareil, the signature move of modernist experts, ensures from the start that the matriarch Ruth Wilcox will be quickly disembodied and brusquely encased in the realm of myth. Untimely though Ruth’s death appears, its logic is methodically organized by the fatigue mentioned in Helen’s early letters that then metastasizes into patent exhaustion over the London wedding of her eldest son and her weariness on those allegedly most energizing of modern female pastimes, lunch and shopping. At the level of plot, these collectively signify a declining health in which mechanization and urbanization act as eviscerating pathogens assailing her body. Thematically, they connote Ruth’s impending obsolescence, so that finally all that remains of her is spirit: part faded Victorian gentility and part worshipped earth mother (all those hay wisps clinging to her trailing gowns), a figure wholly conflated with her ancestral home of Howards End but kept aloft as a mythic spirit benignly overseeing her own ideological and material dispossession.30 Under the cover of these nostalgic and maternal tropes, Ruth Wilcox serves as the synecdoche of a mythic maternalism, on one hand, and of outmoded domesticity, on the other. 31 Nowhere in the text, therefore, are male and female relationships held up as exemplary, thus disrupting any telos of domestic romance. Henry Wilcox’s imperial lechery casts his marriage to Ruth in a sordid light. The clerk Leonard does the right thing by Jacky, but the wrong thing by Helen. Paul Wilcox’s lone courtship, that with Helen, does not survive an evening’s buss, and Evie seems more intent on breeding terriers than Cahills. Charles and Dolly’s marriage comes closest to the procreative standard if progeny alone be deemed a reliable index, except that she is deprecated in the text as utterly vacuous and he disgraces himself with


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his bullying temper. The orphaned Schlegels offer no better models. The aesthete Tibby has been inoculated early and thoroughly against human contact except when his own, mostly gastronomic, pleasures are at stake; Helen metamorphoses from New Woman into single mother with no trace of carnal blush; and Margaret, who notably marries for companionship, is summarily reduced to family nanny. Besides the Schlegels and Wilcoxes mésalliances, we are also told, by no less authority than Dolly, of Tom Howard’s marriage proposal spurned by the eccentric Miss Avery long ago, leaving him distraught and the house without a direct male descendant: ‘Howards End – Howards Ended!’ as Dolly coyly adduces (146). All of these failed or flawed relations point not only to the demise of the conjugal household but also to the central preoccupation of the text, revitalizing the estate Howards End – ‘The house has been empty long enough’, Miss Avery declares, ‘it has been mistake upon mistake for fifty years’ (193). To fill this void, it should come as no surprise that into the abandoned rooms of Howards End arrive all the Schlegel accouterments of culture. Nor should it surprise, given the aims of the novel, that these worldly possessions fit the house so perfectly. Coming from the center of the metropolis that is otherwise vilified in the text, they even turn up exempt from city contagion, or, for that matter, imperial contamination. In fact when it comes to the Schlegels’ possessions, signifiers of cultivation and intellect, the text radiantly affirms over and over again the value of their cultural capital and what these books, art, and furnishings convey – intimacy and easy repartee, poetry and simple affection, the Moorean virtues of beauty and goodness. They confer on the house, in short, the privilege and cultivation of their citified owners: the leisure to acquire and consume, the private space for exchange and display, an independence that is material and intellectual, all of which awes the aspirant Bast and goes unappreciated by the philistine Wilcoxes. What we are witnessing with the translocation of the Schlegels’ material refinements into the uninhabited household of Howards End then is a new spatial compound of property and cultural value. Like its Victorian predecessor, Forster’s modernized version of the home is no less ideological. Just as the Victorian household and sentimentalism came to screen the class interests of the propertied bourgeoisie and the procreative standard that perpetuated the consanguineous family, so too does the cultural model that Forster introduces attempt to efface the evidence and interests of its own ideological production. Indeed, one efficient way to deflect its class interests is to mystify the transformation at Howards End by having it appear guided under the celestial navigation


of the very matriarch Mrs Wilcox that the text is supplanting, an impression that the otherwise sensible Margaret bolsters: ‘I feel that you [Helen] and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman’s mind. She knows everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it’ (222). And as Ruth’s progeny are shown to be inept stewards, the house and affect that form Ruth’s domestic legacy are conferred on her sometime confidante Margaret, who is refashioned as Ruth’s heir designate. With this symbolic transfer, homemade affect – previously the trust of the female avatar of the heteronormative standard, now that of a cosmopolitan woman ambiguously gendered, who is neither motherly nor desires to become one – expands to encompass Margaret’s cultural knowledge as well. Thus, with the single move, the Schlegels’ possessions find storage in Howards End and miraculously fit its rooms, and their material property and its cultural ether fill and replenish the deserted house. The cultural reconstruction of the household is in effect complete – a reconstruction incommodious, however, for the tenancy of the conjugal couple. This then is the logic of nostalgizing the country house, of deposing its matriarch, and of installing the aesthetic and worldly belongings of the urbane Schlegels. All is made ready to receive the successor to Howards End, one who will be the beneficiary of a cultural and affective model capacious enough to convey a homoerotic and homophilic address and to importune a homosexual subjectification – yet one also kin to its country extraction. And here the text does not disappoint. To this high office, the young clerk Leonard and his pinched umbrella are summoned. Umbrellas notwithstanding, no cultural artifact and no moment better capture the young Leonard’s complex signification than his physical conversion from bare to top-hatted head as he steps down a city street lost in remembrance of a conversation with the Schlegels over his nocturnal walking adventure in unromantic suburban London: He took off his top-hat and smoothed it thoughtfully. He had hitherto supposed the unknown to be books, literature, clever conversation, culture. One raised oneself by study, and got upsides with the world. But in that quick interchange a new light dawned. Was that ‘something’ walking in the dark among the suburban hills? He discovered that he was going bareheaded down Regent Street. London came back with a rush. Few were about at this hour but all whom he passed looked at him with a hostility that was the more impressive because it was unconscious. He put his hat on. It was too


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big, his head disappeared like a pudding into a basin, the ears bending outwards at the touch of the curly brim . . . . Thus equipped, he escaped criticism. No one felt uneasy as he titupped along the pavements, the heart of a man ticking fast in his chest. (91) While top hat secures his occupational credential and marks him a member of the genteel class, even if at the extreme fringe, it also puts in relief his ambiguous position in the metropolis. He no sooner dons it than his reverie ends. Fixed in the crosshairs of the novel’s competing tropes of anti-urban boom and pro-rural revival, Leonard trudges uneasily across the several social and class registers of the novel. The precarious class standing of an insurance clerk inscribes his masculinity as unstable and patently incompatible with the romantic idealism that leads him to wed the bawd Jacky or to atone for his adultery with Helen. The natural wisdom conferred on Stephen as part of his native inheritance becomes with this displaced son of the yeomanry the half-truths and misguided chivalry of the urban self-taught. Out of place in the city and out of touch with the country doom him to certain itinerancy if not out-and-out ruin. Leonard’s embodiment of a discrepant masculinity accords with general anxieties over the arriviste class of clerks, as Magali Sarfatti Larson and Maurizia Boscagli document. As imperial expansion transformed London into a world financial center, the twin effects of modernity – urban agglomeration and rural decline – led local men to abandon cottage industries for the metropolis where they swelled the London staffs of global enterprises such as the Imperial and West African Rubber Company owned by Henry Wilcox and fils and the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company, which employs Bast. Both necessity and encumbrance, the clerk class Bast epitomizes is the visible marker of social flux and national insecurity, signifying unease that ranged from class instability and social disarray to falling birth rates and devitalized masculinity. One literary remedy, as suggested earlier of the fiction from Kipling to Rider Haggard, was to repatriate the manly ideal of imperial romance back to the English countryside to take up residence as the robust body of the Anglo-Saxon yeoman. While the move did nothing to reverse urbanization or stem the clerk class, it did procure a compensatory imaginary of what Boscagli calls ‘an aristocracy of the blood, rather than of birth or of money’ (57). The virilized yeoman became the idealized antidote to the depleted masculinity identified with the clerk and his city habitat of sedentary desk jobs and of cramped and squalid flats. The figure also performed the extra service of acting as an iconographic check on the clerkocracy’s ambitions of social advancement and


middle-class assimilation. Added to these is Forster’s own erotic inflection: yeoman virility and its latency in office workers encode for him the fantasy of reviving the Greek ideal of manly love on country downs with rural youths as we saw with Stephen’s depiction. While the text makes clear Bast’s class limitations as bounder and bungler, it also makes him the locus of desires for founding a line of native masculine subjects to relegitimate manly love. 32 Bast’s double representation is evident in the passage quoted above. For in his bareheaded trance, inspired by the cultivated Schlegels’ rapture over his pedestrian adventure, he not only perceives that there is ‘something’ ennobling about the return to nature that his walk roused but he also unconsciously embodies it, however briefly. The fleeting spectacle of the hatless Leonard lost in thought manifests the romantic renewal the natural world still offers its uprooted sons. Indeed, as the discerning Margaret intuits, underneath top hat there breathes ‘a real man’ (107). She confirms, too, the unwholesome effects of urbanization on Bast’s inherent masculinity. ‘Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a couple of ideas’ (84–85). Contrary to urban getup, Bast’s figure evokes a purportedly genuine English manliness, one that predates modern nation and empire and that lives on in him, however vestigially, a fact he later confirms when he shyly admits to Helen that his forebears worked the land and, what is more, that his maternal grandfather hailed from the county full of suggestiveness for Forster’s intimate circle, Shropshire (170). 33 Associating Leonard with the specific locale of A.E. Housman’s homoerotic lyrics subtly naturalizes the clerk’s more primitive lineage and implies that poetry of a homophilic cast and of a pastoral simplicity is his rightful estate, an estate surrendered when his family ventured to the city. Indeed, what Leonard regards as his degrading agricultural heritage, the text explicitly hails as heroic when it later praises yeomanry as ‘a noble stock’ (229). Bast’s latency is made patent in his seduction by another Schlegel, his champion Helen. Here with their serendipitous union, Leonard, the displaced native son and peripatetic clerk, seems to locate and discharge his real purpose in Howards End – serving, in effect, as the sperm donor par excellence – to such an extent in fact that the obliging Bast can be dispatched once the harvesting is done. What the narrative desires of Bast, reminiscent of Robert’s fateful coupling with Mrs Elliot, is an offspring of the arcadian line and not the clerkly article himself – this


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in order to beget a new version of English masculinity, one kindred to primitive robustness and Oxbridge homosexualism but one expressly not propagated through domestic romance. As before, the text deflects its class interests, in this instance, onto the hotheaded Charles, who, in defending what he considers Helen’s honor, delivers the blow that brings on the onetime lover’s heart attack and brings down his own family’s standing. Although the clerk’s weak heart, the liability of his occupation, presages Bast’s fate, his death, unlike Ruth Wilcox’s, warrants no special treatment, no airy afterlife, not even an epitaph once the official inquest is complete. ‘I ought to remember Leonard as my lover’, Helen admits to Margaret. ‘But I cannot. It’s no good pretending. I’m forgetting him’ (239). And so the text encourages, contrary to its famous epigraph, ‘only disconnect’, and thereby deftly prevents any restoration of domestic romance or return to the Victorian procreative couple. Both are dismissed from the novel almost as coldly as is the déclassé Jacky. In this way, the text produces, as if by fiat, the male heir desired from the first.34 Leonard’s service and death and Charles’s assault not only frustrate domestic romance and rid the text of a sticky class complication, they also prevent the patrilineal succession that the text is equally at pains to unseat. The succession that is passed down in the consanguineous family from Henry Wilcox to his sons perpetuates the imperial model of trespass and territorial appropriation practiced on the property Howards End. Leonard’s death, for which Charles is held culpable, importantly disrupts this succession, speeds the Wilcoxes’ downfall, and brings about their dispossession. With the Wilcox men dishonored, depropriated, and unmanned, the text also disconnects the complementary ideological and material practices of property and propagation. And, as justification, it warrants that Henry and his sons never truly belonged to Howards End or to the land that surrounds it, and thus are deemed more emphatically removed from the yeoman-adduced ‘aristocracy of the blood’ than even the hapless Leonard. It does all of this with the mere figure of hay that elsewhere signifies the country’s natural fecundity and Ruth’s profound attachment. From wisps to harvest, the allergic Wilcox men fail the hay test so utterly, an inherited defect we are told, that the neighborhood oracle Miss Avery can mockingly summarize their history to Margaret in a single breath: ‘There’s not one Wilcox that can stand up against a field in June’ (195). Unfit for the outdoors dooms their imperial type de facto as Ruth’s or England’s natural successors. Yet, while the text forecloses on the Wilcoxes, the cultural romanticism implicit in Forster’s admiration of Conrad’s Lord Jim resurfaces with the elevation of the soldier turned intellectual, the Schlegels’ deceased


father Ernst. In choosing the life of the mind over the sword and in devoting himself to the cultural emancipation that forms his children’s legacy, Ernst’s character offers the enlightened intellectual as the ideal replacement for imperial aggressor. It is this cultural estate that Helen’s child will inherit along with Howards End. With these, the text supplants the affective sentimentality of the ethereal matriarch Ruth Wilcox and offsets the encroachments of an acquisitive and insensate imperial ethos that the philistine Wilcoxes typify through colonial and matrimonial ventures. At the novel’s conclusion, a replacement for the once dominant Victorian couple emerges. The hay harvest that keeps the allergic Wilcox patriarch indoors forms the bountiful backdrop to beget a modern generation of Englishmen – the future heir of Howards End, Leonard and Helen’s bastard son, and his garden playmate Tom. Their queer friendship augurs an amative alliance based on an erotic genealogy that the literary expert Forster inaugurates for himself and for the experts and intellectuals of his class – a male subjective and cultural economy that is at once loving, carnal, poetic, manly, and, we should not forget, well-to-do. With Howards End, Forster’s pastoral modernism weans the novel of domestic ideology and grants it cultural integrity suffused with a prosperous queer masculinity. From the friendship of this natural child and hay-field chum, it is not difficult to extrapolate the future friendship of Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder of Forster’s frank representation of male passion in Maurice. In this later novel, however, Forster pushes his hellenic-inspired pastoral one momentous step further by representing homosexual desire as an entirely discrete, definitive, and ultimately salubrious identity. The transformation imagined from Pan’s seduction of an English youth in the hills above Ravello to the prospective one in the hayloft of Howards End becomes in Maurice experiential knowledge and self-acceptance. The transit from thinking to being Greek now plainly means recognizing one’s true nature. Nature is no longer the beneficent space located outside of the middle-class individual but is bound up with the individual’s inherent desires, a conflation signified when the lovers in Maurice retreat from boathouse to the greenwood. Their naturalized coupling indicates that, while Cambridge and a classicist like Clive Durham may still act as catalysts, male relationships are now pleasurably consummated on native ground independent of any hellenic antecedents. Maurice thus offers readers Forster’s most democratizing testament to queer masculinity. Public consumption of this democratic romance presents a more complex transaction. As we know, Forster’s one ‘out’ novel was not got


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out until after his death on his stated instructions. Without a doubt, social taboos and legal proscriptions justly informed his decision to withhold Maurice – whether in 1913, during the Great War, after the armistice, or even later, what with his relationship to Bob Buckingham and attachment to his wife and son. Yet the reasons not to publish may also reside with the success of Howards End and the eroticized community of men it commissions. The fact that the manuscript Maurice made the rounds sub rosa for almost 60 years among the very cultural class Forster imagined with Howards End also meant that the novelist was under no pressing mandate to make it public.35 Such select circulation may have more than satisfied. For with it, Maurice had the exclusive and empathetic audience installed in that refurbished country house. Consistent with experts’ treatment of gender and sex, the pair of lovers thus serve as objects of study or as eroticized objects of study for Forster’s expert and cultured peers. What I am suggesting is that Howards End and not Maurice effectively and publicly answers the dilemma of Forster’s modernism – who shall inherit England – by producing a cultural model for an educated elite of experts. This model, in contrast to its more democratic successor, does not embrace upwardly mobile clerks or loutish eldest sons any more than it will suburban stockbrokers and manor house menials, or, for that matter, looking ahead to A Passage to India, a Muslim physician, regardless of desires. As the case with Woolf, the manipulation of gender and sex of the novel form offers the literary means of distinguishing elite writers as a group from their Victorian predecessors, and, consonant with domestic ideology, from rival contemporaries as part of the middle-class contest for dominance that Trilling identified. In essence, the published Howards End distinguishes Forster as an expert member of this group and provides a model to perpetuate the group’s cultural interests. Maurice does neither and is not, therefore, published in Forster’s lifetime. To be sure, we may rightly speculate, with the hindsight of nearly a century, on the broader effects that might have followed had his erotic coupling of suburbanite and nativist gamekeeper circulated openly as a romantic model ahead of Lawrence’s John Thomas and Lady Jane, at a time, in other words, when heterosexuality was not yet hegemonic. However we may answer that speculation, what we can say with greater clarity is that Forster’s modernist vision was far more prescient and calculated than credited.

5 Putting Rouge on the Corpse: Cosmopolitan Joyce and Modern Culture

‘We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries, to understand our interpreter’ (3). So proclaims the opening of Richard Ellmann’s monumental biography of Joyce and so has Joyce scholarship responded. Expressed in the present progressive, Ellmann’s declaration has continued to summon exegetes so that more than one monograph has staked its interpretive heft on the biographer’s avowal, to such an extent, in fact, that what once appeared as cocky prophecy risks becoming a scholarly platitude of the Joyce industry.1 In this double-helixed logic, Ellmann’s assertion testifies to the artist’s canonicity that Joyce criticism reproduces and thereby perpetuates. In its aftermath, Joyce has accordingly become, in a manner of speaking, one of the discipline’s and modernism’s most valuable literary annuities. This tautological process, so fundamental to disciplinarity and so distinctive of modernism, forms the focus of this chapter. With Joyce, I want to apply the explanatory logic developed in Virginia Woolf’s intellectual model to his cultural transmission and reception in order to make further claims about why, how, and with what consequences literary modernism came to count itself as an artistic movement expressive not of a single nation or people or even of one time but of universal culture, to become the monolith that once held sway over the literary imagination and cultural capital of the twentieth century. 2 Such questions are particularly germane as the scholarly reevaluation of modernism’s most acclaimed novelist has undertaken his conversion from aesthetic icon to political dissident. As Vincent Cheng’s careful and impassioned survey of Joyce criticism attests, the scholarship instrumental in canonizing Joyce’s works has come under siege by 120

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those intent on politicizing them. 3 Their contest not only speaks to the value ascribed to Joyce’s literary capital, which arguably has never been greater, but it also speaks to the structure of modernism itself and the decisive impact its logic had on the discipline of literary studies and the laity it instructs. Significantly, it is this very logic, however, that the current debate appears to ignore in reproducing another round of contemporaries for Ellmann’s implacable interpreter. To wit, those who opt for ‘postcolonial Joyce’ over ‘canonical Joyce’ seem not to notice that the novelist’s experimental fiction, which was both subversive and elitist, matured alongside his commitment to a cosmopolitan community in which the critical establishment of Anglo-American literary studies became imbricated. 4 What makes the modernist attractive to those who would now politicize Joyce is due in no small measure to the prestige he earned as an international artist in the 1920s and 1930s and to the status bestowed on him posthumously as ‘canonical Joyce’. More to point, the expert status that modernist practitioners, such as Joyce, labored to achieve and the subsequent institutionalization their creative capital garnered them within literate circles, the academy, and the arts industry, led to a monopoly on cultural competence that is fundamentally at odds with any liberatory politics.5 True to his doughty ‘non serviam’, Joyce advanced neither a political agenda nor a nationalist cause. Much like Woolf, he chose cultural emancipation and expert accreditation over political enfranchisement and national liberation. His interest was not in mustering a body of citizens to supplant British and Roman Catholic dominance with Irish rule but in producing a sophisticated and secular reading public acculturated to city life and dependent on his and other modernists’ expertise to gain greater cultural fluency. As such, his interest was in acquiring the cultural agency to reproduce subjects not to overthrow states, and it is for this reason that he abandoned colonized Ireland and sidestepped imperial England and the Roman church, wherein power was publicly vested, in favor of continental Europe. Strategically bypassing these domains, the modernist Joyce staked his claim for artistic legitimacy on the local concerns of household and street. Local though they were, however, to transform these spaces challenged imperial authorities at the very base of the social order. Not only did the pulpit and classroom buttress the ecclesiastic reach of the Catholic Church, but so too did the home serve as a locus of its weighty ministry. No less was this true of the other imperial interloper, Britain. The Anglo middle-class household, whether as reality or normative standard, provided the social stability for national cohesion and imperial dominance.


Yet despite its importance to the renovative forces of modernization, the household remains one area unaccounted for in modernist geography, and, in the case of Joyce studies, a preoccupation with national politics will only prolong the neglect. Joyce’s ascent as a self-avowed continental artist and his experimental body of work, which pushed the symbolic and linguistic limits of English signification, offer a singular means by which we can appraise the impact literary modernism had on the socialization processes supervised by the home. Against this local milieu and its social tutelage, the more worldly cultural knowledge of a metropolitan artist-expert such as Joyce would define itself at a time when urbanization was making the boundary dividing home and street more fluid and dynamic.6 The polysemous title of this chapter with its moribund reference is thus deliberate, for arguably no male literary modernist exhibited a more factious and refractory attitude toward the cultural transactions along this divide or came to enjoy more success because of them than Joyce. In the pages that follow, I will argue that the Irish writer makes aggression against the social order foundational to his identity and practice as an artist. In his masquerade as a Bohemian artist in exile, he asserts a new myth of origins that depends on debasing the social order at its emotional center. In his treatment of mother and then of motherland, Joyce promotes his intellectual prowess and artistic autonomy that is then carried to conclusion in the production of his highly stylized fiction. Unlike Woolf, who transforms the social directly into art so that the educated daughters of the domestic woman have unimpeded access to culture and are made de facto members of the cultural class, or Forster, who hellenizes and thereby mythifies the social in order to create an amative and privileged haven for the like-minded men of his class, Joyce’s method offers a different form of mediation but one that takes place, consonant with theirs, over the female body. Joyce, like Lawrence, turns woman into nature but in this instance to arrogate her social power as modern culture. By so doing, Joyce creates a representational space he can then aestheticize and humanize through his creative practice. With this cultural formation, the Irish modernist combines aesthetics and affect that allow him to experience and then to abstract the metropolis, its inhabitants, and individual human consciousness into an international and universal context, about which he thereupon instructs the laity. Because Joyce’s work has no clear national or class bias as does Forster’s, no explicit gender inflection as Woolf’s inevitably evinces, and no determined allegiance to the heterosexualism that binds Lawrence’s, his modernism can more easily make claims to a universality


that is far more aggrandizing than his Anglo-modernist peers’ and far more appealing to a worldly audience as a result. Indeed, in the representation of Ulysses and its production and transmission we can see what may well be his most enduring innovation – the invention of a cosmopolitan literary culture. In Ulysses, he gives us not Lawrence’s Arcadian John Thomas and Lady Jane but the genesis couple par excellence that typifies the century’s post-lapsarian sublime – couchant Molly and cultural Bloom. That many in the literary establishment and beyond regard them in this way lends some credence outright to the argument of this chapter that begins by first considering their progenitor in his adolescent prime.7

I

Goliardic Joyce

In his first trip abroad, under the waggish pretense of studying medicine in the city increasingly regarded as the center of cosmopolitan culture, the young Joyce sets himself apart from the world of Dublin and sets about producing himself as the bereft artist in exile.8 His correspondence home and a single, cunning artifact – the postcard the homesick youth purchases in Paris – help to capture the mythifying strategies and authenticating poses he employs to ground his artistic ambitions. 9 These pivot on two moves, a derogation of domestic agency that renders the young Joyce adrift from family and countrymen and that then serves as pretext for the second, the fabrication of a worldly, itinerant scholar-poet. With it, we can trace the onset of a new myth of origins and a replacement of the primary one, the imaginary dyad of mother and son. His pilgrimage to Paris, however abbreviated, signals a resolve to gain acceptance within a literate European culture, as indeed do his early writings, and as do the introductions he brazenly finagled to the prominent Irish and Anglo-Irish literati of the day, connections he sought out but whose aesthetics he summarily dismissed.10 While this foreshortened journey does not carry the institutional guarantee or the aristocratic entitlement that going up to Cambridge does for Forster, or the imaginary ones that Orlando’s aristocratic pedigree confers on the twentieth-century female intellectual for Woolf, indeed Joyce’s journey is a far cry from these, its cultural meaning operates in the same register. The cunning artifact at the center of his dissembling is, in fact, the familiar stuff of Joyce legend: the postcard the homesick youth mails prior to returning home to Dublin in late December 1902 after his brief introduction to the French capital and to the hardships of an impecunious foreign student. As his letters and biographers disclose, the 22-year-old


Joyce, after an impoverished two weeks abroad, successfully appeals to his mother with complaints of ill health for emergency funds to travel home for the Christmas holidays, all of which she sedulously arranges to help her eldest child (Letters 2: 18–24; Ellmann 114–16; Gorman 88–91). Yet despite the youth’s apparent fiscal and physical distress, flush with funds, he somehow finds the stamina to sow his provincial wild oats by patronizing a Paris theater and brothel. These pastimes evidently embolden him to write home again – this time in the commodified discourse of the souvenir postcard – but a postcard that has a decided twist. For Joyce has it embellished with a photograph taken of himself in a Paris studio expressly for the occasion and, further, has it reproduced in triplicate. 11 The photograph, shot at a slight upward angle against a blank background, accentuates the young man’s stature in this fulllength exposure. No ordinary likeness, the Joyce that stands before us – feet planted apart, hands clasped behind him, head aslant – is decked out in a borrowed greatcoat and topped by the other credible marker of his Parisian acculturation, a Latin Quarter chapeau. In a pose that exudes a confident attitude with a discernible and fitting trace of melancholy, he offers a veritable fantasy of a Bohemian avant-garde writer, a romantic affectation that appears in retrospect entirely consistent with the mature image we have learned to recognize as the cosmopolitan auteur (Ellmann Plate VII; Letters 2: Fig. 9; Gorman 90; Chester Anderson 38–39). Indeed, reproduced in his biographies alongside other early photographs of the artist-aspirant, it provides further discrete evidence of Joyce’s budding celebrity whose caption might well read ‘a portrait of the artist as a young man’. As it turns out, such a caption is unnecessary. On the cards, each bearing a copy of the adolescent’s photograph, Joyce inscribed a message representing his Paris stay from a different perspective. These in toto encapsulate modernism’s allegory of exile, a fable in which the pathos of exile, the dominant trope of the modernist diaspora whose apotheosis Joyce would come to epitomize, screens its ideological operations of displacement and artistic regeneration.12 In this allegory, the incipient artist exploits what is a willful separation by transforming the homesickness it occasions into elegiac art. Indeed, such an expression is perceptible on the card Joyce inscribed to his closest friend, J.F. Byrne, the only extant of the three, in which a soulful lyric compares the sender’s exile (if a fortnight qualifies) to ‘waters making moan’ and the loneliness of seabirds (Letters 2: 20–21). 13 Though the other cards have not survived, the messages they conveyed, which are known generally, are likewise highly suggestive. In contrast to the artful inscription to Byrne is the


racy note written to another friend, Vincent Cosgrave, that boasted in dog-latin of Joyce’s ‘cocotte’ conquests. Lastly, to his parents, Joyce expressed his loneliness and longing for home juxtaposed with renewed complaints about his straightened circumstances. The mise en scène Joyce constructs on this trio of Parisian postcards, however varying in address, establishes this difference between himself and his Anglomodernist peers. Lacking the institutional integument Cambridge accords Forster and the technological collateral Hogarth Press provides Woolf, Joyce blatantly publicizes his accreditation with a representation of an eccentric and original artist of European, if not quite French, lineage. 14 The incipient modernist advertises a new genealogy of authority that he subsequently and successfully realizes in producing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. This process of cultural impersonation exemplifies the logic we might identify, following Slavoj Zizek’s application of Jacques Lacan’s theories of subject formation to popular filmic and printed texts over the century, as ‘deceiving by means of truth itself’ (73, original emphasis). As Zizek explains, ‘we effectively become something by pretending that we already are that’ (73, original emphasis). In other words, who we are depends on the position we assume by putting on its disguise. Visual ontology inaugurates not a fixed essence but performative agency, a condition expressed in contemporary vernacular as ‘fake it ’til you make it’. ‘By “pretending to be something” by “acting as if we were something”’, Zizek writes, ‘we assume a certain place in the intersubjective symbolic network, and it is this external place that defines our true position’ (74).15 The gaze of the Paris photograph Joyce commissions trumps, as it were, the Dublin Joyce, no less a performative subject, who journeyed to France early in December 1902. In view of my reading of literary modernism as an aggrandizing movement, exactly what triumph this synchronal stratagem of photographpostcard performs merits closer inspection. First and foremost, it enacts Joyce’s mythic loss of original identification. It is this primary divestiture that founds Joyce’s and, more generally, modernism’s allegory of exile. The complex relationship Joyce had with his mother and the epistolary exchange with his family from 1902 to 1903 bear this out. Consider, for example, the list of ailments that dominate his letters: forlornness, illness, poor diet, soiled clothing, lack of material comforts, shortage of funds. The deprivation of basic necessities, the evidence of his homelessness in short, he expresses as a loss of maternal munificence. Even so, his nostalgia is not benign. As the letters exchanged with his mother demonstrate, his displacement is one not passively experienced but is instead self-servingly imagined and managed. Most conspicuous


is their dyadic reversal made plain in one letter in particular. ‘My dear Jim’, May Joyce writes him in December 1902: if you are disappointed in my letter and if as usual I fail to understand what you would wish to explain, believe me it is not from any want of a longing desire to do so and speak the words you want but as you so often said I am stupid and cannot grasp the great thoughts which are yours much as I desire to do so. ( Letters 2: 22) In her address, Joyce’s mother mirrors the reflection her adolescent son has conferred on her. And in this reflection, both its structure and content, the young Joyce’s perception dominates. He is the acknowledged superior, if not usurper, in every respect. Joyce’s mother, by contrast, sees herself as his inferior and subordinate. Her knowledge, intellectual acuity, facility with language are all regarded as deficient. Even her one surplus, ‘a longing desire’, seems to accentuate rather than expiate her alleged inadequacy. This rather striking expression of maternal abnegation is at odds, however, with the material evidence of the letters. Although great thoughts are perhaps not within her ken, May Joyce is the parent who replies to her son’s letters, worries in them over his health, comforts his distress, supports his ambitions, and carefully sees to his numerous and detailed requests. While represented as the inept mother who rates a son’s abuse, she decisively intervenes with husband John to bring their son home for Christmas by borrowing against their only remaining asset, fittingly, the family home. Ironically, in this and previous homes, May Joyce’s expertise and resourcefulness sustained a household of 17 nominally headed by a husband whose fiscal, social, and libationary intemperance is well documented. My point, however, is not to offer a ‘truer’ version of Joyce’s home life, or, for that matter, to rescue May Joyce’s reputation, though here there may well be justification. Nor is my intent to restore or mourn the position of the maternal, much less plea for maternal jouissance. Instead, I want to suggest that the son’s exile, his dispossession, works by first maligning the mother’s domestic authority and then passing it off as her personal ineptitude – the distorted image of abasement that May Joyce accedes to and reflects back to her son. 16 Second, it works by denying her agency any obvious value – her motherly ministrations and interventions on his behalf and indeed on behalf of the whole family are either given no visible moment or are deemed inadequate to the son’s privations. The outcome of his dyadic logic is this transposition. Despite her mistreatment in this kinship reversal, it is Joyce who experiences and successfully represents his deliberate


separation from domestic solicitude as his abjection. To him falls the role of victim. His displacement is the one the letters continually reference and validate, until his father’s telegram in 1903 that tersely states the grave illness afflicting his mother and orders James’s immediate return.17 This rhetorical construct of primary loss, however contorted its logic – the son loses and mourns domestic beneficence by first deprecating and distancing himself from it – grounds Joyce’s displacement. It produces a representational space that he transforms into his divestiture where the mother functions mythically as its spectral signified. This quiescent state in turn justifies his reterritorializing this space with a new myth of origins, the photograph of the artist, and a new source of authority, the Paris metropolis. A rudimentary version of this process is the elegiac lyric he writes on the postcard to confidante Byrne, ‘which tells of the journeyings of the soul’ beside the snapshot of l’artiste melancolique (Letters 2: 20). For the full blown versions of the elegizing apparatus we need only turn, as I shall in a moment, to his experimental fiction from Dubliners on. Over this moribund space then, call it maternal or domestic, Joyce grounds his artistic practice to assert his own authority, a cultural logic that modernists, as I have argued in preceding chapters, systematically enact and from which emerges their specialized knowledge of human subjects. Viewed in this light, not only is Joyce’s artistic identity feigned, but so is the mother’s corpse.18 Both images he exploits to validate his superiority over and greater knowledge of the social realm she supervised in the family. The mirror that the son Joyce holds up for his mother to look at herself is the same ‘nicely polished looking-glass’ that the artist Joyce holds up for the education of his Dublin compatriots. 19 The model Joyce employs with the maternal for the sake of the artist-aspirant is later done to the mother country for the sake of his art: a reflection of degradation that is passed off as real circumstance and not as contrived image. What this reflective process, this dyadic reversal, puts in place is the artist as cultural producer. And lest we doubt Joyce’s shrewd aestheticizing of the representational field, we might consider how different by comparison is the mirror Buck Mulligan hands to Dedalus at the opening of Ulysses that the petulant Stephen sneers at as ‘a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant’ (Ulysses 1: 146). To understand the tropological shift in signifiers from cracked to polished, from servant to master, we need to consider the genesis of the artist who has seized possession of the domestic economy. If the gratuitous degradation of the mother anchors one end of the representational spectrum of Joyce’s modernist allegory, then the cultural


and sensual dissipations brokered in playhouse and bordello anchor the other, the second part of his mythifying stratagem. For given his alleged maternal dispossession, what precipitates his transformed specular identity on a Parisian postcard appears to come from the exchanges bragged about in his card to Cosgrave: his paid attendance at a Paris theater and his paid penetration of its women. In another register, these might be shrugged off as the debauched consumption of a male tourist. Here cupidity and carnal knowledge (specifically non-procreative) engenders the Bohemian artist Joyce by what we might call flanerie reproduction: the son, exiled from home, makes his way in the labyrinthine metropole where strange rites of initiation and coupling mysteriously beget his new self, the plot in short of Ulysses, sans Bloom. In place of fictional intermediary and Homeric epic we have their technological equivalent in the alchemy of photography. The anonymous photographer and his chemical disporting produce the enigmatic parturition of the youthful artist. For photography as medium implicitly makes the Joyce who looks out from the photograph into an object of the French photographer’s gaze and of the camera apparatus that faithfully records the image. In other words, the youth transformed into Latin Quarter artist, later revered by his coterie as the subversive founder of a new and original literary lineage, is the putative offspring of French imagination and technological reproduction, a kind of mechanical genesis in which modern technology operates under the symbolic aegis of an originary myth, a modernist hagiography. 20 The consequence is that his photocopy identity appears unpremeditated and whole. Thus a mythic photographic fecundation screens Joyce’s self-conscious desire to become the artist in the photograph as it screens his desire to control the image by which others recognize him. Here as well the evidence of the correspondence suggests that Joyce had something on this order in mind. In a revealing letter, he instructs his family on what news they may relate of his Paris residence and, in essence, wholly censors their reports: ‘No information is to be given about me to anybody except – “O, Very Nicely, thank you”’ (2: 20). This excessive reserve, when read against the blatant spectacle and considered inscriptions offered shortly thereafter in the photograph-postcards, makes Joyce’s parthenogenetic motives clearer. The postcard artifact has an additional function, that of memorializing Joyce’s new urban literacy. While his attire and pose testify to a worldly metamorphosis, what adds to the realness of the pose is the exchange implicit between the French photographer and himself.21 Despite the banal form of the postcard, their exchange hints at a transfer of knowledge


that heightens the power of Joyce’s transformation. Being made an object of a French gaze bestows on the youthful Irishman a cultural competence unavailable to recipients of the photo card in Dublin. There is an exclusive mutuality insinuated in the photograph, if only in rudimentary form, that those who look upon it cannot penetrate. This imaginary dyad supplants, in effect, the one of mother and son. So to the affective expertise appropriated from the domestic and private economy his mother managed, Joyce adds the cosmopolitan expertise of a secular and metropolitan one. As a consequence, the Joyce of the photograph appears to know more of Paris and of the world than his contemporaries who inhabit the colonial and Catholic city of Dublin. Worldly knowledge and the aura of artistic presence work in concert to construct his autonomy and authority. 22 Joyce’s photographic envoy not only works by creating a recognizable and knowledgeable artistic persona that he soon afterward rehearses on the streets of Dublin but also works by creating a distance between persona and viewer. This distance is crucial for artistic autonomy and for establishing dominion over the field of representation, positions that Woolf so skillfully handled and Richardson never successfully managed. 23 The photograph-postcard effects these by enclosing and demarcating the adolescent Joyce’s artistic presence within a frame that simulates the spatial divide of sophisticated Paris from provincial Dublin as it circulates among Joyce’s circle of relations and acquaintances back home. In cordoning off Joyce’s image, it gives proof of his separation; and as a discrete artifact, it works like a fair copy of the new continental Joyce – that seems to anticipate by some 12 years the encomium Ezra Pound paid Joyce for Dubliners: ‘He writes as a contemporary of continental writers’ (401). Indeed, this graphic self-presentation of a cosmopolitan young man of exceptional talent, he subsequently performs on his return to Dublin to attend his dying mother. ‘Away from home’, Ellmann informs us, ‘he played the Parisian, with long hair, a small beard, a wide bow tie, and a Latin Quarter hat (not a tam)’ (130). Given the postcard idiom of representation, in place of ‘the Dublin Joyce’ gone from home for a scant two weeks, we have via photographic parturition the image of the new, cosmopolitan Joyce who knows more of the world – its woes and its pleasures – than his unsophisticated relations and friends in colonial Ireland.24 The photograph-postcards, their production and transmission, grant Joyce the positional superiority, the critical remove, if you will, consistent with the ethos of the expert class, to view his fellow Dubliners as they cannot view him or even apprehend themselves. This position yields Joyce access to his compatriots as it


limits in turn their access to him. We might say then that Joyce publicizes his exile to produce himself as a Bohemian artist whose aesthetic sensibility, intellectual superiority, and worldly knowledge will justify the polished looking glass he would hold up to the mother country – will justify the specular authority he would turn on native Dubliners.25 ‘Tell me’, he is said to have coolly remarked later in life to a friend on the prospect of Irish independence, ‘why you think I ought to wish to change the conditions that gave Ireland and me a shape and a destiny’ (qtd. in Ellmann 109). To consider their fraught exchange, I turn now to Dubliners.

II

Protean Joyce

In ‘The Day of Rabblement’, a response written in 1901 to the all-Irish repertoire that The Irish Literary Theater (later Abbey) had decided on, Joyce remonstrates that ‘[a] nation which never advanced so far as a miracle-play affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad’ (Critical Writings 70). His rebuke of Irish provincialism appears to anticipate his actions thereafter. Having staged his exile and forged his postcard identity on the continent, he aims his newfound expertise at the nation in need of a literary model and transforms it into the object of his worldly scrutiny. Ireland will gain the literary tradition it allegedly lacks with Joyce’s intervention. He accomplishes this feat by taking Ireland’s putative deficiency as a model for Dubliners, and carries it off by the same dyadic reversal of filial relations that enabled his maternal domination. Held up to the mirror of his ‘scrupulous meanness’, the mother country will succumb, as did May Joyce, to his disciplinary vision (Letters 2: 134). The argument I shall pursue with Dubliners is this: Joyce does to the motherland in the public discourse of fiction what he had done to his mother in private correspondence. My interest here is not to arrive at some simplistic determination about whether or not Joyce was a misogynist. Rather it is to consider how Joyce used the rancorous social and political circumstances of his historical moment to authorize himself as a modernist, to renovate the novel form, and to reeducate the tastes and pleasures of a literate metropolitan culture.26 In this light, not to treat issues of gender arising from his personal life or to neglect an outcome that accrues from considering it would seem intellectually problematic. As I argue throughout, for Joyce, no less than for Woolf, Lawrence, or Forster, the Anglo middle-class household, an inherently gendered space, would prove an especially potent but vulnerable site from which to stage a literary coup against


prevailing institutions and social practices. In Joyce’s case, the stakes and payoff were higher in that he took on imperial Britain and Rome and championed a continental alliance over what for him was a parochial and repressive national solution. In Dubliners’s formal structure, then, as in its phenomenal and thematic properties, Joyce employs an analogous method of deprecation of his subject whose distorted image of abasement produces an Ireland that can be mourned as a provincial object of imperfect knowledge, inept agency, misplaced loyalty, needless cruelty, repressed or misdirected passion, and, lastly, lost beneficence. The hegemonic practice of transgressive and nostalgic domination, as with the inverted affiliation with his mother, produces a representational space of mythic dispossession that justifies the genesis of a new authority and therapeutic vision. What this portends is the usurpation of the social agency linked with domesticity first by naturalizing it and then by transferring its power to the ascendant intellectual. Dubliners foreshadows the transformation of the social matrix into a cultural one that Ulysses more completely realizes. In the developmental edifice Joyce constructs for his fictive Dublin, that transits from ‘childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life’, as described in a letter to publisher Grant Richards (2: 134), what matures over the course of the collection is neither the nation, nor any unifying concept of nationhood. It is not the country’s political or religious leadership, and not its constituents. Nor can it be found in its social forms and familial institutions or their discourses. Significantly, their mediating functions are variously represented as enfeebled, pointless, or archaic. Instead the teleology of Dubliners ultimately devolves upon one solitary individual, the cosmopolitan intellectual, and, more precisely, on the self-knowledge his expanded vision commands in the concluding story ‘The Dead’. To him is given the singular if imperfect wisdom to view Ireland, its national and religious divisions, political and domestic institutions, its collectivity and, even more, humanity writ large. This wisdom is gained, consistent with Joyce’s manipulation of the maternal function, at the expense of an ingenuous Irish woman whose symbolic demesne also includes the homeland. Her knowledge, affect, and also notably her passion, the intellectual appropriates as the expanded affective discourse of modern expertise we recognize as humanism. To the secular intellectual and to him alone, however romanticized his usurpation, Joyce extends the polished looking glass of observation. From here the intellectual is notably positioned to see, as I observed in Woolf’s treatment of Mrs Brown, into the deepest recesses of the human psyche. This spatial trope founds what in the twentieth century is regarded as the


ontological truth of humankind. With this expansive specular command, the intellectual is poised to make truth claims of universal dimensions as readers are positioned to receive them. As a result, the intellectual can mediate both the social and private realms of the individual to impart from his privileged vantage point the redemptive knowledge that makes humanity recognizable and modernity bearable, a position and expertise accorded to no other character in the collection. That Joyce wrote ‘The Dead’ belatedly and with the other stories in mind, and placed it last, the most emphatic position in the book rhetorically, only testifies to its latent design. From this promontory, its narrative comments on, completes, and transforms the preceding ones as it also anticipates the urban epic to follow. Let me put Dubliners in some perspective, however, by briefly reviewing its critical reception, one that Joyce promoted in the same letter to Richards, asserting that he chose Dublin ‘because that city seemed . . . the centre of paralysis’ (2: 134). Indeed, its short fiction has been read exactly in this way, as a moral parable of modern paralysis – body, family, church, city, country – all under arrest, symptomatic of the condition humaine, evidence of the Roman church’s absolutism and British exploitation, a double mimesis of colonial oppression and frustrated nationhood. The infirmity that claims Father Flynn of the first story ‘Three Sisters’, who dies following a stroke, also initially impairs the intellectual Gabriel Conroy’s vision in the story just referenced, ‘The Dead’. What seems broadcast over Ireland, to amend its closing soliloquy, is not snow but stasis (223). Separately and together, the stories relate the dysfunction of the very institutions – domestic, educational, religious – that are supposed to foster community and mediate social accord. What Dubliners shows is their exhaustion. The causality of their linear narratives occasions not deliverance but entrapment. Rather than authorizing agency, they frustrate it. Rather than protagonists conquering space, they are encased in and defeated by it. One by one, they are represented not in the process of developing but in a state of stagnation or repression. In short, Dubliners offers us disease as a model of modernity and of the metropole of an occupied country. Neither the institutions portrayed in these stories nor the discourses they galvanize, whether of dinner table, pulpit, pub, or ballot box, can remedy this paralysis because they are the culprits inhibiting the mobility and freedom the characters yearn for in Joyce’s fiction. What is missing from conventional readings of the collection is suggested by what also appears to unify the stories and their protagonists and that is the desire or, more precisely, the desires that subtend them. It is the frustration of


these that puts the protagonists in conflict with one another and with the country’s failing institutions. Frustrated or repressed desire is the cause of paralysis. As seen in previous chapters, a universe of desire is an altogether different epistemic construct from the one crescent in the Victorian century. In place of society, as I have suggested, it produces culture. In place of institutionalized monogamy, it propagates, as Joyce’s snapshot-postcard illustrates, by discursive technology. In place of political and religious leaders, it gives rise to a secular elite of specialists, the modern expert. In place of nationalism, it offers cosmopolitanism. What we call culture is constituted in and around consumption and infused with desire so as to provide an analeptic remedy to the debilitating social institutions Joyce represents as paralyzing the Dublin populace. Political enfranchisement, even discounting the English occupation, would not bring about the transformation Joyce’s protagonists long for and the one he has in mind. In Dubliners, the cultural emancipation that appears as the horizon of the text is unattainable given the protagonists’ socialization. Deliverance lies in a cultural mediation that is latent but heretofore unavailable. Consider this pair of stories, for instance. In ‘Araby’, the young boy’s infatuation for the proverbial girl next door launches his shopping expedition to a fair that fails to gratify his desire, hardly the first novice shopper to be lured by exotic names only to be disappointed by cheap and overpriced merchandise. The boy’s frustration, however, is as much with his non-traditional home, an ineffectual aunt and, in particular, an inebriate uncle who delays his journey, as it is with the quality of things the bazaar, staffed by English clerks no less, displays. It is not desire per se that is rebuked, but a family’s hindrance, on the one hand, and the bazaar’s vulgarity, on the other. For it is the youth’s desire that grants him agency, as noted of Mrs Dalloway’s more seasoned shoppers; it is the instrument of mobility, change, and identity – everything in short that domestic senescence and alcoholic dissipation are not. In contrast to ‘Araby’, the story ‘After the Race’ appears to grant desire carte blanche and even takes as its starting point the transition of an economy founded on production and accumulation to one of consumption and dispersal. For its beau ideal, the story looks eastward to Europe and imagines a continental invasion of Dublin in the form of foreign race cars and their drivers for the Irish motor derby, for which the young protagonist Jimmy Doyle is, as they say, along for the ride. What sets this particular story apart from the others are all the advantages heaped on Doyle that seem indicative of a new class of Irish entrepreneurial wealth, in Jimmy’s case, a fortune derived from his butcher father’s


provisioning of prisons, a point not lost on a reader attentive to tropes of arrestment. New money or not, ill gotten or not, Doyle is the one character in the collection with what might be called a bright future. He has youth, looks, capital, an indulgent father, the veneer of education, including a ‘polishing’ term at Cambridge, and the worldly friends, ‘Continentals’, to show for it, including the French motor car driver, Ségouin, in whose company Doyle receives and basks in the admiring glances of his fellow countrymen (44). Doyle, it seems, cannot lose. But, of course, this being Dubliners, he does and at cards. He gambles away his father’s fortune, or a goodly part of it, in a late-night poker session following the celebratory and lubricating dinner Ségouin hosts to mark the race. The capital meant to buy Doyle an interest in Ségouin’s new motor company is instead simply handed over a card table to the more savvy Frenchman. Yet, the text faults Doyle not for his exuberance and expenditure but for his superficiality, for not knowing how to spend his inheritance. The story is much less anxious about dissipation than what prompts it and what is exchanged for it. And the text makes clear that Jimmy, as with the boy of ‘Araby’, longs for the wrong kinds of things, in the wrong circuits of exchange: in this instance, fast cars and prodigal French engineers. ‘After the Race’ is a moral tale against Doyle’s philistinism. Much as Matthew Arnold chafed at the new wealth of the English nation, so here as well. And if the English solution that Arnold championed in the nineteenth century was, as noted earlier, to turn money into culture, and specifically, literate culture, so is it here as well (Cottom 9). The physic would seem to be cultural not commercial collaborations. Importing the exotic in the form of retail bazaars or motor cars is neither the solution nor the horizon the text summons. These stories, in which Joyce makes frustration and failure palpable and symptomatic of Ireland, suggest that the necessary curative for what ails Dubliners is educating desire, and for that a particular kind of expertise is required. Gaining knowledge over this unseen, private realm and converting it into a public discourse becomes the principal charge of the intellectual. The story ‘A Painful Case’ presents this issue – educating inchoate desire – from the perspective of the bank clerk and would-be intellectual Duffy. Cultured and erudite, a drama and concert patron, the bachelor Duffy apparently knows what to admire. Yet he is otherwise solitary and distant, until a chance encounter with an attractive married woman, Emily Sinico, one evening at the theater, introduces him to the pleasures of friendship. The couple’s prolonged and chaste relationship ends abruptly, however, with her attempt at intimacy that repels the


aloof Duffy, who bolts in panic. Soon after, he effects a separation that ultimately sends Mrs Sinico to gin and suicide. The discord here, which the story undertakes to redress, is the gulf between the clerk’s ardor as a spectator and coldness as a participant. He has sufficient education for the one, but evidently not enough for the other. The first, society sanctions in the cultural performances he frequents; the second, it censures as base sensual indulgence. Duffy’s abstemiousness, his diligence, and thrift, all qualities valued of the nineteenth century in which stability and social standing were deemed worthy aims, do nothing to address more deeply felt desires. The result is sterility for him and despondency and death for Captain Sinico’s lonely spouse. Especially relevant here is the narrative structure of desire that Joyce tellingly locates in the body of the domestic woman. It is the proper and refined but emotionally and sensually deprived Mrs Sinico who is the assertive partner. Driven by a combination of sincere affection and simple lust, she is the one who dares adultery. In exposing to Duffy her libidinous self, she reveals that the private domain of affect, the source of their friendship (the sympathy and attention that draws him out) also embodies, quite literally, a secret repository of desire for which the chaste clerk is unprepared. His confusion, however, diverts attention away from a more consequential transaction in the narrative. In essence, the affective domain the respectable married woman managed in this Irish middle-class household Joyce imbues with a passion located in the body, so that what was formerly an institutional prerogative which women exercised over the household is implicitly transformed into a bodily disposition in need of control. Affect and sensuality are embodied and conjoined in Emily, reducing this domestic woman’s position in the household from one of governance to governed. Instead of overseeing affective relations and domestic romance that perpetuated institutional monogamy and spurred propagation, long her official responsibilities, Emily is made subject to appetites she cannot control: in her initial attraction to Duffy and ultimately in the insobriety that leads to a messy demise at a rail crossing. Joyce, in essence, revokes her control over the affective domain by rendering her a corporal being in need of control. And if this were not enough, Emily’s corporeal body and then her corpse become the material instruments of Duffy’s dilatory selfenlightenment. When, during a solitary dinner at a local eatery, he chances upon the story the evening newspaper carries of Mrs Sinico’s calamity and death, he begins to comprehend what his want of passion means. In the dramatized epiphany that follows, he laments not so much her death as his own forlorn and loveless condition. In effect,


Emily’s ‘painful case’ is sublimated as the self-knowledge of the clerkly intellectual Duffy, consistent with the emotional reversals previously documented. Let me tease out the implications. The coupling of affect and appetite and its glib extinction at a rail crossing might seem only a curiosity peculiar to an odd female protagonist were it not for Joyce’s earlier manipulation of maternal agency that operated by a similar reversal. In fact, this corporealization of the middle-class woman is an extension of the dyadic logic practiced against maternal signification that becomes emblematic of his modernism. He lodges carnal desire within the domestic woman’s body where it can then be exposed, diagnosed, appropriated, enjoyed, celebrated, even mourned, but finally sublimated, in this instance, as the self-knowledge of his male protagonist. Where Emily’s excess of desire leads to ‘over-consumption’, which amounts to her self-destruction, his want of desire leads to withdrawal and ultimately, on her death, to a heightened awareness of his isolation, an unequal exchange of intellection more fully developed in ‘The Dead’. It is, in fact, the last story of the collection that confronts most directly the dissonance between knowledge and desire, artist and nation, intellectual and laity, culture and society that Joyce faced as an Irish intellectual and that he endeavors to solve over the body of another prone female. It, more than A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, provides the model and solution for Ulysses, the text I turn to next. By working through the narrative of ‘The Dead’, we can detect the formal and political choices available to the writer that speak of his emerging modernist aesthetic and cosmopolitan commitments. For the main protagonist, the near-sighted and cerebral academic Gabriel Conroy, the sudden insight that Duffy offers of himself – ‘he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast’ (117) – also serves. Indeed, it is against a festive Christmas gathering that this story is set and that sets Gabriel apart. It is clear that while he is the incumbent patriarch of this extended Irish family and thus meant to preside over the holiday dinner which his elderly maiden aunts, the Morkan sisters, yearly host, he, like Duffy, is not given to indulging openly in their old-fashioned entertainments. Yet, unlike the bank clerk, Conroy is in a position to tutor his compatriots’ pleasures and train their tastes as an educator and literary critic, in which pursuits he manifests a decidedly ‘West Briton’ partiality. In short, the worldlier Gabriel is situated to bridge the cultural horizon to which this collection beckons, as I suggested above, and which all its main characters vainly seek. As opposed to kindly aunts or itinerant schoolboys and bank clerks, Gabriel has at hand cultural resources and the means to deliver


them. In this regard, his authority far exceeds the influence of his contemporaries at the party or, for that matter, any in the collection. Indeed, all the evidence suggests that the responsibility for the laity, which once devolved upon the ecclesiastic clergy represented by Father Flynn whose paralysis and death opens Dubliners, is being conveyed to the secular experts that Conroy imperfectly represents. I say imperfectly because Gabriel’s accomplishments have come at a price. He lacks, as did Duffy, the personal knowledge and experience of everyday human passions. Indeed, the text suggests that Conroy’s training and urbanity are the cause of his insensibility. His education divides him from his family, his family’s social group, and his country. His sophistication, treated as proof of his exceptionality, separates him from his community and their communal pleasures of table and dance floor at his aunts’ party. In other words, the cosmopolite Gabriel, educated out of his class, is estranged from those with whom he would reasonably identify and, more seriously, from the affective realm that sustains the community. We should note, however, the subtle logic underpinning Gabriel’s characterization: his cultivation is judged acquired and his mental pursuits deemed abstractions, whereas theirs are genuine, reckoned unreflective, and grounded in experience. How the protagonist Conroy comes to manage these separations and appropriate their alleged authenticity and reality as his own self-knowledge speaks directly to Joyce’s developing modernist bias and his monopoly of this imaginary dyad – intellectual versus laity – that the story enacts. In each instance, Gabriel’s alienation is rated and resolved against the image of a woman. His detachment from his homeland, captured in his relationship with Molly Ivors, is the one most bluntly represented and most easily abjured in the text. Joyce’s ‘first’ Molly, a nationalist activist and Irish cultural militant, is additionally Gabriel’s intellectual peer. Classmates at the university, they are now colleagues at school. Her functions in the text are twofold: first, to certify Gabriel’s abilities; and, second, to disqualify nationalist politics. Both of these are skillfully managed and come at the expense of a female intellectual. For the first, Ivors is the one person capable of recognizing the highbrow intonations of her colleague’s dinner speech as the only other intellectual at the holiday party. As Gabriel’s equal by intellect but not by sex, she can testify to abilities for which the other characters are either ignorant or unqualified, and does so but without jeopardizing his status as Irish patriarch. Able to verify Conroy’s cultivation due to her education, she cannot usurp his position due to her sex. And this very efficiently transpires. Molly’s teasing exchange while his dance


partner reveals Gabriel’s literary expertise, which she subsequently reconfirms. After mocking him for his continental ostentations and tweaking his pride for reviewing English authors, she confides how much she admires his review of Browning’s poems (188). But the conversation that serves to enhance Gabriel’s prestige has the opposite effect on her own standing, which introduces her second function. For their interaction serves to undermine the validity of the nationalist position, especially as this New Woman is its champion. Assigning nation and politics to an intellectual woman who is described as too forward in demeanor and spinsterish in dress belittles her person in effect and, by extension, trivializes her politics as shrill and narrow-minded. From here, it is no great leap to impugning her public commitments. The reasons for this become clearer when we consider what an advocacy of nation in the hands of an articulate partisan might achieve. A sincere and reasoned expression of the nationalist position by the only other person invested with discursive power who is also a woman might easily eclipse Gabriel’s later sentimentalizing dinner remarks as it might also expose his hypocrisy. And both would make ludicrous his later obsession with his wife’s adolescent crush on a teenage youth. By portraying Molly as assertive, brainy, and old-maidish, the text effectively introduces and disables any national and democratic sentiment from disrupting the party Joyce has in mind and, more importantly, from undermining the story’s purpose of educating and authorizing the cosmopolitan perspective of this male intellectual. The horizon this story delineates, the one the other stories of Dubliners all gesture to, is unequivocally a cultural and not a national or an egalitarian one. It is for this reason that Molly, New Woman exemplar and knowledgeable insider, is dismissed from the party early and abruptly – and notably by her own volition. 27 With the intellectual Molly ousted from the text, there is no one left to oppose Gabriel’s authority, mock his pretensions and his sentimentality, or compete with the import accorded to Gretta’s and her youthful paramour’s passion besides Conroy himself. He is effectively positioned to educate and ironize himself and to be the master of his own epiphany. And these the text also bears out. Significantly, then, while the text dismisses the public realm of the intellectual woman, the opposite holds true for the private ones Gabriel’s aunts and wife oversee. Rather than banishing these, Gabriel assimilates each in turn as part of his intellectual faculty with the same dyadic reversal of maternal signification.28 In the instance of his aunts, although his dinner speech ostensibly reciprocates the hostesses’ warm hospitality with warm praise of their generosity, his toast effects a less than even exchange. 29 His eloquence


noticeably confounds Aunt Julia, who cannot follow the literary allusion to Paris and the Three Graces. The nephew’s understanding of his two aunts and of the authentic Ireland they are made to embody exceeds their understanding of him. His discursive power goes unchallenged and assumes even greater authority in the requiem his dinner address performs in elegizing his aunts’ genuine, but fading, gentility and hospitality. The rhetorical thrust of his sentiments eulogizes Kate and Julia as singular Irish gifts of a passing age that portends not only their imminent decease but also, by extension, a gerontic Ireland’s. If Molly and national advocacy are hastily ejected from the party, the Morkan aunts, by contrast, are consigned to an early grave, and with them the Ireland their graciousness incarnates. In Gabriel’s discursive sleight of hand, the knowledge of the affective realm the aunts’ supervise is made over into the intellectual’s expertise, a hegemonic practice, as noted in previous chapters, that a nostalgic address subtly but efficiently transacts. But usurpation of domestic agency via two elderly maiden aunts and a hospitable Ireland is only one half of the affect over which Gabriel gains dominion. Their affective knowledge converted into a new object of his intellection introduces a still greater enlightenment. This second one occurs with his wife, Gretta, who, the text informs us, is her husband’s inferior by birth, class, and aptitude. Where his aunts’ gentility is subjugated by converting it into a dying tradition, her subjugation is managed more subtly and with far graver consequences. With Gretta’s representation, the social, in essence, is turned into nature, a transfer that is paradigmatic of Joyce’s modernist agency and male modernists in general. This transformation is precipitated by Gabriel’s discovery of Gretta’s teenage infatuation for a country youth aptly named Michael Furey. Her attraction to Michael was evidently returned, indeed in such excess that it literally consumed him. In effect, the frail country tenor risked and lost his life to meet Gretta a final time before her departure to a Dublin convent school. And this tragic bravura, the text insinuates, is not a bad thing. His passion, of which Gabriel (as Duffy before him) seems incapable, is held up as the genuine article. Interestingly, the excesses that made Emily Sinico pitiable and her demise shameful, with the youth Michael, become ennobling and heroic. And when compared to Jimmy Doyle’s gamble, Furey’s is deemed a commendable risk, the mortal loss of which only testifies to its value. Spending one’s life in this way, it seems, is a worthy form of consumption, the ultimate means of disaccumulation.30 Moreover, the passion Gretta admits having for the dead youth also significantly discloses her feelings for a lover that Gabriel had not


known existed and discloses a fervor that he evidently has never himself elicited from his wife. Their companionable marriage, although evidently fecund given their children, has never rewarded him with the intensity she displays for a boy now long buried. His realization then that his wife possesses hidden desires and sympathies from which he has been excluded by both understanding and experience has the crucial effect of enabling his position as it disables hers. The most immediate suggestion is that Gretta embodies both sensitivity and sensuality. Affect is internalized, for one, and then transfigured by the addition of desire. As such, they appear to identify an innate female condition that is quite distinct from any acquired socialization. Located in the body, female affective knowledge is no longer contiguous with household management. A domestic woman’s social knowledge, her epistemology, is converted into a natural passion, her ontology. Domestic competence is, in effect, somaticized so that bodily disposition supplants social function, as ‘A Painful Case’ augured with Emily Sinico’s longing, drinking, and suicide. But there is a distinction to be made here between Emily and Gretta that exposes the metamorphosis desire and the modern woman undergo in ‘The Dead’. Making Gretta’s countrified body, in contrast to Emily’s refined one, the locus of passion allows female desire to be more thoroughly naturalized, and thus prevents any inadvertent disparity between the social and natural from compromising the cosmopolitan intellectual’s ‘innocent’ discovery of his wife’s latent ardor. This process of naturalizing the female body Joyce pushes further with Molly Bloom’s representation until with Anna Livia Plurabelle’s, woman is finally reduced to nature itself, or at least one tributary.31 The result of Gretta’s corporealization is to advance Gabriel’s acculturation. To put the matter simply, making Gretta into nature allows Gabriel to become culture, the arena of intellectual and cosmopolitan expertise that oversees the classification of desire and social differentiation. In addition, the imaginary binary of nature versus culture, one real and the other cultivated, puts in place the necessary critical distance for hegemonic recuperation. Indeed, we might say that in ‘The Dead’ the social is transformed into the natural in order to make culture dominant, a transformation that depends on the mystification of woman and the aestheticization of space, the controlling paradigms of literary modernism.32 Here we see how the domestic woman, arguably the first modern individual, becomes the first fatality of modernism. As Joyce demonstrates, modernism usurped her social position and power by extraditing her to nature. This means is the one he employs for Gabriel’s mastery in ‘The Dead’, a process consistent, as pointed out earlier, with Woolf’s


objectification of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and Forster’s of Mrs Elliot in The Longest Journey, and even with Lawrence’s vilification of the domestic arriviste Ivy Bolton. The difference between Woolf and male modernists, one worth noting again, is significantly this. Woolf mythifies the domestic woman by turning her into art, that is, by making her over into culture, and thereby makes culture accessible to her educated daughters. By contrast Joyce, Lawrence, and Forster bar the domestic woman from culture by turning her into nature. Both processes prepare for the genesis of a new authority and disciplinary knowledge but with far different outcomes for male and female modernists and their cultural descendants. Thus in ‘The Dead’, it is over the supine body of wife Gretta that Gabriel communes with and internalizes desire and sentiment before mastering and objectifying them. From Gabriel’s perspective, the narrator delivers an elegy that critics agree is the most poetic passage of the story and collection, an elegy that moves from his observing the sleeping Gretta to looking out from the hotel window and taking in all of snowy Ireland slumbering before him. In this ocular progress from the recumbent female body to a dormant landscape, the somnolent Gretta is synecdochely transformed first into the mother country, a moribund Ireland that is then imaginatively expanded to a mythic and boundless space without historical definition and without any trace of class or ethnic demarcation, to become simply mother earth. This closing soliloquy enacts a mastery of the visible and the imaginable that is at once aggrandizing and ubiquitous. By aestheticizing and mythifying this imaginary space, the text sanctions a far more expansive and implicitly colonizing worldliness than that which the nearsighted Conroy possessed at the opening of the story.33 It bestows on a now savvier Gabriel a new and profound understanding of human desire and human nature, abstracted into humanism, and with it a commanding vision, both discursive and symbolic, that suggest its universal sweep. The result of his education in the affective realms of human passion and emotive affiliation is not a repudiation of his cosmopolitanism but the means to extend its grasp and valence – beyond Ireland and beyond even the British Isles. To the intellectual is granted privileged access to the horizon the collection of stories gestures throughout. This cultural agency gives the now far-sighted Gabriel tacit control over the representational space his all-encompassing vision constructs even as it makes him subject to its mythifying process. Control over the representational field enables him to occupy two places at once, the particular and the universal, that doubles his mythifying


potency. His mourning for a passion lost to Gretta and absent from his own life and for the vanishing Ireland of his aging aunts’ munificence allows him to assimilate these feminized spaces as part of his own experiential and particular knowledge. And through his aestheticizing gaze and romanticizing discourse, he is tacitly granted mastery over signification and language that also flaunts the adjacent colonizing mother country to effect the reterritorialization of these spaces. Gabriel’s intellection of passion and sentiment thereby anticipates the method of Ulysses and the practice of Joyce’s modernism: a desublimation of desire that grounds and justifies the sublimation of art, the formal exercise of his maternal dyadic logic and the basis for his modernist expertise.34 Joyce delves into and represents the most arcane and base anarchy of the human subject and recovers it through his mastery of a language, both aesthetic and poetic, that grants him, like his emissary Gabriel, positional superiority over the field of representation upon which his cultural aim of social reproduction will depend. Gabriel’s enlightenment, seen from this perspective, might be said to launch the modernist Joyce’s politics of affect that transgresses both social and national dominions, a practice that he extends in his two most experimental works – Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Each tellingly culminates over the body of a woman that gives new meaning to what he was to write of ‘Penelope’: ‘Weib, Ich bin das Fleisch das stets bejaht’.35

III

Divo Joyce

Contrary to conventional thinking then, Ulysses begins where ‘The Dead’ leaves off.36 The concluding story of Dubliners with its englobilizing vision of the landscape as an object of study anticipates Joyce’s virtuoso novel in a way that exile from home and homeland merely declares in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By claiming the field of art as destination, Joyce’s künstlerroman may point to the innovative text that was to follow, but it does so only by extending the pathology of Dubliners. Tied to the logic of the ‘disease’ model of repressed desires in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can go no further than register the nascent artist’s flight. It cannot manifest the mock Homeric therapy Joyce mounts in Ulysses. Stephen’s defection does no more than set the artist against Ireland’s paralyzing institutions and against Rome’s and England’s oppressive ones as he contemplates aesthetic deliverance, a role reprised for him in Ulysses with little advance. His character and the künstlerroman are incapable of effecting the cultural emancipation for the very reasons ‘The Dead’ suggests. The adolescent


Stephen can stage his artistic pretensions, as did Joyce in Latin Quarter getup, but he possesses neither the necessary knowledge nor the critical distance to offer any transformation. By contrast, equipping Conroy with a new and profound understanding of human desire, abstracted into humanism, and granting him a commanding perspective, both aesthetic and mythic, to make this knowledge universal, grants the cosmopolitan intellectual the expertise and platform that the adolescent Dedalus lacks for all his volatile cogitation. What is only wanting in this design then is the technique of consciousness to make it mobile and imitable. With technique, expertise, and positional authority, the modernist Joyce can critique and renovate social reproduction even while disavowing any political or colonizing designs of his own. 37 The argument I wish to extend from ‘The Dead’ is this. Gabriel’s soliloquy of his exilic ‘journey westward’ staged discursively over Gretta’s cataleptic body and visualized panoramically through the frame of a hotel window provides the knowledge and position Joyce puts in motion on the streets of 1904 Dublin with his recording consciousness.38 And here, just as with Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the technique is everywhere in Ulysses, and Joyce nowhere. For Ulysses as for Mrs Dalloway, identification occurs with the process of perception and with the state of being it encodes. With this process, Joyce’s mobile apparatus of sensual ontology remaps the city following first Stephen’s and then Bloom’s diurnal circuit as the modernist artist’s specialized knowledge. The process effects a critical distance over the representational field and over the ephebe Dedalus and the subaltern Bloom as necessary objects of study that result in a new sensorium of body and consciousness. In Ulysses, Joyce aestheticizes the city spaces where the overlapping and competing commercial circuits of exchange excite the desires believed to be intrinsic to the human species and makes them the common currency of the century’s modern subjects. Joyce’s ‘everyman’, the adman Bloom, distanced from any certain class identity, estranged from his Jewish heritage and marginal to Ireland’s, even cuckolded in the conjugal bed by a second-rate tenor – in other words, an outsider to the very social spaces, both traditional and modern, upon which identity (family, class, religion, country) had until then rested – makes over the course of his pedestrian beat what psychological modernism will term polymorphous perversity not just recognizable but a new civic ethos. In Joyce’s linguistic effulgence, Bloom’s promiscuity and the promiscuous commodity converge on Dublin streets to create a democratic vernacular of desire that transforms two symbolic stanchions of the British Empire and the English novel, domestic romance and imperial


adventure, and makes the third, the Roman church’s eternal salvation, into cultural curiosities. Such language and circuitry, of humans, goods, beliefs, and desires, do not annihilate space but multiply it in a collision of time that demonstrates, as does the episode at the novel’s center, ‘Wandering Rocks’, the simultaneity and flux of the modern metropolis. For such a polis, the abstraction of the nation-state totality and the affective or religious structure on which it was based cannot satisfy. Thus it is that Bloom’s peregrinations, his internal divagations and external wanderings, his consumption of everything from pork kidney to Epp’s cocoa, reterritorialize the city and its social intercourse by marking it with every conceivable effusion of body and mind. He is the ideal chronicler, modern minstrel, hapless foil and, as I suggested of Woolf’s Lily Briscoe, the perfect subaltern through which Joyce can perform his desublimation of desire to arrive at a sublimation of art and thereby procure Ireland’s modernization and his own cultural standing as a continental artist. 39 In acknowledging Ulysses’ efflorescence and Bloom’s singular motility and their effect on national and imperial rule, we need to be cognizant, however, of what makes Joyce’s representation of the modern subject and metropolitan epic possible. In other words, we need to be attentive to the ideological reorganization Bloom’s urban odyssey excites. And what this Dublin pilgrimage proposes is a modernist alchemy, consistent with postcard celebrity, clerkly epiphany, and late-night hotel-room disquisition, that once again turns on representations of a domestic woman, referenced at the outset of the chapter, namely, couchant Molly and her consort, cultural Bloom: The one stays in bed, the other canvasses the metropolis; one is desire incarnate and the other, humanity ascendant. In this doublet, not only is the affective realm being conveyed to Bloom’s male provenance as was the case with Gabriel’s in ‘The Dead’, but, as a corollary, so also is procreative sex being transformed and along with it the maternal function. Contrary to Lawrence’s concupiscent novel, nowhere in a text otherwise suffused with sex is normative reproduction or orthodox marriage celebrated: Mrs Dedalus’s death results in family chaos; the sudden death of the Dignam patriarch ushers in financial crisis; Bloom engages in epistolary lovemaking and later ejaculates over the ‘picture’ of a seaside girl; Mrs Purefoy labors in a protracted and painful delivery well beyond her reproductive prime; Stephen’s brothel debauchery is interrupted; even the consummation of Blazes and Molly’s lust is abraded by the onset of menses. Everywhere in the text, however, the nurturing Bloom reveals his capacious sympathies and instincts: in preparing breakfast for Molly and himself; offering his


condolences to the Dignam family; mourning his son’s and his father’s unnatural deaths; feeding beasts from the family cat to sea gulls and a mongrel dog; deflecting the xenophobia of the Citizen; defending motherhood at the lying-in hospital to raucous medical students; ministering to the drunken Stephen at a bordello, and, finally, in excusing his wife’s infidelity. Bloom’s increase in affect works by Molly’s diminution. With her gain in sexual potency and corresponding loss in social authority, there is also a noticeable decline in motherly beneficence as this capacity is also ceded to her husband. If Molly is the twentieth-century’s quintessential everywoman, then she oversees a very changed demographic. She is no longer the biological matriarch of institutionalized monogamy that made for double-digit families in Catholic and Protestant households. In this literary dyad of Molly and Leopold, the procreative couple is being eclipsed and along with it domestic and maternal authority. After 16 years of marriage, Molly has only one surviving child, her daughter Milly, a 15-year-old photographer’s apprentice who lives away from home and has no convent school to foil admirers. By comparison, Mina Purefoy, who would be the exemplary selfless mother in a domestic novel, is put at risk in the difficult delivery of her ninth child, a son. In fact, it is to the hospital where she has been confined that the text has Bloom repair in order to salute prolix if superannuated maternity, now plainly under the supervision of the medical profession or rather its carousing apprentices at Holles Street Maternity Hospital. Bloom’s visit there not only makes him a witness to maternal exhaustion but serves the additional purposes of exposing medical attendance as inept and careless in order to engender the artistic alternative that Stephen’s incipience promises. True to form, Bloom upholds motherhood to the irreverent medical students oblivious of Mrs Purefoy’s trying labor, observing ‘that one must have a cold constitution and a frigid genius not be rejoiced by this freshest news of the fruition of her confinement since she had been in such pain through no fault of her own’ (333: 882–84). His warm defense of maternity points to Mulligan as the possessor of such a cold disposition, a fact Mulligan appears to corroborate with his farcical scheme for human propagation in his Omphalos fertilizing farm. No longer a far-fetched scheme a century later, Mulligan’s plan suggests under whose regulation procreation, which heretofore had been sanctioned by marriage and situated in the family, had landed. The most immediate implications are that maternity is no longer centered in the household, and that the medical experts who now exercise oversight are inured to its significance


and thus unworthy stewards. Their effrontery signals Bloom’s gain as Mrs Purefoy’s champion against an insensitive physician class. As with the attack on the medical profession in Mrs Dalloway, this one in Ulysses disguises as well an appropriation and replacement of a traditional female function. The net effect is to extend the reach of Bloom’s affective domain over natural motherhood and unnatural medical practice to authorize a new cultural agency. His response thus screens the textual assault on the teleology of procreation and orthodox monogamy that enables a cultural replacement – Bloom’s parturition of the artist Stephen. For while the pretext of Bloom’s visit is maternal veneration, the outcome is cultural genesis. This motive Joyce explicitly addressed when he wrote to Budgen of the episode: ‘Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo. How’s that for High?’ (1: 139). Dedalus is even referred to over the course of the episode as the ‘embryo philosopher’ (343: 1295). His discursive conception is procured in ‘Oxen in the Sun’ by the unassuming Bloom’s trespass at the lying-in hospital and by the narrator’s trespass of English literary styles and terminates at Burke’s pub under the ephebe Stephen’s urging in a drunken Dublin vernacular. The value of Dedalus’s gestation and the text’s aesthetics depend, however, on what I take to be Joyce’s politics of affect. And here his adman is the indisputable broker and spokesman. It is Bloom’s humanism after all that separates him from the flashy Boylan, and that separates Stephen, though his remains inchoate, from Mulligan and Haines. Its value is clearly the one the novel instructs readers to embrace as it instructs them to accept that embodied desire is fundamental to the human subject, if enervating to the female set as I shall stipulate in a moment. Bloomian humanism is not an easy intelligence to convey convincingly, however, since its epistemological or institutional base derives from the affective realm the novelist is at pains to displace. As desire must appear to be a natural product, originating in the body and, therefore, outside of commercial and discursive manufacture, so too must its compensatory expertise, humanism, appear to transcend commercialized affective or popular discursive circuits – it must rather appear natural and experiential. The beneficiaries of Joyce’s aestheticized interiority, as with Woolf’s after him, are readers who learn to recognize the desires intrinsic to the body through the filament of consciousness and take them for their own. With his mimesis of consciousness, Joyce dramatizes the intersubjective realm by turning Bloom’s internal cogitations and running commentary into affective values. The ability of readers to make Bloom’s interior monologue correlate with an external


reality and to make that process a translation of their own state of being is the overriding achievement of Ulysses.40 As such, Bloomian humanism, Joyce’s aesthetic of interiority, comes to serve as the compensatory and enabling expertise for a modern subject founded on desire. Ultimately it turns fiction into culture and culture into capital that made and continues to make the cult of Joyce a thriving industry. Indeed, we can see how this process works and the resulting gain in reader knowledge in the sexual exchange between Bloom and Gerty MacDowell, which in fact occasioned the initial public outcry over the novel’s putative obscenity, suggesting that what Joyce portrayed as natural did not come so naturally to the public at first. In ‘Nausicaa’, this unlikely pair’s erotic courtship, Gerty’s exhibitionism and Bloom’s voyeurism, is staged at Sandymount beach, where Bloom retires having paid his respects to the widow Dignam and before venturing off to perform a similar office with Mrs Purefoy. Sandwiched between his homage to traditional if languishing womanhood, bereft wife and childbearing mother, Bloom rendezvous with his distant partner Gerty, who has herself come to the beach with two girlfriends under a maternal commission, to baby-sit the Caffrey twins and young master Boardman. With the fireworks from the Mirus bazaar erupting overhead and the men’s temperance retreat at the Star of the Sea Chapel intoning, the two strangers perform their own ritual of ebullition, with their separate fantasies igniting Gerty’s brazen display and Bloom’s onanistic riposte. In this cacophony of effusion – a roman candle explodes, two of the boys urinate, and Canon O’Hanlon and Father Conroy take turns discharging incense inside a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mother – the marvelous, the profane, the sacred, the titillating, and the ordinary adjoin. As spontaneous as Bloom and Gerty’s beach liaison may first appear, however, it is not entirely unprompted or unmediated. Both parties are imbricated in circuits of desire fed by a culture of consumption, however rudimentary, that make their actions intelligible. In the case of Gerty, fashion magazines, gazette poetry, popular romances, and the diary she keeps fuel her fantasy and performance before ‘the foreign-looking gentleman’; similarly with Bloom, what with the provocative letter he carries in his pocket from Martha Clifford, the coquettish one he has written in response, and The Sweets of Sin he buys for Molly. Yet while the text mocks the vagaries of their mass culture catalysts (newspaper and popular romance, and the false affect they excite), it does not mock the couple’s desires. The text winnows these extra influences, in effect, from the lust that MacDowell and Bloom inexpertly express to one another, and for the same reasons that Gabriel came to appreciate at the


conclusion of ‘The Dead’. First, desire itself, according to the novel, is not obscene but is the very embodiment of humankind. And second, their shared arousal is not debased given the human frailties that attend it, frailties that become evident to a reader by the end of the episode, namely Gerty’s lameness and Bloom’s cuckoldry. Indeed, the exchange that rescues both act and person from mean exploitation and vulgarity is the couple’s compassionate inner awareness: Gerty’s intuition of Bloom’s sorrow and Bloom’s sensibility of the vitiating effect of Gerty’s limp. Their acceptance of desire and their knowledge of a mitigating context register their shared humanity, the affective understanding that is expressed as humanism and that, significantly, appears to transcend or exist outside of the commercialized channels of desire exemplified by a fashion magazine, pornographic novel, or scrap of newspaper poetry. The distinction is critical because it is precisely this apperception the novel trains readers to make. The idea that the affect of humanism exists outside of the contrived sentimentality of a romance novel or the glib pathos of newspaper verse belies, of course, the instance of its own discursive enactment as it also belies its dependence on desire as the privileged and fundamental signifier of an individual’s makeup. In other words, humanism, too, is produced and is circulated in a printed medium as part of a culture organized around promoting desire. 41 Appetite and affect are not only stimulated by popular circuits of exchange then, but are produced within them. They are not independent of the marketplace but are assembled by it. They are not outside of the culture of consumption but circulate within it. What crucially separates Ulysses’ narrative of desire and its corresponding affect from any commercial taint is that they replicate at the point of reader reception, the very myth that made Joyce’s displacement and artistic generation possible in the first place: to wit, desire is nature, and therefore real; and knowledge of desire is enlightenment, and therefore vital. It is desire as nature that the final episode ‘Penelope’ graphically encodes, thereby dramatizing the universality of the new sensorium of body and consciousness that Bloom and Gerty’s impromptu seaside congress fleetingly disclosed. With ‘Penelope’, we not only confront the unadorned article of desire head-on but we are submersed in it, the consequence of which allegedly enables readers to grasp woman’s true essence and the absolutism of desire’s reign. 42 Yet, because ‘Penelope’ presents itself as the raw detritus of consciousness, as unfettered interiority (it is the single episode of Ulysses for which Joyce’s schema assigned no equivalency in art), the discursive space it opens up under the rubric of


desire deserves closer examination, especially as this episode also unfolds along the axis of yet another Irish woman’s outstretched body. In this modern Homeric epic, Joyce has gone one decisive step further with female representation so that his Odysseus can perform his solo quest of remapping street and home and the spaces, ideological and material, that formerly divided them. Joyce effectively severs the married woman, this second Molly, at the outset from domestic management altogether, though still assigning her to the household. Indeed, sequestered in the household puts the matter too mildly – embedded would be more accurate. This voluptuous Molly is reduced to the bedroom for all intents and purposes, where sensuality becomes her unconditional ontology. She occupies no other room, not parlor, not kitchen, with the result that woman and bed are conjoined as the sum and substance of Joyce’s bourgeoisified carnality.43 There Molly is virtually immobilized by desire. Where incommensurate desire led to paralysis in Dubliners, this Irish woman’s surfeit remains symptomatic but is nowhere censured in the text. In other words, what Emily longed for and what a Dublin convent school likely kept Gretta from, Molly indulges. With her overdetermined appetite, she appears less ‘the flesh that always affirms’ and, more accurately, the flesh that continually consumes. Her condition, earthier than the countrified Gretta’s, is so naturalized that her sexual incontinence appears wholly instinctual even after the familial circumstances, social impediments, and class differences of her upbringing in Gibraltar come to light. The only explanation for her avidity arises not over hers but her spouse’s sexual dysfunction, an 11-year hiatus that is painstakingly rationalized by the ‘unnatural’ death of their son Rudy, a loss that, by comparison, has not chilled Molly’s keenness. In addition to an excess of corporeality, this prone female has one other conspicuous trait that sets her apart from Joyce’s other female characters and separates Ulysses from other novels. Molly, who neither dies like Emily nor falls asleep like Gretta, is both sentient and sensate. In contrast to Leopold, whose urban excursion ends with home and slumber, a restive Molly abed launches a discursion. Awake, she ruminates, and ruminates, and ruminates some more, so that nonstop rumination becomes, next to overblown desire, her other distinguishing characteristic. Hers is, however, rumination with a difference. And it is this difference, like the sensuality that subtends it, that is of interest here. For unlike Gabriel whose watchful cogitation proceeds from new knowledge of his wife’s hidden passions and past life to a sudden profound awareness of human frailty, Molly’s ruminations derive from nothing greater than Leopold wanting his morning’s breakfast in bed. While an elegiac narrative


opens onto an epiphanic and abstract vision of modern human geography so that Gabriel’s ‘soul swooned slowly’ (Dubliners 225), Molly’s ruminations lead not to swooning but to insomnia. The consequence of her nattering on about sensual and sexual associations is that Molly cannot sleep, although this, too, she evidently desires. what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office or the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5. (642: 1540–45) better lower this lamp and try again so I can get up early. (642: 1547–48) Desire, which the text grants such discursive importance, apparently requires wakefulness, never mind the fatigue it occasions. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that Molly is denied sleep and is kept instead in a protracted state of excitement by those lusty associations, punctuated only by a string of gratuitous ‘yeses’. And these ‘yeses’ do not sanction or serve the biological reproduction that once formed woman’s estate but seem rather to advance the cultural reproduction, really hyperreproduction, that runs on desire which knows no ‘down time’. What all this suggests is that if we understand desire to be, as the Darwinian narrative of origins instructs, nature’s life force, then, by definition, it must be ceaseless, incessant, even repetitive and haphazard. And the consciousness contraption that encodes it must likewise appear to stream endlessly. The upshot is this logic: as desire incarnate, Molly cannot sleep. Given this, her somatic discursion, regarded as the most intimate and authentic recording of female subjectivity, might more accurately be read as just the opposite – a depersonalized and artificial imposition.44 Rather than representing the essence of being, her subjection to and enthrallment of a consciousness apparatus, which requires a concentrated wakefulness, ought to be seen as an impersonal intrusion no less than the catechistic discourse of ‘Ithaca’ that precedes it. Her fragmented and desultory rambling offers no mimesis of the real. It is a fabricated discourse that, like Ithaca’s, is just agentless. Granting this, we should also not fail to observe that Molly’s identification with a contraption that renders her sleepless, immobile, and ruminative significantly resituates her in the space of home. Withholding the reading of depth that allowed Joyce and fellow modernists to lay claim to modern


consciousness as the rudimental state of being and attending only to the text’s surface, we might see Molly’s garrulity then not liberating modern woman from home but discursively fastening her more closely to it, albeit under a new mandate. Her protracted and overtired mental prattling regarded as a true account of modern woman’s ontology might more productively be read as the modernist version of Mina Purefoy’s prolonged labor on behalf of the biological reproduction and orthodox marriage that had defined woman in the previous century. In place of sentimental surplus and the material and social imperative of unchecked biological reproduction, modern woman’s estate becomes somatic excess and random and repetitive discursivity. In both instances, exhaustion results. Contrary to Molly’s modern prolixity leading to an unequivocal increase of either female pleasure or leisure, Joyce’s modernist platform might instead be viewed as the inauguration of an enervating emancipation. Indeed, the fact that Molly’s character has so completely internalized this state of being means that the cultural canvasser Bloom can sleep soundly – no need now for sublime hotel soliloquies or bedtime swooning. With her perorative and orgasmic ‘yes’, sleep-deprived Molly accedes to Joyce’s aesthetic project and her own corporealization, as have post-Mollies in her wake, who have made sexual and sensual indulgence the measure of modern freedom or lack the sign of its utter foreclosure. Thenceforth, even visual media and most especially film would have to account for this somatic language of interiorized motivation. In Ulysses, enveloping woman in a miasma of desire and remanding her to bed, consistent with Joyce’s epistolary exchange with his mother and with his fictional representations of Emily Sinico and Gretta Conroy, conveys the social matrix, under the guise of a contrived female weakness and/or natural excrescence, over to new oversight and expertise. The end result is to make possible a new source of cultural authority and mobility, Bloomian humanism, and a new form of cultural practice, Stephen’s art – of which both Joyce is artificer. Embedding domestic woman in nature allows him to assimilate the domestic woman’s affective authority as humanism and to reterritorialize the social realm as culture. Joyce’s alchemy, what I earlier called flanerie reproduction, succeeds by making these literary constructions of identity and being appear natural and universal, so that knowledge of them is deemed necessary and indispensable. Readers, who take this version of human nature to be a true and authentic account of the real and then look to specialists like Joyce to educate their desires or conversely treat them, accordingly reproduce themselves as the ‘rouged corpus’ of the cultural metropolis. In this way, they assent to the mythifying process whereby embodied


desire gives rise to transcendent humanism that becomes the cosmopolitan domain of the intellectual and the artist, the cultural horizon to which the avant-garde promised to lead. Herein resides the myth of Joyce’s literary modernism that helps explain the cultural capital his work amassed. It turns out, however, that this cultural Elysium is a gated community. For the other corollary germane to this discussion is that Joyce’s myth and capital are enabled not simply by the force of his logic and aesthetics and not only by his protagonists’ genuineness and the enlightenment they offer. Rather they are made possible by the novelist’s and his sponsors’ skillful management of the marketplace that also trades in the discursive media mocked in ‘Nausicaa’ and powered by desire. Unlike stock or salacious forms, Joyce’s aesthetic form does not traffic in the popular cultural genre of the novel accessible to a common reader, to ‘humanity’ in a word, but rather in an esoteric one that is comprehensible only to an educated elite. For all the pageant of universality and egalitarianism Ulysses appears to offer, its merit obtains by successfully denigrating the lowbrow affect found in popular and mass-circulated media in order to consecrate Joyce’s fictional cosmos as an innovative and higher cultural form. This bears further scrutiny. The positional superiority that the author Joyce strives for and comes to occupy with Ulysses is an application of the one that the intellectual Gabriel Conroy actualizes at the conclusion of ‘The Dead’. If we recall the conditions of Conroy’s enlightenment that occasioned a leveling of class and history to embrace humanity in a timeless panorama, then we should perhaps rethink the subversive potential in the humanism Ulysses offered as an ethical model. For its claim to be egalitarian and universal ironically becomes the means for divo Joyce to achieve dominion. Ulysses democratizes class in order to assert the primacy of a new one, the expert class of the intellectual and artist. It aestheticizes city spaces and immobilizes modern woman in a glut of desire to grant its agents specular and epistemological dominance. Ulysses’ humanism helps conceal, I am suggesting, Joyce’s expert ascription, artistic autonomy, and cosmopolitan status. It allows him to assimilate less knowledgeable groups, the pleasures they experience and the spaces they inhabit – the city of Dublin and its indigenes – and reterritorialize them with myth in place of history and an aesthetics that places the novel beyond the reach of the very people its humanism appears to enfranchise. Regenia Gagnier’s observation that ‘[c]lass equals taste equals consumption’ (242) gets at the distinction I am making here. Usually the class of one’s birth, she says, socially reproduces taste or class as culture. The exception she offers is telling:


‘those “educated” out of the tastes of their parents’, and then notes parenthetically that ‘[a]cademics are often the exception, which probably contributes to their emphasis on the cultural aspects of class’ (240). If the social divide of gendered spheres relied on the affective realm of the household and the value of property and production, the cultural divide, I am arguing, restricts along a cultural axis of knowledge, consumption, and pleasure. And it is this axis that Ulysses helped to both delineate and advance. Hypothetical though it is, we could not easily imagine Molly (or any female character in the novel for that matter) reading a copy of Ulysses from cover to cover, though we could imagine Leopold doggedly struggling through it, provided, of course, he could lay his hands on one. 45 Lest we doubt the monopoly of competence and the production of a cosmopolitan class to exercise that competence, we have Lawrence Rainey’s research that traces the publication of Ulysses. It documents the monopoly on publication that resulted when the novel was offered for private sale in order to circumvent censorship. In the case of this particular work, however, its publication by subscription did more than skirt official banning. Indeed, I suggest that its initial private offering anticipated at the level of publication what eventually transpired at the level of reception. 46 For the 1922 printing, subscriptions were purchased in advance and at prices, though selling at three different rates, that put Ulysses within the reach of only affluent clients. As a result of the unprecedented royalties Joyce received, the net effect was to turn, as Rainey puts it, ‘every purchaser of the edition into a quasi patron, someone directly supporting the artist himself’ (53). What better way to ensure a privileged set of consumers, especially as speculators, collectors, and book agents often held their copies until the value doubled or trebled. At such prices and with such competition, no common reader need bother applying. It is more than a little ironic but hardly surprising then that the first beneficiaries of the foot soldier Bloom’s humanism would be a coterie of well-heeled consumers. In this way, a new group of readers increasingly acculturated to the metropolis came to rely on modernist expertise to acquire a mastery of metropolitan and Western culture. So we should make no mistake about the cultural literacy and about the monopoly on expertise that the cosmopolite Joyce engendered and over whose body suffused with desire this alleged authority was made to appear consensual. In short, the modernist project helped transform the metropolis into an elite cultural imaginary that became the dominant center of communal meaning, diminishing in its wake the authority once vested in the


gendered space of the bourgeois household. With this new imaginary arises the cosmopolitan readership to grant this vision the standing of art and truth and to see in those who share this vision an affinity that transcends national, ethnic, or traditional class boundaries or the gendered terms that formerly pertained. In such a climate, the literacy that the nineteenth century produced no longer sufficed for a polity identified with the metropole and a class identified by its cultural consumables. When Fredric Jameson mourns the loss of the common reader and the appearance of the ‘public introuable’, he perhaps unwittingly testifies to the emergence of the very cosmopolitans with whom Joyce and his modernist cohorts, in displacing the social with the cultural, aligned themselves and whose literary descendants, following Ellmann’s lead, now debate whether canonical or postcolonial Joyce shall prevail.47

Afterword

One unifying thread running through these pages has held that Anglomodernists’ assertion of autonomy and bid to monopolize the literary field through aesthetic practice represented a dynamic process that was part and parcel of the accession of the expert class and the proliferation of secular knowledge. Through their critique of domestic jurisdiction, the institution of the middle-class home, and the biological and social reproductions these oversaw, Anglo-modernists redefined literary art and established themselves among the new expert arbiters of modern culture. The investments these modernists made and the ways in which they positioned themselves vis-à-vis other experts and society at large proceeded from the altered understanding of human nature ushered in by evolutionary theories and neoclassical economics. As explained in Chapter 1, the replacement of a divine and transcendent narrative of separate creation by a scientific one of evolutionary leveling, coupled with the emergence of hedonistic economics that stressed, in W. Stanley Jevons’s words, ‘maximiz[ing] pleasure’, made humankind increasingly understood as fundamentally desire-driven and made the administration and amelioration of desire into a public good (37). By the opening of the new century, experts in the arts as well as in the social and physical sciences competed in translating these epistemic and economic changes into compelling accounts for the subject that came to represent, according to Lawrence Birken, the latest extension of the Enlightenment polity, namely, the desiring individual. Under these acerbated circumstances, knowledge and management of desire became ever more imperative to those who would serve as the interpretive agents of modern subjects. This includes the novelists studied here. They saw in the domestic woman and in the biological and social reproduction located in the household the impediments to 155


the cultural horizon that beckoned and that could only be breached by a new accounting of the quotidian and reconfiguration of daily life in terms of individuals’ desires. Modern enfranchisement in their view meant foregrounding a discourse of desire that rendered its force recognizable in reconfigured everyday forms. Hence, even as Forster circulates by hand his most provocative renovation of male desire and domestic romance, Maurice, Woolf’s entrepreneurial press and Joyce’s enterprising subscription publication disseminate their consciousness contraptions of human desire across aestheticized metropolitan spaces to an urban polity. Their renovations synthesize and synchronize the repetitions of ordinary and intimate daily experience with the flux and tempo of the impersonal metropolis, described by Georg Simmel in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ as the ‘threatening currents and discrepancies of [the] external environment’ (410). We might say, then, that not only did these modernists recharacterize what was most familiar about domestic space and convey it onto the public square, but that, amending Walter Benjamin, they also made what was inherently mechanical about the process appear natural through their innovative techniques. In short, they helped naturalize mechanical reproduction by transforming it into cultural forms that readers could learn to recognize and then to replicate in their everyday lives. Indeed, as various literate publics adopted these renovative forms as truer accounts of human experience, they came to function as cultural means of reproduction. The quandary in all of this was, however, as Peter Nicholls quoted earlier has observed, that ‘[b]ourgeois culture thus seemed to ground itself in the awkward paradox that we become truly ourselves only by copying others’ (13). For these modernists, the upshot was that, although they stridently opposed the middle-class status quo, they were willy-nilly susceptible to and confounded by the underlying logic of the bourgeoisie’s reliance on copying. Even modernists’ most liberatory mandate, ‘make it new’, shows them caught in the paradox of breaking with the old while insisting that their own esoteric models were the wanted replacements to be copied or imitated. The contradiction thus persisted that if ‘imitation is the name of the game’, as Adam Phillips pointedly notes, then ‘originality is an impossibility’ (14). To evade this conundrum, Anglo-modernists presented themselves as exceptional artificers of unique style, while their manifestos pressed readers to subscribe to their aesthetic techniques and adopt their knowledge as the necessary truth of modern life – all enablers of the process of cultural reproduction.

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What motivated their idiosyncratic improvisations, if we remain attentive to the radical effects of this lately narrativized regime of desire, is the peripheral relation of these artists and intellectuals – a metropolitan woman, an educated queer, an Irish Catholic colonial, or, for that matter, a Viennese Jew, and a collier’s son – to the Enlightenment project and its dominant systems of signification. To efface the paradox of middle-class dependence on imitation and to overcome their marginality and achieve legitimacy, they hawked the artist and art object as sui generis not to a gullible but to a divers literate public that more and more, not coincidentally, resembled them. As unique entities and sources of truth, artists and art, experts and field became more insistent features of late modernity as a result – until, that is, the obfuscation of their manufacture and, hence, the fiction of their singularity became no longer wholly sustainable, due in part to their widespread acceptance. As modernists’ mythmaking apparatuses grew more transparent – Freud’s proleptic oedipal genealogy no less than Woolf’s genealogy of Shakespeare’s Sister – so too did their masquerades – such as Orlando’s aristocrat turning into an artistocrat, aristocratic Cambridge turning out eroticized experts, and postcard adverts issuing a continental artist. In point of fact, in order to make ‘the present’ new, Woolf, Forster, and Joyce each declaimed an origin that was itself a fabrication of ‘the past’. Their manipulation should remind us, as Roland Barthes disclosed in Mythologies, that mythification operates by an act of mystification, removing from view historical processes and the human agents they serve (109 et passim). From this perspective, it could be argued that Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ is a consequence of modernists’ expert mystification of their manufactured origins and of a certain willful participation in this obfuscation by their publics (xxiv). If it is accurate to say, then, as Nicholls proposes, that who and what modern individuals copy or, more accurately, are able to copy greatly determine who and what they become, then what modernists should be most remembered for is not their hubris in fashioning what we may in retrospect regard as phony originals, but, and this is key, their ability to make expert copies. Put differently, in modernists’ call for and creation of new understandings of modern desiring subjects, we might rightly see knowledge production put in the service of making copies. We might further see that modernist knowledge production corresponded to and competed with that which experts in other fields were likewise engaged in formulating. Common to both was the underlying circuitry of producing and appeasing desire: the expertise of the group contributed to


an economy founded on desire, in which the individual’s desire for an object was itself ‘a copy’ of desire that, by definition, could not be satisfied but only repeated. In a post-Darwinian and hedonistic age, the insufficiency of a transcendent theology, on one hand, and the modernized currency of desire, on the other, led practitioners in the arts and sciences to vie to relieve the vacuum by making believable copies of what it now meant to be human. The distinguishing feature that emerges in all of this is that the bourgeois dependence on copying and imitation assumed a near teleological function. This quasi-teleological status of the copy gave the category of culture unprecedented import and the literary field that modernists refashioned newfound significance. Identifying modernists’ expertise and the adherence of their followers as a defining modus operandi of modern culture reintroduces the differential of gender that should put in relief that nagging saw of modernism’s ‘great divide’ elucidated by Andreas Huyssen. For what Woolf’s and other female modernists’ experiences demonstrate is that departure from the domestic realm, ‘home’, was every bit as seditious and exilic an act as those more romanticized versions of expatriation narrated by their male counterparts. In leaving the gendered institution of the family and opting for intellectual and artistic pursuits, these women engaged in the production of new narratives that challenged and superceded women’s biological and social functions in the family. In this contested milieu, it should come as no surprise that female and male practitioners alike made the Victorian domestic woman into aesthetic modernism’s pariah; nor should it surprise that she remains a lightning rod in the present, as the functions identified with her still compete for hegemony a century later. Modernists’ derogation of domesticity has thus persisted but in newer forms, or, shall we say, in fresher copies. An example will help make the point, as it will also make apparent that an invocation of gender is seldom strictly about gender. Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism presents a persuasive account of the importance of middle-class women and the novel over the course of the nineteenth century to bourgeois legitimization in the United States. While her study of female individualism complicates Ann Douglas’s 1977 seminal study The Feminization of American Culture by contesting nineteenth-century women’s anti-intellectualism, let me offer another approach to Douglas’s argument that leads to a different assessment. Female intellectuals of the 1970s had a stake in distancing themselves from and demeaning domestic ideology in order to assert their own independent and expert authority. Might we not productively reexamine Douglas’s argument about intellect versus affect, which was

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so instrumental in legitimating female intellectuals after her, from the trajectory of modernists’ and the expert class’s discrediting of the social knowledge and affective literacy of the Victorian household? And might we not understand its disparagement as employing the very means of suppression and appropriation that modernists notably used? What I am suggesting is that Douglas’s radical act of displacement in the 1970s effectively repeats over the domestic terrain of nineteenth-century America the same authorizing move that Woolf models in the 1920s over Victorian Britain. In Douglas’s case, this act works to flatten domestic ideology, thus helping second-wave feminists gain access to the expert class and assume positions of cultural agency. Such a reevaluation of Douglas’s work invites a reevaluation of others’. To offer a counter example, I would suggest that Jürgen Habermas’s elegy in the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere over the breakup of the private/public sphere model gives us, perhaps, the masculinist redaction of one whose authority was thereby challenged in the late twentieth century as intellectual women, otherwise destined for the domestic realm, enter the public arena, as did Douglas, through the professions. As different as their arguments and claims to intellectual agency are, Douglas and Habermas offer a means to reconsider gender that does not appear to operate in either a simple or an exclusive register. What we might draw from the experience and methods of female modernists and their intellectual successors, then, is this. Modernism did not divide strictly along a gendered fault line. Gender may have been hailed exclusively, but it did not operate exclusively. Despite this disparity, gender nevertheless provided one of the most powerful means through which modernist narratives claimed authority, and it did so precisely by making other distinctions less visible. An invocation of gender, whether issued by male or female practitioners, had the effect of covering over other kinds of distinctions. For this reason alone, we should revisit the received wisdom of modernism’s masculine mystique and the corollary that became second-wave feminists’ cause célèbre, the exclusion of women. Female modernists’ public and cultural emancipation and their aesthetic challenges to the bourgeois status quo, as exemplified in their rejection of the cult of domesticity, require that we qualify both claims, that of a dominant masculine ethos and of unequivocal female ostracism. To press these points is not, however, to dismiss out of hand the resilient asymmetry of the sexes then or now. It is rather to point out that the modern abrading of sexual difference in the natural sciences and in neoclassical economics, while not putting an end to the old apartheid


of the sexes or to its associative gender practices, did radically destabilize it. The resulting dissonance and volatility fundamentally upset the reigning domestic ideology that had attempted to make sex and gender cohere as a single, seamless, and incontrovertible entity, most apparent in the Victorian idealization of motherhood. It was this destabilization – in which desire, and not sex, becomes destiny, and gender a matter of practice or behavior – that the modern expert class specifically undertook to regulate and that male and female modernists’ aesthetic innovations helped interpret. Though these epistemic and material renovations are still strenuously contested, their effects are everywhere around us. One has only to consider the manifold ways in which individuals have come to experience their lives across the spectrum of proliferative desires in the metropole. From the perspective of this book, neither gender nor sex can stand without inflection and without qualification, and, further, without attention to the identities that culture makes available for copying outside of traditional biological and social reproductive practices. A more recent instantiation of intellectuals’ accreditation and cultural reproduction that bears on my argument about expert modernists and gender is one that Regenia Gagnier raises in The Insatiability of Human Wants. In the course of her study, Gagnier comes to distinguish political affinities from cultural ones, a distinction that she contends is the aftereffect of the breach between classical and neoclassical economics in the 1870s, when disciplinary concern for a more hedonistic explanation of supply and demand transformed the concept of the public good. The split she notes between ‘[t]aste – or class as culture’ and traditional class formations, she recasts in the contemporary moment: ‘a good leftist will willingly share the pains of working people, willingly redistribute the wealth, but will she share in their pleasures?’ (238, original emphasis). And shortly thereafter, ‘Marxists and other progressives have always supported the working classes around issues of labor or production. But especially in relation to global labor forces, it remains to be seen whether alliances will extend across the diversity of pleasures’ (239). The divergence of class labor from cultural pleasure is one that Max Weber’s ‘Class, Status, Party’ undertook to explicate at the beginning of the twentieth century in differentiating class according to production from status based on consumption (180–95). The breach endures as a modernist legacy that intellectuals and artists uncomfortably carry into the present. And, as Gagnier’s current encounter indicates, one persistent source for the separation of class from culture remains the family. Female and male intellectuals are imbricated by training, incomes, and prestige within the expert class and within the amalgam

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of the culture they create and consume, by being, as she explains, ‘ “educated” out of the tastes of their parents, which probably contributes to their emphasis on the cultural aspects of class’ (240). Indeed, the split experienced between one’s community by birth versus one’s community by education is the exact one that my analysis of Gabriel Conroy’s conflicting allegiances shows Joyce confronting in ‘The Dead’ in developing his modernist practice. A central difference is, of course, that, a century later, it is a first-world female academic who addresses the problem and for whom the disparity spills over into political commitments. The conflicting loyalties of politics and pleasures – seemingly two incommensurate categories – make it difficult to ignore, however, the cultural embourgeoisement of the expert class. At the same time, these allegiances also make it difficult to generate a sustained critique of that which is occluded by inhabiting one temporality, that of leisure and consumption, while simultaneously championing another, that of labor and production – yet all the while deriving advantage from both. Rita Felski’s Doing Time gives us one way to approach the dilemma by offering what may be the missing term between the politics advocated and the pleasures acquired. Her own experience of being educated out of her class and into the expert class of academia leads her to observe that academic ‘culture inescapably alters the class identities of those who inhabit it’ (47). What makes her description especially telling is that the class of her birth is neither the privileged middle-class nor the radically chic working class but the ever unfashionable petite bourgeoisie, the class, as she explains, that ‘cannot be assimilated into a discourse of progressive identity politics’ (46). This class, which possesses, according to her, a ‘negative identity’, when expressed in lived experience ‘becomes an object of irony, humor, or scorn rather than a term around which people rally and with which they identify’ (46). To her call for further inquiry and for greater cognizance of the ‘synchronous nonsynchronicities’ we variously occupy that Ernst Bloch first elaborated in the 1930s, let me add these additional remarks that proceed from my argument on modern culture, experts, and gender (23). For ascription into a class that is cultural not only puts in tension an uncritical advocacy of earlier class formations, but it also makes dubious, as Gagnier implies, the attempt to make a class based on culture cohere to alliances based principally on production and labor. The efforts thus far to reconcile these discrepancies, most notably by Bourdieu, the Ehrenreichs, Gouldner, Gramsci, Guillory, Habermas, and Weber, have not yet sufficiently come to grips with experts’ cultural


embourgeoisement tout court. 1 Whereas an advocacy of working classes allows for a reinstitution of, among other things, progressive time, historical certainty, the divisions of labor and sexes, and hence a recuperation of a simulacral version of that temporality, it is not clear what an advocacy of a modern cultural class might consist of, or, for that matter, what a sustained critique of such a class might entail. One worry that appears to subtend these studies on cultural ascription concerns not so much the possibility of reducing experts to wage laborers, though this rhetorical frame is the one most often used. Rather the worry appears to spring from the possible reduction of intellectual and cultural capital to middlebrow fare, at which point it no longer retains its value and experts their prestige and class standing. There is a context for this concern. As Bourdieu, Eagleton, and Leonardi imply, it was the lower middle-class that most benefited from using education as a passkey to the professions and, thus, as a vehicle for upward mobility. In becoming accredited experts, this group effectively educated themselves out of the class of their birth and into a class whose occupations depended on, as Gouldner asserts, ‘both incomes and quality objects’ (20, original emphasis), the very indices – salary stream, commodities, symbolic and material practices – we associate with a modern cultural class and its capital. In other words, those who had the most to gain from improving their culture – the petite bourgeoisie – came to populate the class most dependent on it for their standing – the expert class. What I am suggesting is that the class configuration of modern culture, by which the petite bourgeoisie assimilates into the middle-class proper, is organized and reproduced differently from the way in which classes based on labor and property are organized and reproduced. One distinguishing characteristic, as I earlier intimated, is the reliance of a cultural class on the circulation of expert and inexpert copies – and on experts specifying the difference. This cultural form of reproduction suggests that experts (such as the progressives that Gagnier perceives as being educated out of the class of their birth and into a class of taste and culture) cannot champion the petite bourgeoisie as a class, as they can attempt with the working classes, because their status and authority depend on there remaining a ‘small’ bourgeoisie to be judged crass, counterfeit, or inept. To ameliorate completely the petite bourgeoisie as a class would put in jeopardy experts’ standing, knowledge production, and cultural capital. For according to Bourdieu, the petit bourgeois has the ‘capacity to make “middle-brow” whatever it touches’ (Distinction 327). One touch can level the distinction that the expert class strives to achieve and maintain. In other words, as Felski

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seems to recognize, the petite bourgeoisie is the ‘negative identity’ of the modern cultural class that experts inhabit. If the antithesis of the cultural class that experts occupy is the petite bourgeoisie, then we have reason to see in the ‘great divide’ identified by Huyssen more than the gender taint of Emma Bovary or of feminized mass culture as the abject underside of modernists’ well wrought urns. Mass gender or gendered mass becomes a way of producing and maintaining the divide rather than confronting it outright. Huyssen’s depiction of the modernist ‘nightmare of being devoured by mass culture’, rather than offering critical lucidity, appears to offer a trope to distance and overdramatize that which might otherwise be more intimate, immediate, contingent, contiguous, and, finally, more banal than the fantasy of excessive voracity (53). Modernists’ opposite may in fact be none other than the petite bourgeoisie. Indeed, it is not only the romancereading Emma Bovary, as the excrescence of provincial or protosuburban middlebrow tastes, who threatened to deflate the value and cachet of modernism’s aesthetic merchandise. We have only to survey the texts assembled on these pages to discover other incarnations of the belittled bourgeois. Passenger Mrs Brown and meddler Mrs Bolton, to name two, come into view and then are swiftly outmaneuvered by their more learned progenitors. In the case of Molly Bloom, Joyce utterly naturalizes her out of any clear class identity and makes her consort’s tastes and sympathies too catholic to succumb to this more stigmatizing blot than even poverty. And as for the inordinately desiring middle-class matron, Emily Sinico, Joyce submits her to humiliating eradication, instead of posthumous mythification, for desiring the wrong object in the petit-bourgeois pedant Duffy. When all is said and done, Woolf, Forster, Joyce, and Lawrence are careful to separate their principal female protagonists from the impress of this class stamp. Indeed their replacement of the Victorian woman depended on her having moral and social value and not appearing, as it were, a second-rate imitation – obsolete, yes, counterfeit, no. Where male protagonists are concerned, similar rules apply. Hence we have a woodsy Scudder and Mellors coarsening their lately assembled middle-class equipage. While with the addled clerks, Bast and Warren Smith, the male version is every bit as dispensable as the female version. Gender thus appears to be a far suppler category in these texts, while class and culture appear more determinate. Given Bourdieu’s calculation that ‘[t]he petit bourgeois is a proletarian who makes himself small to become bourgeois’ (Distinction 338), we might well infer that the expert is a petit bourgeois who makes himself


great to stay bourgeois. Under this calculus, Huyssen’s divide obstructs most, not in its claims about gender, but in its claim to be ‘great’. In lieu of greatness, what emerges is the rather slight divide separating modernists and experts from their nearer relations, ‘the class that’, in Felski’s words, ‘holds back the wheel of history’ (Doing Time 28). Indeed, the petite bourgeoisie not only impedes history but also changes our apperception of it and of temporal progression. Divide this class most assuredly has but in a way and for reasons that modernists and experts had an interest in leaving unaddressed. Expert ascription and the formation of modern culture demanded that they make themselves and any divide appear great. Marking the divide along a gendered mass axis masked modernists’ accession and allowed succession to proceed, a process that we, their successors, have inherited and now replicate in our own knowledge production and cultural embourgeoisement. 2 Huyssen’s fine line when placed alongside Bourdieu’s encyclopedic lexicon of modern copying, Distinction, points to the necessity of qualifying the processes of expert accreditation and cultural reproduction as well as qualifying who and what count as legitimate objects of study and on what bases. The cultural class that experts helped to put in place and to which the modernists of this study contributed through their innovative narratives and aestheticized spatial renovations is a fact that scholars have catalogued in their research and daily replicate in their everyday lives but have only provisionally explicated. Experts, to include those in the academy like myself, yet inhabit a hypervisible class whose boundaries safeguard its pleasures, as Gagnier notes, while allowing members to cross at will in order to alleviate the pains of others over issues of production and labor. In other words, keeping its cultural boundaries unacknowledged except by virtue of its own knowledge production allows the expert class to intervene on behalf of traditionally marked classes or even conflate its interests with theirs when advantageous without having to announce its class dependencies and privileges, in short, without having to declare the means through which this class is reproduced. Its mediating relation to the haute bourgeoisie also bears out this obfuscation, inasmuch as the expert class counts on its high cultural capital as recompense for low wage pay. A monopoly over knowledge production and, thus, authority over the composition of intellectual and cultural capital compensate for salaried income. Expertise is guaranteed to speak for itself and to act as its own reward. The failure to account adequately for the incompatible temporalities and class formations that we traverse not only surfaces in the friction

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between politics and pleasures. It also arises as a disciplinary dispute over the cultural agency that feminist literary and cultural critics have come to claim for themselves and their subjects over the past 15 years, roughly the time period in which Huyssen’s ‘great divide’ gained critical traction and in which the academy credentialed a second generation of feminist intellectuals. If one corrective for the ‘great divide’ is to rethink the differences between historical and cultural class formations, then perhaps this corrective might also serve the debate over intellectual women’s newly professed agency. Pushing the debate in this direction are Gagnier’s and Felski’s inquiries in foregrounding and pressuring tensions over cultural authority, knowledge creation, and objects of analysis. A more restricted approach is Amanda Anderson’s that expressly reproves feminist critics for, in her view, their ‘aggrandized agency’. While recognizing in her essay ‘The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency’ that the problem emerges ‘precisely because agency and critical reflection are insufficiently or confusedly theorized’, Anderson’s own recommendation amounts to a measured retreat from theoretical engagement (52). To counteract these untoward assertions of agency and restore critical equilibrium, she proposes turning back to the discipline of history and away from the young upstarts of literary and cultural studies. Although a return to the discourse of history makes sense on the face of it, it is no out-and-out nostrum given its discursive past and limits, that is, given its reliance on more stable referents, on a more linear and predictable temporality, and on subjects who are more recognizable by class, race, and gender. Such reliance registers, in essence, the very incoherence I have attempted to describe that obtains from our being not simply historically situated subjects but also being culturally reproduced subjects, who, as experts (intellectuals, artists, scholars, and critics), are also agents of modern culture. A remedy that resorts to the self-referential discipline of history – whose modern roots in nineteenthcentury empirical and positivist discourses privilege knowledge production qua knowledge production, and whose progressive temporality Benjamin criticized in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ as ‘homogenous’ and ‘empty’ – would obviate the need to treat the expert as anything but expert (261). In other words, a retreat to history removes the agent from view, but it does not stop the exercise of agency or enable a clearer theorization of it. This approach avoids the dilemma that John Guillory has more deftly explained as ‘precisely that of a class in which the cultural constituent appears to be definitive, and in which its mode of cultural or “knowledge” production is uniquely related to the system of production’ (124, original emphasis). Disclaiming agency


and reverting to history will not serve and may only serve to confound the distinction between cultural constituent and knowledge producer that Guillory discerns. In fact, we can see this blurring in Anderson’s urging greater historical detachment and objectivity in order ‘to objectify facets of human existence so as to better understand, criticize, and potentially transform them’ (62). At the very least, a call for greater detachment should also call to mind Bourdieu’s insight that disinterest invariably masks interest. Intellectuals and artists have, he explains ‘a particular interest in disinterestedness’ (Distinction 316). Indeed, accompanying the calls for increased detachment and objectivity are those for less boldness and more circumspection in feminists’ intellectual work, particularly in those that directly engage the relation of gender to modernity. All said, a detached historical approach betrays nostalgia for a simpler and less complex interaction with the modern. From the standpoint of this study, which overlays the gendered map of received modernism and three leading practitioners onto the cultural formation of the expert class whose knowledge emerged as a defining feature of the past century, it is more than a little unsettling to encounter a plea that female intellectuals become more restrained, more quiescent in their scholarship, in substance, less troublesome. Such advocacy has a disturbing ring to it given the argument on these pages of a brainy English woman, who as good as murders her predecessor, then brashly summons educated women to either become, in effect, her accomplices in the professions and study objects, or risk becoming objects of study themselves for professionals. At its core, a disapprobation of cultural agency may be less worried about aggrandizement and more anxious about entitlement. We would do well to recall as Felski’s Doing Time does in using a longer lens of intellectual analysis that ‘[w]omen and people of color were never hailed as leaders of the Enlightenment. We cannot argue that they are trying to reassert their cultural centrality by a strategic attachment to an external agent. On the contrary, they themselves are the agent, however, problematically’ (169, original emphasis). Yet, the very reason that Felski recognizes ‘cultural centrality’ as the crucial element points to why the problem of agency cannot be posed as a strictly feminist one, or explained in strictly gendered or racial terms. It is not people of color or women’s ‘cultural centrality’ that is at issue in such statements but the novelty of their agency. If we rotate Felski’s observation slightly, we see that the reservation is one of cultural agency pure and simple. Following Felski’s lead, we might say that it is because European males

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were hailed as Enlightenment leaders that their heirs can ‘reassert their cultural centrality’ without it appearing contrived or inflated, and, therefore, questionable. Their accession, by comparison, appears logical and orderly. If we go one step further and set aside privileged males’ access to historical antecedents, then their cultural agency becomes every bit as contentious. One manifestation of a demonstrably masculinist claim to agency that resonates in the present is Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ of the 1970s. In his study, Bloom explicitly applied Freud’s oedipal genealogy, which I argue is an exemplary modernist mythmaking apparatus, to trace the travails of literary creation by successive generations of male poets. In doing so, Bloom produced a model of cultural appropriation for the field of literary studies that benefited a rising generation of male critics. Only the poststructuralists Barthes and Foucault surpassed him by a still bolder arrogation in claiming the death of the author altogether. One clear component of these male critics’ historical interventions is their outright claim to agency. To be consistent, their assertions should also count as acts of aggrandizement. Yet, Anderson’s hyperbole of ‘aggrandizement’, like Huyssen’s incitement of ‘great’, may, in fact, only disguise a more pervasive uneasiness over the appropriation of agency that is latent in the operation of knowledge production and expert accreditation. Instead of taking the feminine as crucible, Anderson seizes on feminist criticism. We might characterize her uneasiness then, not as a masculinist ‘anxiety of influence’ à la Harold Bloom, but more precisely as a feminist anxiety of agency. The distinction that anxiety arises over agency as opposed to influence gets us to the decisive issue. Although both anxieties evince a similar grammar, their temporalities are at variance. Whereas Bloom’s masculinist anxiety is specific and extrinsic, occurring through time in his narrative, so that it appears to carry the weight of history, Anderson’s feminist anxiety is intrinsic and extant at the same time. It obeys a circular logic that goes roughly as follows: because feminist critics lack long-standing historical referents or antecedents, their claims to agency stand out and appear contrived; and because feminist critical agency seems contrived, so, too, do the historical precedents that feminist critics claim appear overstated. Yet, strip away the gender differential, and the logic that we encounter is the paradox of the copy. Making oneself out of copies that experts ordain as originals is at the base of modern knowledge production, expert accreditation, and cultural reproduction. This circular and paradoxical logic suggests why the charge that Anderson levels at feminist


critics of mistaking effects for causes cannot answer (43). Historical causality cannot explain the process of knowledge production and cultural reproduction in which origins are expert fabrications of a past ready-made for copying – a process that adheres in Freud’s oedipal mechanism and in Bloom’s literary application of it; a process, as stated at the opening, that is inherent in modernist expert ascription whether we take Freud’s appropriation of Oedipus or Woolf’s of Shakespeare. Feminist anxiety of agency is, in this respect, but one degree removed from Gilbert and Gubar’s canonical anxiety in The Madwoman in the Attic over the absence of female authors, which hinged, it is worth recalling, on displacing the oedipal model of Bloom’s study with Woolf’s. In the current moment, in which absence is no longer at issue, anxiety manifests itself over the presence of female critics. It is not by chance, then, that uneasiness flares at a time, a millennial one at that, in which intellectual women have emerged as assertive and articulate cultural interpreters of literature and adjacent fields. Having argued against agency being either exclusively a feminist problem, or resolvable in strictly gendered and historical terms, is not, however, to dispute the import of the query, whether raised by Gagnier, Felski, or Anderson. On the contrary, leaving unspoken the relation of knowledge production to cultural accreditation – as I suggest that modernism’s ‘great divide’ did – only further obfuscates the connection of experts in the academy to the hegemonic practices that they assume responsibility for examining. Let me propose, instead, that feminist critics’ recent cultural ascent, as a manifestation of the much larger problem of expert authority and cultural reproduction, of expert and inexpert copies, might provide an especially salient model by which to begin an examination of the process overall. The preceding chapters here may even point the way by showing how the model of, first, Woolf and, then, of her male cohorts helps make sense of modernist expert accession nearly a century ago. As their ensemble further attests, the disentanglement of the present cultural dilemma will require looking beyond the discipline of history and the formation of earlier classes. In pointing to the interdependence of the expert class and modern culture and to the anxiety this provokes, it remains to be acknowledged that no less does the agency claimed on these pages owe to the ability to mount a critique within this self-same class and from a gendered positioned within it. Thus this book carries traces, both material and ideological, of those telltale marks of complicity I have taken pains to uncover in the modernists of this study and in the expert copies

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they made. Yet this conformation offers all the more reason to engage the subject and to gauge our involvement in such a way that, as descendants of these expert modernists, we see ourselves for the stewards and parvenus we decidedly are. As checkered and mixed the results we produce going forward will surely be, this is no time to relinquish the field.

Notes 1 Modern hordes: women, modernism, and the cult of experts 1. Peter Laslett, in his 1972 study of the family as a social organization, argues that social scientists tended to view its history through the lens of ‘folk memory’, and used contemporaneous family models of the so-called primitive societies as the historical past of ‘advanced’ Western ones. It is this very erasure of the immediate past of the Western family and the use of a primitive model that allowed social scientists, like Freud, to assert disciplinary control over the field of representation by denying their own historical context. As Laslett revealingly observes: ‘The very term history itself represents an earlier phase in their [social scientists’] development which probably had to be rejected if properly empirical and adequately comparative research was to get under way’ (4, original emphasis). 2. Adam Phillips makes the point that Freud’s model requires that the new (a copy) be ever a return to the old (an original) in his unpublished talk, ‘Waiting for Returns: Freud’s New Love’. His understanding of the modern bourgeois urge to copy is one that, to my mind, necessitates the replacement of the biological and social reproduction that existed in the ideal Victorian home with a cultural means of reproduction more responsive to the mandate ‘faire nouveau’. As Peter Nicholls observes in Modernisms, whom Phillips also cites: ‘Bourgeois culture thus seemed to ground itself in the awkward paradox that we become truly ourselves only by copying others’ (13). In Freud’s version, this becomes a mandate to copy the original object – the modernized mother. 3. Indeed, were I disposed to Freudian interpretations, I would submit that this transaction is one the physician himself lets slip. For after having specified the universal trauma that incestuous desire unleashes within the human family, he not only discloses that the effect of its prohibition accounts for our modern neuroses, but concludes his disquisition by also averring that ‘neurotics are above all inhibited in their actions; with them the thought is a complete substitute for the deed’ (200, original emphasis). Taking him at his word, I suggest we might infer that his thought in Totem and Taboo, arising from an inability to act in his own time, might well substitute completely for the deed displaced onto an earlier moment – such that the deed might be seen as a manifestation of Freud’s inhibited desire. 4. Deborah Parsons has recently revisited the question of women writers’ relation to modernity and their representations of the city to attempt a corrective, as I attempt here from a different vantage point, of ‘feminist literary criticism and cultural sociology [that] has tended to support the masculine definition of the urban observer, employing a conceptual framework that diametrically opposes hegemonic and female modernism’ (4). 5. According to Bakhtin, the threshold, one of his critical enablers of narrative, functions as ‘the chronotope of crisis and break in life. [ . . . ] In this chronotope, time is essentially instantaneous, it is as if it has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time’ (248, original emphasis). 170

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

We might contrast the vitality and contingency of this chronotope, as I believe the modernist novel does, with his more static chronotope of the parlor, the locus of the arranged meeting and colloquy. Lawrence’s indictment of the sentimental, the affective apparatus par excellence of domestic romance and one certain ideological prop of the Victorian family, was still a polarizing topic in 1928 and remained so until the critical reappraisals of modernism at the end of the century by scholars such as Ann Ardis, Suzanne Clark, and Andreas Huyssen began to show that the binary opposing modernist aesthetics to the popular sentimental was, at best, a flimsy divide, one riddled with inconsistencies and unacknowledged correspondences, and still-to-be-thought consequences. It bears remarking that heterosexuality was, from the last decades of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, not normative behavior but viewed alarmingly as deviant, as scholars who have traced its entry and dispersal into the language of medical experts and then into the vernacular have made clear (see, for example, Jonathan Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality). I refer in particular to Huyssen’s After the Great Divide that identified women with mass culture and thus as modernism’s other. This reading has greatly influenced feminist and cultural critics’ understanding of the movement and women’s relation to it. See also Rado’s chapter 1 in Rereading Modernism that narrates the troubled relation of women and feminism to modernism and its effect on past and present feminist critical paradigms (3–19). See also Pykett’s reading of feminist scholars’ correctives to the gendering of modernism that also analyzes their shortcomings (11–13). An argument on the trespass of household autonomy and appropriation of its authority in the opening decades of the twentieth century owes to such works as Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction, Poovey’s Uneven Developments, Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes, and Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story that helped locate women and the family squarely within the shifting complexities of modernity and showed them to be crucibles of social change and integral to the temporal processes of modernization. For refinements to the above, see Langland’s Nobody’s Angels and Cohen’s Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel. While subsequent scholarship has made us more savvy about any absolute claims for the separate sphere phenomenon of private and public by providing more nuanced documentation of its empirical correspondence and its semantic drift, its ideological penetration as a meaningful socioeconomic formation across class lines has persisted to this day and recurs in unexpected places. Indeed, before consigning the private/public model to exegetic mothballs again, we might consider its continued efficacy in making national institutions and colonial and imperial apparatuses work, however much we may find the work it performs troubling and problematic – or, more to the point, however much we dislike finding ourselves implicated in that which we have abjected. Moreover, to deprecate the model out of hand is to repeat one of the central strategies, as I argue, by which literary modernists and the expert class authorized themselves. I borrow this term from Lamos’s Deviant Modernism (12–16) but tweak it considerably. My interest is to show that the demise of the domestic woman is a trope foundational to modernist narratives of both male and female practitioners and that its valence is broadly socioeconomic and not limited

172 Notes to the psychosexual reaction formation of male modernists. To focus on mors matris in a modernist context is not, however, to ignore the dispatch of the domestic woman in more than one Victorian novel (see, for example, Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word), but to claim that the domestic woman’s place and position are hollowed out and that a new configuration of space results. Who will fill those spaces, with what knowledge, and under what cultural mandate make the transaction altogether different. 11. The imbrication of modernism so-called with expert culture – that is, modernists’ claims to expert knowledge – offers one way to explain the post fin de siècle marginalization of the sentimental discourse of Clark’s study and of the New Woman novel of Ardis’s. It also suggests, as the chapter on E.M. Forster will bear out, that a claim of expertise was a means to deflect possible incrimination away from the author (Wilde’s result) and onto the printed text (Lawrence’s, Hall’s, and Joyce’s results). Ardis’s recent Modernism and Cultural Conflict takes up the link of modernism’s connection to the emergence of English studies as an academic discipline by arguing that modernism retreats from its radical potential, exemplified in the sexuality Wilde embodied and espoused. The argument of this book will point to a more mixed result. But one key component will be that modernist expertise with its assertions of universal verities, as adduced from Freud’s and Lawrence’s examples, aims at a new form of cultural reproduction – a process that neither Wilde nor New Woman novelists successfully implemented. 12. As Bourdieu observes: ‘The history of the field arises from the struggle between the established figures and the young challengers. The ageing of authors, schools, and works is far from being the product of a mechanical, chronological, slide into the past; it results from the struggle between those who have made their mark ( fait date – “made an epoch”) and who are fighting to persist, and those who cannot make their own mark without pushing into the past those who have an interest in stopping the clock, eternizing the present stage of things’ (The Field of Cultural Production 60). He describes this cultural circuitry in his dialectics of cognition (connaissance) and recognition (reconnaissance) (‘Intellectual Field’ 22, 111) and in his introduction to Distinction (1–7). For another complementary perspective on charismatic ideology as the modern professional ethos, see Bledstein (93–97). The conjunction of modernists and modern experts is often made but without claiming their convergence arising from the same cultural mandate. One compelling study of the connection and one to which I am indebted is Rita Felski’s The Gender of Modernity that addresses their affinities directly. Where her study tacitly grants their methodologies, a distinctness that is in keeping with the structure of disciplinarity itself, I suggest greater correspondence, as Chapter 3 makes clear. 13. Pykett, in discussing the moment of modernism, provides a succinct description of the practice of disciplinarity, as modernist literary works were transformed into and reproduced as serious art, thus helping define literature as a separate field. Of ‘the intellectual hegemony of Eliot, Leavis, Richards, and the New Critics’, she notes: ‘the moment of modernism is a prolonged one in which a hegemonic version of literary history and value is first produced and then reproduced by a literary academy committed to working constantly over the same relatively small group of texts’ (10–11). In what follows, I open up the boundaries of modernism to show them more labile

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

still. The ‘small group of texts’ I reread helps to push the conversation further about the cultural context in which literary modernists participated and to point to those forces that led to what Rado calls in Reading Modernism ‘selective canonization’ (4). As Peter Nicholls’s capacious study Modernisms insists, the totality modernism will not answer for the varied polemical and aesthetic appeals made on its behalf. See also Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism; Joyce Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism?; Dettmar and Watt, Marketing Modernisms; and Willison, Gould, and Chernaik, Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. Bourdieu’s seminal work Distinction adds greatly to what Weber described as his ‘over-simplification’: ‘Life-styles are thus the systematic products of habitus, which, perceived in their mutual relations through the schemes of the habitus, become sign systems that are socially qualified (as “distinguished”, “vulgar”, etc.)’ (172). Jennifer Wicke reminds us in ‘Mrs Dalloway Goes to Market’ of Oscar Wilde’s clever riff on John Stuart Mill’s sober aphorism that suggests the sequence I invoke later: ‘The greatest goods for the greatest possible number’ (Wilde qtd. in Wicke 8). For treatment of the professions, see Annan, Perkin, Larson, Gouldner, Bourdieu, Mannheim, Bledstein, and Coser, among others. Jonathan Freedman’s and Thomas Strychacz’s useful studies on the connection between letters and professions overlook the connection to the home in their genealogies. Bourdieu is one scholar who takes the household seriously as one of Althusser’s ‘ideological state apparatuses’, by recognizing the middle-class home as a locus of professionalization. See Levy’s epilogue in Other Women, ‘Modernism, Professionalism and Gender’, to which my reading is indebted, that points expressly to the trespass on domestic governance by experts from psychology and the social sciences and then links their expertise to literary modernism. See Cohen’s Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel for its investigation of women’s protoprofessionalism within the home. My reading of Darwin is indebted to Ernst Mayr’s work on the naturalist. There are numerous texts linking Darwin to the literary. Most useful in scope and presentation are Gillian Beer, Darwin Plots; Burt Bender, The Descent of Love; George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists; A. Dwight Culler, ‘The Darwinian Revolution and Literary Form’; and Walter F. Cannon, ‘Darwin’s Vision in On the Origin of Species’. See also Peter Morton, The Vital Science; Leo Henkin, Darwinism in the English Novel; and Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ‘Nature’s Courtship Plot in Darwin and Ellis’. As Culler has remarked about the significance of Darwinian thought: ‘This dramatic reversal of orthodox thinking is what I take to be the heart of the Darwinian revolution. It is a new manner of conceiving, a new way of looking at things. . . . It had already occurred in several other areas of thought, and its repetition, in one sphere after another, must be accounted a central feature of the Victorian age. It is not exactly a watershed in history of the century so much as a great wheeling round, or re-orientation, of the human mind toward the modern world’ (228). It is also useful to keep in mind, as Cannon notably reminds us, that the trope of the survival of the fittest was neither Darwin’s concept nor part of his rhetoric (157).

174 Notes 20. By according desire a biological basis, Darwinism separated itself from other master narratives of human nature that ranged from Plato to Augustine, from Machiavelli to Locke. 21. The very brief discussion of sexual selection in Origin does not attempt any systematic formulation, particularly in regard to the human species. In The Descent of Man, the contingency of sexual difference appears both settled history and a nagging variable when Darwin explains: ‘it has now been ascertained that at a very early embryonic period both sexes possess true male and female glands. Hence some extremely remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous’ (1: 215–16). Rosemary Jann’s essay, ‘Darwin and the Anthropologists: Sexual Selection and Its Discontents’, explains these contradictions inherent in Origin and Descent as the naturalist’s struggle to rescue civilized man from the implications of natural selection while still remaining allegiant to his theory of genealogical continuity. According to Beer, ‘[I]n The Origin of Species (1859) man is a determining absence. In Descent of Man (1871) man in all his varieties is the topic. The first is a work primarily of biology, the second of anthropology’. Origin emphasizes ‘“natural” (that is, non-human and unwilled) “selection” in creating change’. In Descent of Man Darwin, explains Beer, ‘brings back into the discussion the ideas of will and culture which are notably and deliberately excluded in The Origin. Women and men became his problem’ (10). 22. Hirschman’s first section ‘Counteracting the Passions’ treats this semantic shift showing how an individual’s reason, self-interest, and the accumulation of wealth transformed into a coherent economic system of civic virtue for the nation-state by the nineteenth century. 23. Jevons argues that a focus on demand allows for greater mathematical precision, and hence more objective regulation of the economy. He rereads Smith, Mill, and Ricardo among others in his The Theory of Political Economy and finds in their work the mathematical basis that will structure his own theories (xxii–xxv). 24. ‘To make no distinctions between kinds of commodities – necessities and luxuries, labor and other commodities – in the service of mathematizing, or what Jevons called “fluxional calculus”, led in the twentieth century to theories of “choice”’ (Gagnier 49). 25. That the science of these has a social foundation is evident in Darwin’s other model of choice – artificial selection, which he uses to derive and verify his narrative of natural selection. Two brief examples from each theory may suggest the import of what has become the choice idiom. In the chapter on ‘Natural Selection’ in The Origin of Species, Darwin strikingly compares artificial and natural selection and observes that ‘[a]s man can produce, and certainly has produced, a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not natural selection effect?’ (1: 101, emphasis added). He then concludes the paragraph with an eloquent personification of nature that extols the efficacy of choice: ‘How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those accumulated by Nature during whole geological periods!’ (1: 102). Put simply, ‘methodical and unconscious’ choice, that is, natural choice, is a universal good and a universalizing instrument. This holds even when the result is destruction or extinction, which later in the chapter is eulogized as

Notes 175

26.

27.

28.

29.

the benevolent outcome of natural choice. The privileging of choice is still more apparent with sexual selection in Descent of Man. In describing sexual selection among birds, Darwin not only acknowledges female choice but also links this choice to desire, prosperity, and aesthetics. ‘[T]he most vigorous females’, he argues, ‘will have the choice of many males; and though they might not always select the strongest or best armed, they will select those which are vigorous and well armed, and in other respects the most attractive’ (1: 283). Here female choice determines species’ well-being and the ornamentation that leads to concupiscence as well. Indeed, we can also mark this dilation from the production to the consumption of material goods as tropes of hard work and thrift, central to the bourgeois ethos, slowly yielded by the end of the century to encompass ones of pleasure and expenditure. For the foremost account of the productionist model, see Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Dean MacCannell has explained the shift from one system to another this way: ‘The economics of cultural production is fundamentally different from that of industrial production. In the place of exploited labor, we find exploited leisure’ (28). It is here that I locate the expert class and modernist elite and the formation of a cultural class. By and large, Birken’s work gives agency to ideas and not to the groups who are empowered or disempowered by them. Thus he does not adequately treat this outcome, though, to his credit, he does note the cultural defenses deployed by the sciences to annul the liberatory potential of evolutionary thought. He argues that these should not be the sole basis for judging what was (and is) latent and empowering and cites the highly ambivalent practice of the sciences. Sexology, for example, was deeply invested, on the one hand, in preserving the hegemony of the patriarchal family. Yet by enumerating a multiplicity of desires from normal to abnormal, from acquiescent to perverse, it only showed itself to be duplicative of the production of desire that Birken deems liberatory. One telling instance of this ambivalence is Freud’s shift from the seduction theory to the Oedipal Complex. By admitting the seductiveness of children, Freud inadvertently ‘conferred a kind of symbolic citizenship upon them’, transforming ‘sexless victims’ into desiring subjects and, ironically, on behalf of maintaining paternal authority over the family (Birken 99). Sexology thus worked at cross purposes that are, in my view, endemic to fields of expertise: liberating the very individuals it was also in the profession of disciplining, thereby ensuring the authority and value of its knowledge. One need only recall here Darwin’s doleful panegyric to ‘the heroic little monkey . . . or that old baboon’ that he praises over the ‘savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions’ that concludes Descent (2: 796–97). See also Lennard Davis’s history of the emergence of the normative and eugenics in ‘Constructing Normalcy’. Nor were this knowledge and its deployment limited to women. As pointed to earlier, women’s stigmatization was part and parcel of the treatment accorded other marked categories, such as class and race; real and imagined differences here were likewise systematically medicalized or pathologized by

176 Notes

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

assigning them a scientific basis. If Western women were alleged to be less differentiated, and more childlike, emotional, and passive, then the peoples of Africa and Asia, to include women and men, were also stigmatized under the same scientific logic. The imperialist allegory of subjugation and domination of the inhabitants and territories of Africa and Asia was underwritten by the sciences’ disciplinary power. As Patrick Brantlinger accurately observes: ‘Evolutionary thought seems almost calculated to legitimize imperialism’ (203). In her critique of Birken’s democratizing thesis, Gagnier notes, ‘the desire to consume or to express one’s individuality through that desire is not the same thing as the power to consume’, which leads her to distinguish between elites whose ability to choose does suggest a kind of individualism versus the collective mass consumers whose available product choices confer nothing resembling uniqueness (59–60). Making the expert class visible does not solve the problem that she correctly identifies, but it does suggest a means to address it more directly. I should also point out that Gagnier does not subscribe to the overthrow of homo economicus but retains the figure for reasons that have to do with the aesthetic production her study examines. Toppling the figure, I would argue in response, requires us, if nothing else, to problematize the orthodoxy of male and female as absolutes. See Perry Anderson’s ‘Components of the National Culture’ for the ascription process followed by the Anglo-industrial bourgeoisie. Anderson explains that ‘the industrial bourgeoisie . . . never took the risk of a confrontation of the dominant aristocracy’ but opted instead to ascend to it, and thereby instituted a pattern which the professional middle-class and the intelligentsia in turn followed (225–26). We must not fail to acknowledge that many aristocrats were active agents in industrialization as a means to retain and expand their privilege. The process was more mutually enabling than Anderson allows. To repeat, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, inasmuch as it is the females of the species who act on their desire by exercising choice of mate, grants them a scientific legitimacy previously withheld. For Birken, the economy of the nation-state was, in effect, transformed into a ‘sexonomy’, to use the term he borrows from Traian Stoianovich, by which he means ‘the domain of genderless consuming individuals investigated by sexual science’ (21). To follow on this, Poovey contends that by 1850 institutionalized reproduction and maternal love were the domestic doublet of female identity in the household. Women’s sexual desire was not yet the riddle it was shortly to become; although, as she shows from census figures, women’s domestic retreat was already underway (5–7). It is worthwhile to note that it was Leslie Stephen’s conversion to the godless theories of natural science that propelled his professional career as a man of letters and his renunciation of celibacy. We can discern the effects of his conversion to Darwin’s republic of desire in the reforms of the university system that he advocated – ‘the removal of religious tests, the abolition of celibacy as a requirement for fellowship, and the development of the natural sciences’ (Annan, Godless Victorian 7). There is considerable literature on this subject. In addition to the authorities just listed, see also: J.A. Jackson, Professions and Professionalization;

Notes 177

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia; Lewis A. Coser, Men of Ideas. Paul Fussell’s very accessible investigation, Class, provides a useful introduction to the subject. My remarks are not intended to suggest that the various experts or disciplines developed at the same pace or exercised the same power or were rewarded equally. As is well documented, the expert class was never homogeneous but was itself divided and hierarchical, and contingent on the knowledges offered and services provided being valued. Thus the professions and disciplines were also subordinate to the logic of equivalence. Lovell makes a similar point though she reprises the dystopia associated with the feminine. ‘The arts, and English literary study in particular, have laid claim to a certain moral and cultural superiority which is at the same time a subtle and covert mark of inferiority. The logic is identical to that which structured nineteenth-century domestic ideology.’ This link in logic, coupled with the subject of its expertise, even after the modernization I am locating ‘has brought’, in Lovell’s view, ‘literature and literary criticism so perilously close to femininity’ (141). This further explains why those who profess literature would avert the model of domestic womanhood. Birken, given his commitment to the democratization of desire, cannot recognize the expert class responsible for administrating this latest manifestation of individualism. To do so would admit that his democracy is at heart anti-egalitarian. Indeed, I would suggest that his egalitarian narrative is flawed from the outset, apparent from his opening move when he invokes the elite present in feudal ideology, the ‘equality among peers’, as the basis for Western democracies without acknowledging its exclusionary basis that carried over into modern institutions (5). Birken’s oversight of an expert class is also the missing detail in Douglas Mao’s study of the modernist object that attempts to explain why consumption for modernists loses the appeal it enjoyed at the fin de siècle (18–20). I suggest that consumption does not lose its allure so much as it is recast by an expert class founded on knowledge production, so that objects become for modernist experts, following Gouldner, not ends in themselves but evidence of literary status and cultural capital. Eliot’s ‘clerical produce’ refers to ‘books, pictures’, the art in short that provides income for the fortunate members of the modernist elite (‘On the Place’ 246–47). On the relation of capital and culture, Gouldner also provides this helpful gloss when he observes: ‘The emerging concepts of “culture” and “capital” are Siamese twins, joined at the back: culture was capital generalized and capital was culture privatized’ (25). While I will not risk extending Gouldner’s metaphor, I will say that there is more to this bonding than culture and money can accommodate by themselves – and that is the affective and literate expertise to bring and hold them together. Terry Eagleton’s discussion of the class background of the Leavises, who were instrumental in the founding of English studies as a distinct discipline at Cambridge, is useful to recall. F.R. Leavis’s father dealt in musical instruments, and the father of Q.D. Roth (later married to Leavis) was a draper. This couple, of whom Eagleton designates F.R. as Matthew Arnold’s rightful heir, suggest that the expert class and the cultural bourgeoisie served to advance the interests of the middle-class broadly defined and to enfold members from the arriviste petty bourgeoisie into this new secular elite (Literary Theory 30–53).

178 Notes 40. Poovey’s observations are manifestations, I would suggest, of the logic of equivalence, which operates as well within expert culture (9). As she points out, women’s occupational status and income outside of the home were circumscribed by their status within it – as maternal embodiments and moral educators. She further suggests why it was that female intellectuals would distance themselves from the domestic woman: ‘as long as teacher was considered “synonymous with mother”, the governess’ sex would be more important than her training’ (162, original emphasis). Bruce Robbins also comments on the dichotomy between female experience and male expertise (Secular Vocations 54–56). 41. In her analysis of Dickens’s Hard Times, Gagnier reckons that the gendered private and public dichotomy does not adequately account for the exploitation of labor evident in home and in market, for both are separate from the public sphere of the state (70–71). The distinction she makes is of great import but leaves unanswered the question of gender. So, for example, it is not clear whether the corollary is between factory workers and domestic servants as wage earners or the domestic woman who is an unpaid laborer in the home or all since none of the three groups enjoys public access, for none is properly a citizen, a propertied male. While it is conceivable though unlikely that a male wage earner might satisfy the property requirement and thereby gain access to government, it is not the case that a woman with a similar windfall could. To be sure the private/public split is not a tidy demarcation when it comes to labor and exploitation, but it is gendered one. 42. See, for example, Penina M. Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues; Susan J. Leonardi, Dangerous by Degrees; Martha Vicinus, Independent Women; Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy; and Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres. In England, for example, Somerville College was opened to women in 1879 but granted its first degrees to women in the decade after the Great War. Girton College, opened earlier in 1869, and was transferred to Cambridge in 1873, yet it was not until 1947 that it began to grant degrees to women (Leonardi 22). 43. We can see the effect of professionalization on traditional women’s colleges in the United States, using Mount Holyoke as one example. In order to improve its academic standing, new President Mary Woolley replaced ‘teachers hired for their moral virtues and strength of character with newly trained Ph.Ds recruited for the quality of their scholarship and their teaching potential’ (Glazer and Slater 15). 44. Of the shift I am describing in the early 1900s, Nancy Cott quotes one woman looking back from 1929 on her experience of the previous two decades: ‘“Political freedom and the right to enter the professions and arts had been almost gained by a braver, grimmer, and more fanatical generation of feminists behind us. These were women who had had to make the famous choice between ‘marriage and a career’. We have determined to have both, to try for everything life would offer of love, happiness, and freedom – just like men”’ (Lillian Symes qtd. in Cott 152). Consider also the distinction Rosenberg draws between two generations of female intellectuals, Emily Fogg Mead and her more renowned daughter, Margaret Mead. One difference, according to Rosenberg, that separates the younger Mead from her mother, was the knowledge and control of her sexuality. ‘Though, like her mother,

Notes 179 she married in graduate school, she had no children for many years.’ Selfinterest had precedence over female duty. This postponement of procreation, Rosenberg tells us, was accomplished by the younger Mead ‘mastering the literature on the mechanics of sex and contraception well before marriage’ (210). 45. These rifts form part of academic feminism’s necessary inheritance. One striking instance of the disparity among women and the controversy such disparity aroused may be found in the 1911 inaugural issues of The Freewoman, A Weekly Feminist Review in which the editors Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe hailed exceptional women as the needful vanguard of feminism. See the opening of my ‘Exceptional Women, Expert Culture, and the Academy’. We might also reformulate the spatial dimension of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as the female modernist’s privileged sanctuary overlooking the street and thus set apart from and above not merely male but female right of entry as well. The chapters on Woolf will cover this disparity in more detail. 46. Bourdieu offers another way to understand the phenomenon I am describing: ‘Just as segregation (by sex or any other criterion) tends to slow down devaluation by its numerous clausus effect, so all desegregation tends to restore full strength to the devaluing mechanisms’ (Distinction 134). 47. I refer of course to ‘We Other Victorians’ and the ‘Repressive Hypothesis’ in Foucault’s History of Sexuality.

2

Retailing the female intellectual

1. The decision to buy a printing press was made earlier in 1915. See Woolf’s letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies (2: 59) and her diary account of her birthday of 1915 (1: 28). It took two years to plan and finance, slowed surely by Virginia’s illness during the period. Later she would nostalgically recall in a 1930 letter to Hugh Walpole, ‘when I remember how we bought £5 worth of type and knelt on the drawing room floor ten years ago setting up little stories . . . [it] makes my breast burst with pride’ (4: 152). The history of the press is treated in great detail in Leonard’s autobiography and in John Lehmann’s memoir as manager and then partner of Hogarth. As J.H. Willis points out in his study of Hogarth, founding a press was not an altogether novel enterprise, especially for a couple with strong literary proclivities. However, as Willis notes parenthetically, the Woolfs were unique in one particular respect, where they put their press (3). At times the Woolfs refer to the press in the drawing room and at others in the dining room, the two rooms adjoining one another on the ground floor of their Richmond house. Virginia Blain briefly addresses the placement of the press but in the context of Woolf’s victimization as a child (5). For a description of the suburban Richmond residence, see Hermione Lee’s biography (351–52). For an architectural history of the drawing room and parlour as well as the subtle distinction between the two, see Thad Logan’s The Victorian Parlour. 2. On the convergence of market and art for which Hogarth functioned as one exemplary mediator, see Willison, Gould, and Chernaik; Wexler; and Dettmar and Watt. As Ian Willison notes in his introduction, not only was the press responsible for legitimizing modernist experimentation to a coterie of readers, ‘the commercial component of the Hogarth project led inevitably to a

180 Notes

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

rapprochement with the general trade, as not only did Virginia Woolf develop her own canon, but that canon was accepted by the marketplace’ (xv). It is this reciprocity between aesthetics and commerce, between expert knowledge production and consumption that I will show provides the structural basis of modernism and a modern cultural class. My treatment of androgyny differs considerably from that of feminist and lesbian critiques that have attempted to make Woolf’s insistence on fluidity cohere with a politics in which sex and gender are primary categories of value or of identity, such as Carolyn Heilbrun’s 1973 publication, Nancy Bazin’s study the same year, and the issue devoted to it in Women’s Studies in the following one edited by Cynthia Secor. Critics then and since have tended to disagree over whether Woolf’s androgyny marks a triumph of sexual difference in its refusal to succumb to normative gender relations or, conversely, a flight from difference and a retreat to sameness, to a patriarchal model of sexual dominance. To cite only one lucid example, in Consuming Fiction, Terry Lovell understands androgyny, especially as Woolf appears to employ it, as an attempt to circumvent women’s fraught relation to cultural capital as consumers. Contrary to Lovell’s claim that androgyny denies ‘a woman her sex while it confirms a man’s’ (140), I suggest that androgyny is a social and economic structure that Woolf manipulates in order to consolidate her position as a modernist. Raymond Williams hints at their kindred formation in discussing the cultural context from which modernism and disciplines such as sociology, psychology, and economics emerge (Writing in Society 223–36). More recently, Jonathan Freedman in Professions of Taste links Anglo-American modernism to commodity culture by tracing Henry James’s skill in professionalizing and commodifying late Victorian aestheticism. In Freedman’s view, Pound and Eliot take the incipient professional James as their precursor but claim to place their aestheticism outside of the realm of commerce. I would argue that it is precisely their successful marketing of this idealization and of their own uniqueness, especially as male artists, that a study of Woolf’s model can help to redress. See also Materer and Diepeveen. For treatment of American modernism and the professions in their relation to popular media and consumer capitalism, see Strychacz. Lisa Tickner provides a gloss on this motto, roughly ‘Not Angels but Citizens’, adopted by the East Anglian branch of National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (67). The sentiments expressed in a letter to Violet Dickinson in November 1910 are indicative of what would become increasing reserve about the suffrage movement: ‘My time has been wasted a good deal upon Suffrage. We went to two meetings, at which about a dozen people spoke, like the tollings of a bell. If they spoke faster all their words went into one. It was at Albert Hall. The only amusement was that a baby cried incessantly, and this was taken by some as a bitter sarcasm against woman having a vote’ (1: 438). It was the philanthropic organization of the guild that Woolf had on her mind when she notes in her diary: ‘Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. They rule in the metropolis’ (1: 192). For her more public opinion of the guild, see her ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’, later published with some changes as the ‘Introductory Letter’ to Davies’s Life As

Notes 181

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

We Have Known It (1931), brought out incidentally by Hogarth. Even though her admiration for Davies is as apparent as is her respect for working women, ‘they are humorous, vigorous and thoroughly independent’ (‘Indroductory Letter’ 238), the overriding sentiment is one of ambivalence. ‘However hard I clap my hands or stamp my feet,’ she admits, ‘there is a hollowness in the sound which betrays me. I am a benevolent spectator’ (‘Memories’ 231). Despite her diffidence, Woolf’s commitment to socialism and to working-class politics organizes the argument of more than one critic. Among them is Michael Tratner’s Modernism and Mass Politics, which views Woolf’s (and Joyce’s) alignment with the working-class as instrumental in shaping her modernism. For a different view of Mary’s volunteerism and work, see Jane Marcus’s treatment (27). ‘The Mark on the Wall’ appeared with Leonard’s short fiction ‘Three Jews’ in Two Stories in 1917, the first volume published by Hogarth Press. As Laura Marcus quite rightly observes in ‘Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press’, ‘The Hogarth Press freed her . . . from the sort of audience the Duckworths represented for her – Victorian, conventional, anti-experimental’ (131). It is with Hogarth that all of Woolf’s most celebrated novels and polemical essays would be published and republished in England. A study of female students at Somerville College confirms Woolf’s complaints about their paltry amenities and the greater luxuries bestowed on male students. These all too basic accommodations apparently disinclined women of the aristocratic class to matriculate. A middle-class demographic prevailed at elite female institutions (see Leonardi 14–16). Unlike their male peers, these middle-class female students could not cover their class interests under the cloak of aristocratic tradition or institutional liberality. Elitism, for male students, was systemically ritualized and, along with it, a disavowal of ambition and of professionalism. None of these positions was readily available to female students, who, when aspiring, were usually coded as excessively ambitious or sexless or both. For a discussion of the university system that structured this male intellectual elite, see Magali Larson’s chapter ‘Uses and Limitations of the Aristocratic Model’ (80–103). Along with Harold Perkin and Perry Anderson, Larson makes clear that the rising professional bourgeoisie adopted the model of assimilation into dominant culture that the gentry and the industrial bourgeoisie of the previous centuries had systematically implemented. In addition to the literature connecting women negatively to consumption, see also Thomas Richards’s study of commodity culture, in which the female consumer is the dupe, the manipulated agent and, finally, the commodified spectacle itself (204–48). Without acceding to this association as Richards seems to do, Andreas Huyssen, in constructing an argument on mass culture and modernism, shows how women became identified with all the banal excesses that consumption denoted (44–45). Rita Felski makes a similar connection and uses Madame Bovary to explain ‘why the image of the womanas-consumer has been such a powerful presence in this dystopia of modernity’ (Gender of Modernity 88). ‘Within this modernist moment, art remade the market, and the market made modernism’ (Wicke 22). Wicke’s treatment of Bloomsbury and Mrs Dalloway helps correct the misimpression Paul Delany’s otherwise informative

182 Notes

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

study of the Woolfs’ finances gives. Delany, in claiming that Hogarth was not ‘a profitable investment’ for the Woolfs (6), takes insufficient account of the symbolic capital that the couple encouraged, supervised, amassed, and disseminated, and the recognition and status these in turn granted them. For example, while the sale of Virginia’s half of Hogarth Press to Lehmann fetched only £3000 in 1938, a single signed copy of Hogarth’s edition of The Waste Land, which the Woolfs advertised for 4s. 6d. in 1923, was recently offered for $4600, or approximately £2900 (the dollar figure is quoted in Dettmar and Watt 5). The term is T.S. Eliot’s and refers to ‘books, pictures’ that provide income for some members of the clerisy (‘On the Place’ 246–47). Among these artists were Carrington, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, as well as Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell. As Guinevere Griest points out, Mudie’s Circulating Library, with its ‘Select’ library and its shrewd marketing, helped create the modern readership for novels in Britain and its empire. The decline of the lending library and tripledecker takes place as the novel gains in status as art and trades as a discrete commodity. Though Woolf was a patron, her disdain of the triple-decker form and the circulating library expressed in her diary is perhaps typical of her peers’. ‘Mudies, I confess, sickens me of reading: I feel disinclined even to write, what may become one of these books, so like bales of stuff upon a drapers shelves – only with out the solid merit of good wool’ (1: 165–66). The figure is actually slightly more according to Willis, the press earning £580.14.8 in 1929 (Appendix B, 406). The reasons for the relocation were various but came about partly because of the increasing space Hogarth required. On the configuration of the house at Tavistock Square, see Woolf’s Diary 2: 297. Of the many critics who have subscribed to this view, Alex Zwerdling is among the most persuasive. For Woolf’s relationship to the press, see his chapter ‘Class and Money’. Annan’s narrative of ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’ appears in the prefaces to his two studies of Leslie Stephen and his contribution to the tribute to G.M. Trevelyan, and accords the Anglo-educated bourgeoisie a natural genealogy and a past legitimacy that, like Woolf’s of the female writer, is instead a rather recent and creative imposition. As Larson explains, this genealogy is neither a natural nor an inevitable phenomenon but rather a social and historical one: ‘Historical continuity is . . . deliberately and actively sought in the attempts by organized professions to give themselves a culture with roots in a classic past’ (xv, 80–83). See also Zwerdling on the biological determinism informing Annan’s analysis (335n4). The term is from an unsigned review in Blackwood’s Magazine by Margaret Oliphant of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Orlando sold over 8000 copies in England in eight weeks (L. Woolf, Downhill 143). A Room sold 12,000 copies in England and 10,000 in America in its first six months (Willis 154). It is of no small consequence that the noble Orlando changes into a woman while an outcast living with gypsies in the feminized Orient, as Karen Lawrence points out in her reading of Woolf’s burlesque ‘orientalizing [of ] Orlando’s

Notes 183

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

sex change’ (196). The East as erotic plenitude is put at the service of Woolf’s imaginative biography as it would be of other modernists’ fiction. Such was, of course, not the case with Sackville-West, who forfeited her place at the family estate of Knole on the death of her father, this in the same year Orlando was published. However, consistent with the argument I am making, Sackville-West’s book royalties make possible her purchase of Sissinghurst Castle, and thus restored her noble berth. Raymond Williams suggestively makes this connection between artist and aristocrat in his discussion of modernism (Writing in Society 225). Sackville-West received the Hawthornden Prize for her pastoral poem The Land in 1927, which Woolf caricatures as ‘The Oak Tree’ in the novel. Consistent with Birken’s claim that the desiring individual is the quintessential subject of postindustrial capitalism, Woolf implies in her playful representation of Orlando that desire is the noble’s natural condition. It grants lord and lady vitality, longevity, and agency. Baudrillard says as much in a footnote to his critique of classical Marxist political economy, although he continues to emphasize the mode of production over consumption. ‘On the other hand, if one conceives of consumption as production, the production of signs, which is also in the process of systematization on the basis of a generalization of exchange of value (of signs), then the two spheres are homogeneous – though at the same time, not comparable in terms of causal priority, but homologous from the viewpoint of structural modalities’ (83n.). Around the cluster of signs Bermingham calls the picturesque, we can see the first aesthetic to be commodified by the middle-classes, commodity capitalism’s early contract with female consumers, and the vitality of this contract. The picturesque, she convincingly demonstrates, offers one important site in which the middle-classes were encouraged to aestheticize their lives. Its emphasis on ornamentation was ‘perfectly suited to the kinds of domestic objects easily afforded by the middle-class consumer and supplied in increasing volume by a whole host of domestic manufacturers’ (87). The female consumer in making her person a fashionable sight and fashion site engendered her person within her class. The primary objection, according to the prosecutor Pinard, as Dominick LaCapra explains in quoting him, was that ‘the author, employing “all the wonders of his style”, ha[d] used these colors to paint Madame Bovary, and the result [wa]s a glorification of adultery and an undermining of marriage. For “the beauty of Madame Bovary is a beauty of provocation”’ (37). As LaCapra points out, the defense attorney Senard insisted that this novel is ‘the story of social maladjustment: a farmer’s daughter, socially predestined to become the wife of a small-town officier de santé, receives an education inappropriate for her station in life. This discrepancy between social position and the illegitimate expectations created by education is the source of Emma’s difficulties’ (42). One influential book on fashion in its day is J.C. Flügel’s The Psychology of Clothes, published by Hogarth. Flügel’s study notes the trend in women’s fashion towards an idealization of youth and vitality, boyishness over mature femininity, a postwar phenomenon which stresses ‘long slender limbs and undeveloped torso . . . where any display of the (formerly so much

184 Notes

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35.

36.

37.

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admired) characteristics of the fuller figure is discountenanced’ (162). Orlando, from youth to the 36-year-old poet (from boy to woman), not to mention Princess Sasha as she is first espied (the person skating is either boy or woman) surely conform to Flügel’s description of the preferences in vogue. While I agree with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s reading of Orlando’s cross-dressing as ‘a shift in fashion, so that Woolf associates it with shifts in literary style and shifts in historical styles’ (No Man’s Land 2: 344), I depart from them on what they make of these shifts in style. They see Orlando as a utopic text that revises a female tradition of cross-dressing, literal and literary. This female tradition depends on the binary of sexual difference I am at pains to dispute. My interest is to understand Woolf’s androgyny in terms of its own cultural moment and the very hierarchical model of professionalism her androgynous self-fashioning organizes. One reason the word ‘style’ is preferred to ‘fashion’ is due to the latter’s negative association with Victorian femininity. By the end of the century, a concern with fashion was also linked to the avant-garde and to the stigma of degeneration. I refer, of course, to its identification with fin de siècle decadence in such works as Max Nordau’s. Benjamin complains that ‘fashion covers up reality’, and ‘invents an artificial humanity’ (qtd. in Buck-Morss 100). For Lukács, see his reverential account of Walter Scott’s historical novels versus his critique of Zola and late bourgeois realism. In Flaubert, Lukács would see ‘one of the most important precursors of dehumanization in modern literature’ (195). Jameson places this ‘decorative’ trend in a different place, that of New Criticism. ‘[B]y fetishizing language and making of it the source of a kind of a historical plenitude, they [New Critics] were able to contain their discussion of the logic of content within purely ethical limits, without being obliged to translate those ethical categories themselves into social and historical terms’ (Marxism 332). As is well known, New Critics dismissed history as a meaningful category of understanding and focused their attention, like modernists, on style. Adam Parkes regards Oscar Wilde’s self-fashioned style as paradigmatic of modernism’s. Wilde’s marketing of play, which subverts the Victorian ethos of labor, and sobriety provokes fears over identity within dominant culture that eventually result in his criminalization (15–16). While he is certainly an important precursor, the showman Wilde is not the consummate professional (advocating artistic detachment and the objectification of art) that Woolf and fellow modernists aspire to become. That Woolf has been viewed as a latecomer to modernism does not make her any less exemplary in terms of the logic I am tracing nor does it devalue the impact she has had and continues to have on modernism and feminism. According, for example, to Michael Levenson, Woolf’s ill-timing was ‘because she seemed doomed to repeat the rituals of aesthetic revolt, premature because she was doomed to live before the epoch of the daughters’ (166). Revealingly, what saves her, in Levenson’s opinion, is ‘To the Lighthouse, which becomes finally a vindication of the rights and gifts of the daughter’ (166). What I argue, instead, is that Woolf’s model inaugurates the ‘epoch of the daughters’, and makes clear the logic that informs modern culture with the imbrication of the expert class and refined consumption. For more on this epoch, see my essay ‘Exceptional Women, Expert Culture, and the Academy’.

Notes 185

3

Sacred cows: modernism, Woolf, and her fictive seraphs

1. The occasion was Joyce Carol Oates’s review ‘So What’s So Great?’ of Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World by David Denby, movie critic and recidivist student at Columbia in an introductory course on the ‘Great Books’ (1 September 1996). The two other female writers are Sappho and Austen, and the other modernist is Conrad, whose death in 1924 makes him arguably a twentieth-century writer also. 2. While Bourdieu, the Ehrenreichs, Gouldner, Larson, and Guillory make these points, Harold Perkin singles out the Bloomsbury intellectuals for special mention. Under the subheading, ‘The Condescension of Professionalism’, Perkin shows how the drive for autonomization manifests itself in the arrogance and elitism that marks the Bloomsbury coterie. ‘Intellectuals in particular’, he notes, ‘though drawn almost exclusively from the professional middle class, tended to think of themselves as free-floating mental operators set apart from their social origins. Some intellectuals, like the Bloomsbury group, were in fact Victorians of a familiar rebellious kind but saw themselves as raised above the common herd by their revolt against their parents’ generation. . . . They were all convinced of their superiority to the money-grubbing business men and benighted workers outside of the magic circle of the arts and literature’ (Rise 391). In his example, we can begin to trace the logic by which the narrative of rupture and apogee serves the ambitions of the modernist elite for expert status as well as the way it serves to camouflage these same ambitions. In moving from dominated to dominant culture, the Anglo-modernist elite will portray itself in precisely the terms that Bourdieu specifies: ‘In every field, the dominant have an interest in continuity, identity and reproduction, whereas the dominated, the newcomers, are for discontinuity, rupture and subversion’ (The Field of Cultural Production 275n33). 3. The version of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ referenced here is the one published by Hogarth Press and later reprinted in Collected Essays. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the essay are from the reprint in Collected Essays. This version differs in several important respects from the early version of the essay, which first appeared as a signed review in the ‘Literary Review’ of the New York Evening Post, 17 November 1923, that later became the basis of her talk ‘Character and Fiction’ presented to the Society of Heretics at Cambridge, 18 May 1924. 4. ‘The fact that the members of different classes traveled on the same train, moved by the same power, did not’, as Schivelbusch observes, ‘render them social equals’ (72). De Certeau understands the circumstances this way: ‘Assemblies no longer obey hierarchies of dogmatic orders; they are organized by the girdwork of technocratic discipline, a mute rationalization of laissez-faire individualism’ (113). 5. As Catherine Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story shows with considerable cogency, modern fiction’s narratives about strangers in effect transformed everyone into a character and thereby guaranteed fiction its own market and legitimacy. 6. The coach conversations that abound in eighteenth-century fiction suggest that travelers interacted easily with one another, exchanging knowledge and offering accounts of themselves. In lieu of these lively social exchanges,

186 Notes

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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conversations came to a halt in rail coaches, and in their place travelers observe one another awkwardly and silently (Schivelbusch 73–77). We might usefully compare this fictive rail encounter with an earlier one Woolf staged under similar circumstances. In her 1920 short story ‘An Unwritten Novel’, Woolf’s narrator imagines the life history of another rail passenger, the frumpy ‘Minnie Marsh’. Woolf ‘reads’ her as a middle-aged spinster off on a holiday visit to an affluent brother, smug sister-in-law, and their brood of ill-mannered children. Based equally on a chance meeting, the crowning irony turns on the spinster upstaging her literary creator by being met at the station by her son. In the case of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, the passenger exercises no such rights. That Bennett would be Woolf’s principal target is not coincidental, given his complaint that Jacob’s Room lacked convincing characters. In fact, his criticism was very much on her mind in composing Mrs Dalloway as her diary entries make clear (Diary 2: 248–49). Since the 1920 publication of his Our Women, Bennett and his sympathizers had been engaged in a press duel with Woolf over the intellectual abilities of women, which they saw not only as negligible but resistant to improvement (see Appendix III, Diary 2: 339–42). In one response, Woolf retorts that ‘there will always be in existence a nucleus of women who think, invent, imagine, and create as freely as men do, and with as little fear of ridicule and condescension’ (Diary 2: 342). My project very much concerns the modern emergence and continuation of this nucleus. Though we can all point to possible candidates who might take up the marked class and gender positions Mrs Brown signifies, the singing crone or Mrs Dempster in Mrs Dalloway, Mrs McNab in To the Lighthouse, Crosley in The Years, none carries the representational weight in these works as do the characters Woolf offers as exemplary in her essay: Victoria, Prufrock, Ulysses. As Woolf puts it, Mrs Brown is not merely traveling from one station to another, ‘but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs Brown is eternal, Mrs Brown is human nature’ (330). Freud, to take one notable example, understood his science as mining the unconscious and likened himself to ‘a conscientious archaeologist’ who ‘bring[s] to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity’ (Dora 27). Woolf’s proclamation appears in the early version of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in ‘Literary Review’ of the New York Evening Post, 17 November 1923, and is later reprinted in Nation & Athenaeum, 1 December 1923, and in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, which is quoted here (3: 384). For the relation between modernism and human sciences, see Martin Jay’s essay, ‘Modernism and the Specter of Psychologism’. Jay implies that modernism resists the other professions in order to establish itself as a separate and respected (i.e. expert) domain. Asserting autonomy over the object of study, Jay’s thesis, is of course the primary strategy of the modern expert class. In exposing Bloomsbury’s systematic marketing and consumption of modernism, Wicke argues that ‘stream of consciousness’, the preeminent mode of representation practiced by modernists, functions as a correlative of the thriving consumerism of metropolitan London. In other words, modernism’s stream of consciousness duplicates consumerism’s stream of spending. Identifying Mrs Dalloway’s lyricism with consumer liquidity explains, according

Notes 187

15.

16.

17.

18.

to Wicke, why character treatment of Bloomsbury is completely unnecessary, and, I suggest, counterproductive. It is not enough, therefore, to recognize consumerism and modernism as equivalents, as Wicke does, or to comprehend them as the productive and creative processes they are. It is also necessary to recognize how they break down the barriers between public and private domains to allow a new form of cultural expertise and literacy to emerge. The modernist Woolf becomes the artificer rather than the ‘represented’ beneficiary of consumption in Mrs Dalloway, just as had Flaubert with Madame Bovary, which both distances her from commerce and also structures her positional superiority. For critical readings of the opposition between Woolf and Freud, see Elizabeth Abel’s Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis that importantly documents Woolf’s objections to Freud and psychoanalysis during the 1920s. As Abel explains, Woolf’s views ran counter to those of her husband’s. His enthusiasm is apparent in his agreement to have Hogarth publish the International Psycho-Analytic Library (IPL), and this in the same year that Virginia was completing The Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway, and presented ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ to the Society of Heretics. By contrast, Jan Ellen Goldstein’s 1974 study, ‘The Woolfs’ Response to Freud’, understands Woolf’s attitude as one of diffidence more than of disapproval, pointing to the fact that Woolf claims not to have read Freud to any degree until 1939 (Diary 5: 248). For Goldstein, Woolf was more influenced by G.E. Moore’s radical ethics which promoted artistic sovereignty. Jay’s more recent ‘Modernism and the Specter of Psychologism’, previously cited, makes Woolf’s reserve read more like anxiety, arguing that modernists feared being subsumed by the science of psychology. Two texts by Freud and Woolf would seem to validate Jay’s contentions: Freud’s 1907 critique of the artistic process, translated into English in 1925, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, and Woolf’s 1920 review ‘Freudian Fiction’. These suggest that the pair indeed both aspired for control over the same terrain, that of the imagination, and wanted to exercise this authority unfettered by the other’s expertise. Indeed, Woolf’s so-called reticence about matters sexual that critics often point to in her novels might rather be part of her refusal of Freudian modernism and of her critics’ own interpellation. It is worth recalling that the term ‘scientist’, as S.G. Checkland has noted, was coined in the 1840s specifically after the term ‘artist’ (99). Lovell, in Consuming Fiction, interprets Woolf’s accession to the literary arts as a denial of her sex (140). For her part, Ann Ardis in New Women, New Novels complains that, in the second decade of the twentieth century, Woolf appropriates without proper attribution the feminized treatment of character that female novelists from the 1880s on had been developing (172). Margaret Ezell details the effect of this deletion in A Room of One’s Own on Renaissance and seventeenth-century studies in ‘The Myth of Judith Shakespeare’. If we take the process of expert ascription into account, however, we can see that the contest to gain accreditation not only leads to a claim of rupture with the past but also necessitates a shrewd selection of predecessors and contemporaries. Abel argues in a reading of Freud’s ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ that the alienist intended to colonize the entire cultural field of representation, including the literary arts (16–19). In ‘Freudian Fiction’, Woolf recounts the

188 Notes

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21.

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harmful effects of science’s colonization: ‘Snubbed and discouraged, the artist retreats; and before the end of the book the medical man is left in possession of the field; all the characters have become cases; and our diagnosis is now so assured that a boy of six has scarcely opened his lips before we detect in him unmistakable symptoms of the prevailing disease’ (153). The two, Woolf and Freud, were clearly at odds over control of the same representational field. For example, Freud upholds the family unit as the crucial component in his model of developmental sexuality. By contrast, Woolf’s treatment of androgyny in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own puts in doubt the primacy of the Victorian family and of the procreative model and sexual difference that subtend it. For a discussion of sexology’s involvement in maintaining normative gender roles, see Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents (71, 80), and Chapter 4. Only ‘Mrs Dalloway on Bond Street’, which appeared in The Dial, July 1923, was published in Woolf’s lifetime. See Stella McNicol’s introduction to Mrs Dalloway’s Party (9). Significantly, none of this luncheon threesome has produced a male heir. Desire and fecundity are not coterminous. No longer is the reproduction of male scions, according to this novel, socially mandated. My analysis focuses specifically on Bradshaw and not Smith’s other physician Holmes. While Holmes is tainted by the same brush, he is not the consummate specialist that Sir William is. For a description of the rest cure, see Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient; ‘The Evolution of the Rest Treatment’; ‘The Treatment by Rest, Seclusion, etc., In Relation to Psychotherapy’. For a critique of this treatment, especially as it was applied to women, see Suzanne Poirer, ‘The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure’; Ellen Bassuk, ‘The Rest Cure’; and Barbara Sicherman, ‘The Uses of a Diagnosis’. In The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter contends that W.S. Playfair imported Mitchell’s cure into England for his obstetrics practice in the 1880s, and that his sympathetic treatment ended the seclusion of many a female patient: ‘In encouraging her to eat, acclimating her to vigorous massage, and moving her to a bright room, Playfair ended her bondage to a debilitating ideal of angelic womanhood’ (139–40). In contrast, Bassuk, in quoting a contemporary of Weir Mitchell, describes a more oppressive intervention: ‘Before beginning treatment, the doctor promised the patient a “positive cure” provided that she relinquished control to the physician and “concerned herself with nothing but following directions”. Mitchell made it clear to his patients that he was in total control and that their feelings, questions, and concerns must be disregarded’ (141). Bassuk is quoting here, Byford, Manual of Gynecology, 182. In terms of Woolf, Poirer points to her great resentment of the regimen and particularly of the dietary supplement of milk she was forced to follow. But follow it she did, according to Goldstein, for some 30 years, all the way up to her suicide (445–46). In making this connection, I am not suggesting some crude conflation of Weir Mitchell’s regimen with Freud’s. They are obviously very different treatments and arise from very different etiologies, one physiological, the other psychological. Mitchell’s rest cure came from treating Civil War troops for acute exhaustion and mental duress with rest and food. He later adapted this technique to treat neurasthenia, particularly in women (‘Evolution’ 368–71).

Notes 189 By the end of the Great War, however, Mitchell’s therapy had been judged ineffective whereas Freud’s more radical one of psychoanalysis had gained institutional acceptance. Given Mitchell’s fading star and Freud’s ascending one, it makes strategic sense for Woolf to aim her vitriol at the former while also intending to taint alienists as a class, to include Freud. 25. That Woolf connects Smith’s suffering from the Great War to Clarissa’s from the great influenza epidemic of 1918 suggests a greater cognizance of the stakes aesthetic modernism was waging against psychiatric modernism for control of modern consciousness. We are only slowly beginning to recover the results of this rivalry. As Martin Stone documents in his study of the psychological effects of trench warfare on British soldiers in the Great War, ‘Shellshock and the Psychologists’, the new technologies of warfare from the mass-produced armaments by home-front industries to the massing of soldiers in the trenches on the Western front produced a new form of martial socialization and, subsequently, a new understanding of wartime pathology, suggested by the changed medical classification from the late nineteenth-century’s trope of ‘battle fatigue’ to the Great War’s ‘shellshock’. The shift in tropology is of no small consequence. Mental illness in essence supplanted bodily illness, and shellshock ‘brought neuroses into the mainstream of mental medicine and economic life and set psychiatry’s field of practice squarely within the social fabric of industrial society’ (Stone 266). In other words, the production and regulation of the health, according to Stone, were transferred to the modern sciences of the mind and to Freud’s model in particular, and were accorded cultural authority as a result of World War I. From the war, psychology also entered the home, as Smith’s example suggests. There is, of course, a medical precedent for this intervention in the home, as previously indicated. Weir Mitchell himself relocated his treatment from war front to home front. 26. That Elizabeth and her mother are completely different ‘types’ by temperament and aspirations is even further suggested by Elizabeth’s appearance, on which Clarissa ruminates: ‘Was it that some Mongol had been wrecked on the coast of Norfolk (as Mrs Hilbery said), had mixed with the Dalloway ladies, perhaps, a hundred years ago? For the Dalloways, in general, were fair-haired; blue-eyed; Elizabeth, on the contrary, was dark; had Chinese eyes in a pale face’ (122–23). According to Barbara Fassler, associations with the Oriental were meant to connote androgyny: ‘The association of southern or oriental peoples with homosexuality is thus both a formal theory and a popular myth, so common it crops up in poetry, casual references, and jesting letters. In this context, Woolf subtly gives “Chinese eyes” both to Mrs Dalloway’s daughter Elizabeth and to Lily Briscoe . . . .[I]mages linked to current theories of homosexuality are used to suggest the combination of masculine and feminine qualities in the androgynous character’ (245–46). Elizabeth and Lily, both marked, refuse domestic incumbency, of no small import to this argument on female intellectuals, the expert class, and the structure of androgyny. 27. Smith’s suicide becomes the ultimate act of disaccumulation, the singular trait of a consumer economy, as Birken notes in Consuming Desire. To appreciate Clarissa’s sanction of Septimus’s act, consider also Woolf’s critique of psychoanalysts in her 1920 review ‘Freudian Fiction’. Charging the author of the novel An Imperfect Mother of acting ‘the part of stepfather to some of the

190 Notes

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30.

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very numerous progeny of Dr. Freud’, Woolf goes on to question the salubrity of psychoanalysis. ‘A patient who has never heard a canary sing without falling down in a fit can now walk through an avenue of cages without a twinge of emotion since he has faced the fact that his mother kissed him in the cradle’ (152). The affective injury (the loss of desire and emotional response) is a more damaging affliction, according to Woolf, than the original ailment, and particularly so for the nascent artist or intellectual. It signals a loss of acuity and agency. This point I shall return to with To the Lighthouse. Desire is in both texts intrinsic to ontology. ‘Homeless mind’ is the term, according to Hilde Heyen’s Architecture and Modernity, that best captures the condition of the mobile and rootless indigene of modernity. My reading of mourning in Mrs Dalloway differs considerably from its treatment heretofore offered. To take one noteworthy example, Maria DiBattista’s analysis of this text (and of To the Lighthouse) understands ‘the work of mourning [as] the primary labor performed by the feminine imagination’ (58), that leads to the novel’s ‘last and greatest triumph’ – ‘inaugurating, in the time of the novel, the reign of the feminine lawgiver’ (59). Yet exactly what it means for Woolf to become a ‘lawgiver’ is not addressed on a cultural level. Critical readings, which locate mourning exclusively within the institution of modernist art, all too smoothly segue to the artist’s personal vision or development, overlooking in this leap the logic operating in the interstices between mode and object of representation, between writer and text, and between expert artist and national/familial politics which, in Woolf’s case, allows her to displace her Victorian parents. They fail to see, therefore, the structural changes that this mode both augurs and instances for art and household in competition with other forms of expertise, and what this in turn portends for the female intellectual and expert class. This is, I contend, what is at stake when critics point to Woolf’s domestication of the unconscious, a point that Goldstein, for example, makes and returns to in her essay on the Woolfs and Freud (459 and 471). For Goldstein, however, this appropriation by intellectuals and artists, as nonscience, is only a crude approximation of Freud’s master discourse. In other words, Freud’s proprietary rights over the imagination are upheld in her essay. I suggest, on the contrary, that Woolf’s ‘domestication of the unconscious’ aims at penetrating the imagination to assert her authority over domestic ideology and thereby cancel its Victorian form. As she records in her diary: ‘The word “sentimental” sticks in my gizzard. . . . But this theme may be sentimental; father & mother & child in the garden: the death; the sail to the lighthouse’ (3: 36). And again, ‘I dont feel sure what the stock criticism will be. Sentimental? Victorian?’ (3: 107). ‘I am making some use of symbolism, I observe; & I go in dread of “sentimentality”’ (3: 107). Clearly Woolf wanted to avoid this categorization and its association with the Victorian maternal, especially as it might lessen her critical distance and jeopardize her aesthetic detachment. Her subaltern status is accentuated by Mrs Ramsay’s racialized condescension of ‘her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face’ (29). In addition to Fassler, cited earlier, who understands Orientalism as coding Lily’s androgyny, as indeed the color yellow likely codes Carmichael’s homosexuality, Susan

Notes 191 Lanser reads this color coding in more overtly racial terms. See ‘Feminist Criticism, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and the Politics of Color in America’. These two readings, I suggest, are not as antithetical as they may first appear, a correspondence that must await another moment for me to clarify. 33. In terms of Woolf’s texts, Mrs Ramsay’s want of desire places her on a continuum with other characters, such as Septimus Smith and Lady Bradshaw, whose similar want testifies to their decline, and in Smith’s case, demise, as individuals. Lack of desire signals, post-evolutionism, a loss of agency and of humanity. Its presence appears to distinguish Woolf’s generation from the preceding Victorian one. 34. This shielding is effectively disguised by the linguistic sleight of hand that Ann Banfield identifies in ‘Describing the Unobserved: Events Grouped Around an Empty Center’. In certain modern discourses like Flaubert’s, Proust’s, and Woolf’s novels, according to Banfield, the reader is presented with a speakerless, centerless narration that records events ‘with a now-inthe-past’ which appears to take place outside of any human intervention or even discourse (276). Indeed, she finds Woolf’s segment ‘Time Passes’ exemplary in this way (274). 35. Although DiBattista’s phrasing works to mythify the female artist and her reading to restrict the conflict to one of family romance, she comes to a similar conclusion about literary production (110). What DiBattista fails to acknowledge is Woolf’s complicity in this familial requiem and her resulting gain in status as an expert modernist.

4

Queer couplings: Forster’s hellenic pastoralism and modern masculinity

1. Virginia Woolf observed in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ that Forster spoiled his fiction by relying on outmoded conventions, realism being foremost (333). On the temper of his prose, Katherine Mansfield caustically remarked: ‘E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot’ (qtd. in Gardner 162). And fellow Bloomsberry Lytton Strachey nicknamed him ‘the Taupe’ (King 26–28). See Forster’s own remembrance of not belonging to Bloomsbury (Commonplace Book 49). F.R. Leavis judged Forster a minor writer and dilettante (introduction to the Abinger edition of Aspects of the Novel). In her introduction to Forster’s Selected Letters, Lago acknowledges that Forster ‘created for himself an original persona – odd, demure and whimsical –’ (viii), then forgets his adeptness at self-figuration when she ascribes his reticence to his avowed ‘sexual frustration’ or to self-contempt over his mother’s obsessive nurturing (x). 2. In Levenson’s view, ‘much of the inspiration’ behind Forster’s fictional experiments ‘lies in the attempt to revive a dying tradition’ (79). Tambling’s introduction to E.M. Forster attempts to account for why the novelist remains what he was in his own day, ‘a minor classic’ (1–13). 3. See Bourdieu’s discussion of the interplay between position and disposition (The Field of Cultural Production 61–65). 4. Forster was the first novelist (Eliot was his immediate predecessor) to be invited to deliver the Clark Lectures. At the time of Forster’s lectures, Cambridge came under new statutes that created a distinct English faculty, which

192 Notes

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9.

allowed degrees in modern English literature. See also Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons. This manuscript remained unpublished and largely ignored among E.M. Forster’s Papers held at King’s College Modern Archive Centre until two essays of mine on Forster, ‘Shepherds in the Parlor’ and ‘“Only Cathect”’, brought it to the attention of scholars. It has subsequently been published by Cecil Woolf. This and the quotations that follow refer to this published text. The Apostles, a secret student society known as ‘The Cambridge Conversazione Society’, was founded in 1820 and boasted in Forster’s time notables such as Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, and the philosopher G.E. Moore. When Forster was inducted in his last year at King’s College, the society was entering, in Francis King’s words, ‘its period of greatest glory’ (28–29). For treatment of the Apostles in the era of Tennyson, see Dellamora’s opening chapter of Masculine Desire (16–41). Mill begins The Subjection of Women by countervailing the strong emotions owing to the subject with an appeal to conduct a rational argument over one grounded in feelings (119–20). In the later version of Forster’s talk presented to the Friday Club, at which Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) was present, and which, coincidentally, met on 9 December 1910, Forster was openly disdainful of the lawyer Mill: ‘The mask falls off him, and we see that this man who, seemed so sensible and rather cultured, is really a lawyer’ (21). Previously, the Apostles had discussed W.L. Courtney’s 1904 critique of women writers, The Feminine Note in Fiction, whose sentiments Forster seems to draw on. As Courtney contends: ‘Recently complaints have been heard that the novel as a work of art is disappearing and giving place to monographs on given subjects or else individual studies of character. If the complaint be true – and in some respects it obviously is true – the reason is that more and more in our modern age novels are written by women for women.’ He then continues much as Forster: ‘It is the neutrality of the artistic mind which the female novelist seems to find it difficult to realize. . . . The female author is at once self-conscious and didactic’ (xii–xiii). The literature on the ideology the novel carries is extensive. On the social contract of the domestic novel, see Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction; on the heterosexual contract, see Wittig’s The Straight Mind and Other Essays, and Rich’s Of Woman Born and ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ in Women. I use the term ‘heteronormative standard’ as well as the sex classifications, ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’, advisedly. As scholars have pointed out and as I argue, these terms were only beginning to gain disciplinary and epistemic currency. See, for example, Jonathan Ned Katz’s contention: ‘Heterosexuality, I now think, is invented in discourse as that which is outside discourse. It’s manufactured in a particular discourse as that which is universal. It’s constructed in a historically specific discourse as that which is outside time. It was constructed quite recently as that which is very old: Heterosexuality is an invented discourse’ (182). See Sinfield, The Wilde Century, which understands the homosexual as a belated identity (8). On the unstated ideology discourses convey, see Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. This last quotation comes from the second ending given for the talk, which, as the editor Piggford notes, appears to be more tentative and less didactic in recognition of its mixed audience of men and women (14).

Notes 193 10. Furbank’s biography captures the allure and Forster’s attachment: ‘Nowhere outside England has there been an institution like Victorian Oxford and Cambridge – that Cockaigne or “great good place” for the sons of the professional middle classes. . . . Forster fell in love with Cambridge himself, though not in any tragic sense. . . .Cambridge transformed him, and he always acknowledged his debt’ (1: 49). Forster expresses this sentiment in his 1941 reminiscence ‘Cambridge’ (356–60). 11. This transforming homophilia was part of, Dowling’s study implies, the broad reforms that both universities instituted in the second half of the century, to include abolishing the requirements of Anglican orders for dons and of celibacy for fellows, and the creation of natural science disciplines. 12. My reading of Moore’s impact on Anglo-modernism is indebted to Regan’s useful study, Bloomsbury’s Prophet. 13. Sinfield, who sees the homosexual as a belated identity, argues that it is not coterminous with the category aesthete or dandy of the fin de siècle or even with the public celebrity of Wilde. ‘The interpretative challenge is to recover the moment of indeterminacy. For it is not that our idea of the “homosexual” was hiding beneath other phrases, or lurking unspecified in the silence, like a statue under a sheet, fully formed but waiting to be unveiled; it was in the process of becoming constituted’ (8). Similarly, Dowling observes, ‘in the cultural moment before the Wilde disaster there was no implication of an impending doom, only the gradual emergence into visibility of a new system of values and attitudes, associated with a variety of movements in art and society, having in common their relation to the inchoate counterdiscourse of “homosexuality”’ (132). 14. All his fiction of the tourist trade, ‘The Eternal Moment’, Where Angels Fear to Tread, A Room with a View, A Passage to India, belittle the feminine picturesque. See also Sara Suleri on the imperial import of the feminine picturesque. 15. Pan is not only the tuneful son of Hermes but also part sylvan beast with his goat horns and hoofs. Forest and woods are the local haunts for his ludic pranks that can elicit fear or bliss depending on the recipient’s disposition. 16. In his 1920s’ talk to the Memoir Club, Forster recalls how, unaware of the sexual innuendoes his early stories contained, he was put right by Keynes’s acquaintance Charles Sayle, an assistant librarian at the university library. (‘My Books and I’ reprinted in The Longest Journey, Abinger edition 302.) This admission attests to the fundamental ways in which Forster’s Cambridge colleagues educated the author about his latent homophilia that he textualized in his fiction. Unless stated, quotations from The Longest Journey refer to the Vintage edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 17. As Buzard has noted of Eustace’s in this story and Lucy Honeychurch’s metamorphosis in A Room With a View, the English tourist’s conversion is accomplished over the body of an Italian man: ‘Forster appears to participate in the same kind of exploitation of Italian life and culture he was elsewhere so concerned to criticise’ (18–20n9). 18. In treating the main protagonist Harold’s transformation in ‘Albergo Empedocle’ and the loss of Greek pedagogic models in elite education, Dellamora observes of his awakening: ‘The experience seems to suggest that although it may no longer be possible to think Greek, it is still possible to become Greek (Apocalyptic Overtures 86, original emphasis). My use of Dowling’s extended argument of Oxbridge

194 Notes

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

hellenism leads me, however, to come to a different understanding about the shift Dellamora identifies from thinking to becoming. Bristow’s argument that Forster intended ‘to contest the imperialist masculinity that was keenly intolerant of the intellectual artistic type of leisure-class aesthete with whom he clearly identified’ (56), overlooks the way that Forster, in his professionalism, disassociated himself from the aesthete and his dilettantism. As Jonathan Freedman points out in his study of Henry James, dilettantism is exactly the critique modernists such as Pound mount against James all the while emulating his model of expertise. Although Forster constructs the terms of the critique to fit his own aesthetic values, in important respects it is the same professional quarrel. Given the logic I am locating in the expert literary model, it is no surprise that F.R. Leavis would produce a similar argument against Bloomsbury when he attacks this coterie’s dilettantism in his effort to professionalize literary studies. Two studies indirectly bear on Forster’s synthesis of Cambridge hellenism with his Anglocentrism. What Stape’s ‘Comparing Mythologies’ considers as Forster humanizing of the aloof Pater’s aesthetic – viz. the textual compassion Forster invests in the philistine Maurice’s erotic defection at Cambridge – I read as Forster’s realism put at the service of naturalizing Anglo-homophilia. Roessel’s ‘Live Orientals and Dead Greeks’ documents Forster’s preclusive homage to ancient Greece and his repudiation and disdain of modern Greece in his writings of the 1920s. These and earlier writings confirm, in Roessel’s view, ‘the movement of the Hellenic spirit to the West’ (57). As he comments: ‘Forster’s Hellenism consisted of ideas that reside in the mind and, if they had any locality, they were now in Cambridge libraries and the British Museum’ (56). In face of the war’s incontrovertible evidence, imperial adventure writers such as Kipling and Rider Haggard turned homeward imaginatively to England to resuscitate what was widely perceived as their adventurers’ flagging potency. See Trotter’s ‘Kipling’s England’. Dellamora discusses Forster’s misogynic turn in Apocalyptic Overtures (87), as does Elaine Freedgood in ‘E.M. Forster’s Queer Nation’ (133). An early draft of the novel had Stephen and Rickie going off together, much as Maurice and Alec in Maurice. Forster’s opinion of Oscar Wilde is useful to recall here. In ‘English Literature since the War’, Forster made clear that, while he denounced Wilde’s treatment in the courts and prison, he did not regard Wilde very highly as a writer. Though Forster was prepared to argue this position against critical opinion on the Continent, to my knowledge, he never undertook such an argument. I suggest that neither Wilde’s public infamy not fear of being tainted by a similar brush can adequately account for Forster’s appraisal. Had Wilde suffered no public disgrace, Forster would have still distanced himself. His quest to naturalize his erotic proclivities and to gain recognition as a novelist and a sinecure at Cambridge leads him to disassociate himself, I argue, from his minorite precursor. See Nordau’s first book of Degeneration (1895), ‘Fin de Siècle’. It is important to bear in mind, as Sinfield’s research discloses, that Nordau does not explicitly link the degenerate artist with same-sex passion, even after Wilde’s prosecution. According to Sinfield, Nordau’s revised 1896 German edition, which specifically

Notes 195

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

addresses the convicted Wilde’s decadence, makes no mention of his same-sex passion (97). He further contends that other discourses besides sexology were involved in determining the course of male love: ‘[t]he sexologists were only one factor; concepts of same-sex passion were still up for grabs. Indeed, the most determined and prominent work on the idea of homosexuality was being conducted in opposition to the effeminacy model, on the programme that same-sex passion is quintessentially manly’ (110). It is in this contrary realm that I locate Forster’s artistic expressions of homophilia. He can thus attack the dilettantism of the metropolitan aesthete without evoking his own abasement. Forster’s panegyric over the figure of Demeter in his travel essay ‘Cnidus’ documents his reverence for this mythic maternity. Tellingly, where the acquisition of a Greek case by Macolnia or by the Kirchner Museum is cause for lament, Demeter’s in the British Museum is cause for reverie. Despite Carola Kaplan’s contention in ‘Absent Father: Passive Son’ that literature does not fare well in this novel, the narrator tells us that Rickie’s published works include both an English edition and an illustrated American edition of his novel. Plus there is now to be a volume of his collected short fiction (302, 304). The word ‘cockney’, according to the OED, carries not only the disdain of the inferior cityman as opposed to the robust countryman, and not only more specifically of the Londoner, but it also connotes urban effeminacy and dilettantism, which is consistent with the novel’s censure of the city and its indigenes. See, for example, Stephen’s attitude toward his London supervisor during his brief employment there (263). Bristow reads this association between physical and spiritual deformity in the Elliots as Forster’s ambivalence over the aesthete’s effeminacy, his lack of manliness in the post-Wildean decades, and as his uncertainty over the status of femininity. Surely there is much in Bristow’s analysis, though my reading of femininity via dominant domestic culture is much different. Two points that need amending, however, are that Rickie and Stephen do not, in fact, each marry Agnes in turn, and she does not bear Stephen’s child (Bristow 70–72). Her attachment to the house and her alignment with nature is best described early in the novel: ‘She approached . . . trailing noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands. She seemed to belong not to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it’ (Howards End, Norton Critical Edition 18). Unless otherwise noted, subsequent quotations are from the Norton edition and are cited parenthetically within the text. Oliver Stallybrass notes in his introduction to the manuscripts of Howards End that Mrs Wilcox’s relation to hay was a deliberate part of her symbolic structure (vii). Recent criticism has followed up on the implications of this shift in family relations. Jeane Olson’s ‘E.M. Forster’s Prophetic Vision’ importantly recognizes a new family structure, ‘the blended family’. Kenneth Womack’s ‘Only Connecting’ argues that Forster’s narrative attempts to rejuvenate the larger family system. Jon Hegglund’s ‘Defend the Realm’ traces middle-class fears of contamination by mass culture to argue that the novel embodies a crisis of national identity and salubrity.

196 Notes 32. I take exception to Boscagli’s otherwise careful analysis of Bast’s sentimentalized exploitation when she fails to account for the text’s erotic and aesthetic investment (and Forster’s as well) in the clerk and his offspring (57). Similarly, John Carey understands Forster’s portrayal of Bast as unsympathetic, resulting from his anxiety over the youth’s cultural airs (18–20). Rita Felski’s treatment of petit bourgeois identity in Doing Time more precisely chronicles the class taint that Bast carries and Howards End resists (39). 33. Indeed, Forster went on a walking tour of Shropshire in 1907 and even wrote Housman of his admiration for the poems (Furbank 1: 152–53). 34. Understood this way, Katherine Mansfield’s venomous quip – ‘I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella’ – loses some sting, if not wit (qtd. in Gardner 162). 35. As late as 1960, Christopher Isherwood records loaning the manuscript to the actor Charles Laughton to read (Diaries 1: 857–58).

5

Putting rouge on the corpse: cosmopolitan Joyce and modern culture

1. We can gauge the potency of Ellmann’s prediction in his preface to the revised edition of the biography in which he observes: ‘The pleasure afforded by James Joyce’s works shows no sign of diminution as we reach the centenary of his birth. He exhibits the staying power associated with the greatest writers’ (n.p.). Of course, this view fulfills Joyce’s often-quoted self-advertisement of Ulysses: ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.’ The comment was made in an interview to Jacques Benoîst-Méchin and is quoted in Ellmann’s biography (521). The contribution of this work to Joyce studies was and remains enormous, as Margot Norris notably acknowledges. But she also criticizes, as do I here, ‘the features of its canonizing effects’ – the trivializing of Joyce’s personal life and the devaluing of his radical bent that ‘reinforce the ideology of artistic autonomy’ (Joyce’s Web 8). 2. David Harvey’s essay ‘Modernity and Modernism’ remains a compelling account of the complexity of this process (10–38). 3. Cheng puts the dispute this way: ‘The net effect [of Joyce’s canonization] is to neutralize the ideological potency of Joyce’s texts, to defang the bite of Joyce’s politics’ (82). In other words, there exists a still more potent Joyce than the behemoth heretofore institutionalized. Yet this prospect turns out to trouble Cheng because he cannot quite balance the modernist’s subversive potency (the Irishman’s alleged pro-nationalist and incipient postcolonial politics) with the intellectual community that purports to represent it. Politics even made Joyce himself uneasy, as in this response in 1936 to his brother’s concern over Italy’s political future: ‘For God’s sake don’t talk politics. I’m not interested in politics. The only thing that interests me is style’ (qtd. in Ellmann 697). Contrary to Joyce’s interest is Jameson’s contention in ‘Modernism and Imperialism’ that Joyce has no style because his work is the unmediated representation of the colonized city where there is no disjunction

Notes 197

4.

5.

6.

7.

between product and labor as there is in an imperial metropolis such as London. Enda Duffy’s The Subaltern Ulysses offers another compelling justification for Joyce’s politicization. ‘We may now discern in Ulysses’, he writes, ‘the novel read by metropolitan critics since its publication as the capstone-text of the western (and hence imperial) modernist tradition, rather a blueprint for the staging of the confrontations between the discourses and the material forces at odds in any anti-colonial struggle. . . . I claim that the book ultimately escapes the standard anomie of much modernist textuality because it succeeds in mapping some notions of independence, Irish independence, upon modes of producing information that had served the now defeated powers’ (21–22). This figural Scylla and Charybdis impedimenta are of Cheng’s making (81). David Harvey captures this conundrum concisely when he writes: ‘While modernism always ostensibly asserted the values of internationalism and universalism, it could never properly settle its account with parochialism and nationalism. It either defined itself in opposition to these all too familiar forces (strongly identified, though by no means exclusively so, with the so-called “middle classes”) or else it took the elitist and ethnocentric road by presuming that Paris, Berlin, New York, London, or wherever, was indeed the intellectual fount of all representational and aesthetic wisdom’ (275–76). My argument attempts these subtle refinements: one, that as J.S. Mill put it ‘capital [was] becoming more and more cosmopolitan’, and along with it, so was culture, the horizon that Matthew Arnold pointed to as a remedy to the vulgar materialism of the middle-class; and two, that modernist opposition to nationalism and parochialism was in fact congruent with the aims of the expert – to exist outside or above narrow class or national interests or to establish an elite who exercised a monopoly over cultural competence (Mill, Principles of Political Economy 588). The ethos of cosmopolitanism has generated considerable controversy in contemporary criticism following post-World War II decolonization, and with the collapse in the 1990s, still reverberating, of the Soviet empire and the apparent durability of the American one. As a result, the so-called Western and assimilated Third World intellectuals have tried to come to terms with their survival, their institutional privilege within academia, and their public relevance outside of the university in the new millennium of globalization. See, for example, Tim Brennan’s ‘Cosmopolitans and Celebrities’; Bruce Robbins’s two works on intellectuals and his editing with Pheng Cheah of Cosmopolitics; James Clifford’s ‘Traveling Cultures’; and Caren Kaplan’s ‘Questions of Travel’. See Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (8). I am also relying here on Cottom’s lucid treatment of George Eliot as a liberal intellectual. Not only does culture transform class as he explains, but though the medium of intellectual discourse, it begins to prescribe to social institutions (14–30). My larger claim is that the literate culture the liberal intellectual introduces in the nineteenth century, the modernist intellectual takes an additional step by making it the dominant source of expertise and aesthetic value by appropriating the social as well. The importance of Molly Bloom to a critical understanding of Joyce, of Ulysses, and of modernist studies over the last several decades cannot be overstated, particularly once feminist and psychoanalytic criticism came to

198 Notes

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

the fore. For a historical survey of Molly’s treatment within the field, see Kathleen McCormick’s ‘Reproducing Molly Bloom: A Revisionist History of the Reception of “Penelope”: 1922–1970’ (Pearce 17–39). It and the collection Molly Blooms, in which it appears, further testify to the rich line of inquiry this female character has lately yielded. Molly’s reception may even be read as a history of literary modernism in microcosm for reasons which become clear in my treatment of her character. Joyce stayed at the Grand Hotel Corneille, of which Thackeray, according to Gorman, had written decades before: ‘If you are a poor student come to study the humanities, or the pleasant art of amputation, cross the river forthwith, and proceed to the Hotel Corneille, near the Odeon’ (Gorman 86). According to Bourdieu, intellectuals and artists, lacking the ritualized and institutional sanctions for credentializing that are available to such older professions as law and medicine, perforce resort to other means of accreditation and certification (The Field of Cultural Production 61–65). Joyce’s early attraction to European culture is evident in his championing of Ibsen’s drama and in his rejection of the cultural nationalism fostered by Yeats and the (primarily) Anglo-Irish literary revivalists. See ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, a review of When We Dead Awaken, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1900 (The Critical Writings of James Joyce 49–67). Joyce’s 1904 broadside ‘The Holy Office’ ridicules the Dublin literary circle and in particular Yeats and Russell. He later had it printed in Pola, mailed to Dublin, and distributed by his brother (Critical Writings 149–52). One comprehensive account of this epistolary form is Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card, which would seem opposed to the authenticating apparatus that is Joyce’s signature. It is the picture side of the postcard that is notably absent in Derrida’s écriture, which in Joyce’s instance provides the crucial node of meaning in combination with his inscriptions. Susan Stewart’s On Longing examines the image’s ability to produce a myth of origins (135–39). It should be noted that Joyce inscribes a copy of this photograph to Harriet Weaver in 1924 ‘James Joyce Paris 28 × 24’. The photograph is reproduced in Stanislaus Joyce’s My Brother’s Keeper (facing page 144). I draw here once again on Rosaldo’s ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’ and also on Clifford’s ‘On Ethnographic Allegory’, whose separate critiques of the rhetorical and material constructs of their disciplines provide a means of understanding modernism’s disciplinary apparatus and authenticating protocols. Joyce also sent Yeats this verse, who commented in a letter to him: ‘I think that the poem you sent me has a charming rhythm in the second stanza, but I think it is not one of the best of your lyrics as a whole. I think that the thought is a little thin’ (Letters 2: 23). It was later published in Chamber Music. Though the verse may sound an ironic note, it was not heard by Byrne, who took it as proof of his foremost importance among Joyce’s hometown friends, until Joyce’s other friend Cosgrave boasted of another copy with its lewd ditty. Some 50 years later, Byrne still registered his irritation over the incident. Let it be noted, however, that Joyce does share the same classical education (though not Greek) that Forster publicly and Woolf privately acquired. In valuing this heightened form of literacy, he participates with them in the same fable of intellectual agency in which, as Daniel Cottom explains of

Notes 199

15.

16.

17.

18.

George Eliot, knowledge did come to mean power (9–17). See also Larson on this point. For the rising Anglo expert-class, classical education was the passkey to the most prestigious positions (89). Lacan makes this point about the image in his now-celebrated seminar on the mirror stage: ‘the form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone’ (2). Lacan’s linguistic control over modern consciousness and differentiation via the unconscious, like Joyce’s in his aestheticization of consciousness, I suggest, is part of modernism’s cultural legacy. It is surely interesting to reflect on the introduction of the young Lacan to the eminent author Joyce at Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore in Paris between the wars and Lacan’s later seminar, ‘Joyce le Sithome’, that memorializes the artist (see Rabaté’s ‘Joyce the Parisian’, in Attridge, The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce 97–98, 102n23). Regenia Gagnier captures a similar moment of abjection in the relation of John Stuart Mill to his mother. As Gagnier describes, the younger Mill who was, as she states, ‘absorbed into his father’s professional circles from infancy, came to be painfully conscious that he could only conceive of his mother as a “drudge.” . . . Mill despises her for not being able to sympathize with his and his father’s pleasures’ (77). That her social conditioning gives her no understanding of his preferences points to the cultural divide that will distinguish one class from another and on the basis of its members’ pleasures. This cultural class is the one experts will make their own. The cultural divide Gagnier signals here is what Joyce will make palpable in Ulysses and significantly by refiguring the interests of the domestic woman. While Joyce promises in an early letter from Paris to use his future earnings to buy May Joyce a set of teeth, more customary is his letter giving her detailed instructions for purchasing a new suit and for packing a pudding. This letter, in fact, was one of the last Joyce wrote before receiving his anxious father’s telegram (Letters 2: 22, 40). His mother’s death from cancer the following August further confounded Joyce’s complex affect: a need to monopolize his mother’s attention and to usurp her power. As Ellmann writes: ‘His mother was part of the stable world he was engaged in renouncing; yet he did not want her to renounce him’ (130). Dying is, however, a decidedly extreme means of renunciation. As such, even her death the son attempts to control. The guilt that lingers over his open defiance of her last behest (to perform his Easter duties and pray at her bedside) provides yet another opportunity for Joyce to mourn: this time, his lost innocence. It was his belief that his refusal had hastened, if not caused, her demise. Even with his mother’s death, Joyce refocuses attention onto himself. In making this claim, I am departing from psychoanalytic hermeneutics whose practice, following Freudian modernism, begins with the maternal as foundational to human subjectivity and desire as a universal and transhistorical verity. Among the many studies that apply this specifically to Joyce, see Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, Christine Froula, Modernism’s Body, and Suzette Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. By contrast, I am arguing that Joyce (like Woolf ) attempts control over the same representational field as Freud and deploys a similar mythic structure to this end.

200 Notes 19. The expression comes in an early letter to Grant Richards over the publication of Dubliners: ‘It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories’, Joyce declares. ‘I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass’ (Letters 1: 64). Freud, of course, would make this same claim to knowledge via a mirror in his professional guidebook to the discipline, ‘Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis’. 20. Indeed, I have traced something like this mythifying genesis in Woolf’s production of the androgynous Orlando and in Forster’s truncated union of Stephen Wonham and Rickie Elliot, with the difference that Joyce himself publicly assumes the specular role his literary peers fictionalized in print. 21. As Armstrong contends in her analysis of the photographs Stieglitz shot of O’Keefe, their exchange produces an economy closed to the spectator. Even after careful examination of the photograph, there persists an implied transaction of looks and knowledge between photographer and subject to which onlookers are excluded. Modernism’s power, she argues, derives precisely from the laity’s denied access (Fiction in the Age of Photography 252–61). What’s more, the photo of Joyce creates an aura of mystery precisely because it does not celebrate one of the occasions of bourgeois domestic life. 22. Joyce’s use of the postcard-photograph forms a compelling contrast to the use that Malek Alloula uncovers in his study of the Golden Age of the colonial postcard from 1900 to 1930. Ironically, Alloula, in analyzing the exploitation Algerian women experienced as they were turned into commodified spectacles pandered to European tourists, colonists, and soldiers, appears to repeat their exploitation by making them into an object again, this time a mass object of the intellectual’s gaze. For a critique of Alloula’s ‘photographic album’ in precisely this way, see Rey Chow’s Writing Diaspora (39–41). 23. Joyce bluntly acknowledges the need for this critical distance in ‘The Day of Rabblement’: ‘No man . . . can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself’ (69). Reprinted in The Critical Writings of James Joyce (68–72), which is cited here, it was first printed privately as a pamphlet in Dublin. While Terry Eagleton quite shrewdly depicts Joyce’s quarrel with Yeats and the cultural nationalists as arising from their different heritages, Irish versus Anglo-Irish, and the greater privileges the Anglo-Irish enjoyed, I suggest it also stems from Joyce’s need to distance and differentiate himself from those already occupying the field of literary production to which he aspires (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger 299–300). 24. In speaking about the picture postcards of the plains Indians, Patricia Albers notes: ‘One of the most obvious strategies was to emphasize portraiture. . . . A significant characteristic of these portraits is that the subjects are decontextualized when they are shown in pictures devoid of concrete historical markers and setting. By not showing people engaged in common activities or posed in the settings in which they lived, it is easy to manipulate images to fulfill public fantasies and stereotypes. Such pictures can be readily put to uses and meanings that have little to do with the historical realities of their subjects’ (67). Joyce demonstrates how this process of decontextualization could be turned upside down and could remake the subject entirely. Frank Staff’s

Notes 201 history of the postcard considers the Paris Exhibition of 1889 as the cultural event responsible for the missive’s popularity (54–62). 25. Joyce’s self-commodification and cultural impersonation augur the later photographic essay the novelist staged with Gisèle Freund for the cover and lead story of Time to publicize Finnegans Wake in 1939. This reading of Joyce’s early publicity and his willful self-promotion diminish the effect (whether of amazement or of irony) of the opening of Boscagli and Duffy’s reading ‘Joyce’s Face’ (Dettmar and Watt, Marketing Modernism 133–59). ‘It may come as a shock to some’, they surmise, ‘to find that James Joyce, great modernist writer and arch-priest of high art, appeared on the cover of the May 8, 1939, edition of Time, and within, was “profiled” – that is, subjected to the indignity of having his identity sifted through the stereotypes and banalities of the mass-market American media’ (133). No mention is made in the essay of this photograph-postcard or, indeed, his even more byronic poses photographed in Zurich (cf. Ellmann Plate XXXII; Gorman 171). 26. Norris, for one, has cautioned against reading Joyce’s gender politics from his personal letters and artifacts into his texts. She makes the point about putting aside gender in order to lay greater stress on the radical potential latent in Joyce’s art that borrows from Ibsen’s and Shaw’s socialism, a project I am indeed sympathetic to but approach and answer differently ( Joyce’s Web 9–28). Lisa Rado, commenting on Norris’s project, has urged a more nuanced historical approach to Joyce and to the project of modernism: ‘Rather than condemning Joyce as a paranoid misogynist – as do many Anglo-American feminists – or embracing him as a revolutionary promoter of a feminine discourse – as do many French theorists – Norris abandons both perspectives, charging “that they are not grounded in history, either Joyce’s or modern literature’s”’ (qtd. in Rado 13). So too do Vicki Mahaffey and her study of Joyce avoid either condemnation or adulation, and yet she documents the less-than-laudable positions the writer would take, to wit, anti-Semitic and sexist postures (148–49). In contrast to Norris, I find a different radical dimension in Joyce’s expertise that concerns his use of gender against the institutions, of marriage, family, and household, once responsible for shaping it. Moreover, Joyce’s worldly critique owes as much to Wilde’s brand of socialism, with the British inflection pressed out of it, as to Ibsen’s and Shaw’s. Indeed, with Joyce’s renovations of the novel form and the knowledge his renovations engender, particularly with Ulysses, one could well-nigh date the arrival of (note: I do not say ‘the rise of’) the Anglophone novel, in opposition to the English or British national novel. This change, I would suggest, constitutes a revolutionary act, though a fraught one, and one not precisely congruent with that which Norris champions. On the connections between Wilde and Joyce, and, relevant here, Joyce’s use of Wilde’s life as a model for Finnegans Wake, see Mahaffey’s study of Wilde, Joyce, and Yeats in States of Desire (181–82). 27. The text that encourages Molly’s self-exile also checks papal power in the pointed critique that arises just before with Aunt Kate’s fuming over her sister’s Roman dismissal from the choir with the 1903 papal letter that banned women from church choirs (Dubliners 312n52 ). The text does not restrict the nascent power of the secular intellectual Gabriel, however.

202 Notes 28. Despite Norris’s careful reading of ‘The Dead’, she treats Joyce’s own self-critique far too generously. ‘Art’s self-critique requires Joyce’, she explains, ‘to dramatize that art’s representation of woman as inherently oppressive, and thereby obliges him to specularize his own role as male artist for the purpose of critique’ (100). From my perspective, the assertion of ‘self-critique’ or the implication of self-irony is the trapdoor Joyce built into his aesthetic practice to elude or forestall the critique of others. This equivocation is not unlike that which Colleen Lamos sees operating in Joyce’s sexual evasiveness that allows him to appear all knowing without owning up to any explicit male desire. See Deviant Modernism 158. 29. Gabriel even recalls during his speech that Molly ‘had gone away discourteously’ and this gives him, we are told, more confidence to proceed (203). 30. This point is one, I suggested, that Woolf has Mrs Dalloway recognize and identify in Septimus Smith. 31. Her name combines in Anna, Irish for river, Livia, for the Liffey, and Plurabelle, Italian for loveliest, the very mythification of woman and aestheticization of nature that is characteristic of Joyce’s modernism. 32. Harvey’s chapter ‘The Rise of Modernism as a Cultural Force’ is especially instructive on the aestheticization of space as a counter to politicizing time (260–83). 33. I borrow here from Balibar: ‘Cosmopolitanism presents itself as a universalism (going beyond historical borders) and as a humanism (going beyond differences of social status, of “majorities” and “minorities”). In reality it can be neither the one nor the other. “Cosmopolitanism” . . . is only the alienated figure of humanism and universality’ (73, original emphasis). 34. Kaja Silverman explains this process: ‘Sublimation and desublimation are here linked, as they usually are, to complementary processes of idealization and de-idealization. Sublimation, in other words, directs libido toward a culturally validated goal, whereas desublimation represents an abandonment of that goal for baser pleasures’ (23). Michael Tratner’s ‘Sex and Credit: Consumer Capitalism in Ulysses’ puts this process in terms of consumer economics, desublimation being more akin to spending and sublimation to saving. I am arguing that Joyce’s practice, like Lawrence’s, works by gendering this process. 35. This is quoted in the letter to Frank Budgen that famously describes ‘Penelope’ as ‘the clou of the book’ (1: 170). The quotation above is translated as ‘Woman. I am the flesh that always affirms.’ Emer Nolan’s reading of woman and nation, specifically in his treatment of Molly Ivors, understands Joyce’s ambivalence as a form of reconciliation: ‘Penelope represents an imaginary solution to real contradictions, rather than any kind of “return” to a material origin’ (177). His study, James Joyce and Nationalism, is part of the movement to reclaim Joyce’s nationalist politics. Ann Cvetkovich’s Mixed Feelings convincingly describes how the ‘politics of affect’ engendered a national bourgeoisie. I borrow this term in my discussion, though what it engenders in the case of Joyce is not a national but a cultural bourgeoisie. 36. Mahaffey persuasively offers an alternate route to Ulysses through Giacomo Joyce. Relevant to the argument I am developing is the textual relationship Mahaffey sees Joyce constructing in this notebook in order to compensate for the power inequities he experienced with his language student Amalia

Notes 203

37.

38.

39.

40.

Popper. While he was intellectually superior, a male, and a Gentile, his relationship was one of tutor to this wealthy, attractive, and sophisticated Jewish woman that made him painfully aware of his social and economic shortcomings. This disadvantage he attempts to rectify in Giacomo Joyce. As Mahaffey explains, ‘art, as Joyce would later see more sharply, is too often a simple strategy for reversing the flow of power, allowing the victim and aggressor to change places, and this is precisely what happens in Giacomo Joyce. The story of Giacomo Joyce presents Joyce as Popper’s suffering victim, but its mode of presentation makes her utterly subject to his representation of her’ (151, original emphasis). This power reversal is the exact one that Joyce used with the maternal and is the one that informs ‘A Painful Case’, ‘The Dead’, and also Ulysses. Mahaffey, however, sees Giacomo Joyce as ultimately therapeutic for Joyce, enabling him to overcome in Ulysses Popper’s rejection of him and his own abjection. I argue instead that this power reversal not only continues but grounds Joyce’s expert modernism. This disavowal, I propose, gives a different meaning to the conciliatory tone in the ‘The Dead’ toward Ireland that critics take to be Joyce’s rapprochement with his native country. This rapprochement rather conceals the writer’s twin moves of assimilating the affective politics of home, family, and romantic passion (national politics having been dismissed with Molly) in order to reterritorialize them under his own aesthetic regime. The drive for artistic control and the crisis of representation it catalyzes over a forlorn landscape are ones, in fact, that Joyce returns to in his 1915 drama Exiles as he is also composing Ulysses. In yet another instance of barely disguised selfapostrophizing, Joyce has Robert Hand, the middling journalist and boyhood friend of the émigré author Richard Rowan, urge the expatriate writer to remain in Dublin and refashion Ireland on a cosmopolitan model. ‘If Ireland is to become a new Ireland’, Robert declares, ‘she must first become European. And that is what you are here for, Richard’ (Exiles 43). The hotel room of the expatriate artist, according to Clifford’s ‘Traveling Cultures’, is the exemplary site from which modernism is notably launched. Modernity thus comes to denote a permanent state of diaspora that no one evidently escapes and, as such, makes alienation paradigmatic of the last century. From my standpoint, the hotel room in its anonymity and in its transience certainly enables modernism’s exilic allegory. What I urge is that we not overlook the hotel room as a displacement of or substitute for home and, therefore, that we attend to the gender politics that accordingly pertain. The distinction I am making between Joyce and Bloom is a critical one. In no way am I suggesting that Bloom is Joyce’s doppelganger. He is rather Joyce’s instrument. The modernist Joyce uses his trouper Bloom to reterritorialize Dublin footfall by mouthful. Sisley Huddleston, Paris correspondent for the Observer, the au fait British newspaper targeted at the English leisure class that took to heart the cultural pronouncements of its Sunday columns, declared Ulysses a work of genius in his 5 March 1922 review, a little over a month after the book’s appearance. More to the point, he devoted part of his critique to educating his audience, as Lawrence Rainey puts it, about Joyce’s style and ‘how to read what was then being called “the interior monologue”’ (57–58). The effect of the review

204 Notes

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

was apparently quickly felt with orders for 136 copies two days thereafter. Even local reviews of the novel indicated the instruction Ulysses offered readers as when C.C. Martindale pointed out that the novel helped readers grasp ‘what essentially was never consciously known’ (qtd. in Gardner 205). Although more than 80 years have elapsed since its publication, the novel still presents problems for readers. Students are advised not to read Ulysses but to reread the novel, and for Finnegans Wake, to study it rather than merely read it, preferably under expert guidance. One might even say that here in Ulysses and on the beach with Gerty and Bloom we have arrived at the cultural horizon Dubliners sought, and the one implicit, as earlier adduced from Lawrence Birken’s argument, in the epistemic shift to a universe of desire. In effect, the Cartesian logic of thinking preceding essence is replaced with desiring as the trigger of essence. Whether we view Molly as earth goddess or strumpet, the two predominate readings that Kathleen McCormick tracks in Molly’s first 50 years (27–29) or whether we view her from the feminist angle of jouissance that has emerged since, Molly’s identification with desire pertains to all. Joyce describes the episode ‘Penelope’ in a letter to Frank Budgen as an ‘earthball’ and claims that it revolves around ‘four cardinal points . . . the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt’ (1: 170). I take my lead here from Jani Scandura’s recent reexamination of cinema and the dream world it allegedly inaugurates. In ‘Cinematic Insomnia’, Scandura argues that film does not induce or perpetuate the dreamlike state that the film industry takes as its singular contribution to modern culture. Rather than dream-inducing, film instantiates an alternate form of being, the state of insomnia. For the spectator at the cinema, to lose oneself in a film precisely requires that one not fall asleep, that one not nod off dreaming or even daydream. Film requires that spectators remain awake and alert – quiet, upright, and facing the screen. This forced attention, she contends drawing on Emmanuel Levinas, is, contrary to all appearances and claims, a most depersonalized and objective state. It requires, as the expression ‘losing oneself in a film’ implies, that the self is temporally lost to itself, is held in abeyance or given over to something other than itself, namely, to the apparatuses of screen, projector and film. To be sure, the same phrase exists for readers as in, ‘losing oneself in a book’, but the time, pace, and place of bookreading, not to mention posture, remain under the reader’s control, as does the book as a material object, though it too requires self-discipline. Another way to make this point is to consider the circular that Random House produced in its marketing of Ulysses in the 1930s. Entitled ‘How to enjoy James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses’, it instructed aspiring readers in the art and knowledge of a satisfying comprehension of Joyce’s novel. The contemporary adaptation is students reading the novel in an academic course for credit in which they learn how to enjoy ‘James Joyce’s great novel’. Rainey, by contrast, finds it difficult to come to terms with this financial arrangement and what he understands as modernism’s aesthetic and humanistic goals (69–76). See Jameson’s Political Unconscious (221). Another compelling elegy to the loss of the common reader is of course Lukács in The Historical Novel (286).

Notes 205

Afterword 1. In an entry appearing before his often quoted disquisition ‘The Intellectuals’ that distinguishes between traditional and organic intellectuals (199–210), Gramsci interestingly holds up empathy as the surest means by which intellectuls may bridge their separation from the laity (173). His use of empathy seems similar to that which Gagnier now finds inadequate, to wit, the willingness to only, as she says, ‘share the pains of working poeople’ (238, original emphasis). 2. John Carey’s study of the elitism of modernist intellectuals in which he contends that ‘the spread of literacy to the “masses” impelled intellectuals in the early twentieth century to produce a mode of culture (modernism) that the masses could not enjoy’, I would take the liberty of amending to a mode of culture that the petite bourgeoisie could not copy (214).

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Index

Abel, Elizabeth, 187n16, 187n18 Adorno, Theodor, 18, 51 aesthetes, 102–3, 108, 193n13, 194n19, 195n25, 195n29 ‘Albergo Empedocle’ (Forster), 193–4n18 Alloula, Malek, 200n22 Althusser, Louis, 173n17 Anderson, Amanda, 165–6, 167–8 Anderson, Perry, 176n31, 181n11 androgyny and the Orient, 189n26, 190–1n32 and sexual difference, 34, 180n3 Virginia Woolf’s use of, 35, 47, 56, 70, 180n3; see also specific works Angel in the House, 31–2, 34, 59, 76 Annan, Noel, 19, 46, 52, 182n20 ‘anxiety of influence’, 167 Apostles (The Cambridge Conversazione Society), 93, 96, 97–9, 192nn5, 7 Arcadia (Sidney), 103, 111 Ardis, Ann, 171n6, 172n11, 187n17 Armstrong, Nancy, 65–6, 68, 171n9, 200n21 Arnold, Matthew, 20, 134, 197n4 artists, accreditation of, 160, 164, 198n9 Aspects of the Novel (Forster), 93 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3, 170–1n5 Balibar, Etienne, 202n33 Banfield, Ann, 191n34 Barthes, Roland, 157, 167 Baudrillard, Jean, 51, 183n29 Benjamin, Walter, 51, 55, 156, 165, 184n36 Bennett, Arnold, 62–3, 186n8 Bermingham, Ann, 53, 55, 183n30 Birken, Lawrence, 189n27 on desire/consumption, 17–18, 52, 155, 176n30, 177n37, 183n28, 204n41

on ‘sexonomy’, 19, 176n32 on sexual difference, 16, 18, 175n27 on women’s enfranchisement as subjects, 12–13, 16 Bloch, Ernst, 161 Bloom, Harold, 167, 168 Bloom, Molly (character), 29, 66–7, 123, 140, 144–53, 163, 197–8n7 see also Ulysses (Joyce) Bloomsbury group, 67 and Cambridge University, 97 dilettantism of, 194n19 elitism of, 185n2 and hellenism, 97 members of, 182n15 politics of, 52 and the Woolfs, 41, 44–6 see also Forster, E.M.; Woolf, Leonard; Woolf, Virginia Boer War, 104, 194n21 Boscagli, Maurizia, 115, 196n32, 201n25 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1, 161 on accreditation of artists/ intellectuals, 198n9 on ‘charismatic ideology’ in literature, 7–8, 172n12 on consecrated objects/symbolic property, 90 on copying, 164 on cultural production, 7–8 on disinterest, 166 on the dominant versus the dominated, 185n2 on the expert class and secularism, 19–20 on home as locus of professionalization, 173n17 on the petite bourgeoisie, 162, 163–4 on segregation/desegregation, 179n46 219

220 Index Bourdieu, Pierre (Continued) on sociopolitical accreditation, 92 on styles of life, 173n15 Bristow, Joseph, 194n19, 195n29 Brontë, Charlotte: Villette, 95 Brown, Gillian, 158 Buckingham, Bob, 119 Butler, Samuel: Way of All Flesh, The, 96–7 Byrne, J.F., 124–5, 198n13 Cambridge Conversazione Society, The, see Apostles Cambridge University (England), 96–9, 123–5, 157, 177n39, 178n42, 185n3, 193n11, 194n20, 194n24 Clark Lectures at, 93, 191–2n4 Forster at, 93, 97, 99, 193n10, 193n16 and the Bloomsbury group, 97 capital and culture, 177n38 capitalism, 13–15, 53, 174n24, 180n4, 183n28, 183n30, 202n34 Carey, John, 19–20, 196n32, 205n2 Chamber Music (Joyce), 198n13 ‘Character and Fiction’ (V. Woolf), 185n3 ‘charismatic ideology’, 7–8, 172n12 Cheng, Vincent, 120–1, 196n3, 197n4 choice, 15, 19, 26, 174–5n25, 176n32 civilized class, formation of, 14–15 Clark Lectures (Trinity College, Cambridge), 93, 191–2n4 Clark, Suzanne, 171n6, 172n11 class civilized, formation of, 14–15 clerk, 77–8, 115–16, 119, 134–6, 163, 196n32 education’s benefits to the middle-class, 162 and equivalence, 18–19 and modern culture, 2, 15–19, 24, 34–5, 50–7, 92, 122, 155–8, 160–8, 177n38 petite bourgeoisie, 162–4, 205n2 and rail travel, 60–1, 185n4 and secularization of public life, 19–20

status groups versus classes, 9–10, 160 and taste/consumption, 1, 14–15, 51, 78, 113, 130, 136, 152–3, 160 wealth, and formation of, 17–18, 176n31 see also expert class classical education, 28, 97–8, 198–9n14 ‘clerical produce’, 24, 27, 44, 182n14 clerk class, 77–8, 115–16, 119, 134–6, 163, 196n32 Clifford, James, 203n38 ‘Cnidus’ (Forster), 195n26 Collected Papers (Freud), 44 colonialists, nostalgic domination by, 84–5 color coding of race and sexuality, 189n26, 190–1n32 commodities, as dependent on pleasure, 14, 155 Common Reader, The (V. Woolf), 187n16 Conrad, Joseph, 185n1 Lord Jim, 95, 96, 117–18 consecrated objects/symbolic property, 58, 80, 90 consumerism and choice, 15, 174n24 as dystopia, 17, 24, 181n12 as economic model, 13–15, 23–4, 160–5, 174nn23–4 as elite practice, 33–5, 41–5, 50–5, 64, 70, 80, 92, 97–8, 100–2, 113, 153, 160 individualism versus mass consumers, 176n30 as modernism, 181–2n13, 186–7n14, 187n15 consumption Birken on, 17–18, 52, 155, 176n30, 177n37, 183n28, 204n41 and class/taste, 1, 14–15, 51, 78, 113, 130, 136, 152–3, 160 identity production via, 52–3, 161–3, 183n29 by women, 42–3, 181n12 copying, 2, 156–8, 162, 164, 167–8, 170n2

Index Cosgrave, Vincent, 124–5, 198n13 cosmopolitanism, 29, 98, 114, 121–4, 129–38, 140–3, 152–4, 197nn4–5, 202n33 Cott, Nancy, 178n44 Cottom, Daniel, 22, 197n6, 198–9n14 Country and the City, The (Raymond Williams), 103 Courtney, W.L., 192n7 ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (Freud), 187n16, 187n18 crisis/break chronotope, 3, 170–1n5 critical distance, 67, 129, 190n31, 200n23 cultural agency, 64, 121, 141, 146, 159, 165–8 cultural bourgeoisie, and secularization of public life, 19–20, 24–8, 179n39, 202n35 cultural production Bourdieu on, 7–8 and expert modernists, 2, 5, 7–8, 11, 17, 156, 170n2, 175n26 cultural reproduction and mothers, 2, 5, 170n2 process of, 11, 28–9, 50, 56, 90, 150, 156, 160, 164, 167–8, 172n11 Cvetkovich, Ann, 202n35 dandies, 193n13 Darwin, Charles, 1–2, 11 Descent of Man, The, 12, 174n21 Origin of Species, The, 12, 174n21 see also evolutionism Davidoff, Leonore, 171n9 ‘Day of Rabblement, The’ (Joyce), 130 de Certeau, Michel, 60–1, 185n4 degeneracy and the aesthete, 108, 194–5n25 Delany, Paul, 33, 43, 181–2n13 Dellamora, Richard, 98, 102, 193–4n18 demand/self-interest versus classical economics, 13–15, 17–18, 160, 174nn22–3 Dent, Edward, 102 Derrida, Jacques, 198n11 Descent of Man, The (Darwin), 12, 174n21

221

desire Birken on, 17–18, 52, 155, 176n30, 177n37, 183n28, 204n41 culture of, 17–27, 133, 157–8 and enfranchisement, 13, 17, 118–19, 156 and evolutionism, 12–14, 15, 174n20, 175n27 individuality as based on, 19 for mothers, 1–2, 86–7, 109, 170n3 psychoanalysis on, 2–3, 199n18 and the domestic woman, 2, 4–5, 29, 51, 63, 76, 87, 135–6, 140–1, 144, 151 DiBattista, Maria, 190n29, 191n35 dilettantism, 194n19, 195n25 disciplinarity, 33, 44, 56, 172n13 domestic woman demise (mors matris) of, 6, 22, 32, 140, 158, 171–2n10 desire for, 2, 135–6, 140–1, 144, 151 model of, 34, 39, 67, 177n36, 178nn40–1, 199n16 stability of nation-state as dependent on, 16–17, 93 transformation of, 3–6, 16–17, 22–9 versus female intellectuals, 158–9, 178n40 Dora (Freud’s patient), 65, 68, 69–70 Douglas, Ann, 158–9 Dowling, Linda, 97, 193–4n18, 193n11 drawing rooms, 31, 33–5, 38, 53, 56, 113, 179n1 Dubliners (Joyce), 201n26 ‘After the Race’, 133–4 ‘Araby’, 133, 134 cosmopolitan intellectual in, 131–2, 143 critical reception of, 132 ‘Dead, The’, 131–2, 136–7, 140–1, 152, 161, 203nn36–7 desire in, 132–6, 139–40, 204n41 domestic woman in, 135–6, 140 Gabriel’s acculturation, 140–2 Gabriel’s aunts, 138–9 Gabriel’s elegy, 141, 143–4, 149–50 Gretta’s passion, 139–40, 142, 149

222 Index Dubliners (Joyce) (Continued) Ireland’s deficiency as model for, 130–2 as a mirror, 127, 130, 200n19 Molly Ivors’s role, 137–8, 201n27, 202n29 naturalization of the female body in, 140, 141 ‘Painful Case, A’, 134–6, 140, 203n36 Pound on, 129 sexual/affective pairing in, 29, 131, 135, 139–41 ‘Three Sisters’, 132 Duckworth, Gerald, 37, 38–9, 46, 181n9 Duffy, Enda, 197n3, 201n25 Eagleton, Terry, 162, 177n39, 200n23 economics commodities as dependent on pleasure, 14, 30, 155 demand/self-interest versus classical model, 13–15, 17–18, 160, 174nn22–3 and evolutionism, 13–15, 17–18, 155, 174nn22–3 the public good in, 13, 14, 160 education, 97–8, 161, 162, 198–9n14 Edwardians, 62–3 Ehrenreich, Barbara and John, 19–20, 22, 25, 26, 161–2 Eliot, George, 95, 197n6, 198–9n14 Eliot, T.S. Clark Lectures by, 191n4 on class, 21, 24, 27 on clerical produce, 24, 27, 177n38, 182n14 feminine sensibility expressed by, 69 and James, 180n4 on literary arts, 24, 92, 172n13, 177n38 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 52 Waste Land, The, 44, 182nn13–14 Ellmann, Richard, 120–1, 129, 154, 196n1, 199n17 empire and knowledge imposition, 83–4

‘English Literature since the War’ (Forster), 194n24 English literature, field of, see literature, field of Enlightenment and elites, 18–19 and equality, 18–19 female versus male leaders of, 166–7 homo economicus in, 13, 16, 18, 19, 176n30 sexual difference in, 12, 16, 18, 19 transformation of paradigm, 9–10, 11–17, 173n15 equality, 22, 26, 178n40, 179n46 equivalence, 18–19, 22, 26, 178n40, 179n46 erotic genealogy for a queered cultural class, 93, 102, 119 ‘Eternal Moment, The’ (Forster), 193n14 evolutionism, 11–17 artificial selection, 174n25 and choice, 15, 174–5n25 and desire, 12–14, 15, 174n20, 175n27 and economics, 13–15, 17–18, 155, 174nn22–3 natural selection, 12, 15, 174–5n25, 174n21 normative in, 16, 175n28 as revolutionary, 173n19 secularization of knowledge by, 12–13 and sexual difference, 12–13, 15–17, 159–60, 174n21 sexual selection, 15–16, 174–5n25, 176n32 and women’s stigmatization, 16, 175–6n29 exile, 28, 105, 122–6, 130, 142–3, 158 Exiles (Joyce), 203n37 expert class accreditation/assimilation, 10, 92, 160, 164, 181n11, 198n9 autonomy/authority of, 21, 25, 26, 28, 59, 67, 185n2, 186n13 and conjunction with modernists, 65–6, 172n12

Index expert class (Continued) cultural dependency of, 24, 164, 177n38 and the culture of desire, 17–27, 157–8 as divided/hierarchical, 177n35 and equivalence versus equality, 22, 26, 178n40, 179n46 and female representation, control over, 65–6 income/credit of, 23–4 as knowledge-based, 2, 7–9, 17–18, 20–3, 26, 32, 59, 164, 177n37 male membership of, 24–5 and modern culture, anxiety about, 168–9 occupational standing of, 23–4 and public versus private sphere, 10, 17, 21, 27–9, 159 and queer masculinity, 28, 93, 97, 99, 101–2, 111–12, 118 and secularism, 2, 7, 12, 19–22, 27 and value of their knowledge, 22–3 women in, 24–6, 178nn40–3, 179n45 expert modernists accreditation of, 10, 164 autonomy/authority of, 92, 155 bourgeois paradigm’s transformation as necessitating, 9–10 and cultural production, 2, 5, 7–8, 11, 17, 56–7, 156, 170n2, 175n26 and the domestic woman, 2, 3–6; see also domestic woman elitism of, 7–8, 205n2 female, 5–6, 9, 27; see also Woolf, Virginia the feminine magnified by, 29 incrimination deflected to texts by, 172n11 knowledge claims/production by, 7, 17, 157, 172n11, 177n37 motivation of, 10–11 and the novel, 27–30 versus petite bourgeoisie, 162–4, 205n2 and the private versus public sphere, 1, 3, 5, 11, 171n9 on professionalization of the arts, 92

223

and secularism, 2, 19–22, 27, 36, 61, 69, 79–80, 97–8, 129, 133, 137, 155 and sentimentalism, 83, 95–6, 118, 148, 151, 171n6, 172n11, 190n31 Victorian institutions censured by, 10 see also expert class; intellectuals; modernism Ezell, Margaret, 187n17 family, 2, 10, 170n1, 173nn17–18, 188n19 see also domestic woman; mothers fashion, 52–3, 55, 183–4n33, 183n30, 184nn35–6 Fassler, Barbara, 189n26, 190–1n32 Felski, Rita, 17, 24, 161, 162–7, 172n12, 181n12, 196n32 Feminine Note in Literature, The (Forster), 93–4, 99, 109, 192n5, 192n9 feminine picturesque, 99, 193n14 feminist critics anxiety of agency of, 167, 168 cultural agency of, 68, 165 cultural ascent of, 168, 178–9nn44–5 on James Joyce, 197–8n7, 201n26, 204n42 and modernism, 35, 56, 159, 170n4, 171n8 objectivity/circumspection by, 166 on Virginia Woolf, 62–3, 68–9, 81, 187n17 film and insomnia, 204n44 see also insomnia fin de siècle decadence, 102–3, 108, 184n35 see also aesthetes Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 125, 201n25 flanerie reproduction, 128, 151 Flaubert, Gustave, see Madame Bovary (Flaubert) Flügel, J.C.: Psychology of Clothes, The, 183–4n33 Forster, E.M. on aesthetes, 102–3, 108, 194n19, 195n25, 195n29 as an Apostle member, 93, 192n5 and Buckingham, 119

224 Index Forster, E.M. (Continued) at Cambridge University, 93, 97, 99, 193n10, 193n16 Clark Lectures by, 93, 191–2n4 classical education of, 198–9n14 criticism/characterization of, 91–2, 191nn1–2 Demeter, reverence for, 109, 195n26 erotic genealogy for a queered cultural class produced by, 93, 102, 119 on the feminine picturesque, 99, 193n14 on Greek art, 99–100 hellenism used by, 99–103, 122, 194n20 homophilia/homosexual desire of, 99, 193n16, 195n25 at King’s College, 92–3 literary career of, 92–3 on Lord Jim, 95, 96, 117–18 masculine identification reformulated by, 93 on Mill, 94, 95–6, 192n6 as a modernist, 91–2, 93; see also specific works mother’s obsessive nurturing, 91, 191n1 realism used by, 91, 191n1, 194n20 sexual frustration of, 91, 191n1 status as a writer, 91, 93, 191nn1–2 on Villette, 95 on Wilde, 194n24 on women’s dominance of novels, 93–6, 106–7, 192n7 WORKS: ‘Albergo Empedocle’, 193–4n18; Aspects of the Novel, 93; ‘Cnidus’, 195n26; ‘English Literature since the War’, 194n24; ‘Eternal Moment, The’, 193n14; Feminine Note in Literature, The, 93–4, 99, 109, 192n5, 192n9; ‘Macolnia Shops’, 99, 108; Passage to India, A, 28, 93, 119, 193n14; Room with a View, A, 193n14, 193n17; ‘Story of a Panic, The’, 101–2, 118, 193n17; Where Angels Fear to Tread, 193n14

see also Howards End (Forster); Longest Journey, The (Forster); Maurice (Forster) Foucault, Michel, 16, 29, 167 Freedman, Jonathan, 180n3, 194n19 Freewoman, The, 179n45 Freud, Sigmund, 51, 187n18 on the artistic process, 187n16 Collected Papers, 44 ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, 187n16, 187n18 on cultural reproduction, 2, 170n2 domestic realm psychologized by, 69–70, 188n19 and Dora, 65, 68, 69–70 on neuroses as caused by prohibition against incestuous desire, 170n3 on the Oedipus Complex, 1–2, 29, 157, 167, 168, 170n3, 175n27 psychological treatment by, 188–9n24 ‘Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis’, 200n19 seduction theory of, 175n27 Totem and Taboo, 1–3, 10, 170n3 on the unconscious, 186n11 and Virginia Woolf, 65, 68–70, 75, 187–8n18, 187n16, 189–90n27, 189n24 see also psychoanalysis ‘Freudian Fiction’ (V. Woolf), 187–8n18, 187n16, 189–90n27 Fry, Roger, 98–9, 182n15, 192n5 Furbank, P.N., 193n10 Gagnier, Regenia, 13–15, 17, 152–3, 160, 164–5, 176n30, 178n41, 199n16, 205n1 Gallagher, Catherine, 171n9, 185n5 Galsworthy, John, 62–3 Giacomo Joyce (Joyce), 202–3n36 Gilbert, Sandra, 168, 184n34 Girton College (England), 178n42 Goldstein, Jan Ellen, 187n16, 188n23, 190n30 Gorman, Herbert, 198n8 Gouldner, Alvin, 19–20, 22–4, 161–2, 162, 177n38

Index Gramsci, Antonio, 161–2, 205n1 Gubar, Susan, 168, 184n34 Guillory, John, 19–20, 23, 161–2, 165–6 Habermas, Jürgen, 159, 161–2 Haggard, H. Rider, 104, 115, 194n21 Hall, Catherine, 171n9, 172n11 Hardy, Thomas, 104 Harvey, David, 196n2, 197n4 hellenism/homophilia, 97–103, 193–4n18, 193n11, 193n13, 194n20 ‘heterosexual’, use of, 192n8 heterosexuality, modern fable of, 5, 171n7 Heyen, Hilde, 190n28 Hirschman, Albert, 13, 174n22 history discourse, use of, 165–6, 168 Hogarth Press, 156 and the art/market convergence, 33–4, 45–6, 179–80n2 Bloomsbury group published by, 44, 182n15 cultural literacy promoted by, 33–4 founding of, 27, 31, 33, 179n1 growth of, 36 relocation of, 45, 182n18 sale of, 182n13 success of/profits from, 44–5, 46, 182n13, 182n17 technological disciplinarity organized by, 33, 44 in the Woolf drawing room, 32–4, 45, 56, 70, 179n1 Virginia Woolf published by, 38–9, 44, 181n9 ‘Holy Office, The’ (Joyce), 198n10 home/family, see domestic woman; family; mothers ‘homeless mind’, 79, 190n28 homo economicus, 13, 16, 18, 19, 176n30 homosexuality and desire, 30, 96, 99–100, 104, 110–11, 116, 118 and hellenism, 97–103, 193–4n18, 193n11, 193n13, 194n20

225

‘homosexual’ discourse, 192n8, 193n13 as identity, 28, 106, 111, 114, 118 and male love, 97, 99–100, 118 as manly versus effeminate 195n25 and the Orient, 189n26, 190–1n32 outlawing of, 97, 106 Horkheimer, Max, 18, 51 Housman, A.E., 116, 196n33 Howards End (Forster) cultural reconstruction of the household in, 113–14 domestic romance in, 111–14, 117 family relations in, 112, 195n31 hellenism/erotic genealogy in, 102, 111, 116–17, 196n32 Leonard and Helen’s union, 116–17, 196n34 Leonard’s class standing, 114–16, 196n32 Leonard’s death, 117 male–female relationships in, 112–13 patrilineal succession in, 117 queered cultural romance in, 111, 117–18 Ruth’s idealization/death, 112–14, 117–18, 195n30 sexual/affective pairing in, 28 stylized space of, 111–12 success of, 93, 96, 119 ‘Who shall inherit England?’ as central question of, 91, 119 Wilcox men’s emasculation, 112 Huddleston, Sisley, 203–4n40 Huyssen, Andreas, 158, 163, 164, 171n6, 171n8, 181n12 Ibsen, Henrik, 198n10, 201n26 identity production, 52–3, 183nn29–30 imitation, see copying imperialism, 84–5, 121, 131, 143–4, 171n9, 175–6n29, 193n14, 194n19, 196–7n3, 198n12 ‘imperialist nostalgia’, 84, 198n12 individualism, 19, 158, 176n30 industrialization, 10, 16, 19, 22, 175n26, 176n31 insomnia, 149–51

226 Index intellectuals accreditation of, 160, 164, 198n9 aristocracy of, 46, 52, 182n20 and the expert class, 2, 7–11, 17–20 female, 6, 158–60, 165–8, 178n40; see also Woolf, Virginia traditional versus organic, 205n1 see also expert modernists Isherwood, Christopher, 196n35 Jacob’s Room (V. Woolf) , 38–9, 56, 186n8 James, Henry, 180n3, 194n19 Jameson, Fredric, 55, 154, 184n36, 196–7n3 Jay, Martin, 186n13, 187n16 Jevons, W. Stanley, 13–14, 23, 155, 174nn23–4 Joyce, James as artist-aspirant, 122, 123, 124–5, 127, 128–9 canonicity of/scholarship on, 120–1, 196n1, 196n3 classical education of, 198–9n14 on critical distance, 129, 200n23 European culture as attractive to, 123, 198n10 experimental work of, 122, 127 expert accreditation of, 28–9, 121, 125, 142 feminine sensibility expressed by, 69 Freudian readings of, 199n18 gender politics of, 201n26 immigration to the Continent, 28–9, 121, 123–9 on Irish independence/ provincialism, 130 and Lacan, 199n15 Molly Bloom’s importance to understanding of, 197–8n7 mythic structure used by, 127–8, 199n18, 202n31 in Paris, 123–4, 127–8, 129, 198n8 politics of, 120–2, 196–7n3 postcards (photographs) of himself, 124–5, 127, 128–30, 133, 157, 198n11, 200nn21–2, 200n24 relationship with his mother, 125–7, 130, 199n17

self-promotion by, 201n25 sexual evasiveness of, 202n28 social order debased by, 122 specular authority of, 130, 200n20 style of, 196–7n3 universality of work of, 122–3 women turned into nature by, 122, 139–41, 148, 151 WORKS: Chamber Music, 198n13; ‘Day of Rabblement, The’, 130; Exiles, 203n37; Finnegans Wake, 125, 201n25; Giacomo Joyce, 202–3n36; ‘Holy Office, The’, 198n10; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, 136, 142 and Yeats, 198n10, 198n13, 200n23 see also Dubliners (Joyce); Ulysses (Joyce) Joyce, John, 126, 127 Joyce, May, 125–7, 130, 199n17 Katz, Jonathan N., 171n7, 192n8 Kew Gardens (V. Woolf), 44 Keynes, John Maynard, 45–6, 192n5 Kipling, Rudyard, 104, 115, 194n21 Kirchner Museum, 99–100 Kittler, Friedrich, 32–3, 34 knowledge being without knowing, 103, 105–6, 118 as commodity/property, 20, 23 expert class’s dependence on, 20–3, 26, 32, 59, 164, 177n37 imposed, and empire, 83–4 production of, 7, 17, 157, 165–6, 168, 172n11, 177n37 secularization of, 7, 12–13, 27, 66, 155 technology and, 32–3 value of, and the expert class, 22–3 Lacan, Jacques, 125, 199n15 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence), 4–5, 29–30, 66–7, 140–1, 171n6 Lamos, Colleen, 171–2n10, 202n28 Land, The (Sackville-West), 183n27 Larson, Magali Sarfatti, 1, 19–20, 23, 26, 97, 115, 181n11, 182n20

Index Lawrence, D.H., 122, 172n11 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 4–5, 29–30, 66–7, 140–1, 171n6 Lawrence, Karen, 182–2n24 Leavis, F.R., 177n39, 191n1, 194n19 Lehmann, John, 179n1, 182n13 Levenson, Michael, 91, 184n38, 191n2 Levinas, Emmanuel, 204n44 Levy, Anita, 10, 32–3, 34, 65–6, 67–8, 173n18 libraries, 45, 182n16 lifestyles, 9–10, 173n15 literary modernism, see modernism literature, field of, 7–8, 93, 172–3nn12–13, 191–2n4 literature/literary criticism, and femininity, 177n36 Locke, John, 9 Longest Journey, The (Forster), 140–1 on aesthetes, 108 domestic ideology denigrated/ replaced in, 105–7, 108–9 and the Elliots’ deformity, 103, 107–9, 195n29 hellenism/erotic genealogy in, 102–6, 108–11, 194n23 mythic maternal in, 109, 195n26 mythifying genesis in, 200n20 as pastoral, 103, 106, 108 Rickie’s death, 110 Rickie’s published works, 110, 195n27 sexual/affective pairing in, 28 Stephen and Stewart’s intimacy, 104, 110–11 Stephen’s anticipated succession at Cadover, 110, 111 Stephen’s conception, 109–10 use of ‘cockney’ in, 110, 195n28 Lord Jim (Conrad), 95, 96, 117–18 Lovell, Terry, 8, 21, 180n3, 187n17 Lukács, Georg, 55, 184n36 Lyotard, Jean-François, 157 ‘Macolnia Shops’ (Forster), 99, 108 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) consumption in, 163, 187n15 Emma’s body as aesthetic text, 53, 183n31 Emma’s demise, 6

227

fashion consciousness of, 53–4, 183n31 Flaubert’s identification with Emma, 51 and mass culture, 163, 181n12 social position in, 183n32 success of, 54 trial preceding publication of, 53, 183nn31–2 Mahaffey, Vicki, 201n26, 202–3n36 male love, see hellenism/homophilia; homosexuality Mansfield, Katherine, 191n1, 196n34 Prelude, 44 Marcus, Laura, 44, 181n9 ‘Mark on the Wall, The’ (V. Woolf), 38–9, 56, 181n9 mass culture, 3, 163, 181n12 Maurice (Forster) circulation/posthumous publication of, 118–19, 156, 196n35 hellenism/erotic genealogy in, 102, 118 homosexual passion in, 30, 110, 118 Maurice and Alec go off together, 194n23 posthumous publication of, 118–19 sexual/affective pairing in, 28 success of, 94 Mead, Margaret, 178–9n44 ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (V. Woolf), 180–1n7 Mill, John Stuart, 173n16 on capital, 197n4 Forster on, 94, 95–6, 192n6 relationship with his mother, 199n16 Subjection of Women, The, 94, 192n6 Mitchell, S. Weir, 74, 188–9nn23–4, 189n25 modernism and the aestheticization of interiority, 21–2, 69, 79, 122, 146–7 as aggrandizing, 125 consumerism as, 187n15 domestic woman’s demise (mors matris) under, 6, 22, 32, 158, 171–2n10 and English studies’ emergence, 172n11

228 Index modernism (Continued) versus expert class, 65–6, 186n13 expert knowledge claimed by, see expert modernists female, 159, 170n4 and feminism, 159, 171n8 and gender, 5, 159, 170n4 hotel room as exilic allegory of, 144, 203n38 as male/anti-woman, 5–6, 171n8 and mass culture, 3, 163, 181n12 and professionalization of disciplines, 56 as rupture/apogee, 58–9, 85, 185n2 and secularization of knowledge, 7, 27, 66, 155 and sentimentalism, 4, 5, 95–6, 118, 148, 151, 171n6, 172n11, 190n31 and ‘the great divide’, 158, 163, 165, 168, 171n8 totalizing/monolithic, 8–9, 173n14 see also Eliot, T.S.; Forster, E.M.; Freud, Sigmund; Joyce, James; Lawrence, D.H.; Richardson, Dorothy; Woolf, Virginia modernist studies, 197–8n7 Moore, G.E., 192n5 and ethical system, 99, 104–5, 107, 113 Principia Ethica, 97–8 mors matris, see domestic woman, demise (mors matris) of mothers, 1–2, 5, 22, 85–9, 109, 112, 122, 127, 131, 145–7, 160, 170nn2–3 see also domestic woman ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (V. Woolf), 59–65, 67–9, 82, 185n3, 186nn7–10, 186n12, 187n16 Mrs Dalloway (V. Woolf) and the aestheticization of interiority, 39, 59, 67, 72, 79 aesthetic versus psychiatric modernism in, 189n25 Bloomsbury in, 67 Bradshaw’s representation, 74–7, 80, 89, 188n22 Clarissa versus Elizabeth, 76, 189n26

Clarissa’s representation, 70–3, 76–8, 80, 87, 202n30 class/gender in, 186n9 completion of, 187n16 consumption in, 73, 75, 187n15 criticism of, 70, 71, 78, 190n30 desire in, 87, 190n27 domestic culture destroyed/ supplanted in, 89–90 domestication of the unconscious in, 190n30 female influence/male authority blurred in, 73–4, 188n21 London metropolis in, 78–9, 80 male expertise in, 73–4, 76–7, 188n22 mapping in, 79 mourning in, 190n29 and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 69 nostalgizing of the domestic realm in, 27–8 on rest cures, 74–6, 77 Smith’s representation, 75–6, 202n30 Smith’s suicide, 76–7, 78, 189n27 success of, 6 and The Voyage Out, 70–1, 78 Wicke on, 43, 67, 73, 181–2n13, 186–7n14 ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ (V. Woolf), 70–1, 188n20 Mrs Dalloway’s Party (V. Woolf), 70–1 Nation & Athenaeum, The, 45–6 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (East Anglia, England), 180n4 natural selection, 12, 15, 174–5n25, 174n21 New Critics, 172–3n13, 184n36 New Woman aesthetics/politics, 27, 35–7, 113, 138, 179n45 novelists, 37, 172n11 Nicholls, Peter, 156, 157, 170n2, 173n14 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51 Night and Day (V. Woolf), 37–8, 56

Index Nordau, Max, 55, 108, 184n35, 194–5n25 Norris, Margot, 196n1, 201n26, 202n28 nostalgic domination, by imperialists, 84–5 novels character creation in, 79–80 domestic, social reproduction by, 95 and expert modernists, 27–30 modernist innovations in, 4–7, 10–11, 27–30, 39, 56, 79, 89, 93, 96, 143–4, 148, 201n26 New Woman aesthetic of, 27, 35–7, 113, 138 social/heterosexual contract of, 95 triple-decker, 45, 182n16 Virginia Woolf on, 64–5, 79–80 women’s dominance of, Forster on, 93–6, 106–7, 192n7 Oedipus Complex, 1–2, 29, 157, 167, 168, 170n3, 175n27 O’Keefe, Georgia, 200n21 Orient, 182–2n24, 189n26, 190–1n32 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 12, 174n21 Orlando (V. Woolf), 27–8, 157, 168 androgyny in, 34, 48–9, 50, 52, 54–5, 184n34, 188n19 aristocratic agency in, 50–1 consumption in, 34, 52–3 cultural production in, 50–1, 52 desire in, 52, 183n28 fashion consciousness of, 49–50, 51, 52–7, 184n33, 184n34 female empowerment in, 51 identity production in, 52–3 mythifying genesis in, 200n20 Orlando’s sex change, 49–50, 182–2n24 Orlando’s success, 50–1 playfulness of, 51, 55–6 reception/success of, 6, 47–8, 182n22 and A Room of One’s Own, 47–52 Sackville-West in, 48 social/material spaces in, 50–1

229

Oxbridge hellenism, see hellenism/ homophilia Oxford University, 97, 193n11 Pan, 101, 193n15 Paris Exhibition (1889), 200–1n24 parlor chronotope, 170–1n5 Passage to India, A (Forster), 28, 93, 119, 193n14 pastoral form, 83, 89, 103, 106, 108 performative agency, 125 Perkin, Harold, 19–20, 21, 181n11, 185n2 persona–viewer distance, 129, 200n23 petite bourgeoisie, 162–4, 205n2 Phillips, Adam, 1, 156, 170n2 photography, 125, 127–9, 200n21 Pilgrimage (Richardson), 65–7 Playfair, W.S., 188n23 Poovey, Mary, 21, 25, 171n9, 176n32, 178n40 Popper, Amalia, 202–3n36 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 136, 142 postcards, 198n11, 200–1n24, 200n22 Pound, Ezra, 129, 180n3, 194n19 Prelude (Mansfield), 44 Principia Ethica (Moore), 97–8 private versus public sphere, 10, 17, 27–9, 159, 187n15, 198–9n14 and the expert class, 21 and expert modernists, 1, 3, 5, 11, 171n9 and women, 25, 178n41 professionalism of women, 25–6, 178nn40–3, 179n45 professions and home/family, 10, 173n17 ‘Professions for Women’ (V. Woolf), 6, 28, 31, 42, 52, 69, 76 psychoanalysis on desire, 2–3, 199n18 on the maternal as foundational, 199n18 on the unconscious, 64, 186n11 Virginia Woolf on, 187n16, 189–90n27 psychology, 64, 187n16, 189n25

230 Index Psychology of Clothes, The (Flügel), 183–4n33 public good, 10, 13, 14, 160, 173n16 public versus private sphere, see private versus public sphere publishing, 45–6, 48, 203–4n40, 204n45 see also Hogarth Press quantity, privileging of, 18 queer masculinity, 28, 93, 97, 99, 101–2, 111–12, 118 Rado, Lisa, 173n13, 201n26 rail travel, 60–2, 185–6n6, 185n4 Rainey, Lawrence, 153, 203n40, 204n46 ‘Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis’ (Freud), 200n19 rest cures, 74–4, 188–9nn23–4 Richards, Grant, 131, 132 Richardson, Dorothy, 1, 3, 129 Pilgrimage, 65–7 Room of One’s Own, A (V. Woolf), 28 on androgyny, 34, 39–40, 43, 47, 48, 188n19 in bookstores, 45 on consumption, 34, 41–3 on creative imagination, 39, 41 female intellectual/artist elevated via, 69 feminist criticism of, 187n17 on material things/intellect, 39–40, 41–2, 44 and Orlando, 47–52 reception/success of, 47–8, 182n23 Sackville-West’s endorsement of, 48 spatial dimension of, 43, 179n45 on suffrage versus money, 36–7 Room with a View, A (Forster), 193n14, 193n17 Rosaldo, Renato, 84–5, 89 Roth, Q.D., 177n39 Russell, Bertrand, 192n5 Russett, Cynthia, 12, 29–30 Sackville-West, Vita, 48, 183n25 Land, The, 183n27 Said, Edward, 83–4

same-sex intimacy, see hellenism/ homophilia; homosexuality Scandura, Jani, 204n44 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 60–1, 62, 185n4 secularization of public life, 7, 12, 19–22, 27 seduction theory, 175n27 self-interest, 13–15, 17–18, 174n22, 174nn22–3 sentimentalism, 4, 5, 83, 95–6, 118, 148, 151, 171n6, 172n11, 190n31 sexology, 32, 64, 175n27, 195n25 ‘sexonomy’, 19, 176n32 sexual difference and androgyny, 34, 180n3 in the Enlightenment paradigm, 12–13, 16, 18, 19 and evolutionism, 12–13, 15–17, 159–60, 174n21 technology as eliminating, 32–3 and women’s enfranchisement, 24, 26–7 sexual selection, 15–16, 174–5n25, 176n32 Shaw, George Bernard, 201n26 shellshock, 75–6, 189n25 Showalter, Elaine, 188n23 Shropshire (England), 116, 196n33 Sidney, Philip: Arcadia, 103, 111 Simmel, Georg, 156 Sinfield, Alan, 192n8, 193n13, 194–5n25 Smith, Adam, 9, 13–14 sociopolitical accreditation, 92 Somerville College (England), 41, 178n42, 181n10 Stephen, Leslie, 176n33 Stieglitz, Alfred, 200n21 ‘Story of a Panic, The’ (Forster), 101–2, 118, 193n17 Strachey, Lytton, 69, 70, 71, 78, 191n1 stream of consciousness, 66, 186n14 style, politics of, 55–7 see also fashion styles of life, 9–10, 173n15 subject formation, 125, 199n15 Subjection of Women, The (Mill), 94, 192n6

Index sublimation/desublimation, 142, 202n34 suffrage for women, 35–6, 96, 180n6 survival of the fittest, 173n19 see also evolutionism symbolic property/consecrated objects, 90 ‘synchronous nonsynchronicities’, 161 Tambling, Jeremy, 91, 191n2 taste, 14–15, 152–3, 160 technology, modernist, 79 the picturesque, 55, 99, 183n30, 193n14 Tickner, Lisa, 180n4 To the Lighthouse (V. Woolf) aesthetic control in, 82 Bloomsbury in, 67 class/gender in, 186n9 consumption in, 87–8 and desire, 87, 190n27 domestic ideology/production in, 83, 85, 88, 89–90 domestic woman aestheticized in, 39, 59, 86, 89, 140–1 feminist criticism of, 81 lack of desire/loss of agency in, 86–7, 191n33 lighthouse/summer house as emblems of power, 80 Lily’s gaze/subaltern status, 85–6, 88–9, 190–1n32 Lily’s mourning, 88–9 male epic in, 82–3 male expertise in, 82 male perspectives in, 85–6 and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 69 Mrs Ramsay’s beauty, 86 Mrs Ramsay’s illness/death, 87–8 Mrs Ramsay’s representation, 70 nostalgizing of the domestic realm in, 27–8 the Ramsays’ representation, 80–1, 82–3, 87 reception/success of, 184n38 and sentimentalism, 83, 190n31 setting of, 80 ‘Time Passes’ interlude, 88, 191n34 on Victorian institutions’ failures, 80–1

231

Totem and Taboo (Freud), 1–3, 10, 170n3 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (T.S. Eliot), 52 Tratner, Michael, 181n7, 202n34 Trilling, Lionel, 92, 119 Ulysses (Joyce) city spaces aestheticized in, 143–4, 152 cosmopolitanism of, 123, 151–2, 197nn4–5, 202n23, 203n37 ‘Dead, The’ as a model for, 136, 142–3 desire in, 142, 143–4, 146–9, 150–2, 204nn41–2 domestic woman in, 144–5, 151, 199n16 Giacomo Joyce as a model for, 202–3n36 as Homeric epic, 149 humanism in, 146–8, 151–2 Joyce on, 196n1 and Joyce’s cultural impersonation, 125 Leopold and Gerty’s liaison, 147–9 Leopold as subaltern chronicler/ wanderer, 143–4, 203n39 Leopold’s defense of maternity, 145–6 medical profession attacked in, 145–6 mirror in, 127 Molly’s class status, 163 Molly’s desire, 149, 150 Molly’s importance to understanding of, 197–8n7, 204n42 Molly’s ruminations/insomnia, 149–51 ‘Penelope’, 142, 148–9, 202n35, 204n43 procreative sex in, 145–6 publication of, 153, 156, 204nn45–6 reception/success of, 153, 203–4n40 sexual/affective pairing in, 29, 144–6, 148 Stephen as embryo, 146

232 Index Ulysses (Joyce) (Continued) Stephen’s art, 151 ‘Wandering Rocks’, 144 unconscious, the, 64, 186n11 ‘Unwritten Novel, An’ (V. Woolf), 186n7 urbanization, 122 value, hierarchy of, 14 Victoria, Queen, 2 Villette (C. Brontë), 95 Voyage Out, The (V. Woolf), 37, 56, 70–1, 78 wartime pathology, 189n25 Waste Land, The (T.S. Eliot), 44, 182n13 Way of All Flesh, The (Butler), 96–7 wealth, 18, 176n31 Weaver, Harriet, 198n11 Weber, Max, 9–10, 160, 161–2, 173n15 Wells, H.G., 62–3 Where Angels Fear to Tread (Forster), 193n14 Wicke, Jennifer, 173n16 on consumerism as modernism, 187n15 on Mrs Dalloway, 43, 67, 73, 181–2n13, 186–7n14 on stream of consciousness, 186n14 Wilde, Oscar, 173n16 criminalization of, 97, 98–9 Forster on, 194n24 incrimination deflected to texts by, 172n11 notoriety of, 97–8, 193n13, 194–5nn24–5 self-fashioned style of, 184n37 sexuality embodied/espoused by, 172n11 socialism of, 201n26 Williams, Raymond, 180n3 Country and the City, The, 103 Williams, Rosalind, 23, 53 Willis, J.H., 33, 179n1, 182n17 Willison, Ian, 179–80n2 women as agents of choice, 19, 26, 176n32 ambitions/expectations/motivation of, 25, 178–9n44

anti-intellectualism of, 158 class status of, 24–5 consumption by, 42–3, 181n12 cultural centrality/agency of, 166 enfranchisement as subjects, 16–17, 19, 24, 51 expert class, role in formation of, 24–5 moral authority of, 3, 36, 89–90, 163 and the private versus public sphere, 25, 178n41 professionalism of, 25–6, 178nn40–3, 179n45 in the public sphere, 1, 3, 10, 17, 32–3, 159 stigmatization of, 16, 175–6n29 suffrage for, 35–6, 96, 180n6 versus ‘woman’, 5–6 see also domestic woman; mothers; women writers ‘Women and Fiction’ (V. Woolf), 43 women writers, 93–6, 106–7, 170n4, 192n7 Women’s Co-operative Guild, 36, 180n7 Woolf, Leonard on advertising, 46 as an Apostle member, 192n5 as editor/publisher, 33, 44; see also Hogarth Press on psychoanalysis, 187n16 on publishing, 45–6, 48 Woolf, Virginia androgyny in works of, 34, 35, 47, 56, 70, 180n3 on the Angel in the House, 31–2, 34, 59, 76 ascent of, 58 and Bennett, 62–3, 186n8 and Case, 36 on character creation in novels, 79–80 on circulating libraries, 182n16 classical education of, 198–9n14 critical distance achieved by, 129 daily routine of, 47 domestic realm dismantled by, 69–70 as an expert/intellectual, 35, 59, 64, 67–8, 79, 93, 191n35

Index Woolf, Virginia (Continued) feminist criticism of, 68–9, 187n17 finances of, 43, 181–2n13 on Forster, 191n1 and Freud, 65, 68–70, 75, 187–8n18, 187n16, 189–90n27, 189n24 illness of, 179n1 as an innovator, 59 lectures by, 48 and Margaret Llewelyn Davies, 36, 181n7 as a modernist, 5–6, 9, 27–8, 33, 35, 44, 56, 180n3, 184n38; see also specific works on novels, 64–5 politics of, 35–7, 180–1nn6–7 prestige of, 27, 48 as publisher, see Hogarth Press rest cure taken by, 74, 188n23 on science’s colonization, 187–8n18 social order transformed into art by, 122 suicide of, 188n23 as a teacher at Morley College, 36 on triple-decker novels, 182n16 WORKS: ‘Character and Fiction’, 185n3; Common Reader, The, 187n16; ‘Freudian Fiction’, 187–8n18, 187n16, 189–90n27;

233

Jacob’s Room, 38–9, 56, 186n8; Kew Gardens, 44; ‘Mark on the Wall, The’, 38–9, 56, 181n9; ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’, 180–1n7; ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 59–65, 67–9, 82, 185n3, 186nn7–10, 186n12, 187n16; ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, 70–1, 188n20; Mrs Dalloway’s Party, 70–1; Night and Day, 37–8, 56; ‘Professions for Women’, 6, 28, 31, 42, 52, 69, 76; ‘Unwritten Novel, An’, 186n7; Voyage Out, The, 37, 56, 70–1, 78; ‘Women and Fiction’, 43; Years, The, 186n9; see also Mrs Dalloway (V. Woolf); Orlando (V. Woolf); Room of One’s Own, A (V. Woolf); To the Lighthouse (V. Woolf) World War I, 189n25 Years, The (V. Woolf), 186n9 Yeats, William Butler, 198n10, 198n13, 200n23 Zizek, Slavoj, 125

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