“It will not be all sugar and flowers, but it will lead us beneath the surface of things.”

I am sure it will come as no surprise that I am going to read What Maisie Knew through Nancy Armstrong’s “Gender Must Be Defended.” I considered surprising all of you by using the Spivak article, but ultimately reading Armstrong’s article was like pretending I was a kid and sticking me in a candy store, and so, here we are.

I was very excited by Armstrong’s rethinking feminism’s applicability to Victorian novels in terms of biopower, her discussion of disciplining the (primarily female) individual body in relation to policing the body politic, desire as an internal versus external drive, and the death drive (which I love, thanks to Lee Edelman). This was especially thrilling for me because I think that though Henry James' stories can fit into Armstrong’s ‘inside versus outside the proper household’ model, he also willfully messes with this dichotomy. In his novellas like Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw, for example, non-normative women who succumb to their desire (sexually and for non-biological motherhood, respectively) are destroyed; the woman ‘outside of the household’ is also to some extent punished in The Bostonians where James explores a vaguely homoerotic relationship between an older and younger woman and punishes the deviant American early feminist by handing the naïve younger lady off to a prime example of the patriarchal system of governance. In these examples, James “does revitalize[e] ossified social categories so that a more modern household can coalesce” (Armstrong 539). In What Maisie Knew, however, he does not ‘revitalize a modern household,’ but instead “tears open both the individual and the household and scatters their elements” without a proper resolution, leaving the reader helpless to reconcile what it is s/he is supposed to take away, if anything, from this explosion of domesticity.

I think that, in a nutshell, this is what is occurring in What Maisie Knew:

During the age of discipline, paradoxically, the novel allowed sexuality to escape the body and unite individuals in a single current of energy. Whenever it operates in this way (as a force external to any individual, one that circulates among members of the species and beyond) “sexuality” suddenly seems a terribly inadequate descriptor—at once too specific and too general to explain why women who leave the household and men who abandon the public arena invariably congeal in pairs, threesomes, or mobs to form entirely new entities in Victorian fiction (Armstrong 540).

With the not-quite-incestuous continuous sexual re-pairing of Maisie’s parental figures (vaguely incestuous because Ida has slept with Beale, Beale has slept with Miss Overmore, Ida has slept with Sir Claude, and it’s presumed that by the end of the novel Miss Overmore has slept with Sir Claude (so only the unfortunate Mrs. Wix is excluded from this orgy)), the novel “allow[s] sexuality to…unite individuals in a single current of energy…to form entirely new entities in Victorian fiction” (540). Neither Ida nor Miss Overmore “ceas[e] to be a ‘woman’ and los[e] the protection and support owed a gendered body” when they “leav[e] the protection of the household” (544). A new family is not reconstituted, and Maisie and Mrs. Wix form a female two-some of outcasts that enter “the same category with all the other potentially homeless women who pile up across the century from Austen to Eliot” (539).

So, I could write a whole paper on this (and have written similar papers on this); instead, then, I will tell you how I would go about teaching this to either advanced undergrads or perhaps first-year grad students? You can let me know if this would work for us.

If I were teaching this article, ideally we would be reading it in a Victorian novel class so that the students would have had some exposure to Eliot, Dickens, etc. and therefore the textual references wouldn’t elude them. If they had read Bleak House, for example, it would be much easier to understand the idea “that Esther Summerson is virtually several different people, depending on the types with whom she is connected from one moment to the next” (539). It is important to understand Dickens’ use of the city to connect different social classes and the moment of physical disfiguration that further distances Esther from the mother that presumes her dead. But I digress…

To begin, I would have my students read the last chapter of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, volume I so they understood the main text/theory Armstrong is referencing. We would spend time on what specifically constitutes biopolitics/biopower, starting with this quote of Armstrong’s as a jumping off point as it neatly summarizes exactly what she is taking away from Foucault’s argument and employing as central discussion point in her article: “Discipline persuades us that we harbor within us a form of desire that expresses itself through a body that can be governed by a mind sensitive to the dangers posed by forms of physical pleasure. Rather than something we have and can deal with personally, by contrast, biopower asks us to think of desire as an external force that operates upon and through us on behalf of a group or species” (543).

We would then discuss how this is especially applicable in Victorian novels written after the Industrial Revolution, which mechanized production. We would read production with a double meaning: literal commercial production that changed how the city functioned economically and as the (re)production of bodies: “In 1815 London was already the largest city in the world, but by 1860 it had grown three-fold to reach 3,188,485 souls. And many of the souls it contained were from elsewhere. In 1851, over 38 per cent of Londoners were born somewhere else. [For example] the Irish made up perhaps the single largest immigrant group. In 1841, when the first census to record the birthplace of Londoners was taken, 4% of the population were from Ireland, representing 73,000 individuals.” (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Population-history-of-london.jsp)

If we were reading this in conjunction with What Maisie Knew and/or other of James’ novels, I would bring in some secondary sources about James’s writing style. For example, James’ contemporary Julian Hawthorne (James and Hawthorne occasionally reviewed one another’s novels, though Hawthorne was a significantly less prolific writer) wrote of his experience interviewing James, “He never disappoints; he always interests and stimulates. In the quietest, simplest way, he constantly surprises; turns the flank of an idea and transforms the old into the new. Through the demurest statements and comments, you catch a glimpse of a startling independence, a radical departure from the conventional” (Scharnhorst, Gary, “Julian Hawthorne Interviews Henry James,” 23.) This would help us understand that James’ texts not only appear radical now, but were also odd and non-normative when they were written. (My title is also a Julian Hawthorne quote speaking of James’s novel, The Wings of the Dove (1902)).

We would then bring these concepts back to the text, exploring similar ideas to those I wrote in the first part of this post.

I apologize that this blog post is so long!!!! And also for the random white highlight that I can't get rid of.