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.
