Memoirs of a Fall Quarter of Pleasure

This quarter got me to think about broader contexts and new research projects that could include Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. It also made me super happy that you all seemed to be on board with my crazy ideas of film commentary and magazine interview as critical practice: thanks friends! There is sure to be more off-the-wall critical production in the future.

Here are my four takeaways from the work we’ve done together this quarter:

1. Check out American literature as a place for more sexy texts in the 1700 and early 1800s. Elizabeth Dillons’ “The Secret History of the American Novel” had many points of intersection with the work I’d like to do, but I’d not even thought about trying to get more transatlantic in project scope. Reproduction, the novel, the metropole, race, libertines… there are so many avenues to explore across the sea! Who knows what comparative readings these texts could unlock? 
2. Cool kids revise their past work. Nancy Armstrong’s frank discussion about her initial oversights in reading Foucault made me think about how important rereading is for critical work. Now I keep thinking about the idea of revision, much as Desirée mentioned in her last post. Not only should we reread primary texts and criticism, but our own work too. Change happens and it’s often super fruitful. 
3. Make an erotic literature survey course. I want to teach the class that I started to build in our teaching posts (here and here) someday. I will not give into the urge to start drafting a dream syllabus until this quarter’s papers are done… as much as I may want to. All ideas as to material are welcome.
4. Production is everywhere, everytime. “The Circle of Life” isn’t just about lions, Hamlet rewrites, and the savannah. It’s also about legitimate production and a denial of those who refuse to reproduce. Memoirs, I never knew you and The Lion King had so much in common. Averyl’s and Jessica’s comments in particular made some great connections between things that, on the surface, have absolutely nothing in common.

Killing the Idealistic Dreams of Young Activists

One of the common contemporary methods of interpreting Gallathea is as a forerunner of the modern gay rights movement, or even more boldly, as proof that some of our modern concerns about gender, sexuality, and trans* bodies have always already been present in literature. While I believe that there is enough evidence in Gallathea to support an argument along these lines, I am wary of this kind of heady interpretation because it can lead to undergraduate students thinking that it is okay to dismiss cultural and historical influences before they have mastered them. I do not believe that new historicism is the answer to all early modern literary criticism, but in my experience, undergraduates who fail to learn the value of cultural and historical influence on early modern texts cannot develop the skills to eventually move on from new historicist readings to other schools of criticisms.

The teaching idea that I am sharing would hypothetically be taught to an undergraduate English literature course. I find Armstrong's Foucaldian analysis in "Gender Must Be Defended" to be the best argument by which to teach undergraduates about the problems of reading modern culture onto early modern texts (even though Armstrong focuses entirely on 19th-century works, which disproves my concern for historical accuracy, but let's pretend that didn't happen.... and in fact, it might be helpful to look at these Victorian novels because odds are more undergraduates have read them than have read Gallathea). After a lengthy analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Armstrong says that "being an individual and having a gender amount to pretty much the same thing. As the heroines of sensation fiction demonstrate, the minute one leaves the protection of the household, she ceases to be a 'woman' and loses the protection and support owed a gendered body" (544). While Gallathea and Phillida's escape to the forest and donning of masculine attire may seem thrilling and powerful to modern students who enjoy breaking down gender barriers and binaries, Armstrong's article would interpret their forest adventures differently. Gallathea and Phillida are not self-empowered by their ambiguously-gendered bodies, instead, they lead to both girls' anxieties about their relationship to the "youth" they see before them, and fear that they will eventually be discovered and sacrificed or murdered anyway. The forest is not a green world in which they can escape from society and live outside gendered constraints, rather gender becomes even more important while in the forest because it is so maddeningly ambiguous, and the girls begin to obsess over it.

Armstrong again analyzes Jane Eyre to prove an important point about gender and society:

Readers are fond of noting that Brontë cuts Rochester down to size and feminizes him before she can imaginatively incorporate him into a traditional household. Readers do not tend to notice, however, that this move virtually condemns to death anyone who cannot enter their charmed circle. If, as Foucault suggests, the biopolitical turn translates class warfare into a matter of biological difference, then it follows that the masculine protection of traditional femininity produces the negative femininity that identifies certain people as those who can be allowed to die. (545-46)

From this perspective, the gods' promise to change one of the girls into a man at the end of the play is not an early modern imagining of the transgender body as much as it is a way of imaginatively reinforcing society's values and maintaining the status quo of class warfare. The main plot of Gallathea does not feature your typical upper/middle/lower class warfare, but the relationship between humans and the gods may suffice as a form of class warfare. The conflict between humans and gods led to the demand of a sacrifice, which, like Jane Eyre, is based on a gendered, biological difference: only beautiful, virginal young women can be sacrificed to Neptune. The language of the play sexualizes these virgins in such a way that it is difficult to call them children, and yet their virgin status makes it impossible to call them wives. Because of their liminal existence outside of these two traditional roles of femininity, they are categorized as "those who can be allowed to die."

The marriage between Gallathea and Phillida, then, is the logical conclusion of such biopolitical powers at play. Because the plot cannot allow for their deaths, they must be assimilated into what Armstrong calls the "charmed circle" of the traditional household. Like Jane Eyre's assimilation of Rochester, the assimilation of Gallathea and Phillida requires imagination and creativity. But as radical as Neptune's promise of a change in sex may appear to modern audiences, it is actually the most conservative option available. By incorporating Gallathea and Phillida into a heteronormative union, Lyly reinforces social constructs of marriage, gender, and class.

The moral of the story? If you want to start a cultural revolution and bust up the status quo, don't look to early modern comedies for inspiration, kids. They almost always disappoint.

Write the power: Spivak, Cleland, and fun with who gets to speak

Gayatri Spivak’s “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” isn’t an obvious pairing with Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. But the connections with women in both texts, as well as Nancy Armstrong’s “Gender Must Be Defended,” work together to create the basis for what could be a really fun lesson.

First off, I want to acknowledge that Spivak and Cleland don’t completely match up in time and space (although he did spend a significant amount of time in India… I really need to read more of Fanny Hill in Bombay in order to flesh out this argument). Spivak points out that theory “cannot produce universals,” though it can “produce provisional generalizations” (17). It’s important to recognize that no theory is universal or one-size-fits-all; those who don’t (as she explains in more detail on the following pages) end up with huge gaps in their analysis. For example, Marx is great, but his working-class subject doesn’t map completely onto the subaltern subject here (14-15). In other words, check yourself before you wreak your theory (and yourself). Articulating where the gaps lie will help in better understanding how they effect your analysis.

So now the fun part: Let’s say it’s an upper division undergrad course on erotic literature from the 1600s to today.

I’d use Spivak’s discussion about how “the subaltern’s view … cannot be recovered” as a way to set up some context for Memoirs (12). Those who get to write have power and Fanny writes her own story, making sure it’s not forgotten. Yet, much like these peasants whose “view of the struggle will probably never be recovered,” the majority of sex workers in 1700s London were streetwalkers whose views were also not recorded in a way we can access today (Spivak 12). There are many 18th-century writers who talk about seeing women in the streets, being harassed by them (thanks Boswell), but much of the prostitute narrative, fictional or not, concerns women who work indoors and have a higher-class, often regular, clientele. The lack of voices from less-educated folks makes reconstructing a rounded historical context difficult, especially since so many texts are anonymous. I’d then lead us into looking at how else Cleland’s text seems idealized and what historical evidence from less fortunate/well-off prostitutes does to our interpretation of Fanny’s narrative. For example, hardly anyone gets pregnant and Fanny never gets VD – she is far from typical for her time. Just as this authentick 18th-century edition of Cosmopolitan indicates.

Another teaching point would come from Spivak and Armstrong’s talk about the role of women as exchange objects, not subjects in and of themselves. I would give my students some readings from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin on this topic, then use it as a lens to look at the relationships within Memoirs. The fact that women don’t function “properly” as exchange objects is one of the problems with prostitution. We’d use these readings to look at Cleland’s Memoirs in comparison with texts we’d already read in the class, such as Charles Walker’s Authentick Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues, and Adventures of the Most Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723) and Eliza Haywood’s The Anti-Pamela (1741). It would be a way to consolidate what we’d been working on before, then set us up for whatever our next readings would (like de Sade or something equally fun).

(I’d also want to do something with how Armstrong explicitly talks about revisiting and revising her ideas from before (530-31) as a tool for revising papers and thinking critically. But that’s another topic for another time.)

Levels of Understanding

While teaching undergraduates a primary text in conjunction with a critical article, I have a ladder of different levels of goals I would like to achieve:

• Understand the primary text.  (An obvious point, but one that takes up a not insignificant amount of time in Middle English courses, where the language itself is a barrier.)
• Understand the article.
• Find a way to put the ideas of the article in conversation with the primary text.
• Decide if you agree or disagree with the article.  (I think most of us, at times, find ourselves very accepting of things published in official academic journals.)

To teach students a way of doing the third point, I might put Nancy Armstrong’s “Gender Must Be Defended” into conversation with George Eliot’s Silas Marner.  Armstrong very helpfully focuses on Victorian novels, and both she and Silas Marner are interested in gender roles.

Since the article is lengthy, I would encourage the students to find one point from it that could apply to, or could be in opposition, to Silas Marner.  (Basically like the assignment for these blog posts!)

We might start out by looking at this passage from Armstrong:

“We must conclude that being an individual and having a gender amount to pretty much the same thing…Brontë’s novel, in other words, imagines life outside the gender binary—which includes the lion’s share of its characters—as a state of being that nullifies kinship along with erotic object choice by immersing the individual in a biological milieu that barely distinguishes life from Death” (544).

The base questions are then: Does this seem true of how gender operates in Silas Marner?  Why or why not?  What passages from Silas Marner support your answer?

My own answer, in a nutshell, would be that gender does not operate the same way in Silas Marner, that in the character of Silas himself both what would be considered masculine and feminine traits are eventually combined—and that the combination is what actually helps reintegrate him into society.

At the beginning of the novel, Silas lives alone, tending to his weaving and avoiding interaction with the Raveloe society whenever possible.  When he goes to the local tavern to report the theft of his gold, he is literally taken for a ghost:

“Yet the next moment there seemed to be some evidence that ghosts had a more condescending disposition than Mr. Macey attributed to them; for the pale, thin figure of Silas Marner was suddenly seen standing in the warm light, uttering no word, but looking round at the company with his strange, unearthly eyes.  The long pipes gave a simultaneous movement, like the antennae of started insects, and every man present, not excepting even the sceptical farrier, had an impression that he saw, not Silas Marner in the flesh, but an apparition” (53).

At this point in the story, Silas is an oddity, a caricature of a man, but certainly not an individual.

After Silas adopts the abandoned Eppie, however, his life and the society’s perception of him begin to change.  Yes, Silas finally has a daughter/household to “support his masculinity” (Armstrong 544), but he really takes on the role of both father and mother as he raises Eppie, refusing the help of anyone else.  As the years progress and Silas becomes older, he actually becomes dependent on Eppie.  The teenaged Eppie herself imagines “a little home where he’d sit i’ the corner, and I should fend and do everything for him” (174-175).

During this time, however, Silas is integrated into the society he had been rejecting.  He stops immersing himself solely in his work.  He begins going to church.  He makes friends with his neighbors.  As Silas “softens,” or becomes more “feminine” through socializing and gossiping and completing household chores, he becomes more of an individual to both the other characters and to the readers.  The denizens of the local tavern conclude, “that he had brought a blessing on himself by acting like a father to a lone, motherless child” and “that when a man had deserved his good luck, it was the part of neighbors to wish him joy” (183).

By comparing these passages and plot events from Silas Marner with Armstrong’s argument, we can see that gender is not a clear-cut binary for Marner himself—and that turns out to be a benefit for him.  His place as mother father and mother actually brings him kinship, identity, an renewed life.

A further class discussion might focus on a comparison of Silas with the other male protagonist, Godfrey Cass, to determine whether they exhibit different types of masculinity and what the implications of that are.  We also could determine whether any characters are actually within the gender binary that Armstrong discusses and whether they have particularly fixed identities.

Admittedly this discussion is still somewhat superficial (How is each character portrayed?  Does that fit with or oppose Armstrong’s argument?), but hopefully the comparison of character gender portrayals and the overarching conclusions would inspire some students to think about the topic more closely and perhaps use it as a jumping-off place for a paper topic.

“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.

Poshness & Populations; Perforce, Pedagogically

In her essay "Gender Must Be Defended," Nancy Armstrong suggests that it is the possibility of having — or performing — a gendered role that allows 19th-century heroines (and their households) to differentiate themselves from the seething Frankenstein’s monster of “population” that would otherwise be their milieu.

At first, I was thinking that, if Jane Eyre were to voyage across space-time and find herself in mid-century America (itself an interesting idea for a narrative), she would find the situation Armstrong describes inverted. That is, in Zoline’s narrative, it is becoming part of a normative, nuclear, reproductive household that makes one part of a “population," both monstrous and homogenized. I have already, in other posts, exhaustively quoted the scene in which California is spreading metastatically across the globe, as well as numerous scenes in which “reproduction of oneself” is shown to be the horrifying and entropic end result of the nuclear family, so I won’t belabor this idea.

But then I realized that the difference between Jane Eyre’s fate and that of Sarah Boyle is one that makes all the difference: namely, class. To become part of the sort of household that Jane Eyre founds is to become upper-class; by contrast, the middle class is the aspirational ideal of the mid-century American nuclear family. And then I realized that— if we are to imagine that Sarah Boyle is special, and that is why she is so dissatisfied with this mid-century American dream— the ways in which she is special are marked by an upper-class education (and resultant artistic aspirations).

So if Armstrong traces fiction’s attempts to map the anxiety-producing space between being a body (part of a population) and an individual (worthy of rights, protection, and full humanity), then perhaps we can understand the historical development of this trend in terms of a continuity. While Sarah Boyle is not content with a comfortable lifestyle protected by a domestic sphere, she is exemplary of the idea that those who deserve a unique, fully human, representation may still draw their privileged position from all the markers (accent, education, so on) that once allowed a homeless Jane Eyre to come in from the cold.

How would I try to orient a class discussion around this idea? Well, I probably wouldn't REALLY bring this particular essay to bear on this particular text, but let's pretend I would. I think first it would be necessary to spend some time making sense of the Armstrong piece, mostly focusing on reading comprehension. Then I might actually ask about the Jane Eyre time travel quandary: would Jane find that population/monstrosity/masses are located in a similar or different space in the 1950s than it is in her world?

One thought is that I could ask students to brainstorm facts about Boyle that made her “unique” compared to the homogenous California. I expect I would get answers like “She has blue eyes,” or “she wants to eat her children,” but also probably some of the following:

• Boyle attended “a fine eastern college.”
• Boyle "loves music best of all the arts, and of music, Bach, J.S,”
• Boyle’s decorative use of Buddhist iconography (both Chinese and Thai)
• Boyle’s enthusiasm for the Dadaist art of Duchamps, Arp, and Picabia
• Boyle dreams of freedom/escape through making her creative mark on the world:
• "a new symphony using laboratories of machinery and all invented instruments, at once giant in scope and intelligible to all" 
• "a series of paintings which would transfigure and astonish and calm the frenzied art world in its panting race"
• "a new novel that would refurbish language,” and so on.

Writing these on the board, I could ask students what kind of stereotypes they might associate with someone like that. I imagine words like “education” and “art” and “creativity” would come up. Then I could ask about whether that is similar or dissimilar from what makes someone like Jane Eyre special. In a perfect world, my students might be able to conclude that Sarah Boyle is special because Sarah Boyle is not wholly middle class.

I welcome comments telling me I have no idea what teaching is like.