Carnal desires, both sexual and alimentary

Reading the chapter from Tompkins’s book – Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century – made me strangely hungry. I also couldn’t help but think of Hsuan Hsu’s lecture the other week on paleofiction and race. If wheat, as followers of Grahamite thought proclaim, makes people moral and balanced, what would they say about those who follow paleo diets or are gluten free today??? Are they simply masturbating ALL THE TIME?

But back to Thompkins, teaching, and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

A satirical brothel scene from 1784 via the British Museum. More party, boobs, and booze, less food.

I’d want to dig into the imperialism that Tompkins connects with food, the connections of “diet and racial supremacy,” as well as issues of gender and control (54). The role of women connected to food ties into my previous post about capitalism and prostitutes. Here, though, Tompkins explains Graham’s concerns with food and women, specifically the role of matron as producer of bread and thus sustainer of the domestic order (71). This matron figure contrasts with the girl whose “excessive lasciviousness” Graham describes just a bit strangely (79). She doesn’t eat right, so no amount of moral instruction could prevent her from “self-pollution” and trying to get with the dudes. In other words, excessive sexuality is a threat to this moral code.

Let’s say we’re still in my upper division undergrad course on erotic literature from the 1600s to today. Since the class would be looking at texts from the 19th-century, just as Tompkins does, I’d use her ideas to influence a class devoted to food and erotica. In preparation for class I’d ask students to find one or two instances of food in the text and how they see it being used. They could pick from Memoirs or one of the other books we would have read by then.

I’d then put students in pairs or groups of 3 (depending on class size) and have them share what they came in with to each other. We’d then attempt to classify the different usages of food in the texts and see if there was any pattern in terms of time or space. Since I don’t have that syllabus written (yet), here are some examples from Memoirs:

• PLOT DEVICE: When Fanny sees Charles, the love of her life, for the first time, he’s sleeping off a night of drinking in the brothel’s parlor. Next to him “still remain’d the punch-bowl and glasses, strow’d about in their usual disorder after a drunken revel” (34). Here drink equals negative excess/decadence, but is also the means through which Fanny meets the man she will eventually marry. And it allows her to escape Mrs. Brown’s awful brothel.
• METAPHORIC: Fanny talks about “that store bag of nature’s prime sweets” when feeling up one of her many lovers as well as the “balsamic sweets” of ejaculate during sex with Charles (83, 42). The dizzying round of sex Fanny and Charles have their first day together is also described as a “feast” (43).

There are also lots of dinners in the text, though they are served by others and never made by Fanny. She is not a bread-maker or baker. Breakfast, if mentioned, is chocolate. Clearly she is a lady of excess whose passions are inflamed, perhaps in part by the exotic foods she eats.

After looking at these usages in the texts themselves, class would conclude with a broader discussion of the relationship between food, sex, and power, connecting the texts we’d read through this lens of eating.

I don’t think I would necessarily have the students read this selection, but would pull out some of Tompkins examples to share with them. If it was a grad seminar, they’d get the chapter paired with a 19th-century text. If I was feeling clever, I'd make sure people had brought food to share so that we weren't all starving by end of class.

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.)

“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.