Showing papers in "Nineteenth-Century Literature in 1995"

You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood

Abstract: While literature is suffused with scenes of men eating, there is a conspicuous absence of images of women engaged in the same activity. Margaret Atwood displays a sensitive awareness of how images of women eating have been suppressed and erased. She remarks, "I think I first connected literature with eating when I was twelve and reading Ivanhoe: there was Rebecca, shut up romantically in a tower, but what did she have to eat?" (CanLit Introduction). Atwood probes the prohibitions on the public display of female appetite and the social taboos which surround women and food in terms of the politics of eating. For her, eating is unequivocally political. Atwood defines "politics" as "who is entitled to do what to whom with impunity; who profits by it; and who therefore eats what" (Second 394). Women are rarely depicted eating in literature because, as Atwood's comment implies, consumption embodies coded expressions of power. Atwood displays a profound preoccupation with eating in her writing; she has even edited a cook book. In her novels eating is employed as a metaphor for power and is used as an extremely subtle means of examining the relationship between women and men. The powerful are characterized by their eating and the powerless by their non-eating. Eating is not the only, or the most predominant, metaphor for power; indeed, images of consumption seem so ordinary as to be insignificant. Nevertheless, they reappear persistently throughout the novels and, examined in totality, assume a potent significance. The domestic, the feminine, the inconsequential is, Atwood suggests, highly important. While The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle have been analyzed extensively in terms of food, particularly in terms of feminist theories of eating disorders, critics have failed to note the significance of the food theme in the rest of Atwood's fiction. An analysis of the politics of eating in all the novels provides a new way of reading Atwood and a new understanding of women's relationship to food. All Atwood's heroines initially appear as victims, and they demonstrate their powerlessness through their relationship with food. In The Edible Woman, as Marion's wedding approaches and she subconsciously feels herself being absorbed by Peter, she stops eating. As she loses her identity and autonomy, so she loses her ability to eat. Her non-eating is a physical expression of her powerlessness and, at the same time, a protest against that powerlessness. Significantly, Peter's power is demonstrated by his ability to directly control what Marion eats. He chooses her order in the restaurant, and this is the moment from which Marion can no longer tolerate food. Duncan recognizes Marion's food refusal as a form of protest before she understands it herself. He tells her, "You're probably representative of modern youth, rebelling against the system; though it isn't considered orthodox to begin with the digestive system. But why not?" (192). When Marion finally realizes what is happening to her, she bakes Peter a cake in the shape of a woman and offers it to him to symbolize how he has tried to consume her. Immediately after she ends her relationship with Peter, she regains her sense of self hood and her ability to eat. In Surfacing the narrator's sense of victimization by the father of her aborted child is symbolized by the way she imagines he controlled what she ate during her pregnancy. Anna's appetite is also controlled and repressed. She is a stereotypical woman who possesses all the traditionally feminine characteristics imposed by the process of socialization, and "isn't allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out" (159). The killing of the heron, in particular, highlights the relationship between eating and power. The way that killing is linked to eating and slavery suggests that eating, like killing and enslavement, is an expression of power: Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn't they just throw it away like trash? …

Reinventing Grief Work: Virginia Woolf's Feminist Representations of Mourning in 'Mrs. Dalloway' and 'To the Lighthouse.'

Abstract: Freud, in his studies of hysterics, and the contemporary nerve specialists George Savage and Silas Weir Mitchell, in case studies, treat bereaved women as mentally unbalanced. They assume a causal link between grief and madness without any analysis or explicit justification. Because women had traditionally been the primary mourners, they became the primary patients of rest cures and talking cures. As one of Savage's patients and as the subject of much biographical writing, Virginia Woolf embodies the effects of this easy correlation between madness and grief. In Woolf's case, the issue becomes crystallized in a specific moment: why was the family physician called in to treat the thirteen-year-old Virginia Stephen after her mother died? That moment marks a break with Victorian mourning ritual, and makes vivid the transition from social grief practices to medical and psychological therapies. Her own writings, both autobiographical and fictional, offer a critique of this transition and describe a post-Freudian form of grief work. In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf tells a cautionary tale of the fatal results of the feminization and medicalization of grief, but offers no viable alternative. In To the Lighthouse she removes mourning from the realms of femininity and medicine, and provides a positive model for grief work. As is well documented, her mother's death triggered Virginia's first breakdown; her father's death when she was twenty-two precipitated a severe breakdown and a suicide attempt. Recent theorists consider eating and sleep disorders, hallucinations, anger, and depression to be nonpathological manifestations of grief.(1) Bereavement which prompts a suicide attempt is pathological, but short of that, what constitutes disordered grief? This question becomes particularly difficult to answer when we compare the reactions of Virginia and Leslie Stephen to Julia's death. According to Quentin Bell, both experienced their bereavement as a kind of imitation death, but while Leslie's was comprehensible in terms of Victorian mourning ritual, his daughter's was not. "For a long time he abandoned himself to grief; his life, like his writing paper, was confined within a deep black border" (1:40). Virginia's "breakdown" was "a great interval of nothingness, a kind of positive death which cannot be described and of which Virginia herself probably knew little" (1:44). In Bell's words, Leslie "broke down utterly" after Julia's death, but he did not suffer a "breakdown." There is a fine but definite line between "broke down" and "breakdown," between what can be described in terms of social conventions and what cannot. In "Reminiscences" Woolf compares her father's grief unfavorably to her own and that of her sisters and brothers. In her analysis it is Leslie's grief that is transgressive. She felt that the "Oriental gloom" which her Victorian father imposed on the household was excessive: his "groans [and] passionate lamentations . . . passed the normal limits of sorrow" (Moments of Being 40). She characterizes his expression of grief as both foreign and feminine, as inappropriate; he is like "a Hebrew prophet" (40) and "the Queen in Shakespeare" (94) in his self-dramatization. But Woolf's notion of "the normal limits of sorrow" is very different from her father's Victorian idea. Leslie Stephen was a distraught widower, living in a conventionally darkened house, visited by female relatives and friends who offered sympathy and comfort. The trappings of "Oriental gloom" were the trappings of Victorian mourning ritual. Woolf's insistence on the strangeness of her father's behavior manifests her complete rejection of nineteenth-century modes of grief as emotionally oppressive, excessive, and perhaps even pathological. The profound difference between Leslie's and Virginia's bereavements was both gendered and generational. Woolf's rejection of her father's Victorian bereavement is characteristic of her generation's wholesale rejection of things Victorian, but to her family and to many of her critics Virginia's grief was a disease; Leslie's was normal. …

No end of history : evidence from the contemporary english novel

Abstract: Price, a student in Tom Crick's course on the French Revolution in Graham Swift's novel Waterland, disrupts the class and sets off Crick's rambling but fascinating discourse on the history of the East Anglian fens with a challenge that is all too familiar to teachers of history, literature, and virtually every other academic subject: "What matters . . . is the here and now. Not the past. . . . The only important thing about history, I think, sir, is that it's got to the point where it's probably about to end" (6-7). Price has some distinguished and more articulate company. According to such diverse critics and philosophers as Jean Baudrillard, Francis Fukuyama, and Fredric Jameson, we are at or beyond the "end of history": there stands before or about us only a perpetual present: a world defined only spatially, no longer in terms of development through time. The grand syntheses, the "meta-narratives," the myths that once informed our consciousness of the world, have been discredited and become obsolete. One product of the "end of history" is literary postmodernism, for whose exponents, according to David Bennett, "the past as referent has been effaced, time has been textualized, leaving only representations, texts, pseudo-events, images without originals: a spatial, rather than temporal, order of simulacra" (262). In the rarefied intellectual atmosphere inhabited by post-Saussurean theorists and postmodern critics the notion of the "end of history" may appear to have some validity, but in the more pedestrian regions of the bookstore and the fiction shelves of the library, history and the concept of history are alive and well, particularly as subject and theme in recent English fiction. Indeed, a significant number of the more ambitious English novels of the 1980s and 1990s have in common an acute consciousness of history and a sharp focus on its meanings or potential for meaning. These novels are, for the most part, the products of an identifiable generation of writers who were born in the Forties or early Fifties and came of age professionally in the Eighties: the first generation of the post-World War II era. An exception to this generalization is A. S. Byatt (born in 1936), but her novel Possession (1990) could be said to exemplify this type of contemporary English novel most directly and clearly, if not most provocatively. The other novelists I have in mind include Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, and, pre-eminently, Graham Swift. Swift's Shuttlecock (1981), Waterland (1983), Out of This World (1988), and Ever After (1992), Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984), Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), and Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), Chatterton (1987), First Light (1989), and English Music (1992) are characterized by a foregrounding of the historical consciousness, most often through a dual or even multiple focus on the fictional present and one or more crucial "pasts." Their narrators or protagonists are for the most part explorers of history (in the broadest sense) by profession or avocation. Swift's narrator Prentis in Shuttlecock is a police archivist, Waterland's Tom Crick is a history teacher, Harry Beech of Out of This World is a photojournalist, and Bill Unwin of Ever After is an English lecturer engaged in editing an ancestor's memoirs; Barnes's Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired physician who is an amateur student of the life and works of Flaubert; the central characters in the contemporary plot of Byatt's Possession are literary scholars; Ackroyd's protagonists include a police detective, an archaeologist, and a failed poet who is writing a life of Thomas Chatterton. Those without a professional interest in history are driven to confront it in their attempts at self-definition, self-actualization, or self-avoidance: Ishiguro's aging, emotionally crippled butler in The Remains of the Day is an obvious example. Linda Hutcheon has described a genre which she calls "historiographic metafiction" (xiv), and Alison Lee in her book on postmodern British fiction has identified Flaubert's Parrot and Waterland as examples (36). …

Hearing Is Believing: Southern Racial Communities and Strategies of Story-Listening in Gloria Naylor and Lee Smith

Abstract: In Southern communities the compelling need "to talk, to tell"(1) can inspire numerous -- if not untold -- types of oral performances. As with almost any folk community, Southern stories can range from trickster tales to personal experience narratives to exogamous accounts.(2) From among these various oral genres available for performance, Gloria Naylor in Mama Day and Lee Smith in Oral History have strategically manipulated the personal narrative -- an oral story which recounts an individual's life experiences in the voice of first person -- in order to problematize story-listening in racially separate Southern communities.(3) In her model of Cocoa Day as story-listener, Naylor evokes Southern African American traditions of storytelling, compelling us to hear and believe the personal narratives of a "dead" man. Lee Smith also invites her readers into distinctive racial and cultural territory, manipulating us -- through the effacement of Jennifer Bingham as listener -- into hearing the singular narratives of White ethnic ghosts from Appalachia. Naylor and Smith ultimately reveal their distrust of "the American reader," whose historical reluctance to hear stories of difference compels the authors' use of narrative ploys. Storytellers, faced with the threat of having their personal narratives either dismissed or appropriated, recount their experiences in order to secure ownership of events that belong to them. Indeed, as folklorist Sandra Dolby Stahl has said, personal narratives "`belong' to the tellers because they are the ones responsible for recognizing in their own experiences something that is `story worthy'" ("Personal" 268-69). But while personal-experience narratives "belong" to individual tellers and substantiate what is "story worthy" in their lives, tellers are not lone agents in the storytelling enterprise: Oral performances of personal narratives command real, warm-blooded listeners to enthusiastically receive, value, and confirm the experiences of the teller. In this recurring cycle of telling and listening, the speaking subject tends to be venerated as one who asserts an identity. The position, however, of this "somebody else" -- this listener in Southern culture -- invites our closer attention. One African (San) storyteller has said of his story-listening habits, "I simply listen, watching for a story that I want to hear" (qtd. in Scheub 2). Clearly, listeners will vary in enthusiasm, occasionally choosing to "watch for" a more satisfying story than the one being told. Moreover, degrees of competence can differ among listeners, perhaps forcing a desperate storyteller to survive a telling event with a wooden, unreceptive listener. For a felicitous moment in storytelling, however, the listener must deliberately collaborate with the teller, jointly shaping the production of the story.4 In fact, the proficiency for telling personal narratives emerges from having habitually and actively listened to the experiences of others. The American South endures as a culture that empowers such practices of listening and telling. While the celebration of personal narratives is, of course, not the exclusive province of Southerners, storytelling and listening events nonetheless thrive in the South because of the self-conscious privileging of orality, community, and intimacy in the region: through storytelling, members of a Southern community vigorously reaffirm their connection to each other. This desire to connect has motivated Alice Walker to write that "what the Black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community" (1). Indeed, a Southern identity -- Black or White -- very much depends on gaining the competence to hear the personal-experience narratives of others in order to willfully cultivate intimacy in a community, as is clear in the works of Naylor and Smith. Stahl recognizes that "the knowledge one gains as a listener when personal narratives are told brings with it the sensation of intimacy" (Literary x). …

Re-Visions, Re-Flections, Re-Creations: Epistolarity in Novels by Contemporary Women

Abstract: During the last twenty years a significant number of epistolary novels by women have appeared, of the type which first flourished in England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike the eighteenth-century sentimental examples, however, the epistolary novels emerging now radically rewrite women's lives in a postmodern genre. Although such novels have always been about sexual politics, contemporary ones are more blatantly political in theme and more radical in form, and many are written by women in post-colonial cultures, in which women have been doubly oppressed, from outside by a chauvinistic imperialism and from within by a patriarchy which itself has felt oppressed by outside forces. From Senegal we have Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter (1980); from India, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust (1975); from Australia, Elizabeth Jolley's Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1983); from the United States, African-American Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982); from Brazil, Helena Parente Cunha's Woman Between Mirrors (1983); from Argentina, Sylvia Molloy's Certificate of Absence (1981); and from Canada, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986).(1) With the exception of Ba and Walker, whose books are traditional epistolary novels in structure, the above writers play in a postmodernist sense with epistolary conventions to produce revolutionary texts. All, however, use the letter as a subversive and freeing agent and also as a mirror in which they not only seek themselves and/or another but attempt to change their lives to reflect the mirror image. This essay will focus on the works of Jhabvala, Jolley, Cunha, and Molloy to illustrate the ways in which women writers from around the world rework the epistolary novel. In many contemporary women's novels, women find their freedom and their selves in the act of writing. Women today are doing consciously what women writers have always done, what French feminist theorists call l'ecriture feminine, or writing in the feminine - that is, writing themselves in a way which reflects their experience as the "other" in a culture in which they have been traditionally voiceless and thus powerless. In the epistolary novel and in the many modern women's novels which play (and I use the word "play" deliberately) with epistolary conventions, the writing itself is action and plot, action and plot which refuse the kind of closure informing other narratives. The epistolary novel and women's writing subvert the language and values of the dominant culture. In open epistolary fiction, the process of writing, the attempt to be heard, is more important than working toward an ending, than imposing closure. Eighteenth-century literature without closure (Francoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne, Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise, Smollett's Humphry Clinker) reflects the questioning of received ideas and power structures. Sartre associates the open (epistolary) literature of the eighteenth century with "doubt, refusal, criticism, and contestation" (MacArthur 19). If epistolary writing, which I will show is l'ecriture feminine, is a revolt against the dominant culture, it should not be surprising that most epistolary literature from Ovid's Heroides to present-day novels has been written in a woman's voice and usually by women writers.(2) What, then, is an epistolary novel? Basically it is a novel written in the form of letters, either an exchange of letters between two or more correspondents, or a single letter, or number of letters, from one correspondent to one or more recipients. Novels which are not composed exclusively of letters can also be classified as epistolary, but only if the plot is determined, advanced, and resolved by letters.(3) As we shall see in the novels I discuss, letters (most of them never seen by the reader of the novel) determine, advance, and resolve the plot but more importantly act as psychological motivators on characters in the novels. …

Mrs. Dalloway: Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman

Abstract: If the nature of the artist is to transmute personal experience and feeling into a public act, Clarissa Dalloway is certainly an artist, and Virginia Woolf's novel a portrait of the artist as a woman in middle age. The fundamental action of Mrs. Dalloway is to elucidate the mechanisms of Clarissa's thoughts and actions and to chart the ways in which her existence profoundly controverts the ideology and power relations of her cultural sphere. Critical appraisals of the novel have recognized Clarissa's identity as an artist, but usually in the context of another interpretation. Suzette Henke, for instance, notes that Clarissa's "gatherings serve as . . . creative acts of social artistry" (127), but centers her analysis on the religious models Woolf uses. David Daiches writes, "There is a suggestion throughout that the experiences of individuals combine to form a single indeterminate whole" (73), a suggestion central to Dalloway's aesthetics. Deborah Guth reveals Clarissa's modes of self-invention, glancing at the importance of her parties to the character's self-definition. Clarissa's artistry is the essential key to understanding her character, and the depiction of that character is the novel's key event. Woolf is concerned, before anything else, with the absolutely private mental world of a woman who, according to the patriarchal ideology of the day as well as her own figure in the world, was not imagined to have any artistic feeling at all. Woolf criticizes conceptions of character bound by the exterior forms of life: the whole complex (job, family, assets) that fixes every person firmly in the world of business and power relationships. Against this system Woolf places a world of private significance whose meaning is wholly irreducible to facts of the external world. By conceiving of personality as a private fact, apparently alienated from "public, political culture" and "its imperialistic and death-dealing ways" (Rosenman 77), Woolf shows Clarissa's "actual" existence to be an unrecognized but fundamental contradiction of traditional assumptions about gender. Maria DiBattista points out "the novel's vague but universal sense of malaise, of spiritual incapacity, of frustrated expectations" (24). This malaise arises from each character's perception of an inadequacy in her or his world view to encompass a world that increasingly seems unexplainable. The Europe of the early twentieth century was characterized by a breakdown of traditional models, as Woolf emphasized throughout her work. Clarissa is "modernist" in outlook, fundamentally a nonbeliever. With her "horror of psychological engulfment" (Henke 139), she rejects society's common props against the void: Walsh's passion, Kilman's religion, Bradshaw's Proportion, the simplistic patriotism of her husband and Lady Bruton. As a result, she must face disordered reality without accepted props and create her own meaning for it. This process is central to Mrs. Dalloway. Perhaps the most fundamental fact of Clarissa's psyche is the pleasure she takes in physical, sensual existence. She bursts onto the street to buy flowers and appreciates everything; "carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and singing" (Mrs. Dalloway 4). She neither condemns what seems like an altogether noisy and irritating urban scene (her London is not a Waste Land), nor approves it with the air of a connoisseur; her appreciation depends only on experience. In fact, her delight is free of self-interest or discrimination. She does not appreciate the scene for what it is, but simply because it is. Her world view is suffused with the sense of the solemnity and wonder of existence, but most of all by the wonder of living; she takes life very seriously. Being is a self-sufficient value without reference to other values, rational thought, or emotion; indeed, she sees the worth of being as directly opposed, and superior, to those other values. She uses the non-hierarchical joy-in-life to counter her emotions and desires, conceived of as threatening to her dignity and autonomy. …

The Merging of Spiritualities: Jane Eyre as Missionary of Love

Abstract: This essay analyzes the discourses of spirituality represented in Jane Eyre within the context of the Evangelical upheaval in the Britain of Charlotte Bronte9s childhood and the mixing of supernatural with Christian elements in the "popular religion" of early-nineteenth-century British rural society. In addition to a dominant Christian spiritualism and a supernatural spiritualism, however, a third discrete discourse is identified in the text-the discourse of spiritual love. The novel stages a contest between these three competing discourses. Christianity is itself conflictually represented, being torn between the repressive, masculine Evangelicalism of Mr. Brocklehurst and the healing communion (among women) represented by Helen Burns and the figure of "sympathy." The supernatural is equally conflicted: it is shown to empower Jane and to be a necessary vehicle for bringing Christian discourse in contact with the discourse of spiritual love, but then it is denied and left, like the madwoman in the attic, as the excluded term. Finally, spiritual love is offered by the text as that which solves these contradictions, revising and merging Christianity and the supernatural to produce a rejuvenated spirituality, one that fosters what is conceived of as the "whole" person, her need for mutual human relationship, her spiritual needs, and her desire.

Economies of Living in Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford

Abstract: "ECONOMY." writes William Cobbett in Cottage Economy (1821-22), "means management, and nothing more; and it is generally applied to the affairs of a house and family, which affairs are an object of the greatest importance, whether as relating to individuals or a nation." Due to the influence of the dismal science of political economy, the nineteeth century witnessed a narrowing of this concept to denote a specialized instrumentality rather than the integrated totality formerly encompassed by the term. In the novels of Mrs. Gaskell the standard of "economy" is applied in its older, undissociated sense, encompassing the regulation, rather than the mutually exclusive demarcation, of material and moral life. Throghout Gaskell9s fiction the rightness or the wrongness of a household usually finds its objective correlative in the manifest management of that household. In Cranford (1853) everything from managing household expenditures to managing one9s life is regualted by considerations of economy. The innumerable "small economies" practiced by Gaskell9s characters are among innumerable such arrangements forming the larger social and narrative economy of Cranford/Cranford. Minor though they might seem, the sundry small events of village life are the principal on which Cranford draws for its barely eventful subsistence. In the same way, Cranford9s narrative reflects the formal properties of economy. What finally emerges from his management of a slender store of incident is the identity between the local economy of Cranford/Cranford and larger fictional economies underlying Gaskell9s narrative.

"The Other Side of Silence": Matrimonial Conflict and the Divorce Court in George Eliot's Fiction

Abstract: The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 and the Divorce Court it created were hailed by some contemporary observers as "one of the greatest social revolutions of our time." Among the many "revolutionary" consequences of this new Court was an increased legal and social recognition of psychological cruelty in marriage and, through the journalistic reportage of its proceedings, the creation of a new reading public that had become fascinated with tales of marital strife. This essay suggests and examines a correlation between these legal and social changes and the emphasis found in George Eliot9s fiction on silence as a sign of matrimonial conflict. Throughout Eliot9s fiction, from "Janet9s Repentance" in Scenes of Clerical Life, through to Felix Holt and Middlemarch, and culminating in the portrayal of Henleigh Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda, there is a progressive emphasis on the nonphysical signs of matrimonial conflict and, in particular, on the oppressive power of silence in sexual relationships. Eliot9s use of silence to evoke this experience reflects a new social awareness of psychological cruelty in marriage, one that was being formally recognized in the law courts at this time. But by hinting at a form of matrimonial cruelty so terrible that it must remain veiled, Eliot9s use of silence also functions as a rhetorical device that whets a new public appetite for tales of matrimonial conflict.

Elegies for the Regency: Catherine Gore's Dandy Novels

Abstract: Mrs. Gore9s Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb and its sequel Cecil, a Peer, both published anonymously in 1841, came toward the end of the long run of the socalled silver fork or fashionable novels, which capitalized on middle-class fascination with the aristocratic Regency. Under cover of a masculine first-person narrator Gore was able to give free rein to the whole complex of attitudes and values associated with the by now discredited Regency and its ascendent ruling class. Although she satirizes high society, she shows good-humored indulgence toward her unregenerate dandy as well as misgivings about the emerging middle-class Victorian cult of seriousness and sincerity. Gore9s ambivalent thematic burden-her portrayal of the dandy9s allure and degeneration-exerts tremendous pressure on her narrative form. Like most of the silver fork writers, Gore sidesteps the conventional novelistic patterns of social and economic rise as irrelevant to her aristocratic hero, while she self-cousciously attempts to evade plot altogether, particularly closure. Early Victorian critics and readers appear to have been considerably less receptive to Gore9s themes and techniques than the popular audience of a decade earlier.

Optics and autobiography in Margaret Atwood's cat's eye

Abstract: childhood,2 Cat's Eye plays with the implications of autobiography: advancing and withdrawing it as a mode of authorization; thematizing it as a strategy for simplistic interpretation or, conversely, as the hidden, damaged heart of a work of art; insisting with the fervor of its adolescent girls telling each other scary stories that this is true, this really happened, while at the same time demanding on both aesthetic and metaphysical grounds, What do you mean, true? What do you mean, real? As a Kiinstlerroman, the novel seems to license a double substitution: for painter, read writer; for writer, read writer of this novel. Like Atwood's groundbreaking 1972 novel Surfacing, it takes the form of a first-person narration by a female artist, and in both works visual

Pamela, Shamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue

Abstract: There are Swarms of Moral Romances. One, of late Date, divided the World into such opposite Judgments, that some extolled it to the Stars, whilst others treated it with Contempt. Whence arose, particularly among the Ladies, two different Parties, Pamelists and Antiparnelists. ... Some look upon this young Virgin as an Example for Ladies to follow; nay, there have been those, who did not scruple to recommend this Romance from the Pulpit. Others, on the contrary, discover in it, the Behaviour of an hypocritical, crafty Girl, in her Courtship; who understands the Art of bringing a Man to her Lure.'

Varieties of Mystical Experience in the Writings of Virginia Woolf

Abstract: If one were to catalogue the various types of "mystical" experience appearing in the writings of Virginia Woolf, the list would be virtually indistinguishable from the topics of interest to the Theosophists and spiritualists of her day: telepathy, auras, astral travel, synesthesia, reincarnation, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of a Universal Mind. Yet, prior to writing The Waves, Woolf maintained a posture of utter contempt toward her fellow "mystics." In 1918 she attributed "lack of a good head on his shoulders" to John Mills Whitman, who "had dabbed in mysticism, & had made tables walz & heard phantom raps & believed it all" (Diary 1:114). In 1922 she confided that there was something a bit "mystic, silly" about her friend E. M. Forster (2:204). A year later she dismissed as absurd the rumor that Katherine Mansfield's ghost was haunting an acquaintance's house: But then Brett is not scientific; she at once takes the old fables seriously, & repeats some jargon learnt of Dunning, but no doubt diluted in transit, about day & night, birth, & therefore death, all being beautiful. She feels the "contact" she says; & has had revelations; & there she sits deaf, injured, solitary, brooding over death, & hearing voices . . . did K.M. do something to deserve this cheap posthumous life? (2:237-38) Prior to The Waves, Woolf's fictional characters, including her narrators, demonstrated the same cognitive dissonance between their mystical apprehensions of "reality" and their attitudes toward "mystics." The odious Mrs. Stuart in Jacob's Room "kept a parrot, believed in the transmigration of souls, and could read the future in tea leaves. Dirty lodging-house wallpaper she was" (72). The ridicule is somewhat gentler in To the Lighthouse, where "The mystic, the visionary, walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a stone, asking themselves 'What am I,' 'What is this?' had suddenly an answer vouchsafed them: (they could not say what it was)" (112). "Telling fortunes," in Orlando, is a diversion of the "riff-raff of the London streets" (56). In late 1928, as she was preparing to write The Waves (at that time tentatively titled The Moths), Woolf wrote in her diary that "now, if I write The Moths I must come to terms with these mystical feelings" (3:203); and indeed she did. This article will explore the parallels between Woolf's "natural mysticism" and the teachings of Theosophy, the reasons why Woolf may have denied her own mystical bent for so many years, and the process by which she sought and received authorization for the mystical world-view from two respected intellectual sources before she could accept and embrace those feelings in herself. Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, seven years after Russian emigre Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New York. The organization's original mission, later somewhat abridged, was: (1) To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, colour, or creed. (2) To promote the study of the world's religion and sciences, and to vindicate the importance of old Asiatic literature, namely, of the Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Zoroastrian philosophies. (3) To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially. (Blavatsky 24) Filling the spiritual void left in the wake of Darwinism with non-Christian, non-deistic, humanistic, yet "religious" teachings, the Theosophical Movement quickly spread to Europe and - rather ironically - to India, where it introduced many westernized Indian intellectuals to the concepts of their "native" philosophy for the first time. In London, women's rights / Indian affairs activist Annie Besant became head of the European and Indian chapters (1891), and later of the Society as a whole (1907). Her efforts on behalf of Home Rule for India most certainly placed her in contact with Leonard Woolf, who as a member of the Labour Party's Advisory Committee on imperialism consistently advocated self-government and dominion status for that nation (L. …

"A Point of Conscience": Breastfeeding and Maternal Authority in Pamela 2

Abstract: Pamela's outraged description of her husband's domestic tyranny signals the onset of the first conflict in her married life, and introduces the reader to a crucial episode in the sequel to Richardson's phenomenally popular first novel. Pamela 1 (1740) had been occupied with the violent sexual pursuit of a young servant girl by her wealthy and more experienced master; it ended, disturbingly for some readers, with the sudden repentance of the master, Mr B., who condescends at last to marry the girl he had hoped to rape. Part 2 (1741) takes up where Part 1 left off, and follows Pamela and Mr B. into their married life. What this means for the heroine, of course, is that the continuation is largely a record of maternal experience: Pamela is pregnant virtually throughout the sequel (seven times in all), adopts an illegitimate daughter of Mr B.' s from a former liaison, and gives considerable attention in her correspondence to the care and education of her children.

Color and Light: Huxley's Pathway to Spiritual Reality

Abstract: Unlike modern British writers such as T. S. Eliot and Evelyn, Waugh, Aldous Huxley did not convert to a specific religious community indigenous to Western culture; however, his entire life embraced a consciousness-expanding search for ultimate reality revealed to him through the mystical qualities of color and light. Like Eliot and Waugh, Huxley found himself regarded by many critics as unfaithful to his earlier writing after his conversion to a spiritual faith. Huxley's friend Christopher Isherwood states that Huxley's developing beliefs were "widely represented as the selling-out of a once-brilliant intellect" (Clark 303), and Donald Watt concurs that "in the minds of a majority of critics Huxley was fixed as an entertaining recorder of the frenetic 1920s who later recoiled into an aesthetically suicidal mysticism" (AH 31).(1) More recent critics still tend to divide Huxley's canon into two halves in which Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is sometimes referred to as his "conversion" novel (Bowering 114, Watt AH 19). Although the assumption has been weakening, what many critics mistakenly took to be an abrupt change of direction and attitude in Huxley's writing actually represents a continuation of his search for theological idealism. The writer's steps on the pathway to spiritual reality can be charted -- from his first book of poetry in 1916 to his last novel in 1962 -- through his distinctive use of the imagery of color and light. By 1936 Huxley had already started his troubled spiritual journey from despair toward mystical union with the "pure light of the void." Despite elements of wishful thinking and open doubt in Huxley's life and work, his conscious commitment to the struggle to believe in the Divine Light can be traced as early as 1922 in his first novel, Crome Yellow. Confirmation of Huxley's intentional use of color is summarized in his "Natural History of Visions," a 1959 lecture posing the question, "Why are precious stones precious?" (Human 216). These brightly colored pebbles, says Huxley, are not beautifully harmonized like a work of art or a piece of music; they are single objects which the human mind responds to in an unaccountable way. He states that one reason for our interest can be found in the Phaedo where Socrates speaks about the ideal world of which our world is in a sense a rather bad copy. Socrates says: "In this other earth the colors are much purer and more brilliant than they are down here. The mountains and stones have a richer gloss, a livelier transparency and intensity of hue" (217). Plato writes not merely about a metaphysical idea but also about another inner world which has landscape and beautiful regions of memory, fantasy, imagination, dreams, and-most remote -- "the world of visions" (218). Huxley explains the importance of light and color in this world of visions: This experience of the pure light of the void is a visionary experience of what may be called the highest, the most mystical kind. On a rather lower level the lights seem to be broken up and become, so to speak, incorporated in different objects and persons and figures. It is as though this tremendous white light were somehow refracted through a prism and broken up into different coloured lights. In this lower form of vision we have the intensification of light in some way associated with the story-telling faculty, so that there are visions of great complexity and elaboration in which light plays a tremendous part, but it is not the pure white light of the great theophanies. (228-29) Huxley deduces, therefore, that precious stones are precious because they are objects in the external world -- along with fire, stained glass, fireworks, pageantry, theatrical spectacle, Christmas-tree lights, rainbows, and sunlight -- which most nearly resemble the things that people see in the visionary world (232-35). …

The Naturalism of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth

Abstract: between sex and money in turn-of-the-century upper-class New York life and to reveal the tragic effects of a society of this kind upon a sensitive young woman has been recognized from the publication of the novel in 1905. Criticism of the day, however, and indeed for the next half-century, shied away from an identification of these themes with literary naturalism. The fictional worlds of Norris, Crane, and Dreiser, the naturalists of Wharton's generation, appeared so distant from those of Wharton that the almost inevitable tendency of the literary historian, as revealed most notably in a well-known section of Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds, was to consider Wharton and Dreiser as antithetical tendencies in early twentieth-century American expression. A notable attempt, however, to free Wharton criticism from this

Where He Wrote: Periodicals and the Essays of George Orwell

Abstract: George Orwell has attained something akin to the status of a cultural icon, ironic given the myth of him as an iconoclast. While Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four account for much of this acclaim, Orwell's essays also contribute significantly, and the writer enjoys an honored place in the pantheon of essayists. Seen by some, though not all, as a clear-eyed teller of unpleasant truths, Orwell could also write endearing, perceptive, and unselfconscious pieces about postcards, tea-making, and toads. His essays are used frequently as mortar to support blocks of biographical or psychological speculation, the result of a supposed difficulty in separating the writer and his writings. The very title of Orwell's essay "Why I Write" seems to cry out for such treatment, and the cry has often been answered. In this foregrounding the writer, however, the periodical context in which and for which Orwell wrote his essays often has been ignored. Yet where Orwell wrote is scarcely less important than why he wrote. An indication of the periodical's importance comes from Orwell himself. "The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers," he claims in his 1941 essay "The Lion and the Unicorn" (74).(1) Given that a year earlier his "Boys' Weeklies" had mapped out the terrain for a survey of boys' magazines, the comment signals an abiding interest in the periodical press. In the later essay, however, Orwell comes not to praise the weeklies and monthlies but to bury them - or, at least, to rough them up a little. He declares, "The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion" (74). Orwell names no names (thus damning all), but a paragraph later suggests some suspects, lashing the New Statesman and Nation and the News Chronicle for colluding in the "intellectual sabotage from the Left" of English morale. The accusation carries serious implications, Orwell charging that as a result of this sabotage "Fascist nations judged that [the English people! were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war" (75). Inflammatory stuff, certainly, but there remains an intriguing and telling twist. In the same month in which Orwell was writing "The Lion and the Unicorn," his short, appreciative study of the Victorian novelist Charles Reade appeared. What surprises is not the subject of this essay but the site of publication: the allegedly negative, querulous, unconstructive New Statesman and Nation. Clearly, Orwell was not frightened to bite the hand that fed him (admittedly, the New Statesman and Nation provided only occasional sustenance) but more productive insights can be drawn. First, Orwell acknowledges the centrality of periodicals and papers to the thinking of the English left-wing intelligentsia in the 1930s and 1940s. Young readers of Magnet and Gem were not the only group affected by the periodical press. Second, and more important, he uses those same organs to broadcast his own ideas. The significance of the periodical to the development and transmission of his opinions, however, has largely gone unrecognized. This despite the fact that Orwell's association with periodicals can be traced back to the very beginnings of his writing career. Indeed, periodicals provided that start. For nearly two years before the publication in 1933 of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, his writing (reviews, articles, and essays) appeared only in journals and weeklies. Reviewing the second number of the periodical New Writing in 1936, Robert Waller notes that Orwell, who had contributed "Shooting an Elephant," "is an Adelphi discovery" (188). Since Waller was writing in The Adelphi, this claim to a promising young author lacks a certain impartiality. Nevertheless, the boast contains a sizable element of truth, Orwell's (then Eric A. Blair's) sketch "The Spike" having been published in The Adelphi in 1931. …

The gentleman's true name: David Copperfield and the philosophy of naming

Abstract: No one has ever accused Dickens of being a philosopher. But David Copperfield offers an opportunity for thinking philosophically about naming. Unlike the characters unconscious of their satirical names in Dickens9s earlier novels, the characters in David Copperfield feel the tension of naming and explore with the author what their names are for. They find, of course, that the order of names-the hierarchy of terms by which they refer to and address one another-betrays rank and sentiment, power and desire. But they find more than that a name expresses and enforces the will of the namer. Names in David Copperfield have a way of coming true, and the possibility of names coming true requires there be such a thing as truth. David as he grows must find in falsity and failure the possibility of truth and reform. Dickens always believed in truth. Beneath the jokes and abused language, there is for Dickens an intelligible order of reality that is finally moral and true. No reformed Scrooge or Chuzzlewit comes to fix the broken lives at the end of David Copperfield, but truth wells up in the novel, nonetheless. After Dora and Steerforth die, David reaches at last an adult understanding of names beyond the childish assumption of meaning and the adolescent assumption of emptiness.

Pamela's Textual Authority

Abstract: R emoved from her parents, harassed and imprisoned by her employer, nearly driven to suicide, Richardson's Pamela attempts to forge a personal identity that balances conflicting claims of authority.' As the novel proceeds, Pamela tries to embody her parents' injunctions and to correct the abuses of aristocratic privilege by Mr B.2 Her maturing process culminates in a struggle between Mr B.'s will to power over Pamela and her will to profess and practise virtue. Unfortunately, the authority of Pamela's appeals to tmth and virtue is threatened by her subordinated roles as adolescent, woman, and servant, roles which pose contradicting claims against a mature male ari~tocrat.~ Thus even though her moral stance may be justified by her belief in the correspondence between inward virtue and outward honesty, it is supported by little that is tangible in terms of age, sex, or social status. The only identity, the only authority, and the greatest degree of power she bas are manifest in her writing, a textuality giving voice to an identity Mr B. would willingly debase and silence. A closer examination of the manner in which Pamela

"My Boldness Terrifies Me": Sexual Abuse and Female Subjectivity in the Voyage Out

Abstract: I think I gather courage as I go on. The only possible reason for writing down all this, is that it represents roughly a view of one s own. My boldness terrifies me. (February 1909, Letters 1:383) In July of 1905 Virginia Stephen wrote to Nelly Cecil (Lady Robert), with whom she had been sharing manuscripts and discussing writing, "I feel always that writing is an irreticent thing to be kept in the dark - like hysterics" (Letters 1:196). Virginia had already expressed to Nelly her anxiety about publication several times, once thanking her for her encouraging criticism because "a poor wretch of an author keeps all his thoughts in a dark attic in his own brain, and when they come out in print they look so shivering and naked" (167). She confessed that "the temptation to stick things into a great desk that I have, is increasing. I don't see why one should ever be read" (195). Thus from the beginning Virginia Woolf's career was marked by a tension between desire to publish, to make public her shivering, naked visions, and desire to keep them in the dark drawers of her desk and mind, to protect herself through silence. This tension manifests itself in the self-censorship evident in the transformations from drafts to published works, remarked upon and analyzed by such critics as Louise DeSalvo, Jane Marcus, Alice Fox, and others. It is also evident, I believe, in Woolf's use of indirect methods of expression, ways of "telling it slant," such as allusion, symbol and metaphor (often heavily coded), humor, hints, irony, and understatement to express feminist critique and to handle the problem of "telling the truth about [her] own experiences as a body" ("Professions" 241).(1) The responsibility of the critic toward such a writer is at least twofold: to help the writer's cryptic and coded messages to be heard - to re-member her texts - and to explore why she felt compelled, apparently, to censor herself. In this article I do both in my reading of The Voyage Out. My goals are to show that not only did Woolf write about incest and child abuse in her fiction and use writing as a mode of self-construction and survival, as Louise DeSalvo demonstrates in her groundbreaking work Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, but that Woolf's writing also constitutes, in its form as well as content, both a symptom of her abuse and a social history of female subjectivity. I contend that Woolf's experiences of incest were originatory of her self-censorship as well as of her passionate dissection of and protest against British patriarchy. Further, through my reading of The Voyage Out as a "hysterical" text, I demonstrate that Woolf's text enacts even as it tells how sexual abuse is a major obstacle to the development of the female subject, to the achievement of agency in discourse and society. Woolf makes clear that sexual abuse functions as part of a larger process of female socialization. My analysis relies on the understanding, admirably laid out by Christine Froula, that the sexual abuse of girls and women is "continuous" with their cultural abuse (repression, oppression, denigration, marginalization) and constitutive of that "cultural achievement," women's silence ("Daughter's" 121, 117, and passim). Virginia Stephen's comparison of writing to hysterics suggests one reason for her ambivalence about publication. On some level the young writer knew that her writing, like the symptoms of hysterics, pointed to disturbing family secrets and revolutionary disaffection with established systems of family and society. Like the symptoms of hysterics, her writing reveals, sometimes in code, sometimes directly, her experience as patriarchal daughter and an incest victim, and her analysis of the male power system by which she was abused.(2) Claire Kahane suggests that one of Freud's contributions to the understanding of hysteria was his realization that hysterical symptoms could be read as "coded representations" of his patients' stories. …

"Unbecoming Conjunctions": Mourning the Loss of Landscape and Love in Persuasion

Abstract: I am sorry for the Beaches' loss of their little girl, especially as it is the one so much like me. ... Mrs. Hall of Sherboum was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright.—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband. ... Mr Waller is dead, I see;—I cannot greive about it, nor perhaps can his Widow very much. ... The death of Mrs. W. K. we had seen;— I had no idea that anybody liked her, & therefore felt nothing for any Survivor....1

The education of Cousin Phillis

Abstract: In "Cousin Phillis" Elizabeth Gaskell shows Phillis Holman9s love experience to be inseparable from her education. Gaskell9s male narrator naively supposes that having a male education makes Phillis "more a like man than a woman"; however, the male supervision of her studies and the lessons of her readings in classical and foreign literature confirm instead the constraints of Victorian womanhood. Gaskell9s allusion to the Phillises of Virgil, Ovid, and the Renaissance pastoral tradition implies demeaning and self-destructive models for her heroine and, more broadly, a critique of the representation of women in literary texts. Phillis Holman9s abandonment and collapse repeat the patterns of her classical namesakes, but ultimately she eludes their reductive definitions of womanhood and establishes her individuality in the will to live.

"Ev'ry Lost Relation": Historical Fictions and Sentimental Incidents in Sophia Lee's The Recess

Abstract: Her face, her form, have been so deeply impressed upon the imagination, that, even at the distance of nearly three centuries, it is unnecessary to remind the most ignorant and uninformed reader of the striking traits which characterize that remarkable countenance. ... Who is there, at the very mention of Mary Stuart's name, that has not her countenance before him, familiar as that of the mistress of his youth, or the favourite daughter of his advanced age? ... That brow, so truly open and regal—those eye-brows, so regularly graceful, ... the hazel eyes ... which seem to utter a thousand histories ... form a countenance, the like of which we know not to have existed in any other character moving in that high class of life. ... It is in vain to say that the portraits which exist of this remarkable woman are not like each other; for, amidst their discrepancy, each possesses general features which the eye at once acknowledges as peculiar to the vision which our imagination has raised while we read her history for the first time, and which has been impressed upon it by the numerous prints and pictures which we have seen. Walter Scott, The Abbot (1820)

The Burning Clime: Charlotte Brontë and John Martin

Abstract: The name of the Romantic painter and printmaker John Martin has long been associated with the Brontes. His pictures hung on the Bronte Parsonage walls; the Bronte children both copied his images in paint and transposed them into "print" in their tiny handsewn magazines. His sublime landscapes and gigantic imaginary scenes of ancient architecture-an amalgamation of Classical, Egyptian, and Indian styles-provided unlimited scope for the young architects of Glass Town and Angria. Yet the dynamic relationship between Martin9s lurid canvases and Charlotte Bronte9s writings extends beyond the simple use of pictorialism. In his work she found an analogue for her own frustrating experience, and her response to his work significantly contributed to her personal development as an artist. This essay attempts to trace the way in which Bronte9s writings register her early-nineteenth-century response to Martin9s work in a gradual shift from her initial enthusiasm for his landscapes toward a distrust of his illusive promises of grandeur.

The Dialectic of Love in Sir Charles Grandison

Abstract: Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison is structured around an event that seems to defy both the novel's insistent and pervasive moralistic tone and its characterization of Sir Charles as a moral paragon: Sir Charles is in love with two women at the same time. Love for more than one woman is precisely the quality that distinguishes the rake, the kind of man Sir Charles himself excoriates. How can the exemplar of English integrity, who is not merely another worthy hero but a \"vision of Christ as a realistic eighteenth-century gentleman,\"1 be involved in what he himself rightly defines as a \"divided or double Love\"?2 Why is this paradox necessary for Richardson? Sir Charles suffers a divided love because Richardson wants to endorse competing and contradictory cultural ideals: what recent writers have called \"companionate\" and \"sentimental\" love.3 English society's

Lavater and Physiognomy in English Fiction 1790-1832

Abstract: The study of physiognomy in the novel has become an established domain of literary criticism, with scholars intent on showing ways in which novelists of different nationalities were influenced by the physiognomic theories of Iohann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801). ' The present essay, while consistent with earlier studies in aims and methods, surveys a transitional period in the development of physical character description in the English novel, and suggests some of the hazards as well as the benefits of comparative studies of this kind. Until recently, critics of the major works of English fiction seldom came across Lavater' s name and were thus unaware that he was practically a household name in Britain from the moment in 1789 when the first English translations of his Essays on Physiognomy appeared.2 His fame should not, however, obscure the fact that by the time his theories became known in Britain, physiognomy had not only had a history

«The cock of lordly plume»: sexual selection and the egoist

Abstract: Despite a long-standing acknowledgment of the evolutionary chracter of George Meredith9s poetry and fiction, and a more recent delineation of the specifically Darwinian elements of The Egoist (1879), the relationship between that novel and Darwin9s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) has been overlooked. Both works focus on the evolutionary development of the human moral sense and on the process of courtship between the sexes, but Meredith9s novel links these issues while Darwin9s book keeps them separate. Through his characterization of Sir Willoughby Patterne, Meredith shows that "civilized" egoism is a sign of moral reversion most likely to occur during courtship, and he critiques Darwin9s discussion of sexual selection in humans, exposing its inconsistencies and in particular challenging its portrayal of female choice. While modern feminist critics have rightly identified problems with the novel and the theory of comedy that governs it, Meredith9s attack on Darwin9s culturally powerful view of the sexes endorses a postion on "the woman question" close to John Stuart Mill9s, and the novel9s problems are best seen as part of this attack rather than as naive self-contradictions of Meredith9s feminism.

Question de lecture

Abstract: Seul genre littéraire véritablement expérimental, le roman a toujours été une forme plurielle et instable et un champ de recherche pour l'écriture. Au gré de ses réussites et de ses échecs il a entrepris de rapprocher ou même de marier en d'exceptionnelles symbioses ou des équilibres précaires l'interrogation sur les valeurs, les pouvoirs de l'analyse, la poétique du récit et la prégnance des fictions. Les grands romans du xvme siècle—ceux par exemple de Marivaux, Crébillon, Prévost, Rousseau, Laclos—utilisent et transforment la tradition, les conventions et les usages du genre pour que s'y découvrent et que s'en libèrent les capacités d'analyse qui y sommeillent. Sous le vêtement d'Arlequin des anciennes fictions et sur leur corps multiple, ils essaient de placer la greffe d'un récit plus analytique. Un travail sur les modes et la matière de la narration tente de modifier les fonctions de la fiction. Il en explore le territoire, recompose ses épures, resserre et complique ses trames et met à l'épreuve ses nouveaux pouvoirs de telle sorte que dans les matrices de l'ancienne fable romanesque se développe un nouvel effort d'analyse. Cette tendance a certes toujours existé dans les récits; il nous semble seulement que les romans de ce temps essaient de prolonger, d'illustrer, de précipiter même cette conversion de la narration fabuleuse en une narration plus critique au point que cette transformation pourra apparaître au regard de maints historiens et théoriciens du genre comme un moment fondateur et un trait spécifique. Une sorte de «raison» à la fois empirique, indiscrète, inventive, inquiète et ironique—mais autrement séduisante que son austère cousine des traités philosophiques—vient, dans ces textes majeurs, visiter le récit. Sans qu'on s'en avise toujours, c'est de la pensée qu'on raconte et qui

Why What Happens in Shandy Hall Is Not "A Matter for the Police"

Abstract: Critically speaking, we live in interesting times—as in the Chinese curse \"may you live in interesting times.\" My title refers to Derrida's claim that all organized narration is a \"matter for the police.\"1 1 am using this famous slogan as a shorthand for the radical critique of narrative and representation which surfaces in much contemporary theory and which makes these times so \"interesting\"—that is, both provocative and disturbing. In this view Narrative is a way of knowing that \"tracks, tames, frames the world under the aegis of the Law (in its various incarnations as the Father, the Censor, the Institution, the State, and ultimately, the Word).\"2 \"Shandy Hall\" in my title is shorthand both for the realistic novel, a practice allegedly impelled by this motive to track and frame, and for the eighteenth-century culture in which the novel originates and flourishes. Thus, according to this view of the novel, it is no accident that a kind of narrative which tracks characters in a minutely discriminated temporal-spatial grid should arise in a culture discovering similar techniques for rationalizing time and space in the interests of productivity and surveillance—a sinister Enlightenment which, David Harvey