Thomas Pynchon (1937 - )
The Crying of Lot 49
The author
Born May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, a suburb of New York. "Pynchon" can be traced
back to the Puritans.
High-school yearbook the last photograph.
Entered Cornell University to study engineering physics
Left college for two years in the Navy; returned as an English major; studied
with Nabokov.
1960-62: works on the Bomarc air-to-ground missile at Boeing, Seattle.
Drops out to become a writer and recluse, living in California, Mexico and New
York.
1963: publishes V.
1966: The Crying of Lot 49.
1973: Gravity’s Rainbow.
Later novels: Vineland, Mason and Dixon.
The opening of the novel
Oedipa Maas: the heroine, engaged in a basic fairy-tale motif, the Quest–but with
a difference.
Oedipa: female version of Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx (if you
failed to solve it, the Sphinx killed you and ate you).
Maas: most likely Mas, Spanish for more, with an extra "a." Cf. "mucho mas" or
"much more" for her husband (the word "more" appears in the first sentence).
The central problem of the novel: the world gives us more information than we
can handle (i.e. sort).
Pierce: either a US President who tried to build a trans-continental railway, but
failed; or G.W. Pierce, who wrote Principles of Wireless Telegraphy. A pioneer of
communication theory.
Inverarity: either inveracity, or a rare stamp printed inverted, or the opposite of
rarity (i.e. that which is most common, or entropic).
Jay Gould: robber baron who tried to corner the gold market, controlled the
Union Pacific railroad and Wester Union.
His statue is an ikon: "A representation of some sacred personage, itself regarded
as sacred, and honoured with a relative worship."
Like Oedipa, we are faced with the task of "sorting it all out": creating order out
of disorder by imposing a pattern. The central place where things are sorted in
our society is the Post Office, hence the importance of postal systems in the
novel.
There are two overlapping fields concerned with sorting and the establishment
of order in Lot 49:
Thermodynamics, with its three laws:
1. You can’t win.
2. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
3. Who says they’re going to get better.
"Maxwell’s Demon" proposes to beat them by sorting, and thus avoid the end of
the universe by "heat death" or a condition of maximum entropy.
Communication theory, which aims to sort the signal from the noise, and thus
preserve meaning in the face of too much random information.
Before discussing these, two words on Postmodernism:
Modernism tends to continue the Romantic myth of organicism, and therefore to
be hostile to science. It looks to the past, before society became technologised,
when mythic or religious systems of belief dominated.
Musil is a scientist, but Young Torless focuses on the limitations of the scientific
world-view, and tries to find shelter in humanism.
Postmodernism may well have a dystopian view of science and technology; but
it gives them a kind of respect as the "gods" of the world we now live in. What
postmodernists like Pynchon often do is to make science the source of myth: to
bring together the "rational" and the "irrational" into a paradoxical coexistence.
The Victorians imagined that science would gradually create a rational world
and drive out old superstitions, especially religion. Instead, both have flourished
in our society and become more extreme. At the limit, as with nuclear warfare or
death camps, scientific rationality and destructive irrationality reach
simultaneous peaks (another of our "horseshoe" phenomena).
A second feature of postmodernism is the mixing of cultural levels. Modernism
tends to preserve elite values, and to make a sharp distinction between high and
low culture, the intellectuals and the masses. Postmodernism tends to be
fascinated by low or popular culture; writers like Pynchon (and also De Lillo)
like to play with popular culture and exercise their intelligence on it, instead of
despising or dismissing it.
In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon takes the most ordinary ingredients, such as
used car lots, subdivisions, or the postal service, and turn them into complex
puzzles, with deep philosophical significance. This extends to the underside of
the social system, where Pynchon is fascinated with waste, disorder, insanity,
and those who are excluded from the American Dream. One scientific term for
this disorder is entropy, which Pynchon uses as a term for both thermodynamic
and communicative waste.
68, 84, 135: Maxwell’s Demon
"heat death" in thermodynamics equals noise and the most probable in
communication theory.
[Picture of Maxwell’s Demon]
The story "Entropy" makes the parallel between heat death and cultural death
under consumer capitalism.
A soft dystopia: totalitariansim by consent that turns people into happy robots.
But because they are happy, resistance can only be a kind of madness: you
escape from the closed world of consumerism into a solipsistic world of
paranoia, where you are locked up and tormented by your own fantasies.
Postal Metaphors
The US Postal system: fear is of a monopoly that can send out false messages or
substitute noise for signal.
"Since postal systems control much information, they have great social
implications. Money and power derive partly from information, particularly
when communications are poor. . . . in the era before electronic communication a
very high percentage of the information transmitted traveled by way of the
postal system. Hence, it makes some sense to expect an alternate postal system to
help overthrow the forces that dominate a society." (John O. Stark)
This only makes sense if the post is part of a larger, capitalist conspiracy that
controls the entire culture: if it exists, Pierce Inverarity was one of its main
organisers. History then becomes a struggle between the forces of monopoly (in
Puritan terms, the Elect) and the forces of diversity (in Puritan terms, the
Preterite or "those passed over").
In the Middle Ages, those forces founded a secret society called the Tristero, to
fight the official monopoly held by the Thurn & Taxis family (50) (building in
Vancouver).
The Courier’s Tragedy shows a world where there is nothing but conspiracy, false
messages, torture and assassination. Jacobean plays really are like this; Pynchon
makes fun of them, but also raises the possibility that things like this are still
going on, in a less visible form. The great plot that sets off the sixties is never
mentioned, but provides a context for everything: the Kennedy assassination, 22
November 1963.
The Peter Pinguid Society (35ff), is a parody of the Cold War, which was a
regime of universal suspicion. Specifically, it parodies the ultra-right John Birch
Society (36), named after a missionary killed by the Chinese communists in 1945
and thus the first casualty of the Cold War. Pinguid is not killed, but leaves the
Navy and becomes a real-estate speculator in southern California; as such, he
anticipates Pierce Inverarity.
p. 39: US government fights rival postal services in 1861, setting off the Civil
War. Official history and secret history. (The French Revolution explained, p.
136)
Now there is WASTE, operating at the Scope (which is the subversive underbelly
of Yoyodyne). This may be a harmless, eccentric hobby; or a front for continuing
actions by the sinister Tristero; it may resist Yoyodyne, or be part of Inverarity’s
grand scheme.
Madness?
Sometimes said that modernism is about neurosis, whose main symptom is
anxiety, and postmodernism is about psychosis, whose main symptom is
delusions.
Paranoia and conspiracy are central themes of postmodern fiction: the world as it
is becomes too much for you, you create a private world that makes sense, but
only to you. All it takes is to make a different set of connections between
phenomena.
To be paranoid is to be a projector (62, 64). Projection is a classic Freudian
symptom of psychosis: attributing to other people feelings and intentions that
they don’t really have.
The paranoid’s dilemma: everything confirms your suspicions, but no one will
validate them.
Character Stencil in V: "a hole that creates a pattern" (OED)
Oedipa goes to San Narciso & stays at Echo Courts.
Narcissus refused Echo’s love and died by his own reflection.
Echo was punished by Hera by only being able to repeat the last few words said
to her. She pined away for love of Narcissus until only her voice was left.
"In long-distance telephone lines electric waves traveling through the wires echo
the speaker’s own conversation back to him, and must be suppressed to avoid
confusion." (Columbia Encyclopaedia)
Is Oedipa hearing true messages about Inverarity’s conspiracy, or is she insane
and only hearing her own fantasies echoed back to her? The Remedios Varo
painting (9-10).
Story of Rapunzel:
A witch takes a child and shuts her up in a tower when she is twelve years old;
the tower has no door and only one high window.
The Prince saw the old Witch approach and heard her call out:
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your golden hair."
Then Rapunzel let down her plaits, and the Witch climbed up by them.
"So that's the staircase, is it?" said the Prince. "Then I too will climb it and try my
luck."
So on the following day, at dusk, he went to the foot of the tower and cried:
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your golden hair,"
and as soon as she had let it down the Prince climbed up.
At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man came in, for she had never
seen one before; but the Prince spoke to her so kindly, and told her at once that
his heart had been so touched by her singing, that he felt he should know no
peace of mind till he had seen her. Very soon Rapunzel forgot her fear, and when
he asked her to marry him she consented at once. "For," she thought, "he is
young and handsome, and I'll certainly be happier with him than with the old
Witch." So she put her hand in his and said:
"Yes, I will gladly go with you, only how am I to get down out of the tower?
Every time you come to see me you must bring a skein of silk with you, and I
will make a ladder of them, and when it is finished I will climb down by it, and
you will take me away on your horse."
They arranged that till the ladder was ready, he was to come to her every
evening, because the old woman was with her during the day. The old Witch, of
course, knew nothing of what was going on, till one day Rapunzel, not thinking
of what she was about, turned to the Witch and said:
"How is it, good mother, that you are so much harder to pull up than the young
Prince? He is always with me in a moment."
"Oh! you wicked child," cried the Witch. "What is this I hear? I thought I had
hidden you safely from the whole world, and in spite of it you have managed to
deceive me."
In her wrath she seized Rapunzel's beautiful hair, wound it round and round her
left hand, and then grasping a pair of scissors in her right, snip snap, off it came,
and the beautiful plaits lay on the ground. And, worse than this, she was so
hard-hearted that she took Rapunzel to a lonely desert place, and there left her to
live in loneliness and misery.
But on the evening of the day in which she had driven poor Rapunzel away, the
Witch fastened the plaits on to a hook in the window, and when the Prince came
and called out:
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your golden hair,"
she let them down, and the Prince climbed up as usual, but instead of his
beloved Rapunzel he found the old Witch, who fixed her evil, glittering eyes on
him, and cried mockingly:
"Ah, ah! you thought to find your lady love, but the pretty bird has flown and its
song is dumb; the cat caught it, and will scratch out your eyes too. Rapunzel is
lost to you for ever -- you will never see her more."
The Prince was beside himself with grief, and in his despair he jumped right
down from the tower, and, though he escaped with his life, the thorns among
which he fell pierced his eyes out. Then he wandered, blind and miserable,
through the wood, eating nothing but roots and berries, and weeping and
lamenting the loss of his lovely bride. So he wandered about for some years, as
wretched and unhappy as he could well be, and at last he came to the desert
place where Rapunzel was living. Of a sudden he heard a voice which seemed
strangely familiar to him. He walked eagerly in the direction of the sound, and
when he was quite close, Rapunzel recognised him and fell on his neck and
wept. But two of her tears touched his eyes, and in a moment they became quite
clear again, and he saw as well as he had ever done. Then he led her to his
kingdom, where they were received and welcomed with great joy, and they lived
happily ever after.
Two interpretations of Rapunzel and Remedios Varo:
1. Salvation by romantic love. Pierce is the first Prince, but he falls on his ass
instead of saving Rapunzel. She is left with solipsistic tears in front of the
painting–a version of the Echo myth of unrequited love. Mucho is an inadequate
husband, and Metzger shows love as a stripping away, but with no revelation at
the end, only sex (cf. The striptease metaphor, p. 40). The Prince delivers the
heroine out of isolation into the real world.
2. The philosophical problem of solipsism: how to prove that the world exists as
more than an individual dream or delusion. The Cartesian curse. Standard
solution is consensual validation, but Oedipa only gets more and more
impressions, without any coherence except for what she herself supplies (the
hermeneutic circle).
The faithlessness of Oedipa’s lovers is responsible for both her emotional and
philosophical distress–and they may be worse than faithless.
The Word
In the Puritan tradition, salvation comes from the Word, which is God’s
manifestation in the world (p. 128; & note parallel with literary critics). But, in a
fallen world, the word is corrupted too–like the texts of The Courier’s Tragedy,
which stand for the loss of scriptural meaning.
Ambiguity of the Word appears in Pynchon’s fascination with a postmodern
phenomenon, the acronym: a word that only substitutes for other words, and is
thus a second-order sign, twice removed from a referent. Further, in Lot 49
acronyms are deprived of their stable meanings and often point in opposite
directions, instead of aiding Oedipa’s quest. They are a kind of verbal entropy; if
"communication is the key" (84) as Nefastis says, acronyms are the wrong key for
the lock one is trying to open (which is worse than having no key at all).
83: FSM, YAF, VDC
91: IA - a fragment of CIA
96: CIA.
Bakunin’s miracle (97):
"There exists, finally, a somewhat numerous class of honest but timid souls who,
too intelligent to take the Christian dogmas seriously, reject them in detail, but
have neither the courage nor the strength nor the necessary resolution to
summarily renounce them altogether. They abandon to your criticism all the
special absurdities of religion, they turn up their noses at all the miracles, but
they cling desperately to the principal absurdity; the source of all the others, to
the miracle that explains and justifies all the other miracles, the existence of God.
Their God is not the vigorous and powerful being, the brutally positive God of
theology. It is a nebulous, diaphanous, illusory being that vanishes into nothing
at the first attempt to grasp it; it is a mirage, an ignis fatugs; that neither warms
nor illuminates. And yet they hold fast to it, and believe that, were it to
disappear, all would disappear with it. They are uncertain, sickly souls, who
have lost their reckoning in the present civilisation, belonging to neither the
present nor the future, pale phantoms eternally suspended between heaven and
earth, and occupying exactly the same position between the politics of the
bourgeois and the Socialism of the proletariat."
98, 99: DEATH and ACDC
Climax of the series is NADA (118).
Salvation
If any exists, it comes from a collective rather than a personal quest. Two great
visions of collective America, one negative, one positive:
4-5: Mucho’s used cars are a nightmare vision of an entropic society - "unvarying
gray sickness." Consumer society recycles goods endlessly, so that one longs for
the trumpet-blast of the day of judgement, when the "epileptic word" (95) creates
a discontinuity. Also, driving a used car represents exclusion from grace, in a
society where consumption is the principal religion.
102-104: the sailor’s mattress, another American nightmare of waste and futility;
also entropic, because it’s information can’t be recovered.
149: America’s salvation lies in the Preterite, who one day may speak the Word,
if only by chance.
English 322 - Lectures - Introduction to the Novel
Political Background to the 18th Century
In 1534, Henry VIII breaks with Rome, having declared himself head of the Church of
England.
1. Wants a divorce in order to have a son and heir (Catherine of Aragon can’t have more
children), and to marry Anne Boleyn. Catherine’s nephew, Emperor of Spain, takes
Rome - Pope afraid to give Henry an annulment.
2. Covets the Church’s wealth and independent power.
3. Avoids the radical individualism and Calvinism of continental protestantism Anglicanism a middle way, retains a hierarchy leading up to the King.
Under Elizabeth I (1558-1603) the puritans become active - want a more radical
protestantism, attack remnants of Catholicism and government of the Church by bishops.
James I and his son Charles I battle with the puritans, who overlap with:
1. The new commercial middle classes.
2. Those who feel that the King should be subject to law and to Parliament.
1642, the Civil War or English Revolution breaks out.
Parliament vs. the Crown
Roundheads vs. Cavaliers
Civil War ends with the victory of Parliament and of the modernizing South-East;
Charles I is executed, 1649. Cromwell dissolves Parliament and rules as Lord Protector.
Dies in 1658.
1660, the Restoration of Charles’s son, Charles II. Those who refuse to recognize the
supremacy of the Crown and the Church of England are called Dissenters and are
discriminated against - e.g. cannot attend Oxford or Cambridge or hold public office. But
Charles doesn’t turn the clock all the way back.
1685, Charles II dies, succeeded by his brother James II, a Catholic.
Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s bastard son, invades but is defeated at Sedgemoor and
executed (1685). Defoe, and Richardson’s father, followers of Monmouth. James II
persecutes Dissenters and favors Catholics. Allies himself with Catholic France (Louis
XIV) against Protestant Holland.
1688, James II is forced out by William of Orange, his son-in-law. William and Mary
rule jointly, as firm Protestants. Childless, succeeded by the Hanoverians, George I, II,
III.
The “Glorious Revolution”: supremacy of Parliament over the King, defeat of Catholics,
toleration of Dissenters.
Around 1689, the two main political parties of the 18th century form:
Whigs (from Scottish protestant rebels): supporters of the Glorious Revolution, led by
liberal aristocrats and commercial magnates. Chief 18th cent whig is the Prime Minister
Walpole.
Tories (from Irish Catholic rebels): backwoods landowners, not necessarily Catholic but
favor absolute monarchy and the cause of the Stuarts from James I on. Squire Western in
Tom Jones a classic Tory. Squire Allworthy is a Whig, like Fielding himself. Chief 18th
cent Tory is Bolingbroke, friend of Pope.
Tories favor James II’s son, James Stuart, “The Old Pretender,” who invades in 1715,
fails; his son, Charles (“The Young Pretender,” “Bonnie Prince Charlie”) invades in
1745, fails (background to Tom Jones). Tribal society wiped out at Culloden (1746).
THE NOVEL
Word comes from something new or invented - Boccaccio’s stories in the Decameron
(14th cent.).
Notoriously hard to define; evade the question with “prose fiction.”
“a prose narrative of substantial length with something wrong with it.”
“Prose fiction” emphasises the story or narrative element, which goes back to the Greeks
and the Old Testament (e.g. Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, Genesis 39). Highly developed
in Don Quixote, 100 years before the English novel.
“Novel” emphasises:
a) the embeddedness of the story in a complex and specific social background (Potiphar’s
wife story could happen anywhere).
b) the development of character as well as narrative: at least, an emphasis on the
examination of motives; at most, action becomes entirely internalised, as in the
psychological novel.
On these two conditions, I still believe that the novel is an English invention, rooted in
the particular social situation of the earlier 18th century. Continental novel doesn’t catch
up until the 19th century.
Why? Perhaps because English society was more commercial and pluralistic than the
Continent - more aristocratic and authoritarian there - more mixing of classes and values
in England. More on this later.
Further, novel establishes itself in two forms, one founded by Fielding and the other by
Richardson:
Novel of plot
Novel of character
PLOT:
Scope: “mores hominum multorum vidit” - ambition is to take in the whole of society all social classes, different outlooks.
Time: extensive periods of life, changes from youth to maturity, etc.
Space: covers the ground; the country, the city, travel
Economy: All characters and episodes contribute to the plot, nothing wasted.
Orderly or clockwork universe; deterministic - the author is to the work as God is to the
created world.
Hence, a reliable moral universe.
In Fielding’s case, fundamentally cheerful vision becuase the author is in control of
events. Eupeptic - large appetite for life.
People are driven by clear motives, and are defined by their actions. Hypocrisy the great
sin - upsets the moral order by concealing or substituting motives - but the fundamental
nature of characters is clear to the author, and is also clear to the reader by the end of the
novel.
Examples: Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoy.
CHARACTER:
Focus is not on action, but on states of consciousness - novelist’s task is to explore the
inner space, and to “carry the torch to the back of the cave” (Diderot’s description of
Richardson). Action is secondary to its underlying mental conditions - it expresses
something deeper.
Novelist seeks to inhabit his or her characters, and even to disappear into them altogether
- like Keats’s “chameleon poet,” “negative capability.” The epistolary form is perfect for
the dramatic (rather than controlling) novelist - but at least the narrator should not be too
intrusive, pulling the strings of the action.
Primary concern is with the texture of consciousness, so often there will not be much
“going on” - less need for gross external stimuli.
Examples: Richardson, Austen, Dostoevsky, James, Joyce.
All novels have both plot & character, so these are polarities that help to organize our
responses - James tries to reconcile the two, but mainly by reducing plot to character
(whitening of the knuckles is an action expressing character, but it hardly qualifies as
action in Fielding’s sense).
Polarity of masculine & feminine, extrovert & introvert - glory of the form is that great
novels can be written about the retreat from Moscow, or about Jane Austen’s “little
square of ivory.”
Why England?
Two general theories:
Marxist/economic (Ian Watt): rise of commercial (as opposed to feudal) society creates a
middle-class reading public in England. Novel draws strength from both “high” literature
(classically-influenced poetry and drama) and “low” popular genres
A “hybridised” or “dialogised” genre, devoted to “circumstantial realism.”
Its subject is “the tension between the middle class and the aristocracy” (Trilling) - the
middle ground.
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gesellschaft / gemeinschaft
contract / status
mercantile / feudal
society / community
individual / collective
opportunistic / providential
novel / romance
Spiritual Autobiography (Starr):
Interest in charcter and the inner life derives from the puritan emphasis on personal
salvation, rejection of church hierarchy.
England’s puritan revolution in the 17th century moves it ahead of the continent Spiritual individualism creates the “salvation plot” and a language adequate to inner
experience.
Calvinism requires people to think about:
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Depravity - seeking out of spiritual faults
Election - exploring the workings of grace
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Providence - interpreting the world as “god’s novel.”
[Both these theories apply more to the novel of character - Fielding rooted in an earlier
(mock) epic/ picaresque tradition.]
Reconciliation (McKeon):
Clash of classes and religions leads to epistemological relativism
Secularisation, dialogue, uncertainty, dramatic agon.
Reciprocal causation between economic and spiritual motives reconciles Watt and Starr
(i.e. religion & the rise of capitalism).
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding (1707 - 1754)
Fielding the son of a brave but foolish and spendthrift army officer, who retired at age 33
on half-pay, to a country estate in Dorset bought by his wife’s parents. Henry Fielding the
oldest of 6 children.
Fielding’s mother died when he was eleven; a belligerent and awkward child, growing up
in a Squire Western kind of atmosphere. His father re-married to a Catholic woman Henry has a lifelong grudge against Catholicism - quarrelled with his in-laws over
custody of the children.
Henry sent to Eton, the most exclusive school in England, where he gains a taste for
classical literature, but regularly gets into trouble. At age 18 he tries to abduct a fifteenyear-old heiress, but fails.
Book 4, Ch. 6 (168): why Tom doesn’t try to abduct Sophia - difference between love
and theft.
Contrast with I.10 (77) - the Blifils want to get Allworthy’s sister without loving her.
V.3 (208): more detail on Western’s expectations for his daughter.
Fielding studies law at Leiden (cheaper than Oxford or Cambridge), then makes his living
for eight years as a playwright in London - satires and romantic comedies.
James Harris: “Had his life been less irregular (for irregular it was, and spent in a
promiscuous intercourse with persons of all ranks) his pictures of human kind had neither
been so various, nor so natural. . . . he could not have written as he did without living as
he had.”
Tells Harris he is equally familiar with lust and with love. Gambles and drinks to excess.
Fielding led the most “un-writerly” life of the great English writers.
1734 marries for love Charlotte Cradock, model for Sophia (IV.2, p. 154). She dies ten
years later; two of their three children die young. Her maid stays on to keep house;
Fielding gets her pregnant and marries her, 1747 (compare Tom’s sense of obligation
towards Molly Seagrim, V.5., p. 212).
Fielding writes three novels:
Joseph Andrews (1742) - inspired by contempt for Richardson’s Pamela.
Tom Jones (1749) - his masterpiece.
Amelia (1751) - inspired by nostalgia for Charlotte.
Makes his living as a lawyer and crime-busting magistrate - sentences people to death,
but opposed to public executions.
Dies in Lisbon, his health broken by the life he has led.
Tom Jones:
Will enter the novel by way of the issue of over-determination: what are the real motives
for our behavior, and what is the interaction between multiple motives.
Fielding became a novelist through exasperation with Richardson’s Pamela: he first
wrote a parody of it, called Shamela, and then a comic reversal in Joseph Andrews.
Plot of Pamela is simple: Pamela is a beautiful and naieve girl from the country who
works as a maid for a country squire. The squire tries everything to seduce her, but she
holds on to her virtue. Finally he proposes marriage: she accepts, and becomes a lady.
After marriage, her piety reforms her husband’s previous immorality.
In Shamela, Fielding assumes that Pamela’s rejection of her master’s sexual advances is a
cunning way of leading him on; she is socially ambitious, and her master is too stupid to
see that he is the one being exploited.
Fielding is a brilliant psychologist, but he does tend to assume that one motive rules in
the end, while others are just used to screen it. It doesn’t really matter whether characters
are conscious of their own true motives - whether Thwackum, for example, is a conscious
or unconscious hypocrite.
Issues arising from the Pamela situation:
1. Fielding hates it when religion is used as a disguise for vulgar motives such as lust,
greed or ambition. Subtitle of Pamela is Virtue Rewarded - if it’s done for a reward, can
it still be virtue? II.4. (p. 100) - hypocrites are the greatest danger to religion.
2. In general, Fielding is suspicious of ambition. It is an intrinsically bad motive, because
hierarchy should be preserved. Tom, for example, accepts that he has no right to woo
Sophia; the Blifil brothers are bad for aspiring to rise by marrying Allworthy’s sister (54 though Allworthy gets it wrong - he assumes that because Bridget is unattractive she
must be marrying for love. He is blind both to Bridget’s lust and Blifil’s avarice.)
Molly Seagrim deserves what she gets for putting on Sophia’s gown - because you have
to be born to such clothes.
Tom never thinks of making a fortune by hard work in order to win Sophia later - in his
world, you get a job either through influence, or by buying it (as with a commission in
the army, VII.12, p. 302).
By agreeing to marry her squire, Pamela proved that ambition was her real motive all
along.
3. The only reliable proof of Virtue is action that accords with “Primitive Christianity” generosity, unselfishness, brotherly love, “taking no thought for the morrow.”
II.5. (p. 73) - Fielding’s hatred for the Dissenting or Methodist doctrine of Grace, or
exalting Faith over Works.
Captain Blifil argues that Virtue is an inner state of being in favor with God, and that
Charity may make you “guilty of supporting vice” (73). Similarly, Thwackum likes to
“clap a judgement” on people, as in V.2. (171-172). Such people are hypocritical,
sanctimonious and, typically, socially inferior.
The Dissenting preference for Faith over Works has a Classical equivalent in the Stoic
doctrine of apatheia - “freedom from passion.”
This is the point of the Man of the Hill’s story: VIII.15 (391) - the Man prefers
meditating on philosophy to human involvement - his loathing for humanity corresponds
to Calvinist belief in depravity.
Stoicism is another way of denying the life of action (402); Tom’s natural impulses are
towards doing good to others. Earlier, he had saved the Man of the Hill from robbers; but
the Man feels no reciprocal obligation.
Another point of the Man’s long story is that his wayward youth leads him towards
disengagement. He stops consorting with whores, but never marries - Tom moves
towards a virtuous woman, but the Man is too cynical to do this.
4. Fielding is also steering a middle course between the Dissenters, and the disciples of
Bernard Mandeville, who argued that there was no such thing as Virtue, only self-interest
and pride. VI.1. (217) The Fable of the Bees; Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714).
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Children are brought up to deny their own desires, because this is more
convenient for their parents.
The rich, similarly, praise the poor for being hard-working and submissive.
Religion allies itself with the rich and powerful, telling people that if they are
humble now they will be exalted in heaven.
People are charitable because it flatters their pride, and because society rewards
them for it.
Female virtue is purely strategic; women are as lustful as men, but it is expedient
for them to hide it.
Everything we do follows a calculus of pleasure and pain, so we don’t deserve
credit for “good” actions.
Mandeville was not a leftist radical, but a cynic: society should recognize and
encourage the pursuit of self-interest, because it creates wealth and gives
employment to the poor - primitive Christianity has nothing to offer them.
Against Mandeville, Fielding argues:
Self-interest may be true for many, but it cannot be true for all. The existence of virtue is
proved by the disinterested benevolence of people like Allworthy (218).
Religion is often perverted by hypocrites, but genuine Christianity exists in some (such as
Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews).
Socially, Fielding was a paternalistic conservative who believed in gentlemanly rule to
preserve hierarchy, but give everyone rights appropriate to their status. He mistrusted the
disorderly selfishness of the new commercial society - “possessive individualism.” (Note
how many innkeepers are swindlers).
People should neither get rich nor achieve salvation through individual effort: they are
good or bad by nature, and being a gentleman or “low” is given by birth.
Love is a combination of sex (which is coarse, but not selfish), and of “esteem and
gratitude.” (218) Many women are sexual hypocrites (431, 449, 455), but not all.
Throughout Tom Jones, Fielding criticizes the perversion of love by the upper-class,
homosocial system of property marriage.
Sophia’s proposed marriage to Blifil:
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Western wants to join the estates (221-222) and cares nothing about love marriage is an agreement between two men to transfer property (223).
Allworthy is not against property marriage, but believes that both parties should
have the right to refuse a particular suitor (227) [This will be Clarissa’s position
against her father and brother.]
Western’s sister tells Sophia she should submit, but take the man she really likes
as a lover (234). Fielding damns her as a “politician.”
Fielding’s position: property can be a blessing and a way of doing good to others,
but love must be central to the marriage.
Story of Mrs Fitzpatrick (XI.4 - 10) shows what can go wrong in property marriage from
the woman’s side - though her solution is wrong.
Towards the end, as Sophia’s position becomes more melodramatic, Fielding moves to a
bitter denunciation of “legalized prostitution,” as he calls property marriage (720).
Western compared to the bawd - except that he doesn’t even act out of self-interest, but
out of the homsocial code of reciprocity (698).
Allworthy feels there should be a law against this, and that parents become responsible
for the consequences (736 - 37). When we give charity we don’t know what the recipient
may do, but when we compel marriage we know what the consequences will be.
Western’s reply is that he must be acting unselfishly, because he is spoiling his own
chances of re-marriage (737) - but he is driven by a blind faith in the fate of his land.
His sister, more modern-minded, looks higher in her ambition (741) - note how Sophia
manipulates her (743).
As always, Fielding does not resolve the question of property marriage by any
institutional change, but by making it possible for individuals of good will to avoid its
vices. More on this below.
Narrative Technique
Fielding’s use of the muff:
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164: the muff as synechdoche for Sophia, reveals Tom’s feelings - also a fairytale token, like Cinderella’s slipper.
179: the muff and the homosocial triangle
443: Sophia puts the muff into Tom’s faithless bed
450: the muff becomes Tom’s property rather than Western’s
The Sexual System and the Conclusion of the Novel
The last part of the novel shows a convergence between hero and heroine, after their
alienation in the inn at Upton. But the property-marriage plot is complicated by the
sexual corruptions of London, which threaten to capture both Tom and Sophia, though in
different ways - seduction for Tom, force for Sophia.
Sophia is both threatened by her father (as before) and in need of his protection against
the aristocratic amorality of Lady Bellaston and Lord Fellamar. She gains in stature by
becoming much more than just a maiden in distress, but one who can manipulate too, in
the interests of virtue.
The aristocratic plot: Lord Fellamar wants sexual possession of Sophia, and also her
£80,000; Lady Bellaston wants to get rid of a rival for Tom’s services. Lord F. will rape
Sophia, then “make her amends” by marrying her; Fielding finds this code as detestable
as the sexual opportunism of Pamela (654). Even after Fellamar tries and fails, Western’s
sister still tries to promote the match (741). It’s lucky for Sophia that her father’s
incidental hatred of Lords protects her from this corruption at least (though not that
threatened by Blifil).
Sophia is protected by her own genuine hatred for Fellamar, and by the countervailing
paternalism of Allworthy, which intervenes in her favor. The danger to Tom, however, is
internal - it comes from his own moral weakness.
Tom’s reasons/excuses for falling prey to Lady Bellaston:
1. He is destitute (590), and is therefore no worse morally than a woman who is driven to
prostitution in order to survive; and he offers to give all his dirty money to the
highwayman’s family (though Mrs Miller only takes £10 out of £50).
2. He needs Lady Bellaston to help him stay in London, pass for a gentleman, and find
Sophia - his only alternative would be to go to war, or to sea, and lose Sophia for ever.
3. His gentlemanly code of honor (“gallantry”) requires that a) he must respond when a
woman offers a sexual invitation and b) having taken Lady B’s money once, he is obliged
to go on sleeping with her.
Points 1) and 2) are legitimate excuses, if not justifications. The problems arise with 3):
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Fielding emphasises (rather unkindly) that Lady B. is over-age, over-weight, and
has bad breath (596). [Decorum - what is appropriate to one’s age and status]
Unlike his previous misdeeds, Tom is here partially excused by not enjoying his
infidelity to Sophia.
Tom is not rationalizing a vice or weakness, or acting on a foolish impulse, as he
did with Molly and Mrs Waters.
Only gradually does Tom realise how morally corrupt Lady B. is - he didn’t know
of her inciting Lord Fellamar to rape Sophia. She is a Mandevillian who cares
only about the appearance of virtue (677 - demirep).
Lady B. is cynical about marriage - not believing in love, she only sees property
marriage, and wants to protect herself against it. Ironically, Tom exploits this in
order to break off with her (679).
622-623 is important for distinguishing between Tom and the code of the male
rake, equivalent to Lady Bellaston’s. Having “sowed his wild oats,” Nightingale
would be expected to make a marriage of convenience; Tom converts him to see
that love is what really counts, and that the rakish code is dishonorable and cruel
to defenseless women like Nancy.
The Resolution
The unmasking of Blifil shows that, even now, he is incapable of moral improvement the implied contrast is with Tom (810)
Benevolence (Tom) must be united with Prudence or Wisdom (Sophia) but this must
come from within Tom - Sophia cannot be a Thwackum, or even an Allworthy.
Nietzsche: beauty is the highest form of power, because it operates without compulsion this is the power to which Tom must submit. Further, Sophia is commended for her true
womanly virtue of doing good only by stealth (735-36).
802 - Tom repents to Allworthy and is shown the way ahead, through Prudence; but Mrs
Miller tells him that Sophia still thinks him no more than “a good-natured libertine” (805)
815 - Tom submits himself to Sophia’s moral instruction, and is forgiven.
1. His repentance is over-determined, because he is also getting someone he desires
sexually, and who is rich. To put it cynically, Fielding makes it convenient for him to be
virtuous from now on. (However, Tom is now rich too, so there’s no danger of his being
purely opportunistic, as he was with Lady B.).
2. It’s not clear whether even good-natured men, by themselves, are capable of sexual
virtue: Sophia rules with a velvet glove, but she still rules. Some women are without
morality, but only a woman can be independently moral. Allworthy’s call for a single
standard of sexual morality therefore remains impractical, and Fielding’s conclusion may
be condemned as sentimental, and as perpetuating stereotypes about male and female
attitudes. But perhaps we should just sit back and enjoy the kind of ending that fairy-tales
promise.
English 322 - Moll Flanders Lectures
Life of Defoe
b. 1660, year of the restoration of Charles II, after Cromwell’s death in 1658.
Defoe the son of a butcher, sent to a Dissenting academy but decides not to be a minister
and goes into business.
Marries in 1684, wife has dowry of £3700, eight children. [Interest rates about 4 percent,
therefore £148 per annum]
Duke of Monmouth, Charles’ bastard son, invades but is defeated at Sedgemoor and
executed (1685). Defoe fights in the Monmouth rebellion, pardoned.
1692, goes bankrupt for £17,000 - $3 million or more? Goes back into business. By 1700,
also employed as a writer, and as a spy for the Whigs (who supported Holland and
opposed France).
1703, stands in the pillory for satirizing Tory extremism against the Dissenters.
1704 becomes an agent for Harley, the moderate Tory prime minister - disillusioned with
the Dissenters?
1715, Whigs back in power, Defoe becomes an agent for them while pretending to be still
a Tory.
1719, publishes Robinson Crusoe, followed by his other major works of fiction. 566
works attributed to him.
Continues to be active in business - “Thirteen times I have been rich and poor.” Dies in
hiding from creditors, 1731.
Crucial features of Defoe’s life evident in Moll Flanders:
1. Dissenting morality: the Providence narrative, treatment of the inner life.
2. Business mentality
3. Uncertain fortunes and status (as opposed to the stability of traditional society).
4. Egotism, secrecy, unstable identity.
Problem in reading Defoe is not in recognizing these features, but in deciding the
interplay between them.
Moll Flanders
Moll’s Birth and Upbringing
Deep fissure in 18th cent society between explanation by nature (the old feudal/agrarian
society) and nurture (the new society of opportunity, where people make themselves).
In Tom Jones the blood runs true from one generation to the next - Tom doesn’t pretend
to be a gentleman, or make himself a gentleman - he is a gentleman. Plot consists of
bringing blood and external circumstances into alignment.
Defoe constantly goes back and forth between incompatible explanations:
Is Moll a born thief, destined to be like her mother?
Or is she a typical product of society - “Give me not poverty, lest I steal” (142).
Moll is obsessed with the radical vulnerability of the infant - “that we are born into the
world helpless and incapable” (128).
Locke’s doctrine of the tabula rasa - no innate ideas, we build up a sense of the world,
and of ourselves, by using our senses. But Defoe emphasises the negative aspect of this,
the world’s power over us - what the gypsies would have done to Moll (p. 2).
Moll’s childish desire to be a gentlewoman is foolish, yet the Mayoress says “she has a
lady’s hand” (5) - fairytale explanation by breeding. Moll is set to work on ladies’
clothes, is given such clothes, and passes for a lady eventually. Is this to be explained as
nature expressing itself, or as Moll’s ability to take advantage of the opportunities in her
environment?
Defoe consistently shows Moll herself to be uncertain about causes and motives - she
registers the impact of rival social views, but doesn’t rise to any comprehensive or
theoretical vision - nor does Defoe himself offer one (unlike Fielding).
Might be said that the morality of the introduction is that vision - but it is manifestly
inadequate as a day-to-day explanation of what’s going on.
Love and Money
From the beginning of Moll’s erotic experience, we are left wondering whether love is
natural and spontaneous, or whether it is a response to external stimuli - above all,
economic ones.
Elder brother is a rake (p. 10) who “baits his hook” - so we have no way of judging his
claim to Betty that he is “in love with her” (12). What is certain is that he woos her on
two levels simultaneously, the sexual and the financial.
Story of Danae - prophesied that her son will kill her father, he shuts her up in a tower Zeus comes to her as a shower of gold, she gives birth to Perseus.
Elder brother’s gold is a form of penetration - first 5 guineas, then a handful - when he
gives her a hundred she puts it into her bosom herself, then yields to him.
Moll’s passion is fetishistic - “I was more confounded with the money than I was before
with the love, and began to be so elevated that I scarce knew the ground I stood on” (13).
The money sweeps her off her feet; it precedes sex and is more exciting - to some extent
it is a substitute for it.
All of Moll’s subsequent sexual relations will have a monetary dimension:
a. Prestige culture and romantic love both try to separate sex from the marketplace taboo against exchanging money for sex - Fielding’s critique of property marriage as
“legalized prostitution.”
b. Moll doesn’t even try to make such a distinction - takes it for granted that you must
make a financial assessment before going to bed with anyone.
c. Sex is therefore a transaction, or rather an investment - after each relationship she adds
up whether she has more money or less.
d. In parallel with changes in society as a whole, credit becomes more important to the
transaction - each side tries to impose on the other, and figure out how much the partner
has got - Moll thinks it legitimate to cheat here.
Clothes are also a form of credit, inflating the value of the person who wears them.
e. This is systematized in the idea of the “marriage market” (pp. 11, 46), or rather markets
- the male buys beauty in prostitution, but expects the wife to pay him when he marries.
Moll wants to be paid, but also wants the security of respectable marriage - as usual, her
values are mixed and inconsistent.
The women who describe this system have a neo-feminist critique of it - question of
whether Moll Flanders is “feminist” will be discussed later.
The Novel and Economics
The relentless economism of the novel is obvious - every human relation has an
economic dimension, or is described in economic language, or can be quantified (Mother
Midnight’s bills, p. 121). No shame, or expectation tht it could be any different.
The individual as entrepreneur:
a. Affectionate or “human” relations are secondary to financial dealings, and are
determined by them:
p. 129 - Mother Midnight on caring as a trade - the implicit contrast is with the insecurity
of being “on the parish,” as Moll was as an infant. MM says that being able to pay is the
best way of ensuring good treatment - even Moll finds this too “hardened” a view of the
social system.
But Moll hardly distinguishes having “friends” from having a mutually advantageous
financial relationship.
b. Personal identity and psychological condition are both determined by financial status when Moll has a financial setback, she is likely to have a nervous breakdown, with
depression, vapours, “fancies and imaginations”, etc. (141). But this kind of experience is
only referred to rather than described - perhaps because it lies outside of economic
rationality and the Mandevillian profit/loss calculus.
c. Important to understand how capital determines consciousness in the period before
social security - each individual bears their own risk, and depends on having capital to
protect them against old age, sickness, etc. These risks might be shared by family and
friends; but Moll, as an orphan, cannot rely on family or personal relations as safety net.
Your “security” is a very literal sum, made insecure by the risk of thieves, bad
investments, or failure of banks, etc. You also have to be constantly calculating how to
“place” it for the least risk and best return. Sometimes you have to spend it on show - fine
clothes and consumer goods - to make it seem as if you don’t need it (cf. the Lancashire
husband, 108 - spent all his money to get Moll’s £15,000 - which she didn’t have).
This mobile capital contrasts with landed society, where security comes from being
settled on a family estate, or residing on a property whose owner recognizes an obligation
to you (like Allworthy’s numerous dependents). Servants would be given a cottage and a
little money when too old to work, or a place in the local almshouse.
Capital is fluid (it moves constantly from one kind of asset to another) and variable (its
current value is always going up and down). Moll’s identity has similar qualities; by
implication, if her capital was reduced to zero, her identity too would disappear. The
stable ground of identity in the old organic community has been pulled out from under
her - and from everyone else who is now in the same situation.
Moll and Crime
Ian Watt argues that both Moll as a person and crime as a social phenomenon are
“characteristic products of modern individualism.” In traditional societies, the collectivity
is viewed as a kind of larger family, within which the modern idea of crime has no place
(because there is no place within the family in which you could privately benefit from
crime - think of the battle betwen Moll Seagrim and the rest of the village over her new
dress).
In modern society, the polis (the community) becomes the police. Anonymity and private
acquisitiveness make property crimes possible (and Moll’s crimes are all against
property).
By the early 18th century, Watt notes, there existed “one of the characteristic institutions
of modern urban civilisation: a well-defined criminal class, and a complex system for
handling it.”
At the same time, there arises the philosophical problem of crime:
1. Is the criminal someone who is morally defective as an individual? or
2. Is the criminal merely a member of a particular class that is essentially a product of the
social system - that tells everyone to strive for success, but does not provide success
“easily or equally.”
Some of the time, Moll claims that the “dreadful necessity of [her] circumstances” (143)
is the cause of her becoming a criminal. Still, this is not a developed sociological
argument, such as we might make today: she doesn’t ask herself why a certain percentage
of the population is destitute, she just wants to make sure that she isn’t one of them.
At other times, she thinks of her crimes as caused by her devil:
p. 148: she has enough work to live on, but the devil sends her out into the street.
the silver tankard “calls out to her,” as it were - the goods of the new consumer society
demand to be owned, they are seducers - Moll doesn’t use violence and she is not a
burglar: she takes that which is already on display.
p. 145: the vanity of the mother is blamed for the child’s wearing the necklace - but Moll
herself is caught up in the demands of consumer society: she is not stealing to survive,
but to have fine clothes and ornaments.
What has happened to the idea of “necessity” when society’s wealth has gone beyond
mere subsistence, and when Moll needs to dress well in order to mingle with respectable
people in order to steal enough to dress well?
Moll recognizes the dynamic on page 151: the “busy devil” is the spirit of the new
consumer society, where wants are no longer held in place by the ceiling of a fixed class
status (again, cf. Molly Seagrim in Tom Jones). In this world, people steal luxuries, not
food.
Eighteenth-century society recognized the open-ended potential of property crimes, and
responded with harsher punishments and the spectacle of the gallows. Moll sees it as
madness, or the devil’s work, that she can’t stop stealing even when she risks death. What
we might ask is why there should be this passion for things that go so far beyond
survival?
In concentration camps, people would trade their food rations for cigarettes - there can be
passions stronger than the passion for survival; Moll is in the grip of such a passion, but
she is also an allegory of the arrival of that passion in our society - this is part of the
novel’s fascination.
The passion is, ultimately, for identity and being - the naked infant that she is at the start,
without other grounds of identity, can only become a person at all through acts of
consumption - all other human relations are, for Moll at least, subordinate to this.
Moll is thus typical and abnormal at the same time - thus reconciling the two ways of
looking at crime with which we began.
Moll Flanders and Feminism
We can begin the question of Moll’s femaleness in the context of her crimes - which are
conventionally female both in their means (i.e. deceit rather than violence) and in their
objects (clothing and domestic goods). They are thus continuous (as Moll herself
recognizes) with her earlier exploitation of her sexuality for the purpose of profit.
Mother Midnight (p. 147) sponsors young women as prostitutes, older ones as thieves one career blends into the other, and with her drunken nobleman Moll will practise both
(p. 168-170).
All of this, however, might have been perceived by any outside observer, whether male
or female. Is Moll Flanders a feminine or feminist novel in any deeper sense, as a
sympathetic and convincing representation of female experiences and values?
Ian Watt argues that it is not: “Defoe’s identification with Moll Flanders was so complete
that, desite a few feminine traits, he created a personality that was in essence his own.”
(115)
I’m not sure how we could prove this. Wht we can examine is how Defoe imagines a
Mandevillian self-interest within the social roles and possibilities open to a woman at that
time. There is here a kind of universalism, whereby women’s motives are presented as
effectively no different from men’s, but in fulfilling their desires they must take social
conventions into account.
Moll is Mandevillian in her belief that only appearances matter, that the main thing is not
to get caught, and in her ability to rationalize everything that she wants to do. The
underlying assumption is that women and men are equal (if equal in selfishness), and that
there is no natural or essential femininity, but only direct strategies for men and indirect
ones for women.
Watt says that “Moll accepts none of the disabilities of her sex, and . . . Virginia Woolf’s
admiration for her was largely due to admiration of a heroine who so fully realised one of
the ideals of feminism: freedom from any involuntary involvement in the feminine role.”
If you believe that, you also believe that these “disabilities” can be escaped, given a
certain amount of ambition and cunning. You might go on to say that Moll can be
admired for refusing to be a victim, no matter how badly she is treated; but by the same
token, systemic discrimination against women need not be taken seriously, because if you
follow Moll’s example you can find a way around it.
It is logical, then, that Moll rarely feels much solidarity with other women, unless they
have a common interest and share profits (as with Mother Midnight). At the end, she
enjoys having a “trophy husband” whom she dresses up as a “very fine gentleman” (257)
and who seems to spend more time hunting (251) than in managing the estate.
Twenty years ago, Moll might have been condemned by feminists for false consciousness
and lack of solidarity - today she may be more admired for her successful self-assertion or perhaps condemned, but on different grounds: that she is lacking both in conscience
and empathy. In either case, she is the first major heroine (or anti-heroine) in the English
novel - and a highly distinctive one, as we shall see when we turn first to Clarissa, and
then to Emma.
Life of Richardson
b. 1689 - nearly 20 years older than Fielding, and over fifty when his first novel
published.
Father a skilled carpenter and follower of the Duke of Monmouth - after his rebellion
fails in 1688, Richardson’s father moves from London to Derbyshire to escape reprisals.
Planned that he should enter the church (like Defoe), but has to be apprenticed to a
printer instead - a diligent worker and letter-writer (Stinstra 25).
“I have been twice married; to good women both times.” [R’s intense & sentimental
relations with women were Platonic]
“My business, sir, has ever been my chief concern. My writing-time has been at such
times of leisure as have not interfered with that.” [R concerned with the pressure of
material interests, but not at the everyday level (like Defoe), and not uncritically.]
26 - 27: taken into the company of young women
27 “Serious and Gravity” [not just absence of a comic vision, like Fielding’s - practically
no sense of humor, despite his insight into every other kind of human motive]
29: “Clarissa is a piece from first to last, that owes its being to invention.”
“I never, to my knowledge, was in a vile house, or in company with a lewd woman, in my
life.”
Richardson hurt by Fielding’s satire on Pamela, and considered Fielding a coarse and
immoral writer. Fielding admired Clarissa, though, and sent Richardson a letter telling
him so, especially praising Clarissa’s letters after her rape:
“The circumstance of the fragments is great and terrible: but her letter to Lovelace is
beyond anything I have ever read. God forbid that the man who reads this with dry eyes
should be alone with my daughter, when she hath no assistance within call!” (35)
Opposition between Fielding and Richardson as novelists is classic, & need not be
labored - summed up in Dr Johnson’s remark that Fielding knew how to read the dial of a
clock, Richardson knew the inner workings of it.
Clarissa as an Economic Novel
Original title was “The Lady’s Legacy” - points to the origin of the central situation in
sibling ribalry, rather than sexual relations.
The Harlowe family has only become rich and powerful in this generation - through
discovery of coal on their land and trade with India. If they were an aristocratic (i.e. old
landowning family) inheritance would be by “strict settlement” - that is, land entailed on
the oldest son & his oldest son.
James Harlowe acts as if this were so (top of p. 24, uncles his stewards), but it isn’t yet and the grandfather’s legacy opens up an alternative possibility.
p. 64: Arabella and James jealous of Clarissa’s favor with their grandfather.
He leaves Clarissa his estate, “The Grove,” and half his money - Arabella the rest of the
money - James nothing. Clarissa gives over the estate to her father.
James then inherits an estate in Yorkshire, from his Godmother Lovell.
23-24: Clarissa’s uncles are childless, and think of making Clarissa the family’s ticket
into the aristocracy, by concentrating their wealth on her rather than James.
222: Lovelace has £2,000 a year, and will get £1,000 more from his uncle when he
marries - offers to give Clarissa control of her own wealth for life, plus £400 a year would also sue Clarissa’s male relatives for control of her estate at The Grove. C. says
she won’t sue her father over the estate (74), but L. would.
James’s alternative plan:
1. Marry Clarissa to Solmes
2. Solmes has an estate next to The Grove - 34-35 - will perhaps exchange it for James’s
Northern estate - & will make over all his estate to Clarissa in the event of his death.
3. 34, 80: Solmes covets Clarissa’s estate - one reason why he won’t court Arabella.
4. If Clarissa marries Solmes, who is not an aristocrat, there would be no reason for her
uncles to leave her their property - they’ll leave it to James instead.
5. Solmes plans to oppress Clarissa in marriage (p. 75) - compare Blifil - James can profit
doubly: by getting more property, and by using Solmes as a surrogate to revenge himself
on Clarissa.
In the complete text, Solmes indicates that he expects Clarissa to be a virtuous wife, but
also tolerate his adultery.
6. Arabella will also benefit: a) by making Clarissa unhappy and b) once Clarissa is
married, Arabella has a chance to get married too.
Faced with all this, it’s not surprising that Clarissa toys with the idea of accepting
Lovelace, provided she is sure that she can reform him (60).
The Clash of Cultures in Clarissa
Clarissa and Lovelace are not just opposed individuals; they each represent a class, a
moral code, and a way of life. One way of understanding this is through the
anthropological concepts of Shame culture and Guilt culture.
[For background see, e.g., E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational; Ruth Benedict,
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.]
Shame
Guilt
Pride
Conscience
Peer-group Standards Absolute Standards
Pagan
Christian
Virtue: Prowess
Virtue: Charity
Reparation
Repentance
Class: Aristocracy
Class: Dissenting Middle
Cavalier
Roundhead
Sex: Virile Promiscuity Sex: Monogamy
Marriage: Wedlock
Marriage: Hierogamy
Property Marriage
Sacramental Marriage
Women Subordinated Women Spiritualized
Economics: Display
Economics: Thrift
Resolution: Duel
Resolution: Trial
Lionel Trilling said that the English novel is about the tension between the middle class
and the aristocracy - Clarissa shows this tension at many levels, but also dramatizes it as
a complex struggle between two individuals - each of whom wants to convert the other to
their culture, while at a deeper level being caught up in “the attraction of the opposite.”
Clarissa and Lovelace
There are two schools of interpretation of the novel, one stressing Clarissa’s complicity in
events, the other Lovelace’s guilt. The issue can also be seen as: is Clarissa continuous
with Pamela, or fundamentally different?
Leading recent interpreters on each side are William B. Warner (Reading Clarissa: The
Struggles of Interpretation) and Terry Eagleton (The Rape of Clarissa). But the debate
goes back to the very beginning, with Richardson himself intervening in later editions of
the novel to try and blacken Lovelace’s character, and remove any ambiguity about
Clarissa’s role.
Samuel Johnson: “You may observe there is always something which she prefers to
truth.” Dorothy van Ghent: the novel is “a study in moral obliquity.”
These readings turn on the idea of the “consenting negative” that Clarissa uses against
Arabella - in greater or lesser degree, more or less consciously, Clarissa is seen as always
moving towards Lovelace, though with the aim of honorable marriage. Lovelace is her
partner in this game, recognizing that “It is cruel to ask a modest woman for her
consent”; but his goal is seduction rather than marriage. Women must use “indirect
means” (in Moll Flanders’ phrase) because it is not legitimate for them to express their
wills openly.
Clarissa’s double nature is often complemented by the idea of Richardson’s authorial
dishonesty - that he is out to have his psychic cake and eat it too: by upholding morality
while secretly identifying with Lovelace and thus indulging his sadistic male fantasies.
Richardson claims that he is writing against the abuse of authority by parents, and the
immorality of rakes; the argument is that he doesn’t have to show Clarissa half-dressed
and in distress to do this - that representation is equivalent to recommendation (as with,
for example, violence on television).
Rise of feminist criticism has often brought a more direct reading of Clarissa emphasising Richardson’s sympathy with the plight of women in 18th century society,
and his condemnation of the rake as a sexual predator. Clarissa is, after all, a novel about
rape - and how can you criticise Clarissa’s behavior without condoning Lovelace’s sexual
crime? Such critics say that we should acknowledge that Richardson was “on the right
side,” and that Clarissa said she had “no culpable inclinations” (309). The greatness of
the novel lies in its making an eloquent case for sexual victims, not in an ambiguity that
allows readers to find a deep meaning that is the opposite of the surface one.
William Warner’s argument is deconstructive in a more modern sense - of showing how
the text, as novel, eludes Richardson’s efforts to control its effects on the reader and turn
it into a tract, a straightforward piece of dogma. It is true that flirtation here ends in rape;
but this doesn’t prove that flirtation and rape are continuous with each other. Warner
emphasises the mutually pleasurable struggle of wills between Clarissa and Lovelace, and
sees the rape as both a crime, and a defeat for Lovelace’s project of getting Clarissa to
submit voluntarily. One (female) critic actually argues that Lovelace is impotent when it
comes to the deed - that his obsessive verbalizing about sex is a compensation for
feebleness in performance.
Another critic, Tessie Gwilliam, emphasizes the “erotically charged jealousy and
antagonism” between the homosocial couple, Lovelace and James Harlowe. Clarissa
keeps this rivalry going by her refusal to accept either Solmes or Lovelace.
Warner’s reading focuses on struggle for its own sake - so that neither of the two
antagonists want either to withdraw from the struggle, or to complete it.
Lovelace’s explanation of what he is doing: “I am no sensual man; but a man of spirit One woman is like another - In coursing all the sport is made by the winding hare - A
barn-door chick is better eating.”
Once Lovelace has cornered his prey and overcome her resistance, he loses interest and
begins a new chase - the Don Juan complex.
Clarissa’s aim is the reverse - to subdue the rake to her moral code, and then keep him in
order (as Sophia will Tom). But she worries about her motives for doing this: “has the
secret pleasure intruded itself, to be able to reclaim such a man to the paths of virtue and
honour” (60). The key word here is “such”: Lovelace presents her with a challenge, as a
man like Hickman would not - thus stimulating her pleasure and pride.
The other side of this situation is Anna Howe’s dissatisfaction with Hickman’s lack of
spirit (handout).
Clarissa and the Body
Clarissa is of great importance in establishing influential cultural stereotypes, such as the
rake and his opposing/redeeming counterpart, the pure woman. I want to look here at its
portrayal of the female body, using Manichaeanism and Bakhtin’s idea of the “grotesque
body.”
Mani was a Persian of the 3rd century A.D. His doctrines became intertwined with
Christianity, especially through St Augustine, who was a Manichaean before he was a
Christian.
The world is dualistic, a place of eternal struggle between:




God and Satan
Light and Dark (“The Prince of Darkness”)
Spirit and Matter
Soul and Body
Marvell’s poem “Dialogue Between Soul and Body” expresses the Manichaean idea that
the soul is imprisoned in flesh, and longs to be released and reunited with God as spirit.
The Manichee elite led austere and celibate lives; the lower orders could marry, but
sexual pleasure and the begetting of children were condemned.
Women belonged to Satan’s realm, drawing men down into the realm of matter and away
from the divine spirit; this mistrust of sexuality and of the female body became an
important element in Christianity, thanks to Augustine and others.
Within Christianity, however, a further dualism emerged: between woman as Manichaean
seducer, and as sacred virgin. Richardson cannot use the specifically Catholic symbolism
of the Virgin Mary, but he makes Clarissa into a figure whose spiritual power derives
from her distance from the normal life of the body - her being a “frost-piece,” as
Lovelace calls her, or a “Puritan saint,” in Richardson’s conception. Her counterpart is of
course Mrs Sinclair, onto whom Richardson projects everything threatening in the female
body.
The Russian critic Bakhtin made a distinction between the use in literature of the “exalted
body” and the “grotesque body” - which corresponds roughly to the body above and
below the waist. The exalted body emphasises the ideal, the spiritual and the beautiful;
the grotesque body foregrounds sexuality, dirt and excretion.
Bakhtin concentrates on the comic aspects of the grotesque body - the mode of “carnival”
when the world is turned upside down, and drunkenness and lechery take over. In
Clarissa, the grotesque body is dark and menacing - made into an object of disgust and
horror, especially in the description of the death of Mrs Sinclair.
An important subtext in Clarissa is the threat of venereal disease, which is seen as having
its “reservoir” in the brothel and in the female body - from which the rake may carry it to
his virtuous wife. In this way the exalted body may be invaded by the grotesque body;
whereas Richardson’s great concern is to keep them separate.
Another theme is food as supporter of the flesh, and even as a defilement. Mrs Sinclair’s
gross and decaying flesh is the tangible sign of her moral evil; Clarissa’s wasting away
represents her journey towards the spirit (some modern critics see her as suffering from
anorexia).
Eating is also equated with sexuality, as similar kinds of sensual pleasure - Mrs Sinclair
eats too much, Clarissa hardly at all.
The positive side of Clarissa can be found in the innumerable ways that Richardson
validates female individualism - the novel is an epic of resistance to the reduction of
women to objects or instruments by homosocial society - every act of oppression against
Clarissa only makes her stronger in her self. Even her death represents a triumph over her
enemies - and she is still writing, as the coffin itself inscribed and made into a farewell
letter.
Nor would I want her to compromise - as many voices urge her to do, both inside and
outside the novel - by marrying Lovelace.
Yet misgivings remain:
With the Christian idea of the glorification of suffering, victimization and defeat - with its
corollary, that the inferior position of women in society is a source of moral good.
With the denial or devaluation of any normal path to female self-fulfilment - Richardson
couldn’t find a place for a Sophia Western (or an Emma) in the universe of Clarissa.
Female power may be great, but it must be negative in its operation.
With the potential sadism of the “maiden in distress” plot. Again, we may compare the
treatment of the persecution of Sophia by her father or Lord Fellamar - Fielding doesn’t
drag this out and in some sense relish it in the way Richardson does.
With the schematization of woman into angel or devil - Lovelace says this, and it’s one
view of his that Richardson doesn’t contradict, but dramatizes in the Clarissa/Sinclair
opposition - by facilitating the rape, the women of Mrs Sinclair’s house commit a
gratuitous evil that is worse than Lovelace’s offense.
With Richardson’s rejection of the path of female emancipation or universalist feminism
- it is a flaw in Anna Howe that she favors this, and Clarissa triumphs by moving deeper
into the conventional female role rather than trying to free herself from it. Also, the
conventional role is equally defined by Mrs Sinclair - the other side of the same coin.
Richardson’s genius gave Western culture a powerful stereotype - of the suffering,
spiritualized virgin - that seems to me dangerous in ways that Sophia or Emma could
never be.
Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Emma
Austen’s Life
Seventh of eight children of a moderately prosperous country clergyman, but not
prosperous enough to give his daughters good dowries.
Jane had a patchy education, but read widely at home.
She was a pretty and flirtatious young woman. She seems to have fallen in love with one
young man, who immediately died, then accepted another proposal and backed out the
next day. Another man who was fond of her did not propose, because she had no money.
She never married, and lived with her mother and siblings until her early death; her
closest relationship was with her sister Cassandra.
There has been much discussion recently about whether Austen was lesbian, and whether
this shows in the relation between Emma and Harriet. I am sceptical, but will say more
below.
In Austen’s life and work, we may observe the dilution of religion into manners. Many
younger sons, and probably Austen’s father, went into the church to make a living, not
out of deep conviction. Mr Elton, in Emma, seems entirely lacking in any spiritual
dimension. The religious preoccupations of Defoe, Fielding or Richardson seem quite
distant in Austen’s world.
There is no direct evidence, but much in the novels that suggests Austen was sensitive to
her position as a dependent, unmarried woman. She published her novels anonymously,
however, and did nothing to change her life when they became successful. Not until long
after her death was she recognized as one of the great English novelists, and it is unlikely
that she herself knew the true value of her work - “that little bit (two inches wide) of
ivory, in which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.”
Female Homosociality
It does not seem plausible to me to interpret the relation between Emma and Harriet as
lesbian, but it is homosocial in the sense of using men as pawns in their transactions with
each other. These transactions may be material, or emotional.
Material: Emma wants to provide for her social needs by filling the gap left by Miss
Taylor (now Mrs Weston). She wants to establish Harriet in the village by marrying her
to someone of Emma’s own class, and also to strengthen her own position by having an
unquestioning ally.
Robert Martin will not do for this (p. 80), though Knightley disagrees entirely with
Emma’s veto (87 - 91). He points out that Mr Elton will surely not accept Harriet as an
equal (92).
Emotional: Emma doesn’t want to marry herself, and is not afraid of being single,
because she is rich (109). But she enjoys matchmaking, as a playful exercise of indirect
power (43). Because her female instruments are weaker than she is, Emma’s aim is to get
men (Mr Weston, Mr Elton) to do what she wants, without giving anything of herself in
return. With Mr Elton, of course, this backfires.
Emma criticizes men (p. 90) for liking women who are beautiful, submissive, and nothing
else. One of the novel’s many ironies is that this is precisely why Emma likes Harriet
(and dislikes Jane Fairfax, who refuses this dynamic, but whom Emma doesn’t want to
treat as an equal. When Emma says that women without money are treated with contempt
(109), she is thinking of the Bates and Jane - but Emma will allow her own contempt to
show on Box Hill (364)).
Emma has an inadequate father, and has been spoiled as a child - like Lovelace. Like
him, also, she displays the bad side of the male temperament - except with Knightley, her
relations with others are driven by a love of power, and a withholding of the self.
Austen and Social Power
As a woman, Austen has a clear-eyed view of woman’s relation to power - and scorn,
perhaps even hatred, for those who abuse it, like Mrs Churchill. At the same time, she
respects it - both in itself, and as necessary to the social order. Emma’s power can be
good, provided it is properly channelled; and the lack of power has its own pathology, as
we see with the Bates.
The crucial passage here is the description of Mrs and Miss Bates, pp. 51 - 52.
1. We need to look first at the English system of dual values. George Orwell describes it
in this way:
“the essential point about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in
terms of money. Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but it is also
interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system; rather like a jerry-built modern
bungalow haunted by medieval ghosts.”
The caste system we can call the “prestige culture,” which ranks people according to their
gentility - ultimately, their degree of favor with the landowning aristocracy. The “money
culture” judges simply by how rich people are; and in Austen’s time there was a great
deal of new wealth derived from “trade” - i.e. business of all kinds (p. 309).
The Bateses rank high in prestige, but low in money - yet they still outrank the Coles,
who are a “new” family that have enriched themselves in trade, but that Emma wants to
keep at arms’ length for a while longer - so she is annoyed when the Coles invite her to a
party, instead of waiting to be invited (p. 217 - 218).
Part of Mrs Churchill’s hatefulness is that she is not an aristocrat by blood, but has
chosen to be arrogant out of insecurity (309).
Austen’s own position was closer to Jane Fairfax’s than to Emma’s - she was genteel, but
not wealthy, and may have lost a husband in the way Jane Fairfax “lost” Mr Dixon to
Miss Campbell’s £12,000 (p. 182). Austen is critical both of the power of money, and the
power of prestige - Frank Churchill, and also Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, show the
tension between the upper middle class and the aristocracy (such as we have already seen
in Clarissa).
2. Austen’s own marginality - in terms of status, wealth, and gender - contributes to her
critical view of the social system in her description of the Bateses:
a. “regard and respect” and “uncommon popularity” (51) have a sting in them - they
suggest that the Bateses’ status is in fact an empty one. They are outwardly respected, but
really despised - and might even be hated, if they gave anyone reason to do so.
b. “a most fortunate creature” is “represented speech” in Bakhtin’s terms: it shows that
Miss Bates goes around cringing, to avoid being beaten. But wht kind of a society is it
that requires people to cringe if they want to be accepted (and given charity)?
c. Mr Woodhouse is mentioned to show that he is like the Bateses in every way, except
that he is rich - so that everyone truly caters to his whims (which raises the question:
should we look at him with amusement, or with dislike and disgust?).
d. Emma sees through this charade, and is irritated by it - but she is rebuked by Knightley
when her mask slips. Why is it so important to keep wearing the mask?
e. People in Highbury profess Christian virtues of charity and humility, but it is really a
Nietschzean world of a ruthless struggle for power and self-assertion. What mediates
between the two value-systems is convention - which prevents society from falling into
chaos, but at the price of universal hypocrisy - there is no place here for a fresh, openhearted character like Tom Jones.
f. Austen lays all this bare, but never fully shows her own hand - some critics see her
England as a “great good place,” others think she is full of bitterness - as revealed, for
example, by the comment in Northanger Abbey that “every man is surrounded by a
neighbourhood of voluntary spies.” Her final judgement on the social pecking order is as
veiled as it is on the hierarchy of gender.
The Status of Women
One of the few places where this is explored, though not discussed explicitly is in
Chapter 18 (163 - 65).
Frank Churchill cancels his visit, and Emma and Knightley quarrel about it. Knightley
says that Frank lacks manliness; Emma recognizes in Frank a feminized male who suffers
from his “dependence” on his tyrannical aunt.
Knightley argues for an absolute or universal morality; Emma’s is relative and particular.
She argues, also, that morality is “the interest of the stronger” (like Thrasymachus in
Plato’s Republic). For her, might makes right; for Knightley, right makes might.
Austen herself deploys a complex irony here:
1. This is one of the clearest places where Knightley’s judgement is affected by his
jealousy of Frank (p. 167). Does Austen think Knightley is conscious of his own
emotions? If not, then his universal morality is warped by his particular jealousy.
2. Emma’s whole argument is also undermined by her taking Mrs Weston’s position
rather than her own (163). It is Mrs Weston who has lived as a dependent - Emma never
has, and her situation is actually the opposite of Frank’s (she is a strong woman under a
weak man, he is a weak man under a strong woman). Emma’s real motive is to annoy
Knightley, and to “try out” sympathy for Frank.
3. Austen is thus laughing at both - which makes it difficult to extract any straightforward
position from the debate. Emma is right on p. 165 when she says that people are shaped
by their upbringing, and are not morally free from moment to moment - just as the
Bateses are servile from long habit.
But perhaps there’s a clue in Austen’s saying that Emma is a heroine that no one but
herself will much like - I believe that Austen identified with Emma’s brilliance and
power, even as she knew that almost every other woman in the novel is deformed by her
subordination. Yet the two worst people in the novel are also women of power - Mrs
Churchill and Mrs Elton - which suggests that Emma is redeemed by her agonistic
relation to Knightley.
Box Hill
Begins with Frank saying that Emma wants to know what everyone is thinking (363) - a
dangerous request at any time - cf. 349 “Emma denied none of it aloud, and agreed to
none of it in private” (trip to Box Hill with the Eltons).
Everything that people say “sincerely” does more damage - cf. Mrs Elton saying to
Knightley “Pray be sincere” (351) [note how Knightley gets back at her without her
realising it]
365 - 366: Frank’s sneer at the Eltons is taken by Jane as a coded criticism of their own
relationship - in conjunction with his flirtation with Emma (which Knightley takes as an
example of bad male influence on E.). “hazle eyes” - cf. Jane’s “deep grey” eyes, 180.
Knightley’s rebuke (368): not that Emma was wrong in her judgement, but that it is
unfair to speak truth to the weak. Further, that others (i.e. the Eltons) will turn on Miss
Bates if Emma no longer protects her (cf. their treatment of Harriet at the dance, 324-25,
and Knightley’s intervention to protect her).
Miss Bates knows she is boring, but she can’t stop - it’s a nervous habit, caused by her
vulnerability.
Knightley is an Allworthy, but one who knows what is going on around him - he is a
genuine patriarch to the community, guardian of the weak, promoter of culture - all these
are specifically gentry values. They are threatened from two sides: aristocratic selfishness
and amorality (Frank), nouveau-riche ambition and ruthlessness (Mrs Elton).
Emma needs to be separated from both sets of values, in order to become a worthy lady
of the manor. In these terms, you can’t take away the Bates’s status - even if it is based
on lies and hypocrisy - because your own claim to legitimacy is part of theirs. The
alternative would be a class society where Coles and Eltons would rule, and the shabbygenteel would be crushed. The whole point is to be able to crush them, but not do it - and
to prevent others from trying.
The Bateses are degraded by their situation, it’s true, but the alternatives are worse. Not
everyone wants to be at the top of the pecking order.
On this reading, Emma’s conversion is to traditional gentry values - Knightley is
reminding her of the proper qualities of a ruler - and away from her previous brilliant
individualism. The self must be sacrificed to duty and the (hierarchical) collectivity.
Robert Martin will be accepted on his merits into Highbury society (453), and Emma will
welcome him.
It also must be sacrificed to the discipline of marriage: Knightley is angry with Emma for
flirting with Frank as much as for insulting Miss Bates (though he is too gentlemanly to
show this). Here, Emma’s behavior is similar to Tom’s with Lady Bellaston, an
irresponsible exploitation of her sexual attractiveness. She needs to give up her
promiscuity and submit herself to the moral discipline of her (superior) partner, as Tom
does to Sophia. The interests of the community require, at the top, a monogamous
marriage that will produce a legitimate heir to the estate.
All of this adds up to a “Fieldingesque” reading of the novel - of which the hero is not an
individual, but Highbury as the eternal country estate, and microcosm of the nation as a
whole. Like the young Queen Victoria, Emma must come into her inheritance and vow:
“I will be good.”
But Austen read Richardson as well as Fielding, and Emma can be read as a puritan
rather than a cavalier novel. Here, the climax of Box Hill would be “the tears running
down [Emma’s] cheeks” (369) - which make it into a novel of repentance and
conversion.
Emma’s sins are pride and the love of power; she believes, also, that she is in control of
her fate. She does not steal - she does not have to - but she is greedy for domination. She
never examines her conscience seriously, even after Elton’s proposal (153); and in the
morning she is back to her usual tricks (156).
In Calvinist terms, she is “hardened” against any outside voice.
Her remorse after Box Hill can be seen as a “conversion-experience,” after which she has
become a new woman, able to repent and to see herself for what she is. She is born again
into humility and charity; she has also become capable of self-knowledge. She will serve
Miss Bates, and cease to be a proud exploiter.
Emma is thus a novel of spiritual growth, in which the puritan conversion-narrative is
diluted and secularised, but nonetheless provides the core of the novel. Formal religion
plays little role, but Emma could not be who she is without the two centuries of puritan
self-examination that lead up to her.
Austen is a satirist and a comic novelist, to be sure, but at heart she is serious, devout, and
idealistic. Emma is not a fairy-tale character like Sophia Western, but someone who has a
rich inner life that has been nourished by a long moral tradition. The fairy-tale plot is still
there, but it is enriched by the dimension of character that Austen takes from Richardson
rather than Fielding.
Of course, none of this need be taken on faith - Emma is “serious, very serious” on p.
456, but a page before she says “I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put
up with any other.” At the very least - and like Moll - she will have the cake of
repentance and eat it too, in the form of happiness, prosperity, and sexual fulfilment.
Conclusion: Where’s Jane?
Is Austen’s art marginal, or hegemonic? Is she a feminist, or one who cannot see beyond
women’s traditional roles?
One thing we can be sure of is that Austen likes to tease - she always gives a judgement
with one hand, and puts it in doubt with the other:
“right feminine happiness” (158)
“the affections and utility of domestic life” (456)
It’s not that Isabella and Harriet shouldn’t enjoy their roles - but they seem to enjoy them
so much because their IQ doesn’t get into three figures. Yet, on the other hand, both
Emma and Austen herself seem to enjoy female domesticity - provided they can express
an intellectual and critical consciousness as well.
The only figure in Emma who is both marginal and intelligent is Jane Fairfax - her
bitterness is unquestioned, but needs to be qualified:
1. She is bitter with her subordination - but the immediate instrument of her oppression
will be a woman, just as Mrs Elton is her oppressor in the present.
2. Jane herself hates the kind of person she has been forced to become - a reserved
outsider - for her, there is nothing positive in this status, no scope for revolt and selfassertion like, say, Mary Wollstonecraft (who was herself, briefly, a governess).
3. Jane’s solution is to be re-integrated into society as a woman of power and privilege
herself - everyone seems to be happy with this.
Virginia Woolf’s judgement here is one we should respect (The Common Reader)
If her sister Cassandra had not destroyed Jane’s letters, we would have known.
Perhaps the best answer is that Austen found the only real liberation available to a
woman at that time: in the act of writing itself. There is enough vindication there to rise
above a mere hunting for dogma - as there is in all the novelists we have read.
a. As fictionalised philosophy: what is real in the world? How do emotion and
reason interact?
Musil: critique of impressionism: opposition to intellect, emphasizing the need to
speak to "the heart or to some similar organ."
Impressionist epistemology ignored "the fact that there is no report of experience
which does not presume a spiritual system with the help of which the report is
‘created’ out of the facts."
"The Critique of Pure Reason is an attack on the idea that by reason alone we can
discover the nature of reality. Kant’s conclusion is that knowledge requires both
sensory experience and concepts contributed by the perceiver."
"The transcendental deduction: to prove that any experience whatever must
conform to the categories [substance, cause, effect, etc.] and that the experience
that is thus produced is of an objective world, not a merely personal subjective
creation of each individual." (Warburton)
Luft: "Nietzsche led the way for Musil by identifying science as dead art,
psychology as the queen of philosophy, grammar as the key to modern riddles.
Nietzsche, rather than Freud, served as Musil’s mentor in the realm of the
unconscious, examining the relationships between drives and values. Still more
importantly, Nietzsche offered a view of art, not as an escape, but as the
fundamental human activity."
"Imaginary numbers suggest the possibility of bridging two apparently
disconnected realities, the possibility of calculating with unknown, irrational,
and irreducible quantities." (56)
b. As a sexual drama: the formation of sexual identity, homosexuality and
heterosexuality (Weininger).
Luft: "Freud, Weininger and Musil all reflect a cultural preoccupation with
sexuality and the meaning of masculinity and femininity."
Two sexual interpretations of the novel: Oedipal (Freudian) or in terms of gender
roles. One explains through the family, the other through society.
Freudian
Musil himself critical of psychoanalysis:
Closed circle of argument (disagreement=resistance=proof that the complex
exists).
"with such treatment the human being, even when softly and magnetically
stroked, learns again to feel himself the measure of all things" (i.e. treatment is
self-indulgent, everything that happens to you is important).
Psychoanalysis describes a particular cultural moment.
"women no longer have laps; how can you return to it when she’s wearing skitogs?"
However:
Musil belongs to the same cultural milieu as Freud, hence the relevance of "On
the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love."
"Psychic impotence"
"Two currents–the affectionate and the sensual–whose union is necessary to
ensure a completely normal attitude in love have, in the cases we are
considering, failed to combine."
"Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love"
(251)
"People in whom there has not been a proper confluence of the affectionate and
the sensual currents . . . have retained perverse sexual aims . . . whose fulfilment
seems possible only with a debased and despised sexual object."
"psychical impotence is much more widespread than is supposed, and a certain
amount of this behavior does in fact characterise the love of civilised man [and
woman]"
"there are only a very few educated people in whom the two currents of affection
and sensuality have become properly fused . . . . the man is assured of complete
sexual pleasure only when he can devote himself unreservedly to obtaining
satisfaction, which with his well-brought-up wife, for instance, he does not dare
to do." (254)
"the final object of the sexual instinct is never any longer the original object but
only a surrogate for it. Psychoanalysis has shown us that when the original object
of a wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression, it is frequently
represented by an endless series of substitutive objects none of which, however,
brings full satisfaction." (258)
Bozena and "the whiff of the cowshed" (34)
Bozena undermines Torless’s idealism about his mother (40-41)
Basini, sex & mother (156)
"how to treat women if you’re a sensualist"
"little sons" and "young gentlemen"
Conclusion (217) "the faint whiff of scent that rose from his mother’s corseted
waist."
Gender Roles
Freud only touches on adolescent homosexuality indirectly, through the concept
of perverse object choice i.e. one that satisfies sadistic or "pre-genital" impulses.
Cf. Torless p. 37.
Gender roles satisfy society’s need to impose order on sexual desire; cf. Torless’
desire to be a little girl, p. 128. (shared by Musil himself)
[Show transparencies of gender roles]
In a single-sex school (or prison), inmates reproduce gender polarity within a
single sex. [For women, see Maedchen in Uniform]
Negative aspects of this:
Roles become rigid, are treated as if they were "real" or biological; no room for
playfulness.
Roles are used as channels for the expression of [sadistic] power.
The "male" and "female" roles reproduce the system of sexual domination in the
external society, but in an exaggerated form because the roles are arbitrary, and
therefore need to be policed more strictly.
Klaus Theweleit: After the creation of a unified Germany in 1870, and their
defeat of the French in 1871, it was absolutely the military constructing the body.
The model for all people was male, grim and disciplined. The military was said
to be the school of the nation; you had to go and bear it, and come out of it a
different person than you had been before. You came out German.
Members of the Freikorps not only formed the backbone of the Nazi SA, but were
involved in numerous acts of political terror, including the assassination of
Walther Rathenau. Ernst von Salomon, one of these assassins, describes his
reaction to months of brutal mistreatment, torture, and rigid discipline at
military school:
I began to notice my body stiffening, my posture gaining in confidence. When I thought
back to childhood games at home, I was filled with bitter shame. It had become quite
impossible to move with anything other than dignity. On the rare occasions when a
senseless desire for freedom surfaced, it invariably shattered against a new determination
and will. My new-found capacity to follow orders to the letter was double compensation
for losing the joys of roving unrestrained.[18]
Salomon here demonstrates the tremendous power of the drill, not only to create
a "docile body," in Foucault's terms, but also to create a masculine subject who
takes pleasure in his body's rigidity and power, in his capacity to follow orders,
and finally, if Theweleit is correct, in his capacity to kill.[19] The drill is
successful when it has inscribed a new form of subjectivity in the soldier's body when, to go back to Foucault's term, the soul has been recast in the image of what
Theweleit calls 'the soldier-male.' The soldier-males take pleasure in their
disciplined bodies, in their capacity to carry out the drill, and in disciplined
activity such as work; but they react violently to the prospect of any bodily
corruption, going so far as to kill in defense of the boundaries of their carefullycrafted bodies
Apart from war, the soldier males Theweleit analyzed organize their lives on the
model of severe military discipline and maintain relationships primarily with
other men within a strict hierarchical order. By disciplining the body, rendering
it hard and nearly metallic, they create a kind of protective armor designed to
shield them from their fear of dissolution. This fear emanates from the sense of
an inner void, or lack of psychic coherence, which is then projected outward.
Often it takes the threatening form of a miasma associated with both femininity
and the unruly proletarian masses. The texts Theweleit analyzes frequently
describe this miasma as bloody, oozing, a viscous liquid with the power to
contaminate, overwhelm, or destroy whatever it comes into contact with. The
creation of body armor is designed to render the fascist soldier male resistent to
this contagion, but also, and perhaps most importantly, serves to render him
impervious to sensual or erotic pleasure. For sexual communion with another
implies the breaching of both psychic and corporeal boundaries.
Men themselves were now split into a (female) interior and a (male) exterior the
body armor. And, as we know, the interior and the exterior were mortal enemies.
What we see portrayed in the rituals are the armor's separation from, and
superiority over the interior, the interior was allowed to flow, but only within the
masculine boundaries of the main formations. Before any of this could happen,
the body had to be split apart thoroughly enough to create an interior and an
exterior that could be opposed to each other as enemies. Only then could these
two parts re-form in peace', in the ritual."<18>
Cf. p. 152: "if [Reiting] didn’t beat me, he wouldn’t be able to help thinking I was
a man, and then he couldn’t let himself be so soft and affectionate to me."
Beineberg’s motives, same p.: antinomianism plus apprenticeship in domination
(sex & sadism both ways of "breaking down" the Other).
Masculine "hardness" is reinforced by homosexuality: logical extreme of the
homosociality of military, sports teams, fascism.
Torless’ path to homosexuality:
Discovery of beauty (148) makes up for lack of aesthetic education.
Bisexuality of the artist (Coleridge)
d. As a moral and political allegory: the nature of total institutions; a prophecy of
the rise of Nazism.
(M’s journal, late 30s: "Relation to politics. Reiting & Beineberg: the dictators of
today in nucleo. Also the idea of the mass as object of constraint."
"Would we then have thought that the putsch-officer would become the leading
type in the world?!")
Reiting is "practising" for power: 51-52.
Reiting’s liking for mass-movements, 175.
Reiting prefigures the power-worshipping side of fascism, Beineberg the esoteric.
Orwell, 1984
"Such, Such Were the Joys" (1948?)
An essay about the school Orwell went to from age 8 to 13; after going to another
school, Eton, he went into the colonial police. Both Musil and Orwell were
soldiers - they look at total institutions from inside.
We can look at the two texts to compare British & Austrian schools; but the main
issue (and controversy) about "Such, Such Were the Joys" concerns whether it
was the germ out of which 1984 grew (given that Orwell may have been working
on both at the same time).
Anthony West: "In 1984 the whole pattern of society shapes up along the lines of
fear laid down in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ until the final point of the dread
summons to the headmaster’s study for the inevitable beating. In 1984, the study
becomes Room 101. As these parallels fall into place it is possible to see how
Orwell’s unconscious mind was working. Whether he knew it or not, what he
did in 1984 was to send everybody in England to an enormous St Cyprian’s to be
as miserable as he had been. Only the existence of a hidden wound can account
for such remorseless pessimism."
These critics emphasise Orwell’s sick mind, including a kind of schizophrenia
about having two different names.
On the other side are people like Orwell’s biographer, Bernard Crick, who argue:
a. That the school and its teachers were not as bad as Orwell claimed.
b. That Orwell was a highly sane man, rather than a mentally crippled one.
c. That Orwell was a great political writer with something important to say about
totalitarianism, rather than a neurotic pessimist with a hang-up about his
childhood. 1984 is about the Spanish Civil War and World War II, not about an 8yr old who’s afraid of a beating.
I incline to compromise: 1984 is a general view of a totalitarian society, but it has
a strongly individual flavor, & much of its power comes from deep down in
Orwell’s psyche.
Some arguments for reading "Such, Such Were the Joys" and 1984 at least side by
side:
Not just Freud, but also Musil, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and many others
argue that the most important events of a life have already happened by the time
one enters university, and perhaps much earlier. Children are both plastic and
sensitive; apparently small events can have huge effects on them, especially
episodes of cruelty or injustice.
Removing a child from its parents makes it much more vulnerable to such
events; the child has lost its main defense against the world, and also those who
can make sense of what is happening.
In Torless, the hero is exposed to evil and sexual events coming from its peers; in
"Such, Such" they come from Sambo and Flip - good parents are replaced by
diabolical ones.
Vertical oppression is probably more extreme than horizontal, because the
oppressors have more power relative to their victim; also, the boy in Orwell’s
essay is about half the age of Torless, and hasn’t yet acquired any intellectual
defenses.
Also, in Torless it is possible to appeal to a higher authority, the teachers - they set
a limit to what can happen. In "Such, Such," as in 1984, there is less justice at the
top than anywhere else. Establishes a basis for Orwell's later anarchist beliefs: the
higher up in society, the more powerful, the worse. Hope always comes from
below - from the proles, in political terms.
In both books, evil is mixed up with sexuality and primary functions of the body.
Again, Orwell is more primitive and extreme: transgression in his essay is bedwetting rather than homosexuality. Basini is punished for something he chose to
do; Orwell for something he didn’t want to do, but couldn’t help doing anyway.
Loss of control, regression to infancy, senseless floggings - all of this anticipates
the tortures and mutilations of 1984, where a central concern is the awful things
that can happen to the body.
But also, Sambo & Flip set out to mutilate the mind - they are Orwell's original
manipulators and brainwashers, forcing you to admit what you know to be
untrue.
Orwell's History after St Cyprian's
Got a scholarship to Eton but did no work at all for six years - no chance of going
on to university.
Went into the Imperial Police and served in Burma (Myanmar). Rejects power
and the imperial system (his family tradition). A misfit in the ruling class, but no
love for those he rules - both sides are corrupted.
After five years resigns from the police (1927) to become a writer. Works as a
dishwasher in Paris, travels in England as a bum to see society from the bottom
up (after having seen it from the top down at Eton). Publishes Down and Out in
Paris and London.
Writes novels and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a report on poverty and
unemployment in the North of England. But creates a scandal by attacking leftwing intellectuals in the second half of the book.
Central to Orwell's writing: affection for ordinary working=class people, hatred
and mistrust of those who come forward to take power in their name.
1936, Spanish Civil War. Orwell goes as a journalist in 1937, then signs up for a
left-wing militia, the POUM. Fights for six months, badly wounded. Has to flee
Spain when his comrades are purged by the communists; writes Homage to
Catalonia.
His Spanish experience provides the most deeply felt political background for
1984, especially the ideas about trying to hold on to the truth in a ruthless &
totalitarian world. Much discussion in Homage to Catalonia of how newspapers
and government figures deliberately suppress the truth and create a nightmare
world where no one can be trusted.
Read from pp. 188-189.
The communists, including some Russians sent by Stalin, claimed to be fighting
Fascism; but they also conducted a vicious war against their enemies on the Left,
many of whom were tortured, disappeared, or just rounded up and shot. They
were accused of being Trotskyists, or worse - agents of the Fascist enemy.
A good example was what happened to Andres Nin, one of the left-wing leaders.
The communists arrested him, then staged an "attack" on the jail by armed men
who spoke German - to make it seem that he was a secret Nazi who was being
rescued by them. The men took him away and he was never heard of again almost certainly he was killed by the communists & his body disposed of (June
1937, while Orwell was at the front).
Six years later (1943) Orwell is working as a journalist in London - can't fight in
WW II because of his Spanish wound and ill health. Makes notes for a book
called The Last Man in Europe. All the essentials of 1984 are in these notes; the
book is completed and published six years later; Orwell dies soon afterwards, in
January 1950.
1984: Public Sources
Other experiences contributing to 1984, besides the psychological wounds of his
childhood and what he saw first-hand in Spain (individual experience has an
absolute truth-value for Orwell - no questioning of the self and morality as
Torless does).
1. The rise and near-triumph of the European dictators, especially Hitler and
Stalin; and the similarities between them. Bitter enemies in the thirties, sudden
allies in July 1939, surprise attack on Russia by Hitler two years later. (British CP
follows the Soviet line).
2. Especially, the Soviet purges that began in December 1934 with the
assassination of Kirov. Confessions by the Old Bolsheviks, swear that white is
black.
3. The propaganda and neglect of people's real needs in the Soviet five-year
plans. 2 + 2 = 5 a favorite slogan.
4. Shabbiness, decay and shortage of everything in England during the War and
afterwards - provides a lot of the everyday detail for the book.
5. Orwell's work during the War at the Ministry of Information. Gigantic art-deco
building devoted to propaganda and lies, lots of intellectuals employed there.
6. Belief in the general bloodthirstiness and immorality of intellectuals as
opposed to the decency of ordinary people, who still believe in absolute right
and wrong.
7. Difficulties that he had with publishing his books and articles: fellow-travellers
in the publishing industry make trouble for The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to
Catalonia, Animal Farm and 1984 itself.
1984: Private Sources
1. Orwell's wife dies suddenly in 1945, leaving him lonely and adrift. Later affair
with Sonia Brownell, marries her on his deathbed - model for Julia.
2. When the War ends, wants to live in the country - chooses an extremely
remote house on the island of Jura - feeds his "Last Man" fantasies.
3. In 1947, halfway through the book, becomes ill with TB, has to go to a
sanatorium. Orwell a dying man: struggling to say the last word about
contemporary politics, but also a deeply isolated and despairing individual.
4. Illness makes you a child again; Orwell's condition perhaps re-activates some
of the complexes of his schooldays.
1984 as Science Fiction
Two kinds of science fiction: a) speculation about alternative worlds or the
distant future; b) allegories of the present. The latter are almost always
dystopian, taking current evils and projecting them into an even worse near
future. Orwell writes this kind of SF in 1984 (as does Atwood in The Handmaid's
Tale).
Second kind can be called "topical SF," and one if its problems is that it may
quickly become silly as the actual future diverges from your predictions. Orwell
cleverly gets around this by assuming that the Big Brother regime is an economic
and scientific failure, so that everyday life goes backwards - people are poorer,
dirtier, more limited than they used to be, so little need for new inventions. Two
exceptions are:
1. The telescreen. Television was just beginning in England, Orwell brilliantly
assumes that it will be used to watch people, rather than vice versa.
2. Social changes that don't depend on technology, but contribute to the
nightmare atmosphere, notably the metric system and the 24-hour clock. This is
the "Little England" side of Orwell, and uses a cunning piece of false logic: the
Continent is the birthplace of totalitarianism, the metric system is Continental, so
the metric system is totalitarian.
How much does it matter that, in 1984 or 2000, the future has turned out
differently, and much better? Does this make the book worthless?
a. Could be argued that 1984 is a warning, along with Animal Farm. Orwell tried
to prevent something happening, and his two books were outstandingly
successful in doing this.
Related issue: to what extent did Orwell seriously believe that something like
this might happen? Is the book an expression of his own profound pessimism, or
just a clever fantasy?
Certainly he took the dystopian future seriously in 1938:
"The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships is that they are something
entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past every tyranny
was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of 'human nature'
which as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that
'human nature' is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men
who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows. The
Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modern
state. The radio, press-censorship, standardized education and the secret police
have altered everything. Mass-suggestion is a science of the last twenty years,
and we do not yet know how successful it will be."
The hero of his novel, Coming Up for Air, puts it even more strongly:
"The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan world. The
colored shirts. The barbed wire. The rubber truncheons. The secret cells where
the electric light burns night and day and the detective watching you while you
sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds
of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into
thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate
him so that they want to puke. It's all going to happen. Or isn't it? Some days I
know it's impossible, other days I know it's inevitable."
Given that in five years vastly worse things did happen, Orwell looks like quite
level-headed prophet in 1938.
b. The view that Orwell was an extremist or neurotic pessimist can also be
challenged by pointing to the enormous popularity of 1984. Whether or not
things turned out so badly, the idea that they might still has a powerful, general
appeal. Orwell's skill as a writer comes in here: he is able to arouse strong,
primitive feelings in his audience, almost regardless of the book's relevance to
the current situation. 1984 succeeds as a social myth, whether or not it's "true."
God, Sex and Rebellion in 1984
In the real history of postwar Europe religion, and especially Roman
Catholicism, played a major role in resisting communism and finally defeating it.
I asked myself, why is there no religious opposition to Big Brother, Newspeak
and the rest? Then I read a critic who said that "obviously, O’Brien is a Godfigure"; and the book started to make a different kind of sense.
Orwell was influenced by Dostoevsky’s "Grand Inquisitor" chapter in The
Brothers Karamazov. Jesus comes back to earth and starts healing people; the
Grand Inquisitor arrests him and explains to him that he must be killed, because
people don’t need and shouldn’t expect to find happiness in freedom; they need
an absolute authority to tell them what to do.
He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that at last they have
vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy. 'For now' (he is
speaking of the Inquisition, of course) 'for the first time it has become possible to
think of the happiness of men. Man was created a rebel; and how can rebels be
happy?’
Happiness lies in submission to an irrational authority; this is precisely what
O’Brien is trying to teach Winston. We can see a parallel with Orwell’s personal
situation and the "problem of evil": God tortures us with cancer and tuberculosis,
but also demands that we worship him. Like the Party, God also kills us, even if
we submit.
The "problem of pain" goes hand in hand with the "problem of pleasure": here
the focus is on Julia and sexual as opposed to intellectual rebellion. We may
consider it chauvinistic that Orwell defines Julia as "all body" - "with Julia,
everything came back to her own sexuality." But this is a conscious decision on
Julia’s part: "When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you
feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like
that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up
and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour."
Not necessarily gone sour, but certainly diverted into a different course - which
is typical of Christianity as well of political dictatorship.
The problem of pleasure, in other words, is "why shouldn’t we live entirely for
the physical pleasures of sex, eating, drinking, etc. - since, after all, it was God
who made these things pleasurable."
Julia is a philosophical hedonist, and in her own terms is right to fall asleep when
Winston is reading Goldstein’s book to her.
From another point of view, however, we can criticise Orwell for making women
and proles equivalent to each other: they subvert Ingsoc by retreating into their
bodies, rather than attacking it directly. But this raises the question:
Why did Communism Fail?
The biggest single reason was not intellectual failure, but dishonesty. Fraternity
and equality were noble ideals but, as in 1984, the Inner Party–the Nomenklatura
in Soviet terms–started to live for their secret privileges; and these could not be
kept secret indefinitely. The causes of the Protestant Reformation were similar:
Papal nepotism.
O’Brien won’t fail because he is a torturer, but because of his wine and his
manservant. These privileges were sexual as well: Mao regimented China and
put everyone in uniform, but led a secretly corrupt sexual life. Orwell shows the
privileges, but doesn’t realise that they are the Achilles Heel of the entire system.
Example of Bulgaria.
A sad thought that it didn’t seem to be moral indignation at tortures and
deportations that brought down the Wall, but envy and disgust with the
hypocrisy of the rulers. So 1984 was proved wrong, but not because of the
intrinsic nobility of people like Winston.