Nancy Armstrong

Captivity and Cultural Capital in the English Novel

F.R. Leavis uses Austen to launch his account of the novel’s rise to respectability as a literary form during the course of the nineteenth century. He identifies her as the first novelist to matter in this respect and proceeds to track the “great tradition” from Austen through to its culmination in Henry James.1 Assuming, thanks to Leavis, that with Austen’s career the rise of the novel was complete, Ian Watt never even speculates about the fate of the novel after it had become the preferred reading material of a new commercially-oriented middle class.2 Despite their conflicting notions of what “the novel” is and how to tell its story, then, Leavis and Watt similarly refuse to deal with the question of what connects fiction before Jane Austen to that which comes after her. Together, they conspire to leave us wondering what a form of individualism defined by and authorizing the acquisition of property, according to Watt’s understanding of the novel’s mission, has to do with the ethically tortured relationship between subject and world to which Leavis attributes all proto-modernist formal innovations in fiction. Although my own study of the English novel describes domestic fiction as a continuous and indeed the dominant tradition from Defoe to Woolf,3 I never did say, at least not in so many words, how that tradition required and survived the jolting shift in form and function we experience when leaving the domain of Watt and entering that of Leavis.

Gender and the Work of Words

The authors would like to acknowledge the Rockefeller Foundations support for Nancy Armstrongs research on this project. We thank the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, for providing the intellectual environment where we drafted this essay. We especially thank Henry Abelove, Michael Denning, and Catherine Hall for their scholarly advice on our historical research, and Rey Chow, Lisa Lowe, George Mariscal, and Masao Miyoshi for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

Monarchy in the age of mechanical reproduction

D the period of prolonged mourning following the Prince Consorts death, Queen Victoria mobilized a cluster of features first consolidated and infused with authority in Samuel Richardsons Clarissa and subsequently reproduced by the tradition of sentimental fiction extending through Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens. I am referring to novels whose heroine considers herself to be in captivity when thrust under the public gaze, a woman whose identity resides in her interiority—especially the intensity of her feelings—and not in her body, and whose feelings stem from an intense devotion to a home that no longer exists as such and which can only be expressed, therefore, in her writing. When Albert died, so died Queen Victorias formidable ability to reproduce the line and way of life that had long distinguished those of blood and title from those of mere wealth and education. In withdrawing herself from many of the traditional rites of womanhood and forms of public display associated with royalty, Victoria turned herself into a sentimental heroine who more than compensated in mass public appeal for what she relinquished in terms of political authority. Much like Clarissa, Victoria wrote herself out of one position—which located value in her body—and into another— which located value in invisible virtues that expressed themselves strictly through writing. She, too, wrote as a woman separated irretrievably from her home, albeit by death rather than geography. But where Clarissas body had to waste away in order for her to effect this transformation, Victorias stout little figure could be seen sporting widows weeds for decades. Had Richardsons middleclass heroine lingered on for years in a despoiled body, her writing

Gender and the Victorian novel

The impact and tenacity of the argument launched in Thomas Malthuss famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) can mean only one thing: the nineteenth century opened onto a very different field of narrative possibilities than had preoccupied and entertained the previous century, possibilities in terms of which Victorian authors and readers would imagine their lives, write their novels, and hammer out domestic and colonial policy. Although infant mortality rates had changed little for most of the people and would not improve significantly throughout the nineteenth century, the English population was growing younger. Compounded by the fact that no bouts of plague, famine, or other natural disasters had limited the growth of the population, people were marrying at a younger age. Marry a man with whom you were emotionally compatible if you could, but marry a man of material means you must, such novels as Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816) seemed to say, or else face the degradation of impoverishment or, worse, the need to work for a living. Given that the population under twenty-five years of age shot up from 46 to 58 percent of the population between the mid-eighteenth century and the beginning of Victorias reign in 1837, courtship rituals to ensure that deserving women would meet and win the hearts of eligible men could not have been considered a frivolous activity. Nor could knowledge of the social rituals of the sort that fill Austens pages be distinguished from the political power of a group of men and women who were neither aristocratic nor forced to work for a living. The delicate nuances of feeling and elaborate rituals that gave those feelings both vigor and charm not only consolidated this group but also contained the secret of its perpetuation.

Do Wasps Just Want to Have Fun? Darwin and the Question of Variation

In writing On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin found it necessary to sandwich chapters 3 and 4—where he famously unveiled his theory of natural selection—between two other chapters that sought to account for the minute variations that distinguish each living organism from every other. Obviously finding the individual’s relative biological fitness in a universal struggle for survival inadequate to the task of explaining all of nature’s dubiously functional and even disadvantageous differences, Darwin devoted The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) to formulating a second basis for selection: the female’s preference for certain mates over others for purposes of reproduction, all having proved themselves equally fit. In thus accounting for many of the more flamboyant biological markers of species difference, Darwin also opened up the possibility that this alternative basis for selection had a role to play in the story of speciation. Were the variations that put their mark on future species able to do so because their distinctive traits gave them some advantage over their competitors? Or did they survive because that trait, and perhaps others bundled with it, happened to be attractive to the female of the species?

Introduction: How Do Novels Think about Neoliberalism?

The fourth biennial conference of the Society for Novel Studies was held at the University of Pittsburgh in May 2016 under the leadership of Jonathan Arac, then SNS vice president. Novel sponsored British novelist Tom McCarthy as the keynote speaker, and he agreed to let us publish both his talk and his provocative interview with Nicholas Huber. Members of the editorial board selected four additional papers from the conference that, in their view, shed new light on the relationship between the novel and neoliberalism. The remaining papers in this issue are based on invited talks from symposia held at Duke and Brown Universities that focused on the contemporary novel, critical theory, and the curious relationship these two modes of writing have taken up in the past half century. All the essays went through the journal’s standard review process. To introduce this special issue, we chose two essays that frame the largely unstated question that the collection as a whole addresses: McCarthy’s keynote talk, “Vanity’s Residue,” which leans heavily on certain novels as a mode of critical theoretical writing, and Dierdra Reber’s “ATale of Two Marats,” which leans just as heavily on the explanatory logic of political-economic theory as McCarthy does on that of novels. Together, these essays ask us to consider how major contemporary novelists have changed the novel’s “partition of the sensible . . . which,” according to Jacques Rancière, “allows (or does not allow) some data to appear” (11). Is this alteration of the reader’s formal expectations a matter of course—an expression of the generic obligation of the novel to violate the established novel form, however one construes it? Or do the formal features that distinguish novels written in the last thirty years or so alter that obligation itself? Should we consider the variations that encourage us to identify certain novels with “neoliberalism” as variations of the novel as a genre—or do they amount to a different order of difference that in turn amounts to a different set of generic requirements? If the latter, then can we say that the novels now being written for a global audience are breaking with the novel form itself and dissolving the contract, which changes those expectations— including that of the element of surprise—that readers bring to novel reading? Reber and McCarthy are of one mind that the turn in political and novel history now attributed to neoliberalism has actually been three centuries in the making. Reber begins with the concept of laissez-faire coined by the mid-eighteenthcentury Physiocrats who argued that the economy should be free of regulations to develop according to its own natural law. She shows how that principle derives energy from its opposition (“abhorrence” is her word) to a form of vertical authority that describes itself as rational. Her account holds the vertical authority of empire responsible for curbing the horizontal drive of laissez-faire until the end of the Cold War period, when neoliberalism emerged from the collapse of vertical authority. She sees Trumpery as symptomatic of this collapse: “In a cultural climate dominated by

Introduction: Property and Heterotopia

Aided by the critical wisdom of Novel’s editorial board, I selected the essays for this special issue from a pair of conferences sponsored by the journal. That was in truth the sole institutional connection between the two events. Challenged to organize a one-day symposium on any topic having to do with novel studies, a committee of PhD students at Duke designed such an event in response to the recently coined term Anthropocene, a coinage for the geologic period during which human activities have had global impact on earth’s ecosystems. In its letter inviting its chosen speakers for this symposium, the planning committee asked speakers to address the following questions:

A Gothic History of the British Novel

Over two centuries ago, Sir Walter Scott set the generic standard for the novel by singling out Jane Austen’s Emma as the first mature example of ‘the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life’.1 Franco Moretti has recently called our attention to the sheer number of novels that deliberately reject this mimetic standard.2 Where we used to assume their eccentricity, Moretti’s study forces us to consider what this sizable body of fiction might say about the limitations of those novels that do observe Scott’s criterion for maturity. To address this question, I will advance five propositions designed to counter the ingrained habit of reading novels as models, however distorted, of people and events likely to occur, as Scott suggests, in the world outside the novel. When some version of realism is allowed to define the genre, it inevitably favours novels in which individuals succeed or fail to distinguish themselves as individuals and secure position for themselves within society. But if, as Moretti’s quantitative method suggests, realism is in material terms a subgenre of the novel form, then we ought to ask ourselves what alternative model of self and society are we likely to ignore whenever we favour realism. Based on the broad-based and continuous popularity of Gothic fiction, I shall refer to the literary history that emerges when we privilege forms of fiction that observe this other form as a ‘Gothic’ history of the British novel.

When gender meets sexuality in the Victorian novel

During the Victorian period, the novel confronted a new definition of human nature that challenged Enlightenment models of individualism. Across a swath of disciplines – not only biology and natural history, but sociology, psychology, theology, moral philosophy, and political economy as well – liberal individualism struggled with the problem of man as a population or species. Writing in a form that had traditionally aimed at forming a household that would in turn reproduce self-governing individuals, Victorian novelists could hardly avoid this problem. To maintain the novel’s preeminence, they had to maintain the individual’s viability in a milieu newly hostile to individualism. Victorian novelists of all stripes responded to this challenge by staging the conflict between individual and species as a conflict between gender and sexuality. In carrying the novel into new areas of modern social and not-so-social life, they also broke it into pieces when serialization began. This change in the mode of publication coincided with the novel’s formal fragmentation into multiple narrators and plots, none of which had an exclusive purchase on truth. As a genre, moreover, the novel devolved into such subgenres as detective fiction, gothic fiction, children’s literature, adventure stories, the novels of the romance revival, and sensation novels, all of which reveal how gender relations – and by proxy liberal society – fail either to encompass or to exclude the populations on which the middle classes were coming to depend. An account of gender and sexuality in the Victorian novel is consequently an account of a conflict that did not yield satisfying resolutions so much as a variety of memorable failures.

The Victorian Archive and its Secret

Twelve years ago, in writing Fiction in the Age of Photography, I sought to show how the sheer repetition of certain shots extracted visual information from the camera’s human subject matter and reassembled that information as a system of image-objects that acquired meaning and value strictly in relation to each other. The result was a world composed entirely of illuminated spaces in which virtually all members of the British public could place themselves, their animals, their objects, and their cultural practices. What is more, those who placed themselves within this cognitive map of British society could carry it far afield from its particular referents and use it to render non-European cultures legible in European terms. In this way, photography merged the project of positive knowledge—that assumed one could know by seeing—with the Romantic project of a comprehensive knowledge—that assumed one could see the world whole. This merger, as Thomas Richards argues, “made possible the fantasy of an imperial archive in which the control of Empire hinges on a British monopoly over knowledge” (7). When I assumed that such knowledge took the form of taxonomy—a set of discrete positions designated by features of race, class, and gender—my understanding of the photographic archive was destined to stop there. Ignoring signs of difference, such as those that assert themselves as the ghostly blur in Francis Galton’s composite portraits of the “Jewish” or “criminal” types, I fastened on the spatial architecture of a recognizably Victorian world-picture.