The Body in Question?

Roundtable The Body in Question? Joseph Melling The writing of social and cultural history has been fundamentally reoriented in the past two decades by the methods of textual analysis 122 development, markets, the machine, and other rhetoric of the nineteenth century. Certainly her readings illuminate the cracks and fissures, the infrastructure and underbelly, of Victorian ideology. But the absence of evidence adequate to the magnitude of the argument would be less annoying if the argument itself were more aesthetic. That is, many literary critics make no pretense to providing historical knowledge. They pursue, rather, Sidney’s other goals for literature, not to teach but to delight and move. But only two out of eight of Poovey’s chapters are concerned with literary works, her claims are sociohistorical, and her style is unremittingly that of argument, difficult, and dry. Mostly, however, her style illuminates the ingenuity of the professional literary critic immersed in the beloved body of the text (‘immanent criticism’), and it tends toward self-reflexivity, or an obsession with the reading process itself. Thus this kind of criticism’s mantra-like fascination with ‘representation’. Poovey’s fourth chapter concludes with a mystified paean to ‘connotation’, which reveals the interestedness of all knowledge. In a very ‘connotative’ (read ‘impressionistic’ or ‘elusive’) argument in chapter 8, we are told that a dangerous association between woman and ‘figuration’ has something to do with the political representation of women and people of colour. In both these chapters that return to our contemporary linguistic turn, all that is solid of the historical argument melts into air. Chapter 8, which concludes the book, never returns to ‘the psychological’ nor to the historical specificities of financial speculation. In conclusion, the ‘rhetorical contests’ are insufficiently dialectical; the evidential bases of the claims are too limited. Substantively, the machine, the competing trope for how society works, receives too little attention in that organicism and mechanism are best understood in relation to one another. I have focussed here on the methodological rather than the substantive issues in order to initiate a self-critique of some of the more influential practices in literary and cultural studies, where method and style may be more imitable and imitated than substance. (University of Exeter) Making a Social Body 123 and close reading in which scholars such as Mary Poovey have excelled. The application of such techniques to historical investigation has created a new orthodoxy where the writing of historical narratives as well as the making of public politics is seen as largely the construction of rhetoric. The historian’s tale is reviewed as merely an appropriation of earlier discourses with more or less critical awareness and it is seen as basic good practice that any historical interpretation should acknowledge the political implications of any selection and classification of sources which provided the foundations for the narrative unveiled.’ Such an emphasis on the technologies of knowledge and power implicit in the intellectual labour of enlightenment is particularly apparent in the reappraisals of the history of science and medicine which have followed Foucault’s footsteps around the labyrinth of the human sciences and the great confinement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 Amongst practitioners of cultural and intellectual history this interplay between rhetoric and power has often been presented in terms of physical and discursive space, where competing versions of the world are located in spheres of action and modes of address which were deeply gendered as men moved in the public world and women were largely attached to the private economies of work and feeling3 The recurring interest in the metaphorical connection between bodies and politics can be explained not only by reference to the images of discipline and invasion found in Foucault but also in the imaginative analysis of female insanity as domestic confinement offered in studies of nineteenth-century fiction by Gilbert and Gubar, Showalter and Poovey h e r ~ e l fIt . ~is now commonplace to think of the moral regulation of everyday life in Victorian England as the product of bounded bourgeois rationalities where those who threatened the calculated order of normality would be confined to the borderlands of exclusion and insanity. In her lucid introduction to these essays, Poovey acknowledges both her primary concern with issues of power and representation and her eclecticism in drawing on a variety of tools to construct arguments using the lexicon of Marxist materialism as well as the methods of literary criticism. Whilst distancing herself from the immodest excesses of the New Historicism, Poovey engages in an ambitious exercise to explain cultural formation in Britain during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. She argues that the years 1830-1864 marked a period in which British culture was essentially reformed, as ancient notions of the body politic declined in the face of a scientific rationalism fashioned by political economists. In the process, notions of theological and moral obligations were separated from ideas of economic Roundtable 124 freedom and social responsibility. Paternalist principles of collective commitment gave way to possessive or disciplinary individualism so that even the final novel of Dickens no longer carried the passionate moral resistance to the workings of the making classes that had marked his earliest work. Poovey is most impressive when she delineates the internal contradictions of the credo of rational liberalism, which could both weaken the moral resistance of opponents and create an impetus to fresh demands on male-centred institutions. Making a Social Body shows how notions of the free economic agent and individual property rights surfaced during debates on women’s rights during the 1850s and 1860s to corrode patriarchal dominance. Such engagements fatally weakened the romantic images of feminine compassion on which Dickens and so many other moralists had anchored their alternative vision for industrial society but they also provided grist for the feminist J.S. Mill in the era of the Second Reform Act. Poovey generally presents the social body as a space which was feminised under the gaze of calculating males who used the instruments of science to measure, probe and penetrate the chaotic disorders of contemporary life, though she also reiterates the argument developed in UnevenDevelopments that ideological fixations have to be made and remade in contest with other possible c~nclusions.~ Her essay on ‘The production of abstract space’ pursues a Foucauldian project in seeking to trace the ways in which bodies were placed in relation to a complex intellectual grid created by intellectuals who sought mastery of a social as well as physi (...truncated)