Reconfiguring Victorian Family: Materiality & Commodification in Literary Cases, Summaries of Voice

Download Reconfiguring Victorian Family: Materiality & Commodification in Literary Cases and more Summaries Voice in PDF only on Docsity! “Salvation in a False Direction”: How Domestic Materiality in two Literary Case Studies Reconfigures the Victorian Family Laura Defurio English Setting the Scene: Marx and Engels explore the Family in a Capitalist Economy In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels asserts that English industrialization has disrupted a harmony that had previously occupied the homes of the peasants enmeshed within feudal systems. Engels’ yearning for a peaceful home life imitates Rousseau’s desire to reinstate the self-sufficiency and freedom that was present when men lived in the state of nature. Engels demonstrates his affinity for principles articulated in The Social Contract and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality when he observes that the members of these agricultural households “were comfortable in their silent vegetation”1 (17). Later2, Marx will dismiss the desire for “the isolated hunter or fisherman” and will argue that “Robinsonades”, amongst whom Engels must be included, misinterpret the figure of the natural, solitary producer3 (Introduction 124). Instead, Marx believes 1 Rousseau asserts that in the ‘state of nature’ men are “tranquil and innocent” (Inequality 45). Engels’ reference to “silent vegetation” gestures to Rousseau’s savage who “agitated by nothing, is given over to the single feeling of his own present existence, without any idea of the future, however, near it may be, and his projects, as limited as his views hardly extend to he end of the day” (Inequality 46). 2 Engels composed The Condition of the Working Class in England from September 1844 to March 1845. Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology together between September 1845 and summer 1846 (Preface 1). 3 The degree to which Rousseau proposes a return to ‘the state of nature’ is a controversial subject. For a full description of this critical landscape, see Allessandro Ferrara’s Modernity and Authenticity: A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. State University of New York Press, 1993, p. 30-39. For the purposes of this paper, it is sufficient to understand that Marx is critical of those social theorists who idealize a ‘natural man’ functioning outside of competitive systems. Instead, Marx contends that the purpose of Rousseau’s The Social Contract is to demonstrate how inequality amongst individuals in a social group arises out of methods of production and the security of property. Laura Defurio that Rousseau anticipated the “ ‘bourgeois society’, which began to evolve in the sixteenth century and in the eighteenth century made giant strides towards maturity”’ in the political theory that proposes an alternative social order to combat the disruptive effects of competition (Introduction 124). Marx chides social historians of the 18th century who largely saw the individual “as an ideal whose existence belongs to the past” where Marx understands the individual as “a product of the dissolution of feudal society” (Introduction 124). Marx believes that any idealization of an isolated family unit errs for a number of reasons. First, isolation at this stage of social development would only occur when a member of a civilization is cast out of their community. Second, the romanticization of isolation violates the Aristotelian principle4 that man is by nature a social animal. Finally, man can only “individualise himself only within society” and, for that reason, he thrives in community (Introduction 125). In light of Marx’s criticism, Engels’ romanticization of the isolated family unit within the feudal system must be reexamined to determine whether their “material position was far better than that of their successors” (Engels 16). It will be the goal of this paper to determine the degree to which shifting materiality in the market and in the home governs the future of the Victorian family. In his representation of the peaceful feudal homestead, Engels idealizes the sedentary occupations of the women who work within the home: “Before the introduction of machinery, the spinning and weaving of raw materials was carried on in the working man’ home. Wife and daughter spun the yarn that the father wove or that they sold” (Engels 15). He also claims that the men of this earlier age were entirely virtuous because there were no temptations to lure them away from the household. Engels speculates that these “good husbands and fathers…had no temptation to be immoral, there being no gin palaces or low houses in their vicinity” (Engels 16). Engels attributes the harmony of the household to the fact that they “had their children the whole day at home, and brought them up in obedience and the fear of God; the patriarchal relationship remained undisturbed” (Engels 17). For Engels, familial dissonance is acted out as members of household leave the enclosed unit. Engels argues that the feudal system began the process of commodification by transforming members of the working class into transferable external objects devoid of independent facilities: They were not human being; they were merely toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history down to that time. The industrial revolution has simply carried this out to its 4 See Aristotle’s Politics Book 1, Ch.2 (1253a2). 2 “Salvation in the Wrong Direction” Not only does the man suffer a castration in the market, the women finds herself effectively ‘raped’ by the owner of her commodified body. Engels acknowledges these pseudo-sexual violations when he describes the departure of the newly fetishized state of the household from traditional gender roles: “This condition…unsexes the man and takes from the woman all womanliness without being able to bestow upon the man true womanliness, or the woman true manliness – this condition […] degrades, in the most shameful way, both sexes, and, through them, Humanity…” (155). After the husband and wife submit to acts of economic and material violence (which, for Marx, are synonymous), the unified household of the feudal system is replaced by a deviant familial hierarchy. Engels explicitly names English women as the cause of the disruption within the domestic sphere because, once commodified, they alter the configuration of the family unit. He claims that “the employment of the wife dissolves the family utterly” (154). For Engels, the estrangement of the wife from the family is the most damaging consequence of industrialization because when “the wife supports the family, the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks” (Engels 154). Engels invests all his sympathy with the husband who “cannot escape from the family, must live in the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quarrels, most demoralizing for parents and children alike” and, and in the same breath, Engels chastises the Victorian wife for her absence. After repeatedly bolstering all the traditional notions of gender roles, Engels unexpectedly overturns them. Assuming that London is the culmination of any economic system and culture because it is so ‘prosperous’5, Engels makes a reductio argument to show that the family has been unnaturally unified since the advent of feudalism. He suggests that, if the family, the fundamental unit of a civilization, is corrupted in the height of economic ‘prosperity’ then “we must admit that human society has hitherto sought salvation in a false direction; we must admit that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can have come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning” (156). Engels concludes that the flaw in the earliest family hierarchy is the unifying principle of private interest. In other words, because the family comes together not out of an instinctive affection but simply as a “community of possessions”, its flaws are most clearly evidenced when the family is in its final state (Engels 156). It is important to note that this line of reasoning does not necessarily expose the patriarch as a false sovereign. Engels reasons: 5 Engels intends this statement to be taken ironically insofar as capitalism evaluates its own success by fantastically artificial systems of exchange 5 Laura Defurio If the wife can now base her supremacy upon the fact that she supplies the greater part, nay, the whole of the common possession, the necessary inference is that this community of possession is no true and rational one, since one member of the family boasts offensively of contributing the greater share (156). Here, Engels simply asserts that the authority of the father must be based upon his masculine sovereignty, endowed to him by nature, and that the capitalist society mistakenly understands the father’s authority in the family to derive from his role as material provider. Then for Engels, the peaceful familial hierarchy will be reinstated and the father will resume his reign when the unnatural role of ‘the provider’ is removed. Engels suggests that the false premise of ‘the provider’ will be abandoned after the government that subsidizes capitalism is overthrown. This paper will demonstrate from a brief survey of Victorian social polemics and literary trends that the myth of the masculine provider is overturned within a capitalist system as women enter the workforce. Violence and turmoil in the home and in the market accompanied this transition. Engels relates the story of the father who is forced to care for the household while his wife is in the workforce: ‘…there sat poor Jack near the fire, and what did he, thing you? Why he sat and mended his wife’s stockings with the bodkin; and as soon as he saw his old friend at the doorpost, he tried to hide them. But Joe, that is my friend’s name, had seen it, and said: ‘Jack, what the devil art thou doing? Where is the missus? Why, is that thy work?’ and poor Jack was ashamed… (Jack said) ‘now the world is upside down. Mary has to work and I have to stop at home, mind the childer, seep and wash, bake and mend; and when the poor woman comes home at night, she is knocked up. Thou knows, Joe, it’s hard for one that was used to different.’ (155) The worker attributes his suffering to an ‘upside down world’ and reflects that his pain is intensified because the familial hierarchy has been upended when he ‘was used to different’. Jack laments the gender reversal and the lack of employment for men but at no time in this passage does he express indignation about being denied his ‘natural’ right to provide. Engels wrongly credits the notion of a provider as the cause of this epistemic despondency when instead the disruption in the Victorian worker-family is caused by ideological violence that accompanies the death of the gendered provider. The remainder of this paper will examine two literary representations of the newly forged female provider and will also explore 6 “Salvation in the Wrong Direction” the tensions that developed as people were forced to discredit gender-specific labor. I employ two literary case studies to document how two women, Charles Dicken’s Nancy and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Margaret Hale, escape commodification by asserting their materiality in a capitalist economy. Dicken’s Nancy: Materiality as a means of Emancipation in a Commodified Market During the Industrial Revolution, tensions in the market and the family manifested themselves in two distinct manners; they either encouraged a propensity for violence or they idealized a return to the ‘natural’ order of the family. Dickens is a useful representative of the times because he has made use of both stratagems in order to discredit the altered domestic hierarchy. In Oliver Twist, Dickens embodied the violence of familial disorder and romanticization of the ‘natural’ family within the figure of Nancy. Murder is one of the most extreme consequences of domestic disorder but one example that is often cited by social reformers during the Victorian period6. The figure of the sexually indiscriminate 6 In his reform polemic, In Darkest England: The Way Out, General William Booth offers this report of a domestic murder/suicide to demonstrate the “social condition of the Sunken Millions”: “But how much more terrible must it be for the married man with his wife and children to be turned out into the streets. […] now and then out of the depths there sounds a bitter wail as of some strong swimmer in his agony as he is drawn under by the current. A short time ago a respectable man, a chemist in Holloway, fifty years of age, driven hard to the wall, tried to end it all by cutting his throat. His wife also cut her throat, and at the same time they gave strychnine to their only child. The effort failed, and they were placed on trial for attempted murder” (41). Henry Mayhew provides this gruesome account of a homicidal wife and husband in his meticulously transcribed encyclopedia of working-class occupations, London Labour and the London Poor, in order to demonstrate the effects of dissolute living situations on the city’s working children: “ ‘On Friday, 31st May, 1816, William Moles and Sarah his wife, were tried at the Old Bailey for the wilful murder of John Hewley, alias Haseley, a boy about six years of age, in the month of April last, by cruelly beating him. Under the direction of the learned judge, they were acquitted of the crime of murder, but the husband was detained to take his trial as for a misdemeanor, of which he was convicted upon the fullest evidence, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. The facts, as proved in this case, are too shocking in detail to relate: the substance of them is, that he was forced up the chimney on the shoulder of a bigger boy, and afterwards violently pulled down again by the leg and dashed upon a marble hearth; his leg was thus broken, and death ensued in a few hours, and on his body and knees were found scars arising from wounds of a much older date.’ This long-continued system of cruelties, of violations of public and private duties, bore and ripened its natural fruits. The climbing boys grew up to be unhealthy, vicious, ignorant, and idle men…” (398). 7 Laura Defurio She was resolved. Though all her mental struggles terminated in this conclusion, they forced themselves upon her, again and again, and left their traces too. She grew pale and thin, even within a few days. At times she took no heed of what was passing before her; or no part in the conversations where once she would have been the loudest. At other times, she laughed without merriment, and was noisy without cause or meaning. (Dickens 358) When the time for the meeting arrives, Nancy is initially incorporeal but, as she begins to act independently of Sikes, she asserts her material presence: ‘Hallo!’ cried Sikes. ‘Nance. Where’s the gal going to at this time of night?’ ‘Not far.’ ‘What answer’s that?’ returned Sikes. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I say, not far.’ ‘And I say where?’ retorted Sikes. ‘Do you hear me?’ ‘I don’t know where,’ replied the girl. ‘Then I do,’ said Sikes, more in the spirit obstinacy than because he had any real objection to the girl going where she listed. ‘Nowhere. Sit down.’ ‘I’m not well. I told you that before,’ rejoined the girl. ‘I want a breath of air.’ (Dickens 359) In this episode, one can literally trace Nancy’s slow materialization as she resists Sikes’ attempts to maintain her disembodied state. She begins as a disembodied voice whose place and travels are vague and only negative (‘Not far.’). Next, she positions herself as a voice but is still only making statements of negation (‘I say, not far.’). Nancy is then presented by the narrative as an intellect and a ‘girl’ but, still, she can only allowed to make negative observations and she is not capable of an authoritative voice (‘I don’t know where,’ replied the girl). Finally, she achieves physicality when she remarks that her body is ‘not well’. In her final response to Sikes’ commands, Nancy possesses a voice that occupies time insofar as she refers to her previous statements and, through this temporality, she establishes her materiality. Most significantly, she voices desires that are in opposition to those of Sikes, who Marx would metaphorically designate as ‘the bourgeois capitalist’. Marx’s description of the process by which private property is annulled is strikingly similar to the embodiment that Nancy’s achieves through her power of speech: “The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete 10 “Salvation in the Wrong Direction” emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object” (Economic 139). To escape commodification, Marx suggests that the worker must make his senses human and, in doing so, claim personhood by means of the body’s material functions. Because Nancy discovers that reclamation of her senses is the means to her independence, she is able to assert her materiality. The question then arises: why does Nancy die such a violent death? Nancy’s death is tragic precisely because it follows her triumphant seizure of materiality. After Nancy becomes the agent of her own fate and reacquires her material body, Nancy finds herself in danger of violent retribution because, by controlling her capital, she threatens Sikes’ bourgeois economics. Deviating from Marx, I would suggest that Nancy’s newly-acquired materiality is a positive element of her identity insofar as she functions in the market of information exchange under her own direction. Because of her materiality, Nancy can be evaluated by real elements of her personhood as opposed to the imaginary denominations assigned within a commodified economy. When she describes the location and countenance of Oliver’s kidnapper, Nancy liberally offers a lengthy physical description of Monks, “the localities of the place [and] the best position from which to watch it without exciting observation” (374). In exchange for Oliver’s whereabouts, Brownlow offers Nancy “quiet asylum […] entirely beyond the reach of you former associates [to] leave as utter an absence of all trace behind you, as if you were to disappear from the earth this moment”. Nancy flatly refuses Mr. Brownlow’s offer of incorporeity and, through her refusal, maintains her material agency9. Nancy’s flaw is not, as Tromp suggests, “the capacity for physical damage that Rose transcends in her angelic demeanor, an attribute linked particularly to her class”10 (33); it is her inability to predict that her newly-acquired materiality would offend Sikes’s sense of economy. Because Nancy has just grasped hold of significant materiality, the reader laments Nancy’s decision to return to Sikes more than her “moral failings” (Tromp 32). The incredibly gruesome murder scene that follows Nancy’s reunion with Sikes confirms his need to return Nancy to the state of a disembodied commodity. The violence that results from Nancy’s newfound materiality offers one example of the disruption that may be caused in a household after a woman independently enters 9 Brownlow’s offer contains marked similarities with Dickens’ “An Appeal to Fallen Women” such as the promise of anonymity and domestic comfort and peace. 10 I do not disagree with Tromp when she argues that Rose Maylie’s purity and incorporeal body protect her from physical violence. See The Private Rod p. 26-28. 11 Laura Defurio the market and governs her own exchange. Dickens pointedly denies Nancy the happy family reunion that he allows Olivier. While Dickens idealizes the ‘naturally’ ordered family when he leaves Oliver “truly happy” surrounded by his family in prayer and “gratitude to that Being whose code is Mercy, and whose great attribute is Benevolence” (438-439), he punishes Nancy for upsetting the ‘natural order’ when he leaves her “nearly blinded with the blood rained down from a deep gash in her forehead”, clutching Rose Maylie’s handkerchief, praying “for mercy to her Maker” (383). Margaret Hale as a Masculine Provider in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South In many of her industrial novels, Elizabeth Gaskell demonstrates how the “development of class antagonisms keeps even pace with the development of industry” (Manifesto 40) but, here ends Gaskell’s resemblance with Marx and Engels’ Communist reform. Vehemently opposed to violence, in North and South, Gaskell advocates sympathy and promotes “the transformative potential of direct contact between members of different classes” (Anderson 108-109). Turning now to a heroine of industry, I argue that Margaret Hale asserts her material presence in the household and reimagines the state of the commodified worker. When Mr. Hale tells his daughter, Margaret, that he has resigned from his ministerial and that their family’s social and financial position is damaged, a notable reversal occurs. Margaret becomes the head of household just as her father relinquishes his position as the leader of his parish. Mr. Hale surrenders his primacy in the home when asks his daughter to: “help me to tell your mother. I think I could do anything but that: the idea of her stress turns me sick with dread” (36). The language that Mr. Hale employs contextually unsexes him and, like the lamentations of Engel’s Jack, he speaks “low words of self-reproach and humiliation” (35). Mr. Hale’s mental exertion is so extreme that it causes him to become ill. A physical ailment that is the direct result of unsettling mental exertion is a weakness predominantly exhibited by women in the novel. Both Mrs. Hale and Fanny Thorton suffer from fainting spells, combat the vulgarity of capitalism, and scorn the appearance of the factories and workers that sustain their prosperity. In North and South, physical weakness is presented as diametrically opposed to the pursuits of capitalism. Margaret undermines her father’s ministerial authority a second time because she displays mental fortitude. Margaret assumes her father’s role of provider when she dismisses the Mr. Hale’s blessings, the substance of their former livelihood: 12