new heights. Letter from the Editors
Welcome to the second issue of the 10th edition of the UC Berkeley Comparative Literature Journal. This issue highlights the best undergraduate research in the literary fi eld for the current academic year. With this issue, our magazine renews its mission to be a pathway for budding critics and researchers in our fi eld and to refresh our understanding of the role of literature in society. We thank our newly published authors for trusting us and making this issue possible, as well as for the quality of their high intellectual work. In our current issue, Walter Pach studies Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzioni, discussing the philosophy of punishment prevalent in Piranesi’s works. Pach analyzes how architectural designs reveal an ideology of torture in the Carceri d’invenzione, following Michael Foucault’s theory of the dissemination of power through discipline methods. Our irony, tone, and objects of sublimity and Woolf’s stream of consciousness, Thomas sheds light on the role that novelistic form plays in shaping our moral frameworks. Connor Ethan Yen turns to the detective genre to explore the sensationalist aff ect governing Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. Moreover, relying on Foucault’s theories of sexuality and Freudian psychoanalysis, Yen identifi es a gendered valence in the drive for detection. Yen argues that the detective genre’s impulse for detection, commonly presented as an objective pursuit of truth, is driven by underlying gendered anxiety
I also want to acknowledge our editorial team's hard work and dedication to this issue. It is often challenging to balance academic life with extracurricular activities, and yet, the process of publishing our journal this semester was full of passion. It was truly admirable to see each member of our team fi nding the extra time to meet, read, and discuss the works of other undergraduate students and taking the time to think about the impact of literature on ourselves and for our society. Thanks to our editorial team and to the UC Berkeley Comparative Literature Department for making this new issue possible. I want to end this letter with an announcement. The publication of this issue has always been a learning experience for our team. Part of that experience was discovering the complexities of our fi eld. Comparative Literature embraces a broad perspective of approaches to writing. In our own editorial team, we fi nd students working with multiple literary traditions and interested in a wide variety of schools of criticism, aside from translators, poets, and fi ction writers. Last semester, this interdisciplinary approach to writing pushed us to reactivate Vagabond, an on-campus magazine that publishes translation, creative writing, and art criticism that was dormant since 2014. Because of the incorporation of this new publication as part of our semesterly projects, our editorial board has decided to rename our organization to better accommodate the interdisciplinary approach that we take to valuing diff erent forms of writing. Our organization which formerly took the name of our only publication, Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal, has now offi cially changed its name to Comparative Literature Undergraduate Publication Association at UC Berkeley. With this change, we reiterate and expand our commitment to promoting undergraduate writing in its diff erent forms. Whitney as Editorial Process Manager, Diksha Dahal as Marketing Manager, Priya Sharma as Events Coordinator Manager, Annette Ungermann as Secretary, Andres Marquez as Treasurer, and Faith Leung as Intern. I am sure that this fantastic editorial team will make reach
next published author, Ben Thomas, investigates the infl uence of literature on moral formation, focusing on modernist works. Based on the work of Martha Nussbaum, Thomas analyzes narrative strategies in the works of Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf to give an account of the eff ect that they have on the reader’s moral formation. Examining Mann’s use of
our publications
Lastly, I am honored to welcome the incoming editorial board: Pearlin Liu and Roxana Wang as Editors-in-Chief, Eva
CLUJ Team - Spring 2022 Ron Godoy - Editor in Chief Pearlin Liu - Internal Management Lead Alexis Marfi l - Public Relations Specialist Roxana Wang - External Management Lead Eva Whitney - Editorial Process Management Special thanks to: Alexandra Gonzalez Edgar Editorial Board Editorial Staff Andrea Bernal Fernando Campos Annie Cheng Faith Leung Ruby Marshall Layla Nasseri Priya Sharma Marie Trinh Annette Ungermann Aryan Shafat
Table of Contents • Imagining Democracy, Punishment, and Infinity: Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione By Walter Pach........................................................... 1 • Formative Modernists: Ordinary Sympathy, Sublime Provocation, and Ethics in Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf By Ben Thomas.......................................................... 16 • The Detective Turned Freudian Psychoanalyst: “Detective Fever” and Confession in Wilkie Col lins’ The Moonstone By Connor Ethan Yen................................................. 33
Walter Pach is a fourth-year undergraduate English and French major at the University of South Carolina. He has spent the last year developing software for the Digital Piranesi project and had the opportunity to study under Jeanne Britton, resident expert in Piranesi’s work which has motivated his further literary study on the topics and confl icts posed in Piranesi’s Carceri. It is thanks to the folks at the UofSC that this paper was possible.
Author Biographies
Connor Ethan Yen
Connor Ethan Yen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022 with a B.A. in statistics and a B.A. with highest honors in English. He is currently an M.S. candidate in Data Science at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Connor’s interests in literary study include critical theory, critical university studies, and institutional design & strategy. His work in literary criticism has received recognition from The American Psychoanalytic Association, The University of Maryland’s Department of English, and UC Berkeley’s Comparative Literature and English departments. He seeks to address large scale intuitional questions using both humanistic and quantitative methods.
Ben Thomas Ben Thomas is a fourth-year undergraduate studying comparative literature, Russian and East European studies, and political science at Emory University. His broad research interests include narrative theory, trauma, epistemology, virtue, and imperialism through Slavic literatures, and his current work centers on moral (de)formation in Soviet children’s stories. At Emory, Ben has been involved with the university’s student newspaper, undergraduate research journal, student government, several interdisciplinary fellowships, and political science research. He has also planned and helped teach four undergraduate classes, and he speaks Russian and German. After graduation, Ben plans to attend graduate school for Slavic studies and teach at the postsecondary level.
Walter Pach
Abstract
Imagining Democracy, Punishment, and Infinity:
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) was an Italian architect, artist, and classist. His views of Rome have been known globally for their artistic quality, photorealism, and their imaginary perspectives of ancient monuments. Piranesi influenced many neoclassical artists and experimented with the usage of space and vastness in a way that preempted the Impressionist exploration of light. His “Imaginary Prisons” influenced many Romantic and Gothic authors and have become the topic of much scholarship in modernity. This essay explores how Piranesi’s choice of aesthetics and content was influenced by and influenced Enlightenment thought surrounding punishment, pain, and democratic imaginations of identity. Throughout, this essay explores Michel Foucault’s history and theoretical approach to the development and use of torture in the west through the lens of Piranesi and contemporaneous thought. Piranesi’s influence continues in subtle remarks in various canonical texts and authors, such as De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges. This essay explores the historical moment of liberal, enlightenment thought with the artistic representations of power structures by a largely unsuccessful artist at the moment he emerged into 1 relative fame with a comparative literary approach to textual analysis. It will comparatively analyze Piranesi’s aesthetic and ideological choice and its influence on the work of Borges, De Quincey, and Poe in their respective works.
By Walter Pach
Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione
Piranesi’s work is divided into several vol umes and diverse subject matters. The Carceri d’in venzione, Imaginary Prisons in English, are simul taneously artistically fascinating and historically terrifying for their violent content. This essay will examine and analyze three of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons: “Man on the Rack,”1 “The Drawbridge,”2 and “Prisoners on a Projected Platform.”3 There are three key themes that emerge when reviewing the etchings: 1) the transformation of pain and punish ment as exterior spectacle, 2) the imprisoned as a reflective tool for the viewer, and 3) the emergence of heightened terror as a transformative tool. As this essay is concerned with a temporal and geo graphical moment in the development of the imagination of pain, confinement, and political power, I found that historically and critically contextual
izing passages from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish were helpful as supporting documen tation. These passages reflected this same phenomenon, particularly in the history of the Constituent Assembly’s penal reforms in France. Through “The Man on the Rack,” “Prisoners on a Projected Platform,” and “The Drawbridge,” Piranesi anticipated the advent of omniscient surveillance and demo cratic—that is to say, public, democratized, and ex istential— punishment with its internalization.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was born in Ven ice in 1720 to a family of craftsman, stonecutters, and architects. Forty-one years later, his copperplate etchings and engravings depicting photoreal istic views of both ancient and modern Italy would circulate the continent. His etchings would influence authors such as Horace Walpole, Thomas De Quincey, and Victor Hugo. George Dance would design the dungeons at Newgate prison after being inspired by Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzioni. Today, the International Piranesi Award is given bienni ally for architectural accomplishment in central Europe. Piranesi’s influence includes contemporary architects, art historians, and literary scholars. His work continues to be the subject of interdis ciplinary scholarship and historical analysis. With his mastery of copperplate etching and exploration of classical Roman architectural spaces, Piranesi anticipated what would become the Neoclassicist movement. However, Piranesi’s contemporary in fluence is not limited to literary and architectural impression but continues to inspire questions con cerning the philosophical undergirding of the artistic movement.
Little is known about Piranesi’s early life, though he was born to a family of craftsman in Venice and was heavily influenced by his uncle, an architect. After his failure as an architectur al draftsman in Venice, Piranesi left for Rome to continue his studies in 1740. There, he worked alongside Giuseppe Vasi and developed his skill producing vedute, large scale prints of architectural spaces, country sides, or cities. In 1742, after two years of working alongside Vasi, Piranesi supposedly contracted malaria, prompting a “fit of delir ium” and what he considered to be the source of inspiration and content from which he drafted the Carceri (Yourcenar 104). He etched the first four teen plates on copper shortly after at twenty-two years old as noted by his own inscription. In 1744, the twenty-four-year-old artist returned for a stay in Venice to study under Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, a well-regarded painter known for his “theatrical architecture.” However, it is known that the first edition of the Carceri was printed on Roman paper, suggesting that Piranesi returned and first printed the plates in Rome where they were published in 1750 (Robinson 25, 39-30, 37). The Carceri are divided into two editions with multiple issues of each, the first being published six different times from 1743 to 1749. Be tween the two editions, Piranesi made multiple aesthetic and compositional changes. The first, containing fourteen plates, was printed and self-pub lished between 1749 and 1750 and titled Invenzioni capric di carceri. In 1761, Piranesi published the second edition of the Carceri, changing the title to Carceri d’invenzione and adding two new plates (II and V). Shortly after, in 1764, Piranesi was com missioned to rebuild and redecorate the church of
1 See annex 1. 2 See annex 2 3 See annex 3
2 I. Background
What Miller identifies in The Disappear ance of God as “the Piranesi effect” is the tessel lating horror of the prisons, that “even a pleasant dream, when ‘multiplied into ten thousand repetitions,’ becomes something before which we stand ‘loathing and fascinated’” (67). Miller associates this with the infinite space that Thomas De Quinc-
It
In the preface to his analysis of the diminu tion of divine imagery in the west during the nine teenth century, J. Hillis Miller provides a rationale for exactly this kind of synthesis of cultural representation and aesthetic choice. “Literature is a form of consciousness… though literature is made up of words, these words embody states of mind and make them available to others,” writes Miller in the preface. “If literature is a form of consciousness the task of the critic is to identify himself with the subjectivity expressed in the words, to relive that life from the inside, and to constitute it anew in his criticism” (VII). If literature is a form of consciousness formed of mental imagery, the visual arts offer a glimpse into the internal aesthetic landscape of the artist—a glimpse of this consciousness’s effect.
II. Theoretical Context
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Yet, Piranesi’s Carceri exist in a mytholog ical space, reserved for imagined and physically impossibles. Not unlike the impossible architecture of Olympus or of the Underworld, the Carceri imagine spaces that simultaneously avoid and inca pacitate reason in contrast with Enlightenment aes thetics. They not only avoid comprehension with impossible arches, abounding contradictions in the distribution of load, and absurdity of the human staffage, they exude what Miller calls “the Piranesi effect,” a motif that he associates with not only the Carceri, but their aesthetic operation in relation to the political moment.
Piranesi’s
Accordingly, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the artist, would not have desired to be viewed as an entity distinct from his work, with a dedication described as nearly madness. He was a man detailed by his son as “of passionate feelings, intoxicated by work, careless of his health and his comfort, disdaining the malaria of the Roman campagna, sustaining himself on nothing but cold rice during his long sojourns” (Yourcenar 93). Yet, his etchings of the Roman countryside, artifacts, and imaginary views were, for the eighteenth-century buyer, symbols of wealth and possibility: social capital and “the equivalent of the coffee-table albums of artistic photographs offered nowadays to the tourist eager to confirm or complement his memories, or to the sedentary reader who dreams of faraway places” (95).
Santa Maria Aventina, employing ancient archi tectural elements for which he had grown popular (Yourcenar 92). is important to note that Piranesi failed to secure patronage and financial support during the production of the first edition of the Prisons. The influences of social pressures and constraints cannot be overestimated when considering the young artist’s choice of aesthetics and content. His Carceri were not only unpopular until the 1760s but undesired. While the Prisons are celebrated as his most imaginative and creative work today, during his lifetime they were “mildly appreciated and not at all understood, and consequentially sel dom purchased” (Yourcenar 106). Carceri are above all concerned with the construction of vast, experimental archi tectures. The aesthetics are a combination of classi cal Roman architecture, with contemporary notions of space and light. As Marguerite Yourcenar writes, “it is to the Baroque that Piranesi, in his views owes these sudden breakdowns of equilibrium, this very deliberate readjustment of perspective, this analysis of mass which is for its period a conquest as considerate as the Impressionists’ analysis of light later on” (97). If the vedute produced reflect the prominent artistic techniques, then the content and choice of narrative structure within the copper plates are all the more influenced by contemporaneous philosophical theories. To separate Piranesi from the period when he lived, a historical period not gently hewn with decisive theoretical conflict would be to amputate much of the view that Piranesi’s work offers: it is not only architectural space that is depicted but idea.
4 ey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eat er, would invoke in relation to his experience with the opiate. De Quincey described the experience as the mind becomes self-reflective on its condition in the world where “time and space stretch endless ly in any direction, and where God has withdrawn himself to an infinite distance” (71).
Piranesi’s Carceri, while produced during the Enlightenment, are not a product of the relation of mankind to divinity. The moral and philosophical distancing of mankind’s relation to God was al ready well established by the second edition of the Carceri. Besides papal patronage, Piranesi’s pas sion was devoted to classical figures and mythology. Rather than mourn the image of divinity in Pira nesi’s canon, we ought to accept Piranesi’s Carceri as exactly that: the interpretations of ancient societal potential interpreting the modern condition. The image of divinity and its loss is not spiritually represented, but physically: the vast spaces and immense structures mark an artistic interpretation of the body’s condition in Piranesi’s moment. The prisons were produced at a time histor ically characterized by “the relaxation of penality in the eighteenth century… [where] crimes seemed to lose their violence, while punishments, recipro cally, lost some of their intensity, but at the cost of greater intervention” (Foucault 75). Similarly, in his comparative historical analysis on torture in the West, Christopher Einholf proposes John Langbein’s theory that “torture was abolished during the 17th and 18th centuries because the standards of le gal proof were relaxed to allow convictions without eyewitness testimony or confessions” (109). Sure ly, etched only three decades before the landmark French penal reforms of the Constituent Assembly and the abolition of the death penalty by Emperor Joseph II, Piranesi’s work would have been marked by this same momentum away from corporeal pun ishment. However, given the mythos of Christian virtue and punishment and its persistence in the canonical treatment of criminals, why is Piranesi’s “The Man on the Rack” absent of the redemptive suffering prolifically disseminated in the Western European mythos? In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault notes a crucial transformation that must occur to sta bilize bodily relations in a post-monarchical state: that the public spectacle of torture—widely defined as corporeal violence by authority—is replaced by signifying values that dissuade the would-be crim inal from crime (104). While the Carceri are not subject to this direction, they operate within the cultural period and literary exchange, circulating in what Miller describes as an organism that “cre ates the environment as much as it is created by it” (VIII). Piranesi’s “The Man on the Rack” contains a desperate contradiction in both composition and content relating to pain and ceremonial justice. Un like many of the other Carceri, plate II specifically enlarges several figures to emphasize their impor tance in the narrative of the foreground. From left to right, the viewer sees, enlarged, the man at the wheel, the man on the rack, and the man stand ing above, holding what appears to be a dagger. Distinctly smaller, each other personage is small, expressionless, or positioned to emphasize their emotion via the posture of their bodies. They point, gesture, and gape, but act not on the subject. This posturing serves to exhibit the internal relationship of the collective group rather than the individual consideration. Regard the tranquility upon the fac es of both the rack operator and the man holding the dagger. Here, Piranesi captures three grave his torical artifacts: 1) reflection on classical methods of penal order, 2) the presence and importance of the mob, and 3) the geography of the public specta cle.
While Miller touches upon a crucial element to understanding Piranesi’s aesthetic of madness and irreconcilable dimensions, he incompletely ascribes this artistic moment as a consequence of the modern under standing of mankind’s condition in relation to di vinity.
Judicial thought contemporaneous to Piranesi was that, An offence, quite apart from the damage it may produce, apart even from the rule that it breaks, offends the rectitude of those who abide by the law… the crime attacks the sovereign: it attacks him personally, since the law represents the will of the sovereign; it attacks him physically, since the force of the law is the force of the prince.
(Foucault 47)
Einholf’s analysis of torture suggests, While the deficiencies of the historical record make it impossible to generate numerical estimates of the prevalence of torture, enough ev idence exists, in the form of general historical accounts and case studies, to detect trends and draw some general conclusion. Torture was legal, morally accepted, and commonplace in most ancient, medieval, and early modern societies. (104)
III. Analysis of Piranesi’s
Piranesi’s neoclassical choices of metaphor and association, specifically with the use of seven well-documented traitors to the Empire, further suggest a utility to the public spectacle. Visible in the foreground of the scene are the busts and reliefs of various traitors. Piranesi depicts what is likely the punishment of a traitor or rebel by the sover eign: The Roman Republic and early Empire prohib ited torture against citizens, except in the case of treason, but this changed in the late Roman Empire, as the number of Roman citizens grew and the category of citizens became divided into two classes. Honestores, or first-class citizens, could not be tortured except in cases of treason, but humiliores, or second-class citizens, could be tortured in criminal cases, if the crime was serious and some evidence already existed to indicate guilt. (107)
It is clear that what occurs in this plate is exactly the operation of sovereign reparation, where the sovereign’s assigned actors execute justice. How ever, Piranesi diverges with his exaggeration of the image of the condemned to equal size of the punishers. Rather than depict the criminal as mi nutiae with which the sovereign may rightfully and completely obliterate at will, Piranesi represents this figure as what Foucault describes as “the sym metrical, inverted figure of the king” (29). What is at stake here is not the man’s punishment and the brutality of it, nor the condition of the spectators; it is the role of power in proportion between the con demned and the torturer that is meaningful. In con trast to the other Carceri, “The Man on the Rack” contains dualistic support of the classical mode of penality with the presence of the mob—nota bly absent in the other prison etchings as a force of power—and the open-air setting. This setting, where the validity of the torture is confirmed by its accessibility, signifies a confirmation of the meth ods used. However, it is clear that the mob, only vaguely defined by its members’ outlines—and in the case of the figures to the upper right of the etch ing, their loosely human, animalistic expressions are more apparent than their bodies—is absolutely not the cause of this spectacle. Instead the cause, sovereign in Foucault’s algebra, is identified with the condemned’s equals, the torturers. In “Prisoners on a Projected Platform,” it is exactly the inverse of public spectacle that gives the scene and punishment their fortitude (Piranesi). Rather than vaulting arches bounded by cloudy sky, the tessellation of interior architecture close around the viewer. In fact, the viewer’s position is entirely unknown, only presumably substantiat ed by a walkway or structure. In the background, minute, indistinguishable figures abide in timeless contemplation. Notably, the plate differs from “The Man on the Rack” in the positioning of the prison ers and their ability to see. Rather than being able to gaze around at their accusers and spectators as the tortured in “The Man on the Rack” is able to, the defined texture of the skin and the contorted postures suggest restraint and a complete lack of mobility. This lack of mobility accompanies the subsequent restraint of the etching’s viewer and the spectators of the torture. The walkway just above Carceri
5 “The Man on the Rack” embodies the clas sical mode of penal operation, charged with the physical domination of the body. It is a manifestation of state-sponsored terror in the form of pain.
Einolf describes the function of torture as that to “destroy victim’s sense of self, voice, and reali ty” (105). It is the tension felt before monstrosity, this possibility of the destruction of self, and the beatific imagination of the self that the etching’s viewer must contend with. By the literal suspen sion of the prisoner’s bodies, Piranesi symboli cally captures the fragility by which they are restrained. It is no mistake that the cords that ought to be tought in suspension of the counterweight are loose, despite its floating in the air as if held. “By assuming the form of a natural sequence, punish ment does not appear as the arbitrary effect of a human power” writes Foucault (105). It is by creat ing spaces in which the very architecture suggests a prescriptive treatment that Piranesi captures the power of the emerging democratic state: the state of prescriptive, universal treatment, without consideration for individual favor with the sovereign.
What motivates and terrifies in this scene is the absent sovereign, signifying the decentralization of power. While the spectators stand and watch the torture, they are simultaneously conspirator in its assignment. The effect of this presence without
It is no longer the terrifying restoration of sov ereignty that will sustain the ceremony of pun ishment, but the reactivation of the code, the collective reinforcements of the link between the idea of crime and the idea of punishment. In penalty, rather than seeing the presence of the sovereign, one will read the laws themselves (Foucault 110).
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must be as unarbitrary as possible” (104). How ever, it would seem that it is exactly this arbitrari ness which draws attention and causes confusion to both architectural exaggeration and narrative in-cohesivity. These give Piranesi’s prisons their fortitude and ability to disturb in subtle distortions. Considering the absence of the sovereign, of an equivalently exaggerated deity, or symbolic agent, the viewer and critic are forced to consider the im plications of this absence. As Aldous Huxley writes about the prisons: quoted by Roncato in his essay: One is made to feel that the genius of great art ists and the labor of innumerable slaves have gone into the construction of these monuments, every detail of which is completely without pur pose… The raw material of Piranesi’s designs consists of architectural forms; but, because the Prisons are images of confusion, because their essence is pointlessness, the combination of ar chitectural forms never adds up to an architectural utility or even possibility, and limited only by the necessity of evoking the general idea of a building. (Roncato 7)
What is missing, then, is not a lack of structural symmetry, for this exists within the unidirectional gaze that is created. Just as the viewer is gazing at the etching, witnessing the unease of the prison’s world, the spectators watch the execution of this immense justice. This final gaze is directed towards “the pit.” What might be represented by the spectator’s lack of awareness at the absence of the entire agent of order, justice, and the subsequent symbols that are generated can be explored in relation to the operation of justice within this scene?
To derive the offence from the punishment is the best means of proportioning punishment to crime. If this is the triumph of justice, it is also the triumph of liberty, for then penalties no longer proceed from the will of the legislator, but from the nature of things; one no longer sees man committing violence on man… In analogical punish ment, the power that punishes is hidden. (105) Foucault’s premises in chapter 2, “The Gentle way in Punishment,” begins with (1) “[punishments]
the hanging counterweight terminates premature ly into a wall similar to the walkway towards the right, just above the eyeline of the viewer. The actual projection to which the prisoners are restrained seems to have been constructed and used solely for this purpose, without any of the railing or fencing that protects the other walkways. These features suggest a unidirectional gaze of the spectator—in this case a unified sub ject including both the figures and the etching’s viewer—upon the prisoners. Of course, this gaze is not returned, as the prisoners’ gaze down into the supposed abyss. Here Piranesi plays upon the assumption of the viewer. Considering one’s initial reaction and assuming that the prisoners are sus pended above an abyss reveals the desire to punish, to fulfill the terror that is incomplete within the etching, desired by both the figures and the viewer.
Punishment and torture in Piranesi’s con temporary would not have associated incarceration with the function of entrapment that is common to 21st century judicial function. Rather, the 18th cen tury prison functioned to facilitate reform and reaffirmation of societal values. This included moral instruction and religious teaching, specifically for beggars and public nuisances (Foucault 120-121).
Between the two editions of “The Draw bridge,” this maturation in the imagination of the mechanism of the prison transforms from mere coherence between pain and crime to punishment as such. Piranesi creates a depth of shadow and impos sible architecture: the support for the walkway that stands without holding anything, the winding stair case in the upper right that curves behind a tower without apparent destination, and, most obviously, the pillar lying in the middle of the central walkway below the drawbridge. What had previously been possible architectural imaginations in the first edition (ca. 1750) were transformed into impossi-
While the judicial reforms of the 19th century sug gest incarceration as a viable alternative following the American revolution, corporeal punishment— that of labor, specifically—was understood to sub stantiate an exchange of well-being, of reform, and of progression back to a reasonable livelihood, in cluding interpersonal peace. What is evident in these choices is a repre sentation of the relationship between symbolic ritu al and effective punishment. Where the punishment in “The Man on the Rack” consisted primarily of the public spectacle, the construction of the pris on in “Prisoners on a Projecting Platform” exists independent of the spectacle of punishment. The punishment, while a natural progression of the ar chitecture, is not the source of this setting. What is suggested here is the emergence of a specialized, devoted mechanism for dealing with criminals, their bodies, and primarily, perverse thoughts and criminal ideas. Rather than execute, the projection is intended to terrify. In Foucault’s language, “the ‘mind’ as a surface of inscription for power, with semiology as its tool; the submission of bodies through the control of ideas” serves to confer comprehension of the power structure, rather than capital punishment alone (102). Where the torture of the prisoner by the absent authority is not merely an extension of the idea of the sovereign, but an extension of the consciousness and ego, gen erally. “A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas” (102). Piranesi imagines such a place, where it is the idea that is punished, where fear is used as a weapon in the mind rather than pain inflicted. It is no mistake that Piranesi’s figures are suspended in forced wakefulness above the abyss, for this is the condition of the Enlightenment person, not only in conception of the sovereign but of themselves as subject.
IV. Comparative Literary Analysis & Piranesi’s Influence
7 contest democratizes the punishment, unifying its necessity in the sequence of events.Their bodies are only loosely etched in swirling patterns of single lines, barely circular, further depicting this compo sition of elusive substantive authority. Might the decentralization of authority, but the identification of punishment motivates such an aesthetic choice?
If Miller’s estimation of De Quincey’s aesthetic use of “the Piranesi effect” is to be under stood, perhaps it is not in the rhetorical sense but in the didactic. De Quincey writes, “I believe that all minds which have contemplated such objects as deeply as I have done, must, for their own pro tection from utter despondency, have early encour aged and cherished some tranquilizing belief as to the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of human sufferings” (23). The wandering mind of De Quincey meditating upon the seemingly pointless sufferings of mankind lends itself to the same radical subjectivity of suffering to which Piranesi draws attention. The progression proposed by the cultural, Christian dogma of seemingly pointless, barbaric crucifixion being universally redemptive, is replaced by pointless, unknown, and fundamen tally questionable suffering.
Piranesi’s prisons imagine the possibility of an architectural design whose very design pro motes a fear and terror, not due to the instruments of torture and pain on display, but in the usage and accommodation of space, texture, and impossibili ty. It is the mental, imagined existence of the prisons that disturbs and unnerves the viewer and the occupants rather than their function; it is not the presence of “the projection” or “the drawbridge” that is horrific, it is the ease with which these spac es lend themselves to the use of power to punish.
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To further demonstrate and elaborate on the presence of this philosophy of punishment encoded within the Carceri, I would like to look towards a modern instance of literary engagement with many of the same spatial and epistemological limitations.
In “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges imagines a space that is epistemologically and geo metrically complete. Arranged of adjoined hexagons, the story’s setting is a structure described as spherical and existing infinitely in all dimensions.
Following this consideration of the terror that awaits him, the prisoner explores the surroundings with his hand, finding “trivial difficulties,” “exces sive fatigue,” and an enclosure of unknown shape. The prisoner’s near fall into the pit prompts reflec tion on the stories and imaginative mythos of the Inquisition’s prisons: The death just avoided, was of that very char acter which I had regarded as fabulous and friv olous in the tales respecting the Inquisition. To the victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors. I had been reserved for the latter. (Poe 309)
ble perversions of space in the 1761 version. The architectural changes signify more than artistic preference, for in this impossibility is encoded the determination of choice, construction, and radical artistic force applied to the viewer’s expectations. These aesthetics have been repeated and magnified by authors influenced by Piranesi’s visions, espe cially in the depiction of arbitrary punishment.
The prisoner’s eventual realization about the char acteristics of the prison and the conditions of his confinement offer no solution to this process of identification of punishment with the narrativiza tion of power, nor to the imagination of the poten tial for punishment. This is the principle of height ened terror, where the possibility for the torture experienced is the object of deference, the source of aversion.
“Through this section passes the spiral staircase, which plunges down into the abyss and rises up to the heights” (79). It is home to the librarians and infinite repetitions of information with slight vari ations across space. The populace of the library— which is first called “the universe”—travel vast dis tances in search of hidden, lost information among the varying shelves. Borges experiments with the special imagination of the Latin American prose. The text opens up, flourishing outwards in unchart ed potential, simultaneously offering unimaginable reward and oblivion. The narrator’s gaze, directed towards the paper on which he writes, hastily quan tifies the unimaginable with the abstract symbols they have been given, the same “orthographic symbols” that the books within the library use. The nar rator writes the dimensions of the bookshelves, the number of lines per book, and number of characters per line. Yet, at the same time repeats “the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose consummate center is any hexagon, and whose circumference is inaccessible” (80). The act of rationalizing the irrational reveals its dizzying proportions and the insignificance of the effort. Following, Everything is here: the minute history of the fu ture, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, a demonstration
Of the dungeons there had been strange things narrated—fables I had always deemed them— but yet strange, and too ghastly to repeat, save in a whisper. Was I left to perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness; or what fate, perhaps even more fearful awaited me?(Poe 308)
Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” is one such example text in which Poe explores this transformation of the punishment and the impression which it has upon the imaginative mind. There came thronging upon my recollection a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo.
Writing two centuries after Piranesi’s first edition Carceri were published, Borges imagines a space that is filled not with punishment or its instruments, but with knowledge infinite and boundless. He imagines the possibility of a society with such ac cess in their hands, a society whose ethic is not of bodily manipulation but epistemological. Rather than present even a hopeful aspiration towards resolution of this problem of magnitude, of the treatment of the single individual in the face of the whole, Borges offers no hope. If it is the case that the technologies present in the Carceri are not the source of the terror, but the ease with which the spaces lend themselves to punishment, then Piranesi has imagistically repre sented the change in the distribution of social and political power bound to occur only a few years later and largely anticipated future aesthetic principles. With the bloody revolutions of the 18th and 19th century and the reformation of the doctrines of punishment only decades away, Piranesi’s prisons may preemptively capture the relationship of power exhibited by the democratic forces: that of idealized fear, penalty, and punishment, and a transformation of the power to punish from the sovereign to a se ries of symbolic representations: representations that adjust themselves, that seem to be encoded in spatial dimensions themselves. Piranesi’s pris ons incorporate both classical and contemporary philosophy of punishment. They include scenes of collective spectatorship, participation, and general inclusion in the act. At times, they encode the func tion of Bentham’s panopticon, where “any member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes” how the internal workings of the so cietal machine operate (Foucault 207). Piranesi’s prisons, however, are not only buildings, home and detention for criminals, but entire worlds cascad ing upon themselves. They function to remind both the participant, the imprisoned, and the viewer of the reflections of power and punishment in society. Their architecture terrifies with the question of their origin and what enormous mass could have created such a place. Like the panopticon, Piranesi’s prisons are “democratically controlled, since [they] will be constantly accessible ‘to the great tribunal committee of the world’” (207). However, more horrible and terrifying than this, as Miller writes of mankind, is the realization that “[dreams] only make it possible for him to experience the true nature of his situation. He is an infinitesimal speck of consciousness an infinite distance from its own inner depths” (71). This is the great terror of the Carceri, created in architecture and design: that the participation of all creates the internal presentation of constant power and, perhaps, of punishment.
9 of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnos tic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on this gospel, the veridical account of your death, a version of each book in all languages, the inter polations of every book in all books. (83)
10 Annex 1: Plate II: Man on the Rack
11 Annex 2: Plate VII: The Drawbridge
12 Annex 3: Plate X: Prisoners on a Projected Platform
13 Works Cited Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Ficciones, translated by Anthony Kerrigan, Grove Press, 1962, 79-88. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings, edited by Grevel Lindop, Oxford University Press, 2008. Einolf, Christopher J. “The Fall and Rise of Torture: A Comparative and Historical Analysis.” Sociological Theory, vol. 25, no. 2, 2007, pp. 101-121 Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed., Vintage Books, 1995. Langbein, John H. Torture and the Law of Proof, University of Chicago Press, 1977. Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963. Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. Plate II: The Man on the Rack. 1761. The Digital Piranesi, scalar.usc.edu/works/piranesidigitalproject/carceri-dinvenzione-plate-ii. Accessed 6 December 2021. —. Plate VII: The Drawbridge. 1749-50. The Digital Piranesi, scalar.usc.edu/ works/piranesidigitalproject/plate-vii. Accessed 6 December 2021. —. Plate X: Prisoners on a Projected Platform. 1749-50. The Digital Piranesi, scalar.usc.edu/ works/piranesidigitalproject/plate-x. Accessed 6 December 2021. —. Plate XIII: The Well. 1749-50. The Digital Piranesi, scalar.usc.edu/works/piranesi digitalproject/plate-xiii. Accessed 6 December 2021. —. Plate XIV: The Gothic Arch. 1749-50. The Digital Piranesi, scalar.usc.edu/works/piranesi digitalproject/plate-xiv. Accessed 6 December 2021.
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Rosenfeld, Myra Nan. “Picturesque to Sublime: Piranesi’s Stylistic and Technical Development from 1740 to 1761.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes, vol. 4, The Serpent and the Stylus: Essays on G.B. Piranesi, 2006, pp. 55-91. Wangermann, Ernst. “Josephinian Reforms and Enlightenment Aspirations.” Jewish Culture and History, vol. 13, no. 2-3, 2012. Pp. 194-202, doi.org/10.1080/1462169X.2012.729976. 6 December 2021. Yourcenar, Marguerite. “The Dark Brain of Piranesi.” The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1954, pp. 88-128.
14 Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, edited G.R. Thompson, 1st ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2004, pp. 305-17.
Robinson, Andrew. Piranesi: Early Architectural Fantasies, a Catalogue Raisonne of the Etchings. University of Chicago Press, 1987. Roncato, Sergio. “Piranesi and the Infinite Prisons.” Spatial Vision, vol. 21, no. 1-2, 2007, pp. 318.
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Formative Modernists: Ordinary Sympathy, Sublime Provocation, and Ethics in Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf
By Ben Thomas
Abstract Does art – literature – have a place in the ethical life? Can it practice moral formation?
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Moral philosophers from the nineteenth century through the modern era have answered both questions in the affirmative. In this paper, I argue that several of the former, such as G. E. Moore and Arthur Schopenhauer, inspired the modernist writers Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann to use distinctively modern narrative strategies to morally form their readers. To establish a vocabulary useful in explaining how and to what end they did so, a brief exposition of contemporary virtue theorists opens the paper. Analyses of each writer follow; first, Mann relies on irony, emotional and deliberative narration, and the sublime to provoke the reader into confronting their biases on ethical-aesthetic problems throughout Death in Venice. Woolf creates ordinary “common meeting-places” and uses stream-of-consciousness narration to engender readers’ sympathy in “The Mark on the Wall” and “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” Despite those strategic differences, however, both draw their readers into morally valent individual psychological realities without trying to destroy them. In this way, their texts are capable of re-creating the reader as “finely aware and richly responsible,” a faculty which I then situate in late modernity’s nascent discomfort with and inability to disavow grand narratives. The paper concludes that Woolf and Mann’s formative modernism is a critical midpoint between modernity and poststructuralist postmodernity.
16 “How does one come by one’s morality? Surely,” wrote Virginia Woolf to a friend, “by reading the poets.”1 On the surface, this reads like a quip, an off hand remark about fables or moralizing writers. The 1922 letter from which it comes, however, indicates a deeper signifi cance. In it, Woolf bemoans the fact that “there’s not a single living writer (English) [she] respect[s]” and claims that “the Edwardians, from 1895 to 1914, made a pretty poor show.” These authors, such as Thomas Hardy and Arnold Bennett, often made ethical claims on social conditions and ideology through narrative structure, or the ordering and depiction of events.2 William Scheick, for example, writes that Hardy’s Jude the Obscure uses its “hourglass design” and parallel narration to represent both pessimism and compassion in response to the constraints of fate 3 Scheick does not analyze Woolf in detail, but he does say that she writes characters who “determine their own motives,” creating “an integrity of character so complete that the reader is excluded and reduced to a fascinated voyeur.”4 He is certainly correct to imply that Woolf’s opportunity for moral writing lies in her narration of character, but not to insist that this style excludes the reader. As I argue below, Woolf herself argues the opposite in story and essay alike. Where her predecessors’ narrative structures emphasize how an individual or a society should act according to certain social constraints or ethical principles, I will argue that Woolf’s narrative lens shows the reader how they should be. To understand how it does so and to situate it more fi rmly in literary modernism, this paper will bring two of her short stories into conversation with the German writer Thomas Mann and his Death in Venice The novella is famously concerned with e 1 Woolf, Virginia Woolf to Janet Case, 529. 2 Larson, Ethics and Narrative, 13-14. 3 Scheick, Fictional Structure, 102-103; 97-98. 4 Scheick, Fictional Structure, 30. There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth . . . than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral' sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. —Henry James, Preface to The Portrait of a Lady intersection of aesthetics and ethics, and its modernist author was himself an avid student of moral philosophy.5 For those reasons, it is an ideal text in conversation with which to examine Woolf’s fi ction on the question of moral formation. How, then, can “poets” develop one’s moral consciousness? By what morality could one come through a book?
In 1958, G.E.M. Anscombe launched a scathing critique of her philosophical contemporaries. In “Modern Moral Philosophy,” she declares that the concepts of “moral obligation and moral duty… ought to be jettisoned… because they are survivals… from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer survives.”6 In her account, law-based morality, or that appealing to some binding obligation, became unintelligible when secularization cost it its divine lawgiver. She then fi nds that no principles proposed as replacements, such as utilitarianism and Kant’s Reason, avoid legitimizing some horrifi c actions or bridge the is-ought gap. After her article appeared, contemporary virtue ethics arose to meet that challenge.7 Its adherents understand virtue, or the aspects of self necessary to reach some telos, as the unit of analysis of moral life. Although many scholars focus on diff erent virtues or claim diff erent ends as the telos, they all share that basic paradigm. Virtue ethics concerns itself with the constitution of the self and its consequences, not codifying rules for life or imposing arbitrary obligations, and both writers considered here derive their moral philosophies from major precursors to that project. For that reason, this paper will take the virtue ethics tradition as its starting point. Most recent scholarship on morality in literature involves at least some grounding in the work of Martha Nussbaum. Her ethical project is “the 5 Kitcher, Deaths in Venice, 121-123. 6 Anscombe, “Modern,” 1. 7 Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue is the most infl uential text in contemporary virtue ethics and provides a useful introduction to the fi eld. For more perspectives on virtue ethics, see Virtue Ethics (Oxford Readings in Philosophy), edited by Roger Crisp and Michael Slote.
I. Martha Nussbaum, Virtue Ethics, and Literature
17 search for a specification of the good life,”8 an “ad venture of the personality.”9 To live this adventure well, she argues, one needs the virtue of practical wisdom, or the ability to choose well despite insol uble conflicts of value. This faculty has three com ponents, the first being the habitual use of “flexibility, responsiveness, and openness to the external” to perceive the particulars and values involved in a situation as fully as possible.10 Next follows integra tive, respectful deliberation, involving “link[ing] particulars without dispensing with their particu larity” in mental images.11 In Iris Murdoch’s words, “true vision occasions right conduct.”12 Finally, she claims that one must acknowledge the inevitability of conflicts of value before improvising a decision.13 Key to Nussbaum’s place in this inquiry is her claim that such practical wisdom “must be supplied by nothing less messy than experience and stories of experience,” realistic novels chief among them.14 This is so for three reasons. First, literature presents the reader with a characters’ rich self- and other-perception, as well as their subse quent deliberation on the results. This allows the reader to practice those skills in the laboratory of the text. By bringing the reader into sustained, close contact with a character’s rich psychology and sense of self, literature can help the reader to love that character as an end in itself. This should ensure that “true vision occasions right conduct.” Finally, the sort of richly mimetic literature with which Nussbaum is concerned presents us with those aspects of highly realistic characters as they navigate insoluble conflicts of value, teaching us to anticipate them in our own lives.15 In sum, Nuss baum’s moral psychology contends that becoming “finely aware,” “people on whom nothing is lost,” gives us the information needed to improvise paths through such conflicts of value.
That Nussbaum bases these arguments on the late-period work of the British novelist Henry James, especially his rather impenetrable novel The Golden Bowl, suggests that applying them here as well may prove fruitful. From 1897 until his death, James began to experiment.17 These works, such as The Golden Bowl, “The Beast in the Jungle,” and The Wings of the Dove, feature long paragraphs, chaotic yet rich sentences, and vivid mental imag ery, especially when James elaborates on charac ters’ perception and deliberation. Despite the inaccessibility of this style, it establishes his late works as exemplars of the moral novel for Nussbaum.
16 Certain works 8 Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals,” 134. 9 Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 93. 10 Nussbaum, “Discernment, 74. 11 Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 79. 12 Murdoch, Sovereignty, 64. 13 Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals,” 137. 14 Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 74. 15 Nussbaum does not use the term in Love’s Knowledge, but she defines it in Political Emotions (145) as “the ability to imagine the situation of the other, taking the other’s perspective.” 16 Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 84; Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 135. of literature can help their readers to both develop these abilities and feel “richly responsible” for oth ers to a great enough extent to motivate their use.
James saw them this way himself.18 The same rich perception of characters’ inner selves also appears in Woolf’s stream of consciousness narration. Woolf also read and wrote extensively on James.19 Given these resonances, Nussbaum’s vocabulary appears tentatively compatible with Woolf’s work.
To be sure, Nussbaum’s work is not with out its critics. She spends several pages answering the theorist Hilary Putnam’s criticism that her paradigm could lead to an “empty situation morality” in which anything is permissible given enough agony over a decision and its trade-offs.20 She does so well enough, notably by pointing out that general principles, traditions, and personal background ensure practical wisdom’s reliability. Neither does she provide many other examples of art capable of teaching that virtue beyond James’s work, but that is, after all, one question addressed in this paper through Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” and “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and Mann’s Death in Venice. Together, they should reveal whether and how Nussbaum’s theory of liter ature-induced moral formation applies to writers outside James or to literary traditions outside the Anglo-American. Most importantly, this inquiry should provide some insight as to whether Nuss baumian moral formation has any distinctive rela-
17 McWhirter, Desire and Love, 2 18 Nussbaum, “‘Finely Aware,’” 148. 19 Woolf, Writer’s Diary, 39; 57-58; 301 20 Nussbaum, “Discernment,” 93-96.
Understanding Mann’s preoccupation with moral questions should begin with an account of the moral philosophers who influenced him. First among these is the German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer, whose central work, The World as Will and Representation, Mann so loved that he edited and introduced the 1938 abridged edition.21 He first read the text during the 1890s, long before he began Death in Venice, and returned to it for decades afterward.
22 As Philip Kitcher demon strates using Mann’s archived copy of World as Will, Mann seems to have found two conclusions especially attractive in the second and fourth books of the first volume. The first was Schopenhauer’s skepticism of the productivity of a priori reasoning in comparison with experience of the Will’s tyran ny over the world as its representation, a perspec tive to which Mann subscribes in his 1938 introduction to the text.23 In Kitcher’s words, even more captivating to him were Schopenhauer’s questions, his “modification of the problematic of philosophy, replacing Kantian questions about the world and our knowledge of it with issues about the value of human lives.”24 Among these was the relation be tween the well-lived life and the artistic life, which Schopenhauer held to be inextricably linked.25 Schopenhauer’s work on ethics also prefig ures the recent revival of virtue ethics. In Über die Grundlage der Moral (On the Basis of Morality), he takes the claim that “if an act [has] an egois tic object as its motive, then no moral value can be attached to it.”26 Of all the possible “motives” that he examines, he finds that only compassion satisfies this condition, because the compassion ate person experiences a perceptive synergy with 21 See Thomas Mann, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung von Schopenhauer in einer gekürzten Fassung dargeboten von Thomas Mann (Zürich: Classen, 1948).
18 tion to literary modernism or relies on any kind of distinctly modern relationship with the reader.
II. DeathinVenice
22 Kitcher, Deaths in Venice, 8-9. 23 Mann, “Schopenhauer,” 4:286-288; see also 4:419-421. 24 Kitcher, Deaths in Venice, 35. 25 Schopenhauer, World as Will, 193-201. 26 Schopenhauer, The Basis, 166.
the sufferer.27 As compassion entails feeling those emotions as one’s own, it is the complete abolition of distance between its possessor and its target. In that this compassion is also a motive understood as authentic in the immediacy of its use, it resembles a virtue, an aspect of self necessary to live a moral life. While the depth of Mann’s engagement with this particular text is unclear, the roots of its ideas are also present in the magnum opus that he so loved. In Schopenhauer, he found both a self- and humanity-centered moral framework and a virtue with which to fill it. Even so, Schopenhauer earns that distinction only because Friedrich Nietzsche was an anti-mor al philosopher. Nietzsche was in vogue among the young Mann’s contemporaries, largely because of his inclination to excruciating self-evaluation, to Selbstüberwindung In letters, Mann made clear the influence of this idea on his early work , as he read Nietzsche even before he discovered Schopen hauer.28 Nietzsche was also preoccupied with the conflict between art and morality. This is central to The Birth of Tragedy, in which he writes that “we are expected to feel elevated and inspired at the tri umph of good and noble principles, at the sacrifice of the hero in the interest of a moral conception of things,” but those who do “have had no experience of tragedy as the highest art.”29 Mann may have derived some of his own interest in that question from Nietzsche. Also of note is Nietzsche’s basic predilection to deconstruct conceptual absolutes, especially those of morality, truth, reason, and re ligion.30 Disavowing codification in morality is a precondition to practicing virtue ethics. A virtue ethicist would contend that Nietzsche wrongly generalized from moral discourse in his own time to morality in general. Even so, his inclination to the will to live guided by subjectivity comports with their project, as does what some scholars see as his concern with human flourishing.31 Finally, Mann appears to have noted Nietzsche’s ironic, 27 Schopenhauer, The Basis, 169 28 Kitcher, Deaths in Venice, 9. 29 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 170. 30 See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 5-6: “What really is this ‘Will to Truth’ in us… granted that we want the truth: why not rather untruth?” 31 Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche
Aschenbach’s perception of Tadzio drives the novella’s plot. Specifically, he is concerned with Tadzio’s beauty, but “beauty” seems an inadequate description, given its provocation of awe and rumi nation in him. Aschenbach spends the entire text struggling to describe it. In this way, Tadzio embodies the sublime to him, the aesthetic quality of ineffable beauty. Schopenhauer writes extensively on this idea in World as Will, describing a spectrum ranging from a feeling of beauty to the fullest feeling of the sublime. Those objects that can hurt or unite with their observer, he explains, provoke stronger feelings of the sublime.34 Aschenbach’s experiences of the beautiful follow exactly this pat tern. At first, he merely contemplates the beauty of the city of Venice, which poses no threat to him by itself and therefore evokes the weakest form of the 32 Feder, Mahler, 179-187.
38 In special encounters, such as Aschenbach’s encoun ters with Tadzio in his hotel dining room, on the beach, during a street performance, and before his death, Aschenbach experiences progressively high er degrees of the sublime through Tadzio’s beauty.
34 Schopenhauer, World as Will, 259-268.
36 Mann, Death in Venice, 42. 37 Mann, Death in Venice, 92. 38 Mann, Death in Venice, 134, 136. 39 Mann, Death in Venice, 128. 40 Ross, “Strawberries,” 238-239.
33 Many scholars believe that he did so out of political expediency.
From this, two virtue-ethical questions emerge, the first being the relationship between life and mind and the second being the tension between embodied beauty and artistic sensibility. Aschen bach’s ascetic, disciplined life as a successful but pedestrian author prevents him from acting on or suffering physically from his desire for Tadzio, the embodied beautiful, until he has the barber dye his hair and skin. After this, he eats several overripe strawberries and collapses.39 Here, as elsewhere, this is a symbolic expression of love.40 Unable to seize Tadzio’s beauty, he commits himself to it symbolically, although the obvious immorality of his pursuit and the dangers of staying amid a cholera epidemic would cost him his dignity and his chance to flourish. A mental obsession threatens his 35 Mann, Death in Venice, 32, 34. At this point in the novella, Aschenbach does not know about the looming cholera epidemic.
sublime.35 The sea, which poses a threat but could not sustain Aschenbach’s life, awakens slightly more intense contemplation.36 Aschenbach’s vision then narrows completely when it lands on Tadzio. Here, words fail him: “Er war schöner, als es sich sagen läßt, und Aschenbach empfand wie schon oftmals mit Schmerzen, daß das Wort die sinnliche Schönheit nur zu preisen, nicht wiederzugeben ver mag.”37 This is what Schopenhauer called sublime proper, the sublime sensation arising from objects that could hurt their observer; here, Aschenbach in deed apprehends Tadzio “mit Schmerzen.” Wheth er he reaches the fullest feeling of sublime, that which arises from apprehending the infinity of the universe and one’s unity with it, remains ambigu ous. He dies on the beach before he can walk over to Tadzio and symbolically unite with the beauty that to him has become infinite, but his awed, word less reaction to Tadzio’s gaze suggests that he has reached a new degree of sublime perception.
19 vivid style before any other aspect of his work.32 He never agreed with many of Nietzsche’s sub stantive conclusions, however, and after World War II, he openly disavowed him.33 Along with his ironic attacks on dogma, Nietzsche’s influence on Mann seems to have comprised his preoccupation with Selbstüberwindung and art’s relation to moral life. Together, these suggest that Mann may have inherited specific questions and general elements of what has since become the virtue ethics method from him.
As will become apparent, the broad strokes of the novella’s plot suggest that the problems that Mann explores through Death in Venice incorpo rate his philosophical influences. Its protagonist, Gustav Aschenbach, is a disciplined, ascetic writer of some note who decides to take a holiday in Venice, eventually landing in a hotel near the sea. At dinner, he is struck by the sight of a fourteenyear-old Polish aristocrat, Tadzio, whose beauty he finds intoxicating. Over the next few weeks, Aschenbach’s tormented ardor deepens even as he begins to hear rumors of a serious cholera epidemic sweeping Venice. In the story’s coda, Aschenbach sees Tadzio far away on the beach one last time. When he rises to follow him, he falls back into his chair and dies.
phasizing his character’s nobility by calling him “Gustav von Aschenbach.”42 Why vilify him here, and only here? One piece of Mann’s mockery may indicate the answer. Just before he allows Aschen bach to speak, he calls him “Überwinder seines Wissens und aller Ironie.”43 “Überwinder” echoes Nietzsche’s emphasis on overcoming oneself, but Nietzsche and Mann both used “Ironie” liberally.44 Mann was particularly well-known for it.45 This suggests that Mann’s harsh, almost caricatured attack on Aschenbach may itself be ironic. Even so, some scholars use Aschenbach’s subsequent decla ration that poets must “notwendig in die Irre gehen, notwendig liederlich und Abenteuer des Gefühles bleiben” to make a different claim.46 Martina Hoff mann, for example, indicates his movement from what Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy as the Apollonian mode of life to the Dionysian, from ordered and form-differentiated to disordered and form-undifferentiated.47 However, as Kitcher’s archival work demonstrates, Mann likely did not engage with that part of The Birth of Tragedy in much depth.48 For Nietzsche, moreover, neither the Apollonian nor the Dionysian was praiseworthy alone. He upheld early Greek tragedy as the form’s pinnacle on the basis of its fusion of the two.49 With this in mind, I contend that Mann’s use of irony in this scene confronts the reader with their own dog matic condemnation of Aschenbach’s “fall.” Mann was certainly a careful enough reader to understand that his readers would experience a knee-jerk re action against that fall. His affinity for Nietzsche’s problematization of dogma suggests that he would have wanted to disabuse his readers of such easy instincts as well. In fact, this irony extends to the novella as a whole. In her monograph on Dostoevsky, Greta Matzner-Gore proposes that “both his characters and his narrators ‘are in a struggle’... with ideas, with one another, and with the chaotic stories they
20 embodied well-being. Tellingly, Aschenbach dies at the very moment when he finally appears ready to interact with Tadzio. The overripe strawberries both represent Aschenbach’s commitment to that beauty and, likely infected with cholera, literally kill him. The reader wonders whether the death of Aschenbach, the mind, is an inevitable result of his attraction to the idea of unity with Tadzio, the beau tiful. Put another way, can the artist faithful to the sublime achieve the telos of human flourishing? critical are the ways in which Aschen bach’s apprehension of Tadzio’s beauty prompts the reader to consider the relation between Schopenhauerian compassion and beauty. On one hand, Tadzio’s beauty inspires Aschenbach to draw near er to him, to edge toward a unification. Schopenhauer argued that real, moral compassion involved a sympathetic unification between its possessor and a sufferer. Aschenbach’s movement toward Tadzio, then, should have allowed him to act more com passionately, warning Tadzio’s mother about the cholera epidemic. He does no such thing. In this way, Mann fuses two of Schopenhauer’s questions. If engaging with beauty can provide the artist or the observer with insights into a higher reality but may provoke obsession, can that artist remain compassionate? In this way, the central philosophical question of the text becomes: can one both main tain a sensibility for the beautiful and practice the virtues? Arguing that Mann’s novella places the reader inside that question and that doing so might instill the virtues is a taller task. Indeed, Mann’s narration of Aschenbach’s collapse in the square after eating the strawberries seems to suggest that Mann takes a rule-based ethical stance against Aschenbach’s tragic fall. As he totters in the aban doned plaza, Aschenbach’s “schlaffen Lippen, kos metisch aufgehöht, bildeten einzelne Worte aus von dem, was sein halb schlummerndes Hirn an seltsamer Traumlogik hervorbrachte.”41 This fol lows an extraordinarily harsh mockery of Aschen bach’s former asceticism and loss of dignity. Until this point, Mann withholds overt judgment, and in the coda, he resumes his detached tone, even em 41 Mann, Death in Venice, 131.
42 Mann, Death in Venice, 132. 43 Mann, Death in Venice, 131. 44 Behler, Irony, 93-95. 45 Heller, Thomas Mann, 236-238. 46 Mann, Death in Venice, 130. 47 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 22; Hoffmann, Thomas, 78-92. 48 Kitcher, Deaths in Venice, 29. 49 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 6-8.
Also
While standing in a square, Aschenbach considers warning Tadzio’s mother about the plague; “er er wog eine reinigende und anständige Handlung.”51
21 endeavor to tell.” In turn, this “spark[s] the strug gle in his readers” and “whet[s] [their] desire for… moral beauty.”
How the novella as a whole enacts this dichotomy becomes apparent as Aschenbach de liberates leaving Venice to escape the epidemic.
An unusually rich account of the process where by he decides to keep silent follows, ending in the question, “Was galt ihm noch Kunst und Tugend gegenüber den Vorteilen des Chaos?”52 Here, as at each stage of the sublime, Aschenbach chooses beauty and chaos over ordered virtue, and the rich narration of his deliberation toward that choice draws the reader into that deliberation, at once provoking reactive condemnation and guilty em pathy. Thus arises Mann’s ironic challenge. Who has not been struck by “Hoffnungen, unfaßbar, die Vernunft überschreitend und von ungeheuerlicher Süßigkeit” and felt guilty on their account?53 Viv id exposition of Aschenbach’s emotions and de liberation ensure that we do here. Even while he 50 Matzner-Gore, Dostoevsky, 13. 51 Mann, Death in Venice, 118. 52 Mann, Death in Venice, 120 53 Mann, Death in Venice, 120.
paces the town square, the reader learns the details of his many emotions and often opposed motiva tions on this question. The narrator specifies that he does so “in fiebriger Erregung, triumphierend im Besitze der Wahrheit, einen Geschmack von Ekel dabei auf der Zunge und ein phantastisches Grauen im Herzen.”54 In the narration of his sub sequent dream, the reader also experiences a full, “körperhaft-geistiges Erlebnis” explaining his anx ieties and motivations.55 Where the previous narration of the latter’s deliberation only described his thoughts and emotions, this shows them to us. Just as “ihr Schauplatz war vielmehr [Aschenbachs] Seele selbst” and these images fuse with his self, the narrator’s images of Aschenbach’s experience are so holistically vivid as to bring the reader into emotional unity with him.56
In this way, Death in Venice bears a striking resemblance to Nussbaum’s ideal of moral litera ture. It is “nothing less messy than… [a] stor[y] of experience,” of Aschenbach’s moral and psycho logical world. The richness of its emotional and de liberative narration and its sympathetic component demonstrate to the reader the resonance of Aschen bach’s basic humanity with their own. Nussbaum would see this as teaching the reader to see Aschenbach — people — as ends in themselves and there fore worth loving. The sheer vividness and volume of the perceptual material provided by the narrator gives readers a laboratory to hone their own per ception. In Nussbaum’s paradigm, Death in Venice does therefore function to render its readers “richly responsible” and “finely aware,” respectively. Finally, Mann’s involvement of the reader in Aschen bach’s struggles reinforces to the reader the agony and inevitability of Nussbaum’s insoluble conflicts of value.
54 Mann, Death in Venice, 118. 55 Mann, Death in Venice, 120. 56 Mann, Death in Venice, 122
50 Here, too, Aschenbach’s entire narrative arc is one of struggle, both with himself and between ideas. While Mann likely did not in tend to weigh the Dionysian against the Apollonian, they are nevertheless useful in understanding Aschenbach’s internal conflict. Dreams of chaotic, Dionysian forests, primeval nature, and the East torment and tantalize him. These desires, provoked by Tadzio, exist in tension with his well-ordered conventionality.
Mann surely knew that his readers would instinctively decide either that Aschenbach had lived an excessively Apollonian life, allowed the Dionysian to conquer him, or both, and thereby reach quick judgments on the quality of life possible through each. In this way, the text functions to place the reader inside Aschenbach’s philosophical problems. The questions of Nietzsche’s two modes of life, the possibility of a life both virtuous and faithful to the sublime, and the role of compassion become ours.
22 Spot on the Wall” and “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street”
65 As her significant engagement with Russian literature reveals, Moore should instead have “got it all out of books” about “what men and women think.” In “The Russian Point of View,” she explains that in Chekhov, she sees a fixation on the soul and its status as “ill” or “cured” emblematic of the literary tradition in which he wrote. Dosto evsky’s novels are “seething whirlpools… which hiss and boil and suck us in” with the result that “we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffo cated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rap ture.”
As with Mann, two of Woolf’s philosophical and literary influences shaped her morality more significantly than any others. First among these is G.E. Moore, a pioneer of the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy.57 Woolf likely did not subscribe to that aspect of Moore’s thought, but his ethics was a different matter.58 Moore was a consequentialist, but he held the meaning of “good” to be indefinable because of what many scholars term the “open-question argument.”59 Because all state ments of the form “anything that is X is good” are understood as significant and all questions of the form “is it good that object Y possesses quality X?” are understood as debatable, determining the positive content of “good” must be impossible. Oth erwise, those statements and questions would be insignificant and obvious, as in declaring that “anything that is a clear sky is blue” or asking wheth er it is terrifying to a child that a man possesses a gun. Instead, he claims, intuition reveals to us that which is good in itself, not necessarily in virtue of the value of its parts.60 As a consequentialist, he holds that obligatory duties to reach such goods-inthemselves derive from the results of their associated actions, the degree to which the latter succeed in producing the greatest good possible.61 He also admits that these duties and rules of action derive in part from individual and social context.62 Most importantly of all, he defines the virtues as perma nent dispositions to perform those duties.63 In sum, one should intuit moral value, integrate context, reason, and general principles, to formulate plans to attain it, and use virtue to understand and apply those duties.Woolf may have studied the Principia Ethi ca and applauded Moore’s ethics, but his ideas did 57 Livesey, “Socialism,” 133. 58 Reynier, “Virginia,” 132. 59 Moore, Principia Ethica, 15-17. 60 Moore, Principia Ethica, 76-77; 27. 61 Moore, Principia Ethica, 181. 62 Moore, Principia Ethica, 157. 63 Moore, Principia Ethica, 182. not define hers.64 Indeed, her criticism of a differ ent George Moore might as well be applied to this one. He, she writes, “never used his eyes. He never knew what men and women think. He got it all out of books.”
66 From these works, Woolf learned how to draw a reader into a narrative and provoke a range of emotions in the process. Tolstoy’s work is her case study for attention, because “nothing glances off him unrecorded. Nobody, therefore, can so con vey… all the fierce desirability of the world to the senses” of the reader.67 Moore gave Woolf notions of the Good as indescribable and apprehended through intuition, methods for action as syntheses of reason, principles, and context, and the virtues as qualities of self. From the Russians, she learned to use literature to draw the reader inside the text, depict the health of a character’s inner self, and en courage rich perception thereof. Nussbaum consid ers all of these crucial to literary moral formation. To understand if and how these ideas appear in Woolf’s fiction, I now turn to two of Woolf’s early stories, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and “The Mark on the Wall.” The former narrates the journey of a London socialite named Clarissa Dal loway to buy herself gloves. While narrating this journey, Woolf relates every emotion, every pass ing thought and association, and every aspect of Mrs. Dalloway’s environment not just as they look, but as her character experiences them: A man in bronze stood heroically on a pedestal with a gun on her left hand side the South African war. It matters, thought Mrs Dalloway 64 Reynier, “Virginia,” 132-138. 65 Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, 294. 66 Woolf, “Russian Point of View.” 67 Woolf, “Russian Point of View.”
III. “The
This “something which [one] recognizes” referenc es the ordinary elements of life to which most or all of us can relate. Chancing on such commonplace experiences, thoughts, and objects allows the read er to understand characters in terms of their own lives, as grounded in reality and worthy of respect. In this way, the ordinary becomes what Woolf calls “a common meeting-place” between an author’s character and the reader.
Only those physical details that happen to strike Mrs. Dalloway and her impressions thereof ap pear here, which we see in the descriptions “stood heroically,” “uncompromising,” and “plain.” Her opinions on the statue’s implications for the Brit ish identity appear in the colloquial, abbreviated manner in which her inner monologue would have thought them. As in “it matters” and “heroically,” Woolf reports her emotions as well. In “The Mark on the Wall,” Woolf focuses this practice on just one object. One morning, the unnamed protagonist looks up to see a mysterious spot on her wall. For the entire length of the story, she ponders what the mark is and how it arrived there. Is it a “roseleaf, a crack in the wood?”69 A torrent of related thoughts follow, ranging from epistemological de spair “And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits…?” to psychological speculation “Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action.”
Woolf herself attempts this in both “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and “The Mark on the Wall.” The latter’s protagonist first draws the reader in through the sheer relatability of gazing at a strange mark and idly wondering what it is. The effort becomes explicit when the protagonist muses, “How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.”73 This sentence fuses the “I” of the narrator and the “you” of the reader into one “us,” united by their shared understanding of the same ordinary expe rience. Because it occurs in this shared space, the reader becomes less likely to find the protagonist’s subsequent stream of consciousness disorienting and more likely to appreciate it as authentically human.74 “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” applies the same function both within and through its nar
71 Woolf, “Russian Point of View.” 72 Woolf, Bennett, 17 73 Woolf, “Mark,” 100. 74 Woolf, “Mark,” 112.
23 walking towards Buckingham Palace. There it stood foursquare, in the broad sunshine, un compromising, plain. But it was character, she thought; something inborn in the race; what In dians respected.68
70 In these ways, each story is an exemplar of stream-of-consciousness narration, the narrative device whereby writers present charac ters’ thoughts as firsthand experiences. Both stories are notable for the sheer mundanity of the objects perceived through stream-of-consciousness. Dozens of statues like Mrs. Dalloway’s line the streets of every European capital, and few people ever notice an odd fleck on a wall. That Woolf fixed her stream-of-conscious ness narration so often on the everyday reveals a great deal about her understanding of the ordinary as a concept. Woolf’s own essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” written to refute Arthur Bennett’s contention that Woolf and the Georgian novelists had failed to create realistic characters, makes her awareness of ordinary experience explicit. In dialogue with “Mr. Bennett,” the modernist “Mrs. Brown” accepts Bennett’s premise of character 68 Woolf, Dalloway 69 Woolf, “Mark,” 112. 70 Woolf, “Mark,” 111; 113
development’s centrality to the novel. She insists, however, that the Edwardians had in fact sacrificed creating believable characters in the name of enumerating as many concrete details as possible. Tell ingly, Woolf claims elsewhere that Dostoevsky’s complex, humanly incoherent characters had just begun to awaken English literature to this flaw.71 Why, though, does she find this transition so criti cal? Her answer arrives at the end of the essay: The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognises, which therefore stimulates his imagi nation, and makes him willing to co-operate in the far more difficult business of intimacy. And it is of the highest importance that this common meeting-place should be reached easily, almost instinctively, in the dark, with one's eyes shut.72
24 rative. Just after she leaves home, Mrs. Dalloway runs into Hugh Whitbread, an old friend. They be gin their conversation by talking about the morning and wondering whether “walking in London” is “better than walking in the country.”75 After they establish a shared space using those common experiences, their discussion takes a serious turn. Hugh and his wife have come up to London “unfortu nately to see doctors.”76 Crucially, even this con versation itself is ordinary. One might have three such dialogues while walking to work. In this way, Woolf uses Mrs. Dalloway’s establishment of a “common meeting-place” to establish one between Mrs. Dalloway and the reader. That the text leads the reader to this common place, rather than sim ply tell them to sympathize, resonates with Woolf’s admonition that one should reach common meet ing-places “almost instinctively, in the dark, with one’s eyes shut.” What end could such a “common meet ing-place” serve? Mrs. Dalloway’s example pro vides some indication. As soon as Hugh breaches a serious topic in their meeting-place, Mrs. Dalloway becomes “instantly compassionate.”
77 After the two part ways, this instinctive emotion inspires her thoughts about Hugh and his ill wife. She remembers “with amusement, with gratitude, with emotion” how shy the former had always been. By the end of her meditation, she concludes that “men like Hugh respect” others’ ineffable instincts “with out saying it, which is what one loves… in dear old Hugh.”78 Mrs. Dalloway’s dialogue with Hugh in their common meeting-place provokes first compassion for him, then a thicker understanding of him, and, finally, love for him. This is a humanist ardor, a love for another person as an end in themselves.
cur together in life and in Woolf’s prose.80 While Martin’s “absolute inhabiting” rings somewhat hy perbolic, the narrator of “The Mark on the Wall” does ensure that the reader feels along with her. It also provokes the reader to feel for the narrator, whose epistemological and existential anxieties
On two primary philosophical accounts, many literary critics have argued that Woolf’s no tion that engendering accurate perception in readers provokes sympathy carries moral valence. The first of these is Moore, but the second, David Hume, was also a major influence on Woolf.84 In An En quiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume contends that sentiment, not Kant’s reason, forms the basis of moral psychology, because “everything still presents us with the view of human happiness or misery, and excites in our breast a sympathet ic movement.”
86 Morally effective literature should trigger this mechanism by presenting the reader with an authentic, complete “human happiness or misery.”
81 A virtue ethicist would under stand both processes as stemming from attention, an open readiness to receive information from the world around us.82 It is this attention that Summer hayes calls Woolf’s “clairvoyance,” her “faculty for searching out shy secrets.”83 To reliably inspire sympathy via accurate perception, the author must first perceive well themselves.
All told, Woolf’s prose reflects her moral and literary influences. Through stream-of-consciousness narration in both stories, she emulates Tolstoy’s capacity for rich description of experi 80 Martin, Modernism, 9. 81 Martin, Modernism, 1. 82 Weil, “School Studies,” 111-112. 83 Summerhayes, “Society,” 331. 84 Sim, Woolf, 180. 85 Hume, Enquiry, 26 86 Penelhum, “Hume’s Moral,” 256-257.
85 This sympathetic reaction is a “mechanism” whereby one can “participate in the emotional life, and the pleasures and pains, of oth ers.” Compassion, by contrast, “is merely one of its products.”
The latter is a manifestation of what schol ars of Woolf’s work and that of others have termed sympathy.79 Here, I follow Kirsty Martin in de fining it both as the “more distanced ‘feeling for’ others” and the “absolute inhabiting of another’s experience, or ‘feeling with,’” as the two often oc75 Woolf, Dalloway 76 Woolf, Dalloway. 77 Woolf, Dalloway 78 Woolf, Dalloway 79 See Lowe, Victorian; Britton, Vicarious
Does God exist? How can I know? are both deeply troubling and very common. As Martin ar gues, this sympathy works because of the author’s mimetic success and “determination to be true to what it is to feel.”
25 ence and Dostoevsky’s incoherently human char acters. Her concern with the self’s reaction to liter ature evokes Chekhov’s fascination with the soul. Furthermore, Woolf’s focus of that narration on the ordinary to create “common meeting-spaces” engenders connection and sympathy both between her characters and between her characters and their readers. G.E. Moore’s arguments that one appre hends the indescribable good through intuition, de velops methods for action as syntheses of reason, principles, and context, and uses the virtues to reli ably fulfill them resonate with this system as well, with one exception. As Sim and Martin both argue, Woolf’s characters often exhibit patterns of sym pathy with people whom they do not know.87 This contravenes Moore’s focus on long-term relationships capable of creating morally valuable “organic unity.”88 For Woolf, then, the bond of shared hu manity between two characters or a character and a reader suffices to engender sympathy. As it does for Mrs. Dalloway, this sympathy teaches Woolf’s characters and readers to love others as ends in themselves and helps them to practice perception.
IV. Where Is the Reader? Two strains of moral literature have emerged. In Death in Venice, Nussbaumian moral formation becomes possible through Aschenbach’s apprehension of progressively higher degrees of the sublime. He draws ever nearer to the latter’s highest form, only to die on the beach just before experiencing it. This closing of distance also be comes physical in Aschenbach’s increasingly bold pursuit of Tadzio, in which each encounter is clos er than the last. Tadzioprovokes the problems into which Mann’s narration draws the reader; that the two episodes through which they became clear oc cur near the end of the story is no accident. Aschen87 Sim, Woolf, 182. 88 Moore, Principia Ethica, 149.
Though it has not yet proven to reckon with insol uble conflicts of value, the former two resonances with Nussbaum nevertheless satisfy the latter’s assertion that moral literature renders its readers both “finely aware” and “richly responsible.”
bach’s increasing proximity to the sublime medi ates the reader’s presence within these problems.
Mann’s irony challenges the reader by presenting us with great beauty, Aschenbach’s rich psychological world, that poses great danger to our opin ions and illusions. The end result, as Schopenhauer claims for the sublime, is that we surmount our fear and hostility to develop a greater understanding of Aschenbach and his problems.89 In this way, Death in Venice dramatizes within-narrative physical and emotional distance from the sublime to give the reader a sublime experience of Aschenbach’s psy chological world. Woolf’s stories also enact Nuss baumian moral formation, but they do so by minimizing reader-character distance through “common meeting-places” in the ordinary to give the reader a more complete understanding of the character’s psychological world. How can we account for this mechanistic divergence, the difference between Woolf’s sym pathy of the ordinary and Mann’s sublime provocation? As far as the two stories examined here are representative of her work, Woolf does not force her characters to wrestle with moral dilemmas or insoluble conflicts of value. As we have seen, how ever, each work’s claim to morally form its readers rests on the premises that a universal humanity ex ists and that clear vision thereof produces sympa thy. To give their readers this clarity, whether on a character doing something as banal as buying gloves or as sublime as wrestling with aesthetic sensibility and virtue, both works place the reader within characters’ unique psychological realities. We develop sympathy for them even as we find that their reality, striking in its differences from our own yet relatable and valid in virtue of its clear humanity, challenges our assumptions about being human and living well. Finally, by refusing to force the reader into such conclusions or make their projects explicit, both writers avoid the violent act that would be breaking down the character-reader barrier completely.90 Death in Venice never con 89 Schopenhauer, World as Will, 259-268. 90 This is one way in which Death in Venice problematizes Schopenhauerian compassion.
Moreover, observing Aschenbach’s struggles may even provoke feelings of the sublime in the reader.
V. Literary Modernism and Moral Formation Whether and how Mann’s and Woolf’s works morally form their readers inside Nuss baum’s paradigm is now clear. This inquiry’s final unanswered question, then, becomes one of intellectual history. Why did both take up this challenge so near one another, and how do their results re late to the stage of modernity in which they wrote? “Grand narratives,” as Jean-François Lyotard calls them, purporting to drive history forward using some “transcendental and universal truth” like En lightenment or Progress caused great harm in modernity by encouraging intellectual and political to talitarianism.92 An extended argument on that point is beyond the scope of this paper, but one could easily argue that Enlightenment rationality and the impulse to “civilize” gave rise to the imperial ism and nationalism behind World War I. Though Mann and Woolf may not have been conscious of any nascent anxiety regarding modernity’s codify ing metanarratives, I will argue that it nevertheless pervades their respective works. Instead of preaching principles, they explore the qualitative, intui tive content of the self and seek to improve it in their readers. This presupposes some kind of human flourishing as a telos, which Lyotard might argue itself exemplifies the metanarrative of Prog ress, so they are best understood as uncomfortable with modern metanarrative yet unable to leave it behind. In fact, Mann was an ambivalent national ist during World War I but strongly condemned the Nazi movement decades before World War II.93 In 91 Eide, Ethical Joyce, 3-5. 92 Lyotard, Postmodern, xxiii 93 Kurzke, Thomas, 255; 264. this way, they and their works are creatures of late modernity. Their shared project of closing reader-character distance also qualifies as distinctly modernist on the basis of its mechanism’s most basic prem ise. Both writers assume that if one apprehends another’s humanity, that truth will engender a kind of loving sympathy. This is a manifestation of hu manism, the outlook emphasizing individuals’ so cial potential, well-being, dignity, and agency in virtue of their humanity. As David Quint argues, its recognition of “the newness of [its] enterprise — the extent to which it constituted a rupture with past culture” enabled it to narrativize itself and as sociate itself with modernity.94 Humanism, the one grand principle left in Mann and Woolf’s paradigm, is therefore both the enemy of their belief in plural, interacting personal narratives and the most crucial aspect of their literary actualization thereof.95 One could even read this basic tension as the final ele ment of Nussbaum’s functions of moral literature.
It is an inescapable, irresolvable conflict of values of the kind with which Nussbaum argues that one should reckon through art. The opposition of two modes of life, the Dionysian and Apollonian, in Death in Venice functions similarly. In these ways, Mann and Woolf’s paradigm of moral literature be comes both a distinctive product of late modernity and a critical midpoint between metanarrative-ori ented modernity and poststructuralist postmoderni ty. Indeed, the two writers’ psychological-dis tance function was a recent innovation. In early modernity, for example, Schiller’s work on mo rality and aesthetics offers a very different project. In Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man, he argues that morally effective art preserves truth through social upheaval, prioritizes ideal over re ality, and ennobles one’s character through beauty. While the latter does center the self and its charac ter in moral reasoning, Schiller’s fixation on ideals stands in stark opposition to Mann and Woolf’s de sire to convey the reality of the natural and human worlds. In fact, his major philosophical contribu 94 Quint, “Humanism and Modernity,” 424. 95 Many critics have used a similar argument to criticize Lyotard’s concept of grand narrative.
26 descends to inform us that we are all Aschenbach. As Marian Eide argues in close readings of Joyce, this distinction reinforces each work’s claim to be morally making morality, so to speak.91 On human istic grounds, therefore, both Mann’s and Woolf’s works draw their readers into individual, morally valent psychological realities without obliterating the boundary between the two.
VI. Conclusions
27 tion in the Letters is itself an instance of grand nar rativization. The “instinct of play,” he claims, is a fundamental mode of life involving the contradictory union of sense and reason.96 To contemplate the beautiful, or that which unites feeling and form, is to exercise the play drive, which encourages the beholder to unite sense and reason to become ho listically human. The characteristically modern hu manism appearing in Mann and Woolf is already evident in this line of reasoning, but where they and their moral influences understand morally ef fective art as connecting the individual character’s psychological world with the beholder, Schiller’s thought differs in two ways. First, he claims that the quality of beauty, not any instance of human ity in it, is sufficient to awaken his notion of play drive.97 Moreover, he understands the play drive as a force pushing civilization toward a utopia in which contentment and beauty reign.98 Schiller does claim that art can “educate the sensibility,”99 but he still wants art to understand ideals, sees the play drive as part of a grand teleology, and claims that contemplating beauty is sufficient to ensure that this occurs.100 Mann and Woolf, by contrast, depict more localized narratives, search for the au thentic self, and engage their readers in characters’ psychological realities to morally form them. Schiller’s inclinations persisted, albeit in different forms, through the Edwardian writers whom Woolf so sharply criticizes. Their novelis tic form, as Scheick argues, and use of beautiful, concrete detail to satisfy the sensibility appear highly developed. Although some, like Bennett, preached the merits of rich characterization, they rarely practiced it. Instead, they used their writing to, as Lyotard would conclude, advance the metanarratives of Progress and Enlightenment by advo cating for improved social conditions and ideolo gy. These writers harmonize form and sensibility to advance metanarratives, as does Schiller. Even later in the twentieth century, other artists, such as Bertolt Brecht in his Lehrstücke, relied on the 96 Schiller, Letters, Letter XIV. 97 Schiller, Letters, Letter X. 98 Schiller, Letters, Letter VI. 99 Schiller, Letters, Letter VII. 100 Schiller, Letters, Letter IX. same method.101 The same is true of revolutionary Romantics like Maksim Gorky and Russian Fu turists like Vladimir Mayakovsky. The latter two promulgated the grand narrative of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, but their claims to marry form and sensibility to teach their readers specific ideas nevertheless strongly evokes Schiller’s paradigm.
With Nussbaum’s theory in mind, this comparison indicates that while the distance-closing moral for mation in Woolf and Mann’s works is characteristic of late modernity, it does not broadly apply to literary modernism. Eide’s similar research on Joyce, Martin’s work on D.H. Lawrence, and Nussbaum’s scholarship on James suggests, however, that Woolf and Mann were not the only writers to practice their flavor of moral formation. These formative modernists, as I will call them, comprise a small, diverse, and decentralized yet philosophical ly coherent movement.
With Martha Nussbaum’s paradigm of mi metic literature as capable of moral formation as its guide, this paper has sought to explain how “one come[s] by one’s morality… by reading the poets,” where “the poets” are Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann. First, I argued that Mann derives his preoccupation in Death in Venice with the self, the sublime, compassion, challenging dogma, and certain insoluble ethical problems from Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Irony, image-rich emotional and deliberative narration, and the sublime draw the reader into such ethi cal-aesthetic quandaries and challenge their biases throughout the novella. From G.E. Moore, David Hume, and several Russian writers, Virginia Woolf derives her conceptions of virtue and the good, her understanding of sympathy, and her rich, participatory characterization, respectively. “The Mark on the Wall” and “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” exemplify her creation of ordinary “common meeting-places” engendering sympathy, as well as her use of stream-of-consciousness narration to evoke the emotions necessary therein. Both writers’ 101 Martin, Modernism, 2-3.
Finally, I situated this process in late modernity’s nascent discom fort with grand narratives and inability to disavow them, concluding that their formative modernism is a critical midpoint between metanarrative-oriented modernity and poststructuralist postmodernity. so, this account of formative modern ism is by no means complete. To my knowledge, Martin’s monograph is the only study to examine more than one modernist writer’s practice of moral formation at once, and hers is more specifically con cerned with sympathy in three specific writers than moral formation in a broader movement. With that in mind, future research would do well to examine more authors, such as James and Joyce, together with Woolf and Mann through a Nussbaumian lens. Continental works would be especially instructive. Even the latter two writers’ other works, given what Alex Zwerdling sees as Woolf’s late-period loss of a “sense of oneness with her kind,” might also complicate this argument considerably.102 An inquiry into whether and how moral literature’s functionality has changed in postmodernity might prove illuminating as well, especially in the con text of Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle. Fem inist care ethics, Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other, and other strains of virtue ethics could also bear useful fruit as alternate philosophical lenses. ability to alter the moral psychology of its readers has been controversial at least since Plato lambasted poets in the Republic, but it has taken on a new urgency in recent decades. Especially in the contexts of critical race theory, LGBTQ representation, and free expression, many books have drawn accusations of corrupting or harming the young.103 Many of the same books draw praise from other groups on the basis of their 102 Zwerdling, Virginia, 279; 326. 103 Sarappo, “Shakedown.” capacity to teach social justice.104 Unfortunate ly, both sides of this discourse often assume that literature is capable of affecting a person’s moral consciousness in this way. Very few bother to think rigorously about how it might do so, and the strong case for formative modernist works’ capacity for moral formation suggests that we would do well to debate this question. The nuances of that mor al function also suggest that civil discourse would benefit by doing so with a vocabulary rooted in the debate’s origin and complete enough to parse a text’s holistic moral valence. Moreover, whether one subscribes to Lyotard’s view on the postmodern death of the metanarrative or not, that soci ety has not lost its affinity for simple accounts of complex realities is painfully clear. The recent rise in authoritarian populism indicates the ease with which elites can exploit this weakness, and those interested in stemming that tide may find that the formative modernists’ struggle against metanarra tives provides a useful precedent for their work.
Literature’s
28 mechanisms correspond to Nussbaum’s concept of moral literature as helping one become “finely aware and richly responsible.” I then argued that, at base, both authors’ works draw their readers into morally valent individual psychological realities without obliterating the differences between them. This allows them to re-create the reader as “finely aware and richly responsible.”
Even
104 Grady, “Social Issues.”
Such is the fundamental strength of the virtue eth ics project: in literature and elsewhere, it stands for freedom over constraint — for humanity.
Feder, Stuart. Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2004. Fraser, Giles. Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief. United Kingdom: Routledge, 2002. Grady, Constance. “Social Issues YA Novels Can Be Terrible. The Hate U Give Is a Stunning Excep tion.” Vox, March 30, 2017. https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/30/15074998/the-hate-u-give- angie-thomas-review.
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Nussbaum, Martha C. “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 148-167. Oxford University Press, 1990. “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 125-147. Oxford University Press, 1990.
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30 Larson, Jil. Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880–1914. United States: Cambridge Universi- ty Press, 2001.
Lowe, Brigid. Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. United Kingdom: Anthem Press, 2007. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1984. Accessed December 7, 2021. https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Lyotard_Jean-Francois_The_Post modern_Condition_A_Report_on_Knowledge.pdf. Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice, in Death in Venice & A Man and His Dog: A Dual-Language Book (Dover Dual Language German). Mineola: Dover Publications, 2011. "Schopenhauer." In Achtung, Europa!, edited by Hermann Kurzke and Stephan Kachorski, 253-303. Vol. 4 of Essays. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1993. Martin, Kirsty. Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence. OUP Oxford, 2013. Matzner-Gore, Greta. Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form: Suspense, Closure, Minor Charac ters. Northwestern University Press, 2020. McWhirter, David. Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Moore, G.E. Principia Ethica. Project Gutenberg, 2016. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53430/53430- h/53430-h.htm.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Macmil lan, 1907. ———. The Birth of Tragedy Translated by William Haussmann. Project Gutenberg, 2016. https:// www.gutenberg.org/files/51356/51356-h/51356-h.htm.
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32 doi.org/10.4324/9781315548098. Summerhayes, Don. “Society, Morality, Analogy: Virginia Woolf’s World Between the Acts.” Modern Fiction Studies 9, no. 4 (1963): 329–37. Weil, Simone. “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” In Waiting for God, translated by Emma Craufurd, 105-116. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1951. Woolf, Virginia. A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. United Kingdom: Harcourt, 2003. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown London: The Hogarth Press, 1924. Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street. Chicago: The Dial Publishing Company, 1923. Accessed November 22, 2021. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/63107/pg63107-images.html. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: The Question of Things Happening, 1912-1922. Hogarth Press, 1975. ———. “The Mark on the Wall.” In Monday or Tuesday, 99-116. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Com pany, 1921. Accessed November 22, 2021. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29220/pg29220- images.html.utf8. ———. “The Russian Point of View.” In The Common Reader: First Series, Project Gutenberg of Aus tralia, 2003. Accessed December 6, 2021. https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300031h. html#C15. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World University of California Press, 1986.
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Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) is frequently credited as the first English detective novel. The novel grips the reader into the mystery by infecting them with what is described as a “detective fever.” That is, readerly pleasure is contingent on uncovering the mystery. The pathology of “detective fever” is thus central to understanding the novel’s affective sensationalism. This paper situates Collins’ work in a Freudian and Focauldian model and argues that the desire to unveil feminine privacy underlies the detective aim. Thus, the gendered valence of detection is the primary characteristic of “detective fever.” The detective’s aim, then, closely aligns with what Foucault describes as the Victorian “incitement to discourse” of private sexual desire. The importance of confession to the novel’s conception of detection produces a cursory model for the Freudian psychoanalyst. Ultimately, the gendered anxiety underlying Collins’ detective novel problematizes the genre’s conceit that detection is governed by an agnostic and objective desire for truth.
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) is frequently credited as the fi rst English detective novel.1 Told as a series of testimonies that each reveal a piece of the mystery, the novel functions as a fomite for detective fever. The assumed aim of detection is to uncover the truth behind the Moonstone’s disappearance. The reader is accordingly cajoled into defi ning comedic resolution as detective unveiling. Counterintuitively, marriage between the novel’s two protagonists—the victim and perpetrator of the theft—occurs before the Moonstone is recovered. Comedic resolution is thus achieved without resolution of the novel’s detective mystery. The Moonstone is fi nally tracked down in Murthwaite’s cursory Epilogue, yet even then, the Moonstone retains an air of mystery with Murthwaite noting in the fi nal lines of the novel, “you have lost sight of [the Moonstone] in England, and […] you have lost sight of it forever… What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone?” (462). In eff ect, the momentum of detective fever is dispelled prior to the discovery of the object of detection. This discrepancy between aim and satisfaction is characteristic of The Moonstone’s tendency, as separately noted by Sue Lonoff 1 see Deidre, The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, esp. pp. 179.
I. Introduction
33
33 The Detective Turned Freudian Psy-
choanalyst: “Detective Fever” and Confession in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone
By Connor Ethan Yen
Abstract
Lonoff and Roberts’ skepticism with Collins’ construction of objective truth sponsors a suspicious reading of the assumed pathology of detective fever: that the unitary concern of the detective is the identity of the thief and recovery of the Moonstone. Concomitant to the climactic moments of detective discovery is the scrutiny and revelation of female interiority. Confession of erotic desire is wrangled from Rosanna and Rachel, and any involving breach of privacy is swept under the alter of detection. The novel’s obsession with suppressed female desire captures Foucault’s observation of the Victorian “incite ment to discourse,”4 with subsequent confession modeling the clinical schema of the Freudian psy choanalyst. The pathological raison d’être of detec tive fever is to uncover cells of feminine privacy, making the erotic, public, by obsessive discourse.
II. The Reader’s Detective Fever The novel’s primary mode is characterized by detective fever—the readerly desire to dissect and uncover. “Detective” comes from the Latin detegere meaning to uncover or expose. The Ox ford English Dictionary (OED) provides a valence of “fever” as: “an intense enthusiasm for or inter est in a person” (“fever,” def. n.1). The affective intensity of “fever” along with the term’s medical connotation invite a mode of readership charac terized by an anxious scrutiny of the text.5 Even though detective fever is first coined by Betteridge in chapter fifteen, a sensationalized and anxious form of readership is encouraged from the nov el’s beginning. The Moonstone opens with an ex post facto account of the storming of Seringapat am. Even as the speaker promises an agnostic legal testimony—initially remarking, “I declare, on my 2 See Lonoff, “Multiple Narratives & Relative Truths: A Study of The Ring and the Book, The Woman in White, and The Moonstone.”
Sensationalized detection in the Prologue is generalized by Betteridge’s account of detective fe ver. Betteridge first describes detective fever when Sergeant Cuff suggests that they follow Rosanna’s footprints to Cobb’s Hole, commenting, “if there is such a thing known at the doctor’s shop as a detec tive-fever, that disease had now got fast hold of your humble servant. […] I followed [Sergeant Cuff] (with my heart in my mouth); and waited at a little distance for what was to happen next” (130). The medical metaphor, in addition to the characteriza
4 See Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1: Introduction, esp. Part II. 5 This argument situates readership within a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”
34 and Lewis Roberts,2,3 to destabilize and warp pos ited assumptions through the intersecting of con flicting and biased narratives.
For more, see Felski’s “Suspicious Minds.”
3 See Roberts, “The ‘Shivering Sands’ of Reality: Narration and Knowledge in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone.”
word of honour, that what I am now about to write is, strictly and literally, the truth”—his recount of the event revels in affective sensationalism (12).
The narrator, John Herncastle’s cousin, repro duces the initial theft of the Moonstone, writing, A third Indian, mortally wounded, was sinking at the feet of a man whose back was towards me. The man turned at the instant when I came in, and I saw John Herncastle, with a torch in one hand, and a dagger dripping with blood in the other. A stone, set like a pommel, in the end of the dagger’s handle, flashed in the torchlight, as he turned on me, like a gleam of fire. (16)
Despite the retrospective narration, the narrator withholds the identity of the subject “man.” The delay in the subject identification of “man” with “John Herncastle” amplifies readerly curiosity and excitement. The narrative further heightens reader ly anticipation through the phrase “with a torch in one hand” which serves as a brief clausal filler before the detail of legal interest—the “dagger drip ping with blood”—is revealed. These ambiguous and erroneous phrases embellish the cousin’s testimony, obscuring a narrative supposedly governed by “strictly, and literally, the truth.” Moreover, the poetic account of the Moonstone, “flash[ing] in the torchlight […] like a gleam of fire,” conveys dramatic effect over precision with the Moonstone referenced indirectly. The sensationalized details simultaneously obscure the objective facts of the event and heighten the readerly desire to know those facts. This contradiction associates readerly pleasure with a fantasy of total self-evidence and legibility of the novel’s events. Such anxious desire for transparency—call it, detective fever—serves as a touchstone for the novel’s sensationalism.
tive interest reduces confidence in the accuracy of his testimony. Moreover, the idiom’s depiction of a lack of bodily control and the passivity of the verbs “follow” and “wait” depict Betteridge as unmas culine and cowardly.7 This shift, from description through rigorous citation to description through sensational bias and error-prone observation, con fers a detective anxiety to the reader. That is the reader’s diminished confidence in Betteridge’s ability to satisfy the desire for detection results in the reader’s heightened anxiety for detection. Ac cordingly, as in the Prologue, the reader is implicat ed in the narrator’s psychoneurotic detective fever.
Applications consider desire as an operation on character8 or on Wilkie Collins himself.9 Little attention, however, is given to the psychoanalytic schema of readerly engagement with the text even as sensation fiction as a genre centralizes the reader’s affective experience. Kate Flint’s discussion of Victorian readership in “The Victorian Novel and its Readers” (2010), notes that “reading provoked a good deal of anxiety during the Victorian period […] fiction was regarded as particularly suspect: likely to […] stimulate [] desires” (emphasis mine, Flint 17). The moralistic critique of the Christian Remembrancer (1863), contemporaneous to Col lins, highlights sensation fiction’s affective pri macy; the journal bemoans the genre’s desire to “open out a picture of life free from all the perhaps irksome checks that confine [women’s] own exis
The infection of Betteridge with detective fever exhibits the mode’s disregard for the logical disposition of its host. The steward’s introducto ry citations of Robinson Crusoe develop him as a composed and calculated witness. Betteridge prefaces the testimony by adopting a moral max im from Defoe, quoting, “Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it” (20). This strata gem for project planning staunchly contrasts the affective whims of detective fever—here, Betteridge views “beginning a Work” as a reactionary “folly”, where the instinctual drive for immediate fulfillment should be controlled by logic—that is, by “count[ing] the Cost” and “judg[ing] rightly.”
7 The “unmasculine” characterization follows from Betteridge’s lack of bodily control. This implication views “bodily control” as control of the symbolic phallus. See Lacan’s “The Signification of the Phallus.”
III. The Reader’s Anxiety The characterization of detective fever as a form of neurosis gestures to the trope’s similar ity with the psychoanalytic model of the medical condition. Substantial scholarship has attended to psychoanalytic considerations of The Moonstone (e.g., Allan, 1996; Lawson, 1963; Nadel, 1983).
8 Nadel’s “Science and The Moonstone,” argues that Ezra Jennings' linguistic analysis of Mr. Candy’s ravings mimics the Freudian therapist.
9 Larson’s “Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone,” treats the novel as Collins’ dreamscape. The Oedipal trifecta is subsequently cast—Collins as son, Godfrey Ablewhite as father image, and Rachel as mother image. Larson goes on to use this Oedipal framing to examine Collins’ private life.
35 tion of the passion as uncontrollable through the de scription, “that disease had now got fast hold of your humble servant,” distinguishes detective-fever from the expected professional and controlled approach of the police detective.6 Moreover, the first person narration and the question of “what [] happen[s] next” invite the reader to join Betteridge’s amateur detective endeavor. The desire to become the ama teur detective transforms detection from a profes sional venture into a sensationalized activity where the desire to uncover transcends legal objectivity.
The precision of his citations, “at page one hundred and twenty-nine” in the previous quotation, and his attention to the exactness of dates, reading the pas sage “only this morning (May twenty-first, eigh teen hundred and fifty),” further coerce the reader into trusting Betteridge as a precise and objective witness/detective (20). Nevertheless, Betteridge succumbs to sensational bias over detective preci sion as “(with [his] heart in [his] mouth) […] [he] waited at a little distance for what was to happen next.” The parenthetical positions narration, the “mouth,” as an operation of sensation, the “heart.” Betteridge’s “distanc[ing]” from the event of detec
6 The professionalization of the English police force can be credited to the Met ropolitan Police Act of 1829. The formal enterprise of policing necessarily unified and standardized the class of activities falling under “investigation” and “detection”. With the Metropolitan Police force established only some 40 years before the publication of The Moonstone, contemporary wariness of a police-spy system historically foregrounds this paper’s scrutiny of the detective method. See Lyman, “The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829: An Analysis of Certain Events Influencing the Passage and Character of the Metropolitan Police Act in England.”
by Rachel’s flight from the estate, preserves some symptomatic fraction of the reader’s detective fe ver. The reader’s detective fever is further intensified as Betteridge criminalizes the case of the miss ing diamond, remarking, “Miss Rachel has stolen her own Diamond” (emphasis mine). So, even as the reader is coerced into having faith in Sergeant Cuff’s detective aptitude, the revelations he pro vides leave more anxieties than they resolves. The establishment of a criminal case exactly as Sergeant Cuff quits the Verinder Estate pushes the reader’s detective fever to a symptomatic obses sion with total transparency. The OED defines “to steal” as “to take away dishonestly […] esp. to do this secretly or unobserved by the owner” (“steal” def. v.1). The self reflexive application of “steal” destabilizes the notions of “dishonesty” and “secre cy,” resulting in the positive formation of readerly anxiety rather than its negation. In effect, Cuff’s in ability to resolve all questions about the case, to unequivocally “end [] our anxieties,” betrays the initial readerly investment in the mystery. Readerly excitement develops in expectation for the complete unveiling promised through Cuff. The reader is goaded into investing in the missing diamond as an object of desire since the presence of the detective police ostensibly promises fulfillment of that invested desire. While the reader waits for the de tective unveiling, the distance between desire and its fulfillment manifests as anxiety. When the reader realizes that Sergeant Cuff cannot fulfill the fantasy of a complete revelation of the case, the reader’s remaining desire exists without a promise for its fulfillment. Subsequently, readerly anxiety subsists without any path to its resolution. Cuff’s inability to fulfill the reader’s detective fantasy provokes the reader to anxiously search for any other means of fulfilling the desire to gain complete knowledge of the theft.The neurotic manifestation of detective fe ver resulting from Cuff’s incomplete satisfaction of detective desire parallels the Freudian model of symptom formation. In “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,” Freud notes that the frustrat ed neurotic-to-be fixates in a cathectic direction
36 tence” (Flint, 27). Similarly, John Ruskin further cautions against sensationalizing desire, warning in Sesame and Lilies (1865) that the romance (and by affective similarity, the sensation novel)10 , “be comes dangerous, if, by excitement, it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and increases the morbid thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in which we shall never be called upon to act” (Flint, 26). In all these accounts, the produc tion of desire unites the genre of sensation fiction.
The sensation novel’s capacity to formulate, ampli fy, frustrate, and redirect desire justifies treatment of the reader’s anxiety ridden desire for detection, that is, detective fever, as a psychoanalytic neuro sis. We now turn to how detective fever in the Moonstone magnifies from a subtle readerly desire for legibility to a neurotic obsession with uncover ing. The pivotal detective climax of the First Peri od occurs when Sergeant Cuff reveals to Betteridge his opinion of the case; Betteridge narrates:
“Tell me the truth, Sergeant,” I said. “What do you suspect? It’s no kindness to hide it from me now.” “I don’t suspect,” said Sergeant Cuff. “I know.” My unlucky temper began to get the better of me again. “Do you mean to tell me, in plain English,” I said, “that Miss Rachel has stolen her own Di amond?” “Yes,” says the Sergeant; “that is what I mean to tell you, in so many words. (Moonstone, 141) The surety of the accusation, underscored by the dialog, “tell me the truth,” “I don’t suspect […] I know,” and “this is what I mean,” (emphasis mine) implies a closing of the case. Cuff promises satisfaction of the anxiety of not discovering the mys tery. In doing so, Cuff seems to confirm Blake’s introductory applause where the latter commends, “we are seeing the end of our anxieties already […] when it comes to unraveling a mystery, there isn’t the equal in England of Sergeant Cuff!” (empha sis mine, 104). Despite Cuff’s phrasing of surety in no uncertain terms, the metatextual fact that some three hundred pages of the novel remain, in addi tion to the bar on confessional resolution instated 10 The “sensation novel” is used as an instance of the sensation fiction genre.
[] When we speak of the existence in someone of a libidinal cathexis of an object [i.e. an object cathexis] […] we mean that his libidinal energy is directed towards, or rather infused into, the idea [] of some object in the outer world” (Group Psychology 48). As such, cathexis can be thought of as the allocation of libido, and subsequently concerns the expression of libido.
13 Meant in the broadest of terms to characterize the reader’s reasons for reading on even after Cuff makes his definitive opinion of the case.
37 opposed by the ego.
Characterizing the symptomatic anxiety of the reader’s detective fever as a fixation on a cathected direction opposed by the ego evidences Freud’s insistence that the ego is the primary site of anxiety.
IV. Detection as a Gendered Act
While the novel’s detective claim is to equally scrutinize every facet of the Verinder estate, suspicion condenses around a female thief. Superintendent Seegrave’s methods are initially non-gendered; one of his first actions upon arriving at the estate is to equally “examine the servants []” (94). However, immediately after Seegrave’s cur sory methods are described, Betteridge narrates, “the weaker half of the human family went distract ed on the spot. They bounced out of their corners, whisked upstairs in a body to Miss Rachel’s room […] burst in on Superintendent Seegrave, and, all looking equally guilty, summoned him to say which of them he suspected, at once” (94). Betteridge’s comment connects “the weaker half of the human family” with “all looking equally guilty”. Accord ingly, suspicion is narrowed from all the servants to only the female ones. Betteridge emphasizes female incompetence through his misogynistic epi thet of the female servants and the anxiety-ridden subtext of “distracted,” “bounced,” “whisked,” and “burst.” The description of the female servants as emotionally volatile implicates them as potential suspects. The contrasting account of Betteridge from earlier as the embodiment of composed proprietary epitomized by his precise citations of Rob inson Crusoe, and Superintendent Seegrave’s lofty introduction as “the most comforting officer you could wish to see […] [with] a fine commanding voice, and a mighty resolute eye […] ‘I’m the man you want!’ was written all over his face,” drives the reader to heedlessly follow the narrowing of scrutiny to the female residents of the estate (94). Even before the case is formally opened—marked by Cuff’s arrival on the estate—the reader is encouraged to suspect and scrutinize femininity. Sergeant Cuff similarly confirms the gender bias of detection. After defeating Seegrave’s expla-
14 See Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, esp. “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms.”
11,12 Treating readerly invest men13t in the novel as a libidinal allocation to the discovery of the secret, Cuff’s revelation makes the mystery porous, forcing libidinal allocation to latch to the now-available secret of Rachel’s crimi nal guilt. Nevertheless, the novel’s continual moral defense of Rachel pressures the ego to form an in junction on a readerly cathexis to Rachel’s criminal guilt. For example, in response to Cuff’s accusation of Rachel, Betteridge writes, “If Sergeant Cuff had been Solomon in all his glory, and had told me that my young lady had mixed herself up in a mean and guilty plot, I should have had but one answer for Solomon, wise as he was, ‘You don’t know her; and I do’” (142). This moral defense is reiterated by Rachel’s response to her mother’s cross-examination of her: “I have done much to make my mother pity me—nothing to make my mother blush for me” (181). Betteridge’s biblical defiance, espe cially in the context of his textual allegiance to the lesser Robinson Crusoe, sponsors reverence for his sublime commitment to Rachel. Rachel’s comment further invokes maternal sympathy and feminine piety. Rachel’s image as a sympathetic and mor ally grounded individual contradicts Cuff’s crimi nal accusation. Given the baseline expectation for the only daughter of Betteridge’s “good mistress” to align with the sympathetic characterization, the ego necessarily opposes acknowledgment of, and even more so, cathexis to, the villainization (24).
14 Accordingly, at least until Rachel confesses her se cret, readerly anxiety underlies the text. With the 11 James Strachey, in his translation of Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, defines cathexis as “the analogy of an electric charge, and [] the concentration or accumulation of mental energy in some particular channel.
12 See Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, esp. “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms.”
sensationalism experienced by the reader charac terized by an anxious experience of detective fever, we now turn attention to its virulent course.
Beyond the gendering of the crime, de tective action confines itself to gendered space.
If Cuff’s claim of reservation is taken at face value, then the detail of the thief’s gender is posited as trivial. As such, even before Rachel and Rosanna are placed under direct suspicion, detection is an act characterized by female suspicion.
38 nation that a female servant’s “petticoat[] had done the mischief” of smearing Rachel’s painting, effec tively gender-anonymizing the perpetrator, Cuff reverts back to suspicion of the female servants in dialog with Betteridge: “‘The women will think themselves suspected directly,’ I [Betteridge] said, interrupting him [Cuff]. ‘The women won’t, Mr. Betteredge,’ answered the Sergeant, ‘if I can tell them I am going to examine the wardrobes of ev erybody’ (115). Cuff’s exclusive concern with the women’s wardrobes as a subset of the “wardrobes of everybody” reveals the gender of the suspected thief despite Cuff’s claim to, “keep to [him]self for the present” about his “opinion on the case” (114).
eyes on Miss Rachel’s bedroom door” (emphasis mine, 113). The above emphases keep the mys tery of Rachel’s room in focus, even before Rachel herself comes under scrutiny. Similarly, Rosan na’s room is portrayed as a piece of the mystery when during Cuff’s cross examination, Betteridge discovers that the two housemaids “had stolen up stairs […] had tried Rosanna’s door, and found it locked; had knocked, and not been answered […] when the girl had come down to tea […] the two devils aforesaid had tried her door once more, and found it locked” (emphasis mine, 124). The central point of suspicion is not what is materially known to be in the rooms, but the fact that the locked doors prohibit free access; only after the reader becomes suspicious of Rosanna’s locked room is the more tangible point made of witnessing the “crackling of a fire […] at four in the morning” in Rosanna’s room (124). Female privacy invites suspicion, even when delimiting access is expected as in the case of a lady’s bedroom. Even though the reader is not given any thoroughly substantiated reason to suspect the two women, the repetition of “door” and “locked” tangent to the unveiling of factually relevant details like the smeared paint in Rachel’s boudoir and the unusual activity of Rosanna make the reader suspicious of the otherwise permissible privacy maintained by Rachel and her maid.
Simultaneous to the scrutiny of feminine space, the novel removes suspicion from masculine space. Betteridge concludes his narrative with Cuff confident that the diamond rests in Mr. Luker’s vault. Cuff proposes “to send one of my brother-officers to make an arrangement with that mon ey-lender in London” (175). Cuff emphasizes that “the result [of the plan] is certain”. Nevertheless, Lady Verinder rejects the proposal, minimally re plying, “Consider your proposal declined, in every particular” (175). Lady Verinder’s rejection of the proposal, for which she provides no substantial ra tionale, is quickly glossed over. Betteridge guesses that, “to hear her own daughter made the subject of such a proposal as this, stung my mistress” (175). Yet, Lady Verinder’s defense of Rachel’s privacy seems counterintuitive given that she already con sented to have two separate detectives examine
Throughout the detective work of both Seegrave and Cuff, narration draws attention to the fact that Rachel’s room is closed. While Seegrave is “poking about among the chairs and tables, the door of the bedroom was suddenly opened. After having denied herself to everybody, Miss Rachel, to our astonish ment, walked into the midst of us”; again, while Cuff is discussing the paint smear with Franklin, Betteridge narrates, “as the words passed his lips, the bedroom door opened, and Miss Rachel came out among us suddenly” (emphasis mine, 96). As Rachel concludes her first interview with Cuff, Bet teridge details: “with that answer, she turned away, and shut herself up again in her bedroom” (emphasis mine, 110). Once again, after Cuff finishes his primary examination and returns to Rachel’s bou doir, “the Sergeant walked into the middle of the room, and stopped there, deep in thought, with his
15 This essay thinks of the gendering of space into feminine (private) and mascu line (public) spheres in line with the distinction set forth by Jürgen Habermas and Simone de Beauvoir. For more, see Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) and Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949).
Within the Verinder estate, the two primary rooms of detective interest are Rachel and Rosanna’s bedrooms. The mystery of the Moonstone becomes synonymous to the mystery of the women’s rooms.
15
V. Detection and Confession
“The Indian met his death, as I suppose, by a mortal wound,” said Herncastle. “What his last words meant I know no more than you do.” I looked at him narrowly. His frenzy of the pre
The Prologue incubates readerly desire for, beyond detection, confession. The incident that “induce[s] [Herncastle’s cousin] to refuse the right hand of friendship to [] John Herncastle” is not the murder of the Indians nor the theft of the Moon stone, but Herncastle’s refusal to confess to his crimes (12). Approaching Herncastle the day after the storming of Seringapatam, his cousin narrates the exchange: “Tell me first,” I said, “how the Indian in the ar moury met his death, and what those last words meant, when he pointed to the dagger in your hand.”
39 every corner of Rachel’s bedroom. Moreover, the adopted alternative, “to give [Rachel] a great shock suddenly, under circumstances that will touch her to the quick,” subjects Rachel to unusual cruelty and phrases emotional violence as a detective en terprise (175). Lady Verinder’s rejection of Sergeant Cuff’s proposal demonstrates the novel’s hes itance to infringe upon the privacy of the masculine space of “money-lending”—that is, of the space of business—otherwise necessitated by an investigation into Mr. Luker. Barring investigation, inqui ry into Mr. Luker’s vault is plausibly routine for a “Sergeant in the Detective Force” at Scotland Yard, yet no such direct inquiry is made (450). Similarly, when the family lawyer, Mr. Bruff, discovers the location of the Moonstone after conversing with Murthwaite, the lawyer fails to use any legal mech anism of inquiry into Mr. Luker for the Verinders’ advantage. The novel’s hesitance to closely exam ine Mr. Luker delineates his privacy. Beyond the novel’s tactful negotiations for masculinized privacy, the three Indians serve to morally dissuade infringement upon masculine space. The only time that Mr. Luker is non-hy pothetically investigated before the Moonstone is withdrawn from his vault is when he is abducted by the three Indians. Miss Clack describes the con frontation, retelling Mr. Luker being “aroused from his studies by a tawny naked arm round his throat, by a bandage over his eyes, and by a gag in his mouth. He [] was thrown prostrate and searched to the skin” (205). As noted by Ian Duncan in his essay, “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic” (1994), the Moonstone presents a racial binary where “English failure to recover the Moonstone mirrors an Indian success” (Duncan 301). Even though the reader’s detective fever desires an inquiry into Mr. Luker, investigation by the three Indians intrinsically involves a transgression of Englishness. The reader’s desire for the resolution of the theft is placed at odds with the larger societal desire to uphold English moral superiority. Such social pressures infiltrate the logic of the book, with the three Indians depicted in foreign and repulsive detail. The skin of the Indi ans is described through a “tawny naked arm” and their smell is narrated as “a faint odour of musk and camphor” (Moonstone, 204). Their detective endeavor, while emblematic of English glory for the Scotland Yard detective, is villainized for the three Indians, with their detective search conduct ed “without ceremony, through and through, to his skin [...] [and] hardly within the proper limits of fe male discussion” (204). The grotesque detailing of the abductions by the three Indians highlights a dis tinction between English and Indian morality, recapitulating Murthwaite’s earlier remark that, “if a thousand lives stood between them and the getting back of their Diamond—and if they thought they could destroy those lives without discovery—they would take them all” (83-84). As the novel distin guishes between Indian and English detectives with the former characterized as morally repulsive, race is necessarily vilified to allow the English detective to retain an image of prestige and respectability. The novel’s condemnation of the Indian detectives, without compromising the detective profession as a whole, thus functions to dissuade the reader from scrutinizing male privacy. The Moonstone is obsessively anxious with transgression of masculine privacy, even as the masculine sphere is criminally implicated.
40 vious day had all calmed down. I determined to give him another chance. “Is that all you have to tell me?” I asked. He answered, “That is all.” I turned my back on him; and we have not spo ken since. (16) Herncastle’s verbal confirmation serves no factu al or juridical function. Recall that little room for criminal ambiguity was left when the narrator witnessed Herncastle standing above the dying Indian, “dagger dripping with blood” in hand. Even in the following chapter where Herncastle’s cousin ad mits he has “no evidence but moral evidence […] [and] no proof that [Herncastle] killed” the three Indians, the narrator still possesses unequivocal ev idence for the theft of the Moonstone, and at least circumstantial evidence for the murder of the three Indians (17). Nevertheless, after Herncastle side steps his cousin’s question, the cousin resolves to “give him another chance”. Prior to the exchange, General Baird announced that “any thief detect ed in the fact, be he whom he might, should be hung” (16). The “chance” given either references a chance for Herncastle to legally exculpate himself, or a chance to confess—where confession is priv ileged beyond its function as a juridical method. The narrator does not report Herncastle to the Gen eral even after Herncastle refuses confession. As a result, Herncastle’s “chance” to confess retains a uniquely non-juridical value. It is only after Hern castle refuses confession that the cousin “turn[s] his back on Herncastle”. The remaining tension manifested by the familial severing—even after the factual detective work associated with the theft of the Moonstone is concluded—identifies confession as a latent desire behind detection.
strate the reader’s infection with detective fever and its pathological focus on the feminine. The Latin resonance of detective—to uncover or reveal, prescribes no formal method for obtaining the desired result. Nevertheless, beyond being a latent desire of detection, confession is the primary object of detection’s gendered direction. We now turn to the novel’s obsession with Rachel’s secret. The readerly contraction of detective fever concomitantly targets the mystery of the lost diamond and the mystery of Rachel’s secret. The cur sory search around the Verinder estate following the loss of the Moonstone occupies a single page, after which, Rachel remarks, “I suppose I have no alternative but to send for the police” (91). In the single page before Rachel’s insinuation of criminality, the novel presents two mysteries through the voice of Penelope: (1) “The Diamond is gone!” and (2) “She [Rachel] shrinks, in the strangest man ner, from speaking of it, even to me (Penelope)” (89, 90). Rachel’s unexpected behavior occupies a uniquely verbal register. Rachel can resolve suspi cion by speaking to Penelope—her refusal to speak invites suspicion. Like in the Prologue, detective fever around the theft from Rachel has a latent de sire of confession that is not explicitly tied to the objective goal of determining who stole the Moon stone. Desire for confession from Rachel builds as the mystery of the lost diamond is fleshed out. Af ter Rachel refuses to address the introductory ques tions asked of her by Sergeant Cuff, he remarks, “A young lady’s tongue is a privileged member” (110). Rachel’s private desire to remain silent, the privileging of her “tongue,” metonymizes her sus picious character. Furthermore, Rachel’s desire for domestic privacy is similarly placed under suspicion as Betteridge narrates, “Miss Rachel flatly re fused to have her wardrobe examined. Asked for her reasons, she burst out crying. Asked again, she said: “I won’t, because I won’t. I must yield to force if you use it, but I will yield to nothing else” (118). Rachel’s outbreak that prevents her from giving “her reasons” is recapitulated by her comment, “I won’t, because I won’t.” The dramatic staging of the event is not her flat refusal “to have her ward robe examined,” but rather her refusal to confess a
Characterizing confession as desire phrases the act in Foucauldian terms. Confession is cen tral to Foucault’s theory of power. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, Foucault notes that “Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth” (Foucault 58). The Fou cauldian resonance of confession—it’s “central role in the order of civil [] power”—is signposted to stabilize concurrent discussion of detection and confession (Foucault 58).
Sections 2 and 4 demon
41 reason.
.
The passage’s violent subtext draws attention to the body through the phrases, “hands pressed hard over her heart” and “twisted herself out of my hands.” Nevertheless, bodily pain is overshadowed by Rosanna’s refusal to speak. Betteredge’s initial con cern with Rosanna’s health, asking, “Are you ill?” never receives a reply, nor does the relevance of the question persist after Rosanna’s intended confes sion is tied to the “loss of the diamond.” The lacuna of the detective mystery is Rosanna’s silence, and as such, detective fever’s desire to reveal diverts entirely to desire for Rosanna’s confession. Read erly affective attention that would otherwise be de ployed as sympathy for Rosanna instead succumbs to detective fever
Eric Levy’s “Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and the Problem of Pain in Life” (2002) notes, “Franklin Blake, on whose actions the entire plot hangs, is exempt from responsibility for the vulnerability to suffering caused by his actions […] Franklin Blake as a character represents the liter ary attempt to deconstruct the tragic link between character and fate” (Levy 76-77). In this context, the reader is exempted from the guilt of deferring sympathy to Rosanna because of the joint preeminent commitment with Franklin to the mystery of the Moonstone. Prioritizing feminine confession is thus central to the novel’s literary project.
Limping Lucy and Miss Clack are treated with similar confessional scrutiny. After Lucy re fuses to give Betteridge Rosanna’s note to Franklin, suppressing Rosanna’s speech postmortem, Betteridge narrates in dismay, “Was the darkness going to lift? Were all the discoveries that I was dying to make, coming and offering themselves to me of their own accord? I was obliged to wait a moment […] The detective-fever burnt up all my dignity on the spot. I followed her, and tried to make her talk. All in vain. It was my misfortune to be a man—and Limping Lucy enjoyed disappointing me” (190). The initial rhetorical questions voice the reader’s own anxious desire to know the mystery and the proceeding sentence, “I was obliged to wait a mo ment,” sponsors frustration. When Betteridge does finally approach Limping Lucy, the object of his inquiry is to “make her talk.” Lucy’s silence is vil ified by Betteridge’s sadomasochistic framing of her, that she “enjoyed disappointing me.” Concur rently, hostility against Lucy’s silence is gendered by Betteridge’s lament of his “misfortune to be a man.” The provocation of readerly anxiety for de tection at the beginning of the passage is directed at Lucy’s silence, antagonizing her privacy. Miss Clack’s narrative similarly structures female speech as that which must be wrangled out, pried from,
Finally, upon her departure from the estate, Betteridge observes, “Not a word did she say, either to the Sergeant or to me. With her lips closed, and her arms folded” (156). The narration of “with her lips closed” is redundant to the previous sentence. The repetitive detailing of Rachel’s silence again symbolizes her guilt. Detective fever maintains an equal concern with Rachel’s silence (subsequently, desiring its confession) as with the objective facts of the Moonstone’s theft.
Parallel to interest with Rachel, the confes sional desire of detective fever condenses around Rosanna Spearman. Contrasting the chattery tone of the other servants after their interviews with Ser geant Cuff, Rosanna, “remained longer than any of them. No report on coming out—dead silence, and lips as pale as ashes” (123). The discussion’s ab normally long length prompts readerly curiosity in the contents of the conversations. The main barri er to answering such curiosity is Rosanna’s “dead silence.” Further on, narration teases a complete detective unveiling of the Moonstone’s mystery after Rosanna’s conversation with Franklin at the billiard-table: Rosanna Spearman ran by me, with a miserable look of pain in her face, and one of her hands pressed hard over her heart, as if the pang was in that quarter. “What’s the matter, my girl?” I asked, stopping her. “Are you ill?” “For God’s sake, don’t speak to me,” she answered, and twisted herself out of my hands. […] I can’t explain it,” says Mr. Franklin; “but, if the girl is concerned in the loss of the Diamond, I do really believe she was on the point of confess ing everything—to me […] Rosanna had retired to her own room. She had declined all offers of assistance with thanks and had only asked to be left to rest in quiet. Here, therefore, was an end of any confession on her part. (144-146)
42 and ultimately, confessed. The spinster’s narrative is the only one that requires explicit coercion and negotiation to obtain. Miss Clack comments at the beginning of her narrative, “I am to re-open wounds that Time has barely closed; I am to recall the most intensely painful remembrances—and this done, I am to feel myself compensated by a new laceration, in the shape of Mr. Blake’s cheque” (199). Again in view of Levy, rather than his notion that “solving the mystery of the theft of the Moonstone entails confronting the problem of pain in life,” acquiring Miss Clack’s account entails overcoming traumatic hesitance to narrate through monetary power. Female ailment—Rosanna’s implied by Betteridge’s comment, “‘Are you ill?” and Miss Clack’s psy chological trauma—are deprioritized by the novel’s overwhelming attention to detective fever. The exclusively feminine confessional de sire of detective fever is made rigorous by the pres ervation of Sergeant Cuff’s verbal autonomy. After preventing a supposed rendezvous between Rosan na and Rachel, Cuff goads, “your young friend, Rosanna, won’t slip through my fingers so easy as you think. As long as I know where Miss Verinder is, I have the means at my disposal of tracing Miss Verinder’s accomplice […] In the meantime, I’m afraid I must trouble you to call the servants to gether again” (158). The patronizing tone of “your young friend” and the ambiguous implication of Cuff’s “means at [his] disposal” position Cuff’s knowledge of the case just out of reach of the nar rator and reader. The final comment closing Cuff’s remarks, “I must trouble you to call the servants together again,” places narration back in an active role yet remains detached from the core knowledge Cuff maintains. The Sergeant humorously plays with his prerogative to “keep to [him]self for the present” about his “opinion on the case” despite intensifying detective fever’s desire for revelation. In turn, Betteridge responds, “it is very disgrace ful, but it is not the less true, that I had another at tack of the detective-fever, when he said those last words. I forgot that I hated Sergeant Cuff. I seized him confidentially by the arm. I said, ‘For good ness’ sake, tell us what you are going to do with the servants now?’ The great Cuff stood stock-still, and addressed himself in a kind of melancholy rapture to the empty air” (158). Rather than Franklin’s use of monetary force to extract narrative from Miss Clack, or the narrative’s general refusal to respect female verbal autonomy, the desired confession from Cuff is approached non-antagonistically: Betteridge emphasizes, “I forgot that I hated Sergeant Cuff,” before pleading for his information. Even during Betteridge’s explicit moments of detective fever, Cuff is granted autonomy over what details of the case he chooses to reveal. Cuff’s confession must be pleaded for rather than unsympathetically extracted. After the confessional desire is verbalized, narration again decenters hostility towards Cuff with the reverential proceeding line: “the great Cuff stood stock-still, and addressed himself in a kind of melancholy rapture to the empty air”. Con fession as a latent desire of detective fever uniquely obsesses over female interiority.
VI. Confession and the Female Erotic Rosanna and Rachel’s confessions to Frank lin are fundamentally confessions of erotic desire. At the heart of Rosanna’s suicide letter is a “confes sion [] made in three words. I love you” (312). In a similarly amorous tone, Rachel's confession when Franklin confronts her in the conservatory is, “My hero whom I love and honour, you have crept into my room under cover of the night, and stolen my Diamond!” (348). The love disclosed in Rosanna’s letter is explicitly erotic, as captured by her writing, Rachel “used to give you roses to wear in your button-hole. Ah, Mr. Franklin, you wore my roses of tener than either you or she thought!” (314). Lewis Lawson’s essay, “Wilkie Collins and The Moon stone,” explicates the sexual imagery of the rose, citing from Barbara Seward’s The Symbolic Rose, that “in Freudian belief the explanation is sexual. Blossoms and flowers in general are said to represent the female sexual organs, while the particular shape of the rose associates it most directly with the shape of the vulva” (Lawson 65). The phallic flower stem penetrating the yonic buttonhole further
43 elaborates the erotic image. The sensational aspect of Rosanna’s confession is not her love for Frank lin—to which Cuff has the observation: “the falling in love with a gentleman of Mr. Franklin Blake’s manners and appearance doesn’t seem to me to be the maddest part of [Rosanna’s] conduct by any means,” “Hadn’t you better say she’s mad enough to be an ugly girl and only a servant?”—rather, the sensation aspect of Rosanna’s confession is her dis closure of erotic desire for Franklin (122). Similarly infusing narrative with the erotic, Rachel retells witnessing Franklin steal her diamond, describing, “I saw your hand go into the drawer. And I saw the gleam of the stone between your finger and thumb, when you took your hand out” (346). The penetra tive act construed by seeing Franklin’s “hand go into the drawer” and the vaginal image formed by “the stone between your finger and thumb” reveal the erotic subtext of Rachel’s confession. Unlike for Rosanna, however, the erotic act between Ra chel and Franklin constitutes transgression. Never theless, latent desire resurfaces when Rachel pre vents Franklin from ending his meeting with her, the later narrating, “with the frantic perversity of a roused woman—she caught me by the arm, and barred my way out” (351). The erotic insinuation of “perversity” and “roused” reveal Rachel’s con fession of erotic desire.
17 See Moonstone, pp. 384.
After Rosanna and Rachel make their erotic confessions, the anxieties of detective fever are dispelled. If desire for erotic confession underpins the readerly anxiety of detective fever, we expect the symptom’s resolution following the two confessionals. Ezra Jennings’ laudanum experiment on Franklin is the next step in detection following Rosanna and Rachel’s confession. Sufficient scholarship has attended to the (attempted) verisimili tude of Jennings’ experiment.16 Collins’ scientific framework, exemplified by Jennings’ pronouncement that “science sanctions [his] proposal,” cools detective fever’s anxious desire for unveiling. Hav ing disenchanted the reader with narrated promises for detective discovery through the inadequacies of Superintendent Seagrave and Sergeant Cuff, Collins builds quantitative certainty for Jennings’ 16 See Nadel, “Science and The Moonstone” and Thomas, “The Moonstone, detec tive fiction and forensic science.”
methods by directly quoting William Carpenter’s Principles of Human Physiology and John Elli otson’s Human Physiology.17 Jennings’ inclusion of the doctoral titles of Carpenter and Elliotson emphasizes the appeal to academic authority. As examined in Sections 2 and 3, readerly anxiety arises from detective fever following the reader’s investment in mystery and subsequent betrayal by Seagrave and Cuff’s promises for total discovery. Circumventing the reader’s skepticism with narrated “truth,” Collins’ quotation of external academic text allows the establishment of an absolute truth, independent from narrative bias. Unlike Sergeant’s Cuff desire to “keep to [him]self” about his “opin ion on the case,” from the beginning of Jennings’ engagement with Franklin, Jennings makes clear his hypothesis and methods: at the start of their scientific engagement, Jennings posits to Frank lin, “you entered Miss Verinder’s sitting-room and took the Diamond, in a state of trance, produced by opium” and proceeds to propose the “bold ex periment” to prove his claim (379, 382). With a complete forthtelling of the eventual resolution of Franklin’s guilt, curiosity prevails through the ex periment, but anxious suspense does not. The sci entific method thus transforms detection from fever to scholarship. Transformation of detection into scholarship is highlighted through Mrs. Merridew’s preface to the experiment, commenting, “Mr. Jen nings is about to try a scientific experiment tonight. I used to attend scientific experiments when I was a girl at school. They invariably ended in an ex plosion” (408). However, rather than an explosion, Jennings’ experiment ends in Franklin’s sedated slumber. The absence of “explosion” in favor of sleep proves the remediation of detective fever’s symptomatic anxiety.
Sexuality Volume 1: Introduction, esp. Part III.
44 VII. The Detective and the Psychoanalyst By presenting the Moonstone’s detective fever as a façade for want of confession of femi nine erotic desire, the detective becomes analogous to the psychoanalyst.
18 See Foucault,
In The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, Foucault comments on the Christian pastoral’s ever-expanding arsenal of confessional techniques that “helped to give the confession a central role in the order of civil and religious powers.” Foucault further establishes sex (subconsciously, erotic desire) as the “privileged theme of confession” (Foucault 61). In this view, the Moonstone’s conception of detective fever stands in for the detective’s Scientia Sexualis.18 Within the Foucaludian model, the priest, psychoanalyst, and detective all construct and discipline the social conception of “rational” self-control. Furthermore, the gender-anxiety of the detective aligns the role with the psychoanalyst. Much like Freud’s own description of the psychoanalyst in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), Collins’ detective fever assumes the existence of cells of feminine erotic desire and prescribes confession, at the expense of feminine privacy. The Moonstone’s problematic anxiety with female privacy calls for a reexamination of the post-Victorian total-war ap proach to psychoneurotic symptom treatment. Like with Freud’s conception of hysteria, symptoms of prejudice in culture at large may instead underlie diagnostic obsession. History of
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