There are two main things that drew me to the Raymond Williams reading and the Caroline Levine reading that seem significant to discuss. First off, each reading (though Levine in much deeper depth than Williams) refer to the 19th century when discussing form. Second, a particular type of language, perhaps more noticeably in Williams' piece than in Levine's becomes pronounced and seems to relate to the 19th century: the language of evolution and organisms. Levine quotes Anne McClintock on page 648, where McClintock has argued "that from Charles Darwin onward, 'the image of the natural, patriarchal family...came to constitute the organizing trope for marshaling a bewildering array of cultures into single, global narrative ordered and managed by Europeans.'" Then, in the last paragraph of this same page, Levine makes a reference to Bleak House. Much of Levine's language is in systems and wholes and ways those systems function and then also disrupt other systems and networks. The underlying connotation is that of the "natural" and the way in which forms are naturalized or positioned as biological and inherent. In Williams' piece this is seen through his continuous use of the biological and genetic/reproductive language: "certain dispositions as random," (190) "a moving shape inside the body," (190) "specific organizations," (like taxonomy) (191) "internal impulse," (186) "stabilization" (187) and "individual variations" (188).
I'm interested in the significance of the 19th century specifically on each of these definitions and arguments of and for form and perhaps curious about the relationship between the rise of science and technology within the 19th century as seen by a text like Bleak House (which I just finished reading) and the potentiality of form as a means of understanding the relationship between literature and socio-cultural forces. It seems significant that an underlying, but not deemed explicit connection between socio-political formation and literary formation is that of the biological and that such a text as Bleak House makes that connection very clear. Houses and domesticity in Bleak House are anthropomorphized as living organisms in which characters are merely molecules within a greater whole. It's much easier to see in this 1000 page text because of its attention to the helicopter view of society (which you don't really get until the serial novel). The simplistic definition of an organism is an assembly of molecules functioning as a more or less stable whole. Yet, during the 19th century the notion of stability was questioned in the idea of the "heat death of the universe" which equates equilibrium or complete stasis with death, a state of no production/reproduction (in the 1850s with energy, but seems applicable more broadly).
What to make of all these parallels I'm drawing? Well, I'm sure many of you know I have been obsessing over Bleak House and a way to discuss the pivotal relationship between Esther and Ada as way above "19th century female friendship" but how does one discuss the significance of such a queerness? Especially when, queer theory as a field is sort of in the the midst of repackaging and re-branding itself as potentially normative rather than anti-everything: anti-futurity, queer negativity, queer failure (you get the idea). And then during the Vcologies conference, Kathleen Frederickson situated Darwin, the domestic, eco-criticism, form and queer normativity side-by-side-by-side-by-side. I'm interested in the potential of situating domesticity in Bleak House (but also 19th century texts with female protagonists) as inherently queer because of its ability to reproduce itself--in Bleak House Esther doesn't move out and into a new domestic space when married, but rather her relationship with Ada remains the most important (she raises a kid with Ada) and merely gets a new version of Bleak House: Bleak House 2.0 where positions within the house/organism are merely replaced with members who have already been associated with the original queer kinship structure. And, Chesney Wold--the house of the aristocracy--falls in deep repose with no ability to reproduce heterosexually (no heirs or children, etc). So even here, we have different forms of domesticity working in different ways, but the significance is the fact that in situating, queerness becomes in a sense normative--associated with a "natural" ordering of the socio-political world.
This sort of extrapolation (or the ability to draw these conclusions) seems implicitly apparent in Levine's work, which pays attention to the most salient feature of form: its ability to be both transhistorical and synchronic; and also a pattern and a variant. Levine discusses how forms are not stable and that the peak point of interest for strategic formalism is when various forms collide with one another because in so doing, that's where different strains and mutations occur--some with race being the more prominent feature, or space, or gender, or separate spheres, or the economy, but ones that significantly provide blueprints that can move through space and time while still remaining historically positioned.
Although Levine doesn't suggest what these blueprints can do, she does remain hopeful that new social formations "may come less from organized resistance and conscious radicalism than from the unexpected encounter between forms" (651).
Margaret! Ok, so this comment is more super specific to you and not to the whole class really, but have you done any work with print culture? Your talk of reproduction and queer kinship could really resonate with print culture research on intimacy between author/book and reader. Bleak House reproduces itself not only in the plot, but is also physically reproduced and circulating, in many other ways, including commonplace books and letters, right? So what would it mean for female readers who identify "too much" with their readings to identify with queer characters? I think there might be something interesting in talking about queer domesticity in the novel as well as the domestic practices of reading during the time...that was a jumble, but I read a book on 19th cent American print culture that talked about really interesting forms of intimacy-including the physical, material intimacy of handling the book and the impact of new reading practices as we move away from communal reading in the new wave of literacy during the century.
ReplyDeleteHi Amanda! This is so so useful because I'm in the Victorian Media and the Novel class right now and we are discussing notions of seriality. I have done *no* work on print culture. I would love to talk more about this and about historical domestic reading practices and see what kinds of parallels or significance I could draw. I'm interested too that domesticity (inherently queer in my argument/vision) via queer kinship structures, reproduces by going back into the past/recalling and resituating the past in order to move forward. Jarndyce sets up Bleak House 2.0 exactly like Bleak House 1.0--nothing changes, other than location; the form stays exactly the same to the degree that they add a growelry to make it as exact as possible. They don't have Ada's husband Richard, so they name Ada's child Richard so the house still has a Richard. That form of reproduction seems particularly significant for Bleak House's time where it is situated at the moment of leaving the holocene and moving into the anthropocene--which is basically an environmental queer time landscape. I would love to research print culture/reading practices of Bleak House because as you said there was a move away from communal reading at the same epoch described above. We should definitely discuss this more in/after class!
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