Blog 8: Gendering Blindness

In Nancy Armstrong’s article “Gender Must Be Defended,” she is interested in how “biopolitics” operates within the Victorian novel. This concept stems from the idea that domestic Victorian fiction served to produce “a sense of self embedded in a body that housed asocial instincts and abnormal impulses” (530). She articulates how the Victorian novel shows the relationship between the physical body/consciousness and the collective body of the population. She points out that these relationships serve as disciplinary tactics, or governmental biopolitics, which emerge in the novel though the forms of death, disease, etc. The logic of this discipline creates distinctions within society for those who are acceptable and those who fall short. According to Foucault, she points out, this sub-race of the population is caused by “an excess of the dominant body,” and is furthermore, “a biological threat” (Armstrong 532). Armstrong then locates gender within this sphere and demonstrates how population control is shown through sexual restraint. Moreover, the domestic space and individuality are jeopardized by not adhering to gender norms.

Armstrong claims that similar to Frankenstein’s monster who represents mass humanity being reborn, in Victorian fiction, the female takes the role of one who both inhabits the individual and the population as a whole. She points out that this notion gets complicated through Bleak House’s Esther Summerson, because Dickens presents her as though she should have been consumed by the masses, playing out through a disfiguring disease. This treatment of Esther points to the Darwinian perspective that Dickens addresses, that one person cannot represent the whole human being (Armstrong 537). Esther is then left to represent, “[t]he classic face in which society’s once read the delicate fluctuations of feminine consciousness now records a biological condition that requires a medical diagnosis” (Armstrong 538). Based on this logic, the loss of her beauty presents her as an individual who occupies the space of the masses (the disease connects her with those outside her social/gender/racial sphere).

While Armstrong maintains that disease disrupts class distinction and functions as a form of population control in the Victorian novel, I am interested in the ways in which blindness operates in a similar way. Although I am going to discuss Esther’s blindness in greater detail in my seminar paper, in this blog post I will briefly address Mr. Yule’s vision loss in New Grub Street by George Gissing. Using Armstrong’s position on biopolitics and its place in regards to gender, I want to look at the role of a male occupying this place. Mr. Yule confirms that the threat of blindness is imminent through a strange encounter with the beggar, Duke, who Mr. Yule learns was once a surgeon. The two men enter the beggar’s abode, thereby admitting Mr. Yule into a space of the lower class, where he proceeds to get his eyes checked by the uncertified surgeon. Once Mr. Yule leaves Duke’s home, he experiences an immediate transformation: “It was a curious effect of the imagination that since coming into the open air again his eyesight seemed to be far worse than before” (Gissing 404). The prospect of blindness connects the two men of different classes and reminds Mr. Yule he will likely succumb to a similar fate as this man, as the loss of vision will cost him his livelihood. Ironically, the threat of blindness enables him to see the harsh realities of poverty. Further, the disease itself represents the Foucauldian “excess of the body:” glaucoma results from pressure buildup due to improper fluid circulation within the eye.

In addition to the implications of the disease itself, the vision loss appears when Mr. Yule’s masculine position in the household is threatened by his daughter, Marian. As the intended recipient of the patrilineal inheritance, which Mr. Yule is denied, Marian threatens to disrupt the family order by not wanting to help her father purchase a newspaper. This possibility removes Marian both from the feminine role as she assumes authority by withholding funds, and her father from the masculine role as the magazine would thwart poverty and restore his ability to provide for his family. Ultimately, this scenario doesn’t come into fruition and the novel resolves the problem as this all becomes an unattainable possibility through the restoration of gender norms. The blindness that looms, however, still remains as a reminder that Mr. Yule represents the individual and the masses at large. His disease, though never deeming him legally blind in the novel, frames all talk of the family’s future.