Post #8: Armstrong and The Woman in White

Nancy Armstrong’s text for this week (“Gender Must Be Defended”) used three of the novels that we have already read for our Victorian literature class with Liz Miller: Bleak House, The Woman in White, and The Mill on the Floss. I’d like to use this post to think about the theory and structure of the article (as I begin my own draft) and also to further put in conversation her ideas about the space of the house with The Woman in White. Since I plan to write on this novel soon, I believe this would be the most useful way to write about Armstrong’s text this week.

As I read, I was thinking about Armstrong’s uses Foucault’s theory throughout the piece (not just as a launching point). I thought of Hayot’s text on style, which we recently read, especially when he addresses the use of theorists like Marx in our essays and articles (“The best solution is almost always to do less, or more, with the theory you use” (125)). As another note on structure and theory, I first read Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction before my first TA position in Victorian literature during my MA program, and as I read “Gender Must Be Defended,” I noted the difference in her use of Foucault’s theories in that book project (a much smaller fraction of the book is devoted to Foucault) and this article project. Desire and Domestic Fiction appears over twenty years before this article, rather than the other way around.

Looking through this book again, I found a trace of the article’s argument: “the Victorian novel’s transformation of household space into an instrument that can be used to classify any social group and keep it under observation does not make the novel simply one more instance of the relation of representation to power” (201). I wanted to take a look back at Desire and Domestic Fiction to see how part of the article’s argument is present there, but also to see what she meant when she said she needed to amend her work: “At the time, it was less evident to me how drastically the chapter on biopolitics concluding that volume of The History of Sexuality revised the concept of discipline” (531). I’m really interested in Armstrong’s move here to show what was missing in her earlier work.

Turning to The Woman in White, I want to think more about Armstrong’s analysis of the house as a place that differentiates the gendered from the non-gendered (those who get to live and those who need to be killed off in Victorian novels). I wonder how, exactly, the “asylum” in the novel fits into this order and discipline, especially since the novel uses “asylum” and other forms of captivity in a variety of surprising ways. For Armstrong, “the home…produced a division within society between those who rightfully belonged to society and a subrace of those who were within society but ineligible for membership in it” (534). The description of the asylum makes it seem as if it is a type of home: Speaking of Marian, “some little time elapsed before she could summon composure enough to follow the proprietor of the Asylum to that part of the house in which the inmates were confined” (428). These inmates, it seems, are similar to Bertha in Armstrong’s argument: she is both in the house and cast away. Even though Anne Catherick is “housed” within the asylum, she must die. I’m still trying to connect Armstrong’s conception of gender here to Anne and her death.

What complicates the space of the asylum for me (in conversation with Armstrong’s article) is that there are other individuals who place themselves in captivity. This is what made me interested in writing about the asylums of The Woman in White in the first place. Mr. Fairlie, for instance, keeps himself locked up in his room for the entire novel. Marian and Walter both write on more than one occasion how happy they are to be in isolation. Marian, for instance, finds refuge in locking herself in at Blackwater Park: “Once safely shut into my own room, I opened these pages” (333). Walter likewise finds comfort in being shut away: “The sense of peace and seclusion soothed all thought and feeling into a rapt, unearthly repose” (95). As the novel begins with Pesca “bound to show his gratitude to the country which had afforded him an asylum” (52), I think Collins reworks the space of the house (and even England in Pesca’s case) into multiple asylums. The idea of “discipline” within the house takes on a further consequence.

Armstrong argues that having both an individual narrator and an omniscient narrator shows that “no individual could represent the whole human being” (538). If it’s significant in Armstrong’s argument that Bleak House has two narrators (Esther and the omniscient narrator), I’m now wondering what to make of The Woman in White’s great variety of individual narrators (Walter, Marian, Fosco, Mr. Fairlie, Mrs. Michelson, even a tombstone, and more).