Post #9: Latour, Levine, and The Woman in White

This quarter in my Victorian literature course we read Caroline Levine’s “Narrative Networks: Bleak House and the Affordances of Form,” which showed how Dickens “tried to represent all of England as interconnected.” Levine uses network theory to describe the interconnectedness in the novel, using “nodes” to describe characters: “In Bleak House, each character acts as a node in a distributed network; and to make things more complicated, most characters in the text act as nodes in two or more different distributed networks.” While reading Bruno Latour’s keynote speech, “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network Theorist,” I noted so many similarities with Levine that I looked at her works cited page to see if Latour was listed. Surprisingly, Levine’s article came out less than a year before Latour’s address. (On a side note, these two pieces with entangled ideas occurring in different places makes me think of the very kinds of traceability they both discuss).

I’d like to focus on Latour’s re-thinking of the individual within a network. The actor-network theory, how I see it, is one that prioritizes the complexities of the individual to show that the “whole” is not more important than the “parts”: “an actor is nothing but a network, except that a network is nothing but actors” (5). There is a more equal ground here. One of the issues Latour takes up with network theories is the over-use of nodes and edges that seem frozen. Alternatively, the artwork of Tomas Saraceno shows networks as “enclosed and habitable spaces and envelopes” (rather than fixed nodes) (6). It’s interactive, as well: “by pushing and pulling a tensor,” you can see “what else is moving in the whole array” (7). This movement shows “a non-individualistic grasp on the individual” (12). The infinitive to better describe individuals, then, is not “to be” but “to have” (7): the interactions show that individuals are made up of these interactions.

Levine describes individuals in Bleak House similarly: “So Bleak House represents social relationships not as static structures but as constantly superimposed, conflicting, and overlapping relational webs.” This analysis of social relationships seems very similar to Latour’s figure 4, especially in the description of the overlapping. It might seem that Levine here is not focused on the complexities of the individual, but of the complexities of relationships; yet, Levine then defines individuals as the relationship, as Latour does: “Characters are no centered subjects but points of social intersection.”

The “traceability of the associations” shows the complexities of the individual and also makes the whole seem “smaller” (13). Latour claims that this shift in thinking is due to the available knowledge of the associations, which importantly questions the divide between the individual and “society” (“I don’t use the adjective social anymore” (10)). “Society” isn’t the only major concept that actor-network theory questions: “Networks are a great way to get rid of phantoms such as nature, society, or power, notions that before, were able to expand mysteriously everywhere at no cost” (9). The term “collective existence” better describes the role of the individual.

I’m working, as I described a bit last week, on The Woman in White for this Victorian literature course, thinking specifically about the language surrounding the asylum and other forms of captivity. I’ve been drawn to the “vision” language, especially with dreams and prophecy. I’ve realized, as I hope you’ll see from these passages, that the vision language is traceable. First, I thought I would need to figure out the influence of prophecy language on this work, but the network theory from Latour and Levine made me realize I can trace the influence more through interactions within the novel. Primarily, Anne Catherick, Laura Fairlie, and Marian Halcombe reference their dreams as evidence. Here’s Anne Catherick’s letter to Laura, who is about to marry the man who placed Anne in an asylum: “‘Do you believe in dreams? I hope, for your own sake, that you do. See what Scripture says about dreams and their fulfillment (Genesis xl. 8, xli. 25; Daniel iv. 18-25); and take the warning I send you before it is too late” (116). A couple hundred pages later, Marian (who had read the letter) has a prophesying dream: “In this state, my fevered mind broke loose from me, while my weary body was at rest; and, in a trance, or a day-dream of my fancy—I know not what to call it—I saw Walter Hartwright” (293). This vision is repeated when Marian sees Walter again (“My dream! My dream!” (419)). Another hundred pages after Marian’s dream, Laura repeats this language to another character: “‘Do you believe in dreams?’ she whispered to me, at the window. ‘My dreams, last night, were dreams I have never had before. The terror of them is hanging over me still’” (400). The individual characters are not so individualistic: they are their relations.

(Levine’s text is also helpful for me in that she gives a term to speak about “main” characters: “a few important nodes are simultaneously part of many large clusters. These are called hubs” (520). Esther, for instance, would be a hub in Bleak House. Marian would be a “hub” in The Woman in White.)