Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (70 page)

Read Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century Online

Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

 
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of value judgments in literature, or, as it is now generally referred to, the question of the canon.
To this question must be added a meta-question: what are we doing when we ask this? Are we ourselves performing a disinterested historical inquiry, or will our answer be in its turn determined by our own position? Not many literary scholars nowadays believe in disinterested, value-free inquiry, but there has been a marked shift in the nature of the disbelief. For Leavis, for the New Critics, and in slightly different form for Carey, there is no escaping the pursuit of judgment; literary criticism that does not commit itself to the primacy of qualitymerely descriptive criticismmust remain superficial and even mechanical. But to the new historicists, the feminists, and other schools that practice the hermeneutics of suspicion, the inescapable commitment is not aesthetic but ideological. Deconstructing traditional artistic value judgments in order to discover their underlying political motivation, today's radicals see the claim to artistic autonomy, and the independence of artistic judgment from politics, as itself ideologically determined, as one of the strategies of power. This is very clear in Tompkins, who sets the two conceptions of literary judgment against each other with perfect clarity:
In modernist thinking, literature is by definition a form of discourse that has no designs on the world. It does not attempt to change things, but merely to represent them, and it does so in a specifically literary language whose claim to value lies in its uniqueness. I will ask the reader to set aside some familiar categories for evaluating fictionstylistic intricacy, psychological subtlety, epistemological complexityand to see the sentimental novel not as an artifice of eternity answerable to certain formal criteria and to certain psychological and philosophical concerns, but as a political enterprise.
43
It is even possible to find in Dickens himself some support for the view of a literary text as the exercise of power: after a private reading of
The Chimes
in 1844 (the first beginnings of what eventually grew into the famous public readings), he wrote to his wife, "If you had seen Macready last night, undisguisedly sobbing and crying on the sofa as I read, you would have felt, as I did, what a thing it is to have power."
44
This statement assumes a conception of the artist as performer, controlling the responses of the audiencethe same conception as Thackeray assumed when he said of the death of Paul, in a mixture of envy and admiration, "There's no writing
 
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against such power as thisone has no chance!"
45
This is very different from the claim, admitted even by Huxleyindeed, used as part of his indictmentthat Dickens himself felt the sufferings of Nell and exulted in her joys. It is the difference between an expression theory of literaturewhich believes that the author identifies with his own creations, and that the emotions he strives to express are his ownand a rhetorical theory, which concentrates on the emotions of the reader, and can even lead to the idea of the artist as showman, proud of his total control over audience response. There is abundant evidence for both in Dickens, and it is striking that he expresses the latter in terms of powerthough of course he sees it as the empowering of himself as an individual, not (as would a Foucauldian analysis) as the representative of a group..
Ross, who shares Tompkins's diagnosis that the dismissal of sentimentality is a strategy of masculine power, argues for a less confrontational conclusion:
My argument is not so much for a new canon of literature as for a more radical, non-canonical approach to how we think about literature and its history. Recognizing that writing history is always a process of partly arbitrary selection, I do not desire simply to set up yet another canon, consisting of these specific women writers on whom I have chosen to focus in this study.
46
To rewrite history is always exhilarating; and there is a certain grudging tameness about the traditionalist argument that insists that a fair-sized baby is being thrown out with the patriarchal bath water. But I now have to play that grudging role, since I believe that the radicalism represented by Tompkins and Ross, though it may justify some interrogation, and possible modification, of the previously established canon, does not require its abandonment: ideological factors do influence aesthetic judgments, and it is important to see how this happens, but that does not mean that art should be seen as nothing more than a disguise for ideology.
It is necessary first of all to remind ourselves of a point glossed over by many of the new radical critics, the long existence of writing with the explicit purpose of changing the world, that is, of didactic writing. Many of the recent critical theories that see literature as the agent of cultural intervention seem to me to be asking for a return to didacticism and to be subject to the many criticisms that modern criticism has brought against it.
The abandonment of didacticism is, I believe, the most important single change in the long history of criticism. It is, on the one hand, virtually
 
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impossible to find before the nineteenth century a statement of the nature and purpose of literature that does not include the claim that it promotes virtue or improves the world. In what Tompkins calls "modernist" thinking about literature (which clearly includes a good deal of Romantic and realist thinking as well) it is, on the other hand, difficult to find statements that do. Of course the presence of didactic claims does not mean that the value of the work lies in its didactic function, any more than the fact that so much art, music, and literature was for centuries in the service of the church means that it can only be judged by Christian standards. This is a familiar critical problem, perhaps the most familiar problem of literary criticism, and it does not disappear when we turn to women's writing.
There are two central objections to didactic views of literature, both familiar and both, in my view, irrefutable. The pragmatic objection derives from the fact that the purpose of didactic writing lies outside itself: it aims to influence our moral attitudes and even our behavior, to win converts for Christ, to cause us to treat our friends with more consideration, to vote socialist (or conservative), and so on. The site of its success or failure is not confined to the textual experience and may even be independent of it. However enthusiastic our praise of a work's intentions, it will not have succeeded in carrying them out unless it has, in some degree, changed the world.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
is interesting here, because the case that it succeeded in doing this is probably stronger than with any other novel ever written. Tompkins's claim that critics have denied to the novel "the power to work in and change the world" is quite misleading: criticism has disputed the artistic value of the novel, but conservative and liberal critics alike have agreed about its practical effect. Lincoln's famous compliment to Stowe, as the little lady who started this big war, sounds like evidence that her book succeeded, if not in its direct purpose (for it was not the intention of this pacific writer to start a war), at least in a cognate one. But even this example is not exactly hard evidence, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate that the novel did speed up abolition, or that Dickens did speed up any actual social reforms (the evidence, in that instance, points rather against the claim). These may seemindeed arecrude criteria, but unless we locate the site of didactic impact
outside
the textual experience, we cannot claim that a work is promoting virtue, converting to Christ, or helping to emancipate the slaves.
Ideological readings of literature are not of course to be equated with didactic readings, since they do not look at the stated moral purpose of the work but at how the work illustrates the intermeshing of art and power,
 
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how by carrying out an apparently aesthetic purpose, art actually serves the interests of a dominant group. But this is still to locate the ultimate function outside the work; and I am often struck by how often, in both Marxist and feminist critics, the oblique ideological function attributed to a work merges into, or is even replaced by, a direct didactic oneas is the case in
Sensational Designs
.
The second objection is that didactic, along with ideological, theories are not specific to literature. If
Uncle Tom's Cabin
is to be seen "as a political enterprise," then we need to ask how it differs from those forms of writingg that aim directly at moral or political improvement: insofar as literature promotes virtue, it does not differ from sermons; insofar as it is an agent of reform, it does not differ from political speeches or pamphlets. If aesthetic effect were completely reducible to didactic or ideological function, we would be left with no criteria for distinguishing poems from pamphlets. The expansion of interest that now causes us to look at Spenser's
Short View of Ireland
as well as
The Faerie Queene
, at Poor Law Reports and Queen Victoria's letters as well as Dickens's novels, is wholly to be welcomed (and this book is a modest contribution to it); but that should lead us to look not only at functional parallels but also at differences. When we grant that a poem or a novel may serve an ideological function, we must still go on to ask how it differs from those forms of writing with nothing but that function, and these differences will not be merely formal or superficial (composed of lines that rhyme or of events that are fictitious). One of the great achievements of literary criticism (both modernist and Romantic) has been to explore how carefully the masterpieces conceal and complicate their ideology, how richly they dissolve it into a more complex experience. There is no need to make a simple choice, between denying all ideological function to literature and admitting no other function.
The usual reply to this is that ideological criticism (the hermeneutics of suspicion) must operate not, or not only, on the level of individual judgment but in the construction of criteria for judging. If there are aesthetic criteria for preferring James and Dickens to Stowe and Sewell (and a fortiori to the pamphleteers), these very criteria, when examined, will be seen to serve an ideological purpose. The trouble with this reply is that it has to grow evasive on what aesthetic principles serve what function. If realism is a way of asserting bourgeois culture, so is fantasy. If complexity and subtlety, even indirection, can be seen as the ideals of conservative criticism, so too can immediacy and raw power. The aesthetic standards of bourgeois,

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