The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel / Edition 1|Paperback

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520225893
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/15/2001
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

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Excerpt from the Trauma of Gender by Helene Moglen

Introduction

The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes

I want to challenge two linked assumptions that most historians and critics of the English novel share. The first is that the burgeoning of capitalism and the ascension of the middle classes were mainly responsible for the development of the novel. The second is that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition. [note 1] I want to propose instead that, as surely as it marked a response to developing class relations, the novel came into being as a response to the sex-gender system that emerged in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [note 2] My thesis is that from its inception, the novel has been structured not by one but by two mutually defining traditions: the fantastic and the realistic. [note 3] The constitutive coexistence of these two impulses within a single, evolving form is in no sense accidental: their dynamic interaction was precisely the means by which the novel, from the eighteenth century on, sought to manage the strains and contradictions that the sex-gender system imposed on individual subjectivities. For this reason, to recover the centrality of sex and gender as the novel's defining concern is also to recover the dynamism of its bimodal complexity. Conversely, to explore the interplay of realist and fantastic narratives within the novelistic tradition is to explore the indeterminacy of subjectivities engaged in the task of imposing and rebelling against the constraining order of gender difference.

Socioeconomic changes that accompanied the rise of capitalism contributed significantly to the transformation of the sex-gender system. Although the recent work of feminist historians emphasizes the dependence of these changes on class status and geographical location, there is broad agreement that the situation of women in England altered radically from 1600 to 1750. In the sixteenth century, when women had been involved in production for the subsistence of their households and for market, they had participated in a range of economically significant functions. The next hundred and fifty years saw the breakdown of domestic economy, as lands were enclosed, estates consolidated, and work that had traditionally been performed at home was removed from domestic space and professionalized within a public sphere to which women were barred entry. The family ceased then to be the primary unit of production, and the interdependency of its members was replaced by a division of labor structured along gender lines. [note 6]

feminized male sodomite joined the sexually initiating whore as one whose aberrant status was crucial to the maintenance of the emergent sex-gender system. [note 12] Heterosexuality was prescribed not just as normal but as compulsory, and marriage— ideologically based in mutual feeling rather than in property—became the romanticized site of its expression.

them as timeless and inevitable. Mediating between the power of self-interest and the need for social integration, they showed how modern self-awareness could produce an egotism threatening to society, and they delineated strategies for its containment. The formal methodologies of these narratives supported their ideological suppositions. Creating coherence from a single overarching perspective, they affirmed the possibility of psychic wholeness and structured desire in conformity with communal need. Projecting the reader into the omniscient narrator's place, they confirmed social consensus formally and rejected subversive eccentricity. Presenting truth as a function of reliable representation, they employed language as if it could be adequate to its object, projected characters that were possessed of intelligible interiorities, and shaped linear narratives that synchronized personal and collective histories.

subordinated to her socially responsive moral consciousness. The "correctness" of her choice is signaled by the improvement of her class status and, with it, the class status of her family. Once that is accomplished, her particularized narrative is appropriated for a universalized female plot. Her future happiness, which is presented as secured, rests on the foreclosure of agency prefigured by her mother's insignificance in, or absence from, the text. So while the son assumes the father's active position at the fiction's end, the daughter slips into the invisibility of the maternal role. For both, the marital union, which is romanticized as healing isolation, reinscribes the differences that contribute to isolation's cause. This is made explicit in nineteenth-century realistic novels, where the wedding is prelude rather than conclusion, and marriage focuses the strains created by the oppositional structure of gender arrangements.

and gave to others the authority to mold her life. Identified with their appropriative power, she complicitously adopted a masochistic model of desire, which signaled her socialization while revealing its fundamentally disabling nature. [note 19] In the text, her fate is shadowed by the lives of women who are represented as possible versions of herself: bad women whose passion leads them to madness or to death, and good women who cannot survive the hardships of their marriages to sadistic men.20 The female protagonist can escape her tragic fate only if the fantastic narrative yields to the impulse of romance. Then she marries not the sadistic gothic hero to whom she is magnetically drawn, but the feminized hero whose passivity precludes his participation in the gothic plot. [note 21]

interrogated by a fantastic fiction, which exposes psychic fragmentation and social alienation, sexual anxiety and gender confusion, and interpretive relativity and authorial uncertainty. Tristram Shandy, which has been dismissed as formally anomalous by theorists of realism and ignored altogether by theorists of the fantastic, explores the limits and possibilities of both narrative modes in their mutually constitutive dynamic. In that text, it is the repeated conflict between the need for sexual definition and the desire for indeterminacy that creates the contestation of epistemological perspectives and modal forms. And, finally, The Castle of Otranto, which is the first English novel in which the fantastic mode is dominant, shares many of the thematic concerns and formal realistic strategies that Walpole, its author, explicitly wrote against. More importantly, it unmasks the sexual obsessions that derive from intrafamilial relations and lays open the melancholic nature of the loss incurred by the cultural imposition of gender difference.

sexual difference to anchor psychic and linguistic meaning, and male sexuality to anchor the meanings of sexual difference. In their narratives, which—although not fictions—are still fictive, they structure the contingencies of subjectivity and sexuality as necessarily male and female. [note 28] At the same time, they reveal the inevitable failure of the socializing process by exposing the depth of psychic resistance to any absolute identity, as well as to gender roles that are culturally prescribed.

and extend Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's speculations about the relation of desire to personal and cultural loss.

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Notes to the Introduction

tifying that psychological discourse with women. Hypothesizing the textual restructuring by men of women's sexuality and subjectivity, she subjects sexual to class relations, as do McKeon and Watt, and a textualized female subjectivity to a male materiality conceptualized in oppositional and hierarchized terms. Despite her allegiance to Foucault, she reads the history of the novel positioned, albeit uneasily, with the formal realists: positioned, that is, within the masculinist and materialist discourse that she wishes to interrogate. I examine Armstrong's argument at greater length in an essay, "The Anxieties of Indeterminacy: Towards a Feminist Theory of the Novel."

reference. It is precisely this psychological emphasis that defines nineteenth-and twentieth-century fantastic genres, as it also distinguishes more fragmentary fantastic narratives found in eighteenth-century fictions.

result of evangelical religion, Enlightenment political theory, and the invention of new public spaces (149). Laqueur's influential argument runs counter to Edmund Leites's earlier contention that changes in attitudes about the strength and nature of women's sexuality followed changes in attitudes concerning women's stronger moral character: attitudes that, in his judgment, "freed men from the demand for moral constancy and the threat of moral failure" (Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality, 121).

10. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.

11. See Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives.

12. See Randolph Trumbach, "Sex, Gender, and Social Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London."

13. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias analyzes changes in attitudes and manners that begin to be perceived in the sixteenth century. He maps the social and psychological transformations that accompanied "the civilizing process" through which the lives of human beings were increasingly divided between intimate and public spheres, between permissible and prohibited behaviors. Examining the ways in which increasing social prohibitions come to be internalized as self-control, he also explores the construction, in this period, of a self divided against itself-the self that Freud would ultimately study.

15. In The Unconscious before Freud, Lancelot Law Whyte argues that in the seventeenth century, the individual's experience of "self-consciousness" was isolated for the first time and treated not as a moment of "self-elimination, but as a primary concept or value." He contends that by 1700, when the incipient movements of individualism, liberalism, democracy, rationalism, and scientific skepticism take self-consciousness for granted, the existence of the unconscious begins to be inferred from immediate conscious experience. Elias also attributes this perception of interior fragmentation to the civilizing process:

The pronounced division of the "ego" or consciousness characteristic of man in our phase of civilization, which finds expression in such terms as "superego" and "unconscious," corresponds to the specific split in the behavior which civilized society demands of its members. It matches the degree of regulation and restraint imposed upon the expression of drives and impulses. Tendencies in this direction may develop in any form of human society, even in those which we call "primitive." But the strength attained in societies such as ours by this differentiation and the form in which it appears are reflections of a particular historical development, the results of a civilizing process. (Civilizing Process, 190-91)

20. In an essay that ingeniously unravels the complexities of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Claudia L. Johnson points out that in the novel, "every household conceals the dead body of its mistress" ("The Sex of Suffering: The Mysteries of Udolpho," 112).

contents, upon which it is, nonetheless, completely dependent" (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 199). Stallybrass and White extend and link Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque and Elias's account of the civilizing process.

chapter, as I try to respond to the interpretive requirements of the texts. Like Felman, I consider the boundary between fiction and psychoanalysis to be permeable, and I readily cross it, in the interpretive interests of both discourses.