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Other Women
The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832â?"1898
By Anita Levy PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06865-7
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: THE MAKING OF DOMESTIC CULTURE
The power of discourse is that it is at once the object of struggle and the tool by which the struggle is conducted. (Edward Said, "Criticism between Culture and System")
Indeed, ... "the State" never stops talking. (Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution)
In the course of writing this book something strange began to happen. I found that I was haunted in the still of the night at my desk by what I came to call, for want of a better word, demons. Let me hasten to say that they weren't the kind many women write about and that drive them to thickly carpeted offices to sit in plush chairs and divulge long pent-up secrets to well-paid therapists. Mine were of a different order, belonging not to the psychological domain, but to that of culture. In short, I found that I was haunted by all the things I hadn't said in this book, and by all the traces of the women whose thoughts and desires were suppressed in nineteenth-century England with the rise to power of the new middle classes. If I could no longer hear their stories, told in factories where it was too noisy to hear, to babies too young to understand, men too drunk to listen, and mistresses too wealthy to care, it was not because I had no desire to listen. On the contrary, as a leftist intellectual, I knew that the politically "correct" work I most admired always spoke for those who apparently could not speak for themselves. Thus, in recent years, feminist scholars adopted the voices of women long excluded from history, as they understood it, to restore them to the world of the past, and so to rescue them from obscurity. Marxist scholars, especially those in Britain, recounted tales of working-class men and women from nineteenth-century Manchester and London, with the same end in mind. And, in so doing, they produced some very fine work that stands as a corrective to dominant versions of history. Such work, however, too often conceived of the historical data out of which it imagined the past—the Parliamentary reports, family records, and commissioned studies—as just so many mirrors through which to enter the real terrain of history, much as Alice enters Wonderland. Yet the question I asked was, did they actually succeed in breaking through to a more real past than that existent in the very language of their data? Or did their efforts to restore oppressed or marginalized groups to history, in the final analysis, contribute most to a very real and important politics of the present?
Like them, I knew that the women I could no longer hear in the texts of the human sciences and fiction had, indeed, existed. And I experienced a queasiness because I felt I should be writing about them, not about the discursive woman who emerged from the pages of the studies, reports, and novels that are the materials of this book. Because I live in a culture convinced that words are not real, that their power lies in their function as signs on the road to the other side of discourse in the "real world," I felt guilty for insisting, with Edward Said in the first epigraph to this chapter, upon the power of language to materialize new ways of seeing and being in the world, and so to make words real. Yet this was precisely how the thoughts, words, opinions, and beliefs of the real women of other classes and cultures were displaced by a newly constituted form of cultural knowledge about what it meant to be human. More important, as a result of this suppression all manner of positive cultural values and alternative sexualities were discredited, their outlines preserved now only as a faded memory in the political unconscious of middle-class culture—that repository of cultural materials the political meaning of which we no longer understand because they have since been made the stuff of consciousness, a privatized domain that we imagine to be immune to class-and culture-specific determination.
That this material is culturally rather than psychologically repressed information is crucial to understand. The point, I argue following Fredric Jameson, is to reassert "the specificity of the political content of everyday life and of the individual fantasy-experience and to reclaim it from that reduction to the merely subjective" (1981, 22). To do so is to reverse the priorities with which we usually think of the relationship between self and culture. It is to conceive of the self, and by extension the mind, as a cultural and historical construct the very character of which obliterates its own history as such. Psychological models legitimate this act of erasure when they attribute private motives to a mind apparently devoid of culture- and class-specific features. That traces of thoughts and desires of poor and dark-skinned women, the demons with which I began, reappear as material outside the bounds of my discourse, or even as negative features of the middle-class female self, is entirely consonant with the cultural phenomenon I am describing. It is but one consequence of the displacement of most women as "other" than normal, desirable, and English upon which this study focuses.
As the political identity of these other women was subordinated to a class- and culture-specific norm, a new definition of what it meant to be human and female emerged. It was primarily a norm that placed those members of a different race, class, and sex in a negative relationship to the rational, middle-class, white Englishman. Out of this process of displacement was engendered a monolithic "other woman" who came to represent a whole range of sexual behaviors, class practices, and ethnic and racial groups. As she came to comprise myriad different social and sexual practices, the other woman displaced other women. This book is about a woman with a discursive body, an imaginary construct that was produced in nineteenth-century representations of class, race, and gender. Thus, the title of this book deliberately plays upon the confusion between other women and representations of the other woman in the human sciences and fiction, to emphasize my focus on this very process of displacement. What I want to show is precisely that talking about other women, historically, has been the source of their displacement. Indeed, the human sciences and fiction, much like Corrigan and Sayer's "state" as described in the second epigraph to this chapter, "never stop talking." And in this lies the origin of their power.
As a result of this methodological and political choice, my study excludes other women of class and race—the factory workers, housekeepers, prostitutes, maids, or African women my title fleetingly and imperfectly remembers—and so reenacts their historical disenfranchisement. It does so to rematerialize forms of middle-class power that have since vanished into commonsense norms of self and identity still paramount to its daily enactment. This is no less essential a task than the retrieval of those other women whose place was usurped by the other woman in the history of writing in nineteenth-century England.
In tracing the construction of what I call the other woman, I am dealing almost entirely with the work of British authors and intellectuals. I do not wish to imply that this process occurred solely in England. On the contrary, writing about class, race, and gender is pervasive throughout the imperial nations of Europe, as Klaus Doerner, Sander Gilman, Michel Foucault, and others have demonstrated. My point is to trace the relationship between the production of this female figure and a national identity in England during the period of great imperial expansion, roughly from 1840 to 1890.
To complete this preliminary explanation of my title, I must say a word about dates. This book is about the Victorian period. Yet it begins in 1832, five years before Victoria's accession to the throne, not, as one might expect, because this is the year of the first reform bill but because 1832 is the year of the devastating cholera epidemics that gave rise to sociological investigations of Manchester. Similarly, my study does not end with the death of Victoria in 1901, but with the publication of Havelock Ellis's landmark Studies in the Psychology of Sex. This historical moment witnessed the complete disappearance of the "other women" who appear in my title. They vanished from political memory as psychological writing made their thoughts, words, and sexualities features of a psychologically deviant female self.
In mounting my argument, I want to stress that I reject the idea of culture as a historical reflection or consequence of events in the so-called political or economic world. It is in light of this assumption that I propose to follow the paper trail left by the army of researchers and writers who marched across the face of nineteenth-century England and whose work subsequently spawned the disciplines of the human sciences. Among them were the famous—Herbert Spencer, E. B. Tylor, Havelock Ellis—and the not-so-famous—writers and their work long forgotten, consigned to the dustbin of history that can no longer make sense to us across the disciplinary barricades subsequently erected. These predominantly middle-class professionals and intellectuals invaded the terrain of the working classes, the "primitive," the criminals, and the insane—recording information, telling stories, and uttering pious truths about the lives, habits, and thoughts of the wretched and the not-so-wretched. Certainly those who conducted this research were well-meaning individuals. Yet as intellectually gratifying as this work was with its concerns for underdogs and others, it also served the interests of a particular class. As the researchers participated in the massive project that was the human sciences, the writing of "man" as a sociopolitical formation, they turned out a steady stream of studies, essays, catalogues, charts, and tables. This explosion of print was nothing more or less than a major historical event that appropriated and transformed the political and social information of everyday life into the materials of a standardized individual. This new individual was composed of an interior self enclosed within a gendered body and anchored to a family radically divided from the political world—an individual, I argue, fit to occupy the industrial world. For example, in his 1836 survey of the manufacturing population, Artisans and Machinery, the influential liberal social reformer Peter Gaskell described the individual as someone possessing "instincts and social affections, which can alone render him a respectable and praiseworthy member of society, both in his domestic relations, and in his capacity as a citizen" (6).
Before this moment in history there had been no such thing as a generic person. The individual had always been immersed in a sea of interests—regional, generational, religious, familial, occupational, to name but a few—whose competing terms carved out not one, but several identities for her in the world. Neither had the family been severed from the communal, political, and historical determinants—in the forms of rights, obligations, ties, and duties—that had authorized and defined it. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have shown, the privatized family Gaskell imagined, a family enclosed within a house built in a "durable manner" with "better materials," divided into "distinct compartments" that "separated" the "sexes" (77), was utterly unfamiliar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the human sciences made the family solely her domain, it was the female who was the most susceptible to detachment from this rich world of relations. To her went the responsibility for the health, education, and welfare of this self-enclosed family. Yet, as it was identified with the female body and understood to be an extension of her natural attributes, this mode of production was represented as secondary and derivative. In other words, it came to be understood as a mode of reproduction of daily life, the family, and the individual that bore little relation to the productive domain outside the household. No longer a structure providing the motive and organization for the production and exchange of goods, the family system seemed to be outside of time and of politics.
The project of the human sciences described and defined the reproductive realm of the individual, the home, and the family. In tracing the construction of this realm, I am really outlining a central moment in the creation of the gendered spheres of culture that are necessary for the unfolding of capitalism during the nineteenth century. This productive space, I suggest, actually played a vital role in shaping political economy, what we usually think of as the explanatory logic of nineteenth-century history. In displacing the artisan household, the reproductive realm enabled a gendered distribution of wealth. It also created gendered individuals who imagined social relations in gendered terms—the subordination of female to male. Labor as defined by the reproductive sphere, then, is as much a part of the definition of "man" as a productive being as that provided by Marx in response to Ricardo and Smith. I know of few histories of the nineteenth century that take this form of production into account. Yet its importance in relation to what we usually consider the history of the nineteenth century is crucial; neither the productive sphere nor the reproductive sphere alone can explain this history. While some have studied the project of the human sciences in bits and pieces, it is my contention that the division of these disciplines succeeds only in erasing their common history and their relation to the productive sphere. A crucial insight, namely, the importance of gender in the formation of modern culture, is obscured once the representation of the family is scattered into various disciplines.
When the human sciences are viewed as one entity, however, a simple question emerges: to what extent were the sciences of man first and foremost the sciences of woman? Early nineteenth-century social research presupposes a social role for working-class women as household supervisors; anthropology situates women within all kinship relations on the basis of their sexual desire; and psychology portrays women's consciousness as one that is simultaneously desirous and fearful of men. Fiction representing the nuances of heterosexual love helped to mystify as well as to disseminate the distinctively modern notion of the female formulated within the human sciences. Both the human sciences and fiction focused on the same object of representation, woman's body and mind. As these theories pursued their answers, they always found that answer in the female—within her role, mind, body, or mode of writing. It would appear that the human sciences depended on the notion of the gendered individual. As a feature suitable for application to a large group of people regardless of regional, generational, or genealogical ties, gender made the individual universal or generic. So general an answer is at best provisional; what I am most interested in demonstrating, however, is not the commonplace but the manifold and ingenious strategies by which the disciplines gathered knowledge and redefined nature to establish the hegemony of a gendered individual.
While the human sciences establish a series of boundaries between inside and outside, public and private, male and female, in fiction gender becomes the universalizing principle. It was fiction that both mediated between and popularized these domains by creating an imaginary realm for doing so. I do not mean to suggest that this occurrence in fiction is "imaginary" in the sense of being unreal; rather, fiction provides an "image" or site for the interaction of various languages used to talk about the self. What is more, both the human sciences and fiction treated what were in fact new and unfamiliar divisions of the individual and the family as categories that had always existed. As they dehistoricized these areas, both kinds of writing moved history entirely into the domain of political economy, where it remains today. One of my goals, then, is to dismantle an older, gendered model that narrativizes history according to predefined notions of sexual roles and spheres. Instead, I would like to articulate a model capable of historicizing the production of gendered spheres as such. In this way I hope to put these domains back into history and so to put women back into history. My purpose is to show how the history of discovering and universalizing women that is the project of the human sciences is part of the larger formation that we call middle-class culture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Other Women by Anita Levy. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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