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What can I take from Anderson: how her nuanced understanding of the many forms of detachment makes it easier to understand why realism could be joined with other apparently non-realistic modes: b/c there’s a “free play” among all of these different modes, the differences between them not officially registered but they just kind of slide in and out of one another.

Realism

• Realism is a part of the project of critical detachment: female novelists w/in project of “practice of critical detachment through the mode of realism, which aspired to a systemic representation of social life.” 45
• Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” as objective realist b/c he says critics will “see the object as in itself it truly is” (his words) even while criticism also needs to have the “Free play” approach to received ideas to get past them, even to extend to “restless negative energy” (her words) which makes it “a pleasure in itself” (his words)
  • she says this makes him “located at an oblique angle to the more serious norm of objective realism that has been associated with Arnold”
  • He also says criticism needs detachment, that is, to be disinterested
  • He is “Combines” two Kantian concepts, “aesthetic disinterestednes and critical reason” and he also adds objectivity to the mix, without really theorizing their interrelations of differences, so a big “Range” of forms of detachment
  • aesthetic disinterestedness: free play, autotelic
    • Arnold “a stream of fresh and free thought”
  • critical reason: not the same as objectivity
    • critical reason: “subjects custom and habit to reflexive interrogation”
    • objectivity: “seeks to identify empirically verifiable facts and laws, relying on a more fundamental conception of the objective status of the external world.”
• Arnold has more to offer us than we’ve thought: instead of the Arnold who is scientific and deterministic, see an Arnold with many tools (see above) including cosmo, gives us detachment “as a practice of the self” a la Foucault that unfortunately “fetishizes” the individual (forgetting social and communal)...but that will be fixed in Daniel Deronda
• Deronda: balances “cultural partiality” with a critical distance, so he’s not actually a mystic nationalist, but rather

Wilde

• Detachment thus unsurprisingly not just about realism: she sees Wilde as having critical detachment, and remember how anti-realist Wilde was
• Epigram as detachment: the decontextualized comment pulls pack from the text to comment on a “prior response”
• Dandyism also as a pulled-back person, “participant spectators” rather than fully “embedded”
  • Dandies USE detachment for self-actualization: “rebellion” so can only “Gesture towards a frictionless area of freedom” 59 so “he cannot transvalue”
  • Yet they also do more than that: dandy as the critic, who fosters demythologizing and a rejection of repressive social structures created by habit and order, so that his “self-consciousness” prevents him from ONLY being free-floating via the local, pragmatic, ethical moments of “dandiacal action” requiring focus, energy, a “Reading” of the situation, an ethical imperative shown via the proper response in conversation
    • Why is it important? to “imagine conduct” that’s not “subordinated to rule or custom” 61 (Anderson’s phrase), that is to find what you must do (the “ought”) without “alluding to any external sanction or command” (those are Wilde’s words)
    • Although she realizes the limits of the ethical argument for dandiacal detachment, noting that his plays make the dandy often someone who can’t rise to meet the moral requirements and weight of a situation, “the ethical limits of detachment” 73 “negative and reactive” primarily
      • Instead we find that the appropriateness of the dandy’s epigrammatic style is context-dependent and out of a good context it looks … awkward
      • Thus Wilde doesn’t have complete “insouciance” with detachment that people attribute to him 75
• What Anderson shows for me through her analysis of detachment is that very different things can be done with it: objectivity or anti-objectivity, realism or anti-realism, prescription or play

Thesis

• Detachment is a form of intervention
• Anderson warns about scholars who say that most people just blindly go along regimes of power and are continuous with it, along with an exception, “one or two privileged and anomalous figures who are granted deeper insight into the workings of power, and who seem not simply to instantiate modern power, but to manipulate if not inaugurate it” 42
  • How? “agency and critical reflects are insufficiently or confusedly theorized” 44
  • She wants to avoid both figures: the unreflective figure or the “aggrandized agent” 53
• Villette has many forms of detachment, like feminine modesty, medical discourse, surveillance, and shows both why such detachment is tempting and why it can be dangerous…so that detachment isn’t “permanently alienating”