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Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
Nancy Armstrong 1987

Method

• Doesn’t Basic want tenent: “separate see histories” the for cultural and political spheres power within leisure, the body, courtship, desire, pleasure, gender, the family, the home
  • Won’t give us a history of rise of middle class according to economic changes
  • She says the rise of the middle class was “accomplished largely through cultural hegemony” 9
    • I’m not agreeing with her here: she justifies her explanation by damning the “compulsory” division between private and public that we silly people that we are accept from our teachers. But I think that once you take out that division you can’t make any concrete claims about causation. If they aren’t divided, then they’re all in the same swamp, not one causing another. Once you give up the separation of spheres, you can’t claim causality. Plus, she acts like the “middle class” isn’t first and foremost an economic institution.
• Studies Doesn’t conduct want “separate histories” for cultural and etiquette political books, spheres domestic fiction: doesn’t make distinction between literary and non-literary b/c that wasn’t a relevant distinction back then, she claims
  • Can’t understand politics without understanding history of women (in this case, history of domestic fiction w/its representation of female ideal)
  • Recognized that the separation of public and private was itself an historical product (for example, the novel itself “began to deny the political basis for its meaning” 21 and tried to pawn itself off as moral, psychological truth: eventually turning what is political into the sexual, thus “helping to usher in a new from of state power”)
    • Won’t give us a history of rise of middle class according to economic changes
  • She says the rise of the middle class was “accomplished largely through cultural hegemony” 9
    • Because fiction was leisure-time activity, it mediated struggle between upper classes and working class 16: literacy tames the potential revolutionaries, education takes away the time they’d have had to organize (that is, it disciplines leisure, part of middle-class war against traditional forms of leisure that they found destructive or pro-revolutionary, ie carnival drinking sports)
      • Stigma of novel gradually removed over 18th century, thus helping new definition of the self get disseminated, esp by discouraging “long-standing symbolic practices—especially those games, festivities, and other material practices of the body that maintained a sense of collective identity” 18 (I’m thinking of the dances Hardy shows in the country)
    • I’m not agreeing with her here: she justifies her explanation by damning the “compulsory” division between private and public that we silly people that we are accept from our teachers. But I think that once you take out that division you can’t make any concrete claims about causation. If they aren’t divided, then they’re all in the same swamp, not one causing another. Once you give up the separation of spheres, you can’t claim causality. Plus, she acts like the “middle class” isn’t first and foremost an economic institution.
• Unlike Studies critics conduct like Ian Watt, doesn’t seen women writers and women etiquette books (such as content Robert as and inherently Maria different Edgeworth’s from texts about male public institutionsPractical Education 1801), domestic fiction: doesn’t make distinction between literary and non-literary b/c that wasn’t a relevant distinction back then, she claims
• Unlike Forebears Gilbert and Guber, wants to pay more attention to historical contexts (not just assuming that women always react the same way against the same kind of patriarchy)
  • Unlike critics like Ian Watt, doesn’t see women writers and women as content as inherently different from texts about male public institutions
  • Unlike Gilbert and Guber, wants to pay more attention to historical contexts (not just assuming that women always react the same way against the same kind of patriarchy)
    • (Armstrong’s belief: gendered difference in the novel begins as an alternative to the former regime of defining the individual through “kinship relations” 14: instead of a system of kinship determining individual and the state, we have a private versus public, male versus female situation that is newly invented, what she calls “the gendering of human identity”)
  • To solve it, imports Foucault (how 1987!): desire depends on writing, not prior to it; so we can’t take sexuality (sexual difference) for granted but see it as something that had to develop in society…and it did so through its prior development within the novel (F: discourse of repression merely creates a different kind of sexuality: displaces, not destroys; and it also gives you an excuse to “read” the erotics back into it)
    • That’s cool, except maybe she takes it too far when she says that all of this writing about the individual is what CREATED that individual (how the hell could you possibly prove it? how do you know what “real” people were like?)
• Doesn’t want to take for granted the separation of public and private, male and female, but sees this separation as being developed during history of novel, not as a given that already happened
  • Gender does not “transcend history” 8 but instead has a history

Domestic Woman

• What? A construct of the novel that develops during late 18th century that reflects ideological struggle (rise of middle class) and that will become a social reality (not just textual figure) by 1840s
  • It’s a genre (“the domestic novel”) that described types of individuals that didn’t yet exist
  • The novel form “antedated” (preceded) the social form it represented 9
• When? near end of 18th century and fully developed by mid-19th c
• What’s the problem? why at beginning of “modern culture,” the English became obsessed with writing “for, about, and by woman” 7
  • why women become importance producers of texts
• Have “new form of political power” 3 so rise of domestic woman is “major event in political history”
  • “dominance over all those objects and practices we associate with private life”
  • including leisure, courtship, kinship, household habits, thus giving her power over “human identity”
• Significance of women:
  • “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman” 8 esp because the modern individual is now seen as “an economic and psychological reality”
  • Because you can’t separate the rise of the middle class from the rise of the novel from the creation of the modern desirable woman (the domestic woman): they are all interrelated
    • The rise of the middle class depended on the construction and “dissemination” of the domestic woman ideal
• What is she like?
  • Not desirable b/c of family name or size of dowry: which had been the dominant shape of desire before the domestic woman (belongs to aristocrat-run England, not middle-class-run England)
  • Not the same thing as working-class culture, which people are seen to need to be rescued from
• I Bet It’s Gonna Be Revolutionary
  • “At the site of the household, family life, and all that was hallowed as female, this gendered field of information contested a dominant political order which depended, among other things, on representing women as economic and political objects.” 15
    • So it’s an alternative political order, eh?
  • Yet she says “I do not mean to appropriate a form of resistance” because she recognizes that this female power was really just a means to solidify the power of the middle class (the woman as mother, teacher, nurse etc just as powerful for middle class hegemony as banker, lawyer, etc).
    • She recognizes that “liberal discourse” is one in which gender and class “collaborate” for the sake of middle class dominance
  • As feminism: She confronts the problem of feminists who want to see women as having power but realizing that they must be complicit in some terrible stuff (imperialism, poverty, genocide): she says women have power and that they were complicit: that’s the side she takes (I’m not powerless, and I realize I must accept my complicity.)

Modern Form of Desire

• New form of desire transcends regionalism, religion, and other parochialisms
  • Supposed to be universally desirable: “unfolded the operations of human desire as if they were independent of political history” 9 which was an illusion of course: it coded itself as apolitical but that was a clever mask
• ie, changing what’s “desirable” in a woman: instead of the aristocratic woman, it’s the domestic woman that you want
  • The rise of the novel itself is intertwined in this development: it “hinged upon a struggle to say what made a woman desirable” (5)
  • Instead of class or status, it’s her behavior, which evidences her character
  • At first, it was just about women, but later it was extended to men (19th century, men finally seen as players in domestic field)
    • Examples of men: whereas Sterne’s heroes if they left their political identity it was “anomalous,” by the time the Brontes come along, they have their heroes change accg to growing domesticity: Rochester loses his aristocratic attachments while Heathcliff loses his Gypsy association, both being replaced by domestic identities (ie relationship w/woman)
    • We have a process of “social differences” being subordinated to “gender differences”
• Why does it matter?
  • Questions about what a good woman is reflect power struggles: “competing ideologies” produce the Female
  • Authority of the middle class depended on the sentiments and values that were elucidated by these novels in the form of desirable women
    • Wrenching identity away from social class allows the middle class to seize power: if you say it’s about the individual behavior, well then, we can have power, not just the aristocracy
    • Makes the political psychological: “to attach psychological motives to what had been the openly political behavior of contending groups” 5
  • Changing role of individual: not valued as example of his/her class, but instead as the endowments of the person’s “mind”
  • Because of this change, it seemed apolitical (politics generally associated with that class structure)
  • Because this change “occurred on a mass basis” 6 and “revised the entire surface of social life”
    • Pamela: the unwillingness of a servant girl to yield to her master’s lust shows that we have a shift from the primacy of social relations (I am above you; yield to me) to the primacy of virtue and behavior (it is the story of Pamela’s resistance, and how this virtuousness in the end gives her the reward of being the wife): male sexual aggression is turned into middle-class marital love