A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain. - book reviews

There is underway a refreshing revision of Victorian literary and cultural studies. This is evidenced by two books in particular, published since the late autumn of 1992. The two, Child-Loving and A Community of One, by James R. Kincaid and Martin A. Danahay, respectively, offer significant contributions to nineteenth-century scholarship in their differing fields. Although the diversity, of both subject matter and approach, can only be warmly praised and unequivocally welcomed, in certain cases the arguments may well elicit knee-jerk responses Indeed, with regard to Kincaid's book, this has already been the case in Great Britain, and not confined to academic circles. Still, if we come to these books with the open minds and the flexibility of thought they require, we will be rewarded by freshness without modish fashionability, theoretical sophistication, subtlety of reading, and complexity of conceptualization.

It is always a pleasant surprise to acquire new knowledge. It is equally a surprise, though not necessarily a pleasant one, to have one's beliefs, views, and dogmas challenged in ways that, if one is honest, force one to re-evaluate one's own position. To find that one's knowledge is merely a kind of cultural "knowingness," a form of received and critically unchallenged social wisdom that is used to contain society in its current form, can be a shock. The shock to a particular world-view can be such that one might not wish to read, but, instead, have that which offends banned, censored.

James Kincaid's Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture has already evinced such a response, from one British reviewer, the critic John Carey, in the national newspaper, The Sunday Times. Carey's review provides the most obvious of responses to Kincaid's book. It veers between ad hominem diatribe and thinly veiled accusations that Kincaid was suggesting we all undress little children and enjoy them at our own leisure. Yes, the book does deal with the uncomfortable subject of pedophilia and the cultural construction of pedophiles as monsters in our society, as distinct from other more "hidden" forms of child abuse, as though identifying the pedophile meant letting the child abuser in the home off the hook. But Kincaid's position, pace John Carey, is not the same as advocating pedophilia as a "socially acceptable" practice. Carey's review does not seem so much to get steamed up about, although it does typify, both in the Britain and the United States, a certain formal response to a socially sensitive subject, to which conservative critics on both sides of the Atlantic overreact. The veneer of reasoned thinking on which "quality journalism" relies (as distinct from the more obvious excesses of its "yellow" cousin), whether in British newspapers such as the London Times, or The New York Times or The New York Review of Books, soon becomes peeled off at a moment of ideological tenderness (if you recall the "furore" over Paul de Man and, by extension "deconstruction" in American popular criticism, you should have a sense of what I am describing). What is particularly wrong about overreaction, whatever its ideological positioning, is, as we all know from personal experience, the plain wrong-headedness of the reviewer. Carey's review, as the example of this, gave one the sense that he just had not read the book carefully enough, so incensed had he become by certain phrases and terms in the introduction. In Britain at the time of Child-Loving's initial publication the negative response went further, bringing about rabid responses in certain areas of tabloid journalism (of the kind thankfully absent in the United States), which demanded that the department of the Police force responsible for inquiries into matters relating to vice be called in to investigate, while a Conservative politician allegedly raised the question of the book's propriety in the House of Commons. Kincaid, a Trollope scholar, will no doubt have appreciated the narrative ironies in all this.

But what of Child-Loving itself? The title is ambiguous enough to provide a minor irritant. And it is precisely this kind of ambiguity that Kincaid teases out so successfully in his pyrotechnic prose and inworming analyses. In order to understand the book, we need to take it as having two principal narrative trajectories, both caught up inextricably with the other, informing the other and pushing, through this mode of exegesis, at the safety of critical compartmentalization. The trajectories in question deal with the Victorians and ourselves, things becoming complicated when Kincaid opens to our view what we often think we mean when we use the term "Victorian."

Kincaid begins with the confidently asserted quasi-Foucauldian position that the figure of the "child" as we know it, as constructed from a range of cultural discourses and practices that determined and contained its "childness," did not come into distinct being until the nineteenth century, as part of the general economic and philosophical thrust of the times. Kincaid examines the ways in which the child qua child (and not little adult) was mediated through a range of purifying images and symbols. The child was inscribed by the Victorians with innocence, asexuality, and the invisible, yet perceptible buds of the novitiate angel's wings.

At the same time, however, the "child" became the site of increasingly intense fantasy interest of a more ambivalent nature. This simultaneity is developed by Kincaid as being not merely a matter of felicitous synchronicity, but as a wholly concomitant psychic expression of the other side of angelic perception. The fantasy, argues Kincaid, was one born out of obsessions, desires, and an erotic flaneurism (voyeurism within a consumerist context) that constructs the child as both innocent and erotic, thereby justifying continued interest in "the child." Kincaid suggests that such discursive activity was part of the mythopoetics of Victorian culture and, although this may seem strange to us, was an ongoing activity of (nearly) everyday life. He turns, in support of this argument, to readings that effect the estrangement of the most obvious of texts of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, of Little Nell, various extracts from Oscar Wilde, as well as a whole host of minor poetry and fiction, as well as contemporary sociological/philosophical/psychological commentary on children. This, it would all seem, is to be expected, and we had all had various doubts about Lewis Carroll for a long time now. Kincaid seems to be pursuing the standard Californian (fault) line of New Historicism: reread the well-known, support it with contemporary documentary evidence and draw some interesting conclusions that, in cases other than Kincaid's, are interesting, if hardly earth-shaking: a 3.0 on the critical Richter scale.

Were this all, Child-Loving would hardly seem worth attention. Certainly, there would be nothing to outrage the dull liberal-right. This after all is what we have come to expect from a certain school of critical practice. Were this all, the Victorians would have been duly reinterpreted in yet another area, and "we" could feel justified, as though "we" had come to grips in a safely depoliticized fashion with one more aspect of those strange ancestors of ours.

This is far from all, however. Quite brilliantly, and often outrageously, Kincaid, exploits New Historicism - and our expectations of it, implicitly deconstructing many of its premises, showing himself to be a far more faithful and, therefore, far more wayward and dangerous reader of Foucault than the genealogy-by-numbers approach to criticism. For Kincaid turns his analysis, again and again, on his readers. In arguing that "pedophile" and "child" are roles "necessary to our psychic and cultural life" (5), the author turns on "us" (and himself) by explaining the raison d'etre for his insistence on the use of "we" throughout the text, thereby gathering "us" all up together in the arguments and premises of the book. This practice, he readily admits, makes some people annoyed; but as he also points out (5-10), the annoyance may well be a reaction as part of a refusal to examine our own culpability in the construction of monsters. Kincaid accuses us repeatedly of being other Victorians in our double standards toward children and our attitude toward the pedophile. Pertinently, stingingly, Kincaid unpacks the ways in which our culture focuses pathologically on child-abuse, turning it into the spectacle by which we would otherwise be horrified, while the media and advertising only promote erotic attention. Drawing on court cases such as that of Raymond Buckey (who came to trial in Los Angeles in 1983, following alleged incidents at a nursery school), Kincaid shows how even legal discourse and the laws themselves cannot but help eroticize, demonize, and generally abuse those very "innocents" they are seeking to protect as the very condition of their activities. And what are we, not the "molesters" but we, doing to children "year after year, [making them] play parts in this wretched cultural narrative? I wonder what we do to ourselves" (356).

Kincaid says, tellingly, that we are indulging in "gothic-style narratives, fashioning an Outsider as monster and thus protecting us from the more knowing shadow-stories of incest and the seduction of children by those who are loved and trusted" (356). This is standard cultural practice, regardless of the particular center of attention; substitute Communists, homosexuals, blacks, women, Paul de Man, or rock and roll for pedophilia and the pedophile at any moment in history and you will see what I mean. Once we comprehend the nature of our cultural practices, we are on the way to seeing that there is another tale to tell, in Kincaid's own words, where the "villain roles" should not be assigned to individuals.

This, it seems to me, is where we have a chance to substitute knowledge for knowingness: in those moments of Kincaid's cultural materialist deconstruction where "we" - and I include both you and me in this - might feel most ill at ease, forced into responding to Kincaid with dismissive sounds, in order to delegitimize his argument, while centering ourselves and making our world "safe." And it is this chance, offered through the later pages of Child-Loving, that shows the complex brilliance of the book. For as we move toward its end, we are recalled to its introduction, at least if we have been reading carefully.

Careful reading and complexity of thought are also in evidence in Danahay's impressive study of masculine autobiography, A Community of One. As Kincaid unpacks the categories of the pedophile and child through the thesis that our modern concept of the "child" first appears during the last century, so Danahay examines the philosophical and cultural premises of the autobiographical mode, arguing that it is a category approximately two hundred years old. Drawing carefully on Mikhail Bakhtin and, to a lesser extent, Pierre Bourdieu, Danahay reads across the nineteenth century, from Wordsworth's The Prelude, through Ruskin, Tennyson, Mill, Gosse, and Arnold, to a final chapter on Virginia Woolf. The last may seem an odd choice in a work focusing on masculine autobiography, but Danahay's choice is justified throughout by his understanding of feminist theory and his application of certain areas of that theory in order to reveal the blindspots of the autobiographical mode. His combination of theoretical premises offers a fresh approach to a familiar subject and also avoids any possible falls into depoliticization.

Wordsworth's Prelude certainly offers a fascinating point of departure. Danahay always asks, at least implicitly, that we dismantle the category "Autobiography" in order that we understand it less as a genre, which, from a Bakhtinian viewpoint, he finds suspect, and more as a form of conceptualization peculiar to nineteenth-century culture arising concomitantly with the increasing commodification of society, the division of labor along both gender- and class-oriented lines, Victorian concepts of individualism, and nostalgic yearning on the part of pseudo-radicals for the idea of community. This last desire, argues Danahay, arises out of the paradox inscribed in the masculine autobiographical effort, a paradox centered on solipsistic autonomy implicit in the autobiographical mode and the imminent, socially threatening anarchy presented by the same autonomous individualism.

The writing of masculine autobiography in the nineteenth century, Danahay argues, requires that a writer comprehend the masculine self as an autonomous, creative figure. This self-understanding is effected through the tripartite suppression of the domestic, the feminine, and the social. Yet, of all three figures, the feminine is always there in masculine autobiography, surviving as the other exploited by the male writer for his own productions. The female, in the form of wives and servants, homemakers and employees, is invisible in masculine autobiography, but provides necessary support in order that the male writer can write in the seclusion and peace of his study. Where women do appear - Harriet Taylor for Mill, Dorothy for Wordsworth - they appear only as something to be consumed and subsumed in the generation of the masculine self. This, points out Danahay, is the economic and psychic necessity of autonomy which becomes a form of Bakhtinian monologism.

Danahay is very good at presenting the fundamentals of Bakhtin, in such a way as to aid comprehension and the process of reading Victorian autobiography, without ever intruding the theory in the reader's way. He is also a subtle enough reader that he can distinguish between types of autobiographical mode. For example, Arnold, he contends, is not essentially a monologic writer; that is to say, Arnold focuses not solely on himself at the expense of everyone else, but attempts to create a dialogic form by comprehending the self through its relationship to society (ch. 6, 171-203). Yet, as Danahay reminds us, the discourse of the individual is such that Arnold's efforts at a socially responsible form are problematic at best and ineffective at worst. This is so because of Arnold's - and other Victorians' - misconception of the problematics of selfhood in terms of a simple binarism, of inner self versus outer self. Arnold, like Carlyle and Mill tried to follow an "explicit program of antiself-consciousness; that is they deliberately tried to repress the self in favor of what they saw as wider social claims on the individual" (19). As Danahay makes clear so patiently through a succinct and lucid reading of Ferdinand Tonnies (20-26), the problem here is the focus itself. Victorian subjectivity demanded a constant acknowledgement of the singularity of selfhood, so that to draw the distinction between inner and outer is still to give undue primacy to individuality as such.

Hence the fundamentally solitary nature of masculine self-writing. In contrast to the onanistic practices of male, middle-class writers, Danahay offers us a much-needed glimpse of both women and the working classes writing themselves. In "stark contrast" to male self-inscription, we are provided with Margaret Oliphant, who does not even have a room of her own, but writes at the corner of the family table. When she does have a "solitary space in which to write," she feels guilty about this (7). Danahay supports his contrast between Oliphant and the men with a brief reading of George Mockford, a working-class Methodist (8). In doing so he foregrounds the divisions set up by both gender and class, while also showing affinities, through the crisis of faith, between men of different class due to their gender, from which women are once again excluded.

Danahay's argument and reasoning are clearly presented and logically followed through. His prose is a delight to read because it does not make the error of substituting the complications of tortuous grammar for the complexities of subtle thought. His sources are carefully engaged with and thoroughly worked through, carefully reflected on. And his closure with Woolf is no mere pat, "feminism-by-numbers" corrective to the myopia of nineteenth-century males. Importantly, the author explores Woolf's inherited problem concerning the practice of autobiography, which focuses her own political blindspots. In ending with WooIf, Danahay recalls the issues that affect autobiography and have been read throughout. In doing so, he points to the powerful hold on our imaginations that the image of the author as solitary figure has: "Artistic production is imagined as involving a withdrawal from the social to the private and subjective" (212). Thus, in conclusion, Danahay comes to a point of opening out, of broadening the discussion, where he argues (as strongly as did Kincaid at the end of his work with regard to social imagining) that autobiography is merely one form produced out of two hundred years of a particular ideology of the individual. As the problematic image of Virginia Woolf should make clear, we need not change the terms of the argument to paraphrase Danahay, but the social practice.

Julian Wolfreys University of Dundee

Julian Wolfreys is senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Dundee, Scotland. He is the author of Being English: Narratives, Idioms, and Performances of National Identity from Coleridge to Trollope (1994), The Rhetoric of Affirmative Resistance: Reading, Representation, Dissonance in Modernist and Postmodernist Texts (1997), and Writing the City: Imagining London in the Nineteenth Century (1997). He is currently working on a book-length project on Victorian pastiche in novels and films of the 1980s.

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