More on “The Octoroon”

I didn’t think this novel would be useful, but actually, I’ve just come up with some interesting connections between The Octoroon and Lady Audley’s Secret.

To begin with, here’s Nella Larsen in Passing (wrong century, I know, but still a helpful quote):

Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro? Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for all they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. (16)

This is a perfect articulation of what I was reacting to in my summary of The Octoroon–you can’t tell by looking that someone has that proverbial “one-drop-of-African-blood”!!! But of course, white people’s perspectives in 1861 were quite different than they are now. Mortimer Percy is able to discover, on page 4 of the novel, that Cora Leslie is a slave.

“A slave?” exclaimed Gilbert.

“Yes. The African blood runs in those purple veins. The hereditary curse of slavery hovers over that graceful and queen-like head.”

“But her skin is fairer than the lily.”

“What of that? Had you been a planter, Gilbert, you would have been able to discover, as I did, when just now I stood close to that lovely girl, the fatal signs of her birth. At the extreme corner of the eye, and at the root of the finger nails, the South American can always discover the trace of slavery, though but one drop of the blood of the despised race tainted the object upon whom he looked.” (4)

In Braddon’s novels, there’s a lot that a man can tell about a woman just from looking. Or at least, there’s a lot he thinks he can tell. This moment of recognition in The Octoroon–this moment of a man looking critically at the female body and discerning a secret–happens also at two key points in Lady Audley’s Secret. When George Talboys and Robert Audley look at Lady Audley’s portrait, they think they can interpret it just as accurately as Mortimer Percy interprets Cora Leslie. But even more similarly, the mad doctor who looks at Lady Audley also thinks he can see the one drop of blood, the hereditary taint of insanity–again, just by looking. This connection strengthens the strain of scholarship that sees Lady Audley as a victim of the male gaze, since she gets treated the same way as an American slave (and again, although The Octoroon engages plenty of offensive stereotypes, it’s clear that Braddon was anti-slavery). In both of these cases, the female body becomes a problem to be solved, or a mystery to be detected. This is strikingly apparent in The Octoroon, since the entire novel devotes its gaze to Cora Leslie and whether she does or does not look like a slave… but Paul Lisimon is in exactly the same situation she is, and nobody cares or even notices that he’s an octoroon. This process gets complicated a lot more in Lady Audley’s Secret, as it’s sometimes unclear who is mad–Robert or Lady Audley. And of course, the mad doctor initially thinks he might be there to diagnose Robert. Anyway, these are interesting connections, so perhaps The Octoroon will make it into my dissertation….?

“The Octoroon: Or, the Lily of Louisiana,” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

This was a fascinating novel to read, although I don’t think it will factor into my dissertation at all. I just really wanted to read a British anti-slavery novel, since I’ve never read one before. It was pretty much what I expected: slavery is bad, and the British can’t understand why barbaric Americans are barbaric. The “barbaric American” part is pretty accurate, and certainly in line with American anti-slavery novels, but…. good thing the British never engaged in barbaric acts of oppression against people of other nationalities. In other words, it seems like British anti-slavery novel = pro-British-nationalism novel. Not surprising. The Octoroon makes so many references to how everyone in England is free that I’d love to see what would happen if The Octoroon met Mary Barton or North and South. Very fascinating, nonetheless.

Here is a character list:

Cora Leslie (aka “the OCTOROON!!!”): Daughter of Louisiana plantation owner Gerald Leslie and Francilia, his quadroon slave. Gerald takes Cora from her mother when she is about 5 and sends her to England for her education. She looks white and is raised as a white woman in England (where everyone’s free, so it doesn’t matter anyway). As the novel opens, she finds out that her father is on the verge of financial ruin, and she insists on going home to Louisiana with her friend Adelaide and Adelaide’s family, to comfort her father. Of course, as soon as she hits southern soil, she’s a slave, and everyone seems to know her history except for her. Her father’s mulatto slave, Toby, finally tells her the truth, and when her father’s estate is foreclosed upon, she is seized and sold to Augustus Horton, a super-racist plantation owner (“super-racist plantation owner” = redundant) who wants to make her his mistress. Her British lover, Gilbert Margrave, tries to buy her, but Augustus outbids him. Then he steals her and marries her. They live happily ever after in the wonderful land of England, where everyone is free and happy (believe it if you can).

Gilbert Margrave: Obscenely perfect British guy who is so British that he just can’t seem to wrap his head around the concept of slavery. (The British have no experience with such things, after all). In fact, he’s invented some machinery that will supersede slave labor. Technology is the answer to slavery…. He’s a poet, a painter, and a super-rich speculator, and he falls in love with Cora Leslie at first sight. His friend, Mortimer Percy, tells him that she’s clearly a daughter of the “accursed race of Africa,” but that only makes him love her more (he’s the knight-in-shining-armor type). He follows her to Louisiana and defends her honor against Augustus Horton, who insults her repeatedly. They fight a duel and Augustus wounds Gilbert, but Cora nurses him back to health. After she is seized as a slave, Gilbert tries to buy her for $20,000, but Augustus outbids him (for $50,000). Then Gilbert and Gerald Leslie organize a rescue operation and steal Cora back from Augustus. True to his word, Gilbert marries Cora and takes her back to merry old England.

Mortimer Percy: He’s a plantation owner who’s engaged to his cousin, Adelaide Horton (Augustus Horton’s sister). He’s not romantic, and not really in love with Adelaide, which is not a problem at first, since Adelaide’s in love with Gilbert. He’s also one of those frustrating characters in white anti-slavery novels: he’s a “good” slave owner, who doesn’t beat his slaves or work them too hard. In fact, when he hears that Gerald Leslie was wounded in a slave rebellion, he responds, “when dogs are too violently beaten, they are apt to bite” (11). See? Slavery can work as long as everyone is nice to each other–or maybe it’s still really wrong…. These are the vacillations of this novel…. As Mortimer explains Mr. Leslie’s dilemma to Cora, he says: “the planter finds himself between the horns of a terrible dilemma; he must either beat his slaves or suffer from their laziness. [yes, poor plantation owner! see how much slavery makes him suffer!] Mr. Leslie is not considered too indulgent a master; but he only follows the example of the greater number of our colonists. However, it is not he, but his overseer who was the chief cause of this revolt” (11). So… this character is odd. He’s also an embodiment of that myth that white people could tell immediately, just by looking, whether someone has even a drop of African blood. He discerns Cora’s entire history just by looking at her finger nails. Whaaaat?! Anyway, he stands up for Cora repeatedly, and he breaks off his engagement with Adelaide when she acts too racist, so he’s meant to be portrayed as a good guy. He ends up marrying Adelaide when she ultimately proves that she’s not super-racist, by hiding the escaped Cora and Gilbert from her brother.

Adelaide Horton: She and Cora have been best friends all through school. She abandons Cora as soon as she learns of her heritage, but it turns out that it wasn’t really from prejudice… it was from jealousy, since she loves Gilbert Margrave, who loves Cora. A fit of jealousy leads her to denounce Cora in front of a boatload of passengers and make her move to the back of the boat because of her single drop of African blood (what is the 19th century’s obsession with this “single drop” of African blood? THAT’S NOT HOW BLOOD WORKS!!!). Mortimer Percy, who basically spends the entire novel keeping tabs on the finer points of Adelaide’s racial sympathies (you know, in all the free time he has while his slaves are picking his cotton) eventually breaks off the engagement (although, strangely, it’s more because of Augustus’s reprehensible behavior than Adelaide’s). Adelaide saves the day at the end of the novel and proves herself not-a-racist by taking her brother up on a promise to transfer ownership of Cora from himself to Adelaide (he means to make her a lady’s maid in return for her running away). As Cora’s lawful owner, Adelaide transfers ownership from herself to Gilbert, who sets Cora free. She also hides the lovers in her bedroom, right under Augustus’s nose. When Mortimer finds out about this, he falls in love with Adelaide (or realizes that he always loved her?) and they get married.

Gerald Leslie: Cora’s father and the owner of a big plantation and lots of slaves. He fell in love with Francilia, a quadroon slave, and Cora’s mother. Although Francilia was in love with another slave, Toby, Gerald made her his mistress (he thought his own wife was a bitch, and she didn’t have any kids, so it was okay, right?). Francilia was super-depressed about being Gerald’s mistress, but things started looking up when Cora came along. But Gerald loved Francilia, and he loved Cora, too. And the thought he should do the right thing and take Cora away from her mother and send her off to be educated in England. So that’s what he did. And Francilia was super-depressed again, and he couldn’t stand to look at her sad face making everything all sad, so he sold her. To Silas Craig. Silas figured he could sleep with her pretty easily, but she wouldn’t consent, so he decided to rape her, but she killed herself. Cora begs Toby to tell her this story, and she denounces her father after she hears it. Then she goes an visits her mother’s grave (which Toby made) and forgives her father. But he’s still in financial ruin because Silas Craig cheated his partner, Philip Treverton, out of $100,000. So he loses his estate, his slaves, and his daughter (who is technically a slave) until Silas Craig is proven to be a usurer. Then he gets everything back and moves to England with his daughter and Gilbert. Good thing it all worked out for him. Blerg.

Silas Craig: He’s a lawyer and a usuer. Among his many illegal maneuvers, he owns a gambling house that everyone seems to patronize, but that everyone also seems to hate themselves for patronizing. He’s got several scams going in this novel. One of the big ones relates to Gerald Leslie and his partner, Philip Treverton. When Gerald Leslie heads to England to visit his daughter, he leaves Philip Treverton with $100,000 to pay Silas Craig back for a loan. Treverton pays Craig the money, but then Craig conspires to have Treverton killed, and when Leslie comes back, he is told that the money has not been paid. So he goes bankrupt. At the last minute, one of Craig’s henchmen, William Bowen, reveals the plot, since he’s mad that Craig stopped giving him blackmail money. (Also, William Bowen didn’t actually kill Philip Treverton. He nursed him back to health, and then Treverton became a gold-digger in California. He shows up just in time to denounce Silas). The other big scam relates to Don Juan Moraquitos and the forged will of his brother-in-law, Tomaso Crivelli. Tomaso Crivelli leaves all his money to his son, Paul Crivelli (aka Paul Lisimon). But with Silas Craig’s help, Don Juan kills Tomaso (who is already on his deathbed), forges a new will that leaves everything to himself, and tells Paul that Tomaso is not really his father. Don Juan’s daughter’s governess, Pauline Corsi, overhears this entire transaction, and eventually reveals it, blackmailing Silas Craig to send the real will to Paul. After these scams are revealed, Silas Craig leaves town in disgrace, lest he be subject to the Lynch Law.

Don Juan Moraquitos: He’s Camillia’s father, Tomaso Crivelli’s brother-in-law, and Paul Lisimon’s ward. He’s super-rich, and not a very nice guy, except to his daughter, whom he loves. He seems to treat Paul well, having him articled to become a lawyer (although he has him articled to Silas Craig), but in reality he has stolen his inheritance through a forged will. Other than Silas Craig, the only other person who knows about this is Pauline Corsi, his daughter’s French governess. After sitting on the secret for 13 years, Pauline eventually decides to blackmail Don Juan with it, and tells him to marry her or else she will reveal the secret. He agrees, and everything seems fine. But the day before the wedding, she meets her long-lost lover, and then she has a secret meeting with Don Juan (who knows what happens?), and he kills himself shortly afterward.

Pauline Corsi: She is raised for the first 17 years of her life as the only heir of an Italian Duke. This Duke had fallen out of love with his Duchess when she had not been able to give him an heir. She and her maid finally stole a peasant child one day and raised her as the heir. But on the maid’s deathbed, she confesses to the bait-and-switch, and Pauline’s true heritage is revealed. Her parents throw her out onto the street with $3000, and she goes to America in search of the French painter they wouldn’t let her marry. He’s also looking for her, but they don’t find each other until the day before her wedding to Don Juan. He’d been out digging for gold in California with Philip Treverton. Pauline makes a few under-handed attempts at blackmail through the course of the narrative, but meeting her long-lost lover restores her to virtue and they get married and move back to France.

Paul Lisimon/Crivelli: He’s the son of Tomaso Crivelli, Don Juan’s brother-in-law. He’s actually an octoroon too, but nobody seems to care about that nearly as much as they care about Cora being an octoroon. He has always been in love with Camillia, and she is in love with him too, although her father knows nothing of their arrangement. When Augustus Horton decides he’s going to marry Camillia, he discerns that Paul is his only rival, so he decides to get him out of the way. Since Paul works for Silas Craig, Horton arranges with Craig to entrust Paul with a pile of money and the key to his office, and to then accuse Paul of stealing the money. This works out okay, and Paul goes to jail. But he gets broken out by some sailor friends of his father’s, and he heads off to be a pirate with them for awhile. He eventually comes back just in time to rescue Camillia from losing her reputation at the hands of Augustus Horton, who has kidnapped her on the pretense of taking her to see her suddenly-sick father. Eventually, Pauline Corsi blackmails Silas Craig to publish a retraction to his accusation of theft against Paul, and to send Paul his father’s real will. Paul and Camillia eventually get married, after waiting a respectful amount of time for her to grieve for her dead father.

Theater in “The Black Band; Or, The Mysteries of Midnight”

One of the main reasons I read this book was due to an article about three of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “theater novels,” The Black Band, Only a Clod, and The Cloven Foot. The article observed that it was strange that theatrical adaptations of these theater novels didn’t include any of the theatrical elements of the novels. You’d think that theatrical adaptors would have a heyday with novelistic actresses, actors, and playwrights, right? Nope. The article argues that since the class position of people associated with the theater was so delicate, and since playwrights and actor-managers were keen to see their class positions gain more clout, they effaced all references to the theater, even if they were positive. While novels could portray theater workers completely sympathetically as middle-class workers, theatrical professionals themselves didn’t want to foreground their own labor.

This is a great argument, and based on what I’ve read so far, I completely agree with it. Moving in a different direction, the thing that interest me most about theater in The Black Band is the echoes of Hamlet I’m seeing (or trying to see?). I’m interested in tracing Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s use of Hamlet in Lady Audley’s Secret, and I feel like there’s a lot to be said about The Black Band as well. Here, I’ll just try to trace some broad parallels.

First of all, the most obvious connection: Antony Verner is a tragedian who routinely plays Hamlet. And just like Robert Audley (the other Hamlet I’m identifying), he’s an amateur detective figure who falls in love with a girl named Clara (wow, Mary Elizabeth Braddon repeats names A LOT). Here’s my favorite quotation: “‘I dare not stop a moment longer to investigate this matter now,’ he added, looking at his watch, ‘or they will have to perform the tragedy of Hamlet with the part of ‘Hamlet’ omitted; but the first thing tomorrow morning, we will have the boxes cleared away and open this door, even though it should lead to some haunted chamber and I have to encounter the ghost single-handed” (274).

This brings us to the murderous brothers, which is a part that’s definitely missing from Lady Audley’s Secret. While Antony Verner is not investigating his own family, he’s still investigating the usurpation of one brother by the other. Frederick Beaumorris (Claudius) steals the inheritance of his brother, Jasper Melville/Arthur Beaumorris (Hamlet Sr.), and later tries to kill him via (what else?) poison. This fraternal usurpation is doubled in the Willoughby household, as Lionel usurps his brother’s title.

This gets me wondering about the use of play-acting to evaluate guilt. According to many accounts of the Victorian anti-theatrical prejudice, it seems like Hamlet’s method of trapping his uncle (in the famous Mousetrap scene) would be odious to Victorian audiences. In fact, Robert Audley doesn’t do much of this–he’s usually pretty direct with Lady Audley, as I remember. And the same goes for the aristocratic/upper-class characters in The Black Band: Robert Merton confronts Lady Edith directly, for example. However, Joshua Slythe (the word “sly” is even part of his name) definitely uses play-acting to catch criminals. This might be an interesting thing to investigate further… More later.

Nationalism in “The Black Band; Or, The Mysteries of Midnight”

I, unfortunately, do not know much about the unification of Italy or the revolutions of the 1850s and 60s. But they must have interested Braddon, since this narrative is structured around two secret societies–one in England and one in Italy. I think the contrasts between these societies are noteworthy, and I’d like to think more about the political debates they engage.

First, of all, the Black Band is an organized crime ring. Its purpose is distinctly capitalistic, and its organization is strictly hierarchical. Colonel Oscar Bertrand, as the Grand Master, is at the top, and the rest of the members commit crimes that fit their rank (for example, the Marquis of Willoughby commits political espionage, while Joshua Slythe encounters lower-class criminals who do the dirty work of breaking into houses). The Mountaineers, on the other hand, are an underground political organization, and have a slightly more egalitarian model of organization. They all refer to each other as “brothers,” for example, and five “chiefs” share the leadership function.

However, they are an all-male organization; as the Marquis de Montebello tells Lady Edith, “Nay, dearest, […] the oaths that we take are too fearful to be spoken by such lips as thine. The task we have to accomplish involves death and danger. It is not for woman even to know of our struggles, much less to share them” (543). In the context of the larger novel, this is actually a pretty funny moment. Although the Marquis does not know this, Lady Edith knows much more about death and danger than he does (or at least as much). In fact, Braddon makes sure to include a chapter (an easily-forgotten chapter, perhaps) that credits a woman for the creation of the Black Band. Although Oscar Bertrand is the face of the Black Band for most of the novel, Rosine Rousel is actually the “accomplished trickster and cheat, who found a dupe and a tool in a young man of noble birth, and who taught him to become guilty as herself […] who guided the young officer’s hand in his first forgery […] who planned the first slender elements of that association which now overruns Europe with its depredations” (264, my italics). The Black Band was founded by a woman and continues to employ women as high-ranking criminals throughout the novel. And despite all the attention the narrative gives to Oscar Bertrand’s dark deeds, Rosine Rousel is probably the novel’s most formidable character. I mean, look at the novel’s very las lines:

We have followed the innocent and the guilty alike impartially through the intricate labyrinth of life. We have seen the innocent for a time oppressed–the guilty for a time triumphant; but we have also seen that the wondrous balance of good and evil will infallibly adjust itself in the end; and that a dire and unlooked for vengeance will alight upon the heads of those who defy the Power which rules this marvellous universe, or laugh to scorn the just and merciful laws of an All-Wise Providence. (607)

The wondrous balance of good an evil will infallibly adjust itself in the end?! Really? Well, Oscar Bertrand certainly gets his comeuppance, as does Lady Edith. But what about Rosine Rousel–the ostensible founder of the Black Band? She gets away with a small fortune in jewels and is never heard from again. Perhaps this is a common case of a baggy novel losing one of its needles in a haystack of characters…. or perhaps this is a powerfully dangerous female character who is allowed to outsmart the narrative in exchange for her discretion. The female elements of the Black Band are definitely interesting….

Perhaps this female element is why the Black Band is less bloody than the Mountaineers. The political ideals of the Mountaineers are definitely noble, and the characters associated with the Mountaineers are generally portrayed sympathetically. But in a key scene at the Rock of Terror, where the Mountaineers turn an Austrian trap back on the Austrians, Braddon’s narrator seems to chastise their bloodlust. While “Black Carlo” of the Mountaineers glories in the severed heads of his Austrian enemies, Braddon’s narrator says:

This ignorant man naturally forgot that the murdered soldiers were innocent of the wrongs of ill-used Italy. They only did the bidding of their master, and must have sacrificed their lives had they refused to do that bidding. It is thus that the puppets often suffer for the sins of him who pulls the strings. (559)

In stark contrast, the Black Band try to avoid all “unnecessary” killing. Colonel Bertrand explains it this way:

“Do you think these hands are ever stained, directly or indirectly, with unnecessary blood? It is only your vulgar villain who wades to the accomplishment of his purpose through the horrible ways of gore and guilt. No; death is but the last fatal instrument of the accomplished criminal. I have little need to deal with the poison chalice or the knife. A word, a look, and the creature who stands in my pathway is removed for ever, to drag out life in some dim obscurity; to lose his own identity; to disappear from the ranks of his fellow kind; so that his own brother, meeting him in the street, shall pass him by with a shudder of loathing; but still to live!” (266)

This is an odd speech, since Oscar Bertrand definitely kills the first Marquis of Willoughby in a duel, and he indirectly tries to poison Robert Merton (through Lady Edith), so clearly he’s not super-committed to avoiding gore and guilt. It’s probably a convenient speech that allows Braddon to keep the heir of Clavering alive… but I think it says something interesting about the ethos of the Black Band, as opposed to the Mountaineers. This speech at least tries to construct an ethos of “civilization” that the British would probably want to associate with their self-identity (however unjustifiably). The Mountaineers, of course, are bloodthirsty Italians (at least the “brigand” contingent of their ranks…), so the narrative tries to stain their hands, at least a little, with “unnecessary” blood.

“The Black Band; Or, The Mysteries of Midnight,” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Like lots of Victorian novels, this one is huge, has lots of characters, and an intricate plot… and since I’d like to write about it, I need to keep the characters straight. Where do I even start? I just finished it last night, and I’m already forgetting people’s names…. Here goes:

Colonel Oscar Bertrand: The Grand Master of the Black Band, which is a secret society of organized crime. He’s Austrian, he’s trying to squelch the Italian rebellion, while also stealing everything from wills to wives to money from people back in merry old England. He marries Ellen Clavering, the daughter of one of his “slaves.” She has a huge fortune that nobody knows about, so when she has a son, he packs the new heir off somewhere, tells her he’s dead, and then tries to kill her too. Eventually, he messes with the wrong Italians (another secret society named the Mountaineers who are agitating for freedom) and is tricked into drinking poison that looks like wine. It turns him into an idiot and slowly and painfully eats away at his brain. He is left wandering the hills of Italy until he dies.

The Beaumorris Family:

• Frederick Beaumorris: The oldest son of a rich family. Well, his uncle was rich, at any rate, and planned to leave his wealth to Frederick’s younger brother, Arthur, rather than to Frederick, as the eldest. So, Frederick forges a new will that gives him the inheritance. From there, he moves on to a life of crime and debauchery. He seduces the daughter (Ida Cleveland) of a man he ruins and subjects her to a sham marriage. When she finds out the truth, she briefly goes mad; when she regains her reason, she flees back to England with (of course) her baby, and dies in the streets. The baby, Rose, gets found and raised by Robert Merton’s old clerk, who loves her like a grandfather. Frederick eventually tries to seduce his niece, Clara (not knowing who she is). He is foiled by Oscar Bertrand, who saves him from incest only to blackmail him to join the Black Band. (If he doesn’t, Bertrand will reveal the forgery upon which his fortune rests). Eventually, Robert Merton falls in love with Rose, finds out the secret of her unknown history, tracks down Squire Cleveland (Rose’s grandfather) and Frederick Beaumorris (Rose’s father). Cleveland challenges Beaumorris to a duel for seducing his daughter, Ida. Beaumorris puts off the duel long enough to meet Rose, whose beauty and innocence purify his heart (of course). Then, at the duel, he kills himself and leaves his fortune to Rose. Of course, Rose does the right thing and gives the entire fortune to Clara and Arthur, to whom (as she discovers) it rightfully belongs.
• Arthur Beaumorris: We meet him as Jasper Melville, a penniless gentleman who is living off of his daughter’s talent as a ballerina. He’s a broken man, but he loves his three children, and they are devoted to him. After his oldest, Clara, is kidnapped by Frederick Beaumorris (who doesn’t know he’s her uncle), he receives forged letters that make it look like Clara ran off with Frederick. He believes them, and when Clara escapes from her French prison and makes the trek back to England, she discovers that her father has disowned and abandoned her. He travels to a friend in the north, gets kidnapped by the Beaumorris forgery cover-up crew, and stashed in a madhouse. He’s in the madhouse for almost a year, gets rescued through the efforts of his daughter, via the detective Joshua Slythe, but is too weak to remember anything. Eventually he recovers, loves his daughter again, and waits around in his sickbed for the rest of the plot to work itself out.
• Clara Beumorris: We first meet her as Clara Melville, a ballerina and friend of the prima ballerina, Lolota Vizzini. Despite being a ballerina, Clara is a virtuous gal, and rebuffs the constant flirting of Frederick Beaumorris (who doesn’t know he’s her uncle–I love writing that sentence, hahaha). A stand-up gentleman named Reginald Falkner helps her rebuff this flirting, and the two fall chastely in love. But when Sir Frederick kidnaps Clara, he sends forged love letters (from Clara to Frederick) to Falkner, who, like Clara’s father, believes the forgeries and breaks up with Clara. In the meantime, another stand-up guy, Antony Verner, falls in love with Clara. He’s a tragedian, and promises to restore Clara’s missing father, and her father’s missing fortune, if Clara will marry him. Although she doesn’t love him that way, Clara agrees, because, hey, he’s a great guy. Antony pretty much does everything he promises. He gets her father back, and her father gets his fortune back, although I think Rose Cleveland should get the credit for that one. Whatever, Clara gives Antony the credit and tells him she’s ready to marry him. Of course, Antony somehow magically knows about Reginald Falkner and writes to him to say that Clara has been wrongly accused of running off with her uncle. Reginald somehow magically believes Antony (how do they know each other?!), and Antony lets her out of the deal so that she can marry Reginald. What a great guy. Braddon lets him get married to some unspecified actress at the end.

The Willoughby/Merton Clusterfuck:

• Lionel, Marquis of Willoughby: We meet him as the younger brother of the existing Marquis of Willoughby, who’s a great guy. So as the younger brother, Lionel’s not rich. But he loves a gold digger, so that’s a problem. He proposes to Lady Edith, who says she loves him, but can’t marry someone with no money. So he goes crying to his friend, Oscar Bertrand, who tells him to join the Black Band and he will get 1) his brother’s money and title, and 2) Lady Edith. Lionel joins the Black Band, and Bertrand orchestrates a situation in which Lionel brings his drunk brother to play cards with Bertrand, who cheats. The current Marquis accuses him of cheating, and since he’s drunk, challenges Bertrand to a duel. The Marquis loses, dies, and Lionel becomes the new Marquis. But he feels super guilty, and even when he eventually gets Lady Edith, he starts to hate her because she doesn’t feel guilty. As a member of the Black Band, he eventually moves to Venice with Lady Edith and becomes a secret agent in the Mountaineers, betrays them, and then feels even more guilty and flees from the Black Band and Lady Edith. He’s in love with Lolota Vizzini, so he flees to Naples with her. Braddon allows him to escape, even though these Mountaineer folks seem to think that they capture ALL the traitors (what about Lionel, guys?!). By the time he’s safe in Naples, Bertrand is already an idiot and it’s the end of the book. He spends the rest of his life married to Lolota, happily atoning for the sins of his youth.
• Lolota Vizzini: She’s a famous ballerina and a typical virtuous victim. She got married to a loser at a young age (not her fault–she had a drunk father, and this guy was the lesser of two evils). The loser is actually an Italian double agent (member of the Mountaineers, but reports their activities to the Black Band). He dies (I don’t remember how), leaving Lolota free to fall in love with Lionel. She helps Clara out a lot throughout the novel, especially by sending her money to get back to England after she escapes from the Beaumorris estate in France. During the Italy portion of the book, Lady Edith can tell that Lionel is in love with Lolota, so she vows revenge against them both. She betrays Lionel as a traitor to the Mountaineers (who he did, in fact, betray), but he escapes their single assassination attempt (wow, they give up quickly). She then sends her maid to intercept Lolota as she flees to Naples (where Lionel has arranged to meet her) and send her to a plague-stricken quarter of town. The maid (Rosine Rouel) does this, and Lolota gets a near-fatal fever. Lionel arrives just in time, finds her, and takes her to a mansion, where she is nursed back to health by nuns and world-class physicians. They live happily ever after.
• Lady Edith Merton: She rejects Lionel because he doesn’t have money. Right before he can tell her that he has become a Marquis and inherited all of his brother’s wealth, she marries Robert Merton, the merchant prince. Merton is filthy rich, but he started out poor, so he’s a totally great guy. Oscar Bertrand has already agreed to get Edith for Lionel, so he visits Edith and tells her to murder her husband by poisoning his champagne. She tries that when his back is turned, but stupidly, she fails to notice that she’s in front of a huge mirror, so he sees the whole attempt. He declares her insane (because why else would you try to murder a super rich dude?) and sends her off to his castle in Scotland to be locked up and watched by mad nurses. She makes a very creative escape attempt, which almost succeeds, before Oscar Bertrand successfully breaks her out. From there, he reunites her with her supposed love, Lionel, and the two are sent to Venice as members of the Black Band. She, apparently, has no soul, so Lionel promptly falls out of love with her. But whatever, she tries to have him killed and then bigamously marries the Marquis de Montebello, a high-ranking official in the Mountaineers. Oscar Bertrand shows up to remind her that she’s still a member of the Black Band, and instructs her to get lots of secrets out of her husband. She does, but as she’s telling them to Bertrand, a member of the Mountaineers listens in the shadows and the plans of the Black Band are gruesomely foiled. Now the Mountaineers know that she’s a traitor, so they extract the Marquis de Montebello and take him to a safe place. Then they take Lady Edith to a place called the Rock of Terror and bury her alive. As she’s on the verge of death, some goatherds rescue her and take her to the inn where Lionel and Lolota happen to be staying after their wedding, and in her dying moment she sees that Lionel is alive and all her plans have been foiled.
• Robert Merton: Braddon keeps referring to this guy as the “merchant prince,” and that phrase is now kind of a pet peeve for me. Who knows why. Living the American dream in England, this guy started out as a stock boy or something like that, and is now the richest man for miles around. He’s also an autodidact, a talented politician who fights for the rights of the poor, blah, blah, blah. He marries Lady Edith, who tries to kill him, and then realizes that maybe he should have gotten to know her a bit more…. In the second half of the novel, as Lady Edith is out of sight, out of mind, he falls in love with Rose Cleveland, the faux-granddaughter of his old clerk. She’s also super in love with him, and tearfully reads his political speeches to her grandfather every time she finds them in the paper. The clerk’s nephew is also super in love with Rose, but of course, Rose is actually a rich girl in disguise, so Robert Merton is a much more suitable match. The nephew kind of falls out of the picture, especially after Robert Merton helps discover all of the secrets of Rose’s past and restores her to her rightful place in the Cleveland estate. After he is 100% sure that Lady Edith is dead (he even goes to Italy to double-check), he marries Rose (no bigamy for this guy… how boring).

That’s all I can handle so far. But I think this covers the main points.

Disability studies?

In the middle of reading the newest addition to my project, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, I realized that the plot hinges partly on yet another disables person–Steeve the “Softy” Hargraves. Similarly, I’m going off on yet another argumentative tangent here, but I’ve got to try everything out and see what sticks. How many sensation novels I’ve read have a disabled character who is somehow central to the plot? I think all of them. Lady Audley is MAD (supposedly), Steeve Hargraves is lame and “soft” in the head, that character from The Moonstone whose name I don’t remember is lame, Anne Catherick from The Woman in White is kind of mad (maybe?), Lady Isabel gets disfigured in a train crash, and the list goes on. I could probably do an interesting reading of these characters’ representation on the stage as somehow akin to a Victorian freak show–especially given the research I’ve found about the performance of Lady Audley’s Secret in a madhouse, played by madwomen. Of course, the drawback to this plan I’m forming is that I’d have so much Foucault to read, but that’s not a bad thing.

What if disability is somehow central to sensation literature (both novels and plays)? Perhaps disability presents a problem to be solved, or a problem that somehow cannot be solved, in the same way that narrative necessitates conflict and resolution. Perhaps narrative structure itself works according to a certain logic of disability, where a problem or secret distorts an otherwise mundane world. And how does this narrative logic of disability signify onstage? 

If I went in this direction, I’d pair Lady Audley’s Secret with The Woman in White, since that would just be a chapter about madness. Then maybe I’d pair Aurora Floyd with The Moonstone, since that could be about physical disability. I guess I’ll have to read more Charles Reade and Ouida to see if I can carry this through to those figures as well. This could certainly work for Sweeney Todd too. 

Sigh. This would take a whole new critical apparatus, but if the connections are there, then I have to follow them. As one of my colleagues just said today, your argument = the thing that’s easiest to write about. 

Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading

This is from Eve Sedgwick’s book Touching Feeling, and the subtitle of this essay is awesome: “Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” I probably do, Eve Sedgwick, I probably do.

Sedgwick acknowledges that paranoid methods of reading have helped draw attention to hegemonic class, gender, and race relations. However, she points out two things about this: first, even though paranoid reading can be wonderful, it’s only one among many relationships a reader can take to a text; and second, even though paranoid reading points out hegemonic social relations, it doesn’t follow that anything necessarily needs to be done about those hegemonic relations. In her account, D.A. Miller comes across as a guy on a street corner with an “the end is near” sign, to which she says…. “Yeah. So?” In her words: “for someone to have an unmystified view of systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences. To be other than paranoid […], to practice other than paranoid forms of knowing does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression” (127-128). Here’s a bit of a tangent, but this, I think, is the response to so many people I’ve heard who shake their heads at a piece of critical writing and say, “umm…. that’s a really reparative reading….” as if that critique positions the writer as naive or unenlightened at best, revisionist and retrograde at worst. Sedgwick reminds us, though, that reparative reading does not necessarily deny the “reality or gravity of enmity or oppression.” Good to remember. 

Even more troubling, for her, is this: “it seems to me a great loss when paranoid inquiry comes to seem entirely coextensive with critical theoretical inquiry rather than being viewed as one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds” (126). Again, she’s not saying that paranoid practices are necessarily unwarranted, but just that they’ve become hegemonic in their own right–and they’re not the only methodology out there. 

Then she goes on to define paranoia:

• Paranoia is anticipatory: “The first imperative of paranoia is There must be no bad surprises, and indeed, the aversion to surprise seems to be what cements the intimacy between paranoia and knowledge per se, including both epistemophilia and skepticism. […] The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates paradoxically, a complex relation to temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known” (130).
• Paranoia is reflective and mimetic: “Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood, and it, in turn, seems to understand only imitation. Paranoia proposes both Anything you can do (to me) I can do worse, and Anything you can do (to me) I can do first–to myself. […] one understands paranoia only by oneself practicing paranoid knowing, and […] the way paranoia has of understanding anything is by imitating and embodying it” (131).
• Paranoia is a strong theory: Sedgwick quotes Silvan Tomkins for a definition of “strong theory”: “Any theory of wide generality […] is capable of accounting for a wide spectrum of phenomena which appear to be very remote, one from the other, and from a common source. This is a commonly accepted criterion by which the explanatory power of any scientific theory can be evaluated” (134). Here’s Sedgwick: “As strong theory, and as a locus of reflexive mimeticism, paranoia is nothing if not teachable. The powerfully ranging and reductive force of strong theory can make tautological thinking hard to identify even as it makes it compelling and near inevitable; the result is that both writers and readers can damagingly misrecognize whether and where real conceptual work is getting done, and precisely what that work might be” (136).
• Paranoia is a theory of negative affects: Positive affects are about seeking pleasure; negative affects are about avoiding or forestalling pain. This one is fairly self-explanatory.
• Paranoia places its faith in exposure: “Whatever account it may give of its own motivation, paranoia is characterized by placing, in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se–knowledge in the form of exposure. […] paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story known. That a fully initiated listener could still remain indifferent or inimical, or might have no help to offer, is hardly treated as a possibility” (138).

Textual Harassment: The Ideology of Close Reading, or How Close is Close?

I think this is from Isobel Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic, and I read it awhile ago, so I’m just going to focus on the main points and their application to my project (well, to my project as I conceived of it in my prospectus). 

Armstrong argues against predominant methods of theorizing close reading that organize themselves around a thought/feeling binary. “A rationalist poetics,” she writes, “founded on the antithesis between thought and feeling which still goes largely uninvestigated in our culture, refusing the importunities of the desire of the text, acts as a screen for a more difficult and subtle problem. Sexuality, feeling and emotion are associated with a language of affect which is deemed to be non-cognitive and non-rational. Affect falls outside what is legitimately discussable” (86-87). 

Here’s her thesis: “The task of a new definition of close reading is to rethink the power of affect, feeling and emotion in a cognitive space. The power of affect needs to be included within a definition of thought and knowledge rather than theorized as outside them, excluded from the rational” (87).

And what is affect? Here’s Armstrong: “What we term affect, I would suggest, is the cathecting or build-up and release of energies in this intense analytic process, as well as the process itself” (93).

And a bit more: “I am not proposing a paranoid model of reader and text, but I do believe that all reading that is not reading for mastery necessarily gets caught up with, imbricated in, the structure of the text’s processes, and that this is where thought begins. The intensity of this experience can be renamed as affect and consigned to the non-rational, but this is an impoverishment. Arguably, close reading has never been close enough. It has always been the rationalist’s defence against the shattering of the subject. It has always been engaged with mastery, and the erotics of the text have been invoked to endorse the reader’s power over it” (94-95).

This is on my list because I think that the close-reading trajectory that I’m charting progresses along this thought/feeling binary that Armstrong tries to deconstruct. Sherlock Holmes–at the later end of my trajectory–is the type of close-reader that Armstrong finds problematic. He has no feelings, no emotional ties to the “texts” he reads. In evacuating feeling from his close-reading methodology, Holmes strives for mastery over his texts. Also, he’s always chastising Watson for his anti-rational romanticization of the crime narratives he relates.

Sensation fiction, on the other hand, enables Armstrong’s analysis. I think that sensational detectives, in a proto-Armstrong method, blend the power of affect into a cognitive space. I’ve already traced this idea through most of the texts I’m working with so far, so I won’t recount that all here. But this is what I’ll say about Armstrong if I’m asked…

Hayden White: “Anomalies of Genre”

The full title of this essay is “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres.” Apparently, this essay comes from an issue of New Literary History which was specifically about the utility of theory and history for the study of literary genres, so White doesn’t propose his own theory here. Rather, he overviews and responds to the contributions of the scholars whose work is published in this specific issue, which includes Frederic Jameson. Thus, this is a nice summary of a 2003 issue of New Literary History, but its usefulness for me has really just been that it has pointed me in other interesting directions for my research on “genre theory” (if that’s a thing that exists?).

So, the most useful thing in this summary might be for me to just overview (as White does) the various names that come up in this issue, so that I can go look for their work and read it for myself:

Michael Prince: Apparently, there is a scholar named Ralph Cohen (who I should also look up) who says that “both the notion of (literary) genre and genres themselves appear to be ‘resistant to theory'” (White 597). This is really interesting, and I wonder how Cohen deals with Derrida’s “Law of Genre”? I don’t know how Cohen is defining “theory” here, and I certainly don’t know if Derrida would consider his talk a “theory,” per se…. but I associate Derrida with “Theory” (capital T), so I don’t know what to make of this. Anyway, Michael Prince says that if Cohen is right, then “genre’s resistance to theoretical consideration tells us more about theory than it does about genre itself” (White 597). “For if,” White goes on summarizing Prince…

For if, as everyone seems to agree, genre is an essential element or aspect of literarity, then genre’s resistance to theory implies that theory itself is inimical to literature and should not, therefore, be brought to bear upon literary artwork. Indeed, Prince holds that it may be genre’s resistance to theory that generates the endless task of literary interpretation, which has the role in criticism of mediating not only between literature and life but also between literature and theory as well. (597)

It seems that both Cohen and Prince decide that history is a good alternative to theory in the study of literary genre. If theory doesn’t work, historicize. As White says, “[a] historical treatment is typically seen as an alternative and antidote to the corrosive effects of theory in literary studies” (598). White goes on to say that the “historical approach lets you simply show the ways genre works in different times and places in the development of literature, without having to raise the vexing theoretical question of the value typically assigned to specific genres, various notions of genre, and the idea of a hierarchy of genres in both culture and society at large” (599). This discussion really confuses me. First of all, I don’t understand how “history” and “theory” are two different things. I’m not saying they’re exactly the same thing, but history theorizes and theory historicizes, right? How can one be an “antidote” to the other? They seem mutually constitutive to me… Second of all, all of the great work on the genres of sensation and melodrama that I’ve read seem to both “show the ways genre works in different times and places” AND raise the “theoretical question of the value typically assigned to specific genres” (599). Elaine Hadley’s entire book seems to do both of these things all the time, so I don’t understand the distinction being made here…

I think that the foundational idea that White is trying to gesture at is the idea that genre can somehow be “pure”–which is an idea that has problematic affinities with the notion of racial “purity” and aristocratic “purity.” So… White via Prince via Cohen is trying to say that theory exposes the myth of generic purity, therefore it has nothing else to do? Is that what’s going on here? I still don’t understand… I guess that’s really what Derrida’s “Law of Genre” does–it does identify genre as always already contaminated, and never “pure.” But I don’t see why that realization negates theoretical approaches…???

Moving on, though, I did find a suggestion that the phrase “the law of genre” doesn’t come specifically from Derrida (as I suppose I should have intuited). In Latin, it’s operis lex, and it comes from Horace. It’s a law of generic essence: “It was theory which, in defense of the doctrine of generic purity, ‘forbade’ the mixing of elements from different genres” (White 601). I guess this is why Derrida opens his speech in the way that he does, with the utterances, “Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them.” That was Horace’s operis lex–good to know. Someone names Farrell (didn’t catch the first name) says that the essentialism implicit in the law of genre is actually what goaded poets and other writers to mix genres, since the literary folk generally don’t take kindly to being told what to do.

Jerome McGann: Note to self: look up this Jerome McGann essay. It sounds AWESOME!! So I’m going to read it and write a separate post about it. But as a result of summarizing McGann, White muses, “genre theory might very well profit from a move toward something like the performative mode of addressing its object–a move which has enjoyed massive payoffs in the fields of dance, music criticism, and media studies” (608). I just think that’s funny because a few posts ago, I wrote my summary of David Kurnick’s Empty Houses in the form of a play. So there’s that.

Morson: Again, didn’t catch the first name here. White’s summary of this article didn’t interest me as much as his response to it. White attempts to solve a problem that he summarizes in Morson’s work, saying:

One way of dealing with this problem is to view the literary work as the product (in part, of course) of a kind of dialectic of genres, in which what the formalists called the “dominant” of the work is viewed as an attempted synthesis of all generic conventions used to justify the work’s claim to some kind of realism. This approach to the question of genre gets us beyond any necessity to regard certain “paradoxical” aspects of a discourse of genre as indices of a “problem” and allows us to treat them as the solution to the question of why generic conventions seem necessary to the presentation of a worldview in the first place. (611)

I’m interested in this passage because it reminds me of Winifred Hughes’s theory of the “sensation paradox.” For Hughes, the sensation paradox is precisely a mixing of genres: sensation = romance + realism. It’s paradoxical because romance is about the faraway, and realism is about the everyday; romance is about fantasy, realism is about life’s nitty gritty details. Sensation brings them together–and that’s essentially her argument. Of course, she shows how it works differently in the work of each different author she analyzes, but it’s a bit of a one-note argument. In White’s reading, the sensation paradox would be the solution to the problem of us seeing genre distinctions as “necessary to the presentation of a worldview in the first place.” The sensation paradox could be the antidote to overly-stabilized Victorian theories of genre. That’s interesting. I’m not sure if it’s true, but it’s interesting. And it could be true…

Meditations on Bourdieu’s “Distinction”

Distinction is pretty dense, and it’s based on empirical sociological research done in France, so its methodologies are not immediately applicable to my work on sensation literature. For this reason, I’m not going to write about it in a whole lot of depth right now–I may come back to it after my exam. However, its conclusions and theories are immensely useful to studies of popular culture, so I’m going to reflect on some of the things that initially stood out to me.

Why to people like what they like? What is taste? How is it formed? These are Bourdieu’s main areas of interest in this study. Bourdieu surveys a whole bunch of people from all over France’s socioeconomic spectrum, and because he’s Bourdieu, he finds that–surprise surprise!–social class tends to determine an individual’s taste. Of course, class-based distinctions get reinforced in everyday life, so that social reproduction occurs seamlessly and ideologically. There is definitely such a thing as “working-class” taste for Bourdieu, but the difference for working-class folks is that their sense of taste is subordinate, so their likes and dislikes are constantly getting defined according to dominant classes’ aesthetic preferences: “the working-class ‘aesthetic’ is a dominated ‘aesthetic’ which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics” (41).

Aesthetic choices, for Bourdieu, create “class fractions” and actively distance people in one class from those in another. People internalize their class-based aesthetic preferences at a very young age, and these preferences end up filtering them into the “appropriate” class-affiliation so that the social status quo can be upheld. This is a great theoretical context for a lot of the Victorian responses to sensation fiction and sensation theater–I’m thinking specifically of the reviews of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s work that accuse her of merging the “literature of the kitchen” with the “literature of the drawing-room.” When a person encounters aesthetic products from another social class, Bourdieu finds, this person often reacts with disgust or horror–much like many (middle-class) reviewers reacted to sensation fiction.

Because this amorphous concept of “taste” is internalized so early and so rigorously, it’s incredibly hard to change, so “taste” is part of the equation of social mobility that makes “climbing the social ladder,” as it were, incredibly difficult. If you were raised on Budweiser, it’s going to be difficult for you to acclimate to home-brewed artisan beer, for example. If you were raised on McDonald’s and Taco Bell, molecular gastronomy is going to be a hard pill to swallow. If hanging out in your garage, tinkering with the car you bought for $2000 and drinking Budweiser is your idea of a perfect Sunday afternoon, wine-tasting in Napa, followed by light conversation at an organic, local-ingredient juice bar may seem insufferably boring. Okay, enough of the examples.

The point here is that one of these taste-categories has cultural capital, and the other doesn’t. The artisan-beer-drinking, molecular gastronomy-loving, wine-tasting, locally-grown-organic-food-eating, Jane Eyre-reading middle-to-upper class person has access to cultural capital, while the car-fixing, Budweiser-drinking lower-class individual (who doesn’t even get as many compound-adjective descriptors in my characterization here) has less of a taste for the products of cultural capital. However, since the aesthetic preferences of the dominant class tend to, well, dominate those of the lower classes, the Budweiser-drinking person might feel pressured to approximate a “taste” for artisan beer, for fear of appearing vulgar or tasteless. My summary so far has been an odd and socially stereotypical one–and is a bit disjointed from my own experience, suggesting that Bourdieu’s critique may be a bit dated in some ways. I think a lot of this still holds true, but I also think that marketing plays an enormous role in this equation–Budweiser could be marketed in such a way that it could attain the same cache as home-brewed artisan beer (if the marketing campaign was successful enough). And currently, I think that targeted marketing practices have unearthed niche markets that don’t necessarily feel a whole lot of pressure to conform to a standardized version of “upper-class” taste. Or, perhaps a better characterization would be that, currently, standardized versions of “upper-class” taste are based on the eccentricities of niche markets–hence the appeal of the hipster figure? I don’t know–Bourdieu probably talks about all of this in places of Distinction that my skimming didn’t quite reach.

Anyway, I’m interested in the habitus and the definition of taste. So, here’s some definitions:

TASTE:

• “the propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices” (169)
• “the generative formula of life-style, a unitary set of distinctive preferences which express the same expressive intention in the specific logic of each of the symbolic sub-spaces, furniture, clothing, language or body hexis” (169)
• “the practical operator of the transmutation of things into distinct and distinctive signs, of continuous distributions into discontinuous oppositions; it raises the differences inscribed in the physical order of bodies to the symbolic order of significant distinctions” (170)
• “It transforms objectively classified practices, in which a class condition signifies itself (through taste), into classifying practices, that is, into a symbolic expression of class position, by perceiving them in their mutual relations and in terms of social classificatory schemes” (170)
• “Through taste, an agent has what he likes because he likes what he has, that is, the properties actually given to him in the distributions and legitimately assigned to him in the classifications” (171)

HABITUS:

• “both the generative principle of objectively classifiable judgments and the system of classification of these practices. It is the relationship between the two capacities which define the habitus, the capacity to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted” (165-166)
• “The habitus is necessarily internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions; it is a general, transposable disposition which carries out a systematic, universal application–beyond the limits of what has been directly learnt–of the necessity inherent in the learning conditions” (166)
• “The habitus is not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure: the principle of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes” (166)

Essentially, the concept of the habitus explains many of the Victorian responses to popular fiction and other popular media, and, as I’ve argued before, it explains the professionalization of many sensational detectives, including Robert Audley, Sherlock Holmes, and even Watson. In fact, I wonder if the Sherlock Holmes/Watson relationship could benefit from a more thorough analysis of how the habitus works in those texts. Something to think about for the future…