the damnation of Mr. Bennet

In his great essay in defense of Robert Owen, Alexander Herzen remarks of 1850s England:

”The Continent, politically enslaved, is morally freer than England: the mass of ideas and doubts in circulation is much more extensive.They have become habitual and society does not shake with either fear of indignation before a free man – Wenn er die Kette bricht.

On the Continent, people are powerless before authority: thgey endure their chains, but they do not respect them. The Englishman’s liberty is more in his institutions than in himself or in his conscience.”

This is, I think, a nice way to begin a series of posts that alternate between M. de Staël and Jane Austen. In this way, I can get to the question of the condition of England.

Why England?As de Stael said in On Literature(1801), England is the country in the world where the women are most truly loved. Between De Stael’s statement and Herzen’s, something is happening. Perhaps they are both right.

De Stael thought Pride and Prejudice was vulgar, and Jane Austen, apparently, though De Stael was vulgar. But De Stael was, perhaps, the first to see what literature meant in modernity – and Jane Austen was a great plumber to the very depths of whether and how women are most truly loved.

…

So perhaps we should start with the beheadings. D.W. Harding, in the 40s, wrote a famous essay on Jane Austen that, I think it is safe to say, changed the way critics read her. It was called Regulated Hatred, and it takes up Virginia Woolf’s suggestion that there was a fiercer beast running through these novels than was reckoned by the culture of faux gentility and nostalgia. Harding begins by asking about a discrepancy between the image of Jane Austen – the preferred reading material for retired public servants, the much lauded writer of an idyll – and his own reading of Austin’s texts. In those texts, he believed he found a clue to her method of writing in such a way that her writing was, in crucial ways, overlooked – her decapitations were executed so that they disturbed no one who chose not to be disturbed.

What, he asked himself, was going on?

‘She has none of the underlying didactic intention ordinarily attributed to the satirist. Her object is not missionary; it is the more desperate one of merely finding some mode of existence for her critical attitudes…

As a novelist, therefore, part of her aim was to find the means for unobtrusive spiritual survival, without open conflict with the friendly people around her whose standards in simple things she could accept and whose affection she greatly needed.” [13]

We shall return to the satiric spirit without the missionary point – for this is a characteristic which has a wider application than he may realize. What is interesting, here, is how Harding’s 1940 idea of a double utterance, a code unobtrusively dropped into another code, is so like James Scott’s idea of the hidden transcript – or to use the vocabulary of my last post, it is a way of disguising lateral talk with vertical talk, of respecting a hierarchy while putting into words the anguish of one’s experience of it, in all its corrupting glory. Harding reproduces several passages where he will leave out a phrase, making them seem innocuous or funny, and then put the phrase back in, which makes us see the Jane Austen who could be Michelet’s Sorciere.

A good example of this is in Pride and Prejudice occurs in a passage in book II, after the terrific scene when Elizabeth rejects Darcy’s first proposal. Elizabeth is going through a conversion process in which she sees, as though for the first time, the world righted – the way things really are. And, as Darcy has told her, one of the things that really are is that her family is bizarre, eccentric, and not at all respectable. In particular, her two sisters, Kitty and Lydia, have made spectacles of themselves in the village, throwing themselves at the officers quartered there. Now Lydia, 16, has been invited to stay with friends at Bath, where the soldiers have been quartered next. Elizabeth pleads with her father to prevent this. Her father puts her off with a joke:

"Lydia will never be easy until she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present circumstances."

As we know, Mr. Bennet’s words will come back to haunt him. Austen begins the next chapter with this explanation:

“Had Elizabeth's opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could not have formed a very pleasing opinion of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort. Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem, and confidence had vanished for ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown. But Mr. Bennet was not of a disposition to seek comfort for the disappointment which his own imprudence had brought on, in any of those pleasures which too often console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice. He was fond of the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal enjoyments. To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted, than as her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is not the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.”
One could draw a line between that absolutely scathing glimpse of the marriage in the center of a family and Christina Stead’s The Man who Loved Children and Doris Lessing’s African novels, or The Golden Notebook. The male case was made out later by Hardy, but Jude, in spite of his marriage, earns our respect. Mr.Bennet doesn’t cheat on his wife – he cordially despises her. In this one paragraph, which quickly moves on and moves us into the business of getting Elizabeth and Darcy back together again, we see, as in a flash, the skull under the skin, Mr. Bennet and his wife and daughters stripped bare, like souls damned in a Memlinc painting – except who does the damning here? Hell has been filled in, and social relations, infinite social relations, have been built on top of it.

the of course

We are not utterly cut off.

There was, for instance, Mary Collier. An agricultural laborer, a washerwoman, and a poet. She was taught the crude elements of reading and writing and, in the midst of her toils, took some precious time out of the day to read. She read, for instance, Stephan Duck, another peasant poet, and noted his disparaging words about women “sitting in the fields” rather than swinging their scythes. She cried out against the lie here in her own poem, The Woman’s Labour an epistle to Stephan Duck, which was published in 1739. Collier gives us first hand an account of standing outside in the cold winter dark of early mourning, waiting for the maid to get up and let her and other washerwomen into the house, so they could begin the laundry.

But when from Wind and Weather we get in,
Briskly with Courage we our Work begin ;
Heaps of fine Linen we before us view,
Whereon to lay our Strength and Patience too ;
Cambricks and Muſlins, which our Ladies wear,
Laces and Edgings, coſtly, fine, and rare,
Which muſt be waſh'd with utmoſt Skill and Care ;
With Holland Shirts, Ruffles and Fringes too,
Faſhions which our Fore-fathers never knew.
For ſeveral Hours here we work and ſlave,
Before we can one Glimpſe of Day-light have ;
We labour hard before the Morning's paſt,
Becauſe we fear the Time runs on too faſt.

AT length bright Sol illuminates the Skies,
And ſummons drowſy Mortals to ariſe ;
Then comes our Miſtreſs to us without fail,
And in her Hand, perhaps, a Mug of Ale
To cheer our Hearts, and alſo to inform
Herſelf, what Work is done that very Morn ;
Lays her Commands upon us, that we mind
Her Linen well, nor leave the Dirt behind :


In Collier’s account, the labour is overwhelming. Duck had compared the endlessness of it to Sisyphus – and Collier replies:

“While you to Syſiphus yourſelves compare,
With Danaus' Daughters we may claim a Share ;
For while he labours hard againſt the Hill,
Bottomleſs Tubs of Water they muſt fill.”

What Collier complains of most, in the end, is

Our Toil and Labour's daily ſo extreme,
That we have hardly ever Time to dream.

It is being cut off from something vital that is felt to the very root of one’s wet being. And these nattering ghosts can’t be put down, then, by the utilitarian faith that the market will eventually make all parties happy. I’m making a wager that the vital portion is not the philosopher’s individuality, but Rousseau’s solitude – a flashing, unstructured portion of life upon which the community worth having – the community dreamt of by the aliens from happiness culture, the community in which there is time to dream – must be built.

And so she passes by – one of the obscure. Although not by Virginia Woolf’s standards.



“Ann married Mr. G., of course—of course. The words toll persistently through these obscure volumes. For in the vast world to which the memoir writers admit us there is a solemn sense of something unescapable, of a wave gathering beneath the frail flotilla and carrying it on.”

Virginia Woolf’s stunning essay on the literature of the Obscure is not about the literature of the working woman or man, not about the Mary Colliers, but that of the midlevel, that of families in the very cage of respectability, like Jane Austin’s Bennets, who sense how precariously they are perched. If we search for what has been left behind – what dirt, what voice, what soul – in order to reconstruct the wave gathering underneath these routines, we have to have an ear for lateral communication – those moments when the obscure speak to obscure in their own ever twisting language.

We are not utterly cut off.

“The atmosphere of London is so charged with particles of carbon and black smoke that if you hang up a white cloth in a current of fresh air, you will find it, at the end of two hours, entirely covered with little plack spots, and the white vest that you put on in the morning is dirty before the hour of dinner.” –A year in London, Auguste Jean B. Defauconpret, 1819 – my translation.

In Domination and the arts of resistance, Scott wisely sees that the very form of Hegel’s presentation of the master-slave relationship is politically coded. It is a dyadic form, master on one side and slave or servant on the other. This face to face form has been inherited by philosophy since, and even considered the nucleus of revolutionary thought, but… as Scott points out … the dyad is the master’s preference. ‘The politcal symbolism of most forms of personal dominance carries with it the implicit assumption that the subordinates gather only when authorized to do so from above.” And though we have been told that his personalized struggle for recognition is the very essence and myth of liberation, what is avoided here is the lateral, the association, the crowd. When the slave, in the great myth, faces the master, what is pre-emptively excluded is what Scott calls the hidden transcript, and what I would call lateral communication.

‘One has only to imagine a feudal lord noticing a large number of his serfs advancing unsummoned to his manor, a large number of beggarts (masterless men by definition) moving through the countryside, or even a large crowd of factory workers gathered near the plant manager’s office to recognize the possibilities.” (63)

These two modes of conversational direction – vertical and lateral – are, of course, our old friends from school, our first sense of disciplinary space. Lateral speech, at the wrong time, is punishable.

It may seem a long stretch from masterless men to the Bennet daughters, attending a ball in Pride and Prejudice, but I think that the novel, and especially the novel as the symptom of female insubordination or corruption, participates in this grid. Of course, lateral speech happens at the top as well as at the bottom – and the English novel, supremely, wants to make a place in the middle for it. However, even at the top it is felt to be somewhat lowering when it is exposed, as if the masters speaking among themselves go down the hierarchical scale and gossip. They reveal secrets, they lose the mask – and these secrets are precisely what they are accused of by the slave. It is not all recognition, you see.

The pathos of the obscure, the heavy “of course” that Virginia Woolf correctly sees as forming all the motion that sweeps the obscure across history, is lodged in the fact that the secrets aren’t interesting. That so and so slept with x, that uncle y was a drunkard – all of this, in the memoirs that Woolf picks up, has faded away. It has lost our interest. Such is the difference between synchronic interest, in which busy-ness itself engages us, and diachronic interest, in which only the heroic engages us. One definition of revolution is that it is the time when the arms, so to speak, of the synchronic and diachronic are squeezed together, imposed one on top of the other, so that the obscure becomes heroic, the complaints (doleances) of the blanchisseuses of Marseilles exert an oversocial force that is as riveting as the beheading of a king. Obviously, here, too, the forms of vertical and lateral communication correspond, in some way, link up with the synchronic and diachronic sense of interest.

Time, as Hamlet points out, is out of joint. Time, as Derrida points out, quoting Hamlet in Specters of Marx, is out of joint.

No, we are not utterly cut off. We are wired in.

It is this revolutionary energy to which Woolf unconsciously refers when she says that ‘Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off.”

at the portals of the modern with a basket in my arms

So my faithful gadfly North wants to know, why washerwomen?
Wash women. Laudresses.

Why not seamstresses? Why not the workers in pin factories? Why not paysannes or prostitutes?

Well, partly it is for that most male of reasons: la donna è mobile. Blanchisseuses in 18th century Paris were not only numerous, but also moved in a number of social spaces. The obscure washed their own clothes, often jostling professional wash women on the banks of the Seine. As one climbs the ladder of notability, however, self-presentation, and thus clean linen, becomes ever more important.

And then, too, what would our artificial paradise be without chemicals? In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, while some remnant alchemists looked for universal solvents or the philosopher’s stone, others – whose very spirit is breathed out by the wonderful planches in the encyclopedia, those busy, small worlds – turned to more practical questions. And what was more practical than a better soap. Various substances – from dried pig’s shit to oak ash – were used to get cloth clean. Soap was the big expense for a wash woman – in 1789, when the cahiers de doleances, or notebooks of complaint (or, to be all Jeremiah about it, books of Lamentation) were collected throughout France, the blanchisseuses of Marseilles presented their complaint that the regulations concerning the composition and price of soap were not being respected.

And the relation between soap and clothes is as dramatic, in its way, as that between thesis and antithesis in Hegel’s dialectic. Clothes, after all, took on the complete impress of the ordinary – and especially the extraordinary. Every wine stain, every drop of grease, sperm, juice, all the perfumes and powders, all the sweat – and it is just these fantasmal half-beings, social doxa, that had to disappear. They had to be trampled, beaten, spindled, driven out – all these real ghosts, ghosts in material time. At the same time, the cloth itself had to be preserved. Soillure, dirt, - ground terms, terms that are rooted in the fundamentals of purity and impurity – and the wash woman stands at these archaic portals of purity. “There is not a city where one uses up more linen,” wrote Sebastian Mercier about Paris. And there was not a city where the archaic so joins the modern.

The modern came in the form of Claude Louis Berthollet’s invention of “l’eau de Javel”, in which chlorine was dissolved in a solution of potash lye. You may think that here we have got away from the gods, but actually, here we begin the divine and diabolic course that has touched every creature on earth – for it is among the elements of social life, raising crops, cleaning clothes, that chemistry turned practical, and then took over the human sphere to a point we cannot even comprehend.

Meanwhile, the body breaking method of beating clothes was also slowly being modified. In London, in 1782, Henry Sidgier was issued a patent for a drum rotating machine to wash clothes. Obscure Sidgier! And yet, as Lee Maxwell points out in his history of the washing machine, the principle of the drum rotating machine remains the same today.

What is funny is that out of this vast, centuries old enterprise, relatively little comes down to us. Compare the songs we all know celebrating the cowboy, to those we know celebrating the wash woman. In fact, do we know any celebrating the wash woman? The ‘we’ here is Anglophone. In fact, in France and Germany, and no doubt in Italy, those songs and the literature certainly remain.

It is to the literature I will go next.

solitude and the washerwoman

=Marie Petiet


It is said that St. Petersburg was built on the bones of the builders, the army of serfs that drained the swamps and laid the foundations.

And then, too, as Emerson once said, there was a deal of guano in every immigrant ship that came to America. Buffalo skinners and railroad track men, how many laid down their only homestead and died.

So while we are on the subject, give a thought to the hundreds of thousands of permanently bent spines, the hernias, the paralyzing shoots of rheumatism that rattle around in your clean clothes. Blanchisseuses, Wascherfrau, laundresses, washing woman – from the early modern period to the washing machine of the 50s, this overwhelmingly female job was ill paid, unhealthy, and exhausting. It is, of course, far from over yet. In Mexico City, with its terrible water system, you will not find the American style washer/drier set up as the convenience we all have, and on the rooftops of even rich mansions you might well find the maid soaking clothes in the tub.

Now there is some justice in asking if intellectual history would come unscathed through the judgment of the bones it ignores. And such might be one judgment on solitude as I’ve been construing it. Solitude is a bourgeois affectation – I can hear the voice of the commissar say exactly that, imagine some cloth capped Marxist enforcer from the 30s or 50s pronouncing the very word ‘solditude’ with the utmost contempt.

But contempt has its day, too, its warrant, its reasons. There were armies of washerwomen, and it is a fair question: what would solitude mean to them? To the 167,607 who worked in England and Wales in 1861 (Malcolmson, 7) To the half of free black women who worked as laundresses in Philadelphia in 1840. In France, in the 1870s, there were 90,000 in Paris alone.

Here is what M. Moisy, author of Les Lavoirs de Paris, wrote about the washerwoman:

She has a good heart. A strong yeller, I concur – like the daughter of Mme Angot – she is not less strong in her good sentiments. When an accident, or unemployment strikes one of her neighbors: let a drive be organized in the lavoir: she always gives, even if the charity is to an enemy of yesterday.

She also has the love or her profession, more than other workers of any other profession, and it is tough, this job: the laundry worker begins at six in the morning, only takes an hour off to eat, and works until eight or eight thirty in the evening, around thirteen to fourteen hours a day.

Returned home, wet down to her bones, she has to prepare the soup for her husband and kids, and doesn’t get to sleep until she has done her housework.

The next day should puts on her humid rags to begin the day’s rude existence all over again.” (Barbaret I: 271 – my translation)

Such numbers of women force an image upon the collective mind. It is a little unsettling that the image of the washing woman in the 18th and 19th century corresponds so well to national stereotypes. In Germany and Austria, there was the hetera washerwoman, the Alte Wascherfrau, who had her place in Volkslied and Grimm’s tales, and even casts a shadow in Kafka’s The Trial. In France, from Jean Vadé’s 1740 comic Parisian dialect novel, Lettres de la Grenouillère to Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse, the blanchisseuse was renowned for her freedom, for her constant presence on Parisian streets, and, of course, for her erotic charm – a charm that wished away the wet rags of Moisy’s description. Balzac’s men, his mature men, ass men, cannot resist her. And in England? England, that frightening, puzzling place. Unlike the cook and the chambermaid, who at least get some bawdy attention from 18th century writers and printmakers, and of course get orders in respectable 19th century households, there is something like a negative space, as though the laundress really was a pariah. Which is not true, of course, about Ireland – the old washerwomen in Yeats, and the voices of them in Finnegan’s Wake, are taken from life – that is where the authentic circus animals come from. In America, as we have mentioned, race has everything to do with cleaning clothes.

Well, solitude and the washerwoman will take us to another post.

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a walk of her own

I have not been entirely happy with the way I am developing the theme of solitude in the previous posts – perhaps I am simply bumping against the limit of developing an idea in the hit and run of a blog. I have been concerned from the outset not to make this another totalizing history – that melancholy child of universal history, but here and there, I do just that, or make just those gestures, impose unconsciously the manicheanism of the sides, of the bad and the good in deathgrapple. To shake this out of one’s head is an intellectual victory that is never enough, for it creeps back in the next day. So it goes.

I started out with Marie D’Agoult’s account of the revolutionary tradition in achieving women’s rights – which, appropriately enough, is found in her history of the revolution of 1848. The trend line, here – in as much as the trend line is under my control – is to try to show something about women and the culture of happiness. This is vitally important, as, from one perspective, one could say that the culture of happiness has been uncommonly favorable to women – bourgeois women, peasant women, proletariat women. The aliens from happiness culture, in fact, often seem to suffer from nasty cases of misogyny.

And yet and yet… In the turn towards the republican idea in the 18th century, as Maria D’Agoult notes, women were left out. There is an old tradition of blaming Rousseau for this or that aspect of the French revolution, and it always does something that I am careful not to do, erasing the mediation between intellectual and social history. But there is, as I’ve pointed out, a moment in Rousseau’s work in which both D’Agoult’s criticism and the countering idea, that Rousseau was actually an enlightened figure with regard to women, both have some justification. Examining that moment, in which the difference between men and women speaks in a new way, and the equality between men and women is foreclosed upon in an old way, brings to light a theme that is separated from Rousseau’s political and cultural politics – the theme of solitude. Todorov, for instance, speaks of Rousseau’s notion of solitude as an exception that applies to Jean-Jacques alone, or at least to the rare extra-societal figure. That notion of solitude, conveniently enough, conflates the solitary with the stranger. I have already, in several posts in 2997 and 2008, alluded to the importance of the adventurer in understanding the libertine fissure in the old order - the adventurer who loiters about the village economy, the society of the limited good, the dependence of the little on the great tradition. The adventurer who sails the ocean with his fevers, and destroys populations. The adventurer who becomes a politician in the late nineteenth century.

Like the adventurer, the solitary is not a type categorized by any division of labor. I’m concerned – and here I depart from Rousseau, having taken a hint – though, with solitude as an existential and original condition that founds equality. It is at this moment, in this dream of an exceptional solitude, that an almost unnoticeable division occurs between solitude and individuality. Intellectual historians have noticed that individualism – a word that was first coined in France at the end of the eighteenth century – connoted something disrespectable and a-social up to about the 1830s. Solitude was, of course, eclipsed by individualism. That eclipse inflects, in particular, the history of women. In founding equality on access to solitude, one is not promoting a lifestyle of solitude. Rather, one is promoting the kind of community that allows, in its very structure, access to solitude as one of the basic interstices of the moral life. It is not the community of the hermit or the shut in, but as a possibility available to every member of the community to walk unseen. To change the title of Virginia Woolf’s essay slightly – an essay about the lack of solitude for women, by the way - equality for women means, here, ‘a walk of her own.’ A solitary promenade of her own.

Rousseau was not, of course, the first to discover the conjunction of daydream, meditation, walking, and solitude. There is a famous letter from Descartes to Guez de Balzac, written in 1631, about the solitary walk. It has been translated a number of times into English – some of the translations are a little bizarre. I’m going to translate the famous bits here, and then – I’m going to move on. I want to go to Madame de Stael and Jane Austin next.

On to Descartes, then.

Guez de Balzac was a school friend from La Fleche. He has now fallen into obscurity even in France, and was never very famous in the English speaking world. His fame in the seventeenth century was as a refiner of the language, a rhetor. Or a corruptor of the language – as Stephen Gaukroger points out, Balzac’s style was the court style. In 1631, the court was on a collision course with the nobility – the proto-Fronde. And the Fronde was friendly to the Gassendi circle. Frondeurs were prominent patrons of Epicurian thought. Moliere’s Dom Juan is definitely a Frondeur.

Descartes’ letter to Balzac begins with a movement that startles us, so much does it evoke the Descartes of the Meditations:

“I lifted up my hand against my eyes to see if I was not dreaming when I read in your letter that you had a plan to come here, and still I dare not rejoice at the news otherwise than as if I had only dreamt it: however, I don’t find it strange that an intellect (esprit) as great and generous as your own cannot accommodate itself to these servile constraints to which one is obligated in the court; and since you sincerely assure me that God has inspired you to quit the world, I would consider myself to sin against the Holy Spirit if I tried to turn you from your holy resolution; but you must pardon my zeal if I press you to chose Amsterdam for your retreat, and to prefer it, I wouldn’t say not only to all the convents of the capuchins and chartists, where necessarily good men do retire, but also to the most beautiful spots in France and Italy, and even to that celebrated hermitage in which you stayed last year. However well stocked a country house, it always lacks an infinity of commodities which are only found in the cities; and the solitude that one hopes to find there is never quite perfectly encountered after all. I’d like to see you find a canal that would make the greatest talkers daydream, a valley so solitary that it can inspire them to transports and joy; but unfortunately, it can also be the case that you will have a quantity of little neighbors that will importune you on occasion, and whose visits are more discommoding than those you receive in Paris: instead in the great city where I live, there being no man except me who is not engaged in the market, each is so attentive to his profit that I can remain there all my life without being seen by anyone. I go walking every day among the confusion of a mass of people with as much liberty and repose that attends you in your country lanes; and I never consider the people that I encounter otherwise than I would the trees I would meet in a forest, or the animals I would pass there; even the noise of their tumults no longer interrupts my reveries any more than they would be interrupted by some stream: and if I makes some reflection on their actions, it is with the same pleasure that you have to see the peasants who cultivate your countrysides; for I see that all their work serves to embellish the place of my residence, and to make it the case that I lack nothing. If you find pleasure to see the fruits in your vineyards growing and to exist there in such abundance under your eyes, don’t you think that there is as much to see coming here ships which carry us abundantly all the products of the Indies, and everything that is rare in Europe? What other place could one chose in any other part of the world where all the commodities of life and all the curiosities that could be wished for are as easy to discover as here? In what other country can one enjoy such entire liberty, where one can sleep with less inquietude, where there are always armed men on foot expressly to guard you, where poisonings, betrayals and calumnies are least known, and where there still exists remants of the innocence of our ancestors?”

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