a blog by Peter Leonard
Notes transcribed in real-time, please pardon any errors or misunderstandings.
The first keynote speaker at the Malmö Book Life conference was Brown's Nancy Armstrong, who discussed gender in 19th century British popular fiction. Gender, in her thinking, is what enabled English literature during this period to think through the relationships between those populations which popular opinion held to be capable of violent and unpredictable expansions and contractions. She begins by admitting that much gender-centric work on literature has been reductive, tending to homogenize all those who are non-conformant and resulting in a masculine/feminine binary which reproduces the very problem it tries to solve.
Foucault, in her estimation, holds an answer to this paradox: he traces a shift in society's defensive posture from warding off other ethnic groups to warding off the corruption within the race. She links Foucault's notion of race (a new, multiple body that is uncountable) with Malthusian population discourse and Darwinian mutation theory and arrives at an unpredictable, unstable condition that British literature attempted to think through and control.
Frankenstein's monster is perhaps the best example of the contradictory and interdependent ways of being human that emerge during this period. The monster is mass humanity as one body, crafted from the bodies of the mass. This kind of monster monster shows up in 19th century literature, Armstrong claims, whenever women mediate the vexed relationship between mass and individual.
Dickens' Bleak House provides the exact same description of "individuals as types" as we find in Darwin's South American Voyage. In Dickens, Esther provides the outsider perspective, while the the masses provide the inside perspective. No individual character, Armstrong suggests, can any longer represent what a human being is. Smallpox connects individual to mass, as systems of regulation attempt to control the ebbs and flows of its life.
This "war within and against society" was what the Victorians used gender to think through and approach. Gender was precisely that "Norm" which connects Disciplinarity and Biopower: they converge and overlap on the spongey terrain of sexuality. Drawing examples from Jane Eyre, she traces out how the ostensibly class-centric power dynamic shown was actually intricately linked to gender at every point in the text where classes come into conflict. It takes, Armstrong notes twenty pages for Brontë to get her character Jane Eyre from the rainy outside to the warm inside of the Parsonage. Gender lets us understand this struggle to enter the privileged domestic space better than the obvious class problematic. Hannah, the female housekeeper tries to prevent Jane from entering the parsonage, while the master eventually overrules his domestic servant and admits Jane into the house. This "masculine right to include others" shows for Armstrong the prevalent gendering of class conflict at work within Victorian literature.