Making Connections

In Wilde’s letter to the editor reprinted on page xxiii of the introduction, he suggests that Basil, Dorian, and Lord Henry are incomplete because they fail to strike a balance between indulgence and restraint. At least that’s what our text’s editor gleans from the author’s words. Taking this reading a step further, you might say that the novel allegorizes these impulses, with Basil representing indulgence, Lord Henry restraint, and Dorian the tension between the two extremes. It’s easy for us to forget that Dorian wrestles with this conflict because his efforts are so overshadowed by his losing record and the ugliness of his acts.

You could also apply a similar reading to Bleak House. In this case, Jarndyce, Woodcourt, and Esther also lack a balance between indulgence and restraint. (Although critics have characterized the binary in terms of desire and selflessness, I believe they derive from the same basic impulse.) Jarndyce gives care and protection to his wards, but he will not indulge himself by accepting gratitude. Woodcourt is heroic and generous in deed, but after seven years of marriage he infantilizes Esther and treats her like a domestic. Esther, on the other hand, begins as self-effacing, and like Jarndyce she runs from compliments—not literally like he does but by reflecting the compliment back onto the sender. But Esther at least tries to evolve; it’s just that her efforts are blunted by the men in her life. When she accepts Jarndyce’s proposal, she puts her arms around him and gives him a kiss, but he just stands there like a stone wall. Although she seems to concede defeat at the end, who knows what lies beyond that curious hyphen. 

The point I want to make is that it’s important for givers to accept gratitude for their acts. The process isn’t complete until the receivers express their thankful feelings and the givers accept them. Giving and receiving—whether in the form of material objects or love—is an organic process. It’s essential to the development of a civilized society—in contrast to the decaying world that Dickens portrays—but each link in the evolutionary chain must be fully formed before it can grow. The same logic applies to indulgence and restraint. Henry tells Dorian—in order to egg him on—that “the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it” (19). But this only leads to a life of indulgence, as Dorian shows. Temptation is part of the life force. It should not be replaced by restraint but informed by it. This also holds true for the relationship between life and art, the parallel theme of the novel. Their connection is a symbiotic one. Each cannot prosper without the other. It’s not an either-or question of whether life imitates art or art imitates life; they nurture each other. 

Privileged Gaze?

City Soul of Contrasts

          Oscar Wilde sure seems to be one who holds this "privileged gaze" upon humanity. We’ve been discussing the city in the 19^th century this quarter, and after studying Mayhew’s version of the London Labour’s decrepit poor, now we have a new type of 19^th century Londoner; the flaneur. Yet, this character, with its rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the solitary prostitute, is not just the connoisseur of the street; this flaneur is a nocturnal wanderer in pursuit of entertainment.  Judith Walkowitz’ City of Dreadful Delight’s opening chapter “Urban Spectatorship” explains that it is “the flaneur’s propensity for fantasy” and a “bourgeois male pleasure” whom has a “privileged gaze” and whose exploration and discovery of one’s city can help him obtain the advantage of what Griselda Pollock defines as truly “being at home in the city” (16).  Walkowitz describes the progress of this new urban traveler from the traditional urban spectatorship of the “sympathetic resident” who can take up night walking, (noticeably a male pursuit immortalized in urban accounts since Elizabethan times).

             So, now we learn that the poor hovels of London in the East End become a place of entertainment for the bored aristocracy, how enchanting. The “streets of London became a playground for the upper classes” where the street's sights and characters are" passing shows.” Is this like visiting the animals in a zoo? This is where the connection between Wilde’s classic The Portrait of Dorian Gray and the city landscape really began to connect for me. Dorian goes down to the dumpy London theater to “watch” a second rate actress perform, and Sybil Vane becomes the character in one of his many passing shows.

            Except, Walkowitz begins using terms such as moral and biological degeneration in the latter part of her chapter to define the poor. People of poverty (or the characters in the streets who create the stage shows), who were able to change the bourgeois’ boring reality into an evening bit of fantasy, are now the purveyors of immoral attitudes that ultimately change the biological nature of humanity. Really? Well, yes. Walkowitz declares London to be a place  “where values and perception seem in constant flux” and Wilde shows us that when Dorian enters into these East End opium dens, (where he ultimately learns his horrid immoral behavior as he quite frequently begins sauntering into these decrepit hovels), we watch how one can easily transfer from an “illegible” city at night back into an “ordered and knowable” city before dawn. This fluctuating between reality and fantasy become a construct only a knife can put order to.

              Yet, my argument would differ. I believe that I can prove that the beauty of Dorian (aka. the West End) is a façade. Just like when Walkowitz explains that “the public landscape of the privileged urban flaneur of the period had become an unstable construct threatened internally by contradictions and tensions and constantly challenged from without by social forces that pressed these dominant representations to be reworked, shorn up, reconstructed (17)” I would suggest that Wilde created a satire to explain the obscene vanity of the bourgeois; as long as they kept up “appearances” they did not have to follow any moral code, and these nocturnal wanderings were part of this unstable construct of ethics of the hypocritical rich; a group of West Enders who ridicule the poor as dirty, but enjoy the entertainment provided to them.

            And another way I will prove this (as I believe I am passionate enough about this idea to write my second paper on it) is by taking all the descriptions that Wilde uses to describe the portrait as it changes, and the immoral actions of Dorian and compare the diction to the descriptions that historians use to define the East End. Once Dorian’s soul is defined to be a symbol of the East End, I will then show how the hypocrisy of the bourgeois façade makes Wilde’s novel a satire of his own West End social class.

She / He More Complex than Either / Or -On Wilson

She a Street Walker, Globe Trotter

Immediately we encounter the oppositional positing of two ideological systems: the class interest found in the “Victorian determination to control working-class women” and the gender interest or “feminist concern for women’s safety and comfort in city streets” (Wilson 90). Yet, feminist interests would go beyond a question of female safety and comfort, to attempt to answer the why question in the division of labor while opening the possibility of disrupting or destabilizing our normative ideas of women in cities-exactly what Wilson attempts.

I questioned whether the supposed spectacle of women in the streets and public spaces was due to the intensification of the public / private divide, instead of its erosion, and then, not just of its erosion, but of the erosion rather, of the fixed ideas of gender roles within private / public spheres. In other words, the intensification of a spectacular consumer society risked revealing the use and purpose of controlling the social body- which includes men, and women, and of every class divide.

It seems, at this historical moment, the city itself is becoming reified. Rather than seeing Engels of emblematic of hostility towards urbanization and/or romantic anti-urbanism (91), Engels is bringing up rather, a question of ethics which is at the heart of all systems of domination and exploitation. Sensationalizing women on the streets deflected from the question of ethical treatment of all people.

The alarm was not that women were out on the streets, but rather as Wilson states that the patriarchal order was being undermined by urban life (91). Everyone’s included here. After all, “a more educated, and civilized populace” meant the development of a strong hegemony and its greater exercise of social control. Yet, as Foucault also proposes, where there is power, there is resistance. Therefore, we can see a simultaneous movement of control and conformity while the patriarchal order was also being disrupted.

Looking at industrialization in the U.S., John D’Emilio explains for example,

“The expansion of capital and the spread of wage labor have effected a profound transformation in the structure and functions of the nuclear family, the ideology of family life, and the meaning of heterosexual relations. It is these changes in the family that are most directly linked to the appearance of a collective gay life.” (Capitalism and Gay Identity 102)

Yet, we often forget how heterosexual men (even middle-class men) were also regulated through gender roles and the supposed public / private divide. For example, a middle class family man follows monotonous and routine labor commutes and circuits to his place of work and home. While his movement may have appeared to be “free” he was also confined by the appearance or adherence to respectability etc. On the other hand, as we’ve read in the assigned novels, women in Britain moved about in the cities, and were also on lookers--witnesses of transactions. The genre of travel diaries for example, are of women traveling around the world especially to colonies where they enacted “the gaze” upon the colonized “other,” though noted, that they often travelled either to accompany their husbands, fathers, or for missionary / civilizing work.

I agree with Wilson that “Perhaps worse was that, in the rough and tumble of the city street and urban crowd, distinctions of rank of every kind were blurred” (91) pointing to the fear of exogamy and by that, I don’t mean simply outside one’s race, or culture, but also outside one’s class.

So, while urbanization highlighted the spectacle of women on the street, the spectacle was an exposure rather, for example as with the prostitutes, a great example of a person as both commodity and use value. Luce Irigaray for example goes as far as to propose that patriarchal sexuality and motherhood is a "masochistic prostitution of the (female) body to a desire that is not her own" (The Sex Which Is Not One, 25). I prefer Wilson’s approach in disrupting such fixed polarizations of good versus evil (93) which occurs when gender/sex distinctions are reified.

In short, I also agree that “in practice the private sphere was-and is-also a masculine domain” (98) and that what became public in the social milieu at the time was not the spectacle of public women necessarily but their use and commodity in a rising capitalist and patriarchal society. On the other hand, I cannot negate that women social mobility was blocked entirely through various institutions. Thus, becoming public signaled women as entering more fully into the economy as holders of property, legal contracts, and full citizens rather than as mere spectacles walking the streets.

 

 

On Wilson's "Invisible Flaneur"

I really enjoyed this week's reading. I liked how it helped piece together several issues we've discussed in class over the past several weeks. While it's still very heavy on theory, I think Wilson's style just made it a very good read. As she discusses and historicizes the “relationship of women to cities,” I found it easier to track the claims she disagreed with and where she positioned herself as a feminist writer. She discusses issues of marginality, commodification, consumerism, sexuality, and gender roles. And she explores these issues by citing other critics and theorists. From Baudelaire to Benjamin to Lacan and to other feminist writers, Wilson seems to be situating herself amidst these writers by arguing that women were not isolated from the public sphere; they did have a visible place in the city and they play an important role in the city. One of the claims that she makes, as she responds to Janet Wolff’s argument that women were “wholly excluded” from a male-dominated public sphere, is that images and representations are more important than words or established discourses. She says, “we are confronted with representations, and these are impossible to counter by means of material evidence, trapped as we are in ‘the ultimate labyrinth-history’” (99).

With the rise of department stores, restaurants, and ladies’ rooms, we can see that women were in fact participating in consumerism and were present in public spaces. As I was following Wilson’s argument, I kept thinking about why this would be an important point to make? From today’s perspective, it’s not difficult to understand that woman’s relationship to shopping, consumerism, and the public sphere has a long history dating back to the nineteenth-century. However, in the section “Blurring the Lines of Demarcation,” I understood that Wilson was less concerned with establishing that women were in the public sphere than with exploring a woman’s position in the city, public space. I think she makes a valid point when she argues that women in the city had more opportunities than women in the countryside. The working-class woman had more options in work and residence than if she stayed in the country, “embedded in the family economy” (103). It seems as if Wilson is arguing against other feminist critics who downplay or ignore a woman’s agency, freedom, and opportunity that can be better actualized in the city space than anywhere else.

            If I could try to sum up what I take away from Wilson, I’d say that women and men can be marginalized in society. She ultimately argues against women being invisible flaneurs because the flaneur himself “never really existed” but was just an “embodiment of the special blend of excitement, tedium, and horror aroused by many in the new metropolis” (109). In the city, we are all battling against commercializing and marginalizing forces in a capitalistic society. I love how Wilson states that the true heroism lies in “surviving the disorienting space” of the city (110). It’s not about arguing over the position that men and women hold in society. It’s more about being aware of how a woman’s presence in the city can undermine established ways of thinking and negotiate new ways of thinking.

Wilson's Heroism

Elizabeth Wilson’s The Invisible Flaneur struck me in a lot of ways, but I was most intrigued by the idea that the flaneur, and the “embodiment of the ‘male gaze,’” is an act not of possession or annihilation of the object, but an act that renders the subject invisible (I am on board with the idea that a woman can occupy the space of a flaneur, although I’m not yet prepared to articulate a clear argument for that one yet). Wilson writes that while a common interpretation of the flaneur is built around the idea that the flaneur’s gaze is masterful, rapacious, and possessing, “Voyeurism and commodification lead to the attenuation and deferral of satisfaction” (108). The labyrinth of the city and the city that never provides a complete narrative or interaction produces an experience similar to the experience represented by Edgar Allen Poe’s A Man of the Crowd (I also really enjoyed, and have enjoyed, how all of these readings have been interacting with one another. It almost feels like they themselves exist in an urban space…too much?). In A Man of the Crowd, the flaneur “is never alone; and, when singled out, he vanishes” (109). Wilson then goes on to say “he floats with no material base, living on his wits, and lacking the patriarchal discourse that assured him of meaning, is compelled to invent a new one.” For Wilson, this wandering existence is destructive and that the only way to survive the “disorienting space” of the labyrinth is to create meaning and beauty amongst the masses—“it lies in the ability to discern among the massed ranks of anonymity the outline of forms of beauty and individuality appropriate to urban life. The act of creating meaning, seemingly so arbitrary becomes heroic in itself” (11). This is the moment where I parted a bit with Wilson. I don’t mean that I necessarily disagree with this premise, but more that I’m confused with this somewhat hopeful suggestion. I really appreciated Wilson’s persuasive argument that the masculine gaze embodied by the figure of the flaneur is in fact destroyed by his own anonymity and the instability and invisibility that the city creates. I was also drawn to Wilson’s use of Poe’s Man of the Crowd to support the idea that the flaneur is a figure who vanishes outside of the crowd, but this moment when Wilson suggests that the heroism for both sexes lies in the ability to create meaning within urban life does not sit well with me—mainly because I do not know what that would like after having read this article. Wilson also does not pursue this idea much further and conveniently does not provide an answer for me *sigh.* I guess what I’m wondering is, have we seen instances in other texts (or even a moment in Wilson’s text that I am overlooking), that provides insight into this notion? What would this creation of meaning look like? It’s obviously not through painting…joke of course, but maybe not really?

Bleak House and Wilson's invisible Flâneur

Women being “ensconced in the domestic sphere”(90) are a pretty large theme in Bleak House. The most obvious example is the binary representation of Esther and Lady Deadlock. Esther from the moment we are introduced to her is in the domestic sphere. She may change homes several times, but she is seen only travelling into homes, unless a man accompanies her. Her movements are quite limited to the home. She is portrayed as the Angel of the house, despite not having a loving mother figure in her life, Esther knows what to do when Jenny’s baby dies, she mothers Ada and runs Bleak House noting everyone’s preferences and catering to them behind the scenes.  Lady Dedlock on the other hand is never content with her domestic life and is constantly traveling outside her sphere. In our first introduction to her she expresses her dissatisfaction through boredom, she is then on route to Paris. What is interesting is that the reader finds this out through the housekeeper who is reporting her absence to Mr. Guppy. Absence from the home thereafter defines her role. The next times we hear of Lady Dedlock she is on the rode travelling home but halts the carriage to walk hurriedly away form her husband. She is later seen taking shelter form a storm not at Chesney Wold her home but out in a lodge within the woods. But even her movements within the city are limited, she cannot move about the city without Tom’s guidance. She may have arrived there alone but she was certainly not able to navigate the city without his presence. Even in her final scene, she flees to the tomb of her dead lover and in some odd way is there under a male presence as well. Lady Dedlock’s tale is the story of a woman who succumbed to the immoral and sensual excesses of the city. She birthed an illegitimate child outside of wedlock. Her story is the depiction of the “breakdown of family life”(91).  The only way she was able to preserve her virtue and respectability was by marrying Sir Leicester. It was only by being under the protection of his name and becoming his, was she able to escape her past. The man in this way was able to redeem her but it is interesting that the male presence is largely silent throughout the novel; at most he observes but remains passive.

            The two strongest personalities within the novel are Esther and Honoria’s, decisive and proactive characters. The men in the novel seem like weak figures like the man child, Mr. Skimpole, Tom an actual child, Jenny’s alcoholic husband, Richard the youth with no direction in life, Nemo the opium addict and the various other male figures that seem to quail beneath the power of the more assertive women in the story. Here is where we can apply the idea of the Flâneur as a male observer, with no occupation or sense of duty. Richard, Skimpole and Jenny’s husbands are the obvious examples of wastrels if not quite dandies. However there are men who perform acts but even those remain passive and silent. Mr. Jarndyce for so many years provided for Esther anonymously, he is portrayed as a nice man who by refusing to be thanked also refuses to acknowledge his actions and so though we know he did something we do not know exactly what. Esther’s movements are well documented as are Lady Dedlock’s. He like Sir Leicester  with Honoria offers to protect Esther through marriage, though this is not made explicit in the book. In my opinion he offered marriage after it is revealed that she is illegitimate. This revelation had she remained unmarried would have ruined her respectability and reputation. By becoming a Mrs. Jarndyce she would have been redeemed and saved from disgrace. The transaction from one engagement to another with Mr. Woodcourt is made possible by the fact that she needs to marry for society to accept her in a respectable manner. It is at this point in the story that Esther is in danger of becoming a fallen angel, so to speak. So we have three men performing silent acts of chivalry. They are passive attempts at protection. They can only watch silently and act quietly. Mr. Tulkinghorn is the most passive aggressive male in the novel. He subjects lady Dedlock to his gaze and in some tacit way exerts power over her by revealing that he will for the moment keep silent about her secret. He is a repository of secrets, action waiting to happen; yet that action is repressed and is killed by a woman. He is silenced forever. Despite being portrayed as the weaker gender the female’s characters have the strongest personalities while the men are portrayed as incompetent babies from the courts of chancery to the homes of poor. With this in mind it is amazing to have to acknowledge that society was male centric and patriarchal.

women flaneur and ramblings

So as noted in previous posts, we are introduced to the idea of the "flaneuses," the female version of the flaneur. I have always been fascinated by this idea of the "lounger" generation that was produced with the rise of bourgeoisie. It seems to me like they were an epidemic, just people strolling around without a care in the world because they didn't have anything. It is interesting to see the female version of that, since bourgeoisie women were usually seen in the Madame Bovary sense, useless. Lady Dedlock encompassed that in the beginning, perpetually bored and yet she had a sense of purpose that she never unlocked, well it was too late when she did. 

Baudalaire saw them as key to understanding the city. I mean who better to know the city but someone who participates without really participating. its like a privilege to be able to just watch without being noticed and take it all in. 

What really intrigued me however was how flaneur reminded me of the book/movie American Psycho. Batemen essentially becomes in what we see in Poe's "Man of the crowd," a man of the crowd. If you guys arent familiar with the character, he's basically a 20 something rich wall street dude who kills people for fun and thrill and never gets caught cause in the end no one really knows who he is or how he looks even though they work with him.

Its like he was able to be invisible by being visible all at the same time. 

The movie of course degrades women in all possible ways. They are used as sex objects, seen as perpetually bored and easily murdered by Batemen.

Which leads me to another though. Women, especially then, were kind of invisible. I mean they kept up the sales for all the fluff novels that were published, because they were at home and read for leisure, but what else did they really do. There hasn’t even been one heroine in any of the novels we have read. Their lives are dictated by the male’s reaction and what they want. I mean Esther didn’t choose Woodcourt; she was gifted to him. Mary, well Mary was just there and decided she loved Wilson, in my opinion, just to keep the story going. And sybil, poor Sibyl, is the beginning of Dorian’s descent into hell, and dictated her life according to his words and feelings. Women are essentially objects.

 “Yet although the male ruling class did all it could to restrict the movement of women in cities, it proved impossible to banish them from public spaces. Women continued to crowd nto the city centres and the factory districts.”

I wish I saw more of this, sure Lady D is in the streets, but she’s dead.

I still think the fear of women in the streets is around today. I mean now there are programs like “take back the night,” where women proudly walk in darkened streets because they CAN and not because they want to be raped or hurt. But, don’t we all have that strange fear that maybe you shouldn’t go through that dark alley or walk to your car alone. (maybe I watch too much Lifetime, yes I DO watch too much Lifetime)

I guess what I’m trying to get to is….have things really changed that much.?