Articulating social agency in our mutual friend: Problems with performances, practices, and political efficacy

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 71, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 719-749

  Rothenberg, Molly Anne ^a  

^a TULANE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33746003923     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2004.0041     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. See Gregg Hecimovich's '"The Cup and the Lip' and the Riddle of Our Mutual Friend," ELH 62 (1995): 955-77.
2. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1865) (New York: The Penguin Group, 1997), 27. Subsequent references to this novel will be cited parenthetically by page number; chapter titles are given in the text because there is no standard edition of the novel.
3. The novel is constructed in two main story lines, both devolving from the fact that the body of a drowned man is misidentified. In the first so-called Harmon plot, John Harmon, exiled heir to the Harmon fortune (comprised of vast dust mounds), returns to London from a life at sea to claim his inheritance or abjure it, depending on his assessment of Bella Wilfer, the girl his father's will insists he marry. Once landed, George Radfoot, John's companion onboard ship, conspires with the outcast riverman Rogue Riderhood to murder John, adopt his identity, and seize the fortune. Drugged and dressed in George's clothes, John is thrown into the sea but manages to drown George instead. When the body is found by Rogue and his sometime partner Gaffer Hexam, the authorities believe that John Harmon has been murdered; John goes to view the body incognito, which makes his face, if not his name, known to the police. To escape apprehension as a murderer and to prolong his opportunity to observe Bella, John adopts a new identity, "John Rokesmith," and takes on the duties of secretary to his father's most faithful employees and his own childhood protectors, Noddy Boffin and his wife, who have inherited the Harmon fortune and also taken in the impoverished yet imperious Bella Wilfer, feeling that she has suffered by the terms of the will. The illiterate Boffins have employed Silas Wegg, an envious one-legged man, to read to them; Wegg sees an opportunity to advance himself by finding another Harmon will among the dustmounds with which he plans to blackmail Boffin. Wegg enlists the taxidermist Mr. Venus in his plan, but Venus, who only participated while he was down in the dumps about being rejected as a marriage partner by Rogue's daughter Pleasant, reveals the plan to John Harmon. In the process of thwarting Wegg's plans, John falls in love with Bella and weds her. In the second Hexam story line, Gaffer Hexam is suspected of the Harmon murder. John seeks the true culprit, Rogue, and wrestles with his conscience about revealing himself so that Gaffer's daughter Lizzie will not suffer on account of the false accusations against her father. Instead, John settles on blackmailing Rogue into helping him clear Hexam's name. Eugene Wrayburn, whom Lightfoot involved in the legalities surrounding the case, falls in love with Lizzie despite the difference in their social standing and his father's displeasure. Unfortunately, Lizzie's brother, Charlie, who is trying to better himself, wants Lizzie to marry his unappealing teacher, Bradley Headstone. Headstone feels so strongly about Lizzie that he frightens her: his passion turns into jealous rage against Wrayburn, whom he attempts unsuccessfully to murder. Lizzie leaves London in order to protect Wrayburn from Headstone, ultimately rescues him from Headstone's attempted drowning, and finally becomes his wife. Rogue blackmails Headstone with the knowledge of the attack, but when Headstone tries to kill Rogue, both end up drowning. These characters and a host of minor players - among them the nouveau-riche Veneerings; the usurer Fascination Fledgby, who engineers the bankruptcy of the Veneerings; Riah the Jew, who is forced to act as Fledgby's front man against his own moral code; Betty Higden, the poor woman who would rather die on the road than be taken to the poor house; and the crippled Jenny Wren, dressmaker to dolls, who takes care of her alcoholic father and, with Riah, befriends Lizzie Hexam-provide a set of comparisons and contrasts that invite and frustrate moral accountings in ways that, as I argue above, illuminate the conditions of social agency.
4. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Harlan Davidson, 1947), 60.
5. This realistic dimension is supported by the narrative's reliance on apparently forced coincidence: both the realism and the coincidences highlight the likelihood of slips between cups and lips.
6. I greatly admire John Farrell's essay on partnering in Our Mutual Friend ("The Partner's Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend," ELH 66 [1999]: 759-99), but he tends to establish his pairs by reading narrative fate as an index of moral value.
7. For example, it seems that John Rokesmith unwittingly teaches Rogue Riderhood how to mount an effective blackmail (Rogue-smith?), for the scene in Pleasant's shop where the disguised Harmon intimidates Rogue into repudiating his charges against Hexam is clearly echoed in Rogue's successful blackmail of Headstone in the schoolroom. Trying to distinguish these two cases by arguing that John acts from selfless or disinterested motives (to clear Hexam's name for the Harmon murder) while Rogue doesn't (his own neck is at stake) has some problems: at the time of his conversation with Rogue, Harmon self-interestedly decides to remain incognito in part because he is concerned about how the authorities would view his failure to come forward earlier. By contrast, Rogue's self-interestedness, if not his blackmail activities, is entirely proper, given that he is innocent of the crime in which Headstone seeks to implicate him. The novel also effectively demolishes the argument that ends justify means, showing that there can be no reliable way to ascertain whether one's intentions to do good will in fact result in a beneficial outcome. Good intentions evidently will not suffice, for Riah's sense of morality and self-sacrifice turns out to align him not just with the malicious Fledgby but also with a racist ideology and a predatory economic system. The examples of Headstone's and Wrayburn's love for Lizzie offer dramatic counterexamples to the proposition that loving intentions cancel out reprehensible effects as well as raise the question of the standpoint from which we are to assign value to outcomes.
8. See, for example, George Gissing's "The Radical," in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1904).
9. Contemporary critics of Dickens's social views famously include J. Hillis Miller (Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958]);
10. Jonathan Arac (Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion, Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne [New Brunswick: Rugers Univ. Press, 1979]);
11. and Kucich (Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens [Athens: Univ. of Georgia, Press, 1981]), among others.
12. The view that Dickens offers useful insights into the nature of social relations and the mechanisms of social change is gaining currency, in part due to Elizabeth Ermarth's Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983); see, most recently, Farrell for a useful overview of the issues and critics in this discussion (797 n. 22).
13. While it is not the purpose of this essay to trace the links between Victorian and Victorianist accounts of agency, the interested reader will find a comprehensive account of the complexities and terminology of the Victorian debate in John R. Reed's Victorian Will (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1989).
14. For one recent essay on this point, see Amanda Anderson's "The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity," Victorian Studies 43 (2000): 43-65.
15. In Victorian studies itself, explorations of the relative power of individual agents to challenge and transform dominant systems have been advanced primarily by feminist scholars, such as Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Deirdre David, and Anderson, and cultural studies scholars, such as Patrick Brantlinger, Anne McClintock, and D. A. Miller. See Anderson for a critique of this literature's exceptionalist claims.
16. Daniel Paul Scoggin has written that "Dickens employs the metaphor of living-deadness to identify the far-reaching desire by the avaricious to control the future." See his "Gothic Capital: Speculation, Specters and Atonement in the Victorian Novel," DAI 59 (4):1181.
17. As his critics note, J. L. Austin contradicts himself when he admits that the effect of any "performative" speech act is always dependent upon context. See Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), 8.
18. Because this theory and its criticisms have been well rehearsed, I abbreviate this account. See the critiques of Austin mounted by Jacques Derrida in his limited Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988)
19. and Joan Copjec in her "India Song/Son nom de Venise dans Calcutte desert: The Compulsion to Repeat," in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988).
20. Austin, 14.
21. Austin, 108. I reformulate this relation between perlocutionary and illocutionary acts from an unpublished manuscript coauthored with Valente.
22. Austin, 115, 105.
23. Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 24.
24. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 148.
25. Butler, Gender Trouble, 148.
26. In the opening arguments of Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), Butler herself follows (and then apparently forgets) Derrida's critique of Austin's perlocutionary and illocutionary distinction, acknowledging that iterability allows merely for the possibility that a resignification will transform social structures.
27. Although Butler has disclaimed this volitional form of agency since being charged with it by critics of Gender Trouble, she continues to resurrect it, along with its positional claims, as the political warrant of her theorizing about agency. See Melissa Clarke's discussion in "Rosa Parks's Performativity, Habitus, and Ability to Play the Game," Philosophy Today 44 (2000 supplement): 160-68.
28. For Butler's influence on some feminist theorists' claims to create reliable political effects, see Lois McNay's Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
29. See Fiona Webster's "The Politics of Sex and Gender: Benhabib and Butler Debate Subjectivity" (Hypatia 15 [2000] :1-22), for a concise discussion of Butler's theory of agency and its political potential.
30. Austin's (and Butler's) emphasis on the agent's intentions betrays a debt to the Anglo-American tradition of the philosophy of action, which states the minimal conditions of agency: the agent, one, has the capacity to choose between options and, two, is free from constraint to undertake the action chosen. Haunted by a Cartesian volitionalism, in which a mentally-situated will animates an otherwise inert body to act out its purposes, this account takes the agent as its reference point, limiting its considerations of agency to the effects on the agent. See Brian O'Shaughnessy, The Will, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980)
31. and Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
32. There is a considerable literature in political philosophy based on the notion that such empathetic identification is necessary: without it, so the story goes, we would not be able to compare our positions with others in order to conceive values and institutions impartially. My position is that the empathy so conjured is always partial and always mediated by fantasies of similitude, the content of which will necessarily be different for the parties involved, notwithstanding the identification. Nonetheless, such exercises in identification form a crucial part of the social relation, so long as we understand that relation, as I explain below, to be necessarily split.
33. The members of this group best known in the U.S. are Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau. Luce Giard and Henri Détienne are other influential theorists.
34. In fact, Butler herself appeals to Bourdieu's theories for just this purpose; see her Excitable Speech, 134-35. Interestingly, she faults Bourdieu for making Austinlike distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate performatives, a criticism she does not apply to her own work (146).
35. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), xi. Hereafter abbreviated P and cited parenthetically by page number.
36. These theorists take their cue on nonintentionalism from the phenomenological account of habit articulated in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1995), who regards "the grasping of a habit" as "the grasping of a significance, but it is the motor grasping of a motor significance. . . . Habit expresses our power of . . . changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments" (143, 144). For Merleau-Ponty, habits however acquired have nonintentional agency insofar as they reshape us and the world around us. As we obtain new bodily knowledge, our ability to transform our lives and our circumstances grows, no matter what our conscious intentions. See Clarke for a fuller discussion of Bourdieu's links to Merleau-Ponty.
37. For Bourdieu's definition of the habitus, his term for these durably inculcated predispositions, see The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1980), 54-55.
38. Other parts of Pleasant's body also partake of this duality. For example, like her hair, the swivel eye she inherited from her father sometimes does what she wants and sometimes seems to act independently: neither eye nor hair are fully at her command.
39. See Athena Vrettos, "Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition," Victorian Studies 42 (2000): 399-426.
40. I am grateful to Warren for this image of Pleasant-parrot as sailor sidekick.
41. Venus also associates Pleasant with parrots: he first met her when he was "down at the waterside . . . looking for parrots" (492).
42. For a less critical account of the political relevance of de Certeau's theory, see Mark Poster's "The Question of Agency: Michel De Certeau and the History of Consumerism," Diacritics 22 (1992): 94-107;
43. Ben Highmore's "'Opaque, Stubborn Life': Everyday Life and Resistance in the Work of Michel de Certeau," Xcp: Cross-Cultural Studies 7 (2000): 89-100;
44. and Michael Sheringham's "Michel de Certeau: The Logic of Everyday Practices," Xcp: Cross-Cultural Studies 7 (2000): 28-43.
45. For an extended definition of the difference between strategies and tactics, see de Certeau, 35-39.
46. When Harmon sizes up Pleasant, we may imagine that he is assessing her moral worth. Yet because her shrewdness, closemouthedness, and rationalizing not only suit Pleasant to her quasi-larcenous business but also correspond to Harmon's need for a particular kind of service, it is only by according an absolute positive moral status to Harmon - one he himself refuses - that Harmon's use of Pleasant seems to be a philanthropic intervention earned by her positive moral qualities rather than a self-interested deployment of her morally ambiguous habits.
47. Since drafting this essay, I have read Bruno Latour's "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern" (Critical Inquiry 30 [2004]: 225-48), in which he exposes a "critical trick" of describing, without acknowledging doing so, subjects and objects as both determined and determining: "The subject is either so powerful that he or she can create everything out of his or her own labor ... or nothing but a mere receptacle for the forces of determinations known by natural and social sciences; the object is either nothing but a screen on which to project human free will ... or so powerful that it causally determines what humans think and do" (241 fig. 5).
48. The zeugmatic position of "mutual" which simultaneously separates and conjoins the two other words in the title of this novel is paradigmatic of these dual functions.
49. Some contemporary theorists of agency, such as Ernesto Laclau (Emancipations [New York: Verso, 1996])
50. Chantal Mouffe (The Return of the Political [London: Verso, 1993])
51. and Alain Badiou (Ethics: An Essay in the Understanding of Evil [New York: Verso, 2001]), have recognized, albeit in different ways, the crucial importance of understanding agency in terms of signification, as a function of retroversion and reappropriation, basing political efficacy on what I am calling social agency. Badiou implicitly references the two operations of signification in his description of an emergent political situation; see esp. 112 and following.
52. Of course, political and social factors come into play to attempt to fence off meanings and enforce certain actions; nonetheless, signification works only by means of the necessary failure of stable meaning, as a function of transindividuality and retroversion. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek's The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999).
53. The same properties that make agency social also split social structures. A structure is available only as a function of and split among the various actions that are taken to be instantiations of it. Systems appear as a function of both stabilizing and dissolving operations, which is to say that they work by failing, just as signification itself does. See Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991). In my view, the social nature of agency has truly democratic potential, for it requires us, first, to represent to each other, in a searching and public way, the vicissitudes of signification that will beset us when we act in the social sphere and, second, to identify more precisely, if provisionally, the multiple effects of conventions, institutions, and other mediating structures.