Remembering Miss Wade: Little Dorrit and the historicizing of female perversity

GLQ

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 423-451

  Jagose, Annamarie ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33749838431     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-4-3-423     Document Type: Article

References (100)

1. By one of those happy coincidences in which Dickens specializes, I was employed by the University of Melbourne in the state of Victoria and so found myself surrounded by what I may as well call - following Steven Marcus - "the other Victorians" (Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967]).
2. This kind of interpretive uncertainty might well be endemic to Dickens's narrative. An anonymous 1857 reviewer, claiming Little Dorrit as an "imperishable addition to the literature of [Dickens's] country," nevertheless notes: "We must confess to some disappointment at the explanation, towards the close of the book, of the mystery connected with Mrs Clennam and the old house with its strange noises. It is deficient in clearness, and does not fulfil the expectations of the reader, which have been wound up to a high pitch. Indeed, the woof of the entire story does not hold together with sufficient closeness" ("From a Review of Little Dorrit" in Charles Dickens: Critical Assessments, vol. 1, ed. Michael Hollington [East Sussex: Helm, 1995], 386-88).
3. In his 1991 introduction to the novel (Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit [1857; reprint, London: Mandarin, 1991]), Peter Ackroyd makes a similar point when he represents Little Dorrit as "more confused" than Dickens's other work, admitting that "it is often hard, even after repeated reading, to understand the full burden of the intrigue" (xvi-xvii).
4. Ackroyd, Introduction to Little Dorrit, xvii.
5. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 26.
6. It is not possible to indicate fully the breadth of work that argues for historicized understandings of categories of sexual identification. For a representative survey, see George Chauncey Jr., "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualisation of Female Deviance," Salmagundi 58-59 (1982): 114-46;
7. David M. Halperin, "Is There a History of Sexuality?" in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 416-31;
8. Robert A. Padgug, "Sexual Matters: On Conceptualising Sexuality in History," Radical History Review 20 (1979): 3-23;
9. Valerie Traub, "The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris," GLQ 2, nos. 1-2 (1995): 81-113;
10. and Martha Vicinus, "'They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong': The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity," Feminist Studies 18, no. 3 (fall 1992): 467-97.
11. The kind of historical research I have in mind here might be best represented by Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture: 1668-1801 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). While it is a thorough and engaging account of textual representations of sexual passion between women and is sensitive to the differences between the "long eighteenth" and the twentieth centuries, Passions Between Women nevertheless characterizes its project as extending the historical reach of the word lesbian: "Our foresisters who loved women probably differed in many crucial respects from those of us who love women in the 1990s, but it seems fair to use 'lesbian culture' as an umbrella term for both groups" (7).
12. Recent work has tended to complicate near axiomatic understandings of Victorian femininity. So Mary Poovey titles her book Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), explicitly drawing attention to the contested nature of Victorian models of gender that were "always open to revision, dispute and the emergence of oppositional formulations" (3); Judith Walkowitz corrects what she perceives as a homogenizing tendency in Victorian studies: "Most studies of Victorian sexuality have focused on one single code of sexuality. . . . In so doing, they have assumed the existence of a unitary Victorian culture.
13. In fact, several Victorian subcultures existed at the same time, each with distinct prescriptions about sex" (Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 5);
14. and Jill L. Matus emphasizes the instabilities in Victorian understandings of sexual differentiation, "unsettl[ing] the notion that Victorian medical texts and the narratives of reproductive biology present a unified or coherent representation of female sexuality or sexual difference" (Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995], 49).
15. As any number of critics have noted, the naturalized twinning of masculine and feminine, public and private, industrious and virtuous, supports a specifically bourgeois fantasy of family, enlisting gender - and, specifically, an idealized femininity - in the rise and reproduction of the middle-class family: "Thus it was the new domestic woman rather than her counterpart, the new economic man, who first encroached upon aristocratic culture and seized authority from it" (Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 59).
16. In turn, the bourgeois family, with its dichotomized take on gender and its dynastic investment in reproduction, is drawn into the service of industrialized capital and its circulation of commodities. Following Armstrong, Poovey argues that the wife's "self-regulation was a particularly valuable and valued form of labor, for it domesticated man's (sexual) desire in the private sphere without curtailing his ambition in the economy" (Uneven Developments, 115).
17. Jeff Nunokawa extends the implications of this analysis, arguing that while the domestic sphere acts as an enabling buffer against the vicissitudes of the marketplace, it is not the home - itself vulnerable to cycles of acquisition and ownership, as the Victorian novel's fascination with bankruptcy and debt shows - but literally the virtuous wife who offers her husband the prospect of protection from capital's ceaseless cycles of gain and loss: "The woman conscripted at home is assigned the duties of propriety that capital can no longer be relied upon to discharge. The angel of the house is the still point in an age of capital whose perpetual crises show no sign of waning" (Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], 124).
18. While the analysis of the ideological suturing of gender to class has been the signature of much work in contemporary Victorian studies, recent work has begun to examine the relations between the ideological formations of femininity and race or nationality mobilized under the rubric of empire. Thus, Elsie B. Michie argues that "the mid-Victorian fantasy of upward mobility that linked questions of class difference to questions of colonial dominance was also explicitly gendered" (Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993], 47).
19. Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 34.
20. The quotations are from Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992), 21,
21. and Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 9.
22. If prostitution was read as hollowing out the institution of heterosexuality that guaranteed civilized society, as "a negation of the respectable system of marriage and procreation" (Nead, Myths of Sexuality, 99), then it was equally legible as an indictment of that order.
23. First-wave feminists found it to be "the polluting fact of social existence that tainted all intercourse between the sexes" (Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 160).
24. Nead, Myths of Sexuality, 106.
25. Accordingly, William Acton, the much cited Victorian venerealogist, glosses an interventionist interest in prostitution as an interest in safeguarding the nation's future: "If the race of the people is of no concern to the State, then has the State no interest in arresting its vitiation. But if this concern and this interest be admitted, then arises the necessity for depriving prostitution not only of its moral, but of its physical venom also" (Prostitution Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects in London and Other Large Cities and Garrison Towns with Proposals for the Control and Prevention of Its Attendant Evils [London, 1857; reprint, London, Frank Cass, 1972], 49).
26. Drawing on the ambivalent location of the prostitute within the commercial exchange that increasingly defined the hegemonic status of the middle-class family, Nead observes: "She stands as worker, commodity and capitalist and blurs the categories of bourgeois economics in the same way that she tests the boundaries of bourgeois morality" (Myths of Sexuality, 99).
27. The extent to which prostitution might be reckoned an economic impropriety is suggested by Acton, who identifies women's straying from the domestic sphere into the workplace as one of the principal causes of prostitution. Sketching out a downward spiral that follows no economic law save the one that he offers himself - "Free-trade in female honour follows hard upon that in female labour" - Acton represents prostitution as a disorder of both marital and market relations. Claiming that the advent of women in the workforce lowers men's wages to disastrous effect - "the wages of working men, wherever they compete with female labour, are lowered by the flood of cheap and agile hands, until marriage and a family are an almost impossible luxury or a misery" - and moreover that women are unable to withstand the further diminution of their wages effected by industrialization, Acton offers as a commonplace scenario the prospect of "the famished worker, wearied of [her] useless struggle against capital, . . . tak[ing] virtue itself to market" (Prostitution Considered, 296).
28. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 21.
29. Walter Benjamin's influential work on the city has popularized the nineteenth-century flaneur's recognition of the prostitute as his - albeit desubjectified - double (see, for instance, Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn [London: New Left Books, 1973; reprint, London: Verso, 1992]).
30. Recent feminist work on modernity has tended to problematize this association, although the connection between the male flaneur and the female prostitute is frequently reiterated, as in Susan Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore," in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), 141-56.
31. For an excellent account of the cultural operation of "fallenness" in Victorian culture that is attentive to normative configurations of both femininity and masculinity, see Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).
32. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets, 11.
33. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 50.
34. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 926.
35. If I gag over Little Dorrit and her tireless deference to those who only serve to magnify her wholesomeness through their inability to lay claim to so much as a quarter of her virtue, other critics strenuously suppress any such reaction: "And we do not reject, despite our inevitable first impulse to do so, the character of Little Dorrit herself. Her untinctured goodness does not appall us or make us misdoubt her, as we expect it to do" (Lionel Trilling, "Little Dorrit," The Kenyon Review 15 [1953]: 590).
36. More recently, the unmatchable superiority of the sentimental heroine has been identified as enabling an articulation of female homoerotic desire: "We can clarify the link between nineteenth-century sentimental heroines and the erotic if we recognize how the ideological flawlessness of female sentimentality renders that heroine supremely available for the (highly melodramatic) psychological, sexual and social dramas of other women who labor under, but do not meet, the same standards of perfection" (Mary Armstrong, "Pursuing Perfection: Dombey and Son, Female Homoerotic Desire, and the Sentimental Heroine," Studies in the Novel 28 (fall 1996): 282).
37. A character such as Miss Wade - who, far from laboring under the standards of feminine perfection, defects from them entirely - puts the skids under this feminist reclamation of sentimentality's female-female erotics. After all, an emphatically unsentimentalized homoeroticism between women is facilitated by Miss Wade's perversity, the very knowledge of which is disavowed by the novel's diegetic and extradiegetic economies, while Little Dorrit's epitomizing of femininity articulates a normative gender positionality that will not congeal as a sexuality, the heterosexuality that it underwrites having instead an institutional heft. Finding Little Dorrit irrevocably central to the novel's heterosexualized project of redemption, I read Armstrong's argument about the connection between female homoerotic desire and the sentimental heroine in the nineteenth-century novel as less universalizing than she implies when she writes, "It is time to consider that the nineteenth-century sentimental [novel] - as it does the work of both reflecting female culture and modelling feminine ideological perfection - carries female-female erotics as part of that female experience and model" Mary Armstrong, Studies in the Novel (ibid., 302). Compared to the violently disruptive passions Miss Wade excites, the pale and imitative forms of feminine sociality that are enabled by Little Dorrit's flawlessness can barely qualify as erotic.
38. Patricia Ingham, "Nobody's Fault: The Scope of the Negative in Little Dorrit" in Dickens Refigured: Bodies, Desires, and Other Histories, ed. John Schad (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 112.
39. Despite mentioning the importance of "recognizing the measure of justice in the traditional charges against Dickens's novels (that they are melodramatic, falsely pathetic, didactic, repetitive, and so on)," J. Hillis Miller finds this juxtaposition of "innocence" and "impurity" so compelling that he claims it as "one of the most poignant scenes in Little Dorrit - perhaps in all Dickens" (Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958], vii, 242).
40. Although Susan David Bernstein makes a case for the Victorian prostitutes tropological elasticity, arguing for "the steadfastness of the trope of prostitution for degenerate femininity," my reading of Miss Wade suggests that she falls outside that capacious category, articulating an altogether different disorder in the discourses of Victorian femininity (Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997], 80).
41. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 22. For all he might be, Jonathan Goldberg is not here describing the Victorian but the Renaissance period as he argues for a historicized understanding of the relation between Renaissance texts and modern sexualities.
42. Indeed, Miss Wade's status as a minor character might be precisely why she deserves critical attention. Insofar as it is narratively marginalized and subordinated to the demands of heterosexual closure, the character function of Miss Wade may be seen to parallel that of Hollywood's supporting character, whom Patricia White theorizes in terms of her eccentric relation to the overwhelmingly heterosexual narrative of classic cinema: "A film may be dismissive of a minor player, portray her fate as gratuitous, but it may take less time and care to assimilate her to its ideological project than it would in the case of the female protagonist" (Patricia White, "Supporting Character: The Queer Career of Agnes Moorhead," in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995], 94).
43. Traub, "The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris," 99.
44. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick critiques these dismissals of homosexuality as an improper historical subject by observing the ways in which they frequently "reflect, as we have already seen, some real questions of sexual definition and historicity. But they only reflect them and don't reflect on them" (Epistemology of the Closet [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990], 53).
45. D. A. Miller, "Anal Rope" in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 124. Elsewhere, Miller notes that the raising of the suspicion of homosexuality is effectively managed through the refusal to countenance it: "What is still most familiarly solicited from the devotees of this proverbially innominate love, or solicited from others for them, is not a name, but the continual elision of one. (Consider: - Funny guy, that Al. He's fifty years old and never been married. - Maybe he's gay, Dad. - I didn't say that)"
46. (Miller, Bringing out Roland Barthes [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992], 24).
47. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 19.
48. J. Hillis Miller first argued for Miss Wade as an enviably self-sufficient practitioner of S/M, referring to "the narrow circle of her sadism toward others and her masochism toward herself" (Charles Dickens, 230).
49. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 26.
50. J. C. Reid, Charles Dickens: Little Dorrit (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 19.
51. These are the two most commonly - although not always, as here, simultaneously - held critical explanations for Tattycoram's departure. See, for example, Joan Winslow, "Dickens's Sentimental Plot: A Formal Analysis of Three Novels," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1974 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1977), where it is argued that "Meagles's treatment of Tattycoram results, although unintentionally, in delivering her to the evil Miss Wade" (190).
52. See also Edward Heatley, "The Redeemed Feminine of Little Dorrit" Dickens Studies Annual 4 (1975): 153-64, where great store is put by "Miss Wade's hypnotic power" (158).
53. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 20.
54. With this figure, I allow myself what Dickens never allows: Miss Wade's hand inside Tattycoram. In this, I dramatize D. A. Miller's argument that "every discourse that speaks, every representation that shows homosexuality by connotative means alone[,] will thus be implicitly haunted by the phantasm of the thing itself, not just in the form of the name, but also, more basically, as what the name conjures up: the spectacle of 'gay sex'" ("Anal Rope," 130).
55. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 363.
56. Sarah Winter argues that in this scene Mr. Meagles tries to defend himself against the threat Miss Wade offers "the patriarchal family by her attempt to reproduce herself and her desires through Tattycoram" ("Domestic Fictions: Feminine Deference and Maternal Shadow Labor in Dickens' Little Dorrit" Dickens Studies Annual 18 [1989]: 248).
57. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 369.
58. Lionel Trilling, for example, uses the vocabulary of homosexuality when he describes Miss Wade in terms of "perversion," observing that she "becomes the more interesting if we think of lier as the exact inversion of Esther Summerson of Bleak House" ("Little Dorrit" 585; my emphasis).
59. If it can be allowed that the indirect raising of the suspicion of homosexuality might be a more effective means of promulgating that "knowledge" than an unambiguous nomination, it follows that "coming out" - the direct self-assertion of one's homosexuality - might not always be as straightforward in effect as in intention. A friend of mine when we were both undergraduates - let me call her Vicky, for that is her name - made the trip home to come out to her family. A less oblique announcement can hardly be imagined than the on-site declaration, "I'm a lesbian." Still, first her sisters then her parents, gathered around what was to have been a momentous table, laughed and said, "No, you're not." It was just the kind of thing Vicky would say, back from the city, always ready for a laugh. When she insisted, her parents became cross with her: "You're not," they still said but now as if it were a permission they could refuse, an argument they could win. The next morning, they drove her to the train. "Good-bye," she said, watching them for some acknowledgment, some admission. "Good-bye," they said as always, the consternation all hers. This anecdote, like my argument about the efficacy of the indirect attribution of homosexuality, is intended to problematize the connections, frequently assumed in the field of homosexuality by both homophobic and antihomophobic strategies, between concealment and regression, disclosure and progression.
60. Randolph Splitter, "Guilt and the Trappings of Melodrama in Little Dorrit" Dickens Studies Annual 6 (1977): 125,
61. quoting Dickens, Little Dorrit, 753.
62. For the missing term that triangulates the dyadic "paranoid jealousy," see Freud, "Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality" (1922), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), vol. 18, 221-32.
63. Splitter, "Guilt and the Trappings of Melodrama in Little Dorrit," 125.
64. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 41,
65. and Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 22, 119.
66. If anyone doubts that being a lesbian is as calisthenic as not being one, see Julia Krisleva, About Chinese Women (trans. Anita Barrows [New York: Urizen, 1977]), in which the post-Oedipal lesbian's convoluted negotiations of desire are described: "'I am looking, as a man would, for a woman': or else, 'I submit myself, as if I were a man who thought he was a woman, to a woman who thinks she is a man.' Such are the double or triple twists of what we commonly call female homosexuality" (29).
67. Patricia Ann Ellen Cahill, "Beginning the World: Women and Society in the Novels of Dickens," Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1978 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1979), 127.
68. Patricia Ann Ellen Cahill, "Beginning the World: Women and Society in the Novels of Dickens," Ibid., 131, 128.
69. Mary Janice Murphy, "Dickens' Other Women': The Mature Women in His Novels," Ph.D. diss., University of Louisville, 1975, 122, 123.
70. Heatley, "The Redeemed Feminine of Little Dorrit," 158.
71. Heatley, "The Redeemed Feminine of Little Dorrit," 158. Ibid.
72. Heatley's as if worldly passing reference to lesbianism reminds me of D. A. Miller's caution that "where homosexuality is concerned, the sophistication that has learned how to drop the subject in passing must be just as suspect as the balder mode of panic that would simply drop the subject, period" (Miller, "Anal Rope," 122).
73. Heatley, "The Redeemed Feminine of Little Dorrit," 158.
74. On the connections between the figurings of homosexuality and vampirism, see Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 216-42,
75. and Richard Dyer, "Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism," in Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction, ed. Susannah Radstone (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 47-72.
76. On the more specific connections between lesbianism and vampirism, see Sue-Ellen Case, "Tracking the Vampire," differences 3, no. 2 (summer 1991): 1-20.
77. Miller, Charles Dickens, 235.
78. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), 94.
79. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 20.
80. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police Ibid., 23-24.
81. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 739.
82. Dianne F. Sadoff writes of Miss Wade's handing over of her story to Clennam that "no narrative reason can be given for her act; it appears to be motiveless" ("Storytelling and the Figure of the Father in Little Dorrit," PMLA 95 [March 1980]: 239).
83. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 744.
84. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 3 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), 138-39.
85. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Ibid., 139.
86. Harvey Peter Sucksmith, "Critical Notes," in Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 822.
87. Harvey Peter Sucksmith, "Critical Notes," Little Dorrit (1979), 822. Ibid.
88. Janet Larson, "Designed to Tell: The Shape of Language in Dickens' Little Dorrit," Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1975.
89. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 24.
90. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 744.
91. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (London: GMP Publishers, 1993), 55.
92. Consider, for example, just one item from this list - Miss Wade's figuring of her love for Charlotte, her boarding-school companion: "I would hold her in my arms till morning: loving her as much as ever, and often feeling as if, rather than suffer so, I could so hold her in my arms and plunge to the bottom of a river - where I would still hold her, after we were both dead" (Dickens, Little Dorrit, 749).
93. Her fantasy of a fatal but eternally binding embrace previews that of Bradley Headstone's identical watery clasp of Rogue Riderhood in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865): "When the two were found, lying under the ooze and scum behind one of the rotting gales, . . . [Riderhood] was girdled still with Bradley's iron ring, and the rivets of the iron ring held tight."
94. This scene - and a similar clinch between Magwitch and Compeyson in Great Expectations - has been read by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in terms of a homoerotic "sphineter domination" (Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire [New York: Columbia University Press, 1985], 169). Miss Wade's fatalistic, erotic projection places her within a Dickensian troping of homosexuality.
95. Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 5, 4.
96. Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience Ibid., 168.
97. In making this connection between the operations of ignorance and of knowledge, I am following Sedgwick's observation: "That a particular ignorance is a product of, implies, and itself structures and enforces a particular knowledge is easy to show, perhaps easiest of all, today, in the realm of sexuality" ("Privilege of Unknowing," Genders 1 [spring 1988]: 104).
98. Jaffe, Vanishing Points, 12 (my emphasis).
99. Dickens, Little Dorrit, 30.
100. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 84.