Felix Holt

In response to #2: I really don't know what to make of this book, so everything I have to say feels so speculative. Perhaps Eliot creates such an ineffectual character because she sees the futility of radicalism  in the face of bi-partisan politics, corrupt and greedy politicians, and ignorant constituents.  I can definitely sympathize with Felix's desire to educate the masses, transform them into thinking beings who won't be unfairly swayed and manipulated by the system, greedy politicians, etc. Those are admirable beliefs. And it's an ironic twist that Felix scorns Edith for reading Byron's "romantic" poetry when Byron was much like Felix: both are idealistic, radical, and ultimately politically ineffectual. And, eventually, both men are viewed with disdain and scorn in spite of their good intentions. (Well, admittedly, Byron's many good intentions can often be questioned as he was also quite the libertine for his day. In this instance, however, I'm thinking specifically of his assistance in the Greek Revolution in the early 1820s). But I think Eliot is making a commentary on how deeply entrenched the masses are in ignorance and apathy, and how much they are distracted by the daily grind of work and what they can get for themselves and families in the present. Also, because of their lack of education, political savvy and power, they are easily tricked by shady political men and their empty promises--as we see in the scene with Mr. Johnson polling for Transome. As Felix says in Ch XXVII, in a conversation with Mr. Lyon. Mr. Lyons says "it is our preliminary work to free men form the stifled life of political nullity..." Felix answers, ""...But while Caliban is Caliban, though you multiply him by a million, he'll worship every Trinculo that carries a bottle..." (264, my copy). The masses are ignorant brutes incapable of seeing behind politicians' smoke and mirrors. The brute metaphor is carried into the riot as well when the masses are compared to pigs and oxen: their bodies bearing the workload and being consumed rather than valued for their minds like humans. It's this cycle that continues to perpetuate itself and keep the bi-partisan groups in power and keep the workingman powerless. Like radicalism, Felix tries so hard to expose the truth, to educate, to empower the masses, but it falls short. Also, I think it's reasonable to assume that there are fewer radicals compared to the bi-partisan groups and as a result they have a shorter reach, less power. For instance, Mr. Johnson has the power (read: money) to buy the workingmen a round of beer and all they have to do is show up at the political rally and shout for Transome. The workingmen, because they are uneducated non-thinkers, are quickly and easily satisfied by a temporary treat of beer and easily persuaded that the buyer of the beer is a good man. So the workingman is easily and cheaply bought and sold in a system where they have no power, but where they also don't have to put forth much effort as citizens. They can go on about their workaday lives. Radicalism requires energy and effort to educate, to fight against larger, stronger powers, etc. I think that's why his character is so ineffectual because Felix becomes a sort of symbol of or metaphor for the radical movement. I think Eliot sees radicalism as a good thing, but something that cannot yet compete with or tear down the established system.

Blog 3: post due 5 pm, Sun., Feb. 9; comment due 5 pm, Mon., Feb.  10.

Choose one.

1. Use the blog as a dry run for the position paper: engage with either or both of the critical selections to make an argument about Felix Holt. 

2.  Felix doesn't manage to convert a single workingman to his point of view, he fails to keep the mob from rioting and is arguably responsible for a death, and he does a terrible job of defending himself in court, requiring the Tory DeBarrys' intervention to avoid transportation. Why does Eliot create such an ineffectual protagonist?

Blog #2: Jaffe and Representation

            In what follows, I will first briefly unpack Jaffe’s conception of sympathy and then interrogate its problematic ambiguity. Implicit in her account is an opposition between direct or non-representational sympathy and indirect or representational sympathy. She asserts that the latter is what characterizes the “sympathetic exchanges” in Victorian literature. An important resource for her argument is Adam Smith: “Smith depicts sympathy not as a direct response to a sufferer but rather as a response to a sufferer’s representation in the spectator’s mind. As Peter de Bolla points out, for Smith, “sympathetic sentiment is, in the last analysis, ‘imaginary’” (4). Rather than one human being genuinely sympathizing with another human being, then, the “scene of sympathy in effect effaces both its participants substituting for them images, or fantasies, of social and cultural identity” (4). This scene is representational because both participants relate to each other and to themselves purely through images or fantasies of social-cultural identity (either ideal or degraded). When one participant looks at the other, s/he does not and cannot see who the person truly is but rather what society defines him or her as. How the two participants respond to each other therefore depends on “cultural fictions and self-projections,” which are always already bound up in a socio-political narrative. As both are irreducibly embedded in a society, the “actual bodies” of the participants are superseded by the external identities it imposes on them. These identities not only precede and structure every social interaction, but also constitute the “imaginary” representations through which participants view each other. This is why Jaffe claims that “the distinction between sympathy for fictional characters and sympathy for actual people dissolves” (7). In the sympathetic exchanges she analyzes, actual people are reduced to fictional characters. “[S]ympathy is fictional, in the sense that it is fundamentally involved with representation; in both, sympathetic representation takes place within and constitutes a cultural narrative about the identities of sympathetic object and subject” (7-8).

Now, I agree that sympathy is “fundamentally involved with representation,” but I disagree with Jaffe’s assertion that it is consequently “fictional.” To argue that sympathy is fictional because it is representational implies that “real” sympathy would not be representational. In contrast, I would maintain that every form of sympathy—even if it were to be freed from the socio-political context in which it is immersed—is representational. Jaffe’s mistake is to think representation as secondary to reality, which is a common metaphysical assumption: “The texts discussed in this book repeatedly stage sympathy as representation, as if the attempt to feel for another across a social divide is necessarily mediated by the image of the self as image: the self perceived as an effect of social determinants. . . . a perception of the self as representation” (10). The mode of representation, however, is the only way to relate to oneself, to another, or to anything at all. To be sure, Jaffe is correct to say that “sympathy is always embodied,” always social. But when she asserts that “sympathy ‘does away’ with bodies in order to produce representations, replacing persons with mental pictures, generalized images of ease and of suffering,” she fails to realize that bodies and persons require representations (or “mental pictures”) to take on any signification whatsoever. This is not to suggest, of course, that there cannot be ideological or false representations (e.g., “cultural ideality and degradation”). But such representations are no more fictional than non-ideological or true representations.

On the one hand, Jaffe seems to be perfectly aware of what I am putting forth here. For example, she rightly holds that subjects are always represented by “socioeconomic and bodily markers that signify difference”—difference that sympathy in Victorian literature often tries to negate “with assurances of mutual feeling and universal humanity” (15). On the other hand, she contends that these sympathetic encounters “fall into representation” (19), implying that they were once non-representational and that if they were genuine, they would not be representational. I find both these claims untenable, since sympathy is on my account inconceivable without representation and representation has no value in itself (i.e., it can be good or bad).

Jaffe’s conception of sympathy appears to be diametrically opposed to the scenes of personal interaction we see in North and South (especially Margaret’s interactions with Bessy and her family as well as Thorton proposing the dinner idea after seeing what the laborers are forced to eat at home). In her words, “Sympathy thus conceived grounds the self in the dissolution of the social, doing away with representation in order to reach a common ground of feeling—as if the only escape from social difference were in a common humanity attained in dissolution and death” (15-16). Although I agree with Jaffe that universalist language is dangerous when it effaces socio-economic differences, I think that her position here falls prey to the essentialist logic she is attempting to critique. It is true that socio-economic factors partly define who people are, but who people are cannot be reduced to these factors. Moreover, a form of sympathy grounded in the idea of a common humanity does not do away with representation for the precise reason that such an idea necessitates representation. If characters like Margaret and Hale do sympathize, it is because they find in the idea of a common humanity representations that are other than the ones society imposes. 

Blog #2: A Matter of Class

As several people have already noted in their blog posts, class positions are difficult to pin down for Felix and Esther. Based on various competing class markers, they both seem to be members of the lower middle class, but Felix chooses to identify with the lower class and Esther at first chooses to identify with the middle and upper classes.
 

Felix’s father was originally a weaver and then a quack doctor, so Felix was born into the working class. Felix then acquired an education that would enable him to move up into the middle class if he chose certain jobs. However, much to his mother’s lament, he “made himself a journeyman to Mr Prowd the watchmaker – after all his learning – and he says he’ll go with patches on his knees, and he shall like himself all the better” (57). Felix chooses a trade that places him firmly in the working class, yet this element of choice is a middle-class privilege in itself. Unlike Felix, uneducated working-class men are forced to remain in their social position because they lack other options, and many of them have jobs that involve hard manual labor. Yet, Felix takes pride in his position as a working-class man. He defends his choice of employment to Mr. Lyon, showing his disdain for the middle and upper classes with all of their affectations: “I’ll take no employment that obliges me to prop up my chin with a high cravat, and wear straps, and pass the livelong day with a set of fellows who spend their spare money on shirt-pins. That sort of work is really lower than many handicrafts; it only happens to be paid out of proportion” (63).

In contrast to Felix, Esther highly values outward appearances and upper-class affectations. Esther’s preferences, appearance, and behavior are often shown as incongruous to the life she is expected to lead as a minister’s daughter. Because her father is a minister, Esther can be considered a member of the middle class. However, he is a Dissenting minister, and Esther is well-aware that “Dissenters were looked down upon by those whom she regarded as the most refined classes” (76). In addition, people expect Mr. Lyon and his daughter to live without most middle-class luxuries because “a poor minister must be below the substantial householders who kept him” (76). Even Felix, who does not care for the upper classes or fine ladies in general, observes Esther and thinks that “a fine lady as the daughter of a rusty old Puritan was especially offensive” (67). Of course, the novel later reveals that Esther’s biological father is actually Maurice Christian Bycliffe, an aristocrat with a claim to the Transome Estate. Interestingly, Esther’s upper-class aspirations are often described as an inherent part of her, from “all her native tendencies towards luxury, fastidiousness, and scorn of mock gentility” (76) to various aspects of her physical appearance, like her small feet and long neck (67). Just as Felix is inclined to “stick to the class [he] belong[s] to” (64), Esther’s tendency toward the upper classes is a natural inclination toward the class she belongs to (the class of her heritage).

Felix’s firm decision to remain a member of the working class is tied to his genuine desire for reform. He tells Mr. Lyon, “Why should I want to get into the middle class because I have some learning?...That’s how the working men are left to foolish devices and keep worsening themselves: the best heads among them forsake their born comrades, and go in for a house with a high door-step and a brass knocker” (64). Felix feels a responsibility to the working class and the social ills that his class faces, so he refuses to move into the middle class. When Mr. Lyon suggests that he could help the working class by moving to a higher rank with more power, Felix responds, “Let a man once throttle himself with a satin stock, and he’ll get new wants and new motives” (64). From Felix’s point of view, middle-class and upper-class men cannot truly help the working class because they will inevitably be guided by their own selfish motives. This belief puts Felix and Harold Transome in sharp contrast. Harold Transome is disconnected from the working class and must have his own interests to protect, which is why so many people doubt his Radicalism and think he would change his political beliefs after becoming a Member of Parliament. Unfortunately, if those in power never truly can strive for the interests of the lower classes, it would seem impossible for the lower classes to ever see reform on their behalf.

Felix remains optimistic; when he’s at Duffield, he steps up to speak to the working-class men and argues, “I want the working men to have power. I’m a working man myself, and I don’t want to be anything else” (292). However, Felix does not think that political power is what the working class needs just yet; instead, he has a strong belief in educating members of the working class so that they can change their priorities (which are currently centered on drinking). Felix’s decision to live and work among the lower-class men highlights his dedication to this mission of educating the lower class and thereby making them fit for political reforms. Only be being a part of the working class can Felix have a direct impact on the thoughts and actions of men and women in the working class. Esther’s ultimate decision to marry Felix rather than Harold can be seen as Eliot’s ultimate endorsement of Felix’s Radicalism over Harold’s. In addition, Esther’s choice shows her recognizing the value of her step-father’s class positioning that she was brought up in over her hereditary class positioning.

Matt's Blog the Second: Scenes of Sympathy and/or Charity

Since I am not quite done reading Felix Holt and at the moment do not agree with myself about his class status, I will focus on Jaffe’s insights and North and South.  The prompt asks whether or not Jaffe’s ideas “distort or misunderstand cross-class encounters in the novel,” and I keep coming back to what I think is an important distinction between Jaffe’s conception of “sympathy” and that of “charity,” which does not get much play in her introduction but I think is pretty operational in the novel.  I wonder if by focusing on “sympathy” we run the risk of problematizing any acts of care or kindness from a higher to a lower class to the point of immediate suspicion.

As Jaffe rightly points out, sympathy was an important conduit to the middle-classes’ (at least as depicted in novels) understanding the boundaries of their status above and below:

“[Closely] tied to a sense of economic well-being, sympathy follows a capitalistic logic: like money it must be meted out with care lest it—and the identity it represents—dissipate entirely.  For the Victorian middle classes, then, the attempt to imagine the self in the other’s place was less an enjoyable theatrical exercise than a reminder of identity’s contingency.”  

Sympathy has a value insofar as it helps form the shape of one’s subjectivity within capitalism.  Even further, this marks a sense of exchange value operating between classes, i.e. taking my own value and checking it against the object of my sympathy, I might surmise that it would take 20 of them to amount to myself in terms of capital.  As Jaffe writes, “the need to verify the identity of the sympathetic object suggests that the spectator’s identity is itself fallen and in need of verification, lapsed from an idealized and naturalized aristocratic past.”  Aristocratic, yes, but with regard to North and South, this verification of identity also has quite a lot to do with one’s orientation to God, something Margaret Hale and Bessy both seem to care about a great deal.

On the face of it, charity and sympathy might seem like essentially the same thing with the same problematic possibility of dehumanizing (which I think is a better word for this than objectifying) the individual we deem worthy of charity.  We call large events with celebrities and $500 dinner plates “charity events,” but this is not the sense I am getting at.  I am thinking more in the classical, ideal sense of charity that stems from the Greek word caritas, a word that demands an ethic of love at its root.  While acts and feelings of sympathy might contain love at their base, charity goes a bit further.  I would argue that while Margaret certainly experiences one of Jaffe’s “scenes of sympathy” in her initial contact with the Higginses, she goes a bit further in her sympathy of the Higginses and, later, the Bouchers with her frequent visits and acts of care. 

Undoubtedly, there are points in these exchanges where Margaret clearly thinks herself better than the Higginses on more than one level (education, godliness, etc.), but I think Gaskell critiques these moments by painting Bessy and Nicholas in a more dynamic light.  The words—not just the image, as Jaffe might have it—of these lower class individuals have the ability to change the perspective of someone from a higher class.  This is not to say that Jaffe’s framework does not jive with quite a bit of the class encounters in North and South; I am more concerned that if followed too far, the specter of capitalistic determinism fails to recognize acts that may alleviate some aspect of human suffering in the immediate at the expense of focusing on the structural violence (Thanks Wes!) that needs to be addressed at the political/systemic level.

Blog #2: North and South and the Anthropocene

This week, I'm going to follow Dr. Rosenman's advice to deviate from the blog post prompt if something else strikes our fancy.

My post will focus on three concepts that I believe are interrelated: the physicality of the environment, illness, and class hierarchy. I will contend that all of these concepts intersect in North and South, primarily in the passages that describe the air pollution of Milton.

We learn early on in the novel that Milton is mapped by its pervasive air pollution. To quote at length:

"For several miles before they reached Milton, they saw a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which it lay. It was all the darker from contrast with the pale gray-blue of the wintry sky; for in Heston there had been the earliest signs of frost. Nearer to the town, the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke; perhaps, after all, more a loss of the fragrance of grass and herbage than any positive taste or smell. Quick they were whirled over long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly-built houses...Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black 'unparliamentary' smoke, and sufficiently accounted for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain" (55 emphasis mine).

This passage contains several ideas worth developing. First, before the Hales even reach Milton, a 'deep lead-coloured cloud' fixates their attention. The spectacular quality of the smog is jarring, because Margaret had mistakenly "taken [the cloud] to foretell rain." This misrecognition is significant, because the cloud pervades the "hopeless streets" of the town, becoming not only an emblem of the town itself, but tacitly signifying its complicity in creating these "hopeless" conditions in the first place.

The second idea contained in this passage is the notion that the air pollution of Milton strafes the physical body. The air "had a faint taste and smell of smoke," or, more precisely, it effaces any "positive taste or smell"of nature that might symbolize vitality. Thus, Milton is mapped as a space of danger and risk; it is coded negatively, as a physical environment that is produced by a multiplicity of 'many-windowed [factories]."

Ecocriticism helps us understand the dynamics of this problem, both retroactively in terms of the theorization of Victorian culture, as well as its present day, 'real-world' effects on global culture. In The Future of Environmental Criticism, Lawrence Buell suggests that there is a growing need for critics interested in environmental literary criticism to pay attention to how the "'natural' and 'social' environments impinge on each other" (127). In other words, how does the physicality of a local environment come to inflect social concerns (as well as political, ethical, linguistic, and legal ones)? Drawing on Gadgil and Guha, Buell explains that one instance of this confluence is the notion of "ecological refugeeism," in which "specifically land-based peoples...[are] reduced to welfare or beggary by displacement from their home communities" (121, 120). We have instances of ecological "refugees" in North and South, albeit in two different modes. First, the Hales are "displaced" in a sense, albeit somewhat voluntarily. Second, the residents of Milton are not "refugees" in a strict sense, but they are "reduced to [a type of] welfare or beggary" as well as disease, which I will get to momentarily.

The effects of the polluted air in Milton are rendered just as dangerous as the effects of low wages. We learn that "The life in Milton was so different from what Mrs. Hale had been accustomed to live in Helstone, in and out perpetually the fresh and open air; the air itself was so different, deprived of all revivifying principle" (81). Gaskell painstakingly reminds the reader that one of the most fundamental aspects of existence--the air itself--is actually anti-ontological, a natural structural force that is "deprived of all revivifying principle" but only because human culture has made it so. The extent of these effects are further rendered in hyperbolic, fetishized terms: Bessy yearns simply to momentarily leave Milton so she can "'take a deep breath o'fulness in that air. I get smothered enough in Milton...'" (93). One of the most fundamental aspects of life itself--the air that envelops us--is fetishized as the marker of class privilege: only those who are able-bodied enough to circulate through the landscape of England have the prerogative to take a "deep breath" of air.

To make one more point (I know the post is getting long!), North and South is a text that inaugurates representations of the Anthropocene, a geological age in which human beings can, for the first time, be said to engage in collective action(s) that substantially change the physicality of Earth itself (see Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History"). Timothy Morton, in his 2013 book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, discusses how the Anthropocene was catalyzed by the invention of the steam engine and the rise of industrial capitalism (4-5), both of which heavily influence the production of air pollution seen in Gaskell's novel. I would just like to point out that, if we take Morton's basic argument to heart--in which he argues that reality is defined by "hyper objects," or objects that are so massive and diffusive in time and space that they defy all meaningful human comprehension (1-2)--Gaskell's novel suddenly takes on a different hue. The smog of Milton effectively does away with the notion of class because it subjects everyone throughout the globe to an atmosphere that is corrupted by carbon. The polluted air is a hyper object, then, a massively diffusive object that is "viscous," that pervades and sticks to our bodies, to the point that "It's not reality but the subject that dissolves...reality envelops us like a film of oil" (Morton 32, 35). In the Victorian era, in the 21st century, we can't escape something like air pollution--everyone throughout the world breathes in air that is continually infused with dangerous particles. In this sense, the Victorian age is responsible for universalizing risk by redefining what it means to occupy the space of Earth: everyone is subjected to the same volatile elements.

Whatever Happened to Class?

To identify Felix Holt’s class position troubles the very notion of stable class distinctions.  In his mother’s own words, Felix is the issue of “man from Lancashire, with no trade nor fortune but what he’d got in his head” (55).  That Mr. Holt comes from Lancashire but without trade or fortune suggests his working class status; he comes from industrialized country not as a failed bourgeois master, who might have no fortune but would have at least some trade.  To support himself and his family, Mr. Holt takes up the trade of a quack doctor who “believed [his medicinal recipe] was sent him in answer to prayer” (55).  Further, Mrs. Holt’s dialogue contains certain linguistic markers that separate her from a better-educated class; for example, she frequently begins sentences with conjunctions and regularly drops word-initial vowels.  His parentage, then, suggests that Felix Holt issues from the lower classes.  However, as Esther thinks on her visit to the Holt residence, “Felix chose to live in a way that would prevent any one from classing him according to his education and mental refinement” (221).  In fact, Felix’s educational trajectory—from doctor’s apprentice, to university at Glasgow, and finally to become “journeyman to Mr. Prowd the watchmaker” (57)—indicates his general class trajectory:  not a product of birth but of his own choice.  That Felix can opt to live as the lower classes positions him as outside the lower class despite his protestations against upward mobility.

           

In the case of Esther, parentage again would seem to serve as the primary indicator of class status.  Not quite a foundling, Esther all the same fills the role of the orphaned child of the aristocracy raised by one of the lower classes:  “Esther’s own mind was not free from a sense of irreconcilableness between the objects of her taste and the conditions of her lot” (76).  The child of aristocratic parents, Esther appears to belong intrinsically to a class above that of Mr. Lyon, her stepfather.  Still, Esther, as the daughter of a Dissenting preacher, inhabits the lower middle class of his congregation.  While her appearance and tastes might reach beyond her position, one cannot forget that “she saved nothing from her earnings” in acquiring her finery (77, emphasis mine).  Esther works for what she has.  Though she does not work at manual labor, she also cannot afford to be entirely idle as she might do had she been the daughter of a Church rector.  (Perhaps instead of considering her at the fringe of the middle and working classes, we might instead think of Esther as part of the lower clerical class.)  Of course, the foundling must eventually be found, and here we find in Esther’s trajectory one similar to Felix’s:  Dissenter’s daughter to surviving heir to Felix’s wife.  Esther, too, may opt to live outside the aristocratic class that is thrust upon her.  Again, this self-conducted mobility offers in Esther something outside the working class that she ultimately claims.

In both Felix and Esther, Eliot offers the reader individuals whose class(es) blur(s) distinct lines.  In fact, Eliot presents class as a complex, constructed, non-natural identity marker.  Is she offering instead of economics a better means for classifying people?  As Esther says, “I never knew what nobleness of character really was before I knew Felix Holt” (418).  Might Eliot, then, shift the use of class from external to internal?  No matter the social position of Felix and Esther by the novel’s epilogue, they retain their character—their class.