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Unbroken Patternes: Gender, Culture, and Voice in The Egoist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Carolyn Williams
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Extract

In “AnEssay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit” Meredith makes his famous equation between the status of women and the quality of comedy in a given culture. These two generalized manifestations of civilization - the organized arrangements of gender and genre - evolve together, claims Meredith, in an argument that is no less intriguing for being somewhat circular as to causal relations. But whether comedy is to be regarded as cause or as effect of a progressive civilization, Meredith, defines cultural progress as the growth of social equality between women and men

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 13 , Spring 1985 , pp. 45 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

This essay is indebted and responsive to Julie Rivkin's argument in an unpublished paper, “Breaking the Patterne, or Does The Egoist Have a Feminine Ending?” That paper was presented at the 1983 ML A to a special session called “Reading and Sexual Difference.” Organized by Susan Winnett, the session proposed that a man and a woman reader should be paired to read a single text, the man first reading and then the woman “re-reading, as a woman,” in the subsequent, secondary, and displaced position of the female, as Nancy K. Miller pointed out. In this case, J. Hillis Miller and Julie Rivkin read and re-read The Egoist, Peter Brooks and Nancy K. Miller Les Liaisons Dangereuses. My argument responds both to Rivkin and, with Rivkin, to J. Hillis Miller. Rivkin questions – as I will question – the implications of the novel's closure and exposes the ending as a trick, like the silent “e” in “Patterne,” a “feminine” ending that makes no difference to the sound or sense. At the end of her paper, Rivkin recasts her title question – “Does The Egoist have a feminine ending?” – as another question: “Am I to take the old story of true love rewarded as the new tale of liberated selves?” She replies: “I can't help feeling I'm being called on to celebrate a new form of the old pattern.”

1. Meredith, George, An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit, ed. Cooper, Lane (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897, 1918; rpt., Folcroft Library editions, 1978), p. 118. All further references will be cited in the text as EC, with page number to this edition.Google Scholar

2. Pritchett, V.S., Books in General (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953), quoted in Lionel Stevenson, “Introduction” to George Meredith, The Egoist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Editions, 1958), p. xx.Google Scholar

3. See, for example, the interpretation of James Stephen and James Fitzjames Stephen in Jane Marcus's “Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny,” in The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. and Higonnet, Margaret R. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 68–73Google Scholar

4. Cline, C.L., “George Meredith,” in Lionel Stevenson, ed., Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 338Google Scholar

5. This belief involves his transcription of the principles of biological evolution - where change cannot be perceived in the individual organism's lifespan - to social life. In narrative terms, it involves representing a tendency toward or potential for change as opposed to actual change, as we shall see. For more discussion of Meredith's evolutionism, see my “Natural Selection and Narrative Form in The Egoist,” Victorian Studies, 27 (Autumn, 1983), 53–79; on the implications of evolutionary theory for narrative, see Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); and for a recent, searching essay on general issues in evolutionary theory, more philosophically defined, see George Levine, “Darwin and the Problem of Authority,” Raritan, 3 (Winter 1984), 30–61.Google Scholar

6. Meredith, George, The Egoist (1879; rpt. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Editions, 1958), p. 5. All further references will be cited in the text as E, with the page number in this edition.Google Scholar

7. On Comedy as a mode of reading, see Miller, J. Hillis, “'Herself Against Herself: The Clarification of Clara Middleton,” in The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Heilbrun, and Higonnet, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 98–123, especially 98–101. Julie Rivkin also makes an interesting argument on the subject of Meredith's method and logic of synecdoche.Google Scholar

8. See Miller, J. Hillis, especially pp. 99, 102, 106, 108, et passim.Google Scholar

9. See Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “Sex and the Cognitive Division of Labor” (Paper given at The English Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 08 1983). Miller, J. Hillis has pointed out that Meredith's synecdochic method in The Egoist is “a form of mapping,” on p. 98.Google Scholar

10. Dale, Laetitia is in some senses a liminal figure. Though she lives with her father in total dependence on Willoughby's estate, and though she idealizes, echoes, and “mirrors” him, by the time he engages to marry her, she is older, wiser, and less subservient and doting. By the novel's closure she is a figure of potential change - though here again, actual change is projected by implication only, beyond the novel's closing frame.Google Scholar

11. For a general discussion of dualistic language, hierarchy, and enforced otherness in its specific articulation involving woman as “nature,” see Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), especially the first chapter, “The Masculine Tradition,” pp. 12–40. Homans'work establishes the connection between associating women with nature on the one hand and excluding them as speaking or writing subjects on the other (e.g. 12, 215, et passim). She takes up the particular problem that “the woman as figure invidiously becomes confused with real women” on p. 35. For an influential treatment of hierarchized dualisms (culture/nature, nature/history, etc.) and their relation to the gendered dichotomy male/female, see Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, Lajeune Nee (Paris: Union d'Editions, 1975). See also Shoshana Felman, “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” Diacitics, 5 (1975), 2–10.Google Scholar

12. Cf. Stimpson, Catherine, “Ad/d Feminam: Women, Literature, and Society,” in Literature and Society, ed. Edward, Said (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 179: “A male writer may speak of, for, to, and from the feminine. He cannot speak, except fictively, of, for, to, and from the female. This inability hardly has the dignity of a tragic fact, but it does have the grittiness of simple fact.”Google Scholar

13. Miller, J. Hillis, p. no. 110.Google Scholar

14. Miller, J. Hillis, p. 115.Google Scholar

15. Miller, J. Hillis, p. 109. “It is no accident” at least within the sequence of Miller's argument, because he associates the simultaneous unveiling and veiling that produces the aporia of metaphor with the psychoanalytic legend of the female weaving her pubic hair into a representational phallus, at once hiding the vaginal gap and revealing a mock presence. Thus “it is no accident” insofar as, within this deconstructive tradition, metaphor itself is (metaphorically) re-presented as this “female” duplicity inherent in representation.Google Scholar

16. See Homans, , especially pp. 13–22, 159–61, and 199: “Where nature is Mother Nature she is outside nature.” Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson seems to be a version of what Sandra M. Gilbert calls the “culture-mother,” the renunciatory mother-figure who represents culture by resigning and re-assigning the daughter to the Law of the Father, here turned with a particular twist since Meredith has disguised her as mother Nature. See “Life's Empty Pack: Notes Toward a Literary Daughteronomy,” Critical Inquiry, 11 (March 1985), 355–84.Google Scholar

17. Stevenson, Lionel, The Ordeal of George Meredith, (New York: Scribners, 1953).Google Scholar

18. See Mayo, R.D., “The Egoist and the Willow Pattern,” English Literary History, 9 (1942), pp. 71–78; and Daniel R. Schwarz, “The Porcelain Pattern Leitmotif in Meredith's The Egoist,” Victorian Newsletter, 33 (1968), pp. 26–28.Google Scholar

19. The inspiration for this part of my argument derives from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Sedgwick hypothesizes a “potentially unbroken continuum” in the structure of men's relations to other men, including “male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality,” a continuum “potentially” unbroken because it is in fact broken violently in our society by male homophobia. Sedgwick's definition of male homosociality is conceptually useful because it can register power relations between men across boundaries of class and sexual preference, and - more important for this argument-structurally and historically, in relation to women. Her reworking of several ahistorical triangular models of desire (Girard, Freud, Lévi-Strauss) through recent critiques (Lacan, Chodorow, Dinnerstein, Rubin, Irigaray) yields a conceptualization of the erotic triangle as a historically sensitive register of shifting relations of power and meaning. Particularly useful for my reading here have been her analyses of male transactions circuited through a woman (or women) in novels by Eliot, Thackeray, and Dickens and her analysis of genre and gender in Tennysons's The PrincesGoogle Scholar