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The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire. - book reviews

Criticism, Wntr, 1997 by John R. Reed

by Christopher Lane. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. xiii + 326. $49.95 cloth. $16.95 paper.

The body has been the focus of much literary criticism for the last couple of decades. At first this criticism focused on the body itself, but before long attention turned to affiliated subjects, such as sexuality and disease. A natural extension of these interests was the "unnatural" uses of the body, and gay criticism prospered. Another extension of body writing has become figurative, where not the body itself but only tropes for it are concerned--as with the feminist and postcolonial tendency to read nature or the mysterious East gendered as female. The two books under review here are representative of the later uses of the body as a focus for critical discussion. Mary Poovey's Making a Social Body examines the rhetorical figure of the body employed in social arguments; Christopher Lane's The Ruling Passion studies colonial narratives in which homosexuality must "fall out of representation to allow other meanings to prevail" (232). In both books, the body itself, though never absent as a figure, is displaced in favor of some other objective--social engineering in Poovey's work, colonial mastery in Lane's.

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Poovey's central argument is that during the first half of the nineteenth century in England the image of a body politic was replaced by that of a social body. Through the imposition of what she calls abstract space--a Euclidian "conceptual grid"--a "disaggregation of the social" occurred that led to institutional control and the development of disciplinary individualism. Competing during this period with the image of society as a body (domestic feminization) was the image of society as a machine (dispassionate functionality). One virtue of Poovey's study is her acceptance of such alternative views in the thinking of the time. She is aware that there is no single, dominating belief that works in all of the domains she describes or that accommodates all classes, genders, and ethnic groups. Because of this awareness of complexity, her examinations are all the more satisfying in the focused points they make.

The various chapters of this book began as separate essays and read that way still, including the repetition of evidence from one application to another. Two focus on James Phillips Kay's socio-medical studies of the poor in Manchester. One chapter shows how Kay's metaphors of the social body reinforced stereotypes of the Irish: "Kay's image of a healthy social body cannot accommodate the Irish because--especially in their domestic habits--they are not human" (64). Another chapter concentrates on the emergence of what Poovey calls "anatomical realism" as a way to deal with the new phenomenon of the working populations of industrial cities. This new classification scheme applied the traditional medical notion of a body supervised by a nervous system to a normative model. In short, a theory of the normative physical body was transferred to a normative social body, with predictable results for the different classes. Chapters on Thomas Chadwick's campaign for the New Poor Law of 1834 and his 1842 Sanitary Report demonstrate similar forces at work. The New Poor Law proved extraordinarily unpopular, and it exposed the weakness of Chadwick's reasoning and of his underlying metaphors: "Far from implementing a system that simply reflected the universal wishes of the public at large, the 1834 act had imposed a normalizing system of values on a population whose heterogeneity and attachment to traditional forms of morality, justice, and relief resisted such rationalization" (111).

Oddly enough, since Poovey is a professor of English, it is the chapters on the fiction of Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens that are disappointing. Chiefly they aim to show how the aesthetic domain functioned to affect other domains in the social structure--the political in Disraeli and Gaskell, the economic in Dickens. But the homoerotic reading of Coningsby is somewhat strained, and the analysis of speculation and virtue in Our Mutual Friend is not very original. In the first case, Poovey tries to read Coningsby's normal, if intense, friendship with Oswald Millbank as a scarcely masked homosexual attachment, an interpretation that ignores the conventional presentation of strong male friendships in Victorian literature. In the second case, many scholars have already explored the role of financial speculation in Dickens's novel, myself included a decade ago. Nonetheless, as a study of rhetorical forces at work in nineteenth-century England, Poovey's book is a model of open-mindedness and careful research.

Like Poovey, Lane is laudably conscious of alternative views. His project, he admits, could not even be begun until he "relinquished the fantasy of uncovering or recovering a single and self-evident `colonial homosexuality' in British literature" (xi). Instead, he looks at many colonial factors brought to bear on the symbolization of masculinity and homosexuality. His book argues "that we miss a crucial element of colonial history when we ignore or dismiss the influence of unconscious identification, fantasy, and conflict on these political events" (3). His guides in this investigation are Freud and Lacan, and, as with all attempts to explore the repressed and the displaced, there is a danger here that we interpret signs as we do because of what is in us not because of what is "hidden" in the text. To manipulate evidence to show what is not stated is a delicate endeavor and one at which psychoanalytic critics frequently fail. But Lane is fully aware of the difficulty before him. His fundamental aim is clear enough. His purpose is "to interpret the influence of resistant and generally unassimilable homosexual drives, proposing that sexual desire between men frequently ruptured Britain's imperial allegory by shattering national unity and impeding the entire defeat of subject groups" (41).

The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire. - book reviews

Criticism, Wntr, 1997 by John R. Reed

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