Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature 9781503632318

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
chapter 1 Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books and the Ones and Twos of Femininity
chapter 2 Charles Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity
chapter 3 Precarious Lives: Christina Rossetti and the Form of Likeness
chapter 4 Seriality, Singularity, Sociality: The Case for Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Feminine Singularity

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F E M I N I N E SI NG U L A R I T Y The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Ronjaunee Chatterjee

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

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Sta n for d U n i v e rsi t y Pr ess Stanford, California ©2022 by Ronjaunee Chatterjee. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chatterjee, Ronjaunee, author. Title: Feminine singularity : the politics of subjectivity in nineteenthcentury literature / Ronjaunee Chatterjee. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: L C C N 2021051788 (print) | L C C N 2021051789 (ebook) | I S B N 9781503630802 (cloth) | I S B N 9781503632318 (ebook) Subjects: L C S H : Femininity in literature. | English literature—19th century—History and criticism. | French literature—19th century— History and criticism. | Subjectivity in literature. | Women in literature. Classification: L C C P R 468.F45 C53 2022 (print) | L C C P R 468.F45 (ebook) | DD C 808.8/03522—dc23/eng/20220427 L C record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051788 L C ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051789 Cover design: Susan Zucker Cover illustration: Shutterstock Typeset by Newgen North America in 10/15 Sabon LT

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For my parents, Drs. Ratna and Ramananda Chatterjee

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 chapter 1 Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books and the Ones and Twos of Femininity 26 chapter 2 Charles Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity 56 chapter 3 Precarious Lives: Christina Rossetti and the Form of Likeness 90 chapter 4 Seriality, Singularity, Sociality: The Case for Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White 124 Epilogue 156 Notes 163 Bibliography 181 Index 203

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Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without the fierce emotional and intellectual support of friends, family, and multiple scholarly communities. My initial ideas took shape at the University of California, Los Angeles, under the supervision of Joseph Bristow, and I am deeply grateful for his ongoing mentorship. My heartfelt thanks, too, to Jonathan Grossman and Kenneth Reinhard, to Giulia Sissa, and to Helen Deutsch for guidance, inspiration, and encouragement. This book has additionally benefited from those very early stages of finding my voice at Cornell University, and I have Roger Gilbert, Jonathan Culler, and Douglas Mao to thank for it. In Montreal, I’m grateful to be in scholarly company with Nathan Brown, Marcie Frank, Stephen Ross, Danielle Bobker, Michael Nardone, Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Jesse Arseneault, Michael Nicholson, Sina Queyras, Natalie Kouri-Towe, and Jonathan Sachs. Many people read and engaged parts of this manuscript, offered valuable advice and support, and made my scholarship sharper and infinitely more thoughtful. My deepest thanks to Elaine Freedgood, Tricia Lootens, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Rebecca Colesworthy, Rachel Ablow, Anna Kornbluh, Sonya Posmentier, Naomi Levine, Eugenia Zuroski, Greg Ellerman, Michael Cohen, Dustin Friedman, S.  Pearl Brilmyer, Beatrice Sanford Russell, Myra Bloom, Mairead Sullivan, Manu Chander, Grace Lavery, Nasser Mufti, Ryan Fong, Petar Milat, Julie Beth Napolin, Emily Ruth Capper, Michael Gallope, Amanda Holmes, Alexi Kukuljevic, Zarena Aslami, Justine Pizzo, Renee Hudson, Carolyn Betensky, and Paul Barrett. I should also like to thank the UCLA Nineteenth-Century Group and the ix

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A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

Center for Expanded Poetics for allowing me to present work from the manuscript at various stages. Faith Wilson Stein took an early interest in the project, and the final version would not have happened without her bold shepherding through the multiple stages of publication. I cannot thank her, and Caroline McKusick, enough. I am also tremendously grateful to the anonymous readers of the manuscript who engaged this book so rigorously and generously. I couldn’t imagine my life without Jacquelyn Ardam, who has read and talked through this material more times than I can count. I am lucky to have met Ilana Papir, Will Clark, Joyce Men, Tanaz Faghri Dietz, Vel Jones, Cristina Richieri Griffin, and Ethan Pack in this lifetime. I’m so grateful for the singular friendship of Alicia Mireles Christoff and Amy R. Wong, and I am constantly in awe of their brilliance, patience, and generosity. Finally, my thanks to my family for their love and support: my extraordinary parents Ratna and Ramananda Chatterjee, as well as Ranita Chatterjee, Rupak Chatterjee, Tomo Hattori, and Syontoni Hattori-Chatterjee. For over ten years, my dog Nickel has shown me the sweetness and joy of ordinary care and companionship. Owen Weiss became family at a moment when the world turned upside down, and I am immensely grateful for his humor, compassion, and stubborn belief in me.

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Introduction

T o b e “ s i n g u l a r ” i s usually understood to be one and only one. Yet the grounds of what makes anyone a one—a subject and an individual—are multiple, fractured, and contested. Across nineteenth-century literature, we find feminine figures who chafe against a picture of individuation as predetermined oneness that folds into some larger calculation: women and sisters who are similar and alike but not the same (Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” Charles Baudelaire’s “The Little Old Ladies”), and lyric speakers and girl protagonists who cannot be read as “one” through the contours in place for making oneness and difference legible (Lewis Carroll’s Alice books). These figures of femininity testify to philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s observation that “there is no pure and simple ‘one.’”1 Drawing on the strangeness and richness of these literary models for understanding likeness, difference, and oneness anew, I offer the term “singularity” to describe a model of subjectivity—particularly feminine subjectivity—grounded in what is partial, contingent, and in relation rather than what is merely “alone.” Feminine Singularity turns to a range of nineteenthcentury and contemporary literary texts that grapple with the ongoing violence of a Western liberal imaginary (which is necessarily imperialist and capitalist) to construct different paths to subjectivity and to gender that do not rely on empirical notions of selfhood anchored by the term “identity.” It is my understanding throughout this book that literary-theoretical methods of interpretation remain vital to scripting a vision of singular subjectivity that could exceed identitarian models of gendered personhood in the present. 1

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In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), Black feminist theorist Audre Lorde deploys a theory of the erotic as an internal “measure” of excellence and an “electric charge” that lives outside the exchange value of a capitalist system of labor.2 This kinetic source of one’s unique sense of pleasure and striving is importantly nonsubstitutable, even though its energies are driven toward a sharing between women. Lorde prioritizes the sharing of the erotic— however beautiful and pleasurable or fraught—as structuring the conditions of possibility for greater political and social justice that might have been functionally impossible: for “joint concerted actions not possible before.”3 Yet she is also careful to note that the “erotic cannot be felt secondhand,” that it can and should be shared, but not reproduced through an economy of profit and gain. It is this quality or “kernel” of the women-identified subject Lorde theorizes here that I align with singularity: what cannot be reproduced, but can and should exist in relation, and can and should finally generate new critical possibilities for subjectivity. It is important to recall the contexts in which Lorde developed this reading and her broader theories of difference as a dynamic, contingent, and ultimately generative condition that opposes wooden and binaristic ideas of gender, as well as racial and sexual categorization. Lorde was writing and speaking against second-wave ideals of white female individuality in American feminist circles, which is a climate ostensibly removed from midnineteenth-century Britain and France, where I situate the literary archive of this book. My approach to Lorde’s work is the same one I take with the other critical traditions I engage in this introduction for a definition of singularity: continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer of color theory, and the Black radical tradition. Hers is a theory of the subject, a philosophy of difference, and a profound resource for feminist inquiry in the present. I invoke Lorde’s essay as an initial feminist theoretical touchstone for a definition of singularity to set up one of the key stakes for this book. First, in attending to representations of femininity and femaleidentified figures that I read as singular in (mostly) mid-nineteenth 2

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literature, I set these works in new theoretical constellations that can further our thinking about gender, racial, and sexual difference. Putting Lorde and other theorists into conversation with the literary texts I read in this book establishes the methodological and critical relations that I perform throughout my chapters, which each take a nineteenth-century text and read it closely with a contemporary literary or critical one: oneness and femininity in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books is framed through an essay by Hortense Spillers, and Christina Rossetti’s short lyrics reveal something new in Maggie Nelson’s experimental poem, Jane: A Murder (2005). I model this critical confrontation as a way of finding freedom from existing disciplinary divisions. My chapters are grounded in close readings sensitive to the historical conditions of the nineteenth century, but they are also committed to shaking loose certain historical trajectories that have been kept apart from one another in scholarship as well as in a broader culture. This disruption is necessary if there is to be a feminist theoretical conversation involving nineteenth-century literary texts that expands beyond the interests of second-wave white feminist perspectives. More broadly, this critical disruption can help us challenge received ideas of literary history as well as neoliberal accounts of the subject in the present. This book follow a critical approach the queer theorist and performance scholar Jose Esteban Muñoz calls “thinking beyond the moment and against static historicisms.”4 I look carefully at literary texts from the 1850s through the 1870s in particular—a historical era generally regarded by Victorianists to be consonant with the “rise of liberalism”—and read capaciously outside this moment as well to untangle what this short period appears to consolidate in the long view: a universal liberal subject forged largely out of gendered and racialized disavowals. Feminine Singularity delimits girlhood outside the emergent statistical imaginary of the nineteenth century (chapter 1 on Carroll’s Alice Books); it makes visible a dissolution point of capital in which modern subjectivity is ensnared (chapter 2 on Baudelaire); it allows for a femininity untethered to heterosexual 3

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difference (chapter 3 on Rossetti); and it reveals the logic of sameness that structures both conventional femininity and whiteness (chapter 4 on Collins’s The Woman in White). A brief epilogue that takes up the avant-garde promise of singularity against its widespread use as a harbinger for contemporary artificial intelligence follows. In looking at these texts and figurations, I point to gender’s fundamental entanglement with racial difference and uncover an expanded model of relationality that unsettles the differences that have shaped a conventional account of gender.

Singularity, Sameness, and Difference Singularity has been central to a range of philosophers writing in the post-Kantian tradition, including Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze (whose divergent works on singularity, difference, repetition, and “iterability” I revisit later in this introduction) and more recent theorists such as Derek Attridge, Timothy Clark, and Samuel Weber.5 I owe a debt to all of these theorists, but I also aim to provide an account of the subject that is crucially new. For Derrida, what is most singular—unique and irreducible—is what is paradoxically iterable and repeatable. For Deleuze, what is most singular is “opposed to the ordinary.” Singularity is an inflection point and zone of potentiality, one that is constitutively multiple rather than single.6 We find a similar refusal of the “single” in singular in Nancy’s well-known phrase, “being singular plural.” “Being singular plural” articulates the constitutive plurality of being and the strangeness and besideness that marks living in a world stripped of essentialized origins. The question of community for Nancy is not about the grouping of “identities” around particular kinds of sameness but around the mutual “strangeness” of existing.7 I want to emphasize and elaborate on the complexity of this formulation—which emerges, in part, from Nancy’s careful readings of Heidegger—for a feminist theory of the subject that moves away from second-wave models of female individuality predicated on limiting notions of oneness and difference. Instead, I mine literature and its figurative tools to develop a lexicon 4

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of terms that produce alternatives to these ideas: namely, singularity, likeness, and minimal difference. In the literary works I analyze, singularity maps moments and occasions of gendering when likeness and minimal difference allow for unforeseen or imperceptible forms of uniqueness to leak out and change conditions of possibility in these texts, what Eve Kosofky Sedgwick calls “the surrounding ecologies of sexuality and of gender.”8 Understanding feminine singularity as inhabited by incalculable forms of difference and likeness refocuses our attention on Kevin Quashie’s observation that “oneness is not incompatible with relation; rather, oneness is a relation.”9 “Being singular plural” has become an oft-quoted line of Nancy’s, but it contains a considerable amount of potency for understanding gender, race, and subjectivity anew, both for literary scholars in Victorian studies and those further afield. For Weber as for Attridge, literature affords a special place to think about both the irreducible uniqueness and constitutive plurality of singularity because literature resists full conceptualization or explanation. This is my wager too, though I also share Weber’s view that writing about singularity can be “embarrassing.”10 This is because what is singular for all of the theorists I mention here “tends to belie efforts to conceptualize it,” can be described only on its own terms, and therefore slides away from total understanding. In this regard, singularity can be said to be integral to philosophy but also to escape philosophy itself because it does not tarry with the particular nor with the universal.11 Yet despite evading conceptualization and explanation, singularity remains thinkable in vital ways, especially in and through the literary. I risk the nonconcept of these definitions to open singularity to questions of gendered and racial difference (ideas latent to the philosophies mentioned here but never directly explored). I take inspiration from the perfunctory way contemporary poet Lisa Robertson, whose experimental work The Baudelaire Fractal (2020) I read in chapter 2, defines the promise of the feminine read through singularity: “still lacking any concept, I could only invent.”12 The capacity for invention is one I locate in 5

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canonical “Victorian” texts (such as Collins’s The Woman in White) and wider nineteenth-century ones (such as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal). My method of reading hopefully underscores that these works are stranger, more experimental, and ultimately more generative than what is often assumed about them. At the heart of Feminine Singularity is a question that has animated decades of feminist critical thought: namely, in envisioning new horizons for subjectivity, how can we hold on to the possibility of “difference” without generating new and more coercive antinomies—that is, without collapsing into either essentialized difference or essentialized sameness? One way I approach this question is to observe figures of the feminine across literary genres whose singularity appears in and through relation, specifically relations of likeness or “minimal difference.” Minimal difference manifests across a poetic line through simile, the “like two” of Rossetti’s seemingly interchangeable “maids” Lizzie and Laura in “Goblin Market”; is lived by way of siblinghood and relations of kin that are not filial or parental, like the sisters of Collins’s sensation novel and of Nelson’s Jane; and is even enacted in a series, in which each element of that series gains meaning only in lateral proximity to one another, such as the serial men and women from Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens. These forms of being “like” something or someone else saturate literature, visual culture, and psychic life. Yet what makes us like someone or something else, but not entirely the same as them, remains an undertheorized problem for feminist theory. This is despite the work of Sedgwick, Kaja Silverman, Juliet Mitchell, and Lynne Huffer.13 In Ugly Feelings, American cultural theorist Sianne Ngai names the feeling—and the possibility of a politics—that results from gathering feminine subjectivity around likeness rather than pure sameness or difference: “envy.” Jonathan Flatley further describes a queer practice of “everyday liking” in Andy Warhol’s art in which “things that are alike or similar are neither incommensurate nor identical; they are related and resembling, yet distinct.”14 In Victorian studies, Helena Michie’s Sororophobia (1992) unpacks some forms of likeness and 6

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difference in Victorian texts in a way that has influenced many of my ideas in this book. For Michie, “sororophobia” is an attempt to “describe the negotiation of sameness and difference, identity and separation, between women of the same generation, and is meant to encompass both the desire for and recoil from identification with other women.”15 These negotiations, however fraught and ambivalent, remain a powerful way to think beyond “the limits of the usefulness of difference as a governing structure”16 and reorient ourselves to those forms of likeness and minimal difference that are not given in advance. Reading for minimal difference opens ways of conceiving a subject that are not scripted by preexisting categories. And rather than assume that there are any firm ontological grounds for the term “femininity” in my readings, I instead consider how minimal difference might foundationally structure a relationship to gender rather than follow from it. I begin this book with the assumption that femininity in modernity is always racialized and that a theory of the subject centering femininity centers its foundational entanglement with race too. The geopolitics of nineteenth-century liberalism, the topic of the next section, undergirds all literary texts written in the mid-nineteenth century, whether they directly take up race and the feminine or not. Reading them with some contemporary works additionally reveals the extraordinary reach of liberal individualism, a discourse and a political orientation grounded in notions of proprietorship, moral and aesthetic categories of “taste” and “opinion,” and an oppositional stance toward the collective. Liberal individualism remains the dominant mode for conceptualizing subjects as whole and either “neutral” or marked by categorical and taxonomical forms of difference (typically race, gender, class, and sexuality). My chapters show instead that there are figurations of the feminine across literary genres in the nineteenth century that are not accessible through this framework, and I make use of the term “singularity” to argue for ways of understanding subjectivity outside of it. These works provide a new entry point onto the feminine, a (non) category that remains 7

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contested. But more acutely, they open onto subjectivity itself. Feminine Singularity subsequently excavates a much broader terrain of relationality and subjectivity in mid-nineteenth-century literature than the basic terms of liberal individuation—oneness, sameness, particularity, and universality—allow.

Liberalism and the Discourse of Difference Nineteenth-century literary representations of female subjectivity, and the substantial critical discourse shaped by them, have tended to cluster around gendered types and taxonomies, often positioning themselves entirely vis-à-vis white bourgeois individualism. Antoinette Burton makes the crucial point that “Victorian feminism . . . came of age in a self-consciously imperial culture,” which leaves us with “the problem of how and why the modern British women’s movement produced a universal female ‘we’ that continues to haunt and, ironically, to fragment feminists worldwide.”17 Dismantling the “universal female ‘we’” and its scripted forms of sameness and difference is a key critical horizon for theorizing singularity in this book and for distinguishing singularity from the particularity that grounds these familiar types and groupings. To begin doing so, I want to unpack the contours of an individualism that liberalism helped shape in the nineteenth century. My aim is to unsettle long-standing scholarly rigidities around the following questions: Who counts as one? What are the limits of difference as a conceptual tool? How do we imagine a feminist world without collapsing into the universal female “we”? And how do we untangle the relationship between a model of female individualism and various forms of difference?18 Feminine Singularity takes up the wider assumption that the mid-nineteenth century was a turning point in modern liberalism’s conceptual grounding in broad notions of progress and individual freedom. Yet it is commonly understood that both liberal progress and freedom are abstractions shored up by histories of enslavement and colonial violence.19 Liberalism writ large unfolded as a universalizing philosophical and political project that mobilized difference 8

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as a conceptual apparatus to formalize racial, gendered, and sexual categories of personhood. If British liberalism’s techne is the ballot and the census, then the resulting form of personhood made legible before the liberal state is a countable one, an assumption shared by Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and other prominent figures of British liberal thought in the nineteenth century. And while the idea of countable units of personhood appears at odds with liberalism’s other emphasis on an individual with character, judgment, and moral agency (someone who “counts”), the two were messily entangled, as Elaine Hadley has shown, and literary genres like the multi-plotted novel often manifest.20 Liberalism’s discourse of difference thus shaped an understanding of subjectivity as particular and countable: a notion of a “one” whose legibility fundamentally emerged through quantifiability, and who could be folded into the social whole, whether that whole was a society, a population, or even the species.21 To illustrate further what I mean by countable personhood,  let us briefly recall one of the most important touchstones for the crisis of Atlantic quantifiability in this period. In direct opposition to Bentham’s apocryphal nineteenth-century utilitarian dictum of “everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one,” we find the unspeakable violence of the 1781 massacre of at least 150 enslaved peoples onboard the British slave ship Zong, for insurance collection.22 If this utilitarian calculation of Bentham’s requires that society’s collective happiness be maximized, the dictum also mandates each person’s legal protection and representation, such that each “one” is given equal weight before the law. But in the case of the Zong, the arithmetic failed. The ship’s water supplies had been contaminated on the way to Jamaica, and Luke Collingwood, its captain, drowned the sick and the elderly Africans onboard to claim financial compensation for property loss and damages under the standard marine insurance policy. Each “one” thrown overboard was consequently stripped of their singularity, as their names were never written down. In her celebrated conceptual poem Zong! (2008), based 9

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entirely off the words of the insurance trial that followed the mass murders, contemporary poet M. NourbeSe Philip emphasizes that each “one” nevertheless remained quantifiable because their “financial value was recorded and preserved . . . at 30 pounds sterling.”23 Zong!, consequently, is a contrapuntal work of literature, whose words unfold on the page in an increasingly dizzying manner to testify to the scattering of any singular “one” in this lost archive. Asks Philip, in “Zong! #23”: “was / the weight in being / the same in rains / the ration in loss / the proved in fact / the within in is . . .”24 Being/rains/loss/fact/is. The kinds of violent equivalency illuminated by Philip around countable personhood is the hallmark of a kind of liberalism willfully blind to its own foundations. To Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, and Victorianist scholars who have attended to the development of modern, countable personhood, the consequences are many, and they exceed the disciplinary boundaries of liberal politics and the ideological boundaries of the British nation itself. Poovey’s extensive scholarship in Making a Social Body (1994) and The History of the Modern Fact (1998) catalogs the deepening imbrication of laissez-faire consumer capitalism, statistics, and liberal individualism in the nineteenth century, a conceptual and theoretical problem that underwrites the ledgers of the Zong and that I explore more fully in chapter 1. Political economy, for instance, “provided what looked like both theoretical and descriptive justifications for liberal governmentality by focusing on particulars that could be observed (and quantified) yet subordinating those particulars to abstractions that could not be seen.”25 Though French political liberalism, of relevance to chapter 2 on Baudelaire, develops differently (and more eccentrically), it too found itself dependent on colonial violence elsewhere, and it made newly visible the particularity of an individual who could be folded into a greater whole.26 And while, as Lauren Goodlad notes, “liberalism is conceptually protean,”27 the nineteenth century more broadly manifested “an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation,” to borrow Ian Baucom’s phrase, that stretches from the eighteenth-century heights of the Atlantic slave 10

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trade to twenty-first-century global capitalism.28 The nineteenth century’s dominant logic of accretion and atomization therefore extends well into our contemporary world. Though scholars of Atlantic slavery have already pointed to the Zong as a paradigmatic historical site for the emergence of a racialized calculus around who counts as a one, I see traces of this calculus shaping literary texts on femininity seemingly far afield. For example, here are the quietly scathing opening lines to Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio” (1856): “One face looks out from all his canvases, / One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:” (lines 1–2). The feminine “one” Rossetti describes is an artist’s model: another “nameless girl” sacrificed to patriarchal art and ambitions. She is particular: lovely, with “true kind eyes,” “a queen in opal,” or “a saint, an angel” (5–7). The contours of her identity are given to only the vaguest description, but the poem repeats its particularized count of her as a “one” nonetheless, like a failed incantation. Only the sonnet’s volta makes clear that such a “one” is different only insofar as she is the same, that her particularity is in service of a higher One, a totalizing vision of art: “every canvas means / The same one meaning, neither more or less” (my emphasis, 7–8). I want to emphasize through the juxtaposition of these two textual moments that Rossetti’s “ones” find their deep theoretical footing in an ideological oneness that is both patriarchal and racially violent. The sonnet seeks neither the limiting “ones” of female particularity nor the One of universal aesthetic meaning, power, and closure. This gendered and racialized tension between a countable person and someone who “counts”—that is to say, who matters—is one I explore throughout my chapters because counting almost always reveals a gap between the ideals of quantification and its objects. In most of the literary texts I read here, counting is a trope that deliberately references the bureaucratic energies of the nineteenth century around personhood while remaining rife with possibilities for understanding a “one” otherwise. This is the case in both of Carroll’s Alice books, in which seven-year-old Alice’s fears about being 11

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“one respectable person” in Wonderland lead her to experiment with other forms of enumeration to understand her subjectivity as a girl. Being a one, forming a two, counting to three—I argue throughout my readings that these seemingly basic counting procedures speak to far-reaching questions of being a subject, of difference, and of collectivity, both in the nineteenth century and beyond it. The ideological oneness that grounds the bureaucratic energies of the mid-nineteenth century around gender crystallizes in a phenomenon known as the “Woman Question” debates. The “Woman Question” debates pulled together various perspectives on women’s social, political, and economic status in the 1850s and 1860s. These debates helped mobilize a host of visible “types” of femininity in the broader Victorian imaginary: poet Coventry Patmore’s “Angel in the House,” the fin-de-siècle’s “femme fatale,” and the “New Woman.” More caustic and damning taxonomies include Eliza Lynn Linton’s “Wild Woman,” the sacrificial “Hindoo woman,” the “Venus noire,” and politician W. R. Greg’s infamous “Redundant” or “Surplus woman.” And though taxonomies like the “New Woman” historically arose as progressive formulations, they too manifest a rigid particularizing grounded in clearly demarcated forms of difference and individualism. In turn, modern criticism has generated well-known classificatory categories of its own to name various problems of gendered and sexual difference: an enduring example is the “madwoman in the attic.”29 Even Mill, writing in The Subjection of Women (1869), is quick to note that the proliferating statistical ethnographies of women’s social status can never substitute for an impoverished knowledge of women as subjects: “to understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.”30 On a more sardonic note, Frances Power Cobbe, the nineteenth-century Irish writer and social reformer, observes: “shall we say [femininity] resembles the botanical scheme of the governess who informed her pupils that ‘plants are divided into Monandria, Bulbous roots, and Weeds’?”31 These taxonomies of femininity and their contemporary afterlife in criticism perform a double capture: the point at which “feminist 12

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criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism.” This is what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak diagnosed as the “high feminist norm,” a norm that remains in operation in a scholarly as well as a more quotidian register.32 My way around this problem is not necessarily to stop reading literary texts from the nineteenth century, but to read them with writers and theorists who can help us expel the mirage of white female individuality that continues to hover over the feminist literary-critical project. Reading for singularity instead allows for a confrontation with the proliferating identities and individuations of the present that contemporary liberal capital purports to fold into itself. In the next section, I turn to a series of philosophical and theoretical texts to emphasize that singularity is a mode of perceiving subjectivity as irreducibly unique and in relation.33

Black Holes and Sea Creatures: The Philosophical Grounds of Singularity To conceive of difference outside of identity, to be “singular plural,” is to understand a “one” in a way that is profoundly at odds with how individuality, aloneness, and singleness are typically conceptualized. I pull together various theories of singularity in this section from philosophy after Kant—Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, and feminist psychoanalysis—that are often read as conflicting in their basic premises.34 However, I see them circling around the same problem of the subject as partial rather than whole. To this I add the work of Caribbean and Black studies scholars such as Édouard Glissant, Fred Moten, and Kevin Quashie, and quantum theories of singularity, which offer two critical optics that nuance an intellectual field comprised of many usual suspects. Both approaches to singularity further deploy a powerful critique of Western metaphysics I find necessary and urgent. What I am striving for in my account of feminine singularity is not the incoherence of the self—which I recognize is not only alienating but also often politically unuseful—but a deeper sense of what it means to be a subject whose partiality is a source of invention and promise rather than a limitation. 13

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Kant’s formulation of the aesthetic in the Critique of Judgement (1790) is one touchstone for theorizing singularity within continental philosophy and for critiques from Black and postcolonial studies of the Enlightenment subject writ large. For Kant, an aesthetic judgment does not follow from the determinate grounds of a “concept,” and in this, it is “unique of its kind,” irreducibly singular.35 In that Kant theorizes the boundaries of knowledge as the beginning of a philosophical procedure, his can be understood as an Enlightenment philosophy of the transcendental approached through its very limits. What I find most illuminating about the aesthetic in Kant is that there is paradox, ambivalence, dissatisfaction, and resistance inscribed throughout The Critique of Judgment. These are part and parcel of the strange singularity of the aesthetic, as commentators such as Robert Lehman, Rebecca Comay, Robert Bernasconi, and Kandice Chuh have pointed out. For this reason, the aesthetic lends itself to powerful critiques of existing modes of conceiving gender, sexual, and racial difference, and I argue that it can help us rethink “the subject” from within the basic fault lines of Enlightenment discourse. It’s useful to go over some of the tension that distinguishes aesthetic judgments from other sorts of judgment in Kant’s philosophy. While the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) discusses how determinative judgments construct the relationship between universals and particulars in an epistemological correlation, the Critique of Judgment’s defense of the aesthetic functions differently. The aesthetic for Kant is the strongest example of a reflexive judgment, in which the particular cannot be invoked in the name of a general concept or principle. These judgments arise instead from “subjective feeling” (49) rather than “cognition” (45) and are wholly “disinterested” (55). This is opposed to other judgments of taste discussed by Kant, such as the judgment of what is merely “pleasant” or “good.” As soon as aesthetic judgments are submitted to generalizing, as in the oft-recognized example Kant provides that “all roses are beautiful,” they lose their singularity and become “logical” judgments instead.

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If an example of an aesthetic judgment seems to run precisely against its singularity—its submission to assent or generality—then Kant’s own examples, even of the flowers, are theoretically loaded. Ian Balfour parses this tension in Kant by turning to Derrida’s reading of the Third Critique, which brings to the fore the singularity of the aesthetic and of Derrida’s own thought. In that Kant mandates that the singularity of the aesthetic and of the feeling of beauty must be given to language and representation, he evokes “the desire to make sense of the singular in terms that are not themselves singular.”36 For Derrida this always has consequences for the subject. Balfour puts the stakes thusly: “if the irreducibly singular experience of the aesthetic poses something of a threat to philosophy, might not the ‘subject’ writ large or at large present a similar obstacle, as the locus of feelings, desires, and a body, and thus the locus of something other than thought proper, the putatively proper domain of philosophy?”37 I should emphasize that the language of “feelings, desires, and a body” that describe thought’s “other” easily recalls a matrix of gendered and racial difference that poses a threat to a “neutral” and abstracted notion of the subject of the nineteenth century. If what is most singular for Kant is “subjective feeling”—which preexists judgment, community, and language—then theorists like Spivak and Moten have pointed out how Kant’s overall philosophy restricts the affective potential of judgment to European people and withholds it from colonized and Black people, because for Kant (especially in other texts like The Critique of Practical Reason), race and “raced figures” become the material grounding for the regulation of key ideas: freedom, knowledge, the imagination.38 But for Moten, reading Kant with racialization and sexualization in mind—in other words, through the Black radical tradition—also reveals “the rapturous advent of an implicit but unprecedented freedom.”39 This strain of the aesthetic is “the surprising, multiple singularity of the event” that Moten elsewhere finds in jazz and music.40 In his celebrated work of queer theory, Cruising Utopia (2009), Muñoz too writes of

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“a surplus of both affect and meaning within the aesthetic.”41 For Muñoz, these possibilities within the aesthetic are interruptive as well as future-oriented ones from which to think a politics of queerness and queer subjectivity.42 The aesthetic remains a “threat” to a universal, but it also, for Moten as for Muñoz, constitutes an opening within philosophy. This bears on my thinking as I look for instances throughout literature that activate such an opening and challenge the basic organization of difference under existing frameworks. For me, Kant’s text itself manifests moments of surplus that further draw out the alterity of the aesthetic, its singularity as more than just a question of philosophical abstraction in a Western humanist frame. In discussing the notion of “free beauty” (81), for instance, Kant suggests that “many birds . . . and many sea shells [sometimes also translated as crustacea] are beauties in themselves” (81). The situation of the sea shells, adrift from any determining generality (the ocean?), feels like a particularly apt metaphor for the reflexive judgment itself rather than simply an offhand example of the beautiful. As Derrida writes presciently of the Third Critique in “The Parergon,” “the reflective judgment has only the particular at its disposal and must climb back up to, return toward generality: the example . . . is here given prior to the law, and, in its very uniqueness as example, allows one to discover” (my emphasis).43 The action of “climbing” describes the sort of thinking behind the reflexive judgment, the aesthetic, and behind Feminine Singularity I want to press on here, a thinking that allows for ideas to unfold without immediate capture. It is a labor—aligned with the example of Kant’s sea creatures— perhaps not entirely consonant with the realm of Enlightenment human capacities for “sense.” Moten uses some terms in theoretical physics to characterize the “appositional”—that is, proximate and frictional—singularity of Kant’s aesthetic and of the Black radical tradition. It is the language of “dark matter,”44 and of the “broken, breaking, space-time of an improvisation,”45 that, to my mind, makes newly resonant the grammar of a black hole (“dark matter” and “space-time”) for aesthetic 16

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and literary ways of knowing. Black holes are one shorthand for a singularity: a term in mathematics and physics that names a structural breakdown of existing laws—something of an impossibility. Here is how physicist Kip Thorne puts it: “A singularity is a region where—according to the laws of general relativity—the curvature of space-time becomes infinitely large, and spacetime ceases to exist.”46 It is a “sharp edge” from which one cannot “back away” since “space, time, and spacetime cease to exist at the singularity.”47 The language of a different “space-time” is a different optic, a different difference (as it were) altogether. Black holes and phenomena this dizzying therefore pose an obvious and outsized fascination. They might be our best examples of a cosmological sublime, and they strike a compelling yet not altogether comforting note about the possibilities of other worlds and ways of being. Even more so, they present a fundamental stumbling block to any sort of current thinking—in the humanities and elsewhere—that prioritizes empirical facts and clear boundaries grounded in limited notions of the human. Black holes reveal a vertiginous field of difference that cuts through quantum theory and relativity and, as I contend here, to a reinscription of existing ideas about femininity and subjectivity. Black studies scholars, such as Christina Sharpe, have called attention to the cosmological and environmental consequences of singularity as it is defined in physics to subvert long-standing assumptions over who gets to claim oneness in a Western humanistic frame.48 They also interrogate the chromatics of blackness throughout these discourses while offering an overall theorizing of singularity, or a form of subjectivity that takes shape outside of liberal individualism, important to my project in this book. For Quashie, the space of the singular, the “one” that is also potentially an infinite multiplicity, is always a “one” entangled with another: “in every relation is a world, one of space and contact and unknowing and obliteration.”49 This form of relation paves the way for a dismantling of the racial and gendered logics that allow some subjects—typically white and usually male—to claim “oneness,” while other subjects, in Quashie’s analysis, largely Black 17

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women, remain foreclosed from its fundamental grounds. Relation, for Quashie, is further “the capacity of unfurling, of becoming more and more in/through the tension with another.”50 I would emphasize that this definition of relation does not prioritize preexisting notions of difference and sameness that eventually structure the contours of a world and one’s existence within it. Quashie’s definition of relation recurs to that of Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant’s in Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation). This relation maintains, indeed opens up, a difference among repetition. Such a notion of relation, like the way quantum physics conceives of entities in the world, “always changes all the elements composing it, and consequently, the resulting relationship, which then changes them all over again.”51 Black holes—space-time singularities—further open up to questions of gender, race, and difference in my thinking. As we can see, this is largely because they index the dissolution of existing frameworks for the subject steeped in a liberal calculus. What comes alive when we pay attention to the resonances between black holes, the poetics of repetition, and the philosophical grounds of subjectivity is an idea of a “one” whose difference is shaped by forms of likeness and forms of relation that are not a recognizable coupling nor a hierarchical organization of identity. In his ground-breaking early work Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze explains that “we tend to subordinate difference to identity in order to think it.”52 Repetition “too is thought in terms of the identical, the similar, the equal or the opposed.” Rather than oppose repetition, seriality, and structures that seem to only generate sameness to difference, Deleuze proposes a sort of pure difference “in itself” that grounds being and that preexists any notion of the “one.” In his ontology, singularities are remarkably like black holes in physics, “turning points and points of inflection,” zones of potentiality in a relation of forces.53 I bring back Deleuze here because while he prioritizes pure immanence and affirmation over the negation that grounds psychoanalysis and deconstruction—two important fields of inquiry I pick up in what follows—he nevertheless shares with these theories a desire to locate 18

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difference in places that are nondialectic and nonoppositional. Doing so brings minimal difference, likeness, and relation into the field of subjectivity and helps us understand the capacity of these structures for generating the new. I want to say a bit more about how deconstruction and psychoanalysis offer theories of singularity that help us read femininity against the grain. These frameworks do more than simply rehearse the over-derided “hermeneutics of suspicion” they are charged with. Instead, they offer important coordinates for thinking singularity as the basis for a subjectivity alive to questions of gender and race: that is, alive to both not as identities to comfortably occupy but as “knots” of figurative, structural, and psychic likeness and difference. Singularity in both theories, as a result, becomes the ground of a possible politics too. Throughout Derrida’s work, the “irreducibly singular” appears in language and in living through forms of difference that do not congeal into a binary nor resolve into synthesis (à la Hegel). What Derrida calls “iterability” is a familiar term that allows us to reorganize ideas around identity conceived of as rigid and immutable. Iterability, from my perspective, always partakes of gender and sexuality. We should initially recognize the terminology from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). Butler gives us a stillcanonical account of gender performativity on the basic structural premise that the “need for repetition at all is a sign that identity is not self-identical.”54 What is “iterable” for Derrida is not the same as what is given to assent or generalizability. In “Signature, Event, Context,” (1971), he emphasizes the active, constituting possibilities of iterability, whose etymological roots are in the Sanskrit word itara, which stands for “other” or alterity. “Iterability” for Derrida is not rote, mechanical repetition that reasserts sameness. It is a likeness, a spacing, and a swerve that inhabits language and, by extension, experience: a constitutive “dehiscence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential.”55 Refuting the notion that the uniqueness of the “event” and its iterability oppose one another, Derrida writes that “rather than oppose citation 19

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or iteration to the noniteration of an event, one ought to construct a different typology of forms of iteration.”56 Such a “typology” is a nontypology; it is “no more than a minimal idealization” because it draws out the singularity that emerges from iterability rather than referring back to a transcendental ideal or totality.57 Derrida’s iterability helps us understand how minimal difference could craft feminine singularity because this sort of repetition opens up to a more radical singularity in emphasizing the nondialectic possibilities of each mark, of each spacing.58 Iterability further makes itself available to feminist reading and feminist politics because, as poet Gail Scott muses elsewhere, “this akin-to-the-spacing-which-is-writing keeps open the possibilities of subjects not caught up in a binary thematic, but potentially multiple.”59 The spacing Derrida invokes throughout “Signature, Event, Context”—and indeed, throughout most of his work—borrows from Kantian aesthetics the lack of a-priori origins that nevertheless remains generative, but not reproductive in a heteronormative context. This is a “minimal idealization” that orients toward the future while attending to possibilities inscribed in what is normally shrugged off or sublated to a higher form of cohesion. It is vital to mention psychoanalysis here as a theory of partial subjectivity oriented around the opaqueness of the unconscious and the drives, and of the singularity of these relations too. For Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan after him, the subject is always partial, never emerging through “wholeness” or completion but through lack and negation.60 Psychoanalytic scholar Mari Ruti argues that “singularity” largely sutures a subject’s relationship to the real—that kernel of the unsymbolizable in Lacan’s thinking that nevertheless remains fundamental to desire. This pulsing of the real, of the unassimilable, leads Ruti to describe singularity as what “slides into view from within the fissures of social subjectivity, puncturing the subject’s coherent organization of being.”61 For feminist psychoanalytic thinkers such as Jacqueline Rose, this is a powerful starting point for theorizing our way to a feminine singularity not grounded in the limiting notion of transparent identities.62 Throughout my chapters I engage 20

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feminist psychoanalysis—and try to grapple with its limitations, particularly around racialization—to chart new models for subjectivity that might move the conversation forward both in nineteenthcentury literary studies and in feminist theory. Let me return to the image of a black hole to summarize what we might take away from these various theories of the singular. A spacetime singularity is not nothing, the void, nor the ether. Nor is it everything, a totality, a bounded entity that can be counted. Rather, singularities in the quantum sense involve a something. This “something of the one”63 approaches what Jack Halberstam has elsewhere called the constitutive and immeasurable plurality of subjectivity: “‘Some’ is not an indefinite number awaiting a more accurate measurement, but a rigorous theoretical mandate whose specification, necessary as it is (since ‘the multiple must be made’), is neither numerable nor, in the common sense, innumerable.”64 Feminine Singularity therefore aims to explore the space between the numerable and innumerable— the poetics of this “something”—as the place where a theory of the subject might dwell.

The Form of Feminine Singularity While primary works of literature from the nineteenth century form the basis of each of the following four chapters, the theoretical field these texts generate for me is much wider than the critical apparatus provided solely by one field (i.e., Victorian studies) or another. At its core, this book is very much a work of literary criticism, so I would hesitate to call it interdisciplinary. I do, however, aim to activate the dual strangeness of the literary—its alterity and resistance to full explanation—and of feminist theorizing itself. Here I follow Sarah Ahmed’s note, glossing Teresa De Lauretis, about feminist theory in “Whose Counting?” Ahmed argues that feminist theory needs to operate in a “double register” that “will both contest other ways of understanding the world (those theories that are often not seen as theories as they are assumed to be ‘common sense’), as it will contest itself, as a way of interpreting the world (or of ‘making sense’ in a 21

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way which contests what is ‘common’).”65 This is also what Butler, in an interview about Luce Irigaray with Pheng Cheah, Drucilla Cornell, and Elizabeth Grosz, has claimed should be a constant troubling of shared assumptions about feminist theorizing, for “feminism has to allow its own fundamental precepts to come into crisis in relationship to other critical paradigms.”66 Finally, in aiming for a liberatory theory of the subject, I am compelled and challenged by the following provocation by Rachael M. Wilson: that “what is necessary to feminism is that which cannot be weighed or measured out: it is exactly that which escapes dispensation.”67 In this regard, feminist thought and method needs to be read as singular too: partial, contingent, and always formed in critical relation to the world it seeks to transform. Chapter 1, “Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books and the Ones and Twos of Femininity,” explores the representation of girlhood and the act of counting in Carroll’s Alice stories (1865 and 1871). Throughout both books, Alice persistently asks, “Who am I?” and attempts to answer the question through a basic mathematical procedure of enumeration. My analysis in this chapter is inspired by a short anecdotal moment that opens Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers’s essay “All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother,” in which Spillers discusses being seven years old and imagining splitting off into different iterations of herself. I show that counting allows Alice to recalibrate conventional ways of thinking difference and sameness, and that this is a question about femininity rather than a “neutral” question about identity. I further contextualize Alice’s question within wider shifts toward statistical aggregation in the nineteenth century evidenced by two other texts, William Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” (1798) and John Ruskin’s The Ethics of Dust (1865). I ultimately suggest that through counting, Alice demonstrates a logic of gender as merely emergent and, therefore, as potentially open and multiple. This chapter finishes with a reading of Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” and in particular, her invocation of a “cyborg Alice” to consider the contemporary resonances of Alice’s question.

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My second chapter, “Charles Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity,” develops a wider account of lyric singularity untethered to aloneness or singleness. It focuses on the work of Baudelaire, noting that while a variety of feminine figures abound in his oeuvre, most critical readings of the poet have largely concentrated on the tendency toward objectification, and even denigration, in his portrayal of women. By contrast, this chapter’s first sections read his famous poem on the city from Les Fleurs du mal, “À une passante,” in conjunction with Baudelaire’s observations from Mon Coeur mis à nu, Fusées, and Le Peintre de la vie moderne, suggesting that a form of feminine singularity crystallizes in his work that refuses classification under the broader tenets of urban capital and political liberalism. The second section discusses “Les Sept Vieillards” and “Les Petites Vieilles” to make a claim for a redrawing of gendered individuation in Tableaux Parisiens. I finally examine the scant evidence around Baudelaire’s mixed-race partner, Jeanne Duval, reading her through fin-de-siècle visual culture, critical race theory, and Vancouver poet Lisa Robertson’s experimental novel, The Baudelaire Fractal (2020). Robertson’s narrative enacts femininity through description and, in doing so, begins to dislodge gendered and racialized ideas of the aesthetic. I argue overall that Baudelaire’s outsized influence on midcentury literary constructions of gender, urban capital, and aesthetics marks his work as a vital stopping point in theorizing nineteenthcentury singularity. Chapter 3, “Christina Rossetti and the Form of Likeness,” engages Rossetti’s prose and poetry to theorize a model of minimal difference. I argue that in Rossetti’s work, likeness, specifically in the form of sisterhood, rather than binary difference grounded in the form of the heterosexual couple, shapes lyric individuation. Rossetti’s short fiction and poetry from her earliest work in Goblin Market and Other Poems to her collection of children’s stories, Speaking Likenesses (1871), bear out an interest in a “one” or a singular subject who lies outside of normative understandings of difference and

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kinship. This paradoxical mode of conceiving a feminine self largely out of the vexed psychic realm of similarity recalls Sianne Ngai’s theorizing of envy in Ugly Feelings (2005) as a potentially enabling affect for representing feminist collectivity, and it echoes throughout Maggie Nelson’s book-length experimental poem Jane: A Murder (2005). Rossetti’s work therefore offers us new models for theorizing affiliation that rest on an often contentious but nevertheless generative conception of likeness rather than sameness. My fourth chapter, “Seriality, Singularity, Sociality: The Case for Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,” builds on my earlier arguments about likeness and singularity in a reading of Collins’s celebrated sensation novel, a serialized tale of two women who are switched for an inheritance scheme, only to reveal their sisterhood. Transgressing the boundaries of identity, substituting one woman for another, justifying violence against certain bodies to maintain the fictional coherence of others: all of the moves enacted within Collins’s The Woman in White speak to the well-known anxieties of the Woman Question debates and, in particular, the consequences of negotiating marital law in Britain, which rendered women the physical and economic property of their husbands. But these are crucially the same tropes that distinguish nineteenth- and twentieth-century passing narratives that examine what W. E. B. DuBois describes as the “color line.”68 This chapter therefore studies The Woman in White  and its material afterlife—the popularity of the figure of a “white woman” in visual and popular culture in Britain—to contest the stable epistemic grounds of “woman” and “whiteness.” In revealing that women cannot be substituted for one another after all, Collins’s novel exposes a gap between the visible body and its alleged interior as a stable locus of gendered and racialized subjectivity. In theorizing the long durée of nineteenth-century conceptions of a subject, the concluding section of the book finds that problems of likeness and seriality haunt contemporary posthuman accounts of being as much as they do an earlier liberal humanism. Insofar as contemporary science fiction inherits tropes of doubling and iteration 24

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handed down from the Gothic, it remains enmired in basic questions around how difference functions to articulate ontology. I turn to a contemporary film, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), and consider the presently popularized artificial intelligence definition of singularity, observing that the latter definition is animated by earlier trajectories of literary and philosophical thought. To do so, I offer a short close reading of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) and then concentrate on Ex Machina’s horizon of liberal individualism in its portrayal of the female robot Ava. I focus on the possibilities of robot ontology—which is lateral and serial—to unravel the racial hierarchies that subtend Ava’s particularized model of gender. This epilogue is especially concerned with theorizing difference outside liberal models of ever-expanding inclusion.

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chapter 1

Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books and the Ones and Twos of Femininity

It was not only a delightful but a useful idea to me that one herself need not always turn up. One and one did not always make two but might well yield some indeterminate sum, according to the context in which the arithmetic was carried out, indeed which arithmetic was performed. —Hortense J. Spillers, “All the Things You Could Be By Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife was Your Mother”

T owa r d t h e e n d o f Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), seven-and-a-half-year-old Alice enters a forest in “Looking-Glass Insects,” only to arrive face to face with her own possible extinction. The forest presents no topos of original femininity: as Alice observes, the foundational Western myth of receiving one’s identity and one’s fate by being “named” has evaporated: “‘This must be the wood,’ she said thoughtfully to herself, ‘where things have no names. I wonder what’ll become of my name when I go in? I shouldn’t like to lose it at all—because they’d have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one.’”1 At this juncture, a fawn appears, prompting a question that suggests exhilaration rather than tragedy: “‘Then it really has happened, after all! And now, who am I?’” (LG, 177).2 I begin with this loss of transcendental foundations for Alice and her identity because this is precisely what Carroll was not after in his long career as a writer of fiction. Carroll, or as he was better known to the nonliterary reading public, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson 26

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(1832–1898), was a mathematician and logician, Oxford don, and gifted amateur photographer. He also happened to be a Tory brought up in the High Church whose sympathies bent toward the absolute. In his diaries, Dodgson critiqued Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species (1862), a text published only three years before the first Alice book. Dodgson believed in “the insufficiency of ‘Natural Selection’ alone to account for the universe, and its perfect compatibility with the creative and guiding power of God.”3 Rules, their subversion, and their orderly reinstatement have consequently been the trajectory through which most literary critics have mapped the nonsense games of Wonderland across both Alice books. Despite all its delights, Wonderland appears to these critics (James R. Kincaid, Anne  K. Mellor, Catherine Robson, and Elizabeth Sewell, for instance) as an ultimately closed and rigidly bound world designed to frustrate and, more troubling, to entrap the Victorian girl with her “manners” and “lessons.” Yet Alice’s loss of her name in “Looking-Glass Insects” compels me because it does not frustrate: losing her name is freeing rather than alienating. As Alice reconsiders whom she might be, new relations emerge, implying other conditions of possibility for her existence. For an instant, she wanders through the woods tenderly clutching and speaking with the fawn, who bounds away out of fear the moment the old hierarchies are reinstituted: “‘I’m a Fawn!’ it cried out in a voice of delight. ‘And dear me! You’re a human child!’ A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed” (LG, 177–78). Drawing briefly from Carroll’s preferred domain of logic, we could say that the question of Alice’s being in the forest of “Looking-Glass Insects” is deployed in two modal terms: it is both contingent—she could vanish at any point and cease to exist—and possible—that is, her existence is thinkable, if not entirely representable, and certainly not self-evident.4 The enduring popularity of both Alice books means that readers and nonreaders alike will be familiar with the fictional Alice’s often 27

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Chapter One

whimsical, sometimes unsettling estrangement from herself: growing suddenly large or small, forgetting her name, and swimming through a pool of her own tears. These memorable forms of bodily, social, and psychic estrangement shore up the question of “who she is,” a question Alice asks repeatedly and that presides over her adventures in both Wonderland and Looking-Glass. It is a “rare” question for children’s book protagonists, according to Nina Auerbach, because rather than ask where she is as she falls down the rabbit-hole to Wonderland, Alice asks who she is.5 This chapter takes this question and its vicissitudes seriously to claim that the only answer to “who she is” is Alice’s singularity: her existence as a “one” who is available to counting but not to the recognizable contours of identity and identity’s adjuncts, categorization, and classification. This might seem paradoxical, as we usually think of the proper name— the site of Alice’s repeated loss in Wonderland—as conferring singularity, as marking one’s uniqueness and irreplaceability. Yet it is the basic mathematical procedure of counting ones and twos, a procedure that saturates both Alice books, rather than the register of language and naming that generates the structure for Alice’s feminine singularity and reconfigures a theory of the subject around this numerary logic. To explain what I mean by a feminine singularity scripted through the numerary, it is useful to begin with a basic observation: counting is ubiquitous in both Alice books. Most of Wonderland’s creatures appear in pairs (Tweedledum and Tweedledee) or are strikingly unique themselves (the Caterpillar; the Cheshire-Cat). Because this fantasy world’s creatures spend all their time callously “order[ing] one about, and mak[ing] one repeat lessons” (AW, 106), the Alice books’ overall relationship to mathematics and counting appears uncomplicated: a straightforward satire of the earlier religious didacticism that defined children’s books since the eighteenth century. Most of the mathematical riddles and puzzles encoded in Carroll’s text never get solved, and they often take the shape of tedious “sums” and lessons that quickly lead Alice to boredom and frustration rather 28

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than delight and amusement. Take the end of Wonderland and the infamous trial involving the King and Queen of Hearts from “Who Stole the Tarts?” Carroll inserted a nonsense poem he had originally published in 1855 in the periodical Comic Times: “I gave her one, they gave him two, / You gave us three or more; / They all returned from him to you, / Though they were mine before.”6 The poem is recited by the King of Hearts in lieu of a verdict. By the end of Wonderland, Alice has lost much of her earlier trepidation so that these seemingly redundant puns about ones and twos apparently signify nothing to her, not even “an atom of meaning” (AW, 122). As professor of mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, Dodgson’s most enduring contribution to the field of mathematics was largely pedagogical rather than scholarly. Not especially remembered for his research, he instead worked consistently to make mathematical puzzles a pleasant pastime for English children. This is a notable departure from the rote memorization to which they would have been subjected in the Victorian classroom.7 Further, it is well known to literary historians that the Alice books were drafted during an era of rapid innovation in the field of mathematics—from the development of non-Euclidean geometries to the rising interest in symbolic algebra and finally, the discovery of set theory by George Cantor—all shifts Anna Kornbluh observes “reorient mathematical knowledge from a description of the world to a projection of possible worlds.”8 Dodgson largely defended the older models of mathematical scholarship, going so far as to publish a treatise on Euclidean geometry, Euclid and His Modern Rivals, in 1879. The new mathematics, such as symbolic algebra—with their emphasis on the arbitrariness of truths rather than their absoluteness—disturbed Dodgson’s “commitment to the meaningfulness of mathematics,” as Helen Pycior has argued.9 At the same time, “the root of his nonsense verse may also be in symbolic algebra, which stressed in mathematics structure over meaning.”10 Despite the existential uncertainty wrought by mathematical innovation for Dodgson and others (Cantor himself died in a sanitorium 29

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after intense criticism of his work), his approach across his literary work treats the numerary as a uniquely generative site of knowledge for both adults and children. Nevertheless, Dodgson’s mathematical expertise has contributed to perhaps the most notorious claim about his life and work: namely, that he maintained an erotic attachment to little girls. In that perspective, which dominated much of the twentieth-century criticism of the Alice books,11 mathematics serves as a controlling mechanism for the male writer, delimiting the boundaries of a fantasy world over “which he is the sole master.”12 One touchstone for this entrenched critical paradigm is a photograph of Alice Liddell—daughter of Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church, who inspired the books named after her—inserted into the last page of the manuscript version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which Carroll illustrated and bound himself in 1864. The image is framed by a hand-drawn border that U. C. Knoepflmacher notes intriguingly resembles “the mathematical symbol for infinity,” one ostensibly framing “a face that cannot age.”13 The photographic image—one of thousands Dodgson took of his female “child friends”14—seems to neatly pull together various forms of erotic fixation under the symbolic power of the infinity symbol to “confound temporality,”15 closing the gap between youth and age, girlhood and manhood, past and present. It is clear from the fictional Alice’s repeated encounters with the most basic unit of mathematical thinking—counting—that these forms of engagement reveal more complex possibilities for her sense of “who she is” than any of these well-established critical readings have allowed. The promise of a different kind of oneness emerges in the Alice books—a singularity—that takes shape at the level of counting bodies, including one’s own, marking the count as a site of subject formation, where femininity reveals and troubles the problematic neutrality of abstract subjectivity. To initially understand how the numerary could be enabling for Alice’s subjectivity in these ways, I look to the work of Alain Badiou, for whom the proper name is numerical insofar as withdrawing from it becomes the domain of the 30

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void, of the “empty set” in Cantorian mathematical terms (a set with no elements, the equivalent of zero). Badiou’s philosophical oeuvre is grounded in mathematics as a kind of ontology and formalization, with an emphasis on set theory. It is sufficient to say that Badiou’s theorization of the subject shows that the “one” can be subtracted only from what there is rather than given directly. This lack of givenness negates universalist ideas of oneness, becoming instead the “unpresentation and un-being of the one.”16 Alice’s loss of her name in “Looking-Glass Insects” is such an unpresentation. Losing her name locates femininity elsewhere than in a stable reproductive genealogy, and this temporary opacity—this nonplace of “who she is”—allows Alice to reconsider herself outside of the frame of identity. This repositioning signals the breaching of certain conventional parameters in feminist thought—ones tethered to a watered-down identity politics— and a move toward the unknown, the not-given-in-advance. In the remainder of this chapter I locate a feminist theory of the nonessential one in the Alice books and read them with two other nineteenth-century texts that address girlhood through counting: William Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” (1898) and John Ruskin’s The Ethics of Dust (1865). None of these writers shared any sort of commitment to liberating views on femininity. Yet biographical data seems beside the point; when these three sets of texts are taken side by side, they challenge a rapidly consolidating statistical imaginary that merely quantifies difference in readily discernible and typically oppositional terms. I read all three as contributing to an ongoing conversation in queer and feminist theory on what it means to be a “one” or a “two.” To broaden that conversation, I pay special attention to the work of literary critic and Black feminist theorist Hortense J. Spillers and argue for a salience between the epigraph to this chapter and Alice’s inquiry into “who she is.” As Spillers outlines it, subjectivity escapes grammar and is, rather, an arithmetic. This conversation rewrites limiting notions of sexual difference while fundamentally preserving the possibility of feminine singularity: a subject who counts. 31

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Thinking, Being, Becoming Tracing Alice’s femininity through loss, and specifically the loss of her name, opens some new pathways to thinking subjectivity and difference. More specifically, in turning to counting instead to argue for Alice’s singularity, I build a case for thinking about counting as a site for femininity’s emergence outside of essentialist ideas of gender. Jose Esteban Muñoz writes that “to accept loss is to accept queerness—or more accurately, to accept the loss of heteronormativity, authorization, and entitlement.”17 To answer Alice’s question about “who she is” without the fixed coordinates of a name is not to fetishize lack or negation. It is rather to privilege thinking, the dynamism of becoming, and the possibility of a feminine that is not accountable to heteronormativity. In contemporary politics, naming remains the starting point from which to begin seeking out a form of feminist and anti-racist justice, however uncertain that foundational practice. Yet for feminist scholarship, naming has become a way to conceive of difference in only “juridical or identitarian terms,” as Lynne Huffer argues, and to delimit disciplinary and institutional boundaries.18 In Looking-Glass, Alice’s forgetting of her name reveals the opposite: her girlhood as merely a trace, an aftereffect of those efforts to produce the originary in a name. This is where Alice’s singularity comes to the fore, in the interstices between these efforts: a potent cross section of thinking, being, and becoming. When Alice encounters the numerary, she is posing a question about difference and ontology, always linked to the question of who she is, which is never resolvable through words alone. Early on in Wonderland, a pigeon, one of many cantankerous creatures who appear in Carroll’s fantasy world, asks: “‘Well!  what  are you?’  .  .  . ‘I can see you’re trying to invent something!’ The answer he receives is: ‘I—I’m a little girl,’ said Alice, rather doubtfully” (AW, 55). The lack of certainty in Alice’s answer forms the basis of Gilles Deleuze’s important early work The Logic of Sense (1969). Here, Deleuze moves 32

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through a series of “paradoxes” across Carroll’s various literary works (including the late novel Sylvia and Bruno [1889] and his poem The Hunting of the Snark [1874]) to argue for a philosophy of difference and becoming. For Deleuze, “the loss of the proper name is the adventure which is repeated throughout all of Alice’s adventures,”19 and the absence of fixed identity for Alice is exchanged for the “paradox of infinite identity,” which eludes self-presence and any presuppositions toward depth.20 This form of becoming replaces “being” in the traditional ontological sense. Because linguistic meaning—“sense,” more specifically—in the Alice books constantly slides horizontally away from itself (a good example is Alice’s paradigmatic encounter with Humpty-Dumpty, whose “name means the shape I am” (LW, 208)), Carroll’s fiction represents “becoming” as part of a differential structure in which terms such as “being” are immanent and given relationally, and often serially. Rather than a merely linguistic system, however, this field of curving, sliding, matrices, and points in which Alice’s paradoxical becoming emerges for Deleuze is both poetic and mathematical. It is “the refrain of a song, whose verses form the many series through which the element circulates, being the magic word, in whose case all the names by which it is ‘called’ do not fill in the ‘blank.’”21 But Alice’s becoming also allows for “the relation between mathematics and man [to be] conceived in a new way: the question is not that of quantifying or measuring human properties, but rather, on the one hand, that of problematizing human events, and, on the other, that of developing as various human events the conditions of the problem.”22 Deleuze’s theory of becoming therefore enables us to perceive a structure of difference in the Alice books that defies traditional oppositions of order versus chaos, surface versus depth, and especially, mathematics versus language. To varying degrees of success, Sigmund Freud too found himself preoccupied with the little girl’s question about “who she is,” a question he attempted to untangle in texts such as “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1925). There, the little girl’s question about her subjectivity raises 33

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the problem of sexual difference and the castration complex. For many queer and feminist theorists engaged with psychoanalysis, the girl’s question is a numerary one, as ones and twos form the basic coordinates of heteronormative social life, insofar as these numbers organize the couple form and structure notions of gendered individuation largely through and against that form. Luce Irigaray establishes a critique of this particular count as the foundation of French feminist theory, perhaps best illustrated in the following lyrical meditation from “When Our Lips Speak Together”: “their oneness, with its prerogatives, its domination, its solipsism: like the sun’s. And the strange way they divide up their couples, with the other as the image of the one.”23 The two sublates the one; it surrenders the entire equation to mirroring and mimesis, or mere objectification. For Irigaray, one aim of feminist theorizing is to reinstitute the “two” of sexual difference outside of the heterosexual couple form. This work necessitates rethinking oedipality itself, which (in her reading and that of other feminist theoretical contemporaries, such as Monique Wittig and Hélène Cixous) privileges a oneness rooted in biological dimorphism by way of the phallus. But counting can also yield a difference that chafes against the dominant ideology. One way to think about this is to consider the little girl’s inquiry as revealing the “noncount” of sexual difference, which, for theorists such as Joan Copjec and Alenka Zupancˇicˇ, reveals what fundamentally cannot be counted under existing notions of what counts. Yet, sexual difference functions as a form of difference that is insistent and non-negligible, that refuses not to be counted.24 In this schema—which bears a relationship to Badiou’s notion of the “unpresentation” of one—ones and twos do not graft onto heteronormative pairings or couplings but suggest deuniversalized forms of existence. The girl’s count is subsequently always both about numbers and what it means to count: that is, to matter. “Mattering” in this context then holds in tension two sets of problems that have often been read, in the Western philosophical tradition that includes Deleuze and Freud, as antithetical: the question of 34

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embodiment and materialism, on the one hand, and the question of subjectivity in a psychic register that involves the unconscious, on the other. While not wishing to essentialize psychoanalytic accounts of sexual difference as the only difference, I situate Alice’s feminine singularity at the crossroads of at least both of these approaches to the subject: Deleuzian theories of becoming, as well as feminist and queer theories that engage psychoanalysis to question how being and oneness have been understood. Black feminist theory further turns to singularity to make apparent that gender, sexuality, and race are not simply categories to inhabit as particular beings or demarcated sites of originary, positive meaning. In doing so, Black feminist theory reveals some of the limits of a psychoanalytic approach that does not consider racialization. This is what Spillers is getting at in the epigraph to this chapter, and why this epigraph remains important for reading Alice’s singularity within a wider politics of race and sexual difference. In her essay, Spillers queries the particularity of a “knowing one” by examining psychoanalytic studies produced in a West African context.25 For Spillers, “the knowing one” is forged through an essentialism that is fundamentally white and Western. The anecdote that frames Spillers’s essay, that “one and one did not always make two but might well yield some indeterminate sum,” introduces the possibility of singularity instead, prying open familiar narratives of difference mapped onto the coordinates of a “one” and a “two.” These few lines muse on Spillers’ churchgoing girlhood and a peculiar injunction by her minister to “send go.” The phrase meant to pass the collection plate, but Spillers writes of her imaginative understanding of “send go” as raising a “constitutive pleasure in conjuring up the image of a snaggle-tooth replica of my seven-year old self going off in my place.”26 The “send go” of her girlhood generates a “snaggle-tooth replica” who might do as she pleases, who might be split off from herself to venture in different, unknown directions. This (at least) twoness of Spillers’s girlhood self preexists any sort of coupling that would orient her to different “twos” in a prescriptive 35

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heterosexual vein. A one’s relationship to a two might begin with herself, with a sense of her own plurality rather than her bounded selfhood.27 The anecdote from Spillers’s childhood strikes me as a particularly apt framing for contemplating the numerical grounds of being and subjectivity in and through girlhood, and for thinking through the singularity of a different one who “need not always turn up,” in her phrase.28 This framing anecdote is a critical reminder of the essay’s, and Black feminist theory’s, improvisational, inventive dimensions, and the way such improvisation—stirring up echoes of Alice and her conversation with the pigeon—can unsettle rigid forms of gendered and racialized being.

Census Counting and the Anti-abstracted Child We should recall that the apparently simple act of counting remains highly charged since the nineteenth century and the era of the Alice books. Writing in the contemporary about Albert Camus’s novel The Plague (1947), Jacqueline Rose reminds us: “Counting humans, alive or dead, means you have entered a world of abstraction . . . counting can also mean the exact opposite. If someone counts, they matter.”29 In outlining Alice’s specifically feminine singularity in Carroll’s two Alice books, I want to briefly contextualize philosophical readings of Alice and her “rebel becomings”30 within wider shifts in census-based thinking across the nineteenth century, which formalized counting and difference in the service of quantifiability. Since the formalization of the British census in 1801 and its increasingly bureaucratic commitment to the taxonomized and abstracted individual (across England and its colonies), both possibilities of counting—to matter and to be abstracted (and in this way to potentially not matter)— resound with each invocation of a “one” and a “two.” Being counted initially held out the possibility of making visible what was once neglected, overlooked, or merely ignored. Yet by 1865, the year of Wonderland’s publication, Britain had instituted seven censuses, and the “dull, dry, parade of stupid figures”—that is, the bureaucratic

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mechanism of counting—had been sufficiently stripped of any imaginative power in the public eye to be able to perform purely statistical labor on behalf of the state.31 At issue with “being counted” for the nineteenth century is, moreover, the more concrete question of electoral representation, a process memorably taken up by a late addition to the first Wonderland book: the chapter entitled “A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale,” in which Alice washes up on a bank with a dodo and a few other creatures. The dodo insists on holding a caucus-race, interpreting the term literally, in which “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes” (AW, 31). Dodgson became increasingly preoccupied with voting theory after his involvement in university governance at Oxford, and he published several pamphlets on the subject of fair elections. In playing on the meaning of a “caucus” race (a term Kent Puckett points out that may originate in Algonquin language), Carroll was placing his work on electoral theory within a wider Atlantic context of nineteenthcentury American democracy, which necessarily raised the specter of bodies who would go uncounted under supposedly democratic politics: the formerly enslaved, women, and marginalized others.32 Though Puckett writes that in the Alice books, Carroll dramatizes “a commitment to the political that goes beyond [Dodgson’s] occasional writings on elections,”33 Alice’s own subjectivity remains peripheral to this critical history, or at best, an unruly step on the path to “proper” bourgeois imperial subjectivity.34 Writers mulled over the imaginative capacity of, and limits to, counting and abstracting bodies since the census’s inception. In 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principles of Population, a sociological polemic that contributed directly to Britain’s adoption of its first census. The same year, Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” appeared in Lyrical Ballads; the verse holds open the possibility within poetic language that enumeration is always fraught with multiple forms of unclassifiable difference. Because counting often lays bare what cannot be counted, it exposes and reveals difference in

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its infinite gradations. The thematic and formal continuity between “We Are Seven” and the Alice books satisfies one paradigmatic story in literary history, that of the development of the children’s book during the Victorian period.35 Here I try to imagine this trajectory differently by foregrounding the disruptive count of girl femininity. In Wordsworth’s poem, an older male speaker addresses a “little cottage girl” who refuses to leave out her dead and absent brothers and sisters from her family count, insisting that while “two are gone to sea” and “Two of us in the Churchyard lie” (lines 20–21), “O Master! We are seven” (54). The girl’s insistence on her family’s count eventually closes out the poem, as its final stanza breaks with its quatrain structure and abab rhyme scheme: “But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!” ’Twas throwing words away; for still The little Maid would have her will, And said, “Nay, we are seven!”36

The poem, as even the casual reader of Wordsworth can discern, is more than a simple meditation on death. In its persistent pattern of counting, it indexes several vital oppositions, including the blurring of absence and presence, a rural nostalgia versus an unimaginative urban count, and even and odd numbers. Aaron Fogel reads the poem as an example of “anti-censuses . . . artistic works that drive beyond or work against current operating assumptions about enumeration, and that expose the aesthetics of what we take to be non aesthetic counting procedures.”37 Counting in “We Are Seven” disrupts the neat binary of “aesthetics” versus “non aesthetics”: it is the conduit to the poem’s most imaginative insights. What is all the more striking about Wordsworth’s exploration of these counterintuitive possibilities within counting is that this procedure is clearly gendered as well as classed, as the alternative title to the poem, “The Little Maid and the Gentleman,” evinces. The poem’s addressee moves from a “simple

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Child” (line 1) in the first stanza to a “Little Cottage Girl” (5), and finally a “sweet Maid . . . whose beauty made me glad” (28, 12) in later sections of the poem. Yet while the speaker is able to identify the girl with increasingly gendered precision, he cannot rectify the intractable dispute in the poem as to who gets to count. In its act of simultaneous gendering and “un” counting then, “We Are Seven” registers an alternative count that lies outside of rigid taxonomies of bureaucratic personhood through the figure of girlhood, one more attentive to the rift of subjectivity away from the neutralized contours of a preexisting “one.” The girl’s count is further not merely beholden to a form of Romantic nostalgia but points to the ways in which sexual difference—everywhere present in the poem but never its main problematic—intervenes in the deceptively simple figuring of poetic individuation. This form of counting posits not only a form of “anti-census” thinking but also an anti-abstracted child, one who cannot be particularized through religious moral instruction nor the increasingly liberal logic of state-sanctioned personhood that aims to replace it. We might think of various contemporary theoretical models here, such as Katheryn Bond Stockton’s “queer child,” but the anti-abstracted child exceeds the intellectual space of childhood itself.38 Like the “Little Maid” of “We Are Seven,” who refuses the distinctions that mark a certain type of modernizing personhood, “ones” and “twos” allow Alice to recalibrate conventional ideas of difference and similitude rather than to confirm them. In an early passage from “A Pool of Tears” in Wonderland, Alice, having grown enormously tall from eating a piece of cake, wonders where to go next in the frustratingly changeable fantasy realm: “I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”

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And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them. “I’m sure I’m not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I ca’n’t be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh, she knows such a very little! Besides she’s she, and I’m I, and—oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at this rate!” (AW, 23)

This moment is striking in that Alice puzzles out the question of her subjectivity in ways that are pointedly neither sentimental nor customary. Her exploration of difference bears little resemblance to the idealized relationships within the nuclear family that, for Deborah Gorham, characterize Victorian girlhood: “the image of the ideal daughter at home was most often presented through a portrayal of a girl’s relationship to other members of the ideal family.”39 This is precisely the kind of domestic ideology that Alice has left behind. Eschewing the usual figures of authority—parents, teachers, even other hostile creatures in Wonderland—Alice evokes a lateral sequence of other little girls in which apparent sameness begins to produce an idea of Alice’s subjectivity and, to be more precise, her singularity. It is a moment that plays with the substitutability of femininity, the idea that “Ada” and “Mabel” and “Alice” all boil down to a type and a larger class, a class of indistinguishable little girls. Alice subtracts herself from this set: not being “Ada” or “Mabel” reveals a form of minimal difference from these other children, proving that she can’t substitute them for herself. The following insight from Jean-Luc Nancy helps us clarify the stakes of Alice’s observation: “the singular is primarily each one, and therefore, also with and among others.”40 Alice’s apparently offhand realization that “Besides she’s she, and I’m I” further begins to unfold her singularity from the 40

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repetition and redundancy of singular pronouns, and of grammar more broadly. Alice’s surprising repetitions strain toward the avant-garde: one almost hears Gertrude Stein’s paradigmatic “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Yet grammar is not enough in Wonderland. The phrase “she’s she and I’m I”—which does not presume a stable “I” that preexists its articulation—instantly shifts Alice back to arithmetic and back to the conventional modes of mathematical sums and calculations that represent a contrasting failure of self-understanding, as these multiplications foreclose her ability to “get to twenty” and to open up any idea of imaginative possibility or futurity (the math is also, needless to say, wrong). We therefore find that Alice has further exceeded normative forms of identification, in the way that Susan Stewart describes: “When one counts for counting’s sake, the classification and hierarchies of the everyday lifeworld are flattened into a line of infinite possibility.”41 For Alice, counting and math move from the solely programmatic (“all the things I used to know”) to becoming the periphery of a thinking. And thinking, in Wonderland, is an activity that is not coincident with knowing. But it does have a terrifying capacity to unseat the rules and hierarchies in place, as we find out later when the Duchess, wandering alongside Alice and lecturing her about morals, asks whether she is “thinking again?” Alice, seemingly emboldened by the end of story, quips, “I have a right to think” (AW 93).

“Wild, Fantastic, Impossible” In that Alice experiences a number of bodily changes in her first adventure in Wonderland, from “shutting up like a telescope” (AW, 17) to growing too big for the White Rabbit’s house, the narrative blatantly ironizes the notion of “growing up” in the usual fashion. These physical changes—which on the surface manifest a shifting sense of one’s agency over the body—are also at the forefront of Alice’s negotiation of “who she is.” They exceed mere satire on Victorian middle-class adulthood because they point out the instability 41

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of nineteenth-century anxieties about the female body (as needing to be contained and restricted) and, even more crucially, attempt to recalibrate Alice’s very humanness, in which sexual difference is not a cultural appendage to the body but a modality of being, an orientation to the world. What I am arguing here is that Alice allows us to think more carefully about the malleability of the material world and the material body in relation to psychoanalytic accounts of sexual difference as the latter is often grafted onto more quotidian experiences of gender. Wonderland’s exploration of forms of asymmetry and relationality that unravel conventional notions of girlhood subjectivity also functions at the level of the material body rather than purely in the domain of the symbolic.42 What I read as a form of corporeal dynamism—following theorists of the new materialisms such as Elizabeth Grosz—reflects Alice’s estranged encounter with the body as foreign matter that is not simply terrifying but often exhilarating. “‘Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!” exclaims Alice at the beginning of “A Pool of Tears”: “Goodbye, feet!’” (AW, 20). Earlier, the narrator of Wonderland observes: She generally gave herself good advice . . . for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. “But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person.” (AW, 18)

Here, ones and twos work to reference a relationship to the body as undifferentiated, as “one respectable person.” Individual wholeness is posited in terms of social integrity (“respectable”) as well as bodily integrity (“there’s hardly enough of me”), but neither form of self-sameness is of value in Wonderland. The matter of maintaining this sort of integrity across time and space becomes precisely that: a question of matter, of bodily integrity not as it refracts the coherence of Victorian gender ideology, but as it forecasts the openness of possibility when one’s relationship to an environment involves a certain amount of contingency at the level of the corporeal: what Kyla 42

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Wazana Tompkins elaborates as “an idea of the body as having a life and conversation of its own, with itself.”43 This unraveling of the rigidity of corporeal oneness finds its fullest expression in the Alice books’ visual register, in which Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations laboriously excavate the possibilities of Alice’s relationship to the fantasy world around her. Exploring the contrast  between his and Carroll’s more rudimentary illustrations to Alice’s Adventures Underground (figs. 1 and 2) allows us to register this dynamism.

F i g u r e 1 . Lewis Carroll, illustration for Alice’s Adventures Underground, by Lewis Carroll (1862–64), 76. 43

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F i g u r e 2 . Sir John Tenniel, Alice tries to play croquet with a flamingo as a mallet, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (London: Macmillan, 1865), 85.

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Tenniel swaps out a flamingo for Carroll’s ostrich, but the primary difference between the illustrations is that Tenniel situates Alice in her environment. Whereas Carroll’s drawing finds Alice in a more or less utilitarian relationship to the nonhuman world of Wonderland, Tenniel puts forth their entanglement. To be sure, in a later essay entitled “Alice on Stage,” Carroll readily acknowledges that his earlier sketches “rebelled against every law of Anatomy or Art.”44 This is despite his careful plans for the drawings, inspired by multiple visits to the Natural History Museum at Oxford with the Liddell sisters, and even a few photographic studies of skeletons and other miscellany done in the late 1850s. By contrast, contemporary reviewers of the Alice books generally praise Tenniel’s illustrations, notably for how they do “justice to the exquisitely wild, fantastic, impossible, yet most natural history of ‘Alice in Wonderland.’”45 Clearly, the differences amount to more than just the sophistication of the drawings themselves. The “wild, fantastic, impossible, yet most natural history” of the Alice books describes a dynamic and materialist world that needs to be read less as an idealistic nonsense universe than as a landscape of various kinds of decouplings: mind and body, human and nonhuman, ones and twos. Such decouplings open up a thinking of difference and individuation untetethered to the binaristic notion of sexual difference haunting most of the nineteenth-century’s more conventional ideological investments. As I have been suggesting, Wonderland’s illustrations of Alice— saturated with a mid-Victorian zeal for natural history—corroborate the dislodging of an established form of the “one” toward which counting in Wonderland labors. I use the term “materialism” deliberately to invoke the emerging nineteenth-century philosophies around corporeal matter as the basis of all phenomena, to which numerous figures (e.g., John Tyndall, Thomas Henry Huxley) and a revival of Lucretian atomism belong. I also wish to take into consideration the Marxist historiographical sense of materialism (or historical materialism) here, which posits the centrality of lived social relations to this definition of a materialist world. Both involve a rigorous revision, 45

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among other things, of what produces difference between entities— whether those entities are social classes, human beings, or atomic particles—and fundamentally about what “matters.” While Dodgson’s personal writings do not bear out any significant discussions of the new/old materialisms, his embeddedness in a changing intellectual culture that includes such thinking is indisputable. Notably, Dodgson took portraits at the British Association of the Advancement of Science Conference when it was held at Oxford in 1860, including one of Michael Faraday. Later, Dodgson sent one of his photographs of Flora Rankin from 1863 (a friend of the family of George and Irene Mcdonald) to Charles Darwin for consideration in The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals (1872). In the Alice books, Alice’s encounter with herself as not even “one respectable person” is also an encounter with materiality as itself not-one, as containing within itself multiple infinities, multiple futures, and multiple alterities that Wonderland’s matter—mushrooms, flowers, creatures, and so on—aggressively showcases. It is a world that, on some level, hinges on Alice herself: as Gillian Beer emphatically puts it, she is the “radical principle of the books.”46 Yet this world also troubles simple causality, as in many ways it operates autonomously. In “It’s My Own Invention,” from Looking-Glass, Alice recalls exactly this problem when she is reminded of the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s observation that she is only a temporary creation of the Red King, who is asleep and dreaming the entire story. If she were to wake him, claims Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!” (LG, 189). Later on, Alice muses: “we’re all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it’s my dream, and not the Red King’s! I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream” (LG, 233). This is a hope that never gets resolved, since the final chapter of LookingGlass, “Which Dreamed It,” ends with this interrogative address to the reader: “Which do you think it was?” (LG, 271). Carroll’s Alice books were not the only texts to treat girlhood as a problem for matter’s ongoing transformations in the wake of materialist debates around organic and inorganic forms. John Ruskin’s 46

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The Ethics of the Dust, a series of lectures that extend Wordsworth’s frankly patronizing schema of an older male in conversation with a young girl, or in this case, a set of young girls, was published nearconcurrently with the first Alice book in 1865 and proposes a dialogue around the process of chemical composition and decomposition. Ruskin’s Old Lecturer refers to his girl pupils as “crystals” and “atoms” and finally as “dust” themselves who are “crystalline in brightness” and who “charm infinitely, by infinitude of change.”47 Typically read as another instance of masculine fetishism that seeks to not only control but also inhabit a fantasia of girlhood, the Ethics mobilizes the hardness of crystals together with the mutability of matter to produce a seeming erotics of the girl’s unpredictable body that appears adjacent to Carroll’s project. Ella Mershon begins to read Ruskin’s text differently by suggesting that inorganic matter was “promiscuous” because it could enter into “endless rearrangements, shifting, kaleidoscopically, into many forms,”48 forms that were often stubbornly “asexual.”49 Such promiscuous or unruly combinatory powers speak to the failure of heterosexual modes of distinction to delimit gendered reproduction: the making of a one into a two. Crucially, Ruskin’s text proposes the combinatory powers of matter as fractal, rather than binary: in a section entitled “Crystal Orders,” the Lecturer instructs the girls to “make diamonds of yourselves,”50 which quickly becomes a conversation about why “all the nicest things seem to divide into threes.”51 The Lecturer follows by explaining to the young girls the process of “crystallizing quickly,” a process that follows the pattern of fractal growth to infinity.52 In brief, fractal iteration seeks new forms within self-similarity. Its mathematical roots recur to the seventeenth-century work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the later nineteenth-century findings of Felix Klein and Henri Poincaré, though the formal language of fractals develops only in the later twentieth century in conjunction with a growing interest in computer-based modeling. And despite the Old Lecturer peevishly noting that “the mathematical part of crystallography is quite beyond girls’ strength,” he also cannot help but claim that it is “full of 47

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the most curious teaching for you.”53 Both Ruskin and Carroll then testify to a resolutely fractal logic of iteration in their address to girlhood as gendered matter. The Alice books direct our attention to those areas of mathematical thinking that produce forms of individuation within minimal difference, whether these forms are gendered selves, crystals, or even atoms. These are, as C. Namwali Serpell puts forth, “weird forms”: not pure matter, not pure form, but they are nonetheless “all over the political spectrum” and “undeniably fraught with racial and gender politics.”54 The political stakes of weird forms resonate within the historical context of the mid-nineteenth century as well as beyond its margins. Weird forms push back against a representative model of subjectivity as a stable formation that grounded mid-Victorian liberal politics, as Elaine Hadley has shown: “The embodied forms are distinctive formations of the bodily, materializations of the liberal individual that attain fixity and surface through their reiterated performance over time. . . . [T]he concept of bodily matter as a social process of materialization is especially crucial for forms of abstract embodiment in the mid-nineteenth century in Britain.”55 In Hadley’s language of “abstract embodiment,” the liberal subject is at once abstracted through a disinterested process of cognition—absolutely formalized—and a body who can pragmatically live out those liberal ideals. What my readings of Wordsworth, Carroll, and Ruskin reveal is that femininity is not simply a bodily problematic that threatens abstraction (and the very tenuous counting procedures that aim to reinforce it), but a rupturing on both fronts such that the stability of liberal ideation becomes impossible. There is a radical freedom in the “weird” (and the fractal) to my mind, a way of being that can unhook us from the limiting ways in which gender and sexuality accrue to normative ideas of the body. Weirdness calibrates not to some kind of constitutive exclusion from the normal but to a reframing of what these normative modes of individuation are and can be instead. Serpell makes clear that some forms simply do not function programmatically and are not given 48

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to ordering. And to the pre-Socratic atomists, notably Democratus, who coined a particularly intransigent neologism, Den, to describe atoms as “less-than-nothing” or “not-quite-one,” the material world may simply just be a loose coalition of weird forms, in all their fractal possibility. In Wonderland, then, not making “an atom of meaning” nor “one respectable person” collectively reroute Alice’s question around “who she is” from a site of failure to a landscape of partial, weird, and potentially enabling forms of subjectivity and difference.56

Feminist Futures, Feminist Topographies Part of what is at stake in a fractal reimagining of femininity is scale. Growing large or small, and without the fixity of a name or a stable identity, raises the question of what kinds of mappings of space and time are adequate to perceiving this subject. The question of the kind of scalar imaginary generated by Alice is an implicit one for contemporary theorist Donna Haraway in her classic polemic of socialist feminism, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985). The essay describes the cyborg as the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,” a figuration of the dissolution of boundaries between human and nonhuman, animal and machine, and matter and meaning. Haraway uses the cyborg to grapple with science and technology’s rearrangements of social relations without dismissing technology’s inevitable ascendancy, a kind of turning away that distinguished the majority of feminist writing in the early Reagan era.57 In a cyborg world, what was once devalued can take on an “oppositional” political force, based in new coalitions and new affinities. At one point, Haraway describes the co-opting of smallness in the late twentieth century’s technocratic social reality, a reality in which, ironically, “miniaturization has turned out to be about power.”58 She writes: “the nimble fingers of ‘Oriental’ women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll’s houses, women’s enforced attention to the small, take on quite new dimensions. . . . There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions.”59 49

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Since the publication of this essay—whose entry into the world was nothing short of controversial60—scholars have veered between dismissing Haraway’s cyborg as out of step with feminist concerns of the twenty-first century and mining the text as a still-potent site for examining gender in an anti-essentialist frame. Both appear to be true. As Alison Kafer observes, though Haraway positions women of color as the horizon of cyborg coalition building, the description of the “nimble fingers” of Asian women, supposedly cyborgs of global capitalism, is itself “indebted to colonialist and racial stereotypes.”61 But what about a “cyborg Alice”? What figure did Haraway have in mind here to attend to the ironic shifts in scale that characterize a technocratic landscape and future? I pose this question in line with my use of the term “landscape” to name Alice’s inquiry into who she is—inseparable from the question of where she is—in an effort to trace a feminist topography through the Alice books. In the second installment of the Alice books, Through the Looking-Glass, the conceptual space for thinking about femininity and being in the world as a problem of ones and twos is insistently topological: Wonderland is now a chessboard, and Alice becomes the White Queen’s pawn in the hopes of reaching the Eighth Square and becoming a Queen herself: “‘How I wish I was one of them! I wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I might join—though of course I should like to be a Queen, best’” (LG, 163). The chessboard does not do away with the problem of subjectivity, as is often assumed in “postsubjective” feminist theories that take after Haraway’s “Manifesto” and more diffuse understandings of Deleuzeian becomings. Nor does it graft easily onto nineteenth-century colonial imaginaries of space, imaginaries that critics have often invoked to discuss the Alice books. Instead, Alice’s initial foray back to Wonderland in Looking-Glass brings about a set of encounters that examines her subjectivity vis-à-vis queenliness as a position that cannot and does not remain stable and unchanging through time and space. Instead, queenliness seems to shift time and space altogether.

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It’s worth remembering here that Carroll’s queens are yoked to nineteenth-century feminine taxonomies in complicated ways. The cultural context of the 1870s betrayed a developing anxiety around gender that lodged itself in the figure of the queen. Ruskin borrows its rhetoric to laud the triumph of middle-class domestic femininity in “Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865), instructing white Englishwomen: “queens you must always be; queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons.”62 Queen Victoria herself inhabited a much more uncertain place with regard to imperial sovereign feminine power, as Margaret Homans argues.63 Because a queen was at once exceptional and infinitely proliferative (Ruskin’s “queens” are available to any middle-class woman), its figuration across the Alice books resembles Haraway’s cyborg: denatured and profoundly boundarytransgressing. In Looking-Glass, the figure of the queen torques a gender binary without shedding her origins in a deeply conservative and tyrannical system of power. Insofar as chess involves a sophisticated set of rules that will govern Alice’s quest in this sequel, it is tempting to read the second installation of her adventures as rule-bound rather than free, as an experience of an attenuated subject rather than simply a figuration for different forms of movement and change. Critics have certainly said as much: according to James Kincaid, “gone for good is the open curiosity of the earlier figure,” and “the child seems to appear here only in a series of goodbyes.”64 Nina Auerbach further contends that Looking-Glass Alice is a person “so thinned out that the vapid, passive Tenniel drawing is an adequate illustration of her.”65 These readings are puzzling when we consider the opening pages of Looking-Glass, in which Alice casually short-circuits the logic of binary thinking that governs conventional ideas of twoness. Carroll’s narrator explains that Alice and her sister had been arguing, “all because Alice had begun with ‘Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens’; and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they couldn’t, because there were only two of them, and Alice had

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been reduced at last to say ‘Well, you can be one of them, then, and I’ll be all the rest’” (LG, 141). In this opening, the context of play generates a number of possibilities—“all the rest”—out of “only two of them.” Here Looking-Glass starts with more traditional notions of the two—the opening pages focus on Dinah’s two kittens, one white and one black—only to dismantle them through Alice’s imaginative thinking. Tenniel’s illustration once again endows the straightforward binary of a “looking-glass” world with a more complex asymmetry, as the twin images of Alice passing through a pliable mantel mirror do not completely line up in a neatly inverted manner. I want to spend some time with Looking-Glass queens to show how ones and twos coexist in a unique and topological way in Carroll’s sequel. As the story develops, we encounter more instances of important twosomes, such as the Red Queen and the White Queen, and notably, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who appear under a tree in the woods while Alice searches for the fork in the road (itself a telling reminder of the “dead-end” logic of binary oppositions). As the “White Queen’s Pawn” (LG, 164) in the beginning of her adventure, Alice can move only diagonally along the chessboard, which is in strict opposition to the Wonderland Queens, who move at a completely different pace. In a garden of talking flowers, Alice encounters the Red Queen, who instructs her in how she may be a queen as well, and the narrator notes: “just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run” (LG, 164). The Red Queen is already set apart by her movements, which seem to operate with no fixed guidelines, as Alice notices, despite the Queen chanting “Faster! Faster!” (LG, 165). Though Alice mentions that “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing,” the Red Queen’s retort is that “here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that” (LG, 165). The Red Queen moves at a speed that cannot be measured by a temporal scale drawn from a reality outside this fantasy world. Yet her speed is more than a vague, inexplicable flux since she 52

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demonstrates a clear knowledge of the counting and sequencing that mark difference: “‘At the end of two yards,’ she said, putting in a peg to mark the distance, ‘I shall give you your directions . . . at the end of three yards I shall repeat them—for fear of your forgetting them. At the end of four, I shall say goodbye. And at the end of five, I shall go!’” (LG, 166). The Red Queen finally instructs Alice to reach the Eighth Square while telling her that along the way she must “remember who you are!” (LG, 166). The counting seems to set apart the distinctiveness of each encounter precisely by collapsing space and time, as if a continuous rupturing came between four yards and five yards. Such numerical operations directly counter nineteenth-century imaginings of space that drew on the new mathematics, such that abstract space became a “conceptual grid that enables every phenomena to be compared, differentiated, and measured by the same yardstick.”66 The queen’s counting upends a normalization of space and of scale, and it disturbs Alice’s assurance of being “who she is” in a stable continuum of “latitudes and longitudes” (AW, 13). Both the Red Queen and the White Queen exist in separate temporal registers, as Alice discovers when she meets the White Queen later in “Wool and Water.” The White Queen, frazzled and seemingly helpless, “lives backwards,” which proves to be an advantage since, as she says, “one’s memory works both ways” (LG, 196). In a subtle shift, the story turns the effect of living backwards for the White Queen into a future orientation since the queen remembers, and is often traumatized by, what will happen next rather than what has happened before. The White Queen, who is “just one hundred and one, five months and a day” (LG, 199), renders fully what the Red Queen points toward in her velocity: a reframing of the conditions of futurity through the figures least likely to embody it: older women. When Alice responds incredulously to her age, claiming “one ca’n’t believe impossible things,” the White Queen tells her: “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast” (LG,  199). In this chess game, the queens embody a symbolic register of horizontal 53

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movement that is at a remove from a conventional progress of time and space. It is worth noting that according to the rules of chess, the queen can move any number of squares in any direction: this ultimate freedom translates into the eccentric movements of the Red Queen and the White Queen in Wonderland. Consequently, it is easy to see how Looking-Glass seeks to unravel the exceptional oneness of the position of Queen: not only can we have two queens in Wonderland, we might even have three, as Alice’s quest reveals when she finally arrives at the Eighth Square, only to find the Red and White Queens already there, bickering. Feminine singularity—the problem of the nonoriginary and nonessential “one”—and feminine collectivity—the problem of the two or more— seem inextricable from one another. But the queens of Looking-Glass carry the potential to reorder more than just singleness: they point to a different topography and structuring of space, a place without fixed coordinates from where femininity can invent itself and even remake the world in which it is imbedded. Troubled by origins, the fictional Alice seeks other affinities, other ones and twos. Halfway through Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice muses on the impossibility of her existence in her new fantasy world: “I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!” (AW, 46). Such self-consciousness about fictional genres’ capacity to create worlds and define arcs of yet-unthought possibility strains against the Alice books’ bracketing poems, such as the preface to Looking-Glass, which evokes a different sort of loss—the end of childhood as Time passes and “envious years would say ‘Forget’” (LG, 135, line 18).67 The author and the real Alice Liddell may be a melancholy “half a life asunder” (LG, 135, 4), but the literary Alice finds herself in a register of counting that highlights alternative ways of conceptualizing her remove from the world of neat gendered division and difference. She thus inhabits a near-impossible 54

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realm of signification that exceeds Kincaid’s claim that the Victorian child “was a difference, but it was a difference formed by a culture and inscribed within categories of the perceivable.”68 Not only does counting allow Alice’s feminine singularity freedom outside “recognizable bounds of otherness”69 that circumscribe Victorian ideological notions of childhood, it also suggests a radical rethinking of difference that takes shape within the deceptively simple notion of ones and twos. To make sense of Wonderland, and of one’s subjectivity, is first to lose oneself—repeatedly. Haraway’s cyborg wants nothing to do with Oedipal stories of sexuality and difference, nor with the nineteenth century, for that matter. Yet reading Carroll’s queens together with the cyborg and with Spillers’s girlhood, figures separated by a century that upend femininity in similar ways, puts the myths of essential origins, of identity, and of counting a “one” deeply into question. A “cyborg Alice” helps us see these myths for what they are: the smoothing over of the multiple, incalculable foundations of being. Throughout this chapter, I’ve sought a femininity unfixed by recognizable modes of topological capture. I’ve tried to render the contours of this femininity (however contingent) thinkable in other ways, which has necessitated some wandering of my own to dislodge the typical analytic frames through which nineteenth-century books are often read. In the next chapter, I show how femininity engineers a baroque escape from larger forces at work in modernity. Feminine singularity in both cases reminds us of the limits of well-worn grammars of subjectivity, and it asks us to imagine something new in their place.

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Charles Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity

O f t h e m a n y c r i t i c a l interpretations of Charles Baudelaire’s life and work that have emerged since his death in 1867, the claim that he is a misogynist has enjoyed remarkable critical longevity. Let me run through some of the notable instances: Leo Bersani has suggested that “Baudelaire’s misogyny can be understood partly in terms of a panicky effort to reject the feminine side of his own sexual identity.”1 Later, Patricia Clements observed: “Baudelaire’s misogyny is staggering.”2 By comparison, Paul Sheehan has noted that Baudelaire’s anxieties about heterosexual love “are coextensive with Baudelaire’s misogyny, his fear that preying women can rob a man of his ‘essence.’”3 Such persistent debate about the poet’s aversion to femininity is not so much an argument about his work as it is an observation based on his short life and personal writings that reflect, in often reactionary ways, on his relationship to several women (letters to his mother and the more confessional prose collected in Mon Coeur mis à nu and Journaux intimes). Baudelaire’s striking adult life between Paris and Honfleur is characterized by a few love affairs, notably with a Black woman, Jeanne Duval.4 Like Carroll, Baudelaire’s personal notoriety has largely overshadowed any critical engagement with the forms of femininity we find appearing and disappearing throughout his verse. It has long been a critical commonplace, for instance, that the set of love poems in the section Spleen et idéal from Les Fleurs du mal can be organized along a number of “cycles” that correspond to specific feminine muses.5 But as Rosemary Lloyd has incisively noted, “between the women the poems evoke and the women Baudelaire 56

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knew in boarding rooms or salons, whom he had glimpsed in the street or gazed at on the stage, with whom he’d enjoyed unions of the mind or the body, the connections are tenuous to the extreme.”6 Lloyd’s comment highlights the obvious gap between Baudelaire’s well-documented personal life and his treatment of femininity in his poetry. This is a gap that, when we look carefully, seems to be bridged by the theme of money rather than women themselves: Baudelaire’s lack of and desire for it for most of his life and the simultaneous critique of its circulation in his writing.7 The other term that critics most often use to describe Baudelaire’s relationship to femininity is “ambivalence.”8 This designation partially draws from the context of mid-nineteenth-century capitalism’s changing social norms, which become manifest in Baudelaire’s poetry through the visibility of the female prostitute, who occupies a central place, for instance, in the opening verse of “À une mendiante rousse” / “To a Red-Haired Beggar”9 : “White girl with red hair, / the holes of whose dress / Expose poverty / And beauty.”10 More generally, critics have concentrated on the role of the feminine in Baudelaire’s work as a site of degeneracy, false idealism, and commodification: a “mass produced article” in Walter Benjamin’s words.11 Beyond such attention-grabbing statements as “woman is natural, that is, abominable,” from Mon Coeur mis à nu (OC, 1:677, translation my own), many of the poems from Les Fleurs du mal are also candidates for this argument. We thus find the near parodic comparison of a woman’s eyes in “Tu mettrais l’univers entier dans ta ruelle” / “You’d take the whole universe into your lair” (OC, 1:27) to the lights of the department stores: “your eyes, lit up like the shops” (79), or the infamous speaker of “Une charogne” / “A Carrion” (OC, 1:31) who compels his lover to stare at a carcass by the roadside that he compares to an inviting woman: “Legs in the air / like a woman aroused, / Steaming and oozing poisons” (89). Following the oftenextreme sentiments in these poems, Kerry Weinberg asserts that “since [woman’s] only purpose [for Baudelaire] is to serve man and be used by him, she appears to be hardly more than an animal. The other 57

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extreme in this strange female polarity presents her in an exalted station, as a muse or a divine inspiration.”12 Certainly, we can pick and choose figures from anywhere in Baudelaire’s lyrics and prose works that seem, on the surface, to illustrate a kind of reductive feminine indexicality that corroborates Charles Bernheimer’s account of the misogynistic “imagination of disgust” around female sexuality in the nineteenth century.13 There are the “Damned women” from his set of banned poems about lesbianism; the unnamed women of the new music halls in Paris; and the racialized addressee of “À une dame créole,” one of his earliest published works.14 These types are often read as a wider prelude to taxonomies of femininity associated with the critical groupings of decadence and aestheticism, and the now familiar figures—the femme fatale, the sick muse, the “belle sorcière,” and Black Venus, as I will return to later in this chapter—show up again and again in the later works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, J-K. Huysmans, and Michael Field (Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper). But the problem with settling on this reading of Baudelaire’s misogyny (besides the too-easy conflation of private life and public writing) is that it misses a very basic idea about these poems that Lloyd identifies: “what makes Baudelaire different from almost all his contemporaries is that the women in his poetry are so often distinctively individual.”15 In a similar vein, Christine Buci-Glucksmann observes that in Baudelaire’s writing “the motif of the woman imposes, with its constancy, persistence and wealth of meanings, all its interpretative radicality,”16 while Peggy Kamuf ponders the fact that “without a doubt Baudelairean lyricism is stamped everywhere, or almost, by a feminine appeal or an appeal to femininity.”17 Finally, Deborah L. Parsons suggests that femininity in Baudelaire implies “a concern with the place of women in the city and art of modernity that goes beyond personal prejudice.”18 Because of this thematic, formal, and ideological saturation of femininity throughout Baudelaire’s oeuvre, we are forced to confront the utter impossibility of sealing

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off the masculine-inflected agency of a misogynist lyric “I” without having it dissolve the very moment we try to presuppose its stability. My argument in this chapter starts with the fundamental assumption that when we pose the question of femininity’s contours and effects in Baudelaire’s works, we correspondingly pose the question of an entire political and structural system. One of the main reasons for this is that it proves impossible to separate Baudelaire’s observations (on femininity, the individual, art, or the world at large) in his writing from the fraught center of nineteenth-century Paris in the midst of Haussmanian transformation: an overhaul not only of streets, buildings, and commerce but also of ideology, ways of thinking, and the axis of gendered subjectivity. The political and economic transformation of Paris under Baron Haussmann, in all its specificity, remains crucial to a wider understanding of the nineteenth century. Sharon Marcus writes that Paris and London are “a pair of cities that have been opposed for centuries,” drawing attention to the relative paucity of critical interest in Baudelaire’s Paris for scholars in Victorian Studies.19 This is despite the fact that many poems from Les Fleurs du mal enjoyed an immediate and robust afterlife in Victorian England, in the hands of figures such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and most acutely, Swinburne, who dedicated “Ave Atque Vale” (1868) to Baudelaire. There is little argument against the fact that nineteenthcentury France and Victorian England differed in their respective approaches to aesthetic cultures and political upheaval, with France representing one revolutionary counterpoint to British reform; its avant-garde decadence opposed the staid moralizing of the Victorians. However, I follow scholars such as Rachel Teukolsky in arguing that there is more to be gained than lost by casting aside some of the disciplinary norms that have separated out Baudelaire from the “Victorian” nineteenth century.20 It is more properly the case that both French and British colonial modernity contribute in overlapping ways to the nineteenth-century’s epistemic crises around gender, race, and

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subjectivity, and that studying Baudelaire within this book’s wider contexts allows for a theorizing of these topics from a wider angle. My assumption is one that most scholars of Baudelaire’s works share but tend not to probe: the fact that femininity is poised at the intersection of major economic and political structural change in the mid-nineteenth century; it is not simply an object of scrutiny for the shifting lens of medicine and statistics, both of which subjected women’s bodies to rigid forms of taxonomy. More specifically, I argue here that femininity defines rather than symptomatically reveals the crossroads of two interrelated problems: first, the development of capital, and second, the political grounding of the liberal subject. Femininity defines this crossroads for one reason: in Baudelaire’s works, the feminine continually escapes being seen as part of these dominant paradigms (capitalism and political liberalism) for understanding the twin poles of individuality and multiplicity. “À une passante” / “To a Passerby” (OC, 1:92–93), for example, Baudelaire’s supreme lyric expression of modern flânerie, is grounded in the impossible idealization of a feminine passerby, a “fugitive beauty” whom the city dweller will never be able to grasp fully within his fractured realm of perception. The sonnet launches with the cry of the personified modern street: “La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait” (“The deafening street howled around me”) (277). The assonance deepens the position of an already unmoored city dweller on the brink of subjective dissolution. The opening quatrain relates the immediacy by which the speaker then encounters a woman in the street: “A woman passed, with an ostentatious hand.” While the poem might contemplate the flâneur’s binary perception of the woman as “la douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue” (the sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills), the terrible asymmetry of the two figures—the drifting “moi” and the indefinite yet singular “une femme”—is difficult to miss. The final tercet deconstructs the traditional situation of unrequited love within modernity’s collapse of space and time, maintaining the empty locus of femininity as its anchor point: 60

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Elsewhere, far away!! Too late! Never, perhaps! For I know not where you flee, you know not where I go, O you whom I could have loved, O you who understood! (277)

The force of this poetic strangeness is on an entirely different plane from the statements we find in Baudelaire’s “personal” writings that often appear to bait the reactionary leanings of a reader through sheer rhetoric. In “To a Passerby,” however, to abstract the woman from the mass in lyric terms—the speaker’s impossible project—is equivalent to the liberal identification of this kind of feminine figure: it is a form of violent particularity that the woman escapes entirely. In its interrogation of the modern relationship between the individual and the mass, “To a Passerby” recalls a number of particularizing mechanisms, notably the aesthetics of poetic selfhood, that are trying to work out (and often fix) the relationship of a subject and a greater whole. But as we discover in this short lyric, this form of femininity I identify as feminine singularity (which cannot be understood within a generalized group) frequently challenges the neutrality of the perceiving subject and his assumed grounding in any stable political and psychic foundations. For these reasons, femininity for Baudelaire becomes more than simply a conduit to either spiritual idealism or calculated transgression. In the following sections, I trace some of Baudelaire’s prose observations on the self in the crowds that bear on his representation of gendered existence and follow with a close engagement of two central poems from Parisian Tableaux. The first, “Les Septs Vieillards” / “The Seven Old Men,” depicts the collapse of Oedipal masculinity through serialization; the second, “Les Septs Viellards” / “The Little Old Ladies,” considers feminine singularity as that which succeeds it in modernity. Finally, I turn to a contemporary novel by Vancouver poet Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal (2020), and engage Black feminist theory to think through Robertson’s enactment of feminine singularity in and through the figure of Jeanne Duval, the woman most resistant to the co-opting of identity by capitalist modernity and its 61

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modes of aesthetic capture. Duval throws a wrench in critical attempts to manage the uncertain border between biography, poetics, and a wider social world. Irreducible to Baudelaire’s seeming presentation of racialized female skin, hair, and caprice in Les Fleurs du mal, she nevertheless remains, in the Baudelairean critical canon, “deprived of history  .  .  . the pure child of the colony” as Angela Carter writes in “Black Venus” (1985).21 Instead I consider how Duval opens a theory of feminine singularity, or what Robertson describes as “a fidelity . . . for the antithetical nature of the feminine concept”22 and structures a feminist poetics and experimental literary genealogy against the grain. And by “structures,” I mean informs in a manner that is not given in advance nor geared toward completion. Robertson is a writer whose multiple critical and poetic works, from EXclogue (1993) to The Weather (2001), wrench apart Western literary forms and enact a formal subjectivity through the apparatus of syntax and grammar, veering often toward the florid and the decadent. Within Robertson’s avant-garde canon of subversion, “Woman” is neither something to be reclaimed through lyric directness, a straightforward “lack” in language to be circled around, nor a stable body on which to graft notions of identity. Rather, her writing strives toward feminine singularity in the vein of Baudelaire’s poetics while further prying open vectors of gender and racial difference that continue to limit subjectivity.

The Fugitive and the Infinite: Femininity and the Man of the Crowds “To a Passerby” offers a glimpse of a phenomenon in Baudelaire’s writing: feminine singularity, or the form by which femininity consistently refuses collectivization, reappears frequently where collectivization takes on a specifically economic or political tenor. That alternate ideas of feminine possibility crystallize around the figure of the woman prostitute reveals a particular vanishing point at the center of urban capital: a point at which traditional constellations of gendered

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difference seem to dissolve entirely. Here I turn briefly to some of Baudelaire’s prose works to suggest that this line of thinking often spills out of poetic language. In these essays and fragments (contrary to what a reader might infer), prostitution becomes anything but a personal issue for Baudelaire; instead, it transforms into a vehicle for theoretical contemplations of the gendered individual and the social world. We can look first to a short observation from Mon Coeur mis à nu to consider the crucial nexus of femininity and modernity in his work: “Goût invincible de la prostitution dans le coeur de l’homme, d’où naît son horreur de la solitude.—Il veut être deux. L’homme de génie veut être un, donc solitaire. La gloire, c’est rester un, et se prostituer d’une manière particulière” [The invincible taste for prostitution lies in the heart of man, in which the horror of solitude is born. He wants to be two. The man of genius wants to be one, so solitary. Glory is remaining a one, while prostituting oneself in a particular fashion] (OC, 1:700, translation my own). As we can see, Baudelaire opens up the precarious channel of the indefinite self’s relationship to a collective other, symbolized by prostitution. Prostitution here functions as a conceptual problem, one of desire and action, as well as of freedom and the aesthetic. The leap from individualized prostitute to the economy of prostitution as a metaphor was highly common in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture. The complexity of this movement involves, among other things, “the force of contradictory impulses generated by the idea of prostitution: desire and its inevitable disappointment, the intimate contact of bodies and its demystification by monetary exchange, the ideal aspiration of love and the void enclosing each human being in his loneliness.”23 What is interesting, nevertheless, is how Baudelaire dilutes this set of seemingly irresolvable tensions into the numeric problem of being a one within a two. This statement begins with the seemingly basic (though completely internalized) tenet of desire—becoming other while simultaneously recognizing oneself—which exists as a dual, almost tyrannical psychic force. Further, Baudelaire affiliates the one with

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l’homme de génie, the solitary romantic figure of the “man of genius.” This is a form of solitary oneness drawn directly from the Romantic tradition with which Baudelaire maintains a clearly complex relationship.24 Here, the Romantic man of genius appears as a kind of scapegoat for larger issues of gendered self-definition. The one as solitary proves ultimately unsatisfactory, as does the two as mere reproduction. Something different is required: maintenance of the one within the two, or an enumeration of the poetic subject that exceeds the neat divisions of self and other. There are two additional points that arise from this quotation that bear on Baudelaire’s larger oeuvre and that consequently draw us to the centrality of femininity to his thinking of urban modernity, masculine desire, and poetic subjectivity. One wonders first whether Baudelaire is delineating an aesthetic theory of the impossible (figured as masculine) through the metaphor of prostitution, in which masculinity upholds the contours of a “one” or an “I” while still enjoying the pleasure of scattering itself within the precariousness of a feminine “two” (symbolized ostensibly by prostitution). Yet within this dream of the pleasure of self-dissolution, l’homme de génie’s actualized self remains in hypothetical form: he “wants to be,” but appears terrifyingly unrealized and unanchored. The seemingly conventional premium that Baudelaire places on genius here is rather a negative account of male sexuality much more central to a perilous modernity. This account, as I outlined in the previous chapter, primarily occurs through a form of counting: enumerating a “one” and a “two” signals a mode of gendered difference and becomes the portal to understanding not just poetic selfhood but also far-reaching problems of sexual asymmetry and noncoincidence. At issue, then, is the possibility that the solitary self is fundamentally unbearable, and in some ways this self must obey an internal command to “prostitute” itself to exist at all. Mon Coeur mis à nu’s opening fragment bears out such an opposition: “Of the evaporation and the centralization of Myself. Everything is here.” (OC, 1:676, translation my own). The profound tension in which solitude has 64

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begun to operate in both of these comments has certain contextual roots. According to Pierre Pachet in Le Premier Venu, “solitude” in Baudelaire is a fundamentally unstable term rather than a romantic carryover, for deeply politicized reasons: “If Baudelaire is, on the contrary, hungering for the concentration of the self, it is because he maintains no illusions over the democratic state and the manner in which it suffocates and surrounds a barely resistant individuality.”25 Pachet reminds us that the emergence of the modern phenomenon of democracy, a seemingly progressive development, actually destroys the idea of selfhood and, by extension, undermines a particular form of oneness. When we consider that the undisputed neutrality of a masculine liberal self, or a romantic genius, might be severely preempted by a modern democratic sphere, Baudelaire’s mention of prostitution starts to resemble more of a radical possibility, one aligned with a kind of unspecified freedom. Baudelaire puts this desire for freedom in another way in Fusées, where he observes: “The pleasure of being in the crowds is a mysterious expression of the jouissance of the multiplication of numbers” (OC, 1:649, translation my own). This comment begins with the familiar subject of “To a Passerby”: an urban masculine self who dwells within the amazing sensorium of the city. Elsewhere in his writings, such as his meditation on Constantin Guys, Le Peintre de la vie modern / The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire reprises this sentiment: “c’est une immense jouissance que d’élire domicile dans le nombre, dans l’ondoyant, dans le mouvement, dans le fugitif et l’infini” [It is an immense pleasure to take up residence in numbers, in waves, in the movement of the fugitive and the infinite] (OC, 2:691, translation my own). Baudelaire quickly defamiliarizes the observation in both instances by converting the purely aesthetic notion of being in the crowds into the question of numerical proliferation. Richard Burton identifies this trope as “Protean self-multiplication,” but the clearcut juxtaposition of “jouissance,” “multiplication,” and “nombre” radicalizes mere Protean changeability.26 The sentence from Fusées transitions from pleasure to expression, and finally to “jouissance” 65

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and “multiplication” using the French article “de la”: this is in itself a syntactic form of numeric unraveling, similar to a Russian doll, in which each noun connects in serial fashion. The sentiment becomes more and more exhilarating as we realize the possible incompatibility of each term: the estrangement from one another of self, “jouissance,” “plaisir,” and “foule,” even as they are brought together by the logic of the sentence. The thrill of the numerical in this evocation of being in the crowd aligns itself with the lyric impossibility suggested by “À une passante”: the erosion of a single masculine self and a movement toward the infinite that the poet strongly associates with the feminine. I investigate these moments to draw out a crucial point: when we look at the critical tradition of observing a form of modernity that Baudelaire inaugurated (and Walter Benjamin revives in the twentieth century), femininity always seems to intervene to overturn the grounds of such observing. In his writings, Baudelaire consistently demonstrates openness to strangeness as a singularly feminine strain of possibility, in an effort to liberate thought from its dependence on stale ideas of unity and universality. Form and figure both subsequently refract the problem of feminine subjectivity throughout the critical conversation that begins with Baudelaire and develops into the twentieth century. Leo Bersani, for instance, in Baudelaire and Freud, makes the following compelling claim about the poet’s aesthetic: “The beautiful is always bizarre”—and the bizarre is constituted by a particularity so radical as to resist any generalizing enterprise. The particular is not necessarily a source of the general. It is as if a kind of exhilarating meaningless in the fragmented, madly diversified scenes of modern life led Baudelaire to the notion of a particularity which, as it were, goes nowhere, which is not a “part” of anything.27

Here Bersani refers to a comment Baudelaire makes in The Painter of Modern Life. Baudelaire suggests that the beautiful in modernity is an active principle that is unfinished, violent, and never entirely 66

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classifiable under familiar rubrics. In this well-known work, Baudelaire sums up Guys’s aesthetic in the following terms: “He has searched everywhere for that transitory fleeting beauty of the present, the character of which allows us to call it modernity. Often strange, violent, excessive, but always poetic” (OC, 2:724, translation my own). Bersani pushes this idea further to contemplate the bizarre as “the notion of a particularity” that cannot refer back to a totalizing whole, “which is not ‘part’ of anything.” What I argue here is that this notion of the bizarre is beyond the realm of particularity since particularity suggests the instantiation of a more general concept. Rather, Bersani’s description of the bizarre manifests the singular, or what cannot be totalized. Bersani goes on to write that Baudelaire often “cancels” out a radical aesthetic of the singular by attempting to “complete” or fill in modernity, by setting it against a backdrop of an absolute aesthetic. For Bersani, this type of overreaching on Baudelaire’s part is clearest in the poet’s essays on modern art from the Salons. But I suggest that when we look at the variety of Baudelaire’s observations on the self in the crowds as well as his treatment of it in his poems, we find an overall dismantling of the terms of Marx’s observation from 1844’s Economic and Political Manuscripts, that “prostitution is only the particular expression of the universal prostitution of the worker.”28 Prostitution in the form of the two, as Baudelaire discusses it in the comments I cite above, seems to unmask a generalized idea of femininity rather than strictly oppose, denigrate, or commodify it. In these instances, then, Baudelaire showcases a kind of shortcircuiting that occurs when we try to move from the particular to the universal on the current of femininity. The terms of the particular and the universal thus reroute to something entirely different in Baudelaire’s thought: what I claim to be an oscillation between singularity and infinity. In what follows I discuss two of Baudelaire’s poems from Parisian Tableaux, “The Seven Old Men” and its companion piece “The Little Old Ladies” in which counting to infinity manifests a different 67

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understanding of masculinity and femininity. Eliane F. Dalmolin has observed: “The Baudelairean woman is always moving between two infinities, the infinitely ideal, mineral, whole, and the infinitely modern, fleshy, fragmented. It is from the space in-between that an immense number of women appear on the poetic scene of Les Fleurs du Mal.”29 I extend this commentary to look more closely at what infinity stands for in Baudelaire’s street poetry, which dissolves the very notion of an “ideal” or, by extension, a universal. What we find in these celebrated works is a revelation of the underside of modern individuality under the Second Empire and its glorification of youth, vigor, and sexual conservatism.

Fantômes parisiens / Parisian Phantoms Baudelaire composed both “The Seven Old Men” and “The Little Old Ladies” along with his masterpiece “Le Cygne” / “The Swan” in the course of 1859.30 It is worth remembering that he dedicated all three poems to Victor Hugo, a paragon of the poetic establishment in contrast to Baudelaire’s enfant terrible. While Ross Chambers observes that dedications in Baudelaire’s work are often problematic in their intentions, he also notes that such “plain dedication[s]” as these to Hugo point out certain aesthetic similarities (“sympathy for the wretched”) as well as obvious differences (“Baudelairean empathy” as distinct from Hugo’s “optimistic occultism”).31 Let me briefly recount what is generally well known to scholars of this period. Baudelaire claimed to be drawing on Hugo’s style for all three of these poems.32 Their relationship—both personal and literary—had been particularly charged since 1840 when a young Baudelaire wrote Hugo a letter of admiration, stating: “I love you as I love your works.”33 In the late 1840s to 1850s—an extremely tense period in which Baudelaire abandoned his revolutionary impulses after the failed uprising of 1848—Hugo became a relic of the bourgeois establishment for Baudelaire, despite the older writer’s formal exile from France under the regime of Louis Napoleon for antagonism.34 But when Hugo refused French amnesty in 1859 (he remained outside 68

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France until 1870), Baudelaire seemed to have shifted his sentiments toward something positive, soliciting approval of his work from the older writer, in no small part due to his financial struggles.35 The details of their literary and personal relationship are too complex to cover here. Though Chambers argues that the dedication to Hugo serves to politicize these texts from a comfortable distance,36 I contend that the dedicatory gesture actually introduces an urgent set of angles—both social and political—to the overhaul of gender and femininity in these poems. All of the figures in “The Seven Old Men,” “The Little Old Ladies,” and “The Swan” are outsiders, seemingly exiled from modernity’s narrative of upward progress. These poems further reveal the collapse of Oedipal idealism (with Hugo as the father figure) as a uniquely politicized sentiment (incurring pressure from Paris’s regime changes and failed uprisings), and the replacement of a hollow patriarchy (shown to be heavily dilapidated in “The Seven Old Men”) by an approach to modernity that can be read only as singular and feminine (as “The Little Old Ladies” will articulate). The remainder of my discussion in this section concentrates on “The Seven Old Men” and “The Little Old Ladies,” two poems that Nathaniel Wing singles out in Parisian Phantoms for “the uncanny emergence of the void.”37 My analysis follows what I see as the structural progression of these poems away from an earlier vision of men and women toward something more future oriented. An overlooked point of contact between Hugo’s writing and Baudelaire’s “The Seven Old Men” is the infinite as a concept that both writers approach numerically, as the title of Baudelaire’s poem suggests. Gender dynamics are central to this point, as this poem and its companion piece, “The Little Old Ladies,” deal with the serializing possibility, both monstrous and freeing, of old men and old women. In the former, a speaker hallucinates a seemingly endless parade of aged, potentially evil men, who are indistinguishable from one another and appear out of nowhere. In the latter, a similar speaker observes a series of old women with melancholy and depth, recalling how each woman reveals a certain kind of singularity. A particular section of 69

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Baudelaire’s 1859 essay on Hugo (“Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains” / Reflections on a few of my contemporaries”) opens with a long exultation of the poet’s ability to probe the infinite: “the excessive, the immense, are the natural domain of Victor Hugo” (OC, 2:137, translation my own). At first glance, we might think this is not a version of infinity but merely a kind of expansive form of ennoblement. But Baudelaire is not discussing a notion of infinity that has to do with romantic vastness, as we see in his poems about the city in particular. Here it is worth quoting at length the definition Jean-Paul Sartre provides on Baudelaire’s understanding of infinity, a definition that bears on “The Seven Old Men”: For Baudelaire, the infinite was not a vast given limitless expanse, though he did sometimes use the word in this sense. It was in fact something which never finished and could not finish. For example, a series of numerals will be infinite not because there is a very large number of them which we can describe as an “infinite” number, but because of the everlasting possibility of adding another unit to a number however large it may be. Thus every number in the series has a “beyond” in relation to which it is defined and its place in the series fixed. But this “beyond” does not yet exist completely: I must bring it into existence by adding another unit to the number in front of me. It already gives meaning to all the other numerals which I have written down, yet it is the term of an operation which I have still not completed. Such was Baudelaire’s conception of infinity.38

Despite Sartre’s general disdain for Baudelaire—the majority of the study cited above essentially psychoanalyzes and condemns the poet’s personality—this insight is striking in its precision and originality since no prior commentator had identified this crucial element in the poet’s oeuvre. Sartre helps define a numerically grounded concept of the infinite in Baudelaire’s verse that we see operating in “The Seven Old Men.” What Sartre defines in this passage as Baudelaire’s idea of infinity is notably distinct from a version of infinity that is 70

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metaphysical, absolute, and totalizing. Both kinds of infinity recall Hegel’s Science of Logic, in which he discusses the difference between “genuine” infinity and its spurious “bad” counterpart. “Bad” infinity is a serial concept involving infinite addition and divisibility—a possibility Carroll’s Alice explores that can be thought of as “n+1”— and is therefore always incomplete. For Hegel, this seeming march of the bad infinity in serial fashion is merely a perpetual return to the finite since it is always repeating and rehearsing its relationship to its “finiteness.” If n+1 infinity can be thought of as a line, “true infinity” has closed in on itself like a circle, as Hegel explains: “the image of the true infinity, bent back into itself, becomes the circle, the line which has reached itself, which is closed and wholly present, without beginning and end.”39 For Hegel, true infinity elevates itself beyond finiteness by incorporating the finite into itself fully: a kind of present embrace. What I am going to suggest in light of Sartre’s comment is that Baudelaire’s infinity is on the level of Hegel’s “bad” infinity, and yet it does not partake in the endless rehearsal of the finite he charges it with, precisely because it cannot be elevated to the absolute level of the “concept” by which it opposes a static finiteness. “The Seven Old Men” (OC, 1:87–88) is an example of Baudelaire contemplating bad infinity while considering its structural possibility. The number seven already lends the poem a somewhat charged resonance that correlates with a form of “badness,” insofar as it has been associated with the occult.40 The poem’s celebrated opening lines, “Swarming city, city fully of dreams, where the specter in broad daylight seizes the passerby!” (261), recapitulate an increasingly familiar environment of the polluted and alien cityscape, one that conversely produces a heightened sense of the imaginary. The cityscape multiplies itself across numerous types of figures (“mysteries / mystères,” “sap / sèves,” “two quays of a swollen river / two quais . . . d’une rivière”) as the speaker finds himself dragged rhetorically from “fog / brouillard” to “old man / vieillard,” in a visually imperfect rhyme that crescendos in the sudden appearance of an old man in yellowed rags. 71

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The old man is distinguished by the evil glint in his eye, which anchors the turn in the poem toward an ironic and perverse blazon. The poem describes the old man in terms of various body parts that are shared by the man’s double: His double followed him: beard, eye, back, cane, rags, No trait distinguished them, come from the same hell, This centenarian twin, and these baroque specters Marched in step to an unknown end. (263)

The doubling of the old men, as critics have remarked, bears the mark of the period’s fascination with the fantastic. Yet not only is their utter sameness terrifying to the speaker, it also seems to generate ever-increasing numbers. No sooner has the speaker perceived the twin old men than five more seemingly appear: “For I counted seven times, minute by minute, / This sinister old man who multiplied himself!” (263).41 Furthermore, the literal as well as metaphoric presence of the overbearing yellow fog and the repetition it inaugurates tells us that we are in an industrial and capitalizing world, one in which accumulation is everywhere and nowhere, leading to the speaker’s hallucinations. But this world is also uncanny, self-consciously spectral, and deeply ironic. The old men have no value as commodities under capital but continue to proliferate, like indistinguishable products. They harken back to a time of baroque evils but defiantly march on toward an unrecognizable futurity. Yet even if these repetitions appear out of capital, the grotesque edge of the poem speaks to the fact that its overriding logic is one geared toward infinity. Capital is its own infinity, its own circular transcendence: it cannot recognize the unfinished “beyond” of bad infinity to which it paradoxically owes the trope of serial repetition. But what is intriguing about this poem is that the circuit of repetition fails to close. Instead, the poem presents the possibility of an infinity that might destroy the speaker’s grounding in finite presence (already extremely tenuous in the poem): 72

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Could I, without dying, have contemplated the eighth, Inexorable copy, ironic and fatal, Disgusting Phoenix, self-same father and son? —But I turned my back on the infernal procession. (263)

The threat of n+1 infinity—seemingly arising from within capital’s dead time—becomes too much for the speaker to absorb, despite the fact that the little old men have a purchase in some kind of “eternal air.” The poem’s revision of the grounds of gender is perhaps the most significant reflection of its ideological world. The kind of masculinity Baudelaire observes in the poem is merely the shadow of patriarchal authority, yet the old men certainly ironize the manner by which such authority reproduces itself (largely, as Freud will put it fifty years later, through taboo, prohibition, and the law). Terrifying repetition—in the form of nonreproductive and supernatural sameness—thereby signals a crucial break with Oedipal structure that Burton has observed: “at every point, ‘The Seven Old Men’ inverts and subverts this classic myth.”42 Rather, this series operates with a maniacal freedom that constructs the old men as “son and father to themselves”: a gross subversion of the primary grounds of gender organization under patriarchy. We have, once again, only a trace of its other that the speaker identifies as a “frisson fraternal”: a brotherly sense of terror shared beyond the bounds of the poem. This frisson pulls into focus the infamous last line of Les Fleurs du mal ’s opening poem, “Au Lecteur” / “To the Reader,” which ends with the address: “—Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère!” (OC, 1:6). Whether these sentiments are a tragic plea, an outrageous mockery, or a damning curse, they puncture the veneer of modern citizenship that is organized around the inviolability of brotherhood (in other words, the charged legacy of “Liberté, egalité, fraternité”) by rendering it abject to begin with. At every step, then, “The Seven Old Men” seeks to undo the very basic grounds by which subjects may organize their relationship to something larger than themselves. 73

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The poem ends with the speaker irrevocably weakened and altered by what he has (supposedly) witnessed: “Wounded by the mystery and the absurdity!” Yet the old men seem to have generated or unleashed a form of infinity into the world of the poem that has penetrated the speaker: “And my soul danced, danced, old barge / without sails, on a monstrous and unbounded sea!” (265). Within the modernity Baudelaire investigates, the subject is inherently reducible to the structures that constitute and suffocate it: capitalism, liberalism, and bourgeois patriarchy. Yet at the end of this poem, the speaker’s soul touches a form of bad or tainted infinity (“a monstrous and unbounded sea”) that has cleared these borders. “The Seven Old Men” thus carefully imagines a form of serializing—depicted by the subjects least likely to possess any kind of value—that, in all its “badness,” manages to escape the systems of accumulation and individuation that would seem to underwrite its very existence. This narrative of tainted infinity toward which “The Seven Old Men” directs us establishes the grounds for Baudelaire’s revision of the structure of subject constitution in modernity. This might seem like a lofty claim, but what the poem does in its highly bizarre set of images and ideas is nothing short of a complete overhaul of capital’s vision: one that critiques a form of infinity that begins and ends with itself as absolute. Within this schema, as I have mentioned, a subject appears to be the grotesque consequence of what lies beyond it: capital, temporality, urbanity, and so on. Yet bad infinity proliferates, rupturing the rigid economy of self and world (necessarily and always a question of gender for Baudelaire) to which mid-nineteenthcentury Paris has capitulated. Notably, the poem does not deal with femininity but only the denigration of Oedipal masculinity. Yet the fact that femininity is absent does not mean that it does not factor into the systems the poem contorts and refracts. I want to briefly consider “The Little Old Ladies,” in which we see how the two poems work together to reimagine gender, and particularly femininity, as a question of singularity and seriality.

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“The Little Old Ladies” (OC, 1:89–91) follows “The Seven Old Men” in meditating on the series, but with a very different tenor. Certain elements remain constant in both poems: a dissolute but watchful speaker; a vision of Paris vibrating with derelict possibility; and the close scrutiny of the aged who visibly (or, rather, invisibly) operate on the fringes of the social world. Yet what distinguishes this poem that focuses on elderly women is that instead of depicting them in a series that leads to bad infinity, the poem recognizes each one as singular. In the sinuous folds of old capitals, Where all, even horror, turns to enchantment, I spy, obeying my fatal humors, Certain singular beings, decrepit and charming. (267)

The structure of the poem suggests a clearer picture of the subjects the speaker is observing. The poem is arranged into four sections of varying number of stanzas. The four-line stanzas feature the same rhyme scheme as the previous poem (abab), yet the sounds are more discordant, manifesting the disjunction between the sight of the aged women and the environment they simultaneously arise from and yet to which they do not belong. The lines that describe the old women contain a number of consonant clusters (notably the “fr” sounds), suggesting, further, the asymmetry between the speaker’s gaze and the vision of these women: “Ces monstres disloqués furent jadis des femmes . . . Ils rampent, flagellés par les bises iniques / Frémissant au fracas roulant des omnibus” (These disjointed monsters who once were women . . . they creep, whipped by the iniquitous winds, trembling among the omnibus clatter) (267). This is the kind of subtle discordance we find picked up in the British context by Oscar Wilde, for instance, in his terse poem “Symphony in Yellow” (1889). Despite the earlier discordance, the poem makes clear that the old women manifest a specific feminine presence that appears grotesque only to the unobservant individual, yet contains an epic, near

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unfathomable history that deserves a specific reverence. This history generates rare moments of tenderness in Baudelaire’s oeuvre. The speaker uses the language of peripheral historical women—“Laïs,” the name of several courtesans; “Éponine,” the executed wife of an ancient Gaulois Sabinus; and the priestess of Thalia—to stitch the present of denigrated and aged feminine figures with an exalted genealogy, exclaiming that “all intoxicate” (269). The women further pass in a series “as if they were marionettes” (267) but, unlike the seven old men, reveal to the speaker their inescapable human singularity rather than a hallucinatory sameness. As the poem progresses, the speaker is drawn further and further into the series precisely through differentiation. These later verses describe the women one by one: “Ah! how many of these little old ladies I have followed! / One, among others, when the falling sun / Bloodies the sky with vermillion wounds, / Pensive, would sit apart upon a bench” (271). The stanza demonstrates, once again, a kinship with the old women—who have even less value than the old men in the social system—by suggesting they exist outside the totalizing grip of the present, always a capitalist trap for Baudelaire, rather than a place of genuine freedom. Crucially, the above stanza describes the women as “one”—again indefinite yet singular—and then follows with a more general and contextual characterization. But even more startling is the structural work of this poem to rethink how femininity, as individual or in a group, can be understood within a modern way of seeing. This stanza exemplifies what Kamuf has claimed to be Baudelaire’s specific idea of femininity, “in the sense that it recognizes itself in a proliferation of fugitive feminine figures without a common model, without reference to la femme en general.”43 The series heroically defeats the general in this particular verse, yielding not just figures who are indistinguishable in their suffering but ones who are relentlessly singular. They drift away from a clear relationship to a generalized idea of femininity but, as the poem strives to show, cannot be thought of as merely aberrant.

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The changing landscape of Paris is not simply a quiet background to the speaker’s watchful gaze. Rather, the poem casts a shrewd eye on the shifting arrangements of the Second Empire when the speaker contemplates the eventual death and burial of the old women. Meltzer has perceptively noted that Baudelaire’s poems often involve a “ghost economy” and that “many of his poems concern not only ghosts but graveyards.” And indeed, in this particular verse we do find an interest in death as a possible kind of renewal, a motif Meltzer identifies throughout Baudelaire’s poems.44 However, the image of graves in “The Little Old Ladies” goes further than that, invoking a realm of biopolitical change. The speaker observes the smallness of the women and their resemblance in size to little girls, noting “It seems always as if this fragile being / Gently carries herself toward a new cradle.” For the speaker, death may rehumanize those who have become only “phantoms” in the “swarming tableau” of Paris. He goes on to contemplate the size and shape of their coffins: Unless, meditating upon geometry, I think only, at the sight of discordant limbs, Of how many times the worker must vary The form of the box where we put every corpse. (269)

The image appears once again to be aggressively grotesque, one in the vein of Baudelaire’s general irony toward the human condition. But the motif of burial coffins has far-reaching resonances in the urban climate of Paris, London, and other major cities of the 1850s and 1860s. The logistics of burying the dead within metropolitan Paris, in particular, shifted radically from the mid-eighteenth century to the late nineteenth, initiating nothing short of a “cultural revolution.”45 Parish and church graveyards were abolished in favor of mass burial grounds outside the city, where class markers took hold rather quickly. Bourgeois families earned their own private plots  while working-class Parisians were rendered anonymous in their graves.

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Furthermore, this pilgrimage of the dead to the periphery of the city is what effectively produced the Foucauldian structure of modern life in which “death, detritus, drink, crime, prostitution, even labor itself were, quite simply, to be rendered invisible.”46 I argue further that these divisions between the living and the dead, the sacred and the profane, and the rich and the poor hold up the central division of man and woman that forms the core of the bourgeois familial mythos. Thus, as Burton concludes, “metropolis and necropolis became mirror images of each other.”47 Baudelaire’s poetic scrutiny of the old women’s coffins therefore is a highly charged image in the context of Paris’s “modernizing” policies, policies that forcibly created a new urban subject who is rendered spectral by burgeoning commodity culture. With this in mind, it becomes almost blasphemous (against the city and the Empire, which effectively poses as the new Father) for the speaker to call the old women “Ruins! My Family!” (273). Not only does this sentiment express a certain camaraderie between the invisible in Paris’s “sinuous folds”; it also undoes the tenets of bourgeois patriarchy—Burton’s articulation of “individual autonomy plus family solidarity”—that the new burial grounds sheltered and enshrined. The speaker’s identification with the old women, “as though I were your father,” further recalls a vision of paternity that this poem and its predecessor, “The Seven Old Men,” have put into question. With the edifice of patriarchy crumbling under the grounds of both of these poems, what seems to emerge is a complex feminine singularity that is a borne out of the delirium of the series. Baudelaire’s specific interest in the seriality of gendered existence, as I have shown, not only creates a rupture within capitalism’s totalizing project but also reveals that femininity is the crux of such a rethinking. My discussion has identified several significant places in Baudelaire’s oeuvre that suggest that his depiction of feminine singularity—an understanding of femininity as structure rather than ideology—recurs throughout his prose and poetic works. This radicalization of femininity appears closely alongside his thinking about 78

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the city, but not as its subordinate. Rather, Baudelaire’s poetic contemplation of the urban masculine self dissolves its agency in the face of new configurations of gendered subjects, ones that emerge out of the collapse of traditional ways of conceptualizing the links between particularity and collectivity.

Jeanne Duval, Feminine Singularity, and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal If this story of Venus has any value at all it is in illuminating the way in which our age is tethered to hers. —Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”

Baudelaire’s consistent puncturing of a capitalist imaginary and its ways of organizing subjects remain vital to understanding the contemporary, in which capitalist modernity has swelled to inconceivable proportions, and in which femininity remains a conflictual and often weaponized terrain for claiming types of personhood before the state. In this section I turn to contemporary Vancouver poet Lisa Robertson’s experimental novel, The Baudelaire Fractal (2020). I take specific interest here in Robertson’s gathering of her prose in The Baudelaire Fractal around Édouard Manet’s (supposed) painting of Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining (1862), which hung in the room in which the poet died (fig. 3). Duval and Baudelaire had been in a tumultuous relationship since 1842. The painting continues to be associated with Duval despite some doubt cast on this fact by art historians such as Jean Adhémar and Griselda Pollock, since Duval and Baudelaire had ended their relationship by this date. Furthermore, Baudelaire scholars have historically found the painting, in Therese Dolan’s summary, to be “ugly and strange.”48 No doubt these particular words have to do with the ways aesthetics and portraiture are steeped in ideas—in circulation since the nineteenth century—about feminine beauty as whiteness, an idea that Baudelaire’s poetics do not entirely share. In Manet’s painting, 79

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F i g u r e 3 . Édouard Manet, Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining (Lady with a Fan), 1862. Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary.

the woman is dwarfed by her enormous white crinoline. Her proportions are exaggerated and convene to modernist art principles. The dark notes of her eyes, hair, and background contrast starkly with her dress and seem to, fleetingly, make visible the ideologies at work in this modern aesthetics of femininity. Here, white dress reverses the chiaroscuro from Manet’s other well-known works that appear to confirm the association of whiteness with naturalized and idealized female beauty. One such painting is the “scandalous” work entitled Olympia (1865). In Olympia, a naked white woman reclines on a divan (based on the model and painter Victorine Meurent), attended by her fully-clothed Black maid (based on the art model Laure). Because the white woman at the foreground meets the viewer’s gaze in her nakedness, her erotic beauty is reinforced by the clothed Black woman who serves as background and who retreats from that gaze. 80

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A racialized, ideological binary of black and white is thus established in Olympia to ground female beauty. As Lorraine O’ Grady observes: “White is what woman is; not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gathers in) is what she had better not be.”49 In Baudelaire’s Mistress, instead the painting throws into question the ideological dependence of white female beauty on Black femininity, reducing that whiteness to pure surface. Much of the work of understanding how whiteness and Blackness function as markers of racial difference in Manet’s painting relies on Duval’s complicated relationship to Blackness. Duval is a woman whose outsized presence in Baudelaire’s life and poetics is marred by her absence in critical biography and visual art, her reduction to what Dionne Brand names “the consumptive negress.”50 Where and when she was born, for instance, is up for debate, and these unknowns are the site on which multiple desiring fantasies about race and gender are continually projected in Baudelaire criticism (scholars have offered Saint Domingue [contemporary Haiti], Martinique, or Guadeloupe as possible birthplaces). As Griselda Pollock writes, the complexities of race continually bring back questions of the body, of skin, and of the flesh, and therefore, the already “tenuous” connections between the women of Baudelaire’s life and his work, in the case of Duval, become much more complicated.51 As I address further in chapter 4 of this book, race mounts a challenge to any existing notions of surface and depth used to ground nineteenth-century subjectivity. Much of the labor of racializing Duval, for instance, is taken up by Baudelaire’s male contemporaries—not only by Manet but also by the poet Théodore de Banville and by the photographer Félix Nadar, whose multiple accounts of Duval strain to impose and fix her as a woman of color within a biographical frame.52 These various accounts are conflicting in their use of racial terms, and together they attempt to render Duval legible within existing histories of enslavement and French colonialism (notably, in Haiti), as well as newly charged ideas of racial difference gathering steam from Haussmanization’s rapid 81

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colonial projects during the Second Empire, notably in Algeria.53 They situate femininity squarely within an attenuated yet erotically charged “undecidability” between the biographical, the historical, and the phantasmagoric. I hold very much in view the historical and geopolitical specificities of the nineteenth-century French colonial project, especially the long and grisly shadow cast by Le Code Noire, the French legal code, signed into existence by Louis XIV in 1685, that formalized the enslavement of Black people and that was only eradicated in 1848. However, it remains useful to observe that many of the ways that Duval is racialized and positioned vis-à-vis Blackness in the canon of poetry, Baudelaire criticism, and art history recall Jennifer DeVere Brody’s wider arguments about Anglo-American narratives around women of color. The terms used to describe Duval (as a “quarteroon,” for instance) are also used to describe women of color in the Anglo-American literary tradition, such as the character of Rhoda Swartz from William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847). These terms suggest a wider imaginary (i.e., one that exceeds national borders) around mixed-race femininity, which Brody argues “could be described as neither black nor white, yet also as both white and black.”54 As Pollock also asserts, what we confront when we attempt to unpack Duval’s relationship to subjectivity is a wide “circuit” that renders evident a “masculinist modernist culture in which flourishes an Orientalising, Africanist fantasy.”55 The circuit only closes with a cliché that Duval was consistently associated with, that of the “Black Venus.” Saidiya Hartman powerfully reminds us that this cliché “is found everywhere in the Atlantic world. The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom—turn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus.”56 In contradistinction to the closed critical circuit around Duval’s subjectivity, in The Baudelaire Fractal, a description of Manet’s painting ends Robertson’s novel. It is a stunning and intentionally abrupt crescendo to a text that does not seek to “arrive” anywhere, especially 82

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not at truth claims about femininity. Here is the ending, an ekphrastic passage that also functions as an embedded theory of ekphrasis itself, as a dialectic of word and image: She withdraws from the gaze; she doesn’t offer herself to an interpretation. Her autonomy is the very core of beauty. The concentrated intensity of her distant and withdrawn face is a rhetorical counterpoint to the skirt’s expansive, forward-tumbling froth. I recognize the future girl in her refusal, her gravitas. She is irreducible to the visible, and she is irreducible to the invisible. She is relaxed in her displeasure. She is totally modern. I’ll never know her and she doesn’t care. This is Jeanne Duval. She’s a philosopher. She was painted by Manet in 1862, a year after Baudelaire had dedicated to her a copy of the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal: “Homage à ma très chère Féline.” Now I meet her image in Paris, on June 13, 2019. The linden trees are in flower. I’m fiftyseven years old. I’m thinking about the immense, silent legend of any girl’s life. She’s leaning back, observing.57

Duval is a doubly resistant figure in Robertson’s estimation. She withdraws not only from the visual sphere but also from any attempt to capture the visual within verbal and literary language, the cornerstone of ekphrasis. This dual capture—that scholars of ekphrasis like Peter Wagner point to as “paradoxical,”58 and that multiple poems of Baudelaire’s (such as “un fantôme” / “A Phantom”) make manifest—is especially acute in the case of Black femininity’s (non) representation in Western aesthetics. To gather writing, then, around nineteenth-century visual culture’s notorious excision of Duval59 is not only a challenge to the silencing of Black women in the archive that Black feminist scholars like Hartman and Christina Sharpe have consistently pointed toward.60 It is also a profound dismantling of what Paul de Man names “aesthetic ideology.”61 The Baudelaire Fractal, I argue, returns to the Baudelairean assertion that the beautiful is always bizarre, and therefore singular, subject to transformation, and resistant to convention. When we think of feminine 83

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beauty in these singular, bizarre terms, in Janell Hobson’s phrasing, “beauty becomes a significant site for political resistance and aesthetic transformation.”62 Additionally, for Robertson, this querying of femininity (and especially racialized femininity) as it often grounds conventional ideas of beauty works through description, which is a narrative mode in The Baudelaire Fractal that self-consciously dwells in and on the material, producing a series of surfaces without necessary correlations of depth. Like Manet’s painting, the novel’s descriptive mode indexes a wish spelled out by its narrator: “I want the image to be kinetic and tactile, an undulant elsewhere, not the predetermined fixture of a gaze, not the token of a bordered exchange.”63 Description works against instrumentalization here. Robertson’s narrative mode is a movement, “an undulant elsewhere” she locates partially in Duval’s gaze. In what follows, I establish how description becomes the means for Robertson to engage the feminine singular and offer a poetics of the subject that is consonant with Baudelaire’s street poetry, and that also offers a greater thinking about this poetry’s relationship to the contemporary. In The Baudelaire Fractal, the narrator, a woman named Hazel Brown who wakes up one morning to the realization that she has “written the complete works of Baudelaire,”64 commits to producing “a story about the total implausibility of girlhood.”65 Brown is a near proxy for Robertson herself, taking us on a meandering lyric excavation of her itinerant girlhood in the 1980s spent reading, drinking, and occasionally fucking in Paris. What would it mean, she asks, to inhabit a subject that never coincides with itself, who is damned in more conventional lyric thought to figural reification, and who can be assessed only from the outside as an object: femininity? Robertson’s answer is the novel itself, an exercise in making manifest through the materiality of language a feminine singularity in the style and ironic inheritance of Baudelaire. Throughout the novel, if it can be called that (Robertson herself has said it is more akin to the structure of poetry), she takes up a current of Baudelairean thinking 84

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of femininity as a thinking of capitalist modernity and radicalizes it from the inside through the conceit of poetic transmission. This initial conceit, that a writer wakes up to the convenient “bodily recognition” that she has written the complete works of Baudelaire, reads almost like a gimmick, nominally useful but suspiciously cheap. Yet if we follow Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick as a miniature model of capital—“overperforming and underperforming, encoding either too much or not enough time, and fundamentally gratuitous yet strangely essential”66—the conceit appears vital to Robertson’s project of elaborating a genealogy of thought from Baudelaire’s midnineteenth century to our own, and of femininity’s continued relationship to capital and modernity, as well as to questions of race, aesthetic form, and social difference. One of my initial observations about The Baudelaire Fractal is that, like Carroll’s Alice books, its sustained attention to girlhood is both formal and thematic, disrupting the conventional borders between the two. Hazel Brown is both a “girl” in 1984 Paris, and girlhood is also a narrative mode, “an infraction of thought”67 and a “baroque condition.”68 But is the girl in either sense also a gimmick? She is a form that indexes social relations, “conflates aesthetic value with economic value,” is often deemed “flagrantly unworthy,”69 and, as I argue in chapter 1, is consistently poised in a zone of uncertainty with respect to time and corporeality. The gimmick too is known for its “bad timing” in a capitalism system of production in which timeliness is prized and in which precarious labor is consistently feminized (and the condition of femininity rendered precarious). Capitalism further depends on vectors of social difference like race and gender as it simultaneously dismisses these vectors as ungoverned by its logic. For subjects fixed by the rubrics of race and gender, this leads to a kind of exilic suspension of signification between materiality and ephemerality that the speaker of Baudelaire’s “The Swan” (OC, 1:85) famously observes in that poem. As is well known, he exclaims: “for me everything becomes allegory / and my cherished memories more weighty than rocks” (103). To inhabit 85

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these contradictions, as Robertson does in The Baudelaire Fractal, is to inhabit femininity, “always to be askew, belated.”70 But it is also to enter this suspension and live out a strange kind of freedom that Brown finds primarily in neglected urban spaces: tawdry attic rooms, and cloistered, forgotten quarters within previous lavish Parisian bourgeois homes. Here, The Baudelaire Fractal makes girlhood a malleable architecture, existing fully inside the scene of domesticity. These domestic spaces enact a capitalist logic of feminized labor as secret and occulted. Carefully describing the aesthetics of these rooms allows Robertson a way to live on and beyond the surface of things, such that “a girl in her hotel is free. Here by free I mean that nothing is meant for her.”71 Rather than melancholy—the affective response of the speaker of “The Swan” to the scene (cygne) of modernity—Robertson chooses an intellectual disinterest and an erotic contentment with being completely disregarded by the latest iteration of capital in the twentieth (and twenty-first) century. These affective postures move past simple expressions to become the form that grounds Roberton’s text and shapes its arguments. In The Baudelaire Fractal, singularity is given at the level of the sentence. Rigorously Paterian, the prose itself is architectural, mimicking the rooms in which Brown studiously describes and thus enacts an idea of freedom. To counter the normalization and diminishment of femininity under capitalism’s structures, Robertson instead seeks serial replication, a sort of bad infinity akin to “The Seven Old Men,” but also one that is Deleuzian in its refusal of the conventional organizing principles of surface and depth. On this note, Robertson wonders: If I repeat the word girl very often, it’s for those who, like me, prefer the short monosyllable, its percussive force. I wonder if in repeating I might exhaust the designation that fixed me, flood it with the lugubrious excess it named, and so convert the diminutive syllable to the terrain of the possible.  .  .  . I want to force the category to produce, monstrously, a subjectivity outside subjection.72 86

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I want to stress the feminine singularity that the text seeks to enact within such “monstrous”—that is, nonreproductive iterability— excess. This feminine singularity explodes the conceptual, while it also forces language to reproduce and iterate without a mandate. This is a beginning without origins, and “to begin was an internal attack on the feminine constraint.”73 Writing, literary history, and temporality swerve and are of the feminine, insofar as the feminine, for Robertson as for Baudelaire, is a stain on capital’s project then and now. Robertson thus expands the conceit of Brown’s Baudelairean authorship outside of paternalistic theories of “influence” as well as traditional ideals of feminist “mothers” that ground the latter’s more canonical formulations of literary inheritance. Both theories rest on traditional metrics of gendered difference that The Baudelaire Fractal is resolutely indifferent to. In a section entitled “Twilight,” the narrator begins with an offhand description of menstruating onto a restaurant chair. An incident that is often linked to shame and repulsion in the enduring misogynist imaginary that Bernheimer identifies is here recoded as an “impure repetition” of Baudelairean authorship, a reenvisioning of literary history and the nineteenth-century’s long durée, and a formal bacchanal: “part loss, part object, the stain, with its irregular, permeable border, its ingressions and turbulences, its fragmentary, metonymic nature, its abundance of nested contours, limitless saturation, elisions of property, its regime of discontinuity and contamination, was an operating force at once fractal, mystic, and obscene.”74 The fractal “stain” of Baudelairean inheritance works off a sliding of reference and a repetition that is not sameness: “the stain retroactively transmits a singularity that evades the personal. Everything will be the same without being identical. I’ll be a feminine man whose decadent joy resists all appropriation. I’ll be untimely only.”75 A theory of gendering and embodiment emerges at the crossing of this “untimely” thinking in Robertson. The “stain” transmits but without an agenda or clear form in place. It is resolutely of the body but not fixed by it, nor of any existing value systems. “Girldom” becomes a “long covert 87

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transmission or inheritance of a stain”76 in Robertson’s reimagining of Baudelaire, and this generates a different genealogy of the subject and her relationship to gender. In consistently attending to the materiality of language and its consequences for thinking femininity and the subjectivity of a “girl,” Robertson’s text zigzags between clothing, textile, and painting. The convergence and divergence of these terms already inhabits the Baudelairean lexicon in the plural translations into English of the word “toiles” in Les Fleurs du mal, which as Nathan Brown explores, can mean, depending on the poem and its intertexts, “canvas,” “web,” or “curtain.”77 The tactility and plurality of language here recalls the materiality of the signifier, a preoccupation of deconstructive reading, and in particular, de Man’s readings of philosophical texts. This function of the signifier is what de Man, in the essays that comprise the volume Aesthetic Ideology, describes as a “dismembering” that interrupts the use of the aesthetic to ground philosophy, especially in the works of Kant and Hegel, and notably, in Kant’s theorizing of the sublime in his Third Critique.78 On de Man’s reading of Kant, Rodolphe Gasché writes, the status of the materiality of language in its unwrought, or native, state: It is a cause devoid of all meaning, of all semantic depth, that stands in a relation of eccentricity to what it appears to effect. Because of its ultimate meaninglessness and exorbitant situation, because of the absence of a (meaningful) relation between it and what becomes superimposed on it as its effect, this irreducible formal materiality functions as a break or a discontinuity at the heart not only of the Third Critique, but more generally of thought itself.79

What I find curious here is the way Gasché’s observation is overlaid with the politics of race and gender. Material language is described much the same way as taxonomies of racialized femininity are, in its “native state” and “exorbitant situation” that is “devoid of all meaning.” It is the kind of language used often in Baudelaire criticism 88

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vis-à-vis Jeanne Duval, as I argued earlier in this section. Practicing description in Robertson’s novel reroutes us to the possibilities of such an “infraction” and dismemberment in thinking and names it femininity. But it is a fugitive notion of the feminine that is also, I argue, working through the sort of “narrative restraint” that Hartman claims is a resistant mode of encountering Black femininity in the archive, a “refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure” and “which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man.”80 To ground a reading of Duval across Baudelaire’s life and work in fixed ideas about feminist reclamation is thus to recapitulate to the framing of Black femininity within the coercive terms of “identity,” rather than move, as I think Robertson does, with the “derelict” and “utopian” possibilities inherent in style and form, in the material of prose becoming poetry before one can capture and hold it within one’s grasp. Robertson’s “girl,” as she willfully describes, “is not a concept. Her idea has no core or center; it takes place on the sills, in the nonenunciation of her name. This feminine namelessness seeps outwards with undisciplined grandeur. The girl’s identity is not pointlike, so it can’t be erased. It’s a proliferating tissue of refusals.”81 These refusals amalgamate into a singularity that is a formal, aesthetic, and political interruption of a totalizing capitalist system. Through Baudelaire’s poetics of Haussmanized Paris and Robertson’s contemporary inhabiting of these spaces (both philosophical and material), I make apparent a broader continuity between the nineteenth century and the present, and I begin to address a problem encountered in my first chapter around feminist genealogies of thinking the subject of race, gender, and liberal-capitalist individuation. What I find across both Baudelaire’s and Robertson’s chronologically disparate works is a shared interest in radicalizing the aesthetic to explode it, and to look for different, illiberal ways of inhabiting subjectivity.

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Precarious Lives Christina Rossetti and the Form of Likeness

I n i t s a n o n y m o u s r e v i e w of Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874), the Academy notes rather hopelessly: “this will probably be one of the most popular children’s books this winter. We wish we could understand it.”1 The reviewer—who later dwells on the “uncomfortable feeling” generated by this children’s tale and its accompanying images—still counts as the most generous among the largely puzzled and horrified readership of Rossetti’s story, which describes three sets of girls experiencing violence and failure in their respective fantasy worlds. While clearly such dystopic plots are not out of place in Victorian literature about children, something about Rossetti’s unusual narrative bothered her contemporaries. John Ruskin, for instance, bluntly wondered how Rossetti and Arthur Hughes, who illustrated the story, together could “sink so low.”2 In any case, the book still sold on the Christmas market, and a few months later Rossetti published Annus Domini, a benign pocketbook of daily prayers that stands in stark contrast to the grim prose of Speaking Likenesses. It is therefore tempting to cast this work of children’s fiction as a strange anomaly in Rossetti’s oeuvre, which from the 1870s, beginning with Annus Domini, to her death in 1894 was almost exclusively dominated by devotional prose and poetry. In contrast, in this chapter I show how Speaking Likenesses anchors a widespread interest throughout Rossetti’s writing—but especially in her most well-known poems from Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince’s Progress (1866)—in alternative modes of sociality that refract a conceptual preoccupation with likeness rather than difference. For Rossetti, the lure of similarity, or minimal difference, manifests itself 90

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in two intertwined ways: figuratively, through simile, and socially, in siblinghood and, more specifically, sisterhood. Indeed, sisterhood remains the dominant—and most vexed—kinship relation throughout her lyrics from Goblin Market (for example, in the title poem I will examine in detail, as well as in shorter verses such as “Noble Sisters” and “Sister Maude”). At issue in such relations of likeness is the discreteness of a (typically) feminine self. But rather than destroy one’s singularity, sisterhood, of the especially fraught kind, in fact produces it. For Rossetti, shunning oppositional structures of desire and difference that typically shape individuation (exemplified in the heterosexual couple form and the titles of her uneasy lyrics “He and She” and “Wife to Husband”) subsequently allows for a new space to carve out the singularity of a lyric self and of a feminine subject. In the previous chapter, we saw how feminine singularity—or a form of femininity that refuses consolidation under capitalism’s tenets—takes shape in a proximate literary tradition to that of the English lyric. For Baudelaire as for Robertson, fracturing capitalist modes of thought requires an ironic posture, a perverse and derelict approach to form. Here I take up moments in Rossetti’s work that are perhaps slighter and quieter but no less devastating to a conventional idea of gender and difference. My concern in this chapter is largely twofold: I am interested, on the one hand, in how likeness structures us, how the everyday world of living is in fact more charged with similarity than we have the vocabulary to attend to, or often, the habits to observe.3 In looking closely at Rossetti’s work, I am, on the other hand, scrutinizing how likeness operates as a poetics and a formal technique. In doing so, I suggest that Rossetti traces feminine singularity as a formal problem, building on a definition of “form” that Anahid Nersessian provides: “an adjustment,” one always bound in some sense to a proximity that does not quite close the gap, that may often fail in shaping what it promises to represent.4 I take up various attempts in Rossetti’s poems and short prose to confront likeness between women and to reflect on its relationship to more established kinds of difference. In reading Rossetti’s poems 91

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about sisterhood in particular, I draw a connection to contemporary poet and critic Maggie Nelson, and in particular to her experimental work Jane: A Murder (2005). I elaborate on the formal echoes of Rossetti’s thought in Jane to situate the former firmly in a genealogy of writing concerned with uncomfortable feminist problems: namely, the fraughtness of female likeness and its relationship to the ongoing violence of heterosexual and patriarchal coupling.

Lyric Individuation Individuation as a problem of form bothered and compelled Rossetti from her earliest literary beginnings: this is evident from her oft-quoted early poem “The Lowest Room” (composed in 1856). In this lyric, being a one—whether in front of one’s God, one’s family, or one’s social world—troubles Rossetti’s speaker who, seemingly on the brink of death, wonders: Oh what is life, that we should live? Or what is death, that we must die? A bursting bubble is our life: I also, what am I?5

The speaker follows by narrating a conversation with her sister, whose “tresses showed a richer mass,” and issuing the pointed refrain that “some must be second and not first; / All cannot be the first of all.” Recently, scholars have tended to interpret this striking poetic statement, that “all” cannot be “first,” as a sign of Rossetti’s deep resignation, particularly a form of “reserve” derived from John Keble’s lectures on religion and poetics, and generally influenced by Rossetti’s Tractarian beliefs and early exposure to the Oxford movement.6 That Rossetti’s poetry and prose inherit aesthetic and religious paradigms from the Tractarian poetics of Edward Pusey and Keble is unquestionable.7 But “The Lowest Room” also carefully rejects being “first” within a vertical structure that produces a “one” as part of a knowable “all”: in this case, being “first” within a psychosocial dynamic in which the speaker’s sister seems to have eclipsed her. The observation that “all 92

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cannot be the first of all” pulls us toward the prospect of radical incompleteness in the failed circularity of “all”; the possibility that one could acquire partial meaning outside of the rigidity of clear forms of difference (ones that, incidentally, produce marital and worldly success for her sister, rather than for herself). There appears then to be pleasure in refuting “firstness” and thereby the totality of recognition as well as self-recognition in Rossetti’s account. We therefore find the murmurs of a different architecture of selfhood—untethered to the typical dyad of self and other—unfolding in “The Lowest Room.” That such a dyad of self and other is most often a heterosexual couple is the object of frequent disdain in Rossetti’s lyrics. Several poems lay bare coupling’s figural and social limitations, a critique that I would argue cannot be reduced to biographical explanations about Rossetti’s life as a single woman. “Wife to Husband” (CP, 48), for instance, a little-discussed poem from Goblin Market, recapitulates a familiar theme in Rossetti’s work of a lyric voice’s dissolution within the asymmetrical form of a heterosexual pair. The confrontation occurs in the lyric between the speaker, or “wife,” whose repeated refrain, “I must die,” forecasts her impending parting from the husband-addressee: Pardon the faults in me, For the love of years ago: Good bye. I must drift across the sea, I must sink into the snow, I must die. The imperative “must” drives this poem, separating the wife’s impulse to “drift across the sea” from the husband to whom she instructs: “You can bask in this sun, / You can drink wine, and eat.” While the speaker does mention “the love of years ago,” the poem is self-enclosing rather than mournful of the assumed union. This lyric speaker performs a form of oneness—the repetition of “I”—in the desire for death rather than married life. The repeated “I”s pull the wife away from the husband in a steady movement of withdrawal, culminating in this final, negative assertion: 93

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Not a word for you, Not a lock or kiss, Good bye.

We, one, must part in two; Verily death is this: I must die. (CP, 49) Death again marks the ultimate separation between “wife” and “husband,” but this is not a bad thing, the poem suggests. The fracturing of the supposed “one” of the heterosexual pair into the “two” of death and life is a fracturing of limiting ideas of this “one” as coercive, unified, and stripped of singularity. “Wife to Husband” joins other short poems in Rossetti’s corpus such as “He and She” that manifest a relentless interest in oneness that arise from the failing “two” of heterosexual difference. I suggest that this cluster of shorter poems draws into focus a persistent set of questions in Rossetti’s work around the asymmetry of masculinity and femininity, and the roles that they respectively may inhabit that range from specific to cryptically general (wife, husband, “he,” “she”). In the space of these rigidly delimited differences between the sexes, Rossetti demonstrates a specific desire for a lyric, feminine singularity that these pairings can never produce. In what follows, I further discuss the alternative to heterosexual parings in Rossetti’s work that sets feminine singularity on a different axis: sisterhood. By shifting from the motif of gendered opposition based on a heterosexual economy of desire, toward the more ambiguous but seemingly more compelling arena of siblings, Rossetti explores feminine singularity and its potential for representation. *

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Maggie Nelson’s experimental poem and memoir Jane: A Murder takes shape around the brutal unsolved murder of the poet’s aunt Jane in the late 1960s. In an interview with the Telegraph, Nelson observes that the book is “in addition to violence or fear . . . [about] 94

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the excitements and perils of learning about yourself through twinning and doubling—my sister and me, my mother and Jane, Jane and me.”8 The work is a composite of fragments from Jane’s old diaries, Nelson’s poetry, and occasional prose that blurs several lines: between the poet’s voice and subjectivity; that of Emily, Nelson’s sister; Jane, whom she describes only as “her mother’s sister”; and Barb, the poet’s mother. Though Jane is Nelson’s aunt, it is sisterhood that provides the preferred grounds for Nelson to theorize what female individuation looks like through these various kinship relations between women. Sections of Jane figuratively rehearse the likeness between Nelson and Emily, Barb and Jane, and Nelson and Jane, with whom the poet shares an intellectual and creative kinship, despite having never met (Jane was also a poet). We thus find sets of poems that repeat with slight variations, such as “Barb and Jane” (parts I and II), and “Stacey and Tracey” (the names of two dolls owned by Nelson and Emily in childhood). In “Sisters,” the unspecified speaker begins the poem by recalling: “For quite some time, I felt I was my sister. That was before I just wanted to be her. We liked to tell people we were twins.”9 Pressing down on these inquiries into likeness, sisterhood, and feminine subjectivity is the terrible violence of Jane’s murder, which occurred in an ostensible series together with other brutal killings at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s (these murders were later revealed to be the work of the Co-ed Killer, though another man was eventually charged with Jane’s murder). That serial murder frequently borrows figural tropes, such as repetition, to render the (usually female, often white) bodies of their victims interchangeable and individualized solely through grisly acts of marking is commonplace knowledge in a culture fascinated by misogynistic violence.10 Can a poet write herself out of such structures? Or, to put it another way, what do poetics offer in the way of dismantling recognizable modes of organizing subjectivity—in this case, the violence (both psychic and bodily) of individuation—and replacing them with others? In response to these questions, Nelson’s statement in her 95

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Telegraph interview about what Jane is “about” rhetorically juxtaposes “violence or fear” together with “the excitement of learning about yourself,” but the additive is somewhat misleading. Rather, Jane actively labors to separate feminine subjectivity from the contours of the additive, the mode associated with the serial killer and the patriarchal violence it reproduces, while holding open through writing a space for likeness between women, one made possible by figure. An example of this can be found in Jane’s opening poem, “Figment”: When I tell my grandfather I am writing about Jane, he says What will it be, a figment Of your imagination?

The speaker goes on to say: . . . I wish I could show him: between Figling (a little fig) And figure lies figment, from fingere, meaning to form.11

Nelson’s work begins to offer a corrective to how representations of likeness (whether based in kinship or not) between women usually tether wildly between overly naïve visions of female community and Gothic horrors of female replication and reiteration. In Nelson’s restrained opening verse, rather than remain confined to a pastness truncated by violence, the “form” of Jane emerges within the multiple poetic and “sisterly” voices that structure Jane: A Murder. Note the enjambed “between”—a call to an etymological place of possibility that is also a formal one. The title of Nelson’s work further clarifies Jane’s subjectivity as only ever partially linked to her death, with the colon between “Jane” and “A Murder” representing an unresolved rather than predefined connection. 96

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Nelson invites a consideration of the longer genealogy of likeness between women, in which “sisterhood” is often rhetorically instrumentalized to dampen likeness’s generative powers rather than to amplify them. We may think back to certain defining moments in the history of twentieth-century organizing, in which the term has served as the refrain for political solidarity in women’s liberation circles in the United States under the phrase “Sisterhood is powerful.” But “sisterhood” has also been chided for uncritically glossing over antagonism and aggression between women, as well as excluding women of color, trans women, and other marginalized figures from a movement historically dominated by cis-white feminists. Angela Carter’s classic novella from the 1970s, The Bloody Chamber, ironically reflects back this problem of second-wave feminist organizing, in calling its speaker’s Bluebeardian husband’s murdered wives “a fated sisterhood.”12 It also, to my mind, recalls the series of victims in Jane: A Murder that Nelson’s work actively attempts to dismantle in favor of a different figuration of female likeness. Carter’s often lurid, Gothic tales further serve as a reminder that bonds between laterally affiliated subjects have always haunted paternal, vertically organized lines of kinship in modernity, social ties that not only theoretically organize ways of understanding gender and sexuality but also political community writ large. Relations based on likeness, far from being benign or innocuous, instead hold open possibilities for intimacy, desire, conflict, and aggression, as queer theorists and scholars have observed.13 To better situate Rossetti’s work within this broader constellation of contemporary ideas of likeness, is it useful to recall Victorian debates on the Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill (1907), for example, debates that asked whether a man should be able to marry his deceased wife’s sister. These heated and decades-long debates telegraphed the multiple legal and social anxieties attending to the role of a “sister” in the nineteenth century, and they “enact[ed] the common ‘shifting’ that woman’s identity always undergoes when it is conceived primarily in relation to others.”14 97

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Psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell consequently writes in Siblings: “we need such a paradigm shift from the near-exclusive dominance of vertical comprehension to the interaction of the horizontal and the vertical in our social and in our psychological understanding,” a paradigm shift that might begin by devoting attention to siblings or sibling-like figures of likeness to a subject’s gender formation.15 Mitchell suggests that “the sibling is par excellence someone who threatens the subject’s uniqueness. The ecstasy of loving one who is like oneself is experienced at the same time as the trauma of being annihilated by one who stands in one place.”16 This ambivalent psychic space between laterally affiliated selves can foreground a precarious form of individuality as much as it can destroy it, electrifying anew what Sedgwick describes in “Tales of the Avunculate” as “the vertiginous oscillation of ‘same’ and ‘different.’”17 “Tales” concentrates on Oscar Wilde and the importance of disaggregating vertical ideas of kinship from cultural value, but Sedgwick’s inquiry into nineteenthcentury social bonds at times could easily describe Rossetti’s entire oeuvre, which continuously chafes against patriarchal domesticity to explore relations of similitude and likeness. Two poems from Goblin Market, “Noble Sisters” (CP 27) and “Sister Maude” (CP 53–54), reveal a tense rather than harmonious vision of sisterhood, which nevertheless allows for a powerful engagement with feminine singularity that heterosexuality fails to provide. Both of these poems were composed shortly after “Goblin Market,” yet have attracted very little critical attention: Helena Michie notes that the antagonism in both of these works predominately allows for “the expression of hostility among women.”18 Similarly, Scott Rodgers writes that, in these shorter works, “Rossetti demonstrates how women’s relationships, even within female communities, are triangulated in relation to men.”19 But what is startling about “Noble Sisters” is not so much its inscription of sisterhood within patriarchy as quite self-consciously the opposite: “Noble Sisters” recasts the drama of Antigone and Ismene, the sisters in Sophocles’ Antigone

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entangled by the pressure of what Rossetti’s poem also calls “our father’s name” (28). In Antigone, the incestuous house of Oedipus echoes the endogamous force of the phallic order, one that Antigone, by burying her brother, puts to an abrupt end by reasserting her lateral line of kinship as a sibling. In Rossetti’s poem, the energy of this lateral form of kinship substitutes for patrilineal lines, like Antigone’s narrative. And despite the overt hostility between sisters, sisterhood remains a potent expression of a differential likeness that escapes the limiting polarity of gender. In the poem, two sisters converse over one of their lovers, whom the other sister describes as a “thief” and “nameless man.” The poem follows a call-and-response form between the sisters and a building tension, as one desires to escape with her lover, and the other forbids it. When the inquiring sister finally mentions the lover who comes “to woo [her] for his wife” (28), the other sister answers: “I met a nameless man, sister, Who loitered round our door: I said: Her husband loves her much, And yet she loves him more.” (28)

Rather than seeing this sister as straightforwardly critiquing sexual knowledge outside of the family, we might read her duty to a form of familial insularity as inhabited by excess that effectively produces this poem. The antagonism between these sisters rehearses the violence of being a speaking “one” within a kinship structure, and it is clearly sororal trauma that shapes a “one” rather than the vague threat of a “father’s name.” To claim then, as Rodgers has, that “the most significant bond between these sisters is not a sororal one, but rather the one created by their mutual place within a patriarchal political structure”20 would be to ignore the substitution this poem has made between sisterhood and relationships between men and women. Here, it is the dialogue between sisters that expresses the problem of identification with the other, while “husbands,” “fathers” and “lovers” appear to be unable to generate communication or

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recognition. And though the poem is certainly not a simplistic affirmation of female community, it nevertheless redirects questions of desire, difference, and singularity to the space between sisters. “Sister Maude” echoes a similar set of formal and conceptual problems. Two sisters, one ostensibly with a lover, and Maude, who betrays her, together refract the collapse of the family: “Who told my mother of my shame, / Who told my father of my dear?” (CP 53–54). The haunting difference between this poem and “Noble Sisters,” as we find out, is that everyone seems to be dead: “Cold he lies, as cold as stone” (54), says the sister about her lover, while also noting that “my father may sleep in Paradise, / My mother at Heaven-gate” (54). While the conflict revolves around a lover, whom the sister insists to Maude “would never have looked at you” (54), the only surviving figures who remain in this poem are Maude and her sister. Sisterhood thus stands as a remnant in this lyric, the engine of the poem despite its clearly nonreproductive axis. In the final stanza, sisterhood persists beyond the boundaries of the deceased family, as the speaker claims that in the afterlife, Maude’s envy will continue to haunt her: My father may wear a golden crown, My mother a crown may win; If my dear and I knocked at Heaven-gate Perhaps they’d let us in: But sister Maude, oh sister Maude, Bide you with death and sin. (54)

Notably, we never hear from Maude herself in this poem. But in these concluding lines, any kind of suggested collective in the poem has dissolved. Furthermore, despite the sister’s seeming anger, there appears to be a familiar perverse pleasure in the failings of this familial community. The similarities and likeness implicit in sisterly relations here put into relief the troubling endogamy of the family that lays claim to certain modes of difference. I want to stress that the drama of failed romance, betrayal, and patriarchal familial security across 100

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these short lyrics is generated by, rather than imposed on, the sisters themselves. It is this central relationship of likeness that creates the hierarchies of difference outside it and effectively controls the poetic space. In the remainder of this chapter, I explore how Rossetti’s later and more recognizable works—including Speaking Likenesses and “Goblin Market”—not only disrupt a world of binarized sexual difference qua the patriarchal family but ultimately void it altogether. Stephani Engelstein observes that the contemporary requires “a logic of differential degrees of likeness [that] provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.”21 Looking closely at Rossetti’s concern with likeness reveals a charged set of ideas around femininity and subjectivity, one that appears confrontational at best, violent at worst. Yet her work broadly shows us that likeness offers a much richer, more nuanced terrain on which to carve out an idea of feminine subjectivity, one that resists many of the vectors of difference to which Rossetti herself was subjected to on the Victorian literary market. The starkness by which these works resist defining femininity and individuality along recognizable lines also reorients us to new logics of gendered difference that may be partial and laterally organized.

Speaking Likenesses and the Refusal of Difference In Speaking Likenesses, recognizing oneself as a “girl” or nascent gendered self initially seems influenced by Carroll’s Alice books, which Rossetti had read with interest. Critics have remarked that Rossetti’s story is a rather confrontational response to the “deficiencies” of the Alice stories: Rossetti wrote to her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, that Speaking Likenesses was a “Christmas trifle, wouldbe in the Alice style.”22A reviewer from the Athenaeum additionally writes, “if Alice had never been to Wonderland, the story would have been more enjoyable.”23 Certainly, Rossetti’s story contains a number of direct references to Carroll’s canonical work—notably, the young protagonist Flora’s knowledge on her birthday that, unlike Alice 101

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(who is seven years old in Wonderland), “to be eight years old when last night one was merely seven, this is pleasure.”24 Yet Speaking Likenesses represents in much more lurid detail what Carroll’s narratives suggest in nascent form. In both of Carroll’s Alice stories, Alice’s age becomes a pivot around which the narratives explore girlhood’s possibilities for different forms of growth and change, as well as the vexed questions of self-recognition and subjectivity. In Rossetti’s story, by comparison, Flora seizes on Humpty Dumpty’s threat to the seven-and-a-half-year-old Alice from Looking-Glass that “with proper assistance you might have left off at seven.”25 While warnings such as the one issued by Humpty Dumpty suggest that girlhood in the Alice books veers quite close to the existential stakes of death and annihilation, Rossetti’s fiction, by contrast, addresses limit conditions in a much more dangerous fashion, using child characters to explore the extremes of pain, isolation, violence, and failure throughout. Like Nelson’s Jane well after it, these bleak topics become the only reality for girlhood in Speaking Likenesses, in which each protagonist has to struggle to carve out any sense of freedom or possibility. What might be the connection between the punishing extremes of violence in Rossetti’s work and the preoccupation with different kinds of likeness? As Nina Auerbach and U.C. Knoepflmacher point out, Speaking Likenesses originally had a much vaguer (and bleaker) title: “Nowhere.” The story narrates the encounters of three separate girls with various likenesses of themselves, ones that usually take the form of other children and siblings, both real and imagined. Rather than transcend these various likenesses through more normative modes of relating through difference, such as heterosexual desire or parental authority, Rossetti’s protagonists are forced to inhabit the minimal difference that likeness inaugurates to recognize their subjectivity at all. These violent negotiations of their identity usually happen in the absence of a parent, while the narrator, an unnamed spinster aunt, equates nostalgic ideas like a “mother’s kiss” with an “unattainable gift”: impossible and redundant (326). Furthermore,

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unlike Rossetti’s earlier short fiction, such as “Nick,” in which religious piety reigns supreme and fantasy itself must be guarded against, Speaking Likenesses has a considerably more muted moral thrust. The “lessons” Flora, Edith, and Maggie (the three girl protagonists of Speaking Likenesses) must learn ultimately pale in comparison with the desiring engine of likeness that the stories stage at length. It therefore becomes difficult to ignore that while likeness appears antagonistic for Rossetti, it is simultaneously deeply generative of feminine subjectivity, as I explore in the following sections. Speaking Likenesses glaringly omits parental authority and replaces it by a world of aunts, cousins, siblings, and phantasmagoric likenesses. Here I want to focus on some moments from Rossetti’s story that register her sharp understanding of likeness as a motor for different kinds of possibility. We find, for instance, the tale of Flora’s birthday, in which she is made to play with other children, real and imaginary, that involve her in ghastly games such as “Hunt the Pincushion,” a game that instructs children to “select the smallest and weakest player” and chase her around with pins (336). The story vividly recounts a community built on antagonism, in which “play” repeatedly refers to situations of absurd violence, but a violence seemingly oriented around the claustrophobic interchangeability between the children (the story frequently refers to a mass of “ugly faces” to describe them). The uncanny marker of difference—an “apple of discord” that the children “tossed . . . to and fro as if it had been a pretty plaything”—suggests a nonpedagogic void around gendered distinction that the Aunt cryptically alludes to in an aside: “[What apple, Aunt?—The Apple of Discord, Clara, which is the famous apple your brothers would know all about, and you may ask them some day. Now I go on]” (328). The Apple of Discord’s origins in Greek mythology involves a dispute between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite that eventually led to the Trojan War. Here Rossetti has carefully redirected this mythological symbol of thinly veiled carnal strife to the volatile relationships between children.

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The accompanying illustration by Hughes portrays the children cowering under a monstrous, Medusa-like figure, carrying an apple in one hand and a dagger at her waist (see fig. 4). This illustration links the Apple of Discord to two other intersecting references: the apple of carnal knowledge plucked by Eve in the biblical story of Genesis and the mythical form of the “femme fatale.” Both situate femininity at the uneasy border of violence and rebellion rather than redemption and purity. Interestingly enough, it is Flora’s “brothers” who “would know all about” a signifier of the “discord” at the heart of gendered difference. Here Rossetti displaces the nonknowledge surrounding the marker between masculinity and femininity onto a violent children’s game between siblings. The struggle to distinguish oneself, then, in such a world of seemingly endless torment prompts Flora to ask: “Was this the end of her birthday? Was she eight years old at last only for this?” (330). Rossetti offers no clear lesson, religious or not, for her girl protagonist here. Instead, Flora finds herself entering a dark world of fantasy after she knocks on the door of a yew tree and is ushered into “a large and lofty apartment, very handsomely furnished” (332). This world quickly transforms into a pastiche of elements from the Alice books, where Flora notes that “the only uncomfortable point in the room, that is, as to furniture, was that both ceiling and walls were lined throughout with looking-glasses: but at first this did not strike Flora as any disadvantage; indeed she thought it quite delightful, and took a long look at her little self full length” (332). Not only do these looking-glasses reflect one’s image to infinity, they seem also to spiral outward and refract a separate multiplicity since Flora finds that she is in a room “full of boys and girls, older and younger, big and little” (333). Rossetti literalizes the thoughts and subsequent fears of Carroll’s Alice by seating the children at “tables like telescope tables; only they expanded and contracted of themselves without extra pieces, and seemed to study everybody’s convenience” (333). The boys and girls “stared hard” “with so many eyes upon her” (333), a kind of alienated mass produced by the multiple looking-glasses. The 104

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F i g u r e 4 . Arthur Hughes, The Apple of Discord, in Speaking Likenesses, by Christina Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1874), 11. Source: University of Michigan Library.

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many hostile boys and girls of Rossetti’s anti-Wonderland reorganize difference to an extreme, such that when Flora’s terrifying other, the birthday Queen, finally speaks, the Aunt asks: “[Who was it? Was it a boy or a girl?]” (333). Not content to have her protagonist confront a merely conventional idea of self-image, Rossetti suggests that Flora’s “speaking likenesses” approach each other to infinite degrees of closeness: The birthday Queen, reflected over and over again in five hundred mirrors, looked frightful, I do assure you: and for one minute I am sorry to say that Flora’s fifty million-fold face appeared flushed and angry too; but she soon tried to smile goodhumouredly and succeeded, though she could not manage to feel very merry. [But Aunt, how came she to have fifty million faces? I don’t understand—Because in such a number of mirrors there were not merely simple reflections, but reflections of reflections, and so on and on and on, over and over again, Maude: don’t you see?] (334)

These endlessly reflected children rehearse the earlier games of Flora’s party, except in crueler and more violent ways. Violence and pleasure occupy the same, necessary space in this fantasy world, and as the games continue, the narrative resembles less of a moral lesson and more of an aesthetic exercise in testing the extreme bounds of likeness. The last game follows a banquet in which Flora, starving, watches the other children consume a buffet of food. The children start to build glass houses that they “built from within” (339), enclosing themselves within their creations. While “a very gay effect indeed was produced . . . some houses glowed like masses of ruby, and others shone like enormous chrysolites or sapphires” (340), the reigning effect on a psychic level is clearly claustrophobia. Flora finds that “she was being built in with the Queen” (340), made not only to confront her terrifying likeness but also to be housed with her in a kind of psychic prison. In this final moment before a child hurls a stone at the houses and a climactic scene of warfare ensues, the 106

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Aunt’s earlier aside to “look at home” (338) for similar signs of violence reemerges in a literal and uncanny context. In the third “winter story” of Speaking Likenesses, Maggie, an orphan, must deliver some Christmas tapers for her grandmother, Dame Margaret. A descendant of Charles Perrault’s Red RidingHood, Maggie traverses a sinister wood populated by all manner of fearsome elements. In Rossetti’s story, however, what troubles Maggie in the woods resembles monstrous “likenesses” of her isolation (children not unlike those from Flora’s dream world), hunger (a figure named the “Mouth Boy”), and desire for rest (fantastic creatures named “Sleepers in the Wood”). And in the vein of Speaking Likenesses’ previous tales, Maggie appears drastically isolated in a world without a clear family structure. The Aunt tells us that Dame Margaret took home “little Maggie, her orphan granddaughter, when the child was left almost without kith or kin to care for her. These two were quite alone in the world: each was the other’s only living relation, and they loved each other very dearly” (351). Dame Margaret operates a shop, and Maggie ventures into a forest to deliver the goods to a doctor on the other side of the village. Though she “set off on her journey with a jump and a run” (352), Maggie’s adventure begins with an aggressive fall on winter ice. The Aunt addresses this in her usual tone of nonchalance, noting that “whether her brain got damaged by the blow, or how else it may have been, I know not; I only know that the thwack seemed in one moment to fill the atmosphere around her with sparks, flames and flashes of lightning; and that from this identical point of time commenced her marvelous adventures” (352). Maggie’s imagination subsequently produces a different kind of sociality in her fantasy world. As she journeys into the cold, a swarm of chanting, “monstrous” children surround her, seducing her into their game and making her forget her “fatal promise” to deliver her goods (354). For Maggie, her lack of “kith and kin” means she has to imagine these children, and as the narrator reminds us, “we must bear in mind that Maggie had no playfellows at home” (354). Later, Maggie runs into a group 107

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of “sleepers” resting around a fire, and the Aunt remarks: “Do you know, children, what would most likely have happened to Maggie if she had yielded to drowsiness and slept out there in the cold? . . . Most likely she would never have woke again. And then there would have been an abrupt end to my story” (356). The narrator suggests that the stakes here are much greater than the moral lesson of denying one’s desires or, as Julia Briggs observes, the redeeming force of a “spiritual journey.”26 The most striking likeness in the story is the Mouth Boy, who ostensibly reflects Maggie’s hunger and desire to eat the chocolate from her basket of goods she is delivering. The Aunt asks: “Or was it a real boy? He had indeed arms, legs, a head, like ordinary people, but his face exhibited only one feature, and that was a wide mouth. He had no eyes; so how he came to know that Maggie and a basket were standing in his way I cannot say” (356). The gendered dynamic in this moment is obvious: thus far the story’s focus on these feminine “small heroines” (in Rossetti’s own words) shifts to a grotesque boy figure, himself a “likeness” of Maggie but also an important marker of difference. Hughes’s illustration additionally reveals a portly boy with exaggerated lips and sharp teeth, holding his arms out to Maggie (see fig. 5). Though the boy seems “marked” by gender, and specifically masculinity, he is also incomplete since he is notably missing his eyes and can be read as metaphorically castrated. Maggie’s “appetite” therefore generates a stilted form of desire, refusing clear gendered opposition in favor of this frightening physical asymmetry. This is an interesting disjunction that voids the fantasy of neat heterosexuality and the gendered polarity so often grafted onto it. This fantasy, as Jacqueline Rose reminds us, underscores that “sexuality belongs in this area of instability played out in the register of demand and desire, each sex coming to stand, mythically and exclusively, for that which could satisfy and complete the other.”27 In her only confrontation with some sort of masculinity in this story, Maggie can experience the loss of any such myth of completeness only through gendered opposition. Maggie’s desires, culminating in this projection 108

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F i g u r e 5 . Arthur Hughes, Mouth Boy, from Speaking Likenesses, by Christina Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1874), 85. Source: University of Michigan Library.

of the Mouth Boy, ultimately refract the failure of clear forms of gendered opposition or complementarity and their replacement with an uncanny aesthetic of likeness. In parsing out the manner by which “Mouth Boy”—both text and image—is in dialogue with the question of gendered selfrecognition, it is useful to remember the older etymology of the word “image” (eikôn in Greek) as “semblance or likeness.” Rather than denoting pure difference, “image,” as part of the general constellation of terms falling under representation, draws out difference from similitude rather than separating them altogether.28 The dialectics of Rossetti’s illustrated narrative work similarly: in the vein of Adorno’s concern with nonidentity, or the way in which “objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder,”29 girlhood’s gendered self-recognition implies an impossible desire for either complete mimesis or clear-cut difference that always leaves something 109

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unresolved. Difference in the fantasy worlds of this particular story operates as the excess of likeness, as it is Maggie’s own desires that project minimal but threatening forms of difference rather than any functional form of gender complementarity or opposition. The image of the Mouth Boy renders such structures profoundly disfigured and profoundly flawed. Rossetti has therefore taken us beyond the limits of an easily defined binary of a girl and a boy—and, by extension, femininity and masculinity. In Speaking Likenesses, the projection of otherness always fails to reinforce even an imagined wholeness through clear distinctions, and this psychic operation transgresses the limits of fantasy. As Andrea Kaston remarks, Hughes’s illustrations—most notably the grotesque figure of the Mouth Boy—render the world of “real” children more terrifying than any fictionalized monster.30 Maggie’s determination eventually thwarts her likenesses and causes them to evaporate, and to be sure, this is a happier ending to her story than that of Flora’s. Her ostensible success, however, is ultimately far less memorable than the perverse activity of girlhood perpetually discovering that projected differences are really forms of likeness. These likenesses, furthermore, can never reflect a preexisting idea of what girlhood and femininity should be. Ultimately, Maggie inhabits a world in which predictable forms of differentiation remain impossible.

“Like Two”: Counting Difference in “Goblin Market” Speaking Likenesses’ near-exhaustive negotiation of the horizontal sphere of likeness allows us to revisit Rossetti’s most canonical poem, “Goblin Market,” from a different perspective. The poem narrates the encounter between the near-homonymic sisters, Lizzie and Laura, and the goblin men who sell fruits with a “shrill repeated cry” of “Come buy, come buy” (CP, 7). As countless readers will recall, Laura is successfully lured by the goblins and eats their fruit, withering away until Lizzie, who “could not bear / To watch her sister’s cankerous care / Yet not to share” (13), offers herself to the 110

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goblins who “coaxed and fought her / Bullied and besought her” (16). Lizzie’s violent sacrifice leads to a “life out of death” (19) for Laura who “kissed and kissed and kissed her” (18), and eventually to a seeming order at the poem’s conclusion. The rhetoric of “Goblin Market” remains memorable largely because of the faux naivety implicated in these three-, four-, and five-beat lines that expand and contract, and the excessive rhyming of these short lines. Further, the stresses more often than not render the meter irregular, and therefore parts of the poem appear to be randomized. These and other prosodic features have tempted readers since its publication to think that “Goblin Market” might be more suited for the nursery than for the adult reader.31 Yet it is clear that the poem’s whimsical prosody allows us to focus on points where it does organize itself: usually in structures of parallelism, listing and inventory, rhyme, and finally, through simile, all of which draw attention to patterns of likeness on a figural level that might otherwise escape notice. For Victorian readers, the poem was, on the whole, found to be aesthetically redeeming—“most purely and completely a work of art,”—though finally, a bit dark.32 In the twentieth century, this rather shadowy undertow became the dominant frame through which “Goblin Market” has been viewed: largely as an allegory of sexual corruption and fallenness. The reading is not difficult to grasp given the cycle of temptation, death, and redemption that the poem invites us to see on a surface level. Rossetti’s involvement with Anglican sisterhoods has further provided scholars like Diane D’Amico, Mary Arseneau, and Jill Rappoport with an intriguing context for this perspective: along with her equally devoted older sister, Rossetti was an associate of St. Mary Magdalene’s Penitentiary at Highgate, which worked to rescue women branded “fallen” by the norms of Victorian society. Jan Marsh, for instance, notes the parallels between “Goblin Market” and a religious parable from the Englishwomen’s Journal in 1857 about a “penitent who falls ill from distress of mind” after eating a forbidden apple.33 Other suggestive approaches implicate the economics of the market alongside the economics of desire in the poem, 111

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reading sisterly sacrifice as a particular kind of gift economy that pushes against the goblins’ more modernized consumer culture.34 Despite “Goblin Market’s” seemingly endless allegorical offerings, then, most analyses have glossed over the poem’s central relationship—that of sisterhood—in favor of seemingly larger questions. In so doing, they have overlooked the poem’s basic formal reliance on likeness to produce a form of difference that resists enfolding by a given context.35 Janet Casey, for instance, astutely notes: “Goblin Market celebrates a dynamism—a ‘sisterhood’—between polarities, and allows Laura and Lizzie to embody this interdependence in both narrative and metaphoric terms.”36 But she also posits an ideal of “completeness” and “wholeness” in the poem that sisterhood encompasses, a term that flattens a less than universal oneness we find at the end of the work.37 One of the ways in which the poem begins to sidestep entrenched notions of individualism and completeness is by a very simple mathematical formalism. In other words, it is not difficult to grasp that this is another literary text that counts: it places emphasis immediately on “ones” and “twos” to distinguish the goblins from the sisters. Early verses describe each goblin as follows: One had a cat’s face, One whisked a tail, One tramped at a rat’s pace One crawled like a snail[.] (7)

The sisters, meanwhile, seem to represent an intimate twoness: Like two blossoms on one stem, Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow Like two wands of ivory Tipped with gold for awful kings. (10)

This distinction between ones and twos, however, is not as polarized as the poem would lead us to believe. By its conclusion, oneness falls on the side of the sisters, and we find that the deceptively simple 112

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twoness of their sororal relationality has effectively unduplicated itself. The resulting oneness of sisterly femininity decouples from the primacy of a totalizing One. Indeed, the much-discussed conclusion to the poem, in which the girls have transformed into wives and mothers, demonstrates a form of singularity that not only distinguishes itself from the particularized oneness of the goblin men, as I discuss here, but also depends on their twoness to exist: For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands. (20)

Here, the poem shows us quite clearly that likeness cannot be mimesis, or in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, that “the like is not the same (le semblable n’est pas le pareil).”38 My choice of Nancy here is quite deliberate, as I want to foreground the move the poem makes to a tenuous form of community—the notion of “being singular plural”—that is no longer wed to a petrified notion of the solitary individual nor the isolated one. Rather, we have moved from the “onenesss” of the goblin men, which is particularized, discrete, and operates on only a descriptive level (“in groups or single”), to the “oneness” ascribed to the sisters that involves action and possibility (“to cheer one,” “to fetch one,” “to lift one”). The decisive shift in the poem from “like two” to “one” negates erotic complementarity produced through gender binaries. This is because the likeness between Lizzie and Laura leads to a form of individual distinction that bears little relation to the forms of difference that previously carved out and defined the sisters’ apparent sameness. Helena Michie, who has looked at sisterly difference in her reading of Rossetti’s lyrics, notably invokes these ones and twos to suggest that “Goblin Market” moves from the twoness of sisterly intimacy to the oneness of sexual knowledge. Once more, for Michie, 113

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Victorian texts exhibit a form of “sororophobia”: the simultaneous desire for and aversion to the representation of sisters. Such literary works “frequently enrich and complicate feminist notions of sisterhood, as they undermine our most dearly cherished tropes of female unity.”39 Michie quite aptly suggests that “Goblin Market” “is perhaps more accurately also a poem about sexual difference.”40 Michie, however, goes further by drawing attention to a complex dichotomy in the poem between domestic sameness; the “undifferentiation” of the state of virginity that Lizzie, the “good sister” operates in; and the goblin men’s trade in difference, or more precisely, the individuation produced by sexual knowledge and sexual difference. Yet aligning difference, or “ones”—a term that is distinctly nonhomogenous in the poem—exclusively with the goblin men, and sameness, or “twos” with the domestic safety of the sororal, does not adequately capture the poem’s ultimate emphasis on a oneness that escapes both of these categorical distinctions. In what follows, I analyze the ways in which “Goblin Market” navigates various forms of difference—economic, sexual, and aesthetic, all of which scholars have studied in some detail—as means for examining seemingly hard and fast distinctions between masculinity and femininity. To be sure, the gendered distinction between goblin men, on the one hand, and Lizzie and Laura, on the other hand, has been the main binary through which critics have sought to understand this poem. It is clear from the onset, for instance, that the goblins represent some form of racialized masculinity. They are “merchant men” (7) and animal-like: “the cat-face purr’d / The rat-paced spoke a word” (8). Lizzie and Laura, of course, represent the only recognizable femininity in the poem (although they do allude to their deceased friend Jeannie). What remains absent from the conclusion of this work is an affirmation of a form of femininity by or within these gendered polarities, polarities which are tethered to racial difference, as I return to in the coda to this chapter. The feminine ones we find in the poem’s conclusion arises from an uncanny likeness that characterizes sisterhood in Rossetti’s overall work. This sisterhood runs 114

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against the grain of Michie’s claim that “sisterhood, like the Oedipus complex, is fundamentally family drama.”41 Like the shorter lyrics I examined earlier in this chapter, “Goblin Market” takes great pains to distinguish sisterhood from the container of the patriarchal family and explore its potential as a generative structure in its own right. Sisterhood here stands in a relationship of complete alterity to precisely those vertical lines of kinship that a simplified reading of the Oedipus complex might suggest. No sooner have we read the opening lines than we realize that parents, lineage, and history are absent from “Goblin Market” since the poem begins by notably representing “maids” and “goblins” in a shared form of generality, one that suggests no point of origin for either: “Morning and evening / Maids heard the goblin cry: ‘Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy’” (5). While “maids and goblins” might certainly refer to a gendered distinction, “morning and evening” connote only cyclicality, without patrilineal or generational history. Further, the sisters Lizzie and Laura bear no relation to anyone but each other. When we first hear of their individual names, they appear isolated from any clear context: Evening by evening Among the brookside rushes Laura bowed her head to hear, Lizzie veiled her blushes: Crouching close together In the cooling weather, With clasping arms and cautioning lips, With tingling cheeks and finger tips. (6)

By stark contrast, the goblin men represent a clear form of fraternity that preserves their differences through the familial bond of “brothers”: They stood stock still upon the moss, Leering at each other, 115

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Brother with queer brother; Signalling each other, Brother with sly brother. (7)

The goblins, importantly, represent an order predicated on a seemingly endless replication. Therefore, distinction between the goblins on the order of the “one” is also blatantly nondistinctive, slipping easily into the mass of “they” and the inclusive “voice and stir.” The goblins, then, possess an individuality that represents only a part of a whole: their difference belies universal sameness. The sisters, however, initiate the reverse movement in the poem, in which seeming likeness becomes the vehicle for difference: Golden head by golden head, Like two pigeons in one nest Folded in each other’s wings, They lay down in their curtained bed: Like two blossoms on one stem, Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow, Like two wands of ivory Tipped with gold for awful kings. (10)

Despite their differing approaches to the goblin men (Lizzie plugs her ears to their cries, while Laura goes to meet them), here Lizzie and Laura are framed by the poem as commensurable; they are yoked by the rhythm of this stanza and the rhetorical logic of simile. The poem seems to affirm a state of perfect complementarity between the women, as do the illustrations from Dante Gabriel Rossetti that accompanied the poem’s original printing. Yet these few lines, unlike the majority of the poem, do not rhyme: the anaphora of “like two” substitutes for the propelling force of rhyme to carry the lines forward, making these words striking both formally and thematically. These lines also frame the intimacy between the sisters through a series of images that, on closer inspection, reveals subtle distinctions: the mirroring that occurs through Laura and Lizzie’s pairing 116

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is refracted through related kinds of particularity: colonial (as in the “two wands of ivory”), phallic (suggested by the wands “tipped with gold”), and economic (as we can see through the words “ivory and gold”). Unlike Dorothy Mermin’s claim that the poem “shows women testing the allurements of male sexuality and exploring the imaginative world that male eroticism has created,”42 male eroticism cannot seem to generate anything but sameness, while sororal likeness functions to produce imaginative difference through simile. The point becomes even clearer when we hear about Jeannie, a third, spectral friend figure of the sisters, who “took their [the goblins’] gifts both choice and many, / Ate their fruits and wore their flowers” (14). Jeannie represents Lizzie’s cautionary tale to Laura since Jeanne “fell with the first snow” after eating goblin fruit and “While to this day no grass will grow / Where she lies low” (14). As a third figure, Jeannie subsequently haunts any kind of perfect binary between Lizzie and Laura. But she also haunts complementarity between the goblin men and sisterly femininity, such that she forecloses generative possibility in the poem out of sexual difference. Here, it is worth pointing out the sheer uncanniness of rhyme—seemingly too a vehicle for sameness and complementarity—in these sections of Rossetti’s poem: while the marker of Laura’s “fallenness,” the “kernel-stone,” has no demonstrable pairing in lines 281–319, Jeannie’s metrically abrupt end in which “she fell sick and died” (315) generates four subsequent end-rhymed lines. Jeannie’s story shadows the later, more violent demonstration in the poem of sexual opposition, that of Lizzie’s symbolic rape at the hands of the goblins. In this later scene, Lizzie, wary of her sister’s condition, proposes an exchange to the goblins: “‘Good folk,’ said Lizzie, / Mindful of Jeannie: / ‘Give me much and many:’— / Held out her apron, / Tossed them her penny” (365–67). While much has been made of Lizzie’s knowledge of the market, compared to Laura’s lack of exchangeable coins (Laura gives the goblins a lock of her hair instead), on a much simpler level, both the market and the goblins’ violence traffic in the clear oppositions between sameness and difference. 117

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In other words, objectification, either through economic or sexual means, requires a suppression of likeness in favor of clear othering, and the goblin men operate only in terms of these binary classifications. They therefore tell Lizzie that “Such fruits as these / No man can carry; / Half their bloom would fly, / Half their dew would dry, / Half their flavour would pass by” (15). The goblins’ logic of the “half,” the logic of classification and opposition, can easily slide into violence, as the poem suggests when Lizzie’s encounter with the goblins culminates in the form of a rape: the goblins “hugged her and kissed her: / Squeezed and caressed her,” then “held her hands and squeezed their fruits / Against her mouth to make her eat” (14–15). As scholars have noted, because Lizzie’s sacrifice produces an antidote that then saves Laura and brings the ailing sister a “life out of a death,” this moment conflates erotic imagery with the distinctly Christ-like vision of redemption. But Lizzie’s sacrifice to the ultimate expression of the violence of gendered opposition—rape—also nullifies the force of this difference in the poem. Lizzie’s endurance of the goblin men amounts to gender confusion. She alternately inhabits a phallic position, one “like a rock of blue-veined stone,” and Christlike strength: “like a lily in a flood.” The similes proliferate again when Laura drinks from the “hungry mouth” of her sister: Or like the mane of horses in their flight, Or like an eagle when she stems the light Straight toward the sun, Or like a caged thing freed, Or like a flying flag when armies run. (18)

It is of course no accident that simile, rather than metaphor, flourishes at this crucial moment of resurrection because unlike the latter, simile reinforces likeness without sliding into vertical forms of sameness. Similes cannot express discernible identities or opposites, but they preserve a form of minimal difference in the figural act of announcing similarity. Erik Gray writes that these similes eclipse Laura’s individuality because each rhetorical figure is “impoverishing”; Rossetti 118

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consequently “seems to be admitting her own incapacity to discover a single sufficient likeness.”43 Yet can we confidently assess Rossetti’s similes in a strict economy of likeness and difference, one handed down by a largely masculine lyric tradition, an economy that “Goblin Market” itself purports to unravel? The diminishment of clear likeness suggests a desirable incompleteness, a rhetorical pleasure we have encountered already in “The Lowest Room.” The space of minimal difference between Lizzie and Laura in these proliferating similes produces a new kind of life—precarious and impossible to quantify—out of the death of gendered opposition. The poem thus begins to theorize sexual difference along different lines than goblin men and maids, relocating it to the space between sisters. In the final lines, the poem glances toward a future in which the sisters move from “maidens” to “wives” and finally “mother-hearts”: Days, weeks, months, years Afterwards, when both were wives With children of their own; Their mother-hearts beset with fears, Their lives bound up in tender lives; Laura would call the little ones And tell them of her early prime. (19)

Critics have long puzzled over the fact that no men remain at the end of this poem besides the memory of the goblins’ masculinity; further, the sisters’ claim to motherhood seems oddly devoid of any patrilineal authority. The conclusion continues with an even stranger shift in tone: For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen while one stands. (19) 119

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What Rossetti was after with this conclusion to “Goblin Market,” framed by the cheery motto, “there is no friend like a sister,” has remained a critical puzzle. From one angle, the poem seems to have collapsed into rather straightforward support of a domestic sororal world unconcerned with sexual knowledge. However, femininity does not signify in any meaningful way through the norms of kinship we associate with this division between knowledge and innocence, sameness and difference, and masculinity and femininity. The sisterly “ones” that conclude the poem strike an utterly different note from the “ones” of cat-faced and rat-paced goblins. This form of oneness, as I have noted before, transcends description to evoke potential, and since there are effectively no other relations in “Goblin Market” that persist besides sisterhood, this notion of oneness can carve out difference only through the peculiar form of likeness that sororal relationships—or the difference between two “ones”—produces. Further, when we read the final lines out loud, the phrase “to lift one” invokes the shadow of “like two”: the preposition “to”—with its implications of moving forward, is ghosted by the numeric energy of “two,” the number. The conclusion of the poem thus affirms a singularity that draws from the complicated realm of sisterhood rather than the final, secure image of mothers and children or the oppositional relation between goblin men and women. In effect, the poem’s representation of a distinctly feminine singularity is one of accession to a space between the possible and the impossible: in its final lines, femininity can operate freely in a landscape that has neutralized certain forms of difference that result in stringent dualisms but has its origins in a likeness that is ultimately irreproducible.

Coda: “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857” and Racial Difference I’ve established in this chapter that heterosexual coupling does not offer Rossetti’s speakers much in the way of subjectivity outside of death and the denial of sexual fulfillment. Rather, likeness between 120

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women repeatedly produces singularity by leaning on a minimal but deeply generative difference. This difference is figural and structural. It emanates from the space of form rather than the domain of readily discernible physical difference. The kind of withdrawal we see in Rossetti’s work from the conventional realm of gendered subjectivity—a withdrawal I find instructive for rethinking relationality itself—becomes significantly more complex when it has to contend with racial difference. I turn briefly in this concluding section to Rossetti’s “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857.” To Victorianists, the poem is reasonably well known for its depiction of a white couple who commit a double murder-suicide during the Indian Mutiny or, as it often is referred to in the present, the Indian Rebellion or the first Indian War of Independence. Rossetti originally published the poem in Once a Week, where it was credited to “Caroline G. Rossetti.” Like most white readers in England, Rossetti had read about the Indian Rebellion in sensational, lurid detail in the papers and, in this case, in the tabloid-like Illustrated London News. In 1857, the paper ran a (false) news report about the Rebellion—following an initial report of the events at Jhansi in the Times—of Captain Alexander Skene, claiming that he had shot his wife and then shot himself to avoid falling to the Indian rebels. The poem Rossetti composed in response to the news article appears to be in the usual vein of aggressive melodrama bolstered by racial panic. After it was republished in Goblin Market and Other Poems with a new third stanza, Rossetti also qualified the poem with the following note: “I retain this little poem, not as historically accurate, but as written and published before I heard the supposed facts of its first verse contradicted.”44 Yet given the fact that the poem was reprinted immediately following “Goblin Market,” it is curious how little critical attention it has received.45 I raise it here to put forward the essential imbrication of heterosexual difference with emerging logics of racial difference in the nineteenth century, an idea I explore more fully in the next chapter. When read in the context of Rossetti’s preoccupation with likeness, the poem reveals the wider mechanisms through which difference is structured. 121

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“Jhansi” opens with a recognizable image of the brown, undifferentiated mass: A hundred, a thousand to one; even so; Not a hope in the world remained: The swarming howling wretches below Gained and gained and gained. (1–4)

The opening image of “a hundred, a thousand to one”—coolly hyperbolic—also evocates the racialized (and class-based) foundations of liberal individuation that further consolidated in the British imaginary after the Rebellion (and other colonial uprisings), in which a white subject required the “mass” or the “mob” to count itself and individualize against: a kind of racial sameness to frame liberal difference.46 Here, set against this dehumanized and deindividualized mob of rebels is Skene and his “pale young wife” (5) who engage in a call-and-response for the rest of the poem that ends in their deaths (“Close his arm about her now, / Close her cheek to his, / Close the pistol to her brow—” [9–11]) at one another’s hands: “‘Good bye.’—‘Good bye’” (20). Priti Joshi observes that “events in India were scripted as a romance of heroic masculinity and imperiled womanhood, a national drama  .  .  . that was conceived in gendered terms.”47 Clearly this poem—and the broader landscape of British middle-class journalism—processes colonial unrest through those very terms, the charged (in Rossetti’s oeuvre) language of heterosexual coupling, difference, and gender. More acutely, “Jhansi” engages the specter of sexual violence in which the existence of white femininity—a “pale young wife”—is bound up, as clearly this is the main reason for Skene’s shooting of his wife before himself. While we might say Rossetti here is merely consolidating a perspective on white female victimhood-as-subjectivity that the majority of British readers shared, it is perhaps more prescient to say that the poem lays bare, through a double mediation of the Indian Rebellion (the poem as-news article-as event), the fragile construction of white coupling as the apex of gendered difference, and as Tricia Lootens powerfully 122

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puts it, the “vulnerable, violently structured, racially haunted hearts of our own inherited dreams of private innocence.”48 It is further worthwhile to note that the leader of the Indian Rebellion at Jhansi was a woman, Lakshmi Bai, the rani of Jhansi. That the poem, with its halting punctuation and irregular rhythm in fact references within its larger political context a third, a woman of color (who is not contained by the constraints of verse but nevertheless implicated in the wider situation with which Victorian readers would be aware) complicates the straightforward affirmation of “domestic affection and personal sacrifice on behalf of patriotism and purity” that Victorian readers would associate with a “poetess” figure like Rossetti.49 “Jhansi” is a strange poem. It lives on the border of detached description, deliberate melodrama, and ironic commentary on how colonial events are framed and understood, how they feed networks of difference grounded in the fragile interchange between whiteness and gender. And here is where I find myself caught in this interchange, stranded between the feminist structural promise of a singularity borne out of likeness in Rossetti’s work and the poetic inability to overturn the racial formation of the brown “mass” in this short poem. Rossetti simply cannot provide us a vision of racial difference as insurgent as the one I claim she draws around femininity. This is an impasse but perhaps also an invitation, to take Rossetti’s potent and willful disruption of gendered difference further, to understand finally its connections with how those structures of difference enable and disenable other subjectivities. In doing so, we could make plain the insufficiencies of such forms of differentiation, the generative work of likeness, and the wider consequences of this thinking inside and outside of poetry.

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chapter 4

Seriality, Singularity, Sociality The Case for Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

I wanted to do a blanket title to describe the many different ways in which race and gender play out with each other under the rubric of “white girl.” —Hilton Als, “What Is a White Girl?”

White Girls The most celebrated scene of sensation in nineteenth-century literature opens the third installment of Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White (1859–1860). Poised to draw as much shock and frisson from readers following along in the pages of Charles Dickens’s new periodical All the Year Round, this moment, which D. A. Miller famously named the book’s “primal scene,”1 finds the novel’s main narrator and middle-class drawing teacher Walter Hartright at a fork in the road. This stopping point is between London and Limmeridge House, the estate where he is to teach drawing to Laura Fairlie, the daughter of diseased Philip Fairlie, and her half-sister Marian Halcombe. Indulging in some light erotic daydreaming around “the two ladies whose practice . . . I was so soon to superintend” and “what the Cumberland young ladies would look like,”2 Hartright is jolted back to reality by the uncanny appearance of a woman in white, noting, with great dramatic tension: There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from 124

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head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. (63)

The figure is none other than Anne Catherick, a young woman incarcerated in an asylum, whom we later discover is the illegitimate child of Philip Fairlie. Anne has been shut up by Laura’s future husband, Sir Percival Glyde, a baronet, and his Italian accomplice, Count Fosco, to protect Glyde’s own illegitimacy, or what the novel describes as his “Secret.” What’s more, according to every male character in the novel (who do not yet know of Anne’s parentage), Anne and Laura share an “ominous,” “electrifying,” and “sickly” likeness. This is a likeness that emboldens Fosco and Glyde to substitute their bodies for one another: poisoning Anne, burying her, and inscribing Laura’s name on her tombstone while shutting Laura up in an asylum. Their substitution ultimately enables Glyde to gain Laura’s considerable inheritance upon her death. The encounter between Anne and Hartright takes place before Collins’s characteristically circuitous plot will send him and Marian on a quest to reestablish Laura’s identity. Hartright and Marian eventually succeed, by proving that on the date Laura, or “Lady Glyde,” was proclaimed dead, she was still very much alive and on her way to London from Blackwater Park, Glyde’s estate. Yet in this pivotal scene, claims to truth and reference, which anchor the novel’s overlapping interests in gender, the law, and narrative, collapse for Hartright. We should bear in mind that he presides over the novel’s organization from an omniscient point of view in which all events are resolved: his is the ideal bildung of the neutral and deeply generalized subject of liberalism: collecting, uniting, and thus projecting a fantasy of integration onto the world of the novel. Yet after briefly noting Anne’s all-white clothing, taking pains to dispel all readerly suspicions of fallenness by assuring that “there was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner,” Hartright finally declares: “this was all I could observe of her” (63). As a result, the woman in white 125

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is epistemologically unrecognizable to him within any kind of temporal or symbolic continuity, the twin frames that serve as the backbone of the novel’s inquiry into female identity. Anne is neither a fallen woman, a femme fatale, a runaway bride, nor an especially “redundant woman” as W. R. Greg and the Woman Question detractors would have it. But she nevertheless manages to radically interrupt his self-extending autonomy, to the point that he asks: “Was I Walter Hartright?” (67). Later, as Hartright attempts to draw, he once again acknowledges the loss of his overarching perspective: “I sat down and tried, first to sketch, then to read—but the woman in white got between me and my pencil, between me and my book . . . were we two following our widely-parted roads towards one point in the mysterious future?” (71). A woman in white, white women, and two women who are not one. In the newly electrified modernity of the sensation novel, one shaped by various kinds of gendered and racialized calculus, the woman in white marks the collapse of the dialectic of particular and universal that anchors the legibility of individuation. Whiteness here resists the easy dimensions of purity and virginity, generating instead an excess of figuration that, I argue, gains an unstable racial charge. Diane Elam, for instance, observes: “the figure of the woman in white first of all genders the problem of referentiality and truth. More interestingly, the woman in white appears as the figure of reference itself.”3 On the same note, Mario Ortiz-Robles writes: “the figure of thewoman-in-white is functionally capable of resisting allegorical determinations (say, for instance, ‘bride’) but, as an empty subject position, it can also accommodate them in an iterative series: Laura Fairlie, Anne Catherick, and, by extension, ‘Woman,’ as such.”4 The Woman in White thus moves out of the register of metaphor (i.e., whiteness as virginal, Woman as universal, white womanhood as gender itself) into metonymy (i.e., blankness as serially iterative and contingent), unraveling or rather exposing the (literally) empty foundation of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as “feminist individualism” in the Victorian novel: its claiming of bourgeois individualism 126

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Case for Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

and particularity on gendered grounds through the joint projects of “sexual reproduction” and “soul making.”5 It is this particular form of feminine subjectivity that the genre of the sensation novel—with its sustained look at the regulatory regime of marriage qua gendered difference under English law—is especially adept at scrutinizing. The Woman in White’s “primal scene” therefore makes one thing immediately clear: that the notion of a single, solitary Woman is a receding mirage, a well of semiotic quicksand. But this “single” Woman in white is also a white woman in white. Picking up on the epigraph to this chapter from an interview with contemporary critic Hilton Als about his book of essays, White Girls (2013), I propose we too follow the unraveling of the position of Woman in Collins’s novel— the place that should be held by Als’s paradigmatic “white girl”—to think new possibilities and social arrangements out of gender and race. For Als, a “white girl” is a shifting locus of desirability, vulnerability, masquerade, and power. “White girls” are not so much rigid forms of individuation and identity as they are indexes into a world perpetually caught up in gendered and racial binaries. In this chapter, I want to argue that The Woman in White places femininity in a complex matrix of differences and sameness that structure gendered arrangements of power as much as they structure racial hierarchies. The novel testifies to the cultural production of whiteness in and through tropes of femininity, setting up a chain of associations from sisterly difference to sexual difference to racial difference. And while Laura’s identity is eventually “restored,” the novel makes clear that outside of Walter’s “sensations”—which appear to confirm which woman is which—there is no secure way to verify that the surviving Laura is not, in fact, Anne Catherick. This gesture on the part of the sensation novel leaves the body as a stable site of reading racial and sexual difference radically open. But it also exposes the wider instability of a social order that grounds itself in the fiction of whiteness as a libidinal fantasy that can be sensed, felt, and seen.6 I pause here to note that under the long arc of liberal capitalist modernity, the nineteenth-century novel purports to tell a very 127

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different story about subjectivity than the one I trace in these chapters. The novel’s congealing of feminine individuation in the bourgeois model is a familiar account given by Nancy Armstrong, who famously writes that Victorian domestic fiction showed us that “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman.”7 By privatizing and depoliticizing desire (largely through the marriage plot), the nineteenth-century novel strips individual autonomy of its ideological contradictions, leaving only universal moral feeling and emotional depth. In doing so, nineteenth-century novels, especially those written by women (Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a primary example), consolidated gender as middle-class, white domesticity. “Universalizing the individual subject,” writes Armstrong, is, “simply put, what novels do.”8 In the now-canonical Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) as well as in How Novels Think (2005), Armstrong makes a sustained attempt to demystify nineteenth-century literary and political individualism rather than confirm its ideological stability. The British novel as a technology of social consolidation had to work to “incorporate” and “abject competing ways of thinking about the individual.”9 Such efforts—as Elaine Freedgood also shows—were necessarily leaky, never quite successful.10 Further, “competing” genres to the realist novel included not only so-called minor literary forms (such as children’s books) but also wildly popular fiction that circulated through the 1860s. This particular genre of fiction—the sensation novel— made writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood household names. While delving into often lurid accounts of murder, poisoning, and false identities, these novels produced a thinking around gendered identity that posed a serious threat to Armstrong’s universalized subject because they fundamentally questioned the conceptual apparatus of the universal in delimiting the boundaries of epistemology and ontology. The subject generated in the pages of these novels, which Patrick Brantlinger describes as a “unique mixture of contemporary domestic realism with elements of the Gothic romance, the Newgate 128

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novel of criminal ‘low life,’ and the ‘silver fork’ novel of scandalous and sometimes criminal ‘high life’”11 is, as Lyn Pykett and other Foucauldian readers of the 1980s put it, “the nervous modern individual.”12 This subject indexed a world newly driven by suspicion and surveillance, an incarnation of Sedgwick’s infamous “paranoid reader,” whose very blood would curdle under the sensations Hartright describes: “the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder” (63). Calibrated to the uncertain rhythms of modern life, the sensation novel, particularly in Collins’s hands, spoke acutely to the conceptually vexed relationship between parts and the whole in the political and social landscape of the mid-nineteenth century. If the “whole”—the imperial nation-state—constantly revealed itself to be porous and largely held in place through violence, how then could its relative “parts” relate to one another as well as to the whole to which they must, under the law, remain subordinate? Sensation novels took up the tension that is constitutive of partwhole relationships largely through the problem of female identity and the female body. In Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)—one of two novels Henry James praised for its “thorough-going realism” (the other being The Woman in White)—a newly married woman’s bigamous and violent past explodes the border between the sacred and the profane that holds female particularity in check and by extension, a fragile social order.13 Because a woman’s social and legal identities under coverture law would effectively disappear, meditating on the problem of identity led sensation novelists down increasingly complex and unwieldy paths, revealing only the fiction of “identity” as a stable and essential locus for defining femininity. The sensation novel therefore did not individuate femininity under the bourgeois mandate but developed and extended a familiar Gothic motif of the doubled and iterated female body, or what Emily Steinlight calls “the ungovernable female body.”14 It is a Gothic motif that continues to resonate in the contemporary political sphere. Nearly all sensation novels pose a similar, fundamental question: is a woman ever who she says she really is? This question, requiring 129

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elaborate novelistic and juridical inquiries, chillingly recalls the casual violence, and concomitant spectacle, visited on women’s as well as all marginalized people’s bodies well into the contemporary. The sensation novel, therefore, is a potent reminder of the continued gendered and racialized disavowals that carry over from the rise of liberal humanism into the present. This instability of female embodiment is, for Collins’s The Woman in White, a jumping-off point from which to contemplate other horizons for collectivity that do not rely on existing conceptual schemas. In this vein, the novel is less about “lost particulars” as Nathan Hensley has recently put it, but a doing away of the language of particularity altogether.15 This is a theoretically risky move on the part of the novel because despite its seeming efforts to contain the uncounted and the unassimilable by, for instance, ending the novel with Walter and Laura Fairlie’s male child, the “heir of Limmeridge,” it clearly undermines those efforts in its pages. I argue here that the novel offers an alternative model for thinking the subject in relation by showing us that existence is not only singular but serial. By serial, I mean a horizontal and contiguous arrangement of subjects who are similar but not the same. Collins’s novel moves laterally to destabilize difference and reconstitute the social in the manner that José Esteban Muñoz describes, as a “restructured sociality.”16 In Muñoz’s account, we can glimpse the potential of a different social world through forms of queer relationality that decomplete a universal. Suggesting that inhabiting a female body over time might be inherently queer, The Woman in White leaves open the possibility that subjects could be organized in radically different relations to themselves and to others.17 This novelistic world thus makes an initial observation about gendered embodiment a touchstone from which to consider larger questions of social and political belonging. Transgressing the boundaries of identity, substituting one woman for another, justifying violence against certain bodies to maintain the fictional coherence of others: all of the moves enacted within Collins’s The Woman in White speak to the well-known anxieties of the 130

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Woman Question debates and, in particular, the consequences of negotiating marital law in Britain, which rendered women the physical and economic property of their husbands. But these are crucially the same tropes that distinguish nineteenth- and twentieth-century passing narratives that took on what W. E. B. Dubois labeled the “color line.”18 The color line describes the naturalizing of racial segregation across nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and the subsequent organization of racial difference into spatial and geographical terms. The “one-drop” rule of racial blackness consolidated a modern definition of whiteness beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, across the Atlantic world. The result of this violent legal conscription of the racial binary was a problem of visibility and epistemology explored by passing narratives. “Passing”—crossing racial lines, usually into whiteness—depended on an uneasy relationship to the visual and, especially, to reading skin and the surface of the body. Literature that explores and figures passing typically exposes a gap between the body and its interior as a stable locus of meaning. As Samira Kawash reminds us, “the passing theme insists that knowability and visibility may diverge in unsuspected and uncontrollable ways.”19 The questions raised by passing narratives include (1) what distinguishes “property” from personhood? and (2) who “counts” in front of the law and the state? These are the same questions raised by The Woman in White and many of Collins’s novels (The Law and the Lady [1875], for instance, and No Name [1862]) that interrogate British coverture law and the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870 and 1882). It is vital to consider them, subsequently, as questions of racialization too. The epistemological unease so common to passing literature also drives and animates the Woman in White. The novel’s erotics thrive in the bodily confusion of the sacred and the profane, a “sickly” likeness that threatens to derail an entire edifice of gendered and gradually consolidating racial orders predicated on whiteness as an aesthetic-affective mode. Critics of Collins’s novel have consistently drawn attention to its focus on “white” or “blank” space, both as a 131

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challenge to and reinscription of conventional ways of reading and generating meaning. But they also tend to gloss over the shoring up of whiteness as racial and feminine purity in the novel’s afterlife. Nicholas Daly makes the case that “the early 1860s are white years. The arrival of ‘sensation’ as a byword for the breathlessly modern in these years . . . seems curiously wed to that color.”20 To be more precise, he writes, “the sensation era is ushered in by a series of female figures identified with whiteness.”21 Daly explores the novel’s afterlife in European visual art, particularly the popularity of the figure of a “white woman” in paintings by James McNeill Whistler. But the “Woman in White” had an especially viral role in the popular landscape of the 1860s too, evidenced by the widespread circulation of Collins’s titular figure in material goods, quick and dirty theater adaptations, as well as parodies. One such satirical adaptation appeared in the pages of Punch in February 1863, titled “Mokeanna, or, The White Witness: A Tale of the Times.” An accompanying illustration by George Du Maurier shows a woman in a white nightgown, her hair pulled by a racialized male figure (sometimes referred to as a “Leprechaun”). The contrast in Du Maurier’s image emphasizes the whiteness of the lady against the man’s threat of violence, serving as a reminder of the wider machinery of racial difference set in partial motion by the figure of a woman in white. The ubiquity of a “white girl” in the mid-nineteenth century shifts our attention back to the very color that was to become a paradigmatic noncolor: white. I read white space in the novel as an index of its larger epistemological project: a desire to abstract and to neutralize difference. If these are the blind spots of the narrative, they are also, as I show in what follows, overinvested with the energy of whiteness as a racial marker of universal knowledge and recognition. In the remainder of this chapter, I explore how reading femininity and the female body in Collins’s novel produces whiteness as the “nonracial.” I then examine how the nonracial functions in the novel as a narrative and aesthetic mode. I finally suggest that The Woman in White’s deep interest in seriality and serial being offers other ways 132

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of contemplating subjectivity and sociality that splinter the wholeness and smoothness of the nonracial.

Walter Hartright and the Limits of Narrative In “An Old Question Raised Again,” Immanuel Kant stitches a theory of history with his attempt to reconcile the terror of the French Revolution—the singular event—to an overall faith in human progress. Drafted in the midst of the Revolution at the onset of the Terror, “An Old Question” ruminates on the possibilities of progress in the face of revolutionary political violence, suggesting that revolutionary violence meets particular ends only when it can be witnessed from the outside as a spectacle that guides private feeling. For Kant, the revolution is an example of the sublime that is witnessed or greeted by “enthusiasm.” In the spectatorial context of the scene of revolutionary violence, “humanity as a whole, which hails, with such universal and impartial sympathy, the hopes for its success and the efforts toward realizing it.”22 Embedded within this scene of spectatorial fantasy is the kernel of a real, a violence, or a terror that will continue to rattle German Idealism after Kant—particularly Hegel—who will nevertheless strive to account for how history, subjectivity, and a public sphere can structure and reproduce itself in the wake of revolution (I would strongly add the Haitian Revolution to this more classic scenario of the Terror in France, though Hegel might disagree).23 For The Woman in White, these scenes of revolutionary violence are written directly into the plot: the novel begins in 1849, a crucial moment for revolutionary activity across continental Europe but most explosively in Italy. Furthermore, its various parts, which are narrated in first person by different “witnesses” or characters, are supposedly arranged by Walter into a coherent whole in 1851. As readers now and then would certainly know, 1851, the year of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, is virtually synonymous in the British imaginary with imperial-capitalist modernity: its very own spectatorial fantasy. The post-1848 period in which the novel sets its events then swelled with revolutionary fervor 133

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of a more diffuse kind, and it deserves closer examination. For Italy, the Risorgimento (“Resurgence”) encompassed the long struggle for Italian territorial unification that began with a brief stint under the rule of Napoleon (who took over the throne in 1805) and ended, effectively, in 1870–1871 with the Franco-Prussian War, which granted Italy Rome and the Papal states. The surrounding cultural debate about Italian unification and freedom could not fail to interest Collins and other Victorian writers in Britain, for whom a certain curiosity about the Mediterranean had a long historical precedent.24 This is in many ways proximate to how German philosophy viewed French revolutionary terror: far enough to have missed its visceral insurgency, close enough to assimilate safely. Yet The Woman in White bears witness to the impossibility of coldly, simply, bearing witness: the shadow of absolutism (to which I return briefly at the end of this section) in its engagement with “the Italian Question” and a barely submerged colonial violence continuously return to fracture attempts to manage and digest difference through a liberal form of universalism, the political grounds of its self-consciously modern narrative mode. Together, these currents of political violence in the text operate as shadows that disenchant “blank” or white space in the novel. A larger philosophical and spectatorial project at work in the novel is evident from the first lines of its oft-quoted preface: This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and of what a Man’s resolution can achieve. If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil or gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of public attention in a Court of Justice. But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and the story is left to be told, for the first time, in this place. As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. (45) 134

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This opening provides scaffolding for the novel’s structure and testifies to a crucial transition from the single sovereign power of a paternal lawgiver—“the machinery of the Law that could be depended on,” “the Judge,” and by extension a King or God—to the self-governing individual in a collective social body: a body projected onto the fantasy of equality between “Readers.”25 This is a kind of horizontalizing of authority that forms the social contract of the novel and of the wider social world in which it is embedded: one that imagines a covenant between subjects who are, like Kant’s witnesses to spectacle, capable of approaching collectivity through a kind of disinterested regard. Critical readings of The Woman in White tend to focus on how the novel portrays Britain’s slow grind toward marriage reform in the aftermath of the 1857 Divorce Act, which moved divorce cases from the ecclesiastic to the civic courts. But its consciousness of a transforming political modernity has wider roots, roaming across national borders to colonial and continental spaces. Its trial mode—the touchstone of its liberal understanding of justice— initially enshrines Walter’s role as editor and primary narrator. His increasing self-awareness around what this role demands, however, reaches a culminating point when he reflects on the missing dates from his narrative on which Anne and Laura are exchanged for one another: My heart turns faint, my mind sinks in darkness and confusion when I think of it. This must not be, if I, who write, am to guide, as I ought, you who read. This must not be, if the clue that leads through the windings of the Story is to remain, from end to end, untangled in my hands. (421)

Once more, it is crucial to remember that because the stability of “Lady Glyde” as a subject position rests on Walter’s affective and (subsequent) narrative authority, the novel, as John Sutherland puts it, “is as good as Hartright’s word.”26 His defining pathology, as we can see, is narcissism: in the drive toward the “End,” Hartright 135

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imposes the fullness of his diegetic vision onto narrative absence and otherness, and creates a chain of self-same projections.27 Hartwright’s word is only as good as his self-reflection. And his self-reflection—linked to his erotic voyeurism—is far from mere individual pathology. It is instead intimately connected to his presiding consciousness over the novel, which are the very grounds of its epistemology. As Rebecca Comay cogently explains, “The modern subject turns the whole world into a picture, but only ultimately so as to put itself into the center of the picture.”28 The generalizing authority of Hartright’s narrative perspective, which he immediately and continuously evokes through the novel, draws on Elaine Hadley’s point about liberal “cognition” as an ideal through which “a liberal individual might be extracted from . . . the corporate and physical bodies that traditionally bound human aspiration.”29 The problem then with Hartright’s narrative authority is that this “universal” male subjectivity—one kind of Kantian subject or Weltbaumeister who can supposedly generalize itself—ultimately finds the limits of its extensiveness in femininity. Alternating between lack and excess in Hartright’s narrative, his obsession lays bare his erotic idealization of femininity, as a fantasized other construed by his infinitely projected “I.” Keeping in mind the interruptive force of Walter’s first encounter with Anne, the “Woman in White,” we can juxtapose his sentiments with similar musings over his first meeting with Laura: “How can I describe her? How can I separate her from my own sensations, and from all that has happened in a later time?” (89). Later, after reflecting on Laura’s appearance again and musing on the “familiar sensations which we all know” regarding the beauty of women, he quickly admits to “the idea of something wanting” in her presence: a lack “that seemed strangely inconsistent and unaccountably out of place” (91). This “something wanting” disturbs Walter because it suggests something incomplete within his own powers of observation: “At one time it seemed like something wanting in her, at another, like something wanting in myself, which hindered me from understanding her as I ought” (91). This statement 136

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presents a temporal problem in stabilizing identity, as Irene Tucker argues, that opens up the question of how Laura “exists over time and in what ways such an existence is legible.”30 But more forcefully, I think, it brings into focus Hartright’s elision of difference in his narrative perspective: a point of view that cannot seem to generate anything other than an extension of itself, endlessly reflected and multiplied. Walter’s narration thus reveals something crucial about the novel’s engagement with femininity: reading, thinking, and feeling in The Woman in White demand and produce forms of difference while simultaneously finding their limit conditions within them. This elision on the part of Hartright’s narration undermines the legibility of gender as it does the stability of whiteness as a racial marker.31 The point becomes clear when we consider Walter’s first visual assessment of Marian, which unfolds in the following manner that shadows—quite literally—his inability to contain Anne through erotic or aesthetic means: “she left the window—and I said to myself, the lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, the lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), the lady is ugly!” (74). Marian, the masculinized, “almost swarthy” sister, confuses Walter once again with her inability to be slotted either into his erotic taxonomy or his limited ability to process women’s difference against their alleged sameness. The literary trope of the “dark” sister and the “fair” one requires some entangling here, as it shows us the ways in which binaristic notions of female beauty and moral purity are filtered through the dual prism of racial difference and female substitutability.32 The epistemic bounds of such a self-extending narrator in the nineteenth century are nothing less than the entire world. And in Kant’s description, this world encapsulates “human race viewed in its entirety . . . divided into nations and states (as it is encountered on earth).”33 This formulation recalls the colonizing project that structures such a cosmopolitan outlook for one sort of Kantian subject of the nineteenth century, and in Walter’s claims to narrative authority, 137

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we find its further strengthening in a looser, free trade model of social relations. Walter disappears for a portion of the narrative, fortifying his masculinity in Honduras, a British Crown Colony known for its mahogany exports and its dying settler colonial class. Unlike the later adventure fiction of the nineteenth century Brantlinger and others have termed “the imperial Gothic,” Walter’s forays into Central America remain mostly sketchy and unexplained, the vestiges of a “shadowy presence” in Edward Said’s phrase.34 At one point he decries, “these pages are not the record of my wanderings and my dangers away from home . . . I came back . . . a changed man” (416). Instead of direct description, this excursion finds its most vivid treatment in a dream Marian has of Walter at the steps of “an immense ruined temple,” surrounded by “the figures of dark, dwarfish men” (293). Here we register the novel’s colonial unconscious—to tweak Fredric Jameson’s formulation—this foreclosed arena required for the universal Englishness of its narrative mode to reproduce itself.35 We also witness the nineteenth-century adjunct to Kant’s philosophical tale of moral reason in speculative finance and global capital, both of which rest on a shared mode of abstracted value. This is no more clear than in the details of Victorian England’s forays into Central America in the mid-nineteenth century, a largely economic and anthropological project that Robert D. Aguirre and other scholars have called “informal empire.”36 Marian’s dream bears some relationship to an Anglo-American imaginary around the ruins of Copán (in Honduras), one circulated in popular travel narratives, as well as in the pages of Dickens’s other periodical, Household Words. One such example was a series of essays entitled “Our Phantom Ship,” by Dickens’s staff writer Henry Morley. An installment on “Central America” appeared in the February 1851 issue of the periodical. Morley had never been to Central America. But he nevertheless takes the reader on a fantastical colonial journey through Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and San Salvador, reminiscent of the prose in the enormously popular travel 138

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narrative by the American writer John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841). Morley performs some significant tweaks, however, in narrating his essay in the voice of “We Britons,” gliding from place to place in a decorporealized “Phantom Ship.” This narrative strategy recalls the highly embodied and racialized violence of actual colonial and slave ships like the Zong, and the efforts to distinguish Britons from the site of such violence, which requires a disembodiment and disenfleshment performed by the article’s rhetorical style. The “our” of the title thus recapitulates the conceptual labor of Kant’s disinterested spectator and Walter’s narrative mode, leaning, as it does, for its communality on the foreclosed corporeality of “the present inhabitants of Central America—Spanish, mixed, or coloured.”37 As Walter boards an “American vessel . . . bound for Liverpool” to return from Central America (after surviving a shipwreck off the Gulf of Mexico), he assures the reader that “Laura Fairlie was in all my thoughts when the ship bore me away” (415). It is apparent from these moments that the fungibility of women’s bodies under British marriage law opens itself to a larger narrative about the fungibility of racialized bodies in the long nineteenth century. Indeed, the former depends on the latter, narratively and aesthetically, to accrue symbolic weight.

An Italian with White Mice “England is the land of domestic happiness,” decries Fosco, in his cheerily menacing way (591). Fosco’s irony here is twofold: not only is English domesticity a complete fiction, but it is also, from my perspective, not really the whole story. I want to stay with the violent impossibility of certain well-established forms of abstraction and universality in The Woman in White. Both of these modes are inscribed in its narration, and they form the core of its epistemology. Yet the novel’s form of knowledge production reveals its embeddedness in a whiteness that strives not to be a color and a masculinity that seeks to generalize itself without end. Both are a fiction, just as knowledge 139

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production writ large in European modernity is itself a kind of fiction making, as Mary Poovey has shown.38 In 1992’s now canonical Dead Secrets, Tamar Heller observes that like his friend Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities (which the serialized version of The Woman in White followed in All the Year Round), Collins preserves “an equation . . . between the revolutionary plot and a plot of sexual transgression.”39 Yet, Heller ultimately finds that the novel flattens femininity’s potentially frightening political potential: “the triumph of liberal ideology [is] that, while it defeats a corrupt aristocracy, [it] also diffuses the novel’s radical thematics and the Romanticism associated with them.”40 Heller brings our attention to the entanglement of (white) femininity in the novel with what lies at its seeming periphery: race and revolution. The novel, though, refuses to wrap up with the reinstatement of Laura’s “proper” identity; instead it chooses to follow Walter in a cat-and-mouse game with Count Fosco that ends with this memorable figure’s visceral end. This ending drives home the various contexts that haunt the novel’s efforts to stabilize three coeval categories: “Woman,” “Whiteness,” and “Single.” The Woman in White suggests that one underside to Walter’s “universal” and modern narration is a lingering radicalism in which he too is implicated through the bonds of the “fraternal.” We will see shortly how sibling and sibling-like structures come to dominate The Woman in White, but it’s sufficient for now to say that Walter’s middle-class masculinity is a liberal one linked to others not by paternal filiation but by the edict of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité: three words that continue to frame Western modernity’s encounter with forms of subjectivity and collectivity. Walter’s claim to an authoritative masculine subjectivity occurs not along the vertical lines of filial patriarchy—he is effectively a fatherless character from the very beginning—but along the lateral lines of generalized fraternal selfhood.41 The novel opens with Hartright saving a drowning character for whom he feels a “brotherly affection,” Professor Pesca. Pesca, an Italian political exile living in England, returns at the end of the novel 140

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as a member of the “Brotherhood”—an Italian secret society not unlike the Carbonari—along with Count Fosco himself. The Brotherhood presents a strange kind of male community whose axis of violence operates along the lines of anonymity, anarchy, and absolutism, and it crucially shadows the sibling kinship structures in Collins’s diegetic world, a world delimited by Hartright’s modern, fraternal imaginary. As I’ve shown in previous chapters of this book, lateral relations are far from benign in the nineteenth century. Stefani Engelstein observes that “fraternity . . . is conjured up to solve the problems raised by liberty and equality.”42 This sleight of hand is made apparent in The Woman in White through the political workings of the Brotherhood, a stand-in for revolutionary Italian nationalism. More broadly in the mid-nineteenth century, Italian nationalism served English nationalism in varying ways. Politically, it occupied the hot-seat for British hopes for a wider European liberalism.43 Culturally, Italian nationalism also figured strongly in debates about masculinity and Englishness.44 If subject constitution is a gendered and racialized problem for Collins, one way in which the novel queries its stability is through the notion of a citizen, a position deliberately parodied by the itinerant Count Fosco. Fosco is the most memorable character in Collins’s novel for countless readers, the seeming opposite of the cypher known as the “Woman in White.” Corpulent, dangerous, charming, “an Italian with white mice,” as George Eliot would have it, Fosco is a caricature of the liberal notion of “character” that he simultaneously performs and satirically denies.45 Collins’s portrayal of Count Fosco notably engages with the various myths propagated in print about the Risorgimento and its leading figures. His presence in England is attributed to being a possible spy, one of the “Men [who] were among us, by thousands” (559). By voicing a typical national anxiety about England’s borders and the numerous others populating it, Hartright echoes a well-established British sentiment about “foreignness” (especially the unstable racializing and class marking of Italians) and its insidious threat to a modern imperial nation-state. 141

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Yet when Hartright and Fosco finally encounter each other at the opera, the tone of the novel changes decidedly. Pesca, who has accompanied Hartright, reveals that he is the secretary of the Brotherhood, of which Fosco is also a member: “‘The object of the Brotherhood . . . is, briefly, the object of other political societies of the same sort—the destruction of tyranny, and the assertion of the rights of the people.’” Pesca continues, in an extended monologue that is worth quoting here in full: You think the Society like other Societies. Its object (in your English opinion) is anarchy and revolution. It takes the life of a bad King or a bad Minister, as if the one and the other were dangerous wild beasts to be shot at the first opportunity. I grant you this. But the laws of the Brotherhood are the laws of no other political society on the face of the earth. The members are not known to one another. There is a President in Italy; there are Presidents abroad. . . . We are identified with the Brotherhood by a secret mark, which we all bear, which lasts while our lives last . . . we are warned if we betray the Brotherhood, or if we injure it by serving other interests, that we die by the principles of the Brotherhood—die by the hand of a stranger who may be sent from the other end of the world to strike the blow—or by the hand of our own bosom friend. (570)

The extensiveness of Pesca’s explanation raises the question of why Collins’s novel abruptly shifts its focus from a crime involving feminine substitution to the politics of a fraternal secret society. The most obvious answer lies in the fact that the Brotherhood presents in microcosm the larger issue of gendered and racialized subjects and rights that opens The Woman in White: the problem of envisaging a narrative world—with particular notions of individuation and collectivity—predicated on an abstracted idea of freedom and a modern, secular understanding of justice. According to Pesca, the Brotherhood does not operate as a standard form of political 142

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insurgence that takes shape within the state. It is effectively stateless in its formal structure and effectively revolutionary in a very absolutist sense: it does not direct its activities at a “bad King” or “bad Minister,” its idea of community is built around utter alienation and strangeness, and its ideals of equality derive from the right to die by another’s hand. The organization of the Brotherhood subsequently recalls a number of points. First, that the liberal political order implicit in the narrative structure of the novel—one supposedly built on the equality of all witnesses, readers, and subjects before the law—is fundamentally imbued by a spectral violence born out of the universality of this law and its inevitable excess. Liberalism’s capacity for abstraction, or more precisely, its reliance on such an abstraction, breeds the mechanisms of violence used to regulate a society. This is the kind of violence helmed by no one in particular: an anonymous, faceless form described by Pesca under the Brotherhood’s “principles.” The Brotherhood, as a consequence, represents the oscillation between the abstraction of the law and an individual notion of freedom that has clear consequences for a thinking of gendered and racialized difference because the supposed expansiveness of this law grounds itself in a fraternal order of aggressive sameness. Collins’s preface begins to address this problem, a problem that eventually culminates in the twentieth century in the way Hannah Arendt examines in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). There, she perceptively observes: “From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an ‘abstract’ human being who seemed to exist nowhere . . . the concept of human being, if conceived in a politically useful way, must necessarily include the plurality of human beings.”46 Arendt’s statement makes clear that the doing away of plural singularity in modernity results from the elevation of identity to a depersonalized mode in the name of the law. Arendt never cites gender in the text, but she will note later, in a compelling chapter entitled “Race-thinking before Racism,” that “race-thinking, rather 143

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than class-thinking, was the ever-present shadow accompanying the development of the comity of European nations.”47 This observation by Arendt crucially resonates with its earlier manifestation in mid-nineteenth-century liberal discourse. What we are left with is something entirely like the Brotherhood from Collins’s novel: a masculinized public sphere in which sameness and egalitarian rule (in the name of fraternity) have become a kind of diffuse, policing menace. Any kind of transgression of the law in this realm merely ratifies and affirms the law; by extension, women can be only be understood under such a structure as exclusion or subversion, the kind that can then reinforce the structure’s new patriarchal mode. Collins’s novel, in its concluding plot twist involving the Count, pursues the possibility that citizenship constructed in the fraternal image is fundamentally devastating, by refining a line of thinking that begins in its preamble. The Woman in White thus opens and closes with a sustained look at the excess of a fraternal political system and its consequences for subjectivity, closing around the Count’s eventual downfall. This final scene, taking place in Paris, the original site of revolutionary liberalism, makes liberalism’s intolerable excess in the name of abstraction strikingly clear. As Hartright wanders through Paris, he happens upon what was then a popular tourist attraction: the “terrible dead-house of Paris—the Morgue.” He overhears a conversation between two women in which “they had just come out from seeing the sight in the Morgue; and the account they were giving of the dead body to their neighbours, described it as the corpse of a man—a man of immense size, with a strange mark on his left arm” (613). The grotesque sight of the Count’s body arrests Hartright in a very peculiar way. He goes on to describe the lingering thoughts Fosco’s corpse raises for him: There he lay, unowned, unknown; exposed to the flippant curiosity of a French mob—there was the dreadful end of that long life of degraded ability and heartless crime! Hushed in the sublime repose of death, the broad, firm, massive face and head fronted 144

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us so grandly . . . the wound that had killed him had been struck with a knife or dagger exactly over his heart. No other traces of violence appeared about the body, except on the left arm.  .  .  . The hand that had struck him was never traced; and the circumstances under which he was killed were never discovered. (614)

Hartright’s sustained look at the Count’s corpse reminds the reader of the sheer abjection of this masculinized public sphere, in which an individual can answer only to the authority of Arendt’s “no one.” Fosco’s body and his killer are framed by complete anonymity (“unowned, unknown”), yet his death, symbolized by the mark on his arm, renders his corpse ultra-distinguished. We are therefore faced with a glimpse of a masculine particularity that cannot exist since it is framed by the violence of its own making. This moment suggests that in Collins’s work, the law operates as a political imaginary that is obsessed with embodiment (as the fantasy of feminine bodily substitution recalls) and simultaneously fearful of it (literally marking bodies as profane and abject). Interestingly enough, a novel that confronts subjectivity as a gendered and racialized category mapped out through the unsubstitutability of women’s bodies concludes with a stark look at the abject and othered male corpse. The novel therefore renders what Hadley claims is the grotesque underside of the modern citizen, its body, and “the hermetic and elitist traces in liberalism that recoil from the bodily.”48 But as I argue here, this body’s abjection is a direct consequence of its gendered and racialized disavowals and its inability to evacuate itself of these traces in the name of equality. The Woman in White makes clear that there is something inherent in the universality of fraternal law and fraternal ideology that signals radical failure, and this failure is borne out by the Count’s bodily demise. In other words, we are faced with the failure of masculine singularity to transcend its own binding abstraction, to become the proper subject of historical progress. Here the Kantian sign of history is suspended through the Count’s body, literalizing the illegitimacy and violence that grounds any state, any body politic oriented 145

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around its erasure, and fracturing the modernity the novel is supposed to mediate for its readers. In the following section, I explore how The Woman in White fails to resolve the problem of individualizing bodies through the conventional novelistic channels of plot and character; rather, a serial mode restructures the social and narrative landscape.

Seriality and the Feminine Subject The Woman in White initially strives but fails to understand the body as several things at once: the site of racial knowledge, the container of feminine difference, and something to be neatly transcended to arrive at a point of view adequate to the narrative whole. Yet there is always “something wanting” that interrupts this picture, which we discover is also the “sickly likeness” that binds Anne and Laura through kinship. This likeness cannot be accommodated through the strict forms of sameness and difference Glyde and Fosco weaponize to pull off their crime. Stabilizing gendered and racial truth through the logic of metaphor—the interplay between figure and ground, surface and depth— slides into the logic of metonymy and the serial, which is at work in the novel in more than one way. In this section, I follow two forms of serial thinking in Collins’s novel and make some claims for what seriality generates in its pages and beyond them. My general argument here is that the seriality we find in The Woman in White is an acutely modern one that constructs alternative relationalities or socialities and that enables singularity to emerge. This is despite how Victorian and twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde seriality have been viewed as wholly divergent projects. Published on the heels of Dickens’s Great Expectations in All the Year Round in forty weekly installments between November 1859 and April 1860, Collins’s novel moves sideways in at least two senses: materially, through the print medium of serialization, and structurally, through its development of lateral and sibling and sibling-like relationships between characters. Both forms of serialization frame the failure 146

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of Collins’s fictional narrative to coalesce around a unitary liberal subject: one who, in John Stuart Mill’s stated ideal, “over himself, over his own body and mind . . . is sovereign.”49 But the novel does not simply telegraph the failures of this dominant liberal individualism, as critics have long since argued, but offers up another way to understand social relations: as a serial phenomena, in which apparent sameness and lateral relations generate arenas of minimal difference that allow us to register the singularity of subjects rather than their individuality or particularity. This singularity, as I have observed throughout this book, emerges frequently in and through seriality: it is the series’ potential to exceed a logic of mere replication as reproduction. This might run against the grain of what we tend to think of when “seriality” is invoked in a nineteenth-century context: a yoking of readers across the globe through the shared medium of print, an emerging mechanism of homogeneity, and the consequent flattening of potential singularity as more and more people are subjected to the inexhaustible rhythms of capitalist existence. But as we saw in Baudelaire’s “The Little Old Ladies,” the series does not simply aggregate parts into an ordered whole. It is fundamentally internal to modernity, but it also exceeds its limits. Claire Pettitt argues as much in Serial Forms: for her, “seriality is the defining form of modernity,” and thus it is crucial to think about it “as not just a literary, but also a political, historical, and social category.”50 I would add that for many philosophers, such as both Deleuze and Derrida, the series generates difference as an unforeseen principle rather than simply shoring up forms of sameness. In the twentieth century, a modernist and, later, an avant-garde aesthetics of seriality emerge within the capitalist reality of the assembly line, notably theorized by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Modernist seriality, as Michael McGillen (discussing Eric Auerbach’s serial typology), claims, “does not have the one-after-another structure typical of, for example, the serial novel, but functions through repetitions in which chronological sequence is irrelevant.”51 McGillen deploys a common 147

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argument, that modernist and avant-garde seriality is of a different order than that of the Victorian novel and of nineteenth-century print serialization more broadly. Even though both Benjamin and Collins’s sensation novel dwell in “shock” as the primary affect of modern life, it is easy to see here how the serial fact of The Woman in White’s publication is rarely ever linked with the figural possibilities entertained within its pages. This is largely because Victorian serialization has and continues to function as the strawman for twentieth-century avant-garde definitions of the serial. Collins famously tripped up on the chronology of events in The Woman in White in its serial publication, suggesting that this serial narrative form was not as smooth of a technology as readers might like to believe. Discussing the infamous Blackwater Park timeline that Laura’s identity hinges on, and that Collins had rendered incorrectly, the reviewer E. S. Dallas emphasizes that “the question of a date is the pivot upon which the novel turns.”52 Collins’s early errors lead Dallas to call the novel’s last third “a mockery, a delusion, and a snare.”53 Collins subsequently corrected the chronology as well as issued an apology to readers in the three-volume version of the novel published in 1861. Yet he inadvertently reveals the serious chafing of the midcentury serial novel’s form against the stable chronology it is meant to unfold, putting the argument shared by McGillen and others about its simplistic telos into question. Rethinking the serial form of the novel additionally means rethinking the domestic ideology of home and hearth it is often seen as solidifying over time. Nineteenth-century serialization can be read as modeling, among other economic and social values, “a capacity for endurance, perseverance, and patience” that characterizes a recognizable form of domestic femininity.54 I find it more sanguine, following the argument I have been developing in this book, to pursue the possibility that seriality as a material as well as structural phenomenon unravels rather than consolidates an idea of the feminine subject, revealing only singularity, that which does not graft onto gender as a

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regulatory regime. This unraveling further opens the possibilities for alternative formations for the collective and the social sphere than what Victorian domesticity and nineteenth-century liberal ideology imagines. Other reviews of The Woman in White, for instance, repeatedly describe its narrative structure using the metonymic figure of a “chain.” The Saturday Review, for example, noted: “The link of interest that binds them is that they are all interested in the great secret. By the time the secret is disclosed, the bond of unity will have been broken—the action of the drama in which they figure will have been finished—and they will go their own ways in twos and threes, and never meet again.”55 Here affiliation both in the diegesis and outside of it (suggesting readerly affiliation) is temporary and serial, in that characters (and even readers) are oriented around a problem rather than a stable fact or identity—in this case, Glyde’s secret—and that this problem has the potential to shift relations into “twos and threes” that do not readily map onto heteronormative ideas of the family deployed by the marriage plot. I am struck by how closely the Saturday Review’s casual appraisal of the sensation novel resembles what feminist phenomenologist Iris Marion Young describes, over a hundred years later, as serial collectivity in the work of Jean Paul Sartre: “A social collective whose structure constitutes them [individuals] within certain limits and constraints” and in which “individuals in the series are interchangeable; while not identical.”56 For Sartre, seriality describes how social class structures exist, and for Young, this structuring extends to thinking gender and race. The interchangeability Young describes here is also the crux of The Woman in White’s sensation plot, which turns around Anne and Laura’s failed substitution. Yet the novel confronts a forceful slippage that, for Young, is crucial to distinguishing the radical contingency of the series from the flattening sameness of the group: one that is centered on the “electrifying” and “sickly” likeness that renders Anne and Laura similar and alike but not, finally, the same.

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As The Woman in White ultimately reveals, Anne and Laura are half-sisters. Their likeness is constituted by kinship, which shortcircuits a system intent on using kinship against itself by weaponizing their similarity as sameness for misogynist greed. Furthermore, Sir Percival’s secret, which initially bears the weight of signifying normative inheritance and relationality, also reveals a series, this time of absent fathers, and connects Sir Percival (whose dead father was deformed) with Hartright (who has no father) and, importantly, the series of half-sisters (Marian is implicated here as she and Laura share Frederick Fairlie, their uncle). As a result, any kind of tenuous hold the nuclear family maintained in the novel is lost after Laura is rescued from the asylum, and a new kind of family forms itself in its place along noticeably horizontal lines. As Hartright recounts: “two women live, who are described as my sisters. I get my bread by drawing and engraving on wood for the cheap periodicals. My sisters are supposed to help me by taking in a little needlework” (421).  These family arrangements prove to be quite unusual, as Collins’s novel initially seems poised to excavate (along the lines of many Victorian novels) the patriarchal family and the manner by which this type of family shapes gendered identities. Much of the criticism on the novel has assumed this to be the case.57 One could group these critical readings once more under the banner of Foucauldian interpretations of the novel, which collectively expose the domestic space as inherently troubled by sexual desires and transgression, even as this space seeks to impose a discernible binary on men and women. However, what these interpretations do not address is the overarching structure of filial relationships on which the patriarchal family depends for its continuation and for its legitimacy, and how such a structure is called into question by the novel’s investment in seriality and singularity. To the extent that Laura’s and Marian’s, as well as Anne’s, subjectivities under the law turn on Laura’s marriage to Sir Percival, which was arranged on the deathbed of Laura’s father, their identities initially seem overtly marked by patriarchal family organization. On 150

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the same note, Sir Percival’s “crime,” by relying on the clean substitutability between two women who in some ways resemble each other, merely sensationalizes what is the case under the law itself. The Count puts this rather neatly in his diary entry at a later point in the novel: “That conception involved nothing less than the complete transformation of two separate identities. Lady Glyde and Anne Catherick were to change names, places, and destinies, the one with the other—the prodigious consequences contemplated by the change, being the gain of thirty thousand pounds, and the eternal preservation of Sir Percival’s secret” (563). Both women, from Fosco’s perspective, lack any subjectivity removed from the verticality of patriarchal family order, which genders their roles either as legitimate or illegitimate, economically valuable or worthless; therefore, they can exist only within this mode—as far as the male characters are concerned. While patriarchy and patrilineal inheritance plots have seemingly been read to the point of exhaustion in Victorian studies, Kimberly Juanita Brown reminds us of the enduring, and almost mystical power of this “plot” by way of a racialized inheritance structure of naming in our current world in “The End of the Story: Patriarchy.” Elaborating on the difficulties of patronymic naming for Black diasporic subjects, Brown writes: “the arc of patronymic tethering encloses us, encloses and forfeits alternate possibilities. We live in its constitutive ellipses.”58 For Brown, to try and “end the story of patriarchy,” one thing we might do is to attend to “its insistent replications.”59 How, then, do we end this particular version of the story? How do we read these nineteenth-century texts with Brown’s call to look at patrilineal repetition—and its deep entanglement with gender and race—once more? When we focus our attention on the kinship structures that frame The Woman in White’s sensation plot, we find the novel chafing against the patriarchal inheritance narrative it seems to have set up. More specifically, the basis of Sir Percival’s crime and his secret reveals a deeper subterfuge in the fracturing of the patriarchal family and, by extension, the patrilineal ideology of the law. 151

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The secret is the story of his illegitimacy under a legal structure that recognizes only patrilineage. Sir Percival, as Hartright uncovers, is bankrupt and has taken advantage of Laura’s inheritance to substitute for his own lack of title or estate: “The disclosure of that secret, even if the sufferers by his deception spared him the penalties of the law, would deprive him, at one blow, of the name, the rank, the estate, the whole social existence that he had usurped” (508). Before Sir Percival dies in the burning vestry at Old Welmingham, attempting to protect his secret from Hartright, the novel reveals the absent marriage between Glyde’s parents that signals his illegitimacy. The novel brackets his discovery of the marriage record in such a way as to highlight the confusion of lateral and vertical relationships in the novel itself: I turned to the month of September, eighteen hundred and three. I found the marriage of the man whose Christian name was the same as my own. I found the double register of the marriage of the two brothers. And between these entries at the bottom of the page—? Nothing! Not a vestige of the entry which recorded the marriage of Sir Felix Glyde and Cecilia Jane Elster, in the register of the church! My heart gave a great bound, and throbbed as if it would stifle me. I looked again—I was afraid to believe the evidence of my own eyes. No! Not a doubt. The marriage was not there. The entries on the copy occupied exactly the same places on the page as the entries in the original. The last entry on one page recorded the marriage of the man with my Christian name. Below it, there was a blank space—a space evidently left because it was too narrow to contain the entry of the marriages of the two brothers, which in the copy, as in the original, occupied the top of the next page. That space told the whole story! (507–8)

White space returns here, dissolving not only the legitimacy of Sir Percival under patrilineage and its conscription of gendered 152

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difference but also yoking him to the woman in white and the voiding of whiteness as stable meaning. This celebrated revelation of absence and blankness in The Woman in White is uncanny too in the other ways in which it implicates Hartright and fraternal masculinity into a similar kind of oblivion. As Hartright tells the reader, the record first shows the “marriage of a man with my Christian name” and “the marriages of two brothers,” both facts that he repeats in astonishment over discovering the secret. The parallelism between all three records cannot help but implicate the marriage of “two brothers” and the man named “Hartright” in a similar kind of potential kinship and potential unraveling to Glyde’s absent lineage. We find that Sir Percival, far from simply being the aristocratic object of class revenge in the novel, is part of the same affiliative network of fraternal male subjects, all of which, grasping for some kind of paternal validity, never find it. Sir Percival not only lacks a legitimate parentage, but he is also the last of a line of seemingly degenerate fathers, as Hartright discovers toward the end of the novel upon visiting Mrs. Catherick: “Sir Percival was an only child. His father, Sir Felix Glyde, had suffered from his birth, under a painful and incurable deformity, and had shunned all society from his earliest years” (460). What we find is that the secret has transformed the underlying axis of kinship relations in The Woman in White, revealing only similitude and likeness, rather than binary difference and opposition. In each case, the men and the women represent same-generation relationships that no longer refer to filial and patrilineal origins. Because the narrative implies that Anne is the half-sister of Laura, who is also the half-sister of Marian, all three women are linked in a laterally organized chain of kinship, once removed from one another in relationships that hover between clear difference and obvious likeness. The half-sisters Anne, Laura, and Marian represent forms of singularity precisely because potential likeness is exactly what reveals their differences, which cannot, under patriarchy, be reproduced. These lateral feminine relationships and permutations— what Alix Beeston calls the “woman-in-series”—showcases a kind 153

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of differential singularity in its most potent form.60 This is because subject-formation occurs and reoccurs along the lines of horizontal proliferation, and not through filiation, or the reification of legal identity. As the novel reveals, singularity cannot be a particularized oneness (in the vein of the single identity “Lady Glyde”), nor can it be reproducible sameness (as the fraternal imaginary of Hartright and Glyde read it). Instead, singularity reveals the difficulty of managing difference. But the horizontality that ultimately governs relationships in the novel does not solve the “problem” of identity— symbolized by the name “Lady Glyde”—that the narrative might seek to rectify. Because the name “Lady Glyde” is not a point of resolution, the serial structure of femininity cannot be slotted into this particularized identity. Nevertheless, to “mark” the truth of Lady Glyde’s identity in the novel’s final third, Hartright stages a public destruction of Laura’s tombstone and finally pays written tribute to the diseased Anne in her place. This final graveyard scene is, in many ways, his aim to perform, to an absolute melodramatic extreme, the complete substitution of these women that the perpetrators themselves could not execute: “not a soul moved, till those three words, ‘ Laura, Lady Glyde,’ had vanished from sight. . . . One line only was afterwards engraved in its place: ‘Anne Catherick, July 28th, 1850’” (610). Helmed by Walter, this deceptively simple textual substitution seeks to endorse a fantasy of feminine interchangeability. “Three words” collectively imply a plurality of subjects implicit in the name “Lady Glyde” that is swiftly replaced by the one name, “Anne Catherick,” seemingly a stable but always empty placeholder. This scene remains crucial because the forceful assertion of the identity of “Lady Glyde” on the tombstone necessarily betrays the fact that there is no concrete evidence that the woman Hartright marries is not Laura, and that she may in fact be Anne Catherick. As a consequence, the stability of the woman in white’s subjectivity is left radically open at the end of the narrative, despite the many efforts on the part of its male characters—and of the novel’s narrative mode—to contain it. We understand, finally, 154

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that Collins’s novel is not about one particular woman and her relationship to Woman as a universal. Nor is it really about the stability of such causal relationships between general truths and their particularized iterations. Seriality in the form of horizontal kinship is what introduces the possibility of feminine singularity: one who is irreplaceable and cannot be reduced to the particularity by which the liberal subject is codified. Single or double, same or different. These categories fundamentally shape and delimit femininity, both in the nineteenth century and in the present. Though my focus has been on the figurative grounds of female individuation in The Woman in White, the colonial and white “macrostructure”—however shadowy or submerged—that buttresses all Victorian novels renders it impossible to read blank spaces and white girls outside of the racial order shored up by that structure.61 This is why I follow scholars like Ann Stoler, and more recently, Kyla Schuller and Alicia Mireles Christoff, who have argued that to look at gender and sexuality across nineteenth-century literature is to grapple with those terms’ intimacy with racialization.62 What I hope to have shown here is that deconstructing the epistemic grounds of whiteness and singleness in nineteenth-century literary texts does not simply leave us with “something wanting.” Attending to singularity maps an alternative future for the sensation novel, in which feminine subjectivity would not be forged through overlapping currents of violence but point instead to something like our serial, collective freedom.

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The miserable series of my being has wound to a close. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

A w o m a n wa l k s t h r o u g h a green pasture flanked by mountains. She is wearing a white lace dress with a Peter Pan collar. Her hair and skin are smooth and coiffed. She mounts a black helicopter with decisive purpose and flies over the mountains. When we see her again, she is a shadow in an airport or a train station. Bystanders walk past her, hand in hand. She stares at herself in the glass, and the image fades to black. The woman described above is an android. Played by the actor Alicia Vikander in Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina (2014), this AI woman—named Ava—was built by a sinister Silicon Valley inventor, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Ava, we find out, is designed to entrap a young programmer, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who is hired to test her humanity through the Turing test. The ultimate test Ava is programmed for, though, as we find out, is not Alan Turing’s classic test of whether one is human or machine, but the will to successfully escape confinement by passing as a “desirable” woman. Ava does exactly that, playing the part of a vulnerable, captive woman whom Caleb thinks he has fallen in love with. She leaves him fatally locked in the compound after he engineers her escape at the end of the film, with Nathan dead too. From one angle, Ava is a hyperbolic example of the conventional feminine and the femme fatale rolled into one, tailor made for the male cinematic gaze: she is young, cis, white,

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and seemingly heterosexual. And yet, she belongs to a class of cinematic women—female androids, alien women, and glitchy hologram girlfriends—estranged from the notion of the “feminine” as type or concept.1 These are figures who appear onscreen in their very disappearance, figures of fugitivity who have fled the altar of the human. In their uncanniness they seem to “exists on the edge line” as Kara Keeling describes.2 But an escape from literal and figurative confinement can ever be only partial, as the very terms of Ava’s escape at the end of Ex Machina, and of fugitivity more generally, bear the weight of centuries of racialized violence. Discussing the problem of freedom, fugitivity, and autonomy in terms of the ongoing afterlife of racial slavery in Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman writes: “the nascent individualism of the freed designates a precarious autonomy since exploitation, domination, and subjection inhabit the vehicle of rights.”3 When read with these terms in mind, these AI women testify to the continued hold that gender, race, and sexuality have on figuration itself; they are critical reminders too of liberal individualism’s grip on our politics, on our bodies, and on our collective imaginaries. AI women like Ex Machina’s Ava saturate media culture, accreting into one and perhaps the most recognizable contemporary definition of the term “singularity.” This technological singularity is a point that futurists and computer scientists like Ray Kurzweil have long speculated on, a point at which AI and technological advances will usurp human intelligence, causing radical and unforeseen change. I bring this technological singularity into contact with the feminine figures we have already seen in this book to briefly show that these new singularities remain very much within the old symbolic economies. For Ex Machina’s Ava, leaving Nathan’s compound and achieving her freedom looks nothing like the ironic, utopian myth of Haraway’s cyborg. In Garland’s film, the boundaries between nature and technology haven’t become pleasurably entangled, as Haraway once envisioned. Rather, these boundaries have been carefully reconstituted and nature further enclosed by a corporate capitalism built

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off colonial violence. In the film—which is often wordless—the camera lingers on serene, seemingly empty vistas of mountains and grassland, all owned by Nathan, as if to emphasize for the viewer a pristine terra nullius radiating with wealth and power. Inside Nathan’s hyper-minimalist compound, we learn that Ava isn’t the sole prodigal AI she seems to be, but that she exists in a series with other women androids. These include the silent worker Kyoko—who ends up fatally stabbing Nathan at the end of the film—and the castoff parts of other women of color (always already AI, as Rachel Lee, Danielle Wong, and other scholars have pointed out) whom Ava finds hidden away in the compound’s closets and storage lockers. Crucially, Ava is the only one who survives the nightmare of patriarchal technocratic imprisonment. Kyoko is left to die, maimed and immobilized, in the compound after her rebellion opens the door to Ava’s escape. After Nathan rips off Ava’s arm in the same scene, she takes the skin off another, discarded AI woman to use as her own before leaving this fated sisterhood behind. On the one hand, the robot ontologies of Ex Machina are lateral and serial, underscoring some of the claims I make in this book about a femininity dislocated from essentialized origins, and linked to others through forms of minimal difference that give the lie to patriarchal fears of replication and reproduction. There are inklings of momentary solidarity between these AI women, no matter how fleeting. On the other, finding freedom, becoming human, and “passing” as woman remain stubbornly racialized in Ex Machina. Rather than accede to a posthuman utopian future in which racial and gendered differences cease to produce violent inequalities, the film reenacts the weaponizing of these differences by capitalist generality. As Ava’s final escape bears out, AI women of color are merely discarded parts to be exchanged, substituted, cast away, or folded into a larger whole. They are racialized in and through that exchange and that subordination. In Ex Machina, the whole they might aspire toward is the troubled, organic dream of individual autonomy made legible by Ava’s normative white femininity. 158

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The literary text Ex Machina is based loosely on is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Before the androids and AI of contemporary screen culture, we have Shelley’s Creature: a cut-up being made of parts Victor Frankenstein pilfers from the charnel house, a being who confounds not only Romantic ideas of organic aesthetic unity but also a conventional organization of gender as well as race (as many critics, from Peter Brooks to Susan Stryker, have pointed out).4 Unlike Ava, who desires to separate herself from others, Shelley’s Creature longs for a companion, to “feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded.”5 In the novel’s final pages, the Creature reiterates this problematic of a “chain of existence” and tells Robert Walton, Frankenstein’s frame narrator, that “the miserable series of my being has wound to a close.”6 On the one hand, this enigmatic utterance might refer to the multiple murders of Victor’s intimates and friends that punctuate the plot of Shelley’s novel, or it might refer to the novel itself, an epistolary “chain” of letters and tales (between Robert Walton and his sister Margaret Saville, between Walton and Victor, and between Victor and the Creature) spoken in an open narrative circuit. More broadly, it might also speak to the essential function of the signifying chain in language, which produces meaning through metonymic displacement rather than metonymy’s other, metaphor (which works through substitution to create discrete forms of meaning). Then again, what might it mean to conceive of one’s “being,” one’s fundamental ontology, as a series that exists in and through this minimal spacing, in a metonymic chain, rather than in some clear binary or opposition? There is nothing about the Creature’s phrasing that refers to a preexisting ordering that might determine the terms of the series in advance. Shelley’s Creature articulates the truth of existence as a kind of being-in-common—in and through a spacing— that eludes identitarian myths of the individual. This “miserable series” pertains to the kind of singularity I have sought to articulate in 159

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the previous four chapters because not only does it fail to wind to a close, but it also gives rise to new subjectivities in the novel. At one point, Victor violently recoils from the thought of making a female companion for the Creature because she would become a subject who “might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation” and whose offspring “would make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.”7 The female Creature is even more partial than the Creature who speaks and acts: she is never “finished” but mangled and destroyed by Victor a few pages later. Her subjectivity, however, emerges in powerfully speculative ways in Victor’s terrified musings. “Refusal” of the social contract qua marriage contract—the thing purported to confer humanity (as it is linked to racialized and gendered bourgeois civility) onto the Creature—points up the possibility of forms of serial replication that would undo conventional notions of humanity itself. A hypothetical femininity emerges for a moment in Shelley’s novel untethered to heterosexuality and only nominally attached to conventional gender, a femininity that also contains the potential to unleash difference in unpredictable ways. I hold to this radical vision in Shelley’s novel, however partial it may be. It is a feminist interruption of total meaning and a check to contemporary horizons of the posthuman that, in some of their hasty attempts to do away with questions of the human altogether, endlessly reproduce their own limitations. I want to read Shelley’s Creature as a forerunner to the texts I have read in this book: I observe, like so many readers and critics, the novel’s generative powers to disaggregate femininity and subjectivity from the boundedness of quantified, essentialized identity. Frankenstein further invites us to reconsider teleologies of progress that ground themselves in the past, present, and future of the liberal subject. Its final image— the “darkness and distance” of the icy waves that bear the Creature away—is its own singularity, a black hole of novelistic closure. We might be strange to ourselves, Shelley’s novel seems to say, but

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we can only ever know and be ourselves in that strangeness and in fundamental relation. The novel opens the category of “femininity” in a way I have sought to do across this book. Feminine singularity—whether we think of the open question of Alice’s subjectivity, Robertson’s “girl,” or the serial women of The Woman in White—is resistant to prescripted norms that direct what individuation should look like. Feminine singularity refracts how we have come to understand difference and subjectivity under these conventional narratives. The texts I have read throughout this book figure a mode of thinking I would call experimental, in the future-oriented vein of feminist and queer avantgarde art and literature: the films of Chantal Ackerman, the poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Bhanu Kapil. Rather than see these movements and periods as unrelated, we could change the direction and angle of our thinking and begin to take seriously the strangeness of the nineteenth century to envision a liberatory horizon for femininity, for the subject, and perhaps for politics more broadly, grounded in that strangeness. In a beautiful, challenging essay entitled “Literary Communism,” Jean-Luc Nancy wades carefully into the question of politics and of community grounded in plural singularities and in the community’s “unworking” or (in its original French) its desoeuvrement. “Capital negates community because it places above it the identity and the generality of production and products,” writes Nancy.8 A specific literary communism appears instead through “articulation,” which, for Nancy, is a juncture where “different pieces touch each other without fusing together,” and which “holds itself in suspense.”9 The community here interrupts “its own exemplarity”: its unworking is resistant to completion. While a literary communism grounded in singularity cannot “found” politics for Nancy, it nevertheless “signifies an irrepressible political exigency, and . . . this exigency in its turn demands something of ‘literature,’ the inscription of our infinite resistance.”10 I hope I have done some justice to this thought of the sharing and the

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communing of singularity enabled by the literary, which is not meant to be mournful nor messianic. Literary communism in Nancy’s words does, however, testify to a kind of longing, for something unknowable, for something potentially unrealizable in the present. In tracing femininity on the brink of its own unworking, I commune with that longing and with the radical potential of literature to shift what we think is possible.

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Introduction 1. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 5. 2. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 54. 3. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 59. 4. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 17. 5. The texts I am thinking of are the following: Attridge, Singularity of Literature; Clark, Poetics of Singularity; and Weber, Singularity and Theatricality as Medium. All three scholars take up a definition of singularity in the long aftermath of Kant’s aesthetic judgment, a genealogy I touch on later in this introduction. They also share an orientation to the literary recognizable within the deconstructive tradition. Critics like Attridge treat literary texts not as objects but as events that produce something new or unforeseen with each reading. 6. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 52. 7. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 5. 8. Sedgwick, “Is the Rectum Straight?,” 75. 9. Quashie, “To Be (a) One,” 73. 10. Weber, Singularity, i. Attridge defines singularity as the following: “the singularity of a cultural object consists in its difference from all other such objects, not simply as a particular manifestation of general rules, but as a peculiar nexus within the culture that is perceived as resisting or exceeding all pre-existing general determinations” (Singularity, 63). In The Poetics of Singularity, Timothy Clark identifies a definition of the singular as that which cannot be stated in terms other than its own in the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Hans George Gadamer. 11. This is a claim made by Balfour, “Singularities,” 338. 12. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 47. 13. In addition to Sedgwick, see Huffer, Are the Lips A Grave?; Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh; and J. Mitchell, Siblings. 14. Flatley, Like Andy Warhol, 5. 15. Michie, Sororophobia, 9. 16. Johnson, Feminist Difference, 4. 163

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Notes to introduction 17. A. Burton, Burdens of History, 4. 18. This model for female individualism has been held up largely in the British realist novel and its critical tradition. See Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction. See also Freedgood, Worlds Enough, for an account of how twentieth-century literary criticism of the British realist novel has shaped a persistent idea of its form as closed-off and, by extension, I think, an idea of the subject as similarly bounded. 19. This is well understood to scholars of postcolonial history and the nineteenth century such as Edward Said, Uday Singh Mehta, Andrew Sartori, Nathan Hensley, and Nasser Mufti, and to scholars of Atlantic slavery such as Saidiya Hartman and Paul Gilroy. Mehta reminds us: “Britain, in its self image, was a democracy, yet it held a vast empire that was, at least ostensibly, undemocratic in its acquisition and governance” (Liberalism and Empire, 7). Reading Locke, Burke, and other thinkers important to liberal theory, Mehta further uncovers a language of “classificatory schemes” that “configure the boundary between the politically included and those politically excluded” (58). Feminist political theorists such as Chantal Mouffe, Linda Zerilli, and Carol Pateman have made similar claims. Pateman writes that to neutralize what is the ideal liberal subject’s irrevocably dominant masculinity, “contract theorists constructed sexual difference as a political difference, the difference between men’s natural freedom and women’s natural subjection” (Sexual Contract, 5). 20. See Hadley, “Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody.” 21. The problem of aggregating the individual into a greater whole such as a “population,” “society,” or “species” is the topic of several midcentury British novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and, later, George Eliot. Critics who have addressed this question include Hadley, Catherine Gallagher, Mary Poovey, and Emily Steinlight. 22. Bentham is quoted in Mill, Utilitarianism, 93. Mill, the patron saint of nineteenth-century liberalism, notably revised and also critiqued Bentham’s arguments. We might recall Bentham’s more famous axiom, “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” 23. Philip, Zong!, 194. The court case was Gregson v. Gilbert, 99 E.R. 629 (K.B. 1783). 24. Philip, Zong!, 40. Glossing Zong!’s formal strategy and approach to the gendering of violence, Nicole Gervasio explains: “Insofar as Philip adopts an antinarrative strategy not to give voice, she also mobilizes herself against a long trajectory of feminist idealism that has aimed to recover slaves’ voices” (“Ruth in (T)ruth,” 8). 25. Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, xxi.

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Notes to introduction 26. “French liberalism” gathers a wide variety of political, economic, and social thought in the nineteenth century. Though French liberalism writ large was more “suspicious” of the individual and statist as a consequence, my interest is in how French liberalism too was made to confront the fragility of its cherished notions of rights and freedoms throughout the multiple upheavals and colonial encounters of the nineteenth century. Geenans and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 3. 27. Goodlad, Victorian Literature, 3. 28. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 112. 29. “The madwoman in the attic” refers to Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic. 30. Mill, Subjection of Women, 152. 31. Cobbe, “Criminals,” 107. 32. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” 143. 33. A reading of relation that has been crucial to my own formulation here is provided by Christoff, Novel Relations. There, she theorizes the writings of British object-relations psychoanalysis to “take fuller measure of the wide relational possibilities—and realities—of novel reading” (21). Christoff begins with the premise that reading and feeling never happen alone. Thus, for Christoff, even solitude is relational. 34. For example, the immanent, fundamentally affirmative ontological condition of the singular in Deleuze is usually read as conflicting with Derrida’s differance (and certainly with psychoanalysis’s general focus on lack and negativity). Both theorists, however, reach around and past the Hegelian Aufhebung to consider definitions of the singular and to look for other means through which to contemplate difference. 35. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 80. 36. Balfour, “Singularities,” 343. 37. Balfour, “Singularities,” 345. 38. In Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak charts the foreclosure of the figure of the “native informant” or “Raw man” in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment. 39. Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” 274. Moten calls this “a detour of Kant onto a Heideggerian path” (ibid.). 40. Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” 273. 41. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 3 42. Kandice Chuh glosses Muñoz’ project as being one that can “recognize the stakes of aesthetic inquiry as resting in the question of the radical potential of art to interrupt, reframe, and re-form the fundamental grounds upon which phenomenological, material existence is made (real).” “It’s Not ‘About’ Anything,” 126.

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Notes to introduction 43. Derrida, “Parergon,” 339. 44. Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” 275. Elsewhere Moten writes of a “radicalization of singularity” through Charlie Patton’s voice. Here, too, Moten links this singularity to what I read as Derridean iterability, as Patton’s voice “becomes an instrument not repeatable outside of itself, its own repetitions” (Fitzgerald, “Interview with Fred Moten,” n.p.). 45. Moten, In the Break, 26. A similar energy drives Amiri Baraka’s assessment of Black music and his description of what he calls “the changing same,” which describes how avant-garde as well as popular Black music both practice a continual reinvention and a newness while remaining tethered to a core of tradition. The phrase has come to anchor a specific Black aesthetic and trope of Black temporality that marks “a black position, one of outsideness or of alienation and resistance.” Mackey, “Changing Same,” 360. 46. Thorne, Black Holes, 450. Einstein’s equations for general relativity have enabled most of the current thinking around black holes. 47. Thorne, Black Holes, 450. 48. See the chapter on singularity as an event, “The Weather,” from C. Sharpe, In the Wake, and Wright, Physics of Blackness. 49. Quashie, “To Be (a) One,” 74. 50. Quashie, “To Be (a) One,” 73. 51. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 172. I find that the following observation of Attridge’s helpfully adds to what Glissant is noting here: “singularity is not pure: it is constitutively impure, always open to contamination, grafting, accidents, reinterpretation, recontextualization” (Singularity of Literature, 63). 52. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xv. 53. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 52. 54. Butler, Gender Trouble, 131. 55. Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” 18. 56. Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” 18. 57. Spivak, “Revolutions,” 38. 58. My readings of Derrida here owe a great deal to Weber’s arguments on iterability and theatricality via Derrida and Walter Benjamin. See Weber and Benjamin, Benjamin’s -abilities. 59. Scott, “Feminist at the Carnival,” 44. 60. Freud’s Three Essays is the best account of partiality and subjective development in his work. Lacan’s conception of the mirror stage, for instance, builds on these insights in Freud. Lacan’s later work continues to develop the subject’s partiality through terms such as the objet petit a, the kernel of unconscious desire that is not internal to the subject but rather exists outside of its knowledge. 61. Ruti, Singularity of Being, 3. 166

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Notes to Chapter 1 62. Jacqueline Rose writes of the tension of defining femininity and feminine subjectivity in and through Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis: “the ‘feminine’ stands for a refusal of [phallic] organisation, its ordering, its identity. For Lacan, on the other hand, interrogating that same organisation undermines any absolute definition of the ‘feminine’ at all.” “IntroductionII” in Mitchell and Rose, Feminine Sexuality, 56–57. 63. Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou after him address the question of “oneness” and of singularity as an act and an event, something partial and contingent. For a more in-depth philosophical treatment of this argument of Lacan’s and how it structures Western philosophy, see Reinhard, “Something of One.” 64. Halberstam and Livingston, Posthuman Bodies, 9. 65. Ahmed, “Whose Counting?,” 110. 66. Butler, qtd. in Cheah et al., “Future of Sexual Difference,” 41. 67. Wilson, “Without Measure.” 68. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 125. Chapter 1 1. Carroll, Annotated Alice, 176. Subsequent references to this work will be made in parentheses in the main text as “AW” and “LG.” 2. This particular moment—in which all Alice can remember is that her name begins with an “L”—is a famous one in the robust critical afterlife of the Alice books. It has been glossed by several critics and editors, such as Martin Gardner, who attempt to unravel the meaning of “L,” typically resorting to rather bland biographical speculation. Gardner, for instance, settles on the resonances of “Liddell” in “L.” He also notes that forgetting one’s name is common across Carroll’s other works, such as in The Hunting of the Snark and Sylvia and Bruno. Annotated Alice, 177n17. 3. From Lewis Carroll’s Diaries (November 1, 1874), reprinted in Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 283. 4. Modal logic involves statements that address the truth of a situation through the terms of necessity, possibility, impossibility, and contingency. In deploying these terms to situate Alice’s loss of her name, I take after Charles Shepherdson’s arguments in “Derrida and Lacan” about the role of modal logic in both Lacan’s and Derrida’s work on difference. 5. Auerbach points out: “Other little girls traveling through fantasy countries, such as George Macdonald’s Princess Irene and Frank L. Baum’s Dorothy Gale, ask repeatedly ‘where am I?’ rather than ‘who am I.’ Only Alice turns her eyes inward from the beginning, sensing that the mystery of her surroundings is the mystery of her identity.” “Alice and Wonderland,” 33. 6. Carroll, “She’s All My Fancy Painted Him” (1855), reprinted in Annotated Alice, 122–23. 167

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Notes to Chapter 1 7. Between 1880 and 1885, for instance, Dodgson published a series of mathematic riddles or “knots,” collectively titled “A Tangled Tale,” for the Monthly Packet, an Oxford movement periodical founded by the writer Charlotte Yonge, whose target readership was middle-class Anglican girls. Each story, or “knot,” was framed as a mathematical logic problem that Carroll would provide an answer to in a later issue of the magazine. 8. Kornbluh, Order of Forms, 105. 9. Pycior, “At the Intersection,” 163. 10. Pycior, “At the Intersection,” 149. 11. This perspective comes together in what Karoline Leach, in Shadow of the Dreamchild, calls “the Carroll Myth”: an image of the writer as a child-like saint. The view was nurtured by early biographers such as Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (Carroll’s nephew) and Morton Norton Cohen. Cristopher Hollingsworth describes this image as the following: “He was the shy and virginal clergyman who stumbled into genius through intense love of a child; the man with no life, whose transparent, barely registered existence held only one story: that of his tragic but ultimately innocent deviancy, his ultimate failure to engage with adulthood.” Introduction to Alice beyond Wonderland, ix. The “Carroll Myth” also gave rise to the exact opposite conjecture. Developing largely out of Anthony Goldschmidt’s essay, “‘Alice in Wonderland Psychoanalyzed,” 1933, reprinted in Phillips, Aspects of Alice, 279, this line of thought reaches its critical climax in Kincaid’s ChildLoving. Edward Wakeling’s recent biography, Lewis Carroll, challenges this entrenched set of critical perspectives. Gillian Beer has importantly corroborated this view and suggested that “the orthodoxy that viewed Lewis Carroll as the miraculous product of an incurious and somewhat mediocre mathematician . . . has to some extent dissipated.” Alice in Space, 3. 12. Mellor, English Romantic Irony, 178. 13. Knoepflmacher, Ventures into Childland, 68. 14. Douglas Nickel writes that these photos were taken at the onset of a particularly active period for Carroll’s writing and his photography: “Dodgson created almost a thousand negatives between 1857 and 1862.” Dreaming in Pictures, 17. 15. Robson, Men in Wonderland, 141. 16. Badiou, Being and Event, 69. 17. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 73. 18. Huffer, “Lipwork,” 99. 19. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 3. 20. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 3. 21. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 57. 22. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 55. 23. Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” 208. 168

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Notes to Chapter 1 24. Lacanian philosopher Mladen Dolar explains in “One Divides into Two”: “the alterity of the unconscious is not cut of the stuff of symbolic differences, it opens a difference that is not merely a symbolic difference, but that is, so to speak, ‘the difference within the difference,’ another kind of difference within the symbolic one, a difference recalcitrant to integration into the symbolic, and yet only emerging in its bosom, with no separate realm of its own.” 25. Spillers, “‘All the Things,’” 710–711. 26. Spillers, “‘All the Things,’” 710. 27. Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One begins with a meditation and rewriting of Alice’s forgetting of her name that raises a similar set of ideas about plurality and singularity. Carolyn Burke has elucidated Irigaray’s reading of Alice’s invocation of an “L” in the following observation: “There is no answer other than her [Alice’s] self-renaming. ‘L’ is, of course, multiple in Irigaray’s reading . . . elle/elles—the third person feminine, both singular and plural. To begin with elles(s) means to learn that the female self is multiple.” Burke, Schor, and Whitford, Engaging with Irigaray, 47. 28. Incidentally, Spillers is seven years old, the same age as the fictional Alice. 29. Rose, “Pointing the Finger.” 30. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 2. 31. Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 313. 32. Puckett, “Caucus-Racing,” 14. 33. Puckett, “Caucus-Racing,” 18. 34. Critics such as Daniel Bivona, Nancy Armstrong, and Laura E. Ciolkowski have read the Alice books this way, as an allegory for the white, bourgeois, middle-class woman negotiating its borders against the threat of imperial otherness. These readings make a powerful case for the Alice books’ entanglement with colonialism, but I depart from them in trying to imagine Alice’s subjectivity as less easily grafted onto existing Victorian binaries of difference and otherness. 35. This narrative involves a negotiation on the part of Victorian writers of the trope (a central feature of the poem) of the idealized Romantic child—solitary, pastoral, innocent—that increasingly appeared under siege to middle-class readers by various nineteenth-century upheavals. 36. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 49–50. 37. Fogel, “Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven,’” 24. 38. Stockton, Queer Child. Juliet Dusinberre has additionally traced the early twentieth-century interest in the child to pre-Freudian studies by scholars such as Friedrich Froebel, the German pedagogue, on the child as a new type of species. See Dusinberre, Alice to the Lighthouse. 39. Gorham, Victorian Girl, 38. 169

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Notes to Chapter 1 40. Nancy, Being Singular-Plural, 32. 41. Stewart, Nonsense, 134. 42. There has been a considerable amount of scholarly critique on Lacan’s readings of sexual difference through Freud, especially in trans studies. For a powerful critique of Lacan’s formulas for sexuation, see Lavery, “King’s Two Anuses.” 43. Tompkins, “On the Limits.” 44. Carroll, “Alice on Stage,” 223. 45. Anon., “Reviews: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” 46. Beer, Alice in Space, 5. 47. Ruskin, Ethics of Dust, 166. 48. Mershon, “Ruskin’s Dust,” 476–77. 49. Mershon, , “Ruskin’s Dust,” 486. 50. Ruskin, Ethics of Dust, 72. 51. Ruskin, Ethics of Dust, 73. 52. Ruskin, Ethics of Dust, 73. 53. Ruskin, Ethics of Dust, 86. 54. Serpell, “Weird Times,” 1238. 55. Hadley, Living Liberalism, 17. 56. For Jacques Lacan, den expresses the irreducible nature of sexual difference as it manifests in the object petit a, in his near-unreadable text, “L’étourdit.” For a cogent explanation of the significance of den for Western philosophy and psychoanalysis, see Dolar, “Tyche, Clinamen, Den.” 57. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 151. 58. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 153. 59. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 154. 60. In a separate interview, Haraway explains that her original piece for the Socialist Review was “very controversial” and that the “East Coast Collective truly disapproved of it politically and did not want it published.” “Cyborgs, Coyotes, and Dogs,” 324. 61. Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 113. 62. Ruskin, “Of Queen’s Gardens,” 90. 63. Homans writes: “Given that it is feminist writer [Barbara] Bodichon who focuses on the Queen’s uniqueness to highlight ordinary women’s lack of power and entitlement, Ruskin’s figurative and multiplicative use of ‘queen’ might well seem linked to a conservative social agenda.” Royal Representations, 69. 64. Kincaid, Child-Loving, 296, 297. As already mentioned, other critics concentrating on the “nonsense” genre have also been concerned with both iterations of Wonderland as bound by rules. See Sewell, Field of Nonsense; Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense; and Blake, Play, Games, and Sport. 65. Auerbach, “Alice and Wonderland,” 42. 170

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Notes to Chapter 2 66. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 9. 67. Several critics have glossed the apparent disjunction in tone between these poems and the Alice stories themselves. Jennifer Greer notes, for example: “in the context of Alice’s adventures, the frames do surprise. Their portrayals of her journeys through Wonderland and Looking-glass country bear so little resemblance to the journeys themselves that it is difficult to take the frames quite seriously.” “‘All Sorts of Pitfalls,’” 1. 68. Kincaid, Child-Loving, 65. 69. Kincaid, Child-Loving, 65. Chapter 2 An earlier, partial version of this chapter was published as Ronjaunee Chatterjee, “Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity,” French Studies 70, no. 1 (January 2016): 17–32. By permission of Oxford University Press. 1. Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 66. 2. Clements, Baudelaire, 155. 3. Sheehan, Modernism, 59. 4. It is important to note that multiple feminine figures are featured in Baudelaire’s biography and that he was almost never monogamous: Madame de Sabatier (Apollonie Sabatier) and Marie Daubrun are two notable women with whom he had a relationship. However, many critics would agree with Norman R. Shapiro that “Jeanne Duval was the singular woman in Baudelaire’s life and poems.” Shapiro, Introduction, xx. 5. See Austin, L’Univers poétique de Baudelaire; Leakey, Baudelaire. 6. Lloyd, Baudelaire’s World, 92. 7. Françoise Meltzer puts forth the familiar observation that “almost every one of Baudelaire’s relationships, indeed his entire life, was tainted with the problem of money. At eighteen, Baudelaire inherited his father’s fortune; within a year and a half, as is well-known, he had spent nearly half of it.” Seeing Double, 138. 8. See Ransom, “Mon Semblable, ma mère,” 34; Sanyal, Violence of Modernity, 95; Rangel, Cities in Ruins, 64. 9. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 1:83. Hereafter referred to as OC in parentheses in the main text after a poem’s title. 10. N. Brown, Flowers of Evil, 249. All translations from Les Fleurs du Mal are from this edition (page numbers cited in text), and all translations of Baudelaire’s prose works are my own. The issue of translating Baudelaire’s verse has a long and complex history, famously taken up by Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator” (Illuminations, 69–82). I’ve chosen a translation that preserves the unit of the poetic line and each poem’s precise punctuation over rhyme and meter. 11. Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life, 165. 171

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Notes to Chapter 2 12. Weinberg, “Women of Eliot and Baudelaire,” 31. 13. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, 4. 14. “Les Lesbiennes,” as Pichois notes, was Les Fleurs du mal’s original title when it was announced in 1845 (OC, 1:31). 15. Lloyd, Baudelaire’s World, 94. 16. Buci-Glucksmann, “Catastrophic Utopia,” 220. 17. Kamuf, “Baudelaire’s Modern Woman,” 1. 18. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, 24. 19. Marcus, Apartment Stories, 4. 20. On the question of “Whither Baudelaire” in Victorian studies, see also Jamison, “‘Victorian Baudelaire’”; Kreilkamp, “Victorian Poetry’s Modernity.” 21. Carter, “Black Venus,” 238. 22. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 23. 23. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, 1. 24. As a critic Baudelaire wrote about “le romantisme” extensively, particularly in visual art, notably in the Salon de 1846 under the title “Qu’est-ce que le romantisme?” (OC, 2:420). 25. Pachet, Le Premier Venu, 45. The original reads: “Si Baudelaire est au contraire avide de concentration de soi, c’est qu’il est sans illusion sur l’état démocratrique et sur sa façon d’étouffer et d’encercler l’individualité un peu résistante.” 26. R. Burton, Baudelaire in 1859, 123. 27. Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 20. 28. Marx, Marx on Religion, 139n3. 29. Dalmolin, “Modernity Revisited,” 89. 30. Pichois notes that fantômes parisiens was the original section title for these three poems (OC, 1:1009). 31. Chambers, “Baudelaire’s Dedicatory Practice,” 8. 32. Pichois also mentions that Baudelaire wrote to the journal Revue contemporain about Hugo: “j’ai essayé d’imiter sa manière” (OC, 1:1010). 33. Baudelaire, Correspondance, 1:81–82. 34. For more information on Hugo’s rebellion against the regime, see Baguley, Napoleon III and His Regime. 35. For a sustained discussion of their relationship, see Turner, “Hugo and Baudelaire”; Cellier, Baudelaire et Hugo. 36. Chambers argues that among the various aims of the dedication is the desire to “politicize a text [.  .  .] while generally maintaining an air of noble distance from the sordid politics of the 1850’s” (“Baudelaire’s Dedicatory Practice,” 8). 37. Wing, “Baudelaire’s Frisson Fraternal,” 24. 38. Sartre, Baudelaire (1950), 37–38. The original is Sartre, Baudelaire (1947), 41–42. 172

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Notes to Chapter 2 39. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, 149. 40. Dolf Oehler suggests this poem and a few others from Les Fleurs du mal “renews the rhetoric of Satanism.” “Baudelaire’s Politics,” 28. On the subject of Baudelaire and the figure of Satan, see Culler, “Baudelaire’s Destruction.” 41. It would be impossible to ignore the dimension of the poem that grounds itself in the description of one of the old men’s limbs as either “of an infirm quadruped or a three-legged Jew.” For a more recent conversation about this and other references in Baudelaire’s work (though one that does not take into account the full complexity of nineteenth-century French antiSemitism, which did not align with traditional political oppositions of “left” and “right”), see Baker and Bowles, “Baudelaire and Anti-Semitism.” 42. R. Burton, Baudelaire in 1859, 116. 43. Kamuf, “Baudelaire’s Modern Woman,” 4. 44. Meltzer, Seeing Double, 122. 45. R. Burton, Blood in the City, 132. 46. R. Burton, Blood in the City, 132. 47. R. Burton, Blood in the City, 133. 48. Dolan, “Skirting the Issue,” 611. 49. O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid,” 1. 50. Brand, Blue Clerk, verso 16.2. 51. Pollock, Differencing the Canon. 52. For a cogent explanation of these accounts, see Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 266–70; and R. Mitchell, Vénus Noire. 53. See Christophe, “Jeanne Duval,” for a summary of these passages about Duval from Baudelaire and art criticism. 54. DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities, 16. 55. Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 265. 56. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 1. 57. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 194. 58. Wagner, Icons—Texts—Iconotexts, 13. 59. It is worth noting here that Duval was also allegedly erased from Gustave Courbet’s painting, The Painter’s Studio (1855). Several critics claim again that this erasure was at Baudelaire’s request. 60. See Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake for a specific Black method of reading gaps and silences in the archive and in visual culture. 61. De Man provides a concise definition of ideology as “precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.” Resistance to Theory, 11. Aesthetic Ideology describes how this confusion plays out in philosophical treatments of the aesthetic. 62. Hobson, Venus in the Dark, 7. 63. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 93. 173

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Notes to Chapter 3 64. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 16. 65. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 23. 66. Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 6. 67. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 54. 68. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 109. 69. Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 2. 70. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 30. 71. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 47. 72. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 85. 73. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 108. 74. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 78. 75. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 79. 76. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 81. 77. See N. Brown, Baudelaire’s Shadow, 178. 78. De Man describes this process in the following sentence: “We must, in other words, disarticulate, mutilate the body . . . this moment marks the undoing of the aesthetic as a valid category” (Aesthetic Ideology, 88–89). On the use of the aesthetic to close a philosophical system, Andrzej Warminski glosses: “In the very attempt to ground or validate the aesthetic, both must have recourse to factors and functions of language that disarticulate the aesthetic its linking or mediating role.” Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics, 5. 79. Gasché, Wild Card of Reading, 73. 80. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 12. 81. Robertson, Baudelaire Fractal, 105. Chapter 3 Portions of this chapter have been adapted from Ronjaunee Chatterjee, “Precarious Lives: Christina Rossetti and the Form of Likeness,” Victorian Literature and Culture 45, no. 4 (December 2017): 745–62. Reproduced with permission. 1. Anon., “Current Literature: Speaking Likenesses,” 606. 2. John Ruskin, qtd. in Auerbach and Knoepflmacher, Forbidden Journeys, 318. 3. In Walter Benjamin’s phrasing, modernity brings to bear “the forgotten faculty of being similar.” Benjamin and Tarnowski, “Doctrine of the Similar,” 69.  4. Nersessian, “Two Gardens,” 313. 5. C. Rossetti, Complete Poems, 194. Subsequent references to poems in this edition will be made in-text as CP. 6. According to Emma Mason, “reserve also indicated that some of God’s tenets were simply beyond all human comprehension, only to be revealed to the faithful in heaven. Reserve allowed a writer like Rossetti to adopt 174

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Notes to Chapter 3 reticently the role of theological commentator in her writing while exempting her from accusations of vainly flaunting religious learning unsuitable for a middle-class woman.” “Christina Rossetti,” 198. 7. Diane D’Amico and David A. Kent have commented extensively on Rossetti’s aesthetic debt to Keble and other early Tractarian founders, noting that, in addition to her activism and familial link to Anglican sisterhoods, Rossetti’s “reading indicates her admiration for the movement’s leading figures. She carefully illustrated her own copies of Keble’s Christian Year and Isaac Williams’ The Altar. She owned a copy of John Henry Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, and shortly after his death in 1890, she wrote a sonnet to honor him.” “Rossetti and the Tractarians,” 93. 8. Wood, “Murder Is Red.” 9. Nelson, Jane, 185. 10. For an in-depth theorizing of how these forms are enacted in contemporary America culture, see Seltzer, Serial Killers. 11. Nelson, Jane, 23. 12. Carter, Bloody Chamber, 29. 13. See Butler, Antigone’s Claim; MacCannell, Regime of the Brother. 14. Gruner, “Born and Made,” 425. For a historical overview of these debates, see Wallace, “Deceased Wife’s Sister Controversy.” 15. J. Mitchell, Siblings, 10. 16. J. Mitchell, Siblings, 10. 17. Sedgwick, “Tales of the Avunculate,” 54. 18. Michie, “‘No Friend Like a Sister,’” 407. 19. Rogers, “Re-reading Sisterhood,” 868. 20. Rodgers, “Re-reading Sisterhood,” 43. 21. Engelstein, “Sibling Logic,” 40. 22. W. Rossetti, Family Letters, 44. 23. Anon., “Christmas Books,” 877–78. 24. C. Rossetti, Speaking Likenesses, 326. 25. Carroll, Annotated Alice, 211. 26. Briggs, “Speaking Likenesses,” 212. 27. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 33. 28. Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables, 478. 29. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. 30. Kaston, “Speaking Pictures,” 307. 31. William Michael Rossetti claimed his sister “did not mean anything profound by this fairytale.” Notes from Poetical Works, 459. One Victorian reviewer also thought that “Goblin Market” was “a children’s poem,” albeit with “mature” themes. Anon., Review of Goblin Market, Spectator, 414–15. 32. Anon., Review of Goblin Market, British Quarterly Review, 230. 33. Marsh, “Christina Rossetti’s Vocation,” 242. 175

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Notes to Chapter 4 34. See Holt, “‘Men Sell Not Such’”; Helsinger, “Consumer Power”; Carpenter, “‘Eat Me, Drink Me,’”; Mendoza, “‘Come Buy’”; Lysack, “Goblin Markets.” 35. The poem’s depiction of sisterhood has anchored many critical readings since Rossetti’s work gained renewed attention in the later twentieth century from scholars such as Jerome McGann, Anthony Harrison, and Constance W. Hassett. In his 1965 essay, for instance, Winston Weathers claims that sisterhood symbolized “the fragmented self moving or struggling toward harmony or balance.” “Christina Rossetti,” 81. Another notable reading of sisterhood is by Dorothy Mermin in “Heroic Sisterhood.” More recently, Scott Rogers in “Re-reading Sisterhood” has attended to sisterhood as a motif in Rossetti’s other lyrics. 36. Casey, “Potential of Sisterhood,” 66. 37. Casey, “Potential of Sisterhood,” 75. 38. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 33. 39. Michie, Sororophobia, 21. 40. Michie, Sororophobia, 33. 41. Michie, Sororophobia, 20. 42. Mermin, “Heroic Sisterhood,” 117. 43. Gray, “Faithful Likenesses,” 293. 44. C. Rossetti, qtd. in Complete Poems, 237. 45. A notable exception is Marsh, “Indian Mutiny.” 46. John Stuart Mill performs a similar rhetorical maneuver in On Liberty while discussing liberal character, opinion, and individuation against the “customs” of East Asia and of China in particular. 47. Joshi, “Mutiny Echoes,” 54–55. In her groundbreaking work, Allegories of Empire, Jenny Sharpe writes too that “English women [are] an absent center around which a colonial discourse of rape, race, and gender turns.” Allegories of Empire, 8. 48. Lootens, Political Poetess, 1. 49. Hughes, Introduction to Victorian Poetry, 198. Chapter 4 1. Miller, “Cage Aux Folles,” 152. 2. Collins, Woman in White (2006), 62. All subsequent references to the novel, unless noted, are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the main text. 3. Elam, “White Narratology,” 50. 4. Ortiz-Robles, “Figure and Affect,” 851. 5. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” 244. 6. In The Moment of Racial Sight, Irene Tucker argues that “racial constructionism’s rhetoric of otherness obscures the degree to which perceiving 176

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Notes to Chapter 4 race involves, for better or for worse, experiencing individuals’ likeness to one another rather than their difference” (8). In her reading of The Woman in White, Tucker too concentrates on the likeness at the heart of the novel in the context of advances in anatomical medicine and the 1856 murder trial of William Palmer, or the “Rugeley Poisoner,” that influenced Collins’s plot. Her point that the novel is “a story about the nineteenth-century subject” (77), and that that subject is tangled up with changing notions about how to read race as a material sign, is powerfully relevant here. I take a somewhat different approach than Tucker’s to this initial shared premise by considering the dual functioning of race and gender in the novel in a different set of contexts. 7. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 8. 8. Armstrong, How Novels Think, 10. 9. Armstrong, How Novels Think, 10. 10. See Freedgood, Worlds Enough. 11. Brantlinger, “What Is ‘Sensational’?,” 1. 12. Pykett, “Collins and the Sensation Novel,” 55. Ann Cvetkovich elaborates these points by summarizing the critical consensus on Collins’s work: “The extension of the law beyond its usual boundaries installs a hermeneutics of suspicion in which every fact that excites a sensation merits investigation.” “Ghostlier Determinations,” 25. 13. James, “Miss Braddon.” 14. Steinlight, Populating the Novel, 141. 15. Hensley, Forms of Empire, 104. 16. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 7. 17. And here I also wonder, following Manu Samriti Chander and Joseph Pierce, if this subject and this structure could be “brown.” Chander and Pierce read Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and Jorge Isaac’s Maria (1867) to theorize the possibility of “brown cousins” in the Victorian novel, a form of “embodied mutuality” that would query the “whiteness as the macrostructure through which subjectivity comes to align with the colonial matrix of power.” Chander and Pierce, “Cousin Theory,” 483. 18. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 125. 19. Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line, 134. 20. Daly, “Woman in White,” 1. 21. Daly, “Woman in White,” 1. 22. Kant, “Old Question Raised Again,” 304. 23. See Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti.” 24. Collins visited Italy on three occasions—as a child with his family, on a trip with Dickens, and with his mistress, Caroline Graves. 25. This opening speaks to “the biopolitical pressures generated by the transition from royal to popular sovereignty in the wake of the French 177

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Notes to Chapter 4 Revolution and the long struggle to reconstitute the ‘physiology’ of the body politic over the course of the nineteenth century.” Santner, Royal Remains, xi. 26. Sutherland, Introduction to Woman in White, xiv. 27. Several critics have also questioned Hartright and his repeated claim to objectivity because of his role as self-proclaimed editor and arranger of the diary entries in the novel, in which he writes from a retrospective point of view in which all events have been neatly resolved. Pamela Perkins, for example, suggests: “Walter, far from being objective, is manipulating the narrative for his own ends.” Perkins and Donaghy, “Man’s Resolution,” 392. According to Rachel Ablow, “even at this point in the novel, each description of Walter’s sympathetic bond with his future wife is indistinguishable from an account of projection.” “Good Vibrations,” 165. 28. Comay, Mourning Sickness, 30–31. 29. Hadley, Living Liberalism, 10. 30. Tucker, “Paranoid Imaginings,” 153. 31. I am thinking about a question posed by Anne DuCille: “What does it mean when similarity and difference—even allowing for the power of metaphor—are calculated according to a like-me or an unlike-me that is not only a code for race but a code for skin color?” Skin Trade, 16. 32. Nord discusses how Victorian literature figures these anxieties through the figure of the “gypsy,” which bears some relevance here. In particular, she points to how George Eliot equates “unconventional—indeed heroic—femininity with physical deformity and racial otherness.” Unconventional femininity in Victorian novels therefore tends to be figured by “the mark of race.” “‘Marks of Race,’” 191. 33. Kant, “Old Question Raised Again,” 301. 34. Brantlinger makes the important assertion that “in the middle of the most serious domestic concerns, often in the most unlikely texts, the Empire may intrude as a shadowy realm of escape, renewal, banishment, or return for characters who for one reason or another need to enter or exit from scenes of domestic conflict.” Rule of Darkness, 12. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xvi. 35. Jameson, Political Unconscious. 36. Aguirre, Informal Empire. 37. [Morton,] “Our Phantom Ship.” 38. Poovey, History of the Modern Fact. 39. Heller, Dead Secrets, 123. 40. Heller, Dead Secrets, 128. 41. Walter casually notes in the novel’s opening: “Events which I have yet to relate, make it necessary to mention in this place that my father had been dead some years at the period of which I am now writing; and that my sister Sarah, and I, were the sole survivors of a family of five children” (51). 178

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Notes to Chapter 4 42. Engelstein, “Civic Attachments,” 206. 43. As Jonathan Parry observes, “‘Italy’ was the best sort of political issue because different Liberals could adopt it for different reasons: its ambiguities greatly helped to strengthen and widen the Liberal coalition.” Politics of Patriotism, 233. 44. The most prescient summary of this is the case that Annemarie McAllister has argued: “Questions of what it meant to be a man, what was appropriate manly behaviour, and the construction and policing of gender boundaries were all opened up for consideration, with the Italian operating as Other against which to define English nationality.” John Bull’s Italian Snakes, 26. 45. In Middlemarch, Mrs. Cadwallader refers to Will Ladislaw, who is of Polish origin, as an “Italian with white mice.” This is quoted to Dorothea by her sister, Celia. Eliot, Middlemarch, 304. Goodlad explains that “to build ‘character’ in the nineteenth- century was . . . to resist atomization and embourgeoisement.” Goodlad, Victorian Literature, ix. 46. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 9. 47. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 161. 48. Hadley, Living Liberalism, 21. 49. Mill, On Liberty, 1859, 48. 50. Pettitt, Serial Forms, 2. 51. McGillen, “Eric Auerbach,” 138. 52. [Dallas,] Unsigned review, 6, qtd. in Cox and Bachman, 638. 53. Dallas, qtd. in Collins, Woman in White, 638. 54. Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, 16. 55. Anon., Unsigned review, Saturday Review, qtd. in Collins, Woman in White, 629. 56. Young, “Gender as Seriality,” 725. 57. Pykett, for example, characterizes Collins’s sensation plot as one that fundamentally “turns on a series of interconnected family secrets and deceptions.” “Collins and the Sensation Novel,” 54. Similarly, U. C. Knoepflmacher reads The Woman in White as a “collision between a lawful order in which identities are fixed and an anarchic lawlessness in which these social identities can be erased and destroyed.” In other words, this “lawful order” is implicitly one directed by the Law of the Father and its patriarchal social oppression, while “anarchic lawlessness” represented by Count Fosco, symbolizes a “counterworld” of near-nihilism. “Counterworlds of Victorian Fiction,” 362. Further, Michie refines this point by claiming: “The Woman in White brings the criminal into the domestic, obscuring safe distinctions between them. Every act of immorality or criminality has its double within what seems to be the safe haven of Victorian marriage.” According to Michie, the patriarchal family structure in Collins’s work that seeks to fix “Lady 179

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Notes to epilogue Glyde” as a neat unitary identity faces the threat of this feminine identity’s doubling and proliferation. Sororophobia, 59. 58. K. Brown, “End of the Story,” 162. 59. Brown, “End of the Story,” 162. 60. In my formulation of a feminine singularity borne out of the series, I find shared kinship with Beeston’s argument about the modernist “women in series” scripted through photographic practices that are an “intervallic structural, aesthetic and narrative logic.” In and Out of Sight, 5. 61. Chander and Pierce, “Cousin Theory,” 483. 62. See Stoler, Carnal Knowledge; Schuller, Biopolitics of Feelings; Christoff, Novel Relations. Epilogue 1. There are other examples from film and television, such as the female alien from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), the clones from the television series Orphan Black (2013–2017), and the hologram women of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2014). 2. Keeling, Witch’s Flight, 2. 3. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 117. 4. In “What Is a Monster?” Peter Brooks wonders whether “a monster may be that which eludes gender definition” (389). Brooks finds these questions about gender and “monstrosity” located in the novel in the tension it stages between visual (and often scopophilic) forms of knowledge and recognition and verbal ones. In “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” Stryker queries this claim, especially as it pertains to the transgender subject. She writes that “unlike the monster, we often successfully cite the culture’s visual norms for gendered embodiment. This citation becomes a subversive resistance when, through a provisional use of language, we verbally declare the unnaturalness of our claim to the subject positions we nevertheless occupy” (247). Frankenstein has further been read by many critics—both Shelley’s contemporaries and ours—with the question of racial slavery and nineteenth-century racial science in mind. See, for example, Terada, “Blackness and Anthropogenesis”; Mellor, “Frankenstein, Racial Science.” 5. Shelley, Frankenstein, 104. 6. Shelley, Frankenstein, 158. 7. Shelley, Frankenstein, 119. 8. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 75. 9. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 76, 78. 10. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 81.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrative material. Ablow, Rachel, 178n27 absolutism, 134, 143 abstraction: anti-abstracted child, 39; embodied, 48; excess and violence in, 143–45; from the mass, 61; through counting, 36 Ackerman, Chantal, 161 Adhémar, Jean, 79 aesthetic, the: binaries, 137; and the bizarre, 66–67, 83–84; and counting, 38; and freedom, 63, 65, 86; ideology, 83, 173n61; of impossibility, 64, 66; and materiality of language, 88, 174n78; and seriality, 147; singularity of, 14–16; and whiteness, 79–81 Aguirre, Robert D., 138 Ahmed, Sarah, 21–22 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll): bracketing poem, 54, 171n67; counting and thinking, 32, 41; counting as ubiquitous in, 28–29; counting infinity, 71; counting/not counting sexual difference, 34; critical reception, 27, 30, 169n34; illustrations, 43, 43–45, 44; impossibility, 54; inward question of “who she is,” 28, 167n5; malleability of matter and forms, 41–43, 46;

paradoxical becoming, 32–33; political commentary in caucusrace, 37; and Rossetti, 101–2; singularity among other girls, 39–41. See also Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There All the Year Round (periodical), 124, 140, 146 Als, Hilton, 124, 127 apple of discord, 103–4, 105 Arendt, Hannah, 143–44 Armstrong, Nancy, 128, 169n34 Arseneau, Mary, 111 atoms and atomism, 45, 47–48, 49 Attridge, Derek, 4, 5, 163n5, 163n10, 166n51 Auerbach, Eric, 147 Auerbach, Nina, 51, 102, 167n5 Badiou, Alain, 34, 167n63 Balfour, Ian, 15 Banville, Théodore de, 81 Baraka, Amiri, 166n45 Baucom, Ian, 10 Baudelaire, Charles: aesthetic, 66–67; and Courbet, 173n59; and Hugo, 68–69, 70, 172n32; Haussmanian context, 59, 60; misogyny, 56–58; money

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index Baudelaire, Charles (continued ) concerns, 57, 171n7; on infinity, 69–71; on prostitution and solitude, 63–65; relationship with Duval, 56, 79, 171n4; “Au Lecteur,” 73; “À une passante,” 60–61, 62, 65–66; “Le Cygne,” 68–69, 85, 86; “un fantôme,” 83; Les Fleurs du mal, 56, 57, 59, 73, 83, 88, 173n40; Journaux intimes, 56; Mon Coeur mis à nu, 56, 57, 63–65; The Painter of Modern Life, 66–67; “Qu’est-ce que le romantisme?,” 172n24; Spleen et idéal, 56. See also “Les Petites Vieilles”; “Les Septs Vieillards” The Baudelaire Fractal (Robertson): and the bizarre, 83–84; concept of singularity, overview, 5, 62; ekphrasis on Manet’s painting, 82–83; femininity in capitalist modernity, 84–86; materiality of language, 84, 88–89; serial replication of femininity, 86–88 Baum, Frank L., 167n5 beauty. See aesthetic, the becoming, 32–33 Beer, Gillian, 46 Beeston, Alix, 153, 180n60 being, and becoming, 33 Benjamin, Walter, 66, 147, 166n58, 171n10, 174n3 Bentham, Jeremy, 9, 164n22 Bernasconi, Robert, 14 Bernheimer, Charles, 58, 87 Bersani, Leo, 66, 67 Bivona, Daniel, 169n34 bizarreness and strangeness, 4, 66–67, 83–84 Black feminist theory: critique of psychoanalytic theory, 35; on

the erotic, 2; as improvisational, 35–36 black holes, 16–17, 18, 21, 166n46 Black music, 166n45 Blackness: and idealized female beauty, 79–81; mixed-race femininity, 82; one-drop rule, 131 Black radical tradition, 15–16 Blade Runner 2049 (film), 180n1 Blanchot, Maurice, 163n10 Bodichon, Barbara, 170n63 body, the, 41–43, 47–48, 81, 127, 131 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 128; Lady Audley’s Secret, 129 Brand, Dionne, 81 Brantlinger, Patrick, 128–29, 138, 178n34 Briggs, Julia, 108 Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 82 Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 128 Brooks, Peter, 159, 180n4 brotherhood/fraternity, 73, 115–16, 140–45, 153 Brown, Kimberly Juanita, 151 Brown, Nathan, 88 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 58 Burke, Carolyn, 169n27 Burton, Antoinette, 8 Burton, Richard, 65, 73, 78 Butler, Judith, 19, 22 Camus, Albert, The Plague, 36 Cantor, George, 29–30 capitalism. See liberal capitalist modernity Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson): career in mathematics, 26–27, 29–30, 168n7; illustrations by, 30, 43, 45; personal notoriety, 30, 168n11; photography interests, 30, 45,

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index 46, 168n14; political interests, 37; The Hunting of the Snark, 33, 167n2; Sylvia and Bruno, 33, 167n2. See also Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There Carter, Angela, 62; The Bloody Chamber, 97 Casey, Janet, 112 census, 36–39 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 161 Chambers, Ross, 68, 69, 172n36 Chander, Manu Samriti, 177n17 Cheah, Pheng, 22 Christ-like sacrifice, 118 Christoff, Alicia Mireles, 155, 165n33 Chuh, Kandice, 14, 165n42 Ciolkowski, Laura E., 169n34 citizenship, 141, 144 Cixous, Hélène, 34 Clark, Timothy, 4, 163n5, 163n10 Le Code Noire, 82 Collingwood, Luke, 9 Collins, Wilkie: and sensation novel genre, 128; The Law and the Lady, 131; The Moonstone, 177n17; No Name, 131. See also The Woman in White colonialism, 9–10, 81–82, 121–23, 134, 138–39, 169n34 color line, 131 Comay, Rebecca, 14, 136 Copjec, Joan, 34 Cornell, Drucilla, 22 corporeal dynamism, 42. See also body, the counting: asymmetric twoness, 51– 52; census, 36–39; and fractals, 47–48; personhood as countable, 9–12; riddles, 29, 168n7; sexual

difference, 34, 39, 63–66; topological and temporal approach, 50, 52–54; twoness of girlhood, 35–36; ubiquity in Alice books, 28–29. See also infinity Courbet, Gustave, The Painter’s Studio, 173n59 crowds, the self in, 65–66 Cvetkovich, Ann, 177n12 cyborgs, 49–50 Dallas, E. S., 148 Dalmolin, Eliane F., 68 Daly, Nicholas, 132 D’Amico, Diane, 111, 175n7 Darwin, Charles: The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals, 46; The Origin of the Species, 27 Daubrun, Marie, 171n4 death, 38, 77–78, 92, 93–94, 100, 102, 118, 144–45 deconstruction, 19–20, 88 De Lauretis, Teresa, 21 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 13, 18–19, 32–33, 147, 165n34 De Man, Paul, 83, 88, 173n61, 174n78 Democratus, 49 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 13, 15, 16, 19–20, 147, 163n10, 165n34, 166n58, 167n4 description, as narrative mode, 84 desire: masculine, 63–64; for rest, 107–8; unresolved, in likeness, 108–10 Dickens, Charles, 164n21; All the Year Round (periodical), 124, 140, 146; Great Expectations, 146; Household Words (periodical), 138–39; A Tale of Two Cities, 140

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index difference and sameness: and becoming, 32–33; in liberalist discourse, overview, 8–13, 164n19; and repetition, 18–20; symbolic, 169n24. See also likeness and minimal difference; racial difference; sexual and gendered difference Divorce Act (1857), 135 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge. See Carroll, Lewis Dolan, Therese, 79 Dolar, Mladen, 169n24 domesticity, 40, 86, 128, 139, 148–49 Dubois, W. E. B., 131 DuCille, Anne, 178n31 Du Maurier, George, 132 Dusinberre, Juliet, 169n38 Duval, Jeanne: Courbet painting, 173n59; Manet painting, 79–80, 80, 82–83; racialized biography, 81–82; relationship with Baudelaire, 56, 79, 171n4 economic binaries, 111–12, 117 Einstein, Albert, 166n46 Elam, Diane, 126 Eliot, George, 141, 164n21, 178n32; Middlemarch, 179n45 embodiment, abstract, 48. See also body, the Engelstein, Stephani, 101, 141 enumeration. See counting envy, 6 erotic, the: of girlhood, 30, 47; idealization of femininity, 136, 137; sameness, 117; sharing of, 2 Ex Machina (film), 156–59 Faraday, Michael, 46 femininity: and beauty ideals, 79–81; and the bizarre, 66–67,

83–84; domesticity, 40, 86, 128, 139, 148–49; as infinite, 66, 67, 75, 76, 86–87; limits to legibility of, 136–37; mixed-race, 82; outside liberal and capital identification, 60–61, 62–63, 76, 78–79, 86–87, 89; prostitution, 57, 62–65, 67; queenliness, 50–54; serial construction of alternative social relations of, 146–47, 148–55; substitutability/unsubstitutability of, 40, 137, 145, 149, 154–55; taxonomies, 12–13, 126, 131; unconventional, marked by racial otherness, 178n32; and violence, 104. See also girlhood; sisterhood feminist theory: critique of second-wave, 2, 4, 97; on likeness, 6–7; objective, 21–22; psychoanalytic, 20–21, 34; on sexual difference, 34. See also Black feminist theory Field, Michael, 58 Flatley, Jonathan, 6 Fogel, Aaron, 38 fractals, 47–48 Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), 134 fraternity/brotherhood, 73, 115–16, 140–45, 153 Freedgood, Elaine, 128 freedom, 63, 65, 86, 157 French liberalism, 10, 165n26 French Revolution, 133, 134, 177–78n25 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 33–34, 73, 166n60, 170n42 Froebel, Friedrich, 169n38 fugitivity, 157

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index Gadamer, Hans George, 163n10 Gallagher, Catherine, 10, 164n21 Gardner, Martin, 167n2 Garland, Alex, 156 Gasché, Rodolphe, 88 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 164n21 gendered difference. See sexual and gendered difference genius, man of, 63–65 Gervasio, Nicole, 164n24 gift vs. market economy, 111–12, 117 Gilroy, Paul, 164n19 gimmick, the, 85 girlhood: erotic fixation, 30, 47; as infinite, 30, 47–48, 86; loss of, 54; malleability of, 41–43, 46, 86; minimal difference in, 40–41; as narrative mode, 85; outside bureaucratic taxonomies of personhood, 38–39; twoness of, 35–36; Victorian ideals of, 40, 169n35 Glazer, Jonathan, 180n1 Gleeson, Domhnall, 156 Glissant, Édouard, 13, 18 “Goblin Market” (Rossetti): overview, 110–11; critical reception, 111–12, 175n31, 176n35; patriarchal relationships replaced by sisterhood, 115, 119; similes, 118–19; twoness and oneness of sisterhood, 112–14, 120; universal sameness vs. complementary difference, 115–17; violence, 117–18 Goodlad, Lauren, 10, 179n45 Gorham, Deborah, 40 Gray, Erik, 118–19 Greer, Jennifer, 171n67 Greg, W. R., 126 Grosz, Elizabeth, 22, 42

Guys, Constantin, Le Peintre de la vie modern, 65, 67 Hadley, Elaine, 9, 48, 136, 145, 164n21 Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), 133 Halberstam, Jack, 21 Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 49–50, 170n60 Harrison, Anthony, 176n35 Hartman, Saidiya, 79, 82, 83, 89, 157, 164n19 Hassett, Constance W., 176n35 Haussmanization, 59, 81–82 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 71, 88, 133 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 163n10 Heller, Tamar, 140 Hensley, Nathan, 130, 164n19 historical materialism, 45–46 Hobson, Janell, 84 Homans, Margaret, 51, 170n63 Household Words (periodical), 138–39 Huffer, Lynne, 6, 32 Hughes, Arthur, 90, 104, 105, 109 Hugo, Victor, 68–69, 70, 172n32 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 45 Huysmans, J-K., 58 Illustrated London News (newspaper), 121 impossibility, 53, 54, 60–61, 64, 66 Indian Rebellion (1857), 121–23 infinity: and femininity, 66, 67, 75, 76, 86–87; and girlhood, 30, 47–48, 86; of identities, 46; of likenesses, 104–5; and seriality, 69–75, 76, 86 inheritance plots, 150–52 Irigaray, Luce, 22, 34, 169n27

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index Isaac, Jorge, Maria, 177n17 Isaac, Oscar, 156 Italian Risorgimento, 133–34, 141 iterability, 4, 19–20, 87 iteration, fractal, 47–48 James, Henry, 129 Jameson, Fredric, 138 Joshi, Priti, 122 Kafer, Alison, 50 Kamuf, Peggy, 58, 76 Kant, Immanuel, 13–15, 16, 20, 137, 138; “An Old Question Raised Again,” 133; Critique of Judgement, 14–15, 88, 165n38; Critique of Practical Reason, 15, 165n38; Critique of Pure Reason, 14 Kapil, Bhanu, 161 Kaston, Andrea, 110 Kawash, Samira, 131 Keble, John, 92; Christian Year, 175n7 Keeling, Kara, 157 Kent, David A., 175n7 Kincaid, James R., 27, 51, 55 kinship. See brotherhood/fraternity; sisterhood Klein, Felix, 47 Knoepflmacher, U. C., 30, 102, 179n57 Kornbluh, Anna, 29 Kurzweil, Ray, 157 Lacan, Jacques, 20, 166n60, 167n4, 167nn62–63, 170n42, 170n56 Lakshmi Bai, rani of Jhansi, 123 landscapes and topology, 50, 52–54 lateral relationships. See brotherhood/fraternity; sisterhood Laure (art model), 80

Leach, Karoline, 168n11 Lee, Rachel, 158 Lehman, Robert, 14 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 47 lesbianism, 58 liberal capitalist modernity: bourgeois model in nineteenthcentury novels, 126–28; destruction of selfhood, 65; discourses on difference, overview, 8–13, 164n19; excess in abstraction, 143–44; femininity outside of, 60–61, 62–63, 76, 78–79, 86–87, 89; and infinity, 72–74, 78; suspension of signification in, 85–86 Liddell, Alice, 30, 54 Liddell, Henry, 30 likeness and minimal difference: as concept, 6–7; corrective to representations of, 96; and failed substitution, 149–50, 154; in girlhood, 40–41; hierarchies of difference created by relationships of, 100–101; infinity of, 104–6; and iterability, 19–20; legal and social anxieties about, 97; in similes, 118–19; universal sameness vs. complementary difference, 115–17; unresolved desire in, 108–10; violent negotiations of identity in, 102, 103–4, 106–7. See also brotherhood/fraternity; sisterhood literary communism, 161–62 Lloyd, Rosemary, 56–57, 58 Lootens, Tricia, 122–23 Lorde, Audre, 2 Louis XIV, King of France, 82 Macdonald, George, 167n5 Malthus, Thomas, An Essay on the Principles of Population, 37 208

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index Manet, Édouard: Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining, 79–80, 80, 81, 82–83; Olympia, 80–81 man of genius, 63–65 Marcus, Sharon, 59 marital law, 97, 127, 131, 135, 150–52 market vs. gift economy, 111–12, 117 Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill (1907), 97 Married Women’s Property Acts (1870 and 1882), 131 Marsh, Jan, 111 Marx, Karl, Economic and Political Manuscripts, 67 Marxism, 45–46 masculinity: and brotherhood/ fraternity, 73, 115–16, 140–45, 153; and desire, 63–64; and Englishness, 141, 179n44; Oedipal, 69, 73, 74; racialized, 114; and solitude, 63–65; and violence, 104. See also patriarchy and patriarchal relationships Mason, Emma, 174–75n6 materialism, 42, 45–49 materiality of language, 84, 88–89, 174n78 mathematics, as field, 29. See also counting; infinity McAllister, Annemarie, 179n44 McGann, Jerome, 176n35 McGillen, Michael, 147–48 Mehta, Uday Singh, 164n19 Mellor, Anne K., 27 Meltzer, Françoise, 77, 171n7 Mermin, Dorothy, 117, 176n35 Mershon, Ella, 47 Meurent, Victorine, 80 Michie, Helena, 6–7, 98, 113–15, 179–80n57

Mill, John Stuart, 9, 147, 164n22; On Liberty, 176n46 Miller, D. A., 124 minimal difference. See likeness and minimal difference misogyny, 56–58 Mitchell, Juliet, 6, 98 mixed-race femininity, 82 modal logic, 27, 167n4 modernity. See liberal capitalist modernity Morley, Henry, “Our Phantom Ship,” 138–39 Moten, Fred, 13, 15, 16, 165n39, 166n44 Mouffe, Chantal, 164n19 Mufti, Nasser, 164n19 Muñoz, Jose Esteban, 3, 15–16, 32, 130, 165n42 Nadar, Félix, 81 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1, 4, 5, 13, 40, 113, 161 Napoleon Bonaparte, 134 narcissism, 135–36 natural history, 45 Nelson, Maggie, Jane: A Murder, 94–97 Nersessian, Anahid, 91 Newman, John Henry, Dream of Gerontius, 175n7 new materialism, 42 Ngai, Sianne, 6, 85 Nickel, Douglas, 168n14 Nord, Deborah Epstein, 178n32 novels: sensation genre, 126–27, 128–30; universalizing subject in nineteenth-century, 126–28 numbers. See counting Oedipal masculinity, 69, 73, 74 Oedipus complex, 99, 115

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index Oehler, Dolf, 173n40 O’ Grady, Lorraine, 81 oneness: and countable personhood, 9–12; from failed “two” of heterosexual pairing, 93–94; topological and temporal coexistence with twoness, 50, 52–54; and twoness of sisterhood, 112–14, 120 Orphan Black (television series), 180n1 Ortiz-Robles, Mario, 126 Oxford movement, 92 Pachet, Pierre, Le Premier Venu, 65 Palmer, William, 177n6 Parry, Jonathan, 179n43 Parsons, Deborah L., 58 passing, 131, 156, 158 Pateman, Carol, 164n19 patriarchy and patriarchal relationships: hierarchies of difference created by sisterhood, 100–101; inheritance plots, 150–52; replaced by lateral relationships, 99–100, 115, 119, 150, 153–54; subversion of, 73, 78. See also masculinity Patton, Charlie, 166n44 Perkins, Pamela, 178n27 Perrault, Charles, 107 “Les Petites Vieilles” (Baudelaire): death, 77–78; and Hugo, 68– 69; infinity, 69, 75, 76; singular femininity, 75–76 Pettitt, Claire, 147 Philip, M. NourbeSe, Zong!, 9–10, 164n24 Pichois, Claude, 172n30, 172n32 Pierce, Joseph, 177n17 Poincaré, Henri, 47 Pollock, Griselda, 79, 81, 82

Poovey, Mary, 10, 140, 164n21 population theory, 37. See also census prostitution, 57, 62–65, 67 psychoanalytic theory, 20–21, 33–35 Puckett, Kent, 37 Punch (magazine), 132 Pusey, Edward, 92 Pycior, Helen, 29 Pykett, Lyn, 129, 179n57 quantifiability. See counting quantum theory, 16–17, 18, 21, 166n46 Quashie, Kevin, 5, 13, 17–18 queenliness, 50–54 queer theory, 3, 6, 15–16, 32, 34, 97, 130 racial difference: and affective potential of judgment, 15; and beauty ideals, 79–81; and colonial violence, 9–10, 121–23, 134, 139; and materiality of language, 88–89; mixed-race femininity, 82; passing narratives, 131; and patronymic naming structures, 151; in psychoanalytic theory, 35; and relationality, 17–18; substitutability and disposability, 158; and unconventional femininity, 178n32; undifferentiated brown “mass” vs. white individual, 122–23. See also whiteness Rankin, Flora, 46 rape, 117, 118 Rappoport, Jill, 111 relationality: and becoming, 33; of reading and feeling, 165n33; of singularity, 17–18

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index repetition, 18–20, 41, 95. See also infinity; iterability; seriality revolutionary violence, 133–34 Robertson, Lisa: EXclogue, 62; The Weather, 62. See also The Baudelaire Fractal Robson, Catherine, 27 Rodgers, Scott, 98, 99 Rogers, Scott, 176n35 Rose, Jacqueline, 20, 36, 108, 167n62 Rossetti, Christina: religious beliefs, 92, 174–75nn6–7; Annus Domini, 90; Goblin Market, 90, 93; “He and She,” 94; “In an Artist’s Studio,” 11; “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857,” 121–23; “The Lowest Room,” 92–93; “Nick,” 103; “Noble Sisters,” 98–100; The Prince’s Progress, 90; “Sister Maude,” 98, 100–101; “Wife to Husband,” 93–94. See also “Goblin Market”; Speaking Likenesses Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 59, 116 Rossetti, William Michael, 175n31 Ruskin, John, 90; The Ethics of Dust, 46–48; “Of Queen’s Gardens”, 51 Ruti, Mari, 20 Sabatier, Apollonie, 171n4 sacrificial violence, 110–11, 118 Said, Edward, 138, 164n19 Sartori, Andrew, 164n19 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 70, 149 Schuller, Kyla, 155 Scott, Gail, 20 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky, 5, 6, 129; “Tales of the Avunculate,” 98 segregation, racial, 131 sensation novel genre, 126–27, 128–30

“Les Septs Vieillards” (Baudelaire): anti-Semitism, 173n41; evil cityscape, 71–72, 173n40; and Hugo, 68–69; infinity, 69, 70, 71, 72–74 seriality: of alternative social relations, 146–47, 148–55; and infinity, 69–75, 76, 86; print medium, 146, 148; of social collective, 149 Serpell, C. Namwali, 48–49 Sewell, Elizabeth, 27 sexual and gendered difference: and corporeal dynamism, 42; and counting, 34, 39, 63–66; decoupling binaristic notion of, 45, 47, 51–52; incomplete opposition, 108–10; misogyny, 56–58; oneness from failed “two” of heterosexual pairing, 93–94; violence in binary classifications of, 117–18. See also brotherhood/fraternity; femininity; girlhood; masculinity Shapiro, Norman R., 171n4 Sharpe, Christina, 17, 83 Sharpe, Jenny, 176n47 Sheehan, Paul, 56 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 156, 159–61, 180n4 Shepherdson, Charles, 167n4 siblings and sibling-like relationships. See brotherhood/fraternity; sisterhood Silverman, Kaja, 6 singularity: in deconstruction, 19–20; definitions, 4, 163n10, 166n51; in philosophy, 4–5, 13–16; in psychoanalytic theory, 20–21; in quantum theory, 16–17, 18, 21; as relational, 17–18

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index sisterhood: complementary difference in, 116–17; hostility in, 98–99, 100; inclusion/exclusion in, 97; patriarchal hierarchies of difference created by, 100–101; patriarchal relationships replaced by, 99–100, 115, 119, 150, 153–54; precarious individuality in, 98; twoness and oneness of, 112–14, 120; variety of kinships in, 95 Skene, Alexander, 121 slavery, 82, 157 solitude, 63–65 Sophocles, Antigone, 98–99 sororophobia, 7, 114 space and time, 50, 52–54 Speaking Likenesses (Rossetti): overview, 102–3; and Carroll’s Alice books, 101–2; critical reception, 90; desire for rest, 107–8; illustrations, 104, 105, 108, 109; infinity of likenesses, 104–6; isolation, 107; unresolved desire in likeness, 108–10; violent negotiations of identity in likeness, 102, 103–4, 106–7 Spillers, Hortense J., 26, 35–36, 169n28 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 13, 15, 126–27, 165n38 Stein, Gertrude, 41 Steinlight, Emily, 129, 164n21 Stephens, John Lloyd, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, 139 Stewart, Susan, 41 Stockton, Katheryn Bond, 39 Stoler, Ann, 155 strangeness and the bizarre, 4, 66–67, 83–84

Stryker, Susan, 159, 180n4 Sutherland, John, 135 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 58; “Ave Atque Vale,” 59 symbolic difference, 169n24 technological singularity, 157 temporality and topology, 50, 52–54 Tenniel, John, 43–45, 44 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 59 Teukolsky, Rachel, 59 Thackeray, William Makepeace, Vanity Fair, 82 Thorne, Kip, 17 Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Carroll): asymmetric twoness, 51– 52; autonomy, 46; bracketing poem, 54, 171n67; counting as ubiquitous in, 28–29; counting infinity, 71; counting/not counting sexual difference, 34; critical reception, 27, 30, 51, 169n34; impossibility, 53, 54; inward question of “who she is,” 28, 167n5; loss of name, 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 167n2, 167n4, 169n27; paradoxical becoming, 33; and Rossetti, 101–2; topological and temporal coexistence of ones and twos, 50, 52–54. See also Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland time and space, 50, 52–54 Tompkins, Kyla Wazana, 42–43 topology and landscapes, 50, 52–54 Tractarianism, 92, 175n7 trans studies, 170n42, 180n4 Tucker, Irene, 137, 176–77n6 twoness: asymmetric, 51–52; of girlhood, 35–36; and oneness

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index from failed “two” of heterosexual pairing, 93–94; and oneness of sisterhood, 112–14, 120; topological and temporal coexistence with oneness, 50, 52–54 Tyndall, John, 45 Under the Skin (film), 180n1 Victoria, Queen of England, 51 Vikander, Alicia, 156 Villeneuve, Denis, 180n1 violence: in abstraction and excess, 143–45; colonial, 9–10, 121–23, 134, 139; misogynistic, 95, 96; in negotiating identity in likeness, 102, 103–4, 106–7; revolutionary, 133–34; sacrificial, 110–11, 118; sexual, 117–18, 122 visual culture, 79–83, 131, 132 Wagner, Peter, 83 Warhol, Andy, 6 Warminski, Andrzej, 174n78 Weathers, Winston, 176n35 Weber, Samuel, 4, 5, 163n5, 166n58 Weinberg, Kerry, 57–58 weird forms, 48–49 Whistler, James McNeill, 132 whiteness: female victimhood trope, 122, 176n47; in idealized female beauty, 79–81; instability of social order grounded in, 127, 137, 152–53, 154–55;

mixed-race femininity, 82; and passing, 131 Wilde, Oscar, 98; “Symphony in Yellow,” 75 Williams, Isaac, The Altar, 175n7 Wilson, Rachael M., 22 Wing, Nathaniel, 69 Wittig, Monique, 34 The Woman in White (Collins): overview, 124–26; colonial unconscious, 138–39; critical reception, 131–32, 148, 149, 177n6, 179–80n57; female substitutability, 137, 145, 149, 154–55; masculine subjectivity in generalized fraternal selfhood, 140–45; narrative authority, 135–37, 178n27; revolutionary context, 133–34; and sensation novel genre, 126–27, 128–30; serial construction of alternative social relations, 146–47, 148–55; serial publication, 146, 148 “Woman Question” debates, 12–13, 126, 131 Wong, Danielle, 158 Wood, Ellen (Mrs. Henry), 128 Wordsworth, William, “We Are Seven,” 37–39, 47 Young, Iris Marion, 149 Zerilli, Linda, 164n19 Zong (slave ship), 9–10, 139 Zupancˇicˇ, Alenka, 34

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