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This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

OBJECT LESSONS: WORKING-CLASS NATURALISM
AND THE SUBJECT OF LABOR

presented by

Nicholas Daniel Gavrila

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for ‘

 

 

Ph.D. degreein English

Wad/2W“

Major professor

Date August 6, 1991

 

MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Oppormniry Institution 0-12771

 

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out from your record.

OBJECT LESSONS: WORKING-CLASS NATURALISM
AND THE SUBJECT OF LABOR

BY

Nicholas Daniel Gavrila

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1991

 

 

éié— /2?7

ABSTRACT
OBJECT LESSONS: WORKING—CLASS NATURALISM AND
THE SUBJECT OF LABOR

BY

Nicholas Daniel Gavrila

This study examines the politics of working—class
naturalism during the crisis of Labor in England (1880-1914).
From the broad perspective of a historical, sociological and
semiotic approach, I assess the relationship between the
politics of the Labor movement and the discourse of
naturalism. Working-class naturalism is most oppositional in
Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, most
contradictory in representations of gender in social tracts
and novels by writers in the Labor movement, and most

disruptive in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.

The ideological implications of naturalism reveal that
the term has both dominant and oppositional meanings. In a
dominant or restrictive sense, naturalism implies a method of
scientifically documenting the world as fact, as well as
upholding narrow versions of social evolution, in order to
justify extant social relations. Oppositional naturalism
deploys a set of discursive practices that resists hegemonic
variants of dominant naturalism and attempts to transcend
oppressive social and historical conditions. The term

working-class naturalism or oppositional naturalism

incorporates a diverse intersection of indeterminate
discursive practices, including a wide range of documentary
procedures, the discourse of social evolution, and the

metaphoricity of social organicism.

I begin with a critical analysis of Robert Tressell's

political novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914).

 

In chapter one I address the problem of ideology and social
discourse in Tressell's production of oppositional
naturalism. In chapter two I discuss this problem in

Tressell's resistance to dominant myth in the press.

In chapters three through six, I analyze the politics
of naturalism in gender representations by writers connected
to the Labor movement. I examine myths of gender present in
social tracts and novels. I assess writing on gender issues
by E.B. Bax's, the radical journalist Robert Blatchford, the
South African theorist and novelist Olive Schreiner, and
women connected to the labor movement such as Eleanor Marx

and Isabella Ford.

In chapter seven I address the impact of oppositional
naturalism in D.H. Lawrence's S225 and Lovers. My reading of
Lawrence's autobiographical novel reveals how an
intertextual, ideological struggle between dominant and
oppositional naturalism conflicts the narrative form of

Lawrence's representation of working-class culture.

 

Copyright by
Nicholas Daniel Gavrila
1991

 

Acknowledgments

Many people were so influential with their valuable
support for this project. I would like to thank Professors
Roger Meiners, William Johnsen, Barry Gross, Victor Howard,
Clint Goodson and Richard Peterson for their insights and
comments. Also, Gerald Graff, Norman Kelvin and Doug Kellner
gave me very strong advice and encouragment. I am extremely
grateful to Professor Michael Koppisch, for the support
provided by the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State

University.

I am very grateful for the direction of Professor Victor
Paananen, who carefully advised me on this project and

patiently dealt with my ideas and my drafts.

I would like to thank my family for their kind support,

especially my mother, Theresa Harlow, and Francis R. Harlow.

Norbert Freese was instrumental in helping me to

understand the role of theory in society.

I would especially like to thank Abigail Burford for her

help in more ways than I can ever say.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

IntIOductionoooooooooooo0.00.000.0.0.0.000000.000000000000001

Section One:
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists... ...... ..... ........12

 

Chapter 1:
Working-Class Naturalism and the Subject of Labor..........l3

Chapter 2:
Pressed Reference and the Poetics of the Panorama..........66

Section Two:
Working-Class Naturalism and the Problem of Gender.........96

Chapter 3:
Admirable Sentiments: Oppositional Naturalism and the
Problem of Women's Representation in the Labor Movement....97

Chapter 4:
Dangerous Sentiments:
E.B. Bax and The Fraud 2f Feminism........................ll8

Chapter 5:
Robert Blatchford's "Determined Little Creature"..........l35

Chapter 6:
Myth and Anti-Myth: Notes on Oppositional Naturalism,
Labor and the Politics of Gender..........................l63

Section Three:
D.H. Lawrence's sons and Lovers.‘0.0.0000...0.0.0.00000000193

 

Chapter 7:
Working Through Naturalism:
Lawrence and the Production of Sons and Lovers............l94

 

Chapter 8:
Principled Subjects:
Naturalism, Ideology, and Social Discourse in Sons and

Lovers..........0..0..00......0.0...0..OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOZZZ

Notes..........00......OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOOOOOOOOOOOZSG

ii

 

 

Introduction

You see these Liberals and Tories understand
the sort of people they have to deal with;
they know that although their bodies are the
bodies of grown men, their minds are the minds
of little children.

The only way in which it is possible to teach
these people is by means of object 1eSsons,
and those are being placed before them
everyday.

From The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

 

The years preceding World War I in England witnessed
some of the most intense activity in the history of Labor.
FrOm 1880 until 1914 the Labor movement underwent a process
of self-definition, but this movement had produced a crisis
in culture, which, for many reasons, could be called the
Crisis of Labor. In the wake of the Chartist movement, and the
Reform Act of 1867, which gave the vote to property owning,
working-class men, Labor leaders felt that the interests of
the working classes had been betrayed by politicians
instrumental in reformism. If Tories were generally despised
by Labor, Liberals were to be highly distrusted. Liberals
were viewed by Labor as the handmaidens of Tories.1 With the

potential of the workingman's vote, and possibly the

potential of political revolution Labor, attempted to seize
the day. The time seemed ripe for radical change; between
1880 and 1914, England witnessed an unprecedented activity in
trade unionism and radical movements. But the working class

itself was not overwhelmingly radical. The term populism

best characterizes the general status of working—class
ideology. As J.F.C. Harrison has demonstrated, populism could
be characterized as an us-versus—them mentality, a general
distrust of the wealthy and parliament alike, but also a
feeling that it was better to wait and see how events shaped
themselves before plunging into the uncertain waters of

extreme radicalism.2

‘\

There has never been a time when diverse forms of Labor
affected culture in such a marked way. The late Victorian
era and the Edwardian period have often been characterized
(especially in relation to customs, style and taste) as a
relatively strife-free time. Yet it was marked by some of
the most violent strikes and protests, the formation of
socialist leagues, women's guilds and other oppositional
formations. Few examples of literature have survived as the
direct expressions of the lived relations of working-class
communities and the rhetoric of everyday life. Those
examples of fiction that did, usually addressed the barbarism
of life in the East End of London as a sensational naturalist
phenomenon. But the voices of working—class writers, and

writers in the Labor movement have not received much

 

attention. As Raymond Williams has demonstrated, few novels
were actually produced by working—class writers, and the form
of writing most accessible to working—class subjects was

3 Therefore, few "internal" examples of

autobiography.
fiction exist outside of working-class autobiography. This
problem of representing working-class culture is compounded
by the fact that most Labor leaders and writers in the Labor
movement were not from the working class themselves, but were
from the middle-class. Nevertheless, the contributions made

by these writers in the transformation of culture are

significant.

Writers in the Labor movement were not writing
literature in the way we conventionally think of it.
Even though the idea of literature is continually undergoing
revision, it might still be difficult to claim that some of the
examples I chose in this study are literature or are part of a
"minor" literature. A minor literature might be described as
literature produced in "sub-dominant" social contexts in
which writers inscribe themselves against dominant culture or
the language of dominant culture.4 However, examples of
literature which have been seen as tendency fiction, or
highly politicized fiction are usually summarily dismissed
as something other than literature in conventional terms.
But it can be argued that writing for the political moment,
no matter how tendentious the work may be, or whether it is

framed in the terms of a “minor literature," carries with it

 

 

the production of subtexts and discursive intersections that
supersede the work's stated goals. For example, writers in
the Labor movement may have specific objectives in mind, but
those objectives might be contradicted by assumptions
unconsciously borrowed from literature, religious discourse,
or other discursive forms that the producer of the text hopes
to circumvent. In my examination of how writers either
connected to the Labor movement or from working-class
backgrounds viewed culture in relation to their goals, I
began to see them more as naturalists of a kind that I could
not at first isolate as literary naturalism, nor could I call
them philosophical naturalists, social evolutionists, social
organicists, or even socialists—-although some of these
writers stated that they were committed socialists. Almost
all of these writers were concerned with these discursive
issues. But outside of the sketchy appellation Labor Writer
or Radical Writer, it became difficult to find a way of

characterizing their discourse.

These writers were producing pamphlets, books and
novels that almost always incorporated historical narratives
or exemplary tales that dramatized the plight of the subject
of labor. Their narrative and rhetorical strategies included
elements of political and religious allegory, but they often
relied on mimetic procedures to dramatize the need for
municipal transportation, public utilities, national health

care, child care, better working conditions for women and

 

Educational concerns .

Radical writers inevitably borrowed terms from the
vocabulary of naturalism, social evolution, and social
organicism. In addition to dramatizing social concerns,
radical writers were also concerned with the demystification
of ideological myths produced about the working-classes that
circulated in the organs (magazines, newspapers and
advertisements) of dominant middle—class culture. Many of
these dominant myths rested on stereotypical assumptions
about the world that incorporated a conservative usage of the
discourse of naturalism in order to reinforce a middle-class
hegemony in culture. Therefore, I use the term working-class
naturalism or oppositional naturalism to characterize modes
of writing about working-class culture in England that
attempt to produce a counter—hegemony to dominant assumptions

about everyday life.

But it must be said that writers in the Labor movement
were not necessarily naturalists; that is, they did not refer
to themselves as naturalist authors. Therefore, I use the
term working-class naturalism or oppositional naturalism to
show that the discourse of labor is heavily invested in the
discursive currents of naturalism in a wider, ideological
sense. It might have sufficed to call the subject of
working—class discourse, working—class realism or working—

class representations. But the phrase working-class social

 

organicism or working-class social Darwinism would not work
as an adequate way of assessing the problem of oppositional
writing. In many respects, then, I use the term working-
class naturalism in a provisional sense, because there are so
many facets of the discourse of Labor and working-class
writing that have not been charted and are open to further
ideological and cultural investigations. What these writers
were producing were negotiated forms of naturalism aimed at
the working classes (as well as the rest of culture). In
short, they were producing what I would call a working-class
naturalism. A working-class naturalism may be distinguished
from a minor literature, but depending on the specific work,

it may very well be the expression of a minor literature.

The term working-class naturalism is bound to cause
problems because of its generic literary implications for the
term naturalism, in addition to the philosophical
implications of naturalism. First, the question will be
asked, isn't naturalism itself an oppositional term that by
its own nature focuses on working-class subjects? Didn't
most naturalists align themselves with radical movements and
focus on the degradation of working-class life in the late
nineteenth century? Isn't the term redundant? It is
difficult to answer these questions unequivocally. It was the
case that most naturalist writers focused on subjects and
conditions within working-class culture. But not all aligned

themselves with radical causes. Even in the case of Zola,

 

there is considerable debate about when he pulled back form
such concerns and merely described conditions.5- But as I
point out in chapter one, naturalism as a social or literary
movement never gained the momentum that it did in France and
Germany. In England examples of naturalist fiction usually
revolve around the work of George Gissing, George Moore, and,
to some extent, Arthur Morrison. All of these writers
reflect conditions of working-class life, and they seemed to
have been influenced by sociological and scientific theories

6 However, the formal aspects of

of the subject in culture.
mimesis in naturalism were developed earlier in the
nineteenth century. The influence of scientific studies in

sociology have contributed to the production of naturalism.

In England, as David Baguley writes, literary
naturalism "tended to refer to the nasty French version of
realism that was invading the native tradition."7
Naturalism, like many terms circulating in contemporary
literary studies, is not a fixed or a stable term. Most
studies of naturalism center on French naturalism, the work
of Zola, and the incorporation of experimentalism, causal
relationships, and detailed observation of events as literary
technique. The philosophical versions of naturalism overlap
with literary definitions of the term. One definition of
philosophical naturalism rests on the assumption that the

world "consists of phenomena that are subject to and thereby

explainable in terms of, regularly recurrent natural causes,

 

open to scientific explanation-and forming a self-contained
system of natural explanations."8. It should be added that
naturalism also entails the discourse of natural selection,
and assumptions about the social order in complicity with

social organicism.

Naturalism is a term that constantly shifts in its
meaning, and undergoes a continual transformation in literary
studies. To use the term to characterize the discourse of
Labor and representations of working—class communities might
suggest that the term has an inherently progressive value,
but that is not the case. Naturalist writing may have been
associated with radical movements, but it was not always
radical in its intentions. There is a sense, then, in which
naturalism is appropriated by a dominant tradition,
valorizing the world as it is, and appropriating scientific
discourse for mechanistic, and deterministic aims, but not
necessarily for radical social change or reformist efforts.
On the other hand, there is a kind of naturalism more closely
aligned with social movements that attempts to deploy
discursive aspects of naturalism for progressive objectives.
It would be difficult to say that the writing in the
following pamphlet published by the Social Democratic
Federation was not naturalist in an oppositional sense:

The fascination of Socialism for men who have
undergone scientific training is not, I think,
difficult to explain. The guiding principle

of science is the search for the order of the
universe. To those who have grasped this idea

 

of order, there is something antipathetic in
the chaos of our existing competitive society.
. . . .Again, to the true scientific worker,
the idea of immediate profit is unimportant.
He is accustomed to work for larger and remoter
ends.
. . . .Man is a part of Nature, but he alone
in Nature is able to understand nature. He
alone is capable of modifying Nature in the
pursuit of his own ends. Science has
conceived the idea of a reconstructed
humanity. From this point of view Socialism
is, in fact, a part of Science --it is the
scientific scheme of the negt stage in the
evolution of human society.
This does not imply a reduction of radical discourse to
the status of sub-set of literature. But how do we account
for the discursivity involved in such a passage, in an

example from one faction of the Labor movement?

I have organized this study into three parts. The
first part addresses Robert Tressell's revolutionary novel
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a work that is
remarkable for the time it was written. Tressell's novel
reveals aspects of working-class ideology, and also addresses
the conflicts in the Labor movement itself. Tressell's
contextualization of naturalism reveals different types of
naturalism-—literary and philosophical--in different modes.
Moreover, Tressell articulates a resistance to dominant myths
about the subject of Labor. Tressell's novel is not a
monological novel; it is truly polyphonic in the way it
encodes various voices and subject-positions. As an example

of oppositional naturalism, Tressell reveals the aspirations,

 

10

contradictions and limitations of radicalism during the

crisis of Labor.

In the second part of this study, I look at the issue
of gender constructions in relation to the Labor movement.
In this section, literary naturalism seems less operational,
while aspects of a watery philosophical naturalism were
instrumental in producing versions of the feminine in

culture.

However, gender is one of the most contradictory issues
in the Labor movement. Male writers in the Labor movement
often transferred dominant, traditional notions of gender
under the sign of liberation. In chapter three and chapter
four, I examine two distinct patriarchal (paternalist)
versions of women. On one hand, male writers were concerned
with a version of woman as a kind of hyper-natural agency--
women as hyper-natural, cosmic mothers. In extreme
opposition to this version of women, misogynist writers
threatened by progressive women's voices resorted to vulgar,
positivistic forms of naturalism to demonstrate a crude
essentialism about the feminine. I then address the radical
journalist Robert Blatchford's novel Julie, which encodes
assumptions about social and biological determination in
order to represent women. However, in chapter six, I address
the way women writers such as Isabella Ford, Olive Schreiner,
and Eleanor Marx set out to debunk reductive essentialisms

and patriarchal fantasies about feminine subjects. Women in

 

11

the Labor movement tended to theorize a definition of gender
against patriarchal assumptions that valorized biology and

the private sphere.

Although D.H. Lawrence was not a socialist or a radical
in the way we think of writers in the radical tradition, his
early narrative mirrors aspects of the ideological conflicts
of this period. It is from this perspective that an
ideological reading of Lawrence can supplement and compliment
the diverse psychological and sociological dynamics of his
early narrative. I conclude this study with a reading of
D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. In light of the social
conflicts that Lawrence appears to have turned his back on,
the idea of an oppositional and a dominant naturalism sheds
new light on the production of Lawrence's Sgns and Lovers, a
novel in which the politics of narrative truly experience a

radical transformation in culture.

Section One: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

 

12

Chapter 1
Working-Class Naturalism and the Subject of Labor

Educate. We shall need all our intelligence.
Agitate. We shall need all our enthusiasm.
Organize. We shall need all our force.

EDUCATE! AGITATE! ORGANIZE!

Slogan of the Social Democratic Federation,
1883.

The belief, not only of the socialists but
also of those so-called Liberals who are
diligently preparing the way for them, is that
by due skill an ill-working humanity may be
framed into well-working institutions. It is
a delusion. The defective natures of citizens
will show themselves in the bad acting of
whatever social structure they are arranged
into. There is no political alchemy out of
which you can get golden conduct out of leaden
instincts.

Herbert Spencer, "The Coming Slavery," 1884.

During this time Owen did his best to convert
the other men to his views. He had
accumulated a little library of Socialist
books and pamphlets which he lent to those he
hoped to influence. . . .

As a rule, when they returned them it was with
vague expressions of approval, but they
usually evinced a disinclination to discuss
the contents in detail, because, in nine
instances out of ten, they had not attempted
to read them. . . . Some, when Owen offered to
lend them some books or pamphlets refused to
accept them, and others who did him the great
favor of accepting them, afterwards boasted
that they had used them as toilet paper.

Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists, 1914.

 

In this section I provide a context for an examination

13

l4

 

of Robert Tressell's working-class novel The Ragged Trousered

Philanthropists (hereafter RTP). Tressell's novel embodies

 

most forcefully what I refer to as working-class or
oppositional naturalism. A discussion of the historical and
ideological background from which Tressell was writing is
necessary for a discussion of 33g. I will also point to the

relevance of Tressell's work in a broader cultural context.

The Subject of Labor

On the subject of political developments in the British
labor movement during the early part of this century, E.L.
Hunt argues, as have other social historians, that "Working-
class consciousness was clearly less advanced by 1914 than
the dramatic events of 1889-91 had seemed to promise."1 This'
promise of the left could be felt in the various attempts to
chart a viable course through the uncertain and often choppy
waters of the labor movement. During the 1886's and the
1890's, socialists of most stripes made a difficult passage
from the impossible currents of utopianism and anarchism to
the more practical causeways of reformist procedures,
organized labor struggles, and democratic participation. The
publishing efforts of socialist groups such as the Social
Democratic Federation (SDF), the Fabians, the Clarion Group,
the Independent Labor Party (ILP), and various offshoots
of these organizations intensified dramatically. Armed with

rhetoric, but plagued by a chronic lack of funds, these groups

 

 

15

launched a diverse campaign that they thought would win the
working man over to the socialist cause. For the most part,
the leftist press had failed to achieve an immediate and
effective intervention against the well-heeled, commercial
interests of the dominant factions. After a period of
infighting and domestic adjustments, it would not be until
sometime after 1914 that the left could consolidate its
interests into a single labor party, if these interests could
ever be said to have been consolidated at all. There would
still be squabbles and debates as to what direction labor
should steer itself, but the winds of social change had
prevailed, and English cultural history would be radically
transformed. Institutional changes and transformation in the
public sphere produced a dynamic environment for social
change. Working-class men could now vote; participation

in trade-unionism activity was at an all time high; mass
strikes occurred; the Boer War had planted the seeds of grave
doubt about the fate of Empire; and the suffrage movement was
gaining ground with unprecedented force. In light of this,
ideas about the private and the public spheres were
constantly under revision, as were traditional assumptions
about the subject and class. In short, the Labor movement
possessed a more powerful voice, but it was a voice that did
not speak for all of its subjects; moreover, the ideological
objectives of this voice were continually disputed, as a

dialogic of labor intensified. If culture seemed ripe for

16

rapid social change, one thing was clear: it would take more
than the fierce rhetoric of labor to produce such change. In
general, the left was not short on rhetoric, but it was
divided on the issue of theory and praxis, and its ability to
develop adequate plans for social change demanded serious

revisions.

During this transitional period, radical writers found
themselves coming to terms with their often frustrated
attempts to mobilize the working-class for what they hoped
would be swift action against forms of oppressive social
conditions. But the left found itself in a position that
forced it constantly to negotiate dominant ideological
impasses and examine its own largely untheorized relationship
to the future. But for the most part, radical writers had to
spend a good deal of their time countering the arguments
against their programs, as they were continuously pushed into
defensive postures. Powerful mis-representations of labor--
distortions, myths, and stereotypes directed against their
programs and proposals--freely circulated through the
commercialized sphere of mass-culture. In other words,
representations of labor often tied to representations of
working-class culture in the press, and in other forms of
popular discourse, seemed highly effective in debilitating the
thrust of the labor movement, as much if not more than the
internally divisive aspects of labor weakened its own cause.

It can be seen that from a working-class perspective what

 

l7

subverted radical ambitions more than anything else during
this period--and this was one of the most crucial cultural
problems of the crisis of labor--was a defiant resistance to
social change among workers, something that appeared to
confirm the sobering fact that these dominant myths, through
the mechanisms of hegemony, were firmly entrenched within the
staunchly conformist positions of the very audience the left

had hoped to convert.2

Of course, many of these mythological
or ideological conceptions held by workers about the social
order were genetically derived from a wide range of beliefs
and attitudes, including utilitarianism and the persistence
of popular religious ideas. But if there was a dominant
figure whose social ideas had directly or indirectly affected
working-class attitudes, it was none other than Herbert
Spencer. The left in Britain, primarily the SDF, attacked
Spencer for his views on natural selection and social
organicism, and its implications for the individual in the
social system (what I will refer to here as dominant
naturalism), in which ruthless, persistent struggle between
individuals in a capitalist system functions as the

normalized expression of everyday life.3

Radical writers thus found themselves in a difficult
battle. Pitted against the ahistorical but easily
naturalized tenets of self-help individualism, functionalized
social organicism, and restrictive versions of social

Darwinism made popular by Spencer, leftist writers (many of

 

l8

whom earlier had been undeniably influenced by the implicit
progressiveness of Spencer's earlier writings on social
organicism) were now rejecting the metaphysics of his social
principles and challenging the rhetorical strategies of these
so-called universal laws of human nature and morality.
Through a broad range of political tactics, leftists,
feminists, and reformists of differing degrees produced a
disparate body of oppositional texts that might tentatively
fall under the general heading of working-class naturalism or
emergent naturalism. (I will return to this issue shortly).4
And while I do not want to grant Spencer the status of a
cultural monolith, I will examine how a specific example of
working-class fiction strategically resists the ideological
distortion of social myths largely derived from Spencer and
aimed at the subject of working-class culture and the goals
of the labor movement. At the same time, these oppositional
texts also document the power of dominant ideology and the

function of hegemony to mobilize populations.

Robert Tressell's (real name, Robert Noonan) The Ragged

 

Trousered Philanthropists with its panoramic representation

 

of social processes, is perhaps the most powerfully
dialogical example of an oppositional text which represents
the aspirations, struggles, and contradictions within
working-class culture and the labor movement, well before the

establishment of England's first labor government.

Tressell's novel is indeed a unique and inimitable

19

document of working-class culture, one whose production and
reception themselves make an interesting narrative within the
history of British labor in the early part of this century.
Its narrative skillfully expresses the dialogical tensions
within labor, and remarkably incorporates an intersection of
fictional and non-fictional discursive strategies in its
sobering depictions of a working-class community between the
shadows of Victorian imperialism and the dawn of a stern
Edwardian paternalism. Unlike any other work written at the
time, 333 weaves together a variety of styles and forms,
including religious allegory, documentary realism and
naturalism, working-class autobiography, as well as pamphlet-
strategies of the British Left.5 As a non-canonical work, 333
straddles many of the boundary lines between fictional
writing and other discursive practices. In a contemporary
sense, Tressell's novel lands in the largely uncharted
territory of cultural studies because of its unique history
and its significance for understanding the complex dynamics

of working-class ideology.

Published in two earlier, abridged versions in 1914 and
1918 by Grant Richards Ltd., after Tressell's death, 313 was
later restored to its complete text by Fred Ball, Tressell's
biographer, and published by Lawrence and Wishart in 1955.6
Labor historians refer to Tressell's novel as a "minor
classic," and, as Raymond Williams has noted, 333 is

considered to be "the first internal English working-class

 

 

 

20

novel."7

Incidents and dialogues in Tressell's novel focus on
a year in the life of Frank Owen (allegorically named for the
early socialist Robert Owen), a house-painter down on his
luck who attempts to educate fellow workers in the
economically depressed community of "Mugsborough," which is
an allegorical name for Hastings, where Tressell lived and
worked as a house-painter and sign-painter. Tressell avoids
traditional novelistic themes and describes his novel as
"Being the story of twelve months in Hell, told by one of the
damned." Tressell says that his aim in writing the novel was
"to present, in the form of an interesting story, a faithful
picture of working-class 1ife--more especially of those
engaged in the Building trades in a small town in the south
of England" (12). In stating his intention in writing the
novel, Tressell writes in his preface:
I wished to describe the relations existing
between the workers and their employers, the
attitude and feelings of these two classes
toward each other; the condition of the
workers during the different seasons of the
year, their circumstances when at work and
when out of employment: their pleasures,
their intellectual outlook, their religious
and political opinions and ideals. . . .My
main object was to write a readable story full
of human interest and based on the happenings
of everyday life, the subject of Socialism
being treated incidentally. (12-13)
Despite the fact that Tressell's novel is heavily

autobiographical, information about Tressell's early life is

limited (admittedly, this raises the problem of authority and

 

 

21

authorship in RTE), but it is known that he was born in
Ireland, and lived in South Africa during the Boer War,
before moving to England, where he worked in the building
trade and was directly involved in the British labor

movement 0 8

Undoubtedly, Tressell's reception has had a direct
impact on the Labor movement, beyond its initial publication.
Championed by the Labor party in England for many years--Alan
Sillitoe has written that it was the novel that helped win
the '45 election for Labor--RT§ has received little

9 In England,

attention on this side of the Atlantic.
however, Tressell's novel has been transformed into a stage
play, and has been presented on the BBC, in both radio and

la Recently, in the Masterpiece Theater

video productions.
production of the film series, "A Very British Coup," in
which a Labor Leader in England really does turn the world
upside down, the novel is mentioned again but, as usual, is
misquoted. Whatever its status as a novel, political
narrative, or cultural discourse, Tressell's work is a text
that transforms readings of other works in the dominant
tradition and illuminates ordinary perceptions of culture and
history. And while it prefigures aspects of social realism
with its allegorical posture, didactic rhetoric, and
documentary transcriptions, it is a novel more closely

related to works situated within the naturalist tradition,

but with a pronounced cultural difference.

 

22

Dominant Naturalism and Working-Class Naturalism

Naturalism, as a literary and political movement of
the late nineteenth century, refers to a specific kind of
technique, generally thought of as a style of writing in
which the author positions himself or herself as a detached
viewer, one that details how environmental forces condition
community life and forms of subjectivity. This heavily
continental style of naturalism never really took hold in
England as it did in France and Germany. Discussing the
reception of literary naturalism, P. J. Keating points out in

The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction that "In the

 

 

nineties English critics were often equally distrustful of
scientific naturalism, and were quick to point out the long
'realistic' tradition in the English novel, invoking
primarily the work of Defoe, Jane Austen, Dickens, and George
Eliot as examples of accurate and detailed observation of

"11 Moreover, in England, the most prominent

human behavior.
figure of naturalism, in a conventional sense, is George
Gissing, whose early novels address the problems of

representing socialism and the working-class subject, but
later distance themselves from radical issues and uphold

traditional and conservative attitudes toward class and

culture.

In Europe at the time, the most notable naturalists

such as Emile Zola and Max Kretzer, as Diane Smith argues,

23

ultimately possessed a profound skepticism toward socialism,

12 In a

although they had been involved in radical movements.
formal and technical sense, the naturalist emphasis on
mimetic techniques might have shocked audiences through stark
depictions of the appalling conditions of working-class life
and emphasized a need for radical change, but it nevertheless
withdrew ideologically from a truly revolutionary position.
Despite the fact that many of the naturalists experienced
life in impoverished working-class communities, and for a
time held personal convictions that "led them to sympathize
with the aims of the socialists, they abandoned these
principles because of a loyalty to their own class heritage.
. .and, above all, by their fear of working-class violence in
which they saw no less than a possible end of

"13 However, most British writers connected to ‘

civilization.
the labor movement were less worried about the animalistic
tendencies of the mob, than they were with the tactical power

of labor to effect changes in the work-place and mobilize a

spiritually and politically dis-enfranchised community.

Before I discuss in detail the example of Tressell's
resistance to the production of dominant myths as working—
class naturalism, I want to briefly focus on the problem of
defining naturalism. Raymond Williams has shown that
naturalism is not a transparent term, but an intersection of
aesthetic and political discourses. In Keywords Williams

reminds the reader that the definition of naturalism as an

 

24

accurate description of the external world is a severely
limited definition, one that ignores its historical,
cultural, and philosophical underpinnings. Williams'
definition of naturalism involves at least "two specialized
applications": the first one focusing on the effect of social
environment on the subject, and the second one more related
to the philosophical aspects of natural selection or what is
commonly referred to as Social Darwinism. Leaving
traditional definitions aside, Williams writes that "Given
the complexity of this history, naturalism is a very much

more difficult word than most of its current uses suggest."l4

By revising and historicizing cultural concepts,
Williams and other theorists have paved the way for an
understanding of naturalism as social discourse--and
therefore as a form of cultural study. Attempting to move a
theoretical step further than Williams, Terry Eagleton
politicizes his definition of naturalism more forcefully,
arguing that "[the] naturalist form produces, and is the
product of the bourgeois illusion of 'normality' of the solid
indestructibility of the quotidian world."15 Like other post-
structuralist Marxist critics, Eagleton examines how
naturalism is ideologically overcoded in literary texts, such
as those by Conrad, rather than examining naturalism's
mimetic functions. Eagleton therefore historicizes
naturalism as a complex form of cultural representation.

Although Eagleton also effects a political deconstruction of

 

 

25

dominant naturalism, we will see that a post-structuralist
analysis of ideology is indeed relevant for an examination of
working-class narrative such as Tressell's. Williams,
hbwever, in his cultural investigations, historically directs
us to the rhetorical power of Spencer's philosophy and the
cultural impact that Spencer exerted on the quotidian
perceptions of daily life. Of course Williams is quick to
point out how other writers contributed to a cultural matrix
of naturalist (evolutionary and hierarchical) assumptions--

most notably Bagehot in Physics and Politics. But if there

 

was a dominant, influential figure it was Spencer, whose
later writings were also influential on matters of social

morality, trade, and socialism.16

Ideologues who adopted the Spencerian scheme of things_
("the survival of the fittest"), in which rivalry between
species in the animal world is erroneously interpreted as a
rule or law of nature regarding relations between people
within capitalist systems, were able to propagate these
assumptions as a cultural dominant. Simply put, this
position easily rationalizes exploitation as a "natural"
result of competition. As such a world-view becomes
naturalized in the pages of the public imagination--in the
press and popular fiction--it also becomes naturalized as the
unquestioned status of "objective fact" or what is referred
to as "bourgeois normality." But as Williams argues, this is

part and parcel of a "Social Darwinism in the narrow sense"

 

26

in which "the weaker or less able members of society should
not be artificially preserved, because the process of social
selection that was creating the most vigorous and self-

reliant types was something that ought not to be interfered

With. 0 C 0"17

Williams also points to the flip side of naturalist

versions of competition advocated by Kropotkin in Mutual Aid.

 

This version rejects inter-species rivalry and upholds
intra-species symbiosis. On a social level this would

18 For Tressell this

undoubtedly entail state intervention.
kind of cooperation would provide an alternative to the
“Christian Battle of Life" (a code-word for the social
currents of Spencer's naturalistic philosophy) and help to
restore to the working classes the often mentioned "Benefits.
of Civilization" (the social amenities of industrial .
culture). For Spencer, however, such programs meant the ruin

of society, a collapse of the social order, and the halt of

evolutionary progress.

Oppositional naturalist forms of cooperation were
compatible with the general drift of socialist philosophy at
the time (and sometimes erroneously labeled by less than
scientific socialists as a form of Altruismlg). This
mutualist version of social philosophy tied in neatly with
most currents that characterized the numerous strains of
populist, reformist, and collectivist forms of ideology. One

of the most influential of these groups was the Social

 

27

Democratic Federation (SDF). The early leadership of the SDF
was formed by H.M. Hyndman and William Morris.2g The SDF's
program was arguably the only quasi-Marxist platform of its
kind at the time in England, and its emphasis on the
formation of co-operative communities and progressive reform
so enraged Spencer, that he lost his philosophical cool and
publicly went on the warpath against the SDF and any form of
collectivism, reformism, or intervention.» And it was
Spencer's response to the SDF that would provide Tressell
with some of the crucial raw material for his working-class
naturalist novel. I would like to turn to a specific
exchange between Spencer and H.M. Hyndman that is crucial for
an understanding of the ideology of Tressell's novel.
Although Tressell composed 323 some time after this exchange,
the discourse of labor that Tressell embodies in RTP is

closely allied with Hyndman's earlier positions.

Spencer Among The Philanthropists

When H.M. Hyndman spelled out the goals of the Social

Democratic Federation in 1884 in the pamphlet Socialism Made

 

Plain,21 he quickly drew fire from Spencer. Enraged by
Hyndman's vision of a socialist future for England, which
included the nationalization of land ownership, the
empowerment of a militant, and possibly militarized, working
class, Spencer, employing a deterministic logic, predicted

the ominous threat of centralized state control and

 

 

28

correspondingly the demise of the individual and individual

rights. In the April 1884 issue of The Contemporary Review,

 

Spencer went public with his warning and bluntly titled it
"The Coming Slavery."22 Here, Spencer vehemently argued that
organized efforts to improve the conditions of victims in the
selectively "natural" order would only pull down the stronger
members; as a result of this, liberal and/or socialist
interventions would eventually squeeze the life out of the
bourgeois individual, subsequently rendering the autonomous
subject hostage to a form of state servitude. If social
problems such as poverty and unemployment did arise, they
were not to be redressed by the state or any governmental
agency, these problems belonged to the moral agency, and were
the responsibility of the individual. Accordingly, Spencer
saw the incorrigibly poor and unemployed (and all variants
thereof) to be the defective units of the social body. These
defects sprang from a deeply rooted immorality; therefore the
unfortunate were quite deserving of their miserable position

in the scheme of things.

Not surprisingly, Hyndman could not have received a
more welcomed response from Spencer. What Hyndman wanted was
a public confirmation from Spencer stating, more or less,
that he was one of the contemporary spiritual architects of
greed and self-serving individualism. More or less, a public
confirmation of this fact was what Hyndman received. In his

outburst against the SDF, Spencer had bared his ideological

 

29

teeth, and had unquestionably solidified his role as the
public enemy of labor, the unemployed, and the poor. The SDF
received Spencer's sentiment largely in the spirit of a
"gift" and ironically employed the term "philanthropist" to
describe his rhetorical stance. For example, a Mr. Frank
Fairman, another writer aligned with the SDF, published a
pamphlet on "The Coming Slavery" writing that Spencer "being
a philanthropist, whose sympathies are not limited by country
colour or creed, insults the unfortunate, and apparently

depreciates all attempts to help them."23

Hyndman could now
strategically align Spencer with big-money capitalism, and
confidently claim that "Mr. Herbert Spencer has cleared his
mind of the cant of theology; but the cant of the profit-

monger still holds his intelligence firmly in its grip."24

But it was not necessarily the premise of Spencer's
attack that stirred such controversy; rather, it was the
uncannily brutal language that separated this Herbert Spencer
from the earlier Herbert Spencer, a previously more humane
social philosopher, who had influentially addressed the moral
issues of wealth and poverty in his works such as Social

25 But suddenly, the benevolent and paternal "Dr.

Statics.
Jekyl" of individualism and social organicism had turned
violently schizophrenic; and after uneasily digesting a
socialist pamphlet, had transformed himself into the subject-

position of an authoritarian and racist-sexist "Mr. Hyde."

Consider the disgust he expresses in "The Coming Slavery"

 

 

30

toward the very sight of the unfortunate, who make a

spectacle of themselves in public:
On hailing a cab in a London street, it is
surprising how frequently the door is
officiously opened by one who expects to get
something for his trouble. The surprise
lessens after counting the many loungers about
tavern-doors, or after observing the quickness
with which a street performance, or
procession, draws from neighboring slums and
stable-yards a group of idlers. Seeing how
numerous they are in every small area, it
becomes manifest as such that tens of
thousands swarm through London. (36)

Spencer's firsthand "naturalistic" observation here
warns that social life in London, and most likely the rest of
England, is quickly going to the dogs. Making this claim, he
relies on the imposition of mythical categories to suggest
that these defective creatures—-idlers and loungers-~now roam‘
the streets in ever increasing numbers. These idlers,
according to Spencer, are more than victims of economic
circumstances, they are the living proof of moral
defectiveness and they seem to multiply mysteriously fast.
Such a View is not all that detached from the serious side of
Spencer and his organicist conceptions of society: the
unfortunate souls on the lower rung of the ladder,
metaphorically equivalent to lower forms of animal life,

"swarm" in their alcohol—induced poverty, spreading (dis)ease

to other regions of the social body.

In "The Coming Slavery" Spencer essentializes the

31

anonymous poor as if they are a race to be exterminated. In
the paradoxically cold logic of social organicism it is
better for the social body to remove the offending part
before artificial attempts to assist it leads to further
debilitation. Ironically, Spencer appears amenable to at
least one form of intervention, state sponsored punishment;
but that too is a result of previous but failed ameliorative
attempts: "Saving men from the natural penalties of
dissolute living, eventually necessitates the infliction of
artificial penalties in solitary cells, on tread wheels, and
by the lash."26 Hence, poverty and unemployment--as
problems of a defective individual nature--should not be pre-
empted by the state, because an ounce of social prevention
certainly does not add up to a "pound" of cure. According to
Spencer, if the individual falls into a state of moral
disrepair, it can be seen that he or she shares affinities
with other members of Spencer's version of a "lumpen"
species of the proletariat, which in this case seems to
characterize most workers caught during specific moments of
economic distress. In other words, Spencer's degenerate
ranks of the poor form a class unto itself, a collective
criminality, complete with gender distinctions:

They are simply good-for-nothings, who, in one

way or other live on the good for somethings--

vagrants and sots, criminals and those on the

way to crime, youths who are burdens on hard-

worked parents, men who appropriate the wages

of their wives, fellows who share the gains of

prostitutes; and then, less visible and less
numerous, there is a corresponding class of

 

32
women. (31)

The rhetorical force of Spencer's criminal charges toward the
working-classes appears to have affected the composition of
Tressell's novel. At one point in the narrative (in the
chapter "It is Not My Crime") Owen seems infected with this
criminal affliction, and nearly capitulates to it, when,
after reading a sensational story in the daily paper, "The
Terrible Domestic Tragedy" in which an insane father kills
his children and family, he imaginatively contemplates the

same act.

In other narrative spaces in RTE, Tressell seems to have
calculated the cultural importance of this unceremonious
exchange between Hyndman and Spencer. Both Owen's and
Barrington's radical positions echo the political directives ‘
of the SDF. Workers opposed to these positions refract the
hostile sentiment of the later Spencer of "The Coming
Slavery." Of course this is not a voice limited to Spencer,
as Tressell encodes a diverse range of public "voices"
opposed to socialism and labor politics. But any discussion
of the political and historical context of Tressell's novel
cannot ignore the Spencer-Hyndman exchange, and, as we will
see, Tressell directly appropriates the language of this
debate and, given the language of the actual exchange,

smuggles it into Barrington's lecture in the "Great Oration."

The visceral core of this conflict between Spencer and

 

33

Hyndman can be felt in most of the ordinary dialogues in the
community of Tressell's "Mugsborough." Owen encounters
workers who have thoroughly ingested Spencerian attitudes,
only to spit them back at his suggestions for progressive
reform. This is most evident in the pathetic diatribes
against Owen by the repulsive figure of Crass, a foreman who
spends most of his time finding ways to confront Owen's use
of dialectics, and often succeeds in a brutal, quasi-
Spencerian hammering of reason. Often unable to conduct
arguments on rational grounds, Owen finds himself exasperated
and bitter, and growing more disenchanted toward those he

attempts to educate.

Many of the arguments between Owen and his co-workers
revolve around the politics of Christianity, especially along
the currents of watered-down versions of Spencerian
evolutionary theory, which Tressell sardonically titles "The
Christian Battle of Life." In these dialogues, different
philanthropists express positions that sound like parodies
of workers in early D.H. Lawrence novels. As one of the
characters, allegorically named Slyme, opines on the
epistemological dilemmas of political-theology, he informs
Owen, "I don't pretend to 'ave no 'ead knowledge,'. . ."but
'ead knowledge won't save a man's soul: it's-Lgart knowledge
as does that. I knows in my 'eart as my sins is all hunder
the Blood. . . "(152) Inevitably, these positions cover the

spectrum of the working-class belief systems. But eventually

34

these workers return their conversations to the core issues
of religion, epistemology, and the nature of the social

order.

Spencer maintains the belief that divine
intervention, something akin to religious grace, mysteriously
regulates the social order. Most of the workers in
Tressell's novel agree with these positions, that the state
should not intervene, but that a higher power does. In "The
Coming Slavery" Spencer plays the role of social evangelist,
sternly admonishing his public flock and invoking snippets of
Christian doctrine to reinforce the underlying moral
principle inherent in the natural order and natural
"necessity" of things:
Well, the command "if any would not work
neither should he eat," is simply a Christian
enunciation of that universal Law of Nature
under which life has reached its present
height--the law that a creature not energetic
enough to maintain itself must die: the sole
difference being that the law which in the one
case is to be artificially enforced, is, in
the other case, a natural necessity. And yet
this particular tenet of their religion which
science so manifestly justifies, is the one
which Christians seem least inclined to
accept. (37)
But for Tressell social structures less than
mysteriously regulate divine systems, as they are practiced
by ordinary believers. It is interesting to examine how

Tressell injects this sentiment into dialogues in RTP. Owen

consistently charges that popular forms of Christianity

35

circulating in the community have little to do with actual
theology and more to do with the reproduction of hegemony.
This is dramatized in the many discussions on this issue,
especially as Owen's ornery opponents usually come equipped
for battle with clippings supplied by the daily press to
reinforce positions that accord with what Tressell
sardonically labels "The Christian Battle of Life" or
Spencerian naturalism. In a key instance that dramatizes
this conflict, Crass, the usual instigator in these
situations, presents Owen with an item that characterizes
socialism as a "share and share alike" scheme. Owen answers
this charge, arguing that these ideas in the press are the
result of popular misconceptions of socialism that draw their
sustenance from other religious versions--other texts-~of
naturalism. This "Battle of Life" is depicted as an aspect
of dominant ideology in the service of Christianity:

[T]he difference between so-called

'Christians' and Socialists is this: Christ

taught the Fatherhood of God and the

Brotherhood of Men. Those who today pretend

to be Christ's followers hypocritically

profess to carry out those teachings now. But

they don't. They have arranged 'The Battle of

Life' system instead! (283)
The "difference" that Owen mentions points to re-combinations
of Christianity and socialism among the left at the time.
These re-defined versions of Christianity and socialism were

seen as part of a new religion, which would preserve the

communitarian values of popular Christianity, and uphold an

36

emphasis on compassion and sharing. For Owen, the naturalist
“Battle of Life" system has irrevocably corrupted the values
to which the majority of the working community supposedly

subscribes.

Owen finds his own values and actions overdetermined
and constrained by this "battle." He continually
demonstrates that in order to survive this battle, the
revolutionary worker has to employ his individual resources
more cunningly than the ordinary "philanthropist" who, from
Owen's perspective, willingly denies him or herself a share

in the "benefits of civilization."

But Owen himself profits from the specialized skills he
possesses. Recognized for his painting skills, he makes
money during lean times and provides for his family in ways
that others in the community, due to a lack of
personalized skill, cannot. But this appears to signal a
contradiction regarding Owen's opposition to the "Christian
Battle of Life." Although he is a reluctant participant in
this struggle, Owen nevertheless "wins"--in a very marginal
sense--while other, less talented construction workers
practically starve. Of course this doesn't soften Owen's
condemnation of that very system. But why? Doesn't Owen's
success paradoxically keep him in line with spencerian
notions of evolution and struggle? And what does that say
about Owen's "emergent" position? Tressell appears to

reinforce Williams' assertion that it is "exceptionally

37

difficult to distinguish between those which are really
elements of some new phase of the dominant culture . . .and
those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to
it: emergent in the strict sense rather than merely
novel."27 But Owen's resistance asserts itself in a naively
militant rule, one that falls toward, then pulls away from a

possible complicity with dominant ideology:

The Socialist--very much against his will--
finds himself in the midst of this horrible
battle, and he appeals to the other combatants
to cease from fighting and establish a system
of Brotherly Love and Mutual Helpfulness, but
he does not hypocritically pretend to practice
brotherly love towards those who will not
agree to his appeal, and who compel him to
fight with them for his very life. He knows
that in this battle he must either fight or go
under. Therefore in self-defense, he fights;
but all the time he continues his appeal for
the cessation of the slaughter. He pleads for
the changing of the system. He advocates Co-
operation instead of Competition: but how can
he co-operate with people who insist on
competing with him? No individual can
practice co-operation by himself! Socialism
can only be practised by the Community--that
is the meaning of the word. At present other
members of the community--the 'Christians'--
deride and oppose the Socialist's appeal.
(283-84).

This full-blooded sentiment makes itself felt in almost
every breath of dialogue Owen speaks in Tressell's novel. But
Owen's socialist counterpart, Barrington, appears to be the
exception to this rule. As the wealthy socialist from

unknown parts, the figure of Barrington is sketched in by

Tressell at specific moments in RTP. His presence seems

38

mysterious. It is felt early in the novel, then he fades out.
He is not part of the dialogues and action that-comprise most
of Tressell's novel. Toward the end of the narrative
Barrington reappears, mostly for the "The Great Oration." On
first reading, this character-problem seems to suggest that
Tressell simply did not know what he was doing with this
other socialist character; that Barrington's voice was
redundant (considering Owen's pedagogical voice in "The
Oblong" chapter and other parts of the novel) and that his
general lack of appearance fails to justify his presence in

the novel at all.

This sketchiness on Tressell's part certainly accounts
for the editorial omission of Barrington in the two earlier
abridged versions of 532. But Barrington does play a
necessary role in the novel. In one of his commentaries on
323 (a commentary on the restored, "complete" edition),
Williams argues that "Tressell needed. . .the figure of
Barrington, the wealthy young man who takes up laboring work
in a kind of benevolence, to find out the conditions of
working people, to experience them directly, yet in the end
can withdraw from them, use his own money for the comfort of
Christmas presents, or, as in that episode near the end, go
away and come back to finance the socialist van."28 In this
sense, Barrington serves a social-cultural function in the
novel that displaces the earlier editorial considerations

regarding the novel's production.

39

There is another reason why Tressell needed Barrington
that Williams and other have failed to notice, and that has
to do with the function of rhetoric in 533, and its social
relationship to the class—position of the figure who utters
radical discourse. Also, this has to do with Tressell's
resistance to Spencerian philosophy, but in a historically
roundabout way. In employing both of these socialist
characters, Tressell's representational strategy divides the
emergent voice of labor between the figure of Owen and the
figure of Barrington. This dialogical con-figuration in the
novel more adequately reflects the heterogeneous discourse of
the labor movement; on another level it serves to distance
and to parody the figure of the wealthy Barrington, who,
similar to the historically wealthy figure of Hyndman (the
stockbroker turned socialist), was an outsider. Perhaps it
is no coincidence that Barrington's "Great Oration" mimics
Hyndman's political discourse. This is not to suggest that
Barrington is strictly an allegorical figure for the
historical figure of Hyndman, but that Tressell's posturing
of Barrington allows for the expression of a more public
version of socialism; in that sense, Tressell more directly
records--or assembles--the discourse of the left with more

documentary force than has been previously realized.

The cultural implications in this inclusion are
apparent as Barrington's voice, with its standard middle-

class inflections, is distinctly different from Owen's

 

40

fluctuating intonations. While Barrington's "Oration" is not
a carbon copy of Hyndman's rejoinder to Spencer, it does
approximate Hyndman's views on class struggle and social
change. As Hyndman argues in his response to Spencer, the
goals of the SDF result from a clash between diametrically
opposed positions on contesting theories of social evolution:
"Thus the class struggle which we see going on under our
eyes, the revolution in the methods of production--steam,
machinery, electricity, &c.--which is affecting all classes,
appears in the thoughts of men as a conflict between the
principles of collectivism and individualism, between the

system of public and private property.u29

To the assembled "Philanthropists" at the "Great
Oration," Barrington simulates Hyndman's position in his
critique of the class system and the role of the worker.
Barrington's cOmments on the problem of loafers and idlers,
and the necessity of work in a socialist future, echoes the

tone and sentiment of Hyndman's reply to Spencer.

Under the present system everybody who can
possibly manage to do so avoids doing any
work, the only difference being that some
people do their loafing better than others. .
. .In the Co-operative Commonwealth there will
.be no place for loafers; whether they call
themselves aristocrats or tramps, those who
are too lazy to work shall have no share in
the things that are produced by the labor of
others. Those who do nothing shall have
nothing. If any man shall not work, neither
will he eat. (534-35).

 

41

Regarding the content of this speech, the emphasis on words
such as "idlers" and "loafers" is, as I will point out later,
crucial for Tressell's novel, for these "subjects" are part
of the image—system that Tressell decodes and demystifies.
But it is the external source of Barrington's Oration that we
are concerned with here, for Barrington's speech exhibits a
direct resemblance to Hyndman's language in his response

against Spencer.

Tressell does not simply insert Hyndman's language
into his novel; rather, he re-inscribes Hyndman's political
discourse of the SDF in different words. The "official,"
public voice of the SDF thus enters Tressell's narrative from
the outside and simulates Barrington's entry and exit in the
narrative of 332. It should be added that Tressell's
imaginative insertion of this historical exchange is not an
act of plagiarism or corrupt borrowing on Tressell's part.
The language in 323 is still Tressell's and the only thing he
does borrow from another text is the biblical allusion "If
any would not work neither shall he eat." Those specific
words belong to neither Spencer, Hyndman, or Tressell and are
part of the public domain of dominant theological discourse.
What does matter is the transposition of this statement in
its political usage. Like Hyndman and other members of the
SDF, Tressell's appropriation of SDF political discourse
turns biblical language against Spencer in order to suggest

the insinuatory value of common discourse of the time. For

 

 

 

42

example, the usage of words such as "idler"--i.e., in terms
of class, the "idlers on top" as opposed to idlers on the

bottom. If we look at Hyndman's reply to Spencer, there can
be little doubt that Tressell, an SDF man himself, pondered

the discursive aspects of this exchange.

Again, Mr. Herbert Spencer remarks that the
Christian saying "If any would not work
neither should he eat" is simply an
enunciation of an universal law of nature
under which life itself has reached its
present height--the law that a creature not
energetic enough to maintain itself must die.
Why what is this? There are thousands of
creatures in our present society who have
never been energetic enough to maintain
themselves in any sense whatsoever, and yet
who have eaten excellently well every day, and
will go on so eating from their cradle to
their grave. . . .Such idlers as these are
surely more harmful to the community at large
and, if ethics are to come in, more open to
condemnation, than weary wayfarers who perhaps
have never had a full meal their life through,
however hard they might work. The truth is
our social arrangements breed idlers-~wealthy
idlers at the top: starving idlers at the
bottom. (§3§,.7) ' '

Tressell's linkage of Spencer, Hyndman, and Barrington
ultimately inscribes itself into an overarching allegory of
philanthropy. And while Spencer's "The Coming Slavery"
might not have actually benefited the socialist movement as
much as the left had hoped, Spencer's philanthropy
materializes in Tressell's narrative. But Tressell's alleged
borrowing from Hyndman fictionally transforms Hyndman (or a
figure like him) into an unwitting philanthropist as well.

This action is then mirrored in RTP in the form of

 

..___-._ -.:~..b.g_--—-t

43

Barrington's donation to Owen and the local socialist cause.
In this sense, Spencer and Hyndman both donate generously to
the rhetorical trust (the text) of socialism, and become the
extra-textual philanthropists to unwitting beneficiaries who

reside in the allegorical world of the working-class novel.
Myths, Proles, and the Battles of Working-Class Life

When Barrington finishes his oration, which promises a
utopian future for England, the reader expects that he has
won the crowd over to socialism; after all, he has projected
a better world for workers in which public ownership replaces
private ownership, all forms of work are accepted as "equally
necessary" (the pay the same for all), and collectively
established work programs will maintain individual incentive.
What more could Tressell's impoverished philanthropists hope i
for? How could they all not toss their painter's caps and
Zealously salute what many socialists of the time considered
to be the new religion of man. Tressell tells us that some
believe in this new world. But only a few:

As Barrington descended from the Pulpit and

walked back to his accustomed seat, a loud

shout of applause burst from a few men in the

crowd, who stood and waved their caps and

cheered and cheered again. (523)
It is easy for the words "a few men" not to register with the
significance that it should here. Like other instructive
moments in 313, there is a heavily pregnant pause, followed

by a single question, then a flurry of incredulous responses

 

 

44

and hostile questions. Workers in the novel rarely seem to
know how to discuss these issues productively. They either
end up dismissing them out of hand, or they rudely parrot

slogans lifted from the pages of the daily press.

In this sense, Tressell's representation of
working-class life prefigures an Orwellian landscape of
social control. For Tressell's hapless proles, the
possibilities of political and cultural change have been
successfully prevented or effectively forestalled by an
insurmountable wall of myths, on which are painted the daily
messages that keep these philanthropists in their respective
places. Tressell is certainly proleptic in this respect.
Although the utopian vision of RTP differ from the dystopian
nightmare of 1284, Tressell's philanthropists (the
prototypical proles for Orwell?) gobble up slogans from the
press as eaSily as the proles in 1284 swallow lies from

Orwell's ministry of truth.39

Tressell's representation of
the social semiotics of everyday life show how the cultural
consumption within an emergent mass-culture system works to
constrain the formation of class-consciousness in working—
class culture. The seductive narratives of penny fiction,
the sensational terror of tabloids, or the distractions
provided by race results either provide marginal
entertainment or sufficiently frighten the average worker

into a state of dumbfounded silence. And if that fails to

suppress militant resitance in Tressell's Mugsborough,

45

popular religion, cheap alcohol, and the various debilitating
effects of the local economy and environment function more

effectively as agents of oppression.

It is as if Tressell more than concedes that the
fractured nature of the socialist movement along with the
contradictions within working-class culture account for the
'failure of revolutionary rhetoric to gain converts to its
cause. But that much is realized in the author's preface.
How these things happen is another matter, which is why
Tressell's narrator, although he is unable to internally
distance himself from the strident rhetoric preached by Owen,
often bitterly steps back and describes this communicative
failure, taking it not in stride, but on the chin. The
example of Owen's socialist library provides a handy case-inJ
point. Owen keeps a small cache of revolutionary pamphlets
handy, but he is painfully aware of the fact that it takes
more than the small-arms firepower of pamphlets to pack a
real revolutionary punch. Owen knows that these articles
have considerable influence, that they stimulate the thoughts
of the more articulate members of the working class, but he
also realizes that the practical effect of such discourse,
given the odds facing the working-community, is negligible
against the overpowering environmental and cultural elements
of social hegemony. The sober Owen may invest in the printed
word, but he will only to encounter the usual round of

hostile and incredulous responses:

46

Owen, being a teetotaller, did not spend any
money on drink; but he spent a lot on what he
called 'The Cause'. Every week he bought some
penny or two penny pamphlets or some leaflets
about Socialism, which he lent or gave to his
mates; and by this way and by means of much
talk he succeeded in converting a few to his
party. . . .Others were simply indifferent, or
treated the subject as a kind of joke,
ridiculing the suggestion that it was possible
to abolish poverty. They repeated that there
had "always been rich and poor in the world
and there always would be, so there was an end
of it.". . .Some of those who had shown some
symptoms of Socialism during the past winter
when they were starving had now quite
recovered and were stout defenders of the
Present System (46Z-61).

With the exception of an overly optimistic ending--a
rhetorical flourish for the bright future of socialism in
England--Tressell's narrator rarely attempts to hide his
disdain for those who don't wish to see the promise of
revolutionary light. But for a novel as seemingly
tendentious as 533, this signals a problem. The question
arises as to how politically tendentious RTP really is,
given its representation of the micro-politics of working-

class life?

Again, Tressell willfully documents the desperate
struggles of the socialist movement--its failure to win
popular support, its fractured politics, its inability to
draft a coherent, realizable program--within the mimetic
(technical and formal) conventions that define dominant

conventions of naturalism. Tressell's use of naturalism,

47

however, is double-edged: on the one hand naturalism affords
Tressell the means to incorporate organicism, but on the
other, it allows him to resist the competitive strains of
"narrow" versions of Social Darwinism. In the narrative of
333 Tressell simultaneously encodes a rigorous causality that
explains socialism's inability to mobilize the community
successfully, but nevertheless shows how these failures can
be historicized within the social conventions of a naturalist
world view. Scene after scene, dialogue after dialogue,
Tressell manifests this through the figures of workers too
addled, too angry, and too debilitated by the hellish rhythms
of the working-day to ingest the social medicine offered by
local agitators. Paradoxically, Tressell, like Spencer,
articulates an allegory of natural selection. As subjects
poorly nurtured on the crumbs of determinism and
individualism, these philanthropists will, as Spencer
predicts, form a‘sérapeheap Of defective individuals, who
will rot in social misery. However, in Tressell's depiction
of the world this is not because of any essential aspect of
their moral nature; it is because they cannot wrench
themselves free from the material and semiotic conditions
that overdetermine their social, and therefore, their inter-

subjective existence.

For Tressell, however, one working-class generation may
pass but another will reappear, more wised up and resistant

to dominant ideology than the last. For a later generation

48

of English writers who were able to depart from the rigid
confines of naturalism, this is the case. It is none other
than Orwell's unlikely candidate, Gordon Comstock, the
rebellious poet of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, who consoles
himself in Tressell's novel and justifies his own political
stand through the figure of "the starving carpenter who pawns
everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra

became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that."31

As an object lesson to Orwell and others, Tressell's
incorporation of causality, his representation of the
hegemonic reproduction of myths and signs within cultural
discourse is one of most powerful aspects of RTP. Unpacking
the social mythology/ideology of the "Christian Battle of
Life," subsequently establishes the novel's naturalist
counter text. Tressell demonstrates how deeply rooted in
ordinary language are the mythical elementsof Social
Darwinism and how they successfullymystify and distort the

pragmatics of oppositional strategies.

"I've 'eard a 'ell of a lot of this 'ere
Socialism," remarked the man behind the moat,
"but up to now I've never met nobody wot could
tell you plainly exactly wot it is."

"Yes; that's what I should like to know
too," said Easton.

"Socialism means, 'What's yours is mine,
and what's mine's me own,'" observed Bundy,
and during the laughter that greeted this
definition Slyme was heard to say that
Socialism meant Materialism, Atheism and Free
Love, and if it were ever to come about it
would degrade men and women to the level of
brute beasts. Harlow said Socialism was a
beautiful ideal, which he for one would be

 

49

very glad to see realised, but he was afraid

it was altogether too good to be practical,

because human nature is too mean and t00‘

selfish. Sawkins said that Socialism was a

lot of bloody rot, and Crass expressed the

opinion-—which he had culled from the

delectable columns of the Obscurer-—that it

meant robbing the industrious for the benefit

of the thriftless. (505)
Like many scenes in RTP, this is an indictment of working-
class culture which straddles the line between documentary and
caricature. In this instance, Tressell's round-table style of
reporting attitudes toward socialism here satirically
characterizes ways in which dominant ideology overcodes
everyday life. The sampling of voices here cynically express
contrasting versions of "human nature" and sundry matters
considered to be patently unnatural. What is considered to
be forms of materialism, atheism, and free love in the end
devolve into perceived forms of bestial degradation and the
triumph of Idleness._ To these workers, a socialist world
would be metaphorically equivalent to a social madhouse,
ruled by morally defective criminals and thugs, who are
precisely the very same sort of unemployed, unfortunate
"idlers and loungers" encountered by Spencer in "The Coming

Slavery." But the fact that Spencer points the same finger

at them when they are out of work is part of the joke.
Punch Lines and Time—Sheets

Spencer's invisible pen inscribes its social vision well

beyond his published attacks against socialism. A glimpse at

 

50

graphic social caricature of the time shows us that
Tressell's satire toward the working class provides critical
reflection of the working-classes in popular political
representations. Because of this, we cannot afford to ignore
the imagistic and rhetorical power of graphic illustration
and its effectiveness in transmitting a naturalist version of
the world, especially before the days of photo-journalism and
the cinema. Examples of social caricature from periodicals
of the time provide us with a better picture, so to speak, of

the myths Tressell resists.

The middle-class, somewhat liberal, view of the world
in 22232 provides some pertinent examples. We find Spencer's
social sentiment in "The Coming Slavery" surfacing in
political cartoons. In a 1906 cartoon (Figure l) the
exchange between Heckling Thomas and the "Socialist" portrays
an image otrthe socialist figure as_a lounger or idler seated
with a newspaper, looking too lazy and too old to work.32 On
the right side of the frame the youthful and (morally)
upright Heckling Thomas quizzes him on the issue of sharing
livestock as a satirical analogy for exchange under
socialism, which echoes much of the sentiment expressed by
Crass against Owen. In fact, there is a very similar scene
in 533 between Owen and Crass. Trying to show Owen that
socialism means "share and share alike," the badgering Crass
pulls a newspaper clipping from his pocket titled "Prove Your

Principles or Look at Both Sides." This humorous editorial

51

stresses the identical analogy in which a "discontented hack
and a weary looking cob" talk about Socialism next to their

"unhired cabs." Their discussion of socialism parallels the
message of the Punch cartoon; however it does so in terms of

beans and horse oats rather than livestock.

"Robbing the industrious for the benefit of the
thriftless" is precisely what the visual message of "The New

33 The illustration depicts a

Altruism" (Figure 2) presents-
scene of street theft in broad daylight. A man with a
mustache wearing a bowler hat aggressively reaches into the
pocket of a prosperous looking merchant on a West End street.
On the left, an old hunched up and bedraggled figure looks on
as if he is expecting a handout. Directly underneath the
dialogue the bracketed caption reads "According to Mr. Ramsay;
MacDonald, the programme of certain Labor Members includes

an Old Age Pensioancheme based onja graduated super-tax on
incomes above L5,060." Given the cartoon's ridicule of such
a program, could a visual encoding of Spencerian ideas be any
more graphic? The three figures in the cartoon
metaphorically suggest the circulation of money (a metaphor
for blood or other bodily fluids) through a violent
intermingling of bodies--from right to left--between a
robust, healthy body (the City Merchant), a criminal body,
(the Labor M.P.—-actually a type of urban Robin Hood) and

the possibly diseased body of the morally defective idler,

(the Lifelong Loafer). The status of the hats, or lack of

 

52

them, of these three men is also significant, as it connotes

societal standing.

"The New Altruism" puns not only on popular
misconceptions of socialism, but on the spirit of self-
sacrifice the working-class subject was supposed to have held
for God and Country during the time of Empire.34 The upshot
of the cartoon implies that Labor desires to invert and
weaken the national spirit, and, in accordance with Spencer's
earlier warning, Labor also threatens to endanger the healthy
regions of the social body. That this takes place on a
street resembling a West End district reinforces this danger,
because it forcefully suggests that undesirable elements have
transgressed social boundaries and threaten the stable,

affluent zones of British culture.

Obviously, this public expression toward workers and
radical'figures'stigmatizes.them‘fromithermetaphysical
perspective of being the sinful, wasteful figures of the
archaic social residue of Christian conceptions of Idleness.
But as common as this residual attitude appears in popular
discourse, it conceals the underlying cultural
rationalization that has more to do with changes in the work-
place than it does with Christian attitudes toward virtue and
sin. Temporality becomes the displaced (im)material element
central to definitions of the mechanized rhythms of the
working-day. In a modern sense, idlers and loafers are

really bodies out of sync with the mechanistic processes of

itL4;___________________________________________________________________________4____._-IIIII

 

53

instrumentalized reason, as much as they might be cast as the

organically defective rejects of the social order.

Correspondingly, Tressell represents the subjection to
the mechanistic temporality of the working-day as a politics
of incarceration-—a restriction of the worker's movement
within the grid structure of the modern house--the
implication being that working on the house (which suggests
the pun on "workhouse") implies a confinement to work, while
workers in the community are themselves denied adequate
living quarters. What makes this even more dramatic is that
Tressell's subjects are not toiling in mills or factories,
the traditional sites of narrative misery, but are performing
semi-skilled labor. Hence, the reification of time seems to
be more culturally pervasive. Always under the threat of
getting sacked for "being too long on the job," (itself a pun
on the spatial elementyof Controlled temporality ), Tressell

consigns the artisan to the coordinates of the spatial grid.

As E.P. Thompson has pointed out, the history of clock
time and its relationship to material production can be said

35 In

to measure the evolution of bourgeois culture.
Tressell's novel the mechanistic linkage between work and
time paces the lived relations between the subjects of its
narrative and the time they consume both on and off of the

job. Nowhere in the novel is this more conspicuously

objectified than in the graphic inclusion of what Tressell

54

calls "a new development in the area." Though we might
expect a piece of machinery or some other kind of labor-
saving device, it is nothing more than a piece of paper: the
time-sheet. Prefiguring the Foucauldian voice of panoptic
technology, Tressell describes this textual object as "an
additional precaution" which guards against "the possibility
of any of the men idling or wasting their time"(Figure 4).
The inclusion of this document at first strikes readers as
being somewhat odd. After all, the time-sheet appears to be
a natural part of everyday life as we know it; to think of
this as being innovative or radical by an author strikes us

36 But where else do

as being commonplace and trivial today.
we find a time-sheet in literature before or after Tressell?
In this sense it is a truly novel event, and the inclusion of
the time-sheet in RTP marks its emergence in the world, and
in literature. RTP represents the time-sheet as a historical
iédn,'réf1eéting the technological production of changes in

the regulation and surveillance of the working environment.

The cartoon from £2222 depicting a construction scene
(Figure 4) reflects these changes in controlling work-time by
punning on the mythical status of ordinary/dominant
perceptions of temporality in a humorous context.37 Of
course, the cultural "punch line" of the pictOrial joke,
rests on the less than oblique analogy between the status of
the Empire and the culturally constructed status of the work-

site, the building site. In this instance, popular

55

conceptions of work and temporality are thus articulated in
popular discourse as the products of recent historical
change, and the changing face of Empire. These historical
"products" reflect changes in the modes of production.
Culturally speaking, time is of the essence. The
authority of clock-time and its rule over the work-place is
made clear through this figure. The foreman impatiently
holds his hand on or near his watch-chain. His time, in a
graphic sense, is money (reified time). (We think of the
phrase we encounter in Tressell in which a foreman will
frequently snap at a worker with, "Not on my time, you
don't.") The Foreman's other hand, in the form of a fist,
reinforces that dominance. Other pictorial elements in this
illustration articulate a visual language of power similar to
the hierarchical structures in the work-place in 333. The
foreman, wearing a black waistcoat and jacket, appears
imposing. The worker, jerked into a kind of military
attention, looks at the dominant figure, startled, possibly
confused. The worker wears a kind of pith helmet, which is
strange, but also "builds" up and overdetermines the
associations with Labor and Empire more forcefully. The
foreman appears confident and in control, while the laborer
wears a bewildered expression, his eyes being more "marked"-—
in a semiotic sense-—than those of the foreman. A plank that
extends from the lower part of the frame to the feet of the
foreman suggests that he has a floor to walk on, while the

laborer stands on the ground; the only thing standing between

56

them is a shovel, which stuck in the ground stands idle--
again, the idea of idleness is reinforced by other visual
elements besides that of working figures. A hunched over
figure in the background indicates that some type of work is
taking place. Of course this representation and Tressell's
representation of work-time fit into the larger context of
cultural politics, in light of the strained relationship

between Imperialist policies and Labor programs.
'Mysterious, Unmotivated, and Opaque'

Concerning the politics of culture and the role of
labor, the question arises as to whether or not Tressell
transforms our readings of other texts that represent labor
or working-class environments. Given the overwhelming
influence of Spencer on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
qenturypnarrative, can we_examine dominant versions of
culture and their representations of working-class figures
without an awareness of Tressell's oppositional stance?
Besides its importance for understanding writers of the
turbulent thirties, Tressell's novel certainly casts the
writing of such canonical figures as Hardy, Conrad, Lawrence,

and others, in a different light.

Specific examples from modernist and realist fiction of
this period encode Spencerian elements of dominant naturalism
in works that reflect or formalize aspects of labor.

Glimpses of how these works mark the effects of Spencerian

 

57

ideology might be a good place to start, if we are to chart
the circulation of these myths in the texts of canonical

authors. In Joseph Conrad's The Nigger pf the Narcissus, for

 

 

example, the mutinous figure of Donkin, the manic-mouthed
agitator who rails against the hardships of life on a
merchant ship, is contemptuously described by Conrad's
narrator as a "consummate artist"--in short, a loafer who
complains about work while trying to escape from it.
Donkin's voice represents a dialogical example of Conrad's
ambiguous attitude toward labor politics, as he is cast in
the allegorical role of the vulgar rabble—rouser whose
"picturesque loquacity flowed like a troubled stream from a

"38 Conrad's impressionistic mystification

poisoned source.
of the radical worker suggests that Donkin's (dis)embodied
voice, like poisonous fluid, pollutes the arteries of the
,social body, which for Conrad's social symbolism exists in
the form of the patriarchal organization of the merchant

ship.39

A different example surfaces in John Galsworthy's §.§22
2f Property, which reveals the ideological contradictions of
Edwardian London, and, as the title suggests, depicts
attitudes toward property relations by members of an upper-
middle-class family in London. Consider Galsworthy's
language in a description of an urban landscape in which the
lawn of a London park is strewn with "strange waifs lying

prone on their faces, like corpses on a field over which the

 

58

wave of battle has rolled . . . .as the sun shone with a
clear flame on so much idleness-~on so many human evidences
of the remorseless battle of property raging beyond its
ring."4g Such a description effectively defamiliarizes an
everyday scene from the social picture, which is congruent
with Tressell's "Christian Battle of Life." From
Galsworthy's perspective, these subjects are metonymically
fused into the landscape of everyday life, part of the
"remorseless" struggle that cannot be made comprehensible to
Tressell's philanthropists. In a formalist sense, this
scene, so familiar in Tressell's world, is indeed "made
strange." And similar to Spencer's language that frames
unfortunate workers as part of a criminal class, losers in
this battle (strange waifs, the human evidence) are
memanymically linked to metaphysical categories that re-
situe re .the sosial,_ Darwinist, 9?.Fé?,h°.r..9,f,y."s.uryi.va1_0.f the
fitteest." In other words, Galsworthy symbolically equates

econcxmic struggle with biological struggle.

Conrad and Galsworthy, like many writers of the time,
r('Pvit‘lforce Eagleton's assertion that naturalism, "in
fetishizing the material world, dislocates subjectivity from
it: lbanishing it into its own autonomous zone where it
ineV'Sitably presents itself as mysterious, unmotivated and
opaque."41 In a larger context, Eagleton's description of
naturalism might very well apply to Tressell's narrative as a

paradigmatic model of the social relations between dominant

III-ll--__l

59

and working—class culture. The material world in Tressell's
novel is fetishized; the alienated subjects of labor, most of
Tressell's philanthropists, are dislocated from the
possibility of subjective action. Often Tressell's
frustrated and at times cynical representation of working—
class subjects suggests, that, in a perverse and pejorative
sense, they are truly autonomous--that they are free to
collapse and die on their own. With few exceptions, they are
unmotivated and unable to better their lot in a hostile
environment. And as subjects within class-structures they
exist within an irrevocably opaque landscape, and they are
unable to see beyond it. While this aspect of naturalism is
undeniably part of the ideological fabric of RTP, Tressell
ruptures its texture and reveals its seams, by dislodging
material conditions from metaphysical categories, and
.s%908199.the l°gi¢.9f,#h¢.$991s1.mastiae that systematically

re-produces this naturalist text of life.

The battered casualties of naturalist struggle are thus
the very subjects Tressell attempts to transplant back into
the material world by grafting narratives onto specific
image-structures. Tressell's tactic is to take the mythical
figure out of the public domain of anonymous discourse and
caricature--for example a subject who fits the description
of, say, the Lifelong Loafer--and provide him or her with a
set of social features that particularizes the subject

without replicating the negative features of Spencerian

 

66

thought. Tressell's dry attention to detail records with
linear precision the ravages of the social environment on the
worker's body. In addition to the many stories of worker's
lives in his novel, he also focuses on anonymous figures. A
description of an unnamed worker (as opposed to the many
allegorically named workers) bears this out:

This man had two patches on the seat of his

trousers which were, also very much frayed and

ragged at the bottoms of the legs: the lining

of the coat was all in rags as were also the

bottoms of the sleeves; his boots were old and

had been many times mended and patched; the

sole of one of them had begun to separate from

the upper and he had sewn these parts together

with a few stitches of copper wire. (523)

As a broad-lined charcoal sketch of alienation and
despair, this figure appears as if the social subject's
protective armor has simply worn too thin for survival. The
_frayed suit with its ruptures and seams marks the organic_
decay of the subject. Here, the emphasis on separation,
tearing, and ruptures suggest the violence done to the body
in which the worker is not merely a detached image, but a
living subject. On an allegorical level, this is not the
description of a singular individual as much it is the
metonymic description of a subject who stands in for the
effects of a social system--that is, in the sense that

Spencerian thought can be turned back on itself--undermining

its own social health.

Tressell then supplements this description with a brief

 

61

narrative, and locates this anonymous figure in the
community:

He had been out of employment for several

weeks and it was evident from the pinched

expression of his still haggard face that

during that time he had nothing to eat. This

man was not a drunkard, neither was he one of

those semi-mythical person too lazy to work.

He was married and had several children. One

of them, a boy fourteen years old, earned five

shillings a week as a light porter at a

Grocer's. Being a householder the man had a

vote, but he had never hitherto taken much

interest in what he called 'politics'. In his

opinion, those matters were not for the likes

of him. He believed in leaving such difficult

subjects to be dealt with by his betters (523-

24).
The outrage that Tressell expresses regarding the inability
of action--particularly the inability of this subject to
speak politically--typifies the interventionist attitude of
Tressell's narrator, who speaks for these subjects, and fills
“'in‘vaiués aHA'beiiéfé thatcannOtbe voiced by the silenced

outcasts of Darwinist struggle.

Tressell does voice the positions of others that he
felt could not be articulated by his average philanthropist
who desired change but did not have the confidence to say so.
While the paternalism of such a position is more than
evident, Tressell also reflects an empowered Voice of Labor.
Tressell does so at a time, as Eric Hobsbawm reminds us, when
"wisps of violence hung in the English air, symptoms of a

crisis in economy and society which the self confident

 

62

architecture of Ritz hotels, pro-consular palaces, West End
theatres, department stores and office blocks could not quite

conceal."42

Tressell's image of the building trades,
therefore, is all the more telling as the subject of labor

enters the social picture more prominently.

But at the present time, when the boundaries between
canonical and non-canonical literature, and fictive and non-
fictive discourse have been re-formulated, and the issue of
cultural studies still remains to be debated, Tressell's
novel stands as a document that crosses, but most likely
transgresses, this regional dispute regarding the
institutional aspects of emergent discourse. In this sense,
Tressell is important for understanding how previous cultural
formations and traditions have directly and indirectly shaped:
the politics and criticism from which later generations of
labor writers proceeded.q Tressell's novel, along with other
texts in the labor movement, is important for reconstructing
the alternative traditions that eventually spawned the
cultural work of Williams and the theoretical considerations
of later theorists in the Anglo-Marxist tradition. Finally,
Tressell's ideological decoding of dominant myths proves
informative for understanding and countering the residual
currents of naturalism and Spencerian positions still with us
in the texts of popular culture and especially its
contemporary transcoding in the media. Because of this,

working-class naturalism, like other aspects of working-class

63

writing, should be incorporated into contemporary re-

definitions of culture.

 

 

  

   

 
  
 
     
    
  

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Figure 3

Figure 4

Chapter 2

Pressed Reference and the Poetics of the Panorama

It seems, rather, as though a very large
number of people are being held down at an
appallingly low level in their reading. By
now the massive publications provide worse
fare than almost any individual reader
requires; but that is according to their
nature, as mass publications.

Richard Hoggart, The Uses pf Literacy1

In The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists newspapers are

 

part of the nature of working-class society. Workers in the
novel exhibit a demonstrably low level of literacy, at least
in relation to the way that characters voice concerns about
the information presented to them in the daily papers. The
press is part of the fabric of Tressell's narrative.
.”Foregrounded in the novel, the press mediates, as well as re-
structures, narrative events in such a way that the press
functions as a structural reference point for Tressell's
panoramic representation of class relations and the novel's
representation of ideology and social processes. This is an
aspect of 512 that has been noted by writers concerned with
the cultural impact of Tressell's novel. For example, The

Robert Tressell Papers focus on the fact that "Newspapers

 

loom large in the world of [RTP] as part of the system which
keeps workers in their downtrodden place."2 Such views see

Tressell playing an instrumental role in countering the

66

 

67

projections of dominant ideological interests.

The most obvious of these allegorical targets are the

The Obscurer, and the Daily Chloroform, the political message

 

 

being synonymous with the names: that information, especially
political information, is the object obfuscated by dominant
class interests. As the opening pages of 532 demonstrates,
the most popular aspect of the press for Owen's fellow
philanthropists has to do with information that deals either
with what Tressell refers to as the "cooked statistics"
(information about the economy) or with a fascination with
sporting columns and entertainment activities—-things that
keep these housepainters enthralled with events distant from

their own lived relations.

As public discourse, the role of the press in The

 

Ragged Trousered Philanthropists allows for a social analysis
of the press, but it does much more than that in Tressell' s
narrative. In its oppositional stance, RTP stands outside
the mainstream press and articulates a social critique of how
the press prefigures aspects of what Guy Debord has termed
the "society of the spectacle." In Tressell's representation
of working-class readership, he reveals how the press is
instrumental in the production of subject positions,
commodity circulation, and class relations among workers in

3

the novel. Tressell also provides a radical supplement for

informative sources, documentary procedures, and modes of

68

social critique that he finds lacking in the dominant press.
Tressell effects this in the absence of a socially

efficacious leftist press during the crisis of Labor.

Tressell's text corresponds to later social and
historical investigations of the press in British culture
which demonstrate the shortcomings of the left before the
First World War to use journalism effectively, outside of a
morale booster for those already converted to Labour. As
Raymond Williams points out in The Long Revolution, "Large-
scale expansion of the daily newspaper into the working-class
public did not really take place between the wars, and the
war of 1939-45."4 Furthermore leftist rhetoric failed to
deliver the goods in a way that made a left press a viable

option. As Stephen Koss in The Rise and Fall 2f the

 

Political Press 12 Britain has argued, even though the

 

leftist press had achieved a considerable circulation among
workers, it failed to politicize them because they usually
"articulated the ideals and resentments of mercurial

personalities."5

Tressell critically situates his version of what might
be described as the proto-spectacle, or pre-spectacular
critique, in the opening of the chapter "The Pandorama"-—a
pun on the panorama, the formal device that Tressell employs
to represent the stratified differences of class life in
Mugsborough and the various strategies of representation that

frame images of the working RTP. In a particularly telling

 

69

scene, the young laborer Bert White has constructed a device
that he calls a pandorama, a box resembling a miniature
theater with images from newspapers illuminated by candles.
The show that the children watch is described as "a lot of
pictures cut out of illustrated weekly papers and pasted
toqether, end to end, so as to form a long strip or ribbon"
(533, 322) Bert moves the strip of images across the miniature
stage, something that entertains the assembled children
during the Christmas holiday. But, rather than take his
spectators on an imaginary tour of exotic parts of the world,
Bert subverts the spectacular aspects of the press and shows
images of militant laborers being dispersed by police, scenes
of worker's homes contrasted with the palatial interiors of
luxury hotels, including the well-groomed pets of
aristocrats. Bert angrily "projects" a critique of

consumption and desire within mass-culture_through a

commentary that frames the string of images for the young
spectators. Tressell thus realizes the power of the
spectacle to position its spectators ideologically; the point
of the pandorama, beyond its function as meta-sign for 333,
is to suggest the power of the press to reproduce the social
order in a way that naturalizes cultural mythology. As I

will demonstrate Tressell depicts this in the way the press

affects the construction of Owen's subjectivity.

 

7D
The Terrible Domestic Tragedy

Tressell's depiction of the press and its readership in
the working-class community of Mugsborough (in which the
headlines of the papers blast messages to their readers such
as "GREAT DISTRESS IN MUGSBOROUGH") documents how ideology
and power in the press affect those whose voices are
effectively excluded from dominant representation. Through
the main character Owen, Tressell's relationship to the press
also reveals the subject position of the worker through
discourse, in this case the allegorical figure of Owen, whose
social role as a father is mirrored by the story of the
"Terrible Domestic Tragedy" which appears in the Daily
Obscurer. As Owen reads the paper, we find that the news
story details the sensational account of a murder-suicide,
involving a destitute father who puts an end to his family's
misery by slitting_the throats ofhis children, and then
killing himself.' Owen's reading of the story activates a
series of reflections regarding the nature of the murder, the

possibility of his own family's condition.

Owen reads the story in such a way that the suicidal
worker is--on a symbolic level—~criminalized, framed by
conditions beyond his control, and therefore symbolically
representative of others who have been placed in similar
circumstances. The headline "Terrible Domestic Tragedy"
functions on various levels in Tressell's encoding of social

values. To a dominant middle-class readership, which the

 

71

newspaper's editorial interests express, it is a terrible
tragedy, signifying failure, guilt, and--in the context of
the chapter, "It is Not My Crime"--criminality in the sense
that someone has been framed. To Owen, whose voice is
effectively excluded from the focalization of the Obscurer,
the domestic tragedy also registers these emotive and moral
categories, but the power relations inherent in the
journalistic form--that is, the power between Owen and the
press--reveals that the story is something to be resisted,
painfully, but nevertheless through a social and textual
analysis of how the language and form of The Obscurer
function as a form of social discourse in relation to
ideology. But Tressell transcends the level of social

critique and deploys a symbolic resistance to hegemony.

Poison to Relieve Misery

An analysis of the representation of the press and how
it mediates the subject-position of the allegorical father
(Owen) allows for an understanding of how these dynamics
work in 513. It is necessary to quote from REP at length.
The story happens as follows: as Owen returns from work one
evening, he, like many of his fellow workers, sits down to
read the paper and discovers a shocking story that has more
effect on him than it probably does on the majority The

Obscurer's readership. While drying his clothes near the

 

fire, he looks for his favorite evening distraction:

 

72

Whilst doing this he noticed the newspaper,
which he had forgotten in the coat pocket. He
drew it out with an exclamation of pleasure.
Here was something to distract his thoughts:
if not instructive or comforting, it would at
any rate be interesting and even amusing to
read the reports of the self-satisfied, futile
talk of the profound statesmen who with
comical gravity presided over the working of
the Great System which their combined wisdom
pronounced to be the best that could possibly
be devised. But tonight Owen was not to read
of those things, for as soon as he opened the
paper his attention was riveted by the staring
headlines of one of the principal columns:

TERR IBLE DOMEST IC TRAGEDY
Wife and Two Children Killed
Suicide of the Murderer

It was one of the ordinary poverty crimes.
The man had been without employment for many
weeks and they had been living by pawning or
selling their furniture and other possesions.
But even this resource must have failed at
last, and when one day the neighbors noticed
that the blinds remained down and that there
was a strange silence about the house, no one
'“coming-out'or going in, suSpicions that '
something was wrong were quickly resolved.
When the police entered the house, they found
in one of the upper rooms, the dead bodies of
the woman and the two children, with their
throats severed, laid out side by side among
the bed, which was saturated with their blood.

[. . .] No particle of food was found in the
house, and on a nail in the wall in the
kitchen was hung a piece of blood smeard paper
on which was written in pencil:

"This is not my crime, but society's."

The report went on to explain that the deed
must have been perpetrated during a fit of
temporary insanity brought on by the
sufferings the man had endured.

"Insanity!" muttered Owen, as he read this

 

73

glib theory.

"Insanity! It seems to me that he would have
been insane if he had not killed them."
Surely it was wiser and better and kinder to
send them all to sleep, than to let them
continue to suffer.

At the same time he thought it very strange
that the man should have chosen to do it that
way, when there were so many other cleaner,
easier and more painless ways of accomplishing
the same object. He wondered why it was that
most of these killings were done in more or
less the same crude, cruel messy way. No; he
would set about it in a different fashion. He
would get some charcoal, then he would paste
strips of paper over the joinings of the door
and windows of the room and close the
registers of the grate. . . .

[. . .1 Or one could take poison. Of course,
there was a certain amount of difficulty in
procuring it, but it would not be impossible
to find some pretext for buying some laudanum:
one could buy very small quantities at
different shops until one had sufficient . [.
. .] Then he remembered that he had read
somewhere that vermilion, one of the colours
he frequently had to use in his work, was one
of the most deadly poisons: and there was
some other stuff that photographers used,

‘~’which was very eastho procure; ”Of course,‘

one would have to be very careful about
poisons, so as not to select one that would
cause a lot of pain. It would be necessary to
find out how the stuff acted before using it.
It would not be very difficult to do so. Then
he remembered that among his books was one
that probably contained some information about
this subject. He went over to the bookshelf
and found the volume; it was called Th3
Cyclopedia 2E Practical Medicine, rather an
old book, a little out of date, perhaps, but
still it might contain the information he
wanted. Opening it, he turned to the table of
contents. Many different subjects were
mentioned there and presently he found the one
he sought:

 

 

Poisons: Chemically, physiologically and
pathologically considered.

 

74

Corrosive Poisons.
Narcotic Poisons.
Slow Poisons.
Consecutive Poisons.
Accumulative Poisons.

He turned to the chapter indicated and,
reading it, he was astonished to find what a
number of poisons there were within easy reach
of whoever wished to make use of them:

poisons that could be relied upon to do their
work certainly, quickly and without pain. Why
it was not even necessary to buy them: one
could gather them from the hedges of the road
side and in the fields.

The more he thought of it the stranger it
seemed that such a clumsy method as a razor
should be so popular. Why almost any other
way would be better and easier than that.

As Owen continues to contemplate this act, along with
other possible, less painful ways of killing his family, his
son Frankie bursts into the room, crying out to him, Dad,
Dad! telling Owen, or trying to tell him that he has been

calling out to his father but that Owen must not have heard
him. Lost in suicidal speculation, his son brings him back
to the present and, for a while the thought of suicide leaves

Owen's mind.

It is not only Owen's contemplation of suicide that is
significant here. Of major importance is the chronotope
employed by Tressell in which he dramatically presents Owen
to us in this scene. Briefly defined, the chronotope is
Bakhtin's idea of a space-time configuration, in which

6

dialogues or decisions take place. On one level Owen is

outside of the "Cave," the building he and his mates are

 

 

75

working in. The "Cave" is in reality a house being built for
the wealthy, perhaps a house similar to one under
construction for Soames Forsyte in A M33 2E Property. In RTP
this house is the site where significant dialogues about
public discourse take place. In the "Cave" Owen engages in
discussions about practical economics, the nature of
socialism, arguments about the press and so on--in short,
what matters for workers as the difference between illusion

7 While he lectures to his fellow workers, Owen

and reality.
feels somewhat secure; it is in the domestic hearth that he
experiences anxiety, insecurity and despair over the
information delivered in the daily press. In some ways,
Owen's possible suicide alludes to a Socratic form of
suicide, given his position in the dialogue of labour,

therefore alluding to a shifting subject-position as a

dialectician and family man.

In the domestic sphere Owen's subject-position-—his
role as a father—-exhibits a less stable relationship to the
language of the dominant press; and the relationship between
discourse and power reveals that Owen belongs to that group
which is statistically "ordinary," as in "ordinary poverty
crime." Owen addresses the ethics of the general ("Insanityl
It seems to me that he would be insane if he had not killed
them.") and calls into question the social grounds on which
this Opposition rests. Therefore, he articulates the crime

as a .rationalized activity and imaginatively considers a

———

 

76

course of action which symbolically calls into play the
course of action not pursued by the dead worker:
asphyxiation, poisoning, even strangulation, all symbolic
actions that correspond to a destructive impulse regarding

the health of the social and familial body.

The shift in Owen's subject-position from rebellious
worker to suicidal family man brings into play the
institutional discourse which transforms his daily activity
into a form of domestic incarceration; hence the passage from
the chapter "It is Not My Crime" (the same words left in a
note by the dead worker). Owen transfers his own domestic
situation into an imaginary substitution, a possible final
act of defiance based on desperation and destitution. He
internalizes these conditions as signs of failure and
criminality on his part. But if, like the "ordinary poverty
crime," he is going to break the law, he will do it
differently: "He would set about it in a different fashion."
Hence Owen transforms a poverty of means into a macabre
display of self-destructive wealth, his own working materials
can be used for these purposes. Vermilion, a blood-red
pigment, becomes a useful chemical, a practical poison, as if
the blood of the laborer's family body is itself predisposed
to poison, polluted and contaminated from the outset, and
therefore prevented from action. Yet there is the issue of
using photographer's chemicals. But why these, given the

range of poisons available to the average laborer, with many

 

77

of these substances commonly available? These substances are
also employed in the production of individual and social
images, and it is this elaborate version of suicide which
forms the image—construction of social allegorical image--the
deadly (news)print (The Terrible Tragedy), the deadly and
bloody (literally a blood red) paint-~vermilion, which the
sign painter uses--and, finally deadly images (photography),
the discourse of the panorama-fin this sense the emergence of

the "society of the spectacle."

Owen's recourse to the "Cyclopedia" functions as a form
of symbolic overstatement for the case of the crime,
presenting evidence for questions to which he already holds
the answers, and the various poisons function as metaphorical
categories for working life, regarding the overall health
effects on the working community: physiologically and
pathologically considered, the pathological nature of the
community is metonymically corrosive, regarding the attrition
of workers' lives, as in Philpot and Lindley; it is narcotic,
as in the humorous references to drink; it is slow, in the
sense that social change is practically non-existent; it is
consecutive, in that the death toll merely mounts and paupers
graves, as the Lindens and other nameless subjects in the
narrative are reduced to the status of statistical figures;
it is accumulative, in that the condition in Tressell's

Mugsborough keeps happening.

 

78

Owen's suicide fantasy--on the level of a semiotic
analysis--encodes the intersection of institutional
discourses and enacts an interplay between power and ideology
in which various cultural codes and discursive practices
regulate--even in an imaginary suicide--the social practices
of the laboring body. Therefore if the image found in 322
Obscurer was originally supposed to be a distraction for
Owen, it ironically turns out to motivate his own crime of
suicide and activates a discursive chain regarding the
rhetoric of everyday life. As Owen contemplates suicide, we
find an intersection of various discourses which establish
his social role in relation to his imaginary crime: madness
is in relation to medicine, legality is in opposition to
criminality. But the absent discourse here is that of
organized religion in the form of Mugsborough's "The Shining.
Light Chapel." Later in the novel, Tressell symbolically
links the rhetoric of the poisoned body with the discourse of
religion, a discursive feature which is absent from Owen's

response to the "Terrible Domestic Tragedy."
Poison to Believe, Misery!

It is not, however, until the chapter "The Open Air,"
in which Owen and his son Frankie venture out into the market
area to buy groceries, that Owen connects the issue of
religion to the "crime" that he was thinking about earlier
in the narrative, killing his family, like the person

involved in the "Terrible Domestic Tragedy." While walking

 

79

through the crowded streets with his son Frankie, Owen
experiences a similar kind of feeling toward his present
situation and the larger problem of his identity versus the
faceless crowd. It is at this point that the thought of
continuing under the present conditions is realized as a
state of pure exploitation, individually unbearable. But
more importantly, it is at this point in the narrative that
the "Terrible Domestic Tragedy" reappears in the discourse of

the narrator.

At this specific moment during Owen's walk through the
crowd that Tressell effects a structural equivalence between
his own subjectivity as a member of that crowd and of the
public "readers" engaged in the consumption of the naturalist
"pre-spectacle" of journalism. The press that stands back
from tragedy and merely describes with a popular sense of
causality. Therefore Owen is-a member, but an alienated
member of the faceless crowd that consumes the news that he
reads. But this crowd does not understand his social

position as it is represented by The Obscurer. In other

 

words, the asymmetrical relationship between Owen and the
general readership of the press pushes Owen into a very
defensive posture, dislocating him from the crowd as an other
that they will not be able to "read" if he himself becomes
the victim of the "story." This scene elicits a disparity,

a social, structural asymmetry, between Owen's subject-

position and the crowd, as he recalls the "Terrible Domestic

8E

Tragedy." Hence, Tressell recontextualizes the discursive
space of the public portrayal of private tragedy in Owen's

recognition of himself in the crowd.

As he walked through the crowded streets
holding Frankie by the hand, Owen thought that
to voluntarily continue to live such a life as
this betokened a degraded mind. To allow
one's child to grow up to suffer in turn was
an act of callous, criminal cruelty.

In this matter he held different opinions from
most of his fellow workmen. The greater
number of them were quite willing and content
that their children should be made into beasts
of burden for the benefit of these people. As
he looked down upon the frail little figure
trotting along by his side, Owen thought for
the thousandth time that it would be far
better for the child to die now: he would
never be a soldier in the ferocious Christian
Battle of Life.

 

. . . .He had been working like a slave all his
life and there was nothing to show for it--
there never would be anything to show for it.
He thought of the man who had killed his wife
and children. The jury had returned the usual
'verdict,"Temporary'Insanity.' It never

seemed to occur to these people that the truth
was that to continue to suffer hopelessly like
this was evidence of permanent insanity.

But supposing that bodily death was not the
end. Suppose there was some kind of a God? If
there were, it wasn't unreasonable to think
that the Being who was capable of creating
such a world as this and who seemed so
callously indifferent to His creatures, would
also be capable of devising and creating the
other Hell that most people believed in.

Looking out into the unfathomable infinity of
space, Owen wondered what manner of Being or
Power it was that had originated or sustained
all of this? Considered as an explanation of
the existence of the universe, the orthodox
Christian religion was too absurd to merit a
second thought. But, then, every other

 

 

81

conceivable hypothesis was also--ultimately--
unsatisfactory and even ridiculous (RTE, 245-
46). .

Owen's private discourse here avoids advocating the
worn-out principles of Christian Socialism championed by
previous socialists; rather, it encodes a kind of pessimistic
naturalism, similar to Hardy; the "Terrible Domestic
Tragedy," perhaps resonates with the suicide in ggdg‘thg
Obscure. But instead of affirming a form of pastoralism,
based on traditional Christian metaphysics, Owen rejects, at
least under his present circumstances, the possibility of the
theological sign as spiritual deliverance. We might say that
there is a kind of naive negative theology at work here, in
league with the naturalism that vanquishes the subject,
especially the laboring subject. On the other side of Owen's
rejection of conventional theology lurks the handmaiden of
naturalism, evolution. In relation to this problem Owen's
thought shifts from the social to speculative metaphysics

regarding problems of cosmology and material existence.

To believe that the universe as it is now has
existed from all eternity without any Cause is
surely ridiculous. But to say that it was
created by a Being who existed without any
Cause from all eternity is equally ridiculous.
In fact it was only postponing the difficulty
one stage. Evolution was not more
satisfactory, because although it was
undoubtedly true as far as it went, it only
went part of the way,leaving the great
question still unanswered because it was
unanswerable (513, 246).

82

This private discourse takes place while Owen is
walking through the streets, in the realm of the social, as
it were, and away from the "Cave," where the most public
dialogues take place. What Tressell presents here is a
situation that avoids real public dialogue. Owen, we are
told, would like to accept the belief system of Christian
discourse in the sense that it could represent a truly
ethical form of social action. But as soon as Owen affirms
the refined ethics of Christianity, they are negated by the
present "State of things"--hence there is a dialectic between
the abstract possibility of Christian Socialism and the
regulated cynicism of everyday life in the open air
marketplace.

"In one sense," he thought, "how good it would
be if Christianity were true, and after all
the sorrow there was to be an eternity of
happiness such as it had never entered into
the heart of man to conceive? . . .But no one
'really believed this;“and as for those who’
pretended to do so—-their lives showed that
they did not believe in it at all. . . .
their ferocious determination to secure for
themselves the good things of this world--were
conclusive proofs of their hypocrisy and
infidelity (RTP, pp.246-247).

The word Infidelity here becomes the contested term for
Tressell. And throughout the narrative of The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists, Tressell opposes religious or
quasi-religious terminology against Owen's oppositional

social rhetoric. In one sense, the word "infidelity" has to

do with the press and other discourse that sustains power and

 

83

maintains the hegemony of culture through a regime of

religious discourse.

Similar to the earlier scene in which Owen's attention
shifts from the contemplative to the real, the interior to
the exterior, Frankie's voice again startles Owen and forces
him to confront the immediate situation. In this case it is
a rally of the Shining Light Chapel, which has gathered in
the marketplace, and is conducting its own act of faith, in
which Biblical verses are read, hymns sung, and proclamations
of faith are put to the test. This occurs while the devoted
commune in a rather solemn manner: "During the singing
their faces were a study, they all looked so profoundly
solemn and miserable, as if they were a gang of condemned
criminals waiting to be led forth to execution" (312, 248).
The members of the Shining Light Chapel include Hunter and
others of Owen's co-workers. They are led by a reader, who
warns his flock of the dangers of eternal damnation; a
heckler challenges the preacher, who offers proof in the form
of additional scripture and heightened rhetoric. However,
the evangelist is apparently angered by the behavior of two
well-dressed infidels, who challenge his authority.

Then, having heartily denounced all those
who--as he put it--'refused to believe,‘ he
proceeded to ridicule those half-and-half
believers who, while professing to believe the
Bible, rejected the doctrine of Hell. That
the existence of a place of eternal torture is
taught in the Bible, he tried to prove by a

long succession of texts. . . .(RTP,
248-49)

84

The exchange that takes place between the hecklers and
the preacher mirrors many of the dialogues between Owen and
his fellow workers on the issues of poverty, economic reform,
and the possible promises of socialism. But the comparison
is minimal at best, as the preacher's oratory is directed,
for the most part, at those already converted, whereas Owen
is usually arguing with those he cannot convert. Here, the
audience consists of the likes of Hunter, Misery, and Slyme,
who fervently profess their faith, at least until they are
asked to perform a somewhat "liquid" test after quoting
Biblical verse in which true believers can oust demons,
handle serpents, heal the sick, and ingest "deadly things."

"Well, you can't heal the sick, neither can
you speak new languages or cast out devils:
but perhaps you can drink deadly things
without suffering harm." The Speaker here
sudenly drew from his waistcoat pocket a small

‘ glaSs“bOttle and held it out towards Misery

who shrank from it with horror as he
continued: "I have here a most deadly poison.
there is in this bottle sufficient strychnine
to kill a dozen unbelievers. Drink it! And
if it doesn't harm you, we'll know that you
really are a believer and that what you
believe is the truth!" (RTP, 250)

The astonished Misery, of course, refuses to drink the
poison and attempts to discredit the preacher, saying, "I
suppose you're one of them hired critics wot's goin about the
country doin the Devil's work?" Misery's disbelief thus

forces the crowd to a political recognition, while Hunter and

the others still proclaim their faith in God, ignoring the

85

embarrassing demands of the preacher.

Earlier in the narrative, poison is the means by which
Owen will kill his family, the domestic body. In this
context the means of destroying the social body--or an
allegorical member of it, Misery,--through a poison which
stands in as the object of faith (believe and you will live,
even through you will probably die). Poison is thus the
metaphorical link within a structure of symbolic equivalence,

present in the discourse of the press.

Tressell makes it clear that the values inherent in the
press are therefore ideologically equivalent to the values of
the Shining Light Chapel. Hence the substance of poison is
the vehicle which allows the institutional discourses of
criminality, insanity, and religion to be linked onto a
socially contiguous plane, regarding the opposition between
the private and public, the domestic and the social. If Owen
will commit a murder suicide, he will use poison; if Misery
will drink the poison to reaffirm the values of the
community, he will not only kill himself, but allow the
preacher to symbolically murder him. Thus Tressell employs
the Shining Light Chapel to mirror the disruption of these
values, which form the moral bedrock of the middle-class
community and disseminate from the informational organ, Th3

Obscurer.

The relations of power between the working-class

 

86

subject and the press entails a self-destructive violence or
the possibility of violence regarding the domestic body (Owen
and his family) and the social body (the crowd). Hence,
Tressell's transvaluation of social codes is a violent and
defensive response to a situation from which his voice is
excluded and the possibility of communication effectively

stifled.
Thing in Black and White

If the press affects Owen so powerfully, then how does
the press, as a commodity, effect the subject-positions of
other workers in RTP? As I pointed out earlier, most workers
in 512 seem to be content with forms of passive consumption;
they read the sporting columns and the race results. For
these workers the newspaper provides cultural distractions
_and displaced gentlemanly pleasures._i But when political
concerns enter the picture Tressell immediately politicizes
the representation of the press, pointing to representational
gaps between the forms of class relations and literacy. For
example, when Easton reads The Obscurer, on the issue of
tariff reform and fiscal policy, "he was not able to
understand exactly what the compiler of the figures was
driving at--probably the latter never intended that anyone
should understand-~but he was conscious of a growing feeling
of indignation and hatred against foreigners of every

description, who were ruining this country, and he began to

87

think that it was about time we did something to protect
ourselves" (REP, 19). Economically under-literate, Easton,
like many of the subjects in Tressell's narrative, is
"hailed" by the reigning myths (ideologies) of dominant
culture, which are to some degree demystified by Owen's
didactic dialogues. But if Owen momentarily dislodges
workers from their investment in dominant myth, workers
quickly reinveSt themselves in its discursive features in the
press. Like many of the didactic passages in Tressell's
text, the news-text creates a sphere of discourse in which

these obscured positions become naturalized.

And so the talk continued, principally carried
on by Crass and those who agreed with him.
None of them really understood the subject:
not one of them had ever devoted fifteen
consecutive minutes to the earnest
investigation of it. The papers they read
were filled with vague and alarming accounts
of quantities of foreign merchandise imported
into this country, the enormous number of

‘aliens constantly arriving,'and théir'
destitute conditions, how they lived, the
crimes they committed, and the injury they did
to British trade. These were the seeds which,
cunningly sown in their minds, caused to grow
up within them a bitter undiscriminating
hatred of foreigners. To them the mysterious
thing they called the "Friscal Policy", the
"Fistical Policy", or the "Fissical Question"
was a great Anti-Foreign Crusade. . . .
Therefore, down with the foreigners and all
their works. Out with them. Drive them b----
s into the bloody sea! The country would be
ruined if not protected in some way. This
Friscal, Fistical, Fissical or whatever the
hell policy it was called, was Protection,
therefore no one but a bloody fool could
hesitate to support it. It was scarcely
necessary to think about it at all.

This was the conclusion reached by Crass and

 

88

such of his mates who thought they were
Conservatives--the majority of them could not
have read a dozen sentences aloud without
stumbling--it was not necessary to think or
study or investigate anything. It was all
clear as daylight. The foreigner was the
enemy, and the cause of poverty and bad trade.
(RTP, 21-22)

This passage suggests that information about fiscal
policy proffered by both Liberal and Tory papers, when
ingested by the members of Owen's community, "mysteriously"
transforms itself into a vulgar nationalism, and, watered
down to polarize issues, reinforces a cultural xenophobia
among the working classes whose interests have been deflected
from the primary economics. But the exasperated distance of
the indirect discourse from the generic voice of the
community reveals a problem of literacy, power, and ideology.

Although Crass will later say that he reads both the Ananias1

and The Obscurer to find out "wot side is right," he merely

 

reproduces dominant ideOIOgy by falsely aligning himself with

class-interests, that for all practical purposes exclude him.

Tressell presents several problems here regarding the
commodification of information and its consumption. On one
level the narrator ridicules the working class because of its
inability to recoqnize its own activity as a class and its
relationship to the power and domination of popular discourse
which effectively functions as social control, creating the
voices of Crass and others who mis-recognize their own

discursive positions. Another voice assesses the scope of

 

 

 

89

the ideological dimension of literacy and power, and
sarcastically chides the workers. Tressell reveals a
problem here regarding the "use of literacy." Many of Owen's
fellow workers can read, but they are not literate enough to
understand how specific issues are couched within wider
spheres of discourse alien to their own subject-positions.
Commenting on the status of literacy in nineteenth-
century England, Terry Eagleton once remarked, "What is now
most problematical is not illiteracy, which is after all a
sort of absolute, determinable condition, but those who,
while well able to read, are not quite able to 'read'. . . ."
In Eagleton's sense:

. . .what is most ideologically undermining is

a literacy which is not literacy, a form of

reading which transgresses the frontier

between blindness and insight, a whole nation

which reads but not in your sense of reading.

. .neither quite literate nor illiterate,

neither firmly within one 's categories nor

. securely the Other of them;

Eagleton refers to the status of literacy in relation
to the rise of criticism and the institutions that condition
and govern its cultural dissemination. Tressell's
representation of literacy and power appears to echo a very
similar sentiment. Those who are figuratively illiterate and
socially disempowered cannot read, in one sense of
the word, whereas they can read in another. The point is

that this other sense of illiteracy benefits hegemony, more

than it runs the risk of undermining it. Tressell presents

 

90

characters who are competent in the sense that they are
literate, but their reading is entrenched in a state of
perpetual "non" literacy, as their comprehension of politics
seems to be little more than an auxiliary grasp of dominant
expressions. Tressell thus outlines how against a wall of
reference that anchors the signified of social truth through
the dominant interest of the middle-class press,
possibilities for intra-class dialogue are severely

curtailed.
Proving One's Principles

As Tressell's narrative brilliantly demonstrates,
social reference is expressed through a modality which often
finds expression in the press, as an extension of the
institutional discourses reinforced by dominant--in the case:
of the Obscurer and other papers, middle—class--commercial
interests. "The‘emergen *ideology of Labor threatens the
privileged modes of distribution and circulation, by these
oppositional forms of discourse. As evidenced time and time

again in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the

 

propagation of "useful" information to the working community
is limited at best. By virtue of the form of this
information, its consumption--in the asymmetrical power
relation involved in this process of production and
consumption between the press and its working-class audience-
-involves a struggle in which the reproduction of dominant

interests effectively establishes a level of high affinity or

 

 

91

alignment among workers who accept these values. As Hodge
and Kress point out in Social Semiotics, "Modality expresses
affinity--or lack of it--[through] speaker with bearer via an
affirmation of their affinity about the status of the mimetic
system. Affinity is therefore an indicator of relations of
solidarity or of power, that is, relations oriented toward
the expression of solidarity or of the expression of power
(difference)." Also significant, as Hodge and Kress point
out, is the degree to which a subject expresses affinity,

signifying levels of solidarity or power difference.lg

Of course, in Tressell's novel characters such as Owen,
Barrington, Easton, Philpot, and others express power
differences--Owen and Barrington most prominently, while
Hunter, Misery, Crass, especially Crass, and others express
solidarity with a hegemonic naturalism expressed in the

dominant cultural values of the press.

Perhaps the major issues regarding the discourse of
labor in RTP deal with a definition of socialism that makes
sense to Owen's fellow workers. But the ideological fissures
within the working community, most notably the high degree of
affinity with dominant interests, effectively prevent Owen from
making inroads that can progressively transform the collective
consciousness of workers and therefore motivate them to social

action.

Crass confronts Owen on the true nature of

 

92

socialism in a scene that also reflects perceptions of Labor in
the liberal press. This happens early in the novel in
the chapter "The Exterminating Machines," in which Owen has
again argued with Crass on the issue of employment,
machinery, and tariff reform. Frustrated with his inability
to challenge Owen, Crass resorts to the use of material
evidence--a clipping from the Obscurer, with which he can
steamroll Owen.

Crass did not feel very satisfied with the

result of the machinery argument, but he

consoled himself with the reflection that he

would be able to flatten his opponent on

another subject. The cutting from The

Obscurer which he had in his pocket would take

a bit of answering! When you have the thing

in print-—in black and white--why there it is,

and you can't get away from it! If it wasn't

all right, a paper like that would have never

printed it. (RTP, 168)

Crass‘ perception of the modality of the press confirms
the power of information as print—commodity. His utterance,
“the thing in black and white," underscores the form in which
the modality of the press suggests that truth values are
proffered as binary relations, black and white implying the
implicit veracity of the press as a value-free realm of
discourse; hence Crass' naive assertion and high affinity
with The Obscurer's version of social mimesis. The realm of
social facts is thus located within the commodity form for

Crass--as it is for others of the working community—-and

Crass' solidarity with the dominant values is further

 

 

93

strengthened, while the possibility of a discourse that
assesses facts outside of the dominant press is imbricated

within the social process's commodity consumption.

It is not until "The Oblong" chapter, in which Owen has
conducted a miniature seminar on the principles of socialism,
engaging in long debate and countering claims that socialism
is merely a leveling of wealth, that Crass produces his

weapon, the clipping from The Obscurer. Remarking that the

 

print was too small for his own eyes, he [Crass] passed the

slip of paper to Harlow, who read aloud as follows:

PROVE YOUR PRINCIPLES; OR, LOOK AT BOTH SIDES

"I wish I could open your eyes to the true
misery of our condition: injustice, tyranny
and oppression!" said a discontented hack to a
weary looking cob as they stood side by side
in unhired cabs.

"I'd rather have them open to something
pleasant, thank you" replied the cob.

"I am sorry for you. If you could enter

”into'the’noble'aspiratiOns~---a"“the hack
began.

"Talk plain. What would you have?" said the
cob, interrupting him.

"What would I have? Why equality, and share
and share alike all over the world," said the
hack.

"You mean that?" said the cob.

"Of course I do. What right have those
sleek, pampered hunters and racers to their
warm stables and high feed, their grooms and
jockeys? It is really heart sickening to
think of it," replied the hack.

"I don't know but you may be right," said
the cob, "and to show I'm in earnest as no
doubt you are, let me have half the good beans
you have in in your bag, and you shall have
half the musty oats and chaff I have in mine.
There's nothing like proving one's
principles."

94

Original Parables by Mrs. Prosser
(RTP, 282)

Of course, Crass responds with a "there you are"
position, feeling triumphant with his piece of paper that
"objectively" supports the failure of Labour as a viable
discourse. Understandably, Owen is somewhat startled by this
vulgar display, and strikes back, "that if the Editor of The
Obscurer put that in his paper as an argument against
Socialism, either he is of feeble intellect, or else he
thinks that the majority of his readers are" (3T3, 283).

As Owen further attacks Crass, he claims the clipping from

The Obscurer is "an argument against the hypocrites who

 

pretend to be Christians. . .and that they do not love the
world or the things of the world and say that they are merely
'Pilgrims on their way to a better land.'" Owen's response
here 991°#5.39 the deftif'tggfiffiYifY 9f th? Press.and the
press's ability to effect social control through a modality, which
ultimately prevents a rational exchange of discourse from
taking place within the working community. Moreover, Crass'
rejection of Owen's response reveals the limitations of the
dialogue--or the non-dialogue--as Crass maintains, "We're not
talkin about religion," when Owen swiftly counters that the
affinity of Crass's clipping is indeed aligned with the
politics of popular religion as part of the institutional

base of The Obscurer.

 

The press, then, as a commodity that lends itself to a

 

_. . _. v—.,. , —. 1"

95

fetishization of value, is also a very problematic and
complicated thing in Tressell and accounts for a good part of
the novel's discursive view of culture. It could be said
that Tressell's novel is itself a journalism of resistance in
addition to its status as a novel. It would be difficult to
find a writer who so thoroughly charts out the signs of the
press, its uses as an organ of power, and its relation to
literacy within a community. In this respect it has to be
said that Tressell is mapping out an anthropology of sorts
that reveals the processes of literacy in relation to the
reification of information. The left may have failed in its
attempt to produce a viable alternative that would move
workers. Tressell, in his disgust with such a problem
reveals the dynamics that underlie the problem of mass-
culture, hegemony, andsocial resistance to dominant

mythology.

Section Two: Working-Class Naturalism and the Problem of
Gender

96

 

Chapter 3

Admirable Sentiments: Oppositional Naturalism and the Problem
of WOmen's Representation in the Labor Movement

One of the first things I sensed in public
life was the strong undercurrent of anti-
feminism which pervades most public bodies.
The Labor party itself was only lukewarm on
such matters of 'equal pay,’ while on the
employment of married women most of them were
definitely reactionary. But they dressed up
their objections, either by admirable
sentiments about the "domestic hearth" with
"mother's influence" thrown in as a tear-
raiser, or else they went all Marxian and
stressed the bad economics of two incomes
going into one home, while men with a capital
M were unemployed. Whichever reason was
given, the results were the same when the vote
was taken.

From The Hard Way Up: The Autobiography 2:
Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and Rebel‘

It is difficult to characterize the problem of gender,
ideoloqy, and history in the labor movement without being
culturally reductive or redundant. It is risky, to say the
least, to make comprehensive assessments regarding the
production of an oppositional naturalism by women, in light
of the production of naturalist myths about women produced
by men that subsequently were naturalized in the labor
movement. As the above-mentioned passage by Hannah Mitchell
makes clear, the primary issues that men in the labor

movement focused on often produced representations of women

97

98

that were either condescending, hostile, or patronizing
toward materialist problems and concerns of gender roles and
relations. Due to the multiplicity of these problems, a
proper charting of an oppositional naturalism would entail a
re-mapping of a great deal of ideological territory, and so
many lines of historical force would have to be re—
configured, that there is no clear-cut historical or
sociological approach—-at least no singular approach--as to
how issues of gender and class can be defined without
producing methodological or rhetorical conflicts. The
dominant issue facing women's movements centered around the
role of suffrage; suffrage was a crucial aspect of larger
interrelated issues: women's rights in the work-place, the
role of women in progressive movements, domestic issues,
legal issues, the politics of the body, religious issues and;
progressive forms of spirituality, class conflicts centering
on“the problem cf the domestic and the public spheres, and
other matters that were suddenly intensified and

problematized by the politics of the "Woman Question."2

Given the diversity of women's issues, a truly proper
assessment of the problem of gender and labor would demand a
more rigorous cultural examination than my study permits; it
ought to include both empirical and theoretical modes of
inquiry to account for the varied inflections of ideology and
power in issues such as political enfranchisement, domestic

politics, feminist autonomy, and community structure. But a

 

99

look at how the politics of language and the ideology of
gender were shaped in various political tracts and novels by
both male writers and women writers in the labor movement
will provide some insights into the discursive aspects of
gender constructs. As oppositional discourse or oppositional
naturalism, the fault lines inherent in the discourse of
labor, especially where it cannot admit them, come to the
forefront of an analysis of myth regarding gendered subject
positions. On a cultural and ideological level, this
fragmentation occurs in the form of a dominant discourse by
men and an emergent discourse by women. Male writers often
relied on the unchallenged tenets of evolutionary discourse
or a philosophical naturalism that upheld mystifications of
the feminine body; often these various discourses maintained
vulgar empirical assumptions that upheld crude essentialist
conceptions of biological difference. In other words,

* prOgreSSive men often consciously’or uncdnsciously
perpetuated these myths and stereotypes, many of them hold-
overs from Victorian concerns about the family. For
progressive women, then, the ideological imperative was very
clear: to produce forms of resistance to these stereotypical
myths of the feminine and to strategically situate

oppositional naturalism within a social and material context.

In this section, then, I will examine pertinent
representations of women by men articulating both pro-

feminist and anti-feminist positions within the labor

100

movement. The specific documents that I examine are not
widely known in the sense that they are read today-—in fact
they are obscure-~but these texts certainly express a
dominant side of paternalist ideology in the labor movement.
In reading these documents my strategy is not only to see how
they fit into a larger cultural problem regarding the role of
gender in the labor movement; but also to examine these texts
closely and demonstrate how they served to reproduce,
reinforce, and re-domesticate an ideology of gender based on
naturalistic assumptions. In the second part of this section
I will examine texts produced by women in the labor movement
and show how specific women enacted a resistance to the
conservative, naturalistic myths produced by men in the labor

movement. The point of this is to illustrate how problematic

gender issues were in relation to naturalism, in light of the;

paternalism prevalent during labor's turning point.

The paternalism inherent in the labor movement often
cast labor in the dubious role of a new-fangled men's club,
promising to restore a naturalized body of traditional gender
roles once a socialist state was established, once the
degradations of industrial capitalism were corrected. On
some levels, the sentiments expressed by labor leaders of the
time and the troubling sense of vulgar paternalism
characteristic of workers hostile to labor manifests itself
in Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. A

dramatically charged sense of paternalism forcefully asserts

101

itself in the writings of Robert Blatchford's Clarion Press,

 

as well as the pamphlets of the Independent Labor Party (ILP)
and other groups. Furthermore, in Lawrence's representation
of male voices in the mining community of Bestwood, men are
threatened by radical women, or, in the case of Mrs. Morel,
even women who participate in the local guilds, in additon to
those women involved in socialist and suffragette causes such
as Clara Dawes. The dominant message that these various
voices keep repeating is the paternalist implication that if
working men are to control their own lives, as well as take
control of the processes of production, they are also to
regain control of their families, either through advanced
unionism, socialism, or some other form of revolutionary

activity.

It could be said that in The Ragged Trousered

 

 

Philanthropists Tressell deploys a condescending form of
patriarchal discourse when he excludes women in the labor
movement and fails to include active women's voices. But
perhaps the most powerful evidence of this problem occurs in
Tressell's novel in the scene in which Owen contemplates

3 By enacting an exclusionary

killing himself and his family.
strategy that denies the working-class woman (in this case
Owen's wife Nora) a say in matters that determine the health
of the family, Tressell encodes a kind of paternalist

negation or what I would call a simple act of finality, by

fantasizing a murder-suicide scenario, which can ultimately

 

152

be seen as a cynically hostile gesture toward cultural
hegemony, but also can be seen as a profoundly naturalist
gesture of defeat, as the male worker destroys the microcosm
of the family, symbolically wiping out the allegorical
community of the family. This sense of paternalist finality
operates through a logic of extreme defeatism, a pathos that
suggests that if the economically disempowered male cannot
provide for the family, the subordinate (even more
disempowered) wife embodies no recourse to social change, and
the family, the naturalist vehicle of the novel, is
extinguished by social conditions. Ultimately it is better
to put the family unit out of its misery. Granted this may
not seem like an adequate way of dealing with the woman
question in Tressell's novel, but what is clear is that a
treatment of the woman question was not adequately addressedf
and that such extreme moments of economic distress forcefully

elicit that problem.‘

(Paternalist) Woman. . .The Progressive?

For men dealing with the issue of gender, this was an
awkward problem, indeed, if not for some men on the left, an
impossible problem altogether. Some of the documents in this
discussion devoted specifically to the issue of gender will
allow us to understand more fully the cultural shape of labor
and the idea of socialism in a historical and social context,

rather than presenting a narrow ideological version of gender

 

l$3

in the labor movement. During the crisis of labor we find
that these representations of gender forcefully elicit these
problems, and in some ways stand as parodic examples of
gender, because of the historical distance between
contemporary theoretical views on gender and male-

representations of women early in the century.

We find that specific issues and specific problems
become clearer as to how myths of gender reproduced
retrograde, rather than radical, roles for women. Social
tracts written by men that addressed the "Woman Question"
reveal why the appeal to a dominant naturalism was so
pervasive and how men could conveniently idealize the role of
women as domestic producers in order to minimize the threat
of actual social and sexual emancipation. Some ideologues in
the labor movement could support highly emotional issues such
as suffrage, but still insist on the essential features of
woman's conservative nature so nothing in the social order
would be fundamentally altered. Men could guarantee, at
least on a rhetorical level, a distinct pledge of liberty,
while comfortably banking on the idea that life in a
socialist state would not necessitate the
institutionalization of such liberties. Therefore, by
upholding traditional metaphysical assumptions about gender,
and by disseminating these assumptions through a populist
metaphysics of socialism—~that is socialism idealized as a

complete, nearly immediate historical transformation-~the

104

domestic security of traditional family life as well as a new
future in which emancipation, enfranchisement, and
rejuvenation was due to the female subject, could finally
happen, after centuries of degradation wrought by the

industrial bourgeoisie.

Perhaps the most outspoken and widely known male critic
of the period on this matter is George Bernard Shaw. Shaw's
writings on Fabian socialism, most prominently his

Intelligent Woman's Guide he Socialism, come to mind when the

 

issue of gender and socialism is discussed in most historical
treatments of the issue. In his witty, benevolently paternal
style Shaw's idea that women are the most oppressed subjects
of industrialism is made clear when he says that "under the
Capitalist system women find themselves worse than men
because, as Capitalism made a slave of the man, and then, by
paying the woman through him, made her his slave, she became
the slave of a slave, which is the worst sort of slavery."4
Certainly Shaw's doubled sense of social degradation,
ascribed to the body of woman, reinforces a stereotype of
gender as much as it attempts to address a a distressed
situation. Yet much of Shaw's writings were associated with
a kind of middle-class socialism or seen as a rationalist
discourse that failed to address the lives of working men and
women.

An examination of specific pamphlets and texts produced

by men in the more active--that is the more directly

 

105

political—-factions of the labor movement need to be looked
at seriously, given the spectrum of competing voices in the
labor movement. While these other, lesser known pamphlets
were not very numerous, in terms of the number of pamphlets
devoted to the issue of gender, paternal voices that
attempted to represent women surface amidst the turbulence
brewing in other quarters of the labor movement. One of
these examples can be found in the discourse of the socialist
ILP, a moderate faction of the left that perhaps led the
consolidating forces of what would later become the Labor
party. A close reading of one of these pamphlets that was
repeatedly advertised in other ILP tracts, reflects a
"progressive"—-such a term has to be bracketed-~attitude
toward women that will help us understand the problems that

they engender.

An ILP pamphlet published in 1906 titled Woman. T TThe
Communist by T.D. (Thomas Duckworth) Benson posits a
contradictory version of women that conflates divergent
assumptions about evolutionary theories of human development
with mystified notions of biological essentialism.5 Benson
defines "Woman" in terms of a cosmic, ahistorical essence, a
mythologized phantasm, as divine as any romantic poet's
binaristic vision of cosmic harmony, and as rooted in the
material world as the mechanistic naturalist's assumptions
about humankind and evolutionary history. Unconscious of the

fact that he reproduces one of the most archaic paternalist

 

 

106

stereotypes, Benson links the metaphysics of woman with
conservative principles, the timeless, cyclical, and
regenerative forces of Nature. Man, on the other hand, is
guilty of degrading the innate, cooperative tendencies of the
female principle, the essence of woman; his essential
qualities reside in the linear, mechanistic, and destructive
forces of capitalist—bourgeois culture. Because of man's
brutality, his reckless quest for profit, woman's fundamental
role as the nurturing body--in short, the idealized cosmic
version of Mother——has been ruthlessly degraded and
subsequently dehumanized by the lacerating machinery of the
Industrial Bourgeoisie (along with earlier generations of the
bourgeoisie) which have prevented women from actualizing their
true potential, although what women were estranged from was
actually their ability to become the mothering agents they
are destined by nature to become. If in some ways this
sounds like a watered down version of D.H. Lawrence's
metaphysics of gender, to some extent, at least in the bare
expression of its oppositional stance, it is. On the level
of expressing an oppositional form of gender politics,

Benson attempts to correct for the abuses of a culture seen
to be out of balance; yet his hybrid version of 'woman'
simultaneously encodes a naturalistic ideology that
legitimates an ahistorical construction, a fusion of various

elements of romanticism, social organicism, and Darwinism.

These contradictory positions proceed uninhibited in

107

this pamphlet; and a kind of rhetorical seduction seems to be
the dominant aspect of its composition. It could be argued
that Benson directs the discourse of "Woman" toward both men
and women, but such a strategy is by no means clear. If
Benson's pamphlet is intended for a male readership, then the
masculine proletarian perhaps would be more sensitized—-
certainly not threatened. If the content of "Woman" was
directed toward a feminine audience, then women were to be
informed that they are the Victorian cosmic 'angels' of the
household. But whatever the rhetoric of the pamphlet
suggested, the metaphor of writing is central in framing the
naturalistic scheme of things regarding the story of "Woman."
The human species is to be comprehended as a text in which
nature inscribes or "imprints" its specific features in the
human subject, especially when it comes to gender. Benson
argues that a temporal—biological record is "embedded" in the
human subject, as if there is a coded copy of humankind,
something meta—historical: "Nature," Benson writes, "does
not cease inscribing her records on man when he is born, but
on the frame of each one of us after an entrance into the

world, she has impressed the history of mankind."6

Mythologized and metaphorized as a cosmic printing
press-—nature replicates its imprint through gendered
subject-—it follows that gender traits thus figure as part of

an eternal code. Nature encodes sexual difference outside of

social and historical forces. Feminine essence is something

 

108

to be restored, and this is something that men, through their
activities as revolutionaries, must strive to reclaim.

Benson contrasts a kind of feminine purity against a
degenerate male essence, which he aligns with the dirty
material business of capitalist culture. Through labor
struggles and the inevitability of historical processes, he
argues that men must regain the essential features of a world

to be restored, a community of the future.

But before Benson further defines the issue of just what
exactly is to be restored to women, he apologizes to women
for the sorry state of things caused by centuries of male
domination. Benson admits that patriarchy, especially
capitalist patriarchy, is responsible for the degradation of
women, even if he does not see himself as one of the
capitalist class responsible for this degradation. In
general, this degradation has brought about conditons in
which culture has fallen from a state of grace, a previous
golden era; before the dawn of industrial capitalism,
he argues, it was "highly probable" that "the golden age was
no mere fancy of the poet"7 According to Benson, the
historical movement of civilization proceeds in a linear
direction; it starts "fresh from the hearts and minds of a
semi-communistic people, full of the energy and vitality of a
moral race, but as the concentration of power and property
[falls] into fewer hands apace, luxury enervates the race at

the top, and slavery at the bottom, till it passes others

109

before it."8 This naive conception of pmimitive communism,
combined with an equally naive concept of race exhibits some
affinities with Spencer's ideas about historical progress and

social organicism.

Benson is closer to Spencer, however, on the
issue of social evolution, as he relies on the model of the
individual as an analogy for cultural development, a model
that further explicates the causal relationship between
patriarchy and the industrial organization of society. But
when he attempts to re-humanize the issue more fully to endow
a socialist version of history with an aesthetic, he
appropriates poetic discourse. Specifically he quotes
Wordsworth to articulate this more fully: "Whilst the
history of the degeneration of the race is strongly impressed;
upon the male child from the third year onwards, when as
Wordsworth says: 'Shades of the prison house begin to
close/Upon the growing boy,‘ woman strangely enough bears out
few traces of this decadence. She, through life, retains
those high human attributes that the child possesses."9
Situated within the category of the cosmic child, woman is
thus ontologized as a static essence. Benson then claims
that the body of woman is closer to the first stage of
individual development-—that her purity is the purity of the
child; she is closer to an originary state of innocence.
Again, employing the metaphor of writing he views this

regressive disclosure as a progressive feature of womanhood:

110

This is a curious and unexpected revelation in
the book of nature which shocks our sense of
masculine superiority, but one which no amount
of explanation will explain away. Yet it is
one which is exceedingly comforting to fae
Socialist, when we see the explanation.

Given the logic of this version of "woman," one would
expect Benson to limit the role of women in public and
circumvent the issue of enfranchisement. But he does insist
that women be given the right to vote. Benson advocates
enfranchisement and greater equality, implying that this will
lead to greater participation by women in the public sphere:
"The increasing opportunities in public life for women are
helpful in preventing the rising generation of women from

"11

becoming mere pleasure seekers and parasites. And as a

corrective to capitalism, socialism would mechanistically
produce such a world in which woman functions "naturally" in
her "womanhood." If this is indeed the result of an
evolutionary process, it follows that the authority of Darwin
can be cited to uphold this as part of a determinstic

naturalism.

Is it not rather a natural sequence that,
as industry prepares a socialisitc
environment, woman, the survivor of the old
communism, should enter in and take possession
of her kingdom by right. It is but another
instance of the truth of Darwin's doctrine of
survival of the fittest. A change takes place
in the environment, and immediately, a
different flora and fauna are produced, the
more harmonious at once enter in and possesss.
Woman has not yet grasped the idea that her
entrance into public life is permanent, and
not merely an episode in her career that will

111

$00!] $1388.12

The inaccurate and misleading appropriation of Darwinian
discourse here—~immediate change?-—along with the
preposterous phrasings--"not merely an episode in her
career"--reinforce a reliance on natural selection as
something that socialism mysteriously engenders. The appeal
to a mechanistic naturalism actually signals a conservative
gesture because it forestalls true social change, and
erroneously calls into play the notion of natural selection
as a discourse that can be applied, at will, to the complex,

material dynamics of social struggles.

Benson's "Woman" pamphlet appears to be written from an
altruistic perspective by a male writer who openly welcomes
emancipation, and principles of mutuality. Hence the reason:
for my extensive reading of this pamphlet. And given the
sentiment of Benson's pamphlet how could he not sincerely
desire these things? Perhaps through the significant gaps in
the content of the pamphlet we can see how a strategy of
patriarchy lurks below the sincerity of the writer's stated
position. First, Benson's elision of the simple issues of
labor, the material conditions of work, reveals his
preoccupation with a determinism that would serve to block
the genuine entrance of women into culture. Secondly, Benson
conceals a competitive impulse, one that covertly enforces
power relations between men and women. It is implied,

simply, that women will not need to work once the golden age

112

has been restored. But this problem transcends theories
of evolutionary change, and is affected by the status of

property relations and capitalist competition.

Benson also tries to allay a very real anxiety over the
possibility of radical-feminist emancipation. The implied
threat is embedded in the earlier premise that the true
communism of a retro-golden age falsely invests woman with
mythical powers and assigns her to a realm in which the
essence of "woman" belongs, one which men must endeavor to
restore. Besides the fact that he fetishizes the notion of
woman, by conferring a timeless power onto the body of woman,
such an ideology of gender also fetishizes the idea of
historical change: that is, that one stage of history can be
mechanically exchanged for an "other." But on the level of
fetishism, woman is idealized as the sacred vessel, the
primitive mother archaeologically unearthed from the

historical sedimentation of capitalism.

These problems make a reading of Benson's pamphlet seem
like the entire content of Woman. ; :EEE Communist is a
parody itself, as if it could not be taken seriously outside
of the political site of its production as a pamphlet within a
restricted social and historical context. Yet a very similar
view of woman surfaces in the discourse of more prominent
socialists writing on the metaphysics of women. In the

preface to the "Revolutionist's Handbook, " in G.B. Shaw's

113

Major Barbara, the notion that woman is nature's producer,
reinforces the belief that in a socialist system "woman"
will expand her understanding of her natural sense of re—
production both domestically and publicly. This sentiment
parallels aspects of Benson's pamphlet, as Shaw raises the
nature of woman to the highest ideal of man--those "high
human attributes" of the genius artist. Shaw merely repeats
this as an indispensable feature of paternal ideology coded
through the language of emancipation. Passionate, stubborn,
self-sacrificing often manipulative, and certainly different
in his psychological composition from that of ordinary men,
Shaw writes that "we observe in the man of genius all
unscrupulousness and all the 'self—sacrifice' (the two things
are the same)," Shaw writes, "of Woman." Shaw's statement
that "Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse,"
echoes the position of "Woman" in that once freed from the
confines of the domestic sphere, women are more free to carry

on 'Nature's work.‘13

The point of this is not to identify Shaw with Benson
on a discursive level. Certainly Shaw's writings are more
complex, and a further examination of his ideas about gender
would be necessary to do justice to the body of his work.
But Shaw, like most socialists who claimed to be feminists
as well, runs into severe difficulties when theorizing
gender. And while Benson, like many labor activists of the

time, expresses a desire to see present conditions rectified,

114

he fails to refer to specific proposals that would alleviate
the plight of working women and non—working women alike.
Moreover, references to sexual emancipation are absent, and
can be seen as the repressed threat to men in the labor
movement. The metaphorical linkage between "woman" the
innocent child, and the cosmic Mother attempts to efface the
issue of sexuality and heighten a kind of socialist purity
that can be seen to be closely aligned with middle—class
morality. "Woman" thus poses no threat to the stability of
the family and the patriarchal community. And if we extend
this to Shaw's position, the natural genius of woman
neutralizes the threat posed to ordinary men and everyday

workers.

One final aspect of Benson's "Woman" involves her
innate sense of domestic, social stability, another
naturalistic component of her ontological status, which, in
terms of social conflicts, translates into what Benson
describes as woman's inherently conservative nature. Benson
raises this issue as a way of soothing the savage beast
within the male worker, who might actually fear a radical
tendency in "Woman." Hence, deeply aware of the fears,
tensions, and anger in the labor movement over the woman
question, Benson urges his fellow socialists to loosen the
paternal reins and allow her conservative nature to shine

forth:

I

Some socialists are apt to look askance at

115

this demand of woman and consider her a

conservative force which is to be feared by

them rather than welcomed, but still admitted

to equal rights because justice demands. The

conservatism of woman is, however, not the

conservatism of man, of individualism; it is

rather the individualism of the old

communistic spirit which will find, in the

individualism of the day, nothing that appeals

to it. The conservatism of women will be a

revolutionary force in a society still founded

on individualism, competition and private

property, a combination which has secluded

woman in the home, shut her out from life ah?

subjected her to degradation unmentionable.
Domestic life in the new society is thus redefined and re-
described perhaps within expanded political parameters, but
only with paternal and regulatory restrictions. The object
of woman, positioned through various evolutionary and sexual
discourses, is thus re—inscribed within an imaginary and
allegorical future, in which woman briefly steps out onto
the steps of the house to make a public appearance, only to
return to a mythical, re-naturalized workshop of domestic
production. This is more apparent as the pamphlet appeals to
a revised form of social ethics in which a fusion of the
domestic and the public formulates a model for gender
relations. Ethical matters are to be re—thought from the
locus of the family: "She will insist that the ethics of home
shall be the ethics of public life, and the morality of man
not lower than the morality of woman. The entrance of this
communistic force into a semi-communistic society will

quickly bear fruit.“15 As the opening quote by Hannah

Mitchell attests, statements like these could win very few

116

converts among women. The usage of the family metaphor, in
the minds of radical men, enabled a new form of-
conservativism to prevail, rather than allowing a new form of
radicalism that would enable women to participate within
social struggles. Not surprisingly, this new fruit that
Benson refers to drops from a very familiar patriarchal

tree.

The implication of Benson's pamphlet is that it
conclusively reveals that laboring men would have nothing to
fear because, as it is 'written in nature's book,’ the
family, as the operative metaphor for culture, rules over
nature. The historical, material problem of the structure of
the family and the social formation that it upholds--

something that Engels addresses in The Origin eh Family,

 

Private Property and the State—-is something that Benson
glossesdover.16~ "Woman" as the true progressive in actuality
becomes the true regressive, the conservative force that
supplements patriarchal rule over the family and,
correspondingly, over culture. Hence, complacent with the
rule of the family, male writers like Benson who could posit
such a mythical image of woman could effectively deny her an
active role in the dynamics of cultural change. Restricted to
the domestic sphere, the essential qualities of the feminine
are structurally isolated and assigned to the realm of inert

values: stasis, physical passivity, as well as a child-like

silence. The contradiction is telling: Woman is as

117

progressive as she desires but only in a way that she herself
could not express. Only through men's voices were women to
be granted a legitimate politics of the body and the
community. As long as that was the case, the possibility of
a truly radical voice by women would either be denied or

refuted.

Chapter 4

Dangerous Sentiments: E.B. Bax and The Fraud 23 Feminism

 

Alarmed by an emergent and rapidly growing feminist
movement, some male writers in the labor movement resorted to
desperately hostile measures in order to silence feminist

voices. Ernest Belfort Bax's The Fraud eh Feminism1

 

(hereafter Fraud) was a case in point. As we have seen in

Benson's pamphlet, Woman. T .the Communist, the projection of

 

a contradictory version of the feminine (woman's progressive
ethic and her innate conservativism) merely re-inscribed a
traditional nature/culture metaphysics, and gravely misread
the basis of feminist politics. Benson's pamphlet
demonstrates that such assumptions could be conveniently
naturalized among men. If the tendency was for certain male
ideologues to essentialize feminine nature through a naive,
philosophical naturalism, the body of woman subsequently
could be subjected to the deterministic values of a vulgar
empiricism and a crude psychology. In the service of such a
paternalist form of positivism, such assumptions could be
deployed in the most forceful manner as a vicious rejoinder
to the question of emancipation and suffrage.
Bax's £3229 embodied such misogynist tendencies, as he
attempted to posit women as being biologically inferior to
men, justifying subordination and upholding hierarchical

gender divisions. That Bax was a socialist makes a reading

118

119

of Fraud reflective of specific reactionary tendencies within

labor on the issue of gender.

As an influential, prominent and veteran socialist of
the time, Bax's significance in the discourse of labor until
very recently has gone unnoticed. Bax was an early associate
and friend of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman, G.B. Shaw and
others, whose socialist ideas often attended to a stern,
Victorian treatment of social morality, psychology,
spirituality and other issues. As Jonathan Rose points out

in The Edwardian Temperament, Bax was a "Marxist and Hegelian

 

lay philosopher," who "preached socialism as a 'new religion'

that would supersede Christianity and effect 'a synthesis of

"2 Of course, it is

human solidarity and human freedom'.
questionable as to how much of a Marxist Bax could have been at
the time, due to the general inaccessibility of Marx's

writings, but Bax's ideas were dramatic, influential, and

{7

provocative for the time--so much so, that he was

instrumental in the composition of Shaw's Major Barbara. It

 

is interesting to note that Bax's name also pops up in the
writing of some very significant literary figures. In 1918
Virginia Woolf referred to Bax as a "Victorian Socialist" and
praised him for his radical activities. In 1926 Woolf

commended Bax's autobiography, Reminiscences and Reflections

 

eh‘e Mid and Late Victorian, and commented that Bax's

 

. . .deepest source of gratification lies in
the enlightenment of the working classes. His

120

hope for the future is so deeply founded that

it bridges the gulf cut by the war. The

Socialist ideal reaches beyond 'any mere:

material transformation'; and, believing in

its attainment, he looks forward to a time

when the working classes of the world will be

united in such an international society that

the struggle of gace with race will be for

ever impossible.
It is indeed puzzling that Woolf either overlooked or ignored
Fraud, in which Bax would tenaciously cling to the idea that
even if the world is united and racial equality is achieved,
the sexes will, for Bax, rightly be at odds with each other,
or else they will be in an antagonistic and hierarchical

relationship.

In Fraud Bax appropriates and deploys a diverse set
of discursive practices, including legal theory, vulgar
empiricism, contemporary ethnography, "expert" medical and
psychological discourse, and, generally speaking, whatever
implements of textual demolition he could muster in order to
support his misogynist attack on what he referred to as
"Modern Feminism." Granted, it might appear gratuitous and
excessive even to read Bax given the violence of his
argument, but if in the case of Benson's Woman. 4.;EES

Communist, overblown naturalizations of the feminine essence

 

could be produced as idealized domestic producers, then they
adequately reflected one side of the collective male psyche

of labor. It is safe to say that Bax's attack in Thehg stood
for a more dangerous anti-feminist component among men in the

labor movement.

121

For Bax, "modern feminism" was, in metaphorical terms,
a double edged sword. In discussing the 'two sides' of the
feminist movement, Bax, on the one hand, appears to realize
how principles of feminism function as a strategy of
liberation for women; but on the other hand Bax fears that
changes in the superstructure that favor emancipation
will lead to a general state of 'house arrest' for men.
Bax's castration anxiety over the supposed covert
objectives of feminism can be discerned in his absurd fear
that women were after more than equality and enfranchisement;
that they wanted to overturn extant gender relations so that
equality was a subterfuge for a domination more insidious.
This is apparent in Bax's overview of the problem. He
defines "modern feminism" as having "two distinct sides to
it: (1) an articulate political and economic side embracing
demands for so—called rights; and (2) a sentimental side
which insists on an accentuation of the privileges and
immunities which have grown up, not articulately or as the
result of definite demands, but as the consequence of

"4 Obviously, the

sentimental pleading in particular cases.
second side troubled Bax most deeply. Unable to grasp the
problem adequately as part of a larger problem involving a
more developed form of social critique, Bax denounced
feminism from a rather paranoid perspective, falsely accusing

women's movements as struggles for outright dominance via a

"transvaluation of values, assisted by a sentimental cunning

122

by organized women," something that for Bax would result in an

undermining and a seduction of male hegemony.

Bax launches his argument in Fraud by attacking the
visible efforts of women in the suffrage movement (the
causality implied in this move is that having the right to
vote will lead to a political takeover). Bax appeals to an
imaginary construct, the "average View" of public opinion,
nothing more than the common-sensical view of the world held
by a mythical body of subjects. This allows Bax the comfort
of assuring the reader that he is empowered through an aura
of public authority and therefore reveal the marginality of
the feminist position. If Bax meant to address a socialist
audience, as his other works did, one has to question the
logic of appealing to a dominant sentiment, although what Bax
perceives as the dominant is a particular male sentiment
embedded within the labor movement. Bax appropriates a
public voice to make such a position appear reasonable. He
then employs this public sentiment in order to refute what he
perceives as the overtly "sentimental side" of the feminist
question, a kind of discourse that he sees as a threat to
public (male) rationality. Feminine rationality is something
other than male logic; it functions for Bax as a fundamentally

different kind of rationality altogether.

On this issue he attacks the idea that women have the

intellectual capacity--that is, the appropriate kind of

 

123

logic--to exercise proper judgment in civic matters. Bax
attempts to disprove a popular argument for feminism: the
argument that there are indeed women who have demonstrated,
through intellectual and aesthetic accomplishments, the
extraordinary achievements of males. In this case Bax cites
the figure of George Eliot. Bax then compares George Eliot
to a working-class male of significantly lesser educational
and intellectual training, in order to demonstrate how the
argument is faulty. As for the exceptional woman, the act of
being extraordinary in a man's world results as an aberration
of nature, as an insignificant (in the long run) instance of
an inversion of naturally gendered values. In rather empty
defenses like this Bax appeals to the so-called "logic" of a
spurious argument rather than addressing the specific,
gendered facts, regarding the role of the person of letters
and the social facts that enter into the production of
political discourse.

The pretended absurdity of "George Eliot

having no vote, and of her gardener having

one" is really no absurdity at all. In the

first place, given the economic advantages

which conferred education upon the novelist,

and not upon the gardener, there is not

sufficient evidence available that his

judgment in public affairs might not have

been even superior to George Eliot herself.

Moreover the possession of exceptionally

strong imaginative faculty, expressing itself

as literary genius or talent in works of

fiction, does not necessarily imply

exceptional power of political judgment.5

If this were the case for all literary authors, would Bax say this

124

about William Morris, Shaw, or other writers deeply invested
in the politics of the labor movement? As imaginative
writers, Bax's male compatriots are able to produce ideas that
make good sense for the future, but women are denied this

power.

But for men whose sympathies might be allied with
progressive women, men who affirmed that the suffragette
movement and emancipation movement embodies the key for a
progressive and radically democratized society, Bax reacts
angrily, violently. Bax sees this as a violation of the
nature of men. He claims that men have a tendency to
disagree violently with each other, that they have a natural
propensity to argue and fight about differences--that is,
differences between men. In short, rivalries are a part of
male nature. As a male essentialism, this has to do with
traditional values: _"chivalry, feelings, perhaps inherited,
dating possiblyback to the pre-human stage of man's
evolution, derived from the competition of the male with his

fellow-male for the possession of the coveted female, etc."6

For Bax male willingness to support feminism
transgresses the boundaries of a historically naturalized
rivalry, and can only be explained as a kind of male self-
hatred or an inversion of male principles. Bax stops short
of providing any solid explanation for this, but is clearly
threatened by "a host of literary men and journalists of

varying degrees of reputation who contribute their quota to

125

the stream of anti-manism" and thereby weaken the bonds that
hold men together within the social structure.7- The
paranoid, hysterical implications of Bax's argument has its
legacy in similar debates of the time. Spencer would employ
a very similar kind of rhetoric in order to describe a drift
toward centralized control of the state. And just as Spencer
was threatened by what he perceived to be the increasing
tendency of the state to centralize power and enact
restrictive legislation to subordinate the bourgeois subject,
Bax targets--strangely enough--the entire bourgeois
superstructure as harboring the forces of 'anti-manism--the
legislature, judges, juries, parsons'--all of these he sees
as dupes in a hateful, conspiratorial campaign that will
undermine patriarchal authority and hand power over to women.
Bax's exaggerated fear (again, his castration anxiety returns
with a vengeance) is that women, by co-opting the
institutional forces of patriarchy, willsubjugate men if not
out of a sense of naturalistic necessity, then out of a

spirit of revenge.

It follows, then, that the legal sphere should be the
primary site of this ideological battle against men. The
courts are the locations where Bax views developments in
marriage law, property law, and even criminal law; except as
he views it, judicial decisions have favored women overall;
that progressive efforts to reform the legal system is part

of an "anti-man crusade" that desires to subvert institutions

126

and the courts. Women, he argues, have been allowed to
employ a sentimental guile to win favor in courts of laws and
that patriarchy has been considerably and consistently more
lenient on women--not only during the Victorian era, but
throughout history as well. Feminists, according to Bax,
would thoroughly subvert the legal establishment in their
drive to undermine male authority. To demonstrate this, Bax
cites numerous court cases involving issues of gender that
appear in legal discourse; he refers to adultery cases and
property disputes; he probes court records for specific
examples in criminal cases in which women have received
special treatment due to an ability to plead in a way that
men cannot. For women, Bax argues that the courts yield for
affect, dispensing a leniency that men are subsequently
denied. And after documenting decision upon decision from the
pages of selected courtroom dramas, Bax maintains that there
is "not to be found a single case. . .of one [judicial

decision] favoring the man at the expense of the woman."8

Essential Evidence

Bax's rather faulty examination of the legal system
perhaps indicts his own methodology and undermines his
arguments about the general nature of the legal system. But
much of Bax's Thehg is structured like a legal defense, with
much of its testimony resting on the documents of experts in

the form of medical and psychological texts in order to

 

127

support sociological and biological claims against feminism.
In Bax's vigorous, practically evangelical appeal to specific
authorities, he prefigures what Michel deCerteau states in

The Practice eh Everyday Life on the issue of philosophy and

 

 

social authority. Although the contemporary context in which
deCerteau defines the notion of the expert authority is
certainly different from the specific context in which Bax is
writing, the relevance for the "expert" voice of the social
philosopher is clear when deCerteau maintains that "In the
expert competence is transmuted into social authority; in the
philosopher ordinary questions become a skeptical principle

"9 Bax's strategy of deploying "expert"

in a technical field.
discourse subsequently displaces the practical (and
skeptical) question of woman's body from the voice of the
social philosopher. In other words, Bax realizes he needs
all the ammunition available in order to appeal to the norms
of a vulgar positivism, which remains a technical matter.
Expert discourse—-as clinical discourse--discursively defines
the subject of woman. Bax's reference to medical documents

of the time therefore falsely constitutes the object of

sexuality in the guise of such social authority.

The appropriation of clinical documents, as a means of
constituting the body of woman is perhaps the most
significant discursive gesture made by Bax in the course of
his anti-feminist treatise. Culled from so-called expert

texts, he marshals this evidence to support an authoritarian

128

referent of the body, one that is based on a concept of (a
vulgar) empirical sense of closure- Bax resorts to a
biologically descriptive coding of woman's physiognomy that
marks biological difference as being naturalistic in a
mechanistic, determinist sense. Along these lines Bax
effects a crude, schematic, postivism to do the rest of his
dirty work; he figuratively dissects the female body into its
component parts by citing medical reports that anatomically
quantify the female body as being inferior in its vital
dimensions to the male body. Bax quotes studies that
contrast the size and weight of female organs against the
size and weight of male organs. His totalizing conclusion
reads as follows: "All authorities on the physiological
question are agreed that woman is less well-organized, less
well-developed, than man. . . .this fact is traceable
throughout the whole female organism, throughout all its

"10

tissue and all its functions. These bodily facts are in

conjunction with Bax's conviction that woman "is subservient

"11

to the functions of child bearing and lactation. Such a

claim fixes woman's social role squarely within the domestic
sphere (as if Bax needed such evidence to says this) and

exempts woman from any active role in shaping the public

sphere.

For Bax and other writers of the time "scientific"
theories of sexuality on the continent surpassed the cultural

barriers of Victorian England. The appeal to outside

129

authorities on the matter of sexuality of the time is
characteristic not only of Bax's work but of most attempts to
define the body in either progressive or reactionary forms of
psychology or social philosophy. Given the context of

the state of psychological theory and theories of the body in
England it is culturally significant that some of the most
progressive works on the subject of women were also imported
from more technically 'advanced' continental sources. Freud
of course, comes to mind, but on the left, regarding the

emancipation of women, Woman Throughout History by the German

 

 

radical August Bebel proved to be a highly influential text
in socialist circles.12 Of the variants of imported theory--
that of the body and psyche of woman--Bax quotes the
influential German physician Otto Weininger, a reactionary
physician whose theories of sexuality centered on the
inferiority of the female sex. Bax seems to have ignored
Bebel completely. Yet at the historical moment he is writing
this action by Bax is something a socialist of Bax's stature
would find unthinkable, given Bebel's influence. However,
Bax invests his technical authority in Weininger's treatise,
fetishizing its contents with a mysterious power to explain
the female. On the issue of sexuality, Bax writes that
Weininger's
Geschlect and Charakter (Sex and

Character). . . [is] the most complete I know. The

truth in question consists in the fact,

undeniable to all those not rendered

impervious to facts by preconceived dogma,
that, as I have elswhere put it, while man has

 

130

a sex, woman is a sex. Let us hear Weininger
on this point. "Woman is only sexual, man is
also sexual. Alike in time and space this
difference may be traced in man, parts of his
body susceptible to sexual excitement are
small in number and strictly localised. In
woman sexuality is diffused over the whole
body, every contact on whatever part excites
her sexually." Weininger points out that
while this sexual element in man, owing to the
physiological character of the sexual organs,
may be at times more violent than that in
woman, yet that it is spasmodic and occurs in
crises separated by intervals of quiessence.
In woman, on the other hand, while less
spasmodic, it is continuous. The sexual
instinct with man being, as he styles it, "an
appendix" and no more, he can raise himself
mentally entirely outside of it. [quoting
Weininger] "He can View it [sex] objectively.
With woman this is not the case; the sex
element is part of her whole nature. . . .For
this reason the man is conscious of the sexual
element within him as such, whereas the woman
is unconscious of it as such. It is not for
nothing that in common parlance woman is
spoken of as 'the sex.’ (Bracket mine)

At first glance this crude definition of sexuality
appears to be similar to Benson's; he situates the
physiognomy of woman as synecdoche of an evolutionary order.
But on a deeper level, the differences between women and men
are to be seen in terms of a deterministic, developmental
logic. The female body is contrasted to male as a different
kind of development. Woman, similar to popular views of the
working-classes in Victorian England, remains in a naturally
arrested state of development. This ahistorical, binarist
logic of gender difference produces a conception of gender
14

that leads to a parody of itself as scientific discourse.

The male body possesses the qualities of localized or

131

concentrated control; woman is lost in the flow of
unrestricted desires. Echoing Freud's idea of infantile
polymorphous perversity, woman is child—like, while man,
having control over his phallic drives is mature, on his way
to adulthood. The male's supposed control over his phallus
analogously allows him to control the processes of culture,
while woman's unrestricted desire gives her no control over
her body; hence the surface of woman's body continuously
experiences libidinal drives beyond regulation. Man, on the
other hand, experiences a sense of control over his body,
exerting conscious restriction over sexual desire. But the
regulation here is that inscribed by the politics of male
projection. The fetishized gaze that Bax/Weininger inscribe
into theory figuratively opens Woman's body to a libidinal
imaginary of the male clinician. From this perspective
woman's body remains foreign to herself, alienated as a

circuit of desire that controls her actions.

Weininger thus depicts woman's body as a continual
surface of libidinal intensities; whereas for man the
conscious recognition of drives and instinct involves a locus
of control-~innate restraint, through a recognition of how
desire operates, a self consciousness: "With men sexual
instinct manifests itself locally, and at intervals its
satisfaction is an urgent and pressing need. With women this
is not so."15 The reductive binary nature of such a

statement insists on a caricature of gender relations.

 

132

Given the damaging language and the reductive nature of
such a position, the question has to be raisedas to how one
struggles with this vulgar essentialism without unconsciously
reproducing this terminology in a study of the Labor
movement. Such questions might best be dealt with later when
it is shown how women in the Labor movement countered such
myths. It is easy to see, however, that Bax's appropriation
of Weininger produces a doubled sense of male hysteria in its
misogynist stereotype of the female body. Similar to
Benson's naive metaphysics of gender, woman is aligned with
the reproductive flux of nature; man with the regimented,
disciplinary rhythms of culture. Bax's appropriation of
Weininger's clinical definitions of gender (or these gendered
definitions of the clinical) parody a theory of the body in
its near caricature of phallocentric discourse. But there is
little, if nothing really, to laugh at, given the historical
and cultural force of such arguments, for such a design of
the body allows Bax to suppress further any discussion of
equality, rights, or claims that women possess the same
mental powers as men. Spencer then enters the picture. Bax
quotes Spencer to provide additional support. Spencer's
argument, which compliments Bax's, is that it is a matter of
"physiological necessity" that woman's mental powers are less

than man's, and that "no amount of culture can obliterate

it. "16

Finally, Bax addresses the issue of labor and autonomy in

133

relation to women's rights in at least one area of work in
which a high degree of exploitation occurs: prostitution.
Although Bax appears to deplore prostitution, he examines the
material conditions that produce it. Bax admits that laboring
women whose wages leave them too poor to live properly, "gain
part of their living by their reputable avocation and part in
another way." But as soon as he realizes this, he quickly
ties the issue of prostitution to the men who benefit from
the employment of prostitutes, arguing that the employers of
women who turn to prostitution are socially culpable for
paying such wretched wages, and that "Many of these
employers. . .are doubtless to be found among the noble band
of advocates of White Slave Tariff Bills, flogging and social
purity".l7 Therefore once class struggle and the role of
labor enter the picture, Bax's representational concerns
shift dramatically from the issue of gender to the issue of
social relations between men. After all, men who accept the
wages of prostitution are the men who have most likely been
displaced from the work-world and end up as the "parasites"
that Spencer mentions in his attack against labor and what he

perceives to be the self-induced poverty of the unemployed.

An alliance with Spencer is indeed not surprising,
especially in a context in which the subject of prostitution
is brought up and the "class of women" that Spencer refers to
in "The Coming Slavery" are indeed the subject of one of

Bax's few critical moments in Fraud. Bax's writing on gender

134

suggests that he regarded women in nearly the same vulgar
manner that Spencer viewed the working—classes.i It is in
Bax's willful and malicious blindness, his refusal to see
women as active subjects within community formations, then,
that Bax falls woefully short of even beginning to inscribe
an adequate account of gender or gender relations. What Bax
signals so clearly, perhaps more clearly than anything else
in Fraud, is a total disregard for the virtues that the
passage from Woolf recognizes in his radical writings. As a
"Victorian Socialist," who feared masculine disempowerment,
Bax dragged along some of the most pernicious features of
that period's repressive views on women and sexuality.
Perhaps it might seem unfair in some respects to examine Bax
in such a negative light. Is it fair to be critical of such;
an obnoxious work in view of his more positive
accomplishments? _It is necessary, however, in order to
understand the negative side of gender representations by men
in the labor movement. As women were concerned with
undermining myths of gender, we should also be concerned

with the undermining of specific myths produced within a

dominant context rather than an oppositional one.

 

Chapter 5

Robert Blatchford's "Determined Little Creature'

Bax's vulgar essentialism of gender alerts us to the
the overdetermined and overbearing weight of a condescending
sentimentalism that infiltrates working-class naturalism, one
that typified a kind of paternalism prevalent throughout the
labor movement. It can be said that in fictional discourse
this paternalist sentimentalism is less harsh, less
authoritarian than the strident tones of pamphlet strategies,
although such strategies are at times in complicity with

tendency fiction.

What I would like to show in this section is how
paternalist ideology, in the form of a hybrid naturalism, is‘
expressed by writers in the labor movement in the production
of novels that mirror the forms 6f popular, consumable
fiction. Robert Blatchford's novel Julie: Study 2£.2.§1£1
21.2.5231 (1901) refracts the dominant sentiment toward women
in the labor movement, but approaches a more sympathetic

position than other male writers were able to achieve.

Blatchford's attitudes toward women certainly were not
as inflammatory as Bax's. But to some degree Blatchford could
be as naive and as crudely metaphysical as Benson's

conception of Woman. 1 .the Communist; yet, he did not

 

attempt to mark women as archetypal, primitive communists.

135

136

Nor were Blatchford's views on women as complex as Shaw's.
From the surface features of Julie, it seems that Blatchford
wanted to produce a sentimental romance that would read as a
romance, allowing the political message of the novel, like a
soft sell advertisement, to follow naturally. We can surmise
from Blatchford's political activities, that social
subversion may have been what Blatchford was after, a
subversion of the reified narrative structure of easily
consumable sentimental novels. Blatchford's shadowy role as
the author of Julie complicates this, especially since he
effaced his name from the work, desiring perhaps to "slip

imperceptibly" into the stream of mass-culture.

Before explaining the significance of Blatchford's
Julie, it is necessary to situate the novel in relation to
Blatchford's brief but significant status as one of the most
Iinfluential proponents of the labor movement. Therefore, in
order to better understand the political context from which
£2113 arises, it is necessary briefly to examine the wider
aspects of Blatchford's political perspective, especially
since he had, for a short time, a very significant impact on

working-class politics.

Robert Blatchford was the founder of the radical
Clarion Group, a faction of the labor movement dedicated to
publishing and dramatizing the cause of socialism--
in Blatchford's case, a nationalistic form of socialism that

would unite the working classes with the middle classes. A

 

137

self-styled socialist, Blatchford published widely, and, for
a time, had achieved significant success with his radical
publications. Writing under the pseudonym of "Nunquam," in
his Clarion pamphlets, Blatchford addressed, in evangelical
fashion, nearly every social issue on the political map,
while spreading the gospel of socialism (a term that, as I
shall demonstrate shortly, was filled with complex meanings
for Blatchford, possessing religious, romantic, and populist
connotations). Blatchford had also achieved considerable

success with two of his books Merry England and Britain for

 

 

the British, both of which urged far-reaching, dramatic

 

populist and nationalist solutions for the imperialistic
morass into which England was rapidly sinking. Blatchford's
rhetorical strategies were often designed to capture the
affective side of working-class and middle-class audiences.
Blatchford's pamphlets were often marked by their sharp-
witted jabs at the ruling class, as they appealed to the
vital sentiments of working-class communities-—mostly those
situated in the north of England. Blatchford also took
socialism to the streets in the form of the Clarion cycling
clubs. He also traveled the countryside in a socialist van
championing what he referred to as the "new religion" or the
"new altruism." Tressell documents the arrival of the

Socialist Van in Mugsborough in The Ragged Trousered

 

Philanthropists, and reports on what Blatchford's radical
2

 

strategies with workers were like. What Tressell pays less

138

attention to, however, was Blatchford's flamboyant style, his
quasi-military fanfare, and Blatchford's uncanny ability to
characterize issues in a concise concrete manner with
Dickensian overtones undoubtedly had a considerable impact on
concerned members of some working communities, but
Blatchford's rather eclectic and often unspecified

principles drew the ire of rival socialist factions

nationwide.

Blatchford's theoretical grasp of the principles of
socialism was tenuous at best. He was skeptical of
"scientific socialism," and he was opposed to militant
solutions. Blatchford's criticisms of other militant
organizations at times was strident. He often viewed these
groups with a paranoid distrust, specifically the Social
Democratic Federation (SDF), as being in league with foreign
.P°W%FS.?h?F hid PlaPS,t° Svtjugate England b0the¢9n°mi¢ally
and politically. However, Blatchford was instrumental in the
establishment of the Independent Labor Party (ILP). The
public aspects of political life, however, disagreed with
Blatchford's temperamental personality, as he devoted his

energies to writing.

Blatchford's romantic, evangelical version of socialism
ran against the grain of more established forms of European
radicalism. Blatchford had not read Marx, but he had read
William Morris (the experience that he later referred to as a

religious type of conversion). For Blatchford socialism was

139

something that could be aligned positively with a heady form
of nationalism that had the power to unite classes, and hence
unite all of England politically and economically. This
would be an England in which the working-classes would share
the fruits of industrial and imperial wealth. But a
socialist England would be one in which there was an enormous
transfer of wealth; moreover, once this transformation
occurred England conceivably could become economically
independent from its overseas concerns; England could even-—
through the development of state-run hothouses--produce
enough citrus for England's population.3 Yet Blatchford's
nationalism had its contradictory moments. Blatchford wanted
to see England extract itself from its foreign entanglements;
yet, loyal to a sense of national pride, he backed British
involvement in the Boer War--something that tarnished his
_ image with the left and led to his political divorce from
certain factions of the labor movement.4 For Blatchford
socialism was a fusion of various ideologies transfigured
into a unified, populist message. Perhaps the following
passage on the nature of socialism sums up the diverse
strands of Blatchford's vision of "the new movement" of
British socialism:

If you ask a London Socialist for the origin

of the new movement he would refer you to Karl

Marx and other German Socialists. But so far

as our northern people are concerned, I am

convinced that beyond the mere outline of

State Socialism Karl Marx and his countrymen
have had but little influence. No; the new

140

movement here; the new religion, which is
Socialism, and something more than Socialism,
is more largely the result of the labors of
Darwin, Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Thoreau, and
Walt Whitman. . . . the new religion which is
rousing and revivifying the North is something
much higher and greater than a wage question,
an hour's question, or a franchise question,
based though it be on those things; it is
something more than a mere system of
scientific government, something more than an
economic theory, something more than political
or industrial liberty, though it embraces all
of these. It is a religion of manhood and
womenhood, of sweetness and of light.

For this we are indebted to the idol
breaking of Carlyle, to the ideal-making of
Ruskin, and to the trumpet tongued
proclamation by the titanic Whitman of the
great message of true Democracy and the brave
and sweet comradeship of the natural life--of
the stainless, virile, though human life,
lived out boldly and frankgy in the open air
and under the eyes of God.

Blatchford's flair for alliteration, his metaphorical
flourishes, and his evangelical and exhortative tone in

this pamphlet reveal a hybrid construction of various
Strands70f”diVerse{naturalist7and'romantic"humanist
ideologies, some progressive, some reactionary, but all
based on Blatchford's inspired belief in immediate social
change. Perhaps this could best be described as the result
of a localized attitude toward socialist reforms in the north,
where a history of rebellion and social experimentation left
strong impressions in the cultural memory in a region that
witnessed industrial strikes, the Chartist movements and the

socialist experiments of radical leaders such as Robert Owen.

As the passage suggests, Blatchford's urgent appeal to

141

a religiously inspired humanist ideal--one that encodes
diverse but traditional ideologies--fails in its attempt to
signify anything more than a reintegration of traditional
humanist as well as religious ideals. Moreover, Blatchford's
insistence on the "Northern" inheritance of a romantic ideal
here relies on the premise that one can simply reject what he
refers to as "scientific socialism" or state socialism, for
an idea of socialism that lacks a concrete critique of

economy and relations of production.

In spreading the gospel, Blatchford may have been
enormously important, but as James Callaghan has pointed out,
the Clarion group never really had the cohesion that other
radical groups, such as the SDF, had.6 Neither did the
Clarion seem to have the desired social arguments. Perhaps ;

it is no accident, then, that in The Ragged Trousered

 

 

Philanthropists Owen's sonFrankie mentions a book entitled

England for the English as a book that he and his young

 

friends read for radical inspiration. Owen and his wife Nora
both agree that it is one of the best books, but the implicit
point is that Blatchford provided a primer of socialism for
the young. In Tressell's novel it could be said that Owen's
son Frankie signifies the value of injured innocence that
children in Dickens signify within patriarchal and oppressive
community structures. Tressell intertextually
sentimentalizes Blatchford's discourse as being little more

than kids' stuff, something that the adults approve of and

142

have left on the shelf as part of the family library.7
Blatchford's publications are thus implicitly parodied by
Tressell as an impassioned primer of socialist thought,
which, from the more "scientific" position of the SDF,
implies that Blatchford did not address the underlying issues
regarding the domestic culture and an adequate understanding

of the politics of Empire.

While the Clarion Press was in full swing, Blatchford
produced numerous pamphlets and several books on about every
social issue facing England during the crisis of labor. In
the midst of this social turmoil, Blatchford also had the
time to compose several novels. Blatchford's apparent desire
to reach mass-culture is evident in his impossible romances,
and his romantic utopias inspired by Morris and others. Fon
some reason, perhaps because he did not wish to announce the
poTitical ambitions of Julie with his signature, Blatchford
decided to publish the novel anonymously. In short,
Blatchford's narrative attempts to undermine sentimental
conventions dealing with the intertwined issues of gender,
the subject and environmental forces of working-class
culture. As a popular romance, Blatchford's Julie subverts
the dominant notion that the working classes embody essential
and/or biological qualities--that, in a determinist sense,
the working class represents an underdeveloped part of the
social body. However, one has to wonder if Julie is

Blatchford's covert attempt to represent a masculinist view

 

143

of culture in a novel that certainly would have conflicted
with the rhetoric of his pamphlets on social issues. Of
course, the majority of pamphlets and books produced on
socialism and labor were directed toward the concerns of
working-class men. Blatchford, like most labor writers, was

not known or regarded for his insights on gender.
A Study of A Girl?

The complete title of Blatchford's eponymous novel is
somewhat misleading; Julie is less of a "study" than it is a
combination of a social narrative in the guise of an
'impossible' romance. Julie represents an attempt to subvert
a popular medium but not to alienate its readership because
of its subversive tendencies. Julie is a radical twist on
the Cinderella myth. Possibly intended to capture a
domestic, middle-class readership, Julie aspires toward the
status Ofa'political fairy tale withshades 0f DiCkens

dominating the novel's political rhetoric.

Julie is also a storybook romance. A young waif of
eleven, Julie Flack, finds herself--actually she is found--to
be naturally endowed with a prodigious talent and a heart of
gold. In the midst of the horrible urban squalor of the East
End's "Flowery Dean," Julie is discovered one day by a Mr.
Morton Guineagold, a philanthropist, cello virtuoso, master
music teacher, and occasional wine-sot. Almost miraculously,

Julie appears untainted and unscathed by the local violence

144

of a hostile world. Guineagold bargains for Julie's release
from her brutish parents, and whisks her away from a life of
wretched poverty to a world of outlandish opulence in a

Wimbledon mansion.

Julie might be best described as a kind of Arnoldian
fantasy cast in Dickensian tones in which the feminine
subject of labor is inscribed into culture with a capital C.
Blatchford creates a sentimental figure who is adopted by the
bourgeoisie, or perhaps it is better to say that she is a
figure who sentimentalizes her bourgeois adoption of higher
taste. Blatchford endows Julie with what Tressell calls 'the
benefits of civilization' the amenities of culture denied to
most of the working class, but produced by the surplus of
their labor. Blatchford enacts a narrative transition that
can be seen to be analogous to his utopian desire for the
historicel_trahsformation_of the_working class in general.
As Julie leaves the "Flowery Dean" of the East End, she
undergoes a dramatic, dreamlike change from a working-class
waif to a demure young woman adorned with luxury and a
surplus of natural talent. Julie excels at virtually every
new instrument of learning she attempts. Julie's special
talents lie in the study of violin, and Guineagold molds her
into a prodigy of sorts. So talented is she that she plays
solo for huge audiences. But soon after Julie displays her
talent in musical circles, she is visited by a figure from

her past community. Charlie Chigwin, militant worker and

145

well mannered bloke tells her that her class is in her blood
(it certainly isn't in her accent anymore), and that she
should put her gifts to work for the benefits of labor.
Julie agrees to do so on a limited basis, feeling guilty over
the fact the she is from the Flowery Dean, but no longer sees
herself as part of the working class. While visiting the
"Flowery Dean," she learns that the father she has been

estranged from might still be alive.

But all of this ends in tragedy. One night, on another
visit to the East End, her father, drunk, derelict, and
deranged, walks into the middle of a crowd. He is
brandishes a pistol (why he has it or where he got it is not
explained) in the square of the Flowery Dean. He fires into
the crowd, and, unknowingly, he shoots his own daughter in
the wrist. Likewise, Julie never realizes the identity of
her aseai'ant:- Her fatesFchenf¥e¢$.and 19,3.drunkenr
diseased stupor staggers into a ditch and dies. Of course
the incident ruins Julie's violin career. But the paternal
Guineagold urges Julie to employ her natural talents to study
voice. Julie does so, and after spending time in Italy, she
comes back and sings in England. She returns to the East End
to assist the distressed workers and to entertain her old
community. But exposure to the wretchedness of the Dean
contaminates her. Julie contracts Diptheria, which nearly
kills her, damages her voice, and also kills her singing

career. Ruined by the ravaging environment of the Dean,

146
Julie leaves England.

During Julie's absence in Germany, her surrogate father
Guineagold takes ill and dies. Julie resigns herself to a
life of poverty in the Flowery Dean, the place she belongs
to, at least biologically. However (in conformity with the
conventions of the sentimental romances) Julie is rescued by

Guineagold's long lost nephew, an officer in the Royal Navy

 

who inherits Guineagold's fortune. She marries Gale, is
spirited away, and lives happily in her new role as the wife

of an officer in the Royal Navy.

It would be difficult to say that Blatchford
intended ThTTe to be read or consumed by a politicized
working-class audience--at least in the way that Tressell had
hoped The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists might have been
read. But was Blatchford even hoping that his audience would
”be aware of the posSible pelitical”mes3agés embedded in the
sentimental romance novel? Probably not. In fact it is
doubtful that Blatchford intended the novel to have a wide
working-class readership at all. In ghTTe Blatchford never
addresses the localized, political contests involving
different labor factions. No factions are described as such;
nor are they voiced as regional movements. There is a
considerable difference, then, between Blatchford's political
writing and his novelistic ventures. For example, 12112
takes place in London, the place where Blatchford blasts the

SDF most forcefully in his pamphlets; London is the locale

147

that lacks the religious spirit of the north. But in Julie
Labor is simply a generic form of Labor: militant workers
voice their grievances without references to specific
movements or parties. As I will show later, Blatchford
represents characters who voice Labor as a sentimentalized
allegory of itself. Such a position would never surface in

the prose of his political writings.

 

In this sense, Blatchford seems to have been more
concerned in Julie with the possibility of infiltrating the
popular romance with a radicalized, populist sentiment.
Therefore, in the context of Blatchford's activities in the
labor movement, Julie proves to be a significant novel
because it dramatizes Blatchford's social rhetoric on the
issue of gender, but also because it reveals a politically
regressive aspect of recuperation in which Blatchford's
didactiCism reconciles itself with the dominant middle Class,
something Blatchford tended to avoid in his polemical
writings. Julie thus incorporates the rhetorical
pyrotechnics and the exhilarating commentary of the Clarion
and other aspects of Blatchford's polemical writing.
(Blatchford was one of the better political stylists of the»
time; his journalistic talents provided him with a dramatic
if not a sensational edge.) But in 22112 Blatchford attempts
to deploy narrative structures that mediate political
conditions--the disparity between the bourgeois and working

classes--through the body of a sentimental figure; moreover,

148

Blatchford's novel attempts to effect a change in the
structure of feeling of an audience that consumes the
sentimental romance. But given his preoccupation with
regional and nationalist politics it is perplexing that
Blatchford did not situate this novel in Manchester, since he

was so concerned about a truly Northern phenomenon.

Blatchford's Julie is in many respects in conformity
with dominant ideology regarding perceptions of class.
Working-class environments are represented through a
tropology of naturalism that entails various positions.
Naturalism, it could be said is a mixture of dominant and
oppositional positions in Julie. Blatchford encodes
evolutionary assumptions about social relations and class
relations that correspond with prevailing views of the
working classes. But he also deploysthe documentary mode
of'a more rigorous type of naturaIiSm in order to account for
the squalor of the East End and the general state of despair
that its inhabitants cannot escape from. Hence, there is a
tension in the narrative that Blatchford cannot avoid. He
finds himself caught in a very contradictory sense between
two distinct poles that constitute meanings of naturalism.

On the one hand, Blatchford sides with a naturalism that sees
notions of class bound up with biology and essentialism. On
the other hand, he posits a naturalism that has a radical

potential.

149

Perhaps a way of accounting for the problematic notion
of naturalism in Blatchford's Julie concerns the various ways
that Blatchford addresses the notion of determination. For
example, Blatchford describes Julie as a 'determined'
creature, but the notion of "determination" operates on
different levels of linguistic and social signification. On
one level, Julie is determined to utilize her talents; she is
motivated to succeed in order to compensate for her lack of
social status. But the figure of Julie is also defined by
determining features, social traits or class markers that
appear like signs that are symptomatic of her status within a
genetic and evolutionary order. In this sense she appears as
a member of a lower class that remains locked in a lesser
state of natural development. But there is a third element
to the way the idea of determination operates in Blatchford's
Julie that has to do with the way Blatchford represents Julie
as being a "determined"genius. ’I 7this sense Julie is
determined as she possesses the inherent qualities that allow
her to rise above her genetic and environmental conditions
that paradoxically have marked her past but not necessarily
her present. This is about as close as Blatchford gets to
articulating a progressive position for the gendered working-
class subject. Consider one of the early passages of the
novel in which Blatchford didactically addresses this issue
of environment and the rare genius that nature occasionally

yields.

150

Nature, who would seem to be indifferent to

class distinctions, and regardless of all

systems save her own, has a strangely perverse

way of dropping the divine seeds of genius

upon the starved and stony soils, to the

neglect of well placed, richly fed, and highly

cultivated gardens. Thus it is we often find

lackey souls in royal bodies, sages in rags,

and heroes in corduroy or fustian. Nat re's

caste is of the soul, not of the purse.
'And we also find brilliant, unspoiled talent in the worst of
slums' is what is implied but cannot be stated. This is the
social fantasy that Blatchford spins out for us as a utopian
possibility within a naturalism contingent upon a dominant
'narrow' version of natural selection. For Blatchford, the
poverty that Guineagold finds his 'determined little
creature' in is a self—perpetuating misery produced by
creatures who are naturally disposed to such misery, squalor
and vice--at least that is the voice inscribed in this
passage. Whether or not Blatchford maintained such a
pOSition, in light of his radical writing, is perhaps a
different question. Nevertheless, such a passage exhibits
affinities with dominant representations of the poor, that
poverty and ill-breeding is an essential problem of heredity,
as much as it is a problem of wretched environmental
conditions. Yet is this the voice that a labor leader would
want to inscribe as a reflection of authorial ideology or is
this a voice that Blatchford presents to an audience
predisposed to such notions? Again, the fact that Blatchford

did not affix his signature to the work keeps historical

readers from deciding this question.

151

But there are those moments in the narrative in which
it would be very difficult to separate Blatchford from
dominant ideology, regardless of his progressive views. For
example, Blatchford's depiction of the East End's "Flowery
Dean," Julie's natural habitat, appears to be a mixture of
bad genetics and a hopeless social environment. It is

dramatic in its content and in its tone.

Julie's father was a drunken labourer; his
father and his father's father had been drunken
laborers. Julie's mother had been an ill-fed,
untaught drudge in her youth, and had died
pathetically, a broken-spirited life-weary old
woman at thirty. Her mother's mother was a
maid-of—all-work, who fled sick and miserable
from her state of middle-class white slavery
to seek refuge at the altar, and two years
later gave up the unequal struggle with the
gods, and sank back, bewildered, white, and,
and wistful, into death's kindly arms.

Farther back than these generations the

A archives of Julie's family did not go. But a

’ “keen Student of racial characteristics,
knowing Julie, might have deduced that
somewhere in the bygones, and on the mother's
side, there had been progenitors of hers
possessing character and imagination--light
and heat.

Speculating on Julie's lineage, Blatchford plays out a
'narrow' restricted version of naturalism as natural
selection. Given the concerns of heredity in the rigidly
class-bound society that Blatchford is writing within, the
passage appears to naturalize itself for the reader. "But

things really are that way!" seems to be the statement that

attempts to 'hail' the reader, in order to clear an

152

ideological space in which the conditions are set for a
narrative strategy of sentimental romance that will triumph

over a delimiting naturalism.

Blatchford's essentializing of the East End through the
fixtures of biological discourse aligns his representational
strategy with that of the recuperative efforts of the social
'explorers' of East End slums. What makes the above
mentioned passage interesting is precisely the way Blatchford
reproduces aspects of this restrictive naturalism: 'racial'
characteristics are metaphorically situated outside the text
(the archives) that can account for records of heritage, a
sign of ill-parentage and class markings. Affixed to
matrilineal descent, these genetic and 'racial' qualities
link Blatchford's discourse more firmly to the evolutionary
assumptions concerning essentialized features of the working
cIaSSes. 'Spencer's voice‘Surfaces as the Cultural dOminant,
the voice of philosophical naturalism. And similar to Bax's
biological essentialism, the feminine subject is represented
as a being more 'marked'--in a semiotic sense--than the

normative features of male subjecthood.

Blatchford presents Julie, however, as an extraordinary
creature of nature, a subject whose genius is allowed to
flower once she is released from the hellish conditions of
the "Flowery Dean"--the den of impoverished alcoholic misery

from which she has emerged. An innate talent emanates from

153

both her body and soul such that Julie is transfigured from
the position of the narrator. Determined, overdetermined and
self—determining, Blatchford's Julie is the fetish object of
the working-class female body. How could this not be the

subject of enjoyable romance?
Self-Conscious Contradictions

Throughout Julie, Blatchford appears very conscious of
the fact that he is presenting a political romance and
producing a populist version of the feminine subject as
social muse; yet his energized rhetoric pushes his plot at a
lively pace. In this delightful but somewhat quirky romance,
Julie figures in the embodiment of a paternalistic fantasy
that attempts to reconcile the evolutionary and naturalistic
essence of woman. But woman remains a static object, devoid;
of original thought and revolutionary energy. Blatchford
refuses to admit a'progressive, utopian role for women
outside the position of an accessory. This is evident at
one point in the novel when Julie decides that in order to
engage in social struggles she should not merely perform, but
she should write songs and compose as well. And when she
shows one of her revolutionary compositions to Guineagold, he
informs her that she is not a poet or a composer but a
musician and singer. "You are not a giant, dear child,"
Guineagold informs her. "You are a kindhearted, earnest
lassie, with bright, artistic gifts. . . .You have grace and

spirit, and a certain rare quality of sympathy and sweetness;

154

but no great power."lg

The business of revolution, then,
lies with men. In scenes like these Blatchford concedes to a
regressive view of women-~it doesn't really matter if these
are women in the labor movement or women in general. He
views women as possessing passive, subordinate, or secondary
qualities. It has to be kept in mind, though, that

Blatchford never seems to agree with the harsh views of Bax

in The Fraud eh Feminism, although Blatchford's reliance on

 

the delicate and fragile nature of Julie's genius seems to

conspire tacitly with an essentialism.

As the young waif turned educated and skilled virtuoso,
Julie is cast in the position of social muse; or, perhaps
more deliberately, Julie's body assumes the form of an
"instrument" of affect: she projects the pathos of class
struggle, in musical form, onto her displaced comrades in the
labor movement. In one scene Julieplays at a strike rally.
Local strikers think it would be‘a good idea that she should
play for her "own." Her music thus soothes the savage rage of
angry workers, civilizes them when the rationality of social
discourse fails. Again, Blatchford's complicity with a
middle-class value system seems apparent. He allegorizes
Julie's violin skills as a civilizing force in what is
depicted as a genuinely uncultured lot possessing a deformed
sense of what music is or could be. In short local working-
class traditions take a back seat to "Culture" in a place in

which an instrument such as the violin represents something

 

155

out of reach and exotic to "a wild, motley, unwashed mob of
ragamuffins."ll Blatchford goes as far as to identify the
violin and the body of Julie with their concomitant class-
images:

In the Flowery Dean the violin was associated

with a certain kind of squeaky, jarring,

burlesque of music, which at its best, like

Clonglocketty's bagpipes, "distinctly

suggested an air," and at its worst might be

endured because it would soon move on. The

clear mellow tone of Julie's "darling old

fiddle" was a new thing--a surprise, a silver

voice coming out of unknown worlds, to speak

strange messages in noies of sweetness

hitherto undreamed of.

These "strange messages" that Julie plays are tunes
that are both familiar in the sense that the audience
understands the emotional valences expressed in the
materiality of sound; but Blatchford describes the violin as
.a "silver voice coming out of unknown worlds," as if high
culture embodies an alienating force that the working-classes

will not understand until they themselves can apprehend the

'benefits of civilization.‘

Julie's return to the Flowery Dean estranges the
middle-class reader, making the reading of a consumable novel
seem strange in the political context of Blatchford's
politics. This is manifest when Blatchford shifts to a more
direct political voice in £2112! describing the social
conditions responsible for other less fortunate women living

in the East End, the feminine social casualties. Julie

 

156

presents various images of destitute women, battered wives,
lost waifs and drunken street women who inhabit the Flowery
Dean in a way that allows the reader to see the formulaic,
reified narrative of the popular romance as pure fantasy
against the backdrop of documented class conditions. Against
these social factors, Blatchford's contradictory naturalism
essentializes male and female identities in the novel, but it
is also significant in essentializing class conflicts as part
of a larger form of a mystified sense of naturalistic
struggle. It is not clear, however, if this is a position
that can be attributed to Blatchford himself, or if he

appropriates this discourse to dramatize a cultural dialogic.

Direct speech in Julie signals this problem more
clearly, as characters on both sides of class lines voice
concerns that echo a vulgar naturalism. When workers rail
‘ about Class inequities and social struggle, they often
discuss social struggles as if they were a part of natural
struggle or Darwinian struggle in the grand scheme of things,
not only in world-history, but as a form of meta—historical
biological history that runs deep within what D.H. Lawrence
might have referred to as a primordial form of consciousness
or "blood consciousness." This appeal to the dark side of
nature, the ensuing struggle of the species, can be seen as
an encoding of a populist us-versus-them mentality; in Julie
Blatchford pits rival classes against each other as if it

were a form of inter-species rivalry. For example, when

157

Chigwin delivers his speech to the assembled workers, he
mythologizes his discourse as part of a natural struggle.

This was war, he told them. It was war

between the worker and the idler, the earner

and the robber, the producer and the

exploiter. . . .The middle class and the upper

class were always against the workers. Mustl3

be, just as the hawk was against the pigeon.
Likewise, Blatchford is sure to represent naturalist
assumptions about the working-classes as they are voiced by
members of the local Wimbledon bourgeoisie. During a
cocktail party at Guineagold's, while various members of the
ruling class (many of them having allegorical names) exchange
quips on Shelley, Swineburne, Dickens and others; they also

discuss the fate of the unfortunate "lower orders" of

culture.

The allegorical force of BTatthord's ThTTe is most
apparent during this party scene, in which Blatchford
dramatically airs out tensions over the labor question.

While Julie plays piano for the guests, a Mr. Rufus Moneyply
expresses his thoughts on the natural order of things and the

rank of the working-classes within that order:

"They are just as poor as they deserve to be,"
said Moneyply. "They are just where they fit.
They get what they are worth. If they pig in
the slums, it is because they are too idle and
dirty and drunken to live in decent homes.
What are they? The failures and the good-for-
nothings of the world. Society keeps the dog
in his kennel and the horse in his shafts; but
if the dog bites or the horse kicks he gets

158

the whip. It is only the human lower animal

who is allowed to vote and to make speeches.l4

This seems like an extreme example of rhetorical overstatement
on Blatchford's part, if it were not for the pertinent
examples of Herbert Spencer, who makes nearly the same points

in his article, "The Coming Slavery."

In this scene, Julie, after overhearing Moneyply's
remarks, objects harshly. She informs Moneyply that she too
is from the the East End, is really a member of the working
class, and will not sit passively as members of her own class
are described in terms of animals. Moneyply insists, as has
Blatchford throughout the novel, that it is her talent--a
seemingly innate property of her nature--that saved her from
a life of misery and drudgery. But guests at Guineagold's
party join Julie in her defense of the working classes,
_admitting that many of them were alsoof humble origins; that
it was talent orcunning, somewhere along the family line,
that pulled them out from the lower orders. It is at this
point in the narrative that Blatchford's attempt to rescue
the working-classes from the vulgar assumptions of the
bourgeoisie caves in on itself, because he legitimates the
mechanisms of power that perpetuate restricted class
mobility.

An obviously allegorical figure such as Moneyply, then,
might appear to be little more than a caricature of an

extremely conservative position; but with the figurative

159

language of Herbert Spencer's "The Coming Slavery" and other
anti-labor tracts, Moneyply's discourse is simply
representative of a branch of Tory politics of the time.
Julie later tells Guineagold that she was offended by the way
that Moneyply insulted the working classes. But when it
comes to the issue of class, Guineagold sits Julie down and,
offering a humanist corrective on the matter of class,
informs Julie that social matters certainly do come down to
the level of individual will.

My darling, there Te no working class; no

classes, Julie. What we call Society is like

a flight of steps. It is a long and gradual

descent from the throne to the shoe box.

There are thousands of classes in this

country, and all of them marred and stained by

snobbery and mean envy and dirty pride. But

what about the Flowery Dean. What good could

you have done, Tittle creature, that you were

in that place?1

Class, then, is merely a chimera for the reformer--
certainly a chimera for the well-meaning philanthropist. But
where does Blatchford stand on this issue? It seems less
problematic that he sides with Guineagold in the sentiment
that class is something that he would like to see as part of
the inside of the subject in the form of a utopian wish-
fulfillment; that class is something the radical-humanist
socialist can eliminate with the power of rhetoric.
Blatchford's earlier references to the "New Religion" are now

more telling in that they provide the ideological framework

for a leveling of class and a desire to unite working-class

160

subjects with middle-class ideology. This appears to be an
ideological position that Blatchford cannot escape from, and
a position from which he certainly does not rescue the
narrative of £2112: Even though Blatchford employs the
metaphor of a ladder (a hierarchical, class ladder)—-rather
than a more organic metaphor--this has the irrevocable social
effect of trivializing the issue of class, by stressing
traditional categories of subjective choice and individual
will. But it can be argued that Julie's subjectivity has
never been free or unrestricted, that her choices have been
determined, in advance as it were, by Blatchford's
construction of Guineagold as an authorial mask that

determines feminine subjectivity.

Blatchford attempts to resolve conflicts engendered
between class relations and the subject, but he disavows the
_possibility of the narrative form to take a truly progressive
stance. (Strangely enough, we begin to forget that this is a
novel written by the person who runs the "Socialist van" in
Tressell's novel.) This is evident in Blatchford's solution
to Julie's dilemma. After her musical talents do not
represent viable forms of producing a livelihood, she is

faced with life back in the "Flowery Dean."

But Julie ends on a happy note as the heroine finds her
prince in Douglas Gale, a wealthy nephew of Guineagold, who
is also an officer in the Royal Navy. Julie is rescued, so

to speak, by the forces of capital.(Guineagold's estate, now

161

in the hands of his nephew) and the Royal Navy (a
homogenizing component of class and a synecdoche of Empire).
This resolution, however, pushes Blatchford into a more
conservative position. If there are no classes, in the way
that parts of his narrative argue that there are not, there
is no real insistence for the progressive resolution that he
urges in his pamphlets. With the novel's recuperative ending,
Blatchford appears apologetic for having put such a poor,
young waif through all of this. Julie has never

been herself, has never been granted subjectivity through the

conditions that Blatchford's discourse attempts to promise.

For Blatchford, then, the female working-class subject
serves Guineagold's interests as far as she can, and the
novel serves the interests of labor in a very limited sense.
Ultimately this has to be seen against Julie's labor as a
'violiniSt--that is, it has to be seen in the context of what is
termed unproductive work. As a novelist then, Blatchford, in
the guise of the progressive offers us a social muse who
merely plays for the masses but cannot inspire them. That he
should title his work a "study" of a feminine subject
signals the contradiction of his very project. He plays the
part of radical reformer through the figure of the displaced
feminine subject, one whose polished and refined talents
ultimately withdraw her from the processes of real social
change. Blatchford re-domesticates his narrative project, in

light of what could have been a far more progressive project

 

162

for the sentimental romance; but, rather than attempting to
transform such a novel, Blatchford allows it to settle
comfortably with a projected middle-class readership, which
can easily sweep away the dirt of the Flowery Dean.
Nevertheless, Blatchford's incorporation of radical discourse
in the sentimental novel was significant in relation to other

discursive developments in culture.

Chapter 6

Myth and Anti-Myth: Notes on Oppositional Naturalism, Labor
and the Politics of Gender

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the paternalist
rhetoric of the labor movement and its concomitant strains of
anti-feminism evoked mythical projections of the feminipe
under the sign of progressive liberation. All too often such
rhetorical strategies turned violent, and, as we have seen in
the case of Bax, were propped up by a vulgar empiricism.

While Bax's The Fraud 23 Feminism can be perceived as an

 

extreme example of the misogynist tendencies of male writers

in the labor movement, it can also be said that writers such

as Tressell and Blatchford, along with others who were more
politically active as organizers or labor leaders, had
significant difficulties realizing women's subjective roles

in labor struggles_and realizing women's roles within community-
formations.v As I will suggest in a later chapter, if radical
female subjectivity could be represented in any capacity by male
writers--that is, with some degree of mimetic power that did

not pander to the most sentimental aspects of patriarchy--it

would be found in the early narrative of D.H. Lawrence.l

Obviously the problem of representing women during
the crisis of labor is one of the most complex issues of the
time. It is necessary, then, to return briefly to the most
important novel during the crisis of labor to further

elucidate this cultural problem. We find that an example

163

164

of paternalist exclusionary practices surfaces in Tressell's

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as Tressell appears

 

unable to inscribe a progressive voice for women or a
progressive woman. In contrast, Lawrence's Mrs. Morel, and
certainly Clara Dawes, are more vocal than Tressell's Nora or
Ruth, and Lawrence's females have more mimetic power than
Blatchford's Julie. If, as Tressell puts it, politics is not
for "the likes of us" (the laborers in Tressell's novel),
then in a double sense, politics are not for the likes of
others (women as the other of Labor), who are hopelessly
trapped in domestic situations. It would be difficult to
suggest that Tressell was insensitive to the plight of women
workers or to the stifling conditions of domestic life.
Tressell's negative attitude toward the direct speech of fellow
worker's discussions about women, including the one
voyeuristic scene in hTe, in which workers spy on Rushton
while he spends an elicit moment with his secretary, suggest
Tressell's awareness of sexist discourse in the workplace.
When one realizes how overwhelmed and frustrated Tressell was
when he attempted to engage in dialogues with fellow workers,
one gains a better perspective on what a tremendous act it
was for Tressell to incorporate so many features of working-

class culture.

Tressell's novel reveals a significant problem in
working-class culture on the issue of how men were hailed by

domestic strategies that excluded women from the production

165

of practical consciousness. Scenes in 5T2 reveal the
domestic sphere as the site or training ground for radical
activity and tactics in counter-hegemony. But the home

is where young workers' education initiates young lads like
Owen's son Frankie; it is not a place for radical women.

Owen encourages his son to read pamphlets that illustrate the
building blocks of social change. His wife Nora approves,
but she never really says anything vital about these
concerns. Neither does Nora attend radical meetings, or
cooperative guilds; also, she does not participate actively
in dialogues concerning radical politics. As for Tressell's
other significant female character, Ruth, she is portrayed as
a passive victim. Moreover, Ruth becomes the passive sexual
victim of Slyme, Easton and Ruth's lodger. Interestingly
enough, in one of the few distinct feminist moments in the
earlier published version of 3TB (the 1914 and 1918 versions
publiShed by Grant Richards) Ruth successfully resiSts the
advances of Slyme. That scene was the result of a feminist
intervention by Jessie Pope, the original editor of 3T3. In
the restored 1955 Lawrence and Wishart edition of RTP, Pope's

intervention is lost.2

The problem of an excluded, authentic political voice
by women in male representations, however, did not seem to be
a troubling issue for most men in the labor movement. As we
have seen earlier, women generally were not considered to be

equal to men; but rather, were constructed as the objects of

166

exploitation, or metaphysical agents of reproduction who

have been degraded by capitalism. However, the general
sentiment of labor insisted that once a natural balance is
restored through socialism, the proper domestic nature of
women would be correctly (re)dressed. This sentiment is also

evident in William Morris' utopian News From Nowhere, in
3

 

which the women often resemble glorified servants.

It is beyond the task of this project to attempt to
fully account for these problems of representation. Such a
study would have to trace through ideology and gender
representation in the suffrage movement. Such a project would
necessitate a cultural examination of writing by women,
including an assessment of working-class women's
autobiography. Since the the prevalent attitudes of Labor
were unremittingly patriarchal there was rarely a moment
qvting Fae crisis.9¥.st9r 19 Which_W9msn W959 9°t Simply
dismissed or reduced to the metaphysical status of cosmic
and/or biological essences. The moment was rare when women's
voices were taken seriously on the matter of production and
social change, as the majority of writings published by
radical groups focused on wages, work, and the general
promise of public benefits. Furthermore, most radical
writing circulated within the discursive boundaries of
naturalism and evolutionary theory. This aspect of
oppositional discourse laid a heavy stress on the evolution

of a class of bodies, primarily those of male workers. Such

167

tactics played into the hands of a vulgar empiricism, and
therefore reinforced the idea that women were biologically

inferior to men.
Some Examples of Feminist Radicalism and Resistance

If women writers were to resist male myths, they had to
do so by situating gender within a wider social and
ideological context, one that either circumvented the problem
of "woman's nature" or directly refuted confronted the myth
of "sex-helplessness." This task proved to be an indication
of the monolithic force of paternalist ideology in the Labor
movement. Against the oppressive discourse and lived
relations that women were subjected to in the rest of
culture--in the sense that dominant ideology naturalized
extreme forms of exploitation--the problem of devising a
unified movement, in concert with Labor, seemed to be highly

prablématiC.‘

Women's resistance had to do with the priorities of
various issues: suffrage, domestic labor, labor in the
workplace.4 Under these conditions how could an oppositional
form of writing arise that might transcend the limited
strategies of the pamphlet or the demonstration and hope to
educate women through drama, fiction or other vehicles of
creative expression? Could there be a politicized fiction
produced by women in the labor movement or by working-class

women?

168

Virginia Woolf, perhaps the most prominent and the most
accomplished of modernist women novelists, would later
address this problem in her references to working-class women
and the problem of aesthetic production. But Woolf's
response, which condescended to most of these previous
organized efforts, seems, in retrospect, to misread these
organized attempts, without adequately-examining the material
conditions that produced these specific kinds of writing. In
Woolf's "Memories of a Working Women's Guild," she discusses a
collection of autobiographical writings by working-class
women. In 1930 Woolf was given a collection of letters by
a former member of a women's guild. Woolf's essay reflects
on events concerning working-class women around the year
1913.5 In her essay, Woolf aligns herself with the concerns;
of working-class women, as a sympathizer for reformist
. programs. .Extremely selffconscious of her privileged class-
position, Woolf realizesthat thereis little she can
identify with in her View of this other world, with the
exception of a naive essentialism. Quite bluntly she says,

"6 Woolf is acutely

"Our sympathy is fictitious not real.
aware of working-class life as fragmented and degraded.
Woolf painfully perceives the lives wasted by industry,
repetitive labor, and abusive domestic situations. Woolf
sees these conditions as that which produces severe

limitations in the subject. Understanding how debilitating

these conditions are, Woolf says that the writings she has

169

are incapable of approximating the status of literature,
because the conditions necessary for the production of
literature do not exist for these women. Woolf uncovers
glimpses into writerly imaginations, but she sees them as
limited insights because of the lack of an organic,
totalizing impulse necessary for the production of real
literature. As she examines the writing of working-class
women writers, she comments that:

Here are no reflections; no view of life as a

whole; no attempt to enter into the lives of

other people. It is not from the ranks of

working-class women that the next great poet

or novelist will be drawn. Indeed we are

reminded of those obscure writers before

Shakespeare who had never been beyond the

borders of their own parishes and found

expression diffigult and words few and awkward

to fit together.

The very criteria that the production of literature
rests on for Woolfis something denied to these women. In
this respect, there is an element of dominant naturalism
operative in Woolf's assertions that is both circular and
repetitive. If working-class women write, they can only do
so in a way that reflects the fragmentation of working-class
environments. These women's incomplete experience fails to
allow for the production of novelistic discourse; therefore,
the more they write the more they are incapable of producing
true fiction. According to Woolf these women appear

condemned to this poetic disability as long as they are

subjected to present conditions. Simply, her point is that

170

working-class culture, until it rises to the level of
bourgeois culture, cannot produce the fullness of the novel,
because it lacks the fullness of subjectivity from which the
novel blossoms. Strangely enough, Woolf echoes the young

Lukacs of Theory eh the Novel, lamenting the fragmentation

 

produced by the modern novel in lieu of the organic wholeness
of a lost classical age. For these working-class women whose
fragmented writing Woolf generously surveys, such an organic
world, much less the production of subjectivity in the modern
novel, remains constantly deferred, and can never be
realized; neither can any aesthetic possibility of
transformation take place for these poor souls. That is not
to suggest that Woolf did not consciously align herself with
a desire for social change; Woolf's sentiments reveal her
limitations in perceiving class difference as a form of

cultural difference.

The WOman Question

The problem of theorizing class and gender difference
was not one of producing a proper aesthetic, but more of a
philosophical problem. In 1887, Edward Aveling and Eleanor
Marx published a pamphlet titled "The Woman Question," which
addressed the historical nature of women's degradation and

oppression in industrial culture.8

For Aveling and Marx this
had to do with a closer examination of the historical forces

that constituted the "evolution of society." The authors of

171

"The Woman Question" did not quote Marx or Engels to discuss
the role of capitalist relations inthe historical oppression
of women. For revolutionary guidance they turned to the
example of the German Socialist August Bebel. Aveling and Marx
were in agreement with Bebel that "the death of the
capitalistic method of production, therefore of the society
based on it, is . . .within a distance measurable in years

rather than in centuries."9

In this respect, the "Woman
Question" shunted the primacy of suffrage as the first step
toward equality, something that most in the women's movement
viewed as the primary element of emancipation. For Aveling
and Marx women's emancipation hinged on the abolition of
existing property relations, which, they argued, would bring
about a necessary transformation of the social order. Real
change for women begins with a transformation of the social
order:

We will suppose all women, not only those

having property, enabled to vote. . .the

actual position in respect to men would not be

very vitally touched. . . .But it is essential

to keep in mind that ultimate change, only to

come about when the yet more tremendous social

change. . .has taken place.

Without that lerger social change women will
never be free. g

For this to happen, however, women would have to align
themselves with the struggles of working-class men in order
to effect this social change. Aveling and Marx's vision of a

possible future is something that could take place in years

172

rather than centuries, but given the paternalism of the Labor
movement, it seemed doubtful that such a strategy was

efficacious for social change.

On the level of theory Aveling and Marx were far more
sophisticated than most Labor pamphlets, even later pamphlets
that discussed the social position of woman. Women, Aveling
and Marx argued, were doubly exploited due to their dual
roles, and general forms of exploitation had to be overcome
in order to clear the path for revolutionary naturalism to
reconfigure gender relations: "Women are the creatures of an
organized tyranny of men, as the workers are organized
creatures of an organized tyranny of idlers."11. The
dismantling of this state of legalized tyranny required the
transformation of a basic tenet of bourgeois social
relations: marriage and its social consequences for the
‘reprOduction"of*hegemony.'The'developmentof‘revolutionary
Consciousness partly depended on acquiring a critical
distance from the structures of ideology that reproduced
hegemony and hailed-~that is "interpellated"-—subjects as
gendered subjects in a bourgeois social order. Aveling and
Marx presented their own example of how myths circulate in
dominant culture, pointing to illustrations in Punch as a
graphic example of how such myths patently endorsed the myth
of the bourgeois marriage.

We have said that marriage is based upon
commercialism. It is a barter transaction in

173

many cases, and in all, under the conditions
of things to-day, the question of ways and
means plays of necessity a large part. Among
the upper classes the business is carried on
quite unblushingly. The Sir Gorgius Midas
pictures in Punch testify to this. The nature
of the periodical in which they appear reminds
us that all the horrors they reveal are
regarded as foibles not as sins.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, it is not clear as to
whether or not Tressell had read Punch in order to debunk
common, stereotypical assumptions about workers; but it is
evidently clear that Aveling and Marx had certainly studied

the illustrations in Punch in order to understand the way

dominant ideology in graphic form addresses its spectators.

But if the nature of marriage was based on a commercial
transaction, it could be argued that there was also something
about marriage that was natural, outside of myth--in short, a
counter-naturalism that disputed the social and commercial
base on which the institution of marriage rested: "Some
favored individuals, kings, princes, aristocrats, marry, or
are married, at the age to which Nature points as fitting.
Many of the working class marry young-~that is, at the

"13 Male and female subjects trapped in

natural period.
exploitative conditions were thus denied the possibility of
experiencing their natural capacities to the fullest. This
naturalism, they argued, also had to do with one's sexual
emancipation in addition to overthrowing conventional notions

of marriage and divorce. As for prostitution, that could be

negotiated as an undesirable effect of bourgeois social

174

relations, something that middle-class men benefited from at
the expense and collective injury of a great many of working-
class women. Once capitalism had been overthrown,

prostitution would "pass away."

Aveling and Marx argued that the position of women
would improve immensely under socialist relations. As the
equal of men, and under no pressure to conform to
conventional marriage arrangements, the course of social
evolution would proceed in a positive direction. Similar to

Marx's projections in the German Ideology of the harmonious

 

interplay between labor, philosophy, and art in a communist
society, women would have to put in their "one, two, or three
hours of social labor to supply the wants of the community .
. . .Thereafter she will be free for art or science, or

"14 Aveling

teaching or writing, or amusement in any form.
'and Marx's."Woman Question"-addressed the materialist issues
that most male writers in the labor movement, with the
limited exception of Shaw, could not theorize adequately. In
Aveling and Marx's View, women would have complete power over
their bodies rather than being re-domesticated as the cosmic
phantasm of a mythical form of primitive communism. What
Aveling and Marx insisted on, though, was that there was
something inherently natural in the institution of marriage.
Perhaps marriage was an institution that had to be upheld in

the "Woman Question" in order not to alienate their audience.

It must be remembered that in Tressell's novel, the idea of

175

socialism, as it is voiced by workers hostile to it, is

equated with sexual dissolution. Such propositions were
perhaps too strong for a population caught up in the
contradictory throes of Victorian attitudes about sexuality

and the family. However, the troubling presence of paternalism
in radical movements and its complicity with dominant

ideology was something Aveling and Marx could not take into

account.
Olive Schreiner: Labor and Imperialism

On the level of social ontology the woman question was
often transformed into an aesthetic issue. Olive Schreiner
was one of the most influential women to write on the subject
of labor and women's roles, producing both social tracts and.
novels. As a novelist, she had received recognition. (In ‘

fact, Aveling and Marx quote a passage about gender

 

difference fromSchreiner's novel The Story 2£.EE African
£252 in "The Woman Question.") Schreiner's treatises on the
subject of sexual difference and the gendered nature of
cultural myths appeared in her major theoretical text on

women, labor, and culture. Woman and Labor (1911) was

 

an attempt to deploy the discourse of philosophical
naturalism to counter specific assumptions about vulgar myths
and essentialisms that valorized dominant notions of gender.
Schreiner attacked gendered myths based on culturally

received notions of sexuality.15

176

Schreiner claimed that the value of women's
productivity in differing forms of laborhad not been
realized. More importantly, such categories of work as
mental labor against manual labor were not subject to a
discourse that essentialized biological difference or
associated intellectual skill directly with the body. "It
may also be stated," Schreiner argued, "that women's adequacy
in the modern fields of intellectual or skilled manual labor
is no more today an open matter for debate. . . . ."16
Schreiner's immediate task was to set up a discursive space
in which she could theorize a mode of resistance to dominant

myths in culture. One of the primary objectives of

Schreiner's Woman and Labor, was to undermine the myth of

 

what she referred to as women's "Parasitism," or women's
helpless dependence on men. Modern parasitism was a
condition arising from the historical forces of production.
For Schreiner the movement of culture through imperialism
produced significant changes that had profound effects on
women. The expansion of capitalist technology, the growth of
urbanism, and the regimentation of the body in modern
culture, produced a disciplinarity that excluded women from
meaningful labor and productive roles in the socialorder.
Even though more women had access to leisure, it was a false
sense of leisure or a false consciousness of leisure.
Schreiner argued that women were more the prisoners of

patriarchy than ever before. Modernity had thus left women

 

177

with less compensating activities and values. To restore to
modernity a lost form of spiritual and material value and
build for the future, women would have to overcome an
increasing state of this insidious form of parasitism.
Schreiner was acutely aware of the implications this had for
women of differing classes. For middle or upper class women,
this appeared primarily as a problem of leisure; however, for

working-class women this was entirely another matter:

The position of the unemployed modern female
is one wholly different. The choice before
her, as her ancient fields of domestic labor
slip from her, is not generally or often at
the present day the choice between finding new
fields of labor, or death; but one far more
serious in its ultimate reaction on humanity
as a whole--it is the choice between finding
new forms of labor or sinking slowly into a
condition of more or less complete and passive
sex parasitism!

 

Schreiner relies heavily on evolutionary ideology here,

but she appropriates the discourse of philosophical
naturalism for progressive purposes. Spencer's voice
inscribes itself in a way that Spencer would have disapproved
of. Ruth First and Ann Scott have demonstrated that

Spencer's First Principles was crucial to Schreiner's

 

philosophy. Spencer's evolutionary discourse, seen as a
progressive theory, displaced theological concerns that had
earlier impeded the successful production of progressive
thought. As First and Scott point out, ". . .the Bible had
been the only explanation available to her [Schreiner]; now

she learned that 'all matter is alive', that the social order

178

reflected a deeper biological order, and that progress was
not an accident but a necessity--indeed a law underlying the

whole of organic creation."18

The majority of Schreiner's work, of course, is
devoted to issues of labor and feminism, imperialism, and
patriarchy--specifically with colonial politics. Schreiner is

perhaps best known for her Story 2£.EB African Farm (1883).

 

In one of Schreiner's most significant and under-read novels,

Trooper Peter Halket eh Mashonland (1897), she

 

 

narrativizes an allegory, a feminist morality tale, that
assails the dangerous brew of colonialism, patriarchy and the
inevitable effects caused by the politics of gold prior to
the outbreak of the Boer War. As Patrick Brantlinger has
noted, Halket was Schreiner's "fictional diatribe against

Cecil Rhodes."19

In Halket, Schreiner employs a dream narrative in order
to establish linkages between the forces of capital,
symbolized by gold, the ideology of racism, and its
structural relation to the male psychology of imperialism.

As the young Halket dreams of the possibility of establishing
a mining company or a syndicate in South Africa, he projects
a fantasy in which he imagines himself, or at least his
signature, connected to the social and political arena of
London financial markets: "'The Peter Halket Gold Mining

Company Limited'". . . .Give some shares to men with big names

179

and sell out; they can sell out, too, at the right time."20

But when Halket reflects on the atrocities committed against
indigenous South Africans, the image of his mother intervenes
in his fantasy:

His mother didn't understand these things; it

was all so different in England from South

Africa. You couldn't be expected to do the

same sort of things here as there. He had an

unpleasant feeling that he was justifying

himself to his mother, and that he didn't know

how to.

This image of the feminine appears to the male
imperialist as a moralizing force, who attempts to check or
de-cathect the phallic impulses of imperialist excess. If
women were represented as cosmic mothers, Schreiner's image
of such figures could be nothing other than confrontational
cosmic mother, issuing her divine powers against the forces
of imperialist corruption, racism and capital. In Halket,
Schreiner employs the confrontational dialogue in order to
disrupt stereotypical notions about empire, class and race.
For example, in one scene, the Halket imagines that he sees
his mother who confronts him in his dream. Halket
experiences a bewildered sense of cultural and subjective
dislocation before lapsing off into a dream state in which he
can no longer control his actions. During the dream-
narrative Halket encounters other allegorical figures, most
significantly a Christ figure. Schreiner articulate Halket's

desire through his imperialist ambitions that lead to the

novel's tragic end.

180

Schreiner employed the dream mode in Halket as a
political allegory against imperialism; yet there is another
kind of ironically inscribed allegorical feature that
inscribes itself in Schreiner's intertextuality. The Boer
war itself, as Anna Davin has demonstrated, dramatized the
issue of motherhood and the necessity of reforms for working-
class mothers in England. As Davin points out, "A poor
military performance in the Boer War and Empire had
dramatized fears of national inadequacy and exposed the poor
health of the working-class in England."22 Hence, another
mythical image of women and maternal labor had sprung up,
over the issue of reproductive labor. As Davin points out,
"Motherhood was to be given new dignity: it was the duty and
the destiny of women to be 'mothers of the race,‘ but also

«23

their great reward. With the exception of Woman and

 

Labor, Schreiner's writings focused on South Africa;
nevertheless her presence in mainland political circles in

Britain was considerable.
Working Women and Dominant Myths

In England, if most men in the labor movement could
circulate a non-threatening image of woman as the essential
primitive communist, then they could address other matters
more vigorously. It is a simple fact that women were the
"dark continent" of the labor problem. The issue of women's

roles in the labor movement failed to be publicized in the

181

manner that other issues were. In the years between 1898 and
1907, one notices a dearth of titles that refer to the
problem of women in the workplace. Labor leaders, feeling
the pressure to make speeches about enfranchisement and

women's rights, contributed to the cause.

As late as 1912, Kier Hardie would argue that
enfranchisement (voting rights) should be extended to women.
Hardie's reasoning was based partially on the recent history
involving the rights and powers granted working-class men
during the reformist acts of the nineteenth century. As

Hardie argued, in a pamphlet entitled Radicals and Reform,

 

"We all cry out the shame we feel at the way the middle
classes sold the workers time and again in the Reform
movement; but shall we not be even greater dastards if we
allow a further installment of reform for ourselves form

"24 Hardie criticizes previous

which women are shut out.
radicals including the Chartists arguing that "they excluded
women from the Charter."25 Hardie invokes a common theme in
the radical movement that could be used interchangeably with
the rights of working-men or women: that life was better
before the muddled attempts of reformers--that "Prior to the
Reform Bill of 1832 there was no statutory disability imposed
upon women, and there is a good deal of evidence to show that
in the earlier stages of the country, and particularly from
the 14th to the 18th century, women exercised all the

functions of citizenship on the same terms as men. . ."26

182

Hardie's pleading attempts seem unconvincing, to say the
least. The argument that life was better until liberal
reforms was not what women on the left were eager to hear,

given the general tone of labor politics.

A significant contrast is evident in representations by
male writers about women's issues. Women on the left seemed
to appeal directly to material matters that traversed both
the domestic sphere and the public sphere. In an early SDF
tract in 1884, Annie Besant in "Free Education and Free
Maintenance" makes an appeal on the behalf of impoverished
children, based on a report to the London School Board, that
almost 25,000 school children were going hungry. Besant stressed
the need for the working-class to realize that their children
were "fundamentally of much more importance. . .than the

children of princes. . ."27

Appealing to the more militant
strains of feminism, some women urged others to join the

fight for feminist socialism. In WOmen.Th Rebellion Mrs.

 

Wibaut and Lily Gair Wilkinson co-authored their pamphlet

for the struggle against capitalism. They argued that state
socialism should include a "State Endowment of Motherhood, an
expansion in the types of work women do because of new forms
of machinery, and that women must "claim back from the
possessing classes as many as possible of the numerous things

"28 Careful not to alienate

which are stolen from her.
themselves from men or men from women, they argued that women

"must begin the political struggle also for the man's sake,

183

who has become her labour-comrade and with whom she has the

same interests."29

Among women actively writing for the labor movement,
Isabella Ormiston Ford was one of the more dynamic writers.
An engaged political writer as well as a fiction writer, Ford
had written several short stories and other articles for the

Labour Leader. Similar to men in radical movements, Ford had

 

relied on a diverse range of literary perspectives to shape
her ideas about women, politics, and history. If Robert
Blatchford had synthesized his romantic, naturalist and
humanist positions from the ideas of writers like Ruskin,
Carlye, Whitman and others, women writers such as Ford turned
to significant women for an understanding of history and what
Raymond Williams refers to as "structures of feeling," in
order to more fully address the multi-valences of issues
facing women in the midst of the crisis of labor. As June

Hannam points out in her critical biography Isabella Ford,

 

"Quoting from tracts on women's education written in the
1820's and 1830's, from Hannah Moore's advice on how women
ought to dress, and from the novels of Charlotte Bronte,
George Elliott and Mrs. Gaskell, Isabella showed how women's
lives had been restricted, colorless, and 'devoid of real
living interest' for most of the nineteenth century."39 As
this had slowly changed and more educational and professional
opportunities were opening to women--it is important to note

that Hannam relates this to material factors such as the

184

bicycle--Ford's optimism "wanted to convince Labour men that
middle class women would use their new energies to help the

cause of socialism after fighting against terrible odds

.u3l

Ford actively resisted paternal myths that focused on
the biological essentialism of gender; instead, she focused
on material issues, matters that involved women in the work-
place and women's roles in social movements. While Ford's
writing on women is not directly aimed at attempts by men to
confer either a mystical or a physiological status of woman,
it provided a base of practical resistance. In her
pamphlets and fictional writing she attempted to engage women
more actively in labor struggles, to free them from
traditional roles, and to enlist their support for a variety;
of issues facing the women's movement in England. Ford
stressed the importance of women as factory inspectors, as
opposed to their characterization by men as figures of
domestic support for men's struggles. Ford was keenly aware
of the fact that "the Labor Party was suspicious of the
women's movement because of its middle-class character, and
that members of the women's movement feared the development

of socialism. . ."32

Foremost among Ford's concerns was the improvement of
the status of women in the industrial world. Ford

appreciated the attempts of various organizations to improve

185

the well-being of women, but she realized that traditional
efforts did not adequately confront the problems of the

workplace. In her pamphlet Industrial Women and How he Help

 

Them, Ford opposed dominant attempts to assist industrial
women, stressing an examination of the immediate material
issues, rather than relying on traditional, middle-class
assistance. Ford appreciated the ameliorative intent of
organized philanthropy but downplayed its pretension to
effect changes in the overall social structure.

The philanthropically minded take it up in the

shape of girls' clubs, classes for amusement,

prize givings, teas, "socials,"

etc. . . .District visitors and Bible readers

frequent the mills and factories in the dinner

hour and read to the girls. Self sacrificing

women are everywhere engaged in rescue work. 3

Such a depiction of women being taught virtue while
working in the mills, marks a distinct contrast from
Tressell's world, which is a place where working women are
mostly absent, but organized efforts at social amelioration
are conducted by the local evangelical "Shining Light
Society." Ford's sentiments toward charitable organizations,
however, express a similar cynical attitude toward the
ineffective role of such organizations: "The earnest-minded
band of women who spend their lives in rescue work, also, it
seems to me, tend to perpetuate the evil they detest, since
everyone who works on curative rather than preventative lines

"34

must do so in some degree. Ford's emphasis on

preventative measures rather than curative measures points to

186

the entire inadequacy of middle-class efforts to alleviate
stagnated and distressed conditions. Ford's distance from
the actual conditions of working-class life (as opposed to
Tressell's internal position) might allow her to sound less
bitter and more sociologically formal than Tressell's
narrator; but she expresses a voice whose absence in
Tressell marks one of the major problems of male tendency

fiction.

Ford also confronts the whimsical, sentimental
naturalism of Robert Blatchford's naive novel Julie.
Blatchford presents Julie as a creature who is cured by
capital through her prevention from following the natural
course of her social and physical environment. Julie's
demise takes place in reverse of the causality of naturalist‘
conditioning: only after attaining the status of what could
never happen in the violent and squalid community of the
"Flowery Dean" does Julie fall; she is damaged by the Dean's
environment after she returns to help those whom she feels a
natural alignment toward. Blatchford's sentimental novel
implies that if you return to your East End class roots, it
catches up with you, like the recurring symptoms of a
hereditary disease. Ford's writing confronts these
fantasies, which possess the same social impact as do well
intended people who sing uplifting songs and quote from

etiquette manuals during lunches at mills and factories.

187

In a voice that neither Tressell nor Blatchford could
appropriate, Ford addresses the issue of prostitution as a
social matter tied to industrial matters; and here she voices
a note of cynicism and sarcasm in a way that Tressell,
Blatchford, or other male writers on the left certainly could
not. (Unless we would want to include E.B. Bax) As
benevolent women rescue women who have resorted to
prostitution from the streets: "They, as it were, keep the
market from being overstocked, thus preventing its

35 We see this

unpopularity by any great fall in prices.
social concern marked in naturalist fiction somewhat later.
For example, Irene Heron, wife of Soames Forsyte, in

Galsworthy's The Man 2; Property, offers a very brief

 

study of the type of woman Ford refers to. Irene's new life
in Chelsea is her way of paying back the women of the streets
because of her scandalous affair with Bosinney, the architect

of the Forsyte home.

Ford sees prostitution primarily as an economic issue,
one tied to wage issues. She argues that it should be
legalized. Ford differs considerably with Aveling and Marx
on this issue; she does not project a communistic future in
which prostitution will, like the state, wither away. From
Aveling and Marx's perspective, however, the reformist side
of Ford's politics would have extenuated the miserable
circumstances of a great many women. However, where

socialist aspirations fall short, present-day material

188

conditions have to be understood outside of a desire for
future utopian concerns. Ford views the problems of women's
emancipation, conditions in the workplace, and prostitution
as problems that have to be solved through a more active

participation by women working in history.

Ford published most of her pamphlets, including "Woman
and Socialism" through the ILP, but her politics also
exhibited affinities with the Fabian Society. Like
Blatchford and others in the Labor movement, Ford wrote
novels that addressed women's issues and social issues.
Although Ford was not from a working-class background, she
did write a novel that dealt with factory life and labor

politics in a mill town in northern England. In Mr. Elliott:

 

 

A Novel eh Factory Life, she explored the issue of community.

 

Ford's novel does not represent the conditions of the working
world in a way that a novel like Tressell's does; nor does it
capture the textures of local environment in the way that

Olive Schreiner was capable.36

Nevertheless, Ford's he;
Elliott in the style of a naturalist-realist novel akin to
George Eliot--the title of the novel is not a coincidence--
presents a sociological, ecological and economic critique of
a phallocentric mill owner whose lust for profit and

expansion, tears a community apart, damages the environment,

and brings misery to his own family.

In Mr. Elliott Ford traces the motives and frustrations

of a Mr. Sam Elliott, a mill owner in the northern town of

 

189

Stannerton. Ford's treatment of politics involves
discussions about community, the environment, and working-
conditions, but does so from a detached, quasi-rationalist
perspective. In a convincing scene, Ford depicts a strike
by workers employed by Sam Elliott that tears the community
apart and disrupts daily life. Ford's novel has

difficulty in its representation of labor, however,
dialogues in the novel record the exploitation of women

workers, and stresses an emphasis on community.

The plot of Mr. Elliott appropriates the form of

 

Gaskell or George Eliot. Sam Elliott is himself a former
mill worker who becomes a mill owner. The major conflicts of

Mr. Elliott are set into motion after a strike in which Sam

 

Elliott calls in armed guards who ruthlessly smash the strikei
breakers. This violent action creates tension within the
family and within the community. Ford uses the domestic
sphere as a model for the community. As Mrs. Eliott
(Margaret) is progressively alienated from her former
friends, who include working-class women and middle-class
women, she becomes isolated and bitter, while Sam Elliott
becomes more adamant in his position toward the working

classes.

One of the key issues that Ford attempted to dramatize

in Mr. Elliott was how symbolic exchange displaces the

 

family-~especially Mrs. Elliott--from one social level to

190

another in the community. This is evident in the novel
because as the Eliott family gains local status, they
gradually lose sight of material production, its value to the
ordinary worker. New acquisitions and new objects
symbolically register the Elliott family's new social
position: "One had to have pins and silk dresses of course,
and so they were there; but how they came there, or who made

them, was not a subject that could interest anyone".37

A poignant feature of Mr. Elliott deals with the issue

 

of community. Mrs. Elliott has lost the vital connections
that she once had with women from other classes. She
attempts to get along with the Fairfields, the older, monied
family of Stannerton, but that fails also. After a series of
continuing labor disturbances, her former friends refuse to
see her. The working community is now united against Mr.
Elliott. Elliott's intransigence toward laborers who work
for him gets him into further trouble and alienates the
family more deeply. Elliott blames the strikers for any
subsequent problems that the community experiences. In one
scene he calls in the militia to break up a strike, and one
of the young strikers is killed. The death of the worker
creates a chain of disruptions in the community, and
especially within the Elliott family. Former associates of
Mrs. Elliott's maintain a cautious distance from her and her
new class-position. As her class-position changes, she loses

any ability to engage in meaningful dialogues with her family

 

191

or friends. Mrs. Elliott becomes bitter and withdrawn,
excludes herself from the possibility of community. Ford

encodes an ecological critique in Mr. Elliott. Toward the

 

end of the novel she is stricken with cancer and dies. Ford
clearly equates disease with detrimental changes in

environmental and psychological factors.

In addition to its emphasis on community Ford's he;
Elliott is critical of the way information affects the
community. Similar to Tressell, Ford is highly critical of
the dominant press, especially of the way it represents
dominant commercial interests. An obvious example is found
in the coverage of the strike in which the workers are
figuratively framed for having caused the disturbance,
whereas Elliott, the owner of the mill is exonerated from any
public guilt. Ford thus reflects the history of the dominant.
press in relation to labor unrest during the nineteenth
century. For example, as the local press harasses the
workers for their activity in the strike. Labor leaders are
described by the press as traitors to their country, and

misrepresented by distorted news stories.

Perhaps the most salient aspect of Mr. Elliott is the

 

way the novel portrays subject-positions within the family.
The Elliott's son George is the most pertinent example.
Interested in sport and chance, he eschews his father's
business to become a gambler, and then graduates to the

status of a young lounger. The novel does not focus on

 

192

implied oedipal tensions, but George produces a paroxysm of
rage in his father, telling the old man, half-seriously, that
he can make the right sort of connections for him in
politics. The Elliott's daughter, who goes by the name of
Prissie, is engaged to the son of the Fairfields. Son
George, disgusted with life in Stannerton, says he's leaving
for Australia to raise sheep. At the end of the novel
Stannerton is a worse place because of Elliott's mill, and

Elliott himself ends up bitter, alone in his house.

Ford's attempts at fiction reveal distanced, middle-
class perspective on the lived relations of working-class
individuals. In her fictional work, Ford is perhaps not as
powerful as she is in her pamphlet strategies, where she
stresses the need for women to become more active in the

Labor movement.

In conclusion, one would not want to agree with Woolf's
earlier assertions about the possibility of women writing
working—class fiction during this time, but an internal
representation of labor by a woman writer had yet to emerge.-
The reasons for this could be tied to the diverse politics
surrounding the issue of gender during the crisis of Labor.
Through the efforts of writers such as Schreiner, Ford and
others, however, the possibilities for narrative could be

more fully realized.

 

Section Three: D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers

 

193

 

Chapter 7

Working Through Naturalism: Lawrence and the Production of
Sons and Lovers

 

Working—class people have traditionally, or at
least for several generations, regarded art as
escape, as something enjoyed but not assumed
to have much connection with the matter of

everyday life. Art is marginal, 'fun:' 'It
teks y'mind off things;' 'It teks yer out of
y'self;' 'It meks a break and a bit of a

change.‘ Whilst they are enjoying it, people
may submit themselves, may identify
themselves; but at the back of their mind they
know it is not 'real;' 'real' life goes on
elsewhere. Art may 'tek yer out of yerself;'
but the form of that phrase indicates that
there is, inside, a 'real' you for which art
is not expected to speak; except to reflect,
by conventional means, certain agreed
assumptions. Art is for you to use.

For working-class people the happy ending

. . .is often a happy ending in the kind of
life they have around them, in home and
family; but in that life when things have
'worked out,‘ when the clouds have blown away.
They know life is not really like that; they
do not expect life to be like that in some
hazy future. But they say it is 'nice to
think of' a life like that; and this attitude
seems to me near at times to being a kind of
vision, a glimpse of another order.

1

 

 

Richard Hoggart, The Uses 21 Literacy

D.H. Lawrence is the first major English author of the
twentieth century to have straddled the class divide between
working-class culture and bourgeois aesthetics. Lawrence's
departure from a working-class community is a primary feature
of his aesthetic production. The brutal oedipal themes in

his early work, the complex symbolism and reconstituted

 

195

subjectivity of his later work, and his at times puzzling
psychological metaphysics is often studied as an allegory of

narrative psychological development. Sons and Lovers has

 

been perceived as an autobiographical Bildungsroman; most
critics, however, have focused on the oedipal themes present

in the novel. It could be said that in Sons and Lovers

 

Lawrence represents a move toward a middle-class aesthetic
within the circle of a working-class community, one that for
Lawrence embodies a kind of fragmented pastoralism found in
the tensions between the mechanical rhythms of life in the
town and the mines, and the organic features of the country.
The mining village of Bestwood is situated between both of

these worlds.2

Lawrence's mining community experienced some of the
most intense debates on Labor; yet Lawrence never made these
issues a primary part of his narrative. Socialist characters
do appear in his early work, some social debates take place,
but these issues in Lawrence's text are situated as external,
for the most part, to the overall events of the narrative.
Lawrence's rejection of labor politics is a well documented
fact. Most biographies on Lawrence mention his early
flirtations with radical thought and his complicated

attitudes toWard bourgeois culture.3

Generally speaking,
critics have tended to downplay aspects of the working-class
ideology in Lawrence's early narrative, as if it were only an

incidental feature of his uncanny ability to discern the

 

196

mollecularization of passion, desire, and sexuality. But
these same subjects in Lawrence are, paradoxically, realized
only through a naturalism that has often been subordinate to
other ideological modes: realism, social organicism,

individualism, and so on.

Much of this has to do with the different paths that
Lawrence's aesthetic wandered through, his continual,
renewable sense of self-exile. Similar to his original
departure from the working-class community of Eastwood
(Bestwood in his fiction) on the outskirts of Nottingham,
Lawrence ventured through diverse communities and continents.
It can be said that Lawrence's aesthetic ideology undergoes a
significant transformation in each of his journeys. But it
can also be said that in each peregrination, Lawrence
returns, symptomatically, to the mining village, and to the
social conflicts that disrupt and dialogize his early

narrative.4

In the context of the previous concerns of this study--
the way naturalistic philosophy affected writers in the labor
movement and produced an ideology of resistance, and counter
resistance—-it is crucial to note the way oppositional
naturalism and dominant naturalism intersect in the early
Lawrence's concerns, in addition to the naturalism that forms
the earlier Lawrence's sense of literary realism. In this

section I will focus on Sons and Lovers and demonstrate how

 

 

197

the novel contextualizes naturalism in light of its realist
aesthetic ideology. In doing this I will focus on
biographical material crucial to an understanding of

Lawrence's relationship to working-class culture.

.’

One of the questions sometimes asked by critics is why
Lawrence rejected labor, why he made such a radical turn
toward an extreme form of modernist--fetishized-~subjectivity
in his narrative, which, in its more modernist aspects, is
concerned with the transformations of aesthetic subjectivity
as a utopian compensation for the increasingly reified and

5 The question arises: Did

instrumentalized social order.
Lawrence turn his back on the working-classes? Were they
really part of an Organically conceived lower order where
figures such as churlish miners or despairing, bewildered
miners' wives inhabit romantic landscapes, unable to realize
their subjectivity? These questions might not be easily
answered, but, by examining a kind of dialogic of naturalism
that indeed verges on the politics of culture in Lawrence's
early narrative the answer might become a little more clear

as to how be dealt with these issues against the diverse

ideological territory through which Lawrence traveled.

Upward Mobility

It was quite obvious to me that here was a

young fellow who ought to write, who, indeed
would write, so the sooner he got to it the
better. One would have to find some way for
him. . . .And, before he had seen my office,

198

he had made up his mind that I was the person
to effect that translation. But the office
had given him a bad shock. ‘It hadn't seemed
the proper frame for a person with influence,
wealth, and the acquaintance of the titled.
His own acquaintance with the world had been
very limited and be imagined an office, to be
reassuring, must resemble the office of the
colliery company for which his father worked--
the handsomest, brick and shining granite
building in the valley, with counters and
swing-doors and brass and the clink of coins
unceasing on the air.

Ford Madox Ford

I would like to begin this discussion of Lawrence by
focusing on a brief narrative that depicts Lawrence's
inscription into the institution of literature and into the
modernist canon. This encounter between Lawrence and Ford
written by Ford represents a crucial moment, one that, if
Ford was accurate, sheds light on why Lawrence did not become1
a socially engaged writer and why he did not follow in a

distinctly naturalist tradition.

On his arrival at Ford's office, we find a youthful
Lawrence preoccupied with aesthetic production and its
relationship to production of money. Before meeting
Lawrence, Ford was somewhat nonplused by Lawrence's class
position, and what he represented--to Ford and to culture in
general. Ford was fascinated with Lawrence, not only because
of Lawrence's writing, but because he wrote about working-
class communities. For example, Ford discusses what he found

to be the inventiveness and immediacy of the image in the

199

opening passage of "The Odour of Chrysanthemums," produced
in a style that avoided "the tiresome thing called
descriptive nature, of which the English writer as a rule is
so lugubriously lavish. . . ."7 To Ford, Lawrence
represented the "other half" of culture, but as he also
states, given the strangeness of Lawrence's class-position
"though we might as well have said the other ninety nine
hundredths" of culture. Ford seems to be saying that he had
successfully discovered someone culturally other, someone
genuinely from the working class who could crack the code of
bourgeois aesthetics with his vivid impressionism and his
naturalistic but highly mimetic renderings of working-class
life. Lawrence thus possessed a revitalizing style sought
after by the modernist editor, something new, but something
that editors had not seen much of, given his working-class
background. Ford situates Lawrence's class position,
translating into a new moment for literary productiOn.

And it is to be remembered that, in the early

decades of this century, we enormously wanted

authentic projections of that type of life

which hitherto had gone quite unvoiced. We

had Gissing, and to a certain degree Messrs.

H.G Wells and Arnold Bennett, and still more a

writer called Mark Rutherford. . . .But they

all wrote--with more or less seriousness--of

the "lower middle" classes. The completely

different race of the artisan--and it was a

race as sharply divided from the ruling or

even the mere white-collar classes as was the

Negro from the gentry of Virginia--the

completely differnt class of the artisan, the

industrialist and the unskilled laborer was

completely unvoiced and unknown. Central

Africa and its tribes were better known and
the tombs of the Pharaohs more explored than

200

our own Potteries and Black Country.8

Ford perhaps idealizes the discovery of Lawrence as if
in his own style of author hunting, he might very well have bagged a
Ford's investment in Lawrence's 'otherness' here points to

his objectification of Lawrence's working-class narrative.
This is evident in Ford's initial response to Lawrence. Ford

views Lawrence's work as that of a decontextualized icon,

like it hangs on a wall, divorced from the origincal community
in which it was produced. It must be admitted, however.
that Ford later had visited Lawrence's community of Eastwood.
Here, Ford's reliance on anthropological metaphors to produce
an ironic sense of distance exaggerates the production of
cultural difference evoked through the spurious and
pejorative equivalences linking race and class as biological
types. It is as if Ford unconsciously adopts a kind of
Spencerian voice in describing his close encounter with a
working-class writer. Cautious about his distance, as Well
as his proximity to Lawrence, Ford stresses his egalitarian
but nevertheless uncomfortable attitude toward this alien
being. "For myself I have always automatically regarded
every human being as my equal . . . But a working man was so
unfamiliar as a proposition that I did not know how to bring
it off."lg But as Ford describes his first meeting with
Lawrence, the class-tension and in some ways the class-
resentment expressed by Lawrence in Ford's reported dialogue
with him, helps to explain Ford's defensiveness. When

Lawrence meets Ford, differences in class and taste mark the

201

scene. Ford's artful recollection dramatizes his encounter
with Lawrence.

Then he raised his sardonic eyes to mine and

said: "That's all very well. But it doesn't

look like a place in which one would make
money."

I said with a sort of pained gladness that one
had to put on for that sort of speech:
"Oh, we don't make money here. We spend it."
And he answered with a deep seriousness:
"That's just it. The room may be all right
for your private tastes. . . which aren't
mine, though that does not matter. But it
isn't one to inspire confidence in creditors.
Or contributors." 1
In Ford's reconstruction of this exchange, which he
says he "found disturbing," the subject of aesthetic
production and money dominates the scene similar to the way
Lawrence's treatment of money forms a crucial role in some of:
his earlier narratives. For example, we might consider the
transformative status of a single coin in a short story such
as "Strike Pay." This also takes place as money serves to
regulate the Morel family's health in Sons and Lovers.
Ford appears irritated that Lawrence is concerned with the
appearance of the office, as a site where stories are
brokered as commodities. Furthermore, it is interesting that
the modernist Ford reconstructs the dialogue the way he does.
Would other figures of the time-~those not from the working
class--make comments about Ford's office? Would Ford

remember such details with other writers? Ford finds the

encounter "disturbing," but is so taken with Lawrence's

202

talents that he overlooks Lawrence's class deficiencies.
Ford suggested that Lawrence might do best to stick to a kind
of naturalist tradition, something suitable to his class-
position.
I was inclined to prescribe to him a

course of workingman novels, the idea of which

he found oppressive. He wanted to try his

hand at something more romantic and with more

polished marble and gold and tilted people

among its furnishings regarding aesthetic

production.

I obviously could not blame him for

that. A young man bought up in his

circumstances would be less than human if he

was not determined to have for himself two

thousand a year and footmen and the intimacy

of lords and, particularly, ladies. And you

cannot make good novelists out of men who are

less than human. They'wiTl not understand the

mainsprings of humanity.

Ford's point here is to suggest how desperate the young;
Lawrence was, as he needed money and was confronting it.
'Ford sounds uncomfortable, even a little bitter over the
subject of Lawrence. Lawrence seems to have disturbed Ford;
he appears to have committed an act of transgression. As
Ford puts it, his Office did not look like a place where
money is made. Ford then rationalizes Lawrence's situation
as a working—class writer, desperate to make money, but also
desperate to climb upward into the metropolitan community.
It is understandable, then, why Lawrence would reject Ford's
suggestion that he write working-man's novels. Such novels,

to Lawrence would not have captured what Ford metaphorically

refers to as the "mainsprings of humanity." For Lawrence,

203

these issues would be worked out in his deployment of realist

form, in a way that dramatized conflicts within culture.
The Problem of Realism in Sons and Lovers

The ideological tensions engendered in Lawrence's early
narrative, particularly, in Sons and Lovers, can be
understood in relation to Lawrence's desire to move upward in
culture as a writer, but also, I think, should be understood
in the context of various forms of naturalism. Sons and
Lovers is indeed a realist novel, but its realism is
contingent upon the politics of a cultural dialogic that
incorporates the politics of naturalism. I will demonstrate
this in relation to significant biographical information that
reveals how Lawrence shaped his early aesthetic and social

ideology.

I would like to begin this discussion by asking a3

question about the realism of Sons and Lovers.13 If

 

Lawrence's autobiographical Bildungsroman is indeed a realist
work, then do critical assessments of realism lead to
totalizing conclusions about its aesthetic ideology? It is
more than clear that Lawrence was attempting to employ
realist procedures that dramatized the condition of the post-
romantic artist struggling in the limited environment of his
working-class community. While this community offered
Lawrence the necessary raw material for his work, the mining

village could offer little compensation to the artist who

204

found himself caught between the repetitive rhythms of the
mining world and the liberating forces of metropolitan
culture. Hailed by the latter, Lawrence would enter this
unfamiliar but more promising world, but only through great

difficulty.

Lawrence's outright rejection of the radical discourse
of Labor and his eventual turn toward a radical discourse of
the subject might be viewed as a reactionary move. But
Lawrence works through the tensions produced between
oppositional voices in early works like Sons and Lovers.

Specifically, Sons and Lovers reveals that Lawrence's

 

rejection of Labor and his representation of the aesthetic
producer (Paul Morel) is deeply conflicted as it subordinates
oppositional discourse by propping up naturalistic
assumptions about the subject that are mediated by the
disCourse of dominant naturalism. What I would like to
demonstrate is that Lawrence's representation of Paul Morel's
development as an aesthetic producer actually produces more
than an aesthetic ideology of realism. Lawrence enacts a
dialogical confrontation that is resolved through narrative
force, or through a kind of rhetorical violence in which

dominant naturalism overwhelms oppositional naturalism.

On one hand, Lawrence's organicist voice in Sons and
Lovers rejects the discourse of organized labor and

socialism through his insistence on the inherent power of

205

subjective action (agency) within an organic social order.
This view upholds the idea that the individual Can see
through and therefore transcend the limiting factors of the
social environment. This is a view that would reject the
central tenets of literary naturalism. On the other hand,

the narrative of Sons and Lovers generates a critique of

 

culture that, in some respects, cuts deeper than the
positions of Labor at the time. The community enacts or
enforces a limitation of aesthetic consciousness, cornering
the aesthetic producer--in this case, Paul Morel--who assumes
the status of a liminal figure, a subject at the margins of
the working-community and at the margins of bourgeois
culture. In this sense naturalism is operative as there are
aspects of the community that the subject cannot transcend.
Paul Morel is caught between these contradictory social

forces.

On still-another level of ideological tension,
Lawrence's response to the inherent paternalism of Labor

conflicts Sons and Lovers in a double sense. Significant

 

women (Mrs. Morel, Clara Dawes) express an alignment with
oppositional naturalism and Labor more so than men. In light
of the currents of radicalism that circulated in the mining
community, Lawrence denies the father figure an oppositional
voice; instead Walter Morel is the brute subject of Labor,
more of a figure in a traditional naturalist sense of the

word than he is anything else. The under-world of the mine

206

shapes his behavior, even his physiognomy Walter Morel's
inability to speak about Labor programs has to be seen as

symptomatic of Lawrence's rejection of Labor in general.

Paul Morel's distance from his father and his
development as an aesthetic producer is as much an
ideological struggle, then, as it is a psychological
struggle. Lawrence thus authorizes his subject-position
against dominant culture, but also against the doctrinaire
aspects of oppositional discourse. But before I look at the
narrative incidents that evoke Lawrence's problematic
relationship to naturalism and oppositional naturalism
(something that I take up in Chapter 8) it is necessary to
examine some biographical material that bears this out, if

only in a tangential sense.

A Possible Context for the Production of Sons and Lovers

 

It has been argued that in his early years Lawrence was
attempted to work towards a kind of naturalism, both
philosophic and literary. How we characterize Lawrence's
relationship to naturalism--either as oppositional or
dominant--will remain problematic. What we can safely say,
however, is that Lawrence incorporates various aspects of the
discourse of naturalism into his early writing. Emile
Delavenay has illustrated Lawrence's relationship to oppositional
naturalism in his study of Lawrence and the radical

philosopher Edward Carpenter. Although it is not certain

207

whether or not Lawrence had been in direct contact with
Carpenter, Lawrence had more than likely read Carpenter ad
had been exposed to his ideas. Carpenter theorized a
radicalism that derived its force from the discourse of
naturalism.l4 Daniel Schneider echoes the importance of
Delaveney's study saying, "Lawrence's debt to the climate of
opinion in the Midlands at the turn of the century cannot be
overemphasized."ls As Schneider notes Lawrence's was
passionately concerned with currents in feminism and
socialism, and the opening of the door to a "freer wider
life."16 But the metaphor of debt pushes Lawrence's exchange
with radical currents too far to the side of

"influence." I would suggest that Lawrence was involved in a
transactional relationship with oppositional ideologies.
These transactions can be better understood by briefly
examining_how the early Lawrence negotiated the politics of
'naturalism through his own ambitions and his concerns with
his fiction. Lawrence's transactions with naturalism and

radical thought affect the realist position of Sons and

 

Lovers. But it must be noted that realism, for Lawrence is a
strategy of representation that shatters the transparency of
the (literary) naturalist project of detached description.
Therefore, as Graham Holderness has demonstrated realism in

Sons and Lovers attempts to structure a balance between

 

the outer reality of nature and the interiorization of

experience.17

208

Lawrence problematizes the usage of realism in Sons and

 

.Lovers with a naturalist causality that implies connections
between the industrial environment and the fate of the
subject who is not strong enough to stand up against its
debilitating effects. In the firSt part of Sons and Lovers,
which is also the most conventionally naturalist part, when
Paul Morel begins work as Jordan's--a shop that makes
fittings for false body parts--Lawrence characterizes Paul's
drudgery and his general unhappiness as an unhealthy effect
of the work—world. Lawrence refers to Paul as a "prisoner of
industry." But if Paul is a prisoner, his brother William is
condemned by industry. William is figuratively and
literally done in by the gears of commerce in the
metropolitan context of London. But if industrial culture is
seen as oppressive, limited, and stifling for the individual,;
there is, on an aesthetic level, a way of realizing how a
subject can provide a space and work against the reified
structures of industrial culture. (This is indeed a formal
aspect of the novel's realism.) Paul therefore sees through
things, sees their surface value and also understands the living
system underneath appearance. Paul possesses a kind of
double-sided knowledge, one that focuses on the surface of
things, but also on an underlying system. Lawrence therefore
opens up a narrative space in which he can work through the
problems of naturalist representation that conflict the

realist novel.

209

This problem of representation in Sons and Lovers also

 

shapes Lawrence's depiction of work. If work takes place
among individuals in a positive, communal form, it is
represented in the warm, pastoral overtones through which
Lawrence romanticizes farm labor.* Or, in another context, in
the work-place at Jordan's, labor is seen as tolerable when
Paul becomes part of a community with the women who work in
the shop. However, such depictions of work are contrasted
with scenes that reveal conflicts or struggles in the work-
place. These scenes evoke the underlying ideological

tensions of Sons and Lovers. Paul generally does not work

 

 

well with other men; he appears to be on distant terms with
other male workers--those who might be inclined toward the
more radical programs of Labor. Lawrence cannot embrace a
specific discourse that addresses the problem of work in
culture-:that is, as something to be addressed directly by

'the'narrative.

In contrast to the way writers in the Labor movement
characterized the subject of labor, Lawrence has a tendency
to view the subject of labor as part of layered, organic
strata whose dense archaeology situates workers below the
liminal point of political consciousness, subjecting them to
the brute stimulus responses of the body. As mentioned
earlier, they are silenced politically--Walter Morel is
perhaps the most glaring example. If we look at the young

Lawrence's responses to labor and to local authorities, we

 

210
can more specifically contextualize Lawrence's response.

Lawrence's Early Responses to Radical Discourse and the
Problem of Culture

Letters written by Lawrence in 1907 to a local cleric,
a Reverend Robert Reid, while Lawrence was a student at
Nottingham University of the same year, document Lawrence's
concern with the ideological problems inherent in the

ideological (institutional) conflicts embedded in Sons and

 

Lovers. The letter, which I will quote at length, reveals
how Lawrence expresses an individualist position, embracing
Spencer's evolutionary philosophy, while simultaneously

rejecting radical proposals.

Lawrence identifies his reading material as texts that
highlight confrontations between social philosophy,
evolutionary theory, and theology. .In the very act of
writing this letter to a memberfof thelocal clergy, Lawrence
prefigures the oedipal conflicts with paternal voices that
his early narratives will encode with much more dramatic
force. By disputing or confronting the claims of clerical
authority, Lawrence displaces his anger and his inability to
communicate with his own father and addresses the paternal
figure in local religious authority. Lawrence informs the
Reverend Reid that he is reading Darwin, Herbert Spencer,
Renan, and Robert Blatchford, among others. The major themes
of these texts revolve around the issue of philosophical

naturalism. In a mining village in the north, these writers

211

would shake the bedrock of any traditional upbringing, much
less that of Lawrence's. Therefore, as the young Lawrence
considers the potential revolutionary value of these
evolutionary and polemical writings, he asks a very expected
question. In a subdued, self-effacing posture Lawrence
writes, "And I would like to know, because I am absolutely
ignorant, what is precisely the orthodox attitude--or say the
attitude of the nonconformist Churches--to such questions as
Evolution, with that of the Origin of Sin and Heaven and

Hell."18

It would not take long for Lawrence to formulate an
answer to his own question. Later, in December of the same
year, he becomes well informed on the matter. By this time,
however, Lawrence is convinced that the individual is the
sole producer of theological value. In aneducated and
humanistic tones—one close to the 'rationalist'-position of
anarchists, and certainly not far from the attitudes Of
various socialists of the time--Lawrence responds that
subjects such as faith, truth, religious conversion, and the
contradictions between religious doctrine and social
conditions are issues that should be resolved through the
values generated within subjective experience, and not from
external sources such as those offered by radical reformists

or those proffered by traditional orthodoxy.

The young Lawrence desires egress from restrictive

212

religious values. But as the letter makes clear, he does not
want to trap himself in a solution that appears formulaic or
devised along the lines of social reform. Somewhere in the
scheme of things the subject can find his own path, without
the aid of the community. As Lawrence replies to Reid, we
find confirmation of this position:

A man has no religion who has not slowly and

painfully gathered one together, adding to it,

shaping it; and one's religion is never

complete and final, it seems, but must always

be undergoing modification. So I contend that

true Socialism is religion; that honest,

fervent politics are religion, that whatever a

man will labour for earnestly an? in some

measure unselfishly is religion. 9
The reference to socialism here is a response specifically
directed toward Robert Blatchford's God and hy Neighbor, a
book Lawrence describes as a "vulgar attack" on

2g Clearly, Lawrence has no use for a critique

Christianity.
of Christianity that doubles as a political pamphlet.
Lawrence's emphasis that the development of "one's religion"
is a slow and painful (subjective) project bears this out.
But in his rejection of Blatchford, Lawrence nevertheless

affirms a notion of community (true socialism via inter-

subjective lived relations).

In some respects Lawrence desires a community in which
traditional values can be realized: honest, fervent
politics, earnestness, unselfish virtue. This

may sound like an idealized version of Carlyle, but on the

 

213

other hand Lawrence prefigures a version of what Raymond
Williams posits in his notion of structures of feeling, or
aspects of lived experience of a community "to which the
fixed [institutional and analytic] forms do not speak at all,
which indeed they do not recognize."21 Moreover, if we cross
out the word religion and substitute for it "social
consciousness" we realize what Lawrence implies: that
discourse shapes the subject's world-view--that one's subject
position, and the social system that one lives in, is always

subsumed within a network of ideological relations.

Lawrence desires the establishment of an organic
community; but such a community does not necessarily have to
be seen as a utopian gesture. A sense of community partakes
of various structures of labor, values, belief systems.
Therefore whatever men might labor for-~whatever comprises
individual desires and social goals--is also, by nature, part
of an intricate web of socially determined relationships. As
I suggest in the next chapter Lawrence is perhaps not
all that ideologically distant from the young Marx of the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts; he affirms the
capacity of the individual, while sincerely desiring a sense

of community that transcends the present-day order of things.

The desire for subjective authenticity, a hallmark of
Lawrence's thought, is clearly signaled in Lawrence's letter
to Reverend Reid. But such a belief seems also to approach

the ideas expressed in Herbert Spencer's First Principles.

 

 

214

The fact that Lawrence names Spencer as one of his influences

in these letters is significant for a reading of Sons and

 

Lovers. As we have seen before in the case of Tressell and
other writers, Spencer's cultural influence is present in
both conservative and radical philosophy on the issue of
individualism and collectivism. Many of the attitudes and

values in Sons and Lovers seem to be derived from Spencer's

 

social philosophy. Lawrence's early work incorporates
individual struggle, generational change, and the delicate
relationship between the subject and the community. All of
these concerns might be rooted in a romantic and humanist
heritage, but more specifically they are linked to local

currents in evolutionary and naturalist ideology.

In First Principles, Spencer addresses the vital

 

elements of religion that depict traditional theology as an
attempt to deal with an ultimate mystery. Spencer, however,
is more concerned with the relationship between science and
religion. Spencer cannot maintain traditional beliefs but
neither can he dispense with the ethics of the Christian
tradition. Similarly, the young Lawrence is concerned with
these problems. For Lawrence, such ultimate mysteries are
beyond comprehension; religious concepts, in light of science
and new developments in social evolution and philosophy, must

be negotiated by the individual subject.

Lawrence's concerns with individualism and religious

215

authority thus point to the authorial ideology that informs

the content of Sons and Lovers. In the following passage

 

from Lawrence's letter to the Reverend Reid, he assumes the
position of the radical humanist social critic. Lawrence
cannot reconcile official versions of religion with existing
social conditions, and in a Carlylian voice protests what he
sees as a society of excess and poverty that breeds its own

hypocrisy in spite of its official doctrine.

'It cannot be'--I said to myself 'that a
pitiful, omnipotent Christ died nineteen
hundred years ago to save these people from
this and yet here they are.‘ Women with
child--so many are in that condition in the
slums--bruised, drunk, with breasts half bare.
It is not compatible with the idea of an
Omnipotent, pitying Divine. And how, too,
shall I reconcile a belief in a personal God.
I cannot be a materialist--but Oh, how is it
possible that a God who speaks to all hearts
can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious
luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy
debauchery--such suffering, such dreadful
suffering-~and shall the short years of
Christ's mission atone for it all?

 

 

 

In the subject-position of the angry young social
critic Lawrence then draws upon evolutionary and biological
metaphors to express a quasi-reformist position. Lawrence
throws the determinist voice of Spencer right into the face
of official religion, while simultaneously rejecting radical
proposals:

But sir, there must at least be a harmony of
facts before a hypothesis can be framed.
Cosmic harmony there is--a Cosmic God I can

therefore believe in. But where is the human
harmony, where the balance, the order, the

216

'indestructibility of matter' in humanity? [.
. .] Men--some seem to be born and ruthlessly
destroyed; the bacteria are created and
nurtured on Man, to his horrible suffering. Oh
for a God-idea I must have harmony—-unity of
design. Such design there may be for the
race--but for the individual, the often
wretched individual?

I care not for Blatchford or for anybody. I
do not wage war against Christianity--I do not
hate it--but these questions will not be
answered, and for the present my religion is
the lessening, in some pitiful moiety, the
great human discrepancies.

I have tried to write you honestly--th§§ is
the first time I have revealed myself.

In purporting to 'reveal himself,’ Lawrence
appropriates the Spencerian voice of evolutionary discourse
in order to refute the authority of the local clergy as well
as the radical challenge offered by Blatchford. But Lawrence
does not reveal himself as much as he speaks through the
voice of Spencer. The young Lawrence's denial of traditional
Christianity, his use of biological metaphors to explain the
cosmological status of man, and his insistence on harmonious

design within the universe, enacts a virtual recitation of

Spencer's First Principles. Lawrence admits that he writes

 

from the perspective of youthful arrogance. His rejection of
Blatchford's radical thought echoes Spencer's attack on the
SDF and other radical factions, including the Fabians. As I
will demonstrate later, Lawrence specifically encodes this
discursive drama in Sons and Lovers, employing the culturally

dominant Spencerian voice to silence oppositional discourse.

 

 

217

Spencer's evolutionary organicism, as we have seen in
the case of Tressell, justified the organicist, cooperative
efforts of organized labor, guild cooperatives, and even some
socialist groups. And as we know all too well, Spencer
forcefully expressed the individualist, competitive side of
the public sphere that saw intra-species competition as a
model for "natural" human relationships, along with a
mystification of the competitive forces that ran the
marketplace. This side of Spencer, which eventually became
the most vocal, argued that all interventionist solutions
inevitably fail to rescue the social order from its perils,
because state-induced solutions cannot affect the inner
nature of each flawed individual; instead, regulations and
interventions are little more than superficial dressings:
even though the wound may heal, the infection is still
present and the body--individual or social--will be

progressively debilitated.

In Spencer's First Principles, where he constructs his

 

"Law of Evolution," Spencer explains that the idea of
progress is not a simple transformation; such an "ordinary
idea of Progress is in great measure erroneous. It takes in
not so much the reality as its accompaniments--not so much
the substance as the shadow" (emphasis mine).24 What
Produces real change in social structures is what lies below

the surface:

That progress in intelligence seen during the

218

growth of the child into the man, or the

savage into the philosopher, is commonly

regarded as consisting in the greater number

of facts known and laws understood; whereas

the actual progress consists in those internal

modifications of which this figcreased

knowledge is the expression.
The sentiment here is not all that different from the later,
more polemical Spencer, who places the blame for social ills
on the unemployed and impoverished for possessing an inferior

moral nature; in other words, those undeveloped subjects

within the working classes.

In tacit agreement with Spencer, Lawrence seems to be
suggesting that there is a quasi-teleological principle at
work in the individual and the social system, and that those
who "deny the god in themselves"-—such as Walter Morel--fall
by the wayside. There is a direct, ideological alliance
between the early Lawrence and the Spencer of Tlheh

Principles. NA wider parallel can be seen if we consider

 

Spencer's dictum that this "law of organic evolution is the
law of all evolution." This applies across the cultural

spectrum:

Whether it be in the development of the Earth,
in the development of Life upon its surface,
in the development of Society, of Government,
of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language,
Literature, Science, Art, this same adVance
fro the simple to the complex, holds
uniformly. From the earliest traceable cosmic
changes down to the latest results of
civilization, we shall find that the
transformation of the homogenous into the
heterogeneous, is tha in which Evolution
essentially consists.

 

219

Such an all-encompassing definition of evOlution indeed
provided the framework for discursive developments in
anthropological currents of the time, especially in the
projection of Victorian society as the highest cultural
achievement in world history. It must be admitted that
Spencer's evolutionary thought had the appeal of transcending
local ideological concerns, and thus provided a master
narrative that not only revealed the workings of nature and
culture, but also provided a teleological master narrative.
Hence, we can see its appeal to the young Lawrence looking
for a way to refute religious dogma without invoking radical
social solutions. ‘More than anything else this demonstrates
that Spencer's influence on social theory was so pervasive
and influential at the time that dominant anthropological

conceptions of the era were inevitably Spencerian. 27

Chapter 8

Principled Subjects: Naturalism, Ideology, and Social
Discourse in Sons and Lovers

 

Man is directly a natural being. As a natural
being and as a living natural being he is on
the one hand endowed with natural powers of
life--he is an active natural being. These
forces exist in him as tendencies and
abilities--as instincts. On the other hand,
as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective
being, he is a suffering, conditioned and
limited creature, like animals and plants.
That is to say, the objects of his instincts
exist outside him, as objects independent of
him; yet these objects are objects that he
needs--essential objects, indispensable to the
manifestation and confirmation of his
essential powers.

Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts eh 1844*

 

 

A state of universal brotherhood is so
tempting an imagination, and the existing
state of strife is so full of miseries, that
endeavors to escape from the last and enter
into the first are quite natural—-inevitable
even. Prompted by consciousness of the
grievous inequalities of conditions around,
those who suffer and those who sympathize with
them, seek to found what they think an
equitable social system. . . .After
contemplating the useless being who now
lounges in club-rooms and now rambles through
game preserves, the weary artisan may well
curse a state of things in which pleasure
varies inversely as desert; and may well be
vehement in his demand for another form of
society.

Herbert Spencer, "Labour in Industrial
Society," from The Principles eh Sociology, 18962

 

 

The above mentioned passages here point to the issues

220

that partially characterize an oppositional naturalism. For
Marx, the "suffering, limited and conditioned"aspects of
humanity have to be realized in order to transcend oppressive
conditions and activate human potential more fully That is
not to say that Marx is a naturalist, but that his early work
incorporates naturalism. For Spencer it is "quite natural"
to wish to escape from the "grievous inequalities of
conditions around." Quite natural, but useless, Spencer
would argue. And it is in this sense that Spencer upholds a
dominant "narrow" version of (evolutionary, philosophical)

naturalism that Labor vehemently contested.

In a very broad sense, oppositional writers, as I have
argued, implicitly and explicitly articulated "naturalist"
implications of social change. Oppositional writers employed;
this diverse discourse of naturalism in order to transform
public consciousness. Spencer might have seen these efforts
as misguided, utopian, and injurious to the overall health of
the social body; but Spencer positioned his own discourse, as
we have seen earlier, in a way that could not fully grasp the

degradation of life.

Lawrence, especially the early Lawrence, occupies a
pivotal position between these dominant and emergent
ideologies--somewhere between the early Marx and the later
Spencer--that express values of naturalism. Lawrence could
not have read the early Marx because these texts were not

accessible to him. Lawrence's early writing, however,

221

expresses a concern with the needs of the subject as a
"suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals
and plants." In some respects, it might be argued that
Lawrence mirrors the strategies of Labor in his critique of
culture. Yet Lawrence appears to side with Spencer's
assertion that the establishment of a new order "is so
tempting an imagination" that its realization cannot be
achieved. At least this is what he have observed about
Lawrence in the last chapter, in which the young Lawrence
adopts a Spencerian tone toward social matters. It is

through a reading of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's most

 

autobiographical novel, that I would like to conclude this
study with. As I have indicated earlier, there is a
dialogism of naturalism at work in Lawrence. The fact that
Lawrence had read Spencer, Blatchford and other writers tells
us little, if the way his narratives re-construct the
relationship between history and ideology does not allow for

a more dialogic understanding of naturalism.

In the production of his early narrative Lawrence
appears to be "hailed" or "interpellated" in an Althusserian
sense by forms of dominant naturalism, but any reading of

Sons and Lovers ultimately demands that the reader read more

4

 

closely. Sons and Lovers implicitly refutes oppositional

 

naturalism, and thus calls for a reading that closely
examines the modes in which the novel elicits ideological

positions within its dialogic structure. I would like to say

222

 

that we can employ an Althusserian critique of Sons and
Lovers in a weak sense and a dialogic reading in a stronger
sense. What I will do in this reading is view Lawrence's
dialogues closely, and show how Lawrence positions subjects
in relation to dominant naturalism, oppositional naturalism,

and the subject of labor.

Women and Naturalism in Sons and Lovers

 

In Sons and Lovers what Paul Morel reads during his

 

youthful aestheticization of the world is parallel to
Lawrence's own literary progression in the working-class,
mining community of Eastwood.' As I suggested in the
previous chapter, Lawrence's ideological transactions with
these texts avoids the reductive category of "influence," as

the narrator of Sons and Lovers informs the reader as to what

 

Paul is reading or what stage of intellectual development he
is in. Therefore, the narrative of Paul Morel's aesthetic
development establishes an intertextual battle between
oppositional naturalism--in the discourse of labor and in
various socialist ideas--and dominant naturalism--a
valorization of the individual subject within an organic

conception of the social order.

Paul Morel also sees himself as the subject of
aesthetic production in terms of the post-romantic or
modernist artist as the subject who must exile himself from

the community. As Paul escapes the monotonous confines of'

223

Bestwood, he also finds social refuge and aesthetic
compensation as an artist, a painter, whose work brings him
an uncertain future at the close of the novel. But Paul's
aesthetic development entails a series of ideological
conflicts with other subjects in the community. Early in

Sons and Lovers, it can be seen that Lawrence subordinates

 

oppositional discourse directed toward the role of women and
the family, in exchange for an individualist position that
idealizes the artist as one who sees through things, and,
consequently, resists seeing the social nature of the

aesthetic work.

The social facts of Paul Morel's life in Bestwood offer
no possibility of aesthetic self—realization, if Paul were to
remain within the mining community. Trapped in the position
of a clerk, who aspires to become an artist, Paul reads
widely, engages in dialogues, and contemplates the aesthetic
values of life and nature, art and reality. Eventually he is
forced either to remain in the community, or, after the death
of his mother, leave altogether. But Paul's transformation
is not a distanced act of contemplation. He often exerts
symbolic violence toward political discourse that threatens
either an individualist ethos or the idea of aesthetic

autonomy.

In Sons and Lovers, symbolic attacks against

 

oppositional positions do not reveal Lawrence as a Spencerian

224

 

ideologue in any specifically identifiable way, but the
irreducible traces of dominant naturalism occulted from
Spencer's social philosophy materialize at distinct points in
the narrative, especially in the contexts of Paul's
relationships with women (Miriam, his mother, and Clara
Dawes). How these ideological positions are voiced (or
unvoiced) in the novel is crucial for a cultural re-

construction of Sons and Lovers and its implicit rejection of

 

oppositional discourse. Lawrence fashions Paul's
subjectivity against hostile odds. Lawrence thus produces an
authorization of Paul against the community. But in
inscribing the subject of Paul Morel, he refuses to
acknowledge the social voices that constitute his own
subjectivity, save for the fact that they are "stages" to be
worked through. Hence, Paul views himself as self-subjected
or self-constructed through this struggle; yet he denies the
same possibility for others, and identifies others in the
novel as culturally limited, Or he labels them, as in the
case of the feminist-socialist Clara Dawes, as representing

positions that they cannot transcend.

As we have seen earlier, Lawrence's implicit refusal to
acknowledge the affirmative role of community in subject
formation is well documented in his letter to the Reverend

Reid. In Sons and Lovers, however, Paul refuses to engage in

 

debates with local authority figures. Lawrence channels

these problems of cultural and aesthetic authority onto

225

dialogues in the novel that center on ideas such as nature,
art, and theology. Ironically, Paul does not engage in
dialogue with significant male figures in the cOmmunity.
Walter Morel's semi-literate, bruteness prevents political
discussions. Labor issues, and local politics, with few
exceptions, are exempted from dialogues between men in §22§

and Lovers. However, Paul's father and his work—mates are

 

very articulate when it comes to doling out the week's wages;
Paul's father is also quite dexterous and inventive when he
fixes things in the house. But on the issue of politics or

working conditions he is silent.

Paul does not engage in political discussions with his
father. Lawrence figuratively prevents Paul from having
significant polemical discussions with other men in the
community as well. As a rule, Paul generally avoids

politics. In the few instances in Sons and Lovers when

 

examples of political discussions are mentioned in the
narrative, they are reported as events that take place off-
stage, so to speak. Paul's direct speech--as political
discourse--never really reaches the intensity of Lawrence's
political concerns apparent in his letters on the subject of
politics and religion. It is safe to say that none of Paul's
discussions in the novel approximate the passionate intensity
Lawrence acts out over religion and politics in his letters.
Lawrence over-idealizes the role of the artist, in relation

to his life, as a figure who rises above politics.

226

Lawrence portrays Paul's discussions with other men in
the community as being severely limited. For example,
Miriam's brother Edgar, "a rationalist, who was curious and
had a sort of scientific interest in life"(l95) never shares
the discourse of rationalism with anyone. Paul and Edgar
spend more time learning songs than they do talking politics.
Neither does Paul's speech directly engage the reader in any
of the debates at Willey farm, even though discussions there
revolve around some of most significant issues of the day:
"all the men. . .had bitter debates on the
nationalizing of the land and similar problems"(l95). The
narrator tells us that Paul participates in these
discussions, but Paul's politics are conveniently displaced
to his mother's tongue and not yet defined for himself:

"Paul had already heard his mother's views, and as these were

as yet his own, he argued for her'(195) (emphasis mine).

Instead of representing the direct speech of these
discussions, Paul establishes his basic ideas toward life,
religion and politics in dialogues with Miriam. But the
question had to be asked: Why Miriam? Why not other men in
the community who would be more disposed to discuss
theological and political matters? Lawrence denies Paul
participation in a male community of political discourse.
Instead, Paul's ideas, which could have been worked out in
debates with other men in the community, are figuratively

"thrown at" Miriam. Miriam stands in as the figure who

227

absorbs Paul's assertions about politics, theology and art.
But Miriam submissively declines to contest Paul's assertions
about life; she dutifully listens to his ideas on art; and
she masochistically subjects herself to his diatribes against
religion. Unlike Mrs. Morel and Clara Dawes, Miriam appears
to register at a degree-zero level of social and political
discourse: "After all," she said within herself, "If the
land were nationalized, Edgar and Paul and I would be just
the same"(l95). Miriam is the sensuous embodiment of a
spiritualized organicism--"Anthropomorphic as she was, she
stimulated him into appreciating things thus, and they lived
for her"(l84-85). Against Miriam's sensuous, ideological
passivity, Paul's subjectivity grows in value, as she
becomes the "threshing floor" of his ideas. Through this
uneven exchange, Paul articulates a more heightened sense of
subjective authority. However, Paul's emergent authority in
the novel derives from his working through the socio-
theological conflicts evident in the young Lawrence's
letters; but these conflicts are absent in the narrative of

Sons and Lovers. The rage, despair, and helplessness that

 

Paul experiences in the novel result from the actual social
conflict that Lawrence refuses to inscribe in his
autobiographical novel. This refusal, however, is the
unconscious element of social symbolism, the repressed aspect
of Lawrence's authorial ideology, something that he would act

out dialogically throughout his writing life.

228

 

In Sons and Lovers, therefore Lawrence represses actual
conflicts with local social authority, and deflects these
conflicts off of the passive body of Miriam. But he does
this at the expense of Miriam's subjectivity. Paul projects
onto Miriam his own desire to restrict the other's
subjectivity, and projects that desire as a restrictive gaze
or "spell" that limits his own sense of subjectivity. The
"spell" that Miriam exerts over Paul is thus the sublimated
power of an ideological authority that he sees as a
repressive kind of agency in the concrete expressions of the
local clergy. As Paul struggles with ideas he cannot yet
define for himself, he aggressively tests them on the
anthropomorphic Miriam:

He was more or less under her [Miriam's] spell

again. As usual they were discussing the

sermon. He was setting full sail toward an

Agnosticism, but such a religious Agnosticism

'thathiriam-did not suffer-so badly.i’They.

were at the Renan "Vie de Jesus" stage.

Miriam was the threshing-floor on which he

threshed out all his beliefs. While he

trampled his ideas upon her soul, the truth

came out for him. She alone was his threshing

floor. She alone helped him toward

realization. Almost impassive, she submitted

to his argument and expounding. And somehow,

because of her, he gradually realized where he

was wrong. And what he realized, she

realized. (280) (brackets mine)

Through this mapping of Paul's textual and metaphysical
trajectory, Lawrence provides the illusory impression that he

is dramatizing the process of consciousness-formation as

dialogical interaction and ideological production. But the

229

 

process of this violent drama is stage-play rather than dialogic
interaction. As Paul develops his aesthetic ideology, his
monological voice effectively excludes the ideologically

passive Miriam from truly speaking, and prohibits the
possibility of a dialogic exchange. Lawrence represents

Miriam as a mirror for Paul's narcissistic triumph over an
absent textual and ideological authority, the figure of the
local political-theological father(s). The repetition of the
masculine pronouns parodies dramatic action and reveals a

voice directed elsewhere.

Even the name Miriam connotes her servile status as a

reflective surface for Paul's narcissistic subject-formation.
We see this if we break down the simple sound components of
the name Miriam. The first syllable "mir" suggests mirror,
with a hard workingrclass r sound, "mirrer;" the second
.syllable,fthe'miapfunctions.asithe‘subjectiver"I"’which'is
conjoined with the last syllable, the "am." All in all, the
name Miriam connotes the sound equivalent of mirror-I-am (for

Paul).

It will not be until Paul's relationship with Clara
Dawes that he is forced to confront an actively political
voice. Miriam, however, is subjected to a symbolic violence
imposed on her by Lawrence's conflicted naturalism. Miriam
is metaphorically threshed for ideas. The metaphor of

threshing also suggests organic transformation. The

230

 

_ _ - --_._A.-~.__

threshing of Miriam is cast in terms of a naturalized process
of struggle. Miriam never offers resistance to Paul, and

thus symbolically absorbs the shock of Lawrence's repressed

polemic.

But this isn't the case with Mrs. Morel, whose politics
are never clearly defined, but are indirectly aligned with and
sympathetic toward the sentiments of radical movements. Paul
never openly confronts "her views," but neither he nor the
narrator ever states them precisely or presents them in the
public sphere (as opposed to what Lawrence does with the
politics of Clara Dawes). The partial silencing of Mrs.
Morel's ideological positions prevents political contagion of
the domestic body; in effect, Lawrence protects the private
sphere against the threat of the local public sphere, whose
politics he cannot countenance. In theory, Mrs. Morel's
'activity.is similar-to the discursive positions of radical
....a‘...g...“gu.s‘;g'1.55.11.“£.;a;‘.1;,.‘g.x:.1...'..a '
others who advocated progressive social change. Also, in a
very limited sense, Mrs. Morel is somewhat of a "new woman."
Mrs. Morel's politics re-produce Paul's distress over social
conflicts and eventually cause him to confront her with the
namewof-the-political-father of dominant naturalism (Herbert
Spencer). Mrs. Morel's political position, furthermore,
compflicates the development of Paul's aesthetic
iconscdousness, as much as it does his relationships. Paul

will strive toward a modernist aesthetic that focuses on a

231

heightened awareness of form, materiality, and the work's
fetishized status as a commodity--something Mrs. Morel will
not understand from her limited perspective. Therefore, the
ideological distance between the son as an artist who
distances himself from the community and his mother as a
socially progressive member of women's guilds is marked by a
conflicted attitude toward oppositional discourse and
dominant naturalism. Hence, things are even more conflicted
when a lover, Miriam, complicates the politics of Paul and

Mrs. Morel's relationship.

Mrs. Morel's guild activities are an instance of how
the paternal voice of Labor is culturally sublimated to the
feminine voice. However, her involvement in this group is
discussed from a distance; the reader doesn't know what she's_
saying in these meetings, or even how she's saying it, only
that she writes papers to be delivered. Early in the novel
(Mrs. MOrel's participation in the guild society is portrayed
reverently, with respect for her entrance into the public
sphere, and her participation in public life outside of her
domestic role.

It was a little club of women attached to the Co-

operative Wholesale Society, which met on Monday
night in the long room of the Bestwood "Co-op."

The women were supposed to discuss the benefits to
be derived from co-operation and other social
questions. Sometimes Mrs. Morel read a paper. It
seemed queer to the children to see their mother,
who was always busy about the house, sitting

writing in her rapid fashion, thinking, referring to

books, and writing again. They felt for her on
such occasions the deepest respect. (66)

232

Even if the politics of the guild society opposes
Lawrence's conservative naturalism, the guild represents an
activity that threatens the father's patriarchal subject-
position. Walter Morel rudely mocks the guild as the "clat
fart shop," and as Lawrence says, ". . . from the basis of
the Guild, the women could look at their homes, at the
conditions of their own lives, and find fault. So the
colliers found the women had a new standard of their own,

rather disconcerting"(77).

Lawrence makes it clear that it is the working men who
perceive the guild societies as a threat to local,
patriarchal authority. The tone of the narrator's voice when
he discusses Mrs. Morel's activity in the women's guild, and
the reverence expressed toward it, produces a positive model
, for intellectual and/or aeSthetic activity in the public
sphere, sOmething that Paul strives to emulate, but not
identify with. In this respect, then, Mrs. Morel is as
responsible for Paul's desire to be an artist as is the
displaced oedipal anger Paul harbors toward his father.
Paul's fascination with his mother's public role assumes a
crucial role in the development of his aesthetic
consciousness. Because he moves toward the subject-position
of an artist, whose work becomes public, and is subject to
Possible ridicule by an insensitive public, Paul thus engages in an

activity that simulates his mother's public voice. Paul's

233

‘v-HFV‘W— .—- --.--.~—-—~.~~~-—

concerns about theology, and his passionate devotion to
aesthetics may repress issues of community, but mirror the
religious intensity of his mother's social engagements.
Moreover, Mrs. Morel's activities in the guild suggest a
strong political opposition to Spencer's evolutionary
naturalism, and very possibly an adherence to the kind of
mutual aid proposed by Kropotkin and others, although Mrs.
Morel is certainly not an anarchist, nor is she portrayed as

a radical by any stretch of the imagination.

But as Paul's aesthetic ideology takes a more definite
form, his unconscious political aggression towards his
mother's attitudes becomes more marked. Of course, Paul's
anger is linked to Mrs. Morel's interference in Paul's
relationships, but one of the weapons he uses against her is
his relationship to art, something she cannot understand or
really discuss With Paul in.a way that achieves the status
of fruitful dialogue. Paul's artistic success pleases his
mother, but it is also a factor that Paul uses to silence

her.

The emotional tension between Paul and his mother over
Paul's relationship with Miriam evokes an example of how this
silencing takes place. As Paul "educates" Miriam, his
absence from the family angers his mother. Moreover, Paul
unconsciously estranges his mother by informing her about
their philosophical and literary conversations. This creates

a tension not only on an emotional level, but on an

234

‘fl‘wnr ep-

ideological level, as Paul makes a point of stressing
educational and generational distance--hence, the cultural
and psychological separation from his mother heightens the
ideological friction. In one instance, Paul proudly
announces that he is teaching Miriam algebra, and even though
Lawrence implies that this is a difficult subject for the
"anthropomorphic" Miriam to comprehend, Paul's newly found
pedagogical authority has the effect of unnerving Mrs. Morel.
She replies coldly, "I hope she [Miriam] gets fat on it."
Such a reply not only signals Mrs. Morel's devouring
jealousy, but also expresses a symbolic gesture on her part
directed towards Paul and Miriam's acquisition of an abstract
language (algebra) which itself signifies a level of
education and class mobility denied to Mrs. Morel, whose
position in the community, despite her middle-class

- background and literacy, has been fixed.-

The increasing sense of distance between Paul and his
mother represents the now traditional components of the
novel's oedipalized battle. But a closer reading of these
dynamics reveals how the psychological reading can be
projected to the plane of ideology, which reveals a deeper
social drama unfolding beneath the surface features of the

narrative dynamics.

The ideological aspect of Paul's relationship with

his mother occurs after Paul's negative transaction in the

235

domestic sphere. Paul has offended his mother by
accidentally burning a loaf of the bread she bakes each
Friday. This happens in his mother's absence. When she
returns home, Paul is not there; he is on his way back from
escorting Miriam home. When Paul returns, he finds his
mother silent and very angry. Paul attempts to lighten the
situation, but to no avail. He raises the subject of the
bread and offers to pay, but this is not an issue of pennies
and bread. Mrs. Morel then confronts Paul over the real
issue: Miriam. Mrs. Morel scolds Paul for taking Miriam
home: "Is she so fascinating that you must follow her all
that way?" she asks. Lawrence describes her as appearing
visually disturbed: "She sat still with averted face,
stroking with a rhythmic, jerked movement the black sateen of

her apron. It was a movement that hurt Paul to see"(26l).

Mrs. Morel then raises the issue as to why Paul
spends so much time with Miriam, why she is so fascinating
and Mrs. Morel and the family so uninteresting. Realizing
that his mother is in ill health, and that the issue of
Miriam is so distressing to her, he offers to sacrifice his
love for Miriam in exchange for his mother's affection. The
exchange seems to work, but it is not a real exchange. Paul
is already attracted to Clara Dawes at this pOint in the
narrative and his feelings toward Miriam are mixed. In a
cruel way, Paul enjoys his power over Miriam, and in another

cruel way, he also enjoys the suffering that it produces in

236

 

his mother.

Paul's power over Miriam and his mother has to do with
the defeat of Miriam, but not in the terms that he expresses
to his mother. The defeat of Miriam is, on an ideological
level, also the defeat of Mrs. Morel's oppositional voice, as
Paul effects an emotional double-deal, an exchange with his
mother that will, in effect, render her former political
voice powerless. Mrs. Morel guarantees a renewal of motherly
affection in exchange for the abrogation of Paul's romance
with Miriam; however, the narrator implies that Paul wants

out of his relationship with Miriam anyway.

Paul's sacrifice of Miriam, as I will show here, hinges

on Lawrence's sacrifice of the mother's progressive voice, a
sacrifice for the reader as much as it is a sacrifice for
Mrs. Morel. At one of the most tense moments between Paul
and his mother, he tells her why he does not find her, his
family, the community, or much of anything in Bestwood
interesting, to say the least, or stimulating. As the reader
already knows, Paul's aesthetic development has led him
elsewhere. When Mrs. Morel asks Paul about Miriam, she
cannot contain her jealousy--if Paul doesn't love Miriam,
then why does he spend so much time with her:_

"Then why do you fly to her so often!"

"I do like to talk to her--I never said I

didn't. but I don't love her."
"Is there nobody else to talk to?"

"Not about the things we talk of. There's
lots of things that you're not interested in,

237

that--"

"What things?"

Mrs. Morel was so intense that Paul began to
pant.

"Why--painting--and books. You don't care
about Herbert Spencer."

"No," was the sad reply. "And you won't at my
age."

"Well, I do now--and Miriam does--"

"And how do you know," Mrs. Morel flashed
defiantly, that I shouldn't? Do you ever try
me?"

"But you don't, mother, you know you don't
care whether a picture's decorative or not;
you don't care what manner it is in"(26l).

Paul responds rather strangely. He shifts the
emotional issue to the issue of texts and cultural disourse,
calling into the discussion his mother's relationship to the
discourse of social evolution, naturalist philosophy, and
aesthetics. Paul does this in a very psychically charged
moment. But why--to merely deflect what cannot be spoken?
As the narrator has informed us throughout the novel, these
philosophical issues for Paul have been transformed into
ideological weapons. Paul informs his mother that the
subjects he and Miriam discuss transcend the limitations of
his mother's subject-position. These subjects certainly
transcend the limitations of his father's subject-position,
but that is an irrelevant issue: Paul's entrance into the

world of art is based on a rivalry with his mother's former

interests in social cooperation and guild activities.

As this dialogue continues, Mrs. Morel appears more
visibly shaken. The emotional rupture produced by the

possibility of losing Paul to Miriam--over her discursive

238

limitations--has reduced her to a quivering wreck, a shell of
the subject she once was. Dumbfounded, she cannot articulate
a position that she was once able to. Hence, in a very
different moment here, Mrs. Morel is silenced by the paternal
name of Spencer, which is aligned with the power of her son's
discourse, over the exchange of a lover. Mrs. Morel cannot
utter a response that invokes the former self that the young
Paul had so much respect for. Hence, when Mrs. Morel says
that she doesn't care about Herbert Spencer at her age, she
figuratively empties her voice of social power. Lawrence
thus memorializes her former status as a subject concerned

with social issues that he now deeply opposes.

Paul symbolically usurps the position of the father by
evoking the name of a dominant paternal figure in culture
(Herbert Spencer). Mrs. Morel bargains away what little
autonomy she had left in return for the security that Paul
will return to the domestic circle by refusing Miriam. But
the name of Spencer is significant, since it symbolically
elicits an ideological force that leaves Mrs. Morel
speechless, numb, and shaken. Realizing the emotional
damage he has inflicted on his mother, Paul then attempts to
reduce things to the level of simple generational
differences, saying: 1

"You're old, mother, and we're young."
He only meant that the interests of her age

were not the interests of his. But he
realized the moment he had spoken that he said

239

 

the wrong thing.(262)

Distraught and distressed over this exchange, Mrs. Morel
"cried, in a whimpering voice, so unlike her own that he
[Paul] writhed in agony." 262) (Emphasis mine) The force of
this moment traumatizes both Paul and his mother. But
Lawrence directs the reader's attention to the effect that
this exchange has on Mrs. Morel's subjectivity rather than
Paul's. What is at stake here is the disempowerment and
subsequent de-materialization of Mrs. Morel's former social
self, one constructed through ideology and one that was
empowered through her participation in an emergent public

sphere.

Lawrence inscribes a state of an intense emotional drama
through an oedipal exchange that encodes ideology as much as
it does a mother-son bond. The middle figure in this exchange
is Miriam, who is described as a subject who deploys a
discourse inaccessible to Mrs. Morel. After all, Paul's
attraction to Miriam has brought about this intense scene, as
well as Paul's utterance of a name of a symbolic father in
order to silence Mrs. Morel. But what is intriguing about
Lawrence's dialogue here is that Paul and Miriam have never
discussed the subject of Spencer. Paul and Miriam have
discussed a range of cultural subjects, but neither Spencer's
name nor his social philosophy are directly referred to in a
novel that makes conscious references to cultural figures in

Paul's aesthetic development.

240

Lawrence overpowers oppositional discourse in a way
that allows the oedipal drama to mask the ideological aspects
of the narrative. He substitutes a symbolic image of a

5 The name of

social father through the name of Spencer.
Spencer, as it drops into the dialogue, is endowed with
ideological and social value; here it possesses the force of
law that enables the son to silence the mother. Lawrence
thus fetishizes the name of Spencer as if it contained power
in itself, as if it were an emblem of the law. It works.
Mrs. Morel trembles at the sound of Paul's invocation of a
discursive form that she cannot speak to. Lawrence's
imaginary identification with the paternal Spencer fills in
for the lack of a social voice, for the displaced authority
of the real father (Walter Morel). In this sense Lawrence
attempts to decisively resolve the novel's conflicts between

progressive or cooperative ideology and the conservative

forces of naturalist struggle.

Lawrence unconsciously represents the social forces
that symbolically animate Paul's authority, which
problematizes this struggle in the social dynamics of Sons

and Lovers. Lawrence's invokes the name of Spencer and

 

forces the narrative to reveal the limitations of the
subject's material construction through ideology. Literally
a moment after Paul has silenced his mother, his implicit

recognition of this silencing doesn't seem to count for much

241

 

as a way of covering up the institutional tracks that mark
these subjects. Lawrence's indirect discourse ("He only
meant. . . .") more powerfully reveals the mechanisms at work
that shape the subject. Hence, Lawrence showsus what he
cannot tell us: that desire is bound up with ideological
forces as much as it is with the psychological drives that he
'would later focus on. Subjects in narrative, then, are
constructed by institutions and ideology, something that
Lawrence's valorization of naturalistic ideology could not

escape from.
From the Private to the Public: Clara's Complaint
Lawrence discredits Mrs. Morel's oppositional discourse

and the subject that participated in the guilds, the

community, and hence in history. As social drama, Sons and

 

Lovers ideologically shapes itself through struggles in the
I.domestic.realm,.theqprivatevspheregy Lawrence representsthis
drama as a private struggle--between Miriam and his mother.
The discourse shifts, however, to the public sphere through
Paul's relationship--the most passionate and most physical in

Sons and Lovers--with Clara Dawes. Unlike Miriam and Mrs.

 

Morel, Clara is a worker, well versed in labor politics and
active in local struggles. Separated from her husband, the
irascible Baxter Dawes, she challenges Paul's values and

ideological positions. Clara is older than Paul Morel, and

her "public" status as an avowed feminist and socialist marks

242

her as a different kind of woman, a new woman in a way that
rivals the liberal Mrs. Morel as a mother figure. Lawrence's
subordination of oppositional discourse takes a different,
and within the scope of the novel, a decidedly more public

turn.

Paul's proximity to local radical factions in
Nottingham--those groups whose ideas are most likely
associated with Blatchford and to some extent the Fabians--
metonymically transports him to Clara Dawes via a letter.
"The months went slowly along. Paul had more or less got
into connection with the Socialist, Suffragette, Unitarian
people in Nottingham. One day a friend of his and of
Clara's, in Bestwood, asked him to take a message to Mrs.
Dawes" (319). Immediately, Paul enters into a scene of
production in which he finds Clara doing lace-work at her
mother's house. "He had surprised her in her drudgery" (322).
.¢15?é'é isFPOASéth 5?: Work 59nnds-sifiilarlté one Oil
Tressell's characterizations of the cOnditions Of labor as
being part Of a large scheme of trickery. When Paul asks her
if the work is "sweated," she replies scornfully, "Isn't all
women's work? That's another trick the men have played,
since we force ourselves into the labour market"(322). Paul
remains silent on this issue and asks Clara whether she would
prefer to go back to work at Jordan's, where he, possessing
supervisory power over the work-place now, can get Clara her

job back.

243

Lawrence represents the activity of Clara's lace—work

in a way that embodies Sons and Lovers' contradictory

 

 

attitudes toward doctrinaire features of the discourse of
Labor. Both Paul's proximity to Labor and his ideological
distance from it become the focus of the narrative. He can
present Clara sympathetically, but he cannot agree with her;
he can report the degradation, futility, and exploitation of
Clara's sweated labor, but he cannot link this to structures
of domination and exploitation that figure into the community
at large. Lawrence isolates Clara as a denatured figure, as
Paul directs his gaze toward the objectified body of Clara.
Paul thus reduces Clara's subject-position not to the actual
subject of labor and the social structures that produce
levels of personal misery, but to her status as a subject in
a scene that he finds unnatural. Moreover, the presence of
Clara's mother, described as a predatory spider, who attempts
to silence her when she bad mouths men, compounds the pathOs

of the scene.

Paul appears to realize Clara's complaint: "Wasn't he
to take Clara's fulminations so seriously after all" (323).
On one hand, Paul contemplates Clara's sweated work as a form
of incarceration, a restriction of the body, and the
objectification of the woman worker who has imitated the
unnatural movement of a machine. On the other hand, Paul's

position as a spectator figuratively controls Clara through

244

 

his gaze. Paul's distance from Clara is defined by power; he
is repulsed by the unnatural exploitation he witnesses in her

labor, but he is also attracted by her helplessness:

She spun steadily at her work. He experienced
a thrill of joy, thinking she might need his
help. She seemed denied and deprived of so
much. And her arm moved mechanically, that
should never have been subdued to a
mechanism, and her head was bowed to the lace,
that never should have been bowed. She seemed
to be stranded there among the refuse that
life has thrown away, doing her jennying. It
was a bitter thing for her to be put aside by
life, as if it had no use for her. No wonder
she protested. (323)

In light of Lawrence's general attitude toward Labor,
the effect of the discourse here is to play out the other
edge of Lawrence's attitude toward work and culture. Like
Spencer, Lawrence clearly resists reformist efforts to
explain exploitation as the result of social forces. Hence,
Lawrence decontextualizes Clara's protest as the result of
personal circumstances, as if she is "put aside by life," not
in the sense that her work has been marginalized and sweated
as women's' work, but as if this condition were something

essential to her individual nature.

Lawrence thus deracinates the figure of Clara from a
wider community and grounds her misery, and the narrator's
misery, in the realm of subjective choice. Clara's protest
is thus framed by Lawrence as one that is inadequate to deal

with her own situation, as if she possessed power to change

245

it in the first place. Paul's desire for Clara subsequently
represses the material forces that determine her subject-
position in culture, as his gaze subjects her to the

sexual force of his desire. In this light, the power
dynamics of the above mentioned scene, runs against the grain
of the critique of labor and commerce that Lawrence produces
for Paul Morel, the "prisoner of industry." Simply put, Paul
wishes to "liberate" Clara from her unnatural labor, but not
in the way she desires liberation. Clara is thus in a double
bind: As a worker, she is under Paul's spell; he will
restore her to a position at Jordan's. As the estranged wife
of Baxter Dawes, her (re)productive role in the community has
been de-naturalized through her independence from Dawes.

This is something that Lawrence employs in the narrative in

order to complicate her life in a very public way.

Paul's relationship with Clara incorporates some of the
most ideologically vigorous dialogues in the novel, and
certainly forms the most dialogical aspect of the novel. As
a feminist and radicalized worker, Clara confronts Paul's
assumptions about the social order and the nature of things.
Clara also plays the role of an art critic Of sorts. She
responds to Paul's painting in a way that Miriam and Paul's
mother cannot, criticizing his work, rather than allowing
Paul to didacticize unchecked on the function of art and the

metaphysics of nature and life.

246

Paul's authority over Clara in the work-place, his
position as a supervisor of sorts, enables him to control the
politics of the relationship. Clara resists this power,
which Paul enjoys. The dynamics between Paul and Clara's
courtship within the work-place allows Paul to manage and
therefore contain Clara's radicalism. Paul finds Clara's
radical discourse threatening on many levels, one that
supersedes his mother's guild meetings. The contradiction
here, among other things, is that as Paul gets Clara out of
the house and back into the workplace, her house--actually
her mother's house--is at least a place where she can speak
her mind. When she returns to Jordan's, Clara is transported
to a workplace where Paul maintains surveillance and has
power over her as a superior, a power that he uses to re-
domesticate Clara by issuing demarcations or social lines
that determine the rules of passion versus the rules of the

workplace.

Moreover, Paul turns back on his earlier emancipatory
assertions about work, life, subjective liberation and the
role of art. When Paul is with Clara his paternalist,
authoritarian ambitions speak out more forcefully as the
temporal restrictions on the subject of labor produce
contradictions within culture. For example, Paul's re-
conceptualizes passion. While he is subject to the work-
world he announces that love is equivalent to leisure-time.

He wants it kept out of the work-place: "I don't want

247

anything to do with love when I'm at work. Work's work--"
(438). Clara responds angrily to this, establishing a
position that seems more akin to the voice of a later
Lawrence who rebels against the mechanistic confines of the
social order: "And you'll regulate it [love] according to
Mr. Jordan's closing time?" Paul says he would, "according to
the freedom from business of any sort." Asserting primacy
over both domains of experience, Paul reorganizes the
temporal rhythms of the work-world and private life along the
lines of time expended during passionate activity, against
the reified grid of the working-day. Again, this action
undermines the sentiment of Paul's earlier views on work and

art, life and the politics of love.

During his relationship with Clara, Paul is invested
with a bizarre passion for the reified mechanisms of business
and commerce, something that he earlier experiences as
nothing but a form of horrible drudgery. In effect, Lawrence
overrides any possibility that the workplace can be anything
but mechanized, something Clara must reconcile herself to,
while Paul later escapes. Of course, Clara really does
experience the numbing effect of the working day, something
that is compounded by her status in the community as a
divorced suffragette. Her response to Paul's authoritarian
rule in the workplace counters the libidinal, utopian aspects
of Paul's own desire right back at him. Desire, when it

threatens to blur the lines between reified time and private

248

'nar-m—oafi-v.‘ “—-V _q— ~_.~~~ - 1,

(domestic) space, as it is voiced by Clara, pushes Paul into
a conservative, rather managerial position. Passionate

activity becomes little more than a form of leisure time.

But the conflicts that shape the private/public

structure of Sons and Lovers reveal an incorporation of

 

naturalistic ideology that structures a confrontation between
oppositional discourse and the embedded tenets of naturalism.
Lawrence thus resolves the narrative problem of refuting F

radical discourse by positioning Clara as a public figure, a

 

radical suffragette who "talks on platforms," a woman
"already singled out from the sheep"(388), so to speak, as

much as she is a figure for Paul's desire.

Lawrence materializes this ideological conflict between
a grounded naturalism and a potentially de-stabilizing
radical discourse (Clara's) in the institutional space of the;
brief courtroom drama that features Paul Morel, Baxter Dawes
and Mr. Jordan. But rather than settling the trial over the
issue of Baxter Dawes' assault on Jordan, the judgment, and
hence the exoneration of Dawes, is decided through the absent
figure of Clara. Paul's mention of Clara's name frees Dawes,
angers JOrdan, publicly humiliates Clara, and jeopardizes
Paul's standing in the community, and, more importantly, his
relationship with Clara. Ironically, Lawrence depicts the
trial as a minimal interjection between the sOuffle with

Dawes and his subsequent conversation with Clara:

249

At the trial Paul Morel had to give evidence.
Asked how the trouble began,he said:

"Dawes took occasion to insult Mrs. Dawes

and me because I accompanied her to the
theater one evening; then I threw some beer at
him and he wanted his revenge." ‘

"Cherchez la femme!" smiled the
magistrate.

The case was dismissed after the magistrate
had told Dawes he thought him a skunk.(431)

Lawrence minimizes the potential drama of this scene.
Certainly he could have extended its temporal dimensions, in
order to highlight the tensions between Paul, Dawes, and
Jordan, especially in light of the narrative function of
legal scenes in traditional novels and social fiction. But
as if to make a point about collapsing institutional
hierarchies, Lawrence does the opposite. Lawrence
accelerates narrative time to the point of collapsing the
real time of the trial. Like a book, it is easily opened and
quickly shut. More importantly, Lawrence renders this scene
as if it is part of a larger cultural script, as if it is a
passage in a legal text that has been recited as part of a
natural law. As the destabilizing force, Clara need not be
present, nor does she have to be a material player or witness
in the drama. The mere mention of her name involves the
element of elemental passion, reducing the trial to a
cultural cliche, a joke. Clara protests to Paul:

"Why need my name have been dragged in?"

"Better speak it openly than leave it to be
whispered."

"There was no need for anything at all," she

declared.
"We are none the poorer," he said

250

..';JT rim ‘H v." -

 

indifferently.
"You may not be," she said.(432)

The mere mention of Clara's name reduces her status
within the community, lessening her symbolic capital as it
voids the power of her oppositional social voice. Paul's
insistence that his mentioning of her name is something
better said in public redresses the earlier drama between
himself and his mother over the issue of social and aesthetic
discourse.- Soon after this incident he speaks to his mother
about the matter, who sternly asks him if he really considers
Clara's perspective at all. Clara doubles for Paul's mother-
-yet far from being another woman who stands in the way of
Paul's psychological development, she represents a discursive
point of resistance, as Paul has difficulty engaging in
dialogue with Clara. She is referred to as having two sides,
one physical, one discursive. As Paul says to his mother,

"Sometimes when I see her just as the woman, I love her,

 

mother; but then, when she talks and criticizes, I often
don't listen to her"(432). -Mrs. Morel replies that Clara has
"as much sense as Miriam," a statement that acknowledges
Paul's inability to work through genuine dialogue, as well as
signaling a recognition that returns the narrative to
Lawrence's contradictions within naturalist discourse. Here,
Mrs. Morel assails Paul's contradictory desire. Paul wants
to cling to a somewhat progressive vision of the feminine

while retaining traditional (essentialist) notions of the

female. In this instance, however, the name of Spencer need

251

not be called upon. The name of Miriam, as mentioned by Mrs.
Morel, elicits this contradiction through a kind of double-
displacement, one that recalls the earlier scene between Paul

and Mrs. Morel.

The body of Clara is thus divided into two parts: the
essential and the inessential. One Paul constructs as a
natural force; the other he silences by blocking her words,
silencing the body that speaks through oppositional
naturalism. Lawrence re-domesticates Clara in a way that
consigns the woman to the private, a move that mirrors
versions of the feminine popular in both progressive and
conservative discourse of the time. Paul facilitates the
reunion of Baxter Dawes and Clara. Paul thus hands the
emancipated Clara over to the elemental and brutish figure of
Dawes. Like the stern supervisor he has matured into--at
least for the moment--Paul arranges for Dawes to get a job in
Sheffield. During Dawes' convalescence, the two have become
friends in a manner that suggests a ritual bond ("The two
men, between whom was such a big reserve, seemed faithful to
each other"(495)), which signals that an agreement has been

reached through dialogue.

On a very abstract level, Lawrence symbolically
prefigures the reunion between Dawes and Clara earlier in the
narrative when he stays at Mrs. Radford's house, after

escorting Clara to the theater. This has to do with the

252

 

narrative fabric of what I would call displaced coverings, more
specifically the symbolic status of various clothes that Paul is
forced to wear at specific scenes in the novel that relate to
his identity, but more importantly to the masculine subject
positions: i.e., successful sons or successful lovers. This is
evident as Paul spends the night at Mrs. Radford's. Paul is
forced to wear the pajamas that were intended for Baxter

Dawes to sleep in. Mrs. Radford jokes cruelly in her
working-class accent, "'Said he reckoned to do wi'out trousers
i'bed. She turned confidently to Paul, saying: 'He couldn't
bear 'em, them pyjama things.'" In effect Mrs. Radford

enforces her daughter's estranged chastity and suggests

Dawes' rightful, elemental place in the family by making Paul
wear the sleeping suit. But wearing displaced clothing of
tragic males is something Paul has done before. Paul had

also worn the day-suit of William's, the suit Mrs. Morel
tailors for Paul after William's death. These two scenes,
which involve displaced coverings, point to Lawrence's desire
"to try on“ subject positions that signify a framework of
unity, a desire to reintegrate the displaced and fragmented
elements of an essentialized family structure. Yet displaced
clothing is something that the narrative reveals as Paul's

very lack of belonging to that family picture, as something
that he can only try on. (As an artist Paul will reject the
suit, leave town.) During one of the final dialogues between
Paul, Clara and Dawes, Lawrence self-consciously dislocates

Inaul from any sense of the elemental or primal union that he

253

sees as natural between Clara and Baxter Dawes. As Lawrence
shifts the focalization from Paul to Clara this does appear

to be the case:

And as he went about arranging, and as he sat
talking, there seemed something false about
him and out of tune. Watching him unknown,
she said to herself there was no stability
about him. He was fine in his way, passionate,
and able to give her drinks of pure life when
he was in one mood. And now he looked paltry
and insignificant. There was nothing stable
about him. Her husband had more manly
dignity. At any rate he did not waft about
with any wind. There was something evanescent
about Morel, she thought, something shifting
and false. He would never make sure ground
for any woman to stand on.(500)

While Paul's subject-position undergoes a radical de-
stabilization here--arranging, wafting, shifting--Clara is
radically restabilized in the discourse of working-class
domesticity. Lawrence re-affixes Clara to a private
discourse. Clara's views on the social struggles will be
reduced to the_same kind of trivial sentiments that Mrs.
Morel's are reduced to by Walter Morel earlier in the novel.
That Dawes should bear a resemblance in his brute
helplessness toWalter Morel completes the_narrative
transaction that deflects the subversive power of women's
oppositional discourse. Lawrence is thus able to contain the
threat and re-naturalize the feminine voice through a reverse

projection: everything that Clara desires in Baxter Dawes--

stability, strength, and sureness, is refracted through Clara

254

herself.

The dialogue between Paul Morel and Baxter Dawes
presents itself as one of the few mOments in the narrative
where actual dialogue takes place--two working-class men
deciding the terms of a transaction, the exchange of Clara.
Yet their direct speech is supplemented by the narrator's
recognition that this dialogue merely represses a naturalist
sense of struggle or of primal violence: "The triumphant male
came up in Dawes. He showed his teeth more distinctly" (497).
Dawes' rank in the male tribe, so to speak, is annexed by his
rightful marriage to Clara. Clara may desire Paul but she

does not "belong" to him as she belongs to Dawes.

Finally, the reunion of Dawes and Clara symbolically
ensures an ideological resolution of a dominant naturalism
over a possibly subversive oppositional discourse. Lawrence's;
flirtation with radical discourse--the socialism of
Blatchford, Fabianism, the possible incorporation of
Carpenter's radicalnaturalism, and other forms Of radical
discourse, is conflicted with a naturalism that re-asserts
itself paternally, keeping essential oppositions in place,
re-domesticating the division of labor between the public
realm and the intimacy of the private sphere in the working-
class community. The aesthetic producer--Lawrence/Paul—-
maintains his distance, finally, by detaching himself from

the community where these conflicts were originally produced.

255

Notes to the Introduction

1 Eric Hopkins, A Social History 3T the English Working
Classes (London: Edward Arnold, 1979) 122.

2 J.F.C. Harrison, The English Common People (London:
Croom Helm, 1984) 338.

 

 

3 Raymond Williams, Writing Th Society (London: Verso,
1978) 235.

4 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward
e Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1986).

 

5 L.S. Dembo, Detotalized Totalities: Synthesis and
Disintegration Th Naturalist, Existential and Socialist
Fiction (Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1989) 39.

 

 

 

 

 

6 Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History eh
the English Novel 1875-1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989)
115-121. ‘ ’3

 

 

 

7 David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic
Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 41.

 

 

3 Baguley 44.

9 Paul Eden, Socialism and Science (Keighly: Rydal
Press, 1909) 8.

 

256

Notes to Chapter 1

1 See E.L. Hunt, British Labor History, 1815-
1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981) 334. Also see
J.F.C. Harrison, The English Common People (London: Croom Helm,
1984) 333-347 for a concise overview of the various factions
in the labor movement. Harrison also mentions the importance
of Tressell's novel. For a picture of how utopian and
anarchist radical groups were during the early 1880s see
Logie Barrow, "The Homerton Social Democratic Club 1881-
1882," Histogy Workshop 5 (1978): 188-200.

 

 

2 Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall eh the Political Press
in Britain, 2 vols. (London: Hamish Hamilton,
T981) deals with the problems faced by the left during the
latter part of the nineteenth century. Also see Raymond
Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia UP, 1961).

 

 

 

3 My usage of the ideology/mythology term here is derived
from post-structural theory and semiotics, most notably the
work of Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). Also, see Patrick
Brantlinger's Crusoe's Footprints (New York: Routledge, 1990)
which, among other things, addresses the problem of agency
and social formation regarding the problem of ideology.
Brantlinger assesses the impact of such theorists as Barthes,
Althusser, Raymond Williams and others, and succinctly
locates this problem in the context of ideology and cultural
studies. Brantlinger uses the "ideology/mythology" term in
this context. Also, on the subject of ideology and myth see
James J. Liszka, The Semiotic eh Myth: ‘h Critical Study eh
the Symbol (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989).

 

 

 

 

 

4 All references to Tressell are from The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1955). While Tressell was-not part of a specific community
of writers, there is a forgotten genealogy of leftist and
feminist writers, including Margaret Harkness, Olive
Schreiner, Isabella 0. Ford, and Robert Blatchford. Most of
these writers produced social tracts as well as novels, and
further problematize the politics of naturalism. For an
understanding of how these networks produced Oppositional
discourse see June Hannam, Isabella Ford (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989). Also see Deborah Epstein Nord, "Neither Pairs nor
<3dd," Signs 15.4 (1990): 733-754.

 

 

 

5 Other relevant material on Tressell can be found in the
following critical books and articles. Jack Mitchell's
critical study of Tressell, Robert Tressell and The Ragged

257

258

Trousered Philanthropists (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1969) offers an assessment of Tressell, including his
relationship to other writers and the influence of Carlyle,
Ruskin, William Morris and others on Tressell's novel.
Raymond Williams, "The Ragged Arsed Philanthropists,"
Writing and Society (London: Verso, 1974): 239-255. On the
issue of Tressell and the problem of realism, see Wim
Neetens, "Politics, Poetics, and the Popular Text: The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists," Literature and History
14.1 (1988): 81-90.

 

6 Fred Ball, One eh the Damned (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1973) 207-212.

 

7 Raymond Williams, Problems Th Materialism ehd Culture
(London: Verso, 1980) 217.

 

8 Ball 78-83.

9 See Alan Silitoe's introduction to Tressell in The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (New York: Monthly Review,
1962) 1-4.

1” Ball 254.

11 P.J. Keating, The Working Classes Th Victorian Fiction
(New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971) 132.

 

12 Diane Smith, "Confronting Socialism: The Naturalist
Novel and Its Reception in Europe," Works and Days 14
(1989): 81-90.

13 Smith 82.

14 Raymond Williams, Keywords: ‘h Vocabulary eh Culture
and Society (New York: Oxford UP, 1983) 218—219.

 

 

 

15 Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain (London: Verso,
1986) 24.

 

16 See David Wiltshire, The Social and Political Thought
2E Herbert Spencer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978).

 

17 Williams, Problems 88.

 

18 Williams, Problems 96.

 

19 Robert Blatchford, Altruism:
Christ's Glorious Gospel eh Love Against Man's Dismal Science
.2; Greed (London: Clarion, 1898). Blatchford, one of the most
idealistic of the socialists and one of the least Marxist,
writes in his usual evangelistic tone, that ". . .Socialism

'has behind it the strongest sentiment of modern times--the

 

 

259

sentiment of human love and mercy called Altruism" (4).

20 E.P. Thompson, William Morris: From Romantic to
Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon, 1977) discusses the-
uneasy relationship between Hyndman and Morris and provides a
concise overview of SDF politics.

 

 

 

21 H.M. Hyndman and William Morris, Socialism Made Plain:
Being the Social and Political Manifesto eh The Democratic
Federation (London, 1883).

 

 

 

22 A reprint of Spencer's "The Coming Slavery" can be
found in Truxton Beale, ed., The Man versus The State: A
gollection eh Essays hy Herbert Spencer (New York: Kennerley, 1916) 3
70. This volume also contains an introduction to "The Coming
Slavery" by Henry Cabot Lodge, (31-35).

 

 

23 Frank Fairman, HeEbert Spencer eh Socialism: A Reply
he the article entitled "The Coming Slavery" (In the
"Contemporary Review" for April, 1884.) (London, 1884).

 

 

 

24 H.M. Hyndman from the 1889 reprint of Socialism and
Slavery: Being eh Answer £2.32 Attack Upon The Democratic
Federation (in the "Contemporary Review" 5 April, 1884)
(London, 1889). Among Hyndman's response to Spencer, other
comments reveal his attitude toward Spencer on extremely
radical ideas: "Such being, in brief, the view of the
Socialists it is natural that Mr. Herbert Spencer, the
principal living champion of individualism, should take the
field against us" (5). Also, "That nationalization of the
land accompanied by 'industrial armies' gives our
individualist philosopher another shock (14), [and]
socialists are perfectly satisfied with_the exposition of

'middle-class philosophy by its principal champion"(24).

 

Hyndman also employs metaphors from the discourse of
natural selection in order to challenge Spencer. For
Hyndman, socialism addresses these problems with the aid of
science: "There are few really unprejudiced thinkers who do
.not now admit that capitalists and the middle-class generally
are quite incapable of handling the growing powers of man
over nature for the benefit of the race.. The fact comes out
more clearly as each year passes by. Socialism therefore--
the organised co-operation of men and women educated from
early childhood to take their share in light, varied and
pleasurable labour--must come into control and develop those
forces which individuals did not invent, and which
individuals cannot turn to the advantage of mankind. This
evolution, I say, is inevitable, it is going on all around us
at this hour. Shall we help its peaceful development by
thoroughly understanding its growth and clearing away its
obstacles, or shall we render violent revolution inevitable
by sheer determination not to see? In either case such

260

harmonious association of workers, such as adaptation of
surroundings and application of the increasing powers of
science to the highest physical, mental, and moral
development of man--such socialism, in a word, as we
champion, means for all future generations not Slavery but
full and never ending FREEDOM"(24).

25 In his pamphlet against Spencer, Fairman looks at
earlier comments in Spencer's writing on social questions.
He quotes Spencer, who in "The Coming Slavery" seems to do a
turnaround on the vantage point of the middle class against
the poor: "It is very easy for you, oh respectable citizen,
seated in your easy chair, with your feet on the fender, to
hold forth on the misconduct of the people, very easy for you
to censure their extravagant and vicious habits, very easy
for you to be a pattern of frugality, of rectitude, of
sobriety"(5) See Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York,
1873).

26 Spencer, "The Coming Slavery" 37.

27 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1977) 123.

28 Williams, Writing 253.
29 Hyndman, Socialism and Slavery 6.

3g Williams makes an interesting comparison regarding
different representations of working—class subjects in
Tressell and Orwell. Williams writes, "Indeed there are parts
of this book, which, taken on their own--which is quite wrong
to do, but analytically you can hypothesize it--have such
savage things to say about so many working-class people. . .
.This is the kind of position which becomes a problem again
in a writer like Orwell, who typically did not include in his
diaries or notebooks those working-class men and women he met
who were well-read, articulate, politically conscious or
active in some pursuit which is conventionally not assigned
to the class. If, on the other hand, he met somebody who
fitted a middle-class vision of the drunken or feckless or
ignorant or helpless working-man, down it went"(Writing
249). While Williams chides Orwell here, Tressell could very
well have been one of the significant texts for Orwell's
representation of the proles.

31 George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (London:
Gollancz, 1936) 44. While thEre are accounts of characters
having to pawn their possessions to survive in RTP, Orwell's
reference to the aspidistra seems to be a fabrication of
Gordon Comstock's rebellious poesy.

 

 

32 Illustration from Punch 18 Sept. 1906: 205.

 

261

33 Illustration from Punch 9 Oct. 1967: 87.

34 For a while, social historians have noted the role of
the press in maintaining this attitude toward Empire and the
state. Elie Halevy in his a History 25 the English People in
the Nineteenth Century, vol. 5 of Imperialism and the Rise of
Labor, trans. E.W. Watkin (New York: Dodd, 1961) addresses this
problem. For an excerpt of this, see "Public Opinion and
Imperialism: The New Journalism" in Robin W. Winks, ed.,
British Imperialism: Gold, God, Glory (New York: Hindsdale,
I11.: Dryden; New York: Holt,“l963) 51-55. In 323' The most
visible target of Tressell's social critique is the press--or
an image of the paternal language of the press. Clearly, it
is the dominant social signifier in the novel. It is the
paternalist organ of hegemonic social processes that reforms
and re-shapes social perceptions of politics and nature. Its
Neo-Spencerian representations of hostile struggle is
instrumental in regulating and preventing the pragmatics of
discursive action among workers. This is evident in 53g
dialogues in which we find Owen's co-workers speaking,
literally, in garbled tongues. For example, when discussing
economic issues--fisca1 policy or Tariff reform--Tresse11 has
them slur words, i.e., fiscal policy as "fissical" policy--in
order to stress difference and to mirror the alienated
distance between these subjects and the commercial interests
of newspaper production.

 

 

 

 

 

35 E.P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial
Capitalism," Past and Present Series 2 (1967): 56-97.

36 Illustration from Tressell, 428.

37 Illustration from punch, 22 Jan. 1913: 57.

 

38 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (New York:
Norton, 1979) 61-62.

 

39 See Frederic Jameson's essay on Conrad in The
Political Unconscious-(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981) 2G6-280.

 

 

4g John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (New York:
Scribners, 1918) 67-68.

 

41 Eagleton, Against 24.

42 Eric Hobsbawm,Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1969) 193.

 

Notes to Chapter 2

1 Richard Hoggart, The Uses 2f Literacy (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1957) 193.

 

 

2 Worker's Education Association, The Robert Tressell
Papers (Kent: Robert Tressell Workshop, 1982) 43.

 

 

3 See Guy Debord, 322 Society pf the Spectacle
(Detroit: Black and Red, 1967). Debord presents a critique
of consumer society in late capitalism. The spectacle is a
term that Debord employs to characterize global relations of
capital, power, and ideology in post—industrial culture.
Tressell's self—conscious usage of the panorama prefigures
aspects of Debord's notion of the spectacle. Tressell also
represents the press as a naturalist vehicle of the spectacle
in that journalism merely stands back and describes accounts
of worker's misery through a quasi-scientific causality. The
press is thus that wall of reference consumed by workers, but
not necessarily opposed or negotiated.

 

4 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York:
Columbia UP, 1961) 284.

 

5 Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press

13 Britain, vol. 2 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981) 267.

 

 

6 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl
Emerson  and Michael HoIqu1st (Austin. U of Texas P) 84- 258.

 

7 The cave metaphor in Tresseli' s novel and i ts relation
to platonic dialogue and ideology is analyzed in detail by
Roger Raby, "Propagande ou est ta victoire? Dialogue
didactique manifest et dialogues latents dans The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists de Robert Tressell," Essais sur
1e Dialogue, ed. Jean Lavedrine (Grenoble: Publications de'
L' Universite' des Languages.et Lettres, 1980) 165-177.

 

 

8 Terry Eagleton, The Present Function 2f Criticism
(London: Verso, 1984) 52.

 

 

 

9 Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, Social Semiotics
(Cornell UP, 1988) 176.

 

262

Notes to Chapter 3

1 Hannah Mitchell, The Hard Way Up: The Autobiography

2: Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and Rebel, ed. Geoffrey
Mitchell (London: Faber and Faber, 1968) 217.

2 I will explain these issues later in Chapter 6.
Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx, The Woman Question (London:
Swann Sonnenschein, 1887), addresses the politics of the
public and private sphere more forcefully than most pamphlets
written by men in less militant radical factions.

3 See Chapter 2 for my discussion of "The Terrible
Domestic Tragedy" in Tressell's The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists.

 

4 George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide £2
Socialism and Capitalism (New York: Brentano, 1928) 197.

 

 

5 Thomas Duckworth Benson, Woman. ; .The Communist,
(London: Independent Labor Party, 1966).

6 Benson 4._

7 Benson 4.

8 Benson 5.

9 Benson 6.

16 Benson 6.

ll Benson 7.

12 Benson 9.

l3.George Bernard Shaw states this in the "Epistle

Dedicatory" to his play "Man and Superman" in Man and
Superman (London: Constable, 1931) xviii.

 

l4Benson 11
15 Benson 12
16 See Frederick Engels, "The Origin of Family, Private

Property and the State," The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert
C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978) 734-759.

 

263

 

 

Notes to Chapter 4

1 Ernest Belfort Bax. The Fraud 2: Feminism. (London:
Richards, 1913).

 

2 Jonathan Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 1895-1919
(Athens: Ohio UP, 1986) 29.

3 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, ed. Andrew
McNellie (London: Hogarth, 1987) 263.

4 Bax 12.

5 Bax 23-24.

Bax 24.

Bax 53.

8 Bax 79.

9 Michel de Certeau, The Practice gf Everyday Life
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1984) 7.

1“ Bax 30.
11 Bax 32.

12 As I point out in Chapter 6, Bebel was very
influential for the production of Edward Aveling and Eleanor
Marx's The Woman Question.

13 Bax 28.

14 It is worth noting that a cinematic parody of
Weininger's position is evident in the Hungarian director
Idiko Enyedi's recent film "My Twentieth Century" (Hungary,
1996). In the midst of political turbulence at the turn of
the century in Eastern Europe, one of the film's central
characters, Lili, a young anarchist who reads, among other
things, Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, attends a lecture on feminism
given by Weininger himself. Weininger begins the lecture
calling for the emancipation of women, but then qualifies
that emancipation, by arguing that women are not rational in
the sense that men are--as a result of biological difference.
The film then subverts Weininger's representation of
sexuality by depicting Weininger's position as hysterical
itself. As women in the audience disagree with Weininger, he
begins ranting and raving to the point where his theatrical
hysteria has silenced the audience.

 

264

15 Bax 28.

16 Bax 48.

17 Bax 75.

265

 

.Notes to Chapter 5

1 Robert Blatchford, Julie: A Study gf'g Girl by‘g Man
(London: Walter Scott, 1901).

2 Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955) 584-587.

 

3 See Lawrence Thompson, Robert Blatchford: Portrait
gf‘gg Englishman (London: Gollancz, 1951) 137. Also,
Blatchford in his autobiography My Eighty Years (London:
Cassell, 1931) reflects on his role in the formation of the
Independent Labor Party and hints at his dissatisfaction over
his role as a politician, rather than a polemical writer:
"The I.L.P. was founded, I think, in 1892. It was founded or
started by seven men. I believe I was one of the seven; but
I am not sure and it does not matter" (199).

 

 

4 Robert Blatchford, Merrie England (1894; New York:
Monthly Review, 1966).

 

5 Robert Blatchford, The New Religion (London:
Clarion, 1898) 6.

 

 

6 James Callaghan, Socialism 13 Britain (London:
Blackwell, 1998) 54.

 

7 Tressell 244.
8 Blatchford, Julie 3.
9 Blatchford, Julie 18.

19 Blatchford, Julie 159.

 

ll Blatchford, Julie 148.

 

12 Blatchford, Julie 139.
13 Blatcthrd, Julie 162.
14 Blatchford, Julie 114.

15 Blatchford, Julie 116.

266

Notes to Chapter 6

1 See my discussion of this issue in Chapter 8.

2 Fred Ball, One gf the Damned (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1979) 170.

3 The issue of gender is indeed a problem in William
Morris, News from Nowhere (New York: International, 1967)
179-401. However, it must be admitted that the progressive
aspects of Morris' novel overshadow the residual, paternalist
aspects of his views toward gender. On the issue of
marriage, divorce and property a scene occurs in which Morris
appears to be in agreement with Aveling and Marx. In Morris'
utopia, divorce courts are a thing of the past, as are
property disputes of former times, but some problems of
gender remain: "We do not deceive ourselves, indeed, or
believe that we can get rid of all the trouble that besets
the dealings between the sexes" (238). Similar to Aveling
and Marx, Morris posited an alternative to capitalism through
a progressive, oppositional naturalism, which liberated
gendered subjects from oppressive conditions.

 

4 For an example of how women viewed the ideology of the
Labor movement, see Jill Liddington, The Life and Times 23
.2 Respectable Rebel: Selina Cooper, 1864-1946 (London:
Virago, 1984).

 

 

 

 

 

5 Virginia Woolf, "Memories of a Working Women's Guild,"
Collected Essays by.Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, ed. Leonard
Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1964) 134-148. ‘ - ’ '

 

 

6 Woolf 141.
7 Woolf 147.

8 Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx, The Woman Question
(London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1887).

 

9 Aveling and Marx 4.
10 Aveling and Marx 5.
ll Aveling and Marx 6.
12 Aveling and Marx 9.
l3 Aveling and Marx 9.

l4 Aveling and Marx 11.

267

268

15 Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labor (1911; London:

 

Virago, 1976).

16 Schreiner, Woman and Labor 221.

 

l7 Schreiner, Woman and Labor 77.

 

18 Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (New

 

Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990) 59.

19 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule gf Darkness (Ithaca:

 

Cornell UP, 1988) 176.

(Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1897) 18-11.

29 Olive Schreiner, Trooper Peter Halket gf Mashonland

 

 

 

21 Schreiner, Halket 16.

22 Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History

Workshop Journal 5 (1978): 12.

 

23 Davin 13.

24 Kier Hardie, Radicals and Reform (London: National

 

Labor, 1912) 5.

25 Hardie 5.
26 Hardie 6.

27 Annie Besant, Free Education and Free Maintenance

 

(London: Social Democratic Tracts, 1884) l.

28 Mrs. Wibaut and Lily Gair Wilkinson,.Women in -

Rebellion: Two Views on class, Socialism, and Rebellion

 

 

(19%; Leeds: ILP, 197—3') 10.

100.

Them

 

29 Wibaut and Wilkinson 18.

3g June Hannam, Isabella Ford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)

 

31 Hannam 100.

32 Hannam 102.

L
_m~_

(London: Humanitarian League, 1900) l.

 

34 Ford, Industrial Women 8.

 

35 Ford, Industrial Women 9.

 

 

269

36 Isabella 0. Ford, Mr. Elliott: A Novel gf Factory
Life (London: Edward Arnold, 1901).

 

 

37 Ford, Mr. Elliott 5.

 

 

Notes to Chapter 7

1 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1957) 196- 97.

2 Jeremy Hawthorn discusses the cultural aspects of
Lawrence's representation of the lived relations of working-
class subjects, "Lawrence and Working-Class Fiction," in
Rethinkigg Lawrence, ed. Keith Brown (Milton Keynes: Open UP,
1990) 67-68. Hawthorn establishes a linkage with Lawrence
and other working-class writers--presumably naturalist and
realist authors--by focusing on the tensions that
characterize issues of mobility in working-class fiction.
Hawthorn writes that "Such a concern is found again and again
in working-class fiction, but where many other working-class
writers state their interests in a clash of values, Lawrence
enacts this clash through the language and behavior of the
characters, and without overt narrative statement or
sermonizing or, most importantly, romanticizing working-class
life" (70). Hawthorn's point is interesting, especially when
we consider Lawrence's early representations of working-class
culture, but he fails to address the politicized context of
working-class narratives and the ideological tensions
inherent in dominant forms of naturalism. Hawthorn thus
relegates other working-class writers to a position of social;
pleading.

 

 

 

3 Until very recently, the working-class aSpects 0f

.4;Lawr.ence' s earl life seemed to have taken a badk seat to his
' later. Most criticism on Lawrence focuSed on the affective

and psychological aspects of Lawrence' 5 writing.

4 Of course Lady Chatterly's Lover would figure into
this ongoing conflict. But two later examples of Lawrence's
fiction reveal this tendency to imaginatively return to the
scene of Labor conflicts and.struggles. This is certainly
the case with Kangaroo, a novel that takes place in Australia
and concerns the ambitions of a labor leader and the failed
attempts of a "diggers'" movement. The second novel would be
The Plumed Serpent, a travel narrative set in Mexico, which
resolves the conflict of labor and culture through a return
to primitivism. The Plumed Serpent, by all accounts, harbors
specific, proto-fascist desires, and also reinscribes
Lawrence's concern for an organic culture unified under a
communal sign. In many respects, The Plumed Serpent returns
to the scene of the young Lawrence's concerns with religion
and the politics of Labor. Lawrence may have rejected
radical solutions, but his rejection of these solutions
becomes more symptomatic of his narrative during his

 

 

 

 

 

270

 

 

271

leadership period and in his travel fiction.

5 Lawrence articulates these utopian moments in his
narrative, it can be argued, in a more direct way than a
writer like Conrad does, according to Fredric Jameson's ideas
about aesthetic production and the rationalization of culture
in The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.) 206-
279.

 

6 Ford Madox Ford in D.H. Lawrence: A Composite
Biography, vol. 1, 1885-1919, ed. Edward Nehls (Madison:
Wisconsin UP, 1957) 117.

 

 

 

7 Ford 108.
8 Ford 109-110.
9 Ford 114.
1” Ford 110.
11 Ford 112-113.
12 Ford 116.
13 Graham Holderness, D.H. Lawrence: History,

Ideology, and Fiction (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
P, 1982) 130-158.

 

 

14 Emile Delavenay, D.H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter:
A Study lg Edwardian Transition (New York: Taplinger, 1971).

 

 

15 Daniel J. Schneider, The ConsciousneSs g: D.H. Lawrence
(Lawrence: Kansas UP, 1986) 53. ,

16 Schneider 54.

17 Holderness 148-50.

18 D.H. Lawrence, "To Reverend Robert Reid," 15 Oct.
1907, letter 37 of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence,

ed. James T. Boulton, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979)
36-370

 

 

19 Lawrence, "To Reverend Robert Reid, 3 Dec. 1907,
letter 39, 39-40.

2” The reference is to Robert Blatchford, Egg 33g My
Neighbor (London: Paternoster P, 1902). Blatchford's
radical humanist attack against organized Christianity.
Interestingly enough, Blatchford's recommended reading
material in the preface of his book urges readers to read
some of the very same material that Lawrence had been

 

272

reading.

21 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1976) 130.

 

22 Lawrence, "To Reverend Robert Reid, 3 Dec., 1907,
letter 39, 40-41.

23 Lawrence, "To Reverend Robert Reid, 3 Dec., 1907,
letter 39, 41.

24 Herbert Spencer, First Principles (London: Williams
and Norgate, 1862) 145.

 

25 Spencer 147.
26 Spencer 148-49.
27 George Stocking, Race Culture and Evolution: Essays

‘ig the History gf Anthropology (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1968)
178.

 

 

 

 

Notes to Chapter 8

1 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
gf 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964) 181.

2 Herbert Spencer, "Labour in Industrial Society,"
Herbert Spencer 22 Social Evolutiog, ed. J.D.Y. Peel
(Chicago: Chicago UP, 1972) 244-45.

 

3 All quotations are from D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
(New York: Modern Library, 1922).

4 According to Louis Althusser in "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses" in Essays 2g Ideology (London:
Verso, 1976) Ideology "'acts' or 'functions' is such a way
that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it
recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals into
subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise
operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and
which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace
everyday police (or other) hailing: "'Hey, you there!‘

Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined
takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn
round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical
conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has
recognized that the bail was really addressed to him, and
that it was really him who was hailed (and not someone
else)"(48). - .

' Similarly, the young Lawrence is hailed or called by
Spencer's discourse in the way a symbolic father hails a
symbolic son. As we saw in the last chapter, Lawrence
informs the Reverend Reid who he is not hailed by--namely
Blatchford and other socialists. He does not say anything
about Spencer. As I point out later in this chapter,
Spencer's name drops into the narrative of Sons and Lovers
while Paul is arguing with his mother over his relationship

with Miriam.

5 Rarely would I turn to Jacques Lacan for support when
discussing Lawrence and the problem of ideology, but there is
a passage in "Function and field of speech and language,"
Ecrits (New York: Norton, 1977) 30-113, in which Lacan
states that "It is in the name of the father that we must
recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from
the dawn of history, has identified his person with the
figure of the law" (67). The point of my quoting Lacan here
is not dispute or support Lacanian theory, but to argue that
Spencer has become a textual (symbolic) father for Lawrence.
When Paul addresses his mother in such a tone in this scene,

273

 

 

 

274

he invokes an authority figure--one who authorizes Paul's
discourse.

 

 

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