Victorian novels and the history of sexual desire

A history of sexual desire? Are not the intimate intensities of mind and body that go by that name as insulated from the mass and massive public events that we commonly call history as hunger or pain? Is not the heart filled with passion always the same old story, a drama whose costume may vary from period to period, but whose script remains essentially unchanged? But while much that we experience as sexual desire seems a largely immutable condition of human (and perhaps not just human) existence, the scope and shape of the meanings that we attach to this experience are decided by a complex of historical forces, not least of which, for those of us who live in its aftermath, is the Victorian novel itself. Thus, for example, the great expectation, usually observed in the breach, that sexual bonds will culminate in marriage, or its contemporary cognate, the Permanent Relationship, finds its most eloquent propagations in what one of their critics calls “our books,” the novels whose promise of romance we know by heart as surely as we have forgotten the details of their plots. If we continue to acknowledge, typically in the privacy of our own disappointments, as universal truth a vision of sexual desire as the engine and origin of a partnership at least lifelong, this is in no small part because of the sentimental education we receive from the Victorian novel and its afterlife in more recent narrative forms. If, against often overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we persist in perceiving the halo of “happily ever after” light up the object of our sexual affections, that is in no small part because books like Jane Eyre (1847) and Middlemarch (1872) have taught us so well to do so.

Ben Jonson's reputation stands higher now than at any time since his own era, when it perhaps surpassed Shakespeare's. Today he ranks second in the great age of English drama and is considered one of its very best poets. He continued in high esteem after the 1660 Restoration, but later his fortunes fell as Shakespeare's rose. By the early 1800s his influence languished: his works were sometimes read and respected, occasionally admired, but almost never staged and perhaps as rarely loved. The Romantics seldom valued this professedly classical author, but it was now (ironically) that his fortunes rebounded. He found a devoted editor (William Gifford) whose defenses, though fierce, were usually factual. By now, too, Shakespeare's clear triumph made further battles pointless. Thus began a fairer, more methodical assessment of Jonson. By the mid-twentieth century a renaissance was in full swing, helped by the superb Oxford edition (1925-52). Finally, at century's end, Jonson once again seemed truly central to discussions of his period. Scholarship proliferated; his best plays were regularly (if not widely) performed; and even his “dotages” won some renewed respect. If Jonson were living at this hour, even he might be pleased.

In the years since her death in 1975, Hannah Arendt's large body of work has been ever more widely discussed. So far we can say that her readers have occupied themselves mainly with two contributions that Arendt made to political theory and the study of politics. One is her analysis of the political evil of the twentieth century, especially totalitarianism in its Stalinist and Nazi forms. The other is her analysis of the excellence of politics: its greatness and the place of individual excellence in it (HC, p. 49).

Totalitarianism pressed on her with such force that she had to respond and try to be theoretically adequate to those great horrors. But she began her life as a writer with a dissertation on the concept of love in St. Augustine. One imagines that uninterrupted by political evil, she could have gone on to write philosophically about the many faces that human experience and the human condition present to the determined philosophical observer. She perhaps would have turned her attention to politics eventually, as one more type of human experience, one more way in which human beings enter into relations or confront and deal with one another. I would say, therefore, that her analysis of political excellence grows without artificiality from her original interests.

Jonsonian topographies

Ben Jonson was one of the more traveled dramatists of the English Renaissance. He crossed the Channel twice, as a footsoldier in the Low Countries in the 1590s, and as chaperone for the visit of Sir Walter Raleigh's son to Paris in 1613. At home his most notable journey was his 1618-19 walk to Edinburgh and back, during which he laid plans for a Loch Lomond pastoral and a poem on the wonders of Scotland. Among other exploits, he visited Sir Robert Cotton in Huntingdonshire in 1603, and turned up in Rutland in 1621. But it is entirely characteristic that while away from the city, his imagination harked back to it. In Scotland, he dubbed Edinburgh “Britain's other eye” (HS 1: 143), implying that England's capital was eye number one. Incidents from the Paris trip became source material for Bartholomew Fair. At Cotton's house, he was unable to forget the danger his family stood in from the plague, and was troubled by dreams of home (HS 1: 139-40).

Hannah Arendt's idea of freedom can be said to have two main sources, the first being the Greek polis and the Roman res publica; the second St. Augustine and the Christian idea of a spontaneous new beginning (creatio ex nihilo). These two notions of freedom, which Arendt attempts to combine in her political theory, are not totally compatible. The first or republican idea of freedom is elitist in its content and presuppositions, whereas the second or Augustinian concept has an egalitarian core. This chapter examines both ideas, with specific attention to the tensions they generate in Arendt's work (section I). In the second (shorter and concluding) section, I show how Arendt's theory of political freedom is embedded in a narrative philosophy of history about the decline of man as a political animal, a narrative derived, for the most part, from the first (Graeco-Roman and elitist) concept of freedom. This concept of freedom also provides the normative basis for much of her critique of contemporary politics. We should, as a result, be somewhat skeptical about certain elements of this critique (Arendt's entirely negative view of politics as the quest for social justice, for example) even as we utilize her profounder insights about the nature of politics and freedom.

The term classicism is used here in two senses - as a literary and philosophical system that asserts and celebrates the existence of a series of timeless, unvarying principles of conduct and thought: attention to form, decorum, knowledge, the past, imitation, consistency, fidelity, personal worth; and as an acknowledgment that those principles are embodied in the writings of ancient Greece and Rome, which should be taken as models by all later writers aspiring to repeat the process.

It is clear that Jonson embraced classicism in the second sense. He consciously imitated ancient Greek and Roman authors (although mainly Roman), and called attention to his debt in learned notes to his plays and masques. But he was also a classicist in the first sense, for he yearned to associate himself with the stability of the classical tradition, and the prestige of its authors. One could argue about the wisdom of attempting to translate certain classical concepts into seventeenth-century artifacts, but to consider Jonson outside of the classical tradition would be as anomalous as to ignore Herman Melville's interest in the sea.

Rare poems, rare friends: the Epigrams

In conversation with the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden over the winter of 1618-19, Ben Jonson gloomily predicted that the work of his friend John Donne, “for not being understood, would perish” (Conv. Dr. 158). Writing to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, just a couple of years earlier, however, Jonson had imagined his own poems being studied with attention by “posterity” - that ideal readership to which, on more than one occasion, he had confidently commended his work (Epig. Ded. 15). Neither of these predictions has proved to be exact. Donne's poetry, though relatively neglected throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has scarcely perished; admired and mediated by Eliot, it spoke powerfully to modernist sensibilities and proponents of the new criticism, and is familiar today to readers throughout the Englishspeaking world. Jonson's poems, on the other hand, are less well known and perhaps (ironically) less well understood. It is not that they have lacked discerning admirers such as James Joyce, Marianne Moore, Yvor Winters, and Thorn Gunn, but the band of witnesses has always been small in number. In Epig. 17, addressed “To the Learned Critic,” Jonson declared that it was the opinion of the single judicious person that he esteemed, not that of a wider public: “And but a sprig of bays, given by thee, / Shall outlive garlands stolen from the chaste tree.” In recent times Jonson has had his sprig of bays, perhaps, but hardly his garlands.

Hannah Arendt is one of the few contemporary political and social theorists for whom ancient Greece retains its hold as a point of reference and inspiration. Of the very few who think with the Greeks she is distinctive in having recourse to the pre-philosophical articulation of polis life. Where other theorists understand and judge the polis in terms of a philosophical tradition largely hostile to it, she inverts that reading, condemning the tradition for effacing the originary and in some respects still quintessential expression of freedom and power present in the practices and literature of classical Greece, particularly democratic Athens. Thus, while she has much to say about Plato, it is mostly to chastise him for being anti-political. And though she says much more in praise of Aristotle, in the end she thinks he too misrepresents Greek political life.

There is something perverse about this inversion. For one thing, it rests on a sometimes flatfooted reading of The Republic, the text which provides the principal object of her most sweeping criticisms of the Platonic project. For all of Arendt’s appreciation of the theatrical and performative dimensions of Athenian politics she is largely insensitive to the dramatic structure of The Republic. For another thing, she seems to romanticize a society, Athenian democracy, which is utterly remote from our own, and then compounds things by largely ignoring or excusing what seems most illiberal and/or undemocratic about it: substantial social and economic inequalities, slavery and patriarchy, imperialist adventures, exclusive citizenship laws, the absence of rights and the immoralism of greatness.

Hannah Arendt spent much of her life and a great deal of her writing in an effort to comprehend the destructive forces of the twentieth century, some of which, as she never ceased to remind us, were fundamentally unprecedented and incomprehensible in any ordinary or conventional sense. Within the domain of the social sciences, Arendt argued, there are data which “respond to our commonly accepted research techniques and scientific concepts,” and then there are data “which explode this whole framework of reference” and defy our categories of explanation concerning human social and individual behavior. In the face of such data, Arendt noted, “we can only guess in what forms human life is being lived when it is lived as though it took place on another planet.”

Arendt thought that the line between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, between human life on earth and some other planet, between human evil and absolute evil, was crossed in the final stages of totalitarianism when Nazi anti-semitism transmogrified into the Holocaust, as anti-Jewish legislation, the herding of Jews into European ghettos, and the establishment of forced labor camps, mutated into the creation of death factories for “the fabrication of corpses” undergirded by a methodical and mechanized program for the extermination and annihilation of human beings.

Herman Melville, a subscriber to Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1852, would have found there the serialization of Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Melville had just completed Moby Dick and was busily composing Pierre, or The Ambiguities. Bleak House might well have startled this alert, despairing American mind. Dickens, the best-known, best-selling Victorian author on the New York newsstands, could have been seen by Melville as writing a novel unmistakably indebted to the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the mentor-author whom Melville had nominated as the American equivalent of Shakespeare. If one considers Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street” (first published anonymously in Putnam's Magazine in 1853) it seems he fired back across the Atlantic a rejoinder to Dickens's apparent appropriation of Hawthorne. This textual encounter moves us quickly to the literary relations between British Victorian novelists and their American contemporaries, and it suggests how American writers in the mid-nineteenth century enacted a second war of independence in their major writings.

Ben Jonson wrote Volpone for the King's Men in 1605-6. This premier acting company had been given the accolade of that title, the King's Men, when James I came to the English throne in 1603. Its roster included Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare, both of whom, along with Augustine Phillips, Henry Condell, Will Sly, Will Kemp, John Heminges, Thomas Pope, Christopher Beeston, and John Duke, are listed in the Jonson Folio of 1616 as having acted in Jonson's Every Man in his Humour in 1598. They then constituted the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and for some years had been the premier acting company of England (in fierce competition with the Admiral's Men, headed by Edward Alleyn). In 1599, the Lord Chamberlain's Men had moved into their new theatre, the Globe, on the south side of the Thames across from London in Southwark. Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour was one of their new plays in this location, along with Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar and Henry V. Jonson's Sejanus was acted here in 1603, Volpone in 1605-6 (featuring Burbage, Condell, Heminges, Sly, and two newcomers, John Lowin and Alexander Cooke), The Alchemist in 1610, and Catiline in 1611. The King's Men presented Jonson's The Staple of News in 1626 at their second Globe Theatre, the first having burned down in 1613.

Among the vast array of goods and materials produced during the aggressive onset of industrialism in Britain in the early Victorian period, none was more widely disseminated, more instrumental to everyday life, more essential to the shaping of industrial culture than information. For along with the grand mélange of things that seemed to flow unchecked out of British factories, a river of knowledge (and questions) about how the world worked coursed through every aspect of Victorian life. The era's most conspicuous outward signs of unprecedented material change - steam engines, factories, railroads, urbanization - denoted even grander transformations in the way people thought and acted. Received notions about everything from gender to nationalism, from class to religion, from propriety to biology were open to question. Even assumptions about such fundamentals as space and time were challenged. Not only were people living differently, they were thinking differently, talking and writing differently, acting differently. They were existing differently. Such monumental changes and the effects they wrought became both the form and the substance of nearly all forms of inquiry. On the abstract level, thinkers like Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Pater took up the issue of “progress” - or at the very least “change” - in terms of its political, moral, and aesthetic implications. Others, from novelists such as Gaskell, Dickens, Disraeli, Kingsley, and Frances Trollope to the new breed of social investigator like Edwin Chadwick, James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Henry Mayhew, while often fully aware of the abstract principles that grounded their work, were more directly invested in the concrete examples of change (as either progress or decline) that quotidian life provided.

In what sense (if any) is man a political animal? Hannah Arendt is commonly thought to have made more of the Aristotelian characterization than anyone else in twentieth-century philosophy. I do not mean that she is a good expositor of Aristotle: in fact she is often criticized on that front. I mean that she took the content of Aristotle's claim very seriously, particularly the question of what exactly in man's nature is political and what is not.

Historically, Arendt argued, humans have found their greatest fulfillment in politics. For people like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, “life in Congress, the joys of discourse, of legislation, of transacting business, of persuading and being persuaded, were . . . no less conclusively a foretaste of eternal bliss than the delights of contemplation had been for medieval piety.” In politics, such men found something which managed to redeem human life from the cyclical futility of birth, reproduction, and death. Without that something, their existence would be as uniform and pointless as the life of any animal; or its point would be the biological process itself, the endless repetition of generation after generation. In politics, by contrast, our humanity gives us the chance to transcend the merely natural and to undertake unique initiatives that flare up in the public realm and linger indefinitely in memory and history.

When the emancipated slave, William Wells Brown, visited England in 1850, he made a short visit to the “far-famed city of Oxford . . . one of the principal seats of learning in the world.” Here, he admired the architectural beauties of the university, and, when night fell, walked around the colleges which back onto Christ Church meadow:

Brown’s focus of interest is salutary. Reading provoked a good deal of anxiety during the Victorian period. At the centre of this anxiety about what constituted suitable reading material and ways of reading lay concerns about class, and concerns about gender. In both cases, fiction was regarded as particularly suspect: likely to influence adversely, to stimulate inappropriate ambitions and desires, to corrupt. But in the case of Brown, a man who is painfully aware of the value of education, and of the advantages which privilege bestows, we see someone who is less troubled by the thought that this young man might be learning dangerous lessons from his novel, than someone who cares that he is frittering away his time, wasting those opportunities for learning from which others could gain so much. He seizes the chance to regret how “few of our own race can find a place within their walls,” and to emphasize the need, among black people, to turn their attention seriously to self-education.

In dedicating the 1616 Folio version of Cynthia's Revels to the court, Jonson addressed that body as “A bountiful and brave spring” that “waterest all the noble plants of this island. In thee, the whole kingdom dresseth itself, and is ambitious to use thee as her glass. Beware, then, thou render men's figures truly, and teach them no less to hate their deformities than to love their forms; for, to grace there should come reverence; and no man can call that lovely which is not also venerable.” If, as Jonson claimed, the court nurtured and sustained the whole island, it would be impossible to overestimate the importance of his self-appointed role as court reformer. Throughout his career, though in varying modes and intensities at different times, he assigned himself the gargantuan and foolhardy task of critiquing the foibles and vices of the court. Jonson lived most of his life in close proximity to the English court at Whitehall, and the court figures prominently in his writings. But physical proximity is not the same thing as access.

John Dryden made what has been for centuries the definitive critical judgment on Ben Jonson's late plays, describing them as his “dotages.” Fortunately, the past few decades have seen a critical re-evaluation of these plays which has in important ways contradicted this opinion and concentrated on the merit of dramas which reiterate the important ideas of Jonson's life's work while embodying them in, for him, new dramatic modes, including the romantic drama which he had once despised. Whatever these plays were, as Martin Butler says, “they certainly were not 'dotages.'”

The Staple of News, the earliest of the dramas to be considered here, was performed in 1626 by the King's Men, first at court and then on the public stage; it was printed in 1631. It was Jonson's first play since The Devil Is An Ass in 1616, although he had been busy during these ten years in the production of thirteen masques. It was also his first play after the coronation of King Charles I, with whom he was not to have the close relationship that he had enjoyed with Charles' father, James.