Interestingly for my reading of Arnold, in Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, we find Kant calling the process of detaching oneself from one’s desire (and thus becoming “not merely legally good, but morally good”) a “rebirth.” lvi And yet here in “The Function of Criticism,” as in “Isolation,” the self-perpetuating dyad shame/desire reproduces isolation by acting as a barrier to the “birthing” of the truly disinterested subject.lvii
Lurking beneath the explosion of ugly names as the source of the “bad” is the doubling of the difficult figures of feminine sexual desire and murderous maternity. This doubled monstrosity marks the presence of shame/desire and also points to Arnold’s resistance to metaphoric “birth,” to the rupturing of tradition.lviii In the section to follow I will examine more generally some of the cultural and ideological sources of this resistance to birth in Arnold, and will explore more fully its implications for his poetics and for his attitude toward futurity.
V. Problems with Birth
Again, for Arnold, the poem, or poetry itself, plays the part of the domestic woman: she carries the race into the future, she acculturates new generations, and she does so by abiding by the laws of wholesomeness, beauty, and pleasure. The critic, then, plays the part of the socially useful male who impregnates the poet with “ideas.” In many respects, this formulation is not surprising—the metaphor of reproductive generation as applied to literary production is certainly conventional. However, what is notable in Arnold’s use of this trope is the degree to which the figure of the poet has been effaced. Poetry becomes an abstracted container for the critic’s projections; the poet seems nowhere to be found. Furthermore, aesthetic unity means for Arnold that poetry cannot be invaded, and yet, to press the metaphor, like the female body when not pregnant, the pregnant body cannot accurately be imagined as fully “sealed.” It might be more precise, as suggested earlier, to read Arnold’s metaphoric poem not as a pregnant woman, but rather as a womb. In this case (again, extending the metaphor here), the sealed womb cannot give birth, for a womb cannot labor without a woman. Thus the problem in Arnold’s ideology of pregnant poetry is a problem, as already discussed, of the “future”—the future of the pregnant poem is simply more pregnancy. “The future of poetry is immense” indeed.
Regenia Gagnier has argued that Arnold’s aesthetics is an “aesthetics of evaluation,” an aesthetics focused on the consumer/critic rather than on the producer/artist. Some Victorian aesthetes, such as Ruskin or Morris, she writes, “were concerned with productive bodies, whose labour could be creative or alienated, while others [such as Arnold] were concerned with pleasured bodies, whose taste established their identities” (47). Gagnier’s delineation goes a long way toward explaining the erasure of the poet/body in Arnold’s construction, but we can also look to contemporary writings about pregnancy and birth to situate Arnold’s “all-womb” metaphor within its cultural landscape.
As Mary Poovey and Andrea K. Henderson have demonstrated, nineteenth-century medical texts often described the female body as purely and only a womb. Poovey quotes W. Tyler Smith in the medical journal Lancet as writing (in 1847), “The uterus is to the Race what the heart is to the Individual: it is the organ of circulation to the species . . . man passes continually from the womb of his mother onward to the womb of time” (35). This construction, as Poovey points out, imagines a giant womb in which men are perpetually floating; birth is quickly sublimated into the ongoing pregnancy of “time.” In her analysis of medical textbook plates from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Henderson notes that even as the image of the womb shifts from “mechanical” to “animalistic,” the woman’s body is never portrayed. Rather, the womb and surrounding pelvis (either as bones or flesh) is depicted as an isolated entity, the woman’s torso and legs appear “lopped off,” sometimes with rather gruesome detail (Henderson, 12-20). This erasure of the woman’s body, these critics argue, aligns with or reflects the ideology that defines the feminine as essentially, purely, maternal.
And yet, the scene of childbirth presents a paradox. At issue is the familiar construction of the feminine as at once man’s moral guide and his temptress (Poovey, 32). And in Victorian era descriptions of birthing, both sides of this paradox are at play. Poovey quotes Smith (who was to become one of the founders of the Obstetrical Society) as arguing that the pain of labor serves the useful function of canceling out, or, neutralizing “the sexual emotions, which would otherwise probably, be present, but which would tend very much to alter our estimation of the modesty and retiredness proper to the sex” (32). Others quoted by Poovey conjectured that because childbirth was, at base, a sexually stimulating act (a surprise to mothers), it presented the doctor/viewer with a problematic display of feminine desire, just at the moment when maternity, as the moral ground of the culture, was being most directly expressed (31-2).
Just as this problematically desirous birthing woman is erased in the medical texts and plates referenced above, Arnold’s pregnant poetry removes the poet from the scene. In order for poetry to carry forward the ideological goals Arnold has set for it, it is necessary that the poet, and poetic language itself, move out of the way. Henderson argues that Romantic-era texts describing the scene of childbirth effaced the laboring woman by naming “nature” as the active agent that draws the baby from the woman’s passive form (12-20). Arnold’s critical essays on specific Romantic poets participate in a similar rhetoric. Despite his anti-Romanticism, Arnold seems to have adopted the Aeolian harp model of poetic agency. The individual poet is praised not for his particular skill or even for the “genius” Arnold will claim for him, but rather for the way in which “nature” moves through him, such as in the essay on Wordsworth: “It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him. He has no style” (Works, 9:52). Interestingly, when writing on Keats (who in fact is praised for the beauty of his poetry), Arnold spends the majority of the essay defending Keats’s “character,” drawing evidence of his “nobility” not from poems, but from his letters, thus replacing Keats the poet with Keats the tragic, yet noble, man (Works, 9:205-216). And, as we’ve seen, in Arnold’s essays where “poetry” in general is discussed, the abstraction is once again offered as a passive recipient of abstract forces.lix
To return now to “The Function of Criticism,” we can begin to see how the figure of Wragg, as an emblem for female sexual desire and agency, plays a particularly disturbing role in Arnoldian poetics. Because Arnold relied so heavily on the maternal image in his descriptions of poetry, his choice of the fallen woman as a figure of shame suggests an apprehension about the ideological disruption that female desire suggests, which is also an apprehension about how poetic language can disrupt the ideological function assigned to poetry. Language embodies desire by gesturing toward what it cannot attain, because of the instability at the base of the structure, because language is always an approximation. If poetry, like the domestic woman, is to carry forth the hegemonic ideals of a particular class into the future, then language, with its propensity to disrupt rather than make meaning, resists the very function assigned to it. Just as the domestic/maternal woman’s desire disturbs the ideology that posits her as morally pure, language (and especially poetic language) as desire makes its servitude to ideology unsteady, if not dangerous.
However, Wragg is not only the bearer of an illegitimate child and as such a figure for female sexual desire; she is also that child’s murderer. As an infanticidal mother she represents an even deeper threat to Arnoldian “culture.” In her study of the figure of the infanticidal mother in the nineteenth century, Josephine Mcdonagh makes the convincing argument that Wragg becomes for Arnold a figure of threatening modernity:
By mid century, under the force of the domestic ideology, the figure of the good mother, in its dominant uses, tends to stand for tradition, against the incursions of industrial society. The infanticidal woman is associated with the