but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that” (39). This contradiction marks the degree to which Arnoldian disinterestedness, despite its project of pursuing “a current of true and fresh ideas,” resists its own most radical implications.xliii The embrace of the “new” implied in the progressive searching of the disinterested mind, is met by a resistance to the new, which, as Culture and Anarchy makes abundantly clear, stems largely from a strong mistrust of emergent working class power. To quote Harrison once again, “In Arnolds’ vision of an inevitable new political world in England, the lower classes clearly will play no role in the governance, and certainly not the leadership, of the nation” (17).
The recourse to disinterestedness as finally only the domain of the elite, and therefore a practice of self for some and an ideological imposition for others, arises also out of a profound mistrust of “modernity”—where modernity stands for the urban industrial “spectacle”—and thus reflects Arnold’s anxiety about the unknowable future that democracy always holds out as its hope. Furthermore, this resistance bears a strong relationship to Arnold’s erasure of the figure of the poet and the body of the metaphoric mother discussed above. Both poet and mother, in Arnold’s configuration, come to represent disruptive and productive desire, even as Arnold paradoxically attempts to employ these metaphorically conflated figures toward the perpetuation of tradition.
III. “Thy Remote and Sphered Course”: Desire and Isolation in Arnold’s Marguerite Poems
While Arnold’s Marguerite poems are often admired as some of his most powerfully affective work, they foreground the very problem of desire that leads Arnold finally to reject poetic language as a generative force, and to view poetry as instead the servant of criticism’s ideas. These poems, written during Arnold’s 1849 visit to Switzerland, offer an early assertion of his guiding ethos—that social usefulness must be predicated upon the rejection of unresolved desire. The poems explore the pathology of desire itself and seek to find a remedy to desire’s isolating impact through a movement into the social, a remedy that, for Arnold, demands the renunciation of erotic longing.xliv In these poems desire is problematic because rather than drawing one towards others, desire stands between the subject and the social world. As desire traps the subject in an impenetrable sphere of his own erotic/emotional life, his emergence from this sphere depends upon an absolute rejection of unsatisfied longing.
Arnold most clearly expresses a poetics that rejects desire and embraces disinterested social engagement in the Preface of 1853, though it also arises in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864) and even later in “The Study of Poetry” (1880). Further on I will examine more fully how Arnold’s refusal of desire leads him to also refuse poetic language’s ruptural power. For now, I want to show how the Marguerite poems both forge and complicate this program of disinterested social engagement. Again, the binding nature of desire is, for Arnold, ethically problematic because of the way it isolates the subject in non-productive self-scrutiny. In the therefore ethical act of renouncing desire, figured most clearly in the poem “Isolation. To Marguerite,” Arnold’s speaker announces the shame his desire has produced, and at the same time, names this shame as his remaining affective property once renunciation is achieved.
As shame accompanies the speaker in his movement into productive social engagement, it also writes his continued faith in his own deep subjectivity, for his claim to individual or psychological depth has been based upon the very desire he wishes to forego. Thus the burden/pleasure of shame is that it supplies the speaker with a continued hold on his previous understanding of what constitutes his selfhood, and as such it marks, as we will see, the limit of Arnoldian critical disinterestedness of which these poems are among the earliest of many articulations. Shame creates a rupture in both critical disinterestedness and poetic pregnancy and thus becomes the cataclysmic affect in Arnold’s work that proves the insecurity, and thus the violability, of both Arnold’s poetics of containment and his gradualist politics.
In “Isolation. To Marguerite” we locate the particular bind in which Arnold places his poetic speaker. Here desire and isolation are clearly paired as mutually constructing energies that together negatively impact the speaker’s sociability. Shame and renunciation are paired as the disciplining antidote to this bind of desire/isolation, and motivate his turn to useful social engagement. However, this familiar pattern of Victorian male psychological development (which, as Mary Poovey has shown, has many examples in domestic fiction of the period) is made problematic in this poem by shame’s necessary relation to desire, as well as by the estrangement inherent in the social engagement Arnold imagines as “isolation’s” antidote.xlv
In her essay “Shame and Performativity,” Eve Sedgwick argues that shame is linked to a feeling of isolation or interrupted connection with an “other,” and because of this, is inextricably tied to the formation of selfhood. According to Sedgwick, recent psychologists and theorists of shame locate its inception in the earliest experiences of broken contact, in the moments in an infant’s life when its caregiver fails to return its gaze—when what Sedgwick calls the “circuit of mirroring” is broken.xlvi Sedgwick quotes psychologist Michael Franz Basch as claiming that, “the shame-humiliation response, when it appears, represents the failure or absence of the smile of contact, a reaction to the loss of feedback from others, indicating social isolation and signaling the need for relief from that condition” (4). Sedgwick is interested in how shame, in marking isolation, therefore motivates a need to “reconstitute the interpersonal bridge.” And this link to the desire for reconnection leads Sedgwick to tie shame to performativity and, in a series of moves I won’t reiterate here, to queerness (5, 22).
For my purposes, Sedgwick’s work is of interest primarily in how it names shame as the affect most generative of individuation. Drawing on the work of psychologists (most notably Silvan Tomkins), to support a positive claim for shame, Sedgwick writes:
Shame and identity remain in very dynamic relation to one another, at once deconstituting and foundational . . . What most readily distinguishes shame from guilt is that shame attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is, while guilt attaches to what one does. One therefore is something in experiencing shame . . . In the developmental process, shame is now widely considered the affect that most defines the space wherein a sense of self will develop. (4)
In Arnold’s work we find shame participating in the formation of identity in just this way. Only, it seems, “with” shame can the subject effectively enter the social world, only through experiencing the “thrill of shame” can the subject recognize his need for engagement at the same time that he recognizes his distinction from others. For Arnold, as for Sedgwick, shame seems to be fundamentally constructive of subjectivity.
And yet, as the poems demonstrate, the conventional link between rich interiority and unsatisfied desire is crucial to Arnold’s construction of subjectivity as well (as it is in general to the Victorian period).xlvii Arnold writes renunciation into the narrative of desire, and attempts to invent a satisfying escape from the anguished bind of unresolved longing which is associated here and elsewhere with emasculating inaction. And yet, an interest in maintaining a deeply unknowable affective space—what John Stuart Mill in the 1830’s and Walter Pater in the 1870’s describe and value as “the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion” xlviii and, “the inward world of thought and feeling”xlix respectively—presents a paradoxical requirement to preserve a rich interiority for the renouncing lover. Even as destructive male desire is surrendered, shame becomes the vehicle through which the poetic speaker maintains the authoritative voice of his previous lyric subjectivity. In this way, shame works to construct a deep masculine subjectivity that is, nonetheless, socially active and productive.
However, as Sedgwick argues, if shame impels the subject to “reconstitute the interpersonal bridge,” it also remains as a reminder of the subject’s isolation; it also reconstitutes the bridge to the subject’s abjection. As the remnant of the desire that
