firstly that of the internally binding, and thus anti-social nature of erotic desire, and secondly, that the solution to desire, the antidote “shame,” employed to motivate renunciation, is actually also desire’s representative, marking desire’s continued agitating presence, and thus indicating the limits of “disinterestedness.”
The first and most obvious way in which desire is marked as anti-social can be found in the opening moments of “Isolation,” for here the speaker longs to escape the “world” in order, it seems, to immerse himself in love. And yet, his imagined escape from the world is not, as first it might seem, actually a movement into the world of the beloved, rather it is a movement into the self as occupied by the beloved: “I bade my heart more constant be. / I bade it keep the world away, / And grow a home for only thee” (2-4).
Erotic longing is first and foremost, then, a dialogue with the self. It is secondly a desire to subsume the other into the self. And thus, the second and less obvious way in which eroticism is anti-social begins to emerge: not only is the desiring subject isolated from the “world,” but he is also, as it turns out, more specifically isolated from the beloved as a subject outside of himself.
In the second stanza Arnold describes this isolation in more intensely painful terms, for the “growing home” in the speaker’s heart becomes binding: “The heart can bind itself alone” (9). While the most immediate meaning of this line is simply that Marguerite does not return the speaker’s faithful love (he is bound to her, but she is not bound to him), the reading I am offering shifts the line’s focus onto the nature of erotic longing itself. The “home” grown out of erotic desire traps the lover in an isolating and paralyzing self-scrutiny. This same problem is suggested again two lines later: “Self-swayed our feelings ebb and swell,” the speaker complains. Ebbing and swelling is, of course, like the movement of the ocean, which will reappear in “To Marguerite—Continued.” It moves, but it doesn’t progress. The state of unfulfilled desire is agitating to the self, but does not allow the self to develop. Like the masturbatory erotic that the line hints at, such desire is moving and paralyzing at once.
In the third stanza, we find Arnold’s speaker emphasizing the extent of his growing isolation, for where previously he has been reporting on his dialogue with himself, here he simply addresses himself:
Farewell!—and thou, thou lonely heart,
Which never yet without remorse
Even for a moment didst depart
From thy remote and sphered course
To haunt the place where passions reign
Back to thy solitude again!
(13-18)
This image of the desiring heart’s spherical course, like the image above of binding, figures the lover’s heart as trapped within a container with no exit. This image of a bound sphere appears throughout Arnold’s prose (and is applied to “poetry” and, interestingly enough, to the philistine’s mind and the un-cultured nation). And while here the bound or binding aspect of sphericity is clearly laid out, in his later prose, this binding aspect of the sphere, while still apparent, is obscured. Now, however, Arnold uses the image of spherical movement—like the echo in “To Marguerite—Continued,” and like the ebbing and swelling of the tides of emotion in line eleven of this poem—to represent a static agitation, an activity that gets him nowhere. Recalling here Sedgwick’s description of the early experiences of shame, it’s as if the speaker’s gaze, in failing to be met by its object, must return to its source—must, in failing to connect, turn inward.
And, just at this moment of inward turning, Arnold’s speaker announces his shame:
Back with the conscious thrill of shame
Which Luna felt, that summer night,
Flash through her pure immortal frame,
When she forsook the starry height
To hang over Endymion’s sleep
Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep.
(19-24)
Before discussing how this shame accompanies Arnold’s speaker in his move outward toward the social, which is at the same time a renunciation of desire, I’d like to focus on the image of Luna. In the only truly erotic language of the poem, the speaker identifies with feminine desire, with the “flash” of a shameful desire moving through a female body. Of course, he has prefigured this identification in the preceding lines when he describes the movement of his heart in language metaphorically linked to the circling of the moon around the earth. But here he pushes the metaphor toward a specific, and gendered, mythic figure.
James Eli Adams, writing on Tennyson and Charles Kingsley, claims that figures of female transgression are, for these writers, objects of identification. Adams argues that when images of desiring women appear in these male authors’ works, they represent an imagined escape from masculine self-discipline, and, he argues, this imagined escape is in fact a necessary component of such discipline (Adams, 141). The identification between Arnold’s speaker and Luna works in much this way, for here desire is also associated with femininity out of bounds. In this moment of identification, Arnold’s speaker can represent the transgressive nature of his desire at the same time that he locates it outside of himself. He thus begins the dissociation of his masculine self from his desiring self, and this dissociation will allow him finally to renounce desire and enter the social.
Notably, shame is directly associated with the gaze. In an almost perfect poetic representation of the scene of shaming provided by Sedgwick, Luna experiences the “thrill of shame” when her gazing on Endymion meets his closed, sleeping eyes. Her desiring gaze becomes voyeuristic; and yet her shame is not simply an affective response to the transgressive nature of her desire. Shame, as Sedgwick reminds us, is not only (or perhaps not at all) attached to prohibited behavior. Rather, it is a “reaction to the loss of feedback from others, indicating social isolation and signaling the need for relief from that condition” (36, quoting Basch). The “wandering” that accompanies the “thrill of shame” leads, in the chronology of the poem, to the speaker’s movement into social interaction; as Sedgwick argues, shame “aims toward sociability” (37).
For now, in the following stanza, the speaker allows for the possibility that he may not be “quite alone”—engagement is possible, it seems, as long as it is not predicated upon desire:
Or, if not quite alone, yet they
Which touch thee are unmating things—
Oceans and clouds and night and day;
Lorn autumns and triumphant springs;
And life, and others’ joy and pain,
And love, if love, of happier men.
(31-36)
Here is a construction of effective sociality that is based instead on abstract compassion, much like the disinterestedness Arnold claims for the critic in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” If eroticism assumes isolation, then it seems social involvement must be grounded in “unmating” sympathy. The failure of the speaker’s erotic pursuit and his consequent move into distanced compassion allows him (like Arnold’s critic) to lay claim to a superior knowledge, a superiority that seems to render him more fully human than the abstracted, dreaming “happier men.” Others may be happy, but he is aware, and now it is the happy men who must
