Throughout the Preface Arnold continues to praise powerful poetic expression for being “pregnant” and poetry for having “boundaries and wholesome regulative laws” (15). However, in “The Study of Poetry,” where he again describes poetry as a spherical container, we can begin to sense the anxiety lurking under this construction: “In poetry, which is thought and art in one, it is the glory, the eternal honour, that charlatanism shall find no entrance; that this noble sphere be kept inviolate and inviolable” (Works, 9:132). Here poetry is again figured as a pregnant body—a pregnant body praised not for what it produces, but for what it keeps out. Poetry is metaphorized as a female body because of that body’s capacity to represent the future, and yet, just as the reproductive capacity of the feminine threatens the ideology that posits her as pure, as “inviolable,” it seems Arnold’s metaphorical poem demands strident protection lest it find within itself the very disruptive elements it is employed to resist.
The intensity with which Arnold wants to guard the “noble sphere” of poetry is parallel to the anxiety with which he wants to protect the critic in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” from involvement in the practical. Here Arnold claims “disinterestedness” as the one “rule” for the critic, writing that criticism must show this disinterestedness “by keeping aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches” (Works, 3:270). Just before this passage, Arnold discusses the French Revolution as the example qua example of a period in which “a whole nation [is] penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason,” in which the abiding question is not (as in the English Revolution) “is it legal?” but rather, “is it rational?” (264). Because of this, Arnold calls the French Revolution “the greatest, the most animating event in history.” And yet, he continues, the ultimate fatality of this great event arises from the “mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of reason” (265). Arnold also faults England with precisely this practicality, this obsessive adherence to results. Again, critical free play has, for Arnold, both aesthetic and ethical value; aesthetic because only with reason’s presence in the culture can great art be made; ethical because for Arnold, criticism’s aim is to discover “the best that is known and thought in the world,” in the “pursuit of our total perfection,” by which he means, of course, moral, intellectual, and spiritual perfection (Culture and Anarchy, 5).
And yet, despite disinterestedness’ usefulness to the aesthetic and ethical health of the social body, the aloof critic “touches” upon subjects in much the same distanced way that Arnold’s speaker in “Isolation” is “touched” by “unmating things.” In “The Function of Criticism,” as in “Isolation,” we find that the socially engaged male figure is isolated nevertheless. While now he is not isolated in erotic longing, his disinterestedness seems to construct for him a course as remote as the heart’s lonely sphere in “Isolation. To Marguerite.” (Indeed, in Culture and Anarchy Arnold refers to the truly disinterested citizen as an “alien.”) And this isolated sphere, like that of poetry, is burdened by the threat of rupture.
For the sphere of disinterestedness appears to be broken in the essay by a moment of shaming that is at the same time an image of pregnancy violated. In an attempt to convince his audience of the need for progress, Arnold draws on a news story about “Wragg” (whose very name suggests fragment and tearing as opposed to containment and wholeness). When a “thrill of shame” flashes through the body of “The Function of Criticism in the Present Time,” it is in the figure of this impoverished unwed mother accused of strangling her illegitimate child. Arnold’s language here is intended to shame his audience out of unthinking self-satisfaction. Yet at the same moment, we find a released outpouring of his affective subjectivity that is anything but aloof:
‘Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!’—how much that is harsh and ill-favoured there is in this best! Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world,’ has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original short-coming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names,—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In lonia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than ‘the best race in the world’; by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing! And ‘our unrivalled happiness’;—what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills. The smoke, the cold, the strangled, illegitimate child! (273)
As Sedgwick writes, “shame points and projects,” and we sense in this unmeasured, raging, and seemingly irrational shaming, Arnold’s voyeuristic fascination with the scene of degraded motherhood to which he points (38).lii Furthermore, as Arnold’s shaming of Wragg is also a shaming of England, as such it becomes, like the image of Luna, a self-shaming.
And yet unlike in “Isolation,” where shame inspires the movement away from desire and toward rational social usefulness, Arnold’s abuse of England for its “hideous names” points to the ways in which language, and its ability to produce affective responses, can overwhelm “idea” or “reason” (the critic’s domain). As any reader must agree (and many have), there is no reason behind Arnold’s disgust, and yet the very fact that an ugly list of homophonic names can produce an emotional response that disturbs the logic of Arnold’s argument suggests that the critic’s (and poetry’s) inviolate and inviolable sphere can be ruptured—by language itself.
Following this line of argument, we might read this moment as Arnold slipping into an engagement with the aesthetic, into a judgment of “pure taste” in the Kantian sense. “Ugliness” is presented as an attribute of the thing itself—the name—and not of the thing’s effect. This is purposiveness without purpose, for of course, Wragg’s crime has nothing to do with her name. Her name is bad in and of itself, and Arnold’s fall into homophonic association could thus be called a fall into form. The Wragg moment, despite its seeming interest in practical results (we must not rest in self-satisfaction as long as poor unwed mothers are this desperate) can be, and has been, read as the purest expression of critical disinterestedness within the essay.liii
At the same time, however, the choice of Wragg is not arbitrary. Just as Wragg’s baby (and homelessness) overwhelms her, Wragg’s story, as an example of monstrous maternity, overwhelms the disinterested critic. Again, while pregnancy is everywhere in Arnold’s work a figure for wholeness (and thus for power), birth, as a metaphor for the new, the unknown, the disruptive, is meticulously avoided. In the Arnoldian ideal, poetry might be “pregnant,” but as the bearer and not the producer of ideas; the poem, as the unforeseen and thus disruptive element itself, can never be born. Likewise, the monstrosity of Wragg is a result not only of her having killed, but also of her having birthed. The illegitimacy of the child reminds the reader of the “premature” poetry of the Romantics; this poetry “without critical effort behind it,” which Arnold calls a “poor, barren, and short-lived affair,” rhymes with the short-lived fatherless infant of Wragg (261-2). Thus Wragg’s crime is at least in part her refusal of (or inability to assume) traditional femininity.liv As Arnold writes sardonically, “Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness” (274). Criticism’s commitment to “pure reason” would, in Arnold’s argument, dispel this confusion and thus rediscover Wragg’s lost sex.
Just as in the poem “Isolation,” where shame, as desire’s remnant, maintains the subject’s isolation even as he moves into social engagement, in “The Function of Criticism,” the shaming of Wragg finally suggests the limit, rather than the expression, of Arnoldian disinterestedness. Even as Arnold’s absorption into the aesthetic materiality of names suggests the free play of his mind, the shame that motivates this “aesthetic judgment” seems to call the critic away from this free play, back toward desire. (Though exactly what the object of desire is here is hard to say: it seems to be at once the social welfare of women like Wragg, and the purging
