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 disorder and change brought about by industrialization. As the good mother stands for tradition, the infanticidal woman is the harbinger of the modern. (228)
By focusing his and England’s shame on the figure of Wragg, Arnold is once more betraying a resistance to the potential ruptures in England’s future. Arnold’s choice of Wragg points to the dangerous threat, the “anarchy” that lies at the base of his conception of “culture.” This threat, to put it simply, is modernity itself. Mcdonagh writes:
In the rhetorical construction of High Culture, or Arnoldian civilization, Wragg represents the barbaric work of industry—or anarchy—that will be fended off by the formation of the realm of Culture. And if anarchy is represented by the bad mother, Culture, in its civilizing mission, appropriates the function of the good mother. Like the good mother, Culture provides a site in which a class can reproduce its values, and it does so precisely by regulating the modes of literary consumption, in the same way that the good mother performs her acculturating function through the metaphor of feeding. (229)
Finally, I contend that Wragg points both to Arnold’s conservative resistance to democracy’s most radical possibilities, and to his (ashamed) fascination with the unknowable future, with the “modern.” I will turn now to Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna, written a full decade before “The Function of Criticism,” but anticipating many of the issues within the essay. This poem marks the crossroads of Arnold’s work, and he rejects it from his canon for many of the same reasons, as we will see, that he is repelled by and fascinated with the figure of Wragg.
VI. Empedocles on Etna: The Unbirthing of the Poem
Empedocles on Etna begins with a competition between the poet and the physician over who will better heal modernity. Empedocles, a figure for modernity itself, suffers from self-consciousness, what Carlyle calls the “disease” of inquiry. He cannot escape the dialogue of his mind with itself, and this isolation spells his despair. And yet, while Carlyle imagines “the region of meditation” in its “quiet mysterious depths” as an unmapped creatively productive territory, Arnold’s Empedocles mistrusts his own interiority, finding it not at all a source of vital generation, but rather a binding and static sphere. The mind’s un-freedom arises, for Empedocles, out of its modern incapacity to forge cohesive meanings from empirical data.
When Empedocles complains that man’s “wind-borne, mirroring soul, / A thousand glimpses wins, / And never sees a whole” (1:2, 83-5), we will be reminded of Arnold’s “On the Modern Element,” his 1869 inaugural address at Oxford, in which he most fully presents his picture of modernity as “the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts” (Works, 1: 20). Arnold argues that “intellectual deliverance” is only complete when, “we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of mind which we feel in contemplating a grand spectacle that is intelligible to us; when we have lost that impatient irritation of mind which we feel in the presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which, while it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehension” (20). Unable to process the fragmented and overwhelming spectacle of modernity, Empedocles fails to realize this “deliverance”; he finds his soul suspended—reflective, but incapable of unifying vision. While this vertiginous experience of modernity is taken by other authors such as Baudelaire, Walter Pater, and Dante Rossetti, as a point of departure, an opening into the new, for Arnold’s Empedocles it marks a failure, a stay in development.
In the drama of
