The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See

the use and direction of force in both feudal and protocapitalist economies. For Halpern, the period of the transition to capitalism oversaw the “reversal of the direction of force” from the centripetal to the centrifugal.26 In late feudal England, the landowning class directed force inward in a “centripetal” direction that compelled the maintenance of the “unity of peasant and land,” thus “binding” the peasantry to land-based extrication of dues and services.27 With the transition to the early modern period, some landowners began to direct force outward in a “centrifugal” and “expulsive” direction.28 The nature of peasant struggle accordingly shifted. As Halpern notes, “Force became expulsive rather than binding, centrifugal rather than centripetal, and on the other side the small peasantry now tried to secure its place on the land, whereas before it had struggled to free itself from villeinage.” The Tudor and Stuart eras thus came to be defined by an “explosion in the size of the vagrant population, … who lost their domestic, social, and cultural habitations along with their means of subsistence.”29

      What makes Halpern’s analysis of “breeding capital” particularly illuminating is his account of how the “vagrant” became “errant.”30 In an era when cultural, religious, and institutional traditions of hosting visitors and the poor came under extreme pressure—“the beggars, it seemed, were always coming to town”—the word and idea of the “truant” shifted such that its original denotation as a “vagabond or sturdy beggar” came to be applied in the sixteenth century to “lazy or absent schoolboys.”31 In this new “essentially sedentarizing regime,” wherein vagrancy was deemed “not as a class condition but as a moral or disciplinary failing,” the Tudor schoolhouse became a site for the anxious pedagogical warding off of vagrancy even as actual vagrants were excluded from the schoolhouse.32 Halpern then cites penmanship as an especially compelling example of how “ideological, literary, and pedagogical matters could clearly intersect.”33 How students wrote was as important as what they wrote about. In their copybooks, Renaissance students practiced forming letters by imitating the ideal models and reproducing them over and over again, carefully staying within the gridded boxes: “Penmanship as copying thus emerged from a striated or ‘ruled’ space (in every sense of the word).”34

      If the pen can be understood as an instrument of stylistic enclosure, penmanship was a means of developing one’s individual style. (I recall with fondness my own copybook and my ability to replicate perfect lines and curves when I learned cursive writing during my primary school education in 1970s Australia.) Halpern describes the two stages of teaching penmanship, beginning with letter production and then advancing to line production. While the former required students to imitatively copy letters, the latter demanded the mastery of the flow of ink such that students produced lines that no longer were confined by the ruled space. Students were introduced to the “art of the flourish.”35 Thus, an opposition and then an “unstable union” emerged between letter production as a “disciplinary and sedentarizing regime” and line production as a “fluid and nomadic one.”36 The pedagogy of graphology in Tudor England reflected how anxiety about vagrancy shaped the containment of wandering, nomadic elements, and the emergence of controlled fluidity. Stylistic enclosure was enabled first by lined, gridded paper and then followed by the emergence of the art of the flourish penned by a “free hand” capable of regulating the flow of ink. I take this set of contradictions to be a harbinger of the Romanticist ideal of the sovereign individual. The coming of style anticipated the freedom of the Romantic subject, a freedom rooted in enclosure.

      How does this history of freedom rooted in enclosure translate to the scene of American colonialism in the Philippines? The genocidal conquest of the Philippines was accompanied by a massive displacement of people from the land, which led to their migration to the United States, an accumulation by dispossession that followed the same logic as enclosure. Thus, Halpern’s account of an earlier enclosure in Europe helps us to detect a similar logic at work in the later movements of accumulation in post-Spain, American-occupied Philippines. Halpern’s thesis about stylistic enclosure sharpened my attention to the politics of Filipino manipulations of epistolary style. During my research for the chapter on the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, I came across a sheaf of letters, handwritten in English, by Filipinos to Marguerite Murphy Teahan, who served as the bachelor Frank Murphy’s “first lady” during his tenure as U.S. governor-general in the Philippines.37 Virtually every letter contained a combination of exaggerated flattery of the first lady followed by a concrete plea or demand, ranging from requests for a souvenir picture of Teahan to assistance obtaining a job or housing. For example, Simplicio Laude of Cebu opened his letter in 1934 to Teahan thus: “Standing in the shadow of your sympathy, I am addressing you this letter on a matter that vitally affects the condition of my living. I am at present suffering the great depression that ocurred [sic] in the Philippine Island [sic].”38 In the same year, thirteen-year-old Caridad Camacho, a student at Philippine Women’s College, wrote to Teahan and, after thanking the first lady for “all [her] sacrifice” for the Philippines, noted, “I have read too about the charitable institutions which cares [sic] for my poor fellowmen, especially the children.”39 Also in 1934, Patrocinio Hernando from Ilocos Norte opened her letter to Teahan with this flourish: “It overwhelms me to write a great lady such as you; more so when I face the fact that I am asking of you a favor.”40 As I explain further in chapter 2, enwreathed in ornate flattery, these requests constitute a demand for compensation that does not follow the logic of “progressivist imperialism” and that contains the trace of Southeast Asian values that demand recognition of the obligation that leaders have to provide for their people.

      Figure I.2. First page of a letter from Patrocinio Hernando to Margaret Murphy Teahan, September 17, 1934. Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

      Writing and Accumulation II: The Marriage between the Novel and Property

      Let us put down the pen for now and take up the novel. How might we extend the insights of literature proper, especially the novel, to our understanding of accumulation? I argue that the novel offers different perspectives on accumulation. In the telescoped but productive readings of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope that follow, I show that the novel depicts shifts in modes of accumulation, particularly the shift from what we might call a “fixed” mode of accumulation in Austen’s portrayal of the landed gentry to a speculative mode of accumulation in Trollope’s portrayal of gamblers.

      It is by now almost clichéd to draw attention to the intimacy between the novel and property. In its association with the developmentalism of the bildungsroman, heteroreproductive romance, the idea of national literature, and the West’s land grabs, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European novel wields enormous power as the genre—understood as the convergence of ideological pressures rather than as a static category—that repeatedly teaches the ideological lesson of marriage and property. The ultimate happy ending, the marriage between man and woman, achieves the legitimate heteropatriarchal and racial transfer of property from present to future owners and ensures the naturalized reproduction of the caste system. The apparently biological nature of woman’s destiny and duty to reproduce the next primogenitor works powerfully and insidiously to affirm class, religious, sexual, and racial hierarchies. In his tour-de-force book on Jane Austen, gender and sexuality studies scholar D. A. Miller notes that if, for the girl reader of Austen, the discovery that “Austen meant Woman” compels the girl to “be a good girl,” for the boy reader, the “same discovery … made the boy all wrong.”41 The novel amplifies its naturalization of extant power relations by deploying the pedagogical power of realism in the making of the modern subject.42 While the function of marriage as happy ending is by no means unique to the genre of the novel, the sequential, realist nature of the novel lends an inexorability to the drive toward the ending. The affinity between the genre and various modes of possession—of land, women, labor, and other resources necessary for the reproduction and expansion of capitalist accumulation—has been fortified in the last decade or so by a remarkable resurgence in the popularity of Austen and especially her novel Pride and Prejudice. Loose and stodgy versions of Pride and Prejudice can be found in the form of films, televised serials, YouTube videos, pulp fiction (with vampires, werewolves, detectives, or