Surface Tension. Julie Carr

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 was not (that never can be) met, shame keeps that desire alive, which is why it is such a thrill. “Isolation. To Marguerite” foregrounds two problems then: 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