Surface Tension. Julie Carr

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 be shamed for their opacity, as reason asserts its superiority over dream.

      Yet, as I’ve said, underlying this poem’s conclusion is a doubling of this disinterested viewer with the “shamed” but “thrilled” desiring voyeur of stanza four. This speaker is “not quite alone” not only because he is distantly “touched” by “unmating things,” but also because he is “with” the “conscious thrill of shame” he has extracted from his desire. He carries this shame with him into his resolved movement into (homo)sociability, and it is this (if anything) that enlivens the otherwise dulled list of abstractions he claims engagement with. Shame, however, disturbs the claim these final stanzas make for the speaker’s resolved, disinterested sympathy.

      To reiterate, it seems that isolation/desire has been replaced by renunciation/shame in order to carry the erotically charged subject into a paradoxically more human position defined by critical disinterestedness. This offers a version of Sedgwick’s position, which posits shame as at once a response to isolation and the motivation for its relief. However, the kind of sociability Arnold’s speaker finally enjoys clearly is not the fulfillment of the desire for the other; it is also not a bonding with the universal family of men. Arnold’s Empedocles will claim that by “being true / To our own only true, deep-buried selves,” we are “one with the whole world.” But here Arnold’s speaker achieves sociability only as continued isolation, signaled by the disdainful separation between the I who “loves” (if love) the happier men, and the happier men themselves. What we have to ask, as we look further into Arnoldian disinterestedness, is whether a shamed and shaming disinterestedness can be called disinterested at all. We have to ask if shame, employed here as a bridge not only into the social, but also back into the subject’s deep and desiring interiority, disrupts sympathetic distance as well as the “free play” of the critic’s mind. I will come back to this later in the chapter. For now I’d like to examine Arnold’s other well-known Marguerite poem in order to note the alternative to shamed disinterestedness that this second poem offers.

      “To Marguerite—Continued,” like “Isolation. To Marguerite,” presents a narrative of unsatisfied desire. And, while this poem does not stage the movement from potentially transgressive desire into the social, it does posit the erotic as inherently isolating, and thus raises the problem of desire I have been discussing. In “To Marguerite—Continued,” the speaker’s distance from the object of his desire is itself, paradoxically, an eroticized substance. Rather than eroticizing the beloved’s body, the poet eroticizes the space that divides the lovers—a space figured here as water. While the poem might seem to describe a perpetual state of erotic frustration, its opening word immediately challenges this reading, for the “Yes!” that begins the poem might easily be inspired by the highly erotic language of the first stanza. The “echoing straits” are “between us thrown;” the lovers dot the “watery wild;” and as metaphoric islands they feel the “enclasping flow” of the sea. In contrast to the “remote and sphered course” of the speaker’s heart in “Isolation,” this language suggests a definite pleasure found in separation.^l

      If we read the poem’s opening line, “Yes! in the sea of life enisled,” as a syntactical unit, we find a clear expression of exaltation within isolation. The “Yes!” stands alone as its own sentence with the exclamation point providing a strong visual boundary between the word and what comes after. Furthermore, the trochaic meter of the line’s first foot, read against the following iambs, serves to deepen the isolation of this “Yes!”. This moment of exaltation is metrically and grammatically “enisled,” one might say, in the rolling iambic sentences that follow.

      And this opening stanza’s final lines are telling as well: “The islands feel the enclasping flow,