Surface Tension. Julie Carr

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 of such women with such disturbing names “appearing like a natural growth amongst us,” from the social body, at once the expulsion of such pregnant bodies, with such disturbing desires of their own, and the exposure of these bodies as signaling the nation’s need for criticism’s penetrating work.) It seems that shame rekindles desire—rekindles at the very least the critic’s attachment to results.

      Thus it appears we have answered affirmatively the question posed earlier: whether Arnold’s shame precludes the truly ironic self-distance necessary for disinterestedness. And yet what has not yet been noted is the irony of Arnold’s “Wragg” moment. If reading this passage we say, “he cannot be serious!” this is because he is not. Arnold has been greatly criticized for his attack on names, in our time as well as in his own. In recent years critics such as Josephine Mcdonagh, Marc Redfield, and Susan Walsh take on Arnold’s Wragg. Of Arnold’s contemporaries we can offer as example Fitzjames Stephen from The Saturday Review (December 3, 1864, 684) who wrote sardonically, “Criticism ought to show that Wragg should have been called (say) Fairfax . . . We do not envy the higher criticism if it has to go about ‘murmuring Wragg is in custody,’ till all after-dinner speeches rise to the level of ideal beauty.”^lv

      And in fact, in “The Function of Criticism” Arnold reveals that he is well aware of the reaction the passage will inspire: “Mr. Roebuck [the MP who spoke of England’s “unrivalled happiness”] will have a poor opinion of an adversary who replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody,” he admits (274). In parodying his own methodology here, Arnold highlights the irony with which he means to be read. To return to de Man’s definition of irony as the detachment of the subject from his own work, we have in Arnold’s self-parody, a shift in register, a moment, as de Man would have it, of buffoonery (de Man, 177). And indeed, in keeping with de Man’s description of irony’s function, the Wragg passage produces a profound uncertainty in the structure of the essay. We no longer know what is meant by “disinterestedness” because we cannot tell whether Arnold is truly moved to correct the social problems that lead to Wragg’s crime (in which case he is not disinterested at all), or whether he is only offended by the philistinism of those who, in the name of getting practical results, utter inanities (“Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!”) instead of employing reason. Does Arnoldian disinterestedness (as Park Honan argues) mean ultimately to save the lives of infants by first changing the intellectual practice of those who construct the ideals of the society? Or is Arnold’s disinterestedness here true to form; is Arnold practicing, to borrow Regenia Gagnier’s term, an “aesthetics of consumption” (Gagnier, 47), disinterestedly passing aesthetic judgment on names, on the newspaper’s abrupt style, on the decrepitude of poor neighborhoods, and finally, on the vulgarity of the MP’s self-satisfied speech?

      Finally, it seems that irony allows Arnold to hang in the balance between the ethical and the aesthetic. The turn to irony allows Arnold, in the manner of poetry, to open up a disrupting because disturbing series of questions about the relationship between beauty (or ugliness) and the good. As Arnold’s metonymy links “the gloom, the smoke, the cold, [with] the strangled illegitimate child,” links the guttural sound of the double “g” with “an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions,” he suggests that aesthetic effect, what we might call surface, is intimately connected to the moral depth of a person or culture. In this way the ironic—the poetic—moment, produced through the metonymic process by which language generates language, becomes itself productive of the ideational. The text-machine, to borrow de Man’s term for the slippery chain of signifiers, births a future of critical thought, as generations of readers confront the ambiguous mode of Arnold’s attack.

      Thus I am arguing that the Wragg moment represents poetry reasserting itself into disinterested criticism, that the moment reverses Arnold’s (gendered) positioning of criticism and poetry in which poetry must carry criticism’s rationally achieved ideas. Here, it seems, poetry penetrates criticism with its irrational, ironic meanings, causing a disturbance in the hierarchy Arnold has set up. If this is true, however, it is not without its complications.

      As I hope is clear, I am not content to suggest that simply by turning to Wragg, Arnold betrays his own stricture against criticism’s involvement in the practical and political, that he betrays “disinterestedness” by becoming interested in the plight of poor unwed mothers, for his irony keeps such a reading at bay. But neither, finally, can we read the Wragg episode as a moment of “criticism” at its most “free” because most disinterested. Shame, to return