First published in ELH 59 (1992) 911-938. Published here by permission of the author and The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
Although Mr. Gissing neither writes, nor professes to write, virginibus puerisque, yet to the thoughtful reader anxious to see life thoroughly, and to see it whole, The Unclassed contains nothing that will give offence, and much that will repay perusal. It would be interesting to compare the treatment of a similar theme by any living French author with Mr. Gissing's serious and sincere work which is absolutely free either from pruriency or prudery, being in fact, and in the best sense, English.1
In its qualified approval of expanded fictional subject-matter, this passage from a review of 1884 evokes a range of issues that engaged English literature at the end of the nineteenth century. To this reviewer, the need for a truthful account of life justified the consideration of potentially distasteful topics. But the qualifications implied by his negative praise and by the article's title of "A Novel for Men" are even more revealing of the distinctive nature of English literature in the fin de siecle. For this anonymous nationalist takes pride in the observance of boundaries, whether those of morality or gender or geography.
In many respects,
the late-Victorian period saw conventional categories challenged and redefined,
whether by the decline of the circulating libraries that had enforced literary
morality or by the expansion in women's roles that potentially threatened
masculine identity. 2
However, despite the significance of these changes, it is curious how fundamentally
conservative English fiction remained.
I would like
to address the limits of naturalist fiction in the English tradition by
examining an early work by George Gissing, who is some times classified
as an English naturalist. The Unclassed (1884; second edition 1895)
offers an especially valuable site in Gissing's fiction for the examination
of these limits: its focus on the condition of unclassment anticipates
the insights of later work such as The Odd Women or Born in Exile,
while its serious consideration of literary aestheticism and naturalism
situates it at the heart of the critical debates of its time. This novel
explores a world in which the conventional hierarchies of English society
and thought have proved inadequate, and yet in which the systems that replace
them cannot support a coherent narrative. Gissing's solution to his dilemma
exemplifies the contradictions English writers faced - he can reach a conclusion
only by returning to a discredited traditional scheme. The naturalist impulse
proves impossible to reconcile with English fictional exigencies.
My use of the
term naturalism must necessarily be somewhat loose. ... I mean
a ... literature that focuses on the impingement
of natural processes on human agency and consciousness. Clear-cut generic
definitions are notoriously difficult to make, and the literary tendencies
of the fin de siecle provide no exceptions... I will
begin by examining the threat that literary reviewers perceived in the
naturalistic literature that arose at the end of the century. Their concern
generally centers on a fear of disorder, but their complaints specifically
engage a trio of often overlapping issues: sensation, art, and gender.
I will then move on to The Unclassed by way of "The Hope of Pessimism,"
an early essay in which Gissing critiques Positivism. We will see that
even a writer who explicitly rejected conventional categories of thought
in his non-fictional (and much of his fictional) work engages the same
terms as his contemporaries and falls back on the same set of solutions.
It is ironic
to bring Gissing to bear on these issues, for he is frequently chided for
being out of touch with his own age - wedded to the outdated form of the
three-decker novel and blinded by an anachronistic love for classical literature.
Yet critics have also disdained him for writing too close to his experience
of the age, simply documenting his own personality and endlessly writing
about his own material circumstances.
7 But the continued undervaluation
of Gissing reveals nothing so much as the inadequacy of our own generic
categories, and our continued affinity for outdated aesthetic standards.
Our discomfort with a writer who ambiguously signals his own allegiances
leads us to dismiss his writing as simply autobiographical - lacking an
achieved objective stance. The easiest way to deal with Gissing is to state
blandly that he is an inartistic pessimist and stop reading him. But to
read Gissing and to begin to think about his work is to enter an almost
impossibly complex network of ideas, in which virtually all subject positions
and philosophies are undercut by competing positions and philosophies.
Gissing's able creation of sustained inconclusiveness may occasionally
produce narrative confusion, but it is not reducible to artistic ineptitude.
8
The two developments of realism of
which we have been speaking seem to me to typify the two excesses into
which frankness is inclined to fall; on the one hand, the excess prompted
by effeminacy - that is to say, by the want of restraints which starts
from enervated sensation; and on the other, the excess which results from
a certain brutal virility, which proceeds from coarse familiarity with
indulgence. 24
When we turn
to The Unclassed ... I would like to pay particular attention to how Gissing's
problematization of sensation, gender, and art. By working through this complicated
network of ideas I hope
to show Gissing's disruption of the convenient categories that were the
province of critics and, at the same time, his inescapable allegiance to
them in his novel's conclusion.
In his "Preface
to the New Edition," Gissing offers a clarification of the meaning of his
title:
I should like
to say that by "unclassed" I meant, not, of course, declasse, nor
yet a condition technically represented by the heroine. Male and female,
all the prominent persons of the story dwell in a limbo external to society.
They refuse the statistic badge - will not, like Bishop Blougram's respectabilities,
be "classed and done with." (v)
It is useful
to remember that one of the fears of the reviewers ... was
that new approaches would dissolve all hierarchies and classes. Here Gissing
selects precisely the subject of men and women who stand outside the old
structuring principles. However, for Gissing this is a proudly chosen position:
characters "refuse the statistic badge."
One is reminded of Gissing's emphasis throughout his novels on the spirit
of rebellion that characterizes his heroes...
For Gissing, unlike the reviewers, being unclassed is an expression
of free will and an affinity for the metaphysical rather than a sign of
imprisonment in the world of phenomena.
Two examples
from fairly early in the novel suggest some of the implications of being
outside society, whether voluntarily or not. The experience of Osmond Waymark,
here and elsewhere, comes closest to replicating Gissing's explicitly expressed
opinions. After suffering for some time the indignities of tutoring in
a boys' school, Waymark dramatically resigns his position. Although there
are several reasons for his action, one is a desire "to assert [his] freedom"
(79). Despite his awareness that this freedom is largely delusory, his
lack of employment (and the presence of "six pounds ten in his pocket"
[79]) gives him a feeling of having transcended the troubles of the everyday
world. "His mood was still complete recklessness, a revolt against the
idea of responsibility, indifference to all beyond the moment" (79).43
A passage deleted in 1895 explicitly indicates the advantages of remaining
outside the system. Waymark is strolling through the streets of London.
Our friend walked
on, regarding all he passed with a good- humoured pity. In this madly ordered
world he had no place. He stood on one side, and looked at it all with
unclouded eyes. Yesterday he had himself borne the burden; to-morrow he
would have to resume it, most likely with added bitterness, if that were
possible. In the mean while his faculties called no man master; he had
regained the dignity of freedom. (1:228)
Yet an earlier
episode calls into question the cheerfulness with which Waymark rejects
a constraining educational institution. For The Unclassed begins
literally in class, with a fight between Harriet Smales and Ida Starr in
Miss Rutherford's school for girls. The following pages detail the "unclassing"
of Ida: her expulsion from school and her subsequent fall into menial labor
and prostitution. Ida's alienation is an ambiguous operation. On the one
hand Miss Rutherford is not dispensing high culture to her pupils: she
is "fairly competent" (3), but no more. But to be part of an institution
is to be constructed as well as obstructed, both for students and teachers:
Ida will later praise her early education's role in creating self-consciousness
(131). So placement in an institutional framework is not a trivial matter,
and there is something appalling in the force of the conventions that compel
Miss Rutherford to dismiss Ida to preserve the school's reputation. Moreover,
Waymark's arrogant assumption that he, unlike the struggling workers around
him, has escaped construction by virtue of a free choice, seems highly
questionable. To be free of his job is simply to be constructed more randomly
by his chance encounters in the street.
This pair of
examples effectively introduces a dynamic that will continue to operate
throughout The Unclassed. Osmond Waymark's consciousness dominates
the novel, and his strongly expressed philosophy finds repeated support
in the narrator's explicit moralizing.
Yet events in
the novel relentlessly expose both the inadequacy of Waymark's positions
and his own inability to retain allegiance to any of them. Despite Waymark's
undoubtedly central position in the narrative, it is important to note
that he does not appear until chapter 6. So, despite our interest in Waymark's
perception of reality, that reality exists prior to his interpretation
of it. This is true as well of his relations with the two chief female
characters, Maud and Ida. He interprets them as the two sides of his ideal
(92): the respectable middle-class woman and the sensual woman of the people.
But our prior knowledge of them, as well as our occasional access to their
consciousness, leaves us in no doubt that they have a reality independent
of and more complex than his construction of them. In interpreting Waymark
we must remember that we have not actually witnessed the formative influences
of his childhood, as we have for all the other major characters. At first
this may foster the illusion that he is a free agent; eventually, however,
it can only undercut his authority as observer in a novel that scrupulously
traces the determinants of every character's personality. To lack grounding
is somehow to lack reality, or, to use one of the novel's terms, sincerity.
If the very title
of the novel introduces one of the contentious issues of nineteenth-century
criticism, Waymark's professional goals bespeak another. For he is a budding
artist: a struggling novelist with proclivities for an aestheticism of
the nether world. And, as with the issue of being classed, the issue of
art becomes more complicated the more we trace the network of its determinants.
Waymark sees his theory of art as an evolutionary step beyond his former
interest in social reform, which was the product of his own material conditions:
"I identified myself with the poor and ignorant; I did not make their cause
my own, but my own cause theirs. I raved for freedom because I was myself
in the bondage of unsatisfiable longing" (211). From that early position
he has moved on to an ostensibly superior sensibility, most clearly expressed
in the much-cited scene in which he lays out his artistic principles to
Casti:
The fact is,
the novel of every-day life is getting worn out. We must dig deeper, get
to untouched social strata. . . . Not virginibus puerisque will
be my book, I assure you, but for men and women who like to look beneath
the surface, and who understand that only as artistic material has human
life any significance. . . . The artist is the only sane man. . . . Life
as the source of splendid pictures, inexhaustible material for effects
- that can reconcile me to existence, and that only. (116-17)
This is a provocative
passage that should not simply be accepted as a straightforward statement
of Gissing's own creed, as some critics are tempted to do.45
Instead, it offers several highly problematic suggestions about the nature
of art. First of all, like many writers at the end of the century, Waymark
is arguing for an expansion of literary subject-matter beyond the polite
conventions of the realist tradition. But, unlike George Moore or Emile
Zola, his aim is not to reveal truth, but to create new sensations for
the jaded public, now that the realist novel has ceased to astonish. Waymark
is being not merely unnaturalistic, but un-Schopenhauerian, for he is advocating
an art that provides a subject/reader with exquisite special effects, not
one that elevates the subject beyond individuality and will.
The narrative
by no means consistently endorses Waymark's position. Early on we learn
that as schoolmates Ida Starr and Maud Enderby jointly tried to understand
the latter's mysterious dreams, "for it was an article of faith with both
that there were meanings to be discovered, and deep ones" (28). This creed
might be dismissed as a childish belief if we did not subsequently learn
that Maud does have at least one vision (of her mother's suicide)
that comes true. Evidently there are meanings of significance, and not
mere sense impressions, contrary to what Waymark would say. Perhaps even
more interesting is a passage deleted in the 1895 edition that suggests
a privileged reader undergo the disheartening experience Ida Starr must
suffer: 46
If you, dear
madam, who read this in the ease of assured leisure, should ever feel disposed
to vary the monotony of your life with a distinctly new sensation, permit
me to suggest that you should disguise yourself as a simple work-girl,
and, supposing yourself for the moment quite friendless and "character"-less,
go about from place to place begging for leave to toil. Of course there
will be lacking the real piquancy of despair, yet I doubt not a very tolerable
misery will be produced in the process. . . . A few hours of such experience
will suffice to you; Ida had to endure it day after day, till the days
grew to weeks. (2:261)
In this bitterly
ironic passage we find a rather different appropriation of the language
of sensation. The narrator is clearly contemptuous of one who would feed
off the misery of others by using lower-class life as a source of striking
sensation - yet this fashioning of life into startling scenes is the essence
of Waymark's aesthetic. Nevertheless, this passage represents a reformulation
of that aesthetic rather than a total rejection of it. The narrator is
suggesting that a lady of leisure sympathize with Ida by imaginatively
putting herself in her place; that is what the narrative is doing for the
reader at this point. Appeals to sensation have value in this context because
they offer the only means of bridging the gap between differently situated
human beings creating the sort of fellow-feeling advocated by "The Hope
of Pessimism." This passage s implicit argument discredits the oversimple
characterization of sensation offered by both Waymark and the reviewers.
Waymark's creed
holds yet another level of interest for our purposes by connecting artistic
theory to the problematic decentering of the autonomous individual we began
to see in Gissing s exploration of unclassment. Waymark endorses an almost
Paterian view of the purpose of art, but oddly mixed with the gritty language
of excavation. For Waymark does not promise his audience beauty, but thrills:
he is certainly not "proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest
quality to your moments as they pass." But his creed does ally Waymark
with an emerging sensibility that Jonathan Freedman has linked to Pater's
world view: that of "the mobile, perceptually organized self of a consumer
society, a self that 'fines itself down' (to use Pater's terms) to a series
of sensual engagements with the world - the very process consumer culture
depends on and induces." Like the outcome reviewers feared from an emphasis
on momentary feelings, the implications of this fining-down are frightening:
"The reduction of all seemingly stable entities to an increasingly unstable
and wavering set of relations." 47 Rachel
Bowlby has usefully articulated Gissing's opposition to mass culture's
transformation of culture and gender. 48 Although
consumer culture plays a relatively limited role in The Unclassed, its
association with Waymark offers a suggestive means of further undercutting
his aesthetic position. For we first meet Waymark, not (like the other
characters) in any stable relational setting, such as an educational institution
or a family unit, but as an advertisement:
"WANTED, human
companionship. A young man of four-and-twenty wishes to find a congenial
associate of about his own age. He is a student of ancient and modern literatures,
a free-thinker in religion, a lover of art in all its forms, a hater of
conventionalism. Would like to correspond in the first instance. Address
0. W., City News Rooms, W.C." (39-40)
We therefore
initially see the hero of the novel as consumer goods. With such an advertisement
Waymark at once reveals his marketable qualities, conceals his unique identity
(by controlling access to his person, name, and address), and reduces himself
to a commodity in the competitive economy that "The Hope of Pessimism"
so deplores. 49
A passage deleted
in the second edition elaborates the significance of this means of communication:
See here disclosed,
working without disguise, the central motor of our common life. . . . The
lecture platform resounds its praises in economic eloquence, lauding the
principle of universal Competition. Every-day experience, and its concentrated
index the advertisement column, put the matter in plainer language, do
not care to hide the fact of a brutal fight for livelihood, and sum up
in intelligible terms all the meanness, ruthlessness, anguish, and degradation
which such a system implies. (I:106-7)
Although the
next sentence emphasizes the "incongruity" of Waymark's advertisement with
this medium, the connection of protagonist to economy has nonetheless been
made.
Our subsequent
acquaintance with Waymark tends partially to support his identification
with a fiercely competitive and materialistic economy. The friendship he
establishes with Julian Casti as a result of the advertisement is a largely
positive relationship. Nevertheless, there is more than a touch of pontificating
patronage in Waymark's behavior to his friend. The narrator observes that
"Waymark unconsciously displayed something of that egoism which is inseparable
from force of character" (52) in his dealings with Julian. While Julian's
happy acceptance of Waymark's attitude does little to dramatize this less-
than-damning criticism, we are reminded that "The Hope of Pessimism" associated
egotism with both a Schopenhauerian will to live and a desire for material
success in the competitive modern social order (HP, 90-91). More seriously,
Waymark's cynical understanding of the determining power of wealth is frequently
indistinguishable from a crassly reductive point of view.
50 The clearest example of this comes in his
relations with Ida Starr. Recognizing her unusual qualities, treating her
socially as a respectable woman rather than a prostitute, Waymark nonetheless
cannot escape seeing their relationship in economic terms. During their
visit to Hastings, Ida tells him the story of her life, and his response
is to regret that he does not have sufficient wealth to buy her.
"The end of your
story should not be an unhappy one, if I had the disposing of it. And I
might have - but for one thing."
"What's that?"
she asked, with sudden interest.
"My miserable
poverty. If I only had money - money" -
"Money!" she
exclaimed, turning away almost angrily. (143)
While Waymark
is unconscious of giving offense, Ida immediately recognizes that his remark
indicates that at base he takes her at society's valuation: as a sexual
commodity. More generally, his observation provides further evidence of
his acceptance of the terms endorsed by competitive capitalist society,
and his genuine affinity for the world of the advertisement.
51
Freedman's observations
about the similarities of Paterian aestheticism and consumer culture usefully
frame a feature of the delineation of Waymark that is crucial to our understanding
of the novel. Freedman remarks that the Paterian and consumer economies
"[work] to corrode any principle of stability whatsoever, both within and
without; both commodity and consumer are reduced to the state of flux by
the strategies of a commodity culture." 52
Waymark represents the modern subject reduced to precisely this state of
flux, unable to maintain a consistent personality or philosophy in the
face of the instability of relations in his environment. One indication
of the state of Waymark's consciousness is his inability to maintain the
consistent detachment his aesthetic philosophy mandates. The first edition
underscores this characteristic more than the second; for instance, Waymark
tells himself that he views Ida's arrest as merely "a situation," but the
narrator adds the observation, "and, for all that, his heart was beating
violently" (2:277). However, it is not simply that Waymark believes he
is indifferent, and that there is a secret reality in which he is not indifferent.
Gissing provides repeated examples of Waymark's coldness, as when he recognizes
immediately after his initial encounters with the two women that his feeling
of interest in them was "artificial" (93). In conversation with Julian
in the first edition, Waymark explicitly links his state of mental flux
to his poverty:
There is no such
cant as that which prates of the soul's independence of external things.
Give me a fortune to-morrow, and I shall be in scarcely one respect the
man that I am to-day. . . . Now I am a miserable shifting fellow, paltering
with my own conscience, and despising myself every other moment for the
thought which came the moment before. (2:234)
It might be even
more accurate to attribute his vagaries to the condition of being unclassed.
The Unclassed presents a society in which it is possible to be radically
inconsistent as a character because the determinants of human reactions
can be so widely disparate. Waymark's philosophy of art has brought us
back to the consequences of living in a world without the hierarchies that
could control the influx of sensations.
continued....
click Gissing2 to see the rest of this report.
Return to the bizzare and unusual in the Waymark name
