Run Nancy, Run! (The Novel)

On Nancy Armstrong's "Introduction: The Politics of Domesticating Culture, Then and Now." Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Poitical History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. 3-27.
Amylea's Part I.
Some initial qustions from the first page: Why is it called "domestic" fiction? How did it get that name? Does signifying it as "domestic" only add to the created and assumed distance between "literature" (male) and "popular fiction" (that is, "low" and female)? Even as Armstrong writes to illuminate the power of domestic fiction, she must differentiate it from the privileged term because we have no other way of talking about it, of singling it out for discussion without demoting it.
Of course, this is not her fault. It is, in fact, what she is writing against. Can criticism be a form of social action? Burke would say so, and I think he'd call this type of lit crit "poetry."

     Armstrong ("Nan"? Nance?) wants to connect fiction and desire: "Most fiction, which represented identity in terms of region, sect, or faction, could not very well affirm the universality of any particular form of desire. In contrast, domestic fiction unfolded the operations of human desire as if they were independent of political history. And this helped to create the illusion that desire was entirely subjective and therefore essentially different from the politically encodable forms of behavior to which desire gave rise" (9, emphasis added). In other words, the unprivileged form of fiction, domestic fiction, inscribes desire. As it is the unprivileged term, despite all its power as fiction, it becomes an invisible actor. Domestic fiction ("chick lit"?), in order to talk about desire at all, must separate it from the legitimated forms of commentary--the political, civil, social. As the two further diverged, we ended up with a "two kingdom theory" of desire: The novels changed social behavior, but could not be seen as actors; instead, mores for those behaviors were created seemingly without a history, without a past. Their source was unspeakable, and thus could not be named as the source. Having no past, the mores took greater hold; they seemed eternal (no origin means no ending?), true. And thus, despite the subversive, representative anecdotal nature of the novels, domestic fiction became "unliterary" and unnoticed.

Until now.

      Armstrong gives a different social history of the novel than Watt--instead of saying that social conditions gave rise to the novel, she implies (from a Foucauldian standpoint) that both the social conditions and the novel are in a web of power, pushing and pulling each other, mutually mutable. While the history of the male novel is the one privileged, it has been priviledged after the fact. Both forms were at work, and they are more difficult to extrude from one another--unless one simply looks at the gender of the author. Armstrong uses the idea of "cultural hegemony" to find her way outside the text (a major cultural studies problem). How, we must ask, did the hegemony of that day and this day create our current ideas about desire? How do the novels inscribe and create desire? How do they temper it, domesticate it, turn that subversive human need to possess into something socially acceptable, socially stabilizing (marriage, the "Cinderalla" complex of needing to find the perfect man to have a good life). The idea that "love" (not desire) is the ultimate goal? That class, money, status do not mean as much as "true love"?

Oh barf. Just in time for Singles' Awareness Day (a.k.a. "Saint" Valentine's Day).

What I think Armstrong will miss, based on her overview of her methodology and Foucauldian association, is how the texts themselves create desire--the rhetorical dimension of the texts. Burke describes how the plot and "argument" of a novel (actually, of any good "poetry") lead us to desire. We are assimilated (consubstantiated) into the text's form, recognize it, become part of it. As the texts progresses, we become aware of the construction, and we want to know the end. We almost know the end, we chant along with it, racing toward the conclusion. First, then, next. Even as the novel speaks of desire, gives us a representative anecdote of how to desire, what appropriate desire is, it causes us to desire. And that parallel construction of form/content and effect is especially good rhetoric.
But I doubt Armstrong will go that far.
To Be Continued....