Victorians in Theory: From Derrida to Browning

Comparative Literature, Winter 2001 by Bristow, Joseph

Schad, however, remains so determined to discover countless correspondences between the poet's and theorist's interest in femininity's "lowest place" that his sprightly critical movement back and forth between the two writers often prevents him from producing little more than a list of themes. He maintains, for example, that "Rossetti's daughterly concern with the 'I' of a woman recently dead" in "A Chilly Night" "is paralleled by Irigaray's philosophical concern with Descartes' `eye of a man recently dead'" (p. 20). To be sure, Schad upholds this parallel-itself quite tenuous but potentially engaging-by stating that Irigaray's attempt to visualize the Cartesian cogito from behind its mirrored screen resembles Rossetti's fascination with giving voice to dead female personae who occupy a realm on the other side of the mortal "L" But once he has conjured the conceit, Schad's ceaseless metonymic spirit urges him to connect Rossetti's detestation of the "vulgar optic" with general crises within "Victorian optics." At this juncture he lists famous quotations from Ruskin on the "innocent eye" and Dickens's Mr. Sleary on the "fixed eye of Philosophy" before mentioning "the period's scientific fascination with the physiology of the eye" and Rossetti's "thyroid disorder which left her with bulging eyes" (p. 21). Even though this startling chain of associations sustains at least some thematic continuity, it is pretty difficult to know how or why he arrives at the illness (Graves' disease) that seriously disfigured Rossetti's face in middle age. Eager to discover further thematic links, Schad instantly catches sight of yet another accident waiting to happen: namely, the proximity between Graves' disease and how "Rossetti's relationship to the eye is marked by death in much the same punning way as is Irigaray's" (p. 21). "[F] or `Graves,'" Schad instructs us, "read 'Kore'--the bride of Hades" ("kore represents for Irigaray a dark opening to the concave back of the eye") (p. 21). In my (no doubt restrictive) view, his imperative that we must read one thing for another "in much the same ... way" can only deepen the mystifying darkness of his metaphorical abyss. But maybe that is Schad's point.

The remaining four chapters run hastily into comparable methodological hazards. In his discussion of Arnold's poetry and Foucault's theory, Schad begins by placing well-known lines about "The Sea of Faith" from "Dover Beach" next to remarks about "man" as a "recent invention" that might at some time be "erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea" from The Order of Things. Schad contends that the oceanic movement in both writings belongs "in a sense" to "the same sea" (p. 42). What is more, he insists, "it is this same man, man produced by the retreat of faith, who is threatened with disappearance on Foucault's beach a hundred years later" (p. 41). Even though one might concede that Arnold and Foucault are grappling with analogous conceptual problems (such as the fragility of the category "man" in an era when agnosticism and atheism gather strength), Schad's method, again, is able to do little more than describe the fact that these writers draw on a similar metaphorical resource--one whose flattened-out sameness, I feel, is open to some question. In any case, Schad's tracing of the seas that ebb and flow in "Dover Beach" and The Order of Things, in 1867 and 1966 respectively, does not add significantly to our understanding of familiar aspects of both works.