Sherlock Redux

He's baaaack.  But since we last read Doyle we have walked Ratcliffe Highway, travelled all over India, the Galapagos and Africa, the mean streets of Dickens's London, the far-from-peaceful English countryside, and Cloisterham (defies an adjective).  Is Holmes the same as we last found him?  How and how not?

Possibilities for Cloisterham

Last class we spent a lot of time discussing what the half of Drood we have suggests about the state of England.  The tone of the book is, like most late Dickens, caustic and dark, and also, notably, perhaps more editorial than ever before; but, upon investigation, the facts of this case don't provide  grounds for hope, either.  Unless Datchery is a professional detective, the guiding hand of a national government seems absent from Cloisterham; the Church, in the form of the ubiquitous church tower, is very present, but doesn't seem to offer much of a system of support (Jasper, after all, is one of its staff); there are few - or no - happy, functioning families; and the town's children are ragged and bestial.  The town itself, as a constellation of the animate and inanimate, Dickens writes again and again, has a soporific atmosphere; it's even, in some instances - one thinks of Durdles - difficult to tell the animate and inanimate apart.

Of course, we can't say whether Cloisterham would have been saved - whether a marriage between Rosebud and, maybe, Tartar would have brought new life to the town; whether justice would have been done to Jasper, or whoever was responsible for Edwin's disappearance; whether Edwin would have turned out to be alive.  The kind of pastorship that Lauren Goodlad writes about might have appeared, perhaps in the form of Tartar, or Crisparkle, or Datchery.  Or, private individuals, like the Cheerybyles in Nickleby, might have - preposterously but not impossibly, given Dickens's many manic authorial moments - made everything right in the end.

What strikes me about what does happen in the book, however, is that Cloisterham's stagnation seems to reach such a pitch that it's the stagnation itself that appears to provoke the novel's action.  It's his his boredom, his cramped and monotonous lifestyle, that drives Jasper to the opium addiction that - it seems - make it possible for him to - at least attempt to - murder.  And it's, again, boredom - the sense of inevitability and inertia - that leads Edwin and Rosebud to call their marriage off.  One act - the possible murder - is horrible, and other - the breaking of the engagement - might lead to new, and better, choices, but the stagnation itself drives both acts.  If Cloisterham is a microcosm of England, or of a part of England, I wonder if Dickens's suggestion is that, no matter what, something is going to happen to England - things are incapable of going on the way they have been.  Is, then - I wouldn't want to call it hope, exactly, but - possibility buried within the inertia of the novel?  And is the question for England, then, not are things going to change, but how are the English people going to handle changes that are coming?

Miss Clack and the Problem of Belief

I wanted to begin where our class ended yesterday: in considering how The Moonstone is a novel consumed by the problems how one grounds belief. The novel certainly suggests that there is a crisis of belief occurring for the characters, as well, perhaps for its author. The novel must summon “evidence” from the professional detective’s observations, the feelings and experience of the family, Mr. Blake’s international education, Mr. Bruff’s legal expertise, Rosanna Spearman’s unrequited love, Dr. Jennings and his experiments with opium, and the testimony of one, young, goggle-eyed witness to solve the crime of the missing moonstone, and they are still too late to prevent a murder, or the jewel’s continued disappearance. Apart, each mode of belief, whether grounded in “moral” or empirical evidence, is insufficient to meet the challenge of solving the mystery; together they are only barely passable as a complete document.

One character who seems certain of her position and the validity of her interpretations is, of course, Miss Clack. With her tracts and her ostentatious evangelical Christianity, Miss Clack is an obvious figure of satire, but, more than that, she represents the dangers of being someone who subscribes to a totalizing belief system, and refuses to consider other modes of knowledge. She focuses so completely on her mission as a Christian woman that she makes herself ridiculous (and obnoxious) to the reader. She also remains the sole writer who, she implies, will never fully believe in Rachel’s innocence. Because she refuses to question a belief system that declares Rachel to be a “bad woman” and Godfrey to be “Our Christian Hero,” Miss Clack is denied access to the novel’s final “truth” about the moonstone. She will remain certain of her own rightness (and righteousness) even as the evidence piles up around her. Adhering to only one, totalizing system of belief, creates blindness.

Miss Clack is not, however, the only character who puts too much faith in one form of belief - at first, Rachel completely trusts her eyes, which give her only a partial view of events, despite “knowing” her cousin’s character.  Rachel is willing, however, to revise her belief when new evidence comes to light that supports her own desires and previous knowledge of Franklin Blake’s character. We could call this logical - a simple weighing of proof - but it is important to note that Rachel’s revision and Miss Clack’s refusal to revise both support their inner judgments. Rachel’s love for Franklin may be seen as no more “truthful” than Miss Clack’s dislike of Rachel. They both, therefore, see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe.

The emphasis on the instability of all systems of belief brings me back to Holmes (as everything must, in this course). Holmes has a simple and totalizing method. He observes, he deduces, he is almost always correct. His efficacy is usually demonstrated at the beginning of each tale, like a magic trick. He reveals the method of the trick, and we are therefore sure of his conclusions. In changing from the communal detection of The Moonstone to the singular deductions of Sherlock Holmes, the detective novel becomes more convinced of its own grounding for belief. I’m interested in considering both what is lost by this change, and what is gained.

Professionals and Amateurs in The Moonstone

I wanted to pick up on something that came up very briefly in class: the question of how we read The Moonstone in terms of the development of the detective figure. In his 1-pager, Paul observes that “The novel’s narrative structure puts each of the characters in the position of feverish detective,” which he noted in class results in a lot of both amateur and professional detectives and detective work. While I’m not sure I agree that every character catches detective fever – Miss Clack, for instance, seems almost an accidental detective, happening upon information during her feverish pursuit of her charitable and religious work – I am very intrigued by the division of labor between amateurs and professionals in the novel.

From Holmes, the model of the professional detective we get is of a detached investigator, able to discern vast amounts of information about people and their behavior with no prior knowledge of them or their actions. He is not emotionally invested in the outcome of his case; rather, he is driven by a fascination (or obsession) with solving the problem. Looking at the earlier appearances of detective’s we’ve been discussing, we saw this detachment at work in Dickens’s detective journalism, but not in Lady Audley’s Secret: Robert Audley is personally and emotionally invested in his investigation in a multitude of ways (his relationship with George, his concern for his uncle, his desire not to disappoint Clara, and his own attraction to Lady Audley), and he is not satisfied by having solved the problem. These seem to present two opposing models of the detective: one, professional and detached, the other amateur and emotionally-invested. What I find interesting about The Moonstone is that both seem to be necessary to the resolution of this mystery.

Sgt. Cuff is a perfect model of the professional detective: he is efficient, intelligent in his dealings with others (he gets the servants on his side when the local Superintendent has alienated them), and he is able to decode the significance of apparently trivial details that prove to be crucial to the case. Cuff (apparently based on Inspector Field) is also our first pre-Holmesian example of a celebrity detective: his investigative prowess is well enough known that Franklin Blake, who has been living abroad for years, knows that “when it comes to unraveling a mystery, there isn’t the equal in England of Sergeant Cuff!” (106, Penguin edition). While he initially fails to solve the mystery, I think it’s important that we remember that the only reason he is wrong is because he wrong interprets Rachel’s character – his interpretation of all of the clues, and of Rosanna Spearman’s behavior, are accurate – and Rachel is, as we are constantly reminded, an unusual woman. Once he knows the true cause of her behavior, he is able to solve the mystery almost immediately. In this case, the amateur detectives can make progress where the professional does not because they have the necessary prior knowledge – they know Rachel Verinder. It would seem that the claim this story makes is that the Great Detective figure alone cannot solve the crime – that the spread of “detective fever” is necessary to solve the crime as well as to assemble the narrative. I’m wondering, though, if that conclusion isn’t being a little hard on Sgt. Cuff, given how much time the various narratives spend telling us how exceptional Rachel is. It is her unusual character that trips up the professional detective – perhaps the necessity for amateur assistance is not a rule, but is in itself an exceptional circumstance.

Lawrence Stone on Desertion and Bigamy

Hi everyone,

Further to our discussion about laws surrounding desertion and bigamy in the 19th century, I thought I'd share a few quotations from Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800.

First, on laws regarding spousal desertion:

"A man or woman whose spouse had left home and had not been heard of for a period of seven years was also free to remarry, on the assumption that the missing spouse was dead. If he or she returned, however, either the first marriage took priority over the second or the woman was permitted to choose which husband she preferred." (37-38; given Stone's notoriously iffy use of evidence, I feel I should add that his source here is R. H. Helmholz's Marriage Litigation in Medieval England)

Second, regarding the practice of bigamy:

"In the eighteenth century, more or less permanent desertion was also regarded as morally dissolving the marriage. Thus when in the 1790s the husband of Francis Place's sister was transported for life for a robbery, she soon remarried an old suitor, apparently without any qualms or objections on the grounds that she already had a husband who was presumably still alive. In 1807 a Somerset rector agreed to put up the banns for a second marriage of a woman whose husband had gone off as a soldier to the East Indies seven years before and had not been heard of since. But the man unexpectedly turned up and reclaimed his wife, only to desert her again when he found her consorting with her second husband. He was said soon after to have remarried, despite the existence of this first wife." (40; Stone cites memoirs by Francis Place and the aforementioned Somerset rector)

As far as the first quotation goes, I think it may allow us to assume that the 7-years-absent=legally dead rule has been pretty longstanding, and was probably in effect when Lady Audley's Secret is set. I don't know how widely-known this rule would have been, though, so while legally she may have jumped the gun, we probably can't conclude that she knowingly did so. The second quotation I thought was interesting in light of what Prof. Reitz was saying about transportation to the colonies being tantamount to early death.

Stone also observes that the 19th century probably saw the longest marriages on average throughout human history, because improved medical treatment and sanitary conditions lengthened the average lifespan but divorce remained nearly impossible to obtain. I realize that this is a serious stretch, but I'm wondering if we can read that as influencing the development of detective fiction, or at least as playing into anxieties about families that we see playing out in detective fiction: if we accept Stone's conclusion here, people in unhappy marriages were trapped for much longer than they would have been historically - can we read the frequent spousal murders in early detective novels responding to the increased longevity of a potentially disastrous bond?

Update: also, if anyone is interested, the woman doing work on the bigamy plot in the Victorian novel is Maia McAleavey - she has a few articles already out on the subject, I think, although not one about Lady Audley.

The Chain of Evidence

First off, I want to return to a point that Alyssa raised in her one-pager, a point I don't think we discussed enough in class on Friday. Alyssa notes that, "From a narrative perspective, Lady Audley’s Secret is difficult to read as a detective story because the reader and the detective are never seriously in doubt as to who committed the crime. Rather than solving a puzzle, Robert seems to putting together what amounts to a case for the prosecution, although one that he never plans to carry out." 

Indeed, Braddon never puts any other real suspects on the stage. Unlike Holmes, who starts from a crime committed by an individuated body and untangles a thread of clues that ultimately leads to his identification of the criminal, Robert Audley starts with both end-points already known: the crime (George's disappearance) and the criminal/embodied person (Lady Audley). His detective work focuses on discovering the connection between them, going backward and forward at once, rather than following the bread-crumbs wherever they may lead.

As Alyssa notes earlier in her paper, an Armstrong-ian reading might interpret Robert's quantitative, methodological investigation as working to "tame" the sensational elements of the novel. But how does this influence our assessment of detective work, if Robert can be certain of Lady Audley's guilt long before his "chain of evidence" is complete? He senses her culpability in so many intangible ways: her smile in a painting, a tiny, momentary flicker of expression across her face. And the text leaves so little room for any other criminal--we're never in any real doubt that Lady Audley is behind whatever happened to George. So does this deemphasize the importance of Robert's cold, calculating, logical detective work (as Lady Audley describes it?) These clues don't assist with the identification of the "individuated body" that committed the crime--they just validate what Robert Audley already knows. 

Another bizarre thing about this story is that the moment of the criminal's confession is not the same moment in which the "method" of the crime is revealed. In the climactic scene in which Lady Audley finally admits to the murder of George Talboys (page 294 in the Oxford edition), she identifies herself as a madwoman to Robert and then says, "When you say that I killed George Talboys, you say the truth." But it's not until Robert Audley has taken Lady Audley to the madhouse in Villebrumeuse (and another forty pages have passed) that the now-Mme. Taylor reveals the specifics of what she did to George, admitting that she pushed him into the well (335). In most detective stories, the criminal cannot just admit to the crime--his or her confession must include a specific, detailed account of how everything transpired, less, presumably, for the sake of the detective (who has already deduced it all independently), than for the benefit of the reader, who is still waiting to learn what has happened. Except here, Robert Audley doesn't know that Talboys was shoved into the well until Lady Audley tells him, and she tells him quite at her leisure, days after admitting to the murder vaguely. Is this another way this narrative de-emphasizes the quantitative aspects of Robert's investigation?

Some Random Things

First, I wanted to share some photos of Eastern State - as discussed in class, I definitely recommend a visit. (www.easternstate.org)  The facility was used as a prison until the 1970's when it was abandoned. It was the first "penitentiary" in the United States, in the sense that it was ostensibly geared to rehabilitation.  Prisoners were isolated, and true to the Quaker roots of the place, left with a bible to contemplate their choices.  Even when they were taken for exercise, isolation was maintained, with individual yards instead of a common one.  For those who lacked yards, sacks were placed over their heads to keep them from interacting with others.  This "humane" system didn't work so well - prisoners started to go crazy and eventually the approach was discontinued.  The prison housed famous inmates, including (briefly) Al Capone, and today you can visit his cell.  There are several other common spaces that can be visited including he chapel, synagogue and baseball diamond.  By the 1970's, the number of prisoners was down to a handful and Eastern State ceased operations.  At that point it languished for several years, deserted and slowly reclaimed by nature.  It was going to be demolished in the 1980s and become the sight of luxury apartments but the plan fell through.  Instead, restoration began in the late 80s and by the early 90s portions were open for tours.  Today restoration continues, funded in no small part by the massive "Terror Behind the Walls" haunted house that operates for over a month every fall (and at which my good friend Jenny has played a Zombie for about a decade now).  The prison itself, of course, is far scarier than anyone jumping out from behind a corner with fake blood running down their face.  The experience of visiting is unlike anything I have done - the tours are largely self-guided.  The structure of the prison is like an insect- there is a center with several legs shooting out around it.  You can wander the halls and see the empty cells, most with trees that have grown into the architecture, and small human details that stay in the mind.  Shoes thrown over a rafter, names scrawled on walls, a broom deserted in the corner of a hall, furniture long unused. 

Second, although I am only a little over halfway through Lady Audley, it has me thinking about motive.  Not of the criminal, but of the detective.  Robert Audley spends a lot of time agonizing over what he is doing.  At times he nearly convinces himself that he would be better off letting the mystery go, but he can't.  It seems to me that Robert has many motives - love, of course, but also something closer to compulsion.  He just can't *not* know what happened.  When I think about contemporary detectives - in novels but also television and movies - their motives are as important as the criminals.  And they are often a strange mix of something anecdotal from their lives and something deeper and less conscious - a drive that doesn't have a reason.