The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold

By Antony H. Harrison

The career of Matthew Arnold as an eminent poet and the preeminent critic of his generation constitutes a remarkable historical spectacle orchestrated by a host of powerful Victorian cultural institutions.

The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold investigates these constructions by situating Arnold’s poetry in a number of contexts that partially shaped it. Such analysis revises our understanding of the formation of the elite (and elitist) male literary-intellectual subject during the 1840s and 1850s, as Arnold attempts self-definition and strives simultaneously to move toward a position of ideological influence upon intellectual institutions that were contested sites of economic, social, and political power in his era.

Antony H. Harrison reopens discussion of selected works by Arnold in order to make visible some of their crucial sociohistorical, intertextual, and political components. Only by doing so can we ultimately view the cultural work of Arnold “steadily and … whole,” and in a fashion that actually eschews this mystifying premise of all Arnoldian inquiry which, by the early twentieth century, had become wholly naturalized in the academy as ideology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9780821443132

Antony H. Harrison

Antony H. Harrison is Professor of English at North Carolina State University.

Book preview

The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold

Antony H. Harrison

THE CULTURAL

PRODUCTION OF

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

www.ohioswallow.com

© 2009 by Ohio University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harrison, Antony H.

The cultural production of Matthew Arnold / Antony H. Harrison.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-1899-4 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-1900-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Arnold, Matthew, 1822–1888—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PR4024.H36 2009

821'.8—dc22

2009033165

For Penn, who rejuvenates me,

and Anne, who restores me

RATIONALE

The last truly important critical book devoted to Matthew Arnold’s poetry was David Riede’s Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language, published at the centenary of Arnold’s death.¹ Some twenty years later, we might well wonder at the relative critical neglect endured by this icon of Victorian literature and culture during these two decades.² But various explanations for the phenomenon are ready to hand. New, post-structuralist methodologies dominating criticism in this period have tended to devalue the work of Arnold as effectively as the formalist and New Critical methodologies dominating the previous decades of the twentieth century tended to overvalue it. Similarly, the popularity of feminist and other, new historicist approaches to literary study have shown more interest in recuperating undervalued authors or in analyzing issues of literary power and authority than in revalidating writers already perceived as triumphant in the field of cultural production. Still, in the literary world outside the academy, Arnold retains some prominence, as is remarkably demonstrated in the conclusion to Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel, Saturday, in which a recitation of Dover Beach effectively saves the protagonist and his family from horrifying threats to their lives and property.³ As this case in point demonstrates, the trajectory of Arnold’s career inside and outside the academy since his death suggests the extent to which he has often been reconstructed according to the interests of those who engage his work.⁴ That he is susceptible to such manipulation results in part from the deliberate mystifications that inhabit his poetry and prose. But it is also the case that Arnold, as himself a symbolic figure within the field of cultural production, has always been under construction.

The several entendres of this book’s title will, doubtless, be lost on few readers: the manufacture of Matthew Arnold (as an eminent poet and the preeminent critic of his generation) by various nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual fields of force together with the extraordinarily influential textual creations of Matthew Arnold (both his own and those of admirers who canonized him) constitute a remarkable historical spectacle orchestrated by a host of powerful Victorian cultural institutions (including, among others, Oxford University, the publishing industry, the national education bureaucracy, and the civil list pension commissioners). The chapters in this book begin to investigate these constructions by situating Arnold’s poetry in various contexts that partially shaped it. Analysis of what for Arnold were culturally privileged pressures on his work provides helpful perspectives on fault lines in both his foundational values and his poetic expression of them, and it thus reveals much about the fractured political, social, amatory, and literary underpinnings of guiding middle-class intellectuals in Victorian England. Such analysis also revises our understanding of the formation of the elite (and elitist) male literary-intellectual subject during the 1840s and 1850s, as he attempts self-definition and strives simultaneously to move toward a position of ideological influence on intellectual institutions that were contested sites of economic, social, and political power in his era. (These institutions would include, for instance, the schools and universities, the Anglican Church, the publishing industry, and the law.)

The particular contexts I attend to here are political (from the dual threats of European revolutions in 1848 to that of Chartism at home); social (from the sometimes-histrionic nostalgia for all things medieval in Arnold’s era to the midcentury fascination with gypsies, reflected both positively and negatively in the law and other Victorian cultural texts); literary (from Arnold’s poetic responses to precursors such as Wordsworth and Keats to his attacks on contemporaries such as Alexander Smith); and finally, those of gender (from the silencing of the female voice in his poetry to its implicit assault on the looming figure of the successful poetess). I choose these rather than other contexts with which Arnold was visibly engaged (such as midcentury debates about religion, economics, the Irish Question, or the importance of the classics) not only because the contexts I catalogue above seem to me insufficiently discussed to date but also because they provide new perspectives on Arnold’s rise to power as what John Storey some years ago usefully termed a Victorian organic intellectual.⁵ My frequent procedure with this project is to reopen discussion of selected works by Arnold in order to make visible some of their crucial sociohistorical, intertextual, and political components. Only by doing so, I would argue, can we ultimately view the cultural work of Arnold steadily and . . . whole but also in a fashion that eschews this mystifying and literally prejudicial premise of all Arnoldian inquiry, which, by the early twentieth century, had become wholly naturalized in the academy as ideology.

As will be apparent to readers, the methodologies I make use of in these explorations of cultural contexts that inflect (if they do not determine) important ideological aspects of Arnold’s poetry are largely derived from recent historicist, sociological, deconstructive, and feminist criticism. Pierre Bourdieu is an especially important theorist guiding the direction of my analyses. In The Field of Cultural Production, Bourdieu extends his previous work as a sociocultural theorist to demonstrate how a special variety of power relations is inevitably instantiated in the interactions among authors and texts that aspire to cultural dominance. Fundamental to Bourdieu’s theory is the premise that the literary and artistic field is contained within the field of power, while possessing a relative autonomy with respect to it, especially as regards its economic and political principles of hierarchization.⁶ Bourdieu properly observes that the more autonomous the field [of cultural production] becomes, the more favourable the symbolic power balance is to the most autonomous producers (39). Crucial to Arnold’s success in this field is his strategy always to differentiate his positions as synchronically unique (indeed, often quirky) and thereby to preserve a very high level of autonomy. As Bourdieu contends, because it is a good measure of the degree of autonomy, and therefore of presumed adherence to the disinterested values which constitute the specific law of the field, the degree of [immediate] public success (39) is no measure (and indeed may be an inverse measure) of power in the field, in this case a field in which the most advantageous and desirable power is symbolic: that is, cultural capital.

The present book attempts a relatively simple argument, distilled from analyses of the contexts for Arnold’s work discussed above: the most frequent strategies deployed in Arnold’s poetic productions (and in much of his prose)—strategies that eventually yield his own cultural dominance—are (1) self-marginalization, (2) the (fraudulent) suppression of his works’ true origins, and (3) ideological mystification (either through a process of recentering or shifting apparent ideological positions, or through an implicit or sometimes explicit denial of ideological content or aims). Whether eliding the true historical contexts of poems generated from his immersion in English and European politics during the late 1840s; reconceptualizing the culturally pervasive penchant for all things medieval in the long nineteenth century; appropriating and redirecting (as cultural critique) dominant elements in the work of Keats, the so-called Spasmodic poets, or the phenomenally successful women poets of sensibility (while simultaneously eschewing such influences); or implicitly identifying with gypsy figures that emerge as the central trope in many of his major poems, Arnold disingenuously positions himself as an outsider. He presents competing positions or figures, as well as the social or political or aesthetic values they embody, as lamentably dominant in a not-quite-irredeemable culture. And by doing so consistently and repeatedly over the course of his career, Arnold accrued increasing and finally indomitable cultural capital. By 1939, Lionel Trilling could go so far as to describe Arnold’s reputation as a mythopoeia (Matthew Arnold, 9) and the man himself as one of Bernard Shaw’s ideal masters of reality (13). In the introduction to his monumental edition of Arnold’s letters nearly fifty years later, Cecil Lang could similarly insist that Arnold remains honored wherever English literature is honored, largely because of his indelible influence in the academy. Perhaps more relevant to my general argument (as rehearsed above) is Lang’s further insistence that Arnold has never returned from oblivion because, somehow, he has never been there. (Lang’s perhaps ironic and mystified somehow also figures into my argument, as will be seen subsequently.) Lang explains, "As poet, critic, moraliste, Arnold stood foursquare for what the academy, middle-class and closet poets or delitescent belletrists to a man, always aspired to be—repository, watchdog, evangelist, keeper of the flame of liberal education, apotheosis of its aspirations, representative of ‘culture’ raised to the highest power of excellence."⁷

Theories of the cultural production of texts formulated by Bourdieu and other late-twentieth-century social and philosophical thinkers I cite in the chapters that follow liberate the literary historian to see beyond traditional critical wisdom and are especially helpful in coming to terms with a writer such as Arnold whose successful poetic, rhetorical, and ideological strategies enabled his work to attain an astonishing level of influence on Anglo-American cultural values that has only in the past two decades begun to wane. It is the backgrounds to such influence, specifically as these emerge from (sometimes unexpected) historically situated readings of his poetry, that I explore in this book.

CONTEXTS

1

Revolution and Medievalism

2

Keats and Spasmodicism

3

Poetesses

4

Gypsies

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank friends and colleagues who have assisted or inspired me in important ways: Anne Wallace, my partner, whose brilliant analytical abilities consistently make me see more clearly and whose loving support has kept me focused; Beverly Taylor, who reminded me that this project was genuinely worthwhile; David Sanders, who in effect commissioned it and was patient when I was dilatory; my deans, Toby Parcel and Jeff Braden, who held the pressures of my administrative work at bay so that I could focus time and energy during two summers on this project; my son, Penn, who is always helpful and patient with his dad and repeatedly insisted that my work was every bit as creative as his own; and finally, my many colleagues in English at North Carolina State, also patient and supportive, who have taught me the value of striving to do administrative work well without abandoning scholarship.

Some of the work in this book has been previously published. But as with the work of Matthew Arnold itself, one implication of the re-presentation of these discussions in revised form is that the discursive contexts in which they appear significantly alter or enhance their meaning and their value for Victorian studies. Earlier versions of material reprinted here appeared as the following: 1848, in The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature, edited by Herbert Tucker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), 19–34; Victorian Culture Wars: Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Alexander Smith in 1853, Victorian Poetry 42 (Spring 2005): 509–20; Arthurian Poetry and Medievalism, in The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002), 246–61; "Arnold, Keats, and the Ideologies of Empedocles on Etna," in Antony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 16–43; and Matthew Arnold’s Gypsies: Intertextuality and Historicism, Victorian Poetry 29 (1991): 365–83.

1Revolution and Medievalism

The need to possess the truth, the fear of doubt and uncertainty. It is the fear from which Arnold fled, in the middle of the nineteenth century—the fear of a democratic conversation moving without benefit of authoritative touchstones. Arnold saw it as the spectrous dialogue of the mind with itself. And he had reason to fear that dialogue, which can be unnerving or even worse. It can overthrow altogether what one takes to be the truth: the soul of the world’s culture suddenly brought face to face with the mask of the god’s anarchy—and a mask appearing, in its most demonic guise, as a polished surface reflecting back the image of one’s self.

—Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of

Modernism

Matthew Arnold’s most famous poem, Dover Beach (composed ca. 1851),¹ concludes with his speaker looking away from the chalk cliffs of England toward continental Europe and lamenting that

. . . the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

(lines 30–37)

The disturbed worldview presented in these famous lines originated with tumultuous historical events that shattered the relative calm of Europe at midcentury, but it refuses to name them directly. A far less well known poem, written perhaps a year or two earlier, was published—unlike Dover Beach, which Arnold held onto until 1867—in Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems (1852). Revolutions, an important but brief poem, by its title might lead readers to anticipate specific commentary on the upheavals that disrupted European political systems only a few years before its appearance, or to expect a focus on the threat of revolution in England associated with the Chartist movement that had, remarkably, evaporated after the People’s Charter was delivered peacefully to Parliament in April 1848. Arnold’s poem, however, takes neither of these historically specific approaches to its subject. Because of its relative unfamiliarity, I quote the poem in full:

Before man parted for this earthly strand,

While yet upon the verge of heaven he stood,

God put a heap of letters in his hand,

And bade him make with them what word he could.

And man has turn’d them many times; made Greece,

Rome, England, France;—yes, nor in vain essay’d

Way after way, changes that never cease!

The letters have combined, something was made.

But ah! an inextinguishable sense

Haunts him that he has not made what he should;

That he has still, though old, to recommence,

Since he has not yet found the word God would.

And empire after empire, at their height

Of sway, have felt this boding sense come on;

Have felt their huge frames not constructed right,

And droop’d, and slowly died upon their throne.

One day,