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LITERATURE in the
MODERN WORLD
Critical Essays and Documents

SECOND REVISED EDITION

EDITED BY DENNIS WALDER

LITERATURE IN THE MODERN WORLD
LITERATURE in the
MODERN WORLD
Critical Essays and Documents

SECOND REVISED EDITION

EDITED BY

DENNIS WALDER

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
 OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6dp

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States

by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

© In the editorial selection and material, Open University, 2004

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First edition 1990

Second edition 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Data available
ISBN 0-19-925301-3

13579 10 8642

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
CONTENTS

Introduction 1

PART ONE: GENERAL APPROACHES 17

I QUESTIONING THE'CANON' 19

1 Repossessing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History 20

MARILYN BUTLER

2 Canon and Period 27

FRANK KERMODE

3 Literature and the Rise of English 31

TERRY EAGLETON

4 Women Poets 37
SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR

5 Literary Theory and the Black Tradition 44

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

II INTERPRETATION 52

1 The Babel of Interpretations 53

E. D. HIRSCH, JR.

2 Interpreting the Variorum 60

STANLEY FISH

3 Who Cares About the Text? 68

ROBERT SCHOLES

4 Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory 72

HANS ROBERT JAUSS

5 The Interpreter's Freud 80

GEOFFREY HARTMAN

III COMMITMENT 90

1 To Cambridge Women 91
VIRGINIA WOOLF

2 Writing, Reading, and the Public 96

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

3 Commitment 108
THEODOR ADORNO
vi • CONTENTS

4 Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature 114

ITALO CALVINO

PART TWO: THEMES AND ISSUES 117

FORM AND GENRE 119

1 Story and Narrative 120

SEYMOUR CHATMAN

2 Semiotics of Theatrical Performance 129

UMBERTO ECO

3 The Signs of Drama 137

MARTIN ESSLIN

4 Close Reading 146

JOHN BARRELL

MODERNISMS 153

1 Remarks on Poetry 154

PAUL VALERY

2 Order in Narrative 158

GERARD GENETTE

3 Towards a Semiotics of Literature 167

ROBERT SCHOLES

4 The Ideology of Modernism 175

GEORG LUKACS

5 Modernism and the Metropolis 180

RAYMOND WILLIAMS

6 The Gender of Modernism 187

BONNIE KIME SCOTT

LITERATURE AND NATION 191

1 Beyond a Boundary 192

C. L. R. JAMES

2 Woman and Nationalism 198

VIRGINIA WOOLF

3 The Intimate Enemy 202

ASHIS NANDY

4 The National Longing for Form 211

TIMOTHY BRENNAN

5 Imaginary Homelands 226

SALMAN RUSHDIE
 CONTENTS • vii

IV LITERATURE AND IDEOLOGY 232

1 A Short Organum for the Theatre 233

BERTOLT BRECHT

2 Marxist Criticism 243

TERRY EAGLETON

3 The Text Says What it Does Not Say 252

PIERRE MACHEREY

4 The Death of the Author 259

ROLAND BARTHES

5 What is an Author? 263

MICHEL FOUCAULT

V LITERATURE AND GENDER 279

1 Woman and the Other 280

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

2 Language and Gender 285

CORA KAPLAN

3 The Laugh of the Medusa 291

HELENE CIXOUS

4 Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation 301

TONI MORRISON

5 Introduction to Between Men 307

EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

6 Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire 320

JUDITH BUTLER

VI END OF EMPIRE 328

1 The Discourse of the Orient 329

EDWARD SAID

2 Englands of the Mind 340

SEAMUS HEANEY

3 Behind the Cliches of Contemporary Theatre 348

JOHN MCGRATH

4 From the Victoria Nyanza to the Sheraton San Salvador 354

MARY LOUISE PRATT

VII FROM COMMONWEALTH TO POST-COLONIAL 370

1 On National Culture 371

FRANTZ FANON

2 Colonialist Criticism 378

CHINUA ACHEBE
viii • CONTENTS

3 History of the Voice 386

EDWARD KAMAU BRATHWAITE

4 Post-Colonial Reconstructions: Literature, Meaning, Value 396

BILL ASHCROFT, GARETH GRIFFITHS, AND HELEN TIFFIN

5 The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term'Post-Colonialism' 401

ANNE MCCLINTOCK

6 When Was'the Post-Colonial'? Thinking at the Limit 415

STUART HALL

VIII LITERATURE AND HISTORY 433

1 Theses on the Philosophy of History 434

WALTER BENJAMIN

2 History and Fiction 436

LAURENCE LERNER

3 Introduction to Metahistory 444

HAYDEN WHITE

4 The Text, the Poem, and the Problem of Historical Method 449
JEROME MCGANN

5 The Keening Muse 466

JOSEPH BRODSKY

6 The Hollow Miracle 473

GEORGE STEINER

7 Literary History and Literary Modernity 478

PAUL DE MAN

IX LITERATURE AND VALUE 494

1 What is a Classic? 495

T. s. ELIOT

2 The Exile of Evaluation 504

BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH

Acknowledgements 5 jg
Index of People and Works 523

Subject Index r-,?

INTRODUCTION

This collection of critical essays and documents was originally designed to

accompany an Open University course that ran for ten years during the 1990s
with an annual population of about 700 students. Yet the book also reached well
beyond the boundaries of the OU and indeed the United Kingdom, attracting
sales over the decade of some 40,000. This second and revised edition is aimed
more consciously at the broader readership that the original attracted, a reader-
ship perhaps less specific, yet equally likely I hope to respond to the aims of the
first—which was, after all, designed to engage 'relative newcomers' to the field
with some of the main themes and issues which can be expected to concern
them as 'serious readers of literature today'.
Serious readers are not necessarily students; but the main audience for this
book is assumed to be those involved in some form of guided study that encour¬
ages them to get to know the most important and stimulating writings that have
affected the way literature has been discussed and thought about in recent years.
It was my aim in the first edition to provide material that struck me as exciting,
original, and above all accessible, rather than simply representative of this or
that critical or theoretical approach; and I am convinced that this was one rea¬
son for its success in a field littered with more comprehensive primers, many of
which try to provide introductions to the whole range of critics and positions.
This was never my aim; not merely because I felt it was beyond me (many of the
current introductions are jointly edited, and no wonder), but also because the
proliferation of schools and approaches has been such that it is now hardly
possible to cover them sensibly in a single volume—hence the more recent
appearance of readers and anthologies dedicated to particularly influential lines
of thought, from feminism to post-colonialism, and to particularly influential
individuals, from Edward Said to Helene Cixous.
Examples of these approaches and the writings of those who promoted them
will of course be found here. But not only have I sacrificed coverage to clarity
and multivalency—selecting extracts substantial enough to be used at different
times for different purposes—but I also have my own agenda, inevitably expres¬
sive of my particular experience and preferences; and I would encourage readers
to take that into account when using this book alongside others. What, then, is
that agenda? It involves a view of what has happened to literary criticism and its
ostensible object over the last century.
2 • INTRODUCTION

Aims and Background

To begin with, then, I wish to suggest how the construction of 'English Litera¬
ture' has been challenged and revalued through the development of a variety of
opposed or undermining critical perspectives during what E. J. Hobsbawm has
persuasively characterized as the Short Twentieth Century—from the end of the
First World War to the collapse of communism—a period which witnessed the
decline of Britain as a world-imperial power, and the rise of the United States to
take its place. This shift in world power relations is unignorable; as are the
recurrent crises which marked the twentieth century, and whose effects remain
with us: the impact and memory of two world wars, economic depression,
decolonization, genocide, and terror. The literary and cultural influence of
modernism (in all its varieties) is inseparable from these and related social, polit¬
ical, and historical factors; although the precise nature of the interaction is
extremely difficult, if not impossible to determine. Literary critics even more
than writers tend to exaggerate their own importance in the scheme of things.
Nevertheless, it is possible to suggest that since the late 1960s, and the cultural
and intellectual turmoil surrounding the strikes, student revolts, and anti-
Vietnam War protests in the United States and Europe, traditional literary
criticism in English and the associated 'canon' of texts came under fire as part of
a critique of the whole complex of conservative, authoritarian attitudes sup¬
posedly supporting the liberal-democratic ('bourgeois') states of the West, and
their institutions, including schools and universities. The thinking of Marx and
Freud was reinterpreted and reapplied by radical French intellectuals such as
Louis Althusser (1918-90) and Jacques Lacan (1901-81) so as to undermine the
idea of the individual as an independent self whose actions were in some sense
free. And just as the individual came to be redefined in terms of unconscious or
social and historical forces beyond its control, so, too, the literary text came to
be seen as crucially subject to context, to the extent that texts as such often
disappeared entirely from the terms of analysis.
Language was a key feature of this 'theorizing' of literary study—or rather, a
particular set of ideas about language, which chimed in with the general sus¬
picion of what became anathematized as 'liberal humanist' conceptions of the
individual and society. According to the 'structuralist' tradition, language is not
directly connected with the reality outside itself, but refers to it according to a
set of rules: it is the means by which reality is constructed, rather than some
passive medium through which we perceive things. Literary works are texts
referring to each other, rather than to some external reality; and the point of
criticism seemed to be to find the more general rules according to which lan¬
guage issued in texts, literary or not, so as to question the received ways of
 INTRODUCTION • 3

thinking which become visible in them. A good example was the widely
influential 1968 essay 'The Death of the Author', by the Parisian writer and
cultural critic Roland Barthes (included here), which killed off the author by
claiming that texts emerged not so much from the mind or pen of one person,
but as the focus of a whole range of contextual forces. The organic unity for¬
merly found, and praised when found, in literary works was an illusion; instead,
the work was a text which, like any other, was an unstable linguistic entity, the
so-called 'site of struggle'. The authority of the author, and with it authority
generally, was thus undermined—the whole aim of 'theory'.
It should be recalled that the interest of 'theory' as a set of critical approaches
was not the concern of more than a minority within the academic institutions
of the West. Nevertheless, these approaches have continued to have an impact
elsewhere, especially in those places where European colonial systems of educa¬
tion were deeply rooted, as for example in India, Singapore, or Australia, and
where the various ‘isms'—from structuralism to post-structuralism, from femi¬
nism to new historicism—were soon to be found. From the 1970s onwards such
new, or newly formulated, ideas about literature, language, history, culture, and
society have had a profound effect upon literary studies generally, which helped
pave the way for the specific ideas associated with Marxist, feminist, and psy¬
choanalytic writings to reach teachers, students, and (on occasion) even wider
audiences. The reversal of perspective which undermined universalist claims
about the centrality of the accepted 'canon' of great authors and their works
around which Western literary criticism and teaching circulated opened up the
possibility for literary critics and others of attending more closely to the alterna¬
tive claims of historically neglected or marginalized works. These works were by
definition non-mainstream, and helped promote a sense of difference, of chal¬
lenge, to the 'canon'—itself a more fluid concept than many had previously
realized.
The presence—and, moreover, widespread acceptance—of writings from out¬
side the traditional Anglophone literary 'canon', as well as the rise of a radical
critique of that canon in terms of class, race, gender, and nation, mean that
'Literature in the Modern World' seems a more accurate formulation of the
subject than, say, 'Modern English Literature'. Dropping 'English' is more than a
matter of responding to a shift in view of what counts as writing in English or,
more precisely, in the range of Englishes used by people from Chicago to Delhi,
from Cape Town to Sydney, and from New York to London; it is also a matter of
responding to the fact that for many readers—and writers—literatures in trans¬
lation are sometimes of more pressing interest than writing in their 'own'
languages, even one as dominant as English. Writers have always been less con¬
cerned with the boundaries between literatures and languages than critics and
4 • INTRODUCTION

teachers, which is one reason why I have sought writers rather than their
explicators where possible for evidence of the shifts in attitude towards
literature that developed over the twentieth century.
It has also been part of my agenda to question the idea that it is predomin¬
antly critics and 'theorists' who are responsible for the shifts in perspective that
have affected literature and literary studies; rather than the wider culture that
includes commercial as well as educational institutions, government bodies
such as arts councils, and the media. This wider culture is where the commit¬
ment—social and political as well as aesthetic and personal—of writers has often
been expressed: quite explicitly in manifestos and public statements of varying
kinds, as well as in their 'creative' or fictional work. Some writers (Bertolt Brecht
springs to mind) have been at ease and readily engaged with both theoretical
and literary writing, including the theorizing of their own work; more com¬
monly writers quietly resist attempts to colonize their imaginations by what
often appears to them as the reduction of their work to packaged examples of
trends or tendencies. Many writers have provided more nuanced and inviting
accounts of what they think they are up to than any critic or theorist. I have
included documents by modern writers whose influence has been both
immediate and continuing, from T. S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf, from Chinua
Achebe to Salman Rushdie. But I have not attempted to move yet further
beyond the boundaries of what might reasonably be thought of as literary study:
to have entered into cultural studies more generally would not have been feas¬
ible within the terms of my brief; nor is it necessary. Many of the pieces that will
be found here, such as those dealing with interpretation, ideology, or history,
are invested in topics which by definition cross disciplinary boundaries; but the
focus here is on literature, or literary artefacts—products of the imagination,
rather than the institutions that mediate them.
Despite what I have just said about my emphasis upon writers rather than
critics or theorizers, it is a fundamental assumption of mine that the ensemble
of ideas current as part of the 'theory revolution' in literary studies since the
1960s is intrinsically worth attending to. 'Theory' used to have to do with clari¬
fying assumptions so as to validate an approach to literature, and this meaning
continues to lurk in the undergrowth of debate; while 'critical theory' should
perhaps have been retained for the historically specific sense it had when used
by members of the Frankfurt School (the group of Marxist thinkers who fled the
Nazis for the United States), such as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor
Adorno, and the latter's close friend Walter Benjamin—never an official mem¬
ber of the school, but closely associated with it, and, since his suicide in 1940,
one of the most significant influences upon the reformulation of Marxist criti¬
cism. I have already suggested that the writings of Marx, and to a lesser extent
 INTRODUCTION • 5

those of Freud, as they were interpreted and revised during the later twentieth
century, have had an obvious influence upon the discussion, interpretation,
and evaluation of literature, as many of the texts assembled here clearly
demonstrate.
However, I have not seen it as part of my task to provide those originary
writings, which may easily be found elsewhere; nor, indeed, have I felt it neces¬
sary to present extracts by early originators of contemporary literary theory such
as the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), whose ideas about
language gave rise to structuralist theory; the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky
(1893-1984), whose ideas encouraged the distinction between literary language
and reality; or the Russian American linguist Roman Jacobson (1896-1982),
who developed the idea of literary language as a medium with its own analys-
able characteristics, providing an influential model of language function based
on selection from two axes, the 'metaphoric' or associative dimension, and the
'metonymic' or contiguous.
Instead, what I have tried to demonstrate here is how theoretical and critical
discussion has been concerned with questioning the principles and procedures
of traditional literary study inherited from the nineteenth and early twentieth
century. There is an important sense in which this level of discussion has arisen
as a phenomenon accompanying the rise of the various associated literary, art¬
istic, and cultural movements we think of as modernism; but there is also an
important sense in which other factors, such as the women's movement and the
rise of feminism, have been responsible for the new thinking about language
that has had such a profound effect upon literary studies over the last half-
century. This effect may be discerned initially as the motive for displacing the
traditionally accepted texts of the 'canon', although that has become part of a
larger movement to challenge orthodoxy into accepting what have been
increasingly identified as marginalized voices—whether by the procedures of
pedagogy or by the politics of institutions. According to Marilyn Butler (in the
first extract in this book), 'the canon' has over time 'acquired a weird
momentum of its own', as a result of the 'politics and social needs' of the day;
now that those politics and social needs have changed, a new and historically
informed set of canons is required, if millions of potential readers in different
parts of the world are not to be denied.
It is to those new readers that this anthology is primarily addressed: readers
who seek to understand the exciting ways in which modern literature has come
to be discussed, without losing their focus upon literature, and without having
first to study philosophy, linguistics, sociology, or psychology—despite the fact
that these other disciplines have been extensively drawn on by literary theorists.
The struggle to redefine the subject in terms of developments elsewhere has
6 • INTRODUCTION

inevitably led to an increase in difficulty and jargon; but new thinking involves
new language, and there is a degree to which the more you read, the easier it
becomes. Nonetheless, much of what is written by theorizers seems addressed
solely to the initiated, those thoroughly imbued with the language and thought
of those three great gendarmes (as Barthes called them) of modern literary cul¬
ture Marx, Freud, and Saussure. You will find here writing which has been
deeply influenced by them; but familiarity with their works is not assumed. Nor,
therefore, will you find here many examples of the higher reaches of debate, the
post-structuralist or deconstructionist work of Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), the
post-Foucauldian or post-Lacanian work of Gilles Deleuze (1925-95), or
the 'post-post-structuralist' work of those who have engaged with them, such as
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942). But you should find those higher reaches
more accessible once you have worked through what is here—including indeed
extracts from two of the most influential and accessible of the 'Yale decon¬
structionists', Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man, and two of the most promin¬
ent post-structuralist feminists, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler,
initiators of a significant new site of debate under the rubric of 'Queer Theory'.
The writings of some of those I have included in any case do not fall easily
into any such categorizing, and seem to have gone through it all and come out
the other side: the Bologna semiotician Umberto Eco, for example, whose
account of theatrical performance goes some way towards addressing the
marked absence generally of drama theory (most theory until fairly recently
concerned itself with the novel, or narrative), has long manipulated what he
called (in his 1990 book of that name) The Limits of Interpretation so as to
provoke readers into becoming more flexible and imaginative. The work of
other contributors, such as Michel Foucault, has been of an interdisciplinary
breadth and continuing influence that, while admitted to this book, has had to
be limited to what has been specific to literary concerns, namely his essay on the
figure of the author in literary criticism. Nevertheless, I hope to have given
enough to demonstrate the quality of Foucault's thought, leaving it to the
reader to pursue his historical and philosophical studies elsewhere. Foucault's
thought—like that of several influential modern critics, such as Paul de Man and
Judith Butler—goes back to a figure whose reflections perhaps more than any
other underlie the anti-authoritarian and subversive drive of many of the major
modern critics: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Yet Nietzsche's significance in
challenging metaphysics, and proposing a theory of power as the basis of moral¬
ity, while relying on an analysis of language through its etymological and
rhetorical structures, is of more interest in relation to the development of post¬
modern and deconstructionist criticism than the modernist work that primarily
concerns us here.
 INTRODUCTION • 7

My overriding concern has been to provide some sense of the important

developments that have preceded, as well as accompanied and affected, the rise
of postmodern thinking. Postmodern debates arose in the 1970s, and may be
said to deal with theories and practices that both engaged with modern issues,
and went beyond them. This is not to suggest any simple linearity of develop¬
ment; there are always both continuities and discontinuities. Nonetheless, I
believe it is vital to try and understand the attitudes and approaches towards
literature in terms of modernism, in order to get to grips with postmodernism,
while aware that many writers and thinkers straddle the boundaries between
these movements in literary and cultural affairs—most notably perhaps those
concerned with conceptualizing 'difference', such as Judith Butler. Moreover,
our sense of current concerns draws as much on modernisms as on the post¬
modern, both of these periodizing labels alluding to continuing constructions
of meaning, interpretation, and value in the modern, that is, contemporary,
world.

How to Use this Book

Don't read this book straight through. It will drop from your lifeless hands.
Nevertheless, it has a cumulative logic. I have divided the material into two
parts, 'General Approaches' and 'Themes and Issues'. Broadly speaking, Part One
is designed to provide a range of voices on leading topics that anticipate the
more specific formulations that follow in Part Two. I say broadly, because I have
for this edition added a final section that raises more general issues once again,
in particular the issue that many critics feel has been overlooked in the rush to
theorize: the question of 'value'. This will return you to the opening debate
about the 'canon', but on a more profound level. The book as a whole is not
organized chronologically, but according to a sense of the deepening of debates
and discussion; although by arranging the items within each section so as to
create a sense of the development of a topic or theme, that has usually but not
always led to a chronological order in them.
So you may wish to look at some of the extracts in Part One before those in
Part Two, although that is not essential. Yet the earlier sections do anticipate the
more specific concerns of the later, as you can easily tell if you look at, for
example, the opening extracts in Part One, Section /, 'Questioning the "Canon"',
where the question is raised of what constitutes literature as a subject of interest
or study, and of how this has been debated. The extracts are chosen not only to
suggest the different positions of widely influential figures, from Gilbert and
Gubar to Frank Kermode and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., but also to feed into the
discussions you will find in, for example, 'Literature and Gender', 'From Com¬
monwealth to Post-Colonial' and 'Literature and Value'. If Marilyn Butler may
8 • INTRODUCTION

be thought simply to argue for the reinstatement of a 'minor' poet such as

Southey, and Kermode to question the need for any real change in the concept
of the canon, Eagleton, Gilbert and Gubar, and Gates all find compelling reasons
to extend, or indeed demolish, the whole idea of a canon. Critics as varied as
Sedgwick (who considers Gone With the Wind worthy of discussion) and
Brathwaite (who promotes Caribbean 'pioneers' of oral literature like Louise
Bennett) challenge familiar canonical restrictions, thereby reinforcing Barbara
Herrnstein Smith's emphasis upon the radically relative nature of literary evalu¬
ations (Part Two, Section IX, 'The Exile of Evaluation').
The first section, then, is the model for all the sections that follow: the setting
up of a position or range of positions, which are then questioned, challenged—
or, sometimes, sidestepped in order to make a different point on the issue, the
whole section anticipating perspectives that will emerge later on. Here, intro¬
duced by the first section, is the fundamental issue of how to select the texts we
wish to read, or study.
But if we could agree about what to read or study, how then would we agree
about the meaning of those writings? Is such agreement possible—or desirable?
Section II, 'Interpretation', provides some of the most influential and persuasive
views on the subject of 'hermeneutics', the art or science of interpretation, sup¬
posedly derived from the name of Hermes, winged-footed messenger of the
Greek gods, and patron of interpretation, among other things. As this implies,
how we determine the meaning of a piece of writing goes back a long way; but
modern hermeneutics is to a large extent derived from specifically German
thought about how to interpret the Bible, initiated by the Protestant theologian
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher's emphasis upon phil¬
ology and history, twin means of access to the kind of understanding that
involves a new experience in the present, may be found in many modern inter¬
pretative theories, such as those of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2001) and
(included here as engaged in the more specifically literary field) Hans Robert
Jauss. But a comparison of the arguments and ideas of critics like E. D. Hirsch, Jr.,
Stanley Fish, and—directly engaged with Fish—Robert Scholes, suggests how far
questions of interpretation have penetrated well beyond the European source of
many of them, to brilliant and provocative effect. And as Geoffrey Hartman's
account of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams set beside Wordsworth's 'A slumber
did my spirit seal' suggests, there is no end to interpretation, when 'ordinary
language' gets pressed into art.
Yet there appear to be moments when what Sartre refers to as 'the situation of
the writer' calls forth closure, as an acknowledgement that the larger move¬
ments of society, history, and politics have made the undecidability of meaning
a luxury. Not that Sartre's position is a simple one but, like Virginia Woolf's two
 INTRODUCTION • 9

decades before, it is passionately held. Nor is 'Commitment' a simple matter, as

the extracts in Section III indicate, anticipating many voices spanning the
troubled twentieth century, included for example in the sections 'Literature and
Ideology' and 'Literature and History'. If this anthology should be read with an
awareness that the themes and issues raised in Part One will turn up again in
Part Two, that will not always be where you might expect to find them. Virginia
Woolfs demonstration of the repression of women's voices in 'To Cambridge
Women' usually leads to her work being placed under the feminist or gender
rubric, and that is fair enough; yet her reflections upon, for example, the
importance of 'anon', and the storytelling and spinning that surrounded (and
still surrounds, in many cultures) children—these touch on the relation
between society, language, and literary culture in a way that connects with, for
example, Kamau Brathwaite's remarks about 'nation language' as an oral form,
inadequately recognized by the written traditions of the dominant modern
metropolis. Pondering this may prompt reflection upon the question of how far
feminist approaches have taken into account the narratives of those who, des¬
pite all attempts to make them 'speak' in the world, remain obscure, even
silenced, by the noise of the modern metropolis.
There is of course a vast gap between the overt politics of a writer such as
Woolf and someone like Brathwaite; nonetheless, there are concerns that con¬
nect them as writers acutely aware of their situations within the complex and
paradoxical cross-currents of the modern world, and it would be fair to test them
both as 'committed' writers in that context. More obvious connections can be
made: as, for example, between Sartre and Adorno, since the latter takes Sartre as
his starting point in his famous meditation upon 'Commitment'—famous if
only for having reiterated the memorable and challenging remark to the effect
that 'to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric'. Adorno's range of refer¬
ence is extraordinary, touching on all the arts in his discussion of the virtues and
vices of both committed and autonomous art—a discussion that concludes with
the same image from Paul Klee's Angelus Novus that so entranced Walter Ben¬
jamin, who describes it in the passage extracted in 'Literature and History'—
itself picked up by Anne McClintock for the title image of her critique of 'post¬
colonial' terms in 'The Angel of Progress'. There are many other such connec¬
tions backwards and forwards in what follows, some of them more subtextual
than these; and I leave it to the reader to discover them. If, as Calvino remarks,
'Literature' is 'one of society's instruments of self-awareness', so, too is the dis¬
cussion of literature, as his lecture 'Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature'
testifies.
Part Two, Section /, elaborates structuralist approaches to literature, as an
instance of the striking development of the more formal, analytic dimension of
10 • INTRODUCTION

literary theory under the impact of structuralism. The section concludes with a
challenge to this way of handling literary texts, suggesting that the ahistorical
tendencies of structuralism and semiotics need to be countered by a more his¬
torically and indeed politically informed approach. You will observe that I have
chosen extracts that in their different ways deal with all three genres—narrative,
drama, and poetry, and this is something I have tried to do throughout,
although the various modernisms have influenced genre in uneven ways—
according to some, poetry, and in particular lyric poetry, is the quintessentially
modernist form. Paradoxical, then, that the structuralist development has
focused so much upon narrative fiction. The source of the emphasis upon
poetry is in part the product of a distinction between prose and poetry that
concerned modernists like Paul Valery, whose remarks on language can be taken
as a way into the debates about modernism—or, more usefully nowadays,
modernisms.
A wider range of positions is explored in Section II, as the subversive impact
of modernist thinking and practice is questioned and extended towards ques¬
tions about the nature of the literary (Scholes) and the ideological implications
of these questions (Lukacs and Williams). The point that all these voices are
male, although many key modernists were themselves female, is reinforced by
Bonnie Kime Scott, in an extract from the Introduction to her ground-breaking
anthology The Gender of Modernism (1990), which, not surprisingly, begins
with the voice of Virginia Woolf, whom I have included in my revised section
'Literature and Nation' (previously the too limited 'Englishness').
At least partly as a result of the growing debate about what counts as English
Literature, or Literature in English, and the simultaneous development of cul¬
tural studies, ideas about how national identity is constructed in relation to
literature have taken on new force in recent years. The documents and extracts
collected in Section III, 'Literature and Nation', therefore represent one of the
sections I have revised more than others for this edition. Cricket may seem an
odd topic for any of those not brought up under the sway of British imperialism,
but as C. L. R James's vivid account of what this notoriously English game
reveals, it was a book about cricket that helped initiate West Indian writing
about the West Indies as a modern subject, and sport—whether baseball, soccer,
or cricket—is itself an important form of national self-representation. As a con¬
sciously English writer, Woolf raised the issues of class and gender that have
since dominated discussion of the relation between 'Literature and Nation', but
it has taken 'outsiders' like C. L. R. James and, more recently, Ashis Nandy and
Salman Rushdie to question more closely the nature of the 'self' that is consti¬
tuted within a nation intimately involved in ruling over other nations. Nandy's
analysis is remarkable for the way his focus on figures such as Kipling, Orwell,
 INTRODUCTION • 11

and Wilde sees them as related exemplars of the disturbingly 'intimate' impact
of imperialism upon the self-image of those who belonged to the class of the
rulers, not the ruled. Timothy Brennan develops a subtle and informed critique
of the way various incarnations of the novel have provided one answer for what
he identifies as 'The National Longing for Form', while Rushdie suggests how to
view oneself simultaneously as an Indian writing in Britain, and as inescapably
'international'.
One of the most important matters these contributions on the relation
between national and personal identity raise is the question of how the situ¬
ation of a writer may be understood to shape or influence the given text: in
other words, the question of his or her ideology. The question was raised in an
early form by Jean-Paul Sartre (Part One, Section III), but it was during and after
the 1960s that the new Marxist criticism gave the idea of 'ideology' a more
forceful take on contemporary writing—hence Section IV. By 'new' I mean in
effect Marxism as it has been reinterpreted, primarily by Louis Althusser, who
revised and refined the traditional base-superstructure model in a way that is
explained by Terry Eagleton, who points out that Bertolt Brecht (whom I have
also included) had already showed one answer to the problems raised by the
'vulgar Marxist' model, in his account of the need for a theatre 'to develop the
historical sense' so as to encourage a feeling for the real difference between past
and present. Eagleton considers Marx's argument about how and why it is that
we can continue to like Greek art today; Brecht anticipated the answer by means
of his theory of the theatre, built upon—while radically departing from—
Aristotle, as his choice of title suggests—'Ein Kleines Organon fur das Theater'
(usually translated 'Short Organum for the Theatre'), the word 'organon' an
echo of Aristotle's treatises on the science of reasoning, the Organon or 'Instru¬
ment', subsequently opposed by Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620). One
way in which Marxist critics used historical materialism to redefine their job was
to look to what Pierre Macherey called the 'unconscious' of a work, its pro¬
foundly hidden ideological implications; where Barthes and then Foucault took
this was to propose that written works are constituted anonymously, as it were,
by the forces of production of any given period, including our own. Focusing on
the way in which literary texts may be situated 'ideologically' within the 'dis¬
cursive practices' of a specific period has subsequently led to the development of
what has come to be known as 'cultural materialism' (in its British form) and
'new historicism' (in the United States): both primarily involved in tracing the
connections between texts circulating during the Renaissance period.
One of the most challenging developments of this approach to ideology
as a central concept in analysing the relation between a literary or artistic work
and its changing contexts has been provided by feminist and 'Queer Theory'
12 • INTRODUCTION

originators such as Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler—both of whom I have

placed in Section V, 'Literature and Gender', since their work may be seen to
have grown out of or be related to the founding analysis of de Beauvoir and the
French feminist-psychoanalytic tradition inherited by thinkers such as Helene
Cixous and Luce Irigaray (whose work you can find succinctly clarified in Toril
Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics, 1985). The immediate, complex, and lasting impact
of feminist thought upon the very large range of issues that come under the
rubric of 'Literature and Gender', including some rather complex and shifting
ideas about the construction of identity, made a change of position for this
section imperative. It is also the case that the importance of history, as a com¬
plex if not determining element in the construction of the post-colonial, sug¬
gests that 'From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial' (formerly 'New Writings')
more naturally leads into Section VIII, 'Literature and History', where relations
between different ideas about history, the literary text, and the modern world
are explored. Section V, then, demonstrates the remarkable combination of
insights concerning gender, class, language, and identity that has enabled femi¬
nist criticism to have a massive impact upon traditional approaches to the
understanding of literary texts.
The impact of what has come to be called post-colonial criticism upon how we
read and study literature has been at least equally impressive, as Section VI and
Section VII reveal. The point of 'End of Empire' is to register the centrality for
this development of the analyses of a range of literary and cultural phenomena
that may be considered a part of 'modernity', beginning with Edward Said's
analysis of the West's approach to 'the East', in Orientalism (1978). This text
helped begin what has become a long process of demystifying the exotic
'Other'—the analogy with de Beauvoir's sense of woman as Other has similar
roots in French thought—created by European imperialism. There have been,
and arguably there are now, other empires; but it is the end of the largest and
most comprehensive empire—the British—during the twentieth century that
has signally affected writing and criticism in English. In this context, the reflec¬
tions of the Scottish radical playwright John McGrath and the Irish poet Seamus
Heaney upon post-war writing suggest the value of 'untheorized' work on ideas
about 'centre' and 'margin'; the contribution from Mary Louise Pratt suggests the
value of more scholarly and philosophical criticism affected by the same sense
of a fundamental shift of perspective in the twentieth century. For critics like
Pratt, the West's 'consciousness' in a period of imperial decline involves a subtle
reinterpretation of both earlier and more recent writings, fictional and non-
fictional. Pratt finds it particularly revealing to examine the 'lower' generic
forms of travel and exploration writing, from Mary Kingsley's Travels in West
Africa (1897) to Joan Didion's Salvador (1983).
 INTRODUCTION • 13

Since the 1980s a growing body of theoretical discourse has tried to develop
further our understanding of the issues of writing, identity, power, and history
raised by thinkers such as Foucault and Said, and Section VII is designed to
reflect this. However, one of the problems with this development has been the
implicit denial that writers from those very areas of the world supposed to have
been marginalized or silenced by the oppressive impact of empire and its cul¬
tural hegemony have had anything worthwhile to say on this subject. Perhaps
the most notable example of such a writer is the Martinican psychoanalyst and
thinker Frantz Fanon, although since the first edition of this book his work has
once again slowly been recognized. But even such well-known figures as the
Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe and the Barbadian poet Edward Kamau
Brathwaite have been ignored, while theoreticians get on with their apparently
infinite work of drawing out the cultural and ideological implications of
decolonization. The gulf between writers and critics-theorists has been more
noticeable in this arena than any other, as the extracts here demonstrate. The
Empire Writes Back (1989), by three Australian scholars, opened up debates about
the issues of post-colonial theory and practice in cultures as various as India,
South Africa, Canada, and the Caribbean: they argued for a radical reconception
of 'Eurocentric' notions of literature and language; but it was not long before
powerful voices began to develop and challenge their ideas. Among the most
influential critics of the term itself were Anne McClintock in the United States,
and Stuart Hall in the United Kingdom, both of whom adopted a more political
and sociological perspective upon 'the post-colonial', questioning the tendency
for the term to become a 'bogus universal' rather than an 'episteme' in progress,
encouraging a more careful, historically informed sense of shifting power
relations than some practitioners in the field during the 1990s seemed to allow.
This lack of a sense of history, or of the processes by which different histories
get promoted, leads to the discussion, in Section VIII, of the different concep¬
tions of history that different writings and theories imply or provide. The much-
cited Walter Benjamin, a key figure in the development of a more open
approach to cultural phenomena, drew on both Marxism and the Jewish trad¬
ition of messianic mysticism to propose provocative new ways of thinking
about writing, narrative, and history. His aphoristic style should not put anyone
off: 'There is no document of civilization which is not at the time a document of
barbarism' is one of those influential remarks that bears consideration in any
attempt to account for literature in the modern world. To descend to Laurence
Lerner's plain speaking about the relation between literature and history is to
change levels with a bump, but he provides a good starting point for discussion.
What matters in any contextualizing of a text? Ideology, strategies of writing,
social reality. What, then, about language, the medium of the narratives that
14 • INTRODUCTION

constitute history? Hayden White analyses the possibilities in a way that has led
to the relativist, post-structuralist position according to which historical docu¬
ments become simply texts among texts. Jerome McGann, a textual editor and
'new historicist', takes a different view, whereby the word 'text' is reinterpreted
so as to distinguish between the work of artists and others, depending upon
what is known or can be ascertained about the conditions of production and
consumption, as well as the surrounding social institutions. For him, poems like
those of Byron or Emily Dickinson, are 'time- and place-specific', hence histor¬
ical analysis is a 'necessary and essential function of any advanced practical
criticism'—a position not far from John Barren's, in Section I, 4. McGann takes
the argument further, however, towards seeing poems as in some sense 'trans-
historical', too. Interestingly, the poet Joseph Brodsky does not go so far, while
suggesting that (with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in mind) at times only
poetry is capable of 'dealing with reality'. For George Steiner, on the other hand,
some of the most extreme events, such as the Holocaust, may so 'infect' the
language in which they are conducted that nothing more is available to be said
in that language (he later made an exception for the poetry of Paul Celan; 1920-
70). Do you agree? According to Paul de Man, for whom (like Nietzsche) all
language is figural or metaphorical, critics tend to be blinded to this fact by the
links they perceive, or think they perceive, between reality and writing. Pursu¬
ing this insight brings other paradoxes: 'modernity' in literary works from
Rousseau onwards is typified by writing that seeks to deny the past while
depending utterly upon it. De Man has been vilified for aspects of his own
history: in particular, wartime journalism produced while living in his home
country, Belgium, implying a strand of pro-Nazism that some think explains his
enthusiasm for the anti-referential bias of 'deconstruction'. By a further para¬
dox, both supporters and attackers of de Man rely on a referential conception of
history. The question remains: How far should knowing his personal history
affect our understanding of what he has to say?
The answer may depend upon how we value criticism, and literature. In Sec¬
tion IX, while returning to the issue of which texts to read, and why we should
read them, the idea of canonicity features once again. T. S. Eliot was at least as
influential as a critic as a poet; his essay (from an address to the Virgil Society in
1944) 'What is a Classic?' shows why. For Eliot, as for F. R. Leavis (1895-1978),
over whom he exercised a profound influence, access to the greatest or most
valued works of literature involves coming to terms with those few works that
express the 'maturity' of their language and culture or 'civilization'. Like the
great Victorian poet-critic Matthew Arnold (1822-88), however (and unlike
Leavis), Eliot never limits himself to literature conceived in English. An aware¬
ness of history combined with a 'common style', he argues, enables the greatest
 INTRODUCTION • 15

poets, such as Virgil, to achieve a 'civilized consciousness and conscience'. Yet

this level of perfection leaves successors with an impossible task; more fruitful,
paradoxically, are the works of poets such as Shakespeare and Milton, who leave
things 'open'. All critics and/or theorists engage in acts of evaluation all the
time, whether explicitly acknowledged or not; and, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith
persuasively argues, it is high time to investigate the dynamics of that evalu¬
ation in terms of a more thoroughgoing, explicit, and critical model of human
culture and behaviour.
Henry James remarked in 'The Art of Fiction' (1884) that art 'lives upon dis¬
cussion, upon experiment, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of
standpoints'. So we should not be shy of arguing about what we read: we will
not kill literature. As James went on to point out, 'The successful application of
any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory too is interesting . . . Discussion,
suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they are frank and
sincere.' I hope that the critical extracts and documents contained in this
revised edition will continue to foster the enjoyment as well as the understand¬
ing of literature in the modern world.
Finally, I would like once again to thank colleagues on the original Open
University course team for which the first edition of this reader was conceived
for their support and advice; in particular, Dinah Birch, Angus Calder, Roger
Day, Cicely Palser Havely, Graham Martin, and Michael Rossington. Many stu¬
dents and lecturers have encouraged me by their enthusiastic responses to the
first edition. I would also like to thank all those who have subsequently offered
me their views about revisions, including, for their specific and thoughtful con¬
tributions, the following: Elleke Boehmer, Lyn Innes, Deborah Madsen, Bart
Moore-Gilbert, Paul Overy, James Procter, and Jeremy Tambling.
D.W.
London, 2003
 PART ONE

GENERAL APPROACHES
I
QUESTIONING THE CANON’

The main purpose of this section is to establish the origin and nature of the debate
about what constitutes the subject of literary studies in English today. It also provides a
model for the sections which follow: setting up a position which is then debated,

explicitly or implicitly, by the extracts that follow—the whole section anticipating later

sections and debates. Marilyn Butler expresses the way in which the accepted 'canon' (a
term derived from what were originally the accepted books of the Bible) of literary texts
to be studied came to be questioned from within mainstream English Literature studies

itself. While Butler's position involves attending to writings excluded by conventional

literary history traditions as 'minor', such as those by the Romantic poet Robert
Southey. Frank Kermode questions the need for any real change in the basic concept of
the canon, querying the radicalism of those such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,

whose 'classic' piece established the need to realign a patriarchal formation of the
canon by considering how women poets had been marginalized, or the argument of
those such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to the effect that the 'Black Tradition' was also due

for reconsideration on its own terms.

Terry Eagleton, on the other hand, attempts to undermine what he perceives as the
rise of the literary canon by questioning what is understood by 'literature' itself, while
offering his own account of the historical rise of English Literature as a subject of study.
The discussions to be found in later sections on, for example, 'Literature and Gender',

'From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial', and 'Literature and Value' are all anticipated
here. Critics as varied as Sedgwick (who considers Gone With the Wind worthy of
discussion) and Kamau Brathwaite (who promotes Caribbean 'pioneers' of oral litera¬

ture) challenge familiar canonical restrictions, thereby reinforcing Barbara Herrnstein

Smith's emphasis upon the radically relative nature of literary evaluations in general
(Part Two, Section IX, 'The Exile of Evaluation'). If we could agree about what to read or

study, how then would we agree about the meaning of those writings? Is such agree¬
ment possible—or desirable? Section II, 'Interpretation', will provide some of the most

influential and persuasive views.

20 • MARILYN BUTLER

1 Repossessing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History*

MARILYN BUTLER

In October 1986 the Cambridge historian David Cannadine informed the

readers of the Times Literary Supplement why, broadly, he was leaving Britain for
the USA. He wrote of the pointlessness of specializing in British history, now
that no one but the British were interested in it. In this respect scholars of past
English literature look to be in a far more favourable situation than historians.
The conditions affecting literature have been revolutionized from time to time.
The invention of printing, the extension of literacy and leisure, the mechaniza¬
tion of book production, each in turn brought in new readers, and in the end
the readers determine the books. We are now living through the greatest expan¬
sion yet of the reading public for serious books in English. Thanks to the world
dominance of America, English is what Latin once was, a world language. By
analogy, literature in English will become what the Roman Empire made Latin
literature, and indeed Greek literature too. The literature in the language the
world speaks is—or should be—a world literature.
But, as a matter of fact, 'literature in English' is not at all the same thing as
'English literature', in the sense that the English (or British, or those of Anglo-
Saxon descent) have narrowly conceived it. Literatures in English have begun to
proliferate since the late nineteenth century, in most cases accompanied by a
strong will to independent nationhood, and a consciousness of linguistic par¬
ticularity. The schoolchildren of Canada, Australia, Nigeria and the West Indies
partly learn about national autonomy by studying cultural autonomy. They are
increasingly likely to focus on their own national literatures before rather than
after England's, and before rather than after America's too.
So where does that leave the 'canonical' literature of the past—Shakespeare,
Milton and Wordsworth; Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot; Locke, Wortley
Montagu and Ruskin; now the literature of a third-class power with a first-
ranked language? The loss of British national prestige must entail a threat to the
so-called authority of English literary classics—simply because the main motive
for foreign children to learn about the British past, cultural as well as political,
has in fact (as Cannadine perceived) been removed. Even if we suppose that
America will and indeed has adopted England's literature en bloc as its own
cultural heritage, America with its wealth and strength can afford the luxury of a
cultural heritage. Will the largely third-world nations learning the language
think it worth their while to follow rich Western nations on this point?

* Original version first given as a lecture at Cambridge, 10 Nov. 1987: reprinted from M. Levin¬
son et al., ed., Rethinking Historicism, Critical Readings in Romantic History, Basil Blackwell Oxford
1989, pp. 64-84.
 REPOSSESSING THE PAST • 21

Most school students of English language are sitting, right now, at desks in
China: they do not study English literature. Nations that have done so are show¬
ing signs of giving it up. Shakespeare has been for over a century on the syllabus
in good Indian schools, but he is being declared too difficult, and anyhow
irrelevant, and looks about to go. Schools, like universities, are in crisis where
the humanities are concerned, because everywhere scarce resources are being
diverted into the re-equipping, or creation, of industry. The sixties revolution
that matters worldwide is not the Parisian one that gave Western academics post¬
structuralism, but the South Korean one that turned a war-devastated country
into another Japan. The precondition of that technological miracle was a
retrained workforce, and the moral is not lost on other governments. Where edu¬
cation is concerned, while not precisely saying so, Britain and the United States
as well as India and Australia are increasingly interested in being Korean. The
British Prime Minister acknowledges the utility of studying the English language,
the medium in which buying, selling, and navigating ships and planes is con¬
ducted. She seems no more impressed than Rajiv Gandhi by English literature,
which sells nothing, and may carry disagreeable ideological baggage along with it.
Somewhat against their own professional interest, intelligent young Indian
academic teachers of English (who are numerous) question the relevance of so
much time and money spent on the past writings of a country geographically far
away, which imposed this literature upon them as part of its machinery of
power. Read within Britain, much of the sub-Foucauldian1 cultural history now
pouring out of non-academic British presses—Methuen, Blackwell, Harvester,
and the New Left imprint, Verso—may tend to give a crude and mechanistic
account of the operation of power through literature and education. In the
Third World, the iconoclasm of this type of work hearteningly confronts what
otherwise looks like the white cultural monolith—for it's hard to deny the
inequality of the cultural exchange between north and west on the one hand,
south and east on the other. The bright young staff of Delhi University, readers
of their own Subaltern Studies and of Gayatri Spivak's In Other Worlds, as well as of
the brisk cheap left-wing semi-academic Western paperbacks, are provisionally
willing enough to tolerate the canon, because they are so accomplished at turn¬
ing it into cannon-fodder: apt material for a brutal, totalizing, highly political
form of deconstruction, owing little to the manner of Yale and Cornell.
Aggressive manoeuvres of that kind, whether or not tactically appropriate in
the Third World, are surely not good or even interesting choices for readers
studying their own native tradition, or working in their own first language. We
have all severally to work out our own models for how literary history is to be

1 'sub-Foucauldian': refers to the work of the influential historian of ideas, Michel Foucault (d.
1984). See IV, 5 below. [Ed.]
22 • MARILYN BUTLER

taught in our different countries. It must be for many of us a brutal simplifica¬

tion, and in the end a self-destructive one, to type all past literature as the voice
of power, or of patriarchy, or of any other hateful institution. This form of
pessimism or 'tragic essentialism', as it has been termed, is self-defeating because
it glamorizes what it means to oppose. And a tactic devoted to exposing the bad
faith of literature as a whole is hardly timely when, throughout much of the
world, time and resources spent on research in the humanities have come under
severe scrutiny from the central state. Yet this reductive position, under¬
researched, pseudo-intellectual, is able to pass professionally as a 'historical'
approach to literature, for want of enough properly rigorous alternatives. At
least the seriousness of the situation should belatedly force more ambitious
literary critics to pay attention to the kind of issue that in the Romantic-
modernist period they have characteristically evaded—the question of the rela¬
tionship between culture and the state; more specifically, the role and rationale
of past literature in education.
It can't be much more than 400 years since the centralized nation-states of
Western Europe such as England began to cultivate their own pasts, including
their vernacular literary pasts, as a means of raising national consciousness. For
about half that time, the first 200 years or so, those who took a 'patriot' pride in
native English (and in Scottish and Welsh) literatures were often not national¬
ists, in the modern sense of rallying behind the nation's leaders. From the seven¬
teenth century on, amateurs among the gentry and middling sort collected ver¬
nacular books or the ephemera of popular culture. Pepys's huge collection of
ballads, now in Magdalene College, Cambridge, has recently been published,
and it illustrates the appeal of native alternatives to the aristocratic classical
tradition. When the House of Commons debated the future of Latin in Novem¬
ber 1987, the British public heard heartfelt references to 3,000 years of European
culture. The same line of legitimacy was invoked in the eighteenth century to
justify that period's truly conspicuous consumption in the arts—in architecture,
or in classical statuary. But the classical heritage was articulately contested by
other people's traditions. The new middle-class journals, with their largely pro¬
vincial readership, encouraged the emergence of a more British, non-Latinate
literary past, including ballads, Gothic tales, Elizabethan lyric and drama, and (for
the learned like Cambridge's Thomas Gray2) Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Old Norse.
The eighteenth-century writers who claimed that literature was originally simple
and spontaneous were not themselves especially simple, and some of them
invented their evidence, but they got what they wanted from history by remaking
it. That generation, as well as the Victorian, is one of our possible models.

2 In addition to his famous 'Elegy', Thomas Gray (1716-71) was known for his studies in ancient
languages such as Old Norse. [Ed.]
 REPOSSESSING THE PAST • 23

A single, official English literary history emerges only in the 1820s. The mono¬
liths which European nation-states then made of their cultural traditions are
deeply impressive, since they served all sorts of civic purposes, from mass lit¬
eracy to nationalism, while remaining usefully economical. Critics around 1830
made the single great line of English poets, stretching (almost) unbroken from
Chaucer to Tennyson. The so-called literary canon, a significantly theological
term, was as characteristic of the age of its birth as the railway, and as much the
symbol of British achievement. Together the single line of poets personified the
national spirit, separately they were thoughtful, humane men—a little too like
the ideal university professor perhaps, but wisdom and tolerance remain virtues.
Wordsworth emerged primus inter pares3 among the other five Romantics—then
Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats—because he taught a stoical, essentially
optimistic acceptance of suffering, and because his vision of nature represented
England as still a pastoral society, which was comforting in other ways.
The impact of the canon on all our perceptions is perhaps most striking when
we reflect how quickly and how totally it changed posterity's understanding of
the two literary generations before its acceptance. In the age of Adam Smith,
large numbers of general readers were able to buy or borrow books for the first
time. The novels and poems offered to these new readers were often quotidian
in their concerns, and direct, non-specialized in their vocabulary and range of
allusion. Many authors were women; some of the best poets, we might now
agree—like Burns and Blake—came from the ranks. Nineteenth-century profes¬
sionals, journalists and academics, made great writers into an officer class, and
imposed restrictions on the entry of women and NCOs. The canon came to look
harmonious rather than contentious; learned or polite rather than artless or
common; national rather than provincial or sectarian on the one hand, or dis¬
persed and international on the other. Literature is individualistic or pluralist;
words such as 'canon' and 'heritage' impose a uniformity that had some
practical advantages, especially at the outset, but was always artificial.
The Victorian canon must have been made for the 'general reader', more for
consumption at home than in the classroom, since the process of canon-making
clearly pre-dates the rise of English Literature as a school and university subject.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the era of mass secondary educa¬
tion, syllabus reform and the provision of academic school and university places
for women, English literature was already so wholesome a field of study that its
social utility was easy to argue for. Victorians, noted for their hardheadedness,
saw the merits of a school subject that delivered the nation's traditions to pupils
in an inspiring, unifying and easily digested form. On the most practical level, it

3 Latin: 'first among equals’. [Ed.]

24 • MARILYN BUTLER

provided models for using the language, most universal of all skills in advanced
society; it opened the door to experience, personal and social, in the adult
world. Given the large and steadily increasing numbers of women studying the
subject, the supply of teachers was unlikely to run short. All these arguments
still prevail, and are being rehearsed again in Britain, as a reforming government
strives for an education system which will deliver, among other things, a men¬
tally disciplined, trainable workforce. But what will the content of that school
literature syllabus be? Must it still resemble the Victorian conception, simply
because the Victorian conception is there?
The nature of the population has, after all, changed a great deal in a century. It
is now more urbanized and more ethnically diverse, and many of the non-
formal aspects of its culture are new (radio, television, film, tabloid newspapers,
sport). The adult work required of the populace in the twenty-first century will
be very different from that required in the nineteenth. Without an empire to
hold down, there seems less point in schooling young males in hearty national¬
ism (though many believers in educational reform still seem very keen on breed¬
ing patriots). There is, on the other hand, a valuable social lesson just as
cogently drawn from studying past literature, that of learning to understand
and tolerate the other person's position. Most literature does not speak for the
official, London-based 'nation'. It expresses the view of a sect, a province, a
gender, a class, bent more often than not on criticism or outright opposition.
For literary purposes, the British Isles have always been what the Australian poet
Les Murray recently termed them in the present day, 'the Anglo-Celtic archi¬
pelago'. As a social institution, literature models an intricate, diverse, stressful
community, not a bland monolith.
There is now a logical and powerful case against mindlessly adopting any
canon of great works as a basis of teaching literature in schools. It's hard not to
smuggle in inappropriate ideas about what is most permissible, best sanctioned
by an invisible, unexaminable 'authority'. And we have to acknowledge that
reading a book sets up a transaction between author and reader, changing all the
time as readers change. The consultation document which the Department of
Education and Science in London sent out in July 1987 on the proposed new
National Curriculum wisely acknowledged that its existing normal content
must depend on who the pupils are now and where they have come from. We
should ensure, it says, 'that all pupils, regardless of sex, ethnic origin and
geographical location, have access to broadly the same good and relevant
curriculum and programmes of study'. True, it goes on to speak of a body of
pre-existent knowledge, the 'key content, skills and processes which they need
to learn'. But it also respects 'relevance to the pupils' own experience' and 'con¬
tinuing value to adult and working life'. Every pupil has a right to be given
 REPOSSESSING THE PAST • 25

access to as much refined, musical poetry, as many great dramas and novels,
as they can read with pleasure and profit to themselves. But that principle
also implies a willingness to experiment with other materials, works of hith¬
erto non-canonical status, which individual pupils, or minorities of pupils,
would find more profitable. That is the syllabus problem as it affects schools,
and it is in fact the greater and more pressing problem, with its own long¬
term repercussions on the teaching of literature in universities. But I want
now to turn to look at the problem from the other end, not as a pedagogic
issue in schools, but as an intellectual issue forced upon academics by radically
changed modern circumstances. How in principle should we define the content
of English Literature? How meet the objection that its existing normal content
emerged at a particular time, for particular reasons, many of which no longer
apply?
There is also a formidable case against continuing with the Victorian canon in
its depleted version, as the basis either for teaching university students or for
pursuing literary research. Over time the canon seems to have acquired a weird
momentum of its own, and to have introduced various restrictive practices into
criticism. Some originally pragmatic choices acquired fixity because, by the mid
twentieth century, if you are a dead author and not in the canon you are prob¬
ably not in print. The number of poets one must study gets fewer, and the
number of poems by each writer gets much fewer, as time goes on. The questions
that can be asked of major figures dwindle in number and importance with the
fading of minor ones. The relations between texts are always of crucial signifi¬
cance, but it was left to twentieth-century scholars to claim that only major
texts and major authors have meaningful relations. Keats now communes too
often with Shakespeare, Wordsworth with St Augustine, everyone with the
Bible. However much an artist is indebted to the mighty dead, he or she almost
certainly borrows more from the living—that is, from writers no longer avail¬
able for reading except in the better libraries. In the end, evaluation itself is
threatened: how can you operate the techniques for telling who a major writer
is, if you don't know what a minor one looks like?
Even in its adjusted modern form, the canon is being rapidly overtaken by
events. Already within the last generation some academics at Columbia, Yale
and Cornell have been redrafting literary history, while often denying that there
is a literary history worth studying. M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold
Bloom and their colleagues and pupils, encouraged by the Canadian Northrop
Frye, have quietly installed their own line, which gives the modern East-coast
intellectual his own appropriate intellectual genealogy, and is also, perhaps
accidentally, conterminous with the independent history of the United States of
America.
26 • MARILYN BUTLER

This line begins with Kant and runs through Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Shelley to Hegel, Emerson, Carlyle, Whitman, Nietzsche, Freud and Wallace
Stevens. German thinkers play a large part in the New England canon; many of
the academics constructing it seem to have spoken German as their first lan¬
guage and to have trained in traditions that gave them no such personal motives
for Anglophilia as old-style Ivy League professors often had. Since America has
always been a multi-ethnic community, the British-built canon must often have
tended to alienate, or at least fail to inspire, many of its students of literature.
The strategic placing of Americans in the new one, and the skilful modernizing
of the consciousnesses of the figures in it, does away, at first sight, with two of
the more repellent features of old Eng. Lit.—its foreignness, and its historicity.
On the other hand, it must be said that the new Modernist-Romantic canon
hardly looks tailor-made for students: it is still Eurocentric and intimidatingly
learned, through its range of allusion to the 2,000-year Hebraic religious trad¬
ition which the English Romantics allegedly revived. Wealth and prestige
within the American university system continue to shift to California: it will be
an interesting test of the responsiveness of the profession in America, to see if
Emersonian New England gradually allows a pitch in the avant-garde parkland
to California's Hispanics and Chinese.
It would be premature to offer rival international or British inner-city canons:
those have to emerge with time, and with the raising of the consciousness of
those currently marginalized. But an individual academic can at least begin to
explore the unfortunate intellectual consequences of letting a small set of sur¬
vivors, largely accidentally arrived at, dictate the model many of us seem to
work with, of a timeless, desocialized, ahistorical literary community. What
kind of critical difference would it make to study actual literary communities as
they functioned within their larger communities in time and place? I propose
that poets we have installed as canonical look more interesting individually,
and far more understandable as groups, when we restore some of their lost peers.
My example is a poet who was not accidentally overlooked but dropped by the
curious consensus-making of the 1820s, for he was the Poet Laureate of the day,
Robert Southey . . .
Admitting Southey to the canon we have grown used to studying would not
be a matter of enlarging it by one name. Several of the best-regarded poems of
mainstream Romanticism interrelate so significantly with Southey's poems that
they are no longer quite the same read without them. But if this is so, Southey's
awkward status, neither canonical nor invisible to us, queries the formalist belief
in the autonomous great poem, as well as the 'post-Romantic' faith in the
independence of the great poet. Southey's position on the outside of the canon
also raises the less palatable implications of that institution as a metaphor: it
 CANON AND PERIOD • 27

makes poets look like an exclusive club, an aristocracy, an old regime, a

leadership of the righteously inclined.
Politics and the social needs of the day (progressive quite as much as oppres¬
sive) created in the nineteenth century these notions of literature, which history
has delivered to us. It will be politics and new social needs that now induce us to
revise them. The consequences of shirking a revision are great, for the opportun¬
ity facing teachers of literature in our lifetime may not recur in the next gener¬
ation. Should millions of potential readers of great literature, in all parts of the
world, be welcomed or repelled, given access to the past or in effect denied it?
The barriers raised in their path at present include the intellectual and imagina¬
tive limitations, the conservativism or the possessiveness or the downright
parochialism of entrenched literary professionals. A new historicism, newer and
more open than most work attracting that description at present, seems a far
healthier option.

2 Canon and Period*

FRANK KERMODE

I can best start this section on canon by reading an item from the US Chronicle of
Higher Education dated 4 September 1985. This journal is widely circulated in
American institutions of higher education. On this occasion, at the beginning of
a new academic year, it ran a symposium in which twenty-two authorities in
various fields told readers what developments to expect over the next few years.
This is the forecast for literary studies:

The dominant concern of literary studies during the rest of the nineteen-
eighties will be literary theory. Especially important will be the use of theory
informed by the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to gain insights
into the cultures of blacks and women.
In fact the convergence of feminist and Afro-American theoretical formulations
offers the most challenging nexus for scholarship in the coming years. Specifically
the most exciting and insightful accounts of expressive culture in general and
creative writing in particular will derive from efforts that employ feminist and
Afro-American approaches to the study of texts by Afro-American writers such as
Zora Neale Hurston, Sonia Sanchez, Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison.
Among the promising areas for analysis is the examination of the concerns and
metaphorical patterns that are common to past and present black women writers.
Such theoretical accounts of the cultural products of race and gender will help

* From Frank Kermode, 'Canon and Period', History and Value, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988,
pp. 113-70.
28 • FRANK KERMODE

to undermine the half-truths that white males have established as constituting

American culture as a whole. One aspect of that development will be the con¬
tinued reshaping of the literary canon as forgotten, neglected or suppressed texts
are re-discovered.
Literary theory is also full of disruptive and deeply political potential, which
Afro-American and feminist critics will labor to release in coming years.

This manifesto, for such it appears to be, was written by the Professor 'of
English and of Human Relations' at the University of Pennsylvania. It pro¬
poses what could well be called a radical deconstruction of the canon, putting
in the place of the false elements foisted into it by white males a list of black
females. These will be studied by methods specifically Afro-American. The
writer points out the political implications of these developments, for he
knows that the changes he prophesies will not come to pass without alter¬
ations in more than the syllabus. He assumes that the literary canon is a load-
bearing element of the existing power structure, and believes that by impos¬
ing radical change on the canon you can help to dismantle the power
structure.
What interests me most about this programme is not its cunning alliance of
three forces that might be thought to be in principle hostile to the idea of the
canon—Feminism, Afro-Americanism, and Deconstruction—so much as its
tacit admission that there is such a thing as literature and that there ought to be
such a thing as a canon: the opinions of the powerful about the contents of
these categories may be challenged, but the concepts of themselves remain in
place. Indeed the whole revolutionary enterprise simply assumes their continu¬
ance. The canon is what the insurgents mean to occupy as the reward of success
in the struggle for power.
In short, what we have here is not a plan to abolish the canon but one to
capture it. The association of canon with authority is deeply ingrained in us, and
one can see simple reasons why it should be so. It is a highly selective instru¬
ment, and one reason why we need to use it is that we haven't enough memory
to process everything. The only other option is not a universal reception of the
past and its literature but a Dadaist destruction of it. It must therefore be
protected by those who have it and coveted by those who don't.
Authority has invented many myths for the protection of the canon.
Religious canons can be effectively closed, even at the cost of retaining within
them books of which the importance is later difficult to discern, like some of the
briefer New Testament letters. They can be heavily protected, credited for
example with literal inspiration, so that it is forbidden to alter one jot or tittle of
them, diacritical signs, instructions to cantilators, even manifest errors. And
every word, every letter, is subject to minute commentary. Whatever is included
 CANON AND PERIOD • 29

is sure to have its effect on the world. Suppose, for instance, that Revelation had
not got into the Christian canon, as it almost didn't; it would have been just one
more lost or apocryphal apocalypse, the province only of specialist scholarship;
instead it has had vast effects on social and political behaviour over many ages,
and continues to do so. The Fourth Gospel was at one time under suspicion; had
it not become so central a document for Christian theology millions of people
would have been required to believe something quite different from the ortho¬
dox faith, and quite a lot of them might have escaped burning if not burnt for
some other reason.
So canons are complicit with power; and canons are useful in that they enable
us to handle otherwise unmanageable historical deposits. They do this by
affirming that some works are more valuable than others, more worthy of min¬
ute attention. Whether their value is wholly dependent on their being singled
out in this way is a contested issue. There is in any case a quite unmistakable
difference of status between canonical and uncanonical books, however they
got into the canon. But once they are in, certain changes come over them. First,
they are completely locked into their times, their texts as near frozen as devout
scholarship can make them, their very language more and more remote. Sec¬
ondly, they are, paradoxically, by this fact, set free of time. Thirdly, the separate
constituents become not only books in their own right but part of a larger
whole—a whole because it is so treated. Fourthly, that whole, with all its inter¬
related parts, can be thought to have an inexhaustible potential of meaning, so
that what happens in the course of time—as the original context and language
of the collection grows more and more distant—is that new meanings accrue
(they may be deemed, by a fiction characteristic of this way of thinking, to be
original meanings) and these meanings constantly change though their source
remains unchangeable. Since all the books can now be thought of as one large
book, new echoes and repetitions are discovered in remote parts of the whole.
The best commentary on any verse is another verse, possibly placed very far
away from it. This was a rabbinical doctrine: 'I join passages from the Torah with
passages from the Hagiographa, and the words of the Torah glow as the day they
were given at Sinai.'1
The temporal gap between text and comment or application ensures that in
practice something like the Gadamer-Jauss hermeneutics,2 whether formalized
or not, is always needed. The mutual influence of one canonical text on another,
intemporal in itself, appearing in time only by means of commentary, is the

1 D. Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic in Palestine (1975), p. 44.

2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, philosopher concerned with questions of meaning and interpretation,
or 'hermeneutics'; Hans Robert Jauss, literary critic-scholar who argues that the historical 'hori¬
zon' of texts at various 'moments' alters how they are received and understood. [Ed.]
30 • FRANK KERMODE

essence of Eliot's idea of a canon, expressed in that famous passage in the essay
'Tradition and the Individual Talent'—'the whole of the literature of Europe . . .
has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order', though he
provides, as a secular canonist must, for additions to that order: 'The existing
monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.3 By this
means 'order'—timeless order—'persists after the supervention of novelty', and
it does so by adjusting itself to the new. Here the idea of canon is used in the
service of an order which can be discerned in history but actually transcends it,
and makes everything timeless and modern.
In this, as in the formulae of hermeneutics, in the rabbinical methodology
and in the Marxist aspirations toward a theory of fruitful discrepancy, there is a
clear purpose of making a usable past, a past which is not simply past but also
always new. The object of all such thinking about the canonical monuments,
then, is to make them modern. Indeed variants of this view are found in more
than one writer of the period we now think of as 'Modernist'. At the same time
there was a rival kind of Modernism that professed a desire to destroy the
monuments, to destroy the past. But the ghost of canonicity haunts even these
iconoclasts. And whether one thinks of canons as objectionable because formed
at random or to serve some interests at the expense of others, or whether one
supposes that the contents of canons are providentially chosen, there can be no
doubt that we have not found ways of ordering our thoughts about the history
of literature and art without recourse to them. That is why the minorities who
want to be rid of what they regard as a reactionary canon can think of no way of
doing so without putting a radical one in its place.
This is true even if one agrees with Benjamin that 'there is no document of
civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism',4 for every
'document of civilization' retains qualities that set it apart from possible substi¬
tutes 'in an age of mechanical reproduction'; and to Benjamin, with his
unmatched sense of their qualities (which he subsumes under the name of
'aura'), the abolition of such documents was close to unthinkable. He believed
that the historical materialist should in conscience dissociate himself from these
works of art, indissolubly associated in their making and in their transmission
with injustice and oppression, but he was no more able to do so than the
materialists I've already talked about, including those who believed that the
works of art in question should be preserved as the dearly bought heritage of the
descendants of the victims. Benjamin approved of Proust, with his sense of aura,

3 Selected Prose ofT. S. Eliot, ed. F. Kermode (1975), p. 38.

4 W. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (1968), p. 258.
 LITERATURE AND THE RISE OF ENGLISH • 31

of 'the incalculable individual life'5 (a rather bourgeois expression, surely), and

he disapproved of Dada, which would destroy both aura and the past. There is
no escaping it: if we want the monuments, the documents we value, we must
preserve them in spite of their evil associations, and find ways of showing that
their value somehow persists in our changed world. Moreover we cannot avoid
seeing them as interrelated, as of the same family by reason of their distinctive
features and qualities. So we have somehow to place them in relation to one
another; and the way we do that will help to determine our attitude to the past.
The canon, in predetermining value, shapes the past and makes it humanly
available, accessibly modern.

3 Literature and the Rise of English*

TERRY EAGLETON

We have still not discovered the secret, then, of why Lamb, Macaulay and Mill
are literature but not, generally speaking, Bentham, Marx and Darwin. Perhaps
the simple answer is that the first three are examples of 'fine writing', whereas
the last three are not. This answer has the disadvantage of being largely untrue,
at least in my judgement, but it has the advantage of suggesting that by and
large people term 'literature' writing which they think is good. An obvious objec¬
tion to this is that if it were entirely true there would be no such thing as 'bad
literature'. I may consider Lamb and Macaulay overrated, but that does not
necessarily mean that I stop regarding them as literature. You may consider
Raymond Chandler 'good of his kind', but not exactly literature. On the other
hand, if Macaulay were a really bad writer—if he had no grasp at all of grammar
and seemed interested in nothing but white mice—then people might well not
call his work literature at all, even bad literature. Value-judgements would cer¬
tainly seem to have a lot to do with what is judged literature and what isn't—not
necessarily in the sense that writing has to be 'fine' to be literary, but that it has
to be of the kind that is judged fine: it may be an inferior example of a generally
valued mode. Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket was an example of
inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson
was. The term 'fine writing', or belles lettres, is in this sense ambiguous: it denotes
a sort of writing which is generally highly regarded, while not necessarily
committing you to the opinion that a particular specimen of it is 'good'.
With this reservation, the suggestion that 'literature' is a highly valued kind of
writing is an illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It

5 Ibid., p. 210.

* From Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1983, pp. 10-15,
22-4.
32 • TERRY EAGLETON

means that we can drop once and for all the illusion that the category 'literature'
is 'objective', in the sense of being eternally given and immutable. Anything can
be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably
literature—Shakespeare, for example—can cease to be literature. Any belief that
the study of literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity, as entomol¬
ogy is the study of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera. Some kinds of fiction
are literature and some are not; some literature is fictional and some is not; some
literature is verbally self-regarding, while some highly wrought rhetoric is not
literature. Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable
value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist. When
I use the words 'literary' and 'literature' from here on in this book, then, I place
them under an invisible crossing-out mark, to indicate that these terms will not
really do but that we have no better ones at the moment.
The reason why it follows from the definition of literature as highly valued
writing that it is not a stable entity is that value-judgements are notoriously
variable. 'Times change, values don't,' announces an advertisement for a daily
newspaper, as though we still believed in killing off infirm infants or putting the
mentally ill on public show. Just as people may treat a work as philosophy in one
century and as literature in the next, or vice versa, so they may change their
minds about what writing they consider valuable. They may even change their
minds about the grounds they use for judging what is valuable and what is not.
This, as I have suggested, does not necessarily mean that they will refuse the title
of literature to a work which they have come to deem inferior: they may still call
it literature, meaning roughly that it belongs to the type of writing which they
generally value. But it does mean that the so-called 'literary canon', the
unquestioned 'great tradition' of the 'national literature', has to be recognized as
a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain
time. There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in
itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it. 'Value'
is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific
situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes. It is
thus quite possible that, given a deep enough transformation of our history, we
may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of
Shakespeare. His works might simply seem desperately alien, full of styles of
thought and feeling which such a society found limited or irrelevant. In such a
situation, Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day
graffiti. And though many people would consider such a social condition tragic¬
ally impoverished, it seems to me dogmatic not to entertain the possibility that
it might arise rather from a general human enrichment. Karl Marx was troubled
by the question of why ancient Greek art retained an 'eternal charm', even
 LITERATURE AND THE RISE OF ENGLISH • 33

though the social conditions which produced it had long passed: but how do we
know that it will remain 'eternally' charming, since history has not yet ended?
Let us imagine that by dint of some deft archaeological research we discovered a
great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original
audiences, recognized that these concerns were utterly remote from our own,
and began to read the plays again in the light of this deepened knowledge. One
result might be that we stopped enjoying them. We might come to see that we
had enjoyed them previously because we were unwittingly reading them in the
light of our own preoccupations; once this became less possible, the drama
might cease to speak at all significantly to us.
The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of
our own concerns—indeed that in one sense of 'our own concerns' we are
incapable of doing anything else—might be one reason why certain works of
literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of course,
that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also be
that people have not actually been valuing the 'same' work at all, even though
they may think they have. 'Our' Homer is not identical with the Homer of the
Middle Ages, nor 'our' Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather
that different historical periods have constructed a 'different' Homer and Shake¬
speare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or
devalue, though not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in other
words, are 'rewritten', if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them;
indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a 're-writing'. No work,
and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people
without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this
is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair.
I do not mean that it is unstable because value-judgements are 'subjective'.
According to this view, the world is divided between solid facts 'out there' like
Grand Central station, and arbitrary value-judgements 'in here' such as liking
bananas or feeling that the tone of a Yeats poem veers from defensive hectoring
to grimly resilient resignation. Facts are public and unimpeachable, values are
private and gratuitous. There is an obvious difference between recounting a fact,
such as 'This cathedral was built in 1612', and registering a value-judgement,
such as 'This cathedral is a magnificent specimen of baroque architecture'. But
suppose I made the first kind of statement while showing an overseas visitor
around England, and found that it puzzled her considerably. Why, she might
ask, do you keep telling me the dates of the foundation of all these buildings?
Why this obsession with origins? In the society I live in, she might go on, we
keep no record at all of such events: we classify our buildings instead according
to whether they face north-west or south-east. What this might do would be to
34 • TERRY EAGLETON

demonstrate part of the unconscious system of value-judgements which under¬

lies my own descriptive statements. Such value-judgements are not necessarily
of the same kind as 'This cathedral is a magnificent specimen of baroque archi¬
tecture', but they are value-judgements nonetheless, and no factual pro¬
nouncement I make can escape them. Statements of fact are after all statements,
which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements
are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am
the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their
truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something
useful is accomplished by making them, and so on. A pub conversation may
well transmit information, but what also bulks large in such dialogue is a strong
element of what linguists would call the 'phatic', a concern with the act of
communication itself. In chatting to you about the weather I am also signalling
that I regard conversation with you as valuable, that I consider you a worth¬
while person to talk to, that I am not myself anti-social or about to embark on a
detailed critique of your personal appearance.
In this sense, there is no possibility of a wholly disinterested statement. Of
course stating when a cathedral was built is reckoned to be more disinterested in
our own culture than passing an opinion about its architecture, but one could
also imagine situations in which the former statement would be more 'value¬
laden' than the latter. Perhaps 'baroque' and 'magnificent' have come to be
more or less synonymous, whereas only a stubborn rump of us cling to the belief
that the date when a building was founded is significant, and my statement is
taken as a coded way of signalling this partisanship. All of our descriptive state¬
ments move within an often invisible network of value-categories, and indeed
without such categories we would have nothing to say to each other at all. It is
not just as though we have something called factual knowledge which may then
be distorted by particular interests and judgements, although this is certainly
possible; it is also that without particular interests we would have no knowledge
at all, because we would not see the point of bothering to get to know anything.
Interests are constitutive of our knowledge, not merely prejudices which imperil
it. The claim that knowledge should be 'value-free' is itself a value-judgement.
It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this
is in fact questionable. A thorough analysis of my tastes in food would probably
reveal how deeply relevant they are to certain formative experiences in early
childhood, to my relations with my parents and siblings and to a good many
other cultural factors which are quite as social and 'non-subjective' as railway
stations. This is even more true of that fundamental structure of beliefs and
interests which I am born into as a member of a particular society, such as the
belief that I should try to keep in good health, that differences of sexual role are
 LITERATURE AND THE RISE OF ENGLISH • 35

rooted in human biology or that human beings are more important than croco¬
diles. We may disagree on this or that, but we can only do so because we share
certain 'deep' ways of seeing and valuing which are bound up with our social
life, and which could not be changed without transforming that life. Nobody
will penalize me heavily if I dislike a particular Donne poem, but if I argue that
Donne is not literature at all then in certain circumstances I might risk losing
my job. I am free to vote Labour or Conservative, but if I try to act on the belief
that this choice itself merely masks a deeper prejudice—the prejudice that the
meaning of democracy is confined to putting a cross on a ballot paper every few
years—then in certain unusual circumstances I might end up in prison.
The largely concealed structure of values which informs and underlies our
factual statements is part of what is-meant by 'ideology'. By 'ideology' I mean,
roughly, the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power
structure and power-relations of the society we live in. It follows from such a
rough definition of ideology that not all of our underlying judgements and
categories can usefully be said to be ideological. It is deeply ingrained in us to
imagine ourselves moving forwards into the future (at least one other society
sees itself as moving backwards into it), but though this way of seeing may
connect significantly with the power-structure of our society, it need not always
and everywhere do so. I do not mean by 'ideology' simply the deeply
entrenched, often unconscious beliefs which people hold; I mean more particu¬
larly those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some
kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power. The fact
that such beliefs are by no means merely private quirks may be illustrated by a
literary example.
In his famous study Practical Criticism (1929), the Cambridge critic I. A. Rich¬
ards sought to demonstrate just how whimsical and subjective literary value-
judgements could actually be by giving his undergraduates a set of poems,
withholding from them the titles and authors' names, and asking them to
evaluate them. The resulting judgements, notoriously, were highly variable:
time-honoured poets were marked down and obscure authors celebrated. To my
mind, however, much the most interesting aspect of this project, and one
apparently quite invisible to Richards himself, is just how tight a consensus of
unconscious valuations underlies these particular differences of opinion. Read¬
ing Richards' undergraduates' accounts of literary works, one is struck by the
habits of perception and interpretation which they spontaneously share—what
they expect literature to be, what assumptions they bring to a poem and what
fulfilments they anticipate they will derive from it. None of this is really surpris¬
ing: for all the participants in this experiment were, presumably, young, white,
upper- or upper-middle-class, privately educated English people of the 1920s,
36 • TERRY EAGLETON

and how they responded to a poem depended on a good deal more than purely
'literary' factors. Their critical responses were deeply entwined with their
broader prejudices and beliefs. This is not a matter of blame: there is no critical
response which is not so entwined, and thus no such thing as a 'pure' literary
critical judgement of interpretation. If anybody is to be blamed it is I. A. Rich¬
ards himself, who as a young, white, upper-middle-class male Cambridge don
was unable to objectify a context of interests which he himself largely shared,
and was thus unable to recognize fully that local, 'subjective' differences of
evaluation work within a particular, socially structured way of perceiving the
world.
If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective', descriptive category, neither
will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call
literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-
judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are as
apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building . . .

The Rise of English

Literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology. It has

the most intimate relations to questions of social power. But if the reader is
still unconvinced, the narrative of what happened to literature in the later
nineteenth century might prove a little more persuasive.
If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English
studies in the later nineteenth century one could do worse than reply: 'the
failure of religion'. By the mid-Victorian period, this traditionally reliable,
immensely powerful ideological form was in deep trouble. It was no longer
winning the hearts and minds of the masses, and under the twin impacts of
scientific discovery and social change its previous unquestioned dominance was
in danger of evaporating. This was particularly worrying for the Victorian ruling
class, because religion is for all kinds of reasons an extremely effective form of
ideological control. Like all successful ideologies, it works much less by explicit
concepts or formulated doctrines than by image, symbol, habit, ritual and
mythology. It is affective and experiential, entwining itself with the deepest
unconscious roots of the human subject; and any social ideology which is
unable to engage with such deep-seated a-rational fears and needs, as T. S. Eliot
knew, is unlikely to survive very long. Religion, moreover, is capable of operat¬
ing at every social level: if there is a doctrinal inflection of it for the intellectual
elite, there is also a pietistic brand of it for the masses. It provides an excellent
social 'cement', encompassing pious peasant, enlightened middle-class liberal
and theological intellectual in a single organization. Its ideological power lies in
 WOMEN POETS • 37

its capacity to 'materialize' beliefs as practices: religion is the sharing of the

chalice and the blessing of the harvest, not just abstract argument about con-
substantiation or hyperdulia. Its ultimate truths, like those mediated by the
literary symbol, are conveniently closed to rational demonstration, and thus
absolute in their claims. Finally religion, at least in its Victorian forms, is a
pacifying influence, fostering meekness, self-sacrifice and the contemplative
inner life. It is no wonder that the Victorian ruling class looked on the threat¬
ened dissolution of this ideological discourse with something less than
equanimity.
Fortunately, however, another, remarkably similar discourse lay to hand:
English literature. George Gordon, early Professor of English Literature at
Oxford, commented in his inaugural lecture that 'England is sick, and . . .
English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed,
and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still,
I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls
and heal the State.'1 Gordon's words were spoken in our own century, but they
find a resonance everywhere in Victorian England. It is a striking thought that
had it not been for this dramatic crisis in mid-nineteenth-century ideology, we
might not today have such a plentiful supply of Jane Austen casebooks and
bluffer's guides to Pound. As religion progressively ceases to provide the social
'cement', affective values and basic mythologies by which a socially turbulent
class-society can be welded together, 'English' is constructed as a subject to carry
this ideological burden from the Victorian period onwards.

4 Women Poets*
SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR

Despite a proliferation of literary ancestresses .. . Elizabeth Barrett Browning

commented mournfully in 1845 that 'England has had many learned women
... and yet where are the poetesses? ... I look everywhere for grandmothers,
and see none'.1 In 1862, moreover, Emily Dickinson, articulating in another way

1 Quoted by Chris Baldick. 'The Social Mission of English Studies' (unpubl. D. Phil., Oxford,
1981), p. 156. I am considerably indebted to this excellent study, to be published as The Social
Mission of English Criticism (Oxford, 1983).

* From Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 'Introduction', Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays
on Women Poets, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and London, 1979, pp. xvi-xxii.
1 The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederick G. Kenyon (2 vols. in I, New York: Mac¬
millan, 1899), I, pp. 230-2. Compare Woolf's 'For we think back through our mothers if we are
women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them
for pleasure' (A Room of One's Own, p. 79).
38 • GILBERT AND GUBAR

the same distinction between women's prose and women's verse, expressed
similar bewilderment. Complaining that

They shut me up in Prose—

As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet—
Because they liked me 'still'2

she implied a recognition that poetry by women was in some sense inappropri¬
ate, unladylike, immodest. And in 1928, as if commenting on both Barrett
Browning's comment and Dickinson's complaint, Woolf invented a tragic his¬
tory for her 'Judith Shakespeare' because she so deeply believed that it is 'the
poetry that is still denied outlet'.
Why did these three literary women consider poetry by women somehow
forbidden or problematical? Woolf herself, after all, traced the careers of Anne
Finch and Margaret Cavendish, admired the 'wild poetry' of the Brontes, noted
that Barrett Browning's verse-novel Aurora Leigh had poetic virtues no prose
work could rival, and spoke almost with awe of Christina Rossetti's 'complex
song'.3 Why, then, did she feel that 'Judith Shakespeare' was 'caught and tan¬
gled', 'denied', suffocated, self-buried, or not yet born? We can begin to find
answers to these questions by briefly reviewing some of the ways in which repre¬
sentative male readers and critics have reacted to poetry by representative
women like Barrett Browning and Dickinson.

Introducing The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1959, James Reeves quoted
'a friend' as making a statement which expresses the predominant attitude of
many male literati toward poetry by women even more succinctly than Woolf's
story did: 'A friend who is also a literary critic has suggested, not perhaps quite
seriously, that "woman poet" is a contradiction in terms.'4 In other words, from
what Woolf would call the 'masculinist' point of view, the very nature of lyric
poetry is inherently incompatible with the nature or essence of femaleness.
Remarks by other 'masculinist' readers and critics elaborate on the point. In the
midst of favorably reviewing the work of his friend Louise Bogan, for instance,
Theodore Roethke detailed the various 'charges most frequently levelled against
poetry by women'. Though his statement begins by pretending objectivity, it
soon becomes clear that he himself is making such accusations.

2 Thomas Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960),
No. 613.
3 See especially 'Aurora Leigh' and T am Christina Rossetti' in The Second Common Reader (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), pp. 182-92 and 214-21.
4 Reprinted in Richard B. Sewall, ed., Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 120. In fairness to Reeves, we should note that he quotes this
statement in order to dispute it.
 WOMEN POETS • 39

Two of the [most frequent] charges ... are lack of range—in subject matter, in
emotional tone—and lack of a sense of humor. And one could, in individual
instances among writers of real talent, add other aesthetic and moral shortcom¬
ings: the spinning out; the embroidering of trivial themes: a concern with the
mere surfaces of life—that special province of the feminine talent in prose—
hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up to what existence is;
lyric or religious posturing; running between the boudoir and the altar; stamping
a tiny foot against God or lapsing into a sententiousness that implies the author
has re-invented integrity; carrying on excessively about Fate, about time; lament¬
ing the lot of the woman; caterwauling; writing the same poem about fifty times,
and so on .. ,5

Even a cursory reading of this passage reveals its inconsistency: women are
taxed for both triviality and sententiousness, for both silly superficiality and
melodramatic 'carrying on' about profound subjects. More significant, how¬
ever, is the fact that Roethke attacks female poets for doing just what male
poets do—that is, for writing about God, fate, time, and integrity; for writing
obsessively on the same themes or subjects, and so forth. But his language
suggests that it is precisely the sex of these literary women that subverts their
art. Shaking a Promethean male fist 'against God' is one perfectly reasonable
aesthetic strategy, apparently, but stamping a 'tiny' feminine foot is quite
another.
Along similar lines, John Crowe Ransom noted without disapproval in a 1956
essay about Emily Dickinson that 'it is common belief among readers (among
men readers at least) that the woman poet as a type . .. makes flights into nature
rather too easily and upon errands which do not have metaphysical importance
enough to justify so radical a strategy'.6 Elsewhere in the same essay, describing
Dickinson as 'a little home-keeping person' he speculated that 'hardly . . . more'
than 'one out of seventeen' of her 1,775 poems are destined to become 'public
property', and observed that her life 'was a humdrum affair of little distinction',
although 'in her Protestant community the gentle spinsters had their assured
and useful place in the family circle, they had what was virtually a vocation'.7
(But how, he seemed to wonder, could someone with so humdrum a social
destiny have written great poetry?) Equally concerned with the problematical
relationship between Dickinson's poetry and her femaleness—with, that is,
what seemed to be an irreconcilable conflict between her 'gentle' spinsterhood
and her fierce art—R. P. Blackmur decided in 1937 that 'she was neither a profes¬
sional poet nor an amateur; she was a private poet who wrote indefatigably, as

5 Theodore Roethke, 'The Poetry of Louise Bogan', Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J.
Mills, Jr. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), pp. 133-4.
6 'Emily Dickinson: A Poet Restored', in Sewall, p. 92. 7 Ibid., p. 89.
40 • GILBERT AND GUBAR

some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of
her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars'.8
Even in 1971, male readers of Dickinson brooded upon this apparent dichot¬
omy of poetry and femininity. John Cody's After Great Pain perceptively ana¬
lyzes the suffering that many of Dickinson's critics and biographers have refused
to acknowledge. But his conclusion emphasizes what he too sees as the
incompatibility between womanly fulfillment and passionate art.

Had Mrs Dickinson been warm and affectionate, more intelligent, effective, and
admirable, Emily Dickinson early in life would probably have identified with her,
become domestic, and adopted the conventional woman's role. She would then
have become a church member, been active in community affairs, married, and
had children. The creative potentiality would of course still have been there, but
would she have discovered it? What motivation to write could have replaced the
incentive given by suffering and loneliness? If in spite of her wifely and motherly
duties, she had still felt the need to express herself in verse, what would her
subject matter have been? Would art have sprung from fulfillment, gratification,
and completeness as abundantly as it did from longing, frustration, and
deprivation?9

Interestingly, these questions restate an apparently very different position taken

by Ransom fifteen years earlier: 'Most probably [Dickinson's] poems would not
have amounted to much if the author had not finally had her own romance,
enabling her to fulfill herself like any other woman.' Though Ransom speaks of
the presence and 'fulfillment' of 'romance', while Cody discusses its tormenting
absence, neither imagines that poetry itself could possibly constitute a wom¬
an's fulfillment. On the contrary, both assume that the art of a woman poet
must in some sense arise from 'romantic' feelings (in the popular, sentimental
sense), arise either in response to a real romance or as compensation for a
missing one.
In view of this critical obsession with womanly 'fulfillment'—clearly a
nineteenth-century notion redefined by twentieth-century thinkers for their
own purposes—it is not surprising to find out that when poetry by women has
been praised it has usually been praised for being 'feminine', just as it has been
blamed for being deficient in 'femininity'. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for
instance, the most frequently analyzed, criticized, praised, and blamed woman
poet of her day, was typically admired 'because of her understanding of the

8 Quoted in Reeves, p. 119.

9 John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 495.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Birth control
and the state
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Birth control and the state

A plea and a forecast

Author: C. P. Blacker

Release date: February 26, 2024 [eBook #73050]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1926

Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Donald Cummings and the Online

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIRTH

CONTROL AND THE STATE ***
Transcriber’s Note: New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.
BIRTH CONTROL
AND THE STATE
 BIRTH CONTROL
AND THE STATE
A PLEA AND A FORECAST

BY
C. P. BLACKER
M.C., M.A., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.

New York
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
 Copyright, 1926
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 FOREWORD
The pioneer battles on behalf of Birth Control, as everybody
knows, have been fought in this country by Dr Marie Stopes, who
has largely borne the brunt of that abuse which is meted out to all
popular exponents of ideas that do not harmonize with traditional
morality. The fact that Dr Stopes has been criticized, and at times
attacked by the medical profession (which until recently refused to
acknowledge that the subject of Contraception fell within its sphere)
on the grounds that she does not possess a medical degree, and the
fact that she has retaliated with vigour—and continues to do so in
most of her public utterances, have led to a breach between her and
the more orthodox elements of the profession, which to a certain
extent, has impeded the realization of her ultimate aim, namely the
undertaking by the State of the work she performs on a small scale
in her privately-run clinique.
In what follows I have drawn attention to drawbacks attending the
dissemination of knowledge of Contraception by General
Propaganda. I have done so, however, fully realizing that this
propaganda was, in the first instance, necessary to override the
barrier of prejudice presented by orthodox morality, and equally
realizing that if it had not been for Dr Stopes and her propaganda
this book would probably never have been written. In its essential
plea that advice on Contraception, now obtainable only at private
institutions, be made generally available by the Ministry of Health at
the centres under its control, this book is at one with the wider aim
expressed by Dr Stopes in the words that commemorate the
founding of her first private clinique.
I know that in the past it has proved nearly impossible in a single
book to appeal effectively both to the general public, and to the
medical profession. Yet I have attempted to do that here. The task
has been made perhaps less difficult than usual by the fact that until
recently the subject of contraception has been completely ignored by
the medical profession, which as a whole seems to remain as
uninformed of its wider implication as does the general public. It will
be found that the book ends with a practical suggestion taking the
form of an appeal to the medical profession.
The substance of the first part of what follows originally appeared
as a series of articles in The Saturday Review, to which I am
indebted for permission to publish the book in its present form.
C. P. B.
 BIRTH CONTROL AND THE STATE
A PLEA AND A FORECAST

Since the War, the subject of Birth Control has been widely
discussed, and much has been written about it. By some of its
advocates it has been extolled to the point where any criticism,
however tentative, is resentfully repudiated. By its enemies it has
been represented as a pernicious and unnatural practice leading to
the degeneracy and, ultimately, to the extinction of the race. So
wholeheartedly felt, and yet so profoundly opposed are these views,
that it has been difficult for the average person to find his bearings
on any other basis than that of his own sentiment.
It is clear that the implications of Birth Control, or, rather, what is
generally, though not logically understood by the term, of the practice
of contraception, are far reaching. It profoundly affects the life of the
individual; it reacts upon the internal economy of the community; and
it has a most important bearing upon the international future of the
country wherein it is practised. It is therefore incumbent upon all
serious students of contemporary world-problems to realize clearly
what is to be said on both sides, and to form thereon, as far as lies in
their power, an unbiassed opinion. This obligation weighs especially
heavily on medical men since, if the practice is to be tolerated at all,
it is by them that it should be administered and controlled.
It is a general survey of this sort that is attempted here. The book
will begin with a consideration of the more important arguments that
have been advanced on each side. These will then be discussed,
and there will follow a conclusion as to the bearing of the practice
upon the future of civilization.
It will be convenient first to review the more serious arguments
used against Birth Control, the problem being considered throughout
both as a world-problem and as one with a special significance for
this country. They fall into two distinct categories concerning (A) the
Race and (B) the Individual.
A. 1. The ‘military’ argument finds exponents among Nationalists,
who are convinced that the essential merit of a country lies in its
powers of offence and defence, or who are persuaded that future
wars are, by the constitution of human nature, inevitable, and that it
is therefore necessary for the country to which they belong to be fully
equipped. By such persons, Birth Control is opposed in so far as it
would impair their country’s man power.
2. An argument allied to the above, yet one which must be
distinguished carefully from it, deserves close scrutiny. It is to the
effect that quite apart from military considerations the practice of
Birth Control in a country is capable of acquiring in a short time such
universality that the population may decrease, and eventually
dwindle to proportions which would place that country, whatever its
status, in a position of a second or third-rate power. From history the
approximate generalization can be made that prolific races get the
better of infertile races in the struggle, first for existence, and then at
a later stage, for power. This generalization is likely to hold good in
an economic sphere. Thus a graphic picture has been drawn of what
will happen to England, in the matter of its population, if it follows in
the wake of France. It will come to assume the proportions of an
insignificant little island in the North Sea, the possessor, actually, of a
mighty past, but in the present counting for nothing beside the
densely peopled territories of Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia
and America. Birth Control uncontrolled means race suicide.
3. There is an ‘economic’ argument against Birth Control, which
itself takes two forms.
In the first place it is felt, in under-populated countries like New
Zealand, Australia, and perhaps to a less extent the United States,
that since it is desirable in the general interests that the population
should increase, it is to be preferred that this increase be effected
from native-born stock rather than through the process of accretion
by often undesirable aliens. Hence in most under-populated
countries, Birth Control is opposed.
 In the second place it is probably felt (though probably not
admitted) by the Governments of those capitalistic countries
confronted with a labour problem, which are at the same time
desirous of limiting immigration, that the unrestricted multiplication of
their working classes, by causing a competition for wages, will create
a cheap labour market. It is highly unlikely that this view has much
weight here, though it may easily be otherwise in the United States,
where the labour problem is acute and where it is universally desired
to limit coloured immigration and immigration from South-Eastern
Europe.
4. There is an argument against Birth Control, which has special
reference to the position of this country as the original founder of a
great Empire. Since most of the Dominions are still under-populated
and wish their numbers to increase, and since the increase of native
stock, even though fully encouraged, is unable to supply the demand
for labour, it is contended that Great Britain should always be able to
turn out a numerical surplus to send to the Dominions each year,
which in addition to satisfying a need for better-class immigrants
would serve to consolidate the racial and cultural bonds that keep
the Empire together.
B. The above arguments concern the race. The remainder which
follow refer primarily to the individual.
5. A ‘medical’ argument has been heard to the effect that the
actual practice of Birth Control or, more precisely, the use of
contraceptives, is inimical to health, being capable of causing both
local disease and more general constitutional disorders. Emotional
instability and various neuroses have been quoted as such products.
No woman making use of a contraceptive for the first time can
escape a feeling of revulsion at such a callous interference with a
process that above all others should be spontaneous and instinctive.
No woman can then fail to experience a sense of aversion from such
a deliberate thwarting of Nature’s most fundamental purpose.
6. Very potent also, is a ‘conventional’ objection which in practice
is often associated with the religious argument next to be
considered, though in reality it is distinguishable from it. On these
grounds it is felt that all that pertains to the province of sex is
indecent, disgusting, and unfit for discussion. The topic of Birth
Control is thus stigmatized as ‘immoral’ by many people of no deep
religious conviction.
7. The ‘religious’ objection nowadays finds its chief exponents
among the Japanese and Roman Catholics, though it is also strongly
upheld by many Anglicans and others. By the Japanese, Birth
Control is condemned on grounds that seem to be, partly at any rate,
nationalistic. The Japanese religion, intimately connected as it is with
Ancestor Cult, holds that it is the duty of every man to marry young,
and to produce the largest possible number of children, especially
males, who may carry on the tradition of the family and at the same
time grow up into soldiers capable of fighting for the Mikado in war.
By the Japanese, the Mikado is believed to be a Deity incarnate, not
in the symbolical sense in which some people have thought of the
divine right of kings, but in a real and vital sense, as ‘the occupant of
a sacred throne which was established at the time when the heavens
and the earth became separated.’ To die for him in war is the most
supreme, the most glorious duty. The objection to Birth Control here
would thus seem closely allied to the ‘military’ objection first
advanced.
By Roman Catholics it is held to be a mortal sin to employ any
chemical or mechanical means to prevent conception, the only
permissible form of control being voluntary abstinence from each
other on the part of both parents. The abstinence of one parent
against the will of the other is also considered a mortal sin on the
part of the refractory parent. An exception to this rule is now made
which permits parents not desiring children to make use of a moment
in the periodic life of the mother during which conception is less likely
to take place than at other times—the so-called ‘safe’ period. It is,
however, generally agreed nowadays that the ‘safety’ pertaining to
this period is in many cases quite illusory and devoid of serious
physiological or medical basis. Opponents of the Roman Catholic
Church have represented its insistence on this prohibition as dictated
by a desire to extend her spiritual empire throughout the world, since
obedience to it must bring about a greater relative increase of
believing Roman Catholics than of adherents to other religious
denominations tolerating Birth Control. But its attitude would further
appear to express a conviction (manifested elsewhere in the
insistence upon celibacy among Catholic priests and in its systems
of penances and abstinences) that sexual indulgence is somehow
incompatible with devotion to a purely spiritual life, and when
excessive produces a demoralizing effect upon human nature,
tending to make it weak, lazy, selfish and often vicious. Probably the
Catholic Church feels that the use of devices to prevent conception
would abolish the necessity for salutary self-restraint, and would
promote promiscuous and excessive indulgence. The effect of this
prohibition is that most Catholics who are conscientious about not
using contraceptives have large families. There are some, however,
particularly in France, who do not take the prohibition very seriously.
At the bottom, however, of the religious objection, would appear to
lie the conviction that excessive sexual indulgence, dissociated from
the sequel of procreation and rendered possible by the use of
contraceptives, is morally harmful to the individual.
8. An objection of a pseudo-political nature is sometimes heard
which envisages a bureaucratic extension of Birth Control. The
phrase is here understood to imply a ‘National Control of Births’ and
not a ‘Voluntary Regulation of Births’, its more usual acceptance.
Such a bureaucratic interference in people’s private lives is held to
constitute an infringement of the liberty of the individual—in this case
his liberty to have as many children as he likes, when he likes. The
principle of individual liberty, the corner-stone of nineteenth century
Liberalism, still has a certain number of adherents.
9. The last outstanding argument is to the effect that the
popularization of Birth Control will lead to a general increase in
promiscuity, both among married and unmarried people. The
temptation to illicit indulgence would be made greater, the process of
seducing an innocent girl would be made easier, the ever-present
lure of prostitution to the underpaid girl worker would be made more
difficult to resist, if an assurance could be felt that the subsequent
birth of a child—hitherto a generally prevalent and effective deterrent
—could be prevented by the exercise of a popularly known
technique. The restraint imposed by fear may not be one of a high
moral order, yet the end which it serves is here, by common consent,
socially desirable. In face of the absence of any authoritative source
of information on Birth Control, and of the indifference of the medical
profession with regard to it, certain popular works on the subject
have acquired an immense vogue and have enjoyed an enormous
sale. Though not intended for this purpose, they are purchased and
read extensively by young persons in much the same spirit that
improper literature in general is read. Further, the sale to adults of
these works containing as they do a magnification and eulogy of the
sexual act per se (to be conceived, expressly, apart from its normal
biological sequel of child-birth as a salutary and health-giving
process), and containing also minute instructions as to the technical
use of contraceptives, has not been confined to married persons.
Such works have been held to inflame and pervert the imagination of
the young, and on pseudo-medical grounds, to incite adults to
promiscuity. It is to be noted, however, that the above is an argument
directed not so much against Birth Control itself as against the
method by which knowledge of it is communicated to the public.

These appear to be the most important arguments currently

advanced against Birth Control.
It will be noted that several have been omitted from consideration.
The one based upon biblical condemnation is too futile to merit
restatement. The argument that contraception is ‘unnatural’ is
equally undeserving of repetition. The contention that it is anti-
biological will be discussed later.

Arguments on the other side will now be considered. They divide

themselves into three groups, which may arbitrarily be designated as
International, Social, and Individual arguments.

(a) International.—The connexion between over-population and

war is nowadays fairly obvious and is particularly manifest in those
countries which are both industrially organized and consciously
nationalist in spirit. In the absence of these two conditions over-
multiplication need not be followed by war. India and China, for
instance, are very densely populated countries where over-
multiplication frequently takes place. This process does not,
however, give rise to much danger of international disturbance, in
that both countries are, from the nature of their organization,
incapable of conducting war on modern lines, and neither has a
generally-felt, or a unifying national consciousness. Excessive
increase is here frequently checked by famines, which, though
causing incalculable suffering, do not readily generate wars.
Within recent years two countries have demonstrated the relation
between over-population and war, or the threat of war, namely
Germany and Japan.
In Germany before the war, where the ‘military’ objection to Birth
Control, first advanced, was prevalent, there existed an ethical code
by which German mothers were persuaded that they were fulfilling
the highest spiritual purpose of which their sex was capable by
producing male children destined to be soldiers, prepared to fight for
their country in a victorious war. It is now generally recognized here
that it was this attitude of mind, involving an expectation and a
glorification of war, associated with the distinctively German powers
of efficient organization centred in implicit obedience to the Kaiser,
which served to produce that exultant pride of power and aggressive
national consciousness which precipitated, if it did not actually
cause, the late war. The increase in the population of Germany was
advocated and extolled without regard to that country’s capacity to
support her swelling populations. To-day, though Birth Control is
largely practised by the upper and middle classes in Germany as it is
in this country, the old ideal still lingers on, and to it is attributable
that fear of Germany which, until recently, has so conspicuously
directed French policy since the Armistice.
In Japan the connexion between numerical increase and a
possible war is now coming to be recognized here. Australia, New
Zealand and the United States are already definitely conscious of it.
The Japanese religion, based upon piety towards ancestors (to
whom every man is bound to perpetuate his family), and upon loyalty
to the Mikado who, as Emperor God, is held to be divine, imposes
upon all faithful subjects the duty of marrying young and of producing
many children. This injunction is again promulgated irrespective of
the native resources of Japan, and in the past has necessitated a
considerable annual emigration to other countries. The recent
restrictions imposed by America upon Japanese immigration,
themselves prompted by motives common to most English-speaking
races, have led directly and inevitably to the existing tension
between America and Japan. As things stand at present, it appears
that this tension is likely to increase and may easily eventuate in a
war, in which there would be a greater probability of our being
involved than there was, initially, of America being involved in the
late war. Both the Americans and Japanese are sensitive and proud
people. After further tension has accumulated, a trivial incident—the
possible murder of an American official in Japan by some
irresponsible person—might lead to the despatch of a curtly-worded
note or to the formulation of an abrupt ultimatum out of which a
second world war might, like the last, suddenly flare up, to reduce
modern civilization to ruins and ashes.
Stress is laid on this particular aspect of the population problem
partly because it is felt that few nations now hold the desirable ideal
of adapting their numbers to their particular economic optimum, and
partly because it would seem that in face of this nationally
encouraged increase of population and of certain apparently
unalterable race antipathies, no amount of international pacifism, or
of condemnation of violence, or of genuine humanitarian goodwill
can prevent war.
Germany and Japan display the connexion between numerical
increase and wars most clearly to-day. It is possible that in the future
other nations may become conspicuous in this respect. Thus
America, where the teaching of contraception is illegal (in so far as
anything is), may, in another 50 or 100 years, develop an aggressive
foreign policy. And now that restrictions have been imposed on the
entry of Italians into America, it is conceivable that Italy may at some
time discover an Imperialist mission on the shores of the
Mediterranean.

(b) Social.—This aspect of Birth Control has been much discussed

and is concerned with the dimensions and quality of the population
of these islands. The argument, in the form in which it is usually
advanced, distinguishes a quantitative and a qualitative point of view,
the latter further possessing two aspects.
Quantitatively, it has been pointed out that in the last hundred
years, the increase in the population of this country has been
excessive. Because England was the pioneer of the Industrial
Revolution, she enjoyed initially an unprecedented national
prosperity, unharassed by competitors and with the world as her
market. Though the conditions of many of the early factory-workers
were unquestionably appalling, the wealth and economic importance
of this country increased so rapidly that she was enabled to support
immensely greater numbers than at any previous period of her
history.
Thus in 1821 the population of England and Wales was just over
12 millions; in 1921 it had risen to nearly 38 millions. That is to say
that in a hundred years our population had more than trebled.
When, however, at the beginning of this century other countries
began to enter into competition with us, and to produce
manufactured goods on a large scale often underselling British
goods, our hitherto unchallenged industrial supremacy gradually
commenced to suffer eclipse. But our numbers have not adapted
themselves to our diminished power of employing labour thus
created. On the contrary, the population has continued steadily to
increase, with the result that by slow degrees the unemployment
problem which, at present, looms so large on our political horizon
began insidiously to disclose itself. The present formidable figure of
nearly a million and a quarter of unemployed, together with a large
number of workers on short hours, testifies to the fact that at the
present time in relation to existing economic conditions, this country
seems to be over-populated.
 From the point of view of quality it has been pointed out that there
are two factors which now tend to impoverish the race. They might
be distinguished and arbitrarily named as ‘Dysgenic’ and ‘Economic’
respectively.
The dysgenic factor may be propounded as follows: Though the
Birth-rate in England has fallen from 36 per 1000 in 1877 to 20 per
1000 or less to-day, this decrease has not been accompanied by a
decrease in the population, since the Death-rate has dropped
correspondingly. This has taken place by reason of the complete
suspension, if not the actual reversal, in civilized countries to-day of
the principle of Natural Selection, operative amongst animals and
primitive peoples.
There are three outstanding reasons to which this suspension is
attributable. They are the advances in sanitation and medical
science, the increase in humanitarianism, and the method of
obtaining votes which prevails in democratic countries.
The advances in sanitation and medical science made in the last
60 years have resulted in an enormous reduction of infant mortality
in large towns, and also in an average prolongation of life. Epidemics
of smallpox, cholera, typhus, diphtheria, scarlet fever, etc., which
took such a heavy toll in the past, are now effectively controlled by
the existing system of isolation hospitals, and of efficient public
health supervision. To-day it is possible for the medical student to
traverse his six laborious years of training without seeing a single
case of typhoid fever—a disease which in the times of his elders
used to be one of the commonplaces of a hospital. These
improvements in sanitation, the progress made in aseptic surgery, in
prophylactic medicine, and in the general treatment of disease, have
been largely responsible for the lowering of the death-rate already
mentioned.
The increase of humanitarianism in civilized countries has resulted
in the creation of an enormous number of philanthropic institutions
and charity organizations, through the channels of which much relief
is brought to the impoverished classes. This spirit now makes it
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