DETECTIVE NARRATIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS IN 19 CENTURY ENGLAND by Amy ...

233 Pages·2006·1.23 MB·English

DETECTIVE NARRATIVE
AND THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS IN 19TH CENTURY ENGLAND

by
Amy Rebecca Murray Twyning
Bachelor of Arts, West Chester University, 1992
Master of Arts, West Virginia University, 1995

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
The English Department in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh

2006
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
This dissertation was presented
by
Amy Rebecca Murray Twyning
It was defended on
March 1st, 2006
and approved by
Marcia Landy, Distinguished University Service Professor,
English Department, Film Studies, and the Cultural Studies Program

James Seitz, Associate Professor, English Department
Nancy Condee, Associate Professor, Slavic Languages and Literature and Director of the
Program for Cultural Studies

Dissertation Director:
Colin MacCabe, Distinguished University Professor, English Literature, Film Studies, and the
Cultural Studies Program
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Copyright © by Amy Rebecca Murray Twyning
2006
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DETECTIVE NARRATIVE
AND THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS IN 19TH CENTURY ENGLAND

Amy Rebecca Murray Twyning, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2006
Working with Fredric Jameson’s understanding of genre as a “formal sedimentation” of an
ideology, this study investigates the historicity of the detective narrative, what role it plays in
bourgeois, capitalist culture, what ways it mediates historical processes, and what knowledge of
these processes it preserves. I begin with the problem of the detective narrative’s origins. This
is a complex and ultimately insoluble problem linked to the limits of historical perspective and
compounded by the tendency of genres to erase their own origins. I argue that any critical
reading of the detective story beginning with the notion that real crime and working class unrest
are the specters that the detective story seeks to exorcise misapprehends the real class struggle
that is evidenced in, but also disguised by, the detective story: the struggle between the ascendant
(though never assuredly so) bourgeoisie and the receding (though, again, never assuredly so)
aristocratic and post-feudal ruling classes. Instead, I argue that it is this class struggle that is
apparent in the detective narrative’s special structure—the double structure by which it can pose
any-origin-whatever as a moment of history and construct that history forward while appearing
to uncover it backward. The detective narrative erases precisely the problem of the bourgeoisie’s
lack of origins (from a feudal perspective) and counterfeits history. For this reason, I locate the
detective narrative’s beginnings in specific sites where the transfer of power from traditional
institutions to bourgeois institutions or institutions reformed by the bourgeoisie, including the
Chancery court (in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House), the construction of the New Poor Laws of
1834 (in Wilkie Collins’ The Dead Secret), and marriage and inheritance in Bleak House and
Collins’ The Moonstone. Ending with a study of the commonly acknowledged first detective
novel, The Moonstone, I conclude that this novel and the generic paradigm of the detective
narrative it exemplifies succeed in encrypting the historical discontinuity between post-feudal
modes of production and capitalism and that, ultimately, crime is just an alibi for the work of
historical reconstruction that the detective narrative carries out.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For sharing with me his imaginative power, for lighting so many unexplored passages with his
incandescent intellect, and for living out with me the contraries by which we progress, I owe the
deepest thanks to John Twyning. For her apparently inexhaustible generosity with her time, her
perspicuity, and her genius, I am so grateful to Juli Parrish; she could always see the figure in the
carpet. For teaching me Capital, for having faith in me, for respecting and yet never ceasing to
argue with me, and for all the many other things that make him quintessentially himself and,
therefore, an inspiration, I can only imperfectly express my thanks to Colin MacCabe. I thank
Jean Grace for reading so many drafts with such attentiveness, for understanding the importance
that one sentence or word can make to the process of creating, and for offering such
encouragement. I thank Marcia Landy who may not know how important were the intellectual
standards she set and the theoretical possibilities she illuminated to the creation of this project; I
thank Marcia, also, for giving me Gramsci and Deleuze. I thank Jim Seitz for his generous
support and his camaraderie and have learned from him what it means to love literature and
writing. I thank Nancy Condee for her simultaneously generous and rigorous turn of mind, for
the way she helped sharpen my thinking, and for the revelations I owe to her incisive wit. Geeta
Kothari and Mark Kemp I thank for being my rock and my hard place. Thanks also go to Chris
Boettcher for thinking along with me and being so imaginative and challenging. I also want to
thank Mariolina Salvatori and Jonathan Arac, both of whom taught me how to read. Other
professors whom I want to thank for their intellectual patronage are Tom Miles, Cheryl Torsney,
and Dennis Allen at WVU. And to one of my earliest professors, Tim Newcomb, I am indebted
for being so encouraging. For reading, charting, drawing diagrams, coming up with crazy
analogies, and whatever else it took to understand the first two chapters of Cinema 1 with me, I
cannot forget Phil Mikosz. My students, especially those from the 2006 Spring semester of
Critical Reading and Literature and the Contemporary, have kept me going and kept me
interested. I wrote the very first words of this dissertation to Nikki Twyning in a letter
describing my dissertation, a little trick she thought up to get me writing—without her my
courage would have flagged. And finally, I am ever grateful to my family for believing in me.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.0 THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS.................................................................................1
1.1 GENRE AND THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS................................................1
1.2 “KNOWING WHERE TO LOOK”?...............................................................19
1.3 INVENTING CRIME.......................................................................................42
2.0 THE DETECTIVE NARRATIVE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF HISTORY
IN BLEAK HOUSE.....................................................................................................................53
2.1 COPYING AND HISTORICAL CRISIS........................................................66
2.2 MYSTERY AS ORIGIN...................................................................................91
2.3 THE DETECTIVE NARRATIVE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF
HISTORY..........................................................................................................................104
3.0 SECRETS AND THE ENCLOSURE OF DOMESTIC SPACE IN WILKIE
COLLINS’ THE DEAD SECRET ...........................................................................................114
3.1 ENCLOSURE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE PATRIARCHAL
FAMILY........................................................................................................................138
3.2 NARRATING ENCLOSURE.........................................................................149
3.3 NARRATING, EXPLOITING THE FEMALE LEGACY.........................167
4.0 DETECTING INNOCENCE IN THE MOONSTONE.........................................172
4.1 CRIME AS ORIGIN.......................................................................................187
4.2 DETECTING INNOCENCE..........................................................................199
4.3 “HOW MUCH ALIKE”?................................................................................216
BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................................................223

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1.0 THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS
Origin, though an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to
do with genesis. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by
which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which
emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an
eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material
involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed
in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent
only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a
process of restoration and re-establishment, but, on the other hand, and
precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete. There
takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in
which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is
revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history.
-- Walter Benjamin,
The Origin of German Tragic Drama1
1.1 GENRE AND THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS
There is no simple way to begin an investigation into the detective narrative’s place in bourgeois
consciousness and the bourgeois cultural imagination. The goal of this study is to discover the

1 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1996),
pp. 45-46.
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ideological nature of the detective narrative, what role it plays in bourgeois or capitalist culture,
what ways it mediates real historical processes, and what knowledge of these processes it
preserves. However, the very nature of the project immediately throws up a problem: the
problem of origins. Fredric Jameson’s work with genre as a category of (literary) history
illuminates this problem. In The Political Unconscious2, Jameson addresses genre’s tendency to
erase its own historical specificity, or its particular roots in a historical moment, and the way it
thereby becomes the source of misconceptions of history itself. Particularly, he is concerned
with genre’s use as a diachronic category in a system which tends to negate “the specificity and
radical difference of the social and cultural past,”3 such as he identifies in the work of Northrop
Frye. Jameson writes:
the driving force of Frye’s system is the idea of historical identity: his
identification of mythic patterns in modern texts aims at reinforcing our sense of
the affinity between the cultural present of capitalism and the distant mythical
past of tribal societies, and at awakening a sense of the continuity between our
psychic life and that of primitive peoples.4
In this instance, genre is working as a “‘positive’ hermeneutic,” which means it “filter[s] out
historical difference and the radical discontinuity of modes of production and of their cultural
expressions.”5 As a result, genre becomes a way of negating the material reality of history;
whereas, for Jameson, the work of the historian, which is to say, the work of the Marxist
historian, must be to “respec[t] the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural

2 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1981).
3 Ibid, p. 18.
4 Ibid., p. 130; original emphasis.
5 Ibid.
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past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures,
experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day.”6
The challenge is to study genre in a way commensurate with the conception of history as
“the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity.”7 With this,
Jameson is harking back to one of Marx’s most deliberate statements about the nature of human
history. “The realm of freedom,” Marx writes:
really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency
ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper.
Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and
reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society
and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity
expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive
forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can
consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the
human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective
control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with
the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for
their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm
of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond
it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.8

6 Ibid., p. 18.
7 Ibid., p. 19.
8 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin Books and New Left
Review, 1981), pp. 958-959; also quoted in Jameson: p. 19, n. 3.
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This is the basis for Jameson’s insistence that it is by attending to difference and discontinuity
that we can grasp the processes of history. While there is a universal struggle, there is no
universal interpretation to apply to the “vital episodes in [this] single vast unfinished plot.”9 The
struggle of history is one struggle, but the processes of history have been “repressed and buried,”
submerged in/by the “political unconscious,”10 and each moment must be treated as a
“mystery”11 because there is solidarity but not sameness. The work of the historian, then, is to
“detec[t] the traces of that uninterrupted narrative [and] restor[e] to the surface of the text the
repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history,”12 to treat different moments of the past
as mysteries whose codes we have not yet deciphered.
When it comes to tracing specific and unique historical processes, for Jameson, genre is
nevertheless an important and useful concept and tool for the investigation of history despite its
deployment in universalizing historiography. For Jameson, genre has a material reality and is
therefore expressive of historical processes in however repressed and buried a way. He asserts:
“in its emergent, strong form a genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message.”13 Genre, in other
words, is the “formal sedimentation”14 of an ideology, and thus the particular historical moment
out of which a genre emerges is crystallized in it. For Jameson, this makes genre a useful critical
tool for gaining access to the “political unconscious” of an individual text—in so far as the
conventions of a particular genre are caught up in historical processes and are deposited in later
texts, they mark the ideological negotiations of that text and function as clues to buried historical
knowledge. Jameson writes: “when such forms are reappropriated and refashioned in quite

9 Jameson, p. 20.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 19.
12 Ibid., p. 20.
13 Ibid., p. 141.
14 Ibid., p. 140.
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