After reading 500 pages, I’m left with a question that I’ve been asking since the first 30: why start this “medicated” novel with so many school scenes? Why tell this story using Bernard Langdon as an entry point? Why must Bernard come to Rockland as a schoolteacher? Why the hysterics over the possibility of his teaching young women? Why does Elsie go to school if she rarely actually completes the lessons? And, most mysterious of all in my eyes, why open with the stock scene in which Bernard overpowers the “big boys” at the common school that never comes up again? I certainly can’t answer all these questions, but I think they’re worth continuing to think about. Below are some preliminary thoughts.
First, teaching is a profession with remarkably high status in the text. The opening scenes take place in a classroom and our narrator is a professor. Bernard may finish his medical degree and make a remarkable doctor, but he rapidly returns to teaching, becoming a professor himself. Helen Darley is rewarded for her excellent teaching with marriage to one of the “mansion people.” And no one is more scorned in the text than the educator who cares more for the cost of his students’ food than for their educations, Silas Peckham. But why are these teachers to be so highly regarded? We really do not see them actually teach anyone anything—there are no spelling bees, no school exhibitions, as we might expect after that early common school scene. Most obviously, these characters seem to be held in esteem because teaching is hard work. Helen is clearly overwhelmed by her multitude of responsibilities and Bernard moves from a school where he faces physical violence to one where he must continually stave off the affections of amorous teens. I also think the discussion between the Doctor and the Reverend Doctor at the tea party sheds some light of teachers’ privileged status in the text. The Doctor speaks of how the differences between his and the clergyman’s experiences with others have conditioned their understandings of human nature and theology. I think the text positions teachers as another group in a unique position to develop a complex understanding of human nature that is not blind to individual differences. When Elsie is dying, she loses interest in seeing the doctor and clergymen, but calls both her teachers to her. Bernard and Helen, especially, understand Elsie far better than her father, the clergymen, and even the kind doctor; Helen pieces together her story with help from Sophy and Bernard comes to a deep sympathy with her, so much so that he does give her bracelet to his beloved.
But while teachers may have privileged access to large groups of people’s thoughts and behaviors, they, like doctors and clergymen, are charged not just with understanding human nature, but also with shaping it. The prominence of members of these professions in the text has, I think, a relationship with the way the text deals with determinism and free will. Linda Kerber argues in “The Republican Mother” that before schooling could become widespread in England and the US, strict religious determinism had to be dispensed with. This seems to make sense—if the point of education is to change people, whether it be to change the knowledge and skills they possess, their ways of feeling and thinking, or their norms and values, then for education to be broadly valued it must be believed that people are both changeable and worth changing. Holmes is quite ready to dispense with religious determinism in Elsie Venner; he himself frames the text as his intervention into the doctrine of original sin and he clearly wants his readers to come to see how people cannot be held morally responsible for actions that are the result of innate and unchangeable heritable biological predispositions. Elsie was doomed from the moment the snake bit her mother; she could never have been expected to overcome the consequences of this event and did the best she could in fighting this unwinable fight. (This is how I read her interest in Bernard—as her last attempt to become fully “woman.”) And yet he embraces teachers and seems interested in educational establishments; while he certainly critiques the Institute under Peckham’s management, the principal is rooted out in the end and the school will be reformed. But how can biological determinism leave any more space for education than religious determinism does? How is the belief people are subject to their biological inheritances compatible with the belief that they can be shaped by education?
I think this is one of the reasons Holmes begins hedging about biological determinism. Elsie’s case is extreme and everyone is like his/her ancestors in some way, but exceptions do arise. Right after he asserts that “[t]o be a parent is almost to be a fatalist,” Holmes recognizes that “the traits of some less known ancestor are liable to break out at any time, and because each human being has, after all, a small fraction of individuality about him which gives him a flavor, so that he is distinguishable from others by his friends or in a court of justice, and which occasionally makes a genius or a saint or a criminal of him” (272). Biology is almost destiny, but not quite. And it’s because Holmes’ biological determinism is not a thorough-going throughout the entire text as it would seem that he is able to make a space for education. Character is inherited, but everyone also has his/her own flavor and this flavor makes geniuses, saints, and criminals. Genius, saints, and criminals are not born, as it seems biological determinism would dictate, but made. Part of this “making,” it seems, can come through education.
And here the common school scene comes back into view. The storyline is a familiar one, but I’ve never seen it intertwined with a discussion of the inherited character of the participants before. In the scene in which Bernard triumphs over Abner Briggs, he is sporting his ancestor’s sleeve-buttons, worn in the Old French war, reminding the reader that he is the descendent of warriors. And we are repeatedly told that Abner is the son of a butcher destined to be a butcher himself—this is all we need to know to understand his inherited character. When Bernard puts Briggs out, his teaching tactic, combined with his inherited disposition, triumphs over Briggs’ inherent character and Briggs and his peers learn their lessons: Bernard has no more trouble at the school. Biology, it seems, can be overcome; people can change their behaviors if not their inner characters. Briggs’ intimidation of the schoolmaster is as much a condition of his social circumstances of as his biological predispositions; that’s what makes this a stock scene pitting countrified manhood against learned strength. And this kind of determinism—social determinism—competes with biological determinism in the text.
I would argue that, with the ascendance of education and schoolteachers in the novel, social determinism actually wins out over biological determinism. It is social determinism that is at the heart of the professor’s worries about Bernard taking a teaching job, particularly with young women. He worries that a change in his location and circumstances will reshape Bernard’s ambitions and life path. In a country town, inhabiting the social station of a teacher, Bernard may have no choice but to throw his life away on a country girl. (Thankfully, a city girl happened to be vacationing in the countryside, so this was prevented, but just barely.) The professor recognizes the importance of social circumstances in his discussion of “automatic action” in his letter to Bernard: “Shut up the robber and the defaulter, we must. But what if your oldest boy had been stolen from his cradle and bred in a North-Street cellar?” (227). A change in circumstances can mean changes in character and biology. Witness the transformation of Helen Darley when Bernard starts to share his burdens; witness the change in the theology of the reverend when faced daily with his granddaughter’s goodness. And unlike religious or biological determinism, which circumscribe the role of education, social determinism doesn’t just create a space of education: it demands it. Where religious determinism places responsibility for one’s circumstances on the individual at the same time as it positions the individual as devoid of free will and biological determinism takes responsibility for the most part off of humanity, social determinism creates collective responsibility. The individual is not responsible for the results of his/her circumstances but the community is responsible for creating, maintaining, or ameliorating these circumstances. (This is why the reverend is damned by the text for not responding to Elsie’s solicitation of prayers.) That Holmes embraces the need for collective responsibility is clear from the ending, when Bernard eschews rich clients in favor of poor ones. And it is clear in his embrace of schooling and of teachers: teaching is a status profession in Elsie Venner because its founding principle is collective responsibility for the future of humanity.
Brilliant treatment Allison. I mean only to add that I was also struck by the demension not only of religious or biological determinism, but by moral determinism which also shapes the bourgeois elements of the text. The scene you treat above, whereby the son-of-a-butcher is bested by the representative of the intellectual/warrior caste, their differences are highlighted most as descriptions of their morality –one is embodied, indeed, by the yellah dog which follows him around constantly—he is a “cur” just as much as his animal companion. That this animality will continue throughout the text (in Elsie’s closeness with the “natural” world, her difficulty in being controlled educationally or religiously, and her “animal magnitism”) signifies is not entirely certain.
ReplyDeleteWhat strikes me as odd is Holmes’ almost ironic treatment of the same subject earlier on in his description of the besting of the first schoolmaster—
“When it comes to that, the best man, not exactly in the moral sense, but rather in the material, and more especially the muscular point of view, is very apt to have the best of it, irrespectively of the merits of the case. So it happened now.” (III)
His definition of the “best man” is interesting here—is is not even biologically determined that the butcher’s son is able to overcome his rival. It is rather his real, material (and comically, muscular) body which is determines who wins here. Lived experience, what Allison above calls “socially determined,” most certainly carries more weight in the world of the butcher and schoolmasters. What comes from this is Holmes’ ambivalence about what really causes Elsie’s “condition”. The trajectory which the butcher’s son follows earlier does not seem to be the same Elsie follows in her development (Abner seems more a “natural” yellah dog than Elsie a “natural” rattlesnake).
I also found his language particularly telling, his shoehorning Latin language into much of the text is indicative of a biological mind controlling the narrative. In light of his extended treatment of the “caste” system of New England (executed with all of the subtlety of an anthropological sledgehammer), this is slightly more complicated. Ostensibly, I think the bourgeois sympathies of Holmes are on display in his “oral composition” of the unlearned charactrers in the text. Clearly, Holmes places this kind of language in the mouths of characters not intended to elicit sympathy (with a few examples, Sophy most glaringly). Using language to indicate class differences is hardly new to a 19th century novelist, but through the lens of the literature of science it serves another purpose as well. The effect which emerges makes his work seem almost more observational, like an anthropologist (and narrator) who wishes an impossible distance from his subject.
I thought Holmes’ relationship to the genre in which he was working was most striking about the text. An anatomist of both the body and the novel, Holmes seems to find great pleasure in stating what his chapters will actually do in the titles. ”Epistolary” or, my favorite example, “ A Good Old Fashioned Descriptive Chapter” as guideposts seem to dissect the novel even as it is being written. For a scholar of the 19th century it is serendiptious (as dissection is a primary mode of literary criticism), for a reader of the same time, aware of Holmes’ profession, it must have resonated with a kind of reflexive irony. A taxonomy of a novel is something that readers may expect, but that these designations serve in Holmes as kinds of structural signposts is also worth noting.