ELH

ELH 68.1 (2001) 267-285

The Strong-Arming of Desire: A Reconsideration Oof Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction

Leila Silvana May

It has been more than a dozen years now since the publication of Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction, a book heralded on its dust cover as "strikingly original," and in its advance publicity as one that requires us "to rethink many of the basic issues of the emerging novel in England." ¹ Reviewers have tended to agree. Catherine Gallagher, in her mostly favorable assessment, called Armstrong's argument "a challenging revision of the history of the novel." ² In an even more laudatory commentary, Homer Obed Brown claimed that "the very possibility of Armstrong's theoretical paradigm (let alone the persuasive force of her argument) challenges . . . in general our present way of thinking about the novel." ³ Even a fairly critical reviewer, such as James Grantham Turner, agreed with these forthright characterizations. ("This is, indeed, . . . a bold and original book.") ⁴ In fact, in the intervening period since the publication of Desire and Domestic Fiction, nearly any book addressing gender issues in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel has had to acknowledge the importance of Armstrong's argument. Yet, curiously, most of these acknowledgments seem to be glancing, even half-hearted, appearing only in footnotes, or briefly in introductions, and not surfacing again. ⁵ All this seems to amount to a decision by critics to ignore what, in 1989, Catherine Gallagher had said "certainly cannot be ignored." ⁶ Yet the massive proliferation of references to Armstrong's work--even if languishing largely in footnotes and forming archaeological layers in the "Works Cited" pages of books by feminist scholars--signals that Desire and Domestic Fiction has nonetheless been accorded an authoritative status, however grudgingly at times. It is as if the apparently benign neglect that her actual arguments have received is a guilty one. Critics suspicious of these arguments could not deny their originality and explosiveness, nor the paradox that they seemed both to subvert feminism and breathe new life into it at the same moment. In fact, Armstrong's book arrived upon the scene at a particularly fortuitous moment, when the critical mood was exhausted by arguments that read every text as a subpoena demanding recompense for victimization. It was difficult at the time to remain unimpressed [End Page 267] by Armstrong's dramatic turning of the tables, her restoring of agency and authority to women, and her minimizing of male authority. Yet her accomplishment of this feat also involved a direct snub of "academic feminism" (D, 24). A few critics so designated expressed their annoyance directly (in her 1990 review of the book, Patricia Yeager warned, "Armstrong's analysis represents a step backward for feminist theory"), but most were not so forthright. ⁷ With its progressive credentials issued by her materialist and Foucauldian premises, Armstrong's timely stance was politically appealing; to challenge her arguments was to announce oneself behind the times.

Even though the political moment in which Armstrong wrote Desire and Domestic Fiction is passed, the book remains a pioneering work of canonical criticism, albeit in a new mode. This new mode is, however, one whose logic has not been sufficiently scrutinized. In this essay I will critically analyze those of Armstrong's arguments that I believe have hitherto gone largely unchallenged. I do this not to diminish the historical significance of Desire and Domestic Fiction, but because the book is important enough to merit a serious consideration of Armstrong's arguments in their own right. This does not mean that my intention is to refute Armstrong; I am simply going to show that some of her most dramatic theses do not make sense as stated--sometimes for reasons of logical incoherence, other times for architectural inconsistency--and that when they are more felicitously formulated they in fact prove less formidable than earlier supposed.

I shall inspect six of Armstrong's central interrelated claims, which I will paraphrase as a group before addressing each:

1. In...