Jean Gregorek

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THE ODD MAN: MASCULINITY AND THE MODERN INTELLECTUAL IN GEORGE GISSING’S BORN IN EXILE

Jean Gregorek

If a woman has manly virtues, one feels like running away; if she has no manly virtues, she herself runs away.
--Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols


The man of ressentiment does not know how to and does not want to love, but wants to be loved…. He considers it a proof of obvious malice that he is not loved, that he is not fed.
--Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy


More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.
--George Gissing





George Gissing’s novel Born in Exile (1892) recounts the obstacles faced by a group of young male free-thinkers, intellectuals and Bohemians who strive to find compatible wives. Focusing on the futile efforts of one particular petit-bourgeois intellectual to marry his way into the bourgeoisie, the text offers a bleak prognosis for the co-existence of intellectual life and successful heterosexual relations at the end of the century. In its representation of heterosexual crisis, Born in Exile functions as another male entry into the late Victorian conversation around the “Woman Question” as well as to debates around the impact of the democratization of education. Surprisingly, the former aspect of the novel has received little notice. Criticism of Born in Exile has long recognized its centrality to Gissing’s oeuvre, frequently foregrounding the autobiographical elements in the text.1 Critics have called attention to the novel’s anatomy of the ambiguous social status of the (implicitly male) Victorian intellectual, and its painstaking account of the social psychology of (implicitly male) exclusion.2 What they have neglected to see is the intimate connections it constructs between these themes and the issues generated by the presence of New Women in the novel. Jacob Korg perhaps set the tone in his influential George Gissing: A Critical Biography, in which he links this novel, not with the "Woman Problem" novels (The Odd Women, In The Year of Jubilee) which immediately follow it but with the works of Dostoevsky and Turgenev, as a "novel of ideas."3 According to Korg, “Born in Exile is an important spiritual document, and the only novel by Gissing that can be called European in character.”4 It is indicative of the gender biases at work in the construction of literary modernism that these subgenres—New Woman novels and novels of ideas—have been held to be distinct and exclusive categories; the latter aspiring to universal greatness while the former is relegated to a matter of more limited interest.

A feminist re-examination of the philosophical foundations of modernism has now been underway for more than a decade as scholars consider the many strategies by which the new currents defined themselves against a ‘sentimental’ and ‘effete’ Victorianism. This high modernist construction of the Victorian, typically coded as bourgeois, female-dominated and sexually repressive, has been shown to borrow many tropes of sentimentality in its deployment of the male body as the representative of existential alienation and loss.5 Often modernist texts ‘prove’ their modernity by rejecting the Victorian cult of chivalry towards women. Much modern culture is obsessed by images of feminine evil, as female sexuality is unmasked as insatiable, vampiric, or gratuitously malicious. A reaction against sentimental writing, the feminized language of the 'heart,' is one of the unifying directives of the high modernist aesthetic; however, much male-authored literary modernism, as Eve Sedgwick (among others) has noted, can also be said to be engaging in sentimental modes and conventions. Speculating that around the turn of the century the male body replaced the figure of the child and the domestic woman as the focal point of such sentimental discourse, Sedgwick argues that this trend can be found throughout the fin de siecle and well into the twentieth century. Sedgwick somewhat sardonically names this masculine appropriation of sentimentality "straight male self-pity" and explores its continuing cultivation and celebration in western culture—a celebration which in her view is strengthened by its supposed exceptionality. Her analysis specifically links the emergence of "straight male self-pity" to the challenges posed by late nineteenth-century feminism.6

Born in Exile fits perfectly into this structure of feeling. What Eve Sedgwick refers to as male self-pity here calls attention to persistent class prejudice and to the precarious social positioning of a new fraction of intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. Gissing constructs a narrative logic in which heterosexuality is both an avenue of male upward mobility and an obstacle to moral and intellectual advance. The New Women who populate the fringes of the novel are dismissed by its Bohemian male characters in favor of more traditional feminine types who in turn prove to be unsuitable or to have feet of clay. The resulting heterosexual crisis largely falls into the category of the ‘natural,’ as it is pessimistically represented as an unfortunate, but unavoidable, problem of male desire. Thus the novel openly confronts an objective historical dilemma—the inflexibility of the British class system and the constraints this imposes upon ‘unclassed’ British intellectuals—but inflects its effects onto the murky and implicitly subjective terrain of gender conflict. Gissing critics have long registered Born in Exile as laden with philosophical skepticism or nihilism; what they have not fully grasped is the extent to which this modernist sensibility, far from reflecting some universal crisis of belief, is in the British context the product of a dissident fraction of intellectuals reconceiving their class marginality as victimization at the hands of emasculating females with too much control over social life. Born in Exile, and indeed a considerable number of works designated as “modernist” in the British tradition, rely on a perception of exclusion, of falling between worlds, which was the result of the historical coincidence of the fading Victorian mythology of self-help, the upsurge of fin de siecle feminism, and the growing influence of Nietzschean ideals of philosophical autonomy.

Contra Ressentiment

First articulated in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), ressentiment for Nietzsche is a 'reactive force' par excellence, typical of the self-abasing, compensatory ‘slave’ mentalities which he sees as promoted by Judeo-Christian moral systems. In Nietzsche’s view, modern culture is plagued by these ‘slave’ mentalities, which means that the vital and self-affirming are everywhere under siege by the sickly and resentful. Thus The Genealogy calls for a liberation of the late nineteenth-century individual from the contamination of ressentiment and similar reactive forces. The goal is then the encouragement of the "autonomous, more than moral individual...[who] has developed his own, independent long range will..."7 Although Nietzsche acknowledges that ressentiment arises from an original position of lack of strength, power or control, it does not follow that struggles for social or economic justice have a place in mitigating the development of such slave mentalities. "Complaining is never any good," he insists in a blanket dismissal of nineteenth-century anarchisms and socialisms. "The common, and, let us add, the unworthy thing is that it is supposed to be somebody's fault that one is suffering."8 Therefore any particular action performed by the 'weak,' any action perceived as reactive (whatever its content) is for Nietzsche of a lower order than the actions of the strong: "The active man, the attacker and overreacher, is still a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive one."9 Nietzsche's critique falls on both the supposed psychological traits of the unsatisfied and the strategies these produce. In direct contrast to the active, 'aristocratic' ideal, the rancorous person is neither truthful nor ingenuous nor honest and forthright with himself. His soul squints; his mind loves hide-outs, secret paths, and back doors….he is an expert in silence, in long memory, in waiting, in provisional self-depreciation, and in self-humiliation. A race of such men will, in the end, inevitably be cleverer than a race of aristocrats, and it will honor sharp-wittedness to a much greater degree...”10

Nietzsche's championing of the sovereign individual against collective morality and collectivism in general are well-known; less frequently commented on is his association of the positive qualities of autonomy, creative vitality, spontaneity and instinct squarely with masculinity, while the stultifying 'morality' these oppose is clearly femininized. In The Genealogy, the figure of woman emerges as a condensation of degeneration, disease, and ressentiment: “sick females” are singled out as having “unrivalled resources for dominating, oppressing, tyrannising. The sick woman spares nothing dead or alive; she digs up the longest-buried things.”11 Women dwell in the past, when what are needed are bold men of the future ("a time stronger than our effete, self-doubting present"). Femininity and morbidity must be equally superceded in Nietzsche's autochthonous version of masculinity which asserts itself only to itself.12 Yet this masculinity is constantly vulnerable to a sense of self-doubt, of loss of control, and of its own deep inauthenticity. Moreover, in Nietzsche’s formulation the forces of reaction constantly work to undermine the natural aristocrat; ressentiment continues to be emitted from the weak and oppressed in order to overthrow the manly and the strong--an ingenious and persistent, if unworthy, engine of history. Andreas Huyssens describes Nietzsche's ideal "artist-philosopher-hero" as "the suffering loner who stands in irreconcilable opposition to modern democracy and its inauthentic culture."13 Certainly the Nietzsche of The Genealogy and Twilight of the Idols could be said to cultivate a sentimental interest in the figure of the besieged, unappreciated male intellectual, even while condemning resentment and the sense of being beseiged and unappreciated. To the extent that the later Nietzsche constructs his 'aristocratic' hero as threatened by the manipulations of various 'priests' and 'slaves,' he participates in, and provides legitimation for, the larger structure of feeling Sedgwick identifies as straight male self-pity.

An important chapter in Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, "Authentic Ressentiment: Generic Discontinuities and Ideologemes in the 'Experimental' Novels of George Gissing," mines Gissing's naturalist works in order to question the interested nature of the Nietzschean "theory of ressentiment” and to identify its influential ideological effects. Jameson finds in Gissing’s novels instructive case studies of reformist and revolutionary failures which ultimately exceed generic narrative resolutions and ideological coherence.14 Jameson's critique of Nietzschean ressentiment emerges from his meditation on the complexities of the anti-socialist politics of Gissing’s naturalist period, a period which includes the novels Workers in the Dawn, The Unclassed, Thyrza, Demos, The Nether World, and New Grub Street. In their emulation of the Zola-esque strategies, such as sociological examinations of particular occupations and the use of detached observers to document the environment of the lower orders, these novels produce specialized maps of urban social geography, offering this ethnographic mapping as an explanatory substitute for the ambitious realist frameworks now coming to seem less feasible modes of representation. But Jameson argues that Gissing's naturalist texts at first generate sympathy for the oppressed masses and the conditions of their lives, activating readerly resentment against the upper classes—and then reverse course, going on to demonstrate decisively and "scientifically" that fundamental changes in the social structure are futile because of the character flaws of those attempting to implement radical upheaval. The bleak and overly-punitive endings of all these narratives manifest a “deliberate affective logic” at work. Philanthropic projects, educational reforms, and utopian ideals are inevitably revealed as Nietzschean gestures of hostility lurking underneath the charitable impulse, usually on the part of alienated intellectuals "perpetually suspended between two social worlds and two sets of class values and obligations." The psychological mechanisms of ressentiment can therefore be invoked to explain the twisted motivations of these "unsuccessful writers and poets, bad philosophers, bilious journalists, and failures of all kinds--whose private dissatisfactions lead them to their vocations as political militants.”15

For Jameson, Demos, Thyrza, and The Nether World are particularly fascinating in their effect of stimulating desires for a more democratic society and offering up seemingly factual, objective explanations for why this society cannot be sustained. These novels tend to reassure middle-class readers while they warn the lower classes to “Stay in your place!… “Do not attempt to become another kind of character from the one you already are!”16 Jameson's reading of the early Gissing texts, with their inescapable punishments for class interlopers and social aspirants, illustrates his analysis of Nietzschean ressentiment as an ideologically-motivated psychic projection across class boundaries; "little more than an expression of annoyance at seemingly gratuitous lower-class agitation, at the apparently quite unnecessary rocking of the social boat."17

The heart of Jameson's chapter is his critique of the Nietzschean "theory of ressentiment" itself, a critique with much wider applications than Gissing's novels or Nietzsche's Genealogy. The ostensibly plausible counterrevolutionary narrative of ressentiment echoes through the nineteenth and early twentieth-century, visible in works by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Somerset Maugham and others. Characterizing ressentiment as an "unavoidably autoreferential structure," Jameson concludes that "the theory of ressentiment, wherever it appears, will always itself be the expression and the production of ressentiment.”18 In other words, this relocation of revolutionary impulses in the petty and the personal is itself a sign of the resentment of the privileged--an indication that upper class resentments are merely being projected on to the upstart working class. This pervasive cultural reflex draws its continuing appeal from the way it enables the powerful to continue to claim moral superiority and to cast themselves as the more deeply victimized and aggrieved party.

Yet Jameson's own constructions of "the powerful" require further scrutiny, as the analytic choices he makes revolve solely around class interests, the boundaries of which are simply taken to be self-evident. The obvious gendering of Nietzsche’s ressentiment paradigm goes unmentioned, and Jameson’s useful reinscription of the concept is not extended to the struggles of late nineteenth-century feminism. While Jameson notes Gissing's reliance on the popular Victorian "seme of renunciation" in his narratives, he does not appear to notice that all of the early examples discussed in his chapter are female (Thyrza, Jane Snowden, Clara Hewitt), a fact that naturalizes their surrender of various ambitions in ways not as available to male characters with a wider range of possible actions in the world. The neglect of gender here implies that class and gender categories can remain distinct. Like Raymond Williams before him, he loses interest in Gissing's novels of the nineties, on the assumption that 'public' representations of class tensions have now been subordinated to the ‘private’ realm of gender disturbances.19 Moreover, neither critic attempts to account for the ways in which the class resentments in Gissing's novels, early and late, are frequently enacted in tandem with a strong sense of masculine resentment against women. These class resentments are nearly always bound up with idealized portrayals of inaccessible womanhood, an ideal both fetishized and resented by his aspiring male protagonists. Gissing's first novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), begins a trend readily traceable through his entire body of work--that of deploying the figure of the middle-class woman as a metonym for middle class existence as a whole; not only an object of sexual desire, she signifies the desirability of ‘culture’ itself. Gissing's alienated intellectuals define themselves against this problematically feminized cultural sphere. In this sense, male anxieties about upward mobility become inseparable from, and constituted through, late nineteenth-century constructions of gender.

The alienated intellectual of the late nineteenth-century can be directly traced to movements in popular education at mid-century. Samuel Smiles, author of the 1859 bestseller Self-help which gave a name to one version of this larger cultural trend, sought to provide inspirational examples of the benefits of Protestant virtues and self-education to males of the working classes.20 As the title implies, self-help originally described a trajectory which does not require formal training and circumvents traditional elite universities. For Smiles, “well-directed reading offered a “source of the greatest pleasure and self-improvement…exercis[ing] a gentle coercion, with the most beneficial results, over the whole tenor of a man’s character and conduct.”21 Reading was not only edifying in its own right, it also helped cultivate a sense of personal independence which Smiles prioritized over statist or collective approaches to social problems. Smiles's own interest was primarily in the encouragement of financial independence, thrift, and sound business practices. These virtues were to be inculcated not through publicly-funded formal education (still largely unavailable), but through an informal program of self-education, and through the examples of great self-taught entrepreneurs who had gone before. The reformist agenda of Smilesian Self-help recommended a cheerful resignation to one's allotted place in society while demonstrating future fitness for middle-class standing. With its emphasis on the pursuit of ‘culture’ and a sustained commitment to bourgeois habits and values, self-help encouraged the creation of traditional assimilated intellectuals in the Gramscian sense. This agenda was more or less explicitly designed to head off the potential threats posed by organic working-class and petit-bourgeois intellectuals predisposed to militancy and trade-unionism.

Despite Smiles’s assimilationist goals, one of the actual effects of Smilesian Self-culture--to the extent that it accomplished its aims of democratizing the desire to 'get on'--was to stimulate chronic dissatisfaction. The diffusion of education in the mid nineteenth-century, both self-obtained and, by the 1870s, increasingly available through public schooling, manufactured increasing numbers of well-read and highly-trained individuals with no real outlet for their talents. As it turned out, book-learning, unless aided by active patronage, rarely led to social or financial success. The persistence of aristocratic privilege and patronage ensured that the path to upward mobility remained a difficult one throughout the century. Indeed the advent of popular education and self-help ideals unleashed vociferous reaction, as cultural conservatives bemoaned their supposed contribution to the spread of vulgarity and the cheapening of learning. As John Goode notes, within twenty years of the publication of Self-Help intellectuals like Gissing were facing “the dilemma of becoming self-made men in a world in which self-making was losing its earlier aura of respectability.”22 While some of these self-helpers turned to radicalism or trade-unionism and developed an active critique of the class system,23 a number tended to resolve their divided loyalties through the adoption of a range of philosophical positions which advocated a withdrawal from collectivism.

George Gissing’s failed idealism, and his subsequent retreat into a sharply-defined elitism, has been well-documented by biographers and critics. John Goode reads this elitism symptomatically; for him, it is precisely because “‘civilised’ intellectual privileges proved so elusive” that lower-class intellectuals like Gissing become obsessed with them.24 In Gissing’s case, the precariousness of class position under conditions of ideological conflict re-emerged as a discourse of apolitical aestheticism.25 Another frequent vehicle was, of course, a defensive anti-feminism. Here again Gissing provides a not atypical example. As Lloyd Fernando remarks, Gissing tended to see feminist movements as a major source of “discordant social reality,” and thus his novels frequently imply that “emancipationist ideas gave direct rise to the social vulgarity he detested.”26

My larger contention here is that Nietzsche’s “theory of ressentiment” and its structure of projection converges with a more advanced stage of the nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology of self-help. While the ideology of self-help affirms the possibility of success by working to construct exemplary identities, Jameson’s conception of collective ressentiment can be read as its negative aspect--the available narrative of the rationalization of failure. Self-help claims to produce well-adapted members of bourgeois society who have achieved success (however vaguely defined) through the demonstration of upstanding character and moral worth. Nietzschean ressentiment locates failure in a crucial lack of character--in the deeply mixed motives, invariably tainted by envy or vindictiveness or rancor, of the resentful one. A growing number of "surplus" petit-bourgeois intellectuals, men like Gissing himself, began to congeal into what Raymond Williams calls "dissident fractions," opposed to the influx of mass culture, the rampant commodification in modern life, and the perceived vulgarity and philistinism of the late-Victorian bourgeoisie. As the newly self-cultured ran up against the limits of the Victorian social structure, the potentially democratic side of Smilesian self-help was contained by the psychologizing mechanisms of ressentiment. A resentful attitude, an ax to grind, was evidence to cultural observers like Nietzsche of an incapacity to carry out truly autonomous and disinterested actions. This projective construct of ressentiment can easily encompass a variety of failures and expanded to describe an entire "culture of complaint." I am primarily concerned with the psychodynamics of ressentiment in Gissing's Born in Exile, but also hope that this example serves to adumbrate the psychodynamics of ressentiment more generally, wherever they may be found, including the influential thought of its original theorist.

Born in Exile: Manly Virtues, Feminine Malice

The very title of Born in Exile suggests the self-pitying nature of the protagonist who somewhat histrionically proclaims that "my life has been one of slavery and exile--exile, if you know what I mean by it, from the day of my birth."27 Described as a man of “proud nature, condemned to solitude” (p. 51), Godwin Peak is a quintessentially 'modern' intellectual whose dilemma is that he is attracted only to 'traditional' women. He entertains a parallel desire to join the refined world of the upper classes, a world symbolized, as in most Gissing novels, by refined women of the upper classes. When Patricia Alden asserts that Born in Exile offers "the clearest paradigm of the double bind faced by the upwardly mobile petty bourgeois who can develop himself only by rising but whose rising requires him to compromise his integrity,"28 I would argue that we have arrived at a point in nineteenth-century history where self-help means access to a sphere so "feminized" that entrance into it precludes "authentic" versions of masculinity.

At the same time, Born in Exile constructs the deciding factor in the potential redemption of lower-class masculinity as hinging on a particular male's attitude towards bourgeois women. All of the male characters fully assimilated into the bourgeoisie are portrayed as seriously compromised--they have surrendered the quest for scientific or philosophical truth--and yet working-class men who do not demonstrate respect for women and the values of "civilized society" are of course ignorant and vulgar. The choice is then presented as celibacy or a form of intellectual castration. Significantly, while the novel contains numerous characters who display some degree of gender non-conformity, homosexuality is not hinted at as an option, at least for men; even homosociality is here portrayed as a markedly undesirable state. The true philosopher must remain celibate and apart, but here this notion comes into direct conflict with the impulse toward social mobility. These contradictions lead to formal restrictions on the novel itself, as structurally there are no clear narrative directions for success. The pessimistic terms presented by the novel force the authentic intellectual to remain "Odd," and (somewhat ironically, given this novel’s own distaste for them) Odd in much the same way that Gissing talks about "Odd Women"--redundant, superfluous, unmated, "as in a glove." Yet the protagonist’s ‘exile’ is so overdetermined that it remains unclear whether the novel offers a more forceful condemnation of outmoded social structures and class-based prejudices, or of Godwin Peak's ungentlemanly tactics and personal inauthenticity. In other words, to what extent his fate falls into the realm of naturalist determinism or is rendered, in realist form, a matter of particularized character flaws which call forth some sort of narrative retribution.

Few fictional self-helpers can be as unlikable as the cynical and calculating protagonist of Born in Exile. Godwin Peak is named after the famous radical, his petit-bourgeois father's hero, but he despises his low origins and turns against his father's Northern working-class radicalism, setting about an extended career as a class traitor. He cultivates the trappings of gentlemanliness, learning how to dress, how to speak, and how to conduct himself with a cultivated air. He begins to assert that he belongs to the upper classes "by right of intellect." In pursuit of this goal, he decides that he needs to attach himself to a lady; describing himself as a "plebian" whose "one supreme desire is to marry a perfectly refined woman" (p. 140, Pt.2 Ch.3). Peak's attempt to marry his way into the good life is motivated, in true Gissing style, by a complicated mixture of desires which the novel generally appears to validate, such as a yearning for financial independence and the company of like-minded people, and some that it arguably does not, such as Peak's naiveté about women and his deep shame of his working-class roots.

In the earlier naturalist novels, the intellectual traverses the zones of the modern city where, as John Goode notes, "the named streets of London map the fate of his protagonists,” charting the physical space of the inexorable urban environment and the particularities of the urban underclass with a mix of sympathy and detachment.29 In Born in Exile, environment is not destiny in any ‘scientific’ way, but there is a definite spacial logic. The later novel’s setting alternates between Bohemian London and conservative Exeter, the modern metropolis and the provincial cathedral town. Peak's goal is to leave the city, to escape all contact with the vulgar unwashed masses who disgust him, and, perhaps, to escape modernity itself.31 This spatial distinction demarcates the novel’s main characters along the temporal lines of ‘advanced’ or ‘traditional,’ "in the vanguard of thought" or "behind the times." These temporalized spaces also reinforce the cultural and social disjunctions that Peak tries and fails to negotiate, the position of lonely intellectual trapped amidst the horde vs. companionable bourgeois. Paradoxically, going forward in his life and career means going backward in terms of his intellectual development. Goode speculates that Peak's gravest error may be that "he turns his back on a new world to fight for a place in an old world in which there is no place for him."32 Apt as Goode's formulation is, Peak's error seems seriously compounded by the way he constructs these spaces as gendered. Because he perceives it to be “womanless,” he rejects a relatively free existence in the metropolis in favor of the bourgeois family in the provincial town, which he describes as a "rich field of possible conquest" (p. 169, 168, Pt. 2 Ch. 4), an idealized territory where class privilege and high-minded female society are united. To some extent the novel corroborates this gendering, in that the circle of Bohemians are mostly male and living in various states of unhappy bachelordom, while the tranquil middle-class English home and the lady who presides over it are described as "surely the best result of civilisation in an age devoted to material progress" (p. 170, Pt. 2 Ch. 4).

The narrative of Born in Exile traces the divided identifications and loyalties of the intellectual himself, although its exact attitudes towards these social problems are difficult to establish, as the lines between author, narrator, and central character are here more blurred than in other Gissing novels. Criticism of the novel varies widely as to the amount of distance believed to be discernible between the author and his central character, as well as the amount of irony the narrator appears to direct toward the difficult protagonist. As John Sloan notes, class-conscious British critics have generally found the text rather embarrassingly un-ironic and uncritical in its representations of Peak's snobbery, and he argues, along with Frank Swinnerton, that "the narrator may recognise that Peak has set himself on a fool's errand, but it is in terms which continue to identify with his aspirations."32 However, many of the novel's readers (and especially non-British critics, as Sloan perceptively observes) characterize Peak's quest more positively, as a noble pursuit of individual development, upward mobility, love, and belonging. In this view, the novel's portrayal of Peak's eventual rejection from conventional society becomes evidence of his authenticity and a higher form of success. Alden, for example, speculates that Peak's potential for spiritual growth “may not lie in the country house from which Peak is excluded but in the disintegrative process which he undergoes.”33 Robert Selig finds the novel “masterful” in its account of Peak’s ironic destiny, and (creatively, in my view) reads its final chapters as Peak’s “authentic conversion to love.”34 Jacob Korg's high praise of the novel as a document of European spiritual malaise acknowledges only one limitation--its chief weakness, in his view, is that, with the exception of the protagonist, "there are no other interesting characters."35 Selig concurs, arguing that this otherwise fine work is unfortunately marred by “clumsy and unnecessary” subplots.36 But attention to the novel's supposed 'subplots' locates Peak squarely in the social dilemmas of his type and times and highlights the ways that various versions of Peak's errors and self-delusions are widely shared. Downplaying the subplots risks violence to the text by overlooking its dialogism and making it far more reducible to Peak's perspective than it has to be.37 I would argue that the host of 'minor' male characters and New Women--all with their own contributions to the debate--are essential to the novel's wider preoccupations: the crisis of masculinity which results from either accepting or rejecting domesticity, and the grim prospects for heterosexual relations in an era of female emancipation.

Born in Exile reveals a world of male emotional cripples and self-deceivers, offering theory upon theory clearly meant to be seen as self-interested rationalization. A number of male characters in Peak’s circle of Bohemians are involved in complicated rituals in order to ward off the threat of “Woman qua Woman,” as they charmingly put it, and a large portion of this very ‘talky’ novel is taken up with their earnest debates on this topic. The Bohemian intellectuals careen between adolescent disgust and an equally adolescent over-idealization, and represent a variety of case studies in avoidance: Christian Moxey worships a married woman who has no real interest in him and so settles down to years of Platonic adoration; Malkin attempts to select and train a literal schoolgirl to be an appropriate wife who will follow his freethinking, unconventional lead (the ironies abound); the working-class democrat John Earwaker claims to despise all females as intellectually shallow. Another former schoolmate of Peak's, Bruno Chilvers, comfortably ensconced in a provincial clerical sinecure, describes himself as relieving his wealthy female parishioners of their "state of harassing conflict" (p. 349, Pt. 5 Ch. 1). In a novel riddled with male characters who we observe striking intellectual poses and producing theories which justify their inclinations—the anonymously-published article which turns out to be Peak’s undoing is ironically entitled “The New Sophistry”—it becomes relatively easy to read the many debates around femininity as more of the same. When Earwaker constructs a quasi-evolutionary theory of female mental inferiority, arguing that women and their irrationality represent “the obstructive element in social history” (p. 139, Pt. 2 Ch. 2), we have already noted that the "homely” Earwaker has been described as unattractive to women (p. 23, Pt.1 Ch. 1), and can therefore surmise that his misogynist theories are largely defensive. Given the variety of unrealistic and unsuccessful schemes presented here for integrating heterosexuality and an ongoing life of the mind, Peak’s own plot to marry his way into a life of genteel leisure may in fact seem no weirder than any other.

Earwaker’s is a particularly complicated case. His openly anti-marriage stance (he claims to content himself with wives who “live in literature” p. 141) sets him apart from the other male characters, as does the fact that his career as a radical journalist is marked by a political and intellectual consistency rarely observed in these pages. This seems to imply that the insistent masculinity of his milieu allows him to maintain his mental balance more than most. While his relative stability and steadiness of focus, when opposed to the more dramatic self-deceptions of other male characters, might make Earwaker the novel's intellectual "hero"--or the closest equivalent of one—significantly, his labors are not granted any real influence. If we accept Peak’s assessment of Earwaker, the prediction that "nothing great would come of his endeavors" (p. 443, Pt. 3 Ch. 6), then the novel offers no concrete examples of intellectual promise fulfilled; the energy of all these promising progressive minds dissolves into thin air.

Certainly Peak’s tremendous ambition and habitual self-denial would seem to qualify him for middle-class success. The novel describes him as "possessed of many advantages, the complex brain, the fiery heart, passion to desire, and skill in attempting. If with such endowment he could not win the prize which most men claim as a mere matter of course, a wife of social instincts correspondent with his own, he must indeed be luckless" (p. 220, Pt. 3 Ch. 2). And yet luckless is what Peak turns out to be. Initially launched into the bourgeois world through a scholarship for promising working-class youths (granted, much to Peak’s dismay, by the irredeemably vulgar Lady-by-marriage-only Lady Whitelaw), he graduates from public school at the top of his class but without the social connections of his wealthier schoolmates. The novel begins with prizegiving day at Whitelaw college and the spectacle of the embarassed young Peak squirming under the gaze of the 'Ladies,' ladies who, much to Peak's chagrin, show more attention to the handsome Chilvers and the well-born Buckland Warricombe. While Peak does as well or better than his peers in the realm of academic competition—his talents are noteworthy in both the fields of science and of literature--he fails dismally at attracting female interest and approval, an acknowledgement he already sees as the validation of 'Culture.' A few years later, he constructs an elaborate scheme by which he is able to win the confidence of the wealthy and pious Warricombe family, including the friendship of their son Buckland and, more gradually, the love of their daughter Sidwell. This requires that Peak conceal his longstanding atheist views and philosophical refutations of Christianity. Much to the surprise of his earlier associates, Peak now poses as a defender of orthodox Anglicanism and even decides to become an ordained clergyman in order to gain entrance to the upper echelons of society.

The novel’s plot further revolves around Peak’s choice between two bourgeois women, one traditional and one modern. The elegant, modest, and deeply religious Sidwell Warricombe lives at home in Exeter with her family. She is contrasted with the free-thinking New Woman, Marcella, and her financially independent life in London with her brother Christian. Sidwell represents Peak’s conservative ideal of femininity and becomes his hoped-for prize. We are told that Peak’s interest in Sidwell is “not strictly personal; she moved and spoke before him as a typical woman...Here at last opened to his view that sphere of female society which he had known as remotely existing, the desperate aim of ambition” (p. 169, Pt. 2 Ch. 4). In his first real conversation with her, Godwin notes her apparent lack of exuberant health and her "unsurpassable delicacy of mind," both of which attract him. His conclusion that she "had not much sense of humour" does nothing to decrease his "glad reverence" (p. 154, Pt. 2 Ch. 3; p. 245, Pt. 3 Ch. 4). Although we are specifically told that Sidwell is not studious or capable of sustained intellectual application, she possesses a "subtle if not an acute intelligence" (p. 226-7, Pt. 3 Ch. 3). Drawn to him at first by what she takes to be their mutual faith, by the novel's end Sidwell comes to believe that she loves the ‘real’ atheist Peak. However, ultimately she cannot bring herself to sever her family and class ties through such an unsuitable alliance.

In contrast, Marcella Moxey is that strange creature, a female intellectual; "unusually endowed with analytic intelligence" (p. 329, Pt. 4, Ch. 5), her mind is presumably no longer capable of delicacy. Therefore, despite their intellectual compatibility, Marcella cannot attract Peak, as he repeatedly claims to find "emancipated" women "utterly repugnant" (p. 247). As the female version of the alienated, unclassed intellectual, Marcella is constructed both as Peak’s rival and as his double. His rejection of her seems inflected by resentment at the acuteness of her understanding (and specifically, of her understanding of him), and by his deeply-entrenched sense of self-loathing. Both Peak and Marcella suffer from extreme social awkwardness and a depressive, brooding, solitary nature. Neither is conventionally attractive, yet something in their presence commands attention. Marcella is energetic, possessing remarkable "natural vigour," and a face of "such intellect and character that, after the first moment, one became indifferent to its lack of feminine beauty" (p. 113, Pt. 2 Ch. 1). This directly parallels Earwaker’s observations of Peak’s own striking physiognomy: “a face by which every intelligent eye must be arrested.” Both overdress to compensate for social inadequacies. In Peak’s case, this means impeccably tailored suits to disguise any traces of his low origins; in Marcella’s this takes the form of feminine masquerade—elaborate hairstyles and excessive feminine frills—to distract from her ‘masculine’ aspects. Descriptions of Marcella repeat contemporary sexological discourses of female inversion, the appearance of a male temperament in a female body. Peak explains to Sidwell that she has no reason to be jealous of Marcella, insisting that "she has a man's mind, and I have always thought of her in much the same way as of my male companions" (p. 402, Pt. 5 Ch 4). Marcella’s ‘masculine’ intellect makes her freakish and, as he and Earwaker agree, "an incomplete woman." As Peak tells his friend Earwaker, "She has not a single feminine charm--not one. I often feel very sorry for her, but I dislike her all the same" (p. 120, Pt. 2 Ch. 1). While arguably Marcella is the sole major character in the novel permitted a degree of lasting intellectual integrity, this very integrity ensures that she cannot arouse the sexual interest of even the homeliest of men.

Both Marcella’s and Peak’s deaths are reported indirectly by other characters, rather than represented directly in the text, a narrative strategy which has the effect of reinforcing their status as social outsiders. Marcella dies suddenly as the result of a bizarre accident; with a masculine heroism highly unusual in any Gissing novel she is fatally injured while physically intervening to stop a man’s brutalization of his horse. After the novel polishes her off so heavy-handedly, we learn that her lifelong obsession with Peak has culminated in her bestowing her inheritance upon him. This surprise gift provides him with the financial autonomy he has so fervently desired, and which makes his marriage to Sidwell suddenly possible. However, this act of generosity comes too late. The popular Victorian plot device of the legacy which arrives to reward the deserving hero and enable his bourgeois status is here reduced to a mere vestige, an ironic twist of fate which has no power to alter the course of events. Marcella's bequest only serves to deepen Peak’s humiliation, as it comes from his despised double and a woman whose clutches he has sought for years to escape. From his point of view, Marcella compromises his independence and flaunts her moral and financial superiority by leaving him an income he cannot refuse but will always resent. The most "manly"--most generous, most energetic, most unwavering--character in the novel, Marcella dies not only true to her unchanging love for Peak but to her atheist principles, a marked contrast to his opportunism and hypocrisy. Her last words to Peak locate the blame for his fate squarely on his own shoulders, as she tells him sadly, "surely there was never a man who united such capacity for great things with so mean an ideal" (p. 449, Pt. 6 Ch.3). However, Marcella's apt criticism redounds on her own desires; her words apply equally well to the contrast between her own capacities and her own 'mean ideal' of the unworthy Peak's affections.

Peak is eventually unmasked as a very ungentlemanly fraud, partly through sheer bad luck in the form of a social linkage which develops through Marcella between the unsuspecting Warricombes and the London Bohemians. Horrified by the deception which has been practiced upon them, the Warricombes ensure that the imposter is hounded out of respectable society, and Peak resigns himself to social ruin: "He, it was true, belonged to no class whatever, acknowledged no subordination save that of the hierarchy of intelligence, but this could not obscure the fact that his brother sold seeds across a counter, that his sister had married a haberdasher, that his uncle (notoriously) was somewhere or other supplying the public with cheap repasts" (p. 246, Pt. 3 Ch. 4). For Peak, as for his father, "his strong impulses toward culture were powerless to obliterate the traces of his rude origins" (p. 30, Pt. 1 Ch. 2). Before leaving England forever, Peak again begs Sidwell Warricombe to marry him now that he can support her but she rejects him, describing herself as "a coward" who has "not the courage" (p. 490-2, Pt. 7 Ch. 2). As the novel concludes, all of the odd men in Peak’s circle 'grow up' and settle down to more or less tranquil marital arrangements--we learn that even the hardened misogynist Earwaker is considering “a revision of his philosophy” (p. 498, Pt. 7 Ch. 3). Only Peak remains partnerless. He takes Marcella's money and wanders abroad, where the inexorable narrative logic dictates that, like her, he is soon killed off. It remains unclear if the final blow is dealt by the loneliness resulting from Sidwell’s rejection or the destruction of his last traces of masculine self-respect through his acceptance of Marcella’s tainted legacy.

Born in Exile unquestionably highlights the fact that "character" in the lower-class person is vulgar social-climbing to the upper-class person. Self-culture necessitates a striving which can just as easily be interpreted as the absurd pretension of the arriviste; however, lack of it shows insufficient taste and insufficient ambition. Gissing's text dramatizes the paradox that Nietzsche’s "manly" or "noble" virtues--synonymous with “character”--are only given scope in the upper classes, but only need to be cultivated by those who are not already there. Yet an equally deep-rooted prejudice which contributes to Peak’s exile is his own distaste for the emancipated women of England. For Peak and for the logic of the narrative, Sidwell’s cowardice and Marcella’s integrity are the cause of his misery: "Of Marcella Moxey he could not think emotionally; indeed she emphasised by her personality the lack which caused his suffering" (p. 169, Pt. 2, Ch. 4--emphasis mine). And clearly Peak founders on the "truth" of the Nietzschean aphorism which opens this article, as his goals can only be accomplished through marriage to his ideal woman and she, supremely attractive but remote, lacks courage and "runs away.” The paradox set forth by Nietzsche’s aphorism, the equation of femininity with the absence of “manly virtues,” offers the view of happy heterosexuality as a contradiction in terms.

Peak would seem to be a classic figure of Nietzschean ressentiment, characterized by all of the persistence and cunning Nietzsche ascribes to the "weak," and still all his drive proves insufficient to accomplish his aims. He seethes with envy, bitterness and self-pity from the novel's beginning until its end. Incompatible with the ideal of masculine self-sufficiency, ressentiment for Nietzsche undermines the philosophical disinterestedness needed to pursue higher realms. Therefore the novel also raises the possibility that Peak's problem is that he has only mastered one half of the culture formula; he has disciplined himself, but he has not achieved that inner harmony and detachment which is true philosophic self-culture. Peak's name could also deliberately call forth the Nietzschean man of lofty Alpine realms; the bold, reckless natural aristocrat who rises above mere social convention. Certainly Peak's fierce elitism directly echoes Nietzsche: "I hate the word majority; it is the few, the very few, that have always kept alive whatever of the effectual good we see in the human race. There are individuals who outweigh, in every kind of value, generations of ordinary people" (p. 271-72, Pt. 3 Ch. 5). And Peak's daring masquerade shares much with the artistic self-making of the Wildean Aesthete, the deliberate donning of the mask which tells the truth. The very impossibility of distinguishing these diverse figures--the social climber, the superman, the aesthete--points to the instability inherent in the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment, the fact that the designation of ambition or envy depends of course on the classifier’s point of view.

The text’s preoccupation with “sophism”—intellectual hypocrisy and the ways that seemingly neutral knowledges in fact rely on social particulars—make its combination of anti-feminist stereotypes and its simultaneous commentaries on male defensiveness all the more difficult to unravel. The narration claims as apparent fact a view which resonates with many other Gissing writings on the “Woman Question”: the problem that "growing vulgarism on the one hand, and on the other a development of the psychological conscience, are unfavorable to any relation between the sexes, save those which originate in pure animalism, or in reasoning more or less generous" (p. 245, Pt. 3 Ch. 4). Although the narration clearly calls Peak’s attitudes towards women into question on a number of occasions, it generally shares the assumption that educated women are undesirable, desirable women of the upper classes are out of reach, and uneducated women of the lower classes are utterly beneath notice. Indeed, working-class women make few appearances in this novel, and their only representatives are distant maternal presences, Peak’s mother and his under-appreciated benefactress, Lady Whitelaw. This pattern reinforces the novel's initial proposed trajectory of Peak's maturation into the middle class as his natural sphere. Yet Peak’s deep disgust for his seemingly inoffensive mother appears excessive to the reader, and the narrative voice definitely problematizes Peak’s sexual choices, stressing, for example, that his idols, the female members of the Warricombe family, display “no particular personal charm” (p. 8, Pt. 1 Ch. 1). A key passage explicitly shows how Peak’s sexual fixation on unremarkable upper-class women emerges, not from their physical attractions, but from his refusal to identify with the ‘herd’ from which he comes:

He chanced once to be in Hyde Park on the occasion of some public ceremony, and was brought to pause at the edge of a gaping plebian crowd, drawn up to witness the passing of aristocratic vehicles. Close in front of him an open carriage came to a stop; in it sat, or rather reclined, two ladies, old and young. Upon this picture Godwin fixed his eyes with the intensity of fascination; his memory never lost the impress of these ladies’ faces. Nothing very noteworthy about them; but to Godwin they conveyed a passionate perception of all that is implied in social superiority. He stood, one of the multitude, of the herd; shoulder to shoulder with boors and pickpockets; and within reach of his hand reposed those two ladies, in Olympian calm, seemingly unaware of the existence of the throng….In his rebellion, he could not hate them. He hated the malodorous rabble who stared insolently at them and who envied their immeasurable remoteness (p. 129, Pt. 2 Ch. 2).

Here we see Peak distinguishing himself from the rabble who stare 'insolently' rather than reverently, as he does. This erotic over-idealization of 'ladies,' rooted in class shame, directs Peak's sexual desires for the remainder of the narrative. One could argue that Born in Exile critiques an immature overt hostility to women in order to explore, and in the process, valorize, the 'mature' male intellectual’s construction of the humiliation inherent in heterosexual relations. We are informed that Godwin's early misogyny is common, the inevitable result of a sensitive young man's perception of "the brain-defect so general in women when they are taught few of life's graces and none of its serious concerns--their paltry prepossessions, their vulgar sequaciousness, their invincible ignorance, their absorption in a petty self" (p. 37, Pt. 1 Ch. 2). However, in Peak’s case his dislike of women turns out to be only a stage: in his "longing for refined people, he began to modify his sentiments with regard to the female sex" (p. 51, Pt. 1 Ch. 2). Interestingly, it is at this point Peak takes a turn to the abject. Happening to overhear a conversation between two bourgeois girls, he is completely captivated not by their physical appearance but by their speech, by the “sweet clearness of their intonation, the purity of their accent, the grace of their habitual phrases.” For the first time in his life he feels appropriately “humiliated without embitterment” (p. 52, Pt. 1 Ch. 2). Misogyny gives way to a masochistic abjection based on class inferiority—the unattainable upper-class woman is after all not a woman but Woman in all her “immeasurable remoteness”—and she can be adored and yet still unconsciously resented as symbolic of the institutions which maintain their privilege by excluding Peak's ilk. Her distance opens up space for the cultivation of defensive self-pity as well as for the postponement of the heterosexual possibility. Peak's attitude of humiliation points to the displaced resentment of the bourgeois and aristocratic women he idealizes with such supposed chivalry: "In his rebellion, he could not hate them”--his hostility turns inward, the desire for punishment directed instead at his ignominious self.

One reading of the novel would assert that Peak develops a ‘mature’ and 'realistic' acquiescence to the 'fact' that heterosexual relationships are by nature demeaning to the superior gender. A more sophisticated version would posit that heterosexual relations are demeaning at this particular historical moment due to the superior education and scrupulousness of males. Peak's powers of perception force him to face this disjunction squarely whereas his fellows attempt to avoid it. What the novel terms "erotic madness" is typical only of aspiring masculinities, as John Earwaker, the working-class radical, rejects marriage—or at least pretends to--an attitude shared by adolescents and by the ‘less evolved’ men of the lower class. Peak's conflicted desires and resentments become the concrete indicators of his sensitivity, his depth, his idealism, and therefore his deserving to be part of the bourgeois fraction of intellectuals. Men of this temperament are condemned to a masochistic eroticism which becomes a driving force in itself. This masochistic sensibility carries with it associations of an admirable ascetic self-control which supposedly leads to higher spiritual states.

Not surprisingly under these conditions, none of the numerous odd men of the novel attain their long-held fantasies of marital bliss. One can of course read this telling fact as the novel's commentary on the folly of these particular characters' ideals; however, it could also prove the point that marriage for male intellectuals is a hopelessly compromising affair. The closest Born in Exile comes to the portrayal of an acceptable domestic coupling is that of Marcella’s brother, Christian Moxey, and his plain cousin Janet. With Marcella ensconced as the text's most consistent social outlaw, the aimless Christian proves to be the most adept of the novel's male characters at negotiating the compromises necessary to modern social life. Like Marcella, Christian’s unconventionality is signaled by sexual ambiguity and more than a hint of inversion: "his long, translucent fingers were as sensitive as a girl's"; "He stepped with a peculiar lightness" (p. 113, Pt. 2 Ch. 1). He lacks the decisive masculine character of his sister who has "ten times as much energy as her brother" (p. 87, Pt. 1 Ch. 4). But an important improvement in Christian's feminine temperament occurs at the novel’s conclusion when he finally settles down and marries Janet, the maternal "lady doctor." Unlike Peak, Christian abandons his romantic desire for abasement in favor of a more conventional relationship. Depicted as worn out and past her prime (the strain of her career has unfortunately ruined her never very impressive looks), Janet still flashes a "frank, intelligent smile" (p. 498, Pt. 7 Ch. 3). This is not a marriage of passion, nor one with any reproductive potential; a strong atmosphere of degeneration pervades the novel’s final chapters as society passes to the weak, the nervous, the ineffectual. However, in his final correspondence to Peak, Christian explains that, through Janet, he is now beginning to apply himself: "she had begun to inspire him with a hopeful activity, and to foster the elements of true manliness which he was conscious of possessing, though they had never yet found free play..." (p. 476, Pt. 7 Ch. 1). Thus the novel concludes, possibly ironically, but appropriately given its continuing obsession with the subject, with a general note of praise for bourgeois domesticity. But Christian's chronic lassitude and "feminine" characteristics have already marked him as vulnerable to its soft corruptions, which cannot be an option for the naturally virile but doomed Peak and Marcella.

Perhaps most intriguing from a feminist point of view is the way that this novel both illuminates the self-interested nature of masculine rationalizations about women and allows us occasional insights into the double-bind of the newly educated woman of the nineties. In the middle of the novel, the narrator abruptly acknowledges that it is Marcella who lives her life in a more complete state of exile than any other character:

The emancipated woman has fewer opportunities of relieving her mind than a man in corresponding position; if her temper be aggressive she must renounce general society, and, if not content to live alone, ally herself with some group of declared militants. By correspondence, or otherwise, Marcella might have brought herself into connection with women of a sympathetic type, but this connection had never been made. And chiefly because of her acquaintance with Godwin Peak. In him she concentrated her interests; he was the man to whom her heart went forth with every kind of fervour. So long as there remained a hope of moving him to reciprocal feeling she did not care to go in search of female companions.....Left to herself, Marcella had but slender support against a grim temptation already beckoning her in nights of sleeplessness. Of the two [she and Christian], her nature was the more tragic. Circumstances aiding, Christian might still forget his melancholy, abandon the whiskey bottle, and pass a lifetime of amiable uxoriousness, varied with scientific enthusiasm. But for Marcella, frustrate in the desire with which every impulse of her being had identified itself, what future could be imagined? (p. 287, Pt. 4 Ch. 2) None whatsoever, as it turns out, except as the tainted and unacceptable vehicle for Peak's financial independence. The novel cannot contemplate a fate for the New Woman which does not lapse into melodramatic clichés: drug addiction or accidental but morally appropriate death. There may be some compassion for her lonely, 'frustrate' state, but she is still eliminated from a text which is ultimately the story of male intellectual marginalization and the sad compromises necessary for this marginalization to be overcome. This passage is a perfect example of what John Goode, in another context, refers to as a typical "Gissing moment"--"a dangerous sympathy with the oppressed met with a pessimism which turns itself into the sentimental endorsement of an oppressive system" (p. 45, Pt. 1 Ch. 2).

Here the oppressive system is the novel's construction of heterosexuality at the fin de siecle. Peak's dislike of Marcella can be attributed to an instinctive aversion to her unnatural, inverted character, or to what he interprets as her vengeful nature. If Peak's mature sexuality harbors masochistic depths, the only glimpse we have of Marcella's sexual life reveals a barely-concealed sadism; her thwarted libidinal urges manifest themselves in the quiet satisfaction of long-awaited revenge as she allows all of Peak's years of plotting to be undone: "She was leaning forward, her lips slightly parted, her eyes wide as if in gaze at something that fascinated her....Marcella's eyes closed as if a light had flashed before them; she drew a short sigh, and at once seemed to become quite at ease, the smile with which she regarded Warricombe expressing a calm interest" (p. 340, 341, Pt. 4 Ch. 5). Peak later fears that he sees in her eyes a "light of triumph" which signifies her deliberate rejoicing at "having been an instrument of his discomforture" (p. 444, Pt. 6 Ch. 3). It is easy to read her bequest to Peak as a final gesture of hostility concealed within a seemingly generous impulse--certainly Peak takes it as such. A potent malice lurks in the assertive figure of the New Woman even when she attempts to repress her true nature, and, like all Nietzschean ressentiment, constitutes a particularly sinister and effective form of power. But this vision of Marcella's sadistic sexuality by Peak and by the narrator is, of course, a projection--evidence of Peak's resentment of her intellectual rivalry, of his refusal to identify with one whose obsessions remind him of his own, and perhaps most of all of his own need to be exposed, to be punished, for his daring to desire Sidwell and to violate the sanctity of the upper class world. What is interesting is that the narrative structure of the novel follows Peak's own masochistic desire for retribution here, and casts the agents of this punishment as the spineless traditional female and the perverse New Woman.

Born in Exile is thus the story of two exiles, but only one receives the bulk of the narrative attention. Despite its moments of ironic detachment from its hero, the novel expects a readerly empathy with his impossible situation which includes a repulsion towards New Women and a reluctance to submit to the indignities which accompany marriage to the more traditional sort. The novel veers away from Marcella's terrifying intensities and at the same time introduces less sexually threatening versions in the form of the Sidwell’s friend, the celibate Sylvia Moorhouse (who like Marcella, pines for Peak), and Janet, the asexual middle-aged doctor. While Janet and Marcella share a "remarkable intelligence," Janet displays a "milder, more benevolent" aspect (p. 414, Pt. 6 Ch. 1). In this way the novel repeats the pattern of Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee and The Odd Women of working to inscribe less competitive and more overtly heterosexual forms of New Womanhood. The placid figures of Mary Barfoot, Nancy Lord, Sylvia Moorhouse and Janet the doctor are at least potential objects of a somewhat chastened version of male desire; although, as we have seen, the satisfaction of these desires is represented as a matter of compromise--intriguingly described as "amiable uxoriousness." Even the self-absorbed Peak proves capable of winning the attention and love of several women during the course of the novel. In contrast, Marcella can attract no one. Both Peak and Marcella end their short lives alone, yet only Marcella represents a narrative and an evolutionary dead end; only she is a modern character for whom no future can be imagined. And, if it is possible to read Peak's loneliness and exile as attaining a certain desperate nobility (as indeed, most critics have done), Marcella's behavior seems merely desperate.

Towards Modernism

Born in Exile can be interpreted, as John Goode and John Sloan both do, as an indictment of the Victorian social structure in that Peak's failure is attributed to the snobbery of the class he wants to join: in other words, to the gap between the ideology of self-help and the actual rigidity of the British class system. In this way the novel works, as Jameson notes of earlier Gissing novels, to reveal the subtle strategies of class prejudice motivated by a concern to justify existing economic privilege, yet at the same time, the character flaws which result from a thwarted life are deployed as plot devices which have the end result of defending social inequities. Like Demos or Thyrza, this text can be understood in terms of narrative forms which allow for the projection of upper class resentments against aspiring but morally bankrupt workers or petit-bourgeois, although in the case of Born In Exile, its deepest sympathies remain on the side of the 'unclassed' petit-bourgeois intellectual portrayed as out of step with his times--in some ways tragically ahead, in others, tragically behind. Jameson's dialectical strategy encompasses both impulses, and allows us to see Gissing's text as simultaneously constructing and deconstructing ressentiment, as an anatomy of the production of bourgeois ideology.

I am reading it as an anatomy of the production of modernist gender ideology as well. If, following Jameson's suggestion, the autoreferential structure of ressentiment "can seem to account in a "psychological" and nonmaterialistic sense for the destructive envy the have-nots feel for the haves," then Born in Exile enables its own reading not only as a portrayal of upper-class ressentiment, but also as a text which underscores the ressentiment of the petit-bourgeois male. The male protagonist’s resentment of the New Woman and her search for acceptance can fairly easily be shown to be another example of the irritation of the relatively privileged in the face of the demands and desires of those pushing against existing social constraints. As such, this novel produces a complex double-movement in terms of gendered power dynamics: it promotes a limited amount of sympathy for female ambitions while still refusing these ambitions full narrative play. The acute pessimism towards gender relations here takes the form of the 'common sense' assumption that male desire can only wither in the face of female emancipation. Reading the novel with attention to these issues permits an awareness of late nineteenth-century masculine ressentiment as an elaborate, conventionalized form of annoyance at women's "unnecessary rocking of the social boat."

By the eighteen-nineties, a major problem faced by the male self-helper is that masculinity itself seems to be incompatible with a middle-class conformity which many male writers and critics have diagnosed as the result of too much feminine influence. As Raymond Williams notes, dissidents such as Nietzsche assume that the sovereign individual and his desires are thwarted by the confines of the family and thus cultivate a fierce hostility to domesticity: "His genius is tamed by it....In this strong tendency, liberation translates desire as perpetually mobile: it cannot, in principle, be achieved in a settled relationship or in a society.”38 The result is a strain of modernist sensibility which privileges masculinist fantasies of self-creation and transcendence of the social. Misogynist attitudes increasingly become markers of liberated creativity and of intellectual and aesthetic resistance to the ‘feminized’ vulgarity of modern culture. In England, the scapegoating of the New Woman on the part of petit-bourgeois male intellectuals can be read as a function of the problematic positioning of their own masculinity and the real social humiliations to which they themselves were subject. One of the symptoms--and partial resolutions--of this difficulty and the identity crisis it produced was the positing of "oddness" or "erotic madness"--a deep sense of incompatibility with women, with heterosexuality, with the perceived contaminations of the institution of marriage. The "Oddness" of the failed male self-helper evolves into the Oddness of the authentic but misunderstood modernist artist, and signals a way to restore and invigorate a threatened masculinity. As the voice of literary modernism has largely been constructed as that of the detached flaneur, the solitary philosopher, the anti-social outsider, and the stateless exile, it is unsurprising that literary scholars have often tended to regard Born In Exile not in terms of late nineteenth-century gender formations, but of a high modernist sensibility derived from a decontextualized nihilism. Indeed a considerable number of works designated as “modernist” rely on a perception of exclusion resulting from the historical coincidence of the fading reformist mythology of self-help and the critical force of various feminisms. Many questions remain, however, as to what extent the growing influence of Nietzschean idealizations of 'pure' action, autonomy, and will contributed to the shaping of generally oppositional relations between the modernist avant-gardes and the wide range of vibrant working class and feminist movements of the fin de siecle and beyond.

Notes

1. Gillian Tindall, in her introduction to the Hogarth Press Edition of Born in Exile, is but one of many critics who stress Gissing’s comment that its protagonist is “one phase of myself.” It is also widely accepted that Gissing’s long-standing interest in the tenuousness of the Victorian intellectual career is rooted in his own biography. Fredric Jameson, for example, follows John Goode and Raymond Williams in attributing Gissing’s obsession with signifiers of class, status, and money at least partly to Gissing’s own inability to attain any “successful and definitive class identification.” Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1981).

2. The first view has been thoroughly explored by the Marxist critic John Goode in George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction (London: Vision P, 1978); Born in Exile as a study of the psychology of modern alienation is perhaps best represented by Adrian Poole’s Gissing in Context (London: Macmillan P, 1975).

3. See Jacob Korg, George Gissing: A Critical Biography (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1963), 167-178.

4. In general, critics have tended to view Born in Exile as a significant departure from Gissing’s naturalist novels, and as a precursor to, or a participant in, a twentieth-century fictional tradition characterized by atheism and existentialism rather than belonging to its nineteenth-century moment (see Jacob Korg, Walter Allen, Pierre Coustillas). Charles Swann looks ahead to its “accidental echoes” of Sartre in “Sincerity and Authenticity: The Problem of Identity in Born in Exile,” Literature and History Vol. 10 No 2. (1984): 165-158. Patrick Parrinder notes Gissing's general kinship with pessimistic quasi-autobiographical novelists such as George Orwell and Jean Rhys, whose "dreams (or acts) were tinged with guilt and self-destruction...[and who similarly] represented the novelist as alienated intellectual." "The Voice of the Unclassed: Gissing and Twentieth-Century English Fiction," in George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed, ed. by Martin Ryle and Jenny Bourne Taylor (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing LTD, 2005): 145-158, 150. Jenny Bourne Taylor has attempted to place Born in Exile in a more local historical context, regarding its protagonist as an example of late nineteenth-century "double consciousness" instigated by both the psychological discourses of the period and persistent Victorian social divisions mediated through British educational institutions. She therefore stresses the novel's anticipation of modernist narrative "in its dissection of the protagonist's self-absorbed and divided psyche." "The Strange Case of Godwin Peak: Double Consciousness in Born in Exile" in George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed. 61-75, 63. Like Bourne Taylor I am attempting both to place the novel in a specifically British historical context and to relate it to the emergence of a transnational modernist sensibility.

5. The still-growing list of feminist scholarship on this subject is too long to enumerate, but some works which have influenced my thinking in this paper include Rita Felski's The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1995); Suzanne Clark's Sentimental Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1991); Janet Woolf's Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U. California P, 1990); Andreas Huyssen's After The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1986); and Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de Siecle Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986).

6. “Poised between shame and shamelessness, this regime of heterosexual male self-pity has the projective potency of an open secret….The sacred tears of the heterosexual man: rare and precious liquor…what charm…can reside in the all too predictable tears of women, of gay men, of people with something to cry about?….If these modern images borrow something of their lasting power from the mid-nineteenth-century association with the place of women, what their persistence and proliferation dramatize is something new: a change of gears, occupying the period from the 1880’s through the First World War, by which the exemplary instance of the sentimental ceases to be a woman per se, but instead becomes the body of a man who…physically dramatizes…a struggle of masculine identity with emotions or physical stigmata stereotyped as feminine.” Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 145-46.

7. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. Francis Golfing (New York: Doubleday and Co, 1956), 191.

8. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols (1889), trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 535.

9. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 207.

10. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 172.

11. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 260.

12. In his exposition of Nietzschean ressentiment in Nietzsche and Philosophy trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia U P, 1983), Gilles Deleuze makes explicit what remains implicit in The Genealogy, describing "the dreadful feminine power of ressentiment" as not satisfied with denouncing crimes, "it wants sinners, people who are responsible," 119. (italics mine.)

13. Huyssens, Across the Great Divide, 53.

14. Here Jameson draws on a tradition of left-wing criticism which sees George Gissing’s biography and novels as studies of the psychology of political disillusionment. George Orwell, for example, approved of Gissing’s honest protest against “the form of self-torture that goes by the name of respectability,” but further observed that Gissing ended up wanting to speak “not for the multitude, but for the exceptional man, the sensitive man, isolated among the barbarians” (George Orwell, “George Gissing,” in George Gissing: Critical Essays, ed. by Jean-Pierre Michaux. (London: Vision P, 1981): 195-203 (196, 197). For Raymond Williams, Gissing is "the spokesman of social and political disillusion,” and Williams elaborates on this through his influential analysis of the middle-class phenomenon of "negative identification." What appears as 'zeal on behalf of the suffering masses' is in fact often an adolescent anti-authoritarianism or anti-bourgeois streak generally uninformed about (and ultimately uninterested in) the actual causes of social inequality. This rebellious identification is then particularly subject to disillusionment. Williams sees Gissing and to some extent Orwell as examples of this tendency. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia U P, 1983), 175.

15. Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1981), 199-202.

16. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 189, 191.

17. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 202.

18. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 202.

19. Williams comments that “The novels after 1891 are perhaps better, but in many ways less interesting” (Culture and Society, 174). Similarly, Jameson, while expressing his enthusiasm for these later works, does not give them any attention; he does briefly note at the end of his chapter that class conflicts in Gissing’s novels of the nineties have largely been rewritten “in terms of sexual differentiation and the ‘woman question’” (Political Unconscious, 204).

20. I would like to emphasize that I am defining self-help very specifically in terms of its popularized mid-Victorian incarnation as a predominantly middle-class formation. I am not alluding to various groups--the Corresponding Societies, friendly societies, mutual improvement societies, debating societies, co-operative movements, and numerous 'self-helping' organizations--which developed among the artisan and laboring classes themselves, and which were based, not on the notion of individual self-advancement but on communal ideals of working class solidarity; in Raymond Williams's words, "the principle of common betterment" (Culture and Society 331). The fascinating story of the formation of these incarnations of genuine working-class self-improvement has most definitively been presented in E.P. Thompson's classic study, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966); this history is continued through the century in Eric Hopkins's Working-class Self-help in Nineteenth-Century England: Responses to Industrialization (New York: St Martin’s P, 1995).

21. Samuel Smiles. Self-Help; With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance (1859) (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, & Co., 1881), 363.

22. Goode. George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction, 64.

23. See Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001) for a much more optimistic account of the improving qualities of canonical and inspirational literature. Rose’s invaluable social history of working-class reading draws upon the testimonies of working-class autodidacts and trade unionists, exploring the self-professed use of self-help materials by working-class radicals. Recent historical scholarship such as Rose's has generally tended to complicate the picture of Victorian self-help, stressing its roots in cross-class alliances and its alternative constructions of citizenship. My own interest in the Smilesian self-help agenda, however, comes from its prominence as a nineteenth-century discourse of class mobility and cultural assimilation, its delivery of a promise which Victorian social structures did not for the most part allow to be kept.

24. Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction, 46-47.

25. See John Sloan’s Gissing: The Cultural Challenge for a full and persuasive account of this. I am also reminded of Herbert Marcuse’s critique of nineteenth-century aesthetic culture, which stresses its use of philosophical contemplation as a diversionary tactic: “Culture belongs not to him who comprehends the truths of humanity as a battle cry, but to him in whom they have become a posture which leads to a mode of proper behavior: exhibiting harmony and reflectiveness even in daily routine. Culture speaks of the dignity of "man" without concerning itself with a concretely more dignified status for men...Its realm is essentially a realm of the soul” “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon P, 1968) 103.

26. Lloyd Fernando, “Gissing’s Studies in ‘Vulgarism’: Aspects of his Anti-Feminism,” in George Gissing: Critical Essays, ed. Jean-Pierre Michaux. (London: Vision P, 1981), 112.

27. George Gissing, Born in Exile (1892) (London: Hogarth P, reprint 1985), 477. Page numbers for subsequent quotations are from this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.

28. Patricia Alden. Social Mobility in the English Bildungsroman: Gissing, Hardy, Bennett and Lawrence (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Research P, 1986), 20.

29. Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction, 105.

30. Seth Koven’s Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton U P, 2004) usefully highlights the historical role of the slum as a liminal zone for the exploration of erotic freedom and new identities on the part of late nineteenth-century journalists and reformers. Although Koven’s study does not treat Gissing, the novelist’s own early ‘slumming,’ as well as his many fictional treatments of it, are certainly relevant here.

31. Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction, 66.

32. Sloan. George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge, 105.

33. Alden, Social Mobility in the English Bildungsroman, 23.

34. Robert Selig, George Gissing (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 55-56.

35. Korg, George Gissing, 177.

36. Selig, George Gissing, 56.

37. Interestingly, Gissing's stated intentions play down the centrality of Peak's perspective. The entirety of the passage from Gissing's letter to his friend Bertz which Gillian Tindall excerpts above reads: "Indeed it seems to me that the tone of the whole book is by no means identical with that of Peak's personality; certainly, I did not mean it to be so. Peak is myself--one phase of myself. I described him with gusto, but surely I did not, in depicting the other characters, take his point of view?" (Gissing to Bertz quoted in Spiers and Coustillas, 80).

38. Raymond Williams. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 57.