SOURCE: Danahay, Martin A. “Monologism and Power in Victorian Autobiography.” Victorians Institute Journal 21 (1993): 47-69.

[In the following essay, Danahay focuses on the tension between the monologic and dialogic (and likewise the unitary and social) qualities of language illustrated in the autobiographical works of John Stuart Mill, Edmund Gosse, and Matthew Arnold.]

Ashton Nichols in a recent article in the Victorians Institute Journal on Browning's monologues analyzed the ways in which Browning's poems imply the suppression of other voices that a reader must reconstruct in order to understand the effaced context of the utterance. Nichols used Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of “monologism” to explicate the process at work in Browning's monologues. “Many of Browning's speakers,” Nichols pointed out, “are striving to gain power over an individual or a situation,” (31) and attempt to silence unsettling voices that challenge their power. For Browning's speakers, monologism therefore grants them power over the social context of the utterance. Nichols's analysis of Browning's poetry, like David G. Riede's recent study of Arnold's poetry, Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language, shows how important Bakhtin's theories have become in analyzing the power relations implicit in Victorian poetry and prose.

In this article I propose to extend Nichols's and Riede's provocative analyses into a sustained critique of the subject positions of three Victorian male autobiographers—John Stuart Mill, Edmund Gosse, and Matthew Arnold—in terms of “monologism.” In this article I analyze a distinctively masculine form of Victorian autobiography. As I have argued elsewhere, certain forms of autobiography in the Victorian period betray the class and gender status of the author.¹

Bakhtin's terms enable critics to analyze autobiographical language in the context of wider social patterns such as gender or class. This is a particularly important development for the analysis of Victorian autobiography because the critic is free to place this most individualist of genres in a wider social context. Rather than accept individualized premises of Victorian autobiography on their own terms and analyze autobiographies as expressions of authors writing about themselves in isolation, Bakhtin's theoretical approach situates the writer's language within the power structures of Victorian society, in which centralized bureaucracies of an industrialized nation state were growing in size and scope.² At the level of subject, this power was expressed through what Bakhtin calls the drive toward a “monologic” use of a unitary language.

In making this assertion, I am not claiming that Victorian autobiographers who employed monologism acted in bad faith. I suggest that, in their textual self-construction, language subverted intention because the constructed subjectivity of autobiography replicated an authoritarian form of power, while authors themselves argued for an individual freedom. David Riede suggests that Victorian authors' language “betrayed” their stated intentions. The authors I examine in this article favored individual liberty, yet constructed authoritarian forms of subjectivity within their texts. Riede's final characterization of Matthew Arnold in the conclusion to his book rings especially true in this regard:

In general, the effort to reduce the “heteroglossia” of a multitudinous language to a unified poetic utterance that excludes the untamable associations of other levels and types of discourse is an attempt in language to reflect a unified and authoritative ideology. It is, in short, an attempt to erect a monolithic “culture” against anarchy, a unified ideology … against multitudinousness.

(211)

Riede's diagnosis of Arnold's language is persuasive. Arnold's fear of “multitudinousness” led him in texts such as Culture and Anarchy to idealize the repressive power of the State in the name of an internalized self-repression, just as in his poetry he idealized the unitary status of such figures as the Gypsy Scholar. In Arnold's terms, unitary monoliths such as the State become a vision of wholeness, a “best self,” that represses the disunity of his fragmented subjectivity. The State is the realm of harmony, society that of conflict and heteroglossia. Arnold idealized a centralized, unified State in the political sphere, and yearned for a unitary language that would overcome heteroglossia in his poetry.

The monologism of Victorian autobiography is in conflict with the dialogism of language. Much critical attention has been paid to Bakhtin's concept of the “dialogic,”³ but only recently have critics begun to discuss its inverse, the “monologic.”⁴ When comparing the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies of language, Bakhtin emphasizes that every text, indeed every use of language, is both dialogic and monologic simultaneously:

Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance. … Every utterance participates in the “unitary language” (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces).

(“Discourse” 272)

There is, Bakhtin emphasizes here, no language that can escape these interfused categories. A centrifugal force of the dialogic and a centripetal force of the monologic inform every individual utterance in that each utterance unavoidably participates in both the normalizing and centripetal power of the “unitary language,” and the centrifugal and dispersive forces of heteroglossia. In Bakhtin's terms, the dialogic principle is aligned with heteroglossia, while the monologic represents the centralizing and normative power of monoglossia. These two terms in a Bakhtinian program cannot be separated.

The monologic in its emphasis upon the importance of power for language raises the spectral possibility of a type of dialogue termed “coerced speech” by Aaron Fogel (174). Edmund Gosse's Father and Son illustrates this point well because it is a perfect example of “coerced speech.” Gosse as a child and a young adult was forced by his father to testify continually to the state of his soul. This pressure continued even when Gosse moved away from home as his father persisted in a daily barrage of “postal inquisitions” (208). Gosse clearly resented this pressure, presenting himself as a marionette on the end of a “spiritual cord,” and he resisted his father's questioning as far as possible. On the other hand, Gosse discovers within the narrative itself that when he is away from his father's determining influence he has nothing to write about. For instance, Gosse says he has “nothing to report” about a “breathing-space” spent away from his father's presence (56-57). The autobiography represents a sustained attempt by Gosse to define the state of his inner being in a continuation of his father's pressure to testify to the state of his soul. The book is completely circumscribed by his relationship to his father as a determining principle in his life. Father and Son is therefore a complex mixture of resistance to his father and capitulation to his pressure.

Gosse ends Father and Son with a plea for the “human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself” as he apparently throws off the yoke of his father's domination (224). Gosse claims that Father and Son records his liberation from his father's influence. Within the narrative itself, however, Gosse creates a monologic self that actually internalizes the coercive pressure of his father's presence. Gosse describes the “state of crisis” that ensued upon his discovery that his father was not all-knowing, and that the son could keep secrets from him. A potential for secrecy opened up new possibilities for the construction of his own identity:

There was a secret in this world, and it belonged to me and to a somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk to one another.

(30)

Gosse describes this moment of secret communion as the point at which “my individuality now descended upon me.” His invocation of individuality would suggest that what he is describing here is the sense of a “unitary” and undivided self, but what he portrays is in fact a duality.⁵ Gosse gives a striking representation here of an individual engaged in what Matthew Arnold termed a “dialogue of the mind with itself.” His individuality is actually based upon a divided subjectivity. Arnold and Gosse describe similar forms of subjectivity that internalize a repression of the dialogic nature of their subjectivity. Rather than acknowledge their split subjectivity, they repress their knowledge of this split and insist upon a unitary or monologic conception of self, thus turning dialogue into monologue.

This is a point that needs to be emphasized, since it was an essential move in the Victorian use of monologism. What could be interpreted as a socially-directed idea, that of dialogue, is redefined as certifying the individual's freedom from the heteroglossic and social possibilities of language. Gosse defends himself against a potentially threatening acknowledgment of his split subjectivity by insisting on his independence from his father and his creation of a monologic identity. Gosse's example corroborates Shari Benstock's description of a quintessentially male autobiographical construction of the self. Benstock opposes a feminist and Lacanian version of the writing subject as fragmentary and divided to the conventional male view of the unitary autobiographical self.⁶ Benstock's description of a characteristically masculine form of autobiography in which division is denied or repressed accurately captures the subjectivity constructed in the autobiographical writings of Mill, Gosse, and Arnold:

What is reinforced … is the moi, the ego; what is pushed aside … is the split in the subject … that language effects and cannot deny. Man enforces a ‘unity and identity across time’ by ‘reconstituting’ the ego as a bulwark against disintegration.

(15)

By naming his moment of apotheosis “individuality,” Gosse insists on the unitary self even as he depicts a split subjectivity. He therefore denies and represses knowledge of the heteroglossic possibilities of a fragmented and de-centered subjectivity in the way Benstock describes. Gosse's text betrays a distinctively masculine attitude to autobiography in contrast to the feminine strategies of self-representation in the Victorian period. Linda Peterson has pointed out that certain male-identified narrative forms were not available to the female autobiographer because women were encouraged to be “selfless and self-effacing” (213).

Victorian male autobiographers represent a unitary and autonomous self in their texts thanks to their monologism. Victorian male autobiographers construct linguistic “bulwarks” against the dialogic principle even as they represent a divided subjectivity in their texts. Gosse constructs his autobiography as a “linguistic defense” against the threatening forces of heteroglossia. He aligns himself with the unitary forces of the monologic rather than the dialogic possibilities of the novel in the introduction to his autobiography in order to repress heteroglossia. In the opening lines of his text he insists on his autobiography's “documentary” status and differentiates it from autobiographical novels:

At the present hour, when fiction takes forms so ingenious and so specious, it is perhaps necessary to say that the following narrative … is scrupulously true.

(5)

Gosse's insistence on the difference between Father and Son and fictional autobiographies betrays an uneasiness that his narrative in fact might be mistaken for a fictional text. Gosse's fear on that account is particularly striking since in the narrative itself he associates fiction with resistance to a strict Puritan upbringing imposed by his parents which forbade storytelling. When Gosse is allowed to read his first fictional work, he likens it to “giving a glass of brandy neat to some one who had never been weaned from a milk diet” (14). The intoxicating and dangerous power of fiction is summarized in this metaphor. The wholesome, family values of milk are opposed in this metaphor to the dangerous, adult world of intoxicating fictions. Fiction is both an attractive possibility and one that threatens the sobriety he had learned from his father. Gosse not only shows a simultaneous appreciation of the dialogic possibilities of fiction viewed as an alcoholic beverage but also an implicit leaning toward the “documentary” form of autobiography as more respectable and truthful.⁷

Gosse's text shows that the monologic and dialogic are fundamentally implicated in one another. Gosse's denial of the dialogic possibilities of fiction shows him in contest with the very possibility of a de-centered subjectivity. His autobiography is constructed both in opposition to, and in appreciation of, the possibilities of the imagined resistance to hegemony embodied in fictional texts. Ruth Hoberman has termed this split in Gosse's subject his “narrative duplicity.” As Hoberman points out, “Gosse as subject claims the right to fiction, self-invention, and imaginative freedom, yet as narrator he echoes his naturalist father's faithfulness to literal fact” (304). Just as he professes to resist his father's influence, yet accedes in telling ways, Gosse apparently espouses an allegiance to the dialogic possibilities of fiction in his narrative, but in the final analysis comes down on the side of the “unitary language.” In choosing to write an autobiography rather than a novel, he takes the side of the monologic ideal of a unitary self.

Gosse's text enacts a form of self-repression that internalizes an authoritarian deployment of power. He internalizes his father's repressive regime as a divided subjectivity, one part of which resists and another part of which accedes to his father's power but overtly denies this split subjectivity. This is also the strategy at work in Matthew Arnold's texts. Arnold sounds very much like the Underground Man in Bakhtin's analysis of Notes from the Underground. As Bakhtin emphasizes, the Underground Man's monologue actually tries to preempt dialogue and escape determination by the social. In Bakhtin's account, Dostoyevsky's text constructs an “internal dialogue” (an idea very close to Arnold's “dialogue of the mind with itself”) in which the Underground Man attempts to escape the dialogic aspects of language:

Thus the entire style of the “Notes” is subject to the most powerful and all determining influence of other peoples' words, which either act on speech covertly from within … or which, as anticipated response of another person, take root in the very fabric of speech.

(Problems 149)

As Bakhtin emphasizes, the Underground Man's monologue represents an attempt to escape the determining power of the voices of others. Like the Underground Man, Arnold through his use of monologism tries to escape the determining pressure of the social and to construct a space for the exercise of an autonomous and undetermined will. For instance, Arnold's poetry often begins with an apparent dialogue, as in the opening of “The Buried Life,” but this dialogue is quickly subsumed under an internal and monologic meditation. “The Buried Life” begins with an image of language in conflict as Arnold describes “our war of mocking words.” The opening lines create an image of language implicated in conflicted social relations, an image belied by the rest of the poem.

The poem is apparently socially-oriented in that it is addressed to the figure of the beloved and bemoans the inability of even lovers to express what they really feel to one another. Arnold moves on to describe an epiphanic moment of communication when words do succeed and “our eyes can in another's read clear.” However, rather than discover the existence of an independent Other at this moment, Arnold describes an inner-directed experience in which alterity is lost. Rather than discover what another person is thinking in this epiphanic moment, Arnold focuses on his own “buried life” becoming clear to him:

A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.

(84-87)

The eye that had been reading the text of a female Other “sinks inward” and ends up scanning the individual's own “life flow.” What is initially presented as a moment of dialogue is in fact a monologue, for Arnold speaks of his own “buried life” here, not of the nameless woman. Like Gosse, Arnold finds his identity confirmed in the image of a secret life in which different aspects of his split subjectivity speak to one another. The alienated self implicated in the “war of words” discovers within his consciousness an escape into a realm of inner harmony, thanks to the existence of a secret “unregarded” life untainted by the social “war of mocking words.”

Arnold's self-referential epiphany is subverted, however, as David Riede has pointed out, by the uncontrolled intertextuality of his language (181-90). “The Buried Life” is dense with allusions to other poems, particularly Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” and Milton's Paradise Lost. Arnold constructs his vision of a unitary identity in the face of the knowledge that his words are not his own, despite his dream of an absolute correspondence between self and language. Arnold's monologue here is an attempt to escape heteroglossia. His dream of the correspondence between self and word is bought at the cost of denying the heteroglossia of his own language.

In such poems as “The Buried Life” Arnold tries to avoid not only social conflict and the intertextuality of language but also the knowledge of his own fragmented subjectivity. He acknowledged this fragmentary selfhood in a letter to his sister K:

The true reason why parts suit while others do not is that my poems are fragments—i.e. that I am fragments, while you are whole; the whole effect of my poems is quite vague & indeterminate—this is their weakness.

(Whitridge 267)

Arnold's yearning after “wholeness” is made explicit in this letter, as is his subversive knowledge of his own lack of unity. Arnold represents his sister in this letter, just as he represents the Scholar Gypsy in his poetry, as an image of an ideal unitary self that perpetually eludes him. His sister is “whole” while he is fragmentary, just as the Scholar Gypsy represents a certainty that eludes him. In “The Scholar-Gypsy” the central figure has “one aim, one business, one desire” while the poet is doomed to “half live a hundred different lives.” Similarly in “The Buried Life,” the poet dreams of an escape from his de-centered and fragmented subjectivity, and achieves this escape through monologism.

As in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold associates the social with conflict and alienation in “The Buried Life”; the social is the “war” of competing discourses that he found so unsettling. He opposes to it an ideal of inner cultivation and harmony.⁸

Arnold's poetry and prose are monologic because they deliberately deny that language embodies social conflict, replacing it with an ideal of language in which there is a correspondence between language and a unitary self. In “The Buried Life,” Arnold gives expression to the desire for communion with a self outside of the bounds of language that informs all his writing. George Levine has suggestively characterized all Arnold's writings as “autobiographical fictions” that bespeak his desire for knowledge of the “buried life” (473). For Arnold the heteroglossia of language is disturbing, and must be counteracted by the self as the one site of stability and knowledge.

My analysis of the monologic tendency of the Arnoldian text directly contradicts one of Arnold's most famous formulations. In his Preface to the 1853 edition of his Poems, Arnold criticized Victorian poetry for being too preoccupied with morbid and introspective states of mind in which suffering found no vent in action. Arnold criticized an autobiographical form of poetry he saw as betraying the modern disease of the “dialogue of the mind with itself.” In the conventional reading of his words Arnold is shown as eschewing the subjective. The reverse is actually the case, as can be seen if we examine the terms in which Arnold criticized the “dialogue of the mind with itself.” He criticized a kind of poetry in which:

The suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.

(“Preface” 204)

Firstly, the emphasis upon “mind” as opposed to the world of material reality and action in his Preface helps reinforce the mind/world dichotomy he is attempting to transcend. By concentrating on the divide between thought and action, Arnold helps establish the boundary he seeks to overcome.⁹ By imagining the split between mind and action to be present in the first place, Arnold helps inscribe it more firmly in his discourse. The effect of this dualism is to focus attention on the “mind” even as it apparently represses “mind” in favor of “action.”

Secondly, Arnold's characterization of poetry as a dialogue of the mind with itself, rather than a monologue, implicitly raises the spectral possibility of community and human intimacy. However, the gesture toward the social implied in “dialogue” is rapidly undercut by the addition of “with itself.” The phrase “dialogue of the mind” could be construed to mean dialogue between the minds of different individuals. This “dialogue” of the mind here, however, is emphatically self-referential. “Monologue” would in fact be a more accurate description of this conversation. Arnold gives here an astute analysis of the methods of his own poetry. Arnold's theory and practice are at complete odds with one another; in Riede's terminology, Arnold's poetic language “betrays” his stated intention. Arnold both attempts to repress his subjectivity and embodies it more firmly in his discourse in his “dialogue of the mind with itself.”

Rather than repress a morbid and introspective consciousness, then, Arnold's poems express a “monologic” use of language that denies the social. As Bakhtin emphasizes, monologism is at root a denial of alterity that reduces all social phenomena to objects of consciousness:

Ultimately, monologism denies that there exists outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable of responding on an equal footing, another equal I (thou). For the monologic outlook (in its extreme or pure form) the other remains entirely and only an object of consciousness, and cannot constitute another consciousness. … The monologue is accomplished and deaf to the other's response. … Monologue pretends to be the last word.

(Problems 318)

This description captures the fate of the women interlocutors in Arnold's poems very well. The woman in “The Buried Life” is gradually effaced as a symbol of alterity, leaving only Arnold's voice. The unresponsive and silent women in Arnold's poetry betray the extent to which his writing is an attempt to have the “last word.” Like speakers in Browning's monologues, Arnold silences other voices. As Bakhtin emphasizes in his analysis of the Underground Man's discourse, a monologue such as Arnold's or the Underground Man's is actually a gesture of power and domination. Arnold, like the Underground Man, attempts to preempt the determination of his word by others. He tries to deny the power of the social to determine his consciousness. Arnold uses monologism as a means to assert his autonomy from the social. He represses the social context as a determining presence, representing his language as undetermined by any force beyond his self.

However, as Derrida has argued, pure monologue is an impossibility. Monologue is an ideal of pure presence to itself that seeks to repress the difference of language. Ken Frieden in his astute analysis of Derrida's thought on the subject of monologue argues that “Derrida generalizes from a linguistic observation—that all ‘mono-logos’ is [sic] permeated by dialogue—to the argument that the subject or ‘I’ is incapable of pure presence to itself, even in the form of a self-addressed proposition of self-knowledge” (93). Like Bakhtin, therefore, Derrida sees monologism as a denial of dialogue and an attempt by the author to represent a solitary, autonomous voice. This monological voice, however, is a fragile textual fiction. Arnold's phrase “dialogue of the mind with itself” discloses the spectral sound of other voices even as it aspires to the status of monologue, just as Coleridge's “conversation poems” establish the fiction of an interlocutor.¹⁰ As Frieden points out in his conclusion, Bakthin's theory of language confirms that “the supposedly monological ‘I’ depends on dialogical interactions” (193). The monological text, therefore, cannot escape implication in dialogism despite its privileging of monologue.

A compelling Victorian example of Arnold's “dialogue of the mind with itself” in action is to be found in Mill's Autobiography where he describes his famous “mental crisis.” Mill describes his “dull state of nerves” of the autumn of 1826, when in a depressed state of mind he started to question his own progress in life. He writes:

In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: “suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and a happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered ‘No!’

(94)

Mill here constructs a dramatic monologue. In this one instance in the Autobiography, Mill exhibits a dramatic flair by describing his mental state in terms of a dialogue, and places both the question he asks himself and the answer in quotation marks. Consider the status of these voices, however. This is not an exchange between two separate individuals, but an example of the splitting of a single mind into two consciousnesses very similar to that described by Gosse. Mill's mental crisis is another “dialogue of the mind with itself.” Mill's “mental crisis” takes place entirely within his own mind, with no reference to other people. The internal dynamics of his own self-questioning take the place of any imagined social context. Mill is autonomous and alone, all voices originating within himself.¹¹

Two texts help Mill escape the depression that attended his “mental crisis.” In reading a passage from Marmontel's Memoires, Mill comes upon a passage “which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them” (99). Although Mill does not explain the identifications that go on in this passage, it seems that he reads himself into Marmontel's situation, and in his imagination kills off his father. Mill uses Marmontel as a surrogate and expresses through his reading of Marmontel's text the emotions that he could not express directly in life. Unlike Gosse who, writing later in the century, could represent himself as usurping his father's authority, Mill cannot conceive of himself as directly challenging his father. Instead he uses Marmontel's text as a vicarious way of imagining himself taking his father's place.

A similar strategy informs Mill's reading of his other emotional resource at this time—Wordsworth's poetry. Mill finds in Wordsworth's poetry “the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy” (104). This is a highly ambiguous description in the way that it elides Mill's self and the text he is reading; Mill describes his experience of reading Wordsworth as a joyous self-discovery, finding in the poetry the very qualities he has come to value in himself. When Mill describes his discovery of a “source of inward joy,” it is not clear whether this “source” is located in Wordsworth's or Mill's breast. In other words, this joy could be contained in the poetry, or it could be in Mill's own self, and his reading of the poetry could simply be the catalyst for its release. Mill then describes the poems in a way that further mystifies their status:

In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle and imperfection … and I felt myself at once better and happier once I came under their influence.

(104)

Wordsworth's poetry becomes another of the “influences” in Mill's life, “shaping” his character in the way Mill ascribed to Bentham and Harriet Taylor. Representing himself as overtly passive in this encounter, Mill in fact turns Wordsworth into an indirect image of himself. As he says, he “continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me” (105) Mill therefore does not value Wordsworth independently of his conception of himself, but rather sees in Wordsworth aspects of his own autobiographical development. Mill, in a joyous self-discovery, turns Wordsworth's poetry into the source of his own inward existence. Thus, an encounter with another turns into an act of ventriloquism, and an apparent dialogue with Wordsworth's poetry comes to sound more like a monologue.

Mill begins to sound much like the Arnold of Riede's formulation, or Browning in Nichols's. In Mill's case, monologism is privileged over dialogism. Just as Arnold drew from Wordsworth extensively yet repressed his dependence upon another's words, Mill draws upon Wordsworth's poetry but turns it into a source for his consciousness of self, not consciousness of another.

I will not argue, however, that Arnold or Mill succeeded in repressing completely the heteroglossia of language in their texts, or that what is in question here is some simple binary opposition between monologic and dialogic tendencies. Nor shall I argue that the “dialogic” is an unquestionably politically correct principle while monologism is its evil counterpart. Bakhtin's terms, and my use of them here, should not be reduced to mere binaries. All language, as Bakhtin emphasizes, participates in these competing and conflicted tendencies, so that no text is entirely monologic or dialogic. To exclude either the monologic or dialogic aspects of these texts would be falsely to reduce their complexity.

In other words, I do not wish to propose an exclusively monologic reading of Victorian autobiographical texts. Rather, I wish to emphasize that the monologic itself is engaged in a contest with the forces of the dialogic. To recognize the existence of monologism is to recognize the importance of questions of politics, power, and hegemony in the analysis of Victorian texts. The conflict between the monologic and the dialogic reintroduces the social and political into the apparently private and isolated utterance of autobiography. The contest from the perspective of the monologic operates on the level of denial and repression, but the very force of this opposition is a testimony to the power of the dialogic. The monologic is a denial of alterity that implicitly admits the power of the Other, and refers, however obliquely, to social conflicts embedded in language. Culture and Anarchy, after all, is haunted by the fear of working-class violence that Arnold saw expressed in the Hyde Park Riots, and the text is a prolonged attempt to counter that violence with “sweetness and light.”

I would not want to see critical studies produced in the future that overemphasize the monologic in the way that the dialogic has been promoted in the past. The danger of privileging the forces of monologism at the expense of dialogism is demonstrated in D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police. Miller gives an excellent analysis of the kind of internalized police force that I have attributed to Victorian subjectivity operating at the level of narrative in Victorian fiction.¹² Miller names with impressive clarity the link between Victorian subjectivity and the repressive forces of State control. Miller goes too far, however, in ascribing to these forces a kind of uniform and monolithic determining power. He turns the novel into a completely monologic voice, rather than the site of a struggle between the monologic and dialogic.

By linking his analysis with such works as Jacques Donzelot's The Policing of the Family, Miller excises the possibility of human agency. As he says, “once a power of social control has been virtually raised to the status of an ontology, action becomes so intimidating that it is effectively discouraged” (31). However, it is not the novel that is raising the monologic to the status of an ontology here, it is Miller himself. Miller ignores completely, for instance, the subversive power embodied in the sexuality of Lady Dedlock, a sexuality that escapes determination within the conventional terms of marriage. In other words, Miller reverses the usual privileging of the dialogic, and privileges the monologic instead. Neither view accurately captures the spirit of Bakhtin's terms.

Bakhtin, on the other hand, allows for a concept of agency and resistance. By insisting that language is used by subjects who participate both in the heteroglossic and monoglossic features of language simultaneously, Bakhtin emphasizes how all individual speech acts are riven by the ideological conflicts of their time. His view is neither an abstractly deterministic nor a completely subjective and relativist position.¹³ Bakhtin's insistence on language as the site of struggle between different ideological tendencies allows for both a conception of individual resistance and an acknowledgment of the extent to which speaking subjects are always already social.

Recent theoretical analyses of subjectivity have underscored the importance of recognizing the subject as the site of ideological conflict.¹⁴ By effacing the coercive and hegemonic tendencies in literary texts, critics subvert their own attempts to elucidate the ways in which texts embody resistance to hegemony.¹⁵ By analyzing both the monologic and dialogic tendencies of texts simultaneously, however, critics can name more precisely the relations of power embodied in literary texts.

Rather than present Victorian autobiographical texts as purely monologic and novels as therefore dialogic, I prefer to argue that such texts be approached as embodying both tendencies in conflict with one another. Victorian texts, indeed any texts, should not be approached simply as unitary and centralizing or as fractured and multiple, but as invested in both states at the same time. The tension between the monologic and dialogic in Victorian texts, for example, shows that they are riven by ideological conflicts that threaten to subvert their unitary status. For instance, Matthew Arnold's yearning after “sweetness and light” shows an acute awareness of the social violence and conflict of his day, an unsettling conflict that he tried to deny and marginalize in the construction of his identity. His very insistence on the monologic status of his texts, however, betrays the determining power of the social over his discourse, despite his attempts to evade determination. Like the Underground Man, Matthew Arnold's desire to have the “last word” mutely testifies to the determining power of the other.

Notes

1. See Danahay, “Class.”

2. Bakhtin links a “monologic” use of language to the political power of the State. This crucial point is frequently lost in discussions of Bakhtin's terms. Bakhtin terms language “unitary” that is connected with such centralizing and hegemonic political forces. This language is the vehicle of “the forces that serve to unify and centralize the verbal-ideological world,” and establish a stable version of “correct usage” in the face of the instability and mutability of heteroglossia (“Dialogic” 270). A unitary language “gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization,” so that nineteenth-century language itself records the large-scale political processes of State formation (“Discourse” 271). For a more detailed discussion of the link between the Victorian State and Victorian subjectivity, see Althusser and Danahay (“State Power”).

3. See for instance Herman, Todorov, and de Man.

4. There are a few exceptional studies that address monologism. Fogel and Bernstein have both suggested the theoretical possibilities of the term, while Riede and Nichols have demonstrated its applicability to Victorian texts.

5. “Individual” means in its root sense “that which cannot be divided.”

6. For other studies of autobiography that follow a similar path, see Stanton and Sidonie Smith.

7. For more on the contrast between Gosse's insistence on the “documentary” status of his text and his use of highly metaphorical and allegorical language see Folkenflik.

8. Arnold stressed that “culture” was “an inward condition of the mind” in Culture and Anarchy (45).

9. The problem posed by subjectivity for Victorian autobiographers has been analyzed in interesting and perceptive terms by both Buckley and Loesberg.

10. Frieden analyzes the dynamics of Coleridge's “conversation poems” in Chapter 6.

11. Like Kucich, I read Victorian repression as a “systematic deflection of desire away from any relationship to a collective identity” and a “radical separation of a self-negating libido from a collective context” (27).

12. Miller invokes Bakhtin only twice in his book, but does so in terms that make his analysis of the novel sound close to my own analysis of Victorian autobiography. See especially his remarks on “the panopticism of the novel” which represents “the workings of an implied master-voice whose accents have already unified the world in a single interpretive center” (25).

13. On the efforts of Bakhtin and Voloshinov to resist the extremes of an “individualist subjectivism” and an “abstract objectivism,” see Morson and Emerson (210).

14. Although he does not address Bakhtin in his recent book, Paul Smith comes to a similar conclusion about the possibilities of resistance and agency contained in a critical theory that acknowledges the multiple, de-centered constitution of the subject.

15. This is not an easy question to determine. As studies of resistance by Scott and Willis emphasize, what appears to be local resistance to hegemony may in the larger perspective turn out to be accommodation to the realities of the social distribution of power.

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