Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (review)

"Why is it that Victorian cultural studies," Anna Maria Jones asks in her conclusion to Problem Novels, "refuses to know its own sensational pleasures?" (130). Jones's answer takes us back to the primal scene of Victorian studies' tangled and productive union with disciplinary networks: the sensation novel. Here we first learned to love Michel Foucault, and here we learned to love and deny the contours of a particular—and particularly sensational—critical narrative, in which the power of the critical subject is recouped at the expense of its object. Jones calls this narrative the "hermeneutics of sensation" (4), in which the critic detects a secret relationship or network unknown to the Victorians or previous Victorianists and then initiates the reader into its mysteries, which often turn out to be (as in sensation fiction) the mysteries of the ordinary.

In her introduction, Jones takes as her topic the Foucauldian treadmill of contemporary criticism, in which we keep saying we must move—or are moving, or have moved—"beyond Foucault," and yet do not. She links this compulsive repetition to what, drawing on Andrew Miller's description of prevailing modes of recent scholarship, she calls the "function machine" of Victorian cultural studies, through which "context X + novel Y = critical monograph Z" and where ever more minute and obscure contexts produce ever greater claims for staggering importance and relevance (Jones 4; Miller, "Recent Studies in the Novel," SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43.4 [2003]: 959–97). In both cases, our persistent investment in revealing the secret ins and outs of power networks or the secret relationship of cultural discourses relies on that revelation's ability to produce a special surplus: aggrandized critical agency. As Jones puts it, "the critic emerges as a figure fantastically imbued with agency. In other words, in the 'persistent' iterations of the story of disciplinary power in Victorian culture, critics are also telling the story of their own critical detachment and radical social potential" (6). Current criticism thus produces its own sensational story, and that story is (y)ours.

Problem Novels tells two main stories: how we presently theorize ourselves as critical subjects, and how Victorian novels working in the era or wake of sensationalism theorize both "the novel" and its reading subject as critical. As Jones formulates it, "the fierce debates in the 1850s through the 1880s surrounding the legislation of married women's property forced a crisis in Victorians' understanding of individual agency, and it is this crisis that plays out in the theoretical texts that I call 'problem novels'" (15). The crucial point here is that this "crisis" of agency and subjectivity plays out visibly and consciously. Novels, novelists, and the readers they tutor in critical practice appear as remarkably self-aware, in the know, or at least in the process of knowing. In according the Victorians the measure of awareness and self-critique that we often save for ourselves, Jones makes the critic's high ground of sensational revelation harder to reach and provides us the pleasure of reading someone who doesn't consider herself smarter than the people she writes about.

The "problematic" subjectivity thus theorized by novels of the mid-nineteenth century is marked for Jones by its "ambivalent agency," and it is fair to ask how this subject who is neither detached from nor produced by power relations is different from the one we have had described to us so many times by books of the "function machine" sort. How, in other words, is this "ambivalence" qualitatively different from something that looks more like, say, critical indecision, or the frequently lamented, post-Foucauldian desire to have it both ways that Miller, quoting Andrew Elfenbein quoting Eve Sedgwick, calls the "kinda hegemonic/kinda subversive rut" of much current criticism? (967) First, Jones takes ambivalence as a theoretical topic rather than an unquestioned mode. Second, Jones convincingly demonstrates that Victorian novels beat us to this particular...