Reading Constellations: Urban Modernity in Victorian Fiction by Patricia Mckee (review)

In this densely written work, Patricia McKee uses Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, particularly as it emerges from The Arcades Project, to read a counter to the dominant Victorian myth of linear historical progress, particularly in the construction of “urban modernity,” in four Victorian novels written in the second half of the nineteenth century—Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, Jude the Obscure, and “In the Cage” by Henry James. McKee argues that these works “propose urban experience as an antidote to, even as they participate in, capitalist development; that they entertain the possibility of progress only to expose the damage it does; and that they find in the modern city possibilities of collective experience that capitalism empties out” (17). The book articulates in detail Benjamin’s writing as well as that of other social and literary theorists. Its reach is expansive, and despite its title it sometimes seems to be a book more about Benjamin than about “Victorian Fiction.” I find it difficult to summarize its general point without being reductive of the book as a whole. However, I will focus on the discussion of the novels.

McKee argues that these four novels “collect together what progressive history leaves out and leaves behind” (5) and reassemble “collections of parts, allowing subjects and objects too to pass out of themselves into different constructions of identity” (7). The central characters in the four novels all have parts of themselves that do not fit into the dominant myth of progress in the rapidly growing urban world. They are in “pieces,” a word that occurs in this book periodically to represent the disintegration of both characters and history. In reading these characters’ efforts to find themselves, McKee uses Walter Benjamin’s dialectical relational philosophy of history—the “constellation”—to point to moments when the linear narrative is interrupted, halted in its teleological drive, and ignored, forgotten, and even repressed elements come to the surface of the story to enable a larger and more dialectical sense of history and character. (Think of the river and what emerges from it in Our Mutual Friend.) As McKee puts it, in constellations “events are related in their differences, they appear simultaneously yet remain in their particular places....[which] prevents history moving forward” (2). As a result, past and present collide in the moment, the experience widens out, and this produces new and different ways of seeing the city and one’s place in and of it. Personal “satisfaction” lies “in the expression of unresolved parts found in possibilities of disintegration into parts of other people: horizontal extensions of self rather than an internal integration of self” (31). An example of constellation in Great Expectations is in the interchanges among Compeyson, Miss Havisham, Pip, and Estella in which Pip as a man “emerges...equivalent to Compeyson, but who, as a sensitive lover feeling pain at being tricked, is equivalent to Miss Havisham. A constellation of parts emerges...[and] brings revenge [one of the narrative genres of the novel] to a standstill” (62).

McKee also engages Benjamin’s term “colportage” (the etymological source is the peddler’s cart of heterogeneous items). Colportage “occurs for Benjamin when, in present time and space, events appear that occurred there and elsewhere in other times” (4). The term is used to highlight how the authors of the four novels collect and distribute various possibilities in both time and space, and expand the moment without moving forward and thus open up ways to integrate what capitalist development has disintegrated. For example, the telegraphist narrator of “In the Cage” represents a colportage of “interrupted and intersecting histories”; as a “curator,” she “rearranges persons as if both in contemporary upper-class London and in a romance scenario in which she can take part” (18). Or consider Jenny Wren’s creating costumes and lives for her dolls or the use of citations in Jude the Obscure (McKee notes that “like colportage, citation moves into spaces that are interrupted and extended...