Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (review)

As I began to read Janice Carlisle's Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction, I couldn't dislodge from my imagination that moment in Ang Lee's film The Ice Storm (1997) when Mikey Carver, a melancholy adolescent the film finally deems too poetic to live, reads to his class a report contemplating the conjunction of smell and its object: "because when you smell a smell it's not really a smell, it's a part of the object that has come off of it—molecules. So when you smell something bad, it's like in a way you're eating it. This is why you should not really smell things, in the same way that you don't eat everything in the world around you because as a smell, it gets inside of you." Unable to escape Mikey's scatological fantasy of smell's interconnectivity ("So the next time you go into the bathroom, . . ." he continues), I wondered how this twentieth-century understanding of smell's ability to stage an encounter between the smeller and the smelly object would compare to Carlisle's articulation of a Victorian understanding of olfaction. But while Carlisle pays illuminating attention to smell in the novels of the 1860s that are her subject (the language of encounter and melancholy with which I describe Mikey Carver in fact comes from her), Common Scents is not really about smell, and Carlisle's observations about it are made instead to tell a story about class and about Victorian masculinity.

Carlisle's process, in what must have been its impressive obsessiveness, is impossible not to fantasize about: reading for their odors eighty novels written or published in the 1860s (did she use index cards or a computer program? post-its? crazy notes around the house?), she finds in these novels a surprisingly refined olfactory sensibility. In this decade, unlike in the 1840s, she tells us, novelistic smells are delicate, abstracted, and refined—they are scents rather than stench, florals and tobaccos rather than sweat and muck and death. Attending to them in their abstraction and for their indexical capacity makes it possible for her to notice the ways smells outline encounters (for Carlisle, face-to-face comparative, and thus evaluative, relations) and record exchanges (transformations or reversals in value) between a perceiver of odors and an emitter of them. That the novels Carlisle reads tend to write those who perceive the smells of others as themselves inodorate leads her to make the book's most dazzling turn: to a consideration of the melancholy man. Smelling others but written as unable to smell (to give off an odor) himself, the inodorate perceiver experiences himself as disembodied and thus insubstantial. And Carlisle's work in Common Scents is to articulate and to explicate this perceiver's novelistic predicament as a way of understanding Victorian masculinity and class relations and, ultimately, Victorian politics. The melancholics of the novels of the 1860s (Charles Dickens's Pip and his John Harmon, George Meredith's Evan Harrington, and Margaret Oliphant's Arthur Vincent among them) are symptomatic; restless, wandering, anxious, depressive without cause, romantic, nostalgic, alienated from a labor many of them have never undertaken or that they have left behind, these are men Carlisle understands as made insubstantial by their distance from materiality. The novel's melancholics have made an unknowing bargain, exchanging the material engagements that produce smells (in nonfiction Victorian texts on smell, "noses, more often than not, smell work" [41]) for civility, sometimes for urbanity, for modernity, for respectable middle-class status, for discursivity, and for gentility. Feeling and acting their insubstantiality, these men prove to need, in Carlisle's reading, women of substance: women whose property, money, and bodies may buttress and supplement the insubstantiality of their men. And a changing Victorian masculine ideal demands of them that these men take on the working-class strength from which their gentility has separated them...