Victorian Interior

London, Capital of the Nineteenth Century

Paris
Houses very tall and white:
Cafés, bright, all glass and light:
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Stalls of pictures, books, and maps;
Women walking out in caps;
Soldiers everywhere abounding;
Music on the Boul'vards sounding:
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Noble buildings: gilded railings;
Next them, dirty wooden palings;
Open gardens; dashing fountains;
And the Chaumière's Russian mountains;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"Passages" of fancy trades,
Far beyond our own Arcades:
Such is Paris at a view;
If you doubt it go there too.

--Illustrated London News, 5 September 1846

Consider how often the most important literary and cultural criticism of the last twenty years has been fundamentally concerned with visuality: the imperial or panoptic gaze, the (mis)representation of others, performative identities. New understandings of history, economics, and sexuality have emerged, accompanied not just by pictures but by theses centrally concerned with vision. As a consequence, a discipline called "visual studies" has been born, and anthologies such as The Visual Culture Reader have been published. Journals like Representations and October foreground the interdisciplinary interest in the visual and remind us to what extent New Historicism, cultural studies, and many varieties of feminism work with theatricality, spectacle, and theories of looking, to say nothing of how often these pages are filled with powerful and even bizarre images. Michel Foucault, the most significant influence on New Historicism, meditates brilliantly on visual images ("Las Meninas," at the start of The Order of Things; the scenes of torture in Discipline and Punish), and the way he rethinks "history" is not unrelated to the way he treats vision and representation. ¹

As we know, Foucault's mode of analysis counters nineteenth-century historicist narratives characterized by evolutionary development, archaeological depth, and contextualizing milieu. Yet one may regard The History of Sexuality as a concrete explication of Foucault's interpretive strategy during his career; namely, his version of "history" wards off not just nineteenth-century histories in general but Victorian history in specific. "We 'Other Victorians'" implicitly critiques the contrastive split drawn by Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians and explicitly rejects any oppositional understanding of sexuality within the Victorian period itself or between ourselves and the Victorian period. ² Foucault demystifies the "repressive hypothesis" by claiming that the Victorians talked about sex all the time; it was scarcely repressed. But his spatializing strategy is always to obliterate conceptions of surface and depth, such that Victorian repression necessarily becomes an "open secret." Every disciplinary practice that Foucault attaches to the nineteenth century is at bottom a figure of surface and depth: "the clinical codification of the inducement to speak"; "the postulate of a general and diffuse causality" (i.e., everything can be traced back to sex); "the principle of latency intrinsic to sexuality"; "the method of interpretation"; and "the medicalization of the effects of confession" (History of Sexuality, 1:65-67). Foucault erases the idiomatic definition of the Victorian--that the Victorian represses sexuality--almost as an incidental casualty of this broader assault on figures of depth and continuity. Yet the Victorian is arguably what antithetically grounds and enables his provocations.

In this essay I argue that we need to preserve a particular sense of Victorian interiority. But Discipline and Punish, Foucault's influential study of penal institutions, again encourages us to ignore the literal walls. Although the illustrations of prisoners separated into boxes and different holding chambers are vivid and memorable, Foucault's emphasis throughout the book is as much on the walls' transparency as on their solidity. Authority in the society of the Panopticon can see everywhere; its presence is felt everywhere: "This Panopticon . . . has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole." ³ The Panopticon, whose themes are "at once surveillance and observation, security and knowledge, individualization and totalization, isolation and transparency" (249), is not just a model prison but a model for the origin of institutional discipline; in short, it is a model for the creation of the disciplines by...