The Vanishing Subject

ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 attempted to carry on until social and economic (dire financial need) pressures forced them to give up the struggle. What is also significant, asserts Barret-Ducrocq, is the fact that many of these "abandoned women" subsequently married and reclaimed their children and regularly wrote to the hospital seeking news of the progeny. Finally, BarretDucrocq concludes that the evidence in this archive refutes the view that the sexual behavior and morality of the working-class were primarily affected by poverty, filth, and the crowded, fetid slum life which they endured. Barret-Ducrocq's fascinating study is the translation of the French version published in 1989. In a few chapters the translation is somewhat awkward. Nor are the French and English titles of the book quite accurate because this work is not a history of sexuality in Victorian Britain, but only a study of one important aspect of the subject. However, these are only minor cavils on a very excellent contribution to the social history of nineteenth-century Britain which can be as useful to the specialist in the literature as it is to the historian of the Victorian scene. J. O. Baylen, Emeritus ___________________ Eastbourne, England The Vanishing Subject Judith Ryan. The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 267 pp. $29.95 IN RECENT years, the history of "early psychology," generally focusing on Freud and the development of psychoanalysis in the late 1890s, has received considerable attention. The importance of William James to literary modernism has received somewhat less attention despite the term "stream of consciousness," which he devised in his Principles of Psychology (1890) and which came to be for critics an essential touchstone in discussing such writers as Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, though without a context for an understanding of its wider significance. James, as Ryan states, was "no depth psychologist ," a rather startling comment since modernist critics habitually imply that the "stream of consciousness" reveals not only the apparent incoherence of consciousness but also the subterranean depths of the unconscious. Joyce's "epiphanies," usually regarded as a related concept, provide sudden illumination, but, says Ryan, they "scarcely seem to accord with the modern sciences that developed at the same time as modernist literature." 360 BOOK REVIEWS Because psychology in the late nineteenth century had not yet liberated itself from philosophy, its terminology and presumptions were cast in philosophical language; hence, the "empiricist psychologists" were those wishing "to revive eighteenth-century British philosophy as a conceptual basis for psychology." The "newly modified forms" of philosophical thought derived from Berkeley, Hume, and Locke—that is, a more systematic investigation of the nature of perception, which became the foundation of the new psychology. The Austrian Franz Brentano, a principal figure in its development, proposed that only through our senses could we verify the existence of an outer world. The methodology to be used was introspection since the only "reality" we could know was our own state of consciousness (Brentano therefore denied the existence of the unconscious). In this respect, the empiricist psychologists were post-Kantians in their skeptical approach to the notion of external "reality." Another Austrian, Ernst Mach, and William James also became leading empiricists who disparaged metaphysics for its insistence that "reality" was beyond our senses and who denied the "dualism of subject and object" (a concept leading to Husserl's phenomenology). If, then, consciousness was "evanescent," how could the writer create a coherent, fixed world with plot and character? James emphasized continuity as central to consciousness, but other psychologists, such as Mach, emphasized discrete elements, a "mass of sensations" in a less than unified whole. (Impressionism in painting, suggests Ryan, "with its various flecks of color overflowing the discrete boundaries of individual objects," is the "best way" to understand empiricist thinking, which emphasized differing perceptions from moment to moment.) Ryan's book on the "vanishing subject" reveals how "many of the most striking formal innovations of early twentieth-century literature can be seen as responses " to the anxiety that turn-of-the century writers experienced when faced with "the sense of dissolution and fragmentation" resulting from the new psychology: "Developing a single, consistent...