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Victorian Studies, Volume 48, Number 4, Summer 2006, pp. 625-657 (Article)

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Strategic Formalism:
Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies

Caroline Levine

S
ince the demise of the New Criticism, literary critics have
struggled to articulate links between literary forms and social
formations. From Georg Lukács to Pierre Macherey and Fredric
Jameson, Marxists have been inclined to understand literary forms as
expressions of social and economic realities. To be sure, literary forms
do not reflect economic arrangements in any simple way in this critical
tradition. In The Political Unconscious (1981)—perhaps the most
sustained articulation of a Marxist incorporation of formalist
concerns—Jameson defines an attention to the ideology of form as an
effort to grasp the “symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexist-
ence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipa-
tions of modes of production” (76). Traces or anticipations: for
Jameson, the form of the literary artifact is by no means simply an after-
effect of the “real”; it may itself promise or predict a new reality. Urging
us to move beyond political readings that focus on a text’s content—its
representation of class relations, for example—Jameson argues that the
“historical or ideological subtext . . . is not immediately present as such,
not some common-sense external reality,” but “rather must itself always
be (re)constructed after the fact” (81). Thus it is literary forms, read in
their rich complexity as struggles among conflicting sign systems, that
bear witness to a dialectical social agon, offering us our best access to
both existent and emergent systems of social relations.
Foucauldian and New Historicist critics, too, have argued that
literary forms do not merely reflect social relationships but may help
bring them into being. Powerfully influential accounts of the

We have invited Carolyn Dever and Herbert Tucker to consider Caroline Levine’s argu-
ment for a new approach to cultural studies: their responses to the idea of a “strategic
formalism” will appear in issue 49.1 (Autumn 2006) of Victorian Studies.

SUMMER 2006
626 CAROLINE LEVINE

nineteenth-century novel as different as Nancy Armstrong’s and D. A.

Miller’s share the notion that the specificities of the genre shape new
models of subjectivity, paving the way for the increasingly disciplinary
power formations of bourgeois society. As Armstrong writes, “the
domestic novel antedated—was necessarily antecedent to—the way of
life it represented” (9). And Miller suggests that the novel undertook
the “successful” task of forming “a subject habituated to psychic
displacements, evacuations, reinvestments, in a social order whose
totalizing power circulates all the more easily for being pulverized”
(xiii). In both cases, the novel itself is capable of ushering in new power
relations.
Despite crucial political and methodological differences, then,
Marxist and Foucauldian critics have tended to share a conviction
about the power of literary forms in the social sphere. Literary forms
matter politically because they are indexes of social forms, expressing
or fostering dominant social and economic relationships.
This essay draws on these models to arrive at a new hypothesis.
It develops the idea that literary forms are socially and politically
forceful but concludes that they do not derive their power from their fit
with existing or emerging patterns of social life. Instead, literary forms
participate in a destabilizing relation to social formations, often
colliding with social hierarchies rather than reflecting or foreshad-
owing them. Literary forms, that is, trouble and remake political rela-
tionships in surprising, aleatory, and often confusingly disorderly ways.
A range of critics in recent years—including Heather Dubrow, Dorothy
Hale, Ellen Rooney, Herbert Tucker, and Susan Wolfson—have urged
a new attention to form as part of a politically aware historicism. This
article takes up their call. On the one hand, it relies on historicist work
in the field to understand the ways that literary forms have force in the
social world and are capable of shaping political arrangements. On the
other hand, it extends formalist insights to make the case that social
hierarchies and institutions can themselves be understood as forms.
What emerges is a cultural-political field in which literary forms and
social formations can be grasped as comparable and overlapping
patternings operating on a common plane. Neither precedes or domi-
nates the other, and they are less likely to reinforce each other than to
clash, interrupt, or derail one another. This new formalism claims two
benefits: it suggests a reevaluation of the force of the major cultural-
political categories we have long recognized, such as gender, race, and

VICTORIAN STUDIES
STRATEGIC FORMALISM 627

class; and it reveals cultural, social, and political arrangements and

possibilities that are often occluded by the conventional methods and
premises of cultural studies.
This essay unfolds in several stages. It begins by turning to
current scholarship on “separate spheres,” which has shown that a too-
strict reliance on ideology as an explanatory principle has masked the
complexities of gender’s operations in the socio-cultural field. It then
rearticulates gender as one of many forms, and shows how its power
fluctuates as it encounters other forms. The essay argues that a certain
implicit formalism is already at work in cultural studies, and that
complex relations among identity categories become most intelligible
if we understand them as forms. What follows is a broad redefinition of
form and the outlines of a method for reading the social, which I call
“strategic formalism.” This formalism borrows as much from Michel
Foucault as it does from the New Criticism, and it puts its emphasis on
the social forces that may be unleashed by apparently static forms.
Finally, the last part of the essay demonstrates a strategic formalist
reading practice by turning to a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a
site where literary and social forms collide to produce surprising and
unintentional political effects. In this dynamic context, the binary logic
of separate spheres plays a constantly changing role, emerging at some
moments as part of a powerfully oppressive political formation, at
others as radically unsettling, and even, at times, as fragile and ineffec-
tual, lost in the struggle among vigorously contending forms.

Separate Spheres at an Impasse

In recent years, scholars have made it clear that the ideology of

“separate spheres” was less coherent, less binding, and less powerful
than simple accounts of a strict gender divide had assumed. In 1988,
Mary Poovey reinforced the importance of the “binary logic that
governed the Victorian symbolic economy” (12), but she also argued
that the “domestic ideal was both internally contradictory and unevenly
deployed [and so] open to a variety of readings that could be mobilized
in contradictory practices” (15). Since then, scholars have successfully
unsettled the notion of a rigid divide between public and private,
showing that Victorian women played significant roles outside of the
home, while men struggled to find their proper places within the
domestic sphere (Midgley, Tosh). Even the locus classicus of Victorian

SUMMER 2006
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separate spheres ideology—John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865)—has

been subjected to revisionist readings that recognize its contradictory
and emancipatory logic as well as its insistence on the gender binary
(Nord). And scholars of the nineteenth-century United States have
gone so far as to reject the category of separate spheres altogether
(Davidson and Hatcher, Elbert). As Cathy Davidson argues, the gender
binary “is simply too crude an instrument—too rigid and totalizing—
for understanding the different, complicated ways that nineteenth-
century American society or literary production functioned” (445). She
claims that it is a convenient “metaphor” that allows contemporary
scholars to think simplistically about nineteenth-century culture (446).
And so she calls for its dismissal.
We are at a turning point, it seems, when it comes to thinking
about nineteenth-century gender norms. Having been critiqued as
racist and imperialist, naive and consoling, the rhetoric of separate
spheres has been dismantled, revised, and now even rejected. But
unless we wanted to argue that men and women were absolutely equal
in the period, or that the cultural distinction between masculinity and
femininity was non-existent or irrelevant—which, to my knowledge, no
scholar has been inclined to do—it is difficult to argue that we have no
need for an analytic approach to separate spheres at all. So: What kind
of power did the different discourses of gender wield in the period?
What difference did the notion of “separate spheres” actually make?
Critics in the Marxist tradition tend to understand gender as an
ideology, and they account for its complexity in a variety of ways. One
version of the argument presumes that although bourgeois interests
produced and shored up the rhetoric of separate spheres, there was
sufficient contestation by marginal and radical groups to allow room
for alternative language, unconventional choices, and the potential for
change. Raymond Williams offers this kind of model in Marxism and
Literature (1977). Here, the powerful seek to quell dissent, but inventive
individuals circumvent the rules (108–14). A less humanist version of
Marxism points instead to the contradictions in the ideology itself:
struggling to set itself up as universal and natural, the ideology of the
ruling class nonetheless contains gaps and paradoxes that open the way
to a different kind of social organization. Poovey’s attention to the
internal contradictions in the discourse of Victorian gender norms
draws on this tradition. Louis Althusser famously complicated these
notions: rather than imagining ideology as a single discourse produced

VICTORIAN STUDIES
STRATEGIC FORMALISM 629

by the dominant class, we should think of a range of separate cultural

apparatuses—family, school, church, even sports teams—that call us
into being, and shape us in relation to authority, producing our subjec-
tivities as participants in an ideological field that feels so right and true
that we do not notice it. There is, in this context, no outside to ideology.
Thus, we might say that different Victorian discourses of gender
produced subjects as “masculine” and “feminine,” and the debates,
contradictions, and differences within those discourses actually worked
together to create subjects who, whatever their varying ideas about
gender, assumed themselves to be participants in a binary social world.
The different discourses of separate spheres might be messy and inco-
herent, but the contestation itself—the continual production of
discourse on gender—generated an inescapable recognition that there
were necessarily two genders, only two genders, and only in relation to
each other. This binary is what made heterosexuality seem obvious,
necessary, and natural.
Whether we think in terms of hegemony and dissent, in terms
of self-contradictions in the dominant discourse, or in terms of interpel-
lation into subject positions, what is striking about all three models is
their insistence on the integrating force of ideology. Ideology seeks to
assert and impose a powerful order on the cultural-political field. This
order has been one of the most important objects of analysis and
critique in literary and cultural studies in recent years: after all, if any
specific ideology assumes and enforces orderliness, when we consider
the complex force of different ideologies operating together, their
power to impose order begins to break down. As bell hooks argued
more than twenty years ago, race and class and gender are not parallel
structures of inequality; they are different forms that compete and
interlace and overlap. When we are faced with the competing impera-
tives not only of race, class, and gender, but of imperial expansion,
nationality, sexuality, and disability, the result—unless one is seen as
the root cause of all the others—is not an orderly political culture but
a highly contestatory one. And indeed, so complex is the overlapping
of different political categories that it is not surprising that scholars
have at times favored jettisoning one—such as separate spheres—
because its simplicity seems to foreclose a recognition of the power of
others, such as race or imperial expansion.
Davidson rejects the notion of gender ideology because it is
reductive. I certainly share her concern that it is too simple, too orderly,

SUMMER 2006
630 CAROLINE LEVINE

too all-encompassing to describe the complexities of nineteenth-

century social life. And yet this may not be a reason to stop thinking
about gender in binary terms. What if the binary was crude but also
sometimes operative? What if gender functioned as a binary, and some-
times powerfully? Some theorists argue that identity categories are
characteristically crude and binary—they can spread and be general-
ized because they are reductive.1 The social world is complex, then, not
because it eludes binaries altogether but because multiple crude cate-
gories are always in operation, and because they collide, overlap, and
decenter each other. When race meets gender, neither is clearly in
possession of the cultural-political field, though in some moments one
may eclipse, sideline, or swallow up the other.2
If we cannot do away with ideology, or with crude binaries, we
can understand the cultural-political field as shaped by a web of
competing attempts to impose order. What we call politics, then,
emerges as a set of jumbled and overlapping ways of organizing bodies,
words, and objects. Taken alone, each political agenda might be calcu-
lating and directed, but taken together, they constantly meet, collide,
and get in each other’s way. Crude, binary ideologies—such as separate
spheres—can dominate the social, cultural, and economic world at
some moments, while at others, pressed by alternative and competing
political imperatives, they also falter, are transformed, or even tempo-
rarily disappear.
To put this another way: recent scholarship shows us that we
need a vocabulary that conceptualizes contests and encounters among
different forms of order.3 My own proposal may seem counterintuitive,
since I suggest that what we need for thinking freshly and productively
in cultural studies are terms taken from a rusty and perhaps unap-
pealing old toolbox—formalism. True, I use the terms “form” and
“formalism” in unusually capacious ways. In literary studies, formalism
typically refers to the work of Russian Formalists and the New Critics,
but it can also stretch to include writing by a whole range of theorists,
including structuralists and poststructuralists. It takes a certain queer
logic to lump these all together affirmatively, since often those who
insist on the formalism of structuralists or poststructuralists do so
deprecatingly, imputing to them an apolitical abstraction, an elitist
hermeticism, an arid devotion to the aesthetic divorced from the messy
realities of the world, a pernicious universalism, and an unwillingness
to take into account the powerful historical forces that shape the

VICTORIAN STUDIES
STRATEGIC FORMALISM 631

production and reading of texts (Dillon 46). And, of course, both struc-
turalists and poststructuralists have been at great pains to distinguish
their work from that of their formalist precursors.4 But I mean to upend
the assumptions of our inherited debates and terms here and to
propose that formalism is precisely what gives value—and analytic and
political power—to literary and cultural studies. Formalist modes of
thought are the best that these disciplines have to offer.

The Power of Formalist Abstraction

For many of formalism’s critics, the charge of abstraction has

seemed powerful enough to topple the flimsy formalist house of cards.
But cultural studies—apparently the least formalist of literary approaches
and the one most attuned to historical differences and particularities—
demands a set of crucial abstractions that we can understand in the terms
of formalism, broadly construed. Cultural studies has been concerned,
above all, with understanding the politics of cultural production in
particular historical locations and moments. Much of the analytic work of
political criticism has been to notice hierarchies—but it has been, implic-
itly, to notice repetitions of hierarchies. A single act of violence cannot be
understood as political, but if it takes part in a series of such acts, in a
context in which hierarchies repeatedly organize experience, then we
may grasp it as political. Or to turn this upside down: when a critic points
to the politics of an act, a text, or an identity, she implicitly abstracts from
its particularity to an iterable, portable set of patterned relationships that
organize the social.
Involving powerful attempts to order and reorder bodies,
concepts, and objects, politics is inextricable from the question of form.5
The concept of separate spheres is, I hope, an especially unmistakable
formal example: the metaphor is itself conspicuously formal, evoking not
only a clear binary but also two spatially delineable forms. And if the
discourse of gender takes shape as a binary opposition that repeatedly
orders social experience, then gender is itself a formal problematic. In
fact, all of the powerful hierarchies of identity—gender, race, class,
sexuality—can be generalized because they have been formalized, disci-
plined into recognizable, repeatable oppositions. And so: if cultural
studies has taught us to see power relations as systemic and patterned—
as formalized—then it is time to think about culture in terms of its forms.

SUMMER 2006
632 CAROLINE LEVINE

This conclusion puts critical and cultural studies in an odd

position: the critique most familiarly levied against New Criticism is
directed against its generalizing, transhistorical modes of thought, but
the most politically, historically sensitive version of cultural studies
turns out to be generalizing and transhistorical too. A close look at both
suggests that the New Criticism was never only abstract and universal-
izing, just as cultural studies is never only concrete and particular.6 Both
involve a play of generalizations and particularities. Indeed, although
scholars often suggest that it is urgent to invoke the concrete, material
particularity of time and place to ground politically effective argu-
ments, it is actually a paradox to invoke “particularity,” “materiality,” or
“the concrete” as weapons against abstraction, since such gestures actu-
ally abstract the very categories that are intended to move us to resist
abstraction.7 To insist on the importance of particularity is, after all, to
generalize particularity itself. Thus we who work on a globally situated
Victorian culture, with its proliferating but interrelated objects of
knowledge, might be always and inescapably the heirs of the New Crit-
ical and structuralist abstractions that have been the targets of so much
critique in recent years.8
For cultural studies, such formalist abstractions are not only
inevitable but also epistemologically productive. To demonstrate this, I
will propose an unusually broad definition of form that seeks to elude
both the perils of a universalizing ahistoricism and the seductions of the
purely literary or aesthetic. This is not the formalism of the New Critics
or their successors, but it is not that of their detractors, either. Or
rather, it is both. Form, in my definition, refers to shaping patterns, to
identifiable interlacings of repetitions and differences, to dense
networks of structuring principles and categories. It is conceptual and
abstract, generalizing and transhistorical. But it is neither apolitical nor
ahistorical. It does not fix or reduce every pattern to the same. Nor is it
confined to the literary text, to the canon, or to the aesthetic. It does
involve a kind of close reading, a careful attention to the ways that
historical texts, bodies, and institutions are organized—what shapes
they take, what models they follow and rework. But it is all about the
social: it involves reading particular, historically specific collisions
among generalizing political, cultural, and social forms. One could call
it “social close reading”; I prefer to call it “strategic formalism.”
Deliberately echoing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, here, I am
proposing something of a post-post-structuralist formalism. It is decon-

VICTORIAN STUDIES
STRATEGIC FORMALISM 633

structive in that it acknowledges the political perils of abstractions, of

binaries, of apparently transhistorical forms, while also presuming that
we cannot do without them. Rather than an attempt to surmount or
dismiss reductive abstractions, this self-reflexive project of formalist
bricolage seeks to notice the ways that even the most perniciously
abstracting forms continue to haunt cultural studies. The point is not
to do away with simplifying, iterable forms, then, but to follow them as
they cross paths with other forms. For example, strategic formalism
would bear witness to “separate spheres” as an ordering principle—
fully capable of imposing its simplifying binary logic—and yet would
also show how it stumbles on alternative ordering principles that do
not—cannot—work harmoniously with it. This method is post-post-
structuralist in that it departs from familiar deconstructive practices in
one specific regard: instead of attending to the ways that two sides of a
binary contaminate and destabilize each other, strategic formalism
considers the ways that social, cultural, political, and literary ordering
principles rub up against one another, operating simultaneously but
not in concert. This method shows that it is in the strange encounters
among forms—even those forms that are deliberate outcomes of domi-
nant ideologies—that unexpected, politically significant possibilities
emerge. Thus social change comes not so much from active and inten-
tional agency as from the openings that materialize in the collisions
among social and cultural forms.
But why turn to literary formalism at all? One might argue that
sociology seems a more appropriate resource, since it is precisely the
aim of sociologists to theorize encounters among social categories. And
yet literary formalism is particularly appealing because it offers a highly
developed and refined vocabulary for the intricate interactions among
different levels and kinds of order. After all, the vocabulary of
formalism itself has always been a surprising kind of hodge-podge, put
together from discourses as various as rhetoric, prosody, genre theory,
philology, linguistics, philosophy, and later, folklore, narratology, and
semiotics. In stark contrast to the tidy construction of each work of art
that typically emerged from the analytic work of formalist critics,
formalism has itself always been multivocal and composite. In any given
reading, then, a formalist reader might account for relations among
multiple—and often apparently unrelated—formal elements. She
might connect punctuation to narrative structure, or meter to
metonymy. Thus formalism emerges as an ideal set of methods for

SUMMER 2006
634 CAROLINE LEVINE

thinking about competing modes of order, and it is particularly well

suited to the apprehension of subtle interactions among different
ordering tactics. The point is not that societies are just like poems, but
that literary critics, long practiced at articulating the subtle shaping
patterns that both reinforce and destabilize one another in a given
textual object, are ideally suited to extend those reading practices to
the analysis of cultural life more broadly, understanding cultural enti-
ties as sites where many conflicting ways of imposing order jostle one
another, overlap, and collide.
What the New Criticism and structuralism shared that could
prove particularly useful to thinking about “culture” was a commitment
to making sense of the interconnection of disparate elements. Both
focused their attention on networks of repetitions and differences, and
on relationships between specific instances and generalizing patterns.
Both also eschewed paraphrase and “message-hunting.” Structuralism
was more successful at connecting texts to contexts, interweaving the
patterns of the aesthetic and the social, while the New Critics were
better at recognizing the complex overlap of different kinds of
ordering principles within a single text. Of course, both methodologies
put an unremitting emphasis on totalities: the perfectly unified, auto-
telic aesthetic object for the New Critics, the finite range of cultural
possibilities afforded by interlocking structures for the structuralists.
Such totalizing visions have been convincingly rejected in recent
decades—set against the crucial importance of diversity, marginality,
and excluded subject-positions. But rather than discarding the notion
of wholes altogether, we might do best to approach it strategically. After
all, even those critics who are most dedicated to investigating diversity
and marginality must posit temporal and spatial boundaries around
their objects of analysis. A cultural studies scholar studying debates
about English-language education might focus her attention on the
period between the East India Charter Act of 1813 and the 1870 Educa-
tion Act; or, investigating the circulation of girls’ magazines in Britain,
she might focus on the fin de siècle—a time when periodical culture
was developing new markets and when notions of femininity were in
transition. That is, without imagining that the topics investigated by
cultural studies scholars are either totalizing or exhaustible, we
routinely put forward makeshift, contingent wholes in order to study
cultural events and patterns. The strategic formalist would invite a self-
consciousness about the act of positing the provisional “whole” object

VICTORIAN STUDIES
STRATEGIC FORMALISM 635

of analysis, rather than imagining that it is possible to do away with total-

ities altogether.
Strategic formalism is thus a way to begin interrogating the
forms at work not only in the cultures we investigate but in the thought
of the scholars ourselves. It is “strategic” because it invites us to take up
a new position with respect to the question of forms and abstractions—
a position not of flight or disavowal, but of critical engagement with the
terms of our own discourse. This return to formalism has a certain
urgency now. In the moment of the New Criticism, literary studies elab-
orated an intricate and nuanced vocabulary for thinking about subtle
differences. In the moment of cultural studies, on the other hand, it has
offered a relatively impoverished one, depending largely on the very
kinds of generalizing abstractions it has claimed to escape—the repeti-
tive, transhistorical categories of race, class, gender, nationality, sexu-
ality, and disability. Cultural studies is, we might say, formalist despite
itself. By contrast, strategic formalism pays an unembarrassed attention
to abstract forms as unfashionable as wholes and binaries, proposes that
we cannot avoid simplification, and urges us to recognize the simplifi-
cations already at work in cultural moments and in cultural studies. And
it complicates socio-political categories not by suggesting some way
beyond form but by inviting us to attend to more forms.
Extending the sheer number of the forms we attend to, stra-
tegic formalism draws on both past formalisms and historicisms to
develop a complex, composite vocabulary for thinking about the huge
array of forms that compete, overlap, and interconnect in particular
places at particular historical moments. If forms can be defined as ways
of imposing order, of shaping and structuring experience, the cultural
critic can attend to conflicts and overlaps not just among race, class,
and gender but also among forms of knowledge, forms of narrative,
forms of subjectivity, forms of space, forms of circulation, forms of
community, forms of worship, forms of administration, forms of inti-
macy, and forms of thought. Some impositions of order are discursive,
others are embodied—the bildungsroman and the rhetoric of separate
spheres on the one hand, domestic architecture and police custody on
the other. All are political. But all are also “literary” in the New Critical
sense that they can be read for their various paradigms of ordering and
for the subtle interactions between and within those paradigms. With
this model in mind, we do not have to jettison one form in favor of
another simply because they are incommensurate, but can instead

SUMMER 2006
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think like New Critics about how both reductive and intricate formal
patterns operate intricately together.9 In short, a strategic formalism
invites us to begin to read cultures as dense networks of different kinds
of interacting forms.

Dynamic Forms

Though I have invoked New Criticism and structuralism as

models here, strategic formalism differs from its precursors in the sense
that it seeks to be as much diachronic as synchronic, attempting to
account for the ways that history unfolds. I take my cue in part from
Foucault. Beginning with Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault
suggests that historical change happens when specific institutions intro-
duce new ideas for imposing order. For example, an administrator
might propose a plan for putting prisoners to work that saves money for
the prison, an idea for organizing factory workers that allows each to
repeat a specific task with maximum efficiency, or a rearrangement of
school dormitories intended to prevent sexual acts between students.
“On almost every occasion,” Foucault writes, disciplinary techniques are
“adopted in response to particular needs: an industrial innovation, a
renewed outbreak of certain epidemic diseases, the invention of the
rifle or the victories of Prussia” (Discipline 138). Soon the technique
spreads: others copy it, and perhaps, in time, other institutions will
borrow it, reshaping it for new contexts. Importantly, the technique will
spread only insofar as it works. It must solve a problem faced in other
locations and contexts: typically, for Foucault, it must resolve a
common predicament of turmoil, inefficiency, or invisibility, thus
allowing power to work more effectively. And sometimes it does not
work: the public torture of regicides, intended to reinforce the power
of the king, ended up unsettling monarchical power, since it led to mob
unrest and disorder.
Three aspects of this version of Foucauldian historicism seem
noteworthy here. First, Foucault emphasizes techniques for imposing
order that are developed piecemeal, in response to particular institu-
tional demands. Often, quite unintentionally, the most local solutions
carry a force that goes beyond local needs, while the most grandiose
plans for remaking societies fail to materialize.10 There is, in other
words, a force to forms themselves: a historical potential that inheres in
techniques rather than persons. Thus the organization of a school

VICTORIAN STUDIES
STRATEGIC FORMALISM 637

dormitory might have more power, ultimately, than a state-imposed

trade tariff. Second, forms are portable: indeed, their historical impor-
tance is shown precisely by the extent to which they are taken up at
different times and in different places. Always local in origin, they are
always potentially generalizable. Third, forceful and portable but not
under the control of their inventors or users, the historical spread of
techniques illustrates a crucial gap between intentionality and effect,
between the desires groups have for consolidating power and the
results that follow from particular strategies. This is the gap between
ideology as a comprehensive group-based attempt to impose order and
the kinds of successes and failures that particular ordering tactics actu-
ally achieve. Foucault hints that there is a force that inheres not only in
forms themselves, but in the successful achievement of order, regard-
less of human agency and intentionality.
If techniques succeed by imposing order, we might say that
Foucauldian history takes shape through the introduction of new
formal tactics. The Panopticon is a new way of ordering space; the time-
table is a new way of arranging time; the novel is a new way of producing
a disciplined subjectivity. Foucauldian formalism thus apprehends the
participation of literary forms in the political arena. Here literary
scholars have already provided strong models. Armstrong makes the
case that “novels were making history as they turned scenes of punish-
ment into those that represented order in terms resembling represen-
tations of the factory, prison, and schoolroom” (185). And Miller shows
how novelistic plots incorporate strategies for reshaping readers to
internalize the demands of discipline. In these accounts, the novel
behaves like an institution in its own right, capable of making and
remaking subjects through its narrative strategies.
Where I depart from Armstrong and Miller—from Foucault
himself and the New Historicist critics he has influenced—is in the
notion that literary forms are coherently political, or that they intervene in
a coherently arranged social context. For example, let us imagine that in
a given nineteenth-century novel, the following social and literary forms
(among others) meet: the triple-decker, colonial administration, Chris-
tian brotherhood, liberal individualism, national unity, separate spheres,
racial hierarchy, narrative suspense, syllepsis, free indirect speech, and
the bildungsroman. Sometimes these forms come together to create
unified, powerful cultural formations: the grammatical “forking” of
syllepsis, as Garrett Stewart has argued powerfully and subtly, supports

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the project of colonialism as the “figure of (and for) strategic—and

forced—reunification” (205). But crucially, at other times, the logic of
one form will get in the way of the power of another, and the forms will
undermine one another, opening the way to social and discursive disrup-
tions. The Christian liberal subject, for example, might be broken down
into a set of organizing principles that often work forcefully in concert to
produce a strong nationalist and imperialist agenda: the unified but self-
cultivating individual, who speaks the language of universal “man” yet
also classifies cultures on the basis of their embrace of Christian morality,
individual autonomy, and rationality. And yet, the separate elements of
this subject can come into conflict: at one moment, this subject might
well praise England’s tradition of freedom and therefore unite individu-
alism with patriotism and colonial expansion, but at another moment—
in the context of wartime jingoism, for example—the organizing
principles of individual autonomy and the autonomous Christian
conscience might collide with the call for national unity and pave the way
for a dissenting anti-war movement. Similarly, the capacity for self-
cultivation makes this subject suitable for the narrative form of Bildung,
but its very openness to alterity also makes it susceptible to breakdown,
self-critique, and transformation. Thus the narrative form of Bildung
might consolidate the unified subject of liberalism, but it might just as
well point to its fractured impossibility (Fraiman 12). The presumption
of universalism, similarly, might lead liberals to characterize non-Western
peoples as undeveloped or childlike and hence to justify aggressive colo-
nial campaigns, since, according to this logic, any individual or group not
choosing rational self-government needs to be taught, led, and governed
by those who know better (Mehta). But the metaphor of childhood
carries with it its own form—the lifespan—that itself suggests that Britain
will decline and age, like other empires, while currently “immature”
nations have the capacity to grow strong and powerful. Thus the rhetoric
of colonial aggression is always potentially haunted by the threat of
Britain’s impending decline.11 On an even larger scale, liberalism itself is
not a single form, but a constellation of overlapping and interconnecting
principles of social organization, which are themselves capable of
conflict. For example, liberalism typically presumes a universalism that
imagines that every human is capable of rational self-government and
should therefore be tolerated, even supported, in the fullness of her
difference; and it also rests on a recognition of plurality, of existing
differences. If liberalism’s record bears witness to a doubled history, this

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is in part because these two organizing principles have at times diverged

and clashed: liberalism’s promise of a utopian universalism has been the
resource of numerous progressive movements, from Wollstonecraftian
feminism to civil rights; while its recognition of existing differences has
justified imperial power and violence. Liberalism is capable, then, of
splitting, even turning on itself. Of course, this condensed account is
much too schematic, but the crucial point here is that rather than
arguing for a reading of bourgeois individualism as nationalist or anti-
nationalist, for the bildungsroman as orderly ideology or self-fracturing
difference, or for liberalism as either emancipatory or aggressive, a new
formalism can unpack the intricate and specific conflicts among
ordering principles that lie within and between generalizing forms.
Such a project might begin to seem vast and undifferentiated,
and indeed it is part of the value of a method to reach beyond particular
instances to an unforeseeable array of possibilities. But in beginning to
practice this method myself, I have made some choices about which
forms matter most: I have been particularly struck by collisions between
and within social and literary forms that disrupt a sense that literary
forms “fit” the social, and I have paid special attention to those colli-
sions that suggest consequences that go beyond any conscious inten-
tion, formal encounters that surprise power out of its intended tracks.
My method is “strategic,” then, not only because it must make do with
what it critiques, but also because it exposes the inadvertent conse-
quences of calculated subjective action, revealing how often the most
clear-cut political projects are rerouted and destabilized in the face of
contending forms. In this light, politics turns out to be something quite
different from the project of articulating and imposing a new order.
And if the jostling of incommensurable forms of order is an inevitable
fact of social life, then any meaningful political strategy must involve,
first and foremost, an intricate practice of formalist reading.

Unities and Divisions

In order to make my case more fully, I will turn to a particular

Victorian example. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Cry of the Children”
(1843) might seem painfully obvious in its politics: it isolates a specific
social problem—child labor—and suggests that readers have a responsi-
bility to act in response to the children’s suffering. Straightforwardly
progressive in its aspirations, and reputedly successful in prompting its

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readers to action (Avery and Stott 99), this text would appear, perhaps, no
site for the complex collision of forms. But I propose to read this poem in
two stages to suggest that an unintentionally intricate and inconsistent set
of political conclusions issues from the encounters between social and
literary forms mobilized by this poem. Both stages of this reading focus on
the poem’s use of the rhetoric of domesticity, and both disclose the
changing power of the form of separate spheres as it collides with other
forms. In the first iteration of my reading, I will attend to the formal divi-
sions within the text, showing how the poet employed literary forms to
reveal oppressive and corrupt social formations. Barrett Browning
suggests that poetry, with its capacity for tensions, inversions, and ironies,
is ideally suited to the representation of a divided and hypocritical nation.
Here, social and literary forms seem to unite in an obviously progressive
program to reunite England. And yet, the politically progressive character
of this fusion is thrown into question as soon as Barrett Browning’s ideal
of a unified collective is mobilized in other political contexts, becoming
nationalism and jingoism, enforced consensus and the quelling of
dissent. These contrasting possibilities are indistinguishable within the
poem and release their differing power only as they encounter other
forms. In the second stage of my reading, I trace the implications of
Barrett Browning’s central metaphor. The poet uses the metaphor of the
family in three registers—the family-as-kin, the family of the nation, and
the universal “Christian” family—a fusion we see in many Victorian texts
and one that gestures to the importance of the family as an organizing
ideological formation. Certainly, Barrett Browning insists that all three
domestic registers can and should work together to create a more just and
loving England. But if we follow the encounters among these forms
beyond the poem, they collide in ways that undermine the power of each
to organize the social. Thus the metaphor of domesticity, far from
imposing a coherent order on social experience, actually unleashes a
jumble of organizing principles that support contradictory political aims
and produce a profoundly unstable political-cultural field.
“The Cry of the Children” begins by invoking a series of family
relationships:

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears. (1–4)

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They are weeping in the playtime of the others,

In the country of the free. (11–12)

But the young, young children, O my brothers,

Do you ask them why they stand
Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers
In our happy Fatherland? (21–24)

Child labor is clearly a national problem: the “happy Fatherland” is not

living up to its claim to be “the country of the free.” But the poem simul-
taneously presents the same problem as a failure of the household: in
these lines we have children, mothers, brothers, and a father who fail to
care for those children. And the oddity of Barrett Browning’s image is
that it mixes together the literal and figurative registers. Literal mothers
are unable to comfort their children, while at the same time the figura-
tive father of the “Fatherland” fails to care for the “children” of the
nation. All of this is framed, of course, by the appeal from the narrator
to her “brothers,” the poem’s appointed audience. This repeated
appeal takes on a triple sense in the text: first, the poet evokes the family
relationship in order to urge her readers to take responsibility for the
children of the nation as if everyone were literally related to one
another; second, she insists on the notion of a national brotherhood,
since the second parent-figure mentioned in the poem is the “happy
Fatherland”; and third, as the poem unfolds, it turns out that we should
also be thinking of a Christian brotherhood, since God the Father
appears, later in the poem, seeming to the child-workers like the
unfeeling factory overseers—the only father-figures they know. Only
when adult men begin to live genuinely charitable Christian lives, the
poet suggests, will the children be able to believe in a good and loving
God. Here, then, three powerful social formations come together as
versions of the same: domesticity, nationality, and Christianity. The
logic of separate spheres seems powerful indeed, authorizing the
woman poet—whose “proper” realm involves the domestic affections—
to argue that a loving domesticity must join with the large domesticity
of the nation and the even larger demands of a universalizing Christian
brotherhood to care for the children of England.
Within this comprehensive familial framework, the poem
emphasizes divisions and disunities. Indeed, dissonance is one of the
major formal and polemical strategies of the poem. Having fused the

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nation and the world into a single family, operating in a single, carefully
united domestic context, and having isolated “brothers” as the site of
moral and social responsibility, the poem then disrupts this context in
a series of uncomfortable, tense moves. First, mothers are clearly
divided from fathers. In fact, mothers emerge as entirely innocent and
powerless. In the opening stanza, the children “are leaning their young
heads against their mothers / And that cannot stop their tears”; in the
second stanza they simply weep “before the bosoms of their mothers.”
Silent, tender, and embodied, the mothers offer the closeness of phys-
ical embrace and the hope of consolation but no escape from suffering,
nor any lasting solace. They cannot comfort the children because
responsibility lies elsewhere: with the brothers who govern the “happy
Fatherland.” The power of the masculine, public sphere overwhelms
and incapacitates the feminine realm of home.
In this figural environment, it is curious that Barrett Browning
begins the poem with an epigraph from Euripides’ Medea (431 BCE), a
play that comes to its climax in the murder of two children by their
mother—an act of retaliation against their father, who has decided to
take a new wife. An ancient play that imagines mothers as capable of sacri-
ficing their children for the most vengeful of reasons frames a poem in
which mothers appear both helpless and blameless. Barrett Browning
quotes Medea’s words just before she kills her children, words revealing
her remorse and anguish when the children look at her: “Theu theu, ti
prosderkesthe m ommasin, tekna,” translated as “Alas, alas, my children, why
do you look at me with your eyes?” Barrett Browning incorporates this
image of the child’s pleading look in both the third and final stanza,
when the children of the factory “look up with their pale and sunken
faces / And their look is dread to see” (149–50).
Why frame the poem with the look of suffering children,
begging their mother to spare them, and end it with the same look, this
time directed not at mothers but at brothers, caretakers of the “Father-
land”? In both cases, the children’s look expresses a demand: it begs,
piteously, for mercy. This is perhaps the strongest interpellative
moment in the poem, the moment when action is required and when
something must be done before tragedy ensues. For Euripides, too, this
moment is the crucial one: when the child is not only an object of pity
but becomes a seeing subject—one who looks back at us; this is the
moment of inescapable responsibility, as Medea is forced, very much
against her will, to recognize.

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In the text, Barrett Browning left Euripides’ dramatization of

the moment of responsibility in Greek. Consequently, the vast majority
of her women contemporaries would not have been able to read the
poem’s epigraph, though it represents the guilt of mothers more
clearly than any other in the poem. Perhaps, in the 1840s, the Greek
quotation would have persuaded male readers to take the “poetess”
seriously, since she was able to show mastery of an ancient language; but
more importantly, perhaps, it allowed Barrett Browning to address a
message only to male readers. Only the reader who knows Greek will
grasp that there are two conflicting images of motherhood in the poem:
the violent, vengeful, irresponsible mother who lets her children go to
their deaths, and the loving, powerless image of motherhood within the
poem. In other words, Barrett Browning subtly rewrites Medea:
replacing the guilt of mothers with the responsibility of brothers and
fathers, she implies that contemporary women have become helpless,
and she codes this message so that only male readers could appreciate
their failure. In doing so, the poet dramatically undermines the notion
that the feminine sphere of home is a site of moral strength or security:
to women readers, she offers an image of powerlessness, and to male
readers she first offers an image of the vengeful mother and then shifts
responsibility from her to the negligent brothers who are failing to use
their public power to protect and empower the domestic sphere.
If mothers are divided from fathers, and male readers from
female ones, the whole national family is also—and obviously—divided
by class. Barrett Browning separates children into two groups: those
who can be carefree and playful, enjoying the “natural” state of child-
hood; and those who are subjugated and imprisoned by the punishing
conditions of the factory. The separation of mothers from fathers and
the carefree from the oppressed then effects a startling inversion. The
working children are so alienated from their proper state that they
manage to reverse the usual relations of youth and age. The very first
lines of the poem introduce the logic of temporal dissonance. “Do ye
hear the children weeping, O my brothers / Ere the sorrow comes with
years?” (1–2). A few lines later, “the man’s hoary anguish draws and
presses / Down the cheeks of infancy,” and the children wonder why
graves are only for the old (27–28, 36).12
If families are split and laboring children alienated, it is
because the nation is divided not only in its material conditions but also
in its rhetoric: hypocritical leaders trumpet English freedom while

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ignoring the impossibly constraining conditions that actually prevail.

This dissonance is perhaps the primary source of the poem’s irony:
while claiming to be a land of freedom and justice, the “Fatherland”
willingly exploits its most defenseless members. In the first stanza, the
children weep and suffer “In the country of the free” (11–12). Later,
the poem similarly charges Christian brothers with their own hypocrisy.
In stanza nine the narrator challenges her readers to comfort the chil-
dren in a conventional Christian way. “Now tell the poor young
children, O my brothers— / To look up to Him and pray” (101–02).
The children answer such feeble Christian gestures by struggling vainly
to find comfort before lapsing into despair.13 Barrett Browning offers a
clear alternative to the failures of contemporary Christianity in stanza
eleven: “For God’s possible is taught by His world’s loving— / And the
children doubt of each” (135–36). God’s goodness cannot be under-
stood through hollow and self-serving rhetoric: the children will only
be brought to faith through loving action performed on their behalf.
Thus it is crucial for Christians to bring their ethical practices into line
with their professed beliefs.
Taken together, these contradictions and inversions structure
the poem and divide the national family: negligent modern fathers have
changed places with cruel ancient mothers; the family is split into
exploited and privileged classes; youth has turned into age; and England
faces the double embarrassment of national and religious hypocrisy, its
leaders self-divided subjects who fail to live up to their stated beliefs. The
rhyme scheme of the poem, with its doubled sounds occurring always
across the distance of an intervening line that belongs to a competing
rhyme—ababcdcdefef—reinforces this sense of splits and tensions. All of
these divisions, too, offer opportunities for irony: the “happy Father-
land,” the helpless mother unable to read the Greek text that holds her
responsible for her children’s suffering, the ancient child longing for
death, the country of the free, the factory-overseer as the image of God.
And all hint at a single solution: reunification. That is, mothers united
with fathers as the loving caretakers of children; child-laborers permitted
to rejoin their natural, youthful state of play and faith; England brought
into line with its own stated value of freedom; and Christians uniting their
faith with loving works in the world. Taking on gender and class, domes-
ticity and nationhood, politics and religion, patriarchy and paternalism,
a divided nation and an absent God, Barrett Browning mounts an argu-
ment for immediate resolutions to deep and unjust inequalities.

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If the poem’s formal techniques—inversion, contradiction,

rhyme, and irony—proved politically powerful in the debate about
child labor, they also had the potential to reach beyond that debate,
invoking a set of portable, transhistorical social forms. Consider, for
example, Barrett Browning’s accusations of hypocrisy and their reli-
ance on a particular conception of the form of the subject. The hypo-
crite is the person who proudly and openly professes a set of virtues and
then furtively contradicts those virtues in practice; to use the language
of separate spheres, the hypocrite’s public values conflict with private
actions. According to the logic of Barrett Browning’s poem, both the
split subject of hypocrisy and the separation of spheres should disap-
pear once England is properly united. And yet, although hypocrisy
seems to share the binary form of separate spheres in the poem, it is in
fact a different ordering principle, generating quite another set of
political implications when added to the mix.
Scholars argue that hypocrisy has grown especially significant in
modernity. Though premodern hyprocrites existed, certainly, charges of
hypocrisy increased in societies structured around the division between
public and private spheres and predicated on the foundation of the
sincere individual conscience (Arendt 96–106). Hypocrites are always in
danger of being caught and exposed, and those who use the disclosure
of hypocrisy as a political weapon—let us call them “antihypocrites”—
implicitly invoke an idea of the proper subject. The hypocrite improperly
detaches belief from practice, and thus the virtuous person is, by implica-
tion, the one who binds motivations to actions, who brings inside and
outside into a single harmonious whole. Of course, Barrett Browning is
by no means the only thinker to posit the political value of a wholly inte-
grated subject, the one whose internal and external lives are not—but
should be—seamlessly continuous. Indeed, countless radical political
movements in the past century—from Maoism to many versions of femi-
nism—have imagined that progress will only happen when political
subjects are at one. With these thinkers, there is no freedom without
integrity and integration, the oneness of self and the oneness of society.
On the other hand, however, a familiar cast of characters, from
Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud to Jacques Derrida and Judith
Butler, suggests that this position carries its own dangers. They have
argued that we are always and necessarily haunted by doublings, splits,
and self-divisions. They have worried that the insistence on unifying
souls and bodies, discourses and practices, requires violent constraint

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and control. Bringing actions in line with principles would only mean a
carefully policed reduction of existence to the rule of explicit doctrine
and prescription. Hannah Arendt, in On Revolution (1961), argues that
the French Revolution turned into the Reign of Terror precisely
because of Robespierre’s obsession with hypocrisy. The act of
governing became entirely focused on the hunt for traitors against the
revolutionary cause, the purging of those who had committed impure
and corrupt actions under the cover of public virtue (97, 99). And in
his classic account of the workings of disciplinary power, Foucault
argues that the modern regime of discipline invented the gap between
the secret soul and the public performance so that a new kind of power
could emerge, aiming to regulate chaos and corruption through the
meticulous management of the body’s actions.
The danger of the antihypocritical stance, then, is that its insis-
tence on formal unity may create its own kind of imprisonment. If
Arendt and Foucault are right, freedom has more in common with self-
division and contradiction than with consistency and principled,
unified subjectivity. But freedom is one of Barrett Browning’s most
explicit objects in the poem, and freedom is precisely what the poet
imagines will be realized through the exposure of the hypocrites. Is
there a contradiction here? Perhaps. After all, as soon as Barrett
Browning suggests that freedom will follow from a reign of antihypoc-
risy, she overlooks the potential coercion implicit in her own critique.
Seeking inconsistencies that divide thought from action, pursuing
contradictions, working to uncover betrayals of public rhetoric—all of
these might be politically effective when it comes to implicating
powerful subjects, but they will not, according to Arendt and Foucault,
usher in an era of freedom. Thus we might be tempted to call Barrett
Browning’s invocation of freedom its own kind of hypocrisy.
But were I to conclude with such an accusation, I would dupli-
cate Barrett Browning’s own methods: setting up a clear opposition—
in this case, two kinds of leftists, those who favor the strong, stable
subjective agent and those who instead celebrate the self-divided and
the inconsistent. I would be inviting those who choose the strong
subject to acknowledge the impurity and inconsistency of their own
arguments, the corruption of their notions of freedom with real and
painful unfreedoms. In doing so, I, too, would surely become hypocrit-
ical, using the weapons of simple binary opposition and consistency to
make the argument against simple binary opposition and consistency.

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If this seems like an impossible position, strategic formalism

suggests a response, in the sense that it imagines that forms—including
unified and divided subjects—have no intrinsic political efficacy, but
that they take on their political force only in encounters with other
forms.14 Thus rather than asking whether Barrett Browning herself was
really a radical or really a conservative—a debate that has been raging
about her for quite some time15—a strategic formalist would ask,
instead, whether the specific formal tactics she uses might be particu-
larly effective in political situations where powerful figures are failing to
live up to professed principles of justice, fairness, equality, and
freedom, while Foucault’s skepticism would be urgently required in
contexts where thoughts and actions are constantly policed, punished,
and exposed for inconsistency or self-division. The point, then, would
be not to isolate forms, to bind them to intentions, or to choose
between them, but to recognize their challenges to each other.
Certainly, consistency can challenge self-division, but it is also true that
self-division may be needed to challenge consistency. In this view, both
the hypocrites and the antihypocrites, both the Foucauldians and the
Marxists, might offer forms that could be put to strategic use for an
effectively emancipatory radical politics.

Form and Scale

Strategic formalism allows us to draw the implications of

Barrett Browning’s forms both in and beyond her own time, to bring
her into conversation with Victorian reformers as well as figures as far
flung as Robespierre and Butler, and thus it is a method that seeks to
be both historically specific and transhistorically expansive. It is less
about what authors intend or what readers receive than about what
forms do. And it links literary forms to social forms as if they inhabited
the same plane, as if poetic techniques and social formations were
comparably iterable patterns, each struggling to impose order. Thus
rather than reading Barrett Browning’s forms as pointing back to the
poet’s own political views or to unconscious ideological patterns that
subtend her culture, we may read them as generative models that
produce different political effects in different formal contexts. Setting
aside external causes and authorial intentions like the most faithful of
New Critics, the strategic formalist locates political effectiveness in the
impersonal operations of forms themselves.

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So far I have been working with binaries and unities—as if in

keeping with close reading’s most traditional practices—but now I want
to pursue a second formalist reading that involves a stranger and more
unexpected set of collisions. “The Cry of the Children,” as we saw
earlier, brings together three models of the family often invoked
throughout the Victorian period: the family-as-kin, the family of the
nation, and the transnational Christian family. Of course, my descrip-
tion of these models does not do justice to the many complex and
significant shifts in the constitution and rhetoric of the domestic sphere
that happened over the course of the century, but it does suggest an
alternative to a certain critical consensus about the politics of the
family. Since Armstrong published Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), if
not before, Victorianists have been alert to the repressiveness of the
discourse of domesticity. For Armstrong, domestic fiction represented
a remarkably successful technique for containing political resistance.16
And Anne McClintock has argued that from Charles Darwin onward,
“the image of the natural, patriarchal family . . . came to constitute the
organizing trope for marshaling a bewildering array of cultures into a
single, global narrative ordered and managed by Europeans” (45). In
these influential accounts, the family functions as a powerful organizing
figure, resolving the contradictions of the social while underwriting
both the disciplinary strategies of the modern state and the racism of
imperial expansion. A strategically formalist reading of the trope of the
family builds on these models to arrive at a different conclusion: first, it
rearticulates the problem, suggesting that the rhetoric of domesticity
exerted its extraordinary power precisely by joining together different
social forms; and then, pursuing the logic of these forms, it concludes
that the rhetoric of domesticity could not compel these different
patternings to fit perfectly together—and thus was incapable, ulti-
mately, of imposing a clear order on political experience.
“The Cry of the Children” is just one example among many
nineteenth-century texts that likened the nation to a family in order to
urge their audiences to take responsibility for England as a whole. From
as far back as Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791)
to Chartist calls to action, and from Jane Eyre (1847) to Bleak House (1852–
53), texts of the period often figured continuities between family, nation,
and Christian brotherhood.17 But, crucially, these different versions of
the family are not perfectly homologous, or perfectly continuous. For
example, the call to national brotherhood scales the family upward and

VICTORIAN STUDIES
STRATEGIC FORMALISM 649

alters it in the process. Women are routinely cast as the moral centers of
the home, but if the home swells to encompass the nation, then women
can be redefined as the moral centers of the nation, becoming public
and national players in violation of the conventional separation of
spheres. Florence Nightingale is a famous example: she and her admirers
persistently imagined her service to the nation at war as an extension of
maternal care. “Where I am is ‘Home,’” she is reported to have said to a
soldier in Crimea; “I bring with me its comforts and its care to the battle-
field and camp, and all a mother’s love shall tend your aching brow and
staunch the oozing blood” (qtd. in Edge 6). The form of gender, split
into public and private realms, encounters the form of the nation-as-
family, and suddenly feminine confinement becomes national political
agency. Amy Kaplan argues that this is one reason why white women in
the nineteenth century were not only victims of a disabling separate
spheres ideology, but powerful players in the production of racism and
imperialist expansion: “If domesticity plays a key role in imagining the
nation as a home, then women, positioned at the center of the home,
play a major role in defining the contours of the nation and its shifting
borders with the foreign” (582).
The call to universal Christian brotherhood scales the family
upward even further, and the result is another chain of peculiar
political effects. Although Barrett Browning invokes an image of a
Christian family to support her demands for specifically English
reforms, the form of the Christian family can subvert the national
family. To take a well-known example, nineteenth-century Anglo-
American antislavery societies relied heavily on the argument for a
universal Christian brotherhood and deliberately imagined themselves
as part of a supranational project. Here are the words of abolitionist
John Mercer Langston on the antislavery movement in 1858:

Its principles of love and mercy, of beneficence and good-will have their home in the
bosom of God. The paternity of the anti-slavery movement belongs to no particular in-
dividual, nation or age. Wherever oppression has exhibited its hydra-head, whether in
the days of antiquity or in modern times, there the spirit that animates and energizes
this grand movement, has arrayed itself in hostile and deadly conflict against it. (41)

If God the father is the father of all, then there can be no ultimately
meaningful national divisions or boundaries. And so the emancipatory
rhetoric of transnational Christian kinship joins the aggressive rhetoric of
national kinship that underwrote imperial, and indeed racist, expansion

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in the name of national superiority. As Tricia Lootens has shown, more

than one nineteenth-century poet paradoxically embraced a passionate
internationalism alongside a Romantic organicism, “with its project of
consolidating national identity” (259).18 Strangely, the two logics—one
universalizing and progressive, the other racist and nationalist—were
sometimes indistinguishable, offered up, as in Barrett Browning, as a
single metaphor. But they could also be very much at odds. The idea of a
Christian brotherhood authorized transnational projects as disparate as
missionary work, colonialism, antislavery activism, suffrage, and human
rights. And indeed, as political scientists and historians have argued, the
nineteenth-century antislavery and suffrage movements established
patterns of transnational political affiliation and activism that laid the
groundwork for the formation of humanitarian non-governmental orga-
nizations, which have been crucial to the processes of contemporary
globalization and to the undermining of the power of nation-states (Keck
and Sikkink 39–78). In short, in different contexts, the figure of domes-
ticity works both for and against nationalism, both for and against racism,
both for and against women’s confinement to the home. To determine
the politics of a metaphor, then, is to have to face the fact that the
different forms joined by the metaphor do not easily come together in an
orderly and directed fashion.
With the subject of metaphor, I want to return, briefly, to the
problem of literary formalism. Metaphor, in my account, is not a poetic
response to different notions of collectivity that circulated as political
discourse; nor does it function as an expression of the views of partic-
ular political groups or imperatives. It is, precisely, another form, one
that collides with the family-as-kin, the administration of the nation,
and the call to universal Christian brotherhood by merging them into
a single figure, allowing them to appear as one lexical, conceptual, and
social unit: the family. In her fusion of multiple forms of collectivity,
Barrett Browning allows us to see how powerful the joining pressure of
metaphor could be. But although the poet’s metaphor carries a
unifying force, it does not have the power to divest the cultural forms it
invokes of their difference; it cannot literally collapse them into one.
And as long as the various versions of the family continue to take a
variety of forms, those forms, when they meet, take unpredictable
paths. That the literal family, the nation-as-family, and the universal
family meet on metaphoric ground guarantees only that their paths will
cross, but they may ultimately undermine as well as reinforce one

VICTORIAN STUDIES
STRATEGIC FORMALISM 651

another. Thus the complex political effects of the rhetorical figure of

the Victorian family are not the result of individual or group intentions;
nor do they simply reflect the workings of ideology. Instead, emerging
out of conflicts among disparate forms, the composite, internally
divided rhetorical figure of domesticity is capable of generating its own
social, political, and cultural causality.
Using the same formal terms to speak about politics and litera-
ture together allows us to see that social forms and literary forms are
always potentially embedded within one another. Just as literary forms
employ social content, so social affairs are shaped and reshaped by
competing and various formal patterns. Certainly, national, religious,
economic, and literary forms deserve their own attentive analyses. But at
the risk of making strategic formalism sound grandiose and all-
encompassing, its potential is that it allows us to recognize that none of
these can be ultimately determining. As soon as we characterize the social
as an intricate overlapping of contestatory forms, each trying to impose
its own order, it is no longer convincing to take any of these as the cause
or origin of all of the others. In this context, “politics” and “literature” are
more comparable than not. Neither is more finally the agent of historical
causality, and neither is more obviously in possession of the cultural field.
When two kinds of form overlap, the encounter frequently brings not an
all-out victory for one or a stand-off or even a compromise, but rather a
transformation of the political possibilities of both forms. Forms, in this
account, do not only constrain and confine; they are not static and they
do not endlessly reproduce the same. Instead, their interaction is
dynamic, historically speaking, and when they meet they often generate
a radical alterity, an array of unexpected and unintended differences.
When rhyming couplets meet nationalism, and when the binary form of
separate spheres meets the bildungsroman, their encounters produce a
history of unplanned consequences. And so it is, perhaps, that the poten-
tial for revolutionary new social formations may come less from orga-
nized resistance and conscious radicalism than from the unexpected
encounter between forms.
University of Wisconsin

NOTES

The author would like to thank Susan Bernstein, Jan Caldwell, Amanda Claybaugh,
Natalka Freeland, Jane Gallop, Sara Guyer, Theresa Kelley, Tom Luxon, Megan Massino,

SUMMER 2006
652 CAROLINE LEVINE

Jon McKenzie, Mary Mullen, Mario Ortiz-Robles, Henry Turner, Rebecca Walkowitz, the
Victorian colloquium at UC-Irvine, and the anonymous readers at Victorian Studies for
their invaluable comments and suggestions.
1
As Gallop puts it, “these structures are crude and schematic, but . . . as with
most of the workings of gender and/or authority, the crude and schematic is usually all
too apt” (25, ellipsis in original).
2
For a powerful account of the ways these categories mutually constitute and
undo one another in the Victorian context, see Brody.
3
Intersectional analysis, a term said to have been coined by legal theorist
Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the analysis of gender, race, class, and sexuality
together—without subordinating any of these to the others—has offered cultural studies
scholars a set of resources for thinking about the relations among identity categories. But,
this approach has generated less a single, coherent methodology than a range of produc-
tive scholarly approaches, as indicated by the different ways of understanding gender,
race, and class we find, for example, in Poovey, McClintock, and Davidson. This essay
builds on some of the insights of intersectional analysis and pushes it in the direction of
a self-conscious formalism.
4
Lévi-Strauss, for example, argues that formalism separates form from content,
whereas structuralism understands no such opposition (“Structure”). Derrida writes: “It
is a normal monstrosity to say that everything the word ‘poststructuralism’ embraces is
formalist, aestheticist, apolitical, little concerned with history or with socioeconomic
reality”(79). It should be noted, however, that although structuralists tried to distinguish
themselves from formalists, they also used the term “form” to describe structures; see
Lévi-Strauss, Structural 21, 24; Barthes 109–14; and Culler 78.
5
In 1989, Liu made a dazzling case for the reliance of the New Historicist analysis
of power on formalist assumptions: specifically, he argued that New Historicists in
different periods invoked the same dialectic between what he calls “The Governing Line”
and the “Disturbed Array,” or between authority, rule, and structure on one hand, and
variety, multiplicity, and freedom on the other. This pattern, he argued, was reminiscent
of the New Criticism, with its “formal principle of connection holding plurality in unity”
(730). For Liu, this repetition across fields bespoke a symptomatic blindness, but he did
not ask whether it was possible that power actually worked this way: that is, might it be
possible that power precisely involves the imposition of forms to contain multiplicities
within unities?
6
It might be argued that the New Critics were as much—or more—aware of the
dangers of abstraction than their successors. For example, Richards maintained that for
political reasons, it is essential to develop rigorous reading practices, which resist or fore-
close “stock responses,” those passive habits of assuming one already knows what a text
means: “If we wish for a population easy to control by suggestion we shall decide what
repertory of suggestions it shall be susceptible to and encourage this tendency except in
the few. But if we wish for a high and diffused civilization, with its attendant risks, we shall
combat this form of mental inertia” (295). There can be no genuine democracy without
skeptical, active reading that curbs settled clichés and unthinking, conventional assump-
tions. Or to put this another way, the reader is herself excessively formalized, too likely to
fall into patterns of thought that she merely imposes on the text without attending to its

VICTORIAN STUDIES
STRATEGIC FORMALISM 653

difference from herself. Thus close reading—scrupulous attention to that which is not
the reader—interrupts the routines of convention.
7
In his classic essay on Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, Hall both regis-
ters their call for particularism and subjects it to convincing critique.
8
As Hartman put it several decades ago, “those who have tried to ignore or tran-
scend formalism tend often to arrive at results more abstract and categorical than what
they object to” (42). Moretti has recently made the powerful case that any attempt to
assert a method for grasping the vast and complex patterns of “world literature” will
involve abstraction: “reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s
precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know. This
is why less is actually more” (57–58).
9
I take New Criticism to be preferable to structuralism here because it provides
a model for thinking about tension and friction among formal elements as well as coher-
ence, for a perplexing and crowded multiplicity of ordering principles as well as the
clarity of strong binary structures.
10
Foucault calls successful techniques “small acts of cunning endowed with a
great power of diffusion” (Discipline 139).
11
Reynolds’s skillful account of the complex nationalism of Victorian poetry
suggests this conclusion, though Reynolds himself argues that the Victorians treated the
Italians as childlike, and therefore capable of development, while they “fixed” colonized
peoples in more rigid, unchanging types (82). And yet, there is ample evidence that the
rhetoric of colonialism returned repeatedly to the metaphor of the child. Charles Edward
Trevelyan, to give just one example, writes of India as one of a number of “nations which
are still rising to manhood” (qtd. in Zastoupil and Moir 289).
12
Later, invoking Coleridge, Barrett Browning goes so far as to hint that her chil-
dren are in fact more ancient than the ancient mariner himself, “seeking / Death in life,
as best to have” (53–54).
13
First, the children reason that the wheels of the machines are so loud that God
could not possibly hear them if they prayed (105–06); then, since they can just barely
imagine a place of rest, they imagine that God might be believable after death as someone
who would offer them rest (123–24); but finally they contradict this notion by turning to
the idea that man is made in the image of God. If their overseer in the factory is like God,
then when they go to God they will never, surely, be allowed to rest (127–28).
14
Thus both formal unities and formal disunities can bring about progressive as
well as conservative effects. Here, again, Spivak’s “strategic essentialism” offers a model
for imagining forms as both constraining and enabling: even such a widely recognized
and pernicious illusion as essential “femininity” might have its uses. Another justification
for such a claim might come from Deleuze and Guattari. They distinguish between a
“major” and a “minor” language by defining the major as the language that wields the
power of constraints while the minor works by the force of variations. But, Deleuze and
Guattari argue, this is not a simple opposition between unity and multiplicity, since each
is always already defined and implicated by the other. “You will never find a homogeneous
system that is not still or already affected by a regulated, continuous, immanent process of variation”
(103). Homogeneity always depends on variation; but there is no variation without the
shaping power of homogeneity.

SUMMER 2006
654 CAROLINE LEVINE

15
Led by Cora Kaplan in the 1970s, the first major cohort of academic feminists
praised Barrett Browning for her courage in speaking out boldly in a patriarchal context
and for her willingness to explore female erotic desire. A generation later, David’s
groundbreaking study of Victorian women writers launched a strong critique of the
poet’s politics, citing specifically her naiveté about poverty, her essentialism, and her
embrace of the role of the “traditional intellectual” (113). In recent years, Stone has
praised Barrett Browning’s willingness to “move out of the private realm conventionally
associated with women and become more explicitly political” (189), while Brophy regrets
the fact that the poet never broke free of conventional Victorian liberal views. And Shires
has argued that she acts as a crafty “cross-dweller,” adopting masculine traditions while
exposing their constructedness (331).
16
Armstrong claims, for instance: “Novels incorporated new political material
and sexualized it in such a manner that only one resolution would do: a partitioned and
hierarchical space under a woman’s surveillance” (185).
17
Reynolds shows persuasively that marriage worked as an image of national
union—though not always uncritically—for many of the most prominent Victorian poets,
including Barrett Browning (44–72). Burke writes that the English, unlike the French,
have wisely understood their nation as a family: “we have given to our frame of polity the
image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest
domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections,
keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually
reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars” (34); the Char-
tist William Lovett routinely refers to working-class readers in Ireland, Poland, and else-
where as Christian “brethren” and insists that “all mankind are brothers” (125, 131); Jane
Eyre’s Englishness—figured not only in her opposition to Bertha but also to the French
Céline—is epitomized as a model of self-controlled and disciplined domesticity, a model
that her cousin, of course, exports to India as missionary work; Bleak House figures all of
England as a series of interconnected familial links that join people as dramatically
different as Jo and Lady Dedlock.
18
Both Lootens and Reynolds also point to the difficulties of imagining Great
Britain as a single nation, given its multinational constitution, a tension that can certainly
be understood in formal terms.

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