Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction

Leila Silvana May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317058410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Why were the Victorians more fascinated with secrecy than people of other periods? What is the function of secrets in Victorian fiction and in the society depicted, how does it differ from that of other periods, and how did readers of Victorian fiction respond to the secrecy they encountered? These are some of the questions Leila May poses in her study of the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure in fiction from Queen Victoria's coronation to the century's end. May argues that the works of writers such as Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Arthur Conan Doyle reflect a distinctly Victorian obsession with the veiling and unveiling of information. She argues that there are two opposing vectors in Victorian culture concerning secrecy and subjectivity, one presupposing a form of radical Cartesian selfhood always remaining a secret to other selves and another showing that nothing can be hidden from the trained eye. (May calls the relation between these clashing tendencies the "dialectics" of secrecy and disclosure.) May's theories of secrecy and disclosure are informed by the work of twentieth-century social scientists. She emphasizes Georg Simmel's thesis that sociality and subjectivity are impossible without secrecy and Erving Goffman's claim that sociality can be understood in terms of performativity, "the presentation of the self in everyday life, " and his revelation that performance always involves disguise, hence secrecy. May's study offers convincing evidence that secrecy and duplicity, in contrast to the Victorian period's emphasis on honesty and earnestness, emerged in response to the social pressures of class, gender, monarchy, and empire, and were key factors in producing both the subjectivity and the sociality that we now recognize as Victorian.

1 Dialectics of secrecy and disclosure

Sociology and the narratology of secrecy

There is no action possible without a little acting.

—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

My fascination with the project of secrecy in Victorian fiction was inspired in part by the work of a number of social scientists who have studied the function of secrecy in their respective fields: sociology, social psychology, and anthropology. It is recognized that secrecy in the Victorian world played a significant role, and I have come to believe that the application of sociological theories of secrecy to British fiction in the Victorian period provides insight into Victorian sociation and subjectivity. Therefore, in this chapter I will set forth in more detail the two primary sociological theories of secrecy that I will employ throughout, those of Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman (who could be called “Simmel’s bulldog”).

Simmel was born in 1856 and died seventeen years after Queen Victoria’s demise. The near contemporaneity of the professor and the Queen might make the former’s theories particularly well suited for use in analyzing literature written during Victoria’s reign. Their overlapping life spans are indeed convenient for my theses, but in fact Simmel surely meant for his theories to be generalized. He formulated his theory of secrecy in such a way as to acknowledge the historicity of secrecy, allowing the components of his formulas to shift relative to time and place. Goffman’s theory often seems tightly tied to the first half of the twentieth century. Some of his examples now feel dated (London chimney sweeps “dress in white,” “American college girls” play down their intelligence when in the presence of “datable boys,” American wives “leave The Saturday Evening Post on their living room end table but keep a copy of True Romance in the bedroom”).¹ The second chapter in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life is called “Forgetting of Foreign Words,” and the primary example is of someone forgetting a word in Virgil’s Exoriare. It is fair to say that Freud’s example is dated. This particular parapraxis is one that most of us in today’s world are in no danger of making. The fact that this and many other examples in Freud’s book are dated does not in itself refute Freud’s theory; I have no doubt that we could still test the truth of either Freud’s or Goffman’s theory, replacing dated examples with newer ones. If I am treating the theories of Simmel and Goffman as if they were trans-historical, it is only in this sense.

Sociologists, like literary critics, do not always agree with one another. Therefore, having presented the theoretical bases of my argument, I will tidy up a bit around the sociological edges, anticipating possible objections to my thesis (imagined criticisms by Judith Butler and, in a note, by Stanton K. Tefft). From there I will attempt to establish a connection between my work and that of John Kucich in his The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction, a book I consider to be essential to any discussion of secrecy in Victorian fiction. Kucich appeals to Simmel’s authority only briefly, but at a propitious juncture in his book, thereby placing himself in the Simmelian tradition. Because I intend my book to make a contribution to literary criticism rather than to sociology, I will end this chapter with a brief discussion of the role of secrecy in narrative theory and in narrative strategies as they apply to the fiction of the Victorian period.

Georg Simmel and the constitutional role of secrecy

Georg Simmel (1858–1918), Privatdocent and ausserordentlicher Professor at the University of Berlin, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In addition to the sociology classes he taught, he gave occasional lectures on philosophy, especially on Kant. He wrote an essay with the very Kantian title of “How is Society Possible?”² But rather than seeing this and similar problems as primarily logical and ethical, as Kant had done, Simmel sees them as structural. Unlike Kant, Simmel does not consider prevarication and other forms of deception as always socially destructive. To the contrary, Simmel sees a socially valuable creativity in the dynamics of the veiling of the truth. In The Secret and the Secret Society, composed in 1908, he writes: “All social relations among individuals are based on their knowing something about one another… . Our relationships thus develop upon a basis of reciprocal knowledge.”³ But he complicates this formula when he adds that all social relationships also “presuppose … a measure of mutual concealment” (314). Indeed, according to him, “We simply cannot imagine any interaction or social arrangement or society which are not based on this teleologically determined non-knowledge of each other” (311–12). There is a further twist:

all of human intercourse rests on the fact that everybody knows somewhat more about the other than the other voluntarily reveals to him; and those things he knows are frequently matters whose knowledge the other person (were he aware of it) would find undesirable.

(323)

This means that there are elements of deception and self-deception woven into the fabric of social life. I take pleasure in knowing more about you than you think I know, but apparently it does not seriously occur to me that you must know more about me than I think you do. Furthermore, these deceptions are a precondition of sociality.

Even though we know more about others than they want us to know, we certainly do not know everything about them, and we are often highly motivated to find out more. In fact, Simmel’s most important contribution to the sociology and social psychology of secrecy is his articulation of the role of concealment in social relationships and interactions – the roles played by silence, secrets, lies, misinformation, disrupted information, disinformation, deception, duplicity, manipulated ignorance, illusion, and all other forms of veiled information. In the exploration of the social history of concealment, all paths lead back to Simmel. According to him, both sociologically and psychologically, “secrets are necessary” as means to personal and social ends (332).

Were Simmel writing today, he might or might not have been pleased to discover neo-Darwinian support for his theory about the roles of secrecy and deception, on both the social and individual levels. In a recent book, biologist and evolutionary anthropologist Robert Trivers argues that both the capacity for deception and the capacity for the detection of deception (closely related to what I am calling the dialectics of secrecy and disclosure) are part of our genetic inheritance, both having survival value. All animals, including humans, are born “into a world saturated with deceit.”⁴ Survival and reproductive success require that biological organisms inherit skills both in deceiving and detecting deceit. Moreover, as these skills become more sophisticated they promote the evolution of intelligence itself: “The evidence is clear and overwhelming that both the detection of deception and often its propagation have been major forces favoring the evolution of intelligence” (5). Trivers continues: “An important part of understanding deception is to understand it mathematically as an evolutionary game, with multiple players pursuing multiple strategies with varying degrees of conscious and unconscious deception” (48).

Simmel arrives at similar conclusions, derived from sociological rather than biological premises. He catalogues some of the socially teleological necessities that are achieved through secrecy. First, concealment is universally necessary because complete revelation is psychologically impossible: if we revealed all aspects of our inner life, it “would drive everybody into the insane asylum” (312). Second, even the most intimate relationships would founder without “distances and intermissions,” whose success presupposes “a certain ignorance and a measure of mutual concealment” (315–16). Indeed, Simmel is convinced that many marriages fail because of a “lack of reciprocal discretion” (329). He argues that these necessary silences can often be arranged by mutual if unspoken consent, but sometimes “aggressive techniques” (315–16) are in order to achieve this end – that is, sometimes lies are appropriate. In this context, Simmel suggests that the “ethically negative value of the lie must not blind us to its sociologically quite positive significance for the formation of certain concrete relations” (315–16). Third, information that is withheld shapes the “intensity and nuance” (307) of relationships. Without concealment of information these important human subtleties could not exist, and the social world would be too one-dimensional to be tolerated. Fourth, without the ability to withhold information, the inner life of the individual is at risk, especially our self-respect, because it is closely related to the respect we receive from others, and respect requires social distance. We cannot always afford to be recognized as what we are. This need adds yet another reason to believe that deception is psychologically and socially necessary. Finally, another socially necessary feature of secrets appears when we consider the function of shared secrets, which create “we” groups by excluding outsiders. The concept of “we” that is thus developed is based on the idea of exclusive possession.

According to Simmel, the secret itself is an impressive psychosocial artifact. He says, almost reverentially, that the ability to keep secrets “is one of man’s greatest achievements.” The secret

produces an immense enlargement of life; numerous contents of life cannot even emerge in the presence of full publicity. The secret offers … the possibility of a second world alongside the manifest world; and the latter is deeply influenced by the former.

(330)

One experiences “the sensation of the ego as that which is absolutely ‘one’s own.’ ”⁵ Such a conception of the ego involves the feeling of radical uniqueness that escapes physical, social, and moral determinations. One’s secret world and one’s imaginative world (often the same) produce that feeling of uniqueness, and hence are components of subjectivity. The very idea of subjectivity presupposes secrecy.

Simmel says that we all understand why secrets are necessary, but besides the instrumentality of secrets, there is in addition the universal fascination that secrets generate. However, the value of the secret is only as good as the ability to resist the temptation to reveal secrets through gossip or confession. It turns out that the fascination with secrets is partly the fascination with the possibility of betrayal. Simmel writes:

The secret, too, is full of the consciousness that it can be betrayed; that one holds the power of surprises, turns of fate, joy, destruction – if only, perhaps, of self-destruction. For this reason the secret is surrounded by the possibility and the temptation of betrayal.

(333)⁶

When Simmel says that we know more about the other than the other wants us to know, he implies that we know some of the secrets of the other, but that we often keep secret this knowledge of secrets. There is, in fact, a significant sociological role played by these secrets that are not secret. Simmel says, “what is intentionally or unintentionally hidden is intentionally or unintentionally respected” (330). Part of the reason that these open secrets are respected is, as we have already seen, that we are only capable of dealing with a certain amount of information. It is for this reason that partners in modern business dealings want to know “only exactly that and no more about their partner which they have to know for the sake of the relationship they wish to enter” (319). I am discreet about the cashier’s acne problem not only for her sake but for mine. Discretion, however, is not merely a convenience but also a moral duty. The weight of this duty varies from one society to another. This duty is related to the fact that privacy (a space in which one can guard one’s secrets) is a partial determinant of selfhood. To violate the field of privacy allotted to each individual “constitutes a lesion of the ego” (322).⁷ Apparently for Simmel the role played by the allowance of privacy in the construction of the ego is culturally determined, often along the lines of social class. In more conservative societies, there is a pronounced “ideal sphere around every human being,” differing in size and extension depending on certain social contingencies. This sphere is created by the amount of privacy allotted to the individual, or to the number of apparent secrets (apparent, because many of them are known to almost everybody) to which the individual can claim a right. This sphere cannot be breached without destroying the “personality value of the individual.” The radius of this sphere marks “the distance whose trespassing by another person insults one’s honor” (320–21).⁸ In the case of “great personages” such as some kings and queens, penetrating this circle by even taking notice constitutes a violation (322). With the exception of children and convicts, every individual has the right to some discretion, even in less conservative societies. But in social interactions there are certain things that must be made known, and the individual has no moral right to demand protection from inquiry into those spheres. The “duty of discretion – to renounce the knowledge of all that the other does not voluntarily show us – recedes before practical requirements” (323). But of course even when there is a social need to pry into the affairs of others, often the keepers of secrets do not give them up without a fight.

As mentioned earlier, though Simmel clearly believes that his investigation reveals a number of universal functions of secrecy as a determinant in human interactions, he is well aware of the historicity of even these universal functions. The closest he comes to stating a theory relating to secrecy’s vicissitudes from culture to culture and from one historical period to another is what he calls his

paradoxical idea that under otherwise identical circumstances, human collective life requires a certain measure of secrecy which merely changes its topics: while leaving one of them, social life seizes upon another, and in all this alternation it preserves an unchanged quantity of secrecy.

(335–36)⁹

This seems to contradict his assertion that earlier societies needed less secrecy and had avail...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: The paradox of duplicity
• 1 Dialectics of secrecy and disclosure: Sociology and the narratology of secrecy
• 2 Lost in Labassecour: Villette and the privatization of secrecy
• 3 Selfishness and secrecy in the “howling wilderness”: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
• 4 Madness and class conflicts: Lady Audley’s sensational secrets
• 5 Veiled secrets, veiled subjects: Scheherazade and the orientalizing of Victorian secrecy in Bulwer-Lytton’s Leila: or, The Siege of Granada
• 6 The end of secrecy? The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index