Neo-Victorian Self-Help, or Cider House Rules

Abstract

Go to the self-help section of the bookstore chain, and you face a welter of advice on everything you were never taught in kindergarten about your body, relationships, spiritual growth, and managing your investments and career. Similar concoctions of personality and money crowd the shelves of memoir and biography as well as fiction, in defiance of generic and disciplinary distinctions. The private is publicized, making hash of separate spheres. Whether the integration of the personal with the political and economic is a welcome or an alarming sign-and across the political spectrum it has been seen as both it is not so much a sign of these times. Self-fashioning has long been regarded as a trade secret. Victorian self-help modeled the entrepreneur, implicating the fundamentals of character in the principles of success. John Irving's The Cider House Rules (1985) revives the Victorian tradition of self-help, as though turning back the clock to a time when home and work were united and character spelled success. In The Cider House Rules, the hero's development is both accelerated and stalled by his enrollment in two hybrid institutions: an orphanage that doubles as an abortion hospital, and a cider house. Both locations, the two zones of Homer Wells's life so far, serve as home, school, workplace, death place, and Foucauldian carceral institutions, perhaps. Like factories they amass-and divide-labor (including reproductive labor) that might naturally have taken place in the private home: orphanage and cider house collapse the public and private spheres and simulate families in an