The Marginal, the Equitable, and the Unparalleled: Lady Dedlock's Case in Dickens's Bleak House

Abstract

The Marginal, the Equitable, and the Unparalleled: Lady Dedlock’s Case in Dickens’s Bleak House Dieter Paul Polloczek (bio) I Art about ethnicity or race, about class, about gender and sexuality—in short, art that reflects, transforms, or engenders the shifting phantom of human identity—has been advanced by many as the crucial work for our time. In the sixties and seventies, historicism that embodied the contradictions of its culture was collapsing. During the eighties, the “theory canon” in humanities and art departments was in decline because it failed to construct a rationale especially for literary curricula. Contemporary criticism in the nineties has so far focused on the various relations between components of cultures. Among those components, literature and art are considered to play an even more marginal role than they used to. Critics have shifted their attention toward the phenomenon of marginalization as such, for never have so many assumed that the hegemonic “othering” of minorities is an important factor in fashioning dominant or mainstream modes of culture. An increased degree of inclusivity has paradoxically made it even harder for minority groups to articulate their unconstitutional and unethical disadvantages by means of complaint, appeal, or resistance. 1 For almost a decade, the most committed proponents of cultural criticism in advanced industrial societies have been investigating the links between inclusivity and marginalization. These links often serve as ambiguous signs and symptoms of the networking structures of global communication links. In The Mode of Information and The Second Media Age, Mark Poster has explained the contradictory nature of interactivity in these structures. 2 Sometimes it speaks through a radically participatory democracy, sometimes through a covertly neocolonialist buyout of environmental globalism. As a result, criticism in the nineties has predominantly attempted to illuminate and articulate possibilities for the notion of the marginal. However, some critics tend to overestimate the impact of minority [End Page 453] literature on the culture of which it is a part. While it is certainly both possible and desirable to specify the differences such texts are making in terms of crossing and shifting cultural boundaries, these differences must constantly be defined in contradistinction to established literary crossovers. Critics pleading for the cultural relevance of minority texts are thus pressured to reduce the established to the hegemonic. In On the Margins of Modernism, Chana Kronfield has persuasively argued, with an emphasis on Hebrew modernism, that minority literature competes with more established (but perhaps nowadays equally unread) texts for the very acknowledgment of marginalization. 3 Moreover, minority literature has to contend with nonminority forms of making differences. 4 Essentially, minority literature competes for better ways to expose, if not prevent, the damages that this very type of competition generally inflicts on the marginalized. Consider for example some of Toni Morrison’s novels, described by many as a supreme illustration and critique of consumer capitalism’s hegemonic construction of subjectivity. Since the “culture wars” of the late eighties and early nineties, these novels have been making their way from the margins of culture both into our curricula and onto the best-sellers’ bookshelves. Thus, the “minority” aspect of literature—as opposed to its articulation of the marginal—is often overrated, particularly with regard to the transformative impact it may have on the hegemonic features of cultures to which it relates. In cases where that aspect is in fact overrated, a danger arises lest the notion of minorities becomes reified as representative of the contradictions endemic to advanced industrial societies, that is to say, at exactly the point where inclusivity and marginalization connect. This is a danger because then minority literature would assume a role similar to the one established literature was said to play in times of organic historicism: it would be expected to encompass cultural contradictions while participating in them. More important, minority literature is only one single instance of what the constraints and possibilities of marginality can mean for literature. The marginality of modern literature in general emerges from its relation to more socially relevant ways of organizing and transforming knowledge. As I indicated before, this particular type of marginality can be said to derive from the fast-changing conditions of literature’s inclusion in modern cultural processes...