A Taxidermist Named Mr. Venus
Notes on a very odd book about Dickens
I am not a Dickens scholar. I’m not up to date on current research. I would all the same hazard that Arthur Washburn Brown’s peculiar 1971 study Sexual Analysis of Dickens’ Props is among the least-cited items in the literature. His method is nearly an example of proto-distant reading:
It was some years ago in a doctoral seminar presided over by Susanne Nobbe that I first read all of Dickens’ novels all the way through. Mrs. Nobbe suggested for the seminar paper that I might see what, if anything, Dickens did with the symbol of fire. I decided then that he had done little that was unexpected with it, but it was at that time that I developed the painstaking technique of going through the novels page by page and noting down on 3” by 5” slips of paper every reference to fire. When I came much later to work on the props in Dickens’ novels I employed the same technique, and consequently amassed upward of 25,000 such slips of paper. It is out of the foundation provided by this mass of material that the observations in the following pages are drawn.
Thanks to what sounds much like a professor’s attempt to put off a hovering grad student, readers may now enjoy Brown’s panorama of the Dickensian object-world. The book is ordered into chapters that bear alluring titles such as “Beanstalk Country: On Top of the Tallest Erection” and “The Oldest Lettuce: Erotic Umbrellas and Sexually Suggestive Food.” I am not sure whether Brown manages to work in all 25,000 references, but it certainly feels like he does. Every object has a “sexual” significance. This is to say, each stands for some body part, sexual act, or more or less transgressive desire that Brown claims to unearth beneath the surface of the text. Dickens is not usually approached in this fashion; paranoid reading is not usually so relentlessly quantitative. All of this is exacerbated by the extreme goofiness of much Dickens: characters with names such as Mr. M’Choakumchild (an abusive teacher), Dick Swiveller, Charity Pecksniff, or Polly Toodle; a taxidermist named Mr. Venus who marries a young woman named Pleasant Riderhood; a character in Bleak House who consumes nothing but gin and then spontaneously combusts.
The term “prop” itself goes nearly unexamined. “The novels of Charles Dickens are crowded not only with people but also with specific, concrete objects. If the novels’ pages were a stage, these objects would be regarded as props,” Brown writes at the start of chapter one (which is entitled “A Hundred Thousand Games: Why Cribbage Represents Sexual Intercourse”). This is as much justification as Brown needs. One thing that makes the idea of the prop interesting is that it’s a way not to say “object” or “thing,” words that have a more respectable pedigree in literary theory. Prop is a theater word. It suggests prop comedy: the most disreputable of comedy’s forms. A prop, then, is not just an object. It’s an object under a proscenium. Dickens’ world is a theater of persons, of characters, but also of things that take on the character of persons.
Sexual Analysis effects a thorough reversal of perspective on the relation between persons and props as we usually see it in fiction. Human events become accessories to narratives about things. Brown doesn’t so much interpret Dickens, then, as rewrite the whole of the Dickens corpus as a set of it-narratives. Also known as the novel of circulation, the it-narrative was a type of book, popular in eighteenth-century Britain, that recounts the adventures of some inanimate object such as a coin, a teacup, or even an atom. Brown’s innovation is that the protagonist of each chapter’s it-narrative is fused to an erotic meaning. Walking sticks, for example, stand for masturbation—logically enough. Less expectedly, an oversized head of lettuce is a symbolic phallus. But then, so are most things in Brown’s reading. Beanstalks are almost too obvious to bother explaining. Each object-itinerary is therefore doubled like one of Ferdinand de Saussure’s signifier/signified pairs. There’s the prop, or material signifier, and then there’s the sexual signified that it betokens. A third factor is the concealed identity of the human characters who are associated with a given prop (some of which—such as the “boiling liquids” symbolizing “sexual fire” that occupy Brown in his third chapter—don’t exactly seem like props at all; “prop” is also a way of not saying “motif” or “trope”). Various Dickensian persons turn out to be avatars of underlying, vaguely Jungian or Joseph Campbell-like archetypes, among them the “Loathly Hag” and the “Goblin King.” These are the dramatis personae of an overbearing “sexual mythology” that Brown elaborates in midcentury pop-Freudian vernacular: castrating mothers and all that.
The way in which any prop reveals its meaning is tremendously varied in Dickens, or rather in Brown’s presentation of Dickens. But the meaning is always the same and always comes out. Brown’s monomania is so complete that he more or less grows a new and deviously inventive work in the shell of a bunch of Victorian novels. He all-but obliterates the original text, even in the process of enumerating what feels like every plot point in every novel. This is not a book for Dickensians. Probably, its ideal reader will have read no Dickens at all. The fantasmagoria would then be complete.
Once started, “sexual analysis” turns out to be interminable. The symbolism of a given prop “gets larger and more prominent as we proceed through the novels, rather like a snowball rolling downhill, or, like the meaning of a series of related dreams.” This turns out not to be very akin to recent discourses on the agency of objects, which might have seemed like where I’m heading here. Dickens’ things don’t do as they please. They certainly are not independent of human thought or desire. Rather, they are the form that desire assumes, compulsively. Brown is, least of all, practicing psychoanalytic criticism, as he claims to be doing. Proper psychoanalytic criticism doesn’t identify symbols that possess an invariable and as-it-were objective sexual meaning across all instances of a text, whether of a fiction or a dream. For one thing, sexuality—at least in the more defensible modes of psychoanalytic thought—isn’t a stable signified to which signifiers attach. A person’s sexuality is rather the product of the vicissitudes of instincts as they traverse symbolization. This is why we have problems, after all. Rather than being the hidden origin of everything that occurs at surface level, anybody’s sexuality is itself the result of a process, most famously that of the grueling transition from the pre-Oedipal stage to supposedly normative heterosexual object choice. That is to say, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, but when it’s more than a cigar it is so for specific persons, for specific reasons. It will be evident why making a card catalog of every mention of cigars in a given oeuvre is unlikely to satisfy this analytic criterion.
Psychoanalysis does, of course, trace the cathexis (or occupation: Freud’s word is the less jargonish Besetzung) of libidinal intensities on human or non-human objects. The props that we encounter in Brown’s book have a different autonomy, though. It isn’t so much that Dickens’ characters, or even Dickens himself, symptomatically displace desire onto objects, as in classic paraphilia. Rather, objects as such—wooden legs that stand both for the erect phallus and for its castration, or games of cribbage that betoken sexual intercourse—emerge in Brown’s telling as lodestones around which characters and narratives arrange themselves. The sexuality they figure doesn’t really belong to anyone. If the novels are indeed a “hieroglyphic language which reveals a sexual mythology,” as Brown puts it, he seems unconcerned to figure out why exactly Dickens needed to come up with the mythology and its hieroglyphs in the first place. This is just how things are.
Brown’s displacements and condensations of identities, his concordance of the various “props” with their phantom personages, become utterly impossible to follow, for all his manic signposting. Here is a passage that is representative of the book’s whirling intensity. Brown is discussing Mr. Sloppy and Jenny Wren, two minor characters in Our Mutual Friend:
When he looks at her impressive array of dolls, Sloppy remarks that she must have been taught sewing for a long time in order to do it so well. Jenny replies that she was never taught a stitch, but “just gobbled and gobbled” until she learned how. She has sewn a great deal, and produced many babies, that is dolls, by means of it. There are interesting suggestions here of notions of the magical ingestion of babies, and of anal birth. Sewing, like shoemaking, is a manual craft of a suggestive nature, inasmuch as it consists of a rhythmic in and out sort of motion. Among other things, Jenny is a Loathly Hag who is a little girl. She is a little girl loathly hag who happens also to be a golden girl. In the uniting of opposites which takes place in Our Mutual Friend, she unites both the attractive young and desirable part with the old, unattractive, mother part.
Jenny is not able to walk very well. Sloppy offers to make a new “crutch-stick,” assuming the one he sees in her room to belong to “him you call your father.” After realizing his error and then watching Jenny demonstrate how to use the prosthetic, Sloppy observes that “it seems to me you hardly want it at all.” Brown informs us that, in this sequence, Sloppy is “telling her that at last she can stop being a castrating female.” Our Mutual Friend is accordingly “the novel in which the castrating women give back the phalluses they’ve stolen to their men-folk who ought to have and to wield them… Unlike all the other earlier castration threatening women with their wands, umbrellas, crutches, and other emblems of the father’s phallus, here at last is a woman who can freely consent to give into Sloppy’s hand the phallus torn from the father.” One can’t help visualizing the idea.
The gender politics of all this are downright hallucinatory. The book climaxes with an account of the wedding of John Harmon to Bella Wilfer in Our Mutual Friend. To remind fellow non-Dickensians, John is believed drowned and has been courting the avaricious Bella under a false identity. Due to the conditions of his curmudgeonly father’s will, it is only by marrying her that he can reclaim his rightful inheritance, but John insists on winning Bella’s affections on merit rather than for his (potential) wealth. In this he succeeds, luckily not before conquering his fiancée’s mercenary temperament. By this point in recounting the plot, Brown has identified so many characters in so many ways that he can make this marriage symbolize the coupling of literally every man with every woman in the Dickens-verse, thus bringing to its (happy?) conclusion the battle of sexes and generations that he has described with so much relish thus far:
It is a combination of the primal scene of the sexual intercourse of the parents with the incestuous scene of the father’s copulation with the daughter, and the son’s copulation with the mother. It enables John Harmon, in some displaced and refracted sense, to be in his father’s place in the act of his own begetting. He and his father are, at that moment, one. It renders him, therefore, in some remote but definite sense divine.
To his credit, Brown recognizes that such an extravagantly lubricious fantasy goes a little beyond the pale, even on his own idiosyncratic terms: “It is a chastening thought to me that Charles Dickens himself might have viewed the foregoing with horror and outrage… I personally find it quite depressing to contemplate the fact that he almost certainly would have regarded what I have written about him as being in the worst possible taste.” Just so. But it is also an open question whether, by now, Brown is writing about Dickens at all.
Psychoanalysis does not actually countenance apotheosis by way of incest. This is unquestionably fetishism, but it isn’t Freud’s. Is it Marx’s, then? The bizarre insistence of the “props” in Brown’s interpretation suggests that, indeed, relations between people have become relations between things, as in the commodity fetish. But if so, the consequence is not so much to explicate novelistic fetishism by way of the capitalist economy as to infect both with uncontrollable surplus: of libido, of meaning, of narrative. Sexual Analysis is a book so bursting-full of outrageous acts of interpretation that it ceases to matter whether they are correct. For them to be correct would erase the Dickensian text altogether to make room for a depth psychology of an unspecified subject, given that it isn’t in any recognizable way that of either Dickens or of his creations. Depth psychology becomes speculative fiction. If a cribbage board symbolizes “a hundred thousand” acts of coitus, it is hard to see how that sexuality could belong to any one or two subjects, or even be human at all. Brown’s objects flirt with an absolutely decoded production désirante.
Where else do we find “props” in the nineteenth-century novel? Well, everywhere: no age has been more thing-obsessed. But there are instances that raise the universal preoccupation to sublimity. Consider The Spoils of Poynton, by Henry James: the great novel of interior decorating. Poynton is a house. Specifically, it’s a country house that the widow Mrs. Gereth has filled with objects of exquisitely refined taste. Unfortunately, her son Owen is engaged to marry Mona Brigstock, whose family is of more or less the same (upper) class but has appallingly boorish sensibilities. The book’s drama turns on the wretched fate of these collectables should they fall into Brigstock possession—to the intense distress of Mrs. Gereth as well as her young friend Fleda Vetch, who happens to be in love with Owen, too. James lavishes descriptive prose on Poynton’s titular “spoils,” which consist of old furniture, satins, porcelains, and the rest of the late Victorian repertoire of fine things. As the literary scholar Thomas J. Otten has noted, special attention is here devoted to the interface of precious objects with human hands and bodies: “The movements most characteristic of the novel are ones like fingering, handling, fondling, arranging, gathering, rubbing one’s hands together (as Mrs. Gereth continually does, sometimes in delight and sometimes in nervous agitation); with The Spoils, James’s famously ‘grasping imagination’ turns to the literal act of grasping.”1
Arthur Washburn Brown would have had a field day with this. It isn’t, in fact, too hard to imagine a Sexual Analysis of James’ Props. All that fondling and fingering… As it happens, Otten doesn’t go there. Jamesian objects are certainly media of personal identity and profound psychic projection, but on a less mythically primal level. The category involved here is not that of “props” in general, but rather that of props that confirm their owner’s good taste and, by extension, social class in ineffably corporeal terms. The beautiful object responds obligingly, indeed sensuously to the brush of the aesthete’s fingertips. A Philistine Brigstock perceives no such forthcomingness. Although there was an entire Victorian industry built around the education of taste, it is ultimately in flesh itself that James understands taste to reside. Hence the intense reciprocity in his novels between decorated interiors and the people who inhabit them. Architectural details, rugs, draperies, lamps—all literally mold the body, and mold it badly if badly designed. To use objects well is thus continuously to reinscribe class as something inalienable because part of one’s substance. As Otten nicely puts it, Mrs. Gereth’s class is “so much a part of her that it has little to do with conscious action but instead emerges most fully in those ‘unwitting’ moments when her hand operates as if by rote; class thus becomes something buried deep within the body, located in the nerves and the hand they govern” (and thus operates much like “style” in the forensic connoisseurship of Giovanni Morelli and Bernard Berenson, one might add).
Brown does have some sensitivity to the classed connotations of certain “props.” Boot-blacking, for example, is tied to Dickens’ traumatic experience of déclassement after his father was sent to debtors’ prison in 1824. Yet for the most part Sexual Props is wholly uninterested in social and cultural context, as Laurence Senelick notes in one of the few (predictably scathing) contemporary reviews of the book that I have managed to dig up. As a result, certain of Brown’s interpretations are just factually wrong; his (no less predictable) reading of Dickens’ use of the verb “to come” to “adumbrate ejaculation,” for example, is vitiated because, at least according to Senelick, “‘to come’ was far less common a slang term in Dickens’ day than was ‘to spend’”2—although on this detail the present author must plead ignorance. More generally, Brown “has no sense of period, no feeling for nineteenth-century culture, no familiarity, it would appear, with any other Victorian writer.” The fact that Arthur Washburne Brown never seems to have published anything else does suggest that his career as a literary scholar was not destined to be an illustrious one.
Yet it’s the purity of Brown’s libidinal theater that draws me to his hermeneutic, loopy as it may be. Confirmation of refinement, of class—by connoisseurship, by touch, by a “contact with the object”3 that has not ceased to be the common coin of scholarship in the humanities—are wholly absent from Sexual Analysis. Brown wouldn’t know a Sèvres gravy boat from a chamber pot, and I suppose would consider both interchangeable vaginal symbols. Vulgarity has its utopian potential inasmuch as it renders such distinctions, or distinction itself, inoperative, as desublimators from Rimbaud to John Waters have known well. This is a book so absolutely, irredeemably tasteless that it can do nothing to shore up the self-regard of an educated class.
Otten, “The Spoils of Poynton and the Properties of Touch,” American Literature, vol. 71, no. 2 (June, 1999), 263-290. I’m aware of this article thanks to Jeremy Melius.
Laurence Senelick, “Arthur Washburn Brown, Sexual Analysis of Dickens’ Props,” Dickens Studies Newsletter, vol. 4, no. 2 (June, 1973), 50-52.
On this point, compare: T.J. Clark, “Preliminary Arguments: Work of Art and Ideology,” in Papers Presented to the Marxism and Art History Session of the College Art Association Meeting in Chicago, February 1976 (Los Angeles: Department of Art, University of California Los Angeles, 1977), 3.