The Will to Power

In her field-changing first book, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism, Jennifer L. Fleissner placed female identity at the center of the most masculine of genres: American naturalism. Women, Compulsion, Modernity made the stunning argument that the trajectory of female characters in naturalist novels is not one of decline—the term critics typically use to characterize naturalist plots—but stasis, “ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion” (9). Fleissner pointed to Carrie in her rocking chair in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie; the heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” going round and round her room; Edna Pontellier going “on and on and on” into the water at the end of Kate Chopin's The Awakening; the compulsive repetitions of Trina in Frank Norris's McTeague; Lily Bart's vacillations in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth; Melanctha's repetitions in Gertrude Stein's Three Lives. In a stroke, naturalist determinism became naturalist compulsion.Whereas Women, Compulsion, Modernity maintained a tight focus on the late nineteenth century, the story Fleissner tells in her impressive new work, Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem, covers an extraordinary amount of historical, philosophical, and critical ground. The “philosophical trajectory of the will begins in Saint Augustine” (ix), she instructs us, and ends in our current critical moment. Scale aside, there are clear links between the two books. Fleissner cites with approval Leo Bersani's claim that the protagonists of the American novel possess either an “energetic excess of being” (Bersani 70) or an “equally unnerving” (16) “stillness” (80), the latter formulation strikingly similar to the account of naturalist character in Women, Compulsion, Modernity in terms of “stuckness” (9). “If Bersani is right,” Fleissner suggests, “character itself—individuality—may be . . . the source of [the novel's] deepest strangeness” (16). We should stop thinking that “the novel is synonymous with realism” (17), she proposes, and start conceiving of its relation to other genres, such as the romance, the term most often used to characterize American fiction. Such a recalibration would place American fiction where it belongs, not as extraneous to the history of the novel—Fleissner herself begins her chapter on Herman Melville by asking, “Is Moby-Dick a novel?” (146)—but central to it. As Fleissner sees it, “the American novel in fact has arguably far more overlap with Continental fiction [than with British realism], for, as has long been noted, it never quite makes the transition to realism from romance. . . . It also joins Balzac, Dostoevsky, and others in remaining in greater contact with the philosophical tradition” (17).Maladies of the Will is a learned book—perhaps too learned. Consider the following passage, from near the beginning of Fleissner's chapter on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: [Our] genealogy will take us from the nominalists of the fourteenth century, and Petrarch's dialogue with Augustine at the dawn of the Renaissance, through to the seventeenth-century writings that would establish the significance of interiority and lay the groundwork for the early novel. . . . We will then see how the eighteenth century, drawing on writers like Locke and Shaftesbury, strove to manage that interiority in order to conceive it as the grounding for modern political and social life. And finally, then, we will be in a position to consider its reemergence in those later eighteenth-century works through which we can, at last, understand Hawthorne's novel: not only gothic fiction, but Kant's moral philosophy. (51)“At last,” indeed! Although such an itinerary is unnerving, the reader is reassured by Fleissner's serious, intellectually responsible approach. She shows herself to be equally at home discussing Giorgio Agamben's belief in potentiality as, say, Lionel Trilling's debt to Friedrich Nietzsche.Attempting to summarize Fleissner's history of the will is not for the fainthearted. She proposes that “the familiar lineaments of the ‘modern individual,’ so often derived from Descartes or Locke, in fact represent a reaction against the stranger conception of a newly individuated self to be found in writings like Augustine's” (26); traces “a trajectory from maladies of excessive will . . . to ones of the will's deficiency” (xiv) across the nineteenth century; criticizes the “contemporary intellectual landscape” for regarding “the will, no less than the novel . . . to be merely a relic of nineteenth-century ideals” (10); and charts a path between Ian Watt's contention that the novel's emergence in the eighteenth century is inseparable from that of the modern individual “striving to fulfill its own self-interest in an increasingly secular world” and Michel Foucault's account of “subjectivation,” in which identity is, “essentially, self-subjection” (3). One of the most impressive aspects of Fleissner's account of such histories is her refusal to collapse into each other the various oppositions that interest her. Take, for example, two modes of thought central to Fleissner's project: “The Lockean emphasis on a will straightforwardly fulfilling itself as practical reason . . . [and] the sentimental injunction to surrender will altogether in favor of a feelingful merger with a larger whole” (35). Fleissner notes that both these views of the self have provoked “strong critiques,” since their view of the subject can be seen either “as overly self-defined, on the one hand, or overly constrained, on the other.” Such criticisms inevitably “have the effect of returning us to the opposing version” (3). But rather than seeing these dualities as inevitably false, Fleissner extends and enriches them by outlining what they owe to writers and schools of thought seemingly quite distant from them, such as Saint Augustine's Confessions or the severe self-examinations of the Puritans.Fleissner's interest in the Puritans results in a powerful new reading of The Scarlet Letter, the subject of her first chapter. Her account of Hawthorne's novel begins by asking a fascinating question: What if a novel “were to pressure the boundaries of [fiction] not by refusing the . . . category of interiority, but by hyperbolizing it?” (48). Hester Prynne's problem is that she thinks too much, leading her into what Hawthorne refers to as a “moral wilderness” (Scarlet Letter 170). As Fleissner puts it, “How was it that the very strategy we think of as most reliably humanizing fictional characters here had the opposing result?” (48). She finds an analog for Hester's predicament in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which “interiority . . . becomes the very source of anxious torment, because interiority—one's thoughts, more than one's actual misdeeds—also appears in a new way as the primary staging ground for the will, and, hence, potentially the very site of sin itself” (62).This notion that critics have overlooked theological works in their accounts of the novel is also central to Fleissner's second chapter, which explores what she insists is a greatly underrated work, Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons. Fleissner reads Stoddard's text as a bildungsroman, though a rather odd one, “a story of recovery” rather than triumph, “a story . . . not of ‘onward and upward’ but one of stumbles, fits, and (re)starts” (126). Such attention to the elasticity of genre is also evident in the last chapter of Maladies of the Will, which examines a return to romance at the fin-de-siècle evident in works such as Paul Laurence Dunbar's Sport of the Gods, Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk.As impressive as her readings of these texts often are, Fleissner's true gift as a critic is her ability to chart the development of a writer's thinking across a career, or the reasons why one school of thought emerges at a particular moment. A particularly compelling example can be found in chapter 4, a large part of which is devoted to Henry James's The Ambassadors. Here Fleissner pays long overdue attention to Bersani's extraordinary 1975 work A Future for Astyanax. Bersani reads James as a novelist of manners, much as Trilling had done years earlier. Unlike Trilling, however, Bersani draws a causal link between James's account of an often-bruising social world and “the withdrawal into a space of thought” undertaken by so many of his characters, which he sees “as a means of achieving the more radicalized freedom the social world finally rebuffs” (232–33). “The crucial point in Bersani's argument,” Fleissner notes, is that, in a strange irony, this very freedom functions as a form of reenslavement. For, in retreating into itself, the Jamesian “I” could be said to disappear, to become indistinguishable from what Bersani refers to as “the neutral territory occupied by language” (Bersani 146). Rather deftly, Fleissner points out that this “ethical critique” of James's work is reversed in the powerful readings that Bersani produced near the end of his life, which make “equally strong claims on behalf of these texts’ ethical virtues” (235–36).The starting point of chapter 3, on Moby-Dick, is another opposition, this one taken from Hegel. Fleissner notes that “self-denial, [the] merger of the individual into a greater totality . . . and the self-inflation of the Romantic artist represent, for Hegel, two sides of the same problem” (161). Hegel thus could be said to place “the opposition between self and non-self” within rather than without (167). Fleissner reads Ahab as a fictional exemplification of this seeming paradox. He both externalizes his self by making the crew swear to make his will theirs and internalizes the world by having the very thing he chases become part of his own body—his whalebone leg. Fleissner's restaging of this Hegelian opposition recalls Sharon Cameron's study The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne, which counterposed Melville's work to that of Hawthorne in similar terms: “The fantasy in Moby Dick is that human identities might be joined by a Siamese ligature, following which all men, fused, will be squeezed ‘into each other.’ . . . The fantasy of Hawthorne's tales is that all selves might be joined, not by corporeal enlargement but rather by corporal diminution in which the self is distilled to a representative bodily organ—for example, to Ethan Brand's heart” (Cameron 2–3).The most memorable of the readings offered in Women, Compulsion, Modernity was of Frank Norris's McTeague, and Fleissner happily returns to Norris's work in Maladies of the Will. Chapter 5 largely consists of an analysis of Vandover and the Brute. Fleissner makes the compelling argument that Vandover's strange decline—he ends up naked on all fours in his room howling like a wolf—is “because of rather than despite the fact that he begins the novel a ‘good’ boy from a good family who diligently says his prayers nightly” (278). Seen this way, Vandover unfolds according to a very different logic than the fascination with hereditariness that governs the novels of Émile Zola, the writer to whom Norris was most often compared. Fleissner takes up the work of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who famously argued that what distinguishes human beings from animals is “not simply [that we] want to do something but [that we] ‘want to want to’ do something” (qtd. 313). At times, that is, we want to have different wants than the ones we have. Upholding Frankfurt's distinction would seem to be particularly important in the naturalist world, one in which the boundary between people and animals is strangely permeable, as Vandover's fate demonstrates. Yet Fleissner points out that the desire to “‘want to want to’ do something” is so persistent in Vandover that, rather than serving as a marker of difference from nonhuman life, it is a crucial element in Norris's hero's decline. “If anything keeps ‘beginning all over again’ in Vandover,” she contends, “it is the idea of beginning all over again. The idea of the break with compulsively repeated habits . . . seems itself to generate yet another structure of repetition” (313). Even the desire to break free from compulsion is itself a compulsion. One of the unnerving lessons of Maladies of the Will is that our own self-help age, which repeatedly counsels us to change our habits, renders us all naturalist subjects, stuck helplessly in place.