Class Acts

To begin with, I really appreciate what Elizabeth Langland's survey of the Victorian novel and Victorian social mores sets forth to do. By showing the ways in which women participated in and created the set of strict rules governing class in England, she gives women a lot of power that many thinkers (Thompson!) fail to give them as a group. Coming from a cultural perspective, I think most of us are excited whenever we see someone taking social requirements into consideration and looking at the world on the human level. People have personal commitments and social ties that link them strongly even to oppressive systems, supporting the status quo even while it harshly exploits them. By pointing out the ways that strict social regulations were manipulated and even created by women to guard their class rank, Langland humanizes Victorian middle class women while she critiques their complicity with the same system that required tightlacing. Social ties--far from creating the ideal utopias that many see when they read the term "community" today--can be exclusive, petty and exploitative. As she ominously points out: "our efforts may not bear the fruit we intend within a complex dynamics of power" (20). This reminds me of Thompson's contingent histories, where outcomes are never sure until after the fact.

However, as Langland points out, the unknowable nature of history cannot be seen as a purely negative aspect of the process of history. Instead, she (often implicitly) points out the ways in which women took control of situations, facilitated class boundaries and in Gaskell's case, forged new ways of negotiating class. If we cannot predict historical outcomes, dominant discourses can fail to keep the people under control as well, and cracks suddenly appear in the superstructrual "mirror." But Langland points out that there are no angels in history. For Victorians especially, class was a real thing that was consciously defended and always in contention.