Abstract
This chapter establishes both the intellectual history of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and the main conflict in how that concept has been applied to Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction, using J. Hillis Miller’s formulation of the “cheerful hypothesis” versus the “gloomy hypothesis.” The chapter provides a history of the concept of performativity beginning with J.L. Austin, and a detailed analysis of Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. The central paradox of Butler’s theory is the way that it depicts people as being wholly constructed and compelled to “perform” their roles by discourses, and yet also able to “resignify” those discourses through failed performances. When critics apply Butler, they generally choose to emphasize only the cheerful side of this paradox. The chapter illustrates this tendency by a survey of criticism applying Butler to nineteenth-century literature in general and to Gaskell in particular.
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Notes
- 1.
I have followed the Springer house style for documentation of sources, which is based on the Chicago Manual of Style Author Date system. For primary texts, however, I will use titles in citations where necessary, rather than dates. To ensure usability to the widest possible range of readers of this book, I have cited editions of Gaskell’s writing that are most likely to be available in the college classroom. Full bibliographic information for all editions I cite can be found in the References list.
- 2.
Miller ’s “disambiguation” of Butler’s concept of performativity from those of J.L. Austin and Jacques Derrida exists in two print forms. In For Derrida (2009), he goes into somewhat more detail but uses the terms “depressing” and “exhilarating” (146) in describing the two different reactions to Butler. He changed to the terms “gloomy” and “cheerful” in a revision of that material, “Performativity1/Performativity2,” that is found in an essay collection from 2010. I have chosen to use cheerful and gloomy. It should be noted that these words do not correspond to the numbered versions of performativity in the second article’s title; Miller designates J.L. Austin’s work on words that perform actions as performativity sub one, and theatrical performance as performativity sub two. For Miller, Butler’s theory is a mixed and extended derivative of both, but in practice, it seems that critics who produce “cheerful” readings also emphasize the theatrical side of Butler’s theory.
- 3.
Butler, Gender Trouble , p. 136. Further references to this text will be given parenthetically and abbreviated as GT for clarity.
- 4.
Butler, Bodies That Matter , 121–3. Further references to this text will be given parenthetically and abbreviated as BTM for clarity.
- 5.
See, for example, Dorice Williams Elliott, “Class Act: Servants and Mistresses in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell”; Emma Karin Brandin, “Domestic Performance and Comedy in Cranford and Wives and Daughters”; and the chapter on the Victorian dining room in Andrea Kaston Tange’s Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature, and the Victorian Middle Classes (Tange also analyzes Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks in similar terms in that book). These are all works published in 2010.
- 6.
Included in her 2015 collection Senses of the Subject.
- 7.
See Bodies That Matter, x, 125, and 230–1.
- 8.
In Chap. 2, I will cite an article I wrote about Mary Barton in the early 2000s. It uses the term “discipline” in a way meant to borrow the aura of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, but without actually citing the book. I believe that my use of the term is consistent with Foucault’s, but nevertheless it is a violation of what I will call principle 4 later.
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Schaub, M. (2019). Introduction: The Paradox of Subjectivity and the Naturalization of Theory. In: Performativity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Shorter Fiction. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26314-0_1
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