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The Ethics of Indecency: Censorship, Sexuality, and the Voice of the Academy in the Narration of Jacob's Room

1997; Duke University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/441744

2325-8101

Susan Cannon Harris,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Although much of plot of Jacob's Room deals with Jacob's sexual education, narrative voice is spectacularly reticent when it comes to actually recording his progress. Throughout novel, anything spoken on topic of sexual desire or sexual activity is subjected to very specific and ostentatious kind of censorship that cuts overt discussion of sex or sexual desire out of text even as it directs reader's attention to lacunae left behind. This artificial and deliberate . . . narrative reticence (Zwerdling 900) is partially critique of how Jacob's (and Woolf's) contemporaries dealt with sexuality; it also helps Woolf parody conventions of bildungsroman, which require hero's sexual education to assume central role.(1) But narrative's refusal to record Jacob's sexual education is more than just satire on Edwardian prudery. The narrative censor in Jacob's Room dramatizes what Foucault calls the great process of transforming sex into (22); it speaks verbosely of its own silence and takes great pains to relate in detail things it does not say (Foucault 8). Its object is not to remove sexuality from novel, but to police it by turning it into narrative that can be controlled. By deliberately incorporating this censor into narration, and by inviting reader to observe its methods and motives, Woolf makes policing of sexuality in Edwardian England one of central issues of Jacob's Room. The main business of this study is to trace operations of that censor and examine intimate relationship between project of regulating sexuality and other, apparently unrelated, effects of power that are dramatized in novel, including Jacob's death in World War I. Naturally Foucault's discussion of regulation of desire in The History of Sexuality will provide much of framework and some of vocabulary for this argument; but while Foucault's model is in many ways peculiarly applicable to this novel, there are also some important points of divergence between Foucault's construction of sexual discourse and discourse circulating in Jacob's Room. Perhaps most significant point of divergence is that while Foucault is infamous for eliding question of agency and refusing to locate power that regulates sexuality in any specific of institutions and mechanisms or any discrete system of dominance exerted by one group over another (92), narrative construction of Jacob's Room argues that Woolf had specific ideas about who and what wielded that power. Woolf carefully entwines narrative strand that follows Jacob's sexual education with one following his intellectual education until two finally become inseparable; same narrator that regulates sexual discourse in novel also trumpets values of intellectual culture that molded Jacob. By showing that success of this regulatory project is necessary to continued dominance of academy and its values, Woolf ensures that reader's knowledge of censor's misdeeds also indicts Cambridge and what it represents, and that war that rips out of his narrative finally becomes damning metaphor for academy's attempt to protect its secrets. Before we can discuss this peculiar form of censorship we must come to some understanding of how narration works in Jacob's Room. Critical opinion on this head has evolved over time from an assumed equation between Woolf and narrative voice of her novel to recognition of complicated ironic distance between Woolf and her characters (Morgenstern 351). Still, puzzling determination to see narrator as monologic, unitary voice with distinct identity seems to prevail. Writing in 1972, Barry Morgenstern announced that narrator of Jacob's Room was in fact a thirty-five year old and proceeded to draw her short profile (353); 14 years later, Karen Lawrence's more sophisticated critique of narrative voice in Jacob's Room still insists on single narrator who is a woman, ten years older than Jacob with a distinct personality (33-4). …