Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée

Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature

Jean-Michel Ganteau and Christine Reynier (dir.)

Publisher: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée

Place of publication: Montpellier

Year of publication: 2013

Published on OpenEdition Books: 25 March 2022

Series: Horizons anglophones

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Printed version

Number of pages: 257

Electronic reference

GANTEAU, Jean-Michel (ed.) ; REYNIER, Christine (ed.). Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature. New edition [online]. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013 (generated 25 mars 2022). Available on the Internet: <http://books.openedition.org/pulm/9645>.

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Illustration de couverture : Crédits photographiques Christine Reynier et Jean-Michel Ganteau, 2012.

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Abstracts

Over the last few decades, in the wake of the ‘Ethical Turn’, contemporary literature has been examined through the prism of the ethics of alterity. Yet, this may not be consistently the case with Victorian and Modernist literature, since relatively few of the authors of those periods have elicited such critical and theoretical scrutiny. The articles in this volume set off to re-read Victorian and Modernist literature in the light of the ethics of alterity and investigate whether the post-Auschwitz, contemporary period breaks away from or favours lines of continuity with the productions of the earlier era. It also strives to address works which do not belong to the canon, focusing alternately on great authors and less known artists, on what has been termed ‘minor’ texts or genres that are less visible than the novel. Approaching literature by examining the relations between ethics and aesthetics, even while adopting an ethical approach, helps the authors in this volume contribute to revising the contemporary, Modernist and Victorian canon in English Literature.

Jean-Michel Ganteau (dir.)

Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France), where he chaired the Department of English Studies for four years and co-chaired the CERVEC research team between 2004 and 2010. He is at the moment in charge of the postgraduate programmes and of the Doctoral School (E.D.58). He is the editor of the journal Études britanniques contemporaines. He is the author of two monographs: David Lodge: le choix de l’éloquence (Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2001) and Peter Ackroyd et la musique du passé (Michel Houdiard, 2008). He is also the editor, with Christine Reynier, of four volumes of essays Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Publications Montpellier 3, 2005), Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Arts (Presses universitaires de la Méditerrannée, 2007), Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Literature (PULM, 2010), and Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Arts being due in late 2011 (PULM). He has also edited three volumes of essays in collaboration with Susana Onega, The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fictionsince the 1960s (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British Literature (Rodopi, 2011) and Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Fiction (Routledge, 2013). He has edited special issues of various journals (Études anglaises, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens). He has published some sixty articles on contemporary British fiction, with a special interest in the ethics of affects (as manifest in such aesthetic resurgences and concretions as the baroque, kitsch, camp, melodrama, romance), in France and abroad (other European countries, the USA) as chapters in edited volumes or in such journals as Miscelánea, Anglia, Symbolism, The Cambridge Quarterly, etc.

Christine Reynier (dir.)

Christine Reynier is Professor of English Literature at the University of Montpellier III. She has published extensively on major Modernist writers, edited books and journals on Woolf (Insights into the Legacy of Bloomsbury. With Unpublished Essays and Memoirs by Roger Fry, V. Bell and V. Woolf, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 62, octobre 2005; Journal of the Short Story in English, Special Issue on Woolf 50, July 2008) and published Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). She has also written a monograph on Jeanette Winterson, Le Miracle ordinaire (P.U. Bordeaux 2004). She is the editor, with J-M. Ganteau, of Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Publications Montpellier 3, 2005), Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Arts (Publications Montpellier 3, 2007), Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Literature (PULM, 2010) and Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Arts (PULM, 2012).

Table of contents

Introduction

Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau

On Tears Shed at Brownlow Hill in the Summer of 1866: Alterity, Politics, and Style in Josephine Butler’s Writings

Frédéric Regard

1 Towards Disinterested Communication

2 Giving Humanity to Read

3 From Personal Testimony to Political Mobilisation

4 Categorisation, Class Formation, and Fiction

‘I hold it towards you’: Alterity in Lyric Address

David Nowell Smith

Modernist Ethics, Critique, and Utopia

Stephen Ross

Sovereign Subjects Stephen Dedalus, Irish Conscience, and Ulysses’s Utopian Ethos

Christine Froula

D.H. Lawrence’s Mr Noon, its Significant Other, and the Physioethics of Reading

Noëlle Cuny

1 Mr Noon as speculum lectorum

2 Preventing Bubble Formation

Towards an Ethics of Singularity: The Shattered Mirror of Identity in Ford Madox Ford’s Parades End

Isabelle Brasme

Writers, Friends and Lovers: Virginia Woolf, G.E. Moore and the Aesthetics of Personal Relations

María J. López

1 Bloomsbury, Moore and “The Ideal”

2 To the Lighthouse and the Search for Unity

3 The Waves and the Language of Love

4 Good Writers Are Good Friends

The Relation to the Other in John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent (1929)

Florence Marie-Laverrou

Introduction: from one Conception of Identity to Another; from one Conception of Alterity to Another

1 Narrative Identity and Ethical Responsibility

2 The Ethics of Otherness in a Modernist Form

Beyond Alterity—Within Alterity: Edith Sitwell’s Self-Reflexive Assessments of Modernism

Rainer Emig

‘To feel pity even for the planets’: The Aporias of Responsibility in Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter

Paula Martín Salván

1 ‘I am the responsible man’

2 The Infinity of Responsibility

3 Irreplaceability and Facing Responsibility

The Lay Community: Weil, Murdoch, Badiou and the Ethics of Other-Centeredness

Julian Jiménez Hefferman

Moral Questions and Ethical Answers: On some Responsibilities of British Satire in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Laurent Mellet

James Kelman’s Confrontational Ethics in You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free

Vincent Dussol

1 ‘In Just Institutions’

2’With and for others’

3’Aiming for the good life’

On ‘Personal Affection and the Appreciation of what is Beautiful’: Rewriting and Rethinking Ethics in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

Elsa Cavalié

1 Forster, Smith and Moore

2 The Principia Ethica in On Beauty

3 An Ethical Relationship to the Other

The Ethics of Re-Writing: Jeanette Winterson’s Weight (2005)

Eileen Williams-Wanquet

1 Mimesis I or recognition

2 Mimesis II or telling the story again

3 Mimesis III or Reconfiguration

Of Friends, Enemies and Neighbours: Political Theology and the Ethics of Alterity in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Susana Onega

Responsibility in Verse: William Wordsworth and J.H. Prynne

Michael Kindellan

Notes on contributors

Introduction

Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau

This volume would like to shed a different light on Victorian, Modernist and contemporary British Literature by analysing it through the prism of the ethics of alterity. It comes as a natural complement to our previous volumes in this series which read 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century British literature as the locus of impersonality and emotion or of autonomy and commitment.1 Indeed, ethics can be seen as an extension of the political in literature (issues addressed in the last two volumes) and as focusing on individual relations (and therefore involving the personal and emotions, issues as equally addressed in the first two volumes). Such connections are highlighted by some contributors to this book. In a radically new approach, Frédéric Regard explores Josephine Butler’s writings as a re-working of various myths and as exemplifying the shift from morals to ethics and paving the way for political action. While basing his argument on Cixous’s recently developed concept of ‘humanity,’ he shows how, in this instance of committed nineteenth-century literature, ethics, aesthetics and politics are inextricably linked, thus retrieving Rancière’s definition of the political as always literary, a definition that had provided the starting point for some articles in a previous volume.2 When concentrating on modernist literature, Stephen Ross comes back to some of the issues debated in the last two volumes revolving around Adorno’s conception of autonomy and commitment in art3 and provides a compelling analysis of the Modernists’ desire to ‘make it new’ as a mode of disruption, defamiliarisation and critique of the status quo that is fundamentally ethical in its foregrounding of indeterminacy and its resistance to closure (as witness E.M. Forster’s novel, A Passage to India). This could be called, using Woolf’s words, the modernist text’s ethical ‘resistance to reading,’ an incompletion which constitutes, according to Ross, the very possibility of justice. When dealing with more recent production, Susana Onega echoes previous analyses of British literature, respectively based on Winterson’s cogito ‘Amo ergo sum’4 and the concept of neighbour-love as expounded by Žižek in his political theology,5 and goes a step further in her ground-breaking reading of Oranges Are not the Only Fruit, when reminding us that even emotion is non totalisable and that no emotion is the final one.

To work on ethics is quite a challenge since numerous competing definitions of the term have been given from Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant to Levinas, Ricœur, Derrida, Deleuze, Nussbaum, Badiou, or Attridge.6 Such work is compatible with such approaches as privileging either an ‘ethics of truths’ or a more deontic form of ethics (therefore closer to morals), words, phrases and notions that have become fashionable since the advent of ‘the ethical turn’ of the post-structuralist era but that are nevertheless useful in re-thinking modernity. Within the framework of an ethics of alterity, the other ‘[w] hatever its precise complexion, ... is primarily,’ in Derek Attridge’s words, ‘an impingement from outside that challenges assumptions, habits, and values, and that demands a response’ (Attridge 32). The other ‘is always a singular encounter, and an encounter with singularity. [It refers to t] he otherness that is brought into being by an act of inventive writing—an argument, a particular sequence of words, an imagined series of events embodied in a work’ (Attridge 29).

The relation to the other, whatever the definition of the term, rests on a form of confrontation which can take the shape of a simple encounter, a dialogue or on the contrary, some sort of conflict. An ethical relation to the other implies some form of responsibility (towards the past, towards History, towards the story, etc.) that can be connected with, for instance, memory or repression, repetition or censorship and erasure. In fiction, responsibility can be represented through excess or reticence and can thus be connected with a baroque aesthetic or an aesthetic of decadence, or, on the contrary, with silence, more specific to Modernism than aestheticism or post-modernism. Responsibility is also predicated on values: the values fiction transmits wittingly or unwittingly and the way in which it transmits them: respectfully or not, falsifying, manipulating or appropriating data, the past or texts of the past. All this may be seen as addressing the issue of the ethics of style, as raised in several of the following articles, whether it concerns the verbal pyrotechnics of a Martin Amis (Mellet) or the simple direct form meant to ‘put the feeling out there’ in Zadie Smith’s terms (Cavalié), the good old narrative expressive of solicitude favoured by James Kelman (Dussol) or the especially vulnerable poetic forms (among which lyrical address) evoked by Kindellan and Nowell-Smith. One step further, moving away from mere style, addressing the issue of the ethics of alterity in modern British literature is tantamount to stressing the continuum between the ethical, the political and the aesthetic, as emphasised by Rancière,7 while attending to matters conversant with such categories as genre or mode. This is apparent in Mellet’s contribution, devoted to satire, that arch vehicle of the moral and possibly of the ethical. Genre and mode are also given pride of place—certainly in a more surprising way—in the articles of Nowell-Smith, Jimenez Hefferman and Regard, respectively dealing with such forms as lyricism, comedy and melodrama, forms that one rarely associates with ethics. What those forms may have in common, though, is their vulnerability, their refusal to be strong forms, and their predilection for and impulse towards the open and the non totalising, as is apparent in Attridge’s conception of the literary event as site or advent of otherness.

Dealing with such a topic is a way of making philosophy and theory enter into a dialogue with the literature of the Victorian, Modernist and contemporary periods. British fiction can be read in its own philosophical context or within a larger one, in the light of other than British and more recent philosophy and theory, two options that may not be incompatible. While it may be perfectly legitimate to analyse Victorian and modernist texts in the light of the philosophy of our time, it may also be fruitful to read them in context, with the moral philosophers that were so influent in the England of their time. Admittedly, reading Victorian and modernist literature in the light of the ethical theories of the time is not exactly common today, although it might be a way of entering and understanding this world more fully as well as of illuminating the difference between morals and ethics and locating the shift from one to the other. When ethics are mentioned in a British context, the name that generally comes to mind is that of G.E. Moore. He is indeed regarded as the founder of ethics and said to have deeply influenced the artists of the Bloomsbury Group who hailed his book, Principia Ethica, when it came out.8 Lytton Strachey thought it a groundbreaking book which ‘laid the true foundations of Ethics’ and he dated ‘from Oct. 1903 the beginning of the Age of Reason’9 while John Maynard Keynes wrote later that it spelt out his and his friends’ ‘religion’ and marked ‘the opening of a new heaven on earth.’10

However, Moore acknowledges his debt to his own professor in Cambridge, Henry Sidgwick, and with Sidgwick, a whole field of philosophy dealing with ethics opens up, not much tilled by literary criticism. At the centre of English moral philosophy in the 19th century, a controversy developed over ethics between the Utilitarians and the Intuitionists. Now, the utilitarian doctrine has been much debated, but the Intuitionists’ position is almost completely neglected in histories of philosophy and surveys of literature, according to Schneewind.11 While the intuitionists hold that no evidence is necessary for moral judgment, the Utilitarians think it indispensable to justify moral judgments. They are also at variance about the appreciation of the value of action: if, for the Intuitionists, value can be measured by the generous nature of actions, for the Utilitarians, it depends on the degree of utility of an action. And where the first lay the emphasis on the personal, on intuition, feelings and sympathy, the others privilege the impersonal. Such notions and concepts involved in moral judgments as the personal and the impersonal, selfishness and generosity, action, responsibility to the other or sympathy are familiar to writers too and it might be fruitful to examine their work in the light of moral philosophy, its controversies and the ‘ethical turn’ it experienced at the dawn of the 20th century when G.E. Moore published Principia Ethica in 1903, a book which is said to have marked the shift from morals to ethics.

But we may consider that it is as suspicious to claim this as to write, as Virginia Woolf did, that ‘in or about December 1910, human character changed.’12 Indeed, Moore is closely connected with Henry Sidgwick who, in 1874, published The Methods of Ethics,13 a book that was harshly criticised by Leslie Stephen in The Science of Ethics (1882).14 Sidgwick deals with the principles of common sense morality and shows that far from being the expression of the will of God, they are not universal:

Conformity to the dictates of the utilitarian principle is what makes right acts right.... But the utilitarian principle is not valid by definition. It is valid because it is demanded by our actual moral principles. In a world that was very different from ours, in which very different moral principles were commonly accepted, some other principles might be the independent first principle. (Schneewind 34)

Sidgwick, in a way, brings to a close the utilitarian tradition according to which general happiness is the ultimate moral end of social and individual action and is ‘the true standard of right and wrong, in the field of morals’ (10). His method of ethics consists in determining what a human being ought to do, what is right for him. What is held to be right is what conforms to certain principles of duty and Henry Sidgwick assumes that right conduct is the ultimate good for man. He looks at the various conceptions of moral philosophy, compares intuitionism with egoistic and universalistic hedonism, their respective definitions of pleasure and happiness, desire and health, and addresses the potentially conflicting ethical relations between pleasure and honour, sensual indulgence and health, pleasure and virtue or desire and pleasure, and tries to reconcile these antagonistic philosophical approaches, even if painstakingly, according to Schneewind. While dealing with the intricacies of this debate, Sidgwick displays an awareness of the difficulties of the utilitarian doctrine, even if he never departs from it, as John Rawls points out in his preface to The Methods of Ethics. G.E. Moore will acknowledge Sidgwick’s role and in a way take his point to its logical conclusion.15 Moore will denounce the fallacious arguments of some of his predecessors who identified good with pleasure, dismiss the definition of ethics as dealing with the question of what is good or bad in human conduct and launch into an enquiry into what is good, privileging an open approach:

If we start with the conviction that a definition of good can be found, we start with the conviction that good can mean nothing else than some one property of things; and our only business will then be to discover what that property is. But if we recognize that, so far as the meaning of good goes, nothing whatever may be good, we start with a much more open mind.
(72)

His ensuing definition of good as ‘the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects’ (237) is famous and has percolated into contemporary production, as shown by Cavalié’s analysis on Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. Even if it is highly debatable and has been much criticised as propounding an aestheticist ethics,16 it has the merit of shifting the definition of good away from morality. With his attempt at providing, in the wake of Sidgwick, ‘a correct judgment of what things are good or bad in themselves—a judgment which has never yet been offered by ethical writers’ (230), Moore challenges the authority and universality of a supposedly ‘natural’ set system of virtues and vices. This signals the moment of entry into ethics, the moment when a shift from morals to ethics took place. And the difference between the two has been phrased most clearly by Deleuze, though with reference to Spinoza instead of Moore or Sidgwick: ‘[E]thics... replaces morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values. Morality is the judgment of God, the system of judgment. But ethics overthrows the system of judgment.’17

Pondering on the way moral philosophy has shaped the Victorian novel, on the way the ‘ethical turn’ that Moore initiated has influenced modernist writings offers one possible line of approach to our topic, the ethics of alterity, and to the confrontation between literature and the other as philosophy, as well as to the responsibility of fiction in pursuing or countering the philosophers’ definitions of ethics, in yielding to or resisting readings and misreadings induced by philosophy, especially Moore’s philosophy, as it was used to read the writings of Bloomsbury. How the Victorian, Edwardian and modernist novels may have outdone moral philosophy and possibly defined ethics differently, together with the notions of alterity and responsibility; how modernist writings may echo the shift from morals to ethics or how they may in some measure act as forerunners of a later ethical turn begins to be debated in the articles presented in this volume, especially by Maria Lopez who brings out the contradictions and lacunae in Woolfian criticism before analysing Woolf’s ethics in the light of Moore’s and showing how they both set high value on friendship or the love of the other.

But the way in which the Victorians and the Modernists themselves may have been influenced by or attuned to the ethical theories of the Utilitarians or Intuitionists is far from being fully chartered. Schneewind makes a first and brief attempt with George Eliot and Elisabeth Gaskell. It is something that deserves to be pursued just as a reassessment of Modernist ethics, that would fully interrogate Moore’s influence18 and above all, that of his predecessors, would deserve to be attempted. Such an approach would come as a complement to an analysis of ethics in British literature based on more recent continental philosophy—what most contributors to this volume have chosen to do, some even providing, as Eileen Wanquet does by way of introducing her reading of Winterson’s latest novel, a thorough review of contemporary ethical theory. This is also what is suggested by Florence Marie-Laverrou whose reading of Ricœur allows her to see in Wolf Solent the seeds of Cowper Powys’s ethical modernism.

Another form of dialogue is privileged by some authors here. Rainer Emig’s original contribution discusses the pull between totality and fragmentation together with the very possibility of an ethics of alterity in modernist fiction by focusing on Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics, a marginalised text here illuminated by the dialogue Emig chooses to establish between Freud, a contemporary both of the Victorians and the Modernists, and philosopher Jacques Rancière. In a similar fashion, Isabelle Brasme takes a close look at Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy and its quest for an ethics of the relation to the other—or the self as other— both through Freud’s concept of the uncanny and Levinas’s analysis of the other’s face. The other’s face as the reader’s face is also at the heart of Noëlle Cuny’s analysis of Lawrence’s unfinished novel, Mr Noon, although the dialogue between the author and his reader as well as between Lawrence and Levinas turns out to be more problematic. Taking up in some way Regard’s point, Michael Kindellan analyses responsibility in Prynne’s poetry, especially in relation to Wordsworth’s poems, as debt, defined not in financial terms but as debt between other and self.

Debt is perhaps one of the key notions—clearly defined by Kindellan— running through the following articles, a notion related to that of the gift—used in an equally discreet though essential way throughout the collection. For in fact, at the heart of the ethics of alterity in its Levinasian acceptation, lies the idea of the asymmetry of the ethical: the idea that I am responsible for the other without any expectation of reciprocity. This is what makes the image of the debt a complex one, compounded as it is of that of the freedom of the gift. This is apparent in the writings of Zadie Smith, in her ‘putting the feeling out here’ (Cavalié) once again, or in Winterson’s ethics of love as interpreted by Onega. The pity that poetically and ethically invades the world of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter seems to become emblematic of the ethical debt-gift of non-identificatory, non-possessive, non-totalising empathy that runs through the literary texts scrutinised in the following articles.

As may be apparent in the following lines, the debate on the ethics of alterity seems to be fuelled by literary works that give pride of place to the emotional or the affective over the merely intellectual or cognitive. This may sound as a commonplace of this field of studies19 but should be emphasised all the same, as the notions and concepts that may be said to operate most specifically in the following articles are such as bank on the irrational and belief. In most instances, this goes hand in hand with an emphasis on the failure of cognitive processes and, in Cathy Caruth’s famous phrases, a ‘collapse of understanding’ or ‘crisis of truth.’20 This detour through the field of trauma theory is not fortuitous as it is designed to point at the non totalising impulse of the ethical relation, i.e., its radical impossibility to embrace and comprehend, its necessary acceptance of the surplus or of the remainder. This is most apparent in Ross’s evocation of the Forsterian spectral, a notion that evokes the return of the ghostly as manifestation of the text’s openness to the cultural (and historical) other. Such a notion finds its equivalent in the taste for liminal and extreme situations– in their melodramatic expression in many cases— that are staged in many of the works that are commented on here (Butler, Forster and Greene, among others, being emblematic of such an orientation), as if the ethics of alterity were best expressed or performed in relation to muddled, muddy situations that privilege chiaroscuro over full light, thus laying the stress on the limits of intellection and of perception. In other words, it seems as though in many cases the ethics of alterity as voiced by the representatives of Modern British culture present in this volume were expressed in terms of faithfulness to the incomplete and the multiple, as translated in Kindellan’s vision of the multiplicity of perspectives in Wordsworth. At times, the ethics of alterity also becomes an ethics of truths, in Badiou’s acceptation of the terms as faithfulness to an idea that is, precisely, the idea of the limits of the idea and of cognitive devices. At the heart of the ethics of alterity would thus lie a cognitive hole—this once again clinching the analogy with the workings of trauma.21

Such an observation leads naturally to one of the most implicit but perhaps most common notions to be encountered in the following pages, i.e., that of vulnerability. This is most certainly to be taken in the Levinasian sense of vulnerability to the other, but also as pointing to a vulnerability of another type. Most prominently in Regard’s paper that is concerned with a fundamentally vulnerable population, the notion of the banality of the vulnerable, the idea of a fundamental solidarity predicated on an asymmetrical relation is present—if only in a subterranean way— in most of the following articles, as evidenced in Lopez’s emphasis on solidarity and perhaps most specifically in Jimenez-Hefferman’s commitment to frailty and imperfection (Regards addresses the notion of solicitude). One step further, what seems to emerge from the works under study is a model of the modern subject as essentially vulnerable, as poles apart from the models of ‘muscular modernism’ (Ross), independence and power. What appears is the image of modern subjectivity as characterised by gaps and holes, uncertainties and imperfections, pointing at a model of individuality as predicated on dependence and care. As if vulnerability were the most humble yet endurable common denominator of the ethical situation and of modern agency, as if the ordinariness of the vulnerable were a means to set up an ethical agenda based on attention to the invisible and the frail. As if, in other words, vulnerability were the sine qua non of responsibility to the other, where the ethical and the political meet in the eye-opening power of the aesthetic event.

Notes

1 Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau, eds, Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Montpellier: PULM, 2005), Jean-Michel Ganteau and Christine Reynier, eds, Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Arts (Montpellier: PULM, 2007), Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau, eds, Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Montpellier: PULM, 2010), Jean-Michel Ganteau and Christine Reynier, eds, Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British Arts (Montpellier: PULM, 2012).

2 See especially Catherine Delyfer’s ‘The Politics of the (In) audible/ (In) visible in Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown (1884),’ Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British literature, eds. Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Montpellier: PULM, 2010) 31–42.

3 See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ‘Autonomy Versus Commitment: Eliot, Adorno, Bakhtin and Foreign Words,’ Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British literature, eds. Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Montpellier: PULM, 2010) 15–30; Elena Gualtieri, ‘Fascist Modernism as Committed Literature?’ Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British literature, eds. Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Montpellier: PULM, 2010) 69–80; Jean-Michel Ganteau, ‘In Thy Autonomy Is Thy Commitment: Brigid Brophy’s In Transit,’ Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British literature, eds. Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Montpellier: PULM, 2010) 191–202.

4 Christine Reynier, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Cogito— “Amo, ergo Sum”—or Impersonality and Emotion Redefined,’ Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature, eds. Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Montpellier: PULM, 2005), 299–308.

5 See Jean Radford, ‘A Question of Justice: Hilary Mantel’s Experiment in Love,’ Autonomy and Commitment in Twentieth-Century British literature, eds. Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Montpellier: PULM, 2010) 243–252.

6 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (London: Penguin, 2004); Spinoza, Ethics (London Penguin, 2004); Emmanuel Kant, Critique de la raison pure. Trad. Alain Renaut (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 2004); Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Duquesne: Duquesne UP, 1999); Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence (Duquesne: Duquesne UP, 1999); Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994); Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza. Philosophie pratique (1970; Paris: Minuit, 1981); Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 2001); Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso Books, 2002); Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

7 Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique (1990; Paris: La Fabrique, 1998).

8 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, ed. and intro. Thomas Baldwin (1903; Cambridge: CUP, 2000).

9 Letter from Strachey to G.E. Moore, 11 October 1903; qtd by Thomas Baldwin in his ‘Introduction’ to Principia Ethica (Cambridge: CUP, 2000). IX-XXXVII; XI.

10 J. M. Keynes, ‘My Early Beliefs,’ qtd. Baldwin XXXIII.

11 Jerome B. Schneewind, Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2010) 43.

12 Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1923), The Essays of Virginia Woolf vol. III, 1919-1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York and London: HBJ, 1988) 384–389.

13 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, foreword by John Rawls (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981).

14 Leslie Stephen, The Science of Ethics (1882; London: Smith Elder & Co, 1907).

15 As John Rawls writes in his foreword to The Methods of Ethics, Sidgwick shows the superiority of universal hedonism over intuitionism but stops short of showing its superiority over egoistic hedonism (Rawls in Sidgwick VI).

16 See especially A.J. Ayer, about Bertrand Russell’s harsh criticism of Moore in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982; London: Unwin, 1984) 48.

17 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Ethics without Morality,’ in The Deleuze Reader, Constantin V. Boundas ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 73. The original French version reads as follows: ‘l’Ethique... remplace la Morale, qui rapporte toujours l’existence à des valeurs transcendantes. La morale, c’est le jugement de Dieu, le système du Jugement. Mais l’Ethique renverse le système du jugement’ (Deleuze 36).

18 It is generally accepted that Moore influenced the Bloomsbury Group. Whether it is entirely true or not, whether his philosophy is relevant to account for Bloomsbury art, and especially the fiction of E.M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, is a problem which has not yet been fully addressed. On that subject, see Todd P. Avery, ‘Ethics Replaces Morality: The Victorian Legacy to Bloomsbury,’ English Literature in Transition 41.3 (1998): 294–316. And Christine Reynier, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy and Literature’ 38.1 (April 2014) (forthcoming).

19 See Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel, Reading after Levinas (London: Routledge) 7.

20 Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) 7, 17.

21 For more detail on the relationships between trauma and the ethics of alterity see Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, ‘Introduction,’ Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British Fiction, eds. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011) 7–19.

Authors

Christine Reynier

E.M.M.A., University Paul-Valéry — Montpellier III

Jean-Michel Ganteau

E.M.M.A., University Paul-Valéry — Montpellier III

On Tears Shed at Brownlow Hill in the Summer of 1866: Alterity, Politics, and Style in Josephine Butler’s Writings

Frédéric Regard

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, England imported from France a system of prostitution regulation designed to curb the spread of venereal diseases by providing men with ‘safe’ extramarital sex. The foundations of this system had been laid by Parent-Duchâtelet, who had managed to modernise the Augustinian theory according to which prostitutes were a necessary evil, one without which good order could not be maintained in society.1 For Augustine, whose views would influence European sexual ideology for centuries and lend religious legitimacy to the madonna/whore dichotomy,2 two categories of women were required: the good, faithful wives to service men’s procreative needs, and the base, debauched prostitutes to cater to their desires and pleasures outside of marriage. Even though ‘healthy,’ the prostitute was thus presented as the other of the virtuous wife and mother—a specimen of radical alterity in Victorian ideology. In his effort to coat Augustine’s argument with a layer of modernity, Parent had drawn a telling comparison: prostitutes were to society what subterranean sewers were to the hygienised or sanitised modern urban centres, i.e. channels for discharging not waste water, but an excess of male sexual energy.3 In England, the major proponent of this theory was William Acton, a consulting surgeon of London, who was not concerned only with the technical aspects of the treatment of venereal diseases, but also with the wider social issues with which theses diseases were connected.4...