The Governance of Isabel Osmond née Archer

Foucault’s “15 January 1975” is concerned with the modes of control that the French state exercised over “abnormal” or dangerous populations from the middle ages through the 18th century, the second of which eventually became the model for modern “positive technologies of power”, to be exercised over the entire population. The first of these modes was “exclusion”, the goal of which was purification and which was employed in the case of lepers.  Exclusion eventually gave way to the second mode of control, manifested during the plague; it was, conversely, “inclusion” -- an extreme inclusion, whereby plague society was partitioned and surveilled constantly: “It was a power that was continuous... surveillance had to be exercised uninterruptedly. The sentries had to be constantly on watch...and twice a day the inspectors...had to make their inspection in such a way that nothing that happened in the town escaped their gaze” (45 Foucault).

Later, this power was transferred from the emergency situation to everyday governance. According to Foucault, “[The Classical Age invented techniques of power] that can be transferred to very different institutional supports, to state apparatuses, institutions, the family and so forth. The Classical Age developed therefore what could be called an ‘art of governing’” (48), but, significantly, one that was deployed for governance in modes not so totalizing as for the plague society. Instead, such modes were deployed in schools, medicine and industry; the Classical Age “refined a general technique of the exercise of power that can be transferred to many different institutions and apparatuses” [italics mine]. In other words, this method of control was diffused so as to become more palatable.  I would argue that, even as they were refined for state government, the plague society’s methods of control were not refined for women, because it did not matter whether they agreed to be governed; governing them needed less subtlety.

Decades after the Classical Age Foucault writes about, women in 19th c. western society were subject to plague society control within the home (and, of course women in many developing and non-secular societies today are still treated to the plague society’s surveillance): their spheres of life were restricted (like the plague victim’s) to the home and friends’ homes -- to spaces where they were known. When they left these spaces, they were accompanied by men or other chaperones who could watch [over] them. The patriarch was sovereign and his wife and children, if they existed, his subjects. As long as they lived within his walls, he was entitled to know where his family were at all times, how they spent their time and money, and with whom they associated. For the wife, who of course never grew up and out of her husband’s home, this might have been understood as for her own good since perhaps the fate to be most avoided by a woman in the 19th c. was that of being cast out by her husband.

Like the plague victim, a failure to appear when and where expected would give rise to suspicion: the plague victim who was ill and could not appear at the window was dangerous to public health and the woman who did not answer when called for was likewise considered dangerous. She was a danger to herself (that is, she was forever in danger -- supposedly from those who would prey upon her) when she could not be accounted for, a danger that was a sexual danger to her honor and thus, she was a danger to the unity of the home and, by extension, to the fabric of society. In both cases, the danger is called a danger to the public good, but it is also a danger to the state.

We can see the tension between this old mode of governing women and the “modernization” of views about women in The Portrait of a Lady, a portrait that anticipates high modernism in its themes. As wealthy and free-spirited Isabel comes of age and her personality solidifies, she becomes intrigued with Gilbert Osmond’s “old world” quality and apparent refinement of taste, but as soon as they are married, she understands to what degree he demands that her self be sacrificed to his conservatism: “He said to her one day that she had too many ideas, and that she must get rid of them....He really meant it—he would have liked her to have nothing of her own but her pretty appearance.  She knew she had too many ideas; she had more even than he supposed, many more than she had expressed to him when he asked her to marry him.” And she tries to conform to his requirements: “One couldn’t pluck [her ideas] up by the roots, though of course one might suppress them, be careful not to utter them.”

By suppressing her ideas, Isabel has learned to participate in her own surveillance and when she refuses to leave Gilbert for the reason that her (suspiciously new) ideas of marriage do not permit of rupture under any circumstances, the character the reader has come to know is destabilized and lost. Not only has Gilbert oppressed her, but, having come around to his way of thinking, she agrees to be oppressed. “The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all.  Her mind was to be his—attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deerpark.  He would rake the soil gently and water the flowers; he would weed the beds and gather an occasional nosegay ....He didn’t wish her to be stupid....But he expected her intelligence to operate altogether in his favour, and so far from desiring her mind to be a blank, he had flattered himself that it would be richly receptive.  He had expected his wife to feel with him and for him, to enter into his opinions, his ambitions, his preferences; and Isabel was obliged to confess that this was no very unwarrantable demand on the part of a husband” (italics mine).

Waaay out of words....