Erica’s Reviews > The Novel and The Police > Status Update

"secrecy would be the spiritual exercise by which the subject is allowed to conceive of himself as a resistance, a friction in the smooth functions of the social order, a margin in which its for reaching discourse does not reach"

Secrecy is a mode whose ultimate meaning lies int eh subject's formal insistence that he is radically inaccessible to the culture that would otherwise entirely determine him"

Readers read characters, characters do not read US. Sensation novel in 19c renders the liberal subject the subject of a BODY, whose fear and desire of violation displaces, reworks and exceeds his constitutive fantasy of intact privacy" man-not real man.

Most fundamental value that the novel upholds in privacy, determination of an integral autonomous 'secret' self --readers take for granted the existence of a space in which the reading subject remains safe from surveillance, suspicion, reading, rape, but WATCHES/READS characters who oversee, suspect, read, rape each other"

calmness of judgement asked of reader set against nervous agitation that is the technology of the sensation novel.

Why testimonies in WiW? What at the end is brought before the law?

woman's nervousness in men = male homosexuality. The reader is an effeminized male [like Hartright?]

Argues that the woman in White assumes its reader is male ["remember the first woman you loved..."]

Trollope seems bored in his own narration, lack of affective intensity of characters = seems even handed and fair.

"Dickens's insight into the institution as confinement induces a claustrophobia so exasperating that the only proper political response to it seems to be a 'direct attack on the whole system' but in Trollope's vision of the institution as schism, resistance = bureaucratic instructions to apply elsewhere, in another department" power dispersed, never monolithic or all consuming. Institution is "aerated" in Trollope.