Steven Paul Marcus (December 13, 1928 – April 25, 2018) was an American academic and literary critic who published influential psychoanalytic analyses of the novels of Charles Dickens and Victorian pornography.
[3] Marcus attended William Howard Taft and De Witt Clinton High School and graduated at the age of fifteen in 1944, against the backdrop of World War II.
[30] In a special issue of the Partisan Review in 1993, Marcus characterized political correctness as a new incarnation of the "soft totalitarianism" described by George Orwell, whereby orthodoxies "muzzle, stifle, or suppress dissent, and create fear and anxiety in those whose thinking deviates from their prescriptions".
Marcus cited the example of a professor of anthropology denouncing the candy Mars Bars as a confectionery embodiment of America’s indefensible impulse to colonize everything, including extraterrestrial planetary space.
Marcus's arguments would prove exceptionally influential, including claims that the master-concept of Nicholas Nickleby was a hostility to "prudence"; that the abstract principle governing Dombey and Son was resistance to change and temporal decay; that Sam Weller cagily subverts the idealizing morality of Mr. Pickwick; and that Oliver Twist makes its most incisive political indictments through "satiric innocence", or a position of non-partisan humanity.
[37] Using a psychoanalytic lexicon developed by Sigmund Freud, The Other Victorians[38] draws on archival materials from the Kinsey Institute to analyze sexual subcultures in nineteenth-century Britain.
Marcus culls the official views of Victorian society from physician William Acton, whose writings anxiously deny the existence of childhood sexuality even as they make elaborate recommendations to suppress it.
[38]: 27 Marcus contrasts these official views with the clandestine circulation of pornography, records of which were meticulously preserved by Henry Spencer Ashbee’s elaborately annotated indices.
[38]: 34 The Other Victorians also provided the first extensive study of the anonymous eleven-volume pornographic memoir My Secret Life, which Marcus took to be an authentic sexual biography inflected with fantasy.
[38]: 111–28 Marcus draws out revealing episodes of Walter's sexual life, including the rape of his wife,[38]: 93 coerced sex from domestic servants and starving laborers,[38]: 108 the insertion of shilling pieces into vaginas to gauge their capacity,[38]: 159 and persistent fears of genital inadequacy, castration, and impotence.
[38]: 278–80 Marcus’s most famous conceptual contribution is his coinage of the term pornotopia to describe a utopian fantasy of abundance where "all men ... are always and infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both.
[41] Mike Spilka cautioned that Marcus's conclusions are drawn from a very small sampling of texts, which leads him overestimate the anxiety around depletion of the seminal economy.
[43] In a lengthy review essay, historian Brian Harrison charged that Marcus's unitary ideal of "pornotopia" was based on too few texts; that he omitted a bibliography and references to My Secret Life; that his "research is not sufficiently extensive to bear the weight of his relatively ambitious conclusions"; and that his analysis contains "moralising passages which might well have been uttered by a nineteenth-century clergyman".
[44] Meanwhile, in the popular press, a review in The Times described the subject matter as "ghastly stuff" and derided Marcus as "a student of smut who deserves to be admired as much for stamina as for integrity of purpose".
Joudrey cites examples of "impotence, syphilitic outbreaks, torn foreskins, severed rods, soiled cocks, and slack vaginas" to illustrate a pervasive pattern of failure and conflict that is fundamentally at odds with "utopian fantasies of purity and immortality".
[51] Similarly, though Marcus characterized pornography as apolitical and ahistorical fantasy, Joudrey has cited evidence from the underground Victorian magazine The Pearl of extensive political commentary, including references to the Reform Bills and Contagious Diseases Acts and allusions to many controversial public figures, such as Annie Besant, Charles Spurgeon, Wilfrid Lawson, Newman Hall, Edmund Burke, William Gladstone, and Robert Peel.
Engels accomplishment was not so much explaining the material forces that built Manchester into a landscape of industrial squalor, but in reckoning with a spectacle of such enormity that words themselves failed as a means of representation.
Marcus then turns to comparing Engels's analysis of Manchester to those of major literary observers, including Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edwin Chadwick, and French economist Léon Faucher.
[53] Echoing Chase, John Lucas argues that Marcus's "psychoanalytic speculations" are entirely unhelpful and in some cases "plain silly", noting that whether Engels saw Thomas Carlyle as a father-figure is "not of the slightest importance".
By using the worst examples of filth and poverty as archetypal, Marcus colludes with Engels in erasing the gradations of the working class and their efforts at cultural production.
Marcus then takes up Freudian concepts to suggest that Eliot's early fiction is a complex system of psychic defense mechanisms constructed to control three principle subjects: sexual passion, class conflict, and the unintelligibility of the world.
He illustrates this process by showing that in Scenes of Clerical Life, Milly Barton suffers from a miscarriage, which Eliot obliquely represents, then dies from experiencing premature labor.
Marcus takes this to imply that Milly died of her own sexual satisfaction in her marriage, engendering a profound and compelling mystery as to why a less-than-ordinary man could gratify an extraordinary woman.