61 pages • 2 hours read
Jordy RosenbergA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Love inscribes the body—and this is a process as excruciating as it sounds. For some of us it is literal, Kafkaesque. A selbst-verlusting that is both terrifying and pleasurable. The body does not pre-exist love, but is cast in its fires.”
Voth’s ideas about love are central to the love present in the manuscript and in his own life. The selbst-verlusting (“self-loss”) in love paradoxically leads to self-discovery. Jack loses his old, inauthentic self in loving Bess and only finds his new identity as Jack through his love with Bess. Jack’s body is symbolically made intelligible to him through love.
“London is a place of individualists. No longer busy with simple folk—sheep milling, beer being quaffed, folks picking herbs for sustenance. All gone. Now, a Body be gaoled for perambulating the town without occupation, folks afraid to walk the streets in fear of being arrested for Idleness and even the open Sewers and the trash piles prohibited—property of the newly formed Nightsoil Concerns, authorized by the Lord Mayor himself.”
The preacher’s words reflect the rapidly changing nature of London in the 18th century. With the advent of imperialism and colonialism abroad, London and its surroundings became focused on wealth production and privatization. London once had common areas for grazing, but in the 18th century, those commons replaced with factories and wage work. This shift in understanding of common spaces and productivity is called “possessive individualism.”
“This Something—what he thought of as his something—made his servitude, while a miserable confinement, a hidey-hole too. His whole life was some hidden, rank place. And so his confinement became the door inside him between his waking life and something still unwoken, something lying close-packed like a bomb at his core, poised to shiver into a coruscated, glinting shower of—of—of what, he knew not. But there was Something just beyond the door inside him. Some difference within him that he did not yet want to know.”
The descriptive language around Jack’s Something makes it seem very dangerous. The “unwoken bomb” is antithetical to the productive life Jack leads under Kneebone’s tutelage. The repetitive stuttering of “of—of—of” is an example of free and indirect discourse, or a narrator speaking directly in the syntax and dialect of a character’s internal thoughts. Jack’s inability to complete his description of the Something makes it seem larger than life and indescribable.
“He’d imagin’d this would be easy—this saying himself into being—but now it didn’t feel entirely right or True. He became loosed from his Body, floating up to the splintered-beam ceiling of the pub. […] And when he heard his name in her mouth something happened. The apparition-Jack zoomed down from his watching-spot on the ceiling and sank firmly […] into his Body.”
Jack is unable to claim his identity alone. When he names himself for the first time, he is the only one to have ever named himself Jack. Jack’s discomfort with his “new” identity causes him to dissociate. Being Jack only feels rights when other people know him as Jack and call him Jack, as Bess does. Jack’s identity relies on community.
“Your labor is the property of Kneebone. Your rest restores you to labor for Kneebone, and thus is your Rest my Property as well.”
Every part of Jack belongs to Kneebone, like a tool. Kneebone literally treats Jack as a tool, an object that exists to make him profit in his daily work. Kneebone’s treatment of Jack is a common experience among workers in 18th-century London.
“It was Amsterdam, Bess said, that had taught the world profiteering. Had sent its surveyors to drain England’s fens, to starve the common folk. […] London will be just like Amsterdam soon—a place of only merchants and commerce. Still, some things are beyond our will—those things that connect us—and that’s where we can be free.”
Amsterdam, and the Dutch, were instrumental in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Dutch traders developed the trade routes, the technology for transporting and enslaving large numbers of people, and so on. Amsterdam was also one of the wealthiest, most prosperous cities in the 18th century. Bess identifies Amsterdam’s ideas on profit, slavery, and land ownership as the source of her woes.
“Objects were speaking to him, she said, like a Lover, or a Priest. […] [Bess] Told him that each one was telling a different version of the same sermon: the Alpha and Omega of their Genesis. And each one was asking for the same thing. Liberate us.”
Marxist theory states that capitalism turns all objects into commodities, or objects that are only of value to society for their ability to be traded and generate profit. The objects speak to Jack to tell them about how they were made and what they should be used for. The liberation the objects seek is to be used and valued instead of only having value in their ability to trade hands alongside money.
“Our thought here is that we can make our [cow-urine derived organic testosterone] […] unique by releasing it in conjunction with the publication of the […] the earliest authentic confessional transgender memoirs in Western history.”
P-Quad cannot patent the testosterone supplement, so they seek to capitalize on a piece of history that is invaluably important to the transgender community. Voth’s modern-day framing narrative is a highly satirical parody of the profit incentive present in universities and their relationships with giant corporations.
“He was on the other side of a high thick Hedge of branches with vicious tips. He could not come through. And she could not come to him.”
“Sloth Is Sin.”
Productivity is heavily associated with virtue in 18th-century London. This association was used to justify exceedingly long workdays in factories, often over 12 hours a day for weeks on end with no days off. Conversely, “sloth” or idling and not making profit for factory owners had to be demonized as a sin.
“‘They wish to dry the earth to a cracked turf so that they can make our hands, our very vitality, into property. Our sweat a property. Our very ‘membrances a property.’”
The draining of the fens had a dual purpose: First, it created vast swathes of new grazing land for livestock. More grazing land meant more animals and more profit for businessmen who owned multiple farms. Second, it removed the means of subsistence for fen dwellers like Bess’s family, who survived in small communities and away from centers of trade and commerce; these people did not contribute to the wealth of the nation and lived sustainable, communal lives. With the loss of their means of subsistence, people like Bess were forced into city centers where they had to take on factory or sex work.
“Spinoza who so enjoyed to watch. […] That’s exactly the trouble with Deists […] They’ve been gentl’d into watching by the relative ease of Amsterdam life. Watching leads to Abstractions, Vagaries, Mistakes due to Distance and Contemplation.”
Bess’s father advocates for a hands-on approach to reality. He fears that watching, as Spinoza does, leads to complacency with the horrors of the world. Bess takes her father’s approach to heart.
“I had to leave just as I was. The Surveyors would be looting our huts, as I had heard they did in the other villages. I would have to leave wearing only my mother’s muslin shirt and my father’s breeches. To make my way to the only place left for a girl with no means to make any kind of a life or living. London.”
Bess’s life is an example of the consequences of the quest to expand grazing lands in England and make every inch of land profitable. In the 18th century, city centers like London thrived by exploiting people in precarious situations.
“So, then, his misery was not the dog; he was his misery’s dog.”
Jack finds a paradoxical comfort in his misery. If Jack stays in his misery, he does not have to be brave and show his true self to the world. Deciding to be Jack and escape Kneebone’s authority is harder for Jack than being complacent in his dissatisfaction with life.
“There are in the world no such men as self-made men! We have all either begged, borrow’d or stolen. We have reaped where others have Sown, and that which others have strewn, we have gather’d.”
Okoh’s speech is a riff on Frederick Douglass’s “Self-Made Men” speech of 1859. Douglass theorizes that the only self-made men are those who are not given any favors or privileges from birth due to their circumstances; those that have these privileges are necessarily becoming “self-made” on the backs of other people. Okoh’s speech takes this a step further, implicating everybody in these favors and privileges. Okoh’s twist on Douglass’s speech takes a communal approach to “making it.” No one person can succeed without others to support them.
“After all, where are we but the accumulation of centuries of terror? Still, they have a saying here about the past, and I am told this is what decided the matter once and for all: All History should be the history of how we exceeded our own limits. […] To them, I think, this is history: breathing air into a previously unfelt opening.”
Voth questions whether the past several centuries of human history are worth cataloguing. His mysterious friends give him a much more optimistic, radical view of history. They believe that history is finding ways to do what was once thought impossible. This “previously unfelt opening” is one that Jack exists in, cataloguing and imagining transgender existence at a time when accounts from people of marginalized genders are sparse.
“Welcome to my dissection-ship. A glorious scientific chamber for the extraction and synthesization of elixir. Straight from the nasty bits of the world’s most famous rogues—London’s all the better off without ‘em.”
Science, efficiency, and the commodification of human bodies are linked together in the Poor Maria. Wild’s solution to crime is not to rehabilitate criminals or address societal issues, but to turn them into products for profit.
“It’s a perfect dissection chamber, really. Owned by no nation. Free to roam ports […] free of the Arm of the law. Or, more properly, free to become our own autonomous Arm of the law. We’ve only to establish an agreement with the body-snatchers of a local area to assure ourselves of the Freshest and most Virile specimens.”
Wild’s dissection lab is the perfect business: Free from nations and laws, it can pursue profit without any limits. Wild’s vision weds a private policing company with unrestrained profits.
“Bess’s nightmare would come true. The Policing Operation. It was a closed circle. Bodies, Elixir, Profit.”
Bess’s insight into Wild’s plans was correct all along. Her position as the daughter of the freedom fighters who witnessed the destruction of the fens allows her to see the political system around her more clearly than Jack and the others. Rosenberg suggests that Bess’s position as a marginalized person allows her to more easily make these connections.
“There is nobody who is unmarked by [the bloody history of chattel slavery]. […] There is no body, no sexuality and, simply put, no sex outside the long history of Western imperialism’s shattering of the world. And once we understand this, we’ve got to go back and reconsider just how so-called ‘impossible’ Marx’s speaking commodity is or is not.”
Voth’s comment is an addition to a complex conversation around commodities, bodies, and histories. Voth argues that humans have often been commodities and so can obviously speak. Marx originally wrote that commodities are silent and voiceless; they are stripped of any feature other than their latent ability to be traded for value and profit. Marx’s view fails to account for the history of chattel slavery, which tried to reduce human bodies to mere commodities like a frying pan or a water bottle. Voth goes one step further and posits that nothing exists today outside of this relationship to chattel slavery; the ways we think about bodies, identities, and intimacy are a product of the chattel slavery that built the modern world.
“There is the medical history that purports a linearity (a kind of endochronology—a so-called progress narrative of the alignment of sex hormones and subjectivity, if you will). And then there is our history—fragmented and fugitive.”
Voth imagines medical history as having two channels: the legitimized channel of authority and the delegitimized channel of medical scientists’ test subjects and case studies. The first is a clear, simple narrative of progress; scientists slowly discover, catalogue, and explore abnormalities around the human body and endocrine systems. The second is mostly a gap in the historical record; the original sexologists never wrote their own ideas down about their bodies and experiences, and many others who lived on the margins as gender-nonconforming individuals left no trace of their existence. This imbalance skews common perceptions of history toward the channel of authority as the history of medicine and human bodies.
“He died on the Tree like Bailey the Highwayman and Brooks the Shop-Lifter and Nayler the Preacher of Freedom and Equality. He died at the hands of the profiteers like all the rebels, and freedom fighters rotting under the water of the fens.”
At the moment Sheppard is hanged, he is connected to every other rebel and criminal that has experienced the same violence from the state of England. Rosenberg uses simile to equate Sheppard to these figures, uniting their fates and rebellions in a single, violent act.
“The mob rushed the stage so quickly that Aurie Blake was swallow’d up in a sea of clamoring ordinary Folk. He did not reach Jack. The mob got to him first. And the mob carried Jack on their shoulders through the Town to keep him safe from the Dissectors and the Wardens and Wild and all who wished to profit from his body.”
The historical Jack Sheppard’s body was taken from the gallows by the crowd, both to protect him and to parade their hero through the town. Jack’s status as a hero and a thief reflects a severe discontent with the authorities in the 18th-century London population. The laws Jack broke and the laws that saw him hanged were severely unpopular.
“But—he said—if we die there? If there are no Fen-Tigers left? If the Surveyors shoot us dead? Then we will Haunt the Fen, Bess said. Something between an exhortation and a prayer they would perish, and they would wait. History would find them—all the underwater dead, all the Family of Love, the Inmates, and all those who had died in the fens—the centuries-long dead, too; the ones who died when the Norman invaders came steaming over the moorland from the north. Robbers, Rebels, Lovers. Wait. Wait under waters, she said. History will find us. History will avenge us all.”
“There is the history that binds us all. The terrible history that began when the police first swarmed the streets of the cities and the settlers streamed down the decks of their ships, casting shadows on the world to turn themselves white. Casting the wickedest net. There is no trans body, no body at all—no memoir, no confessions, no singular story of ‘you’ or anyone—outside this broad and awful legacy. So when they ask for our story—when they want to sell it—we don’t let them forget. Slavery, surveillers, settlers and their shadows. […] I’m not saying this battle was fought for you. History is not that linear. And yet, because of it, and many others like it, now you inhabit your own skin.”
Voth ends the novel stressing that we do not need to know history to be affected by it. Voth uses Bess’s language of sedimentation to build history up to the present; no one event or identity or body is totally separated from the historical power struggles and politics that have crafted the modern day. This idea of history as sedimentation is evident in the structure of the manuscript. It is not a “singular story” since, according to Voth, there can be no singular story of any one body or person. Voth imagines history as a twisting, non-linear thing within which everybody is constantly ensnared.
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