Objects and Objectivity

Abstract

This essay examines the sociological works of Harriet Martineau, particularly 1838’s How to Observe Manners and Morals, through the lens of disability studies and Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto.” The authors argue that Martineau depended, due to her perceived “disabilities” of deafness, illnesses and gender, on objects such as the ear trumpet, the telescope, and various theoretical constructs to mediate her access to the outside world. In doing so, she created a “cyborg self” whose tools allowed her to re-write traditionally masculine concepts such as scientific objectivity. These tools were both actual – the ear trumpet and telescope allowed the detachment and control necessary for the nineteenth-century scientist – and metaphorical – Martineau stressed that her disability forced method, a concept that grew ever more important to scientists as the century progressed. Martineau's disabilities reshaped her into a “cyborg self” who was able to approach questions of scientific objectivity from an un-gendered perspective.

Keywords:

• Harriet Martineau
• Donna Haraway
• Cyborg
• scientific objectivity
• disability studies
• sociology

Notes

 1. For more on Haraway and the reverberations of her Manifesto, see Linda Howell, “The Cyborg Manifesto Revisited”; Joseph P. Rouse, “What are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?”; Veronica P. Hollinger, “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism”; and Jessie Daniels, “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment.” According to Daniels, the most recent of these studies, cyborg theories do allow for resistance of gendered and racial norms but can also result in their reinscription.

 2. This work reintroduced Charles Darwin, then aboard The Beagle, to Thomas Malthus's ideas about population growth, crucial to his own development of the theory of natural selection.

 3. Emile Durkheim, widely accepted as the founder of modern sociology, wrote that “our main goal is to extend scientific rationalism to human conduct… What has been called our positivism is but a consequence of this rationalism” (ix).

 4. Indeed, Anderson's gloss of the development of distance throughout the century emphasizes how inter-related social and natural sciences, as well as philosophy and ethics, were. The idea of distance, she writes, “lies behind many Victorian aesthetic and intellectual projects, including the emergent human sciences and allied projects of social reform; various ideals of cosmopolitanism and disinterestedness; …Yet at the same time many Victorians were wary of…the overvaluing and misapplication of scientific method as well as forms of alienation and rootlessness that accompanied modern disenchantment, industrialization, and the globalization of commerce” (4).

 5. While Sickroom's guiding principles are normatively Christian, Martineau's invocation of the “order” of the moral world suggest a turn to alternative spiritual and scientific ways of viewing the world; by the end of her life she would have turned from her strict Unitarianism to a spiritualist view that alienated both family and colleagues.

 6. In order to explore how her ovarian tumor served to “mark” her, it is enlightening to return to the debate about her condition in the British Medical Journal. W.H. Day writes to the journal about the occasionWhen Sir Charles Clarke visited Miss Martineau, and agreed with me in supposing that the uterus was the seat of disease (in which it appears we were not correct, though Mr. Spencer Wells says it was a natural error, and one which did not affect the issue), he used a somewhat homely illustration, which offended the taste and excited the displeasure of the patient. He said that, as the organ grew larger, it would rise as if from the kitchen to the parlour, intimating that relief would be thus obtained, but not cure. (785)This metaphor, reminiscent of the earlier wandering womb, marks Martineau as a patient with uterine troubles, a hysteric; the domestic image of the kitchen and parlour reinscribe her gendered place, a place fully ensconced in the home. Continuing this debate, fueled by Martineau's own desire to turn to mesmerism, Markham further marks her as passive, “fallen into the hands of other [unconventional] medical men” (711). Finally, all of these things mark her as “other.” According to Thomas Greenhow, they explain “some of the peculiarities of character which were apparent during her remarkable career” (449). And what are these “peculiarities?” They are, according to Samuel Smiles, that she had a “manly heart and head” (499); “Somehow,” writes Bohrer, “Miss Martineau was fortunate enough to acquire these ‘manly’ organs within a female body, and appears to Smiles as she did to others as a distinctly extraordinary breed, a kind of intellectual hermaphrodite” (24). While Smiles and Bohrer perceive her as positively marked, she was nonetheless marked as different, deviant, and dis-abled.

 7. “She was intensely sympathetic”, “wrote Woolf of the Angel; “She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life…She bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her” (285).

 8. For a helpful summary of the Baconian debate, see Carolyn Merchant, “Secrets of Nature: The Bacon Debates Revisited.”

 9. This would coincide with Ketabgian's reading of Martineau and machines. She argues that Martineau sees power, especially female power, as a “result of working with the machine.” (36). While theorists like Karl Marx write about the conflict between person and machine, Katabgian argues that Martineau “restricts the visibility of such a conflict, instead treating the prosthesis as a metabolic transformation of the body and as a revelation of the inherent powers of humans” (37).

10. Social class would have been significant to Martineau's deaf audience as well. Sign language, developed in the eighteenth century, foregrounds other social markers: “To designate a close acquaintance one needs only three signs: gender, then class, then profession.” Thus, “sign language renders visible in linguistic form the nuances of class power” (Davis 123).

11. Huxley, as a personal friend of Darwin's, would have been acquainted with Martineau both intellectually and socially, suggesting the possibility of a true intellectual heritage.

12. He prefaces Camera Lucida by declaring the need for a “history of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity,” suggesting the tangled relation between objective watcher and subjective experiencer brought into being by objects that mediate the senses (12).

13. See Maria Frawley, “A Prisoner to the Couch: Harriet Martineau, Invalidism, and Self-Representation”; and Alison Winter, “The Reform of the Invalid in Victorian England.”