Making a Social Body : British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864

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Summary: Overview of Mary Poovey's Making a Social Body
Review: Poovey's book is a collection of seven distinct, but inter-related essays. Poovey, complicates the notion of looking at how identity categories (class, gender, ethnicity, race and so on) fractures a society, by examining how England came to think of itself as constituting a social body in the early to mid parts of the nineteenth century. Poovey suggests that the way to trace this formation, and she stresses that it is a process, is to investigate, "the incoherences generated by disaggregation [because they] often show up at the site of modern identity categories that have dominated........................15)." Raymond Williams' famous categories of residual, emergent and dominant ideologies inform Poovey's theoretical framework in looking for the "incoherences." Poovey also suggests that she is working against the Focauldian tradition of power as a monolthic force, precisely because she in invested in looking at the incoherences and fractures of identity categories. With these two frameworks helping to underpin her work, Poovey relies on both literary texts , such as Gaskell's Mary Barton and Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, as well as more strictly defined historical texts, social reform and government reports authored by people such as James Phillips Kay, Edwin Chadwick and Thomas Chalders. Making a Social Body is an important work for people who want to look at the formation of British subjects in the early Victorian period. Poovey's work is also a nice demonstration of how literary critics can, and should, move between novels, and other forms of fictional, literary production, as well as texts that are not generally concieved of as "Literature."