The Deity and Doctor Arnold

Arnold "was a self-righteous blockhead," he wrote to his mother while composing the portrait in December 1915, "but unlike most of his kind, with enough energy and determination in him to do a good deal of damage-as our blessed Public Schools bear witness!" (qtd. in Holroyd 611)-a view that endorses the most sweeping claims for Arnold's influence. [...]Arnold was acutely aware of the difficulties confronting his large ambitions. In effect, Arnold's authority is structured by a double-bind in which boys must be absolutely individuated, "free and manly," and yet must submit to a community defined against "that proud notion of personal independence which is neither reasonable nor Christian" (qtd. in Stanley 67).2 The psychic pressures entailed by this regimen were captured in Arnold's notorious flogging of a boy named Marsh, whom Arnold wrongly suspected of lying. [...]the frequency with which academics over the past forty years have approached Victorian literature and culture as if it were a threat to be disarmed, a subject to be taught so that it might never happen again.