Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914

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Author: Jil Larson

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A revitalization of the ®eld of ethics and literature has recently gained the attention of scholars in philosophy and literary studies. Drawing on interdisciplinary work in this ®eld by a diverse range of thinkers, including Martha Nussbaum, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur, Jil Larson offers new readings of late Victorian and turn-of-the-century British ®ction to show how ethical concepts can transform our understanding of narratives, just as narratives make possible a valuable, contextualized moral deliberation. Focusing on novels by Thomas Hardy, Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, Larson explores the conjunction of ethics and ®n-de-sieÁcle history and culture through a consideration of what narratives from this period tell us about emotion, reason, and gender, aestheticism, and such speech acts as promising and lying. This book will be of interest to scholars of the nineteenth century and modernism, and all interested in the conjunction of narrative, ethics, and literary theory. Jil Larson is Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University. A former managing editor of Victorian Studies, she has published on Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and ethics and literature. She is currently a member of the Executive Board of the Centre for the Study of Ethics in Society at Western Michigan University.

ETHICS AND NARRATIVE IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 1880±1914 JIL LARSON Western Michigan University

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Jill Larson 2004 First published in printed format 2001 ISBN 0-511-03188-2 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-79282-7 hardback

For my parents and my friend Jonathan

Contents

Acknowledgments

page viii

1 Ethics and the turn to narrative

1

2 Victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at the ®n-de-sieÁcle

20

3 Emotion, gender, and ethics in ®ction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

44

4 When hope unblooms: chance and moral luck in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess

64

5 Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics

93

6 Promises, lies, and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes

114

Afterword

137

Notes

141

Bibliography

165

Index

173

vii

Acknowledgments

My thinking about ethics and literature began in earnest during my graduate school years at Indiana University, and I would like to thank Patrick Brantlinger, William Burgan, and especially Donald Gray for encouraging my work in this new ®eld while also deepening my love for Victorian and Edwardian British literature. I am grateful to Robert Warde for the inspired undergraduate teaching that set my feet on this path in the ®rst place. A faculty research grant from Western Michigan University helped me begin work on this book, and the intellectual and emotional generosity of my colleagues helped me see the project through its many drafts. I thank, in particular, Allen Carey-Webb, John Cooley, Mike Jayne, Gwen Raaberg, Mark Richardson, Peter Walker, and Daneen Wardrop for their careful readings. I am especially grateful to Peter for the shape and direction he gave to my study of Henry James, and for teaching me about ethics through his example of grace under pressure. Thanks also to my brothers and sisters-in-law and to Meg Anderson, Michael Pritchard, Paul Farber, Susan Hubert, Nancy Eimers, Jaimy Gordon, Shirley Scott, Arnie Johnston, Michael Recchia, Molly Lynde Recchia, Gail Graham, Carla Anderson, and all others who took an interest in the project and helped keep my own interest keen. Classroom discussions and more informal conversations with my students in undergraduate classes and graduate seminars have in¯uenced this book in immeasurable ways, and I would like to thank, in particular, the students in my Hardy and Conrad course and those who participated in my summer seminar on ethics and viii

Acknowledgments

ix

narrative. I also thank Rachel Herp, my undergraduate research assistant, who in addition was a wonderful computer consultant. I am especially indebted to Jennifer Carpentier, Kristin DeKam, and Kim Dysinger, graduate students who have become dear to me as friends; Kristin in¯uenced nearly all the philosophical aspects of this book (especially my thinking about Charles Taylor's ideas), Jen has left her mark on my understanding of ethics and British aestheticism, and Kim has stimulated my thinking about the questions I take up in my discussion of moral luck. I am grateful to Tobin Siebers for reading the manuscript as a whole at that crucial point when the book was just beginning to take shape. His perspective was invaluable, as were the incisive comments and suggestions of Cambridge's readers. I thank the audiences at the Ethics and Literature conference in Aberystwyth, Wales and the Victorian Studies conference in Liverpool, England in 1996 for their responses to my work-in-progress. For permission to reprint portions of this work that appeared in Conradiana and Rereading Victorian Fiction, I thank Texas Tech University Press and Macmillan respectively. I appreciate the encouragement and patience of my editor at Cambridge, Ray Ryan, who so generously allowed me the time I needed for revisions. Finally, I thank those to whom I've dedicated the book: my parents, whose love and moral depth have sustained me through good times and bad, and Jonathan Barkow, who has taught me so much about the ethics and intimacy of reading with another.

chapter 1

Ethics and the turn to narrative

Can the reality of complex moral situations be represented by means other than those of imaginative literature? Bernard Williams1

The dilemma cuts two ways. On the one hand, how much of what is genuinely important to people can be rendered in universal theories? On the other hand, are stories valuable for ethics, if no moral is attached? Tobin Siebers2

I began planning this project in the late 1980s, during the heyday of critical theory when interdisciplinary studies of literature had become common and literary critics were writing from theoretical vantage points developed through work in other ®elds, especially history and philosophy. Given my interest in the ethics of ®ction, I noticed that the seemingly natural combination of moral philosophy and literature was virtually non-existent in literary criticism, despite all the attention to other branches of philosophy. Why? In an essay published in The Future of Literary Theory (1989), Martha Nussbaum concedes that to answer this question fully would be a long story, which ``would include the in¯uence of Kant's aesthetics; of early twentieth-century formalism; of the New Criticism. It would include several prevailing trends in ethical theory as well ± above all that of Kantianism and of Utilitarianism, ethical views that in their different ways were so inhospitable to any possible relation with imaginative literature that dialogue was cut off from the side of ethics as well.''3 Like Wayne Booth, who had articulated his answer to this question a year earlier in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1

2

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914

Nussbaum also faults the writing that gave ethical criticism `à bad name, by its neglect of literary form and its reductive moralizing manner'' (``Perceptive Equilibrium'' 62). While traditional ethical criticism was too often essentialist, normative, and blind to the implications of narrative choices and rhetorical relations both within a text (between narrator and narratee, for instance) and outside a text (between readers or listeners and narrators and implied authors), the formalist correctives to this type of literary criticism tended to leave ethics behind altogether.4 These reasons drawn from the history of literary studies and moral philosophy are persuasive, but the neglect of ethical criticism can also be explained by examining the anxieties that have lingered in the wake of this history. These anxieties and prejudices are evident in the way most intellectuals, especially those in English departments, respond to the word ``moral'' by distancing themselves from it, automatically associating it with censoriousness, lifedenying rigidity, coercion. The expectation of this response is palpable in nearly all of the seminal studies of ethics and literature. Booth's admirable and ambitious book on the subject, for example, is marred by a defensiveness of tone, undoubtedly because he anticipates just such a hostile audience.5 Not surprisingly, Geoffrey Harpham begins his 1992 study of ethics, language, and literature with a discussion of ethics as an `èmbattled'' concept: `Èthics often provokes from other discourses the same resentment and belligerence provoked in the subject by ethical laws or by the conscience.''6 Partially for this reason, ethical theory and literary theory have, until recently, remained separate discourses. In his Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism, Tobin Siebers also alludes to the reaction typically provoked when these discourses are brought together, and he too, in a prefatory warning, employs a military metaphor: `Ì ask those readers interested in a less polemical evaluation of the relations among ethics, politics, and literature to consider my work in Morals and Stories . . . It is less a battle cry than this effort . . .'' (Cold War xi). Since this battle to gain a hearing for arguments about ethics and narrative has been fought so ardently and intelligently by Siebers, Harpham, Booth, Nussbaum, and


3

others who have entered the fray either along with them or later, forti®ed by their example, my hope is that my own book can build on their work, not by continuing the battle but (to return to Nussbaum's gentler metaphor) by participating in what it has made possible ± a newly revived dialogue among novelists, literary theorists, and moral philosophers. This book has two broad purposes: the ®rst is to read ethics through narrative by re¯ecting on ethical concepts or problems as they take shape in the telling of a story; the second is to further an argument about late Victorian aesthetics and ethics. This second purpose makes my project similar to William Scheick's in Fictional Structure and Ethics: The Turn-of-the-Century English Novel.7 We share an interest in Hardy and Conrad (a juxtaposition that Scheick concedes might strike some as odd) and in the ethics of their ®ction, particularly their ideas about compassion. My work departs from Scheick's, however, in the philosophical lenses through which I read these texts, and, perhaps most importantly, in the literary historical direction of my overall argument. While his book focuses on Hardy, Conrad, Wells, and other writers of their generation in relation to twentieth-century ®ction (both modernist and contemporary), my study considers late nineteenth-century English novelists in relation to Victorian culture and the work of those writing earlier in the century. One reason for this emphasis is my interest in the turn-of-the-century obsession with the new, which went hand-in-hand with sometimes de®ant, but more often ambivalent efforts to break free of the trammels of the old, including both mid-Victorian moral culture and novelistic traditions.8 At the end of the last century there existed a similar desire for a clean break.9 In late twentieth-century moral philosophy this turn toward the new has often meant a turn to literature, a move that has accompanied recent skepticism about foundations, including those grounded in reason and ahistorical, hypostasized conceptions of human nature. If nothing else, this interdisciplinary work has stimulated debate. Because the questions posed by moral philosophers writing about literature have done so much to revitalize the

4


thinking of literary critics writing about ethics, I would like to consider brie¯y what has motivated this turn to narrative and why some philosophers resist it just as much as some literary theorists object to a focus on ethics. Before I attempt to read ethics through narrative, in other words, it will be useful to explore some of the arguments for and against such a methodology. ethics and narrative detail: the example of feminist philosophy Among the controversial but in¯uential philosophers who have made a case for the ethical value of studying literary texts, Martha Nussbaum provides a striking example because she has gone so far as to argue that literature can be read as moral philosophy. Although it is not accurate to call her work antifoundationalist (since she makes it clear that principles play a role in ethical deliberation and that good judgment involves an element of universalizing), one of the main reasons for her turn to narrative is that it offers the particularity that philosophical discourse lacks. Like the antifoundationalists, Nussbaum is wary of philosophy's emphasis on general descriptions. In her view, ``the particular is in some sense prior to general rules and principles'' (Love's Knowledge 165); reading a novel, then, can be `à paradigm of moral activity'' (Love's Knowledge 148) because long narratives, by de®nition, unfold stories rich in complicated details. This idea becomes especially intriguing in the context of Victorian ®ction because one of the reasons novel reading was thought to be not only less respectable than other forms of literature but even morally suspect (especially from the perspective of certain nineteenth-century religious sects) was that ®ctional details enchant and seduce and are therefore liable to distract readers from the moral of the story.10 To locate the ethics of ®ction in its particularity, however, is to refuse the assumption that the ``moral'' must reside in a general, normative truth.11 Nussbaum's essays on philosophy and literature have much in common with work in feminist ethics, one of the ®elds currently


5

developing philosophical ideas through literary texts. Margaret Urban Walker, for instance, describes an alternative epistemology for a feminist ethics that will lead to ``questioning barriers between philosophical, literary, critical, and empirical investigations of moral life.''12 Like Nussbaum, Walker responds to the regnant paradigm of moral knowledge by advocating increased attention to the particular, a ``contextual and narrative'' construction of ethics (here she is also drawing on the work of Carol Gilligan), and an awareness of the crucial role of emotion in our ethical lives. Walker and Nussbaum desire a moral philosophy that accounts for both the unique and the socially situated, for `ìndividual embroideries and idiosyncrasies, as well as the learned codes of expression and response'' (Walker, ``Moral Understanding'' 167). In other words, they want a philosophy with historical awareness and a detailed narrative dimension.13 To say, however, that these two philosophers and this position represent feminist ethics would be to oversimplify a dynamic, contested area of inquiry. One of the points of contention hinges on whether or not rejecting normative philosophy in favor of what has come to be thought of as postmodern ethics ± in its resistance to universalism and its dismantling of philosophical tradition ± will lead to positive change for women. Virginia Held, for one, suspects that it will not, for she fears a corrosive skepticism that distracts attention from gender; she argues that ``the alternative to a philosophy which has become a handmaiden of the sciences should not be a philosophy which becomes a handmaiden to literature.''14 Maintaining a clear distinction between philosophy and literature, according to Held, offers a safeguard against subjectivism and relativism by keeping the focus of philosophy on general, shared understanding; in her view, that will do more to further feminist moral inquiry than giving in to what she describes as ``literary postmodern fragmentation'' (Feminist Morality 16).15 Nussbaum's privileging of the particular and the literary would undoubtedly be subject to Held's critique, but she resists, as does Held, what both writers perceive as counterproductive arguments in feminist philosophy, such as the idea that reason, as a product of

6


patriarchy, must be replaced with some new mode of thinking that overturns the old demand for objectivity. Like Held, Nussbaum questions how these arguments, formulated in the wake of poststructuralist critical theory, further women's progress; in Nussbaum's view, ``the opposition to women's equality . . . derives support from the claim that traditional norms of objectivity are merely a parochial liberal ideology. Women in philosophy have, it seems, good reasons, both theoretical and urgently practical, to hold fast to standards of reason and objectivity.''16 What interests me about this debate and others in current moral philosophy is that they have emerged through interdisciplinary discussions that are shaking loose formerly stable ideas. As much as I share Held's goal of transforming culture by developing a feminist morality, I do not see why literature and postmodern theory must necessarily be threats to this end. On the contrary, I ®nd intrinsic value in the questions that arise once the barrier between ethical theory and literary theory has fallen ± regardless of how those questions are answered. For this reason, I see a distinction between Nussbaum and Held, similar as their positions are in certain respects. And this is also why I argue for integration of traditional philosophical standards with postmodern skepticism about those standards. Seyla Benhabib develops a similar argument, pointing out that norms of `àutonomy, choice, and self-determination'' must be central to social criticism that is helpful to women in their struggles, but also stressing that it is possible to imagine a universalism that is attentive to gender, context speci®c, and interactive rather than legislative ± what she calls `à revivi®ed, postEnlightenment universalism'' (Situating the Self 3). Nussbaum and Benhabib are right that traditional standards of reason and objectivity do women's causes more good than harm, but at the same time, the students of subjectivity (including those of us who read novels and poststructuralist theory) have at least made everyone more alert to bias masquerading as objectivity by calling for scrutiny of the assumption that authority be granted to whatever or whomever claims to be disinterested. And such wariness can bene®t women as much as well-reasoned argumentation can ±


7

hence the value of integrating the two. As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, our way of talking about morality `ìs not what it once was''17 because subjectivism is such an integral part of our culture, but we appeal to reason in our arguments nonetheless: ``Does this not suggest that the practice of moral argument in our culture expresses at least an aspiration to be or to become rational in this area of our lives?'' (After Virtue 10). And do not certain forms of subjectivism aspire to a kind of `òbjectivity'' by unmasking pseudo-objectivity?18 Although I admire Nussbaum for rejecting, rather than simply tolerating, absurd and potentially destructive extremes (such as the idea that we should seek a form of reasoning that abandons the rational), I also see reason to value the questioning of philosophical tradition that happens to be one of the consequences of a turn toward the literary on the part of ethical thinkers, including Nussbaum herself. Just as I stress the value of integrating the objective and the subjective, tradition and the critique of tradition, I also believe in bene®ting from the work of very different philosophers ± such as Martha Nussbaum and Emmanuel Levinas ± whose work is not often included in the same study (or at least not accorded equal authority). In subsequent chapters I hope it will become apparent that I seek not to ¯atten out or even to reconcile divergent perspectives in so multivalent and contentious a ®eld as contemporary moral philosophy, but rather to demonstrate how and why ideas that emerge from a variety of philosophical orientations can illuminate different dimensions of ethics ± especially ethics during the Victorian ®n de sieÁcle, a period passionate about the new and yet, as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, better than we are at seeing rival ideas ± old and new ± as compatible instead of merely antagonistic.19 stories, theories, and moral remainders In light of these complications, rather than speaking of unidirectional in¯uence, it might be more accurate to say that it is the cross-fertilization of philosophy and literary theory that has

8


provoked a critique of foundationalist philosophy, which then fostered a new relationship between ethics and literature. Like Nussbaum and Walker, Richard Rorty has called for `à general turn against theory and toward narrative.''20 He describes a role for narrative that is at once philosophical and political. What creates solidarity, he insists, is not metaphysics or religion but detailed descriptions of other human beings (especially those unlike `ùs''), together with redescriptions of ourselves that include qualities, such as cruelty, traditionally suppressed in our self-descriptions: ``This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist's report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel'' (Contingency xvi). Rorty's readings of Nabokov and Orwell demonstrate his conviction that ``literary language is, and always will be, parasitic on ordinary language, and in particular on ordinary moral language. Further, literary interest will always be parasitic on moral interest'' (167). Characters in novels are concrete and socially embedded, and thus they encourage us to re¯ect on our own choices and actions in relation to theirs.21 Such re¯ection makes solidarity and ethical/political change more likely than totalizing theories that attempt to escape contingency and to unify incommensurable values. Philosophy is often idealistic in a way stories are not. Ethical theory attempts to imagine the perfect moral choice because, in Platonic fashion, it tends to equate the ``perfect'' with the ``good,'' the `ùniversal'' and unchanging with the ``true.'' By contrast, narrative, which typically dwells on the particular and unique, more often imagines loss, regret, and imperfection. That it does so is one of its points of attraction for many contemporary moral philosophers, including Nussbaum, Walker, and Rorty. In her reading of Henry James's The Golden Bowl, Nussbaum describes the transformation of Maggie Verver's moral idealism into something more contingent. As Nussbaum shows, James's provisional and contextual ethical sense is conveyed through the very form of his writing, at the levels both of syntax and of narrative technique. The complexity, obliquity, and ``sheer dif®culty of James's later style'' alert us to ``the incompleteness and inadequacy of our own


9

attention'' (Love's Knowledge 144) and thereby underscore the novel's ethical themes. Through a series of particular experiences ± the story the novel tells ± Maggie comes to embrace a ``new ideal,'' one which, paradoxically, enables her to accept her own imperfections. Nussbaum reads it this way: ``See clearly and with high intelligence'' (which is also her description of a key ethical imperative of James's ®ction). This new ideal says to Maggie, `Ìf love of your husband requires hurting and lying to Charlotte [your husband's mistress], then do these cruel things, making the better choice. But never cease, all the while, to be richly conscious of Charlotte's pain and to bear, in imagination and feeling, the full burden of your guilt as the cause of that pain'' (Love's Knowledge 134, 135). Because this point so relies on the full context of Nussbaum's reading of the novel, out of context it might seem like merely an argument for something akin to liberal guilt. But the point is an honest one that often emerges from narrative accounts of ethical choice: no act, no matter how good, is without its cruelty and its troubling loose ends, but recognizing this fact can take one further, ethically, than blinding oneself to another's pain in order to live more comfortably with one's own moral choice. As Zygmunt Bauman observes in his delineation of postmodern ethics, morality is necessarily aporetic: ``virtually every moral impulse, if acted upon in full, leads to immoral consequences; yet no moral impulse can implement itself unless the moral actor earnestly strives to stretch the effort to the limit.''22 Such moral actors tend to remain dissatis®ed with their choices after they have made them. Narratives tell the often unsettling but instructive stories of these actors, while the philosophical position Bauman and Rorty seek to refute with their antifoundational arguments strives for the very certainty and rule-governed con®dence that such stories disallow. Margaret Urban Walker also resists the view that a correct verdict can bring closure to a moral problem. Her narrative paradigm, by contrast, suggests ongoing, continuously revised understanding. Like Nussbaum, she sees ethical choice and action not as the solution to the problem but as messy attempts to do what's right; these choices will almost inevitably leave what she

10


calls ``moral remainders,'' ``genuine moral demands that, because their ful®llment con¯icted with other genuine demands, are `left over' in episodes of moral choice, and yet are not just nulli®ed'' (``Moral Understanding'' 170). Placing this `èpisode'' in the context of a full story ± connecting past, present, and future ± calls attention to its moral remainders (which, as Nussbaum's example from James shows, are sometimes people who have been hurt). Narrative also satis®es our need to understand `òthers,'' `àctual others in a particular case at hand, and not repeatable instances or replaceable occupants of a general status'' (Walker, ``Moral Understanding'' 167). Again, the pull of narrative for contemporary philosophers is the corrective it offers to the abstract, totalizing vision of much traditional ethical theory. In response to the philosophical contention that we can believe either in ``the good life for man,'' which is a determinate ideal, or in rival, incommensurate, mutually exclusive goods, MacIntyre questions the assumptions of contemporary moral philosophy underlying this either/or choice. Like Walker and Nussbaum, MacIntyre undertakes a critique of these assumptions by appealing to an idea that has much in common with Walker's conception of moral remainders: ``By choosing one [of two rival goods] I do nothing to diminish or derogate from the claim upon me of the other; and therefore, whatever I do, I shall have left undone what I ought to have done'' (After Virtue 224). MacIntyre points out that in our culture of liberal or bureaucratic individualism, the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues has been lost, and one of the consequences of that loss is an inability to see that an ethical agent's choice between rival goods in a tragic situation is not the central ethical concern that J. L. Austin, R. M. Hare, and others contend it is. ``What this contention is blind to is that there may be better or worse ways for individuals to live through tragic confrontations of good with good. And that to know what the good life for man is may require knowing what are the better and what are the worse ways of living in and through such situations'' (224). Narratives help us to imagine what these better and worse ways might be, and late Victorian ®ction, because of its skepticism about agency, tends


11

to encourage ethical assessment that does not center on choice. Even though the views of Nussbaum and MacIntyre differ considerably in some respects, they are similar, then, not only in their Aristotelian origin but also in their regard for the narrative context of ethical life. For MacIntyre, any speci®c, meaningful account of the virtues presupposes our ability to see a human life as having unity and narrative structure. To examine an ethical choice in isolation from the ways of living through the consequences and moral remainders of such a choice simply makes no sense to him. Rorty, an analytical philosopher who does not share MacIntyre's historicist orientation (and in fact represents the very liberal individualism that MacIntyre ®nds so troubling), nonetheless similarly values a narrative paradigm and turns to literature at least in part because it keeps us from deceiving ourselves about moral remainders. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he describes a ®gure he calls the ``liberal ironist,'' which is clearly himself and all others who would be happiest in his utopian, postmetaphysical culture. His de®nition of ``liberal'' comes from Judith Shklar's argument that although cruelty has traditionally not been the worst of sins in either politics or religion, the liberal hates cruelty more than any other evil.23 The `ìronist'' element of Rorty's term refers to this ®gure's willingness to accept the contingency of his or her most central beliefs, acknowledging that there is nothing beyond history and chance that grounds them. Many of the questions of metaphysicians strike the liberal ironist as pointless: `Ìs it right to deliver n innocents over to be tortured to save the lives of m x n other innocents? If so, what are the correct values of n and m?'' . . . Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question ± algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort ± is still, in his heart, a theologian or metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities. (xv)

For antifoundational philosophers like Rorty, as well as for the late Victorian liberal ironists at the center of my study, story has replaced moral hierarchy, and human and contextual particularities

12


have become more important than the rules and theories that guide ethical choice. To grant primacy to narrative and detail is not, however, to reject principles or even normative morality.24 As Tobin Siebers has observed, ``we have a moralistic tendency to reject morals just because they are morals'' (Morals and Stories 41). By appealing to relevant ethical theory, my analysis of late Victorian ethics seeks to avoid that tendency, even though the ®n-de-sieÁcle writers were themselves among the ®rst in literary history to succumb to it. A central thesis of this book is that these writers shaped what they considered a new ethics by telling traditional stories in a new way, and the methods and details of those narratives construct alternatives to conventional Victorian morality even as they reveal the residual hold that such a morality has on late-century writers. And this brings me once again to the second of the two purposes of my study, mentioned above: to investigate the connection between aesthetics and ethics. imperfectly breaking free: the new ethics and aesthetics of turn-of-the-century narratives Referring to Victorian Christianity, the narrator of Olive Schreiner's novel The Story of an African Farm (1883) says, ``When a soul breaks free from the arms of a superstition, bits of the claws and talons break themselves off in him. It is not the work of a day to squeeze them out.''25 This metaphor of embedded fragments of claws and talons vividly captures the attitude of Schreiner and other post-Darwinian writers toward not only the religion but also the ethics and ideology from which they are breaking free. Her novel's narrator represents Christian morality as irrational (`à superstition'') and oppressive (the bird's embrace is not only allencompassing but painful and predatory). But because novelists tend to be preoccupied with the histories that situate us, Schreiner also points out through her choice of metaphor that this `òld'' morality will not simply disappear once it is consciously rejected, for it has already had a de®ning in¯uence.


13

In my next chapter, which considers ethics within both a Victorian and a more broadly modern, post-Enlightenment context, I discuss the importance of history and of the ®n-de-sieÁcle writers' sense of themselves as transitional. The anxiety about agency experienced at this historical juncture differs in important ways from similar anxieties that came before and after, and though it is impossible to do justice to the complexity of all that contributed to this difference, there is value in delineating ± even in broad strokes ± the conception of history that informs my thinking about turn-ofthe-century narrative ethics and about the contribution twentiethcentury moral philosophy can make to an analysis of this ethics. All the writers I am considering in this study, besides emerging from a particular moral tradition, have also, of course, been in¯uenced by a particular novelistic tradition. By reworking familiar narrative techniques and genres, they do not completely escape an aesthetics that has been the vehicle for a more conventional morality than the new ethics they are seeking to articulate. But they make surprising or unsettling aesthetic choices that allow them to undertake a different sort of ethical inquiry than that of earlier Victorian writers.26 Hardy, Schreiner, and other late-century New Woman novelists, for example, in their revisions of traditional courtship and marriage plots and their transformation of realism, attempt to displace patriarchal values and assumptions with a new ethics of gender relations and sexuality. Yet they do so under the guise of telling realistic stories of relationships between men and women ± just like those of their mid-Victorian precursors. Oscar Wilde, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, develops what I would call a proto-postmodern ethics by telling, ironically enough, a traditional fairy-tale or fable-like story with an ostensibly clear moral. But that morality survives only as the embedded beak and talons in an otherwise ethically elusive and contradictory text. Of all the ®ction writers I consider, Joseph Conrad is the most committed to the ideal of ethical principles. Unlike Hardy's, his novels are full of identi®ably good and evil characters, and his narrators and implied authors rarely shy away from moral judgments. Still, the radical ways in which Conrad departs from nineteenth-century narrative

14


tradition complicate the principled, clearly de®ned morality that can be identi®ed in his texts as a Victorian inheritance. Conrad appropriates traditional genres but then works against their norms both aesthetically and ethically. In Lord Jim, the romantic sea story/ adventure novel of the sort Jim himself read as a boy becomes, in Conrad's hands, a narrative that skeptically questions many traditional moral notions ± heroism, the effectiveness of a code of conduct, the value of sympathy ± by violating the narrative conventions that typically undergird these ethics. Similarly, Heart of Darkness in®ltrates the jingoistic adventure-writing tradition to construct a critique of imperialism, and Under Western Eyes, the Conrad novel I focus on in the ®nal chapter of this study, unfolds as a spy story in a political context that obliterates the distinctions on which such a story would seem to hinge: the difference between `ùs'' and ``them,'' autocrat and revolutionary. Like the other writers I consider, then, Conrad develops narratives that are fascinating hybrids of old and new; Victorian genres and normative values compete with technical experimentation and searching, ¯exible modes of ethical inquiry. In the ®n-de-sieÁcle texts I examine, I focus on four ethical preoccupations that are all related to what is arguably the keynote of late Victorian and turn-of-the-century ethics: anxiety about agency. I delineate these preoccupations as gender and sexual ethics (chapter 3), moral luck (chapter 4), aestheticized ethics (chapter 5), and the ethics of speech acts (chapter 6). For the novelists of this period, a time of cultural upheaval and uncertainty, all of these concerns are related to questions about personal freedom and doubts about moral autonomy. After the following chapter, which paves the way for a reading of ethics contextualized by intellectual history and cultural politics, I begin by exploring ®n-de-sieÁcle ideas about agency in narrative treatments of sexual ethics. Besides sharing an interest in gender, sexuality, and power, Hardy and such late-century women writers as Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand sought to confront and narrate the problem of cruelty and victimization in a way that would transform Victorian sexual morality. I consider their narrative efforts to


15

articulate a new, emotionally driven ethics alongside philosophical discussions of the cognitive dimension of emotion and the debates surrounding Gilligan's feminist notion of an ethics of care. In interpreting these stories about what the late Victorians called the New Woman, I am as intrigued by the ethical ambivalence and uncertainties of the texts as I am by their de®ant critiques of the status quo. Unlike recent critics who have discussed Hardy's novels in the context of New Woman ®ction, however, I am reluctant to attribute the ethical contradictions of his work to his gender or to describe him as signi®cantly less feminist than his female contemporaries. I argue that Hardy's ethics of love has been misconstrued as patriarchal, conceding that the emotional and passionate nature of his ethical thinking leaves it vulnerable to just such interpretations. Schreiner and Grand run the same risk, and their women characters often slide into cruelty as they unsuccessfully attempt to escape their culture's paradigm of dominance and submission in relations between the sexes. Like John Kucich, who concludes his recent study of Victorian ethics with chapters on Hardy and Grand, I feel that New Woman writing is best understood within an ethical context since moral categories were so important to the feminism of these late-century writers. Unlike Kucich, however, who focuses on ``questions of truthfulness in both personal and aesthetic domains''27 and in doing so illuminates one dimension of this ethical context, my treatment of these writers concludes that an understanding of emotion ± especially as it in¯uences rational choice ± can shed light on another crucial dimension and lead to a different assessment of the ethics of this ®ction. To argue that these three writers, despite their differences, all sought to develop an ethics of emotion at odds with Victorian public morality and the ideology of separate spheres is to question recent judgments (including Kucich's) about how Hardy's novels might be read within the context of New Woman ®ction. In my fourth chapter I discuss the ethics of Hardy's ®ction from a very different perspective, though one even more clearly imbued with concerns about agency. It is a critical commonplace that the plots of Hardy's novels are governed by chance, but this important

16


dimension of his narratives is illuminated in a new way when studied in light of the controversial concept of moral luck, which has only recently received the attention it deserves. In¯uenced by the work of Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel on this topic, I make a case for the existence of moral luck as Nagel de®nes it: ``Where a signi®cant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral luck.''28 This concept is central to the ethics of Hardy's ®ction. Agency, responsibility, and moral assessment become problematic when luck plays a determining role in our lives, as it so often does in Hardy's novels. Chapter 3 focuses on moral luck in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. On the surface A Laodicean seems to be merely a lurid melodrama, but its controlling metaphor of life as a game in which we must gamble whether we choose to or not makes it a fascinating text to read alongside Hardy's more famous novels. Central to all three works are ideas about time, timing, knowledge, intention, and moral judgment. I argue that Hardy's belief in moral luck complicates his attraction to Kantian ethics which is opposed to such a concept because of the primacy for Kant of intentions and agency. An ethical concern at the heart of late nineteenth-century British aestheticism also raises the question of agency: is it possible for the Victorian artist to escape Victorian morality? In the ®ction of Oscar Wilde and Henry James, I explore the ethical implications of the aestheticist desire to refashion the world. Chapter 5 compares Wilde's strange, Gothic, proto-postmodern, ®n-de-sieÁcle narrative, The Picture of Dorian Gray with James's The Ambassadors, an early modernist novel which, as Jonathan Freedman has pointed out, offers a response to Wilde's aestheticism in Dorian Gray (Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Structure [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990]). I build on Freedman's comparative study by reading both novels in light of philosophical ideas about the ethics of self and other, especially as expounded in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur. I see the different styles of aestheticizing ethics in Wilde and James as similar in


17

emotional self-protectiveness, a strategy that erects a defense against both suffering and love. The ®nal ethical preoccupation in the texts I discuss is lying, which critics have only recently begun to recognize as central to Victorian ethics, just as important as the moral earnestness for which the nineteenth century was famous. This section of my study bene®ts from John Kucich's The Power of Lies but focuses on Conrad, a novelist his book mentions only in passing. While Kucich's approach emphasizes the function of honesty and dishonesty within the dynamics of middle-class Victorian culture, my own approach considers lying ± like promising, confessing, and storytelling itself ± as a speech act that late-century writers (unlike most of their Victorian precursors) began to treat with nearly obsessive self-consciousness. When philosophical literature on promising and lying is juxtaposed with Conrad's Under Western Eyes, a novel about both, the ethical signi®cance of particularity, context, and narrative emerges with unusual clarity. Philosophical re¯ection on this topic ± even at its most sophisticated and nuanced ± seems unable to do justice to the complexity of the problems and paradoxes that motivate or follow from the promises and lies narratives imagine. Whereas in my analysis of late-century narratives of passionate and compassionate love, Hardy's stories about moral luck, and the aestheticized ethics of Wilde and James, I argue that ethical theory can provide a framework within which to interpret the ®ction, in this chapter I maintain that the novel offers the better ethical guide, enriching our understanding of the moral philosophy. Speech acts are dependent on contexts, and the dialogic form of the novel furnishes these contexts in a way that abstract philosophy cannot. This ®nal section of the book, then, offers further evidence for Nussbaum's claim that ethical inquiry in literature can offer a viable alternative to the prevailing mode of inquiry in moral philosophy. In these ®nal two chapters, my discussion of Wilde, James, and Conrad raises a broad question about turn-of-the-century ethics by examining how such different writers can be equally ambivalent in their understanding of the relationship between art and morality.

18


As dissimilar as Wilde and Conrad are, for example, in their attitudes toward aesthetics, they start from an oddly similar de®nition of art. Wilde's de®ant declaration in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray that `Àll art is quite useless'' sums up Conrad's frustration with the dif®cult and apparently pro®tless work of writing novels, which often felt to him like a form of torture. As Anthony Cascardi explains, ``what Conrad understands by the dif®culty of art has roots in the fact that it remains in the end aesthetic, that it is a sphere of work without apparent purpose or aim and, for Conrad, without signi®cant compensation outside that which it can itself provide'' (`Èthics and Aesthetics'' 21). Wilde embraces the idea of art's uselessness as a release from the bondage of Victorian didacticism (which, in fact, neither his novel nor his preface manage to avoid altogether). Conrad, however, resists aestheticism despite its attractiveness. As dif®cult as he found the effort to believe in truthfulness and art's capacity to achieve an ethical end by telling the truth about the world, his ®ction continues to undertake this effort. Virginia Woolf recognized both Conrad's struggle and his success in the very texture of his prose: ``the beauty of surface has always a ®bre of morality within. I seem to see each of the sentences . . . advancing with resolute bearing and a calm which they have won in strenuous con¯ict, against the forces of falsehood, sentimentality, and slovenliness.''29 Conrad's ®ction seems very modern in its depiction of lying as virtually inescapable, and yet Woolf is right that for Conrad falsehood nevertheless remains the enemy. His protagonists seek to disentangle themselves from webs of deceit, and Under Western Eyes ± unlike The Picture of Dorian Gray ± never glamorizes lying. The emotional approach taken by Hardy and the New Woman writers in their reworking of Victorian ethics is antithetical to the approach of Wilde, James, and Conrad, who project well-disguised, elusive narrators and implied authors and guard themselves against feeling. Conrad does so because of his Kantian distrust of emotion's potential to undermine reason and ethics, even though throughout his ®ction there are vivid instances of emotional bonding. James does so by ®ltering his story through a character's consciousness,


19

which enables a more nuanced, ¯exible form of moral deliberation than other narrative methods, even as it protects him from divulging any ethical commitments of his own. Wilde does so because as a homosexual his strongest feelings were banned. Much of Wilde's most memorable writing startles us through its apparent affront to reason, but ultimately it appeals to a reader's intellect and aesthetic sensibility rather than eliciting compassion or other emotional responses. These three writers rethink Victorian morality not by turning to emotion or revising the traditional love plot, but by exploring the relationship between private and public that has always been so central to ethics. Wilde's need to lead a double life, despite the openness signaled by his public ¯amboyance, made him especially alert to the discrepancy between the ethics he could imagine for his private life and the public code of morality that made lies necessary. Conrad, too, coming as he did from a family of political activists, had a heightened awareness of the public world that demands roles, contracts, and disguises; his novels show that while individuals can work to change this world, it has the power to coerce and to strip away ethical agency. One of my aims in the chapters that follow is to demonstrate the centrality of ethics to our understanding of ®n-de-sieÁcle literature and culture. Like Kucich and other recent commentators on ethics and politics, I believe we need to work against `àn oversimpli®ed sense of how ethics is related to the kinds of political or ideological concerns that have preoccupied contemporary criticism'' (The Power of Lies 37). All of the writers I consider were political in their desire to change what they considered obsolete or oppressive attitudes, institutions, laws, and moral codes. But the politics of their texts cannot be construed apart from the ethics, just as the ethics can only be read through close attention to aesthetic choices. I also hope to show that such attention to narrative detail and context can complement the work of moral philosophy, and that the theories and debates animating contemporary ethics can revitalize our study of the ethics of ®ction.

chapter 2

Victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at the ®n de sieÁcle

Theory is required to support observation, just as much as observation theory.

Alasdair MacIntyre1

Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.

Charles Taylor2

Despite all the emphasis on particularity, context, and narrative in recent studies of ethics and literature, scholars working in this ®eld have directed surprisingly little attention to the question of why an ethical problem or set of ethical concerns dominates in narratives written during a given historical period. Such historicizing might be avoided for the simple reason that identifying the moral preoccupations of an era represents only the beginning for an ethical critic and immediately begs several questions. My claim, for instance, that anxiety about agency during the British ®n de sieÁcle determines in a variety of ways the ethical sensibility of late Victorian and turn-of-the-century novels gives rise to a question about history ± how are the ethical issues of these novels distinctively different for their time? ± as well as to a number of theoretical inquiries about the value of understanding ethics as historically contingent, inquiries that concern the existence of moral absolutes and the validity of universal claims about virtue.3 Any satisfying answer to these questions would entail a complex explanation of both the relationship between history and ethics and the historical and cultural context of Victorian ideas about will, agency, and determinism, not to mention nineteenth-century conceptions of selfhood. Although all I can do here is begin to explore 20

Anxiety about agency at the ®n-de-sieÁcle

21

a few points that would contribute to such an explanation, doing so will further disclose my theoretical assumptions and clarify what I mean when I refer in subsequent chapters to Victorian morality and ®n-de-sieÁcle ethics. Because the historical context of the ®ction I go on to discuss must be conceived both narrowly (the 1890s) and broadly (modern), my method in what follows is to investigate the continuities that make the late nineteenth century seem to be of a piece with both the Victorian period and the twentieth century as well as the discontinuities that mark it as distinctively different, especially in its ethics and its ideas about identity and agency. Between the Victorians' vigorous efforts to deny anxiety about agency and the moderns' acceptance of such angst as unavoidable, the turn-of-the-century writers positioned themselves not only in a discursive, ethical space that they felt to be new and leading to the new but also in the midst of paradox. The paradox of at once accepting uncertainty and instability and developing creative strategies to refuse the despair that seemed to come in the wake of such acceptance enabled the late Victorian writers to forge a new ethics. Although this ethics emerges in all its contradictions, details, and subtleties only in the ®ction I discuss later, my treatment of it here, in the context of intellectual and cultural history, sketches its broad outlines and highlights features of the past and future that help give it de®nition. mill and macintyre: historical peculiarities and moral convictions One of the twentieth-century philosophers most attuned to the historical dimension of ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre, can be said to have an unlikely Victorian precursor of sorts in John Stuart Mill. MacIntyre has famously argued that `èvery moral philosophy has some particular sociology as its counterpart'' (After Virtue 225) and that it makes no sense to speak of virtues apart from the social order that gives rise to them. He has also sketched a history of morality that describes the unity and teleology of both the Aristotelian ethical tradition and that of Aquinas and the Christian

22


Middle Ages, lamenting the disappearance of this belief in telos and a common human good by the time of the Enlightenment. The modern liberal state has since become merely an `àrena in which each individual seeks his or her own private good'' (172). Because we no longer share moral ®rst principles, there is no hope for moral consensus in modern Western society. If this incoherence of moral standards that MacIntyre identi®es and deplores set in during the eighteenth century, then by the early nineteenth century men and women, J. S. Mill among them, were already self-consciously talking and writing about it. Ostensibly, of course, Mill is quite different from MacIntyre, not only as an advocate of liberal individualism but also as a Utilitarian, for in MacIntyre's view, `ìnternal goods and external goods are not commensurable with each other'' (198), and this is a distinction that is alien to the Utilitarians, even to Mill, though he comes closest to making it (199). Yet, as A. Dwight Culler points out in his discussion of the in¯uence of the Saint Simonians on both Mill and Carlyle, Mill, as early as the 1830s, came to see history as a series of periods that were either `òrganic'' (a Saint Simonian term that designates an age uni®ed by a coherent set of religious or philosophical beliefs) or ``critical'' (the group's term for periods lacking any overarching authority).4 This vision of the past bears a striking similarity to MacIntyre's. Like many Victorians, Mill thought of himself as living in an age of transition, and as Robert Denoon Cumming has pointed out in his study of the development of liberal political thought, there is a correlation ``between the transitional character of Mill's age and the history of a mind that presses forward through successive phases.''5 Like his other writings, Mill's autobiography, with its emphasis on stages, attests to the historical structure of his thought and to his importance as ``the ®rst noteworthy political thinker in the British tradition to accord theoretical relevance to history as a progressive development'' (Cumming, Human Nature and History 369). From the Saint Simonians Mill learned to take the historicist view6 and to ask not merely whether an institution or reform or ethical orientation was rational but whether it was ``suitable for a particular


23

people at a particular time'' (Culler, Victorian Mirror 55). The antiessentialist strain in MacIntyre's account of the virtues as well as his nostalgia for a time before the eighteenth century, a time when life and morality were uni®ed and purposeful, are evident in Mill as well, though he is somewhat more approving of his own age than MacIntyre is of modernity: But the chief bene®t which I derived at this time [in the 1830s] from the trains of thought suggested by the St. Simonians and by Comte, was, that I obtained a clearer conception than ever before of the peculiarities of an era of transition in opinion, and ceased to mistake the moral and intellectual characteristics of such an era, for the normal attributes of humanity. I looked forward, through the present age of loud disputes but generally weak convictions, to a future which shall unite the best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organic periods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual action in all modes not hurtful to others; but also, convictions as to what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven on the feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and so ®rmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life, that they shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others.7

In their moral philosophy, then, both MacIntyre and Mill are alert to the danger of identifying the ethics of a particular time with ``the normal attributes of humanity.''8 And because they are both postEnlightenment thinkers (albeit at opposite ends of an historical continuum that stretches from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century), they fear that what once had provided unity and ®rm grounding in discussions of ethics has vanished. Their strongest dissimilarity, however, and what characterizes them as having been in¯uenced by different philosophical traditions and different historical and cultural contexts, emerges in their descriptions of what they ®nd most dismaying about their respective societies. For Mill it is slavish and stultifying conformity, whereas for MacIntyre it is incoherent values and a lack of consensus. This difference is instructive if we are to follow the lead of both philosophers and acknowledge that something valuable is gained in a discussion of Victorian and ®n-de-sieÁcle ethics if it is prefaced by an account of the cultural history of those periods. As Cumming notes,

24


for Mill, ``The individual's individuality . . . acquires a certain general relevance insofar as he represents his particular period in history'' (Human Nature and History 365), and this subjective representation of history is complexly ethical, conveying as it does both one's values as shaped by a particular historical moment and one's resistance to those values. The ethos of the early to mid-Victorian period that is the subject of Mill's social criticism yields at the ®n de sieÁcle to the creative tension between a new ethics of freedom and an old morality of convictions (the union of different types of historical periods that Mill had predicted) and then in the twentieth century to the liberal individualism that for MacIntyre dominates an age `àfter virtue,'' a period in which the language of morality persists but in such a fragmented form as to be virtually without substance. As will become clear in my later treatment of MacIntyre's thesis, I cannot, of course, completely agree with an argument that impugns the value of contemporary moral philosophy, for work in this ®eld has proved stimulating ± despite its many unresolved debates ± to my thinking about the ethical issues I discuss in this book. I am in complete accord, however, with his claim that `àny speci®c account of the virtues presupposes an equally speci®c account of the narrative structure and unity of a human life and vice versa'' (After Virtue 243). Because I believe this to be true and am also in agreement with Mill's belief in the general relevance ± both historical and ethical ± of an individual's individuality, I am turning to ®ctional accounts of human lives as a way to understand how English ®n-de-sieÁcle writers speci®ed virtue and construed ethical problems. And in this chapter I will brie¯y consider ideas about the structure and unity of the lives of the Victorians themselves since this intellectual history is important to the ethics of the ®ction ± and vice versa. mid-victorian faith in the paradox of self-denying will Even early in the Victorian period, assumptions about choice and self-determination were being challenged by industrialism and its


25

attendant social changes, by science and its new methods of conceiving order and relating humans to the rest of a diverse world, and by a class system that insisted upon conformity, whether by constraining an individual's practical choices (about schooling, vocation, marriage, etc.) or by promising greater freedom and status through adherence to middle-class rules and habits. Early in the century, Victorians met these challenges with a vigorous assertion of will, but beneath this simple attitude lay an ambivalent sense of self. Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus describes its protagonist, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, as a typical nineteenth-century man both in his spiritual crisis, with its ensuing doubt and despair, and in his recovery, which paradoxically necessitates a reclaiming of the self through shifting the focus from self to the larger world of work and duty to others. The de®ant self-assertion of the Byronic hero in Romantic literature was much more straightforward than the Victorian depiction of will as self-mastery, as learning self-denial and one's place in a complex social network. Carlyle's narrator says of Teufeldrockh's progress, ``he is now, if not ceasing, yet intermitting to èat his own heart'; and clutches round him outwardly on the NOT-ME for wholesomer food.''9 During this period, the ``not me'' fed the Victorian self either by shoring it up in its insecurity, or by signaling, as Carlyle does, the greater likelihood of ®nding happiness in duty than in freedom, in an other-directed focus rather than in introspection.10 John Reed, in his study of Victorian will, points out that Carlyle saw the self as a nodule of will ringed round by necessity yet also described existence as a web of ®laments endlessly extending. This contradiction epitomizes a central con¯ict in the nineteenth-century perception of the self as both an independent, willing, even embattled entity, and an elusive, yielding, self-less medium for transmitting the energy of some divine or natural power.11

Some Victorians ± those who chose religion over science as well as those who managed to reconcile the two ± emphasized divine power and the biblical imperative of dying to self. But interestingly enough, even those who lost their faith and looked to the natural rather than the supernatural for meaning often developed phil-

26


osophies grounded in self-sacri®ce and perceptions of the self as simultaneously strong willed and sel¯ess. With his theory of natural supernaturalism, Carlyle exempli®es this willfulness in his refusal to make a choice between the secular and the divine. As Culler observes, Carlyle's ``quasi-divination of history'' and ``quasi-secularization of God'' seem contradictory since one concept is not really assimilable to the other (Victorian Mirror 73). Yet Carlyle's ideas perfectly re¯ect one aspect of historical reality that, as we have seen, Mill hoped humanity would outgrow: our need periodically to throw off creeds and convictions and to replace them with others better adapted to the current age. The complexities and contradictions in the writings of Carlyle and other early Victorians are symptomatic of the need that accompanied rapid social changes early in the nineteenth century, the need for reform ± the need, to use Carlyle's own metaphor, for new clothes to replace those that had become worn-out and ill-®tting. The tailoring of this new garment ± which could be neither traditionally Christian, according to Carlyle, nor strictly Utilitarian ± involved trial and error. Still, Carlyle warned against endless intellectual speculation. In an age of dizzying change and complexity, Victorians experienced doubt but for the most part refused to dwell in it, or even to proclaim a conviction without then acting on it. `Ì must mix myself with action, lest I wither by despair,'' the speaker of Tennyson's Locksley Hall resolves, after a jilting by the woman he loves, a rejection that results from his lack of wealth and social status and that temporarily leaves him feeling robbed of choice and mired in morbid introspection.12 Matthew Arnold, mindful of what he described as ``the bewildering confusion of our times,'' deplored poetry `ìn which suffering ®nds no vent in action; in which a continual state of mental distress is prolonged.''13 This Victorian belief in the power of the active will is the keynote of Sartor Resartus. Teufelsdrockh quotes Goethe: ``Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action''; he describes conviction as worthless ``till it convert itself into Conduct''; and he urges the following precept: `` `Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,' which thou knowest


27

to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer'' (187). In the early to mid-Victorian period, then, a belief in deontological agency enabled what Carlyle triumphantly called the `Èverlasting Yea'' and dispelled much of the confusion that came in the wake of social change. This sense of agency conjoined to duty was certainly not identical to what is commonly thought of as freedom. Carlyle's ``Gospel of Freedom'' acknowledges that, in Teufelsdrockh's words, `Òur life is compassed round with Necessity'' (178). Focusing on the discourse surrounding industrialism in the ®rst half of the Victorian age, Catherine Gallagher investigates the many ways ``freedom'' came to be debated and rede®ned as a concept during this period. The model of freedom in abolitionist tracts, for example ± that of a free, unregulated labor force ± angered social reformers targeting the abuses of industrial capitalism. They pointed to workers who were deprived, by a free market, of their choices about employers, working conditions, and even ± because their actions were often dictated by economic necessity ± moral behavior. As Gallagher points out, the social reformer Robert Owen and his followers strongly advocated a deterministic view of moral development. Many liberal political economists agreed with Owen, or at least with his initial premise: These thinkers essentially rede®ned the concept of freedom by applying it to action, not to the will, and by contrasting it to external constraint, not to internal necessity. They argued that the will was the product of the convergence of various unwilled psychic entities, which were the results of one's experiences, and was therefore determined, not free. However, if one acted according to one's will, these thinkers called one's actions `free.' Liberty, then, was freedom from external constraints and was entirely reconcilable with strict determinism. (Gallagher, Industrial Reformation 13)

Although he shared with the liberal economists belief in the proposition that the will is not self-determined, Owen did not accept this de®nition of free action because he believed that without being rational an action could not be free. Hence educating workers was a priority among the reforms for which Owen campaigned. But average middle-class Victorians, in their acceptance of the status

28


quo, their work ethic, and their concern to avoid being paralyzed by doubt and confusion, seized what they must have seen as their freedom by acting on a duty determined by others; thus many of them internalized and lived this rede®ned concept of agency. In his ambitious study of the sources of modern identity, Charles Taylor, like MacIntyre, considers ethical questions in relation to history; because he believes any understanding of the good to be entwined with an understanding of the self, history ± with its changing conceptions of the self ± is inescapably pertinent to ethics. Taylor stresses the continuities more so than the discontinuities between our age and the nineteenth century, titling one of the chapters of Sources of the Self, `Òur Victorian Contemporaries.'' Like MacIntyre, he marks an important shift at the time of the Enlightenment, which he characterizes not in the traditional way as a loss of religious faith but rather as a redirecting of the action such faith enables: ``The Victorian era was in general more pious and more concerned about the state of religion than was the eighteenth century. But the faith which emerged from this renewal was signi®cantly different ± among other ways, in its intense practical concern ± from what had existed before the Enlightenment'' (399). The simultaneous rise of the middle class and the rise of the novel during this period can, of course, be related to the new in¯ections and practical emphasis of this faith, with its strong implications for ethics and politics. Taylor ®nds the British anti-slavery movement particularly revealing as an early example of what has become a widespread modern recognition of justice as central to the good life, which in turn gives rise to the phenomenon of citizens' movements taking shape around a moral issue. And as he points out, it is crucial not to underestimate the religious leadership in these causes ± both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ± even if a ``secularizing slide'' occurred among some of those involved (401). But if reform was one positive impetus to emerge from this Victorian Christian or other-directed conception of self, another was the impetus to submit to external authority, a moral motivation that provided a comforting sense of security but was less clearly positive in its consequences. This Victorian ethos undergirds the


29

culture of complacency that Mill critiques in On Liberty. And as we have seen, his own hope, like Owen's, looked toward a future in which moral convictions were ®rmly grounded in reason rather than resting on arbitrary social conventions. What disturbed Mill about his society, as he observed it from the highest class to the lowest, was that people seemed to have given up individualized wishes, peculiarities, and eccentricities of conduct: ``they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done.''14 A Calvinistic conception of humanity, or any other version of a self-denying ethic (such as the one Carlyle advocates in Sartor Resartus), struck Mill as all too pervasive in his age, and he believed in the possibility of agency that did not crush individuality but fostered its growth through the practice of healthy selfassertion: In our times, . . . everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves ± what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. (Mill, Essays 264±65)

Even though Carlyle advocates the very modes of renunciation that Mill thought to be at the root of the self-censoring tendencies of Victorian society, Carlyle was himself vibrantly eccentric, as is the protagonist of Sartor Resartus, who retailors Hamlet's aphorism when he observes that ``Custom . . . doth make dotards of us all'' (237). Both Carlyle and Mill, then, believe in forms of agency not constrained by custom and social expectation, and criticize their society not so much for anxiety about agency or for paralyzed will as for living unexamined lives governed by habit rather than thoughtful choice. Carlyle's injunction ± do your duty but not mechanically ± was more incoherent and potentially contradictory than Mill's urging of individual liberty,15 but both writers limn a

30


society whose freedom did seem to be more external than internal, more a matter of what legislated duty and social pressure allowed than of personal choice. When Carlyle and Mill describe the forces that stultify an individual's potential for unpressured, thoughtful choice, the industrial image of the steam engine ®gures this anxiety about enforced conformity in both Sartor Resartus and On Liberty.16 The fear that the mechanistic model of human nature would replace the organic took hold, for obvious reasons, during the industrial revolution, and even though Mill vigorously resists this new model in On Liberty, he does align himself with the evolutionists in their nineteenthcentury conception of conscience as internal mechanism. And this makes sense for him because despite the metaphor of the machine, the new model is more particularist and ¯exible than the old. In his recent Freudian study of the sources of moral agency, John Deigh makes the point that throughout the eighteenth century conscience was believed to be `àn authoritative source of moral knowledge,'' but by the Victorian period it was no longer thought of as knowledge of moral truth but was instead considered an internal mechanism to keep one from giving in to temptation. A newly in¯uential Darwinian theory led some Victorians to believe that this mechanism evolved in social animals with sophisticated mental capacities by producing in them feelings of remorse and regret.17 Mill agreed with the evolutionary conception of conscience as primarily biological, psychological, and social rather than epistemological, and this agreement posed less of a problem for him than for Carlyle who, unlike Mill, had a religious upbringing and suffered the typical Victorian spiritual breakdown, which led him to retailor, rather than altogether relinquish, Christian conceptions of conscience as divinely prompted, as authoritative in an ultimate sense. Deigh points out that Freud's writings were later to offer a synthesis of these two conceptions of conscience, retaining the phenomenology of our experiential feeling that the voice of conscience ± what Paul Ricoeur refers to as ``the agency that calls''18 ± issues an injunction above and beyond us while also incorporating the modern idea of conscience as a mechanism for maintaining social


31

order.19 Freud's later writings, according to Deigh, help us solve the puzzle that came into being with the new nineteenth-century evolutionist conception of ethical agency, a conception that emphasized moral feelings and motivations but left behind the comforting knowledge of moral truths. The Victorians themselves, I would argue, responded to this puzzle with fear, resisting the new model of Mill and the evolutionists ± i.e., conscience as an individual's internal emotional reaction to a moral situation ± and self-protectively adhering to an epistemological model of conscience which undervalued feelings and motivations. These feelings and motivations, however, as the ®n-de-sieÁcle Victorian novelists would later attempt to demonstrate through their storytelling, were vitally important to an ethical life, even though they were often in con¯ict with absolute moral rules and principles. late victorian doubts about morality and agency: improvising a new ethics As MacIntyre reminds us, `àbstract changes in moral concepts are always embodied in real, particular events'' (After Virtue 61). Early in the Victorian period, individuals imagining and enacting their own sense of agency faced challenges created by industrial, scienti®c, social, and ideological upheavals. These challenges not only persisted later in the century but were complicated in a variety of ways: by greater questioning of once clearly de®ned gender roles and assumptions about love and marriage, by post-Darwinian skepticism about the sovereignty of reason in a world of uncontrolled emotions and events, and by political changes that cast doubt on the traditional relationship between the public and the private. I explore the connection between these cultural anxieties and the ethics of ®n-de-sieÁcle ®ction in greater detail in the chapters to follow, but by way of preface to this analysis, I shall broadly sketch what I see as the ethos of the late-century which, in counterdistinction to that of the early and mid-Victorian era, is marked not by a deontological escape from self or a paradoxically strong-willed refusal of choice but instead by anxious yet ¯exibly ethical

32


searching, an openness to the surprising and unusual, and an ambivalence poised between regard for Victorian morality and attention to the ethical relevance of that which lies beyond morality's authority. Edmund Gosse's memoir, Father and Son (1907), offers a luminous example of the difference between Victorian and late Victorian/Edwardian ethical assumptions in its retrospective narrative of Gosse's Victorian childhood, which was dominated by values and paradigms he could never fully accept. At the end of the book Gosse describes himself as a young man determined to claim `à human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself '' (251). Self-fashioning is an ethical concept radically divergent from the mid-Victorian understanding of the self as determined by family, social convention, and deontological morality. The focus on the inner life is also new, a departure from the Victorian ethos of looking outward to others and de®ning oneself through vigorous agency in the world. If the Victorians avoided potentially troubling con¯icts by accepting will as determined and embracing action in and of itself as a safe, understandable form of freedom, then the late Victorians suspended the need to choose that can arise even when there is no real possibility of choice; they more courageously explored freedom and determinism as two extreme, though equally compelling, truths, allowing the tension its own reality rather than seeking to resolve it. Terry Eagleton's description of the period nicely captures the unresolved tension in the late-century conception of agency, a conception characterized by zest for multiplicity in contrast to the Victorian need to unify, control, and ground: ``The ®n de sieÁcle is the age of the subjective and extravagant, of a complex inwardness and individual deviancy which threaten to burst the stereotyping moulds of language and convention; but it is also an era in which, as with the Shavian life-force, we are mere instruments of some ulterior, altogether impersonal evolution'' (Eagleton, ``Flight'' 16). Darwin's in¯uence is evident here in the emphasis on diversity, variability, and otherness as well as in the humility before vast processes beyond human control. As Gillian Beer reminds us, `Èvolutionary thinking is not a grid; it is a bundle


33

of apprehensions.''20 The difference between the mid-Victorian and late Victorian conceptions of agency can be seen as the difference between a self that mobilizes strategies of avoidance in the face of such apprehensions and a self that dwells within the anxiety. Late Victorian agency, though constrained and compromised in many ways, is characterized by a freedom made possible, paradoxically, through honesty about one's own limitations. Such honesty is the hallmark of Gosse's text. In Father and Son Gosse simultaneously defends Darwin's theory of evolution, which his father refused to accept, and tells a story in which ``complex inwardness'' and `ìndividual deviancy'' are triumphant against the rigid law of the father ± in this case a father who is at once a careful, precise, taxonomizing naturalist and a minister in the fundamentalist Christian sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. Gosse's portrait of his father satirizes Victorian insistence on self-denial and conformist categorizing. Not exactly autobiography, nor biography, nor ®ction, Father and Son is itself elusive of category, and its subversion of autobiographic tradition is something that is acknowledged even by those who emphasize the work's Victorian tendencies.21 The personal truths of experience, especially if they challenged normative public morality, were not typically introduced into the public realm by Victorian autobiographers. In Father and Son, Gosse makes a clear case for the importance of these personal truths. Gosse's efforts to resist dogmatism with the greater openness and even waywardness that he ®nds in the details of private experience can be read as the beginnings of a new epistemology, one that implies an ethics no longer wedded to the need for certainty or an unshakeable foundation. In her study of epistemic responsibility, Lorraine Code describes intellectual honesty in terms I ®nd relevant not only to Gosse's stance but also to Pater's concept of the self in ¯ux, Hardy's ``series of seemings,'' William James's pragmatism, Conrad's skepticism, and the resistance to Victorian gender ideology among the New Woman writers: Intellectual virtue is, above all, a matter of orientation toward the world, toward one's knowledge-seeking self, and toward other such selves as part of

34


the world . . . This attitude involves a willingness to let things speak for themselves, a kind of humility toward the experienced world that curbs any excessive desire to impose one's cognitive structurings upon it.22

Lacking this humility, Philip Gosse was, according to his son, ``more an attorney than a philosopher,'' more a Victorian selfprotectively fending off doubts than Edmund Gosse himself was, for the son possessed a capacity for negative capability that he faults his father for lacking: ``this obstinate persuasion that he alone knew the mind of God, that he alone could interpret the designs of the Creator, what did it result from if not from a congenital lack of that highest modesty which replies Ì do not know' even to the questions which Faith, with menacing ®nger, insists on having most positively answered?'' (113). Rather than following his father's lead and adopting for himself certainties and dogmas to live by, Gosse embraced imaginative literature, especially Shakespeare (Keats's prime example of the poet of negative capability), allowing art to guide his thoughts and beliefs in a tentative, exploratory fashion quite contrary to his father's scienti®c method. I disagree with Martin Danahay's claim that in his autobiography Gosse, like Mill, exhibits a lack of attention to his own subjectivity by focusing on his father. This claim generally holds true for Mill, the mid-Victorian who fears and avoids self-scrutiny: `Ì neither estimated myself highly or lowly,'' he admits. `Ì did not estimate myself at all'' (quoted in Danahay, Community of One 153). But by the end of the Victorian period, the apparent other-directedness of a writer like Gosse is striking quite a different note from Mill's. Danahay misses this note when he concludes that Gosse's `ìnnate and persistent self is merely a `nut' of resistance, a stubborn refusal to do something rather than a positive assertion of an alternative existence'' (165). He misses the self ± a very un-Victorian self ± that does not believe in positive assertions. Facing religious, philosophical, and ethical questions, latecentury writers were, in a variety of ways, likely to respond, `Ì don't know.'' Their intellectual inquiries were therefore able to begin not exactly with unbiased empiricism but with honesty about the relevance of the detailed subjective context within which ideas


35

and ethics take shape. The particulars of Gosse's narrative contribute to our sense of individualized agency, will as complexly motivated and constrained. Although Gosse shares some of his father's Victorian habits, even at times his resistance to mainstream post-Darwinian theories, Darwin's in¯uence on Father and Son is apparent nonetheless, if only in Gosse's late Victorian unwillingness to submit his thinking to categories that will no longer accommodate it. Like Darwin's work, then, Father and Son stresses the connection between adaptation and survival. The acknowledgment of the need to ``retailor'' began early in the Victorian period with Carlyle, but too often the new garment was designed to bind an unruly will rather than to allow room for healthy growth. The fear and repression that characterized the Victorian response to threatened agency become, at the end of the century, a less paralyzing anxiety that allows for risk and opportunity. William James's observation that `ìf a man fears error in a neurotic fashion, it may well prevent him from taking the risks which would lead him to the truth''23 signals the turn toward a new epistemology and ethics and away from the conservative, defensive position of the Victorian who clings, often out of fear, to a strict conception of duty, convention, or world-view. Why reject an hypothesis, the late-century writers ask, just because we cannot prove it absolutely?24 The mid-Victorian crisis of faith itself arose from this neurotic need for certainty, according to James, who argues in favor of `àny hypothesis . . . live enough to tempt our will,'' including the hypothesis of God's existence (``Will to Believe'' 32). While Edmund Gosse asks himself whether there is a god and answers, `Ì don't know,'' his father is not only certain that God exists, he also claims to know the will of God. Philip Gosse's Omphalos (1857) provides a near-parody of this Victorian refusal of doubt. His son describes ``this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume'' (105) as an attempt to tie up all loose ends, to answer all unanswered questions, ``to bring all the turmoil of scienti®c speculations to a close, ¯ing geology into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion eat grass with the lamb'' (105). The aplomb with which Philip Gosse develops his theory that God's

36


creation ``bore false witness to past processes, which had never taken place'' (104) is symptomatic of a craving for unity and certainty that de®ned the elder Gosse's generation. By contrast, Edmund Gosse's emphasis on his irreconcilable differences with his father and his ambivalent feelings of ®lial love and bitter resentment aligns him with other ®n-de-sieÁcle writers whose work is characterized above all by intellectual honesty, creative tension, and acute awareness of all that militates against any certainty or agency pure and simple. British aestheticism and the literary impressionism that writers such as Thomas Hardy came to identify with further exemplify a ®n-de-sieÁcle emphasis on subjectivity and inward agency in contrast to Victorian conceptions of freedom as external. The dramatic monologue ¯ourished in the mid-Victorian work of Tennyson and Browning because it enabled poetry about subjectivity and eccentric individuality to wear a mask of objectivity, and more often than not, especially in Browning, it became a vehicle for a vigorous sense of agency in the world, even when that agency and the power that accompanies it are subtly and ironically undermined (as in ``My Last Duchess'' and ``The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church'').25 For aesthetes such as Pater, living with a late-century awareness of deterministic necessity did not eliminate a belief in agency; rather, it drove it from an external, objective realm of realizable goals to the artist's mind, ``removing the arena of freedom to a world where whatever could be called action was entirely internal'' (Reed, Victorian Will 383). The very arena the mid-Victorian writers sought to avoid in order not to lose their freedom in morbid introspection, guilt, and confusion, the late Victorians claimed as their territory, one no less fraught with anxiety than it was earlier in the century but no longer a place to ¯ee. Sheila Berger, J. B. Bullen, H. M. Daleski, and others have considered how strongly Hardy's techniques as a novelist were in¯uenced by Impressionist painting, and noting this in¯uence is one way of demonstrating how Hardy, like Pater, locates freedom in inwardness and individuality rather than in scope for action in the world which, as I discuss later, is nearly always hampered by


37

chance and luck for Hardy's characters. What we selectively see when we look out at the world is determined by who we are; describing the Impressionists in a notebook entry of 1886, Hardy exhibits a quintessential late Victorian fascination with this subjectivity: ``their principle is, as I understand it, that what you carry away with you from a scene is the true feature to grasp; or in other words, what appeals to your own individual eye and heart in particular amid much that does not so appeal, and which you therefore omit to record.''26 The mid-Victorians minimized tension and discord by de®ning and adhering to norms and by dutifully working toward goals. This normative, teleological orientation toward the world shifted at the end of the century for a complex variety of reasons, and the late Victorians began to ®nd pleasure in particularity, especially when set off against a type or norm, and in piquant contrasts and tensions. Eagleton alludes to the ``perverse fusion of discipline and exoticism'' during the period (``Flight'' 19); though he writes about it in relation to Hopkins and to late-century representations of British imperialism, it is also evident in the aesthetics of Pater and Wilde. Even Pater's quirky method of writing reveals ®n-de-sieÁcle values. He would put together bits of writing on squares of paper as though working a jigsaw puzzle except without any sense of what it would all amount to or result in (Culler, Victorian Mirror 381). In both method and style, Pater suspends judgment and avoids commitment, believing that ``the will remains free as long as it remains untouched by conscious teleology. To take aim is to lose direction'' (Culler, Victorian Mirror 381). Still, the late Victorians did not view themselves as breaking free from history altogether, as having come from nowhere on the road to nowhere. In fact, much of their anxiety about agency arose from cultural narratives about history and our control or lack of control over the course of events: ideas about heredity and degeneration (which imbue Hardy's ®ction, especially Jude the Obscure, the closest of his works to the contemporary mode of naturalism), theories of mass culture, and theories of the unconscious. Even though a mid-Victorian, optimistic belief in progress had eroded

38


considerably by the end of the century, many late Victorian writers continued to make a claim to cultural authority. James Eli Adams argues, for example, that British aestheticism appealed to popular, teleological versions of evolutionary theory to break from conventional moral rules but also to establish continuity in an apparently fragmented world. The self had become more dominant and particularized than it was earlier in the century, but it was never a self in isolation, a stable ego differentiated from all others. The late Victorians saw it instead as a self that, through heredity, contains past selves, and through history embodies a collective cultural legacy.27 Culler speculates about Pater's vision of history, which is probably not as aptly represented by the mirror (the past as analogous to the present) as Mill's or Carlyle's views of history are: `Ìt may be that [Pater] looks down through the clarity of his own nature into a many-layered past, each layer of which is stained with the tincture of that through which it is perceived'' (Victorian Mirror 258). This image nicely captures both the aestheticist emphasis on subjectivity and Hardy's Impressionist account of individualized modes of perception. Thus history and agency for the ®n-de-sieÁcle writers are both quite complicated: history is at once no longer a matter of progress toward a goal, and yet it is sometimes teleological in its appropriation of evolutionary theory or its fears of degeneration; autonomy is compromised by ideas about in¯uence, heredity, and patriarchy (the strong Victorian father's presence is still palpable), and yet agency is af®rmed, though anxiously, through strategies of introspection, rebellion, and self-fashioning. These ambivalences and hesitations and the controversies they gave rise to in late Victorian British culture are characteristic of the end of any century in its self-consciousness about transition. Before I undertake a reading of the ethics of this period through the particularity of its narratives, I would like to return to MacIntyre's argument about ethics after the Victorians and brie¯y consider the ethics of the twentieth-century ®n de sieÁcle, which is of course the stained tincture through which I am studying stories of the nineteenthcentury ®n de sieÁcle.


39

reading the victorians against and within twentieth-century ethical frameworks According to Alasdair MacIntyre's argument, the Victorians, like us, lived in a time `àfter virtue'' when ``shared moral ®rst principles'' no longer ordered people's lives. In the modern world, MacIntyre claims, we ``work with fragmented survivals'' of a moral tradition (After Virtue 257). Although this argument is in many ways persuasive and recognizably true, it tends to blur important differences between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as differences within the Victorian period of the sort I have been exploring. As will be clear from my discussion below, this blurring is almost inevitable because, as signaled in Taylor's reference to `òur Victorian contemporaries,'' the continuities are indeed as strong as the discontinuities. Still, the fragmentation and relativism MacIntyre deplores is without a doubt more pervasive in the twentieth century than it was in the nineteenth, and my study focuses on a turning point by discussing how ®n-de-sieÁcle ®ction delineates an ethics that is continuous with both Victorian morality and twentieth-century ethical diversity and yet distinctive in its poised position between the two. Moreover, MacIntyre's argument begs the question by insisting that beliefs must be coherent, part of a uni®ed system, to be moral.28 My own argument ¯ies in the face of this assumption by suggesting that for the late Victorians ethical insights were born from openness to surprise and willingness to relinquish a clearly centered, deontological morality for the sake of a viable, though much more inchoate ethics. Whether or not the hope these ethical insights inspire remains alive or becomes nearly extinguished by the late twentieth century is a question that my reading of ethics in narrative implicitly raises through its theoretical framework, which tests the practical value of recent ideas in moral philosophy. Given his belief in the importance of history for our understanding of ethics, MacIntyre does not underestimate how different Victorian values are from twentieth-century ethical thinking, despite our shared post-Enlightenment instability. In fact, both he

40


and Taylor most often weave together differences and similarities when writing about the last century in relation to our own. When describing the ``linguistic twists and turns'' of moral vocabulary throughout history, MacIntyre notes that in the Victorian period `` ìmmoral' and `vice' become associated . . . with whatever threatens the sanctity of the Victorian marriage . . . and hence acquire in some circles an exclusively sexual connotation. The society for the suppression of vice did not have among its interests the suppression of either injustice or cowardice'' (After Virtue 233). Still, even this point of difference between the Victorians and the late Victorian/ modern period, when examined from another angle, seems less a difference than a concern re¯ected in moral vocabulary throughout our century, albeit with varying in¯ections. The preoccupation with sexual morality certainly persisted into the late Victorian period and can be traced through language. For example, the term ``New Hedonist,'' popular in the 1890s, was taken by many to be a euphemism for ``homosexual'' (Stokes, In the Nineties 26), despite its apparently more general reference to all who believe pleasure to be the highest good. And even this broader way of understanding New Hedonism underscores historical continuity (despite the ``new'') by linking it to `òld'' hedonism and thus, as Culler reminds us, to mid-Victorian Utilitarianism: `Ìt was generally accepted in nineteenth-century England that Utilitarianism was the modern counterpart of Epicureanism, the `greatest happiness of the greatest number' being the modern democratic or universalist version of ancient hedonism'' (Victorian Mirror 264). This is a surprising and ironic conjunction, especially when one considers that in the 1890s Oscar Wilde writes in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, `Àll art is quite useless'' to proclaim a New Hedonism that refuses Victorian Utilitarian ethics. Regardless of this and other ®n-de-sieÁcle attempts at a clean break, history is inescapably a narrative, and the persistence of the past emerges as a theme ± sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit ± in much of the ®ction I discuss in subsequent chapters. The features that distinguish ethics in the modern period include a self-conscious awareness of one's place in history, which the


41

Victorians felt more than people did at any earlier point in history, and what Taylor describes as `à set of questions'' that ``make sense to us . . . and . . . would not have been fully understandable in earlier epochs'' (Sources of the Self 16). These questions concern the meaning of life and articulate doubts which, both Taylor and MacIntyre point out, are quite characteristic of our age. Taylor's thesis rightly insists that frameworks are inescapable, even in the twentieth century, and yet they are also inevitably problematic: This vague term points towards a relatively open disjunction of attitudes. What is common to them all is the sense that no framework is shared by everyone, can be taken for granted as the framework tout court, can sink to the phenomenological status of unquestioned fact. This basic understanding refracts differently in the stances people take. For some it may mean holding a de®nite traditionally de®ned view with the self-conscious sense of standing against a major part of one's compatriots. Others may hold the view but with a pluralist sense that it is one among others, right for us but not necessarily binding on them. Still others identify with a view but in [a] somewhat tentative, semi-provisional way . . . This seems to them to come close to formulating what they believe, or to saying what to them seems to be the spiritual source they can connect their lives with; but they are aware of their own uncertainties, of how far they are from being able to recognize a de®nitive formulation with ultimate con®dence. There is always something tentative in their adhesion, and they may see themselves, as, in a sense, seeking. (17)

This strikes me as an incisive encapsulation of the character of twentieth-century beliefs. Although the mid-Victorians began to feel qualms of uncertainty of the sort described here, they successfully repressed them. Only in the late Victorian period does the ``de®nitive formulation'' slip beyond reach. And yet what Ian Watt points out in his study of Conrad in the nineteenth century ± that Conrad was at once ``more contemporary and more old-fashioned'' than modern writers such as Joyce, Lawrence, Pound, and Eliot29 ± I would argue is true of the ®n-de-sieÁcle writers in general: they were divided between a yearning for authority, certainty, and even normative vision, on the one hand, and a commitment to intellectual honesty (with all its questions and doubts), self-fashioning, and individualism on the other hand, whereas the modernists were

42


less torn, more content with what they considered ``private systems of order and value'' (Watt, Conrad 32).30 What begins as a dilemma for the late Victorians, however, often results in a balanced acknowledgment of con¯icting claims, a refusal of the either/or choice. The age that Mill looked forward to ± an age capable of combining the organic and the critical historical modes, as the Saint Simonians termed them ± seems to have been most nearly realized at the end of his own century. For this reason, Eagleton's contrast of the ®nde-sieÁcle radicals with those of our century also conveys his greater admiration for the late Victorians, who embraced `à set of compatible rather than antagonistic concerns,'' which were ®ssured in the latter half of the twentieth century (``Flight'' 12). As will become clearer in my discussion of New Woman ®ction, the compatibility of the concerns did not result in a uni®ed political program among ®n-de-sieÁcle radicals, but the tensions that existed then were more creative and fruitful, arguably, than they have since become. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed a unique moment of what can perhaps only be understood as paradox: an anxiety about agency that was neither so disturbing as to call for repression (as it was for the Victorians) nor so familiar as to be embraced as inevitable (as Taylor's description of modern frameworks suggests that it is in our own age). Ultimately, then, MacIntyre's view of morality in the modern period is more pessimistic than mine, if only because the late Victorian struggle to imagine agency and shape a more just, humane ethics was so valiant. Like Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, and others who mark a revitalization in contemporary ethical theory (to which MacIntyre's work has certainly contributed through the challenge it issues), I would argue that although the possibilities that energized ethics at the end of the last century faltered for much of the modern period, these possibilities are once again vibrantly alive. When writing about contemporary ethical theory in relation to late Victorian narrative ethics, I sometimes draw on the work of philosophers clearly at odds with one another, but I am also interested in combining the work of those writing in different traditions


43

or from diverse philosophical orientations in order to create frameworks that are perhaps idiosyncratic to my own twentieth-century style of meaning-making. Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, though their attitudes about ethics in the modern period diverge sharply in some respects, share a concern to understand ethics in relation to history and narrative because to do so is to create meaning. As Taylor points out, the modern predicament is a ``loss of horizon'' or fear that life is meaningless. Hence the need for a framework, which Taylor de®nes as ``that in virtue of which we make sense of our lives spiritually. Not to have a framework is to fall into a life which is spiritually senseless. The quest is thus always a quest for sense'' (18). He is in debt to MacIntyre for this analogy of the quest, and in After Virtue the medieval conception of the quest is intricately de®ned as at once teleological ± for to begin an ethical quest one must have some idea of ``the good,'' something beyond a relativistic sense of everything being equally good ± and open-ended, for the quest teaches us about the goal. My discussion of ®n-de-sieÁcle narrative ethics in relation both to mid-Victorian morality and to the frameworks and controversies of twentiethcentury moral philosophy enacts its own quest, beginning with the assumption that the consequences of post-Enlightenment anxiety about agency change throughout the modern period but concern for the virtues persists, even as it assumes a variety of new forms and is sometimes articulated and explored only by those standing against the dominant currents of their culture.

chapter 3

Emotion, gender, and ethics in ®ction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

Flirtation, if it can be sustained, is a way of cultivating wishes, of playing for time. Deferral can make room.

Adam Phillips1

In the ®ction published in the 1880s and 90s that focuses on the ``New Woman'' or late Victorian feminist, the break from traditional assumptions about women and ethics is sharp but not de®nitive. Likewise the rejection of conventional aesthetic choices often leads these writers not to narrative methods that are wholly innovative and successful but to strange experiments. In this transitional literature, written during a period of cultural upheaval, the exaggerated and the extravagant invade realism, as if to startle readers out of their complacency.2 Formal innovations enable the exploration of a new sexual ethics. In keeping with Victorian novelistic tradition, the New Woman writers tell stories about love and marriage. But marriage is no longer the goal toward which everything inevitably tends; it is, instead, an object of the text's ethical scrutiny. As Teresa Mangum notes in her study of Sarah Grand and the New Woman novel, ``Promoting the interests of women, these novels work to remake marriage, a framework shaping so many women's lives, into a ®ctional structure and an institution that would give women power, control, authority, security, respect, and, most signi®cantly, agency.''3 As in other latecentury ®ction, New Women writing betrays an insecurity about choice and agency, provoked in this case by the political and social consequences of gender inequity. The characters in New Woman novels are self-conscious about the awkwardness of rejecting old beliefs and values when the new 44

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

45

ones are so inchoate. These are the conditions that make agency problematic. In the words of Waldo's Stranger in Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883), ``To all who have been born in the old faith there comes a time of danger, when the old slips from us, and we have not yet planted our feet on the new'' (135). Evadne, in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893), notes something similar when she observes to her husband that he is not to blame for ruining her life: `Ìt is not our fault that we form the junction of the old abuses and the new modes of thought. Some two people must have met as we have for the bene®t of others'' (340). In her analysis of late Victorian feminism in the context of this mid-air, transitional historical moment, Sally Ledger points out that ``the recurrent theme of the cultural politics of the ®n de sieÁcle was instability, and gender was arguably the most destabilizing category. It is no coincidence that the New Woman materialized alongside the decadent and the dandy. Whilst the New Woman was perceived as a direct threat to classic Victorian de®nitions of femininity, the decadent and the dandy undermined the Victorians' valorization of a robust, muscular brand of British masculinity deemed to be crucial to the maintenance of the British Empire.''4 Not only were gender categories destabilized at the end of the century, though; these new threats to stability were themselves elusive and complex, dif®cult to categorize. Both in ®ction and in the periodical press, representations of the New Woman were multiple and contradictory. She was sometimes stereotyped as intellectual, masculine, and asexual, other times as sexually voracious and unable to control her emotions. She was aligned both with the free love movement and with the campaign for the reform of marriage laws, which was characterized by insistence upon monogamy within marriage for both men and women. Patricia Ingham offers one theory about why the varied representations of New Women in ®ction re¯ect an inevitable reality: `Àll escapes or attempts to escape into unmapped territory are necessarily erratic; where there is no established route, self-assertion will be idiosyncratic.''5 The confusion within this effort to rede®ne gender and sexual morality re¯ects confusion and ideological fragmentation within cultural politics as a whole during

46


this period; the periodical press lumped together the New Women, the decadents, and the socialists in the 1890s, but the challenges they posed were, as Ledger argues, `ùltimately too fragmented to form a coherent ideological programme to that posed by the monolithic grand narrative of Victorianism'' (``New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism'' 41). Still, narrative efforts to tell new stories, to experiment, to slip from the hold of dominant cultural assumptions ± even if only temporarily and imperfectly ± enabled these ®n-de-sieÁcle writers the chance to cultivate wishes and play for time, to ¯irt with possibilities. And while that is very different from establishing a sound, ideologically coherent plan for change that would dovetail with other radical movements, it was what was possible at this point in history. Drawing on Foucault's idea of a reverse discourse, Ledger argues that the Victorian periodical press unwittingly opened a discursive space, through its attacks and ridicule, for voices in support of the New Woman and her claims.6 If nothing else, this space for dialogue between dominant and suppressed discourses created room to maneuver and awareness, in the words of Grand's heroine, of one's position at the junction of old and new. The painful struggle of Evadne and other characters in New Woman ®ction re¯ects the challenge these authors faced when striving to write honestly about women's experience and to bene®t those who would continue this endeavor in the future; such an endeavor, as Patricia Stubbs points out, entailed `à political as well as an aesthetic struggle . . . The inoffensive heroine who could shock no one was a highly political creature, and only the most determined of writers were prepared to modify, let alone transform her.''7 If the transitional groping of the New Woman writing mars it aesthetically and dooms its heroines to frustration, thus weakening its political impact, the ®ction nevertheless merits our attention for what it reveals about the ethical concerns of late Victorian feminism. emotion, reason, and gender New woman writing is an emotional literature that afforded its audience a fresh way of thinking about emotion. As Lyn Pykett em-


47

phasizes in her study of the sensation novel and New Woman ®ction, ``to some of its earliest readers and critics the New Woman writing simply was feeling; it was an hysterical literature, written (and read) on the nerves.''8 In addition to being emotionally charged, however, this ®ction often takes emotion as its subject, investigating the interplay of feeling and reason in women's choices. As Pykett argues, many of these writers ``simultaneously celebrate the feminine and/as feeling, and problematise the conventional association of woman with feeling'' (174). In that sense, these writers not only represent a particular historical moment in the making of the modern identity (to adopt Charles Taylor's phrase), they also anticipate the concerns of twentieth-century feminists by exploring the relevance of gender to ideas about subjectivity and agency. One in¯uential tradition in philosophical thought views emotions as irrational, animal, and feminine. Designated unruly and disruptive of ethical deliberation, emotions must be controlled and educated by reason. Current work in philosophy and cognitive psychology, however, in¯uenced by an Aristotelian philosophical tradition, suggests that far from being merely a hindrance to responsible thought and action, emotion plays an instrumental role in ethical decision-making.9 The popularity of Daniel Goleman's recent book, Emotional Intelligence, results from the promise for social and ethical change inherent in a better understanding of the role emotions play in our lives. Goleman identi®es `à pressing moral imperative'' as his impetus for writing a book concerned to preserve ``the goodness of our communal lives'' from the sel®shness and violence currently threatening it.10 Emotional intelligence, as Goleman de®nes it, involves not only learning to manage feelings and control impulses, but also becoming aware of one's own emotions ± especially as they relate to beliefs, judgments, and actions ± and better attuned to the feelings of others. This new respect for the ethical value of emotion stems from greater understanding of the complex cognitive dimension of emotion than is possible if one adheres to the dualistic view that separates reason and feeling, associating the former with masculinity and power and the later with femininity and nurturance.

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The Victorian ideology of separate spheres was, of course, predicated on this assumed difference between men and women. By calling attention to the ethical implications of this ideology, New Woman writing began to rede®ne the role of emotion in the lives of women while dramatizing in their ®ction how gender socialization continued to thwart and isolate even the most rebellious and progressive of the new heroines. In a sense Carol Gilligan's work on women's moral development takes up the very questions that interested the New Woman writers: How differently do men and women de®ne moral problems? Is there a new way to speak about ethics `ìn a different voice,'' one that accords as much importance to emotions, context, and relatedness as to individualistic rights? In an interdisciplinary forum on Gilligan's work published in Signs in 1986, many of the critics of In a Different Voice misunderstand the goal of the study, which is not to prove statistically that men and women are different, or to argue for the value of separate spheres. Rather, her work seeks to rede®ne morality so that women's experiences, which have shaped women's psychological development, are not ignored or devalued, as they were in studies by Lawrence Kohlberg, Erik Erikson, and others. The ``voice'' referred to in her title is `ìdenti®ed not by gender but by theme.''11 What she is furthering is a different model of ethical deliberation for men and women both, one that includes emotions, particularly those of empathy and compassion, instead of rejecting them as irrational. Reading Thomas Hardy's late novels, especially Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), in the context of the ®ction of the New Woman has been an ongoing project of Victorianists at least since Penny Boumelha's 1982 study of sexual ideology in Hardy's novels. One of the most intriguing of the recent efforts to contextualize Hardy's ®ction in this fashion occurs in John Kucich's 1994 book on Victorian ethics, The Power of Lies. Unlike Kucich and other literary critics who attribute the ethical contradictions of Hardy's novels to his gender and describe him as signi®cantly less feminist than his female contemporaries, I argue that preconceptions about women, emotions, and ethics have kept


49

too many critics from recognizing what Hardy has in common with such late-century women writers as Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand.12 Kucich considers Hardy to be a detached aesthete who scapegoats women and who distances himself from emotion, sexual desire, and subjectivity, thereby safeguarding his own moral position. This reading betrays an assumption not shared by the narrators and implied authors of Hardy's novels ± the belief that emotion and desire interfere with responsible ethical choice. As I interpret Hardy's ®ction, one of its central ideas is that reason and emotion are not truly ``separate spheres.'' Hardy rejects the totalizing, absolute nature of the Victorian doctrine of separate spheres, constructing instead a contextual ethics of particularity. Like Grand and Schreiner, he seeks to forge new de®nitions of what can constitute gender identity and sexual morality. In contrast to earlier Victorian novelists, these writers critique a sexual ideology that punishes women for acting on their emotions and desires. Admittedly, however, several features of New Woman writing tend to obscure this critique or even to render it selfdoubting. For that reason it will be helpful to sort out the various strands of my argument about this complex body of ®n-de-sieÁcle literature. First, this ®ction often resists the separate spheres of belief that women are naturally associated with feeling and men are naturally associated with reason. These writers question such a stereotype. But they also seek to redeem the ethical and cognitive potential of emotion. They associate emotion with women but no longer diminish women's power by doing so. Second, because a woman's emotions can make her vulnerable, this ®ction often contrasts women whose intellect and education arm them with direct methods of self-defense to women who rely more exclusively on emotions and desires that lead them to indirect forms of in¯uence and manipulation. What this contrast obscures, however, is the role played by emotion in the intellectual development of these New Women, the degree to which feeling and reason are interrelated. Third, the ®ction dramatizes a new kind of ¯irtation: unlike the

50


traditional coquette, the late Victorian feminist ¯irts not only to attract attention and indulge her desires but also to experiment and learn. This is, admittedly, a controversial claim, and I realize that by making it I am aligning myself with contemporary critics of the New Woman who, through sexist misreading, diminished her by categorizing her as a mere ¯irt. What interests me, however, is the novelists' appropriation of ¯irtation for their new sexual ethics; by reinscribing this familiar, often frivolous activity as a trope for something more radical and signi®cant, they seem to give readers what they expect only to disconcert them. Finally, the heroines rarely escape punishment or emotionally crushing defeat of some sort, though this could be said to be a mark of the honesty of the ®ction, a clear-eyed acknowledgment of all that thwarted even the most progressive of late-century women. I argue, then, that in its treatment of emotions and sexual relationships, Hardy's Jude the Obscure shares both the feminist concerns of the New Woman writing and its ethically complex treatment of emotion, reason, and gender. To test the validity of this argument, I offer a reading of Hardy's novel in the context of Olive Schreiner's ``The Buddhist Priest's Wife'' and The Story of an African Farm and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins. emotion and ethical choice ``The Buddhist Priest's Wife'' tells the story of a New Woman leaving for India who must say goodbye to the man she loves without letting him know that she loves him. Like Jude the Obscure, this story critiques the ideology of separate spheres and the double standard, even as it demonstrates that in their relationships with men women may appear powerful when they are actually at the mercy of in¯exible patriarchal rules and ingrained assumptions about gender. The intellect seems more educable than the emotions and drives; hence, according to Schreiner's heroine, men and women are most alike intellectually. In keeping with separatespheres imagery, the story's New Woman imagines circular disks representing the sexes. When it comes to their power to reason,


51

men and women are equal, and that half of each disk is identical, a bright red. But the red shades into different colors, blue in one and green in the other, when it is a matter of the personal and sexual, areas in which men and women, according to the heroine, are most starkly different in their emotions and behavior. True to the values of most New Woman writing, in¯uenced as it was by social Darwinism, the story attributes this difference to ``nature'':13 `ìt's not the man's fault,'' says the heroine, `ìt's nature's.''14 But if the story accepts this as a reality, it also makes it seem cruel and unfair, for this difference empowers the man and strips the woman of agency. The ®ction suggests that in sexual relationships a measure of power and in¯uence is granted to the woman who ethically compromises herself through passive manipulation. Schreiner's heroine refuses to play this game: If a man loves a woman, he has a right to try to make her love him because he can do it openly, directly, without bending. There need be no subtlety, no indirectness. With a woman it's not so; she can take no love that is not laid openly, simply, at her feet. Nature ordains that she should never show what she feels; the woman who had told a man she loved him would have put between them a barrier once and for ever that could not be crossed; and if she subtly drew him towards her, using the woman's means ± silence, ®nesse, the dropped handkerchief, the surprise visit, the gentle assertion she had not thought to see him when she had come a long way to meet him, then she would be damned; she would hold the love, but she would have desecrated it by subtlety; it would have no value. (92)

Schreiner reveals here how the New Woman differs from the traditional woman: she is ethically more scrupulous, but her capacity for love is at once her strength and her tragedy, for the depth of her thwarted emotional longing combined with her intelligence means that `ìn one way she was alone all her life'' (84). Like other New Women, this heroine ®nds that she is unable to address both her intellectual and her emotional needs. Complexly interrelated as these needs are, Victorian culture nevertheless structures them as antithetical and mutually exclusive. As Laura Chrisman points out, the man in Schreiner's story is oblivious of the woman's love for him and `àll of their intellectual discoursing on the nature of love develops this irony, together with the irony of the gap between

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intellectual and emotional expression.''15 In one sense, the story is about the paradox of this gap, which is unnecessary and hurtful to women and yet helpful as well, for the division of the intellectual from the affective provides Victorian women with a defensive strategy, a way to gain control over their emotions and the men who have the potential to agitate these emotions.16 Schreiner's heroine is too intelligent to blunder into the trap of simply acting like a man, directly expressing what she feels and wants and thereby alienating herself from the more conventional man she loves, but she is also too emotional, and too deeply in love, to rest content with being this man's friend. The story is dominated by its heroine's efforts to intellectualize and rationalize her pain, to control it through an ability to understand it. Clearly, her emotions and her attachment to a particular person have led her to her ideas about gender, sexuality, and ethics, though as she sees it, the intellectual life is apart from emotions; it allows a woman to ``drop her shackles a little'' (93). In that, it is like death. The story begins and ends with reference to the heroine's beauty in death. ``Death means so much more to a woman than a man,'' she says; ``when you knew you were dying, to look round on the world and feel the bond of sex that has broken and crushed you all your life gone, nothing but the human left, no woman any more . . .'' (93). Escaping the shackles of sex, whether through cogitation or through death, is but one aspiration of this New Woman.17 An equally strong aspiration arises from her desire to be loved by the man who hurts her when he denies her sexuality, when he says, ``You're the only woman with whom I never realise that she is a woman'' (93). Given the norms of late Victorian society, once gender difference is overcome and a man recognizes the humanity of a woman, she no long represents romantic or sexual possibilities for him. The protagonist of ``The Buddhist Priest's Wife'' is thus caught in a double-bind: wanting this man's love but refusing the assumptions about gender differences that seem to make it possible.18 The solution is to emigrate to India, to remove oneself from the culture responsible for this double-bind. As Chrisman remarks, there is a eugenicist twist implicit in the story's ending: `Ìndia serves Schreiner,


53

arguably, as a repository for evolutionarily overdeveloped women, who are marked out as being unsuitable wifely and maternal material. Sexual and familial activity is to be denied them as a wastage of their resources; they can make the greatest social contribution through their intellect'' (`Èmpire, `Race', and Feminism'' 58). But the ethical import of the story is conveyed through the woman's emotional pain, masked as it is by her intellectual defenses. The story encourages us to question why intellectual women could not also be loving wives and mothers; thus the story erects gendered antinomies only to deconstruct them.19 Joyce Avrech Berkman has compared Schreiner to current poststructuralists in this regard, noting that `ùnlike present-day thinkers, who can marshal a plethora of twentieth-century scienti®c, historical, and philosophical evidence for their views on the cultural construction of gender, class, and race, Schreiner attacked widely held assumptions about human difference without such scholarly support.''20 Like Schreiner's story, Jude the Obscure takes as its subject ``the inseparability of emotional and intellectual aspiration,''21 and again the characters muse on the possibility of friendship across gender lines: `Ìf he could only get over the sense of her sex,'' Jude Fawley thinks about Sue Bridehead, ``. . . what a comrade she would make.''22 But like the woman in Schreiner's story, he ®nds that his desire makes this impossible. In contrast to his uncomplicated physical attraction to Arabella, his feelings for Sue include both intellectual and emotional af®nity. In part the connection he feels with Sue arises from their shared sensitivity, their emotional response to life, of which Hardy thoroughly approves despite the pain that accompanies their capacity for love, fellow-feeling, and empathy. Kucich claims that in Hardy's ®ction desire and emotionalism, especially as they are associated with women, interfere with honesty (Power of Lies 228). The trouble with this argument is that it obscures Hardy's critique of the assumption that rationality, with its often in¯exible regard for principle, is superior to emotion and awareness of multiple perspectives, including those shaped by the feelings that arise from particular attachments.23

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The chapter of Jude the Obscure that is key to an understanding of this dimension of the novel's ethics is the one that focuses on Richard Phillotson's deliberations about Sue's request for a separation from him. Hardy's belief in the importance of emotion in ethical decision-making is particularly clear at this pivotal moment in the narrative. In conversation with Gillingham, Phillotson explains his decision to release his wife from her marriage vows so she can live with her lover. His friend attempts to reason with him, to talk him out of this unconventional decision, but Phillotson responds, `Ì am only a feeler, not a reasoner'' (243). As the chapter makes clear, however, Phillotson is indeed reasoning, but his thinking is guided by emotion: by his love for Sue, by his empathetic responsiveness to her pain (which he metaphorically alludes to as her ``cries for help'' [241]), and by his intuitive recognition that she and Jude share an `èxtraordinary sympathy or similarity'' (241).24 `Ì simply am going to act by instinct, and let principles take care of themselves,'' Phillotson declares. The implied author leaves us in no doubt that this is a responsible, compassionate decision. Kucich argues that ``Hardy's women are regularly aligned with emotionalism, as opposed to the customary rationality of his men'' (Power of Lies 228), but he begs the question by assuming that emotion is emotionalism and therefore suspect, and also by opposing feeling and reason, which, as in this chapter of the novel, are only apparent opposites. Moreover, Hardy's novel subverts the separate spheres of ideology by creating men, such as Jude and Phillotson, who are as tender-hearted and emotional as the female characters, and women who are intellectuals. Kucich is right that Sue loses her capacity for moral reasoning by the end of the novel, as Tess does by the end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, while the male characters gain philosophical wisdom (230), but it is too often overlooked that Sue, the novel's New Woman, educates both Jude and Phillotson through her intellectual superiority. Jude describes her as `à woman whose intellect was to mine like a star to a benzoline lamp'' (422). Phillotson admits that ``her intellect sparkles like diamonds, while [his] smoulders like brown paper'' (241). And


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when he comes up with the radical idea that a woman and her children could very well be a family without a man, he realizes that he has `òut-Sued Sue'' in his thinking (243). As John Goode comments about Sue, comparing her to Jude, ``she does not seek the City of Light ± she has it already'' (Thomas Hardy 158). Unfortunately, her intellectual superiority, like that of the heroines of Grand and Schreiner, creates emotionally traumatizing problems for her, even as it illuminates the minds of those who come to know her. A traditional role for women is to in¯uence men, and in that sense Sue is not unlike other Victorian heroines. Where she differs from them, however, is that her moral in¯uence is not only as intellectual as it is emotional: it is thoroughly unconventional. Her collapse at the end of the novel into guilt-ridden hysteria is a symptom of her emotional susceptibility. Ironically, though, it is this very susceptibility that has made her such a sensitive teacher of radical ideas. After this breakdown, she unsuccessfully attempts to reverse the ethical education she has provided for Phillotson and Jude. Only as a force of conventional in¯uence is Sue ineffectual. Through his heroine, Hardy subverts the paradigm of traditional feminine in¯uence, but in¯uence remains important to the ethics of the novel. When Sue tries to persuade Phillotson to release her from the marriage bond, for example, she seeks to in¯uence him, as she has been in¯uenced, by John Stuart Mill's ideas about liberty. Mill himself was saved by in¯uence, as he describes in his Autobiography: following a nervous breakdown, he found medicine in Wordsworth's poems because they expressed ``thought coloured by feeling'' (104) and helped him restore balance to his overly analytic mind, a product of his Utilitarian education. Sue's breakdown represents a different kind of imbalance: thought distorted by feeling. Prior to this crisis, though, Sue is not at all the cold and unsympathetic character that some readers perceive her to be. Her ideas are imbued with emotion and therefore potently in¯uential. Ingham emphasizes the ``fruitful ambiguity'' in Hardy's language and characterization in this novel, which she considers his most feminist; what she refers to as the ``kaleidoscope of critical Sue

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(mis)construing'' (Thomas Hardy 78) is symptomatic of readers still caught in categorical thinking about gender, not open to the ambiguity of this kind of emotional±intellectual in¯uence. If Sue is `à harp which the least wind of emotion from another's heart could make to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own'' ( Jude the Obscure 293), if, in other words, she is as susceptible to the emotions of others as they are to her ideas, then she is inconstant, as Kucich points out. But Hardy's novel stresses that constancy is an unrealistic ideal for sexual relationships, and sexuality is a strong component in the complex of forces that doom the relationship of Jude and Sue. The empathy that moves Sue to shed tears at the sight of Father Time's tears is what makes her a sympathetic character (lovingkindness, in Hardy, often counterbalances the misery associated with erotic attraction), despite the cruelty that results from her vacillations in her relationships with men. Similarly, her reasons for withholding in sexual relationships are contradictory and often dif®cult to understand, but as Ingham points out, Sue's strength and integrity are evident in her ability to claim ``her right to say no whatever the reason'' (Thomas Hardy 76). Although it is dif®cult to generalize about New Women, the heroines I focus on in the ®ction of Schreiner, Grand, and Hardy all attempt to overcome their lack of agency, often at great risk to themselves and those they love. These attempts result only in imperfect success and ultimate failure, largely because gendered paradigms, even by the end of the nineteenth century, were extremely dif®cult to resist, but also because Victorian culture did nothing to encourage the blending and balancing of emotion and intellect so essential to a responsible ethical life for women and men, especially in romantic relationships and marriage. flirtation Emotion in the ®ction of Schreiner and Hardy is indeed associated with women, but it is a vital component of their intellectual and ethical lives. Jude the Obscure develops another theme prominent in the ®ction of late-century women writers: the idea that the New


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Woman's intellect becomes a weapon she turns against men as a means of defending herself against patriarchal injustice and freeing herself from constraints. In her relationships this exercise of power leads the New Woman to become what Hardy calls `àn epicure in emotions'' (180), usually with cruel consequences for the man or men in love with her. Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, like ``The Buddhist Priest's Wife'' and Jude, poses the question of what it would be like for a woman to be in a relationship with a man without the complications of gender and sexuality. Grand's Angelica Hamilton-Wells employs her cleverness as a child to secure rights equal to those of her twin brother. She grows up well-educated but restless, without intellectual challenges. Like Sue's feeling that Jude is her counterpart and Lyndall's bond with Waldo in The Story of an African Farm, Angelica's twinship with a boy is key to her understanding of gendered identity.25 As Teresa Mangum notes in her discussion of the novel, `Àngelica . . . possesses potential for resistance because she has experienced the formation of gender and the systematic devaluing of women it enforces ®rsthand as an opposite sex twin'' (Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 134). When the newly arrived choir tenor falls in love with her at ®rst sight, she disguises herself as her brother and develops a close friendship with him. Later she is unable to account for her behavior, though she admits to her desire for excitement and her rebellion against those who would domesticate her. Cross-dressing allows her a luxurious physical freedom; it also enables a rare sort of intellectual liberty.26 She says to the tenor, `Ì have enjoyed the bene®t of free intercourse with your masculine mind undiluted by your masculine prejudices and proclivities with regard to my sex.''27 The consequences for her are therefore positive, despite the guilt she suffers after her exposure. For the tenor, however, the prank has psychologically painful repercussions, and his experience with Angelica eventually leads to his death. Lyndall, the New Woman in The Story of an African Farm, shares Angelica's yearning for more possibilities than life offers a woman. Lyndall's mind and imagination help her satisfy this

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emotional hunger. Instead of literal role-playing, she mentally multiplies herself by participating in forms of life completely unlike her own ± transcending time, gender, and race, imagining herself a medieval monk, a Kaf®r witch-doctor, and a variety of other selves. `Ì like to see it all; I feel it run through me ± that life belongs to me; it makes my little life larger; it breaks down the narrow walls that shut me in'' (182). As both Lyn Pykett and Ann Ardis have noted, this disruption of stable feminine identity occurs in much of the New Woman writing and is often reinforced by its unconventional narrative strategies.28 Although sel¯essness was expected of the traditional Victorian woman, the late-century New Woman paradoxically seeks to escape self through intellectual and emotional experiments in self-actualization, even when these experiments are hurtful to others. Lyndall's restlessness is evident as well in her relationship with the man she loves. She explains her feelings for him by stressing his strength and power, even as she exerts her own power by refusing to marry him, though she is pregnant with his child, and by confessing that she became involved with him because `Ì like to experience, I like to try'' (206). This adventurousness, which is at once calculating and emotionally self-indulgent, is what leads her to describe herself as having no conscience (176), certainly an unfair self-assessment, though it is true that she hurts those close to her through her unconventional choices. She has enough of a conscience to wish she were a better person, to prefer being good to being loved (201). Schreiner encourages us to recognize Lyndall's burden of guilt but also to question where the New Woman's responsibility begins and ends in a patriarchal society that so circumscribes women's freedom. In her relationship with Jude, Sue is very much like Angelica and Lyndall because she too feels emotional restlessness followed by compunction. Like these other New Women, Sue is ``venturesome with men'' (182). She enjoys tormenting Jude by having him walk down the aisle with her as practice for her marriage to Phillotson. She explains that she likes to do interesting things that ``have probably never been done before'' (180). But her pleasure


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evaporates when she realizes that her ``curiosity to hunt up a new sensation'' causes Jude pain (180). Living with an openness to possibility, Sue also strives to be responsible and compassionate. The novel shows us how dif®cult it is for her to balance concern for her own needs with her desire to avoid hurting others. The ethical problems in her life exercise her emotional intelligence, particularly within late Victorian culture with its confusing mixture of old and new expectations for women. All three of the women in these novels evade commitment and seek to gain emotional satisfaction from their relationships with men in daring, unpredictable, intellectually self-conscious ways. Their behavior is understandable but also sadistically ¯irtatious.29 The novels waver between evoking admiration for these New Women, and the new ethics of possibility that they bring to their relationships, and judging them for turning their backs on a traditionally feminine ethics of care. In her study of Sarah Grand, Teresa Mangum deplores ``the critic's power of erasure'' when quoting Hugh Stut®eld, a literary critic for Blackwood's Magazine, who patronizes Grand's characters in particular and the New Woman in general. But there is nothing inaccurate in Stut®eld's observations of the complex, ¯irtatious character of this new brand of literary heroine: The glory of the women of to-day as portrayed in the sex-problem literature is her ``complicatedness.'' To be subtle, inscrutable, complex ± irrational possibly, but at any rate incomprehensible ± to puzzle the adoring male, to make him scratch his head in vexation and wonderment as to what on earth she will be up to next, ± this is the ambition of the latter-day heroine. (quoted in Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 32)

Although I agree with Mangum about the sexist tone of this commentary, I am not convinced that Stut®eld's reading of ``the political struggles of the New Woman as a new and fairly transparent form of ¯irtation'' is `à distinctly sexist misreading'' (32). The ¯irtation in these novels is fascinating because it serves the political aims of these late-century women, even if only in a compromised way. Far from being the agents of purposeful change that Mangum's interpretation makes them, Grand's heroines, like

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Schreiner's and Hardy's, are indeed the ``victims of restless dissatisfaction'' of Stut®eld's description, though they are not merely that. Their restlessness and experiments with new forms of ¯irtation prompt their agency, which is exploratory and performative rather than purposeful. They alternate between being victims and agents.30 This instability is a mark both of their complexity and of their ®n-de-sieÁcle predicament. This ®ction encourages us to view ¯irtation, traditionally thought of as ethically suspect (perhaps especially by feminists), in a new light. In the New Woman novels I consider here, ¯irtation coincides with the heroines' moments of advantage, power, and self-fashioning, while the foreclosure of possibility that puts an end to their intellectual and emotional playfulness and unpredictability coincides with cultural containment and loss of even limited agency. Writing about ¯irtation, Adam Phillips asks, ``what does commitment leave out of the picture that we might want? If our descriptions of sexuality are tyrannized by various stories of committed purpose ± sex as reproduction, sex as heterosexual intercourse, sex as intimacy ± ¯irtation puts in disarray our sense of an ending. In ¯irtation you never know whether the beginning of a story ± the story of the relationship ± will be the end; ¯irtation, that is to say, exploits the idea of surprise'' (On Flirtation xviii±xix). Surprise is sprung on the man by the woman in each of these novels: Angelica surprises the tenor when he realizes that she is a woman, not an enchanting boy. By refusing to marry or to make a commitment, Lyndall surprises the father of her baby, who, she realizes, will continue to love her as long as she resists his mastery. And Sue surprises the men in her life at every turn: by marrying Phillotson as a way of getting back at Jude for concealing his own marriage, by refusing to sleep with Jude even after leaving her husband for him, by returning to Phillotson as a penance after the death of her children. In each novel, the story of the relationship is shaped not by the man's choice, but by the woman's restless discontent and unwillingness to be the traditional heroine in such a story. Although the men are hurt by this new kind of ¯irtation that


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takes away their power, the novels also encourage us to recognize the positive ethical consequences of a ``¯irtation that puts in disarray our sense of an ending.'' Temporarily, all three heroines win for themselves a better kind of love and relationship by avoiding commitment and imagining and enacting their own agency. The sexual equality, friendship, and freedom that they achieve in their relationships with the men they love is short-lived and contingent on material conditions and circumstances beyond their control. But this new kind of romantic relationship energizes potential, even if it is potential that never fully blooms. Thus in New Woman ®ction, ¯irtation, a stage of courtship that the respectable, modest Victorian woman was advised to disdain, ironically enough plays a critical role in the development of a more feminist sexual ethics. our sense of an ending If these experimentally ¯irtatious women characters ``put in disarray our sense of an ending,'' their stories and the norms of late Victorian culture eventually manage to contain them. The emotion that has informed the thinking of these women does indeed become debilitating in the end, though it is important to see that, depressing as it is, the punishing plot reveals not the authors' beliefs about what the New Woman's fate should be, but his or her recognition of what it most often was. Both The Story of an African Farm and Jude the Obscure counterpoint the New Woman character with a traditional woman, Em and Arabella respectively, and in both novels the conventional, respectable woman thrives while Lyndall and Sue suffer, one literally dying and the other metaphorically dying through self-sacri®ce. The Heavenly Twins also focuses primarily on two women, though as Kucich points out, the counternarratives of Angelica and Evadne are self-canceling (The Power of Lies 252). They reveal Grand to be more conservative than Schreiner or Hardy because not only are both of her heroines punished and subdued by social strictures, both are redeemed by the superior wisdom of men. The resolutions of their stories underscore the novel's emphasis on the inter-

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dependence of women's and men's ethics. As Evadne points out in her criticism of gendered moral education, ``So long as men believe that women will forgive anything they will do anything'' (92). Once women's morality changes, men's will too.31 This point is not canceled when it is reversed: with their greater power and education, men can do much to help women socially, intellectually, and ethically. But what is disturbing about Grand's conclusion is that both Angelica and Evadne cling pathetically to their male rescuers ± in contrast to Sue and Lyndall who make choices that defy the men they love. The Heavenly Twins begins with a portrait of Evadne as a reader and thinker but also a loving, warm-hearted person, who fears that her unusualness as an intellectual woman will have painful emotional consequences: `Ì don't want to despise my fellowcreatures. I would rather share their ignorance and conceit and be sociable than ®nd myself isolated even by a very real superiority'' (37). Mangum points up the irony: ``For the intellectual woman success can only be failure'' (Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 107). Like the heroine of ``The Buddhist Priest's Wife,'' Evadne ®nds that for much of her life her fate is to be alone, stranded because of her difference and her principled stands, including her refusal to consummate her marriage to her syphilitic husband, with whom she nevertheless lives because of her father's skill at exploiting her emotionally.32 Once she promises her husband not to involve herself publicly in intellectual or political work, Evadne is left with no outlet for the tremendous energies apparent from the novel's opening study of her mind and character. By the end of The Heavenly Twins, the early focus on Evadne's reading has given way to Dr. Galbraith's narration ± his reading of her life as a broken spirit, a woman who has collapsed into hysteria.33 Her state is very much like that of Sue Bridehead's at the end of Jude the Obscure. Sue becomes ``creed drunk,'' as Jude describes her, clinging not to a man but to the religious and moral orthodoxies she had rejected all her life. Schreiner's heroine similarly turns against herself. After having lost her baby as Sue loses hers, Lyndall struggles with a wasting illness and judges herself ``weak'' and ``sel®sh'' (247); the


63

`òld clear intellect'' (252) resurfaces moments before her death, but her ®nal psychological state, like that of the other New Women in this ®ction, is marked by desperate yearning.34 Countering the stereotype of the New Woman as merely an `ìntellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves'' (Hardy's Preface to the First Edition of Jude, xxxviii), Grand, Hardy, and Schreiner all depict the late Victorian feminist as someone who feels as deeply as she thinks and, in fact, suffers not from mere high-strung nervousness but from unresolvable moral dilemmas created by gendered cultural politics and an uneasy transition between old and new de®nitions of friendship, love, and marriage.35 The cultural containment of these women that occurs at the end of each novel reestablishes separate spheres ideology by associating women with emotion that overwhelms reason. As we have seen, however, the novels attempt to counter this stereotype while also acknowledging its destructive power. Schreiner, Grand, and Hardy delineate a subtle, complex, and ethically promising relationship between emotion and reason in the lives of these early feminists only to expose all that militates against this new sense of self: social ostracism with its attendant guilt and isolation, the fear of causing pain to loved ones, and perhaps above all the internalized social norm of the woman as emotional and therefore not capable of reason ± or if intellectual then not truly feminine. Hardy deplored what he described as the cosmic joke that emotions were allowed to develop in a such a defective world, and yet he recognized the ethical force of emotion. Too often critics who stress Hardy's difference from the New Women writers slip into a twentieth-century version of separate spheres thinking, characterizing Hardy as on the side of reason, wary of the feminine and the emotional, even though there is little in his novels to support such an interpretation. Like Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand, Hardy encouraged his readers to rethink conventional ideas about women and feeling, as dif®cult as that was during an age just beginning to understand women's aspirations without fathoming how they could be realized.

chapter 4

When hope unblooms: chance and moral luck in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess

How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? ± Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan . . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain. Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness . . . You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.

Thomas Hardy1

Jeanette Winterson2

Essential to any study of the ethics of Hardy's ®ction is an understanding of chance and luck ± personi®ed in his poem ``Hap'' as the ``purblind Doomsters'': ``Crass Casualty'' and ``dicing Time.'' Yoking such apparently contradictory concepts as luck and morality raises dif®cult, unsettling questions about moral responsibility. Philosophers who make the unequivocal Kantian claim that ``morality is secure against the luck-sensitive issue of how things chance to turn out''3 have been challenged in recent years by Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, and others who insist on a place for luck in our conception of ethics. Attention to the issues involved in this debate can lead us to a more precise way of thinking about the role of luck in the ethics of Hardy's ®ction, just as attention to Hardy's narratives can provide us with subtler, more detailed examples of moral luck than those in the philosophical discussions. Hence, while moral philosophy can help us to read Hardy, such a reading in turn helps to validate the contested idea of moral luck. As Virginia Woolf observed about Hardy, he was a writer whose 64

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 65

works, for all their deliberate plotting, convey a sense of freshness and surprise, as if the best effects of his ®ction are produced by chance. Reading his novels, Woolf sensed in them `à little blur of unconsciousness,'' a ``margin of the unexpressed'': `Ìt is as if Hardy himself were not quite aware of what he did.''4 This is a haunting description of a quality in Hardy's writing that remained beyond his conscious control but nonetheless contributed to the ethics of his ®ction. In his way of thinking about the world, Hardy stressed the involuntary and the emotional as mysterious forces that often get the best of will and conscious agency: `Èvents and tendencies are traced as if they were rivers of voluntary activity, and courses reasoned out from the circumstances in which natures, religions, or what-not, have found themselves. But are they not in the main the outcome of passivity ± acted upon by unconscious propensity?''5 This skeptical question reveals Woolf 's description to be in accord with Hardy's own sense that choices and actions, including the act of writing, are too often misrepresented as completely rational and controlled. The elements of fortune and luck discoverable in any chain of events carry implications for the moral assessment of the outcome of those events. Hardy's narrators make it dif®cult for us to disentangle luck and morality, as some ethicists would have us do, and his novels convey a characteristically late Victorian view of agency as pressured and compromised. This understanding of agency implies an ethics that demands choice and responsibility accompanied by a necessary, though uncomfortable, acceptance of limited control over events. moral luck Nicholas Rescher, who believes that courses of action only apparently acquire moral status that depends on luck, offers several brief narratives, including the following, to illuminate what philosophers mean by moral luck: Consider the case of a bank's night watchman who abandons his post of duty in order to go to the aid of a child being savagely attacked by a couple of men. If the incident is ``for real,'' we see the night watchman as a hero.

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However, if the incident is a diversion stage-managed as part of a robbery, we might well consider the night watchman to have been an irresponsible dupe. And yet from his point of view, there is no visible difference between the two cases. How the situation turns out for him is simply a matter of luck (Rescher, Luck 153).

But the luck of how it turns out has implications for the moral assessment of his action, as unfair as this seems, given the man's good intentions in both hypothetical cases. A similar example is Thomas Nagel's story of the man who runs in to rescue a victim from a burning building. If, in the course of the rescue attempt, the man accidentally drops the victim from a window instead of bringing him out alive, our moral evaluation of him as a hero is bound to be different even though this difference is contingent upon luck. ``Where a signi®cant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral luck'' (Nagel, Mortal Questions 26). Kant, who argued for the primacy of intentions, maintained that there could be no such thing as morality subject to forces beyond the control of the agent: a will is good `ònly because of its willing'' not ``because of what it effects or accomplishes or because of its adequacy to achieve some proposed end'' (quoted in Nagel, Mortal Questions 24). This is a view that reassures us with its clarity and its bracing emphasis on our reasoned choices, and, as we shall see, it is a view that appealed to Hardy in his compassion for those who must choose and act in a haphazard world not of their own creating. Still, ready as always to take `à hard look at the worst,'' Hardy was equally compelled by the more troubling and ethically complex view that the outcome determines our understanding of what has been done. As Nagel notes, the Kantian argument offers an inadequate response to a basic problem in ethics for which there is no wholly satisfying solution (25). In novels that represent life tentatively, as `à series of seemings,'' Hardy views this problem from a multiplicity of angles, and though his ®ction doesn't offer us the comfort of a single solution, it implicitly challenges the reasonable but reductive conclusion that there is no such thing as moral luck.


Nagel outlines four ways that luck can affect morality (28). The ®rst, which he calls ``constitutive luck,'' refers to the kind of person one is, whether one is born, for example, with or without certain capacities, inclinations, and talents. The second, ``circumstantial luck,'' describes the circumstances and problems that occur in a person's life. The third, ``causal luck,'' is the luck inherent in the way antecedent circumstances affect choices and agency. The fourth, ``resultant luck,'' is a term for the way one's actions turn out. Martha Nussbaum's claim that moral luck is internal as well as external is especially relevant to Nagel's ®rst two categories, and it has important implications for the novels because Hardy is fascinated by the relationship between destiny and character. As we see again and again in life as well as in Hardy's ®ction, misfortune can be reversed in a minute, but its internal ethical effects ± its effects on character ± often take much longer to heal: `Ìt takes a long time to restore to the slave a free person's sense of dignity and selfesteem, for the chronic invalid to learn again the desires and projects characteristic of the healthy person, for the bereaved person to form new and fruitful attachments''.6 To cite but one example of internal moral luck in Hardy's novels, I will turn brie¯y to The Mayor of Casterbridge. Given the novel's representation of historical as well as personal instability during the Victorian period, it should come as no surprise that this example portrays mobility in the British social class system not as a matter of determination and choice but as dif®cult to predict, control, or even trust. Elizabeth-Jane no sooner arrives in Casterbridge with her mother than she ®nds herself a prominent person, stepdaughter to the mayor. Yet she doesn't rejoice in her new social status or advertise it by buying herself ®ne clothes and knickknacks because her childhood circumstances combined with her constitutive luck have shaped her fears, desires, and expectations and thus determined how she responds to this surprising circumstantial luck: ``Her triumph was tempered by circumspection; she had still that ®eldmouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have

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suffered early from poverty and oppression'' (Mayor of Casterbridge 158). Those who seek to deny the relevance of luck to morality have argued that we should focus on character and intentions, the internal rather than the external. But as we have seen, it is a mistake to assume that this is a realm protected from chance: ``restricting the domain of moral responsibility to the inner world will not immunize it to luck'' (Nagel, Mortal Questions 32). Hardy's novels make this point especially vivid. Resultant luck, also prominent in Hardy's ®ction, is a particularly controversial notion because of its implications for our theories of justice. Although Nagel resists the dangerously simpli®ed view that any action can be justi®ed or excused by history, he does maintain that actual results shape our ethical assessments: ``That these are genuine moral judgments rather than expressions of temporary attitude is evident from the fact that one can say in advance how the moral verdict will depend on the results'' (30; emphasis his). He illustrates this claim by pointing out that if one negligently leaves a baby unattended in its bath, we know in advance that if the baby drowns one is morally culpable, whereas if there is no dire result, the moral assessment and self-judgment are more likely to be milder ± in that case, `òne has merely been careless'' (31). There is, of course, something unsettling about the notion of responsibility that is not dependent on human control, but it is true that people take moral risks everyday, knowing that the outcome of their choice can make a tremendous difference to what they have done and to the consequences they will have to live with. In his compassion, Hardy baulks at the idea of assuming responsibility in a ¯awed, contingent world, where it is virtually impossible to live a good life ± or even to act at all ± without moral danger; his honesty, though, coupled with his respect for the complex particularity of the stories he tells, keep him from clean, rational propositions of the sort Rescher, for example, makes in his argument against moral luck: `Ìf the signi®cant evaluation at issue results from luck, then morality does not enter into it. And if it is moral through being in some way within our responsibility and control, then it is not a matter of luck'' (Luck 158). Studying Hardy's


narratives, with their attention to the bizarre twists and turns of life, shows us that separating morality and luck in this way is not as easy as it sounds. Morality is supposed to provide `à shelter against luck.''7 It is quite idealistic, though, to assume that human moral assessment can operate with godlike knowledge of a person's life, character, and intentions. Too lofty a conception of justice can lead to injustice, for it sets us up as the sort of judge none of us can possibly be, given our human limitations. Bernard Williams argues against the moral resistance to luck on these grounds: `Àtheists say that in forming ideas of divine judgement we have taken human notions of justice and projected them onto a mythical ®gure. But also, and worse, we have allowed our image of a mythical ®gure to shape our understanding of human justice'' (Making Sense 243). Instead of ``purifying'' morality by keeping it safe from luck, Williams proposes that it is more honest and just to realize that our choices and actions are always subject to forces beyond our control, and if we are ever to take responsibility, we must do so by considering the actual consequences of our actions, intended or not. Margaret Urban Walker similarly claims that there are positive implications for our ethical lives if we embrace the concept of moral luck rather than fear it as an unruly contradiction in terms. Those who deny the existence of moral luck seek to protect what she and Williams call ``pure agency'': ``Pure agents are free, on their own, to determine what and how much they may be brought to account for by determining the intentional acts and commitments they will undertake, and recognizing the limits to their control beyond these.''8 The consequences of this view of agency is that if a person makes a commitment but refuses to take responsibility for the unexpected possibilities that the commitment entails, carefully separating voluntary agency from luck, there is likely to be greater suffering for others as well as a loss of integrity for the agent. For example, a woman may decide to have a child but not be prepared for the bad luck of caring for an ill and unusually dif®cult child, or a man may enter voluntarily into a lighthearted friendship and unexpectedly ®nd himself burdened with the responsibility of coping with the

70


grief of a friend who is suddenly also a bereaved husband (``Moral Luck'' 245). How well we deal with luck is a mark of our goodness. In a sense, Walker suggests, moral luck brings such virtues as integrity and grace into being: `Ìf integrity is the capacity required to deal morally with the impurity of luck-ridden human agency, its general absence should be a dis®guring of human life in ways broad and deep. For the same reason, a way of conceiving agency that attempts to banish the impurity that gives integrity its point should produce under examination an alien and disturbing picture of moral life'' (243). In Hardy, the characters who accept the impurity of their agency come closest to achieving wisdom and virtue. Ironically, Tess of the d'Urbervilles proclaims in its subtitle that Tess is a ``pure woman,'' when actually her impurity and the impurity of her world bring into being her virtues of compassion and integrity. Hardy is no less paradoxical when he leads Henchard to recognize that ElizabethJane, his stepdaughter whose morality is so beautiful to him, has her origins in the impurity and immorality of the wife-sale and the subsequent illegitimate union of her parents. Henchard is disturbed by Nature's ``contrarious inconsistencies'' and by the `òdd sequence'' of events, but Hardy encourages us to see that just as virtuous intentions can result in disaster, moral luck can follow in the wake of recklessness and evil. As judges and guides of judgment, Hardy's narrators are fascinating in their responses to moral impurity. Their perspective characteristically oscillates from distanced to intimate, and they themselves are in that sense godlike: at once remote and involved. But Hardy's narrators rarely assign blame, aware as they are of the unpredictable messiness and vulnerability implicit in the lives of even the most rational and ethically scrupulous of his characters. The very fact that these careful moral deliberators are as likely to bring about pain and undesirable consequences as are the less aware and conscientious of Hardy's characters demonstrates his belief that morality cannot be protected from luck and hazard. Much has been written about chance in Hardy.9 But these studies do not directly consider the role played by luck in the ethics of


Hardy's ®ction, a topic that merits attention, especially given the extensive examination the issue of moral luck has recently received in philosophy. As different as they are in the stories they tell, A Laodicean (1881), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) share a concern with the ways that knowledge, time, and timing ± all subject to luck ± affect moral choice and judgment. Characters' attitudes toward the past are as ethically signi®cant as their intentions regarding the future, and their concern for personal history is ampli®ed thematically by Hardy's own preoccupations with history conceived more broadly as ancestry and the past of Wessex. Although one would think the past would be more stable and determinate than an uncertain future, in Hardy's ®ction it is as subject to change, chance, and unpredictability as anything else. The novels suggest that life is like a game of chance, and therefore suspense, risk, and hope are inevitable for those who play and even for those who would rather sit on the sidelines and watch. This analogy between life and gambling reveals that, for time-bound humanity, agency is always impure. Nevertheless the analogy also enables Hardy to explore his characters' passionate but thwarted desire for control, for pure agency. In A Laodicean, William Dare, one of the few wholly unsympathetic characters in Hardy, attempts to study and manipulate the odds as a way of winning the game; his hunger for control and his determination to plot a future for himself back®re, though, revealing the dangers of the calculating, scienti®c approach to life so prevalent in an age when technological progress and faith in science were supplanting faith in God and his providential plotting of human lives. More sympathetic characters who take this approach appear in the other novels: Lucetta Templeman and Angel Clare both seek power and control as moral agents but pay a price for underestimating the importance of the unforeseen. All three novels include episodes that will help us clarify the concept of moral luck. Perhaps even more important, Hardy's narratives compel us to practice ethical assessment under the most dif®cult conditions. And in that way literature tests and extends the project begun by moral philosophy.

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the moral melodrama of hardy's gamblers Coincidence, that hallmark of Victorian ®ction, can be seen as a function of luck, contingent on the timing of separate events by a force beyond human control. As Gillian Beer has pointed out in her re¯ections on coincidence in George Eliot's ®ction, readers may object to coincidences in novels but they are everywhere apparent in life: ``Coincidence is in large measure a matter of paying attention. We are surrounded continuously by coincidences. We observe them only when they challenge, con®rm, or play into our preoccupations. It is for that reason that the level of coincidence rises sharply when we fall in love.''10 Moreover, falling in love is a vivid reminder of contingency ± two people meet who might not have met ± and of all that is beyond our control at a time when we most care to orchestrate events and the feelings and actions of another. In Hardy's love stories and his narratives in general, timing is crucial; his narrators allude to a superhuman presence that has planned everything perfectly only to botch the plan while putting it into practice. Because his characters also have plans, dreams, and intentions, they suffer when they experience the `àwryness'' of life: they are plagued by the sense that either God or cosmic randomness causes events in their lives to take place at the very moment when these events would be most likely to interfere with their own wishes or intentions. Thus they often experience bad timing as bad luck. The narrator of Tess, for example, re¯ects bitterly on Tess's inopportune meeting with Alec d'Urberville: In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say ``See!'' to her poor creatures at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply ``Here'' to a body's cry of ``Where?'' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game . . . it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment: a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing strange destinies.11


This worldview is clearly not in accord with the traditional religious view that ``God does not play dice with his world'' (Rescher, Luck 122), that `ìn everything God works for the good'' (Romans 8:28). The ®rst two sentences of the passage, however, suggest a belief in some sort of higher power ± referred to later in Tess as ``the President of the Immortals,'' here as ``Nature,'' and in ``Hap'' as ``dicing Time,'' one of the forces of randomness that govern the universe. Hardy could not accept the existence of a god who was at once omnipotent and good. In his notebook entry of February 5, 1898, he jotted a reminder: ``write a prayer, or hymn, to One not Omnipotent, but hampered; striving for our good, but unable to achieve it except occasionally.''12 What hampers such a god if his intentions are good? Luck? Hardy wavers between a conception of a random world, in which God is a gambler as subject to chance as his creatures are, and a conception of a world ruled by a malicious practical joker. As the speaker of ``Hap'' insists, the latter is actually the less disturbing view because at least then life would make sense and we would have someone to blame. Hardy exhibits a restless obsession with agency characteristic of the ®n de sieÁcle, provocatively attributing tyrannic, uncertain, or even paralyzed agency to God. By raising these questions about chance and luck in his novels and poetry, Hardy knew that he was challenging the views of his religious readers, whose attitudes about gambling were clear. In their eyes, it was an immoral activity because, as Rescher explains, gambling abandons the uses of God-given reason and bases a decision on the mediation of chance or fate. Indeed, there is something impious about thinking that there are any `casual' or `chance' occurrences. It is only from our human point of view that `casual events' exist at all; an omniscient God keeps track not only of the ¯ights of sparrows but of the toss of a coin as well. (Luck 121)

Some philosophers and many theologians believe that there is no such thing as ontologically grounded chance: ``There is merely epistemic chance, grounded in the imperfections of human knowledge'' (Rescher, Luck 132). Hardy is more attracted to the

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possibility of a god who is imperfect but compassionate. And he repeatedly personi®es Gaming and Chance, granting them an undeniable reality instead of suggesting that they could be explained away if only we knew more, if only we could see the bigger picture. Hardy's complex, shifting worldview cannot, of course, be reduced to the clicheÂ that life is a crap-shoot. Such a reduction does nothing to account for the beauty inherent in the idiosyncratic yet elemental and resonant insights of Hardy's ®ction and poetry. In The Melodramatic Imagination Peter Brooks offers a useful way to understand this beauty and intensity through his theory of melodrama,13 a nineteenth-century mode too often misunderstood and vili®ed. Focusing primarily on Balzac and Henry James, Brooks does not include Hardy's novels among his examples, but given their coincidences, their boldness and aesthetic risks, and above all their dramatic staging of moral dilemmas, it is easy to see how the novels correspond to Brooks's de®nition of this mode of imaginative expression. As a prelude, then, to my discussion of A Laodicean, one of Hardy's more melodramatic works, I will brie¯y consider what Hardy gains through his creative experiments with the conventions of melodrama. Despite Woolf 's praise for the effects Hardy seems to achieve without full awareness, I agree with Peter Widdowson that Hardy was well aware of many of his ®ctional strategies, including bizarre, anti-realist aspects of his novels which critics are often too quick to write off to authorial carelessness. Widdowson quotes a telling passage from Hardy's autobiography to demonstrate this awareness: Art is a disproportioning ± (i.e. distorting, throwing out of proportion) ± of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities, which, if merely copied or reported inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence ``realism'' is not Art.14

Oscar Wilde makes a similar case against realism in ``The Decay of Lying,'' and, as I have already argued, New Woman writing was deliberately anti-realist. This late-century new aesthetic was accompanied by a new ethic. The melodramatic mode, in contrast to


realism, articulates what Brooks calls the ``moral occult,'' ``the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality.''15 According to Brooks, melodrama came into being with the French Revolution and its aftermath: This is the epistemological moment which it illustrates and to which it contributes: the moment that symbolically, and really, marks the ®nal liquidation of the traditional sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch), the shattering of the myth of Christendom, the dissolution of an organic and hierarchically cohesive society and the invalidation of the literary forms ± tragedy, comedy of manners ± that depended on such a society. (Melodramatic Imagination 115)

Such a characterization may seem extreme, but a melodramatic imagination such as Hardy's ®nds truth in extremes because they satisfy a craving for a bold reinvention of ethics. Hardy's characters and narrators mourn the erosion of traditions and communities that had sustained families for generations, and yet the novels neither succumb to nostalgia nor embrace new utilitarian philosophies and technological conveniences to replace what has been lost; instead, they offer a potent, hyperbolically charged vision of an interrelated past and present to compensate for the lost God-®lled universe. ``Melodrama starts from and expresses the anxiety brought by a frightening new world in which the traditional patterns of moral order no longer provide the necessary social glue'' (Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination 20). This new, post-Enlightenment world, from which God had withdrawn, could not be for Hardy ± nor for James or George Eliot or Wilde ± a world without ethics, moral drama, and spiritual presence of some sort. Melodrama enabled Hardy to recreate God as a gambler, to speculate about the new gods of Chance and Luck, to explore ultimate confrontations between good and evil within a world where so much is uncertain and mixed, and to do justice to emotional, elemental, and even spiritual truths that realism blunts or misses altogether.16 There is thus a paradox at the center of Hardy's need to disproportion realities in order to tell the truth, and the irony Brooks observes about melodrama can lead to a deeper appreciation of this form of

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truth-telling in late Victorian ®ction: to avoid the melodramatic and the risks this mode entails is ``to oversimplify in the manner of a Flaubert, to misestimate what life is really about and art is really for'' (Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination 159). For Hardy, to make life subject to reason alone, without accounting for chance, emotion, uncertainty, and all that is beyond agency, is indeed to misestimate what life is really about and to comfort ourselves with false security rather than with life's ± and art's ± intimations of forces that transcend what we can know and control.17 Through the melodrama of A Laodicean Hardy develops gambling as a metaphor more overtly than he does in either of the other novels, in part because gambling ®gures in the plot literally when George Somerset and William Dare meet ``by chance'' at Monte Carlo. While Dare is a bold risk-taker (as his name suggests), Somerset is merely an onlooker at the game, unaware that his courtship of Paula Power, which has sent him across Europe in search of her, is soon to be temporarily derailed by forces beyond his control. Hardy's narrator makes us feel the gulf between Somerset's innocent view of the casino and his own more worldly perspective: `Às a non-participant in its pro®t and losses, fevers and frenzies, it had that strange effect upon his imagination which is usually exercised over those who behold Chance presented to them with spectacular piquancy without advancing far enough in its acquaintance to suffer from its ghastly reprisals and impish tricks, that strip it of all romance.''18 Dare, despite his cosmopolitan surface, is just as naive in his con®dence that his theory of chance will lead him to certain success. He may eventually win at the gaming table (``notwithstanding a little in-and-out luck at ®rst'' [312]), but he loses the larger game of manipulating others to secure his own respectability and fortune. Like Father Time in Jude the Obscure, Dare plays a strongly allegorical role in the novel. He lives in time like the rest of the characters, but he seems not to age; others ®nd his appearance to be disconcertingly boyish because they can not determine what age he is, or even, at ®rst glance, whether he is a man or a boy.19 They are equally uncertain about where he is from, for he enumerates all the


places he has lived without mentioning a place of origin or a nationality. His role in the novel mimics that of the implied author.20 Like Hardy himself, Dare attempts to orchestrate the lives of others and to create characters ± by ``vamping up a Frankenstein,'' for example, when endeavoring to make a successful suitor of his father, Captain De Stancy (Hardy's allusion to Mary Shelley's novel here alerts us to Dare's illusory sense of control over his ``creature'') (191). Dare's lack of ``moral ballast'' (288), however, makes him seem very unlike the implied author and beyond the reach of the narrator's sympathy. But this quality, too, sets him apart from the other characters and makes him seem larger than life. Like Chance itself, Dare specializes in ``ghastly reprisals'' and `ìmpish tricks.'' Although Dare seems to be a one-dimensional ®gure, a melodramatic villain, his complexity lies in his double role as superhuman personi®cation of Chance and as human victim of events beyond his control. He is Captain De Stancy's illegitimate son, and as such he has no place in society, no power, and no recognized, respected identity. His status is purely a matter of luck. Through his father, an aristocrat who has lost his fortune, he pursues Paula (whose last name, signi®cantly, is Power) for her money. He says to De Stancy, `Ì am what events have made me, and having ®xed my mind upon getting you settled in life by this marriage, I put things in train for it at an immense trouble to myself '' (160). But if Dare is what events have made him, why does he believe that he can control events? He carries with him a book called ``Moivre's Doctrines of Chances,'' which is `às well-thumbed as the minister's Bible'' (139) and clearly thought of by Dare as a rival book to live by. Though he realizes that events have controlled him, his error is that he nevertheless believes with a certainty he considers `àlmost mathematical'' (286) that he can now make his own luck. Dare is able to persuade his father to woo Paula because not only does De Stancy have the constitutive luck of being unusually susceptible to falling in love, he also has a ``tendency to moral chequer-work'' (209). He is a good person occasionally capable of very black deeds (``something rare in life,'' as the narrator admits, mischievously

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calling attention to the melodramatic extremes in the story he tells [208]). Paula's uncle ®nds out who Dare is and what he is up to, but Dare is able to blackmail the blackmailer because Abner Power, like himself, has a shady past and lacks moral ballast. In the end, though, Dare fails to calculate the role that Charlotte, De Stancy's sister and a thoroughly good woman, will play in his life. Dare does not anticipate self-sacri®cing virtue botching his plans, probably because, always out for himself, he has no personal attachments or loyalties. Even though Charlotte herself loves Somerset, she refuses to let this love or the advice of others prevent her from doing the right thing. Charlotte realizes that Somerset is the man Paula will undoubtedly marry if the marriage of convenience does not take place, and still she tells her friend the truth about the deception practiced on Paula and Somerset by De Stancy's illegitimate son. Paula has no idea that Dare is related to her ®anceÂ in this way, and so it is even more signi®cant that Charlotte disabuses her friend before the wedding rather than afterwards, ignoring those who urge her to wait. The good in De Stancy's character surfaces at the last minute, too, so Dr. Frankenstein has not completely controlled his monster. If Dare is taken by surprise when his plot collapses, it is also partially because he doesn't understand life as his father does. In the days before the wedding date, De Stancy's ``mood had been that of the gambler seasoned in ill-luck, who adopts pessimist surmises as a safe background to his most sanguine hopes'' (390). What makes A Laodicean more than merely an entertaining potboiler is Hardy's brooding self-consciousness about the way things happen. His characters share this self-consciousness by thinking of themselves as gamblers. Those who calculate the odds and play their cards carefully, as Dare and Abner Power do, watch their life's work explode in their faces (a literal experience for Power who destroys his stock of explosives before returning to England and has the mixed moral luck of dis®gurement, which causes him pain but also affords him a disguise from both his outlaw employers and from the police). Those who nervously enjoy but doubt the security of their good fortune ± as both suitors do when things are going well, for they understand the perversity of chance ± prove to


be wise in their wariness; as the narrator says, quoting Shakespeare, ``when Fortune means to men most good . . . she looks upon them with a threatening eye'' (123). As for those, like Charlotte, who observe what seems to be an inevitable course of events but heed a moral imperative that changes everything ± they ®nd themselves burdened with confusion about their ethical agency and withdraw from the world and its responsibilities. In a very Hardyan conclusion, Charlotte enters a nunnery, loving both Somerset and Paula, but from a distance and without any worldly reward for her love and goodness. Hence, though Charlotte acts with probity and brings about a happy ending for her friends, she is not able to secure a loving relationship for herself. In different ways, then, all the characters in this novel are at the mercy of unpredictable forces. Their agency is impure and their future is as much beyond their will as it is indifferent to their wishes. luck and the presence of the past Yet to focus almost exclusively on the future and the gambler's or moral agent's attitude toward it is to ignore the past, a force that is nearly as crucial to the ethics of this novel as it is to the ethics of The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess. In her attempt to account for the popularity of gambling in the nineteenth century, Gillian Beer considers the phenomenon ± which had a strong appeal, across all social classes, despite prohibitions against it ± in light of evolutionary and thermodynamic theory. ``The new theories unsettled knowledge of the past and prediction of the future. Instead of constant rediscovery of stable norms the future became irregular, chancy, peopled by speculative types whose relation to the present might repeat and extend the scandal of our relation to other earlier species.''21 Besides being linked to this scandal and to a history that is never safely contained by conclusions about it, the past is associated with constitutive luck, for instance, since it makes the characters who they are. Dare has the crucial bad luck of illegitimate birth; his immoral choices spring from this luck, and it is unlikely that they would be the same without it. In that sense, the Victorians

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were unsettled not only by questions of agency and an uncertain future, but also by a double-edge anxiety about the past compounded both of regret and of fear that the past is, in some uncontrollable and threatening sense, still alive. Sophie Gilmartin's study of ancestry in nineteenth-century British literature shows how, repeatedly in Hardy's work, ``narrative is built upon a foundation which is palpable, material, layered with seams of generational and geological history.''22 This perspective on the past in Hardy's ®ction and poetry is valuable in part because it illuminates the value ± the ethics even ± of memory for Hardy. To forget is to betray. The active effort to remember ± to remain connected to one's personal past, to ancestors, and to history ± has for Hardy both moral and aesthetic implications. Re¯ecting on memory, sense impression, and loss, Hardy wrote in a journal entry of 1897: ``Today has length, breadth, thickness, colour, smell, voice. As soon as it becomes yesterday it is a thin layer among many layers, without substance, colour or articulate sound'' (quoted in Gilmartin, Ancestry and Narrative 223). But this elegiac impulse with its aesthetic longing and ethics of constancy (so visible in the romantic devotion of characters such as Gabriel Oak, Diggory Venn, Marty South, and Tess herself ) is counterbalanced in Hardy's novels by a very different orientation toward the past: the need to forget. Only through forgetting and escaping the weight of ancestry and heredity does agency become available to Hardy's characters, who often express a concomitant need to erase past events that hamper forward movement and free choice. But the past is seductive. Although the lure of the presently unattainable past apparently has nothing to do with moral luck, Hardy's novels prove otherwise. Luck has shaped his characters' lives in ways they long to reverse; this longing to ``go back'' imbues the novels not with nostalgia but with a poignant desire for the impossible, for, in other words, a different past, or a present interpenetrated by a past that is living rather than static or irrevocable. Conversely, Hardy's ®ction also represents the role of luck in the desire to escape one's past, to wipe the slate clean. Exploring both the beauty of the past that seems alive and malleable in the


present and the nightmare of the inexorable, unlucky past that will not die, A Laodicean, Tess, and The Mayor of Casterbridge hold out the possibility of ethical agency only to show how this dazzles and deludes those who are actually very much at the mercy of time and luck. For reasons other than illegitimacy and greed, Paula shares Dare's desire to be a De Stancy, and her willingness to believe the worst of Somerset is partially determined by her attitude toward the past. The novel's ending is not unequivocally happy for Paula because she remains obsessed with a past she will never have ± the past as represented by the historic, romantic De Stancy clan who once inhabited the castle that her industrialist father's money enabled her to own and that is reduced to ruins by the end of the novel. The last words we hear her say to Somerset are `Ì wish my castle wasn't burnt; and I wish you were a De Stancy!'' (431). Hardy, who was himself fascinated by old families, does not allow us to dismiss Paula's wish as merely a whim. Some of the most striking descriptions in the novel capture the strangeness and beauty of a past that lives on in the present.23 For example, De Stancy impresses Paula and his sister by entering a portrait of one of his ancestors; he dons ancestral armor, picks up a sword, and stands in front of the painting's frame. He asks them what they think. ``He looked so much like a man of bygone times that neither of them replied, but remained curiously gazing at him'' (189). While De Stancy embodies the past, Somerset merely studies it through his work as an architect; still, whether she wants to or not, Paula falls in love with Somerset. On one level anyway, we are encouraged to see this as her bad luck. Pursuing him across Europe by seeking out places of architectural interest, she enters a street in Lisieux that transports her to the Middle Ages, especially when she gazes at a house covered with ancient carved ®gures ``cloaked with little cobwebs which waved in the breeze, so that each ®gure seemed alive'' (399). An old woman pokes her head out of the window and Paula witnesses with fascination the blurring of the line that separates present from past, as she did when saw De Stancy in the picture frame: the `òld woman's head . . . was so

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nearly the colour of the carvings that she might easily have passed as a piece with them'' (400). Paula's desire to merge with the past despite her ties to the modern world is more eccentric, more a quirky Hardyan dimension of the novel, than the destructive plotting of the illegitimate son so traditional in literature, but the luck of birth shapes the attitudes and ethical choices of both heroine and villain. A Laodicean repeatedly evokes fascination with the persistence of the past in the present. Most broadly, as Widdowson notes, the novel's project is ``to examine the mentaliteÂ of a contemporary society in transition between `the ancient and the modern' ± a phrase it uses more than once'' (On Thomas Hardy 97). The past is known and comforting compared to the present, which is dominated by the almost frightening potential of new technology such as photography and telegraphic communication, both of which play important roles in Dare's impish tricks. The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess are also narratives obsessed with the relation of past and present, luck and choice. They focus on characters admirably intending to turn a new leaf, to replace a guilty past with a redeemed future. This intention proves futile, though, because of the persistence of the past. Chance and bad timing frustrate good intentions so that the ethics of these novels is strongly anti-Kantian despite the narrators' attraction to Kant's idea that the good will ``sparkle[s] like a jewel in its own right'' regardless of how things turn out.24 In Tess Hardy offers us different models of moral assessment, his narrator's being the most prominent. Angel Clare, for a time, offers a rival model to that of the narrator even though by the end he and the narrator are similarly compassionate to Tess and forgiving of what the world ®nds sinful in her behavior. Not surprisingly, given the ``hard logical deposit'' in the depths of his constitution (237), Angel initially aligns himself with the censorious, Victorian morality of that world and judges Tess severely for not living up to his ideal of purity. But later, in a Kantian moment, he revises his judgment: ``Who was the moral man? Still more pertinently, who was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not


only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay not among things done, but among things willed'' (328±29). He has learned that Tess had a child out of wedlock, and though he hears the story from her, she tells him after their wedding despite her intention to tell him before. Hardy shows us Chance actively thwarting this moral intention at every turn (the most memorable instance being the written confession she puts under Angel's door only to discover that it accidentally slid under the rug). I agree with H. M. Daleski that Tess is not merely `à hapless victim of forces beyond her control,''25 for at no point does Hardy make our assessment of responsibility that easy. Still, Daleski's characterization of Tess as a ``tragic agent'' is apt. As he points out when discussing the famous instance of the letter under the rug, there is still time before the wedding for Tess to talk to Angel after she ®nds the unopened letter. The tragic dimension of her choice, as I see it, lies in the power of circumstance to pressure her to make the choice she would, on one level anyway, rather not make.26 If she isn't fully responsible for the deception, is she responsible for her sexual relationship with Alec? Hardy gives us enough evidence to believe that what happens to her in the Chase Woods is rape, but he also has Tess continue to live with Alec and say to him, ``My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all'' (83), suggesting that Alec takes advantage of her in different ways, some more her responsibility than others. My approach to what has become an interpretive crux in discussions of the novel, is to acknowledge that Tess is indeed raped by Alec (she is manipulated, she is asleep when it happens, the villagers hear a struggle and the sound of her cries coming from the Chase); after the rape, however, she yields to Alec's seduction, and she takes responsibility for the choice to stay with him. The responsibility is not hers alone, however. When she returns home, Tess poignantly (and uncharacteristically) blames her mother: ``Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk?'' (87). Joan Durbey®eld, who becomes almost a procuress in her avidity to get her daughter married, clearly deserves some of the blame, though she too acts with good intentions.

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In his condemnation and then complete exoneration of Tess, Angel swings from one extreme to the other. By contrast, the narrator loves Tess and believes in her purity from beginning to end, even as he calls attention to her impure agency and the circumstances and consequences that constrain her will. Are we, as readers, to follow the narrator's lead? In a sense we do, since most of us ®nd Tess very easy to love and, as a victim of bad moral luck, hard to blame. ``Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself '' (38); her self-blame becomes another model of moral assessment ± and an important one because Tess is clearly the most virtuous character in the novel. What makes our ethical response to her so complicated is that Tess is admirable for taking responsibility for the consequences of her actions despite their discordant relationship with her intentions. She blames herself, and by doing so, paradoxically gives narrator and readers all the more reason not to blame her. Hardy's novel makes a point about moral luck similar to Margaret Urban Walker's claim that impure agency is what makes integrity possible: Tess does not intend or deserve the consequences that befall her, but she takes responsibility for them. ``She would pay to the uttermost farthing,'' she thinks before her confession (``Moral Luck'' 220). At the same time, those readers who admire Tess for her integrity do not want her to suffer, and it seems an injustice that she should. In its complex, double ethical vision, the novel thus offers as a model of moral assessment the self-judgment of its principled heroine whose morality is not completely overruled by the generous, compassionate spirit of forgiveness represented by the narrator of her story. As if to test our capacity to judge mercifully, Hardy makes Tess's acts more extreme at each stage of her story and more inextricably entangled with events from the past. She goes from killing a horse (accidentally, while asleep) to killing a man (deliberately but out of the bewilderment of unreturned, unrewarded love for another man who would bene®t from this one's death ± in other words, with good intentions and with the pressure of the past upon the present made visible by Angel's sudden reappearance). She goes from being raped, to being seduced, to becoming what she vowed


she would not become: Alec's ``creature.'' Angel realizes that it is the strength of Tess's love for him that `èxtinquish[es] her moral sense altogether'' (372). As he sees it, her body is now drifting `ìn a direction dissociated from its living will'' (366). For most readers (and ultimately for Tess herself, who understands that she must ``pay'' for the murder as she has paid for all her choices), Tess must be judged guilty by the end of the novel, but passing such a judgment is dif®cult because we know so much about her goodness. We are like Izz Huett, who cannot speak badly of Tess even if when there are reasons for doing so: ``the fascination exercised over her rougher nature by Tess's character compelled her to grace'' (264). Hardy's representation of Tess similarly compels his readers to grace. In her letter to Angel, Tess slips into wishful thinking: ``What was the past to me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether'' (325). The trouble is that the past will not die. After Tess's confession, Angel is quick to suggest that her character is tainted because of her d'Urberville lineage, and, as Gilmartin observes, Tess's aversion to studying history ± ``Because what's the use of leaning that I am one of a long row only'' ± is related to her desire to avoid thinking about her ancestral past and thus ``retain at least the illusion of individual will'' (Ancestry and Narrative 229). Her murder of Alec represents a desperate, ®nal attempt to kill the past that has prevented a fresh moral start. That, too, back®res. Chance has always prevented Tess's will from being in accord with her actions. After the murder, Angel says, `Àh ± it is my fault.'' And yet Hardy does not allow us to shift the blame that easily. Angel's musing about Tess's ancestral past ± ``what obscure strain in the d'Urberville blood had led to this aberration'' (372) ± calls attention to the unfairness of constitutive luck and the determinative in¯uence the past can have on present moral choices. But the novel leaves us neither squarely in the Kantian position of judging Tess by her good intentions alone (how can we do so as Alec's blood seeps through the ceiling?) nor prepared to think of her execution as just. The phrase ``moral sense'' has become ironic in Hardy's world of chance, for it does not make sense that a woman as gentle,

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loving, and ethically scrupulous as Tess should be punished so persistently. Without completely abandoning normative ethics, then, the novel leads us to question our assumption that a rational understanding of moral principles can lead us to fair moral assessment. It does so by making us acutely aware of the powerful and unruly force of Tess's bad luck. In the course of his re¯ection on ethics, time, and timing, Hardy concludes, in both Tess and The Mayor of Casterbridge, that it is simply not possible to learn from experience. ``By experience,'' says Roger Ascham, ``we ®nd out a short way by a long wandering.'' Not seldom that long wandering un®ts us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess Durbey®eld's experience was of this incapacitating kind . . . She ± and how many more ± might have ironically said to God with Saint Augustine, ``Thou hast counselled a better course than thou hast permitted.'' (Mayor of Casterbridge 103)

Michael Henchard, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, is a much wiser man by the end of the novel than he is at the beginning, but in all other respects he is just as badly off ± `òn the precise standing he had occupied a quarter of a century before,''27 fallen from his position as mayor, cut off from family, working as a hay-trusser. Even as a young man Henchard realizes that knowledge most often comes after all chance of acting on it has passed (75). As an older man, he knows that even if he were granted the chance, he now has ``the wisdom to do'' but not the ``zest for doing'' (395). Hardy's bitter commentary on the irony of understanding that comes too late underscores once again his belief in the importance of timing ± a matter of luck ± and his philosophical perspective on time, knowledge, and moral character. Like Dare and Tess, Henchard and Lucetta are both unable to escape their pasts. Henchard, who became intimately involved with Lucetta when he was ill and she nursed him back to health, decides to do the right thing ± to marry her to save her reputation. His guilty secret ± that many years earlier he sold his wife to a sailor ± has remained a secret, and since it is likely that Susan Henchard is now dead, he is prepared to make amends to Lucetta rather than hurt a woman again. But ``behold, Susan appears!'' as Henchard


puts it when telling the story to Farfrae. Her return, which initiates moral bad luck for both Henchard and Lucetta, is ®gured as a haunting. ``Mrs Henchard was so pale that the boys called her `The Ghost' '' (153). She is a ghostly reminder of a past that Henchard had assumed was dead. Newson, the sailor who purchased her from Henchard and was thought to have drowned at sea, also returns as a ghost to remind Henchard that there is no such thing as putting the past behind him.28 After he has lost his business to his rival, Henchard lingers in the establishment as an ordinary worker, a shadow of his former managerial self. A freshly painted sign over the gateway symbolizes the supplanting, the turn of the wheel of fortune, but it also reminds us that the present does not cancel out the past: `À smear of decisive lead-colored paint had been laid on to obliterate Henchard's name, though its letters dimly loomed through like ships in a fog. Over these, in fresh white, spread the name of Farfrae'' (294).29 Initially, it is the bad luck of Susan's return that keeps Lucetta from the marriage she believes she desires. Later, Susan's death frees Henchard to marry Lucetta just when she has fallen in love with Farfrae. Having left her native Jersey to escape her reputation, once in Casterbridge Lucetta abandons her original plan to marry the man who could restore that reputation, deciding instead that she can leave her past behind. `Ì won't be a slave to the past ± I'll love where I chose,'' she declares to herself (250). In this de®ant plan to make her own luck she is, like Dare, only temporarily successful. Her past and her private life are mercilessly exposed in the most public fashion during the skimmington ride when her ef®gy is tied to Henchard's and paraded through the streets of Casterbridge. One of the causes of this public humiliation is Lucetta's unwillingness to believe that Jopp, despite his attempt to blackmail her, could have any control over her life. But if her luck had been different, this refusal to be blackmailed might have worked in her favor, and on one level it is ethically admirable to refuse to be manipulated. And yet because her letters to Henchard chance to get into Jopp's hands and because Newson, passing through town, loses his way, ends up in Mixen Lane, and, on a whim, ®nances the skimmington

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ride, Lucetta's virtuous present life is sabotaged by her guilty past. If her luck had been better, she would have suffered no moral condemnation. As Henchard warns her, `ìt is not by what is, in this life, but by what appears, that you are judged'' (248). Hardy's novel simultaneously acknowledges and protests this pragmatic ethical truth. merit, desert, and luck: hardy's practical jokers As John Goode has pointed out, Henchard plans a series of melodramatic catastrophes, which Hardy describes as practical jokes ± ``the reading of the letters to Farfrae, the humiliation of Lucetta in the ring, and the self-presentation to the royal personage'' (Thomas Hardy 92). Not one of these pranks goes as planned. Goode is right to note that `àwareness disables''; Henchard's feelings for others get him to stop short. But just as important is what Elizabeth-Jane calls ``the persistence of the unforeseen'' (441). Chance itself (in Hardy's world anyway) is a practical joker. As we have seen, Dare, who suffers from no qualms of conscience, also fails to take control and to secure his future when playing practical jokes on Somerset and Paula. The phony telegram and the trick photography designed to blacken Somerset's character do short-term damage, but Chance has the last laugh on Dare, as it does on Alec and Henchard. Those who are daring and de®ant in Hardy inevitably end up more pathetic than those, like Elizabeth-Jane, Tess, and Charlotte, who come to understand the kind of world they live in and to accept their impure agency with stoic dignity. Dignity is exactly what the practical joke is designed to undermine, however, and thus Hardy's wary, self-protective characters are also vulnerable ± merely in a different way.30 They too seek control over their lives and refuge from the cruelty of Chance. The plot of The Mayor of Casterbridge could be described as a series of practical jokes beginning with the wife-sale. Henchard seems to be in charge of this joke on Susan, who asks him before she leaves with her purchaser just how serious his intention is: `` À joke? Of course it is not a joke!' shouted her husband, his resent-


ment rising at her suggestion'' (78), but even at this point Hardy makes it clear that Henchard has made a choice ± to auction off his wife ± fully expecting that no one would take him seriously. In his description of the shifting reaction of the guests in the tent ± who began by cheering Henchard on ± the narrator emphasizes the shift Henchard undergoes from reckless practical joker to the victim of a more powerful joker: Seizing the sailor's arm with her right hand, and mounting the little girl on her left, she went out of the tent sobbing bitterly. A stolid look of concern ®lled the husband's face, as if, after all, he had not quite anticipated this ending; and some of the guests laughed. (79)

Hardy brilliantly echoes this moment later in the novel when a bull on the loose chases Elizabeth-Jane and Lucetta. Once the animal has been punished and secured, Elizabeth-Jane pauses to look at ``the bull, now rather to be pitied with his bleeding nose, having perhaps rather intended a practical joke than a murder'' (280). One practical joke leads to another. Susan's revenge on her husband, though she does not intend it as such, takes the form of a letter revealing that Elizabeth-Jane is Newson's daughter, not his own child, who died in infancy. Susan had directed that the letter not be opened before Elizabeth-Jane's wedding day, but as Mother Cuxsom predicts, after her death Mrs. Henchard's wishes will count as nothing (191). Henchard opens the letter just after he tells Elizabeth-Jane the lie ± which he believes to be the truth ± that he is her father: ``The mockery was, that he should have no sooner taught a girl to claim the shelter of his paternity than he discovered her to have no kinship with him'' (197). It is his bad moral luck to welcome love into his life and to feel the pull of a blood-tie just before learning that the daughter he loves is not his daughter.31 Even though he would not have reached out to her if he had had the knowledge of their true relation, he does reach out in a way that changes Elizabeth-Jane's life, and Hardy suggests that Henchard would be a better person if he were to take responsibility for his choice, despite its unintended consequences, especially since it is a choice that springs from his original decision to sell his wife. Instead of loving Elizabeth-Jane anyway, or telling her the truth

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about her paternity, or both, Henchard at this point merely rejects her, focusing on his own victimization by a cosmic practical joker who reduces all of his plans and hopes to dust and ashes. Longing for purer agency, he neglects to act in the impure, compromised, contingent ways that would make him a better man. But moral luck in this novel, as in Tess, does not always permit such clear ethical assessment. Even in this case, Henchard's discouragement is understandable since again and again his efforts to relieve his loneliness are thwarted by life's practical jokes. He gambles one last time when Newson shows up at his home and, with Elizabeth-Jane asleep in the next room, Henchard tells him that his daughter is dead. Clearly, telling this lie is wrong, but Hardy encourages us to see how what Nagel calls ``resultant luck'' shapes our understanding of the ethics of what Henchard has done. Even though the lie is impulsive, Henchard tells it expecting to be challenged, expecting not to get away with it.32 In that sense, it's almost like a joke. When Newson merely takes the lie for the truth and leaves town, Henchard's reaction is similar to his disconcerted dismay after the wife-sale: Then Henchard, scarcely believing the evidence of his senses, rose from his seat amazed at what he had done. It had been the impulse of a moment. The regard he had lately acquired for Elizabeth, the new-sprung hope of his loneliness that she would be to him a daughter of whom he could feel as proud as of the actual daughter she still believed herself to be, had been stimulated by the unexpected coming of Newson to a greedy exclusiveness in relation to her; so that the sudden prospect of loss had caused him to speak mad lies like a child, in pure mockery of consequences. He had expected questions to close in round him, and unmask his fabrications in ®ve minutes; yet such questioning had not come. But surely they would come . . . (368)

When Newson does not return, Hardy makes it dif®cult for us to know whether we are to de®ne Henchard's moral luck as good or bad. In a sense, and from his point of view, it is good: he tells a lie to secure ®lial affection and gets away with it. But seen another way, his moral luck is bad from the beginning: he does not intend to get away with the lie, and the fact that he does makes his act evil, for he now has a responsibility he never bargained for with this ``last desperate throw of a gamester'' (402): the power to bring


loved ones who believe each other to be dead back to life. Similarly, when Newson ®nally does discover the truth and return to Casterbridge, Henchard's moral luck is simultaneously good and bad. It is bad because, once he is found out, he loses Elizabeth's love and regard. It is good because when the consequences of his lie turn out to be less dire, the immorality of the lie itself is palliated. At ®rst, Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae do not see it this way; their condemnation of Henchard is unmitigated, even though Newson, ``the chief sufferer'' and victim of the lie, takes Henchard's side: `` `Well, 'twas not ten words that he said, after all,' Newson pleaded. Ànd how could he know that I should be such a simpleton as to believe him?' '' (392). Although gullible, Newson is not naive. His experience of the world as a seaman, a traveler among ``strange men and strange moralities'' (391), has led him to be more ¯exible and accepting as a moral thinker than his principled, provincial daughter. ``Ha-ha! ± `twas a good joke, and well carried out, and I give the man credit for't'' (391). We know more than Newson. The lie is intended as a sort of joke, but it is not well carried out, for at no point is Henchard in control of it. As in our judgment of Tess, luck again makes clear moral assessment of the novel's protagonist dif®cult. The narrator presents us with a continuum of views, ranging from Farfrae's simple ``He ought not to have done it!'' (391) to Newson's `` 'Twas as much my fault as his, poor fellow'' (392). But neither of these judgments seems fair or adequate, as Elizabeth-Jane comes to realize by the end of the novel when she compassionately re¯ects ``that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given'' and that most people deserve much more. The characters in A Laodicean, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and The Mayor of Casterbridge are all gamblers and impure ethical agents. This is as true of those who are calculating as it is of those who are reckless. It is as true of those who relish the game and throw the dice de®antly as it is of those who understand the power of Chance and would rather not play. In his pessimism, Hardy believed that much that is good in humanity is not allowed the opportunity to bloom. A pervasive theme in his novels is that we deserve better.

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Despite Rescher's case against moral luck, on one point he and Hardy would agree: ``how we deserve to be treated is something that, in the ®nal analysis, lies wholly within our power . . . Luck manages to decouple fate from desert. But no force can decouple merit from desert'' (Luck 169). Rescher also argues that `òur fate is not within our power, but our character is'' (169). Here Hardy would disagree. We can strive to make our moral characters what we want them to be, but in this realm of life, like all others, too often hope unblooms. In Nussbaum's words, ``much that I did not make goes toward making me whatever I shall be praised or blamed for being'' (``Luck and Ethics'' 78). Hardy's focus in these novels on the intervention of chance in our lives signi®cantly shapes the ethics of his ®ction. His novels stress that there is indeed such a thing as moral luck and clarify the value of acknowledging its existence. If we admit that contingency shapes who we are and what we do, we are less likely to be arrogant and controlling; more likely to consider a variety of possible consequences when making a choice and to take responsibility for that choice even when our resultant luck is bad, even when our intentions were good; and most importantly, given Hardy's ethics of love and fellow-feeling, acknowledging moral luck will lead us, perhaps, to judge others with greater compassion.

chapter 5

Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics

Like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart.

William Shakespeare1

The proximity of the other is the face's meaning, and it means from the very start in a way that goes beyond those plastic forms which forever try to cover the face like a mask of their presence to perception. But always the face shows through these forms. Prior to any particular expression and beneath all particular expressions, which cover over and protect with an immediately adopted face or countenance, there is the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such, that is to say, extreme exposure, defencelessness, vulnerability itself. Emmanuel Levinas2

Besides sharing a strong aestheticizing impulse, Oscar Wilde and Henry James both lampooned Victorian morality to make way for what Wilde called a New Ethics. The quintessential ®n-de-sieÁcle aesthete, Wilde asserts in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) that ``there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.''3 The novel that follows this preface unfolds in the form of a fairy tale of sorts and raises moral questions on nearly every page, and yet established boundaries between the moral and the immoral do indeed blur and shift. Thus this strange late-century, protopostmodern work ventures an experiment in aestheticizing morality, in transforming Victorian deontology into an ethics that provides more scope for beauty and unorthodox choice. On the surface, James's The Ambassadors (1903), with its decorous modernist sensibility, seems an unlikely novel to pair with Wilde's, especially considering how antagonistic toward each 93

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other the two writers were. But as Jonathan Freedman has persuasively argued in his study of James in the context of British aestheticism, it makes sense to read The Ambassadors as James's rejoinder to Dorian Gray, for Wilde's novel is, in part, a response to James's earlier ®ction and essays: ``what Wilde appropriates from James, James reappropriates from Wilde in a disguised and somewhat ironized form. For just as Wilde's aesthete revises the nature and functions of the Jamesian artist, so Strether's experience in Paris transvalues the claims of Wildean aestheticism.''4 My examination of these two novels builds on Freedman's comparative analysis by moving beyond his thesis that Wilde's aestheticism resides in sensations and the body while James's depends on `àmplitude of consciousness'' (Professions of Taste 199). Reading the novels in light of philosophical ideas about aestheticism and what Paul Ricoeur calls ``hermeneutics of the self,'' I see the different styles of aestheticizing ethics in Wilde and James as similar in emotional self-protectiveness, a strategy that erects a defense against both suffering and love. As I suggest throughout this book, the positive ethical potential of art, particularly narrative art, is tremendous. In this chapter, though, I explore how an aestheticizing impulse can be evasive of responsibility and antithetical to ethics. As Terry Eagleton has noted of the aesthetic, `àny account of this amphibious concept which either uncritically celebrates or unequivocally denounces it is . . . likely to overlook its real historical complexity.''5 Late Victorian British aestheticism was at once a potent source of transformative energy that challenged mainstream values and an impotent and idealist retreat from life's dif®culties during a period of cultural upheaval. The implied authors of both Dorian Gray and The Ambassadors, aware of this paradox, are ambivalent aesthetes because they are held by Victorian morality despite their desire for freedom. The anxiety about agency that plagued Hardy and the New Woman writers, then, is just as evident in Wilde and James. Ideas about ¯uid identity, in¯uence, and self-delusion are yoked in both novels to questions about choice and the forces that constrain agency.


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image and concept With its trope of the portrait that lives and the lovely young man who never ages or changes, The Picture of Dorian Gray plays with assumptions about the relation of art and life. Although a very different sort of novel, The Ambassadors dramatizes similar concerns, because for Strether literary works and paintings strongly color his perception of reality and shape his choices.6 Hence, prior to a discussion of these two novels, I want brie¯y to explore aesthetic theory, especially that of Emmanuel Levinas, whose work on the ethical dimension of aesthetics strikes me as especially pertinent to the concerns of these turn-of-the-century narratives. As a student of Heidegger and Husserl, Levinas brings the perspective and presuppositions of twentieth-century continental philosophy into my reading of ethics and narrative, which has thus far been dominated by the perspectives of Anglo-American moral philosophy. Some of Levinas's ideas about art and ethics con¯ict with those introduced earlier ± as we will see ± but by including them I hope to suggest that ®n-de-sieÁcle narratives can be illuminated from many angles within this reanimated ®eld of philosophy and literature, and to advocate openness to a variety of ethical frameworks rather than allegiance to one and hostility to others. More particularly, I read James's The Ambassadors through Levinas and Ricoeur because the reading of the novel Nussbaum offers through Kant and Aristotle, as suggestive as it is, fails to satisfy my ethical questions about Lambert Strether and the novel's ending and, in fact, seems to distort Strether's character by idealizing it.7 Moreover, a postmodern ethical theory is, I would argue, particularly appropriate for Wilde and James, who are among the most proto-postmodern of ®n-de-sieÁcle writers. It is easy to see that Wilde's novel is proto-postmodern in its dissolving of boundaries, its self-re¯exivity, and its wily contradictions, but one can also make a case for a postmodern James. Ross Posnock does so by calling attention to openness and curiosity in James's novels, to, for example, ``Strether's internalizing of difference and his dissolving of

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unitary identity,'' and more generally to what he terms James's ``politics of nonidentity,'' a phrase that Posnock admits ``cannot avoid the paradox of trying to label a strategy dedicated to disrupting the compulsion to ®x identity.''8 He goes on to make a distinction that has signi®cant implications for our understanding of art and philosophy: `Àny de®nition is identi®cation, and identity logic is our normal mode of thought. By positing a transparent coincidence between concepts and their objects, this logic tacitly excludes ambiguity, as the ¯ux of reality is converted into the ®xity of concepts.''9 What Posnock and others who celebrate Jamesian ambiguity tend to overlook, however, is the inherent tendency of art to confer permanence on the temporal. We might assume that art, on the one hand ± especially art that arises from negative capability and a keen sense of life's complexity ± escapes identity logic and captures the ¯ux of reality, while philosophy, on the other hand, settles for the ®xity of concepts. As we have seen, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Margaret Urban Walker all identify this ®xity in philosophy and turn to literature as a way to develop a more supple and nuanced ethics. Levinas, in ``Reality and its Shadow,'' his most controversial essay on ethics and aesthetics, challenges this view, and by doing so offers a corrective to the common tendency to idealize art (a tendency that was, of course, particularly strong at the end of the last century). He argues that once art replaces an object with its image, the image neutralizes the real relationship that a concept allows. In other words, concepts initiate dialogue and lead to understanding, whereas disinterested artistic vision, with its ``blindness to concepts,'' focuses on the ineffable and the beauty of completeness and closure. `À novel shuts beings up in a fate despite their freedom,''10 and for Levinas an aestheticizing instinct is thus similar to the desire to evade ethical responsibility by immobilizing time and process. For him, art is associated with ®xity. ``Such a ®xity is wholly different from that of concepts, which initiates life, offers reality to our powers, to truth, opens a dialectic. By its re¯ection in a narrative, being has a non-dialectical ®xity, stops dialectics and time'' (Levinas, ``Reality and Its Shadow'' 139). Criticism, accord-


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ing to Levinas, restores vitality, alterity, and ethics to art because it animates the work's conceptual meanings and initiates discussion of them. Linda Dowling, in her study of language and decadence in ®n-de-sieÁcle British aestheticism, alerts us to exactly what troubles Levinas about the aesthetic. De®ning the Euphuistic ideal of style in Pater's Marius the Epicurean as an arti®ciality that arrests the transitive, she points out that the effect of the Pater-like poisonous book in Dorian Gray, ``both as Dorian himself experiences reading it and as we see its in¯uence on his life, is to collapse time: hours pass unheeded as Dorian reads, and `years' pass as we read of his reading.''11 This capacity to ®x and freeze time is part of what makes the book, and the aestheticism it represents, fatal to those who fall under its in¯uence. Levinas would agree with Wilde that in and of itself, `àll art is quite useless,'' or, as Wilde proclaims earlier in the Preface to Dorian Gray, ``No artist desires to prove anything.'' While the aphorisms of Wilde's preface celebrate this disengagement, Levinas considers the dark side of aestheticism. Ultimately so does Wilde's novel. In his well-known denunciations of realism in ``The Decay of Lying,'' Wilde insists on the primacy of art, claiming that life imitates art and not vice versa. But in Dorian Gray such a clear statement of cause and effect becomes impossible because life and art in this narrative are so intimately intermingled and interpenetrated. James's aestheticism results in the same effect. If Strether sees the beautiful afternoon he spends in the French countryside imitating a Lambinet painting, if he retreats from life to art, soon enough life reasserts its in¯uence: Chad and Mme de Vionnet surprisingly ¯oat into the scene. For Strether the real could be said to disrupt the aesthetic at this moment, but it is hardly that simple: the boundaries between the two shift and dissolve. As Posnock rightly notes, ``To oppose the actual to the vicarious, life to art, and active to passive is antithetical to the libidinal sublimation of James's psychic economy'' (The Trial of Curiosity 231). Just as a person's life becomes a work of art in Dorian Gray, vicarious pleasure and receptiveness in The Ambassadors ± what Nussbaum describes as the value in James of being `àctively passive''12 ±

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blend the real and the imaginative so thoroughly that it becomes dif®cult to distinguish the two. The title of Levinas's essay ± ``Reality and Its Shadow'' ± suggests a connection between life and art, but the essay itself resists the idea of the transparency of images, the mimetic quality of art, referring instead to the image as an `àllegory of being,'' `àn ambiguous commerce with reality,'' a shadow, an other (135). It is not that reality comes ®rst and casts a shadow that is art, because for Levinas, ``These are two contemporary possibilities of being'' (136). Wilde's essays and Dorian's and Lord Henry Wotton's comments privileging art over life miss this point in a way that The Picture of Dorian Gray as a whole does not. The competing claims of life and aesthetic existence that structure Wilde's novel are also palpable in The Ambassadors. In Levinas's words, ``discussion over the primacy of art or of nature ± does art imitate nature or does natural beauty imitate art? ± fails to recognize the simultaneity of truth and image'' (136). The novels dramatize this simultaneity, and from it, as Levinas's essay suggests, arise important ethical questions. I shall consider these questions in the context of Levinas's ideas about responsibility and of Paul Ricoeur's Levinasin¯uenced philosophical studies in Oneself as Another. For the narratives exemplify and animate the philosophy while the philosophical context enables a fresh reading of the novels in relation to each other and to British aestheticism in general. self and other Attendant upon the aestheticizing impulse in the novels is a desire for impossible freedom and control on the part of the characters. As in the New Woman ®ction and in Hardy's novels, these texts are pervaded by a late-century spirit of aspiration, a yearning for something other than or beyond oppressive reality. Dorian's regret that he cannot live in the timeless realm of art is what precipitates his wish to trade places with the portrait, his desire for control beyond the range of ordinary human agency. Strether's regret also springs from a frustration with time: ``There were some things that had to


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come in time if they were to come at all. If they did not come in time they were lost forever.''13 In his mind, time is linear and relentless. Strether's advice to Little Bilham is to avoid his own mistake: ``live all you can,'' he urges him (132). Although subject to many illusions, Strether has forgotten what he calls ``the illusion of freedom'' (132) because he sees all too clearly how life molds us by limiting our capacities and opportunities.14 His aesthetic sensibility ®lls him with yearning for completion and perfection, and this longing, in turn, leads him to refashion the world through his imagination in such a way that real people are left behind, transformed into what he wants and needs them to be. Hence his aesthetic ideals seduce him away not only from Mrs. Newsome's rigid Victorian morality, but also from responsibility to others who live in time, in a ¯awed world, and in selfhood that is complex and not always malleable to expectations and norms. Levinas's wellknown concept of the face of the other describes an ethical imperative: a self comes into existence only when it responds to an other summoning it to responsibility. Both Dorian and Strether struggle to heed this summons, but a fear of suffering and a desire for aesthetic consolation leads them to turn away from the face of the other and its appeal for recognition and compassion. In his hermeneutics of the self, which he contrasts to Cartesian philosophies of the cogito, Paul Ricoeur posits an hypothesis which he calls ``the triad of passivity and, hence, of otherness'' (Oneself as Another 318; emphasis his). This passivity is experienced in the body, in intersubjectivity, and in conscience. Ricoeur's three categories of otherness become clearer and more concrete when studied in relation to the novels. First, one is passive in relation to one's own body (what Ricoeur terms ``the ¯esh''), which can be seen as an other. `Òntologically, the ¯esh precedes the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary'' (324), meaning that we do not choose our own bodies, we do not ask to be born, and in fact we do not even remember being born ± we are just here. The body is also what tells us of otherness as we run up against the concreteness of the world; existing is resisting. The self 's sense of continuity is

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anchored in the body. Despite Freedman's understandable association of the body with the aestheticism of Wilde and consciousness with the aestheticism of James, the body plays an important role in the ethics of both novels.15 Not only does Dorian explore his New Hedonism through physical sensation, he is granted a wish that aestheticizes the body, making it immune to the effects of time and thereby intensifying what Ricoeur refers to as the idem or unchanging sense of identity (contrasted to the ipse, or changing personality). By uttering his wish, Dorian actively wills a radical passivity or stasis for his body. Likewise, though less obviously, the body is of vital signi®cance in the plot of James's novel. When Chad and Mme de Vionnet drift into the idyllic Lambinet afternoon, they open Strether's eyes to the erotic, physical dimension of a relationship he had, with willful blindness, assumed to be a ``virtuous attachment.'' His ambassadorial mission was to disentangled Mrs. Newsome's son from a physical affair and to assure his physical return home. Strether's evasion of the real in favor of the abstract and ideal becomes both an evasion of responsibility and an evasion of physical and emotional intimacy. He evades the truth about the erotic life of the young man he in other ways observes so perceptively because he evades real connection with others in his own life. Behind this evasion, ironically, lies a motivation that is ethical as well as aesthetic. He wishes to escape into beauty, but he is also self-protective, wary of moral hazard. As Nussbaum points out, Strether `ìs convinced that loneliness is the condition of luminous perception; and his fear of intimacy is at the same time a fear for his moral being'' (Love's Knowledge 189). But in protecting his moral being he cuts himself off from the broader, richer ethical life he is clearly yearning for when he responds to the surprise of Paris and of Maria Gostrey, a woman who lives life rather than triumphing over it as the women of Woollett do.16 Marcia Ian makes the extremely suggestive point that for James consciousness is interior and the unconscious is exterior, associated with the body, with a threatening intersubjectivity, with an external world of all we would rather not know about (including death) which nevertheless demands our


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attention.17 Choosing to live in his head, Strether, as Ian puts it, `àccepts his dual role as spectator and spectacle, speci®cally as the spectator at the spectacle of his own negativity, while others enact what he will not, namely, intimacy'' (118). His negative morality comes as recompense for what is sacri®ced or lost: a messier, more intersubjective and intimate ethics that can be experienced only in a fully embodied life of engagement with others. But it is also important to see that Strether chooses ``the spectacle of his own negativity,'' and loss is one consequence of this choice. Ricoeur's second point, that the self is passive in relation to the other-than-self, also has thematic relevance for both novels. In the ethical dimension of selfhood as Ricoeur de®nes it, `òne reserves for the other the exclusive initiative for assigning responsibility to the self '' (Oneself as Another 331). This de®nition counters Husserl's idea of `ànalogical transfer,'' whereby we understand an other in relation to what is known about the self. Following Levinas, Ricoeur argues that ``to represent something to oneself is to assimilate it to oneself, to include it in oneself, and hence to deny its otherness'' (336). In contrast to Husserl, Levinas posits a radical dissymmetry between the self and the other. In aestheticizing ethics, both Dorian and Strether lose sight of this crucial self±other relation of dissymmetry. The process is clearer in Dorian's story than in Strether's, especially by the end when Dorian openly deplores his lost capacity for love. One of the ethical implications of his wish that his life become art is that he can see his own face but not the face of the other. `Ì am too much concentrated on myself '' (205), he realizes too late to escape the terrible symmetry of self and mirrored self that his wish has called into being. The world narrows down to himself and his image. Dorian is haunted by these lines from Hamlet: ``Like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart'' (215). These are Claudius's words to Laertes, designed to spur him to revenge by charging him with insincere and inadequate grief for his father, and they are of course ironic since Claudius himself is capable of only the show of sorrow. Like Claudius, Dorian lives a lie; when he is not wearing a disguise, he is still masked ± his ``real''

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face hides his ``true'' face. Unlike a natural face, Dorian's is inexpressive of the pain he feels, and he is therefore emotionally isolated from others, all of whom he dupes whether he wants to or not. The portrait, meanwhile, lives and vividly registers his heartlessness. Dorian's life has become a painting, and though he formulates a second wish ± to be good ± he can never achieve this aspiration, in part because its motivation is aesthetic, not ethical. `Ì want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous,'' he admits to Lord Henry, who ®nds this `à very charming artistic basis for ethics'' (97). But because it is not other-regarding, his impetus is as ineffectual ± and indeed corrupting ± as it is charming. James Eli Adams notes that Herbert Spencer's conception of evolution offered ®n-de-sieÁcle writers a new model of subjectivity: progression toward a self that complexly subsumes all that is external to it. The model appealed to Pater and Wilde because it offered `à quasi-scienti®c ground for locating all forms of òtherness' within the self '' (Dandies and Desert Saints 221). The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Ambassadors similarly dramatize this way of conceptualizing consciousness, insisting on both the aesthetic bene®ts and the ethical costs. The dire effects of a self-centered aestheticism are most evident in Dorian's relationships with women. Dorian falls in love not with Sibyl Vane the whole person, not with the face (to use Levinas's trope) that summons him to responsibility, but with Sibyl the actress.18 He falls in love with her masks, her insincere, performative self ± the multiple identities she assumes on stage ± for this self is merely another version of his own aestheticized and aestheticizing identity. The real woman, with her imperfections and her suffering, is an other that only brie¯y ¯ickers into existence for him when he hears of her death. When she chooses life and love over art, which leads to Dorian's rejection of her and to her subsequent suicide, Dorian recognizes this choice in the suffering and guilt he feels before Lord Henry talks him into aestheticizing Sibyl's death. The aestheticizing essentially reverses Sibyl's choice of life over art. Lord Henry says to Dorian, `Ì can sympathize with everything, except suffering . . . I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly,


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too horrible, too distressing'' (39). Keats, one of the most in¯uential of Wilde's precursors in British aestheticism, marveled at great art's capacity for ``making all disagreeables evaporate.'' That consolatory effect of the conversion of life into art is precisely what Lord Henry and Dorian rely on to shield themselves from the ugliness and pain of Dorian's treatment of Sibyl and from the vulgar reality of her self-destructive response to this treatment. Wilde makes us feel the chilling lack of compassion in this aestheticizing even as he leads us to recognize how prone we all are to distance ourselves from life's `ìnartistic'' tragedies. Dorian heartlessly muses aloud on Sibyl's death, and Lord Henry just as heartlessly encourages him: `Ìt seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded.'' `Ìt is an interesting question,'' said Lord Henry, who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism ± `àn extremely interesting question. I fancy that the true explanation is this. It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of the dramatic effect. Suddenly we ®nd that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both.'' (100±01)

This disengagement from the pain of the other, this exploitation of life's `èlements of beauty,'' exempli®es Levinas's mistrust of the idea that art as consolation can be considered ethical: `àrt, essentially disengaged, constitutes, in a world of initiative and responsibility, a dimension of evasion'' (`Èthics as First Philosophy'' 141). Wilde's narrator's stance on the morality of his characters is also evasive, so contradictory as to be nearly impossible to pin down.19 In his later relationship with the country girl, Hetty, Dorian fares no better ethically than he did with Sibyl. He struggles to be

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responsible by breaking off his relationship with the girl, but, as even Lord Henry can see, Dorian is concerned to do the right thing, not for Hetty's sake, but for the sake of the beauty of his own soul. Hetty is merely another casualty of his frantic though impotent efforts to escape from the cold world of art back to the real world that summons him to responsibility, genuine ethical agency, and human connectedness via the dis®gured, metamorphosing face in the portrait. Strether, too, severs connections with others, which is ironic because, as he admits to Miss Barrace, he does not feel that his life is his own; he says to her, in fact, `Ì seem to have a life only for other people'' (160). Posnock refers to Strether's ``capacity to impregnate himself with otherness'' (228), a capacity that leads him to exult in incoherence rather than ®xed identity. This aesthetic tendency to escape the perceived limitations of self though sympathetic identi®cation is not quite the same thing as Dorian's glorying in roles, disguises and other ways of multiplying the self through lies. But it is also not as admirable as Posnock makes it seem. True empathy, paradoxically, involves not ``living for others'' but recognizing their separateness and allowing them to live for themselves, feeling with them but not appropriating their feelings. Strether misses the signi®cance of Chad's relationship with Marie de Vionnet because he needs Chad to be someone he is not: an idealized version of Strether's own younger self. Strether's aestheticizing of the relationship ± making it the story of a young man who lives beautifully, without compromise or human fallibility ± distances him from the real Chad, who, as others point out to Strether, is not as ``good'' as he imagines.20 In ``living for others,'' Strether rewrites their lives so they will live for him. This pernicious tendency is most evident in the bizarre imperative he only half-facetiously issues to Mme de Vionnet: ``don't be for me simply the person I've come to know through my awkward connexion with Chad . . . Be for me, please, with all your admirable tact and trust, just whatever I may show you it's a present pleasure to me to think you'' (307). Marcia Ian notes this denial of genuine otherness in James's work as a whole, for his ®ction creates a world


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``homogeneous only because it is . . . constituted by, for and about the `me,' and thus constitutionally closed to others and even to otherness per se'' (``Henry James'' 133). The escape into beautiful, re®ned consciousness is ultimately an escape from other people. Strether's rejection of Maria Gostrey at the end of the novel is also marked by his aestheticizing, idealizing impulse. Having experienced pain, vulnerability, and helplessness in the loss of his wife and son, Strether seems determined to regain control by insulating himself from love and the emotional risks that accompany intimacy.21 By urging Chad not to forsake Marie de Vionnet, Strether cuts all ties with the imposing woman from Woollett, making certain that because of what she will see as his perverse disobedience Mrs. Newsome will have no inclination to ``patch it up'' with him. The advice also allows him to sever his connection with Chad. Choosing to leave his Woollett past behind would be no bad thing for Strether, but he chooses to return to Woollett after having cut himself off from everyone there. Even more self-defeating is his choice to leave Maria Gostrey, the woman who loves him. When Maria hears of his advice to Chad, she says to Strether, `Òh . . . you have done it . . . You can't after that propose ± '' Strether interrupts her before she can ®nish her sentence, which could very well have been ``You can't after that propose to forsake me after advising him not to forsake her.'' But he bluntly forestalls and diverts her by putting words in her mouth: ``Propose again to Mrs. Newsome?'' (345), he says, ®nishing Maria's sentence for her. Strether goes to see Maria Gostrey determined to face `ànother separation'' (342). Ironically, however, throughout the interview he keeps the focus on himself or on her as mirror of himself, effecting the separation by refusing her separateness. Like the eponymous hero of Conrad's Lord Jim who, in the end, deserts his bride and sacri®ces himself for an abstract principle, Strether turns aside from the real woman who loves him, and instead embraces a beautiful moral ideal. He says that he must leave her ``to be right'':

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``That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.'' She thought. ``But with your wonderful impressions you'll have got a great deal.'' (346±47)

With these words Marie Gostrey implicitly points out to Strether that he could reap a complex variety of bene®ts from his recent experience, including the courage to make ethically admirable choices of the sort Woollett's narrow sense of morality disallows. But by seeking, like Dorian, to secure the beauty of his own soul ± in other words by aestheticizing away the real other-than-self before him and denying their face-to-face dissymmetry ± Strether evades the loving ethical injunction inherent in Maria's objection. She protests: ``why should you be so dreadfully right?'' His response presumes, once again, to tell her what she wants: ``That's the way that ± if I must go ± you yourself would be the ®rst to want me'' (347). He insists to her that she really does understand because she is just like him. His aestheticizing tendency leads him not only to construct an ideal line of behavior for himself, something ``right'' and ``logical'' with no loose ends, but also to assume her complicity in his plan. To do otherwise would be to acknowledge life's messiness and the dissymmetry of a relationship that he has decided is beautifully symmetrical. ``You can't resist me,'' he declares, triumphantly secure that he has won the argument. There is obvious ambiguity in Maria's `Ì can't indeed resist you'' ± a statement that is as much a description of emotional, erotic attraction as it is the concession of an intellectual point. But Strether ignores this ambiguity. ``Then there we are!'' The novel ends with a lie, with an `Ì'' masquerading as a ``we.'' Hence, as is evident from both narratives, if there is no true dialectic of self and other because of the aesthetic desire to transcend the human and escape the real, then there is no ``we,'' no ethical dimension, merely ego, an appropriating `Ì.'' As Ricoeur argues, Husserl's concept of the analogical transfer, ``namely the admission that the other is not condemned to remain a stranger but can become my counterpart, that is, someone who, like me, says Ì' '' (Oneself as Another 335; emphasis his) is useful in the gnoseological


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dimension. But the cognitive movement from oneself to an other must be supplemented by the ethical dimension's inverse movement ± both cognitive and emotional (heartfelt rather than heartless) ± from an other to oneself. If it is not, what results is a totalizing ego but no other-regarding ethical self. These narratives of the aestheticizing life, ending as they do in separation and the isolated individual, dramatize the consequences of face-to-face encounters that rely on analogical transfer alone. In his ®nal category of the triad of otherness, Ricoeur discusses the relation of the self to itself through the concept of conscience. This is, of course, a fundamentally moral concept, but Ricoeur attempts a de®nition that clears away preconceptions about ``bad conscience'' and ``good conscience'' to uncover the mystery and uncanniness of conscience, the self-and-other within: `Ùnlike the dialogue of the soul with itself, of which Plato speaks, this affection by another voice presents a remarkable dissymmetry, one that can be called vertical, between the agency that calls and the self called upon. It is the vertical nature of the call, equal to its interiority, that creates the enigma of the phenomenon of conscience'' (342). This is an aporetic other because we do not know if the source of the ethical injunction is other people in our lives, ancestors we never knew who have nonetheless shaped us, God, or merely `àn empty place'' (355). In his re¯ections on Kant's discussion of conscience, Tobin Siebers also stresses the otherness of conscience: ``We experience the necessity of obeying our conscience às if ' it were another person's bidding. The man accused by the court of conscience, Kant explains, is one and the same person with the judge of the court'' (Morals and Stories 110). The character-building that comes from listening to conscience, according to Siebers, takes place in solitude, apart from others. As true as that may be, communing with conscience feels like being with another. The expression commonly uttered by those ready to heed an injunction of conscience ± `Ì can't live with myself unless . . .'' ± reveals the doubleness of the phenomenon and belies theories of a unitary self. Conscience is central to both novels. In Dorian Gray the portrait

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that bears witness through its physical transformation to Dorian's moral corruption is of course an emblem of his conscience; it is at once himself and an other literally external to him. When describing meeting Dorian for the ®rst time, Basil Hallward, the painter of the portrait, tells Lord Henry that the experience was like coming ``face to face'' with an `èxternal in¯uence'' (6). Out of fear he turns away. Dorian's in¯uence does indeed prove deadly to him, just as his and Lord Henry's powers of in¯uence over Dorian ± opposite though they are ± kill him in the end when the stabs of conscience becomes too much for him and he retaliates on the painting with a knife. In his description of this ®rst encounter of painter and model, Basil stresses that he turns from Dorian out of fear, not conscience. Lord Henry tells him this is nonsense: ``Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil'' (6). Basil's fear stems in part from a foreboding of the responsibility he will have as the creator of Dorian's conscience. In¯uence is a fearful thing, the novel stresses, regardless of the direction it moves ± from self to other or other to self. Levinas would say that in the initial face-to-face encounter, Dorian summons Basil to responsibility. Basil, for all his apparent moral uprightness, shirks such a summons at ®rst. Even after he completes the portrait that Dorian's face seems to compel him to paint, he senses its power ± and his responsibility for that power ± and wants to destroy it. Later, when Dorian brings the artist face-to-face with the transformed painting, Basil says, `Ì don't believe it is my picture'' (157), shrinking from responsibility. Paradoxically, in the beginning the portrait as conscience has a deleterious in¯uence on the model, an in¯uence so bad that Basil's repeated moral and religious injunctions carry no weight whatsoever with Dorian. As Dorian develops a more complex relationship with the painting, however, it begins to work on him just as a conscience would, urging him to ®nd a release from guilt. Despite his denial of art's ethical potential, Wilde is clearly intrigued by the capacity of both the portrait and the ``poisoned'' book to have an immoral in¯uence. Once the portrait exercises a positive ethical in¯uence, however, Wilde makes it clear that


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though art can corrupt Dorian, it cannot redeem him. Conscience can torment, as the novel vividly dramatizes, and art can play the role of conscience, but neither conscience nor art wins ethical agency for Dorian. Both in¯uence and guilt in Wilde's novel stem from sexual magnetism that is so overpowering as to strip away the agency of even a man as ostensibly virtuous and self-controlled as Basil. Attraction to the aesthetic compounds this sense of passivity. The painting of Dorian reveals more than the artist intends of his homoerotic attraction to his model. When Dorian sits for the portrait, he is just beginning to fall under the in¯uence of Lord Henry: ``There was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are suddenly awakened'' (20). On his canvas Basil captures this fairytale moment of awakening to romantic love. By doing so he confers magic on his art that Dorian is later able to activate through his wish. This active willing is preceded by passivity: Lord Henry's fascination, Dorian's surrender to in¯uence, and Basil's state of artistic inspiration. It is perhaps misleading, however, to separate the three this way because they are all different dimensions of the one person, as Wilde himself acknowledged,22 and they all experience fascination, in¯uence, and aesthetic enthrallment. All three men are aesthetes seduced by such qualities of art as image and rhythm that create an aesthetic order of existence where, as Levinas argues, ``we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by [the poetic order]'' (``Reality and Its Shadow'' 132).23 In fact, the term that aesthetic existence most readily evokes for Levinas is ``magic'' (132). And magic is, of course, the presiding metaphor in Wilde's novel about art. In¯uence and conscience are just as powerful in James's novel as they are in Wilde's. As Freedman points out, both narratives focus on ``the problematic interrelation between sexuality, in¯uence, and personal relations . . . In Wilde's novel, as in James's, to put oneself (as James would say) ìn relation' is to open oneself up to the dynamic interplay of the in¯uence and counterin¯uence of others'' (Professions of Taste 194). The ®rst thing that strikes

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Strether about Chad when they meet for the ®rst time in Paris is the positive in¯uence Marie de Vionnet has had on his young friend. This in¯uence becomes a source of fascination for Strether so strong as to in¯uence him, leading him to stray from his original moral intention ± to bring Chad home both literally and ®guratively (home to New England and its values). Having been brought up on Puritan morality in Woollett, Strether ®nds himself plagued by qualms of conscience throughout his stay in Paris. What troubles him about the affair of Chad and Mme de Vionnet and his own complicity in it is the ease with which everything takes place. When fate fails to administer the ``sternness'' Strether expects, he ®nds himself longing for punishment of some sort; he speaks of `à sense ± which the spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of ± that somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow, and that they were at least not all ¯oating together on the silver stream of impunity'' (317). Even as conscience is important to him, indeed a part of him, he gently mocks and de®es it as if it were an other. In that way, and in his ambivalence, he resembles Dorian. Turning against the portrait, Dorian thinks, `Ìt had kept him awake at night . . . It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it'' (223). In destroying this face, this other summoning him to responsibility, he destroys himself. In the Gothic image of reversal with which the novel ends, the artwork is once again static and perfect, while the real Dorian ± ``withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage'' ± is returned to time and immediately claimed by death. Strether de®es conscience much less melodramatically by urging Chad to continue in his adulterous affair. Even this de®ance is equivocal because he forestalls his own impending affair with Marie Gostrey ± his own chance for erotic love and transformative in¯uence ± in order to be ``right.'' How different is that from Mrs. Newsome's need to be ``straight''? If his conscience is externalized in this imposing woman from Woollett, then his effort to escape from her is as compromised as Dorian's effort to free himself from the face of conscience.


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Wilde and James both sympathize with this revolt against the tyranny of conscience and Victorian morality, but neither is able to narrate a successful rebellion. The aesthetic impulse, then, in both its ®n-de-sieÁcle and its modernist mode, decries traditional ethical constructions without dismantling them or signi®cantly diminishing their in¯uence. aesthetics and ethics Just as their characters ®nd aesthetic means of evading responsibility, Wilde and James themselves sidestep didacticism ± or even a more subtly identi®able ethics ± through their evasive narrators, through the ®lters of their protagonists' minds, and through the aesthetic detachment afforded by a pastiche of generic conventions. Telling Dorian's story as a strange mixture of real and unreal, novel of manners and Gothic fairy tale, Wilde allows a traditional moral to take shape, even as he distances himself from it: a ®xation on self at the expense of others ends not only in damage to others but in personal defeat and suffering. This strong moral meaning, which emerges gradually as the narrative unfolds, is undermined, however, by Lord Henry's seductive ideas, by the hypnotic appeal of beauty as Wilde describes it, and ultimately by the preface, which was written after the completion of the novel and clearly designed to deconstruct the morality readers would be sure to ®nd inherent in the story's tragic ending if nowhere else. By creating Lambert Strether as a literary man and an imaginative, metaphorical thinker whose sensibility is steeped in art, and by focalizing the narration through him, James makes it dif®cult for his readers not to see Strether as the representative of a new, ®ner ethics emerging from aesthetic values rather than from moral principles. Like Dorian, though, he has a distorted sense of himself in relation to others, and ends up not in a loving relationship but in isolation. To call either of these novels love stories would be misleading, and yet they are both narratives about men who observe love and who fail at it themselves. As ethically elusive

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as both works are, it is possible to read them as cautionary tales about the consequences of the very human desire to escape the human. If art embodies our longing for perfection, then it also tempts us to risk losing what is valuable about the imperfect real. Dorian and Strether appeal to art for a protective space where they are invulnerable to time, suffering, and alterity. But this is a space, as both men discover, where freedom is illusory and love impossible. A brief comparison of Wilde and James to Proust, especially Proust as read by Levinas, will help to clarify what I mean when I say that the aestheticism of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Ambassadors prohibits love. Proust's representation of romantic love stresses mystery and suffering. In Strether's relationship with Maria Gostrey, as we have seen, he denies her separateness and thus her mystery. In Dorian's relationship with Sibyl, he seeks to avoid suffering by choosing the unreal over the real. By contrast, in Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel's insatiable curiosity about Albertine, whose otherness makes him long for knowledge, is a source of jealousy and suffering of all sorts, but it is love because it is nurtured by a recognition of the other as separate. `Òntologically pure, this Eros is not a relation built on a third term, such as tastes, common interests, or the conaturality of souls, but has a direct relation to something that both gives and refuses to give itself, namely to the Other as Other, the mystery'' (Levinas, ``The Other in Proust'' 164). Levinas equates being responsible with being hostage to the Other, suggesting that the `Ì'' only comes into being when it is answerable to something other than self. Dorian and Strether wish for irresponsibility, but this wish brings them neither freedom nor love, neither ethical agency nor genuine connection with others.24 It might seem presumptuous for a reader to speak of characters and implied authors attempting to evade responsibility for the safe haven of aestheticist art when a reader's own responsibility is so problematic.25 Adam Newton, in his study of narrative ethics, describes the responsibility of a story's reader or listener as twofold: `Ìn part it means learning the paradoxical lesson that `getting'


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someone else's story is also a way of losing the person as `real' as `what he is'; it is a way of appropriating or allegorizing that endangers both intimacy and ethical duty. At the same time, however, one's responsibility consists of responding to just this paradox'' (Narrative Ethics 19). The act of reading a literary character, of experiencing literary art, is fraught with some of the very paradoxes and dif®culties of establishing a just and loving relationship with another human being, and that is why art's potential to be ethically instructive is as strong as its potential to shelter us from the real and the ethical. My reading of Lambert Strether and Dorian Gray makes no claim to have ``got'' either of them; much of their complexity and mystery eludes an interpretation that has at times felt too censorious. But I agree with Newton that as much as it is a reader's responsibility to understand the dangers of appropriating and allegorizing and to avoid careless treatment even of ®ctional people, it is also our responsibility to run these risks and embrace these paradoxes for the sake of ethical meaning-making.

chapter 6

Promises, lies, and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes

At the moment of my commitment, I either (1) arbitrarily assume a constancy in my feelings which is not really in my power to establish, or (2) I accept in advance that I shall have to carry out, at a given moment, an action which will in no way re¯ect my state of mind when I do carry it out. In the ®rst case I am lying to myself, in the second I consent in advance to lie to someone else. Gabriel Marcel1

If, like truth, the lie had but one face, we would be on better terms. For we would accept as certain the opposite of what the liar would say. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an in®nite ®eld. Michel de Montaigne2

Martha Nussbaum, Tobin Siebers, Robert Coles, Richard Eldridge, and Wayne Booth, among others, have revitalized the ®eld of ethics and literature by investigating how the study of narrative can uniquely enrich our understanding and teaching of ethical concepts.3 As I have mentioned, Nussbaum has gone so far as to claim that literature is a form of moral philosophy. An Aristotelian who takes as her starting point the idea that ethics is the desire to de®ne a good life for a human being, Nussbaum values novels as ``texts which display to us the complexity, the indeterminacy, the sheer dif®culty of moral choice . . . If our moral lives are `stories' in which mystery and risk play a central and a valuable role, then it may well seem that the ìntelligent report' of those lives requires the abilities and techniques of the teller of stories'' (Love's Knowledge 141±42). The formal, generalizing, unemotional style traditionally adopted by moral philosophy often fails to do justice to the richness 114

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 115

and particularity of our lives. A moral philosopher herself, though one whose writings cross disciplinary boundaries, Nussbaum does not, however, reject the philosophical for the literary, but instead seeks to combine them. Two points central to her work have informed my thinking about Conrad's novels: ®rst, contemporary ethical theory is as important as literary theory for those of us studying ®ction; and second, narratives, through their structure, style, and dialogue, as well as their emphasis on character and choice, enact a unique form of ethical inquiry for readers attentive to their particularity. This chapter tests these assumptions through an analysis of one of Conrad's most ethically problematic novels while also considering how turn-of-the-century anxiety about agency is as pervasive in Conrad's ®ction as in the other narratives I have discussed. Under Western Eyes (1911) frustrates efforts to locate its moral center because one of the novel's most insistent themes ± that language itself is suspect ± denies readers the comfort of a clearly communicated moral meaning. Lisa Rado represents an in¯uential group of critics of the novel when she concludes that `ìf there is any moral to this tale, it is that it is dangerous to look for one.''4 However, recent arguments about Conrad's linguistic pessimism actually bene®t an ethical study of Under Western Eyes by suggesting how this study might appropriately begin with what the text reveals about the uses of language. The novel's plot turns on the acts that words enable: con®ding, promising, self-communing, betraying, interrogating, lying, confessing, storytelling. Although all of these speech acts are ethically interconnected, two of them ± promising and lying ± have generated so much discussion within moral philosophy that it seems important to consider the transformation such ethical concepts undergo when elaborated through narrative rather than philosophical discourse. What does Conrad's rich and complicated story about Russian autocrats, spies, and revolutionaries have to contribute to an understanding of what it can mean to make a promise or to tell a lie? This is a question critics have addressed obliquely, but because the lies that follow from the novel's crucial act of betrayal are so obvious and dominant

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in the narrative, paradoxically they have received little direct attention ± even from critics centrally concerned with ethics.5 Following Andrzej Busza's observation that ``Razumov's tragedy resides in the fact that he is living in a society which imposes upon its members extremely dif®cult moral problems, while simultaneously confusing their moral bearings,''6 my discussion of promising and lying will consider how Under Western Eyes collapses ordinarily bold political distinctions (for example, between government informant and terrorist, autocrat and revolutionary) and develops characters who have lost, along with their moral bearings, their belief in self-determination and ethical choice. But I am just as interested in how this moral and linguistic pessimism is related to the unsentimental hope of the novel's ending, which suggests that there are honest, courageous ways to use language even within corrupt societies. I want to begin by considering a de®nition of promise-making formulated by Annette Baier, a moral philosopher who is, like Conrad, wary of atomistic, rule-based morality. An antifoundationalist in philosophy, in¯uenced by J. L. Austin and ``his relentless questioning of all easy generalities, his ®delity to complex facts,'' Baier de®nes a promise as words that carry the force of `àgreement-based custom'';7 it is Hume's de®nition of promise-making that she seeks to clarify and interpret, stressing that our assumption that morality is a cultural phenomenon is an idea that Hume in his day needed to champion: ``Today's version of reason . . . is not the reason Hume tried to dethrone. It is much more like that capacity to acquire what Hume called `habit,' to learn and operate with `customs,' `conventions,' and social àrti®ces.' This was a capacity Hume contrasted with reason'' (Baier, Postures of the Mind 177). Conrad too saw ``moral law'' not as natural or absolute but as socially determined. A ®ction about Europeans in Africa, `Àn Outpost of Progress'' (1897), like Heart of Darkness (1899), dramatizes how morality is undermined by ``the negation of the habitual'' (40) that accompanies a change in surroundings. Both novels suggest that social context makes what we think of as morality possible: in the words of the narrator of `Àn Outpost,'' ``The courage,


the composure, the con®dence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insigni®cant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion.''8 In a passage deleted from the manuscript of Heart of Darkness, Marlow re¯ects on how martial music can make a mild-mannered fellow suddenly feel capable of murder; all that stands in his way is social custom and the reputation it confers ± the fact that there is `à man next door to call you names.''9 In her Humean de®nition of promising Baier stipulates that every promise is accompanied by the threat of penalty: `ìf I can have you as it were stigmatized, so that others recognize you as someone not to be trusted, then you have a fairly strong selfinterested reason not to break your promise to me'' (188). Conrad's sense of the moral power of public opinion to restrain through language alone is in keeping with this de®nition. But Under Western Eyes subjects to skeptical scrutiny the normative dimension of this idea ± the assumption, in other words, that ethical penalties are straightforward, operative, and predictable. I am arguing that in Under Western Eyes Conrad demonstrates, through his sophisticated narrative method, that within a particularized political context the consequences of a broken promise can be much more perverse and complicated than most philosophical re¯ections on such ethical commitments would be likely to anticipate. Even a philosophical discourse as subtle and complex as Baier's fails to do justice to these complications because it remains abstract, while Under Western Eyes compels us to pay attention to details. My analysis of these details follows what I see as the ethical structure of the novel, which is determined by speech acts and the social contracts they imply: ®rst promising, then lying, and ®nally confessing. promises Razumov's story begins with talk of reputation, the concept most often linked in ethical theory to promising. Ironically, however,

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Razumov's worthy reputation as someone who can be trusted is responsible for the nightmarish turn his life takes. For Haldin seeks Razumov out, though he is a virtual stranger, on the basis of what he has heard and assumed about his fellow student's character. Haldin, political assassin in hiding, stands leaning against the stove in the very room Razumov plans to enter to work on the prizewinning essay that will secure his reputation as `à celebrated old professor, decorated, possibly a Privy Councillor, one of the glories of Russia ± nothing more!''10 With the abrupt intrusion of Haldin into Razumov's rooms, Conrad underscores the power of the political to disrupt and control the personal, but he also stresses how different one's public reputation can be from one's sense of self. The good reputation Razumov has among the revolutionaries seems completely out of his control and quite different from the one he actively strives to attain.11 One of the effects of reading Part One of the novel, then, is that we begin to question the moral commonplace that conscious choices earn us the reputation we would wish to have. For very particular reasons, Razumov wants to be recognized as a good patriotic citizen; his aspirations are understandable because they are those of Prince K-'s illegitimate son, who desires attention and approval but cannot be openly acknowledged by his father. The political contingencies of Razumov's life, however, confront him with choices that deny him the future he plots for himself. Thus the ethical import of the story of Razumov's unwilling political involvement emerges less from an analysis of his choices than from attention to the powerful social net that constrains them. `À man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men,'' Razumov realizes before his encounter with Haldin, but his modi®cation, ``by reason of respect or natural love'' (63), betrays his naive optimism at this point. Later he comes to a better understanding of the complex and unruly forces that generate the reputations we confer on each other. Staking his life on the reputation of a stranger, Haldin asks Razumov to secure the means of his escape, but he makes Razumov a promise: `Ì don't see how my passage through your rooms can be


ever known. If I should be got hold of, I'll know how to keep silent ± no matter what they may be pleased to do to me'' (67). Agreeing to seek out Ziemianitch constitutes Razumov's promise of help: ``You must give me precise directions, and for the rest ± depend on me'' (69).12 From the beginning, then, Haldin and Razumov are locked in a relationship of mutual dependence, a reciprocal agreement to live up to one's word and not to name names (for Haldin, an important part of Razumov's reputation is reserve). According to Baier's de®nition, when we make a promise, ``there is an immediate exchange of powers to harm, but not of the same sort of power to the same sort of harm'' (200). This is usually true in the sense that the person who has extracted a promise has the power to damage the promisor's reputation, whereas the promisor's power to harm need not be as dependent on a community that cares about a person's trustworthiness. In other words, by breaking the promise, the promisor could compromise the promisee's safety, endanger lives, etc., whereas the promisee's power to harm is more often dependent upon the value of reputation. In the story Conrad tells, however, the matter becomes much more complicated. In this political context, the power to harm is equalized because each man promises to protect the other's life from a repressive regime's ultimate power to harm. Although Haldin has sought out Razumov to request a promise, the promise he makes in return cancels the implicit threat to damage reputation with which a promise is conventionally received, especially when we consider that Haldin does not make his promise contingent on the loyalty of Razumov, whose trustworthiness is not questioned for a minute. Arguing with himself and rationalizing his decision, Razumov breaks his promise only hours later. He turns Haldin in because he has no desire to be trusted by revolutionary students, but does wish to earn the trust of the czarist government. The moral rule does not hold, though, because Razumov commits an act of betrayal only to win admiration from his uncomprehending fellow students for being Haldin's accomplice; ironically, breaking a promise strengthens his reputation among the revolutionaries as much as keeping it would have done. General T- notices, and later exploits,

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what he calls Razumov's ``great and useful quality of inspiring con®dence'' (91). Traditionally thought to be a virtue, this quality in this context robs Razumov of will and agency. It also leaves him feeling profoundly alone. He con®des in Mikulin, `Ì begin to think there is something about me which people don't seem able to make out'' (129). In contrast, Haldin keeps his promise but is eventually executed, earning only martyrdom as his ethical reward. And until his death, Haldin persists in thinking of his friend as ``magnanimous'' (101), even when Razumov, after the betrayal, blurts out to Haldin words that reveal that he is no revolutionary. When Razumov is referred to obliquely, during the police interrogation of Haldin, as ``the man . . . on whose information you have been arrested'' (125), Haldin refuses to name him or to say anything at all about him. It is far from clear that Conrad encourages us to see this resolve as an act of heroism. In his mysticism, Haldin has described himself as inevitably shaped by and shaping a political movement, resigned to do the ``heavy work'' required of him by the community with which he identi®es himself: `Ìt's you thinkers who are in everlasting revolt,'' he says to Razumov. `Ì am one of the resigned'' (70). Just as Razumov's sense of agency is illusory, Haldin's political acts are not necessarily free or individually motivated; in fact, his resignation to the tide of revolutionary change reveals its obverse during the interrogation ± resistance to authority that becomes a kind of acceptance of coercion as a fact to be endured, a force that de®nes one's role and identity. In The Secret Agent (1906), the Professor speaks of humanity with contempt because of its slavery to social convention: ``The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality ± counter moves in the same game . . .''13 Haldin sees himself as a game piece, ``moved to do this ± reckless ± like a butcher . . . scattering death'' (70). His political rhetoric is occasionally disrupted by pangs of conscience, but, as Busza points out, both Haldin and Razumov ®nd their actions motivated by ideologies that remove them ``from the restraints of an ordinary formal conscience'' (``Rhetoric and Ideology'' 110). Haldin


describes his bomb-throwing as a necessary strategy of his side, which, he contends, will win because it has `à future . . . a mission'' (69). He risks his life gladly, knowing that his spirit will simply migrate to another Russian body and go on warring against tyranny; otherwise, ``where would be the sense of . . . martyrdom?'' he muses (69). If during the interrogation Haldin had broken his promise, lied, and betrayed Razumov (now obviously a pawn in the government's game), the revolutionary cause would have been better served. But the Professor's observation about the power of conventionally de®ned social roles holds true in this case: the job of secret police is to interrogate and torture, and the terrorist's traditional defense and de®ance is silence. Despite the teleology of Haldin's political rhetoric, the novel itself suggests that this game is played out endlessly, futilely repeating cycles of violence. In his sense of himself as utterly alone and out of the game, Razumov resembles the Professor. But social convention snares Razumov, drawing him into his nation's political life without mitigating his loneliness. The Professor ± in his single-minded, anarchic quest for the perfect detonator ± seems, by contrast, to be Conrad's creation of an unreal man who embodies the remote possibility of escaping the social. Razumov is more painfully real. His acts of making and breaking a promise implicate him in new coercive social contracts and carry consequences that doom him to be perpetually misunderstood. Most painful of all, Razumov simultaneously feels helpless (no longer in control of his choices or identity) and guilty. He thinks of Haldin's intrusion as beyond his control, but he considers his own promise, with its implicit lie, an act he might have forestalled ± if only he had known the consequences: ``You don't know,'' he thinks. ``You welcome the crazy fate. `Sit down,' you say'' (118). If for Haldin the future is a foregone conclusion, for Razumov it abruptly changes from the site of his glorious career to a mine®eld he cannot choose not to navigate. The question Councillor Mikulin asks as Razumov moves toward the door in the middle of their interview ± ``Where to?'' ± is one Razumov cannot answer because he understands that if he

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was ever in control of the direction of his life, he is no longer. The question underscores Razumov's despair at ®nding himself caught in a squeeze between the lawlessness of autocracy and the lawlessness of revolution: ``The feeling that his moral personality was at the mercy of these lawless forces was so strong that he asked himself seriously if it were worth while to go on accomplishing the mental functions of that existence which seemed no longer his own'' (113). Conrad makes us acutely aware that normative moral life, which is Razumov's initial aspiration, becomes impossible within such a political context. After telling the story of the broken promise that perversely wins Razumov social acceptance of the wrong kind, Conrad takes us inside Razumov's struggle to regain his sense of agency and moral personhood. This struggle seems to begin even before Haldin is apprehended, during those moments when Razumov tries to convince himself that once this assassin leaves his room everything will return to normal. Like Marlow concentrating on the work of repairing his steamer, Razumov seeks refuge in the ordinary details of daily life, recognizing in them `àn armour for the soul'' (94). But unlike Marlow, he is tormented both by his inner life and by the outer experience that should provide his armor. Under Western Eyes dramatizes and counterpoints ethics as public (social contracts, political allegiance, reputation, ideology, etc.) and ethics as private (conscience, deliberation, self-deception, personal relationships, etc.). ``Nobody doubts the moral soundness of your action,'' the Prince assures Razumov, but of course Razumov himself is tormented by doubt and by the secrets that burden him after the betrayal. Before entering his rooms with the knowledge that he must conceal the truth from Haldin, he reminds himself that ``life goes on as before with its mysterious and secret sides quite out of sight, as they should be. Life is a public thing'' (95). But Razumov's tragedy is that his life has become too public ± no longer his: his public reputation is what gives rise to his contact with Haldin, his hope to please public of®cials (his only family) leads to his betrayal, the police raid on his rooms reenacts Haldin's disruption of his privacy, and when he feels compelled to agree to work as a spy he


gives up his intelligence as an independent thinker to serve state intelligence. Nevertheless, paradoxically, what Razumov ®nds most unbearable is an inner voice relentlessly rationalizing and arguing with itself. Even though he belongs to neither of the groups that claim him, he must outwardly seem to belong, and the inner voice obsessively warns him that a truthful self, which is private and prohibited, is always in danger of leaking out. Ordinarily we think of conscience as internalized social ethics, but in Razumov's case his conscience is at odds with the social and political world he negotiates. Ostensibly also at odds are the groups constituting the political world from which he struggles to free himself. During the interview with Mikulin that leads to his employment by the government, Razumov beholds in his mind's eye an image of his brain as a ®gure being torn asunder on a rack. The thoughts that accompany this vision, however, return us to the idea that from Razumov's vantage point revolutionaries and autocrats are more alike than different. Whereas the of®cials remain suspicious of him even as they are willing to use him, the revolutionaries ardently embrace him because their utopian illusions blind them to the qualities in Razumov that they would rather not see. But while nervously discoursing to Mikulin, who ®nds it easy to get people to talk, Razumov confuses the groups that have him on the rack: With a great ¯ow of words he complained of being totally misunderstood. Even as he talked with a perception of his own audacity he thought that the word `misunderstood' was better than the word `mistrusted,' and he repeated it again with insistence. Suddenly he ceased, being seized with fright before the attentive immobility of the of®cial. `What am I talking about?' he thought, eyeing him with a vague gaze. Mistrusted ± not misunderstood ± was the right symbol of these people. Misunderstood was the other kind of curse. Both had been brought on his head by that fellow Haldin. And his head ached terribly. He passed his hand over his brow ± an involuntary gesture of suffering, which he was too careless to restrain. (121)

As Jeremy Hawthorn has noted about this novel, the characters' bodies are often more direct and expressive than their words; gestures reveal, while language tends to distance, conceal, and deceive.14 But the novel also represents language, despite the malle-

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ability that makes it susceptible to manipulation, as slippery ± unpredictable and uncontrollable. In the wake of his broken promise (which he rationalized to himself with carefully chosen words), Razumov is misunderstood by the revolutionaries, though he would prefer that they mistrusted him, and mistrusted by the authorities whose trust he had hoped to earn. Although the two groups are pulling him in opposite directions, to Razumov they appear identical in many ways, not the least of which is the way they are both conspiring to make a liar of him. lies While Razumov's experiences in Part One of the novel are initiated by the promise that Haldin exacts from him, and characterized by Razumov's suddenly keen understanding that life is a ``public thing,'' the second and third parts of Under Western Eyes represent Razumov's employment as a double agent, his entry into a social contract that renders his life too private to be shared. Hence, lies and deception become the focus of this section of the narrative. Conrad returns in this novel to the ®gure he used for lying in Heart of Darkness: the taste of something rotten. When Sophia Antonovna says to Razumov, ``You must have bitten something bitter in your cradle,'' he absently accepts her explanation. But when he adds, `Ònly it was much later'' (250), he has traced the source of his life's bitterness to his broken promise and the lies to Haldin which in turn necessitated more lying. Razumov proves to be a liar at once consummate and deeply reluctant. In his recent Bakhtinian reading of Under Western Eyes, Bruce Henricksen observes that the narrative method of this novel undermines our ``desire to attribute individual ownership to . . . words.''15 By making the novel a translation and a narrative rendering of Razumov's notebook and several other documents and interviews, Conrad reminds us of Bakhtin's point that `èvery word is a shared word'' (Henricksen, Nomadic Voices 138). The novel does stress the transindividual nature of language, but the argument that Conrad thwarts our efforts to identify who owns particular words


raises an interesting problem for those of us studying the novel's thematics of lying. How do we identify Razumov, or anyone else in the novel, as a liar when it is so dif®cult to determine which words are his ± ``his'' both in the sense of resulting from relatively free choice and in the sense of his and not someone else's (for example the language teacher's)? Conrad seems simultaneously to encourage us to condemn the verbal act of lying and to be skeptical of our judgment as we wonder whether we are being lied to ourselves about the agent of deceit. Henricksen's view of the novel's unanchored language is more optimistic: by af®rming ``the civilizing power of discourse in the face of silence,'' his argument responds to what he seems to view as an overemphasis on the novel's moments of coerced speech and writing: ``. . . all language in the novel is shared language carrying signi®cance and values that escape the control of any individual,'' and this dialogism is what makes freedom possible by disempowering monologic discourse (138, 149). My own sense is that the novel's ending does offer some hope of community by af®rming just such an ideal of shared language, but the possibility is realized only when Razumov is able to gain a measure of ethical agency by escaping from oppressive social control and what he feels as the coercion to speak lies. That we as readers often have been left wondering about the ownership of words makes the moment late in the novel when Razumov confesses, `òwns up'' to his broken promise and lies, all the more powerful. In moral philosophy, a liar is most simply and traditionally de®ned as a person who has chosen untrue words for which he or she then becomes responsible. As much as the speech acts in Under Western Eyes invite a poststructuralist reading, Conrad's treatment of lies also raises old-fashioned, pragmatic questions of conscience and responsibility. In her book on lying, Sissela Bok draws a distinction between ``the freeloading liar and the liar whose deception is a strategy for survival in a corrupt society,'' but she goes on to make the important point that what she calls the ``freeloading liar,'' the liar who is deceitful but expects everyone else to be honest, is related to the type (like Razumov) who feels coerced

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into lying: once enough persons choose to lie, the rest of their community will ``feel pressed to lie to survive'' (Lying 25). Razumov's resentment clearly communicates that sense of pressure. As if against his will, he ®nds himself again and again identi®ed with what he hates. He admits that he despises Haldin because ``to keep alive a false idea is a greater crime than to kill a man'' (127). What he means is that he hates the utopian visionary in Haldin, but the phrase ``to keep alive a false idea'' becomes a perfect description of Razumov's own purpose in life after his act of betrayal. By holding back the truth about his visit to Ziemianitch, Razumov keeps alive for the autocracy, despite its suspicion, the false idea that he is free of any complicity in Haldin's crime. By posing as a revolutionary in Geneva, as Haldin's accomplice, Razumov takes in everyone with his masquerade but is overcome by self-loathing because he knows that ``to keep alive a false idea'' has become his vocation and supplanted the noble career he chose for himself. Razumov also reenacts what he thinks of as Haldin's lesser crime. As many readers have recognized, while Haldin ``kill[s] a man'' by throwing the bomb at Mr. de P ±, the corrupt Minister of State, Razumov ``kill[s] a man'' by ®ngering the political criminal. Both before and after Haldin's death, Razumov obsessively refers to him as a phantom ± one that is harmless because he can be walked over, or convenient because he can be blamed as a ``haunting, falsehood-breeding spectre'' (289). But these ways of characterizing Haldin are of a piece with Razumov's pattern of selfdeception; he repeatedly lies to himself about Haldin as a means of distancing himself from the man's humanity and evading ethical deliberation. Taking comfort in his recollection that Haldin believed in an afterlife, Razumov forgets the nature of that afterlife as Haldin described it: the migration of the soul of one revolutionary into the body of another. But we might read Razumov's excruciating internal struggle of the novel's second and third parts not as a haunting by Haldin but as an uncanny instance of in¯uence, of Razumov's character being inhabited and reconstructed by a migrating revolutionary soul. This is a strong image of coercion,


though by the end of the novel the blurring of the boundary between Razumov's character and Haldin's is cast in a more positive light. The ``phantom'' that ruins Razumov's life later lends him his courage.16 Razumov resents whatever force it is that seems to compels him to lie; at war with it is his impulse to tell the truth. At one point, in conversation with Peter Ivanovitch (who accepts Razumov, in that resonant Conradian phrase, as `òne of us'' [215]), Razumov declares his identity with Russia, but then immediately regrets his words: ``That was not the right sort of talk. All sincerity was an imprudence. Yet one could not renounce truth altogether, he thought, with despair'' (215). In Under Western Eyes, as in his other political novels, Conrad considers the problem of how and why truthfulness is incompatible with politics, why honest men (and sometimes women) ®nd themselves caught up in lies when they become entangled in political contexts. Ironically, the group most honest in its witnessing of tyranny and unnecessary human suffering is also the group most evidently mired in dangerous illusions, most likely to lie to itself and to be taken in by lies. Haldin's initial misreading of Razumov, which is repeated by the revolutionaries in St. Petersburg and Geneva, does tremendous harm to Razumov, to Haldin's family, to the revolutionary cause. But, as Hannah Arendt argues in ``Lying in Politics,'' the urgent need to bring about future change is often linked to denial of present reality: ``the deliberate denial of factual truth ± the ability to lie ± and the capacity to change facts ± the ability to act ± are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.''17 An imaginative writer from a family of political activists and artists, Conrad must have been acutely aware of this interconnection.18 In much of his ®ction, political involvement is made possible by imaginative activity that occludes clear vision of facts but enables action. `Àction is consolatory,'' as de®ned by the narrator of Nostromo (1904). `Ìt is the enemy of thought and the friend of ¯attering illusions.''19 In Under Western Eyes, however, skepticism about those caught up in revolutionary action (expressed most often through

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Razumov's scorn or the language teacher's disapproval) is in dialogue with voices defending the revolutionaries for attempting to combat what Nathalie Haldin calls ``the absolutist lies,'' even if the process entails countering lies with lies. She attempts to get the language teacher to recognize what his Western perspective obscures: I believe that you hate revolution; you fancy that it's not quite honest. You belong to a people which has made a bargain with fate and wouldn't like to be rude to it. But we have made no bargain. It was never offered to us ± so much liberty for so much hard cash. You shrink from the idea of revolutionary action for those you think well of as if it were something ± how shall I say it ± not quite decent'' (157).

Through her friendly mockery of the language teacher's decontextual ethics ± a sort of English drawing-room moral code of manners, being ``honest'' and ``decent'' by not being rude or raising objections ± Nathalie makes it clear that she resents his efforts to protect her from political involvement. At the same time, Peter Ivanovitch, the man attempting to lure her into involvement, is a pseudo-feminist hypocrite and liar, a ``revolutionary'' who is as much a tyrant as any of the representatives of autocracy. Despite her innocence, Nathalie understands how ruthless political institutions create networks of cruelty and suffering even among those who de®ne themselves against oppression. In a novel that lacks a clear sense of narrative authority, the epigraph helps us gauge where the implied author's sympathies lie: `Ì would take liberty from any hand as a hungry man would snatch a piece of bread.'' Conrad quotes Nathalie here, and though much of the novel's satire is directed against the revolutionaries, her idealism and passionate urgency are granted respect. Her ``revolutionary faith is expressed too winningly for us to feel that Conrad is merely indulging her.''20 If Haldin's spirit lives on, perversely and stubbornly, in Razumov, it ®nds a more welcoming home in Nathalie, who envisions a future not only just but merciful: ``Revolutionist and reactionary, victim and executioner, betrayer and betrayed, they shall all be pitied together when the light breaks on our black sky at last. Pitied and forgotten: for without that there can be no union


and no love'' (327). Razumov's response to these words is `Ì hear,'' and their promise of forgiveness helps him to wrest a sense of agency from his growing belief that he is merely a manipulated player in a cosmic practical joke, a belief that gains strength after the news of Ziemianitch's death but develops alongside his desire to free himself from living a lie.21 Razumov's ®rst response is relief when he hears that Ziemianitch has committed suicide and is now assumed to have been Haldin's betrayer: the safety this error confers on Razumov will free him from the need to tell any more direct lies. But he also ®nds that the story Sophia Antonova passes along has afforded him a ``glimpse into the utmost depths of self-deception'' (273), and Ziemianitch's quintessentially Russian slide into mysticism ®lls him with `à large neutral pity'': This was a comedy of errors. It was as if the devil himself were playing a game with all of them in turn. First with him, then with Ziemianitch, then with those revolutionists . . . He interrupted his earnest mental soliloquy with a jocular thought at his own expense. ``Hallo! I am falling into mysticism too'' (274).

Razumov, who has prided himself on being sober, clear-eyed, and ± as his name suggests ± rational, ®nds himself in a situation so bizarre that at ®rst he can only make sense of it by subscribing to a vision of the future that is as fatalistic as the Russian peasants' or as assured of its providential success as the revolutionaries' or autocrats'. Yet this belief in Providence is only tentative ± an occasion for self-mockery. In her reading of the novel, Lisa Rado makes much of Razumov's ``transcendent vision of his own destiny'' (``Walking Through Phantoms'' 89), but the words she ascribes to the novel's protagonist are actually Mikulin's: `Ì believe ®rmly in Providence. Such a confession on the lips of an old hardened of®cial like me may sound to you funny'' (283±84). The latter of these two sentences (which Rado does not quote) underscores once again how much the government of®cials resemble the revolutionaries and how distanced Razumov feels from both groups. When he hears that Sophia Antonova, whom he thinks of as ``the respectable enemy,'' the most intelligent of the revolutionaries,

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believes in him, Razumov admits to Nathalie that he is struggling to resist the temptation of belief in Providence: Things then are going as well as possible. Everything conspires to . . . Ah! these conspirators . . . they would get hold of you in no time! You know, Natalia Victorovna, I have the greatest dif®culty in saving myself from the superstition of an active Providence. It's irresistible . . . The alternative, of course, would be the personal Devil of our simple ancestors. But, if so, he has overdone it altogether ± the old Father of Lies ± our national patron ± our domestic god, whom we take with us when we go abroad. He has overdone it. It seems that I am not simple enough . . . That's it! I ought to have known . . . And I did know it'' (325).

These words confound and frighten the language teacher, but Nathalie senses that Razumov is on the brink of confession, that he is holding something back from her. Ultimately, Razumov is not simple enough to be taken in by ``the old Father of Lies,'' his country's god or devil; his curse is that he sees a lie as a lie. He realizes that to say `Ì ought to have known'' misses the point by excusing himself as a dupe, when really ± even in his self-deception ± part of him has seen quite clearly how Ziemianitch and the other self-styled revolutionary conspirators unwittingly conspired to keep him, the betrayer, safe. His love for Nathalie and the ideal of a truthful life that she represents (since there is in her ``no guile, no deception, no falsehood, no suspicion'' [324]) has made this situation unbearable for him. Point of view is crucial in any discussion of lying, since the perspective of the liar is so radically different from that of the person being lied to. Razumov's scorn for Haldin and the other political players has made it dif®cult for him to be anything but selfcentered in his thinking. But when he comes to care about Nathalie, he ®nds that he is able to free himself from his culture's cynical arguments about the diabolical determinism that governs his life and from his skepticism about the possibility of truth telling. As Bok notes, ``Both skepticism and determinism have to be bracketed ± set aside ± if moral choice is to retain the signi®cance for liars that we, as deceived, know it has in our lives'' (Lying 23). As a skeptical thinker, Conrad was always mindful of the limits and dangers of skepticism.22


In The Unvarnished Truth, David Nyberg takes issue with what he sees as the standard view in moral philosophy that deception is a categorical wrong. His more contextual approach to lying stresses a point that also surfaces in Under Western Eyes: deception is ubiquitous because it is encouraged and rewarded on a social level and often experienced as fostering emotional well-being on a personal level. Deceiving is ``publicly condemned,'' Nyberg points out, but at the same time it is ``privately practiced by almost everybody.''23 Quite unlike Conrad, Nyberg displays a pragmatic readiness to accept the inevitability of lying and to develop what he believes we have evaded because of moral philosophy's tendency to overvalue truth telling: that is, an ethics of deception. ``The central problem is this: even though we have come to know that life without deception is not possible, we have not diligently trained ourselves to deceive thoughtfully and judiciously, charitably, humanely, and with discretion'' (Varnished Truth 25). What is troubling about Nyberg's position, and what makes it, in my view, only partly right, is its rather cynical assumption that most of us would prefer to be deceived and to deceive, even if we could avoid a life of lies. Conrad's Razumov makes us vividly aware of reasons to question this assumption. Although Under Western Eyes dramatizes the pervasiveness of deception, Conrad retains the distinction between truth telling as virtuous and lying as harmful, both to self and others. ethical agency If three-fourths of the novel undertakes an ethical inquiry into promising and lying as speech acts, the fourth part concerns Razumov's choice to confess to those who have been deceived and face the consequences. In keeping with the novel's constant interplay of the ethical and the political, the private and the public, the nonverbal and the verbal, Razumov actually confesses twice. His ®rst confession takes place during what he considers a private interview with Nathalie (the language teacher is eavesdropping, but Razumov is oblivious to him until after the confession when he

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mutters, ``How did this old man come here?'' [328]). In this confession, the truth struggles on his lips (327), but he communicates it without words, simply by pressing `à denunciatory ®nger to his breast with force'' (328). His second confession is written, a voluble outpouring and a preliminary to the publicly spoken confession he makes to the revolutionaries gathered at the Laspara house. Before considering the signi®cance and the consequences of these confessions, it is crucial to notice what a key role the structure of Under Western Eyes plays in a reader's ethical response to Razumov. Conrad's narrative method functions to delay his audience's most severely judgmental response until the fourth and ®nal part of the story, so that it coincides with, and is complicated by, Razumov's self-judgment and confession. Not until this section do we learn, for example, that Razumov reenacts Haldin's request for help by maliciously asking Madcap Kostia to steal money (which Razumov later discards) to help him get out of Russia, even though this event takes place very early in the chronology of the story. Our full sense of the moral signi®cance of this act comes through Razumov's own confession: ``He was a fool, but not a thief. I made him one . . . I had to con®rm myself in my contempt and hate for what I betrayed'' (331). In the earlier sections of the novel our judgment of Razumov, for one reason or another, remains tentative. In Part One, we share to a certain extent his sense of violation and bewilderment. In Part Two, because the narrator ± in the background for much of Part One ± steps forward as the language teacher ignorant of Razumov's act, motivation, and true identity, we see Razumov simultaneously through the eyes of an uncomprehending European and in Part Three, through the eyes of the Russian revolutionaries in Geneva who implicitly trust and admire him. We are of course aware of the irony in his gift of inspiring con®dence, but because there is a gap between Mikulin's question, ``Where to?'', and Razumov's realization that he has little choice but to cooperate with authority, we have no certain knowledge at this point that Razumov is a police spy, and even if this fact is inferred, the reader encountering the novel for the ®rst time is left in the dark about motivation. The result of this narrative strategy


for most readers is probably that they judge Razumov, but also understand him; for much of the novel readers are in fact made acutely aware of the moral degradation he undergoes because of the lies he seems destined to tell. Only in the fourth part are the novel's readers, along with its characters, fully enlightened about the extent of Razumov's responsibility and the element of malice in his motivation. The act of confession is itself complexly motivated. By having Razumov engage in the dangerous self-indulgence of telling the truth to himself by writing in a journal, Conrad makes it clear that Razumov desires to confess for his own sake, not to make himself physically secure (Ziemianitch's suicide has done that), but to rid himself of the sensation that he is suffocating in lies. Still, in his letter to Nathalie, Razumov describes the confession as yet another coercion to speak. On the personal level what coerces him is conscience: he heeds a moral imperative. Within the social and political context the pressure comes from Nathalie ± from her trust in Razumov and her belief in her brother's revolutionary cause. Both Razumov's self-revelation to Nathalie written in his journal and the language teacher's narration of the events of that night of confession suggest a mirror-image repetition of the night Haldin was betrayed. Realizing that ``you don't walk with impunity over a phantom's breast'' (334), Razumov decides that Haldin is haunting him not as an insubstantial spirit but as Nathalie ± she is the soul destined to carry on her brother's work. She is not merely deluding herself, however, when she says to Razumov, `ìt is in you that we can ®nd all that is left of his generous soul'' (321), as ironic as the words seem in this context. The dead man's presence is nearly palpable for both of them just before Razumov reveals the truth ± they simultaneously recognize Haldin in each other. Remarkably, Razumov becomes the courageous and generous soul Nathalie believes him to be, and she exhibits courage and generosity through con®dence in him similar to that expressed by her brother. After lying to Mrs. Haldin by conveying the news of Ziemianitch's suicide, Razumov comes upon Nathalie suddenly and unexpectedly: ``Her presence in the ante-room was as unforeseen as the apparition

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of her brother had been'' (318). Appropriately, their conversation begins with Nathalie's fear that her mother will become unhinged and begin hallucinating, seeing her son as a phantom. For the ®rst time, it occurs to Razumov that he had a choice: `Ì might have told her something true,'' he admits of his interview with Mrs. Haldin, indirectly beginning his confession to Nathalie and thereby regaining for himself a measure of ethical agency and political freedom, even though by this time he is understandably skeptical of any romantic notion of free will. Agency ± power to change the course of his life ± is still trammeled by others. ``You were appointed to undo the evil by making me betray myself back into truth and peace,'' he addresses Nathalie in his journal. ``You! And you have done it in the same way, too, in which he ruined me: by forcing upon me your con®dence'' (331). He recognizes that he betrayed himself when he betrayed Haldin; only another betrayal of self ± this time inauthentic self ± can release him from his ``prison of lies'' (334). His vow of revenge was `Ì shall steal his sister's soul from her'' (331), but instead her soul/Haldin's soul is forced upon him. In the novel's conclusion, Conrad underscores an identity between Razumov and Haldin ± son of autocracy and revolutionary martyr ± which was earlier presented only ironically as Razumov's reluctant pose. Conrad imagistically merges these doubles by having Razumov deliberately wait until midnight to run down the stairs of his lodgings just as Haldin did in St. Petersburg and by leaving us with one ®nal, sinister repetition of the staircase imagery that became one of Razumov's ®xations after gazing at the statue in the General's room, Spontini's ``The Flight of Youth.'' After detonating Razumov's eardrums, Nikita and the men who assist him rush with Razumov ``noiselessly down the staircase'' (339). Thus Razumov reenacts what Haldin must have experienced when hustled away to his punishment by the police. Following the public confession to the revolutionaries, Razumov becomes, like Haldin, a victim of brutality. This seems to be Conrad's way of vividly representing Razumov's hard-won capacity for empathetic identi®cation. Razumov is simultaneously punished by both sides in the


political struggle (Nikita ``killed ± yes! in both camps'' [348]). His words before he is attacked are his most con®dent assertion of agency: ``. . . today I made myself free from falsehood, from remorse ± independent of every single human being on this earth'' (338). Paradoxically, Razumov's sense that he had been robbed of independence, enmeshed in the lives of others, coexisted with his unbearable loneliness. Deaf and crippled, he can no longer deny what Tekla recognizes immediately: ``He'll need somebody'' (343). At the end of Under Western Eyes Conrad narrates alternatives to the novel's earlier suggestion that the political is opposed to the ethical. Tekla, in her devoted care of Razumov, and Nathalie, in her ``compassionate labours'' in Russian jails and homes, ®nd forms of social involvement that mitigate suffering. From what we hear of Razumov at the novel's end, we can gather that his relationships with those around him have changed. In his freed intelligence and new ability, despite his deafness, to engage in genuine dialogue with the revolutionaries who visit him, Razumov is no longer strangled by his own words.24 As Sophia Antonova reports, ``He talks well'' (347). Writing about the Aristotelian idea that our ties with others, our lack of self-suf®ciency, are not to be transcended but recognized as a virtue, Martha Nussbaum observes that ``politics is about using human intelligence to support human neediness'' (Love's Knowledge 373). That seems close to the de®nition we are left with at the end of the novel, and it clearly brings together the political and the ethical, the public and the personal. Razumov's agonized wish to be `ìndependent of every single human being on this earth'' is like wishing to be immortal, and Nussbaum seem right to suspect ``that there is an incoherence lurking somewhere in the wish; that what we actually love and prize would not survive such translations. That we may be doomed or fortunate to be human beings simply, beings for whom the valuable things in life don't come apart so neatly from the fearful and terrible'' (368). Conrad's novel heightens our awareness of this truth in the way it shapes our desires as we read. Through its structure, dramatized choices, internal monologues, relationships and dialogues, the narrative

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moves its readers to want Razumov to escape from his claustrophobic prison of lies, even as we are made to understand the risks that any confession in this political context would entail. We are led to see the virtue in taking such risks. By satisfying the desires of its implied readers, the novel's ending entangles the valuable ± Razumov's truth-telling and the ethics of care and human connection that this act enables ± with the terrible ± a crippled neediness that marks as ironic Razumov's desperate wish to transcend humanity. His insistently nontranscendent life reminds us that we cannot escape the need for an ethics and politics of some sort. The linguistic pessimism inherent in the novel's view of the psychological traps of modern political life ± in which listening becomes a form of espionage, and talking a way to lie, manipulate, and coerce ± is relieved by what Avrom Fleishman calls `àn encouragement to change'' in the novel's ®nal vision of community and uncoerced communication (Conrad's Politics 242). The optimism of the conclusion of Under Western Eyes is quali®ed but not deconstructed by the horrible fact of Razumov's physical mutilation and by the association throughout the novel of speech acts with political pressure and undermined ethical agency. Conrad's hope for social change was contingent upon recognition of the importance for both individual and community of keeping promises and telling the truth, even though his novel reminds us that doing so will often seem impossibly dif®cult.

Afterword

English ®n-de-sieÁcle novels, as I have endeavored to show, are among the most ethically challenging narratives of the Victorian period because they were written in a time of cultural transition and anxiety about ethical agency. In periods of greater cultural stability, the sort of moral perplexity so evident in these texts vanishes under a veneer of self-assurance. But the sheer insecurity of the ethical perspectives of turn-of-the-century narratives, because it disables the capacity to gloss over all that does not ®t a neat set of norms, makes possible an honesty about the dif®culty, the loose-ends, and the unresolvable problems of our moral lives. In the New Woman writing, ®ction by both men and women challenged separate spheres ideology through its formal experimentation and its exploration of the capacity of emotion to liberate moral thinking from gendered rules and norms. Reading this literature in the context of philosophical ideas about emotion, reason, and gender enables a richer understanding of the importance of feelings in the lives of late-century intellectual women struggling with ethical problems. These feelings reveal a cognitive dimension when studied in relation to ethical choice, and thus the novelists redeem emotion from the questionable status that Victorian culture had conferred upon it by associating it with women. As I argue, however, while Schreiner, Grand, and Hardy reconceptualize the traditional Victorian heroine, they also vividly represent all that militates against this woman's new sense of self ± her social ostracism, her guilt, her failure in romantic relationships. Thus they imagine a new and ethically promising dynamic of emotion and reason in the lives of both women and men only to show through 137

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Afterword

the stories of these early feminists that such a dynamic, though real, is not yet recognized by a culture still steeped in separate spheres thinking. My discussion of twentieth-century literary criticism suggests that some readings of Hardy in the context of New Woman writing have, unfortunately, been just as susceptible to the pernicious tendency to associate men with reason and women with feeling, while undervaluing the ethical potential of emotion. Anxiety about agency is pervasive in New Woman writing, and is perhaps most evident in the endings of the texts I examine. In these endings, the cultural containment of the heroines reestablishes separate spheres ideology by associating women with emotion that swamps reason and results in hysteria, nervous breakdown, or death. As much as these novelists wanted to plot bright futures for their heroines, their intellectual honesty about the real conditions of progressive women in late-century English society constrained their sense of narrative possibilities. In their lives as in their relationships, the New Women all evince a hopeful, ¯irtatious desire to defer ``the ending,'' to play for time and equal opportunities, and this is a mark of their ethical agency even when the ¯irtation leads to pain and guilt. But their inability to defer the fate they dread, and their increasing awareness of this inability, make their stories depressingly grim. Agency is also at issue in my study of A Laodicean within the context of two of Hardy's most famous novels. What this context shows is that the metaphor of the ethical agent as a gambler and prankster, a trope that is central to A Laodicean, illuminates a reading of moral luck in Tess and The Mayor of Casterbridge as well. A contested, elusive concept in philosophical discourse, moral luck becomes much easier to understand ± less an abstraction and more a reality of ordinary life ± when identi®ed in Hardy's narratives. Conversely, a better grasp of the philosophical nature of the phenomenon enables a more precise, nuanced discussion of Hardy's obvious obsession with fate and chance. A post-Darwinian freethinker, Hardy was unable to accept the traditional Christian belief that God does not play dice with his universe. As he sought to fathom what role ethics could play in a

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world governed by chance and randomness, Hardy became fascinated by stories of ethical agents whose plans and dreams are overturned by luck. His novels ask what sort of moral assessment is most responsible in a world where agency is so often dramatically ± even melodramatically ± compromised. Ostensibly, the Victorian context is much less important to this chapter, given its metaphysical concerns, than to the others in this book. But Hardy's obsession with luck is a quintessentially ®n-desieÁcle preoccupation because of the unease about agency that fuels it. If notions about God and a providential plan no longer construct an ethical paradigm, then such late-century agnostics as Hardy were faced with the daunting task of shaping an ethics that acknowledges luck and the important role it plays in our lives. The controversy still surrounding moral luck as we move into the twenty-®rst century, like the controversy still surrounding the role of emotion in ethics, suggests that the intellectual work begun in the Victorian period has not been satisfactorily completed in our own age. Distress about agency manifests itself in at least two other preoccupations of this period: ®n-de-sieÁcle British aestheticism and turn-of-the-century fascination with the interrelated speech acts of promising and lying. As I have endeavored to show through my discussion of Wilde, James, and Conrad, both of these areas of concern are marked by the temptation to transcend the human and embrace the ideal. The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ambassadors, and Under Western Eyes all expose the dire ethical consequences of succumbing to this temptation. Wilde and James are relevant novelists to read in light of the ethical ideas of Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur because their narratives, as I have argued, are all about the value of acknowledging intersubjective boundaries. When this acknowledgment does not occur, when ± to use the language of Stanley Cavell ± the desire for knowledge displaces acknowledgment or recognition of the other, the protagonists ®nd themselves cut adrift from the rest of humanity, deprived of the agency they desire ± to transcend the merely human ± but also deprived of love and relationship.

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When isolated in his prison of lies, Conrad's Razumov also doubts his capacity for freedom as an ethical agent. He suffers even more than Dorian and Strether, but unlike them he remains open to love, able to acknowledge the betrayal of his broken promise by acknowledging the other, Nathalie, and the difference his truthtelling will make to her. Locked like Dorian in a relationship of self and mirror-self, self and conscience, he is able to ®nd release from solipsism and suffocating lies when he recognizes the interdependence of human existence, no longer proudly bent on transcendence. Even the ending of Conrad's novel, despite its hopeful vision of community and release from guilt, offers but a quali®ed, tentative belief in agency. The ethics of his ®ction, like that of Schreiner, Grand, Hardy, Wilde, and James, is shadowed by ®n-de-sieÁcle doubt and perplexity. The very uncertainty of these narratives, though, becomes their ethics. As much as these novelists attempt to shape a new ethics by reimagining narrative aesthetics, they also carry the embedded beak and talons of what Schreiner ®gured as the arms of a superstition. Victorian morality clearly had a residual hold on them, but their ethical sensibility was capacious and realistic enough to want to keep the best of the old ethics as they forged the new. Ultimately, they all recognized the value of traditional morality when purged of its unrelenting and hurtful idealism and its unquestioned assumptions about gender, emotion, alterity, and agency.

Notes

1 ethics and the turn to narrative 1 Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Harper, 1972), xi. 2 Tobin Siebers, Morals and Stories (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 46. 3 Martha Nussbaum, ``Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,'' in Ralph Cohen, ed., The Future of Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1989), 62. 4 For an account of this ``straightjacketing of ethics'' by both deconstruction and narrative theory, see Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapter 2. 5 See, for example, Nussbaum's review essay, revised as ``Reading for Life'' and included in Love's Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), chapter 9. In her view Booth's desire to defend himself leads him to concede too much: `Ì think Booth is, at this point, bending over backwards to answer his real or imagined critics in the literary world, hastening to reassure them that he is no dogmatist, no stuffy defender of logic. He should not bend over so far'' (243). Similarly, Siebers wonders if this tendency leads Booth to retreat from ethics to purely aesthetically motivated judgments (see Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], 11), though it should be noted that Booth himself argues against drawing a clear distinction between ethics and aesthetics. 6 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting it Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 9. 7 William J. Scheick, Fictional Structure and Ethics: The Turn-of-the-Century English Novel (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990). My approach is also similar to that of Laurence Lockridge in The Ethics of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) a book that 141

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focuses on the ethics of particular writers to develop a theory about the ethics of a particular historical moment. In his study of the 1890s, John Stokes calls attention to ``the rhetorical magnetism of the single word `new''' during this ®nal decade of the century (In the Nineties [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 15). For studies that treat concerns of the Victorian ®n de sieÁcle in relation to those of the late twentieth century, see Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de SieÁcle (New York: Penguin, 1991) and the essays collected in Cultural Politics at the Fin de SieÁcle, ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Edmund Gosse's childhood, as he describes it in Father and Son (1907), furnishes a classic example of story deprivation, for in his family the reading of ®ction was strictly prohibited. As Plymouth Brethren, his parents considered both storytelling and novel reading to be sinful activities. His mother had been a natural storyteller as a girl but successfully repressed this instinct, much to Gosse's dismay. He himself eagerly devoured ®ction wherever he could ®nd it during his boyhood; he describes reading a sensation novel, for instance, while kneeling on the bare ¯oor of an attic peering at the pages which had been torn from the book to line an old trunk (Father and Son [New York: Penguin, 1983], 49, 59). Siebers argues that ``to emphasize the story as story, giving all weight to its detail and none to generalization, cuts it loose as an example from ethical theory'' (Morals and Stories 46). Still, he demonstrates through his reading of fables in Morals and Stories that morals are often inadequate to stories. That is Nussbaum's point, too. In a discussion that follows her reading of The Golden Bowl, she usefully contrasts a generalized moral ± `Àll daughters should treat their fathers as Maggie treats Adam here'' (blunt and inadequate) ± with what she calls `à direction of thought and imagination'' that does justice to the particularity of the scene: `Àll daughters should treat their fathers with the same level of sensitivity to the father's concrete character and situation, and to the particularities of their histories, that Maggie displays here'' (Love's Knowledge 166±67). Again, detail and context are crucial. Margaret Urban Walker, ``Moral Understanding: Alternative Èpistemology' for a Feminist Ethics,'' in Eve Browning Cole and Susan Coultrap-McQuin, eds., Explorations in Feminist Ethics: Theory and Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 169. As early as the 1960s, Iris Murdoch ± herself a novelist as well as a philosopher ± called for a moral philosophy that was more attentive to

Notes to pages 5±11

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human relationship, particularity, and emotion, all of which she felt had been compromised by the overly theoretical orientation of contemporary ethics. In his recent study of moral psychology and moral theory, Lawrence A. Blum makes the point that, unfortunately, Murdoch's charge is still true twenty years later. See Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) and Blum's Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 16±17. Seyla Benhabib shares Held's wariness even as she draws from postmodernist ideas in constructing a model of communicative ethics attentive to issues of gender: ``Postmodernism is an ally with whom feminism cannot claim identity but only partial and strategic solidarity'' (Situating the Self: Gender, Politics, and Communicative Ethics [New York: Routledge, 1992], 15). Women would only make a virtue out of necessity, for instance, if they embraced the postmodern vision of self as fractured and opaque. Martha C. Nussbaum, ``Feminists and Philosophy.'' Review of A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, Louise M. Anthony and Charlotte Witt, eds., in New York Review of Books, 20 October 1994: 60. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 22. About pseudo-objectivity, or an appeal to an essentialism that might not even exist, MacIntyre points out that ``when men and women identify what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too completely with the cause of some universal principle, they usually behave worse than they would otherwise do'' (After Virtue 221). Terry Eagleton, ``The Flight to the Real,'' in Ledger and McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics 12. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xvi. Nussbaum shares Rorty's view of what happens ethically when we read novels. She makes the further point that for self-examination we need the sort of emotional distance a narrative can provide: `À novel, just because it is not our life, places us in a moral position that is favorable for perception and it shows us what it would be like to take up that position in life'' (Love's Knowledge 162). Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 11. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 8.

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24 Anthony Cascardi has pointed out that even Fredric Jameson, who writes in The Political Unconscious of the need to get beyond ethics, refers to the ``moral'' of his book (`Àlways historicize!''): ``The stoic refusal of desire that we confront in the form of historical necessity does not in the end eliminate the desire to sublimate or transform necessity into something more meaningful or valuable, like a `moral''' (`Èthics and Aesthetics in Joseph Conrad,'' Western Humanities Review 49.1[Spring 1995], 19). 25 Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (New York: Penguin, 1979), 150. 26 Catherine Gallagher shows us that in the early Victorian period, too, a new theory of morality and culture and a new practice of realism were born at the same time; see Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832±1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), xiii. 27 John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 248. 28 Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 26. 29 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1962), 312. 2 victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at the F I N D E S I EÁ C L E 1 MacIntyre, After Virtue 81. 2 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3. 3 These theoretical inquiries into the relationship between history and ethics, which I address and test through my argument about ethics and ®n-de-sieÁcle narratives, are at the heart of the two studies that most thoroughly inform this chapter: MacIntyre's After Virtue and Taylor's Sources of the Self. The inquiries are also undertaken via the controversies among critics in the ®eld of ethics and literature. Nussbaum, Booth, and Siebers, as we have seen, have produced seminal studies in this ®eld, and yet their largely ahistorical approach is challenged by the theoretical work of philosophers such as MacIntyre and Taylor and supplemented by more historically focused works of ethical/literary criticism. 4 See A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), chapter 3. 5 Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought, vol. 2 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 367.


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6 Although one phase of Mill's mental history was clearly his replacement of a theory of human nature with a theory of history, Cumming raises the question of whether Mill later disavowed his Saint Simonian-in¯uenced writings and also points out that despite the undeniable importance Mill accords the historical approach, ``this most versatile writer never wrote a single historical work'' (Human Nature and History 361). 7 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 117. 8 Victorian moral philosophers, arguably less susceptible than contemporary thinkers to this failure to locate their ideas within a particular tradition, bene®ted from their absorbing interest in history, which was due in part to their sense of living in an age of ¯ux. As Culler observes, ``men do not think deeply about the character of their own age until they are aware that it differs from the past'' (Victorian Mirror 40), and for the Victorians this sense of difference was not only acute (as it has been for many in the twentieth-century), it was new. As Charles Taylor points out, ``the very picture of history as moral progress, as a `going beyond' our forebears, which underlies our own sense of superiority, is very much a Victorian idea'' (Sources of the Self 394). Unlike the Victorians, however, we have cultivated a tradition in moral philosophy that assumes that it is not a tradition. Why? Perhaps because a philosophy avowedly constrained by history is humbler and thus less appealing than one unchecked in its pursuit of pseudo-scienti®c rational certainty. 9 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and Selected Prose, introduction by Herbert Sussman (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1970), 168. 10 In his recent study of nineteenth-century British autobiography, A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in NineteenthCentury Britain (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), Martin A. Danahay strongly emphasizes ± and deplores ± the role of ``not me'' in Victorian writing about the self. Adapting Foucault's concept of subjected sovereignty, Danahay claims that in their autobiographies Mill and Edmund Gosse both overtly advocate individual freedom while actually depicting `à form of subjected autonomy'' (148), by which he means a subjectivity that is dependent on an external constraining force. For both Mill and Gosse this force was primarily the father, though as I argue below I think Gosse, a turn-of-the-century writer, chooses the internal over the external with more determination than his Victorian predecessor. Gosse does not fully share Mill's mid-Victorian embarrassment with a focus on self, though such a focus is something he defensively and somewhat guiltily struggles for throughout Father and Son. Gosse's quintessentially modern delight in eccentricity and the fruits of introspection do not negate his awareness of external sources of authority or his

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anxiety about his own autonomy, but they do signal an ambivalent conception of self and agency much more typical of the ®n-de-sieÁcle than of the mid-Victorian period, a distinction Danahay ignores by treating Gosse as `à Victorian preserved in amber'' (149). John Reed, Victorian Will (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1989), 22. Alfred Lord Tennyson, ``Locksley Hall,'' The Poetical Works of Tennyson (Boston: Houghton Mif¯in, 1974), 90±94; l. 98. Matthew Arnold, ``Preface to Poems, 1853,'' Victorian Poetry and Poetics, 2nd ed., ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange (Boston: Houghton Mif¯in, 1968), 488. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty in Essays on Politics and Science, Collected Works, vol. 18, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 265. As Danahay points out, though, in his Autobiography Mill overtly argues for the freedom of the individual even as he undercuts that argument by ceding his own autonomy to external authorities, such as his father, the ideal of Utilitarian reform, or his wife Harriet Taylor and her powerful in¯uence. In some ways his position is as contradictory as Carlyle's and betrays the extent to which he is a product of the culture he critiques. See Danahay, Community of One, chapter 5. Like Carlyle and Mill, George Eliot's mid-Victorian perspective suggests that the steam-engine, by metonymy, evokes not only the industrial revolution but all the hectic changes that came in its wake. `Ìngenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind,'' the narrator of Adam Bede (1859) says. ``Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thoughts to rush in. Even idleness is eager now . . . '' (514). This eagerness, which Wordsworth referred to at the very beginning of the nineteenth-century as the present need for ``gross and violent stimulants'' (144), is ``the modern standard'' that Eliot's narrator contrasts to ``Fine old Leisure.'' But like Mill, Eliot embraces the new even as she casts a fond look backward. The tone of this passage in the novel is as gently mocking of old-fashioned simplicity as it is admonitory about the hazards of life in a complex, industrial age. See George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York: Penguin, 1985) and William Wordsworth, ``Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802),'' Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. II, 6th ed., ed. M. H. Abrams, et al. (New York: Norton, 1993), 140±52. John Deigh, The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), viii. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 342. Charles Taylor argues that ``just as in the case of our conceptions of the


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good, our ideas about our moral motivation show a confusing mixture of the fusion, mutual in¯uence, and rivalry among the different sources'' (Sources of the Self 412). If Freud does indeed fuse very different ideas about conscience and ethical agency as Deigh claims, this mixing and combining is very much in accord with what Taylor sees as the mutual in¯uence of belief and unbelief during the Victorian period. Gillian Beer, `Èvolution of the Novel'' in A. C. Fabian, ed., Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 109. Peter Abbs, for instance, is quite critical of Gosse for his Victorian tendencies ± neurotic reserve and hypocrisy, in particular ± and yet even he notices something new and un-Victorian in what he calls the ``second version'' of Father and Son: ``The ®rst version is written from the wary Victorian intelligence; it has a shrewd eye to the audience, a concern for tact and decorum, and has come to believe, like Darwin and Spencer, in the pure objectivity of Science. The second version is the unsettling subjective voice of the more honest but dispossessed modern, of authenticity struggling outside communal values and inherited judgements, ready, at least in principle, to fashion its own inner life'' (Abbs, Introduction, Father and Son [New York: Penguin, 1983], 14). This second version feels more dominant to me than what Abbs calls the ®rst, especially when Father and Son is juxtaposed to other examples of Victorian autobiography ± such as Mill's ± or biography ± such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. Like all late Victorians, Gosse has been shaped by the period of his childhood, and it seems unrealistic to expect him to be entirely free from its in¯uence. It seems equally unjust to minimize all that is not Victorian about his worldview and ethics. Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 20. William James quoted in C. Stephen Evans, Subjectivity and Religious Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian University Press, 1978), 152±53. In Rational Choice and Moral Agency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), David Schmidtz critiques as contradictory Mill's efforts to offer a proof for the principle of utility, for Mill himself acknowledges that ®rst principles cannot be proven. Late Victorians and Edwardians, such as Gosse in Father and Son and William James in ``The Will to Believe'' (The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979]) and Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1982), are better able than the Victorians to relinquish the need for certainty and are thus more postCartesian in their reasoning. And as Schmidtz points out, ``The claim that we ought to reject what is not indubitably certain is itself a conjecture about proper scienti®c methodology, a conjecture that is hardly beyond

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reasonable doubt. Therefore, the Cartesian method of hyperbolic doubt fails to pass its own test'' (215). In Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), Carol Christ traces the complex development of the dramatic monologue form, and sheds light on the uneasiness about potential egoism felt by Victorian poets such as Browning, who wanted to explore subjectivity but felt guilty doing so. After the negative critical reception of his ®rst published poem, Pauline, written in the Romantic confessional mode, Browning turned to the more objective dramatic monologue form. Christ notes that `ìn Pauline the guilt which the autonomy of selfconsciousness imposes upon the speaker is extraordinary even for a poem in this genre'' (18). Browning was able to escape his own guilt by choosing instead of this genre a dramatic mode that exposes the limitations of self-consciousness and the ego's desire for control. ``Whenever Browning described the dramatic nature of his poetry, he emphasized that his poems did not concern himself '' (19). This is reminiscent of Mill's claim to not `èstimate'' himself. Not surprisingly, Mill criticized Pauline for what he considered its obsessive focus on both ``self-worship'' and ``self-disgust'' (Christ, Victorian and Modern 18). Thomas Hardy, notebook entry, 7 December 1886 (Hardy's emphasis) in The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 191. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 220. Carol Gilligan and others working in the ®eld of feminist ethics tend to align this need for a coherent, rational system of moral beliefs with male socialization and acceptance of a more relational, contingent, and contextual morality with female socialization. In the next chapter I consider the implications of Victorian separate spheres ideology ± and feminist resistance to it ± for the ethics of ®n-de-sieÁcle ®ction. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 33. This is a generalization, of course, and does not hold true for all on even the short list of modernists Watt mentions. T. S. Eliot, for instance, was far from content with private systems of value, though his work explores the impoverishment of the lives of those who are.

3 emotion, gender, and ethics in fiction by thomas hardy and the new woman writers 1 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), xix.


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2 As John Goode notes in his reading of Hardy's New Woman novel, Jude the Obscure, in Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), `àgain and again the novel breaks out of its frame'' (139), deploying strategies of illusion-breaking to create something new that will shake up readers lulled by realism and an attendant acceptance of the status quo. Lloyd Fernando, in his ``New Women'' in the Late Victorian Novel (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), remarks that ``rarely in the history of the English novel had opinions and attitudes rendered such service in lieu of art on behalf of a contemporary movement'' (133), dismissing the ethical content of New Woman novels as `òpinions and attitudes'' detrimental to the aesthetic quality of the majority of this late-century ®ction, though important for its in¯uence on George Gissing and Hardy. Fernando, like many of the contemporary critics of these novels, seems to miss the point of the New Woman writers' need to refuse old forms, true as it may be that this need did not always result in a pleasing aesthetic experience for readers. For an excellent discussion of the complex question of the political effectiveness of antinarrative strategies in Olive Schreiner's work and, more generally, that of women and minority cultures, see Janet Galligani Casey's ``Power, Agency, Desire: Olive Schreiner and the Pre-Modern Narrative Moment,'' Narrative 4.2 (May 1996): 124±41. 3 Teresa Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 16. 4 Sally Ledger, ``The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism,'' in Ledger and McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics, 22. 5 Patricia Ingham, Thomas Hardy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990), 90. 6 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de SieÁcle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 9. Ledger points out, however, that for New Woman writers the language of the marginal and the discourse of dominant ideology were equally compromised and problematic (``The New Woman'' 34). Janet Galligani Casey also stresses the problems for late Victorian feminists of `àttempting to articulate one's liminal status through genres that will at once remain faithful to that liminality and yet project it within the dominant culture'' (``Power, Agency, Desire'' 131). 7 Patricia Stubbs, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel, 1880±1920 (Sussex: Harvester, 1979), 25. 8 Lyn Pykett, The Ìmproper' Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 169. 9 For an instructive description of these traditions and their arguments

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see chapter 3, ``Rational Emotions,'' of Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 53±78. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995), xii. ``Forum on In a Different Voice,'' Signs 11.2 (1986), 327. Gail Cunningham's discussion of Hardy in the context of New Woman writing is representative of the many critics who describe Hardy's approach as something other than feminist: ``The areas of interest which led his novels to converge on the New Woman ®ction were sexual morality in general, and a pervading cynicism about marriage. Neither of these need necessarily imply a speci®cally feminist approach: indeed in many of his novels Hardy's view of women, and his ideas about sex and marriage, seem to pull him uncomfortably in different directions'' (Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel [New York: Harper and Row, 1978], 81). I wonder, though, if Hardy himself is `ùncomfortably'' ambivalent, or if some readers are made uncomfortable by the challenge his heroines ± especially Sue Bridehead ± present to their assumptions about women and feminism. Like other New Women writers, Schreiner was in¯uenced by the evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin, and after an early crisis of religious faith embraced science, sometimes with ethically troubling implications, as Sally Ledger demonstrates in her analysis of Schreiner's ``deployment of eugenic theory in the name of feminism'' (New Woman: Fiction and Feminism 73). Charles Taylor offers a trenchant discussion of scientism as a constituent of modern culture, emphasizing that it signals not a loss of faith or a sharp break with mid-Victorian Christianity ± for scientism `ìtself requires a leap of faith'' ± so much as `à new militant moral outlook growing out of the old and taking its place beside it as a ®ghting alternative'' (Sources of the Self 404). Olive Schreiner, ``The Buddhist Priest's Wife,'' in Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de SieÁcle, ed. Elaine Showalter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 92. Laura Chrisman, `Èmpire, `Race,' and Feminism at the Fin-de-SieÁcle: The Work of George Egerton and Olive Schreiner,'' in Ledger and McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics, 57. Janet Galligani Casey focuses on similar strategies in Schreiner's un®nished novel, From Man to Man. For Rebekah, the heroine of this novel, intellectual pursuits (and writing in particular) afford an eroticized, highly private refuge. Writing diary entries and letters, full of polemics and philosophical ruminations as well as highly emotional expressions of love for her husband, who is unfaithful to her, is for the heroine `àn act that comes to embody all of the emotional and sexual energy that is


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thwarted in her daily existence'' (``Power, Agency, Desire'' 136). Casey's point is that this private writing distracts Rebekah from public writing, which is true, but it is also interesting to note how the personal, traditionally feminine and emotional genres of letter and diary are intellectualized and made strange, fascinating, even erotically compelling, in late Victorian feminist writing. Victorian women poets similarly sought comfort and a sense of agency and control in intellectual detachment and in imagining their own deaths. In several of her lyric poems, Christina Rossetti's speaker, for instance, assures her beloved from beyond the grave that it is now a matter of indifference to her if he remembers or forgets her. Similarly, Charlotte Mew seeks what she call the `ìnhuman thing'' (quoted in Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart [Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992], 287), the white space of ``vision and desolation . . . which turns experience into art'' (Leighton, Victorian Women 287), not only as a retreat from relationships and the pain of emotional entanglement and rejection in a patriarchal society, but also as a position of power and invulnerability. In the words of Angela Leighton, who beautifully draws out this dimension of both poets' work, ``to miss life itself is to gain, in its place, the free time of the dream'' (163). Even though the New Woman writers turned more openly and de®antly against Victorian patriarchy, these strategies of ``free time,'' imagination, play, ¯irtation, and indirection are clearly evident in the lives of all of the late-century heroines I consider. I agree with Laura Chrisman's assessment of the depressing dead end of this story and of the `èssentially monologic and isolationist perspective'' of Schreiner's stories in general, despite their experimental combining of realism and symbolism and their dialogues between men and women. As Chrisman notes, ``the speech patterns expose the impossibility of social communication and an integrated feminist identity and collectivity'' (`Èmpire, `Race,' and Feminism'' 47). In her discussion of Schreiner's Woman and Labour, Ledger points out that Schreiner attempted to bring her eugenicist thinking in line with her feminism: ``The evolutionary arrest of woman, the denial of intellectual activity and traditionally `masculine' pursuits, would sound a death knell for human evolution. As mothers of the human race, the evolutionary development ± bodily and intellectual ± of women was, for Schreiner, crucial'' (New Woman: Fiction and Feminism 24). Joyce Avrech Berkman, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 231. Laura Green, ```Strange [In]difference of Sex': Thomas Hardy, the

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Victorian Man of Letters, and the Temptations of Androgyny,'' Victorian Studies 38.4 (Summer 1995), 544. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 159. Sheila Berger stresses Hardy's `àntagonism toward consistency and rationality'' in her reading of the novelist's re¯ections on his aesthetic values. For example, Hardy `àppreciates drama in literature because it àppeal[s] to the emotional reason rather than to the logical reason; for by their emotions men are acted upon, and act upon others''' (Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process [New York and London: New York University Press, 1990], 4). In her Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Sussex: Harvester, 1982), Penny Boumelha observes that the similarity of Jude and Sue marks a change in Hardy's ®ction: ``There is no sense that Jude and Sue inhabit different ideological structures as there is in the cases of Clym and Eustacia, or even Angel and Tess'' (141). Green also identi®es this similarity between its male and female protagonists as one of the features of Jude that make it the most radical of Hardy's novels (``Strange [In]difference'' 527). A fascinating dimension of all of the New Woman novels I consider is the characterization of the New Man. Angelica's twin Diavolo (like everything else about them, their names are, ironically, more ®tting if reversed) supports his sister's feminism and cross-dresses himself even as he takes his own privileges for granted. Jude and Waldo are tenderhearted men who hate injustice of any sort and are thus sympathetic to the cause of the women they love. But Jude occasionally utters essentialist, limiting ideas about women (which critics wrongly confound with Hardy's own ideas), and Waldo is dreamy and often merely bewildered by Lyndall's political ideas. Most importantly, the men in the novels demonstrate the tragic reality that cross-gender friendships were not viable in late Victorian culture. Ledger writes of Waldo and Lyndall, ``theirs is a powerful brother/sister type of relationship, an emotional and intellectual bond which, like Sue Bridehead and Jude Fawley's, is shown not to be possible in the world represented by the novel's discourses'' (New Woman: Fiction and Feminism 83). And I think Mangum is right to question whether Angelica's desire for friendship between men and women `òn terms unimaginable to the Victorians'' would be perceived as any more realizable now than it was then (Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 136). Sue similarly experiments with cross-dressing when she is compelled to wear Jude's clothes after a act of rebellion results in a drenching of her own. As Goode points out in his comparison of Sue and Angelica, ``Sue


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gets caught between image and utterance. It is the requirement of clothes and image that she leaps out of '' (Thomas Hardy 158). Goode's excellent chapter on Jude in his book on Hardy intricately traces Sue's more complex efforts to leap into a voice; like other critics describing the tension between old and new in the New Woman ®ction, Goode notes that ``the heterodox voice is the voice of the future tied dependently into the discourse of the present'' (170). Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 458. Pykett makes this point in her discussion of George Egerton's ®ction (The Ìmproper' Feminine 173). Ardis observes, more generally, that in New Woman writing heterogeneity has replaced ``the humanistic model of integrated selfhood or `character.' A monolithic model of New Womanliness [is] not . . . substituted for the old model of the `pure woman''' (New Women 113±14). Green makes the intriguing point that ``linguistic pedantry occurs with remarkable frequency in moments of ¯irtation or jockeying for position between male and female characters'' (``Strange [In]difference'' 536). In Schreiner's novel, too, ¯irtation is as intellectual as it is emotional ± and distinctively different from the ¯irtation of the mid-Victorian coquette. Lyndall's lover says to her, `Ì like you when you grow metaphysical and analytical,'' and she thinks, ``he was trying to turn her own weapons against her'' (204). See Scott McCracken, ``Stages of Sand and Blood: The Performance of Gendered Subjectivity in Olive Schreiner's Colonial Allegories,'' in Alice Jenkins and Juliet John, eds., Rereading Victorian Fiction (London: Macmillan, 2000), 145±56, for an intriguing argument about New Woman identities as performances self-consciously played out within a context (or on a stage) of material conditions that limited agency. George Bernard Shaw praised Grand for demanding that ``the man shall come to the woman exactly as moral as he insists that she shall come to him'' (Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 89). A. R. Cunningham identi®es two main types of New Women heroines: the ``bachelor girl,'' a designation appropriate for Sue, Lyndall, and Angelica, since this type was thoroughly unconventional in her thinking; and the New Woman of the ``purity school,'' a designation that ®ts Evadne since she is unusually intelligent but not willing to abandon traditional Victorian moral values and ideals. See A. R. Cunningham, ``The `New Woman Fiction' of the 1890s,'' Victorian Studies 17 (1973): 176±86. Even as a reader, Evadne, like Jude, is an autodidact for whom ``the reading experience is structured as an alternative to education rather than

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a means to education'' (Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 103). Goode's point that Jude raises the question of education as a leading out and an admission of the obscure to ``the garden of bourgeois order'' (Thomas Hardy 103) is equally relevant to Evadne, whose dif®culty acquiring books and isolation in reading them reveal the constraints on her agency, even as her bold, feminist notes on her reading ± like Jude's enthusiasm and freshness of perspective as a young scholar ± underscore the advantage of exclusion from the bourgeois order. Unfortunately, the trajectory of both characters as readers is far from hopeful. Evadne, for instance, goes from an active, curious critical thinker, to a woman who reads to escape, to a nonreader whose life is a casebook read by Dr. Galbraith. 34 See Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 30±35, for an account of how contemporary psychological theories were deployed to silence New Woman characters and their creators. 35 It would be instructive to compare the dramatic psychological breakdowns of these New Women to the emotional collapse suffered by heroines of earlier Victorian novels, such as Gwendolen Harleth in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (New York: Penguin, 1995). Unlike Evadne, Gwendolen glories in the superiority that isolates her from others until that isolation breaks her spirit. Then, like Evadne, she is overcome by hysteria. Reaching out to Deronda for moral guidance and advice about how to establish loving connections with others, Gwendolen, unlike Sue and Lyndall, moves hopefully into the future. Eliot's heroine suffers for her difference, but she is not so different that she cannot reintegrate herself into society. These New Women are unable to do so because their efforts to conform lack conviction and authenticity. They reject gender expectations more rebelliously than even the most rebellious of earlier Victorian heroines. For a discussion of Eliot's `èmotional intellect'' and her sexual ethics in relation to the Woman Question, see Fernando, ``New Women'' in the Late Victorian Novel, chapter 2. 4 chance and moral luck in a laodicean , the mayor of casterbridge , and tess 1 Thomas Hardy, ``Hap,'' The Complete Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 9. 2 Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (New York: Vintage, 1987), 73. 3 Nicholas Rescher, Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995), 171. 4 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, 1. 258.


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5 Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840±1928 (1928, 1930; rprt. London: Macmillan, 1965), 175; emphasis Thomas Hardy's. 6 Martha C. Nussbaum, ``Luck and Ethics,'' in Daniel Stateman, ed., Moral Luck (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 97. 7 Bernard Williams, Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 241. 8 Margaret Urban Walker, ``Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure Agency,'' in Daniel Statman, ed., Moral Luck (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 245. 9 These studies include Albert Pettigrew Elliott, Fatalism in the Works of Thomas Hardy (New York: Russell, 1935); Roy Morrell, Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaysia Press, 1965), and Bert G. Hornback, The Metaphor of Chance: Vision and Technique in the Works of Thomas Hardy (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1971). For a more recent, though brief, discussion of this issue in Hardy studies, see Mary Rimmer, ``Club Laws: Chess and the Construction of Gender in A Pair of Blue Eyes,'' in Margaret R. Higonnet, ed., The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 203±04. 10 Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 128±29. 11 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 46. 12 Hardy quoted in Jan Jedrzejewski, Thomas Hardy and the Church (New York: St. Martin's, 1996), 41. 13 The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). 14 Hardy quoted in Peter Widdowson, On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and Earlier (New York: St. Martin's, 1998), 228±29. 15 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 5. 16 In The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), William J. Scheick describes another late-century ®ctional mode that offered an alternative to realism ± romance. The dynamics of one form of this genre ± ``the simultaneous intimation and concealment of some ultimate insight'' (59) ± reveals it to be akin to melodrama as Brooks de®nes it. 17 As Charles Taylor argues, though, even those who advocated rational freedom in the nineteenth century did so with evangelical fervor, espousing `à kind of heroism of unbelief, the deep spiritual satisfaction of knowing that one has confronted the truth of things, however bleak and unconsoling'' (Sources of the Self 404). Hardy's melodramatic position

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sometimes strikes this note, but ultimately the romantic depth of his major novels offers richer emotional satisfaction than the bleak truths and amorality of ®ction by Flaubert, Gissing, or the late Victorian naturalists. Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 283. Widdowson calls attention to Hardy's self-conscious, sometimes even tongue-in-cheek treatment of chance in A Laodicean, insisting that ``such èxternalized' treatment of coincidence and chance may give us some clues as to whether or not it is also one of Hardy's involuntary `¯aws' in the `major' novels'' (On Thomas Hardy 106). (Clearly, Widdowson thinks it isn't.) Paralleling resistance to the concept of moral luck among philosophers is resistance among literary critics to plots governed by coincidence and chance rather than by choice and so-called laws of probability. Both Teresa Mangum and Elaine Showalter discuss Father Time in the context of childhood deformity most often associated with syphilis but signifying, more generally, in Showalter words, ``the con¯icts, lies, and hypocrisies of the sexual system'' (``Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de SieÁcle,'' in Ruth Yeazell, ed., Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth Century Novel [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986], 108). Father Time is illegitimate in the sense that he is born after his parents part; Dare is also an illegitimate son. Set apart by their unusual appearance, they are both melodramatic characters who gesture toward a dark, enigmatic dimension of life while also embodying Hardy's criticism of unjust social attitudes and conditions. In his subtle and penetrating discussion of Hardy's self-consciousness about his artistry in this novel, Peter Widdowson points out that A Laodicean was categorized by Hardy as one of his ``Novels of Ingenuity,'' while Dare is identi®ed as `ìngenious'' in his methods of deception. As in my analysis of the relation of author and character here, Widdowson associates Dare with Hardy in this way but also goes on to show that what Hardy is really doing is parodying the deceptions of ®ctional realism by parodying Dare and his doctored photographs (On Thomas Hardy 113). Thus Hardy mischievously merges with his villain only to distance himself later. Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 276. Beer also pursues the fascinating question of how novel readers are gamblers, and in Hardy (she focuses on The Return of the Native), ``the reader is balked of control, forced to survey the reassuring expectations with which we habitually people the future'' (294). Sophie Gilmartin, Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 198.


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23 In Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), J. Hillis Miller has recognized as one of the characteristic features of Hardy's work the `ìrresistible coercion of history'' (103). 24 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Ethics, in T. V. Smith and Marjorie Grene, eds., Berkeley, Hume, and Kant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 366. 25 H. M. Daleski, Thomas Hardy and Paradoxes of Love (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 151. 26 For some readers, an ethical reading of Tess's agency is undermined by Hardy's melodramatic imagination and his presentation of Tess as an elemental force, captured at Stonehenge to signify her association with ancient patterns of death and rebirth. This symbolic dimension of the novel is undeniable, but equally undeniable, in my reading anyway, is Tess's moral personhood and her convincing reality as a tragic agent. 27 Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (New York: Penguin, 1985), 395. 28 In a passage in The Life pertinent to this point, Hardy writes, ``For my part, if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the ¯esh; by which I mean putting on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts, and taking their views of surrounding things. To think of life as passing away is a sadness; to think of it as past is at least tolerable'' (209±10). In Hardy, time passing is a source of pain not because the past disappears but because we continue to live with it; death seems to be the only thing that will free us. Tess, for example, despairs because ``bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself '' (299). 29 Gilmartin writes about another palimpsest-like image in Hardy's The Well-Beloved. Pierston and his original beloved in the Caro line carve their linked names on a cliff shore, but the sea and the process of time erase them, and they are written over by the names of their descendants. Like many other protagonists in Hardy, Pierston unsuccessfully seeks to recover the agency time robs him of, in his case by loving three generations of women. But as Gilmartin succinctly observes, ``He can belong to one generation only, not all three'' (Ancestry and Narrative 233). Similarly, Henchard's old-fashioned ways are displaced by those of the younger generation as time does its relentless work in The Mayor of Casterbridge. 30 Miller describes the ``fundamental spiritual movement'' of Hardy's ®ction as the exact opposite of Nietzsche's will to power: Hardy's is the ``will not to will'' (Thomas Hardy 6). But this form of will, though it does not tempt fate, provides inadequate protection from misfortune.

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31 As Gillian Beer notes, in Hardy ``bad luck is good for story'' (Open Fields 294). Her ®nal comment about Hardy is interesting in light of Henchard's self-destructive recklessness, his death-wish, and his desire, expressed in his will, to be completely forgotten after his death (especially since Hardy also puts all of these aspects of Henchard's character into question through the tropes of game-playing and joking): The Return of the Native, Beer argues, is aligned with ``the new forces that disturb the current of the 1870s, those of uncertainty and entropy, the cosmic lottery. But [Hardy] pins it also into that other antique yearning grati®ed by play: the longing for disaster, the full but ®ctive experience of obliteration'' (Open Fields 294). 32 Bernard Williams's concept of `àgent-regret'' precisely describes what Henchard feels after several of his crucial moral choices. He is vividly aware of how he might have acted otherwise if he had known the outcome of his act. (See Williams, ``Moral Luck'' 42.) 5 oscar wilde and henry james: aestheticizing ethics 1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (New York: Bantam, 1980), 118. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, `Èthics as First Philosophy,'' in Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 82±83. 3 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), xxiii. 4 Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 168±69. 5 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 9. 6 In Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), Pierre Walker points out that Strether, with his tendency to romanticize, supplements his incomplete knowledge with simplistic literary models such as the morality tale and the Gothic romance, even as his own story unfolds for us in the more subtle and complex form of the novel of manners (71). 7 See Nussbaum's discussion of the novel, ``Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,'' in Love's Knowledge, 168±94. 8 Millicent Bell's argument about The Ambassadors shares Posnock's emphasis on openness and possibility in the novel rather than on the inevitability that ¯ows from ®xed identity: ``The telling of The Ambassadors èmpties' . . . only certain of Strether's possible adventures from out the bag of what might be imagined for him ± yet our sense of his potentiality allows us to see what these alternatives might be, to see them


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as latent in the narrative'' (Bell, Meaning in Henry James [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991], 353). The richness of James's method of storytelling is that it makes us aware of the many narrative choices available to the author, even as it leads us to consider his protagonist's need to plot a life that could take any number of different directions. This implicit resistance to closure and awareness of multiplicity are among the qualities that make James seem postmodern. But as I shall argue, even Jamesian art seeks refuge from ¯ux through a protagonist who is not nearly as open to life as he seems. Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16. Emmanuel Levinas, ``Reality and Its Shadow,'' in Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader, 139. Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de SieÁcle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 171. Although Nussbaum's reading of Strether signi®cantly differs from my own, I do share her admiration for the more passive, porous, receptive way of being in the world that Strether cultivates in the process of freeing himself from the Kantian, active, duty-bound morality represented by Mrs. Newsome and Woollett. For Nussbaum's discussion of the Jamesian value of being `àctively passive,'' see Love's Knowledge 176±185. Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (New York: Norton, 1994), 131. For an excellent discussion of the questionable ethics of Strether's ``Live all you can'' speech, see Pierre Walker, Reading Henry James 76±77. The troubling values associated with both `ìllusion'' and ``freedom'' ± such as a narrow, blinkered view of reality and the desire to escape responsibility and transgress the boundaries of actual human agency ± become quite clear by the end of Strether's story. Terry Eagleton faults Kantian aesthetics for its inability to represent the body; what results, he argues, is a non-sensuous aesthetic (Ideology of the Aesthetic 21). Although my reading of aestheticism in both Wilde and James stresses the desire to escape the real, the mortal, the limited, and thus ultimately the physical, Eagleton is right that as a branch of philosophy aestheticism grounds abstractions in the body: ``The aesthetic concerns this most gross and palpable dimension of the human, which post-Cartesian philosophy, in some curious lapse of attention has somehow managed to overlook. It is thus the ®rst stirrings of a primitive materialism ± of the body's long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical'' (13). Nussbaum makes this point, not in relation to Maria Gostrey but in relation to Marie de Vionnet, though it seems to me to be true of either

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woman since Maria is as in love with Strether as Marie is with Chad: ``We see that the women of Woollett, unlike Marie de Vionnet in her love of an irreplaceable particular person, are able to triumph over life and to avoid becoming its victims. But that's just it: they triumph over life, they don't live'' (Love's Knowledge 179). Marcia Ian, ``Henry James and the Spectacle of Loss: Psychoanalytic Metaphysics'' in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics at the Fin de SieÁcle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 116. It is interesting to note the differences between Wilde and the New Woman novelists in the ethical treatment of gender and performativity. Despite his evident love of masks and theatricality, in Dorian Gray Wilde shows how living aesthetically and falling in love with a work of art or a performance can become a trap rather than a means to agency. Free indirect discourse is one of the many techniques the novel's narrator employs to keep his own views ± and those of the implied author ± hidden. To consider but one example, when the narrator seems to assert his own views unequivocally, as when he says, `Ìs insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities,'' he quickly pulls the reader up short by beginning the next paragraph, ``Such at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion'' (142±43). But my description of this moment in the novel might not do enough to credit the way language itself carries Wilde perilously close to self-exposure. As Linda Dowling points out, the ``rhetoric of secrecy'' in Wilde need not always be related to the secret of his homosexual life; literary language, Wilde intimates, is dangerous because of its autonomy, its otherness. It is thus secretive and mysterious by its very nature. ``This sense of language as possessing an independent life is everywhere in ®n de sieÁcle literature,'' and its power is often ®gured as seductive and evil (Dowling, Language and Decadence 160). It is instructive to compare Little Bilham's response to Chad to Strether's response. The younger man agrees that Chad has changed but compares him to ``the new edition of an old book that one has been fond of,'' and then quickly admits that he himself is ``beastly immoral'' to expect Chad to be only what he wants him to be: `Ì'm afraid it would be a funny world altogether ± a world with things the way I like them'' (111). He clearly sorts out what is good for Chad and what is good for himself. Strether does just the opposite: he sees what he would enjoy ± a life in Paris with Marie de Vionnet ± and then decides that is what Chad must want, too. As Freedman points out, Strether and Lord Henry are very much alike in the vicarious satisfaction they take in `à compensatory erotic that endows the contemplator with power over that which he sees, and relieves him of


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the burden of suffering that can come with more direct involvement'' (Professions of Taste 193). After the death of his wife, Strether eschews direct involvement, preferring aesthetic detachment, illusion, and selfprotective strategies within his relationships. ``Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian what I would like to be ± in other ages perhaps'' (Oscar Wilde to Ralph Payne, 12 February 1894). Another ®n-de-sieÁcle example of the power of both sexuality and art to trans®x is Hardy's short story ``The Fiddler of the Reels.'' Nussbaum's reading of Strether as an admirable, though ¯awed, ethical agent is perhaps encouraged by the implied author's own alignment with the ethos of his protagonist. But as Eagleton points out, James is aware of Strether's evasion of life: `Ìn the end there was nothing that Henry James didn't know; but such a supremely beautiful intelligence is hardly compatible with living, which of course he knew as well. Strether wants to get out of all that fatiguing complexity with not a drop spilt and his hands clean, salvaging nothing for himself, pregnant with an enormous, useless intelligence completely bereft of exchange value'' (``Flight to the Real'' 20). Aware of his protagonist's evasion, James nevertheless is himself evasive about the ethics of dodging life in this way. For discussion of a full range of a reader's responsibilities, see Booth, The Company We Keep 134±42. 6 promises, lies and ethical agency in joseph conrad's under western eyes

1 Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976), 50. 2 Michel de Montaigne, `Òn Liars,'' Essays, quoted in Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage, 1978), 3. 3 For a variety of views on the interrelationship of literature and moral philosophy, see especially Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature; Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988) and Morals and Stories; Richard Eldridge, On Moral Personhood (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mif¯in, 1989); Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. 4 For discussion of Conrad's linguistic pessimism and its effects, see Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad's Poetics of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) and Lisa Rado, ``Walking Through Phantoms: Irony, Skepticism and Razumov's Self-Delusion in Under

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Western Eyes,'' Conradiana 24 (1992): 83±99. Like Rado, Eloise Knapp Hay argues that the novel lacks a moral center, in part because there is no one in the text to guide our reading of it; see her `Ùnder Western Eyes and the Missing Center,'' in David R. Smith, ed., Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes: Beginnings, Revisions, Final Forms (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1991), 121±53. For example, in The Art of Failure: Conrad's Fiction (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), Suresh Raval demonstrates his claim that criticism is a form of moral discourse through his precise analysis of the implications of Razumov's broken pact with Haldin and through his treatment of Razumov's confession, but he does not discuss the ethical import of lies in the novel. Similarly, since Steve Ressler is a self-consciously ethical critic, whose Joseph Conrad: Consciousness and Integrity (New York: New York University Press, 1988) offers a brilliant and thorough moral analysis of Razumov's character, it is surprising that he says so little about lying. Andrzej Busza, ``Rhetoric and Ideology in Conrad's Under Western Eyes,'' in Norman Sherry, ed., Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 111±12. Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), xi. Joseph Conrad, `Àn Outpost of Progress,'' in Samuel Hynes, ed., The Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad (New York: Eccho, 1991), 40. See Robert Kimbrough's note in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988), 37±38. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York: Penguin, 1985), 63. As Steve Ressler has pointed out, the relation between reputation and identity is a persistent concern in Conrad. Marlow (in Heart of Darkness), Jim, and Nostromo, as well as Razumov, ®nd their characters shaped by the ironic fact that `àn ascription of in¯ated virtue can have consequences as grave as unmerited disrepute'' ( Joseph Conrad 102). As Stanley Cavell has maintained, a promise-like commitment can exist without the explicit, ritual words `Ì promise.'' If too much emphasis is placed on utterances beginning with those words, we risk taking our ordinary commitments too lightly. See Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 298. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (New York: Penguin, 1986), 94. See Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment (New York: Edward Arnold, 1992), 236±59. Bruce Henricksen, Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 145. Lisa Rado associates the act of walking through the phantom of Haldin with Razumov's misguided attempts to make order out of thin air, to


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cling to dead Enlightenment ideals (``Walking Through Phantoms'' 85, 86). But it is not clear what this reading of the image of the phantom has to do with Haldin unless it accepts that he is nothing more than an abstract representative of chaos; to do so is to repeat Razumov's denial of the reality of the other ± and to deny the responsibility that such reality entails. Hannah Arendt, ``Lying in Politics,'' in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969), 5. In his critical biography of Conrad, John Batchelor discusses the ``terrible moral stress'' Conrad experienced during the composition of Under Western Eyes when dredging up painful memories of family and childhood in political exile in Russia. A possible source for the political betrayal in the novel's plot could be the story of Conrad's Uncle Stefan's death, told by Tadeusz Bobrowski in The Bobrowski Memoirs. See Batchelor's The Life of Joseph Conrad (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 18±19, 171. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (New York: Penguin, 1983), 88. Avrom Fleishman, Conrad's Politics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 239. For discussion of the epigraph and the strength of Nathalie's character, see also Batchelor, The Life 183; Ressler, Joseph Conrad 137±38; Hay, `Ùnder Western Eyes'' 133. Rado dissents from this critical estimate of Nathalie, noting (with some justice) that in her rejection of Razumov at the end of the novel Nathalie does not live up to her ideals. See Rado, ``Walking Through Phantoms'' 92, 96. Thomas J. Cousineau's psychoanalytic reading of Razumov's decision to confess (``The Ambiguity of Razumov's Confession in Under Western Eyes,'' Conradiana 18 [1986]: 27±40) strikes me as unfairly judgmental of a very human attraction to the spirit of love and forgiveness that Nathalie represents. For Cousineau, the novel constructs an impossible choice between viewing the confession as an act of ``moral independence'' or of regression to `àn infantile state of peace'' (36). Another way to look at the confession is to see that despite Razumov's ®erce desire for independence, he also acknowledges that love is what makes it possible for him to speak the truth; once he confesses, his condition of need is tragic but not pathetic. Others care for him, and his life is at last interdependent and his moral integrity restored. Mark Wollaeger persuasively demonstrates this point in his Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990): ``Skepticism may dissolve the grounds for establishing the reality of others, but in the consequent emptiness anxieties about agency restore the presence of others in the fear of their malign in¯uence'' (190). This is an accurate way of characterizing Razumov's skepticism, though the novel's

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ending reestablishes the protagonist's belief in agency through his conviction that Nathalie exerts a positive ethical in¯uence. 23 David Nyberg, The Varnished Truth: Truth Telling and Deceiving in Ordinary Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7. 24 Henricksen nicely captures the paradox: ``Razumov casts off his monologizing deafness; like Oedipus seeing in his blindness, he now converses in his deafness'' (Nomadic Voices 158).

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Index

Sartor Resartus, 25±7, 29, 30, 146 n. 15 Casardi, Anthony, 18, 144 n. 24 Casey, Janet Galligani, 149 nn. 2 and 6, 150 n. 16 Cavell, Stanley, 139, 162 n. 12 Chrisman, Laura, 51, 52 Christ, Carol, 148 n. 25 Christian morality, 12, 21±2, 25, 26, 28, 30, 33, 34, 73, 138 Coles, Robert, 114 Conrad, Joseph, 3, 13, 17±19, 33, 41, 115, 139 Heart of Darkness, 14, 116, 117, 122 Lord Jim, 14, 105, 162 n. 11 Nostromo, 127, 162 n. 11 `Àn Outpost of Progress,'' 116 Secret Agent, The, 120±1 Under Western Eyes, 17, 18, 114±15, 116, 117±36, 140, 161 n. 4, 162±3 n. 16, 163 nn. 18, 20, and 21, 162 nn. 5 and 11, 163±4 n. 22 Cousineau, Thomas J., 163 n. 21 cross-dressing, 57, 152 n. 26 Culler, A. Dwight, 23, 26, 37, 38, 40, 145 n. 8 Cumming, Robert Denoon, 22±4, 145 n. 6 Cunningham, Gail, 150 n. 12, 153 n. 32

Abbs, Peter, 147 n. 21 Adams, James Eli, 38, 102 aestheticism, 36, 38 49, 94, 95±8, 105, 107, 159 n. 15 agency, 10, 13±16, 19, 28, 29, 30±3, 35±8, 61, 73, 76, 80, 81, 83, 94, 115, 120, 136, 138, 140, 153 n. 30, 157 n. 29, 159 n. 14, 163±4 n. 22 alterity, 97, 98±111, 140 ancestry, 71, 80, 85; see also heredity Ardis, Ann, 58, 153 n. 28 Aristotelian ethics, 11, 21, 47, 95, 114, 135 Arnold, Matthew, 26 Austin, J. L., 10, 116 Baier, Annette, 116±17, 119 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 124±5 Batchelor, John, 163 nn. 18 and 20 Bauman, Zygmunt, 9 Beer, Gillian, 32, 72, 79, 156 n. 21, 158 n. 31 Bell, Millicent, 158 Benhabib, Seyla, 6, 143 n. 15 Berger, Sheila, 36, 152 n. 23 Berkman, Joyce Avrech, 53 Blum, Lawrence, 142±3 n. 13 Bobrowski, Tadeusz, 163 n. 18 Bok, Sissela, 125 Booth, Wayne, 1±2, 114, 114 n. 3, 141 n. 5, 161 n. 25 Boumelha, Penny, 48, 152 n. 24 Brooks, Peter, 74, 75±6 Browning, Robert, 36, 148 n. 25 Bullen, J. B., 36 Busza, Andrzej, 116, 120 Byronic hero, 25

Daleski, H. M., 36, 83 Danahay, Martin, 34, 145 n. 10, 146 n. 15 Darwinism, 12, 32, 33, 51; see also evolution deconstruction, 141 n. 4 degeneration, 37, 38 Deigh, John, 30±1 deontological morality, 27±8, 32, 39, 93 determinism, 20, 25, 27, 36 Dowling, Linda, 97, 160 n. 19

Carlyle, Thomas, 35

173

174 Eagleton, Terry, 7, 32, 42, 94, 159 n. 15, 161 n. 24 Egerton, George, 153 n. 28 Eldridge, Richard, 114 Eliot, George, 72 Adam Bede, 146 n. 16 Daniel Deronda, 154 n. 35 Eliot, T. S., 41, 148 n. 30 epistemology, 31, 33, 75 Erikson, Erik, 48 evolution, 30, 31, 32, 33, 38, 79, 150 n. 13 feminist ethics, 4±7 Fernando, Lloyd, 149 n. 2, 154 n. 35 Fleishman, Avrom, 136 ¯irtation, 49, 56±61 formalism, 1±2 Foucault, Michel, 46, 145 n. 10 Freedman, Jonathan, 16, 94, 160±1 n. 21 Freud, Sigmund, 30±1, 146±7 n. 19 Gallagher, Catherine, 27, 144 n. 26 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 147 n. 21 Gilligan, Carol, 5, 15, 48, 148 n. 28 Gilmartin, Sophie, 80, 85, 157 n. 29 Gissing, George, 149 n. 2 Goleman, Daniel, 47 Goode, John, 55, 149 n. 2, 152 n. 26, 154 n. 33 Gosse, Edmund Father and Son, 32±6, 142 n. 10, 145 n. 10, 147 n. 21 Gosse, Philip, 32±6 Omphalos, 35 Grand, Sarah, 14, 15, 44, 49, 50, 153 n. 31 Heavenly Twins, The, 45, 46, 57±61, 61±3, 152 n. 25 Green, Laura, 153 n. 29 Hardy, Thomas, 3, 13, 15, 18, 33, 36±8, 48, 49, 63, 64±5, 66, 91±2, 152 n. 23, 155±6 n. 17, 157 n. 28 Far from the Madding Crowd, 80 ``Fiddler of the Reels,'' 161 n. 23 Jude the Obscure, 50, 53, 54±7, 57±9, 60±1, 61±3, 76, 149 n. 2, 150 n. 12, 152 nn. 24 and 25, 153 nn. 26, 32, and 33, 156 n. 19 Laodicean, A, 16

Index Mayor of Casterbridge, The, 16, 67±8, 70, 71, 82, 86±91, 158 n. 31 Return of the Native, The, 80, 152 n. 24, 158 n. 31 Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 16, 54, 70, 71, 72, 80, 82±6, 152 n. 24, 157 nn. 26 and 28 Hare, R. M., 10 Harpham, Geoffrey, 1±2 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 123 Hay, Eloise Knapp, 161±2 n. 4, 163 n. 20 ``Hedonism, New,'' 40 Heidegger, Martin, 95 Held, Virginia, 5 Henricksen, Bruce, 124, 164 n. 24 heredity, 37, 38 history and ethics, 20±43 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 37 Hume, David, 116, 117 Husserl, Edmund, 95, 101, 106±7 Ian, Marcia, 100, 104 impressionism, 36, 38 Ingham, Patricia, 45, 55 James, Henry, 8±9, 16, 18, 93, 139 Ambassadors, The, 16, 93±4, 95±6, 97±8, 99, 100±1, 104±6, 109±10, 111±13, 160 n. 20, 160±1 n. 21 Golden Bowl, The, 8±9 James, William, 33, 35, 147 n. 24 Jameson, Fredric, 144 n. 24 Joyce, James, 41 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 16, 66, 95, 107, 159 nn. 12 and 15 Keats, John, 103 negative capability, 96 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 48 Kucich, John, 15, 17, 19, 48±9, 53, 54 language and ethics, 8, 97, 115, 123±5, 136, 151 n. 18, 160 n. 19; see also speech acts Lawrence, D. H., 41 Ledger, Sally, 45, 46, 149 n. 6, 150 n. 13 Leighton, Angela, 151 n. 17 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 93, 95±8, 99, 103, 108, 109, 112, 139

Index ``liberal ironists,'' 11±12; see also Rorty, Richard Lockridge, Laurence, 141 n. 7 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 7, 10±11, 20, 21±4, 31, 39±43, 143 n. 18, 144 n. 3 Magnum, Teresa, 44, 152 n. 25, 153±4 nn. 33 and 34, 156 n. 19 Marcel, Gabriel, 114 McCracken, Scott, 153 n. 30 melodrama, 74±6, 155±6 n. 17, 157 n. 26 Mill, John Stuart, 21±4, 29, 30, 31, 34, 42, 55, 145 n. 6, 147 n. 24, 148 n. 25 Autobiography, 55, 145 n. 10, 146 n. 15, 147 n. 21 On Liberty, 29, 30 Miller, J. Hillis, 157 nn. 23 and 30 modernism, 41 Montaigne, Michel de, 114 moral luck, 16, 64±92 ``moral remainders,'' 10, 11; see also Walker, Margaret Urban Murdoch, Iris, 142±3 n. 13 Nabokov, Vladimir, 8 Nagel, Thomas, 16, 64, 66, 67±8 naturalism, 37 ``New Man,'' 152 n. 25 ``New Woman,''15, 18, 33, 42, 44±63, 74, 98, 137±8, 149 nn. 2 and 6, 150 nn. 12 and 13, 151 n. 17, 152 n. 25, 153 n. 26, 153 nn. 30 and 32, 154 nn. 34 and 35, 160 n. 18 Newton, Adam Zachary, 2, 112±13, 141 n. 4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 157 n. 30 Nussbaum, Martha, 1±3, 4±7, 8±9, 10, 11, 17, 42, 67, 95, 96, 97, 100, 114±15, 141 n. 5, 142 n. 11, 143 n. 21, 144 n. 3, 149±50 n. 9, 159 nn. 12 and 16, 161 n. 24 Nyberg, David, 131 Orwell, George, 8 Owen, Robert, 27, 29 Pater, Walter, 33, 36, 38 Marius the Epicurean, 97 Phillips, Adam, 44, 60

175 Posnock, Ross, 95, 97, 104 postmodernism and ethics, 5, 9, 13, 93, 95 Pound, Ezra, 41 Proust, Marcel, 112 Pykett, Lyn, 46±7, 58, 153 n. 28 Rado, Lisa, 115, 129, 162 n. 16, 163 n. 20 Raval, Suresh, 165 n. 5 Reed, John, 25, 36 religious faith, 34±5 Rescher, Nicholas, 65±6, 68 Ressler, Steve, 162 nn. 5 and 11, 163 n. 20 Ricoeur, Paul, 16, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 106, 107, 139 Rorty, Richard, 8, 11±12, 96 Rossetti, Christina, 151 n. 17 Saint-Simonians, 22, 42, 145 n. 6 Scheick, William, 3, 155 n. 16 Schmidtz, David, 147±8 n. 24 Schreiner, Olive, 12, 13, 14, 15, 49, 149 n. 2, 150 n. 13, 153 n. 30 ``Buddhist Priest's Wife, The,'' 50±3, 62 From Man to Man, 150 n. 16 Story of an African Farm, 12, 45, 57±61, 61±3, 152 n. 25, 153 n. 32, 154 n. 35 Woman and Labour, 151 n. 19 self-fashioning, 32, 38, 41 sensation novel, 47 separate spheres, 48, 49, 137±8 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 29, 79, 93, 101 Shklar, Judith, 11 Shaw, George Bernard, 153 n. 31 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 77, 78 Showalter, Elaine, 142 n. 9, 156 n. 19 Siebers, Tobin, 1, 12, 107, 114, 141 n. 5, 142 n. 11, 144 n. 3 speech acts, 116±17 promising, 117±24, 162 n. 12 lying, 124±31, 162 n. 5 Spencer, Herbert, 102, 150 n. 13 Stokes, John, 40, 142 n. 8 Stubbs, Patricia, 46 Stut®eld, Hugh, 59±60 subjectivism, 5, 6±7, 36

176 Taylor, Charles, 28, 39±43, 144 n. 3, 145 n. 8, 146±7 n. 19, 150 n. 13, 155 n. 17 Taylor, Harriet, 146 n. 15 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 36 Locksley Hall, 26 Utilitarianism, 1, 26, 40 Walker, Margaret Urban, 5, 8, 9±10, 69±70, 84, 96 Walker, Pierre, 158 n. 6, 159 n. 14 Watt, Ian, 41, 148 n. 30

Index Wells, H. G., 3 Widdowson, Peter, 74, 156 nn. 18 and 20 Wilde, Oscar, 17±19, 93, 139, 161 n. 22 ``Decay of Lying, The,'' 74, 97 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 13, 16, 18, 40, 93±4, 95, 97, 98, 99±104, 107±13, 139 Williams, Bernard, 1, 16, 64, 69, 158 n. 32 Winterson, Jeanette, 64 Wollaeger, Mark, 163 n. 22 Woolf, Virginia, 18, 64±5 Wordsworth, William, 55, 146 n. 16

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914

Narrative Ethics

The English Novel and Prose Narrative (Literary Studies (Edinburgh Paperback))

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel

The English Novel In History 1840-95 (Novel in History)

Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Chaucer Studies)

The English Novel In History: 1950-1995

Reading the Novel in English 1950 - 2000

Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics

MASTERS OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse (Studies in Narrative)

The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel

Ancient Narrative: Supplementum 1 Space in the Ancient Novel

Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Narrative as rhetoric: technique, audiences, ethics, ideology

Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English: A Novel

Poetry and Narrative in Performance

Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance (Greek Culture in the Roman World)

Body, Nation, and Narrative in the Americas

Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel

The Dialogics of Dissent in the English Novel

Beyond Narrative Coherence (Studies in Narrative)

The English Novel in History 1700-1780 (The Novel in History)

The English Novel in History 1895-1920 (The Novel in History)

The Specialist in Ethics

The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel

Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas

The art of alibi: English law courts and the novel

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914

Narrative Ethics

The English Novel and Prose Narrative (Literary Studies (Edinburgh Paperback))

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel

The English Novel In History 1840-95 (Novel in History)

Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Chaucer Studies)

The English Novel In History: 1950-1995

Reading the Novel in English 1950 - 2000

Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics

MASTERS OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse (Studies in Narrative)

The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel

Ancient Narrative: Supplementum 1 Space in the Ancient Novel

Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Narrative as rhetoric: technique, audiences, ethics, ideology

Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English: A Novel

Poetry and Narrative in Performance

Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance (Greek Culture in the Roman World)

Body, Nation, and Narrative in the Americas

Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel

The Dialogics of Dissent in the English Novel

Beyond Narrative Coherence (Studies in Narrative)

The English Novel in History 1700-1780 (The Novel in History)

The English Novel in History 1895-1920 (The Novel in History)

The Specialist in Ethics

The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel

Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas

The art of alibi: English law courts and the novel

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