The Realist Novel (Approaching Literature)

Approaching Literature

The Realist Novel edited by Dennis Walder

in association with The Open University

Copyright © 1995 The Open University First published 1995 by Routledge in association with The Open University 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data applied for ISBN 0-203-99306-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0 415 13571 0 hardback ISBN 0 415 13572 9 paperback A210vol1i1.1 1.1

Contents

Preface

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CHAPTER ONE

The genre approach DENNIS WALDER

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CHAPTER TWO

Reading Pride and Prejudice PAM MORRIS

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Reading Frankenstein RICHARD ALLEN

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Part One

CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

The novel and society DENNIS WALDERSTEPHEN REGANPAM MORRISRICHARD ALLEN

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Reading Great Expectations DENNIS WALDER

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Reading Fathers and Sons DENNIS WALDERGLYN TURTONPAM MORRIS

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Can realist novels survive? RICHARD ALLENDENNIS WALDER

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Realism and romance ARNOLD KETTLE

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Realism and the novel form IAN WATT

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Jane Austen and the war of ideas MARILYN BUTLER

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The English novel RAYMOND WILLIAMS

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Part Two

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The realistic imagination GEORGE LEVINE

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On Great Expectations DOROTHY VAN GHENT

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Culture and imperialism EDWARD SAID

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The reality effect ROLAND BARTHES

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Towards a methodology for the study of the novel MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgements

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Index

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Preface

This book is the first of a four-volume series, which has been designed to offer a range of different but current approaches to the study of literature. The emphasis throughout is upon practice, not theory. The idea is that the reader will learn about a specific approach by seeing it applied to a selection of texts. Of course, it is important to say something about the origins and assumptions of an approach, but the main focus will be on how helpful it is to study texts in a particular way. By this we mean how much it will enable us to add to our understanding and pleasure in reading. You may—and we hope you will— come to question the usefulness and value of the different approaches, but to find out what each has to offer, you need to adopt it for yourself. The approach we use in this book is both ancient and familiar. It involves asking the question: what kind of work is this? In other words, to what literary type or genre does a particular text or piece of writing belong? Literary genres are classes of literature, grouped according to method or subject. For example, a piece of writing may be a poem, a play or a novel and if it is, say, a novel, it may be one of several kinds of novel. Genres can be interpreted through their formal characteristics, or in terms of their historical context, or both. In this book, we emphasize the historical dimension. This seemed to us most appropriate when dealing with the realist novel, because it was in a specific historical period—the first half of the nineteenth century—that this type of writing became one of the dominant and most popular forms of English literature. We have had to be very selective and we have decided to focus upon detailed ‘readings’ of just four novels from the period, although you will find frequent reference made to other, related novels. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1) are ‘classic’, accessible and entertaining examples of the development of the realist form in fiction. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a provocative counter-example in which realist strategies are employed to render a story of myth and horror. Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), one of the greatest Russian novels, shows how realism was a European and not merely an English phenomenon. All the novels are available in paperback, and we have indicated the editions that we have found most useful, accurate and easily obtainable.

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In the first part of the book, the chapters on the novels are interwoven with chapters of a more general nature. Where appropriate, further reading sections have been included to indicate where to look for more information if you have time. The second part of the book contains a number of extracts from critical writings, which are used in the discussions with the aim of developing understanding of the issues raised and giving an idea of the origins of those issues. The texts have been chosen to provide a ‘taste’ of some of the most influential critical material. The authors would like to thank their Open University colleagues for helpful discussion and comment, in particular Nora Tomlinson, who is a tutor assessor, and the course external assessor Judie Newman. The course manager Julie Dickens helped to make the book possible on time, and the editors Julie Bennett and Peter Wright helped to make it intelligible. Dennis Walder

Dennis Walder is Senior Lecturer and Head of Literature at the Open University Richard Allen is Staff Tutor and Senior Lecturer at the Open University Pam Morris is Reader in English at Liverpool John Moores University Stephen Regan is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University Glyn Turton is Head of Humanities at Chester College of Higher Education

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Part One

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Chapter One The genre approach by Dennis Walder

Introduction Approaching literature through study of its genres has been fundamental to literary criticism in the European languages since Aristotle’s Poetics in the fourth century BC. What Aristotle did was, first, to gather as many examples of a given literary phenomenon as possible and then, by observing resemblances, differences and alliances, to extract from these examples a few general descriptive principles. This is the approach he used, for instance, when preparing to analyse tragedy. Tragedy, he said, was a serious, dramatic representation of an important human action, arousing pity and fear so as to purge those emotions. Tragedies had unity (beginning, middle and end), plots and characters. The hero was a person of significance who was flawed…and so the analysis proceeded. This way of defining a type of literary work on the basis of its characteristic features has been employed throughout the history of western literature from Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and then to our own time. It is an approach that has always had its followers, although it has varied in impact and acceptance. In eighteenth-century Europe, for instance, it was common to think of literature as being modelled on the ‘classical’ genres of Greece and Rome, such as tragedy or epic. ‘Imitating’ earlier works was considered a high endeavour. There was a hierarchy of literary forms, and the best way of expressing yourself was to find the one most suitable for what you had to say. This view was summed up in what was called ‘decorum’. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a contrary view developed, stressing the original and individual in creative works rather than their closeness to earlier models. Nowadays most people would probably say that what is most important is the individual encounter with a particular work, rather than its classification. Nevertheless, literary works are still classified for particular purposes, by or on academic syllabuses, and there have always been people who believe in approaching works of literature (or art) in terms of their shared features. In his widely influential Anatomy of Criticism (1957) the critic Northrop Frye set out to establish a comprehensive and systematic account of all literature in terms of

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what he called genre archetypes. Other critics, such as Wayne Booth (in The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961), have applied this approach to a single genre, analysing its typical features in great detail. More recently, a general interest in genre has reasserted itself as a way of understanding the generation of meaning through the way one literary text is like or relates to others. Those who use the term nowadays usually do so to indicate that in literature broad forms of expression can be identified, and that it is worth looking at particular works in relation to these broad forms, and each other. All this can appear rather complicated, but two trends in thinking about literary genres may be distinguished. 1 The idea that literary genres are fixed or transcendent types which stay the same, and to which individual works may or should correspond. 2 The idea that literary genres change through time, and are the product of particular social and historical processes. In this book, the authors will be referring to both of these trends, but we believe that it is only of limited use to classify a given text without also considering the process by which it came into being. For us, literary genres are not timeless essences, but emerge through the circulation of ideas and practices within a specific culture. Taking into account genre is one important way of thinking about the meaning and interest of literary texts. The genre we consider here is realist prose fiction, which may be said to have become the dominant literary form in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. The examples chosen to focus on all come from that place and time, and have been carefully selected to demonstrate just how helpful it can be to read them in terms of their defining features. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1) are well-known, ‘classic’ examples of realist prose fiction; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) offers a challenge to what may appear to define the form; and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) shows how far the realist ‘aesthetic’ or artistic approach became the dominant mode beyond the merely English employment of its conventions. The point of examining these texts closely is to ensure that our generalizations are always well grounded. Far too much of the study of literature nowadays has moved onto a plane that excludes the works themselves, in all their complexity and seductive particularity. Rules and expectations First, as you may already have protested, who apart from professional critics and other specialists classifies literary texts? The immediate answer is that most, if not all, of us do on some level, and for good reason too. To allow me to prove this to you, please try the following exercise. What kind of literature would you say the passage below belongs to?

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The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a 65-year-old spinster of the parish of St Matthew’s in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged 10, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared. This unlikely pair of companions had left Miss Wharton’s flat in Crowhurst Gardens just before half past eight to walk the half-mile stretch of the Grand Union Canal to St Matthew’s church. Here Miss Wharton, as was her custom each Wednesday and Friday, would weed out the dead flowers from the vase in front of the statue of the Virgin, scrape the wax and candle stubs from the brass holders, dust the two rows of chairs in the Lady Chapel, which would be adequate for the small congregation expected at that morning’s early Mass, and make everything ready for the arrival at nine twenty of Father Barnes. Discussion If you guessed that this extract is from a detective novel, you were right. You might also have said ‘crime novel’ or ‘mystery novel’, with which it shares many features, although if you had been able to read on to the start of the next chapter, you would have had ‘detective novel’ confirmed: ‘As soon as he had left the Commissioner’s office and was back in his own room Commander Adam Dalgliesh rang Chief Inspector John Massingham.’ The passage is, in fact, the opening paragraph of A Taste for Death (1986) by the well-known writer of detective fiction, P.D.James. Detective novels are one of the most popular kinds or genres of literature that you are likely to encounter today, and it is precisely (although not exclusively) the features that are indispensable to the genre that have made it so popular. Readers know what to expect and want more of what they read. ■ Indispensable to the detective genre are such features as: a crime, usually murder; a plausible setting, including a detailed and specific account of time and place; and, of course, a detective, often a professional, who has special intuitive and/or deductive powers. Did you perhaps notice that the passage begins like an official report—‘Miss Emily Wharton, a 65-year-old spinster of the parish of St Matthew’s in Paddington, London’—and then makes a joke of this, with ‘Darren Wilkes…of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared’? This sort of playfulness is characteristic of the writing of P.D.James, and is more common to English than American detective novels. It is not necessary to the genre; it is a variation that adds to its appeal. Many English detective novels also have a religious setting—aptly enough, since they deal with death and the defeat of evil. An even more common feature is suggested by the ‘unlikely pair of companions’, Emily Wharton and Darren Wilkes: the crime and its resolution tend to bring into contact people from widely different classes or areas of society. Of course, if you had first picked up the book in question, the cover and format would have told you what kind of literature to expect. The cover (Figure 1) depicts a little statue of a monk or saint floating above a bloodstained sheet over what appears to be a body, and the ‘blurb’ on the back offers a summary of the plot

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without giving away ‘whodunit’. You might have found it in the ‘detective fiction’ or ‘crime’ section of a library or bookshop, while looking for an enticing title by an author you had heard of, or seen reviewed. The cover, the ‘blurb’, the library or bookshop classification are all what are known as cultural indicators of the book’s genre. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that there are also clues in the way a book is written that suggest the genre to expect. Why is this important? On one level, it does not seem to matter at all and on another, it matters a lot. It does not seem to matter because reading is so much a private, unreflecting process, especially reading a story of this kind, which we are likely to want to read fairly fast in order to find out what happens next. This already begins to show why it does matter that we ‘know’ what kind of text we are dealing with. (I have placed the word ‘know’ in quotes, because I do not mean to say that we can fully articulate what it is that we know in this case.) It matters because we would not want to read any further if we did not expect to discover who has been killed, how they were killed, why they are in the church, what the connection is between the 65-year-old spinster and the boy, and so on. We read literary works with certain expectations, and it is a crucial part of the reason we read, and the pleasure we obtain, that those expectations are satisfied. The detective novel demonstrates this fact very clearly, because it is a relatively strict literary genre. By strict I mean that it can be seen to have clear and definable rules. Some of the most famous practitioners have themselves defined these rules. The American writer Raymond Chandler, creator of the private detective Philip Marlowe, listed ‘ten commandments for the detective novel’ as follows. 1 It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement. 2 It must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection. 3 It must be realistic in character, setting, and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world. 4 It must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element; i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading. 5 It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes. 6 It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader. 7 The solution must seem inevitable once revealed. 8 It must not try to do everything at once. If it is a puzzle story operating in a rather cool, reasonable atmosphere, it cannot also be a violent adventure or passionate romance. 9 It must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law…if the detective fails to resolve the consequences of the crime, the story is an unresolved chord and leaves irritation behind it. 10 It must be honest with the reader. (Quoted in Parsons, The Book of Literary Lists, 1986, p.129)

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Figure 1 Cover designed by Irene Von Treskow for the paperback edition of P.D.James, A Taste for Death, 1986 Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

It is typical of the stricter literary genres (the sonnet is another) that they involve rules like this, which describe, or even prescribe, how they should be written. If you have read detective novels, you should be able to confirm that these are some of the essential ingredients. Indeed, you should be able to do so even if you have not read any such novels, but have seen film or television detective stories, such as Farewell, My Lovely (1975), based on Chandler’s novel (1940) of the same name, or the television versions of P.D.James’s novels. Another way of expressing this is to say that we are familiar with the ‘tradition’ of the detective story. Like every genre, the detective novel has its own literary tradition, which has emerged over time. According to Nicholas Parsons, P.D.James’s choice of the ‘six greatest masters or mistresses of the detective genre’ is Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.Sayers and Margery Allingham, whose works span the nineteenth and

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twentieth centuries (ibid., pp.48–9). Each of us may have a different list. I would have mentioned Dickens, whose Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1853) has to solve two murders, and who appears earlier than Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff, in The Moonstone (1868), although not before Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, in ‘The murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), probably the first modern detective story. Whether or not you are familiar with any of these works, you can read and enjoy P.D.James insofar as the expectations set up by her novels meet to a sufficient degree your own personal experience (including reading books and watching television) and attitudes. It will enrich your reading to read other examples of the genre, and if you were going to study the detective novel, you would have to read other examples in order to understand better what they set out to do, and how far they seem to you to achieve their ends. I would like to turn again to Chandler’s ‘ten commandments’. Which are the most important elements for the reader of the detective novel? Are there elements that are important for novels in general? Discussion Chandler’s rules operate on two levels. First, there are the specific elements that seem important for the form of detective novels, that is, the crime-puzzle-solution elements. Secondly, there are the more general elements: credibility, being ‘realistic in character, setting, and atmosphere’, and having a ‘sound story value’. The emphasis upon uniformity, keeping to the rules of this genre and not straying into another, is itself typical of the detective novel, as I have already suggested. Overall, what strikes me as most important is Chandler’s stress upon the writer’s relationship with the reader. This is really the key to the whole question of defining the genre of a literary work. It could be argued that we know what detective novels do, even if we have never read one, because they draw upon assumptions and expectations we have built up over a long time, going back to when we first learned to read, indeed learned our language. It is not by coming across all the possible uses of the language that we become fluent speakers of it, but by incorporating (nobody is quite sure how) its rules, as a result of experiencing a certain, limited amount of it. It is the same with the ‘languages’ of literary forms: on the basis of a certain experience of, say, novels, we learn what to expect when we pick up a particular book described as a novel. Just as being a fluent speaker of English does not mean being fluent in all the (geographically and historically) different varieties of English that exist, so being an experienced reader does not mean knowing all the different varieties of reading that exist. What we do, when encountering a new or unfamiliar variety of language use, is try to relate it to what we already know. The same process of ‘normalizing’, or ‘recuperation’ as it is sometimes called, applies to reading texts. The excitement and interest that they generate is the result of a complex mixture of recognition and novelty. As individuals we are all different, but as readers (and as writers) we have a

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lot in common. We are conditioned to read in certain ways, which can be identified and studied— even changed. ■ I have been talking about the detective novel as an example of a literary genre. This has taken me into discussing larger issues. One of the difficulties in using the idea of genre is that specific and general uses are sometimes muddled: the detective novel is a genre, but so is the novel itself. We can avoid possible confusion by using the term ‘sub-genre’ for the detective novel. There are also the genres of the past, such as tragedy and epic, which can add to the confusion if we are not careful. These are sometimes referred to as the ‘traditional’ genres. Then there is the fact that some genres are not confined to literary production. Detective fiction is one example of this, but there are many others, such as science fiction or the western, which may be found in film and television. Genre categories are often rather loosely defined, and they tend to overlap. Indeed, some of the greatest literary works in terms of one level of genre classification—such as drama—are ‘mixed’ in terms of another. Shakespeare’s ‘problem’ plays, for example, were so called because they were strictly neither tragedies nor comedies, but a compelling mixture of both. It is worth trying to establish some basic genre categories to work with and I suggest the following classification, which proceeds roughly historically. 1 Traditional genre categories (for example, tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric, pastoral, satire). 2 Genre as a general kind of literary production (for example, novel/fiction, poem/ poetry, play/drama). 3 Sub-genre as a more specific kind of literary production (for example, detective novel, Gothic novel, Bildungsroman (apprenticeship or education novel), ode, sonnet, dramatic monologue, social comedy, Restoration play, naturalist drama). These are not hard-and-fast, scientific definitions, with objective validity. They are literary categories that change according to use and context over time. This is especially clear from the way traditional genre categories continue to be used: terms such as comedy or tragedy are often used in the third as well as the first category. Perhaps the most familiar and reliable usage is the second category, to divide up fiction, poetry and drama, which is how the term is most commonly used nowadays for the study of literature. The aim here is to consider the novel, which, as its name suggests, was thought of from the start as something new, and having to do with news. This was in the eighteenth century, when poetry and drama were already ancient, and the novel was thought of as having more concern with everyday life than other, earlier genres. In other words, it was ‘realistic’—an idea that is still with us, although, as we shall see, things are not quite so straightforward as this. To start with, there are so many different kinds of novel, the genre is so varied, rich and popular, that, as the critic Raymond Williams has remarked, ‘it is almost a literature in itself (The Long

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Revolution, 1965 edn, p.304). Yet most of us rely upon at least a basic idea of what we expect to find when we pick up a novel to read. What is a novel? In discussing the detective novel, I suggested that Chandler’s emphasis upon character, story and credibility or realism was important for thinking about the novel in general. If we collect these elements together, we can formulate at least one broad definition of the novel: A fictitious prose narrative of considerable length, in which characters and actions representative of real life are portrayed in a plot of more or less complexity. This is a definition offered by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. It would probably cover most of the examples that immediately come to mind, but as soon as you pursue it, you find that as well as offering answers it raises questions. Let us consider the key terms of the definition. Fictitious I have already used the term ‘fiction’ as an alternative to ‘novel’, and this is one way of classifying the novel. Novels are fictions, or may be called fictitious, because they depict imaginary characters and actions. However, we know that parts of Dickens’s Great Expectations were drawn from the author’s own life, and that other novels, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) were suggested by and even based on real events. On the other hand, Shelley’s Frankenstein was derived from a dream or nightmare, and could hardly have happened to somebody in real life. Some novels, therefore, seem to be more or less fictitious than others. Is there a conflict here with the assertion in our definition of the novel that characters and actions are ‘representative of real life? We will be coming back to this issue, which is fascinating, large and complex. Prose It is possible to find novels in verse, such as Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986), the idea for which came from Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1828–33), but most novels are written in prose, which helps to establish a sense of the genre’s access to recognizable, everyday existence. This is because prose is a form of language that does not draw attention to itself to the degree we expect of poetry, and so tends to be thought of as a more ‘transparent’ medium. As soon as you think about this, you will realize that it is a relative matter: the ‘transparency’ of novel writing is an illusion. Many nineteenth-century novels fostered the illusion and encouraged readers to forget they were reading an invented story by depicting characters learning that they had been led astray by reading fiction. Austen’s Catherine Morland, for example, in Northanger Abbey (1818), decides that ‘Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for’ (1990 edn, p.l60). There is an element of self-consciousness about this which has reached an extreme form in some

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modern novels, although it was anticipated by Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), a novel about the writing of a novel, in which the narrator discusses with the reader his progress (or lack of it) in telling his story. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979, trans. 1981) begins: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room’ (p.9). What such examples demonstrate, among other things, is the enormous flexibility of the prose medium, and the sense in which novelists are experimenters, seeking new ways of exploring, coming to terms with, even changing, human realities. They also show how, in doing so, novelists have been involved in defining for themselves what it is they are doing, usually in terms of other genres or sub-genres of writing, although in the case of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller with a side-swipe at another medium, television. Hence Austen’s implied attack upon ‘all Mrs Radcliffe’s works’, which represent a contemporary form or sub-genre of fiction called ‘Gothic’, to which we shall return. Before that Samuel Richardson referred to his novel Clarissa (1747–8) as ‘the History of a Young Lady’ (in a letter of 1752 quoted in Allott, Novelists on the Novel, 1965, p.41), rather than as a romance, although it was about a beautiful young girl becoming the victim of a heartless rake. The whole story is presented through letters, which is a sub-generic form that continues in Shelley’s Frankenstein and later, for example, in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983). Narrative Narration is the process of telling, and it helps to distinguish novels from plays, or drama, in which the action is directly presented rather than related. There are many narratives that are not novels, from films to murals, and it may seem simpler to talk of ‘story’. The trouble is that not only are there novels that lack story in the sense of a connected succession of events (in the twentieth century, some of the novels of Samuel Beckett, for example), but a systematic study of the elements of narration has developed, which draws on a much wider range of thought than can be included under the heading of ‘story’. Perhaps the point to remember is that even when novels appear to be dramatic or visual or in other ways non-narrative, they are nevertheless always being told. There is always a narrator, a narrative voice or source, even where there is what seems to be plain description, argument or statement. The famous opening of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice provides an example: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ This is not spoken by any identifiable character (although as we read on we realize it could have issued from Mr Bennet’s mind), but it is narrated. It is part of the whole complex of language making up the verbal world of the novel, and, as such, can be modified or contradicted by other Voices’ the reader will come across. How could a dramatic or film equivalent be presented? It would be impossible to have exactly the same effect. It is the multiplicity of voices that lends the novel its potential range and openness to competing or alternative interpretations. One critic whose name is inseparable from this view of the novel is Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). Bakhtin stressed the uniqueness of the novel as a genre in

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terms of its openness, and especially the way in which its incorporation of other voices, texts and styles has allowed it to reflect different understandings of the world through time. According to Bakhtin, these other voices are like languages, which are ‘realized’ in the novel, and which thereby make quite new connections and relationships available to readers for the first time in European culture. Length Novels must be longer than an anecdote or short story, but how long is ‘longer? Almost anything seems possible, and some novels have been immense. Clarissa, for instance, which appeared in eight volumes, was one of the earliest on a very large scale, running to more than a million words. In 1993, Seth’s A Suitable Boy, with over 700,000 words, created a publishing sensation, while proving that readers were still willing to buy (if not to read to the end) very long fictional works. It is not just a question of length, however. It is also a question of how much space seems necessary for the fulfilment of our expectations: a novel should engage us for long enough for us to feel it has dealt with its subject in some depth and complexity. This is not very precise, which is why there are borderline cases of narrative fictions which it is difficult to classify as either short stories or novels. For such works—Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) is a good example—we reserve the term ‘novella’. This is an Italian word that comes from the name for certain short prose narratives popular before the novel, for example, the hundred stories about relations between the sexes collected in Boccaccio’s Decameron (1358). Novelists themselves have used a variety of terms, including ‘novella’, ‘tale’, ‘story’, ‘romance’, to suggest concern with a single episode or state of affairs in a prose narrative shorter than a novel. Such terms are never finally fixed in meaning. They depend upon the changing perceptions of their subject within particular cultural practices. Characters Characterization is perhaps the most memorable and important aspect of novels. Most of us can recall characters from novels we have read over a long period of time more easily than the stories, or even their titles and authors: Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, Emma, David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Kim, Mrs Dalloway…the list seems endless. The importance of character to novelists may be gauged by the fact that all of these names happen also to be the titles of the novels in which they appear. As the author of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) herself declared: ‘I believe that all novels…deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose and undramatic, so rich, elastic and alive, has been evolved’ (Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1924, in Bowlby, A Woman’s Essays, 1992, pp.74–5). Virginia Woolf immediately went on to show that the representation of human beings in fiction can mean almost anything: ‘You see one thing in character, and I another. You say it means this, and I that. And when it comes to writing each makes a further selection on principles of his own’ (ibid.). Nevertheless, if you think of the novels that seem to you to be great novels, from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1862–9), she continued,

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if you think of these books, you do at once think of some character who has seemed to you so real (I do not by that mean so lifelike) that it has the power to make you think not merely of it itself, but of all sorts of things through its eyes…in all these novels all these great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise, they would not be novelists; but poets, historians, or pamphleteers. (Ibid., p.96) What do you think is the point of Woolf s parenthetical aside, ‘I do not by that mean so lifelike’? Discussion I think this touches on the paradox that, although we have to believe in the existence of characters while we read, it is a mistake to assume that they do, or have, or even could have existed. One example might be Frankenstein’s creature: nameless, sub-human, in what sense does he count as a character at all? Or, to take an even more extreme case, there is Gregor Samsa, in Franz Kafka’s fable Metamorphosis (1915), who discovers at the beginning of the story that he has turned into a beetle. Many novelists have angrily repudiated the suggestion that their characters are directly based on real people; equally many, often the same writers, have admitted that they derived their characters from contact with individuals they have met or known. Turgenev would insist that his characters were not invented, but discovered, and that the character of Bazarov (in Fathers and Sons) was derived from a country doctor encountered on a railway train: ‘the novelist was struck by the man’s rough, matter-of-fact, candid manner… It flashed upon [him] that here was a representative of a type, one which was to become known as the Nihilist’ (Yarmolinsky, ‘Fathers and Children’, 1959, in Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 1989 edn, p.253). If Bazarov’s character represents a ‘type’, then by definition that is drawn from more than one real-life person. This helps to remind us that novelists may use character to do more than represent human personality or psychology: it may be used to represent larger attitudes or beliefs, even to be symbolic. On the other hand, and no less important, characters can act as narrators or facilitators of the action. They may function to some degree in all of these ways, hence their importance to the genre. Character is not, therefore, a stable universal, but a form of representation that novelists have to use. For these reasons character is difficult to talk about technically or critically. ■ Action(s) I have just said that characters can facilitate action. Some theorists have reduced characters to no more than ‘actants’, or the agents of action. Of course, action implies an agent, and without action there would be no story, or narrative. What is important here, though, is that the term ‘action’ needs to be thought of broadly, as more than simply an external happening, an event in the social and physical world. Actions can be as much internal to a consciousness as external to it.

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It is a particular feature of some twentieth-century fiction to internalize the action, as in the works of D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Proust’s vast novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27, first translated as Remembrance of Things Past) does not dispense with action or event, but concentrates instead upon the apparently inconsequential—dipping a madeleine in tea, for example—as the focus of the bond between the past and the present in the mind that is the real subject. Another way of thinking about action or actions is as the events that, in the narrative, constitute the basic movement through time. An event is simply a change from one state of affairs to another; a succession of events we might call a story. E.M.Forster, in a witty little book on Aspects of the Novel (1927), preferred to stress the importance of character, but had to admit nonetheless that ‘“Yes—oh dear yes— the novel tells a story.”… That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist’ (1974 edn, p.17). The tone of regret is intentional: for Forster, the mere ‘narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence’ (ibid., p.18) had only one merit, that of making the audience want to know what happens next. Consumers of detective stories and other popular sub-genres that rely on this aspect of the novel may not feel quite so ready to disparage it. Moreover, it is arguable that Forster is in any case drawing a model of narration which, in the form he expresses it, rarely exists at all. It is hard to think of a story that is nothing more than a succession of events arranged in time; there is almost always some connecting element beyond that, some element of causality, and where there is not we supply it. Forster insists that in this case we are talking about ‘plot’. ‘“The king died and then the queen died” is a story’, says Forster; ‘“The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot’ (ibid., p.60). However, there is nothing to stop us reading into the first sentence the plot implied in the second. Representative of real life As readers, we expect novels to provide us with a special kind of access to real life. When we begin to read Dickens’s Great Expectations, for example, the novel seems to present us with a recognizable world, a world we can believe in. Read the extract from chapter I of the book below and think about how this is done. My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little

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stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine—who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle—I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouserpockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence. Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain… (1994 edn, p.3) Discussion The novel opens with someone telling us his name and how he came by it, and the fact that his parents and infant brothers are all dead. He then goes on to describe their tombstones, the churchyard and surrounding location by the river, and the occasion when he gained his ‘first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things…on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening’. By plunging us immediately into what seems to be one individual’s remembered experience of the world, the novel persuades us that this story is ‘real’. This is the common (and required) experience of novel readers: that we should come to believe in the characters and their story, even while knowing on some level that it is imaginary. It is also what makes us want to read on. There is a lot more to be said about this opening. For the moment I would simply like to point out that the setting of Great Expectations was familiar to Dickens from his childhood, and it was his custom to show friends round the Kent churchyard on which the scene is based, but they would see thirteen little gravestones lying there! (See Figure 2.) He had reduced the number to five for the novel, on the grounds that nobody would believe it if he gave the true number. What the critic Roland Barthes (1915–80) has called the ‘reality effect’ in fiction is created not by a literal copying of reality, but by the use of certain codes of communication to persuade us to accept the illusion of reality: by giving us details, literally ‘untrue’ as they are, such as that of the five graves. ■ The idea of art as an imitation of life goes back a long way—at least to Plato (Republic, Books 2, 3 and 10) and Aristotle, the latter of whom claimed that imitation (or mimesis) was a human instinct. According to his Poetics, it was the different manner of imitation or representation that distinguished different kinds of work. We can say that it is the particular way in which a novel operates that leads to it being commonly identified as realistic—although, yes, fictitious. Plot A plot is a series of connected events. The word seems to imply something made, or put together deliberately. As the dictionary definition of the novel says, plots can be more or less complex. Various distinctions have been proposed between action, story and plot. A group of literary theorists known as the Russian Formalists

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Figure 2 Gravestones in Cooling churchyard, Kent. Photo: David Sheppard.

(Russian Formalism flourished between 1817 and 1827) drew a distinction between fabula (story), defined as the skeletal incidents in the novel in their chronological order, and sjuzhet (plot), defined as the narrative presentation of these events in the novel, in whatever order. More recently, the French Structuralists (such as Barthes and Gérard Genette (b.1930)) have redefined the terms in various ways, calling ‘story’ histoire and ‘plot’ discours. We should think of action, story and plot as a continuum, without trying to draw too hard and fast a line between the most minimal happening in a narrative and the most complex or involved structuring of

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it. Perhaps we should keep the useful distinction made by Forster between the story, as a kind of summary in chronological form of what happens in a novel, and the plot, as the actual succession of events, however they are organized. Where the more recent theorists have made great advances has been in developing terms and concepts for analysing with great subtlety the ways in which ordering can be managed, especially how and why the plotting or structuring of a novel deviates from the merely temporal succession of its constituent events. I have been listing the different elements in our definition of the novel in this way for convenience, as a kind of scaffolding, to enable us to discuss the novel by highlighting some of its most obvious and familiar features. I do not want to suggest that these are the only categories that may be useful. For example, I have not mentioned ‘theme’, ‘structure’, ‘setting’ or ‘point of view’. These categories are best developed later, once we have a clear idea of at least those more general aspects of the novel form that have begun to achieve some fixity of reference. Division and classification is always to some extent an artificial exercise, and Henry James was neither the first nor the last to attack talk of these things as if they had a kind of internecine distinctness, instead of melting into each other at every breath, and being intimately associated parts of one general effort of expression… What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? (‘The art of fiction’, 1884, in Edel, The House of Fiction, 1962, p.34) Before the twentieth century it was novelists themselves (including James) who were most concerned to define and defend the emergent form of their writing, by theorizing about its nature and its techniques. A tiny handful of critics, such as David Masson, author of the first book on the novel in English (British Novelists and their Styles, 1859), also tried to define its leading characteristics. Like contemporary novelists, critics and theorists, what the early novelists said should always be thought of as subject to the changing situation in which they were living. Our understanding of the term ‘novel’ is always being affected by the novels and their reception in our own time, and will go on being affected by the writings of the future. ‘This is doubtless true of most of the generic terms used in literary criticism’, as the critic Jeremy Hawthorn says. He continues: But because the novel’s rejection of traditional forms and conventions as well as its ability to respond to and incorporate aspects of the changing world around it into itself are fundamental to its existence, the novel is generically characterized by a sort of permanent revolution of both its form and its content. (Studying the Novel, 1982, p.7) Thinking about the novel as a genre, as Bakhtin points out, helps us become more aware of its future as well as its past. Although we do deal with particular novels in

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this book, it is vital first to consider some of the general problems of reading, studying and assessing novels. Questions of approach and analysis, and of which concepts are most fruitful in the literary criticism that studying novels involves, will be raised throughout the book. This means you can find lines of enquiry that should serve you well when reading the novels we have chosen to discuss in more detail. It also gives the whole discussion some structure and continuity, ensuring that you do not treat any text in isolation. The aim of the more general discussion chapters is to reinforce this emphasis and provide points for pausing to develop further our thinking about the nature and effect of the genre approach in relation to our chosen novels. The rise of the realist novel As we have just seen, the standard current definition of a novel centrally includes the idea of representing the real world. There is nothing new about this. Novels seem to address themselves more closely to real life than poetry or drama. ‘Realism’ is a word that anyone studying novels cannot avoid using, or at least trying to come to terms with. There seem to me to be at least three reasons for this. 1 The history of the genre is intimately bound up with the concept of realism. 2 The novel’s major development in the nineteenth century is impossible to follow without taking into account the family of features or conventions that the word realism allows us to isolate and distinguish from the conventions employed in other kinds of literature (and art). 3 Despite recent attempts to displace or undermine the idea of realism as outdated or infected by humanist ideology, its use persists. Most of the fiction we read (and indeed, watch, in the form of television drama) is realist in orientation. However, realism is so complex a word that if we do not use it carefully we can find its meanings and applications very confusing. One way of starting to consider its uses is to look at the origins and development of the novel genre. Before we do so, it might be worth reminding ourselves that what we are talking about in this case is the specifically aesthetic realm, in which the words ‘realism’ or ‘realistic’ refer to the representation of reality. What we are not doing is using the word in its common, everyday sense to refer to facing the facts (usually gloomy) of a situation, as we do, for example, when we say of someone that he or she has a realistic approach to life. Although the novelist may also be realistic in this later sense, the novel is first of all a verbal text and, as such, it is an imitation (or mimesis) of reality. Further, unlike a film, say, it cannot imitate reality directly. It uses words to give the illusion of reality. Where did this way of writing come from?

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A history of the novel Unlike poetry or drama, the novel appears to have had a determinable beginning, so we might expect literary historians to have tried to map out its history. What might such a history look like? As far as the emergence of the novel in English is concerned, one of the best brief introductions to its historical antecedents has long been considered Arnold Kettle’s Introduction to the English Novel (1951). Kettle (1916– 86) was a product of the English School at Cambridge, at the time strongly antihistorical, but his politics ensured a broader, European approach to literary production. In particular, he was strongly influenced by the approach to fiction of the Hungarian Marxist theorist, Georg Lukács (1885–1971), whose writings were barely known in English-speaking countries until the publication in Britain in 1950 (and in the United States in 1964) of his Studies in European Realism, a collection of essays dating from 1935–9. Lukács, from the beginning, certainly saw the novel as in some sense reflecting reality, but he had a special idea of what kind of reality it reflected. For Lukács, the novel reflected a total social reality. For him the greatness of the novels of Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac and Leo Tolstoy was based on their depiction of the underlying forces of social change. Kettle followed this view in his book on the English novelists, suggesting that the achievements of Austen, Dickens and James were made possible by the prior emergence of the novel as a distinctive, popular literary form, in association with major changes in western European society. Read the extract ‘Realism and romance’, from the first volume of Kettle’s Introduction to the English Novel, in Part Two. What does Kettle consider to be the most important question to ask about the development of the novel genre and how does he answer this question? How important a distinction does he make between realism and romance? (Note that Kettle refers to the ‘modern novel’ to distinguish it from earlier fictions in English, French and Italian which were something like novels. He is using the word modern in the sense of post-medieval.) Discussion For Kettle, the key question is: why did the novel arise at all? His answer is that it was the literary form that corresponded most closely to the needs and experiences of the rising commercial class in England. It was a means of ‘taking stock of the new society’ (Part Two, p.211) which was coming into being after the seventeenthcentury English Revolution. Kettle believes that the undeniable attractions of ‘romance’ remained tied to a form of society that had passed—a feudal, aristocratic society. There is, he argues, a profound and complex connection between the dominant literary genre of any period and the changing shape and needs of the society of the time. He sees Rabelais as one of the ‘first revolutionary bourgeois writers’ for ‘the realism which underlies his most fantastic flights and images’, for his ‘utterly anti-romantic’ viewpoint, and for his ‘critical questioning of values and attitudes’ (ibid., pp.212, 213).

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It is this critical or questioning aspect of realism that Kettle found most important about the novel’s relationship with the society it depicts. It can be argued that novels like Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations, for all their apparent realism, bring about for the reader an immersion in their fictional worlds as escapist in their way as the idealized worlds of medieval romances with their knights-errant and their damsels in distress. By drawing us so effectively into a world we can think of as like our own, a world that seems ultimately safe and comfortable, the realist novel leaves us where we are—or so the argument might run. ■ However, if we follow Kettle’s approach, we are pushed towards thinking about the relationship between a novel and its socio-historical context in a way that enables us to develop a more critical understanding of the historical forces at work in our world—a world shaped by the dramatic changes consequent upon the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. In Kettle’s hands this approach is subtle and multi-faceted. Of Austen’s work, for example, he points out that the ‘silliest of criticism’ is to blame her for ‘not writing about the Battle of Waterloo or the French Revolution. She wrote about what she understood and no artist can do more.’ Nevertheless, ‘no sensitive contemporary reader can fail to sense an inadequacy’ about the world she does deal with: ‘her unquestioning acceptance of a class society… values and standards…based on the assumption that it is right and proper for a minority of the community to live at the expense of the majority’. On the other hand, there is her ‘materialism’, her concern for ‘human feelings in a concrete situation’, above all’ her highly critical concern over the fate of women in her society, a concern which involves a reconsideration of its basic values’ (An Introduction to the English Novel, 1967 edn, vol. 1, pp.93, 98). It is in this way that Marxist critics such as Lukács and Kettle (and those who have succeeded them, such as Raymond Williams (1921–88) and Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)) have chosen to focus upon what they see as the great art form of the middle classes, in order to demonstrate how it represents those classes and their relationships realistically, that is, critically. For example, according to Eagleton, Austen’s work ‘offers a peculiarly privileged focus for examining the conflicts and alliances between aristocracy and bourgeoisie’ in the early nineteenth century (Criticism and Ideology, 1976, p.126). Kettle’s class-based analysis of the history of the novel was significantly modified and expanded by Ian Watt’s classic study, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), and this book has to some degree been superseded by more recent research—for instance, Lennard J.Davis’s Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (1983) and Geoffrey Day’s From Fiction to the Novel (1987). However, Watt’s emphasis upon the relationship between the development of the novel’s new form of realism and the way of life of the rising middle classes remains widely influential. While adopting a less thoroughly sociological viewpoint, he provided a much more detailed and persuasive account than Kettle of the different factors that accompanied, if they did not actually help to determine, the timing and nature of the emergent genre: the rise of literacy and the printing press; the development of a market economy; urbanization; and so forth.

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Read the extract ‘Realism and the novel form’, from Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, in Part Two. What other factor(s) that were dependent upon broad social changes does Watt suggest are important in thinking about the emergence of the novel form in the early eighteenth century? How does this lead him to define realism in the novel? Discussion Probably the most crucial development as Watt sees it was the effect of an increasingly individualistic, secular outlook among the dominant groups in society. This outlook was evident in contemporary philosophical discourse, which stressed the importance of the unique, individual experience as the source of truth and identity. ‘The novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects this individualistic and innovating reorientation’ (Part Two, p.216). It was this new spirit that led to a growing concern with the inner self in its relation to its environment. Hence the novel is ‘distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualization of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment’ (ibid., p.219). Watt calls this technique ‘formal realism’. Formal realism is a manner of representation according to which the novel is ‘under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms’ (ibid., p.222). Thus, characters are given everyday, non-traditional, nonallegorical names: Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe struggling to keep her virtue, rather than John Bunyan’s Christian searching for God; Henry Fielding gives us the detail of Tom Jones’s exact route to London, rather than the ‘Bohemian limbos’ we find in Elizabethan dramas; and the plots of Defoe are not—like those of earlier narratives— taken from traditional or legendary stories, but are derived from contemporary sources, in travel literature or criminal confessions. ■ Interestingly, in his book Watt refers to a remark made by Lukács’s: that the novel is the epic of a world forsaken by God. This should not be taken to mean that a novel may not explore religious themes or motives. What it does mean is that we are unlikely to find supernatural explanations for what happens within story or character, even where something outlandish or fantastic is occurring—as in the Gothic novel or one of its descendants, such as detective or science fiction. At the same time, the impact of Puritanism upon the English novel can hardly be underestimated, involving as it does a conception of life as a continuous moral and social struggle. To sum up, we can say that, from its earliest days, the novel has been typically concerned with depicting the development of individual life within a specific setting, a concern that is thought to have arisen in association with the rise of a certain kind of society in England. Its method of representation is realistic in its attempt to depict

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what the world is like, and this is achieved through the depiction of detail by means of ‘a more largely referential use of language’. Whose history? It is important to note that many writers and critics would prefer not to think about the novel in terms of its history—or, indeed, of any history. In Forster’s widely read Aspects of the Novel, the English novelists were envisaged not as floating down that stream which bears all its sons away unless they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room—all writing their novels simultaneously. They do not, as they sit there, think: ‘I live under Queen Victoria, I under Anne, I carry on the tradition of Trollope, I am reacting against Aldous Huxley.’ The fact that their pens are in their hands is far more vivid to them. They are half mesmerized, their sorrows and joys are pouring out through the ink, they are approximated by the act of creation, and when Professor Oliver Elton says, as he does, that ‘after 1847 the novel of passion was never to be the same again’ none of them understands what he means. That is to be our vision of them— an imperfect vision, but it is suited to our powers, it will preserve us from a serious danger, the danger of pseudo-scholarship. (1974 edn, p.5) How useful do you find this way of talking about novels? Discussion Forster’s ‘vision’ is useful, I think, in reminding us that writers do not think of themselves as being part of a trend or historical movement—indeed, that such considerations are likely to be far from their minds as they sit, scribbling away, absorbed in their own worlds. Insofar as Forster is asking us as readers to adopt the same position, he is urging each of us to focus upon our personal encounter with a novel, and to trust our instincts, rather than the words of a ‘pseudo-scholar’ who tells us, for example, that the book we are reading represents the novel of the 1840s. This approach has its attractions, and was more characteristic of the influential Cambridge English School of the 1920s (to whom Forster’s Clark Lectures on the novel, which are printed as Aspects of the Novel, were addressed) than that of Kettle’s time. Forster went on to say that he had the highest respect for ‘genuine’ scholars, for the person who has read huge amounts and who can contemplate the novelist in the stream of time. Unfortunately, he thought such scholarship ‘incommunicable’. He was not prepared to theorize about the novel himself, beyond saying that certain ideas tend to recur in the minds of those writing novels, whatever their period: ideas about story, plot, people, and so on. In other words, he did subscribe to an underlying notion of genre—he could hardly offer to give a series of lectures on

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‘Aspects of the Novel’ without doing so—but it was a resolutely unhistorical notion. Further, he insisted that what is important are human beings, not rules; all there is to judge novels by is something called ‘life’. ‘So then we are back in the old bog’ as Woolf exclaimed in exasperation after reading Forster’s book; ‘nobody knows anything about the laws of fiction; or what its relation is to life; or to what effects it can lend itself’. She continued: If the English critic were less domestic, less assiduous to protect the rights of what it pleases him to call life, the novelist might be bolder too. He might cut adrift from the eternal tea-table and the plausible and preposterous formulas which are supposed to represent the whole of our human adventure. But then the story might wobble; the plot might crumble; ruin might seize upon the characters. The novel in short might become a work of art. Such are the dreams that Mr Forster leads us to cherish. For his is a book to encourage dreaming. None more suggestive has been written about the poor lady whom, with perhaps mistaken chivalry, we still persist in calling the art of fiction. (‘The art of fiction’, 1927, in Bowlby, A Woman’s Essays, 1992, p.125) In other words, there is something limited and provincial about Forster’s approach, which undermines the potential of the novel as a work of art. For Woolf, there is something peculiarly English (‘the eternal tea-table’) about this way of seeing the genre, which discourages writers, and readers, from taking account of the major developments that have occurred elsewhere. And yet, she concludes, Forster’s book encourages ‘dreaming’ of a better state of things. Why does she use the term ‘poor lady’ for the art of fiction? Woolf’s gendering of the novel is more than merely a jokey way of reworking the traditional view of the muse as female. It also suggests another perspective upon the formation of genre, which to her is nothing like as straightforward as Forster would like it to be. ■ Women writing novels In ‘The art of fiction’ Woolf began her account of Aspects of the Novel by referring to fiction as a lady ‘who has somehow got herself into trouble’ and who is being approached by many ‘gallant gentlemen’, including Forster, to rescue her (ibid., p. 121), that is, to fix and domesticate the novel genre, according to their viewpoint. Woolf is not against rule-making as such; what she is against is the inadequacy of the rules so far created, by (English) men. As she points out: ‘though rules may be wrong and must be broken, they have this advantage—they confer dignity and order upon their subject; they admit her to a place in civilized society; they prove she is worthy of consideration’ (ibid., p.122). This echoes the attempts of earlier women writers to claim some status for what they perceived as a maligned form of writing. There is a famous passage in chapter V of Northanger Abbey in which Austen’s narrator defends novelists:

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Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the ninehundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them… ‘And what are you reading, Miss—?’ ‘Oh! it is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.—‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. (1990 edn, pp.21–2) Not only is this a delightfully witty defence of the novel genre, it proposes a gender perspective upon its development. There was more than one ‘History of England’ during the eighteenth century, when writing histories was popular, and they were all by men. John Milton, Alexander Pope and Matthew Prior were among the most well-known major writers of the preceding century or so, and were all male poets. The Spectator was an immensely popular early-eighteenth-century periodical conducted as a gentlemanly, club-like endeavour by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who were also the main contributors. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was a masculine, often salacious parody of the developing conventions of the novel in the eighteenth century. By contrast, Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) were novels by Fanny Burney, and Belinda (1801) was a novel by Maria Edgeworth, evidently much closer in period and interest to Austen. Not only were they by women, they were all about women in contemporary English society. Since the 1980s, and, in particular, since the publication of Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s feminist study of the nature of literary influence, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), the traditional paradigm of the history of the novel as a kind of oedipal struggle between literary fathers and sons has been undermined. Much more attention has been paid to the role of woman writers and readers, as well as to the often unconscious assumptions of critics and scholars (usually men) about the genre they construct as they construct its history. One reason for these assumptions may be that, to begin with, most of the early novelists and their commentators were men, although soon (before the end of the eighteenth century) women formed a large if not dominant section of the reading public. The well-known writers are easily identified: Defoe (1660–1731), Richardson (1689–1761), Fielding (1707

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54) and Sterne (1713–68), and each of them received substantial treatment in most histories of the novel until very recently (although Sterne often received less attention, for example being relegated to ‘a Note’ in Watt’s book). Consideration focused on the class backgrounds of these writers, and the nature of their specific contributions to the growing genre of realist fiction. Defoe and Richardson came from the new and rising merchant classes of the City of London, whereas Fielding and Sterne were identified with the more traditional, gentlemanly classes of the countryside. (Sterne was a rural clergyman, although Fielding, the son of a general, was a lawyer and playwright in London before becoming a novelist.) Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) are seen as initiating the novel’s interest in ‘low’ life, presented as a series of incidents impinging upon the individual character. Richardson’s Clarissa reveals just how deeply the writer can enter the inner world of a character through the presentation of consciousness by means of letters. In Clarissa these are mainly from the heroine, who is tormented by her family, then by her lover, is raped, and eventually dies. Fielding’s concern, as befitted his background and education, was with the nature of moral judgements, and with the manipulation of his readers’ responses towards a complicated ‘epic’ plot, which was kept at a distance by his authorial voice and ironic tone. Sterne, on the other hand, set out to subvert the whole claim of his predecessors to be creating and communicating meaning and order by simultaneously setting out to give us the fictional biography of his hero Tristram Shandy and comically proving it cannot be done, since language is so ‘slippery’. (Both Fielding and Sterne, by the way, counter simplistic assumptions about the middle-class background of the early novelists.) Austen tends to be seen as the literary ‘daughter’ of at least two of these men: of Richardson, in her deft and persuasive analysis of the inner life of women engaged in the trials of love, and of Fielding, in her detached, humorous concern with morals and manners. What is often forgotten is the fact that probably her most important antecedent was Burney, whose Cecilia provided the title of Pride and Prejudice and whose work undoubtedly acted as a direct influence. What is also often forgotten is the fact that not only were women the major consumers of fiction during the nineteenth century, they were the major producers too. Throughout the period, writers as diverse as Frances Trollope, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Dinah Craik and Marie Corelli were producing novels ranging from sensationalism to serious social comment, from popular ‘pot-boilers’ to lasting masterpieces. One of the greatest novelists of the time, Mary Ann Evans, better known to posterity by her male pseudonym George Eliot, herself noted this fact, addressing the question of how it had come about. Her viewpoint was most succinctly expressed in an article about the art of fiction, written just at the time she began her first story. In a review of ‘silly novels by lady novelists’, she attacked the vast numbers of contemporary women writers who, instead of faithfully depicting life’ and leaving it to teach its own lesson, used stereotyped characters, inane plots and facile

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didacticism to create a thoroughly false impression of the world. ‘Happily’, she concluded, we are not dependent upon argument to prove that Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest;—novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements… But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirements which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women. (Eliot, ‘Silly novels by lady novelists’, 1856, in Pinney, Essays of George Eliot, 1963, p.324) Eliot’s tone is both more serious and more confident than Austen’s narrator in Northanger Abbey. Can you see what her argument is, and how it relates to the idea of the novel as a genre? Why do you think Eliot uses a capital letter for ‘Fiction’? Discussion Eliot is arguing that women novelists can and do equal the achievement of men, that they do so ‘after their kind’, their novels having a ‘precious speciality’ about them, that the restrictions upon women’s lives do not restrict their potential as novelists, and that this is related to the nature of the ‘species of art’ or genre of the novel. This, according to her, is remarkably free and open—a freedom that too easily leads to disaster as well as success. I hope you will agree that the key point in Eliot’s argument in terms of genre is her view that the novel is so flexible. Her use of the capital letter for ‘Fiction’ reinforces her claim for the status of the genre, despite the impact of ‘silly novels’ by her contemporary ‘lady novelists’. Yet Eliot’s view is not as open as it appears: underlying her argument is her assumption that the genre of the novel is essentially realist, although she is too subtle to define realism simply as truth to life. In a famous digression in chapter XVII of Eliot’s novel Adam Bede (1859), the narrator announces that her ‘strongest effort’ is to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath. (1961 edn, p.174)

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The image of the realist project as offering a ‘mirror’ to reality is a common one. Here Eliot emphasizes the subjective, hence ‘defective’, basis of such realism, despite a commitment to the ‘faithful’ translation into words of ‘men and things’ that underlies it. However firm her allegiance to realism, the novelist imposes her own vision on what she sees. This is partly because this personal vision is inseparable from her artistic awareness, and partly because without it her work would lack shape or point. The artist, in short, always offers a version of experience. Eliot’s remarks underline the fact that, contrary to Forster’s view, literary forms such as the novel do not exist ‘out there’, as timeless essences, but are located in particular moments. In these moments they are defended, defined or redefined. If we look at the history or formation of the novel, we find it is in effect made up of a collection of such moments involving the writers themselves trying to establish what it was they were doing, by establishing how it differed from what others were doing, including those who had influenced them. ■ Realism or romance? According to Henry James: ‘The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life… The characters, the situation, which strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most, but the measure of reality is very difficult to fix’ (‘The art of fiction’, 1884, in Edel, The House of Fiction, 1962, pp. 25, 3D. Unlike the Romantic poets, realist novelists did not on the whole use treatises or manifestos as a way of explaining or justifying their methods or subject. Their views have to be gleaned from prefaces, reviews, letters or even comments embedded within their narratives, such as Austen’s in North anger Abbey or Eliot’s in Adam Bede or, later, Conrad’s famous preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897). James was perhaps the main exception among novelists writing in English in the nineteenth century. In his sustained account of ‘The art of fiction’, he tried to develop at some length the realist position earlier expressed by Eliot, in order to examine the dilemma of reconciling ‘truthfulness to life’ with art. Insofar as any more systematic theory of the novel can be identified elsewhere, this was primarily to be found in France. Here the major nineteenth-century novelists, from Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert to Émile Zola, engaged in a debate about their artistic practice, which centred on the issue of realism. The earliest recorded use of the word ‘realism’ as a literary term was in a Parisian periodical, Le Mercure Français, in 1826, although it was not until the 1850s that the word found wide currency. By then a short-lived journal entitled Réalisme (1856–7) had helped to make it more familiar, but as a style of painting as well as writing, although the main contributors to the debate remained the novelists themselves. Réalisme was edited by a minor novelist, Edmond Duranty, who wrote most of the articles, under a pseudonym. His view was that realism meant writing fiction based on observation of the world of ordinary men and women in society, using the simplest language to reach the widest audience. It also meant avoiding ‘the torments of soul of young men with too much imagination’, ‘tortured phraseology

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and ideas’, and ‘romantic psychology’ (quoted in Hemmings, The Age of Realism, 1974, p.165). This tendency to define the central concern of the novelist in opposition to that of more imaginative and ‘romantic’ writing is apparent right from the novel’s earliest beginnings as a recognized genre. The history of the novel has until recently been envisaged primarily in terms of the development of realism. Like any history, this has involved selection and interpretation. By drawing on Kettle and Watt, we have in effect been following one line of thought, albeit the dominant one, from the various surviving accounts and documents. Considering realism as central in the development of the novel is justified by the evidence of contemporary writers, critics and readers. However, there is increasing critical interest nowadays in the significant variations upon this development, and even direct challenge to the notion that the novel’s origins are grounded in realism, as opposed to fantasy and the psychic life, for instance in Marthe Robert’s Origins of the Novel (1980). This challenge has arisen as a result of a revision of the male-oriented traditional history of the novel, highlighting both its arbitrariness and the claims of such earlier female novelists as Aphra Behn (1640–89) and Mary de la Rivière Manley (c.1672– 1724). Behn and Manley were the first professional women writers and are nowadays called the ‘mothers of the novel’. Their fiction cannot easily be labelled ‘realist’, including as it does strong elements of romance, such as exotic locations and the exploitation of extremes of feeling. However, as our concept of the history of the novel is changing with the inclusion of women novelists, it is also changing as we become more open to elements that are commonly excluded from realist fiction. These are almost always present in popular novels, and are also increasingly evident in the late twentieth century in ‘serious’ or ‘highbrow’ novels by writers like Angela Carter and J.G.Ballard. It may be that, under the impact of theorists such as Bakhtin, we have become more aware that the boundaries between genres are fluid and shifting. If many novelists have contrasted their work with romance, this may suggest not so much how different but how closely allied are the realist and romance strains of the genre. Thus, even while we regard the novel as a mainly realist form, which emerged in association with the decline of romance, we need also to recognize the genre’s openendedness, and the extent to which romance has remained a part of it as one of a range of alternative narrative practices. The dominant written form during the period associated with the rise of the novel was history, which is one reason that so many novelists, from Behn to Fielding, called their novels ‘histories’ (the sub-title of Behn’s Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) was ‘A True History’, and of Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), ‘The History of a Foundling’). However, if the closest narrative form with which the early novelists wished to associate themselves was history, the closest narrative form from which they tried to dissociate themselves was romance. As Richardson wrote in a letter in 1752: ‘What a duce, do you think I am writing a Romance? Don’t you see that I am copying Nature’ (quoted in Allott, Novelists on the Novel, 1965, p.41). A more elaborate and extended example is provided by the novelist Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance through Times, Centuries and Manners

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(1785). This book involved an extended discussion of story-telling from the Greek epic poet Homer in about the eighth century BC onwards, cast in the form of a dialogue between three characters, the chief of whom, Euphrasia, speaks for the author. Read the extract below and consider Reeve’s discussion in the light of what we have been saying about the potential instability of the distinction between the novel and romance. Can you tell which literary form Reeve prefers? EUPHRASIA The word Novel in all languages signifies something new. It was first used to distinguish these works from Romance, though they have lately been confounded together and frequently mistaken for each other. SOPHRONIA But how will you draw the line of distinction, so as to separate them effectually, and prevent further mistakes? EUPHRASIA I will attempt this distinction, and I presume if it is properly done it will be followed,—If not, you are but where you were before. The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things.— The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen.—The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that it is all real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own. (Quoted in Allott, Novelists on the Novel, 1965, p.47) Discussion Dialogue was itself a literary genre derived from ‘classical’ Greek and Roman writing and was considered in the eighteenth century to be an appropriate means of communicating philosophical debate. However, despite the attempt to balance different views which this use of the traditional genre might be supposed to encourage, there seems little doubt that through Euphrasia’s voice Reeve draws a clear and confident distinction between the novel and romance. Reeve appears to favour the former, especially in what she says about how its characters affect us. The impression this exchange gives is of a quite stable distinction between two ways of creating fiction. ■ It is interesting that Reeve had herself attempted shortly before this ‘to unite the various merits and graces of the ancient Romance and modern Novel’, as she said in the preface to The Old English Baron: A Gothick Story (1778) (quoted in Allott, Novelists on the Novel, 1965, p.45). This was, in fact, one of the first examples of a sub-genre of the novel, Gothic, that tried to combine the ‘real’ and the ‘fabulous’. This flourished in England between the 1770s and the 1790s. The stability of

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Reeve’s definition is therefore somewhat illusory, helpful as it is to us to understand how the emerging realist novel form was being defined at the time. What was the Gothic novel? The term refers to the Gothic or medieval architecture of the gloomy castles much favoured by writers from Horace Walpole onwards. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) is usually thought of as the first fully fledged example of the Gothic novel, introducing the familiar elements of a medieval setting in which sensational and supernatural events take place, as a sinister aristocratic hero tortured by a guilty secret tries to capture a beautiful heroine. The Gothic sub-genre developed within decades of the rise of the realist novel, almost as if it were an attempt to challenge the establishment of the genre. Its proliferation in the closing years of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth acts as a kind of counterforce to the image we have established of the steady development of realist fiction. Although the specific sub-genre faltered, there remained a continuing strain of Gothic or romance traceable throughout the period that follows. This was apparent in the novels of writers such as Scott, Emily Brontë and Dickens, whose work has often therefore been sidelined when identifying the dominant realist elements in writers such as Eliot or Anthony Trollope. The fact that Shelley’s Frankenstein with its gothic overtones was written more tha n a decade after Austen began to write her parody of the Gothic novel in North anger Abbey (which was published posthumously) should give us a proper sense of the nature of the novel. It is, as it always has been, engaged in recreating itself out of various different elements, not necessarily in any simple linear fashion. This is not to suggest that, especially in the nineteenth century, it was not inclined towards realism; rather, it is to suggest that that is far from the last word about it. It is with these thoughts in mind that we have chosen to focus on the particular selection of novel texts you will find discussed in the chapters that follow. I have referred to all of them already, in one way or another. Of course, we should not read a novel trying to fit it into some already preconceived notion of what it is or should be. This would take the point out of the creative richness it offers. At the same time, in coming to a deeper understanding and evaluation of what a novel offers, we do in practice constantly refer back to our experience and knowledge of real life. This, I hope, now includes a more conscious awareness of the issues involved in talking about and studying novels. Further reading Booth, W.C. (1961) The Rhetoric of Fiction, University of Chicago Press. Conrad, J. (1963) The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Other Stories, Penguin Books. Davis, L.J. (1983) Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, Columbia University Press. Day, G. (1987) From Fiction to the Novel, Routledge. Frye, N. (1957) The Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton University Press. Gilbert, S.M. and Gubar, S. (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press.

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Gilmour, R. (1986) The Novel in the Victorian Age, Edward Arnold. Hunter, J.P. (1990) Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction, W.W.Norton. Lukács, G. (1972) Studies in European Realism, trans. E.Bone, Merlin Press. Rimmon-Kennan, S. (1983) Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, Methuen. Robert, M. (1980) Origins of the Novel, Harvester Press. Rodway, A. (1970) ‘Generic criticism: the approach through type, mode and kind’, in M.Bradbury and D.Palmer (eds), Contemporary Criticism, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 12, Edward Arnold, pp.83–105. Showalter, E. (1978) A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, Virago.

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Chapter Two Reading Pride and Prejudice by Pam Morris

Introduction by Pam Morris Chapter One identifies as a defining feature of the novel as a genre its portrayal of individualized characters in a specific geographical and historical world. The novelist must construct a sense of character ‘as an identity of consciousness through duration in time’ (Part Two, p.221) and yet show that identity undergoing change as the character interacts with the social and moral forces of his or her world. This balance of continuity of identity with change is essential for the moral component of character that seems central to many realist novels. If characters were not aware of their past behaviour and feelings as part of their continuing identities, then moral development would be impossible for them and moral judgement of them, the allotment of blame and praise, would be inappropriate. It is the representation of character change as a process of interaction between a person and his or her social world that typifies realist fiction. In romance and fairytale, change is usually represented as a magical and instantaneous transformation: the beggarmaid into princess, the frog into prince. Another characteristic of the realist novel is its special use of the potential of prose. We often think of novels as reflecting life, but clearly words are not like mirrors. Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on language have been found helpful in thinking about the nature of novelistic prose. For Bakhtin it makes no sense to consider meaning in terms of definitions in a dictionary. It is only the linguistic context in which a word is used that produces its meaning, and that meaning will always be shaped to greater or lesser extent by the word’s interaction with all the other words in that context. Words are always in some sense answering other words. Bakhtin uses the term ‘dialogic’ to convey this idea of words as essentially interactive. He sees language at any moment of history as a dialogue of voices: those of different classes, genders, professions, age-groups, and even of past epochs. Each voice speaks of its own way of seeing the world; each speaks from its own value system. Bakhtin says: ‘At any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot [manyvoiced] from top to bottom’ (The Dialogic Imagination, 1981, p.291). The novel, Bakhtin claims, developed as a way of artistically orchestrating these voices. The

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form of the novel is inherently dialogic, in that any novel is an active participant in the voices of its time. Bakhtin writes: ‘The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types…and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized’ (ibid., p.262). It is this dialogic quality of the novel, which produces the capacity to challenge the dominant voice or voices at any particular moment, that Bakhtin associates with the genre. The idea of the novel as a dialogic form will underlie my approach to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). The discussion of the text falls into three main sections. The first section focuses upon the artistic organization of the novel, looking closely at the first chapter, then at the first few chapters and then at the structure of the novel as a whole. This section on the ‘artfulness’ of the novel is followed by a consideration of the novel’s relation to the social era in which it was produced and the critical debates it has generated since its production. This leads, in the final section, back to the question of realism: how fully does Austen work within realist conventions? The novel as an ‘organized’ form Reading Pride and Prejudice chapter I Few novels construct a more convincing impression of fully known and realized characters interacting with an authentic social world than those of Austen. However, this effect of naturalness is achieved by means of superb artistic organization, which exploits to the full the potential of novelistic prose and form. A close look at the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice is a good way to begin to appreciate what this ‘artfulness’ involves. It has become common in terms of literary criticism to admire the opening sentence of the novel as a brilliant example of Austen’s ironic style: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ (1990 edn, p.1).1 However, let us think more carefully about the first sentence and the one that follows: ‘However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters’ (ibid.). The opening voice is that of the narrator. It is a third person narrator in that the voice speaks from outside the story and refers to characters inside the story by name or by third person pronouns: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’. (A first person narrator is a character within the story and refers to himself or herself in the first person as ‘I’.) We shortly discover that the narrator is omniscient—able to see into the thoughts of all the characters. What tone of voice is being used and what is the position of the narrator in relation to the statements made in the first two sentences? What kind of society is evoked by this tone and what thematic concerns are being immediately suggested?

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It is important not to make any simple identification between the author and the narrator. The narrative voice is an integral part of the artistic construction of the novel. The narrator is a presence inherent only in the verbal texture of the narrative and is in no sense co-essential with the physical woman, Jane Austen, who crafted the narrative. Although the narrator is not a character in the story, the voice of the narrator is no less produced by the words of the text than are those of the characters. I have just said that the opening sentence of the novel is seen as a brilliant example of Austen’s ironic style, but what is irony and how can we recognize it? Unfortunately it is not possible to provide a simple definition. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives us: ‘simulated ignorance’, ‘the expression of meaning in language which normally expresses the opposite’, ‘discrepancy between the expected and the actual state of affairs’. Usually irony involves a more knowing viewpoint, frequently that of the narrator shared with the reader, which is implicitly mocking the more literal or apparent meaning of words or a situation as understood by a character. The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice is recognizably ironic in tone because we assume that the consciousness of the narrator is mocking the statement expressed; taken literally it is too extravagant to represent sensible opinion. However, I would describe this as humorous mockery rather than the expression of overt indignation or anger. The consciousness of the narrator seems almost wickedly mischievous in the attitude to the views of the social world that its voice evokes. Obviously, the narrator does not share the values and attitudes of that world, but nevertheless finds in them a source of a good deal of comedy. It should also be noted that the ironic effect is produced by the use of ‘double-voiced’ language. The words used ostensibly convey a social voice believing that a wealthy single man must be in want of a wife, but somehow we know that they can also mean the opposite. The narrator fuses two viewpoints within the single sentence: a particular social viewpoint and an opposing, satirical one. One implication of this is that the narrator can be thought of as something of a ventriloquist—able to inhabit and utilize a variety of voices. What kind of society is implied by the opening sentences of the novel? Obviously, one in which a concern with wealth, property and marriage predominates. The impression given is of a world consisting of a small, inter-knit neighbourhood in which gossip of new arrivals and opinions concerning them quickly circulate and form the main focus of interest. Potential themes arise directly from this initial intimation of the fictional social world of Pride and Prejudice. The opening assertions ironically reverse what is surely going to be a driving impetus of the narrative: the want of single men of fortune as husbands. One voice says that there is a hint of darker irony in the suggestion that any such man is immediately regarded by the families of the neighbourhood as the ‘rightful property of some one or other of their daughters’. Another, less complacent voice says that in reality the only ‘property’ rightfully belonging to a woman is the hope of acquiring a husband, wealthy if possible. One other major concern seems to be introduced: a notion of truth (a word twice repeated). This is brought into play by means of an opinion so ‘universally acknowledged’ as to claim truth status. It will be worth noticing how

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frequently in the text the term ‘every body’ is used to suggest general acceptance of opinion or prejudice as ‘the truth’. After this impressively ‘artful’ opening to the novel, the chapter proceeds by means of a different narrative mode. The presence of the narrator gives way to a passage of dialogue between characters. This provides a useful illustration of the two main forms of narration. A writer can either have the narrator tell what happens, describing the feelings and reactions of the characters, or can use a more ‘dramatic’ method in which the reader seems to see and hear the characters act and speak for themselves. The former mode of narration is usually referred to as ‘telling’ and the latter, more dramatic mode is called ‘showing’. Most writers, and Austen is no exception, make use of both means. ‘Telling’ has the advantage of clarity and economy (it is much quicker to say ‘John was deceitful’ than to ‘show’ it through the character’s speech or ‘character discourse’ and actions). However, ‘showing’ is often more effective in involving the reader imaginatively with characters and producing an active response of sympathy or judgement. The aim of most writers will be to ensure that their ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ work together to enhance the effect of authenticity produced by their prose. How effective is the confirmation between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ in chapter I? Discussion It is quite impressive, I think. Mrs Bennet’s character discourse seems to ‘demonstrate’ just those social attitudes the narrator has declared to be ‘universal’: the ‘young man of large fortune’ is already being appropriated by her busy imagination as a likely husband for one of her daughters. The aura of familiarity produced by Mrs Bennet’s ready use of proper names— Mrs Long, Mr Morris, Sir William and Lady Lucas—constructs, with great economy of means, the feeling of a small community linked by the exchange of reports, gossip and shared interests. ■ Character discourse (which includes both direct and indirect speech) is one of the main means by which novelists construct a perception of different personalities and shape the response of readers towards the values and attitudes they represent. How do we view the character of Mrs Bennet after having read the first chapter? Discussion Mrs Bennet’s discourse quickly suggests to us her unquestioning reliance upon just the attitudes and gossip the narrator has ironized. Her speech, moreover, is exclamatory, tending towards the garrulous, lacking a sense of humour and given to non sequiturs: ‘A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!’ (p.2). This is a character with whom we are unlikely to identify or even feel any close degree of sympathy. Indeed, an ironic distance is unobtrusively structured into the narrative from the outset. Whereas Mr Bennet is referred to throughout the chapter simply as Mr Bennet, Mrs Bennet is referred to as ‘his lady’ or ‘his wife’ in a subtle shift of tone that demotes her dignity. This tonal

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shift provides a good example of the complex effects of the use of voice in novelistic prose. An impression of Mr Bennet’s taciturn personality is produced by the brevity of his speeches, and his superior intelligence to that of his wife is indicated in his ironic application of logic to her illogicalities. Clearly, Mr Bennet is to be perceived as not sharing the ‘universal truths’ of the neighbourhood. ■ The final paragraph of the chapter returns to the narrative mode of ‘telling’. As if to ensure that readers have drawn the correct conclusion about the characters already ‘shown’, the narrator briskly sums them up. Does this indeed confirm our response to them? Discussion The sentence describing Mr Bennet as ‘a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice’ (p.3) seems both to tally with the qualities suggested by his character discourse and to further the construction of his personality. However, the sentence describing Mrs Bennet as ‘a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper’ (ibid.) strikes me as a harsher judgement than any I should have made of her in response to the first chapter. Not all readers would perhaps agree with me. Nevertheless, it is always fruitful to locate any apparent discrepancies between what a narrative tells and what it shows. Such discrepancies often indicate areas of conflict or contradiction, which the text may not overtly or consciously acknowledge. What is certain at this point is that the stringent judgement of Mrs Bennet confirms that the narrative voice is untainted by any conventional sentimentality. ■ This detailed consideration of the first short chapter of Pride and Prejudice reveals an impressively business-like proceeding. The main themes have been introduced and a social world with its system of values and preoccupations has been intimated. The construction of characters has begun with Mr and Mrs Bennet, and reader interest has been successfully aroused in the question of whether or not Mrs Bennet will manage to secure a wealthy husband for any of her five daughters. The arrival of Mr Bingley, the young man of fortune, in the neighbourhood has provided the narrative impetus necessary to initiate the momentum of the plot. Widening the focus The first paragraph of chapter II offers a good example of the clever ways in which realist novelists use language to consolidate the illusion of reality. The narrator confides to the reader the privileged information that, unbeknown to his family, Mr Bennet has visited Mr Bingley. When we read ‘It was then disclosed [to them] in the following manner…’ (p.4), the feeling that we already know what is to be disclosed subtly confirms our sense of an event having taken place. The rest of the chapter adopts the narrative mode of ‘showing’ to begin to construct an impression of the whole Bennet family and the relationships between them. This is typical of Austen’s style generally, in that dramatic ‘showing’

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predominates over ‘telling’ in her work. It is one of the reasons why readers tend to feel so closely involved in her fictional worlds. Very attentive readers may well notice that Lizzy (Elizabeth), picked out in the first chapter as her father’s favourite, speaks most sensibly in this chapter. Mrs Bennet’s indulgent favouring of Lydia could also be recognized. Austen is already establishing a convincing foundation for their subsequent development and narrative fates. I suspect that this is the kind of meticulous crafting that is more easily noted in a second reading of the novel and as such is part of the pleasure subsequent readings provide. Mrs Bennet’s irritable comments on Mrs Long in chapter II sustain the idea, established in chapter I, of an immediate and familiar neighbourhood of families. This is developed more fully in chapter III by utilizing a very sophisticated form of narrative prose. The chapter begins with the recognizable voice of the narrator: ‘Not all that Mrs. Bennet, however, with the assistance of her five daughters, could ask on the subject was sufficient to draw from her husband any satisfactory description of Mr. Bingley’ (p.6). For this reason, the narrator continues, the Bennets were obliged to rely upon the second-hand report given by Lady Lucas of her husband’s impression of Mr Bingley. Sir William ‘had been delighted with him. He was quite young, wonderfully handsome, extremely agreeable, and to crown the whole, he meant to be at the next assembly with a large party. Nothing could be more delightful!’ (p.6). Now, whose voice are we hearing in these words? No quotation marks are used in the paragraph that flows on without break from the first sentence given above, which is clearly attributable to the narrator. What happens when the narrator begins to tell of Sir William’s response is that the narrative language starts to take on the tone and kind of expressions Sir William or Lady Lucas themselves might use. The prose maintains a fluid balance midway between indirect narrative commentary and direct character discourse. The term used for this immensely flexible form of prose is ‘free indirect speech’ and its development and utilization to achieve all sorts of effects is one of Austen’s greatest contributions to the form of the English novel. In this case the effect is primarily ironic; by ventriloquizing the kind of language associated with the Bennets and the Lucases, the narrator establishes a subtly mocking distance from its effusiveness. Moreover, because it is not presented in the form of direct speech by Sir William or Lady Lucas, the effect is more diffuse, giving the impression of generalized opinion among the neighbouring families. A similar effect is achieved by a further use of free indirect speech in the fourth paragraph in the chapter when Mr Bingley is obliged to be in London before the assembly ball. The language of the narrator again takes on the intonation of the neighbourhood voices, as opinion and rumour circulate concerning his absence and expected return. By such means Austen deftly conveys a convincing impression of a small social world and develops the suggestion of the importance of opinion, reports and gossip within its system of values. However, the most important aspect of chapter III is, of course, the introduction of the two principle young men, Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy, to the neighbourhood within the novel’s fictional world and to the readers outside it. Equally important is

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the first disagreeable impression formed of Mr Darcy by Elizabeth Bennet as a result of his boorish behaviour towards her. By this stage in a first reading we are just possibly beginning to pick out Elizabeth as the potential heroine of the story, but it is worth noticing how subtly and gradually the focus of attention moves in upon her. The narration of the ball is largely dramatic. What does this ‘show’ about the society in which the main characters are to move and develop? Discussion I would say it demonstrates very clearly the superficial and materialistic way in which judgements are made in the social world represented. Men are evaluated according to their fortune, women according to their faces. Within five minutes of his entrance a report is in general circulation of Darcy ‘having ten thousand a year’ (p.7). Bingley tries to exhort his friend to dance by enthusing over the choice of ‘so many pleasant girls’, several of whom are ‘uncommonly pretty’ (p.9). Darcy turns down Elizabeth as ‘tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me’ (ibid.). Opinion is also shown to be highly volatile. Darcy’s wealth ensures he is regarded with great admiration for the first part of the ball until his aloof and unfriendly demeanour produces an equally strong and impressionistic prejudice against him: ‘His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and every body hoped that he would never come there again’ (p.8). This, of course, is another example of free indirect speech and it is worth noticing that comforting use of the term ‘every body’ as a means of consolidating consensual prejudices. ■ Any remaining doubt as to Elizabeth’s status as the heroine of the book is resolved in chapter IV, which finally establishes her centrality both as the character in whom we are most interested and as the perspective through which we subsequently view most of the fictional events and people. The chapter opens with a dialogue between Elizabeth and Jane. What impression of Elizabeth as a character is constructed by her speech? Discussion The character discourse produces a very attractive indication of a witty, lively intelligence which is made yet more pleasing by an affectionate responsiveness towards Jane and an evident capacity for self-mockery. Elizabeth’s speech reveals her ability to cut through conventionality and platitude: ‘He could not help seeing that you were about five times as pretty as every other woman in the room. No thanks to his gallantry for that’ (p.11). However, as her warm regard for Jane makes clear, her wit is not just disenchanted cynicism, and so there is nothing to prevent a close reader identification with her character. ■ This is further promoted by another technique of Austen’s narrative method. The dialogue between Elizabeth and Jane in chapter IV closes with a paragraph of ‘telling’ that begins with the following sentence:

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Elizabeth listened in silence, but was not convinced; their behaviour at the assembly had not been calculated to please in general; and with more quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister, and with a judgment too unassailed by any attention to herself, she was very little disposed to approve of them. (p.12) The voice here is unambiguously that of the narrator; this is not free indirect speech, since there is no slippage into Elizabeth’s mode of speaking or intonation. However, the point of view conveyed is that of Elizabeth, giving her unfavourable impression of Bingley’s sisters. The writing is drawing on and playing with the division between ‘who speaks’ and ‘who sees’. It is the narrator’s voice that speaks but we see largely through the eyes of Elizabeth. The term for this is ‘focalization’ and from this point in the novel the main focalizer is Elizabeth, although not invariably so. One effect of using a character as focalizer is to increase reader sympathy, since we so often see things through that character’s eyes. This can be a very useful devise for a didactic novelist who aims to educate the readers’ moral discrimination by closely involving them in the process of moral improvement the hero or heroine enacts. The title Pride and Prejudice suggests what is to be a major area of moral concern in the text, and I have indicated how carefully each chapter develops and extends the idea of a society largely dependent upon gossip and superficial impressions. Notice how the dialogue between the two sisters in chapter IV takes up precisely this theme, with Jane expressing her desire ‘not to be hasty in censuring anyone’ whereas Elizabeth is humorously exasperated that with so much good sense Jane can ‘be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others!’ (pp.11–12). This questioning of what is true perceptiveness and what is merely impression and prejudice occurs again at the conclusion of chapter IV. Bingley’s view of the assembly at Meryton is wholly positive: he has never met pleasanter people or prettier girls and he cannot conceive an angel more beautiful than Jane. ‘Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had felt the smallest interest’ (p.13). However, in the middle section of this chapter there is a fairly prolonged passage of ‘telling’ by the narrator. The paragraph that begins with Elizabeth’s perception (focalization) of Bingley’s sisters soon shifts into a unified narrative voice and point of view: ‘They were in fact very fine ladies; not deficient in good humour when they were pleased, nor in the power of being agreeable where they chose it; but proud and conceited’ (p.12). The authoritative tone adopted by the narrator here implies that we should read this as a true assessment of the sisters, and for the next three paragraphs the narrator continues in this manner, offering the reader what clearly purports to be objective information about the various characters. Thus, we can begin to recognize a hierarchy of voices in the novel in terms of what we might call their ‘truth status’, with the voice of the narrator making the greatest claim to veracity.

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Figure 3 Domestic scene, engraved by W.Bond from a painting by G.Jones, 1822. Mansell Collection.

What this all amounts to is surely something far more impressive than any mere reflection of reality—even supposing that to be possible in words. Austen’s writing is ‘artful’ in the most positive sense, exploiting all the flexible possibilities of novelistic

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prose: intonation, narrative positioning, focalization and dramatic character discourse. The carefully staged introduction of characters, the subtle focusing of attention on Elizabeth and the consistent development of thematic concerns from chapter to chapter all indicate a superb artistic organization and understanding of novelistic form. Characterization Subsequent chapters continue to add to the list of character names: Charlotte Lucas, the aunt and uncle Phillips at Meryton, Mr Collins, Mr Wickham and the Gardiners. One of the main means by which a personality is attached to these proper names is succinct ‘telling’ by the narrator. More importantly, our recognition of their individuality is achieved by dialogue: above all, we come to know an Austen character by his or her voice. For this reason, letters ‘written’ by characters are always an important and revealing method of characterization in Austen’s fiction. Their use points too to the influence on her work of eighteenth-century epistolary novels by writers such as Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney. In Pride and Prejudice the various letters of Mr Collins are delightfully comic examples. What aspects of Mr Collins’s character does his first letter, given in chapter XIII, evoke? Discussion I would pick out an absurd obsequiousness to rank and a pompous and wordy selfimportance, which expresses itself in banal conventionalities: ‘I feel it my duty to promote and establish the blessing of peace in all families’ (p.55). The main function of this kind of pious platitude is to cloak self-interest with the appearance of complacent morality. What Mr Collins is seeking is a grateful and useful wife! He is one of Austen’s many memorable comic characters, but it is typical of her ironic method more generally to allow self-deceptions, false self-justifications, prejudice and hypocrisy to be self-revealing in character discourse. ■ Elizabeth disconcerts Bingley fairly early in their acquaintance by assuring him that she already understands him perfectly (p.36). Characters, she tells him, are either deep and intricate or they are easily comprehended. We might equally apply this division to the representation of character in Pride and Prejudice. However, it is the non-intricate characters who most amuse the reader. Mrs Bennet, Mr Collins, Lady Catherine de Bourgh are without psychological complexity; we can laugh at their absurdities almost without reserve since in most respects we do not equate them with real people. They are more like the comic caricatures or humours found in earlier literary genres in that they invariably perform in the same way whenever they appear in the story. They are too static to seem authentic as people. We do not expect them to develop morally or psychologically as a result of anything that happens to them in the way that we do with more realistically conceived characters. Some readers have also felt that Jane, Bingley and Darcy are not complex enough to

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sustain the major parts they are allotted in the narrative and in the moral scheme of the work. Critics have complained that Darcy is represented as too stiff and uninteresting to be fully satisfactory as the partner to Elizabeth. Ultimately whether this is found to be so will depend on the response of the individual reader. However, it is essential in all of Austen’s novels to give due attention to the dramatic form of the writing. To convey meaning it often relies upon qualities associated more with spoken language: intonation, hesitation, double meanings and what is not said. Read in this light much of Darcy’s character discourse becomes more ‘intricate’, constructing the idea of intelligence and barbed humour, as when he responds to Miss Bingley’s charge that Elizabeth attempts to recommend herself to men by undervaluing her own sex: ‘“Undoubtedly,” replied Darcy, to whom this remark was chiefly addressed, “there is a meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable’” (p.34). It is significant too that many of the sparring conversations between Elizabeth and Darcy take the form of conflicts over interpretation; both are represented as having an intelligent sensitivity to duplicitous language. A good example of this is Darcy’s recognition, in chapter X, that the assumption of humility in a person’s speech often functions as an indirect boast. Elizabeth would have done well to have applied Darcy’s discrimination to Wickham’s self-disclaiming speech. It is, of course, the characterization of Elizabeth that most fully produces a sense of an intricate, highly individual personality. Moreover, by focalizing so much of the story from her perspective, Austen allows readers to gain a privileged insight, not accorded to those of other characters, into Elizabeth’s feelings and her process of emotional and moral development. As already noted, the character discourse of Elizabeth inevitably makes hers the most attractive consciousness represented in the text; her speech combines shrewdness with affection, intelligence with selfdeprecation and expresses it all with wit and good humour. Beyond this, throughout the novel, Austen carefully places Elizabeth in situations involving opposition, which draw reader sympathy onto her side and build up her status as the heroine. She is shown combating first the snub by Darcy, then the spiteful prejudice of Miss Bingley and finally defying the pride and insults of Lady Catherine. Austen’s work often conveys its meanings by use of contrast or oppositions. Thus, Elizabeth’s character is defined for us by the contrast presented with Jane’s trusting candour on the one hand and Miss Bingley’s snobbish affectation on the other. The episode of Jane’s illness at Netherfield is used to bring out these contrasts in sharp relief, but it also highlights another aspect of the characterization. Austen’s main means of differentiating her characters is by constructing highly individualized styles of speech for them, which articulate social attitudes, views of the world and of themselves. In addition to this, with Elizabeth we are given an attractive impression of an animated physical energy. She does not just walk the three miles in the rain to Netherfield to visit Jane, she ‘jump[s] over stiles and spring[s] over puddles’ (p.28). The characteristic image of Elizabeth is that of laughing and running, as when Mrs

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Hurst and Miss Bingley each take Darcy’s arm leaving her to walk behind alone: ‘she then ran gaily off, rejoicing as she rambled about, in the hope of being home again in a day or two’ (p.46). Such freedom of action and thought epitomizes the impression of her personality conveyed by the text. With all these devices brought into play to consolidate reader sympathy and identification with Elizabeth, it is hardly surprising that she has always been one of the most popular heroines in the canon of English literature. Are we meant to identify with her viewpoint completely? Is she the only character in the text not subjected to scrutiny and ironic mockery? Clearly not, since her major misjudgements and prejudices are at the centre of the narrative structure. A character given to such self-assured statements as ‘Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never’ (p.11) seems almost certain of being admired from an unexpected quarter. That Elizabeth can be so complacently aware of Mr Collins’s probable ‘complimentary’ intentions towards her and yet so unaware of Darcy’s makes the comedy at her expense more enjoyable. The most serious irony brought to bear upon Elizabeth is in relation to her judgements of Wickham and Darcy. Look, for example, at chapter XVI in which Wickham tells her of his unjust treatment at the hands of Darcy. How are Elizabeth’s thoughts and words placed in an ironic light? Discussion This episode is represented in a way that constructs a viewpoint for the reader at variance from that expressed by Elizabeth’s thoughts and words. Although she is fully aware of the indelicacy of any enquiry into the relationship of the two men, she not only enthusiastically and uncritically responds to Wickham’s confidences, but speaks unguardedly about her own impressions of Darcy. ‘I have spent four days in the same house with him, and I think him very disagreeable’ (p.68) she says, not reflecting how little is the time she has spent with Wickham or how unjustly her comments describe Darcy’s behaviour towards her during her stay at Netherfield. She is equally uncritical in accepting Wickham at his own estimation when he piously declares that, although Darcy deserves to be publicly disgraced, ‘Till I can forget his father, I can never defy or expose him’ (p.71). Comically, he makes this declaration immediately after ‘exposing’ Darcy to the full to Elizabeth. Whereupon ‘Elizabeth honoured him for such feelings, and thought him handsomer than ever as he expressed them’ (ibid.). Elizabeth is shown here to be as self-deceiving as other characters of whom she likes to make fun. She judges Wickham entirely on superficial appearances—‘Whatever he said, was said well; and whatever he did, done gracefully’ (p.75)—and persuades herself that her feelings are highly motivated and her judgement unimpeachable. ■ The close identification we are encouraged to feel with Elizabeth works in conjunction with the ironic consciousness offered the reader here to further the novel’s moral instruction. It is easy to recognize and ridicule the self-serving hypocrisy of Mr Collins or the mindless prejudices of Mrs Bennet. However, to perceive an intelligent human being, in whose happiness we have come to feel an

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active concern, to be equally capable of self-deception and misjudgement makes the teaching more effective. In this way the irony and comedy serve as strategies for refining the discrimination of the reader. The discourses of the various characters reflect their moral sensibilities, indicating their degrees of self-deception, foolishness, pride, prejudice and deliberate duplicity. A fully truthful discourse is the standard against which each character is judged and is the goal towards which the hero and heroine must strive. The reader’s education follows the path of their moral progress by identifying with it. Narrative structure It is only in the light of the completed narrative process that the pervasive irony involved in the Elizabeth-Darcy relationship can be appreciated. In that sense it is what might be called structural irony rather than localized comedy. Whilst most of what Mr Collins or Mrs Bennet says produces a local humorous effect in the text, the twists of meaning or reversals given to Elizabeth’s categorical statements and intentions are only brought to the reader’s consciousness (and potentially to her own) with the full development of the plot’s structure. When she refuses Sir William Lucas’s attempt to persuade her to dance with Darcy, responding to Darcy’s willingness to oblige with ‘Mr. Darcy is all politeness’ (p.22), she intends only the immediate sarcasm of insinuating that he is acting only out of politeness. There is some local rebound of comedy against Elizabeth here since the reader knows that already Darcy is attracted to her. However, in the course of the novel all of Darcy’s ‘politeness’, in the full moral weight of that term as consideration for the feelings of others, will be revealed to Elizabeth in his compassionate and delicate response to Lydia’s elopement. A rather more light-hearted example of structural irony is Elizabeth’s quarrel with Darcy, during her stay at Netherfield, as to how far a friend should be allowed to sway a person’s judgement. Elizabeth asserts: ‘You appear to me, Mr. Darcy, to allow nothing for the influence of friendship and affection. A regard for the requester would often make one readily yield to a request, without waiting for argument to reason one into it’ (p.43). However, less than a hundred pages on we find Elizabeth raging over just such a complacent temperament, which has allowed Bingley to be dissuaded from his attachment to Jane: ‘She could not think without anger, hardly without contempt, on that easiness of temper, that want of proper resolution which now made him the slave of his designing friends, and led him to sacrifice his own happiness to the caprice of their inclinations’ (p.119). Later still, almost at the end of the narrative, Elizabeth can think much more tolerantly of Bingley’s easiness of temper and of Darcy’s influence which restores him to Jane: ‘Elizabeth could not help smiling at his easy manner of directing his friend’ (p.330). The great pleasure afforded to subsequent readings of Pride and Prejudice is the recognition of how almost every assertion made by Elizabeth in the first half of the novel is ironically reinterpreted in the course of the narrative. This shows that the

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artistic organization operates as effectively in terms of the overall structure of the work as it does with the word-by-word precision of the prose. Since structural irony reflects the underlying moral scheme of a work, consideration of the narrative of Pride and Prejudice would suggest that the novel manifests a carefully balanced formal design. How would you, briefly, sum up the moral scheme of the plot? Discussion Somewhat simplistically, we could say that the heroine’s judgement is initially distorted by a prejudice that derives from her ill-founded pride in the astuteness of her first impressions of people. The hero, on the other hand, suffers from an equal corruption of judgement, which is founded upon the pride arising from a prejudiced view of class. Both have to discover the truth about themselves in the process of discovering the truth about each other and so arrive at a true meeting of minds. ■ Dancing is a recurrent motif in the work. In chapter III Darcy declines to dance with Elizabeth; in chapter V Elizabeth asserts to her mother: ‘I believe, Ma’am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him’ (p.l6). In the next chapter she keeps to this resolution and refuses Darcy as a partner. At Netherfield one of their antagonistic exchanges concerns dancing. It is therefore fitting that the structure of the narrative as it relates to them has all the formal pattern of a dance. They become acquainted with each other and Elizabeth especially forms her misapprehensions in the neighbourhood of Longbourn. Her movement towards the truth takes her on a geographical as well as an intellectual and emotional journey towards Darcy. At his aunt’s house at Rosings she discovers a different view of him even before she receives his letter. However, it is at his own home, Pemberley, to which she travels with her aunt and uncle Gardiner (whose residence in Gracechurch Street so offends Darcy’s class pride) that Elizabeth finally learns to understand and appreciate Darcy at his true worth. Darcy has to make the opposite journey. At Rosings he believes he makes the ultimate concession to his pride in proposing marriage. However, he has to learn to accept Elizabeth without condescension. He must travel geographically and psychologically, first to her aunt’s and uncle’s home in London and then the whole distance to Longbourn. Austen avoids obvious use of symbolism in her language. She aims to allow more direct understanding. However, places in which people live frequently suggest social and moral values. Longbourn, dominated by the presence of Mrs Bennet, seems to be the location of all the prejudices of ‘an unimproved mind’; Rosings, dominated by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, represents the worst of an equally ignorant class pride. At Pemberley, Elizabeth recognizes a judicious taste which points to cultivation without the vulgarity of affectation or show: It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills;—and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its

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banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by awkward taste. (p.215) In a way Elizabeth seems to recognize her true home in this episode, and beneath the novel’s moral structure and realist form we might glimpse elements of a far more ancient tradition, the pattern of fairytale. Elizabeth is like a bewitched princess in a ‘Longbourn’ exile from her kingdom until the destined hero overcomes all the obstacles to restore her to her proper place: the spell-bound beggar-maid transformed back into the princess! At the beginning of this chapter I suggested that the innovative representation of characters as specific individuals involved in a convincing social world was closely associated with the realist novel’s claim to offer moral truths. Austen’s work is usually seen as typifying this moral seriousness. However, lurking beneath the realist form there seem to be the residues of the more archaic romance. Arnold Kettle describes romance as allowing readers to avoid facing up to the challenges of the real world. Does this imply that ultimately Austen’s work is unworldly and escapist? Or do these ancient fairy-tale elements enter into a more questioning relationship with the realist presentation of characters —as Bakhtin might suggest? Critical debates What is the relationship of Pride and Prejudice to the social world in which it was produced? How have readers responded to it through time? Contemporary and early views In our culture it might seem that the two requisites for establishing a writer as a serious artist are comparison to Shakespeare and a vigorous disagreement among critics about the value of his or her work. Although she did not become a household name like her contemporary Walter Scott or like Charles Dickens later in the nineteenth century, Austen very quickly met these two requirements. In a long, intelligent review of her work in 1821 Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, an experienced reviewer and writer, claimed that in her dramatic presentation of characters she ‘was hardly exceeded even by Shakespeare himself (quoted in Southam, Jane Austen, 1968, p.98). This high praise of her dramatic method was reiterated by the critic G.H.Lewes in 1859: instead of description, the common and easy resource of novelists, she has the rare and difficult art of dramatic presentation: instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves. In this she has never perhaps been surpassed, not even by Shakespeare himself. (Ibid., p.157)

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Such estimations have continued to the present day, one modern critic writing: ‘Mr Collins…has almost the status of Falstaff or Hamlet or Don Quixote—as a person who is somehow perceived as having a life independent of the work of art that contains him’ (Gard, Jane Austen’s Novels, 1992, p.107). However, not all of Austen’s first readers were so impressed. Charlotte Brontë’s reaction was, perhaps predictably, far from appreciative. She described Pride and Prejudice as ‘a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck’ (quoted in Southam, Jane Austen, 1968, p. 126). More generally, she characterized Austen’s novels as lacking anything like warmth and enthusiasm; anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt… She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well, [but] she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood… Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman, if this be heresy—I cannot help it. (Ibid., pp.127–8) As is often the case, this tells us as much about the writing of Charlotte Brontë as about that of Austen; however, others did (and do) share her feeling that Austen’s work is rather circumscribed in its social and emotional range. Even Lewes’s long final appraisal of Austen is strongly qualified by his judgement on the restricted scope of her work: ‘Her fame, we think, must endure. Such art as hers can never grow old, never be superseded. But, after all, miniatures are not frescoes, and her works are miniatures. Her place is among the Immortals; but the pedestal is erected in a quiet niche of the great temple’ (ibid., p.166). The idea of a quiet, lady-like seclusion from the larger world of political and social affairs with all its vulgar contention and passions was much enhanced by A Memoir of Jane Austen published in 1870 by her nephew James Edward AustenLeigh. This constructed a hagiographical image of Austen as ‘dear Aunt Jane’, an author of charming love stories, who lived an uneventful life within the domestic circle of her family— gentle, religious, unworldly and unambitious. The family took care to preserve this image for posterity. Nearly all of Austen’s letters were burnt by her sister Cassandra, who had been her closest confidant. A few carefully selected extracts remain, like that to her nephew in which Austen compared his writing to ‘the little bit (two Inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour’ (Chapman, Jane Austen’s Letters, 1952, pp. 468–9, 16 December 1816).

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Austen-Leigh’s Memoir initiated the critical recognition of Austen that, as Lewes predicted, has endured ever since. However, valuations of her work even well into the twentieth century have remained troubled by what Ian Watt, in 1963, described as ‘the first and most enduring of the critical problems that Jane Austen’s works raise…[the] one of scale: does the patent restriction of her subject matter of itself exclude her from the ranks of the great novelists?’ (Watt, Jane Austen, 1963, p.2). The restriction of subject-matter perceived in her work encompasses two areas of experience. It is felt that she shows lack of concern with the wider social and political world and a reluctance to engage with the life of the passions and more intense emotions. More recently, critical studies have vigorously challenged both aspects of this perception from a variety of angles, several of which are themselves in contention. In reading this section, therefore, you should keep in mind the title, ‘Critical debates’. It is intended to emphasize the novel’s active engagement in the social dialogue of its era and, equally, the dialogic relations between criticism and a literary text. We should not be looking for the last or final word or the truth as to the meaning of any novel, but rather taking part in the continuing dialogic response to all the voices orchestrated within its form. Having worked carefully through the language and structure of Pride and Prejudice, you should feel able to take part in the debates and you might like to think for a moment whether you share any of the reservations about Austen that earlier readers expressed. The wider social and political world The overt and (at the time) polemical aim of Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975) was to challenge the retiring, lady-like image of Austen as a novelist. Even to associate her name with a discordant term like ‘war’ was a declaration of a new approach to the novels. Butler’s detailed and scholarly book aims to situate them firmly within the contentious and partisan ideological conflicts that characterized English culture during the years that followed the French Revolution. Central to these was the reaction produced in England by the execution of the French royal family and the reign of terror from 1792 to 1795. In the highly charged atmosphere of this time, differences of religious observance, views on education, conventions of social behaviour, ways of dressing, even forms of the novel were all caught up in the politicized social dialogue. A popular form of the novel that developed towards the end of the eighteenth century was the sentimental novel. In this the hero or heroine displays great sensitivity of feelings and sympathies, entering intuitively into the sufferings and sorrows encountered in the course of the plot. In Henry MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), the hero is moved to tears of pity and tenderness on almost every page. Sentimental novels were part of a larger ‘cult of sensibility’ that had developed during the 1760s and 1770s, partly in reaction to the emphasis upon reason and intellect that predominated for most of the eighteenth century. The appeal to sensibility was based upon an optimistic belief in the innate goodness of human nature. The most powerful proponent of this view was the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–72), especially in his influential novel Émile (1762), which

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was widely read in England. The perception of human nature as essentially benevolent was further developed by Romantic writers, who celebrated the intuitive truth of subjective feeling and the wisdom of the heart above external, rational codes of ethics and the sanctions of religious and social authority. Butler argues that sentimental novels made important innovations in the novel genre by their emphasis upon subjective experience as the central locus of reality in the fictions. They developed a concern with the representation of human consciousness as fleeting, emotional and complexly non-rational. Moreover, they encouraged a much closer bond of sympathy between reader and central character. The sentimental novelist aims to involve readers emotionally with the subjective experience of the hero or heroine, not to activate their rational judgement in ethical considerations of moral blame. However, Butler argues, in the politicized climate resulting from reaction to the French Revolution, such subjectivism at the expense of authority, an upholding of Rousseauistic views of a benign human nature with a tendency to sympathize with the victims of any form of social inequality, came to be seen as dangerous Jacobinism. In the face of political reaction, sentimental novels became wholly associated with revolutionary sentiment and were made the target of hostile attack and parody by anti-jacobin writers. They stressed the hubristic dangers and follies of relying upon subjective judgement and insisted that the inherently sinful tendency of human nature necessitated submission to external, objective codes of conduct. Austen, Butler argues firmly, as the daughter and sister of clergymen of the Established Church, began life in the conservative fold. As a teenager she was the author of a satire on sensibility, Love and Friendship, and two of her first completed novels, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Northanger Abbey (1818), display the typical attitudes of anti-jacobin novels, mocking subjective feelings and gothic fantasizing. Both of these novels were in draft by 1797, but, Butler claims, all of Austen’s novels belong generically ‘to a movement that defines itself by its opposition to revolution’ (Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 1987 edn, p.123). Throughout her work, Austen chastizes characters who elevate their own judgement above objective ethical foundations of truth and satirizes the errors into which such subjectivity leads them. Moreover, Austen adheres to the realist form of the novel, using a third person narrator to convey a sense of objective reality, in preference to the subjective form of fiction made fashionable by sentimental and Gothic novels. Butler quotes Austen’s ‘prayer’ as evidence of her alignment with this conservative moral and political position: Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of temper and every evil habit in which we have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and the danger of our own souls…. Incline us to ask our hearts these questions oh! God, and save us from deceiving ourselves by pride or vanity. (Ibid., p.189)

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The great strength of Butler’s book is the way in which she perceives Austen’s novels as part of the contentious political dialogue of their time and as actively involved in the ongoing development of the novel as a genre, itself being shaped and shaken by the ideological debates and struggles. However, the ultimate test of any criticism is the insight it offers into individual literary texts. This would be a useful point to read the extract from Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas in Part Two. As you do so, consider how convincing you find Butler’s historically informed reading of Pride and Prejudice. What aspects of the text does this approach help to emphasize? How far does her view of the novel make sense of it as a whole? Are there any aspects of style or theme that you feel to be important and that her reading seems to ignore or underplay? Discussion Response to criticism, like response to novels, is closely related to our own values and experience. What I like about Butler’s account of Austen’s novels is the serious and scholarly respect she accords to the ideas and issues they contain and her insistence that intelligent contemporary readers perceived them in the same way. This approach brings a more careful attention to what might otherwise easily pass as the simple love story of Elizabeth and Darcy. Butler usefully emphasizes the undoubtedly Christian language of penitent self-criticism that characterizes the discourse of the hero and heroine as they recognize their errors of judgement. Elizabeth is such an attractive heroine, to modern readers especially, that it is not difficult to overlook the shallow basis of her liking for Wickham and the degree to which she willingly blunts her normal intelligence in response to the flattery his attentions offer her wounded pride. Equally, it is possible to miss the insidious way in which Elizabeth allows this prejudice to dispose her to accept, on hearsay, without question, a serious charge of misconduct against Darcy. ■ By reminding us of the place of Austen’s fiction in the development of the novel genre, Butler allows us to appreciate more fully the skilful representation of a culpable heroine in Pride and Prejudice. Whereas the sentimental novel fostered a wholly emotional engagement in the subjective experience of the central character, conservative, anti-jacobin fiction reasserted the need for an objective moral appraisal of culpability and virtue. Placed within this perspective, we can recognize that, in Elizabeth, Austen has used a method of characterization (employing a mixture of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’, free indirect speech and character focalization) that enables the reader both to make moral judgements about the heroine’s behaviour and to retain sympathetic involvement in her experience. As Butler points out, Austen was writing at a time when Evangelicalism was a growing force throughout English social life. Closely affiliated to the conservative political mood of the times, the evangelical movement strongly condemned all forms of ‘frivolity’ in behaviour, dress, social intercourse, thought and word. Its influence was to bring about the moral and cultural conformity that we think of as ‘Victorian values’. Austen’s conscious attitude to the growing influence of the

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evangelical movement appears to have been mixed. However, Darcy’s formal rectitude and responsible demeanour as a great landowner does suggest he is already responding to the call to seriousness the evangelicals directed at the upper classes after the Revolution in France: the insistence on the need for the aristocratic classes to put their house in order to forestall criticism from below. Elizabeth’s response to Lydia’s elopement is also couched in the language of evangelical morality: ‘she has been given up to nothing but amusement and vanity. She has been allowed to dispose of her time in the most idle and frivolous manner’ (pp.249–50). Butler’s reading also brings out the formal thematic relationship between the two central couples: Darcy and Elizabeth, and Bingley and Jane. Austen typically uses similarities and contrasts to clarify the reader’s moral discrimination between the strengths and weaknesses of a trusting, charitable view of fellow human beings and a sceptical and rational appraisal of the truth behind pleasing appearances. Butler is right too, it seems to me, in seeing pride and prejudice as closely interrelated human failings rather than as oppositions. You might like to consider how the characterization of Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs Bennet also makes use of comparison and contrast to illuminate the interconnections and dangers of these two ‘sins’. It is Butler’s unqualified use of the word ‘sin’ in relation to the novel that focuses my reservations about some of the emphasis in her reading. She makes very little of Mr Collins’s part in the novel, but he too is an element in the careful structure of comparison and contrast that organizes the characterization. In the main, Mr Collins epitomizes a grotesque form of servile pride and its resulting prejudices. The religious intolerance he expresses towards Lydia has to be seen as part of this slavish desire to flatter and imitate the views of his social superiors. His letter to Mr Bennet in which he says that ‘The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this’ (p.262) is clearly meant to be read in a strongly satirical light. However, Mr Collins continues his letter: ‘I am inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she could not be guilty of such an enormity, at so early an age’ (ibid.). This sentiment echoes the evangelical emphasis upon the inherent sinfulness of human nature, but the fact that such an opinion is voiced in the novel by Mr Collins must make us hesitate to assume it is equally the unquestioned view of Austen, as Butler claims, and, moreover, the one that orders the entire structure of the work. I suggest it might be preferable to read the text as more fully dialogic. The various voices represented by the novelistic prose—narrator’s and characters’—do indeed articulate the passionate debate of the world outside the novel, and the text orchestrates these voices into a genuine dialogue of opposing points of view. None of the points of view is necessarily given the final or authoritative word. Both the hero and the heroine use the terminology of Christian penitence to express their remorse for so misjudging the other, and it is important to take account of this in recognizing the serious issues involved in their earlier mutual intolerance. Intolerance was a marked feature of the political climate that Butler rightly says shaped Austen’s work; it was particularly marked in the conservative reaction

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against all forms of progressive thought. It seems significant therefore that, at the end of the novel, when Darcy and Elizabeth declare their love for each other, whereas Darcy continues to use language reminiscent of evangelical discourse: ‘I cannot be so easily reconciled to myself (p.326); ‘Painful recollections will intrude, which cannot, which ought not to be repelled. I have been selfish all my life’ (p. 328), Elizabeth speaks of tolerant forgetfulness: ‘You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure’ (p.327). Such tolerant forgiveness can be understood as an aspect of the novel’s pervasive spirit of comedy, which is closely associated with the character of Elizabeth. This comic spirit is the element that seems most forgotten in Butler’s account. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas was one of the earliest critical studies to perceive Austen’s texts as dialogic, in the sense that they were engaged with the interaction of views among the various social groups, classes and forces during a very turbulent period of English history. However, as I have suggested, it perhaps underestimated the contradictory and complex ways in which Austen was responding to that war of ideas. A more recent reading of Pride and Prejudice is that offered by Isobel Armstrong in her introduction to the 1990 edition of the novel cited throughout this chapter. Although concerned, like Butler, to situate Austen’s work within the framework of contesting ideas and values in the early years of the nineteenth century, she argues that the text is more ambiguous in its political alignments. She emphasizes the long period of its production, probably first drafted in 1796 and revised and largely rewritten before publication in 1813. For this reason, Armstrong says, the complexities of the text register a situation when bourgeois individualism and its nature require examination and critique, and a later situation when the very reverse was the case—when despotism and repression were a substantial threat. Hence the novel discloses a play of conflicting energies and positions. Hence it is a deeply questioning work. (p.x) Despite this caution, Armstrong seems to give more emphasis to the elements in the text that other readers have seen as rebellious or subversive, particularly the character of Elizabeth. Her discussion of the Elizabeth-Darcy relation usefully redresses the balance after Butler’s reading by stressing the real injury done to Elizabeth by Darcy’s culpable class pride. The issue of class, which Armstrong highlights in her discussion of the changing meaning of the word ‘pride’ during the period of the novel’s production, is surely more important than Butler allows? For example, the ridiculing of the vulgar and greedy pride of Lady Catherine de Bough and the contrast deliberately presented to it in the rational and generous demeanour of Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle Gardiner has to be seen as an astringent comment on the merits of rank and birth. Elizabeth’s union with Darcy and the welcome accorded her aunt and uncle into the select circle at Pemberley confirms the importance of a relative fluidity of social boundaries. However, we must remember

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that Lady Catherine is also welcomed back into the Pemberley circle. In its representation of class relationships the novel is promoting a consolidation and enlargement of respectability but certainly not its overthrow. For this reason I have reservations about Armstrong’s claim in relation to Elizabeth that ‘the novel implies that she remains an interloper at Pemberley’ (p.xxiv). It is an attractive idea, but like all interpretations it would need to be backed by some demonstrable evidence in the words of the text; I am not sure where this can be found. I am even less convinced that Lydia’s ‘cheerful subversion of sexual convention’ and her ‘jokes about the excitement of dressing an officer in drag’ can be read as evidence that the novel ‘radically questions the artificial construction of gender by society’ (pp.xxiv-xxv). This might be a useful place to pause and assess your own response. In attempting to place the novel’s political sympathies and alignment how would you weigh Elizabeth’s apparent disregard for rank, authority and conventional decorum against the more conservative moral movement of the plot structure? This is a point I will return to towards the end of this section. Marriage and the domestic sphere: feminist criticism Approaches like those of Butler and Armstrong have done much to dispel the image of Austen as a retiring ‘lady’ novelist concerned only with the domestic affairs of two or three families in a tranquil English neighbourhood. However, another approach is possible to the so-called problem of scale in Austen’s work. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf complained of discrepancies in the way literary texts were perceived. She thought that masculine values prevailed, and that critics assumed a book to be important because it dealt with war or insignificant because it dealt with the feelings of women in a domestic setting. In the 1970s, feminist criticism, an important new presence in literary studies, began to take up Woolf’s claim in a systematic way, arguing that the concern of women writers with the lives and experiences of women was neither trivial nor unpolitical in the wider sense. Thus, in Literary Women (1978), Ellen Moers points out that ‘from her earliest years, Austen had the kind of mind that inquired where the money came from on which young women were to live and exactly how much of it there was’ (p.67). Moers argues that the pervasive and precise concern with income and property in Austen’s novels, a concern extremely well illustrated in the early chapters of Pride and Prejudice, constitutes a specifically hard-headed, female form of realism. It is what makes marriage so important and serious a subject in Austen’s fiction. In a social world where the only possibility of movement in a woman’s life was through marriage, choice of a partner was as serious a business as choice of career was for a man. Seen in this light, Elizabeth’s refusal of Mr Collins is as brave an act as that of a young man who refuses to enter the family firm. Mrs Bennet’s warning to Elizabeth, ‘if you take it into your head to go on refusing every offer of marriage in this way, you will never get a husband at all—and I am sure I do not know who is

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to maintain you when your father is dead—I shall not be able to keep you’ (p.102), is the dark underlying possibility of Elizabeth’s future. Marriage for women at Austen’s time was almost the only moment accorded importance in their lives. Their freedom for manoeuvre and for actively seeking a partner was severely limited to the few acquaintances that came within their social orbit. Decorous encouragement or discouragement, acceptance or refusal were their only opportunities for exercising choice. Upon the rightness of that choice, often itself the object of severe parental pressure, depended their entire future well-being. Thus, Austen’s prime theme of marriage is far from trivial. It is, Moers argues, better viewed as ‘marriageship’, a complex, delicate process of investigation and manoeuvring by women in order that they may achieve a good settlement for life without sacrifice of dignity or self-respect. ‘Marriageship’, says Moers,’ ‘is one of those literary subjects that must be read imaginatively from the woman’s point of view, which here differs from the man’s’ (Literary Women, 1978, p.71). You might like to consider Austen’s representation of the various young unmarried women characters in Pride and Prejudice. How does she use her method of comparison and contrast to investigate the possible approaches to the difficult and important business of ‘marriageship’ which faces them all? You might also find it illuminating to compare the quite different approach to ‘marriageship’ of the young men in the novel. Treating marriage as a proper subject for serious artistic consideration might in itself be seen as a radical attitude, but it does not necessarily imply that Austen was a critic of the institution or of the position of women in society generally at that time. What indications are there in Pride and Prejudice as to Austen’s views on these matters? Does she represent marriage negatively or positively? Discussion You might feel that the very successful marriages of Elizabeth and Jane to Darcy and Bingley which conclude the novel, guaranteeing the sisters not only wealth and status but love and respect as well, imply that Austen has no serious reservations about marriage as the ultimate goal and fulfilment of a woman’s life. The logic of the plot seems to confirm that young women who avoid the extremes of either materialistic ambition (Charlotte) or imprudent emotional gratification (Lydia) will be rewarded with the admirable husbands they deserve. In addition, some critics have argued, Austen frequently features in her novels a young, wilful heroine who learns to curb and subdue her imaginative and emotional energies under the maturer guidance of the man she eventually marries. Such a structure confirms traditional, patriarchal assumptions that women are frail creatures in need of male counsel and control. The ending of Pride and Prejudice has been interpreted as conforming to this pattern. ■ However, this view of Austen overlooks the fact that in two of her novels, Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818), it is the heroine who is represented as more morally correct and mature than the hero. Neither does it seem to me that the ending of Pride and Prejudice offers a clear-cut case of a heroine who learns to

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submit to the better judgement of the man she is to marry. Both hero and heroine admit their mistakes with an equal sense of their lack of judgement, and Elizabeth is represented as more resilient and less overcome by remorse in her attitude to her past mistakes. In her marriage to Darcy, the text does seem to be suggesting the possibility of real equality in a relationship between a man and woman. Elizabeth soon begins to tease Darcy again and we are informed that Elizabeth’s ‘lively, sportive, manner of talking’ to her husband makes a strong impression upon Darcy’s young sister, Georgiana: ‘Her mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in her way. By Elizabeth’s instructions she began to comprehend that a woman may take liberties with her husband, which a brother will not always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself (p.345). This idea of a Utopian new order dawning at Pemberley can, of course, be seen as confirming the fairy-tale quality of the marriage plot. It could be said that the novel simply ignores the harsher realities that constituted the lives of women at the time. My response to this would be that the two fairy-tale marriages are etched out against a sombre background of much bleaker possibilities. In Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (1978) the critic Nina Auerbach has drawn attention to the intensity of collective female waiting in Austen’s novels: In the family microcosm, the male whom all await can alone bring substance: by inheriting the estate, he will ensure the family the solidity and continuity of income and land. Without him, their emotional and financial resources, and ultimately the family itself, can only evaporate. The quality of the Bennet household is determined by the…realization that the period of protracted waiting is not a probationary period before life begins: waiting for a male is life itself. (pp.39–40) There is no description of Longbourn as home, only Pemberley is given material substance in the text. Throughout the novel Elizabeth and the other women are depicted as waiting anxiously for the arrival or entry of men into assemblies, into rooms, into their families, into their empty, insubstantial lives. Elizabeth turns into a joke Darcy’s cruel comment as she sits without a partner: ‘She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men’ (p.9). Perhaps more than any other comment in the novel, this remark is brutally revealing about the relations of power existing between men and women just below the surface of conventional social intercourse. Behind the representation of Elizabeth’s bitter anger at Darcy and her welcome acceptance of Wickham’s apparent attraction to her there lie the real fears and pain a young woman would inevitably feel in such a situation. Darcy is not just offering her a public snub, he is threatening the foundation of her trust that hopes of future respect, happiness, even identity can have substance. What the absence of these qualities in marriage would mean for a woman is hinted at in the way Charlotte Lucas’s prudent union with Mr Collins is presented

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as the best she can do for herself in order to avoid the greater evils of dependence upon her father and brothers. Should Elizabeth’s sense of outrage and betrayal by her friend be read as displaced anxiety and anger stemming from uncertainty as to her own ability to avoid a like fate? Certainly, the text offers no support for her severe judgement of Charlotte’s conduct. When Elizabeth visits Charlotte in her married home she notes the careful apportioning of the front rooms of the ground floor to Mr Collins. She gives Charlotte credit for this arrangement, which ensures that her husband is not often in her company. However, at the end of the novel Charlotte is said to be pregnant: there were severe limitations to a wife’s ability to avoid her husband’s presence. You might, in addition, consider Mr Bennet’s conduct as a husband and the likely pattern of Lydia’s married life, in coming to an assessment of Austen’s representation of the position of married women in her society. The critical approaches discussed so far certainly make strong claims for reading Pride and Prejudice as a text multiply engaged in the most important and passionate debates of its time. However, none of the approaches directly confronts the question of the novel’s sub-plot of fairy-tale romance. In thinking about this it is helpful to remember the many-voiced qualities of the novel’s language. We tend to speak of a text as if it is the result of the author’s conscious intention. However, the imaginative processes involved in artistic organization are too complex to be adequately covered by the term ‘intention’. Almost all authors speak of texts as in some peculiar way having lives of their own. Moreover, according to Bakhtin, words are where the conflicting views of the many social groups of an era collide and contest. No writer can drown the echoes of that clash of voices from the words he or she uses. In addition, the meanings of words are often complicated by our unconscious desires— by hidden impulses and repressed longings that determine the context in which we use them. Seen like this, the novel’s language is dialogic in multiple ways. The words used are layered with the ideological conflicts of their own historical moment (with varying degrees of awareness of this on the part of the writer); they will contain, too, echoes of past values and social conflicts; and they may be thought of as ‘speaking’ the writer’s unconscious and conflicting desires. The word ‘desire’ may seem a strange one to associate with Austen. Her life and works seem exemplary of that lady-like ideal of proper womanliness that was increasingly insisted upon as natural to a female identity. As this ideology developed in the nineteenth century the idea of femininity was fused with that of innocence and purity. A proper woman would neither feel nor recognize desire. Conformity with this repressive stereotype of self-denial and moral puritanism gained women the reward of male idealization and with it their sense of self-esteem. Women, therefore, had a strong investment in accepting and internalizing this ideology of a naturally pure femininity. However, for a woman who wanted to enter the public domain of writing, this internalized image of what she should be inevitably gave rise to a crisis of conflicting feelings. The woman writer had to find a way of resolving the internal war between her acceptance of the need for lady-like restraint and her unrestrained impulses of creative energy.

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It has been argued that in Pride and Prejudice the character of Elizabeth functions to resolve this crisis of conflicting desires.2 In the early part of the text a desire for freedom (on the part of women readers as well as the woman writer) can be fulfilled by identifying with the unrestrained physical (sexual?) energy of Elizabeth as she jumps over puddles and runs laughing away from those who would subdue and constrain her. Equally, Elizabeth offers a sense of freedom of the imagination and a subversive disrespect for orthodoxy and authority. Romantic love is represented as a magical transforming power in the lives of the hero and heroine. It purports to be subversive in that it seems to flout family authority, social status and economic considerations. However, the values associated with romantic love are almost invariably conservative because it insists upon the fundamental separation of the personal from the social. For all its claims to transformative power, love does not change social institutions. What is more, by closing the plot with the culmination of romantic love, as Austen does in Pride and Prejudice and all her other novels, the relationship between men and women is frozen at the moment when it is most flattering to women’s desires, at the point when they seem to exercise greatest power. However, the power romantic love confers on women is entirely fictional. It has no reality in terms of the social and economic institutions of marriage and property. What the conclusions of Austen’s novels offer, therefore, are imaginary, escapist (fairy-tale) consolations to the real needs of women in their social lives. However, the desires invested in texts are as multiple as the voices in the texts, and by no means all the voices are complicit with prevailing value systems, nor are they easily suppressed. The impulses and energies of the imagination are endlessly inventive in the strategies and indirections they construct. Elizabeth’s subversive laughter cannot be stifled, it continues to sound, and there is a way, surely, in which it undercuts both the main plot’s investment in moral reform and the subplot’s investment in romantic love. Moreover, in the voice of the narrator Austen constructs another even more ambiguous consciousness: witty, ventriloquist, mocking, sly, clever and knowing, it is far removed from the approved ideal of a lady-like innocence. The comedy and imaginative freedom of the writing opposes narrow moral, political and gender orthodoxies. This aspect of the work, its comic power, and its relation to realism is the subject of the final section of this chapter. Realism and comedy In volume II, chapter XIX, which deals with the Gardiners’ visit to Derbyshire with Elizabeth, we are suddenly informed: ‘It is not the object of this work to give a description of Derbyshire, nor of any of the remarkable places through which their route thither lay; Oxford, Blenheim, Warwick, Kenilworth, Birmingham, &c. are sufficiently known’ (p.213). The implication is that the object of the work is to give readers an account of what is not known to them but which is equally part of material, referential reality as are the places mentioned. Much of the art of realist writers consists of so disguising their art and fostering the illusion that they are

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referring to actual people, places and events. For this reason the realist form of the novel has been attacked by some modern critics, not so much for constructing the illusion of reality per se, but because in so doing, it is argued, it produces overcomforting fictions and passes these off as how things really are.3 Instead of challenging their readers’ perceptions and expectations, realist novels cater for and confirm all their most deeply held preconceptions. One of the comforting fictions that the realist novel is accused of confirming for us is a belief in individual identity as unified and coherent over time, allowing inner awareness to provide a basis for self-knowledge and truth. It is the foundation, too, of many if not all moral codes. If a person does not retain the same identity over time, and so is not able to form a perception of self based upon memory of past actions and feelings, then he or she cannot be held blameable or praiseworthy, and the sanctions of punishment and reward that hold moral codes in place are inapplicable. As we have seen, an extreme model of a restrictively coherent female identity came into force during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to police the behaviour and desires of women. Is it fair to criticize Pride and Prejudice for offering us the idea of identity as knowable and unified so that self-knowledge is attainable and, as a result, personal improvement a moral responsibility? Discussion It would surely be impossible to deny that these assumptions structure the form of Pride and Prejudice. In episode after episode the irony functions to highlight the prejudiced acceptance of appearance for substance and to mock discourses that are characterized by self-deception and opinion held as truth. Offended by Darcy’s proud demeanour, the Meryton assembly decides at once that he is the ‘most disagreeable man in the world’ (p.8). Although Jane cannot believe ill of Darcy as the friend of Bingley, yet ‘it was not in her nature to question the veracity of a young man of such amiable appearance as Wickham’ (p.76). ■ The implication of the ironic position taken by the narrator as regards mere appearance, prejudice and gossip, and the contrast constructed between the characters’ discourses based upon these and the authoritative claims made by the narrator’s voice, is that the truth about character is always there to be recognized and that those who fail to see it are justifiably blameworthy. The moral status of the hero and heroine is related to their ability to clear their perceptions of impressions and prejudice and arrive at a true knowledge of each other. Central to this is the capacity for self-knowledge: on reading Darcy’s letter, Elizabeth feels she has been ‘blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd’. ‘Till this moment, I never knew myself, she says (p.185). Darcy is represented as proceeding through a like process of selfenlightenment. We could see the hero and heroine as attaining the level of rational perception of truth that the narrative has always indicated exists. In this sense, the form of the novel—its structural movement towards truth and moral self-knowledge, its use of irony and its hierarchical arrangement of discourses

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according to their truth status—does seem to offer us a reassuring belief in individual identity as knowable and stable. However, I want to suggest that the novel contains a comic vision that is radically at odds with our deeply held assumptions about identity, assumptions that underpin the effectiveness of all forms of social and self-control. Despite all its emphasis upon truth, the narrative points to one area of extra-fictional reality where the truth about individual identity may not be practically possible or desirable. Those without power cannot always afford to be honest; women in want of a husband may find it necessary to appear other than they feel. When Elizabeth refuses Mr Collins’s proposal he repeatedly assures her that his esteem is not lessened by her ‘delicate dissembling’, until, exasperated, she begs him to consider her ‘a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart’ (p.98). However, the text suggests that for women heart and reason do not always speak with the same voice; in acting rationally, a woman may be doing just that—acting. Charlotte Lucas rationally performs the role allotted to her by Mr Collins to safeguard herself from the worse indignities of poverty and dependence. Whilst Elizabeth is pleased that Jane’s growing attachment to Bingley is veiled by her manner, Charlotte believes that a woman had better act more in love than she feels. Neither of them seems to believe that speaking the truth of the heart is the wisest course. When discussing her disappointment in regard to Bingley, Jane says: ‘We must not expect a lively young man to be always so guarded and circumspect…. Women fancy admiration means more than it does.’ To which Elizabeth replies: ‘And men take care that they should’ (p.122). While such inequality exists between the sexes it would seem a necessity for women at least to act rationally, no matter what they feel. Elizabeth’s ‘impudence’ does not protect her from the necessity of dissembling. When her father teases her with Mr Collins’s letter warning against any marriage with Darcy, Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried. Her father had most cruelly mortified her, by what he said of Mr. Darcy’s indifference, and she could do nothing but wonder at such a want of penetration, or fear that perhaps, instead of his seeing too little, she might have fancied too much. (p.323) In a situation of such uncertainty and impotence of choice only a woman as young and foolish as Lydia would fail to make her ‘feelings appear what they were not’. There are other moments in the text when there appears to be even greater doubt about the possibility of separating truth from fancy. Just before Darcy comes to propose to her, Elizabeth, ‘as if intending to exasperate herself as much as possible’ against him, rereads all of Jane’s letters (p.167). This time she ‘noticed every sentence conveying the idea of uneasiness, with an attention which it had hardly received on the first perusal’ (ibid.). Having learnt from Colonel Fitzwilliam that

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Darcy prides himself on effecting the separation of Bingley from Jane, she has now ‘a keener sense of her sister’s sufferings’ (ibid.). Is this second reading of Jane’s letters to be understood as offering a truer insight of her unhappiness than the earlier reading of them, or does anger against Darcy encourage Elizabeth to exaggerate the import of ‘every sentence conveying the idea of uneasiness? The language here is ambiguous and affords us no way of resolving this question. Earlier in the text, Elizabeth says: ‘But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever’ (p.37). As well as this instability of the observed identity, she might have noted the instability of the observing consciousness. Elizabeth’s affection for Jane makes her perceive Darcy in a harsher light and her increased anger makes her read Jane’s feelings with more intensity. Much later, when Darcy’s letter has led to a revolution in her feelings, she scrutinizes his portrait at Pemberley: ‘There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth’s mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance’ (p.220). Under this influence she remembers the warmth of his declaration of love but ‘softened its impropriety of expression’ (ibid.). Is this to be read as part of Elizabeth’s progress towards the truth? There is nothing to suggest she ever departs from that ‘softened’ view and later when Jane reminds her of how she has disliked Darcy she replies: ‘You know nothing of the matter. That is all to be forgot. Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself (p.331). Memory, on which depends the possibility of a stable, knowable identity, is, as Elizabeth and the text acknowledge, always a carefully selected and ordered narrative—a fiction. This suggests perhaps that there can be no such thing as an individual consciousness without opinion and prejudice. What about the narrator’s voice, which seems throughout to guarantee the possibility of truth? Elizabeth likes to tease and she does this as Darcy recognizes by ‘wilfully’ misunderstanding everybody (p.51). We could see a very similar impulse on the part of the narrator to tease the reader. When Darcy appears deeply affected by the news of Lydia’s elopement with Wickham, ‘Elizabeth…observed, and instantly understood it. Her power was sinking; everything must sink under such a proof of family weakness’ (pp.244–5). This is the narrator’s discourse but it stays firmly within Elizabeth’s focalization. The narrator of the story must know that Elizabeth does not correctly understand the meaning of Darcy’s appearance, but allows the reader to share that misconception in order to delay the closure of the narrative. There are many such moments of necessary non-disclosure in the narrative, and in some of them the focalization is far more slippery or ‘wilful’ than in the example quoted above. In volume II, chapter I, Jane receives word from Miss Bingley that the family is not to return to Netherfield. The following paragraph opens: ‘Hope was over, entirely over; and when Jane could attend to the rest of the letter, she found little, except the professed affections of the writer, that could give her any comfort’ (p.119). This is the narrator speaking, and the phrase ‘professed affections’ implies that that part of the sentence is also the narrator’s focalization, since at this stage Jane still believes in the sincerity of Miss Bingley’s regard for her. However,

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this is not the case with ‘Hope was over, entirely over’, since clearly the narrator knows that hope is not over. What we have here has to be Jane’s perception of hopelessness, but the narrator allows a deliberate slippage between the tone of Jane’s despairing certainty and that of narrative authority. A similar duplicitous slippage between character consciousness and narrator’s consciousness occurs when the regiment leaves Meryton, occasioning the departure of Wickham and Lydia. The narrator informs us ‘Elizabeth was now to see Mr. Wickham for the last time’ (p. 206). This has to be Elizabeth’s perception since, of course, she is to meet Wickham again as Lydia’s husband. Thus, two consciousnesses inhabit the words: the naïve consciousness of the character and the knowing consciousness of the narrator. However, the narrator does not include us in this knowingness; our naïvety is teased like that of the character. In other words, the only voice in the text that can guarantee truth is, in fact, often deliberately unreliable—the most teasingly duplicitous appearance of all. What is more, the very ventriloquism of the narrative voice, its ability to adopt a variety of viewpoints, radically questions the concept of a unified individual identity that provides the foundation of the realist form of the novel. Am I then suggesting that it is a mistake to see Austen as either a moralist or a realist? No, I think these are wholly appropriate and instructive ways of reading her work, as long as we keep in mind the fact that they do not exhaust the possibilities of meaning generated by a text like Pride and Prejudice. We need to remember Bakhtin’s view of the novel form, deriving from its origins in popular, comic, antiestablishment traditions, as essentially self-questioning and protean. In Chapter One it was rightly stressed that our cultural expectations of different genres, such as detective fiction, are inherent in our ability to read them appropriately. Our experience in this chapter of reading Pride and Prejudice provides a balancing warning. We must not let preconceptions about a literary genre become a straitjacket to our reading that limits the perpetual novelness of the novel form. Notes 1 Unless otherwise stated subsequent references to Pride and Prejudice are to this edition and page numbers only are given. 2 Several critics have suggested this but in what follows I am particularly indebted to Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, 1984. 3 The main critic associated with these views is Roland Barthes. For a discussion of Austen’s work that is similar to the following of mine, see Miller, Narrative and its Discontents, 1981, pp.3–106.

Chapter Three Reading Frankenstein by Richard Allen

Introduction Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is one of the most accepted classics of English fiction and is a fitting place to test ideas about the genre of the realist novel. This chapter discusses another very famous but very different text—Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818)—by Mary Shelley. The chapter also considers the genre of the Gothic novel and explores how genres and their rules can interact within a single work. We are accustomed to thinking of novels like Pride and Prejudice or Frankenstein as single entities; the pages of each individual book sit within their bindings separate on our shelves. However, thinking of a novel as part of a genre means thinking about what one novel shares with others, and about the way in which these shared elements, acting like rules and existing outside any particular novel, make the genre what it is. The boundaries between one novel and another seem to dissolve. Both Frankenstein and its author lend themselves to discussion of this dissolving of the boundaries of texts. Frankenstein is the name of a novel as well as a character in the novel, but also the name of a film made in 1931 and of a number of later films. On occasion the name ‘Frankenstein’ is used to refer to the creature in the novel rather than to his creator. In the same way, the name ‘Shelley’ belongs to the writer of Frankenstein, but also to her husband Percy Shelley, author of poems such as Ode to the West Wind (1819) and plays such as Prometheus Unbound (1818). Mary Shelley’s self-identity is an important consideration in discussion of Frankenstein. If this seems a curious way of looking at things, that is appropriate for this chapter, since it aims to ask whether we sometimes need different ways of reading novels and different ways of thinking about families and the relations of parent and children. Genre conventions in Frankenstein The events of the first fifty or so pages of Pride and Prejudice seem relatively unremarkable: a new family arrives in a country district, Jane Bennet catches a cold and is introduced to her future husband, and Elizabeth Bennet has her first

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exchanges with Mr Darcy. Contrast the opening paragraphs of chapter IV of Frankenstein. by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe. (Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, 1994 edn, pp.38–9)1 As the scene progresses, everything becomes yet more extraordinary. It seems so different from the way in which Austen writes that you might begin to wonder how useful—even how valid—it is to speak of Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein as belonging to the same genre: I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. (pp.39–40) However, before abandoning the idea, think about whether there are any similarities in the first four chapters of the two books which do suggest that they belong to the same genre and observe the same rules. Discussion The most obvious similarity—so obvious in fact that you might not think it worth mentioning—is that both texts work to create character and that the narrative is structured by the actions and development of characters. You might have noticed that, as Pride and Prejudice begins by introducing readers to the Bennet family and then, in chapter III, introduces Elizabeth Bennet, so Frankenstein begins by introducing us to Robert Walton and his sister Margaret Saville. As we read Captain Walton’s letters—assuming we have no prior knowledge of the story—we might imagine that we will be following the development of these characters through the novel. Our involvement with them is, however, abruptly blocked by the shift to the narrative of Victor Frankenstein. Still, we might seem to be within the same genre: what could be more realistic when you meet a stranger than that he should tell his

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story and what could be more familiar than a chapter spelling out a character’s origin? ■ So we may still feel able to speak of Frankenstein as belonging to the genre of the novel, but we will need to develop our ideas of the genre into something more elaborate since things are not entirely straightforward. Whereas the realist novel usually draws readers in and works to avoid us thinking ‘this is fiction’, Frankenstein calls attention to its nationality by, in effect, having two beginnings in different styles. After starting a novel in the epistolary style made popular by writers such as Samuel Richardson, we then start a novel in the biographical style familiar from novels like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). In the earliest printings the title — Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus—was repeated at the beginning of chapter I, so that the book contained a preface followed by a story told in letters, which in turn was the preface to another story. Even allowing for the questions that chapter II of Pride and Prejudice raises about the distance and detachment of the narrating voice, I would say that the kind of ‘stepping out of the frame’ evident in Frankenstein, which underlines the fact that this is a story, is quite foreign to Austen’s methods. If you read more books from the early nineteenth century, you will see that in this period at least two competing sets of genre rules and conventions were in play, often working independently but also, as in Frankenstein, often working together. It seems that when Shelley was writing Frankenstein there were times when she felt realist ‘rules’ were entirely appropriate, but that as often another set of ‘rules’—those now called Gothic—were more suited to her imaginings. For example, in the Gothic novel, one story often nests within another and large sections of the narrative are set out as a tale told by one character to another. In this way Frankenstein follows Gothic conventions. In the centre of the book is a story told by the creature within the story told by Frankenstein, which is within the story told by Walton. In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986) Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick has described the Gothic novel as ‘pervasively conventional’, with a form and content that can be predicted with ‘unnerving certainty’. The pattern can be seen in its ‘purest’ form in the novels of Ann Radcliffe written in the 1790s. According to Sedgewick (p.9, paraphrased) the Gothic rules are as follows. 1 The setting will include ‘an oppressive ruin’ in ‘a wild landscape’ in a European country which is ‘a Catholic or feudal society’. 2 At the centre of the story will be a heroine conspicuous for her ‘trembling sensitivity’ and her lover, whose behaviour will show great ‘impetuosity’. 3 Also central to the story will be a ‘tyrannical older man’, usually described as having a ‘piercing gaze who is going to imprison and try to rape or murder them’. 4 The form of the novel will be ‘discontinuous and involuted’.

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5 Certain topics will regularly recur, for example: an interest in the ‘priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; the discovery of obscure family ties’. 6 The reader will regularly observe the ‘possibilities of incest’, ‘unnatural echoes or silences’ and the ‘poisonous effects of guilt and shame’. 7 ‘Unintelligible writings’ will regularly be discovered; much will explicitly be said to be ‘unspeakable’. The making of the creature You will have some idea of the conventions of the realist novel from your work on Pride and Prejudice. Look now at chapters III and IV of Frankenstein and consider whether they show similarities with Austen’s methods or seem to follow the Gothic conventions set out above. Discussion The first two to three pages of chapter III seem to me to work quite squarely within realistic conventions, recounting a coherent sequence of thoughts which describes the development of Frankenstein, up to the point where we are explicitly told ‘Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman’ (p.34). The ‘remember’ here is important because it brings back to the foreground an overall narrator: Frankenstein is telling his story to Walton on the ship, his body weakened by many hardships but his mind still in control of the narrative. However, we then start to be aware of the working of the Gothic rules, particularly in the paragraph beginning ‘These thoughts supported my spirits’ (p.36) where we read clearly of the impetuosity of this ‘hero’. Frankenstein works in Ingoldstadt but he seems just as isolated as if he were in a castle in a wild landscape. In the details of the creation of the creature, deaths and burials figure prominently. Finally, Frankenstein’s moral doubts—‘I doubted at first whether I should attempt’ (p.35)—have been replaced by an obsession with the unspeakable: ‘One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places’ (p.36). ■ The carefully spelt out details of the size of the creature show how the conventions are intertwined. The realistic notion that it is easier to work with large ‘parts’—a sentiment any surgeon might acknowledge—sits beside and perhaps stops us asking just where these ‘parts’ come from. Were the bodies already eight feet tall, or did Frankenstein have to search through piles of corpses until he found oversized examples of the body parts he needed? Realistic details stand beside unspeakable conjunctions of creation and death, imagination and imprisonment: ‘In a solitary chamber, or rather cell… I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment’ (pp.36–7).

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Chapter IV allows these Gothic conventions a much freer run, as the quotations on pages 61–2 above show. Among many examples, I would single out the deathlike state into which Frankenstein is plunged, and the idea of confrontation with the unspeakable contained in the description of his return to his workshop: My hand was already on the lock of the door before I recollected myself. I then paused; and a cold shivering came over me. I threw the door forcibly open, as children are accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side; but nothing appeared. (p.42) The description of Frankenstein’s reaction to this event—‘I felt my flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly’—seems to represent a variation on one of Sedgewick’s Gothic rules, showing in the hero the ‘trembling sensitivity’ conventionally seen in the heroine. In fact, Shelley often pushed out the boundaries of the conventions she found in Gothic novels. The ‘hero’ is dogged by a truly tyrannical figure, but one who is physically larger rather than older than himself. In addition, whilst the suspense depends on threats to the ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’, it also depends on the fact that Frankenstein in turn threatens and pursues his pursuer. A similar shifting of the boundaries seems to happen in the case of the ‘possibilities of incest’ (see the sixth of the Gothic rules proposed by Sedgewick). In the 1818 text Elizabeth Lavenza and Frankenstein are first cousins; a marriage or a sexual relationship between the two would have seemed to most readers improper. In the 1831 revision of the text this blood relation was removed. However, the extraordinary close and inward-looking relationship between Frankenstein and his monstrous ‘son’ remains centre stage and untouched, with each going out of his way to prevent the marriage that would break the bonds easily as strong as those of wedlock that bind ‘father’ and ‘son’ together. As well as involving the interaction of realistic and Gothic conventions, Frankenstein draws on several other stylistic or cultural ‘conventions’. Not surprisingly, given that it was written in the company of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel employs the conventions now called Romantic. Indications of this occur throughout the novel in the descriptions of nature and in the way nature inspires and consoles Frankenstein. In chapter IV (p.41) Mary Shelley quotes directly from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1817). It may be that the quotation is a sign that Shelley was very familiar with Coleridge’s work and that the verse came into her mind as expressing what she wanted to convey, but comparison of the novel’s story and the poem suggests that the borrowing has more significance. The plots of the two works are similar: after the stanza quoted by Shelley, Coleridge’s poem switches gear as ‘the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country’ (see lines 446–70). In the novel, in the paragraph after the stanza has been quoted, Henry Clerval’s return marks an analogous change of gear. In chapter III there are signs of Shelley mixing Romantic ideas about the

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power of the imagination with ideas about science. It is imagination rather than rationality that is the driving force behind Frankenstein’s creativity: my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man. The materials at present within my command hardly appeared adequate to so arduous an undertaking; but I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed. (p.35) However, the novel is no more an innocent reflection of Romantic ideas than it is an innocent reflection of the Gothic: Frankenstein’s physical attempt to reconstruct the human frame serves as an image for the goal of Romantic artists: the spiritual regeneration of man. But… the process fails to have the glorious results it was supposed to have…creation… is portrayed as a filthy and disgusting process. (Cantor, Creature and Creator, 1985, pp.108–9) The novel plainly offers a critique of the ambitions and aspirations at the heart of most Romantic writings—the sort of project envisaged, for example, in ‘the spiritual regeneration of man’. The creature and Frankenstein Let us now move forward in the novel to volume III, chapters II and III (pp.131– 46), the chapters that mark the beginning of the final stage of the relationship between the creature and Frankenstein. We journey first with Frankenstein and Clerval through England and Scotland and then with Frankenstein alone to the Orkney Islands. The journey is told throughout in Frankenstein’s voice, but a complicated double perspective on events is created. Frankenstein, speaking to Walton, looks back on his life, but we also read about him looking back at the time of the journey and seeing ‘in Clerval…the image of my former self (p.131). Interestingly, Frankenstein’s realization that Clerval is ‘the image of my former self comes barely a page after Frankenstein has identified Clerval with the hero of Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey (1798), in which the poet also looks back on his former self. (See the discussion of ‘doubles’ on page 80 below.) Is there anything in chapter II which brings to mind a positive outcome— something like what Paul Cantor describes as ‘the spiritual regeneration of man’— or does it rather evoke ‘a filthy and disgusting process’?

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Discussion There are signs of ambition and aspiration, but the prevailing mood is very dark. The atmosphere is one of restlessness, and we can see this dramatized in the tension between Clerval’s desire to experience the new and Frankenstein’s apprehension at the future. Feelings are depicted through strong images: in Oxford he is excited by the ‘divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice’ but this is only ‘For a moment’, ‘For an instant’. More powerful is the image of him as ‘a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul…the iron had eaten into my flesh’ (pp.133–4). Perhaps most striking of all is the way in which scene and mood come together at the end of the chapter in the description of the remote island to which Frankenstein goes to carry out his second great experiment. Earlier in the chapter the matter-of-factness of the phrase carries the reader over the ghastly reality of Frankenstein collecting ‘the materials necessary for my new creation’ (p.132). In the description of the Orkneys the wording is very different, although the grim reality depicted escapes the ‘senses of the cottagers… benumbed by want and squalid poverty’ (p.136). A most telling moment comes towards the end of the chapter, where harsh metaphor and the horrible reality are combined—‘I went to it in cold blood’ (p.137). ■ The pace of the narrative shifts as we move to chapter III, which tells the events of scarcely more than twenty-four hours. Do other things change as well, for example point of view, mood? Discussion The point of view remains the same but the focus seems to be much more on the present, rather than on any comparison of past and present. The mood also becomes more even, remaining in a single tone: the pleasure in nature and company identified with Clerval disappears and the dark mood increases. Most noticeably, the language takes on a quality that, depending on the extent to which the reader is involved in the tale, may seem either melodramatic or intensely powerful, striking at the deepest emotions. ■ The creature now understands clearly what options face him and the starkly different ways in which his life might find a good or a bad meaning: ‘Shall each man,’ cried he, ‘find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?… You can blast my other passions; but revenge remains —revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die; but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery.’ (p.140) Marriage and death seem to concatenate for Frankenstein too: the creature’s threat —‘I shall be with you on your wedding-night’—provokes Frankenstein to feel that this will be ‘the fulfilment of my destiny’ (p.141). As if to consolidate the darkness

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of tone, this whole scene with the creature is enclosed within references to the killing of its mate: The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and, with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew. (p.139) The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being. (p.142) Genre differences and archetypes The contrast between the language Shelley uses in volume III, chapter III of Frankenstein and that used by Austen in Pride and Prejudice is strong. Shelley seems to press language to an extreme and risk an unbridgeable gap opening between the language of her novel and the reader’s experiences. In making a comparison between the two books, however, we need to be wary of any suggestion that one book or one crisis is more serious or more real than the other. Both deal with events that are central to the way families work, and the family lies at the heart of western culture, so both have a very serious intent. Austen depicts the moment when a girl child separates herself from her parents to become an adult and shows how that assertion of individuality is inextricably involved with the acceptance of a relationship with a man—a relationship that may be companionate, intellectual, economic or dependent in different degrees. Shelley depicts a closely analogous process: the ‘child’ creature demands not only his independence from his father’ Frankenstein but the freedom to become a husband and father himself. Frankenstein parallels Pride and Prejudice in other ways. We understand clearly the family origins of Victor Frankenstein and read of his education, his ambitions, his preparations for marriage, his struggles in life and eventually his death. If anything, we know the creature better; we even see the moment of his conception and, through his narrative, we discover how he has learned about the world. On the other hand, looking for differences between the two books, you might notice that Shelley’s story takes the reader right up to the creature’s and the hero’s deaths, whereas Austen’s ends with the characters just launched on married life. More importantly, the two novels seem to draw on different genres or combinations of genres. If an author adopts a genre because, in some way, it enables him or her to communicate a particular message, then the fact that the two books employ different genres should prompt us to suspect that they have different messages or embody different views of the world.

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In ‘On repetition’ in The World, The Text and The Critic (1984), Edward Said has argued, for example, that the realist novel is concerned with seeing people as peculiarly individual beings facing an individual destiny. Pride and Prejudice seems to fit easily into this frame. The reader leaves the book feeling that he or she has encountered a very distinctly individual heroine and, indeed, that the purpose of the book is to establish the differences that exist between her and other characters. In general terms, we might say that this kind of ‘novelistic heroine or hero has one task set above all the others’, namely to be ‘different’ (Said, ‘On repetition’, 1984, p. 117). The fact of their being different allows the reader to enjoy the possibility that he or she can escape a life that is bound by ‘repetition’. Said speaks of ‘paternity and routine’ weighing ‘heavily’ on anyone who lives within the western family, inheriting from it qualities and behaviour: To be novel is to be an original, that is, a figure not repeating what most men perforce repeat—the course of human life…the novelistic character is conceived as a challenge to repetition, a rupture in the duty imposed on all men…to create and recreate oneself unremittingly and repeatedly. (Ibid.) Mikhail Bakhtin’s perception of the novel as dialogic (see Chapter Two, p.31) is relevant here; again, there is the idea that reading a novel gives us freedom and allows us to escape from the feeling that our lives fit into an endlessly repeating cycle. The characters in Frankenstein are so extraordinary that it may seem perverse to suggest that they are anything other than ‘original’, but there are a number of signs that indicate Shelley was intent on depicting ‘repetition’ and the unremitting and repeated duty imposed on men and women. The Modern Prometheus The sub-title—The Modern Prometheus—suggests right away that we should be aware that this story is a modern repetition of the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus. This myth had increasingly regularly been cited in British and European literature from the middle of the eighteenth century. At first Prometheus was an example of supreme creativity—his story is almost a secular version of the creation of human life in the Book of Genesis. When the German poet and philosopher Johann von Goethe (1749–1832) wanted to praise Shakespeare, for example, he wrote that Shakespeare ‘emulated Prometheus, formed his people on his model feature for feature, but in colossal dimensions…and then animated them all with the breath of his spirit’ (quoted in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 1971, p.282). Although there is no direct evidence that Shelley had read this comment, we cannot help noticing the parallel here, remembering furthermore that Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) is among the creature’s collection of key books in Frankenstein. A further suggestion of Shelley’s involvement with this particularly German way of thinking is to be found in the way that a sentence from the creation

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scene in Frankenstein— ‘Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?’ (p.36)—echoes a sentence from a lecture given by August Schlegel in 1801: ‘In this manner did Prometheus imitate nature, when he formed man out of the clay of the earth, and animated him with a spark stolen from the sun’ (quoted in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 1971, p.282). There is clear evidence that Mary’s father (William Godwin) read Schlegel and that Mary’s reading habits mirrored those of her father. The positive image of Prometheus persisted; in the preface to his drama Prometheus Unbound Percy Shelley wrote: ‘Prometheus is…the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends’ (Wu, Romanticism, 1994, p.877). However, when Byron wrote his poem Prometheus at the Villa Diodati in July 1816 (more or less contemporary with the beginning of Frankenstein) he depicted Prometheus in different terms—as a creature opposed to the gods. Flawed by some grave fault, he faced a cruel destiny, determined to endure. At one point in the poem the poet addresses Prometheus directly, referring to: thy patient energy, In the endurance, and repulse Of thine impenetrable Spirit, Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse, (ll.40–3) and Byron goes on to describe Prometheus as: ‘a sign/To Mortals of their fate’, adding ‘Like thee, Man is in part divine,/A troubled stream from a pure source’ (ll. 45–8). The dark force behind this interpretation of the myth can be seen in the next lines: Man in portions can foresee His own funereal destiny; His wretchedness, and his resistance, And his sad unallied existence. (ll.49–52) How can these images of Prometheus, showing on the one hand an ideal creator figure and on the other a creature tormented by a cruel destiny, help us to understand the force of Shelley’s sub-title for her novel? Discussion The positive images of Prometheus as creator seem to have a direct relevance to the youth of Frankenstein. His ambition to create life shows him aiming for something close to ‘the best and noblest ends’, and hoping to develop what in man is ‘in part

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divine’. Later in the novel his character seems to shift to have more in common with the darker image of Prometheus, very much ‘a troubled stream’. After agreeing to create a companion for the creature, Frankenstein’s life can be seen as ‘funereal’ and full of ‘wretchedness’. Frankenstein says of himself: ‘I felt then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease to be—a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others, and abhorrent to myself (p.133). The journeying of Frankenstein to the Orkneys allows an even closer analogy with the dark image of Prometheus, although Shelley spares her ‘hero’ the worst torments of the myth, merely highlighting his ‘sad unallied existence’ with the words: ‘I desired that I might pass my life on that barren rock, wearily it is true, but uninterrupted by any sudden shock of misery’ (p.141). ■ Paradise Lost The title page of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein suggests that Shelley aimed for more than a ‘repetition’ of the Prometheus story. We find there three lines from John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost (1667): Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?— (Book X, ll.743–5) A familiarity with Milton’s work was commonplace around 1800 and Shelley was in a position to be particularly familiar with it because her father had made himself an authority on the poet when she was a child. From her journals (Shelley, The Journals, 1987) we can see that she read all of Milton’s major works at least once between 1815 and 1817, and Paradise Lost twice. In retrospect we have no difficulty in seeing the lines on the title page as setting the tone for what follows. As close as anything to the spirit of Milton’s lines is the creature’s cry at the end of volume II, chapter VIII: ‘I am alone, and miserable’ (p.118). Like the Prometheus myth, Paradise Lost offered an example of a story of ambition and of the capabilities of man. The story told in the poem repeats and elaborates the story told in the Bible in the Book of Genesis. In Genesis and the teachings of the Church based upon it, God creates man in His image and then creates woman in man’s image. Man falls from God’s favour and grace because he is tempted by woman to eat from the tree of knowledge, but this can be described as a ‘fortunate fall’ since it liberates man to self-knowledge and conscious willed goodness rather than an innocent and naïve perfection. Milton elaborates the Bible story by giving the story of Satan—the agent of the woman’s and then the man’s fall —in more detail. Satan is an angel who has fallen from a blessed and God-given state because he has had pride enough to think he can rival God. The moral message of Paradise Lost can be read as much the same as the conventional Christian story on which it is based, but around 1800 the poem came to be read in a more complicated

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way. Theology demanded that God be perceived as necessarily good, yet He could also be seen by the sceptic as a tyrant, since His plan seemed to require that mankind suffer. Satan was necessarily evil, yet he might also be seen as a hero rebelling against this tyrannical God. An indication of this way of perceiving the story is apparent in Percy Shelley’s preface to Prometheus Unbound. Percy Shelley is sufficiently favourably disposed to Satan to see him in terms of the perfect Prometheus; he only dismisses Satan as a possible hero for epic because of ‘taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement’ (Wu, Romanticism, 1994, p.877). Making a link between Frankenstein, Paradise Lost and Genesis would undoubtedly have been easier for the reader of the early nineteenth century, when classical education and Christianity were so much more central to culture than they are now. Can you see parallels between the poem and the Bible story and the broad structure of the novel? Discussion I hope you will have recognized some similarities. Most obviously perhaps there is the parallel between creator and creature in the novel and God and man in the biblical story. The brief description I have given of Paradise Lost might also have led you to see the parallel between creator and creature and God and Satan. Frankenstein acts like God in making the creature and then behaves like a tyrant in abandoning him and refusing his requests. The creature, on the other hand, like Satan, soon seems to aim to rival his creator and former master. Equally, the creature can be compared to Adam: his initial degraded state repeats that of the fallen Adam, whilst his later development repeats man’s advance towards the recovery of grace. ■ A reader with only half Mary Shelley’s familiarity with Milton would pick up more detailed echoes that bring the figure of Satan into her novel. At the beginning of his story, for example, the creature demonstrates his own reading of Paradise Lost when he describes finding shelter in terms drawn from the poem: the hut is ‘as exquisite and divine a retreat as Pandaemonium appeared to the daemons of hell after their sufferings in the lake of fire’ (p.83; see also pp.104–5). Towards the end of the novel, Frankenstein refers to himself as like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell’ (p.180). The use of words like ‘Pandaemonium’ and ‘archangel’ make the references to Paradise Lost obvious, but elsewhere the Miltonic references are more indirect. The agreement by Frankenstein to create a mate for the creature is a case in point. In broad terms this ‘repeats’ Paradise Lost: in Book VIII of the poem Adam appeals for ‘fellowship’ as in the novel the creature pleads for ‘the sympathy of some existing thing’ (p.120). However, what we find next are strong contrasts rather than similarities. In Paradise Lost, God

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took From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm, And life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound, But suddenly with flesh filled up and healed: The rib he formed and fashioned with his hands; Under his forming hands a creature grew, Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair. (Book VIII, ll.465–71) On the Orkneys Frankenstein thinks ‘with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged’ (p.139). However, in both cases, we might also note, the outcome is the same; ideal desires lead to grotesque reversals and paradise is most definitely lost. Consider the following passages: how straightforward a parallel can you detect here? The creature speaks to Frankenstein: Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master;— obey! (p.140) God speaks to His Son about the fall of man: man disobeying, Disloyal breaks his fealty, and sins Against the high supremacy of heaven, Affecting Godhead, and so losing all, To expiate his treason hath nought left, But to destruction sacred and devote, He with his whole posterity must die. (Paradise Lost, Book III, ll.203–9) Discussion There is a parallel here between the harsh judgement of the first sentence of the extract from Frankenstein and the extract from Paradise Lost. In both a figure full of power determines to commit another to wretchedness and destruction. However, the phrase ‘You are my creator’ in the second sentence of the Frankenstein extract shows that the straightforward analogy between God the creator and Frankenstein the creator has been pushed to one side. The created being goes on to declare himself the master. ■

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A reader of Frankenstein with knowledge of Milton and the Bible would here see Shelley developing a clear variant of the creation story. In Paradise Lost God’s harsh judgement is followed and softened by the offer from His son to sacrifice himself to redeem mankind. At the end of the story is the triumph of Christ ruling in majesty as part of a trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. By contrast, the ending of Frankenstein offers a bleak picture: the ‘son’s’ acts lead to the death of his ‘father’ and creator. There are myths in which the killing of the father by the son leads to a new generation and new hope, but at the end of her novel Shelley commits the ‘son’ to ‘darkness and distance’ (p.191). What I am hoping to show in this part of the chapter is the way in which Frankenstein frequently operates in a different genre from Pride and Prejudice and how this makes for different ways of reading and creates different meanings. Austen’s novel works by creating a kind of microcosm into which the reader is drawn. The meaning of the book lies within that world and within the individual characters living at a very specific time. In Frankenstein there is sometimes (particularly in Walton’s narrating) a very precise, dated story mimicking everyday reality, but more often the reader is drawn through that into the ‘deeper’ and perhaps more ‘universal’ world of myth. The different possibilities that these two strategies offer readers can be seen in miniature in the use of the word ‘deranged’ in the two books. In volume III, chapter IV of Pride and Prejudice we read: The mischief of neglect and mistaken indulgence towards such a girl.— Oh! how acutely did she feel it. She was wild to be at home—to hear, to see, to be upon the spot, to share with Jane in the cares that must now fall wholly upon her, in a family so deranged; a father absent, a mother incapable of exertion…her uncle’s interference seemed of the utmost importance. (p.247) The reader is here, surely, expected to empathize with Elizabeth and see the state of the Bennet family as something bad. Austen puts the weight of her narrating voice behind that of Elizabeth in condemnation of the ‘deranged’ state and the desire to bring about an ‘interference’ that will return a proper order to the family. The case is not entirely straightforward, however, because Elizabeth is also described as ‘wild’. This might risk making her too seem deranged, but by adding ‘to be at home…to share with Jane in the cares’ Austen enables us to share Elizabeth’s heightened but normal state and see it as quite distinct from the state of her family as she perceives it, full of ‘mischief and ‘neglect’. With Frankenstein, the reader is positioned differently. When Frankenstein calls out in agony after the death of Clerval, ‘The conclusion of this speech convinced my father that my ideas were deranged’ (p.157), we know too much about Frankenstein’s circumstances to identify with his father’s point of view, although we might by this stage of the novel wish to feel some sympathy with it. We remain close to the intensity of Frankenstein’s sense of his past—‘I murdered her. William, Justine, and

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Henry—they all died by my hands’ (p.156)—and his future, which dominates the nightmare world into which we have been drawn, and we know that the situation has gone too far to return to normal. Normal life, such as is represented by Frankenstein’s father, remains a pale presence in the novel. Even Walton, whose narrative draws everything together for us, is never seen sitting by the fire at home with his sister but is to be found in pursuit of a crazy idea in the Arctic wastes. In volume III, chapter III the exchanges between Frankenstein and his creature hold the reader in the dominant ‘deeper’ world. The recurring motif of the creature’s superhuman speed—‘I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle, and quickly lost him among the undulations of the sea of ice’ (p.122)—occupies the reader’s imagination as it does Frankenstein’s. After the encounter in the Orkneys Frankenstein tells how he ‘walked about the isle like a restless spectre…the words of the fiend rung in my ears like a death-knell, they appeared like a dream, yet distinct and oppressive as a reality’ (pp.141–2). Within this dream-reality reverberates the creature’s threat—‘I will be with you on your wedding-night’—echoed by Frankenstein and italicized in the text by Shelley. Mary Shelley and the war of ideas Parents and genres A genre may be said to act as a kind of parent for a text; it provides the environment within which the text can develop and to a considerable degree it determines the kind of message a text may utter. However, just as a child is never an exact replica of its parents and can conform with or rebel against them, so a text is at least as likely to differ from the genre to which it belongs as to conform. Just as a child is a new individual, the product of two different parents, so a text can be formed by different genres and become something new. Frankenstein is an intriguingly appropriate text to think about in this context for a number of reasons. The creature comes into being as a new and absolutely original hybrid, and in the same way the novel Frankenstein is a hybrid of and therefore not exactly the same as its genre ‘ancestors’. At the same time Frankenstein asserts that there are continuities and repetitions, and these can be traced back on literary maps to Paradise Lost, as well as on historical maps to the political circumstances of the time and even on autobiographical maps to Shelley’s own life. Frankenstein should not, however, be read as a simple translation of these connections, for almost always some transmutation takes place. It is more appropriate to talk of ‘shadowings’ than repetitions. One of the most obvious shadowings illustrates this well. Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died giving birth to her. As with the creature in the book, birth was accompanied by death (see p.39), and the resulting child had only one parent. In giving the names ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ to the child whose birth caused the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley’s father surely aimed to perpetuate her mother’s existence, some would say

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abandoning the child in the process. Carrying the names ‘Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’ as a child, Shelley had no name that was exclusively her own and was in a way as nameless as the creature in her most famous novel. Wollstonecraft was a potent but highly difficult role model. To her husband and her followers she was the epitome of the finest feminist radicalism, but faced with her ideas and the image of her projected in Godwin’s Memoir of 1797, ‘public opinion’ in general was ‘bursting with shock and outrage’ (St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 1989, p. 279). If anything, the general hostility to Wollstonecraft increased during her daughter’s childhood. Shelley grew up as the daughter of someone whom at least half society vilified. In the index to one volume of the conservative Anti-Jacobin Review, at the end of the entry for ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ the reader is cross-referred to ‘Prostitution’ and the single entry under that heading is ‘see Mary Wollstonecraft’ (ibid., p.185). To search for signs of the influence of Shelley’s mother in Frankenstein seems a perplexing task. Whilst Wollstonecraft’s political and fictional work focuses almost exclusively on women, that of her daughter seems to go out of its way to exclude women and women’s issues. In contrast, and despite their uneasy personal relationship, Shelley seems to have accepted her father as one of the literary ‘grandparents’ of Frankenstein. In particular, the influence of his famous novel Caleb Williams (1794) can be seen in Frankenstein’s structure and theme. The narrative of Godwin’s novel is driven by rivalry and pursuit just like that of Shelley and we can trace the emphasis on the inevitability of events in Frankenstein to Godwin’s political ideas, which also underlie Caleb Williams. Caleb is a servant who by chance discovers that his master Falkland is a murderer; for much of the novel Falkland pursues and torments Caleb to avoid the secret being revealed. Man’s essential nature is revealed in Godwin’s novel through extreme situations and expressed in extreme language that foreshadows Frankenstein. For example, towards the end of the novel, Godwin has Caleb exclaim: Was it for this that I had broken through so many locks, and bolts, and the adamantine walls of my prison; that I had passed so many anxious days, and sleepless, spectre-haunted nights; that I had racked my invention for expedients of evasion and concealment; that my mind had been roused to an energy of which I could scarcely have believed it capable; that my existence had been enthralled to ever-living torment such as I could have scarcely have supposed it in man to endure? Great God! What is man? (1982 edn, p.279) A little later Caleb confronts his pursuer in a courtroom scene. He describes his past sufferings in terms that again seem close to the language of Frankenstein: Where is the man that has suffered more from the injustice of society than I have done? I was accused of a villainy that my heart abhorred. I was sent to jail. I will not enumerate the horrors of my prison, the lightest of which would make the

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heart of humanity shudder. I looked forward to the gallows! I believed that one word of resolute accusation against my patron would deliver me, yet I was silent, I armed myself with patience, uncertain whether it were better to accuse or to die. (Ibid., p.321) Godwin used this plot to create a radical social message: a man like Falkland who has rank and power in society can torment someone from a lower class without restraint. The law offers no protection and even becomes a part of that persecution; only in the final scenes does true justice triumph. Shelley appears to borrow the form without borrowing the kind of direct political content—Frankenstein is hardly touched by the countries in which he lives or travels—but beneath this superficial absence of a parallel, Frankenstein does shadow Caleb Williams to engage with key issues of the time. Revolution and monstrosity A dictionary of synonyms almost contemporary with Shelley’s novel puts the word ‘monster’ into a group with, among other words, ‘wonder’ and ‘miracle’: Wonders are natural: miracles are supernatural. The whole Creation is full of wonders; the Bible contains an account of the miracles that happened in those days… Wonders are agreeable to the laws of nature…monsters are violations of the laws of nature. (Crabb, English Synonyms Explained, 1824, pp.811–12) Both Godwin and Wollstonecraft were seen as sympathetic to events that appeared to the majority of English people to be the most awful violation of the laws of nature in recent times, namely the Revolution in France and the execution of the French king and queen. In 1979 Lee Sterrenburg wrote that ‘the symbolic association between Godwin and monsters was forged in the period 1796–1802, when the conservative reaction against him reached its peak’ (‘Mary Shelley’s monster’, p.146). The mould was formed by Edmund Burke in Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796) when he wrote: out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination, and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it possible she could at all exist. (Quoted in Sterrenburg, ‘Mary Shelley’s monster’, 1979, p.143)

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In 1800 the Anti-Jacobin Review called the followers of Godwin and Wollstonecraft ‘the spawn of the monster’ (ibid., p.147). The tenacity of these associations is shown by Thomas De Quincey’s comment in 1837 that ‘most people felt of Mr Godwin with the same alienation and horror as of a ghoul, or a bloodless vampire, or the monster created by Frankenstein’ (ibid.). There are some obvious analogies here, particularly between Burke’s commentary on the French Revolution and the creature’s destructive progress in the latter part of Frankenstein. Is Shelley using the creature to attack radical ideas? Discussion If we focus exclusively on the destructive side of the creature we are likely to come to such a conclusion, but this would be quite false to the novel as a whole. A very different image is presented in the first part of the novel in the creature’s own story. After only a few moments, the being that Frankenstein can see only in terms of ‘unearthly ugliness [that] rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes’ (p.76) shows himself to have intense sensitivity. The opening paragraphs of volume II, chapter III show a being who is entirely innocent and capable of responding to nature and goodness. He also develops, learning very fast. Simply by watching and listening to the De Lacey family he masters not only simple ‘label’ words like ‘fire, milk, bread, and wood’ but also more complex value-laden words —‘good, dearest, unhappy’ (p.89). Taken in isolation what should impress us is the optimism of the creature’s account: ‘My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope, and anticipations of joy’ (p.92). ■ What might be described as the ‘optimistic radical agenda’ embodied in the creature’s story continues as he learns to read using a small but extremely select library. From Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther he learns ‘speculation and astonishment’ (p.103). From Plutarch’s Parallel Lives he learns ‘high thoughts… above the wretched sphere of my own reflections’ (p.104). He reads Paradise Lost as a ‘true history’ that ‘moved every feeling of wonder and awe’ (p.104). Perhaps most importantly he is not a merely passive reader. He applies what he reads in Sorrows of Young Werther to himself and also reaches an understanding close to that of the reader when he refers ‘the several situations’ of Paradise Lost ‘as their similarity struck me, to my own’ (pp.104–5). Implicitly his story evokes progressive eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas. For all his interest in the story of Adam’s ‘fall’ to knowledge, the creature embodies the teaching of Jean Jacques Rousseau: that knowledge can be acquired without temptation or sin. When you reach this point in the novel—especially if you are conscious of the Gothic convention of one story nesting inside another— you might remember that this is the second account of intellectual development you have read, and think back to the early chapters of volume I, which take the reader through Frankenstein’s education. Might an awareness of these parallel stories add to our perception of the political messages in the novel?

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Figure 4 Boris Karloff created an often sympathetic image of Frankenstein’s creation in The Bride of Frankenstein 1935 directed by James Whale, Universal Studios. Photograph courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

Discussion In both cases the most ambitious learning seems to take place in isolation, but while

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Frankenstein works in a willing solitude, the creature’s ambition is ‘to claim’ the ‘protection and kindness’ (p.107) of the De Lacey family. This corresponds to the different tone of the two accounts. The creature’s education seems to grow naturally, as he learns and develops, whilst Frankenstein’s is marked by strains and rejections. Their ambitions are correspondingly different. The creature seeks companionship and integration into society, whilst Frankenstein seeks to achieve that which society must find most alien. The political message of the creature’s conduct is that his destructiveness is not innate but is caused by the actions of others and especially his rejection by Frankenstein. If Frankenstein himself comes to seem the more monstrous of the two, this is the result of his ruthless intellectual ambition. ■ This more complicated idea of what is—and what causes—monstrousness ties in with more complicated ideas and feelings about the French Revolution which clearly existed at the time. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) ‘denounces armed insurrection as a pernicious monster, set free by experimenters and reformers’ and describes ‘military democracy’ as ‘a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it’ (Sterrenburg, ‘Mary Shelley’s monster’, 1979, pp.162–3). An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) written by Wollstonecraft sets things out a little differently, allowing that the French revolutionaries are ‘devouring, cannibal-like monsters destroying their own parents’ but insisting that they were ‘social products’ rather than innately evil (Sterrenburg, ‘Mary Shelley’s monster’, 1979, pp.162–3). Turn back to the creature’s narrative, particularly the last page of chapter VII and the beginning of chapter VIII in volume II (pp.109–18), and consider whether there is evidence there that Shelley wants the reader to see monstrosity as a social product and even to see the process that creates it in action. Discussion Two incidents seem particularly to support this possibility. First, when the creature does attempt to approach those he sees as his teachers and appeals to them—‘save and protect me!… Do not you desert me in the hour of trial!’ (p.110)—he is met only with the most savage rejection. Faced with the creature sunk down on a chair and begging for help, Felix sees him but does not listen, responding only with ‘supernatural force’ and a ‘transport of fury’ (ibid.). The natural innocence of the creature still seems able to recover, however. Soon after this experience he is allowed an extremely un-monstrous reverie in the paragraph in chapter VIII beginning ‘I generally rested during the day’ (p.115) and including the touching words ‘I allowed myself to be borne away by them; and, forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy. Soft tears again bedewed my cheeks.’ In the second incident the creature saves a young girl from drowning, but his reward for this benevolent act is to be shot by the girl’s father, who also sees only the outward form of the creature and not his inner being. Even after this Shelley seems not to want the creature to succumb entirely to monstrosity. When the creature first

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sees the child William he imagines that he can ‘educate him as my companion and friend’ (p.117). Only when William cries ‘Hideous monster!… My papa…is M.Frankenstein’ (ibid.) is the creature’s monstrous destiny sealed in the murder of the child and the motiveless framing of Justine. ■ Although this section of the narrative seems to embody the idea that the ‘monstrous’ aspects of events like the French Revolution are created by society, there is a difficulty in seeing this more radical stance in the novel as a whole. The creature’s story may lie at the centre of the novel but it is virtually impossible to see it as the essential meaning. First, our sense of its value in the overall scheme is ‘controlled’ by the greater weight of Frankenstein’s own narrative and presence. Secondly, both these stories are framed by the narrative of Walton, someone initially uninvolved in the events whom it seems we can trust. However, the effect of Walton on the value structure of the novel (the framework of values on which the novel is based) is greater than this and his character is more complex. Whilst he appears detached and reliable, he shares many of Frankenstein’s qualities and acts as a kind of double to him in the story; his ambitions and his determination to pursue an almost unattainable end are a smaller version of Frankenstein’s own. The fact that Walton is allowed to offer sympathy and admiration to Frankenstein, to survive him and to have the last word can only help to vindicate Frankenstein’s position in the novel as against that of the creature. Frankenstein, forced to hunt down and destroy the fruits of his ambitions, is made the real tragic hero of the story—‘what comment can I make on the untimely extinction of this glorious spirit’, asks Walton (p.186). In contrast, the idea that the origins of the creature’s monstrosity can be attributed to his creator and to society is pushed aside and he is condemned to the role of the ultimate villain, a being who, asserts Walton, will ‘lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power’ (p.188). It must be open to conjecture whether Shelley’s stance here reflects the changing political situation. Britain had become even more hostile to revolution by 1816. For many readers the ability of Walton to control the value structure of the novel is limited, and this may be a consequence of the employment of another Gothic convention, whereby characters appear to live parallel lives and to be doubles of each other. Some parallels are straightforward and ‘realistic’. Elizabeth and Frankenstein grow up together in the same house with the same influences but—in accordance with social convention—the ambitions of one must be entirely domestic while the other is free to travel and explore the wide world. The presence of the faithful Elizabeth who longs to marry Frankenstein but never mentions the possibility of their having children heightens the strangeness of Frankenstein’s egotistical creation of his child. It is equally realistic that as friends Clerval and Frankenstein should lead lives that are parallel. The doubling here throws Frankenstein’s ambitions into high relief beside his friend’s more modest ideas, but it is also disturbing, when the creature that is Frankenstein’s creation kills the character who is Frankenstein’s double. More disturbing than this is the striking way in which the creature and Frankenstein are doubles, as the discussion of the shadowing of Paradise Lost (pp.70

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4 above) has already suggested. The question of whether a realist novel presents an original individual or a kind of repetition is also relevant here (see p.68 above). We may see Frankenstein as devoted to the emergence of a single wiser individual— Walton—who learns from the story not to repeat the destiny of Frankenstein. More likely, the repetitions and doublings in the characters will leave us convinced that repetition is inevitable. Despite the differences that mark out individuals, similar patterns dog their lives— the human story is one of ambition, desire and, ultimately, failure and death. Imagining the foreign My aim in this part of the chapter is to suggest a way of reading what at first sight appears extraordinary and even fantastic in Frankenstein, by seeing these elements as potentially also offering a commentary on political events. Fundamental to the novel is a story in which a person comes into contact with things that are strange, foreign and monstrous. There seems no doubt that to the English events in France after 1789 epitomized the strange and monstrous, despite—or perhaps because of— the fact that England had had just as seismic a revolution only 150 years before, in the course of which a king had been executed. However, there is a danger that placing too much weight on the force of the reaction to the events in France will drive out consideration of other influences. During the period when the novel was being written, for example, the British presence in India generated regular interest. Before 1760 India was just an overseas country in which Britain traded along with other European countries. During the next half century or so—through the India Act of 1784, the Permanent Settlement of Bengal of 1783, the modification and renewal of the East India Company Charter of 1813 etc.—a legislative framework was established which was eventually to make India the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. Along with political changes went a questioning of the relations between British culture and the foreign world where colonies were to be established. Should Britain, for example, see foreign lands as containing existing cultures to be respected or should it see colonies as places where the cultures—like the ‘parts’ from which Frankenstein makes a new being—were dead or moribund? The creature’s narrative can easily be read within this context. It contains clear echoes of eighteenth-century texts that presented ‘savages’ as noble. One of the most famous of these, well known to Godwin and thus probably to his daughter, was Denis Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage’ published in France in 1772, in which Diderot made the savage an apparently naïve but in fact very acute commentator on European culture. The creature takes on exactly this role, for example in the paragraph beginning ‘These wonderful narrations’ (p.95). Monstrosity was also a key idea in an event that provoked fevered interest in the late 1780s and whose aftershocks were still being felt in 1818. This was the impeachment and trial of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal, on charges of corruption, which began in 1788 and dragged on until 1795. In retrospect, Hastings’s ‘crime’ seems mainly that he was on the wrong side in the

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developing argument about whether foreign cultures were to be respected or swept aside. His opponents—led by the most famous orators of the day, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan— blackened his name by alleging that he was involved in all kinds of acts of barbarism against the Indian people. In the opening speeches of the trial, delivered in 1788, Hastings was himself presented as a monster; contemporary accounts spoke of the speeches describing events ‘more harrowing—and more horrific—than human utterance on either fact or fancy, perhaps, ever formed before’. When the speeches referred to the torturing of women, supposedly instigated by Hastings, ‘the agitation of most people was apparent’; women in the public galleries fainted at the ‘infernal enormities’ (Sulieri, The Rhetoric of British India, 1993, p.60). The parallel with Frankenstein can be made to seem strikingly close. The British colonizer—like Frankenstein—has potentially excellent ambition, but the working out of that ambition in the particular shape of Governor-General Hastings creates a monster. This pattern may have had a particular resonance in readers’ minds in 1818, for Hastings died in that year. However, Frankenstein also foreshadowed a way of thinking which soon became dominant and which saw the foreign world as something to be colonized and converted to ‘superior’ European values. Eighteenth-century ideas of the noble savage had been swept away just as Frankenstein’s and Walton’s narratives finally sweep away the enlightened story of the creature. In India, British policy, formulated by Lord Cornwallis, was to see ‘everything Indian’ as corrupt; ‘the new British officials kept their skirts clear of the dust and mud. Thus began a racial division’ previously unknown (Watson, The Reign of George III 1760–1815, 1960, pp.322–3). The way forward for the colonizers as they consolidated their power lay in separating themselves from the colonized races. The whole ideology was based on the idea of difference and the ability of one party to define the other as inferior or ‘monstrous’, just as Frankenstein increasingly defines the creature as a monster. Again it is easy to see the parallels between Shelley’s novel and these ideologies and to see the novel prefiguring the way individuals and government bodies came increasingly to think as the century progressed. The superior westerners come to an overseas land and, by the act of raising a flag and giving a name, create a new entity which they mould in their own image,2 as Frankenstein takes pieces of the dead and makes a new creature. However, as the new creation develops and takes on more of the westerner’s civilization, so difference is eroded and the basis of difference on which power rests slips away. In the nineteenth century and later the idea that the native and the colonizer might be just the same struck at the basis of colonial culture, the concept that colonization was a process in which a naturally superior group governed a group that was inferior. The colonial response was to define the subordinate race as somehow essentially ‘primitive’ and to include within the definition of primitive the idea of savagery.3 It was then natural to take all steps to keep the threat posed by this savagery under control. This process is eerily foreshadowed in Frankenstein in the changes that take place in the creature’s character. As the novel progresses, any possibility that Frankenstein and his creature can share values and ambitions is forgotten; moreover, the reader is made more and

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more to feel difference between them and to forget the possibility that the difference may arise from Frankenstein’s treatment of his creation. The creature becomes by his very nature ‘monstrous’. Frankenstein’s warning to Walton (and to the reader) in the last chapter of the book epitomizes the relentless assertion of difference; the reader is urged to remember that the creature is eloquent and persuasive; and once his words had even power over my heart: but trust him not. His soul is as hellish as his form, full of treachery and fiendlike malice. Hear him not; call on the manes of William, Justine, Clerval, Elizabeth, my father, and of the wretched Victor, and thrust your sword into his heart. I will hover near, and direct the steel aright. (p.178) Hidden within Frankenstein’s tragedy is the tragic fate of a creature whose whole being is entirely bound up in his rivalry with his ‘master’. On the surface, this hidden story is resolved by the creature’s decision to kill himself: I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. (p.191) This dramatic farewell is one of the strongest signs that Frankenstein is a story of colonialism, for Shelley seems to draw on the descriptions in literature and in public reports of the Hindu practice of sati, the requirement by custom and religion that a widow throw herself onto the funeral pyre of her husband. The parallel again implies the idea already touched on (see p.65 above) that the creature is somehow married to Frankenstein and would thus become his widow. It has been suggested that Shelley drew on an epic poem by Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810), and there are also similarities between the end of Frankenstein and a novel by Lady Morgan, The Missionary (1811),4 both of which works contain descriptions of the practice of sati. Public discussion of the practice was quite common, although always more actively among the British than among Indians, and it came to a head in 1818 when the Governor of Bengal outlawed the practice in his province. It is a complicated story. Kumar, in The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (1993), has written: ‘Recent historical research suggests that the nineteenth century sati abolition movement might have created the myth of an existing practice where none existed. Not only was sati neither common nor widespread, it could never be either continuously, for its truth lay in being heroic or exceptional’ (p.9). Frankenstein seems to shadow these complexities. The parallel with colonialism also seems to work to confirm the creature as part of a different race with unenlightened customs, but there are other

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possibilities. The creature may be unenlightened in contemplating the practice of sati, but, like the Indian widow, he would be choosing a heroic end. Since its publication Shelley’s novel has provided its readers with a scheme and images that are so strong they have transferred into other debates and issues. In 1824, for example, just after the second edition of the novel appeared: George Canning spoke in the House of Commons in a debate on West Indian slave emancipation, remarking of the slave that To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passion, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance’. (Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, 1987, p.60) In 1860 Charles Dickens wrote of a young man with ‘great expectations’ being suddenly confronted by the truth of those expectations in the form of a creature from a foreign land: ‘The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me’ (Dickens, Great Expectations, 1994 edn, p.335). In the same decade monstrosity was again a convenient image for radical activity. In 1866, when the enfranchisement of the working class was being argued over, Tenniel produced a cartoon of The Brummagem Frankenstein, showing a monstrous working man hanging over and threatening one of the advocates of the reform. In 1882 he returned to the image, now creating The Irish Frankenstein (Figure 5), in which ugly and monstrous violent nationalism hung over and threatened Charles Stewart Parnell, the representative of moderate Parliamentary nationalists. In 1931 Universal Studios produced the first of what has become an astonishingly varying and enduring series of images, which has brought Frankenstein and particularly his creature a new life. Domesticity, sexuality and creation in Frankenstein Domesticity and sexuality: a peculiar paradise? At first in Frankenstein ‘the family’ seems good in itself and good for society. Frankenstein’s father marries to bestow ‘on the state sons who might carry his virtues and his name down to posterity’ (p.18).5 Frankenstein looks back on his early days with fondness and admiration, declaring ‘No youth could have passed more happily than mine’ (p.21). The first chapter ends on a positive peon of praise for the family environment: Such was our domestic circle, from which care and pain seemed for ever banished. My father directed our studies, and my mother partook our enjoyments. Neither of us possessed the slightest pre-eminence over the other;

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Figure 5 The Irish Frankenstein, Punch, 20 May 1882, p.235.

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Figure 6 Poster for the Japanese film Furankenshutain tai Baragan (Frankenstein Conquers the World) 1966 directed by Inoshiro Hondo, Toho Company Limited. Photograph

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the voice of command was never heard amongst us; but mutual affection engaged us all to comply with and obey the slightest desire of each other. (pp.25–6) However, readers who can distance themselves from Frankenstein’s point of view may notice details that prefigure the strains to follow. First, the family cuts across generations in a most curious way. Frankenstein’s aunt marries ‘early in life’ (p.20), has a child—Elizabeth—and afterwards dies. Frankenstein’s father marries in ‘the decline of life’ (p.18) a woman probably young enough to be his daughter, who soon gives birth to a child —Frankenstein himself. Elizabeth and Frankenstein are formally first cousins, but Frankenstein’s mother and Elizabeth seem also to be of the same generation, while Frankenstein’s father may be old enough to be his grandfather. Shelley seems to go out of her way to avoid there being any continuing parent-child relationship. Frankenstein and his father are a generation apart, and the latter comes to marriage as something secondary to ‘public business’ (p.18). Meanwhile, Frankenstein’s mother, having already lost her own mother, is left an orphan when her father dies. Elizabeth’s father gives her away rather than trust her to the care of a stepmother. Frankenstein’s parents’ relationship is also hardly a romantic one: his father is to his mother ‘like a protecting spirit to the poor girl, who committed herself to his care’ (p.19). Frankenstein seems set to follow the same pattern in his relations with Elizabeth. He describes her as ‘docile and good tempered, yet gay and playful as a summer insect’. He is pleased that she seems prepared to ‘submit’ with ‘grace’ to ‘constraint and caprice’ (p.20). Shelley seems intent on making the significance of all this clear, since at the end of the paragraph where these words appear she has Frankenstein say: ‘I loved to tend on her, as I should on a favourite animal’ (pp.20–1). Later Elizabeth does develop from this, and at the climax of the story she is even allowed a share in the stress of the narrative, so that she appears ‘a more fit companion for one blasted and miserable as I was’ (p.160). Just before this point, Elizabeth is briefly given a narrative of her own in the letter she writes to Frankenstein (pp.157–9). What does this letter tell us about Elizabeth’s feelings and desires? Discussion The letter is designed to express Elizabeth’s ‘too sincere a love’, but with certain brief exceptions the language throughout is less than emotional, and ‘tranquillity’, used twice in the letter, would seem to sound the keynote. It might be argued that Elizabeth’s desire not to ‘disturb’ Frankenstein is to the fore, but this seems hardly to explain the continuing description of the relationship in terms of ‘affectionate playfellows…dear and valued friends…brother and sister’. The nearest Elizabeth comes to a direct appeal—in the sentence beginning ‘Answer me’—demands not a positive expression of Frankenstein’s love but a kind of assurance by default that he does ‘not love another’. Indeed, perhaps the closest we come to a sense of her

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feelings is not here but in the contorted syntax of the sentence beginning ‘Even now I weep’. ■ Now compare Elizabeth’s letter with Frankenstein’s words in the two paragraphs after the end of the letter. The language used by the ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ is very different. How is the difference created and are there any similarities beneath the difference? Discussion Frankenstein’s language is much rougher and more abrupt. It is also more violent and highly coloured, for example: ‘tear me from the glimpse of happiness’, ‘destruction’, ‘if my torturer should suspect’. However, beneath the different language both are dealing with their deepest feelings, and both express them with great emphasis on abstractions; in Elizabeth’s letter, ‘honour’ is italicized for emphasis, while Frankenstein exclaims ‘Alas! what freedom?’ Both see themselves as caught in a triangular relationship: Elizabeth imagines herself caught between Frankenstein and some unnamed other, while Frankenstein feels caught between Elizabeth and the creature. Both also seem to internalize the dilemma. In the paragraph beginning ‘You have travelled’, Elizabeth turns the possibility of her having a rival back to being a matter of her own feelings. Similarly, in the first paragraph after Elizabeth’s letter, Frankenstein’s narrative turns from the threat from the creature—which ironically Frankenstein can only see as directed against his own life—into a kind of soliloquy: ‘If he were vanquished, I should be a free man. Alas! what freedom?’ ■ In this respect the characterization of Elizabeth and Frankenstein is entirely consistent—as realist rules would dictate—with that in chapter I. There, for example, Frankenstein explains: ‘The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own’ (p.21). More striking is the way in which in both of the paragraphs after Elizabeth’s letter, sexuality and monstrosity come together. Near the beginning of the first paragraph Frankenstein confronts his destiny: ‘On that night he had determined to consummate his crimes by my death’ (p.159). There is a dark play on words here. ‘Consummate’ as an adjective in early-nineteenth-century usage is very suited to the creature, for as Crabb (English Synonyms, 1824, p.241) states, it ‘is employed only in a bad sense’ (the creature is intent on a ‘consummate crime’). Used as a verb—as it is on page 159—it refers to perfection or completion and to the sexual intercourse that follows marriage and makes it legally binding. Frankenstein reflects on the latter meaning as something plainly pleasurable: ‘Sweet and beloved Elizabeth! I read and re-read her letter, and some softening feelings stole into my heart, and dared to whisper paradisaical dreams of love and joy’ (p. 159). Potentially, Elizabeth has the ‘power to draw [him] from’ the dark monsterly ‘fits’ (p.160) and to transform the first meaning of consummate into the second. However, the fragility of this possibility is emphasized by the second half of the sentence on page 159 and the one that follows: ‘but the apple was already eaten, and

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the angel’s arm bared to drive me from all hope. Yet I would die to make her happy.’ As the narrative progresses, we are more likely to accept Frankenstein’s suffocating point of view. If we can escape this point of view as we read, we may notice the complexity of a sentence like: ‘But on the day that was to fulfil my wishes and my destiny, she was melancholy, and a presentiment of evil pervaded her; and perhaps also she thought of the dreadful secret, which I had promised to reveal to her the following day’ (p.162). This runs together Frankenstein’s marriage to Elizabeth, her conversion in his eyes from an ‘affectionate playfellow’ or a’sister’ (p. 158) into a sexual being, his pursuit of the creature and his own death. In a curious way Frankenstein’s promise to reveal the secret on the day after the marriage and after the consummation links to the Bible story: after the ‘paradisaical dreams’ will come knowledge and expulsion from the garden. It is hard to resist the idea that running alongside Shelley’s commitment to Frankenstein’s point of view and the story of his fight with the creature is a desire to undercut that and create an image of sexually anxious maleness driven by a fear that the marriage night will mean his death and that the consummation will be ‘consummate’. Look closely at the following other examples of Frankenstein’s language immediately before his wedding (pp.164–5). How does Shelley want us to see his state of mind? Does it make a difference if we take these phrases out of context? I was anxious and watchful, while my right hand grasped a pistol which was hidden in my bosom; every sound terrified me; but I resolved that I would sell my life dearly, and not relax the impending conflict until my own life, or that of my adversary, were extinguished… ‘Oh! peace, peace, my love,’ replied I, ‘this night, and all will be safe: but this night is dreadful, very dreadful.’ I passed an hour in this state of mind, when suddenly I reflected how dreadful the combat which I momentarily expected would be to my wife, and I earnestly entreated her to retire, resolving not to join her until I had obtained some knowledge as to the situation of my enemy. Discussion Shelley wants the reader to see this as the high point of Frankenstein’s struggle with the creature; the vocabulary of war—‘sell my life dearly’, ‘adversary’, ‘combat’, ‘enemy’—makes him almost like a soldier pacing the battlements before the day of battle. Again, the point of view is crucial. Here it prevents us seeing the gap between this kind of language and any real emotion. Taken out of context this element is heightened: what value are we to put on a man who, on the eve of his wedding, thinks of his beloved in terms of ‘resolving not to join her until I had obtained some knowledge as to the situation of my enemy’? Moreover, taken out of context the language seems to take on disturbing echoes. One set of words has to do duty for Frankenstein’s relation with Elizabeth and his

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relation with the creature. In this light, the physical and sexual menace of the first extract threatens Elizabeth as an adversary with consummation and death. ■ As he registers how ‘dreadful’ the night will be, Frankenstein, in a more sympathetic voice, urges Elizabeth to retire from the scene of conflict, but Frankenstein’s ‘monster’—or Frankenstein’s monstrous self—is on the loose. After waiting in vain to confront the creature, Frankenstein discovers what his being can do. It leaves his bride ‘thrown across the bed…her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair…her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal bier… The murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp…on her neck’ (pp.165– 6). Does this kind of description undermine the characterization of individuals and the story of the novel? For myself I think not, since here as elsewhere the narrative seems to encourage a slippage from the specific tale to the archetypal. A little later in the chapter the same thing can be seen in the sentence ‘A fiend had snatched from me every hope of future happiness: no creature had ever been so miserable as I was; so frightful an event is single in the history of man’ (p.167). This sentence is in three parts, and each tells a different version of the story. First there is Frankenstein’s official version, then ironically he collapses together the framework of the narrative by referring to himself as a creature, and finally the event is cast in terms of something ‘single in the history of man’, namely Adam’s fall from grace. Frankenstein and creation One of the most important points in the history of Frankenstein’s reputation came with the publication of Ellen Moers’s Literary Women in 1972. Moers’s aim was to place the novel in the context of Shelley’s life work and within a coherent feminist account of the development of the woman writer and the female imagination. Equally relevant to our purposes here was her desire to give a feminist account of literary genre. The story of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’s life between 1814 and 1818 as told in her letters (Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1980, 1983, 1988) and her journals (Shelley, The Journals, 1987) is every bit as compelling as Frankenstein itself. Moers describes the writing as recording ‘a horror story of maternity of the kind that literary biography does not provide again until Sylvia Plath’ (Moers, Literary Women, 1978 edn, p.95). Mary was pregnant by Percy Shelley when she went off to Europe with him in July 1814, just before her seventeenth birthday. In February 1815 she gave birth prematurely to a daughter, who lived for only twelve days. In January 1816 she gave birth to a son, William. In June 1816 she began Frankenstein and became pregnant again before completing the novel in May 1817. In October 1816, during the time she was writing the novel, her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, committed suicide. Meanwhile, in November 1914 Harriet Shelley—still Percy Shelley’s wife—gave birth to a son fathered by another man, and in January 1817 Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont gave birth to a daughter after a brief affair with Byron.

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Moers argues that these circumstances should prompt us to see that, even ‘without a heroine, without even an important female victim’, still ‘Frankenstein is a birth myth…lodged in the novelist’s imagination…by the fact that she was herself a mother’ (ibid., p.92). Moers’s argument has a remarkable emotional power: Death and birth were…as hideously intermixed in the life of Mary Shelley as in Frankenstein’s ‘workshop of filthy creation’. Who can read without shuddering, and without remembering her myth of the birth of a nameless monster, Mary’s journal entry of March 19, 1815, which records the trauma of her loss, when she was 17, of her first baby, the little girl who did not live long enough to be given a name. ‘Dream that my little baby came to life again,’ Mary wrote; ‘that it had only been cold, and that we had rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits.’ (Ibid., p.96; see also Shelley, The Journals, 1987, p.70) Moers finds an inescapable echo of this in Frankenstein’s words and thus sees his acts as a kind of wish-fulfilment on Shelley’s part, dramatizing her own desires: ‘I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption’ (p.36). However, before concluding that Frankenstein’s actions identify the novel as wish-fulfilment on its author’s part, we need to remember also that: At the time she was writing this book, the baby William [Shelley’s second child] was in the tenderest and most intimate stage of dependent intimacy. The mite five months of age was passionately tended—but not very knowledgeably or hygienically—by both his parents. It is almost inconceivable that Mary could allow herself to introduce a baby boy into her book; deliberately call him William; describe him in terms identical with those in which she portrays her own child in one of her letters [in which she alludes to the real boy’s identical blue eyes in similar rhapsodic terms, see chapter V, p.47]— and then let Frankenstein’s monster waylay this innocent in a woodland dell and murder him by strangling. (Church, Mary Shelley, 1928, quoted in Levine and Knoepflmacher, The Endurance of ‘Frankenstein’, 1979, p.93) Moers does acknowledge this darker tone, attributing it in a more general way to Shelley’s perception of her own situation. She argues that, in view of Shelley’s depression at her child’s death, the book must be taken as a cathartic and very public rendering from her woman’s point of view of the myth of childbirth. It presents not an idealized madonna and child image but a ‘fantasy of the new-born as…monstrous agent of destruction’ and a depiction of the child ‘as piteous victim of parental abandonment’, recalling that Shelley’s birth had been the occasion of her

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mother’s death, that she had been left motherless and that her child had died a few days after being born. In these ways the novel is ‘a phantasmagoria of the nursery’ (Moers, Literary Women, 1978 edn, pp.97–9). Remember too that Shelley’s father was also called William. The creature’s outburst in the last chapter of the novel voices his child’s sense both of rejection by a parent who ‘sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the indulgence of which I was for ever barred’ (p.188) and of inadequacy which stems from that rejection: ‘your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself’ (p.190). Summing up her reading of the representation of motherhood in the novel, but more and more allowing the meaning to spread out from Shelley’s text, Moers writes: Frankenstein seems to be distinctly a woman’s mythmaking on the subject of birth precisely because its emphasis is not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows birth: the trauma of the afterbirth. Fear and guilt, depression and anxiety are commonplace reactions to the birth of a baby, and well within the normal range of experience. But more deeply rooted in our cultural mythology, and certainly in our literature, are the happy maternal reactions: the ecstasy, the sense of fulfilment, and the rush of nourishing love which sweep over the new mother when she first holds her baby in her arms. (Literary Women, 1978 edn, p.93) The novel here offers a critique of conventionally accepted ideals of motherhood as it elsewhere offers a critique of Romantic aspirations (see p.65 above). What we can see being created is another kind of genre framework for the novel. Moers links Frankenstein to a genre she calls Female Gothic; other texts in the genre include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862). Female Gothic can represent the realities of family life from a woman’s point of view, especially the relations of parents and children and of sisters and brothers which are suppressed in conventional ideologies of the family. Her emphasis is on how this literature enabled women writers and readers to use writing as a way of representing and understanding themselves and their personal experience. In Frankenstein this can be seen embodied in the move from the idyllic image of family life at the beginning of the novel to the darker images surrounding the wedding. Other indications of what might have prompted Shelley to write a darker birthmyth, which subverted the ideology of happy maternal reactions to childbirth, can be found in the way her own experience contrasted with messages coming from a movement which by 1800 had acquired great strength in British culture, and which was to continue to form one of the key bases of nineteenth-century ideas of femininity. In Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1994) Linda Colley describes this as ‘a cult of prolific maternity’, which

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was immensely attractive to those who believed (as many did before the introduction of a census in 1800) that Britain’s population was in decline, and to those who simply wanted more live births so that the nation might better compete in terms of cannon-fodder with France. This particular concern increased along with the scale of European warfare, as witnessed by the spate of maternity hospitals established for the benefit of the poor in London and elsewhere from mid-century onwards. Encouraging women to breed, urging the benefits of maternal breast-feeding over wet-nursing, rescuing foundlings and orphans, all these causes became increasingly attractive to British legislators, pundits and charitable bodies in the second half of the eighteenth century, for practical as well as humanitarian reasons. The motto of the Lying-in Charity for Married Women at their own Habitations, a smart London charity patronised by the Prince of Wales in the 1780s, was frank and typical: ‘Increase of Children a Nation’s Strength’. (p.240) Frankenstein and Eve Frankenstein is also discussed in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s immensely influential study of women’s writing, The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). Like Moers, they see the Gothic genre not as escapism but as a form of writing that could actively enable the representation of women. They take almost for granted the fact that beneath its story of men and monsters Frankenstein represents the feminine. In setting out the case for this they too draw on the personal testimony in Shelley’s journals, but they focus more on what the writing tells of her reading and intellectual development: as was only natural in ‘the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity,’ Mary Shelley explained her sexuality to herself in the context of her reading and its powerfully felt implications…her principal mode of selfdefinition—certainly in the early years of her life with Shelley…was through reading. (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979, pp.222–3) With this approach they note, for example, that the entry of 19 March 1815 which Moers quotes (see p.90 above) is part of a longer entry and continues: ‘Shelley is very unwell—read Gibbon’. A slightly later comment suggests that, in fact, Mary Shelley read eighty-seven pages of Gibbon on that day (Shelley, The Journals, 1987, p.70). The entry for the day when her baby died testifies to the same almost automatic tendency to read: March 6 [1815] find my baby dead—

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Send for [Thomas Jefferson] Hogg—talk—a miserable day—in the evening read fall of the Jesuits [by Isaac D’Israeli]. H[ogg] sleeps here. (Ibid., p.68) Gilbert and Gubar aim to link the feminist analysis begun by Moers with literary analysis. This focuses on Shelley’s reading of Milton, particularly Paradise Lost, which, as has already been noted, she read twice in the period 1815–17. In addition, Gilbert and Gubar give a feminist inflection to the kind of evidence discussed above (see pp.70–4), focusing especially on what they see as the curious fact that this novel by a woman about ‘birth’ lacks any really central woman character. Why is there no obvious equivalent of Eve? The central point of their answer to this question is that Frankenstein’s ‘single most self-defining act’—giving life to another being— in fact ‘transforms him definitively into Eve’ (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979, P.232, emphasis added). Two webs radiate out from this key point. The first links together Shelley as a mother and as a woman writer. Having a child of her own and having a book of her own marked equally decisive steps towards adulthood. For Mary as for many people the desire for adulthood carried with it the ambition to rival her parents. This in turn was a cause for anxiety, an anxiety that anyone as familiar with the story of Paradise Lost as Shelley was might easily imagine and feel in terms of Satan’s daring to rival God. The signs of this anxiety are present in the way in which Mary Shelley surrendered Frankenstein and her later work to Percy Shelley or her father for approval. With Frankenstein she accepted a whole host of rewritings of her text from Percy Shelley, even in the climactic last chapter (from the paragraph beginning ‘His voice became fainter’ (p.186) up to the end). She then gave him ‘carte blanche to make what alterations you please’ (Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, 1982 edn, p.xviii) on the proofs and allowed him to write the preface.6 For Gilbert and Gubar this mixture of pride in her achievement and uncertainty about her power brings together Shelley the writer, her character Frankenstein and the figure of Satan from Paradise Lost: ‘Victor-Satan is paradigmatic…of the female artist, whose anxiety about her own aesthetic activity is expressed…in Mary Shelley’s deferential introductory phrase about her “hideous progeny”’ (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979, p.233; see also Shelley’s ironic comment in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein: ‘I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper’, Shelley, Frankenstein, 1994 edn, p.197). The character of Walton is also drawn into this frame. In his first letter to his sister he writes of his attempts to become a poet and of how he ‘for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation’. This ambition came to nothing: ‘You are well acquainted with my failure, and how heavily I bore the disappointment’ (pp.6–7). This parallels Shelley’s fears that being a woman who is not successful is to undergo what Gilbert and Gubar describe as a ‘fearful tale of a female fall from a lost paradise of art, speech, and autonomy into a hell of sexuality, silence, and filthy materiality’ (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979, p.227).

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The second web links again Frankenstein and Paradise Lost, focusing on the parallel characters caught in hostile rivalry that occur in these texts. The novel has Frankenstein and the creature, Milton’s poem has God and Satan. Gilbert and Gubar argue that, in a tradition of Christian belief that is quite misogynistic, Milton presents God’s creation of Adam and then Eve as having a parallel in the creation of Sin by Satan. Both these have parallels with Frankenstein’s creation of the creature from the limbs he collects together: God creates Eve from a limb of an already existing creature and Sin is created from the ‘left side opening wide’ of Satan (see Paradise Lost, Book II, 11.755ff.). Reading back into Frankenstein, Gilbert and Gubar see the archetypes of Eve and Sin hanging over creation in the novel: what is the real significance of the episode in which… [Frankenstein] locks himself into his workshop of filthy creation and gives birth by intellectual parturition to a giant monster? Isn’t it precisely at this point in the novel that he discovers he is not Adam but Eve, not Satan but Sin, not male but female? If so, it seems likely that what this crucial section of Frankenstein really enacts is the story of Eve’s discovery not that she must fall but that, having been created female, she is fallen, femaleness and fallenness being essentially synonymous. (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979, p.234) The web does not end here, for a further analogy can be traced between what Shelley writes of her own life in her journals, and the life she creates for her creature. Gilbert and Gubar comment on the ‘intellectual similarity’ between the creature and ‘his authoress (rather than his “author”)’, that is, between the creature and Shelley rather than the creature and Frankenstein. This first suggests that Victor Frankenstein’s male monster may be a female in disguise…the books which educate him…are not only books Mary had herself read in 1815…but they also typify just the literary categories she thought it necessary to study…each must have seemed to her to embody lessons a female author (or monster) must learn in a male-dominated society. (Ibid., p.237) One of these lessons concerns the lack of self that femininity implies in an environment dominated by the masculine. Both the creature and Shelley lack a name of their own. Just as the creature remains Frankenstein’s creature and creation, Mary Shelley retains Wollstonecraft’s, or Godwin’s, or Percy Shelley’s name—she retained Percy Shelley’s even though she outlived him by almost thirty years. From this perspective, any simple idea that Mary Shelley’s point of view is that of Frankenstein needs to stand beside the notion that she also identified with ‘the monster’s… shuddering sense of deformity, his nauseating size, his namelessness, and his orphaned, motherless isolation’ (ibid., p.239). What the novel represents are the ‘feelings of rage, terror, and sexual nausea, as well as idealizing sentiments’ which

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‘accrete for Mary and the monster around the maternal female image’ (ibid., p.244, emphasis added). It might be tempting to suggest that the kind of interpretation that sees Frankenstein and the creature as representations of the female or the feminine flies in the face of a sense of realism. What matters in this context is that we should understand the kind of reading this approach involves and how such a reading relates to questions of genre. Frankenstein may operate within realist conventions which require us to respect the gender of characters, but the persistence of the images contained in or drawn from the novel insist on other ways of reading. Whilst the conventions of the realist genre make the story work, setting up family structures and understandable lives, it is the power of those elements that go beyond the realistic that provokes readers into creating wider and wider—and more allpervasive—meanings in the novel and in their lives. Notes 1 unless otherwise specified, all subsequent references to Frankenstein are to this edition and page numbers only are given. 2 The paradigm established here closely matches that which was already available in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623) in the relation of Prospero and Caliban. 3 The process came to be crystallized in the myth of black male sexuality threatening white femininity, a myth that worked to obscure the much larger threat posed to black women by white men. 4 Nigel Leask quotes the following sentences from The Missionary in his discussion of parallels between Lady Morgan’s novel and Percy Shelley’s poem The Revolt of Islam (1817): ‘A form scarcely human, darted with the velocity of lightning through the multitude, reached the foot of the pyre, and stood before it, in a grand and aspiring attitude…[shouting! “Brahma receive and eternally unite our spirits!” [she leaps onto the pyre]’ (Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, 1992, p.116). 5 These words recall Wollstonecraft’s words in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): If children are to be educated to understand the true principles of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot; and the love of mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues spring, can only by produced by considering the moral and civil interest of mankind…the education and situation of woman at present shuts her out from such investigations. (1975 edn, p.86) 6 There is some dispute about Percy Shelley’s involvement. Marilyn Butler concludes that this amounts to ‘minor corrections’ (Shelley, Frankenstein, 1994 edn, p.260), but the biographer William St Clair contends that: Shelley’s part emerges from a comparison of two [extant manuscript drafts!… One version, in Mary’s hand, includes a few suggestions

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inserted in Shelley’s hand. In the other, the final version which was printed, he rewrote the whole passage. The changes have the effect of elevating the language. Phrases that appear trite are removed or worked up; some sentences are lengthened to give greater dignity; a few striking words are introduced, e.g. ‘strangled’, ‘abortion’. As an example, Mary’s version of the last sentence—‘Pushing himself off I soon lost sight of him in the darkness and the distance’—is altered to ‘He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance’. (St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 1989, p.554)

Chapter Four The novel and society by Dennis Walder, Stephen Regan, Pam Morris and Richard Allen

Introduction by Dennis Walder In this chapter we intend to ‘take a step back’ from the detailed consideration of specific texts in order to broaden our perspective, although examples will be drawn from the novels selected throughout the book. Although the overall emphasis of the book is on practice not theory, like any approach to literary study the genre approach inevitably involves paying some attention to more general issues. The relation of the novel to society is one such issue. This is so large and amorphous a topic that it is difficult to know where to begin. In fact, we have already begun, by looking at several accounts of the emergence of the realist novel in terms of social change. This is the approach taken by the critics Arnold Kettle and Ian Watt. Their pioneering work continues to be important, although their approach has been profoundly modified, if not undermined, by later critics, who challenge the traditional view of the ‘rise of the novel’ as a somewhat limited, male-oriented and parochial way of perceiving the relations between literature and life. In The Novel and Society: Defoe to George Eliot (1984), Grahame Smith has argued that the novel arises at a point when the idea of society as such begins to enter human consciousness, and that the depiction of an ‘image’ of society remains central to nineteenth-century fiction. Smith’s broad view of the development of the novel as a major literary genre arising from this basic impulse allows him to take a more positive view of such ‘low’, ‘popular’ or even ‘nonliterary’ forms of fiction as melodrama, which were more closely bound up with the ‘great’ novels of Charles Dickens and, say, William Thackeray than is usually admitted. The different views of the novel taken by critics all have one thing in common: they depend upon what kind of literary activity they think the novel is, in other words, upon their notion of its genre. If they regard the novel as essentially realist in the way that Watt does, closely associated with the rise of print and the middle class, they are bound to stress the line running from Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson in the eighteenth century to Jane Austen and George Eliot in the nineteenth. Whereas if they take a wider conception of the novel, as a genre open to

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popular or alternative forms of narrative such as fantasy, romance and the Gothic, this enables them to account for Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley and the Brontës—and, as we shall see, Dickens, although his uniquely mixed use of genre makes classification difficult. The lesson we can learn from this is not to slot any writer or text into a preordained generic category, but to explore the range of fictional practices that the novel, even when it was predominantly realist, took on. In reading this chapter, it is important to think about how the novel is defined in the different sections, and about the kinds of example that are offered, as you look at the questions raised. How far do novels influence society and how far are they influenced by society? What social vision or ideology is proposed by a given novel— in terms of gender and class, if not race and nation as well? Although there are no simple answers to such questions, we hope that reading some of what critics have to say in response to them will enable you to consider the novels discussed in this book in a wider, more comparative context. We begin the chapter by considering the views of two highly influential critics, F.R.Leavis and Raymond Williams, both of whom were convinced of the central importance of the connection between the realist novel as a genre and ‘life’ or society, whilst differing radically on how to understand that connection. Their views continue in circulation, but they have been challenged by the growth of feminist criticism, which is discussed in the second part of the chapter. Feminist criticism has certainly provided the most vital contribution to the debate in recent years, and cannot be ignored by anybody interested in studying fiction. As scholars have shown, women readers and writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dominated the genre in all its aspects. Why? This is one of the most intriguing questions to ask about the novel form. Is it perhaps related to the sorts of belief that the genre seems to convey? Some critics, such as George Levine, whose views are considered in the third part of the chapter, suggest that the novel serves society by embodying a basically ‘liberal’ perspective of reality. If so, again, we are prompted to ask why. One factor is the characteristic readership of novels—who buys novels and under what material circumstances. This, in turn, is affected by the manner of publication. The concluding part of the chapter looks at the shaping impact of the market upon the genre. The tradition of the realist novel by Stephen Regan There are two principal ways of thinking about the relationship between ‘the novel’ and ‘society’. One of these has to do with the history of the novel as a developing literary genre: to what extent was the novel shaped or produced by a particular set of social conditions? The other is concerned with the critical assessment or evaluation of the novel as a literary form: how effectively or persuasively does the novel ‘reflect’ or ‘represent’ society? In both cases, the question of realism is profoundly important.

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As we have seen in the extracts in Part Two associated with the earlier chapters of this book, literary historians generally agree that the emergence of the novel as a new genre of writing was intricately connected with the emergence of a new kind of society in the eighteenth century. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, argues that the realist conventions of the novel coincided with the needs and interests of a society (or a particular social class) that was becoming more rational, secular and individualistic in its outlook. In his Introduction to the English Novel, Arnold Kettle ventures the opinion that romance gives way to realism at precisely that point when feudalism is being supplanted by capitalism. It can be seen, then, that the evolution of the novel does not take place in an isolated artistic environment but is deeply affected by the shifts and stresses of the changing social order. In addition, much of the critical commentary that has accompanied the development of the novel has been concerned with the nature of realism and the extent to which the methods and techniques of realism can create a sufficiently complex and comprehensive image of society. The idea of imitation or mimesis is a familiar one in early theories of realism, and the model it usually adopts is that of a mirror. The nineteenth-century French novelist Stendhal provides a memorable instance of this when he writes of the novel as ‘a mirror travelling along a highway’ (quoted in Grant, Realism, 1970, p.64). Not all novelists and critics, however, espouse this kind of confidence in realism. In 1890, for instance, we can find Edmund Gosse writing an essay titled ‘The limits of realism in fiction’, in which he employs the familiar comparison between the mirror and the novel, only to cast doubt on its validity. Gosse points to ‘the inherent disproportion which exists between the small flat surface of a book and the vast arch of life it undertakes to mirror’ (quoted in Grant, Realism, 1970, pp.64–5). It is not surprising, then, that a new generation of novelists writing in the early years of the twentieth century— among them, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf—should dissent from the conventional methods of realism and express a preference for a fiction of fleeting sensations and impressions, a preference for psychological intensity rather than social comprehensiveness. Even so, traditional realist methods continued to be employed and so, too, did the persistent belief that realism was capable of portraying society in all its complexity. We have already seen (Chapter One, p.18) that the influential theories of Georg Lukács rested on a deep conviction that the realist novel could provide a vivid and immediate image of ‘the totality of a society’ and reveal its pattern of development. While Lukács conceded that no art could ever present more than an approximate image of that totality, he nevertheless insisted that the value of a novel depended largely on the extent to which it embodied, as accurately and as completely as possible, a particular social structure or historical period. Few critics are now likely to speak about realism with the kind of confidence that Lukács espouses, and the subsequent critical debate has been very much a matter of proposing more refined and increasingly sophisticated ways of talking about the novel in relation to society.

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It is here that the work of Raymond Williams proves so valuable. In The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence (1970) Williams makes a decisive break with the usual formulation of the novel and society, and offers instead the much more dynamic idea of the novel in society. In Williams’s estimation, the novel is not adjacent to society but deeply implicated within it; it is not a mere product of society but an active constituent, helping to shape the ideas and values by which a society comes to know itself. Williams refers to the novel not as a genre but as a structure of feeling: the value he attaches to each novel is measured not only in terms of formal or stylistic achievement but in terms of the lived experience that the novel embodies. To some extent, The English Novel is an elaboration and extension of the critical ideals of Lukács and Kettle. It is also a quiet but sustained response to one of the most influential and controversial works of literary criticism in the post-war period: The Great Tradition (1948) by F.R.Leavis. Like Kettle, both Leavis and Williams were products of the English School at Cambridge. Leavis was passionately committed to the idea that literature could provide ‘a criticism of life’. As part of a ‘minority culture’, literature had a profoundly moral role in helping to combat the destructive forces of ‘mass civilization’. The interests and preoccupations of Leavis and his followers were widely propagated through the quarterly journal Scrutiny, which remained in circulation from 1932 to 1953 and exercised a potent influence over the teaching of English literature. With its emphasis on a carefully selective ‘map’ or tradition of English literature and a serious judgement or ‘scrutiny’ of literary texts, the work of Leavis embodies a liberal humanist ideal of criticism. Although in many ways indebted to Leavis’s example, the work of Williams issues from a more radical set of convictions about ‘literature’ and ‘society’ and from a more emphatically political standpoint. The son of a railway signalman, Williams grew up in the Welsh border village of Pandy. His critical theories were nourished by a lifelong commitment to working-class ideals of community and reinforced by his experience as an adult education tutor. If Williams drew on the local perspective of his own ‘border country’, he also incorporated within his writing a vast tradition of European socialist thought. As well as being an accomplished novelist and drama critic, Williams maintained a strong interest in television and media studies, turning increasingly from the specialized study of ‘literature’ to the multi-disciplinary challenge of ‘cultural politics’. Among his many influential books are Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958), The Long Revolution (1961) and The Country and the City (1973). At this point we ought to pause and reconsider the principal ways of thinking about the novel in relation to society. We have seen how the birth of the novel coincided with significant changes in the political, economic and intellectual values of eighteenth-century society, and in that sense might be regarded as the creation or product of a particular society. We have also seen how literary criticism has given prominence to the question of realism, and to the ways in which individual novels strive to create a convincing and sufficiently complex account of society. These ways of understanding the novel as a social artefact have given rise to the common

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assumption that there is a tradition of the realist novel, a shared set of concerns and procedures, which has evolved or developed over the past two centuries. The tradition has been variously defined according to the ‘value’ or ‘greatness’ that critics attribute to selected works of fiction. For many critics, the substantial achievement of the novel as a literary form lies not merely in its ability to represent or recreate society, but in its ability to produce a sustained and powerful criticism of that society. There is no doubt in Kettle’s mind, for instance, that the ‘value’ of each novel lies in its contribution to human freedom. The novels that Kettle most admires are those which most forcefully expose the constraints and limitations imposed on human behaviour by social institutions, and which turn their resources of form and technique towards this end. His tradition is one of revolt, and it includes such novels as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urberuilles (1891). Let us now take a closer look at the critical practice of Leavis and Williams, bearing in mind these key terms—realism, society, greatness, value, tradition. First, read the following extract from The Great Tradition, briefly noting what Leavis proposes in terms of a recognizable tradition of novel writing in England. Jane Austen is one of the truly great writers, and herself a major fact in the background of other great writers… In fact, Jane Austen, in her indebtedness to others, provides an exceptionally illuminating study of the nature of originality, and she exemplifies beautifully the relations of ‘the individual talent’ to tradition. If the influences bearing on her hadn’t comprised something fairly to be called tradition she couldn’t have found herself and her true direction; but her relation to tradition is a creative one. She not only makes tradition for those coming after, but her achievement has for us a retroactive effect: as we look back beyond her we see in what goes before, and see because of her, potentialities and significances brought out in such a way that, for us, she creates the tradition we see leading down to her. Her work, like the work of all great creative writers, gives a meaning to the past… This account of her would, if I had cared to use the formula, have been my case for calling Jane Austen, and not anyone later, ‘the first modern novelist’… But it would certainly be reasonable to say that ‘the laws conditioning the form of Jane Austen’s novels are the same laws that condition those of George Eliot and Henry James and Conrad’. Jane Austen, in fact, is the inaugurator of the great tradition of the English novel—and by ‘great tradition’ I mean the tradition to which what is great in English fiction belongs. (1948 edn, pp.5, 7) What are the laws of membership that regulate ‘the great tradition’? Perhaps we should begin by asking how Leavis defines ‘tradition’.

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Discussion Leavis considers the history of the novel in terms of continuity. The novel as a literary genre reaches its ‘maturity’ through a process of steady, organic growth. There is a strong sense of linear progression: Jane Austen is the ‘inaugurator of the great tradition of the English novel’; Austen has a profound influence on George Eliot; and Eliot, in turn, provides the appropriate materials for Henry James. ■ The idea of tradition that Leavis proposes is based on T.S.Eliot’s famous essay, ‘Tradition and the individual talent’ (1919). According to T.S.Eliot, a writer’s relation to tradition is a creative one, in the sense that each gathers up the potentialities of the past and transforms these, in some original way, for the benefit of those who follow. Leavis is quite explicit about the standards and achievements that represent and uphold the tradition. The first requirement is that great novelists should ‘change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers’ (The Great Tradition, 1948 edn, p.2): in other words, they must demonstrate a degree of technical originality and sophistication. The second requirement is that they are ‘significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life’ (ibid.). Leavis expects one kind of achievement to follow naturally from the other: Jane Austen’s plots, and her novels in general, were put together very ‘deliberately and calculatedly’ (if not ‘like a building’). But her interest in ‘composition’ is not something to be put over against her interest in life; nor does she offer an ‘aesthetic’ value that is separable from moral significance. The principle of organization, and the principle of development, in her work is an intense moral interest of her own in life that is in the first place a preoccupation with certain problems that life compels on her as personal ones. (Ibid., p.7) Austen’s interests in ‘composition’ and ‘organization’ are inseparable from her ‘intense moral preoccupation’. Later we are told that D.H.Lawrence is not just ‘a most daring and radical innovator in “form”’, but a writer whose ‘innovations and experiments are dictated by the most serious and urgent kind of interest in life’ (ibid., p.24). The serious interest in life that Leavis admires is essentially a moral issue, and the term ‘moral seriousness’ is both frequently employed and rigorously applied in The Great Tradition. In practice, it means that Henry Fielding is excluded from the tradition because his attitudes and concerns are ‘simple’, whereas James is included on the grounds of technical and moral sophistication. In this way, the novel as a genre of writing is subjected to a process of classification and discrimination, to be reconstituted in the terms of a tradition or ‘canon’ of literary achievement. It may be helpful to read another extract from The Great Tradition before moving on to the work of Williams, whose sense of the possibilities and achievements of the novel is radically different from that of Leavis.

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It might be commented that what I have said of Jane Austen and her successors is only what can be said of any novelist of unqualified greatness. That is true. But there is—and this is the point—an English tradition… Positively, there is a continuity from Jane Austen. There is evidence enough that George Eliot admired her work profoundly… Henry James also was a great admirer of Jane Austen, and in his case too there is that obvious aspect of influence which can be brought out by quotation. And there is for him George Eliot as well, coming between… When we come to Conrad we can’t, by way of insisting that he is indeed significantly ‘in’ the tradition—in and of it, neatly and conclusively relate him to any one English novelist. Rather, we have to stress his foreignness—that he was a Pole, whose first other language was French… Conrad’s themes and interests demanded the concreteness and action—the dramatic energy—of English… We may reasonably…see some Dickensian influence in Conrad’s use of melodrama, or what would have been melodrama in Dickens; for in Conrad the end is a total significance of a profoundly serious kind. The reason for not including Dickens in the line of great novelists is implicit in this last phrase. The kind of greatness in question has been sufficiently defined. That Dickens was a great genius and is permanently among the classics is certain. But the genius was that of a great entertainer, and he had for the most part no profounder responsibility as a creative artist than this description suggests… The adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness. (Ibid, pp.9, 10, 17, 19) What criticism might he levelled at The Great Tradition? Discussion One obvious criticism is that ‘the great tradition’ is narrowly selective. Leavis’s eagerness to create a league table of first division novelists leads him, at times, to speak slightingly and dismissively of other, ‘minor’ novelists. This distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ novelists is made too easily and too assuredly. Occasionally, the ‘greatness’ of a particular novelist is simply insisted upon or presented in the terms of a circular, self-evident argument: we are told that Eliot’s work had a significant bearing on that of James because she was a great novelist. ■ A further criticism of The Great Tradition is that Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, largely because of their early appearance in the evolutionary history of the genre, are unfairly relegated to being mere progenitors of the novel. More surprising, perhaps, is the reluctance of Leavis to grant anything more than a secondary order of significance to the novels of Charles Dickens (with the puzzling exception of Hard Times (1854)). In 1970 Leavis collaborated with Q.D.Leavis to produce a more substantial and considered approach to Dickens in Dickens the

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Novelist. Many students are surprised to find Leavis writing so grudgingly, and at times condescendingly, about the novels of Hardy and the Brontës: Jude the Obscure (1896) is impressive ‘in its clumsy way’ (The Great Tradition, 1948 edn, p.23), while Wuthering Heights is ‘a kind of sport’ (a freakish, uncharacteristic example of the novel genre) (ibid., p.27). In reading The Great Tradition we might be inclined to ask: do not the novels of Dickens, Hardy and the Brontës engage with serious moral issues? Leavis is not explicit enough in his definition of ‘moral seriousness’ and rather too guarded about the moral values he admires and approves of in fiction. Part of the difficulty here, as we have already seen, is that Leavis tends to use the phrases ‘moral seriousness’ and ‘serious interest in life’ interchangeably. ‘Life’ is clearly a touchstone of value for Leavis, but the word is employed in a peculiarly vague and abstract way, with little indication of either life’s diversity or its complex processes of social and historical change. For a more exact account of how the novel might engage with ‘life’, we need to turn to Williams. Read the extract from Williams’s The English Novel in Part Two. List what you think are the principal ways in which its critical approach to the novel differs from that of The Great Tradition. Discussion I would say that the most immediate and significant feature of The English Novel, especially when compared with The Great Tradition, is that Williams begins by concentrating on a period of just twenty months, between 1847 and 1848. He sees this time as decisive in forming a new kind of ‘consciousness’, and he seeks to relate this new consciousness or awareness to the prevailing sense of crisis in all the major and radical issues of the day: industrial development, the struggle for political reform, Chartism, and the growth of cities and towns. Williams scrupulously avoids using the word ‘tradition’, and refers instead to a new generation of writers emerging from this unprecedented moment of social change. The English Novel has a more clearly defined historical focus than we have seen in The Great Tradition. Williams shows more interest than Leavis in the changing social context in which novels are written and read. Williams does not, however, consider the novels as products of society: ‘the new pressures and disturbances were not simple moulds out of which new forms came’ (Part Two, p.234). Novels, he believes, have an active role and value in ‘defining the society, rather than merely reflecting it’ (ibid.). This is not an easy point to grasp and perhaps the best way of explaining it is to say that Williams does not conceive of society as something settled and composed—a static background to novels—but as a process going on at the same time as novels are being created. Williams tries to make us think of novels being written while the relationships, institutions and experiences we call ‘society’ are being lived and made. The novels are a vivid and immediate part of that life. ■ Williams offers a more radical and incisive account of the relationship between the novel and society than Leavis does. What does Williams regard as the central issues

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and ideas of the novel? What special knowledge and understanding does he think the novel can articulate? Does he, for instance, identify some presiding concern of the novel such as Leavis’s ‘moral seriousness’? Discussion While Leavis clearly values novels that reveal a serious interest in ‘life’, Williams concentrates on their involvement with one central issue: ‘the exploration of community: the substance and meaning of community’ (ibid.). Most novels, he maintains, are ‘in some sense knowable communities’ (ibid., p.235). In the mid nineteenth century, however, the kind of confidence with which writers had previously engaged with ‘society’ was severely undermined. The idea that a community could be fully known and understood through people and their relationships was complicated and confused by rapid social change. What the novelist then faced might be termed ‘the crisis of the knowable community’. Williams believes that some of the most significant creative developments in the form and structure of the English novel arose from the writer’s need to speak convincingly from within ‘a known community’ at a time when the very notion of community was being critically altered. It is important to stress this point because the kind of criticism practised by Williams is sometimes dismissed as ‘merely sociological’. Where Leavis sees technical sophistication as a necessary corollary to moral seriousness, Williams sees stylistic experiment accompanying social change. He sees the ‘astonishing’ creativity of Dickens, for instance, being fuelled by the lively manifestations of a new urban popular culture in journalism, songs, cartoons and theatre. ■ Having considered some of the general principles and procedures at work in The English Novel, we might now look at the selection of novelists made by Williams and note what kind of emphasis and evaluation he gives to the works of each writer. You will probably have noticed, for instance, that Austen occupies a prominent position in both The Great Tradition and The English Novel What aspects of her work does Williams choose to emphasize? Discussion Williams strongly disputes the familiar idea that Austen’s work is ‘a fiction of purely personal relationships’ (Part Two, p.236) played out against a ‘settled’ social background. The common assumption that she chose to ignore the decisive historical events of her time has been partly responsible, he thinks, for this way of reading her novels (see Chapter Two on Pride and Prejudice for a more extended discussion of this point). Williams argues to the contrary that estate incomes and social position are indispensable elements of the ‘relationships’ in Austen’s novels, and that these must be understood in terms of their full historical and political complexity. In Mansfield Park (1814), for instance, it might seem that there is a simple contrast between Sir Thomas Bertram as an example of the old landed gentry

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and the Crawfords as an example of the new middle class in London. Sir Thomas, however, is also a colonial proprietor in the sugar island of Antigua, while the Crawfords have family connections with the navy and receive an income from landed property in Norfolk. In Pride and Prejudice social relations are similarly complicated. Darcy is an established landowner, while his friend Bingley has inherited £100,000 and is hoping to buy an estate. Mr Bennet has an income of £2000 a year but his estate is ‘entailed’ (it can be acquired only by inheritance); he has married the daughter of an attorney whose brother is in trade. Sir William Lucas also has strong interests in ‘trade’. What these novels reveal, then, is not ‘a simple settled society’ but rather a ‘sharply speculative process: of inherited and newly enclosing and engrossing estates; of fortunes from trade and colonial and military profit being converted into houses and property and social position’ (Part Two, p. 237). Williams suggests that many of the problems of human conduct that Austen’s novels dramatize can be attributed to the social confusions and contradictions that emerge from a long and complicated transmission of wealth. Relationships in the novels are never a purely ‘personal’ matter. The paradox of Austen’s writing, as Williams sees it, is that it manages to retain a level tone and implacable surface in the midst of disruptive social change. His explanation is that her novels judge and evaluate a particular class according to its seeming ‘improvement’, but in a way that isolates the class (and its moral responsibilities) from the rest of society. The community she writes about is ‘wholly known’ but ‘very precisely selective’ (ibid., p. 239). Here, Williams introduces an extremely important aspect of the argument he puts forward in The English Novel: that the ‘known community’ has to be interpreted and understood by the reader in terms of the writer’s way of seeing. In the case of Austen: ‘What she sees across the land is a network of propertied houses and families, and through this tightly drawn mesh most actual people are simply not seen’ (ibid.). Like Leavis, Williams observes a line of continuity from Austen to Eliot, but he insists that the development of the English novel depended partly on the recognition of other kinds of people (different social classes) and other kinds of country (urban as well as rural), and on the recognition that social and economic relationships were often determining elements of conduct. The concept of ‘the knowable community’, then, has to be approached not just in terms of the growing size and complexity of communities but also in terms of the writer’s viewpoint and consciousness. ■ Perhaps the final point to stress about the different critical attitudes and approaches of Williams and Leavis is that Williams firmly believes that the meanings and experiences of nineteenth-century fiction connect in a profound and valuable way with our social problems and dilemmas in the later twentieth century. Through the earlier fiction we discover our own epoch, our own ways of knowing and identifying ‘community’. In the light of this discussion of the novel and society, you might like to read more of The English Novel. If so, you should certainly look closely at what Williams

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has to say about the novels of Dickens, Hardy and the Brontës, since it is here that Williams most obviously reclaims and reinstates those writers he felt Leavis had marginalized in The Great Tradition. The opening chapter is a powerful defence of Dickens, not only against the criticism of Leavis, but against all those commentators, including in the twentieth century George Orwell, who question the nature of Dickens’s achievement. Dickens’s social criticism, Williams asserts, ‘is in the end marvellously achieved and still profoundly active’ (The English Novel, 1970, p.58). His appraisal of the Brontë novels, although rudimentary when compared with recent feminist interpretations, is also powerfully stated: ‘the Brontë sisters knew directly a whole structure of repression in their time; knew it and in their own ways broke it with a strength and a courage that puts us all in their debt’ (ibid., p. 63). In the novels of Hardy, Williams looks at the recurring problem, faced by characters such as Jude Fawley and Clym Yeobright, of holding on to both social advancement and social solidarity. Hardy, in that respect, speaks not from some vanished rural solitude, but from ‘the heart of a still active experience’ (ibid., p.99). Literary criticism never stands still, however, and we need to think beyond the confines of a book like The English Novel. It could be argued, for instance, that Williams is just as selective, in his own way, as Leavis, and that what he succeeds in producing is a ‘counter-tradition’ of great novels and novelists. Williams seems to concede this point in a later essay (1977), ‘Forms of English fiction in 1848’, in which he looks at the sheer enormity and variety of novels being produced and consumed in a single year, including many forgotten bestsellers and popular titles. What about that emphatic ‘English’ in the title of Williams’s book? It is clear that Leavis faces some difficulties in accommodating ‘outsiders’ such as James (an American) and Joseph Conrad (a Pole) within the tradition. Williams, who inherits this stress on the English novel from Leavis, finds how limiting the term can be when he looks at the writings of James, Conrad and Joyce towards the end of his book. In Chapter Five on Great Expectations we will see that the appropriate historical context in which to consider the development of the novel might well be that of ‘Empire’ rather than ‘England’. Such a realization has obvious consequences for the way in which we understand the relationship between the novel and society. Similarly, the concept of realism is not a narrowly English concern, and we need to broaden our understanding of the term by means of a comparative, international perspective. For this purpose, in Chapter Six we will turn to nineteenth-century Russia and Fathers and Sons, one of the realist novels of Ivan Turgenev. Women and the novel by Pam Morris A growing body of scholarship—largely the work of feminist literary critics writing after F.R.Leavis and Raymond Williams—has established the key role of women writers in the development of the novel genre. Beginning with Aphra Behn and continuing to the present day, women, as both writers and readers, have found the

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novel a particularly conducive form for giving artistic expression to their experiences, aspirations, fears and desires. Why do you think that women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turned to the novel rather than to other more prestigious and fully developed literary forms like poetry and drama? Discussion It is important to be clear that we are talking almost entirely about middle-class women and not about working-class women. It was the growing wealth and status of the middle classes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that provided the women in the family with time for reading. Increasing gentility demanded that middle-class women were spared any form of work apart from that of managing the domestic sphere to ensure the conspicuous comfort and prosperous ease befitting successful respectability. There was a sense in which novels acted rather like etiquette manuals for their middle-class female readers, slightly unsure of all the niceties of social decorum. In the fictional worlds provided, women could find models of the proprieties of balls, morning visiting, letter writing and decorous courtship rituals. At a more serious level, the increasing concern with the proper nature of womanly behaviour, together with the insistence that women were especially suited to preside over the domestic sphere, gave prestige to the novel as the form most able to examine and represent these themes. Since women were being idealized as guardians of the heart and hearth, the authority of women writers to deal with these matters had to be acknowledged. However, whilst most of the admired women novelists in the eighteenth century produced fiction that supported this dominant gender ideology, they also produced heroines whose adventures, courtship entanglements and even minor rebellions allowed their female readers to identify with more romantic and daring desires than their increasingly confined lives permitted. Finally, for those women who were not financially secure, novel writing was one of the few paying occupations that could be pursued in their own homes without too much outrage to the public sense of decency. Most of the early women novelists took up their profession simply because they needed the money. In this sense, the novel genre, which was the first form to begin developing a mass readership, was the obvious one for them to look to. Unlike poetry it was not guarded by the need for a classical education and was not regarded as a high literary form. Thus, there was not so much resistance to women’s entry into the field of fiction, where less prestige was at stake. In addition, the novel form was immensely flexible; its protean quality made it possible for women to shape it to their own needs as artists. Virginia Woolf stresses this point in A Room of One’s Own (1929) when she considers the difficulties that had faced earlier women writers: There is no reason to think that the form of epic or of the poetic play suit a woman any more than the [male] sentence suits her. But all the older forms

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of literature were hardened and set by the time she became a writer. The novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands. (1945 edn, p.74) ■ The idea that women shaped fictional forms to express their own needs, experiences and sense of the world suggests that definitions of the realist novel, like, for example, that of Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel, based entirely upon the work of male novelists, might need some revision. By implication this raises an intriguing question and one that remains important—and contentious. Is writing by women likely to be different from writing by men? If so, does die difference derive per se from the fact of sexual difference—that women are female—or does it stem from women’s different cultural positions and experiences? Since such questions are central to the consideration of women’s role in shaping the novel genre this might be a good point to think about your initial views on the issue. Discussion I feel very wary of ascribing any attributes—literary or otherwise—to women’s inherent nature as women. This kind of ‘essentialist’ or determinist thinking has been used too often down the centuries to confine women to their biology, to insist that a woman’s identity and destiny are inseparably—essentially—linked to her possession of a womb. Many feminist thinkers share my reluctance to perceive any aspect of women’s abilities and personalities within a biologically determined framework. On the other hand, some feminists have made use of such arguments to claim that women’s different, more intimate relationship to giving birth and to a maternal female body produces an inherently different sensibility in women from that of men. This can be recognized, it has been argued, in women’s more rhythmic and flowing language, their articulation of continuity rather than separation in their work, and their use of imagery suggestive of birth, the female body, menstruation, cyclical and rhythmic forms of time. As pointed out in Chapter Three, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been read in the light of these kinds of idea. These possibilities are attractive and intriguing and I would certainly not want to dismiss them. However, it also seems important not to overlook the difficulties in maintaining this view. How would we respond to these same qualities when they appear in writing by men? Or when they do not appear in writing by women? Furthermore, many of the attributes that tend to be listed as ‘women’s writing’ are worryingly similar to those stereotypical qualities that male critics have always been quite happy to label as feminine, thereby restricting recognition of women’s full literary achievements. ■ It has been less contentious to consider the way in which differences in women’s social and personal experiences within various cultures and historical eras may have affected their writing and produced different forms from that of more mainstream male writing. However, it is only relatively recently, with the development of feminist criticism, that this has been considered systematically, although there have

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always been individual voices like that of Woolf which queried the consideration given to gender in the attribution of literary qualities. As a body of study, feminist literary criticism developed as part of the feminist movement of the late 1960s and in its initial phase was primarily concerned with images of women in literature. The main priority of this phase was the rereading of canonical male texts to highlight the pervasive misrepresentation of women within the whole literary tradition. Through this rereading project we have come to recognize how frequently female characters are portrayed in predominantly stereotyped ways: ‘good’ women in literature are almost invariably docile, beautiful and chaste and the plot rewards them with marriage and domestic happiness. ‘Bad’ women are those who are aggressive, ambitious, undomesticated and sexually threatening and their usual fate within the plot is unhappiness, loss of hope, madness, despair and even death. Such women are frequently represented as destructive to men, bewitching them into loss of their male rationality, moral judgement and potency. Thus, in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), Eve’s feminine love of flattery and propensity for deceit is shown to beguile Adam into a fatal moment of weakness. The angel Gabriel is sent to tell him (and the reader): ‘From man’s effeminate slackness…begins’ all human woe (Book XI, l.634). Women, through Eve, are held responsible for all the ills of the world, including death. However, Mary, as virgin mother of the Redeemer, is perceived as the maternal source of all goodness, grace and eternal life. In other words, the feminine in our culture functions symbolically as the image of our highest ideals and desires and of our greatest fears and dread. This potential of the feminine to represent totally opposing values is largely due to the fact that only masculinity is given a positive meaning in itself in our language system. Only ‘man’ can stand as the norm, as humanity in general. Significantly, there are no gender opposites for the words ‘emasculate’ or ‘effeminate’. A sense of identity can only be formed and known against an opposing identity perceived as different or other, I would suggest. We can acquire a sense of self—of ‘me’—only in opposition to what is ‘not me’ or other. Woman functions as the ‘other’ which allows men to construct a positive identity as masculine. Femininity is perceived as irrational, unassertive and frail so that masculinity can be felt as rational, assertive and strong. Because what is ‘other’ does not have an identity in its own right, it can serve as an empty space to be ascribed whatever attributes a more dominant group chooses. Through the centuries, women, black people, Jews, homosexuals, have been made the imagined locations of multiple cultural dreams, idealizations, fears and hatreds. Across different cultures ‘femininity’ is found representing nature and artifice, purity and corruption, life and death, domesticity and the exotic. This notion of the ‘other’ was most notably developed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949). Some of these ideas are considered in more detail in Chapter Six in relation to female characters in Fathers and Sons, but it would also be fruitful to consider Charles Dickens’s representations of women in Great Expectations in these terms when you come to read the novel in association with Chapter Five.

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A woman’s canon? The second phase of feminist criticism developed from the late 1970s as a natural consequence of the first. Attention was turned to writing by women in the belief that it would offer an alternative tradition to that of the predominantly male canon, one in which women would find themselves and their lives more positively represented. The novel genre was the most obvious starting-point for this construction of a women’s canon, since the novel is the form most usually associated with the representation of real life rather than with mythic or symbolic writing. Furthermore, in the work of Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot there was already an established body of writing upon which to base the alternative tradition. Elaine Showalter, an American feminist critic, was largely influential in calling attention to the need to establish a women’s canon and she pioneered the way with A Literature of their Own: British Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977), a scholarly study of an almost invisible tradition of women novelists, many of them completely forgotten, from the 1840s to the 1960s. Showalter takes her title from John Stuart Mill’s contention in The Subjection of Women (1869) that ‘If women lived in a different country from men, and had never read any of their writings, they would have a literature of their own’ (quoted in Showalter, A Literature of their Own, p.3). As it was, Mill regretted, women would remain imitators of male writers. Showalter quotes a similar point made by G.H. Lewes, also in the nineteenth century, that women’s literature had to that time been merely imitative: ‘To write as men write is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as women is the real task they have to perform’ (ibid.). What Showalter demonstrates is that women writers by the mid nineteenth century already had a literature of their own. By bringing to light the work and achievements of the many forgotten minor novelists in this chain she enables us to recognize the continuities of theme and style within women’s writing. What is more, Showalter insists, we need to take account of the negative pressures upon their work of the economic and social position of women at the time, in order to estimate fully the achievements and triumphs of this alternative women’s tradition. In her detailed discussion of the cultural problems facing women writers in the nineteenth century, Showalter emphasizes the pressures exerted by stereotypical perceptions of a feminine identity which had become normalized by that time: ‘To their contemporaries, women writers were women first, artists second’ (ibid., p.73). A woman’s body, it was reliably held, made her unfit for any strenuous intellectual activity. Wilful pursuit of such activity would inevitably lead to fatigue, decline, unhealthy mental excitation, madness, and, it was darkly hinted, would undermine her destined creative role, that of maternity. What is more, a woman’s natural duty called her to relinquish self for the care of others: the pursuit of art was incompatible either with a properly feminine selflessness or with ladylike delicacy and propriety. Showalter quotes stark and poignant expressions of these views from the correspondence of Charlotte Brontë. The poet Robert Southey, to whom Brontë had applied for advice, wrote: ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life

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and it ought not to be.’ In her reply, Brontë anxiously sought to allay his criticism (and her own guilt?): ‘I carefully avoid any appearance of pre-occupation and eccentricity which might lead those I live among to suspect the nature of my pursuits … I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them. I don’t always succeed’ (ibid., p.55). In a review of Brontë’s novel Shirley (1849), Lewes wrote: ‘The grand function of woman, it must always be recollected, is, and ever must be, Maternity, and this we regard not only as her distinctive characteristic, and most endearing charm, but as a high and holy office’ (ibid., p.68). Showalter’s research provides powerful evidence of the pressure exerted upon women writers in the nineteenth century to conform to the ideal of feminine propriety and self-restraint. However, because she begins her study with the work of the Brontës, she does not really challenge the earlier history of the novel proposed by critics like Arnold Kettle in An Introduction to the English Novel and Watt, who saw male writers—Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson—as the founding fathers of the genre. As Jane Spencer’s title, The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986), suggests, she aims to do just that. She looks at the neglected body of fictional writing by women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and affirms: ‘I am claiming that they (i.e. women writers) occupy a much more important place in the development of the novel than is usually believed’ (p.ix). She goes on to say, however: ‘I am wary of viewing that success as a simple gain: the terms on which women writers were accepted worked in some ways to suppress feminist opposition. Women’s writing is not the same thing as women’s rights’ (ibid.). Spencer takes a more ambivalent view than that of Showalter towards women novelists’ relationship to the approved feminine identity, seeing it as offering them both opportunities and restrictions. It allowed women to gain a respected place for themselves within the realm of literature, but it did so at a price. The increasing emphasis given to the distinctive values of the home and the domestic virtues meant that women’s sphere of experience came to be regarded as important enough to form the subject-matter of serious fiction. The reappraisal of women’s proper domain allowed women authority on and special insight into the truth of the emotional and moral life. Hence women could claim respect from men when they wrote on these matters. Spencer writes: The novel of domestic life not only provided women writers with a subject they were likely to know about…but one they had a special authority to deal with. According to the new ideology of womanhood women were special creatures with a special mode of expression. Eighteenth-century commentators, especially towards the end of the century, were full of praise for women’s didactic writing, their sentiments, their knowledge of the heart, their knowledge of their own sex. (Ibid, p.21)

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Thus, for many female novelists the feminine ideology offered both a valued individual identity as a woman and a prestigious public identity as an approved writer. However, there were serious penalties to be paid for this social acceptability of a special sphere for women’s writing. It was a privileged place allotted to them, and any woman writer, like Mary Wollstonescraft, mother of Mary Shelley, for example, who refused to be confined within the moral, domestic and emotional perimeters of that sphere could expect to be severely criticized. Moreover, within the feminine ideology, women’s writing was perceived as an extension of their ‘natural’ feminine identity and as such, whilst its virtue and sentiment were admired, it was implicitly thought of as frailer and less rational than male writing and inherently inferior. Nevertheless, Spencer goes on to argue convincingly that, paradoxically, this conservative moral didactic tradition of women’s writing was responsible for developing what is widely regarded as one of the novel’s most impressive achievements: the construction of individual identity by means of a full representation of the inner life of emotions, thoughts and moral and psychological processes. Whereas in male eighteenth-century writing the heroine remains totally virtuous throughout the story, women’s writing brought about ‘the crucial shift in the novel’s presentation…from the stasis of perfection or villainy, to the dynamics of character change’ (ibid., p.141). Women’s didactic tradition introduced into fiction the faulty heroine who is reformed in the course of the story. This involved the construction of a woman whose identity is neither perfect nor beyond redemption but whose character development is the main focus of the reader’s interest and concern. In this almost exclusively women’s tradition, the heroine is young, naïve, wilful and flirtatious—although, of course, never promiscuous—and in the course of the plot she is brought to see the error of her ways, usually by the concerned criticism of the man she will marry, and to submit her wavering fancy to moral authority. Such a formula seems entirely conservative in its import and explicitly it works fully within the acknowledged place of women writers as moral teachers. However, in effect this tradition is much more progressive than it seems. In the first place, the sympathetic construction of a heroine who behaves rebelliously or wilfully offers a legitimate space for these sentiments in the imaginations of both women readers and writers, allowing identification with such sentiments. Even though the heroine later repents, the empathetic artistic treatment of her earlier feelings of waywardness inevitably validates them to some extent. What is of perhaps greater importance is the interest focused upon the process of moral reformation. It is this that initiates the concern in the novel with the growth of a character’s subjective identity and develops the narrative techniques for conveying it. The representation of the psychology of unique individuals is regarded as a great achievement of the realist novel genre, and, Spencer argues, it is women novelists who first began to realize a sense of psychological identity by exploring and analysing the moral development of their heroines. What is more, the techniques they evolved were put to use to focus

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interest upon the minds of young, wayward female characters at the very time when dominant ideology outside the novel was intent on disregarding the seriousness of women’s minds. Although working within this ideology, which perceives women as the weaker vessels, as emotional rather than rational beings, the didactic novel implicitly insists upon the supreme importance of a woman’s inner life. This is the tradition that Austen is pre-eminently heir to and her innovative development of free indirect speech comes directly from her sense of the complex intellectual and moral capacities of her heroines. Spencer sums up the collective achievement of women novelists in this respect thus: The tradition of the reformed heroine, however much its basic fable worked in the opposite direction to feminist protest, did contain the implicit assumption that women’s moral growth was both more important and more interesting than had usually been thought… Austen took this development further. It is not just that, as one critic has pointed out, Emma ‘has a moral life as a man has a moral life’, but that she is the first character in English fiction, male or female, to have a moral life so richly created and yet ironically analysed. Characterization of men in the novel only reached a comparable level after Austen’s example had shown the way. (Ibid., p.177) Emma Woodhouse is the eponymous heroine of one of Austen’s later novels, but you might consider how apt Spencer’s judgement is when applied to Pride and Prejudice. Is Elizabeth Bennet’s moral life also ‘richly created and ironically revealed’, and how does it compare with the representation of the hero’s moral life? In thinking about this you might usefully focus upon volume II, chapters XI— XIII of Pride and Prejudice, which represent Darcy’s proposal, subsequent letter and Elizabeth’s response to both. Discussion In chapter XI we certainly gain a sense of Darcy’s strong and conflicting feelings as Elizabeth indignantly rejects his offer. From complacent ‘security’ as to her acceptance, ‘His complexion became pale with anger, and the disturbance of his mind was visible in every feature’ (p.169). His speech and bodily actions equally ‘show’ what we are thus ‘told’ of his astonished outrage: ‘“And this,” cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room, “is your opinion of me!”’ (p.171). However, on the whole chapter XI stays closer to Elizabeth’s feelings (the focalization is hers), and although chapter XII is full of detail, the stiffly formal style of Darcy’s letter offers little insight into personal emotion apart from offended pride. Chapter XIII, on the other hand, traces the whole process of Elizabeth’s feelings, constructing a sense of close intimacy with her thoughts through use of free indirect speech and direct speech. Exclamatory sentences and questions dramatize her movement from indignant rejection to first self-doubts and finally to shame and self-

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blame. There really is no comparable representation of Darcy’s change of heart and mind although several other chapters make further contributions to our understanding of Elizabeth. ■ However, while recognizing women’s major contribution to the novel’s construction of character in terms of inner development, we might not perceive it in such a wholly progressive light as Spencer suggests. As discussed in Chapter Two on Pride and Prejudice, a sense of individual identity as coherent and unified is the necessary basis of moral and social codes. Only an identity that is knowable, and open to self-scrutiny and awareness, is controllable. Another problem related to psychological realism, and indeed to realist conventions generally, is that in keeping with the claims to offer an authentic account of real life, it must confine itself to the world as it is. In the interests of realism, a Charlotte Lucas is a more suitable heroine than an Elizabeth Bennet, in that Charlotte’s experience must have far more closely resembled the experience of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women than did the fairy-tale ending of Elizabeth’s story. Even Austen, apparently, found it necessary to deviate from realism into the more attractive realms of romance. Desire can be as compelling a motivation to the narrative impulse as that of curiosity about or interest in the real world. The main appeal of romance and Gothic fiction for its many women writers and readers was precisely that it offered an escape from a maledominated reality into an invented world in which otherwise forbidden fantasies of power, passion and sexuality could be explored. A more subversive tradition? The study that looks most comprehensively at women’s writing in terms of a more subversive tradition is that of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). Gilbert and Gubar consider not just the social constraints operating against early women writers, but also their complex anxieties and fears about their own identities as creators. Cultural attitudes suggested to them that childbearing was the only natural female form of creativity; artistic and intellectual activity was harmful for women, leading to illness, nervous debility, even madness. It was, moreover, often darkly associated with forbidden sexuality. An unlicensed female imagination suggested, to the patriarchal mind, unlicensed passion as well. When aspiring women writers looked to the tradition of literature they wished to emulate, what they found there was confirmation of these fears: recurrent images of women as mad, bad or monstrous for giving way to their passions and impulses. On the other hand, virtuous and approved women were represented as dispiritingly submissive and meek, and creative only in the maternal sense. Women writers’ responses to the anxieties they felt when faced with such fearful self-images in literature were complex. On the surface they produced work that conformed to the ideological demands made of women writers, but simultaneously they constructed hidden plots which rework and revise the images of female monsters and madness to articulate

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their own inner sense of anger and rebellion—and, it seems likely, that of their women readers. The classic example of this, and the text from which Gilbert and Gubar take their title, is Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë. The apparently conforming heroine has a repressed double, the monstrous impassioned woman hidden away in the attic. This is Bertha Mason, the forsaken wife who escapes confinement to burn to the ground her master’s house. Women’s writing, Gilbert and Gubar claim, is characterized throughout the nineteenth century by images and plots that covertly express their anger and dis-ease at their confinement within the domestic house and the female body. Hence the proliferation of enclosure, imprisonment, sickness, mirrors and double identities as motifs in women’s fiction. Chapter Three discusses some of these ideas in relation to Frankenstein. Could they be at all relevant, do you think, to such an apparently sane text as Pride and Prejudice? Discussion I think that there is something rather delightfully monstrous about Lady Catherine de Bourgh. What is more, she is very fierce on the subject of women’s right to inherit property. Her forceful, dominating manner usurps what is conventionally regarded as a masculine mode of behaviour and her freedom in expressing her own opinions, demands and anger is outrageous in one sense but liberating in another. It seems to be quite possible that she permits women readers a subtle degree of vicarious pleasure. Although Elizabeth Bennet rightly resents her interference, they are quite similar characters in terms of forcefulness. Would it be too fanciful to see Lady Catherine as a kind of mirror image of Elizabeth’s more monstrous self? ■ Gilbert and Gubar’s study, like that of Showalter, has become a classic of feminist criticism and has been immensely influential as an approach to women’s writing. However, they have also been criticized for, among other things, offering a rather monolithic account. They seem to imply that all writing by women contains a hidden feminine identity based upon anger and rebellion against an all-pervasive patriarchal tyranny. They read the gothic elements in women’s writing invariably as subversive plots and invariably as a direct reflection of the writer’s repressed feelings. In a more recent book, Consuming Fiction (1987), Terry Lovell, a British Marxist feminist, has taken a more cautious view of the nature of romance and Gothic fiction. Lovell returns to the association of the rise of the novel with the rise of capitalism and the middle class as emphasized by critics like Kettle and Watt. However, she revises this history of the novel by bringing women writers more fully into the account. In particular, she claims that lack of awareness of women’s fiction led to an overestimation of the importance of the realist novel and an underestimation of the romance and Gothic traditions within the genre where women as readers and writers predominate. Lovell also sees the construction of character as a defining feature of novelistic form, but her thinking on this is influenced by more recent trends in psychoanalytical literary theory. Current views of identity stress instabilities and lack of definition rather unity and coherence.

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Individuality is seen more as a cluster of different selves, many contradictory, and of fluctuating impulses, desires and moods. Lovell suggests that a sense of identity as coherent and rational and therefore purposeful and amenable to self-discipline met the need of rising capitalism. The process of entrepreneurial consolidation of wealth and status by the middle class during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries required a strong sense of individualistic identity and worth. The realist novel with its emphasis upon carefully individualized characters, its concern with their growth of self-awareness and selfcontrol, their energetic quest for social identity and position undoubtedly met this class need. Great Expectations can be read as offering its readers a hero who comes to embody and affirm the bourgeois values of the Protestant work ethic. However, the needs of expanding commodity capitalism are very complex. Capitalism, Lovell claims, ‘is Janus-faced. When the capitalist producer has his eye on his own management and workforce, the qualities he likes to find and encourage are the classic bourgeois virtues—thrift, efficiency hard work, frugality. But when he turns his attention to the purchaser of his commodities he may be happy to find a different creature’ (Lovell, Consuming Fiction, 1987, p.31). The ideal consumer is not a single-minded, coherent, self-disciplined identity, but someone open to desires and fantasies, someone whose notion of self is plural enough to identify with a potentially endless supply of consumer goods. The novel as a genre, Lovell argues, ‘is deeply implicated in this fracture within capitalism’s imaginary selves’ (ibid., p. 16). What is more, it is especially women who are positioned at the point of ideological contradiction or fracture. On the one hand, a woman’s identity was confined to the unified moral ideal of a restrained, decorous femininity, which functioned to confirm the repressive code of puritan self-discipline. On the other hand, the woman as wife and mother within the domestic sphere and as the object of male sexual attraction was the central focus for the impulses of the conspicuous consumption needed to sustain capitalist boom. The split within the novel genre served these two contradictory needs. The more prestigious form of realism, which by the 1840s was awarded the status of ‘literature’ (and became more exclusively the domain of male writers), continued to validate the approved public ideology of moral individualism. The less respected forms of romance and Gothic fiction— always associated with women as readers and writers—continued to nourish the desiring, fantasizing impulses which were unacknowledged but equally necessary for a capitalist consumer-based society. Seen like this, these non-realist forms of romance and Gothic fiction seem less subversive than critics like Gilbert and Gubar claim and more complicit with existing power structures. The fantasies of feminine power offered to women readers by romance’s focus upon the period of courtship not only provide an illusionary fulfilment for women’s unsatisfied desires, but also stimulate those desires and channel them into an equally illusionary belief in the seductive power provided by the latest fashions and consumer goods. Novels often take a tone of moral condemnation in depicting the ‘frivolous’ enthusiasm of a Lydia Bennet for new bonnets and ribbons while simultaneously providing detailed descriptions of women’s

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clothes and rooms, which have the seductive allure of glossy merchandise catalogues. When you read Great Expectations you should notice the way Pip’s rise in social status is documented in terms of conspicuous consumption. However, desires and impulses, by their very nature, exist beyond the domain of rational thought and are frequently at odds with restrictive codes of social and moral decorum. Forms of narrative that open themselves up to irrational, unconscious energies may well disturb and challenge the orthodox perceptions of reality that the realist novel offers as an objective reflection of things as they really are. This is particularly the case with the forms of fantasy fiction where what is strange or uncanny is not ultimately resolved and explained naturally in terms of, for example, a character’s or a narrator’s dream or madness. Novels that leave the reader uncertain about the source of strangeness in the text do function to unsettle many of our preconceived, unquestioned beliefs and values. Lovell suggests that Frankenstein is a good example of this unresolved, disturbing form of fantasy Can you think of ways in which the formal structures of its narrative work to prevent any resolution of the strange story unfolded? Discussion The series of first person narrators who relate the events can offer only subjective accounts. There is no reassuring third person omniscient narrator who can provide an objective explanation and interpretation of the story. It is not that we doubt the truthful intention of Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein or the creature, but their language increasingly takes on the intensity and unreality of dream and the events they unfold are enacted against landscapes of archetypal extremity—vast mountain peaks, ice, snow and storm. In addition, there is the strange sense of converging identities among all the characters, as in dreams. The creature frequently seems to be Frankenstein’s other self—persecuting and victimized—but what is the status of their relationship to Walton? Are both figments of his unconscious or paranoia? Such deliberate unresolvability undermines the fundamentals of social and moral order. As the discussion of the novel in Chapter Three suggests, even the stability of gender identity is shaken by Shelley’s text. Frankenstein transgresses the boundaries of the permitted, allowing access to what is repressed and forbidden—incest, homosexuality, necrophilia, excesses of power and sexuality. The firm divisions between reality and fiction are shattered along with the illusion of a unified, coherent identity, which, as I have suggested, is the mainstay of all social and moral codes. ■ Throughout the long and varied involvement with the novel genre of women as writers, readers and critics, what has been centrally at stake is their identity as women. Feminist criticism began with concern about stereotypical, mythical images of women in literature and turned to writing by women for more positive and authentic representations of a feminine identity. The resulting studies of women as writers have shown how, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women novelists were caught up in complex ways in the ideological process of redefining

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the notion of womanhood. Many women writers gained respect for their work by constructing themselves in the image of approved femininity. However, through their creative output, whether seen as part of the effort to conform to the ideal or as a covert subversion of it, women have been at the forefront of the novel’s innovative artistic concern with the representation of identity. The recognition of this as a major contribution that women writers have made to the rise of the novel has played an important part in redressing the negative image of women’s creative capacities and has established their claims to canonical status. However, the notable achievement of feminist literary criticism has produced its own disquiet. Other voices within feminism, especially those of black, lesbian and working-class women, felt constrained to point out that the so-called women’s canon constructed by early feminist critics like Showalter and Gilbert and Gubar focused only upon the writing of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. In effect, to speak blandly of ‘women’s writing’ is itself to impose a restrictively unitary identity upon the feminine, veiling the diversity of experience, interests and access to power between women. It constructs a comforting myth of cohesive sexual identity, which allows us to ignore the fact that women are often divided by the forces of class, wealth, race and sexual orientation and do not invariably feel any over-riding group solidarity as women. In The Colonial Rise of the Novel (1993), Firdous Azim makes this the central issue of her text. She, too, emphasizes the cultural dominance of realism within the novel tradition and its construction of a powerful sense of individual identity. She associates this not just with the needs of a rising assertive capitalist class but equally with the rise of imperialism. Both forms of individualist expansionism require a sense of self-identity as masterful, able to order and control. Such a self-identity has to be constructed in opposition to an ‘other’, who is seen to need control and ordering. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women, the working class and black people were placed in the position of that ‘other’ upon which white male supremacy was constructed. Azim suggests that the rise of the European realist novel is complicit with this construction. She criticizes feminist readings of Jane Eyre which celebrate it as a progressive ‘woman’s’ text while ignoring the construction of the mad wife in terms of the stereotypical ‘other’ as Creole, disordered, violent, lascivious, needing in every respect the imposition of control and restraint (pp.107–8). We might also consider the suggestion that Shelley is displacing onto her creature fears about the violent and destructive ‘otherness’ of the working class. Azim is not concerned only with mastery and control as novelistic themes. She argues that the novel’s construction of a unified and omniscient narrative voice, during the crucial period of its development in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, must also be seen as making a powerful contribution to the ideological construction of an individualistic notion of self. The narrative voice offers itself as knowledgeable, able to interpret, judge and impose order upon the fictional world it surveys. In particular, the characters it most frequently judges and awards either praise or rebuke are the wayward social ‘deviants’: women, the lower class or

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‘natives’. In relation to this, after reading Chapter Five you might think about the way the plot of Great Expectations brings about the control and punishment of its wayward women: Mrs Joe, Miss Havisham and Estella. Azim suggests that the realist novel’s construction of a central narrative perspective, which can offer a knowledge of characters that they themselves lack, provides a unique model for colonial, patriarchal and class authority. In this respect, she says, a woman’s narrative voice always operates from a contradictory double position: in gender terms it occupies the place of an ‘other’ to be known and controlled, while in terms of class and race it frequently identifies with the position of mastery. Do you see Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein, both written by women, as offering any support for this view of a contradictory double position? In other words, can we recognize contradictions or double perspectives within their narrative voices? How authoritative and knowing do the narrators claim to be? Discussion I would say that both texts offer some support to Azim’s thesis. As already discussed, the many narrative voices that construct Frankenstein rule out any one authoritative, reliable explanation of the story (see pp.117–18 above). There is such a slippage of identity between the various characters that who is controlling and victimizing whom is kept constantly shifting. Mastery is a position struggled for but never attained. In Pride and Prejudice, the voice of the narrator does seem to claim moral authority and knowledge about the characters, but, as argued in the section on ‘Realism and comedy’ in Chapter Two, there is a subtle undermining of these claims by the text’s comic vision. There is a covert ironic recognition that truth is never completely separable from prejudice and a conscious teasing of the reader by misleading or withheld perceptions. ■ As a final point for you to consider in relation to women and the novel, I would suggest that one of women’s most important contributions to both the realist and the romance forms of the genre is a sense that identity is always fragmented and multiple, always implicated in our desires and always largely fictional (see Chapter Two, p.55 and Morris, Identities in process’, 1993). This insight inevitably undermines the claims to knowledge about human character that uphold all forms of social authority. Paradoxically, it may be that the more narrowly confined identity permitted to women is what allows them this insight. Women, more often than men, have a sense of having an approved identity imposed upon them or held up for them to emulate. Thus women, more easily than men perhaps, come to recognize that there is always something fictional, some sense of performing a role, about our self-identities. In their writing—even that of someone as apparently rationalist, realist and moralist as Austen—they show us that the formation of ‘self is a play of many voices and many possible identities.

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The realist novel and liberal ideas and values by Richard Allen Chapter Two on Pride and Prejudice discussed the question of whether Jane Austen was in some way a member of a ‘conservative’ or ‘conserving’ party (see p.47) and showed how complex is the answer to such a question. In this part of Chapter Four I want to explore an analogous question, namely whether there is a particular connection or affinity between the realist novel, especially in the nineteenth century, and a set of political ideas and values that can be given the name ‘liberal’. It is important to say straight away that in discussing the connection between a writer’s work and his or her politics we are scarcely ever dealing with a situation in which a writer is a prominent member of a political party.1 More usually it is matter of a writer thinking, feeling and imagining in accord with certain political ideas. It is worth remembering too that writers do not ‘sign up’ as members of a realist ‘party’; rather, they adopt realist styles and conventions when these seem most appropriate for their thinking, feeling and imagining. In linking realist novel writing with liberal ideas and values, we are dealing with a complex situation, with various levels of commitment by writers to both realist writing and political ideas. Although ‘liberal’ was a powerful and much-used word, particularly in the mid nineteenth century, it is notoriously difficult to define. As Richard Altick says in Victorian People and Ideas (1973), ‘the word “liberal” occurs in varying contexts’ and is peculiarly ‘resistant to definition’ (p.29). However, to allow this difficulty of definition to divert us from considering the relation of the realist novel and liberal ideas and values would be to ignore a major aspect of the genre. To my mind, the exploration of this relationship can enable us to understand how writers used the realist novel within the process that Raymond Williams describes as a defining of society rather than a mere reflecting of it (see p.99 above). By analysing the novels and seeing this process in action we can come to a better understanding of the worlds they describe. Two aspects of liberal ideas and values are of particular significance. First, there is a valuing of the individual not as an especially heroic figure but as someone rather ordinary; in Altick’s eyes this leads to ‘cautiously democratic sympathies’ and ‘intellectual tolerance’ (Victorian People and Ideas, 1973, p.29). Second, there is an emphasis on the here and now and the secular. With this goes a playing down of the idea that our living on this earth is merely a passage to some more important after-life. Instead, it becomes something important in itself and in which—to draw again on Altick—‘reason’ can lead to ‘progress’ (ibid.). The centrality of these ways of thinking can be shown by referring to one of the most famous of all nineteenth-century English realistic writings, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). The final sentences, and thus the final message, of the book read as follows; in true realist and liberal style the focus is not on general issues but on an individual character, the heroine Dorothea Brooke. It is also on progress —‘the growing good of the world’:

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we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas…the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. (1994 edn, p.838) Can you see any ways in which these liberal ways of thinking and understanding can be linked either to Pride and Prejudice or to Frankenstein ? Discussion Austen is plainly interested in and values the behaviour of an individual like Elizabeth Bennet. Despite her special qualities, Austen wants us to see Elizabeth as quite an ordinary person. Although Austen intends to make judgements and to set out the kind of behaviour that is most valuable, the phrase ‘intellectual tolerance’ also seems appropriate for the comic tone of the novel. In more general terms the way Austen describes what happens to individual characters—how they differ one from another, how they develop etc.—is very much in line with a liberal and realistic way of thinking, feeling and imagining. It is more difficult to put Frankenstein into this frame, but the novel does begin and end with individual characters, Robert Walton and Victor Frankenstein. It is also as impossible to imagine the novel without the realistic detail as it is to imagine it without the more fantastic elements. In both novels, in a relatively strong way, and despite Mary Shelley’s use of mountain and Arctic settings, our attention is drawn to the need to ‘sort things out’ in the here and now. There is no suggestion whatsoever that Frankenstein or the creature go on to face grander judgement in the future, or that Austen is interested in leaving the reader thinking of Elizabeth or Darcy anywhere much beyond Derbyshire. Neither novel, on the other hand, allows us to think that reason or reasoning is of itself a good thing. Indeed, it can be said to be part of Frankenstein’s and Elizabeth’s problems that they reason too much. On the other hand, for both writers, the exercise of reason is a significant issue, and both might be said to encourage us to work out how reason can help us live in a world where God has not disappeared but certainly withdrawn a little. ■ In his book The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (1981), the critic and historian of the novel George Levine starts from this way of thinking. You will find an extract from Levine’s book in Part Two. You may like to read it now or, perhaps better, after you have finished this part of the chapter. For example, Levine says that realistic writing is driven by ‘empiricist’ thinking ‘with its tendency to value immediate experience over…systems’ of thinking ‘and ‘it was obviously related to the developments in empirical science as they ran through the century’ (Part Two, p.243). Realistic writing is also part of ‘some moral enterprise of truth-telling’; it ‘always implies an attempt…to discover

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some non-verbal truth out there’ (ibid., p.240). He goes on, however, to qualify in very important ways these assumptions and the conclusions that might be drawn from them. Before considering this, I want to think further about the general relationship between the novel genre and liberal thinking and to draw in the idea that the value of the novel in itself and in relation to other forms of literature depends on that link. It is argued, for example, that we should read novels because they express liberal sentiments and that since these sentiments are particularly closely linked to realistic writing we should value realistic novels above all others. Two of the key statements of this view were both first published in 1948. This is not at all a coincidence; in the aftermath of World War II, as more and more evidence of Nazi genocide appeared, and as more evidence of Soviet government atrocities came to light, many intellectuals felt themselves to be in a period of crisis. The novel seemed to give them something to hold onto. In an essay on ‘Manners, morals, and the novel’ (reprinted in 1951 in a collection called The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society) the American critic Lionel Trilling wrote: For our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred years…its greatness and its practical usefulness lay in its unremitting work of involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination… It taught us, as no other genre ever did, the extent of human variety and the value of this variety. It was the literary form to which the emotions of understanding and forgiveness were indigenous, as if by the definition of the form itself. (1970 edn, p.223)

Responding to the same sense of crisis, F.R.Leavis—whose ideas as expressed in The Great Tradition were discussed earlier in this chapter— wrote: Is there any great novelist whose preoccupation with form’ is not a matter of his responsibility towards a rich human interest, or complexity of interests, profoundly realised?—a responsibility involving of its very nature, imaginative sympathy, moral discrimination, and judgement of relative human value? (1948 edn, p.29) You might like to pause for a moment and try to think back to what it was that first made it seem to you worth while to read novels. It was certainly arguments like those of Trilling and Leavis that made me think I was not entirely wasting my time ‘with my nose stuck in a book’ when I started to think about this curious habit. The persistence of the ideas they put forward can be seen in Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (1985) by Meenakshee Mukherjee, in which she discusses links between British fiction and the development of the novel genre and novel writing in India:

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a subtle and certain link exists between the novel as a genre and liberal ideology as a way of life. This is because the novel recognises the uniqueness of individuals and accepts the plurality of beliefs and values. In other words the novel comes into being only when the reader and writer believe in the uniqueness of the individual and his will. Individuals and their relationships are important [in the novel] only when they are not completely controlled by and are not totally subservient to [wider] powers like the church or the Dharmashastra or the gods on Olympus. (1994 edn, p.37, emphasis added) These sentences are part of a discussion of Indian literature towards the end of the nineteenth century when, Mukherjee says, much writing was explicitly ‘propaganda… be it for Christian, Muslim or Hindu values’ (p.36). Novels in the British realistic and liberal genre did not emerge in India until these sectarian propaganda missions were put to one side. This may raise questions about the extent to which liberal realistic writing should be valued. Drawing on what you know of the history of India since 1900 and the way relations with Britain have changed, can you think of anything that might have prompted less value to be placed on liberal realism, particularly as far as Indian writing is concerned? Discussion The most important event in Indian history in this context is the decolonization of India in 1947, which was the result of an increasingly successful nationalist struggle from around 1920 onwards. Now you might think that the presence of a genre embodying liberal values would be of great benefit in this, maintaining a sense of balance amidst all the nationalist actions and their repression by the British. This might have been the case in terms of British repression being modified or controlled by ‘imaginative sympathy’ or a belief in the ‘uniqueness of the individual and his will’, but perhaps the same would not apply to the message of nationalism. Surely this was a time when Indians would have valued works that were controlled by larger powers, propagating, for example, the chauvinistic idea of India as a nation, and in which the complexity of interests was put to one side in favour of a way of writing that matched the struggle in which the people were engaged. ■ It seems to me a strength in Levine’s approach that he adopts a sceptical stance in his enquiry into the meaning and value of realistic writings. For example, he notices something that ties in with the discussion about the narrating voice in Pride and Prejudice in Chapter Two. There, you may remember, it was said that although this voice is often assured, sometimes the tone is much more difficult to grasp (see pp. 58–9). The possibility is even raised that it may be the source of a contradiction in the text, whereby the ‘ability’ of the narrating voice ‘to adopt a variety of viewpoints, radically questions the concept of a unified individual identity that provides the foundation of the realist form of the novel’ (p.59). Levine quotes

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examples from a string of what are generally accepted to be realistic novels of points at which the narrator seems deliberately to break through the realistic surface, thus drawing attention to the artificiality of the pretence of realism that otherwise dominates (see Part Two, p.241). The authors do this apparently as much as anything to ‘call the readers names’ and declare them unfit to be readers of the novel with which they are currently engaged. Look at the extracts quoted by Levine. How do the authors address the readers and what might this tell us about the authors’ feelings about realism? Discussion Charlotte Brontë seems the mildest, suggesting that her readers might ‘never’ be ‘more mistaken’. Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and William Thackeray, in contrast, are quite dismissive—‘leave’ the book ‘at the next halt’ says Scott; ‘take warning and go elsewhere’ says Thackeray; ‘throw the book aside’ says Edgeworth. George Eliot adopts a stance familiar to most school pupils—‘you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me’. These examples suggest that realistic writing and the values that go with it are far from universally acceptable. It could be that this is a question of the taste for different kinds of fiction—the audience prefers entering ‘a flying chariot drawn by hippogriffs’—but it is likely to be more than that: readers are unwilling to engage with ‘something as unromantic as Monday morning’ (ibid.). The writers seem to accept that realistic writing challenges readers’ expectations about style and subject. These writers know that they are engaged in what Levine’s rather concentrated language terms ‘a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality’ (ibid., p.244). ■ It is relatively straightforward to identify the new style of writing. Levine refers to ‘fictions…exuberant with details’ and readers experiencing ‘the sheer pleasure of being able to see, as though for the first time, the clutter of furniture, the cut of clothing, the mutton chop and the mug of hot rum’ (ibid., p.245). Just what was the ‘new reality’ that this new style might describe and that readers might resist? One ‘standard’ argument has it that by the mid nineteenth century the realistic novel was an appropriate form to represent ‘a massive confidence as to what the nature of Reality actually was’. At its heart was the idea that ‘human life, whatever the particular conditions, may ultimately be seen as unified and coherent’ (ibid., p. 243). It is certainly possible to find examples of this kind of confidence in the period. Charles Kingsley, one of the most representative figures of the middle and later nineteenth century and a very popular novelist, prompted by a visit to the Great Exhibition, preached a sermon in 1851 which included this rhapsody: If these forefathers of ours could rise from their graves this day they would be inclined to see in our hospitals, in our railroads, in the achievements of our physical science, confirmation of that old superstition of theirs, proofs of the

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kingdom of God, realisations of the gifts which Christ received for men, vaster than any of which they had dreamed. (Quoted in Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1957, p.43) ‘Unified and coherent’ seems also to be a good description for the character of someone who could say of a typical day as Kingsley did: See how much a day can do! I have since nine this morning, cut wood for an hour; spent an hour and more in prayer and humiliation, and thereby established a chastened but happy tone…written six or seven pages of a difficult part of my essay; taught in the school; thought over many things while walking; gone round two-thirds of the parish visiting and doctoring; and written [this letter]… Such days are lives— and happy ones. (Ibid., p.261) Surely readers would be unlikely to resist a reality in literature or in life—to which perhaps Trilling and Leavis look back with some nostalgia— composed in these terms? However, the example of Kingsley also shows that this kind of confidence in thoughts and actions may be shadowed by something darker; only a little later he recorded that ‘if I stop, I must go down. I must work’ (ibid., p.261). Perhaps we should look more sceptically on this new and energetic delight in the individual and in describing a detailed reality. Kingsley’s more anxious words might prompt us to ask (using Levine’s words) whether these ‘fictions…exuberant with details’ are not ‘melancholy thematically’ (Part Two, p.245). I hope you will already have thought about this kind of issue in relation to Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein and that the issue will strike you as also relevant to Great Expectations. Does Austen’s novel, for example, offer us the confident assurance that truth and goodness will prevail, or is the tone more melancholy? Does it affirm that individuals will be saved from ‘pride and conceit’ (Pride and Prejudice, 1990 edn, p.328), in the sort of reconciliation scene we find in volume III, chapter XVI, or is it a kind of fairy story in which Elizabeth and Darcy are special creatures precisely because they escape the pride and vanity that are for ordinary people almost inevitable? Is even the brightest fantasy about the freedom allowed to women inevitably touched with melancholy, which arises from the fact that we know that almost everywhere in Britain in the early nineteenth century women were the property of men? At the end of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations the hero Pip is an isolated figure, denied any of his expectations. Exuberant detail appears to have been washed away and the prevailing tone seems indeed melancholy in sentences like the following: A cold silvery mist had veiled the afternoon, and the moon was not yet up to scatter it. But, the stars were shining beyond the mist, and the moon was coming, and the evening was not dark. I could trace out where every part of

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the old house had been, and where the brewery had been, and where the gates, and where the casks. I had done so, and was looking along the desolate garden-walk, when I beheld a solitary figure in it. (1994 edn, p.477) The ‘imaginings’ that realistic writing brings into public view are complex. They plainly embody liberal ideas that value the individual and the ordinary human being, and seek for answers about moral questions in the here and now rather than the beyond. However, they are also ways of fantasizing that the world ‘be meaningful and good’ and ways of combating ‘the persistent fear…that it is merely monstrous and mechanical, beyond the control of human meaning’ (see Part Two, p.245). Realistic writing is often anxious writing, in other words, and the realist genre is a genre appropriate for the anxieties felt by writers and readers alike. The record of Eliot’s life can provide an example of what I mean here. Her realist novel Middlemarch ends with a statement affirming liberal values (see p.121 above). It was a great success and on 5 November 1873 she wrote to her publisher: ‘Is it not wonderful that the world can absorb so much “Middlemarch” at a guinea a copy?’ (Cross, George Eliot’s Life, n.d., pp.517–18). Eliot takes pleasure in the financial reward that comes from her having caught the mood of the times, the feeling that there is a ‘growing good’ in the world and that ‘things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been’ (Middlemarch, 1994 edn, p.838). However, alongside the positive sentiments in the letter to her publisher we find a sense of personal doubt, as she writes: ‘I am slowly simmering towards another big book; but people seem so bent on giving supremacy to “Middlemarch” that they are sure not to like any future book so well’ (Cross, George Eliot’s Life, n.d., pp.517–18). She also writes anxiously about public events and about a world that seems rather far from a ‘growing good’. At the time, the colonial British power was attempting violently to subdue the Ashanti tribe in West Africa. Eliot’s liberal mind saw what was going on as ‘stupidity’: ‘That Ashanti business seems to me hideous. What is more murderous than stupidity?’ (ibid.). She is not here able to imagine a fine, liberal conclusion and can only express a sense of what it must be like for those women whose men are serving in Africa: ‘To have a husband gone on such an expedition, is a trial that passes my imagination of what it is possible to endure in the way of anxiety’ (ibid.). The realist novel and the publishing market by Richard Allen In this chapter we have emphasized the relation between the novel and society as well as exploring the idea of the novel in society and considering what kinds of value the realist novel can embody. This raises the question of how novels are written and marketed. The form of the novel is vitally affected by the circumstances of its publication and by economic and technological factors operating within the fiction market. In this part of the chapter we shall be thinking about novels in very physical terms: how a writer’s ‘imaginings’ are transferred onto paper, into shops and

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libraries and thus into the hands of readers. This kind of approach is interesting in itself, but it is also interesting to put it beside the approaches of critics like F.R.Leavis, Raymond Williams (and George Levine). These regularly imply a continuity in the history of fiction, in which writers pass on the skills of their profession to their successors (see pp.100–6 above). However, every famous novelist was once an unknown novelist who had to persuade a publisher of the value of often unconventional work. Directly or indirectly, both Leavis and Williams in particular also claim that a special relationship exists between the novels that are selected as part of ‘the great tradition’ and the social worlds from which they emerged. Is this something that can only be seen in retrospect by the literary historian, or should we expect these novels to have sold well when they were first published and been favourably received by readers recognizing then that they had a special relevance to their lives? It is best to open out these questions through particular examples. What, for instance, can we learn from a brief description of the publication of Jane Austen’s early work? Thomas Egerton published Sense and Sensibility in 1811, but he was so unsure of its success that he insisted Austen bear the costs of the first edition. In 1812 this first edition of 1000 copies seemed to be selling well, so Egerton offered Austen £110 for the copyright of Pride and Prejudice, which she reluctantly accepted —she had hoped for £150. By June 1813, 1500 copies had been sold. This tells us a little, but much more information is needed before we can answer the kinds of question we want to raise. It may help us in understanding what it meant to be a writer at the time if we consider the fact that Austen’s name does not appear on the title page of the first edition of either Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice. In the same context it is important to realize that copyright law was different. Since 1880 the author has generally been able to have the sole right to decide who shall print his or her his work for fifty years from first publication or for fifty years after his or her death,2 whichever is the sooner. Before 1880 authors had much less control over their work and in the years around 1800 the situation could be fairly described as chaotic. Generally, a writer sold the copyright of his or her work outright to a publisher. It was in the publisher’s interest to protect that copyright and thus the profits that came from it, but the laws that upheld the copyright owner’s rights were seldom enforced. Frequently, publication of a popular work by one publisher would rapidly be followed by a pirate edition by another or perhaps a ‘sequel’ supposedly by the same author but actually by a ‘hack’ writer. For much of the nineteenth century the only way a writer of novels who did not have private means could make a living from writing was by regular production of new work. We also need more information to understand what the sales figures mean. In Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (1968) Brian Southam surveys the reception given to Austen’s work and concludes: During her lifetime Jane Austen knew that her works were fashionable … And there was no lack of recognition from the few critics capable of grasping

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her achievement. Scott, in 1815, and Whately, in 1821, saw her as a distinctively ‘modern’ novelist, the representative of a new school of writing… Down to 1870, there is a continuing thread of praise, acknowledging a great writer. Yet throughout this period Jane Austen remained a critic’s novelist— highly spoken of and little read. (p.2) Comparison with the sales figures of other works published at the same time tells a similar story. Walter Scott was clearly what might be called a reader’s novelist: in the first three months of 1813, 10,000 copies of Rokeby were sold; in the first six months of 1814, 6000 copies of Waverley were sold; in 1815, 2000 copies of Guy Mannering were sold on the first day of publication; and in two weeks in 1818, 10,000 copies of Rob Roy were sold. Equally striking is the scale of the popularity of Scott’s poetry and that of Lord Byron. In 1810, 20,300 copies of Scott’s newly published The Lady of the Lake were sold; in the first month of 1813, 6000 copies of Byron’s The Bride of Abydos were sold; and in 1814, 10,000 copies of Byron’s The Corsair were sold on the first day of publication. Even these figures need to be put into perspective, since there were even greater sales elsewhere in the publishing trade. In 1823 a pamphlet telling the ‘Full, True and Particular Account of the Murder of Weare by Thurtell and his Companions’ written by James Catnach is reputed to have sold 250,000 copies, and the subsequent account of the trial of Thurtell sold 500,000 copies in the same year.3 More difficult to include in this kind of comparison were Gothic novels. A few of these novels, mostly published before 1800, must count as individual bestsellers, but the genre is characterized by the mass production of very similar novels, so that it is the sheer bulk of the genre as a whole that is most impressive. Williams argues that Austen’s novels convey a good deal of the historical and political complexity of their times. Should information about Austen’s limited popularity among her first readers prompt us to rework this claim, or to reassess the claims made for realism as the genre to which we should give most attention around 1800? Discussion Given the strength of Austen’s reputation it would be a bold critic who would dismiss her work; repeatedly and in different ways readers have found her novels full of historical and social insight. The evidence of sales figures is likely to be drawn into the argument, with the qualification that her writing was ahead of its time, only fully understood by an élite section of the reading public. When first published, we might say, Austen’s work had something of the status given to avant-garde writing today. Bestsellers appear not to have come from the realist genre; members of the reading public apparently did not want to spend their reading time in the ‘real’ world in which they lived. Further reflection suggests that this may not be entirely true and that realism was in vogue. What better describes one of the apparent aims

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of realism than the phrase ‘Full, True and Particular’ in Catnach’s title? Equally, although Scott’s poetry and novels told of foreign adventures, they were usually set in precise historical situations and incorporated real political events and struggles. Byron’s reputation was made from his poetry and his sensational reputation, but he was known as a political radical and he used his work for political ends. A concern for the ‘real’ is thus quite pervasive, even though the realist genre in a pure form remains a minority interest. ■ In understanding the publication history of Austen’s early novels and the information above about the sales figures of other works we also need to take into account social class and gender. In some respects it makes sense to speak of a market stratified by class and by gender. Catnach made a great deal of money targeting a particular just-literate section of the reading public; at the time of publication Austen’s work was mainly read by the upper middle class; and the Gothic novel appealed predominantly to women and to the middle class. Other examples of stratification in the market are more complex. Byron’s work was read by those with the same kind of knowledge as himself—it particularly required a classical education —but his writing plainly also crossed class and education boundaries to a wider audience. Scott’s work appears to have had a similar wide appeal, undermining the idea that his readers needed a good grasp of history, particularly Scottish history. It is probably fair to say that, as the century progressed, within the social groupings in which the novel was the most popular literary form, realistic styles were most favoured. Serious realism certainly sold well: royalties on British and overseas sales of Middlemarch earned George Eliot £8000 between 1871 and 1879, and she made an additional £9000 between 1876 and 1879 from Daniel Deronda (Jones, ‘Disraeli’s Endymion’, 1974, p.155); among lesser-known names, Mrs Humphrey Ward’s immensely serious Robert Elsmere sold 70, 500 copies between 1888 and 1891 (Altick, The English Common Reader, 1957, p.386). However, it is easy to underestimate the continuing vigour of less realistic styles such as the Gothic or the more ‘adventure story’ -oriented historical fiction. In the 1890s in particular there was considerable debate about a possible revival of ‘romance’, centred especially on the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and to a lesser extent that of Henry Rider Haggard. What might we deduce first, from the increasing popularity of realist writing and second, from the continuing existence of non-realist writing? Discussion We might conclude that the kind of story and characters that the realist novel encouraged matched what readers wanted. The popularity of realist novels seems to show that nineteenth-century readers increasingly liked books that engaged them with the kinds of question they met outside books. For example, Anthony Trollope’s novels present a series of vivid analyses of the relationships between men and women, whilst Robert Elsmere deals with the hero’s loss of his religious faith and the effect that this has on his family. The continuing interest in ‘romance’ and

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‘adventure’ stories seems, however, to show that readers—and the evidence is that it was particularly lower-middle-class readers—still read to escape. If you think back to Frankenstein, however, it is clear that the distinction between engagement and escape is not simple. The ‘discontinuous and involuted’ world of the Gothic novel, where destiny is governed by ‘unintelligible writings’ (Chapter Three, p.63), provides an apt metaphor for a world marked by social and technological change. Millions left rural communities to move into the alien world of the city, and the increasing systematization of work in factories and offices left many feeling out of control and isolated in a world that lacked meaning. Even apparently straightforward adventure stories like Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) might in fact be seen as realistic, giving readers their best chance of understanding what it felt to be involved in Britain’s latest imperial expansion. ■ I have been writing as if the book fiction market allowed readers free choice in their book buying and reading. In fact, choice depended as much as anything on price and on methods of distribution. One of the most important events in the history of British fiction publishing occurred in 1821 when Scott’s publisher, capitalizing on the success of his novels, began selling Kenilworth in a three-volume format at 31s 6d (£1.57p) for the set. This price was well beyond the means of most readers, but amazingly this format and this price survived as the dominant one for new fiction until 1895. A three-volume novel—known in the trade as a ‘three decker’— would conventionally be ‘920 pages long, with twenty-one and a half lines on each page and nine and a half words in each line’ (quoted in Jones, ‘Disraeli’s Endymion’, 1974, p.157). To put the price in context, in the late 1860s the household income of a prosperous professional man would have been around £500 a year, but that of a lower-middle-class clerk only £99 (that is, 38s a week). How much of this might have been available for men’s book buying is uncertain, as is how much a woman without paid work or an income of her own would have been able to squeeze from her housekeeping for her reading. A woman doing paid work would almost automatically have had even less money to spend on books: a woman bookbinder, for example, might have earned around £31 a year (12s a week), whilst a woman cook might have received only £19 a year as well as her board (Best, Mid-Victorian Britain 1851–75, 1979, pp.110, 124; Alexander, ‘Women’s work in nineteenth-century London: a study of the years 1820–50’, 1976, p.91). Most readers had to wait until novels were published in a cheap reprint edition—usually first at a price of 6s but thereafter sometimes for as little as 6d—or had to borrow them from a library. The most famous library, Mudie’s Library, was founded in 1842 and the second largest, W.H.Smith’s Circulating Library, in I860. The economic advantages of the libraries for readers are obvious: for the price of one volume of a novel a subscriber had the right to borrow one book at a time throughout the year. The three-volume format of publication had advantages for the libraries, since it meant either that each three-volume set could satisfy three readers at a time, or that wealthier subscribers would take out three subscriptions to be sure of being able to complete the story in one reading.

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Another method of publishing novels developed alongside the three-volume format, that is, publishing in serial form in magazines. Technological advances and better distribution networks made magazine publication more efficient and attractive illustrations made magazines more popular. In the 1820s magazines consisted mostly of non-fiction, but this changed with the serial publication of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers in 1836. Dickens went on to become the most successful exponent of serial publication, first through the magazine Household Words founded in 1850 and then through the magazine All the Year Round (see Chapter Five, p.141). In terms of the range of important authors published, The Cornhill Magazine, founded in I860 by the publisher Smith, Elder & Company, had an almost equal claim to fame. It appeared monthly and aimed for a generally serious and relatively affluent middle-class audience. Each edition cost Is. The first issues sold no less than 110,000 copies and the editors boasted that since each copy was read by many people their readership probably numbered a million (Cornhill Magazine, vol. 1, no. 6, June I860, p.759). Some copies were kept and bound together, with a special title and contents page. The volume title page of my copy still bears the pencilled instruction to the binder to use gold blocked green leather for the spine, making a volume fit to stand on the shelves of any gentleman’s library. Smith, Elder aimed high from the first, as it appointed as editor William Thackeray, already a famous magazine writer and second only to Dickens in fame as a novelist. Although imaginative writing was the main form of contribution, the aim was to provide a variety of reading, giving both entertainment and instruction and something appropriate for each member of the family. Magazine publication put novels into a different physical format. Did it also make for a different kind of reading? The answer must be broadly ‘yes’ but what specific differences can you think of? Discussion Since each instalment of the story had to hold the attention and leave the reader wanting to read the next one, in a sense the pace of reading and of the narrative would have been different from what we are familiar with today. For example, with a monthly magazine like The Cornhill, the reader who had started Framley Parsonage in January I860 and read an instalment of three chapters a month would, by June I860, only have reached the eighteenth chapter out of the eventual total of fortyeight. A typical reader would be unlikely to ration his or her reading to a page or so of a serialization a day but would probably—particularly as the story worked towards it climax—read it quickly as soon as the magazine appeared. The rest of the month would remain either for rereading, or for lending the copy to friends and discussing characters and plots. Discussing characters and wondering about their destinies would have contributed to the sense that the story was about real people. The first magazines had two or even three serializations ‘on the go’ at the same time; an editor might have aimed to have two very different styles of story but equally there may have been a blurring between one story and another. ■

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These general conclusions can be easily illustrated from the opening number of The Cornhill Magazine. The first part of Framley Parsonage ends in almost archetypal fictional fashion, teasing the reader with a ‘will-he-won’t-he’ question: ‘After all, was it necessary that he should obey Lady Lufton in all things?’ The precise descriptions of Framley Parsonage, Framley Court and the village of Framley itself all sound entirely real. On the other hand, a factual account of the search for the explorer, Sir John Franklyn, lost in Canton, includes a sentence that sounds like the end of a novel: ‘Over and over we told our adventures, and we never tired of listening to the one all-absorbing, though melancholy subject, of the discovery of the fate of Sir John Franklyn and his companions’ (Cornhill Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, January I860, p.120). This is not to suggest that readers could not distinguish between the fictional Framley in the county of Barsetshire on the one hand and the real Canton in China on the other (although they were little more likely to have visited Canton than Framley), but to draw attention to the similarities of narrative structure and language in instalments of novels and factual accounts. Very important consequences flow from the technology and the economic necessities of publication. It has been argued, for example, that serial publication became an accepted and highly successful form of publishing and reading not only because it generated good financial returns but because it corresponded to the view of life that is embodied in realist writing. Being within each number was for instalment readers living in history, a fictionalised past in which one was not sure where all events lead; being between numbers or at the end of an entire text was inhabiting one of those moments at which one glimpses or creates larger patterns, fixing oneself more securely within a scheme of history. (Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial, 1991, p.61) The instalment reader could not, we must remember, look to the back of the book to find out whether a character would survive and, if so, at what cost. Readers had to wait through weeks of uncertainty—in the case of Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) their apprehension was stretched over nineteen months—before domestic peace and happiness arrived in their reading. When it did come there was usually scarcely more than a single episode during which to enjoy it, since almost invariably the magazine would already have drawn the reader into a new serial with a new set of doubts. Further reading Armstrong, I. (ed.) (1992) New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, Routledge. Bell, M. (1988) F.R.Leavis, Routledge. Eagleton, T. (1976) Criticism and Ideology, New Left Books.

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Eagleton, T. (1976) Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontë’s, Macmillan. Eagleton, T. (ed.) (1989) Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, Polity. Ingham, P. (1992) Dickens, Women and Language, Harvester Wheatsheaf. Jacobus, M. (ed.) (1979) Women Writing and Writing About Women, Croom Helm. Leavis, F.R. (1952) The Common Pursuit, Chatto & Windus. Leavis, F.R. (1955) D.H.Lawrence: Novelist, Chatto & Windus. Mills, S. with Pearce, L., Spaull, S. and Millard, E. (1984) Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading, Harvester Wheatsheaf. Mitchell, J. (1984) Women: The Longest Revolution: Essays on Feminism, Literature and Psychoanalysis, Virago. Morris, P. (1993) Literature and Feminism: An Introduction, Blackwell. Mulhern, F. (1979) The Moment of Scrutiny, New Left Books. O’Connor, A. (1989) Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics, Blackwell. Punter, D. (1980) The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Longman. Roe, S. (ed.) Women Reading Women’s Writing, Harvester. Said, E. (1989) ‘Jane Austen and Empire’, in T. Eagleton (ed.), Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, Polity, pp.150–64. Spender, D. (1987) Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen, Pandora. Sutherland, J. (1995) Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers, Macmillan. Williams, R. (1966) Modern Tragedy, Chatto & Windus. Williams, R. (1983) Writing and Society, Verso.

Notes 1 In the first half of the nineteenth century the political group in parliament which most notably stood for liberal values was the Whig Party; the Liberal Party came into existence in the 1860s. Anthony Trollope stood unsuccessfully for election as a Liberal candidate in 1868, but the most famous example of a writer who entered politics is Benjamin Disraeli, who became leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister (1868, 1874–80). 2 This will change to seventy years when British copyright law is brought into line with that of other members of the European Community. 3 All the figures that refer to British sales are from Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900, 1957, pp.382–7. Altick judges that the figures for well-known writers are reasonably reliable, but accepts that those for popular works like those by Catnach may be inflated.

Chapter Five Reading Great Expectations by Dennis Walder

Introduction In this chapter we return to the focus upon a specific novel, and consider some of the different ways of reading it suggested by asking to what genre or kind of writing it belongs. In the first of the text-based chapters in this book, Chapter Two on Pride and Prejudice, we offered a ‘reading’ of the novel that highlighted the construction of character as a central part of the moral aim of realist fiction. In Chapter Three, on Frankenstein, we considered another way of thinking about novels, in terms of realist strategies employed to represent psychic or even mythic ‘truths’. Different readings or interpretations of this ‘challenge’ to the mainstream realist novel were proposed, drawing on feminist and post-colonial ideas about literary forms. The novel as a kind of writing continuously involved in offering representations of the everyday, of the past and present world, is inevitably bound up with the different ways in which we have come to think about ourselves in relation to that world. Insofar as novels typically have a specific location, in time and place, they are characteristically involved in the major upheavals of their societies, directly or indirectly. Whether we are talking about the currents of change that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is concerned to evaluate or the revolutionary developments in knowledge that provoked Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the point is that we are viewing the novel as a genre capable of registering in satisfyingly complex ways what we think we know about how the world we live in has come about. This goes beyond what used to be the dominant way of thinking about novels in this country, according to which they were basically moral, English and liberal, although of course many of the greatest novels can usefully be thought of in that way. If a novel like Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1) may be thought of as a ‘classic’ example of the genre, then, we would expect to find that the nature of its realism is more than simply a matter of the presentation of the moral growth of a single character. Depending upon how we choose to read it, it may also be about many other things, more or less apparent. In what follows, I want to suggest a range of approaches to this novel, each of which builds on its predecessor. To begin with, I consider how contemporary readers and critics viewed the novel—what sort of expectations they had—as a way of thinking about our expectations, and to question

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assumptions based upon the familiar, almost mythical Dickens that we all think we know. Next, approaching the text as an ‘autobiographical’ type of novel, I look at how it takes us beyond the actuality of first person narrative—with which we so easily identify as readers—towards the realm of the gothic or ‘grotesque’. This enables me to proceed to an ‘hallucinatory reading’, derived from critics who explain the novel in terms of the fantasies of desire and revenge expressed through hidden psychic patterns linking the different characters. Finally, further questioning the idea that we should read Dickens’s novel as realist in any simple sense, I take up the possibility that we should think of it as playing a part in the broader history of Britain, including its colonial history. It has been held that the mainstream realist novel did much to ‘normalize’ imperialist attitudes. I do not think things are quite so straightforward: apart from anything else, this presumes a very limited idea of the genre. Nevertheless, it takes us beyond the familiar, towards a reading that raises yet more possibilities for what we may find in the novel. My aim is to increase your sense of the genre’s potential, not just to advocate any one reading or place Great Expectations within a particular category. Openings and ogres One important way of approaching the novel as a genre is to think about what expectations this kind of text would have aroused in its first readers. This is a way of reminding us of the gap between then and now, of the fact that readers of the original novel had certain assumptions, which would have been different from our own. It is a way of remembering the changing cultural-historical context, which will help us to make sense of a text, but also of reading with more awareness of what the process of reading involves. In order to help us to think about how our reading may be influenced by our conventions and assumptions, I would like briefly to consider a modern novel, which raises these issues quite sharply. Here is the opening paragraph of a novel published nearly a century after Great Expectations. How does it capture the reader’s interest? What literary tradition or sub-genre is being referred to and why? What features, if any, does it have in common with the opening pages of Great Expectations? (You may remember that I referred to the opening of Dickens’s novel on page 14 in Chapter One.) If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two haemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all—I’m not saying that—but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around Christmas before I got pretty run-down and had

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to come out here and take it easy. I mean that’s all I told D.B. about, and he’s my brother and all. He’s in Hollywood. That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week-end. He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. He’s got a lot of dough now. He didn’t use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home… Discussion This is the opening paragraph of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D.Salinger, and, like Great Expectations, it aims to capture our interest by immediately plunging us into the experience of an individual character, who tells us his story. As in Dickens’s novel, that character is a young boy somewhat at odds with the world around him, in a way both funny and pathetic. The narrator in the modern novel explicitly recalls Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), but mentions the hero of that book only to deny that he is going to write the ‘kind of crap’ Dickens wrote and going on to assert that he will not tell us his ‘whole goddam autobiography or anything’ either. The tendency towards exaggeration in the Salinger passage reflects a characteristic of young people’s speech, but the form and content of the opening also establish a number of points about the text. First, the modern author is consciously participating in a tradition of first person, autobiographical narrative fiction, which Dickens helped to establish. This form of writing conventionally begins with an account of the narrator—hero’s origins, childhood and parentage. Secondly, we are being reminded of that tradition or sub-genre in order to enjoy a consciously rude reaction against it. Thirdly, for all the naïvety of the narrator of the modern text, the author behind him is hardly naïve. Are we not, for instance, meant to feel more critical towards the boy narrator’s family than he does? You might also have noticed that the specific allusion to David Copperfield clarifies the child narrator’s gender, which is reinforced by the ‘pretend-tough’ tone. In Great Expectations, Philip Pirrip’s name signals the gender of its autobiographical narrator, who is not going to tell us much about his parents either, not because they are touchy, but because they are dead. He, too, ignores or omits a lot of the ‘David Copperfield kind of crap’, although not in a self-aware, modern way. Comparison of the two openings enables us to notice rather forcibly Dickens’s manner of appealing to his readers. His narrative is first person, but, unlike the Salinger text, it involves an adult narrator looking back over a considerable time and so able to exercise adult judgements about himself. For example, he says that it was a ‘childish conclusion’ of his young self to imagine his dead mother ‘freckled and sickly’ on the basis of the gravestone inscription ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above’ (Dickens, Great Expectations, 1994 edn, p.3).1 We may also notice that what the narrator calls childish, in perhaps the negative sense, may be thought of more positively, in terms of a child’s unconsciously acute perception of his mother’s likely

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condition, at that time and with all those young and presumably sickly children. (I am not suggesting that any reader would think about all this on a first reading, by the way.) This distancing effect, pulling us back to the adult narrator’s perspective, and then further, to our own reading of that narrator’s views, is reinforced by Dickens’s way of handling time. Salinger uses the present tense, and his child narrator looks back just less than a year. Dickens uses the past tense, and has his narrator moving swiftly from a succinctly generalized past to ‘a memorable raw afternoon towards evening’, when the boy Pip realized ‘the identity of things’, and recalled himself as what the narrator goes on to call a ‘small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry’ (pp.3–4). The shift to the continuous tense brings the experience of feeling like a fragmented individual at the mercy of the elements right up into the present of its telling. ■ Perhaps the most striking thing about the opening of Great Expectations is the way it combines the rhetorical immediacy of the speaking voice, and the closeness to the reader that invites, with this flexibility between different perspectives in time. Dickens thereby combines the ancient storyteller’s art with more recent developments in narrative technique. By ‘recent’, I have in mind the development of first person written narrative in the nineteenth century. There was a growing interest in the idea of a narrative retrospectively discovering a pattern of development in the young mind from within. (This was usually male, although Jane Eyre (1847) is the notable exception.) This type of autobiographical fiction is sometimes given the label Bildungsroman or apprenticeship novel (from Johann von Goethe’s influential narrative of this type, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–6)). However, a ‘confessional’ element, derived from religious (especially puritan) tradition, was equally important in the formation of the sub-genre. In this kind of narrative, the moral focus on the individual, which, as we have seen, was central to the formation of realist fiction, became mapped onto stories of the thoughts and adventures of childhood. Most of the earlier authors working within the autobiographical sub-genre chose to tell their story from the perspective of the adult, rather than as if it were spoken by the child or adolescent. The latter could not be expected to express feelings or analyse situations except within a limited range and remain credible, and so could only offer the most indirect or attenuated sense of moral or spiritual values. The characteristic modern version of this type of narration was established by James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The Catcher in the Rye shows the continuity of the modern way of representing the inner workings of the mind, in terms of an inner monologue or ‘stream of consciousness’, which aims at authenticity rather than morality. As novelists themselves have long recognized, the choice of what ‘point of view’ to adopt is one of the most important decisions they have to make. Theorists have gone on to isolate many different aspects of this decision, perhaps the most important being the distinction between ‘who speaks’ and ‘who sees’. In the opening of Great Expectations, the speaker is the adult Pip, but the child Pip is the

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one who sees. This gap is vital for the exploration of memory as well as morality in the novel, and as it proceeds the adult narrator’s voice and comments play an increasingly important part in the way the narrative is mediated. The dual role or perspective is established from the first words, if only by implication: My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. (p.3) This is the voice, not of the boy himself, but of the man, who can refer with lighthearted irony to the inadequacies of the ‘infant tongue’. In an act of selfidentification explained by the next paragraph, the child gives himself a name associating him with his dead father, even as it registers his isolation from his unknown family. (Father-figures are especially important in what follows, as we shall see.) The second paragraph of the novel reinforces the suggestion of the creative power of the boy’s ‘fancies’ or imagination, at the same time as it offers a critical perspective upon that power: reading the grave inscriptions leads to unreasonable or childish images, which nonetheless sway us with their sympathetic or comic force. The defining moment of Pip’s life which follows is rendered with a touching melancholy, ‘a memorable raw afternoon towards evening’ (p.3), when childish fantasy is dissolved by the reality of the overgrown churchyard, his dead family and its gloomy environment. His sense of isolation and fear is suddenly dramatized by the appearance of the gruff stranger who threatens to murder and even eat him. The eruption of direct speech (‘Hold your noise!’), as a man ‘started up from among the graves’, takes us directly into the frightening present again: ‘A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg’ (p.4). Did you notice how this paragraph presents the man as the boy first sees him, with the minimum of narrative interference, by omitting the verbs from the first two sentences? The first shocking appearance of the convict (well caught in David Lean’s memorable film version of the novel, see Figure 7) brings into play another set of associations, which are critically important for our sense of the kind of novel we are dealing with here. How are we to respond to the convict’s first appearance? By what means does the narrator mediate the ‘reality’ of this character to us? You may find it helpful to consider the suggestion that the convict’s appearance recalls an ogreish child-scarer discussed in an earlier chapter in this book. Discussion The convict’s opening words (‘Hold your noise!… Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!’, p.4) have just the exaggerated unreality we would expect of a stage

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Figure 7 Still from the Cineguild film production of Great Expectations 1946, directed by David Lean, with Anthony Wager as Pip, Finlay Currie as Abel Magwitch. Photograph by courtesy of the Ronald Grant Archive.

or fairy-tale monster. Yet I think we accept his ‘reality’ because of the way Dickens presents the character: by making him not only something threatening as seen by the shivering child, but also something comic, as he becomes when mediated to us by the narrating adult. The humorous, ironic effect emerges, for instance, when the convict himself momentarily takes fright as Pip indicates that his mother is ‘There, sir!’ in the graveyard (p.5). The effect is confirmed when the convict tells Pip that if he does not do as he is told, there is a young man who will ‘get’ him even when he thinks he is safe in bed (‘in comparison with which young man I am a Angel’, p.6). Pip is terrified, but we are not—nor, clearly, are we meant to be. The distance between who sees and who speaks in this situation is explicitly indicated by the narrator’s words when he describes the impression made upon young Pip as the convict leaves: ‘he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in’ (p.7).

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With superbly grotesque precision—‘cautiously’ seems particularly apt—Dickens suggests the fearful closeness of living and dead to the young Pip. At the same time, the boy’s fancy anticipates something of importance for the novel as a whole, which may well work upon us unconsciously in a first reading. This is the power of the dead, the forgotten or unseen, unexpectedly to influence our lives. The manner of narration invites sympathy and understanding for the child Pip, but by reminding us of the adult narrator it offers a more detached perspective as well, making possible the ironic humour that plays about the entire narrative. The initial conception of the convict suggests gothic melodrama, but it is melodrama incorporated within a subtle artistic medium to produce complex effects within the reader. Why does the term ‘gothic’ seem appropriate? Well, surely, the figure that ‘started up’ into Pip’s view with such suddenness ‘from among the graves’, with his frightful glaring and growling, reminds us of that other creature from the dead who, as you may recall, caused a frightened young boy to cry out as he struggled: ‘Let me go… monster! ugly wretch! you wish to eat me, and tear me to pieces—You are an ogre’? Of course, Frankenstein’s creature goes on to kill his victim (Shelley, Frankenstein, 1994 edn, p.117), whereas, for all his ogreish aspect, the convict in Great Expectations does not and, as we soon realize, would not. Shelley’s creature tells his own story, distanced by being told to another narrator, whereas Dickens’s ‘monster’ is seen from his potential victim’s point of view. This makes his presentation in terms of what we might read as ‘gothic’ excess in fact rather plausible, since it can also be understood as the product of a young imagination replete with the monsters and ogres of folk and fairy-tale tradition. Moreover, this is a young imagination already sensitized by long infant meditation upon the family gravestones, amid the dreary winter marshes. ■ That Dickens knew of Shelley’s creature and may well have had him in mind is indicated by an explicit association very much later, after Pip finally learns the identity of his mysterious benefactor. He thinks of himself in the role of the ‘imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, [who] was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me’ (p.335). Curiously, Pip sees himself as in different ways comparable to both Frankenstein and the creature, a typically gothic doubling which yet arises plausibly enough in his consciousness. In other words, the first person narrative provides a realist perspective upon happenings inherently gothic, melodramatic or non-realist in implication. Insofar as we are brought to share the boy Pip’s viewpoint, we share his sense of the world as arbitrary and frightening; insofar as we are brought back from it by the adult narrator’s viewpoint, we are invited to adopt a more ‘mature’ position, noting the plausibility of the child’s and then the young man’s experience. I have used the word ‘grotesque’ to indicate the effect upon Pip’s childish imaginings of the convict’s appearance as it is conveyed to us, but also because this is the word Dickens himself thought of when the first inklings of this narrative came to him. The idea for the story began as an idea for a short essay by a semi-fictional

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adult narrator he had created for his magazine All The Year Round in January I860, to recount recent experiences in town and country, and to delve into memories of his own childhood in Kent and London. As Dickens began to compose the essay, there came to him ‘a very fine, new, and grotesque idea’, he told his friend and biographer John Forster. ‘I begin to doubt’, he continued, ‘whether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the notion for a new book… I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner’ (Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, 1928 edn, p.733). By early October Dickens’s hand was forced by the need to boost the circulation of All The Year Round, then falling as the result of a tedious serial by another writer. The new serial was to concern the adventures of ‘a boy-child, like David [Copperfield]’ and, to avoid any unconscious repetition, Dickens reread David Copperfield and was ‘affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe’. His approach to the new serial was to be more detached: I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn too— and which indeed, as you remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic conception that first encouraged me. (Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, 1928 edn, p.734) The ‘very funny’ relationship between the child and the ‘good-natured foolish man’ is that between Pip and his sister’s husband, Joe Gargery the blacksmith. The ‘grotesque tragi-comic conception’ upon which the whole mystery plot turns is, of course, the connection between Pip and the convict. The terms Dickens uses suggest popular theatrical or romance conventions, according to which distant or long-lost relations turn up when they can cause most surprise. Dickens had already published Hard Times as a serial to revive the fortunes of All The Year Round’s predecessor, Household Words, a twopenny weekly begun in 1850 with the aim of casting ‘something of romantic fancy’ over ‘familiar things’ (ibid., p.512). When he hastily decided to put his new idea into All The Year Round, which had already seen the heartening effect upon sales of his historical romance, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), he planned a weekly serial of about the same length. It was to be much shorter than his other novels, normally published in twenty monthly parts, but would still be read over a lengthy period of time (Figure 8). Like all Dickens’s serializations, Great Expectations was also published in book form (in three volumes) shortly after its completion in the magazine. When speaking of serialization, he told an aspiring author: There must be a special design to overcome that specially trying mode of production’ (Paroissien, Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, 1985, p.318, 20 February 1866). What do you think the fact of this magazine serial mode of production implies in terms of the author’s relationship with his readers and with the characters and plot of the novel?

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Figure 8 All The Year Round, vol. IV, no. 84, 1 December I860, p.1. The first page of Gra3£ Expectations as it first appeared. British Library PP.600.4.gh, reproduced by permission of the British Library Board.

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Discussion The most obvious effect is that it helps the author-narrator, that is, the adult narrator not the boy Pip, seem close to his readers. We are likely to identify with him, to share his vision and judgements, and it may be difficult to realize that he is, after all, a fictional construct as much as the boy Pip. The serial mode of publishing fiction is bound to build up a powerful illusion of reality. However fanciful the treatment, we are likely to identify closely with a character or voice met repeatedly over an extended period of time, as in a television ‘soap opera’. In first person narrative, that character is the narrator. If we are likely to identify sympathetically with characters we feel we come to know over time, we also need certain memorable features established and repeated to hold a long and complicated narrative in our minds. Dickens famously created a profusion of characters for his big novels, characters vividly defined so that they needed no reintroduction. Although there are fewer characters in Great Expectations, they exhibit distinctive verbal and/or physical mannerisms to keep them in the reader’s mind. One of the most notable among the convict’s mannerisms in the early chapters is a ‘click’ in the throat when his more sympathetic feelings are aroused (p.19), a little detail that recurs very much later (pp.316, 442). Another example of a memorable feature might be Mrs Joe’s reputation for bringing her younger brother up ‘by hand’ (p.8), repeated whenever she appears in the earlier part of the book. The relative brevity of Great Expectations meant that it required very tight control over the narrative plotting, including a note of suspense at the end of each weekly episode of one or two chapters, whereas for his other novels Dickens could afford a more leisurely pace. (The serialization plan for Great Expectations is given as Appendix C on page 487 of the 1994 edition of the novel cited throughout this chapter.) The three volumes of the book coincide with the three distinct and roughly equal parts of the plot. The first deals with Pip’s childhood in Kent and the dissatisfactions set up by Satis House; the second with his life as a young ‘gentleman’ in and around Little Britain in London; and the third with the arrival of the convict, and Pip’s attempts to save him, to forgive Miss Havisham and to be forgiven by Joe. ■ The abrupt and striking beginning of the novel, rich with anticipatory hints (not to mention the ‘pivot’ upon which the plot will turn), is obviously a good way to start a new serial as well as a new book. The evidence is that contemporary readers were very pleased. They were absorbed, they thought it a return to Dickens’s comic vein, and sales soared. As modern readers, with a willingness to read more actively and seek meanings at a deeper level if so prompted, we nevertheless accept the illusion of reality that is, after all, vital to our involvement in the whole narrative. This is created at the very start by a range of familiar realist strategies, from the rendering of the boy’s thoughts and impressions when he encounters the escaped convict, to the precise number of gravestones in the churchyard setting on the windswept marshes. The dating of the start of the story to one Christmas Eve in the early 1800s is suggested parenthetically on the first page, where we learn that Pip’s

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parents lived ‘long before the days of photographs’ (p.3) (so he has to imagine what they looked like). It is made more explicit as we read on, by the preparations for Christmas dinner (p.13), by the appearance of the King’s soldiers, and by many other clues (see p.77 and the editor’s note on p.493). At a time when the novel as a predominantly realist genre appeared to have stabilized, Great Expectations occupied a fairly recently established sub-genre, autobiographical fiction, but it also incorporated other generic possibilities, in particular those of Gothic fiction and popular melodrama. For example, when the convict first comes into Pip’s view, he is like an emanation from the graves in the churchyard. He is marked all over his body by the landscape and he tells the boy he wishes he were a frog or an eel. He finally limps off towards the black and deathly gibbet on the river’s edge, which had once held a pirate, looking as if he were that pirate ‘come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again’ (p. 7). The word ‘grotesque’ can be used to describe the surprising mixture of forms, characteristic of Dickens’s writing, in which human, animal and vegetable seem to intermingle, but which is nonetheless designed to win our belief. Without winning that belief, Dickens cannot hope to engage us with the moral patterning of his text. Grotesque expectations If, as I have been suggesting, the opening chapter of Great Expectations demonstrates a novel that employs melodramatic and Gothic techniques while maintaining its actuality as a first person narrative, how does this relate to our expectations as modern readers of Dickens? The trouble is, Dickens is too familiar. Most readers will have heard of the author, if not the novel, and many will have come across some other version of it, as a film, a television serial, a tape recording, a school text, a children’s book— or, as Virginia Woolf said, as one of those stories like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Grimms’ Fairy Tales, communicated by word of mouth ‘in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to the memories and myths of life, and not to its aesthetic experience’ (‘David Copperfield’, 1925, quoted in Wall, Charles Dickens, 1970, p.273). This may seem to reflect something many of us feel about Dickens, but it also reveals a certain condescending assumption that Dickens’s novels are less than art because they belong to the realm of childhood experience, the realm of ‘memories and myths’. Yet, as Woolf went on to acknowledge, Dickens’s extraordinary powers have a strange effect. They make creators of us, and not merely readers and spectators… Subtlety and complexity are all there if we know where to look for them, if we can get over the surprise of finding them—as it seems to us, who have another convention in these matters—in the wrong places. (Ibid, pp.275–6) Woolf was reviewing Dickens when his reputation was suffering from a general reaction against Victorianism, as evidenced, for example, in her friend Lytton

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Strachey’s wittily irreverent Eminent Victorians (1918). She was, moreover, expressing the views of someone engaged in redefining the novel by means of her own more internalized, subjective kind of writing. However, her point is crucial. To read Dickens with full understanding, we have to become ‘creators’. This means that if, as modern readers, we do not expect to find subtlety and complexity in Dickens, this is not because it is not there, but because it is not where we expect to find it. We must search it out—we who have other ‘conventions in these matters’. What are our conventions in these matters? It is difficult to say, partly because these are to a large extent made up of habits of acceptance that are unconscious. For instance, we accept the artificial dialogue of a novel as ‘real’ although it is a construct, quite different from a recording of actual speech. In addition, what we accept in practice is so varied. Among the texts of our own time, for example, this might range from an experimental novel by John Fowles to a social realist novel by Margaret Drabble, from an historical romance by Georgette Heyer to a thriller by Patricia D.Cornwell, each written according to a different set of rules. All these publications fall within broadly realist parameters, parameters that stubbornly persist long after realist strategies have lost their status as a ‘high’ art form, although they continue to be important in popular culture. As we have seen, historically the conventions of realism were accompanied, if not on occasion overturned, by alternative forms of representation. These included romance and Gothic fiction, which appealed to sufficient readers (if not always critics) to sustain them, and which continue in popular forms of writing. What is especially interesting about Dickens’s writings is the degree to which they anticipate the continuing hybridity of genre expectations, although to his early readers his work simply confirmed the growing importance of realist assumptions. When Dickens published his first book—a collection of periodical essays and stories called Sketches by Boz (1836)—it was welcomed for its fidelity of description, combined with a humour which, though pushed occasionally to the verge of caricature, is, on the whole, full of promise. But their principal merit is their matter-of-factness, and the strict, literal way in which they adhere to nature. (Collins, Dickens: The Critical Heritage, 1971, p.28) With rare exceptions (generally from critics in other countries, such as Edgar Allan Poe or Ludwig Tieck), the published response to Dickens during his lifetime stressed the realist and ignored or disparaged the non-realist element in his work. However, as his use of caricature and fantasy became more apparent (for example, in A Christmas Carol, 1843), and as his popularity increased, some reviewers felt an obligation at least to try to come to terms with his kind of writing. Thus, G.H.Lewes hailed the early Dickens for his descriptive observation and truthful perception of character. Lewes subscribed to a simple but comprehensive definition of realism, according to which all art was a representation of reality, and the best art, like that of his partner George Eliot, was an accurate representation of reality.

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However, he could not define ‘by what peculiar talent Boz is characterised’, because the novelist mixed in so many other qualities, including such ‘absurdities’ against ‘nature’ as exaggerated characters, and incredible coincidences of plot (‘Sketches, Pickwick and Oliver Twist’, 1837, in Collins, Dickens, 1971, pp.64–8). When Dickens responded to such criticism, which was rarely, he pointed out that ‘what is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to another’ (preface to Martin Chuzzlewit (1867): 1951 edn, p.xv). Furthermore, as he argued in a letter to Forster: It does not seem to me to be enough to say of any description that it is the exact truth. The exact truth must be there; but the merit or art in the narrator, is the manner of stating the truth. As to which thing in literature, it always seems to me that there is a world to be done. And in these times, when the tendency is to be frightfully literal and catalogue-like—to make the thing, in short, a sort of sum in reduction that any miserable creature can do in that way—I have an idea that the very holding of popular literature through a kind of popular dark age, may depend on such fanciful treatment. (Life of Charles Dickens, 1928 edn, pp.727–8) Despite having been praised for it, Dickens opposed the ‘literal and catalogue-like’ tendency of the literature of his time, preferring a ‘fanciful treatment’ of his subject, by which he meant incorporating popular or subliterary genres like melodrama, fairy stories, Gothic tales and romances. Since this was at a time when writers such as Eliot and critics such as Lewes were trying to establish the novel as a serious, ‘high’ art form, increasingly realist in orientation, his approach was easily misunderstood. The critic David Masson, in comparing Thackeray as a novelist ‘of the Real school’ with Dickens as a novelist ‘of the Ideal, or Romantic’, sensibly argued that ‘each writer is to be tried within his own kind [of writing] by the success he has attained within it’ (‘British novelists since Scott’, 1859, in Eigner and Worth, Victorian Criticism of the Novel, 1985, p.150). However, the distinction is too absolute, although Dickens would have agreed with Masson that his writing was ‘romantic’ in the sense that, as he said in the preface to Bleak House (1853), he ‘dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things’ (1951 edn, p.xiv). This did not mean that he excluded everyday reality, or a certain level of representational accuracy. When he was criticized for the fact that a character in Bleak House was portrayed as dying by ‘spontaneous combustion’ (a widespread idea that the human body could burn up through internally generated chemical reactions), he referred to the ‘scientific’ evidence to support its plausibility. It was Lewes who attacked him for going beyond the bounds of the plausible, just as it was Lewes who, after the novelist’s death, summed up Dickens’s achievement by repeating all the standard charges against him, in particular his ‘susceptibility to the grotesque’, suggesting unreality to the point of madness (‘Dickens in relation to criticism’, 1872, in Collins, Dickens, 1971, p.573).

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Views such as these typified the ‘cultivated’ or upper-middle-class response to Dickens for many years, with the result that, although his works have always been read in vast numbers, it has only been comparatively recently that they have been thought to deserve serious attention. The views of the critic F.R.Leavis were mentioned in Chapter Four, but Dickens’s reputation as worthy of study at the highest level rests upon three pieces of criticism that preceded Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948) by several years. These are George Orwell’s ‘Charles Dickens’ (Inside the Whale, 1940), Humphry House’s The Dickens World (1941) and Edmund Wilson’s ‘Dickens: the Two Scrooges’ (The Wound and the Bow, 1941). When Leavis argued that ‘Dickens is a great genius and is permanently among the classics’, he added to the growing weight of critical attention Dickens was receiving, only to undermine it at the same time by excluding all except one of Dickens’s novels from the ‘great tradition’ of the English novel. Leavis’s argument, like Lewes’s before him, turned on the legitimacy of Dickens’s mixed kind of writing, in particular his use of melodrama. This, for Leavis, was a low’ art form, making Dickens’s art by association equally low, or at least just that of ‘a great entertainer’. For Leavis, the ‘adult mind doesn’t as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness’ (The Great Tradition, 1960, p. 19). Hard Times escaped this damning judgement, despite the melodrama that most of us might find in it, because of its status as a ‘fable’, capturing the ‘key characteristics of Victorian civilization’ (ibid., p.20). Leavis’s viewpoint, for all its narrow cultural élitism, was sympathetic to Dickens, but it was over twenty years before he and his wife Q.D.Leavis published Dickens the Novelist (1970), extending the ‘great tradition’ to all Dickens’s ‘mature’ novels, of which Great Expectations was the last. According to Q.D.Leavis (whose broader knowledge of nineteenth-century fiction may have contributed to this revision): ‘The sense in which Great Expectations is a novel at all is certainly not to be arrived at by applying to it the ordinary conventions and assumptions derived from Victorian novels in general’ (Dickens the Novelist, 1970, p.288). In a chapter rather alarmingly called ‘How We Must Read Great Expectations’, she argued that Dickens found in this novel a ‘freer form of dealing with experience’ than the realist inheritance provided or than his readers expected, enabling readers to move ‘without protest, or uneasiness even, from the “real” world of everyday experience into the non-rational life of the guilty conscience or spiritual experience, outside time and place and with its own logic’ (ibid., p.289). Whether we are ever taken quite so far beyond the everyday is a moot point, but it is easy to see what she means in relation to Pip’s guilty conscience, for example. Pip had always been treated ‘as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends’ (p.23). This is a comical expression of the unpleasant contemporary emphasis upon children as little sinners who need to be bullied into virtue. The Christmas dinner at which all the adults except Joe attack Pip, morally speaking, seems to confirm this judgement. It represents the ‘real’ world of everyday experience, easily confirmed by historical evidence as well as our own awareness of

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how children can be terrorized by the righteous. However, there is also the child’s way of seeing things—powerfully present to us as well—producing a sense of guilt so pervasive that it feels as if it is in the nature of things. Even the cattle look ‘clerical’ and accusing (p.17) and ‘when I and my conscience showed ourselves’ (p.21) we feel the boy’s alienation as a non-rational state quite beyond what we might expect from someone brought up as he has been. Where does this come from? The answer is revealed by Dickens’s wonderfully sympathetic exploration of the inner dilemma of a boy caught between the demands of the terrifying, starving convict on the one hand and his inadequate surrogate parents on the other—the bullying sister with the ‘impregnable bib’ (p.8) and her submissive, child-like husband. We are told that his upbringing has made the child sensitive, and the adult narrator is quite severe about the inability of his young self to confess his ‘pilfering’ on the convict’s behalf to Joe (pp.40–1). However, it is precisely this sensitivity that has led Pip to align himself with the outcast, against even Joe, leading to an irrational excess of guilt. He suffers a continual fear that his ‘criminal’ association will be discovered by the respectable citizens around him. For instance, when the man with the file arrives at the Jolly Bargemen with ‘two fat sweltering one-pound notes’ for him, he thinks of himself as on ‘secret terms of conspiracy with convicts’ (p.77). By this stage in the novel the ‘freer form’ Dickens has adopted enables him to expand his narrative beyond surface realism, as shown in the first encounter with Miss Havisham and Satis House. This is where the second major thread of the plot begins, which is made explicit for us by the adult narrator’s comment: ‘Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day’ (p.71). How does Dickens establish the first link in this second thread of the plot? How do you interpret the presentation of the wealthy woman and her surroundings in chapter VIII? Re-read especially pages 56–9. What elements in the ‘manner of narration’ direct us beyond surface realism? Discussion The link is established by the impact upon Pip of Miss Havisham and Estella. The meeting with the convict on the marshes will prove the source of his actual expectations, whereas this encounter will prove the origin of his false expectations. The ‘logic’ is not rational, the event is arbitrary, but it feels convincing, because of how it is handled. The narrative presents Miss Havisham as a grotesque creature, who appears at first as ‘dressed in rich materials’, ‘bright’ and ‘sparkling’, a ‘fine lady’, but who in the next paragraph becomes like ‘some ghastly wax-work at the Fair’, or ‘a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress’ in one of the old marsh churches. The hidden association with the convict and the opening scene is hinted at when she lays her hands on her side as she says, ‘Do you know what I touch here?’ Pip is reminded ‘of the young man’, that is, the convict’s threat of an imaginary young man who would ‘get’ him.

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Miss Havisham’s speech is patently unreal, the diction and rhetoric of melodrama, but we accept it because we are viewing her through the frightened boy’s eyes, and we have been prepared for his fanciful yet suggestive vision of things. The stopped clock, the wedding garments and the closed room seem similarly melodramatic rather than realistic, but they provide by association an indirect expression of Miss Havisham’s mental condition, confirmed later by what we learn of her history. Miss Havisham’s gothic surroundings alert us to an understanding of her position beyond anything the young boy could see, although as the adult narrator informs us he ‘saw more’ in the first moments ‘than might be supposed’. Her corrupting potential is conveyed to the reader, even though the boy Pip remains unaware of the implications of what he sees. Further, we can be brought to realize, by searching out significance in the places were we may not expect to find it, that this departure from realism serves to highlight the hidden and unexpected ways in which the narrative will articulate its meaning. There are hints, for example, of Miss Havisham’s ambivalence, as witch or fairy godmother (both roles are referred to, see pp.83, 154), which will eventually connect with the parallel ambivalence of the convict’s role as benevolent uncle or vengeful father. ■ We do not have to share Q.D.Leavis’s perception of the spiritual dimension of the novel to admit the mixed nature of Dickens’s writing, its grounding in different fictional modes, which opens it up to many equally relevant and convincing readings. However, to begin to develop a deeper insight into Great Expectations, we need to think more about how we approach this kind of writing. Like Pip, we may discover that our expectations have been based on some false or at least misleading premises. This is particularly so if we forget that the novel was published not only after familiar realist fictions of moral purpose such as Pride and Prejudice, but also after Gothic works such as Frankenstein, whose tales shadow Austen’s orderly, coherent and humane world. This shadowing accompanies conventional views of the novel genre as one of realist formation, suggesting ways of writing that connect with the inner history of the psyche and the wider history of Britain in the world. The fact that today we are more aware both of the unexpected ways of the mind and of Britain’s colonial history should encourage us to read Great Expectations in a more challenging light than we expect of the familiar, mythical Dickens of childhood. Hallucinatory reading Dickens employs popular sub-genres in a way that tries to persuade his readers to accept that there is another manner of stating the truth or, indeed, as we may see it now, that there are other kinds of truth, at a time when the trend was to be ‘frightfully literal and catalogue-like’. In practice, he does provide the kind of ‘superfluous’, ‘useless’ or ‘concrete’ detail crucial for what the critic Roland Barthes has usefully identified as ‘the reality effect’, an effect at the basis of narrative from the nineteenth century onwards. Without this element of depicting detail, the illusion of the real

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cannot be sustained. It is easy to find examples in Great Expectations. Almost at random (the randomness confirms the point), I might mention the sack of peas the narrator informs us is present in Pumblechook’s front office, and on which his shopman takes his ‘mug of tea and hunch of bread-and-butter’ at eight o’clock on the morning that Pip and the pompous corn-chandler have breakfast, before Pumblechook delivers him to Satis House (p.53). Despite the gothic overtones of her first appearance, the illusion of everyday reality is sustained even in Miss Havisham’s odd environment by, for example, added details of her jewels and trinkets, her ‘handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a prayer-book, all confusedly heaped about’ before her looking-glass (p.56). Of course, such details are functional in other ways, adding something to the significance of each scene and character. Pumblechook is always associated with food and Miss Havisham is at least as confused as her ornaments, which here also signify the halted preparations for a wedding. Other novelists of the time similarly attempt to create the effect of reality with, at its best, a realism of detailed description that seduces the reader precisely through its detail. For example, we are told that a ‘necklace of purple amethysts set in exquisite gold-work, and a pearl cross with five brilliants in it’ (1994 edn, p.12) attracts the eye of Dorothea Brooke, who is introduced to the reader in the opening chapter of Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). In this case the detail also serves to confirm and develop the idea of a character whose psychology and background has just been given to the reader at some considerable length, over four pages. Pumblechook’s shopman has no further role in the novel by Dickens, and although Pumblechook’s association with seedcorn continues— towards the end of the book his mouth is stuffed full of flowering annuals by the journeyman Dolge Orlick (p.461)—his inner life is never analysed. What about Miss Havisham, whose role is more central? Is her inner life offered to us? I think it should be clear that, despite the shared ground of realist detail, what Dickens intends to convey with details such as the trinkets and other paraphernalia with which he surrounds Miss Havisham is rather different from the use of detail by a novelist like Eliot. Dickens prefers not to analyse Miss Havisham’s mind or feelings or personal history; instead, he presents us with a complex, highly suggestive image of what she is, and may become. I want to stress this aspect of Dickens’s kind of fiction, because he is so often thought of as the novelist of the stereotypically obvious, with his tyrannical men, dried up women and pathetic children. Although there may be nothing wrong with being obvious, the point about Great Expectations is that it is most persuasive when it is not obvious. Various critics have tried to point out what is obvious about the novel (see, for example, Q.D.Leavis’s ‘How We Must Read Great Expectations’), but the struggle to do so makes it seem less and less obvious. From the title, with its ambivalent overtones, to the two endings, neither of which is unambiguous, this is surely a novel that resists tying down to any simple message or summary? It could be argued that one of the things it is about is precisely the inadequacy of the obvious. This is a function of its multi-genre status. If, for example, the novel

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seems obviously a classic story of self-education, of the rise of a young man from his rural roots towards metropolitan sophistication, then it also appears to undermine this very familiar Victorian tale. As Kate Flint says in the introduction (p.xvii), Pip’s Bildungsroman is the ‘antithesis’ of those well-known and widely read contemporary chronicles of humble perseverance, such as Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), which it calls to mind. Flint also relates Great Expectations to the contemporary vogue for sensation novels exemplified by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (I860), with its ‘combination of crime, violence, a self-sequestrated woman, and the revelation of her ward’s parentage’ (p.viii), although Dickens’s book is also more than a novel of mystery and suspense. Flint proposes that Great Expectations is best seen in terms of the broad form of fictional autobiography. This is in line with her overall emphasis upon the novel’s dramatization of ‘the issue of identity’, by means of which it participates in mid-Victorian attempts to show that work, loyalty and compassion are their own reward, while leaving ‘uncertain how Pip may prosper in the busy society of modern, urban Britain’ (p.xxi). This impression of variety and uncertainty about the novel’s status brings us back to the approach I am putting forward here: that we think about reading it as a text which draws on a mixture of artistic conventions, offering a multiplicity of meanings, depending upon which genre-frame or set of strategies we emphasize as readers. This is not to deny that to read the book only as an education novel is revealing, and makes sense of the story as a tale of personal moral development. To prove this point, first try and summarize the novel as a tale of individual moral development, and then consider what such a summary leaves out. Discussion This is the story of an orphan, Pip, who is brought up by his sister and her husband, the village blacksmith. Pip encounters and helps an escaped convict, and is later sent to call upon an eccentric heiress, whose ward, Estella, makes him despise his lowly origins, and with whom he falls in love. When Pip is of age, the heiress pays for him to be apprenticed as a blacksmith, but four years later he is told he has expectations of great wealth from a secret benefactor, whom he assumes to be the heiress. He departs to enjoy his good fortune in London, where he neglects his family and old friends and lives a life of dissipation and idleness. Pip’s benefactor turns out to be the convict he met as a child who is recaptured and sentenced to death, with the loss of the wealth he made when he was deported to Australia. Meanwhile, Estella marries a boorish young man. Pip is left penniless and ill, but is nursed by his fosterfather the blacksmith, who pays his debts, and from whom he learns humility and compassion. He finds work through a friend whose career he aided in secret during his time in London. Finally, he discovers that Estella has been mistreated by her husband and is humbled and a widow. However, the story does not make clear whether or not they eventually marry. This is accurate as far as it goes, although even such a bald summary suggests the romance contours of the book’s structure, its fanciful pattern of ironic revelation

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and its odd mixture of realistic and gothic or melodramatic associations. It is the latter two associations that take it beyond the plain articulation of a Bildungsroman. What such a summary most obviously leaves out is Pip’s inner life. ■ I have suggested that Miss Havisham’s psyche is indirectly revealed through the associations implied when Pip first sees her and her surroundings, but how do we learn about Pip himself? We need to consider this in the light of what I have been saying about Dickens’s largely external way of reporting his story, from the distanced perspective of Pip as an adult. The answer to the question takes us back to Lewes’s insinuation that Dickens’s vision as a writer was grotesque and unreal almost to the point of insanity. What Lewes said was that Dickens’s imaginative power was comparable to the hallucinations of the insane, except that in his case the hallucinations had the ‘coercive force of realities’. Unreal and impossible as creations like Miss Havisham are, ‘speaking a language never heard in life, moving like pieces of simple mechanism always in one way’ (‘Dickens in relation to criticism’, 1872, in Collins, Dickens, 1971, p.572), they nonetheless persuade us uncritical readers to believe in them, and not simply by means of descriptive detail. Lewes thereby implied something very important about the novelist’s work that I would like to explore. The suggestion is that Dickens touches on submerged or repressed areas of the personality, which can only find expression indirectly or through unexpected, even disturbing, yet persuasively vivid associations. It was not until Wilson’s 1941 essay, ‘Dickens: the Two Scrooges’, that this suggestion was developed (under the twin influences of Jung and Freud) as a serious critical viewpoint. According to Wilson, Dickens’s brilliant public persona as a successful comic novelist and energetic social reformer was a cover for the deep pain he always felt as a result of his own sense of shame and rejection as a child—when he had to work in a boot-blacking factory at the age of ten, and his family were imprisoned for debt. This pain, said Wilson, emerged in his fascination for outcasts, criminals and murderers, often coupled with a sympathetic portrayal of neglected children such as Oliver Twist—or Pip. Pip can thus be understood as like his creator in being both inside and outside the society of mid-Victorian Britain. This is revealed in his relationships with Joe and the convict Abel Magwitch, Estella and Miss Havisham, and the curious parallels and similarities they imply. This sort of approach tends to underplay the art of the writer, even as it supports rich readings of the unsettling insights claimed for the writings. However, it offers a new kind of challenge: to read Dickens as if, consciously or not, he laid bare the tensions within himself in such a way as to reach the deep and typical anxieties of his own age—and ours, shaped as it is by its predecessors. This challenge was taken up by an influential American critic, Dorothy van Ghent, who found in the complex, non-realist development of character and plot in Dickens a vision linking inner and outer worlds which explains the strange, hallucinatory surface of his narrative. Her account of Great Expectations as the type of this approach towards Dickens has hardly been improved upon. Read the extract ‘On Great Expectations’, from van Ghent’s The English Novel: Form and Function, in Part Two. This is a densely argued and detailed text, but I

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suggest that you focus on the following questions to enable you to identify the main points made. How does Dickens depart from the conventions of characterization and plot familiar from other novelists? In what way, then, does Pip’s inner life become available to us? (Look at van Ghent’s examples.) How does this explain his relationships with the main characters around him? Van Ghent goes on to assert that there are two main themes in Dickens’s writing, which are also two related kinds of crime. How, if at all, are these themes resolved in this novel? Discussion Van Ghent claims that Dickens’s writing is characterized by a ‘general principle of reciprocal changes, by which things have become as it were daemonically animated and people have been reduced to thing-like characteristics’ (Part Two, pp.247–8). Thus, Estella, ‘the star and jewel of Pip’s great expectations…wears jewels in her hair and on her breast’, and says ‘I and the jewels…as if they were interchangeable’ (ibid., p.248). This is a device frequently used in fiction to illustrate symbolically a person’s qualities, but in Dickens it becomes something more, since the objects seem to ‘devour and take over’ the person whose attributes they represent. Miss Havisham has used two children, Pip and Estella, as ‘inanimate instruments of revenge for her broken heart…and she is being changed retributively into a fungus’ (ibid.). She anticipates her end by referring to her relatives feeding off her when she is laid out on the same table as her decaying wedding-cake. In addition to the reciprocal transformation of human and non-human in the Dickens world as a means of representing the inner life of his characters, the momentum of his plots is driven by moral imperatives rather than realistic events. They ‘obey a’causal order—not of physical mechanics but of moral dynamics’ (ibid., p.249). What brings Magwitch across the oceans to Pip again is their longstanding guilt, ‘as binding as the convict’s leg iron which is its recurrent symbol’ (ibid.), rather than any inherently logical plotting. Again unlike realist or (as van Ghent calls it) ‘naturalistic’ fiction, another strategy is to make the ‘opposed extremes’ of good and evil become part of a ‘spiritual continuum’ (ibid., p.250). They become aspects of each other and even of a single character—in this case, Pip. Pip’s inner life is displayed by means of his fantasies, projected onto those around him. All the characters are, in some sense, aspects of Pip himself. This means that what van Ghent identifies as the two kinds of crime in Dickens —‘the crime of parent against child, and the calculated social crime’ —are ‘analogous’, or like each other (ibid.). Both involve treating persons as things: the crime of dehumanization. They are also ‘inherent in each other’ (ibid.), in that the corrupt will of the parent or parent-figure towards the child becomes part and parcel of the corruption of social authority: the good authority figure has become (was always potentially?) evil. The brutality exercised towards Magwitch in childhood by ‘society’ (see pp.342–3) is therefore to be understood as the same as that meted out to the young Pip. The permutations of this vision are so far-reaching that they go beyond any rational explanation. Van Ghent suggests that we are prompted to think

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of a solution beyond the logical, such as ‘original sin’, which indicates the need for ‘an act of redemption’ (Part Two, p.251). In Great Expectations this does take place, although it ‘could scarcely be anything but grotesque’. The redemption is anticipated by Mrs Joe’s ‘humble propitiation of the beast Orlick’ (ibid., p.252), a moment that reappears as ‘Pip “bows down,” not to Joe Gargery, toward whom he has been privately and literally guilty, but to the wounded, hunted, shackled man, Magwitch, who has been guilty toward himself (ibid.). ■ Whether or not you agree with this complex account, these ideas are worth thinking about. Following van Ghent, we could go on to read the novel in terms of Pip’s fantasies of desire and revenge. For example, when his sister has been smashed down with a convict’s leg-iron, he is ‘at first disposed to believe that I must have had some hand in the attack’. Although we know he has not (p.17), this can easily be read as a reflection of Pip’s real, but unconscious because aggressive, feelings towards the one who brought him up ‘by hand’, and regularly applied ‘the Tickler’ to his frame. There is so much suppressed (and indeed actual) violence in the novel, hovering on the edge of everything that happens, that this kind of reading is surely persuasive? If at first it seems improbable, consider the point at which, many pages later, when Orlick tries to murder Pip in revenge for what he (rightly) gathers have been all Pip’s attempts to have him sent away, the gloating brute tells him ‘It was you as did for your shrew sister… You done it; now you pays for it’ (p.421). The rational explanation offered is that it was Orlick’s resentment and jealousy at Pip’s preferment, and his beating by Joe, itself provoked at least in part by Mrs Joe (chapter XV), that led Orlick into trying to murder her. However, the non-rational, deep association of Pip with Orlick (and Orlick with the primeval ooze, see p.129) remains. This is confirmed by many little details, such as the suggestion that Orlick also desires Biddy, expressed by his ‘dancing’ (ibid.) at her which so annoys Pip, surely because it is also an expression of his feelings on a level he can only convey indirectly, if at all. When it came to describing feelings of desire, Dickens was, of course, inhibited by contemporary prudery. This was especially strong in the case of cheap and accessible serial fiction, which could enter every home. He was obliged to be indirect, but this has its advantages. Estella is far from being one of Dickens’s notoriously ‘legless’ angels, like Agnes in David Copperfield, although to begin with Estella’s body is absent, or substituted by a star, confirming the cold distance implied by her name. When Pip first sees her at the ironically named Satis House, ‘her light came along the long dark passage like a star’ (p.58). Her disdain is reflected in remarks about Pip’s commonness, and his ‘coarse’ hands—remarks that linger in his mind, since he keeps repeating them, and which to us evidently provoke in him both class and sexual yearning at once. That his deeper desires are not confined to himself is clarified by another of his visits to Satis House, when, after he has beaten the ‘pale young gentleman’ in the hidden garden, he finds Estella waiting with the keys. But, she neither asked where I had been, nor why I had kept her waiting; and there was a bright flush upon her face, as though

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something had happened to delight her. Instead of going straight to the gate, too, she stepped back into the passage, and beckoned me. ‘Come here! You may kiss me, if you like.’ I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. I think I would have gone through a great deal to kiss her cheek. But, I felt that the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing. (p.91) This is skilfully done, and it is developed as an undercurrent of implication by another fight, that between Joe and Orlick. This was provoked, as I have suggested, by Mrs Joe’s interfering. ‘You’d be everybody’s master, if you durst’ (p.112), says the journeyman, which leads to a ‘Ram-page’ on her part, and Mrs Joe dropping ‘insensible at the window’, but not without having ‘seen the fight first, I think’ (p. 113). On one level, Mrs Joe is depicted as a virago whose bullying of her young brother and husband in some sense is supposed to make her ‘deserve’ being flattened by Orlick. On another level her behaviour is presented as the implied product of frustrated desire: her ‘square impregnable bib’ (p.8) may well have something to do with Joe’s inability to come ‘to a stand’ (p.48). In other words, both of them are subject to barely understood inhibitions and maltreatment in the past (which in Joe’s case is given in detail, see pp.45–6). Perhaps too we eventually understand the frigidly self-consuming Miss Havisham as the product of her past, and Pip as deeply connected with both Joe and Miss Havisham in his secret sado-masochistic urges—secret in the sense that they are never openly acknowledged, while being present through implication. Miss Havisham and Orlick are both linked with Estella, the main object of Pip’s desire, and also with his class guilt. It is fitting that he should be nearly killed by both of them towards the end, duly expressing the satisfaction of his need for selfpunishment through the twin ordeals. All this may produce a feeling of inevitability, rather than surprise, when we learn that Estella marries the brutal Bentley Drummle, and that this leads to violence against her, too, before she can— in an analogous progression to Pip’s—return to the main narrative, humbled and contrite. Such hidden patternings begin to show what can be teased out of the richly ambiguous surface so well described by van Ghent, taking us beyond what appears at first sight to be merely another reflection of conventional mid-Victorian attitudes towards its restlessly aspiring heroes and its wayward women. Freudian readings like Wilson’s and van Ghent’s have multiplied, although today they are less common than they used to be. Their main message is that desire is interwoven with guilt along classic psychoanalytic lines, which propose that since desire is repressed it can only appear indirectly. Let us take an example to illustrate this theory and its implications more fully. Until reading critics of this persuasion, I had been puzzled to know how to explain the fantasy Pip experiences at Satis House of Miss Havisham hanging by the neck

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from a great wooden beam, which he thought ‘a strange thing then, and I thought it a stranger thing long afterwards’ (p.63), and which recurs very much later (p.397). No explanation is offered. The only obvious connecting link seems to be the presence of Estella, whose appearance also comes to call up ‘strange’, hallucinatory feelings in Pip (p.235). It all feels too specific to be merely part of the deathly atmosphere surrounding Miss Havisham. An explanation is finally offered for the uncanny associations surrounding Estella when it is revealed that she has been reminding Pip of her mother, Molly, Jaggers’s strong-wristed (and murderously violent) servant woman. This provides one last link of association, ‘wanting before’, and ‘riveted for me now, when I had passed by a chance, swift from Estella’s name to the fingers with their knitting action, and the attentive eyes’ (p.386). Does this help to explain the image of Miss Havisham hanging? Might there be a connection with Pip’s early memory of Magwitch resembling a hanged man come to life and then going to hook himself up again? After all, it turns out that all these people are related, in one way or another, in the complicated unravelling of the plot. There are various possibilities here and I do not want to tie things down too much, since we are talking about hints and suggestions rather than anything very clear. However, if we think in terms of van Ghent’s view that everything in Dickens’s ‘nervous’ universe has in some way to do with child-parent relations, it seems possible to read things as follows. Pip’s fancy of Miss Havisham hanging from the beam recalls his similar fancy of the escaped convict, because it thereby suggests the boy’s unconscious wish to kill both his imagined parent-benefactors. This is a repressed desire that produces excessive feelings of guilt, fear and anger towards them, feelings that retrospectively become justified to the degree that both Magwitch and Miss Havisham are revealed as manipulators of their ‘adopted children’. These children inadvertently, that is unconsciously, contrive to punish them, and could even be said to bring about their deaths. When Pip imagines Miss Havisham hanging the second time—‘A childish association revived with wonderful force’ (p.397)—he has just learned that Estella has married, and that Miss Havisham regrets what she has done. She asks for his forgiveness and, although according to the Christian moral scheme he must comply, there is a repressed desire to punish her, which is realized the next moment when she bursts into flames in his presence. Whether this is accidental or not is left unclear. Similarly, when the returned convict reveals his identity and his relationship as ‘second father’ (p.315) to Pip, the first impulse of revulsion becomes a much more extended attempt to rescue and forgive, but in vain, leaving Pip in the end safely alone. I say ‘safely’ because Pip now refuses any kind of patronage, financial or familial, despite the advice of both Wemmick and Jaggers. Although at first this leaves him ill and alone, Joe comes to look after him ‘in the old unassertive protecting way’. ‘I fancied I was little Pip again’, he says, becoming like a child in his hands’ (p.461). The new, patrilineal bonding enables Joe, the father who never was, to become father to another little Pip:’—I again!’ as Pip expresses it (p.475). All Pip’s guilty fears and visions of murder can disappear at last in this recreation of himself, through his final acceptance of Joe and Biddy

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Like so many earlier scenes, this return to the forge replays numerous details of Pip’s preceding encounters, giving it an almost ritualized feel, as the reader is made to go through the process of repetition and return that makes up the basic rhythm of the story. These details appear at first to be purely surface realism, but an active reader can sense that more lies behind or within them, in the heightened awareness encouraged by recognition of Dickens’s hallucinatory writing. When Biddy touches the new Pip’s hand to her lips, ‘and then put the good matronly hand with which she had touched it, into mine’ (p.476), we can understand that she thereby replaces Mrs Joe’s bringing up ‘by hand’ and the sado-masochistic feelings long associated with it, with her own form of domesticated desire. Pip’s hands were burnt by the false mother, Miss Havisham, and are now recovered. Before that, Magwitch had, in the climactic recognition scene, come towards him, ‘holding out both his hands for mine’ (p.327). Pip resisted this action at first, then accepted it, as he accepted his ties to the outcast convict. On the latter’s deathbed he held Magwitch’s hand, who finally ‘raised my hand to his lips. Then, he gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own hands lying on it’ (p.455). That moment is recalled by ‘the friendly touch of the once insensible hand’ (p.477) of Estella when, at the last, Pip meets the convict’s daughter and thinks of Magwitch pressing his hand, a memory empowering him to take ‘her hand in mine’ (p.479), as they go out of the ruined place in the last paragraph of the novel. Thus, the constant association of Miss Havisham’s world with that of Magwitch, represented as coincidence, contains a revelatory truth about Pip and the source of his aspirations. It is also an indication of their common status as outsiders. Little Britain and the Empire Reading Great Expectations for its insights into the ways of the psyche does not mean that we should ignore its connections with its time or ours, or with the wider history of Britain in the world. As van Ghent pointed out, the intuition expressed in terms of Dickens’s creation of a universe of reciprocal change, in which human and nonhuman become each other, took place at a time that witnessed a full-scale demolition of traditional values…correlatively with the uprooting and dehumanization of men, women, and children by the millions—a process brought about by industrialization, colonial imperialism, and the exploitation of the human being as a ‘thing’ or an engine or a part of an engine capable of being used for profit. This was the ‘century of progress’ which ornamented its steam engines with iron arabesques of foliage…while the human engines of its welfare grovelled and bred in the foxholes described by Marx in his Capital. (Part Two, p.246) According to this view, the class system depicted in the novel, and the great expectations it feeds on, are ultimately rooted in the reality of the prison hulks (Figure 9), the decay and murder that occupy the more or less hidden underground

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Figure 9 Prison hulk at Deptford, engraving by George Cooke after Samuel Prout 1826. Photo: Mary Evans Picture Library.

of the narrative. The most pointed irony of Pip’s story is that the woman he falls in love with, and perhaps in the end joins, turns out to be the child of that dark and hidden reality. Reading the novel in terms of its power as social statement or critique goes back at least as far as the work of two key figures mentioned earlier, George Orwell and Humphry House. House in particular established an influential interpretation of Great Expectations based upon a profound understanding of the nature of midVictorian British society. ‘Many people’, he said, ‘still read Dickens for his records and criticism of social abuses, as if he were a great historian or a great reformer’ (The Dickens World, 1965 edn, p.9). He went on to question this view, since the precise connection between Dickens’s writings and the times in which they appeared, between his urge for reform and some of the things he wanted reformed, was far from clear-cut. Moreover, the Dickens that emerged from House’s account of the novels, the journalism, and from much contemporary comment on the social and political issues that interested the novelist—from debtors’ prisons to child labour, from prostitutes to sanitation, from schools to religion—was a relatively conservative figure. This Dickens drew attention to conditions after others had noticed them, and proposed reform rather than revolution, insofar as he proposed anything at all. In Orwell’s words, Dickens’s criticism of society ‘is almost exclusively moral… There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be

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overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown’ (Inside the Whale, 1940, in Wall, Charles Dickens, 1970, pp.297–8). Such perceptions of Dickens continue to occupy the middle ground of Dickens criticism. Whether or not we accept them, the account of Great Expectations offered by House still deserves attention for its informed judgement of the novel as an expression of the phase of society in which it was written (not the imaginary dates of its plot). House says: In the last resort [Dickens] shared Magwitch’s belief that money and education can make a ‘gentleman’, that birth and tradition count for little or nothing in the formation of style. The final wonder of Great Expectations is that in spite of all Pip’s neglect of Joe and coldness towards Biddy and all the remorse and self-recrimination that they caused him, he is made to appear at the end of it all a really better person than he was at the beginning. It is a remarkable achievement to have kept the reader’s sympathy throughout a snob’s progress. The book is the clearest artistic triumph of the Victorian bourgeoisie on its own special ground. The expectations lose their greatness, and Pip is saved from the grosser dangers of wealth; but by the end he has gained a wider and deeper knowledge of life, he is less rough, better spoken, better read, better mannered; he has friends as various as Herbert Pocket, Jaggers, and Wemmick; he has earned in his business abroad enough to pay his debts, he has become third partner in a firm that ‘had a good name, and worked for its profits, and did very well’. Who is to say that these are not advantages? Certainly not Dickens. (The Dickens World, 1965 edn, p.156) What do you think of House’s account of Great Expectations? Which elements in the book appear to confirm what he says, and which do not? Discussion I would suggest that House’s account is plausible as far as it goes—which is not far enough. Dickens does appear to approve Pip’s achievement of respectable middleclass integrity by the end of the novel, telling us that he has worked hard and paid his debts, unlike the ‘false’ gentleman, Compeyson, who resorted to crime and betrayal. Although he relies on unearned wealth, Pip is not like Miss Havisham’s dubious relatives, who ‘sponge on others’. Mrs Pocket’s delusions of aristocratic grandeur go hand in hand with an inability to do anything remotely resembling work. In particular, we are encouraged to approve of ‘the only good thing I had done, and the only completed thing I had done, since I was first apprised of my great expectations’ (p.411), namely, Pip’s secret arrangement to help Herbert Pocket obtain a place in a commercial venture. Pip’s life of wealthy idleness is certainly shown up when the transported convict reappears to claim him and his ‘genteel’ manners are fully demonstrated. When we witness the silly drunkenness and

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womanizing of The Finches of the Grove (p.269) and Pip’s insensitive behaviour towards Joe and Biddy, it is perhaps an achievement on Dickens’s part to have maintained our sympathy through ‘a snob’s progress’. Is that all it is? Pip is never merely a snob, although much of the comedy of the novel is drawn from the superficial side of his aspirations. For example, when Pip arrives to select a suit appropriate for a young gentleman with expectations, the tailor Trabb’s boy knocks his broom ‘against all possible corners and obstacles, to express (as I understood it) equality with any blacksmith, alive or dead’ (p.148). He later parodies Pip’s ‘distinguished’ walk through his home town, by walking alongside, airily waving his hand and exclaiming ‘Don’t know yah!’ to the delight of the spectators and Pip’s deep embarrassment (pp.242–3). Pip’s snobbishness brings misery, however, and his own continuous commentary upon it reveals as much and more. We are never allowed to forget that at the centre of the narrative there is a narrator who does not excuse or disguise his earlier flaws. Moreover, by revealing the immense web of connections linking Pip’s gentility on the one hand, and murder and deportation on the other, the narrative implies that the great achievements of mid-Victorian society were founded upon some very dark realities indeed. ■ House’s reading relies upon assuming that the novel is a realist text, with a satirical edge. Yet it is a reading that can be taken further, and some critics have developed a much more complex and persuasive view of the theme of gentility. Robin Gilmour, for example, argues that Great Expectations is unique among Dickens’s fiction ‘in that its real subject is not a specific social abuse, or a series of related abuses, but nothing less than civilisation itself. Gilmour probes the implications of Pip’s acceptance of the mutual dependencies of a class-divided society by showing how far Pip seems aware that his struggle towards ‘the civilised life’ is ‘sharpened by a knowledge of its very precariousness’ (Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentlemen in the Victorian Novel, 1981, p.125). Different notions of gentility were in circulation at the time, indicating various perceptions of high social status, involving wealth, property, education or ‘polish’, and moral qualities. Dickens was conscious to the point of obsession of the distance he had come as a hugely successful, self-made public figure whose early background and experience was a matter of shame to him. Yet, by the time Great Expectations was published, his marriage had broken down, and a liaison with an actress (the likely model for Estella) was kept secret to avoid tainting his public image, so he was well aware of what might lie behind the middle-class dream. The novel demonstrates, in the repression of desire and activity associated with Satis House, one cost of becoming a gentleman. At the same time it promotes a kind of moral and spiritual gentility. This is shown in Pip’s acknowledgement of the Christian ideals of love and forgiveness, as when he watches Joe from his sickbed, ‘penitently whispering’: ‘O God bless this gentle Christian man’ (p.458). Dickens asserts Joe’s moral gentility at the same time as he acknowledges the social distance between him and Pip. Pip cannot join Joe and Biddy in the end, he has to go abroad to make his (modest) fortune.

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Is all this any more than an elaboration of House’s view? It assumes that Dickens underwrites Pip’s mid-Victorian, middle-class values: as a moderately prosperous, well-tutored (by the Pockets, father and son) and hard-working bourgeois, distinct from the parasitical, leisured aristocracy (Bentley Drummle) on the one hand and the brutal rural workers (Orlick) on the other. Joe represents the honest toiler, whose values Pip admires, but cannot emulate. A motif in this theme is money: notice how often and in what contexts ‘money’ is referred to, from the payment for Pip’s indentures to Magwitch’s fat notebook. Its centrality for Pip’s expectations is made quite clear. As he recalls, ‘it was impossible to dissociate’ even the sought-after Estella from ‘all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood’ (p.233). In the end, after losing all his money, he starts again (as a clerk), builds himself up to a partnership, and earns enough to return after eleven years in the East as a potential partner for Estella after all. If the novel is taken to be exclusively realist in orientation, as this approach tends towards, it becomes difficult to avoid what George Levine has identified as the ideology of realist writing, the ideology of liberal individualism. Dickens aimed to appeal to his predominantly middle-class audience, who believed that a man could aspire to be a gentleman by cultivating such values as decency, loyalty, generosity, sensitivity and hard work, ‘cemented together’ with the Christian ideals of charity and forgiveness.2 Such an approach does not preclude searching and intelligent readings, which bring out Dickens’s conscious mastery of his theme and form. The strong moral sense that pervades the narrative as presented by the adult narrator can be explained as a reflection of the author’s own beliefs, undeniably complex and critical as these may have been. The language of the novel may thus be seen as no more than an instrument—if a finely tuned one—designed to establish and express the truth as Dickens and (some at least of) his readers saw it. A further twist has recently been given to this broadly realist reading of the novel in its times by the cultural critic Edward Said, in Culture & Imperialism (1993). Said’s book proposes (among other things) a general revision of the history of the novel as a realistic genre by asking that we see it as crucially connected with ‘the imperial process’ in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He takes Great Expectations to be one of the ‘well-known and very great novels’ in the history of the genre which can be read in terms of this ‘hitherto ignored aspect’ of novel criticism (Part Two, p.253). Said situates himself in line with Raymond Williams as a reader of novels in terms of their broadly incorporative cultural reach, their role as mediators of contemporary ‘structures of feeling’ (see p.99 above). He claims to be offering a much more inclusive and dynamic account of how the European novel operated than has hitherto been provided even by Williams, whose criticism is in any case limited by his mainly English focus. I would like now to look at what Said says explicitly about Great Expectations. Read the extract from his book Culture & Imperialism in Part Two. How far do you accept Said’s argument? What new insights does it provide? What difficulties, if any, do you find in his approach? You might like to think especially about the kind of novel he assumes Great Expectations to be.

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Discussion According to Said, Great Expectations is ‘primarily a novel about self-delusion’, in which Pip becomes in the end reconciled to his benefactor Magwitch ‘and to his reality…as his surrogate father, not as someone to be denied or rejected, though Magwitch is in fact unacceptable, being from Australia, a penal colony designed for the rehabilitation but not the repatriation of transported English criminals’ (Part Two, p.253). Said goes on to refer to two books concerned with the ‘history of speculation about and experience of Australia’ (ibid., p.254). This is an experience in which, he says, ‘we can locate Magwitch and Dickens…as participants… through the novel and through a much older and wider experience between England and its overseas territories’ (ibid.). Dickens took an early interest in Australia (as seen for instance in David Copperfield) as a place where labourers could do well, although they also thereby became permanent outsiders. However, Said adds, his fiction takes no interest in ‘native Australian accounts’ of conditions there, nor does he allow any ‘return’ to the metropolis (ibid.). The exception is Magwitch, the transportee whose ‘delinquency’ must then be ‘expiated’ (ibid., p.255), by Pip’s acceptance of him. Pip is then himself renewed by the appearance of another child called Pip, and by the original Pip’s new career ‘not as an idle gentleman but as a hardworking trader in the East, where Britain’s other colonies offer a sort of normality that Australia never could’ (ibid.). This links Dickens with the set of attitudes that supported ‘Britain’s imperial intercourse through trade and travel with the Orient’ (ibid.), thereby helping to normalize rather than question it in any way. The novelistic enterprise, in short, helped to keep the Empire and its peoples in their place—at the exploitable margins of British society. This alerts us to a new set of meanings to be read from Great Expectations as a text of its time, while reasserting its liberal-conservative pull. Even without following up any of Said’s sources on Australian history, we can appreciate the marginalizing effect of Dickens’s fictional discourse— and that of most major novelists of the nineteenth century from Jane Austen to George Eliot onwards. However, Said simply takes it for granted that Dickens’s work falls within the realist tradition of Robinson Crusoe, as if there were not enormous and critical differences between Defoe’s realism and that of Dickens. These differences include all the alternative, Gothic and romance genre elements, which serve precisely to suggest the validity of the ‘outsider’ experience that Said claims Dickens avoids or ignores. His argument rests implicitly upon a familiar history of the novel as a realist genre which, even if it were still agreed, runs into serious difficulty when it meets Dickens’s writings. ■ I am not trying to suggest that we ignore Said’s criticism. On the contrary, he provides a salutary reminder of that ‘other’ history of Dickens’s times, that is, the colonial history, which any attempt to relate his work to its times needs now to negotiate. Rather, I am trying to suggest that the criticism should prompt us to look

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again at the key characters, events and relationships in the novel, with an awareness of the uniquely mixed genre that it puts forward. In the limited space I have left here, I would like to consider once again how Dickens deals with the relation between Pip and Magwitch. This relation, it seems to me, offers the truly subversive potential of the novel. Considering this potential may enlarge our understanding of imperial Britain of the 1850s and 1860s, a time of high achievement whose legacy is with us yet. Of course, there is a convincing realism in Dickens’s characterization of both boy and convict, even when they meet on that stereotypically Victorian setting, a deathbed. Here Dickens troublingly allows Pip to express his profound pity for the outcast by revising the well-known biblical prayer from Luke 18:13, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner’, in a way that suggests a pharisaical perversion: ‘O Lord, be merciful to him, a sinner!’ (p.455). The remarkable, detailed account of Magwitch’s trial and sentencing, which precedes the deathbed scene, is witnessed by Pip as a young man, but it is depicted by the older narrator as a memorable tableau, which takes us into another, symbolic dimension. Why do you think that Dickens wrote in this way here? At that time it was the custom (as I learnt from my terrible experience of that Sessions) to devote a concluding day to the passing of Sentences, and to make a finishing effect with the Sentence of Death. But for the indelible picture that my remembrance now holds before me, I could scarcely believe, even as I write these words, that I saw two-and-thirty men and women put before the Judge to receive that sentence together. Foremost among the two-and-thirty, was he; seated, that he might get breath enough to keep life in him. The whole scene starts out again in the vivid colours of the moment… The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of light between the two-and-thirty and the Judge, linking both together, and perhaps reminding some among the audience, how both were passing on, with absolute equality, to the greater Judgement that knoweth all things and cannot err. Rising for a moment, a distinct speck of face in this way of light, the prisoner said, ‘My Lord, I have received my sentence of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours,’ and sat down again. (pp.451–2) Discussion Dickens’s imagination in this highly charged, significant moment is extraordinarily visual. Pip recalls the scene which, as he says, ‘starts out again’ in Vivid colours’, the shift into the present tense reinforcing the shift into a static, apparently timeless mode, slowing down the entire narrative. Surely Dickens used this technique to create in readers a sense of a much larger perspective, a perspective that does infinitely more than just enhance the drama of the moment? It calls on the contemporary awareness of popular depictions of such scenes to question the law,

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and the society whose attitudes it embodies. If you look at the complete passage, you will notice that Dickens gives us the judge’s speech condemning Magwitch as an offender from infancy, ‘a scourge to society’ (p.452), but this view is then radically challenged by the ‘broad shaft of light’ that links the two together in equality before death. It is clear that we are being taken into a dimension beyond realism. I have said that the scene takes us into a symbolic dimension to stress its static, visual quality, although it could almost be called allegoric in its clarity and moral significance. It is, in fact, probably derived from a famous engraving by William Hogarth called Paul Before Felix (1748), which Dickens would have known. In this Saint Paul stands before a Roman judge on a trumped-up charge of riotous assembly, a divine light shining aptly on him from behind his accusers as he appeals to a higher authority to justify him. We do not need to know this to respond to the appeal inherent in Dickens’s elaborate picture. It may be helpful though to realize that behind it lies a popular, native tradition of graphic satire, typically anti-establishment and antiauthoritarian. It is another aspect of the novel’s close incorporation of non-realist traditions of representation. ■ The way in which this important scene at the defining moment of the Pip and Magwitch story has been imagined implies the deep connection between the highest and the lowest. Once we accept this connection, we can read the narrative afresh as the source of currents of implication which at least question its own tendency towards accepting the status quo. We can go further, turning Said’s view upsidedown, and argue that it is one of this novel’s greatest strengths to assert, with whatever qualification, in an imperial age the deep connection between the achievement of wealth, status and happiness in Britain and the misery, humiliation and deprivation of those condemned to be its underclass, and sent abroad to colonize a land nobody wanted to think about. Pip’s resistance to Magwitch in the hallucinatory, dream-like recognition scene that opens the third volume of the book can be seen to express the resistance of all those in his society who would rather not know about the source of their position or their country’s pre-eminence. The realist features of that sequence—it has a filmic quality—ensure that we as readers are drawn in as we, through Pip’s eyes, meet ‘A.M. come back from Botany Bay’ (p.329), with his ‘blast you every one, from the judge in his wig, to the colonist a stirring up the dust’ (p.328) (Magwitch at least knows that even out there we find a class system), with his pocket-book, his ‘greasy little clasped black Testament’ (p.330), his clasp-knife and his appallingly ungenteel manner of eating—‘in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable… Some of his teeth had failed him since I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in his mouth, and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog’ (p.327). As with any great novel, there are always further possibilities. Reading Great Expectations with an active awareness of Dickens’s kind of writing, we could pursue, for example, the fact that, according to Robert Hughes’s book on the convict settlement of Australia, one of the most notorious escapees was an Irishman

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transported in 1819 for seven years for stealing six pairs of shoes, who resorted to cannibalism to survive (The Fatal Shore, 1987, pp.220–6). The way people eat in this novel, and in particular the way Magwitch feeds (a ‘Bolter’, unlike the young Pip who is only accused of this by Joe), carries some strange and unexpected overtones, which would bear investigating, but not now. Now is the moment to leave Great Expectations to you, and your further reading of it. Further reading Flint, K. (1986) Dickens, Harvester. A good general study, influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin and emphasizing the importance of Dickens’s journalism. Sadrin, A. (1988) Great Expectations, Unwin Hyman. The best up-to-date guide to the novel, taking into account recent theoretical developments without being overwhelming. Self, R. (ed.) (1994) Great Expectations, Macmillan New Casebook. The best recent critical anthology, with a useful introduction and bibliography, and twelve extracts, of which the most interesting in relation to the discussion here are those by Peter Brooks (from his Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Clarendon Press, 1984) and Jeremy Tambling (from his provocative essay, ‘Prison-bound: Dickens and Foucault’, Essays in Criticism, 36 (1986), pp.11–31).

Notes 1 Unless otherwise stated subsequent references to Great Expectations are to this edition and page numbers only are given. 2 See Walder, Dickens and Religion, 1981, pp.198–203 for an account of the novel in terms of Dickens’s religious beliefs.

Chapter Six Reading Fathers and Sons by Dennis Walder, Glyn Turton and Pam Morris

Introduction by Dennis Walder So far in this book we have been concentrating on novels written in English. However, many people feel that the realist novel reached the peak of its achievement outside Britain, and in particular in mid-nineteenth-century France and Russia. The writings of Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, to name but a few of the most widely read, deserve attention in any serious account of the genre. In terms of our overall strategy of using detailed ‘readings’ of a few significant texts to raise the important issues, it seemed a good idea to take as a European text a novel by Turgenev, the first Russian writer to enjoy an international reputation. Turgenev was honoured even more in France, England and America to begin with than in his homeland. Henry James called him ‘the novelist’s novelist’. As James went on to suggest, Turgenev’s achievement was above all as a creator of character, ‘character expressed and exposed’ (‘Turgenev’, in Kettle, The Nineteenth Century Novel, 1981, p.173). What better text to look at than Fathers and Sons (1862)—or Fathers and Children, as it is sometimes translated—the novel containing Turgenev’s most famous character, Bazarov the nihilist. The alternative titles raise the issue of translation. The fact that many English novelists influenced by Balzac, Turgenev and other European authors have been unable to read French or Russian (or German, Spanish or Italian) does not seem to have presented a problem. Nor do we as readers need to be limited by purist objections to reading novels other than in the originals. Of course, something of the original is lost when a literary work is read in translation. Novels, like plays or poems, are made up of deliberately chosen words in a particular order, and to alter any of this will alter the meaning. However, as Ian Watt and others have suggested, realist novels as a genre tend to use language in a way that is typically more referential or ‘transparent’ than poems, and perhaps plays as well, so that translation may produce less alteration. At the same time, we should not forget that what we are reading is a translation, and that some adjustment has been made to it.

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To a degree, this is true even of novels written in English: they are written in the language of their own time, and we sometimes have to be especially sensitive to this. We should check the notes, for example, when we come across an odd or unexpected usage. The danger is always that we will not notice words that have a familiar meaning but carry a different nuance. An example of this is the reference to Covent Garden in volume II, chapter XV of Great Expectations. This would have signified an area of ill-repute and prostitution to contemporaries, although now it might seem a quite innocent place for Pip and his companions to have visited. As Richard Freeborn, translator of the 1991 edition of Fathers and Sons cited throughout this chapter,1 points out on p.xxviii, there have been many translations of this book, ‘but the first worthy translator of Turgenev into English was Constance Garnett’, in the 1890s. Freeborn’s own translation into a more modern idiom contains some surprising and perhaps clumsy usages. The first of these appears on the first page, where he has the servant Peter sound like an old black retainer from the American South, addressing the landowner Kirsanov as ‘sah’, rather than ‘sir’, as in earlier translations. Freeborn is one of the first translators to have had the good fortune to look at Turgenev’s working manuscript, presumed lost until recently, as an aid to producing his version. Whilst the Garnett translation sounds to anyone who is not a Russian specialist more authentic nineteenth-century prose, it is inevitably less accurate, which is why we have chosen the Freeborn version. In the discussion that follows, the issue of translation is not referred to, but you should not forget it, especially when considering any quotations from the text of the novel. The first part of the chapter, taking up the thread of this book so far, offers a ‘reading’ of Fathers and Sons that considers what makes Turgenev a realist writer. There is no single, straightforward answer to this question, but the importance of character, and especially the idea of character as ‘type’, is central to both the aim and the effect of his fiction. This emphasis produces a kind of realism that raises its obvious historical connection ‘to the level of universal human concerns’. The difficulty about finding universality in a novel so obviously engaged, from the first sentence onwards, with contemporary reality—or, to be more precise, with a representation of contemporary reality—is that it may lead us to accept as true and permanent what is actually socially determined, and therefore may be changed. The chapter goes on to look at what struck the first readers as highly topical—the account of new intellectual movements of the time. This too, through Turgenev’s ability to excite our sympathy for his people and their problems, leads us to face a ‘realistic’ vision of life, in which the capacity for self-knowledge is tragically contradicted by the capacity for error. Finally, the last part of the chapter explores one of the most interesting ways in which Fathers and Sons can be seen to be vigorously involved in contemporary issues, that is, in the link between the representation of women in the novel and the turmoil of 1860s Russia. Most readers find Turgenev’s depiction of women remarkably effective, even if they seem more static, more ‘symbolic’, than his male characters. The question is: how does this function in relation to the overall impact

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of the novel? Does the apparent ‘break’ in surface realism—for instance in the rather strange yet suggestive depiction of Anna Odintsova—operate in any way like the characterization of, say, Estella in Great Expectations, telling us something on a deeper level about the society in the novel? The relative openness of the Russian novelist about sexuality is striking when compared with contemporary English fiction, as is the sense of debate about serious issues. Both features enable us to see a larger horizon for the genre of realist fiction than was perhaps apparent before. Turgenev as a realist writer by Glyn Turton Fathers and Sons, now generally regarded as one of the greatest of nineteenth-century Russian novels, was, in its own time, highly controversial. It could hardly have been otherwise, since the arguments and conflicts enacted in the book stem from the profound political crisis that characterized nineteenth-century Russian society (about which I will have more to say in a moment). The depiction of fictional character in Russian literature at this time almost always made an ideological statement about a whole society. It is useful to compare English literature of the same period. In this country, the ‘condition of England’ question as it was called was debated by Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Mrs Gaskell and others of their generation with no less passion than Turgenev and his contemporaries brought to the issue of Russia’s destiny. However, the English literary debate about the state of the nation was articulated in terms of social improvement and reform, whilst the nature of the Russian political system was so reactionary that any imaginative critique of Russian society was potentially revolutionary. It is not difficult to see how the character of the iconoclastic country doctor, Bazarov, committed to denial and destruction as prerequisites of progress, could become a focus of heated ideological dispute. I want first to relate the figures created by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons to certain general questions of character and type in realist fiction. As noted in Chapter One, ‘character is difficult to talk about technically or critically’ (p.13). In recent discussion about character in fiction, the prevailing tendency has been to question ‘naïve’ assumptions of a direct correspondence between actual human beings and imaginary ones. This has been part of a wider trend in modern literary theory, which has questioned the straightforward notion of the fictional text directly referring to real life. Such an approach may have its value: by abstracting the text from its context, it is possible to bring to light ambiguities or contradictions never intended by the author and which may even conflict with his or her position. However, this trend also has its limitations, particularly when you try and apply it to a text so historically specific as Fathers and Sons. One way of overcoming this is to argue, as the critic A.D.Nuttall has argued, that we should think of texts not as directly transcribing reality but as offering ‘hypothetical cases’, or versions of, reality that seem probable by comparison with reality (A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality, 1983).

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The construction of hypothetical cases which may be subject to the test of comparison with contemporary reality suggests precisely the process in which Turgenev apparently felt himself engaged in his writing. In the foreword to the 1880 collected edition of his work, he declared his principal purpose as a writer to be ‘consciously and impartially to depict and embody in suitable types both what Shakespeare calls “the body and pressure of time” and that rapidly changing physiognomy of Russians of the cultured stratum, which has been preeminently the object of my observations’ (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 1960–88 edn, vol. XII, p.303). This highlights the nature of Turgenev’s realist conception of fictional art: he speaks of his objective being to embody the spirit of the age in ‘types’. In one sense, Turgenev is simply articulating what must be the aim of any realist writer in any culture. We all of us bear the imprint of the society in which we live, so that a writer who wants to give an account of ‘things as they are’ must balance the individuality of characters against their social identities. Henry James took his lead from Turgenev when he insisted in ‘The art of fiction’ (1884) that the realist writer must select from reality but ensure that the selection made is ‘typical’. In constructing individuals who were also representative of classes, groups and attitudes, Turgenev was greatly assisted by the rigidly stratified and relatively undiversified nature of nineteenth-century Russian society. The strict division of the greater part of the population into landowners and serfs—the owners and their human property—and the moral problem that this division posed are issues that permeate the themes of Fathers and Sons. Thus, it is worth noting that the first thing we learn about the first character to appear in the novel (Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov) is that he is a landowner who is speaking to a servant. One of the most impressive features of Fathers and Sons is the way in which Turgenev integrates questions of far-reaching social importance with the delineation of individual human personalities. The scope of the issues covered is extremely wide; the sense I am left with after reading Fathers and Sons is of an extraordinary inclusiveness, of specific historical events raised to the level of universal human concerns. The key to his approach is concentration. This novel, like his others—and in sharp contrast to those of many of his contemporaries in Russia and abroad—is limited in scale. At the outset of his career as a novelist, Turgenev experienced some anxiety about his predilection for the short novel form, wondering whether his apparent inability to compose a novel on the grand scale might be considered a weakness in his repertoire as a writer. Such fears were groundless: Turgenev made the short novel form his own, relying essentially upon a dramatic technique that gives his fiction, at its best, both immediacy and credibility. However, the dramatic force of Fathers and Sons comes not just from the restricted scale of the fiction, but from the combined effect of concentration at several levels. Let me explain what I mean by this. First, the number of principal characters is limited, affording maximum narrative control and the ability, even within a short book, to shape a sense of the individuality of each figure presented. Second, the predominant setting, that of the provincial country house, acts to confine and so to heighten the emotional and intellectual tensions of the novel.

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Third, the critical interplay of character, upon which most novels rely for their interest, largely derives in Fathers and Sons from the extensive use of dialogue. A good example of the importance of dialogue is to be found in chapter 10, where the exchanges between ‘the fathers’ and ‘the sons’ encapsulate the fundamental conflicts of temperament and ideology that shape the narrative as a whole. Turgenev’s use of dialogue intensifies the reader’s sense of the human dynamics that the fiction describes, giving the impression that the characters, once visualized by their creator, have assumed a momentum of their own. This is something that Turgenev repeatedly insisted was the case, whenever he was accused by the representatives in real life of either ‘the fathers’ or ‘the sons’ of travestying their generation. Later in this part of the chapter I shall examine the relationship between characters in Fathers and Sons and their multiple significance—as individual persons, as social types and as human archetypes. First, though, it will be helpful to consider a specific example of Turgenev’s method of presenting character. In the short first chapter of the novel (pp.3–6), how does the author seek to establish the authenticity of the figure he is introducing, Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov? What realist strategies are evident in the narrative account of Kirsanov? Discussion None of the techniques that Turgenev uses to establish a sense of Kirsanov and his background could in itself be called sophisticated. However, the method overall is effective. The narrative uses a moment of enforced inactivity in the present life of Kirsanov as a kind of fulcrum on which to balance the character’s significant past and his immediate future. This establishment of a life perspective’—the conferring upon a fictional figure of a described past, a briefly dramatized present and a future latent in the narrative about to unfold—is the opening move in what we realize is the realist transaction between writer and reader. The voice of the third person narrator in the narrative (‘We will acquaint the reader with him’, p.3) is open acknowledgement of its fictiveness. However, this is counterbalanced by the provision of the social history in which Kirsanov’s personal life is embedded as well as by an indication of the key to his individual nature. You will have noticed that time and place are carefully specified, current social and political change alluded to (the newly emancipated house-serf, Peter; the recent reform of the estate) and that the whole way of life of the gentry class is encapsulated in the brief history of Kirsanov. Within these historical and biographical frames, Turgenev intimates Kirsanov’s dominant characteristic—his strongly emotional nature and his capacity for attachment to loved ones. Emphasis upon this trait is in turn used to implant in the reader’s mind the novel’s central theme—the relationship between fathers and sons. The intense fondness of Kirsanov for his son is in implied contrast to the remote, spartan attitude of his own father towards him. In analysing the realist strategies of the chapter, we might note, as well as this use of historical and personal detail, the positioning of characters’ inner emotional lives

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in relation to an indifferent external world, which gives compelling depth to the narrative. The poignant truth that human and animal life goes on regardless of the sufferer in its midst is suggested by the feeling of the whole of chapter 1, and in particular as Kirsanov experiences the commingled emotions of pride in his son and sorrow that his wife is not there to share it with him. Hope and regret meet in Kirsanov’s thoughts of his young son and his dead wife, reinforcing the strong sense of the opening chapter as a moment suspended between past and future. The pathos generated by Turgenev’s account of this moment is intensified by the keenly observed details of the physical and animal phenomena around Kirsanov, all of them heedless of the intensity of his experience. As throughout Turgenev’s work, nature appears to remain impassive, and impervious to the inner life of human beings. At one level it is simply the isolating discontinuity between human feeling and the non-human world that registers; at another it is the consonance of the character’s emotional state with the images of oppressive heat and listless torpor, creating a mood of languid melancholy, which affects us. This reminds us, perhaps, of our human capacity to see our subjective state mirrored in the world around us. In any case, the distillation of distinct, powerful moods is a notable feature of nineteenth-century Russian writing; it occurs particularly commonly in the stories and novels of Turgenev and in the stories and plays of Anton Chekov. I think that we should take Turgenev’s frequent recourse to mood as a fictional device as a mark of his realism, since it is in mood, or atmosphere, that we may be said to experience in potent form a sense of our own reality in relation to the world. ■ Character and type in Fathers and Sons In order to understand fully what Turgenev achieved in Fathers and Sons, it is necessary to know that it represents the culmination of his project of depicting ‘the rapidly changing physiognomy of Russians of the cultured stratum’. It was preceded by three short novels—Rudin, A Nest of the Gentry and On the Eve. In all of these, written between 1856 and I860, Turgenev explored the same question: what effect does Russia have upon educated men and women of exceptional abilities—and what effect can they hope to have on Russia? In working through this question, Turgenev adopted for himself definite forms of classification or hypothetical ‘case study’ (to adapt Nuttall) in relation to which his characters might be understood. One such ‘case’ was gender; another was age-group or generation; yet another was the crucial distinction among Russia’s intellectual community between westernizers and Slavophils, that is to say between those who believed in western European solutions to Russia’s problems and those who believed in Russian ones. To this list may be added Turgenev’s half-literary, half-psychological theory of the essential polarities within human personality, what he used to call the Hamletic and the Quixotic. He understood these terms to refer to the predominance in the personality either of a person’s own ego (Hamletic) or of some received ideal or principle (Quixotic). It is in Fathers and Sons that these forms of classification are interwoven most subtly to create a sense of the complexity of human individuality in society and the world.

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As a result, conflict and affinity, similarity and difference may be seen occurring in different patterns between the characters, depending on the forms of classification Turgenev is considering. These varying patterns lend variety and depth to the central group of characters. For example, looked at in the light of their ideological beliefs, declared interests and age difference, Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov and Bazarov are diametrically opposed. Yet, if we consider them in the light of Turgenev’s distinction between the Hamletic and Quixotic principles at work in human life, the two seem strikingly alike. Both claim adherence to firm principles—Bazarov to uncompromising materialism and Kirsanov to ‘civilized’ virtue—but both are also driven by a powerful sense of self. In other words, there is between them a temperamental affinity. This is strongly hinted at when the critical point in their stormy relationship, the duel, is over. We may accept that the function of mainstream realist fiction, from Jane Austen onwards, is critical and educative, that is, it aims to teach a moral by dramatizing the lives of human beings who are in the process of (often painful) learning about themselves and others. At the same time, in any mature work of realism there are limits to the extent to which both the fictional character and the reader can be educated, since human behaviour may be considered as much a matter of compulsion as it is of control, of irrationality as of reason. One of the strengths of Turgenev’s way of writing is that it embodies and projects knowledge of this view in its delineation of character. As the nineteenth-century realist novel developed, plot tended to be replaced by the drama of consciousness. Fathers and Sons, with its minimal plot, proceeds in terms of the conflict of ideas, the clash of temperaments and the consequent shifts in perception, or re-evaluations, that the characters undergo. In this sense, it may be thought of as defining a stage on the route from conventional ‘plotting’ to the interaction of characters’ consciousnesses more obvious in late, even modern fiction. What examples can you find in the novel of changes in, or increased perception, as experienced by characters in the course of their development? Discussion There are numerous points at which one or other of the central characters experiences an illumination, an enforced reappraisal of themselves in relation to others or vice versa. One such that occurs to me takes place in chapter 11 when Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov, an inveterate day-dreamer, is seated alone in the garden, attempting to restore his conception of the world as a place fit for beauty and sentiment, a conception that has been undermined by Bazarov. He does so by entering the bitter-sweet world of his memories, only to be jolted out of it by the voice of Fenechka, his mistress; his attitude towards her reminds him sharply and unavoidably of Bazarov’s strictures against class-consciousness (p.69). What such unasked for moments of insight do (and they are quite frequent, occurring with other figures in the novel) is allow the reader to experience, vicariously, the intensity of altered consciousness. Another example is provided

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when Arkady is suddenly made aware of ‘the entire limitless depth of Bazarov’s conceit’ (p.129) by the latter’s expression of contempt for Sitnikov and his kind. This is surely a milestone on the way of Arkady’s withdrawal from Bazarov, a withdrawal that quickens after the violent argument between the two in chapter 21. It remains then for the degree of their separation to be highlighted by Katya (p. 201), when she characterizes Bazarov as untamed and Arkady and herself as handreared. Another illumination occurs in one of the most poignant moments in the novel When Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova visits Bazarov on his death-bed, she is horrified by the sight of his disease-wracked body, and the horror is compounded by the sudden, piercing realization that ‘she would not have felt such terror if she had really loved him’ (p.236). This moment of realization does more than just set the seal on Odintsova’s feelings for Bazarov; it also powerfully reinforces the dominant (and limiting) trait of her character, namely her ultimate inability to allow her composure to suffer disturbance. The instincts of both the dramatist and the chronicler were strong in Turgenev and his work illustrates particularly well the way in which ‘showing’ and ‘telling’, that is, forwarding the story by means of dialogue or by means of narration, combine in the novelist’s art. The conjunction of dialogue and narration occurs most obviously in such moments of revelation, in which characters are made to experience insight, and we as readers to experience a corresponding insight into character. ■ Bazarov It requires little justification to devote a separate section of this chapter to Bazarov, since he is so dominant in the text and so crucial to our understanding of its scope and purposes. More than that, the case of Bazarov vividly illustrates one of the most important aspects of the development of literary realism in the mid to late nineteenth century, already hinted at: the shift in emphasis from plot to character. Character came to be conceived before, and to take precedence during writing over, plot. However, the idea of ‘character as destiny’ that developed raises questions about the extent to which individual lives can really be thought of as governed by material and ideological factors, by the nature of the historical ‘type’. I discuss Bazarov in the context of history later in this chapter. For the moment, it should be noted that Turgenev’s account of the way in which he was conceived conforms exactly to the process outlined above (pp.169–70) of basing fictional type on character derived from observation. Some years after the publication of Fathers and Sons, Turgenev, in his essay ‘Apropos of Fathers and Sons’, wrote that he never attempted to ‘create a figure’ unless I had a living character rather than an idea, to whom appropriate elements were gradually added and mixed in. Since I do not possess a great deal of free invention, I always needed solid

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ground on which I could step firmly. That is precisely what occurred with Fathers and Sons. (Fathers and Sons, 1989 edn, p.169) Turgenev went on to speak of the real-life model for Bazarov as being a young provincial country doctor who had impressed him, although we should note that three individuals were also named as the basis for Bazarov in the author’s preliminary sketches (see Fathers and Sons, 1991 edn, p.248). The historical and cultural significance of Bazarov is most often related to the character’s self-proclaimed nihilism, the denial of all received values and a belief only in the liberating potential of scientific materialism. The fact that Bazarov’s name has become synonymous with nihilism may have lessened the appreciation of his complexity as a figure. Whilst at one level of the fiction he is the advocate and exponent of a single, uncompromising, revolutionary doctrine, at another he represents a cluster of ambiguities and contradictions in which are combined some of the essential strands of both Russian and European cultural history in the modern period. Yet we may agree that Bazarov is a convincing product of imaginative realism as a result of the author’s successful layering of type and archetype, the local and the universal, in the construction of his character. When the novel was first published, it was easy for Russian readers to see in Bazarov a familiar two-faced model of Russia’s history, with its conflicting yet combining forces of modern western enlightenment and medieval, Asiatic savagery. Russia’s unstable oscillation between a sense of superiority and one of inferiority towards the West was an unresolved tension, which Turgenev was attempting to work through in the central figure of Fathers and Sons, who brings together a mission to educate and an impulse to negate and destroy. In addition to a purely national crisis of identity and purpose, there are quite elemental and perhaps even universal issues played out in the representation of Bazarov. First, there is the question of sexuality and sexual politics. The portrayal of women in Fathers and Sons is dealt with in more detail later in this chapter, but it is worth noting at this point the striking modernity of Turgenev’s treatment of the relationship between Odintsova and Bazarov. Odintsova, whose name derives from the Russian word for ‘single’ or ‘alone’, is characterized as a privileged, intelligent and independent woman, whom circumstance and disposition ultimately inhibit from a committed sexual relationship with Bazarov. He is a self-proclaimed, upstart sensualist, whose disdain for sentimental entanglement is betrayed by powerful emotion. The novel’s handling of sexual attraction in terms of personal and social power relations, force of circumstance and the complication of love by temperament seems to me notably realistic, in the sense that it is I believe of general human application—and ahead of its time. The complex significance of Bazarov is further enriched if we ‘read’ him in the light of certain archetypes. One such—which it is intriguing to find in a novel so manifestly realist in conception—is that of the romantic rebel. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the isolated individual in revolt against social and

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political orthodoxies was a familiar figure in European literature. Typically, the rebellion was undertaken in the name of a higher ideal, such as imagination, individual liberty or the popular will. Bazarov’s materialistic nihilism and his denunciation of romanticism as a form of illusion represents a partial inversion of this established pattern; he is a rebel whose belief in the need to annihilate is the cause to end all causes. It is possible to enlarge the meaning of Bazarov’s form of rebelliousness to fit a still wider frame—that of philosophical and moral absolutes—and his kinship with a much more disturbing variant of the romantic rebel, the Man-God, then becomes apparent. In place of the concept of rule by God, the scientific materialism and philosophical and religious scepticism of the nineteenth century left a vacuum. Arguably this could only be filled either by self-restraint on the one hand, or by the assumption of God-like powers of arbitrary self-assertion on the other. The struggle between reasoned restraint and the will to seize power is acted out in European literature from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at the start of the nineteenth century through to the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw later in the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. It gave rise to a denial of moral constraint and compassion and to the exploration, by imaginative means, of acts of calculated amorality. Bazarov’s sense of human insignificance in the cosmic order combined with his violent intellectual bullying of Arkady in chapter 21 place him precisely at this problematical intersection of science, philosophy and morality in imaginative art. The conjunction of rational enquiry and willed destruction leads us to another paradox that Bazarov embodies—the coexistence of the roles of messianic liberator and demonic destroyer. I will discuss this dimension of Turgenev’s most powerfully realized figure in the course of locating Fathers and Sons more specifically in its historical context. The historical context of Fathers and Sons by Glyn Turton In speaking of the realism of Turgenev’s novel, I have tended to emphasize its universality, the sense in which Fathers and Sons vividly illuminates the perennial concerns of all men and women. This is why the book has proved so enduringly popular. However, what struck its Russian readers at the time of its publication was its topicality, the way in which it focused, partly explicitly and partly by implication, on the burning issues of the day. Fathers and Sons was published in 1862, just one year after the most momentous event in the history of nineteenth-century Russia, the emancipation of the serfs. At a stroke, the imperial decree liberating the peasantry from the gentry, whose lands they were obliged to till, loosened the entire structure of Russian society. The system of serfdom, which had developed gradually since the seventeenth century, rested on a strict pyramidic principle. The serfs laboured for the landed gentry and the gentry in turn served the omnipotent Tsar as bureaucrats, soldiers and (most important of all) agents of social control. It took Russia’s calamitous defeat in the Crimean War

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and the accession of a more liberal Tsar, Alexander II, in 1856 to drive home the inevitability of reforming a semi-feudal system which had retarded Russia’s economic development and corrupted the nation morally. The events in Turgenev’s novel take place just before the emancipation, at a point when landowners such as Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov were being encouraged by the government to conduct experiments in economic partnership with their serfs in order to prepare the ground—literally—for wholesale reform (see pp.5, 11 and passim). However, this economic and social change did not carry with it any equivalent political reform; emancipation did not mean enfranchisement, either for the peasantry or, in any true sense, for the gentry class that had hitherto owned them. Master and servant alike remained ‘children of the Tsar’, with nothing remotely resembling the western European notion of civil liberties. Before concentrating on how this historical situation pervades Fathers and Sons, it may be helpful briefly to consider the question of the relationship between realism and history in both its wider and its specifically Russian aspects. Politically repressive regimes bring with them censorship, and censorship, while it restricts artistic freedom, also confers on art enormous potential power. If a single version of the truth is affirmed by the state and all contrary accounts of reality are denied, a writer who persists in dissenting from the authorized ideology becomes a realist in a very special and important sense. Turgenev’s view of these matters had been formed during a literary apprenticeship which was served under the intensely reactionary regime of Alexander II’s father, Tsar Nicholas I, whose censors imprisoned him briefly in 1852 for writing a eulogy upon the death of the great Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol. By the time Turgenev wrote his major works—the late 1850s and early 1860s—truth bearing had come to be seen as part of the mission of Russian literature, particularly prose fiction. In all that he said about his writing—and about Fathers and Sons in particular—Turgenev insisted that ‘to reproduce the truth, the reality of life accurately and powerfully, is the literary man’s highest joy, even if that truth does not correspond to his own sympathies’ (‘Apropos of Fathers and Sons’, in Fathers and Sons, 1989 edn, p.171). This lofty commitment to truth derives partly from the influence of his friend and literary mentor, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, whose role in making Russian literature socially conscious in orientation was all important. It also stems from the way in which Turgenev’s own temperament affected his view of the function of art. He was sometimes accused of lacking fire in his convictions, but he cherished one ideal to the point of passion—that of dispassionateness. If to incur the annoyance of the most partial commentators at both ends of the political spectrum indicates impartiality, Turgenev’s aim ‘to reproduce the truth’ may be regarded as fulfilled in Fathers and Sons. The novel divided critical opinion, and in particular the figure of Bazarov did so in a way that no fictional character in Russian literature has done before or since. The book acted as a ‘lightning conductor’ for all the pent-up political energies that began to circulate once Alexander II’s social reforms—modest by western standards but in Russian terms

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dramatic—were under way. Young radical progressives, whose spirit Turgenev had sought to capture, varied in their response, but in general they accused him of travestying their zealotry in his portrayal of the curmudgeonly, sensual Bazarov. Conversely, conservative critics took the view that Turgenev had been too sympathetic to the forces of revolution in making his nihilist hero attractively superior to the other characters in the novel.2 These polarized reactions illustrate both how powerful and how problematical a self-proclaimed realist text can be in the highly charged political conditions of historic change. The years 1861–2 were just such a moment: the emancipation of the serfs was accompanied by serious student unrest in St Petersburg, the first signs of nationalist revolt against Russian rule in Poland and the circulation of revolutionary pamphlets in the capital. These events mark the beginning of the process of political disintegration that was to lead to the revolution of 1917. The impact at such a time of a novel whose central figure is committed to no other principle than that of denial and destruction can easily be imagined. The ability of realist fiction to engage with contemporary life, as opposed to the past, came to be seen as one of its most powerful attributes. In a potentially revolutionary situation, that power was intensely magnified. Writing of the early 1860s, Richard Freeborn observed that ‘[t] he role of the Russian nineteenth century novel as a chronicle and criticism of its time acquired at this point—on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs—a revolutionary dimension’ (The Russian Revolutionary Novel, 1982, p.11). This takes us to the heart of the question of how realist fiction relates to history. Realism in literature, when it deals with contemporaneity, is both documentary and critical. It gives an account of the norms of the time, but it also stands above them. Most realist texts simultaneously communicate a knowledge of the present as the present, and an understanding of the present as it may seem when viewed from the future. I want to try and illustrate this from Fathers and Sons. The novel shows what is actual and intimates what is potential in a number of ways. One of these is in its handling of the question of political change in relation to social class. I referred earlier to the rigid stratification of mid-nineteenth-century Russian society into the vast mass of the dispossessed—the peasantry—and the landowners with their vested interest in the perpetuation of privilege. Few stood outside these categories, but those few were significant beyond their numbers. Bazarov belongs to that narrow layer of educated men and women whose fathers were not landowners but existed on the margins of the social structure, typically in occupations such as priest or doctor. Their absence of a stake in the existing system left such men—and, increasingly, women in the years that followed—free to act as the carriers, first, of explosive ideas and subsequently of explosives themselves. Turgenev’s portrayal of Bazarov owes much to his observation of the ardent young intellectuals of the 1850s and 1860s, the successors to his own more liberal, reformist circle of contemporaries (see pp.xi—xii). At a more profound level, in focusing on Bazarov, who is without social affiliation, and his disturbing effect on ‘the gentry’, the author is dramatizing in microcosm the way in which the whole rigid, flawed edifice of Tsarist Russia might be brought down by the actions of a

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relatively few single-minded individuals. The prophetic force of this in relation to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 is clear. Most remarkably, this intimation of what the intellectual might ultimately bring about in Russian history is combined in Fathers and Sons with a penetrating insight into the difficulties that type of individual would encounter in the short term. One of the things that distinguishes Bazarov from the gentry around him is his ability to talk to and win the trust of the common people (see p.53). He is proud of the fact that his grandfather ploughed the land, but claims to harbour few illusions about the peasantry. This ability to relate to peasants without idealizing them might seem to suggest that Bazarov’s gifts of leadership could stir ‘the dark people’, as the educated called them, into political action. Yet, in chapter 27, when Bazarov attempts political dialogue with the peasants of his father’s village, the result is an impasse, in which each side contemptuously gives up on the other. At this point, the narrator makes a significant narrative intervention: Alas, the contemptuously shrugging Bazarov, who knew how to talk to the peasants (as he had boasted in his quarrel with Pavel Petrovich), this selfassured Bazarov didn’t even suspect that in their eyes he had something of the look of a village idiot. (pp.224–5) One way of reading this is to see it as Turgenev, the privileged author—landowner, notwithstanding his claims to impartiality, betraying personal views on the undesirability of educating the peasant. Another is to see it as a remarkable piece of historical foresight. A decade and a half after the events related in Fathers and Sons, when the young men and women of the Russian intelligentsia went out into the villages and fields to educate the peasantry to the idea of their own revolutionary potential, the profoundly conservative peasants did one of two things: ignored them or turned them over to the Tsarist gendarmes. The peasantry was not fertile ground for revolution. It was to take the development of an industrial proletariat—which not even Turgenev foresaw—to provide the vital ingredient for political upheaval. What he did foresee was the over¬ whelming difficulty of radicalizing an illiterate, superstitious and deeply patriarchal peasantry. Before we leave the topic of realism and history in relation to Fathers and Sons, one point remains to be emphasized. Bazarov is a would-be fighter and destroyer (see his conversation with Arkady, p.219), but he is also a scientist, a doctor and an educator. In this respect his case illustrates one of the most important stimuli to the development of nineteenth-century realism as a literary movement: the ideal of science as the key to progress and enlightenment. If science means knowledge (which it literally does), knowledge understanding and understanding progress, then through science human society might be steered towards an enlightened future. The popularity of this line of reasoning among European intellectuals in the mid nineteenth century led to science as an instrument of progress providing a model for novelists committed to realism.

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However, the scientific account of the phenomenon of human life has its limits. Ironically, given its indebtedness to the paradigm of science, it was realist fiction that highlighted those limits. Imaginative literature displays not only our capacity for self-knowledge and self-control but also the facts of our irrationality, our proneness to error and our mortality. The fate of Bazarov, who is undone by love and the inner contradictions of his nature, illustrates this. Pathos, the quality in literature that excites pity or sadness, can be understood as a form of realism in the strict sense that it compels the reader to confront ultimate, unpalatable realities. It was the great achievement of the nineteenth-century realist novel that it could render faithfully the facts of social existence and explore the claims of human reason, while ultimately measuring them against the immeasurable —the contradictions of human behaviour and the extremes of suffering, which are neither amenable to reason nor changeable through time. The representation of women in Fathers and Sons by Pam Morris The realist novel is one of the great achievements of Russian art, but Russian women writers do not figure prominently in that achievement. This is in contrast to the development of the realist narrative form in England. There are no Russian counterparts of Jane Austen, the Brontës or George Eliot, even though women poets have won the highest praise in Russia. The representation of female characters in Russian literature thus presents us with something of a paradox, since it is the maleauthored Russian realist novel that has produced some of the most remarkable and complex female characters in the whole of the novel genre. Turgenev’s women are frequently seen as the prototypes of this tradition and Russian readers are as familiar with their names and personalities as with real-life female acquaintances.3 They are written about in Russian criticism—and elsewhere —as if they were portrayals of real women. One important underlying question for this section is how ‘true’ or authentic is Turgenev’s representation of women. You may recall that the section on ‘Women and the novel’ in Chapter Four outlined the feminist critical strategy of rereading canonical texts to reveal the pervasive misrepresentation of women within the literary tradition. In particular, feminist critics have alerted us to the way in which women are frequently constructed as ‘other’ to a male norm. Instead of being perceived as identities in their own right, women characters tend to function as locations for male desires, fears and anxieties about the female. The representation of women in literature is comprised largely of variations upon the stereotypical images of virgin and whore, wicked witch and child-like innocent, Eve and Magdalene, wife, mother and mistress. It was suggested that when you came to read Great Expectations and Fathers and Sons you might like to consider how relevant this perception is to Dickens’s and Turgenev’s treatment of female characters. How do we estimate Turgenev’s women? What are the positive achievements of his imaginative construction of feminine experience and personality?

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Discussion Perhaps what strikes most readers coming to Turgenev from the English tradition of the novel in the nineteenth century is the fullness and maturity of his approach. By comparison, there seems so much English writers leave out of their representation of female characters. In Elizabeth Bennet, Austen offers us a sense of a shrewd and lively intelligence, but a woman with Odintsova’s intellectual concern with the latest thinking in science, politics and the arts is surely unimaginable in an English novel? Of course, this has as much to do with more general cultural and historical differences as with narrowly gender issues; male characters in English novels rarely engage in intellectual discourse either. Still, it is noteworthy that even Katya, who in many ways represents opposing values to those of her sister, is quite capable of discussing the merits of Heine’s writings with Arkady (p.200). This provides a stark contrast to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where only the male characters are represented as active intellects. ■ What is more, in contrast to Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov, Odintsova is shown to be highly efficient in managing a large estate and in ordering the daily life of the household so that it seems to glide ‘along rails’ in the manner that so irritates Bazarov even though he enjoys the ease provided. In Fathers and Sons it seems taken for granted by the male characters that women can manage their own lives, property and fortunes, even if some disapproval of this is suggested—a point I will come to presently. What is most striking in the comparison with English writing of the same period is Turgenev’s relative freedom in writing about the sexual relationships between the characters, and about their sexual feelings, attitudes and experiences. It is refreshing to find a woman who is sexually mature, who has already been married, and who is not innocently youthful, considered interesting enough to be the heroine of the work. In most English texts marriage marks the end of the heroine’s story and any evidence of active sexuality in a female character unsanctioned by a firm attachment to the man she is destined to marry carries ominous moral implications. Whereas Odintsova is permitted to go on to a second marriage, which promises her the possibility of happiness and even love, it seems unlikely that any English heroine who behaved with the freedom she does with Bazarov would have escaped punishment, unhappiness, even death within the moral unfolding of the plot. In all these ways, Turgenev seems to be concerned to represent his main female character as an interesting identity in her own right. We might also note in passing that although in many ways the Fenichka-Kirsanov relationship is very similar to that of Joe and Biddy in Great Expectations, Turgenev’s representation seems so much more ‘grown-up’ in its perceptions. However, although in this respect Russian nineteenth-century realism appears able to offer more authentic women characters than the English tradition,4 Turgenev has not escaped criticism in terms of stereotypical representation. It has been argued that women in his novels invariably fall into one of three recurrent types, of which the most important aspect and indicator is their physical beauty or

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lack of it (Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature, 1987, p.18). The first two polarized types are beautiful in very different ways: there is the pure young heroine just emerging from youthful awkwardness into shy sexual awareness and the older femme fatale who seeks to attract men by her mature sexuality but is not herself passionate, indeed is often coldly incapable of love. The third type is the unattractive or ugly woman who is presented as ridiculous, especially should she presume to try to attract men. Can we recognize these types of women in Fathers and Sons? Discussion It is not very difficult! Clearly, many of the aspects of the characterization of Odintsova conform to the femme fatale type. Although she deliberately sets out to attract Bazarov, asking Arkady to bring him to visit her and when he comes attempting to provoke his interest and actively encouraging him to reveal his emotions, she is shown to be without strong feelings herself. This sense of her lack of passion is reinforced by the image of her in bed, thinking in an intrigued way about Bazarov, yet quickly falling asleep over ‘a silly French novel…all clean and cool in clean and fragrant bed linen’ (p.106). The implication is that she seeks out Bazarov from motives of curiosity and ennui rather than desire, as he recognizes when he tells her she is probably incapable of love. Although the actual cause of his death is a typhus infection, almost self-inflicted, the text implies that it is Odintsova who has fatally destroyed the force of life in Bazarov. He leaves her house having not slept or eaten for several days, his lean profile’ almost like a death’s head and he tells Arkady the ‘machinery’s come unstuck’ (pp.131–2). ■ Read in this light we might begin to sense something repressively sterile in the rigid routine Odintsova imposes on her household, excluding all traces of spontaneity or vitality. The little speech’ with which she greets Arkady and Bazarov on their arrival at her house is delivered ‘in a particularly precise way as if she had learned it by heart’ (p.98). We might even want to consider whether the white linen and drapery so often associated with her (‘She looked paler by the light of the single lamp… A full white dress covered her whole figure in soft folds. The tips of her feet… were scarcely to be seen’, pp.113–14) hints at death almost as surely as the more obvious symbolism of Miss Havisham’s bridal decay in Great Expectations. There is certainly a sinister element in the way she seems suddenly prepared to turn her attractions upon Arkady after Bazarov has suggested that the former is in love with her: ‘You say he’s not indifferent to me and I’ve always thought he liked me. I know I could pass for his aunt, but I don’t want to hide from you that I’ve begun to think of him more and more. In that kind of youthful and fresh feeling there is a certain charm’ (p.215). Equally clearly, Katya is represented as fresh, young and virginal. As with this type generally in Turgenev’s novels, she is given to blushing and tears as indicative of her spontaneous emotional responsiveness. She is apparently demure and quiet but reveals intuitive wisdom and insight; Katya understands Bazarov’s nature from the

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beginning. In opposition to her sister, Katya functions in the text as an image of new life. She ‘adored’ nature and is given to arranging flowers. Turgenev’s association of this type of woman with life as opposed to death is even more obvious in his representation of Fenichka with her baby. The two women are described in very similar terms; it is not surprising that Fenichka comes to love Katya next to her husband and child. However, despite this there are some oddly sinister connections between them and the character of Odintsova. What is the implication of Fenichka’s relations with Bazarov, do you think? Is it being suggested that there is a part of the feminine nature that cannot resist flirtation and has a need for male admiration? After Arkady’s declaration of love to Katya, we are told: ‘He was already beginning to submit to her and Katya sensed this and was not surprised’ (p.220). Earlier she has admitted to herself that she will have him kneeling at her feet (p. 206). Is Turgenev implying that even women as apparently guileless as Katya and Fenichka inevitably seek to overpower men, that the female is sinister and deadly to the male? It seems to me undeniable that there are elements of some such negative or fearful perception of women in the text. However, Turgenev’s representation of his female characters is both more interesting and more complex than this implies. Certainly looking at the characters in Fathers and Sons as a whole we must be struck by the beauty, mystery and strength of the women and the weakness and failure of the men. To demonstrate the complexity of the women characters we need to situate the novel once again in its historical context, but this time in terms of its engagement with a passionate debate ensuing in Russia at the time upon ‘the woman question’ (as it was called). Fathers and Sons and ‘the woman question’ The long reign of Catherine the Great (1762–96) marked the beginning of a slow process of improving the social position of women in Russia by removing some of the traditional discriminations against them in education, law and the family. However, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century, Russian political life was characterized by intrigue and rivalries fermented in Catherine’s court and in the fashionable salons presided over by powerful aristocratic women. This fuelled traditional male prejudice against the dangerous influence of feminine guile and treachery and provoked hostility to what was seen as its origin: the corrupting influence of western culture and political fashions upon the traditional values of Russian life. Nevertheless, women’s position continued to improve into the nineteenth century. During the 1830s and 1840s Russian male intellectuals began actively supporting women’s claims to greater equality. Much of the impetus for this was due to the impact in Russia of French political ideas, particularly in the form of romantic aspirations articulating the ‘freedom of the heart’ and a generalized belief in the emancipation of the human soul. The cult female figure during this phase of romantic political thinking in early-nineteenth-century Russia was the French

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novelist George Sand, who had separated from her husband to lead an independent —somewhat notorious—life of her own in Paris. It is to this generation that the brothers Kirsanov belong. The next generation, that of the 1850s and 1860s, was to be more radical in its political views, especially after the failure and defeat of Russia in the Crimean War (1856). These were the sons determined to overthrow the worn-out values and traditions of their fathers, which they believed were suffocating progress in Russia. It was this generation that began actively formulating ‘the woman question’ in association with the issue of the emancipation of the serfs (1861). Laws were passed forbidding husbands to beat or mutilate their wives, although the habit of wife beating among the peasants was still sanctioned by customary law—a point Bazarov comments upon scathingly in the novel. The rights of women were linked to the emancipation of the serfs in a more material sense than that of a common political ideal. The impoverishment or feared impoverishment of large numbers of the gentry by the return of land to the peasants created a very real need among many women to find a means of economic support, which their fathers or brothers were no longer able to guarantee. In 1859 women were granted permission to attend university lectures with male students, but in 1861 this privilege was removed by government order. However, in the larger cities, and especially in Moscow and St Petersburg, numerous young male intellectuals and radicals offered free tuition and lessons to their female relatives, friends and neighbours. Fictitious marriages became popular, whereby aspiring young women who felt trapped within the provincial familial home were rescued by young men who offered to marry them so that they could acquire the necessary documents and permission to move to Moscow or St Petersburg or to Zurich, Paris or Heidleberg to study the new ideas. Doubtless some of these young women were betrayed, but there is not a great deal of evidence to suggest that Bazarov’s sexual cynicism was the prevailing attitude among the male radicals of the 1860s. Out of the debate upon ‘the woman question’ came Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is To Be Done? (1863). Chernyshevsky was a leading spokesman for the radical intellectuals during the 1850s and 1860s and his novel became one of the most famous and influential in Russian literature. It was read by Lenin, who declared it ‘can fire one’s energies for a lifetime’ (quoted in Andrews, Women in Russian Literature, 1988, p.155) and he used its title for one of his own political works. The main character of What Is To Be Done? is the heroine, Vera Pavlovna, who breaks away from all the traditional roles and preconceptions about a woman’s life and needs. The plot does not end traditionally with her marriage. Instead, she marries twice and establishes relationships of comradeship and respect with her husbands. More importantly, she pursues a series of active careers, setting up a model sewing co-operative which not only supports herself but allows her to liberate other women into an independent life. Eventually Pavlovna trains as a doctor, finding a fulfilling professional life for herself. The book came to be called ‘the bible’ for all Russian women with aspirations towards independence, and it inspired many women to leave their parents, husbands, even children and move into the cities to join

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a circle, co-operative or commune of like-minded women. The more politically radical of these young women became known as nigilistki (female nihilists). It is striking that, in the decades leading up to the overthrow of the Tzar and the revolution of 1917, women in Russia were more numerous in and took a far more active and significant part in the many subversive political movements than women anywhere else in Europe.5 Chernyshevsky’s novel became the focus of an intensifying conservative reaction against demands for women’s emancipation. At the centre of conservative views was a belief in the traditional sanctity of motherhood as women’s natural sphere and creative fulfilment. In 1850 a writer on the position of women in Russian society declared: The family is the kingdom of woman—her life’ (Atkinson, ‘Society and the sexes in the Russian past’, 1978, p.34). However, in the same year a woman writer complained: ‘Sometimes it seemed that God created the world for men only…. For them there is fame and art and learning; for them there is freedom and all the joy of life…. But if a woman does not achieve happiness in family life, what is left for her?’ (ibid.). Conservatives blamed such disaffection upon the destructive influence of western ideas on the sanctities of the Russian traditional family. In particular, vitriolic attacks were made upon Chernyshevsky’s novel and more especially upon those who attempted to put its ideas into practice. Nihilists were caricatured as dirty, sexually immoral and politically dangerous and deceitful. All those involved in radical movements were denounced as ‘un-Russian’ or as seduced by the destructive allurement of foreign influence; the linking of political subversion with sexual seduction became an obsessive theme in anti-feminist writing. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons can only be fully understood if it is seen as vigorously involved in these passionate issues. Indeed, Chernyshevsky’s novel is in many ways a response to Turgenev’s work, especially On the Eve (1860), the novel that had preceded Fathers and Sons. However, where precisely should we situate Turgenev’s work within the Russian political spectrum of the 1860s? What attitudes towards ‘the woman question’ are expressed in Fathers and Sons? The most useful startingpoint for considering this would be the representation of the liberated woman, Yevdoxia Kukshina, in chapters 13 and 14, and you might then go on to contrast this with the depiction of Bazarov’s mother in chapter 20. Discussion Kukshina is clearly meant to be representative of the radicalism of the late 1850s to 1860s. She has Vowed’ to defend the rights of women ‘to the last drop of my blood’, and is scornful of Sand, ‘an out-of-date woman’ who was the heroine of the earlier romantic generation (pp.83, 80). She has separated from her husband and plans to go abroad to study in Paris and Heidelberg (p.81). The description of her person and household repeats some of the stereotyping of radical women found in most conservative writing. She is dirty and slovenly in her habits and person: her room is scattered and dusty, her hair dishevelled and her dress crumpled. Moreover, her conversation and behaviour is presented to ‘show’ us that her radicalism is

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shallow and affected. While she considers herself ‘good-natured and simple’ (p.79), nothing about her is simple or spontaneous. The narrator ‘tells’ us that she greets her guests with a string of questions upon topical issues ‘with excessively feminine casualness, without waiting for answers’ (p.80). It is important to notice the narrator’s generalization here, which would seem to impute lack of serious concern (‘feminine casualness’) to all women as part of their feminine nature, not just to Kukshina as an individual. The narrator draws repeated attention to Kukshina’s unattractive physical appearance almost as if that were partly her fault. Kukshina is unfortunate enough to show her gums above her top teeth when she laughs (p.79) and her piano playing reveals ‘her flat-cut fingernails’ (p.84). However, what is most significant in terms of the dominant patriarchal ideology of mid-nineteenth-century Russia is her declaration ‘I’m free, I’ve no children’ (p.81). From a conservative perspective, this would count as a near-sacrilegious statement. ■ Arina Vlassyevna, Bazarov’s mother, and ‘a real Russian noblewoman of former times’ (p.145) is constructed as Kukshina’s opposite in almost every detail. She is represented as superstitiously religious and spontaneously emotional. She has never read a book and, although married against her will, she has devoted herself to her husband’s well-being, allowing him the complete management of her estate. Beyond all this she worships her son, finding her entire identity and fulfilment in this maternal role. The rhetorical form of the narrator’s comment: ‘Such ladies are already few and far between. God knows whether one should be glad of that fact!’ (p.146), implies a certain open-mindedness, but in fact the representation contrasting the new and the old schools of women leaves little doubt as to where the text places its values. The use of polarized characters to confirm the underlying values of the text is a device frequently used by writers. Austen, for example, always has opposing pairs of characters in her novels. In a similar way, writers often construct parallels between characters as a way of unobtrusively guiding the reader’s sympathies and judgements in line with the text’s value system. In Fathers and Sons telling similarities link the characters of Kukshina, Odintsova and Bazarov. The introduction of Odintsova in the text is carefully positioned immediately after the description of Kukshina. Despite the apparent contrast between the two women in terms of beauty, dignity and intelligence, there are significant common features. Both women despised their husbands and are childless. Odintsova was educated in St Petersburg at the centre of new thinking, her ‘reprobate’ father treating her as a friend and equal, which suggests that she has acquired little sense of the value of traditional authority. Like Kukshina, she engages in intellectual debates with men, and her discussions with Bazarov imply that, like him, she regards nature from a materialist and scientific point of view, but has no feeling for it as source of life. Even more significantly, she shares Bazarov’s nihilism. The narrator tells us that she has ‘no prejudices, not even having any strong beliefs… Her mind was keenly enquiring and indifferent at one and the same time’ (p.105). It would seem that she spoke the truth when she told Bazarov that there was ‘too much that was the same about us’ (p.215).

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However, her sense of an unsatisfied desire at the centre of her life also links her to the enigmatic Princess R., who destroys the life of Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov. The princess is also childless, encumbered with a husband she despises, apparently a frivolous coquette, yet she finds ‘no peace in anything’, laughing by day but spending her nights in anguish and weeping. The most sustained irony of the novel lies in the similarity of the fates of Kirsanov and Bazarov, which both utterly fail to recognize. The enigmatic beauty of the princess bites so deeply into Kirsanov’s soul that ‘Like someone who’s taken poison, he couldn’t settle’ (p.37). In effect, Kirsanov is dead emotionally from the year 1848, the year in which revolutionary movements all over Europe toppled old authorities and ancien regimes. We might say that Bazarov is the luckier of the two in that his poison kills him off quickly, thus sparing him Kirsanov’s lingering hopelessness. This parallelism between two of the main male characters helps to highlight another criticism made of Turgenev’s artistic treatment of female characters. In his novels, apart from On the Eve, women tend to function merely as episodes in a plot structure, which is intent upon tracing the development of the young male hero into maturity (Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature, 1987, p.13). In this sense Turgenev’s novels are male bildungsroman, in which the women are important only in terms of the effect they have upon the hero’s life. Within the stories the women do not develop as people and the complex processes of their feelings and intellectual growth are not represented. We can certainly see this pattern in the representation of Princess R. and Kirsanov, but what of Odintsova and Bazarov? Could this criticism be applied to Turgenev’s representation of their characters? I suggest you think about this first in terms of plot structure. Does Odintsova simply function as part of the unfolding of Bazarov’s story or does she have a story in her own right? Discussion It seems to me that Odintsova’s main importance in the novel is the fatal effect she has upon Bazarov. Her function is to produce the ironic parallel between the young nihilist and his apparent enemy, the romantic aristocrat Kirsanov. You might feel that Turgenev provides Odintsova with her own story after Bazarov’s death, with her later marriage and its possibilities. However, this is surely too perfunctory to count as a story? On the other hand, the fact that he includes it might suggest that Turgenev was more involved imaginatively with Odintsova than he realized. I will return to this point shortly. ■ In addition to women’s position and function within the structure of the plot, it is important to consider in relation to the women characters the effect of the novelistic devices of focalization, ‘showing’ and ‘telling’, which are crucial to the way a writer shapes the reader’s understanding of and response to characters. The space devoted to Odintsova’s own story within the text of Fathers and Sons, which is largely confined to chapters 16–18, is certainly quite short in comparison with that allocated to the two main male characters. What is the balance of focalization used

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for the male and female characters? Are we offered the same insight into Odintsova’s feelings and perceptions as into those of Bazarov? How does the alternation of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ function in relation to these two characters? Read pages 105–25, carefully analysing the effect of these three novelistic devices. Discussion These are some of the most intensely imagined and written pages of the novel and I have only space here to make a few points, so you may well pick out other important aspects. The narrator ‘tells’ quite a lot about both characters but I am struck by a difference in the quality of the ‘telling’. On pages 105–6 the general character of Odintsova is summarized for us; the narrator’s authoritative tone and form of words seem to be offering us a comprehensive understanding of her vague mixture of desires with timid conformism which goes well beyond any selfawareness the character herself might possess. This authoritative knowledge even seems to encompass women as a whole, as if the fact that they are women makes such generalized truths about their characters possible: ‘Like all women who had not succeeded in falling in love, she sought for something without knowing precisely what’ (p.105). Bazarov, on the other hand, is not offered for us to understand in terms of generalizations about male psychology. In the prolonged passage of ‘telling’ on pages 110–12 we do not get a summarized knowledge of his personality generally but an account of his feelings at a particular time. The insight into these feelings does not belong to the privileged perception of narrator and reader. Bazarov is shown as self-aware and the passage is largely his focalization. As with ‘telling’, ‘showing’ in the form of the characters’ own speech is distributed reasonably evenly between Odintsova and Bazarov, but again I think there is a difference. On the whole Odintsova expresses puzzlement about her feelings and turns to Bazarov for explanations of herself and of life, which, by and large, he feels able to supply. Although we are given Odintsova’s words on these pages, we rarely have any sense of her feelings, whereas the struggle of Bazarov’s emotions below the surface of his speech is frequently indicated. For example, when Odintsova asks him from what personal experience he speaks when he tells her she is probably incapable of love, he replies to himself: “‘You’re bored and you’re having a bit of fun with me out of boredom, while I…” His heart was actually on the point of breaking’ (p.118). The effect of this kind of representation is somewhat paradoxical. Despite the narrator’s implied claim to full knowledge of Odintsova, her impulses and character remain to the reader, like those of the Princess R. to Kirsanov, something of an enigma. Whilst utilization of ‘showing’, ‘telling’ and focalization directs the reader’s sympathy and understanding towards the hero, it is the mysterious image of a woman that haunts the text. ■ I am arguing that Turgenev’s representation of female characters does indeed differ in form and content from his representation of male characters. Whilst his heroes are constructed as developing individual histories, his women are depicted as static images and in the main they function metaphorically or symbolically in the

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text. However, I certainly do not want to imply this is a wholly critical or negative judgement of Turgenev’s women characters. As I suggested above, I think they often exert an immensely powerful effect upon the reader’s imagination, often far more than that of the male characters. In Fathers and Sons the female characters, Katya, Fenichka and most especially Odintsova, do function to suggest a mysterious ‘otherness’ in contrast to the ‘everydayness’ associated with the male characters. For Turgenev, this feminine unknowability may be said to suggest fears and desires that cannot otherwise easily or at all be articulated within the conventions of realism, insofar as such conventions aim to remain true to the ‘here-and-now’, material reality of life. In a time of great social change and uncertainty, like the 1860s in Russia, when demands were being made that would overturn all the long-held values of a way of life, it is not surprising to find fictional female characters functioning metaphorically to suggest male disempowerment, and even death. However, Turgenev’s representation is even more richly ambivalent than this—and more courageous. Odintsova’s need to marry for financial reasons after the death of her irresponsible father is made clear in realist terms. What Turgenev is also honest about is the effect of such a marriage of necessity upon a woman’s sexual sensibilities: ‘She had hardly been able to stand [her late husband]… and had acquired a secret aversion to all men, whom she regarded as nothing more than untidy, ponderous and flabby, feebly importunate creatures’ (pp.105–6). The sense, represented here, of women’s unfulfilment within the present social arrangement, of an unnameable emptiness or desire at the centre of feminine life can be read as suggesting a mysterious unknown force for change or the impending pressure of the future. This is most strongly felt in the image of the window that lets in ‘the vexing freshness of the night and its mysterious whisperings’ (p.116). Eventually Odintsova retreats from this opening, rejecting the possibility that it offers, even though she has been forced to look back on her life and sees ‘no more than emptiness…or sheer ugliness’ (p.125). However, it is significant that it is through the woman character that this opening is revealed, not through the ostensible revolutionary Bazarov.6 It seems to me that, because aspects of Odintsova are left unexplained, the rend in the fabric of realism is never completely closed up again. The power of the characterization of Odintsova in Fathers and Sons and of Estella in Great Expectations derives largely from the use of metaphor to intensify the language by which they are represented. In this they may be said to fail one of the requirements of the realist genre: they are not entirely convincing or authentic constructions of women as specific individualized characters. More positively, it might be said that they produce points at which the text exceeds the limits of its representational possibilities as realism. Images of women in male-authored texts very often supply the ‘novelness’ that has been seen as the defining quality of the novel as a genre. The woman in the text often provides the moment when we catch a glimpse of future possibilities.

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Further reading Freeborn, R. (1960) Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist, Oxford University Press. Gifford, H. (1964) The Novel in Russia, Hutchinson. Seton-Watson, H. (1967) The Russian Empire 1801–1917, Oxford University Press. Turton, G. (1992) Turgenev and the Context of English Literature, 1850–1900, Routledge.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise stated subsequent references to Fathers and Sons are to this edition and pages numbers only are given. 2 For a fuller account of contemporary reactions, see Berlin, ‘Fathers and Children’, 1994, pp.280–5. 3 Throughout this section I am indebted to Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature, 1987, p.13. 4 They are authentic in realist terms, but not, of course, necessarily more powerful or ‘true’. Charles Dickens’s representation of Miss Havisham in her withered bridal gown and decaying house seems to me one of literature’s most unforgettable images of wasted and repressed sexuality. 5 For an account of this see Porter, Fathers and Daughters: Russian Women in Revolution, 1976; Stites, ‘Women and the Russian intelligentsia’, 1978. 6 Porter describes a short prose poem by Turgenev (found posthumously) called At the Threshold, in which a young girl stands outside a great door. A voice warns that those who pass through will face cold, hunger, hatred, mockery, contempt, shame, prison, illness, death. ‘I know,’ the girl says, ‘I am ready.’ The voice then insists that she will perish and no one will even know whose memory to revere. The girl says ‘I need neither gratitude nor pity. I do not need a name’ and she crosses the threshold (fathers and Daughters, 1976, p.153). The heroine Elena in On the Eve makes a similar declaration before she crosses into the unknown world of historical change and vanishes into a void.

Chapter Seven Can realist novels survive? by Richard Allen and Dennis Walder

The changing form of the realist novel In 1958 a novel was published which began: ‘Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.’ With this simple sentence, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe began what was to become one of the classics of world literature, Things Fall Apart. The novel outlines the tragic story of Okonkwo, an important man in his clan in the days before the whites arrived in West Africa. Its aim was to question received ideas about the history and way of life of colonized people, by means of characters and a story that brought the reader into intimate contact with their everyday experience. This has been the traditional claim of the realist novel: to tell a tale not told before, using techniques that involve readers closely with the individual in a specific society, towards the ultimate objective of extending their sympathies and understanding. It is a claim that, arguably, does not become out of date. In this concluding chapter, we will touch on some of the ways in which the genre seems to have survived up to the present. Achebe’s novel has sold over two million copies worldwide, and been translated into most of the major languages. Since its first publication there has been an explosion of fiction in English from countries formerly under British rule, using a wide-ranging mixture of indigenous and western story-telling strategies to engage with past and present. The writings of Achebe, like those of R.K.Narayan, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Laurence, V.S.Naipaul, Thomas Kenneally and a host of others from around the globe, prove beyond doubt the extraordinary persistence of the realist novel as a distinctive cultural form, long after its supposed extinction by more recent kinds of writing. All these writers have, in different ways, reacted against or transformed the genre, whilst guaranteeing its survival by bringing to bear new creative energies from their own concerns and traditions. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to tell the story of the realist novel genre from the time of Charles Dickens and Ivan Turgenev to the time of Narayan and Naipaul, but such a history would certainly reveal not only the persistent attractiveness of realistic conventions to writers but also a number of occasions when writers challenged what they saw as dominant but supposedly moribund styles. The history would also reveal a continuing interaction between realistic and other

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conventions of the kind we have seen in Frankenstein and Great Expectations. It would register that realism is much more than just a literary style, and that realist writing eventually benefits from being considered in a much wider frame, which includes painting, music, cinema and television. There is, for example, just as strong a sense of the way individual lives are part of their surroundings in a Dutch realist painting of an interior as there is in a Jane Austen novel. A painting like W.P.Frith’s Ramsgate Sands (1853) contains as vivid and realistic an account of a day’s outing as George Gissing’s description of a trip to the Crystal Palace in his novel In the Year of the Jubilee (1894). Realism can even be said to be an active force in music, which is generally held to be the least representative art. Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond there was a vogue for what was known as ‘programme music’. This type of music, which took its structure from the desire to represent an event or scene or a particular time of day as much as from abstract musical form, was commonly written and listened to. Early in the nineteenth century Hector Berlioz made a programme the basis of his Symphonie Fantastique (1830). Equally representative of the type are Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote (1897–8) or Tintagel (1917–19) by Arnold Bax, which depicts the seascape near a ruined castle on the north Cornwall coast. We need to approach realism as a concept in all the art forms, including literature, in an open-minded and flexible manner. Dickens used to set out quite consciously to find what he needed as the ‘reality’ upon which to base a fiction. In the case of Hard Times (1854), some of this ‘reality’ drew directly from a visit to Preston, where he went to see the strike he wanted to write about. However, the novel that resulted (unlike Dicken’s journalistic account of the Preston Strike for Household Words), came as much if not more from the imaginative, fanciful reworking of experience as from any documentary rendering of it. Dickens was always praised for his documentary realism, yet sought to demonstrate truth through non-realist, ‘romantic’ or symbolic strategies of presentation. Although Great Expectations or Frankenstein may seem to be more challenging of conventions than, say, Pride and Prejudice, the latter also has its ‘cracks’ and ‘openings’, its reach beyond the everyday both in terms of morals and in its depiction of ‘reality’. As these paradoxes imply, it would be a mistake to look for any hard-and-fast definition of the realist novel. Most novels of the first half of the nineteenth century display the same mixing of genre conventions. If we approach them in terms of the whole complex of assumptions and conventions surrounding the realist endeavour, we can develop our enjoyment and understanding of what they are about. Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), for example, portrayed in extensive detail what the author knew at first hand of the conditions of Manchester working-class people, such as the ‘heaps of ashes’, that is, faeces around their homes, whose smell could almost knock a person down. At the same time, the novel projected through symbolically heightened death scenes the author’s middle-class, Christian faith in the potential of individual charity and love across class boundaries. The tendency towards a romance element in even the most determinedly realist text reminds us

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that what we will always find is some (easy or uneasy) blend of elements, among which to seek a balance. As readers, we approach such texts with a willingness to be absorbed in or by the realist conventions, before becoming aware not only that they are conventions but also that they coexist with alternative or questioning conventions. This is true of the work of Anthony Trollope, with his careful account of the lives of the rural gentry or urban middle classes just as much as that of his contemporary Dickens (whom he caricatured as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’) or even of more obviously ‘romantic’ writers such as the Brontës. That said, there were more determined attempts at wholly realistic novels. One example is the work of a group of writers whom we now refer to as ‘Naturalists’. The self-proclaimed founder of the group, Émile Zola (1840–1902), and his followers, including George Gissing (1857–1903), thought the novel should be so real that it could be manipulated like the material of scientific experiments. The group took to an extreme the note taking that writers like Dickens practised, and used it to create novels that to them proved the determining effect of the environment. For his novel Germinal (1885) Zola researched the mining area of northern France to make sure that he got his facts right. The result was a work in which a whole community, which is impoverished and worn down, struggles against its physical and social environment. Naturalism was not, though, limited to the nineteenth century, as the documentary novels of Arnold Bennett (1867–193D demonstrate. There were also equally trenchant challenges to realism. Almost at the same time as Zola was writing, a group of writers in Britain was mounting a challenge to the whole idea of realism in the name of ‘romance’. Prominent and still popular examples of the works of this group are R.D.Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (1869) and R.L.Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886). These novels brought readers to the edges of their seats with excitement as the adventures unfolded and startling coincidences abounded, but there was an undercurrent of realism in the descriptions of people and places. In the early part of the twentieth century another major challenge was made to the existing conventions of realism. Virginia Woolf took a key role in formulating the charges against not only ways of writing but also the ways of looking at the world that they embodied. In ‘Modern fiction’ (1919) she wrote that novelists go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is…labour thrown away… [by the novelist in the cause of creating] an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour… Must novels be like this?

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Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel… [I]f a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit? (The Common Reader, 1925, pp.188–9) Woolf’s essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924) shows these ideas in action, in a witty and quite devastating attack on the work of Arnold Bennett, H.G.Wells and John Galsworthy, all then at the height of their fame. She imagines that each is trying to write a novel centred on a woman—Mrs Brown—glimpsed in a railway carriage. She proposed that Bennett would observe every detail with immense care. He would notice the advertisements; the pictures of Swanage and Portsmouth; the way in which the cushion bulged between the buttons; how Mrs Brown wore a brooch which had cost three-and ten-three [sic] at Whitworth’s bazaar; and had mended both gloves —indeed the thumb of the left-hand glove had been replaced… [this is just the technique he uses in his novel Hilda Lessways]… he begins to describe, not Hilda Lessways, but the view from her bedroom window… One line of insight would have done more than all those lines of description; but let them pass as the necessary drudgery of the novelist. And now—where is Hilda? Alas. Hilda is still looking out of the window. Passionate and dissatisfied as she was, she was a girl with an eye for houses… Therefore the villas must be described…we cannot hear her mother’s voice, or Hilda’s voice; we can only hear Mr Bennett’s voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds and copyholds and fines… Mr Bennett…is trying to hypnotize us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there. (‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1924, in Bowlby, A Woman’s Essays, 1992, pp. 78–80) What this meant for Woolf’s own writing can be exemplified in the following brief extract from To the Lighthouse (1927). It describes a moment in the lives of the members of the Ramsay family through the mind of Mrs Ramsay, who sits knitting and reading a bedtime story to her son James. Her thoughts, however, are running on her husband’s melancholy state of mind and what it means for her:

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Charles Tansley thought him [Mr Ramsay] the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said. But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not only here, but all over the world. Flashing her needles, confident, upright, she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them aglow; bade him take his ease there, go on and out, enjoy himself. She laughed, she knitted. Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly against and again, demanding sympathy. He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing around her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full … So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent. (1964 edn, pp.44–5) How far does this seem like writing that follows realistic conventions, such as that familiar from Pride and Prejudice or Fathers and Sons? Discussion It would be difficult to describe Woolf’s writing as ‘realistic’ in terms of the realism we find in the earlier novels. Woolf sees no need to spell out exactly what is happening, and phrases like ‘the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male’ or ‘she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them aglow’ seem to work on a different basis from the writing in the earlier novels. That said, it is also a characteristic of Austen’s narration that we are held almost within an individual character’s mind. Surely, too, all the ‘luminous halo’ of Woolf’s description is anchored in the detail of the knitting needles and the simple scene conveyed in the words ‘she knitted’. The passage shows that small, simple detail can carry just as much weight as an extended catalogue of descriptions, so creating indeed a revived kind of realism. ■ A similar effect can be felt in parts of Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce, whom Woolf refers to in passing in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. As a whole the book flouts most of the then accepted conventions of fiction, and yet at its heart are regularly moments like the following. A character—Leopold Bloom—is in a butcher’s shop buying a kidney for his breakfast: A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling the items from a slip in her hand. Chapped: washing soda. And a pound and a half of Denny’s sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips. Woods his name was. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood. No followers allowed.

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Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack… [The last kidney is at last his.] His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket. Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers’ pocket and laid them on the rubber prickles. They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid, disc by disc into the till. —Thank you, sir. Another time. (1960 edn, pp.70–2) These critiques of contemporary conventions of realism remain powerful to this day; what were originally avant-garde stances came to occupy a position of dominance in literary histories. This dominance may blind us to the fact that the attack operated very much in a minority, high-cultural world and that Bennett’s approach had its strength and appealed to readers. What drove him as much as anything is summed up in an entry in his journal written in 1931: Does a novelist want his characters to remain in the mind of the reader? Some novelists don’t. But I do, for one… The thing is to produce an impression on the reader—the best you can, the truest you can: but some impression. The newest despisers of form and conventionalisation produce no impression at all. (Quoted in Allott, Novelists on the Novel, 1965, pp.290–1) All the evidence suggests that there was a large market for writing with characters who stayed in the mind of the reader. There was an even greater one for writing that mingled realistic styles with sensational events. Bennett was happy, like Woolf, to write for a minority taste, but he loved the fame and wealth more popular writing brought. Peter Keating refers to him as ‘the swashbuckling conqueror of the commercial market’. He quotes from a letter from Bennett to his agent: ‘You don’t yet realise what an engine for the production of fiction you have in me’, and from a more unguarded letter to his friend George Sturt: ‘I believe I could fart sensational fiction now’! (Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1991, p.84.) Realism in other media The need to approach these issues flexibly is well illustrated by the way in which, although writers of realistic fiction have continued to supply the market of which Bennett wrote, the demands of that market in the twentieth century have also been satisfied by work in different media. These media have used genres which are in their own way novel but which have fed on the conventions developed through the nineteenth-century realist novel. The media we are referring to are cinema and television. Generally speaking, silent films can be argued to owe at least as much to painting and popular engravings as to literature. Even in silent films with narrative

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drive, such as D.W.Griffiths’s Birth of a Nation (1915) or Intolerance (1916), the effect is at least in part that of a moving version of a painting. The introduction of sound changed this, throwing immense weight onto the presentation of that most central element of realistic writing, character. Although on occasion watching a film is much like watching a play on the stage, the analogy with the novel is more apt most of the time. Editing of film allows the story to move effortlessly inside and outside buildings and across time in just the fluid way that is possible in a novel. It seems, moreover, that, like a photograph, a film can ‘show’ reality in a mirror-like way, achieving in this respect something that was beyond even the highest ambitions of a novelist like Trollope who aimed to show ‘real life’. However, the analogy between the novel and the film goes deeper than this, for film-makers soon began to use plot structures that novelists had developed, so that within the separate media the genres often began to coincide. This partly followed from the fact that from the beginning the cinema adopted and adapted fiction as the basis for films. An early example of this was the hugely successful film Gone with the Wind (1939), made from the already successful book of the same name (1936) by Margaret Mitchell. Other examples of cross-fertilization of genre across media can be found in the work of one of the most influential of all film-makers, Orson Welles. In Citizen Kane (1941) the plot structure taking the hero from great success to failure through the cycle of a single life might be seen to draw on some of the oldest models of dramatic tragedy, but the execution of it in a detailed, everyday world has strong parallels with the tales of the rise and fall of more modern entrepreneurs told by, for example, Dickens and Trollope. Citizen Kane is the story of someone pressed into great expectations; its final message is similar to the first and more sad ending of Great Expectations in which Pip stands alone, filled with a mute but then hopeless longing for Estella. Truth, it seems, lies in longing, rather than in delight in the reality of life, which has driven so much of the earlier parts of both stories. These films and many others like them made in the 1930s and 1940s spawned whole sequences of descendants in the United States and across the world, all of which can be discussed in ways that are applicable to the realist novel. One plot that has supplied the raison d’être for a number of realist films as well as a number of realist novels involves a family with two children (often brothers) who each go their own way, often compete against each other, and are only reconciled in death or some similar extreme event. It might be argued that this plot derives from older folk-tale sources or from psycho-analytical understandings of the family, but it is one that people in the last century and a half have frequently encountered in the family sagas of the realist novel or the cinema. The analogy between realist fiction and the cinema outlined here can be extended still further by the suggestion that, just like some novelists, some film-makers were dissatisfied with the conventions of orthodox realism. In the same way that writers like Woolf and Joyce attempted to remake the novel, so film-makers like Luis Bunuel attempted to remake the realist world of the cinema with films such as That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Similarly, French ‘new wave’ film-makers aimed for

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a flowing, sometimes directly music-like realism in films such as Louis Malle’s Les Amants (1957) and Jacques Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1961). The nature of the technology used in the cinema and the way in which cinema is often experienced, however, started a series of counter movements. These have led the medium more recently to move away from realist genre conventions, although the plot structures often survive the move. As film settings and the film image grew bigger, and cinemas became larger and grander, the emphasis shifted away from realism towards spectacle, and plots became more and more bound by unrealistic happenings and special effects. Realism, however, does persist, not only in certain areas of cinema but in another medium that cinema might itself be said to have created, namely television. Can you think of any reasons why this should be the case? Discussion This may be related to the fact that television is a private or domestic medium, like the novel, something we view in our homes, where it seems ‘natural’ for what we see frequently to correspond to the surroundings. It is as if we had a window into an imaginary house next door. In addition, television is watched more or less continuously, as opposed to the cinema, where viewings have a more pronounced beginning and end. This means that there are limits to the extent that spectacle of the cinematic kind can feature in television programmes. Most importantly, the economics and financing of television has created a sub-genre—the ‘soap opera’— which has taken over the conventions of the realist novel and produced a form that easily rivals the realist novel at its most popular. ■ Originally designed to fill in between advertisements for washing powders on television in the United States, hence the name ‘soap operas’, these programmes have now expanded to meet the apparently unceasing demands of their audiences. Some critics regard the intense adherence of viewers to ‘soaps’ as a sign of a decline in our culture, but in fact they are as much a sign of the easy familiarity the audience has with quite sophisticated viewing habits. As with the nineteenthcentury readers of realist fiction, the audience knows that a ‘soap opera’ is fictional, but readily suspends that knowledge to believe in the characters as ‘real’. Again, it is important to register common elements in the plot structures used in realist novels and ‘soaps’, as well as the existence in both of entirely realistic surface representations. Some of these common elements flow from the fact that both the nineteenth-century novel and the ‘soap opera’ are serial compositions. As well as the long-running strands that keep the ‘soap’ going, each episode must have its own shape, often ending on a note of suspense that leaves the viewer anxious to watch the next instalment. If the next instalment in fact starts off with a different strand of the plot, viewers—like readers before them—feel securely that the interrupted strand will be continued later. Key motifs in the long-running strands in ‘soap operas’ would also be familiar to readers of realistic novels, in particular the way in which stories are structured to give the sense that the past works to determine the

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present and the future. More often than not, this structure involves a dark secret, which provides a frisson of excitement and expectation for the reader or viewer. Novels can draw on more than one genre, and there are numerous examples of novels drawing on Gothic conventions alongside realistic ones, in which this dark secret has a supernatural quality. In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, for example, a mysterious and ghostly nun provides the frisson of excitement, just as in Frankenstein it is the creature who acts like a ticking time-bomb in the narrative. ‘Soaps’ draw much less on the mixing of genres than novels, as often as not emphasizing the ‘normality’ of the ‘secret’, but they also on occasion flirt with the sensational. In the stress on normality a continuity may be seen with a novel like Middlemarch, where the effect of the past on the present is articulated through the perfectly normal act of making a will. Although George Eliot uses emotive images—for example in the section title ‘The dead hand’— she makes the progress from past to present very ‘normal’, since the character who exemplifies the past is old and ill and his death is natural, if a little untimely. When the ‘soap opera’ Eastenders was launched on BBC television, the event that was to lie waiting to have an effect was equally natural—a young woman became pregnant after a secret affair with another character. Tension mounted in later episodes as the impact that this must (realistically) have on other characters became more and more obvious. Please pause here, particularly if you are a regular watcher of ‘soaps’, and think about how far these comments relate to the ones you watch. Do they seem driven by realistic conventions or are there signs of other, less realistic styles and devices? Can you identify the kind of plot structure we have been describing? Discussion One particular example comes from viewing the Channel 4 ‘soap opera’ Brookside. This is a series known for the strongly realistic setting; the actors work in real houses with only the silent and invisibly watching cameras indicating the fictionality of events. The series is also realistic in that it sets out to deal with contemporary social problems. However, there are also dark secrets; at one point a frisson of expectation had been building over many months from just such a social problem—physical and sexual abuse within a family. After Trevor Jordache had battered his wife and raped his daughters, the wife and one daughter, feeling the state and authorities were powerless to help, killed him and buried the body under their garden patio. After many months a problem with the drains in the next-door garden brought the past— and the body—back into the present. A great deal of effort was devoted to making the events work within realistic contexts, and they were allowed to form a web with other aspects of the story. Previously some sensation had been caused by one of the daughters ‘coming out’ as lesbian. Following the murder the mother wanted to deny that gay sexuality is ‘natural’ by ascribing the daughter’s choice to what had happened in the family. However, we need immediately to qualify such statements. The timing of the discovery of the body was apparently dictated partly by a desire to revive the viewing figures, just as an event might be introduced into a realistic

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magazine serial to raise sales. The events in this ‘soap’ stand at the more extreme end of the continuum between the ‘normal’ and those that border on the simply sensational, something more akin to what one might find in a Gothic novel than a realistic one. ■ New interpretations of the realist form All this seems to exemplify the way in which realist strategies can be translated from one medium to another, finding new life and still commanding very wide audiences. As we reach the end of an episode of a ‘soap’ we may feel a continuity with a Victorian reader finishing the latest episode of a serialized novel. There is a sense of being in contact with a reality that has shape and comes neatly to a close, but there is also a sense of being in contact with ‘the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness’. These are the words of Mikhail Bakhtin (Part Two, p.267) who has been mentioned in earlier chapters in this book. Bakhtin’s contribution to thinking about the novel and its future potential has been profound and is continuing, although it has only been relatively recently that his work (first published in the 1920s) has become easily available in English. You will recall his notion of the ‘heteroglossic’ or multi-voiced nature of the novel from the discussion of Pride and Prejudice in Chapter Two. There it was suggested that within the wonderfully lucid thematic structure, the narrator’s and characters’ voices are orchestrated into opposing points of view, none of which is final or authoritative. Many of Bakhtin’s examples were taken from Dickens, although as far as we know he did not write about Great Expectations. Even in this first person narrative, which seems to maintain a single voice and viewpoint, our experience as readers makes it quickly evident that the text is far from ‘monologic’. As pointed out in Chapter Five, there is from the start a split between who sees and who speaks, which alerts us to the distance between the child’s vision and that of the adult, implying that neither is finally authoritative. Further, although Dickens’s text ensures an illusion of reality by familiar strategies of character, plot and texture, it is subject also to the questioning implicit in its use of Gothic and romance features. Seeing predominantly realist novels in this way enables us to consider the possibility of reading them for their subversive potential, which arises from the fact that they express a moral order only to undermine its authority by imitating or parodying the voice of that authority. An example of this can be found in Great Expectations, in the narrator’s mimicry of the judge’s voice and values when the outcast Magwitch is sentenced to death (Dickens, Great Expectations, 1994 edn, p.452). In Bakhtin’s terms, the interplay between many voices in a novel, each embodying a different viewpoint and values, through the imitation, parodying or quotation of different texts or styles of writing, is what makes the genre unique. It is also what enables it to overcome the problem noted by critics like George Levine of thinking about the realist novel in terms of its ‘misguided’ attempts to offer a faithful account of reality. As Levine points out, even at the height of its success as a

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kind of writing, realist fiction in the early and mid nineteenth century never merely offered a settled, confident sense of the nature of reality, although, of course, many writers shared a belief that their explorations would reveal a comprehensible world. As we read the texts of that time today, what emerges is less a self-satisfied vision of an objective world ‘out there’ than a self-conscious attempt to create a new reality. Marxists like Arnold Kettle and Georg Lukács were also antagonistic towards what they thought of as the dominant, capitalist interpretation of reality. However, they saw it as containing within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Realist novels could foster this by adopting not a passive, reflective stance but a critical approach, responding to the underlying trends and not merely the surface textures of everyday life. The question of whether the realist novel offers something confident, even selfsatisfied, or something ‘heteroglossic’ is taken up in a different way by Roland Barthes. His conviction that there is always something below the surface of what seems to us ‘natural’ or ‘real’ makes him hostile to the realist novel. Barthes’s focus was upon language as a meaning-creating system in the novel. Influenced by both Marxism and Structuralism, he found realist writing too ‘readerly’. By this he meant too ‘transparent’ or intelligible, too easily assimilated by readers, who therefore found in it a simple confirmation of their (bourgeois) view of life. He felt that an accepted, ‘natural’ view of the world was created, which suggested that there is one truth only, and that the realist text is its voice. Structuralists like Barthes argued that language was a system (or structure) making communication possible by means of pre-arranged patterns, hence challenging the ‘liberal humanist’ assumption that we use language as free individuals, rather than as predetermined social or ideological ‘constructs’. This led to some very innovative ways of reading realist texts, as largely self-contained systems of communication codes not orientated towards a pre-existing outer reality. If you would like to think further about the effect of such criticism, you should read Barthes’s S/Z (1974, trans. 1975). This uses a little-known tale called Sarrasine by the French realist par excellence Honoré de Balzac to prove that realism cannot, any more than any other kind of writing, guarantee access to the real world. Using about seven times as many words as Balzac’s story, Barthes probes the process of reading according to five codes of meaning. The first (the ‘hermeneutic’) is concerned with the narrative puzzles that the story poses and eventually solves, the last (the ‘referential’) codifies all the many references the text makes to a reality outside itself. These references to an extra-textual or historical reality are a defining characteristic of realist writing, which presents itself as if it were a faithful transcription of reality. Barthes proposes that all such references to morality, psychology, history or art are no more than the commonplaces of the age, the ‘already written’. Even the verbal descriptions of people and places originate in writing, not reality. It is unthinkable to him that they might come from observation or experience. They come from other texts, or codes of signification, such as painting. Rather than follow Barthes to his end point (which, curiously enough, after dissolution of the text into numerous signifiers, comes back to the idea that, after

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all, a trace of the representation of reality can be recovered) we could pause and consider an instance of this approach to realism. Barthes’s influential article ‘The reality effect’ (1967) still stands out, at least partly for its brevity and clarity. Read the extract from this article in Part Two. Can you sum up what it says? How is it meant to affect our view of realist narrative? The title ‘reality effect’ has become a catchphrase among critics writing about the realist novel: do you find it persuasive? Discussion Barthes’s article asserts that realism is essentially a verbal effect, creating meaning through conformity to conventions of representation, not by reflection of any actual external reality: ‘a real referent if ever there was one’ (Part Two, p.258), he says of Rouen, as it is described in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856). Barthes uses descriptive detail, which is usually thought of as mere padding in novels like Flaubert’s, to show that these apparently superfluous elements of narrative do have a function. This is, precisely, to create the ‘reality effect’, to give the illusion of dealing with the real world by an accumulation of ‘useless’ notations. These, Barthes states, signify the real, they do not denote it. When Flaubert’s narrative turns to Rouen, the whole description, which the author rewrote six times, is ‘constructed so as to connect Rouen to a painting’ (Part Two, p.259), implying that it is governed by aesthetic plausibility, not conformity to the object. ■ Barthes’s use of terms like ‘scandalous’ and Vertigo’ to suggest the effect upon us of his ‘discoveries’ reflects his aim to unsettle familiar notions of representation in realist narrative. Whilst it seems true that the typical realist narrative includes detail for which there is no obvious function (although this can be harder to find than Barthes suggests), perhaps we should think more of a continuum, a spectrum of codes of representation, some of which are at the more fantastic end, some closer to actual experience? Although what Barthes says seems powerful, it does not inevitably lead to the idea that there is no world of which things can be said. Barthes’s agenda appears to involve justifying ‘modernist’ rather than realist kinds of writing. The former indeed do not respect what he calls the ‘laws of the genre’. He does not mention any examples, but novelists such as Samuel Beckett or Italo Calvino, who prefer to play with the ‘laws’, even to see how far they can go in undermining them, confirm this urge to expose the apparently arbitrary nature of the traditional conventions of representation or mimesis. ■ British critics of the novel, such as David Lodge, who have accommodated Barthes, are concerned to test the usefulness of his ideas. However, this is as far as we can take this line of thought here, although you should be aware of the radical reach of Barthes’s theory, especially as it has been taken up by ‘post-Structuralists’. This group would deny even the reality of ‘author’, or that any hard-and-fast meanings can be derived from a text. If we are aware that realist novels establish themselves as ‘truth’ by means of the use of a variety of codes or discourses, but predominantly those that attempt to create

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the impression of the real (place, character, time, and so on), we will read realist texts as more varied and subversive than we might expect at first sight. Who could fulfil the demands of realist narration more successfully than Trollope’s solidly portrayed, fully rounded church dignitaries, financiers and politicians? Yet they are, nevertheless, presented by a narrator, who draws attention to himself as someone who knows more than either his characters or his readers, and who takes us into his confidence with a sly, unobtrusive air of colluding with, rather than confirming, our sense of reality. The writings of modern crime and detective novelists like P.D.James may seem to depict the real world, but they parody the familiar conventions of ‘safe’ realism in order to threaten and shock us with the extraordinary events and grotesque people found in such ‘ordinary’ settings as the cathedral close or the city bank. The concept of genre is important to writers and readers of novels today as a conscious literary-cultural category or set of rules. This carries with it a way of viewing or recreating the world that we can play with, affirm or deny, but only insofar as we allow ourselves to be guided by the expectations it sets up in us. The ‘sense of the real’ generated by more recent texts, from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) to J.G.Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984), crucially depends upon the reader’s ability to read according to realist genre expectations, since only then can we be shaken by their transgression of those expectations, towards allegory or fantasy. The structure of such novels tries to make us revalue genre: by invoking the settings, stories and characters of the earlier realist novel, it questions our presumed attachment to outmoded notions of what constitutes reality, outmoded through association with the great or ‘classic’ nineteenth-century novels. Yet close attention to those earlier novels, as this book has been trying to show, indicates nothing so obviously limited by its genre. This is, if you like, a modern trick—with, naturally again, its own rules. Perhaps only a theory of the novel as an endlessly self-renewing, protean genre can do justice to such developments. You might like finally to read the extract Toward a methodology for the study of the novel’ from Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, in Part Two. Bakhtin makes exaggerated claims for this ‘supergenre’, calling it ‘the only developing genre’ (Part Two, p.262), which therefore ‘reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding’ (ibid., p.264), suggesting it is ‘in the vanguard of all modern literary development’ (ibid., p.267). Exaggerated? Maybe. Yet his emphasis upon its ‘peculiar capacity for change’ (ibid.) is surely right. This is why we have not been able to offer any definition, any ‘system of fixed generic characteristics’ (ibid.) to account for the novel; by definition, it is fluid, open, inconclusive—although we have argued that at times certain features emerge, even appear to dominate. This helps us to comprehend how a genre powerfully affected by a ‘socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society’ (ibid.) can enter into the international realm. This is not only the Europe of Bakhtin’s imagining, but the world as we now know it, in which European languages, particularly English, have become wide currency, as have their attendant literary forms. This is not to say that narrative or story-

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telling is not a universal art, but that the realist novel, as a kind of story-telling, has succeeded in adapting itself to a remarkable range of cultures and societies, and so will survive—or will it? That is up to you, Dear Reader.

Part Two

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Realism and romance by Arnold Kettle

From: Kettle, A. (1977) An Introduction to the English Novel. Volume I. To George Eliot, Hutchinson, pp.28–36 (first published 1951). The time has come to pose explicitly our first essential problem: why did the modern novel arise at all? The answer can be put in a number of ways. The novel, we may say, arose as a realistic reaction to the medieval romance and its courtly descendants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the great eighteenth-century novels are nearly all anti-romances. Or the novel, we may say, arose with the growth for the first time of a large, widely distributed reading public; with the increase of literacy the demand for reading material naturally rose and the demand was greatest among well-to-do women who were the insatiable novel-readers of the time. For such a public, spread all over England in country houses, the theatre was not a feasible form of entertainment, but the novel was perfection. Hence the length of the novels (for their readers had only too much time on their hands), hence their tone, hence their number, hence (by the end of the eighteenth century) the circulating libraries. Or the novel, we may say, grew with the middle class, a new art-form based not on aristocratic patronage but on commercial publishing, an art-form written by and for the now-powerful bourgeoisie. These answers are all part of the truth, but they are less than the whole of it. The whole answer cannot be condensed into a sentence and is as hard to grasp as history itself. We shall not understand the rise of the English novel unless we understand the meaning and importance of the English revolution of the seventeenth century. Great revolutions in human society change men’s consciousness and revolutionise not only their social relationships, but their outlook, their philosophy and their art. Feudalism, the society of the Middle Ages, had as its principal characteristic a peculiar rigidity of human relationships and ideas which sprang inevitably from the social structure. The basic activity of feudal society was agriculture, the basic social unit the feudal estate or manor. Towns, though they gradually grew in importance, were the exception, not the rule. The governing class, that small minority who alone had the leisure, the education, the wherewithal to develop a sophisticated art (as opposed to the unwritten folk-culture of the unlettered), owed their social superiority to their

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ownership of the land and their virtual ownership of their serfs. Their chief concern, inevitably, was to maintain that ownership. Since their wealth and power did not depend on technical advances, they could have no deep interest in scientific experiment or widespread education. On the contrary, their whole interest, their very existence as the kind of people they were, demanded the preservation (with whatever sanctions, spiritual and physical, that might be necessary) of the status quo. All summaries and simplifications inevitably do violence to the infinitely rich and complex processes of social and cultural change. One cannot hope to do justice in a few sentences to the whole vast complicated medieval culture. What one would emphasise here (without suggesting for a moment that there is no more to be said) is the social rigidity and intellectual conservatism of the feudal order. Such an order was bound to produce art of a particular kind and its characteristic product in the realm of prose literature was the romance. Romance1 was the non-realistic, aristocratic literature of feudalism. It was nonrealistic in the sense that its underlying purpose was not to help people cope in a positive way with the business of living but to transport them to a world different, idealised, nicer than their own. It was aristocratic because the attitudes it expressed and recommended were precisely the attitudes the ruling class wished (no doubt usually unconsciously) to encourage in order that their privileged position might be perpetuated. And romance performed, as it performs to this day, the double function of entertainment through titillation and the conveying in palatable form of a particular kind of philosophy of life. Romance grew in popularity in the Middle Ages as social relationships and class differences under feudalism became increasingly rigid. The connection between the emergence of a leisured ruling class and the growth of romance is very significant. It is not, of course, that only the leisured read or listen to romantic literature; on the contrary its quality of ‘substitute-living’ (the evocation of a kinder, more glamorous world) especially recommends it to the unleisured, those who most need the consolations of an escape from a cruel or humdrum reality. The important point is that as division of labour increases and classes become as a consequence more stratified the rulers come to adopt a way of life very different from that of the majority. They have long, by virtue of their ownership, lived better; now they come to live differently. The ruling-class men no longer actually till their own fields and sell their own chattels at market, but pay someone else (not necessarily in money) to do it. The ruling-class women, in particular, become less and less like the women of the people in activity and even in appearance. And so the ideas and attitudes of the ruling class inevitably become different. Their culture, in all its many forms, changes. The directions in which it changes—as far as literature is concerned—all lead away from realism, the frank and uninhibited representation and consideration of the experiences and potentialities of the community as a whole. For how can such complete frankness exist? Not only do the rulers have their own way of life and therefore their own standards and values which the people do not, cannot—except in their dreams and fantasies—share; the rulers also have their secrets, secrets they

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are not prepared to share with the people or even to express quite frankly and openly to themselves. And what now primarily interests the ruling class is not the people’s way of life (the word ‘vulgar’, originally connoting simply ‘of the people’ takes on new overtones), but the achievement of a culture which not merely pleases but actually strengthens and defends their class. Such a culture relies, is bound to rely, not on realism (even though the occasional realistic and— to that extent— revolutionary artist, like Chaucer, appears) but on romance. Romance, in the first place, delights and entertains the rulers without bringing them face to face with realities they would sooner put behind them. The wimpled lady of the feudal court and her modern counterpart who steps out of her limousine to ask the attendant at the circulating library for a ‘nice book’ are one and the same. In the second place it builds, for the edification and pleasure of those unfortunate enough to find themselves outside the privileged élite, a fantasy, a pseudo-world, seductive or sad, delightful or horrible, which has one unfailing quality: that, however remote it may be from reality, the values and attitudes it incorporates are such as are least likely to undermine the theories and practice of class society. Closely connected with, indeed inseparable from, the escapist nature of romance is its function as a form of titillation, a function that has had a profound influence on the modern novel. The bulk of medieval romances did not enlarge the consciousness of their audience in any helpful way, neither does The Blue Lagoon, but they did give their audience a kick, so does The Postman Always Rings Twice. The aim of such literature is not to sum up experience, not to enlarge the imagination, and not merely to provide an escape from the sordid (in many modern cases it is rather an escape to the sordid), but to provide sensation for sensation’s sake. It thrives on the boredom and cynicism, the blasé and jaded unfulfilment of people who have too little to do or too little purpose and satisfaction in what they do. Its crudest form is pornography: but it has many other forms less crude though scarcely more desirable. The world to which medieval romance transported its audience was a world of chivalry and exciting adventures, of gallant men and charming women, of bad magicians and Christian gentlemen sans peur et sans reproche, above all of idealised love. It is not sufficient to label this world escapist and imagine one has explained it away. All art is, in an important sense, an escape. Nor is it enough to refer to romance’s idealised picture of the world as though idealisation were a form of original sin and needed no more explicit condemnation. There is a sense in which the capacity to escape from his present experience, to use his accumulated consciousness of the past to project a vision of the future, is man’s greatest and distinguishing ability. We must not forget the force of Aristotle’s argument that poetry is valuable precisely because it shows men not simply as they are, but as they ought to be or (in terms more sympathetic to us today) as they are capable of becoming. This fantastic quality of art, that it takes us out of the real world so that, as Shelley put it, it ‘awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought’, this quality is not a trivial or accidental byproduct but the very essence of the value of art. If art did in fact—as the ultra-

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naturalistic school tends to assume—merely paint a picture of what is, it would be a much less valuable form of human activity, for it would not alter men’s consciousness but merely confirm it. What we should remember, then, about romance, is not that it involves an escape, but a particular kind of escape. Medieval romance makes no attempt to give an impression of life in the lands and times it is dealing with, but it does attempt ‘to use its subject matter as a means of conveying a new philosophy’. Dr Vinaver, in the Introduction to his monumental edition of The Works of Thomas Malory, writes: ‘Whatever the subject of the narrative (of the courtly romance) its primary function… was to serve as the expression of thoughts and emotions inspired by courtly idealism, to translate in terms of actions and characters the subtle varieties of courtly sentiment and the highly sophisticated code of courtly behaviour.’2 And this is as true of the seventeenth-century prose romances like Ornatus and Artesia as it is of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century poets to whom Dr Vinaver is here referring. The didactic element in romance is important. The picture of gallant knights and their ladies (usually married to somebody else) told a story which not merely elevated the feudal idea of chivalry, but as often as not had a religious sanction too. One of the principal results of the Christian world-picture in medieval romance (a world-picture generally superimposed upon an older, pagan mythology) was to emphasise a tendency to the over-simplification of ethical questions. Life becomes a battle between Good and Evil. Characters, instead of being realistic, that is to say human, that is to say neither wholly good nor wholly bad, tend to become entirely black or white. This is the effect of imposing a static, idealist moral code upon the actual movement and complexity of human behaviour. A static pattern imposed upon a changing, developing object is bound to be inadequate. The best of the romances, of course (much of Malory for instance), avoid these crudities and come thereby that much nearer realism and life. The impulse towards realism in prose literature was part and parcel of the breakdown of feudalism and of the revolution that transformed the feudal world. Because today the term bourgeois is connected in our minds with people wellestablished, comfortable, conservative, it is not easy for us to think of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class. But we must recall that this was the very class which in seventeenth-century England organised the remarkable, democratic New Model Army, cut off the King’s head and established the republican Commonwealth. The commercial bourgeoisie were revolutionaries against the feudal order because the feudal order denied them freedom. It denied them freedom, physically, legally, spiritually, to do what they wanted to do, to develop the way they needs must develop. The feudal world, based on static property-relationships, exalting an unchanging, God-ordained hierarchy in Church and State, was a prison to the rising commercial class and to their artists and thinkers. Freedom to trade, freedom to explore, freedom to investigate, freedom to invent, freedom to evolve an adequate philosophy, these were the supreme, undeniable needs of the men of the new society, and for them they were prepared, as men always must be for their necessary freedoms, to die.

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They were prepared to risk death on the high seas or on the battlefields; they were prepared, in full consciousness and with the black horror of the medieval hell as the reward of error, to go to the block or to the fire. And the bourgeois writers, exalted by their vision of a world of profit and delight, Of power and honour and omnipotence, were revolutionaries too, prepared like Faustus to play for the very highest and most desperate stakes in their task of forging a new literature adequate and helpful to the revolutionary consciousness of their age. In the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the critical period of revolutionary transformation, the main emphasis and achievement in literature was in poetry. In the eighteenth century it is in prose. The shift corresponds to the changing needs and spirit of society. Most of us tend to assume, until we think more carefully about it, that prose is simpler, more ‘natural’ and therefore probably older than poetry. But we now know from anthropologists that poetry is almost certainly a more primitive and historically an earlier development than prose. Because early literature is oral and not written down it is hard to get to know very much about it, and only slowly are we beginning to delve into the fascinating problems of the origins of literature. Such a study is not, however, an academic one in the narrow sense, indeed it is one from which the pedants tend to sheer off because it brings them up against too many inconvenient questions (the whole issue is therefore too often shelved on the grounds that we have not sufficient objective material). The basic questions involved are: what is the purpose of poetry and prose? What functions do they perform in primitive society and why therefore do they arise? Clearly in the light of such questions many of the stock ‘theories’ of literature, that it is ‘self-expression’, that it gives delight, that it has something to do with the eternal verities, are hopelessly inadequate. Obviously literature expresses the self of the author (though when we recall that in primitive art there is often no one ‘author’ the problem becomes less simple); obviously it has something to do with long-term truths (or we would get nothing out of Homer today); the important questions are, why? In what way? How does literature work? It seems reasonably certain that while the earliest poetry in primitive society is connected with ritual and work…, prose or non-rhythmical speech is the language of private persuasion. Poetry arises before prose not only because (in a period when writing is not yet practised) it is easier to remember and hand on (that is a consequence rather than a cause), but because it helps the people in their necessary common rituals through which they achieve their collective ability to master nature. The primitive affinity of poetry is with magic. Prose arises later as science gradually supersedes magic and conscious control replaces instinctive emotion. Prose is a later, more sophisticated use of language than primitive poetry precisely because it presupposes a more objective, controlled and

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conscious view of reality. Stories…can only come into existence as men become conscious, however imperfectly, of social processes and man’s complicated, unending struggle against nature. This objective quality of prose, that it makes coherent some facet of outer reality already apprehended, is very significant. It explains, for instance, why it is more possible to translate a novel than a poem. And it explains why in eighteenth-century England there should have been a particular impulse towards prose-writing. For literature to the bourgeois writers of this period was, above all, a means of taking stock of the new society. A medium which could express a realistic and objective curiosity about man and his world, this was what they were after. It was the search for such a medium that led Fielding to describe Joseph Andrews as a ‘comic epic poem in prose’. Their task was not so much to adapt themselves to a revolutionary situation as to cull and examine what that revolution had produced. They were themselves revolutionaries only in the sense that they participated in the consequences of a revolution; they were more free and therefore more realistic than their predecessors to just the extent and in just those ways that the English bourgeois revolution involved in fact an increase in human freedom. We must not push too far this distinction between prose and poetry because in practice the two interpenetrate and it would be disastrous to underestimate the degree to which all modern novelists use language poetically. But we will do well, nevertheless, to bear in mind some of the fundamental problems involved in this difficult subject. Two points in particular are worth emphasising. In the first place I think it is as well to approach the study of a great body of prose literature, such as the English novel, with the realisation that prose is not just poetry’s plain sister, a haphazard, prosaic (how significant the word is!), inferior, easy alternative to verse, but that it is a great and wonderful field of human activity and experiment. I think it is good to realise that the development of prose-writing is not a mean or humdrum part of man’s history, but that it is linked close to his continuous, infinitely rich and various struggle to control his world and transform it, to evolve a philosophy adequate to his necessities and a society adequate to his desires. And particularly it is worth bearing in mind that prose is an advanced, subtle, precise form of human expression, presupposing a formidable selfconsciousness, a delicacy of control which it has taken human beings untold centuries to acquire. Secondly, I believe even this superficial glance at the origins of literature gives us a clue to our question: why did the novel arise when it did? Why did the medieval romance not continue to satisfy the needs of the men and women of the bourgeois revolution? The answer, at bottom, is that the bourgeoisie, in order to win its freedom from the feudal order, had to tear the veil of romance from the face of feudalism. To the bourgeois man, as we have seen, feudal society was not satisfying but frustrating. And so he felt no impulse to defend that society and no sympathy with a literature designed to recommend its values and conceal its limitations. On the contrary his every need and instinct urged him to expose and undermine feudal standards and sanctities. Unlike the feudal ruling class he did not feel himself immediately

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threatened by revelations of the truth about the world and so he was not afraid of realism. The first revolutionary bourgeois writers, like Rabelais, were by no means conscious of being bourgeois or, in any political sense, revolutionary. Rabelais is soaked in the learning and tradition of the Middle Ages; no book tells us so well as his what medieval France was like. And yet Rabelais, in his full-blooded assertion of the glory of physical living, in his colossal irreverence, in his profound and daring inventiveness, in the realism which underlies his most fantastic flights and images, is utterly anti-romantic. His exuberance and his laughter shatter every pretence of the world of chivalry. No idealised picture of genteel womanhood could be proof against the irrepressible obscenity of a Panurge. Gargantua and Pantagruel enlarged the scope and potentialities of prose literature both through Rabelais’ view of life (the content of the book) and his language (its form). And, as always, the form and content are inseparable. The hilarious verbal experiments, the incredible lists, the inventive energy of the style cannot be isolated from what Rabelais had to say: the flights of fantasy, the delight in science, the confidence in human reason, the respect for the human creature in all its absurdity, the refusal to be bamboozled about mankind. And because Rabelais’ book was carried over into English by translators of genius who understood precisely what he was saying, he enriched the English language too and gave to English prose-writers…a sense of the variety and potentiality of their medium. Rabelais’ use of language is to a large extent poetic, that is to say words are used for their own associative values, and rhythms originate not simply from an attempt to record accurately the actual values of speech, but from an attempt to use, weight and give new significance to those values. In Rabelais, then, we find a revolutionary impulse towards realism in a still essentially medieval man, but when, half a century latter, in 1605, the first part of Don Quixote appeared, the revolt against medieval standards had become fully conscious. Cervantes’ novel is sometimes regarded as essentially a burlesque. One might as well describe Macbeth as a play about witchcraft. Certainly Cervantes’ purpose is to a high degree satirical— ‘the Fall and Destruction of that monstrous Heap of illcontrived Romances, which, though abhorr’d by many, have so strangely infatuated the greater part of Mankind’—but romance is satirised not for its own sake but because it hinders the writer from telling the truth about life in all its aspects. To over-emphasise the negative side of Don Quixote is to reduce it to the stature of a Cold Comfort Farm; whereas Cervantes’ tremendous achievement is that, quite apart from the intrinsic value of his own rich creation, he re-asserted in story-telling the tradition of the realistic epic. The fantasy of romance carries away the reader in order that he need not face life, the fantasy of Don Quixote quickens his sense of life, involves him in a critical questioning of values and attitudes, imposes a pattern on experience which deepens its meaning. Cervantes knew quite well that the destruction of romance was a necessary act in the freeing of the world from the chains of feudalism. And he closes his book with the words:

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As for me, I must esteem myself happy, to have been the first that render’d those fabulous, nonsensical stories of Knight-Errantry, the object of the public Aversion. They are already going down, and I do not doubt but they will drop and fall altogether in good Earnest, never to rise again. Adieu. Notes 1 I should make it quite clear that I am not referring to the great medieval epics— such as the Niebelungenlied or the Chanson de Roland—which are not romance in the sense I use the word. 2 Vinaver, E. (1947) The Works of Thomas Malory, Introduction, p.lxv.

Realism and the novel form by Ian Watt

From: Watt, I. (1972) The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Penguin Books, pp.9–23, 33–36 (first published 1957). There are still no wholly satisfactory answers to many of the general questions which anyone interested in the early eighteenth-century novelists and their works is likely to ask: Is the novel a new literary form? And if we assume, as is commonly done, that it is, and that it was begun by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, how does it differ from the prose fiction of the past, from that of Greece, for example, or that of the Middle Ages, or of seventeenth-century France? And is there any reason why these differences appeared when and where they did? Such large questions are never easy to approach, much less to answer, and they are particularly difficult in this case because Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding do not in the usual sense constitute a literary school. Indeed their works show so little sign of mutual influence and are so different in nature that at first sight it appears that our curiosity about the rise of the novel is unlikely to find any satisfaction other than the meagre one afforded by the terms ‘genius’ and ‘accident’, the twin faces on the Janus of the dead ends of literary history. We cannot, of course, do without them: on the other hand there is not much we can do with them. The present inquiry therefore takes another direction: assuming that the appearance of our first three novelists within a single generation was probably not sheer accident, and that their geniuses could not have created the new form unless the conditions of the time had also been favourable, it attempts to discover what these favourable conditions in the literary and social situation were, and in what ways Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding were its beneficiaries. For this investigation our first need is a working definition of the characteristics of the novel—a definition sufficiently narrow to exclude previous types of narrative and yet broad enough to apply to whatever is usually put in the novel category. The novelists themselves do not help us very much here. It is true that both Richardson and Fielding saw themselves as founders of a new kind of writing, and that both viewed their work as involving a break with the old-fashioned romances; but neither they nor their contemporaries provide us with the kind of characterization of the new genre that we need; indeed they did not even canonize the changed nature of their fiction by a change in nomenclature—our usage of the term ‘novel’ was not fully established until the end of the eighteenth century.

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With the help of their larger perspective the historians of the novel have been able to do much more to determine the idiosyncratic features of the new form. Briefly, they have seen ‘realism’ as the defining characteristic which differentiates the work of the early eighteenth-century novelists from previous fiction. With their picture— that of writers otherwise different but alike in this quality of ‘realism’—one’s initial reservation must surely be that the term itself needs further explanation, if only because to use it without qualification as a defining characteristic of the novel might otherwise carry the invidious suggestion that all previous writers and literary forms pursued the unreal. The main critical associations of the term ‘realism’ are with the French school of Realists. ‘Réalisme’ was apparently first used as an aesthetic description in 1835 to denote the vérité humaine of Rembrandt as opposed to the idéalité poétique of neoclassical painting; it was later consecrated as a specifically literary term by the foundation in 1856 of Réalisme, a journal edited by Duranty. Unfortunately much of the usefulness of the word was soon lost in the bitter controversies over the low’ subjects and allegedly immoral tendencies of Flaubert and his successors. As a result, ‘realism’ came to be used primarily as the antonym of ‘idealism’, and this sense, which is actually a reflection of the position taken by the enemies of the French Realists, has in fact coloured much critical and historical writing about the novel. The prehistory of the form has commonly been envisaged as a matter of tracing the continuity between all earlier fiction which portrayed low life: the story of the Ephesian matron is ‘realistic’ because it shows that sexual appetite is stronger than wifely sorrow; and the fabliau or the picaresque tale are ‘realistic’ because economic or carnal motives are given pride of place in their presentation of human behaviour. By the same implicit premise, the English eighteenth-century novelists, together with Furetière, Scarron, and Lesage in France, are regarded as the eventual climax of this tradition: the ‘realism’ of the novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding is closely associated with the fact that Moll Flanders is a thief, Pamela a hypocrite, and Tom Jones a fornicator. This use of ‘realism’, however, has the grave defect of obscuring what is probably the most original feature of the novel form. If the novel were realistic merely because it saw life from the seamy side, it would only be an inverted romance; but in fact it surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it. This, of course, is very close to the position of the French Realists themselves, who asserted that if their novels tended to differ from the more flattering pictures of humanity presented by many established ethical, social, and literary codes, it was merely because they were the product of a more dispassionate and scientific scrutiny of life than had ever been attempted before. It is far from clear that this ideal of scientific objectivity is desirable, and it certainly cannot be realized in practice: nevertheless it is very significant that, in the first sustained effort of the new genre to become critically aware of its aims and methods, the French Realists should have drawn attention to an issue which the novel raises more sharply than any other

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literary form—the problem of the correspondence between the literary work and the reality which it imitates. This is essentially an epistemological problem, and it therefore seems likely that the nature of the novel’s realism, whether in the early eighteenth century or later, can best be clarified by the help of those professionally concerned with the analysis of concepts, the philosophers. By a paradox that will surprise only the neophyte, the term ‘realism’ in philosophy is most strictly applied to a view of reality diametrically opposed to that of common usage—to the view held by the scholastic Realists of the Middle Ages that it is universals, classes, or abstractions, and not the particular, concrete objects of sense-perception, which are the true ‘realities’. This, at first sight, appears unhelpful, since in the novel, more than in any other genre, general truths only exist post res; but the very unfamiliarity of the point of view of scholastic Realism at least serves to draw attention to a characteristic of the novel which is analogous to the changed philosophical meaning of ‘realism’ today: the novel arose in the modern period, a period whose general intellectual orientation was most decisively separated from its classical and medieval heritage by its rejection —or at least its attempted rejection— of universals. Modern realism, of course, begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses: it has its origins in Descartes and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century. But the view that the external world is real, and that our senses give us a true report of it, obviously does not in itself throw much light on literary realism; since almost everyone, in all ages, has in one way or another been forced to some such conclusion about the external world by his own experience, literature has always been to some extent exposed to the same epistemological naivety. Further, the distinctive tenets of realist epistemology, and the controversies associated with them, are for the most part much too specialized in nature to have much bearing on literature. What is important to the novel in philosophical realism is much less specific; it is rather the general temper of realist thought, the methods of investigation it has used, and the kinds of problems it has raised. The general temper of philosophical realism has been critical, anti-traditional, and innovating; its method has been the study of the particulars of experience by the individual investigator, who, ideally at least, is free from the body of past assumption and traditional beliefs; and it has given a peculiar importance to semantics, to the problem of the nature of the correspondence between words and reality. All of these features of philosophical realism have analogies to distinctive features of the novel form, analogies which draw attention to the characteristic kind of correspondence between life and literature which has obtained in prose fiction since the novels of Defoe and Richardson. (a) The greatness of Descartes was primarily one of method, of the thoroughness of his determination to accept nothing on trust; and his Discourse on Method (1637) and his Meditations did much to bring about the modern assumption whereby the pursuit of truth is conceived of as a wholly individual matter, logically independent

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of the tradition of past thought, and indeed as more likely to be arrived at by a departure from it. The novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects this individualist and innovating reorientation. Previous literary forms had reflected the general tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the major test of truth: the plots of classical and renaissance epic, for example, were based on past history or fable, and the merits of the author’s treatment were judged largely according to a view of literary decorum derived from the accepted models in the genre. This literary traditionalism was first and most fully challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience—individual experience which is always unique and therefore new. The novel is thus the logical literary vehicle of a culture which, in the last few centuries, has set an unprecedented value on originality, on the novel; and it is therefore well named. This emphasis on the new accounts for some of the critical difficulties which the novel is widely agreed to present. When we judge a work in another genre, a recognition of its literary models is often important and sometimes essential; our evaluation depends to a large extent on our analysis of the author’s skill in handling the appropriate formal conventions. On the other hand, it is surely very damaging for a novel to be in any sense an imitation of another literary work: and the reason for this seems to be that since the novelist’s primary task is to convey the impression of fidelity to human experience, attention to any pre-established formal conventions can only endanger his success. What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel’s formal conventions would seem to be the price it must pay for its realism. But the absence of formal conventions in the novel is unimportant compared to its rejection of traditional plots. Plot, of course, is not a simple matter, and the degree of its originality or otherwise is never easy to determine; nevertheless a broad and necessarily summary comparison between the novel and previous literary forms reveals an important difference: Defoe and Richardson are the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legend, or previous literature. In this they differ from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, for instance, who, like the writers of Greece and Rome, habitually used traditional plots; and who did so, in the last analysis, because they accepted the general premise of their times that, since Nature is essentially complete and unchanging, its records, whether scriptural, legendary, or historical, constitute a definitive repertoire of human experience. This point of view continued to be expressed until the nineteenth century; the opponents of Balzac, for example, used it to deride his preoccupation with contemporary and, in their view, ephemeral reality. But at the same time, from the Renaissance onwards, there was a growing tendency for individual experience to replace collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of reality; and this transition would seem to constitute an important part of the general cultural background of the rise of the novel.

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It is significant that the trend in favour of originality found its first powerful expression in England, and in the eighteenth century; the very word ‘original’ took on its modern meaning at this time, by a semantic reversal which is a parallel to the change in the meaning of ‘realism’. We have seen that, from the medieval belief in the reality of universals, ‘realism’ had come to denote a belief in the individual apprehension of reality through the senses: similarly the term ‘original’ which in the Middle Ages had meant ‘having existing from the first’ came to mean ‘underived, independent, first-hand’; and by the time that Edward Young in his epoch-making Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) hailed Richardson as ‘a genius as well moral as original’,1 the word could be used as a term of praise meaning ‘novel or fresh in character or style’. The novel’s use of non-traditional plots is an early and probably independent manifestation of this emphasis. When Defoe, for example, began to write fiction he took little notice of the dominant critical theory of the day, which still inclined towards the use of traditional plots; instead, he merely allowed his narrative order to flow spontaneously from his own sense of what his protagonists might plausibly do next. In so doing Defoe initiated an important new tendency in fiction: his total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir is as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes’s cogito ergo sum was in philosophy. After Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding in their very different ways continued what was to become the novel’s usual practice, the use of non-traditional plots, either wholly invented or based in part on a contemporary incident. It cannot be claimed that either of them completely achieved that interpenetration of plot, character, and emergent moral theme which is found in the highest examples of the art of the novel. But it must be remembered that the task was not an easy one, particularly at a time when the established literary outlet for the creative imagination lay in eliciting an individual pattern and a contemporary significance from a plot that was not itself novel. (b) Much else besides the plot had to be changed in the tradition of fiction before the novel could embody the individual apprehension of reality as freely as the method of Descartes and Locke allowed their thought to spring from the immediate facts of consciousness. To begin with, the actors in the plot and the scene of their actions had to be placed in a new literary perspective: the plot had to be acted by particular people in particular circumstances, rather than, as had been common in the past, by general human types against a background primarily determined by the appropriate literary convention. This literary change was analogous to the rejection of universals and the emphasis on particulars which characterizes philosophic realism… both the new trends in philosophy and the related formal characteristics of the novel were contrary to the dominant literary outlook. For the critical tradition in the early eighteenth century was still governed by the strong classical preference for the general and universal… however, a contrary aesthetic tendency in favour of particularity soon began to assert itself, largely as a result of the application to literary problems of the

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psychological approach of Hobbes and Locke. Lord Kames was perhaps the most forthright early spokesman of this tendency. In his Elements of Criticism (1762) he declared that ‘abstract or general terms have no good effect in any composition for amusement; because it is only of particular objects that images can be formed’;2 and Kames went on to claim that, contrary to general opinion, Shakespeare’s appeal lay in the fact that ‘every article in his descriptions is particular, as in nature’. In this matter, as in that of originality, Defoe and Richardson established the characteristic literary direction of the novel form long before it could count on any support from critical theory. Not all will agree with Kames that ‘every article’ in Shakespeare’s descriptions is particular; but particularity of description has always been considered typical of the narrative manner of Robinson Crusoe and Pamela. Richardson’s first biographer, indeed, Mrs Barbauld, described his genius in terms of an analogy which has continually figured in the controversy between neo-classical generality and realistic particularity. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for example, expressed his neo-classical orthodoxy by preferring the ‘great and general ideas’ of Italian painting to the ‘literal truth and…minute exactness in the detail of nature modified by accident’ of the Dutch school;3 whereas the French Realists, it will be remembered, had followed the vérité humaine of Rembrandt, rather than the idéalité poétique of the classical school. Mrs Barbauld accurately indicated Richardson’s position in this conflict when she wrote that he had ‘the accuracy of finish of a Dutch painter… content to produce effects by the patient labour of minuteness’.4… The concept of realistic particularity in literature is itself somewhat too general to be capable of concrete demonstration: for such demonstration to be possible the relationship of realistic particularity to some specific aspects of narrative technique must first be established. Two such aspects suggest themselves as of especial importance in the novel—characterization, and presentation of background: the novel is surely distinguished from other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualization of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment. (c) Philosophically the particularizing approach to character resolves itself into the problem of defining the individual person. Once Descartes had given the thought processes within the individual’s consciousness supreme importance, the philosophical problems connected with personal identity naturally attracted a great deal of attention. In England, for example, Locke, Bishop Butler, Berkeley, Hume, and Reid all debated the issue, and the controversy even reached the pages of the Spectator.5 The parallel here between the tradition of realist thought and the formal innovations of the early novelists is obvious: both philosophers and novelists paid greater attention to the particular individual than had been common before. But the great attention paid in the novel to the particularization of character is itself such a large question that we will consider only one of its more manageable aspects: the way that the novelist typically indicates his intention of presenting a character as a particular individual by naming him in exactly the same way as particular individuals are named in ordinary life.

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Logically the problem of individual identity is closely related to the epistemological status of proper names; for, in the words of Hobbes: ‘Proper names bring to mind one thing only; universals recall any one of many.’6 Proper names have exactly the same function in social life: they are the verbal expression of the particular identity of each individual person. In literature, however, this function of proper names was first fully established in the novel. Characters in previous forms of literature, of course, were usually given proper names; but the kind of names actually used showed that the author was not trying to establish his characters as completely individualized entities. The precepts of classical and renaissance criticism agreed with the practice of their literature in preferring either historical names or type names. In either case, the names set the characters in the context of a large body of expectations primarily formed from past literature, rather than from the context of contemporary life. Even in comedy, where characters were not usually historical but invented, the names were supposed to be ‘characteristic’, as Aristotle tells us,7 and they tended to remain so until long after the rise of the novel. Earlier types of prose fiction had also tended to use proper names that were characteristic, or non-particular and unrealistic in some other way; names that either, like those of Rabelais, Sidney, or Bunyan, denoted particular qualities, or like those of Lyly, Aphra Behn, or Mrs Manley carried foreign, archaic, or literary connotations which excluded any suggestion of real and contemporary life. The primarily literary and conventional orientation of these proper names was further attested by the fact that there was usually only one of them—Mr Badman or Euphues; unlike people in ordinary life, the characters of fiction did not have both given name and surname. The early novelists, however, made an extremely significant break with tradition, and named their characters in such a way as to suggest that they were to be regarded as particular individuals in the contemporary social environment. Defoe’s use of proper names is casual and sometimes contradictory; but he very rarely gives names that are conventional or fanciful—one possible exception, Roxana, is a pseudonym which is fully explained; and most of the main characters such as Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders have complete and realistic names or aliases. Richardson continued this practice, but was much more careful and gave all of his major characters, and even most of his minor ones, both a given name and a surname. He also faced a minor but not unimportant problem in novel writing , that of giving names that are subtly appropriate and suggestive, yet sound like ordinary realistic ones. Thus the romance-connotations of Pamela are controlled by the commonplace family name of Andrews; both Clarissa Harlowe and Robert Lovelace are in many ways appropriately named; and indeed nearly all Richardson’s proper names, from Mrs Sinclair to Sir Charles Grandison, sound authentic and are yet suited to the personalities of the bearers. Fielding, as an anonymous contemporary critic pointed out, christened his characters ‘not with fantastic high-sounding Names, but such as, tho’ they sometimes had some reference to the Character, had a more modern termination’.8

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Such names as Heartfree, Allworthy and Square are certainly modernized versions of the type name, although they are just credible; even Western or Tom Jones suggest very strongly that Fielding had his eye as much on the general type as on the particular individual. This, however, does not controvert the present argument, for it will surely be generally agreed that Fielding’s practice in the naming, and indeed in the whole portrayal of his characters, is a departure from the usually treatment of these matters in the novel. Not, as we have seen in Richardson’s case, that there is no place in the novel for proper names that are in some way appropriate to the character concerned: but that this appropriateness must not be such as to impair the primary function of the name, which is to symbolize the fact that the character is to be regarded as though he were a particular person and not a type. Fielding, indeed, seems to have realized this by the time he came to write his last novel, Amelia; there his neo-classical preference for type-names finds expression only in such minor characters as Justice Thrasher and Bondum the bailiff; and all the main characters—the Booths, Miss Matthews, Dr Harrison, Colonel James, Sergeant Atkinson, Captain Trent, and Mrs Bennet, for example—have ordinary and contemporary names. There is, indeed, some evidence that Fielding, like some modern novelists, took these names somewhat at random from a printed list of contemporary persons—all the surnames given above are in the list of subscribers to the 1724 folio edition of Gilbert Burnet’s History of His Own Time, an edition which Fielding is known to have owned. Whether this is so or not, it is certain that Fielding made considerable and increasing concessions to the custom initiated by Defoe and Richardson of using ordinary contemporary proper names for their characters. Although this custom was not always followed by some of the later eighteenth-century novelists, such as Smollett and Sterne, it was later established as part of the tradition of the form; and, as Henry James pointed out with respect to Trollope’s fecund cleric Mr Quiverful, the novelist can only break with the tradition at the cost of destroying the reader’s belief in the literal reality of the character concerned. (d) Locke had defined personal identity as an identity of consciousness through duration in time; the individual was in touch with his own continuing identity through memory of his past thoughts and actions.9 This location of the source of personal identity in the repertoire of its memories was continued by Hume: ‘Had we no memory, we never should have any notion of causation, nor consequently of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person.’10 Such a point of view is characteristic of the novel; many novelists, from Sterne to Proust, have made their subject the exploration of the personality as it is defined in the interpenetration of its past and present self-awareness. Time is an essential category in another related but more external approach to the problem of defining the individuality of any object. The ‘principle of individuation’ accepted by Locke was that of existence at a particular locus in space and time: since, as he wrote, ‘ideas become general by separating from them the circumstances of time and place’,11 so they become particular only when both these circumstances are

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specified. In the same way the characters of the novel can only be individualized if they are set in a background of particularized time and place. Both the philosophy and the literature of Greece and Rome were deeply influenced by Plato’s view that the Forms or Ideas were the ultimate realities behind the concrete objects of the temporal world. These forms were conceived as timeless and unchanging,12 and thus reflected the basic premise of their civilization in general that nothing happened or could happen whose fundamental meaning was not independent of the flux of time. This premise is diametrically opposed to the outlook which has established itself since the Renaissance, and which views time, not only as a crucial dimension of the physical world, but as the shaping force of man’s individual and collective history. The novel is in nothing so characteristic of our culture as in the way that it reflects this characteristic orientation of modern thought… So much for the main analogies between realism in philosophy and literature. They are not proposed as exact; philosophy is one thing and literature is another. Nor do the analogies depend in any way on the presumption that the realist tradition in philosophy was a cause of the realism of the novel. That there was some influence is very likely, especially through Locke, whose thought everywhere pervades the eighteenth-century climate of opinion. But if a causal relationship of any importance exists it is probably much less direct: both the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel manifestations of larger change—that vast transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different one—one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places. Here, however, we are concerned with a much more limited conception, with the extent to which the analogy with philosophical realism helps to isolate and define the distinctive narrative mode of the novel. This, it has been suggested, is the sum of literary techniques whereby the novel’s imitation of human life follows the procedures adopted by philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and report the truth. These procedures are by no means confined to philosophy; they tend, in fact, to be followed whenever the relation to reality of any report of an event is being investigated. The novel’s mode of imitating reality may therefore be equally well summarized in terms of the procedures of another group of specialists in epistemology, the jury in a court of law. Their expectations, and those of the novel reader coincide in many ways: both want to know ‘all of the particulars’ of a given case—the time and place of the occurrence; both must be satisfied as to the identities of the parties concerned, and will refuse to accept evidence about anyone called Sir Toby Belch or Mr Badman—still less about a Chloe who has no surname and is ‘common as the air’; and they also expect the witnesses to tell the story ‘in his own words’. The jury, in fact, takes the ‘circumstantial view of life’, which T.H.Green13 found to be the characteristic outlook of the novel.

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The narrative method whereby the novel embodies this circumstantial view of life may be called its formal realism; formal, because the term realism does not here refer to any special literary doctrine or purpose, but only to a set of narrative procedures which are so commonly found together in the novel, and so rarely in other literary genres, that they may be regarded as typical of the form itself. Formal realism, in fact, is the narrative embodiment of a premise that Defoe and Richardson accepted very literally, but which is implicit in the novel form in general: the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms. Formal realism is, of course, like the rules of evidence, only a convention; and there is no reason why the report on human life which is presented by it should be in fact any truer than those presented through the very different conventions of other literary genres. The novel’s air of total authenticity, indeed, does tend to authorize confusion on this point: and the tendency of some Realists and Naturalists to forget that the accurate transcription of actuality does not necessarily produce a work of any real truth or enduring literary value is no doubt partly responsible for the rather widespread distaste for Realism and all its works which is current today. This distaste, however, may also promote critical confusion by leading us into the opposite error; we must not allow an awareness of certain shortcomings in the aims of the Realist school to obscure the very considerable extent to which the novel in general, as much in Joyce as in Zola, employs the literary means here called formal realism. Nor must we forget that, although formal realism is only a convention, it has, like all literary conventions, its own peculiar advantages. There are important differences in the degree to which different literary forms imitate reality; and the formal realism of the novel allows a more immediate imitation of individual experience set in its temporal and spatial environment than do other literary forms. Consequently the novel’s conventions make much smaller demands on the audience than do most literary conventions; and this surely explains why the majority of readers in the last two hundred years have found in the novel the literary form which most closely satisfies their wishes for a close correspondence between life and art. Nor are the advantages of the close and detailed correspondence to real life offered by formal realism limited to assisting the novel’s popularity; they are also related to its most distinctive literary qualities. Notes 1 Works (1773), V, 125. 2 1763 ed, III, pp.198–9. 3 Idler, No. 79 (1759).

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Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 1804, I, cxxxvii. No. 578 (1714). Leviathan (1651), Pt I, Ch. 4. Poetics, Ch. 9. Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr Fielding (1751), p.18. This whole question is treated more fully in my ‘The Naming of the Characters in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding’, RES, XXV (1949), pp.332–38. Human Understanding, Bk II, Ch. 27, Sects, ix, x. Treatise of Human Nature, Bk I, Pt 4, Sect. vi. Human Understanding, Bk III, Ch. 3, Sect. vi. Plato does not specifically state that the Ideas are timeless, but the notion, which dates from Aristotle (Metaphysics, Bk XII, Ch. 6), underlies the whole system of thought with which they are associated. ‘Estimate of the value and influence of works of fiction in modern times’ (1862), Works, ed. Nettleship (London, 1888), III, p.37.

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Jane Austen and the war of ideas by Marilyn Butler

From: Butler, M. (1987) Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Clarendon Press, pp.162, 164–7, 206–18 (first published 1975). For good or ill her twentieth-century readers seem agreed that Jane Austen stands aside from the ideological convulsions that accompanied and followed the French Revolution. But detachment is not the quality that evidently strikes her contemporaries. Her first critics may be aware of her unusual tact in handling her didactic content. Richard Whately, noting this, compares her very favourably with Maria Edgeworth. It is a well-known passage of criticism, shrewd, sensible, and in line with twentieth-century conceptions. Whately is not saying, however, that Jane Austen has less didactic content than Maria Edgeworth: merely that she manages it better. It is clear from the development of his argument that he does not look upon Jane Austen’s unobtrusiveness as an admirable quality in any final sense. It is a virtue because it gives additional effect to her impeccable orthodoxy: Miss Austen has the merit (in our judgement most essential) of being evidently a Christian writer; a merit which is much enhanced, both on the score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion being not at all obtrusive. She might defy the most fastidious critic to call any of her novels… a ‘dramatic sermon’. The subject is rather alluded to, and that incidentally, than studiously brought forward and dwelt upon.1 …The purpose of this study…is to show that her manner as a novelist is broadly that of the conservative Christian moralist of the 1790s;2 that she continues to write as a Christian, with minor modifications only to accord with the prevailing manner; and that before the disputatious sectarianism of the next generation, it is still possible to draw a critical divide where Whately puts it: between the advocates of a Christian conservatism on the one hand, with their pessimistic view of man’s nature, and their belief in external authority; on the other hand, progressives, sentimentalists, revolutionaries, with their optimism about man, and their preference for spontaneous personal impulse against rules imposed from without… Study of the novel of the 1790s shows how the two types of partisan differ in placing the hero in his environment. One test of allegiance is the degree of sympathy with which a novelist views the feelings of his hero. Another, whether the

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plot, broadly, suggests a victim suffering at the hands of society, or a misguided individual rebelling against it. The first issue arouses real differences of interpretation among readers of Jane Austen, and is best left to an examination of the individual novels. But on the second, the question of her plot—or, for the two are hardly separable, her form— some preliminary generalization is possible. Jane Austen moves turn and turn about between two plots, which can be crudely characterized as built about the Heroine who is Right and the Heroine who is Wrong. The first type, the Heroine who is Right, acts as spokesman for conservative orthodoxy. Elinor, Fanny, and Anne advocate principle, duty, and the sacrifice of private inclination to the service of others. The Heroines who are Wrong arrive at this state of true understanding only late in the day: they begin in intellectual error, brought about in Catherine by immaturity and false lights, but in Elizabeth and Emma by the more spiritual-looking errors of pride and presumption. In these three novels the dénouement follows the heroine’s discovery of her mistake, and Elizabeth’s exclamation is representative. ‘I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away… Till this moment, I never knew myself.’ The moment of selfdiscovery and self-abasement, followed by the resolve in future to follow reason, is the climactic moment of the majority of anti-jacobin novels. But of course the same moment occurs in the other three novels: in essence the action of all six Jane Austen novels is the same. In Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, however, it is a character other than the heroine, or more typically at least two characters, not only a lover but a parent-figure, who must perceive how far they have been deluding themselves. The difference between the two types of plot does not lie in the action, but in the relationship of the central character to the action. In the one case the heroine herself makes the moral discovery, in the other she brings it about in someone else. Where the heroine is fallible, the novel as a whole can be said to enact the conservative case; where the heroine is exemplary, she models it. The great nineteenth-century novelists changed the reader’s relationship to the consciousness of the central character, so that we are trained to involve ourselves more sympathetically than critically in the inward experience a novel has to offer. We do not look primarily to the plot to convey a meaning, and we may have to be cajoled, as a conscious exercise in historicism, into seeing that earlier novels may be about general and ethical rather than personal and emotional truths. Jane Austen’s achievement is to naturalize a didactic tradition; but she relies on our sharing her beliefs, or at least identifying what they are. Her subtlety is such that, from the first, inattentive readers might be misled—as Maria Edgeworth was when she found Emma merely trivial… But Whately saw more clearly, and Scott, and others too, or Jane Austen would not have been reviewed so seriously and approvingly as she was. The language of partisan writing was there in her novels for the alert to read: the day-to-day realism, the sceptical treatment of inward ‘lights’, and above all the chastisement that her plots meted out to presumption… The subject of Pride and Prejudice is what the title indicates: the sin of pride, obnoxious to the Christian, which takes the form of a complacency about the self

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and a correspondingly lower opinion, or prejudice, about others. Darcy’s pride is humbled mid-way through the novel, when he proposes to Elizabeth and to his astonishment is rejected. The lesson he has to learn is not quite that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven; it is more that we have no innate worth, either of social status or abilities. We have to earn our right to consideration by respect for others, and continuous watchfulness of ourselves. Elizabeth’s corresponding sin is more subtle and her enlightenment requires the space of the whole book. To begin with she seems unconscious that she suffers from pride at all. Quick of observation, encouraged by her father’s example to take delight in the follies and vanities of others, she sees everyone’s mistakes but her own. The false proffers of friendship from Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst do not deceive her: she already has too low an opinion of them. She is quick to see and enjoy the foibles of Mr. Collins, as she has always taken pleasure from those of Sir William Lucas. But she also quite unreasonably persists in thinking ill of Darcy, and, just as perversely, in thinking well of Wickham, even when the evidence that he is a fortune-hunter is placed before her. Elizabeth’s pride in her own fallible perceptions is her governing characteristic. There has been a curious tendency to take ‘Pride’ and ‘Prejudice’ to be polar qualities, like ‘Sense’ and ‘Sensibility’, whereas in the course of the novel we generally see them associated within the same character.3 The proud Lady Catherine is certainly prejudiced, and the prejudiced Elizabeth can validly be accused of pride. Caroline Bingley after all declares that her manners are ‘a mixture of pride and impertinence’,4 and though we need not take the jealous Miss Bingley too literally as to Elizabeth’s manners, on Elizabeth’s moral character she probably speaks more truth than she knows. So does the sententious Mary. Her pompous definitions follow Elizabeth’s flippant reference to her own pride as well as to Darcy’s: ‘…I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.’ ‘Pride’, observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, ‘is a very common failing I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of selfcomplacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonimously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.’ It is a distinction which on the whole works in the book, for both Elizabeth and Darcy are too proud to be vain. Elizabeth, who is so quick about the mistakes of others, has no inkling of her own fallibility until Darcy’s proposal and the explanatory letter which follows it. The confrontation between these two central characters naturally brings about mutual illumination, not because one has opposite qualities which the other must learn to adopt, but because each discovers the other to be worthy of respect: the very

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admission of the value of an opponent forces both Elizabeth and Darcy to be more humble about themselves. Elizabeth’s first concession is relatively trivial: she sees initially that she has been mistaken about Wickham. But it is more than this. As she examines her own mental processes, she notices that she has never been objective about him. She never tried to check his account of himself against information about his early life, if she could have acquired any; or even against what would have been available, ‘some instance of goodness, some distinguished trait of integrity or benevolence’. On the contrary, the subjective impression had been enough for her. ‘His countenance, voice and manner, had established him at once in the possession of every virtue.’ She now perceives that there was objective evidence; that Wickham, a stranger, ought not to have spoken so freely; that, contrary to his boast, he had not stood his ground, but had avoided Darcy; yet at the time she persistently ignored every pointer. Conversely she begins to see that apart from her own antipathy she has no case against Darcy. She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.—Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd. ‘How despicably have I acted!’ she cried.— ‘I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.— How humiliating is this discovery!— Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.—Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.’ Later, in her confession to Jane, she is equally self-abasing: ‘…I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one’s genius, such an opening for wit to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.’ The last statement is perhaps the most perceptive utterance of Elizabeth’s selfexamination over her earlier treatment of Darcy… Elizabeth prides herself on her individualism and trusts her perceptions, never recognizing that her judgements are really grounded in her feelings. While Darcy is equally assured, his generalizations tend to be those of society at large, and he is far more careful than Elizabeth to base his arguments upon reason… Jane Austen has to allow time for her lovers to come together, and especially for Elizabeth to change her emotional antipathy for Darcy into a predisposition to love

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him, and she also needs time to bring Elizabeth to a full sense of right reasoning. In the second half of the book an event occurs, Lydia’s elopement, which Elizabeth must concede gives objective support to Darcy’s dislike of her connections. But the event has richer significance than this, since it provides a test of Mr. Bennet’s character as a father. And Mr. Bennet, with his satirical view of human folly, his irresponsible detachment from it as it is manifested in his own family, is shown to be morally very defective indeed. Elizabeth, trying to comfort him when Lydia’s affairs are at their worst, begs him not to be too severe upon himself: ‘You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to fall into it. No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough.’ And it does pass away. At least, Mr. Bennet soon resumes his characteristic tone, his ironic detachment, and his tendency to enjoy his own cleverness at the expense of others. ‘For what do we live, but to make sport of our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?’ His remarks about Wickham as a son-in-law are heavily ironic; yet he does enjoy him, as he enjoys Mr. Collins, precisely because he can see through them: ‘Much as I abominate writing, I would not give up Mr. Collins’s correspondence for any consideration. Nay, when I read a letter of his, I cannot help giving him the preference even over Wickham, much as I value the impudence and hypocrisy of my son-in-law.’ The moral exposure of Mr. Bennet is a further examination of the vices that Elizabeth, to a less culpable degree, has shared: for she is quite as much the product of her father’s influence as Darcy was of his. It is from her father that she derives the tendency that is in her to misanthropy, before her reformation begins: ‘The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.’ No wonder, then, that she is brought to a proper view of Darcy’s pride and prejudice, which, although excessive, was still in its way more reasonable, more based on objective evidence, than her own. Like Darcy, she emerges from a period of introspection concluding that, partly through a wrong upbringing, she has consistently over-valued herself. ‘For herself she was humbled; but she was proud of him.’ The most central of the antitheses in the novel is the one which contrasts the attitudes of the two pairs of central characters to the people around them. Darcy and Elizabeth are similar in being ‘satirical’: they tend consistently to adopt a low opinion of others. In this they are continuously compared with the other couple, Bingley and Jane, who are modest about themselves and charitable about others. ‘Your humility, Mr. Bingley, must disarm reproof, says Elizabeth, in pointed reference to the arrogance of Darcy. Bingley thinks well of the people of Meryton,

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Darcy ill. The arrogant Darcy is convinced, wrongly, that Elizabeth loves him; Bingley is too diffident about himself to believe that Jane returns his feeling. The same contrast is more thoroughly worked out in the conversations between Elizabeth and Jane, where it is of more moment because Elizabeth’s moral errors matter more to the reader than Darcy’s. Elizabeth has always admired Jane for her ‘candour’, her generous capacity to think well of others, and at several points in the novel she pays general tribute to the quality while in the individual case persisting in her own characteristically astringent view. Jane is surely too kind in thinking Charlotte’s motives in marrying Mr Collins may not be narrowly prudential; she has to admit that she was over-charitable about Miss Bingley; she did not see through Wickham; but she was right in two important instances, in detecting goodness where it really was—in Bingley and in Darcy. After Wickham has spread his slanders about Darcy at Meryton, Jane alone resists taking a prejudiced, hasty, or illnatured view: …everybody was pleased to think how much they had always disliked Mr. Darcy before they had known any thing of the matter. Miss Bennet was the only creature who could suppose there might be any extenuating circumstances in the case, unknown to the society of Hertfordshire; her mild and steady candour always pleaded for allowances, and urged the possibility of mistakes—but by everybody else Mr. Darcy was condemned as the worst of men. Elizabeth’s conversations with Jane, in which she is gently urged to take a more candid view, counterpoint her conversations with Darcy, in which we see her illfounded prejudices in action. Now this clearly is the kind of antithesis in which a balance is meant to be struck. Many critics have echoed Elizabeth’s remark, ‘intricate characters are the most amusing’. We would not exchange Elizabeth’s intelligence for Jane’s innocence, nor Darcy’s consistency for Bingley’s pliancy, even though the faults of the central couple lead them into worse moral error. But in fact the author does not want us to —it is clear that her view of the truly Christian character blends the best qualities of all four. Elizabeth and Darcy take a properly pessimistic view of human liability to err, and, rightly applied, their perceptiveness will be a great moral quality: for Jane Austen insists that the scrupulous self-knowledge which she prizes is the product of their kind of sceptical intelligence. The example of the other couple helps them to harness their talents to more Christian ends, by showing charity towards others and humility towards themselves…in the comparison between the two central couples, faults are identified with excesses in either extreme, and excellence lies in the mean. But the different beliefs that divide Elizabeth and Jane are not fundamental, for they concern the proper application of principles which they both share. Elizabeth’s satire versus Jane’s candour is a very different polarization from nature versus art, and it can never suggest to us that over the novel as a whole Jane Austen compromises between two views of human nature. Her moral ideal is clear: it is

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most nearly approached by Darcy and Elizabeth at the point when they have acknowledged the necessity of Jane and Bingley’s humility and candour. In their ultimate state of enlightenment, Jane Austen’s hero and heroine illustrate a view of human nature that derives from orthodox Christian pessimism, not from progressive optimism. The theme of the moral education of Elizabeth, which is paralleled by that of Darcy, does not sanction but rebukes the contemporary doctrine of faith in the individual. If in nothing else, a clue to the conservatism of the novel lies in the original title, ‘First Impressions’. Mr. B.C.Southam has suggested that Pride and Prejudice may have begun as a burlesque on that popular theme. Jane Austen had already employed it satirically more than once, for both Love and Friendship and Sense and Sensibility mock the convention of love at first sight; and, in doing so, express conservative scepticism about the ‘truth’ of man’s spontaneous feelings. It is possible that Jane Austen meant to ridicule the hackneyed theme by standing it on its head: what she offers is hate at first sight. In any case, as she develops her plot in the final version, it is clear that to her love at first sight and hate at first sight are essentially the same. Both are emotional responses, built on insufficient or wrong evidence, and fostered by pride and complacency towards the unreliable subjective consciousness. It may well have been that with such a title the early version was more dogmatic: it belongs, after all, to 1796–7, years of great partisan activity in the novel, and approximately the era of the early work on Sense and Sensibility. Yet, for all its polish and technical maturity, the finished Pride and Prejudice has not, evidently, modified its ideological stance. As a novel it is far better than Sense and Sensibility, but no less conservative… Marriage at the end of a conservative novel should be, and is, the fulfilment of a personal moral quest. An impulsive or mistaken protagonist, frequently someone whose first choice in love was rash, now uses sober judgement and external evidence to select a partner in marriage. Usually it is a girl, a Marianne or a Camilla, who wisely chooses a guardian-like husband; occasionally, for the point is not a sexist one, an Edward Ferrars or an Edmund Bertram arrives at his second choice, to find a wise mentor in an Elinor or a Fanny. The personal implication in every case, given the prudence of the partner, is that by the act of choice the erring lover gives up his or her youthful waywardness; all at once, it seems time to grow up. The ‘true’ marriage which follows close and sceptical analysis of the self is also the marriage which commits a couple to a responsible leading role in society. Jane Austen’s heroines have a tendency to end up married to clergy or landowners, the spiritual or material leaders of a local community. Unquestionably the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice suggests all these traditional aspects. For both, but in our eyes more essentially for Elizabeth, it represents the arrival at true criticism of the self via correct, humbling assessment of another. Pemberley is significant in this inward process, but not because it means money and status. Darcy’s grounds teach Elizabeth that his taste is ‘neither formal, nor falsely adorned’, and thus refute her preconceived notion of his pomposity. The good opinion of his housekeeper and tenants is precisely the

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objective proof of character that she neglected to look for in the case of Wickham. And of course the existence of Pemberley hints at a future life of active social involvement for both Darcy and Elizabeth, a role of far more real dignity than the self-important and selfish patronage of a Lady Catherine de Burgh. Knowing the other five Austen novels, and a whole genre of lesser works by novelists of similar ideals, we can guess at a properly inward reading of the dénouement. It would have been obvious to her first readers, who were well schooled in the ideological significance of marriage and of the processes leading up to it. But the meaning is not precisely or not sufficiently written into the text. If we return to the issue of Elizabeth’s ideas about marriage in general, or to her own marriage with Darcy in particular, we find something of a vacuum. The elements in the novel which convey its meaning are the antithetical patterning, and a series of incidents; Pride and Prejudice tends to externalize its action, even though that action is a history of changing attitudes. The most striking omission from the novel’s stylistic techniques is continuous free indirect speech, the simulated flow of the heroine’s consciousness which is the narrative vehicle of the other mature novels. In having a faulty heroine, Pride and Prejudice is comparable with Northanger Abbey and Emma; in technical sophistication it lies between the two. With Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen rejects both the ironic authorial intrusions of Northanger Abbey, and the use of a hero who comes near to representing a moral ideal, to rely almost wholly for both narrative and interpretation upon amusing and dramatic dialogue. The clues for a right reading of the characters are present in conversation for anyone acute enough to pick them up. Darcy, though stiff, is careful, scrupulous, truthful; Elizabeth, intoxicated by the pleasure of attacking him, often says what she does not mean. Precisely the same technique is to be used with greater clarity in Emma: for there the heroine’s unreliable thought-processes are exactly defined by the accuracy and objectivity of Mr. Knightley’s conversations with her. The trouble with Pride and Prejudice is that many readers do not perceive just how critical the author is of Elizabeth’s way of thinking. The meaning is obscure partly because Elizabeth’s thoughts are insufficiently characterized, and partly because no character within the novel effectively criticizes her. The reader accepts Knightley’s evidence as objective, but tends to reject Darcy’s, since he too is prejudiced; alternatively, Jane Austen does not reveal enough about what Darcy is supposed to be thinking. In Elizabeth’s crucial conversations with Jane, the antithetical technique, contrasting Elizabeth’s satire with Jane’s candour, operates in a baffling way: sometimes Jane is in the right, sometimes Elizabeth. Jane is an ineffective guide to the failures of Elizabeth’s consciousness, since as far as the reader knows Jane herself hardly thinks at all. Confusion enters because as a whole intelligence is represented as faulty in the novel. Nothing so clearly illuminates the difference between the rationalist Maria Edgeworth and the Christian Jane Austen as the admiration the former bestows on Belinda’s intelligence, and the scepticism with which the latter regards Elizabeth’s. What makes Pride and Prejudice especially baffling is that the form taken by intelligence in the novel is so seductive. The reader cannot help admiring Elizabeth’s wit and sharing her lively and satirical vision. He enjoys Pride and

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Prejudice largely for its caustic portraits of the servile Mr. Collins, the foolish Mrs. Bennet, the sublimely insolent Lady Catherine de Burgh—which means that he looks out on the world of the novel with the eyes of an Elizabeth, even of a Mr. Bennet. The action may imply that this is morally a defective outlook. But, granted that the reader cannot identify himself either with Darcy or Jane, where is his alternative? Elizabeth’s reformation is not complete until near the end (and everyone notices that the second, less satirical and extrovert half of Pride and Prejudice is less enjoyable than the first). The Gardiners, the only characters in the greater part of the novel who combine sceptical intelligence with good nature, do not offer a persuasive alternative to Elizabeth’s consciousness, because during most of the action they do not know enough about what is really happening. The result is that in Pride and Prejudice the reader tends to feel himself in a moral limbo. The intention never was a statement about contemporary society which was ‘militantly anti-snob’ or ‘antiChurch’. But the mistake is understandable. The inadvertent impression left by Pride and Prejudice is, literally, a negative one. In spite of this, the general public has liked Pride and Prejudice the best of Jane Austen’s novels, and it is easy to see why. Of them all, it is the most outwardlooking, the most richly inventive in terms of character. Its breadth and spirit make it marvellously pleasing. There is no reason why we should object that it has no clear message; it has been compared with Mozart, who has no message either. What we can say is that in lacking clarity it is untypical of Jane Austen. It may well be that the author was more worried by the lightness of the effect than the irony of her tone when criticizing it implies; for with Fanny of Mansfield Park she reverted to a model heroine resembling Elinor. In this way, though setting herself great technical problems—and, most readers have felt, presenting a far less likeable central character —she at least avoided an effect dreaded by the moral novelist of the time, that of presenting a faulty heroine whose very errors were attractive. No other Austen novel except Pride and Prejudice can be accused of the fault most censured by Johnson, that of exhibiting virtues and vices promiscuously mixed, and by this means confusing good and evil. ‘Vice…should always disgust; nor should the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, be so united with it, as to reconcile it to the mind.’ The exterior Elizabeth presents to the world has all the graces of gaiety, and we do not understand her mental misdeeds clearly enough to call them vices. In Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen might have appeared to err from orthodoxy, not wilfully, but through a fault in the execution, and she never made the same mistake again. Notes 1 ‘Northanger Abbey and Persuasion’, Quarterly Review, xxiv (Jan. 1821), 859. Whately is engaged in a comparison between Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth as equals: two naturalistic novelists, and also, to use Maria Edgeworth’s phrase, two ‘philosophic’ novelists, one rationalist and one Christian. 2 Jane Austen’s modern critics, notably Q.D.Leavis and B.C.Southam, have established the essential continuity of her work. Their field of interest has been primarily her

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evolving technique, but their demonstration applies equally to her ideas and to her form. 3 But cf. Andrew Wright, Jane Austen’s Novels: A Study in Structure, London, 1954, p. 106: ‘Darcy’s pride leads to prejudice, and Elizabeth’s prejudice stems from a pride in her own perceptions’; and E.Zimmerman, ‘Pride and Prejudice in Pride and Prejudice’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, xxiii (1968). 4 [Page references for quotations from Pride and Prejudice have been omitted, as the edition used by the critical text is not the 1990 edition cited throughout Chapter Two.] 5 Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts, London, 1964, pp.59–62.

The English novel by Raymond Williams

From: Williams, R. (1970) The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence, Chatto & Windus, pp.9–12, 14–24, 26. I keep thinking about those twenty months, in 1847 and 1848, in which these novels were published: Dombey and Son, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, Tancred, Town and Country, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall What was it just then that emerged in England? It was of course no sudden process of just a few months. But we can see, looking back, those months as decisive. The English novel before then had its major achievements; it had Defoe and Fielding, Richardson and Jane Austen and Walter Scott. But now in the 1840s it had a new and major generation. For the next eighty years the novel was to be the major form in English literature. And this was unprecedented. What these months seem to mark above all is a new kind of consciousness, and we have to learn to see what this is, and some ways of relating it to the new and unprecedented civilisation in which it took shape. The changes in society had been long in the making: the Industrial Revolution, the struggle for democracy, the growth of cities and towns. But these also, in the 1840s, reached a point of consciousness which was in its turn decisive. The twelve years from Dickens’s first novel to his radically innovating Dombey and Son were also the years of the crisis of Chartism. The first industrial civilisation in the history of the world had come to a critical and defining stage. By the end of the 1840s the English were the first predominantly urban people in the long history of human societies. The institutions of an urban culture, from music-halls and popular Sunday newspapers to public parks, museums and libraries, were all decisively established in these years. There was critical legislation on public health and on working-hours in factories. A major economic decision, on free trade and the repeal of the corn laws, had begun a long realignment of politics. In the struggle and disturbance of those years the future, of course, was not known. But the sense of crisis, of major and radical issues and decisions, was both acute and general It is then not surprising that in just this decade a particular kind of literature—already known and widely read, but still not very highly regarded—should come to take on new life, a newly significant and relevant life. Here, in these hands, a generation of writers, in very different ways, found the common forms that mattered, in response to a new and varied but still common experience.

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There were of course immediate and related reasons for the new importance of the novel. Reading of all kinds was increasing. Between the 1820s and I860 the annual number of new books rose from 580 to over 2,600, and much of the increase was in novels. New methods of binding and printing had brought bookprices down. In the period in which these novels were published there were new cheap libraries: the Parlour and the Railway: not led, of course, by the new generation, but by others: Lytton, Marryat, G.P.R.James. The reading of newspapers and magazines was increasing rapidly, though the major period of expansion was still twenty years ahead. In every way the reading-public was still a minority, and the book-reading public especially so. But serial publication of fiction, in the new family magazines, was significantly expanding the number of readers of novels. Direct market factors were important to writers in more pressing and evident ways. But this is no simple case, in the end, of demand and supply. Several of the best new writers were involved in the market, and with their eyes wide open to it: Dickens above all. But what was written and what had to be written had many other sources. The crisis of the society and the expansion of reading were themselves related. More and more people felt the need for this kind of knowledge and experience, as customary ways broke down or receded. But beyond even this, as we can see most clearly from the novels themselves, the new pressures and disturbances were not simple moulds out of which new forms came. The men and women who were writing—some at the centre of opinion-forming and the market, some distant and isolated—took from the disturbance of these years another impetus: a crisis of experience, often quite personally felt and endured, which when it emerged in novels was much more than a reaction to existing and acknowledged public features. It was a creative working, a discovery, often alone at the table; a transformation and innovation which composed a generation out of what seemed separate work and experience. It brought in new feelings, people, relationships; rhythms newly known, discovered, articulated; defining the society, rather than merely reflecting it; defining it in novels, which had each its own significant and particular life. It was not the society or its crisis which produced the novels. The society and the novels—our general names for those myriad and related primary activities—came from a pressing and varied experience which was not yet history; which had no new forms, no significant moments, until these were made and given by direct human actions. What then can we define that emerged from those months: those twenty months in which, looking back, we can see so clearly a particular achievement: a confirmation of a generation; confirmation of a new importance, a new relevance and new forms? From the many possibilities in those varied reading experiences I would choose one bearing as central: the exploration of community: the substance and meaning of community. From Dickens to Lawrence, over nearly a hundred years, this bearing seems to me decisive. What community is, what it has been, what it might be; how community relates to individuals and relationships; how men and women, directly engaged, see

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within them or beyond them, for but more often against them, the shape of a society: these related themes are the dominant bearings. For this is a period in which what it means to live in a community is more uncertain, more critical, more disturbing as a question put both to societies and to persons than ever before in history. The underlying experiences of this powerful and transforming urban and industrial civilisation are of rapid and inescapable social change; of a newly visible and conscious history but at the same time, in most actual communities and in most actual lives, of a newly complicated and often newly obscure immediate process. These are not opposite poles: they are the defining characteristics of the change itself. People became more aware of great social and historical changes which altered not only outward forms —institutions and landscapes—but also inward feelings, experiences, self-definitions. These facts of change can be seen lying deep in almost every imagination… Most novels are in some sense knowable communities. It is part of a traditional method—an underlying stance and approach—that the novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways. Much of the confidence of this method depends on a particular kind of social confidence and experience. In its simplest form this amounts to saying—though at its most confident it did not have to be said —that the knowable and therefore known relationships compose and are part of a wholly known social structure, and that in and through the relationships the persons themselves can be wholly known. Thus from the middle term, of visible and comprehensible relationship, both societies and persons are knowable; indeed certain fundamental propositions about them can even be taken for granted, in terms of a received and mutually applicable social and moral code. Many factors combined to destroy this confidence, in the process of extraordinary change through which the new novelists were living. One effect of this change has been widely recognised. It has indeed become a dogma—more properly, a half-truth —that persons are only partially knowable in and through relationships; that some part of the personality precedes and survives—is in a way unaffected by— relationships; that in this special sense persons are not knowable, are indeed fundamentally and crucially unknowable. And this is a belief which in itself forces new and very radical experiments in the novel; experiments which have been more active and more exclusive in every subsequent generation. What is not so often recognised in this well-known effect is that at the other end of the scale a similar process has been evident: an increasing scepticism, disbelief, in the possibility of understanding society; a structurally similar certainty that relationships, knowable relationships, so far from composing a community or a society, are the positive experience that has to be contrasted with the ordinarily negative experience of the society as a whole (or of the society as opposed to the local and immediate community). An important split takes place between knowable relationships and an unknown, unknowable, overwhelming society. The full seriousness of this split and of its eventual consequences for the novel can be traced only towards the end of the century. But its pressure is evident from this first period

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of crisis: Dickens’s response to it—a very early and major response—is perhaps the key to understanding him, and especially to understanding his very original and creative use of the novel as a form. Now we have only to name this particular crisis—the crisis of the knowable community—to see how deeply it is related to the changes through which these novelists were living. We can see its obvious relation to the very rapidly increasing size and scale and complexity of communities: in the growth of towns and especially of cities and of a metropolis; in the increasing division and complexity of labour; in the altered and critical relations between and within social classes. In these simple and general senses, any assumption of a knowable community—a whole community, wholly knowable—becomes harder and harder to sustain… The problem of the knowable community, with its deep implications for the novelist, is then clearly a part of the social history of early nineteenth-century England and of the imaginative penetration and recoil which was the creative response. But what is knowable is not only a function of objects—of what is there to be known. It is also a function of subjects, of observers—of what is desired and what needs to be known. A knowable community, that is to say, is a matter of consciousness as well as of evident fact. Indeed it is to just this problem of knowing a community— of finding a position, a position convincingly experienced, from which community can begin to be known—that one of the major phases in the development of the novel must be related. It is so often taken for granted that a country community, most typically a village, is an epitome of direct relationships: of face-to-face contacts, within which the novelist can find the substance of a fiction of personal relationships. Certainly this aspect of its difference from the city and the suburb is important. Most English novels before Dickens are centred in rural communities, and it is because he is centred in the city— and not only a city but a metropolis—that he has to find strength and basis in an alternative tradition: in the popular culture of urban industrial society… But even within rural communities the problem of what is known— what is desired and needs to be known—is very active and critical. This is the real key to a very important development of the country novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and then again from George Eliot to Hardy… It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen chose to ignore the decisive historical events of her time. Where, it is still asked, are the Napoleonic wars: the real current of history? But history has many currents, and the social history of the landed families at that time in England was among the most important. As we sense its real processes we find that they are quite central and structural in Jane Austen’s novels. All that prevents us from realising this is that familiar kind of retrospect, taking in Penshurst and Saxham and Buck’s Head and Mansfield Park and Norland and even Poynton, in which all country houses and their families are seen as belonging effectively to a single tradition: that of the cultivated rural gentry. The continual making and remaking of these houses and their families is suppressed, in this view, by an idealising abstraction, and Jane Austen’s world can

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then be taken for granted, even sometimes patronised as a rural backwater, as if it were a simple ‘traditional’ setting. And then if the social ‘background’ is in this sense settled, we can move to an emphasis on a fiction of purely personal relationships. But such an emphasis is false, for it is not personal relationships, in the abstracted sense of an observed psychological process, that preoccupy Jane Austen. It is, rather, personal conduct: a testing and discovery of the standards which govern human behaviour in certain real situations. To the social considerations already implicit in the examination of conduct, with its strong sense and exploration of the adequacy of social norms, we must add from the evidence of the novels a direct preoccupation with estates incomes and social position, which are seen as indispensable elements of all the relationships that are projected and formed. Nor is this a preoccupation within a settled ‘traditional’ world; indeed much of the interest and many of the sources of the action in Jane Austen’s novels lie in the changes of fortune—the facts of general change and of a certain mobility—which were affecting the landed families at this time. Thus it would be easy to take Sir Thomas Bertram, in Mansfield Park, as an example of the old settled landed gentry to be contrasted with the new ‘London’ ways of the Crawfords (this is a common reading), were it not for the fact that Bertram is explicitly presented as what Goldsmith would have called ‘a great West Indian’: a colonial proprietor in the sugar island of Antigua. The Crawfords may have London ways, but the income to support them is landed property in Norfolk, and they have been brought up by an uncle who is an admiral… Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, is a landowner established for ‘many generations’ but his friend Bingley has inherited £100,000 and is looking for an estate to purchase. Sir William Lucas has risen from trade to a knighthood. Mr Bennet has £2,000 a year but an entailed estate, and has married the daughter of an attorney whose brother is in trade… To abstract this social history is of course to describe only the world of the novels within which the more particular actions begin and end. Yet it must be clear that it is no single settled society. It is an active complicated sharply speculative process: of inherited and newly enclosing and engrossing estates; of fortunes from trade and colonial and military profit being converted into houses and property and social position; of settled and speculative marriages into estates and incomes. It is indeed that most difficult world to describe, in English social history: an acquisitive high bourgeois society at the point of its most evident interlocking with an agrarian capitalism that is itself mediated by inherited titles and by the making of family names. Into the long and complicated interaction of landed and trading capital, the process that Cobbett observed—the arrival of ‘the nabobs, negro-drivers, admirals, generals’ and so on—is directly inserted and is even taken for granted. The social confusions and contradictions of this complicated process are the true source of many of the problems of human conduct and valuation which the personal actions dramatise. An openly acquisitive society, which is concerned also with the transmission of wealth, is trying to judge itself at once by an inherited code and by the morality of improvement.

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The paradox of Jane Austen is then the achievement of a unity of tone, of a settled and remarkably confident way of seeing and judging, in this chronicle of confusion and change. She is precise and candid, but in very particular ways. She is for example more exact about income, which is disposable, than about acres, which have to be worked. Yet at the same time she sees land in a way that she does not see ‘other sources’ of income. Her eye for a house, for timber, for the details of improvement, is quick, accurate, monetary. Yet money of other kinds, from the trading houses, from the colonial plantations, has no visual equivalent; it has to be converted to these signs of order to be recognised at all. This way of seeing is especially representative. The land is seen primarily as an index of revenue and position; its visible order and control are a valued product but the process of working it is hardly seen at all. Jane Austen then reminds us, involuntarily, of the two meanings of improvement which were historically linked but in practice so often contradictory. There is the improvement of soil, stock, yields, in a working agriculture. And there is the improvement of houses, parks, artificial landscapes, which absorbed so much of the actually increasing wealth. It is the essential commentary on what can be abstracted technically as the agricultural revolution; that it was no revolution, but the consolidation, the improvement and the expansion of an existing social class. Cultivation has the same ambiguity as improvement. There is increasing growth and this is converted into rents, and then the rents are converted into what is seen as a cultivated society. What the ‘revolution’ is for, then, is this: this quality of life. Jane Austen could achieve her remarkable unity of tone—that cool and controlled observation which is the basis of her narrative method; that highly distanced management of event and description and character which need not become either open manipulation or participation and personal involvement—because of an effective formula: improvement is improvement. The working improvement, which is not seen at all, is the means of social improvement, which is then so isolated that it is seen very clearly indeed. It is not seen flatteringly. The conversion of good income into good conduct was no automatic process. But what is crucial is that the moral pretension is taken so seriously that it becomes a critique: never of the basis of the formula, but coolly and determinedly of its results in character and action. She guides her heroines steadily to the right marriages. She makes settlements, alone, against all the odds, like some supernatural lawyer, in terms of that exact proportion to moral worth which could assure the continuity of the general formula. But within this conventional bearing, which is the source of her confidence, the moral discrimination is so insistent that it can be taken in effect as an independent value. It is said by literary historians that she derives from Fielding and from Richardson, but Fielding’s genial manipulative bluff and Richardson’s isolating fanaticism are in fact far back, in another world. What happens in Emma, in Persuasion, in Mansfield Park, is the development of an everyday uncompromising morality which is in effect separable from its social basis and which, in other hands, can be turned against it. It is in this sense that Jane Austen relates to those later writers who had to learn to assume, with increasing unease from Coleridge to George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, that there was no

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necessary correspondence between class and morality; that the survival of discrimination depended on another kind of independence; that the two meanings of improvement had to be not merely distinguished but contrasted; or, as first in Coleridge, that cultivation in its human sense had to be brought to bear as a standard against the social process of civilisation. In these hands, decisively, the formula broke down: improvement was not improvement; not only not necessarily but at times in definite contradiction. Jane Austen, it is clear, never went so far. Her novels would have been very different, involving new problems of structure and language, if she had. But she provided the emphasis which had only to be taken outside the park walls into a different social experience to become not a moral but a social criticism. But now consider again Jane Austen’s ‘knowable community’. It is outstandingly face-to-face; its crises, physically and spiritually, are in just these terms: a look, a gesture, a stare, a confrontation; and behind these, all the time, the novelist is watching, observing, physically recording and reflecting. That is the whole stance; the grammar of her morality. Yet while it is a community wholly known, within the essential terms of the novel, it is as an actual community very precisely selective. Neighbours in her novels are not the people actually living near by. They are the people living a little less near by who in social recognition can be visited. What she sees across the land is a network of propertied houses and families, and through this tightly drawn mesh most actual people are simply not seen. To be face-to-face in this world is already to belong to a class. No other community, in physical presence or in social reality, is by any means knowable. And it is not only most of the people who have disappeared. It is also most of the country, which becomes real only as it relates to the houses which are the real nodes. For the rest the country is weather or a place for a walk. It is proper to trace the continuity of the novel—a very important tradition of moral analysis—from Jane Austen to George Eliot. But we can only do this intelligently if we recognise what else is happening in this literary development: a recognition of other kinds of people; other kinds of country; other kinds of action on which a moral emphasis must be brought to bear… The analysis is now brought to bear without the class limitation. The social and economic relationships are seen necessarily as elements, often determining elements, of conduct. The problem of the knowable community, that is to say, is not only a matter of physical expansion and complication. It is also and primarily a problem of viewpoint and of consciousness. And it is at this point, precisely, that it interlocks with the methods derived from the new historical consciousness; the new sense of society as not only the bearer but the active creator, the active destroyer, of the values of persons and relationships.

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The realistic imagination by George Levine

From: Levine, G. (1981) The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley, University of Chicago Press, pp.5, 6, 8, 15–22. Realism in England belongs…to a much more affable and moderate tradition, focusing not on the dregs of society, not on the degradations and degenerations of humans in bondage to a social and cosmic determinism. It belongs, almost provincially, to a ‘middling’ condition and defines itself against the excesses, both stylistic and narrative, of various kinds of romantic, exotic, or sensational literatures. The programatic realism of the late century, with its pseudoscientific connections, its ‘experimental novels,’ its assumption that the norm of human experience is the extreme, was part of a rebellious movement against the mid-Victorian real and the art that projected it. …Whatever else it means, it always implies an attempt to use language to get beyond language, to discover some non-verbal truth out there. The history of English realism obviously depended in large measure on changing notions of what is ‘out there,’ of how best to ‘represent’ it, and of whether, after all, representation is possible or the ‘out there’ knowable. The history was further complicated by the artist’s sense of responsibility to the audience, by conventions of propriety, and by the nature of earlier literary imaginations of the ‘real.’ Moreover, there is the problem that ‘realistic’ did not become a label for novels until rather late, so that while Ian Watt can talk about the ‘rise of realism’ in the eighteenth century, the word in ordinary usage is associated not so much with Jane Austen’s kind of novel as with Arnold Bennett’s or Gissing’s, and even more, of course, with Zola’s… But my focus will be on the struggle inherent in any ‘realist’ effort— the struggle to avoid the inevitable conventionality of language in pursuit of the unattainable unmediated reality. Realism, as a literary method, can in these terms be defined as a self-conscious effort, usually in the name of some moral enterprise of truth telling and extending the limits of human sympathy, to make literature appear to be describing directly not some other language but reality itself (whatever that may be taken to be); in this effort, the writer must self-contradictorily dismiss previous conventions of representation while, in effect, establishing new ones. No major Victorian novelists were deluded into believing that they were in fact offering an unmediated reality; but all of them struggled to make contact with the world out

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there, and, even with their knowledge of their own subjectivity, to break from the threatening limits of solipsism, of convention, and of language… We get close to the texture of realism, however, if we recognize that narratives touched by the realist impulse try to resist or circumvent the formal conventions of narrative. The primary conventions of realism are its deflation of ambition and passion, its antiheroism, its tendency to see all people and things within large containing social organizations and, hence, its apparently digressive preoccupation with surfaces, things, particularities, social manners.1 Committed to treat ‘things as they are and not as the story teller would like them to be for his convenience’2 realists assume the possibility of making the distinction and thus save meaning at the sacrifice of pleasure. Realism further complicates itself because in requiring a continuing alertness to the secret lust of the spirit to impose itself on the world—if not as hero, then as martyr—and in resisting the romance forms that embody those lusts, it is always on the verge of another realism: the recognition that the reality it most adequately represents is a subtly disguised version of its own desires. There is, then, a continuing tradition of self-consciousness in realistic fiction, a tradition formally initiated in Don Quixote. The self-consciousness marks realism’s awareness both of other literature and of the strategies necessary to circumvent it, and—at last—its awareness of its own unreality. The complex fate of realism as it unfolds through the century is latent in that self-consciousness. Ironically, the selfconsciousness itself becomes a convention, and we can detect it in realism’s most overt anti-literary manifestos. A look at a few of these provides a useful starting point. If, among those who may be tempted to peruse my history, there should be any mere novel-readers, let me advise them to throw the book aside at the commencement of this chapter, for I have no more wonderful incidents to relate, no more charges at the muse, no more sudden turns of fortune. I am now become a plodding man of business … [Maria Edgeworth, ‘Ennui, or Memoirs of the Earl of Glenthorne’ (1804)] I do not invite my fair readers, whose sex and impatience gives them the greatest right to complain of these circumstances, into a flying chariot drawn by hippogriffs, or moved by enchantment. Mine is an humble English postchaise, drawn upon four wheels, and keeping his Majesty’s highway. Such as dislike the vehicle may leave it at the next halt, and wait for the conveyance of Prince Hussein’s tapestry. [Scott, Waverley (1814)] All which details, I have no doubt, JONES, who reads this book at his Club, will pronounce to be excessively foolish, trivial, twaddling, and ultrasentimental. Yes; I can see Jones at this minute (rather flushed with his joint of mutton and half-pint of wine), taking out his pencil and scoring under the words ‘foolish, twaddling,’ etc., and adding to them his own remark of ‘quite true.’ Well, he is a lofty man of genius, and admires the great and heroic in life and novels; and so had better take warning and go elsewhere. [Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847)]

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If you think from this prelude that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations: reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid lies before you; something as unromantic as Monday morning, when all who work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto. It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting, perhaps towards the middle and close of the meal, but it is resolved that the first dish set upon the table shall be one that a Catholic —ay, even an Anglo-Catholic—might eat on Good Friday in Passion Week; it shall be cold lentils and vinegar without oil; it shall be unleavened bread with bitter herbs and no roast lamb. [Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849)] The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character, and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable,— a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had that complaint favourably many years ago. ‘An utterly uninteresting character!’ I think I hear a lady reader exclaim—Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a ‘character.’… Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull, grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones. [George Eliot, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton,’ Scenes of Clerical Life (1857)] The family resemblances are remarkable, and these quotations are unquestionably characteristic of a tone and attitude that dominated in English fiction for the first fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century. They are kin, for example, to the parodic opening of Northanger Abbey, in which Catherine Morland is defined by virtue of her qualities inappropriate to heroines; to Dickens’s explanation of the naturalness of melodrama in Oliver Twist (chapter 17); to the mock-heroic language of some passages in Barchester Towers, and to Trollope’s explanation there of why he abjures surprises in fiction, and has difficulties with happy endings; to the strategy of Mrs. Gaskell in Mary Barton of attempting to force upon the reader a recognition of the ‘hidden romances’ in ‘the lot of those who daily pass you by in the street.’3 Although such passages had become commonplace by the time of George Eliot, each writer, however sophisticated, writes as though the enterprise of the ordinary in fiction were new and difficult, and that in 1860 as well as 1804, the audience had to be warned and cajoled about it. Yet there are differences in the rhetorical strategies, suggesting that the stakes were getting higher. What light satire remains in the

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passage by George Eliot (compare Mrs. Farthingale with Thackeray’s Mr. Jones) moves into a rhetoric of almost romantic intensity, so that the style insists on the seriousness which, in Austen, Scott, even Thackeray, is one of the immediate objects of derision. Even the awkward satirical thrust of the passage from Shirley is intense enough to belie the Thackeray an gestures in the metaphors of food. Thematically, that is to say, these passages all conventionally assert that fiction should shift its focus from the extreme to the ordinary, and that to do so is morally instructive; rhetorically, they imply that to do so is also to violate the dominant conventions of fiction (implicitly absurd, immoral, or both), but in fact to make fiction more, not less, intense, and to give back with greater authenticity by Wordsworthian strategies the very romantic powers taken away in the rejection of conventions. The refusal of major realists to acknowledge the conventionality of these strategies had partly to do with the nature of much popular fiction of the time, but more important, the refusal was essential to the convention itself. It supported the special authenticity the realist novel claimed by emphasizing its primary allegiance to experience over art. But there is no need to think the emphasis disingenuous. In adopting the technique of the direct address to the audience in order to justify the treatment of ordinary experience, all these writers participate in a cultural project— moral, empirical, and self-conscious—that appears conventional only in retrospect. The epistemology that lay behind realism was empiricist, with its tendency to value immediate experience over continuities or systems of order, and it was obviously related to the developments in empirical science as they ran through the century. These developments did not, of course, validate either the discontinuities empiricism would seem to imply, or the minimizing of imagination and intuition. Yet in requiring the validation of imagination in the visible world, recognizable to the audience that figures so prominently in these passages, realism posits a tension between imagination (with the faculty of reason, as well) and reality. Values are reversed in that the realistic method proceeds to what is not visible— the principles of order and meaning—through the visible; the a priori now requires validation. But the process does not imply a mere literalism of reportage, or ‘copyism.’ The implication of each of these passages, most powerfully developed by George Eliot, is that the aim of the apparently dull record of the humdrum is to discover ‘the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy.’ The writers all share a faith that the realist’s exploration will reveal a comprehensible world. George Eliot requires that her narrative, attaining to tragedy, convey the impression of an empirically shareable experience. Its relation to reality may be mediated by consciousness, but it is authenticated by the appeal of consciousness to the shared consciousness of the community of readers. For the realistic method, it is a matter of balance. One of the dominant theories about nineteenth-century English realism has pointed misleadingly to a reconciliation of these difficulties. If the reality observed is coherent and meaningful, so the theory runs, so too will be its represented form. Thus, the important distinction between realism of correspondence and realism of coherence, invented (used even by the Victorians) to cope with the difference between the text and its subject, between reality and art’s appearance of reality, is

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lost. Ioan Williams, arguing the standard case, for example, says that ‘there is no doubt that the mid-Victorian novel rested on a massive confidence as to what the nature of Reality actually was,’ and that ‘the most fundamental common element in the work of the mid-Victorian novelist…is probably the idea that human life, whatever the particular conditions, may ultimately be seen as unified and coherent.’4 Generally, the quotations confirm this view: they do, after all, conclude with ‘tragedy and comedy,’ and the apparent confidence with which they imply the value of the trivial suggests an underlying organicism, characteristic of Victorian thought. But reflection suggests that what is most striking in these passages is not their unquestioning confidence, but their self-consciousness about the difficulties of the arguments in favor of common sense. They are engaged in a battle parallel to that familiar one, most allegorically handled in Hard Times, between life, with all its emotion and vitality, and utilitarianism, with all its analytic calculation… We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly selfsatisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality. Its massive selfconfidence implied a radical doubt, its strategies of truth telling, a profound selfconsciousness. In a culture whose experience included the Romantic poets and the philosophical radicals; Carlyle and Newman attempting to define their faiths; Charles Lyell telling it that the world reveals ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’; the Higher Criticism of the Bible from Germany; Hume, Kant, Goethe, Comte, and Spencer, with their varying systems or antisystems; non-Euclidean geometry and a new anthropology made possible by a morally dubious imperialism; John Stuart Mill urging liberty and women’s equality; Darwin, Huxley, and the agnostics; Tennyson struggling to reimagine faith; Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, Pater—in such a culture it is more than a little difficult to imagine a serious literary mode based on a ‘massive confidence as to what the nature of Reality actually was.’ In Dombey and Son the railroad produces an ‘earthquake’ and opens up new realities to the insular Dombey (but more important, to his insular audience). In The French Revolution Carlyle describes a world in constant process, always burning, and warns of the possible consummation for English society. And Mrs. Gaskell—in Mary Barton and North and South— maneuvers carefully against what she feared correctly to be a growing breach between the classes. The confident moralism of which the great Victorian writers are frequently accused turns out almost invariably to be an attempt to rediscover moral order after their primary energies have been devoted to disrupting conventions of moral judgement. The tradition reflected in the passages I have quoted belongs with Wordsworth’s attempt to ‘choose incidents and situations from common life, and… to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination,’ and with Carlyle’s attempt to persuade us to see every drawing room as the cross-roads of the infinite. Nineteenthcentury realism, far from apologizing for what is, deliberately subverts judgments based on dogma, convention, or limited perception and imagination… What seems clear becomes cloudy as we see more and from different perspectives. Even as they

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articulate the social codes, these novels complicate them, engaging our sympathy with lost women, tyrannical husbands, murderers, revolutionaries, moral weaklings, rebellious girls, spendthrifts, and dilettantes… The disruptions of moral judgement, of aesthetic patterning, of common sense perceptions have a serious import that we can too easily solemnize. After all, despite the disappearance of God, the potential disappearance of meaning, the mysteries and disruptions, the primary form in which most nineteenth-century English realism manifests itself is comedy. Even these highly moral passages, urging upon us what seems an ascetic renunciation of the glamorous, are partly comic performances. They seem to take pleasure in the details they invoke from outside the patterning conventions of romance. And the great realistic fictions are exuberant with details, even when they are melancholy thematically. The alienation implied by description is partially compensated for by the sheer pleasure of being able to see, as though for the first time, the clutter of furniture, the cut of clothing, the mutton chop and the mug of hot rum, the flushed cheeks of Mr. Jones, and the dull grey eyes of Amos Barton. This very vitality of detail is part of the realist’s gestures at life, for they will not succumb to the conventions of patterning… It is just possible that…the realist’s self-conscious rejection of form represents a viable alternative to the Jamesian selfconscious restriction and purification of form. There is a violence implied in the conventions of narrative that wrests resolution from the muddle of experience. If nineteenth-century realism normally succumbs to these wishful thrusts, it also typically indulges in the satisfaction of anticlimactic wisdom, pretending that life extends beyond its pages, that life is only partially reflected in the novel’s multitudinous disregard. There is a pleasure in knowing life, and a pleasure in the power to seduce an audience into believing it has seen life too… The impelling energy in the quest for the world beyond words is that the world be there, and that it be meaningful and good; the persistent fear is that it is merely monstrous and mechanical, beyond the control of human meaning. Realism risks that reality and its powers of disruption Notes 1 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax (Boston, 1976) sees realism as a strategy to serve society by ‘containing (and repressing) its disorder within significantly structured stories about itself (p.63). I would revise this view by adding that while it struggles to contain what it imagines as monstrous, it also devises the strategies to imagine and release it. 2 Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity (New York, 1963), p.27. 3 Mary Barton (London, 1906), ch.6, p.70. 4 The Realist Novel in England: A Study in Development (Pittsburgh, 1974), pp.x, 13.

On Great Expectations by Dorothy van Ghent

From: van Ghent, D. (1961) The English Novel: Form and Function, Harper & Row, pp.128–38 (first published 1953). Dickens lived in a time and an environment in which a full-scale demolition of traditional values was going on, correlatively with the uprooting and dehumanization of men, women, and children by the millions—a process brought about by industrialization, colonial imperialism, and the exploitation of the human being as a ‘thing’ or an engine or a part of an engine capable of being used for profit. This was the ‘century of progress’ which ornamented its steam engines with iron arabesques of foliage as elaborate as the antimacassars and aspidistras and crystal or cut glass chandeliers and bead and feather portieres of its drawing rooms, while the human engines of its welfare groveled and bred in the foxholes described by Marx in his Capital (Hauntingly we see this discordance in the scene in Great Expectations where Miss Havisham, sitting in her satin and floral decay in the house called Satis, points her finger at the child and outrageously tells him to ‘play.’ For though the scene is a potent symbol of childish experience of adult obtuseness and sadism, it has also another dimension as a social symbol of those economically determined situations in which the human soul is used as a means for satisfactions not its own, under the gross and transparent lie that its activity is its happiness, its welfare and fun and ‘play’—a publicity instrument that is the favourite of manufacturers and insurance agencies, as well as of totalitarian strategists, with their common formula, ‘We’re just a happy family.’) The heir of the ‘century of progress’ is the twentieth-century concentration camp, which makes no bones about people being ‘things.’ Dickens’ intuition alarmingly saw this process in motion, a process which abrogated the primary demands of human feeling and rationality, and he sought an extraordinary explanation for it. People were becoming things, and things (the things that money can buy or that are the means for making money or for exalting prestige in the abstract) were becoming more important than people. People were being de-animated, robbed of their souls, and things were usurping the prerogatives of animate creatures— governing the lives of their owners in the most literal sense. This picture, in which the qualities of things and people were reversed, was a picture of a daemonically motivated world, a world in which ‘dark’ or occult forces or energies operate not only in people (as modern psychoanalytic psychology observes) but also

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in things: for if people turn themselves or are turned into things, metaphysical order can be established only if we think of things as turning themselves into people, acting under a ‘dark’ drive similar to that which motivates the human aberration. There is an old belief that it takes a demon to recognize a demon, and the saying illustrates the malicious sensibility with which things, in Dickens, have felt out and imitated, in their relationship with each other and with people, the secret of the human arrangement. A four-poster bed in an inn, where Pip goes to spend the night, is a despotic monster that straddles over the whole room, putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace, and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner. Houses, looking down through the skylight of Jaggers’ office in London, twist themselves in order to spy on Pip like police agents who presuppose guilt. Even a meek little muffin has to be ‘confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron cover,’ and a hat, set on a mantelpiece, demands constant attention and the greatest quickness of eye and hand to catch it neatly as it tumbles off, but its ingenuity is such that it finally manages to fall into the slop basin. The animation of inanimate objects suggests both the quaint gaiety of a forbidden life and an aggressiveness that has got out of control—an aggressiveness that they have borrowed from the human economy and an irresponsibility native to but glossed and disguised by that economy. Dickens’ fairly constant use of the pathetic fallacy (the projection of human impulses and feelings upon the nonhuman, as upon beds and houses and muffins and hats) might be considered as incidental stylistic embellishment if his description of people did not show a reciprocal metaphor: people are described by nonhuman attributes, or by such an exaggeration of or emphasis on one part of their appearance that they seem to be reduced wholly to that part, with an effect of having become ‘thinged’ into one of their own bodily members or into an article of their clothing or into some inanimate object of which they have made a fetish. Dickens’ devices for producing this transposition of attributes are various. To his friend and biographer, Forster, he said that he was always losing sight of a man in his diversion by the mechanical play of some part of the man’s face, which ‘would acquire a sudden ludicrous life of its own.’ Many of what we shall call the ‘signatures’ of Dickens’ people—that special exaggerated feature or gesture or mannerism which comes to stand for the whole person—are such dissociated parts of the body, like Jaggers huge forefinger which he bites and then plunges menacingly at the accused, or Wemmick’s post office mouth, or the clockwork apparatus in Magwitch’s throat that clicks as if it were going to strike. The device is not used arbitrarily or capriciously. In this book, whose subject is the etiology of guilt and of atonement, Jaggers is the representative not only of civil law but of universal Law, which is profoundly mysterious in a world of dissociated and apparently lawless fragments; and his huge forefinger, into which he is virtually transformed and which seems to

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act like an ‘it’ in its own right rather than like a member of a man, is the Law’s mystery in all its fearful impersonality. Wemmick’s mouth is not a post-office when he is at home in his castle but only when he is at work in Jaggers’ London office, where a mechanical appearance of smiling is required of him. And as Wemmick’s job has mechanized him into a grinning slot, so oppression and fear have given the convict Magwitch a clockwork apparatus for vocal chords. Or this general principle of reciprocal changes, by which things have become as it were daemonically animated and people have been reduced to thing-like characteristics—as if, by a law of conservation of energy, the humanity of which people have become incapable had leaked out into the external environment—may work symbolically in the association of some object with a person so that the object assumes his essence and his ‘meaning.’ Mrs. Joe wears a large apron, ‘having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles’—she has no reason to wear it, and she never takes it off a day in her life. Jaggers flourishes a large white handkerchief—a napkin that is the mysterious complement of his blood-smeared engagements. Estella—who is the star and jewel of Pip’s great expectations—wears jewels in her hair and on her breast; ‘I and the jewels,’ she says, as if they were interchangeable. This device of association is a familiar one in fiction; what distinguishes Dickens’ use of it is that the associated object acts not merely to illustrate a person’s qualities symbolically—as novelists usually use it—but that it has a necessary metaphysical function in Dickens’ universe: in this universe objects actually usurp human essences; beginning as fetishes, they tend to—and sometimes quite literally do—devour and take over the powers of the fetish-worshiper. The process of conversion of spirit into matter that operates in the Dickens world is shown working out with savage simplicity in the case of Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham has been guilty of aggression against life in using the two children, Pip and Estella, as inanimate instruments of revenge for her broken heart—using them, that is, as if they were not human but things—and she is being changed retributively into a fungus. The decayed cake on the banquet table acts, as it were, by homeopathic magic—like a burning effigy or a doll stuck with pins; its decay parallels the necrosis in the human agent. ‘When the ruin is complete,’ Miss Havisham says, pointing to the cake but referring to herself, she will be laid out on the same table and her relatives will be invited to ‘feast on’ her corpse. But this is not the only conversion. The ‘little quickened hearts’ of the mice behind the panels have been quickened by what was Miss Havisham, carried off crumb by crumb. The principle of reciprocal changes, between the human and the nonhuman, bears on the characteristic lack of complex ‘inner life’ on the part of Dickens’ people —their lack of a personally complex psychology. It is inconceivable that the fungoid Miss Havisham should have a complex inner life, in the moral sense. But in the art of Dickens (distinguishing that moral dialectic that arises not solely from the ‘characters’ in a novel but from all the elements in the aesthetic structure) there is a great deal of ‘inner life,’ transposed to other forms than that of human character: partially transposed in this scene, for instance, to the symbolic activity of the speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies and to the gropings and pausings of the

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black beetles on Miss Havisham’s hearth. Without benefit of Freud or Jung, Dickens saw the human soul reduced literally to the images occupying its ‘inner life.’ Through the changes that have come about in the human, as humanity has leaked out of it, the atoms of the physical universe have become subtly impregnated with daemonic aptitude. Pip, standing waiting for Estella in the neighborhood of Newgate, and beginning dimly to be aware of his implication in the guilt for which that establishment stands—for his ‘great expectations’ have already begun to make him a collaborator in the generic crime of using people as means to personal ends— has the sensation of a deadly dust clinging to him, rubbed off on him from the environs, and he tries to beat it out of his clothes… Upon the river, one cannot escape its action; it may throw the murderer and his victim in an embrace. At the end of Great Expectations, it swallows Compeyson, while, with its own obscure daemonic motivation, though it fatally injures Magwitch, it leaves him to fulfill the more subtle spiritual destiny upon which he has begun to enter. The river scene in this section, closely and apprehensively observed, is one of the most memorable in Dickens. It is necessary to view Dickens’ ‘coincidences’ under the aspect of this wholesale change in the aptitudes of external nature. Coincidence is the violent connection of the unconnected. Life is full of violent connections of this sort, but one of the most rigorous conventions of fictional and dramatic art is that events should make a logically sequential pattern; for art is the discovery of order. Critics have frequently deplored Dickens’ use of coincidences in his plots. But in a universe that is nervous throughout, a universe in which nervous ganglia stretch through both people and their external environment, so that a change in the human can infect the currents of the air and the sea, events and confrontations that seem to abrogate the laws of physical mechanics can logically be brought about. In this sense, the apparent coincidences in Dickens actually obey a causal order—not of physical mechanics but of moral dynamics. What connection can there be [Dickens asks in another novel] between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! What brings the convict Magwitch to the child Pip, in the graveyard, is more than the convict’s hunger; Pip (or let us say simply ‘the child,’ for Pip is an Everyman) carries the convict inside him, as the negative potential of his ‘great expectations’— Magwitch is the concretion of his potential guilt. What brings Magwitch across the ‘great gulfs’ of the Atlantic to Pip again, at the moment of revelation in the story, is their profoundly implicit compact of guilt, as binding as the convict’s leg iron which is its recurrent symbol. The multiplying likenesses in the street as Magwitch draws nearer, coming over the sea, the mysterious warnings of his approach on the night of his reappearance, are moral projections as ‘real’ as the storm outside the windows and as the crouched form of the vicious Orlick on the dark stairs. The conception of what brings people together ‘coincidentally’ in their seemingly uncaused encounters

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and collisions—the total change in the texture of experience that follows upon any act, public or private, external or in thought, the concreteness of the effect of the act not only upon the conceiving heart but upon the atoms of physical matter, so that blind nature collaborates daemonically in the drama of reprisal—is deep and valid in this book… In the sense that one implies the other, the glittering frosty girl Estella, and the decayed and false old woman, Miss Havisham, are not two characters but a single one, or a single essence with dual aspects, as if composed by montage—a spiritual continuum, so to speak. For inevitably wrought into the fascinating jewel-likeness of Pip’s great expectations, as represented by Estella, is the falsehood and degeneracy represented by Miss Havisham, the soilure on the unpurchased good. The boy Pip and the criminal Magwitch form another such continuum. Magwitch, from a metaphysical point of view, is not outside Pip but inside him, and his apparition is that of Pip’s own unwrought deeds: Pip, having adopted ‘great expectations,’ will live by making people into Magwitches, into means for his ends. The relationship between Joe Gargery, saintly simpleton of the folk, and Orlick, dark beast of the Teutonic marshes (who comes ‘from the ooze’), has a somewhat different dynamics, though they too form a spiritual continuum. Joe and Orlick are related not as two aspects of a single moral identity, but as the opposed extremes of spiritual possibility —the one unqualified love, the other unqualified hate—and they form a frame within which the actions of the other have their ultimate meaning. A commonplace of criticism is that, as Edmund Wilson puts it, Dickens was usually unable to ‘get the good and bad together in one character.’1 The criticism might be valid if Dickens’ were a naturalistic world, but it is not very relevant to Dickens’ daemonically organized world. In a naturalistic world, obeying mechanical laws, each character is organically discrete from every other, and presumably each contains a representative mixture of ‘the good and bad.’ But in Dickens’ thoroughly nervous world, that does not know the laws of mechanics but knows only spiritual law, one simple or ‘flat’ character can be superimposed upon another so that together they form the representative human complexity of good-in-evil and evil-in-good. Two kinds of crime form Dickens’ two chief themes, the crime of parent against child, and the calculated social crime. They are formally analogous, their form being the treatment of persons as things; but they are also inherent in each other, whether the private will of the parent is to be considered as depraved by the operation of a public institution, or the social institution is to be considered as a bold concert of depravities of individual ‘fathers.’ In Great Expectations the private crime against the child is Mrs. Joe’s and Pumblechook’s and Wopsle’s, all ‘foster parents’ either by necessity or self-conceit; while the social crime is the public treatment of Magwitch. That the two kinds of crime are inherent in each other we are made aware of as we are led to identify Magwitch’s childhood with Pip’s; the brutality exercised toward both children was the same brutality, though the ‘parents’ in the one case were private persons, and in the other, society itself. Complicating the meaning of ‘the crime’ still further, Magwitch also has taken upon himself the role of foster parent to

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Pip, and whether, as parent, he acts in charity or impiousness, or both, is a major ambiguity which the drama sets out to resolve. ‘The crime,’ in Dickens, is evidently a permutation of multiple motivations and acts, both public and private, but always with the same tendency to convert people into things, and always implying either symbolically or directly a child-parent situation. The child-parent situation has been disnatured, corrupted, with the rest of nature; or rather, since the child-parent situation is the dynamic core of the Dickens world, the radical disnaturing here is what has corrupted the rest. His plots seldom serve to canalize, with the resolution of the particular set of plotted circumstances, the hysteria submerged in his vision of a nature gone thoroughly wrong; the permutations of the crimes are too many, and their ultimate cause or root is evasive, unless one would resort to some dramatically unmanageable rationale such as original sin. The Dickens world requires an act of redemption. A symbolic act of this kind is again and again indicated in his novels, in the charity of the uncherished and sinned against child for the inadequate or criminal father—what might be called the theme of the prodigal father, Dickens’ usual modification of the prodigal son theme. But the redemptive act should be such that it should redeem not only the individual fathers,’ but society at large. One might almost say— thinking of Dickens’ caricatures of the living dead, with their necrotic members and organs, their identifications of themselves with inanimate objects—that it should be such as to redeem the dead. Great Expectations is an exception among his novels in that here the redemptive act is adequate to and structural for both bodies of thematic material—the sins of individuals and the sins of society… The guilt of the child is realized on several levels. Pip experiences the psychological form (or feeling) of guilt before he is capable of voluntary evil; he is treated by adults—Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook and Wopsle—as if he were a felon, a young George Barnwell (a character in the play which Wopsle reads on the night when Mrs. Joe is attacked) wanting only to murder his nearest relative, as George Barnwell murdered his uncle. This is the usual nightmare of the child in Dickens, a vision of imminent incarceration, fetters like sausages, lurid accusatory texts. He is treated, that is, as if he were a thing, manipulable by adults for the extraction of certain sensations: by making him feel guilty and diminished, they are able to feel virtuous and great. But the psychological form of guilt acquires spiritual content when Pip himself conceives the tainted wish—the wish to be like the most powerful adult and to treat others as things. At the literal level, Pip’s guilt is that of snobbery toward Joe Gargery, and snobbery is a denial of the human value of others. Symbolically, however, Pip’s guilt is that of murder; for he steals the file with which the convict rids himself of his leg iron, and it is this leg iron, picked up on the marshes, with which Orlick attacks Mrs. Joe; so that the child does inevitably overtake his destiny, which was, like George Barnwell, to murder his nearest relative. But the ‘relative’ whom Pip, adopting the venerable criminality of society, is, in the widest symbolic scope of intention, destined to murder is not Mrs. Joe but his ‘father,’ Magwitch—to murder in the socially chronic fashion of the Dickens world, which consists in the dehumanization of the weak, or in moral acquiescence

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to such murder. Pip is, after all, the ordinary mixed human being, one more Everyman in the long succession of them that literature has represented, but we see this Everyman as he develops from a child; and his destiny is directed by the ideals of his world—toward ‘great expectations’ which involve the making of Magwitches— which involve, that is, murder. These are the possibilities that are projected in the opening scene of the book, when the young child, left with a burden on his soul, watches the convict limping off under an angry red sky, toward the black marshes, the gibbet, and the savage lair of the sea, in a still rotating landscape… As the child’s original alienation from ‘natural’ order is essentially mysterious, a guilty inheritance from the fathers which invades first awareness, so the redemptive act is also a mysterious one. The mysterious nature of the act is first indicated, in the manner of a motif, when Mrs. Joe, in imbecile pantomime, tries to propitiate her attacker, the bestial Orlick. In Orlick is concretized all the undefined evil of the Dickens world, that has nourished itself underground and crept along walls, like the ancient stains on the house of Atreus. He is the lawlessness implied in the unnatural conversions of the human into the nonhuman, the retributive death that invades those who have grown lean in life and who have exercised the powers of death over others. He is the instinct of aggression and destruction, the daemonism of sheer external Matter as such; he is pure ‘thingness’ emerging without warning from the ooze where he has been unconsciously cultivated. As Orlick is one form of spiritual excess— unmotivated hate—Joe Gargery is the opposed form—love without reservation. Given these terms of the spiritual framework, the redemptive act itself could scarcely be anything but grotesque—and it is by a grotesque gesture, one of the most profoundly intuitive symbols in Dickens, that Mrs. Joe is redeemed. What is implied by her humble propitiation of the beast Orlick is a recognition of personal guilt in the guilt of others, and of its dialectical relationship with love. The motif reappears in the moment of major illumination in the book. Pip ‘bows down,’ not to Joe Gargery, toward whom he has been privately and literally guilty, but to the wounded, hunted, shackled man, Magwitch, who has been guilty towards himself. It is in this way that the manifold organic relationships among men are revealed, and that the Dickens world—founded in fragmentariness and disintegration—is made whole. Notes 1 The Wound and the Bow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941), p.65.

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Culture and imperialism by Edward Said

From: Said, E.W. (1994) Culture & Imperialism, Vintage, pp.xiv-xvii, 73–5, 77–8 (first published 1993). One of the difficult truths I discovered…is how very few of the British or French artists whom I admire took issue with the notion of ‘subject’ or ‘inferior’ races so prevalent among officials who practised those ideas as a matter of course in ruling India or Algeria. They were widely accepted notions, and they helped fuel the imperial acquisition of territories in Africa throughout the nineteenth century. In thinking of Carlyle or Ruskin, or even of Dickens and Thackeray, critics have often, I believe, relegated these writers’ ideas about colonial expansion, inferior races, or ‘niggers’ to a very different department from that of culture, culture being the elevated area of activity in which they ‘truly’ belong and in which they did their ‘really’ important work. Culture conceived in this way can become a protective enclosure: check your politics at the door before you enter it. As someone who has spent his entire professional life teaching literature, yet who also grew up in the pre-World War Two colonial world, I have found it a challenge not to see culture in this way—that is, antiseptically quarantined from its worldly affiliations—but as an extraordinarily varied field of endeavour… I analyse [novels and other books of the colonial period] because first of all I find them estimable and admirable works of art and learning, in which I and many other readers take pleasure and from which we derive profit. Second, the challenge is to connect them not only with that pleasure and profit but also with the imperial process of which they were manifestly and unconcealedly a part; rather than condemning or ignoring their participation in what was an unquestioned reality in their societies, I suggest that what we learn about this hitherto ignored aspect actually and truly enhances our reading and understanding of them. Let me say a little here about what I have in mind, using two well-known and very great novels. Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) is primarily a novel about selfdelusion, about Pip’s vain attempts to become a gentleman with neither the hard work nor the aristocratic source of income required for such a role. Early in life he helps a condemned convict, Abel Magwitch, who, after being transported to Australia, pays back his young benefactor with large sums of money; because the lawyer involved says nothing as he disburses the money, Pip persuades himself that

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an elderly gentlewoman, Miss Havisham, has been his patron. Magwitch then reappears illegally in London, unwelcomed by Pip because everything about the man reeks of delinquency and unpleasantness. In the end, though, Pip is reconciled to Magwitch and to his reality: he finally acknowledges Magwitch—hunted, apprehended, and fatally ill—as his surrogate father, not as someone to be denied or rejected, though Magwitch is in fact unacceptable, being from Australia, a penal colony designed for the rehabilitation but not the repatriation of transported English criminals. Most, if not all, readings of this remarkable work situate it squarely within the metropolitan history of British fiction, whereas I believe that it belongs in a history both more inclusive and more dynamic than such interpretations allow. It has been left to two more recent books than Dickens’s—Robert Hughes’s magisterial The Fatal Shore and Paul Carter’s brilliantly speculative The Road to Botany Bay—to reveal a vast history of speculation about and experience of Australia, a ‘white’ colony like Ireland, in which we can locate Magwitch and Dickens not as mere coincidental references in that history, but as participants in it, through the novel and through a much older and wider experience between England and its overseas territories. Australia was established as a penal colony in the late eighteenth century mainly so that England could transport an irredeemable, unwanted excess population of felons to a place, originally charted by Captain Cook, that would also function as a colony replacing those lost in America. The pursuit of profit, the building of empire, and what Hughes calls social apartheid together produced modern Australia, which by the time Dickens first took an interest in it during the 1840s (in David Copperfield Wilkins Micawber happily immigrates there) had progressed somewhat into profitability and a sort of ‘free system’ where labourers could do well on their own if allowed to do so. Yet in Magwitch Dickens knotted several strands in the English perception of convicts in Australia at the end of transportation. They could succeed, but they could hardly, in the real sense, return. They could expiate their crimes in a technical, legal sense, but what they suffered there warped them into permanent outsiders. And yet they were capable of redemption— as long as they stayed in Australia.1 Carter’s exploration of what he calls Australia’s spatial history offers us another version of that same experience. Here explorers, convicts, ethnographers, profiteers, soldiers chart the vast and relatively empty continent each in a discourse that jostles, displaces, or incorporates the others. Botany Bay is therefore first of all an Enlightenment discourse of travel and discovery, then a set of travelling narrators (including Cook) whose words, charts, and intentions accumulate the strange territories and gradually turn them into ‘home’. The adjacence between the Benthamite organization of space (which produced the city of Melbourne) and the apparent disorder of the Australian bush is shown by Carter to have become an

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optimistic transformation of social space, which produced an Elysium for gentlemen, an Eden for labourers in the 1840s.2 What Dickens envisions for Pip, being Magwitch’s ‘London gentleman’, is roughly equivalent to what was envisioned by English benevolence for Australia, one social space authorizing another. But Great Expectations was not written with anything like the concern for native Australian accounts that Hughes or Carter has, nor did it presume or forecast a tradition of Australian writing, which in fact came later to include the literary works of David Malouf, Peter Carey, and Patrick White. The prohibition placed on Magwitch’s return is not only penal but imperial: subjects can be taken to places like Australia, but they cannot be allowed a ‘return’ to metropolitan space, which, as all Dickens’s fiction testifies, is meticulously charted, spoken for, inhabited by a hierarchy of metropolitan personages. So on the one hand, interpreters like Hughes and Carter expand on the relatively attenuated presence of Australia in nineteenthcentury British writing, expressing the fullness and earned integrity of an Australian history that became independent from Britain’s in the twentieth century; yet, on the other, an accurate reading of Great Expectations must note that after Magwitch’s delinquency is expiated, so to speak, after Pip redemptively acknowledges his debt to the old, bitterly energized, and vengeful convict, Pip himself collapses and is revived in two explicitly positive ways. A new Pip appears, less laden than the old Pip with the chains of the past—he is glimpsed in the form of a child, also called Pip; and the old Pip takes on a new career with his boyhood friend Herbert Pocket, this time not as an idle gentleman but as hardworking trader in the East, where Britain’s other colonies offer a sort of normality that Australia never could. Thus even as Dickens settles the difficulty with Australia, another structure of attitude and reference emerges to suggest Britain’s imperial intercourse through trade and travel with the Orient. In his new career as colonial businessman, Pip is hardly an exceptional figure, since nearly all of Dickens’s businessmen, wayward relatives, and frightening outsiders have a fairly normal and secure connection with the empire. But it is only in recent years that these connections have taken on interpretative importance. A new generation of scholars and critics—the children of decolonization in some instances, the beneficiaries (like sexual, religious, and racial minorities) of advances in human freedom at home—have seen in such great texts of Western literature a standing interest in what was considered a lesser world, populated with lesser people of colour, portrayed as open to the intervention of so many Robinson Crusoes… Nearly everywhere in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and French culture we find allusions to the facts of empire, but perhaps nowhere with more regularity and frequency than in the British novel. Taken together, these allusions constitute what I have called a structure of attitude and reference. In Mansfield Park, which within Jane Austen’s work carefully defines the moral and social values informing her other novels, references to Sir Thomas Bertram’s overseas possessions are threaded through; they give him his wealth, occasion his absences, fix his social status at home and abroad, and make possible his values, to which Fanny Price (and Austen herself) finally subscribes. If this is a novel about ‘ordination’, as Austen

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says, the right to colonial possessions helps directly to establish social order and moral priorities at home. Or again, Bertha Mason, Rochester’s deranged wife in Jane Eyre, is a West Indian, and also a threatening presence, confined to an attic room… In Dickens’s Great Expectations, Abel Magwitch is the convict transported to Australia whose wealth—conveniently removed from Pip’s triumphs as a provincial lad flourishing in London in the guise of a gentleman—ironically makes possible the great expectations Pip entertains. In many other Dickens novels businessmen have connections with the empire, Dombey and Quilp being two noteworthy examples… As a reference, as a point of definition, as an easily assumed place of travel, wealth, and service, the empire functions for much of the European nineteenth century as a codified, if only marginally visible, presence in fiction, very much like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose work is taken for granted but scarcely ever more than named, rarely studied…or given density. To cite another intriguing analogue, imperial possessions are as usefully there, anonymous and collective, as the outcast populations…of transient workers, part-time employees, seasonal artisans; their existence always counts, though their names and identities do not, they are profitable without being fully there. This is a literary equivalent, in Eric Wolf’s somewhat self-congratulatory words, of ‘people without History’,3 people on whom the economy and polity sustained by empire depend, but whose reality has not historically or culturally required attention. In all of these instances the facts of empire are associated with sustained possession, with far-flung and sometimes unknown spaces, with eccentric or unacceptable human beings, with fortune-enhancing or fantasized activities like emigration, money-making, and sexual adventure. Disgraced younger sons are sent off to the colonies, shabby older relatives go there to try to recoup lost fortunes (as in Balzac’s La Cousine Bette), enterprising young travellers go there to sow wild oats and to collect exotica. The colonial territories are realms of possibility, and they have always been associated with the realistic novel. Robinson Crusoe is virtually unthinkable without the colonizing mission that permits him to create a new world of his own in the distant reaches of the African, Pacific, and Atlantic wilderness. But most of the great nineteenth-century realistic novelists are less assertive about colonial rule and possessions than either Defoe or late writers like Conrad and Kipling… Naturally, if you yourself happen to have a colonial background, the imperial theme is a determining one in your formation, and it will draw you to it if you also happen to be a dedicated critic of European literature. An Indian or African scholar of English literature reads Kim, say, or Heart of Darkness with a critical urgency not felt in quite the same way by an American or British one. But in what way can we formulate the relationship between culture and imperialism beyond the asseverations of personal testimony? The emergence of formerly colonial subjects as interpreters of imperialism and its great cultural works has given imperialism a perceptible, not to say obtrusive identity as a subject for study and vigorous revision. But how can that particular kind of post-imperial testimony and study,

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usually left at the margins of critical discourse, be brought into active contact with current theoretical concerns? To regard imperial concerns as constitutively significant to the culture of the modern West is, I have suggested, to consider that culture from the perspective provided by anti-imperialist resistance as well as pro-imperialist apology. What does this mean? It means remembering that Western writers until the middle of the twentieth century, whether Dickens and Austen, Flaubert or Camus, wrote with an exclusively Western audience in mind, even when they wrote of characters, places, or situations that referred to, made use of, overseas territories held by Europeans. But just because Austen referred to Antigua in Mansfield Park or to realms visited by the British navy in Persuasion without any thought of possible responses by the Caribbean or Indian natives resident there is no reason for us to do the same. We now know that these non-European peoples did not accept with indifference the authority projected over them, or the general silence on which their presence in variously attenuated forms is predicated. We must therefore read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented (I have in mind Kipling’s Indian characters) in such works. Notes 1 Hughes, R. (1987) The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, Knopf, p.586. 2 Carter, P. (1988) The Road to Botany Bay. An Exploration of Landscape and History, Knopf, pp.202–60. 3 Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and the People Without History, University of California Press.

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The reality effect by Roland Barthes

From: Barthes, R. (1986) The Rustle of Language, Blackwell, pp.141–8 (first published 1967). When Flaubert, describing the room occupied by Mme Aubain, Félicité’s employer, tells us that ‘an old piano supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons’ (‘A Simple Heart,’ from Three Tales); when Michelet, recounting the death of Charlotte Corday and reporting that, before the executioner’s arrival, she was visited in prison by an artist who painted her portrait, includes the detail that ‘after an hour and a half, there was a gentle knock at a little door behind her’ (Histoire de France: La Revolution)—these authors (among many others) are producing notations which structural analysis, concerned with identifying and systematizing the major articulations of narrative, usually and heretofore has left out, either because its inventory omits all details that are ‘superfluous’ (in relation to structure) or because these same details are treated as ‘filling’ (catalyses), assigned an indirect functional value insofar as, cumulatively, they constitute some index of character or atmosphere and so can ultimately be recuperated by structure. It would seem, however, that if analysis seeks to be exhaustive (and what would any method be worth which did not account for the totality of its object, i.e., in this case, of the entire surface of the narrative fabric?), if it seeks to encompass the absolute detail, the indivisible unit, the fugitive transition, in order to assign them a place in the structure, it inevitably encounters notations which no function (not even the most indirect) can justify: such notations are scandalous (from the point of view of structure), or, what is even more disturbing, they seem to correspond to a kind of narrative luxury, lavish to the point of offering many ‘futile’ details and thereby increasing the cost of narrative information. For if, in Flaubert’s description, it is just possible to see in the notation of the piano an indication of its owner’s bourgeois standing and in that of the cartons a sign of disorder and a kind of lapse in status likely to connote the atmosphere of the Aubain household, no purpose seems to justify reference to the barometer, an object neither incongruous nor significant, and therefore not participating, at first glance, in the order of the notable, and in Michelet’s sentence, we have the same difficulty in accounting structurally for all the details: that the executioner came after the painter is all that is necessary to the account; how long the sitting lasted, the dimension and location of

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the door are useless (but the theme of the door, the softness of death’s knock have an indisputable symbolic value). Even if they are not numerous, the ‘useless details’ therefore seem inevitable: every narrative, at least every Western narrative of the ordinary sort nowadays, possesses a certain number… Moving ahead to Flaubert, we see that the aesthetic purpose of description is still very strong. In Madame Bovary, the description of Rouen (a real referent if ever there was one) is subject to the tyrannical constraints of what we must call aesthetic verisimilitude, as is attested by the corrections made in this passage in the course of six successive rewritings. Here we see, first of all, that the corrections do not in any way issue from a closer consideration of the model: Rouen, perceived by Flaubert, remains just the same, or more precisely, if it changes somewhat from one version to the next, it is solely because he finds it necessary to focus an image or avoid a phonic redundance condemned by the rules of le beau style, or again to ‘arrange’ a quite contingent felicity of expression; next we see that the descriptive fabric, which at first glance seems to grant a major importance (by its dimension, by the concern for its detail) to the object Rouen, is in fact only a sort of setting meant to receive the jewels of a number of rare metaphors, the neutral, prosaic excipient which swathes the precious symbolic substance, as if, in Rouen, all that mattered were the figures of rhetoric to which the sight of the city lends itself—as if Rouen were notable only by its substitutions (the masts like a forest of needles, the islands like huge motionless black fish, the clouds like aerial waves silently breaking against a cliff); last, we see that the whole description is constructed so as to connect Rouen to a painting: it is a painted scene which the language takes up (‘Thus, seen from above, the whole landscape had the motionless look of a painting’); the writer here fulfils Plato’s definition of the artist as a maker in the third degree, since he imitates what is already the simulation of an essence. Thus, although the description of Rouen is quite irrelevant to the narrative structure of Madame Bovary (we can attach it to no functional sequence nor to any characterial, atmospheric, or sapiential signified), it is not in the least scandalous, it is justified, if not by the work’s logic, at least by the laws of literature: its ‘meaning’ exists, it depends on conformity not to the model but to the cultural rules of representation. All the same, the aesthetic goal of Flaubertian description is thoroughly mixed with ‘realistic’ imperatives, as if the referent’s exactitude, superior or indifferent to any other function, governed and alone justified its description, or—in the case of descriptions reduced to a single word— its denotation: here aesthetic constraints are steeped—at least as an alibi— in referential constraints: it is likely that, if one came to Rouen in a diligence, the view one would have coming down the slope leading to the town would not be ‘objectively’ different from the panorama Flaubert describes. This mixture—this interweaving—of constraints has a double advantage: on the one hand, aesthetic function, giving a meaning to ‘the fragment,’ halts what we might call the vertigo of notation; for once, discourse is no longer guided and limited by structural imperatives of the anecdote (functions and indices), nothing could indicate why we should halt the details of the description here and not there; if it were not subject to an aesthetic or rhetorical choice, any ‘view’ would be

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inexhaustible by discourse: there would always be a corner, a detail, an inflection of space or color to report; on the other hand, by positing the referential as real, by pretending to follow it in a submissive fashion, realistic description avoids being reduced to fantasmatic activity (a precaution which was supposed necessary to the ‘objectivity’ of the account); classical rhetoric had in a sense institutionalized the fantasmic as a specific figure, hypotyposis, whose function was to ‘put things before the hearer’s eyes,’ not in a neutral, conservative manner, but by imparting to representation all the luster of desire (this was the vividly illuminated sector of discourse with prismatic outlines: illustris oratio); declaratively renaming the constraints of the rhetorical code, realism must seek a new reason to describe. The irreducible residues of functional analysis have this in common: they denote what is ordinarily called ‘concrete reality’ (insignificant gestures, transitory attitudes, insignificant objects, redundant words). The pure and simple ‘representation’ of the ‘real,’ the naked relation of ‘what is’ (or has been) thus appears as a resistance to meaning; this resistance confirms the great mythic opposition of the true-to-life (the lifelike) and the intelligible, it suffices to recall that, in the ideology of our time, obsessive reference to the ‘concrete’ (in what is rhetorically demanded of the human sciences, of literature, of behavior) is always brandished like a weapon against meaning, as if, by some statutory exclusion, what is alive cannot not signify—and vice versa. Resistance of the ‘real’ (in its written form, of course) to structure is very limited in the fictive account, constructed by definition on a model which, for its main outlines, has no other constraints than those of intelligibility; but this same ‘reality’ becomes the essential reference in historical narrative, which is supposed to report ‘what really happened’: what does the non-functionality of a detail matter then, once it denotes ‘what took place’; ‘concrete reality’ becomes the sufficient justification for speaking. History (historical discourse: historia rerum gestarum) is in fact the model of those narratives which consent to fill in the interstices of their functions by structurally superfluous notations, and it is logical that literary realism should have been—give or take a few decades—contemporary with the regnum of ‘objective’ history, to which must be added the contemporary development of techniques, of works, and institutions based on the incessant need to authenticate the ‘real’: the photograph (immediate witness of ‘what was here’), reportage, exhibitions of ancient objects (the success of the Tutankhamen show makes this quite clear), the tourism of monuments and historical sites. All this shows that the ‘real’ is supposed to be self-sufficient, that it is strong enough to belie any notion of ‘function,’ that its ‘speech-act’ has no need to be integrated’ into a structure and that the having-been-there of things is a sufficient principle of speech… Semiotically, the ‘concrete detail’ is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and with it, of course, the possibility of developing a form of the signified, i.e., narrative structure itself. (Realistic literature is narrative, of course, but that is because its realism is only fragmentary, erratic, confined to ‘details,’ and because the most realistic narrative imaginable develops along unrealistic lines.) This is what we might call the referential

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illusion. The truth of this illusion is this: eliminated from the realist speech-act as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ returns to it as a signified of connotation; for just when those details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do— without saying so—is signify it; Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the real’ (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity. This new verisimilitude is very different from the old one, for it is neither a respect for the ‘laws of the genre’ nor even their mask, but proceeds from the intention to degrade the sign’s tripartite nature in order to make notation the pure encounter of an object and its expression. The disintegration of the sign—which seems indeed to be modernity’s grand affair—is of course present in the realistic enterprise, but in a somewhat regressive manner, since it occurs in the name of a referential plenitude, whereas the goal today is to empty the sign and infinitely to postpone its object so as to challenge, in a radical fashion, the age-old aesthetic of ‘representation.’

Toward a methodology for the study of the novel by M.M.Bakhtin

From: Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C.Emerson and M.Holquist, University of Texas Press, pp.3–11. The study of the novel as a genre is distinguished by peculiar difficulties. This is due to the unique nature of the object itself: the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted. The forces that define it as a genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of the novel as a genre takes place in the full light of the historical day. The generic skeleton of the novel is still far from having hardened, and we cannot foresee all its plastic possibilities. We know other genres, as genres, in their completed aspect, that is, as more or less fixed pre-existing forms into which one may then pour artistic experience. The primordial process of their formation lies outside historically documented observation. We encounter the epic as a genre that has not only long since completed its development, but one that is already antiquated. With certain reservations we can say the same for the other major genres, even for tragedy. The life they have in history, the life with which we are familiar, is the life they have lived as already completed genres, with a hardened and no longer flexible skeleton. Each of them has developed its own canon that operates in literature as an authentic historical force. All these genres, or in any case their defining features, are considerably older than written language and the book, and to the present day they retain their ancient oral and auditory characteristics. Of all the major genres only the novel is younger than writing and the book: it alone is organically receptive to new forms of mute perception, that is, to reading. But of critical importance here is the fact that the novel has no canon of its own, as-do other genres; only individual examples of the novel are historically active, not a generic canon as such. Studying other genres is analogous to studying dead languages; studying the novel, on the other hand, is like studying languages that are not only alive, but still young. This explains the extraordinary difficulty inherent in formulating a theory of the novel. For such a theory has at its heart an object of study completely different from that which theory treats in other genres. The novel is not merely one genre among other genres. Among genres long since completed and in part already dead, the novel is the only developing genre. It is the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history and therefore it is deeply akin to that era, whereas the

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other major genres entered that era as already fixed forms, as an inheritance, and only now are they adapting themselves—some better, some worse—to the new conditions of their existence. Compared with them, the novel appears to be a creature from an alien species. It gets on poorly with other genres. It fights for its own hegemony in literature; wherever it triumphs, the other older genres go into decline… The mutual interaction of genres within a single unified literary period is a problem of great interest and importance. In certain eras—the Greek classical period, the Golden Age of Roman literature, the neoclassical period—all genres in ‘high’ literature (that is, the literature of ruling social groups) harmoniously reinforce each other to a significant extent; the whole of literature, conceived as a totality of genres, becomes an organic unity of the highest order. But it is characteristic of the novel that it never enters into this whole, it does not participate in any harmony of the genres. In these eras the novel has an unofficial existence, outside ‘high’ literature. Only already completed genres, with fully formed and welldefined generic contours, can enter into such a literature as a hierarchically organized, organic whole. They can mutually delimit and mutually complement each other, while yet preserving their own generic natures. Each is a unit, and all units are interrelated by virtue of certain features of deep structure that they all have in common. The great organic poetics of the past—those of Aristotle, Horace, Boileau—are permeated with a deep sense of the wholeness of literature and of the harmonious interaction of all genres contained within this whole. It is as if they literally hear this harmony of the genres. In this is their strength—the inimitable all-embracing fullness and exhaustiveness of such poetics. And they all, as a consequence, ignore the novel. Scholarly poetics of the nineteenth century lack this integrity: they are eclectic, descriptive; their aim is not a living and organic fullness but rather an abstract and encyclopaedic comprehensiveness. They do not concern themselves with the actual possibility of specific genres co-existing within the living whole of literature in a given era; they are concerned rather with their coexistence in a maximally complete anthology. Of course these poetics can no longer ignore the novel—they simply add it (albeit in a place of honor) to already existing genres (and thus it enters the roster as merely one genre among many; in literature conceived as a living whole, on the other hand, it would have to be included in a completely different way). We have already said that the novel gets on poorly with other genres. There can be no talk of a harmony deriving from mutual limitation and complementariness. The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, re-formulating and reaccentuating them. Historians of literature sometimes tend to see in this merely the struggle of literary tendencies and schools. Such struggles of course exist, but they are peripheral phenomena and historically insignificant. Behind them one must be

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sensitive to the deeper and more truly historical struggle of genres, the establishment and growth of a generic skeleton of literature. Of particular interest are those eras when the novel becomes the dominant genre. All literature is then caught up in the process of ‘becoming,’ and in a special kind of ‘generic criticism.’ This occurred several times in the Hellenic period, again during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but with special force and clarity beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century. In an era when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent ‘novelized’: drama (for example Ibsen, Hauptmann, the whole of Naturalist drama), epic poetry (for example, Childe Harold and especially Byron’s Don Juan), even lyric poetry (as an extreme example, Heine’s lyrical verse). Those genres that stubbornly preserve their old canonic nature begin to appear stylized. In general any strict adherence to a genre begins to feel like a stylization, a stylization taken to the point of parody, despite the artistic intent of the author. In an environment where the novel is the dominant genre, the conventional languages of strictly canonical genres begin to sound in new ways, which are quite different from the ways they sounded in those eras when the novel was not included in ‘high’ literature. Parodic stylizations of canonized genres and styles occupy an essential place in the novel. In the era of the novel’s creative ascendancy—and even more so in the periods of preparation preceding this era—literature was flooded with parodies and travesties of all the high genres (parodies precisely of genres, and not of individual authors or schools)—parodies that are the precursors, ‘companions’ to the novel, in their own way studies for it. But it is characteristic that the novel does not permit any of these various individual manifestations of itself to stabilize. Throughout its entire history there is a consistent parodying or travestying of dominant or fashionable novels that attempt to become models for the genre… This ability of the novel to criticize itself is a remarkable feature of this ever-developing genre. What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above? They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the ‘novelistic’ layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally—this is the most important thing—the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present) … all these phenomena are explained by the transposition of other genres into this new and peculiar zone for structuring artistic models (a zone of contact with the present in all its openendedness), a zone that was first appropriated by the novel. It is of course impossible to explain the phenomenon of novelization purely by reference to the direct and unmediated influence of the novel itself. Even where such influence can be precisely established and demonstrated, it is intimately interwoven with those direct changes in reality itself that also determine the novel and that condition its dominance in a given era. The novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding. Only that which is itself developing can

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comprehend development as a process. The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it. In many respects the novel has anticipated, and continues to anticipate, the future development of literature as a whole. In the process of becoming the dominant genre, the novel sparks the renovation of all other genres, it infects them with its spirit of process and inconclusiveness. It draws them ineluctably into its orbit precisely because this orbit coincides with the basic direction of the development of literature as a whole. In this lies the exceptional importance of the novel, as an object of study for the theory as well as the history of literature. Unfortunately, historians of literature usually reduce this struggle between the novel and other already completed genres, all these aspect of novelization, to the actual real-life struggle among ‘schools’ and ‘trends.’ A novelized poem, for example, they call a ‘romantic poem’ (which of course it is) and believe that in so doing they have exhausted the subject. They do not see beneath the superficial hustle and bustle of literary process the major and crucial fates of literature and language, whose great heroes turn out to be first and foremost genres, and whose ‘trends’ and ‘schools’ are but second- or third-rank protagonists. The utter inadequacy of literary theory is exposed when it is forced to deal with the novel. In the case of other genres literary theory works confidently and precisely, since there is a finished and already formed object, definite and clear. These genres preserve their rigidity and canonic quality in all classical eras of their development; variations from era to era, from trend to trend or school to school are peripheral and do not affect their ossified generic skeleton. Right up to the present day, in fact, theory dealing with these already completed genres can add almost nothing to Aristotle’s formulations. Aristotle’s poetics, although occasionally so deeply embedded as to be almost invisible, remains the stable foundation for the theory of genres. Everything works as long as there is no mention of the novel. But the existence of novelized genres already leads theory into a blind alley. Faced with the problem of the novel, genre theory must submit to a radical re-structuring. Thanks to the meticulous work of scholars, a huge amount of historical material has accumulated and many questions concerning the evolution of various types of novels have been clarified—but the problem of the novel genre as a whole has not yet found anything like a satisfactory principled resolution. The novel continues to be seen as one genre among many; attempts are made to distinguish it as an already completed genre from other already completed genres, to discover its internal canon —one that would function as a well-defined system of rigid generic factors. In the vast majority of cases, work on the novel is reduced to mere cataloging, a description of all variants on the novel—albeit as comprehensive as possible. But the results of these descriptions never succeed in giving us as much as a hint of comprehensive formula for the novel as a genre. In addition, the experts have not managed to isolate a single definite, stable characteristic of the novel—without adding a reservation, which immediately disqualifies it altogether as a generic characteristic.

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Some examples of such ‘characteristics with reservations’ would be: the novel is a multi-layered genre (although there also exist magnificent single-layered novels); the novel is a precisely plotted and dynamic genre (although there also exist novels that push to its literary limits the art of pure description); the novel is a complicated genre (although novels are mass produced as pure and frivolous entertainment like no other genre); the novel is a love story (although the greatest examples of the European novel are utterly devoid of the love element); the novel is a prose genre (although there exist excellent novels in verse). One could of course mention a large number of additional ‘generic characteristics’ for the novel similar to those given above, which are immediately annulled by some reservation innocently appended to them. Of considerably more interest and consequence are those normative definitions of the novel offered by novelists themselves, who produce a specific novel and then declare it the only correct, necessary and authentic form of the novel…in such a category belong…numerous declarations and statements of principle… Such statements are not attempts to incorporate all the possible variants of the novel into a single eclectic definition, but are themselves part and parcel of the living evolution of the novel as a genre. Often they deeply and faithfully reflect the novel’s struggle with other genres and with itself (with other dominant and fashionable variants of the novel) at a particular point in its development. They come closer to an understanding of the peculiar position of the novel in literature, a position that is not commensurate with that of other genres. Especially significant in this connection is a series of statements that accompanied the emergence of a new novel-type in the eighteenth century … In all these statements, each reflecting the novel in one of its critical stages…the following prerequisites for the novel are characteristic: (1) the novel should not be ‘poetic,’ as the word ‘poetic’ is used in other genres of imaginative literature; (2) the hero of a novel should not be ‘heroic’ in either the epic or the tragic sense of the word: he should combine in himself negative as well as positive features, low as well as lofty, ridiculous as well as serious; (3) the hero should not be portrayed as an already completed and unchanging person but as one who is evolving and developing, a person who learns from life; (4) the novel should become for the contemporary world what the epic was for the ancient world… All these positive prerequisites have their substantial and productive side—taken together, they constitute a criticism (from the novel’s point of view) of other genres and of the relationship these genres bear to reality: their stilted heroizing, their narrow and unlifelike poeticalness, their monotony and abstractness, the prepackaged and unchanging nature of their heroes. We have here, in fact, a rigorous critique of the literariness and poeticalness inherent in other genres and also in the predecessors of the contemporary novel (the heroic Baroque novel and the Sentimental novels of Richardson). These statements are reinforced significantly by the practice of these novelists themselves. Here the novel—its texts as well as the theory connected with it—emerges consciously and unambiguously as a genre that is both critical and self-critical, one fated to revise the fundamental concepts of

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literariness and poeticalness dominant at the time. On the one hand, the contrast of novel with epic (and the novel’s opposition to the epic) is but one moment in the criticism of other literary genres (in particular, a criticism of epic heroization); but on the other hand, this contrast aims to elevate the significance of the novel, making of it the dominant genre in contemporary literature. The positive prerequisites mentioned above constitute one of the high-points in the novel’s coming to self-consciousness. They do not yet of course provide a theory of the novel. These statements are also not distinguished by any great philosophical depth. They do however illustrate the nature of the novel as a genre no less—if perhaps no more—than do other existing theories of the novel. I…attempt…to approach the novel precisely as a genre-in-the-making, one in the vanguard of all modern literary development. I am not constructing…a functional definition of the novelistic canon in literary history, that is, a definition that would make of it a system of fixed generic characteristics. Rather, I am trying to grope my way toward the basic structural characteristics of this most fluid of genres, characteristics that might determine the direction of its peculiar capacity for change and of its influence and effect on the rest of literature. I find three basic characteristics that fundamentally distinguish the novel in principle from other genres: (1) its stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel; (2) the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image; (3) the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images, namely, the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness. These three characteristics of the novel are all organically interrelated and have all been powerfully affected by a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships. A multitude of different languages, cultures and times became available to Europe, and this became a decisive factor in its life and thought.

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Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this book: Kettle, A. (1977) ‘Realism and romance’, An Introduction to the English Novel. Volume I. To George Eliot, pp.28–36, Routledge (first published by Hutchinson, 1951); Watt, I. (1972) ‘Realism and the novel form’, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, pp.9–23, 33–36, Penguin Books; © Oxford University Press 1975. Reprinted from Jane Austen and the War of Ideas by Marilyn Butler (1975) by permission of Oxford University Press; Williams, R. (1970) The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence, pp.9–12, 14–24, 26, Chatto & Windus; Levine, G. (1981) The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley, pp.5, 6, 8, 15–22, The University of Chicago Press; van Ghent, D. ‘On Great Expectations’, from The English Novel: Form and Function, Harper Torchbooks, the Academy Library. By permission of Harcourt Brace & Company Inc.; Said, E.W. (1994) Culture & Imperialism, pp.xiv-xvii, 73–5, 77–8, Vintage. By permission of Aitken, Stone & Wilie; excerpts from ‘The reality effect’, from The Rustle of Language by Roland Barthes translated by Richard Howard, pp.141–8. Translation copyright © 1986 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc. Reprinted by permission of Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc., and Basil Blackwell Ltd; ‘Epic and novel. Toward a methodology for the study of the novel’, approximately 3660 words, from The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M.Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, pp.3–11, copyright © 1981.

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Index

À la recherche du temps perdu see Proust, Marcel Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart 194 action, in novels 13 Adam Bede see Eliot, George Addison, Joseph 23 Alexander II, Tzar of Russia 180, 181 Alexander, S. ‘Women’s work in nineteenth-century London’ 134 All the Year Round 135 and Great Expectations 145 Allingham, Margery 6 Allott, M. Novelists on the Novel 10, 28, 29, 199 Altick, Richard The English Common Reader 133 Victorian People and Ideas 124, 125 Amelia see Fielding, Henry Anatomy of Criticism see Frye, Northrop Anti-Jacobin Review 77, 79 Aristotle 213, 225, 274, 276 Poetics 3, 15 Armstrong, Isobel introduction to Pride and Prejudice 52 Arnold, Matthew 246, 253

‘art of fiction’ see James, Henry Aspects of the Novel see Forster, E.M. Auerbach, Nina Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction 55 Austen, Jane 100, 229, 251 Emma 232, 237, 238, 246 heroines 229 influence of other writers on 24 ‘knowable community’ in 244 Love and Friendship 49, 236 Mansfield Park 55, 109, 232, 239, 245, 246, 265, 266 Marxist critics on 19 Northanger Abbey 10, 23, 25, 27, 30, 49, 237, 251 Persuasion 55, 232, 246, 266 polarized characters in novels 190 Pride and Prejudice 4, 24, 31, 109, 124, 138, 196, 232 artistic organization of 34 characterization 12, 40, 51 class in 45, 46, 53 285

compared with Fathers and Sons 184 compared with Frankenstein 62, 64, 65, 69, 76, 153 critical debates on 46 escapism in 19 fairytale in 46, 56 feminist criticism of 53 irony in 34, 42, 44, 58 liberal ideas/values in 125, 126, 129 narrator 11, 34, 37, 39, 40, 51, 60, 123, 128 publication of 131 social order in 245 publication of works 131 realism and 247 Sense and Sensibility 49, 131, 232, 236, 237 in The English Novel 109 in The Great Tradition 105, 106 and women’s canon of literature 114 Austen-Leigh, James Edward A Memoir of Jane Austen 48 Australia, and imperialism 264 Azim, Firdous The Colonial Rise of the Novel 122

286

Bakhtin, Mikhail 11, 17, 28, 46, 56, 61, 70, 203 The Dialogic Imagination 31, 207 ‘Toward a methodology for the study of the novel’ 207, 272 Ballard, J.G. 28 Empire of the Sun 206 Balzac, Honoré de 18, 27, 170, 205, 222 La Cousine Bette 266 Barchester Towers see Trollope, Anthony Barthes, Roland 15, 16, 154 criticisms of realism 204 S/Z 205 ‘The reality effect’ 205, 267 Bax, Arnold Tintagel 196 Beauvoir, Simone de The Second Sex 114 Beckett, Samuel 11, 206 Behn, Aphra 28, 100, 111, 225 Belinda see Edgeworth, Maria Belinsky, Vissarion 181 Bennett, Arnold 197, 198, 199, 247 Berkeley, George 224 Berlioz, Hector Symphonie Fantastique 196 Best, G. Mid-Victorian Britain 134 Bildungsroman (apprenticeship novel), Great Expectations as 142, 155, 156 birth images, in Frankenstein 113 Birth of a Nation see Griffiths, S.W. Blackmore, R.D. Lorna Doone 197

Bleak House see Dickens, Charles Boccaccio Decameron 11 Booth, Wayne The Rhetoric of Fiction 3 British Novelists and their Styles see Masson, David Britons: Forging the Nation see Colley, Linda Brontë, Charlotte 24, 100, 196 on Jane Austen 47 Jane Eyre 119, 123, 142, 240, 265 and realism 128 Shirley 115, 202, 251 in The English Novel 110 and women’s canon of literature 114 Brontë, Emily 24, 30, 100, 196 in The English Novel 110 and women’s canon of literature 114 Wuthering Heights 94, 105, 107, 240 Brookside 203 Browning, Robert 253 Bunuel, Luis 201 Bunyan, John 20, 225 Burke, Edmund 84 Letters on a Regicide Peace 79 Reflections on the Revolution in France 81 Burnet, Gilbert History of His Own Time 226 Burney, Fanny 40 Camilla 23 Cecilia 23, 24 Butler, Bishop Samuel 224 Butler, Marilyn Jane Austen and the War of Ideas 48, 53, 229

Byron, Lord 67 Don Juan 275 poetry sales figures 132 as political radical 133 Prometheus 71 Caleb Williams see Godwin, William Calvino, Italo 206 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller 10 Cambridge English School 18, 21, 104 Camilla see Burney, Fanny capitalism and conspicious consumption 120 and the realist novel 19, 103, 123 Carey, Peter Carlyle, Thomas 173, 261 The French Revolution 253 Carter, Angela 28 Carter, Paul 265 The Road to Botany Bay 264 Castle of Otranto see Walpole, Horace Catcher in the Rye see Salinger, J.D. Catherine II, Tzarina of Russia (The Great) 187 Catnach, James 132, 133 Cecilia see Burney, Fanny Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote 217, 250 Chandler, Raymond Farewell, My Lovely 6 ‘ten commandments for the detective novel’ 6, 6, 9 ‘Charles Dickens’ see Orwell, George Chaucer, Geoffrey 212, 222 Chekov, Anton 176 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai

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What Is to Be Done? 188, 189 Christie, Agatha 6 Christmas Carol see Dickens, Charles cinema, realist fiction and 200 Citizen Kane see Welles, Orson Clarissa see Richardson, Samuel class background of realist writers 24 and the English revolution 214 and feminist criticism 122, 123 and feudal society 211 in Great Expectations 159, 162, 164 in Jane Austen’s novels 109, 245, 247 in medieval society 212 and morality 246 in Pride and Prejudice 45, 46, 53 and the realist novel 18, 102, 214 in Russia 174, 180 and Fathers and Sons 182 and sales figures of novels 133 see also middle class Cobbett, William 245 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 246 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 67 Colley, Linda Britons: Forging the Nation 94 Collins, P. Dickens: The Critical Heritage 149, 150, 151, 156 Collins, Wilkie

The Moonstone 6 The Woman in White 155 Colonial Rise of the Novel see Azim, Firdous Color Purple see Walker, Alice comedy 9 realism as 254 communities, knowable, in The English Novel 108, 110, 242 Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction see Auerbach, Nina Comte, A. 253 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur 6 concrete reality 271 Conjectures on Original Composition see Young, Edward 222 Conrad, Joseph 266 Heart of Darkness 11, 266 in The English Novel 111 in The Great Tradition 106, 111 The Nigger of the Narcissus 27 Consuming Fiction see Lovell, Terry copyright law 131 Corelli, Marie 24 Cornhill Magazine 135 Cornwell, Patricia D. 149 Cousine Bette see Balzac, Honoré de Craik, Dinah 24 creation, in Frankenstein 72, 92 Crimean War 187 Culture & Imperialism see Said, Edward Curse ofKehama see Southey, Robert

Daniel Deronda see Eliot, George Darwin, Charles 253 David Copperfield see Dickens, Charles Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel 20 Day, Geoffrey From Fiction to the Novel 20 De Quincey, Thomas 79 Decameron see Boccaccio Defoe, Daniel 20, 100, 115 class background 24 Moll Flanders 24 names of characters 225 and the realist novel 218, 220, 221, 222, 223, 227 Robinson Crusoe 9, 24, 64, 148, 167, 223, 266 and The Great Tradition 107 Descartes, René 221, 223, 224 detective novels 5, 9, 20, 206 dialogic form, the novel as 31, 70 Dialogic Imagination see Bakhtin, Mikhail dialogue 29 in Fathers and Sons 174 Dickens, Charles 100, 200, 242, 243 A Christmas Carol 150 A Tale of Two Cities 147 and Bakhtin 203 Bleak House 6, 150 and the ‘condition of England’ question 173 David Copperfield 141, 145, 148, 158, 167, 264 Dombey and Son 136, 240, 253

288

Gothic traces in works of 30 Great Expectations 4, 9, 111, 120, 121, 138, 170 act of redemption in 260 child-parent relations in 160, 259 coincidence in 258 compared with Citizen Kane 201 compared with Fathers and Sons 185, 186, 193 desire in 158 escapism in 19 film version of 143 and Frankenstein 86, 144 hallucinatory reading of 138, 154 imperialism in 140, 161, 261 liberal ideas/values in 129, 130, 166 opening of 14, 140 as represention of real life 14 serialization of 145 van Ghent on 157, 159, 161, 254 women characters 114, 123, 152, 158, 193 Hard Times 107, 145, 151, 196, 253 and Jane Austen 47 in Leavis’s The Great Tradition 106 Martin Chuzzlewit 150 and the Naturalists 197 Oliver Twist 251 Pickwick Papers 135 Sketches by Boz 149, 150 in The English Novel 109, 110 Trollope on 196 Dickens: The Critical Heritage see Collins, P.

Dickens the Novelist see Leavis, F.R. and Leavis, Q.D. ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’ see Wilson, Edmund Dickens World see House, Humphrey Diderot, Denis Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage’ 84 Dombey and Son see Dickens, Charles domesticity, in Frankenstein 89 Don Juan see Byron, Lord Don Quixote see Cervantes, Miguel de and Strauss, Richard Dostoevsky, Fyodor 170, 180 Drabble, Margaret 149 Duranty, Edmond 27, 220 Eagleton, Terry 19 Eastenders 202 Edgeworth, Maria 128, 232 Belinda 23 compared with Jane Austen 229, 238 ‘Ennui, or the Memoirs of the Earl of Glenthorne’ 250 Egerton, Thomas 131 Elements of Criticism see Kames, Henry Home, Lord Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 30, 100, 150, 244, 246 Adam Bede 25, 27 Daniel Deronda 133 and Jane Austen 105, 106 and liberal ideas/values 130

Middlemarch 202 liberal ideas/values in 130, 226 realism of detailed description in 154 sales figures 133 and realism 128 and the realistic imagination 252 Scenes of Clerical Life 251 ‘Silly novels by lady novelists’ 24 and women’s canon of literature 114 Eliot, T.S. ‘Tradition and the individual talent’ 105 Émile see Rousseau, JeanJacques Eminent Victorians see Strachey, Lytton Emma see Austen, Jane Empire of the Sun see Ballard, J.G. empiricism, and realism 252 English Common Reader see Altick, Richard English Novel see Williams, Raymond ‘Ennui, or the Memoirs of the Earl of Glenthorne’ see Edgeworth, Maria epics 3, 272 and the novel 277 epistolary novels 40, 64 Eugene Onegin see Pushkin, Alexander Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel see Davis, Lennard J. fairytale, in Pride and Prejudice 46, 56 family sagas 201 Farewell, My Lovely see Chandler, Raymond

289

Fatal Shore see Hughes, Robert father-figures, in Great Expectations 143, 153, 160, 166 Fathers and Sons see Turgenev, Ivan feminist criticism 102, 111, 113, 122 of Pride and Prejudice 53 feudalism, and medieval romance 211, 216, 217 fictionality, in Frankenstein 64 fictitious, the novel as 9 Fielding, Henry 20, 115 Amelia 226 class background 24 and Jane Austen 24, 246 Joseph Andrews 216 names of characters 225 and the realist novel 218, 220, 223 and The Great Tradition 106, 107 Tom Jones 28 films, realism in 200 Flaubert, Gustave 27, 170, 220, 271 Madame Bovary 205, 267 focalization in Fathers and Sons 191, 192 in Pride and Prejudice 39, 40, 42, 51, 61, 118 formal realism 20, 227 ‘Forms of English fiction in Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel 13, 21 Forster, John 256 Life of Charles Dickens 145 Fowles, John 149 France

Flaubert’s description of Rouen 267 ‘new wave’ film-makers 201 Rabelais and 216 and the realist novel 170 Realist School 27, 220, 224 Structuralists 16 Frankenstein see Shelley, Mary free indirect speech, in Pride and Prejudice 38, 39, 51, 117, 118, 237 Freeborn, Richard 172 The Russian Revolutionary Novel 182 French Revolution and Frankenstein 79, 81, 82, 83 and Jane Austen 229 Pride and Prejudice 48, 51 French Revolution see Carlyle, Thomas Frith, W.P. Ramsgate Sands 194 From Fiction to the Novel see Day, Geoffrey Frye, Northrop Anatomy of Criticism 3 Galsworthy, John 198 Gargantua and Pantagruel see Rabelais, François Garnett, Constance 172 Gaskell, Elizabeth 24, 173 Mary Barton 196, 240, 251, 253 North and South 253 gender see women Genette, Gérard 16 genre archetypes 3 in Frankenstein 69 genres mixing of 100, 194, 196 and soap operas 202

the novel as a genre 3, 272 rules and expectations 4 sub-genres 8, 9 traditional categories 9 Germinal see Zola, Émile Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan The Madwoman in the Attic 23, 119, 122 on Frankenstein 95 Gilmour, Robin 165 Gissing, George 197, 247 In the Year of the Jubilee 196 Goblin Market see Rosetti, Christina Godwin, William 71, 77, 79, 84 Caleb Williams 78 Goethe, Johann von 253 on Shakespeare 71 Sorrows of Young Werther 71, 81 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 142 Golden Gate see Seth, Vikram Golding, William Lord of the Flies 206 Gone with the Wind see Mitchell, Margaret Gordimer, Nadine 194 Gosse, Edmund ‘The limits of realism in fiction’ 103 Gothic novels 10, 20, 29 and capitalism 121 class and gender appeal of 133 Female Gothic 94 and Frankenstein 62, 65, 66 and Great Expectations 148, 153 and Jane Austen 50 mass production of 132 and realist fiction 149 rules of 65, 66

290

and soap operas 203 and social change 134 Great Expectations see Dickens, Charles Great Tradition see Leavis, F.R. Green, T.H. 227 Griffiths, S.W. Birth of a Nation 200 Intolerance 200 Gubar, Susan see Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan

The Dickens World 151, 162, 164, 165 Household Words 135, 145, 196 Hughes, L.K. and Lund, M. The Victorian Serial 136 Hughes, Robert 265 The Fatal Shore 169, 264 Hume, David 224, 226, 253 Huxley, Aldous 253

Hammett, Dashiell 6 Hard Times see Dickens, Charles Hardy, Thomas 244 Jude the Obscure 107 Tess of the d’Urbervilles 105 in The English Novel 110 and The Great Tradition 107, 110 Hastings, Warren 84 Haunted Study see Keating, Peter 200 Hawthorn, Jeremy 17 Heart of Darkness see Conrad, Joseph Heldt, B. Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature 185, 191 Heyer, Georgette 149 history of the novel 18, 28 of realism 247 realism and 271 Fathers and Sons 181 History of His Own Time see Burnet, Gilbert Hobbes, Thomas 223, 224 Hogarth, William Paul Before Felix 168 House, Humphrey

idealism, and realism 220 identity feminine 114, 115, 116, 121, 122 as fragmented and multiple 124 individual 120, 123 and the naming of characters 224 in Pride and Prejudice 58 personal 226 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller see Calvino, Italo imagination, realism and 252 imperialism culture and 261 and Frankenstein 83 in Great Expectations 140, 161, 261 liberal ideas/values and 130 In the Year of the Jubilee see Gissing, George India British imperialism and Frankenstein 83 decolonization and novel writing 127 individual identity see identity, individual valuing of the 125

Intolerance see Griffiths, S.W. Introduction to the English Novel see Kettle, Arnold irony in Great Expectations 144 in Pride and Prejudice 34, 42, 44, 58 James, Henry 226 ‘The art of fiction’ 16, 27, 174 in The Great Tradition 105, 106, 111 on Turgenev 170, 174 James, P.D. 6, 206 A Taste for Death 5 Jane Austen see Watt, Ian Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage see Southam, Brian Jane Austen and the War of Ideas see Butler, Marilyn Jane Eyre see Brontë, Charlotte Joseph Andrews see Fielding, Henry Journals see Shelley, Mary Joyce, James 103, 228 Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man 142 in The English Novel 111 Ulysses 199 Jude the Obscure see Hardy, Thomas Jules et jim see Truffaut, Jacques Kafka, Franz Metamorphosis 12 Kames, Henry Home, Lord Elements of Criticism 223 Kant, Immanuel 253 Keating, Peter The Haunted Study 200

291

Kenilworth see Scott, Sir Walter Kenneally, Thomas 194 Kettle, Arnold 19, 28, 100, 104, 120, 204 Introduction to the English Novel 19, 102, 115, 211 ‘Realism and romance’ 18, 211 The Nineteenth Century Novel 170 Kidnapped see Stevenson, Robert Louis Kim see Kipling, Rudyard King Solomon’s Mines see Rider Haggard, Henry Kingsley, Charles 129 Kipling, Rudyard Kim 266 language literary works in translation 170 reality and in Pride and Prejudice 37 use of in Rabelais Laurence, Margaret 194 Lawrence, D.H. 13, 106, 242 Le Mercure Français 27 Lean, David film version of Great Expectations 143 Leavis, F.R. 102, 129, 131 on Dickens 106, 151 The Great Tradition 104, 105, 127 criticisms levelled at 107 and Williams’s The English Novel 107 Leavis, F.R. and Leavis, Q.D. Dickens the Novelist 107, 151 Leavis, Q.D. 107, 151, 153, 155

Lenin, V.I. 188 Les Amants see Malle, Louis The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley see Shelley, Mary Letters on a Regicide Peace see Burke, Edmund Levine, George 102, 131, 166, 204 The Realistic Imagination 126, 128, 247 Lewes, G.H. on Dickens 150, 151, 156 on Jane Austen 47 on women and literature 115 liberal ideas/values defining 124 in Great Expectations 129, 130, 166 in Pride and Prejudice 125, 126, 129 and the realist novel 124 libraries, nineteenth-century 135, 211, 240 Life of Charles Dickens see Forster, John Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy see Sterne, Laurence ‘limits of realism in fiction’ see Gosse, Edmund Literary Women see Moers, Ellen Literature of their Own see Showalter, Elaine Locke, John 221, 223, 224, 226, 227 Lodge, David 206 Long Revolution see Williams, Raymond Lord of the Flies see Golding, William Lorna Doone see Blackmore, R.D.

Love and Friendship see Austen, Jane Lovell, Terry Consuming Fiction 120 Lukács, Georg 18, 19, 20, 103, 104, 204 Studies in European Realism 18 Lund, M. see Hughes, L.K. and Lund, M. Lyell, Charles 253 Lyly, John 225 MacKenzie, Henry The Man of Feeling 49 Madame Bovary see Flaubert, Gustave Madwoman in the Attic see Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan Malle, Louis Les Amants 201 Malouf, David 264 Man of Feeling see MacKenzie, Henry Manley, Mary de la Rivière 28, 225 ‘Manners, morals and the novel’ see Trilling, Lionel Mansfield Park see Austen, Jane marriage in Fathers and Sons 192 ficticious marriages in Russia 188 in Frankenstein 69, 70, 89, 91 in Pride and Prejudice 54, 237 Martin Chuzzlewit see Dickens, Charles Mary Barton see Gaskell, Elizabeth Masson, David 150 British Novelists and their Styles 16

292

medieval romance 211, 216, 217 melodrama 100 Great Expectations and 148, 151, 153 Memoir of Jane Austen see Austen-Leigh, James Edward Metamorphosis see Kafka, Franz Michelet, Jules 267, 271 middle class and Dickens 151 and the realist novel 100, 120, 211 women and novel reading 111, 211 and novel writing 112 Middlemarch see Eliot, George Mid-Victorian Britain see Best, G. Mill, John Stuart 253 The Subjection of Women 114 Milton, John 23 Paradise Lost and Frankenstein 72, 77, 81, 83, 97, 97 and images of women 113 traditional plots in 222 Mitchell, Margaret Gone with the Wind 200 film version of 200 ‘Modern fiction’ see Woolf, Virginia Moers, Ellen Literary Women 54, 92, 93, 95 Moll Flanders see Defoe, Daniel money, in Great Expectations 165 monsters in Frankenstein 79, 144

in Great Expectations 143 Moonstone see Collins, Wilkie moral development in Great Expectations 138, 155 in Pride and Prejudice 40, 43, 117, 232, 234 and the realist novel 31 moral imagination, and the novel 126 moral judgement, realism and 24, 253 moral seriousness, in The Great Tradition 106, 107, 109 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ see Woolf, Virginia Mrs Dalloway see Woolf, Virginia Mukherjee, Meenakshee 127 ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ see Poe, Edgar Allan music, realism in 196 Naipaul, V.S. 194 naming of characters 224 Narayan, R.K. 194 narrative formal realism and 227 the novel as 10 realistic 271 structure in Pride and Prejudice 44 narrator in Fathers and Sons 175 first person 141 in Great Expectations 141, 142, 147, 156, 165 in Pride and Prejudice 11, 34, 37, 39, 40, 51, 60, 123, 128 in Trollope’s works 206

women as narrators 123 Naturalists 197, 228 Nest of the Gentry see Turgenev, Ivan Newman, John Henry 253 Nicholas I, Tzar of Russia 181 Nietzsche, Friedrich 180 Nigger of the Narcissus see Conrad, Joseph Nineteenth Century Novel see Kettle, Arnold North and South see Gaskell, Elizabeth Northanger Abbey see Austen, Jane Novel and Society: Defoe to George Eliot see Smith, Grahame Novelists on the Novel see Allott, M. novellas 11 novels characterization 12 defining 9 epistolary 40, 64 as a genre 3, 272 history of the 18, 28 magazine publishing of 135 as representation of real life 14 in verse 10 see also realist novel Nuttall, A.D. 173, 176 Oliver Twist see Dickens, Charles ‘On Great Expectations’ see van Ghent, Dorothy On the Eve see Turgenev, Ivan originality, and realism 222 Origins of the Novel see Robert, Marthe Ornatus and Artesia 214 Orwell, George 110

293

‘Charles Dickens’ 151, 162 paintings, realist 194 Pamela see Richardson, Samuel Paradise Lost see Milton, John Parallel Lives see Plutarch Parnell, Charles Stewart 86 particularity, and realism 223 Pater, Walter 253 pathos, and realism 183 Paul Before Felix see Hogarth, William Persuasion see Austen, Jane philosophy, realism in 220, 226 Pickwick Papers see Dickens, Charles Plato 270 Republic 15 plot, in novels 16 Plutarch Parallel Lives 81 Poe, Edgar Allan 150 ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ 6 Poetics see Aristotle poetry Aristotle on 213 epic and lyric 275 genre of 9 prose and 215 women novelists and 112 Pope, Alexander 23 Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man see Joyce, James post-Structuralists 206 price of books, nineteenth century 134, 240 Pride and Prejudice see Austen, Jane Prior, Matthew 23

programme music 196 Progress of Romance through Times, Centuries and Manners see Reeve, Clara Prometheus see Byron, Lord Prometheus Unbound see Shelley, Percy prose the novel as 10 and poetry 215 and the realist novel 31 Proust, Marcel À la recherche du temps perdu 13 publishing market 131, 242 Puritanism, impact on the novel 21 Pushkin, Alexander Eugene Onegin 10 Rabelais, François 19, 216, 225 Gargantua and Pantagruel 217 race, and feminist criticism 122, 123 Radcliffe, Ann 65 Ramsgate Sands see Frith, W.P. realism as comedy 254 and empiricism 252 formal 20, 227 French writings on 27, 220 history and Fathers and Sons 181 idealism and 220 moral judgement and 253 and the novel form 218 originality and 222 in other media 200 particularity and 223 and pathos 183 philosophical 220, 226

realistic imagination 247 romance and 18, 27, 211 scholastic 221 Réalisme 27, 220 realist novel critical and educative function of 177 definition of 196 and liberal ideas/values 124 rise of the 17 and social change 100, 108, 109, three-volume format 134, 135 211, 240 tradition of the 102 Realistic Imagination see Levine, George reality effect 15, 154, 205, 267 Reeve, Clara The Progress of Romance through Times, Centuries and Manners 28 referential illusion 271 Reflections on the Revolution in France see Burke, Edmund Reid, Thomas 221, 224 religion Christian ideals in Great Expectations 165, 166 Jane Austen and 229 Pride and Prejudice 51, 232, 236, 238 medieval romance and 214 Rembrandt 220, 224 Republic see Plato Reynolds, Sir Joshua 224 Rhetoric of Fiction see Booth, Wayne Richardson, Samuel 40, 64, 100, 115 Clarissa 10, 11, 20, 24 class background 24

294

and Jane Austen 24, 246 naming of characters 226 Pamela 223 and the realist novel 218, 220, 221, 222, 223, 227 and romance in the novel 28 and The Great Tradition 107 Rider Haggard, Henry 133 King Solomon’s Mines 134 Rime of the Ancient Mariner see Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Rise of the Novel see Watt, Ian Rise of the Woman Novelist see Spencer, Jane Road to Botany Bay see Carter, Paul Robert Elsmere see Ward, Mrs Humphrey Robert, Marthe Origins of the Novel 28 Robinson Crusoe see Defoe, Daniel romance capitalism and 121 character change and 31 in Dickens 150 in Frankenstein 67 medieval 211, 216, 217 realism and 18, 27, 149, 196, 197, 211 Room of One’s Own see Woolf, Virginia Rosetti, Christina Goblin Market 94 Rouen, Flaubert’s description of 267 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 81 Émile 49 Rudin see Turgenev, Ivan Ruskin, John 261

Russia and the Crimean War 187 Turgenev and 174, 179 Fathers and Sons 180 and the ‘woman question’ 187 Fathers and Sons 189 Russian Formalists 16 Russian Revolution (1917) 182, 188 Russian Revolutionary Novel see Freeborn, Richard Said, Edward 70 Culture & Imperialism 166, 169, 261 Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye 140, 142 Sand, George 187, 189 Scenes of Clerical Life see Eliot, George Schlegel, August 71 scholastic realism 221 Scott, Sir Walter 18, 30, 47, 128, 232, 251 Kenilworth 134 and realism 133 sales figures of works 132 Waverley 250 Scrutiny 104 Second Sex see Beauvoir, Simone de Sedgewick, Eve Kosofksy 65, 66, 67 Self-Help see Smiles, Samuel Sense and Sensibility see Austen, Jane sensibility, cult of and Jane Austen 49 sentimental novels, and Jane Austen 49, 50 Seth, Vikram A Suitable Boy 11 The Golden Gate 10

sexuality and creativity in women 119 in Fathers and Sons 179, 185 in Frankenstein 89 Shakespeare, William 173 Goethe on 71 and Jane Austen 47 particularity in 223 ‘problem plays’ 8 traditional plots in 222 Shaw, George Bernard 180 Shelley, Mary 24, 100 Frankenstein 4, 10, 30, 113, 138 compared with Fathers and Sons 184 and creation 72, 92 and death 66, 69, 70 domesticity in 89 and imperialism 83 liberal ideas/values in 125 as the modern Prometheus 70 narrative voice in 123 and the ‘otherness’ of the working class 123 and Paradise Lost 72, 77, 81, 83, 97 shadowings in 77 unresolved fantasy in 121 influence of mother 77 The Journals 72, 92, 93, 95 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 92 Shelley, Percy 67, 92, 97, 213 Prometheus Unbound 62, 71, 73 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 84 Shirley see Brontë, Charlotte Showalter, Elaine

295

A Literature of their Own 114, 116, 120, 122 ‘showing’ in Fathers and Sons 178, 191, 192 in Pride and Prejudice 35, 37, 51 Sidney, Sir Philip 225 silent films 200 ‘Silly novels by lady novelists’ see Eliot, George Sketches by Boz see Dickens, Charles Smiles, Samuel Self-Help 155 Smith, Elder & Company 135 Smith, Grahame The Novel and Society: Defoe to George Eliot 100 Smollett, Tobias 226 soap operas 201 social change and the Gothic novel 134 and the realist novel 100, 108, 109, 211, 240 Sorrows of Young Werther see Goethe, Johann von Southam, Brian Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage 132 Southey, Robert 115 The Curse of Kehama 86 Spectator, The 23 Spencer, Herbert 253 Spencer, Jane The Rise of the Woman Novelist 115 Spenser, Edmund 222 Steele, Richard 23 Stendhal 103, 170 Sterne, Laurence 226 class background 24 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy 10, 23, 24

Sterrenburg, Lee 79, 81 Stevenson, Robert Louis 133 Kidnapped 197 Strachey, Lytton Eminent Victorians 149 Strauss, Richard Don Quixote 196 Studies in European Realism see Lukács, Georg Subjection of Women see Mill, John Stuart Suitable Boy see Seth, Vikram Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage’ see Diderot, Denis Swinburne, Algernon Charles 253 Symphonie Fantastique see Berlioz, Hector S/Z see Barthes, Roland Tale of Two Cities see Dickens, Charles Taste for Death see James, P.D. television, realism and 200, 201 ‘telling’ in Fathers and Sons 178, 191 in Pride and Prejudice 35, 39, 40, 51 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 253 Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature see Heldt, B. Tess of the d’Urbervilles see Hardy, Thomas Thackeray, William 100, 128, 135, 251, 261 and Dickens 150 Vanity Fair 250 That Obscure Object of Desire see Bunuel, Luis Things Fall Apart see Achebe, Chinua

Tieck, Ludwig 150 Tintagel see Bax, Arnold Tintern Abbey see Wordsworth, William To the Lighthouse see Woolf, Virginia Tolstoy, Leo 170 War and Peace 12, 18 Tom Jones see Fielding, Henry ‘Tradition and the individual talent’ see Eliot, T.S. traditional genre 9 traditionalism in literature 221 tragedies 3, 9 Trilling, Lionel 129 ‘Manners, morals and the novel’ 126, 127 Trollope, Anthony 30, 134, 196, 200, 201, 206, 226 Barchester Towers 251 Trollope, Frances 24 Truffaut, Jacques Jules et jim 201 truth and liberal ideas/values 126 in Pride and Prejudice 59, 60, 124 and realism 221, 247 and the realist novel 206 Turgenev and 181 Turgenev, Ivan A Nest of the Gentry 176 Fathers and Sons 4, 111, 170 character and type in 12, 170, 176 female characters 114, 172, 179, 184 polarized characters in 190 representation of women in 184 historical context of 180

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On the Eve 176, 189, 190 as a realist writer 173 Rudin 176 Ulysses see Joyce, James van Ghent, Dorothy ‘On Great Expectations’ 157, 159, 161, 254 Vanity Fair see Thackeray, William verse, novels in 10 Victorian People and Ideas see Altick, Richard Victorian Serial see Hughes, L.K. and Lund, M. Walker, Alice The Color Purple 10 Walpole, Horace Castle of Otranto 30 War and Peace see Tolstoy, Leo Ward, Mrs Humphrey Robert Elsmere 133, 134 Watt, Ian 28, 100, 120, 247 Jane Austen 48 on language of realist novels 170 on male writers 115 The Rise of the Novel 19, 102, 112 ‘Realism and the novel form’ 20, 218 Waverley see Scott, Sir Walter Wells, H.G. 198 Welles, Orson 200 Citizen Kane 200 What Is to Be Done? see Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Whately, Richard, Archbishop of Dublin, on Jane Austen 47, 229, 232 White, Patrick 264

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship see Goethe, Johann von Williams, Ioan 252 Williams, Raymond 19, 102, 106, 125, 131, 166 background 104 ‘Forms of English fiction in 110 on Jane Austen 132 The English Novel 103, 240 compared with The Great Tradition 107 The Long Revolution 9 Wilson, Edmund 259 ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’ 151, 156, 159 Wolf, Eric 266 Wollstonecraft, Mary 77, 79, 81, 116 Woman in White see Collins, Wilkie ‘woman question’ in Russia 187 and Fathers and Sons 189 women character development of female characters 116 in Fathers and Sons 114, 172, 179, 184 in Great Expectations 114, 123, 152, 158, 193 images of in literature 113 and the novel 111 as novel readers 111, 211 as the ‘other’ 114, 123 ruling-class 212 writing novels 22, 112 see also feminist criticism ‘Women’s work in nineteenth-century London’ see Alexander, S. Woolf, Virginia 13, 103

A Room of One’s Own 53, 112 on Dickens 148 feminist criticism and 113 on Forster’s Aspects of the Novel 22 ‘Modern fiction’ 197 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ 198, 199 Mrs Dalloway 12 realism and 197, 200 To the Lighthouse 198 Wordsworth, William 253 Tintern Abbey 68 Wuthering Heights see Brontë, Emily Yonge, Charlotte Mary 24 Young, Edward, Conjectures on Original Composition 222 Zola, Émile 27, 197, 228, 247 Germinal 197