4	Virtual Provinces, Actually

THE PROVINCIAL NOVEL

The account of aesthetic experience laid out in Semi-Detached aligns with Catherine Gallagher’s description of voluntary frameworks of disbelief and of realist fiction’s reliance on “believable stories that do not solicit belief.”¹ It also proposes that throughout the nineteenth century there is a heightened awareness of, and focus upon, occasions when the voluntary nature of that disbelief is held up to the light. The advent of a self-referential literary discussion of semi-detachment—of what it means to be caught up in a moment but also capable of pulling oneself away from that moment to reflect upon it—becomes an avenue for writers and other artists to reflect upon what kind of hold upon its readers a mimetic artwork has. When the text reflects on the detached status of the reader him or herself, partially drawn into the cognitive world of the artwork, partially stepping back and contemplating it from a distance, such moments become the occasion for the author to reflect upon what such partial immersion means for the relationship between an actual social milieu and fictional ones.²

The doubled consciousness explored in the introduction, which crops up even in mundane moments of reverie like Jane Eyre’s pensive abrogation of ordinary activity when after an overly eventful day she barricades herself into her room (“Now I simply thought”), points to a pervasive nineteenth-century realist interest in the paradoxical ways in which local attachments can abet rather than thwart moments of detachment. This chapter, however, turns to a set of novels that share with short fiction a generically anomalous status. Whether we construe the provincial novel as a subgenre within Victorian realism or as ur-realism, the center from which all Victorian novels truly emerge, what becomes clear is that at the heart of the provincial novel lies not so much a triumph of the local over the cosmopolitan (Little-Englandism), but a fascinating version of magnum in parvo, whereby provincial life is desirable for its capacity to locate its inhabitants at once in a trivial (but chartable) Nowheresville and in a universal (but strangely ephemeral) everywhere. In fact, we might even go farther: entering the provincial spaces carved out by such novels requires an imaginative conception of oneself as existing at once within and without a tiny beehive of a world: magnum ex parvo, great arising from little.

When I asked a colleague to name some important Victorian provincial novels, she looked at me as if I were insane: “All of them,” she explained gently, as to a drooling child. What is it, though, that nineteenth-century writers thought made a novel not simply extra urban but downright provincial? In 1824, Mary Russell Mitford offered up a long-lived answer; she praised Jane Austen’s novels for successfully delineating a knowable and loveable world. In fact, a world lovable because knowable:

Even in books I like a confined locality . . . Nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen’s delicious novels quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and every person it contains.3

Readers’ interest in any known place, that is, depends on intimacy predicated on the possibility of reciprocity and connection. Austen’s success is that her readers forget they have a book in hand and instead imagine they are within a geographically and psychologically compassable world. This sense of readerly security might theoretically arise in a novel not so firmly rooted as Austen’s, but Mitford is skeptical that the form is capable of inducing a sense of placid stability if its subject matter is peripatetic: “Nothing is so tiresome as to be wheeled over half Europe at the chariot wheels of some hero.”⁴

In praising both the knowability and the secure totality of Austen’s represented worlds, Mitford does more than affirm the famous reading of Austen as a miniaturist, toiling on “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”⁵ She initiates the tradition of praising the provincial novel for what is left out (troubling aspects of modern life) as much as for what is put in (evocations of a placid, rural, backward-looking England). Interestingly, Mitford’s account of a comforting literature based on compassability also indirectly acknowledges the distancing effect of what James Buzard has described as the nineteenth-century novel’s autoethnographic impulses.⁶ We are happy in the world of the novel, Mitford explains, because we can contemplate, closely and yet with a consciousness of our own distinction from them, characters who coexist like “ants in an ant-hill [or] bees in a hive.”⁷

The very features Mitford singles out for praise in the provincial novel are those that Mikhail Bakhtin influentially defines as epitomizing the residual and irrelevant features of both provincial life and provincial novels. Bakhtin emphasizes the importance of the bildung tradition, specifically in contradistinction to the comparative unimportance (and rural placidity) of the “petty-bourgeois provincial town,” with its “commonplace, philistine, cyclical . . . viscous and sticky . . . ancillary time.”

In the provincial novel we witness directly the progress of a family-labor, agricultural or craft-work idyll moving into the major form of the novel. The basic significance of provinciality in literature—the uninterrupted age-old link between the life of generations and a strictly delimited locale—replicates the purely idyllic relationship of time to space, the idyllic unity of the place as locus of the entire life process. . . . The provincial novel has the same heroes as does the idyll—peasants, craftsmen, rural clergy, rural schoolteacher.8

Bakhtin’s critical template has proved surprisingly durable. According to Ian Duncan’s persuasive account, the British provincial novel presents a world that is “compact” (usually traversable on foot or horseback) and “familiar,” yet also “distinctive.”⁹ Duncan also notes the provincial setting’s “comparative historical backwardness,” which helps account for the “nostalgic mode” through which it is generally viewed.¹⁰ To Duncan’s five criteria could be added Franco Moretti’s description of the provincial as defined primarily negatively, through the sorts of possibilities and plots that provinciality rules out.¹¹ Virtually everything that delineates the provincial novel is included in those cogent criteria: compactness, familiarity, distinctiveness (usually from the metropole), nostalgia-inducing comparative backwardness, and negative definition.¹²

Consider the opening paragraph of perhaps the most instantly recognizable set of British provincial novels of all, Trollope’s Barchester series:

The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of—; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected. Let us presume . . . that the west end of Barchester is the cathedral close.¹³

The disavowal of temporal and geographic specificity, and of personality, is provincialism incarnate: all six of the Duncan/Moretti criteria are in view by the bottom of the first page.¹⁴

Crucial among those criteria, perhaps, is a special kind of provincial compactness, a curiously portable kind of geographic fixity. John Locke points out that when a chessboard is picked up and moved without disturbing the pieces on it, “we say [the pieces] are all in the same place, or unmoved.”15 Provincial novels similarly are interested not in absolute location, but in the way that its pieces (its dramatis personae) are situated in relation to one another. Small wonder that many begin with the arrival of a naïve stranger (better still, a returning native) who must be briefed on everyone’s comparative standing—and address. Moretti argues that “one cannot map provincial novels—you cannot map what is not there,” but he also proposes a very helpful distinction between mapping (of the real, geographically knowable world), and diagramming, which simply establishes a differential relationship between locations (three houses down from the corner; next town after Middlemarch, etc.).¹⁶ Provincial novels are unmappable, but they must be diagrammable: the one drawing Eliot made of the world of Middlemarch (Fig. 4.1) was a relational chart of distances between villages.¹⁷

PROVINCIAL SEMI-DETACHMENT

The importance of this diagram logic to the provincial novel should also help draw our attention to another aspect of the genre, equally important, but distinctly unamenable to diagramming. Bakhtin emphasizes the sticky and idyllic qualities of provincial life, but in doing so he overlooks the ways that even the most seemingly sedentary provincial worlds always contain linkages to a greater world beyond, a world that crucially discloses itself within the provincial location, even if only by way of the characters’ awareness of their imbrication in that larger realm: Jane Eyre touching Roman history in Miss Temple’s Roman books, Miss Marjoribanks laying Napoleonic plans to conquer Carlingford—but also Maggie Tulliver materializing (in chapter 1 of The Mill on the Floss [1860]) in the narrator’s cold study.

Victorian readers possessed a vast arsenal of terms to describe what it felt like to get lost in a novel. Readers are engaged or enthralled; the novelist is a magician or a time traveler. The annihilation of present space and time often seems a blissful consummation.¹⁸ The highest praise a reviewer can give Dracula (1897) is to admit that “at ten we could not even pause to light our pipe,” and by midnight “we listened anxiously for the sound of bats’ wings against the window.”¹⁹ Robert Louis Stevenson envies Fyodor Dostoyevsky beyond all writers because “it is not reading a book, it is having a brain fever to read [Crime and Punishment].”20 For many readers, then, a novel succeeded, if it could engender absorption so complete that actions the work merely represented could trigger “the ‘creepy’ effect, as of pounded ice dropped down the back.”²¹

FIGURE 4.1. Eliot’s only visual aid: a diagram showing distances between important sites for the novel. Quarry for Middlemarch (n.d., MS Lowell 13, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

What of those novels, though, that present themselves neither as brain fevers nor as pounded ice? A wide range of Victorian novels implicitly or explicitly propose self-limiting claims about the sorts of power that an aesthetic experience has—or ought to have—over its readers. In such works, the reader is imagined as getting lost in a book, but remaining simultaneously aware of the real world from which she or he has begun to separate. For example, consider what might be called “phase-shift” moments, in which the narrator discovers that what had seemed to be a sensation within an artwork’s imagined world is actually a sensation that can be tied to the here-and-now, as well. As we saw in the introduction, the musing narrator whose voice opens The Mill on the Floss finds himself located at once in the world of the Tullivers (staring at Maggie by the mill) and in his own readerly space:

It is time, too, for me to leave off resting my arms on the cold stone of this bridge. . . .

Ah! my arms are really benumbed.

The reader, like the narrator, is suspended between the world of the mill and the study—Eliot’s peculiar ellipsis marks the moment (of waking, of dizziness?) where that confusion arises.22

What is it that makes Eliot commence a novel that ends up located entirely inside the world of Dorlcote Mill with this antechamber, half-bridge and half-study armchair, located so oddly between worlds? If a novel sought mainly to immerse its readers in a sensually complete shadow world, a moment like this would be a glaring anomaly, a signal of failed aesthetic effect. Enough similar instances exist, though, to paint a picture of semi-detachment not as an inadvertent way station but as a state deliberately sought out. We might, for example, trace through Victorian realist novels moments when a movement toward pure abstraction gets unavoidably anchored in the physical location from which that flight to abstraction began. The introduction discussed self-annihilating Jane Eyre reading herself into arctic bird life (in a window seat screened from and yet connected to a cold world beyond the glass) who is also cousin Jane, aware that at any moment the red curtain will be thrown back and her book will be turned into another weapon in that most common Victorian struggle, cousin against cousin. Moreover, the experience of semi-detachment that comprises a fully realized provincial life—far away from the seemingly inescapable centrality of the metropolis, yet still connected to it—is in important ways analogous to the relationship that the reader is meant to have to the text itself. This is true both in sophisticated novels that thematically reflect on the problem of partial absorption (Middlemarch) and in novels that resist such attempts at reflexivity (The Chronicles of Barchester).

One marker of the logic of semi-detachment that powers the provincial novel is a recurrent tendency toward generic parody and half-appropriation of other genres in British provincial novels. Not just the relatively awkward parodies of Dickens and Carlyle in Trollope’s The Warden but also Gaskell’s gesture toward the fairy tale as “usual rigmarole of childhood” in one novel’s opening line—and in another, toward the realm of Greek myth: “In the first place, Cranford is in the possession of the Amazons.”23 Such parody is on display in Emily Eden’s Semi-Detached House, for example, in which the suburban languors of Dulwich are animated by a “turn for quotation” (a turn to ballads and Shakespeare, principally).²⁴ In quoting, characters make their lives meaningful by analogizing them to the lives they devour in distinctly nonprovincial (and nonprosaic) artworks. A fascinating palette of generic parodies is also at the core of the (unjustly) neglected provincial novels of Margaret Oliphant: especially Miss Marjoribanks. For Oliphant (much like Gaskell in her half heroic, half mock-heroic Cranford), the provincial novel holds its power precisely by simultaneously borrowing and renouncing the seemingly more grandiloquent plots and formal devices of various other genres.

If for Bakhtin the provincial novel is defined by the sense that any meaningful event has to happen elsewhere, one of the striking elements of the British provincial novel is how this disjunction is routinely turned on its head. Going up to London, which looks like productive activity, frequently turns out instead to be a misguided, even fatal loss of focus. Raymond Williams has made the case that in Hardy’s novels the disjunction between past and present is not between country and city, but runs through the rural idyll itself.²⁵ That claim also has interesting relevance to the worlds of Cranford and Carlingford. Whether through genre parody or fiscal perturbation, in such provincial novels the macrocosmic and “world-historical” proves to be just as present in the idyll space as it is anywhere else.

In the novels of Trollope, Gaskell, and Oliphant, core and periphery frequently get reversed, so that what matters to the nation’s center happens on its edges: in Gaskell, the business town of Drumble waits on backwater Cranford’s decisions, and in Trollope, Barchester’s family dramas run back upstream to shape metropolitan politicking. We know how little can be expected from the new Bishop in Barchester Towers, for instance, when we read:

Dr. Proudie was, therefore, quite prepared to take a conspicuous part in all theological affairs appertaining to these realms, and having such views, by no means intended to bury himself at Barchester as his predecessor had done. No! London should still be his ground: a comfortable mansion in a provincial city might be well enough for the dead months of the year. . . . The resolution was no doubt a salutary one as regarded the world at large but was not likely to make him popular either with the clergy or the people of Barchester.26

For London to “still be his ground,” it is necessary for the Bishop to give up hope of a meaningfully active role in Barchester or in the novel that takes Barchester as its locus amoenus. The Bishop is instantly judged irrelevant, structurally consigned to the very same category as the various London-based writing forms that Trollope satirizes in The Warden (the blowhard journalist, the Carlylean prophetic ranter, and the lachrymose Dickensian social-problem novelist). In 1882, R. F. Hutton summed up Trollope’s ability to center the world on his provincial microcosm nicely: Barchester is “the center of all sorts of crowding interests, of ecclesiastical conflicts, of attacks of the press, of temptations from the great London world.”²⁷ It is not a retreat, but the moving center of a moving world.

COMPARATIVE PROVINCIALISM

A sly remark of Hardy’s rings true: even the sprawling European plot of The Dynasts is provincial—when viewed from the heavens. The British tendency to center fiscal, romantic, and vocational plotting in the hinterlands stands in striking contrast to the role that bucolic interludes play even in provincially inclined Continental novels. In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for instance, Levin’s remarkable night spent sleeping among his peasant laborers provides a crucial benchmark. During that blissful night, Levin resolves to give up everything related to his social position and immerse himself in both rural labor and the contemplation of natural beauty.

At the very instant Levin casts his psychic lot with the peasantry, though, he hears a coach flying toward him, and in it he sees “a young girl, apparently just awakened. . . . Bright and thoughtful, all filled with graceful and complex inner life to which Levin was a stranger, she looked through him at the glowing sunrise.”28 It is Kitty, his eventual wife, who by pure chance Levin has happened to see speeding by. With her arrival, his purely bucolic interlude ends abruptly—as it generically must. Anna Karenina, no matter how lovable a sidelight Levin’s rural improvement schemes may be, is born from bildung: expect nothing less from a novel that begins with a love affair born on a train and ends with a railway suicide.

As Bakhtin’s account of the provincial novel suggests, Levin’s temporary retreat from his classed role offers a compact, familiar, distinctive, historically backward domain that serves as the negative space against which the metropolitan world can unfold in all its active, emergent plottedness. With a very few exceptions, in the rest of Europe the appeal of the provincial remained, like the idyll or the eclogue, a possibility glimpsed on the margins, briefly entertained and then discarded—as in this suggestive moment where Levin half succumbs to the allure of a timeless life he can never fully envision. Or worse: when Flaubert casts a cold eye on the “moeurs de province” in Madame Bovary (1856), the dread provincial mundanity Emma Bovary has married into is embodied in “Charles’s conversation . . . flat as a sidewalk . . . everyone’s ideas walked along it in their ordinary clothes.”²⁹ Emma’s only refuge from that flat, anti-cosmopolitan ordinariness is a Walter Scott-fueled Quixotism (“And you were there too, you sultans with long pipes, swooning under arbors in the arms of dancing girls, you Giaours, Turkish sabers, fezzes, and you especially, wan landscapes of dithyrambic countries”) which makes Emma wish (perfect motto of the stranded provincial dreamer) “both to die and to live in Paris.”³⁰

The Victorian provincial novel, by contrast, is willfully centered on out-of-the-way eddies and the flotsam and jetsam that wash up in them. Life may seem to be elsewhere in Trollope’s novels, but the novel takes place in the very elsewhere where life is. Think of Ang Lee’s film The Ice Storm (1997), set in 1970s suburban Connecticut. The young, would-be protagonist of the film (who thinks he’s in a bildungsroman) leaves his provincial town for New York in pursuit of a girl and some adventures; twelve hours later, he returns home from a series of disappointments—no girl, no stories. Meanwhile back in his hometown, where he is convinced nothing ever happens, everything—intoxication, sex, love, and death—has.

PROVINCIAL COSMOPOLITANISM

Victorian provincial novels do not simply proclaim that great plots happen in small places. They aim to represent what it feels like for characters (and implicitly readers) to be confined to a restricted locale—and yet also, simultaneously, aware of an indirect connection to the currents of a greater world beyond. One way to read the provincial novel’s evident anti-Londonism is to emphasize that England, unlike France and Russia, has multiple geographical centers of power.31 However, there is also something more at play here. Matthew Arnold warns that the English are in danger of succumbing to provincialism because “we all of us like to go our own way and not to be forced out of the atmosphere of commonplace habitual to most of us.”³² Yet the Victorian provincial novel pointedly inverts Arnold’s logic: the most far-flung, least appealing, and most seemingly cloistered reaches of the country are its key loci, not despite but because of their “commonplace” quality.³³ You might think of the characters in provincial novels responding to Arnold’s condemnation of their provinciality not by moving to London, but by hunkering down at home and ordering more books and journals so as to read about how cut-off and backward they are.

The relationship between provinces and larger realms (the nation, the world) is unmistakably shaped in certain ways by the neat inversion that Benedict Anderson proposes in understanding how novels make up “imagined communities”: that in their depiction of a plurality of multiple locales, novels can create a nation united across vast swathes of space and time. If Mitford sees the provinces as beautifully self-contained worlds, Anderson’s reading turns them potentially metonymic: the part that can also stand in for the whole, as a church stands for churches, a house for the houses of the nation as a whole. Anderson’s account, though, misses a crucial doubled sensation that keeps recurring in these novels: the awareness that one is living at once inside a tiny world, a trivial world, caught in the middle of nowhere, and yet one is also located within the larger currents of the day, potentially locatable anywhere.

The provincial novel is built around the significantly insignificant life, a life worth remarking on because it is invisible, and its channels are, like Dorothea Brooke’s, diffusive. In part, this simply underscores Philip Larkin’s maxim: “Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”³⁴ It is remarkable how well such instances of cloistered worldliness succeed—at least inside the dream world of the Victorian provincial novel. The number of Gaskell characters who manage cosmopolitan acts of introspection and abstract cogitation—minutely inspecting leaves (Roger Hamley in Wives and Daughters) or beetles (Job Legh in Mary Barton³⁵)—is an important reminder that in the Victorian provincial novel every place, no matter how common, is defined in part by its uncharted edges—edges understood as trailing undiagrammably off into Belgium and Canada (Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley) or even into the sky (Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower). Those who travel abroad clutch their copies of Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne (a late eighteenth-century work that reached a wider readership only in the mid-nineteenth century, when it became a common companion for émigrés36) in order to materialize their “home thoughts from abroad.” Those who stay home, meanwhile, gaze ruminatively into terraria and Ward’s boxes.

Insect contemplation, in fact, is a surprisingly useful figure with which to grasp how Victorian provincial novelists reflexively understand their own project. I made the case earlier that the era’s new ways of understanding magnum in parvo were crucial for understanding the ways that Victorian provincial novels both acknowledged and worked beyond the way that their characters resembled, as Mitford had put it, “ants in an ant-hill.” Accordingly, when a microcosm appears in these novels, it is worth considering not just what such a metonym means to readers but also what it seems to mean to the characters themselves. Thus in Middlemarch, just before her climactic scene with Rosamond, we find Dorothea “dilating with Mr. Farebrother on the possible histories of creatures that converse compendiously with their antennae.”³⁷ The two conversations—Dorothea’s talk with Farebrother while her mind is truly occupied with her coming talk with Rosamond, and the conversation going on between the insects whose little world looms mysteriously below—resonate curiously with one another. Readers are privy to Dorothea’s effort to divert herself from private miseries by envisioning another world that lies somewhere just beneath the limits of her myopia.

If the epigraphs in Middlemarch are hooks that lift characters up out of their narrow neighborhood, allowing readers to reimagine the novel’s social world as if it were a Renaissance play, the compendious conversations of the insects suggest that looking down is another way to shift scales. Both raise the possibility of a life that is coterminous with one’s own and yet phase-shifted so as to be only semi-present. A melodramatic tableau looms for Dorothea: both she and her readers can predict (incorrectly, it turns out) just the sort of well-worn plot that awaits her. Instead, what she calls the “social spirit” leads her to talk insects with Farebrother and soil conditions with “old Master Bunney.”³⁸ Like lifting our eyes up to the epigraph, these downward glances to earth and insects propose that the affairs of our local world can be reassessed by approaching them from a different sort of perspective altogether. Is it time, then, to reclassify Edwin Abbot’s Flatland (discussed further in chapter 7), with its satirical account of characters incapable of grasping the truth about the three-dimensional solid moving through their planar world, as the ultimate Victorian provincial novel?

Such glimpses of a different set of axes or a new vantage point on distant worlds—glimpses that nonetheless permit characters to continue their old provincial life—form a near-omnipresent element of Victorian provincial novel. Even at the grimmest moments, these shifts in vision recur: when Tess Durbeyfield teaches her brother to see the stars as worlds, “most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted,” he has to look up and survey the sky in order to grasp that he and his sister live “on a blighted one.”39 This pattern of looking downward so as not to look in the mirror of one’s own life, or looking upward to abstract ideals in the sky for the same reason, is one that Hardy perfectly captures and anatomizes in that coldest of climaxes to the Victorian provincial novel, Jude the Obscure. That novel anatomizes Jude and Sue’s semi-detachment: apart or together, the two appear “gliding steadily onward through a dusky landscape of some years later leafage,” always moving on, never arriving.⁴⁰ Like Father Time himself, who glides wearily over the earth as if no part of it were any different from any other, Jude is afflicted with the modern vice of restlessness.

However, the form that it takes in Jude the Obscure is peculiarly abstract: Jude himself strives to see every problem as a case, as the enunciation or embodiment of a general rule. Faced with the arrival of his son, Jude enunciates a principle rather than acknowledging a blood-claim: “All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time and entitled to our general care.”⁴¹ For Jude to reclassify the boy that way (and for the novel itself to accept the relabeling, referring to him as Father Time from this moment onward) is somehow to make his son available as subject matter for ongoing conversations with Sue.

These conversations poignantly aim toward some abstract realm of ethereal cogitation even when Jude and Sue’s lives (they bake biscuit replicas of the colleges Jude once longed to enter) are defined by the direst material circumstances. Hardy is charting what it means for his characters to take local actuality (thwarted education, bad marriage, “too menny” children) and reimagine each privation as an instance of unapproachably distant universal truths. Accomplishing this—especially within a novel that had initially seemed firmly anchored in the “Wessex” that supplied the frame through which Hardy’s work was nearly inevitably interpreted—requires Hardy to explore what it means to treat one’s own griefs as the property of the universe. That is the crux of Jude’s making (or at least striving to make) his and his family’s life into a sounding board of abstract concerns, rather than a painfully contingent and personal set of experiences.

It is not that such novels simply permit the reader to establish a semi-detached relationship to this world. Rather, they insist upon that semi-detachment by modeling it with the forms of attention and of quasi-removal that open up for the novels’ own characters. Mitford and Bakhtin both presume that the readers of provincial novels have a voyeuristic and a detached interest in woes and gladness not their own. In Middlemarch, though, the implicit readerly response is modeled in the characters’ own evident awareness of what it means to observe half-removed worlds: Farebrother not only immerses himself in the parliament of bugs, he also urges Lydgate to immerse himself in the microscopic world of his own work. If we never see a character looking up to the head of a chapter to observe and reflect on the epigraph under which the forthcoming actions have been gathered (though there are moments in Middlemarch when characters seem to quote from a chapter’s epigraph, an unsettling trick), we do find characters looking downward at yet smaller worlds (e.g., Henrietta’s involuntary “beaver-like notes” as she hunts for her gift from Ladislaw, a “tortoise shell lozenge-box”).42

Eliot and Hardy are not writing in the mode of science fiction that in subsequent decades allows H. G. Wells (subject of chapter 7) to conjure up characters who “[move] out of our space into what is called the Fourth Dimension”; the mode that also allows Abbot to introduce into his Flatland a three-dimensional sphere who takes a brief sojourn in a world of only two dimensions.⁴³ Yet details like Farebrother’s insect world (and Jude’s biscuit colleges) signal authorial awareness that transient attachment to such microcosms entails semi-detachment from one’s own milieu. Mitford’s image of the world of the novel as “ants in an ant-hill [or] bees in a hive” is at once invoked and complicated (sublimated almost) in Eliot by virtue of the reflexivity that Eliot weaves into encounters with worlds that are imagined as overhead or underfoot in her novels. Characters who gaze down at microcosms in Eliot novels (think of Lydgate’s scientific ambition to trace “subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space”; not to mention Eliot’s arresting image of Mrs. Cadwallader as a microbe waving “certain tiniest hairlets”⁴⁴) are themselves reflecting on what it means to be a reader gazing down on the self-contained, yet also infinitely potentiated, world of a novel.

THE IRRITANT IN OLIPHANT

The problems associated with life in a microcosm are not unique to Eliot and Hardy. My colleague’s point (all Victorian novels are provincial, you dope!) suggests that we could range far afield from Eliot and still discover not just those Moretti/Duncan criteria in place but also the turn toward semi-detachment. Creating too wide an omnium gatherum of Victorian provinciality might run the risk of losing sight of the particular kinds of narrative opportunity this turn opens up for Victorian writers who hew close to the core provincial problem: how is this miniature world related to the actual Victorian social realm that it at once represents and escapes from? Accordingly, this chapter concludes by focusing on another novelist of the day, one who seems considerably less conscious than Eliot and Hardy of the most self-referential aspects of novels about provincial microcosms.

The fiction of Margaret Oliphant (1828–97)—Scottish-born author of around ninety novels, as well as hecatombs of criticism and short fiction, and an astonishing autobiography—is variegated on the surface, but consistent at its core.45 Throughout a long, complex career Oliphant persistently grappled with what she understood as the key ethical and epistemological problem of modern life: how is one to find pleasure and satisfaction in a life that is persistently defined by small demands, petty encumbrances, and the inescapable claims that one’s friends, family, and neighbors lay upon one? On the one hand the social demands that her protagonists face are baffling and onerous. On the other, to step back from such duties—which generally means neglecting one’s own family—is to be ethically derelict. One’s choices are twofold: either find a way, usually a fiscal way, to be freed up for abstract thought and higher, nobler action; or resign oneself to doing one’s unpleasant local duties to family and neighbors (Nettie in The Rector’s Family, for example) as they arise.⁴⁶ There is no third way.

Both Oliphant’s fiction and her autobiography make plain how bitterly she resents the grind, the relentless grind that social (and financial) obligations force on the would-be autonomous individual. There is an important wrinkle, however, which brings us back to the fore of the logic of semi-detachment and its potential advantages for the novelist. On the one hand, Oliphant bemoans the kind of vexing, mundane impingements of one’s daily duties on characters who (like Oliphant herself, as she sketches the scene in her Autobiography) want only to be left alone to get some of their own (higher, worthier) work done.⁴⁷ Oliphant is the muse of irritation, the patron saint of that prickly feeling you get during minor setbacks that temporarily divert you from higher goals. On the other hand, heaven help those who actually manage to disentangle themselves from mundane demands enough to pursue that higher calling.⁴⁸ Perhaps the key not just to her Autobiography but to Oliphant’s work generally lies her in acid depiction of George Eliot swaddled up by Lewes, free to play Lady Bountiful without the bother of walking among her people (“Should I have done better . . . if I had been kept, like [George Eliot] in a mental greenhouse and taken care of?”).49

Resentful as she may be of those interruptions that prevent her getting down to a higher sort of work, Oliphant resents even more those who (like Eliot) think they can simply pull clear of those roles and walk away.⁵⁰ Her attack on Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance puts her position beautifully: “After all we are not ethereal people. We are neither fairies nor angels. Even to make our conversation—and still more to make our life—we want more than thoughts and fancies—we want things.”⁵¹ Oliphant is not, though, simply embracing pure materialism in her attack on Hawthorne. She understands her characters as continuing to strive for a “life elsewhere” even as they are surrounded by those things, those blocky objects, that make life real.⁵² Oliphant does not watch her characters as if they were ants on an ant-hill: she wants her readers to recognize them as human beings like themselves, both sustained and trapped by their milieu. Oliphant protagonists never have the luxury of gazing through a window at a neighbor’s funeral “with the interest of a monk on his holiday tour,” like Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke.

In Oliphant novels, it often emerges that the ethically proper path is seemingly available for characters, but actually unattainable, because the exigencies of the present moment oblige, or seem to oblige, characters to do something that’s different from the ethical fundamentally decent course they have charted out. In The Perpetual Curate (1864), for example, young Wentworth (the novel’s eponymous, and penurious, curate) finds himself so dogged by his daily duties and by his needy relatives that he can barely hear himself think. Perpetual social incursion on his barely present private realm ensures that he will be unprepared when moments of real opportunity crop up.

Such a moment does arrive, early on. Wentworth’s only hope of marrying his beloved and pursuing his vocation honorably seems to be to please his aunts, before whom he must deliver an Easter sermon. Unfortunately, his religious beliefs differ from theirs, and the sermon he prepared (not knowing they would hear it) emphasizes his High Church beliefs in ways that are sure to alienate them.⁵³ This is classic Oliphant irritation: the problem of proximity, the way that his aunts appear unexpectedly and press him just where he would have loved a little bit of (Eliotic) space apart. Absent such space, what is Wentworth to do?

With a sigh, he begins the sermon he knows will doom him with his aunts, since it reveals the gap between his beliefs and theirs. Yet something curious happens inside him as he speaks:

He spoke, in very choice little sentences, of the beneficence of the Church in appointing such a feast, and of all the beautiful arrangements she had made for the keeping of it. But even in the speaking, in the excited state of mind he was in, it occurred to the young man to see, by a sudden flash of illumination, how much higher, how much more catholic, after all, his teaching would have been, could he but have once ignored the Church, and gone direct, as Nature bade, to that empty grave in which all the hopes of humanity had been entombed. He saw it by gleams of that perverse light which seemed more Satanic than heavenly in the moments it chose for shining, while he was preaching his little sermon about the Church and her beautiful institution of Easter, just as he had seen the non-importance of his lily-wreath and surplices as he was about to suffer martyrdom for them. All these circumstances were hard upon the young man. Looking down straight into the severe iron-grey eyes of his aunt Leonora, he could not of course so much as modify a single sentence of the discourse he was uttering, no more than he could permit himself to slur over a single monotone of the service; but that sudden bewildering perception that he could have done so much better—that the loftiest High-Churchism of all might have been consistent enough with Skelmersdale, had he but gone into the heart of the matter—gave a bitterness to the deeper, unseen current of the Curate’s thoughts.

Besides, it was terrible to feel that he could not abstract himself from personal concerns even in the most sacred duties.54

Discomfort with one’s own actions is a perennial problem for Oliphant characters: in The Doctor’s Family (1863), for example, both the hero and heroine are guilty of innumerable petty actions against their own moral convictions, simply because they are forced to put up with irksome family members at close quarters and at inopportune times. With Wentworth’s sermon, however, the problem is more complex. We see the character realizing an inconsistency within his own actions, but one that he cannot immediately remedy—even though it would be prudent and clever for him to do so. After all, could he find the right words, he might demonstrate his beliefs were “consistent enough with Skelmersdale” that his aunts could have him appointed to the living that would give him the wherewithal to marry his beloved.

The effect of the gap between what he realizes and what he is able to say in the crucial moment is not just to make the reader aware of discrepancies between the character’s inner world of thoughts and the actuality beyond, it is to make us reflect on the ways in which unwelcome social pressure (preaching before his aunts) can be both an irritant and also the spur that he needs to push his thinking along to a higher level. This too is a problem of semi-detachment: not physical, but mental. Wentworth realizes that he could please his aunts without betraying his core beliefs. Though those thoughts run through his brain, they do not alter his words. This is not for ethical but for practical, psychological reasons. He is committed, by rote almost, to saying one set of words while thinking quite another. George Levine has described Oliphant’s attention to the gap between moral order and one’s “felt life.”55 Here, we could say Wentworth is aware that he could choose not to sermonize—but aware only with the part of his mind not already busy doing that very sermonizing.

Anne Banfield’s Unspeakable Sentences follows the logic of free indirect discourse to an unexpected conclusion: that fiction charts the gap between a sentence that seems to provide an impersonal magisterial account of the world as it is, and those sentences that clearly provide an account only of the experience of a particular character.⁵⁶ Wentworth’s split consciousness not only highlights the gap between the world as experienced and the world as it actually is, it also details what it means for a character to become uncomfortably aware that such a space is opening up.

Such scenes, in all their fraught complexity, are what led Henry James to praise Oliphant as “a talent that could care to handle a thing to the tune of so many pages.” However, the way Wentworth’s quandary is immediately dropped (never recurring as a site for ethical or psychological duress) speaks to James’s addendum: that having raised such an issue, Oliphant will “yet not care more to ‘do’ it.”⁵⁷ While admitting the fiscal exigencies that shaped her writing, James judges Oliphant harshly because she raises such complex ethical and psychological moments and then brings her novels to “storybook” conclusions as if those moments had never occurred. After waxing eloquent in her praise, James ultimately judges Oliphant not by the issues she raises but by her willingness to drop them: “There is a fascination in the mere spectacle of so serene an instinct for the middle way, so visible a conviction that to reflect is to be lost.”⁵⁸ What James misses in Oliphant is the attention she pays to the question of just when moments of near-escape like Wentworth’s can arise: not in seclusion and quiet, but precisely in the midst of the usual havoc and confusion that surround them.

James steps back and serenely judges Oliphant for yielding to exigencies. Certainly Oliphant herself judged herself for such yielding—judged herself but also was cogent and careful about how material circumstances formed (or deformed) her writing: “All the things I seem to want are material things. I want money. I want work, work that will pay, enough to keep this house going which there is no one to provide for but me. I don’t know how to stop to change, to make another way of living.”59 Oliphant’s is not a world of cultured oases, but of impinging demands. Paradoxically, however, these demands turn out to be just what characters require in order to come fully to their senses.⁶⁰

Oliphant’s instinct to resolve even the knottiest complications happily, so that plot complication and psychological uncertainty vanish in a welter of good feeling, could be taken then as an indication (but not necessarily a deleterious indication) of how she understood her work, not simply as circumscribed but as actively defined by the various economic and cultural forces that James depicts as unwelcome intruders within it.⁶¹ If she sometimes mused bitterly that her work taken as a whole is nothing more than “an infinitude of pains and labour, and all to disappear like the stubble and the hay,”⁶² she also describes herself writing with “that curious kind of self-compassion which one cannot get clear of.”⁶³ We ought to think of Oliphant’s novels as sustained rather than undermined by that “self-compassion.” Not only are her novels structured by the way she yields to provincial pressures, they are themselves about the lives of those who are constantly forced to yield to just such pressure.⁶⁴

The next chapter explores in detail James’s own distinctive approach to what it might mean for a character to exist in two worlds simultaneously, whether those worlds be the mind and the social realm, the realm of ghosts and of living beings, or even in his final novel, the world of the present and the past. James has the patience (as well as the affluence-induced leisure) to abide with endlessly iterated and nuanced complexities around occasions of moral choice that may look like virtually nothing in terms of palpable public action. It is not surprising, then, that he would not be kind to Oliphant’s unwillingness to abide with such moments. What he overlooks is how perfectly and brilliantly representative of actual cognition is the movement of Oliphant’s prose away from such moments—back into mundane social exigencies that besiege characters like Wentworth, and exigencies that Oliphant was herself besieged by and that she thought besieged her readers, as well.

Oliphant’s embedded and embodied characters (remember her brief against Hawthorne: “We are neither fairies nor angels”) struggle to gain small spaces from which to look down on their own lives, spaces that become visible in little moments like Wentworth’s mental half-reverie during his sermon. But those moments remain linked to and indeed directly dependent upon the social actuality that might seem to require overcoming for contemplation to take place: contemplation in Oliphant is occasioned by irritation, rather than occurring when such irritation is overcome. Taking pride (as well as self-compassion) in never herself having been granted a sanctioned space apart, Oliphant turns the rough impositions of mundane activity into the pressure that pushes her work upward.

CONCLUSION: POST-VICTORIAN PROVINCIALISM

Twentieth-century British provincial novels have an utterly different range of possibilities from those this chapter has explored by way of Eliot, Oliphant, and their contemporaries. Some of Eliot’s sense for the paradoxical centrality of provincial experience may still be preserved in the few opening chapters of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), but the absurdity of imagining there could be any true intellectual engagement in a bungalowed provincial life becomes the central comic device of E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series (1920–39). To quote Nietzsche in the confines of Riseholme is simply to reveal risible pretentiousness, a laughable effort to align oneself with a “life of the mind” incompatible with life in the sticks. A similar refusal to admit the compatibility of the cosmopolitan and the parochial shapes the Bovarysme of William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life (1950; “que je m’ennuie” exclaims its hero to an audience of schoolboys65), the parodic exuberance of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954; the novel’s senile old villain has no higher ambition than making it onto a radio program devoted to “provincial culture”⁶⁶), and the genteel resignation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978). That refusal shapes as well the 1963 film Billy Liar, the 1968 concept album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989; provincialism deconstructed), and a thousand subsequent British high-, middle-, and low-brow restagings of what precisely is wrong with the provinces.

The starkness of the differences between such later provincial novels and their Victorian antecedents clarifies the importance of the historical developments in ideas about semi-detachment that this book aims to chart.⁶⁷ Dorothea Brooke and her Middlemarch cohort, like Oliphant’s irritated, mundanely burdened curates, businesswomen, and struggling pensioners are semi-detached provincials. In both Eliot and Oliphant—despite many immense differences in their lives, working conditions, and the novels they produced—what emerges as a perennial provincial preoccupation is the same. Both explore in detail and across a wide range of characters, wrapped up in distinctive subjective experiences, what it means to be half-engulfed in daily cares, and half-aware of the forces at work elsewhere in the great world, which might offer one a different kind of outlet if things were only slightly different.

Eliot’s account of provincial life and thought runs in a somewhat happier vein, but operates according to the same ground rules. If Middlemarch ends with Dorothea’s commitment to the invisible diffusive currents that link her to her neighbors, its other axis—the epigraphs that lift us away from Lowick to an imagined Renaissance scene, the spiritual half-parallels that make Dorothea simultaneously like and unlike St. Theresa, and the insect kingdoms that open beneath her feet—works to remind us that the provinces are in fact like the distant world to which their inhabitants aspire: they are like that world, that is, precisely in being unlike any other place. In their dislocation, their location; in their provinciality, their cosmopolitanism.