… or, more properly, “Afterward.” Because, after all, the Victorian era does end. And that leaves a book like this in a rather tricky position. My subtitle is “The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel”—but who, exactly, is having the sort of phenomenological reactions to novel narrative that I am discussing? If it is mainly twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers, then how do we connect them to novels from a very different time? In each of my chapters, I have certainly looked for some record of contemporary mainstream opinion, whether in relation to Oliver’s outcome, Dickens’s propensity to make us laugh, or a desire to see Gwendolen married and reintegrated back into Deronda’s aggregate whole. At the same time, though, it would be disingenuous to deny that this book falls back on concerns of present-day reading. This occurs to some extent because arguments about narrative form function by a principle of recognizability: if my reader does not expect, by the novel’s midway point, that Oliver will stay away from crime, or if that same reader does not sense some subdued motivating strength under David Copperfield’s evident passivity, then my arguments will be a good deal less successful. The question, ultimately, is one of presentism and historicism: how do we connect our own experience to these objects and experiences which are centuries old?
Before I attempt to address this, it will be useful to sum up. My argument so far has been twofold. First, I have tried to show that an insight into the moral concerns of Victorians would also offer insight into their formal engagement with the novel form. A closer look at the content of Victorian moralizing, in other words, would also show an unexpected formalizing: in terms of suspense, developmental narrative, humor, and even, in Deronda, the ultimate insufficiency of the Victorian novel form as a cognate to the failure of socially grounded intuition. The second point that I have tried to make is that, while an approach grounded in Victorian moral philosophy might reveal unexpected dimensions of these formal practices, it would not make them look drastically different. They would still be recognizable—readable, to use the term I offered earlier—because their ethical concerns have become embedded in what we consider to be purely formal responses. As I suggested in my introduction, I am not certain that this ethical tradition is one that we should necessarily be striving to emulate. It is, however, one that has become a part of the way we read.
By why the Victorian novel? If the moral-formal concerns that I’ve been discussing are still with us, as I believe that they are, why does this book focus solely on the nineteenth century? To a certain extent, the answer is institutional. I don’t mean this only in the drab sense of disciplinary constraint, though there is that; books, especially first books, are written in fields of specialization, and the nineteenth-century novel is mine. But I think there is a more positive version of this idea: disciplinary formations, and the consensus that they produce, go a long way toward describing what a certain period means. I touched on this already in my discussion of the Bildungsroman, but it bears emphasis: when we talk about the Victorian novel, we are not talking about all novels written between Victoria’s coronation and her Diamond Jubilee. Lots of people wrote books in the nineteenth century, but, if our shared field of reference is any indication, only about twenty-six wrote Victorian novels. Start with a big eleven: all of Austen (not, it bears repeating, a Victorian), all of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, some of Collins, all of Dickens, all of Eliot, most of Gaskell, some of Gissing, all of Hardy, a bit of Thackeray, and as much Trollope as you can bear. Add two more to the count if we include James and Wilde. Then another thirteen, mainly for specialists, bringing us to twenty-six: Ainsworth, Braddon, Anne Brontë, Butler, Bulwer-Lytton, Carlyle (for Sartor Resartus), Disraeli, Martineau, Meredith, Oliphant, Schreiner, Stevenson, and Stoker. I’m sure a few are missing, but beyond this set, I think the expectations of shared reference fall off sharply. The point of compiling this list is to show that when we talk about the periodization of a field we are, in very real ways, talking about the ideas that we use to structure our periodization: the principle of selection by which we choose our texts.
“Choose” is probably the wrong word here; we don’t freely choose which works make up the field. In part this is because of obvious institutional pressures. But a much more significant reason is that the felt proximity of Victorian novels tends to be a fundamental axiom for the field. In spite of the fact that we’re talking about works from another century, and another country, most of the critical apparatus built around the field depend on the notion that, in talking about the nineteenth century, we are talking about ourselves. Most forms of critical historicism—whether they tell time by a Marxist or Foucauldian clock—take this for granted: Victorian novels fall within the bourgeois epoch or the modern episteme. They describe a time whose society tells us something about our own society, but with enough temporal distance to allow us to recognize things about our society more effectively. We know ourselves better, or so the story goes, when we can recognize ourselves in the past. If historicism shows a preference for denaturalizing certain texts, then along with this comes a preference for texts that seem natural in the first place. This isn’t only a point about historicism; formalism in general, and narratology more specifically, usually takes a certain coherence and legibility as a given. To the extent that nineteenth-century realism becomes a key site for formal narrative analysis, it does so because it most fits the model of a story that makes sense, that works according to a narrative grammar that we understand.
For myself, this presentist heritage is not one that I would be anxious to divorce myself from. It seems to be an open secret among Victorianists that many of us are not primarily invested in either England or the nineteenth century. Speaking personally, I came to the field less because of a deep sense of attachment to either the time or the place, and more out of a desire to work within the closest thing the English language seemed to have to a realist tradition—and to work with the formalist and historical-materialist critical traditions that implies. I wasn’t interested, and am still not overwhelmingly interested, in “speak[ing] with the dead,” to use Stephen Greenblatt’s famous phrase.1 I am more interested in talking to myself: the way I think about my role in society, the way I encounter the fraught pleasures of reading. Not just talking to myself, actually—the choice of texts is not an individual one, so we are talking to ourselves.
This is part of the heritage of the Victorian novel. People see value in it because it seems to describe concerns that are still with us. As D. A. Miller puts it, “The ‘death of the novel’ … has really meant the explosion everywhere of the novelistic, no longer bound in three-deckers, but freely scattered across a far greater range of cultural experience.”2 The story of the Victorian novel, according to Miller, is thus the story of “a central episode in the genealogy of the present.” Of course, this also means, as I suggested above, that this is partially because we select those novels which will seem to fit into that genealogy. But we also reproduce them: the mechanics I have been associating with the Victorian novel have continued rather unabated across cultural forms: novels, films, cable television prestige drama. The reason, I think, that we can detach the Victorian novel from the Victorian era in this way is two-fold. First of all, it speaks to the fact that the formal qualities we have been looking at are not tied completely to either England or the nineteenth century; rather they are, in many ways, features of realism more generally. If, for whatever reason, realism was associated with one chapter in literary history but not with the next, that does not mean that its position in the market, or in the culture more generally, had diminished greatly. Now, the question of why obscurity became a significant mark of literary style in the twentieth century is one that is beyond the scope of this study.3 Yet the very notion of difficulty, of a literature that succeeds in no small part because it overturns our sense of how things should work in a novel, is always in part dependent on a continued intuitive understanding of those conventions. The underlying intuitions of realist fiction not only continue to exist in popular entertainments; they are also implied, in their absence, by any work that seeks to call them into question.
This idea—the dependence of the unexpected upon a tacit understanding of the expected—has a corollary in literary history. As Fredric Jameson has suggested, authors who wished to consider their work as “modern” or “modernist” required some sort of field to judge their work against. The work in question, as far as prose was concerned, tended to be the Victorian novel. In other words, we can associate Victorian fiction—a body of work that is well over one hundred years old—with the present in some small part because the modern fiction that followed it required something static on which to base the “new.” Jameson makes this point:
[W]e may observe that the division of literature into [realism and modernism] is dictated by the attempt to deal adequately with modernism, rather than the other way around (in this sense, even Lukács’ accounts of realism are defensive and reflect his own “conversion” to the earlier artistic style). The concept of realism that thereby emerges is always that with which modernism has had to break, that norm from which modernism is the deviation.4
Jameson’s goal here is to make modernism dialectically dependent on realism, and thereby to produce a periodization of literature that follows the continuities of capitalism, rather than one that decisively breaks at the turn of the century. But the paradoxical result of this approach is that it sets up the “norm”—the text that seems to obey the rules we implicitly understand—to be located in the past. To the extent that narrative difficulty is a result of defying expectation—or, as countless critical arguments have it, the “calling into question” of those expectations—it is necessary that we define it against some originary set of texts that held those expectations. This sort of static past is, for Jameson, a fiction, albeit one central to a certain sort of literary periodization:
[W]henever you search for “realism” somewhere it vanishes, for it was nothing but punctuation, a mere marker or a “before” that permitted the phenomenon of modernism to come into focus properly. So as long as the latter holds the center of the field of vision, and the so-called traditional novel or classical novel or realistic novel or whatever constitutes a “ground” or blurred periphery, the illusion of adequate literary history may be maintained.5
The idea of a stable realism is something that can only be maintained from a distance; when we look too closely, we see that nothing perfectly fits the mold, and that nothing is, itself, thoroughly readable. There is something here of the old mathematical proof that there are no uninteresting numbers: if there were uninteresting numbers, one of them must be the smallest; and then it would be the smallest uninteresting number, which is interesting. When we draw out realist novels to look at them closely, they become distinctive—interesting to us precisely because of how they break the rules. Literary critics tend to place a good deal of value on novelists who, like cops in movies, play by their own rules.
But it’s useful, I think, to understand the rules that we live by. Understanding is not the same as ratifying, of course—but it doesn’t seem that any useful critique can occur without that understanding. When we talk about “the Victorian novel,” we are talking less about the multiple possibilities of the books themselves and more about the criteria by which we label things familiar, intuitive, and like us. The Victorian novel, a tradition that we have inherited and continue to maintain and produce, is ours, in a way that it was not even the Victorians’. As I’ve said in a few places in this book, I don’t think the moral structure of the Victorian novel should provide us with lessons. It’s not what we ought to be, but rather what we are. That seems like a good place to start.