CHAPTER 4

BACK IN TIME: THE BILDUNGSROMAN AND THE SOURCE OF MORAL AGENCY

There is a quietly haunting line toward the end of Margaret Oliphant’s 1866 Miss Marjoribanks. In announcing its main character’s unmarried status in its title, the novel tells us what it will be working to undo. “I don’t mean to be Lucilla Marjoribanks for ever and ever,” the title character insists, suggesting a trajectory toward the moment at which she will be neither a Miss nor a Marjoribanks.1 Readers of Austen or Eliot will not be surprised by the general contours the novel takes:² an independent, intelligent domineering young heroine, Lucilla Marjoribanks, is spoiled by her father; busy with her position in town and flirting with “a wit and a man of fashion,” she brushes off the more prudent proposals of her cousin, Tom Marjoribanks.³ The novel’s end, though, finds her wiser and a bit chastened, and she accepts marriage to Tom, taking his name—Marjoribanks, the name that has always been hers:

[A]ll Carlingford interested itself, as has been said, in the details of the marriage, as if it had been a daughter of its own. “And yet it is odd to think that, after all, I shall never be anything but Lucilla Marjoribanks!” she said, in the midst of all her triumphs, with a certain pensiveness. (496)

Whatever it is that Lucilla had been preparing for, it turns out, will never come: what she has already been is what she shall remain. The “pensiveness” here recalls Roland Barthes’s conclusion that the “the classic text is pensive … , keeping in reserve some ultimate meaning.”⁴ That is, while Lucilla’s narrative works its way toward her fulfilled development, that development will remain tacitly held back—a narrative promise that cannot be kept. Middlemarch ends on a similar note: “Many who knew [Dorothea], thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done.”5 Lucilla and Dorothea’s narrative conclusions foreground what Andrew Miller has called the “optative” mode in realist fiction: the tendency to dwell in counterfactuals of “lives unled.”⁶ Miller invokes the image, from Kierkegaard, of Victorian characters “nailed to themselves.”⁷ Lucilla, in this scene, is nailed to herself; try though she might—try though she did, for the whole of the novel—she “shall never be anything but Lucilla Marjoribanks.”

This all might seem like making much of a technicality; she has gotten married, after all, and even though her name hasn’t changed, the legal source of the name has. But it is precisely this shift—something remaining the same while its source changes—that I want to focus on here. “Marjoribanks” had previously been a name that signified Lucilla’s relation to her father; now, it is the name that signifies her relation to Tom. But just as importantly, with her father having died rather late in the novel, and not there to give her away at the wedding, it is “all Carlingford” that acts as her father, as if she were “a daughter” of the town itself. In other words, at the marriage ceremony, “Marjoribanks” ceases to be the name that she had received from her father, and now becomes a name that she receives from the community. It is true that, as numerous critics have noted, the resolution of the female Bildungsroman is almost always a scene of loss.⁸ But unlike Emma Woodhouse before her or Dorothea Brooke after, we are able to see something of what Lucilla gains in her (regretful, necessary) exchange: not the negation of the person she has been, but a redefinition of the foundation of that person in terms of her community.

In this chapter, I will argue is that such communal redefinition is reliant on a temporal dynamic: characters come to be able to recognize themselves in a community when they are able recognize themselves in the past. Lucilla’s final stage of narrative development comes when she understands differently the prior conditions that determine the person she is. By redefining the source of Lucilla Marjoribanks in terms of her community, she effectively changes the stakes of the game. Instead of Lucilla’s integration into her community being an event that still needs to happen in the novel, Lucilla discovers that, through a redefinition of the past, she has already been integrated. What this resembles, ultimately, is nothing so much as the recuperative time-travel plots of late twentieth-century, in which the secret to future resolution lies in changing the past.⁹ Recalling the Rawlsian conception of ethics, discussed in the introduction, as “acting in accordance with a law that we give to ourselves,”¹⁰ I would like to suggest that the Bildungsroman, as a narrative form, depends on unifying oneself with that law-giving self in the past.

We have already seen a form of this unification in the previous chapter. There, I argued that narrative development in David Copperfield depends on finding the communal bases for one’s intuition. This experience, which I called, after Shaftesbury and Kant, sensus communis, was mobilized by the experience of humor: the sort of “getting it” that requires a tacit understanding of the judgment of others. In this chapter, I will take that argument one step further and argue that the notion of sensus communis—dating back to the moral-sense philosophy of Shaftesbury—becomes fundamental for the structure of the Bildungsroman. Indeed, as we shall see, the very concept of Bildung traces back to Shaftesbury, through the German importation of his works. In tracing this history, we will also be able to see how the Bildungsroman went from being just one story among others to being the central story of the novel form. Such a claim, of course, is one part history and one part historiography: not just what happened but also what we choose to emphasize in our retelling of events. Yet, here the two are oddly intermixed. We focus on, and find meaning in, certain stories from the past—the ones that seem still to be about us—for the same reason that the characters in those stories identify with their past selves. In the moral form of the Victorian novel, in other words, we find the ethical basis for the study of the Victorian novel.

A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

Suppose I tell you that I have a Victorian novel for you to read. I have not yet told you who wrote it or what it’s about. But if you have some familiarity with the field, with the meanings attached to the “Victorian novel,” then you likely know quite a bit about it. It will be long—probably five hundred pages or more in a modern Penguin edition. It will not offer much in the way of sex scenes. Its hero will probably be young and not yet set in life. There will be some maturation, most likely some carriages or a railroad, a career for a hero or a marriage for a heroine, and a polite degree of anxiety about industrialization and commodity culture.

But here’s something else you will probably know: the novel that I’m going to give you will not be particularly difficult to read. It may take you a while—but it will seem more familiar, more like a novel than the work of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Austen, as always, conspicuously excepted); and it will require a good deal less aesthetic sophistication and effort against the grain than a modernist novel. When we talk about the “Victorian novel,” one of the principal things we are referring to is a certain sweet spot in relation to the post–World War II reader: modern enough to be recognizable; not so modern as to be obscure. And for this reason, it does not need to be taught to competent contemporary readers—at least not at the level of basic textual comprehension. More precisely, we can say that Victorian novels are those novels that do not need to be mediated by historians or interpreters. They might benefit from such mediation, as those who have taught them know, but that is only because students are only too eager to find themselves in them. Teachers and critics have to assert the need for historical or formal mediation precisely because the novels do not seem like they need it: because they seem immediate. Neither dated nor obscure, they are readable.

Theories of the realist novel, more generally, take this sort of experiential proximity as a given. José Ortega y Gasset, in his Meditations on Quixote, addresses this question directly. In discussing Don Quixote’s famous categorization as the first novel, he moves quickly to an interpretation that stresses readerly familiarity. Quixote, he says,

is said to be a novel; it is also said, and perhaps rightly, that it is the first novel in point of time and in merit. Much of the satisfaction that the contemporary reader finds in it comes from what it has in common with the kind of literature favored in our times. As we peruse its old pages, we find in them a modern note which is bound to draw the venerable book closer to our hearts: we feel it to be at least as close to our innermost sensibility as are the builders of the contemporary novel—Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, or Dostoievski.11

This provides Ortega with the jumping-off point for his “Short Treatise on the Novel”: “But what is a novel?” begins the next paragraph. But it is worth lingering over the claims already made. First: to be a “novel” is to have, in some way, a “modern note” that brings a book “closer” to its twentieth-century readers. And second: to be “close to our innermost sensibility” is to be like Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, or Dostoevsky—in other words, like a nineteenth-century realist.

In Victorian studies, the emphasis on immediacy might be less explicit, but it is fundamental all the same. In fact, it does not seem too much a stretch to say that readability is the operative defining principle of the Victorian novel. It is not a quality that we happen to find in the works we study but rather the means by which we decide which works to study in the first place.¹² Usually, critics of the nineteenth-century novel frame this selection as a sort of descriptive analysis: making implicit use of the familiarity of the object of study. I have already had cause to cite Jameson’s claim that nineteenth-century realism “show[s] the functioning of all those realities of capitalism that have not changed substantially … wage slavery, money, exploitation, the profit motive.”¹³ But surely that is not a claim about every text from the nineteenth century. What we see is not so much an act of description as one of prescription. A novel that does not align with present-day “realities of capitalism” or “cultural experience” will not disprove the claims; it will just fall, like Jack Sheppard, outside the field of study.

A quick look back makes it clear how limited this collection of readable novels is. David Masson, in his 1859 British Novelists and Their Styles, probably the earliest engagement with the Victorian novel as a serious object of study, lists “thirteen distinct varieties of the British novel, as in existence during the quarter of a century after Scott’s influence had begun, and as in existence still.” They are: (1) “the novel of Scottish life and manners”; (2) “the novel of Irish life and manners”; (3) “the novel of English life and manners”; (4) “the fashionable novel” (what we would now call the “Silver-Fork novel”); (5) “the illustrious criminal novel” (now the “Newgate novel”); (6) “the traveller’s novel”; (7) “the novel of American manners and society” (a subset of the traveller’s novel, which, like the next one is “worthy of being separately classed”); (8) “the Oriental novel, or novel of Eastern manners and society”; (9) “the military novel”; (10) “the naval novel”; (11) “the novel of supernatural phantasy”; (12) “the art and culture novel”; and (13) “the historical novel.”14 While we can certainly recognize some examples of the Silver-Fork novel and the Newgate novel, this odd hodgepodge of classificatory schemes takes the form more as a contextual background for a set of chosen works: Oliver Twist is not notable as an example of the Newgate novel subgenre, but rather the Newgate novel subgenre is notable because it gave us Oliver Twist.

Masson, though, seems to sense that the seriousness of the novel enterprise rests in his twelfth category: “the growth and education of an individual character of the more thoughtful order” (225). This is the “art and culture novel,” what we would now call the Bildungsroman. What is particularly striking in Masson’s description, though, is that even while he admits that the “art and culture novel” is not particularly common in England—“I do not know that we have yet, or, at all events, that we have had till very recently, any very pure specimen of the novel so designated” (225)—he still seems to see it not so much as its own category but rather as an elevation of the tendencies inherent in the other categories he has discussed. So, for example, he suggests that the “most characteristic product of the time was, and is, the Fashionable Novel” (229); yet he suggests at the same time that “what is best in our fashionable novels seems to have arisen from an occasional desire on the part of those who practise such a style of fiction to make it subserve some such purpose [of growth and education]” (225). One form, then, can seem to by subsumed by another. Or, to look at it from the other side, one form—the Bildungsroman—can transcend and elevate other forms.

It is not simply the fashionable novel that Masson finds the Bildungsroman to elevate. In fact, in looking at more serious “novels of purpose”—“Novels,” Masson explains, “made in the service not of ‘contemporary fun’ merely, but also of contemporary earnest”—he emphasizes that it is the themes of the Bildungsroman that make them into something more than topical “pamphlets” (265, 266):

By far the highest class of recent novels of purpose have been some which might be recognized by themselves … under the name of Art and Culture Novel. … The novels I mean are those which, concerning themselves or not, in a dogmatic manner, with the specialties of present political or ecclesiastical controversy … address themselves rather to that deeper question of fundamental faith as against fundamental skepticism, which is proclaimed everywhere as the one paramount fact of the age—embodying certain views on this question in the supposed education of an imaginary hero, or of several imaginary personages together, who pass through various intellectual stages to attain one that is final. In all novels whatsoever, of course, the hero passes through a series of mental stages, the usual goal or consummation being an all-consoling, all-illuminating marriage. But in the Art and Culture novel, as I consider it, the design is to represent a mind of the thoughtful order, struggling through doubt and error toward certainty and truth. … (266)

As this passage proceeds, Masson’s focus shifts from social-problem novels to Bildungsromane to “all novels whatsoever.” By refocusing the specific political agendas of a given “novel of purpose” onto what he sees to be a “deeper,” and certainly more abstract, question, Masson depoliticizes them. But as his reference to “pamphlets” suggests, he believes that in doing so, he is also arguing that the best of these novels should be less ephemeral, both in the themes they cover and the fates they meet. The reference to the nuptial conclusion of “all novels” may seem a bit of a non sequitur here, but the rhetorical thrust is clear enough: when novels of purpose make that purpose into something related to development, they not only transcend what we would now call the “social-problem” novel, or the “industrial novel”; they produce something representative of the “deepest” possibilities of the form as a whole. As an example, it is interesting to consider the case of Mary Barton: if Elizabeth Gaskell had had her way, and had named the novel John Barton, would it have produced the same reaction? While it is impossible to say with any certainty, the absence of any novels in the Victorian canon centered on middle-aged men driven to desperate crime would seem to suggest not. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, in an essay titled “Why Political Novels Have Heroines,” ties the political argument of British political novels to their heroines’ “development”: the relatively chaste possibilities for a Victorian novel heroine, Yeazell argues, shapes the political imaginary around a limited erotic imaginary, with the effect that “social and political anxieties are contained.”15 Political novels, of course, had both male and female protagonists; but Yeazell’s essay points to the fact that those with heroines have continued to be central to our understanding of the subgenre.¹⁶ As with Oliver Twist, a narrative trajectory of development seems to be the vehicle that has carried these novels from their containment in subgenre.

The special pride of place granted the Bildungsroman has continued to this day. As one undergraduate textbook of Victorian literature puts it, “A German form—the Bildungsroman—is often viewed as the model of realist fiction.”17 Indeed, in the most influential strands of novel theory, the Bildungsroman is either the model for the realist novel or practically synonymous with it. M. M. Bakhtin, though he is best remembered for stressing the “novelistic” as a process that could be present in a wide variety of forms, still allows that to understand “the forms of the novel in the nineteenth century, and above all the realist novel (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, and Thackeray),” the Bildungsroman is of “special importance.”¹⁸ Georg Lukács, of course, placed the Bildungsroman in such a central position in his Theory of the Novel that the work—and those, like Moretti’s Way of the World, that follow from it—is essentially a Theory of the Bildungsroman. In each of these cases, the key characteristic of the Bildungsroman is its goal of mediating between individual development, something that requires some separation from the social sphere, and a reintegration back into that the social sphere. As Joseph Slaughter puts it, “The Bildungsroman is a unique and vital variant of the modern novel because it is especially equipped to normalize the conditions of inclusion in and exclusion from the public sphere. … The Bildungsroman purposes to bridge the gap between exclusion and inclusion.”¹⁹ Those who propose the special place for the Bildungsroman in the theory and history of the novel would seem to be largely invested in this sort of mediation between an individual and her social context. Even a critic like Ian Watt, who shows no particular interest in the Bildungsroman as a form, will suggest that we only reach the “full maturity of the genre” with Austen, and her “harmonious reconcil[iation]” of Richardson and Fielding’s styles: one the artist of the private and the internal, the other the artist of the public and external.²⁰ Even when the Bildungsroman is not a key term in the argument, the essential synthesizing characteristic of the Bildungsroman is offered as the defining feature of the novel form—and that feature is presented as only fully emerging in the nineteenth-century tradition.

How does this specific narrative trajectory come to stand in for novel narrative in general? The answer, it will turn out, comes from the implicit preference Victorian studies has for novels that seem to offer an immediate connection with the past: novels, that is, in which we can recognize ourselves. It is this principle of selection that ultimately privileges the Bildungsroman. Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose hermeneutic approach is specifically concerned with the question of how an aesthetic connection across a temporal divide is possible, sees the theme of development, or Bildung, as central to this experience. In Truth and Method, Gadamer proposes Bildung as that concept which differentiates between works that seem familiar and works that do not: “The concept of Bildung most clearly indicates the profound intellectual change that still causes us to experience the century of Goethe as contemporary, whereas the baroque era appears historically remote.”21 “Bildung” here refers to the larger concept of what he calls “self-formation, education, or cultivation” (8). Gadamer draws the term from the German hermeneutic tradition of Herder and Dilthey, but, for our purposes it is worth noting that it actually comes into German use from England, in a translation of Shaftesbury’s ethical works. We will return to the question of the lineage of the term later in this chapter; for now, it suffices to say that Gadamer argues that works of art which describe an individual’s interaction with tradition will become, themselves, part of a tradition. People who cultivate themselves—become part of a culture—become recognizable to others as part of others’ cultivation. For the purposes of the argument in this chapter, we could reformulate this as follows: those works that show people recognizing themselves in the past will be the works from the past in which we recognize ourselves.

CHOICES ALREADY MADE

The representative example of the Bildungsroman has long been Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. For Lukács, among others, Goethe’s novel depends upon its protagonist’s ability to recognize himself in the social world.²² This recognition is the essential move that makes “reconciliation between interiority and reality” possible.²³ The key moment of such recognition occurs when a mentor explains to Wilhelm that

when [a man’s] development has reached a certain stage, it is advantageous for him to lose himself in a larger whole, learn to live for others, and forget himself in dutiful activity for others. Only then will he come to know himself … (301)

He will “come to know himself” when he “forget[s] himself” in a larger social whole. The principal English instantiation would be Dorothea’s “incalculable diffusion” into public life at the end of Middlemarch. What these texts posit is the notion that, in order to find yourself, you must look to your membership in something larger.

Such a connection is different from resigned acceptance of the past. The classic account of this sort of resignation comes in Moretti’s Way of the World, in which he points to the resolution of the Bildungsroman as a final reconsideration and redefinition of what has come before: “the facts have not changed, but their value … has. On second reading, the past is permeated with a new meaning, its aim the well-being of the individual.”²⁴ The model here for Moretti is the sort of reordering of past events that occurs with the “solution of a mystery”: a determination of an underlying fabula (story) from a finally complete sjuzhet (narration of those events) (70). The oddly genre-bending supernaturalism of Wilhelm Meister’s mysterious secret society at the Tower underlines this claim. Ultimately, for Moretti, the end of the narration fixes past events into place. Meaning is the reparation for the foreclosure of possibility. The fixity of narrative conclusion speaks to the fact that Moretti sees this sort of “second reading” as an attempt to make the best of what you are given. Given an unchangeable state of affairs, freedom giving way to necessity, Moretti suggests, the only alternative left is the “valorization of necessity, the ‘positive’ side of … the escape from freedom” (69). This is a result of the fact that the Bildungsroman, which requires the move toward freedom and individuality, and ends with absorption into community, is “of necessity … intrinsically contradictory” (6).

This claim is based, at least in part, on the notion that the individual and the communal represent contradictory impulses. What I would like to suggest instead is that the Bildungsroman, instead of attempting a narrative resolution to the contradictory demands of individual and community, can instead be understood to offer a representation of the communal basis of moral intuition. Simply put, what I will argue in this section is that the formal principles of narrative in the Bildungsroman, the production of the drive forward in the text, develops out of an interplay between seemingly autonomous free choice on the part of its central character and a pre-existing basis for those choices. The sense of “rightness” in a developmental narrative arises from the form’s suggestion that a character’s choices are always, already, founded in a communal context. The reconsideration of the past in terms of the present is not a final resignation, but, instead, a consistent element of the narrative form of the Bildungsroman.

First, though, let us start by considering a choice of some significance in the larger history of the nineteenth-century novel: Wilhelm Meister’s decision to leave the world of the theater and devote himself to family and state—that is, to replace his youthful dreams with mature responsibility. If Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship functions in literary history as the exemplary Bildungsroman, then in this choice, we have the locus classicus of nineteenth-century character development. For all its importance, though, the moment, when it comes, passes quickly by: “Wilhelm was about to take a formal leave of the theatre, when he felt that in reality he had already taken leave, and needed but to go.”25 This moment will probably not come as a surprise to anyone reading the novel. The plot has been taking Wilhelm away from the theater for some time. In deciding to go, he just follows along with the trajectory of the plot. At the same time, by projecting this decision into his past, the novel suggests that this narrative trajectory was itself a act of Wilhelm’s own will, albeit an act of will that we never see at the level of narrative. This probably makes some intuitive sense—many people have had the experience of making a tough decision and having it not take because it felt like it had not already been made at a deeper level. What this means formally, though, is that the novel works to suggest that Wilhelm’s choice, as fictional character, takes hold here because he has already made the choice at a level that redirected the narrative itself.

This is a small—if significant—moment in Goethe’s novel, but it is hard to overstate how prevalent this pattern is in nineteenth-century fiction. In what follows, I will look at a number of examples from Dickens’s Great Expectations, in which the moment of apparent decision constantly refers back to an earlier decision. By the time we see textual evidence of one of Pip’s choices, it seems his mind has already been made up. The actual moment of choice remains elusive. This fits in well, perhaps, with our notion of character: it would not do for Pip, or any other character, to make each decision ex nihilo. There must be some consistency; each choice must seem based in what we already know. At the same time, though, for the character to appear as character, the choice must seem somehow free. There is a reason that undergraduates frequently resort to the counterfactual notion that characters are somehow autonomous, that they could have done otherwise. This is part of the illusion that novel narrative creates, and it is, as I will now show, an important determining factor in the sense of narrative necessity.

The first of Pip’s choices occurs at the novel’s opening, with Magwitch accosting Pip in a graveyard and demanding that Pip steal food for him. This has frequently been identified as the novel’s primal scene. It starts the narrative machinery in motion, certainly, and without it there would be no expectations, no trip to London, no dreams of marriage to Estella. Magwitch, though, does not leave Pip a legacy solely because he had threatened him years earlier. He does so because Pip brings him the food. It may seem slightly off-key to refer to this as a choice, given the duress under which Pip committed the theft. All the same, Magwitch later sees it as one, claiming Pip “acted noble,”26 an evaluation Pip does not deny. Let us address this question first, then. Does Pip have a choice? Not to have a choice means, quite literally, for there to be no alternative; only one course of action presents itself. Pip’s situation, on the other hand, provides two very clear alternatives: he may either steal food and a file, and stay silent about it, or he may have his heart and liver torn out. If following a rather obvious pragmatic logic in this case seems like the only sensible way to go, this should not obscure the fact that a choice after all has been made, under a certain set of circumstances.

In his description of his torturous night carrying out Magwitch’s order, Pip makes clear that these different options are indeed available to him. The night plays out as an ongoing tug-of-war of these different inclinations. Pip has a clear conscience of his theft being wrong—here figured physically as the piece of bread he must keep hidden in the leg of his trousers (12–13)—but immediately after the mention of that conscience, Pip’s mind again turns to a fear of Magwitch and the young man (13). The two leanings seem to pull Pip between them. On the one hand, he says, “The guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe … united to the necessity of always keeping one hand on my bread-and-butter … almost drove me out of my mind.” On the other hand, as he thinks of the convicts outside, he writes, “If ever anybody’s hair stood on end with terror, mine must have done so then” (13). To complicate matters further, his thought of the convicts is not thoroughly one of fear; he already shows some empathy with Magwitch when he imagines him “declaring that he couldn’t and wouldn’t starve until tomorrow” (13), insofar as he imagines his suffering. The novel repeats this process of conscience overridden by ambivalent fear and sympathy in brief in the following paragraph, in which Pip describes trying to stir the Christmas pudding: “I tried it with the load upon my leg (and that made me think afresh of the man with the load on his leg)” (13). Again, we see around the act of theft these three mixed sensations—guilt, fear, and sympathy—with their three contrary, though overlapping, imperatives: I ought not to do this; I ought to do this; I must do this.

Yet nowhere do we see a deliberation between these contrary imperatives actually taking place. At the end of the paragraph described above, as Pip stirs the Christmas pudding, he adds a neat conclusion to his difficulties: “Happily, I slipped away, and deposited that part of my conscience in my garret bedroom” (13). This passage nearly begs for interpretation of Pip’s ability to deposit his conscience elsewhere, but we should not overlook its simple denotative import: Pip is going to steal the bread. All of Pip’s musings on the matter lend to the difficulty—the “burden” (12)—of stealing the bread. But the actual theft of the bread, the theft as an act, appears as a foregone conclusion.

Even if it is a foregone conclusion, though, the important thing to notice here is that Dickens spends pages on Pip’s warring conscience and desire for self-preservation. Rather than present the theft as a matter of simple necessity, the foregone conclusion is still subject to the appearance of deliberation. In other words, Dickens makes it clear that there is a choice to be made, just as he makes it clear that the choice is predetermined. Hearing the guns of the prison ships firing, and feeling the smart of a reproach from Mrs. Joe for asking too many questions, he states: “I felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the Hulks were handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe” (15, emphasis mine). The final statement, with its expression of the future tense embedded in the imperfect—“was going to”—could potentially be read as a proleptic statement of fact by the older, narrating Pip, along the lines of “But I would soon find out.” However, the childlike guilt of the first prediction that he was on his way to the Hulks—and, just as importantly, the fact that this statement is not true—would suggest that it is the young Pip who makes the statement about the theft, who already feels destined to this act. Rigorously speaking, there is a certain undecidability between these two readings, but it is a productive one for our purposes. For it points to the strong sense of predetermination in this statement, as a choice already in the past and unable to be altered. Such awareness is present throughout the night: “I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I must rob the pantry” (15). What is not present in the description that led up to this point, however, is a stated reason for why Pip knows this to be the case. At every point up to and including the theft, regardless of which position Pip takes toward it, the theft itself has the quality of an act that had already been firmly decided upon in advance. This is not to say that there was no choice; Pip’s entire narration of the night refutes that. There is a choice, but that choice had already been made.

The night leading up to the theft, then, presents a compelling formal paradox. On the one hand, by continually stressing Pip’s conscience, the novel implies that the act was one that Pip could have chosen not to commit. The option, at least, is always explicitly present. On the other hand, the act is at every point a necessary one. It should be stressed, though, that this necessity does not take the form of Pip’s fear of having his liver eaten. That fear is present, of course, but largely irrelevant, since the choice is always presented as having been made, already, in the past.

This would seem to be an example of the sense of felt necessity, already mentioned, that Barthes refers to as “the discourse’s instinct for preservation.” Barthes’s analysis, remember, was specifically about the freedom, or lack of freedom, of a character to choose: Sarrasine’s choice of whether or not to visit La Zambinella. For Barthes, the seeming choice is depicted, through a sort of psychological overdetermination, in order to mask “by superposition the implacable constraint of the discourse.”27 The moment seems to be one of free alternative, then, but this is only the surface phenomenon of a determining narrative direction.

And yet this would seem to be taking the underlying narrative structure, the determining law that the reader feels, as somehow pre-existing the novel itself. Seen structurally, there is no reason why Great Expectations would have necessarily ended without beginning had Pip not brought Magwitch the food. The threat of retaliation would have hung over the narrative every bit as “unbounded,” to use a term of Brooks’, as that “energy” produced by Pip’s actual choice. The structure that Barthes sees as directing the novel is produced, as I discussed in the previous section, through the process of reading.

Of course, the choice is determined by the narrative. Insofar as Pip is an actant in Great Expectations, he could not have done otherwise. But at the same time, this narrative, Great Expectations, only comes into existence with the narration of these choices. To claim that the choice is only the surface appearance of an underlying narrative seems to overlook the equally true fact that the underlying narrative is determined by a seemingly free choice. Pip’s choices, as Brooks seems to suggest, are moments of transition in the narrative, dictating the direction it will go. On the other hand, as actual moments of decision, they are oddly undetectable, always seeming to refer back to a decision already made. They dictate the narrative, and yet they are dictated by the causal necessity of the narrative. The former (choice as moments of transition) perhaps fits better with an intuitive reading of the novel; the latter (choice as dictated by the narrative), with an analytic reading. Kant, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, makes a similar point:28 “reason for speculative purposes finds the road of natural necessity much more traveled and more usable than that of freedom; yet for practical purposes the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of our reason in our conduct.”²⁹

The utility of Kant’s ethical thought in this reading is the intense scrutiny under which he puts the relation of autonomous choice and constraint; his ethics as a whole can be productively read as being less about right and wrong or good and bad, and more about freedom and necessity. In fact, he refers to his ethics at one point as his “science of freedom” (4:387). The best-known element of this theory is Kant’s “Categorical Imperative”: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” The received wisdom on this formulation makes it into a procedure for making moral decisions: a situation comes to an agent, the agent tests to see if a reaction would be permissible as a universal law, decides for or against that action. This interpretation is not quite accurate—it seems to overstate the extent to which the process is conscious³⁰—but at times in the Groundwork, Kant seems to encourage it, particularly in the four concrete examples he offers as illustration. Whatever the case may be, though, this particular aspect of Kant’s theory, actually occupies only the first two parts of his Groundwork: analytic sections that argue that if there is a moral law, this is what it would look like. By far the greater part of Kant’s ethics, which extends from the third section of the Groundwork through the Critique of Practical Reason, his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and finally his Metaphysics of Morals, is more concerned with the murkier topics of autonomy and free will—not so much what a moral decision is by definition, but how we can make a free decision at all.

What we are really looking for in the notion of free will, according to Kant, is a cause that is “unconditioned.” In other words, there must be something spontaneous, not caused by something else. And that, as far as we are able to cognize, is quite impossible to find. In the second Critique, Kant makes the unlikely concession that, looked at temporally, free will seemingly cannot exist:

[E]very event, and consequently every action that takes place at a point of time, is necessary under the condition of what was in the preceding time. Now, since time past is no longer within my control, every action that I perform must be necessary by determining grounds that are not within my control, that is, I am never free at the point of time in which I act.31

Theoretical reason thus finds it impossible to imagine freedom. At the same time, as mentioned above, he believes that in our practical reason—our normal decision-making intuition—we must still consider ourselves free in order to make use of our reason. Furthermore, he asserts the existence of a “moral feeling,” which commonly takes the form of guilt. A human being, he writes, may see an act as something “in which he was carried away by the stream of natural necessity” and yet, all the same, “he nevertheless finds that the advocate who speaks in his favor can by no means reduce to silence the prosecutor within him” (5:98). We can feel guilt, in other words, even for an act that seems beyond our control. This serves as a good description of Pip’s attacks of conscience—culminating in his sentencing himself to the Hulks—over an action that seemed from the start a foregone conclusion. Not only do we act as if we had free will, but we also feel as if we must have somehow been responsible for acts that, viewed analytically, appear inescapably determined. The reason for this, Kant argues, is that though necessity is indeed the cause of our actions, we have chosen to allow necessity to be the cause: “A rational being can … say of every unlawful action he performed that he could have omitted it even though as appearance it is sufficiently determined in the past and, so far, is inevitably necessary” (5:98). Kant comes to this conclusion through some finessing of the distinction he makes in the first Critique between the appearance of consciousness (which we have access to) and consciousness as thing-in-itself (which we do not).³² The upshot of these technicalities, though, is that we end up in the odd position of having a subject whose actions are shaped by a maxim—a guiding principle—which the subject chooses to follow “antecedent to every use of freedom in experience.”³³ This is one of the strangest points in Kant’s ethics; it seems as if he is saying that what appears to be natural necessity actually comes about through our own choice—but through a choice that does not occur in time.³⁴

This choice is often read as being purely atemporal after a rather mystical fashion—a reading Kant’s own language would seem to encourage. But we need not concede entirely to transcendental idealism. Henry E. Allison, a particularly incisive commentator on Kant, offers the following:

[T]his does not mean that we are to regard fundamental maxims as adopted either in some mysterious pre- or nontemporal manner or by means of a self-conscious, deliberative process. It is rather that through reflection we find that we have been committed all along to such a maxim, understood as a fundamental orientation of the will towards moral requirements.35

The ultimate Kantian notion of freedom is founded, first, in the acceptance that we could have done no other and, then, in the understanding that we chose to be able to do no other. To rephrase: every choice that we can sense comes about through the temporal stream of natural necessity, so there must be free will at the level that we cannot sense, and that is itself outside of time. But precisely because we cannot sense this, it would be mystification to imagine actually making this choice. Instead, we must just take responsibility for the fact that we must have made a choice, and that this oriented us. As Alenka Zupančič puts it, freedom for Kant demands that “one has to discover the point where the subject itself plays an (active) part in lawful, causal necessity, the point where the subject itself is already inscribed in advance in what appear to be laws of causality independent of the subject.”³⁶ In other words, Kantian freedom takes the form—one that we have already seen in Dickens—of a choice that has already been made.

The projects of Dickens in Great Expectations and Kant in his ethical work are actually quite similar: the effort to present autonomous decision making in a way that remains true to both the idea of freedom and an intuition of temporal causality. Each moment of decision points back in time to something prior, and seems an effect of necessity at the moment it is made. In this way, each character choice seems—and here we recall Barthes—utterly determined by the constraint of narrative. At the same time, though, the moments of character choice are indispensable to the narrative insofar as they determine its direction. Remember Kant’s claim that just as speculative reason cannot conceive freedom, practical reason cannot do without it. The same seems to hold true for the experience of reading Great Expectations. We cannot imagine how the narrative would assume its direction without Pip’s seemingly free character choices. Where are Pip’s choices? Already made. But by locating freedom in decisions already made, we come to see the narrative as something that ought to go in a certain direction. From the reader’s naive belief in the freedom of Pip’s choices comes—returning again to Brooks’s usage—the “desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text,” that is, narrative desire.

These ethical-narrative dynamics are at play in what is probably the most famous moment of choice in Great Expectations: Pip’s decision to accept his expectations and go to London. The first question that Jaggers asks Pip is about whether he would be willing to go always by his nickname in order to receive his expectations. Pip’s response, since it is his first response, and in the affirmative, must also count as an acceptance of sorts: “My heart was beating so fast, and there was such a singing in my ears, that I could hardly stammer that I had no objection” (136). The moment of Pip’s acceptance is thus actually buried in a comparative phrase. It is only the obvious inevitability of the answer that serves syntactically to highlight the deafening noise of his excitement. This moment of acceptance is repeated again, with more impact, when it becomes clear that his expectations will force Pip to leave Joe for London. Yet his response again shows something less than deliberation: “I said (glancing at Joe, who stood looking on, motionless), that I supposed I could come directly” (138). The parenthetical glance serves notice of Pip’s at least implicit awareness that, in accepting, he is also parting, perhaps forever, from Joe. Yet Pip has already begun to answer in the affirmative—“I said …”—before the parenthetical pause. He has already made the decision to accept.

So when does he make this decision? He has told Biddy earlier that he wants to be a gentleman. His desire here is forceful: “I never shall or can be comfortable—or anything but miserable—there, Biddy!—unless I can lead a very different sort of life from the life I lead now” (125). Forceful though it may be, however, this sentiment is not in itself a decision. As Pip himself states, it occupies only one side in a debate ongoing within himself, the other being occupied by Biddy’s sentiment that leaving his comfortable life would be a “pity”: “Now, I too had so often thought it a pity, that, in the singular kind of quarrel with myself which I was always carrying on, I was half inclined to shed tears of vexation and distress when Biddy gave utterance to her sentiment and my own” (125). Pip’s “quarrel with himself” does not lack a resolution. Rather, by the time it has been phrased as a quarrel, in a move that should be familiar by this point, it is already too late; the decision has been made. “I told her she was right, and I knew it was much to be regretted, but still it was not to be helped” (125).

The portrayal of Pip’s decision to go to London, then, follows as necessity from his decision that he will do whatever it takes to become a gentleman. Indeed, by the time Jaggers appears, this decision is so implicitly understood that the Barthesian imperative that the “story must go on” appears to have gained a definite content and direction: the story must go on, toward London and Pip’s expectations. And it is because of Pip’s decision, already made, that we know and expect this. The choice will be made; it must be made; it has already been made. The fundamental decision that determines the decision to leave home is itself presented in the language of necessity, while at the same time being within the domain of free will. It is a “quarrel with oneself” whose final result, all the same, is “not to be helped.”

FAMILIAR STORIES

Pip’s narrative of development, then, proceeds as both necessary and self-determined. It is precisely here that we can locate the freedom of a character: not in a radical independence from the plot’s chain of causation but rather in the consistent presentation of a strict determination that is nonetheless based on a prior choice. Rather than privileging either character autonomy or the constraint of plot, a reading in these terms focuses on the necessary reciprocity of the two positions. In the Bildungsroman, though, where the plot works toward the reintegration of an individual and community, the constraint of plot is a formal representation of the sense of “necessity”—to use Moretti’s term—exercised by that individual’s social context. So, the sort of autonomy that we saw in our discussion of Great Expectations can offer a model as well for understanding how the Bildungsroman, more generally, produces a narrative that works toward both development and social inclusion.

The trick here is that these novels do not just present our choices as already having been made; they present them as already having been made by ourselves as social beings. Remember, at the level of narration, Pip’s choices took the form of backward-projected grammatical sleights of hand. At the level of the underlying, inaccessible story, though, we had to assume these choices had already been made. This is a narratological restatement of Kant’s noumenal and phenomenal, but we could also give it a more psychological spin: the choices exist at the level of a subtextual unconscious, which directs Pip’s trajectory, and when his textual choices come, they simply follow along. When we look at the way this plays out in the larger body of Bildungsromane, what we see is that this essential model of time and narrative holds, but the nature of the choices already made becomes more social in nature. We become a member of a community, in other words, by recognizing that we were already—in the fabula, the noumena, or the unconscious—making choices rooted in our communal belonging.

The claim that Bildungsromane make, then, is that we do not only come to discover ourselves as part of a social whole; we come to discover instead that we have always been part of a social whole, and that our development lies in recognizing this fact. So, to take one central example from Wilhelm Meister, Wilhelm’s apprenticeship—his development, broadly speaking—begins to come to an end with his discovery that he is a father: “His apprenticeship was therefore completed in one sense, for along with the feeling of a father, he had acquired the virtues of a solid citizen.”37 From paternity, then, comes citizenship, and the resolution of development. What makes this moment particularly notable though, is that the son that Wilhelm discovers, Felix, is not a stranger; Wilhelm has been caring for him for some time. So the moment that that Goethe highlights as the culmination of Wilhelm’s development is one in which, practically, very little changes. He had been taking care of Felix before, and would, presumably, continue to take care of him after. What changes is not the practical arrangement but rather the character’s disposition toward it. As Joseph Slaughter has pointed out, Wilhelm does not become a citizen automatically as a result of paternity; he has to claim it: “In Goethe’s novel, citizenship names the categorical distinction between ignorant subjection (the father as hapless sperm donor) and the conscious affirmation of social relations (the father as willing foster to his own child).”38 The key difference here is one of will: Wilhelm is a biological father either way, just as Lucilla is a “Lucilla Marjoribanks” either way. The distinction is not between being one thing and being something else. Instead, it is a choice between, on the one hand, being something unknowingly and passively and, on the other hand, asserting it as an act of will.

We see this active, willing dimension of development emphasized in a debate between Wilhelm’s mentor Lothario, and his petit-bourgeois friend Werner. Where Wilhelm and Werner’s disagreements had previously revolved around the role of art in society, or Wilhelm’s desire to “develop [him]self fully” (174), this conversation centers on the quite practical issue of paying taxes:

“I can assure you,” said Werner, “that in all my life I have never thought about the State, and only paid my dues and taxes because that was customary.”

“Well,” said Lothario, “I hope to be able to make a good patriot out of you. A good father is one who at mealtimes serves his children first; and a good citizen is one who pays what he owes to the State before dealing with everything else.” (311)

The exchange not only hammers home the citizen-as-father figure but underlines one of its trickier implications. If choosing to care for one’s children corresponds to choosing citizenship, then, carrying the metaphor in the opposite direction, civic society would seem to play the role not of a protector, disciplinarian, or enabler—it would instead play the role of a dependent. As if to ward off any confusion, Goethe has Lothario connect paying the state taxes to serving food to one’s children. Now, the question here is not whether Werner will pay his taxes, or even should pay his taxes. He already does so, and does so without complaint. By choosing actively to pay his taxes, though—by choosing to do what he already does—he would switch the order of the parental metaphor around. No longer just a child of his community, he would come to see the community as his own child: something that he has made as much as it has made him.

This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation. We have already seen William Whewell’s claim that “The moralist, as well as the poet, must give us back the image of our mind. He must show us the connections of moral truths which had governed our thoughts, though we had not unfolded them into reasonings.”³⁹ In Chapter 3, I discussed how this led to a sense of shared, unconscious, experience: sensus communis. Here, I’d like to emphasize the “community” in “communis.” Moral philosophy, by Whewell’s understanding of the term, serves to emphasize a communal belonging—one that already exists, but that we are not yet aware of.

The root for this particular strain of intuitionist thought goes back, as many of them do, to Lord Shaftesbury.40 So too does the idea of “Bildung” that we have seen in Gadamer and others. “Bildung”—often presented is as a particularly autochthonous German concept—is a translation of Shaftesbury’s description of the “formation of a genteel and liberal character”⁴¹ in his 1711 Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.⁴² The Characteristicks, a collection of his mature works, argued in various ways for the existence of a harmonious cosmic order: a position that led him to believe that the happiness of an individual, properly cultivated, would coincide with the larger happiness of the species. If properly educated to understand our own intuitions, we can thus follow our own motivations while at the same time working for the betterment of society. Shaftesbury’s influence was quite strong in Germany—stronger, in fact, than it was in England, according to Leslie Stephen: “In Germany, where sentimentalism is more congenial to the national temperament, [Shaftesbury] found a warmer reception than amongst his own countrymen.”⁴³ Herder, for example, called Shaftesbury “the beloved Plato of Europe”: a “virtuoso of humanity that has had a marked influence on the best minds of our century, on men who have striven with sincere determination for the true, the beautiful, and the good.”⁴⁴ The same figure who would generate many of the ideas that continued into nineteenth-century intuitionism was, as Herder describes, a specific influence on the German idea of development as well.

If Shaftesbury’s presence in this tradition is strangely underplayed by Anglo-American critics discussing British Bildungsromane, it is at least partly because of how much his reputation suffered over the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Stephen, for example, saw in Shaftesbury’s work an early example of how, “in England, attempts at a priori philosophy have taken the form of an appeal to common sense.”⁴⁵ This tradition “which thus tries to convert the vox populi into the vox Dei … seems to have been first made popular in the eighteenth century by Shaftesbury.” Stephen is critical here because he sees Shaftesbury as elevating conventional wisdom—perhaps even prejudice—into an eternal moral law.⁴⁶

Shaftesbury, though, does not believe that this vox rings true from the start; it is more akin to an aesthetic faculty, and it thus requires cultivation. Agents do have a natural and innate “Sense of Right and Wrong,” Shaftesbury argued, but this is not an innate ability for judging the morality of acts. Rather, it is a reaction to the motives underlying the actions of others. When those motives are virtuous, or loving, we feel a reflected love for them, what Shaftesbury calls a “reflected Sense”: “an Affection towards those very Affections themselves.”47 This affection toward an affection, what Stephen Darwall has called “second-order approval,”⁴⁸ thus makes it clear that Shaftesbury’s view of the moral sense is something shared, a morality based on certain analogies drawn between different intelligences. This notion is drawn from Lockean epistemology; what Shaftesbury adds to it, though, is the idea that this sort of reflection has the immediacy of sensory perception: he specifically connects it to the “Eye and the Ear” (28–29). As justification for his discussion of affections-toward-affections, Shaftesbury writes,

The Case is the same in mental or moral Subjects, as in ordinary Bodys, or the common Subjects of Sense. The Shapes, Motions, Colours, and Proportions of these latter being presented to our Eye; there necessarily results a Beauty or Deformity, according to the different Measure, Arrangement and Disposition of their several Parts. (28–29)

The fundamental language here, then, is that of aesthetics. And as a language of aesthetics and taste, it required cultivation. He quotes approvingly from a translation of Persius’s Satires on the necessity of a moral education:

Doubtless the seeds of moral goodness and honor which, although we had received them from nature but nevertheless surrounded by vices and very nearly obscured, lie hidden in our minds just as if remotely buried in a deep ditch, unless a better cultivation should occur so that they might stir us in our night labors to excavate them and present them in public actions. (216n)

Tangled metaphor aside—why “excavate” the seeds rather than cultivate them to grow?—Shaftesbury introduces with this passage the idea that our moral education should be that which enables us to recognize ourselves in harmonious connection to others. It should allow us to recognize the essential communal moral agreement that lies hidden in our minds. This requires, according to Shaftesbury, the “formation of a genteel and liberal character”⁴⁹—that is, it requires what, after its translation into German, we come to know as “Bildung.”

“Bildung,” then, as the term comes into German from Shaftesbury, denotes the cultivation of what Shaftesbury would call “sensus communis”—“common sense,” or shared understanding. This was a key term in my discussion of humor in Dickens in the previous chapter, and it is worth recalling Hannah Arendt’s account of the term: “[not] a sense common to all of us, but strictly that sense which fits us into a community with others, makes us members of it and enables us to communicate things given by our five private senses.”50 Arendt was interested in the possibilities of using Kant’s aesthetics as the basis for a political philosophy. In Shaftesbury, though, as Gadamer has pointed out, sensus communis already had a “political and social” dimension: it was “an element of social and moral being.”⁵¹

Now, none of this is to suggest that the Bildungsroman is properly an English genre.⁵² The term itself does not come into common critical usage in German until the end of the nineteenth century, in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey.⁵³ It is not until the 1930s, with the publication of Susanne Howe’s Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen, that the term came to be intimately associated with the British novel of the nineteenth century.⁵⁴ But even Masson’s discussion of the “art and culture novel,” and its growing importance for English novelists, sees it as having a foreign root: “By far the greatest example of this species of fiction in modern literature is the ‘Wilhelm Meister’ of Goethe; and there can be no doubt that that work, since it was translated, has had some influence on the aims of British novel-writing” (225). Now, while Goethe did indeed have some influence—particularly on Coleridge, Carlyle, Lewes, and Eliot⁵⁵—that influence can be easily overstated. There was a fair amount of interest in German works in England around the turn of the nineteenth century—ranging from The Sorrows of Young Werther to the multiple adaptations and translations of Schiller’s drama Die Räuber—but this interest quickly cooled, and during the early decades of the century, the English opinion of German literature was quite low.⁵⁶ The point here is not to claim a national proprietorship,⁵⁷ but rather to suggest that the philosophical strains that we see in the European Bildungsroman map on to the tradition of intuitionist thought.

In brief, then: the operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that we are all already a member of a community, and that our decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation—of the sort that Shaftesbury advocates—means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis.

At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that the concept of readability that seems to underlie the object selection of Victorian studies—the preference shown for texts that seem immanent and familiar—is at least partially due to the ethos of Bildung represented in them. Now we can be a bit more precise in this formulation. Bildung depends on a cultivation of liberal individuals that allows them to understand themselves as being already part of a community and tradition. The mechanism for doing so is the recognition of the self in the past. This describes the object analyzed by Victorian studies, which, as we have seen, tends to elide the difference between the terms Bildungsroman, “realism,” and “novel.” But it also describes the principle of selection that leads to such elision. The novels, in other words, teach an ethical lesson, the practical implementation of which is the study of those novels.

It is, again, Gadamer who presents the most thorough account of this mutually enforcing circle of object and analysis, or, as he would have it, tradition and interpretation. Gadamer sees, as the basis of all understanding, the “interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter”:

The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to the tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves.58

Again, we have something that sounds like Rawls’s formulation of the law that we give to ourselves. Here, though, it is not quite a law that we give to ourselves, but rather a law that we are given by tradition—and which we then, through, an analysis of that tradition, re-inscribe. In terms of Victorian readability, we could understand this field of literary study to be defined by an experience of the recognition of the self in the past. Those books that do not fit this mold, remember, will simply not be taken to be Victorian novels. And, in fact, the field is not just defined by this experience; it is supported by the implied ethical gain of recognizing ourselves in the past. The value of this interpretive practice, though, is itself based on the implicit value of the works that it chooses to study. Georgia Warnke offers a useful gloss on the play of these themes in Gadamer’s work:

The interpretations we project onto these texts are not our own autonomous creations … but are rather bequeathed to us as part of the narratives themselves. These already possess specific vocabularies, plots, and sets of issues and insofar as we are “thrown” into the narratives, their languages and trajectories necessarily provide the contours for our understanding of them. … As historical beings, we find ourselves in historical and cultural traditions that hand down to us the projections or hypotheses … of that which we are trying to understand.⁵⁹

Whether or not we want to take on the complications of the entire Gadamerian concept of tradition and prejudice as a model of understanding, it seems to describe at least this particular field: a set of interpretations that reiterate the form of the narratives they analyze; a set of narratives that produce, in their moral form, the ethos of the field that isolates and studies them.

“PROPERLY CULTIVATED MORAL NATURE”: MILL’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The “moral feeling” Kant describes—what he colorfully refers to as “prosecutor,” watching over an agents’ actions, and acting as an “incentive” to moral action (5:79)—finds an odd echo in the British ethics of the nineteenth century. Though I have been concentrating in this chapter and elsewhere largely on Victorian intuitionists, it is in the writing of the intuitionists’ greatest interlocutor that we most clearly find this sort of guilt-based internal acting as moral incentive. John Stuart Mill, in Utilitarianism, describes the internal sanction of duty as “a feeling in our mind; a pain, more or less intense, attendant on violation of duty, which, in properly cultivated moral natures rises … into shrinking from it as an impossibility.”60 If our moral nature is properly developed, Mill seems to suggest, we will be able to feel a wrong state of affairs, and thereby be drawn toward right action.

It is this connection between a moral feeling and the “cultivation” of moral nature that I wish to discuss in this section. I do not mean to suggest that Mill’s particular brand of internalism was the same as that of Shaftesbury or, in Mill’s own time, Whewell.⁶¹ What I am interested in, though, is the fact that Mill turns, in his posthumously published Autobiography, to a narrative account of personal development to explain the connection of his own mental progress and growth with the development of his mature philosophical thought. If, as I have suggested, developmental narrative brings with it a whole host of ethical presuppositions—particularly about a communally founded sensus communis—then we should expect to find those in Mill’s writing as well. As we saw with Cardinal Newman, the act of writing narrative can bring with it the implicit ideas of the form. By explaining the growth of his thought in terms of a narrative of personal development, Mill ends up making use of the formal ethical conceit that the validity of his philosophical positions derives from their basis in a shared ethical sense.

While Mill’s work might have depended on a felt internal motivation, he was careful to distinguish it from the sort of innate intuition that he thought undermined the work of Whewell and others like him. Mill remains fairly consistent in his take on this sort of intuitionism throughout his career. To take just one example, from the Autobiography:

The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad intuitions. By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification.62

The key objection here lies in the reference to intuition arising “independently of observation and experience.” Mill, over the course of his work, would attempt to develop instead an account of how we can work with something that feels and functions like intuition but derives instead from accumulated experience. Intuition, as Mill sees it, will allow prejudice, superstition, or conventional wisdom to act as the final court of moral appeal. The result, in his mind, would be conservatism disguised as moral law.

The distinction between Mill’s account of moral feeling and the one that he criticized in intuitionist philosophers comes down to this question of experience. In his discussion of Adam Sedgwick’s Discourse and its championing of the “moral sense,”⁶³ he stresses the importance of developing an innate feeling in order to give it moral content. He begins from a “natural” standpoint:

The idea of the pain of another is naturally painful; the idea of the pleasure of another is naturally pleasurable. … In this, the unselfish part of our nature, lies a foundation, even independently of inculcation from without, for the generation of moral feelings.⁶⁴

If he offers the possibility for a morality “independent” of the external world, he is careful to emphasize that it is at least two steps beneath a functioning ethics: a “foundation” for the “generation” of “moral feelings.” Plenty can go wrong in those steps, he suggests, offering the case of children as an example. Sedgwick, following in a tradition common to much moral-sense philosophy, had offered children as an example of strong natural moral feelings. Mill counters: “There is no selfishness equal to that of children, as every one who is acquainted with children well knows.” Children, though they might possess affection and sympathy, have not yet been taught how to consider something other than pleasure. We must look instead to morality as the result of education: “The time of life at which moral feelings are apt to be strongest, is the age when we cease to be merely members of our own families, and begin to have intercourse with the world” (61). So, even given the foundation of a natural symmetry between an agent’s own pleasure or pain, and that of another, it will require a good deal of cultivation to move from that foundation to developed morality.

The way that Mill’s story of cultivation is usually told is in terms of his famous discovery of Wordsworth, and his acceptance of the importance of poetic feeling in a deliberative philosophy. This reading has become something of a stock argument for the importance of aesthetic, apolitical culture, along the lines of the triumph of imagination over philosophy in Dickens’s Hard Times. The basic account of this reading is certainly suggested by the text, which uses the language of religious conversion to move from proposed social action to poetic reflection. Mill, famously, explains the genesis of his depression as both insipid and soul-shaking: “I was in a dull state of nerves … one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first ‘conviction of sin’” (80–81). Questioning himself in a moment of near-Wesleyan self-examination,65 he considers whether, should his political and philosophical goals be realized, he would be happy: “an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’” (81). If he cannot find guaranteed happiness in the happiness of others, though, he does eventually find them in Wordsworth’s poetry. This poetry “seemed to be the very culture of feelings, which I was in quest of. … From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall be removed” (89). Raymond Williams sums up the seeming moral of this account: “These paragraphs are now the classical point of reference for those who decide that the desire for social reform is ultimately inadequate, and that art, the ‘source of inward joy,’ is fortunately always there as an alternative.”⁶⁶

Mill’s poetic awakening has been frequently rehearsed, but I would argue that its totemic importance in Mill’s developmental narrative has had a tendency to be overstated.⁶⁷ To be clear, I am not making a diagnostic claim here about what specific readings or moments assisted Mill in his recovery from depression. What is evident, though, in the account he gives of that recovery, is that the reading of Wordsworth represented neither the first stage nor the last. His depression clearly recurs, and it is not poetry alone that helps to lift it. After his discussion of Wordsworth, Mill turns to an account of his developing philosophical and political thought, and then mentions that these intellectual concerns played a large part in his ongoing depression: “during the later returns of my dejection, the doctrine of what is called Philosophical Necessity weighed on my existence like an incubus” (101). I will say more about the meaning of this “philosophical necessity” below, but the first important point to take away is simply that his dejection continued long past his poetic epiphanies. Indeed, he mentions that the experience with Wordsworth, as well as the moment in which he weeps over Marmontel, are offered because they appear to Mill to be “a kind of turning points, marking a definite progress in my mode of thought.” Yet such points, he goes on to say, actually give “a very insufficient idea of the quantity of thinking which I carried on respecting a host of subjects during these years.” The implication seems to be, then, that these moments of epiphany acted as a sort of surfacing of a much longer process that continued to be ongoing for Mill. And, in fact, the pacing of the chapter seems to back this up. He makes some attempt at dating his mental progress when describing his first grim moment of self-examination (winter of 1826), and his eventual rehabilitation through literary culture (Marmontel in spring or summer of 1827, Wordsworth in autumn of 1828). Yet when he turns to the thinking that seems to underlie all this, he leaves it floating indefinitely out of time: it was something that has been going on “during these years.” It is understandable that critical discussions of Mill’s recovery have concerned themselves much more with Mill’s aesthetic awakening, and said little about the ongoing intellectual progress, since Mill himself seems to push it into the background of his narrative. But it is this vaguely paced development—ongoing, in the background—that Mill offers as primary, with the more specific moments only being surface phenomena of the larger process.

This sort of background process, as we have seen in Goethe and Dickens, is the stuff of developmental narrative, even if it only becomes accessible through its occasional conscious surfacings, in the form of choices already made. In the case of Mill’s development, it seems that this sort of “thinking” is actually a re-establishment of Mill’s prior thought in terms of communal consensus. What informs his transformation and recovery, in other words, is an account of a rediscovery, not of poetry, but of a sort of conventional wisdom:

Much of this, it is true, consisted in rediscovering things known to all the world, which I had previously disbelieved or disregarded. But the rediscovery was to me a discovery, giving me plenary possession of the truths, not as traditional platitudes, but fresh from their source; and it seldom failed to place them in some new light, by which they were reconciled with, and seemed to confirm while they modified, the truths less generally known which lay in my early opinions, and in no essential part of which I at any time wavered. All my new thinking only laid the foundation of these more deeply and strongly, while it often removed misapprehension and confusion of ideas which had perverted their effect. (101)

Mill’s intellectual development takes the form of returning to certain commonly held ideas that he had once rejected. At the same time, he wants to emphasize that even though others might believe the same truths, they likely only do so out of convention, whereas he—by virtue of “truths less generally known,” and because he had to discover the conventions for himself—can possess them more completely. And, finally, these newly rediscovered truths—conventional for others, original for Mill—do not contradict the newer truths, but instead more powerfully affirm them. What Mill is narrating here, then, is a moment not only in which one set of ideas is “reconciled” with another but one in which his own education is reconciled with the conventional wisdom of others. And yet, in this moment of reconciliation, Mill does not have to change the essentials of his already existing beliefs, which had, up until this point, kept him separate from others.

It is not his beliefs that shift, then, so much as the foundation for them. The teachings of his father and Bentham were a rejection of conventional wisdom, but in his recovery from despair, Mill comes to discover that he finds greater, and more permanent, truth in those teachings when they are based on commonly held notions. The model here is one that we have already seen in the opening discussion of Miss Marjoribanks: just as Lucilla Marjoribanks stays Lucilla Marjoribanks but transfers the authority for that identity from her father to her larger community, so Mill keeps the “essential part” of his earlier opinions but transfers the proving source of those beliefs to a shared, communal source: “things known to all the world.” His development is not so much a change in orientation as it is a rewriting of the past, a refiguring of origin. By choosing to view our past in a certain way, we choose the present set of conditions that have determined us, and thus achieve, if not freedom from all determination, at least some measure of agency in necessity.

This developmental structure, of rewriting past determination in order to find agency in the present, does not just describe the form of Mill’s intellectual progress; it also describes the content. Mill chooses only one example of a truth “known to all the world” to illustrate his point: the question of “Philosophical Necessity,” and whether he was “scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances: as if [his] character and that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our control, and was wholly out of our own power” (101). The conventional wisdom in this case would be some form of naive free will, set against the associationist model of the character that Mill had been educated with.68 The conflict that Mill faces here is not that he wishes to believes one or the other but rather that he wishes to believe both:

I often said to myself, what a relief it would be if I could disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of character by circumstances. … I said that it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be believed by all quoad the character of others, and disbelieved in regard to their own. (101–2)

Here we see the concerns that we have been discussing thus far in this chapter, the seeming antinomy between the experience of free will and the theoretical strength of a determinism position. Mill’s phrasing is similar to Kant’s: “reason for speculative purposes finds the road of natural necessity much more traveled and more usable than that of freedom; yet for practical purposes the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of our reason in our conduct.”69 And his solution is similar as well. We recall that Kant attempted to solve this problem by suggesting a form of willing against time, in which our own agency becomes part of the cause of our determination. Without resorting to the language of idealism, Mill suggests something similar: “what is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of free will, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing” (102). In other words, while we might be shaped by determining circumstances, we have the ability to ourselves become one of those circumstances.

Much of the discussion of these philosophical points in the Autobiography is a gloss of a work that he had already written—written before the composition of the Autobiography, that is, but after the experiences he is narrating.⁷⁰ In his 1843 System of Logic, Mill argues that in spite of his rational conviction in the character being formed by circumstances, it is still the case that anyone has the “power to alter his character”:

Its being, in the ultimate resort formed, for him, is not inconsistent with its being formed by him as one of the intermediate agents. His character is formed by his circumstances (including among these his particular organization); but his own desire to mould it in a particular way is one of those circumstances, and by no means one of the least influential.⁷¹

The intellectual solution that Mill offers for his depression, then, is not so much a turn away from social progress to art as it is a turn away from the sense of determination being something that was done to him, and toward the idea that he also had the power to take part in his own determination. It is in this possibility that he is able to locate a feeling that he classifies as freedom: “This feeling, of being able to modify our own character, if we wish, is itself the feeling of moral freedom which we are conscious of” (841).

This is all dependent, of course, on having the “will” or the “wish”—Mill emphasizes the conditional in both cases—to change. Mill brings up the question of whether or not such a will is itself determined, and answers the question in rather unsatisfying fashion: “A person who does not wish to alter his character, cannot be the person who is supposed to feel discouraged or paralysed by thinking himself unable to do it” (840). The desire to change oneself and the ability to change oneself come out to the same thing. And while this is still subject to a certain amount of determinism, at least it is not the case for everyone; at least, we might infer, it is not the case for John Stuart Mill. The proof that someone has the capacity for “moral freedom,” as Mill calls it—and remember, not everyone does—is that he might feel “discouraged or paralysed”: “the depressing effect of the fatalist doctrine can only be felt where there is a wish to do what the doctrine represents as impossible” (841). He would use these same terms, in describing the doctrine’s effects on him, when he drafted the first six chapters of the Autobiography a decade or so later: a “depressing and paralysing influence” which “ceased altogether to be discouraging” (101). The order of influence here is a bit convoluted, so it is worth specifying that the language of the Autobiography quotes that of the textually prior Logic, even if the Logic describes the lived experience that inspired the Autobiography. In any event, what is certainly clear is that Mill conflates his own depression with the very condition of possibility for “moral freedom.”

From this perspective, then, Mill’s account of his depression in the Autobiography takes on a rather different dimension. It is not only an indictment of his father and Bentham’s philosophy, one that will be healed with a proper dose of literary culture. Instead, it is a mark of freedom: a redefinition of the grounds of one’s circumstantial determination. It is through the narration of his mental crisis, in other words, that Mill is able to assert his own role as one of the “circumstances” that formed his own character. To understand how he might be able to do so, furthermore, requires that he rediscover “things known to all the world.” The process of achieving a “properly cultivated moral nature,” lies in recognizing that agents have the potential to become fully developed individuals only when they realize—or, rather, actively, willfully recognize—that the community that shapes them also includes them as a member.