Realism and the Victorian Novel

Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins and the Victorian Sexual System by
Richard Barickman; Susan MacDonald; Myra Stark; Realism and Consensus in the English Novel
by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth; Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction by Barbara Hardy; The
Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life by Barry Qualls; The Fallen
Woman in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel by George Watt ...
Review by: Merritt Moseley
The Sewanee Review, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Summer, 1985), pp. 485-492
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27544487 .
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 ARTS AND LETTERS 485
to objectify himself and to create an implied author may become part
of the drama.
The Rhetoric of Fiction enacts the rhetorical principles for which
Wayne Booth is arguing. His implied voice is humane, learned, poised,
gently authoritative, and logical. He insists on making moral distinc
tions. Booth strikes the reader as a reasonable man, a man who respects
us and wants to share with us his
reading and thinking. By referring to
his vast literary experience and to the experience of ordinary life, he
presumes the continuity between reading and living, and the importance
of reading well to living well. For him reading is a mode of understand
ing and for him understanding is the highest good.

REALISM AND THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

MERRITT MOSELEY

Just a hundred years ago Henry James could observe that "only a short
time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not
what the French call discutable." Ah. Now, of course, it seems that the
English novel is inexhaustibly discutable. The Golden Age of the
the Victorian offers a rich variety of
English novel, period, particularly
approaches?of different ways to come at the novels, of different kinds
of things to say about them?as well as an enormous number of good
novels for analysis. we or dread,
Though might look forward, with relish
to the day when there is more to say about David Copperfield
nothing
or Middlemarch or in sight. This is a
Vanity Fair, that day is nowhere
tribute not only to the remarkable inventiveness of the human mind in
the practice of literary criticism but also to the vast and rich
diversity
ness of Victorian novels. They give us much to think about, much to
talk about: they ramify in many directions. us a web of rela
They give
Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stark, Corrupt Relations:
Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins and the Victorian Sexual Columbia
System.
University Press, 1982. xiv + 286 pages. $25; Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism
and Consensus in the Novel. Princeton Press, 1983. xvi + 278
English University
pages. $26.50; Barbara Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction. Peter Owen,
Hardy,
1985. 216 pages. ?12.50; Barry Quails, The Secular of Victorian Fiction:
Pilgrims
The Novel as Book of Life. Press, 1982. xvi + 218 pages.
Cambridge University
$39.50, $11.95 Watt, The Fallen Woman in the
pb; George Nineteenth-Century
Novel. Barnes & Noble, 1984. 232 pages. $27.50.
English

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486 ARTS AND LETTERS

tions, with multiple more prim standards, a shock

plots, and, by later
a
ing laxity about artistic unity and relevance; they also dwell, in larger
external web of relations, with the world itself. The Victorian novelists
never that the novel does refer to the world. Maybe
questioned they
were naive; but their naivete, a and confi
along with purposiveness
dence about art that the modern writer seems to lack, enabled them to
produce this body of fiction about which we continue to find occasions
for criticism. "Discussion, suggestion, formulation," James wrote, "these
are when they are frank and sincere."
things fertilizing

One of the topics for discussion and formulation, among the Victorians
as
today, has been the nature of this relationship with the world?or
the question of realism. Thomas Hardy objected to the word realism
as "an unfortunate, an word," and wished
ambiguous George Gissing
that "the words realism and realist might never again be used, save in
their proper sense by writers on scholastic
philosophy." The term re
mains with us, still not fitted with a good, mutually accepted definition.
In some respects every artist is some kind of a realist?that is, every
artist wants to give the real representation of something, the differences
among different kinds of art deriving from the different objects or pro
cesses to which the artists swear fidelity. Hawthorne, for instance,
eschewed verisimilitude, but aimed to give a real representation of the
truths of the human heart.
In The Realistic Imagination ( 1981 ) George Levine challenges "the
antireferential bias of our criticism" by rehabilitating realism against
the fashionable assumptions of deconstructionism. He defines realism
as an attitude toward, and a way of using, language: "Whatever else it
means, it always implies
an attempt to use language to get beyond
to discover some non-verbal truth out there." In relating
language,
realism to language; in linking, say, Mary Shelley and D. H. Lawrence;
in explicitly that realism is linked to modernism; even in de
claiming
the realistic program as the unnameable"?with its
fining "naming
echoes of Beckett?Mr. Levine is toward an expansive
catchy working
use of the term. Realism cannot be an inferior stuff compared to mod
ernism if, rightly understood, it is modernism, can it? He reaches back
ward too, allowing that realism in the English novel begins with Defoe.
Here he agrees with Ian Watt, who makes realism coterminous with the
rise of the novel. To expand the coverage of realism while attenuating
its definition is a questionable contribution.
and Consensus in the Elizabeth Deeds
In Realism English Novel
Ermarth makes another attempt to define realism, and she applies that
definition in a series of readings of major texts. Her theoretical chap
ters are not only remarkably learned but exciting and persuasive; the
readings that follow are intelligent and illuminating. She founds her
definition of realism on an analogy with painting. This is Henry James's

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 ARTS AND LETTERS 487
favorite route of approach?"a novel being a picture." To James the
novel-as-picture enables him to think of point of view and composition,
as well as to claim that accurate without moral instruc
representation,
tion, is high aim enough. To Ermarth the analogy is occasion for some
more consideration of realism in painting. She traces it
discriminating
to the Renaissance of the use of multiple viewpoints, a dis
discovery
covery that "unifies space and rationalizes sight" and gives additional
to the spectator; adds
importance depth; implies equality of viewpoints;
and "homogenizes the medium of perception and unifies the field per
ceived." All of these changes move painting beyond the typological
and discontinuous world of medieval painting.
To base criticism of one art form on an analogy with another is al
ways risky. It has, however, been standard with criticism of the novel
from the beginning?and is probably necessary because this late
own and must borrow. Thus we
arising form has no terms of its get
point of view, scene, rhythm, leitmotif, perspective, impressionism, and
architectonics. Any such analogy has limited power to describe and
judge outside its original field. Using the caution appropriate to such
an about realism in literature.
enterprise, Ermarth argues compellingly
She uses analogies: "What the faculty of sight is to space, the faculty
of consciousness is to time"; "the realistic narrator's function, like that
of the implied spectator in painting, is to homogenize the medium";
"the linear coordinates in fiction (past, present, and future ) operate like
the spatial coordinates in
painting (front, side, and back)"; as realistic
painting requires the rationalizing of space, by a consensus among
multiple viewpoints, realistic fiction requires the rationalizing of time.
The basis of realism in both cases is consensus.
This theory emphasizes the narrator as the fictional counterpart to
the implied spectator in painting, and the author says much about the
narrator's function. In a chapter called "The Narrator as Nobody" Er
marth insists that the narrator, the crucial component of realistic fiction,
is not individual and not corporeal but is instead a "potentiality of con
sciousness," insubstantial, disembodied. All this is true in an important
sense, but insofar as these conclusions are empowered
by the analogy
between the realistic narrator and "point A" in realistic painting, they
are forced. And I for one will have trouble
learning to call the narrator
it, as Ermarth does. Despite their disembodiment and insubstantiality
the narrator of Vanity Fair is he and the narrator of Emma is she.
Ermarth's book is valuable in many ways, not least because its author
recognizes that the term realism, as we apply it to novels, is a set of
conventions that came into being and may disappear?may have al
ready disappeared?as realistic conventions in have more or
painting
less done. Ermarth sees Henry James as neither the initiator nor
being
the apex of realism, as he is often proclaimed, but one in whose work
the conventions of realism, always fragile, are threatened. "While realis

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488 ARTS AND LETTERS

tic conventions richly demonstrate the power of consensus, the act of

consensus itself stands in mid-air as an heroic act of faith." James,
by
demonstrating the arbitrariness of that act, "strains the consensus of
realism to the In addition to implying a terminus for
breaking-point."
realistic conventions, the author successfully attempts to show their be
ginnings, which she traces to Jane Austen, to Persuasion.
specifically
In the chapter on Defoe and Richardson she argues cogently that their
treatment of time is inconsistent with the consensus
required for real
ism. Realism requires the rationalization of time; Defoe and Richard
son, more interested in the other world than in this one, and more in
spiritual autobiography than in temporal continuity, write novels that
employ some verisimilitude but for typological ends and, lacking con
sensus and consciousness, do not meet the preconditions of
unifying
realism.
The two Victorian exemplars of realism considered here are Charles
Dickens and George Eliot. It is a measure of the multifariousness of the
Victorians that the same two authors in a
great figure prominently study
that emphasizes emblematic art and spiritual autobiography?the "un
realistic" concerns of Defoe and Richardson. And yet this book, Barry
Qualls's The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction, is entirely persuasive
in linking Dickens, Eliot, and Charlotte Bront?, mostly through Carlyle,
to a tradition of emblematic art, symbolic journey, and typology. This
tradition, represented in Pilgrim's Progress and the emblematic art of
as well as in more secular forms in the
dissenting Christianity, sym
bolism of the British romantic poets, was familiar to the novelists from
their childhood. Bulwer-Lytton defined the aim of the art of his century
as "an interior symbolical signification with an obvious
combining
interest in character and incident." To think back over the
popular
Victorian novels explicitly related to Bunyan is to understand how
seriously novelists pursued the goal defined by Bulwer-Lytton. Dickens
uses the word progress to describe the lives of Little Nell, Esther Sum
merson, and Oliver Twist, among others. Quails lists some emblems
from the religious tradition that the romantics used, and their ubiquity
in Victorian fiction helps to underline his point: "the mirror, the prison,
the labyrinth, the dunghill, the rescue of the shipwrecked pilgrim, and
the conception of life as an embattled progress." Try to imagine Dickens
without or
dunghills prisons!
One salutary result of this book is to demonstrate that Thomas Car
is crucial to our of Victorian novels, even though he
lyle understanding
wrote none and was contemptuous, like those other transcendental neo
Emerson and Thoreau, of mere fiction. Sartor Resartus, Quails
puritans
insists, is both "a spiritual autobiography partly in the Puritan tradi
tion" and "a budding Romantic's tender tale of loss and soulful woe."
Add to these two motifs, which operate again and again in the Vic
torian classic novels, that greater concentration on character and

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 ARTS AND LETTERS 489

incident, and we see the combination of exterior and interior that

characterizes the Victorians, a combination for which Quails appro
priates Carlyle's term natural supernaturalism.
The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction is a good book that
empha
sizes a side of the novel neglected by
an age with mimetic preoccupa
tions but undeniably there and important. I regret that Quails has not
devoted more attention to the comic use of the same motifs, which is
common. To be sure, Little Nell even thinks of herself, sometimes, as
a
Pilgrim. But what about Sairey Gamp, Dickens's comic masterpiece,
who in her self-pity constantly refers to this life as a "Piljian's Projiss
of a mortal wale"? Surely the use of emblematic materials in comic
ways, and as the character-note for a and unreflective character,
vulgar
makes the point of their ubiquity as strongly as possible.
Sairey Gamp is one of the heroines of another book, Corrupt Rela
tions, by Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stark. This
book tells us that Sairey opposes and satirizes the sexual values of the
novel and the society and that she "manages all this by professionaliz
ing the social roles to which she has been confined; by pretending to
be all role, she manages to be all self and thus triumphs over some of
the most restrictive marital practices devised by man. . . . This
para
doxical wife is husbandless and childless because there is no available
conception of marriage that can equal her own imagination and capaci
ties." I had always thought her husband died. We should not be sur
prised to discover that Becky Sharp and Glencora Palliser are other
exemplars, since this book is about the Victorian sexual system (all
encompassing shorthand: the patriarchy ) and the assault on itmounted,
apparently without their own knowledge, by Dickens, Thackeray, Trol
lope, and Collins. But I was surprised to find the revisionist treatment
of Mrs. Joe in Great Expectations: why isMrs. Joe the way Pip describes
her? Because she is "subtly tyrannized by a society that offers no satis
a
fying way of life to poor woman with Mrs. Joe's shrewd intelligence
and fierce energy ( and very few options to any woman )."
This is a frustrating book :because its authors' hearts are in the right
place, we are continually exasperated to find their heads so askew. The
study suffers from serious flaws both in the analysis of the subjects and
in the The authors
methodology. simply take for granted that the Vic
torian sexual system, or patriarchy, was sick and corrupt. I believe this,
with less fervency; but it would be nice to have some demon
though
stration or some explanation of the particular most deplorable evils. It
is regrettable that, like some other feminist thinkers, the authors adopt
an uses selective determinism. Women are
analysis that nearly always
victims of the patriarchy, except when they elude it and earn approval:
then they are free agents; men, being the patriarchs, are
responsible
for the women's misdeeds. Mr. Gamp, who drinks and abuses his wife,
is a brute. Mrs. Gamp, who drinks much more, abuses her patients,

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490 ARTS AND LETTERS

lies, and connives at murder, is either a product of the patriarchy or a

clever rebel flying past the nets. The tendency here is to admire any
woman who does not fit into the sexual system, particularly fallen
women, independent widows, and unmarried women, no matter how
psychologically distorted the novels show them to be.
This approach is not wrong, though it is so one-dimensional that
one loses for the The is
sympathy procedure. wrong methodological
and comes when the authors argue not only that they read the novels
the special way they do, but that the authors wrote them that way,
despite any conventional evidence to the contrary. I too wish that
Dickens, Thackeray, and Collins had been more aware of the
Trollope,
injustice of the sexual system in which they lived, less complacent
about women's place in the world. But responsible critics differentiate
between wishes and facts. The writers of Corrupt Relations do not;
instead they locate the sexual insurgency in that nebulous realm of the
author's ambivalence, the unexpressed and unconscious knowledge de
nied straightforward outlet. On the surface these Victorian writers were
traditional acceptors of the patriarchy; but, rightly understood, they
were the kind of savage ironists who deceive not
only many readers but,
even more atten
subtly, themselves. Ordinary ways of reading?paying
tion to what the omniscient narrator for instance, or a
says, observing
character's behavior?aren't enough to winkle out the feminist ideas
beneath the surface. Nothing short of complete inversion of
throbbing
some characters, of dubious and "counter
perception unpersuasive
plots" and "undercutting" and paradoxical parallels, and occasional dis
tortion will do. If Esther Summerson is told she is her mother's shame
(because she is a bastard), why, revise this to read that "Esther is told
explicitly by Miss Barbary, the curse began with their [Dickens's wom
en's] births and defines the basic conditions of their lives." Sometimes
we are told that the attack on the patriarchy is in the novels "by design";
but for the most part it just finds its way into everything, like King
Charles's head, until we can be told that all four of these novelists "share
a ironic method that directs their distinctive techniques
comprehensive
toward a common purpose, the exposure of a corrupt system of sexual
values and its particular oppressive impact on women."
To turn from Corrupt Relations to George Watt's The Fallen Woman
in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel is a strange experience. By
most standards Mr. Watt's book is a poorer performance. It isn't very
or very well researched, and it isn't well written ( the idiom
profound,
"one in the same" and the use of to mean "criticize"
"prevaricate"
measure of his linguistic But the book has unde
give the suavity).
niable strengths. The subject is important: the Victorian novelists
returned again and again to the fallen woman as a of
subject?some
them, like Gissing, in it (he had also married a fallen
specializing
woman, who fell further after her marriage). And what Watt shows

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 ARTS AND LETTERS 491
is that the attitude toward fallen women is uniformly sympathetic,
readers that society is both partly to blame for their fall
showing
and terribly cruel in assigning punishment afterward. The novelists,
including Dickens, Collins, Gaskell, Hardy, Trollope, and George
Moore, demonstrate in treating the fallen woman that she is just as much
sinned against as sinning; that the woman unjustly receives all the pun
ishment for a sin that is at least as much the man's (there is no such
thing
as a fallen man, a home for
reclaiming wayward men, or a move
ment to give them a new start in Australia ); that fallen women can be
reformed, rather than being forever blackened with corruption; and
that the seriousness of the fall is directly related to the class of the
woman and the man. What is refreshing about this book is that Watt
finds these insights, all of them critical of "the patriarchy"?though
women were most toward the fallen?right out in the
unforgiving
open. Not a one of them is a product of the author's ambivalence, woven
unconsciously into the pattern. His book reminds us once again that the
art of the Victorian novelists springs from design. We read them, and
write about them, most we assume that
sensibly when they knew what
were
they doing.

Plow pleasant to find a new book by Barbara Hardy. One of the really
writers on the novel, she is author of two books on
illuminating George
Eliot, a book on Dickens, a book on Thackeray, and four or five others.
One begins to read a new book by Barbara Hardy without fear of
or or
trendy but meretricious sophistry, stupidity, special twisting of
old texts into new shapes. Her most recent work, Forms of Feeling
in Victorian Fiction, is a study of how feeling is embodied in the nov
els of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontes, Hardy, and James.
To write a book noto about feeling in fiction seems at first an odd en
terprise: feeling is so important in the novel?hasn't this surely been
done? And yet Mrs. Hardy offers something new and at the same time
truthful about each of the novelists she features.
Her book is essentially a series of
readings of the major writers, with
out an theoretical construct. The are connected
overarching readings
because in each case her attention is on the novelist's use of emotion.
This unity is not seamless : from time to time one feels the disparateness
of a collection of occasional essays, particularly in the book's focus on
minor novels. Half the on Thomas is devoted
relatively chapter Hardy
to The Trumpet Major, and this proves to be a not entirely assimilated
essay written to introduce a new edition. But for the most part the au
thor persuades us of the importance of the texts she uses; and, through
the quiet but absolute authority with which she masters the Victorian
novel, she persuasively makes the novels she chooses, and the passages
in them she selects for close attention, much more representative.
widely
Hardy does have two unifying technical concerns, two ways of repre

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492 ARTS AND LETTERS

senting feeling which she pursues are the

through these novels: they
figure of personification, allegory; and "the figure of inca
including
or what Ernst Robert Curtius called 'the of
pacity, " topos inexpressi
means
bility.' By this she the device of expressing powerful emotion
by avowing its "words cannot or "who can
inexpressibility: express,"
say what she felt?" Her concern with these two tropes makes itself felt
recurrently but uninsistently through her readings. But this book is by
no means so specialized as to concentrate on them. About each author
she discusses she has something to say. She writes per
illuminating
on those Dickens was at writing about?
suasively feelings good
revulsion, fury, fear, for instance?and those he was bad at?tenderness
and desire?and (which is crucial) between sentimen
distinguishes
tality and the representation of feeling. She is good on Dickens's death
bed scenes, usually lumped together as embarrassments, and she shows
that while Little Nell's dying is crude and badly done, the death of
Paul Dombey is delicate and subtle and moving. She is not reluctant
to recognize the power of emotion, even when it is attached to some
thing that fascinated the Victorians but does not fascinate us, like the
death of children.
Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction is full of good things: it is best,
I should say, on Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. Along the
way the critic quietly relates reflexivity to the representation of emo
tion, explores George Eliot's open endings, and makes some penetrating
observations on the use of and to emo
imagery psychomachia represent
tional conflict in the novels of Emily and Charlotte Bront?. Her book
also has a welcome which to me is rather than Ameri
quality English
can. It not as
only is free from jargon, but reads if written by a sympa
thetic reader for her counterparts. It is not for contemporary Casaubons.
It has a healthy and unashamed lack of theorizing and an almost total
absence of references to secondary sources. You can't find out here what
Professor Miller says about any of these books?only what Barbara
Hardy thinks?and feels. For those who read Victorian novels, that is
plenty. This would be a scandalous dissertation, but it is a very fine
book.

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