CAROLINE LEVINE Victorian realism - warwick.ac.uk · Victorian realism 85 or renew. But even when...
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Victorian realism
CAROLINE LEVINE
At i rst glance, realism seems easy to grasp and dei ne. Even the most cas-
ual readers have a strong sense of what feels lifelike to them, and consider
themselves perfectly within their rights to object to implausible plots and
exaggerated characters. Many critics would broadly agree that realist writ-
ers rejected allegory and symbol, romantic and sensational plots, supernat-
ural explanations and idealized characters, and opted instead for the literal,
credible, observable world of lived experience. And yet, no consensus has
ever emerged among scholars about the essential qualities of a realist novel.
Critics have produced a lengthy and various list of dei nitions over the past
half-century, and new scholarly characterizations appear with remarkable
frequency. The year 2008 alone saw two major contributions: Richard
Menke’s Telegraphic Realism , which makes the case for the realist novel
as an expression of crucial shifts in Victorian media, and Daniel Novak’s
Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction , which argues that
Victorian realist writers drew from photography, yet, surprisingly, under-
stood the photograph as a highly constructed, artful form rather than a
transparent window onto the world. 1 Realism has variously been associated
with the ordinary, the middle class, the present, historical consciousness,
industrialization, the city, and the nation; it has been linked to omniscient
narration, free indirect discourse, vernacular dialogue, extended description,
open-ended narrative, the panoramic, and the detail; it has been seen as a
way to explore the interior lives of characters and the exterior movement of
objects; it has been cast as totalizing or particularizing, as naïvely invested
in transparency or as highly self-conscious about the problem of represen-
tation. Realism has also constantly crossed boundaries, claiming English,
French, US, Brazilian, Japanese, Indian, and African traditions – among
others – and spanning centuries, media, and genres.
For scholars of literature, realism is most often associated with nine-
teenth-century i ction, and the lasting inl uence of the Victorian novel has
meant that it has provided a kind of model for later realisms to resist, revive,
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Victorian realism
85
or renew. But even when we coni ne ourselves to the restricted terrain of
the Victorian novel, realism still manages to confound i xed dei nition.
Nineteenth-century realist writers typically declared an interest in conveying
the “truth,” for example, but their characterizations of truth varied widely.
Was the goal transparency, as George Eliot suggests with her metaphor of
the mirror in chapter 17 of Adam Bede ? Was the aim rather plausibility, as
Thackeray implies in Henry Esmond , resisting providential plots in favor of
gradual unfoldings and unplanned outcomes? Should realist writers be striv-
ing for comprehensiveness, as Dickens in creating the vast interconnected
social world of Bleak House aims to do? Or at psychological lifelikeness, as
Trollope tells us in his Autobiography ? Should writers adopt a satirical style
to send up the artii ces of i ction, as in Vanity Fair , or struggle to make an
accurate record of regional and working-class diction, as in Mary Barton ?
To make matters more perplexing still, the particular novels typically clas-
sii ed as realist complicate the term in fascinating and maddening ways:
if George Eliot is a consummate realist, then what are we to make of the
allegorical ending of The Mill on the Floss or the improbable coincidences
tying Daniel to Mordecai in Daniel Deronda ? Dickens may be a realist in
his attempt to capture the social life of the modern city, but his charac-
ters range from the cartoonishly distorted to the impossibly mawkish. As
for Jane Eyre, who has felt to many readers like one of the most power-
fully realistic protagonists in i ction, her plot turns strangely supernatural
at crucial moments. And these are just a few of the most famous examples.
Numerous i ctions in the Victorian period are inclined to mix realist fea-
tures with elements that are typically considered anti-realist: gothic tropes
( Wuthering Heights ), sensational plots ( Great Expectations ), even intrusive
narrators who comment on the artii ces involved in storytelling ( Vanity Fair
and Barchester Towers ). There is no established set of realist characteristics,
it would seem, and no perfectly exemplary texts.
Amanda Claybaugh has recently argued that realism is best understood
as a “syndrome,” a motley assortment of characteristics – “such as contem-
poraneous subject matter, events and characters understood as types, and a
thick description of the social world” – that developed independently but
were imitated so often that eventually they came together to create a recog-
nizable kind of novel. 2 This is a helpful starting point, since it allows us to
think of realism as a set of overlapping features. As in a medical diagnosis,
a text may qualify as realist if it manifests several of the symptoms, but it
does not have to show every one. Armed with the dei nition of realism as a
syndrome, we can see how novelists as different as Dickens and Eliot, the
Bront ë s and Trollope, Gaskell and Thackeray, may all be productively read
as realists.
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Caroline Levine
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Scholars have offered three broad explanations for the rise of nineteenth-
century realism that help to show why it has managed to elude clear and sta-
ble dei nitions. The most inl uential of these is articulated by Georg Luk á cs,
who saw novelistic realism as a response to the upheavals of the indus-
trial and political revolutions of the late eighteenth century and the rise of
Napoleon, which prompted a new sense of history on a mass scale. Life no
longer seemed governed by natural processes, and ordinary individuals for
the i rst time had a sense that they were participating in social and political
transformations that shaped both national and world histories. 3 Britain in
particular was a site of rapid change. The industrial revolution thoroughly
transformed the British economy from the late eighteenth to the early nine-
teenth centuries, shifting the nation from a primarily stagnant agricultural
economy to a fast-growing urban one. Vast numbers of people moved off
rural land to i nd work in factories, which clustered in urban areas. London
was the biggest city in the world – the biggest, in fact, that the world had
ever seen – and new urban slums, characterized by i lth, hunger, and dis-
ease, grew at a horrifying rate. Luk á cs argues that realism in the novel was
the struggle to present the forces of historical change and necessity not as
abstractions but as the detailed and tangible experience of ordinary people
caught at specii c moments in history. More recently, Harry Shaw has built
on this account, agreeing with Luk á cs that realist texts share an interest
in the task of understanding individuals in the midst of large-scale histor-
ical processes. And Shaw suggests that the novel offers a surprisingly varied
range of strategies to address this sense of history: a commitment to the
richness of concrete objects that gesture to the material conditions of his-
tory; dynamic plots that reveal processes of “social change and motion”; an
interest in representing historical difference and otherness; and narrators
who call our attention to the ways that consciousness is limited by the spe-
cii city of circumstance. 4
If Luk á cs and Shaw understand the realist novel as a response to pro-
found social and economic upheavals, classic studies of British i ction claim
instead that realism was above all an epistemological project, exploring the
processes by which one could know or grasp the real. For Ian Watt and
George Levine, for example, the realist novel posed a quintessentially mod-
ern set of questions about the nature of reality and our access to it. Watt
points to the widening inl uence of empiricist philosophy, which, beginning
with Descartes, imagines that truth may best be found by the individual,
depending on her own lived experience, independent of tradition. In order
to capture a convincing reality, the novel borrows from this empiricist epis-
temology a focus on individual characters, who rely on the evidence of their
own eyes and ears to gain access to the truths of the world. “Individualist
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and innovating,” the novel is the form that best captures this philosophical
position in literature. 5
For George Levine, the Victorian realist novel rel ected a more plural
intellectual landscape, responding to many currents in a skeptical, seculariz-
ing culture intent on rethinking the beliefs of the past:
a culture whose experience included the Romantic poets, and the philosoph-
ical radicals; Carlyle and Newman attempting to dei ne their faiths; Charles
Lyell telling it that the world revels “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect
of an end”; the Higher Criticism of the Bible from Germany; Hume, Kant,
Goethe, Comte, and Spencer, with their varying systems or antisystems; non-
Euclidean geometry and a new anthropology made possible by a morally
dubious imperialism; John Stuart Mill urging liberty and women’s equality;
Darwin, Huxley, and the agnostics; Tennyson struggling to reimagine faith;
Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, Pater … 6
As secular kinds of knowledge such as empirical science, history, and
anthropology grew increasingly powerful and competed with older spirit-
ual modes, Levine claims that realist i ction self-consciously took part in
a larger “secularizing movement directed against the falsehoods of earlier
imaginations of reality” (11). Since writers were always aware of the limits
of their capacity to tell the truth, the struggle to produce a convincing real-
ism required a constant examination of conventions. This meant not only a
rethinking of familiar techniques of storytelling, but often an unsettling of
conventional wisdom and morality too. Thus realism had to be constantly
exploratory and experimental, refusing to come to rest in settled values,
truths, or conventions.
A third school of thought, less well known than the other two, offers yet
another compelling account of the changing nature of realist i ction. In the
1920s, several Russian formalist critics argued that realism had to shift over
time because what feels realistic changes, depending on the audience. A new
technique or subject matter can strike readers as startlingly, freshly real,
while conventional formulas for presenting the world often start to feel stale
and familiar – revealing themselves as hackneyed artii ces. Roman Jakobson
explained that a feeling of verisimilitude depends on continual innovation:
Everyday language uses a number of euphemisms, including polite formulas,
circumlocutions, allusions, and stock phrases. However, when we want our
speech to be candid, natural, and expressive, we discard the usual polite eti-
quette and call things by their real names. They have a fresh ring, and we feel
that they are “the right words.” But as soon as the name has merged with the
object it designates, we must, conversely, resort to metaphor, allusion, or alle-
gory if we wish a more expressive term. It will sound more impressive, it will
be more striking. To put it in another way, when searching for a word which
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Caroline Levine
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will revitalize an object, we pick a farfetched word, unusual at least in its given
application, a word which is forced into service … The words of yesterday’s
narrative grow stale; now the item is described by features that were yesterday
held to be the least descriptive, the least worth representing, features which
were scarcely noticed … To the followers of a new movement, a description
based on unessential details seems more real than the petrii ed tradition of
their predecessors. 7
Our sense of what is freshly and strikingly real, and what is strangely and
artfully unreal, is radically contingent, depending on the representational
norms that dominate at any given moment. In this account, the realist novel
must unsettle any attempts at a stable dei nition, since each new generation
of writers will want to reject the petrii ed formulas of their precursors.
Whether we understand realism as the product of a rapidly industrializing
modernity, a response to a set of epistemological problems, or an attempt
to startle audiences with the shock of the real, all three of these accounts
put an emphasis on historical change and movement – and see realism as
rejecting above all the static, ossii ed worldviews associated with the past. Is
it any wonder, then, that realism should elude strict dei nitions? It emerges
in all three scholarly traditions as a project constantly alert to the perils of
immobility, and so becomes both an aesthetic of motion – recognizing the
necessity of change – and an aesthetic in motion – perpetually trying to out-
run its own conventions, refusing to i x its own practices and orthodoxies.
Paradoxically, of course, this emphasis on difference suggests that realism
was relatively coherent after all. What realist writers had in common was a
probing, searching, sometimes anxious struggle to register the fact of restless
change. And because what they shared was a desire to mark difference, the
work they produced was destined to take many shapes.
To make sense of this dynamic plurality, this chapter will focus on four
of the main shaping problematics faced by realist writers: subjects, objects,
perspective, and time. On the one hand, these help us to get at character,
description, narration, and plot, the most basic formal building blocks of
the novel. But they also raise historical and philosophical questions – who
counts as a subject? How and why do material things matter? From what
vantage point can one know the real? What causes events to unfold over
time? All four of these socio-formal problems generated new possibilities
as well as new challenges for nineteenth-century writers. We will see how
realist writers negotiated the various difi culties these contending questions
threw up at them, and how the most basic forms and aims of the realist
novel sometimes came into conl ict. And we will see how realism emerges as
a “syndrome,” manifesting a rich range of responses to a world in the midst
of social upheaval, intellectual innovation, and artistic change.
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Victorian realism
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Realism’s subjects
The term r é alisme i rst emerged in France to describe the work of the painter
Gustave Courbet, who caused a scandal in the 1850s with his starkly unsen-
timental paintings of workers and peasants. If art had long been the domain
of the beautiful and the ideal, suddenly artists were willing to shock audiences
by exploring lives shaped by humdrum, arduous labor in squalid conditions.
Realism became famous for its lowly characters. The novel in Britain had
in fact long been interested in the ordinary individual rather than the epic
hero: we might think of Defoe’s Moll Flanders or Richardson’s Pamela. But
nineteenth-century writers continued to widen the i eld of representation to
capture the truths of prosaic, gritty, and hideous experience. Thanks to the
realists, poor, marginal, and hitherto neglected i gures, such as seamstresses,
pawn-brokers, factory workers, drunks, prostitutes, and beggars came to be
seen not only as serious artistic subject matter, but also subjects in the philo-
sophical sense, sources of knowledge and action in the novel rather than
picturesque or comic objects.
Alex Woloch argues that this new emphasis on democratizing charac-
ter created a problem for the realist novel. On the one hand, writers could
now choose to make absolutely anyone a protagonist, but this egalitarian
impulse runs up against the necessary inequality of the novel form, which
allows only a few characters ever to be fully rounded, while everyone else
is doomed to remain minor. 8 There is no way for the novel to be genuinely
democratic in its characterization. Thus novelists faced a difi cult choice:
which particular characters should they select out to represent from the vast
array of real persons who populated the social landscape?
Some of the most famous realist texts are Bildungsromane , whose pro-
tagonists – Jane Eyre, David Copperi eld, Maggie Tulliver – begin their nar-
ratives as bewildered, yearning, isolated children who cannot make sense of
the social world or of their place within it. Romantic writers such as Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Mary Shelley had already begun to
show a serious new interest in childhood. But the realist novel in England
would insistently return to children to consider how one could come to be
a successful, l ourishing individual in the complex new social environment
of industrial Britain. In many cases, the novel focused children of uncertain
class status, whose futures could take shape in multiple ways, to grapple
with the question of how one came to be a proper modern subject.
Jane Eyre is a particularly powerful example. Jane is an orphan who begins
her life in a wealthy propertied household, but is treated as an indigent
dependent. She is not quite on the level of the servants in the novel, but nor
is she a full member of the upper classes. Straddling class lines, she struggles
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Caroline Levine
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against coni nement and injustice, and on the basis of her quick intelligence,
her refusal to be subjugated, and her i erce integrity, learns to assert herself
as a free subject in the social world. She has seemed to many readers a cred-
ible and deeply sympathetic protagonist: both realistic and unique in her
determination to overcome obstacles to self-assertion and fuli llment. For
feminist critics in the 1970s, she stood for the celebration of female indi-
vidualism in a limiting patriarchal context. 9 Recent critics have tended to
build on this account of Jane Eyre as a consummate individual, but they have
taken a gloomier view of individualism. Asserting the values of self-making,
independence, and hard work, Jane is eventually rewarded for her bourgeois
individualism by being allowed to move into the ranks of the gentry, but
along the way we can see glimpses of the sacrii ces that this upward mobility
entails: wealth made from slave labor in Jamaica and colonial conquest in
Madeira, the death of Bertha Mason Rochester, even the expulsion of Ad è le
from the inner circle of the family at the novel’s close. Gayatri Spivak has
famously made the case that British imperial violence actually required and
depended on exactly the kind of individualism Jane exemplii es so well. 10
This reading points not only to the novel’s powerful ideology, but to
something paradoxical about the genre’s use of character: it is the fact that
Jane feels unique, independent-minded and self-reliant that makes her stand
for a generalizable norm – the reality of the modern self. Thus the realist
Bildungsroman suggests one solution to the problem of which characters the
novel should choose: a single, highly individuated protagonist who distills
the larger complicated and troubling question of what it takes to become a
modern subject. Thus Jane Eyre compels our attention for her singularity,
but it is paradoxically this singularity that makes her stand for the general
phenomenon of modern individualism.
To be sure, the Bildungsroman was by no means the only formal choice for
realist writers interested in capturing the experience of a new social world.
Some sought instead to give a more sweeping, comprehensive view of social
life and widened their i eld of characters to incorporate a range of i gures
from many different walks of life. Often their aims were self-consciously
political and ethical, intending to draw sympathy and sometimes political
action. 11 In one of the classic accounts of realism – chapter 17 of Adam
Bede – George Eliot argues that art should provoke readers to feel sympathy
for a range of characters who are neither beautiful nor heroic because in fact
it is these people who surround us and need us:
These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither
straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and
it is these people – amongst whom your life is passed – that it is needful you
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should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsist-
ent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire – for
whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would
not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so
much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work,
that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and
the common green i elds – on the real breathing men and women, who can be
chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered
and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken,
brave justice … In this world there are so many of these common, coarse
people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we
should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out
of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only i t a world
of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always
have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of
commonplace things – men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and
delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. 12
Rather than distracting us with ideal beauty, writers should prompt audi-
ences to recognize the dignity of commonplace lives. For Eliot, this was pri-
marily a moral problem. For other realist writers, such as Elizabeth Gaskell,
it was also crucial to expose social and economic interconnections between
comfortable, middle-class lives and desperately deprived and difi cult ones.
The point was not only to shock audiences with ugly, lowly new content,
then, but to galvanize them into a new understanding of their own place in
a complex social environment.
And yet, thorny new formal questions arose along with the novel’s expan-
sive embrace of the social whole. Should the novelist who seeks to give a
comprehensive or systemic picture of a whole society focus our attention on
a few people we can know well or try to represent many distinctive indi-
viduals? Dickens struggled with these two alternatives in novels he wrote
close together in the 1850s, one in condensed weekly installments over six
months, the other in longer part issues over almost two years. The briefer
Hard Times contains only a few major characters, but these represent a
whole society by acting as representatives of broad social groups: Stephen
Blackpool, the honest worker; James Harthouse, the degenerate aristocrat;
Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian businessman. In an effort to capture a
whole society, Hard Times relies on synecdoche, rendering the social world
through a small number of characters who represent signii cant new types
of social subject.
In the vast expanse of Bleak House , by contrast, Dickens opts for more
than seventy idiosyncratic characters to present the social life of the nation.
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Although these many i gures come from different classes, Dickens seems
less interested in using them as representative types than in showing the
interconnections among far-l ung lives. He traces links from the aristocratic
Sir Leicester Dedlock to Jo the crossing-sweeper by way of philanthropists,
soldiers, dancing masters, doctors, aesthetes, and lawyers. Most of these
i gures are highly peculiar rather than typical, and their social signii cance
derives from the fact that their lives intersect with the lives of others. Esther
herself is at the center of the story not so much because she is a remark-
able person in her own right – as she tells us all too often – but because she
is located at the intersection of a clandestine affair, a vast and sprawling
lawsuit, and a murder investigation. The novel also makes it clear that we
have an obligation to understand these social intersections. Skimpole, for
example, is blameworthy because he refuses to entertain the notion that
he is affecting others through his own patterns of spending and debt, while
Mrs. Jellyby sees herself at the busy hub of a philanthropic network while
egregiously ignoring her family. Even Jo, who clearly typii es urban poverty
and neglected childhood, repeatedly appears in the novel because he is a
point of contact for others: i rst he links a dead man to the law; then he has
evidence relevant to a murder investigation; he also draws efforts at urban
reform; and he is a carrier of disease across class boundaries. The way that
Dickens distills his society, then, is not through a single character or small
group of representative individuals, but through a networked structure of
social relationships. 13
Woloch points to Middlemarch as another unusually complex response
to the problem of inequality among the novel’s characters. With its focus
on the expansion of the franchise, Middlemarch thematizes the question of
the distribution of signii cance among persons, but it also structures what
Woloch calls its “character-space” to pose the same question on the level
of form. That is, Middlemarch refuses to choose between the one and the
many. The novel “can be read in terms of a singular protagonist (Dorothea),
a pair of co-protagonists (including Lydgate), a series of principal characters
(including Mary and Fred, Will, Rosamond, Casaubon, and Bulstrode) or a
manifold group of characters, extending from principals to nearly anonym-
ous i gures who all compete for attention within the narrative web” ( The
One , 3).
With Jane Eyre , Hard Times , Bleak House , and Middlemarch , then, we
can begin to see the range of ways that realist texts approached the problem
of characterization in their struggle to capture a social world. One solution
involved relying on a single individuated i gure whose development traced a
plausible and exemplary path to successful maturity. Here the single central
character allows the novel to distill large-scale social processes. Alternatively,
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a writer could offer a small handful of typical and representative characters
to gesture to whole social groups. A third approach involved multiplying
distinctive characters while drawing attention to processes and paths that
linked them. George Eliot merges all of these in an extraordinarily deli-
cate balance. And she is not the only novelist to combine these strategies:
individuation, representativeness, and interconnection are never mutually
exclusive, and we see all three in many realist texts. The highly individuated
protagonist, as we have seen, is itself a social type, and even Hard Times ,
with its emphasis on representative i gures, traces a painful education for
its atypical Louisa Gradgrind. Rich combinations of individuals, types, and
networks can be found in the period’s most sweeping realist i ctions, such as
Vanity Fair and The Way We Live Now . Thus instead of dei ning a single or
optimal mode of characterization for realism, we can instead acknowledge
the experimental range of ways that the realist novel struggled to represent
ordinary and humble modern subjects enmeshed in complex webs of social
relationship .
Realism’s objects
Realism brought to art not only new subjects but also new objects. The
Victorian novel is notorious for being packed with things – from natural
curiosities to expensive commodities, and everything in between: heirlooms,
outi ts, instruments, fetishes, furniture, gems, exotic species, foodstuffs,
antiquities, and even limbs (like those stuffed into Mr. Venus’s shop in Our
Mutual Friend ). In part, novelists valued things as part of a dense descrip-
tion of the social world, understanding material objects as an integral part of
lived experience. Indeed, objects can often capture social relations as well or
better than subjects: they can circulate as commodities; they can be passed
down through families; they can be lost, hidden, and stolen; they can be
obstacles, instruments, or ends in themselves; their value can be emotional,
economic, symbolic – or all of these.
While theorists have disagreed about the role and purpose of objects
in the nineteenth-century novel, they have tended to agree that they were
essential to the realist enterprise. For Roland Barthes, for example, it does
not matter much which things the novel includes: a barometer in Madame
Bovary creates a “reality effect,” acting as a “useless” detail that in its very
superl uity resists serving narrative meaning and so simply announces the
reality of the world represented by the text. Objects like these say nothing
but “we are the real,” and it is for this reason that the realist novel depends
on them. For Luk á cs, by contrast, the specii city of objects at moments espe-
cially of crisis or tension can capture the experience of living in history:
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Caroline Levine
94
things are concrete, particular facts that gesture to larger and more general
systems, “part of the broad living basis of historical events in their intricacy
and complexity.” 14 Well-chosen objects in the novel can distill the experience
of large-scale relations among social groups.
In recent years, scholars have grown increasingly interested in the real-
ist novel’s attentiveness to things. Cynthia Wall, for example, has investi-
gated the growing value granted to objects in the novel from the eighteenth
to the nineteenth century: for the i rst time things, and especially domestic
things, became worthy of lavish description, interrupting narrative in more
and more richly detailed ways. Wall suggests that this change came about
thanks to a growing consumer culture, which concentrated a new attention
on objects; new technologies that enabled new kinds of minute attentiveness
to things – such as the microscope; and a new embrace of empirical forms
of knowledge, which prized particularities as ways of getting at general
truths. 15 The novel often lingered particularly long on the visual appearance
of objects, perhaps rel ecting a Victorian culture that was richly and even
obsessively specular, swarming with exhibitions, panoramas, and optical
toys and instruments. 16
Amy M. King offers an explanation of realism’s prolii c descriptions of
objects that has more to do with values than with new technologies or prac-
tices of consumption. She argues that the novel’s protracted descriptions
drew an ethical justii cation and a set of practices from natural theology,
which imagined that a knowledge of God could be found in the smallest
details of the natural world. This worldview demanded a meticulous obser-
vation of things in nature as an act of reverence, “i nding much in the small
and the quotidian.” King points out that Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village
(1824–32), a twenty-i ve-hundred page text, was enormously popular in the
Victorian period, and it was organized around “a set of descriptive modes
premised upon dilation of detail and delaying narrative drive.” Rather than
understanding realism as a deeply secular project – pace George Levine –
King argues that this reverential relation to objects became a staple of the
Victorian novel, “a residue of the sacred” that found its way into the long
descriptive passages of Adam Bede , Mary Barton , and Trollope’s Barsetshire
series. 17
Unlike Wall and King, who have explored the realist novel’s deliberately
loving attention to things, Elaine Freedgood surprised critics in 2006 by
returning to Barthes’s reality effect. She makes the case that the Victorian
novel is simply too massive to take all of its objects seriously, and she urges
us to linger on precisely those “nonsymbolic” objects which the novel
brushes by: those it packs into its pages as markers of reality but uninter-
esting in themselves, the ones we necessarily dismiss, saying, “oh yes, the
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Victorian realism
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real, the literal, never mind.” 18 For Freedgood, these articles matter because
they had real histories of production, circulation, and consumption beyond
the pages of the text. Dickens may mention Magwitch’s tobacco only glan-
cingly, for example, but by specifying that it is the “Negro head” variety
three times in the text, he calls up a signii cant reality he never elaborates.
As many Victorians knew, this tobacco was picked in the United States by
slaves, exported to Australia where it was used as currency by colonial set-
tlers exterminating aboriginal peoples, and banned in England between
1842 and 1863. Thus the object, though only mentioned in passing, can
be read as a site where the realist novel “stockpiles” historical information,
compressing into a single thing a vast and terrifying story of world trade,
genocide, and enslavement.
Whether they offered “thick” or “thin” descriptions of objects, lavish-
ing detail on them or compressing and distilling social relations through
them, Victorian realist writers depended on things much more than their
eighteenth-century precursors. They also tended to value them more than
their modernist successors. An interest in the material object is therefore one
of the hallmarks of the realist novel. From Lizzie Eustace’s diamonds to the
dust-heaps of Our Mutual Friend , and from Lucy Snowe’s buried letters to
the checked curtains of Mary Barton , realist i ction is certainly jam-packed
with things. These usually remain shadowy and marginal but always, like
characters in Alex Woloch’s account, have the potential to become prom-
inent, taking on particular meaning and value, as a protagonist does. The
realist novel is thus populated with unrealized possibility. The object world,
like the realm of ordinary people, is simply too crowded to be rendered in
full. And so the realist Victorian novel persistently asks – and invites us to
ask – which objects matter, and why.
Realism’s perspectives
When the novel wants to focus our attention on a subject or an object, it
pushes it into the foreground, inviting us to zoom in. But it can also stand
back, encouraging a stance of distance or detachment. Sometimes it even
asks us to admit a vast panorama, taking in the multiplicity of the city, the
nation, the world. Our relation to subjects and objects in the realist novel
depends very much, in other words, on the vantage points it adopts.
Two major intertwined questions have preoccupied the many critics who
have considered the perspectives of the realist novel. First, if realism tries
to convey a social world, then what are the boundaries of that world? Is it
a small community such as Gaskell’s Cranford? Is it the dense, mysterious,
and plural world of the city, as in the Sherlock Holmes stories? Or does the
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Caroline Levine
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narrative sprawl beyond the nation, like Vanity Fair and Daniel Deronda?
Second, what formal techniques of narration does the novel adopt to convey
social wholes? Does it opt for the i rst-person vantage point of the embed-
ded participant or the bird’s-eye view of omniscience – or some complex
combination of the two? The problem of perspective thus joins content to
form and brings into focus both the social and the epistemological dimen-
sions of realism, asking not only which reality should be conveyed, but also
from what vantage point we can best grasp it. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth
argues that the perspectives made possible by realism marked a profound
epistemological shift, a break from a medieval notion of discontinuous space
and time, which privileged discrete and isolated details, to a new conception
of time and space as “continuous, homogeneous, neutral media … popu-
lated by objects that exhibit certain consistencies of behavior, regardless of
changes in position, which enable us to recognize them as the same.” 19
Politically minded critics over the past few decades have made a differ-
ent kind of perspectival claim, arguing that it is no accident that the novel
and the nation became powerful forms around the turn of the nineteenth
century, and urging us to think of the nation as the novel’s most important
horizon. As Franco Moretti explains:
Some nation-states (notably England/Britain and France) already existed, of
course, long before the rise of the novel. They had a court at the center, a dyn-
asty, a navy, some kind of taxation – but they were hardly integrated systems:
they were still fragmented into several local circuits, where the strictly national
element had not yet affected everyday existence. But towards the end of the
eighteenth century a number of processes come into being (the i nal surge
in rural enclosures; the industrial take-off; vastly improved communications;
the unii cation of the national market; mass conscription) that literally drag
human beings out of the local dimension, and throw them into a much lar-
ger one. Charles Tilley speaks of a new value for this period – “national loy-
alty” – that the state tries to force above and against “local loyalties.” He is
right, I believe, and the clash of old and new loyalty shows also how much of
a problem the nation-state initially was: an unexpected coercion, quite unlike
previous power relations; a wider, more abstract, more enigmatic dominion –
that needed a new symbolic form in order to be understood . 20
Too vast and abstract to be experienced as a single collective, the nation
needed a cultural representation that would allow people to grasp it as
one – and to cherish it. The realist novel provided one solution. In Benedict
Anderson’s famous account, the novel imagines a social world where char-
acters who do not know one another perform actions simultaneously, and so
invite us to think of millions of strangers sharing the experience of “steady,
anonymous, simultaneous activity.” 21 As we see characters moving through
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Victorian realism
97
the “homogeneous empty time” of the nation, we come to conceive of our-
selves too as participants in a shared national life.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South certainly works to forge a newly
coherent sense of the nation. The queenly Margaret Hale moves from the
stable agricultural world of southern England, with its aristocratic heredi-
tary estates, to the industrial north, where factory smoke darkens the sky,
and fortunes are quickly made and lost. Though initially disgusted by the
ugliness, newness, and violence of the north, she comes to celebrate the
industrial economy as dynamic and vigorous, a source of energy for the
nation as a whole. Joining Margaret, an heiress, to the industrialist John
Thornton at the end, Gaskell imagines in them a productive union of mas-
culine and feminine, aristocracy and bourgeoisie, industrial north and agri-
cultural south.
And yet, some critics have argued that the realist novel also persistently
pushes beyond the frame of the bounded nation. For critics like Spivak,
the realist novel’s tendency to think of itself as conveying universal truths
made the novel complicit in imperialism – part of an impulse to force non-
European others into a single set of values and norms – but more recent
theorists have shown the value in moving beyond the nation. Amanda
Anderson, for example, points out that “Nation-forming was at the heart
of the modern agenda, but so was the ideal of cosmopolitanism, which pro-
moted detachment from parochial interests, broad understanding of cultures
beyond one’s own, and a universalism that saw all peoples as belonging to
humanity over and above any individual nation.” 22 In its struggle to convey
social realities, including economic relationships, imperialism, and global
migrations, the realist novel adopted cosmopolitan and globalizing perspec-
tives alongside national ones, sometimes coexisting and sometimes super-
seding or displacing them. Daniel Deronda , with its intersecting “English”
and “Jewish” plots, offers for Anderson one particularly subtle and self-
conscious version of this joining of national and cosmopolitan frames.
Tanya Agathocleous argues that realist writers often adopted a cosmo-
politan perspective when they represented the teeming life of the modern
city. Given its plural and multiethnic populations, its role as the center of
a global empire, and its importance to revolutions in media and technol-
ogy that were transforming transnational commerce and communications,
London was not so much a national center as a “microcosm of the globe,”
a “world city.” Realist writers therefore often deliberately turned to London
as a way to imagine a vast global reality that could not itself be captured.
“If the world as a whole could not be seen, it could be brought before the
mind’s eye through the observation of the city, conceived of as a world in
miniature.” 23
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Caroline Levine
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All of these readings suggest that realism strove to capture a social total-
ity that could not be experienced directly. It is not surprising, therefore,
that realist writers developed techniques of omniscient narration: narrative
perspectives not lodged in any single consciousness but able to move in
and out of multiple spaces and minds and to present connections among
people which they themselves might not be aware of. This form of narration
allowed writers to adopt worldviews that rose above the particularities of
situated experience and knowledge. Thus the novel could apprehend a vast
web of social relations.
But omniscient narration may also have served a consolatory cultural func-
tion in a rapidly secularizing culture; that is, omniscient narration could i ll
the place left by a disappearing God. 24 And perhaps it was this that led some
realist writers to shun omniscient narration, fearing that there was something
troublingly metaphysical, totalizing – unreal – about the disembodied per-
spective. We might think of Pip, David Copperi eld, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe,
Dr. Watson, and Conrad’s Marlow, all i rst-person narrators who guide us
through their worlds without the benei t of super-human knowledge.
The novel’s frequent use of the i rst-person narrator clearly complicates
the problem of realist perspective. On the one hand, in its struggle to capture
social relations, realist i ction strives to give an overarching view, under-
standing particularities as elements that signify within a larger whole. Here
it seeks a detached and synthetic vantage point. On the other hand, realist
texts evince an ongoing skepticism about overarching and totalizing per-
spectives, preferring the more ordinary and familiar techniques of empir-
ical observation and verii cation. In these cases it opts for the limited and
uncertain perspective of the i rst person, corroborating Ian Watt’s inl uential
argument that the realist novel disseminated the principles of philosoph-
ical empiricism, which prized the “individual investigator” gathering evi-
dence about the world through lived experience ( Rise of the Novel , 13).
With narration, then, realist i ction seems to reach a crossroads: should our
knowledge of the realities of the world be sweepingly comprehensive or spe-
cii cally embodied, divinely complete or humanly partial?
What is perhaps most remarkable about the realist novel is the fact that
it often merged these two strikingly different modes of knowledge through
brilliant formal innovations. The i rst and best known of these is a tech-
nique called free indirect discourse, which was famously developed by Jane
Austen and became commonplace in the Victorian novel. Ingeniously, free
indirect discourse combines the narrator’s style of speech, reporting in the
third person, with the speech mannerisms and viewpoint of a specii c char-
acter. In Barchester Towers , for example, Trollope uses free indirect speech
to describe Eleanor Bold’s emotion after Mr. Arabin has proposed to her:
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Victorian realism
99
She idolised, almost worshipped this man who had so meekly begged her par-
don. And he was now her own. Oh, how she wept and cried and laughed, as
the hopes and fears and miseries of the last few weeks passed in remembrance
through her mind.
Mr Slope! That any one should have dared to think that she who had been
chosen by him could possibly have mated herself with Mr Slope! That they
should have dared to tell him, also, and subject her bright happiness to such
a needless risk! 25
The narrator describes Eleanor’s internal monologue in the third person, yet
reports the character’s thoughts in her own shocked words (“Mr Slope!”), and
embeds her temporal vantage point (“now”) within the narrator’s third person
past tense (“Oh, how she wept and cried and laughed…”). Thus the novel sets
up a l ow between the synoptic and the specii c, merging the individual and
omniscient perspectives so intimately that they cannot be prised apart.
A second and more subtle formal innovation in the relationship between
omniscient narrators and particular characters emerges in James Buzard’s
dazzling reading of the nineteenth-century novel in Disorienting Fictions .
Arguing that British writers used the novel to perform a kind of autoethnog-
raphy – apprehending and conveying a specii cally British culture to itself –
Buzard reads the realist narrator as a prototype for the participant-observer
crucial to twentieth-century anthropology. In Mary Barton , for example, the
narrator walks through the industrial city, immersing herself in its life, like a
i eld worker who travels to a remote village. But she also resists representing
a self-contained or isolated proletarian culture, deliberately including her
own social world in the novel as well, as she incorporates “both workers
and bourgeois readers in the newly activated, positive cultural identity of
the nation.” What makes this particularly extraordinary is that the novel
manages to merge the i rst-person experience of the participant with the dis-
tant perspective of the third-person observer. On the one hand, the narrator
is part of the world she describes, a member of the same large community
as the workers; on the other hand, “in relation to a cultural i eld conceived
as an array of more or less incarcerating, view-restricting positions, the nov-
elistic narrator gains authority by traveling outward or upward from, or
comprehensively among, those separate positions in order to grasp their
structural and moral interdependence.” 26 The narrator’s bird’s-eye view is
therefore that of a cultural insider who lays claim to the detached know-
ledge of an outsider as well. She is both a participant in her national culture,
able to share the limited perspective of her characters in the story-space, and
a distanced observer in the novel’s discourse-space, able to connect relevant
details to make sense of the whole. Surprisingly, Buzard argues that this
double position characterizes i rst-person narrators as well as omniscient
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Caroline Levine
100
ones, contending that Jane Eyre the narrator, for example, looks back on her
younger self to explore the child’s narrow and immersed vantage point from
a position that can both share that perspective and detach itself from it .
Many different realist novels experiment with combinations of omnisci-
ence and i rst-person experience by adopting the techniques of free indirect
discourse and the stances of participant-observation, but one realist novel
raises the distance between the omniscient and the i rst-person narrator to
a self-conscious formal principle. Bleak House is unusual in switching back
and forth between an impersonal, detached, ironic, mobile, and know-
ledgeable narrator who speaks in the perpetual present tense, and Esther
Summerson’s situated, immersed, na ï ve, past-tense account. Critics have
interpreted this famously alternating perspective in a compelling range of
ways, from Joseph I. Fradin’s claim that it works as a metaphor for “the
divided modern consciousness,” to Lisa Sternlieb and Alison Case, who
argue for Dickens’s gendering of the two narrators. 27 But for the purposes
of considering Victorian realism, we might conclude that the double nar-
rative perspective of Bleak House is simply the most l agrant of a great
number of realist efforts to bring together the sweeping bird’s-eye view that
takes in the whole social world, and the more lifelike individual struggle
to make sense of experience on the ground, with only partial knowledge
to go by .
Realism’s plots
Subjects, objects, and perspectives are the stuff of many kinds of representa-
tions, including painting and poetry, but the novel is always organized along
a temporal dimension as well. Realist i ction, with its persistent concern with
change, puts at its center the problem of dynamically unfolding relations.
And in fact, Victorian writers were often fascinated by questions of causal-
ity: what sets off events, produces social change, instigates relationships?
Take, for example, the famous scene in Vauxhall Gardens in Vanity Fair ,
where Thackeray invites us to dwell on the question of cause and effect. Jos
Sedley, who is about to propose marriage to Becky Sharp, drinks too much,
and suffers from such a terrible hangover the next day that he l ees London
altogether, breaking off his connection to Becky and changing the course of
all of the protagonists’ lives:
That bowl of rack punch was the cause of all this history. And why not a bowl
of rack punch as well as any other cause? Was not a bowl of prussic acid the
cause of Fair Rosamond’s retiring from the world? Was not a bowl of wine the
cause of the demise of Alexander the Great, or, at least, does not Dr. Lempriere
say so? – so did this bowl of rack punch inl uence the fates of all the principal
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Victorian realism
101
characters in this “Novel without a Hero,” which we are now relating. It inl u-
enced their life, although most of them did not taste a drop of it.
The young ladies did not drink it; Osborne did not like it; and the conse-
quence was that Jos, that fat gourmand , drank up the whole contents of the
bowl … 28
Thackeray isolates a single, minute, commonplace occurrence as the cause
of a shift in the whole web of relationships. And in good realist fashion, he
asks the reader to consider whether the novel’s causal patterns don’t extend
into our own world: “Are not there little chapters in every body’s life, that
seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?” (chapter vi ).
Vanity Fair therefore purports to offer one example of a generalizable and
credible model of cause-and-effect relationships that describes the world
outside the novel as well as the world within.
While narrative time allows realist writers to consider plausible connec-
tions among events, plotting also presents an ongoing challenge for the real-
ist novel. One of the problems with ordinary life, of course, is that it tends
to be monotonous, unexciting – plotless. Imposing a temporal coherence
gives shape to the narrative but runs the risk of feeling distinctly artii cial.
Thus the appeal of narrative form competes with the verisimilitude of its
contents. In New Grub Street , Gissing’s writer Biffen asserts that he is going
to write a novel that will “reproduce” life “without one single impertin-
ent suggestion save that of honest reporting.” The result, he acknowledges,
“will be something unutterably tedious … If it were anything but tedious,
it would be untrue.” 29 More often than not, the realist novel refuses this
kind of tedium, returning again and again to the neat resolutions of the
marriage plot, or the fascinating mysteries of detection, and incorporating
sensational events, sentimental love, and even pivotal coincidences along
the way. The coincidence is in fact startlingly pervasive in realist i ction:
we might think of Lucy Snowe’s awakening in her godmother’s house in a
foreign land, Pip’s rescue at the crucial moment from Orlick’s attempt to
murder him, Thornton’s chance sighting of Margaret Hale bidding a strange
man goodbye at the train station, Phineas Finn’s prevention of a deadly
attack on Robert Kennedy on the street, Dorothea’s happening upon Will
and Rosamond at an indiscreet moment, and many others.
Critics have often leapt to assume that such neat plotlines represent an act
of bad faith, an undermining of realism’s goals of plausibility and verisimili-
tude in favor of successful sales and the most effortless of readerly pleasures.
Marxists in particular have argued that the tidy endings of the Victorian
novel close down the real social injustices and upheavals that have been
glimpsed along the way. “By the device of an ending,” Terry Eagleton writes,
“bourgeois initiative and genteel settlement, sober rationality and romantic
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Caroline Levine
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passion, spiritual equality and social distinction, the actively afi rmative and
the patiently deferential self, can be merged into mythical unity.” 30 Thus
narrative closure betrays the goal of verisimilitude in favor of ideologically
soothing conclusions that subtly reinforce the power of the ruling classes,
making it feel natural and inevitable.
But other critics have argued that it is a mistake to focus too heavily on
the novel’s endings. After all, the Victorian novel spent a great deal of time
in its ample middle. Many realist novels were serialized – including Bleak
House , Middlemarch , and Vanity Fair – thus enforcing regular interruptions
in the long middle . I myself have argued that the realist novel frequently
turned to techniques of suspense not to drag readers to a foreordained end-
ing but rather as a way of teaching readers a skeptical approach to the truth
that was borrowed from science. That is, suspenseful narratives hint at hid-
den truths but defer revealing them, keeping us aware of our own ignorance
as we wait for the reality to emerge. As i rst-time readers, we know that facts
are being withheld from us, and we make guesses – is the strange sound
in the attic made by Grace Poole? Does Miss Havisham intend Estella for
Pip? – but our anxiety, doubt, and desire to keep reading remind us that the
truth may be different from anything we have guessed or hoped. Like scien-
tists, then, we learn to make hypotheses and then suspend judgment, as we
wait for the unfolding of events to coni rm or unsettle our expectations. 31
This means that the realist novel deliberately keeps the potential for different
narrative trajectories open, inviting us to consider what Harry Shaw names
“co-plots,” the unrealized potential paths a narrative can take ( Narrating ,
143). The ending, in this context, is not so much a logical or natural result
of narrative unfolding as it is one among many plausible outcomes. Indeed,
realist novels sometimes foreground this fact: Great Expectations , with its
two different conclusions, or Villette , which leaves us suspended, remind
readers that realist narratives do not always end in satisfying closure.
If suspense was used for realist purposes – to teach us a skeptical epistemo-
logical approach to the truths of the world – then perhaps even sensation
i ction may be incorporated into the canon of Victorian realism. Certainly
Wilkie Collins shares Thackeray’s fascination with cause-and-effect rela-
tionships as they unfold in the world beyond the text. Consider, for example,
Count Fosco’s account of statistical probabilities in The Woman in White :
Crimes cause their own detection, do they? And murder will out (another epi-
gram), will it? Ask coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, Lady
Glyde. Ask secretaries of life-assurance companies if that is true, Miss Halcombe.
Read your own public journals. In the few cases that get into the newspapers,
are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered?
Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are not reported, and the
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Victorian realism
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bodies that are found by the bodies that are not found, and what conclusion do
you come to? This. That there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise
criminals who escape … When the criminal is a brutal, ignorant fool, the police
in nine cases out of ten win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated, highly-
intelligent man, the police in nine cases out of ten lose. If the police win, you gen-
erally hear all about it. If the police lose, you generally hear nothing. 32
In depending on an empirical model general enough to reach beyond the
boundaries of this particular text, the Count implies that the clever criminal’s
ultimate escape is always entirely plausible, even when it does not come to
pass in some particular case. On the one hand, this gesture clearly invites us
to imagine that it is perfectly possible that he might himself escape, thereby
generating a suspense that will haunt the novel right up to the spectacle of his
dead body at the Morgue; but on the other it also suggests that this suspense
may actually operate beyond the limits of this plot, since even when it kills
the Count, the novel’s appeal to statistics compels us to recognize that other
clever criminals may yet escape, in other i ctions and, more frighteningly, in
our own world. Count Fosco thus manages to defamiliarize realist suspense
in the novel: when we feel the doubts and anxieties of information withheld,
we may know that some outcomes are highly probable, but we must also face
the fact that more exceptional eventualities also have a chance, however slim,
of prevailing in any particular case. What suspense teaches us is that even the
most likely, predictable outcomes always compete with more startling, more
improbable ones. And that means that the most sensational coincidences
may in fact be the proper stuff of the realist novel. 33
Victorian plots often trace a character’s path to understanding, as well
as the reader’s. Jane Eyre seeks not only freedom but also knowledge, con-
stantly testing hypotheses against the evidence of her world, while Pip leaps
to assume that his bequest comes from Miss Havisham and must slowly
learn not to impose his assumptions on the real. In these cases, the plot
charts not only events and experiences, but a process of truth-gathering
that, like Thackeray’s account of causality in Vanity Fair and Count Fosco’s
interest in probability, extends beyond the boundaries of the text to con-
sider how we might best acquire a knowledge of the world. And all of these
examples suggest that realist plotting may have been more often a way to
think seriously about causality and knowledge than a device for rushing
headlong to formulaic and predictable endings.
Conclusion
Realism’s plurality did not mean that it was simply a collection of distinct
practices or forms, like items on a menu. The various aims of realism could
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Caroline Levine
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compete for priority and even come into difi cult conl ict. The effort to paint
a rich psychological portrait of individuals, for example, existed in tension
with the effort to take a comprehensive view of a whole society. Transparency
collided with the artii ces of narration. Plausibility contended against both
moral purposiveness and narrative excitement. Lavish description of minute
particulars required the close-up; a large social vision called for the pano-
rama. George Levine argues that the stopping of time to describe things in
detail also ran up against the impulse toward plot. 34 Omniscience, itself an
impossible perspective, seemed to offer a kind of knowledge that the partial
individual consciousness could not.
To be sure, these conl icts also prompted some of realism’s most exciting
and inl uential innovations in the novel form. The inclusion of poor, mar-
ginal, and working-class characters allowed novelists to hold to the goal of
plausibility while teaching a moral and social lesson to their readers. Sheer
sordidness may also have allowed some of the delights of unfamiliarity and
adventure to bourgeois readers even while the text kept to the supposedly
humdrum frame of ordinary experience. Free indirect discourse brought
together omniscient and limited i rst-person perspectives to afford both a
large sense of a whole social body, as in historical writing, and the lifelike
uncertainty and limited perspective of the individual, as in empirical science.
It was also a canny device that seemed to suggest a certain transparency,
implying that characters were “highly legible to their narrator even when
they are not directly speaking or acting.” 35 And the suspense plot allowed
writers to craft thrilling plots while making serious arguments for a skep-
tical, secular, scientii c epistemology.
Realism offered no stable or settled response to the upheavals of the social
world but rather a variety of experiments in form and content. It could not
be called a na ï ve project, as novelists engaged in a dynamic, self-rel ective
set of processes, responding to the limitations of prior i ctions in ingenious,
interrogatory, and transformative ways. Nor was it a purist enterprise, seek-
ing to i nd a single resolution to its ongoing questions. When we look for
realism, in the end what we i nd is a complex syndrome of linked, overlap-
ping, and contending aims and forms.
NOTES
1 Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism (Stanford University Press, 2008); and Daniel Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
2 Claybaugh draws the notion of a syndrome from an article in German by Peter Demetz, “Zur Dei nition des Realismus,” Literatur und Kritik 2 (1967): 333–45. See Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 44.
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3 Georg Luk á cs, The Historical Novel , trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962).
4 Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 165.
5 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 13. 6 George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 20. 7 Roman Jakobson, “Realism in Art,” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and
Structuralist Views , ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1971), 40–41.
8 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many (Princeton University Press, 2003), 30. 9 See, for example, Adrienne Rich, “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless
Woman,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979).
10 Since Europeans dei ned humans as individualized and autonomous, the imperial project violently and paradoxically sought to “ make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in himself.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 248.
11 For connections between the realist expansive use of character and the political project of reform, see Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose , 6.
12 George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham (Oxford World’s Classics, 1996), xvii.
13 For a fuller version of this argument, see Caroline Levine, “Narrative Networks: Bleak House and the Affordances of Form,” Novel 42 (fall 2009), 517–23.
14 Luk á cs, Historical Novel , 45. See also Luk á cs, “Narrate or Describe,” in Writer and Critic , ed. Arthur D. Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 110–48.
15 Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformation of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
16 See Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
17 Amy M. King, “ Natural History and the Novel: Dilatoriness and Length and the Nineteenth-Century Novel of Everyday Life,” Novel 42 (Fall 2009), 460–68.
18 Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 11.
19 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton University Press, 1983), 18.
20 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 17.
21 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso, 1983), 26.
22 Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001), 126.
23 Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15.
24 J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968 ).
25 Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857), ed. Robin Gilmour (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), vol. iii , ch. 14.
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26 James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2005), 47. 27 Joseph I. Fradin, “Will and Society in Bleak House,” in PMLA 81 (March
1966): 95–109; Lisa Sternlieb, The Female Narrator in the British Novel: Hidden Agendas (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 78; and Alison Case, “Gender and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospective Distance in David Copperi eld and Bleak House ,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory , ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005): 312–21.
28 W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847), ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg (New York: Norton, 1994), ch. vi .
29 George Gissing, New Grub Street (London: Smith, Elder, 1891), ch. i . 30 Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Bront ë s (Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, rev. edn., 2005), 32. 31 Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and
Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003 ).
32 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), The Second Epoch, ch. iii .
33 I elaborate this argument more fully in “An Anatomy of Suspense: The Pleasurable, Critical, Ethical, Erotic Middle of The Woman in White ,” in Narrative Middles , ed. Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011).
34 George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 191.
35 Frances Ferguson, “ Emma and the Impact of Form,” MLQ 61 (March 2000), 70.
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