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Victorian Realism

Question

• Despite the dominance of �realism� as a descriptive category for the Victorian novel�especially as a developmental history, in which the Victorian era appears as a time of the creation, codification, and growing dominance of realism�close attention to these works reveals a host of images, metaphors, and even events that fly in the face of realism�s scientific objectivity and representational verisimilitude. The Gothic, the improbable, the grotesque, the symbolic, the spiritual, and the mythological pervade the works of such �realist� powerhouses as Dickens, Eliot, and Bronte. How do the anti-realist strategies of such authors suggest a different role for the Victorian novel in the development of realism? With reference to at least three works of criticism, use at least three novels that trouble our understanding of realism to reevaluate its role in the Victorian novel.

Outline

• Victorian era golden age of realist novel in the Anglophone world
• Lack of sustained, methodical analysis of realism in contemporary Victorian criticism: 60s and 70s were the golden era for theorizing realism
  • Latest currents in Victorian crit (gender, cultural studies, philosophy, empire, aestheticism, the gothic, science, religion, affect)
  • Cambridge Companion
  • Realism as taken for granted
  • Much of realist definitional work done by modernist scholars at worst as a straw man and at best as a referential context to understand modernism the better, just as the most pithy statements about modernism are found in people trying to define postmodernism in such a way that privileges the latter at the expense of the former.
• General Survey of Characteristics
  • Suspension of disbelief
  • Holistic characters
  • Use of types rather than heroes
  • Emphasis on contemporary social institutions and issues and contemporary political and economic events
  • Richness of detail
  • Pragmatic understanding of language, with assumption of a certain clarity and efficacy
  • Showcases the development of people within social institutions of secular, bourgeois society
• Definitions of realism are many, swinging from those embedded in purely philosophical discussions to the ones embedded in a more “narrow” historical materialism (Jameson’s “Beyond the Cave” in which realism is a commodity produced by bourgeois society to “map” itself in the wake of the collapse of traditional systems of knowledge, so that realism plays a part in the construction of the bourgeois consciousness: a desacralized, pragmatic, common-sense everyday)
• Classic definitions, Watt and Wellek
  • Watt, w/his etymology and philosophical history, The Rise of the Novel, 1957
    • Became critical turn over fights about Flaubert, where people then turned to Richardson, Fielding, Defoe to give the word a pre-history
    • “the novel�s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it.”
    • Realism can’t perfectly realize scientific objectivity, but instead it raises the question of representationalism, that is, semantics (relash of words to meanings)
    • Watt’s ideas: it begins w/philosophical realism: Descartes, Locke “external world is real, and that our senses giver us a true report of it”
      • Method of Realism: “study of the particulars of experience by the individual investigator�free from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs” so that you are a critical individual investigator rejecting collective truths
      • The novel, w/its autobiographical bent and its love of the new, is perfect for this job
    • Characteristics
      • pay attention to individuals: w/ Locke: �personal identity as an identity of consciousness through duration in time; the individual was in touch with his own continuing identity through memory of his past thoughts and actions� (from On Human Understanding); w/Hume also says we need memory for identity: our self is �Chain of causes and effects� and Newton and Locke’s attn to history
      • “fidelity to human experience, attention to any pre-established formal conventions can only endanger his success” so novel is “formless” both in content and form
      • Got a naive belief that the work of the third-person narrator does not trouble this idea of individual as source of truth
      • Berkeley and Locke: emphasis on particulars, rejecting neo-Platonism
      • time process: Forster’s “life by time” rather than old “life by values;” where you are the product of your experiences and present behavior is the result of the past
      • Now literature can illuminate a part of life we didn’t see before: “the texture of daily experience” on the “more minutely discriminated time scale” so realism is mixture of historical time and minute time
      • lively sense of place
      • protestation of authenticity
      • prose style is a “full report” and exhaustive instead of stylized summary
      • natural voices rather than graceful mannerism
      • Romantic b/c emphasizes individuality and novelty
    • conclusions
      • juridical: realism as “the sum of literary techniques whereby the novel�s imitation of human life follows the procedures adapted by philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and report the truth” where realism in novel is parallel manifestation of what also is manifested in philosophy
      • as method: “a set of narrative procedures which are so commonly found together in the novel, and so rarely in other literary genres”
      • �a full and authentic report of human experience�
      • where you have MORE of the characteristics above than other genres usually do: a kind of checklist definition of realism where you meet a saturation point that says Yes you’re realist
    • doesn’t believe that talking about inner life of characters is that different from realism: �There is no absolute dichotomy between the internal and the external approach to characters� just a “difference of emphasis rather than of kind” where Sterne still has character types; where Proust is talking about Third Republic too; where James is the master of the two extremes, objective and subjective, just like Joyce, whose end of Ulysses includes a description of the contents of Bloom’s drawers next to Molly’s daydream
  • Wellek, “Concepts of Criticism” 1963
    • �All critical theory since Aristotle covers �imitation� cf ancient Greek: Parrhasius tricking his rival by his intense trompe l�oeil that leads his rival to try to �pull� a curtain away from the painting�but that�s the painting
      • But rather than see realism a “literal copying,” like naturalism, realism can include conveying “higher reality” of the truths of “dreams and symbols”
    • Philosophy: Kant and Scheller were instead of nominalism (names are only ideas), ideas are real; Schiller and Schlegel are the ones to apply this to art
    • Art: comes earlier than Watt’s derivation, talking about 1830s in France, like Hugo, being called realist: “faithful imitation�of the originals offered by nature�the literature of the true�
      • Seen in Scott, applied to Balzac, Stendhal, Balzac, Dumas, the Goncourts
      • crystallizes as aesthetic term in 1850s w/Gustav Courbet’s paintings; and Champfleury’s Realisme journal, saying realism is �Art should give a truthful representation of the real world�by observing meticulously and analyzing carefully. It should do so dispassionately, impersonally, objectively�
    • England gets realism in 1880s w/Gissing and George Moore, and Thackeray
      • First systematic analysis: George Henry Lewes, �Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction� 1858 praising Thackeray. �Realism is the basis of all Art.�
      • Overall, England’s Victorian realism means �truth of observation and a depiction of commonplace events, characters, and settings�
    • America about same time as England, through Howells and James; Germany it didn’t really hit; Italy’s Verismo; Marxism: Engels in the 1880s talking about realism via “milieu” and “type” (and then Lukacs of course)
    • Dostoevsky: attacks what he calls “photographic realism:” �My idealism is more real than their realism.� �they call me a psychologist: mistakenly. I am rather a realist in a higher sense, i. e. I depict all the depths of the human soul.�
    • naturalism, �in constant competition with �realism� and was often identified with it� 232; �the separation of the terms is only a work of modern literary scholarship�
      • in philosophy assoc w/secularism, materialism
      • only Zola is faithful, rigorous to this model with his scientific, experimental novel
      • seen as a later offshoot of realism that’s associated heavily w/Zola and scientific determinism
    • imitation of nature, verisimilitude, truth, objectivity
    • Auerbach had a rigorous definition of realism, chasing out the comic, the moralist, the didactic, the grotesque, the idyllic: which is so rigorous you only have Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola left
    • Wellek leaves out modernism b/c the work of impressionism and Woolf, Proust, etc is �individualizing, atomistic, subjective realism that refuses to recognize an objective order of things�solipsism� b/c individual seen as �only reality�
    • so what is realism? �universal feeling for the end of romanticism, for the rise of a new age concerned with reality, science, and this world�
      • �a regulative concept, a system of norms dominating a specific time, whose rise and eventual decline it would be possible to trace and which we can set clearly apart from the norms of the periods that precede and follow it�
    • Description
      • �the objective representation of contemporary social reality� by which he means you are rejecting the fantastic, the fairy-tale-like, the allegorical and the symbolic, the highly stylized, the purely abstract and decorative..no myth�no world of dreams� as well as “pure chance” and “extraordinary events” (b/c of scientific mood of culture w/its mechanical causality)
      • �the ugly, the revolting, the low�sex and dying� with a mixture of genres: comic, satiric, and burlesque
      • Didacticism: �implied or concealed� in theory, a truthful representation wouldn�t be propagandist. Yet this is realism�s theoretical difficulty: �tension between description and prescription�which cannot be resolved logically but which characterizes the literature of which we are speaking”
      • This is solved with the creation of the “type” where real meets ideal (ie Geoge Sand, where type is a model you should imitate) and it’s a social rather than archetypal type; and the type is where realism is seen to have objective social observation
      • Objectivity: the other “watchword” along w/type; �a distrust of subjectivism, of the romantic exaltation of the ego: in practice often a rejection of lyricism, of the personal mood” and “impersonality, the complete absence of the author from his work, the suppression of any interference from the author� (James and Flaubert don’t tell us how to think about their characters)
      • Silence about fictionality: James: Trollope has �suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, make-believe� Such a betrayal of sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime.�
      • Objectivity is often said as where the person, the author, has disappeared: Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Hazlitt, Stendhal all talking about objectivity
      • However, Wellek says disappearance of author is NOT necessary b/c that would delete Sterne, Fielding, Dickens, Scott, etc etc; Follows Kate Hamburger in saying that these interruptions don�t always ruin illusion of reality; b/c you don’t ruin the objective representation of society by doing that; and actually Wellek associates disappearance of author to subjective turn of non-realist modernism: they �actually dissolve outer reality� when they do that
    • Rise of realism associated w/historical realism, ie, Auerbach on Stendhal: �embedded in a total reality, political, social, economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving� and the fact that Balzac is just Scott plus a few historians like Michelet
    • Concluding Definition, which he admits to be a “Disconcertingly trivial conclusion:” �an ideal type which may not be completely fulfilled by any single work and will certainly in every individual work be combined with different traits, survivals from the past, anticipations of the future, and quite individual peculiarities� so that all you have left is �the objective representation of contemporary social reality� plus a vague whiff of historicism
    • Can’t be perfectly realistic: �has its set conventions, devices, and exclusions� that make it fail of being perfectly realistic
      • Yet other extreme is bad too: may �lose all distinction between art and the conveyance of information or practical exhortation� b/c reportage is �bad art�
    • Wellek’s Crazy Idea: �The theory of realism is ultimately bad aesthetics because all art is �making� and is a world in itself of illusion and symbolic forms.�
      • Stendhal: “a mirror walking down the road” (Red and the Black preface)
  • My reaction to Wellek: the austerity of his guidelines for realism, what it can and cannot be, would mean that nothing is realism, which makes him have recourse to this “no one book has it all” structure. Realism is created by the shuttling back and forth between objectivity and subjectivity, where the delineation of the “objective” is a creation that is a device to discover the relative powers of the individual and the social: which has the more or less power, when, and how. Realism has to be able to judge inside of the text what is real and what is not empirically real. The authors have to define, in a process included in the novel itself, what that objectivity will mean. To do so, no wonder you have little bits that don’t seem realistic: to stage the determination of what is objective and what is not.
• One of the last high marks was Mc Gowan?, 1986, Representation and Revelation, who does better trying to understand how a work of realism includes non-objective parts
  • Victorians �haunted� by Cartesian dualism, the separation of mind and reality, b/c then how can you know the external world?
    • How do they react? �synthesis of eighteenth-century and romantic theories of mind�s position in the world� � and self-consciously so (cf Mill�s essays on Bentham and Coleridge)
    • Wanted to get the best of both worlds, not their excesses
  • Representation: �Representational theories of knowledge posit the necessity for some intermediary that stands between mind and the world, serving as their point of contact.�
    • This is Lockean b/c Locke says that your senses mediate your experience with the environment. Senses mediate your experience and knowledge of the outside world. The problem is how to ensure the veracity, the truth of the representation that reaches you.
  • They get scared b/c they can’t actually verify that the truth you get corresponds with The Truth out there: Locke, �The Mind knows not Things immediately, but only by the intervention of the Ideas it has of them,� (Essay on Human Understanding)
    • �knowledge by means of ideas which are causally connected with, but only representative of, objects distinct from the mind� and it’s true when those ideas correspond to reality but there’s no way to know
  • So they swing to Revelation, when direct knowledge is given to you. This is Romantic, but the tendency was even in Locke himself
    • You have to have something that’s unmediated, to guarantee that you know the truth: �Revelation�is the basis of a model that asserts that immediate knowledge of the real, either through direct sensory perception or through an intuitive grasp of essential principles, can be attained.� lots of sight metaphors, and this is where God often comes in
  • Mc Gowan? ups the ante by saying that Victorians also realized that language mediates between people, thus endangering communication and making the problem of representation work also on the level of the writing of the novel itself: ideas are already represent a mediation of the world via your senses, and then words are mediations of your ideas…so how can you guarantee anything?
  • As the two extremes they went back and forth on, set in motion w/Romantics protesting against empiricism, epitomized by the Victorian understanding of Locke: senses mediate the environment, so no direct language; but then anxious and wants to say that Yes Yes It’s Accurate, so tries to formulate idea of Revelation
  • “Victorians, more than either the empiricists or the romantics, are inclined to forgo revelation altogether in favor of representation�a tendency, I think, attributable to the Victorian interest in cultural solutions.”
  • �obsessive need to identify the real indicates their inability to locate it with certainty.� so realism for Mc Gowan? is the creation of a particular reality and then the forging of links to it from mind and language
  • what is truly Victorian is that they finally did accept mediation and say you could improve society nonetheless (which isn’t in Yeats, he says)
• Using Barthes, write a paragraph about your own theory of realism
  • I agree w/Mc Gowan? that we can read Victorian realism as a conflict between these two extremes of knowledge and the philosophical conflict of epistemology in this time, but instead of investigating on thematic level, I’d like to investigate form
  • Describe Barthes
    • structuralism can’t understand realism b/c it sometimes seems outside of function: “narrative luxury, lavish to the point of offering many �futile� details and therefore increasing the cost of narrative information.” “What is the significance of this non-significance?”
    • description “enigmatic” not easy to cohere “no finality of action or communication” like Flaubert’s Rouen having “vertigo of notation” (endless)
    • �The pure and simple �representation� of the �real,� the naked representation of �what is� (or has been), thus appears as a resistance to meaning.� w/lifelike versus intelligible (because in the words of Catherine Gallagher there’s a tension between facts and values for the Victorians, where facts are increasingly seen not to automatically mean values, which is what Utilitarianism was all about)
    • �Flaubert�s barometer, Michelet�s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real. It is the category of �the real� (and not its contingent contents) which is signified.� and �the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, that basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity.�
    • realism = moments of description where “the signified is expelled by the sign” as there is a “direct collusion” between referent and signifier (larger structure of meaning gone in favor of the illusion of an object in the real world being noted)
      • however the kicker is the the idea of reality is what’s being proven here, the actual signifier is “I promise it’s real”
    • �Referential illusion:� in realism, �just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do�without saying so�is signify it.�
      • The referential illusion is the �collusion� between signifier and referent. This isn�t gonna happen: you only get in touch with the category of �the real.�
  • What I care about from Barthes: �Realistic literature is narrative, of course, but that is because its realism is only fragmented, erratic, confined to �details,� and because the most realistic narrative imaginable develops along unrealistic lines.�
    • I kind of believe that, but accept that like Peter Demetz realism requires a suspension of disbelief. What I like about him is that he notes that realism is itself unrealistic: not that the unreal means that this particular work therefore doesn’t count as realism, but that the unreal is constitutive of realism itself.
• David Copperfield
  • David Copperfield’s alternation of denotative descriptions of events within recognizable historical moments and milieux, with moments of prophecy or dreaming where Copperfield uses memory to take control of his life, shows how the real itself has to be interpreted, has to be experiences within a trance insofar as it represents character growth. Lockean individuation is occurring here, and here we have the reconciliation of the individuals with society that Adorno slams realism for in Aesthetic Theory. The dreamworld here helps to constitute the real b/c its alternatives make up for what’s lacking in the scientific, objective world, making it something you experience character growth out of knocking against, and therefore affirming it. But this process of dreams and imagination has to keep going on and on for him to be reconciled with objective reality.
  • With a mention of Pickwick Papers: 1837; picaresque novel is put onto a scientific basis (this is supposed to be the “papers” of a scientific and fellowship club) but maintains the episodic riot of the picaresque (ie the Sancho Panza like Sam Weller, Pickwick’s mouthy servant), until Pickwick getting into jail turns it completely around. It’s like he accidentally winds up in jail, the highest picaresque episode yet (Dickens is betting higher and higher) actually implodes on Dickens and he gets a whiff of what he’ll do in Oliver Twist and Hard Times; and then you end up with a utopian community made at end, domestic
    • The joke is that as soon as the book abandons pretending to be the published paper of a scientific society, that’s when it becomes “realism” as we know it: not the scientific view alone but also its proper objects (unlike Wellek and Watt).
    • A psychological reading would say that Dickens himself was struck b/c what he was writing corresponded to his personal objective conditions for living (his family being sent to debtor’s jail), the writing becomes more recognizably novelistic in the grand Victorian tradition (with bildung and interwoven events).
  • This realism ends in a utopian community…
    • Go see Pickwick Papers
  • Copperfield is 1850, where his career really solidifies
    • Autobio: it’s where he purges his blacking boots stuff; that is, where social commentary becomes a kind of uncovered repression, where the process of realism is reversed (begun, but abandoned; instead of picaresque, then found)
    • Where Dickens decides to go the “character” route which is one of the main halves of historical development of realism (the individual; social reality)
    • The Fantastic is in Copperfield (the wreck that kills the genteel Steerforth and rustic Ham on Yarmouth coast), the comic (Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Micawber’s voluminous verbiage, “I’ll never desert Mr. Micawber;” cousin Betsy screaming, “Janet! Donkies!” and then proceeding to beat them up), but is punctuated by the vicissitudes of objective social reality (Betsy’s failed speculations, Mr. Micawber’s various failures; and all along you have the bildung of little Davy becoming a successful author; and you have utopia/dystopia again, everyone who doesn’t have a home at the end b/c of social movements either gets in jail (Uriah Heep) or Australia (the fallen woman Daisy and her guardians; the impecunious Micawber and family); as well as the daily problems of society (alcoholism of Mr Wickfield) next to pure evil (Uriah Heep) and showing how they work together
  • go see David Copperfield
  • While Pickwick is a story of fancy coming into brutal contact with “objective social conditions,” David Copperfield is a story about how Dickens and Copperfield both overcome the negative experiences with “objective social reality” by cultivating imagination and fiction-writing (the power of the imagination to stop time and memory and therefore gain control over your life), so that objective social life will play a participating role in your life but not an overwhelmingly deterministic role. This is what English realism added to French: the turn away from determinism to an investigation of the limitations of both institutional society and of individuals. But this equilibrium if diff, as we’ll see:
• Jane Eyre, 1847
  • What kinds of realism it has according to the formal definitions
  • As a part of the journey to domesticate the paranormal into realism
• A milestone on the course of crystallizing realism
  • Where the fantasy, the supernatural, the fairy tale, the vision, the improbable, and the fairy tale all come together, are cancelled out and preserved at a higher level
• The improbable is domesticated and put into Providential narrative (through the science of physiognomy and temperament, as well as through religion)
  • ESP moment is seen as God’s will b/c it’s when Rochester admits that God knew what was right all along
• The elven, the strange, the Gothic, is put into a material framework
  • Jane’s eccentricity is explained as an effect of having been to Lowood and her experience as a child with her horrid aunt and cousins (this is Locke’s theory of individuation as the consciousness being built up through experience and memory through time) in addition to her own temperament (also a narrow need to keep the family together)
  • Rochester’s own Gothic past is made by the commonplace greed of his father and brother, trying to keep the family property together
• Hegelian pattern: Jane constantly wants her inner spirit and soul to be free, disclaiming the importance of her earthly frame or superficial independence (ie, she can be a paid servant but still retain her spiritual freedom; she can retain her feminist independence even while being “flesh of his flesh” b/c she has explained that his presence helps to draw out her whole entire being)
• It’s a weird model of determinism that strives to be empirical and scientific through the creation of a personal history and the biological explanation of physiognomy and temperament, but then again, the temperament is consistently experienced as elven, strange, and supernatural. Bronte wants her heroine to be explicable scientifically and yet resist bland determinism and still have the aura and glamor of freedom and a certain charisma of Jane’s “Quaker simplicity.”
• The Strange
  • Her visions (the dreams, like of her mother saying “Go, child, out of temptation”)
  • Her drawings (the Evening Star, the floating corpse and wreckage surmounted by a bracelet-stealing bird)
  • Jane’s being compared to, associated with fairies, elves, sylphs, sprites, witches, Turks, genii, etc
• How Is Gothic “Cancelled?”
  • Turned into art
    • Jane’s drawings
  • Turned into a story
    • Innkeeper recites the story of the Thornfield fire as if to a stranger (the condition of the novel), rather than Jane witnessing it, having someone who was there say it, or having a vision of it happening
  • Jane’s conversation
    • When Jane gets back to Rochester, he keeps talking about her being an enchantment, the ESP scene, her being an elf, but she insists on talking about getting his hair tidy, acquiring eggs and ham, etc: all material and down-to-earth
  • Religion
    • ESP explained as God’s will
    • The socially approved supernatural is left in charge of the field
  • Jane’s Distance
    • 377: In first flush of their love, she keeps him at a distance, provoking him and teasing him in order to keep him from giving her those Gothic names: elf, sprite, etc
    • The “pungent” is used so that their relationship doesn’t sink into cloying sweetness
    • It keeps him “in reasonable check” so that he cannot overmaster her by being too loving (she knows she will cave and lose her independence if not)
• How Is Gothic “Preserved?”
  • These exact same ways! It receives plenty of page-time, but you are not to read them as the final arbiters of truth, but instead on the register of feeling and emotion: especially your own as the reader
  • It’s a foreign spice that doesn’t wholly conceal the plain mutton underneath
  • The supernatural and the material are so wrapped up in each other that you can hardly tell what was improbable and what probable
    • The painful material circumstances she suffers while escaping Thornfield seem to purchase for her the right to “stumble upon” her unknown cousins
    • Divine Justices renders Rochester so low that his personal situation seems lowly enough for Jane Eyre to wed with (his blindness and lameness seem to cancel out her obscurity and personal unattractiveness)
    • The transfer of the Totally Out There supernatural elements to the providence of God makes the former acceptable as their ultimate interpretant: the pagan is dissolved into the accepted supernatural mode, which is what makes it realistic
      • For example, the ESP, but also the mysterious elements surrounding the marriage: the electrical storms, the cloven chestnut tree, Bertha’s eerie visit to Jane’s chamber: all end up in the undramatic (as Jane argues) climax at the church and a scary but unterrifying (Jane does not faint) visit to the third story; and Jane interprets it as having to hapen b/c she had made “an idol” of Rochester and put him before God
      • There is the supernatural, but it is explained in such a way as to make it objective (“We all believe in God, right?”)
• Religion CONTAINS the supernatural elements, allows them to be roped into a realistic framework
• We hear the story of Bertha, which is a geographical division of labor that ousts the supernatural and irrational: where the irrational occurs on colonial soil, and the reason why he’s steeped in it occurs on British soil and is quite materialist, quite objective, about his being the second son
• Contingency in Jane Eyre
• What the Gothic elements speak to is contingency: chance versus fate
  • Jane says it’s “absurd” to await “circumstance” (559) which would put her and Rochester back together, but that’s kind of what she does: her romance is duly put on hold until Rochester is ready for her
• How is it different?
  • Bildung: Jane is tested and grows in her generosity and charity by teaching at the charity school
  • Circumstance, chance, improbable is reinterpreted as Providence
• Temperament in Jane Eyre
• The cult of personality begins here, with the “unique” Jane Eyre whose situation just happens to be perfect for storytelling
• Personality
  • Jane’s being different from Aunt Reed is the explanation for her bad treatment: people in general do not like each other b/c of their born natures “shunned them as one would fire, lighting or anything else is that is bright but antipathetic” (156)
  • 181: Yes, experience can change you: Rochester we meet after “fortune has knowed me about” making him “hard and touch” but not wholly so: he is still “pervious” (you can be changed but not forever)
  • 418 “the hitch in Jane’s character” makes her leave Thornfield
  • 419: St John the saint: he is a saint b/c he wants to change his character to make it more acceptable to God (he does this by sacrificing his chance at romantic happiness with the pretty heiress Miss Oliver)
  • Bronte’s real crime against Bertha is denying her access to temperament: Bertha is a monster of fate, a victim merely of her genes, becoming an alcoholic madwoman like her forebears
• The science of temperament: physiognomy
  • Maybe half a dozen times Jane uses it to make generalizations about people’s personalities, esp her own (“organ of Veneration” huge)
  • Bronte wants a scientific base for her conversations about personality
• Love here emerges in its modern form, as the merging of two completely compatible temperaments (their “natures”) 347
  • Note about the rest of her works about being classics of character production, like Villette and The Professor (and see her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights as going off the deep end on this, which is why this book is seen as such an anomaly: not because of its being diff qualitatively but quantitatively, a diff of intensity rather than of kind), and where she wants to talk about social reality like Shirley she ends up abandoning the realist attention to history and folk cultures to talk about character development as such: a split personality (just as Eliz Gaskell’s novels, especially Mary Barton, North and South, and Cranford all show signs of a vast formal change when the author decides to talk about character or conversely to talk about social environment)
    • There is a tension between the realism of Jane Eyre and the spiritual side which is there to create an aura of supernaturalism and mystique around her.
    • Although realism at first developed character as an alternative to the nameless, featureless allegorical markers that were in literature before, some realism tended to exaggerate this quality so much that it created a strange parallel of two levels of writing.
• Mill on the Floss
  • Realism as J P Sterne’s On Realism 1973, where social whole is presented as �common ground� for reader and author: �World of shared reality� (Stern 150) where reader shares the world presented in the novel
    • Realism is at its best �where human relationships are formalized and protected against the caprice of solipsism, in the social institutions of a given age� (91)
    • Eysteinnson gives a good list (194): family, politics, bureaucracy, schools, churches, newspapers, judiciary
    • Eliot is caught between this mode of realism, which dominates, and her love for her character which has been noted by critics a lot. So again English realism is a contest between the literary, and literature’s own solipsism, and the constant need to reference some mimetic “outside”
  • With a mention of Middlemarch, where Dorothea is interesting as a character developing but she also represents a particular response to the social (ie, arguing in front of a bunch of men, tho’ she’s at dinner, that it would be better to spend money on improvements on the farms which would help everyone than to use it to hunt which is only for the advantage of the few), so she can argue for Utilitarianism while remaining within character, therefore eclipsing the distance between individual and social b/c we care about her in the guise of her social thought, like Margaret Hale in Gaskell’s North and South
    • Similarly, issues like the fight for the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Agricultural Revolution that succeeded upon the I R, and the expansion of the electorate to include Catholics appear as a vehicle for individual improvements, not as an inert background
      • This is the golden age of realism, I’d say, where the social and the individual do as Lukacs wants to say come together alchemically it seems, ** The Catch: it is still a part of a gendered dance where the men make the history and the women symbolically enact it when their marital choices and domestic behavior represents choices in reaction to that reality (Rosamund Vincey’s disastrous marriage to Lydgate, whose scientific vigor has to be set aside to provide his young wife with the consumer objects she so desires, versus Dorothea’s decision to give up “rank and fortune” to marry for love)
  • Mill on the Floss
    • As realism: attention on ordinary people and ordinary events that represents historical change (Maggie and her brother Tom are witnesses of the transition from St. Ogg’s as a remote agriculture depot with its manual labor jobs to a fashion-driven industrial depot centered on clerkship and managerial jobs)
    • But this transition is made sense and evaluated through non-realistic modes: the narratorial intrusions put the story in mythical, transhistorical perspective instead; the flood at the end wiping the Tulliver siblings away as divine retribution for Maggie’s sins…which are yet social
    • Maggie herself is imaginative and can’t chain herself down to the world of decorum and etiquette, which is recognize as artificial and undesirable by the narrator, but still carries the power of Nature inside of it
      • I guess Eliot risks deconstructing her narrative in order to show that even tho’ societies are constructed by man, they still seem to possess the power heretofore explained in supernatural terms. The age of science can’t really exhaust the motor of social etiquette and gossip.
    • The auction scene is where we get to test the power of society: While Mrs. Tulliver collapses and disintegrates as each piece of her china and linen is taken away from her, Maggie actually becomes more heroic b/c the hardship disciplines her and makes her attend to daily life.
    • So for Eliot if you are going to understand society realistically, you have got to use some non-objective strategies to do so.
    • As Catherine Gallagher has argued, Eliot’s career represents a switch from the Utilitarian “representational” model of democracy of Adam Bede and Scenes from Clerical Life, to a strange mysticism in Daniel Deronda in order to give Daniel spiritual powers to change the world visible through becoming a Zionist leader. Maggie doesn’t have enough power to change the social, however, and that’s why she is destroyed by society. Eliot’s expressionism in giving Maggie’s destruction a mythical form and meaning can thus be read as a goodbye to the earlier forms of realism and her investigation of a higher realism where the spiritual will gain more currency. Mill on the Floss is the moment of the tipping towards this direction, I think.
• Dracula
  • Where the disjuncture between science and the supernatural widens, gapes open hugely
  • Rather than the supernatural being a tamed personal God whose Providence is seen as a variety of mechanical causality, like much of Victorian literature, and one that people are striving to connect and reconcile with science (like Arnold) this is the supernatural as such: the vampire is straight from cultural mythology
  • And science here is seen in its glamorous guise as the innovator: as the producer of new machines for observing and therefore controlling reality, from the recording phonograph to the Kodak cameras down to the typed and collated diary entries of all involved. Science also creates the opportunity for the blood transfusions that keep everyone alive while they fail to keep Dracula at bay, and a “Radical science” from foreign parts (Van Helsing from Amsterdam) knows about vampires.
    • Telegrams, phonograph, Kodak, typewriter, shorthand, shipping lists (“How I miss my phonograph!” Dr Seward sighs when they follow him back to Transylvania)
    • How is this realism? David Lodge in The Modes of Modern Writing: �the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to descriptions of similar experience in nonliterary texts of the same culture.� Quoted Eysteinnson 195, who says that we could translate Lodge to say that literary discourse is �constantly nourished� by language of �dominant modes of cultural representation� which in our case is science; and yet the Gothic mode of the vampire says that perhaps realism is where literary and non-literary codes meet. That’s my new definition of realism!
  • Empire, sexuality, marriage, faith are all interrogated vibrantly
  • What we have here is a cleavage of the real and anti-real strategies within the tradition of the realist novel. The discursive patterns follow the realist mode (where social types speak in an accessible vernacular that matches the extra-literary discursive patterns of the day), and they are deployed to represent two very different objects: the supernatural, and the hyper natural (the technological determinism and the optimistic faith in the powers of empiricism and the scientific method). In the end, science has destroyed the supernatural being, but it hasn’t eliminated the belief in the supernatural, and indeed we couldn’t no the power of these secular scientific tools unless a supernatural being were to fight us. The anti-real will always be there, and the division between the real and anti-real, the lack of balance anymore between the two, has already pointed the way to modernism.
  • It is not realistic as such, but what it does is illustrate what I’ve been documenting: the “patchwork” nature of realism b/c it doesn’t cohere from the very beginning (ie art can’t possibly be actual reality, duh), and Dracula is at the position of tension 1899 where it’s all about to explode (modernism). What I want to argue is that it doesn’t look like realism, but actually it’s an archetypal example of how I always think realism works: the alternation of realist and some kind of anti-realism, where realism gets to be the explanatory mode of both the realist and anti-real events, but the anti-real is always reserved some space.