Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2001"

Novels and Systems

Abstract: "Let me make the novels of a country," wrote Anna Barbauld in 1810, "and let who will make the systems" (61-62). This extraordinary statement came at an extraordinary moment in literary history: the moment, as Homer Brown has argued, of the "institution" of the novel as we now know it (179-85). In fact, if Brown is correct in linking that institutionalization to the editorial enterprise of Barbauld (The British Novelists) and Scott (Ballantyne's Novelist's Library, 1821-24), this statement is not only descriptive but constitutive. As the last sentence of the introductory essay that explains and justifies Barbauld's pioneering project, it participates in the rise of the novel. Why, then, have our efforts to recount that rise been so conspicuously silent-with the few exceptions noted below-about the very genre that Barbauld highlights as the novel's primary competition? The answer is simple: we have forgotten that system, like the novel, is a genre and not just an idea-it's a form of writing that was crucially important to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Barbauld's statement, as well as the rise of the novel it helps to enact, make sense only when we recover the history of that genre. In doing so we can better answer the question central to this special issue of Novel: what is the relation between the novel and the era we call Romantic?

The Romantic-Era Novel

Abstract: Maria Edgeworth's prefatory comments respond to the debate about the social function of the novel that had haunted it throughout the eighteenth century, and was especially intense in the last decade. She acknowledges that in spite of the worthy examples of Burney and Inchbald there was a pervasive sense that the novel was a debased form, mad, bad, and dangerous, particularly for impressionable female readers. In the spring of 1801, she wrote to her sister Harriet that Belinda would be available in the autumn: "Pray give her ladyship a better character than she deserves, and do not despise Belinda even if you should meet her in a circulating library" (qtd. in Kirkpatrick, xi). We begin with Edgeworth's comments because they raise a number of issues that will be central to our claims for the Romantic-era novel, preeminently classification-the LinnaeanDarwinian desire to categorize the species that subtends writings of the period and the relation between the novel and the public sphere, including the material technologies of circulation. We will argue that the generic promiscuity of the Romantic-era novel, which was so problematic for conservative contemporary critics as well as for many post-Romantic literary historians, in fact opens up new possibilities for exploring and mapping the contours and conditions of the cultural-historical landscape of the second half of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain.

"Unhuman Humanity": Bodies of the Urban Poor and the Collapse of Realist Legibility

Abstract: Recently, several scholars of late nineteenth-century urban fiction, photography, and social science discourse have stressed the complicity of these cultural forms with emerging modes of social discipline In particular, critics have argued that the desire to represent the lives of socially subordinate populations-tenement dwellers, immigrants, vagrants-in novels, photographs, and scientific studies converged with governmental and private-sector reform and social service programs to establish an extensive, tightly-woven web of surveillance through which the poor and disenfranchised were analyzed, regulated, and policed Literary historian June Howard contends, for example, that naturalist writing reinforced Progressive-era structures of social dominance in which the poor become objects of professional-managerial class scrutiny Howard argues that naturalism is characterized by an organizing dichotomy between a privileged, autonomous narrator, with whom the reader is aligned, and a "brute," a degraded inhabitant of a deterministic world Rather than an a self-governing individual, the "brute" is the central subject in a spectacle of determinism that confirms the power of the narrator's gaze and the moral authority and freedom of the readers "[T]he menacing and vulnerable Other"-the "brute"-"is incapable of acting as a self-conscious, purposeful agent[;] he can only be observed and analyzed by such an agent" (104) However, although the spectator describes and explains the brute, he (rarely she) retains his autonomy from the deterministic environment the brute inhabits; while "we explore determinism, we are never submerged in it and ourselves become the brute" (104) Ultimately, Howard argues, the narrator/brute split anticipates the Progressive movement, which placed reform in the hands of a small cadre of ostensibly enlightened, nonpartisan experts "It is a very short step," Howard contends, "from naturalism's gesture of control to progressivism's, from the sympathy and good intentions of the naturalist spectator to the altruistic and ultimately authoritarian benevolence of the progressive reformer" (131) Along similar lines, Mark Seltzer has recently argued that realism's drive to render the social world legible operates as a form of cultural surveillance Seltzer contends that realism's and naturalism's diverse "registers" "are coordinated within a single technology of regulation" ("Statistical" 84), "a flexible and totalizing machine of power" (Bodies 44) "[T]he realist vision of the urban underworld," Seltzer contends, "involves a disciplinary relation between seeing

Maria Edgeworth and the Romance of Real Life

Abstract: An objective interest in human nature and the way it manifests itself in social custom no doubt lies behind Maria Edgeworth's liking for facts. But she never makes a general declaration of this kind. Thefacts in the notebooks do not coalesce with one another or provoke trains of thought. They are merely evidence of a jackdaw-like attitude towards examples of human behaviour. -Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth 239-40

Metaphoricity and the Romance of Property in The Old Manor House

Abstract: Charlotte Smith's 1793 novel, The Old Manor House, has been discussed variously in light of its status as romance, anti-romance, and gothic; it has been recognized as her best novel and as the one that most clearly betrays her literary weaknesses; it has been both praised and blamed for its device of filtering current events though the lens of the past.1 Interestingly, however, what has been least noted is its development of a facet of British culture with which Smith was intensely familiar: the ramifications of inheritance law and the hardships imposed by a legal system unused to the coupling of "female" with "property ownership." Smith famously contended with the inheritance laws of her time, struggling for more than thirty years both with the laws themselves and the "fearful spectres of chicane and fraud," as she described lawyers (The Emigrants 11.355), attempting to untangle the flawed will of her father-in-law and secure her children's inheritance.2 Moreover, she experienced the most common form of disinheritance to her sex: as the daughter of the house she was entitled to no share in her own family's property.3 This consequence of her gender resonates most strongly when she first publishes her Elegiac Sonnets in 1784, writing from the debtors' prison to which she had followed her husband but situating herself figuratively on the volume's title page as "of Bignor-Park, Sussex," a transferral not only of self to property but of property to self. For Smith, brought up to consider herself genteel and a young lady "from" if not "of" property, land ownership held a continual appeal. Married to "new money" derived from trade, and shunted from house to house during the years of her marriage, Smith looked back on a childhood spent at family country estates and saw what represented at once stability and risk: always there and always already lost. That her novels, and The Old Manor House in particular, feature protagonists reliant on landed property reflects her habitual concern with the relationship between ownership and identity. In The Old Manor House, the rightful ownership of an estate is essential to plot development, and the sex of the owner is itself key. Smith creates a "money plot" and centers the novel's love story of Orlando and Monimia around the

Modernism's Dirty Little Secret@@@Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity

Abstract: 1. Civil society: aesthetics and pornography in the eighteenth century 2. Victorian obscenities: the new reading public, pornography and Swinburne's sexual aesthetic 3. The mastery of form: Beardsley and Joyce 4. Being disinterested: D. H. Lawrence 5. Modernist criticism: the battle for culture and the accommodation of the obscene.

Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and Secret Codes

Abstract: During the 1990s more critical work has appeared on the Anglo-Irish "national novel" than in any decade since 1800-1810 when, by common consent, the subgenre first appeared. The new edition of Edgeworth in twelve volumes is a contribution to this collective effort, but the edition is appearing after what is effectively a "school" of Anglo-Irish postcolonial criticism. In the course of the 1990s Tom Dunne, Seamus Deane, Terry Eagleton, and most recently Kevin Whelan have between them established an essentialist line, not closely concerned with the text, on what they see more broadly as a body of writing initially by Anglicized and Protestant Irish writers that made the "writing of Ireland" a topic dominated by the colonial relationship with England and addressed to the English.1 Some of the postcolonial group argue that the relationship has from the first been hierarchical: they instance the debate Edmund Spenser borrowed from a dialogue by the Greek, Lucian, that of Civility versus Incivility, which survived into the nineteenth century with the Irish permanently cast in the role of barbarians. Critics vary somewhat in the closeness with which they make such general propositions fit individual writers. Whelan is most dogmatic in fitting the colonizer-stereotype to Edgeworth and in the process giving her a specific political role:

Homo-Formalism: Analogy in the Sacred Fount

Abstract: In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James sets out to investigate the commonsense belief "that the thoughts which psychology studies do continually tend to appear as parts of personal selves" (227). The primary question about experience, according to James, is why it seems "as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned" (226). In putting the question this way, James takes issue with Hume's empiricist critique of identity, his conclusion that persons "are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions," and thus "whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity" of the self, "[t]here is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different" (35152). James's argument in the Principles is that this critique of the unified self ignores the most crucial evidence in its favor: what Hume identifies as our "natural propension" to imagine that we are so unified. For James, the fact that individuals continue to experience themselves as selves, despite all evidence to the contrary, suggests that this feeling of self must be more than a mere mistake. What holds the self together in his analysis is, in the end, a "feeling" of "warmth and intimacy" (331) with one's past thoughts, a recognition that they all belong to the same self. "And thus it is, finally," he claims, "that Peter, awakening in the same bed with Paul, and recalling what both had in mind before they went to sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the 'warm' ideas as his, and is never tempted to confuse them with those cold and pale-appearing ones which he ascribes to Paul" (334). What is striking, I think, about this moment in the Principles is that the model for the routine way in which the self gets constituted as a self in everyday life is an image of two men waking up in bed together. In calling attention to the strangeness of this image, however, I do not mean to suggest that the Principles is somehow "really" about homosexuality. In fact, it is precisely the asexual and unerotic nature of this image of Peter and Paul waking up together that interests me. One might argue that James relies on such an image here because the issue he's addressing is the issue of sameness, the way in which individuals inevitably recognize the sameness of their past and present selves. Given that (with their alliterative names) Peter and Paul are meant to work as mirror images of one another, James is asking how it is that Peter, on awakening next to Paul, has no problem recognizing that he is himself and not Paul. His answer is that while we make judgements of similarity all the time, some things are more the same than others. No matter how "warm and intimate" are Peter's feelings for Paul, no

Technologies of Vision in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew

Abstract: The creative and critical writings of Henry James invest heavily in optical tropes. Of these, the most familiar is, perhaps, the narrative "point of view" itself. A famous passage in the 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1880) likens the novel form to a house with many windows, at each of which stands "a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass" (xxx). For James, here, the novelist is above all a spectator, located within the privacy of an edifice figuratively breached by "apertures" which connect him visually with the "human scene." The trope of the many-windowed house of fiction seeks to ground fictional form in what is termed, a few lines later, "the posted presence of the watcher" (xxxi). Yet this apparent conflation of rhetorical structures with optical metaphors-a recurrent move in James's theoretical writings-masks a displacement, within the governing ocular trope, from the "pair of eyes" to the "field-glass," which enhances the powers of the unaided eye and magnifies the object of the gaze. To render the authorial observer dependent upon an optical device is to define narrative point of view as a technological prosthesis. The critical history of James's texts has been dominated by a preoccupation with point of view as a means of access to the psychology of an individual subject, obscuring the extent to which, for James, as Sharon Cameron has argued, consciousness is "disengaged from the self ... reconceived as extrinsic, made to take shape-indeed, to become social-as an intersubjective phenomenon" which no longer "add[s] up in realistic ways" (77, 21). This untethering of consciousness from the subjectivity of an individual, and its repositioning within a relational field, is a necessary byproduct of the new social, spatial and visual conditions of the turn-of-the-century metropolis. While the Jamesian project has always been seen as a "modernizing" one, aspiring to no less than the redefinition of the novel in aesthetic and technical terms, recent work, by Mark Seltzer, Ross Posnock, Sara Blair, and John Carlos Rowe, has begun to place it in a dynamic, rather than purely formal, relation to modernity, identifying an urgent concern with the cultural transformations brought about by technology, urbanization, and mass culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This essay seeks to extend these insights by exploring the complex cultural adjustments that condition the most influential part of James's legacy: his innovations in fictional perspective. James's formal strategies-his raising to a higher power of narrative "technique"-model newly self-reflexive forms of subjectivity in fiction. The rise of a Victorian mass "visuality," whose impact has been analyzed by, amongst others, Jonathan Crary and Nancy Armstrong, can supply some of the historical

The Work of Art: Irony and Identification in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"

Abstract: In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee tried to create prose to make readers feel what it's like to pick cotton. Through laborious descriptions of the hands cramping, the strain on a bent back, and the feel of sweat on a working body, Agee hoped to transfer the actual sensations of picking to the reader. His rhetorical experiments stemmed from his desire to produce a "credible language" for representing the "plainness and iterativeness" of a sharecropper's work to a middle-class audience (Letters 115, Praise 320). Agee claimed that he wanted to make the sharecropper's experience "so real to you who read of it, that it will stand and stay in you as the deepest and most iron anguish and guilt of your existence that you are what you are, and that she is what she is, and that you cannot for one moment exchange places with her" (Praise 321). The vast gulf in experience between readers and subjects made identifying with the croppers virtually impossible, according to Agee, a problem compounded by the limitations of language. Despite all of his experiments in representation, Agee acknowledged that the sharecroppers in his documentary book remained "hermetically sealed away from identification with everyday 'reality"' (Praise 240). For Agee, identification was both an aesthetic and a political problem: it was a phenomenological effect of language with social and political consequences. Moreover, Agee worked within a form-the documentary book'-which expressly encouraged middle-class readers to identify with the subjects represented in order to spur social change.2 If authors could make readers identify with the people they depicted, the thinking went, they might promote action to

What Is a Romantic Novel

Abstract: From the time there was a thing you could call a "Romantic novel," it has been a source of embarrassment for its critics. Until the advent of Scott, even the reception of the best that the genre could produce was marked by squeamish ambivalence. Thus, Arthur Aikin's notice of Radcliffe's The Italian in The Monthly Review (March 1797). In order to fix Radcliffe's place in the aesthetic order, Aikin constructs a hierarchy of modern fiction, in which the "most excellent" and "difficult" species of "novel-writing consists in an accurate and interesting representation of such manners and characters as society presents." Aikin is looking back toward the male tradition of the novel, exemplified above all by Fielding and Richardson, and forward, unwittingly, to Jane Austen and George Eliot. "Next comes the modern Romance; in which, high description, extravagant characters, and extraordinary and scarcely possible occurrences combine to rivet the attention, and to excite emotions more thrilling than even the best selected and best described natural scene." So far, it seems, so good. But then Aikin proceeds: "This species of fiction is perhaps more imposing ... on the first perusal" but at second glance it reveals its "vast inferiority" to "the genuine novel" (49). Whereas the novel is based on "truth," the romance is just a narrative gimmick for exciting curiosity, which it can no longer do once we have guessed the "secret" of its plot. Aikin concedes that women may master the more difficult novel (presumably, he has Burney in mind) but implies that romance is their natural sphere. Thus, Radcliffe may be the supreme practitioner of "modern romance"-of the Romantic novel, we might now say-but this only leaves her at the head of the tribe of scribbling women and some ways behind even the laggards in the male ranks ahead of her, proper novelists staggering under the masculine burden of rigorous truth. Robert Kiely's seminal study, The Romantic Novel in England, is equally embarrassed. Kiely begins his introduction by likening the Romantic novel to a species of Frankenstein's monster, a crazy patchwork of appropriated, dismembered, unassimilated literary forms. He then explains how this calamitous experiment came into being. The Romantic novelist was drawn to the period's interest in the subjective and irrational, the oneiric and the outr6, as represented in such aesthetic fads as the sublime, graveyard imagery, and the supernatural. While such material was workable in the medium of poetry, it pulled against the qualities that had become intrinsic to the novel form: duration, a concern with community, and the objective representation of events. Kiely repeatedly essays different formulas for the hash the Romantic novelist subsequently made of things: "The English romantic novelists seem to have wanted it both ways-to authenticate the incredible, to claim originality without really departing from the familiar" (10); "they tried to introduce the unnamable [sic] into a genre which derived

At Home in England, or Projecting Liberal Citizenship in Moll Flanders

Abstract: In 1957, Ian Watt suggested in The Rise of the Novel that Protestantism and capitalism are the informing logics behind novelistic representations of society. Defoe's novels, inaugurating the new genre in Watt's account, represent communities that privilege individual pursuit of economic possession and manifest the strife and alienation that inevitably plague an order founded on such an ethic. The society envisioned in these novels, Watt points out, resembles the one theorized in the political philosophy of John Locke. Following C.B. Macpherson, we have come to identify this political philosophy as the origins of modem liberalism and to label it "possessive individualism." On such an account, rights-based politics are designed to protect private property, and the autonomy of individuals necessarily comes at the expense of social commitment. As Watt puts it, "[t]he hypostasis of the economic motive logically entails a devaluation of other modes of thought, feeling and action: the various forms of traditional group relationship, the family, the guild, the village, the sense of nationality-all are weakened" (64). Thus, in the novelistic vision of "possessive individualism," characters are essentially isolated accumulators of property; Defoe's characters, as Watt describes them, are all "an embodiment of economic individualism" (63), and they, essentially, "all belong on Crusoe's island" (112). More recently, critics have challenged the notion that Defoe's vision of modem society is one of tenuously linked, alienated outcasts. For example, John Bender, in Imagining the Penitentiary (1987), argues that Defoe represents the formation of a society whose bond is based on a homogenizing norm inculcated by social institutions, for which the penitentiary is a paradigm. In the same manner in which Foucault suggests that the rise of liberal individualism is accompanied by the rise of the penitentiary, Bender argues that the highly individualized personalities of Defoe's characters are a product of the disciplining of consciousness to conform with hegemonic norms. Political cohesion, in this model, is derived from the internalization of ideology and the subjectivization of consciousness, a feat achieved through the very architecture of modem cities and through the social institutions that organize daily life. In the "possessive individualism" model assumed by Watt, persons are first and foremost autonomous economic agents who become rightful citizens only after they have become owners; they voluntarily surrender some of their natural freedoms to the state in exchange for its power to protect their property rights. The political bond, on this account, is a chosen and precarious alliance of I'd like to thank Frances Ferguson for her inspiring and generous advice throughout, Amanda Anderson for her invaluable suggestions at crucial moments, Ronald Paulson for bringing An Essay upon Projects to my attention, and Irene Tucker, Rachel Cole, and Galia Sartiel for their illuminating comments on early drafts.

The Geography of Violence: Historical Fiction and the National Question

Abstract: Hazlitt, who seems to have read everything, may have been the first to identify the impersonal authority to be found in Scott's historical fiction. In doing so he suggests something of the revolutionary significance of this form of the Romantic-era novel that will give it a dominant role in the world literature of the next hundred years. The purpose of this essay is to recover some part of that legacy. "If Sir Walter Scott may be thought by some to have been 'Bor universal heir to all humanity,' it is plain Lord Byron can set up no such pretension" (235). Thus Hazlitt, at the outset of his essay on Byron in The New Monthly Magazine in May 1824. At no point in the essay on the poet is he able to shed the exemplar of Scott, about whom he had written the previous month, in diagnosing the achievement of the two British authors "who would carry away a majority of suffrages as the greatest geniuses of the age." In spite of his political sympathies there is in fact, for Hazlitt, no contest:

Superfluity and Suction: The Problem with Saving in the Mill on the Floss

Abstract: To survive Mr Glegg, and talk eulogistically of him ...-to have sums of interest coming in morefrequently, and secrete it in various corners, baffling to the most ingenious of thieves (for, to Mrs Glegg's mind, banks and strong-boxes would have nullified the pleasure of property-she might as well have taken her food in capsules) ... made aflattering and conciliatory view of thefuture. -George Eliot, The Mill bn the Floss 126-27

Mrs. Dalloway, the Dictator, and the Relativity Paradox

Abstract: Walter Pater, a keen observer of contemporary trends and a writer for whom Virginia Woolf had close affinities,1 declared in 1865 that the defining feature of modem thought was "its cultivation of the 'relative' spirit in place of the 'absolute"' (Appreciations 66) This statement is bound to seem enigmatic, since the great philosophical, scientific, and polemical movement that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century under the banner of the relativity principle-the principle that nothing exists but relations-has yet to be redeemed from the oblivion into which, for various ideologically inflected reasons, it fell after the turn of the century Yet relativity, along with evolution, to which it was so closely tied as often to be nearly synonymous with it, was well recognized at the time as the distinctive theme of much of the Victorian avant garde It was proclaimed as such by Herbert Spencer, the most eminent early spokesman of relativity, in his once-famous manifesto First Principles (1862) and by a constellation of other distinguished Victorian radicals and freethinkers including, to name only a few, the psychologist Alexander Bain, the mathematician WK Clifford, the statistician Karl Pearson, the economist WS Jevons, and the theorist of physics JB Stallo These writers set forth the doctrine of what Bain called as early as 1855 "the law of RELATIVITY" (Senses 8) and, later, the "principle of Universal Relativity" (Logic 1: 255) as the foundation of a newly rigorous scientific rationality, one emancipated from the reign of "metaphysical" absolutes unable to give logically coherent accounts of themselves Restoring this movement to view is indispensable to a fully articulated understanding of modernist, and thus postmodernist, intellectual culture; and restoring Virginia Woolf's great novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) to its connection with the philosophical tradition of relativity is necessary-so I argue in this essay-to understanding it in its full historical matrix There may be little need at this late date to challenge once again, as many Woolf scholars now have, Lukacs's implausible idea of her as a writer of hermetically self-enclosed "subjective experience" and as an instance of the modernist "negation of history" (51, 21); but her important link to the nineteenth-century relativity movement and, in particular, its bearing upon her literary experimentalism, have yet to be brought to light2 From the start, this movement of radical intellectual reconstruction was a moral and political movement as well In attributing the rise of relativity thinking to "the influence of the sciences of observation," Pater makes the point clearly,

“You Heard Her, You Ain’t Blind”: Seeing What’s Said in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract: In "The Trope of a New Negro," Henry Louis Gates traces the connection between the brutality of the Jim Crow era and the proliferation of racist images. "Everywhere a white American saw a black image," Gates points out, "that image would be negative" (150). The sheer proliferation of racist images-from toaster and teapot covers, to magazine advertisements, to popular postcards and posters-provoked by way of response a large number of images of racial uplift. "Black Americans sought to re-present their public selves in order to reconstruct their public, reproducible images" (129), Gates suggests, because black writers were acutely aware that "to manipulate the image of the black was, in a sense, to manipulate reality" (137).1 Such manipulation was as much about linguistic images as visual ones, for black writers drew "a correlation between the specific characteristics of the individuals depicted [in positive images] and the larger character of the race" (143). But instead of exploring the complex dynamic between metaphorical and metonymic likenesses suggested by this correlation, Gates chooses to privilege "the precise structure of the black voice by which the very face of the race would be known and fundamentally reconstructed" (143). Blackness becomes a matter of sound rather than sight, a discursive reconstruction of an all-too-visible image. Gates' preference for voice over vision is in keeping with both his own critical trajectory-he is best known of course for his championing of the black oral tradition in The Signifying Monkey-and African-American literary history.2 As Diana Fuss has argued in Essentially Speaking, the work of many otherwise antiessentialist African-American critics has been motivated by a powerful dream of the vernacular, a dream that, because the vernacular has already been lost, "operates as a phantasm, a hallucination of lost origins.... The key to blackness is not visual but auditory; essentialism is displaced from sight to sound" (90). This tendency to privilege voice over vision has been particularly acute in the case of