Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2005"

Reading Ahead in George Eliot

Abstract: just what I desire to produce gentle thoughts and happy remembrances" (Haight, Selections 204). Carlyle had written of how she "could fancy in reading it, to be seeing and hearing once again a crystal-clear, musical, Scotch stream, such as I long to lie down beside" (Haight, Letters 17). It seems surprising that Carlyle reports having a mental picture which is nowhere present in the book. But that a book might prompt its reader to a peaceful reverie of her own is modeled within the novel itself. In one moment late in the novel, Seth Bede sits with a volume in hand, "Wesley's abridgement of Madam Guyon's life," similarly thinking of something else: he appears with his "blue dreamy eyes, as often as not looking vaguely out of the window instead of at his book." "'[T]h' lad,'" Adam says of his brother, '"liked to sit full o' thoughts he could give no account of; they'd never come t' anything, but they made him happy'" (531). Putting the book aside in favor of private "thoughts and ... remembrances" appears, paradoxically, to have been "the sort of effect" Eliot sought. But imagination could not simply be counted on to conjure "gentle thoughts and happy remembrances." Eliot often discovered her readers daydreaming in ways she found discouraging. For over the course of her career, Eliot found that many of her readers were busily engaged in an imagining of their own direction and one little like Jane Carlyle' s "remembrances." Reading several of Eliot's novels in serial form, readers often guessed what the next installment would contain and guessed wrong. Over the many months during which Romola or Middlemarch first appeared, a complex relation developed between the author and her forecasting audience which became an increasing anxiety for the novelist. As Blackwood recorded of her remark about her last novel, Daniel Deronda, "It was hard upon her that people should be angry with her for not doing what they expected with her characters" (qtd. in Martin 235). Eliot's recognition that she could not control the wayward imaginings of readers was compatible with the growing recognition in the period that the imagination was not easily controllable. In the mid-nineteenth century, Victorian psychologistsamong whom Eliot's partner, George Henry Lewes, was a central figure were beginning to theorize the unconscious workings of the imagination, which appeared particularly immune to rational control or coaxing. While Eliot modeled in Adam Bede the kind of daydreaming she thought was compatible with novel reading (as Seth Bede's reverie echoes the benign daydreams of Carlyle), so she also modeled a kind of daydreaming that she scorned as wholly incompatible with novel reading (e.g. Hetty Sorrel). Eliot thus enlists her fiction in an effort to sway her readers' minds towards "gentle" thoughts, and away from Hettyesque wishfulfillment.

Hardy’s Transatlantic Wessex: Constructing the Local in The Mayor of Casterbridge

Abstract: Theories of globalization have lately been accompanied by the admonition that we have always been global, that transcultural exchange is older than the nation, and that flows of bodies and commodities are not exclusive to postmodernity. At the same time, there has been renewed attention to globalism's theoretical counterpart, the concept of the local. This attention to the local and the global has helped to energize the emergence of Atlantic studies, a "new yet well-seasoned paradigm" which presents the Atlantic and its borderlands as a single region bound by common histories of exploration and exchange (Boelhower 28). Atlantic studies is poised to mediate between the concepts of the local and the global by offering an alternate frame, apart from that of the nation, through which to consider them. In literary studies, the Atlantic paradigm has been strikingly popularized by Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993), a work whose explanatory power rests largely on the importance of the Atlantic slave trade to later instances of cultural transmission.1

Bookcases, Slipcases, Uncut Leaves: The Anxiety of the Gentleman’s Library

Abstract: As the age of Victoria drew to its close, the gentleman's private library became an increasingly fraught topos in British and American literature and culture. For while writers like Matthew Arnold had fought to maintain a privileged place for literature within a culture whose reading habits had suddenly become far more "practical," many Victorians quickly began to fetishize not literature per se but the physical book itself not the contents but the container. It is by now commonplace to say that in essays like "The Study of Poetry" Arnold makes fetish objects out of short snatches of verse; a methodology like his use of poetic "touchstones" makes it possible to conceive of the literary field as coming in small denominations, the "loose change" of literary capital. On a small scale, this kind of approach results logically in the literary anthology, a compendium or short-cut to culture; on the larger scale, this logic gives us the gentleman's library, stuffed with books with their pages uncut on show quite explicitly, everything in its right place. For there was a palpable nervousness about the Victorians' relation to their books and thoughtful men and women of the time could sense it. In an 1859 essay in Fraser 's Magazine, an anonymous commentator writes about what he calls "furniture books" not books about furniture or the construction of furni-

A Nation Without Nationalism: The Reorganization of Feeling in Austen’s Persuasion

Abstract: For many recent critics, Jane Austen's Persuasion demonstrates the novel's role in the rise of British nationalism. In Anne Mellor's account, Persuasion makes Austen a "mother of the nation"; Miranda Burgess calls Persuasion a "national romance" (154). That Austen addresses the nation in Persuasion seems no longer in doubt, but readings of the novel in the context of the nation nevertheless face one difficulty: why does Austen refer to the nation only once, and why does Anne Elliot widely considered Austen's most deeply feeling and deeply felt character express no sentiments about the nation itself?1 Part of the reason that Persuasion appears to many critics to meditate on nation is that it portrays the British navy so admirably at a time when the navy's victories against Napoleon were a source of nationalist pride. In praising the naval officers' manliness, courage, and willingness to sacrifice, Austen certainly participates in this postNapoleonic fervor.2 But the novel contributes to the contemporary hero-worship of the navy without reflecting the nationalist sentiments the navy inspired. In fact, thinking about the role of the navy in Persuasion leads to a surprising vision of nation that foregrounds government bureaucracies and agencies. In Persuasion, Austen raises the question of nation as an epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical problem: how do we know we are part of a nation? How do we feel our nationality? And what purchase do the citizens of a nation have on each other? Austen argues that it is in fact impossible for any person to imagine the nation. Instead, she suggests, administrative agencies such as the British navy define individuals' obligations to the nation as a whole and the people within it. Such a model is surprising because it removes content from the nation: nationality does not designate a shared history or culture, and does not arise from among the people, but is imposed on them through government agencies. In making administrative agencies the crux of national identity, Austen emphasizes a factor that hac been largely overlooked in recent accounts of national identity. During the Napoleonic wars the British government expanded the role of bureaucratic agencies both at home and abroad. The war with France and the growth of the East India Company placed more men in service. A growing population and increasing urban densities required expanding the judicial system, the

“The Glorious Lust of Doing Good”: Tom Jones and the Virtues of Sexuality

Abstract: The question of Henry Fielding's relation to sentimentalism is not merely a local matter of literary-historical fine-tuning. As this essay argues, it directs us to other, seemingly broader or more ambitious, concerns: including, within literary studies, the ongoing critiques and revisions of Ian Watt's work on the "rise of the novel," and within gender and sexuality studies, the numerous and varied theoretical engagements with the Foucauldian history of sexuality. But in order to approach Fielding's sentimentalism, we must first clear some critical ground. Accordingly, I open with a consideration of how critics have conventionally negotiated the question of Fielding's sentimentalism. This negotiation, when it surfaces in a discussion of Fielding, is instructively ambivalent that is, both the fact and the quality of this ambivalence will merit our attention. The longstanding hesitation in bringing out Fielding's sentimentalism reveals at least two things: first, a view into how sentimentalism bears on the history of sexuality, and second, a view into how the story of the "rise of the novel" embeds, within the novel form itself, an understanding of sentimentalism as a permanently suspect category. These two conceptual plots, I suggest, reflect and reinforce one another. I turn then to a reading of Tom Jones, in which I consider how Fielding's sentimentalism engages him in both the literary and the socio-political concerns of his time. Specifically, through the concept of "good nature," Fielding presses the question of whether and if so, how male sexual lust can be socially rehabilitated and legitimated, perhaps even vindicated. As I argue, the celebrated architecture of Fielding's novel not only accommodates the seemingly unruly forces of lust, but also rearticulates this passion as constitutive of moral feeling and social order. Tom Jones represents male heterosexual passion as a source, perhaps the source, of moral judgment and ethical conduct, for in its pages, it is sexual passion that infuses law with spirit and duty with blood.

Anachronism and the Uses of Form in Joseph Andrews

Abstract: Not the Great Rich, who turns Men into Monkeys, Wheelbarrows, and whatever best humours his Fancy, hath so strangely metamorphosed the human Shape; nor the Great Cibber, who confounds all Number, Gender and breaks through every Rule of Grammar at his Will, hath so distorted the English Language, as thou [love] dost metamorphose and distort the human Senses ... thou can'st make a Mole-hill appear as a Mountain-, a ]eWs-Harp sound like a Trumpet; and a Dazy smell like a Violet.... In short, thou turnest the Heart of Man inside-out, as a Juggler doth a Petticoat, and bringest whatsoever pleaseth thee out from it. (1.7.31-32)

Jane Austen and the Gentrification of Commerce

Abstract: In the fifth chapter of Persuasion (1817), Jane Austen's narrator describes the desolation of her heroine Anne Elliot as Anne contemplates her impending departure from her family's ancestral home in the Somersetshire countryside. The move, to smaller rented quarters in the city of Bath, is a sad one. In language that has come to haunt criticism of the novel, the narrator observes: "Anne, though dreading the possible heats of September in all the white glare of Bath, and grieving to forego all the influence so sweet and so sad of the autumnal months in the country, did not think that, every thing considered, she wished to remain" (23). The heroine's mood is as mercurial as it is doleful in the span of a sentence moving between dread, regret and resignation. Yet what has always struck critics is the way the Somersetshire scenery seems to function here, and elsewhere, as a kind of objective correlative for not only Anne's but also Austen's mood. "Autumnal" is the word used to describe Persuasion, the last novel Austen completed before her death and the work that critics often call her most personal. There is no need to rehearse the reasons why this critical commonplace, linking Anne's autumn with Austen's, is "teeming with fallacies" a judgment Claudia Johnson rendered some time ago.1 Rather, the question that must be asked is: what does the perceived autumnal mood of the novel have to do with its supposed critique of aristocratic authority? The question asks us to consider the relationship between the novel's political and personal dimensions, and it also requires that we negotiate a more complex politics than is often assumed. For once one looks into it, the regret Anne expresses appears to be related to the heroine's sense of degradation in her family's social position, a feeling of injured pride articulated the moment Anne crosses the threshold of the apartment in Bath. Though she acknowledges that her new home "was undoubtedly the best in Camden-place," she "sigh[s]" that "her father should feel no degradation in his change; should see nothing to regret in the duties and dignity of the resident land-holder" (90-91). Such sentiments are commonly expressed in Austen's fiction, but what is their role in a novel whose other distinguishing feature is its attack on aristocratic prerogative? Most attempts at historicizing Persuasion focus on the novel's exaltation of Captain Wentworth, a naval officer and "man of sense" whose "worth" trumps the claims of lineage (167). The novel's hero has even acquired what we might call meta-heroic status within Austen criticism. A typical commentator singles out Wentworth as "the only Jane Austen hero who lifts a finger to better his

Disenchanting China: Orientalism and the Aesthetics of Reason in the English Novel

Abstract: In The Rambler 4 (March 31, 1750), Samuel Johnson prescribes a distinctly modern form of English prose fiction he calls "the new realistic novel." Modern readers, Johnson argues, are no longer enthralled by the magical objects and fantastical plots of heroic romance; as this older form of storytelling loses its power to persuade, a new kind of narrative claims to satisfy the reader's need for more rational fare by "bringing] about natural events by easy means, and . . . keep[ing] up curiosity without the help of wonder" (175). Rambler 4 thus plots English fiction's entrance into the modern world Max Weber identified as a state of