The title of Goethe's epic Hermann und Dorothea indicates that the story concerns two main characters or protagonists. The bulk of scholarship on Hermann und Dorothea has been concerned "with determining the meanings of these two characters, what each "stands for" as encodings of two socio-political alternatives and milieu. Though Hermann's name evokes the militant defender of Germania against the imperial oppressors, the Hermann *who defeated the Roman general Varus in the battle of Teutoburger Forest in 9 a.D. (the Prince of the Cherusker is represented as the protagonist of Kleist's Hermannsschlacht), he comes across in Goethe's characterization as rather the immature, mild-mannered provincial bourgeois son. Dorothea, on the other hand, whose function "within the character-system is quite complex, as we will see, displays a heroic temperament and worldliness linked to her experience as a refugee of the French Revolution, which undergo a process of domesticization over the course of the narrative. Goethe's epic tells the story of their marriage, and likewise suggests a commentary on two political options of the time and their potential resolution. In a letter to Herzogin Louise, Goethe describes his epic poem as the representation of the two main "dispositions" separating the contemporary "world: "Das Ganze schien mir zu fordern das die zwei Gesinnungen in die sich jetzt beinahe die ganze Welt teilt neben einander und zwar auf die Weise "wie es geschehen ist dargestellt "wurden" (13 June 1797). 1ThCSe two political "attitudes," however, can be said to describe a fissure "within late eighteenth-century bourgeois ideology, two character traits, if you will, of a conflicted enlightenment humanism. Goethe's text doesn't present a simple political situation in which progressive enlightenment representative democracy confronts a reactionary provincial nationalism. Neither side is correct, for the truth lies in the fact of their mutual struggle "within political life.2 Stated differently, we might say that the fissure inhabits the space between the general claims to humanism of the "world citizen ("Weltburger") of the French Revolution and the particularity of the provincial German townsperson ("Burger").3 The presentation of these two "attitudes" in political life in the immediate wake of the French Revolution is framed "within the setting of an idyll and figured as a symbol in Goethe's sense of the term.4 The idyllic framework provides perhaps the most central trope - namely, the "well - that helps figure the process of narrative characterization as both a political symbol and agent of narrative structure. In Canto VII, titled "Dorothea," Hermann encounters Dorothea at a "well outside the village. He says to her, "Freilich ist dies von besonderer Kraft und lieblich zu kosten. /Jener Kranken bringst du es wohl, die du treulich gerettet?," emphasizing Dorothea's beneficence (7:20-21). The two sit beside one another while Dorothea explains to him that she has come to fetch "water from this well because the refugees have dirtied the "water in the village by selfishly letting their animals or themselves wash anywhere in them, "Denn ein jeglicher denkt nur, sich selbst und das nachste Bedurfnis/ Schnell zu berried' gen und rasch, und nicht des Folgenden denkt er" (73536). The interaction of Hermann and Dorothea, as it is figured through their mutual recognition of one another's reflection in the "well as they fetch "water for the other refugees, contrasts "with the egocentric behavior of each of those individual refugees, "in such a hurry to deal "with his own needs": Also sprach sie und "war die breiten Stufen hinunter Mit dem Begleiter gelangt; und auf das Mauerchen setzten Beide sich nieder des Quells. Sie beugte sich uber, zu schopfen; Und er faste den anderen Krug und beugte sich uber. Und sie sahen gespiegelt ihr Bild in der Blaue des Himmels Schwanken und nickten sich zu und grusten sich freundlich im Spiegel. …

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Epic World Citizenship in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea

Benjamin Franklin says little about his mother, Abiah, in the Autobiography , and critics have ignored her presence, presumably with the view that his reticence should be the model for our own. This essay situates Franklin's reticence in relation to the ideology of mothering and the egalitarian family to emphasize the contrast between competition and equal distribution. Whereas recent recuperations of Franklin's infrastructure-building and civil-society projects have emphasized only the brightest facet of a social order we still inhabit, Franklin's mother reminds us of the chasm between Franklinian success and the social cost of the competition on which it is based.

The Self-Made Son: Social Competition and the Vanishing Mother in Franklin's Autobiography

One of the peculiar challenges facing scholars who wish to write about Thackeray's fiction is locating a dominant critical account to argue against. The MLA Bibliography contains a great number of examples of scrupulously argued, compelling research into Thackeray's body of writing, but few if any of them have reached any kind of canonical status as the (or even one of the) interpretive accounts that define how critics understand his fiction. It can seem, for example, that Thackeray is either consciously or unconsciously evaded by many scholars seeking to develop overarching, defining accounts of the nineteenth-century novel. In two works that helped set the terms for decades of critical conversation about nineteenth-century literature – Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) and The Novel and the Police (1988) – Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller each give at most a passing mention to Thackeray (he shows up four times in Armstong's book; never in Miller's). In their equally influential bodies of criticism, Mary Poovey and Catherine Gallagher provide no sustained – or even fragmentary – treatment of Thackeray's work. Moving into the twenty-first century, one would look in vain for a chapter on Thackeray in Amanda Anderson's The Powers of Distance (2001), Sharon Marcus's Between Women, and Alex Woloch's The One vs the Many (2003) – books that have provided us with key terms, issues, and methods to do our work. (To readers of this journal, it might be not necessary to say the following: Thackeray's fiction includes many illustrations of the phenomena discussed by these works – cosmopolitanism, female-female friendship, and minor characters – so his absence cannot be explained solely on this basis.) And to move backwards from the 1980s, Steven Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, and Raymond Williams produced pioneering analyses of the links between history, ideology, and Victorian literature, but Thackeray's writing played almost no part in their elaboration of those links, with Hillis Miller focusing on Thackeray only in one short essay and one book chapter among his large body of scholarship and Williams omitting him altogether from The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970).

Forgetting thackeray and unmaking careers

Dirty Bodies: Filth and Marginal Characters in Asian American Literature

This article argues that George Eliot’s Romola theorizes large-scale sympathy as a way of ethically engaging large groups of individuals outside one’s immediate social ambit. Yet the failed attempts of characters like Savonarola and Tito to imagine the experiences of unknown others suggests that large-scale sympathy estranges the sympathizing subject from the specificity of individual experience. This leads us to see a fault line at the heart of George Eliot’s work, whereby the necessity of imagining the simultaneous experience of others is continually brought into conflict with the impossibility—and the danger—of doing so.

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The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

Epic World Citizenship in Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea

The Self-Made Son: Social Competition and the Vanishing Mother in Franklin's Autobiography

Forgetting thackeray and unmaking careers

Dirty Bodies: Filth and Marginal Characters in Asian American Literature

Large-Scale Sympathy and Simultaneity in George Eliot's Romola

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