scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
MonographDOI

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

09 Feb 2009-
About: The article was published on 2009-02-09. It has received 315 citations till now.
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argued that Middlemarch encourages readers to adopt the many-sided understanding of ideals championed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859) by deliberately contrasting Dorothea Brooke's ethos of sympathetic discipline with Fred Vincy's egoistic spontaneity.
Abstract: Abstract:This article argues that George Eliot's Middlemarch (1874) uses character foils to promote liberal habits of evaluation in readers. By deliberately contrasting Dorothea Brooke's ethos of sympathetic discipline with Fred Vincy's ethos of egoistic spontaneity, the novel cultivates readers' appreciation for these conflicting ethical modes. In so doing, Middlemarch invites readers to adopt the many-sided understanding of ideals championed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859).

3 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a somewhat different kind of mutiny is proposed, one that focuses on a traditionally devalued character in order to challenge the widespread practice of repeating Forster's formulas in ways that have encouraged a superficial dismissal of Dickens's methods of characterization.
Abstract: “Characters arrive when evoked,” E. M. Forster announced during the now-famous lectures that he delivered in Cambridge in 1927, “but full of the spirit of mutiny” (Aspects of the Novel 66). He was thinking about the difficulty of reconciling the lives of human beings with the construction of “people” in novels and about the challenges of maintaining an effective balance between character and other aspects of a novel. A somewhat different kind of mutiny is proposed here, one that focuses on a traditionally devalued character in order to challenge the widespread practice of repeating Forster’s formulas in ways that have encouraged a superficial dismissal of Dickens’s methods of characterization. While acknowledging the broader and decisive shift in modernist attitudes toward the representation of inner life in fiction, though without entering into full confrontation with Bloomsbury anxieties toward Victorian influences, I would like to wrest Mrs. Micawber out of the clutches of an attitude that has made it easier to iconoclastically gloss over Dickens’s art of the novel. According to E. M. Forster, the “really flat character,” for which he offered Mrs. Micawber as his paradigmatic example, can be “expressed in one sentence” that is easily remembered by the “emotional eye.” Such characters, he claimed, fail to “surprise in a convincing way” because they do not exhibit “the incalculability of life” – even if “life within the pages of a book” (6778). Prominent explicators of narrative fiction (and life) immediately took issue with Forster’s definitions,1 yet their caveats remain less popular than his categorizations along with his choice of examples. Every study of literary character must therefore acknowledge today that Forster’s categorizations are permanently entrenched in our critical discourse,2 and this extraordinary

3 citations