Courtship and the English Novel

Feminist Readings in the Fiction of George Meredith

Janet Horowitz Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138671683
• eBook ISBN: 9781317206132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1987, these essays deal with the three major novels of George Meredith. It explores in particular Meredith's feminism and demonstrates how each novel embodies his very modern views of the relations between the sexes.

This book will be of interest to those studying 19th Century literature and feminism.

Chapter I
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A Novel with a Hero

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And since the first novel is always apt to be an un-guarded one, where the author displays his gifts without knowing how to dispose of them to the best advantage, we may do well to open Richard Feverel first. It needs no great sagacity to see that the writer is a novice at his task. The style is extremely uneven. Now he twists himself into iron knots; now he lies flat as a pancake. He seems to be of two minds as to his intention. Ironic comment alternates with long-winded narrative. He vacillates from one attitude to another. Indeed, the whole fabric seems to rock a little insecurely. The baronet wrapped in a cloak; the county family; the ancestral home; the uncles mouthing epigrams in the diningroom; the great ladies flaunting and swimming; the jolly farmers slapping their thighs: all liberally if spasmodically sprinkled with dried aphorisms from a pepper-pot called the Pilgrim's Scrip--what an odd conglomeration it is: But the oddity is not on the surface; it is not merely that whiskers and bonnets have gone out of fashion: it lies deeper, in Meredith's intention, in what he wishes to bring to pass. He has been, it is plain, at great pains to destroy the conventional form of the novel. He makes no attempt to preserve the sober reality of Trollope and Jane Austen; he has destroyed all the usual staircases by which we have learnt to climb. And what is done so deliberately is done with a purpose. The defiance of the ordinary, these airs and graces, the formality of the dialogue with its Sirs and Madams are all there to create an atmosphere that is unlike that of daily life, to prepare the way for a new and original sense of the human scene.¹

As an experimental novelist herself, Virginia Woolf is alert to the significance of Meredith's notorious oddities. His style is indeed difficult and idiosyncratic, but his vacillations represent his difficulty in coming into a new relation to his material. He keeps trying on different styles and discarding them midsentence. And the form of his novels and particularly of his first novel is even more puzzling and disorienting than the style. He "has destroyed all the usual staircases by which we have learnt to climb." He is actually out to "destroy the conventional form of the novel." And why? Because he is anxious to "prepare the way for a new and original sense of the human scene." Woolf refers to Meredith's "defiance of the ordinary," but it is really his defiance of the novelistic which she is talking about. He is indeed out to smash the old stairways that lead to the reality of other English novelists, but are ill-suited to convey his own imaginative vision of the world.

The most obvious departure for the first readers of the novel, in 1859. was the seduction of Richard by the courtesan Bella Mount. This attempt at opening up the Victorian novel to Victorian sexuality was met by the banning of the novel from Mudie's Circulating Library, ensuring its commercial failure. The other major innovation--the unexpected tragic ending of what looks like a romance or a comedy until the final chapters--remains puzzling and disturbing.² It is hard to know how to take it. In Victorian novels we can accept a sentimental catastrophe like the death of little Paul Dombey, cr an effective ironic shock like the death of George Osborne: but Lucy's death at the very end of this novel is distressing and shocking in ways not so easily reconciled by any immediately available sense of literary closure. That is, it doesn't look like anything we've seen anywhere else, and even in context it seems unprepared for and gratuitously painful. Meredith seems to be breaking up his own patterns, disorienting the reader even on the very last page where we expect a resolution, not a blow.

Like many novelists, notably Fielding and Austen, who are both invoked in Richard Feverel.³ Meredith is beginning his career by reacting against other novels. Shamela and Northanger Abbey were parodies which allowed their writers to go forward past the accepted premises of fiction which they were violently rejecting. In Richard Feverel Meredith is making a similar effort. Just as Jane Austen had to exercise the soppiness of the Gothic heroine and the unreality of the Gothic world in order to clear the way tor her own vision, so Meredith had to confront and break apart the accepted courtship patterns of English fiction and the accepted virtues and vices of English heroes and heroines, and most of all the sentimentality of the Victorian novel in order to clear a space tor his own reality. In reading Meredith's fiction, then, and especially his first novel, we must be prepared to be jarred, unsettled, disturbed, and puzzled. He has set out to "destroy the conventional form of the novel" becuase he wants to shake his readers out of the comfortable assumptions those forms confirm; he offers instead new patterns, new ways of construing our experience. And we must be willing to feel rather lost in order to make ourselves available tor Meredith's "new and original sense of the human scene."

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It is useful to begin a discussion of such a disorienting novel by ordering its complicated action into the three discreet sections which I think are quite obviously the units in which it was conceived.

In 1858 Meredith's wite, Mary Peacock Nicoll Meredith, deserted him and their five-year-old son, and eloped with her lover to Italy. The following year The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was published. It tells the story of Sir Austin Feverel who is similarly deserted by another Mary and left with an infant son, Richard.⁴ When his wife leaves him Sir Austin writes a book of aphorisms, "The Pilgrim's Scrip," on the eternal treachery of Eve, and he formulates a scientific "System" to prepare his son to meet her temptation, which he thinks of as the family Ordeal. The novel describes the failure of Sir Austin's System, beginning with Richard's fourteenth birthday when he gets into his first big scrape and ending approximately on his twenty-first birthday when he is left like his father with an infant son to raise alone.

Richard runs away from his fourteenth birtday celebration rather than strip for a medical examination. He quixotically tramps across the countryside looking for adventure with his new Sancho Panza comrade, Ripton, and runs into Farmer Blaize who whips the boys for poaching. Because the delicately reared Richard cannot bear the indignity of the whipping, he hires Tom Bakewell, a plowboy, to burn the farmer's rick in retaliation. A series of juvenile plots and adult counter-plots eventually lead to Richard's confession and repentance. This first section of the novel is referred to by the narrator as The Bakewell Comedy.

In the second section of the novel the "Son of a System" reaches adolescence, and falls in love with Farmer Blaize's niece Lucy, while Sir Austin is off in London scientifically seeking a mate for the boy. The lovers are discovered and separated, and Richard falls into total apathy. In an effort to restore the boy's spirits the Baronet sends him up to London where he accidentally finds Lucy, and, in a burst of impetuous love and defiance, convinces her to elope. The couple are secretly married and go to the Isle of Wight for their honeymoon.

With the marriage, Richard has crossed his "Rubicon" into adulthood and the rest of the novel is increasingly serious and ominous. Sir Austin is so hurt by his beloved son's disobedience and by the apparent failure of the System that he refuses to be reconciled. But Lucy is informed by Richard's cynical young cousin and tutor Adrian that Sir Austin would probably agree to see Richard alone. In compassion for her husband, Lucy pretends that she is afraid to meet Sir Austin and convinces Richard to go alone to London, where Adrian, under instructions from Sir Austin, takes him into "every sort of company." The Baronet remains sulking on a mountaintop in Wales pretending to have a plan and waiting for time to heal his resentment.

The results are catastrophic. Richard's ignorance of women leaves him an easy prey to Bella Mount who allows him to think he is reforming her. His seduction sends him into such a pit of self-hatred that when Sir Austin does arrive in London finally offering to reunite him with his wife, Richard no longer feels worthy of her. Furthermore, while he is fighting with his love and his shame, Richard is called to the deathbed of his adoring cousin Clare. She leaves a diary detailing her girlish love for him and her agony at his scorn of her loveless arranged marriage. Richard feels responsible for her death and byronically exiles himself from England in self-hatred and shame. Lucy, left alone on the Isle of Wight, has a son unknown to her husband and unrecognized by Sir Austin.

At this point in the action Richard's responsible and selfless cousin Austin Wentworth returns to England after a long absence. He takes Lucy and the child to Sir Austin immediately, knowing that the Baronet will receive them if his pride is spared the pain of inviting them himself. Went-worth then searches out Richard and tells him he is a father. A Rhineland forest storm awakens in Richard a religious awe of his abandoned wife and child and leaves him purified and ready to return to love and duty in England.

All seems well. Richard is returning. Sir Austin and Lucy await him together at Raynham. Then Richard stops at his London hotel and finds an old letter from Bella telling him of a plot against his wife on the part of Bella's old paramour Lord Mountfalcon. He feels compelled to challenge the dissolute lord to a duel. The duel is arranged for the next day. Richard goes home for only an hour, tortured by the necessity to leave his wife and child again. He leaves Lucy near distraction with fear, and embarks for France and the duel.

The last chapter is a letter describing Lucy's death of brain fever in France. She has broken under the final strain of being near her wounded husband but forbidden to see or speak to him for fear of worsening his condition. It drives her mad and ultimately kills her. Richard recovers from his wound a completely shattered man without the wife who had been the real center of his life. The loving Lady Blandish laments that "he will never be what he promised." The Hope of Raynham has fallen victim to the Feverel Ordeal.

Richard is one of the first children in fiction to grow logically before our eyes, filling out a skeletal character apparent in his boyhood. The quixotic mistakes which are comic in the boy and endearingly romantic in the adolescent are disastrously irresponsible in the adult. The pride and energy which lead him to arson and elopement lead as well to the three abortive heroic actions of the final section: the attempt to prevent Clare's marriage which ends in her death; the campaign in aid of fallen women which ends in Richard's seduction; and finally the duel to defend his and Lucy's honor which destroys them both. A careful reading of the novel reveals the deliberateness with which the seeds of the disaster are made apparent in the playful antics of the young man.

The first fourteen chapters of the novel quite deliberately I think bring the boy just past his fourteenth birthday. Chapters I-IV introduce us to Sir Austin, his misogyny, and his System, and so serve as a prologue to the novel as a whole and to the Bakewell Comedy section.⁵ The present action of the novel begins in Chapter V which is entitled "Showing How the Fates Selected the Fourteenth Birthday to Try the Strength of the System." The test of the System is presented as a comedy of English boyhood and in fact, as we shall see, owes a great deal to Tom Jones.

The second section of fourteen chapters is the part of the novel most vividly and affectionately remembered by many readers for the lyric romanticism with which the courtship of Richard and Lucy is described. Chapters XV and XVI serve as prologue to this section, rapidly summarizing four years of Richard's life, bringing him to adolescence and establishing Sir Austin's responsibility for Richard's romantic fever, since it is Sir Austin's flirtation with Lady Blandish which precipitates Richard's romance with Lucy. The second section or the novel ends with another birthday rebellion, now at age nineteen. Richard attempts to find Lucy on a stormy night and succeeds only in making himself ill. His recuperation furthers the romance of Sir Austin and Lady Blandish, which provokes at the very center of the novel the key epigram: "sentimentalists are they who seek to enjoy Reality without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done."

Chapter XXIX begins the "New Comedy" as Meredith calls this part of the action, reflecting the fact that the elopement is successor to the old Bakewell Comedy. The tag also puns on the Hellenistic "New Comedy" which presented a pair of young lovers circumventing the opposition of an old father. Immediately after the marriage comedy, in Chapter XXXV, the "creditor" appears in the form of cousin Adrian who will announce the "thing done" to the world. The rest of the novel is concerned with the debtorship incurred by the System and by the marriage. Sir Austin and Richard are both called to account and must face up to the consequences of their sentimental actions.

Tragedy becomes a possibility because Richard is no longer a child. He has undertaken an adult's responsibilities by marrying, and he has come upon adult problems which his father is no longer willing to providentially bail him out of. Through Bella and Clare he gains carnal knowledge and the knowledge of death, so that when he is faced with the final ordeal of choice presented by Bella's letter, he is no longer an ignorant child but a morally responsible adult, capable of tragic error with irrevocable consequences.⁶ The changes from comedy to romance to tragedy in the separate sections of the novel are not a wavering of artistic intention, then, but a daring attempt to represent the organic progression of Richard's life from childhood through adolescence and into an adulthood for which he is ill-prepared. Meredith is attempting to write comedy and romance with the moral force of tragedy, and though that force may not be immediately apparent to his readers he is certainly hoping to move us to a recognition of the seriousness of gestures we view sentimentally as merely funny or romantic. The novel is designed, then, to jar us by the fruits of Richard's boyhood and adolescence and so make us reexamine our original conventional reactions.

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About half way through the novel Meredith pulls himself up short in the midst of describing the hero's departure from his cloistered estate and confronts himself with the fact that he probably has no audience for what he is trying to say. The passage clearly comes out of the self-consciousness which Virginia Woolf shrewdly associates with the beginning novelist, although it speaks to all of Meredith's fiction. Characteristically enough, the tone changes from simple irony directed as Sir Austin watching Richard board the train for London to a genuine plea for a new audience for a new sort of fiction.

Now surely there will come an Age when the presentation of Science at war with Fortune and the Fates will be deemed the true Epic of modern life; and the asp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Courtship and the English Novel
• Chapter I: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A Novel with a Hero
• Chapter II: The Egoist and the New Woman
• Chapter III: Diana of the Crossways: The Heroine of Reality
• Bibliography