The English Novel In History 1840-1895

Elizabeth Ermarth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780367238933
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134980246
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

The construction of history as a social common denominator is a powerful achievement of the nineteenth-century novel, a form dedicated to experimenting with democratic social practice as it conflicts with economic and feudal visions of social order. Through revisionary readings of familiar nineteenth-century texts The English Novel in History 1840-1895 takes a multidisciplinary approach to literary history. It highlights how narrative shifts from one construction of time to another and reformulates fundamental ideas of identity, nature and society.
Elizabeth Ermarth discusses the range of novels alongside other cultural material, including painting, science, religious, political and economic theory. She explores the problems of how a society, as defined in democratic terms, can accommodate political, gender and class differences without resorting to hierarchy; and how narrowly conceived economic agendas compete with social cohesion.
Students, advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and specialists will find this text invaluable.

1
NARRATIVE AND NATURE

PROLOGUE: A PATTERN AND A PURPOSE

Detective stories represent in a most familiar manner a narrative code characteristic of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, detective narratives re-inscribe over and over again, in books or other media, a post-Enlightenment faith in rationality and, more to the point, in the naturalness of reason. A character in Graham Greene’s novel, The Honorary Consul, explains the ritual value of such narratives of disclosure:

There is a sort of comfort in reading a story where one knows what the end will be. The story of a dream world where justice is always done. There were no detective stories in the age of faith–an interesting point when you think of it. God used to be the only detective when people believed in Him. He was law. He was order. He was good. Like your Sherlock Holmes. It was He who pursued the wicked man for punishment and discovered all.

(Greene, 1974: 238)

Unlike bitterly ironic versions in le Carré-style detective plots which depend on deconstructing this faith, the garden variety detective stories still reassure us; their soporific value lies in their assertion that it is natural for human measures to work. Mystery and contradiction are only apparent. No matter how egregious the crime, no matter how gratuitous the act, Sherlock Holmes can always discover the secrets that explain what seemed opaque, and can explain it to his doubting interlocutor, Dr Watson–a figure reminiscent of the hapless Socratic interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues. Where Watson is likely to complain that something makes ‘no sense’, Holmes always understands that absolutely everything has meaning: that ‘there’s a pattern and a purpose in it’. Holmes’s enduring popularity rests on his affirmation of this truth. The narrativealways reveals an ‘elementary’ causality; it always illuminates Watson’s disbelief. What such narratives codify is faith in a rationality with almost infinite extension. The narrative code enshrined in these stories is one where ignorance and unbelief can be illuminated by unknown facts discovered and secrets revealed. It is a code evident in almost all Victorian novels, perhaps in all plotted novels of suspense, from the superlative achievements of Charles Dickens and George Eliot to the lesser ones of Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle.

The narrative code that features the unearthing of secrets plays on those ambiguities between social and natural order that so rivets the attention of nineteenth–century readers. If a civil law is broken, Holmes repairs the rift in social function by discovering the secret, establishing causality, and isolating the individual agent responsible. But what is the relation between civil law and that wider, but still-rational, arena that is governed by laws of other kinds, laws that have to do with everything from chemical reactions to human nature? Does social law depend upon the same rational system that produces natural law? The ‘solution’ of a crime, like the resolution of dissonance in harmonic music, reaffirms the existence of a single system of explanation and interpretation.

Here the detective story, and all the plots based on it, verges on very deep waters. Its faith in rationality is as deep, as abstract and as old as the Greek principle of non-contradiction. What is at stake in any particular case is nothing less than faith in ‘natural’ powers of intuition and reason. These powers, while obviously cultivated in the case of Sherlock Holmes, still seem somehow outside of and even prior to sociality: a kind of natural talent that, potentially, can be shared, even by a Dr Watson. This peculiar symbiosis between human rationality and total rationality has been described by Michel Foucault, as well as by Graham Greene’s character, as a religious, not a logical move.

But such soporific narratives contain a potentially fatal ambiguity about the relation between nature and history. Does human rationality discover Reason, or put it there? Is it individual human reason that gives the world its meanings? Or is that rational order already there to be discovered and assimilated, a thing to which humans aspire? As consumers of narrative, do we seek particular causes, or Cause itself?

Such systemic ambiguities figure importantly in nineteenth-century narratives, although generally they become explicit only after 1850. Something happens to narrative in the middle of the nineteenth century, something favourable to the historical aesthetic in which the detective code makes sense, and unfavourable to the kind of providential explanation that operates so prominently in novels before mid-century.

What is most important in this chapter is a shift in the very construction of nature and in the differing narrative codes at stake in that shift. Before mid-century, ‘nature’ generally appears in novels as something hospitable to human aspiration. Fifty years later, nature generally appears in narrative, to the extent it appears at all, as something inhospitable to human meaning. In short, Victorian novels move from one to the other of the two constructions of nature that Thomas Carlyle announces in Sartor Resartus: one a nature that is the ‘living garment of God’, and the other, a nature that is, morally speaking, a ‘dead mechanism’. In early Victorian narrative these two visions provide fruitful ambiguity, providing ostensibly historical and social narrative sequences with rhetorical burdens. Around mid-century, as the historical aesthetic gains an almost sudden ascendancy over the providential, mid-century novelists experiment with an entirely social, secular construction of human possibility. Great moralists like Charlotte Brontë or William Thackeray seek justification in nature, while George Eliot or Anthony Trollope refer all questions of moral agency and social justice to entirely socialized human action. Towards the end of the century, these ambiguities between natural and social explanation resurface in Thomas Hardy to serve an essentially tragic vision of nature. The mid-century social novel thus marks a shift from the one construction of nature to the other, and a reformulation of narrative code.

NARRATIVE WITH CLOUDS OF GLORY

Before 1850, Nature with a capital ‘N’ appears in narrative as a divinely formed setting for human affairs. Nature remains essentially anthropocentric, even three centuries after Copernicus (1473–1543) refocused cosmology away from earthly affairs. Novelists of the nineteenth century inherit this morally intelligible, man-centred nature from Romanticism, from the Enlightenment, and from Renaissance humanism. Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality’, for example, quite overtly naturalizes individual identity:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

‘Intimations’ Ode, lines 60–66

The ‘soul’ (not, we note, the ‘self’) belongs to a divinely organized scheme of nature. Society figures only negatively, as a ‘prison house’ that twists and reduces natural order. A Wordsworthian suspicion about social conditioning and historical explanation permeates much of the best fiction of the 1840s. The novels of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë particularly associate social usages with corruption and the good life with ‘natural’ inspiration; but they are by no means alone. An apparently social novelist like Thackeray offers the same distanced view of society as a corrupt and limited arena in a larger moral order. These novelists employ a narrative sequence that is primarily rhetorical, not historical; time produces nothing new; only the same, same old stories.

To begin with such assumptions about social possibility means that, as Graham Greene’s character suggests, the possibilities of plot sequence are to some extent already settled. Plot involves departure from or arrival at truths that remain beyond question, truths that are ‘natural’. Such plots are often episodic and based on the journey trope: the idea that life is a road with a moral destination, a pilgrim’s progress of the kind Wordsworth’s poetry invokes and that has powerful narrative antecedents in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton’s Paradise Lost. In such narratives there are no open-ended possibilities, no alternative outcomes. The niceties of causal sequence have less importance than the re-inscription of familiar stories about the Christian pilgrim’s progress in this world, or the fall from grace. They tend to be picaresque because they put no priority on the complex causalities and open-ended possibilities characteristic of historical, social novels.

Less accomplished writers than the Brontës or Thackeray may simply imitate the narrative sequence, without doing much to activate the assumptions from which such sequences derive. Many hundreds of nineteenth-century novels, sometimes optimistically called ‘histories’, put the voice and manners of the time into this functionally conservative narrative structure. Geraldine Jewsbury’s The History of An Adopted Child (1853) rambles sentimentally through the experiences of a young girl brought up by harsh grandparents, whose absentee mother turns up and retrieves her, only to die leaving the girl to live with a friend and, eventually, to marry into a comfortable life. Defoe is behind such novels, not Walter Scott. The picaresque traditions of typological narrative inform them, not the social traditions of historical narrative (Ermarth, 1983: 3–92; Fish, 1973: 74).

Even a more accomplished novel like Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure book, Kidnapped (1886), has a similar grammar; it depends heavily on nature for its interest, although a demystified nature composedof brambles and other obstacles, and it has a similarly episodic sequence devoted to a series of adventures of an orphaned youth who is sold into high-seas slavery, escapes by shipwreck, and makes his way back to Edinburgh and his inheritance after weeks of wandering through miles of Scottish countryside and having to cope with everything from extreme thirst to outlawed Jacobins. The ‘point’ of such tales does not lie with the complex influences of social development, but instead with various social situations along a journey, however remote from a pilgrim’s progress that journey might seem to be. Development over time is not an issue in such texts, or is only a marginally important issue. The social context is a frame, not a focus.

This complicity between nature and ‘man’ generally sets apart such novels from the more sceptical social narratives of the nineteenth century, political narratives as well as literary ones. The Wordsworthian language positively relishes this anthropocentric complicity. To describe ‘the Soul’ as our ‘Life’s Star’, and to say that at birth we come from God ‘trailing clouds of glory’, certainly implicates nature in human growth. A star is like my soul, my divinely-given nature like a sunrise. The sunrise is not, to use a phrase of Conrad’s, ‘purely spectacular’; the sunrise is implicated in my progress, and in some way even guarantees the divinity of my nature. The star provides an objective correlative, perhaps even a warrant for the very existence of my soul.

Such projection of human characteristics into nature appears in scientific as well as literary narrative, and especially in the most contemporaneously influential scientific writing of the century, Darwin’s books on The Origin of Species (1859) and the Descent of Man (1871). Though Darwin is discussed most fully in Chapter Two of this book (The Idea of History), it is worth noting here how his use of narrative language projects human qualities on to nature, and even preserves conventional and even conservative constructions in that language. Descent of Man especially relies on metaphors that naturalize certain human values. For example, males compete in the battle for survival, females do not, although often in some nations ‘women are the constant cause of war’, as they are implicitly in the rest of the animal kingdom (Darwin, 1979, I: 418; II: 312–15, 323). Accumulation is a value (the female ant that accumulates more is ‘superior’ to the scale insect that does not). ‘Equality’ in numbers between the sexes does not bear essentially on fertility, but considerable time is spent discussing ‘equalizing the sexes’ (ibid., I: 315ff.). Productiveness is a value (ibid., I: 318) and even a sign of higher intelligence and moral sense in some animals as opposed to others. Implicit comparisons between animal and human ‘breeding’ thread the text (e.g. ibid., I: 274; II: 403). Byconsidering gradation in a historical horizon, Darwin employs a method with radical potential; at the same time, however, he retains some of the language and values of a religious, and essentially ahistorical discourse, including and especially the implication that nature itself admits of value classification, if not hierarchy. In such ways conventional and unacknowledged values creep into the scientific description.

Later in the century, Kipling provides a literary version of such anthropomorphic projection in Jungle Book (1894) and Second Jungle Book (1895), where animal tales are human stories masked. Kipling effects a complete colonization of nature by human language, human interests, human competitions and jealousies. This feat has its charm for children, but it extinguishes nature as anything very mysterious, or even as anything other than human. His writing takes to extremes the analogic relation between the human and the natural. To discuss social agendas through projection on to animals not only tames the animals, it universalizes the projected human agendas, which is to say, it renders them in effect ‘natural’, essential, and thus secured beyond human influence or effort. Thus colonized, Kipling’s nature universalizes the particular social and personal concerns he represents. Such an effort had obvious local interest to England as a colonial power confronting black-skinned natives half a world away.

But though Kipling presents only a particularly egregious example of anthropocentrism, neither he nor Darwin nor Wordsworth are alone in deploying the analogical technique that links nature in complicity with man. That use of metaphor has been a cultural value since the Renaissance, and belongs to humanism. The French novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet (English versions of most of his writing are shamefully unavailable in Britain), argues in his seminal essays on the novel that ‘belief in nature is the source of all humanism’ (Robbe-Grillet, 1989: 57), and that this complicity between nature and humanity is the keynote of humanist tragedy. Humanism makes man the measure of all things, not just by an arm’s length in painting (the bracchae-length measures of Quattrocento realist painting), but by the inscription of human agendas over the face of the entire universe. Darkness ‘broods’, the stars are ‘beacons’; and when humans misbehave, all nature feels the wound (Milton’s Paradise Lost, IX, lines 782–784, 1000–1001).

This analogical habit remains especially strong in novels of the first half of the nineteenth century. For example, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre the eve of Rochester and Jane’s would-be sinful marriage also is Midsummer Night’s eve; their rhapsodic hopes find expression in terms of ‘the shining stars [which] enter into their shining life up in heaven yonder’ (C. Brontë,1966: 280; ch. 23); and the horse-chestnut under which they meet is struck by lightning during the night’s storm, leaving ‘half of it split away’ (ibid.: 284–5). This is no mere accident of weather, and the split tree is more than a ‘symbol’ of the division between Jane and Rochester. This is nature’s comment on their plans; it is a moral warning.

English novels of the 1840s, especially those by the Brontës, Thackeray and the early Dickens, generally depend upon a narrative code that is rooted in a religious tradition and still naturalizes both personal and social life. Its causal explanations, even where they may use historical conventions, remain fundamentally providential in their narrative codes. This ‘providential aesthetic’ (Vargish, 1985) provides narrative codes that depend to a considerable degree upon readers who make certain religious assumptions about how nature operates. I am indebted to Thomas Vargish’s discussion of this important dimension of Victorian narrative, The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction, 1985. The providential discursive framework has immense flexibility, as its currency from Bunyan to Dickens shows; but its ‘histories’ always belong to a timeless, apocalyptic pattern where origins and ends are not in human hands. The Providential Aesthetic, then, belongs to that complex transition in mid-century between a naturalized and a secularized vision of nature.

Delightfully strange blends of the cosmic and the proto-historical appear in novels like The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), Dombey and Son (1846–48), Wuthering Heights (1847), Jane Eyre (1847), and Vanity Fair (1847–48). Depending as they do upon a tradition of religious assumptions about nature and personal life, they are novels that treat social constructs very sceptically. All minimize the ideal of development that John Stuart Mill enunciates so vigorously in his essay On Liberty (1859). At the same time, and within the constraints of providential narrative, they experiment with historical conventions in ways that focus the tensions between the natural and the social order.

NATURE KNOWS BEST: THE BRONTËS AND THACKERAY

Writers as apparently different as Emily Brontë and William Makepeace Thackeray nevertheless produce similar kinds of narratives. Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë all occupy readers with the tensions created by pursuing individual history in a natural context. While these tensions take on more laughing qualities in William Thackeray’s writing, his treatment of individual experience resembles theirs much more than it resembles that of the historical novels of the later nineteenth century. His historicaland urban settings, his verbal playfulness and intellectual wit, give his novels quite a different tonality from theirs, but not a different narrative code. This does not detract one iota from his brilliance or delightfulness, but as the section on him below makes evident, he writes, even in Henry Esmond, a different kind of narrative than the historical novels of Scott, Trollope or George Eliot. Chapter Two develops the important distinction between historical novels and novels that merely use historical material.

Each of the three Brontë sisters writes accomplished narratives in a style of her own. Anne’s two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), have a certain composure and intellectual strength that makes them seem still quite contemporary. Charlotte’s four novels, The Professor (written first and published posthumously in 1857), Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853), demonstrate an impressive range and a writing style that is practically unique in its successful combination of two quite different narrative codes. ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: NARRATIVE AND NATURE
• 2: THE IDEA OF HISTORY
• 3: SOCIETY AS AN ENTITY
• 4: DILEMMAS OF DIFFERENCE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY