Literature Politics & Theory

Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, Diana Loxley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415291279
• eBook ISBN: 9781136492358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First Published in 2002. Modes and categories inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation. 'New Accents' is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. The present selection of papers, made from nearly two hundred published, represents in some measure the diversity of the work at the eight Essex Sociology of Literature Conferences.

1

Forms of English fiction in 1848

RAYMOND WILLIAMS

There are many reasons for remembering 1848, and down among them the fact that the first bookstalls were opened on the new British railway system: one might say by a man called W. H. Smith, but in fact by a firm with a title that reminds us of one of the most famous novels published in that year – W.H. Smith and Son. This empirical reminder of W.H. Smith – and Son – in an analysis of the world historical year 1848 could well seem an impertinence. Indeed, it is an item of vulgar capitalist enterprise which can seem to stand between us and the more attractive uplands of high bourgeois ideology. Yet any historical analysis, when it centres on a date, has to begin by recognizing that though all dates are fixed all time is in movement. At any particular point there are complex relations between what can be called dominant, residual and emergent institutions and practices. Then the key to analysis is investigation and identification of the specific places occupied within an always dynamic field.

Thus, in terms of capitalist book-selling, Smith's bookstalls and the associated Parlour and Railway Libraries, cheap reprints of popular novels, are emergent. In terms of emergent production we must look quite elsewhere. But between production and book-selling there are those other social relations indicated by what was actually, in majority, being read, and here W.H. Smith – and Son – are again relevant, since they recorded their ‘top ten’ authors. An interesting list: Bulwer Lytton, Captain Marryat, G.P.R. James, James Grant, Catherine Sinclair, the Canadian Thomas Haliburton, Mrs Frances Trollope, the Irishman Charles Lever, Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen. I would imagine that most students and teachers of literature would be relieved when they came to the end of the list and found people they had been reading in the last two months. Again, if one looks at the titles, asking what ‘they’ were reading in 1848, we find that at the top of the list were Agincourt, The Romance of War, The Last Days of Pompeii, Midshipman Easy, The Heiress of Bruges, Stories from Waterloo, Scalphunters, Rody the Rover, Pride and Prejudice and The Little Wife.

A theoretical problem is then at once evident. In one now familiar mode we can move from the characterization of bourgeois society in that epoch to a characteristic bourgeois ideology and then its appropriate fictional form. I have indeed heard it said that 1848, that remarkable year for new major novels, is the moment of the initiation in fiction of a characteristic bourgeois realism. There are then two immediate problems. First, that what the bourgeoisie was reading was on the whole not bourgeois fiction, in any of its ordinary senses. Second, that the new major novels, from Vanity Fair to Dombey and Son and from Mary Barton to Wuthering Heights, can be characterized as bourgeois realism only by an extraordinary flattening, a mutual composition which in fact succeeds in hiding the actual and effective processes, the complex formation of the real forms.

In an alternative mode of historical as distinct from epochal analysis, the problems are still there but may be more specifically negotiable. For we have to begin by recognizing the very complex interlock in politics and culture of dominant and residual forms, and the even more complex process, in relation to that interlock, of specific and still-forming modes of emergence. In fiction especially this is clearly the true shape, the moving shape of the year 1848. Thus, in the titles that I cited, and in the majority of the authors, one can identify two popular ‘forms’ in the loose literary-historical sense of the term, as primarily determined by content but carrying its own formal consequences: the historical romance, which is virtually dominant, particularly when it is a historical romance associated with war; and the consciously exotic, itself often significantly associated with the new epoch of colonization. The historical romances, one should observe in passing, are different from the period of Scott, although that is how they tend to turn up in the textbooks. They have much less real historical content; the distinction we make between historical and costume novels or drama is appropriate to many of them. A place, a setting of a colourful kind, is there, but the historical movement, the historical tension within the period, is subordinate to the sense of historical spectacle. And of the exotic the same is true. It is not, needless to say, the story of the colonial wars: it is the adventure story extracted from that whole experience.

But these, I would argue, are in 1848 residual forms, in the sense that while they still command a majority readership among a given formed public, they are beginning to be written less. Through the 1840s there is a distinct decline in the production of both, and the beginning of other kinds. Nevertheless, the fact of this residual element is crucial because it is part of that interlock which is central to English culture in the 1840s: a complex interlock between what (in shorthand) are aristocratic and bourgeois views of life and value systems. The bourgeoisie, that is to say, is in these terms reading predominantly aristocratic fiction, with that kind of social universe assumed. And what is coming through in its own forms is at a lower level of development, in the first instance. The interlock between the residual and what in the course of the 1840s was becoming a dominant bourgeois culture is not negotiated through the residual forms, but through new kinds of consciously class-directed fiction. And here we must begin to make some distinctions within the dominant.

It is fairly easy, as a matter of fact, to find bourgeois fiction in the 1840s which corresponds quite directly to the explicit values and interests of the bourgeoisie. That is to say, you will find stories that are transferring their interest from birth to wealth, from inherited position to self-made position. As recently as the 1830s it had often been doubted whether the middle class were sufficiently interesting to have novels written about them – a doubt that has since occurred to others. But within the 1840s the aristocrat who had seemed the natural figure for a romance was beginning to be affected, in a certain category of fiction, by the new bourgeois ethic of self-making and self-help. Indeed, a strong emphasis on work as distinct from play carried with it, actually as one of the main incentives of this class of fiction, a clear diagnosis of poverty which it included as a fact directly related to lack of personal effort or indeed to some positive vice. Thus those explicit, conscious bourgeois values which are the formal social character of the class in that period got into fiction, but not, as a matter of fact, into any very important fiction: which is why the stereotyped terms ‘bourgeois fiction’, ‘bourgeois realism’ do not work as if they were simple formulas. You can find the straight ideology in a lot of the new magazine fiction, the family magazine serial fiction of the 1840s; you can find it in the tracts that were very widely written in fictional form and addressed to particular sectors of the working class with the aim either of religious conversion or conversion to temperance. These were put into fictional forms, with stories of how people could succeed by temperance and by effort, or could fail by drunkenness, weakness and vice, and with the moral directly attached, in spite of the fictional form, that you must not blame your poverty on others or expect others to relieve it; it is a matter of your own effort and your own sobriety.

Alongside that dominant, specifically bourgeois fiction – the association of self-making ways of wealth and virtue; poverty as a moral fault; emphasis on the sanctity of marriage; manipulation of plots to punish sexual offenders quickly – you find something which is not residual, except perhaps in one area, but is equally not emergent. There is a subordinate and there is a repressed culture, and each has its appropriate fictional forms within the specific interlock. The subordinate culture is, of course, that of the working class which, at the level of politics, at the level of social and industrial organizations, was already in the first phase of its maturity as a class, but which culturally was still in very marked ways subordinate. If there are elements of emergence – the discovery of new forms in which the experience of a different class can be expressed – they are right at the edges; often significantly near to the personal voice, in autobiography; or in certain kinds of poem. In fiction, and as a matter of fact in much of the popular verse of the time, there is an extraordinary reproduction, by working-class novelists and poets quite closely associated with the working-class political movement, of bourgeois forms though sometimes with the moral turned the other way. But much more often, in the complex interlock of the period, there is an identification of the aristocracy, of the landlords specifically, as the class enemy. And this is crucial to understanding the period. That the working class was coming in part to perceive the industrial bourgeoisie as the class enemy was crucial to the politics. But within the culture – and this encouraged many quite powerful forms – the old aristocracy, the landlords, were much more commonly so perceived. If you look at what can be called the radical melodrama and the fiction associated with it through this period you will find some radicalism, but most of it is directed at the old class enemy – at the landowner. And this is after the period in which, in the real history, the landowning classes and the industrial bourgeoisie had begun to make their decisive social composition. And so much of the working-class fiction and poetry reproduces what are in fact dominant bourgeois forms. It does not do so entirely but when it moves into anything new it often moves towards something which overlaps with that other element which I referred to as the repressed culture.

The repressed culture is that consequence of the bourgeois failure to recognize even the facts of its own experience and, above all, its sexuality. A huge trade in pornography was a classic feature of book-selling from the late 1820s right through to the mid-Victorian period – actually not with much newly produced pornography, but mainly reprinting and adaptation of eighteenth-century work or translations. That area is there, and curiously there is an area of the subordinate fiction, very popular among working-class readers, which is not too far from it although it is not pornographic in a strict sense. But it is scandal: scandal about the court and about the aristocracy; not scandal about the bourgeoisie or about the working class themselves. If you look at Reynolds’ Mysteries of the Court of London, for example, directly imitating a French form in Sue, or if you look at Reed's History of a Royal Rake, you will find the sort of thing which had a distinct place in the social perspective of working-class readers because it told them that the highest people in society were, in fact, behaving scandalously. And the terms of this judgement were terms which that part of the working class shared with the newly self-organizing and consciously moral bourgeoisie. That Reynolds could move from speaking at a Chartist meeting in Trafalgar Square to writing the Mysteries of the Court of London shows how, within the complex class interlock, opposition and the experience of subordination were being expressed at different levels which do not cohere. And while this was so, the emergence of anything which could be properly called a proletarian fiction is not really to be looked for. You get some adaptation of residual forms: the popular series of historical novels about Wat Tyler or Jack Cade; versions of the Civil War written from the radical side, which fiction had not normally done; romances of the radical melodrama kind in which a poor girl is seduced and abandoned (but here again the seducer is a fairly regular social figure, he is the aristocrat or the officer; he is not yet typically, as he would eventually be in this sort of literature, the manufacturer or the commercially rich man). So it is right, I think – with great respect to Samuel Bamford; to Ebenezer Elliot, who perhaps comes nearest to finding an authentic voice among those popular writers of the 1840s; to Thomas Cooper and to the many hundreds of others who tried – right to see it as a subordinate culture, though with significant links to what is actually crucial about the dominant culture in the long run, that it included this large repressed area where it could not admit what it was reading and could not admit experiences which it nevertheless craved.

It is in relation to the complex interlock of classes that you have to diagnose the problem of emergence. If you read what was then emerging backwards, either from your own historical or theoretical understanding of what should have been said – which is a natural temptation – or even from your calculation of the probabilities of what might have been said, you may be looking in the wrong place and you may yoke together things which were in fact emerging in significantly different ways – changes which we can better appreciate if we look at the matter in terms of the problem of form.

Let me say something in formal terms about seven novels written around this year: Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Shirley, Mary Barton and Dombey and Son. What we are often offered is a generalized diagnosis of the emergence of a conscious, incorporating bourgeois culture with its appropriate fictional form, which is realism; you know that diagnosis. One can fairly easily flatten these novels into that, at too early a level, though the real question is whether or not one can eventually significantly group them. Take first the easiest thing to say about Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights: that these introduce a new stress on the imperatives of intense personal experience, or indeed, as all the introductions put it, on passion. It is not that this isn't a perfectly reasonable general description, but when you look at it in terms of form there are immediately some interesting problems. Jane Eyre seems the simplest case because it is called an autobiography, edited, you remember, by Currer Bell – and with that characteristic distancing of the identity of the actual author in the pseudonym: ‘an autobiography edited by…’. But this is at the level of the most external form of presentation, because the voice that takes over within the actual writing and which totally controls the narration and the observation is throughout a personal voice of a new kind, quite different from conventional personal-centred fiction. The difference is most obvious in the common problem of reading Charlotte Brontë aloud. There is a radical difference when you read her aloud and when you read her silently as a private reader, which is clearly what the voice is arranged for. For there are secrets, to put it at its plainest, that you and Charlotte Brontë are meant to share as if you were on your own; tones which are not so easily accessible if other people are listening. That very particular personal voice – the direct ‘Reader, I married him’ – is, with a necessary kind of intensity, making the direct invitation: ‘Put yourself in my place, feel with me.’

That particular note is very distinct from, for an interesting reason, even The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, because if you look at that in terms of form what you find – well, you could say a double personal narrative. What you have is a male narrator enclosing the diary of a woman, and it is the diary which is the means of disclosure of the misunderstanding of the relationship which has troubled the narrator – who, actually, to provide a further complication, is supposed to be writing a very long letter to a friend: a misunderstanding which has troubled him in all the period up to the availability of the diary. Chapters I to XV are the very long formal letters to the friend, XVI to XXXXIV are the private diary, and XXXXV onwards resume in the male narrative. Now already this deliberate dispersal of points of view introduces a certain difference, a certain distinction, into what is otherwise flattened into the notion of an autobiographical subjective intensity. Indeed, it is much more significantly related to a more familiar form which is that of the misunderstood relationship – and here a word can be said which relates to a more general problem. The most familiar fictional device within the terms of bourgeois fiction for blocked intense sexual feeling was the discovery … Well, let me put it another way. Two people who, within the terms of this culture, cannot be in love and relate, find themselves doing so. What is in the way, normally, is not just the institution of marriage, but the actual existence of – usually – the wife, sometimes the husband. The characteristic device for escaping from this situation without breaking the morality is that the wife turns out to be insane, alcoholic or indeed deeply vicious. The tied partner displays extraordinary heroism in tending the alcoholism, the insanity or what may be, thus proving that self-sacrifice produces virtue. But there is a built-in moment at the end of this situation and at that point, having proved your virtue and, of course, waited, the relation can happen. Now this is not just something that happened in magazine fiction, for of course it happens in Jane Eyre. But aside from this fairly deliberate device for admitting relationships outside marriage without questioning marriage as such, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, like some of the tracts and the magazine fiction, negotiates the man/woman relationship in terms of the ideality of brother/sister, ideal that is in that brother/sister could share everything that a man and woman could properly share, or needed to share. There is no hint, at least at any conscious level, of incest or anything of that kind. It is simply that they are good friends, helping and supporting each other.

What is seen as a guilty relationship (in terms of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) turns out to be a brother/sister relationship, which can therefore be properly a substitute for a marriage relationship. Again, of course, there is a prolonged test of suffering, which in fact has occurred before the time of the narration, but which, within the time of the text, occurs in the middle, where the diary goes back over it. By the time you have reached that point the long suffering has happened. What has been perceived as a guilty relationship then becomes the ideal brother/sister relationship, and they can move on from it. This would not be possible without that specific form which modifies autobiography, in allowing the two points of view on a relationship which can be misunderstood.

In Wuthering Heights, too, there is again double narration, but significantly a double narration by persons who, both off-centre from the material of the narrative, have an attendant and in time differentiated relationship to the primary events. This has moved to a multicentred objective viewpoint, both in time and narration, on to a series of events through generations which can be summarized as an assertion of absolute primary intensity. And one can hardly read Wuthering Heights at all unless one recognizes that as the value at its centre. But it is very consciously placed within a structure which the most careful analysis discovers to be even more complex than had been initially noticed – a structure of time, of interrelation of modes of observation and stages of the primary relationship. If you look at the sequences through Lockwood and Nelly Dean, if you look at the constantly open relations between the modes of observation that Lockwood and Nelly Dean as narrators can command, and then the modes of experience that those they are observing are structurally involved with, directly and through the generations, you find something very much more complex in form and therefore in the whole structure of the experience than can possibly be represented by the singular expression of intense subjectivity. Indeed, we find both the subjectivity and a process of its displacement, and one must not take them, in my view, as constituting a value from either side. When Cathy has said ‘If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be’ she has made one of the classic assertions of a sense of identity and of a sense of relationship (identity in relationship), and this, I believe, is one of the most profound responses to the actual culture of the 1840s, although it is not at any overt level political or social: ‘If all else perished and he remained, I s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General editor's preface
• Introduction
• Notes on contributors and editors
• 1 Forms of English fiction in 1848
• 2 Baudelaire and the city: 1848 and the inscription of hegemony
• 3 Religion and ideology: a political reading of Paradise Lost
• 4 The Romantic construction of the unconscious
• 5 The trial of Warren Hastings
• 6 Bakhtin, Marxism and post-structuralism
• 7 National language, education, literature
• 8 The other question: difference, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism
• 9 Images of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a history of the present
• 10 Towards a grammatology of America: Lévi-Strauss, Derrida and the native New World text
• 11 Orientalism reconsidered
• Bibliography
• List of papers given at the Essex Conference 1976–84.
• Index