Why Literary Periods Mattered

Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies

Ted Underwood

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804788441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

In the mid-nineteenth century, the study of English literature began to be divided into courses that surveyed discrete "periods." Since that time, scholars' definitions of literature and their rationales for teaching it have changed radically. But the periodized structure of the curriculum has remained oddly unshaken, as if the exercise of contrasting one literary period with another has an importance that transcends the content of any individual course.

Why Literary Periods Mattered explains how historical contrast became central to literary study, and why it remained institutionally central in spite of critical controversy about literature itself. Organizing literary history around contrast rather than causal continuity helped literature departments separate themselves from departments of history. But critics' long reliance on a rhetoric of contrasted movements and fateful turns has produced important blind spots in the discipline. In the twenty-first century, Underwood argues, literary study may need digital technology in particular to develop new methods of reasoning about gradual, continuous change.

1

Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790–1819

Many of the best-known nineteenth-century historical novels lend history an ironic grandeur by dramatizing characters’ inability to perceive the historical dimension of the events that surround them. Walter Scott’s Edward Waverley attends a hunting party in the Highlands—only to discover a week later, when he is accused of treason, that the hunting party was in fact the beginning of a Jacobite rebellion. In Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, Fabrizio wanders through the fields of Waterloo, buying and losing horses, shooting men and being shot at, trying vainly to locate a battle. War and Peace elevates this kind of dramatic irony into a prescriptive theory of history: “In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in a historic event never understands its significance.”¹

Critics of the novel place a high value on these ironies. But they have interpreted them in radically different ways. For Georg Lukács, the sidelining of individual protagonists marked a crucial stage in the novel’s approximation to Marxism. “What matters . . . in the historical novel is not the re-telling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events.”² The unplanned entanglements of Scott’s “mediocre heroes” foreground these social forces, while marginalizing the sort of historical narrative that celebrates fateful individual choice. Approaching the topic from a different perspective, Nicola Chiaromonte concluded that the opacity of history in the nineteenth-century novel was an early symptom of the century’s waning confidence that history had any humanly accessible meaning—providential, Hegelian, or otherwise. What Lukács interpreted as proto-Marxist popular history, Chiaromonte interpreted as a harbinger of “the collapse of socialism.”³

Given the philosophical differences that separated these two readers, it is not surprising that they attributed different kinds of significance to the nineteenth-century historical novel. But it is a little surprising that they chose to locate those diametrically opposed truths in the same aspect of the form—in the protagonist’s inability to grasp the historical significance of the plot. Critics have consistently been drawn to this blind spot, which gives aesthetic form to the basic historicist insight that individual perspectives are constituted by a social structure that may not itself be visible. But critics have consistently read that insight as an expression of the principles that shape their own methodology. Isaiah Berlin, for instance, traced Tolstoy’s theory of history back to a skeptical reaction against the optimism of Enlightenment historiography. Wolfgang Iser discovered in Scott what one might call a reader-response theory of history, in which “eye-witnesses bring to life only their own particular section of the fading past, so that each account clearly presents only one aspect of reality and never the whole.”⁴ More recently, Ina Ferris has correlated the formation of the historical novel (and the national tale) with a debate that pitted the “official” history of “great public events” against the unreadable traces of social history and local memory.⁵ There is, in short, a broad critical consensus that the historical novel’s emphasis on opacity and necessary blindness enacts an important insight about representation of the past—but no consensus at all about the insight it is supposed to enact.

This chapter will not offer yet another account of that insight. On the contrary, I’ll argue that there is less epistemological insight to explain than critics have generally assumed, because versions of the dramatic irony that critics appreciate in Scott and Stendhal already darkened the earlier works of Ann Radcliffe and Lady Morgan. In Gothic novels, the collective past is already as opaque as it will become in historical novels. In national tales, it is already evident that protagonists are caught up in a larger story whose contours exceed their individual field of vision. What changes between 1790 and 1817 is not that writers discover a newly skeptical theory of social experience—but rather that the mysterious opacity of the collective past (previously embodied in landed property) is transposed onto personal historical cultivation. To put this more pointedly: early-nineteenth-century novelists didn’t have to invent a historicist aesthetic, they just had to show that it could serve as a foundation for middle-class cultural distinction. As we’ll see in Chapters 2 and 3, the limited, perspectival knowledge of history in Scott’s novels later became a model for the first period survey courses. So by assigning a peculiar prestige to half-knowledge of history, novelists like Radcliffe, Morgan, and Scott were also, unwittingly, building a foundation for the cultural authority of periodization in English departments.

Since “history” and “the collective past” may sound like synonyms, I should explain what I mean by the latter phrase, which will be used here in a broader sense. One of the salient characteristics of social existence is that it takes place on a temporal scale larger than individual life. A group existed before any of its members were born, and it generally continues in some form after they die. When I talk about the “collective past,” or “collective time,” I am referring simply to the way social life is set off from individual experience by this difference of scale, whether the collective past is embodied in institutions and inherited property, dramatized as myth and ritual, or narrated as history.

Because the larger temporal scale of collective life is one of the primary ways a group transcends its members, the symbols of collective time have often doubled as symbols of public authority. As Zygmunt Bauman observes, “long and carefully recorded pedigrees are significant through setting the scions of long and known lineages apart from the commoners who cannot trace their ancestors beyond a second or third generation . . . For similar reasons, the splendour of old, inherited riches can never be matched by the glitter of brand-new fortune.”⁶ In early modern Britain, legal authority depended quite explicitly on this reification of collective time. Birth and inherited property conveyed authority because they actually contained the past. This was particularly true, as Wolfram Schmidgen has shown, of the manorial estate. According to Edward Coke’s Compleate Copy-Holder (1641), for instance, copy-hold estates were so intimately dependent on custom that they contained time itself as a life-giving soul.

[T]ime is the mother, or rather the nurse of manors; time is the soule that giveth life to every Manor, without which a Manor decayeth and dieth [. . .]. Hence it is that the King himselfe cannot create a perfect Manor at this day, for such things as receive their perfection by the continuance of time, come not within the compasse of a Kings Prerogative . . . neither can the King create any new custome, nor doe any thing that amounteth to the creation of a new custome [. . .].

For this reason it is important for Coke to show that “the self-same form of manors remains unaltered in substance” since the Normans, and perhaps even the Saxons.⁷

It would be a misunderstanding to suppose that, by gesturing at the Normans, Coke is invoking the authority of “history.” As Reinhart Koselleck has shown, our habit of invoking the past as “history”—using the word to mean not merely a genre of writing, but the whole course of human events—is a late-eighteenth-century innovation. It became possible to use the word that way only after the discourse of universal history had popularized the assumption that all human societies, past and present, were linked together by the gradual “realisation of a hidden plan of nature” (to quote Kant).⁸ In Edward Coke’s time, the authority of history was imagined less abstractly. “Historia” was “magistra vitae” simply because books of history contained a storehouse of discrete examples: admirable models and salutary warnings that might guide a reader.⁹ But in most circumstances of daily life it was, of course, impractical to consult a written account. The broader authority of the past was therefore called “custom” or “antiquity,” and it did not have to be borrowed from historians. The collective past was rather embodied in a wide range of living institutions. The Church was a fellowship of the dead and the living stretching back to Christ. The antiquity of a community was visible in the graveyard and, as Coke takes pains to show, it constituted legal authority in the manorial estate.

Wolfram Schmidgen’s study of “the law of property” argues that community, legal authority, and time remained embedded in novelistic descriptions of things (descriptions of land especially, but also other kinds of property) through the end of the eighteenth century. Schmidgen concludes by suggesting that in Radcliffe (and more decisively in Scott) this symbolic fusion of time, space, and community began to give way to “the individualized, privatized, and reified outlook of modern capitalism,” which disavows the embedding of social relations in things. I agree with Schmidgen’s account (and have already been specifically indebted to his interpretation of Edward Coke) but I want to look more closely at the end of the process he describes, because Schmidgen’s account would seem to contradict the critical consensus I summarized at the beginning of this chapter. Schmidgen’s reading of Waverley suggests that Scott separated time from the estate by insisting on the visibility of discrete symbols of the past. “While the common law’s construction of legitimacy relies on the assumption that not everything that can be known is visible, Waverley’s description of landed property sponsors an epistemology that equates the knowable with the visible.” The past is therefore reduced to a visible token—for instance, to the famous portrait of Edward Waverley in Highland dress that gets added to the walls of Tully-Veolan.¹⁰

This reading precisely reverses a prevailing narrative about the historical novel. As I began the chapter by noting, many scholars have argued that Scott advanced realism by discovering that “history” is as invisible and as ubiquitous as the air. Schmidgen claims that Scott reified the past by making it visible, where Lukacs and Iser suggested that his innovation was to make history disappear. What explains this contradiction? I tend to think the question of visibility, as such, is a red herring. There was a robust consensus among novelists, from Ann Radcliffe through George Eliot, that the temporal dimension of community was concealed from the casual observer. But different genres and discourses defined the hidden temporal dimension of community differently. Eighteenth-century novelists had envisioned collective time as embedded in places and things—pre-eminently, in the manorial estate. But as Gothic novels were displaced by national tales, and eventually by historical novels, the customary authority of property was treated increasingly as an empty sign. This is not quite to say that the past was condensed, as Schmidgen suggests, into visible artefacts or museum exhibits.¹¹ Rather, nineteenth-century novelists began to imply that the really important, invisible part of collective time was located in the minds of their characters—although only, perhaps, as a slumbering potential, which the events of the narrative would have to awaken and develop.

The central effect of this change, I will argue, was to shift the authority of the collective past away from landed property and toward personal cultivation. In this way, the national tale and historical novel participate in a larger romantic-era argument that systematically redefined a whole range of virtues (independence, for instance) so that they could be possessed not just by landowners but by urban professionals and entrepreneurs.

Personal cultivation gives characters access to the collective past most transparently when it takes the form of historical learning, and romantic-era novelists did find a host of ingenious ways to make historical learning drive a plot. Characters discover old manuscripts, study inscriptions, clean gravestones, argue about Irish history, and claim to exhume Roman relics or buried treasure. But the connection between cultivation and history is just as frequently made in subtler ways, so that knowledge of poetry or natural philosophy can carry the same social weight as historical learning. To accomplish this, it is only necessary that the psychological depth characters reveal, when they are quoting Shakespeare or studying Irish botany, should eventually turn out to be temporal depth. It is only necessary that cultivation should produce eerie parallels, or dreams, or flashes of déjà vu, which connect present-day characters to an ancestral past, and reveal its persistence within them. To foreshadow, briefly, a topic that the fifth chapter of this book will tackle at more length: one of my reservations about the discourse of collective “memory” in recent criticism is that it has tended to overread the figurative differences between official history and this sort of déjà vu. “Memory” and “history” are often, in post-romantic writing, different names for a single fantasy—different ways of imagining collective time as something an individual can internalize.

History becomes important in the romantic novel, in short, because it allows characters to internalize the authority of the past—previously embedded in institutions and property—as a portable attribute of character. This promotes the importance of historical cultivation in particular, but it is also a sign that learning in general was taking on a new social function. The logic that fostered this new function has been explored convincingly in Ernest Gellner’s account of the rise of nationalism. To sketch this briefly: in industrializing societies, education acquires an economic importance that eventually begins to shape collective identity. Ties of kinship and locality give up some of their economic significance in favor of the portable social capital that permits a worker to move from one occupation or location to another. As an (indirect) consequence of these shifts, there is growing pressure to identify the boundaries of the state with the boundaries of a distinctive national culture, and to imagine collective identity in terms of cultivation. This logic can confer a new social consequence even on forms of learning like botany and chemistry, which might not immediately seem national. But the new social centrality of learning is dramatized even more forcefully by literary and historical cultivation, which illustrate the spatial boundaries that separate each nation from others, as well as the temporal continuities that bind it to itself. The eighteenth-century expansion of historiography to encompass the history of manners and private life, as well as commerce and the arts, needs to be understood in this context: the shift from a strictly political to a cultural history parallels the rising economic significance of the “nation” vis-à-vis the “state.”

To return, then, to the question that opened this chapter: What was the insight that permitted Scott—and other early historical novelists—to represent history as something invisible and ubiquitous? The question is badly formed because no special insight was needed. Eighteenth-century writers were already fascinated by the radical differences of scale that made it difficult for individual observers to grasp collective change; “historicism” is partly a name for growing consciousness of that blind spot. Eighteenth-century novelists often embedded the mystery of the past in descriptions of landed property, representing houses and landscapes as palimpsests that record multiple overlapping layers of time. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the mystery of the past takes up residence in a different aspect of novelistic form. Instead of informing the setting, it moves gradually into character, where it manifests itself as a mode of cultivation that includes both knowledge of the past and eerie blindness to it. This chapter traces that process of translocation. In the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, I’ll argue, personal cultivation remains so intimately bound up with the obscure authority of landed property that it is difficult to distinguish the two. The relationship between property and culture in the national tale is more difficult to characterize, because one of the central projects of the genre is to rethink that relationship. The national tales of Lady Morgan, for instance, begin by linking national culture to the antiquity of property in a very Radcliffean way. But in Morgan’s later novels, property loses much of its symbolic power, and the grandeur of collective time is dramatized mainly by mysterious parallels that bind characters to their precursors in a remote era of Irish history. The chapter concludes by comparing two of Morgan’s novels to two of Scott’s published in the same period, to highlight the way both authors use their protagonists’ ignorance of the past to represent historical cultivation as a sublimely elusive distinction that transcends ordinary categories of class. In the late Regency period, the generic boundary between “national tales” and “historical novels” is often less important than this shared fantasy.

Decaying Castles and Cultural Distinction

No reader of Ann Radcliffe will be surprised to learn that her novels emphasize architectural setting. Ruined abbeys and castles dominate her novels both by defining an atmosphere and by permitting reversals of fortune that hinge on the discovery of secret panels, disused chambers, and forgotten passageways to the sea. In this respect, Radcliffe typifies the late-eighteenth-century beginnings of Gothic. As titles like The Recess (1785) made plain well before Radcliffe, architectural obscurity was central to the genre. Birgitta Berglund points out that “the Gothic novel . . . came to be almost synonymous with ‘novel set in a (mysterious and menacing) Gothic building,’” and observes that more than a third of the books listed in a 1798 prospectus ...