CAROLINE LEVINE Victorian realism - warwick.ac.uk · Victorian realism 85 or renew. But even when we coni ne ourselves to the restricted terrain of the Victorian novel, realism still

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Victorian realism

CAROLINE LEVINE

At i rst glance, realism seems easy to grasp and dei ne. Even the most cas-

ual readers have a strong sense of what feels lifelike to them, and consider

themselves perfectly within their rights to object to implausible plots and

exaggerated characters. Many critics would broadly agree that realist writ-

ers rejected allegory and symbol, romantic and sensational plots, supernat-

ural explanations and idealized characters, and opted instead for the literal,

credible, observable world of lived experience. And yet, no consensus has

ever emerged among scholars about the essential qualities of a realist novel.

Critics have produced a lengthy and various list of dei nitions over the past

half-century, and new scholarly characterizations appear with remarkable

frequency. The year 2008 alone saw two major contributions: Richard

Menke’s Telegraphic Realism , which makes the case for the realist novel

as an expression of crucial shifts in Victorian media, and Daniel Novak’s

Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction , which argues that

Victorian realist writers drew from photography, yet, surprisingly, under-

stood the photograph as a highly constructed, artful form rather than a

transparent window onto the world. 1 Realism has variously been associated

with the ordinary, the middle class, the present, historical consciousness,

industrialization, the city, and the nation; it has been linked to omniscient

narration, free indirect discourse, vernacular dialogue, extended description,

open-ended narrative, the panoramic, and the detail; it has been seen as a

way to explore the interior lives of characters and the exterior movement of

objects; it has been cast as totalizing or particularizing, as naïvely invested

in transparency or as highly self-conscious about the problem of represen-

tation. Realism has also constantly crossed boundaries, claiming English,

French, US, Brazilian, Japanese, Indian, and African traditions – among

others – and spanning centuries, media, and genres.

For scholars of literature, realism is most often associated with nine-

teenth-century i ction, and the lasting inl uence of the Victorian novel has

meant that it has provided a kind of model for later realisms to resist, revive,

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Victorian realism

85

or renew. But even when we coni ne ourselves to the restricted terrain of

the Victorian novel, realism still manages to confound i xed dei nition.

Nineteenth-century realist writers typically declared an interest in conveying

the “truth,” for example, but their characterizations of truth varied widely.

Was the goal transparency, as George Eliot suggests with her metaphor of

the mirror in chapter 17 of Adam Bede ? Was the aim rather plausibility, as

Thackeray implies in Henry Esmond , resisting providential plots in favor of

gradual unfoldings and unplanned outcomes? Should realist writers be striv-

ing for comprehensiveness, as Dickens in creating the vast interconnected

social world of Bleak House aims to do? Or at psychological lifelikeness, as

Trollope tells us in his Autobiography ? Should writers adopt a satirical style

to send up the artii ces of i ction, as in Vanity Fair , or struggle to make an

accurate record of regional and working-class diction, as in Mary Barton ?

To make matters more perplexing still, the particular novels typically clas-

sii ed as realist complicate the term in fascinating and maddening ways:

if George Eliot is a consummate realist, then what are we to make of the

allegorical ending of The Mill on the Floss or the improbable coincidences

tying Daniel to Mordecai in Daniel Deronda ? Dickens may be a realist in

his attempt to capture the social life of the modern city, but his charac-

ters range from the cartoonishly distorted to the impossibly mawkish. As

for Jane Eyre, who has felt to many readers like one of the most power-

fully realistic protagonists in i ction, her plot turns strangely supernatural

at crucial moments. And these are just a few of the most famous examples.

Numerous i ctions in the Victorian period are inclined to mix realist fea-

tures with elements that are typically considered anti-realist: gothic tropes

( Wuthering Heights ), sensational plots ( Great Expectations ), even intrusive

narrators who comment on the artii ces involved in storytelling ( Vanity Fair

and Barchester Towers ). There is no established set of realist characteristics,

it would seem, and no perfectly exemplary texts.

Amanda Claybaugh has recently argued that realism is best understood

as a “syndrome,” a motley assortment of characteristics – “such as contem-

poraneous subject matter, events and characters understood as types, and a

thick description of the social world” – that developed independently but

were imitated so often that eventually they came together to create a recog-

nizable kind of novel. 2 This is a helpful starting point, since it allows us to

think of realism as a set of overlapping features. As in a medical diagnosis,

a text may qualify as realist if it manifests several of the symptoms, but it

does not have to show every one. Armed with the dei nition of realism as a

syndrome, we can see how novelists as different as Dickens and Eliot, the

Bront ë s and Trollope, Gaskell and Thackeray, may all be productively read

as realists.



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Scholars have offered three broad explanations for the rise of nineteenth-

century realism that help to show why it has managed to elude clear and sta-

ble dei nitions. The most inl uential of these is articulated by Georg Luk á cs,

who saw novelistic realism as a response to the upheavals of the indus-

trial and political revolutions of the late eighteenth century and the rise of

Napoleon, which prompted a new sense of history on a mass scale. Life no

longer seemed governed by natural processes, and ordinary individuals for

the i rst time had a sense that they were participating in social and political

transformations that shaped both national and world histories. 3 Britain in

particular was a site of rapid change. The industrial revolution thoroughly

transformed the British economy from the late eighteenth to the early nine-

teenth centuries, shifting the nation from a primarily stagnant agricultural

economy to a fast-growing urban one. Vast numbers of people moved off

rural land to i nd work in factories, which clustered in urban areas. London

was the biggest city in the world – the biggest, in fact, that the world had

ever seen – and new urban slums, characterized by i lth, hunger, and dis-

ease, grew at a horrifying rate. Luk á cs argues that realism in the novel was

the struggle to present the forces of historical change and necessity not as

abstractions but as the detailed and tangible experience of ordinary people

caught at specii c moments in history. More recently, Harry Shaw has built

on this account, agreeing with Luk á cs that realist texts share an interest

in the task of understanding individuals in the midst of large-scale histor-

ical processes. And Shaw suggests that the novel offers a surprisingly varied

range of strategies to address this sense of history: a commitment to the

richness of concrete objects that gesture to the material conditions of his-

tory; dynamic plots that reveal processes of “social change and motion”; an

interest in representing historical difference and otherness; and narrators

who call our attention to the ways that consciousness is limited by the spe-

cii city of circumstance. 4

If Luk á cs and Shaw understand the realist novel as a response to pro-

found social and economic upheavals, classic studies of British i ction claim

instead that realism was above all an epistemological project, exploring the

processes by which one could know or grasp the real. For Ian Watt and

George Levine, for example, the realist novel posed a quintessentially mod-

ern set of questions about the nature of reality and our access to it. Watt

points to the widening inl uence of empiricist philosophy, which, beginning

with Descartes, imagines that truth may best be found by the individual,

depending on her own lived experience, independent of tradition. In order

to capture a convincing reality, the novel borrows from this empiricist epis-

temology a focus on individual characters, who rely on the evidence of their

own eyes and ears to gain access to the truths of the world. “Individualist



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and innovating,” the novel is the form that best captures this philosophical

position in literature. 5

For George Levine, the Victorian realist novel rel ected a more plural

intellectual landscape, responding to many currents in a skeptical, seculariz-

ing culture intent on rethinking the beliefs of the past:

a culture whose experience included the Romantic poets, and the philosoph-

ical radicals; Carlyle and Newman attempting to dei ne their faiths; Charles

Lyell telling it that the world revels “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect

of an end”; the Higher Criticism of the Bible from Germany; Hume, Kant,

Goethe, Comte, and Spencer, with their varying systems or antisystems; non-

Euclidean geometry and a new anthropology made possible by a morally

dubious imperialism; John Stuart Mill urging liberty and women’s equality;

Darwin, Huxley, and the agnostics; Tennyson struggling to reimagine faith;

Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, Pater … 6

As secular kinds of knowledge such as empirical science, history, and

anthropology grew increasingly powerful and competed with older spirit-

ual modes, Levine claims that realist i ction self-consciously took part in

a larger “secularizing movement directed against the falsehoods of earlier

imaginations of reality” (11). Since writers were always aware of the limits

of their capacity to tell the truth, the struggle to produce a convincing real-

ism required a constant examination of conventions. This meant not only a

rethinking of familiar techniques of storytelling, but often an unsettling of

conventional wisdom and morality too. Thus realism had to be constantly

exploratory and experimental, refusing to come to rest in settled values,

truths, or conventions.

A third school of thought, less well known than the other two, offers yet

another compelling account of the changing nature of realist i ction. In the

1920s, several Russian formalist critics argued that realism had to shift over

time because what feels realistic changes, depending on the audience. A new

technique or subject matter can strike readers as startlingly, freshly real,

while conventional formulas for presenting the world often start to feel stale

and familiar – revealing themselves as hackneyed artii ces. Roman Jakobson

explained that a feeling of verisimilitude depends on continual innovation:

Everyday language uses a number of euphemisms, including polite formulas,

circumlocutions, allusions, and stock phrases. However, when we want our

speech to be candid, natural, and expressive, we discard the usual polite eti-

quette and call things by their real names. They have a fresh ring, and we feel

that they are “the right words.” But as soon as the name has merged with the

object it designates, we must, conversely, resort to metaphor, allusion, or alle-

gory if we wish a more expressive term. It will sound more impressive, it will

be more striking. To put it in another way, when searching for a word which



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will revitalize an object, we pick a farfetched word, unusual at least in its given

application, a word which is forced into service … The words of yesterday’s

narrative grow stale; now the item is described by features that were yesterday

held to be the least descriptive, the least worth representing, features which

were scarcely noticed … To the followers of a new movement, a description

based on unessential details seems more real than the petrii ed tradition of

their predecessors. 7

Our sense of what is freshly and strikingly real, and what is strangely and

artfully unreal, is radically contingent, depending on the representational

norms that dominate at any given moment. In this account, the realist novel

must unsettle any attempts at a stable dei nition, since each new generation

of writers will want to reject the petrii ed formulas of their precursors.

Whether we understand realism as the product of a rapidly industrializing

modernity, a response to a set of epistemological problems, or an attempt

to startle audiences with the shock of the real, all three of these accounts

put an emphasis on historical change and movement – and see realism as

rejecting above all the static, ossii ed worldviews associated with the past. Is

it any wonder, then, that realism should elude strict dei nitions? It emerges

in all three scholarly traditions as a project constantly alert to the perils of

immobility, and so becomes both an aesthetic of motion – recognizing the

necessity of change – and an aesthetic in motion – perpetually trying to out-

run its own conventions, refusing to i x its own practices and orthodoxies.

Paradoxically, of course, this emphasis on difference suggests that realism

was relatively coherent after all. What realist writers had in common was a

probing, searching, sometimes anxious struggle to register the fact of restless

change. And because what they shared was a desire to mark difference, the

work they produced was destined to take many shapes.

To make sense of this dynamic plurality, this chapter will focus on four

of the main shaping problematics faced by realist writers: subjects, objects,

perspective, and time. On the one hand, these help us to get at character,

description, narration, and plot, the most basic formal building blocks of

the novel. But they also raise historical and philosophical questions – who

counts as a subject? How and why do material things matter? From what

vantage point can one know the real? What causes events to unfold over

time? All four of these socio-formal problems generated new possibilities

as well as new challenges for nineteenth-century writers. We will see how

realist writers negotiated the various difi culties these contending questions

threw up at them, and how the most basic forms and aims of the realist

novel sometimes came into conl ict. And we will see how realism emerges as

a “syndrome,” manifesting a rich range of responses to a world in the midst

of social upheaval, intellectual innovation, and artistic change.



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Realism’s subjects

The term r é alisme i rst emerged in France to describe the work of the painter

Gustave Courbet, who caused a scandal in the 1850s with his starkly unsen-

timental paintings of workers and peasants. If art had long been the domain

of the beautiful and the ideal, suddenly artists were willing to shock audiences

by exploring lives shaped by humdrum, arduous labor in squalid conditions.

Realism became famous for its lowly characters. The novel in Britain had

in fact long been interested in the ordinary individual rather than the epic

hero: we might think of Defoe’s Moll Flanders or Richardson’s Pamela. But

nineteenth-century writers continued to widen the i eld of representation to

capture the truths of prosaic, gritty, and hideous experience. Thanks to the

realists, poor, marginal, and hitherto neglected i gures, such as seamstresses,

pawn-brokers, factory workers, drunks, prostitutes, and beggars came to be

seen not only as serious artistic subject matter, but also subjects in the philo-

sophical sense, sources of knowledge and action in the novel rather than

picturesque or comic objects.

Alex Woloch argues that this new emphasis on democratizing charac-

ter created a problem for the realist novel. On the one hand, writers could

now choose to make absolutely anyone a protagonist, but this egalitarian

impulse runs up against the necessary inequality of the novel form, which

allows only a few characters ever to be fully rounded, while everyone else

is doomed to remain minor. 8 There is no way for the novel to be genuinely

democratic in its characterization. Thus novelists faced a difi cult choice:

which particular characters should they select out to represent from the vast

array of real persons who populated the social landscape?

Some of the most famous realist texts are Bildungsromane , whose pro-

tagonists – Jane Eyre, David Copperi eld, Maggie Tulliver – begin their nar-

ratives as bewildered, yearning, isolated children who cannot make sense of

the social world or of their place within it. Romantic writers such as Jean-

Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Mary Shelley had already begun to

show a serious new interest in childhood. But the realist novel in England

would insistently return to children to consider how one could come to be

a successful, l ourishing individual in the complex new social environment

of industrial Britain. In many cases, the novel focused children of uncertain

class status, whose futures could take shape in multiple ways, to grapple

with the question of how one came to be a proper modern subject.

Jane Eyre is a particularly powerful example. Jane is an orphan who begins

her life in a wealthy propertied household, but is treated as an indigent

dependent. She is not quite on the level of the servants in the novel, but nor

is she a full member of the upper classes. Straddling class lines, she struggles



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against coni nement and injustice, and on the basis of her quick intelligence,

her refusal to be subjugated, and her i erce integrity, learns to assert herself

as a free subject in the social world. She has seemed to many readers a cred-

ible and deeply sympathetic protagonist: both realistic and unique in her

determination to overcome obstacles to self-assertion and fuli llment. For

feminist critics in the 1970s, she stood for the celebration of female indi-

vidualism in a limiting patriarchal context. 9 Recent critics have tended to

build on this account of Jane Eyre as a consummate individual, but they have

taken a gloomier view of individualism. Asserting the values of self-making,

independence, and hard work, Jane is eventually rewarded for her bourgeois

individualism by being allowed to move into the ranks of the gentry, but

along the way we can see glimpses of the sacrii ces that this upward mobility

entails: wealth made from slave labor in Jamaica and colonial conquest in

Madeira, the death of Bertha Mason Rochester, even the expulsion of Ad è le

from the inner circle of the family at the novel’s close. Gayatri Spivak has

famously made the case that British imperial violence actually required and

depended on exactly the kind of individualism Jane exemplii es so well. 10

This reading points not only to the novel’s powerful ideology, but to

something paradoxical about the genre’s use of character: it is the fact that

Jane feels unique, independent-minded and self-reliant that makes her stand

for a generalizable norm – the reality of the modern self. Thus the realist

Bildungsroman suggests one solution to the problem of which characters the

novel should choose: a single, highly individuated protagonist who distills

the larger complicated and troubling question of what it takes to become a

modern subject. Thus Jane Eyre compels our attention for her singularity,

but it is paradoxically this singularity that makes her stand for the general

phenomenon of modern individualism.

To be sure, the Bildungsroman was by no means the only formal choice for

realist writers interested in capturing the experience of a new social world.

Some sought instead to give a more sweeping, comprehensive view of social

life and widened their i eld of characters to incorporate a range of i gures

from many different walks of life. Often their aims were self-consciously

political and ethical, intending to draw sympathy and sometimes political

action. 11 In one of the classic accounts of realism – chapter 17 of Adam

Bede – George Eliot argues that art should provoke readers to feel sympathy

for a range of characters who are neither beautiful nor heroic because in fact

it is these people who surround us and need us:

These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither

straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and

it is these people – amongst whom your life is passed – that it is needful you



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should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsist-

ent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire – for

whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would

not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so

much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work,

that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and

the common green i elds – on the real breathing men and women, who can be

chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered

and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken,

brave justice … In this world there are so many of these common, coarse

people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we

should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out

of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only i t a world

of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always

have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of

commonplace things – men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and

delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. 12

Rather than distracting us with ideal beauty, writers should prompt audi-

ences to recognize the dignity of commonplace lives. For Eliot, this was pri-

marily a moral problem. For other realist writers, such as Elizabeth Gaskell,

it was also crucial to expose social and economic interconnections between

comfortable, middle-class lives and desperately deprived and difi cult ones.

The point was not only to shock audiences with ugly, lowly new content,

then, but to galvanize them into a new understanding of their own place in

a complex social environment.

And yet, thorny new formal questions arose along with the novel’s expan-

sive embrace of the social whole. Should the novelist who seeks to give a

comprehensive or systemic picture of a whole society focus our attention on

a few people we can know well or try to represent many distinctive indi-

viduals? Dickens struggled with these two alternatives in novels he wrote

close together in the 1850s, one in condensed weekly installments over six

months, the other in longer part issues over almost two years. The briefer

Hard Times contains only a few major characters, but these represent a

whole society by acting as representatives of broad social groups: Stephen

Blackpool, the honest worker; James Harthouse, the degenerate aristocrat;

Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian businessman. In an effort to capture a

whole society, Hard Times relies on synecdoche, rendering the social world

through a small number of characters who represent signii cant new types

of social subject.

In the vast expanse of Bleak House , by contrast, Dickens opts for more

than seventy idiosyncratic characters to present the social life of the nation.



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Although these many i gures come from different classes, Dickens seems

less interested in using them as representative types than in showing the

interconnections among far-l ung lives. He traces links from the aristocratic

Sir Leicester Dedlock to Jo the crossing-sweeper by way of philanthropists,

soldiers, dancing masters, doctors, aesthetes, and lawyers. Most of these

i gures are highly peculiar rather than typical, and their social signii cance

derives from the fact that their lives intersect with the lives of others. Esther

herself is at the center of the story not so much because she is a remark-

able person in her own right – as she tells us all too often – but because she

is located at the intersection of a clandestine affair, a vast and sprawling

lawsuit, and a murder investigation. The novel also makes it clear that we

have an obligation to understand these social intersections. Skimpole, for

example, is blameworthy because he refuses to entertain the notion that

he is affecting others through his own patterns of spending and debt, while

Mrs. Jellyby sees herself at the busy hub of a philanthropic network while

egregiously ignoring her family. Even Jo, who clearly typii es urban poverty

and neglected childhood, repeatedly appears in the novel because he is a

point of contact for others: i rst he links a dead man to the law; then he has

evidence relevant to a murder investigation; he also draws efforts at urban

reform; and he is a carrier of disease across class boundaries. The way that

Dickens distills his society, then, is not through a single character or small

group of representative individuals, but through a networked structure of

social relationships. 13

Woloch points to Middlemarch as another unusually complex response

to the problem of inequality among the novel’s characters. With its focus

on the expansion of the franchise, Middlemarch thematizes the question of

the distribution of signii cance among persons, but it also structures what

Woloch calls its “character-space” to pose the same question on the level

of form. That is, Middlemarch refuses to choose between the one and the

many. The novel “can be read in terms of a singular protagonist (Dorothea),

a pair of co-protagonists (including Lydgate), a series of principal characters

(including Mary and Fred, Will, Rosamond, Casaubon, and Bulstrode) or a

manifold group of characters, extending from principals to nearly anonym-

ous i gures who all compete for attention within the narrative web” ( The

One , 3).

With Jane Eyre , Hard Times , Bleak House , and Middlemarch , then, we

can begin to see the range of ways that realist texts approached the problem

of characterization in their struggle to capture a social world. One solution

involved relying on a single individuated i gure whose development traced a

plausible and exemplary path to successful maturity. Here the single central

character allows the novel to distill large-scale social processes. Alternatively,



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a writer could offer a small handful of typical and representative characters

to gesture to whole social groups. A third approach involved multiplying

distinctive characters while drawing attention to processes and paths that

linked them. George Eliot merges all of these in an extraordinarily deli-

cate balance. And she is not the only novelist to combine these strategies:

individuation, representativeness, and interconnection are never mutually

exclusive, and we see all three in many realist texts. The highly individuated

protagonist, as we have seen, is itself a social type, and even Hard Times ,

with its emphasis on representative i gures, traces a painful education for

its atypical Louisa Gradgrind. Rich combinations of individuals, types, and

networks can be found in the period’s most sweeping realist i ctions, such as

Vanity Fair and The Way We Live Now . Thus instead of dei ning a single or

optimal mode of characterization for realism, we can instead acknowledge

the experimental range of ways that the realist novel struggled to represent

ordinary and humble modern subjects enmeshed in complex webs of social

relationship .

Realism’s objects

Realism brought to art not only new subjects but also new objects. The

Victorian novel is notorious for being packed with things – from natural

curiosities to expensive commodities, and everything in between: heirlooms,

outi ts, instruments, fetishes, furniture, gems, exotic species, foodstuffs,

antiquities, and even limbs (like those stuffed into Mr. Venus’s shop in Our

Mutual Friend ). In part, novelists valued things as part of a dense descrip-

tion of the social world, understanding material objects as an integral part of

lived experience. Indeed, objects can often capture social relations as well or

better than subjects: they can circulate as commodities; they can be passed

down through families; they can be lost, hidden, and stolen; they can be

obstacles, instruments, or ends in themselves; their value can be emotional,

economic, symbolic – or all of these.

While theorists have disagreed about the role and purpose of objects

in the nineteenth-century novel, they have tended to agree that they were

essential to the realist enterprise. For Roland Barthes, for example, it does

not matter much which things the novel includes: a barometer in Madame

Bovary creates a “reality effect,” acting as a “useless” detail that in its very

superl uity resists serving narrative meaning and so simply announces the

reality of the world represented by the text. Objects like these say nothing

but “we are the real,” and it is for this reason that the realist novel depends

on them. For Luk á cs, by contrast, the specii city of objects at moments espe-

cially of crisis or tension can capture the experience of living in history:



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things are concrete, particular facts that gesture to larger and more general

systems, “part of the broad living basis of historical events in their intricacy

and complexity.” 14 Well-chosen objects in the novel can distill the experience

of large-scale relations among social groups.

In recent years, scholars have grown increasingly interested in the real-

ist novel’s attentiveness to things. Cynthia Wall, for example, has investi-

gated the growing value granted to objects in the novel from the eighteenth

to the nineteenth century: for the i rst time things, and especially domestic

things, became worthy of lavish description, interrupting narrative in more

and more richly detailed ways. Wall suggests that this change came about

thanks to a growing consumer culture, which concentrated a new attention

on objects; new technologies that enabled new kinds of minute attentiveness

to things – such as the microscope; and a new embrace of empirical forms

of knowledge, which prized particularities as ways of getting at general

truths. 15 The novel often lingered particularly long on the visual appearance

of objects, perhaps rel ecting a Victorian culture that was richly and even

obsessively specular, swarming with exhibitions, panoramas, and optical

toys and instruments. 16

Amy M. King offers an explanation of realism’s prolii c descriptions of

objects that has more to do with values than with new technologies or prac-

tices of consumption. She argues that the novel’s protracted descriptions

drew an ethical justii cation and a set of practices from natural theology,

which imagined that a knowledge of God could be found in the smallest

details of the natural world. This worldview demanded a meticulous obser-

vation of things in nature as an act of reverence, “i nding much in the small

and the quotidian.” King points out that Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village

(1824–32), a twenty-i ve-hundred page text, was enormously popular in the

Victorian period, and it was organized around “a set of descriptive modes

premised upon dilation of detail and delaying narrative drive.” Rather than

understanding realism as a deeply secular project – pace George Levine –

King argues that this reverential relation to objects became a staple of the

Victorian novel, “a residue of the sacred” that found its way into the long

descriptive passages of Adam Bede , Mary Barton , and Trollope’s Barsetshire

series. 17

Unlike Wall and King, who have explored the realist novel’s deliberately

loving attention to things, Elaine Freedgood surprised critics in 2006 by

returning to Barthes’s reality effect. She makes the case that the Victorian

novel is simply too massive to take all of its objects seriously, and she urges

us to linger on precisely those “nonsymbolic” objects which the novel

brushes by: those it packs into its pages as markers of reality but uninter-

esting in themselves, the ones we necessarily dismiss, saying, “oh yes, the



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real, the literal, never mind.” 18 For Freedgood, these articles matter because

they had real histories of production, circulation, and consumption beyond

the pages of the text. Dickens may mention Magwitch’s tobacco only glan-

cingly, for example, but by specifying that it is the “Negro head” variety

three times in the text, he calls up a signii cant reality he never elaborates.

As many Victorians knew, this tobacco was picked in the United States by

slaves, exported to Australia where it was used as currency by colonial set-

tlers exterminating aboriginal peoples, and banned in England between

1842 and 1863. Thus the object, though only mentioned in passing, can

be read as a site where the realist novel “stockpiles” historical information,

compressing into a single thing a vast and terrifying story of world trade,

genocide, and enslavement.

Whether they offered “thick” or “thin” descriptions of objects, lavish-

ing detail on them or compressing and distilling social relations through

them, Victorian realist writers depended on things much more than their

eighteenth-century precursors. They also tended to value them more than

their modernist successors. An interest in the material object is therefore one

of the hallmarks of the realist novel. From Lizzie Eustace’s diamonds to the

dust-heaps of Our Mutual Friend , and from Lucy Snowe’s buried letters to

the checked curtains of Mary Barton , realist i ction is certainly jam-packed

with things. These usually remain shadowy and marginal but always, like

characters in Alex Woloch’s account, have the potential to become prom-

inent, taking on particular meaning and value, as a protagonist does. The

realist novel is thus populated with unrealized possibility. The object world,

like the realm of ordinary people, is simply too crowded to be rendered in

full. And so the realist Victorian novel persistently asks – and invites us to

ask – which objects matter, and why.

Realism’s perspectives

When the novel wants to focus our attention on a subject or an object, it

pushes it into the foreground, inviting us to zoom in. But it can also stand

back, encouraging a stance of distance or detachment. Sometimes it even

asks us to admit a vast panorama, taking in the multiplicity of the city, the

nation, the world. Our relation to subjects and objects in the realist novel

depends very much, in other words, on the vantage points it adopts.

Two major intertwined questions have preoccupied the many critics who

have considered the perspectives of the realist novel. First, if realism tries

to convey a social world, then what are the boundaries of that world? Is it

a small community such as Gaskell’s Cranford? Is it the dense, mysterious,

and plural world of the city, as in the Sherlock Holmes stories? Or does the



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narrative sprawl beyond the nation, like Vanity Fair and Daniel Deronda?

Second, what formal techniques of narration does the novel adopt to convey

social wholes? Does it opt for the i rst-person vantage point of the embed-

ded participant or the bird’s-eye view of omniscience – or some complex

combination of the two? The problem of perspective thus joins content to

form and brings into focus both the social and the epistemological dimen-

sions of realism, asking not only which reality should be conveyed, but also

from what vantage point we can best grasp it. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth

argues that the perspectives made possible by realism marked a profound

epistemological shift, a break from a medieval notion of discontinuous space

and time, which privileged discrete and isolated details, to a new conception

of time and space as “continuous, homogeneous, neutral media … popu-

lated by objects that exhibit certain consistencies of behavior, regardless of

changes in position, which enable us to recognize them as the same.” 19

Politically minded critics over the past few decades have made a differ-

ent kind of perspectival claim, arguing that it is no accident that the novel

and the nation became powerful forms around the turn of the nineteenth

century, and urging us to think of the nation as the novel’s most important

horizon. As Franco Moretti explains:

Some nation-states (notably England/Britain and France) already existed, of

course, long before the rise of the novel. They had a court at the center, a dyn-

asty, a navy, some kind of taxation – but they were hardly integrated systems:

they were still fragmented into several local circuits, where the strictly national

element had not yet affected everyday existence. But towards the end of the

eighteenth century a number of processes come into being (the i nal surge

in rural enclosures; the industrial take-off; vastly improved communications;

the unii cation of the national market; mass conscription) that literally drag

human beings out of the local dimension, and throw them into a much lar-

ger one. Charles Tilley speaks of a new value for this period – “national loy-

alty” – that the state tries to force above and against “local loyalties.” He is

right, I believe, and the clash of old and new loyalty shows also how much of

a problem the nation-state initially was: an unexpected coercion, quite unlike

previous power relations; a wider, more abstract, more enigmatic dominion –

that needed a new symbolic form in order to be understood . 20

Too vast and abstract to be experienced as a single collective, the nation

needed a cultural representation that would allow people to grasp it as

one – and to cherish it. The realist novel provided one solution. In Benedict

Anderson’s famous account, the novel imagines a social world where char-

acters who do not know one another perform actions simultaneously, and so

invite us to think of millions of strangers sharing the experience of “steady,

anonymous, simultaneous activity.” 21 As we see characters moving through



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the “homogeneous empty time” of the nation, we come to conceive of our-

selves too as participants in a shared national life.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South certainly works to forge a newly

coherent sense of the nation. The queenly Margaret Hale moves from the

stable agricultural world of southern England, with its aristocratic heredi-

tary estates, to the industrial north, where factory smoke darkens the sky,

and fortunes are quickly made and lost. Though initially disgusted by the

ugliness, newness, and violence of the north, she comes to celebrate the

industrial economy as dynamic and vigorous, a source of energy for the

nation as a whole. Joining Margaret, an heiress, to the industrialist John

Thornton at the end, Gaskell imagines in them a productive union of mas-

culine and feminine, aristocracy and bourgeoisie, industrial north and agri-

cultural south.

And yet, some critics have argued that the realist novel also persistently

pushes beyond the frame of the bounded nation. For critics like Spivak,

the realist novel’s tendency to think of itself as conveying universal truths

made the novel complicit in imperialism – part of an impulse to force non-

European others into a single set of values and norms – but more recent

theorists have shown the value in moving beyond the nation. Amanda

Anderson, for example, points out that “Nation-forming was at the heart

of the modern agenda, but so was the ideal of cosmopolitanism, which pro-

moted detachment from parochial interests, broad understanding of cultures

beyond one’s own, and a universalism that saw all peoples as belonging to

humanity over and above any individual nation.” 22 In its struggle to convey

social realities, including economic relationships, imperialism, and global

migrations, the realist novel adopted cosmopolitan and globalizing perspec-

tives alongside national ones, sometimes coexisting and sometimes super-

seding or displacing them. Daniel Deronda , with its intersecting “English”

and “Jewish” plots, offers for Anderson one particularly subtle and self-

conscious version of this joining of national and cosmopolitan frames.

Tanya Agathocleous argues that realist writers often adopted a cosmo-

politan perspective when they represented the teeming life of the modern

city. Given its plural and multiethnic populations, its role as the center of

a global empire, and its importance to revolutions in media and technol-

ogy that were transforming transnational commerce and communications,

London was not so much a national center as a “microcosm of the globe,”

a “world city.” Realist writers therefore often deliberately turned to London

as a way to imagine a vast global reality that could not itself be captured.

“If the world as a whole could not be seen, it could be brought before the

mind’s eye through the observation of the city, conceived of as a world in

miniature.” 23



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All of these readings suggest that realism strove to capture a social total-

ity that could not be experienced directly. It is not surprising, therefore,

that realist writers developed techniques of omniscient narration: narrative

perspectives not lodged in any single consciousness but able to move in

and out of multiple spaces and minds and to present connections among

people which they themselves might not be aware of. This form of narration

allowed writers to adopt worldviews that rose above the particularities of

situated experience and knowledge. Thus the novel could apprehend a vast

web of social relations.

But omniscient narration may also have served a consolatory cultural func-

tion in a rapidly secularizing culture; that is, omniscient narration could i ll

the place left by a disappearing God. 24 And perhaps it was this that led some

realist writers to shun omniscient narration, fearing that there was something

troublingly metaphysical, totalizing – unreal – about the disembodied per-

spective. We might think of Pip, David Copperi eld, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe,

Dr. Watson, and Conrad’s Marlow, all i rst-person narrators who guide us

through their worlds without the benei t of super-human knowledge.

The novel’s frequent use of the i rst-person narrator clearly complicates

the problem of realist perspective. On the one hand, in its struggle to capture

social relations, realist i ction strives to give an overarching view, under-

standing particularities as elements that signify within a larger whole. Here

it seeks a detached and synthetic vantage point. On the other hand, realist

texts evince an ongoing skepticism about overarching and totalizing per-

spectives, preferring the more ordinary and familiar techniques of empir-

ical observation and verii cation. In these cases it opts for the limited and

uncertain perspective of the i rst person, corroborating Ian Watt’s inl uential

argument that the realist novel disseminated the principles of philosoph-

ical empiricism, which prized the “individual investigator” gathering evi-

dence about the world through lived experience ( Rise of the Novel , 13).

With narration, then, realist i ction seems to reach a crossroads: should our

knowledge of the realities of the world be sweepingly comprehensive or spe-

cii cally embodied, divinely complete or humanly partial?

What is perhaps most remarkable about the realist novel is the fact that

it often merged these two strikingly different modes of knowledge through

brilliant formal innovations. The i rst and best known of these is a tech-

nique called free indirect discourse, which was famously developed by Jane

Austen and became commonplace in the Victorian novel. Ingeniously, free

indirect discourse combines the narrator’s style of speech, reporting in the

third person, with the speech mannerisms and viewpoint of a specii c char-

acter. In Barchester Towers , for example, Trollope uses free indirect speech

to describe Eleanor Bold’s emotion after Mr. Arabin has proposed to her:



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She idolised, almost worshipped this man who had so meekly begged her par-

don. And he was now her own. Oh, how she wept and cried and laughed, as

the hopes and fears and miseries of the last few weeks passed in remembrance

through her mind.

Mr Slope! That any one should have dared to think that she who had been

chosen by him could possibly have mated herself with Mr Slope! That they

should have dared to tell him, also, and subject her bright happiness to such

a needless risk! 25

The narrator describes Eleanor’s internal monologue in the third person, yet

reports the character’s thoughts in her own shocked words (“Mr Slope!”), and

embeds her temporal vantage point (“now”) within the narrator’s third person

past tense (“Oh, how she wept and cried and laughed…”). Thus the novel sets

up a l ow between the synoptic and the specii c, merging the individual and

omniscient perspectives so intimately that they cannot be prised apart.

A second and more subtle formal innovation in the relationship between

omniscient narrators and particular characters emerges in James Buzard’s

dazzling reading of the nineteenth-century novel in Disorienting Fictions .

Arguing that British writers used the novel to perform a kind of autoethnog-

raphy – apprehending and conveying a specii cally British culture to itself –

Buzard reads the realist narrator as a prototype for the participant-observer

crucial to twentieth-century anthropology. In Mary Barton , for example, the

narrator walks through the industrial city, immersing herself in its life, like a

i eld worker who travels to a remote village. But she also resists representing

a self-contained or isolated proletarian culture, deliberately including her

own social world in the novel as well, as she incorporates “both workers

and bourgeois readers in the newly activated, positive cultural identity of

the nation.” What makes this particularly extraordinary is that the novel

manages to merge the i rst-person experience of the participant with the dis-

tant perspective of the third-person observer. On the one hand, the narrator

is part of the world she describes, a member of the same large community

as the workers; on the other hand, “in relation to a cultural i eld conceived

as an array of more or less incarcerating, view-restricting positions, the nov-

elistic narrator gains authority by traveling outward or upward from, or

comprehensively among, those separate positions in order to grasp their

structural and moral interdependence.” 26 The narrator’s bird’s-eye view is

therefore that of a cultural insider who lays claim to the detached know-

ledge of an outsider as well. She is both a participant in her national culture,

able to share the limited perspective of her characters in the story-space, and

a distanced observer in the novel’s discourse-space, able to connect relevant

details to make sense of the whole. Surprisingly, Buzard argues that this

double position characterizes i rst-person narrators as well as omniscient



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ones, contending that Jane Eyre the narrator, for example, looks back on her

younger self to explore the child’s narrow and immersed vantage point from

a position that can both share that perspective and detach itself from it .

Many different realist novels experiment with combinations of omnisci-

ence and i rst-person experience by adopting the techniques of free indirect

discourse and the stances of participant-observation, but one realist novel

raises the distance between the omniscient and the i rst-person narrator to

a self-conscious formal principle. Bleak House is unusual in switching back

and forth between an impersonal, detached, ironic, mobile, and know-

ledgeable narrator who speaks in the perpetual present tense, and Esther

Summerson’s situated, immersed, na ï ve, past-tense account. Critics have

interpreted this famously alternating perspective in a compelling range of

ways, from Joseph I. Fradin’s claim that it works as a metaphor for “the

divided modern consciousness,” to Lisa Sternlieb and Alison Case, who

argue for Dickens’s gendering of the two narrators. 27 But for the purposes

of considering Victorian realism, we might conclude that the double nar-

rative perspective of Bleak House is simply the most l agrant of a great

number of realist efforts to bring together the sweeping bird’s-eye view that

takes in the whole social world, and the more lifelike individual struggle

to make sense of experience on the ground, with only partial knowledge

to go by .

Realism’s plots

Subjects, objects, and perspectives are the stuff of many kinds of representa-

tions, including painting and poetry, but the novel is always organized along

a temporal dimension as well. Realist i ction, with its persistent concern with

change, puts at its center the problem of dynamically unfolding relations.

And in fact, Victorian writers were often fascinated by questions of causal-

ity: what sets off events, produces social change, instigates relationships?

Take, for example, the famous scene in Vauxhall Gardens in Vanity Fair ,

where Thackeray invites us to dwell on the question of cause and effect. Jos

Sedley, who is about to propose marriage to Becky Sharp, drinks too much,

and suffers from such a terrible hangover the next day that he l ees London

altogether, breaking off his connection to Becky and changing the course of

all of the protagonists’ lives:

That bowl of rack punch was the cause of all this history. And why not a bowl

of rack punch as well as any other cause? Was not a bowl of prussic acid the

cause of Fair Rosamond’s retiring from the world? Was not a bowl of wine the

cause of the demise of Alexander the Great, or, at least, does not Dr. Lempriere

say so? – so did this bowl of rack punch inl uence the fates of all the principal



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characters in this “Novel without a Hero,” which we are now relating. It inl u-

enced their life, although most of them did not taste a drop of it.

The young ladies did not drink it; Osborne did not like it; and the conse-

quence was that Jos, that fat gourmand , drank up the whole contents of the

bowl … 28

Thackeray isolates a single, minute, commonplace occurrence as the cause

of a shift in the whole web of relationships. And in good realist fashion, he

asks the reader to consider whether the novel’s causal patterns don’t extend

into our own world: “Are not there little chapters in every body’s life, that

seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?” (chapter vi ).

Vanity Fair therefore purports to offer one example of a generalizable and

credible model of cause-and-effect relationships that describes the world

outside the novel as well as the world within.

While narrative time allows realist writers to consider plausible connec-

tions among events, plotting also presents an ongoing challenge for the real-

ist novel. One of the problems with ordinary life, of course, is that it tends

to be monotonous, unexciting – plotless. Imposing a temporal coherence

gives shape to the narrative but runs the risk of feeling distinctly artii cial.

Thus the appeal of narrative form competes with the verisimilitude of its

contents. In New Grub Street , Gissing’s writer Biffen asserts that he is going

to write a novel that will “reproduce” life “without one single impertin-

ent suggestion save that of honest reporting.” The result, he acknowledges,

“will be something unutterably tedious … If it were anything but tedious,

it would be untrue.” 29 More often than not, the realist novel refuses this

kind of tedium, returning again and again to the neat resolutions of the

marriage plot, or the fascinating mysteries of detection, and incorporating

sensational events, sentimental love, and even pivotal coincidences along

the way. The coincidence is in fact startlingly pervasive in realist i ction:

we might think of Lucy Snowe’s awakening in her godmother’s house in a

foreign land, Pip’s rescue at the crucial moment from Orlick’s attempt to

murder him, Thornton’s chance sighting of Margaret Hale bidding a strange

man goodbye at the train station, Phineas Finn’s prevention of a deadly

attack on Robert Kennedy on the street, Dorothea’s happening upon Will

and Rosamond at an indiscreet moment, and many others.

Critics have often leapt to assume that such neat plotlines represent an act

of bad faith, an undermining of realism’s goals of plausibility and verisimili-

tude in favor of successful sales and the most effortless of readerly pleasures.

Marxists in particular have argued that the tidy endings of the Victorian

novel close down the real social injustices and upheavals that have been

glimpsed along the way. “By the device of an ending,” Terry Eagleton writes,

“bourgeois initiative and genteel settlement, sober rationality and romantic



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passion, spiritual equality and social distinction, the actively afi rmative and

the patiently deferential self, can be merged into mythical unity.” 30 Thus

narrative closure betrays the goal of verisimilitude in favor of ideologically

soothing conclusions that subtly reinforce the power of the ruling classes,

making it feel natural and inevitable.

But other critics have argued that it is a mistake to focus too heavily on

the novel’s endings. After all, the Victorian novel spent a great deal of time

in its ample middle. Many realist novels were serialized – including Bleak

House , Middlemarch , and Vanity Fair – thus enforcing regular interruptions

in the long middle . I myself have argued that the realist novel frequently

turned to techniques of suspense not to drag readers to a foreordained end-

ing but rather as a way of teaching readers a skeptical approach to the truth

that was borrowed from science. That is, suspenseful narratives hint at hid-

den truths but defer revealing them, keeping us aware of our own ignorance

as we wait for the reality to emerge. As i rst-time readers, we know that facts

are being withheld from us, and we make guesses – is the strange sound

in the attic made by Grace Poole? Does Miss Havisham intend Estella for

Pip? – but our anxiety, doubt, and desire to keep reading remind us that the

truth may be different from anything we have guessed or hoped. Like scien-

tists, then, we learn to make hypotheses and then suspend judgment, as we

wait for the unfolding of events to coni rm or unsettle our expectations. 31

This means that the realist novel deliberately keeps the potential for different

narrative trajectories open, inviting us to consider what Harry Shaw names

“co-plots,” the unrealized potential paths a narrative can take ( Narrating ,

143). The ending, in this context, is not so much a logical or natural result

of narrative unfolding as it is one among many plausible outcomes. Indeed,

realist novels sometimes foreground this fact: Great Expectations , with its

two different conclusions, or Villette , which leaves us suspended, remind

readers that realist narratives do not always end in satisfying closure.

If suspense was used for realist purposes – to teach us a skeptical epistemo-

logical approach to the truths of the world – then perhaps even sensation

i ction may be incorporated into the canon of Victorian realism. Certainly

Wilkie Collins shares Thackeray’s fascination with cause-and-effect rela-

tionships as they unfold in the world beyond the text. Consider, for example,

Count Fosco’s account of statistical probabilities in The Woman in White :

Crimes cause their own detection, do they? And murder will out (another epi-

gram), will it? Ask coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, Lady

Glyde. Ask secretaries of life-assurance companies if that is true, Miss Halcombe.

Read your own public journals. In the few cases that get into the newspapers,

are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered?

Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are not reported, and the



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bodies that are found by the bodies that are not found, and what conclusion do

you come to? This. That there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise

criminals who escape … When the criminal is a brutal, ignorant fool, the police

in nine cases out of ten win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated, highly-

intelligent man, the police in nine cases out of ten lose. If the police win, you gen-

erally hear all about it. If the police lose, you generally hear nothing. 32

In depending on an empirical model general enough to reach beyond the

boundaries of this particular text, the Count implies that the clever criminal’s

ultimate escape is always entirely plausible, even when it does not come to

pass in some particular case. On the one hand, this gesture clearly invites us

to imagine that it is perfectly possible that he might himself escape, thereby

generating a suspense that will haunt the novel right up to the spectacle of his

dead body at the Morgue; but on the other it also suggests that this suspense

may actually operate beyond the limits of this plot, since even when it kills

the Count, the novel’s appeal to statistics compels us to recognize that other

clever criminals may yet escape, in other i ctions and, more frighteningly, in

our own world. Count Fosco thus manages to defamiliarize realist suspense

in the novel: when we feel the doubts and anxieties of information withheld,

we may know that some outcomes are highly probable, but we must also face

the fact that more exceptional eventualities also have a chance, however slim,

of prevailing in any particular case. What suspense teaches us is that even the

most likely, predictable outcomes always compete with more startling, more

improbable ones. And that means that the most sensational coincidences

may in fact be the proper stuff of the realist novel. 33

Victorian plots often trace a character’s path to understanding, as well

as the reader’s. Jane Eyre seeks not only freedom but also knowledge, con-

stantly testing hypotheses against the evidence of her world, while Pip leaps

to assume that his bequest comes from Miss Havisham and must slowly

learn not to impose his assumptions on the real. In these cases, the plot

charts not only events and experiences, but a process of truth-gathering

that, like Thackeray’s account of causality in Vanity Fair and Count Fosco’s

interest in probability, extends beyond the boundaries of the text to con-

sider how we might best acquire a knowledge of the world. And all of these

examples suggest that realist plotting may have been more often a way to

think seriously about causality and knowledge than a device for rushing

headlong to formulaic and predictable endings.

Conclusion

Realism’s plurality did not mean that it was simply a collection of distinct

practices or forms, like items on a menu. The various aims of realism could



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compete for priority and even come into difi cult conl ict. The effort to paint

a rich psychological portrait of individuals, for example, existed in tension

with the effort to take a comprehensive view of a whole society. Transparency

collided with the artii ces of narration. Plausibility contended against both

moral purposiveness and narrative excitement. Lavish description of minute

particulars required the close-up; a large social vision called for the pano-

rama. George Levine argues that the stopping of time to describe things in

detail also ran up against the impulse toward plot. 34 Omniscience, itself an

impossible perspective, seemed to offer a kind of knowledge that the partial

individual consciousness could not.

To be sure, these conl icts also prompted some of realism’s most exciting

and inl uential innovations in the novel form. The inclusion of poor, mar-

ginal, and working-class characters allowed novelists to hold to the goal of

plausibility while teaching a moral and social lesson to their readers. Sheer

sordidness may also have allowed some of the delights of unfamiliarity and

adventure to bourgeois readers even while the text kept to the supposedly

humdrum frame of ordinary experience. Free indirect discourse brought

together omniscient and limited i rst-person perspectives to afford both a

large sense of a whole social body, as in historical writing, and the lifelike

uncertainty and limited perspective of the individual, as in empirical science.

It was also a canny device that seemed to suggest a certain transparency,

implying that characters were “highly legible to their narrator even when

they are not directly speaking or acting.” 35 And the suspense plot allowed

writers to craft thrilling plots while making serious arguments for a skep-

tical, secular, scientii c epistemology.

Realism offered no stable or settled response to the upheavals of the social

world but rather a variety of experiments in form and content. It could not

be called a na ï ve project, as novelists engaged in a dynamic, self-rel ective

set of processes, responding to the limitations of prior i ctions in ingenious,

interrogatory, and transformative ways. Nor was it a purist enterprise, seek-

ing to i nd a single resolution to its ongoing questions. When we look for

realism, in the end what we i nd is a complex syndrome of linked, overlap-

ping, and contending aims and forms.

NOTES

1 Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism (Stanford University Press, 2008); and Daniel Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

2 Claybaugh draws the notion of a syndrome from an article in German by Peter Demetz, “Zur Dei nition des Realismus,” Literatur und Kritik 2 (1967): 333–45. See Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 44.



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3 Georg Luk á cs, The Historical Novel , trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962).

4 Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 165.

5 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 13. 6 George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (Chicago and London: University of

Chicago Press, 1981), 20. 7 Roman Jakobson, “Realism in Art,” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and

Structuralist Views , ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1971), 40–41.

8 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many (Princeton University Press, 2003), 30. 9 See, for example, Adrienne Rich, “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless

Woman,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979).

10 Since Europeans dei ned humans as individualized and autonomous, the imperial project violently and paradoxically sought to “ make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in himself.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 248.

11 For connections between the realist expansive use of character and the political project of reform, see Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose , 6.

12 George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham (Oxford World’s Classics, 1996), xvii.

13 For a fuller version of this argument, see Caroline Levine, “Narrative Networks: Bleak House and the Affordances of Form,” Novel 42 (fall 2009), 517–23.

14 Luk á cs, Historical Novel , 45. See also Luk á cs, “Narrate or Describe,” in Writer and Critic , ed. Arthur D. Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 110–48.

15 Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformation of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

16 See Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

17 Amy M. King, “ Natural History and the Novel: Dilatoriness and Length and the Nineteenth-Century Novel of Everyday Life,” Novel 42 (Fall 2009), 460–68.

18 Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 11.

19 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton University Press, 1983), 18.

20 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 17.

21 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso, 1983), 26.

22 Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001), 126.

23 Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15.

24 J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968 ).

25 Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857), ed. Robin Gilmour (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), vol. iii , ch. 14.



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26 James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2005), 47. 27 Joseph I. Fradin, “Will and Society in Bleak House,” in PMLA 81 (March

1966): 95–109; Lisa Sternlieb, The Female Narrator in the British Novel: Hidden Agendas (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 78; and Alison Case, “Gender and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospective Distance in David Copperi eld and Bleak House ,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory , ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005): 312–21.

28 W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847), ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg (New York: Norton, 1994), ch. vi .

29 George Gissing, New Grub Street (London: Smith, Elder, 1891), ch. i . 30 Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Bront ë s (Houndmills:

Palgrave Macmillan, rev. edn., 2005), 32. 31 Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and

Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003 ).

32 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), The Second Epoch, ch. iii .

33 I elaborate this argument more fully in “An Anatomy of Suspense: The Pleasurable, Critical, Ethical, Erotic Middle of The Woman in White ,” in Narrative Middles , ed. Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011).

34 George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 191.

35 Frances Ferguson, “ Emma and the Impact of Form,” MLQ 61 (March 2000), 70.



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CAROLINE LEVINE Victorian realism - warwick.ac.uk · Victorian realism 85 or renew. But even when we coni ne ourselves to the restricted terrain of the Victorian novel, realism still