The Classic British Novel by Howard M. Harper,; Charles EdgeReview by: Andrew WrightNOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 1973), pp. 86-88Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345060 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 07:13

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to NOVEL: AForum on Fiction.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.81 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 07:13:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NOVELIFALL 1973

British Classics

HOWARD M. HARPER, JR., and CHARLES EDGE, eds., The Classic British Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), pp. 239, $10.

This is a collection of critical essays by twelve members of the English Department of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and, as might be expected from such a source, the book as a whole represents a high degree of competence and also lucidity. Two or three of the essays are extraordinarily good, some are merely routine; but all give evidence of responsible thinking about the novels under consideration. No particular approach is favored over any other-quite plainly, there is no party line at Chapel Hill. But there is nothing new-fangled in any of the essays, which deal variously in the history of ideas, biographical evidence, generic study, and linguistic analysis. The editors say, somewhat apologetically, that "we decided that if one dimension pre- dominates, it is the epistemological." So far as this observation can be understood by one reader it is neither more nor less applicable than such an observation would be about any collection of critical essays whatever.

There is one major failure in the collection, and for this the editors must take the responsibility that editors customarily take in such circumstances: a number of the essayists have not taken adequate account of the works of biography and criticism- and even primary sources as well-that might have helped them to test their hypo- theses, compare their arguments, and stake out such new ground as there might be. For the reader, such a failure must have a further consequence: unless he himself is familiar with the sources he cannot be certain how far the arguments being made in this volume are original, how far they are received opinion, how far they are eccentric, how far they are truisms. For instance, it is insufficiently responsible in an essay dealing with irony in Tom Jones published in 1972 to fail to mention Glenn Hatfield's brilliant treatment of that subject in a well-known book published four years ago. It is a pity that an essay on Sterne depending on some threadbare and dubious generalizations about the eighteenth century drawn from the Pelican Guide to English Literature should not have been strengthened by more catholic and direct experience of the

primary sources, and that a consideration of Sterne's response to Locke should not have taken account of Sigurd Burckhardt's "Tristram Shandy's Law of Gravity," published as long ago as 1961. It is too bad that the essay on Emma should not have contained reflections on Marvin Mudrick's arguments of two decades ago. And it is a

disagreeable surprise to find that George Eliot is discussed without mention of any of the criticism published in recent years. The Haight edition of the Letters is referred to, but not the biography (1968)-nor is the work of Barbara Hardy (1959), W. J. Harvey (1961), U. C. Knoepflmacher (1968), to mention only the most obvious examples.

So much being said, the collection can be read, or some of the essays can be read, with profit. Readers of Novel will want to know something of the arguments of these

essays, so that they can decide how far the book may be useful in particular re- searches. In the essay on Tom Jones, Thomas A. Stumpf begins by drawing, somewhat

86

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.81 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 07:13:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWSIBRITISH CLASSICS

crudely and breezily, the Richardson-Fielding contrast; he then asserts that Fielding's "unwillingness to enter the minds of his characters . . . could be called anti-psycholo- gism." In this connection there is mention, a touch scant, of Ian Watt. There is also a consideration of Fielding's irony which would, as I have indicated, have been the stronger if the author had consulted Glenn Hatfield on the subject. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. writes interestingly on the white bear out of the end of the fifth volume of Tristram Shandy-Walter Shandy's question, "-Did'st thou ever see a white bear?" to illustrate his point about the use of auxiliaries; but the generalizations about the intellectual climate in which the novel was written need further consideration. Among the best of the essays in the volume is, not surprisingly, that of Richard Harter Fogle on The Monk. It is a study of the plot, or rather plots, of this novel which-like Coleridge-Fogle finds praiseworthy, though-again like Coleridge-not altogether so. That is, he considers the novel as a whole and as a novel rather than as a portrait of Ambrosio or as a gothic fiction merely. Charles Edge considers Emma's metaphors of rulership in an essay that may be more valuable for undergraduates reading the novel for the first time than for specialists. C. Hugh Holman makes a manful and on the whole successful effort to rescue The Fortunes of Nigel from the neglect that it has suffered, even at the hands of Scott's admirers; it is a lucid and sensible intro- duction to that neglected masterpiece of historical fiction. Samuel G. Barnes treats the influence of Carlyle on David Copperfield, or, to put the matter in Professor Barnes's own terms, the exemplification of the Carlylean doctrine of work in that novel. He proposes that the doctrine of hero worship in David Copperfield is in the process of being assimilated into Dickens's own sense of humanitarianism. Fred D. Thomson, in "Politics and Society in Felix Holt," correctly assesses the degree and quality of Felix's radicalism, relating it to George Eliot's own life and opinions. Felix is a misfit, "believing in the abstract principle of progress broadcast by the Radicals yet holding with the Conservatives that the rate of institutional progress should never exceed that of human nature." In an essay on The Last Chronicle of Barset, William A. West begins defensively with a somewhat protracted review of the assumption that Trollope is second-rate, and he proposes-treating us, I fear, to Northrop Frye and the Mythos of Spring-that The Last Chronicle is comic; but the main argument of the essay is the perfectly sound one that the authorial presence is appropriate in comedy and that the sense of friendly intimacy established by Trollope is right. It is an essay of considerable merit. J. 0. Bailey's "Ancestral Voices in Jude the Obscure" is a wide- ranging and erudite consideration of the Hardy family background as it bears on Jude, a work which, despite Hardy, has always been taken to be autobiographical, correctly as Professor Bailey demonstrates with painstaking particularity. Dougald McMillan's "Nostromo: The Theology of Revolution" develops the argument that "the guilt and redemption which dominate the book are worked out specifically in terms of Christian myth and theology." As such it takes issue with such critics as Claire Rosenfield who have argued that the novel consists of two stories that do not sort well with each other. Weldon Thornton is the author of an essay that is called "James Joyce and the Power of the Word" in the table of contents and at the head of the chapter itself but which, in the running title, reads "World" for

87

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.81 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 07:13:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NOVELIFALL 1973

"Word." Joyce would have smiled. Thornton treads a path already familiar to readers of Joyce criticism, that relating to Joyce's conception of language. His argument, which runs counter to that of many of Joyce's readers, is anti-nominalistic. The volume concludes with a pair of essays by Howard M. Harper, Jr. on Women in Love and Mrs. Dalloway respectively. The Lawrence piece uses Fantasia of the Unconscious "not as a rationale for the novel, but rather as a gloss for it"; but- perhaps because there is so much Lawrence criticism about-it seems less important than the essay on Virginia Woolf, especially because Professor Harper considers the three Mrs. Dalloways, the first in The Voyage Out, the second in the story "Mrs.

Dalloway in Bond Street," and third in the novel which bears her name. ANDREW WRIGHT, University of California, San Diego

CALVIN BEDIENT, Architects of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 275, $7.50.

Calvin Bedient has written a dialogue of self and soul dressed as an historical chronicle. But the author is no chronicler: he is a polemicist, an architect who destroys or builds a literary reputation using a Nietzschean ethic of self as his touchstone. He stud- ies the works of George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster, the "supreme crea- tive consciences ... in English fiction," because, he says, they present the major ideals for the self, respectively "Christian and ascetic, pagan and mystical, Greek and individualistic," in the "post-Christian dispute over the best blueprint of human character."

Mr. Bedient's ideal is unashamedly modern. He sees Forster and Lawrence as total reactions to the Victorian ideal which was alienated from the body and so found its

"only refuge . . . outward, in the community." In his view Eliot, Shaw and Pater were united in advocating a selflessness which attempted to "abdicate the instinctual basis, the actual and necessary impurities, of our lives," while the modern conscience "sets its standards freely flying where . . . the life of the body becomes the road to the spirit. A new vision of wholeness and integration . . . overthrows a morality of suppression, exclusion, and denial." Among Victorians only J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold stood even partially against this monolithic affirmation of Victorian soul. And

only in Mill's On Liberty was individuality truly affirmed. Unfortunately this bare summary is capable of doing justice to Mr. Bedient's grasp

of Victorian ideas. To simplify is human: this iubercritick oversimplifies. Perhaps the most crucial error comes in missing the dialectical sense of self which most serious Victorians developed. Mill, for instance, argued in On Liberty that individuality is a virtue only because of its social utility. Arnold held self-perfection as an ideal, but an ideal impossible to achieve while ignoring society.

Malice is added to simplicity when Mr. Bedient spends seventy pages attacking George Eliot as a sacred cow whose products, Middlemarch excepted, are morally and

88

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.81 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 07:13:43 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions