The British and American 19th century Novel

The British and American 19th century Novel.

The next course presents the cultural and intellectual background of the 19th century

British (Victorian) and American novel. The recurrent features of the two variants are

comparatively considered, as well as their relation to previous narrative forms/

types/techniques. The dominant modes (realism vs. romance) are illustrated taking into

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account the major literary works of the period as well as modern critical

assumptions.

Conventionally, the British 19th century novel is also called the Victorian novel. The

Victorian age overlaps with the reign of Queen Victoria, from her coronation, in 1837, to her

death, in 1901. From a geopolitical point of view, it stands for the age of the British empire

which occupied then one third of the world. Britain's geopolitical power in the 19th century was

a consequence of its being the first industrialized country in the world, due to the scientific

and technological progress it had been involved in since the end of the 18th century.

Urbanization changed the countryside, with the displacement of the rural population: this was

reflected in literature by the nostalgic rememberance of the rural past in many Victorian

novels.

From a sociological point of view, the dominant middle-class ethics of progress

involved materialistic optimism but also excessive pragmatism and mercantilism. Moral duty

remained an imperative with most people, whether it be supported by self-interest or Christian

principles. But it also involved cultural ambition, an urge of the middle classes for instruction;

culture will be used as a public service, with a didactic purpose. The Victorian state was

essentially considered as being liberal, non-interventionist, however, the liberal legislation was

considered as impoverishing or oppressive towards the working class. This led to a social

unrest, requiring the adoption of a number of Reform Bills which enfranchised the man of

property but also meant the modernization of British society. The acts passed in their favour

were partly due to the works of the novelists of the day who revealed the harsh existence of

children as well as the cruel methods of education.

In the mid-Victorian epoch, there was no national educational system and little

provision for the secondary education of girls. However, the Victorians managed to increase

the participation of masses to the phenomenon of culture. They demanded universal primary

education and the inclusion of modern sciences and languages in the curriculum. The

movement for the emancipation of women became more accentuated in the last thirty years of

the Victorian age (J.S. Mill wrote The Subjection of Women in 1869, supporting their social

and professional emancipation, providing an impetus to the feminist movement of his time).

The Victorian Age can be considered modern in so far as it included generalised mass

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literacy and the modernization of education as well as quality journalism reflected in the wide

circulation of prestigious magazines. One monthly issue of a literary periodical would contain

scientific or general critical essays, poetry and serialised fiction. Among the effects of the

Victorian sense of a useful culture is the didactic tone of Victorianism, adapted to the

utilitarian view of culture as a gain from the "greatest happiness of the greatest numbers "

standpoint.

We should also focus on man's position in the universe during the Victorian age in order to

understand Victorianism. The orthodox puritanism of the average man was an uncritical

ethically religious doctrine that pragmatically invoked Biblical spirituality to support the ascent

of the imperial, most civilized nation. Utilitarianism, the specific Victorian ideology

corresponding to this social component, was based on the 1776 treaty The Wealth of Nations,

written by the Scottish economist Adam Smith and it assumed that progress of civilization

should be associated to increasing national wealth. But the other component of the

Victorian cultural background was less optimistic, implying secularism, rationalism based on

the study of science and its revelations. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859)

challenged the Victorian perception upon life and old explanations in the field of biology or

geology. The evolutionary theory led to the questioning of man's role and importance in the

world and influenced the doctrines of important novelists, such as George Eliot or Thomas

Hardy.

The Victorian reading public firmly established the novel as the dominant literary

form of the era. The outstanding characteristics of the Victorian novel were:

a) The English novel originated as a middle-class genre, and it was the logical reading matter

for the 19th century bourgeoisie

b) Unburdened by tradition or status, the novel was flexible, and hence adaptable to the

portrayal of the multitude of changing situations in Victorian life

c) Escapism had become a psychological necessity to an era troubled by chaotic

industrialism.

d) Realism was the justification for the conscious reader as escapism was the actual satisfier of

his unconscious needs. Victorian novelists appealed to their audience with the appearance of the

real world.

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e) The earnest Victorians sought and found in contemporary novels instruction for living amid

great complexity and change.

f) The novel assumed for the 19th century the mission fulfilled in earlier eras by the epic:

formulation of the "myth" of the age.

The outstanding characteristics of the Victorian novel were:

a) Acceptance of middle-class ethics and morals. The "good" characters conform to

principles of bourgeois orthodoxy and are properly rewarded.

b) Social orientation. The major human problem treated by the Victorian novelists is the

adjustment of the individual to his society.

c) Emphasis upon characters. The Victorian novelists strove to produce fascinating

characters who resembled people their readers knew or would like to know. Most characters

were middle class, in middle class setttings, and with the typical middle-class preoccupations,

even in "historical" novels. Their complexity was almost wholly emotional. Lower class

figures were usually subordinate, treated patronizingly.

d) The hero. The central figure, though proving human weakness, is moulded to the Victorian

ideal of the rational man of virtue. Human nature is believed to be fundamentally good and

deviations from the bourgeois code are errors of immature judgement to be corrected when

becoming mature.

David Lodge shows that the Victorian novel is a synthesis of pre-existing narrative

traditions (the comic vein of Henry Fielding's narratives, Richardson's sentimental/didactic or

Clara Reeve's Gothic/romantic) rather than a continuation of one of them or an entirely new

literary phenomenon and underlines the fact that the dominant mode, the synthesising element

is realism (in the tradition of D.Defoe). The novel appeared as a reaction against miraculous

tales and stories of chivalrous deeds, its essence being the parody of so-called elevated genres

and the expression of the truth of everyday life.

Discussing the nature of the novelistic discourse as it was established in the Victorian epoch,

Henry James argues in his "Art of Fiction" that

"the air of reality -the solidity of specification seems to me to be the supreme virtue of

a novel - the merit on which all the other merits (including the conscious, moral one)

helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and if

these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced

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the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process

form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist. They are his

inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, his delight. It is here, in very truth, that

he competes with life; it is here that he competes with the painter in his attempt to

render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the

relief, the expression, the surface and the substance of the human spectacle. All life

solicits him, and t o render the simplest surface, to produce the most momentary

illusion, is a very complicated business".

18th century novelists had also used techniques of travel stories, biographies, diaries,

historical writings. The idea was that the novel must adhere to truth and probability. The

history of the novelistic genre reflects the oscillation between two tendencies, represented by

the realistic vein and the romance, the latter being illustrated in medieval English literature by

the legends of King Arthur, collected by Sir Thomas Mallory in his Morte d'Arthur (1485).

Clara Reeve, a Gothic and sentimentalist novelist of the later half of the 18th century,

stated the difference between the two genres in an often quoted fragment introductory to

her fiction (in the 18th century, the meaning of the word Gothic pointed to the wild, barbarous

and crude; the fashion of the Gothic novel reached its highest limit in the 1790s and the early

years of the 19th century - they were tales of the macabre, fantastic and supernatural, usually

set amid haunted castles, graveyards, ruins, wild picturesque landscapes):

"The Novel is a picture of real life and manners and of the times in which it was

written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language describes what never happened

nor is likely to happen. The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every

day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the

perfection of it is to present every scene, in so easy and natural a manner and to make

them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are

reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses of the persons in

the story, as if they were our own.".

It follows that the romance is oriented towards mythic, allegorical or symbolic forms, being

less committed to the immediate and faithful reflection of reality than the novel. The

American 19th century novelist N. Hawthorne declares in his preface to The House of the

Seven Gables, that the novel "aims at a minute fidelity not merely to the possible, but to the

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probable and ordinary course of man's experience" whereas " when a writer calls his work a

romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its

fashion and material, which he wouldn't have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed

to be writing a novel [. ] The romance - while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself

to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the

human heart, has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances to a great extent, of

the writer's own choosing or creation. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate

use of the priviliges here stated, and, especially, to mingle the Marvellous rather as a slight,

delicate and evanescent flavour, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish

offered to the public.

In British literature, Charlotte Brontė's (1816-1855) fiction might be estimated in terms

of the predominance of the romance within the novel form, of the romantic heritage which

involves exaltation of the faculty of feeling and imagination, an intense dramatism, lyricism.

Her novel Jane Eyre is the story of a search for identity in the Victorian environment. The

novel is a blend of Realism (the harsh living conditions of the ill-favoured classes) and romance

elements (Gothic characters and landscapes). Formally regarded, it is a realism of sensibility,

not quite a common mimetism of existence, but a subjective transcription of experience. Emily

Brontė(1818-1848) dramatizes in Wuthering Heights what Freud calls the id (hidden, most

obscure part of the human personality), embodied in her main characters, in Heathcliff and to a

certain degree in Catherine, as "the secret well-spring of vitality". It is a novel based on an

opposition between, on the one hand, the elemental and on the other hand, the socially tamed

nature. We could recognise here a Victorian opposition between Carlylean vitalism with its

emotional excesses and utilitarianism with its moderation. The novel has a romantic tinge,

mixing reality (Victorian authenticity) with an archetypal/elemental nature that reaches into the

fabulous realms of imagination. The presence of the two narrators is a device used for the

integration of a mythical story into a realistic environment.

Victorian witers are conventionally divided as the first and the second generation of

novelists, according to the main features relevant to their works. The first generation is

represented by W.M.Thackeray, Ch. Dickens, Elisabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, the Brontė

sisters and George Eliot. These writers were confident in progress and the moral improvement

of the individual. The second generation, represented by Samuel Butler, George Meredith,

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Thomas Hardy, turned against Victorian orthodoxy as pessimism and satire appeared in their

fiction. They marked the transition to modernism, being influenced by European literature

and philosophy.

Therefore, realism marked the need of cultivating truth in art, be it social, economic

or individual and of a minute documentation undertaken by the writer seen as a man of science.

George Eliot discussed in one of her Essays the nature of truth as a key concept. Henry

Lewes, an influential critic of the age, also believed that "realism is the basis of all Art, and its

antithesis is not Idealism, but Falsism". W.M. Thackeray wrote parodies and burlesques of

romantic historical novels, assessing in his introduction to Pendennis:" I ask you to believe that

this person writing strives to tell the truth. If there is not that, there is nothing".Thus the

province of the novel was extended to include the ordinary, the humble, the lower classes. The

genre gained a more elevated status, becoming a debate on the urgent matters of the day. In

Oliver Twist, Dickens professed that he adopted this principle in the name of the truth

(although Northrop Frye believes that Dickens's novels - undeniably stamped by realism -

are nevertheless "fairy tales in the low-mimetic displacement").

Publication of novels in monthly installments enabled the poor to purchase their

novels. The part-issue form of publication and the periodical novel increased the role of

suspense as the solution to the previous crisis was expected. This manner of publication created

a close connection between reader-author. However, writing in installments might have proved

damaging to the unity of the novel since the author had to cope with the demands of

serialization.

But Realism appears to the 20th century critic as a mere convention according to which

the novel strives to constitute an authentic report of human experience. Does a realist text

proper actually exist? The novel is obviously an artefact and there cannot be an absolute

objectivity. However, for the Victorians, realism implied the relationship reality-fiction, not

that between teller and his tale. The audience had a complete trust in the narrator, sharing the

same values. Realists took nevertheless many elements from romance, such as Dickens's

romantic treatment of characters within realistic settings (used in many of his bestsellers)

or the Brontės' use of Gothicism.

Northrop Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism" may be used for analysing Victorian fiction, as

its first essay structures literature typologically into modes: 1- the divine, mythical mode: gods,

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2- the mode of romance, centered on demigods, heroes in extraordinary circumstances 3- the

high mimetic mode- human heroes endowed with exceptional features, functioning in natural

circumstances, 4- the low-mimetic mode, characters whose status is of ordinary human beings

in recognisable social environments, 5- the ironic mode, man looked down from a satirical

perspective. In Frye's opinion, Victorian literature combines the low-mimetic mode of realism

proper with some traces of high-mimetic, romance or the serious, ironic mode perspective.

What the structuralist critic Hillis Miller identifies as the original point for the Victorian

character, his painful separation/alienation of the community in order to become re-integrated

at the end of the novel corresponds to Frye's characterization of low-mimetic literature as a a

sort of comedy in which the new order is triumphantly installed at the end. The predictable

narrative plots have been read by N.Frye as archetypal manifestations of romance analysed as

the mythos of summer in his third essay. A "quest myth" is central to romance, following the

sequence of the agon, the pathos and the recognition/anagnorisis. In romance, situations are

often symbolic, exemplary or representative from a general or typological point of view.

Characters are fairy-tale like, demons, dragons, angels. The Victorian novel oscillates between

comic forms at the beginning of the age (Dickens, Thackeray), forms belonging to the tradition

of the high-mimetic (George Eliot), or mythically ironical (Thomas Hardy).

Nevertheless it may be hard to draw a line between the novel proper (the realistic

mode) and the romance (fanciful fiction). Richard Chase shows in his study The American

Novel and its Tradition that American fiction of the same age has defined itself by

incorporating an element of romance. This tradition,"inevitably springing from England" has a

native quality that tends to differ from the English tradition "by its perpetual reassessment and

reconstitution of romance within the novel form".

In order to estimate the distinctly American quality of the literature produced in the

United States in the nineteenth century, one should take into account the relation in which it

stands to the British tradition. In the first half of the nineteenth century, America, an

independent political state since 1776, was increasingly gaining ground for the full assertion of

a national cultural consciousness. American culture reached this point at a time when the

Romantic movement still dominated Europe. In R.Spiller's words, "the even more ardent

nationalism that Romanticism assumed" came to the United States at the moment of an

awakening national consciousness. However, American literature has its roots in the English

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tradition. Spenser, Bunyan, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Pope have all been assimilated by

American literature. The Pilgrim's Progress should be viewed as a "determining link" between

English and American literature.

The intellectual pattern of New England included, alongside Puritanism, reform

movements such as Abolitionism and Transcendentalism (a philosophic movement started by

Emerson which implied a strong belief in individual self-reliance, initiating a revolt against

the Puritan inheritance). Inspired by English Romanticism and German idealism, it

acknowledged God's benevolence as the sole characteristic of the Supreme Being, laying

emphasis on the importance of the freshness of perception opposed to cultivation of the past .

As for the writers of the period, they were drawn to romance rather than the novel proper.

This narrative tradition appeared to be better suited for the type of investigation that

preoccupied them and also to the interest which they took in the self.

It is the solitary individual that stands at the centre of such writings as The Scarlet Letter

or Moby Dick. By compelling the indidual to take the course of self-scrutiny, American fiction

evolved as an investigation of metaphysical, psychological and moral nature as against the

analysis of manners and morals that informs an important tradition of the English novel (but

this distiction is not so sharp if we take into consideration Wuthering Heights, considered as an

example of pure romance within the English novel). The typical American form signifies an

assumed freedom from the ordinary novelistic requirements of verisimilitude, development

and continuity, a tendency towards melodrama and idyll, a tendency to plunge into the

underside of consciousness.

However, the best American novelists, among whom Hawthorne and Melville hold a

prominent place, have found uses for romance far beyond the fantasy and sentimentality often

associated with it. They have used it to introduce into the novel the introspection of

Puritanism as well as the imaginative freedom of Transcendentalism. In their opinion, the

power of romance lies in the ability to express dark and complex truths unavailable to

realism. As R.Chase also stated, the "history of the American novel is not only the history of

the rise of realism, but also of the repeated rediscovery of the uses of romance". This

tradition is major in the history of the American novel, but minor in the history of the English

novel. If the classic English novel is preoccupied with "the illusion of life" and "solidity of

specification", "the continuity of events and the characters' sense of events", to use Henry

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James's terms, the Americans have a marked preference for symbolism. It allows them to

formulate moral truths of universal validity.

Homework

1.Why is Victorian fiction considered to be a blend of realism and romance?

2.What is the relationship author-reader and its impact on the fictional narrative in the Victorian

age?

3. American literature and its relation to the British tradition.