Counterfactual Plotting in the Victorian Novel

Narrative and Its Non- Events: Counterfactual Plotting in the Victorian Novel The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Glatt, Carra. 2016. Narrative and Its Non-Events: Counterfactual Plotting in the Victorian Novel. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493430 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Narrative and its Non-Events: Counterfactual Plotting in the Victorian Novel A dissertation presented by Carra Glatt to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English Harvard University Cambridge Massachusetts April 2016 © 2016 Carra Glatt All rights reserved Dissertation Advisor: Elaine Scarry Carra Glatt Narrative and its Non-Events: Counterfactual Plotting in the Victorian Novel Abstract This dissertation examines the role of several types of counterfactual plots in both defining and challenging the borders of nineteenth-century realist fiction. Using texts by Dickens, James, Gaskell and Hardy, I argue for the narrative significance of “active” plot possibilities that, while finally jettisoned by the ascendancy of a triumphant rival, exert an enduring influence on the novels that evoke and discard them. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………. iii Chapter One: The Non-Existent, the Fictional, and the Counterfactual ………………………1 Chapter Two: Seeing Shadows: The Alternative Plots of Dickensian Realism ……………….34 Chapter Three: Lifting the Veil: Horror by Proxy in the Sensation Novel ………………….....73 Chapter Four: A 'Thing Quite Other than Itself’: Henry James and the Proxy Narrative……...107 Chapter Five: Fancying the Delight: Hypothetical Realism in The Woodlanders and Mary Barton…………………………………………………………………………………………. 142 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….183 iv Chapter One: The Non-Existent, the Fictional, and the Counterfactual This dissertation is about what does not happen in the Victorian novel. The description sounds absurd; the set of events that do not occur in the Victorian novel is infinite, comprising everything from the Second World War to the murder of Dorothea Brooke to the plots of every novel written before 1837 or after 1901. Yet consideration of alternatives to a given state of affairs is crucial to our understanding of a novel. At the beginning of a novel, anything is theoretically possible. By its end, every sequence of events, save one, will have been rendered counterfactual. Plot emerges out of the gradual elimination of possibilities, from the revelation, on the first page of a work, that we are in nineteenth-century London and not sixteenth-century Paris to the final disclosure that the hero's comic sidekick has settled down with Betty the barmaid and not Susan the seamstress. The vast majority of the counterfactuals produced in this process are trivial. If a character goes to a dinner-party on a Tuesday, technically, a version of the novel in which the event were held on a Wednesday would constitute a counterfactual plot, even though no meaningful change would have taken place. On the other end of the probability spectrum, most alternatives to an actual plot are simply not worth contemplating. One might suspend disbelief enough to accept that an Englishman named Jonathan Harker lives in a world populated by blood-sucking fiends, once informed of this fact, but only sufficiently ominous telegraphing by the text allows a reader of Dracula rationally to expect it. Similarly, while a reader might plausibly wonder whether Jane Eyre will wind up shunning romantic marriage for a life of religious vocation, it is probable that no reader, at least until the present moment, has imagined an alternative in which Jane becomes an acrobat in a traveling circus. Even superficially more reasonable possibilities will often be beyond the scope of consideration for any reader possessing the slightest familiarity with the conventions of narrative; we do not believe that there is any serious risk of Elizabeth Bennet 2 either marrying Collins or remaining single, although both outcomes would be far more likely for a woman of her social position than marriage to one of the richest men in England. Other counterfactual possibilities, by contrast, are vital to the dynamics of a narrative. Sometimes, a text introduces such possibilities directly. As Angel Clare prepares to cast his wife out, the narrator of Tess of the D'Urbervilles expresses the space between reconciliation and tragedy in a brutal quirk of grammar: “If Tess had been artful, had she made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically.... he would probably not have withstood her. But...the many effective chords which she could have stirred by an appeal were left untouched” (253).i Only present-tense tears will do; the conditional can taunt us, but not influence Angel. Other potential outcomes may be embedded implicitly in the design of a narrative. The same readerly instincts that warn us away from considering the murder of Dorothea Brooke might mislead us into initially anticipating that our heroine will marry, not Ladislaw but Lydgate. Structurally equivalent, Dorothea and Lydgate, the principal female and male protagonists of Middlemarch, are also more obviously suited to one another than Dorothea is to Ladislaw, whose vaunted reformist zeal is as liable as not to collapse into mere petulance or peter out into dilettantism. It is easy enough to imagine a version of Middlemarch in which Dorothea and Lydgate, saved from early romantic folly by the timely deaths of their unsuitable partners, find happiness in pursuing a shared but now wisely tempered concern for the public good. But none of this, of course, happens. Lydgate dies in middle-age after being forced to give up his ambitions toward medical reform at the joint urging of his wallet and his wife. Dorothea fares better in what appears to be a perfectly happy marriage to Will, whose wife's influence (and money) leads him finally to commit himself to a career as “an ardent public man” (792). Yet the inescapable force of what might have been shapes our response to the novel. 3 Lydgate's belated discovery of a woman who could in fact have been the partner and helpmeet he so needs underscores the magnitude of his mistake. In Dorothea's case, the effect of the counterfactual is subtler, but perhaps more striking. Dorothea's fate could be mistaken for the conventional happiness of the marriage plot as she settles down to marriage, motherhood, and a life of quiet usefulness. The novel's own awareness of alternatives to this life, however, complicates the final tableau. Most obvious in its portrayal of Dorothea as a thwarted Saint Theresa, the sense of compromise inherent in the narrowing of Dorothea's ambitions is underscored by her marriage to a man who, for all his merits, may not represent the best of all possible husbands. Deselected, but far from insubstantial, the counterfactual thus lives on to inform and challenge its triumphant opponent. This project is itself informed by two primary questions: what features of a text create significant, or what I call active, counterfactual plots, and how do those plots shape our reading of the text as written? Later in this chapter, I will suggest some preliminary answers to these questions, and make a case for the particular relevance of the counterfactual plot to the study of the Victorian novel. First, however, I will consider prior attempts to answer the more fundamental question of whether and how to assign value to the unreal at all. Theoretically, that which does not exist should lie beyond the realm of practical consideration. Yet a tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship reflects a prevailing sense that not all fictions are created equal. Among all that never was, we find a broad category of imaginable things characterized by an obstinate refusal to be stopped by a small matter like their own lack of it. Into the Jungle A woman dreams of a golden mountain. When she wakes, the image stays with her so vividly that she searches her memory for its source – a place she had been once, long ago, or maybe only 4 a picture she had seen and never quite forgotten. If a photographer captured the Grand Canyon or Kilamanjaro in just the right light, she thinks, he might produce something like that, but when she looks through a set of pictures of the two places, there is nothing in the layered plateaus of the one or the snow-capped heights of the other to compare with the mountain of her dream. Continuing her search, she finds an image of what could, perhaps, be called a golden mountain, but it is not her mountain, she can tell at once, though she cannot immediately say, as morning passes into afternoon and the dream becomes more distant, what distinguishes the two. The shade of the gold, she supposes, or perhaps the steepness of the ascent. But no, she suddenly recalls, it is more than that: as she approached the mountain, the horse she rode, she can remember clearly now, had wings, and the path they took was paved with bricks cut, impossibly, into square circles, for the mountain is not in the Sahara, or New South Wales, or the American Southwest. It is in Meinong's jungle, the realm of non-existent things. Meinong's jungle is a concept named, somewhat disparagingly, after the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong (1853-1920), best remembered for his work on the ontology of the unreal. His Theory of Objects takes on the problem of intentional objects – objects produced by human thought that may or may not refer to an actual entity in the real world.ii The mental contemplation of one's cat, just out of sight in the next room, forms an intentional object, but so too does the mental contemplation of a Cheshire Cat, an entirely imaginary creature.

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