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Indignant Reading Indignant Reading The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Goodman, Lesley Anne. 2013. Indignant Reading. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11051185 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 Indignant Reading A dissertation presented by Lesley Anne Goodman 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 May 2013 © 2013 Lesley Goodman All rights reserved Professor Leah Price Lesley Anne Goodman Professor Amanda Claybaugh Indignant Reading Abstract In 1871, R. H. Hutton criticized George Eliot for “unfairly running down one of her own characters”: Middlemarch’s Rosamond Vincy. Hutton blamed Eliot for being cruel to her own creation and used his role as a reader and a critic to lodge a public complaint on Rosamond’s behalf. Indignant Reading identifies this response—dissatisfaction and even anger with an author for his/her perceived mistreatment of a fictional character—as a common occasion for literary criticism in the nineteenth century. The indignant readings found in Victorian reviews, letters, and prefaces advance conceptions of plot, characterization, and fictionality distinct from those offered in modern narratological criticism or historicist accounts of Victorian novel practice or literary criticism. Rather than abstracting the aesthetic and ethical concerns from the emotional terms common to Victorian criticism, I see these concerns emerging in conjunction with serious emotional demands and significant, if sometimes inchoate, beliefs about the “rights” of fictional characters. In my discussion of indignation resulting from crimes of plot, I argue that insufficiently motivated events were interpreted by Victorian critics and readers as arising from the author rather than from the text. Discussions of crimes of characterization reveal an implicit tri-partite model of fictional character, in which authors might be incorrect about their own characters as well as cruel toward them. This manner of thinking about authorial accuracy and justice implies, I argue, a conception of fictionality that de-emphasizes the distinction between fiction and non- iii fiction, modeling the author’s relationship to his fiction on that of the historian to his text. This approach to fiction changes, however, in the twentieth century, alongside restrictive attitudes about the role of affect in performing literary criticism. While indignant reading re-enters the academy as one type of feminist criticism, which emphasizes the ethical at the expense of the affective, indignation in its most emotional form has become a primary mode of expression for fan communities. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Poetic Injustice 31 2 Out of Character 58 3 Fictionality in the Nineteenth Century 102 4 Reading Indignantly After the Victorians 169 Bibliography 209 v Acknowledgements There was a time when I did not think it was possible to write a dissertation on a subject like “indignant reading.” This project only came about due to the continuing encouragement of Elaine Scarry, who believed in it from its beginnings as a response paper to Jude the Obscure. I owe endless thanks to Leah Price, the reason I attended Harvard and one of many reasons I am glad I did. Asking Amanda Claybaugh to be on my committee was one of the best decisions I have ever made, and her insight into my work has been invaluable; she always asks the right questions—those I fear and need the most. My research at Harvard University has been supported by generous fellowships from the English Department as well as the Whiting Dissertation Completion fellowship. The dissertation could not have been written without the resources available through the Harvard University libraries and the assistance of Laura Farwell Blake and Gwen Urdang-Brown. I must also acknowledge the teachers and professors who guided me through high school and college: Anita Anderson, Mary Martin, and Susan Barrett from Richard Montgomery High School, and Betsy Bolton and Carolyn Lesjak from Swarthmore College. I am also grateful to the graduate community in the English department at Harvard University. The British Literature Colloquium has guided my work on too many occasions to count. Thanks as well to the members of DRAG (the Dissertation Research Advisory Group): Nick Donofrio, Maggie Gram, Liz Maynes-Aminzade, and Jesse Raber. Kristen Roupenian has spent far too much time reading drafts and listening to me talk about my research, and for that, I will always be indebted to her. Thanks to my father, Fred Goodman, who never stopped encouraging me to read, and to my sister, Carly Goodman, who liked English first, and to Andrew Jacobs, for Keeland and more. And finally, I’d like to thank Lauren Ullrich, the most indignant reader I know. vi Indignant Reading: An Introduction There are two things almost everybody knows about the death of Little Nell. The first is that crowds gathered at the docks in America, eagerly awaiting news of Little Nell’s fate in the next installment of The Old Curiosity Shop; the second is Oscar Wilde’s aphorism: “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”1 Little Nell has been a problem for literary critics. Few twentieth-century critics seem to think either the character or her death is aesthetically admirable, and they seem to be mystified by the fact that people used to think either was good. As George Ford pointed out in 1955, “It is notable that we can read with pleasure what Dickens’ contemporaries said of David Copperfield, but what they said of Little Nell fills us with astonishment or even a kind of embarrassment.”2 Within a period of one hundred years, Nell went from being compared to King Lear’s Cordelia to becoming a source of shame to admirers of Dickens. For a long time, the question seemed to be: how can we excuse Dickens—and his readers—for Little Nell? Scholars have attempted to explain what they perceived as the failure of Little Nell through psychological and biographical analysis, making much of the ways in which Dickens’ own closeness to Nell, through her supposed real-life counterpart, Mary Hogarth, obstructed his 3 4 artistic vision. They have read Nell as allegory, fairy tale, or fable. In 1959, Mark Spilka 1 Violet Wyndham, The Sphinx and Her Circle: A Biographical Sketch of Ada Leverson, 1862-1933 (London: Andre Deutsch, Limited, 1963), 119. 2 George H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel-Criticism Since 1836 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 55. 3 Adriana LaPointe, “Little Nell Once More: Absent Fathers in The Old Curiosity Shop,” Dickens Studies Annual 18 (1989): 19-38. 1 attempted to “isolate a defect in the author’s sensibility and to indicate… a similar defect in his nineteenth-century readers.”5 For Spilka, the changing tides of taste—one common explanation for the Little Nell phenomenon—are not sufficiently explanatory; he suggests instead that “the quality of Victorian sentiment seems neurotic… the lavish flow of tears, over Nell and her counterparts, was a form of cultural neurosis in the audience.” Writing in 1967, Lawrence Selenick also turns to “neurosis”: “This wholesale mourning for a fictional maiden strikes us as irrational; a genuine cathartic release is not astonishing, but we are baffled by the seeming inadequacy of the cause of catharsis.”6 F. R. Leavis similarly finds an inexplicable disjunction between Little Nell as depicted and the response: “to suggest taking Little Nell seriously would be absurd; there’s nothing there. She doesn’t derive from any perception of the real; she’s a contrived unreality.”7 More recent critics are less likely to insist that readers’ reactions, being aesthetically unmotivated, are thereby inexplicable. We are perhaps more comfortable with historical- aesthetic relativism; we can, as Ford suggested, “shift part of the responsibility from Dickens to the age itself.”8 Sentimentalism is no longer an accusation but, at least in part, an explanation. I am not convinced, however, that the strong reaction to Nell’s death is truly surprising or inexplicable; the history of aesthetic response is also the history of extreme emotional response. I do not intend, in this introduction, to offer an analysis of Nell’s death or the reaction to it; that will have to wait until my first chapter. Instead, I am interested in what we talk about 4 Lawrence Selenick, “Little Nell and the Prurience of Sentimentality,” Dickens Studies 3 (1967): 146-159. 5 Mark Spilka, “Little Nell Revisited,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 45 (1960). 6 Selenick, 151. 7 F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 225. 8 Ford, 68. 2 when we talk about Little Nell. Critics tell the story of Little Nell, which is actually the story of American readers at the docks and Oscar Wilde sneering at them, for the same reasons we tell the story of the apocryphal readers of Pamela who rang wedding-bells to honor Pamela’s marriage to Mr. B.9: they construct a reader we like to imagine as other. Wilde’s quip, though meant to be shocking, secures us in our understanding of Victorian readers as the very definition of uncritical readers: lacking taste, reading only for the indulgence of emotions, unclear about the line between fiction and reality.10 Wilde sanctions our judgment.11 The story of Little Nell is the story of uncritical readers and our distance from them.
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