Butler, Hardy, Galsworthy, Bennett And
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BUTLER, HARDY, GALSWORTHY, BENNETT AND D. H. LAWRENCE AS WRITERS OF THE FAMILY CHRONICLE NOVEL: A STUDY OF TWO GENERATIONS OF POSSIBILITIES OF THE FORM LANA SLMPSON A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of The Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA September, 1971 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada Date ABSTRACT The English family chronicle novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It occurred as a reflection of the controversies of nineteenth-century natural science over evolutionary development—directly, in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, and indirectly, as English novelists felt the influence of French naturalism. Because the emergence of the family chronicle novel is so closely bound up with naturalism, nowhere can we more clearly see the reaction to naturalism worked out than in the Victorian and Edwardian family chronicles. Very often, to understand the way in which a given novel is a family chronicle—that is, how the author has used the form for his own purposes—is to define the author's stance toward naturalism. In this thesis, I examine works of five chronicle writers—Butler, Hardy, Galsworthy, Bennett, and Lawrence— and argue that a measure of the success of the works as family chronicles is the degree to which the artists succeed in overcoming the inherent limitations of the naturalist convention, even as they used the form bequeathed by it. I suggest that D. H. Lawrence*', s The Rainbow is the most interesting of these family chronicles because he has used aspects of the art of Butler and Hardy, in order to create in opposition to Bennett and Galsworthy. He works with the underlying concerns of naturalism in order to transform them into a passionate denial of the determinist attitude implicit in naturalism. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I .... 1 Chapter II . ... Id Chapter III .... 33 Chapter IV .... 63 Chapter V . ... SO Chapter VI .... 122 Chapter VII .... 144 Historical Footnote .... 177 Bibliography .... l&O CHAPTER I The family chronicle is a way of recounting experience that is probably as old as men's desire to understand their own lives in relation to the immediate past. Aeschylus and Sophocles fashioned tragedies within the terms of the histories of families; the writers of the Old Testament recounted their history as a series of family chronicles; Shakespeare not only gave an account of historical events in his chronicle plays, but made the form serve as a com• plex realization of such abstractions as the notion of kingship. The usefulness of the family chronicle structure to the novelist who wants to give imaginative ordering to social history is obvious. It allows for a patterning of events so as to explain the characteristics of succeeding genera• tions in terms of the first; the success or failure of the characters at social and individual fulfillment may be either explicitly measured or implicitly revealed through the juxta• position of generations. The author's emphasis, of course, may fall in any one of several directions. He may stress the way the social fortunes of a family rise or decline, or the progress toward a personal fulfillment which is less contingent upon social forces than upon inherited personal 2 - characteristics. At its best, the family chronicle allows for a complex portrayal of that perennial concern of the realist novel, the interaction of individual fulfillment and general social conditions. Nevertheless, the English family chronicle novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It occurred as a reflec• tion of the controversies of nineteenth-century natural science over evolutionary development—directly, in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, and indirectly, as English novelists felt the influence of French naturalism. Naturalism—"realism with scientific pretensions," as it has been defined—was the literary movement which most thoroughly expressed the prevailing confidence in the methods and use• fulness of contemporary science. By and large, naturalism remained an alien influence in English literature; it never became indigenous, even though its influence upon English writers—who, after all, had to come to terms with the same issues that provoked naturalism in France—was enormous. We have few thoroughly naturalist novels in English, and those that we do have—for example, George Moore's The Mummer's Wife—are carefully and consciously created after French models. Naturalism remained a strain in English realism which was either an emulation (perfectly successful, in Arnold Bennett's Ricevman Steps) of the artistic successes of French naturalism, or equally deliberate transformation, modification, or reaction to the French sources. Precisely because the emergence of the family chronicle novel is so closely bound up with naturalism, nowhere can we more clearly see the reaction to naturalism worked out than in the Victorian and Edwardian family chronicles. Very often, to understand the way in which a given novel is a family chronicle—that is, how the author has used the form for his own purposes—is to define the author's stance toward naturalism. In this thesis, I shall examine works of five chronicle writers—Butler, Hardy,' Galsworthy, Bennett, and D. H. Lawrence—and argue that a measure of the success of the works as family chronicles is the degree to which the artists succeed in overcoming the inherent limitations of the naturalist convention, even as they use the form bequeathed by it. To its chief theoretician, naturalism was as undebatable as a natural force—indeed, was the literary product of evolution. In Le roman experimentalT Zola confidently asserted: ...the experimental novel is a consequence of the scientific evolution of the century; it continues and completes physiology, which itself leans for support on chemistry and medicine; it substitutes for the study of the abstract and metaphysical man the study of the natural man, governed by physical and chemical laws, and modified - 4 - by the influences of his surroundings; it is in one word the literature of our scientific age, as the classical and romantic literature corresponded to a scholastic and theological age.-^ This manifesto of French naturalism expresses a confidence not only in the general direction of contemporary science, but in its direct benefits to mankind, which is unusual in its optimism even for its time: We shall enter upon a century in which man, grown more powerful, will make use of nature and will utilize its laws to produce upon the earth the greatest possible amount of justice and freedom. There is no nobler, higher, nor grander end. Here is our role as intelligent beings: to penetrate to the wherefore of things, to become superior to these things, and to reduce them to a condition of subservient machinery. Well, this dream of the physiologist and the experimental doctor is also that of the novelist, who employs the experi• mental method in his study of man as a simple individual and as a social animal. Their object is ours; we also desire to master certain phenomena of an intellec• tual and personal order, to be able to direct them. We are, in a word, experi• mental moralists, showing by experiment in what way a passion acts in a certain social condition. The day in which we gain control of the mechanism of this passion we can treat it and reduce it, or at least make it as inoffensive as possible. And in this consists the practical utility and high morality of our naturalistic works, which experiment on man, and which dissect piece by piece this human machinery in order to set it going through the influence of the en• vironment. When things had advanced 5 - further, when we are in possession of the different laws, it will only be necessary to work upon the individuals and surroundings if we wish to find the best social condition. In this way we shall construct a practical sociology, and our work will be a help to political and economical sciences. I do not know, I repeat, of a more noble work, nor of a grander application. To be the master of good and evil, to regulate life, to regulate society, to solve in time all the problems of socialism, above all, to give justice a solid foundation by solving through experiment the questions of criminality—is not this being the most useful and the most moral workers in the human workshop?2 Zola's view of the social function of the novelist the naturalist novelist, that is—may seem somewhat grandiose. Nevertheless, it is not without precedent in its belief in the enormous social importance of the work of a conscientious realist novelist; it builds upon Balzac's Preface to La comedie humaine: Thus Walter Scott raised to the dignity of the philosophy of History the litera• ture which, from age to age, sets peren• nial gems in the poetic crown of every nation where letters are cultivated. He vivified it with the spirit of the past; he combined drama, dialogue, portrait, scenery, and description; he fused the marvellous with truth—the two elements of the times; and he brought poetry into close contact with the familiarity of the humblest speech.