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Social Science and the Realist Novel's Turn to Character Social Science and the Realist Novel’s Turn to Character The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:39947184 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 Social Science and the Realist Novel’s Turn to Character A dissertation presented by Rachel Michelle Stern to The Department of English in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts August 2018 © 2018 Rachel Michelle Stern. All rights reserved. ! Dissertation Advisor: Professor Leah Price Rachel Michelle Stern Social Science and the Realist Novel’s Turn to Character Abstract From Marxist criticism to network theory, literary scholarship conceives of social representation in the realist novel as a function of narrative scope. In this reading, novelists illustrate our existence within a social body by forging unexpected narrative connections among seemingly disparate characters, across a wide range of socio-economic classes. My dissertation traces the rise of an alternative form of social representation in the realist novel, the representation of a society through an individual character who is its product. In mid-Victorian realism, character is increasingly figured as a static constellation of predeliberative affects, tendencies, and motives, while narrative, no longer a successful vehicle for an individuals’-eye-view synthesis of events, becomes increasingly fragmentary. My project traces this new formulation of character to the introduction of positivist social empiricism into novelistic practices of representation. The resulting category of positivist literary realism marks a new stage in both technologies of literary representation and cultural interpretation of social scientific epistemology. Although positivism advances a sweeping diachronic narrative of social progress, its empiricist paradigm emphasizes the representative power of self-contained, particular social observations. In the novel, these become observations of character. Per Harriet Martineau, we are to read particular characters as representing the unfolding of general social laws under a particular set of circumstances. But in the fiction of Charles Dickens, John Henry Newman, and George Eliot, treating individual character as self-contained product of social forces ultimately points to the unknowability of the process that shaped that character. John Stuart Mill tries and iii ! ! fails to reconcile this empiricist understanding of character with a more narratively integrated account of character development. Under these circumstances, narrative loses its putative realist function of connecting cause and effect. Instead, realist fiction recognizes the isolation and determination of character by conceptualizing social forces as operating within the mind of the individual. Positivist realism moves the novel toward a structure that depicts the cause and effect laws under which we operate as fragmented and situates social causality within individual consciousness itself. ! iv ! ! Table of Contents Title Page……………………………………………………………………………………i Copyright Page………………………………………………………………………………ii Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………iii Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………v Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1: “The True Romance of Human Life:” Principle, Narrative, and Social Representation in Harriet Martineau’s Fiction…………………………………………………….………….20 Chapter 2: “Nothing But Facts:” Dickens and the Problem of Induction……………………50 Chapter 3: “Such Accidents are the Characteristics of Persons:” Accident, Character, and Judgment in John Henry Newman……………………………………………………………81 Chapter 4: “Men Are Not, When Brought Together, Converted into Another Kind of Substance:” John Stuart Mill’s Sociology of Character…………………………………………………..119 Chapter 5: “The Looking Before and After, Which is our Grand Human Privilege”: The Statics and Dynamics of Social Perspective in George Eliot and Herbert Spencer…………………147 Coda: Character and the Founding of Sociology……………………………………………..185 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………..190 v ! ! Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible without the help, guidance, and support of many people. I am especially grateful to Leah Price, John Plotz, and Deidre Lynch; to Gwen Urdang- Brown and Niti Seth; to Matthew Franks, Porter White, and Jessica Glueck; and to Mark and Catherine Stern, Daniel and Melina Stern, and Aaron Ramirez. vi ! ! Introduction This project investigates the encounter between the burgeoning field of social science and realistic modes of literary representation in the nineteenth century. Much has been written on the ways in which the rise of the social sciences broadened the scope of the nineteenth-century novel to accommodate the masses, both as a numerical reality and as a new socio-political form. The realist novel’s narrative structure has been examined in relation to the ideas of communities both corporeal and abstracted; to crowds and mob behavior, collective political agency, and, most recently, globalization and network theory. But in order to understand the extent of the social sciences’ influence on literary form in the nineteenth century, we must also examine the novel’s techniques for positioning social causes within the consciousness of the individual himself, changing the narrative of social causality from one of contingent connection to one of inescapable determination. I seek to understand how the influence of social science reconstituted the core structuring idea of the novel, individual character, as the site of larger-scale social causality. The positivist empiricism that helped to shape the emerging social-scientific perspective of the nineteenth century represented social phenomena not as aggregations of individual phenomena but as sui generis facts – an epistemological transformation that John Stuart Mill compares to a “chemical” change of state.1 Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy was a social epistemology designed to bring to sociological observation the same scientific rigor that characterized the study of physics by studying society through the prism of the “social fact”. If a mass phenomenon is transformed into a distinct entity, my project asks, is the literary individual transformed with it? The realist novel reinvented not only narrative, but also character, as a social !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. by John M. Robson, 1 edition. (London: Routledge, 2014), VIII. Pp. 879-880. 1 ! ! form in a new sense of the word shaped by the burgeoning field of social science. In the work of writers such as John Henry Newman and George Eliot, we can see the realist novel moving beyond situating the individual character within a social network to representing character as internally socially determined at the levels of thought and affect, while developing narrative structures that are no longer explanatory and connective, but fragmentary. In keeping with Caroline Levine’s argument that we must read form not as static and sealed-off, but as dynamic and capable of traversing a range of discourses,2 I trace the ways in which, from the fiction of Harriet Martineau onward, a positivist-inspired literary realism took up new sociological practices of description as aesthetic forms and applied them to the scope of individual experience. The realist novel in the nineteenth century often depicted the mind as a space of fragmentary motives and tendencies that preceded rational thought. Mid-nineteenth-century accounts of the motives that we can neither recognize nor articulate to ourselves often attributed these motives to the influence of social forces on the individual. Even the Victorians’ Darwinian accounts of mind frequently emphasize the workings of social forces as much as they do those of nature. Recent work by Nicholas Dames3 and Benjamin Morgan4 has traced the ways in which the realist novel shaped itself in relation to, and in turn helped to make a space in everyday life for, contemporaneous accounts of human psychology and physiology. While I make a similar argument for the novel’s adaptation of sociological forms, in this case the significance of this !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015). 3 Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction, 1 edition (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 4 Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2017).! 2 ! ! adaptation lies in the mismatch between the two categories of thought, an incongruity of scope more fundamental and more consequential than any between psychology or its antecedents and the novel, both of which concern themselves with the individual mind. In importing sociological ideas into its structure, the novel translates a deliberately large-scale epistemology of society into terms of individual life, thereby applying social
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