GEORGE MEREDITH and the PSYCHE Courtney L. Vien

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository THE INWARD MIRROR: GEORGE MEREDITH AND THE PSYCHE Courtney L. Vien A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature Chapel Hill 2009 Approved by: Dr. Allan Life Dr. William Harmon Dr. Laurie Langbauer Dr. John McGowan Dr. Beverly Taylor ©2009 Courtney L. Vien ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Courtney L. Vien: The Inward Mirror: George Meredith and the Psyche (Under the direction of Allan Life) One of the most intriguing aspects of George Meredith’s work is his prescient, astonishingly realistic portrayal of the human psyche. Meredith anticipates the theories of Freud and the techniques of such modernists as Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf in his depiction of the psyche as fluid, multilayered, and influenced by subconscious drives. This dissertation analyzes the presentation of the psyche in four of Meredith’s major works: the novels The Ordeal of Richard Feverel , The Egoist , and the neglected masterpiece Diana of the Crossways , and the sonnet sequence Modern Love . In these works, Meredith portrays not only his characters’ thoughts and feelings but also their subconscious desires and fears, their attempts at self- aggrandization and self-delusion, and the archetypes and cultural scripts which inform their behavior. He argues for greater acceptance of emotion, sensation, intuition, and other non-rational aspects of the psyche, which he saw as devalued in an age which privileged science and technology. In his novels and poetry, Meredith also grapples with the philosophical implications of the decentered self, acknowledging that the instability of the self casts doubt on other traditional loci of truth, such as God and Nature. Ultimately, however, he suggests that, with sympathy, patience, and right reading, people can recognize a stable center of selfhood in one another, which he terms the soul. Finally, the dissertation explores the iii ways in which Meredith’s concept of the psyche inform his bold experiments with novelistic form and narrative voice. iv DEDICATIONS This dissertation is dedicated to my husband John, the love of my life. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The great philosopher Emo Phillips once said, “Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.” Well, that goes double when you’re writing a dissertation. Here’s to those who made it worth it: Dr. Life , for encouraging me to write the dissertation I wanted to write; Mom , for never letting me give up, and for my early training in scholarship as her “research assistant” in the UMD library; Dad , for always believing in me; Kristin , for showing me, as a teenager, that I could produce hundreds of “pages”; Grandma Reynolds , for chanting “A-E-I-O-U” over my cradle; my in-laws, Songyun and Huihong , for welcoming me into their family, and for spoiling me with Cantonese feasts and free tailoring; Aunt Laura and Uncle Frank , for the much-needed breaks at their beach house; Gypsy, Savannah, and Bingley , for the comic relief; and the baristas at Starbucks and Bean Traders, and the hardworking coffee growers worldwide , for providing the fuel. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: The Neglected Master . .1 Chapter I. Science, Gender, and the Exposed Self in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel . .13 II. Modern Love : The Three Faces of George Meredith . .57 III. “Currents of feeling, our natures”: The Mobile Psyche in The Egoist . .96 IV. Reading for the Soul: Diana of the Crossways . .130 Works Cited . 187 vii INTRODUCTION THE NEGLECTED MASTER “Ah! Meredith!” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying , Who can define him? His style is chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate. [E]ven if the man’s fine spirit did not revolt against the noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. By its means he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with wonderful roses. (81) These days, it seems, not many people are willing to brave the thorns to get at the roses. Meredith receives precious little critical attention: in the past ten years there has been only one full-length study of his work published, and one biography. 1 He is not taught frequently, and his name is barely mentioned at the major conferences. 2 But Meredith, I believe, deserves better than such neglect, for reasons also beautifully articulated by Wilde: His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly- moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence him in any way, but has gone on intensifying his own personality, and producing his own individual work. He is still the same. He is an incomparable novelist. (260) 1Namely, Richard C. Stevenson’s The Experimental Impulse in George Meredith’s Fiction in 2004 and Mervyn Jones’s The Amazing Victorian: A Life of George Meredith in 1999. 2Since NAVSA was founded in 2002, for example, there appear have been only three papers on Meredith presented at its conferences, one in 2003 and two in 2008 (. (I have not been able to find data for 2005, though, as that conference’s website has been taken down.) Meredith’s best characters are astonishingly self-aware, thoughtful, and multilayered; the reader is made privy not only to their thoughts but their perceptions, their subconscious drives, their personal mythologies and archetypes, and their most cherished delusions about themselves. In his depiction of the human psyche Meredith would not be equaled until Joyce brought out Ulysses in 1922. In certain respects a modernist working without benefit of modernist techniques, Meredith was hampered by the conventions of the novel at his time, by an idiosyncratic style, and by a “philosophy” that sounds quaintly naïve after two world wars. Nevertheless, his psychological insight can rival that of any writer of the twentieth century. Freud thought him England’s greatest novelist, 3 and, after reading the likes of Diana of the Crossways , it is not difficult to see why. In one of the great ironies of literary history, Meredith’s reputation was savaged by the very generation of writers he helped inspire. His present unpopularity can partly be traced to the drubbing he received at the hands of the modernists, with whom the academy is still enamored. Partly because Meredith represented high Victorianism, Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, and Forster all disparaged him in print, 4 and even Woolf, in her judicious essay on Meredith, had many harsh things to say. Above all, the modernists objected to Meredith’s habit of inserting himself into his novels. Forster complained that [h]is philosophy has not worn well. His heavy attacks on sentimentality—they bore the present generation, which pursues the same quarry but with neater instruments . And his visions of Nature—they do not endure like Hardy’s, there is too much 3 Freud used a scene from The Egoist as an illustration in his famous essay on the Freudian slip, and references the obscure The Tragic Comedians in The Interpretation of Dreams . 4In 1918, just nine years after Meredith’s death, Pound wrote that Meredith “is chiefly a stink” (qtd in Lucas page 1). Lawrence wrote disparagingly of The Rainbow that he hoped it would appeal to “the Meredithy public” (qtd. in Beer 193). Joyce was dismayed to hear A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man likened to The Ordeal of Richard Feverel , even though the two books share some important similarities. In a 1902 review of Walter Jerrold’s George Meredith , he wrote that Meredith’s novels had “no value as epical art” and that he considered them “philosophical essays” (qtd. in Beer 210). 2 Surrey about them, they are fluffy and lush. What is really tragic and enduring in the scenery of England was hidden from him, and so what is really tragic in life. When he gets serious and noble-minded there is a strident overtone, a bullying that becomes distressing. What with the faking, what with the preaching, which was never agreeable and is now said to be hollow, and what with the home counties posing as the universe, it is no wonder Meredith now lies in the trough. (89-90) Woolf, likewise, found Meredith’s “preaching” distasteful: His teaching seems now too strident and too optimistic and shallow. It obtrudes; and when philosophy is not consumed in a novel, when we can underline this phrase with a pencil, and cut out that exhortation with a pair of scissors and paste the whole into a system, it is safe to say that there is something wrong with the philosophy or with the novel or with both. Above all, his teaching is too insistent. He cannot, even to hear the profoundest secret, suppress his own opinion. (qtd. in Adams 537-38) Indeed, Meredith does not disappear into his novels in the manner that the modernists themselves championed. Even the best of his books are hardly seamless.

Load more