Counter-Didactic Victorians: the Problems of Education in the Novel a Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English and T
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COUNTER-DIDACTIC VICTORIANS: THE PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION IN THE NOVEL A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Amir Tevel June 2016 1 © 2016 by Amir Tevel. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/qm778vc6716 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Andrea Lunsford, Co-Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Franco Moretti, Co-Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Alex Woloch Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost for Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii 2 Counter-Didactic Victorians "A political novel would not suit." "Notices to Correspondents," London Quarterly Review 1851 The Problem of the Industrial Novel The ideal place to begin answering the main question of this chapter (and this dissertation) is the industrial novel, arguably the most political genre of Victorian fiction between 1840 and 1866. Studies of the industrial novel are repeatedly confronted with a conceptual problem: these novels tend to begin with socially charged situations, serious debates about working-conditions, and middle-class protagonists who represent class so simply that an allegorical interpretation is all but demanded of the literary critic. The more the novels progress, however, the less clear their social meaning becomes -- class-conflict turns secondary to middle- class love plots, social debates become more and more scarce, and the protagonists become less and less identifiable with a clear and consistent social position. In other words, the most political genre of fiction in this period ends up being far from clearly political. Why? Scholars have offered two central solutions to this problem. The Marxist solution, spearheaded by Raymond Williams, discusses the change as the fearful reaction of a bourgeois subconscious incapable of fully addressing social problems because of its dread of the working 3 classes. Thus, Williams argues, “[r]ecognition of evil [in industrial novels]was balanced by fear of becoming involved. Sympathy was transformed, not into action, but into withdrawal” (109). John Lucas calls this structural shift a bourgeois "retreat from the abyss," and Ruth Yeazell, too, analyzes a key structural feature of the genre, the substitution of "a politically dangerous man for a sexually unaggressive woman," as the "refuge" these novels take to escape the "deep anxiety about the growing division between the classes" which characterizes them (Lucas 141, Yeazell 127). P.J. Keating's extraordinary study of The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction goes further than this, broadening this type of analysis to all Victorian fiction representing the working classes: ...this process of avoidance of main issues is not peculiar only to minor, or indeed very minor novelists, but applies to most English working-class fiction written before the eighties. It is not so much a matter of degrees of talent, as a refusal or inability to break away from the literary and social conventions governing the role that a working man can be allowed to play in a novel. (46) While such accounts can be (and often are) traced to a well-known Victorian fear of revolutionary social change, they are remarkably unsympathetic to their subject matter, and therefore are limited in the sensitivity of their analysis: seeing these novelists as cowards does not lend itself well to an understanding of the ways in which the rift between political engagement and domestic plots might have been itself deeply ingrained in Victorian views of the relationship between the two. This is in some ways the point of departure for Catherine Gallagher's scholarly masterpiece The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, which offers a solution that has been largely augmented by Rosemarie Bodenheimer's The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction, and then taken to an absurd logical extreme by Josephine M. Guy's The Victorian Social-Problem Novel.1 The formal contradiction, argues Gallagher throughout, 1 The differences between Gallagher and Bodenheimer are negligible, and the studies complement each other 4 between social and private themes in industrial fiction, is the result of, and comment on, the paradoxes of Victorian ideologies, particularly in their attitude towards the relationship between the two spheres. "These novels, indeed, often display a structural tension created by the simultaneous impulses to associate and dissociate the public and private realms of experience" (114). Having this more sympathetic attitude towards the ideologies underlying these novels allows Gallagher to show how the personal solutions that end them, far from being an escape from public ones, are a necessary consequence of ideologies that intrinsically separate the personal from the social in order to unite them. This restores a sense of the deep link between the ethical and the political that Victorian culture clearly registered, and while the Marxist school does not really ignore social analysis of the personal,2 its political commitments to institutional changes do not allow such an analysis to turn into a probing of the ideological complexity such a link entails. Gallagher and Bodenheimer, then, have shown as well as any critic can, how the most political genre's seeming formal shift away from politics is less of a shift than a deeper exploration of the complexities of its political raison d'etre. Among the two solutions, then, the second one seems more attentive to Victorian intellectual history, and on the whole more convincing, while the Marxist account is more socially coherent and offers a more consistent view of middle-class values. There is, however, a third solution, one that is offered in passing by critics of both camps, but hardly ever elaborated on or explored in depth. This solution is one based on the critics' aesthetic sensibilities to the formal problems these political novels tend to run into, the general consensus that the entire genre is somehow artistically flawed. As a result of the perceived artistic failure of these novels, 2 Thus, Raymond Williams analyses the marriage between Margaret Hale and Thornton as "a unification of the practical energy of the northern manufacturer with the developed sensibility of the southern girl," and nearly every Marxist account of industrial fiction involves a reading of the marriages in these novels as a metonymy for uniting social classes (92). 5 the critic will often assert an incompatibility between the formal or aesthetic demands of the novel and its political demands. Thus Keating writes, rather imperiously for a critic who is far from committed to his own point: Any attempt to show how the working classes are portrayed in Victorian fiction must return again and again to the apparent difficulties experienced by novelists in trying to establish a balance between commitment to a class viewpoint and artistic form. (5) But his own study hardly returns to this balance, at least not explicitly. Catherine Gallagher's analysis of Disraeli, similarly, ends on a staggering note of dissonance between the novel form and politics: What this industrial novel [Sybil] displays, then, is the exclusion of politics from the novel, even in the work of a writer who was above all a political man and who believed that politics, like literature, provided the best hope of reconciling facts and values. Disraeli cannot, finally, create a mode of representation for his desired politics. Politics and Literature tend to exclude rather than complement each other... (218) Other critics may easily be cited, but the story is largely the same: critics assert a difficulty in reconciling political and literary aims as a characteristic of these novels' themes and forms, even to the point of claiming a relationship of mutual exclusivity between the two, only to proceed with their analysis as if the claims were never made.3 This dissertation will take this parenthetical claim as the basis for its argument, and not just for the industrial novel, but for the Victorian novel as a whole. More specifically, I intend to show Victorian novelists and critics, far from seeing the novel as the perfect tool for espousing 3 A couple more examples should establish the practice. Igor Webb opens his analysis of industrial fiction (though he defines the genre differently, and treats texts often not considered part of it) with the promising claim that ""The formal problem that Austen, Bronte and Dickens face is the difficulty of assimilating the profoundly disruptive social and political developments of their time into the novel of manners" (10). Fast forward to Webb's analysis, and the "problem" turns into a "parallel," thus in effect dissipating as a problem: "[t]hese questions of theme and ideology are intimately bound with a parallel aesthetic question: how will a fictional character be "justified," be shown to have become such and such a person?" (47-8) Guy comes even closer than this, when she claims that melodrama complicates the politics of realism of industrial novels for literary reasons, because "realistic description, or the enumeration of factual details, could not provide materials for plots" (118). But she immediately dismisses this as the "obvious" and "prosaic" solution, proceeding instead to offer a political reading of melodrama, not even acknowledging the conflict between the two explanations (119).