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Depressive Realism: Readings in the Victorian Novel Christine Smallwood Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Christine Smallwood All rights reserved ABSTRACT Depressive Realism: Readings in the Victorian Novel Christine Smallwood This dissertation makes two arguments: First, it elaborates a depressive genealogy of the Victorian novel that asserts a category of realism rooted in affect rather than period or place. Second, it argues for a critical strategy called “depressive reading” that has unique purchase on this literary history. Drawing on Melanie Klein’s “depressive position,” the project asserts an alternative to novel theories that are rooted in sympathy and desire. By being attentive to mood and critical disposition, depressive reading homes in on the barely-contained negativities of realism. Through readings of novels by William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë, it explores feelings of ambivalence, soreness, and dislike as aesthetic responses and interpretations, as well as prompts to varieties of non-instrumentalist ethics. In the final chapter, the psychological and literary strategy of play emerges as a creative and scholarly possibility. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments………………………………………………………..……………….ii Introduction: Depressive Realism, Depressive Reading…………………………..………1 “Made to Go On Pleasantly Enough”: Settling for Vanity Fair………………...……….23 Soreness, Pain, and Comfort: Feeling and Thinking in Trollope………………...……...65 “What is it you don’t like in him?”: Dislike in Jude the Obscure……………………...115 That Burning Clime: Play and Pedagogy in Charlotte Brontë………………………….163 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………200 i Acknowledgments My name is on the cover, but this document is filled with other people’s ideas—some that I was given, some that I overheard or stole, and many that I misunderstood. I am very lucky to have had a dissertation committee who allowed me back my way into an argument. Their patience and confidence that I would figure everything out in time taught me a great deal about writing. It would be impossible to properly credit Nick Dames. He transformed how I think about the novel and reading. Whenever I wanted to stop working—or thinking—he tactfully opened the next door. He showed me that my jokes and digressions and intuitions could be ideas. Bruce Robbins challenged me and prevented the project from falling into complacency and cynicism. He saved me from my worst instincts. Jim Adams was endlessly knowledgeable and encouraging. His careful editorial eye always zoomed in on places where problems of structure and style were symptomatic of problems of concept. Andrew Delbanco welcomed me into the American Studies program, and didn’t give me too hard a time when I jumped the pond. The students and faculty of Columbia’s Nineteenth-Century Colloquium read versions of the chapters on Hardy and Trollope and offered invaluable feedback. I am especially grateful for the comments of Sharon Marcus, Erik Gray, and Anahid Nersessian. Danny Wright made it through early drafts of two chapters, and his reading recommendations got me to places I didn’t know I was trying to find. Michael Paulson was a thoughtful, close reader of the introduction and a consistently generous interlocutor. Alicia Christoff, Aaron Matz, and Zachary Samalin graciously shared unpublished work. Zach’s support was unwavering and his enthusiasm for Victorian literature contagious. My friends and colleagues at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research have been a source of community, especially Abby Kluchin, who through two institutions of higher education has made me feel less crazy and alone. Anne Diebel was a true friend, and an astoundingly good reader of people. Jamie Parra has been a constant intellectual companion. He always reminded me to write what I wanted to write, even (especially) when it seemed too small or too weird. As for Ben Parker, my mind would be a far poorer and lonelier place to live without his friendship. This dissertation has something to do with the last five years of our conversations. My husband Gabriel only rarely forced me to talk about what I was doing. He gave me the thing I most want: privacy. I thank him for that and for everything else. ii Introduction: Depressive Realism, Depressive Reading “Depressive Realism” is an argument for a critical strategy with unique purchase on realism. Like Eve Sedgwick’s “reparative reading,” it uses the work of Melanie Klein to structure a style of reading. But unlike Sedgwick, who emphasizes that “the more satisfying object” inaugurated by the depressive position is “available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in return,” I emphasize the negative aspects of the depressive position.1 “In the depressive position,” Ruth Stein writes, “the person deals with the feelings by bearing (with) them, by acquiring the capacity to tolerate their essentially ambivalent and fluid nature.”2 This dissertation explores the feeling of “bearing with” ambivalent feelings, such as soreness and dislike, as aesthetic responses and as interpretations. Rather than imagining an interpretation to be separate from feeling, as Susan Sontag did when she called for the replacement of interpretation with erotics, I use feeling as an interpretive strategy. The meaning of the novels I write about lies in the feelings they provoke as well as the feelings that structure their worlds. My four authors—William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë—share an ethos that my readings try to bring to light. They exist on a continuum, representing different degrees of stuckness or woundedness, and different strategies for tolerating or rejecting ambivalence. Reparative reading is a big 1 Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press), 2003: 128. 2 Ruth Stein, “A New Look at the Theory of Melanie Klein,” in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 71 (1990): 505 1 tent, and at times depressive reading will find itself beneath its poles.3 But my project holds off from theorizing a love-relationship to the object of criticism that is Sedgwick’s ultimate concern. The antagonist of “Depressive Realism” is not paranoid reading—it’s the discourse around sympathy. The depressive reading style might be a portable one, although it has fallen outside the limits of time-to-degree to explore that possibility. One reason I call this project “Depressive Realism” and not “Depressive Reading” is that I don’t yet know what a depressive modernism, for example, would look like. The phrase “depressive realism” was coined by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, two psychologists who in 1979 found that depressed people are more realistic and accurate in their perceptions of the world that non-depressed people. Their experiment involved asking depressed and non-depressed college students to choose whether or not to hit a button. Once the response time had passed, a light would or would not illuminate. Then the participants rated their control over the outcome. The non-depressed subjects were found to overvalue their control over this contingent situation, while the depressed subjects correctly perceived their lack of control. The depressed students were labeled “sadder but wiser,” and said to have a firmer grasp on reality than the non-depressed. Later researchers, however, have argued that it is the depressive’s negative bias, or inherent pessimism, that cause her to rate her control lower. That is, the issue is not one’s own sense of contingency, but one’s willingness to make any positive statement at all. 3 “The reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks.” See Sedgwick, 150. 2 The depressed person is not more attuned to the reality of her lack of control, but simply doesn’t want to say “yes” to anything.4 Like the depressed experimental subjects, depressive readers are nay-sayers—not because they are distrustful or suspicious, but because they understand the critical enterprise to be incomplete, thwarted, or powerless. Being a depressive reader means recognizing the impossibility of scholarly ideals like disinterestedness, and giving up on the pursuit of “really” getting to the singular truth of any given text. The emphasis here is not so much on the embrace of multiplicity, in the matter of a deconstructive criticism, but on the stakes of criticism: What does criticism matter? To whom and for whom does it matter? What is the meaning of our insistence that it matter at all? I am not saying that the scholarly critical endeavor is a futile one, necessarily; I am asking what we might be left with, or even gain, if we relinquish what we have come to rely on as its most obvious justifications. (In some especially vocal quarters, this has to do with political purchase; in other corners, criteria such as greatness or beauty.) This project begins from a refusal to justify its object (the novel); its existence is justified by the novel. Depressive reading admits that critical interests and preoccupations are driven by temperament and affinities rather than the truth of an object at hand. One could read the depressive critical move as a response to a failure to get properly interested in the given object of study—in this case, the Victorian period. But a depressive reader would say that the object, in any case,

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