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Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

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Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Anna Elizabeth Clark Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Anna Elizabeth Clark All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Anna Elizabeth Clark Since Aristotle, we have categorized characters in terms of relative quantity and proportion. From Henry James’s “center of consciousness,” to E. M. Forster’s theory of “round” and “flat,” to Deirdre Lynch’s “pragmatics of character,” to Alex Woloch’s influential “one and many,” scaled distinctions between “major” and “minor” characters have remained unchallenged since the Poetics. Yet, such classifications don’t speak to the ways characters generate interest and consequence disproportionate to their textual presence. My dissertation counters scaled definitions of character by proposing a form of characterization called protagonism. Here, limited amounts of text yield the kind of capacious subjectivity we normally associate with copious amounts of dialogue or exposition, as formal narrative features such as point of view and interpolation produce richly compact portraits, often of otherwise ancillary figures. Protagonism may lack the “exhaustive presentation” that Ian Watt claims is inherent to the novel, but it is nonetheless rich in the personality and specificity we typically associate with protagonists. Indeed, many canonical novels, especially those of literary realism’s highpoint in nineteenth-century Britain, resist the character hierarchy implied by distinctions such as major and minor. In addition to manifest examples such as Collins’s “experiment” with many narrators in The Woman in White (1859), we can count instances in which novels juxtapose quantitatively significant characters in qualitative terms. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where the title character’s protagonistic potential is undermined by his creature’s arresting autobiography, to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), in which readerly affections are split between a Jewish hero, an egoistic heroine, and a narrator’s attempt to relate “everything” to “everything else,” novels that are far from generic outliers fit uneasily into scaled models of characterization, even when their titles and critics imply otherwise. Protagonism is how such novels disrupt the impulse for sustained identification with a single exceptional perspective, directing attention towards characters who might otherwise appear nondescript, inscrutable, or threatening. As my project traces protagonism’s adaptable formal applications, it considers a version of figurative individuality based not in self-differentiation, but in what I refer to as social recognition: in contrast to readings of the nineteenth-century novel as a site in which individual and social agon find expression before an ultimate reconciliation or synthesis, protagonism’s brief, concise, and instantaneous markers of richly individualized perspective foreground the perception of subjectivity over its descriptive representation, flattening out tensions between individuality and its inscription within a social body. Narrative techniques such as focalization, free indirect discourse, and autodiegetic narration all serve to produce the kind of reflexive recognition more commonly associated with sight, evoking a precise subjectivity at first “glance.” This version of literary individuality both reflects and complicates the social purpose that Victorian authors such as Dickens and Eliot claim for the novel. As Eliot suggests in “The Natural History of German Life,” literature should “amplif[y] experience and exten[d] our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot,” resisting stock figures and stereotypes to produce a readerly relationship with realist characters that is deliberate, sustained, and self-reflective. This view of the novel’s morally instructive capacity is refracted in recent arguments by scholars such as Martha Nussbaum, who argues that readers’ engagement with the novel’s prolonged form and involved descriptions cultivates their ethical imagination. Yet for both Eliot and latter- day critics, the readerly experience of identification with characters remains suspect, if still implicitly desirable, risking what Wayne Booth has described as an “immature” experience of literature divorced from its “aesthetic experience.” Protagonism reveals such dissonances while also showing how characterization itself is a means for the novel to explore individuality’s social obligations. Protagonism models the inclusive social sympathy Eliot seeks; it also demonstrates the limits and failures of such collective ends. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Protagonist 22 Chapter Two: ‘All the unnumbered points’: Villette’s Prismatic Protagonism 77 Chapter Three: The One and the Many: Protagonism and The Woman in White 127 Chapter Four: “An Individuated Crowd: Character, the City, and Bleak House 172 Bibliography 222 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation could not have been written without the invaluable guidance, advice, and support of my extraordinary advisors: Sharon Marcus, Nicholas Dames, and James Eli Adams. Equally necessary have been the kind words and daily companionship of my family and friends, especially John Wanzel, Diana Maiden, Thomas Clark, Naomi Clark, Noah Spencer, Christa Robbins, and Michael Robbins. I also wish to thank my exceptional professors and peers for their conversation, insight, and advice. It has been my privilege to work with Susan Pedersen, Bruce Robbins, Philip Kitcher, Erik Gray, Eileen Gillooly, David Kurnick, Deb Aschkenes, Anne Diebel, Abigail Joseph, Katja Lindskog, Sarah Minsloff, Ben Parker, and Danny Wright. ii For John iii Introduction But why always Dorothea? George Eliot, Middlemarch I. EQUIVALENT CENTERS OF SELF We take for granted that the realist novel works by largely by description. In the words of Roland Barthes, the “concrete details” that accumulate in realism’s prose signify nothing so much as “we are the real.”1 Description situates the reader in the realm of the ordinary and everyday, while at the same time revealing a self-conscious consideration of nature of reality and our ability to represent it.2 There is one facet of the realist novel, however, that defies this commonsense alignment between description and the literary representation of the everyday world: characterization. As I will argue, realist characterization, particularly in the nineteenth- century British novel, deploys a host of narrative strategies that give rise to a sense of characters’ significance and interior depth without the use of detail-packed description. 1 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect.” 1968. In The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986) 141-48. 2 Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 11-12. Levine paraphrases Lukács in his description of the “alienation” signified by realist description. 1 Consider, for example, these introductions of two different though equally typical protagonists. First, from Middlemarch: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by simple dress.3 And second, from The Small House at Allington: Lilian Dale, dear Lily Dale – for my reader must know that she is to be very dear, and that my story will be nothing to him if he do not love Lily Dale – Lilian Dale had discovered Mr. Crosbie was a swell.”4 At first glance, these character introductions are noticeably distinct. The first bears the weight of authoritative judgment; the other is delivered as a casual aside in the midst of a conversation about someone else. Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke is anointed: the combination of a preface about a “modern day St. Theresa,” a volume titled “Miss Brooke,” and a first sentence highlighting her Vermeer-like loveliness leaves us no doubt and little choice about with whom we will first align our interest. In contrast, the narrator’s bald declaration in The Small House at Allington of Lily’s favored position speaks to her status as one among many potential favorites – there is nothing innately exceptional about her. Dorothea is placed into a cast of accompanying characters; Lily is plucked out of one, and even then, only temporarily. What is shared by these introductions, however, is a rendering of characters’ centrality that is coincident with their first appearance on the page. We know, of course, that Eliot’s Dorothea and Trollope’s Lily are both paradigmatic Victorian heroines: attractive, likeable young people whose romantic dramas predominate in the plots of their respective novels. Yet, 3 George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 261. 4 Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington (New York: Penguin, 1991) 16. 2 perhaps because of their cultural currency, we have tended to overlook how these characters become narratively prominent for reasons that have nothing to do with their minutely described motivations or sympathetic emotional lives. I start with Dorothea and Lily to draw attention to how such characterization renders the protagonist role both inevitable and oddly tenuous. Even as novels attach narrative importance to a single prominent figure, they create heroes and heroines
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