NOVELS AND IDEAS: CONCEPTIONS OF AGENCY IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY FICTION by Patrick Fessenbecker A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland March 2014 ©2014 Patrick Fessenbecker All Rights Reserved Abstract “Novels and Ideas” examines the representation of moral agency in Victorian fiction. A major strain of criticism portrays the investment in ethics in Victorian fiction as a way to avoid more serious political issues, creating a separate discourse that emphasizes the particular and emotional over the general and the rational. Recently, however, critics have seen a more complex dynamic, identifying the way literary texts develop their own accounts of traditionally philosophical topics like reflective awareness and moral psychology. Noting what Stefan Collini has called the “unreflective Kantianism” of Victorian ethics, “Novels and Ideas” continues this avenue of research, arguing that Victorian writers depict a sophisticated relationship between reason and emotion in moral deliberation. George Eliot shows how sympathy refigures the key commitments of Kantian respect in affective terms: in her novels, sympathy responds to the value of personhood as such. Charles Dickens’s contrast between admirably bland protagonists and eccentric minor characters reformulates the tension between obligations that stem from mere humanity and those that stem from a concrete identity. George Meredith’s analysis of egoism challenges the assumption of self-controlled selfishness in utilitarian psychology, suggesting that the egoist manifests an inability to carry out long-term projects and thus a breakdown in rational agency. Finally, Anthony Trollope challenges the assumption that rationality consists in deliberative judgment, suggesting that emotions can be more responsive to reasons than conscious thought. Alongside these readings, the project reflects on what it means to read so openly for the ideas in what are, admittedly, artistic texts. Through an analysis of the arguments that support the “anti-cognitivist” belief that art does not make assertions, the project develops an approach that emphasizes reading for the content. Since reading for the intellectual content involves bringing texts from the past into conversation with current debates, the ii project additionally defends interpretive anachronism, advocating a modified “presentism” that combines rational and historical reconstruction. It concludes by turning to philosophical aesthetics, arguing that the compelling ideas within a text can give it literary value. iii Acknowledgments Although I’ve been interested in the philosophy in literature essentially since high school, the nature of this project—what its core argument really was, and how its various pieces would fit together—didn’t become entirely clear to me until a meeting with Amanda Anderson during my fifth year at Hopkins, when I’d already been working on it for some time. After having perused another of the interminable drafts of my George Eliot chapter, Amanda told me—with what I suspected was a hint of exasperation—that I was reading Eliot as if she was just saying the things I read her as saying. As Amanda put it then, I was making a sort of “category error,” dismissing the fact that Middlemarch was, after all, a work of fiction. That, it occurred to me, was really the central problem I needed to address—why I wasn’t making a category error, or if I was, why that sort of error could be justified as literary criticism. From that conversation came the core of “In Defense of Paraphrase,” the introductory piece that would eventually determine the broader work. And that’s appropriate, because Amanda’s thought has been enormously important for my own. There’s plenty of overt evidence of that in this dissertation, which engages her work directly in a number of places, but perhaps even more important was the silent influence she exerted as my director and primary interlocutor. I don’t remember what I said to Amanda at the time, but I’m sure that I wasn’t appropriately cognizant of the importance of the problem in my response. To put the point delicately, an energetic commitment to my position has generally been the hallmark of my participation in intellectual discourse (rather less delicately: I’m awfully stubborn. Stubborn to the extent that my father brought it up in his toast at my wedding). And so let me say that I’m grateful to Amanda not only for her perceptive reading of my work, but for the patience with which she mentored me through this process. I know it wasn’t always easy. iv I also want to thank Jesse Rosenthal and Sharon Cameron for their hard work in helping me develop as a scholar. Jesse’s efforts as a sounding-board for even my most desultory thinking were extremely helpful, and his extensive commentary on the Eliot chapter was instrumental for its final development. Although my direct engagement with Sharon’s work diminished as the dissertation transformed from a transatlantic project into one solely concerned with Victorian novelists, I remain deeply influenced by the intense mixture of creativity and close analysis that characterizes both her scholarship and her teaching. For their critical commentary, but more importantly for their friendship, I’m grateful to Matt Flaherty and Roger Maioli. Both have been extremely sympathetic readers, working to inhabit the methodology I was developing and helping me see how to extend it. I try to indicate in footnotes the many specific points where a conversation with them helped clarify my argument, but I’m sure I didn’t get them all. And I’m grateful as well to Robert Day, Nick Bujak, and Doug Tye, whose conversations with me in and out of seminar over the last seven years have been an essential background to my work. I don’t want to forget to thank the administrators—especially Nicole Goode and Karen Tiefenwerth, but also Susie Herrman at the beginning of my Hopkins tenure and Sally Hauf at its end—who make the work of the Hopkins English Department possible. Similarly, I want to thank the editors and readers at New Literary History and Victorian Studies, where parts of this project appear or will appear, for their careful attention to my work. Finally, I want to thank my wife and my family. I completed this project against the background of the disastrous job market for those with doctorates in the humanities, and my ability to find reliable employment after graduation has never been far from my mind. I’ve sometimes felt melancholic as I finished my dissertation: as a friend in a similar situation put v it, there’s a chance that we’re already late in our academic careers, and that our dissertations will be the end of our oeuvre rather than the start of it. A little depression is probably a necessary feature in every doctoral student’s life, and—as is perhaps needless to say— thoughts like these about academic jobs certainly exacerbated those feelings. I’m enormously grateful to my sisters Erin and Kate, to my dad Bob and my stepmother Denise, and to my cousins Beth and John Flaherty (and Matt Flaherty, once again), for being such wonderful people—filled with humor and happiness—as to help me forget such thoughts from time to time. Lastly and most importantly, I want to thank my wife and best friend Willie, who put in the yeoman’s effort of helping to copyedit my chapters as I submitted them, and who has been unflaggingly kind and supportive throughout my graduate career. vi Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv 1 PREFACE We Other Leavisites 28 INTRODUCTION In Defense of Paraphrase 85 CHAPTER I George Eliot’s Moral Philosophy 170 INTERLUDE Justifying Anachronistic Frames 202 CHAPTER II From Moral Psychology to Metaethics: Sidgwick, Eliot, and Meredith on Egoism 265 CHAPTER III Charles Dickens on Identity and Obligation 309 INTERLUDE Narrative Equilibrium and Reflective Equilibrium, or the Virtues and Vices of Clarity 327 CHAPTER IV Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception, and Ethical Confusion 381 CONCLUSION The Challenge of Aesthetic Skepticism and the Importance of Being Profound Bibliography 395 Curriculum Vita 416 We Other Leavisites The pages that follow this preface include two separate but interrelated lines of inquiry. The first traces the representation of moral agency and deliberation in the works of a series of Victorian novelists, arguing that each writer develops a sophisticated account of the relationship between reason and emotion in his or her depiction of moral decision-making. The second line of inquiry reflects on the methodology involved in this interpretive project, asking how one might justify such an overt attention to the intellectual content in what are, after all, artistic texts. The two arguments are thus relatively independent—the first line of inquiry engaging in literary criticism, while the second involves arguments in literary theory and the philosophy of art. But at the level of final justification, the two are necessary for each other: the interpretations invite a series of challenges that can only be met at the level of interpretive theory, while the theoretical model seems to me only ultimately defensible if it bears fruit in the interpretive realm in the form of interesting and insightful close readings. With this, as is perhaps the case with any argument in hermeneutic methodology, the proof is in the pudding. In emphasizing the nature of moral deliberation in such novels, I hope to draw out the resonances between the ethics in Victorian fiction and the tradition of moral philosophy initiated by Immanuel Kant. Stefan Collini has recently suggested that there was a sort of “unreflective Kantianism” to “Victorian moral commonplaces”; he writes that the “morality characteristic of dominant Victorian culture” had four key features: 1 First of all, morality was understood very much as a system of obligations in which, to adapt a suggestive phrase from a quite different context, ‘only an obligation could beat an obligation’, and in which, consequently, there was a tendency to extend the category of ‘duty’ as widely as possible.