Victorian Fiction
Realism I
• Dominant: realism
– but: ruptures; Gothic elements, coincidencies
• Realist fiction:
– illusion of reflecting reality (personal and social
life)
– as it seems to an average person;
– empirical history;
– 3rd- or 1st-person narration;
– plausibility, intelligibility
Realism 2
• Protagonist:
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not heroic
but an average person from the middle classes
not aiming at high achievements
but normal happiness and success (business,
marriage).
• Major topic: the everyday
• Contiguity:
– temporal, spatial and causal relationships
– metonymical narration
Realism 3: mode of presentation
• illusion of actual or ordinary experience
• transparency of presentation: as if narration were
„natural”;
• seemingly unselective way
• when analysed:
– narration structures/organises the material just as
much as in the case of later modernist texts (see
then),
– but hides its codes of structure, whereas modernism:
self-awareness of, and self-reflection on its own
codes)
The Brontë sisters
Charlotte Brontë
(1916–1855)
Emily Brontë
(1818–1848)
Anne Brontë
(1820–1849)
The Brontë sisters
• Known as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell
• 1847: annus mirabilis in English literature:
(Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey,
Vanity Fair, Dombey and Son)
• Robert Southey’s letter from March 1837 (poet
laureate at that time): “Literature cannot be
the business of a woman’s life, and it ought
not to be.”
Novels
• 1847:
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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Agnes Grey by Ann Brontë by the same publisher
The Professor by Charlotte Brontë was rejected;
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
1848: Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
1849: Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
1853: Charlotte Brontë, Villette
1846 (written)/1857 (published posthumously):
Charlotte Brontë, The Professor
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
• a female Bildungsroman; rewriting of
the male Bildungsroman
– Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moor
House — the stations of her pilgrimage;
Rochester, St. John Rivers
• creates a new type of heroine (active,
daring to articulate her wishes, and
launching on a pilgrimage into the
wide world)
• a new plot for a new type of heroine
• rewriting the romance tradition: in
the resolution Jane plays an active
role not Rochester
• rewrites fairy tales (cf. Rochester and
Jane’s first meeting, and also the
concluding note of the novel)
Elements and style
• early Victorian novel
– realistically motivated plot
• Rochester’s Byronic character
• Romantic contrasts:
– St. John Rivers: a white marble Greek statue, coldness and
perfection
– Rochester: passion, darkness, fire
• Gothic element: Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the
attic
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what can/could have become of Jane
warning JE
Protector of JE
JE’s non-identical double
Emily Brontë:Wuthering Heights
• Heathcliff, Catherine, Thrushcross
Grange; Nelly
• Blake’s visionary worlds, Blakean Hell
• a resemblance to Jane Eyre
• a ghost story
• a Gothic story
• a psychoanalytic story in which
Heathcliff represents the unconscious
against a repressive civilisation;
• Political readings: Heathcliff
representing
– class struggle
– the rebellion of the oppressed Irish;
• an intertext to Milton’s Paradise Lost
• a parable of the emergence of culture
Narration, structure
• Unreliable narration
• Several unreliable narrators (main: Lockwood,
Nelly)
• Instability, relativity
• 1st/2nd half: deterioration?
Wuthering Heights
• a creation of culture
• both generations are needed for it to come to full
circle,
• not a romance, but that as well:
– a creation of culture - the creation of gender: a central
role
• a novel of genealogy:
– a fierce and violent struggle for the dominance of the
family, for the family as such, i.e. for the smallest
social unit
Wuthering Heights
• the story of the second generation is just as important
• Heathcliff and Catherine I create a unity and totality outside culture
and civilisation → disrupt culture
• The second generation: seems a repetition and a replica of the first
one
• But: seems rather to represent the inversion of the process:
– denying all the transgressive and violent aspects of H & CI’s love
– they re-enact the romance of civilisation
– gain their place within the realm of culture, within the framework of
the long established patriarchal culture that goes back to 1500 (see
the sign over the gate in Wuthering Heights)
– an ending at the greatest distance from their parents’ transgressive
romance.
• Culture resumes its power
• H&CI : the only disturbing presence: haunting the moors as ghosts,
but they are safely marginalised and repressed: order is restored
George Eliot or Mary Ann Evans
(1819–1880)
A Victorian icon: the Sage;
Social circle:
John Stuart Mill
Herbert Spencer (social
Darwinism)
George Henry Lewes
GE: writer, translator (from
German: Feuerbach, e.g.).
George Eliot
• Novels:
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Adam Bede (1859),
The Mill on the Floss (1860),
Silas Marner (1861),
Romola (1863),
Felix Holt (1866),
Middlemarch (1871–72),
Daniel Deronda (1876)
• Collection of essays: Impressions of Theophrastus
Such (1878)
Fiction/philosophy
• Key concept: the notion of organic society
• Notions of biology/evolution applied to social growth
• In the centre: the question of the part and the whole, the
relationship of structure and its constitutive elements
• Raising the question of
– the relationship between society and individual,
– the freedom of the individual
– individual rights and responsibilities, etc.
Fiction/philosophy
• The idea of fixed functions:
– Each individual is defined in terms of a set of social roles
– Origins: taxonomy: the description (and acceptance) of a preset
structure, without much option for change— a rather static view—
rigidity of organic structure
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Ideas of organic process or change, rather than structure
undermined concepts of fixity (individual or social)
fluidity of process
greatly influenced by Darwin’s theories of evolution
– constant change in the form of incessant adaptation to the
environment
– but a dynamic process
– the idea of natural selection: borrowed by theorists in other
disciplines to express ideas of uninterrupted historical development
(Herbert Spencer: social darwinism)
The Mill on the Floss
• Maggie Tulliver and Tom Tulliver
• Maggie:
– a gifted, iconoclastic girl, with an exceptional intelligence,
– yet moulded in the machinery of how a young woman is
being created by the psychosocial process,
– herself internalising concepts of self-renunciation and a
sense of duty
– but in constant conflict with her desire.
The Mill on the Floss
• Tom: moulded according to his role
– a successful businessman
– cost: losing his humanity and all human attachments and connections.
• A double, and opposite Bildungsroman:
– pulling the plot into two different directions
– both directions marked by gender
– posing the question what happens if one absolutely accepts the notion that the
structure is unchangeable, and there’s no way of going against the grain.
• The answer: both of them are doomed to death.
– Apparently it is a death by chance (they die in a flood, when Maggie wants to
save her brother, Tom),
– but considering the logic of the novel, it is inevitable: under that structure
there’s no way to survive in a meaningfully human way
– the psychosocial formation is tragic for both of them
• The flood washes away the human landscape
• Nature regenerates itself in a long process (concept of biology and organic
development)
• Recreating both the natural and human landscape
Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
Great Expectations (1861)
Pickwick Club
The Adventures of Oliver Twist
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas
Nickleby
The Old Curiosity Shop
A Christmas Carol
The Life and Adventures of Martin
Chuzzlewit
Dombey and Son
David Copperfield
Bleak House
Hard Times
Little Dorrit
A Tale of Two Cities
Our Mutual Friend (unfinished)
Dickens and his fiction
• the most popular
• publications: often in magazines first – reached a wide reading public;
• Victorian divisions: urban, metropolitan writer: associated with London
and the city in general;
• yet: countryside: a haunting presence and nostalgic longing in the
background of his novels
• Contradictions arising from the process of urbanisation and
industrialisation
• novels: social problem novels:
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poverty
debtor’s prison
orphanages
workhouses
crime, prostitution
legal system (lots of lawyers, testaments, wills in his novels)
questions concerning the accumultaion of wealth.
Dickens and his fiction
• Yet: all this: not always explicit
• a subtheme of the novels
• in all: coincidence, random events play a role –
undermine the otherwise relatively consistent
realism of the texts
• open up ”the Other Victorians”:
– the shadows of Victorianism
– often constitute the basis on which the apparent
surface myths like progress, morality, development,
richess, etc. are built
Great Expectations
• subject: etiology of guilt and the etiology of atonement that lurks behind
the decent facades of Victorian accumulation of wealth
• coincidences: create violent connections between what seem to be
utterly un/disconnected
• Magwitch, the convict: negative potential of the protagonist Pip with
great expectations
• Magwitch: as the projection and concentration of Pip’s potential guilt
• Gothic element: Miss Havisham: underlying story of the Victorian
construction of womanhood.
• the apparently seamless realist story is torn apart
• montage technique (those of dreams)
• bring to the surface the affinities between the guilt of our desires and the
commonplaces of our immediate perceptions
• Dickens in this way: both veils and unveils both sides of Victorian reality.
• contemporary readers: fascinated by his storytelling
• cultural studies and deconstructive reading: reveal the depths of his
narrative technique
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
Thomas Hardy
• “Wessex” (Dorset, Dorchester); rural writer
• Novels:
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A Pair of Blue Eyes
Far from the Madding Crowd
The Return of the Native
The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Woodlanders
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Jude the Obscure (1895)
• Article: “Candour in English Fiction”: “the great bulk of
English fiction of the present day is characterised by its
lack of sincerity”
• George Gissing:: “After Hardy’s Tess one can scarcely
see the limits of artistic freedom”
Tess of the D’Urbervilles:
A Pure Woman
• controversial novel, enormous sale
• reason: title and subtitle a slap on the face of Victorian
morality
• a young woman is raped and gives birth to an „illegitimate”
baby whom she even baptises on her own
• multiple moral crime and sacrilege
• yet: subtitle: A Pure Woman (the equivalent of the
Hungarian title)
• story: how she can cope with this past of hers, through a
(failed) marriage
• how she is forced into situations, in a deterministic way as
in (Zola’s) naturalist novels
• no way out → becomes a murderer
• sacrificed on the altars of this culture: symbolically she is
captured at Stonehenge
Jude the Obscure
• some favourable reviews
• but some more headlines: “Jude the Obscene”,
“Hardy the Degenerate”, “The Anti-Marriage
League”
• banned from public libraries, a bishop burnt it,
the biggest lit scandal for years
• After JO: Hardy: utter disappointment with the
novel reading public and with Victorian hypocrisy
• decision to write poetry only
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