Mind-Telling: Social Minds in Fiction and History
Inaugural-Dissertation
zur
Erlangung der Doktorwürde
der Philologischen Fakultät
der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
Freiburg i. Br.
vorgelegt von
Maximilian Alders
aus Wesel
Sommersemester 2015
Erstgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Monika Fludernik
Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Jörn Leonhard
Vorsitzender des Promotionsausschusses der
Gemeinsamen Kommission der Philologischen,
Philosophischen und Wirtschafts- und
Verhaltenswissenschaftlichen Fakultät:
Prof. Dr. Hans-Helmuth Gander
Datum der Fachprüfung im Promotionsfach: 25.01. 2016
Zusammenfassung
Die Präsenz von Gruppen bzw. „Social Minds“ (Alan Palmer) in faktualen und fiktionalen
Erzählungen ist unverkennbar: Kollektive und deren geteilte Erfahrung tragen erheblich zur
narrativen Dynamik vieler Geschichten bei. Dies betrifft ein Spektrum, das von kleinen
Einheiten (wie Liebespaaren oder Konfliktakteuren) über größere Gruppen (wie Familienkreise
oder Arbeitsgemeinschaften) bis hin zu maximalen Kollektiven (wie früheren Generationen
oder gar der gesamten Menschheit) reicht. Die Dissertation untersucht die Darstellung
kollektiven Bewusstseins vergleichend in ausgewählten Romanen und Mentalitätsgeschichten.
Mittels eines vom Verfasser entwickelten Instruments („Mind-Telling“) wird erforscht, welche
Arten von Kollektiven auftreten und mit welchen rhetorischen Strategien diese ausgestaltet
werden. Besonderes Augenmerk liegt gemäß der narratologischen Ausrichtung des
Graduiertenkollegs 1767 auf den Wechselbeziehungen zwischen faktualem und fiktionalem
Erzählen.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1:
Introduction………………………………………………………………...…1
Fictional and Factual Narrative
Fiction and History
Method and Corpus
Chapter Outline
I. Theory
Chapter 2:
Mind-Telling and Social Minds in (Narrative) Theory…………...….........14
Mind-Telling
Mind-Telling in History
Mind-Telling about Collectives
Palmer’s Social Minds Approach
Collective Experientiality
Other Research in Narrative Studies
Research by Historians
Fiction and History: Factuality, Narrativity, Collectivity
History and Mind
Research by Narratologists
II. Analysis
American Renaissance Self-Fashioning
Historical Context: American Puritanism ……………………………………………...…51
Chapter 3:
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter ……………………………............73
Chapter 4:
Perry Miller, The New England Mind ………………………………………114
Victorian Collective Affect Portraiture
Historical Context: British Victorianism…………………………………………………145
Chapter 5:
George Meredith, The Egoist …………………………………………..........162
Chapter 6:
Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind …………………………..199
Chapter 7:
Conclusion …………………………………………………………….........237
Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………………..245
1. Introduction
Narrative not only stages and describes the immense diversity of human experience but also
contextualizes, negotiates and explicates it. A permanent exchange between the representation
and the interpretation of human experience pervades narrative. Employing the analytical
instrument I label ‘mind-telling’, this study explores narrative’s explanatory discourse about
anthropomorphic fortunes. More specifically, this study starts from the observation that social
minds, group cognition and collective experience have received insufficient attention from
narrative scholars as genuine phenomena in their own right. My inquiry treats the topic of group
experience both conceptually and analytically, and deliberately seeks to extend Alan Palmer’s
pioneering Social Minds in the Novel (2010). I trace how fictional (novels) and factual
(historiographical) narratives accommodate explicit commentary, especially about social
minds. Taken together, the central topic under scrutiny here is narrative’s discourse about
collective minds.
The study focuses on ‘mind’ as the crucial factor manifesting the cognitive semantics
involved in the narrative representation of human experience. ‘Mind’ refers to a range of
phenomena including emotions, thoughts, intentions, beliefs, desires, dispositions, unconscious
impulses, bodily drives and the more complex issues of individual and collective identity. In
recent years, narratologists have opened multiple routes that integrate these components into
narrative studies in new and productive ways. Cognitive approaches to narrative have
flourished, as epitomized by such studies as Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds (2004) and Lisa
Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction (2006).
In particular, Palmer’s Social Minds in the Novel (2010) has emphasized that narratives are
not restricted to representing the cognitive elements of individual experience but that collectives
assume significant narrative presence as well. It emerges that numerous and variegated
constellations of group cognition are depicted in fictional and factual narratives, though Palmer
does not study the latter mode. Through his emphasis on social minds, Palmer reinvigorates the
study of an important phenomenon already identified during the heyday of narratological
structuralism: Gérard Genette calls attention in Figures of Literary Discourse to “another,
collective psychology, for which contemporary anthropology has done something to prepare us
and the literary implications of which deserve to be explored systematically. The fault of
modern criticism is perhaps not so much its psychologism as its over-individualistic conception
of psychology” (Genette 1982, 16-17).
1
Among the narratological areas to which I thus hope to contribute is the ‘representation of
consciousness’1. Dissecting the means by which narratives display minds, this field has been
shaped by such superb contributions as Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds (1978). I fully
empathize with Cohn’s initial revelation that “the questions that gave rise to this book arose
empirically, at the point where my interest in narrative form came to meet my predilection for
novels with thoughtful characters and scenes of self-communion” (Cohn 1978, v; emphasis
added), but critically discern an individualist bias in her explorations of narrative consciousness.
Though Cohn’s study constitutes a landmark achievement in the late 1970s and climactically
consolidates this narratological niche discipline, the collectivist shift which Palmer has
introduced further contours this area and, roughly four decades later, injects fresh momentum
into the exploration of narrative minds.
My work in this study is aligned to enhance Palmer’s groundbreaking analysis of social
minds. Comparing novels and works of history, I examine social minds not only in fictional but
also in factual narrative. I in fact identify a specific factual genre which I label ‘narrative history
of mind’. In order to properly conduct this research, I develop my own tool, ‘mind-telling’.
From these analytical processes I derive a number of conceptual assertions, some of which
challenge existing assumptions. Responding to an observation Cohn makes in The Distinction
of Fiction (1999), for instance, I posit the existence of factual minds, i.e. the representation of
consciousness in factual narrative. Besides elaborating on Palmer on the analytical level,
therefore, I also draw narrative-theoretical conclusions.
Fictional and Factual Narrative2
In addition to ‘social minds’, the second major domain which this study addresses is the relation
between fictional and factual narrative. The narratological relevance of studying factual
narratives, in productive contrast to fictional ones, has perhaps most visibly been established
by Genette et al. in their essay “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative” (Genette [et al.] 1990).
The essay appeared in a 1990 special issue of the journal Poetics Today which featured another
landmark contribution, Dorrit Cohn’s “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective”.
Cohn has in fact paid further attention to the nexus between factual and fictional narrative in a
1
Palmer (2005b) provides a concise introduction to “Thought and Consciousness Representation (Literature)”,
which, centering on the so-called speech-act approach, can be applied to both factual and fictional prose.
2
A slightly altered version of the following three paragraphs appears in Alders (2015).
2
number of essays (e.g. “Pierre and Napoleon at Borodinó: Reflections on the Historical Novel”)
later collected into the volume The Distinction of Fiction (1999).
Cohn notes that historical narrative gives more prominence to social minds than individual
minds3. The observation can be widened to include other genres of factual narrative such as
journalism (though there exist notable exceptions such as life-writing). While factual narrative
therefore lends itself to being subjected to social-minds investigations, social minds in fictional
narrative also need to be identified more extensively. That is, narrative theorists should attend
to the full generic spectrum of prose narrative, including short and flash fiction, as well as to
drama and poetry. Thus, this study seeks to bring two major subjects which have remained
underexplored in narrative studies into dialogue with one another: social minds and the relations
between factual and fictional narrative. This plan provides an overall framework to which the
individual chapters contribute analytical and generic emphases which will be summarized in
the conclusion.
The essential concern driving the reflections by Genette and Cohn is the question whether
the core parameters of narrative, which were developed on the basis of fictional narrative, can
equally be applied to factual narrative. In other words: can factual narrative be subsumed into
the overarching category of ‘narrative’ as one of its modal sub-genres; or does it constitute a
narrative mode in its own right, sufficiently idiosyncratic to require a different set of analytical
instruments? A moderate answer would point to scales, degrees and the need to look at
individual cases. Nonetheless, the lowest common denominator arising from such
considerations is the need to clarify whether, and how specifically, such fundamental
components as ‘narrator/author’, ‘character’, ‘focalization’, ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘mind’ manifest
themselves in diverse examples of factual narratives as pitted against the foil of fictional ones.
This comparative analysis, anyhow, underlies my analysis of fiction and history. On her part,
Cohn encourages the conducting of such examinations in the spirit of “a critique that questions
whether existing categories are or are not fiction-specific, that points up ways in which existing
tools need to be qualified or modified before they can be applied to nonfictional narrative, and
that spotlights discursively inscribed fault lines between the two narrative domains” (Cohn
1999, 110). Revisiting one such ‘fault line’ will be especially rewarding as it relates to the
3
See Cohn: “[T]wo of the parameters with which a historiographic narratologist would have to deal with are, first,
the fact that history is more often concerned with collective “mentalities” than with individual minds, a focus that
creates altogether distinctive discursive conventions requiring detailed examination; and second, and related, the
massive prevalence of summary over scene in historical narration, where external focalization is maintained over
rather vaster (and less closely paced) temporal stretches in the lives of individuals or nations than the tense hour
in Henry’s lunchroom covered by [Ernest Hemingway’s] “The Killers” (Cohn 1999, 121).
3
narratological study of consciousness: this study claims the existence of ‘factual minds’,
individual and social, meaning the representation of consciousness in factual narration.
Monika Fludernik has recently developed a kindred and yet more conciliatory agenda in her
2013 essay “Factual Narrative: A Missing Narratological Paradigm”. Fludernik argues that “a
division between factual and fictional narratology does not make much sense. What one needs
is a model that is flexible in providing concepts that are necessary for the analysis of both types
of narration and that allows a combination of these concepts” (134). Emphasizing “the
constructed and carefully crafted quality of much factual narration” (122), Fludernik
encourages the enterprise of “a poetics of factual narration” (122) which would capture, among
others, such criteria as factual narrative’s “structural shaping,” “stylistic issues” and “imagery”
(122). My own concept of mind-telling is designed as an instrument which, though limited to
probing the representation of minds in narrative, can be applied to fictional and factual modes,
and thus help develop a poetics of factual narration.
Fiction and History
As an exemplification of the divide between fictional and factual narrative, this study contrasts
novels and works of history. History is not only saturated with social minds, but also offers
fertile material for narrative studies more generally. In an essay honouring “Garrett Mattingly,
Historian” Jack Hexter states that:
In the best writing of history, analysis and narrative do not stand over against each other in
opposition and contradiction; nor do they merely supplement each other mechanically. They
are organically integrated with each other; to separate them is not an act of classification but
of amputation. (Hexter 1971, 170)
The fact that historiography marries together analysis and narrative – fundamentally resembling
fictional prose in this respect – serves as my starting point to trace a number of narratologically
oriented questions. Most centrally, my inquiry starts from the assumption that collective
protagonists constitute a significant, if as yet underappreciated, part of narrative’s character
typology (see also Bromberg 1990, Langland 1984). This assumption opens the vista towards
recognizing further deviations from the dominant character type, which, at least in fictional
narrative, is that of the single protagonist. Collectivity, in other words, prompts narrative
scholars to suspend the single human individual as the model for narrative’s experiential and
4
agential subjects. Such essential components of narrative as ‘mind’, ‘character’, ‘action’ and
‘focalization’ have to be rethought according to the collectivity paradigm. This process of
adjustment might venture as far as studying narrative representations of “the lived texture of
non-human experiences” (Herman 2011b, 178), for which examples might include animals,
forces of nature and abstract ideas.
One could argue further that it is only through narrative representations that such ‘deviant’,
inconspicuous agents become visible as phenomena on a par with human characters in the first
place. Factual narration, history in particular, provides informative material in this regard
precisely because it does not depend on the schema of the individual human protagonist as
much as fiction. Though certain genres (life-writing) and counterexamples (Garret Mattingly’s
historiographical The Defeat of the Spanish Armada [1959]) may weaken this hypothesis, the
overall majority of factual narratives displays character typologies which substantially differ
from those of fictional narratives. This estimation concurs with Michel de Certeau’s assertion
in The Writing of History that “history places a population of the dead on stage – characters,
mentalities, prizes” (de Certeau 1988, 99).
To study the respects in which (selected samples of) fiction and history differ and cohere,
this study assumes a conceptual matrix which accommodates the phenomena emerging from
the comparison between literary (as fictional) and historiographical (as factual) narration, and
which triggers both types to engage in mutually informative dialogue. Monitored by a scholarly
meta-discourse cautious not to flatten the generic, functional and textual differences which do
distinguish these two modes of writing, such a matrix can treat them as different and similar. It
constructs itself in the interstices between these three thematic blocks: collectivity, factuality,
narrativity.
Inquiries pertinent to these foci have been located in the environs of the question,
comparative in orientation, in which specific ways fictional and historiographical prose
respectively participates in the overall category of ‘narrative’. Research on historiography in
particular has identified a “revival of narrative” (Stone 2001 [1979], 281), based around “the
most important and central debate in the philosophy of history since the 1960s: the extent to
which the discipline of history is essentially a narrative mode of knowing, understanding,
explaining and reconstructing the past” (Roberts 2001, 1).4 This debate has seen not only
historians but also philosophers and literary scholars probing the deep-structural dimension of
historiography’s narrativity, while pinpointing surface-structural techniques and ‘signposts’
4
See The History and Narrative Reader for landmark essays shaping what the volume’s introduction refers to as
“the history and narrative debate, 1960-2000” (Roberts 2001, 1).
5
employed by historians, through which such a dimension might be manifested. Below I survey
the findings from this debate which are relevant for my deliberations.
The specific factual genre I explore in this study is a historiographical sub-category which I
label ‘narrative history of mind’. Rather than political events, martial affairs and the deeds of
influential individual leaders, it details the patterns of shared cognition and affect of specific
population groups. It does so by narrative means in that it depicts thought dynamically, meaning
in terms of collective characters (‘the Puritans’; ‘the Victorians’) acting out cognitive processes.
This sub-mode of history, in other words, foregrounds factual social minds and therefore
constitutes the ideal format to study the historiographical discourse about collectives. The two
exemplifications of the narrative history of mind analyzed in this study are Perry Miller’s The
New England Mind (1939) and Walter Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind (1957).
This Anglo-American genre entertains affinities with the ‘history of mentalities’ emerging
out of the French Annales school. Peter Burke identifies three major characteristics of the
history of mentality: (1) “a stress on collective attitudes rather than individual ones”, (2) an
emphasis on unspoken or unconscious assumptions and (3) “a concern with the structure of
beliefs as well as their content, with categories, with metaphors and symbols, with how people
think as well as what they think” (Burke 1986, 439). Burke further observes about the history
of ideas that “we very much need something to occupy the conceptual space between the history
of ideas, defined more narrowly, and social history, in order to avoid having to choose between
an intellectual history with the society left out and a social history with the thought left out”
(440). This description captures the similarities between the history of mentalities, the history
of ideas, and what I determine as the narrative history of mind. The latter traces precisely the
thought processes and cognitive dispositions of a historically specific population group.
The pivotal, Palmer-inspired question I arrive at tackling in my comparison of fiction and
history is how collective characters and shared experience are represented and negotiated in
selected examples of fictional and factual narration. My leading concern is to gather the
linguistic particulars, narrative devices, and principles of operation employed to convey, and
comment on, social minds. I capture these in the analytical sections of this study. The premise
of this research activity is that a diversity of such means is to be detected by a systematic
analysis. In this process, I also identify which types of collectives are depicted. Since a more
detailed awareness about methodology underlies my work, I would next like to go into some
depth on this front.
6
Method and Corpus
In its most general dimension, the methodological approach implemented here is narratological,
meaning narrative-theoretical: my chief interest is in the systematic analysis and corresponding
conceptualization of (prose) narrative’s operations and implications. What drives me as a
scholar is the fascination with the phenomena I encounter in narrative prose texts while I am
immersed in the process of experiencing them as a solitary reader. This fascination involves a
strong desire to recuperate these phenomena in narrative-conceptual terms. Such an
emphatically inductive activity consciously derives its methodological spirit from Genette:
To analyze it [Proust’s Recherche] is to go not from the general to the particular, but indeed
from the particular to the general: from that incomparable being that is the Recherche to
those extremely ordinary elements, figures, and techniques of general use and common
currency which I call anachronies, the iterative, focalizations, paralipses, and so on. What I
propose here is essentially a method of analysis […]. (Genette 1980, 23)5
Like Genette’s, my investigations are primarily discourse-based, though also oriented towards
story or content, which explains my focus on representation; the latter I take to be the (dynamic
employment of) linguistic and narrative-technical particulars devised by authors, uttered by
narrators and processed by readers. I concentrate, in other words, on the textual how more than
on the what, though with an awareness of “the central idea of a semantization of narrative
forms” (Nünning 2000, 361), namely the insight “that formal techniques are not just analysed
as structural features of a text, but as narrative modes which are highly semantized and engaged
in the process of cultural construction” (360). Nünning foregrounds that the boundary between
these two levels, the formal and the semantic, is pervious. The how and what of narrative
representations are inextricably enmeshed. Properly extended, they in fact entail the entire
panoply of w-matters, such as who, when, where, and, crucially important for the study of
history, why. The Pandora’s Box of possible scholarly projects thus unfurled, however, makes
5
See also Pier who stresses that “[…] the point I wish to make is although Genette’s narrative theory might appear
to be dated from the vantage point of postclassical narratology, this may not be the case when it is viewed in
accordance with what it itself purports to be: a study of the specificity of narrative within the scope of an open
poetics. Now, from this perspective, it would be fitting to reconsider Narrative Discourse, not as a paradigm case
of classical narratology with its rage for taxonomies, binarisms and closed and sterile formalisms, but as a method
that navigates between the particular (in this case, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past) and the general to which
all organized bodies of knowledge, including the theory literature, aspire” (Pier 2010, 9-10; emphasis original).
7
it imperative to specify an analytical focus, deliberately limiting an otherwise unrestricted field
of inquiry.
The focus of my own narratological approach in this study is on the how dimension of
narrative representations. The main objective, in other words, is to identify the discursive
phenomena involved in social minds depictions. Furthermore, the study relates these
phenomena to conceptual debates within narratology, focused around the two areas of (i) the
narrative means of representing (especially collective) minds, and (ii) the relations between
factual and fictional narration. Additionally, the study surveys research on the historical
situation out of which the respective works emerge. At the same time, I emphasize that this
study does not seek to explain anything. Such disciplines as history and phenomenology may
aspire to explicate the phenomena they investigate, thus placing particular importance on
tackling narrative’s why dimension. My work in this study does not participate in such
explanatory endeavours.
Pragmatically speaking, the study is comparative, probing fictional and historiographical
texts closely alongside each other, in an attempt to extract analytical and conceptual insights
from this intimately contrastive perspective on an interdisciplinary corpus. As classical
narratology of formalist-structuralist inspiration concentrated its inquiries on fictional
literature, there is a demand to invigorate narratological expeditions into the territory of factual
narration, including “the great factual-literary masterpieces”6 (Siebenschuh 1983, 2). Though
such research has for some time been ongoing after Genette bemoaned a “restricted
narratology” (Genette 1990, 756) based on narratology’s “implicit privileging of fictional
narrative” (755), Fludernik has recently still diagnosed factual narrative to be a “missing
narratological paradigm” (Fludernik 2013, title; emphasis added) and encouraged the
development of a “poetics of factual narration” (122). While Ann Rigney cautioned that “the
literary or discursive dimension of history-writing has for long been ignored” (Rigney 1990,
ix), Dorrit Cohn initiated a specifically “historiographic narratology” (Cohn 1999, 110), on
which I elaborate below.
It is the case, though, that the pathbreaking work of Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur in the
1970s and 80s anticipates the narratological approach towards history that Cohn envisions.
White and Ricoeur already conceptualize and implement what Hans Kellner refers to as
“crooked readings of historical writing […]” which “[…] unfocus the text they examine in order
to put into the foreground the constructed, rhetorical, nature of our knowledge of the past, and
6
Siebenschuh mentions James Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire as examples (see Siebenschuh 1983, 1).
8
to bring out purposes, often hidden and unrecognized, of our retrospective creations” (Kellner
1989, 7). More recent studies by narrative scholars probing a corpus comprised of historians’
prose, such as Rigney’s (1990) and Carrard’s (1992), on the other hand, brilliant and pioneering
as both them are, exclude fiction. I discuss in more detail in separate sections below how these
issues are viewed in selected research on historiography by historians. What has not been
offered to date is a contrastive analysis of fiction and history. This study, then, does aspire to
bring these two narrative types into contact, thus obeying Cohn’s (1999 [1990]) admonition
that “the features that set the two domains [historiography and fiction] off from each other
cannot be clearly perceived unless full comparative attention is given to both levels [story and
discourse] in both domains” (111; emphasis added).7
But according to what parameters will they be juxtaposed; what is the tertium
comparationis? My systematic focus is (i) on the types of social minds and (ii) on the means of
representation by which the narrative discourse treats collective minds. Whereas historiography
negotiates “the idea of social subjectivity” (Carr 2001, 153) much more than individual
mentality and therefore inherently lends itself to this criterion, fictional prose narrative is
pervaded by groups and their shared experience nonetheless. Overall, the analysis of social
minds promises to yield rich scholarly results.
The corpus of this study – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) vs Perry Miller’s
The New England Mind (1939); and George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) vs Walter
Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind (1957) – was chosen to facilitate investigating how
social minds are portrayed in examples of fiction and history. Though the two historical groups
depicted in the corpus are the seventeenth-century American Puritans and the nineteenthcentury British Victorians, the fictional and historiographical narratives representing them were
produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The diachronic exchanges between
representation and production thus emerging are interesting phenomena in their own right. Such
considerations, however, are not part of the systematic orientation of my (discourse-)
narratological research. Concerning the corpus, furthermore, the aim is not to sift through a
large number of narratives in order to distil representative results, but, on the contrary, to
concentrate on the small number of four works which negotiate collective minds prominently
and are therefore likely to reward extended examination.
7
See also Jaeger (2002), Rüth (2005).
9
It should be addressed that especially the historiographical works were not selected because
their content makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates in history. In terms of
their historiographical knowledge, these works, especially Houghton’s Victorian Frame of
Mind, may in fact be perceived as obsolete. It is their extended historiographical discourse on
collective cognition involving narrative practices, instead, which makes them relevant for my
purposes. The texts stem from post-Medieval English-language national environments, NorthAmerican and British, and belong to the cultural paradigm that might roughly be surveyed as
‘Western civilization since the Renaissance’. Cross-cultural variation – say between African,
Chinese, Arabic and European narratives – is therefore excluded from my inquiry.
A final methodological note of more general contours. The principal questions sketched
above guide and systematize my research activity, yet they remain tied to a fundamental
condition: both narrative modes comprising the corpus under investigation here are restricted
by the medium of textuality8 in their attempts to bring (back) to life a ‘submerged population
group’9. Bound by the basic pragmatic necessities of the written narrative form – constituting a
beginning, dividing multiple plot lines into various segments and establishing an endpoint –,
history, like fiction, is “a discontinuous thing in a world of discontinuous things” participating
in “the scandal of general discontinuity” (Kellner 1989, 2).
Yet it is precisely because the textual narratives I probe come as ‘discontinuous things’, or
fixed products, that I feel perfectly comfortable in the position of an armchair narratologist,
conducting text work under decidedly philological auspices, even and especially when
analyzing historiography. In fact, the historiographical narratives examined in my corpus are
not only text-based – manifested in textual form rather than in any other medium –, but also
self-consciously text-derived – informed and inspired by textual documents more than by other
types of historical evidence. They are text-derived in the sense that its sources, these vital and
8
In a collective volume on the so-called New Historicism (Veeser 1989), Hayden White confirms that “[…] the
textualism of the New Historicists, like the textualisms of Structuralists and Post-Structuralists, of Geertz and
Foucault, has the advantage of making explicit and therefore subject to criticism the textualist element in any
approach to the study of history. And beyond that it permits us to see that the conflict between the New Historicists
and their critics, especially those of them who come from literary studies or cultural studies in general, is a conflict
between different theories of textuality” (297).
9
In his study of the modern short story, The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor notices “the first appearance in fiction
of the Little Man” (15) [in Gogol’s story “The Overcoat” (1842)] and argues that while “the short story has never
had a hero […] it has instead […] a submerged population group […]” (O’Connor 1962, 18). Giving voice to
‘ordinary’ middle-class rather than aristocratic characters had already been the dominant task on the novel’s agenda
of nineteenth-century realism, a process which culminated in naturalism’s explicit depiction of underprivileged
population groups (e.g. Gissing, The Nether World (1889). Historiography’s population groups may also be argued
to be ‘submerged’ – de Certeau’s the dead as resuscitated onto the historiographical stage –, while a particular
focus arises with the Annales school on ‘little men and women’: “groups, more rarely individuals, which had been
overlooked when historiography mainly concerned itself with statesmen and military leaders – generally speaking,
with the powerful” (Carrard 1992, 110). Burke (1990) portrays the evolution of the Annales.
10
much-discussed components of historical inquiry, are literary documents of both fictional and
factual status; and they are self-consciously text-derived because the historians I discuss openly
communicate exactly this circumstance in their prefaces. The authors I examine are thus happily
engaged in a universe of textuality. Houghton for example pronounces literature’s privileged
capacity to provide information on ‘the inward thoughts of a generation’:
For my data I have turned to literature in the full faith that “if we hope to discover the inward
thoughts of a generation,” as Whitehead once remarked, “it is to literature that we must
look.” But literature in the broad sense that includes letters and diaries, history, sermons, and
social criticism, as well as poetry and fiction. It is there that “the concrete outlook of
humanity receives its expression.” The wording is precise. If the end proposed, in Newman’s
words, “is that of delineating, or, as it were, painting what the mind sees and feels,” we can
do this fully and precisely only through what the mind expresses. That is why I have made
extensive use of quotation. Attitudes are elusive. Try to define them and you lose their
essence, their special color and tone. They have to be apprehended in their concrete and
living formulation. (Houghton 1957, xv)
From the standpoint of a historian, such assumptions may be perceived as problematic as only
subjects with the capacity of writing thus gain a voice. At the same time, literature’s (including
fictional literature’s, including the novel’s) significance for reconstructing individual and
collective mentality or for otherwise providing noteworthy insights into bygone social, political
and cultural constellations has been salient to various researchers.10 Stephen Greenblatt’s
practice of a “poetics of culture” (Greenblatt 1980, 5; emphasis original), for instance, reposes
on the insight that “language, like other sign systems, is a collective construction; our
interpretive task must be to grasp more sensitively the consequences of this fact by investigating
both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in
the literary text” (5). This circumstance is corroborated by Greenblatt’s methodological
revelation that “the literary text remains the central object of my attention in this study
10
See for instance Nünning (2002): “Wenn man davon ausgeht, daß narrative Formen keine überzeitlichen
Konstanten sind, sondern Einsichten in Denkmuster und Kollektivvorstellungen ihrer Entstehungszeit vermitteln,
dann gewinnen sie einen eigenständigen Wert als Quelle für eine mentalitätsgeschichtlich orientierte
Erzählforschung und Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte” (29-30). See also Nipperdey (1983): “Literatur ist, wie alle
Kunst, ein Spiegel und Indikator für die Seelenlage, das Weltverhältnis, das Selbstverständnis der Menschen, der
Zeit, zumal die große Literatur, und dann auch die, deren Anspruch auf Dauer gescheitert ist, gerade dann, wenn
wir fragen, warum das so war. Darum steht die anspruchsvolle Literatur in unserem Zusammenhang – wie die
große Malerei und die ernste Musik – im Mittelpunkt” (756). Berkhofer (1969), however, cautions that “[…]
creative works offer special problems of their own when used as historical evidence” (17).
11
[Renaissance Self-Fashioning] […] because […] great art is an extraordinarily sensitive register
of the complex struggles and harmonies of culture […]”11 (5).
Textuality’s potential to register the comprehensive complexities intimated by Greenblatt
can of course not simply be taken for granted. Houghton himself remarks that “literature […]
is not a transcript of reality” (Houghton 1957, 374). In relation to historiographical writing, Juri
Lotman (1990) therefore convincingly adduces that “unlike the deductive sciences which
construe their premises logically, or the experimental sciences which can observe them, the
historian is condemned to deal with texts” (217; emphasis original), which entails, as Lotman
further says, that “the historian creates facts by extracting non-textual reality from the text, and
an event from a story about it” (218). To be sure, one must therefore maintain with Philippe
Carrard (1992) “[this] awareness of the epistemological difficulties involved in extracting
factual information from aesthetic documents” (157).
In the works of Miller and Houghton literature’s validity nonetheless assumes a profound
dimension; texts manifest the major database through which they aim to (re-) establish “[…]
structures of factuality […]” (Berkhofer 1995, 57)12. Their tacit premise is to conceive of
written bequests from a particular period – i.e. fictional and factual literature – as precisely that:
material relics of at least equally reliable evidence as buildings, clothes and bones. Resonating
with Greenblatt’s “collective construction[s]”, the thrust of this evidence allegedly stems from
“the fact that three generations in New England paid almost unbroken allegiance to a unified
body of thought, and that individual differences among particular writers or theorists were
merely minor variations within a general frame” (Miller 1967, vii); and from “the intimate
connection between literature and life [as] a significant feature of the Victorian age and one of
its chief glories” (Houghton 1957, xvii).
Despite the justified cautions by Lotman and Carrard, what emerges is that textual
documents from the past must be accorded a higher degree of informative value compared to
the non-textual eloquence of bones and buildings. Even if by means of a precarious hermeneutic
11
Brian Vickers, however, while critically engaging in his Appropriating Shakespeare with the so-called ‘New
Historicism’ (Vickers 1993, 214-271), accuses Greenblatt of “a disregard for the integrity of the literary text; a
bending of evidence, background and foreground, to suit one-sided interpretations; the foisting of modern cultural
and political attitudes on to Renaissance texts […]” (267). At the very least, one might wish to clarify to what
extent Greenblatt’s methodology really differs from earlier works such as Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being
(1936) and Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1942), which are significant early contributions to the
discipline of intellectual history/the history of ideas. More specifically, can Greenblatt’s leitmotivish (Renaissance)
‘self-fashioning’ be subsumed as one of Lovejoy’s “unit-ideas”?
12
The full passage reads: “[Thus] interpretation plays a much larger role in normal history than the profession
likes to admit in its texts, reviews, classrooms, or meetings. Historians’ textual creations, especially those most
prominent or popular in the professions, are more structures of interpretation than the structures of factuality they
purport to be” (Berkhofer 1995, 57).
12
procedure, it is in written accounts more than in other material(s) that scholars may trace
historically conditioned subjectivity – as it were in operation –, including its inevitable
entanglements in then-prevalent collective frameworks. As the process of textualization
stimulates the articulating mind to activate several of its multifarious cognitive resources,
textual sources can be conceived as products of mentality par excellence.13 Fictional and factual
literature not only facilitates but foregrounds the discursive negotiation of the (culturally and
historically diverse manifestations of) human experience, be it through the productions of
literary writers and historiographical authors or by less conspicuous exemplars of the species
such as the diaries and letters of ‘ordinary’ people. This circumstance is made even more
pertinent by Quentin Skinner’s (2002) “consideration that any writer will normally be engaged
in an intended act of communication” (102) – communication not least with a curious posterity
interested to learn ‘what it was like’ in the past. I thus feel legitimized, confident and privileged
to remain a text worker not merely because of the textuality of my objects of investigation and
their sources, but because of the unique capacity inherent in textual remains to bespeak and
conserve past mentality.
Chapter Outline
The ensuing chapters are structured as follows. I first develop and contextualize my analytical
instrument, mind-telling, in conceptual terms. I then introduce the topic of collective minds as
I emphasize Alan Palmer’s recent approach and propose the wider notion of ‘collective
experientiality’. A concise survey of the state of research distils those lines of narratological
and historiographical inquiry that are most pertinent for this study. Operating on a rather
abstract level, these chapters prepare the ground to tackle the study’s core interest, which is to
examine in two case studies how mind-telling represents social minds in fiction and history.
Each case study consists of a contrastive comparison between one literary and one
historiographical text according to a particular thematic focus: (1) American Puritanism and (2)
British Victorianism. The concluding chapter rounds the inquiry off as it summarizes the
study’s analytical and conceptual findings and suggests areas for future research.
13
One might even go as far as consulting textual evidence to extract the dimension of what Braudel labels
unconscious history – “the history of unconscious processes” (Braudel 1970, 160).
13
2. Mind-Telling and Social Minds in (Narrative) Theory
Mind-Telling14
This chapter explicates my concepts of mind-showing and mind-telling, both of which serve as
instruments to examine the representation of narrative minds in fictional and factual narratives.
I place my concepts within narratological as well as historiographical debates, and I quote
passages from a range of prose narratives to exemplify my tools. The emphasis in this inquiry
is on mind-telling which is the explicit discourse narrators establish about characters’ minds.
While both mind-showing and mind-telling can serve to probe individual and social minds, it
is the latter which will be the chief focus in the analytical sections of this study.
I generally differentiate two basic modes of representing individual as well as collective
consciousness: ‘mind-showing’ and ‘mind-telling’. These are my elaborations, derived from
the narrative-theoretical distinction between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ as discussed by Percy
Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921). Lubbock’s terminology in the book varies (‘scenic’
and ‘dramatic’ vs. ‘panoramic’ and ‘pictorial’), but what is important to me are the underlying
phenomena he addresses. Though Lubbock is by no means the first to reflect on what, by Plato
and Aristotle, was viewed as the difference between mimesis and diegesis in ancient literary
theory, he reconsiders these issues in the light of nineteenth-century literature, especially
Flaubert, Thackeray and Henry James. Seeking to distinguish modes of representation in
fictional narrative, the essential question Lubbock asks is this:
Are we placed before a particular scene, an occasion, at a certain selected hour in the lives
of these people whose fortunes are to be followed? Or are we surveying their lives from a
height, participating in the privileges of the novelist – sweeping their history with a wide
range of vision and absorbing a general effect? Here at once is a necessary alternative.
(Lubbock 1965, 66)
The first option, ‘showing’, is to be understood as that mode of presentation which, if it were
not embedded in a prose-narrative discourse, would be drama (hence Lubbock’s terms
‘dramatic’ and ‘scenic’). The second, ‘telling’, denotes the ways in which “he [the novelist]
14
A slightly altered version of the following section has been published in Alders (2014).
14
must interpose on his own account to let us know how the people appeared, and where they
were, and what they were doing” (111).
At least two intertwined issues are contained in Lubbock’s discussions. The first is the purely
formal question of which presentational mode is used, showing or telling: how are the narrative
data rendered? This will be my guiding question in this study and I discuss it in more detail
below, providing my own definitions. The second issue is that each of these two modes
manifests the presence of a ‘knowing’15 narrator, her (discursive) communications to the reader
and a distinct role16 which this narrator assumes in the process of narration. Lubbock states that
“a novelist, with a large and discursive vista before him, could not hope to show it all
dramatically; […] it needs a mind to create that vista” (119). He also says that “the story requires
a seeing eye […]. If no such selecting, interpreting, composing minister is needed, then we have
drama unmixed” (142). Lubbock furthermore conceives this narratorial mind as “a personal
entity, about whom we may begin to ask questions” (114). This second issue thus concerns the
dimension of the narrator’s/author’s involvement in the story, which clearly goes beyond the
formal considerations of the showing/telling divide, and which is a minor research focus for me
in the following.
My main research focus, rather, will be to probe in detail the ways in which particularly the
telling-mode operates in factual and fictional narrative. Therefore, I will subsequently juxtapose
these two modes more fully in order to explicate, first in theoretical terms, the elaborations I
derive from Lubbock’s (and others’) discussion. It should be made clear right away that this
“contrast of two methods” (Lubbock 1965, 112) is indeed an abstract one. A neat separation of
mind-showing and mind-telling is artificial since in the fabric of the narrative text they are
intertwined in most sentences, cooperating to narrate characters’ minds, so that “the line
between showing and telling is always to some degree an arbitrary one” (Booth 1983, 20).17
15
The question of a given narrator’s ‘knowledge’ is an intricate one. It needs to be ascertained, for example, in
which sense an ‘omniscient’ narrator can be regarded as all-knowing. The issue of narratorial (un-)reliability is
also pertinent here. Perhaps, I hypothesize, the Stanzelian typology, which is based on different ideal-typical
‘narrative situations’ (Stanzel 1984, 46-62) could even be replaced by one based on the quality and quantity of
different narrators’ knowledge as textually manifest. See also Füger (1978).
16
The argument that narrators in non-fictional prose are to be equated with the narrative’s author cannot disguise
the fact that non-fictional narrators nonetheless assume a distinct role, pruning the author/narrator’s complex
empirical identity down to the textual function of author/narrator as journalist, historiographer, politician, diarywriter, letter-writer, etc.
17
The distinction between these two presentational modes of writing derives from the quarrel in ancient literary
theory about ‘diegesis‘ and ‘mimesis’. Key twentieth-century texts on this issue are Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of
Fiction (1965 [1921]), Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983 [1961]) and Franz Stanzel’s A Theory of
Narrative (1984 [1979]).
15
Stanzel likewise highlights that “between these two possibilities [showing and telling],
however, there is a broad transitional zone” and, anticipating reader-response approaches based
on constructivist assumptions, remarks that “the propensity of the individual reader’s
imagination determines whether he regards a particular text as an instance of an epic-indirect
or a dramatic-direct presentation” (Stanzel 1984, 66). In the preface to The Wings of the Dove,
Henry James frames the situation with his idiosyncratic writerly eloquence when he speaks of:
[...] the odd inveteracy with which picture [telling], at almost any turn, is jealous of drama
[showing], and drama (though on the whole with a greater patience, I think) suspicious of
picture. Between them, no doubt, they do much for the theme; yet each baffles insidiously
the other’s ideal and eats round the edges of its position; each is too ready to say “I can take
the thing for ‘done’ only when done in my way.” The residuum of comfort for the witness of
these broils is of course meanwhile in the convenient reflexion, invented for him in the
twilight of time and the infancy of art by the Angel, not to say by the Demon, of
Compromise, that nothing is so easy to “do” as not to be thankful for almost any stray help
in its getting done. (James 1986, 353-354)
From a scholarly perspective it is nonetheless decidedly useful to elucidate the distinguishing
features of mind-showing and especially of mind-telling, so as to gain a more than basic
theoretical comprehension. Since the binary distinction I am drawing here betrays “a passion
for typology and classification” (Fludernik 2005b, 38) and operates on “the illusion that
narrative is knowable and describable” (ibid.), however, such a comprehension will remain
provisional and must perpetually be tested against, and elastically inflected according to, the
textual phenomena. I intend my concepts to be malleable (and ideologically unencumbered 18)
instruments that make for dynamic readings, capable both to zoom in closely on textual details
and zoom back out to consider wider narratological issues on this textual base.
It is in this sense that I would describe my method as inductive, as I seek to theorize about
literary phenomena after having noted their presence in numerous texts, in an effort to explicate,
18
In this I follow Kindt and Müller who recommend that “the concepts of narrative theory should be ‘neutral’ with
regard to [the] theory of interpretation, so that their use remains independent of the choice of a concrete interpretive
approach, i.e., so that it does not imply a decision in favour of a specific conception of meaning” (Kindt and Müller
2003, 213). Needless to say, this includes the issue of gender as “too many literary abstractions which claim to be
universal have in fact described only male perceptions, experiences, and options, and have falsified the social and
personal contexts in which literature is produced and consumed” (Showalter 1985, 127). Further, on the relations
between ideology and interpretation, see Hogan, who, when “[...] reading politically oriented literary criticism and
theory [...]”, found himself “[...] shocked by the elitism of faculty and graduate students who adopted fashionable
political approaches to criticism and viewed all who did not as retrogressive and naive” (Hogan 1990, vii).
16
a posteriori, that which is already there. I might say with Lubbock that “the author of the book
was a craftsman, the critic must overtake him at his work and see how the book was made”
(Lubbock 1965, 274), without being certain, however, if critics can ever overtake authors.
I conceptualize mind-showing as the mode in which the narrator presents a character’s mind
through the ‘neutral’19 description of her mental, bodily and speech actions as concurrently
performed.20 Mind-showing thus betrays what a fictional mind presently does, by means of
dynamic verbs. Mind-showing further employs speech acts, stream-of-consciousness and, in
early modern prose, soliloquy. Since I adopt from Palmer the inclusion of externalist
phenomena into the realm of what legitimately counts as expressions of a character’s
consciousness, mind-showing presents not only cognitive impulses, but also physical actions
and verbal utterances (see also my discussion of Palmer below). Emotional, mental and
instinctual (internalist) events count as ‘acts’ in this schema just as utterances in dialogues and
physical deeds (externalist). Essentially, any act a character concurrently executes, internally
or externally, is therefore to be regarded as a manifestation of his or her mind.
For instance, the variant of mind-showing displayed in this scene from Hemingway’s “Hills
Like White Elephants” is entirely externalist:
The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was
brown and dry.
“They look like white elephants,” she said.
“I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer.
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
19
It could plausibly be argued that neutrality of presentation is impossible in fiction, as any seemingly merely
descriptive verb, such as ‘walk’, will always already be coloured by associations from individual readers’
experiences. Stanzel goes as far as saying that “mimesis, in the strict sense of direct or drama-like presentation, is
possible in the novel actually only by means of dialogue”, which he classifies as “an avoidance of mediacy”
(Stanzel 1984, 65). Developing his notion of the ‘implied author’, Booth initially remarks that “we all know by
now that a careful reading of any statement in defense of the artist’s neutrality will reveal commitment; there is
always some deeper value in relation to which neutrality is taken to be good” (Booth 1983, 68). For the sake of
this essay, however, which does not contain enough space to properly engage in deep-structural considerations of
this kind, I assume that a sentence such as ‘she walked down the street’ displays a neutral reporting, whereas ‘she
walked elegantly down the street’ involves the explicitly qualifying intervention of a (knowing) narrator.
20
One rather central issue which my schema poses is how I deal with temporal relations. I regard presently
executed, ‘neutrally’ described actions as mind-showing. These usually come in the grammatical form, in English,
of the simple past, which, however, – as the “epic preterite” (Hamburger 1993, 64-81) – is recuperated as a
temporal mode indicating present execution. Actions rendered in past perfect, on the other hand, as actions which
in fact belong to the past in the story-world, I regard as instances of mind-telling, since they present memories of
acts, not current performances. Announcements about a character’s fictional future likewise count as mind-telling
enunciations. Hamburger, distinguishing between verbs of outer and inner actions, concludes that “the use of these
verbs [of inner actions] constitutes the stringent epistemological proof that the preterite in epic literature does not
have the function of designating past-ness, just as its combination with the deictic adverbs constitutes the
grammatical proof thereof [...]” (82).
17
“I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.”
(Hemingway 1987, 211)
The mind-showing in this scene is entirely externalist because it is deliberately restricted to
presenting physical actions. The verbs in this scene exclusively and neutrally describe physical
activities: “the girl was looking off at the line of hills”, “she said”, “the man drank his beer”,
“the man said”. This however only pertains to the mode of presentation – externalist mindshowing – used to convey this scene; both characters’ minds are obviously very present in this
not-quite-harmonious exchange between the young lovers.
The point is that the cognitive semantics of this scene has to be inferred by the reader
according to the iceberg image that Hemingway proffers (see footnote 21) as an explanatory
model of his writing style. No verb expressing interiority – such as ‘think’, ‘feel’ or ‘realize’ –
makes explicit any of the significance constituting the scene’s narrative point. While it is true
that the scene’s meaning can only be understood in the light of the story as a whole, I seek to
exemplify by citing this passage that the way in which this scene is displayed happens by means
of what Genette aptly labels “external focalization” (Genette 1980, 190, emphasis added), “in
which the hero performs in front of us without our ever being allowed to know his thoughts or
feelings” (190). It is an uncanny coincidence, however, that, towards the end of the story, there
surfaces a tiny speck contaminating this prototypical piece of showing-mode narration with an
enclave of mind-telling about a collective: “He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the
people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train.” (Hemingway 1987, 214, emphasis
added)
By contrast, this scene from Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River Part I” (1925) displays
a combination of externalist and internalist mind-showing in the first and last sentence
respectively:
He [Nick] walked along the road and feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack. The
road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking up-hill. His muscles ached and the day was
hot, but Nick felt happy. (Hemingway 1987, 164)
Similar to the quotation above, this scene conveys the character’s mind through its external
manifestations (“Nick walked along”). In addition, the reader is here confronted with what goes
on inside the protagonist’s consciousness (“feeling the ache”; “his muscles ached”; “Nick felt
happy”). However, this typically Hemingwayesque internalist mind-showing comes in the
18
terse, woodcut shape of minimal statement, sporting none of the modal and semantic
elaborations omniscient realism is notorious for. Hemingway’s writing technique (see quotation
in footnote 21) in fact involves the conscious omission of such information. It is precisely such
discursive extensions which the telling-mode identifies.
Mind-telling, according to my schema, articulates the modalities qualifying a character’s
mind, in its momentary performance or general disposition: the how and why of what a character
does, feels and thinks. Mind-telling’s discourse provides con-textualizing insights in addition
to the ‘neutral’ unfolding of the character’s momentary actions. For example, mind-telling thus
crucially articulates what a character is, by means of static verbs. As mind-telling is likewise to
be conceived as a general mode of presentation (rather than a specific technique), it
encompasses a variety of linguistic, technical and thematic possibilities. This variety is best
understood as a scale ranging from (a) almost invisible one-word adjectival qualifications
integrated in dominantly mind-showing passages; (b) bits and phrases; (c) sentence-long units;
(d) entire mind-telling sections featuring no mind-showing at all, only discourse about a
character’s mind.
Some of these various means by which mind-telling operates have been usefully gathered
by Manfred Jahn (2005a) in his online publication Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of
Narrative. Drawing on Jahn’s database, I attempt to subsume under my consciously broad
concept of mind-telling some of the more specific means of qualifying consciousness in
addition to its ‘re-presentation’: static verbs (Mrs. Jones was strong-willed), adjectival,
adverbial and phrasal qualifications (I reflected ruefully on my remark from two hours ago; He
thought back to his comment almost with a tendency towards self-deprecation), substantival
proclamations (Henry saw misery in John’s face), Cohn’s psycho-narration (Mary’s sense of
self seemed to dissolve), commentary (didactic, evaluative, explanatory).
Mind-telling (like mind-showing) is thus embedded into the narratological branch which
Alan Palmer identifies as “Thought and Consciousness Representation”. Palmer helpfully
differentiates the major ways of (fictional) narrative’s rendering of minds in terms of ‘the
speech category approach’. This involves that “characters’ thoughts are analysed by using the
same categories that are used to analyse characters’ speech” (Palmer 2005b, 602). Palmer
adduces a “basic three term model” (603). The first category, ‘direct thought’, “allows the
narrator to present a verbal transcription that passes as the reproduction of the actual thoughts
of a character” (603) and corresponds to mind-showing. The second category, ‘thought report’,
“is the presentation of characters’ thoughts in the narrator’s discourse” (603) – ranging from
“indirect speech” to “highly condensed summary” –, and corresponds to mind-telling’s various
19
manifestations. Palmer’s third category, ‘free indirect thought’, is a combination of the first two
and corresponds to a mixture of mind-showing and mind-telling.
Mind-telling’s most pronounced manifestation, accordingly, is located at the end its scale:
an extended passage, syntactically enclosed, of the narrator’s explicit discourse about a
character’s mind – narrating general dispositions or other modalities, while not presenting
momentarily executed acts –, which often turns out to be mind-telling even in a literal sense. A
passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) attests this:
Her [Dorothea’s] mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception
of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct
there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed
to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur
martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. (Eliot 1965, 30)
No physical (or cognitive) action is described in this section; the character does nothing. Rather,
the narrator explains the architecture of Dorothea’s mind and does so in the decidedly crafted
way of fictional literature. Relating Dorothea’s mind in terms of a discursive subject-matter,
the narrator uses static verbs to explain the character’s cognitive characteristics (“was
theoretic”; “was enamoured”). Dynamic verbs are utilized, in conjunction with qualifications
through noun phrases, to relate permanent tendencies and dispositions rather than momentary
actions (“yearned by its nature after some lofty conception”; “likely to seek martyrdom, to make
retractions, and then to incur martyrdom”).
Such overt communications on the part of the narrator are significant, first, to detail how
characters attain their distinct (narrative) presence, to detail, in other words, the ways in which
the process of characterization unfolds. Second, in rather articulate contrast to Hemingway’s
manner of narration, Eliot’s narrator herself emerges as “a personal entity, about whom we may
begin to ask questions” (Lubbock 1965, 114). More specifically, one needs to discern that the
narrator’s narrative discourse in Middlemarch (as in omniscient narration generally) manifests
an attitude towards the fictional world, including its inhabitants and events. The questions thus
adumbrated, however, clearly transcend the research focus of this study and would properly
have to be treated in more detail than is possible here. Suffice it to note an informative line of
inquiry surrounding the contemporary “death and return of the author” (see Burke 1992).
It emerges that another salient component of mind-telling’s explicit and multilayered discourse,
which genuinely marks it as being about rather than by a character’s mind, is the use of
20
rhetorical patterns and stylistic devices, which clearly manifests this discourse as being shaped
by the skill of a literary artist. Observe how Joyce closes “The Dead” and with it the entire
Dubliners (1914) collection:
His [Gabriel’s] soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (Joyce
1996, 256)
The final sentence of Joyce’s collection is saturated with rhetorical devices, thus lending a
decidedly poetic dimension and lyric shape to the narrator’s last words. The syntactical pattern
of this sentence is chiasmic. Alliteration prevails in the first part to the extent of approaching
onomatopoeia, emulating the noise of the falling snow. There is also the use of metaphor and
personification involved, since, strictly, Gabriel’s soul cannot swoon. The formal rhetoric at
work in this passage clearly testifies that the mind-telling about Gabriel is crafted in literary
terms as the character’s individual identity dissolves into the collective infinity of “all the living
and the dead”.
Since mind-telling often comes in such rhetorically marked formats, my approach wholeheartedly welcomes Dan Shen’s suggestion that “in order to gain a fuller picture of narrative
presentation, it is both desirable and necessary to combine the concerns of narratology and
stylistics” (Shen 2005, 142). When Shen argues that “[the] narratological features and stylistic
features interact and reinforce each other, and it is necessary to see their interaction in order to
understand the “how” of Hemingway’s art” (146), I can merely assent and briefly add: not only
the “how” of Hemingway’s art. In other words, the interaction between naratological and
stylistic features is to be analyzed in a larger corpus.
These are some of the major phenomena which I hope to amass more fully when exploring
a larger corpus. It is from the ability to serve as an umbrella for quite a range of linguistic means,
narratorial techniques and thematic preoccupations, I maintain, that the deliberately general
term ‘mind-telling’ derives its utility for students and critics alike. It denotes a mode of writerly
presentation, ‘telling’, as restricted to one general area: minds in textual narrative. It seems
worth mentioning this conscious limitation, which is an emphasis at the same time, because
more often than not the fact that narrators openly qualify characters’ minds is not discerned as
a potential of the telling-mode. Konigsberg gives voice to this tendency when he remarks that
“narration has traditionally been divided into the two basic techniques of telling and showing,
although much narration is a combination of the two. The first technique synopsizes large
21
periods of time, generalizes actions, and frequently emphasizes the narrator’s own presence”
(Konigsberg 1985, 45). What about telling’s discourse about fictional minds: its negotiation,
qualification and indeed contemplation of characters’ consciousness? Hence I posit the term
‘mind-telling’ to pinpoint this highly significant and ubiquitous capability of the telling-mode;
hence the insistence on it in the title of my study.
Dorrit Cohn, in Transparent Minds, saw these matters clearly and has in fact already
identified, to a certain measure, what I call mind-telling, and its prevalent features, in her
discussion of what she labels ‘psycho-narration’: “the narrator’s discourse about a character’s
consciousness” (Cohn 1978, 14). Cohn emphasizes that psycho-narration is based on the
epistemic difference between extradiegetic narrator and intradiegetic character. The authorial
narrator has a “superior knowledge of the character’s inner life and [a] superior ability to present
it and assess it” (29). Cohn further observes that this “cognitive privilege” (29) on the narrator’s
part is clearly evidenced by her language, since she can discourse about the story world in a
detached way – as distinct from the language of the character, who is linguistically and
ontologically restricted to her fictional identity. Cohn singles out two specific dimensions which
the narrator can convey precisely because of her privileged position: a character’s “psychic
depth” and her “ethical worth” (29). Cohn pithily characterizes this advantage of narratorial
discourse when she writes that “psycho-narration often renders, in a narrator’s knowing words,
what a character “knows,” without knowing how to put it into words” (46).
There are two reasons why I develop a terminology different from Cohn’s, i.e. ‘mind-telling’
rather than ‘psycho-narration’. One reason is to account for the altered perspective on the
representation of consciousness brought about by Palmer’s emphasis on the externalist
possibilities that the narratorial discourse encompasses. The term ‘mind’, I argue, allows for
both internalist and externalist modes of representing consciousness whereas the term ‘psyche’
is too narrowly concentrated on inner events: ‘mind’ is thus an inclusive term, whereas
‘consciousness’ is an exclusive one. Concomitantly, while ‘telling’ is perhaps just as suited to
describe the nature of authorial discourse as ‘narrating’, the former permits the differentiation
between ‘mind-telling’ and ‘mind-showing’ which is not as comfortably granted by the broader
category of narration.
The second reason, growing out of the first, is that mind-telling is a more extensive category
– a presentational mode that accommodates various specific techniques – and thus covers
considerably larger territory. It must be emphasized, however, that the phenomenon that Cohn
discusses as psycho-narration – the narrator’s overt and extended discourse about a character’s
22
mind – is to be taken as mind-telling’s most pronounced exemplar. I argue, nonetheless, that
mind-telling covers much more ground than this, for instance minute one-word qualifications.
A remarkable peculiarity, moreover, which manifests a blending of mind-telling and mindshowing is free indirect discourse. The title and argumentation of Roy Pascal’s study The Dual
Voice pinpoints this overlap between the narrator’s (telling) and character’s (showing) way(s)
of mediating minds: “the simplest description of [free indirect discourse] would be that the
narrator, though preserving the authorial mode [telling] throughout and evading the ‘dramatic’
mode of speech and dialogue [showing], yet places himself, when reporting the words or
thoughts of a character, directly into the experiential field of the character, and adopts the
latter’s perspective in regard to both time and place” (Pascal 1977, 9).
However, free indirect discourse can be charted precisely as a highly fascinating exceptional
phenomenon; it emerges in a narrative context which is dominated by one of the above-listed
presentational modes.21 It is temporarily that the narrator assumes the mindset and language of
one character in passages of free indirect discourse. Commenting on Schnitzler’s Leutnant
Gustl (1901) and Fräulein Else (1924), Pascal concedes that “the insistent self-awareness of
the narrator can be appropriate at a brief climax of anguish or terror, but cannot be maintained
over longer and less tense periods without suggesting a neurotic condition (Schnitzler wisely
made these stories short)” (Pascal 1977, 4).
Ultimately, my study seeks to establish its two concepts, mind-telling and mind-showing,
not primarily in order to evaluate a given narrative’s aesthetics, but to facilitate a more
accessible, more conscious and perhaps even more accurate study of the ways in which fictional
minds are encountered by readers. Even though it may appear to be an obsolete binary, I think
that the distinction between telling and showing retains a high percentage of critical and
theoretical expediency, namely for the purpose of examining presentational modes of rendering
fictional minds, individual and collective, but also objects and entire worlds. I further claim that
mind-telling has to date not been studied exhaustively enough and that its discourse comprises
phenomena which are yet to be unravelled.
For reasons already specified by Dorrit Cohn (see above) extended passages of what I call
mind-telling typically feature in the narrative situation of such an ‘omniscient’22 narrator,
located on an extradiegetic level and issuing information about characters who are themselves
21
See Fludernik: “[P]ure free indirect discourse is as rare as pure interior monologue, or texts using indirect
discourse exclusively (with no directly quoted dialogue). More typically, speech and thought representation in
literary texts is entirely multi-shaped, so that no specific function can be aligned with any of the formal options, at
least not on a generally valid level” (Fludernik 1993, 309).
22
The whole nexus of omniscient narration has been productively reconceptualized in recent Narrative articles
especially by Culler (2004), Nelles (2006), Heinze (2008) and Dawson (2009). See also Sternberg (2007).
23
located on the intradiegetic level(s) of narration. Mind-telling, however, also surfaces in other
narrative situations, including homodiegetic narration23, which can be witnessed in a sample of
unreliable ‘Gothic’ fiction, Edgar Allan Poe’s murder-involving “The Black Cat” (1843):
From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness
of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. (Poe 1986, 320)
Unlike in the instances of omniscient narration considered thus far, the first-person narrator
here is also an embodied character participating in the story – in fact the narrative’s main
character. And yet he maintains a mind-telling discourse resembling that of an omniscient
narrator as he overtly states “the docility and humanity of my disposition” and “my tenderness
of heart”. Two crucial conditions, however, differentiate Poe’s narrator from the narratorial
persona one usually encounters in the realist novel. One, this narrator’s mind-telling is restricted
to himself rather than ranging across the entirety of storyworld participants. As the label ‘firstperson narrator’ suggests, the interiority about which he can discourse is limited to one
character: himself. Second, “The Black Cat” reveals itself to be a prominent case of ‘unreliable’
narration, meaning that the course of events in the story completely contradicts these initial
pronouncements. This exemplar of first-person narration nonetheless shows that mind-telling
appears across genres, modes and narrative situations; mind-telling may be useful for
narratological lines of inquiry not considered in this study.
One such line of inquiry is feminist narratology, prominently advanced for instance by the
work of Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol, which anchored the parameter of ‘gender’ within
narrative studies. Mind-telling is a tool, I suggest, which can help determine a distinctly female
experience in first-person narratives such as Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” (1979),
whose opening paragraph demonstrates this:
I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of
excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the
pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that
bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white,
23
See also Lanser: “The conventions regulating the relationship between a narrator’s privilege and the mode of
representation are violated more frequently than one might expect. [...] one kind of deviation from the norm occurs
when a homodiegetic narrator takes the omniscient privilege of the heterodiegetic voice” (Lanser 1981, 162).
24
enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.
(Carter 1985, 7)
Like Poe’s, Carter’s first-person narrator is characterized by a strong sense of self-reflectivity
which finds expression through mind-telling. Unlike Poe’s, Carter’s first-person narrator is not
unreliable, even though the story events stand in a similarly stark contrast to her qualifying
cognitive self-attribution of “a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement”. Mind-telling
furthermore facilitates this narrator to fashion her distinctly female identity by adumbrating the
inchoate contours of the journey schema which the ensuing narrative is to unfold: “[…] away
from girlhood […] into the unguessable country of marriage”. I would in fact argue that the
telling of her own mind, through a genuine literary style, is the major (speech-) action which
Carter’s first-person narrator executes. By physical standards, this young woman is rather
passive, she does very little. Instead, it is her mother who performs the crucial deed, at the end
of “The Bloody Chamber”, of shooting the male monster and epitomizing the female heroknight on horseback. The narrator’s achievement, by contrast, is her rhetorical performance as
a character-narrator. She masterfully crafts her experience in a self-conscious, self-reflective
discourse manifested through mind-telling.
Omniscient literary realism, as a consequence, is not the exclusive perspectival and thematic
narrative mode to employ the presentational mode of mind-telling, but nonetheless does so most
prominently, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, which is why my focus in this
dissertation is on realist fiction. (As historiography is usually in the third-person singular voice,
the criterion for selection here was a thematic one, the depiction of collective minds, rather than
a modal one, as omniscient voice). In my estimation, mind-telling’s variegated manifestations
in realist prose are yet to be synchronically systematized – an enterprise which the present study
can outline only very broadly – before a diachronical approach might then go on to investigate
mind-telling in (omniscient) prose texts as early as Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte de Arthur
(1485), Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590), and indeed
Elizabethan historiography such as Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577-1587), or Thomas More’s
The History of King Richard III (c. 1513-1518).
25
Mind-Telling in History
So far, my exemplifications of mind-telling have been drawn from fictional prose. The tool can
be applied to factual narratives as well. Vital for the project of this study is that historiography,
as a factual mode of narrative, also employs mind-telling, about individuals as well as
collectives. Two works of history celebrated for their resemblance to literary narrative while
nevertheless conducting historiographical research are Garrett Mattingly’s The Defeat of the
Spanish Armada (1959) and Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom (2006). Both works use mindtelling:
On both sides, no doubt, one may discern vanity and calculation and selfishness; probably
those are necessary elements in any love affair. If Elizabeth Tudor was to rule England at all
– and she had all a Tudor’s determination to rule – she had to win the love of her people
because there was nothing else she could depend on. (Mattingly 1962, 25)
Stein and Hardenberg, the two most influential reformers within the Prussian administration
after 1806, represented two distinct German progressive traditions. […] The two men were
also temperamentally very different. Stein was awkward, impulsive, and haughty.
Hardenberg was shrewd, agile, calculating and diplomatic. (Clark 2006, 320)
The demands of German nationhood complicated the inner life of the Prussian state,
amplifying its dissonances, disturbing its political equilibrium, loosening some bonds while
reinforcing others, bringing at once a diffusion and a narrowing of identities. (Clark 2006,
556)
In the first quotation, Mattingly describes the relationship between Queen Elizabeth I and her
subjects, which he metaphorically designates as a “love affair”. His historiographical discourse
operates on mind-telling terms as “on both sides, no doubt, one may discern vanity and
calculation and selfishness” and as “she [Elizabeth] had all a Tudor’s determination to rule”
(emphasis added). Mattingly thus avails himself of precisely that capacity which Cohn denies
the historian, the factual knowledge of another subject’s experientiality, and he articulates it by
such mind-telling attributes as “vanity” and “selfishness”. Clark likewise openly analyzes the
mentality of Stein and Hardenberg by way of contrasting them. It is through such
unambiguously evaluative adjectives as “awkward, impulsive, and haughty” (Stein) and
26
“shrewd, agile, calculating and diplomatic” (Hardenberg) that the historian classifies these
historical figures. Clark also uses mind-telling in the second quotation, though this time the
‘mind’ he discusses is that of a non-human entity. It is an interesting narrative phenomenon by
means of which Clark homogenizes an enormous diversity of sub-groups into a ‘singular’
instance assumed to possess a common interiority: “the inner life of the Prussian state”. The
narrative discourse reveals that this instance accommodates the complex relations among its
constituent parts, so that the state’s inner life is marked by ‘amplified dissonances’, ‘disturbed
equilibrium’, ‘loosened and reinforced bonds’ and ‘diffused and narrowed identities’.
As historiographical scholarship has increasingly become self-conscious in the wake of the
twentieth-century ‘revival of narrative’, narrative-theoretical, poetological and discourseanalytical approaches – precisely the business ‘mind-telling’ deals in – have emerged as
informative and valued additional perspectives. While scholars such as Hayden White and Paul
Ricoeur paved the way for these directions in the study of history-writing, other researchers
have pursued lines of inquiry more closely related to the present agenda. This is true above all
of Robert F. Berkhofer’s work (1969; 1995; 2008). Berkhofer is an unavoidable source for this
study because he explicitly discusses the telling-showing and story-discourse distinctions in
relation to historiography. Berkhofer writes that “[I]n producing a text that attempts to bridge
the gulf between the ideal of the Great Past and the goal of professional history, the historian
faces the problem of telling rather than showing from a literary point of view” (Berkhofer 1995,
147). Berkhofer furthermore repeatedly engages in a comparison between history and fiction,
for instance when expounding the significance of telling and showing in both narrative modes.
Since these matters are at the very center of my approach, I am quoting the passage in full:
Showing and telling in literary productions go under the names of mimesis and diegesis,
scene and summary, enacting and recounting, simulation and reportage, among the more
popular designations. Today the distinction between Aristotle’s terms mimesis and diegesis
centers on contrasting modes of representing actors and actions in various media. As
“enacting” and “showing” suggest, mimetic representation is direct reproduction of words,
actions, and scenes through the medium. Such direct imitation is denied to novelists and
historians. They are limited to summarizing or recounting what happened. Thus histories,
like novels, are mimetic only in the sense that they sometimes use the words of the actors –
and even then they are written, not spoken, words. They cannot be mimetic in the classic
sense because they cannot replicate words and actions as in a film or play or duplicate the
scene or the action as in a painting or photograph. Their mode must therefore be primarily
27
diegetic. Similarly, their “realism” derives not from a seemingly direct reproduction but from
representation through other, indirect means conventional to the medium. (147)
Interestingly, Berkofer assumes the same narrative operations at work in both history and fiction
as “[…] histories, like novels, are mimetic only in the sense that they sometimes use the words
of the actors […]”, yet “[…] cannot be mimetic in the classic sense […]”. Accordingly, “[T]heir
mode must therefore be primarily diegetic”. Berkhofer, in other words, does not draw a
distinction between factual and fictional prose in terms of showing and telling. Moreover, he
concludes that both history and fiction turn out to be “primarily diegetic”, which confirms my
premise that mind-telling is the suitable instrument to explore social minds in these narrative
genres. Berkhofer thus embraces this binary opposition as a heuristic instrument, useful on the
conceptual plane not least because “[W]ith this elementary distinction we can examine better
the degree of invention and interpretation in historical texts that produces the problems of
partiality historians see” (147). Eventually, however, as Berkhofer (2008) correctly highlights,
such “[…] dichotomies make good slogans but poor theory, because they fail to describe the
collective, intellectually mixed nature of histories as synthetic products” (216).
To recapitulate: mind-showing conveys a character’s mind from inside the individual
character (e.g. interior monologue) or betrays external bodily actions and utterances in
dialogues (speech acts). Mind-showing, being restricted in this sense, presents the character’s
action in its present execution. While mind-showing renders these expressions of a character’s
mind without explicitly qualifying them, i.e. (re-) presenting them by “merely” stating them,
mind-telling provides explicit qualifications and modal descriptions about (the how and why
of) these expressions.
It is crucially important that mind-telling is distinct from mind-showing in that the former
manifests, by means of explicit and discursive qualifications, indeed by a kind of additional
discourse, psychological dimensions which are suggested but remain unarticulated in the mode
of mind-showing. Mind-showing’s functioning could be designated as ‘presentation’ and mindtelling’s as ‘proclamation’. Mind-telling may therefore be understood as the antagonistic pole
to Hemingway’s ‘minimalist’ mind-showing which operates on the principle of omitting, of not
articulating what goes on inside characters’ minds.24 One could modify Hemingway’s image of
24
Hemingway writes in Death in the Afternoon: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about
he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those
things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only oneeigth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only 0makes hollow
places in his writing” (Hemingway 1955, 192).
28
the iceberg, of which, in his fiction, only the tip is visible (and the main body has to be
complemented by the reader) by saying that mind-telling makes visible considerable parts of
the body of the iceberg in addition to its tip.
While mind-telling and mind-showing are designed to examine the representation of
fictional minds in any prose text – whether it be fictional or non-fictional; pre-, high-, or postmodern, realist ‘omniscient’ narrative is most informative when it comes to garnering the
various linguistic and thematic means by which the mode of mind-telling operates. Realist
novels provide the most rewarding material for this initial synchronic analysis, because it is in
this genre – the realist novel from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy – that omniscient narration
emerges in its most communicative, sophisticated and ‘naïve’ shape. Naïve in the sense that the
convention of an authoritative narrative discourse, which can by no means be reduced to
‘condescending commentary’, is not yet compromised, problematized and developed further as
– perhaps through “an activity of hesitation” (Heath 1972, 22)25 – in modernist prose.
Mind-Telling about Collectives
Crucially important for this study is that mind-telling can be used to detect social minds, and
can moreover capture the fascinating transitional realm between individual and collective
experience, a realm already invoked in the title of the book from which the following quotation
is taken, John McGahern’s Amongst Women (1990):
Maggie flew over from London on the morning of the Day. Mona and Sheila met her at
Dublin Airport and the three sisters drove to Great Meadow in Mona’s car. They did not
hurry. With the years they had drawn closer. Apart, they could be breathtakingly sharp on
the others’ shortcomings but together their individual selves gathered into something very
close to a single presence. (McGahern 1990, 2, emphasis added)
25
Heath explains that “the purpose of the present book [his The Nouveau Roman. A Study in the Practice of Writing
(1972)] is to present one moment in the development of a radical shift of emphasis in the novel from [this]
monologistic realism to what I call the practice of writing. This shift is not to be understood in the traditional terms
of a change from ‘social realism’ to ‘psychological realism’ or whatever, but in terms of the deconstruction of the
very ‘innocence’ of realism. Its foundation is a profound experience of language and form and the demonstration
of that experience in the writing of the novel which, transgressed, is no longer repetition and self-effacement but
work and self-representation as text. Its ‘realism’ is not the mirroring of some ‘Reality’ but an attention to the
forms of the intelligibility in which the real is produced, a dramatization of possibilities of language, forms of
articulation, limitations, of its own horizon. This attention may be defined as an activity of hesitation.” (22)
29
The analytical expediency of the mind-telling mode is succinctly exemplified by this passage.
First, mind-showing presents the actions of Maggie, Mona and Sheila as individual characters,
even though a process of convergence between them is already under way as “Mona and Sheila
met her [Maggie] at Dublin Airport and the three sisters drove to Great Meadows in Mona’s
car. They did not hurry.” It is only through a distinctly mind-telling description, however, that
this confluence of separate identities is revealed: “together their individual selves gathered into
something very close to a single presence.”
Another exemplification of a shifting between individual and collective scenarios occurs in
the beginning of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love” (1981), which sets the pattern that is to recur throughout the story: the oscillation between
the individual experientiality of the story’s first-person narrator and the communal experience
of the four friends – the narrative’s “we” comprising two married couples –, into which the Inarrator repeatedly merges. Thus, while the basic narrative situation may be first-person, as
manifested in the ‘narrating I’, the ‘experiencing I’ is integrated into an ‘experiencing we’ 26.
The story’s opening asserts this
My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that
gives him the right.
The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the
kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife,
Teresa – Terri, we called her – and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we
were all from somewhere else. (Carver 1989, 137)
Mind-showing dominates here as the passage features past progressive phrases such as “was
talking” and “were sitting”, but mind-telling shines through in such static verbs as “is a
cardiologist” and “were all from somewhere else”. The latter are subtly integrated and can be
properly distinguished only once a theoretical distinction of the mind-telling/-showing sort is
applied. More importantly, the passage focuses on the communal (we-) experience of the two
couples using Hemingwayesque overtones: “The four of us were sitting around the kitchen table
drinking gin. […] We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else”.
26
We-narrative has been studied for instance by Margolin (1996), Richardson (2006; 2015) and Marcus (2008).
30
The next example, a passage in the beginning of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813),
fully concentrates on mind-telling about a collective:
They [Mr. Bingley’s sisters] were in fact very fine ladies; not deficient in good humour when
they were pleased, nor in the power of being agreeable where they chose it; but proud and
conceited. They were rather handsome, had been educated in one of the first private
seminaries in town, had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending
more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank; and were therefore in every
respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others. They were of a respectable
family in the north of England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories
than that their brother’s fortune and their own had been acquired by trade. (Austen 1966, 9)
It becomes instantly obvious that this section does not present action and is not concerned with
the situated cognition of the ladies, but relates the ladies’ permanent or dispositional cognition.
The passage, in other words, informs readers about what the ladies are, always, rather than what
they do, now. Buttressing the mind-telling through explanatory and evaluative phrases,
Austen’s omniscient narrator furthermore manifests a stance towards this group. One only
needs to consider the explicitly ironical characterization entailed by such attributes as “very
fine ladies”, “proud and conceited” and “rather handsome”. Formally speaking, the narrator’s
disclosing that they “were in the habit of spending more than they ought […] and were therefore
in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others” communicates the
genuine mind-telling phenomena of habits and cognitive dispositions. Enmeshed with these
information, however, on an additional level of communication, is the scathing irony of
Austen’s narrator, manifesting a distinctly critical attitude towards the ladies by means of this
discourse about the social mind of the “very fine ladies”.
The passage thus strikingly exemplifies that mind-telling is employed to contextualize
collective as well as individual characters. It is the ladies’ common disposition which is
foregrounded here to the extent that their shared past is suggested when the narrator conveys
that they “had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town”. There is a tendency
lurking in such depictions, however – unlike in the case of mind-telling about individual
protagonists –, which moves towards the pole of what, extending Forster (1953, 65-79), one
can conceive as a collective flat character. This tendency towards ‘flattening’ might be seen as
being inherent in collective mind-telling as the attribution of features to several characters,
rather than to an individual, entails a widening, de-concentrating motion in the narrator’s
31
discourse. At the same time, since these attributes concern mind-telling, they serve to give some
degree of psychological depth to the ladies, thus ‘rounding’ them, to abide by Forster’s
distinction. Collective mind-telling can be seen as serving both poles at the same time.
While mind-telling about individual and collective characters functions according to the
same basic mode, differences can be discerned as to the extent to which mind-telling about
collectives reaches the same psychological depth-dimension as that about individuals. This is
partly due to the fact that, in fictional narrative, the paradigm of the single protagonist remains
the prevalent schema. More importantly, however, it is grounded in the condition that collective
minds are not as meticulously describable as individual minds in the first place. Though the
complexities involved in collective mentality are clearly greater, because of the entanglement
of multiple minds, they concern inter-, rather than intra-mental conditions. This results in a
seemingly unwieldy, multisubjective, and thus multicentered cognitive convolute, as compared
to the nodal concentration of one subject’s intramentality. It is fascinating, therefore, that the
‘narrative history of mind’ genre as exemplified by Miller and Houghton attempts precisely to
trace such massive entities as the Puritan mind and the Victorian mind, as the analytical sections
will show in detail. Before exploring these, I discuss how the topic of collective minds and the
relations between factual and fictional narrative have been addressed by researchers.
Palmer’s Social Minds Approach27
In his 2010 Social Minds in the Novel, Alan Palmer foregrounds the neglected area of collective
manifestations of narrative minds. The study reconciles three levels, (a) the introduction of
extraliterary disocurses, (b) the conceptualization of social minds and (c) the respective analysis
of novels. Though these three levels are formally kept apart through the chapter divisions,
Palmer competently interrelates them in the book.
In chapter 1, he explicates his methodological position as a cognitive narratologist, insisting
that “my cognitive approach is a pragmatic, undogmatic, and unideological one” (7). Palmer
goes on to reiterate some of the major propositions of his previous book, Fictional Minds, which
may indeed be read as a complementary study to Socials Minds. Subsequently, he consults
discourses from outside literary studies, particularly the cognitive sciences, on such topics as
attribution theory (20-24) and physically distributed cognition (51). Inviting the cognitive
sciences to inform narratologists is in line with Palmer’s repeated emphasis on the continuity
27
Some of the paragraphs in this section have been published in Alders (2013b).
32
between principles operating in empirical reality and fictional storyworlds, since, “as with all
other as aspects of the reading process, we bring our real-world cognitive frames to bear when
we encounter fictional intermental units” (49).
In chapter 2, Palmer elaborates the main claim of his book as he posits the vital importance
of what he labels social minds:
An important part of the social mind is our capacity for intermental thought. Such
thinking is joint, group, shared, or collective, as opposed to intramental, or
individual or private thought. It is also known as socially distributed, situated, or
extended cognition, and also as intersubjectivity. Intermental thought is a crucially
important component of fictional narrative because, just as in real life, where much
of our thinking is done in groups, much of the mental functioning that occurs in
novels is done by large organizations, small groups, work colleagues, friends,
families, couples, and other intermental units. (41)
Palmer then establishes a tentative spectrum to differentiate various kinds of intermental
thought as represented in novels: intermental encounters; small intermental units; mediumsized intermental units; large intermental units; intermental minds (46-48). He stresses,
however, that “the simplicity of this typology hardly begins to do justice to the complexity and
range of the intermental units to be found in novels” (48). In chapters 3-5 Palmer applies the
concepts developed in chapter 2, which results in “discussions of the social minds to be found
in those magnificent canonical warhorses Middlemarch, Little Dorrit, and Persuasion” (35).
Underlying Palmer’s treatment, furthermore, are a number core assumptions which are
critical to understanding his position. Most central among these assumptions is the cognitivescience-derived “realization that mental functioning cannot be understood merely by analyzing
what goes on within the skull but can only be fully comprehended once it has been seen in its
social and physical context” (43). This makes consciousness a phenomenon which is as much
external as it is internal. Thus, “the whole fictional mind” (28) becomes visible and physically
manifest in forms such as body language, tactile exchanges and gazes. Correspondingly, Palmer
distinguishes between an internalist and externalist perspective on fictional minds. Whereas “an
internalist perspective on the mind stresses those aspects that are inner, introspective, private,
solitary, individual, psychological, mysterious, and detached” (39), “an externalist perspective
on the mind stresses those aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident,
embodied, and engaged” (39).
33
Moreover, Palmer proposes to reconceptualize some of narratology’s key categories, namely
mind/consciousness, action and characterization. In fact, Palmer argues that, in contrast to prior
narratological approaches, the externalist perspective facilitates a holistic understanding (about
individual as well as social minds) which perceives these three parameters as necessarily
intertwined. The criterion which is said to epitomize this shift is ‘dispositions’ (27-34):
It is by interpreting episodes of consciousness within a context of dispositions that
the reader builds up a convincing and coherent sense of character. It is through the
central, linking concept of dispositions that characterization and thought
presentation can be seen as different aspects of the same phenomenon. (28)
How relevant is Social Minds in the Novel for the discipline of narratology? Palmer himself
contends that “it is necessary to find room for it at the center of narrative theory” (42, emphasis
original), since “intermental units are to be found in nearly all novels” (41), non-fictional text
types and media (198-201). In sum, Palmer’s work indeed constitutes nothing less than a major
adjustment of how narratologists conceptualize narrative’s arguably most significant capacity:
the projection of human experience – now explicitly including collective, meaning shared,
experience. That the momentum of Palmer’s conceptual and analytical innovations finds
resonance among international scholars of narratology is demonstrated by the fact that the
journal Style devoted its entire issue 45.2 (2011) to critical responses by 25 narrative theorists
to Social Minds in the Novel. These responses show that Palmer’s treatment needs to be
conceptually elaborated and historically contextualized within historiographical and
narratological research. Palmer’s findings also need to be extended diachronially and studied
in the light of factual narratives, such as historiographical ones, which I do below. Such
potential for elaboration and extension proves that Palmer has delivered perceptive pioneer
work; his innovative focus on social minds outlines a fecund analytical agenda, which is
especially useful for comparative investigations of fictional and factual narration, in my case
fictional and historiographical prose.
34
Collective Experientiality
At the same time, it must be recognized that, in her 1996 Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology,
Monika Fludernik has already provided an intriguing and comprehensive concept,
“experientiality”, which is sufficiently capacious to accommodate internalist as well as
externalist expressions of narrative minds. Experientiality encompasses the parameters of
‘action’ and ‘embodiment’, but Fludernik awards prime significance to (the narrative evocation
of) ‘consciousness’ as the most pertinent experiential quality.
However, Fludernik’s conceptualization of experience is too narrowly committed to an
individualist paradigm rather than being fully susceptible to the phenomena that surface once a
collectivist perspective is recognized as an omnipresent and thus inevitable narrative
dimension. Fludernik does touch on groups and collective configurations at various points in
her study, but seems to push the crucial dynamics and formations between (varying numbers
of) individuals into the background. Above all, this is true for the critical narratological category
of ‘character’, which is extended considerably through the inclusion of non-individual shapes.
Related narratological categories which are to be adjusted when viewed through the collectivity
lens are ‘mind’, ‘action’ and ‘focalization’. Combining the emphasis on social minds recently
provided recently by Palmer with Fludernik’s concept of ‘experientiality’, I posit what thus
emerges as ‘collective experientiality’.
Collective experientiality is meant to be an umbrella notion which makes visible, in the first
place, the range of phenomena and scenarios in which experience is shared by two or more
characters. Precisely because these phenomena come in variegated shapes, ‘collective
experientiality’ does not seek to pre-determine the forms collectivity takes in narrative(s), but
is meant as a thematic grid serving to ascertain these forms on inductive, analytical grounds.
These shapes include external, physical actions as well as internal thoughts, affects and
(permanent) dispositions, all of which are encompassed by Fludernik’s parameters of action,
embodiment and consciousness.
The range of phenomena spanned by ‘collective experientiality’ is apt to cause scholarly
expeditions into multiple directions, especially once such expeditions are coupled with
parameters drawn from narratology’s postclassical contextualism or, more generally, from
twentieth-century literary theory. From my perhaps somewhat ‘classical’ point of view, the
most fascinating line of inquiry concerns the question of how the notion of ‘collective
experientiality’ spells out in actual narratives. My analyses below are dominated by this
35
question, though to some extent this study considers conditions to do with the historical context
of the factual and fictional narratives it explores.
It should be stressed that, despite the focus on social minds, no impervious boundary
between individuality and collectivity is postulated here; both of these categories, often
interfused, retain their validity as orientational poles framing human experience – in empirical
reality as well as in narrative representations. One of the characteristic dimensions of fictional
narrative is in fact the elaboration of the unique, idiosyncratic experience of solitary identities,
reflecting Marlowe’s paradoxical adage in Heart of Darkness (1899) that “we live, as we dream
– alone […]” (Conrad 2006, 27). However, though in our innermost selves ‘we’ may indeed
live and dream alone, along the way we surely interact more or less intimately with other people,
willingly or unwillingly. As part of the human species, furthermore, individuals carry in them
genetic, biological and psychological dispositions. The fact that narratologists cannot ignore, at
any rate, is that an immense variety of such forms of collective experience is explicitly
represented in factual and fictional narratives (including Heart of Darkness28).
The scholarly project which this study implements is not to juxtapose the concepts of ‘social
minds’ and ‘collective experientiality’ in order to make a case for one of them in the manner of
an either/or decision. Rather, both can coexist as narrative-theoretical complements. Palmer has
opened up the field of narratology to shared forms of cognition and, in particular, has offered a
very helpful typology to distinguish various social units. I nonetheless suggest ‘collective
experientiality’ as a more copious conceptual frame which indicates the vast intratextual
narrative dimension constituted by collectivist phenomena in need of being integrated into
existent narratological knowledge bases. The implication for the process of analysis is to
operate not on the basis of a static conceptual frame of seemingly unshakable certainty, but to
navigate under the auspices of a malleable notion which sets a general thematic format – ‘social
minds’ and their ‘collective experientiality’ – without exhaustively pre-clarifying the entire
panoply of its intra-narrative manifestations. It is imperative to retain a hermeneutic sensitivity,
an investigative alertness, even a conceptual skepticism, in order to continuously register new
variations of narrative’s phenomena, collective and otherwise.
Besides Palmer’s conceptual deliberations on social minds, various notable scholars from
different disciplines have propounded their views on (aspects of) the central topic(s) of this
study or have treated questions in its environs. There exists a body of scholarship on the
interrelations between fiction and history as involving the parameter of collectivity. In the next
28
See for example Brian Richardson’s Unnatural Voices (2006).
36
section, I provide a survey of those contributions which are most pertinent for my present
agenda. An often-paraphrased early reflection on the general division between literature and
history is Aristotle’s account in the Poetics. Yet I will not even attempt to trace the millenniaspanning chronology of this discussion. Suffice it to note with Thomas Pavel that “the
distinction between history and fiction is thus itself historical to a large extent, and thereby
subject to considerable variation” (Pavel 1992, 18).
Rather, I will pick from the abundant material at hand, especially from contributions in
recent decades, those concerns which are relevant for my activity in this study. Such pragmatic
selectivism certainly hazards to neglect significant information. But my impetus here is not
primarily to re-assume debates led in the past – to highlight this aspect or to rebut that
perspective –; nor to deliver even a faint resemblance of an exhaustive diachronic survey of
these exchanges; but to specify the research context for my own take (‘mind-telling’) on these
issues, which, while being contextualized within such debates to some extent, seeks to operate
on its own (terms).
As an intended effect of what might thus appear as unsentimental reductionism, I will elide
several ‘big issues’, such taxing and wide-raging issue of (textual) ‘representation’. I will
instead focus my inspection on the fruitfully ambivalent intersection between literary and
historiographical ‘narration’ (another such giant theme) in the quite slim corpus analyzed in the
ensuing chapters. I should stress again that my guiding question is not whether these two text
types represent social minds; the works were selected on the grounds of containing ample
material. I rather examine how they represent; in other words, which linguistic and narrative
strategies they employ as they shape the information they convey. Posing this latter insight –
that particular representational means in fact mould the data they mediate – is a good way to
enter existing research discussions.
Other Research in Narrative Studies
Lubomír Doležel suggestively states in Heterocosmica that “the semantics of narrative is, at its
core, the semantics of interaction” (Doležel 1998, 97). The rather obvious and narratologically
highly relevant understanding of interaction is the exchange between individual characters in
the sense of ‘two or more separate entities engaging with each other in various ways’. This
recuperation, however, is grounded in an individualist conception of mind and action. What is
equally implied by this observation, though perhaps not as obviously, is that interaction can be
carried out by a more or less unified entity, as such consisting of two or more characters, – a
37
collective agent rather than several separate ones. In this second sense, interaction relates to
individual action much as intermentality relates to individual consciousness: both of these forms
denote a type of experience which is in itself multi-personal, shared by various subjects rather
than carried out by one autonomous agent, thus manifesting what cognitive scientist and
philosopher John Searle conceptualizes as “collective intentionality” and “we consciousness”:
Many species of animals, our own specifically, have a capacity for collective intentionality.
By this I mean not only that they engage in cooperative behavior, but that they share
intentional states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. In addition to singular intentionality
there is also collective intentionality. (Searle 1995, 23)
No set of “I Consciousnesses,” even supplemented with beliefs, adds up to a “We
Consciousness.” The crucial element in collective intentionality is a sense of doing (wanting,
believing, etc.) something together, and the individual intentionality that each person has is
derived from the collective intentionality that they share. (24-25)
Elsewhere (Alders, [forthcoming1]), I discuss non-narratological concepts of collectivity,
including Durkheim’s ‘social fact’, Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ and Carr’s ‘weintentionality’. In yet another essay (Alders 2015), I survey narratological work on collective
experience before Palmer, including Lanser’s ‘communal voice’ (Lanser 1992) and Langland’s
explorations of Society in the Novel (1984).
I have done this work elsewhere because in this study I will not deal with non-narratological
concepts of collectivity and their wider relevance for (re-)defining narrativity. Though Doležel
lucidly foregrounds the semantic dimension of interaction in narrative, my focus here is on
determining analytically the formal, syntactical shapes through which such interaction
manifests itself in narrative. Due to its discourse-narratological alignment, this study is
predominantly geared to identifying the formal devices by which collective minds are
represented; and, accordingly, to conceptualizing their narrative-technical principles of
operation. I anticipate that it might turn out to be impossible to completely sever such analyses
from considerating the domains of semantics, historical contextualization and even
phenomenological explanation. This project, however, prioritizes intratextual form rather than
extratextual implications. The question fuelling my research, as already explained earlier, is
how narrative expresses shared experience; the net result is intended to be an accumulation of
the phenomena thus unearthed, in fiction and history comparatively.
38
As indicated, it is in Alan Palmer’s recent work (2010) that narrative representations of
collectivity have for the first time been framed into a systematic typology. His work, therefore,
is the chief dialogue partner when it comes to conceiving collective experience.
Research by Historians
I first discuss research by historians which is of a more general character, including the relations
between factual and fictional narration, before turning to aspects which pertain more
specifically to collective minds.
Fiction and History: Factuality, Narrativity, Collectivity
Reinhard Koselleck’s essay “Fiction and Historical Reality” [“Fiktion und Geschichtliche
Wirklichkeit”] might serve as a starting point to crystallize the underlying conditions at stake
when contrasting the narrative modes of fiction and history. Koselleck explains that there is
never a full congruence between historical reality and that which is articulated about it by means
of language (Koselleck 2010, 88). History, in other words, never merges into language (88). On
the contrary, there is an unavoidable tension which prevents any speech act from ever capturing
historical reality (88). There is an “incommensurability” (89) between historical reality and the
way in which it is processed through language (89). The result of this circumstance is what
Koselleck labels “the fiction of the factual” [“die Fiktion des Faktischen”] (91). Significant for
the present study, furthermore, is that Koselleck mentions the difficulty for the historian to
articulate affective phenomena such as ‘fear’ as motives for action, since no sources for such
cognitive forces are available. He concludes that there exists a pervious transit between the
factual and the fictional in historians’ attempt to articulate historical reality by linguistic means
(93).
Koselleck’s insights are relevant in two ways for narratological inquiry. First, they prompt
narratologists to maintain a sensitivity, in their analyses, towards the ways in which
historiography articulates “the fiction of the factual”; to take into account, in other words, that
it is a discursive factuality which historiography generates. Second, Koselleck foregrounds
motivational and hence psycho-cognitive components as hard-to-elicit but highly relevant
components, thus confirming the importance of ‘mind’ in historical reality and
historiographical discourse.
39
In addition to Koselleck’s reflections on the nature of the historian’s discourse, the latter’s
making is further clarified in Jörn Rüsen’s article “Historical Narration”. Rüsen postulates “[…]
a creative activity of the human mind working in the process of historical thinking and
recognition” (Rüsen 1987, 89). Rüsen makes a case, moreover, for the distinctly narrative
character of this process as “narration is the way this activity is being performed and “history”
– more precisely, a history – is the product of it” (87). This leads Rüsen to conclude that “the
all-important sense of history lies beyond the distinction between fiction and fact” (89). In
Narrative Logic, Frank Ankersmit similarly argues that “[…] the historiographical value of a
piece of history is determined less by the facts disclosed in it than by the narrative interpretation
of such facts” (Ankersmit 1983, 1). This study investigates precisely the ways in which such
‘narrative interpretation’ is explicitly formulated, in historiographical as well as fictional prose.
In History, Rüsen confirms that “for more than four decades narrativity has gradually
become the most convincing answer to the questions for [this] distinctive nature of history”
(Rüsen 2005, 3), but at the same time demands that “historical narrative has to be analyzed in
respect to its distinctive nature, its difference from fictional literature, its specific interest in
empirical evidence” (4). Rüsen lays out an entire research program when he remarks that “in
order to find out how and why history is both – factual and fictional, empirical and meaningful
– one has systematically to take into account its narrative character” (4). To the extent of its
thematic focus on collective minds, this study will respond to the issues Rüsen posits here.
The understanding of the relation between history and narrative can be further be enhanced
by citing Mary Fulbrook’s observation in Historical Theory: “historical consciousness is an
inevitable part of the human condition; we are intrinsically beings who live within some
conception of time, some knowledge that certain things have gone before, are changing, and
will change in the future” (Fulbrook 2002, 143). As a complementary dimension to this insight,
building on Rüsen and Ankersmit, one might add that another inevitable part of the human
condition is a narrative consciousness; we are intrinsically beings who live within some
conception of story, some knowledge that the things which have gone before and will take place
in the future are endowed with significance. This significance manifests itself in more or less
complex character constellations and plot developments analogous to that of our concurrent
experience, analogous even to recurrent patterns and perhaps even to narrative universals.
For instance, regardless of its historical, economic and cultural specificities, each human life
acts out birth (beginning) and death (end). Each human life features the character configurations
of parents, siblings, friends, work mates and (marriage) partners. When the resulting
intersubjectivity is thwarted for some reason (such as orphanage, mental disorder or premature
40
death) the pattern remains in operation nonetheless as that schema from which the thwarted
scenario deviates. More importantly, still, each human life is inherently endowed with a basic
sense of significance, translating into various scenarios of narrative point. Due to the
fundamental sense of life’s worth and human aspiration towards happiness, (constellations of)
characters and (chains of) events are recuperated as comic, tragic or indeed insignificant. It is
the human condition’s ‘narrative consciousness’, I maintain, which aligns with its ‘historical
consciousness’ to enshrine the significance of the past – in fictional as well as historical
narratives, in narrative representations as well as real-life memories; on a personal as well as
on a collective scale.
This latter dimension, the nexus between individuality and collectivity, is intriguingly
contemplated by Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative (1984 [1983]; vol.1, 193-206). In this
section, Ricoeur discusses the parameter of ‘character’ in historiographical narrative, a
parameter which comprises further narrative components, especially mind and agency. Says
Ricoeur:
[…] nothing in the notion of character, understood in the sense of someone who performs
an action, requires that this character be an individual human being. […] the role of character
can be held by whomever or whatever is designated in the narrative as the grammatical
subject of an action predicate in the basic narrative sentence “X does R.” In this sense history
only extends and amplifies the dissociation made between character and real actor in
emplotment. It could even be said that history helps to give to the character his, her, or its
full narrative dimension. In this sense, individual responsibility is just the first in a series of
analogies, among which we find peoples, nations, classes, and all the communities that
exemplify the notion of a singular society. (197)
This culminates in the conclusion that “society, once it is considered as a singular entity,
appears in historical discourse as a quasi-character” (197), which “enables history and the other
social sciences to avoid the difficulties of methodological individualism” (199).
Historiography’s capacity to avoid what Ricoeur calls “methodological individualism” is a
critical insight in its own right. Far from being bound to the paradigm of a single human subject,
which predominates in fictional narrative, Ricoeur asserts that, in the light of historiographical
as factual prose, the parameter of character additionally encompasses much more variegated
shapes. In the wake of Ricoeur, narratology needs to take into account that factual narrative has
the potential to substantially alter the understanding of its most fundamental categories –
41
‘character’ among them –, which have overwhelmingly been modelled on the equation of
narrative with fictional narrative, and character with individual, human subject. Conversely,
Ricoeur’s break through the glass ceiling of the individuality paradigm cautions narratologists
that within fictional narrative there is likewise a larger variety of character types in operation
than has previously been recognized, including non-human agents. For my concerns in this
study one of the non-individual human character types is central, namely collective characters,
representing shared experience in both fictional and factual narrative.
History and Mind
After having paraphrased studies considering the implications of the overall condition that
historiographical prose is not as straightforwardly factual as one might have thought, but
doubtlessly attributes vital importance to forms of collective experience, it will be expedient to
look at discussions by historians which are more specifically focused around matters of mind
depiction. The condition that historiography (and other types of factual narrative) depicts
consciousness is one of the leading conceptual assertions of this study. The topic receives
specific attention in the writing of twentieth-century ‘new history’ under Annales school
auspices. In his influential essay proclaiming “The Revival of Narrative”, the British historian
Lawrence Stone (1979) refers directly to the Annales when he perceives that “one of the most
striking recent changes in the content of history has been a quite sudden growth in feelings,
emotions, behavior patterns, values and states of mind” (Stone 2001, 289). Stone further notes
that “more and more of the “new historians” are [now] trying to discover what was going on
inside people’s heads in the past, and what it was like to live in the past, questions which
inevitably lead back to the use of narrative” (289). The label ‘history of mentality’ has been
attached to this type of historiography due to its focus on past interiority.
The main thrust of my comparative approach derives from the intersection between this
emphasis on cognition in history – the sense of ‘what it was like’ to live in the past as well as
the narrative means of its mediation – and the equivalent emphasis in literary studies espoused
recently by the so-called ‘Theory of Mind’ approach. A chief representative of the latter is Lisa
Zunshine who writes in her Why We Read Fiction (2006) that “[…] it [mind-reading] is a term
used by cognitive psychologists, interchangeably with “Theory of Mind,” to describe our ability
to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires” (6).
Stone’s insistence above may in turn trigger narratologists to (re)consider whether depictions
of mind indeed “inevitably lead back to the use of narrative” (Stone 2001, 289, emphasis
42
added); whether, in other words, the narrative mode is equivalent to the evocation of
consciousness – as Fludernik (1996) has prominently argued –, or which other criteria are to be
met by a piece of speech to qualify as narrative.
Compared to whether and why, my inquiry assumes that the more interesting question is to
trace how such narrative representations of (collective) minds spell out in historiography, which
is to ask which means and techniques feature in the actual texts by historians treating mentality.
Though identifying these measures is substantially an activity in the spirit of formaliststructuralist, i.e. classical-narratological, approaches, I aspire to expand such analyses by
considering contextual realms, paying tribute to ‘postclassical’ developments in narrative
theory. My corresponding expedition detects the attitude(s) towards the primary texts which
their authors, both historians and fiction writers, express chiefly within their primary texts, but
crucially also in paratextual addenda.
My concept of mind-telling helps to ascertain analytically the means by which
historiographical (as well as fictional) narrators expose, in varying degrees, a stance towards
that which they depict. It is an instrument meant to be applied, attaining its full expediency in
the process of textual analysis, striving for (Geertzian) ‘thick description’; striving, to adopt
Nünning’s words, for “[…] ‘thicker’ descriptions (sensu Geertz) than those offered by
structuralist narratology, descriptions which take into account both thematic and formal features
of texts and the ways in which epistemological, ethical, and social problems are articulated in
the forms of narrative representations […].” (Nünning 2000, 361) As just explicated, however,
my activity in his domain will be limited to the author’s involvement as textually manifested.
My overall focus is to identify technical narrative operations.
Berkhofer anticipates in his Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (1969) some of the
key concerns traced recently by Lisa Zunshine (2006) and Alan Palmer (2004; 2010) in
cognitive narratology. The latter has placed emphasis on the need to widen the emphasis literary
studies conventionally puts on characters’ interiority by including externalist ways of
conceiving fictional minds, for instance body language and facial expressions. Berkhofer,
however, approaches the topic from the opposite direction. When he asserts that “the basis of
the problem lies in the possibility of studying the internal component of human actions as
opposed to the mere external manifestations” (Berkhofer 1969, 8), he addresses precisely the
nexus between inward and outward cognitive phenomena which underlies especially Palmer’s
approach. Berkhofer’s insight that “those who believe that the internal component may be
studied explore the actions of man for clues to the scheme they postulate exists “inside his skin”
(9) resonates in its very phrasing – in the shape of a scholarly inversion or chiasmus – with
43
Palmer’s programmatic argument that matters of consciousness in literature are to be studied in
terms of “the mind beyond the skin” (Palmer 2003, title).
In fact, the emphasis on internal (i.e. cognitive) phenomena as the driving elements in history
is already strongly articulated in Collingwood’s posthumously published The Idea of History
(1946). Collingwood anticipates Berkhofer and Palmer in that he basically distinguishes
between the inside and the outside of events and actions (Collingwood 1946, 213). A vital
element of Collingwood’s demonstrations is the capacity of the historical imagination, as “his
[the historian’s] main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent”
(213). This imaginative re-experiencing by the historian of historical cognition is the
fundamental premise of Collingwood’s ‘idea’ of history: “the history of thought, and therefore
of all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s mind” (215). Prematurely
nodding to those Annalistes obsessed with quantitative methods, Collingwood scolds historians
who “neglect their proper task of penetrating to the thought of the agents whose acts they are
studying, and content themselves with determining the externals of these acts, the kind of things
about them which can be studied statistically. Statistical research is for the historian a good
servant but a bad master” (228).
Collingwood indeed posits cognition as the main causal force in history as “the cause of the
event […] means the thought in the mind of the person by whose agency the event came about:
and this is not something other than the event, it is the inside of the event itself” (214-215).
Accordingly, for Collingwood “historical knowledge is the knowledge of what mind has done
in the past […]” (218). The acts of individual minds, furthermore, are inevitably entangled in
what Collingwood refers to as “the corporate mind (whatever exactly that phrase means) of a
community of an age” (219, emphasis added) – “to study the mind of the Victorian age […] is
simply to study the history of Victorian thought […]” (219-220) –, because “the body of human
thought or mental activity is a corporate possession, and almost all the operations which our
minds perform are operations which we learn to perform from others who have performed them
already” (226).
Overall, one might suspect that the application of the historical imagination which
Collingwood envisions for the historian conspicuously resembles the novelist’s creative
process. It is at this precise junction that Dorrit Cohn sceptically relativizes that “contrary to its
reputation […], the practice of “re-enactment” recommended by Collingwood in no sense
makes historical figures transparent in the manner of fiction; rather, it displays the historian’s
effort to find ways of overcoming their constitutional opacity” (Cohn 1999, 156). Cohn’s
44
assertions about the relations between fiction and history, especially concerning narrative
minds, are a neat place to transit to research by narratologists.
Research by Narratologists
Cohn, “proposing some rudiments for a historiographical narratology” (Cohn 1999, 110) in her
essay “Signposts of Fictionality”, advances the study of historical prose in explicitly narrativetheoretical terms and she does so by engaging historiographical (as factual) with literary (as
fictional) narrative, because this is “the front where the borderline of fictionality has been most
hotly disputed and most nearly stamped out” (110). Unsurprisingly, Cohn’s treatment addresses
“the vexing problem of reference in either narrative domain” (112) and in fact recommends,
but for historiographical cases only, to enhance the binary model of story vs. discourse, endemic
to narratologists’ readings of fictional texts, by adding “the referential level” (112), which is
“the more or less reliably documented evidence of past events out of which the historian
fashions his material” (112).
This, Cohn notes, is a central component of the literature-history division since “the idea
that history is committed to verifiable documentation and that this commitment is suspended in
fiction has survived even the most radical dismantling of the history/fiction distinction” (112113). Cohn subsequently singles out three areas in which fiction and history may be contrasted:
the story/discourse separation (enhanced by the issue of reference in history); narrative
situations, including the representation of consciousness; the author-narrator relationship. The
second area in particular leads Cohn to express her essential diagnosis that “marked by their
distinctive discursive modes, historical fiction and history are different in kind, not in degree”
(121), not least because “the minds of imaginary figures can be known in ways that those of
real persons can not” (118).
The ruthless opposition in terms of which Cohn asserts that fiction’s attempts to convey
minds by means of written language results in transparency whereas historiography’s opacity
is constitutional, however, needs to be questioned. The examples of historiographical prose I
examine in this study venture to do what, according to Cohn, is strictly reserved for fiction:
making minds transparent as though the narrator were in full possession of the characters’
experientiality. Conversely, if one recuperates fiction’s operations on the basis of ‘natural’
parameters in the manner of Fludernik’s (1996) ‘natural’ narratology, one is made aware, upon
closer inspection, of the ‘unnaturalness’ of fictional narrators’ knowledge of characters’ minds,
especially collective minds, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere (Alders 2013a).
45
One must in fact make an even more fundamental argument about the capacities of textuality,
whether factual or fictional. Precisely because the kind of ‘experientiality’ that textual narrative
offers is, as Fludernik explains, “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’”
(Fludernik 1996, 12; italics added), it necessarily operates in an as-(if-)world29, ontologically
speaking, brought about by the interaction between reader and text. That is to say, the
circumstance that textual narrative’s quasi-reality is mediated, evoked, created (call it what you
may) through written language – this circumstance already drastically restricts the access
readers may possibly get to a character’s mind. Hence by definition textual narrative can only
provide mediated experientiality. Fictional minds, after all, might not become as transparent
through text as Cohn posits.
Correspondingly, Philippe Carrad’s “[…] basic hypothesis remains that the process of
textualization matters in historiography and that it should not be taken for granted” (Carrard
1992, 83).
Carrard’s Poetics of the New History (1992) is an important book-length
contribution by a narrative scholar which furthers but also critiques Cohn’s assumptions.
Carrard takes issue on at least two points with Cohn’s premises. In a more general vein, Carrard
states that “[I]t seems illegitimate […] to oppose narrative and argumentative discourses as
massively as Cohn does” (78). More specifically, Carrard argues that “[U]sing “transparent
minds” may not automatically index a text as fictional, despite what Dorrit Cohn asserts in the
study which she devotes to the subject (1978 [Transparent Minds]). But it certainly disqualifies
that text as a piece of scholarly historiography […]” (113).
Carrard examines a selected corpus of Annales school history in his Poetics of the New
History – which the subtitle specifies as French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier
–, but also presents insights relevant for wider discussions about the characteristics of
historiography, including its relation to fictional narrative. Crucially, for example, “[…]
figurative expressions are numerous and diverse in the New History” (204). Carrard particularly
notes two types of figurative practices, namely employing (micro- and macro) personifications
– essentially the anthropomorphizing of “hamlets, villages, cities, regions” (205) – and
“transferring the terminology of economics and business administration to the social domain”
(206). In fact, none other than “Foucault has provided the New Historicists with part of their
framework, including key metaphors borrowed from the market place, like “circulation,”
“negotiation,” and “exchange” (206). It is especially the first of these devices which is relevant
29
See also Doležel (1998) on the topic of “Possible Worlds in Fiction and History”.
46
for my concerns here, as it points to a specific device in this type of historiography: the
focalization of collectives. Says Carrard:
Viewed from this perspective, personification supplies an answer to a problem of writing
that could be formulated as follows: provided that there are in fact [what Arthur Danto calls]
social individuals, how can they be textualized, that is, represented in language? [...] Treating
geographic entities (the Mediterranean), national entities (France), and social occasions (the
festival) as behaving like organisms affords a solution and constitutes a powerful rhetorical
shortcut. It is difficult, for that matter, to conceive how social individuals could be inscribed
in texts if personification were banned from scholarly discourse (as several historians and
composition teachers say it should be), or if it were somehow to disappear from the language.
(Carrard 1992, 209)
On the one hand, Carrard maintains that “New Historians transformed the story of groups which
positivism had hardly considered into something that was “tellable” or “reportable” […]:
worthy of being investigated, recounted, and later remembered” (110-111). On the other hand,
however, Carrard perceives certain shortcomings in their treatment of groups. Specifically,
“[T]he concept of “social individual,” under that name or another, remains undefined in
Braudel’s work, revealing a lack of epistemological concern which we shall add to the dossier
of the Annales school’s uncertain relations to ‘theory’” (214). Similar to Cohn, however, who
demands that “[…] full comparative attention […]” (Cohn 1999, 111) be devoted to the
fiction/historiography split, Carrard likewise suggests that “[…] an analysis more detailed and
more comparative than mine could tell whether personifications in Braudel, Corbin, and others
[of the Annales school] are both numerous enough and different enough from the known types
to justify coining new terms or recasting old ones” (Carrard 1992, 216). Both scholars thus
endorse the comparative method which I will implement in the analytic sections of this book,
even though under shifted auspices as concerns corpus and thematic focus.
Fludernik is another narratologist who, on at least four occasions (1994; 1996; 2001; 2010),
has expressed views on the issues at stake here. In Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996),
for instance, Fludernik observes that “[H]istory, by definition, is that area of study which
interprets, orders, analyses and attempts to explain human experience, but it does not set out to
represent such experience” (41, emphasis original). Though these different procedures –
interpreting, ordering, analyzing, explaining and representing – may be argued to be interfused
47
with each other to various degrees in both historiographical and fictional prose,30 Fludernik is
correct in pointing out that historiography typically does not offer representation in the sense
of enactment; typically, it does not provide scenic accounts of individual characters as carrying
out acts in more or less specified spatio-temporal scenarios. Or does it?
My analyses will reveal that it is as much the case that history puts characters on stage and
has them utter speech acts and perform deeds as it is the case that fictional narrative “interprets,
orders, analyses and attempts to explain human experience” in addition to representing it. Mindshowing applied to historiography reveals the former, mind-telling applied to fiction proves the
latter. A narrative inquiry such as Clark’s Iron Kingdom (2006) is inconceivable without
Collingwoodian ‘re-enactments’, representing the major protagonists of Prussian history
through protagonists’ actions. Fludernik’s insights can nevertheless be recuperated when her
reasoning is taken not as identifying categorical differences between, but dominant tendencies
within, historiographical and literary prose. Historiography usually employs scenic
representations marginally, rather as rhetorical props, to introduce a topic for instance, but then
usually swiftly shifts into a discursive mode which indeed ‘interprets, orders, analyses, and
attempts to explain’ in the shape of argumentative rather than mimetic prose. Omniscient
narration’s argumentative, explanatory and overall discursive passages, on the other hand, are
subsumed into a narrative mode which primarily dramatizes characters and their actions,
primarily presents a fictional world, primarily tells a story.
This is true, at any rate, for the diachronic, century-spanning tradition of realist prose, from
which my case studies in this study are consciously taken. It may be true that more experimental
or otherwise non-realist fiction, such as post-modern prose or the pre-modern romance genre,
contradict my points. Such deliberately diachronic research would in fact be highly informative;
I have co-edited a respective collection of essays (Alders and von Contzen 2015). This present
study is limited to examining realist prose.
While Fludernik (1996, 41) thus seems to endorse the conclusion that the texture of,
respectively, historiography and fiction – i.e. syntactical and stylistic patterns – does allow for
formal(ist) differentiations, an earlier statement suggests a different channel of inquiry: “[T]he
distinctions which one needs to draw between fiction and history are to be situated not on the
textual plane (at least not necessarily so) but on the levels of production and reception” (1994,
82). The qualification in brackets suggests, however, that it might be possible to reconcile text30
Note for instance the phenomenon of “narrative explanation” which “[…] argues that our puzzlement about
what happened in human life is often best resolved by telling a story explaining how it could come about […] not
why something did come about“ (Ankersmit 2005, 354). Mink similarly concludes that “narrative explanation” is
no longer a contradiction in terms” (Mink 1970, 544).
48
focused and extra-textual analyses. This, at any rate, is what the present study aspires to deliver:
while the devices of representation on the textual surface will be identified – as communicated
by particular narrators –, it will also be attempted to ascertain the degree to which the
corresponding author intervenes, expresses an attitude, shows involvement. The evidential
basis for such attempts will be intratextual clues in relation with paratextual statements
surrounding the narrative proper.
In terms of the issue of collectivity, moreover, Fludernik (1994) states that “history and
fiction […] interpret human experience from complementary points of view, with history
describing human interaction on a transindividual plane […] and fiction depicting the typically
human on the basis of an individual’s transpersonal experience” (89). These estimations concur
with Cohn’s assertion that “fiction enables a writer, first and foremost, to render historical
happenings by way of the personalized and momentary experience of individual human beings”
(Cohn 1999, 151). It remains to be seen when comparing history and fiction, I would say,
whether such rather strict separations between individual and collective experience can really
be kept. Concomitantly, I would like to test whether really “only fiction is able to create the
impression of presenting historical events at the moment they happen, thereby bringing to life
the ‘raw, vital material’ of experience without the distortions of hindsight” (152).
Fludernik (2010) has in fact addressed questions in the environs of “Experience,
Experientiality, and Historical Narrative” in an essay of the same title. Two points in it are
particularly relevant for my discussion. First, Fludernik perceives collective experience as a
distinct preoccupation of ‘cultural history’:
Cultural history, merging with the history of ideas and mentalities, is often concerned with
the development of collective understandings and concepts, looking at the shaping and
persistence of communal experience through the centuries. […] Such histories, by eluding
the grip of the individual subject and its experientiality, end up focussing on collective
experience, and usually rely on a mass of ego-documents which reflect the experiential
parameters of individual lives in the historical past. The experientiality of the source is thus
sublimated and transformed into collective experience as a historical object of analysis.
(Fludernik 2010, 41-42)
It should first be noted that the historiographical area which Fludernik somewhat copiously
designates ‘cultural history, merging with the history of ideas and mentalities’ constitutes a
rather distinct sub-branch within history-writing. As this type of historiography is most
49
susceptible to rendering aspects of collective experientiality, both texts in my corpus stem from
this category.
Second, Fludernik perceptively registers “the innate reflexivity” (46) inherent in all accounts
of past experience, which is “a major characteristic that historical experience shares with
narrative” (46). Her analysis of historiographical prose leads Fludernik to conclude that:
The challenge of academic historiography has been to combine methodological empiricism
with a representation or evocation of experience and experientiality. The term experience
here does not necessarily refer to historical experience, although this might be included, but
to the quality of what it was like to live in a former age. (47) […] Experientiality thus
includes experience in its affectivity and immediacy and at the same time brings in its
rational, didactic and explanatory reworking. The dynamics (or dialectic) between these two
elements constitutes experientiality. (50)
The latter dimension, the dynamics between representing and interpreting “the quality of what
it was like to live in a former age”, is precisely what mind-showing and mind-telling seek to
ascertain in linguistic and narrative-technical detail. Mind-telling in particular denotes the
discursive mode in which factual and fictional narratives explicitly articulate their “innate
reflexivity”, as Fludernik aptly phrases narrative’s discourse about represented experience. As
literary scholarship especially on collective minds is as yet rather slim, I hope to contribute to
this particular area in the following analytical sections of my study.
50
American Renaissance Self-Fashioning
Historical Context: American Puritanism
The historical phenomenon of seventeenth-century North-American Puritanism has long been
of scholarly interest in its various interrelated religious, social, economic and cultural
components.31 In fact, “the Puritan colonies of seventeenth-century New England have perhaps
been studied more intensively than any comparable settlements in human history” (Coffey and
Lim 2008, 7). This prominently includes the so-called ‘witch hunt trials’ (see Hall 1991,
Rosenthal 1993). Puritanism is central to the early formation of American nation-building and
has since remained vital for American identity. Puritan writings, moreover, participate in the
establishment of American literary culture (see Gunn 1994, Colacurcio 2006, Zapf 2010),
reflecting the condition that “Puritanism was an intrinsically bookish movement” (Keeble 2008,
309). Sydney V. James gives an overview of different interpretations of Puritanism by
historians. In terms of the “modern study of Puritanism” (James 1968, 5), he distinguishes the
two camps of “the Harvard school” and what he calls “the new look” (5).
Such historical studies on American Puritanism as Kenneth B. Murdock’s Increase Mather
(1925) and Samuel E. Morison’s Builders of the Bay Colony (1930) are representative of the
Harvard school, and James also cites Perry Miller’s work, especially both volumes of The New
England Mind (1939; 1953), as belonging to this group. The Harvard school primarily traces
Puritan ideas and intellectual processes on the basis of Puritan writings. What James says about
Morison epitomizes the school’s approach: “[…] he steadfastly studied the Puritans in the light
of their thought and aspirations – taking what they wrote seriously – and regarded early
Massachusetts as a colony shaped by devotion and ideas rather than by economic determinism
and greed” (James 1968, 5). Accordingly, Miller’s own book “[…] showed as a systematic
whole the elements of Puritan thought that remained constant during the years from 1630 to
about 1720 […]” (6). When James describes the second volume of The New England Mind
(From Colony to Province; 1953) as “a narrative of ideas losing mastery as they interact with a
changing world” (James 1968, 8), he exemplifies that “[T]he Harvard school goes on […] in
the continued pursuit of literary and intellectual history […]” (8).
31
See for instance Boorstin (1958), Reinitz (1970), Demos (1972), Vaughan (1972), Bremer (1995), Innes
(1995), Bremer (2008), Hall (2008).
51
The Harvard school’s take on American Puritanism thus coincided with the founding of (the
US-American version of) the discipline of intellectual history, which is the attempt by historians
to reconstruct past thought, affect and experientiality.32 From its inception, however, this
historiographical sub-discipline has met with skepticism, to be found even in studies aiming to
inform about the subject. Robert A. Skotheim, for example, initiates his survey study American
Intellectual Histories and Historians (1966) with the caution that “[T]here is probably no aspect
of historical writing which concerns such vague and elusive subject matter as histories of men’s
thoughts” (Skotheim 1966, 3). Nevertheless, the beginning decades of the twentieth century
saw the establishment of that historiographical strand which, in its US-American variant, grew
out of a re-engagement with Puritanism: “Harvard [i.e. the Harvard school] took the lead in the
re-vitalization of Puritanism as a foundation for the history of ideas in America not only through
the scholarship of Murdock, Morison, and Miller, but also through the work of their students
during and after the 1930’s” (Skotheim 1966, 212 [footnote 71]).
However, James also notes that “[…] dissatisfaction with its [the Harvard school’s]
commitment to the dominance of ideas in human affairs has led a number of scholars to seek
new ways to assess the role of Puritanism” (8). These latter studies on Puritanism aiming for
what James calls a “new look” (James 1968, 9), as exemplified by Bernard Bailyn’s The New
England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955), instead demanded a “context that scaled
down the importance of ethical precepts and then showed how the precepts were quickly
overborne by mundane considerations” (James 1968, 8). According to James, Bailyn “[…]
weaves an all-encompassing fabric of explanation out of diverse materials” (9) rather than
placing prime emphasis on religious and intellectual ideas, as the Harvard school had done.
Other aspects of the ‘new look’ on Puritanism include “a family as a register of changes which
Miller had viewed from the standpoint of Puritan thought” (9) in Richard S. Dunn’s Puritans
and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England (1962); “the changing spatial
relationships of New England towns” (9) in Anthony Garvan’s Architecture and Town Planning
in Colonial Connecticut (1951); and “the study of individual communities” (9) in Sumner C.
Powell’s Puritan Villages (1963).
The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (2008) presents a variety of contemporary
historical research which “[…] is not exhaustive, but [it] is designed to offer a rounded
introduction to the subject” (Coffey and Lim 2008, 9), as the editors John Coffey and Paul C.H.
32
See Collini (1985) for concentrated responses by Stefan Collini, Michael Biddis, Quentin Skinner, J.G.A.
Pocock, and Bruce Kuklick to the question “What is Intellectual History?”
52
Lim write in their introduction. The volume is divided into four parts, “English Puritanism”,
“Beyond England”, “Major themes” and “Puritanism and posterity”.
Part II, “Beyond England”, contains two essays focusing on New England Puritanism. The
first one is Francis J. Bremer’s “The Puritan experiment in New England, 1630-1660”. Bremer
traces the early stages of the immigrants’ attempt to establish “political foundations” (Bremer
2008, 128) and “religious foundations (130) in seventeenth-century New England, which above
all posed the difficulty of developing a homogeneous religious creed: “[D]efining a community
was a challenge for the colonists. They came from different regions of England, where their
particular experience had led to variations on the Puritan theme” (128). Bremer thus indicates
the internal tensions and sub-divisions of the Puritan social mind.
The second essay, David D. Hall’s “New England, 1660-1730”, looks at the latter part of
the seventeenth century. Hall concentrates on determining “[…] elements of change and those
of continuity” (Hall 2008, 143), primarily the role of “[…] the church both as a comprehensive
means of grace and as a selective gathering of ‘visible saints’ worthy to participate in the
sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper” (144). Hall concludes by stressing the Puritan
clergy’s high degree of social influence: “[Yet] by the end of the century the dominant mode of
religion revolved around a learned ministry and institutional church capable of incorporating
almost everyone in some form of covenant. In becoming so inclusive Puritanism in New
England accomplished far more than its English parent and nonconformist contemporaries were
ever able to do” (154-155; emphasis added). From the perspective of historical studies, both
Bremer and Hall thus touch on the vital importance of the development and maintenance of
Puritanism as a community-building, shared way of life that involved distinct challenges and
tensions.
Contributing to the section of the “Major themes”, Ann Hughes adds the topic of
“Puritanism and gender”. Generally, Hughes discusses “the ways in which women found
meaning and influence within Puritan families and networks” (Hughes 2008, 294), stressing
that “we need to consider what Puritanism contributed to the expectations and possibilities for
the proper roles and behaviour of women and men” (294; emphasis original). Particularly
relevant for a social minds analysis of the adultery plot in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter,
Hughes notes that “Puritan zeal for social and sexual purification aroused frequent accusations
of hypocrisy, and in some communities and at some times (as in the 1650s) it had particularly
grim implications for women who bore illegitimate children or were accused of adultery” (295).
Looking at the “experiences of ministers’ wives” (296) and “the gendered language of
scripture” (304), Hughes observes that the issue of gender in Puritan life involved “complexities
53
and contradictions” (296). She concludes that “[W]ithin the varied faith of Puritanism, religious
conviction helped to construct gender relations, as gender relations in turn had a profound
impact on religious practice” (304).
The two narratives examined in the following analytical sections, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Perry Miller’s The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
(1939), both have New England Puritanism as their subject-matter. While Hawthorne’s novel
depicts a fictional story of adultery clearly resonating with the witch hunt trials, Miller provides
a historiographical account of seventeenth-century Puritan religious thought. Both narratives
prominently concentrate on the Puritans’ group mentality, meaning the Puritan social mind. In
fact, Michael J. Colacurcio detects a dialectical dynamics between Hawthorne and Miller in
(the prologue to) his study The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales
(1984):
If I were myself to review, in my own astringent manner, the present volume of criticism
[his Province of Piety], I should almost certainly think to suggest that its author seems to
have got Nathaniel Hawthorne all mixed up with Perry Miller; that a rather shy writer of
strange, imaginative tales has been rationalized, by an obvious academic, into an aggressive
historical ideologue. […] And I recall quite vividly the enthusiasm which indited itself in the
margin of some now discarded anthology: “My God – Hawthorne is Perry Miller”
(Colacurcio 1984, 1)
Developing his approach, Colacurcio unsurprisingly qualifies the quasi-equation between
Hawthorne and Miller he sets up, but nonetheless maintains his suggestive hypothesis that
Hawthorne is “our first significant intellectual historian” (3), observing, too, that such an
understanding involves “the intriguing psychobiographic or generic problems disclosed by
Hawthorne’s precise mixture of intellectual style and rhetorical manner” (2). Due to his distinct
historiographical prose, Miller has in turn been viewed as an artist by some critics. These issues
will be examined closer in the analytical chapters following this introductory section. Before
being scrutinized in their narrative contents, the two texts will now briefly be introduced
individually.
54
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Though having achieved political liberation from the British Empire in the late eighteenth
century (as prominently manifested in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, with its
rhetorically crafted we-voice33), it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that NorthAmerica’s cultural independence was established. The first pinnacle of a self-consciously
national US-American literature was manifested by a critical mass of works by writers
including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman
Melville and Walt Whitman. Published in 1850, The Scarlet Letter forms a core part of this
corpus. Roughly a century later, F. O. Matthiessen sought to capture the cultural-historical
significance of this period in his 1941 study American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the
Age of Emerson and Whitman34, which opens thus:
The starting point for this book was my realization of how great a number of our past
masterpieces were produced in one extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression [i.e.
“the half-decade of 1850-1855”]. It may not seem precisely accurate to refer to our midnineteenth century as a re-birth; but that was how the writers themselves judged it. Not as a
re-birth of values that had existed previously in America, but as America’s way of producing
a renaissance, by coming to its first maturity and affirming its rightful heritage in the whole
expanse of art and culture. (Matthiessen 1949, vii).
Hawthorne’s novel needs to be understood, therefore, as abiding by what Donald Pease calls
“[…] global renaissance time – the sacred time a nation claims to renew when it claims its
cultural place as a great nation existing within a world of great nations” (Pease and Michaels
1985, vii). Such an affiliation elevates the narrative’s status towards negotiating the wider
concern(s) of American national identity through a fictional format which – in terms of plot,
setting, character constellation and explicit authorial commentary – openly flaunts its relations
33
In Alders (forthcoming1) I probe the Declaration of Independence through a collectivist narratological lense.
The notion of the American Renaissance has been revised and elaborated since Matthiessen published his study.
See especially Pease and Michaels (1985), “The American Renaissance Reconsidered”, a collection of essays
engaging critically with Matthiessen, including previously unrecognized writers in the ‘American Renaissance’
canon, and discussing the implications of this period for American history. Contextualizing Hawthorne’s legacy,
Philip Gould points to “[…] a larger project in American literary studies examining the politics of canon formation,
which involve in this case the cultural and ideological contexts contributing to both Hawthorne’s reputation and
that of an elite coterie of literary kingpins around whom F.O. Matthiessen defined ‘the American Renaissance’”
(Gould 1996, 2).
34
55
to factual reality and the author’s personal family history. It is this factual dimension embedded
in the novel which has led Michael J. Colacurcio to argue “[…] that Hawthorne is indeed,
among other things, our first significant intellectual historian; that he is more profitably
compared with Perry Miller than George Bancroft or Catherine Sedgwick; that his historical
prescience may well surpass his Freudian acumen” (Colacurcio 1984, 3-4).
In his biography Hawthorne (1879), fellow nineteenth-century novelist Henry James
confirms the correspondence between reality and fiction in Hawthorne’s work. James also notes
that this particular novel gained immediate recognition as an American literary accomplishment
which could rival European ones:
In fact, the publication of The Scarlet Letter was in the United States a literary event of the
first importance. The book was the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the
country. There was a consciousness of this in the welcome that was given it – a satisfaction
in the idea of America having produced a novel that belonged to literature, and to the
forefront of it. Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as anything
that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely American; it
belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England. (James 1967,
88)
While being “absolutely American”, as James phrases it, it is even more palpable that the novel
is absolutely Puritan, given the early period in American history to which the narrative attends.
Hawthorne, the author, indeed self-consciously exploits the fact that his material “belonged to
the soil, to the air” and that “it came out of the very heart of New England” just as much as he
himself. This is shown by the way in which he initiates the story of The Scarlet Letter by means
of a chapter-long prelude entitled “The Custom-House”. In it, he gives voice to “[…] an
autobiographical impulse […] in addressing the public” (Hawthorne 2005, 7) when relating his
personal experiences as a surveyor in the Salem Custom House, a position he was appointed to
in 1846. More significantly, this autobiographical impulse leads Hawthorne to explicitly
contextualize his empirical self within the factual historical dimension of his Salem ancestors’
implementation of “the persecuting spirit” (11)35. Himself entrenched in this collective
mentality – “strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine” (12) –,
35
In his annotations to the Norton edition of The Scarlet Letter, Leland S. Person provides information on
Hawthorne’s forebears, explaining for instance that “John Hathorne (1641-1717), [William’s son and]
Hawthorne’s great-great grandfather, presided at the Salem witch trials” (Hawthorne 2005, 11, footnotes 1-3). See
also James (1967, 1-19) on Hawthorne’s ancestors.
56
Hawthorne thus yokes his individual identity to the wider negotiation of what can be conceived,
oxymoronically, as a ‘collective autobiography’36. It is at this precise juncture that the fictional
narrative merges with American Puritanism as a historical phenomenon: the novel’s plot
receives its referential poignancy not least from this authorial self-reflectivity. Besides his
individual self, Hawthorne also dramatizes the Puritan collective self.37
Hence, I argue that Hawthorne thus practices an idiosyncratic and multiplex 1850 USAmerican version of what Stephen Greenblatt has termed ‘self-fashioning’ in his 1980 study
Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare. Greenblatt states that “perhaps the
simplest observation we can make is that in [the England of] the sixteenth century there appears
to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable,
artful process” (Greenblatt 1980, 2). I venture to apply Greenblatt’s notion to The Scarlet Letter
as a specimen of the nineteenth-century American Renaissance as construed by Matthiessen.
This move is inspired and validated by Hawthorne’s self-communications in “The CustomHouse”. It is given further credence by the fact that, as though aware of Pease’s ‘global
renaissance time’, the novel itself repeatedly refers to the transcontinental continuities between
Puritan ‘New England’ and Elizabethan Britain, brought about by the British Puritans’
emigration to North America. Blending Matthiessen (1949) and Greenblatt (1980), I propose to
call Hawthorne’s practice ‘American Renaissance Self-Fashioning’.
Above all, this conceptual merger serves to decode the novel’s introductory section which
gradually morphs from real-life ego-document into fictional story-telling in the form of an
elaborated prelude. “The Custom-House” explicates the ways in which the novel’s narrator is
rooted in the empirical Hawthorne and how both are entangled in Puritanism as a collective
phenomenon, including especially the latter’s ambivalent psychological heritage. Again, these
circumstances are the pivotal hinges when it comes to establishing the narrative’s relations to
factual history and its significance for American history and culture. The key impression
induced by “The Custom-House” is that The Scarlet Letter negotiates past matters of present
relevance for the American people, in 1850 and beyond.
36
What I label ‘collective autobiography’ is inspired by Anderson’s (2006) ‘biography of nations’: “[…] the
nation’s biography snatches, against the going mortality rate, exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms,
assassinations, executions, wars, and holocausts. But, to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be
remembered/forgotten as ‘our own’” (206).
37
See also Colacurcio: “Clearly the narrator of The Scarlet Letter – however criticism shall come to identify that
cautious, even fearful, yet ever polite personage – knows a great deal more about the Puritan world of the 1630s
and 40s than he will forceably obtrude on the notice of the less knowledgeable readers he alternately assures and
provokes. […] And so before his own narrative has had the time it usually takes an extended fiction to develop a
life of its own, he challenges us with an anxious-making reminder that his story really does presuppose a prefictive, “historical” world” (Colacurcio 1997, 207).
57
Even though “The Custom-House” is “introductory” (Hawthorne 2005, 7) to the novel,
Hawthorne already identifies himself here as “a romance-writer” (29) who functions as a moral
lightning rod for the deeds of his ancestors: “[…] I, the present writer, as their representative,
hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes […]” (12). This convergence between the
author’s fictional story-telling, his own biography and the wider New England social history is
in keeping with Greenblatt’s “more cultural or anthropological criticism” (Greenblatt 1980, 4)
which operates on the assumption that “[…] self-fashioning derives its interest precisely from
the fact that it functions without regard for a sharp distinction between literature and social life”
(3). Solidly ingrained in Puritan empirical reality, Hawthorne’s handling of these conditions
takes the shape of fictional narrative art in The Scarlet Letter.
Though my own focus in the following will be a narratological one, such considerations as
entertained by Matthiessen and Greenblatt indicate that, besides an analysis of its formal
crafting and narrative structures, the novel lends itself to a variety of interpretive approaches.
The novel has amassed a vast body of non-narratological critical reflections, interpretations and
source material (see for instance Bloom 1986, Crain 2000, and Millington 2004). Hawthorne
(re-)negotiates some of the fundamental questions governing North-American communal life,
and is viewed by many “as an influential maker and articulator of nineteenth-century American
culture” (Gilmore 2005, 600). Without claiming to be exhaustive, the following pages will trace
some prominent readings prompted by the narrative since its publication. They are intended to
provide further context for my subsequent social minds analysis of the novel. I first discuss
general criticism on The Scarlet Letter and then summarize research which touches on
collectivity-related issues.
Hawthorne and Criticism
Henry James’s biography of Hawthorne makes a number of astute observations which help
contextualize Hawthorne from the perspective of a fellow novelist and which implicitly
anticipate some of the key concerns of this study, meaning the ways in which social minds
issues are addressed in the novel. Perhaps most significantly, James perceives Hawthorne’s
unique appropriation of literary realism’s enduring topic: the depiction of single protagonists
being placed within historically recognizable social environments, and the interactional
dynamics that emerges in the process. Hawthorne’s narrative is one of the most influential
American novels not least because it so ingenuously dramatizes unforgettable individual
figures, first and foremost Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, in relation to equally
58
memorable Puritan groups and their communal contexts in the early phase of North-American
identity-building. Committed as they were to religious doctrines derived from Puritanist
theology, these groups’ daily practices involved intense soul-searching and a permanent
consciousness of their own sins: “His [Hawthorne’s] forefathers had crossed the Atlantic for
conscience’s sake, and it was the idea of the urgent conscience that haunted the imagination of
their so-called degenerate successor [i.e. Hawthorne]. The Puritan strain in his blood ran clear
– there are passages in his Diaries, kept during his residence in Europe, which might almost
have been written by the grimmest of the old Salem worthies” (James 1967, 8).
James specifies that Hawthorne’s engagement with the Puritans involves external
environment as much as internal disposition:
He [Hawthorne] had certainly not proposed to himself to give an account of the social
idiosyncrasies of his fellow-citizens, for his touch on such points is always light and vague,
he has none of the apparatus of an historian, and his shadowy style of portraiture never
suggests a rigid standard of accuracy. Nevertheless, he virtually offers the most vivid
reflection of New England life that has found its way into literature. […] But none the less,
Hawthorne’s work savours thoroughly of the local soil – it is redolent of the social system
in which he had his being. (3-4)
According to James, though Hawthorne’s narrative does not amount to the kind of academic
inventory of “[…] the social idiosyncrasies of his fellow-citizens […]” as might be facilitated
by “[…] the apparatus of an historian […]”, The Scarlet Letter still “[…] offers the most vivid
reflection of New England life that has found its way into literature […]” and “[…] is redolent
of the social system in which he [Hawthorne] had his being”. While relativizing the accuracy
with which Hawthorne renders life-like contemporary scenarios, James confirms the
significance of collective constellations in the novel and the fact that the narrative “savours
thoroughly of the local soil”.
The Puritan collective in The Scarlet Letter is the underlying focus of various essential
recuperations, ideological and otherwise, which the novel has accrued after its publication.
Social constellations are repeatedly and variously emphasized in the scholarship on Hawthorne,
though usually in relation to themes such as politics and history rather than in terms of the more
formalist analyses I will conduct in the next chapter. Exemplifying this strand, Leland S. Person
writes that “The Scarlet Letter offers a brilliant analysis of group psychology – of the way, to
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use Dimmesdale’s term, a ‘hungry’ group of people will believe what they want and need to
believe about a public figure, regardless of the evidence before their eyes” (Person 2007, 73).
Eventually tending towards a political reading in his “The A-Politics of Ambiguity in The
Scarlet Letter”, Sacvan Bercovitch asserts that “Hawthorne’s portrait of Hester is a study of the
lover as social rebel” (Bercovitch 2005, 579), a schema which rests on the (pre-)existence of a
collective against which the ‘social’ rebel can position herself. Bercovitch accordingly observes
that “the basic symbolic opposition in The Scarlet Letter is that between self and society” (595).
Furthermore, according to Bercovitch, “the polarity of self and society remained central through
the successive discourses of libertarianism, federalism, republicanism, and Jacksonian
individualism” (596). The novel’s structural and semantic themes are thus assessed by
Bercovitch as making statements which may inform such discourses as politics and history:
“The Scarlet Letter is the story of a stranger who rejoins the community by compromising for
principle, and her resolution has far-reaching implications about the symbolic structures of the
American ideology” (596).
One such symbolic structure of (not only) American ideology is the variegated and
collectivity-based issue of ‘social class’, as Michael T. Gilmore argues in his essay “Hawthorne
and the Making of the Middle Class”. Gilmore’s reflections recuperate The Scarlet Letter as a
document which is ambivalently engaged in producing a distinctly American ‘middle class’:
Nathaniel Hawthorne, perhaps our most “canonical” nineteenth-century novelist, the writer,
indeed, in whom the canon is given birth, maps the emergence of middle-class identity and
simultaneously reveals the self-contradictory and unsettled nature of the new configuration.
Behind this claim lies the work of historians and students of gender and the family who have
shown, convincingly to my mind, that the period when Hawthorne was writing saw the
appearance of the middle class in its recognizably modern form. […] Yet Hawthorne’s text
complicates the findings of these scholars. The Scarlet Letter points not simply to the
development of an American middle class but also to the highly ambiguous character of that
construction. It makes clear that the category of class, at least as the category arises in the
Age of Jackson, does not march under the banner of essentialism. Hawthorne’s masterpiece
amounts to a warning that, in rescuing class from erasure, we must dispel any notion of its
being a self-consistent entity. (Gilmore 2005, 598)
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Concluding that “Hawthorne’s masterpiece amounts to a warning […]” that social class is not
“a self-consistent entity”, Gilmore implicitly assumes that this fictional narrative has the
traction of an intellectual-historical account. Gilmore looks particularly at Arthur Dimmesdale
and Hester Prynne as individual prototypes of a nascent American bourgeoisie. Gilmore’s
considerations, however, are based on interpretive recuperations to an extent which my own
analyses are not. Gilmore’s reading of Hester and Arthur in terms of middle-class collectivity,
in other words, relies on a hermeneutic effort. Such a move is perfectly legitimate and indeed
offers an inspiring vista. But it does have to semantically construe the character/class correlation
rather than finding it manifest in the text, especially from twentieth-century hindsight. The
novel does feature minor individual characters which are explicitly portrayed as representing
collective units; I capture these instances in the next chapter. Gilmore is thus not so much
concerned to register the formal functioning of group descriptions in the novel, but instead
sheds light on the complexities involved in (what he perceives as) the narrative’s participation
in middle-class formation so that, due to “the highly ambiguous character of that construction”
(598), “Hawthorne’s new class threatens to come apart even as it comes into being” (599).
Moreover, Gilmore points to the fact that the seventeenth-century community described in
the novel hardly resembles any nineteenth-century nor even early modern notion of middleclass life:
The Puritan commonwealth depicted in Hawthorne’s early chapters, and at various
subsequent moments throughout the text, looks decidedly premodern in its emphasis on
hierarchy and patriarchy and in its blurring of the boundaries between public and private. It
is a community of rulers and ruled, of ministers, magistrates, and soldiers exercising
authority over a deferential and largely undifferentiated people. (Gilmore 2005, 601)
It is in accordance with his main claim about the novel’s ‘making of the middle class’ that
Gilmore pays attention to how the collectives in the novel ‘look’, meaning which constitutive
members they are comprised of, according to which ideological principles they are governed
(hierarchy, patriarchy), and so forth. He is thus not interested in what will be my guiding
motivation in the analytical section below: determining the distinct formalist mechanisms by
means of which the narrative conveys these relations. Hawthorne’s novel provides fertile
ground for both interpretive and formalist analyses of group depictions. It is true, as Gilmore
asserts, that “the only socioeconomic groupings Hawthorne refers to are the rich and the poor,
or, in the antiquated vocabulary the novels sometimes adopts, the high and the low” (600).
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However, my analysis will challenge Gilmore’s further observation that “the mass of Puritans
are distinguished from their rulers only by being designated ‘the people,’ with little detail
provided about their material condition” (600). The variety of formalist and rhetorical principles
I identify below suggests that the novel does in fact differentiate substantially between various
collectives contained in “the mass of Puritans”.
A further dimension which Gilmore mentions is Hawthorne’s personal entanglement in
these collective dimensions, both as author in relation to his fiction and as private individual in
relation to past and present American social history:
A glance at Hawthorne’s own circumstances, and another look at Hester’s standing in the
community, may help to elucidate his oscillations. The author of The Scarlet Letter occupied
a highly irregular class position. As he impresses upon us in “The Custom-House,” he was
descended from one of New England’s most distinguished families. The Hathornes (spelled
without the “w”) were long-standing members of the Massachusetts elite and perhaps the
closest thing the non-slave-holding states boasted to an aristocracy. The novelist’s ancestors
journeyed to the New World with the first wave of Puritan immigrants. They were prominent
jurists and magistrates whose deeds – or rather, misdeeds – were recorded in histories of the
country’s earliest settlement. But like Poe’s mythical Ushers, the line’s fortunes have
declined precipitously. (Gilmore 2005, 612)
In accordance with his family affiliations, Hawthorne deliberately reconstructed New England
‘local colour’ scenarios in his writing. In order to lend authenticity to his scenes, plots and
thematic preoccupations, he immersed himself in numerous historiographical works (see
Ryskamp 2005, Colacurcio 2005). This is not to say that Hawthorne was primarily a writer of
historical novels, but he was also that. As a consequence, ‘Hawthorne and history’ is a topic
recurrently found in critical volumes. Sometimes, Hawthorne is more concerned to depict issues
of an explicitly political character, such as in the short story “Endicott and the Red Cross”, at
other times the stress is on Puritanism’s psychological repercussions – that which Henry James
above identifies as “the pressing moral anxiety, the restless individual conscience” –, for
example in “The Minister’s Black Veil”. The Scarlet Letter powerfully combines these
accentuations which will be traced more closely in the next chapter. Before that, I introduce the
factual narrative I have selected.
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Perry Miller, The New England Mind
On the basis of his monumental two-volume study of Puritan thought, The New England Mind
(1939; 1953), Perry Miller is one of the founding fathers of the Harvard school of intellectual
history and, moreover, American Studies as a distinct discipline.38 Drawing on a vast body of
Puritan writing to reconstruct (and indeed to re-enact in Collingwood’s (1946 [posthumous])
sense) the patterns of thought, feeling and religious belief of the seventeenth-century New
England Puritans, Miller creates what I label a ‘narrative history of mind’. As he portrays the
voices of Puritan writers as live actors enacting the story of their collective cognition, Miller
unmistakably employs narrative means to serve his intellectual-historical end.
Due to its substantial degree of authorial self-reflectivity, furthermore, Miller’s work can be
taken as the chief contribution of a delayed scholarly American Renaissance self-fashioning. I
suggest to read Miller as the factual equivalent in American intellectual history of the fictional
achievement of the The Scarlet Letter in the realm of literary culture. It is precisely in a spirit
of soul-searching self-enlightenment that Miller embarks on his project of systematizing the
psychological contents of seventeenth-century North-American Puritanism. In the preface to
Errand into the Wilderness (1956), Miller tells the biographical anecdote that, when on a
military stint in the Congo, the inspiration about his life’s scholarly mission struck him. This is
how he fashions himself in this section:
To the elucidation of this story [“the massive narrative of the movement of European culture
into the vacant wilderness of America”] I, in common with several historians of my
generation, have devoted my life; to this investigation, I dedicate what remains of it. These
papers, along with three or four books, are all I have yet been able to realize of a
determination conceived three decades ago at Matadi on the banks of the Congo. I came
there seeking “adventure,” jealous of older contemporaries to whom that boon had been
offered by the First World War. (Nobody had the prescience to teach me patience, to assure
me that I too should have my War.) The adventures that Africa afforded were tawdry enough,
but it became the setting for a sudden epiphany (if the word be not too strong) of the pressing
38
On Miller’s legacy for American studies see Colacurcio: “It remains true, first of all, that the influence of Perry
Miller has worked to create one of the most powerfully unified fields of textual study in the history of the modern
academy – second only, if at all, to Matthiessen’s ‘American Renaissance’” (Colacurcio 1997, 3). See also
Colacurcio’s following remark: “But what supposable canon can ever be constituted by folding Winthrop’s
Journal of New England into The Scarlet Letter? Only that of ‘American Studies,’ presumably, where literary
appreciation usually takes a back seat to intellectual or social history” (Colacurcio 1997, 206).
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necessity for expounding my America to the twentieth century. (Miller 1956, vii; emphasis
added)
The self-conscious motivation of “expounding my America to the twentieth century” is at the
heart of Miller’s work, which, culminating in The New England Mind, stands in immediate
relation to Puritanism’s diachronic continuities and idiosyncrasies: “[W]hat I believe caught
my imagination, among the fuel drums, was a realization of the uniqueness of the American
experience […]” (ix). Miller’s writing, like Hawthorne’s, betrays the American experience as
being anchored in a collective, communal way of life. In addition, both authors are most
interested in the cognitive underpinning of this experience. Both of them, therefore, are deeply
concerned with social minds. Mind-telling, as my analysis in the next sections will show, makes
it possible to study above all the narrative rendition of these conditions.
So seriously does Miller take matters of mind that he conceives them as “the basic factor in
human history”. Reminiscent yet again of Collingwood (1946), the following statement
contains nothing less than the rudiments of a mind-centered conception of history:
I have never entertained the slightest ambition of making these [Puritan] ideas palatable to
my contemporaries in any other sense than the historical one. There they are – those with
which American thought began. Respect for them is not the same thing as believing in them
– as Nathaniel Hawthorne preëminently demonstrated. But historians are apt to slide over
these concepts in a shockingly superficial manner simply because they have so little respect
for the intellect in general. I have difficulty in imagining that anyone can be a historian
without realizing that history itself is part of the life of the mind; hence I have been
compelled to insist that the mind of man is the basic factor in human history. (Miller 1956,
ix)
Miller defines “these ideas” as marking the starting-point of a distinctly American intellectual
tradition – “those with which American thought began” –, which, invoking a diachronic
trajectory, suggests a prehistory to what Matthiessen determines as “America’s way of
producing a renaissance, by coming to its first maturity and affirming its rightful heritage in the
whole expanse of art and culture” (Matthiessen 1949, vii). Coincidentally, Miller points to the
period around 1850 when he mentions Hawthorne’s authorial attitude in this quotation,
emphasizing that the latter’s engagement with Puritanism was marked by respect but not
compliance. Miller thus implicitly confirms that The Scarlet Letter can be taken as a fictional
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narrative which expresses a view on Puritanism as a factual historical phenomenon; that, in
other words, the novel may figure as a document relevant for the history of ideas and Hawthorne
as “our [read: North America’s] first significant intellectual historian” (Colacurcio 1984, 3). By
insisting that “the mind of man is the basic factor in human history”, Miller counts ‘the whole
expanse of art and culture’, products created by human minds, as a valid section of historical
study. Implementing the tenets of the Harvard school, cultural artefacts and textual documents
even attain supremacy over demographic conditions, prominent leaders and political events in
this cognitive conception of history.
Though Miller allegedly pursues a historian’s scholarly intention, however, his narrative
practice in The New England Mind is more differentiated. The teller’s self-fashioning, quoted
above, is not be neglected as it supplies crucial contextual information. It is the (f)actual tale,
nonetheless, which constitutes the analytical material for my investigation below. That tale is
special. Miller in effect forges a new generic format, the narrative history of mind, as he tells
his historiographical story of New England thought. In the process, he deploys quite a few
strategies usually found in fictional narrative.
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century is made up of 4 sections (“books”), each
containing 4 chapters. The four sections are “Religion and Learning”, “Cosmology”,
“Anthropology” and “Sociology”. The chapters treat such topics “The Augustinian Strain of
Piety”, “The Intellectual Character” and “The Plain Style”. Overall, as Miller states in the
“Foreword” preceding his study, “[…] the book is rather a topical analysis of various leading
ideas in colonial New England than a history of their development” (Miller 1967, vii). What
makes this work so suitable for my purposes is its hybrid mix of self-reflective frame, factual
reference and fictional technique. The distinction, indeed idiosyncrasy, of Miller’s
historiographical discourse has been perceived by various scholars, so that a veritable Miller
criticism can be traced in its major strands.
Miller and Criticism
The relevance of the first volume of The New England Mind was recognized immediately after
its publication. In a contemporary review, Carl Bridenbaugh notes that “Perry Miller exhibits
much of the intellectual fortitude so characteristic of his Puritan heroes in the task he has set
himself. In series of volumes which promises to be one of the outstanding achievements of
American scholarship he proposes to analyze and trace the historical development of the mind
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of New England” (Bridenbaugh 1940, 887-888). Bridenbaugh perceives the uniqueness of
Miller’s approach and style, but his observations curiously differ from later assessments:
This book [Miller’s The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century] deserves a wide
audience not only of scholars but of intelligent general readers as well. Unfortunately, to all
but the narrowest of specialists Mr. Miller’s academic and frequently repetitious style may
well prove insurmountable. A Teutonic ponderosity, which at times makes the book read
like a translation of Mommsen, often obscures the sweep and poetry of a truly magnificent
conception. A simplification of sentence structure and a pruning down of paragraphs, better
assimilation of quoted material, and a more thorough distillation of unquestionable learning
and scholarship would have produced more of the streamlined qualities of the author’s
Orthodoxy in Massachusetts. And yet, as the Bible was the ultimate authority of the Puritans,
so The New England Mind must be a Sibylline Book for students of American history,
literature, and culture. (888-889)
Besides Bridenbaugh’s rather derogatory discernment of Miller’s “[…] Teutonic ponderosity,
which at times make the book read like a translation of Mommsen […]”, a number of scholars
have attempted to determine the numerous aspects of Miller’s practice. Robert A. Skotheim
perceives an essential innovation marking Miller’s mode of historiographical narration when
he observes the following:
[…] Miller usually paid little attention to the influence of social and economic forces on
ideas, and most of his general statements on the role of ideas in history emphasized the
virtual autonomy of thought in human affairs. Specifically, this comparison of the treatment
given to Jonathan Edwards by Miller and Parrington indicates the kind of challenge Miller
offered to progressive histories of ideas. It was a challenge to take ideas more seriously, to
analyze them in more depth and at greater length, and it was a challenge to social and
economic interpretations of thought. It was a call to make ideas, and not simply political and
economic ones, the center of written histories. And Miller’s histories of ideas made a case
for the proposition that the meaning of American experience could be best located, not
through uncovering the hidden economic and political aspects of life, but through uncovering
the hidden meaning of ideas. (Skotheim 1966, 210-211)
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Skotheim makes a number of points here, two of which are particularly relevant. The first is
that Miller prioritizes ideas as historiography’s decisive actors: “[…] a call to make ideas, and
not simply political and economic ones, the center of written histories”. This translates into
those formal and technical strategies of textual representation which I examine in detail below
and which reflect the significant condition that Miller’s focus on ideas comes in the shape(s) of
narrative. Skotheim’s second point links this thematic concentration on ideas to Miller’s wider
semantic “[…] proposition that the meaning of American experience could best be located […]
through uncovering the hidden meaning of ideas”. Skotheim posits that Miller’s focus on (the
collective Puritan cognition of) ideas entailed their hermeneutic recuperation in terms of a, in
this case North-American, national semantics. As with Hawthorne, this link is corroborated
through the author’s explicit self-assertions, but also through the impact of Miller’s narrative
on public exchanges about the Puritan foundations of American national identity.
David A. Hollinger offers a conceptual framework in his essay “Perry Miller and
Philosophical History” that aims to decode the distinct dynamics of Miller’s writing and his
wider understanding of history:
[This] basic tension between “the Conscious” and “the Mechanical” illuminates Miller’s
work in a way more important than is even hinted in any of these examples. It is expressed
in his entire conception of cultural process, including his affirmation of the place of mind in
history and the ambivalence with which he contemplated the demands the environment made
on it. Any history other than intellectual history was for him virtually meaningless;
meaningless in the sense that it is written with something other than the consciousness of the
community as its primary referent. To deal with the mind was to deal with at least the
potentiality for value; to study such topics as “trade routes, currency, property, town
government and military tactics” was to reduce oneself to observation of the merely
mechanical, of that part of the process of culture the farthest removed from the locus of
value. (Hollinger 1968, 193-194)
Hollinger thus confirms what Miller himself reveals in the quotation above, namely the central
importance Miller attributes to the dimension of ‘mind’ in history and culture. Indeed, Hollinger
goes so far as to claim that “[A]ny history other than intellectual history was for him [Miller]
virtually meaningless; meaningless in the sense that it is written with something other than the
consciousness of the community as its primary referent”. As Miller’s own practice in The New
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England Mind consistently reflects this condition, it poignantly expresses the expediency of
this factual narrative for a social minds approach.
An additional cognitive parameter Hollinger mentions as being critical to an appreciation of
Miller’s writing concerns the layer of dispositions. As permanent components of human
cognition, dispositions form a crucial part of the study of narrative minds (see especially Palmer
2010, 28). Among other functions, my concept of mind-telling is designed to proactively detect
representations of dispositions. Says Hollinger about Miller:
But as each interaction of mind and environment issues in a new configuration of ideas and
emotions, the culture makes an important contribution: every response of mind to
environment owes as much to the disposition of mind prior to the confrontation as to the
nature of the impinging environment. And it is this disposition of mind, this ever-changing
product of cumulative experience that Miller chiefly seeks to understand and explain; insofar
as what men “do” is history, their actions are significant as manifestations of this duallydetermined state of mind. (Hollinger 1968, 195-196)
The quotation resonates with Palmer’s emphasis on what he labels the ‘though-actioncontinuum’, which is the correlation between ‘internalist’ forces, such as intentionality and
affect, and ‘externalist’ phenomena, mainly physical action. Hollinger points out, moreover that
this correlation involves decidedly collectivist repercussions: “[…] what men “do” is history,
their actions are significant as manifestations of this dually-determined state of mind”. Yet more
pertinent is Hollinger’s stress on dispositions, “this ever-changing product of cumulative
experience that Miller chiefly seeks to understand and explain […]”. The fact that Miller’s
narrative history of the Puritan mind attends to collective cognition so explicitly and
abundantly, as acknowledged by critics such as Hollinger, is one of the principal reasons why
this work was selected for my analytical work in this study. An additional criterion which
Hollinger addresses is Miller’s use of language:
Miller was primarily an artist not because he wrote with resonance and verbal richness, but
because his organization, architecture, and intricacy of conception reveal an intensely
purposive and creative activity; Miller’s work is antithetical to that which purports to “let
the facts speak for themselves.” A close reading of Miller makes all too obvious the truth of
a proposition for which J. H. Hexter and David Levin, to cite only its most recent champions,
have tried with difficulty to gain wider acceptance: an historian’s language is not detachable
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from the “substance” of his work. Unquestionably, Miller’s best work reveals a depth of
aesthetic sensibility, achieves a level of artistic merit rare in his generation of historians. To
term him an example of “the historian as artist and as scientist” is to vulgarize the mind of a
scholar whose work translated that cliché into something substantial and sophisticated. (200)
The apposite question of the historiographer’s moulding of the factual data is at stake here.
Hollinger indeed discerns that Miller’s manner of narration is “[…] antithetical to that which
purports to ‘let the facts speak for themselves’” as it reveals “[…] a depth of aesthetic
sensibility, achieves a level of artistic merit rare in his generations of historians”. Such a
sensibility, constituting a quality of mind on the author’s part, provides an explanation for the
fictionalizing tendencies in Miller’s writing but at the same time compromises its degree of
factuality.
Similarly, Stanford J. Searl, in his essay “Perry Miller as Artist” states that “[B]y committing
himself to a search for the inward, emotional meaning of the Puritan experience, Miller faces a
characteristic problem of the artist: he must discover a language which can express the spiritual
reality of what he calls Puritan ‘piety’” (Searl 1977, 221). What makes Searl’s analysis
particularly interesting for my purposes is that he works in a quasi-narratological spirit,
identifying phenomena of Miller’s use of language, some of which already occur in the
“Foreword” to The New England Mind. Searl notes, for instance, that “Miller writes about piety
[…] as if piety itself possesses some original, instinctual energy […]” (224). According to Searl,
what happens in Miller’s prose is that “[A]bstract ideas about some unpredictable power in the
universe become transformed into a visual, sensual metaphor (if still abstract), so that the reader
may know the experiential feeling of this idea” (226). The decisive condition for the present
study is that, in Miller’s practice, these ideas manifest the content of the Puritan collective
experience. Exploring the ways in which Miller’s rendition of “the experiential feeling of this
idea” translates into specific narrative strategies will be my activity in the analytical section of
this chapter.
Robert Middlekauff confirms in “Perry Miller” some of the skepticism voiced by Skotheim
above when he states that “[E]motion largely defies analysis by the tools of intellectual history,
and Miller, of necessity, chose to explicate Puritan ideas, all the while insisting that the ideas
in some complicated way expressed, when they did not oppose, religious zeal” (Middlekauff
1969, 175). Yet, cautious as these scholars seem to be towards these conditions on a conceptual
level, they at the same time recognize Miller’s handling of such alleged impossibilities as
tracing past collective thought and emotion. Middlekauff is no exception to this rule:
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This is part of Miller’s technique; he is never content to rely on mere assertion, but
accompanies it with an elaborate demonstration. [...] What Miller achieves in this
reconstruction is more than a demonstration of the intellectual basis of action: he shows the
remarkable congruity of theology and the structure of the mind. (176)
A substantial amount of appreciation surfaces in this description which, remarkably, defines
Miller’s work precisely along the lines of the showing/telling distinction underlying my own
approach: “assertion” being the equivalent of ‘telling’, “demonstration” that of ‘showing’. The
reconciliation between these two poles hinges above all on Miller’s unique ability, as
Middlekauff further argues: “Miller’s achievement in his study of the Puritans surely owes more
to some indefinable quality of his imagination than to his method” (180). This claim reiterates
the perception of Miller as a historiographical artist who fashions for himself a mode of telling
history creatively, deriving from “some indefinable quality of his imagination”.
Miller’s mode of narration is grounded in a deep familiarity with the written sources he
frequently quotes; the discourse arising from this is clearly on the collective patterns of
cognition prevalent in seventeenth-century New England. Middlekauff informs his readers
about the “[...] leading assumptions of his [Miller’s] technique: that Puritan thinking, whether
as creation or as response to change, was more important, and more revealing, than the
“objective” changes in society themselves” (180). He further remarks:
One may wonder whether Miller himself was aware of all the implications of this
proposition. Implicit in it seems to be the notion that all important experience will find some
expression in words and, perhaps, even that no significant experience will defy verbalization.
(180-181)
Middlekauff questions to what extent Miller was aware of the quite momentous question
whether “all important experience will find some expression in words and, perhaps, even that
no significant experience will defy verbalization”. A fundamental methodological issue, this
problem touches on the very foundation of intellectual history’s endeavor to excavate past
cognition on the basis of written sources, factual and fictional narratives among them. As the
analytical section on The New England Mind shows, Miller in fact aims to cover unconscious
regions of the Puritan mind.
Francis T. Butts, in his essay “The Myth of Perry Miller”, offers a re-evaluation of Miller
and Miller criticism. Against a scholarly strand epitomized by Skotheim above, which
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understands Miller as someone who depicts ideas as autonomous from attachments to economic
and material environments, Butts claims that “Miller never lost sight of the social and political
repercussions of religious impulse and theological doctrine” (Butts 1982, 694). Butts observes
that Miller has a functional and dynamic view of the (collective) human mind. According to
Butts, Miller depicts Puritan religious thought as developing from “man’s emotional
experience”:
The dynamics of the Puritan mind were not initially a matter of tension between piety and
intellect. The tension originated within man’s emotional experience. It arose out of man’s
sense of loss and his restless, passionate thirst for wholeness – that is, out of his existential
experience. […] The articulation of religious doctrines was but the attempt to give formal
expression to what Miller thought was man’s tormenting primitive sentiment. (671)
In this definition, thought figures as a remedial instrument serving to alleviate an existential
insecurity which is affective in nature as “the tensions originated within man’s emotional
experience”. Butts interprets Miller as arguing that the intellect and theological reasoning were
means to respond to “man’s sense of loss and his restless, passionate thirst for wholeness” as
“the articulation of religious doctrines was but the attempt to give formal expression to what
Miller thought was man’s tormenting primitive sentiment”. A further affect-based dimension
Butts discusses is Miller’s interest in the semantics of national experience: Butts foregrounds
“[…] his fascination with the emotive aspects of life, his preoccupation with the problems of
the American identity […]” (669). Directly related to the mid-nineteenth-century ‘American
Renaissance’ and its development of a national self-consciousness in the realm of literary
production, these preoccupations amount to nothing less than an attempt to determine “Miller’s
conception of the meaning of America”:
Thus, as perceived by Miller, the New England Puritans “were swinging free in time and
space, masters of their own destiny, their fate in their own hands to make or mar at will.”
These words contain the germ of Miller’s conception of the meaning of America. (692)
Like all of Miller’s history, its underlying subject concerns the transformation and
development of the American identity, which was part of the growth of the modern mind.
Miller relished depicting crises in men’s identities provoked by social and intellectual
change. (693)
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In the first quotation, Butts places emphasis on the ‘metahistorical’ dimension in Miller’s work
of the self-reliance of the Puritans who, as “masters of their own destiny”, thus already display
that core trait of the American mind which figures so prominently in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
contribution to the American Renaissance. Miller’s stress on this essential quality places him
into the trajectory of American intellectual self-reflection initiated by the nineteenth-century
‘American Renaissance’ which, for instance in Emerson’s writing, aims to articulate America’s
national character. Miller’s self-conscious driving force, it should be remembered, is “the
pressing necessity for expounding my America to the twentieth century”. Miller’s America, as
Butts highlights, is one built on emotional, affective foundations. Miller thus shows affinities
to the mode of Victorian collective affect portraiture I identify below, as well as an
understanding of history which counts emotions, sentiments and affects among the driving
forces of mankind’s actions, and therefore encourages historians to include such phenomena in
their studies of the past.
What is missing in the literary and historical discussions of the The Scarlet Letter and The
New England Mind is a distinctly narratological perspective comparing these works in their
narrative shapes. In the following I will provide such a focus. I analyze the two narratives in
terms of the types of collectives (‘who’) that appear in them and in terms of the narrative
techniques (‘how’) used to represent and negotiate these social minds.
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3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
As Hawthorne’s introduction to the novel, “The Custom-House” chapter, was discussed in the
previous section, I plunge right into the narrative. The Puritan community is a central character
in this novel. The narrative’s very first sentence relates that “a throng of bearded men, in sadcolored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing
hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which
was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes” (Hawthorne 2005, 36). If there
are novels that distil their essence in the first image they present, The Scarlet Letter is among
them. My subsequent mind-telling analysis lays bare that the narrator represents the “throng of
bearded men” (36) as embodying that “persecuting spirit” (11) which he had attributed to his
seventeenth-century ancestors in “The Custom-House” sketch. This attribution, moreover,
incorporates a critical attitude on the author’s part.
The novel’s initial scenes dramatize Hester Prynne’s release from prison as she literally faces
the Puritan mind in the shape of a collective they-agent with its “heavy weight of a thousand
unrelenting eyes” (42). Found guilty of adultery and incarcerated for this reason, Hester has
served the sentence pronounced upon her by “the verdict of public sentiment” (37). The
narrative voice does not even attempt to convey these incidents in neutral terms, but integrates
explicitly evaluative nominal descriptions into the presentation of the prevalent collective
mentality. In a distinctly mind-telling mode, readers thus encounter “the grim rigidity that
petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people” (37), manifesting “that early
severity of the Puritan character” (37), which translated into actual practices of eviction,
corporeal punishment and execution (37). While Hester anticipated “the stings and venomous
stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult” (43), she in fact
experiences that “[…] there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the
popular mind […]” (43). These quotations reveal that the novel’s narrative dynamics hinge
fundamentally on the Puritans’ involvement as a collective unit. However, as I show in the next
sections, the novel differentiates substantially between diverse types of social minds (I. Who)
and employs various strategies (II. How) to represent them. Clarifying these two domains is the
main objective of the following analysis.
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I. Who
Individual(s) as Social Minds
It may seem counterintuitive, even contradictory, that individual characters could possibly
negotiate collective minds. This, however, is precisely what happens early in the novel when
the narrator’s discourse focuses on two prominent cases. Here is the evidence:
The door of the jail being flung open from within, there appeared, in the first place, like a
black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with
a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and
represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was
his business to administer in its final and closest application to the offender. (39-40)
Here, to witness the scene which we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself, with
four sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of honor. He wore a dark feather
in his hat, a border of embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath; a gentleman
advanced in years, with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He was not ill fitted to be
the head and representative of a community, which owed its origin and progress, and its
present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered
energies of manhood, and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely
because it imagined and hoped so little. (47)
It is significant to note that, on the level of story, both individual characters, the town-beadle
and the governor, are bodily present on the scene (“there appeared the grim and grisly presence
of the town-beadle”; “Here […] sat Governor Bellingham himself”). Both, furthermore, are
described as being equipped with props and accessories that carry symbolic meaning. The townbeadle comes “with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand”; the governor sits
“with four sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of honor”. An atmosphere of
looming violence and watchful surveillance is created by these individual figures.
It is the narrator’s discursive abstraction which establishes the link between these singular
characters and the collective mind they epitomize. Specifically, the narrator articulates “the
whole dismal severity of the Puritan code of law” as “prefigured and represented” by the
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individual “personage” of the town-beadle. Similarly, the factual historical person of “Governor
Bellingham” is proclaimed by the narrator to be “not ill fitted to be the head and representative
of a community, which owed its origin […] to the stern and tempered energies of manhood, and
the sombre sagacity of age […]”. Besides the formal mechanism of ‘pars pro toto’ and the
rhetorical device of personification implementing the depiction of these two individual figures,
the narrator employs mind-telling to articulate their semantics. Noun phrases such as “the whole
dismal severity of the Puritan code of law” and its “sombre sagacity of age” contextualize, and
explicitly evaluate, the prevalent collective mentality. The narrator not only proclaims these
individual characters to exemplify the Puritan mind; he also conveys an attitude of critical irony
through his narrator’s mind-telling communications. The individual characters thus crystallize
the cognitive atmosphere of the Puritan social mind.
Minimal and Small Social Minds
Several of the novel’s chapter titles (e.g. see below ‘miscellaneous’) indicate that the narrative
foregrounds various minimal collective units consisting of two characters. Two of them will be
examined closer here. First, the particular minimal unit formed between Arthur Dimmesdale
and Roger Chillingworth is a particularly apt epitome of a precarious, non-harmonious
connection. After Hester has established her existence as a socially ostracized penitent,
Dimmesdale, her illicit adulterous lover, continues to exert his public office as minister,
undetected as co-adulterer. His health, however, gradually deteriorates. Thus Chillingworth,
Hester’s wronged husband, comes into play, acting as Dimmesdale’s medical supervisor with
ulterior intentions: “[A]s not only the disease interested the physician, but he was strongly
moved to look into the character and qualities of the patient, these two men, so different in age,
came gradually to spend much time together” (82). The narrative details their relationship in
several passages, some of which are quoted here to demonstrate how the narrator’s mind-telling
frames the semantics of this minimal unit:
Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of intimacy, as we have said, grew up between these two
cultivated minds, which had as wide a field as the whole sphere of human thought and study,
to meet upon; they discussed every topic of ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private
character; they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal to themselves;
and yet no secret, such as the physician fancied must exist there, ever stole out of the
minister’s consciousness into his companion’s ear. (83-84)
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With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down,
each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and
bestowing a mutual and not incurious inspection into one another’s business. (85)
In the first quotation, mind-telling articulates a shared affect which, metaphorically, assumes
independent agency and even a spatial existence: “a kind of intimacy […] grew up between
these two cultivated minds, which had as wide a field as the whole sphere of human thought
and study, to meet upon”. The collective actions imparting that “they discussed every topic”
and “they talked much” describe habitual verbal exchanges rather than presenting a situational
scenario. Thus, the focalization in this passage is predominantly collective, exemplified for
example by the condition that “they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal
to themselves”. The latter part of this section, however, briefly, focuses on the experientiality
of the two characters as individual entities.
This latter circumstance can be recuperated as a significant characteristic of miminal and
smaller social minds, namely that the individuals comprising these units can be recognized as
distinct identities with proper names. This is not the case when it comes to larger and maximal
collectives, such as social classes (e.g. the aristocracy) or general groups (e.g. British women),
though representative individuals may embody these larger collectives by means of
synecdoche. In the first quotation above, for example, the minimal unit is split into the
individual experientiality of its two constituent characters as “no secret, such as the physician
fancied must exist there, ever stole out of the minister’s consciousness into his companion’s
ear”.
Transitions between the autonomy of the (two) individuals and the participation in the small
social mind they form together remain a continuous feature of this minimal unit and,
presumably, of all small social minds. This can be inferred from the second quotation which
conveys that “[…] these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet
familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual and not incurious
inspection into one another’s business” (85; emphasis added). It thus exhibits the concept of
‘fission-fusion’ cognition which Miranda Anderson has introduced into narrative studies
(Anderson [2015]). According to this notion, social minds undergo motions of convergence and
divergence, meaning that they are subject to malleable processes of fusion, fission and reunion.
This latter case is further exemplified shortly after when the narrator conveys that “[I]t proved
not difficult to reëstablish the intimacy of the two companions, on the same footing and in the
same degree as heretofore” (91; emphasis added).
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As mentioned, the two-mind unit between Dimmesdale and Chillingworth displays poignantly
that minimal units can be based on disharmonious relations that may even approach fierce
hostility. A duel or joust, for example, would be a formalized, pre-arranged constellation in
which two characters engage antagonistically. The experience they undergo in the process is
nonetheless shared. Though Chillingworth and Dimmesdale are not overtly juxtaposed as
opponents, a venomous intention on the part of Chillingworth pervades their connection, as
these two quotations show:
Unable to accomplish this, he [Dimmesdale] nevertheless, as a matter of principle, continued
his habits of social familiarity with the old man [Chillingworth], and thus gave him constant
opportunities for perfecting the purpose to which – poor, forlorn creature that he was, and
more wretched than his victim – the avenger had devoted himself. (93)
It is singular, however, how long a time often passes before words embody things; and with
what security two persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject, may approach its very
verge, and retire without disturbing it. Thus, the minister felt no apprehension that Roger
Chillingworth would touch, in express words, upon the real position which they sustained
towards one another. Yet did the physician, in his dark way, creep frightfully near the secret.
(143)
In the first quotation, mind-telling imparts that “habits of social familiarity” exist between
Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, which signals that their interaction has been sustained to the
point of routine. More significantly, mind-telling then articulates, on Chillingworth’s part, “the
purpose to which – poor, forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched than his victim – the
avenger had devoted himself”. Through this explicit framing of Chillingworth’s motivation, the
minimal unit with Dimmesdale is overtly characterized as disharmonious, involving the roles
of “avenger” on Chillingworth’s side and “victim” on Dimmesdale’s. Chillingworth is further
pronounced to be a “poor, forlorn creature” due to the revenge scheme he imposes on
Dimmesdale. This framing by the narrator pertains directly to the minimal group depicted here
as it makes explicit the semantics of this social mind which clearly involves ethical
implications.
The positive counter example that the novel adduces – a minimal social mind bound by
romantic love – is the adulterous couple, Hester and Arthur. The central instance dramatizing
their bond is the ‘forest scene’ during which both meet outside the confines of the town in which
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the novel is set. This scene was already discussed above (see section on ‘Collective
Focalization’), but further passages can be cited in which Hester and Arthur undergo the shared
experience of a minimal unit. Their relationship, however, is obviously marked by the existence
of a third character, their daughter Pearl, as this scene shows:
It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before experienced, that they sat and
watched Pearl’s slow advance. In her was visible the tie that united them. She had been
offered to the world, these seven years past, as the living hieroglyphic, in which was revealed
the secret they so darkly sought to hide, – all written in this symbol, – all plainly manifest, –
had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame! And Pearl was
the oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt that
their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined, when they beheld at once the material
union, and the spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together?
Thoughts like these – and perhaps other thoughts, which they did not acknowledge or define
– threw an awe about the child, as she came onward. (132)
The paragraph negotiates the intersubjective experientiality of the intimate social mind formed
by Hester and Arthur. It is by means of mind-telling that the narrator contextualizes the emotion
which Hester and Arthur share: “[…] a feeling which neither of them had ever before
experienced […]”. The temporal sphere of the past perfect demonstrates that the narrator’s
discourse is about the characters’ minds, surveying at once the entire subjective histories of
these two characters (“had ever experienced before”). Mind-telling then translates this affective
condition into an explicative noun phrase, relating about Pearl that “in her was visible the tie
that united them”. Pearl is pronounced to be “the oneness of their being”, who is “at once the
material union, and the spiritual ideal, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally
together”. Hardly could more overt phrases be used to demonstrate mind-telling’s capacity to
integrate a layer of semantic recuperation into the narrative which combines analytic and
evaluative pronouncements.
Yet Pearl’s significance goes further. Related to this collective sentiment is Pearl’s wider
significance in the fictional world of the novel “as the living hieroglyphic, in which was
revealed the secret they [Hester and Arthur] so darkly sought to hide, – all written in this
symbol, – all plainly manifest, – had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the
character of flame!” Though by means of a hypothetical scenario (“had there been […]”), the
narrator places the lovers’ minimal social mind into the larger town mind, allegorizing the way
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in which, through their daughter Pearl as a “living hieroglyphic”, their intimacy is openly
perceivable by the public Puritan mind. Eventually, then, the reclusive privacy which the
minimal social mind of the two lovers represents is shown to be correlated with larger social
minds.
Sub-Groups
A number of specific Puritan sub-groups can be distinguished. While explicitly described as
collectives, these groups fulfil complementing functions and assume a background(ed) presence
while foregrounding individual characters or more prominent collectives. The first example
here adumbrates the presence of Native Americans in seventeenth-century New England. The
scene flanks Roger Chillingworth’s first appearance, during Hester’s public display:
An Indian, in his native garb, was standing there; but the red men were not so infrequent
visitors of the English settlements, that one of them would have attracted any notice from
Hester Prynne, at such a time; much less would he have excluded all other objects and ideas
from her mind. By the Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him,
stood a white man [Chillingworth], clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage
costume. (44)
The Indian, though “evidently sustaining a companionship with him [Chillingworth]”,
functions as a supernumerary and does not reappear in the narrative. He is, however,
contextualized in terms of the group he belongs to, “the red men”, who “were not so infrequent
visitors of the English settlements”. This example indeed illustrates that sub-groups are a perfect
means to serve the function of establishing (a) narrative background. This is noteworthy, first,
as a formal mechanism involved in shaping the narrative dynamics of this scene. Second,
moreover, mentioning sub-groups invites interpretation. In this particular case, an ideological
approach suggests itself, one which pays attention to the problematic constellation of “English
settlements” being established in the territory of the “red men”. The narrative, in other words,
invokes the history of North-America’s autochthonous population.
Children, a more visible sub-group, do reappear in the novel. They function above all as a
focalizing device providing yet another perspective on Hester’s special position in the Puritan
community:
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Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be shut out from the
sphere of human charities, would creep nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the
cottage-window, or standing in the doorway, or laboring in her little garden, or coming forth
along the pathway that led townward; and, discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, would
scamper off with a strange, contagious fear. (57)
The narrator’s mind-telling significantly portrays the children as pre-rational creatures “too
young to comprehend” the reasons why Hester has been “shut out from the sphere of human
charities”. However, they are fully capable of experiencing the scarlet letter’s semantics through
the affect of a “strange, contagious fear”. Omniscient mind-telling yet again avails of its
epistemic super powers as it formulates the emotive experientiality of an infantile collective.
The second quotation presenting the particular sub-group of children is this:
The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived, had
got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions,
in the mother and child; and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not unfrequently
reviled them with their tongues. (64)
Mind-telling expresses a permanent disposition on the children’s part who are “of the most
intolerant brood that ever lived”. Accordingly, mind-telling reveals how they formed their
attitude towards Hester and Pearl. Specifically, mind-telling details that the children had
developed “a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary
fashions, in the mother and the child”. These instances clearly articulate the mind of this subgroup by stating traits through noun phrases. Internalist and externalist mind-showing (“scorned
them in their hearts; reviled them with their tongues”) completes the children’s collective
experientiality depicted in this scene.
A more complex example of a sub-group enveloping a major individual character is this:
The other eminent characters, by whom the chief ruler was surrounded, were distinguished
by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess
the sacredness of Divine institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just, and sage. But,
out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of
wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgement on an erring
woman’s heart, and disentangle its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect
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towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed conscious, indeed, that
whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the multitude;
for, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony, the unhappy woman grew pale and trembled.
(47; emphasis added)
Two phenomena are particularly noteworthy. The first one is the narrator’s mind-telling about
“the other eminent characters” whose mentality is introduced in some detail. Readers learn that
they “were distinguished by a dignity of mien” and how this piece of (externalist) mind-telling
relates to “a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of Divine
institutions”. The passive voice (“were felt”) yet again indicates a shared affective disposition
prevalent at a given time. Clearly, the contents of the ‘were felt’ sentence relate a sentiment
shared by a wider collective of the entire era, thus transcending the particular sub-group of ‘the
other eminent characters’. The latter are further portrayed through overtly mind-telling terms
as “they were, doubtless, good men, just, and sage”. This sentence ideally illustrates how mindtelling functions, declaring ‘good’, ‘just’ and ‘sage’ to be the attributes of ‘their’ mode of being.
The second phenomenon links this particular sub-group and their affective attributes to the
universal entity of “the whole human family”, reasoning hypothetically that “it would have been
easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of
sitting in judgement on an erring woman’s heart […]”. The narrator here clearly employs mindtelling to manifest an attitude of critical irony towards this sub-group. The passage shows that
The Scarlet Letter depicts the collective Puritan agency as characterized by a judgmental
motivation, thus shedding ironical light on its own earlier statements of these men as ‘good’,
‘just’ and ‘sage’. Apart from the narrator’s stance towards these incidents, however, the passage
yet again confirms the palpable and significant presence of collectives in the narrative.
A specific phenomenon pertains to sub-groups of the ‘those who’ type. They remain
unspecified, unnamed and occur only marginally. Although these groups attain a rather
uncontoured narrative presence, which may be even more minor than that of minor individual
characters, the narrator nevertheless attributes states of mind and intentions to them. The “red
men” mentioned above can be classified as such an unspecified group, while further illustration
contains actual ‘those who’ references:
And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the
term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected
to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even
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startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and
ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was
something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the
occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the
attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque
peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer, – so
that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were
now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time, – was that SCARLET LETTER, so
fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking
her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
(40-41; emphasis added)
The function of ‘those who’ is to throw into relief Hester’s beauty and the radiance of the scarlet
letter, which is why they are neither named nor numbered. In effect, the ‘those who’ group
functions as a background foil. Yet in spite of this evanescent presence, the narrator treats them
as members of an intermental unit who “were astonished, and even startled” and “were now
impressed”. This unit, furthermore, is clearly not one formed on the spot but has been sustained
over time, as the past perfect verbs indicate. The root of their astonishment is precisely that they
“had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous
cloud” as they “had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne”. This temporal ‘beforeafter’ schema also quite literally stresses the scarlet letter’s defamiliarizing impact (“had been
familiarly acquainted”; “were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time”) on the
‘those who’ group.
The polyvalent symbol of the scarlet letter subsumes multiplex semantic levels and involves
a further collectivity-related dimension which is mentioned at the end of the passage. Similarly
unspecified as the ‘those who’ group, the ultimately maximal social minds unit invoked here is
the all-encompassing entity of “humanity”. This gnomic collective continues the narrator’s
discourse on the aphoristic level of timeless truth(s) initiated earlier in the novel. Yet again, the
individual character is shown ‘in collective contrast’ as the token denoting her adultery “had
the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her
in a sphere by herself”. Hester enters a distinct ontological realm, after the manner of saints,
which however entails a mode of being precisely severed from an ‘ordinary’ bond with
humanity. Thus marked by an intensified, radicalized individuality, Hester’s post-prison
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identity is developed in relation to the most comprehensive of all unspecified human collectives,
“humanity”.
All of these relations just unearthed become manifest by means of mind-telling. This is true
of the collective cognition of ‘those who’, unravelling a past (perfect) temporal sphere from
before the plot’s (fictional) present setting in with Hester’s release from prison. This is also true
of the concomitant ‘before-after’ schema and its emphasis on an experience of collective
defamiliarization as they “were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time”. The ‘as
if’ construction is a particularly conspicuous (and effective) means employed here by mindtelling to conjecture ‘their’ collective cognition in terms not of an actual but a metaphorical
scenario. ‘As if’ constructions project precisely alternative quasi-realities. Endemic in
metaphorical renderings, this procedure is nonetheless meant to shed light on the ‘actual’
fictional reality on which it eventually reflects back.
Large and Maximal Social Minds
In addition to minimal units and sub-groups, the novel’s character constellation also contains
large and maximal collectives. Palmer’s investigation of “The Middlemarch Mind” (Palmer
2005) can serve as the model for one prominent instance in The Scarlet Letter: the novel
repeatedly dramatizes an explicit ‘town mind’. Two passages in particular serve to illustrate
this large social mind. The first one is this:
If the same multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her
punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above
the platform, nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark gray of the midnight. But
the town was all asleep. (97; emphasis added)
The quotation displays the technique of hypothetical collective focalization. While Hester,
Arthur and Pearl stand on the pillory at night in this scene, no Puritan collective is present.
During Hester’s public trial at the beginning of the narrative, the presence of that group was
vitally involved in creating the scene’s tension. This passage only refers to “the same multitude”
hypothetically, by means of a subjunctive phrase: “they would have discerned no face […] in
the dark gray of the midnight”. By means of a(nother) singular noun phrase, the following
indicative statement then compresses the collective character of ‘the multitude’ into a more
abstract maximal social unit, asserting that “the town was all asleep”. The fact that the
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anthropomorphized town is absent during this midnight scene means that Arthur’s outing is
precisely not publicly perceived. The town mind thus does not realize the issue at stake, which
is Arthur’s participation in the adultery. If anything, the phenomenon of the town mind yet
again underscores the fundamental importance of the Puritan social mind as a collective
character in its own right. It interacts with individual characters and co-determines the
narrative’s dynamics and semantics. Here is a second passage featuring an explicit town mind:
“It is done!” muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands. “The whole town will
awake, and hurry forth, and find me here!”
But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater power, to his own
startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy
slumberers mistook the cry either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of
witches; whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over the settlements or lonely
cottages, as they rode with Satan through the air. (98; emphasis added)
The quotation first focalizes the town mind through the character’s speech as Arthur anxiously
assumes that “the whole town will awake, and hurry forth, and find me here!” The narrator then
responds to Arthur in quasi-dialogical terms, stating that “but it was not so. […] The town did
not awake”. Both passages about the town mind (re-)confirm two interrelated circumstances.
One, the narrative presents the town itself here as an independent collectivist unit. The passive
activity which the town executes – being asleep – manifests a rather inconspicuous
participation, but emphasizes precisely the noteworthy narrative procedure of transforming a
static, inanimate unit into a dynamic, experiential entity operating in human-like ways and
consisting of various sub-groups.
In fact, the latter are detailed in more specific ways. Besides the “drowsy slumberers”, which
can be taken to represent the town society, including the town officials and clergy, the narrative
suggestively refers to “the noise of witches; whose voices, at that period, were often heard […]
as they rode with Satan through the air”. The narrative thus attaches the suspicious sub-group
of the witches to the town mind as, apparently, a nighttime concomitant. Needless to say, the
witches invoke the factual historical dimension of the Salem witch trials and other forms of
persecution committed by the “drowsy slumberers”, if they are to be recuperated as the Puritan
crowd that they designate in the novel’s beginning.
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The following section continues to differentiate the various sub-divisions implied by such a
congeries of elements. The extract details the consequences Hester faces after her release from
prison, as she reintegrates herself into the community’s daily routines:
Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she [Hester] feel the innumerable throbs of
anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the undying, the ever-active sentence
of the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that
brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman. If she
entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her
mishap to find herself the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for
they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something horrible in this dreary woman,
gliding silently through the town, with never any companion but one only child. Therefore,
first allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the utterance
of a word that had no distinct purport to their own minds, but was none the less terrible to
her, as proceeding from lips that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a
diffusion of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang,
had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves, – had the summer
breeze murmured about it – had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud! (59)
The passage spells out what the narrator suitably labels “the undying, ever-active sentence of
the Puritan tribunal”. The initial emphasis is on the various human groups implementing this
sentence. The clergymen addressing “words of exhortation”, a crowd “with its mingled grin
and frown” and, particularly, the children of the town who “had imbibed from their parents a
vague idea of something horrible in this dreary woman” which they “babbled […]
unconsciously”. The underlying intention of these (re-)actions, in the narrator’s mind-telling
phrase, is “the diffusion of her [Hester’s] shame”. The enumeration of these various sub-groups
culminates in a further dimension of indeed maximal, universal proportions as Hester gains the
impression “that all nature knew of it”. As a consequence, even inanimate parts of the natural
setting become hypothetically focalized, anthropomorphized, and indeed distinctly
narrativized: “it could have caused her no deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered
the dark story among themselves, – had the summer breeze murmured about it, – had the wintry
blast shrieked it aloud!”
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The human sub-groups in this passage – for instance clergymen and children – are to be
understood, I suggest, as ‘general collectives’, which is a type of social mind that the novel
contains in rather high numbers. Examples can be found here:
The poor, as we have already said, whom she [Hester] sought out to be the objects of her
bounty, often reviled the hand that was stretched forth to succor them. Dames of elevated
rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were accustomed to
distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by
which women can concoct a subtile poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a
coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer’s defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an
ulcerated wound. (59; emphasis added)
General collectives are large and maximal social minds of unindividualized contours which
may or may not be part of the plot. In the current passage, the first two general collectives, “the
poor” and “dames of elevated rank”, are intradiegetic collectives and thus participate in the plot.
Their involvement, however, is described by habitual actions: “the poor […] often reviled at
the hand that was stretched forth to succor them”; “dames of elevated rank […] were
accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart.” The tendency towards habituality finds
its proper climax in the mentioning of the gnomic context of “that alchemy of quiet malice, by
which women can concoct a subtile poison from ordinary trifles […].” The latter is the most
general of these three collectives and tends towards expressing universal conditions rather than
merely general collectivity. Mind-telling clearly throws negative light on all three groups by
describing their particular actions (“reviled at the hand that stretched to succor them”) or, even
more explicitly, by articulating such as evaluative noun phrases as “drops of bitterness”,
“alchemy of quiet malice” and “subtile poison”. An obvious gender dimension again enters the
narrator’s (ironical?) discourse here, though it should be noted that Hawthorne judges male
general collectives in similarly unfavourable terms.
Significantly, unlike such individual and decidedly fictional characters as Hester and Arthur,
general collectives appear in factual narrative also. “The poor” in particular is a type of
designation which emerges in diverse narrative contexts, fictional and non-fictional, and is
certainly not restricted to the (possible) world of this novel, though in the passage above “the
poor” refers to a specific general collective as part of the town in which The Scarlet Letter is
set. General collectives such as ‘the poor’ cannot, by definition, be traced back to genuine and
unique individuals with proper names, whether invented or real. Instead, it is their inherent
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characteristic of a general collective which predisposes them to feature in both narrative modes.
As they remain unspecified, unquantified and, as it were, faceless, they represent the more or
less static masses which nonetheless contribute quite significantly to rendering the often
neglected (background) conditions of ‘the Habitual’. Thus prompting readers to perceive ‘that
which goes without saying’, general collectives may thus even trigger defamiliarizing effects.
Hawthorne’s tendency towards gnomic universalism, established at the very beginning of
the novel and palpable throughout, entails that the narrative repeatedly makes pronouncements
about general collectives of large and even maximal scale, emerging not only from the depiction
of collective but also individual characters, as in this passage:
She [Hester] had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic, – a taste for the
gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing
else, in all the possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure,
incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle. (58; emphasis added)
Initially, mind-telling explicates a rather momentous facet of Hester’s character which
differentiates her most severely from the Puritan mind: “a rich, voluptuous, Oriental
characteristic, – a taste for the gorgeously beautiful”. Articulating this anti-Puritan, “Oriental”
sensibility in the shape of these abstract noun phrases and further communicating it to be a
permanent disposition, which Hester “had in her nature” – these are typical mind-telling
operations. After depicting Hester as an individual character, the narrator then moves into the
realm of gnomic universality, concentrating on the general ‘species’ that Hester belongs to:
“women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the
needle”.
The gender-related dynamics thus unleashed by mind-telling invites interpretive
recuperation. The passage serves to throw Hester into relief by revealing an aesthetic sensibility
which may be the core of her distinctive moral character, her exceptional stamina in the face of
a repressive Puritan mentality. Hester is above all a uniquely resilient woman, attaining heroic
stature as she reassumes her life in extremely untoward circumstances. Hester embodies a
concept of femininity which radically reinvents the conventional version of ‘Woman’ which
the passage implicitly adduces at the end: “women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the
other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle”. The most typical of all domestic activities,
needlework, figures as the stereotypically passive, private, powerless activity preserved for the
majority of women for centuries, cementing the ‘angel of the house’ gender role. Fuelled by
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her “rich, voluptuous, Oriental […] taste for the gorgeously beautiful”, Hester uses her
needlework talents to upend this conception of feminity. A major dimension of The Scarlet
Letter, therefore, is the dramatization of an unforgettable story of female empowerment.
Though Hester is a charismatic individual case, her example clearly has collectivist, even
universalist repercussions as the narrative makes explicit through its statement on “women”.
In addition to featuring a variety of collective characters on the level of plot, the narrative
employs a number of discursive strategies, or ‘how’ mechanisms, which I would like to identify.
II. How
Collective Contexts
One of these (multi-shaped) strategies places either individuals or collectives into (further)
collective contexts. The first section here, for example, throws Hester into relief as an individual
character who is ostracized from the Puritan group but who nonetheless carries collectivist
significance:
Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at
which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody
their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught
to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast, – at her, the child of honorable
parents, – at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman, – at her, who had
once been innocent, – as the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And over her grave, the
infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument. (55)
Hester’s “individuality” is narratively explained in this passage as epitomizing a “general
symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and
embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion”. Her personal, intimate experience
comes to be the measure of the Puritan social mind, albeit by way of negative counter example.
The collectivist ramifications in this section are in fact multiple. It has already been revealed
that Hester herself figures as “the general symbol”. On the part of the community, “the preacher
and moralist” constitute general types, not distinct individuals. In addition, the community is
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represented by such general collectives as “the young and pure”. Though the narrative itself
immediately subsumes her into the Puritan social mind, Hester emerges as the only recognizable
individual character in this passage, thus exemplifying how individuals can be placed into
collective contexts.
A related schema is in operation when individual characters are directly contrasted against
a collective. Here is an example:
Full of concern, therefore, – but so conscious of her own right that it seemed scarcely an
unequal match between the public, on the one side, and a lonely woman, backed by the
sympathies of nature, on the other, – Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary cottage. (68)
The contrast between individual and collective could hardly be made more explicit than through
the ‘on the one side […] on the other’ schema utilized here. Foregrounded as an instance of the
character’s internal focalization, mind-telling formulates how Hester’s consciousness views her
position self-confidently in this contrastive constellation; she is “full of concern […] but so
conscious of her own right, that it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public […]
and a lonely woman […].” The formal method of contrasting individual and collective is thus
deployed to reveal and even dramatize Hester’s individual cognitive functioning in the face of
a hostile collective.
In the process of rendering the dynamics of Hester’s mind in this scene, the narrator
moreover sides with the character (and, by implication, positions himself against “the public”),
most conspicuously through the parenthetical phrase “backed by the sympathies of nature”, but
also through describing Hester as “a lonely woman” living in a “solitary cottage”. These
parentheses and epithets are doubtlessly mind-telling communications. They qualify the
character(s) – the individual one explicitly and the collective one implicitly – and, in addition,
voice an attitude towards both. Concomitantly, it should be highlighted that the narrative
momentum of this scenario derives precisely from the hostility which the Puritan social mind
surrounding Hester expresses towards her, be it in words or deeds. For the sake of the rhetorical
principle of contrast the Puritan collective is grammatically compressed here into a massive
complex, “the public”.
In addition to placing individuals into collective contexts, the novel depicts collectives as
juxtaposed with other collectives. As noted above, the very opening establishes the vital
importance that social minds assume in it. Besides the “throng of bearded men […] intermixed
with women”, as the novel’s major collective protagonist on the level of plot, the beginning
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paragraphs present two additional collectives, one gnomic type and one historically specific
one. Though subsequently the narrative gradually elaborates on the interrelations of its
individual characters, the opening two paragraphs constitute a collectivist frame which
differentiates these three types of they-units:
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats,
intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front
of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron
spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might
originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to
allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In
accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built
the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they
marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which
subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old church-yard of
King’s Chapel. (36; emphasis added)
It can again be observed that the narrative’s very first sentence presents the “throng of bearded
men” as conducting a decidedly static action (“was assembled”) in the physical environs of a
symbolically charged spot (“in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily
timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes”). It is through (‘externalist’) mind-telling,
moreover, that this collective protagonist is described in terms of its physical appearance (“sadcolored garments”). The narrative’s collectivist dimension, including its semantics, is
ensconced in the novel’s first paragraph.
In the second paragraph, furthermore, two particular groups constitute a collective context
in which the initial collective character is placed. One of them comes in the shape of gnomic or
typological universality (“the founders of a new colony”), the other one in the shape of historical
and geographical specificity (“the forefathers of Boston”). The narrative in fact pronounces an
overt link between these latter two (“in accordance with this rule”), thus eventually forging an
analogy between all three social minds. The difference between them, nonetheless, is that the
“throng of bearded men” participates in the fictional world as a(n) (intradiegetic) character,
whereas the other two feature as (extradiegetic) collectives from outside the world of the
narrative, thus providing a collective context.
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In both of its intertwined levels, historico-geographical specificity and gnomic universality, this
context connects the narrative’s fictional plot with the factual givens of North-American
Puritanism. First, such details as “the forefathers of Boston”, “Cornhill”, “Isaac Johnson’s lot”
and “King’s Chapel” are without doubt factual references, intended precisely to locate the
fiction within a real-life format, the Boston area. Second, the gnomic recuperations of a “Utopia
of human virtue and happiness” in terms of timeless philosophical reflections could also occur
in historiographical, essayistic or philosophical – meaning non-fictional – discourse. Integrating
a factual discourse into what is chiefly fictional story-telling, the narrator sets a pattern here
which is to recur throughout the novel, for instance through what I label Zeitgeist narration
below. As a consequence, readers cannot but relate The Scarlet Letter to these collective
contexts which, from the narrative’s onset onwards, straddle the boundary between fictionality
and factuality.
A further exemplification of this principle follows shortly after, when Hester stands on the
pillory, before the Puritan crowd, with the magistrates questioning her:
In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now, for two or three
generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us, but was held, in the
old time, to be as effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the
guillotine among the terrorists of France. (42; emphases added)
The mentioning of the “the terrorists of France” establishes the context of another collective
which sheds light on ‘us’, the narrative’s trans-generational collective addressee. The formal
mechanism of ‘collectives in collective context(s)’ thus clearly applies here, since the analogous
connection between the two groups is stressed through the repetition of “among”. Another
phenomenon which links these two groups and constitutes a way of representing collective
consciousness in this passage is the passive voice in “was held”. Palmer (Palmer 2005, 434)
has demonstrated that the passive voice is a crucial means indicating the cognition or mentality
of communities, towns and other sustained intermental units. Such a collective mode of thinking
is precisely implicated by the passive voice in this passage. When the narrative recounts that
“this scaffold […] was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent in the promotion of good
citizenship, as […]”, it assumes that “in the old time” most community members were
convinced of the disciplinary efficacy of this device. The passive phrase “was held”, therefore,
betrays a shared disposition.
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An additional dimension which deserves to be explored is the temporal contextualism operating
in this passage which juxtaposes “now, for two or three generations past” and “the old time”.
The first of these temporal spheres, “now”, refers to the narrator’s contemporaneity which the
prelude establishes as the mid-nineteenth century (in the Boston area). “The old time”, by
contrast, refers to the same geographical region “two or three generations” previously, meaning
seventeenth-century Puritanism. Implicit in the mentioning of “the terrorists of France”,
however, is a third temporal situation, the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century in
and around Paris, which might similarly be seen as an exemplification of a failed “Utopia of
human virtue and happiness”. Since these temporal scenarios furthermore involve the
negotiation of their prevalent ideological mentalities, these instances tend towards participating
in a ‘history of ideas’ type of historiographical narration. This pertains to the diachrony of
different generations of Puritans as well as to the contrast between “us” and “the terrorists of
France”. In sum, the novel’s Puritan collective is focalized through various collective contexts.
Collective Focalization
Another form of representing collective minds comes in the shape of ‘collective focalization’.
According to Manfred Jahn, “focalization denotes the perspectival restriction and orientation
of narrative information relative to somebody’s (usually a character’s) perception, imagination,
knowledge, or point of view. Hence, focalization theory covers the various means of regulating,
selecting, and channeling narrative information, particularly of seeing events from somebody’s
point of view, no matter how subjective or fallible this point of view might turn out to be” (Jahn
2005b, 173). The specific characteristic of collective focalization is that the ‘somebody’ whose
perspective is accentuated is a collective rather than an individual character.
Though visual experience is the most literal exemplification of this phenomenon, it also
subsumes other perceptual activities (see Jahn 2005b, 174) as well as instances of collective
cognition and ideological standpoints. The ensuing collectivist instances from The Scarlet
Letter will illustrate this variety. Some of them pertain to situational, others to permanent
scenarios. Some present collectives as hardly notable background entities which function as
complements to the experience of individual characters; others emphatically foreground
collectives as characters in their own right. Like many of the collectivity-based parameters I
identify here, the term collective focalization adumbrates a field of quite diverse phenomena
rather than pinpointing one minute narrative operation. This passage, for example, describes a
rather hidden instance in the context of a particular spatial scenario:
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It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument
of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it
up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this
contrivance of wood and iron. (42; emphasis added)
The phrase ‘to the public gaze’ not only focalizes the scenario (a tightly confined human head
upon a platform) in deictic terms – ‘to’ as in ‘towards’ –, but also contracts the visual perception
of multiple people into a single noun phrase, elaborated through a definite article and an
adjective, “the public gaze”. The narrator then clarifies the semantics of “this contrivance of
wood and iron”, pronouncing it to epitomize “the very ideal of ignominy”, a moral quality
which clearly relies on the presence of the public gaze. Without a crowd’s immediate
perception, the pillory scenario entirely loses its momentum: what is ignominious is the state
of being openly displayed to the public gaze. The ‘public gaze’ thus implicitly attains semantic
if not ideological significance in addition to its perceptual dynamics.
A similar nexus prevails in the next scene, though it refers to Hester’s daughter Pearly rather
than to the wearer of the scarlet letter herself:
But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds. Her mother [Hester], with a morbid purpose that
may be better understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be procured,
and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the arrangement and decoration of the
dresses which the child wore, before the public eye. (62; emphasis added)
Similar to the scene above, the passage does not represent a situational event, but describes a
permanent (plot-based) condition, Pearl’s physical appearance, especially her dress. The
pertinence of the particulars of Pearl’s garments, nonetheless, derives from its function as a
medium for a vicarious communication between Hester and the Puritans. The latter are rendered
through the synecdoche of “the public eye” and remain the defining context in the frame of
which the individual characters devise their thoughts and actions. The Puritan public exists as
a backgrounded entity in both of these two passages and hardly surfaces at all, though it
represents an important foil contextualizing the experience of the individual characters.
The next passage, drawn from the first of the novel’s three ‘pillory scenes’, during which
Hester faces the assembled Puritan crowd, involves a slightly more complex rendering:
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Dreadful as it was, she [Hester] was conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand
witnesses. It was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him [Chillingworth] and her,
than to greet him, face to face, they two alone. She fled for refuge, as it were, to the public
exposure, and dreaded the moment when its protection should be withdrawn from her.
Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely heard a voice behind her, until it had repeated her
name more than once, in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude. (46)
The dynamics in this extract consists not just of the relation between individual character
(Hester) and large collective (the Puritan crowd), but also presents the small collective unit
formed by Hester and her hostile husband, Chillingworth. The Puritan public, however, is still
(only) co-focalized through Hester’s experience, more specifically through mind-telling’s
mediation of Hester cognition. For instance, mind-telling uses a metaphorical expression to
relate that Hester “was conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand witnesses”, thus
revealing the individual character’s experientiality as inevitably bound to the presence of the
Puritan social mind. Offering to Hester what the narrator metaphorically describes as “shelter”,
“refuge” and “protection”, the collective figures as a character with rudimentary experiential
capacities in its own right. Also, the collective’s perceptual capacity is extended beyond the
visual dimension as the particular utterance in this scene is “audible to the whole multitude”.
Such incipient abilities are only adumbrated and co-focalized in these first three passages,
but find fuller rendition in a number of other scenarios. Speaking very generally, the novel’s
collectives can be divided into small social minds, more specifically minimal units comprised
of two individuals, and large social minds such as ‘the public’ and ‘the town’. In the remainder
of this section, I provide an example of each: first a miminal unit, then a maximal one. While
multiple, more or less harmonious intermental pairs people the narrative – including those
formed by Hester and Pearl, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, as well as Hester and
Chillingworth –, the central instance exemplifying the shared experience between two
characters is clearly the famous ‘forest scene’ in which Hester and Dimmesdale encounter each
other on intimate terms for the first time after their adulterous affair. Here is how the narrative
tells the story of their reunion:
It was no wonder that they [Hester and Arthur] thus questioned one another’s actual and
bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet, in the dim
wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who
had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in
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mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of
disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost! They were awestricken likewise at themselves; because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness,
and revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such
breathless epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment. It was
with fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur
Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne.
The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was dreariest in the interview. They now felt
themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere. (122-123)
Unambiguously, this is an instance in which the shared experience of a small social mind, two
individuals, is foregrounded so as to become the chief center of focalization. At the same time,
it is mainly through mind-telling that the narrator conveys the experiential quality of the theyunit formed by Hester and Arthur. The emphasis is on the way in which both of them experience
their encounter in affective and even existential terms as “they thus questioned one another’s
actual and bodily existence, and even doubted their own”. Mind-telling then uses the
metaphorical tool of a life/afterlife analogy, technically a simile, through which the meeting of
these two minds is described as being “like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave,
of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly
shuddering, in mutual dread […]”. A typical mind-telling phrase continues to relate a shared
cognitive state: “They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves”. Even more strikingly, mindtelling conveys an epiphanic moment equally undergone by both characters as “[…] the crisis
flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and experience,
as life never does, except at such breathless epochs”. The passage culminates in a prime
exemplification of how centrally this novel portrays collective experientiality: “They now felt
themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere”.
By contrast, an example of a maximal or at any rate large social mind occurs about mid-way
through the novel. It addresses how the town mind makes sense of Dimmesdale’s deteriorating
health which in truth is due to his publicly undetected participation in the adulterous affair with
Hester. The passage moreover reveals how such a large unit may be differentiated into various
sub-parts, all of which form part of the workings of the maximal collective:
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And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale’s best discerning friends, as we have intimated, very
reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence had done all this, for the purpose – besought
in so many public, and domestic, and secret prayers – of restoring the young minister to
health. But – it must now be said – another portion of the community had latterly begun to
take its own view of the relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician.
When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be
deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its
great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring,
as to possess the character of truths supernaturally revealed. The people, in the case of which
we speak, could justify its prejudice against Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument
worthy of serious refutation. (85)
On a basic level, the passage focalizes various collective sub-parts of the overarching town
mind, so that readers do not merely learn what “[…] Dimmesdale’s best discerning friends […]
very reasonably imagined […]”, but also that “[…] another portion of the community had
latterly begun to take its own view […]”. In effect, collective focalization thus morphs into
collective multi-focalization as several parts of the same social minds are distinguished in terms
of their perspective, more specifically in terms of their opinions (rather than their perceptions).
Mind-telling then shifts collective focalization into a decidedly gnomic realm, asserting
aphoristically that “when an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is
exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on
the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound
and so unerring, as to possess the character of truths supernaturally revealed”. An interesting
bipolar nexus is thus established between the reliability of judgements arrived at on the basis
of visual perception as against intuitive, affective cognition. The truth-value of this statement
is currently not under investigation, nor is the question whether these two poles need necessarily
be construed as oppositional rather than complementary. What is crucial for my purposes,
instead, is that the gnomic collective mind of “an uninstructed multitude” is focalized here as a
collective which “attempts to see with its eyes” and “forms its judgements […] on the basis of
its great and warm heart […]”. The narrator yet again employs mind-telling to detail the
perceptual, cognitive, affective (in one word: experiential) operations of a collective mind after
having posited the latter’s existence in the first place.
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The narrator then moves the narrative back into the plot by means of what might be conceived
as a ‘double collectivization’. First, the gnomic collective is re-specified as “the people” of the
town and, second, the narrator pronounces them to be the people “in the case of which we
speak”, thus maintaining his authorial use of the ‘royal we’. A final mind-telling instance is that
the people are mentioned in terms of “its prejudice against Roger Chillingworth”, which again
presents the collective unit as an entity fully capable not merely of (visual) perception as in the
examples of ‘the public gaze’ above, but capable also of affect, cognition and (ideological)
attitude. The complex parameter of (collective) focalization is thus comprised of variegated
elements.
This is likewise prevalent in the next quotation which conveys the effect of Dimmesdale’s
preaching style on ‘the people’:
The people knew not the power that moved them thus. They deemed the young clergyman a
miracle of holiness. They fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven’s messages of wisdom,
and rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very ground on which he trod was sanctified. The
virgins of his church grew pale around him, victims of a passion so imbued with religious
sentiment that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it openly, in their white
bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before the altar. The aged members of his flock,
beholding Mr. Dimmesdale’s frame so feeble, while they were themselves so rugged in their
infirmity, believed that he would go heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their
children, that their old bones should be buried close to their young pastor’s holy grave. (9495)
At the beginning of the passage mind-telling showcases one of its rather fascinating capacities
by adducing an instance of ‘nescience’ as “the people knew not the power that moved them
thus”. The next three sentences maintain this focus on ‘the people’ as a general collective,
established through such focalizing phrases as “they deemed”, “they fancied” and “in their
eyes”. The narrative goes on to determine two specific sub-groups of the general collective
addressed by Dimmesdale, “the virgins of his church” and “the aged members of his flock”.
The narrator’s mind-telling further characterizes specifically the first group as “victims of a
passion so imbued with religious sentiment that they imagined it to be all religion”. His
discourse about Puritan psychology takes on a decidedly gender-related dimension here,
describing these young women as “victims” of the religious doctrines dominating Puritan
mentality which, by implication, prevents any secular, ‘natural’ passion from arising. In sum,
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the passage offers an account of a collective’s experientiality, focalized through that collective
as a whole as well as through two of its sub-parts.
Two further instances provide more evidence of how collective focalization finds diverse
manifestations in the novel. The first one yet again oscillates between gnomic universality and
the novel’s specific story-world:
The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice, when too
strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when
the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity. Interpreting
Hester Prynne’s deportment as an appeal of this nature, society was inclined to show its
former victim a more benign countenance than she cared to be favored with, or, perchance,
than she deserved. (106)
The passage commences by focusing on “the public” as a transhistorical collective of gnomic
generality which mind-telling declares to be “despotic in its temper”. The next sentence,
however, places this same collective right into the spatio-temporal environment of The Scarlet
Letter’s fictional world. As on a number of other occasions in the novel, this collective is
focalized as a full-fledged character in its own right as “society was inclined to show its former
victim a more benign countenance […]”. Mind-telling articulates a collective disposition (“was
inclined”) on the part of “society” which is immediately related to intentional physical
behaviour (“to show its former victim a more benign countenance”). Internalist and externalist
expressions of this large social mind coincide.
The same passage further zooms in on a significant group contained in the overarching unit
of the town’s public mind and clarifies their mental habits which differ somewhat from those
of ‘the people’:
The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer in acknowledging
the influence of Hester’s good qualities than the people. The prejudices which they shared
in common with the latter were fortified in themselves by an iron framework of reasoning,
that made it a far tougher labor to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid
wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to be
an expression of almost benevolence. Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom their
eminent position imposed the guardianship of the public morals. (106)
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It is distinctly through mind-telling that “the rulers, and the wise and learned men of the
community” are characterized, since “the prejudices which they shared in common with the
latter [i.e. the people] were fortified in themselves by an iron framework of reasoning”.
Particularly the latter phrase – “by an iron framework of reasoning” – is a striking manifestation
of how mind-telling avails itself of its discursive advantages. It takes little interpretive effort to
detect an attitude of critical irony on the narrator’s part as he depicts the Puritan leading class
as incarcerated in the cognitive cage of their religious rationality. The narrator integrates a level
of sarcastic commentary into his descriptions of the Puritan rulers. This is further enhanced by
his observation that, once they perceive Hester’s continuously charitable conduct, “their sour
and rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the course of years, might grow to
be an expression of almost benevolence”. A similar correspondence between internal cognition
and external facial expression is at work here as above, while the time span (“in the course of
years”) and the adverbial noun phrase (“an expression of almost benevolence”) further manifest
the narrator’s irony.
All of these instances testify that the parameter of focalization finds decidedly collectivist
manifestations in the novel. These instances vary considerably in terms of the size and narrative
visibility these units assume. The next section probes a closely related phenomenon, collective
focalization in the hypothetical mode.
Hypothetical Collective Focalization
A further mechanism of representing social minds concerns the ways in which the narrator
adduces possible and hypothetical, rather than actual, thoughts as well as actions of collective
agents. The notion of ‘hypothetical focalization’ was made prominent by David Herman who
posits that this concept “[…] entails the use of hypotheses, framed by the narrator or a character,
about what might be or have been seen or perceived – if only there were someone who could
have adopted the requisite perspective on the situations and events at issue” (Herman 1994,
231). Unsurprisingly, as is the case with ‘regular’ focalization, this present investigation focuses
on collective manifestations, those carried out by social minds. Take for instance this passage:
Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim
rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured
some awful business in hand. (37; emphasis added)
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Mind-telling is the indispensable representational mode for the narrational capacity in this
passage as both the (grammatical) subject of this hypothetical scenario (“the grim rigidity […]”)
and the projected action it carries out (“would have augured”) betray in fact neither cognitive
nor physical executions by an embodied entity, whether individual or collective. Readers are
instead confronted with the narrator’s semantic recuperation (“would have augured some awful
business in hand”) of a quality (“grim rigidity”) which is already couched in mind-telling terms
of an evaluative slant. Mind-telling here stages a scenario of duplex counterfactuality in that it
portrays (1) a hypothetical enterprise conducted by (2) a personified quality of collective
cognition.
The same technique is deployed in the next section which refers to the same scene:
Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such
bystanders, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a
degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity
as the punishment of death itself. (37-38; emphasis added)
It is again an affective quality, the bystanders’ “sympathy”, which is speculatively asserted
(“might look for”) to be ‘meagre and cold’ and thus clearly presented in evaluative tones.
Though the passage in fact takes the perspective of the individual general figure of “a
transgressor”, the narrative point of the scene nonetheless derives from the individual’s
interaction with a collective (“from such bystanders”), so that the latter gets co-focalized. In
addition, the passage involves a temporal now/then schema (“in our days […] then”) which
hypothetically focalizes the prevalent public attitude towards the pillory as a disciplinary
device, expressed vicariously through the respective verbs (“would infer”; “might be
invested”).
Foregrounding hypothetical collective focalization, mind-telling here yet again verifies its
suitability as a narrative mode able to reveal the crucial semantic dimensions of the psychocognitive architecture underlying (or overarching) the plot. Thus, however, mind-telling not
only complements the external plot of the ‘who-caused-which-sequence-of-events’ type of
narrative causality, but establishes an additional ‘internal plot’ as it personifies and stages
psycho-cognitive forces as quasi-characters, thus extending and elaborating the external plot.
Concentrating on (individual as well as collective) psychology, cognition and experientiality,
mind-telling effectively tells an additional story about the plot.
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This additional story does translate into staging cognitive forces but, as the example of
hypothetical collective focalization demonstrates, also covers adducing counterfactual
complexes of various might have been scenarios. The latter may encompass such phenomena
as the ‘double fictionality’ of imaginary figures in the fictional world (“the sympathy a
transgressor might look for”) or may temporarily re-place the plot’s historico-temporal
coordinates (“amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New
England”). Mind-telling thus houses a quite remarkable variety of phenomena which enrich the
narrative complexity of various intertwined plots, merging into a super-plot. Hypothetical
focalization, applied to both individual and collective characters, is one of these phenomena, as
the following lengthy passage about the ‘pillory scene’ further illustrates:
The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of
guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to
smile, instead of shuddering, at it. The witnesses of Hester Prynne’s disgrace had not yet
passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that
been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of
another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present.
Even had there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed
and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified than the Governor, and
several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town; all of whom sat
or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When such
personages could constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking the majesty or reverence
of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would
have an earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. (42;
emphasis added)
Note, first, that the ‘scene’ and ‘the spectacle’ become personified and cognitivized to the extent
that “the scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of
guilt and shame”. It is due to the mind-telling attributes of ‘awe’, ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ that the
scenario gains its narrative significance. The designations ‘scene’ and ‘spectacle’ furthermore
imply social gatherings, meaning that these affect-signifying nouns above aim to describe the
atmospheric quality prevalent among the assembled Puritans. This is proven by the final
sentence quoted here: “accordingly, the crowd was somber and grave”.
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Furthermore, an abundance of hypothetical phrases can be detected in this section, all of which
relate the Puritans’ possible rather than actual collective experience. The first one, for example,
conjectures (along the lines of “such as must always […]”) that the aforementioned (mindtelling) scenarios of awe, guilt and shame entail one another, whether in Puritan or other
contexts. In consequence, an extension into universal applicability is assumed by “such as must
always” assertions. The additional dimension which makes this an instance of hypothetical
collective focalization is that both “scene” and “spectacle” imply intermental units.
The next exemplification of this principle of representing collective minds projects a future
scenario – “before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile” –, forging a variation of
a clear-cut might have been hypothesis. A mechanism of compression is again at work here,
since a multi-layered social fabric is condensed into the monolithic entity of (a) “society”. The
narrator seems to possess quite comprehensive knowledge about this entity, notably extending
to (apparently definite) times and states of mind in the future. These relations therefore do not
so much concern hypothetical scenarios which describe alternative yet simultaneous events, but
concern possible developments of a proleptic kind. The narrator utilizes his omniscience to
anticipate, rather than to hypothesize, though this anticipatory mode resembles the hypothetical
one very closely in its form and effect. The sense of a future perspective is further enhanced by
the next sentence in the passage which states that “the witnesses of Hester Prynne’s disgrace
had not yet passed beyond their simplicity.” An apt label for this variant might be anticipatory
collective focalization since, besides their proleptic contents, these phrases refer to collective
they-agents.
However, the section does include various ‘proper’ hypotheses which likewise focus on
shared experience. The most illustrative example can be found in the middle of the paragraph.
The narrative focalizes the Puritan they-unit when stating that “even had there been a
disposition [among the Puritan population] to turn the matter [of Hester’s adultery] into ridicule,
it must have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified
than the Governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the
town […].” It is quite remarkable how pithily this instance functions as hypothetical
focalization of a collective mentality. The narrator openly speculates about collective
dispositions. What happens in the quotation is in fact not so much the exchange between
intermental units as such, but the competition between certain ideas and qualities deriving from
their collective experientiality. Strictly speaking, readers find one collective’s “disposition”
vying with another’s “solemn presence”, both of which are displayed in the hypothetical mode.
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Finally, a notable phenomenon is the phrase “it was safely to be inferred that […]” which
indicates a logical conclusion to be drawn from the hypothetical scenario described in the
sentence. Conspicuously, the phrase uses the passive voice, which may yet again indicate a
collective recipient-agent executing the inference. It is the very nature of logical inferences,
after all, to be intersubjectively valid. The narrative thus implies a collective addressee without
explicitly mentioning such a figure in the manner of ‘dear reader’.
Zeitgeist39
A significant phenomenon present in The Scarlet Letter which relates directly to the concerns
of this study consists in the personification of Zeitgeist. It occurs when the temporal unit of an
entire age, period or era assumes agency and experientiality. In other words, this technique
anthropomorphizes the age into a persona-like instance and can therefore be recuperated as a
concentrated depiction of the Puritan collective mentality. The following passages deserve to
be quoted in full, because they illustrate not one but various characteristics of the novel’s mindtelling (particularly in direct comparison to Miller’s The New England Mind):
The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of
petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not
unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an
execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and
maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from
them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every
successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer
beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her
own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half
a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable
representative of the sex. (38)
39
In the following, I use the notion of Zeitgeist in a general sense in order to capture textual phenomena expressing
what roughly translates as ‘the spirit of the times’. In other words, my use does not involve a specific philosophical
or psychological understanding of the term.
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But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly characterized the
mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the market-place of Boston had not been
born to an inheritance of Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had
lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed
as one great mass, would appear to have been as stately magnificent, and joyous, as the world
has ever witnessed. Had they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would
have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and
processions. (146)
It was an age when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive
materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The people
possessed, by hereditary right, the quality of reverence; which, in their descendants, if it
survive [sic] at all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force, in the
selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly,
perhaps, for both. In that old day, the English settler on these rude shores, – having left king,
nobles, and all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence
were strong in him – bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried
integrity; on solid wisdom and sad-colored experience; on endowments of that grave and
weighty order which gives the idea of permanence, and comes under the general definition
of respectability. These primitive statesmen, therefore, – Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley,
Bellingham, and their compeers, – who were elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a ponderous sobriety,
rather than activity of intellect. They had fortitude and self-reliance, and, in time of difficulty
or peril, stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide.
The traits of character here indicated were well represented in the square cast of countenance
and large physical development of the new colonial magistrates. So far as a demeanor of
natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not have been ashamed to see
these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the House of Peers, or made the
Privy Council of the sovereign. (150-151)
The connection between age and mentality is overtly established by the narrator: in all three
instances quoted here the Zeitgeist narration is directly linked to plural expressions denoting
Puritan (sub-)groups (‘the women’; ‘the persons’; ‘the people’). It is in decidedly mind-telling
terms, moreover, that psychological traits of the age are made explicit. Readers learn that “the
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age had not so much refinement […]” (38) and that a “[…] gray or sable tinge […] characterized
the mood or manners of the age” (146).
Furthermore, the narrative’s narration of Zeitgeist involves evaluative pronouncements
manifesting an attitude towards Puritanism as an age, the latter coming to be equated with the
dominant collective mentality. Readers are told, for example, that “morally, as well as
materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and
breeding” (38). It is true, the narrator cautions that “we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable
tinge, which undoubtedly characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in
the market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of Puritanic gloom” (146). But
when he relates that “it was an age when what we call talent had far less consideration than
now, but the massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal
more” (150), the narrator clearly transcends the mode of neutral description, voicing a decidedly
critical stance, specified to the point of enumerating “these primitive statesmen […] –
Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their compeers […]” (151) in terms of how their
lack of refinement, intellect and imagination translates into physiological features (151).
Manifesting a striking similarity to Miller’s mentality-historiographical treatment,
Hawthorne’s age-narration involves an explicit contrast to Elizabethan England. This contrast
serves to reveal the historical evolution of Puritan psychology. It openly refers to the historical
period of seventeenth-century North-American Puritanism as emerged from the historical age
of sixteenth-century Elizabethan England. The Scarlet Letter’s Zeitgeist narration, I argue, is to
be decoded as an embedded (mentality-historiographical) reality discourse equivalent to
historiography’s factual negotiations, though the former is subsumed into fictional storytelling
while the latter is not. The narrative thus contributes to the enterprise Hawthorne initiated in
“The Custom-House”, namely addressing the factual relations of collective Puritan mentality
by means of a fictional format. Hawthorne openly talks about a real issue, the actual Puritan
social mind in seventeenth-century North America.
For this purpose, Hawthorne draws on miscellaneous sources (including numerous histories
of New England, newspapers, magazines, chronicles, etc.) as “the factual background of his
most famous novel” (Ryskamp 2005, 257). Though Hawthorne repeatedly takes liberties with
these facts according to his compositional strategy, the quoted passages of Zeitgeist narration
demonstrate that he is committed to rendering the historical phenomena. It is especially the
treatment of psychology – individual but decidedly also collective psychology – which creates
the effect of ‘realism’ in The Scarlet Letter. The novel’s mind-telling portrays the same
phenomena as histories about Puritanism (of which Miller’s, as will be shown in the next
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chapter, is an ambivalent example). But, unlike professional academic historiography, the
novel, as a “free form” with “no limits other than those of the language” (Fowles 1977, 144),
will not be held accountable in terms of its meticulous adherence to fact-based accuracy. The
novel gives license and leeway to the elaborations of artistic inspiration to an extent which
academic historiography does not and cannot.
Miscellaneous
A number of strategies can be grouped together as ‘miscellaneous’ as they are more marginal
than the ones above. For instance, phrases containing ‘there was’ proclamations are a
frequently-employed mind-telling tool in the novel. Even though they can relate individual as
well as social minds, the following instance displays their application involving a collective
scenario:
In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanor on the part of the
spectators [i.e. the Puritan crowd observing Hester on the pillory]; as befitted a people
amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so
thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike
made venerable and awful. (37; emphasis added)
On a technical level, one can in fact perceive ‘there was’ statements about social minds as the
most revelatory way in which this mode of negotiating mentality functions. These declarations
quite simply posit qualities such as “a solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spectators”,
implementing mind-telling’s major principle of operation: the experiential quality of this
behaviour is not presented (through mind-showing), but stated, by means of an abstract noun
phrase. In the cited passage, the narrator continues to communicate on this discursive level as
he further explicates that readers are dealing with “a people amongst whom religion and law
were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused […]”. This is
mind-telling about a collective par excellence. Here is more evidence:
There was much joy throughout the town, when this greatly desirable object was attained
[Chillingworth, as physician, and Dimmesdale, as his patient, living in the same house]. It
was held to be the best possible measure for the young clergyman’s welfare; unless, indeed,
as often urged by such as felt authorized to do so, he had selected some one of the many
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blooming damsels, spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife. (84; emphasis
added)
It is again by means of a ‘there was’ phrase that the narrator establishes the collective affect of
“much joy” as being prevalent “throughout the town”. The latter designation alludes to a (storybased) phenomenon which I identify below, an explicit ‘town mind’. The passage also contains
the passive voice (“it was held to be […]”) as another device of representing the majority
opinion ‘in town’. The paragraph goes on to mention even further instances of collectivity,
intimating the possibility of a marriage between Dimmesdale and the member of a general
(‘many’-) collective, “one of the many blooming damsels”. This possibility is “urged by such
as felt authorized to do so”, an unspecified sub-group of the ‘those who’ type, the mentioning
of which indicates that the town mind divides into smaller collective units.
Collectives are portrayed mainly through the narrator’s discourse, but also surface in
characters’ speech and dialogue. According to my concepts, this manifests an instance of mindshowing, narrative-technically speaking. However, the ways in which social minds are
discussed in characters’ speech infiltrate mind-telling contents into the mind-showing mode. In
other words, (individual) characters talk about (collective) characters in the examples I have
selected and thus vie with the narrator when it comes to the crucial activity of semantic
recuperation. This early passage illustrates the mechanism. It is in fact the novel’s very first
direct speech act, located still in the narrative’s incipient exposition. The passage depicts a
compact social mind in action, a group of women:
“Goodwives,” said a hard-featured dame of fifty, “I’ll tell ye a piece of my mind. It would
be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in
good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What
think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a
knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have
awarded? Marry, I trow not!”
“People say,” said another, “that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor,
takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come upon his
congregation.”
“The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch, – that is a truth,”
added a third autumnal matron. “At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot
iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead. Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me.
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But she, – the naughty baggage, – little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her
gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment,
and so walk the streets as brave as ever!”
“Ah, but,” interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by the hand, “let her
cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.”
“What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown, or the flesh of
her forehead?” cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these selfconstituted judges [narrator]. “This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die.
Is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the
magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters
go astray!” (38-39, all emphases added)
The central aspect of this exchange is that the particular intermental unit of the “goodwives”
self-consciously pronounces itself to be a hic et nunc collective – “us five, that are now here in
a knot together” –, but also puts itself into the context of various other collective minds involved
in the situation surrounding Hester. The other major collective participating in the story and
mentioned by the women consists of “the worshipful magistrates” who, the women
hypothetically demand, “should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead”.
A more inconspicuous social mind implicated in the passage is ‘the people’ (“people say”)
which can be seen as corresponding to “the public behoof”. The women also relate the various
intradiegetic characters to more general categories, describing themselves as “church-members
in good repute”, mentioning “such malefactresses as Hester Prynne” and pronouncing that “the
magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen”. Abiding by the same mechanism, the narrator
furthermore designates the women as “these self-constituted judges”.
These phrases are anything but neutral descriptions but clearly engender mind-telling
effects, even though, apart from the latter example, these are all characters’ speech acts and
therefore instances of mind-showing. These effects (may) indicate the attempt to render a
collective mentality characterizing ‘the people’ of the local Puritan community which, on the
basis of its religious underpinnings, tended to be judgmental according to the doctrinal foil of
their religious upbringing. Thus, the magistrates as “church-members in good repute” and
“God-fearing gentlemen” are contrasted to “such malefactresses as Hester Prynne”. Succinctly,
the narrator captures precisely this disposition towards straightforward prejudices with his
mind-telling phrase classifying the women as “self-constituted judges”. As a result, mindshowing and mind-telling cooperate intimately in this section, which, as the italicized parts
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show, is suffused with social-minds components. Particularly, mind-showing in the shape of
the characters’ direct discourse operates in explicitly mind-telling terms.
In addition, a stylistic device which contributes to depicting social minds in the novel is the
use of imagery. The following section contains two such phrases:
The voice which had called her [Hester’s] attention was that of the reverend and famous
John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar, like most of his contemporaries
in the profession, and withal a man of kind and genial spirit. […] He looked like the darkly
engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons; and had no more right
than one of those portraits would have, to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a
question of human guilt, passion and anguish. (47-48; emphasis added)
Both of the italicized clauses literally ‘liken’ the individual character, Wilson, to a collective
which he is thus declared to resemble. The first instance presents an anonymous group, “most
of his contemporaries in the profession”, which pronounces Wilson to belong to the category
of ‘learned clergymen’, meaning that he spends his life in and around books. The second simile
analogizes the individual character to an alternative (ekphrastic) collective, “the darkly
engraved portraits we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons”. The implication arising from
this second simile is that Wilson is a sort of ‘living dead’ and, accordingly, “had not more right
than one of those portraits would have, to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question
of human guilt, passion and anguish”. The narrator uses the metaphorical expression to voice
sharp criticism of Wilson and the Puritan collective he belongs to, denying them precisely the
capacity to deliver a judgement on “a question of human guilt, passion and anguish”. The
narrator here touches on the judgmental trait endemic to this novel’s social (town) mind and the
historical Puritan mentality it serves to embody.
A second passage in which a metaphor is employed to represent a social mind occurs when
the small unit formed by Hester, Arthur and Pearl embark on the pillory one night:
She [Hester] silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding little Pearl by
the hand. The minister felt for the child’s other hand, and took it. The moment that he did
so, there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring
like a torrent into his [Arthur’s] heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother
and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three
formed an electric chain. (100-101)
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The last sentence captures the shared experience of this unit as mind-telling employs a
metaphorical expression to convey that “the three formed an electric chain”. Earlier in the
passage, the processes which lead to this final state are described in terms which can likewise
be examined by applying mind-telling. The scene first presents the sentimental image of the
three holding hands as an expression of their family intimacy. More significantly, the narrative
articulates the interior events leading up to what is described as a transfer of vitality from the
two female characters over to the male one: “a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his
own, pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother
and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system”. Resorting to
metaphors, mind-telling articulates that quite contrary degrees of involvement and potency
characterize the individual parties of this minimal unit. Whereas Hester and Pearl are in a
position of distributing “vital warmth”, Arthur sits on the receiving end as his exhausted “halftorpid system” leaves him in a situation of drastic affective want. In consequence, the
individuals constituting this social mind assume rather heterogeneous roles in it. The crucial
observation in the present section, however is that the narrator expresses through metaphors the
ways in which Hester, Arthur and Pearl relate to each other as they temporarily merge into a
quasi-family.
As a distinct narratological category with an inherent focus on collectivity, we-narrative has
been studied by various scholars (e.g. Margolin 1996, Richardson 2006, Marcus 2008).
Preceding full-fledged, or at least more sustained, we-narration in the twentieth century, forms
of ‘we’ are repeatedly integrated into omniscient narration in its nineteenth-century variant. The
Scarlet Letter is a good example for the latter. The use of ‘we’ fulfils various functions in the
novel and designates different kinds of collectives. An early instance is this:
[This] rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had
merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines
and oaks that originally overshadowed it, – or whether, as there is fair authority for believing,
it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prisondoor, – we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our
narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do
otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope,
to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the
darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow. (37; emphasis added)
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The ‘we’ in this passage appears to be the pluralis modestiae, the plural of modesty comprising
the author and his readership, which is verified by the reference to “the reader”. Inherent in this
practice is the gesture towards involving the extratextual collective readership receiving the
story. Though the readership, as exemplified by the general figure of ‘the reader’, is a group
which does not participate in the narrative, the narrator nonetheless openly addresses this group,
thus inscribing it into the process of narration through the use of ‘we’, ‘us’ and related phrases
such as “our narrative”. Thus, a mechanism from the novel’s beginning is maintained, one that
integrates various ontological levels with one another, most significantly the levels of intra- and
extradiegesis, meaning the fictional world of the narrative and the non-fictional world outside
the novel. The differences and yet interrelations between social minds denoting historical
specificity (“the forefathers of Boston”) and gnomic universality (“the founders of a new
colony”) have shown that this latter realm encompasses further complexities, especially the
diachronic variability of past, contemporary and future audiences.
As the narrator continues to mention this collective addressee – ‘us’ – in his
pronouncements, he decidedly aims at gnomic universality, for example here:
In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer
should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the
pang that rankles after it. (41; emphasis added)
There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature, – whatever be the
delinquencies of the individual, – no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide
his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do. (42; emphasis added)
The addressee implied by “our [common] nature” is a collective which clearly extends beyond
the confines of the narrative and its readership, encompassing ‘all humanity’. This is in
accordance with the narrator’s aphoristic statement in this passage and the universal dimension
of human affairs which Hawthorne has woven into The Scarlet Letter from the second
paragraph onwards. The passage moreover features the general figures of “the sufferer” and
“the culprit” which, ironically, are assumed to be male (”he”; “his face or shame”), even though
the specific individual to which to the gnomic assertion refers is female (Hester Prynne).
The narrator doubtlessly relates these statements in the shape of gnomic mind-telling. Not
only does he assume a universal ‘we-mind’ to exist in the first place, but he also speaks as
though he had complete access to the contents of “our common nature” and the authority to
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communicate them. As the quotations make abundantly clear, the narrator employs mind-telling
to invoke a collective mind of universal scope. In the manner of aphoristic truths, this collective
mind transcends (any) spatio-temporal specificity, but rather possesses a fixed set of cognitive
dispositions presumably amounting to a stable essence of human cognition. The mind-telling
phrase “in our nature […] there is a provision” strongly suggests that the narrator envisions ‘us’
as sharing a set of permanent mental leanings according to which ‘our’ consciousness operates.
It is remarkable that the collective we-mind addressed here – both rhetorically as an addressee
and also self-reflectively in terms of the contents of the we-consciousness – is not (only) the
Puritan mind of the narrative, but additionally subsumes all humanity. ‘Our nature’ furthermore
covers intra- and extradiegetic realms. This is remarkable because the statements cited above
grow right out of the novel’s fictional plot. The mind-telling in this passage, particularly the
use of ‘we’, thus conveys an extradiegetic (factual) deictics from inside the (fictional) diegesis.
The factual historical dimension of the trans-generational continuity in which the storyworld
participants stand, and which Hawthorne deliberately foregrounds in “The Custom-House”
chapter, is maintained in the novel by the device of ekphrasis. The narrative at one point
describes “a row of portraits”:
On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of the Bellingham lineage,
some with armor on their breasts, and others with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were
characterized by the sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on; as if they
were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh
and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men. (71)
Various operations in fact collaborate here. The first one, ekphrasis, is the textual description
of intense visual scenarios, especially visual works of art. In the present case, ekphrasis depicts
a number of portraits in the house of a particular character in the novel, governor Bellingham.
The paintings depict social minds by “representing the forefathers of the Bellingham lineage,
some with armor on their breasts, and others with stately ruffs and robes of peace”. The second
operation at work here is mind-telling. Verbalizing features of the forefathers’ collective
mentality, it conveys that “all were characterized by the sternness and severity which old
portraits invariably put on […]”. Mind-telling then elaborates these two qualities of the
forefathers rather spectacularly by conjuring up an alternative reality through an ‘as if’
construction: “[…] as if they were ghosts, rather than pictures, of departed worthies, and were
gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of the living men”.
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Mind-telling discursively superimposes a second ekphrasis which (re-)represents the
forefathers as ghosts. This procedure, furthermore, adds a semantic layer to the picture since
the portrayed personages are framed in overtly antagonistic terms. This latter tendency is further
manifested by a third technique, hypothetical collective focalization: “as if they […] were
gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of the living”.
Particularly the prepositional with-phrase is an example of mind-telling’s articulation of
evaluative qualities on the part of the collective mind which is (hypothetically) focalized in this
passage. A fourth aspect is the simultaneity of two diachronic realms facilitated by the ‘as if’
scenario, as the deceased forefathers are portrayed as “gazing […] at the pursuits and
enjoyments of the living men”. The use of ekphrasis to depict this specific collective mind thus
encompasses multiple strategies.
Inconspicuous formats which contribute to representing social minds are the paratextual
elements of titles and chapter headings. Generally speaking, titles such as Sons and Lovers, The
Woodlanders, Buddenbrooks and Dubliners crystallize an emphasis on family, group or
otherwise collective experience. It is true that at least as many novels signal a focus on one
individual character through their title (e.g. David Copperfield, Effi Briest). This, however,
merely reinforces a pervasive claim of this book: collective experience is an underexplored
narrative dimension which coexists and interacts with individual experience as a crucial
complement which deserves an equal amount of attention.
In The Scarlet Letter, chapter titles repeatedly herald the shared experience of minimal social
minds, meaning two-character units. Chapter 8 announces a focus on the relationship between
Pearl and Arthur as “The Elf-Child and the Minister”, chapter 14 is about “Hester and the
Physician”, chapter 15 about “Hester and Pearl” and chapter 17 about “The Pastor and his
Parishioner”. The experiential variety emerging from these minimal units decidedly
incorporates disharmonious, even malicious relations. The union formed between Arthur
Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth, for example, is suggestively termed by the title of
chapter 10 “The Leech and His Patient”.
After identifying the major narrative strategies by means of which The Scarlet Letter
represents the Puritan mind and after probing how narratorial utterances reveal Hawthorne’s
decidedly critical attitude towards this collective mentality, I move on to examine the same
aspects in Perry Miller’s monumental historiographical work, The New England Mind (1939).
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4. Perry Miller, The New England Mind
Foreword
Miller initiates his considerations in (the first volume of) The New England Mind40 in the shape
of a prominent “Foreword” which is to be understood as a factual ego document by the author.
Similar to Hawthorne’s “Custom-House” chapter, this section is intercalated before the actual
main narrative. In it, Miller explicates his approach and motivation to study the Puritan mind
and also, to some extent, reveals his stance towards it. Miller describes his project “as a
preliminary survey, as a map of the intellectual terrain of the seventeenth century” (Miller 1967,
vii). The author asserts that “I am herein concerned with defining and classifying the principal
concepts of the Puritan mind in New England, of accounting for the origins, inter-relations, and
significances [sic] of the ideas” (vii). Miller thus declares his ‘mapping’ to follow scientific
principles (defining; classifying; accounting), reiterating that it “aims at a descriptive analysis”
(vii) and “is offered as a chapter in the history of ideas” (vii). At the same time, however, the
study participates in narrative practices; Miller himself refers to his work as “the narrative” (vii)
and, early in The New England Mind, designates it as “the story of New England thought” (32).
Much as Hawthorne integrates a historiographical persona into his novel’s narrator figure,
Miller appears as a storyteller in this mentality-historiographical work, as I will elaborate in the
next section.
Concerning attitude, if Hawthorne can be discerned as performing his own version of an
‘American Renaissance self-fashioning’, inevitably manifesting a distinct stance in the process,
Miller also practices a scholarly self-fashioning of sorts in the “Foreword”. For instance, in
order to advertise his “impartiality” (viii), he feels obliged to communicate that “I
wholeheartedly admire the integrity and profundity of the Puritan character but that I am far
from sharing in its code or from finding delight in its every aspect. Yet I can honestly say that
my interest in Puritanism has not been a matter of liking or disliking” (viii). While Hawthorne’s
self-fashioning translates into the ways in which he instigates his narrator in The Scarlet Letter;
Miller’s writing practice likewise, from the very beginning onwards, carries traits of a distinct
authorial design.
40
Miller’s The New England Mind consists of two volumes, The Seventeenth Century (1939) and From Colony to
Province (1953). My analysis is limited to the first.
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In the “Foreword”, Miller further resembles Hawthorne in that he repeatedly understands the
New England mind in terms of “the background of English and European opinion” (vii) and
assumes “that Puritanism was one of the major expressions of the Western intellect” (viii). This
discursive strategy might be identified as ‘perspectival extension’:
Quite apart from the adventitious interest that attaches to New England Puritans as founders
of an American nation, they are also spokesmen for what we call the Renaissance, and I
believe that the principal value of this volume will prove to be that it makes some
contribution to our study of general intellectual history. (ix)
When the thought of New England is regarded not from a New England or even from an
American point of view, but is seen as what in truth it was, a part, and an important part, of
the whole thought of the seventeenth century, exemplifying the essential characteristics and
struggling with the most importunate problems of the epoch, then and only then can both the
provincial and European scene be illuminated. (ix)
In its widest implication, such zooming out views New England Puritans and their thought as
growing out of the Renaissance as a transnational, Eurocentric period in the history of ideas
(thus implicitly invoking a global history). It also facilitates retrospective discussions relating
to New England Puritans as founders of an American nation as entertained for instance in
Anderson’s Imagined Communities (Anderson 2006). Miller’s reference to “the most
importunate problems of the epoch” furthermore indicates his handling of Zeitgeist narration
(see below) as one specific instrument utilized for treating collective mentality. Miller further
employs many more techniques which are examined closer in the next section. The most
significant condition emerging from the passages just quoted, however, is the basic focus on
the Puritans’ collective mentality. Considering “New England Puritans as founders of an
American nation” and “spokesmen for the Renaissance”, Miller undoubtedly concentrates on
social minds in history.
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The New England Mind
I. Who
Miller’s work sports a diversity of social minds on the level of “the story of New England
thought” (Miller 1967, 32) that his narrative history of mind presents. In addition to a variety
of they-units, a number of non-human agents appear in Miller’s discourse, above all personified
ideas and concepts. These are particularly decisive elements because they are distinguishing
characteristics of The New England Mind as a factual narrative. This section first provides a
survey of story phenomena.
Individual(s) as Social Minds
One of the shapes in which Miller depicts social minds was already detected above in the
chapter on Hawthorne: ‘individual(s) as social minds’. While Hawthorne’s narrator explicitly
declares individual characters to be representatives of the Puritan social mind, Miller at times
operates in a similar vein, though with reference to factual rather than fictional individuals. For
example, after quoting from A Compleat Body of Divinity (1726) by the colonial clergyman
Samuel Willard, Miller asserts that “[O]ne illustration from New England writings will indicate
how the reflex was understood in America […]” (Miller 1967, 242). As in the cases of the townbeadle and Governor Bellingham in The Scarlet Letter, an individual instance is pronounced to
stand in for the entire social mind, as marked by the passive voice (“was understood”) and the
geographical designation (“in America”), reflecting that Miller views the Puritans as incisive
early representatives of ‘the meaning of America’. Significantly, Miller does not put Samuel
Willard as a flesh-and-blood historical person on the historiographical stage but instead
dramatizes his written statement. Miller’s practice of quotation is a crucial dimension in its own
right which will be discussed separately below. What is central here is to note that Miller adapts
the strategy of ‘individual(s) as social minds’ to include the realm of (theological) literature. It
is a differentiating phenomenon of Miller’s factual narrative that a citation from a source text
figures as quasi-character.
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Another passage demonstrating this principle is this:
[The second question], of the relation of the will to the understanding, was apparently settled
in the textbooks. The will, dwelling in the heart, is necessarily blind and can see only what
the reason sends down to it in the form of images. […] William Ames wrote this doctrine
deep into the New England tradition, and founded the whole ethical system upon it: he
defined faith as an act both of the understanding, which yields assent, and of the will, which
embraces the assent, but reason’s act must come before the act of will; “The Will … cannot
will or nill any thing unlesse reason have first judged it to be willed or nilled; neither can it
choose but follow the last practicall judgement, and do that which reason doth dictate to be
done”. (248; emphasis original)
Miller repeatedly quotes individual authors, in this case William Ames, to exemplify particular
elements or traits of the Puritan collective mind. His discourse makes it clear that precisely this
function of the individual exemplifying a general disposition is intended: “William Ames wrote
this doctrine deep into the New England tradition, and founded the whole ethical system on it
[...]”. The voice of the individual writer is directed towards shaping the collective mind, “the
New England tradition”. It is also noteworthy that the passage itself is a cognitive constellation,
“the relation of the will to the understanding”, which yet again reflects Miller’s assumption of
the central importance of ‘mind’ in history. The will and the understanding are singular notions,
yet denote dispositional tendencies of the Puritan mind shared by presumably all Puritans.
These notions, too, are individuals figuring as social minds.
Sub-Groups
Besides the major collective protagonist in Miller’s work – ‘they, the Puritans’ (see below) –,
a number of sub-groups, either specified or left unspecified, can be added to the spectrum of
social minds appearing in Miller’s work. The specified sub-groups tend to be smaller collectives
within the large Puritan they-unit. For example:
Puritan divines counted that day lost in which they did not spend ten or twelve hours in their
studies. They sacrificed their health to the production of massive tomes which demonstrated
beyond the shadow of a doubt that man, created upright, fell of his own untrammeled choice
into a corruption so horrible as to deserve the worst of punishments and so abject as to
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preclude all hope of recovery by his unaided efforts. Imposing though the sheer bulk of this
literature may be as a monument to clerical industry, it probably never convinced anyone
who was not already in profound agreement. The doctrines of original sin, of the depravity
of man, and of irresistible grace were not embraced for their logic, but out of a hunger of the
human spirit and an anxiety of the soul. (21-22; emphasis added)
Miller uses mind-telling to describe a significant sub-group, “the Puritan divines”, in terms of
the routines of thought and action which their erudition entailed. The verbs ‘count’ and
‘sacrifice’ indicate habitual, rather than situational, actions of the Puritan divines. They are
employed to elucidate a central part of the Puritan mind, the divines, in terms of their permanent
dispositions. The implication of a sentence such as “[T]hey sacrificed their health to the
production of massive tomes […]” is that they grounded their daily routines on this principle,
not once but always. Miller expresses skepticism, however, as to the efficacy of this “monument
to clerical industry” as “the sheer bulk of this literature […] probably never convinced anyone
who was not already in profound agreement”. The divines, at any rate, figure as a special subgroup among the Puritans.
Towards the end, the passage also contains the passive voice as another means of
representing collective mentality: “[T]he doctrines of original sin, of the depravity of man, and
of irresistible grace were not embraced for their logic, but out of a hunger of the human spirit
and an anxiety of the soul”. The agent of the passive construction carrying out the embracing,
however, is the Puritan collective in its entirety rather than a smaller collective within it. Miller
states that basic tenets were held “out of a hunger of the human spirit and an anxiety of the
soul”, attributing these intense affects to the agents of that passive construction through mindtelling nouns.
Another passage of similar contours likewise foregrounds the dynamics between the specific
sub-group of “Puritan theologians” and the larger Puritan collective:
Puritan theologians cited testimony of [this] sort ostensibly to corroborate revelation; they
did not expect that in itself the force of such reflections would be sufficient to humble
sinners. Even in the face of indisputable facts men persist in their blindness and refuse to
make the inescapable inferences. The degradation of man will be realized to the full extent
only when viewed with the light of grace, and without that light no amount of factual
perception will lead to spiritual understanding. Yet, for all that, the theologians themselves
continued to press upon men not yet regenerated the arguments from common knowledge,
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and their persistent appeal to experience may be taken by us as a sign that the piety was
derived as much from it as from Biblical instruction, that the doctrine came not only from
the book of Genesis but also from the lesson of mortality. (24-25)
The passage is saturated with social minds. The depiction of the sub-group of “Puritan
theologians”, centrally, concentrates on shared cognition as “they did not expect that in itself
the force of [such] reflections would be sufficient to humble sinners”. Though Miller again
describes a habitual predilection of this sub-group, rather than a momentary cognitive act, such
mind-telling renditions nonetheless narrativize the Puritan mind into the dynamic schema of
‘they-agent + habitual cognitive action’. The latter designation, “humble sinners”, manifests
not a specific sub-group but a general collective, even a universal cliché collective, within the
Puritan world-picture. Mind-telling then shifts into a gnomic discourse, propounding that “even
in the face of indisputable facts men persist in their blindness and refuse to make the inescapable
inferences”. This piece of information enlarges the perspective established earlier, moving from
the specified collective of the “Puritan theologians” to the wider collective of “ humble sinners”
to the maximal social mind of “men”. Mind-telling declares the latter to operate according to
principles of cognitive delusion, persisting “in their blindness” and refusing “to make the
inescapable inferences”.
The passage then showcases the passive voice in the will-future tense to indicate the
collective cognition of the Puritan social mind: “The degradation of man will be realized to the
full extent only when viewed with the light of grace […]”. At the same time, the passive voice
may also invoke a collective recipient here, meaning the audience, who will be prompted by
Miller’s discourse to (re-)conceive the contents of Puritan theology. The section then returns to
the particular agent under scrutiny here, sub-groups, when asserting that “the theologians
themselves continued to press upon men not yet regenerated the arguments from common
knowledge […]”. The sub-group is described in terms of the influence it seeks to gain over a
larger social mind, “men not yet regenerated”, through arguments.
Moreover, Miller invokes a collective addressee towards the end of the passage as “their
persistent appeal to experience may be taken by us as a sign that the piety was derived as much
from it as from Biblical instruction, that the doctrine came not only from the book of Genesis
but also from the lesson of mortality”. Two things are noteworthy. One, Miller implies a ‘we’
instance not so much as a contemporary audience, comprised perhaps even of professional
academics, but uses it rather as a plural of modesty to voice his own interpretive suggestion
about the interrelation between Puritan experience, piety and scripture. Miller here infiltrates
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his own hermeneutic recuperation into the depiction of Puritan mentality. He thus seeks to
clarify and explain, however, rather than criticize.
Besides specific parts of the Puritan social mind, quite a few sub-groups appear in Miller’s
discourse which do not belong to it but might be described as ‘other collectives’. A concentrated
passage is this:
Puritans did not invent [this] reasoning. The discovery that man can conceive of God only
by clustering the attributes, culled from the meadows of philosophy, around an unknowable
essence had been fully exploited by scholastics. In Puritan thought the doctrine received a
renewed importance because they, in common with Augustinians of every complexion,
medieval or Protestant, accused other theologians of abusing it. With the correctness of their
charge we are not now concerned, but rightly or wrongly they believed that for centuries
philosophizing divines had mistaken the limitations of the mind for the limits of reality.
Theorists had endeavored to confine the unconfinable within artificial distinctions.
Thomistic theologians had erred by making God too rational – an error of which Anglicans
like Richard Hooker were still guilty – nominalists had exaggerated His irrationality,
Lutherans His mercy. The various “Calvinist” groups started from a fresh realization that to
fix too narrow limits or too explicit tendencies upon the principle of the cosmos was to court
disaster. (13)
The function of this section is to trace the evolution of Puritan thought and, more specifically,
to identify the intellectual precursors of the Puritan mind who may have anticipated some of
their doctrinal issues. In that process, Miller names a number of such ‘other’ groups: scholastics,
Augustinians, other theologians, philosophizing divines, theorists, Thomistic theologians,
Anglicans, nominalists, Lutherans and various Calvinist groups. Though these groups overlap
to some extent and certainly stand in (theological) relation to the Puritans, they nonetheless
integrate a critical mass of ‘other’ sub-groups into The New England Mind.
The entire passage can be read as staging a ‘battle of ideas’ which sees different groups
inventing, refreshing and (re-)appropriating various lines of thought across the centuries. In
these processes, social minds ‘exploit’, ‘accuse’, ‘believe’, ‘endeavor’, ‘err’ and ‘exaggerate’.
Miller’s parenthetical information that “with the correctness of their charge we are not
concerned” reinforces that his discourse does not primarily seek to obtain clarity about the
validity of the intellectual contents of the Puritan mind. Instead, as his practice abundantly
testifies, Miller collocates those contents, portrays them in the shapes they take in the Puritans’
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cognition and traces them historically by including ‘other’ groups, as in the passage above.
Hence readers encounter such mind-telling vocabulary as “discovery”, “renewed importance”
and “fresh realization” rather than, say, truth-propositional expressions. The objective of
Miller’s discourse, accordingly, is to trace the shared cognitive procedures of these groups.
Furthermore, unspecified groups enhance the variety of sub-collectives. I do not examine
their function in the text or their impact on the reader, but merely note that formulations such
as ‘those who’ denote types of unspecified groups which differ from the clearly named ‘they,
the Puritans’ and other such specified collectives. Here is an illustration of an unspecified social
mind:
Theological formulation was difficult because regeneration is a mystery. Those who have it,
or think they have it, cannot tell exactly how it was wrought or precisely what happened,
and those who do not have it cannot conceive what it might be; furthermore, there are some
who are never quite sure whether they have it or not, and they make the problem exceedingly
difficult. [We have little right to patronize the Puritans for their ignorance.] (26; emphasis
added)
It is true that the mentioning of the Puritans in the last sentence makes it clear that the
unspecified groups from earlier in the passage stand in relation to the specified large unit at the
end. However, “those who” and “some” are referentially ambiguous, representing groups which
could possibly be part of the Puritan mind, but, alternatively, could be part of another religious
mentality based on regeneration. These unspecified collective denotations thus maintain the
tendency towards universalism which Miller’s discourse offers throughout. What is notable is
that such radically indistinct collectives feature in Miller’s discourse at all and that, despite
their vagueness, he relates their seemingly definite minds, stating that “those who do not have
it [regeneration] cannot conceive what it might be” and that “there are some who are never quite
sure whether they have it or not”. Miller treads on very thin scholarly ice here.
Large and Maximal Social Minds
The New England Mind contains recurrent uses of ‘we’. Though these come in the shape of the
author’s plural of modesty (‘we’ as in ‘I, the author’), a collective addressee is vicariously
invoked as well (‘we’ as in ‘we, the collective audience’). A dual focus of propounding his own
view (which could alternatively be formulated in the first person singular) and that of a
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collective readership (which could not be formulated in the first person singular) thus
characterizes Miller’s way of handling this particular format. However, the following passages
reveal that his we-voice frequently makes definite assertions about the workings of Puritan
thought. His modest plural appears at times to be a rather presumptuous one. Here is an
illustration:
We shall find that [such] ideas existed in their minds in more or less happy fusion with their
religious convictions, and that when there was latent opposition among them, the Puritans
themselves were at best only dimly aware of it. (6; emphasis added)
Miller speaks as the author here who anticipates the further development of his study, knowing
what ‘we shall find’, but thus also encourages the audience to participate in a collective
reception process, to observe what ‘we shall find’.
Note also how pointedly Miller uses the mind-telling mode. Two aspects are especially
apposite. First, Miller forges abstract nouns to capture the quality of how “such ideas existed in
their minds in more or less happy fusion with their religious convictions” and how “there was
latent opposition between them”. Such phrases perfectly exemplify my concept, articulating a
level of description (in the process of representing a factual social mind) which incorporates
both the abstraction of conceptualization and the evaluation of authorial attitude. Second, Miller
again takes the liberty to narrate a sub-conscious dimension, stating without any doubt or
qualification that “the Puritans themselves were at best only dimly aware of it”. The tacit
assumption of such a statement is that the author is familiar with the Puritan collective
interiority to the extent of being able to authoritatively relate even the marginal and nether
regions of their consciousness (see also the section below on ‘The Puritan Collective
Unconscious’). Speaking in terms of the discursive strategies Miller employs, the one marker
of factual narrative is the initial “we shall find”, reflecting Miller’s scientific motivation of “[…]
defining and classifying the principal concepts of the Puritan mind in New England, of
accounting for the origins, inter-relations, and significances of the ideas” (vii).
In immediate relation to this meta-dimension of scholarly reflection surfacing in The New
England Mind, a number of passages containing ‘we’ reveal important information about
Miller’s systematic and methodological self-understanding:
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[These] considerations are almost too elementary to need restatement; still, they indicate
cautions to be observed as we seek for a definition of Puritan piety, of the temperamental
bias behind the thought, before we undertake to examine the thought itself. (6)
[…] I should remark that we are not here dealing with the verbal propositions through which
the ideas were embodied in technical handbooks, but for the moment we are seeking to
understand, as far as we can without resorting to sanctimonious and hackneyed phrases, with
what emotional connotations the three beliefs were invested, what they meant, not so much
as speculation, but as ever present realities to men of this particular piety, and especially to
men in seventeenth-century New England. (10)
As we study [this] distinction we come close to the Puritan’s innermost sense of the living
process. (33; all emphases added)
All three passages remarkably combine the plural of (scholarly) modesty with mind-telling
(noun) phrases as though ‘our’ most essential interests were recapitulating “the temperamental
bias behind the thought”, tracing “with what emotional connotations the three beliefs were
invested” and determining “the innermost sense of the living process”. These mind-telling
phrases are crucial references when it comes to decoding the kind of factual narrative Miller
presents here. All three quotations epitomize Miller’s emphasis on the Puritans’ collective
consciousness and the “ever present realities […] to men in seventeenth-century New England”.
Through the use of ‘we’, Miller moreover invites his audience to adopt these interests as their
own and to join such activities as “we seek”, “we undertake to determine the thought itself”,
“we are seeking to understand”, “we study” and “we come close”. For Miller, the first-person
plural is above all a means to establish his distinct scholarly project and to encourage a
collective addressee to cooperate in it.
As noted before, this scholarly project is a distinct one. It is the attempt to make Puritan
thought come alive, to stage its contents, to dramatize its experientiality. Apart from his actual
practice, Miller also incorporates a level of methodological self-awareness into his discourse
which, by means of mind-telling, voices precisely the objective of his research: “the
temperamental bias behind the thought”, “with what emotional connotations the three beliefs
were invested” and “the Puritan innermost sense of the living process”. Above all, these three
mind-telling phrases exemplify the unique generic mode within intellectual history which
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narrativizes a specific collective mentality into a monumental historiographical they-narrative
based on mind-telling and accommodating even the use of a we-voice.
Unsurprisingly, ‘they, the Puritans’ compose the prevalent large social mind in Miller’s
work. Exemplifications abound to an extent which makes it imperative to select a few
representative passages. From the very beginning onwards, Miller designs his “story of New
England thought” dominantly as a factual they-narrative which, however, uses strategies known
from fictional story-telling and is therefore to be regarded with special (narratological) interest.
Early on, for instance, readers encounter this passage:
They [the Puritans] saw no opposition between the spirit of religion and the letter of
theology, between faith and its intellectualization, and they would have found no sense
whatsoever in modern contentions that the words and parables of Christ may be understood
without reference to an organized body of abstractions. (6)
The sentence combines the two strategies of focalization and hypothetical focalization of a
collective as described through mind-telling. The verb ‘see’ clearly does not denote an act of
visual perception but refers to the Puritans’ way of conceiving “no opposition between the spirit
of religion and the letter of theology, between faith and its intellectualization”. Dissecting the
psychology of the Puritan they-unit is the chief motivation of this (factual) narrator who puts
his own ‘organized body of abstractions’ to use in that mind-telling process. The sentence also
displays an instance of hypothetical collective focalization when relating about the Puritans that
“they would have found no sense whatsoever in modern contentions […]”, which, by way of
negation, conveys another cognitive disposition of the Puritan mind. Miller’s discourse aims to
authoritatively pinpoint the cognitive framework of this historical they-unit, i.e. of a factual
social mind.
Another passage which illustrates this condition is this:
Puritans did not invent this reasoning. […] Puritans reasserted the divine simplicity and
warned men to guard their thinking lest they again identify God’s essence with whichever
of the attributes seemed most attractive to them. They were endeavoring to reach truth about
God by deductions from the content of their conception of Him, whereas most of their
predecessors, they believed, had arrogantly pretended to extract deductions from His
inscrutable essence. (13)
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The passage similarly portrays the thought processes of ‘them, the Puritans’, continuing to tell
‘the story of New England thought’. What is again remarkable is the degree of certainty
emanating from Miller’s assertions. Strictly speaking, it is not verifiable whether, for instance,
“they were endeavoring to reach truth about God by deductions from the content of their
conception of Him, whereas most of their predecessors, they believed, had arrogantly to extract
deductions from His inscrutable essence”. Determining factual accuracy indeed does not seem
to be Miller’s chief concern, but rather dramatizing those contents he finds in the innumerable
Puritan sermons, textbooks and diaries he takes as the basis of his study. His history of ideas is
above all a narrative of Puritan they-cognition.
It is true that Miller at times does abide by the more conventional (and accurate)
historiographical style of representing historical interiority, whether individual or collective,
which is the cautious ‘must-have-thought’ mode allowing and even invoking falsification. This
passage is a good example:
Their [the Puritans’] reluctance to dwell upon [it] more specifically was a precaution of piety;
even though the doctrine seemed to imply no conflict with their creed, Puritans must have
sensed intuitively that an intensive study of the faculties might end by lessening man’s
realization of sin or his awareness of his dire need for grace. (243)
Miller first authoritatively explains the mind-telling quality of “their reluctance” to be “a
precaution of piety” before adding more carefully that “Puritans must have sensed intuitively”
certain conditions. Yet the particularly vague activity of ‘sensing intuitively’, impossible to
verify and extremely difficult even to speculate on, lends itself to being related in this way.
This, at any rate, is a very rare occasion on which Miller employs the ‘must-have’ style.
Overwhelmingly, in The New England Mind he fashions his they-narrative about Puritan
cognition by means of indicative statements which leave no doubt of his ostensible epistemic
certainty about matters of Puritan consciousness.
As was already noted, Miller frequently puts the Puritan world picture into diachronic
perspective, crystallized for instance in this passage: “[…] Puritans in the early seventeenth
century still lived in the ordered, hierarchical, and fixed world of medieval cosmology, and by
it could still glorify man as a “Microcosmos” (240). Miller here clearly uses a mind-telling
phrase indicating mentality-historical continuity – “the ordered, hierarchical, and fixed world
of medieval cosmology” – to delineate the Puritan mode of living and thinking. Similar in
content, the next sentence stages such dispositions in more dynamic terms: “[T]his doctrine of
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the psychological process was a part of the intellectual heritage which Puritans accepted without
criticism, almost without realizing that it was a doctrine, since to them no other concept was
available” (242). While above the rather abstract notion of “the ordered, hierarchical, and fixed
world or medieval cosmology” manifests an obvious example of mind-telling, the second
sentence involves mind-showing elements (“Puritans accepted”). These later, however, are
immediately tinged by such mind-telling components as “the intellectual heritage”, “without
criticism” and “almost without realizing that it was a doctrine” – all of which betray the
qualifying interference of a superordinate narratorial figure in the know about these conditions
of Puritan collective cognition.
A curious phenomenon is Miller’s inclusion of ‘man’ as a maximal social mind. Though
clearly an individual instance in grammatical terms, the designation nonetheless denotes a
maximal, universal collective (synonymous to ‘mankind’). Notice, for instance, this passage:
It is obvious that man dwells in a splendid universe, a magnificent expanse of earth and sky
and heavens, which manifestly is built upon a majestic plan, maintains some mighty design,
though man himself cannot grasp it. (7)
‘Man’ is characterized in this passage by a referential polysemy. It pertains to Puritanism as a
historically and ideologically specific group mentality which The New England Mind
illuminates. At the same time, ‘man’ alludes to ‘mankind’, embedding the Puritans in
universalist terms. The focus in this sentence is on a collective cognitive inability, on the ways
in which ‘man’ is unable to apprehend the “mighty design”, the “majestic plan”, on which the
“splendid universe” surrounding ‘him’ is based: “man himself cannot grasp it”. Here is thus
another social mind on the level of Miller’s historiographical plot, “man”, as mediated through
a discourse which explains this mind to be historically specific and, as such, yet participating
in a realm of timeless truths.
A similar passage is this:
Goaded by his appetite for happiness, man ranges over the world, glutting his senses with
enjoyments which give no relief beyond the delusive moment; in his inability to find
enduring comfort in a surfeit of pleasures man exhibits at once the desperateness of his
present condition and the loftiness of his origin: […]. (23)
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An illustrative example of his ‘creative’ use of language, Miller translates the Puritan doctrine
of man’s innate depravity into a piece of mind-telling which seeks to immediately appeal to the
reader. Such suggestive mind-telling phrases as “goaded by his appetite for happiness”, “his
inability to find enduring comfort in a surfeit of pleasures” and “the desperateness of his present
condition and the loftiness of his origin” do not merely manifest an emphasis on the condition
that an affective nether region underlies and fuels Puritan theological thought. These phrases
also convey an impulse on the author’s part to make explicit the (universalist) semantics of
these circumstances.
Ideas
Ideas, notions and concepts – the eponymous protagonists of any ‘history of ideas’ – count
among the entities which Miller brings to narrative life through personification. Miller’s generic
commitment indeed comes into its own when ideas function as quasi-characters and assume
intentionality, agency and cognition in this narrative. Overall, as will become clear below, it is
astounding to what extent Miller’s work is nonetheless not dominantly a history of ideas but
one centered around the Puritan collective mentality represented through they-units and other
anthropomorphic collectives. Things and ideas do appear, but they remain minor players when
measured against the overwhelming presence that human social minds attain. The following
passage nonetheless does feature a personified idea:
Thus, while Puritan piety insisted upon the undecipherable nature of God, and warned
against affixing a disproportionate importance to any one of the ideas which we employ in
thinking about His unthinkable essence, nevertheless it did focalize human emotions. (16;
emphasis added)
“Puritan piety” emerges as an intentional entity in this passage. In particular, it “insisted upon
[…] and warned against”. These attributions, it has to be conceded, might be rhetorical to a
serious degree. But whether they are, or not, does not matter so much to narrative scholars
primarily interested to detect the formal operations at work in the text. The fact remains that an
idea, more specifically a religious sentiment, is presented as participating on the level of story
in the same (experiential, intentional, cognitive) way as a human character.
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Miller then elaborates through mind-telling on the ‘actions’ performed by piety. Piety insists
on “the undecipherable nature of God” and warns against “affixing a disproportionate
importance to any of the ideas […]”. Such semantically suggestive epithets as ‘undecipherable’
and ‘disproportionate’ do not voice the author’s attitude. Rather, these adjectives aim to express
clearer the experiential ‘feel’ of Puritan thought. In accordance with Miller’s overall project,
they can be understood as contributing towards asymptotically achieving intermental free
indirect discourse: the narrative voice fuses with the focalization of the ‘character(s)’, in this
case Puritan collective religiosity, to convey the latter’s experientiality. The narrative voice is
exploited in this passage to explain the idea. Piety is cited here for the purpose of revealing its
significance for the Puritan mind: “it did focalize human emotions”.
A similar case is the next section which stages personified ideas even more overtly in a
scenario that amounts to a veritable ‘theater of the soul’:
The soul must therefore conclude that it is itself the cause for its plight; becoming further
aware that the will nevertheless deliberately persists in evil, the soul cries out in anguish,
“O rottenness! O monstrosity of life and profundity of death! Could I like that which was
unlawful only because it was unlawful?” (22; emphasis added)
More explicitly than above, ‘the soul’ and ‘the will’ participate in this quasi-dramatic scene in
which the idea-characters not only execute cognitive acts (“conclude”, “becoming further aware
of”, “persists in evil”), but also perform the externalist speech act of ‘crying out’ (mindshowing) which is modally qualified as taking place “in anguish” (mind-telling). Miller literally
makes the soul speak.
Miller maintains this mode in the next section, bringing more cerebral qualities to narrative
life:
Rational conviction at best makes things appear but as they seem, whereas spiritual
conviction presents them as they really are. The holy spirit may use argumentation, but it
goes much farther and enables the soul to see intuitively as well as through the point-bypoint demonstrations of logical discourse. (30)
These various idea-characters figure as centers of cognitive agency in an attempt to render the
internal dynamics of the Puritan soul. In particular, “rational conviction” and “spiritual
conviction” are described as contrarily-inclined forces with hermeneutic potency as they make
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sense of “things” according to their inherent dichotomous dispositions (rational vs spiritual).
Another such participant is “the holy spirit” who/which “enables the soul to see intuitively”. It
is, again, not the doctrinal or philosophical validity of Miller’s representation which I seek to
determine. What is of prime importance for me is to note the narrative-technical operations
which unmistakably dramatize ideas in this passage.
Quite stunningly, Miller furthermore integrates things as narrative agents into his
historiographical discourse. These unsurprisingly derive from the vast array of textual sources
which he uses as the foundation of his assertions about the Puritan mind. Miller literally stages
textual sources so that, similar to the personified ideas explored above, material objects such as
books appear as quasi-characters with anthropomorphic intentionality. Here are some
examples:
Therefore Puritan textbooks hastened to assert that while we cannot define God we may
piece together “an imperfect description which commeth neerest to unfold Gods nature.”
(11; spelling original)
Puritan sermons dwelt incessantly upon the theme of “concursus dei.” (14)
The Bible contains His revealed will, tells men what is expected, but does not explain why,
for even if it were explained men could never understand their relation to the whole drama
of creation. (20)
The first quotation personifies “Puritan textbooks” to the extent that they “hastened to assert”,
thus dramatizing these written documents as though they were participating in the same
ontological mode as human collectives. The assumption underlying this phenomenon is that,
through narrativization, things may attain experiential capacities such as agency and cognition.
This is likewise the mechanism prevalent in the second quotation which states that “Puritan
sermons dwelt incessantly upon the theme of “concursus dei”. While it is true that both of these
material objects are not involved in scenarios of flesh-and-blood embodiment, they nonetheless
appear in Miller’s discourse as items with agential capabilities of their own. The third example
also personifies a ‘thing’, the Bible, which, however, is not exclusively Puritan, unlike the first
two. The Bible has an immediate and highly significant influence on Puritan theology, but in
addition possesses diachronic and universal validity, unlike the first two. Narrative-technically,
nonetheless, it is staged here according to the same mechanism of personification as the
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textbooks and sermons. Since the Bible “tells men what is expected, but does not explain why”,
it functions as a center of (quite decisive and outspoken) intentionality in Miller’s narrative.
As a unique entity of decidedly non-factual status, God may seem to be an inconspicuous
figure to appear in a factual narrative that aims to trace the collective mentality of a historical
group. Yet since the New England mind is suffused and defined by religious dogmas, God
attains a central position in the Puritans’ collective thought. In Miller’s narrative, at any rate,
God figures for example in these passages:
It [the sentiment of piety] joined God and man, the whole and the particle. God reached out
to man with His grace, man reached out to God with his faith. (9)
Yet, though individual Puritans might forget its implications, to Puritanism itself the idea
was fundamental that God, the force, the power, the life of the universe, must remain to men
hidden, unknowable, and unpredictable. He is the ultimate secret, the awful mystery. (10)
As one of Puritanism’s most vital elements, the dynamics between ‘God’ and ‘man’ is
foregrounded in these passages. It is thus clearly for the purpose of elucidating the New England
mind that God is mentioned here. The crucial point, nevertheless, is that, at least in the first
quotation, Miller’s prose dramatizes God. The latter actively participates in the plot of ideas
which the narrative creates. God turns into a center of agency and cognition that “reached out
to man with His grace”. Especially the ‘with’ phrase manifests mind-telling’s involvement in
this sentence, establishing discursively the semantic pertinence of God’s action of reaching out.
The second quotation maintains this emphasis on God’s importance for the Puritans. Note first
the distinction Miller makes between few exceptional “individual Puritans” and “Puritanism
itself”, reinforcing the latter to be the prevalent collective mode of thought. The mind-telling
phrases by means of which God is described indicate that the Puritans’ relation to God is above
all a cognitive one: “[…] God, the force, the power, the life of the universe, must remain to men
hidden, unknowable, and unpredictable. He is the ultimate secret, the awful mystery”. God is
thus declared to be the fundamental epistemic principle of the Puritan world-view, and yet
appears as a quasi-actor. Besides the types of collectives, Miller’s narrative deploys various
strategies to represent them. These latter will be gathered in the next section.
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II. How
Personification
A significant principle of negotiating collective mentality in The New England Mind is the
personification of ideas, meaning the attribution of agency, consciousness and intentionality to
abstract entities. From a strictly scientific point of view, one would have to assess this principle
as compromising historiography’s discursive ratiocination, which is normatively characterized
precisely by maintaining a discourse that does abstract from the (narrative) staging of historical
forces and entities as quasi-actors. Miller, by contrast, uses it repeatedly and emphatically, as
in this passage:
Apostasy has not demolished the faculties, but put a malignancy into them, so that merely
by acting according to their natures they produce discord instead of harmony; hence the
reason does not suffer from a hostility to truth, because reason, as long as it lives, must desire
to conceive true images of things. (259)
It is crucial to note that the abstract entities mentioned here are vital attributes of the
theologically tinged Puritan mind: apostasy and reason. They themselves, however, are
personified by Miller’s discourse as they carry out affect-laden processes such as ‘abolishing’,
‘putting malignancy into’, ‘producing discord’, ‘suffering from a hostility to truth’ and ‘desiring
to conceive true images of things’.
It is for two reasons that this is noteworthy. The first reason is that personification is the
chief narrative-technical principle which allows Miller to dramatize the contents of the Puritan
mind. By ascribing agency, sentience and cognition to such abstract entities as apostasy and
reason, Miller deliberately employs narrative means to forge the distinct variant of his
historiographical discourse: the personification of ideas is above all a narrativizing strategy.
The second reason is of wider narratological pertinence. It concerns the ways in which such
strategies, as found in this factual narrative, reflect back into narratology as a discipline which
formed its knowledge base overwhelmingly on the basis of a fictional corpus. Here is an
example of how narratological attention paid to factual narration identifies a non-individual and
non-human type of agent on the narrative stage. Though eventually the ideas Miller stages are
to be recuperated in terms of the anthropomorphic entity they refer to – the Purian mind –, their
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formal shape(s) nonetheless deviate from the conventional character type. And it is precisely
these shapes which I intend to identify here. Personification is among the most prevalent of
Miller’s narrative techniques.
Collective Focalization
The representation of social minds is inherently linked to the phenomenon of collective
focalization, i.e. the rendering of the perspective of a group of two or more people. Miller
frequently employs this technique. In the following instance, he communicates epistemic
certainties about the Puritans which violate human limits of knowledge and, therefore, are
typical for the omniscient fictional storyteller41: “[…] from their own point of view, and in their
daily life and meditation, they valued the reformers [Luther; Calvin] more for inspiration than
instruction” (92, emphasis added).
Quite literally, this example shows that this factual narrative depicts the cognitive
perspective of a collective mind, the Puritans, “from their point of view”, as “they valued the
reformers more for inspiration than instruction”. Miller uses mind-telling to portray this
cognitive disposition which counts as an instance of focalization: Jahn (2005b) defines that
“focalization denotes the perspectival restriction and orientation of narrative information
relative to somebody’s (usually a character’s) perception, imagination, knowledge, or point of
view” (173; emphasis added). In other words, as Miller’s mind-telling narrativizes the Puritan
mind, portraying habits of thought and sentiment, it automatically focalizes this social mind,
even and especially when focusing on cognition rather than perception. Jahn’s understanding
of focalization, applying to individual as much as collective forms, is precisely not limited to
perceptual activities, but includes cognitive ones as well.
This condition unfolds notable repercussions once it is considered in conjunction with
Hamburger’s (1993 [1957]) and especially Cohn’s (1999) claims that authoritatively rendering
characters’ minds is exclusive to fictional narration. Instead, such sentences as just quoted
above provide evidence for one of the key conceptual assumptions posited in this study: the
representation of consciousness in factual narrative, i.e. the existence of ‘factual’ narrative
minds. This claim transcends the present analytical focus and will be elaborated in the final
conclusion of this study. Here is another apposite passage:
41
For an elaboration of the argument that omniscient narration is to be understood as a species of ‘unnatural’
narration see Alders (2013a).
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[This] doctrine of the psychological process was a part of the intellectual heritage which
Puritans accepted without criticism, almost without realizing that it was a doctrine, since to
them no other concept was available. Indeed, from their point of view it was simply a fact
which had never been questioned, as obvious and natural as that two plus two equals four.
(242; emphasis added)
Mind-telling is the dominant mode here as the narrative explains the “[…] the intellectual
heritage which Puritans accepted without criticism […]”. The verb, ‘accepted’, is seemingly
conveyed in the mind-showing mode but, as in previous cases, in fact refers to a permanent
disposition. The verb thus serves the mind-telling purpose of clarifying the role which the mindtelling noun phrases of “this doctrine of the psychological process” and “the intellectual
heritage” play in the Puritans’ mind. The verb is further qualified through the mind-telling
phrases “without criticism” and the parenthetical “almost without realizing it was a doctrine”.
These latter two demonstrate once again that Miller narrates the New England mind from
the (quasi-omniscient) position of nuanced familiarity with the Puritans’ collective thought
processes. The ‘almost’ phrase being a particularly striking instance as the narrator thus conveys
(his alleged knowledge about) shades and tones of the Puritans’ shared cognition. The most
explicit instance of collective focalization then follows in the second sentence, when Miller
establishes that “from their point of view it [the doctrine] was simply a fact which had never
been questioned […]”. The italicized phrase leaves no doubt that Miller betrays an instance of
collective focalization and continues in the mind-telling mode when issuing information in the
past perfect tense (“a fact which had never been questioned”). Specifically, the adverb ‘never’
manifests an epistemic privilege on the narrator’s part which approaches the pretension of
omniscience. Amounting to a clear breach of the ‘must-have’ style, this statement purports to
overlook the entire history of Puritan collective thought.
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Hypothetical Collective Focalization
Miller further employs collective focalization in its hypothetical, subjunctive variant. Here is
an early passage:
Had Puritans been cloistered hermits or contemplative sages they would have found time
perhaps to marvel as much at God’s wisdom as at His sway, but since they led exceedingly
active lives, it was His rule with which they had most frequently to deal. (16; emphasis
added)
The passage first hypothesizes in mind-telling terms about ‘they, the Puritans’ (“Had Puritans
been cloistered hermits or contemplative sages”) and their resulting cognitive activity (“they
would have found time perhaps to marvel […]”). In particular, the permanent (“had Puritans
been”) character-typological classifications (“cloistered hermits or contemplative sages”)
manifest Miller’s rhetorical participation as oriented towards explicating the semantics of
Puritan mentality. These mind-telling labels seem to be used here for tactical purposes,
however, as Miller asserts non-hypothetically in the same sentence that “they led exceedingly
active lives”. Initiated through a conjunction indicating a shift into a straightforwardly
argumentative direction, “but”, this second part provides information on how the Puritans
‘actually’ spent their time. The hypothetical focalization is employed, therefore, as a negative
foil, to be corrected by the narrator’s subsequent revelations. Especially the inclusion of the
hypothetical mode, however, assumes that the narrator is knowledgeable about the Puritans’
collective experientiality: he relates not merely what they were and did, but also what they could
have been and might have done.
An example of slightly different contours occurs in Miller’s section on “Anthropology”
(237-362) which delineates the Puritans’ notion of “The Nature of Man” (239-279):
Puritanism would have lost all grounds for individual moral responsibility had it held that
[the] psychological reflex, once inaugurated by the senses, was automatic and irresistible;
there had to be a break somewhere, a power that could refuse to play the mechanically
consistent part, that could deviate voluntarily from the norm. If the academic theory were
taken too literally, it would enslave the soul to an internal march of sensory images, and
Puritan piety could permit no such conclusion. (250; emphasis added)
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A noteworthy difference to any fictional type of narration consists in the fact that Miller
personifies a conceptual entity (“Puritanism”) into an experiential center of consciousness,
while, however, retaining the ‘-ism’ terminology reminiscent of academic discourse. Fictional
narratives such as The Scarlet Letter would hardly do this. Note how distinctly Miller
anthropomorphizes, as it were cognitivizes, the theoretical construct of ‘Puritanism’ into an
(individual) agent that ‘holds’ and ‘permits’, thus representing an entire (collective) mentality.
More significantly, it is again the narrator’s purported epistemic certainty which allows him
to discourse about Puritanism in the hypothetical mode. This becomes manifest especially in
the first sentence of this quotation: Miller’s assumed omniscience not only encompasses
knowledge about the Puritans’ actual interiority but extends even to the Puritan possible
mentality under altered circumstances. Miller confidently speculates about a Puritan
counterfactual psychology, one that did not materialize. Especially, the passage rules out the
hypothetical condition that “[the] psychological reflex, once inaugurated by the senses, was
automatic and irresistible”. Miller also uses the grammatically most conspicuous marker of
hypothetical focalization, the if-clause, to establish a further condition: “if the academic theory
were taken too literally, it would enslave the soul to an internal march of sensory images, and
Puritan piety could permit no such conclusion”. Not only is this a case of hypothetical collective
focalization (“were taken too literally […] would enslave […] could permit”, but also one which
involves a metaphorical use of language (“enslave the soul to an internal march of sensory
images”) that creates dynamic and enlivening effects.
The Puritan Collective Unconscious?
Perhaps the most spectacular liberty Miller’s historiographical discourse takes is that he
thematizes contents of the Puritan mind’s unconscious dimension. He does so in distinctly
mind-telling terms:
In estimating the scholastic cast of the Puritan mind we must remember, not only that
Puritans were unaware how much they naturally and inevitably took from medieval lore,
but that they seldom went directly to medieval writers. (102, emphasis added)
[…] clearly in their consciousness the problem of reconciling God’s decrees and rational
order loomed large in the natural universe, but they were hardly aware of even the existence
of a similar problem within the soul. (242; emphasis added)
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They [Puritans] were quite content with their universe, even though it had been the scene of
man’s fall; they believed that God had created it by perfect wisdom, and that it was just such
a universe as men should live in. They had no conscious intention of disturbing its outlines
or widening its horizons. (366, emphasis added)
Operating in the mind-telling mode, Miller’s statements in these passages resemble omniscient
narration very closely as they combine two crucial mind-telling powers: the narration of
unconscious mentality and the narration of permanent dispositions. On all three occasions –
“Puritans were unaware”, “they were hardly aware” and “they had no conscious intention” –
the static verbs express a permanent feature rather than a temporal state of the Puritan mind.
Miller’s alleged knowledge of unconscious relations is proven by negating the possession of
specific mental contents (“were unaware”; “were hardly aware”; “had no conscious intention”).
Miller not only posits that the Puritan mind contains an unconscious area, but he also professes
to know that region’s specific elements.
Quotation
Miller’s use of quotation is a crucial element of his narrative history of the Puritan mind. He
inserts passages from Puritan writings into his prose without providing immediate
bibliographical references. In the “Foreword” Miller states that his omission of these details is
due to pragmatic constraints as “[…] the documentation would run as many pages as the text”
(ix). He also claims that “[I]n most instances, it is a matter of complete indifference or chance
that a quotation comes from Cotton [Mather] instead of Hooker, from Winthrop instead of
Willard; all writers were in substantial agreement upon all the propositions which I am
discussing in this book […]” (ix).42
The New England Mind is therefore deficient in, though not entirely void of, what Cohn
(1999) adduces as an essential differentiating component of the non-fictionality of
historiographical discourse, namely “the entire ‘epigraphic’ apparatus (foot- or end-noted,
prefatory or appended) that constitutes a textual zone intermediating between the narrative text
itself and its extratextual documentary base” (115). Eliminating the references from the
42
Which leads Searl to ask this question: “How can Miller utter such a statement?” (Searl 1977, 227). Miller does,
however, further explain that “[…] I have assumed the power to omit [such] annotations, and to supply through
the remaining notes only the sort of marginal comment or bibliography that may be of value to more general
readers. Meanwhile, an annotated copy of this volume has been filed in the Harvard College Library along with a
bound set of complete notes, in which references are given to the provenience of each quotation and often to other
instances of like utterances in the New England writings” (ix).
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quotations in his main text, Miller circumnavigates a major obstacle which, stylistically
speaking, hampers an unimpeded ‘flow’ in academic writing. As Cohn observes, “[…] the
stratum of testimonial evidence obligatorily lines even the most homogeneously surfaced
historical narrative” (115).
Miller’s quotation practice entails not only a more mellifluous prose style, however, but
also an effect of dramatization. The reader is led to process, and to respond to, the statements
from Puritan writing in the same manner as to fictional characters’ direct discourse, the latter
being orchestrated and contextualized by omniscient narrators in (not only realist) novels. This
effect is increased, as Searl (1977) observes, by the fact that “the language of Miller, as narrator
of his history, changes or becomes modified to such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish
between the narrative voice and the voices of the quotations” (227). The following passage
provides evidence for various pertinent phenomena:
As we pursue the story of New England thought we must bear in mind the complete
separation which the founders made between supernatural grace and all its natural simulacra.
[…] God diffuses Himself through space to create and sustain the world, but there is a second
emanation, over and above the original one, which is grace. […] The omnipotent Being fills
all space, controls all actions, directs all destinies; out of Him comes all life, and without the
constant play of His sustaining power physical being would disintegrate into nothing. He
fills heaven and earth with His presence, says Hooker, “His infinite Being is every where,
and one and the same every where in regard of himself; because his being is most simple,
and not subject to any shadow of change, being all one with himself.” There is, says
Shephard, an essential presence of the spirit “that is in every man, as the Godhead is every
where, in whom we live and move.” The spirit lives in the most wicked men, in “the vilest
creature in the world.” […] As we study this distinction we come close to the Puritan’s
innermost sense of the living process. It is as though a pulsating energy were continuously
pumped through creation’s veins by the beat of a mighty heart, which yet at irregular
intervals, by an exceptional contraction of the ventricles, sends forth a stream of still more
tremendous force. Out of the same being have proceeded the stars, animals, men; but in some
incarnations the being has taken forms superior to others. “The least spear of grass has the
same power to make it that made heaven and angels,” says the Puritan, but he does not then
chant with the author of Leaves of Grass [Walt Whitman] that the least thing in creation is
equal to any other. (Miller 32-34)
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Searl explicates this passage as “an intensely creative activity” (Searl 1977, 227), offering the
reader “an imaginative vision” (227) in the shape of “a composite, nearly mosaic voice forged
out of a multiplicity of styles” (227). While these explanations capture the overall impression
of Miller’s prose in this extract, Searl’s intuitions can be re-formulated in more explicitly
narratological terms. The category of ‘direct discourse’ (“says Hooker”; “says Shephard”; “says
the Puritan”) is one tool reminiscent of fiction. In the context of what Miller himself labels “the
story of New England thought” these individual utterances, furthermore, are clearly intended to
exemplify Puritan mentality as a collective phenomenon. While the quotations by Hooker and
Shephard function according to the principle of ‘individuals expressing plurals’ noted above,
“the Puritan” is likewise shorthand for ‘the Puritans’.
Considering that he operates in the mode of factual narration, Miller seems to initiate
statements of a rather unexpected kind when he informs his readership that “we pursue the story
of New England thought” (emphasis added). The sentences that follow this announcement –
“God diffuses Himself through space to create and sustain the world”; “the omnipotent being
fills all space, controls all actions, directs all destinies” – can be recuperated narratologically as
instances of what Palmer conceptualizes as intermental free indirect thought (Palmer 2005,
432). Unlike in the cases of direct and indirect discourse, the technique of free indirect discourse
manifests a blending between the narrator’s and character’s utterances. In fiction, this technique
is usually employed to depict individual characters’ minds. The crucial point about Palmer’s
modified notion of free indirect discourse and Miller’s practice of it is that the experiential field
in which the narrator places himself here is that of the collective Puritan mind. Since the latter’s
shared ways of thinking and feeling are being addressed in the quotation above, this is an
example of intermental free indirect discourse.
As a characteristic of factual narration, moreover, the content of these expressions relates
Puritan mentality in terms of (the thought processes of) its theological contents. In a fictional
treatment, the focus would most likely be on the states of mind accompanying the fictional
events which form the respective story’s plot. It might be the case that Miller’s narrator above
pronounces himself to trace the story of Puritan thought, just as Hawthorne’s narrator toys with
scientific pretensions (“I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage […]” (Hawthorne
2005, 17); “to observe and define his character […]” (19). The fact remains, however, that The
Scarlet Letter is primarily a story, The New England Mind generically a study. Yet since a
theological ideology pervades the Puritan collective experience, it counts as a vital component
of mentality.
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Miller’s prose, furthermore, is tinged with metaphorical expressions towards the end of the
passage: “[I]t is as though a pulsating energy were continuously pumped through creation’s
veins by the beat of a mighty heart, which yet at irregular intervals, by an exceptional
contraction of the ventricles, sends forth a stream of still more tremendous force”. This is the
narrator’s translation of the relations depicted earlier in the passage into a metaphorical
Gesamtschau, or summarizing survey. The particular metaphorical rendering Miller uses here
enlivens his prose style and, more significantly, opens the vista towards the Puritans’
conception and experience of their environment as a living, embodied organism with physical
idiosyncracies (cycles of harvest, natural catastrophes, etc.) that are to be interpreted according
to scripture. Miller’s handling of metaphorical rhetoric is thus another means of quoting the
Puritan collective mind which readers would usually expected in fictional narrative.
Conclusion
Analyzing the The Scarlet Letter and The New England Mind has yielded two groups of
phenomena which can now be jointly and comparatively assessed. (1) The typological diversity
of collective figures participating on the level of (fictional) story and (historiographical) quasistory (‘who’). This group comprises the rubrics of individual(s) as social minds, minimal and
small social minds, sub-groups, and large and maximal social minds. While this pertains to
both narratives, Miller’s history of the Puritan mind additionally features ideas (ideas, things,
spiritual entities) quite extensively. (2) The variety of means and techniques by which the
narratives depict social minds on the level of discourse (‘how’). This second group consists of
collective contexts, collective focalization, hypothetical collective focalization, Zeitgeist, and
miscellaneous (‘there was’ proclamations, characters’ speech, imagery, the use of we,
ekphrasis, and chapter titles). Miller furthermore employs personification, makes idiosyncratic
use of (scholarly) quotation and thematizes the Puritan collective unconscious.
In a basic sense, these analytical results demonstrate that both texts are suffused with
collective manifestations of core narrative parameters such as character, mind and focalization.
While quite a few collective characters and rhetorical strategies feature in both Hawthorne’s
novel and Miller’s history of mind, there are also differences between them. The following
parameters pinpoint these implications more specifically.
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Narrative Components
Miller personifies a variety of non-human entities (ideas, things, spiritual entities) into
anthropomorphic narrative agents representing the Puritan social mind. He thus narrativizes
these notions into live actors with intentionality and agency. His use of ideas as narrative agents
extends categories such as ‘character’ and ‘action’. The generic label ‘history of ideas’ does not
merely indicate a particular historiographical content but also the methodological principle of
Miller’s own format of a narrative history of the Puritan mind: ideas turn into collective
characters. Examining factual narratives alongside fictional ones delivers a visible result at this
point.
The New England Mind differs substantially from The Scarlet Letter in terms of the human
collectives it depicts. Miller’s work does portrays unique fictional individuals, marked by
(mind-)telling proper names such as ‘Roger Chillingworth’, in any detail. The individual writervoices Miller quotes serve to emphasize contents of the collective Puritan mind. Miller also
does not elaborate on the minimal two-character units which are abundant in Hawthorne’s
narrative and in fictional narrative generally. Instead, larger they-units prevail in Miller’s work.
Besides the major unit of ‘they, the Puritans’, various specified and unspecified Puritan subgroups recur. Remarkably, Miller repeatedly includes maximal universals such as ‘man’, and
thus transcends the scope of a historically specific population group as he places that group’s
religious sentiments into larger diachronic developments in the history of ideas.
Unlike The Scarlet Letter, Miller’s narrative history of mind accordingly does not present a
plot-based story with a clearly demarcated character constellation of the dramatis personae
sort, and it does not unfold causally as well as temporally subsequent sequences of events. From
the beginning, it sets out to trace the cognitive predilections of the Puritan collective mind.
Employing his various techniques, however, Miller delineates the thought patterns of the
Puritans in a dynamic way that focuses on the actual processes of their shared mentality. In this
sense, Miller’s practice cognitivizes and collectivizes the factual genre of historiographical
narrative. Hawthorne’s fictional narrative, by contrast, rests on the physical and cognitive
(inter)actions of individual and collective beings as placed into distinct material environments,
abides by a dramatically conceived plot pattern.
On the level of discourse, Miller employs many of the techniques known from fiction, which
further reflects his overall project of narrativizing the contents of Puritan thought. For instance,
he resorts to diverse shapes of collective focalization and personification. In addition, Miller’s
inchoate rendition of the Puritan collective unconscious and his handling of quotation is
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noteworthy. The latter manifests a striking deviation from the regular practice of immediate
reference in historiographical scholarship, quoting individuals and collectives from Puritan
writings as though they were participating in a live narrative. In sum, Miller thus operates as a
scholarly mind-teller in The New England Mind, exhibiting massive evidence that this factual
narrative represents and negotiates (collective) consciousness.
In turn, Hawthorne at times appears in the persona of a historiographer in The Scarlet Letter.
His narration of Zeitgeist is the most palpable exemplification of this tendency which however
also surfaces when he contextualizes the Puritans as a historically specific population group
and, specifically, his own ancestral ties with them. Oscillating between factual conditions and
fictional negotiations, “The Custom-House” chapter epitomizes Hawthorne’s authorial selffashioning. Unlike Miller, Hawthorne does not use the narrative mode to trace the cognitive
processes by which the Puritan social mind instantiated its theology. Hawthorne does not
concentrate on telling what Miller, describing his own work, calls “the story of New England
thought”. The Scarlet Letter may be understood as telling its own version of the story of New
England thought; a story, however, that involves the plot-based exchanges between a variety of
Puritan social minds, such as the ‘throng-bearded men’, and individual characters such as
Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. In this respect, the two narratives display essential
differences.
Authorial Attitude
In the process of determining the formal operations at work in these narratives it further
emerged that the authors’, i.e. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and Perry Miller’s, attitude is ineluctably
inscribed into the pronouncements of their narrators. As regards Hawthorne, for instance, the
critic A. N. Kaul perceives:
On account of his personal temperament, his artistic sensibility, and his family history, he
[Hawthorne] could approach the seventeenth century as an insider, retaining at the same time
the outsider’s ability and freedom to judge and evaluate. Like so many great works of
literature […] The Scarlet Letter is a searching criticism of the world with which it deals
precisely because it takes its stand firmly within that world. (Kaul 1986, 10)
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Kaul’s observations emphasize a significant semantic dimension inherent in the formal
techniques. This dimension consists in the novel’s “searching criticism of the world with which
it deals” and characterizes what can, as I have proposed, be deciphered as Hawthorne’s
‘American Renaissance self-fashioning’. Thematizing his own family affiliations with the
Puritans, Hawthorne unmistakably incorporates a critique of his ancestors’ collective mode of
thought into his narrative. The tool of ‘mind-telling’ detects the textual details on the basis of
which such interpretive extrapolations can be developed.
To re-illustrate this latter point: a particularly incisive passage from the novel may be requoted here to demonstrate mind-telling’s efficacy to not only conduct textual analysis but also
facilitate interpretation, in this case documenting Hawthorne’s “searching criticism”:
The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer in acknowledging
the influence of Hester’s good qualities than the people. The prejudices which they shared
in common with the latter were fortified in themselves by an iron framework of reasoning,
that made it a far tougher labor to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid
wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to be
an expression of almost benevolence. Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom their
eminent position imposed the guardianship of the public morals. (Hawthorne 2005, 106)
One mind-telling sentence in this passage is especially revealing: “[T]he prejudices which they
[the rulers] shared in common with the latter [the people] were fortified in themselves by an
iron framework of reasoning […]”. Particularly the latter phrase describes Puritanism as a
static, rigid, prejudiced world view that equals a metaphorical ‘cognitive cage’: an “iron
framework of reasoning”. This, in turn, cannot but stimulate a skeptical stance towards the
Puritan rulers on the reader’s part. The wider context of the passage increases this impression
through such sarcastic (externalist) descriptions as “day by day, nevertheless, their sour and
rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to
be an expression of almost benevolence”.
The final remark that “thus it was with the men of rank, on whom their eminent position
imposed the guardianship of the public morals” makes explicit the social momentum of this
collective mentality. Led by rulers whose assigned power positions entail “the guardianship of
the public morals”, the entire town mind functions according to the “iron framework of
reasoning”. It is this shared mentality which stands in such bitter opposition to Hester’s “rich,
voluptuous, Oriental characteristic”, her “taste for the gorgeously beautiful” (58). Through such
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explicit and stylized mind-telling enunciations as juxtaposed here, Hawthorne dramatizes a
prominent collective mind in interaction with individual ones, most centrally Hester Prynne’s.
Unambiguously, the author takes sides in the process, assuming a decidedly critical attitude
towards the Puritan mind. This attitude, furthermore, reflects back into considerations about
‘factual’ history, since the novel leaves no doubt that it refers to the actual conditions of
seventeenth-century American history. While it does contain invented or modified elements,
overall the narrative is sufficiently ‘realistic’ to be recognized as a portrait of this particular
historical period. As Hawthorne expresses an attitude so explicitly, these statements could even
be taken as contributions to historiographical discussions aiming to clarify Puritanism’s
semantics. As has been suggested, Hawthorne may indeed count as North-America’s first
intellectual historian, though using fictional narrative to elaborate his views.
Miller does not approach the Puritans with the same reservation as Hawthorne. Miller’s own
designations of his work reveal the hybrid nature of his intentions: a “descriptive analysis”
which nonetheless presents “the story of New England thought”. It is the latter formula which,
consciously or not, leads Miller to apply techniques usually found in fictional narrative. The
effect is the fascinating paradox of a factual story of collective thought, a narrative history of
the Puritan social mind. Though Miller remains a self-declared historian of ideas, in the process
of telling the Puritan mind he doubtlessly morphs into a factual narrator. As such, he does not
reveal a clearly definable attitude towards the Puritan mind. In the Foreword, he attributes to
himself the mind-telling quality of an “impartiality” (Miller 1967, viii) towards the Puritans,
stating that “[…] I should like to make clear that I wholeheartedly admire the integrity and
profundity of the Puritan character but that I am far from sharing in its code or from finding
delight in its every aspect. Yet I can honestly say that my interest in Puritanism has not been a
matter of liking or disliking” (viii).
Miller, in other words, does not position himself in such evaluative terms that fuel the fierce
irony of Hawthorne’s omniscient narrator. Miller’s version of a scholarly American
Renaissance self-fashioning does, however, involve a standpoint of wider implications. His
epiphany-derived mission of “expounding my America to the twentieth century” (Miller 1956,
vii) and his assumption “that the mind of man is the basic factor in human history” (ix)
adumbrates the author’s perspective. Miller’s scholarly identity imbues the discourse of his
factual narrator. Out of Miller’s self-reflective assertions, generic innovations and systematic
commitments arises a distinct understanding of the American experience that attains universal
reach: underlying Miller’s discourse is a view of world history as being dominated by cognitive
forces and relations. His forging of a ‘narrative history of mind’, “the story of New England
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thought”, is the specific and unique generic format into which he moulds this conceptual
commitment. In terms of temporal validity, Miller’s view goes considerably beyond
Hawthorne’s, opening the vista towards wider diachronic continuities such as “The Augustinian
Strain of Piety” which Miller identifies as a sustained affective disposition on the Puritans’ part.
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Victorian Collective Affect Portraiture
Historical Context: British Victorianism
Stating that “[T]he Victorians are still with us” (Wilson 2002, 1), A. N. Wilson in The
Victorians (2002) suggests that nineteenth-century British Victorianism43 continues to affect
contemporary British self-identity, much as seventeenth-century North-American Puritanism
has been shaping modern US-American mentality. Like Puritanism, Victorianism has certainly
accumulated a considerable body of research. Such major historical ‘-isms’ spanning decades
or even a century inevitably involve an overwhelming mass of data. Historians are aware that
the informational abundance inherent in any ‘-ism’ necessitates conscious methodological
management to ensure the viability of given research aims. One general institutional response
to this challenge is the division of the university into academic branches, for instance historical
and literary studies as core parts of the humanities, and specialized sub-disciplines covering
various periods, geographical areas, and methodological approaches. Due to its focus on
collective mentality, the specific field of intellectual history is most informative for a social
minds analysis.
Accounts by intellectual historians of nineteenth-century Britain have gone through notable
shifts. Josef L. Altholz notes that “[T]he study of Victorian England – like the reputation of the
Victorian era or the connotations of the word ‘Victorian’ – has passed through several phases”
(Altholz 1976, v-vi). Altholz names such works as Thomas Humphry Ward’s The Reign of
Queen Victoria: A Survey of Fifty Years of Progress (1887), Lytton Strachey’s Eminent
Victorians (1918) and G. M. Young’s Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936) as
contributions emerging more or less contemporary with the period. Further studies produced
throughout the twentieth century then manifest, as Altholz discerns, “[…] the development of
professional research on Victorian England, which reached its maturity in literary scholarship
in Walter Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind (1957) and in historical study with [George]
Kitson Clark’s Making of Victorian England (1962)” (Altholz 1976, vi). Altholz also mentions
“[…] a stream of popular interest in the period” (vi) marked by “[…] such works as Steven
Marcus’s The Other Victorians (1966), showing the ‘underside’ of the life of the seemingly
respectable Victorians […]” (vi). An important study published around the same time as
Houghton’s is Asa Briggs’ The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867 (1959), while Jerome H.
43
For general recent introductions to nineteenth-century British history see Black and MacRaild (2003), Boyd
and McWilliam (2007) and Steinbach (2012).
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Buckley’s The Victorian Temper appeared in 1951. More recent contributions to the study of
Victorian intellectual history include Stefan Collini’s44 Public Moralists: Political Thought and
Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930 (1991), Theodore K. Hoppen’s The Mid-Victorian
Generation 1846-1886 (1998), and A. N. Wilson’s The Victorians (2002).
Rather than tracing the differences between these scholarly works, it is expedient for the
present inquiry to see what unites them, which is the attempt to capture aspects of an enduring
Victorian essence, to pinpoint the multi-faceted collective mentality of the era, and to set it apart
from earlier and following times. Jerome H. Buckley’s assumption epitomizes this project and
reveals its relevance for social minds explorations: “[T]he Romantics […] believed that the
solitary self by its own intuitions could reach general and normative truths; the Victorians
sought understanding and self-realization in a shared social experience” (Buckley 1976, 15).
Within the plurality of these studies, a distinct historiographical mode can be identified
which I metaphorically label Victorian collective affect portraiture. In the spirit of the Harvard
school in American intellectual history, the emphasis of a number of prominent historians
engaging with nineteenth-century British mentality has been on determining the emotional
atmosphere prevalent among the Victorians. Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870
(1957), the historiographical work scrutinized below, is driven by the attempt to define the
shared affects and dispositions governing large portions of upper- and middle-class Victorian
society during the period indicated in the title of his study. As can already be glimpsed from
the table of contents (Houghton 1957, vii-ix), which presents a list of affective parameters
divided into the three segments of “emotional attitudes”, “intellectual attitudes” and “moral
attitudes”, Houghton in fact prioritizes affective over intellectual phenomena, and thus
exemplifies the mode of Victorian collective affect portraiture.
In the initial section entitled “The Task of Revision” of his The Making of Victorian England
(1962), being the Ford lectures delivered before the University of Oxford [in 1960], George
Kitson Clark endorses the significance of affects for historical inquiry. More generally, Clark
sketches a revisionist approach in historical studies which involves questioning “[…] a
tendency to concentrate on those men and women whose ideas were drawn from the commonly
understood world of political expediency rather than from the less generally frequented world
of spiritual experience […]” (Clark 1962, 24). Operating in the vein of this revisionist agenda,
44
See also the work by other scholars affiliated with the so-called ‘Sussex School’ of intellectual history, especially
John W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981), and Donald Winch, Riches
and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834 (1996). Collini, Burrow and
Winch together produced That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History
(1983).
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Houghton and other intellectual historians include factual and fictional narratives as
historiographical source material, and thus inevitably discover the importance of collective
affects which, Clark explicitly argues, is part of the ‘task’ of revision:
The result of [this] concentration on the readily intelligible has been to suggest that the ideas
which have controlled history are those which appear to be rational, or at least intelligible,
to the writers of it. Nothing of course could be further from the truth. […] Even where a
recognizable argument has apparently controlled action it has normally received its strength
from some already prevailing emotion or from some deep-seated belief or prejudice which
has supplied the premises. […] Therefore, in order to understand the springs of action it is
important to try to understand the emotions, the irrational feelings, and this is precisely what
rationally minded historians are likely to fail to do. (Clark 1962, 24-25)
Clark’s line of argumentation in this section adumbrates rather fundamental theoretical
questions about the role and impact of ideas and arguments in history, particularly in relation
to human action. In the process of explicating his perspective on these issues, Clark highlights
the crucial role that affects play as motivating forces in human cognition and action. Clark
seems to view collective affects as a motivational deep-structure: “[E]ven where a recognizable
argument has apparently controlled action it has normally received its strength from some
already prevailing emotion or from some deep-seated belief or prejudice which has supplied
the premises”. As a consequence, Clark argues, “[…] in order to understand the springs of
action, it is important to understand the emotions, the irrational feelings […]”. The
historiographical genre of collective affect portraiture, as exemplified by Houghton’s Victorian
Frame of Mind of 1957, I claim, is a distinct mode within intellectual history implementing the
important revisionist aspect of studying Victorian collective emotions, as encouraged by Clark
in his 1960 Ford Lectures at Oxford.
Some scholars, however, question the postulate of a stable social mind underlying the project
of ascertaining the collective mentality of parts of Victorian, or any, society. Asa Briggs, for
example, in his Victorian People (1955), states that “[I]t is a mistake to make ambitious
generalizations. The unity of the [mid-Victorian (1851-1867)] period is somewhat deceptive”
(Briggs 1980, 12). Notions about what constituted the specific contents of a respective national
or otherwise collective mind underwent changes in the history of intellectual history. Says
David Hollinger in relation to American studies:
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To this [the quarrel in the 1970s and 80s over the domains covered by social and intellectual
history] the intellectual historians responded by articulating more sharply than they had
before the sense that intellectual history did not claim to embrace all thinking, but focused
more on the discourse of intellectuals, and on the historical acts of people who made history
by arguing. […] Hence by the 1980s it was rare to see titles invoking the “American mind,”
because intellectual historians were more conscious than before that the intellectual leaders
they studied were not necessarily representatives of the national population as a whole […].
(Hollinger 2007, 16)
In “Americanist Criticism. An Apologetical Introduction” Michael J. Colacurcio likewise
remarks that “[…] my focus is on the religious ideas that always tempt the observer to posit
some conscious fiction, like “the mind” (Colacurcio 1997, 1-2; emphasis added). Such
reservations towards what manifests nothing less than the core assumption of the narrative
history of mind already pervade contemporary reviews from around the publication date of The
Victorian Frame of Mind, as I discuss in more detail below.
Those disavowing the presence and significance of a given historical group’s collective
mind, however, have not prevented Houghton and others to operate precisely with this notion.
Houghton himself, at any rate, takes as his starting-point the inventory that “the Victorian mind
remains for us blurred and obscure. […] The general “portraits” of Victorian England are good
in their several ways, but they are limited in range or lacking in integration. We are still without
an extended and rounded synthesis” (Houghton 1957, xiii). He even intimates that the
assumption of a collective mind applies diachronically when he states that “[T]he kind of
inquiry here undertaken is the more important because to look into the Victorian mind is to see
some primary sources of the modern mind” (xiv). Before and after Houghton, other scholars,
too, have maintained a line of historical research which accepts the notion of a more or less
coherent collective mentality. They are traced here briefly.
A study providing an early twentieth-century historiographical account of the Victorian
social mind is G. M. Young’s Victorian England. Portrait of an Age (1936). Though what I call
Victorian collective affective portraiture is a metaphorical label aiming to capture the overall
tendency prevalent in the history of ideas on nineteenth-century British society, there is a degree
of literal description in the pictorial metaphor. Young says in the “Introduction” to his study
that “[A]s I read [a host of factual and fictional Victorian writings], my picture of Victorian
England grew clearer, and it was a very different picture from the one at that time commonly
accepted by popular opinion and set out by popular writers” (Young 1969, v; emphasis added).
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Young goes on to reveal the specific nature of his project when he states about his work that
“[…] I found myself asking, what is this chapter [i.e. an earlier draft of his book] really about?
For that matter, what is History about? And the conclusion I reached was that the real, central
theme of History is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening: in
Philip Sidney’s phrase, ‘the affects, the common thought of common things’ […]” (Young
1969, vi; emphasis added). Young, in other words, consciously endorses the historiographical
model of Victorian collective affect portraiture.
In 1955, Asa Briggs initiated his Victorian People. A Reassessment of Persons and Themes
1851-67 by asserting about “high-Victorian England [1851-1867]” (Briggs 1980, 9) that “from
its social balance it produced a distinctive civilization of its own” (9). Briggs seeks to determine
the then-contemporary Zeitgeist when he goes on to note that “five main influences [prosperity;
national security; belief in the superiority of English representative institutions; belief in a
common moral code; belief in free discussion] conditioned the national mood” (10 [10-12]). In
methodological terms, Briggs continues the schema set up by Lytton Strachey in Eminent
Victorians (1918), which is to study an age trough representative individual figures. Says
Briggs: “[T]he method I have adopted in this book [Victorian People] is to try to discover the
unity of society through a study of selected people who were alive and active in the 1850s and
1860s” (Briggs 1980, 17). Thus, he seeks to distil the prevalent attitudes of the high-Victorian
social mind: “[T]he studies of individual people in this book are not designed as miniature
biographies so much as explorations of the value judgements and preferences of mid-Victorian
society” (18). Briggs’ emphasis on such emotionally charged parameters as “belief in a common
moral code”, “national mood”, “value judgements” and “preferences” continues the mentalityhistoriographical tradition of Victorian collective affect portraiture initiated by Young.
Jerome H. Buckley’s The Victorian Temper. A Study in Literary Culture (1966), similarly,
is committed to investigating the emotional underpinnings of the phenomenon of ‘taste’ and its
literary manifestations:
[For] Victorian taste is intelligible only in a context of thought and feeling which defies easy
definition. If Victorian literature – which remains perhaps the truest reflection of that taste –
was in part the work of its individual authors, it was also in large measure, necessarily, the
product of a diverse culture, of attitudes social and moral which helped condition its values,
of the background, in short, that it is my present purpose to describe. (Buckley 1966, vii)
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Buckley adopts the notion of a Victorian social mind characterized not least by its affects, “a
context of thought and feeling which defies easy definition”, and declares it to be his prime
object of study. Moreover, he endorses the link between collective mentality and literature
which many intellectual historians subscribe to, Houghton certainly among them. Buckley
indeed specifies his aim:
The chapters that follow constitute neither an intellectual history of Victorian England nor
an ordered survey of Victorian letters. They strive neither to trace in detail the growth, for
example, of scientific or religious thought nor to examine the specific development of
dominant literary genres like the novel or the personal lyric. They are devoted rather to a
charting of the impulses that prompted and the forces that shaped a manifold creative
expression, to a study in particular of the “moral aesthetic,” its rise and decline, and its
relation always to a variable climate of opinion and emotion. (Buckley 1966, vii)
Exploring the “[…] variable climate of opinion and emotion” as well as “[…] charting […] the
impulses that prompted and the forces that shaped a manifold creative expression […]”,
Buckley consciously contributes to collective affect portraiture.
In a more recent publication, Public Moralists. Political Thought and Intellectual Life in
Britain 1850-1930 (1991), Stefan Collini overtly maintains this focus as he states in the
“Introduction”:
This book is intended as a contribution to the intellectual history of modern Britain. It
attempts to bring to life and to explore in sometimes unusual ways certain central themes in
the development of English moral and cultural attitudes, and their bearing upon political
argument from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. In practice, the book
largely concentrates on reconstructing the thought and sensibility of some of the leading
members of the educated class of this period. But it also does express a conviction that our
understanding of this aspect of our history, and still more the manner and tone in which we
write about it, are consequential, albeit in a limited way, for our sense of identity and conduct
in the present. (Collini 1991, 1)
Collini explores “[…] the development of English moral and cultural attitudes […]” as well as
“[…] the thought and sensibility of some of the leading members of the educated class of this
period”. He traces the affect-based though “[…] less explicit habits of response and evaluation
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that are deeply embedded in the culture” (5). He thus positions himself as an archaeologist of
Victorian mentality, aiming to extract affective and intellectual dispositions. Furthermore,
Collini assumes a close link between, on the one hand, the British national identity arising from
this deeply-embedded psychology and, on the other, English literature. Foregrounding the
correlation between the Victorian social mind and nineteenth-century British literature is a
measure resembling the methodological framework governing Houghton’s and others’ mode of
historiographical narrative: written documents are the source material from which the contents
of collective affects are drawn. States Collini:
My own starting-point in this chapter [“The Whig Interpretation of English Literature.
Literary History and National identity”] is that, understood more largely as the dynamic or
activating power of the assertion and confirmation of national identity, a power operating,
often unobserved, across a wide range of political and cultural activities, English nationalism
has in fact been a vast presence in British history of the last two centuries […], even although
it has largely not been recognized as such or systematically articulated. This suggests the
need to explore […] some of the sources and idioms available for formulating this sense of
national identity in Victorian Britain. But, even more than in earlier chapters, the discussion
will extend well beyond the narrowly political. For I want to propose that, since at least the
late eighteenth century and in increasingly official form since the late nineteenth, a crucial
vehicle for establishing and negotiating the relevant sense of national identity has been
provided by that symbolic and emotionally charged selection of writing known as ‘English
literature’. (Collini 1991, 346-347; emphasis original)
Collini broaches variegated topics which this present study has neither the space nor the
competence to discuss adequately. I refer for instance to the vexed issue of “[…] national
identity, a power operating, often unobserved, across a wide range of political and cultural
activities […]” and its relation to English nationalism. Pertinent to my aims is that, while
confirming the historical importance of Victorian collective self-consciousness, Collini
correlates this phenomenon with “[…] that symbolic and emotionally charged [read: affectladen] selection of writing known as ‘English literature’”. The latter he in turn understands to
be “[…] a crucial vehicle for establishing and negotiating the relevant sense of national identity
[…]”. Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind is grounded in the same premise of distilling past
collective affects from factual and fictional (narrative) texts.
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A.N. Wilson in The Victorians (2002) explicitly places himself into a historiographical tradition
that seeks to paint narrative portraits of ‘the Victorians’. Wilson could in fact hardly be more
self-conscious about his participation in this generic mode. States Wilson in the preface:
I am not an academic historian, and would not consider myself qualified to write for such as
were. What follows [The Victorians] is what G.M. Young in an earlier generation, and in a
masterly account of the Victorians, called a ‘portrait of an age’. […] I have tried to draw a
picture of the Victorians and their age which makes sense of them to our generation, to retell
some of the outstanding incidents and portray some of the outstanding figures of the period.
(Wilson 2002, 4)
Wilson’s portrait also concentrates on collective affects as his preface states, for instance that
“[T]he Victorian era felt like a time of peace for almost everyone in Britain” (Wilson 2002, 1).
Wilson furthermore captures insights about the Victorians’ affective and cognitive framework
from his narrative portrait, remarking that “[F]rom the first, the Victorians possessed the
capacity for constructive self-criticism” (617).
Nineteenth-Century Britain (2003) is a volume by Jeremy Black and Donald M. MacRaild
that “seeks to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to nineteenth-century
Britain” (Black and MacRaild 2003, xvii). A variety of thematic sections such as “the urban
world”, “people” and “cultural trends” reflects the authors’ premise that “far from being
confined to politics, economics and ‘society’, the idea of history is now widely defined and due
attention is also paid to cultural history” (xvii) and other factors such “the environment” (xvii)
and “issues of gender and ethnicity” (xvii).
Similarly, in Understanding the Victorians. Politics, Culture and Society in NineteenthCentury Britain (2012), Susie L. Steinbach “foregrounds social and cultural history, including
attention to gender, race, and class” (Steinbach 2012, 2) and concomitantly seeks “to elucidate
who the Victorians were: how they lived, what they did, what they believed, what they valued”
(2). Steinbach states that “this book focuses on lived experience, dominant representations, and
shared (and conflicting) assumptions and beliefs […] and on the interplay between received
ideas and lived experience” (4). Significantly, Steinbach emphasizes that “[A]lthough we
cannot speak of a single Victorian worldview […], we can explore the range of worldviews that
were available” (4). Unmistakably, Victorian collective mentality and the underlying shared
experience are major topics in recent historical research.
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These studies give an overview of the work on Victorianism that has been done in historical
studies. The following sections zoom in specifically on the contexts of the two individual
narratives which will be the focus in the analytical sections, Meredith’s The Egoist and
Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind.
George Meredith, The Egoist
The Egoist was published in 1879 which allows Meredith to render aspects, especially affects,
of British society from the vantage of the final stages of the nineteenth century. One crucial
way of decoding the novel’s late-Victorian semantics is to pay attention to the social minds
relations it depicts. Especially, The Egoist negotiates gender relations45 in collectivist terms as
it repeatedly links individual characters to universal reflections on ‘men and women’. In his
essay “The Meaning of Egoism in George Meredith’s ‘The Egoist’”, Richard B. Hudson
initially suggests that “[…] the action [in the novel] centers on Sir Willoughby Patterne and his
presumptions and apparently has no meaning in the vast world outside, except perhaps in its
implications for the conduct of all young men in love” (Hudson 1948, 163; emphasis added).
More forcefully, however, the narrative encourages feminist explorations which
contextualize the fiction’s male and female characters within the larger historical framework of
women’s social and economic situation throughout the nineteenth century. Robert M. Adams
alludes to this nexus when he opens his preface to the 1979 Norton edition of the novel by
stating that “[W]hen George Meredith set about writing The Egoist in the late 1870s, the
movement for the improvement of women’s social position and for the assertion of women’s
legal rights was just gaining momentum” (Meredith 1979, vii). Similarly, Jenni Calder critically
reflects a paternalistic dynamics governing the novel’s plot and crucially involving
Willoughby’s, the main male character’s, attempts at marriage:
As long as they [women] could be persuaded to believe that marriage was their major
occupation in life, and as long as there were men who could afford to buy wives, either with
money or with social status, ideally with both, it would be possible for men such as Sir
Willoughby Patterne in Meredith’s The Egoist to consider their destined brides as precious
items of furniture, tributes to their own good taste. (Meredith 1979, 472)
45
For a discussion of “Unbroken Patternes: Gender, Culture, and Voice in The Egoist” see Williams (1985).
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While Calder detects paternalism as the principle dominating Victorian gender and marriage
relations46 as illustrated in Meredith’s novel, other concerns relevant for a social minds
approach surface in this narrative as well. Meredith’s narrator time and again invokes a national
Victorian public in the shape of a collective ‘we’ addressee, reflecting Jerome H. Buckley’s
hypothesis of a Victorian “double self-consciousness”47 (Buckley 1976, 5) grounded in societal,
rather than solitary, subjectivity. Buckley assumes that “[…] the Victorians sought
understanding and self-realization in a shared social experience” and that “Victorian art […]
especially literature […] communicates its concern with a general psychology […]” (15).
Richard D. Altick confirms a collective awareness as a differentiating Victorian trait:
[This] corporate self-consciousness intensified throughout the century. The Victorians were
very much aware that they were performing in the limelight of history, and one of their great
ambitions was to do so with credit. “We are an era in human history,” they said in effect,
“the farthest milestone on the long road of man’s progress. We take our role very seriously.
Will posterity applaud or deplore our performance?” (Altick 1973, 74)
Regarding The Egoist, the narrator’s discourse on ‘men and women’ and on the ‘Victorian we’,
which will be examined closer in the analytical section, explicitly integrates temporal and
referential layers into the narrative that transcend the Victorian period and make statements of
an essentialist kind. These discourses in the novel mostly relate collective affects and cognitive
dispositions and thus offer a fictional version of Victorian collective affect portraiture.
Meredith and Criticism
Not only was the The Egoist (1879) produced towards the end of Meredith’s career, and late in
the Victorian period generally, it also substantially deviates from the dominant novelistic
patterns of Victorian fiction established by such writers as George Eliot and Charles Dickens.
In his essay “A Counter Kind of Book”, Robert M. Adams notes about Meredith’s novel that
“[I]t represents a set of variations on standard themes and arrangements which give it the
46
See, however, Hoppen who maintains that “[S]urely too it is the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth or twentieth
centuries, which can most accurately be described as the great era of companiate marriages” (Hoppen 1998, 324).
47
See Buckley: “They [the Victorians] were, it seems to me, far less self-satisfied than self-conscious – that is,
less absolute than relativistic in their self-regard. Indeed we might argue that a double self-consciousness, public
as well as private – by which I mean an awareness of the personal self in time and of the whole era as a perpetual
transition – was their central attribute. Each of the major Victorians knew not merely his place in a social order
but also his place in history, the roles he could or should play in a social drama of many shifting scenes. The idea
of history dominated the intellectual life of the nineteenth century” (Buckley 1976, 5).
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appearance of a very different novel” (Meredith 1979, 551; emphasis original) and that “[I]ts
“strangeness” causes The Egoist to stand out among books of its class [i.e. the Victorian novel]
[…]” (553).
One of the specific aspects Adams adduces to corroborate his hypothesis of the narrative’s
alterity is its cast of characters: “[I]n general, the persons of the novel are wealthy, if not beyond
the need for work, at least to the point of regarding work as a disagreeable imposition. They
have no social reforms to propose, no political issues to urge. A few of them have a bare
minimum of the most perfunctory religious sentiment: the rest, quietly and without the slightest
consequence, have none at all […]” (552). Indicated by the plural in these observations, Adams
discerns a basic uniformity and passivity among the characters which warrants the assumption
that they are members of typological groups rather than full-fledged individuals.
According to Adams, this effect comes about not least through the narrator’s discursive
presence: “Its [the novel’s] prose style […] is elliptical, metaphoric, and epigrammatic to the
point where the author seems sometimes out to distract attention from its characters” (552).
Adams further observes that “[T]here is little description – for example, of Colonel De Craye,
of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson. The novel is short on body, where most Victorian novels are
long” (552; emphasis original). In relation to the showing/telling distinction, this assessment
registers the comparative scarcity of showing-mode narration in The Egoist. At the same time,
this condition points to the fact that, instead, the novel features a prominent (mind-)telling
discourse which contextualizes the characters, often in collectivist terms, making it fertile
material for the present study. Indeed, this condition is the main reason why this narrative,
rather than a different Victorian novel, was selected for the ensuing analysis.
It is precisely on these grounds that Virginia Woolf criticizes Meredith:
He [Meredith] cannot […] suppress his own opinion. And there is nothing that characters in
fiction resent more. If, they seem to argue, we have been called into existence merely to
express Mr. Meredith’s views upon the universe, we would rather not exist at all. Thereupon
they die; and a novel that is full of dead characters, even though it is also full of profound
wisdom and exalted teaching, is not achieving its aim as a novel. (Meredith 1979, 538)
Woolf evaluates the notable presence of the author/narrator as detrimental to the characters’
chances of narrative survival. Significantly, she also refers to the characters in the plural as
“they”, presumably in the shape of shared experiences, “resent” and “seem to argue”, and
indeed “die” due to the narrator’s overt and extensive telling-mode discourse. From her
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perspective, emerging right out of (Bloomsbury) Modernism with its aesthetic preference for
showing-mode narration, Woolf concludes that The Egoist, “full of dead characters”, fails to
achieve its aim as a novel, which resonates with Jami Bartlett’s remark that “George Meredith
is a canonical writer generally agreed to be bad at writing […]” (Bartlett 2009, 547). What for
Woolf is a fundamental aesthetic flaw nonetheless contains copious data for the present social
minds approach: the rhetorical strategies employed by mind-telling on the level of narrative
discourse. Meredith’s narrator may not allow his characters a fully individualized and
independent existence, as Woolf laments, yet in the process of commenting on the fictional
events he sheds decidedly collectivist light on them.
A slightly different collectivist understanding of The Egoist underlies Richard B. Hudson’s
argument in “The Meaning of Egoism in ‘The Egoist’” (1948). Hudson contends that:
[T]he purpose of this study [his essay] is to show that the full meaning of the novel depends
in part upon an understanding of what egoism stood for in Meredith’s philosophy and that,
despite the spirit of comedy in which the novel is conceived, its underlying aim is serious
indeed. How seriously Meredith took egoism appears clearly whenever he writes in his
poetry of the intellectual evolution of society or of the goals toward which society as a whole
is moving. In the light of what Meredith says here, the egoism of Sir Willoughby Patterne is
more than mere conceit or self-worship; it is a reversal of the evolutionary process, a bar to
progress. (Hudson 1948, 164)
Hudson elaborates his argument by drawing on Meredith’s understanding of evolution since
“Meredith deduces the relationship between man and society as a further evolutionary process”
(164). According to Hudson, Meredith betrays that “[…] egoism is opposed to the social
organization because egoism seeks to preserve the individual at the expense of society as a
whole” (166-167) and that “[S]urvival of society as a whole – society in the largest and most
cosmopolitan sense of the word – is far more important than the survival of the single
individual” (167). Therefore, as expressed in Meredith’s poetry, “[S]ubmission to nature’s laws
and to the governing of reason causes one to suppress the primitive self and to understand the
meaning of life in terms of service and subordination to the good of the group” (171). Hudson
finds a direct expression of these concerns in The Egoist as “[…] Sir Willoughby puts whatever
brains, ability, and material wealth he has to the enhancement of his own ego, rather than to the
service of mankind” (175).
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Hudson’s essay is an interpretive account of the central theme in the novel, egoism, and as such
does not relate directly to social minds analyses. Hudson’s reasoning nonetheless hinges vitally
on the correlation between individual and society as, in tune with the collectivist bias of
Victorian mentality, Meredith’s understanding of evolution in fact places high(er) importance
on the latter. Victorian mentality is likewise the central topic of Houghton’s historiographical
work.
Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870
Houghton continues the specific tradition in intellectual history inaugurated by Miller, the
narrative history of mind. Houghton systematizes the cognitive, especially affective,
dispositions of the mid-Victorian social mind, which is why his study is most suitable for this
present inquiry. The title of Houghton’s book, furthermore, The Victorian Frame of Mind,
echoes Miller’s major work. To what extent Houghton possibly emulates Miller and the
Harvard school approach is a question of little relevance for my analysis. Certainly, at any rate,
Houghton operates along continuous lines rather than treading entirely new territory. This is
evident in the “Acknowledgements” section of his book where he reveals the impulses of his
scholarly enterprise:
As I call to mind the people who have had a share in the creation of this book, I think first
of my colleagues on the Board of Tutors in History and Literature at Harvard College from
1931 to 1940. It was there at our Tuesday lunches in the persistent discussions of intellectual
history that this book, though still unthought of, had its deepest roots. In ways too intangible
to trace, I owe much to the conversation – sometimes brilliant, often fantastic, always lively
– of Paul Doolin, Dana Durand, John Finley, F. O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller, Elliot Perkins,
Jack Potter, Dan Sargent, and Ed Whitney. (Houghton 1957, xi)
During “[…] the persistent discussions of intellectual history […]” with these scholars
Houghton must have witnessed precisely the incubation period of Miller’s The New England
Mind (1939) and Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941) in the years between 1931 and
1940. These two works rest fundamentally on the premise that a correlation exists between
American literature and society, negotiating the national psyche. Houghton operates according
to the same assumption but applies it to nineteenth-century British life and letters. Houghton
establishes, for example, “[…] that the two major poems of the age, In Memoriam (1850) and
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“Empedocles on Etna” (1852), are subjective accounts of the Victorian soul […]” (Houghton
1957, 334-335). Using mind-telling as an analytical instrument, this study traces the narrative
measures by means of which Houghton implements this tenet.
While Miller approaches the New England mind according to one persistent pattern of
religious sentiment, “the Augustinian strain of piety”, Houghton presents the Victorian mind as
a mosaic of diverse and enmeshed collective affects. His table of contents (vii-ix) indicates his
practice of Victorian collective affect portraiture. It consists of three major parts – explicitly
designated “Emotional Attitudes”, “Intellectual Attitudes” and “Moral Attitudes” –, which are
in themselves sub-divided into such sections as “Optimism”, “Anxiety”, “Anti-Intellectualism”,
“Rigidity”, “Earnestness” and “Enthusiasm”, and others.
This results in a list of affective qualities which generates various effects. On a basic level,
this list specifies, assembles and correlates collective affects into the cognitive matrix, or frame,
which is the Victorian mind according to Houghton. In addition to providing merely an
informative structure, however, the contents list signals Houghton’s collective affect portraiture
and his participation in the ‘narrative history mind’ genre. The enumeration of Victorian
character traits evinces a distinct thematic focus which deviates from conventional
historiography based on sequences of political and martial events shaped by great leaders. Thus
an inchoate narrative about collective affects inheres in this compressed list and anticipates
Houghton’s sustained mind-telling prose. As a consequence essential for my aims, Houghton’s
prose style differs markedly from more argumentatively-geared historiography and might seem
unprofessional, even amateurish, to readers of twenty-first-century academic historiography. In
the process of framing the Victorian mind by narrative means Houghton develops a
historiographical mode of Victorian collective affect portraiture which has been recognized and
criticized as such.
Houghton and Criticism
Reviews that were published contemporary to The Victorian Frame of Mind raise a number of
critical points against Houghton’s approach. One line of criticism concentrates on the
underlying notion of a given period’s ‘mind’, whether Victorian or otherwise. G.F.A. Best, for
instance, observes that “Houghton believes that an age (or period, or era) has an objectively
perceptible mind, and that you can understand it, complicated and even schizophrenic though
it may be, just as you can understand, if you try hard enough, the mind of even the most unusual
person” (Best 1959, 528). Best concedes that “[T]he questionableness of its central assumption
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[of a period mind] in fact affects this book less than might be expected” (529), but notes that
“[T]he social and economic foundations were shifting all the time; many peoples’ ways of
viewing life must have been radically changed during this period (let alone have been already
changing before 1830) […]” (529).
In another contemporary review, Best’s skepticism is shared by John Bicknell who
reinforces that “[T]o ascertain and display the mental attitudes characteristic of an era are tasks
recognizably difficult. What is the “frame of mind” of any period?” (Bicknell 1961, 75). Similar
to Best, Bicknell concludes that “[W]hat we really miss in this book is the dynamic of change,
the delineation of ideas in movement and the forces productive of movement” (Bicknell 1961,
77). Perpetuating this line of criticism, Asa Briggs states that “[I]t is the co-existence of
different generations which makes it extremely difficult to generalize about either emotional or
intellectual attitudes and the juxtaposition of evidence from the 1830s – and even before – and
the 1860s in this book makes it difficult to accept all Professor Houghton’s judgements” (Briggs
1959b, 136).
By contrast, in a conspicuously uncritical review, none other than Perry Miller registers what
he perceives as the distinct achievements of Houghton’s approach. Miller particularly
underscores the methodological innovations of Houghton’s “[…] quietly revolutionary analysis
of the Victorian frame of mind; I [Miller] am persuaded that it [The Victorian Frame of Mind]
will have effects, both contential and methodological, upon historical evaluation in both the
Englands” (Miller 1957, 407-408). More specifically, whereas previous historical accounts
such as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) aimed “to string the story as a succession
of biographical beads […]”, Houghton provides “something more organic, more structural”
(408). Says Miller:
Mr. Houghton does not attempt to set forth the full range of the thinking of any of his central
characters. He lets them appear, along with a thousand lesser figures, just as the theme calls
for their appearance. But the result, thanks to his skillful evocation, is to give us a sense of
them all, not only in and for themselves, but as they stand in relation to each other. The last
notion he has in mind is to impose upon the Victorian mind any preconceived scheme of
consistency: he enables one to understand of that era – and by implication of our own
different but not too different era – how the most sentient of intelligences can simultaneously
hold essentially contradictory conceptions. (409).
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Miller thus praises Houghton for drawing a historiographical portrait that accommodates shared
affects within one study rather than a series of separate, quasi-biographical set pieces which are
then more or less coherently reconciled to serve a recurrent ‘red thread’ argument. According
to Miller, Houghton’s practice of arraying the voices of a large variety of eminent Victorians is
“[…] to give us a sense of them all, not only in and for themselves, but as they stand in relation
to each other”, and he does so by narrative means as “[H]e lets them appear, along with lesser
figures, as the theme calls for their appearance”. Houghton, in other words, delivers a narrative
history of the Victorian social mind, much as Miller tells the story of Puritan mentality.
Furthermore, Miller postulates that Houghton’s methodological practice is an innovative
contribution to the disciplinary development of intellectual history:
[At the same time,] I think it fair to say that Mr. Houghton had also put aside the precepts of
most American practitioners of the art which has come to be called either “history of ideas”
or “intellectual history.” Most of these have taken some convenient catalogue of obvious
“ideas” – e.g. religion and science, slavery, evolution – and have assumed that they discussed
the life of the mind by presenting an inventory.
Mr. Houghton creates an exciting and highly informative book by organizing his chapters
around basic attitudes, complexes of both emotion and thought – around what I am tempted
to call (if I use the word correctly) syndromes – of the Victorian mentality. (408)
Miller claims that Houghton’s collective affect portraiture adds not only new methodological
impulses but also “contential” (408) aspects to the discipline of intellectual history. Rather than
“some convenient catalogue of obvious ‘ideas’”, Houghton “creates an exciting and highly
informative book by organizing his chapters around basic attitudes, complexes of emotion and
thought […]”. Unwillingly or not, Miller thus invokes the comparison between The Victorian
Frame of Mind and his own The New England Mind which emerges implicitly from the
analytical sections in this study in respect to the representation of social minds.
It should be recalled, however, that my explorations focus neither on the question of the
“contential” accuracy of these studies nor on the ways in which they bear upon the disciplinary
evolution of intellectual history during the twentieth century. For the consciously narratological
purposes of this study, the crucial dimension is not the question whether Houghton’s research
has become obsolete by today’s standards. Houghton appears to play a marginal role at best in
contemporary historical studies. In Public Moralists, Collini mentions “[…] the still useful
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Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 […]” (Collini 1991, 105) in a
footnote. The MLA International Bibliography lists only one entry: Houghton’s study itself.
Yet the fact is that Houghton rendition of “some convenient catalogue of obvious ‘ideas’”
and “complexes of both emotion and thought” comes in the generic format of a narrative history
of mind, and therefore offers fecund material for probing the means by which social minds are
expressed in this factual discourse. Overall, it is how Meredith and Houghton craft their fictional
and factual portraits of Victorian collective affect which the following sections examine in more
detail.
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5. George Meredith, The Egoist
Meredith’s novel participates in the mode of Victorian collective affect portraiture as it
repeatedly betrays shared emotions and sentiments. Though the novel presents diverse social
minds contents, it predominantly depicts collective affects. The following analysis will explore
the various manifestations of these phenomena in terms of the types of social minds on the level
of plot (I. Who) and the narrative strategies on the level of discourse (II. How).
Prelude
It is by means of a gnomic statement with unmistakably collectivist implications that Meredith
opens the novel’s prelude: “[C]omedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life,
and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we
have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no more violent crashes, to make the
correctness of the representation convincing” (Meredith 1979, 3). Remarkably, the emphasis in
this initiation into the narrative is on entities of an abstract (comedy), universal (human nature)
and collective (social life; civilized men and women; “we”) kind rather than on individual
characters. The novel’s plot, in other words, is embedded into a wider non-individual
framework. The interpretive intuition arising out of this inaugural scenario, verified by the main
narrative, is that those individual characters who do appear in The Egoist stand under the
auspices of the larger forces at work in the novel, above all “the Comic Spirit”, as the prelude
further clarifies:
The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all
accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech. For, being a spirit, he hunts the
spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit: he has not a thought of persuading you
to believe in him. (3)
As a personified cognitive being, “the Comic Spirit” designs a schema according to which the
individual characters’ experiences unfold: he “conceives a definite situation for a number of
characters” and “hunts the spirit in men”. Later in the prelude suggestively characterized as
“our united social intelligence” (4), the comic spirit figures as the driving and devising force
behind the novel’s plot and, furthermore, a civilizing power of universal measures: “[S]he
[Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of
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the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the
polisher, a sweet cook” (5). The fact that the narrative refers to the comic spirit both as male
(“he”) and later as female (“she”) anticipates the gender politics explicitly addressed by the
narrator throughout the novel.
The need for comedy’s abilities to correct “the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found
among us” derives from the postulated omnipresence of the individualist vice par excellence,
namely excessive self-centeredness, from which the novel derives its title:
Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on earth; that might
indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title is the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full
of the world’s wisdom. So full of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which the
generations have written ever since they took to writing, that to be profitable to us the Book
needs a powerful compression. (3)
Significantly for this present study, which consciously explores factual and fictional narration
as manifested in written formats, Meredith’s narrator invokes two interrelated metaphorical
schemas to decipher “the world”. First, there is the ‘WORLD AS BOOK’ schema which reveals
strong affinities to the intellectual historian’s assumption of a close relation, if not immediate
continuity, between (human) life and (factual and fictional) literature. Second, this schema is
intensified by the narrator’s citation of a global history of writing in this passage. This practice,
further, is carried out by a diachronic succession of creative collectives, “the generations”.
Paradoxically, the point of this passage is to define their shared habitat, the world, as infested
precisely with the disease of over-individualism, egoism, which the comic spirit and his helpers,
imps, are out to cure or at least expose: “[I]mps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle
detective vision: malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever
they catch sight of Egoism they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim
their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come” (6). The prelude thus paves the main
narrative’s way in terms of various collectivist and affect-based parameters.
The Egoist
The narrative opens with a paragraph relating the incipient individual life of the main character,
Willoughby, to the collective dimension of his family history. The paragraph in fact bristles
with allusions to groups. A variety of social minds is implicated in the opening passage:
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There was an ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible over the infancy of
Willoughby, fifth in descent from Simon Patterne, of Patterne Hall, premier of this family,
a lawyer, a man of solid acquirements and stout ambition, who well understood the
foundation-work of a House, and was endowed with the power of saying No to those first
agents of destruction, besieging relatives. He said it with the resonant emphasis of death to
younger sons. For if the oak is to become a stately tree, we must provide against the crowding
of timber. Also the tree beset with parasites prospers not. A great House in its beginning
lives, we may truly say, by the knife. Soil is easily got, and so are bricks, and a wife, and
children come of wishing for them, but the vigorous use of the knife is a natural gift and
points to growth. Pauper Patternes were numerous when the fifth head of the race was the
hope of his county. A Patterne was in the Marines. (7)
Presiding over young Willoughby, the “ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible”
echoes the collective gaze instituting The Scarlet Letter, the “heavy weight of a thousand
unrelenting eyes” (Hawthorne 2005, 42). Collective focalization in its visual manifestation (but
also in other ways) is thus inscribed into both of these narratives. Both individual characters,
Willoughby and Hester, are from the onset physically enveloped by social minds, the latter
attaining an explicit narrative (co-)presence. While Hester faces a hostile Puritan community
immediately surrounding her, in Willoughby’s case it is his fatherly family line, founded by
Simon Patterne, which establishes the social structure into which his life is placed. The family
line is analogically embodied by the image of the oak tree representing the continuity of
succeeding Patterne patriarchs.
The passage includes further instances of collective characters. For example, possible
enemies which may pose a threat to the fertile growth of the family tree come in the shape of
such unspecified collectives as “those agents of destruction, besieging relatives”. In terms of
the tree analogy, they translate as “parasites” and are then again described as “Pauper
Patternes”. Mind-telling terms such as “agents of destruction” clearly convey sarcasm and thus
a distinct authorial attitude.
It should also be noted that the narrative features a collective addressee from the first section
onwards. When the omniscient speaker remarks in parenthesis that “we may truly say”, he
administrates his narratorial office by mentioning what at first sight appears to be a pluralis
modestiae, the plural of modesty, comprising the author and his readers. In this particular case,
however, it may also carry tones and traces of the pluralis majestatis, the ‘royal we’ of high
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office. As this we-voice is to recur throughout the novel and constitutes a collectivitydesignating narrative phenomenon, it can serve as a starting point for my examinations of the
shapes in which social minds feature in The Egoist. The novel’s opening section constitutes a
pattern which, apart from the narrator’s we-voice, contains many more such devices.
I. Who
Intimate Minimalism
Generally, the novel does not brim with social minds on the level of story. It nonetheless does
present instances of collective characters, including minimal units consisting of two characters.
Specifically, Willoughby and Clara, the two main characters attempting but failing to get
married, form a minimal they-unit:
The world was the principal topic of dissension between these lovers [Willoughby and
Clara]. His opinion of the world affected her like a creature threatened with a deprivation of
air. He explained to his darling that lovers of necessity do loathe the world. They live in the
world, they accept its benefits, and assist it as well as they can. In their hearts they must
despise it, shut it out, that their love for one another may pour in a clear channel, and with
all the force they have. They cannot enjoy the sense of security for their love unless they
fence away the world. It is, you will allow, gross; it is a beast. Formally we thank it for the
good we get of it; only we two have an inner temple where the worship we conduct is
actually, if you would but see it, an excommunication of the world. We abhor that beast to
adore that divinity. This gives us our oneness, our isolation, our happiness. This is to love
with the soul. Do you see, darling? She shook her head; she could not see it. She would admit
none of the notorious errors of the world; its back-biting, selfishness, coarseness,
intrusiveness, infectiousness. She was young. She might, Willoughby thought, have let
herself be led: she was not docile. (40)
Rather than displaying an instance of a minimal social mind blending two lovers into a state of
unanimity, however, the passage precisely thwarts this scenario. The female character resists
being absorbed into the romantic reclusion which the male character proposes: “[H]is opinion
165
of the world affected her like a creature threatened with a deprivation of air”. The mind-telling
simile goes as far as intimating a sentiment of dehumanization on the young woman’s part
(“like a creature threatened with a deprivation of air”), caused by her male counterpart’s ideas
about their relationship. The specific shape which this lovers-unit is supposedly to take exists
above all in Willoughby’s imagination and imposes an isolationist model of ‘they mentality’
on Clara. She, however, clearly opposes his view of them: “She shook her head; she could not
see it. […] She was not docile”. The passage thus displays the interesting example of an intimate
minimal unit, two lovers, which never quite merges into complete collectivity, but remains
fragile. Though referred to as ‘they’, the two individuals do not dissolve into the romantic
togetherness insinuated by that pronoun in this context.
This minimal, if frail, social mind reappears in the shape of a hypothetical encounter. Rather
than an actual meeting of minds, the following instance narrates a conjectural one. It presents
the main male character, Willoughby, and a young woman he wishes to marry, Clara:
What would he think? They [Clara and Willoughby] might never meet, for her to know. Or
one day in the Alps they might meet, a middle-aged couple, he famous, she regretful only to
have fallen below his lofty standard. (204; emphasis added)
The projection into the fictional future of the possibility of a meeting serves a very particular
purpose here, elucidating the actual shared experience between the two characters in the
fictional present. Nevertheless, the passage is significant in that it presents a non-actual might
(never) be scenario, conveyed first through hypothetical mind-showing (“they might never
meet”; “they might meet”), before mind-telling takes over to explicate the semantics of such an
encounter (“a middle-aged couple, he famous, she regretful only to have fallen below his lofty
standard”) which again breaks the unit apart into its individual constituents. Though it appears
in a fragile, failed form here, the phenomenon of intimate minimalism counts as a significant
illustration of the collective characters participating in the novel.
166
Sub-Groups
As a slightly larger exemplification of social minds, the novel repeatedly presents sub-groups,
for instance in this section:
There was a story of a brilliant young widow of our aristocracy who had very nearly snared
him [Willoughby]. Why should he object to marry into our aristocracy? Mrs. Mountstuart
asked him, and he replied, that the girls of that class have no money, and he doubted the
quality of their blood. (16; emphasis added)
The (Victorian) ‘we’ entity installed in the novel’s beginning continues to be the chief collective
in this passage which gets further clarified as the narrator foregrounds a particular sub-group,
“our aristocracy”, emerging out of the narrative’s plot line. In fact, it emerges out of a peculiar
sample of a story-within-the-story, which is presumably common knowledge among storyworld
participants: “there was a story of a brilliant young widow of our aristocracy”. Though this
latter sub-group attains its narrative presence as a discursive object – a complementary foil on
which the foregrounded individual characters execute their (speech-) actions –, this background
presence assumes the shape of a particular social group (“our aristocracy”). It is through mindtelling, moreover, that the narrator conveys the male character’s doubts about “the quality of
their blood”, invoking the dimensions of ethical motivation, both on the part of the character
(Willoughby) and on the part of the group thus described.
Another sub-group in The Egoist are unspecified witness-characters who likewise wield
their influence from backgrounded positions. At one point the narrator employs mind-telling to
explain the modalities of “observers”:
Observers of a gathering complication and a character in action commonly resemble gleaners
who are intent only on picking up the ears of grain and huddling their store. Disinterestedly
or interestedly they wax over-eager for the little trifles, and make too much of them.
Observers should begin upon the precept, that not all we see is worth hoarding, and that the
things we see are to be weighed in the scale with what we know of the situation, before we
commit ourselves to a measurement. And they may be accurate observers without being
good judges. They do not think so, and their bent is to glean hurriedly and form conclusions
as hasty, when their business should be to sift at each step, and question. (193)
167
Rather than presenting this group as actors engaged in the plot, the narrator (again) confronts
readers with information on a disembodied, general they-unit, “observers”. The narrator
attributes characteristics to this sub-group through such mind-telling noun phrases as “of a
gathering complication and a character in action”. The “observers” are further portrayed by
means of an analogy and the principle of collectives in collective context (“Observers […]
commonly resemble gleaners […]”). The narrator then makes normative statements about this
group (“should begin upon the precept”; “when their business should be”) which likewise rest
upon the assumption of a shared cognition and intentionality on the part of the observers.
The rather astonishing aspect is that the collective which the narrator vicariously addresses
here is not an intradiegetic one participating in the fictional world, not even an extradiegetic
one participating in the narrator’s world, and not even an extra-fictional one participating in the
actual world. It is, rather, a hypothetical collective, constructed by the narrator’s discourse.
Though doubtlessly of collective nature, the group invoked here by the narrator remains vague,
unspecified and above all disembodied. All the more surprising is the significance which the
narrator nevertheless ascribes to this group.
Men and Women: “The Difference! The Difference!”
The narrator’s tendency to lift the contents of his discursive reflections into gnomic universality
is nowhere more manifest than in a major thematic strand which pervades the novel from
beginning to end, his discourse on ‘men and women’, as exemplified by this sentence: “[M]en
are so little chivalrous [now], that no miracle ever intervenes” (168). The novel is suffused with
such utterances which openly address the gender politics of human affairs both in terms of their
purportedly universal implications and also in terms of Victorian society as a historical
formation unique to nineteenth-century Britain. The quotation above in fact encompasses both
dimensions as, though cast as a gnomic aphorism, it specifies its historical position by stating
that “men are so little chivalrous now”, meaning the time of the plot, i.e. nineteenth-century
Britain. The narrator’s discourse comprises various more specific narrative-technical operations
already identified above. In the following, I look more closely at the technical diversity by
which the topic of ‘men and women’ is rendered.
The first instance I quote operates according to the narrator’s typical method of appending
a discourse about collectives to the presentation of an individual (homodiegetic) character. The
scene presents an exchange between the characters of Dr. Middleton and Willoughby, witnessed
and reacted to by Clara:
168
She [Clara] sighed and put a tooth on her underlip. The gift of humourous [sic] fancy is in
women fenced round with forbidding placards; they have to choke it; if they perceive a piece
of humour, for instance, the young Willoughby grasped by his master, and his horrified
relatives rigid at the sight of preparations for the deed of sacrilege, they have to blindfold
the mind’s eye. They are society’s hard-drilled soldiery, Prussians that must both march and
think in step. It is for the advantage of the civilized world, if you like, since men have decreed
it, or matrons have so read the decree; but here and there a younger woman, haply an
uncorrected insurgent of the sex matured here and there, feels that her lot was cast with her
head in a narrower pit than her limbs. (67; emphasis added)
Overall, the passage again contextualizes individual characters (Clara, Willoughby) in the light
of collective considerations. The passage also abounds with metaphorical expressions.
Particularly noteworthy is an(other) analogy from the military domain which, in addition, avails
itself of a national stereotype to shed light on a social mind: “[T]hey are a society’s hard-drilled
soldiery, Prussians that must both march and think in step”. The passage continues with an
instance of factual world-making (“the civilized world”), before invoking a general figure
(“here and there a younger woman”). Thus employing manifold techniques, the passage is
nevertheless thematically centered on gender relations. Mind-telling sustains the narrative’s
negotiation of men and women by formulating such statements as “the gift of humourous [sic]
fancy is in women fenced round with forbidding placards […]”. Such an explicit attribution of
a gender-based collective trait is perpetuated in the next quotation. Clara is about to speak with
her father, Dr. Middleton, about a change of her feelings for Willoughby:
She [Clara] had heard women abused for shallowness and flightiness: she had heard her
father denounce them as veering weather-vanes, and his oft-repeated quid femina possit: for
her sex’s sake, and also to appear an exception to her sex, this reasoning creature desired to
be thought consistent. (147)
The passage retains the novel’s prevalent mode of embedding individuals in collective context.
More poignantly than in other scenes, however, mind-telling reveals the individual character’s
mental functioning as consciously counteracting the male prejudice which understands the
female sex in terms of “shallowness”, “flightiness” and, metaphorically, as “veering weathervanes”. Mind-telling makes explicit that the character’s motivation derives from precisely this
169
nexus: “for her sex’s sake, and also to appear an exception to her sex, this reasoning creature
desired to be thought consistent”. The character adjusts her cognition according to (the social
perception of) her collective type, and it is through mind-telling that these cognitive contents
are openly related. A similar case occurs later in the novel, when another female character is
haunted by “the difference! the difference!” of her gender group:
She [Clara] was almost imagining she might imitate him [Vernon], when the clash of a sharp
physical thought: “The difference! the difference!” told her she was woman and never could
submit. Can a woman have an inner life apart from him she is yoked to? She tried to nestle
deep away in herself: in some corner where the abstract view had comforted her, to flee from
thinking as her feminine blood directed. It was a vain effort. The difference, the cruel fate,
the defencelessness of women, pursued her, strung her to wild horses’ backs, tossed her on
savage wastes. In her case duty was shame: hence, it could not be broadly duty. That
intolerable difference proscribed the word. (166; emphasis added)
The passage first personifies a thought as acting on Clara’s mind with the sudden eruption of
an epiphany. The emphatic rendering of “[T]he difference! the difference!” crystallizes the
gender-based inner conflict troubling the character, so that the paradoxical entity of “a sharp
physical thought” raises its voice inside the young woman. Mind-telling turns Clara’s mind into
an arena where forces clash and dramatic actions occur. The ‘difference’ of her female identity
morphs into an impulse which is inimical to the character’s attempt to liberate herself from the
gender prejudices preventing her self-realization. In such a lively way are these internal
pressures dramatized that mind-telling fuses with mind-showing in this scenario: “[T]he
difference, the cruel fate, the defencelessness of women, pursued her, strung her to wild horses’
backs, tossed her on savage wastes”. In its histrionic display of ebullient inner impulses, the
sentence is reminiscent Romantic fiction. Only mind-telling is capable of communicating,
crafting, and commenting on such (gender) dynamics operating in a character’s mind.
Here is another passage which attends to Clara’s situation and which functions similarly,
defining the character as a “representative of her sex”:
But she [Laetitia] was jealous on behalf of her sex: her sex’s reputation seemed at stake, and
the purity of it was menaced by Clara’s idle preference of the shallower man. When the
young lady spoke so carelessly of being like Crossjay, she did not perhaps know that a
likeness, based on a similarity of their enthusiasms, loves, and appetites, has been established
170
between women and boys. Lætitia had formerly chafed at it, rejecting it utterly, save when
now and then in a season of bitterness she handed here and there a volatile young lady (none
but the young) to be stamped with the degrading brand. Vernon might be as philosophical as
he pleased. To her the gaiety of these two, Colonel De Craye and Clara Middleton, was
distressingly musical: they harmonized painfully. The representative of her sex was hurt by
it. (268-269)
Not only does the narrator depict the individual characters in this scene as ‘representing’ the
larger categories of “sex”, “women” and “boys”, but furthermore indicates that the semantic
relevance of their interactions derives from these collective contexts. In the first sentence,
accordingly, “she [Laetitia] was jealous on behalf of her sex: her sex’s reputation seemed at
stake, and the purity of it was menaced by Clara’s idle preference for the shallower man”. Note
again that it is the mind-telling mode which makes these circumstances explicit through such
noun phrases as “on behalf of her sex”, “her sex’s reputation” and “the purity of it”. It is likewise
the mind-telling mode which, capturing “the gaiety of these two [De Craye and Clara]” and the
evaluative rendition that “they harmonized painfully”, foregrounds a small social unit as
prompting ambivalent feelings relating to the larger gender class(es) on Laetitia’s part: “the
representative of her sex was hurt by it”. It may be the case that a profound irony pervades the
novel, epitomized by the comic spirit. The narrative reflects grammatically that the individual
characters are placed within the overarching and powerful collective forces of socially ingrained
gender relations.
The novel also features scenes in which it is exclusively in the individual character’s mind
that collective phenomena are negotiated. The following instance illustrates this pithily:
She [Clara] choked. There are times when there is no medicine for us in sages, we want
slaves; we scorn to temporize, we must overbear. On she sped, as if she had made the mistake
of exchanging words with a post. The scene between herself and Willoughby was a thick
mist in her head, except the burden and result of it, that he held to her fast, and would neither
assist her to depart nor disengage her.
Oh, men! men! They astounded the girl; she could not define them to her understanding.
Their motives, their tastes, their vanity, their tyranny, and the domino on their vanity, the
baldness of their tyranny, clenched her in feminine antagonism to brute power. (272-273;
emphasis added)
171
The consideration takes place entirely inside the character’s mind but unmistakably stands in
intimate connection with social relations, especially concerning the male species. Mind-telling
first uses a metaphorical expression to render the character’s attention as being concentrated on
one other individual as “the scene between herself and Willoughby was a thick mist in her head
[…]”. However, the narrator then immediately moves the character’s thoughts away from this
one-on-one scenario into reflections on the male species in general. The shift from individual
male character to general male collective in the girl’s mind is in fact marked by an enclave of
free indirect discourse which could hardly be more explicit: “[O]h, men! men!” The narrator’s
subsequent mind-telling retains the female character’s perspective as “they [men] astounded
the girl; she could not define them to her understanding”. In a spectacularly figurative way,
mind-telling then (again) dramatizes (male) collective qualities as actors inside the character’s
mind: “their motives, their tastes, their vanity, their tyranny, and the domino on their vanity,
the baldness of their tyranny, clenched her feminine antagonism to brute power”. A veritable
mind theater is thus orchestrated by the narrator’s mind-telling discourse, vitally played by
parameters of male collective mentality.
Another section which deserves attention as an exemplification of how the narrative
negotiates a collective female identity (examples about men are to follow soon) appears a few
pages after the one just cited:
Maidens are commonly reduced to read the masters of their destinies by their instincts; and
when these have been edged by over-activity, they must hoodwink their maidenliness to
suffer themselves to read: and then they must dupe their minds, else men would soon see
they were gifted to discern. Total ignorance being their pledge of purity to men, they have
to expunge the writing of their perceptives on the tablets of the brain: they have to know not
when they do know. The instinct of seeking to know, crossed by the task of blotting
knowledge out, creates that conflict of the natural with the artificial creature to which their
ultimately-revealed double-face, complained of by ever-dissatisfied men, is owing. Wonder
in no degree that they indulge a craving to be fools, or that many of them act the character.
Jeer at them as little for not showing growth. You have reared them to this pitch, and at this
pitch they have partly civilized you. Supposing you to want it done wholly, you must yield
just as many points in your requisitions as are needed to let the wits of young women reap
their due harvest and be of good use to their souls. You will then have a fair battle, a braver,
with better results. (170)
172
The narrator’s irony is clearly palpable. The passage is a distinct example of an extended stretch
of narrative discourse, contextualizing but not advancing the plot, which makes it perfect
material for a mind-telling analysis, as does the concentration on the collective mind of
“maidens”. Perhaps one of the first aspects to notice is the you narratee as opposed to the we
group which the narrator typically addresses in the novel. The narrator speaks to an audience
of males who supposedly share a set of (patriarchal) assumptions about gender relations, more
specifically the role of women. This triggers ideological recuperation and poses the issue of
authorial attitude.
Yet more pertinent are the ways in which the narrator conveys the specific contents of this
passage. Mind-telling negotiates the young women’s collective mentality in such sentences as
“maidens are commonly reduced to read the master of their destinies by their instincts […]”,
which in fact involves three groups. An explicit inter-collective relation is manifested between
“maidens” and “their masters”. A third collective can be extrapolated from the passive voice
used in this sentence (“are commonly reduced”), which suggests a habitual, socially ingrained
way of conceiving “maidens” and, by implication, gender relations more generally. But who
constitutes this third group conducting the ‘reducing’? Despite the tendency into gnomic
universality of this passage, the readily available candidate would be: Victorian society during
the period in which the novel is set. The sentence thus accommodates a double temporality in
that it is cast in a gnomic present tense, but relates contents of a historically specific scenario,
thus invoking diachronic variability. Concomitantly, the sentence contains a double
referentiality in that all three collectives – maidens, masters and the extrapolated instance of
Victorian society – are fictional elements of the novel and at the same time exist in the empirical
world outside the novel.
The passage goes on provide details of the maidens’ mental architecture, which, purportedly,
is based on the necessity to suppress all instincts for learning, knowing and thinking, in order
to remain desirable for men: “[T]otal ignorance being their pledge of purity to men, they have
to expunge the writing of their perceptives on the tablets of the brain: they have to know not
when they do know”. The return of the repressed, however, is imminent, as “the instinct of
seeking to know, crossed by the task of blotting knowledge out, creates that conflict of the
natural with the artificial creature to which their ultimately-revealed double-face, complained
of by ever-dissatisfied men, is owing”. Saturated with narratorial irony, the passage is a clear
instance of mind-telling about a collective they-unit. It is the mind-telling mode which indeed
allows the narrator to convey a distinct stance through his discourse in the first place. How does
this come about technically?
173
Note, for one, the abstract, noun-based language used by the narrator to reveal the maidens’
“total ignorance” and “pledge of purity to men”. Note, further, the figurative scenario involved
in the maidens’ “writing of their perceptives on the tables of the brain”, a scenario which ends
in the narrator’s concluding proclamation that “they have to know not when they do know”.
Arguably the most peculiar use of language by the narrator is his way of articulating the
resulting quandary in the maidens’ minds, namely “that conflict of the natural with the artificial
creature to which their ultimately-revealed double-face, complained of by ever-dissatisfied
men, is owing”.
The fact that all of the techniques just mentioned are combined in this passage is not even
the most significant characteristic. Rather, what emerges from it as an even more momentous
capacity is the narrator’s practice of phrasing the maidens’ experiential condition(s) in a
discourse about that experientiality. In its attempt to explain the maidens’ alleged “doubleface”, the narrator’s discursive elaboration of “that conflict” betrays a predilection towards
‘psycho-analysis’, meaning literally the analysis, rather than the representation, of the maidens’
(Victorian) frame of mind.
In addition to focusing on female groups, The Egoist also negotiates male collectives, as this
passage testifies:
Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, or they shoot us higher than the
topmost star. But it is as we please. Let them tell us what we are to them: for us, they are our
back and front of life: the poet’s Lesbia, the poet’s Beatrice; ours is the choice. And were it
proved that some of the bright things are in the pay of Darkness, with the stamp of his coin
on their palms, and that some are the very angels we hear sung of, not the less might we say
that they find us out, they have us by our leanings. They are to us what we hold of best or
worst within. By their state is our civilization judged: and if it is hugely animal still, that is
because primitive men abound and will have their pasture. Since the lead is ours, the leaders
must bow their heads to the sentence. Jealousy of a woman, [sic] is the primitive egoism
seeking to refine in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of an invasion of rights; it
is in action the tiger threatened by a rifle when his paw is rigid on quick flesh; he tears the
flesh for rage at the intruder. The Egoist, who is our original male in giant form, had no
bleeding victim beneath his paw, but there was the sex to mangle. Much as he prefers the
well-behaved among women, who can worship and fawn, and in whom terror can be
inspired, in his wrath he would make of Beatrice a Lesbia Quadrantaria. (190-191)
174
It is a decidedly male collective which is addressed in this section as “women have us back to
the conditions of primitive man, or they shoot us higher than the topmost star”. Crucially,
however, women emerge as the counterforce which guides men. Nothing less than the progress
of civilization, allegedly, rests on them: “[T]hey are to us what we hold to be our best or worst
within. By their state is our civilization judged: and it is hugely animal still, that is because
primitive men abound and will have their pasture”. The narrative discourse employs a ‘them in
relation to us’ schema, but not, as is often the case, to express a quarrel between two hostile
collectives (‘them versus us’). Instead, men and women are assumed to coexist, meaning that
their relations to each other need to be negotiated in terms of the inevitable social and biological
contract binding the two gender groups. The force threatening peaceful togetherness –
“primitive egoism” – arises from within men. The narrative discourse unambiguously uses the
mind-telling mode to discuss the permanent particulars governing these relations.
In that process, the narrative flaunts a number of phenomena. The most prominent of them,
already hinted at above, is the narrator’s membership in the male ‘us’-group. The narrator in
effect gets ‘personified’, meaning that his otherwise omniscient invisibility turns into a
palpable, if disembodied, participation. Akin to the first-person singular (‘I’) references one
sometimes encounters in omniscient narration, the reference here, however, is to the first-person
plural (‘we’), reflecting a factual, heterodiegetic, diachronic collective of males including the
narrator himself. Second, the diachronic dimension is enhanced by the intertextual references
to the female characters of Lesbia (Catullus) and Beatrice (Dante) which increases the sense
that male-female gender relations in this narrative need to be seen in the light of the historical
developments and prior negotiations in literature and the arts. As the most intimate shape of
shared experience, the relation between man and woman is arguably also the most momentous
bond in human affairs. Metaphor is another pervasive device through which this is conveyed.
The most visually elaborate analogy occurs towards the end, when man as infested with
“primitive egoism” is described as “the tiger threatened by a rifle when his paw is rigid on quick
flesh […]”, expressing the dialectics between primitivism and civilization operating in this
passage. The narrative discourse thus comprises several strategies which explicitly relate the
group minds of men and women.
The next passage maintains the perspective of a male we-collective, showing that even when
women’s view s rendered, a male we-collective remains in force:
175
Let women tell us of their side of the battle. We are not so much the test of the Egoist in
them as they to us. Movements of similarity shown in crowned and undiademed ladies of
intrepid independence, [sic] suggest their occasional capacity to be like men when it is given
to them to hunt. At present they fly, and there is the difference. Our manner of the chase
informs them of the creature we are. (191)
In contrast to the passage above, the narrator here openly describes the relations between men
and women in terms of warfare: “[L]et women tell us their side of the battle”. This battle is in
fact metaphorically elaborated into a hunting scenario. The narrator, as part of the male ‘we’,
grants women the “occasional capacity to be like men when it is given to them to hunt” –
invoking the history of decisive female monarchs in British history (“crowned and undiademed
ladies of intrepid independence”) –, but concludes that “at present they fly, and there is the
difference”. Literary criticism which is not restricted to a formalist agenda could take these
communications as a starting point for diverse interpretive recuperations. For instance,
ideological criticism, feminist in particular, could ask to what extent the hunting scenario and
the concomitant binary choice between ‘hunting’ and ‘flying’ cements a patriarchal view of
gender identities. One could likewise trace the hunting motif in prior literary productions, such
as the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt, still without resorting to narratological instruments.
From a mind-telling point of view, the prime observation is the underlying condition that
the narrator openly discusses these group relations. The sentence which best illustrates the
narrator’s mind-telling in this passage is this: “[M]ovements of similarity in crowned and
undiademed ladies of intrepid independence, [sic] suggest their occasional capacity to be like
men when it is given to them to hunt”. The narrator formulates the shared mental disposition of
“crowned and undiademed ladies” mostly by means of noun phrases (“intrepid independence”,
“capacity to be like men”).
The ‘we’-perspective identifying the narrator as male (“let women tell us”), positions his
discourse in ironical terms and cautions readers about their responses to it. An ambiguity about
the narrator’s stance reigns in this mind-telling, which is continued in the next section:
Dimly as young women are informed, they have a youthful ardour of detestation that renders
them less tolerant of the Egoist than their perceptive elder sisters. What they do perceive,
however, they have a redoubtable grasp of, and Clara’s behaviour would be indefensible if
her detective feminine vision might not sanction her acting on its direction. (191)
176
The section contextualizes the individual character of Clara in the light of the collective of
“young women”, thus exemplifying one of the novel’s major methods of depicting social minds,
namely ‘individuals in collective context’. This encompasses hypothetical mind-telling as
“Clara’s behavior would be indefensible if her detective feminine vision might not sanction her
acting on its direction”. Earlier in the sentence, the narrative discourse focuses more overtly on
a collective mind when relating that “dimly as young women are informed, they have a youthful
ardour of detestation that renders them less tolerant of the Egoist than their perceptive elder
sisters”. Several mind-telling strategies cooperate in this latter statement to qualify the group of
“young women”. On a basic level, mind-telling declares them as being “dimly […] informed”
and as having “youthful ardour of detestation”, two static verbs enhanced by noun phrases
denoting permanent qualities, especially in the latter case. Further, the statement contrasts this
collective to a general individual, “the Egoist”, and also to a comparative collective, “their
perceptive elder sisters”. In its grammatical shape, reflecting a contextualizing as well as
evaluating tendency, this is an unequivocal specimen of mind-telling involving a collective.
A metaphorical expression dominates the following:
Very gentle women take in that manner impressions of persons, especially of the worshipped
person, wounding them; like the new fortifications with embankments of soft earth, where
explosive missiles bury themselves harmlessly until they are plucked out; and it may be a
reason why those injured ladies outlive a Clara Middleton similarly battered. (195; emphasis
added)
Focusing on the sub-group of “very gentle women”, the narrator first recounts their habitual
perceptions (“take in that manner impressions of persons […] wounding them”), before using
a metaphorical scenario to elucidate these particulars by means of a visual analogy: “[…] like
the new fortifications with embankments of soft earth, where explosive missiles bury
themselves harmlessly until they are plucked out […]”. The sense of martial combat conveyed
by the image of “explosive missiles” translates the process of the very gentle women’s being
wounded by the worshipped person into crass physical terms, implicitly reprimanding them for
their defenselessness. While the missile metaphor resonates with earlier depictions of malefemale relations described as a ‘them versus us’ schema, the passage then moves towards
employing these details about collectives in order to shed light on an individual woman, Clara
Middleton, according to the principle of ‘individuals in collective context’.
177
Note also the next passage:
Ladies, fatally predestined to appeal to that from which they have to be guarded, must expect
severity when they run off their railed highroad: justice is out of the question: man’s brains
might, his blood cannot administer it to them. By chilling him to the bone, they may get what
they cry for. But that is a method deadening to their point of appeal. (195)
The gnomic certainty with which the narrator pronounces his views on the contrast between
“ladies” and “man’s brains and blood” contains metaphorical elements (“railed highroad”) and
colloquial expressions (“by chilling him to the bone, the may get what they cry for”), but above
all contains irony and ridicule. Mind-telling first specifies that the ladies in this sentence are
“fatally predestined to appeal to that from which they have to be guarded” and, as a
consequence, “must expect severity when they run off their railed highroad”. While the first
instance is clearly mind-telling, because, by means of ellipsis, it uses a static verb (read: “[are]
fatally predestined”), the second sentence is noteworthy for its use of dynamic verbs (“must
expect”; “run”) to describe habitual actions rather than immediate executions. This latter
phenomenon also characterizes the curiously half-gnomic “by chilling him [man] to the bone,
they [the ladies] may get what they cry for”. Fully gnomic, yet interspersed with the ‘narrative’,
is the phrase “justice is out of the question”, while the concluding sentence, “but that is a method
deadening to their point of appeal”, again manifests an analytical mind-telling comment of
rather specific focus (“their point of appeal”).
Another contrast between men and women is addressed in these paragraphs:
The strangeness of men, young and old, the little things (she [Clara] regarded a grand wine
as a little thing) twisting and changing them, amazed her. And these are they by whom
women are abused for variability! Only the most imperious reasons, never mean trifles, move
women, thought she. Would women do an injury to one they loved for oceans of that — ah!
pah!
And women must respect men. They necessarily respect a father. “My dear, dear father!”
Clara said in the solitude of her chamber, musing on all his goodness, and she endeavoured
to reconcile the desperate sentiments of the position he forced her to sustain, with those of a
venerating daughter. (197)
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Readers stay within the mind of one character during these passages, yet the contents of this
individual mind straightforwardly move into collectivist considerations juxtaposing men and
women. Mind-telling and mind-showing coalesce to reveal that “the strangeness of men, young
and old, […] amazed her. And these are they by whom women are abused for variability!”
Though mind-showing is employed as the character in fact experiences these cognitions on the
spot, it is mind-telling which accounts for the abstract characterization of the men and women,
manifested by the nouns “strangeness” and “variability”. Such formulations do not even attempt
to render the character’s experience through maximal mimeticism, but betray the narrator’s
participation as he rephrases the character’s experience in mind-telling terms.
The same procedure characterizes the second paragraph. Particularly pertinent in this respect
is the curious blend of mind-showing and mind-telling which recounts that “[…] she
endeavoured to reconcile the desperate sentiments of the position he forced her to sustain, with
those of a venerating daughter”. The narrator explicates the character’s “desperate sentiments”
simultaneous to displaying them through language awkwardly intellectualized (“she
endeavoured to reconcile”). The character, furthermore, is depicted as the individual
exemplification of the dictum preceding her cognitive actions (“And women must respect men.
They necessarily respect a father”) as, “in the solitude of her chamber”, the character is
described as being immersed in the psychic dynamics of father-daughter relations.
In its very last paragraph, the novel returns to the decidedly collectivist light in which it
commences. The last paragraph contains a number of familiar phenomena:
So, and much so universally, the world of his dread and his unconscious worship wagged
over Sir Willoughby Patterne and his change of brides, until the preparations for the
festivities of the marriage flushed him in his county’s eyes to something of the splendid glow
he had worn on the great day of his majority. That was upon the season when two lovers met
between the Swiss and Tyrol Alps over the Lake of Constance. Sitting beside them the Comic
Muse is grave and sisterly. But taking a glance at the others of her late company of actors,
she compresses her lips. (425)
Various collectivity-related topics can be discerned in this passage. For example, the “two
lovers” from earlier in the novel reappear, now meeting over the Lake of Constance, in a
scenario clearly invoking a Romanticist Grand Tour scenario. Beside them sits “the Comic
Muse”, “grave and sisterly”, as the personified comic spirit accompanying the narrative’s
characters from the prelude onwards. The very close of the novel thus resumes the collectivist
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frame established in the prelude which is further evidenced by the comic muse’s final action:
“[…] taking a glance at the others of her late company of actors, she compresses her lips”. The
comic muse herself is the individual epitome of a principle of collective scope, and the
characters she deals with are the social minds of the “two lovers” and the larger unit of “her late
company of actors”.
The Victorian ‘We’: A Factual, Diachronic, Heterodiegetic Collective
Early in the novel the narrator specifies the ‘we’ he uses repeatedly in his omniscient discourse,
identifying it as a decidedly British national collective and thus transcending, redefining the
boundaries of both ‘royal’ (king and his subjects) and ‘modest’ (author and readership) we.
Interesting for a research agenda which consciously compares fictional and historiographical
prose is that Meredith’s narrator defines the Victorian we in this narrative in terms of factual
British history, a referential gesture which, clearly resembling Hawthorne’s overt reference to
Puritanism in The Scarlet Letter, anchors the novel’s fictional discourse in empirical reality. In
the following early, constitutive instance of this type of ‘we’, the narrator alternates between
‘we’-passages and his regular omniscient discourse displaying the (mostly female) individual
characters around Willoughby:
We are a small island, but you see what we do. The ladies at the Hall, Sir Willoughby’s
mother, and his aunts Eleanor and Isabel, were more affected than he by the circumstance of
their having a Patterne in the Marines. But how then! We English have ducal blood in
business: we have, genealogists tell us, royal blood in common trades. For all our pride we
are a queer people; and you may be ordering butcher’s meat of a Tudor, sitting on the canebottom chairs of a Plantagenet. (8; emphasis added)
Similar to Hawthorne’s discourse on seventeenth-century American Puritanism, Meredith
negotiates the British nation’s collective identity by mind-telling means in this passage. Note,
for instance, the narrator’s self-attribution that “we are a small island” which defines the
nation’s insular ontology in terms of its physical space – its collective embodiment, as one may
say. Mind-telling’s static verbs (“we are”), correspondingly, are the grammatical shape by
which the narrator further relates that “we have ducal blood in business: we have, genealogists
tell us, royal blood in common trades” and that “for all our pride we are a queer people”. The
narrator further enhances his use of mind-telling through a possessive noun phrase, “our pride”,
before adding the wider diachronic contexts of two royal family lines in English history, the
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Plantagenets and the Tudors, which were crucially involved in preparing (Plantagenets) and
founding (Tudors) the British Empire and, thus, modern British identity.
More significant for my analysis in this incipient section of the novel is that the narrator uses
mind-telling about a collective. As the passage above establishes a rather particular ‘we’ – the
collective British nation as an empirical entity of factual status and reference –, readers will see
all subsequent instances in connection with this first one. Technically, the narrator expands his
own individual persona into a we-collective which is located outside the story world. One must
in fact perceive that this collective is not one historically specific group, but that it takes the
shape of the diachronic, transgenerational evolution of England’s entire population (“we are a
queer people”), as the reference to the early royal families proves. Employing ‘we’, I argue, the
narrator inscribes the factual, diachronic, heterodiegetic British national collective into the
novel as a collective narratee.
It is from a male perspective, significantly, that the narrator focalizes this we-persona. This
circumstance becomes crucial in the light of the fact that, as shown above, the novel’s narrative
discourse permanently contextualizes its individual characters by negotiating gender relations,
typically in the shape of the generalized groups of men and women. The novel sustains a gnomic
discourse which, similar to its references to factual history, involves an extratextualist deictics,
openly pointing towards real-life recuperation. Take these two passages, for instance:
Marriage has been known to have such an effect on the most faithful of women, that a great
passion fades to naught in their volatile bosoms when they have taken a husband. We see in
women especially the triumph of the animal over the spiritual. (74; emphasis added)
“Women!” said he [Willoughby].
We do not expect so much of women; the heroic virtues as little as the vices. They have
not to unfold the scroll of character. [narrator] (76; emphasis added)
What appears as a quasi-universal, gender-blind British nation in the initial we-statement above
gets drastically redefined here into a dominantly patriarchal (Victorian?) mentality witnessing
and commenting the narrative events in the shape of a heterodiegetic chorus, surfacing
intermittently in the novel, with the narrator as spokesperson. Significantly, the narrator’s
attempt(s) to define “women” involves abstract moralistic qualities and ideological
recuperation on both occasions, evident in such mind-telling phrases as “the triumph of the
animal over the spiritual” and “the heroic virtues” and “vices”.
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Such phrases invariably set the novel in relation to earlier, especially Medieval, modes of
narration in which the embodiment of typological contrasts of the ‘physical vs spiritual’ and
‘virtue vs vice’ variety were vital projects on the narrative agenda. Trans-periodical continuities
of this kind increase the sense of a diachronic collective being addressed and implicated by the
‘Victorian’ we in these passages from The Egoist. The narrator himself overtly construes such
similarities, sustained across the centuries, when, above, he invokes the Plantagenets and the
Tudors to contemplate the we’s collective mentality. Numerous further passages maintain this
we-voice which, however, as further sections below will demonstrate, morphs into a malleable
collective with shifting attitudes in the novel. ‘We’ turns out to be a rather mutable entity which
(re)appears in modified shapes, designating multiplex groups.
II. How
Collective Contexts
The dominant mind-telling principle that Meredith’s narrator applies is contextualizing
individual characters within larger collective frameworks which do not appear as collective
protagonists on the story level. In the overriding majority of cases collectivity is thus an explicit,
but heterodiegetic, dimension in the narrator’s discourse: groups do not participate as actively
in the plot as in other fictional narratives such as The Scarlet Letter. As the analysis above
shows, the emphasis in The Egoist in terms of homodiegetic participants is on individual
characters, apart from a small number of ‘intermental encounters’ (Palmer 2010) during social
gatherings featuring in the plot. The principle of collective contexts hinges on the conditions
that these two diegetic levels are intertwined to the effect that intra-narrative individual
characters are framed in direct relation to the extra-narrative collectives. Frequently, the plot
negotiates wider collective constellations of allegedly essentialist implications. This practice
establishes a substantial difference to novels, such as The Scarlet Letter, which feature
influential homodiegetic collectives in their character cast. The Egoist, rather, uses mind-telling
to introduce its social minds chiefly on an additional discursive level. These three passages
illustrate the technique:
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With the wit to understand him [Willoughby], and the heart to worship, she [Clara] had a
dignity rarely seen in young ladies. (37; emphasis added)
She [Clara] preferred to be herself, with the egoism of women! (41, emphasis added)
Supposing Clara heard the world’s version first! Men whose pride is their backbone suffer
convulsions where other men are barely aware of a shock, and Sir Willoughby was taken
with galvanic jumpings of the spirit within him, at the idea of the world whispering to Clara
that he had been jilted. (55-56; emphasis added)
The first two instances function according to a procedure which declares the female character
(Clara) to pertain to the categories of “young ladies” and “women”. In both cases, these
discursive placements into what appear to be collective universals, or types, involve mindtelling. The first example commences with mind-telling about the ‘young lady’ as an individual
character equipped “with the wit to understand him, and the heart to worship”, but continues
by focusing on how this individual character’s mentality compares to her general type as “she
had a dignity rarely seen in young ladies”. The single protagonist’s cognitive and affective
qualities, in other words, are annotated in terms of the mentality of her gender peers, the latter
presumably existing as a stable cliché collective. True, imbued with the comic spirit, the
narrator peppers his phrases with cheeky irony. Yet the sentence nevertheless aptly illustrates
the technical operation of collective contextualization.
While this first example adduces an aspect differentiating the character from other ‘young
ladies’, the second one pronounces how the individual character’s mind chimes with what is
posited here by the narrator as a general female trait. It is again through mind-telling that this
apparently gender-typological dispositions is articulated: “she preferred to be herself, with the
egoism of women!” A rather typical mind-telling device, such with-phrases are frequently used
by omniscient narrators in realist prose to qualify a character’s thoughts, acts or utterances in a
particular light. In this sentence, the with-phrase creates a link between the female character
and the presumably stable and diachronically continuous group of “women” and their “egoism”.
The with-phrase is thus (re-)utilized for the purposes of indicating the character’s membership
in a superordinate group. The mind-telling component on which this passage is based, a
collective female “egoism”, carries an especially pointed irony as it stands in overt opposition
to the novel’s overall drive: The Egoist refers to a male individual.
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The third instance then indeed contextualizes a male individual character within his larger typegroup(s), likewise clearly marked by its gender, though the order by which this comes about is
reversed compared to the first two passages above. Mind-telling here first sub-divides the
universal collective of ‘men’ into those males “whose pride is their backbone” and those other
males “who are barely aware of the shock”, before it then relates the individual character,
Willoughby, as being “taken with galvanic jumpings of the spirit within him […]”. What
becomes clear overall is that, besides the technical mechanism of individuals being placed into
the context of wider collectives, this strategy is employed to mediate such mind-telling contents
as “pride”, “shock” and “spirit”. The explicit emphasis in all three cases is on cognitive and
affective dispositions, revealing not only the individual characters’ minds but also those of their
peer groups. Biased towards negotiating gender relations, moreover, The Egoist mostly relates
variations of the ‘men vs women’ schema (see below). Generally speaking, novels realize the
principle of individuals in collective context by presenting professional groups (e.g. lawyers,
farmers), class-related categories (e.g. proletarians, aristocrats), character-typological aspects
(e.g. villains, heroines), geographical groups (e.g. Northerners, Southerners) or other such subcollectives. The Egoist itself at times features such specified collectives, or sub-groups (see
below). The vital condition in all three instances above, at any rate, is that Meredith’s
omniscient narrator relates cognitive traits of purportedly universal gender collectives.
Unambiguously, these are examples of mind-telling about collectives.
Another phenomenon which recurs in the novel pertains to collectives being openly
contrasted with other collectives. This principle thus involves no individual characters, but it
nonetheless has to be noted that the groups which are being compared come, again, as
heterodiegetic universals rather than homodiegetic participants. The following passage displays
this phenomenon:
Now men whose incomes have been restricted to the extent that they must live on their
capital, soon grow relieved of the forethoughtful anguish wasting them by the hilarious
comforts of the lap upon which they have sunk back, insomuch that they are apt to solace
themselves for their intolerable anticipations of famine in the household by giving loose to
one fit or more of reckless lavishness. Lovers in like manner live on their capital from failure
of income: they, too, for the sake of stifling apprehension and piping to the present hour, are
lavish of their stock, so as rapidly to attenuate it: they have their fits of intoxication in view
of coming famine: they force memory into play, love retrospectively, enter the old house of
the past and ravage the larder, and would gladly, even resolutely, continue in illusion if it
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were possible for the broadest honey-store of reminiscences to hold out for a length of time
against a mortal appetite: which in good sooth stands on the alternative of a consumption of
the hive or of the creature it is for nourishing. Here do lovers show that they are perishable.
(47-48; emphasis added)
In typical mind-telling manner, the section contrasts two collectives which are not involved in
the plot as embodied beings operating in the fictional world of the novel (unlike “the throng of
bearded men” in The Scarlet Letter). Rather, they appear in the shape of two unspecified
discursive groups: ‘men’ and ‘lovers’.
Nonetheless, it is rather astounding that the narrative discourse employs the mind-telling
mode to detail the cognition of these indistinct collectives, thus ineluctably pretending to be in
possession of solid epistemic insights about their shared mentality. In fact, the comparison
between the two concerns exclusively their mental functioning. Accordingly, the men of the
first group “soon grow relieved of the forethoughtful anguish wasting them” and “are apt to
solace themselves for their intolerable anticipations of famine in the household by giving loose
to one fit or more of reckless lavishness”. “Lovers in like manner” are presented in terms of the
cognitive implications which this ‘role’ entails. For instance, “they have their fits of intoxication
in view of coming famine”. Since readers learn nothing whatsoever about the spatio-temporal
particulars of these group identities, readers indeed encounter nothing but the mind-telling
about them.
This, I perceive, exemplifies a phenomenon Fludernik mentions in Towards a ‘Natural’
Narratology, as she redefines narrativity on the basis of the critical factor of ‘experientiality’.
Fludernik writes that “narrativity can emerge from the experiential portrayal of dynamic event
sequences which are already configured emotively and evaluatively, but it can also consist in
the experiential depiction of human consciousness tout court” (Fludernik 1996, 30; emphasis
original). It is the latter – “the experiential depiction of human consciousness tout court” –
which features in the passage about the two groups above. These two collectives dot not carry
out “dynamic event sequences” nor even one static physical actions (such as “being assembled”,
as the “throng of bearded men” in The Scarlet Letter), but are compared only in terms of their
habitual group cognition.
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Personification, Metaphor, and More
Remarkably, Meredith resembles the historians under scrutiny here in that he explicitly
personifies and dramatizes ideas. This is evident already in the novel’s prelude which launches
the ‘Comic Spirit’ and the ‘Book of Egoism’ as the major forces overarching and governing the
fictional events. Furthermore, the passage about ‘lovers’ already cited above encompasses an
illustration of the narrator overtly deciphering the notion of love in terms of the experience of
shared intimacy underlying it:
More than the poor clay world they [lovers] need fresh supplies, right wholesome juices; as
it were, life in the burst of the bud, fruits yet on the tree, rather than potted provender. The
latter is excellent for by-and-by, when there will be a vast deal more to remember, and
appetite shall have but one tooth remaining. Should their minds perchance have been
saturated by their first impressions and have retained them, loving by the accountable light
of reason, they may have fair harvests, as in the early time; but that case is rare. In other
words, love is an affair of two, and is only for two that can be as quick, as constant in
intercommunication as are sun and earth, through the cloud or face to face. They take their
breath of life from one another in signs of affection, proofs of faithfulness, incentives to
admiration. Thus it is with men and women in love’s good season. But a solitary soul
dragging a log, must make the log a God to rejoice in the burden. That is not love. (48;
emphasis added)
Though the passage emerges out of the plot as carried out by the novel’s individual protagonists,
it nonetheless manifests an extended stretch of discourse apart from that plot, moving into
gnomic universality by negotiating the idea of love in relation to a general, if minimal,
collective: “love is an affair of two”. This formulation shows that affective formats of universal
scope, such as a love, are intrinsically collectivist: in order to be realized, they require the
formation and maintenance of social minds. The end of the passage accentuates this condition
by way of negation as “a solitary soul dragging a log, must make the log a God to rejoice in the
burden. That is not love”.
Mind-telling is the suitable mode to elaborate on the further particulars of this intimate social
mind and its specific emotional contours. The fact that love is here described in its gnomic
dimension, for instance, is evidenced by the use of the temporal present. The narrative revives
this particular sample of how an idea (love) is morphed into a collective personification (lovers)
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when it relates, later in the novel, that “[I]f you know lovers when they have not reason to be
blissful, you will remember that in this mood of admiring envy they are given to fits of
uncontrollable maundering” (275).
Apart from personification, The Egoist features other types of metaphorical expressions as
additional ways of representing collective minds on the level of narrative discourse. In the
following section, for instance, the narrator employs a simile to characterize “men”:
She [Clara] kept Crossjay beside her till she dismounted, and the colonel was left to the
procession of elephantine ideas in his head, whose ponderousness he took for natural weight.
We do not with impunity abandon the initiative. Men who have yielded it are like cavalry
put on the defensive; a very small force with an ictus will scatter them. (183; emphasis added)
The metaphorical designation in terms of which “men who have yielded it” are characterized
occurs within the frame of a gnomic statement, conjuring up a contrastive scenario from the
military domain (“like cavalry put on the defensive”) in order to pronounce what purports to be
a timeless truth about a particular male collective. The narrator thus upholds his practice of
setting individual characters into collective contexts. In this case, the metaphorical expression
carries ironical and evaluative tones. Metaphors are a specifically effective means not so much
of telling minds per se, but of elucidating their role in the narrative’s dynamics and semantics.
Metaphors open up alternative, hypothetical scenarios through a mechanism of associative
suggestion which vicariously reflect back on the plot in multiple forms. Metaphorical
expressions thus eventually comment more openly and pointedly on the story (participants) than
any overt description or utterance by the narrator. As a consequence, however, metaphors do
not provide ‘factual’ information in the quantitative and logical sense. It is precisely for this
reason that metaphorical expressions appear in fictional narrative much more frequently and do
not seem out of place there. Factual narration surely employs analogical modes of speech as
well, including metaphors, but they stand under much closer scrutiny of serving the
argumentative point in question. Readers of factual narrative typically do not encounter the
deliberately polyvalent ‘free play’ of metaphor characteristic of fictional narratives.
On another occasion, a collective (mind) is invoked through a simile which sheds light on a
collective in the story:
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Like a shy deputation of young scholars before the master, these very words to come were
preceded by none at all; a dismal and trying pause; refreshing however to Dr. Middleton,
who joyfully anticipated that the ladies could be induced to take away Clara when they had
finished. (199; emphasis added)
The simile draws on a stereotypical real-life scenario, “a shy deputation of young scholars
before the master”, in order to characterize a particular moment in the plot, namely “a dismal
and trying pause”. The hierarchical relationship between the ‘young scholars’ and ‘the master’
in the simile, however, introduces a power and gender dynamics into the scene. While the figure
of the superior master corresponds to Dr. Middleton, the inferior (“shy”) young scholars
correspond to the ladies. The metaphorical collective thus reflects back into the narrative,
semantically, creating a particular ambience which might otherwise not have been unearthed.
The next passage contains a similar use of metaphor:
For he [De Craye] was of the order of gentlemen of the obscurely-clear in mind, who have
a predetermined acuteness in their watch upon the human play, and mark men and women
as pieces of a bad game of chess, each pursuing an interested course. (178; emphasis added)
Thematizing the novel’s main and recurrent exemplification of social minds – “men and
women” –, the passage metaphorically analogizes these two general gender groups to “pieces
of a bad game of chess, each pursuing an interested course”. However, this metaphor is inserted
into an earlier collectivist context, namely the views on “the human play” by “the order of
gentlemen of the obscurely-clear in mind”, of which de Craye is pronounced to be a specimen.
Mind-telling again declares an individual character to be part of a collective mentality.
Ekphrasis is another rather indirect means used in the novel to represent collective figures.
As in The Scarlet Letter, it is through the description of a portrait of ancestors that ekphrasis is
realized. A prominent instance of this occurs at this specific moment in the novel, when Vernon
encounters an illustrative circle:
Vernon ordered Dr. Corney’s dose, and was ushered upstairs to a room of portraits, where
the publican’s ancestors and family sat against the walls, flat on their canvas as weeds of the
botanist’s portfolio, although corpulency was pretty generally insisted on, and there were
formidable battalions of bust among the females. All of them had the aspect of the national
energy which has vanquished obstacles to subside on its ideal. They all gazed straight at the
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guest. “Drink, and come to this!” they might have been labelled to say to him. He was in the
private Walhalla of a large class of his countrymen. The existing host had taken forethought
to be of the party in his prime, and in the central place, looking fresh-flattened there, and
sanguine from the performance. By-and-by a son would shove him aside; meanwhile he
shelved his parent, according to the manners of energy. (220-221)
The narrative does not quantify the names, numbers and life-spans of “the publican’s ancestors
and family”, a physically dead collective which nonetheless assumes a palpable pictorial
presence in this scene. Mind-telling specifies this paradoxically lifeless presence in terms of a
shared mindset – “all of them had the aspect of the national energy which has vanquished
obstacles to subside on its ideal” –, which maintains the novel’s discourse on national identities
(see below). Subsequently, a reverberation of the collective gaze from the novel’s beginning is
conveyed through metaphorical and hypothetical variants of mind-showing: “They all gazed
straight at the guest. “Drink, and come to this!” they might have been labelled to say to him”.
It is a quite astonishing narrative mechanism reminiscent of Gothic or ghostly scenarios which
resuscitates a dead collective to the point of exerting hypothetical actions. The sense of an eerie
presence of the dead is further created by the character’s experience of a vault-like spatial
scenario: “[H]e was in the private Walhalla of a large class of his country-men”. Thus, as above,
a collective which does not participate homodiegetically contextualizes the individual
character’s experience.
Shortly after, the individual character of Clara exchanges silent gazes with the dead as “she
glanced at the concentrated eyes of the publican’s family portraits, all looking as one […]”
(227; emphasis added). Established in the prelude, the scene reinforces the collectivist context
in which individual characters are placed, while also resonating with the “ominously anxious
watch of eyes visible and invisible” which presides “over the infancy of Willoughby”.
Ekphrasis produces the effect that the individual characters are kept under collective
surveillance in this novel. Mind-showing and mind-telling, at any rate, describe collective
dispositions, perceptions, and hypothetical actions in these scenes.
Characters’ Speech
Though it is mainly through the narrator’s discourse that social minds are rendered, principally
employing the mind-telling mode, collectives are also thematized in characters’ speech,
including dialogue. The novel features various instances which I quote and discuss in the
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following. The first of these participates in the discourse on national identities (see below),
more specifically Irish and English. The female characters of Clara Middleton and Mrs.
Mountstuart are engaged in this dialogue:
“These Irish or half-Irishmen are my taste. If they’re not politicians, mind: I mean Irish
gentlemen. I will never have another dinner-party without one. Our men’s tempers are
uncertain. You can’t get them to forget themselves. And when the wine is in them the nature
comes out, and they must be buffeting, and up start politics, and good-bye to harmony! My
husband, I am sorry to say, was one of those who have a long account of ruined dinners
against them. I have seen him and his friends red as the roast and white as the boiled with
wrath on a popular topic they had excited themselves over, intrinsically not worth a snap of
the fingers. In London!” exclaimed Mrs. Mountstuart, to aggravate the charge against her
lord in the Shades. (289)
The character’s speech is incorporated into the narrator’s prose discourse. Mrs. Mountstuart
discusses the group mentalities of “Irish gentlemen” as contrasted against “our men’s tempers”.
She does so in a manner which displays women as appropriating the dynamics of precisely this
discourse. This stands in quite stark contrast to the patronizing, at times even ironically
misogynist, tendency in the narrator’s discourse on gender relations throughout the novel. Since
the dialogue is focused on the national differences between two male groups (Irish vs English),
however, rather than on the gender differences between men and women, the passage in fact
participates in collectivist considerations in multiplex ways.
The external, actantial frame, as mentioned, stages female characters through their speech,
thus allowing them to speak their minds undisturbed by the narrator’s discursive interventions
so dominant in The Egoist. In essence, then, this piece of dialogue presents the small social
units of two female minds in verbal interaction, regardless of any of the specific contents
surfacing in the dialogue. The latter constitutes the internal, discursive frame of this scenario
and makes explicit especially Mrs. Mountstuart’s thoughts on the national male collectives. By
means of dialogue, the female characters here articulate a discourse-within-the-(narrative)discourse, and a distinctly mind-telling one, as they make observations such as “our men’s
tempers are uncertain” and “have a long account of ruined dinners against them”. These
revelations about the disposition of the male psyche invert a common cliché about women
(‘women are fickle’ → “our men’s tempers are uncertain”) which, in effect, establishes a
feminist counter discourse. The narrative thus accommodates conflicting viewpoints by and
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about social minds within itself. The ladies’ utterances clearly complement the narrator’s
dominantly male and patriarchal perspective, in fact openly contradict it. The narrative itself
subverts the male-centered rhetoric perpetuated by the narrator, though the comic spirit lurks
behind the corner in all statements, whether by the narrator or by the characters.
Widening the picture, the same dialogue is continued in the following scene:
“[…] But what will ever teach these [English] men? Must we import Frenchmen to give
them an example in the art of conversation, as their grandfathers brought over marquises to
instruct them in salads? And our young men too! Women have to take to the hunting-field
to be able to talk with them and be on a par with their grooms. Now, there was Willoughby
Patterne, a prince among them formerly. Now, did you observe him last night? did you notice
how, instead of conversing, instead of assisting me — as he was bound to do doubly, owing
to the defection of Vernon Whitford: a thing I don’t yet comprehend — there he sat
sharpening his lower lip for cutting remarks. And at my best man! at Colonel De Craye!
[…].” (290)
More directly than above, Mrs. Mountstuart’s discourse here contextualizes some of the
narrative’s individual male characters (Mr. Capes, Willoughby Patterne, Vernon Whitford,
Colonel De Craye) in terms of collective national gender groups which are contrasted to one
another. Not only is the behavior of “these [English] men” set against their French peers (“Must
we import Frenchmen to give them an example in the art of conversation”) but also seen in
relation to their own ancestors (“as their grandfathers brought over marquises to instruct them
in salads”). In addition, “our young men” are judged to their detriment as regards their bearing
towards their female contemporaries as “women have to take to the hunting-field to be able to
talk with them”. Note also that Mrs. Mountstuart speaks in the we-voice of a female subcollective which markedly differs from the narrator’s predominantly male ‘we’ and, more
significantly, is assumed here as possessing the agency and influence of an independent social
group. This latter dimension is compromised only to a minor extent by the fact that the character
is named as ‘Mrs.’, i.e. as a person married into a male household: her speech actions clearly
mark her as an independent individual mind speaking in the name of a female we-collective.
Mrs. Mountstuart has a further appearance, shortly after, when she addresses Clara with this
piece of speech, continuing in the same vein as above:
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“Let me tell you one thing about jealous men — when they are not blackamoors married to
disobedient daughters. I speak of our civil creature of the drawing-rooms: and lovers, mind,
not husbands: two distinct species, married or not: — they’re rarely given to jealousy unless
they are flighty themselves. The jealousy fixes them. They have only to imagine that we are
for some fun likewise and they grow as deferential as my footman, as harmless as the
sportsman whose gun has burst. […]” (292)
The female character yet again posits a female ‘we’ as a social unit pitted against “jealous men”
in terms of a rather oppositional gender difference. The jealous men are distinguished into
“lovers” and “husbands” as “two distinct species, married or not”. What speaks through Mrs.
Mountstuart is yet again the voice of a female Victorian collective which self-confidently and
somewhat mockingly differentiates, contextualizes and judges the Victorian male as “our civil
creature of the drawing room”. Rather than being spoken about by the narrator, the Victorian
woman herself speaks in Mrs. Mountstuart’s utterances and she does so with the self-assurance
and authority of lived experience. The fact that the form in which this female ‘we’ pronounces
itself is uttered speech, not the narrator’s discourse, reflects the sense of the women’s grounding
and participation in the intradiegetic world. Women actively contribute to the overt negotiation
of collective identities in the shape of these speech acts which, though instances of mindshowing, unfold in mind-telling terms.
Yet male characters likewise express their views on group mentalities and do so in quite
similar ways. In the following passage the physician Dr. Corney has this to say:
“That’s well,” said the doctor, “if the invalid sleeps long. The lady is not looking so well,
though. But ladies vary; they show the mind on the countenance, for want of the punching
we meet with to conceal it; they’re like military flags for a funeral or a gala; one day furled,
and next day streaming. Men are ships’ figure-heads, about the same for a storm or a calm,
and not too handsome, thanks to the ocean. It’s an age since we encountered last, colonel:
on board the Dublin boat, I recollect, and a night it was.” (353)
Immediately after having pronounced his ‘diagnosis’ of the individual female (“the lady is not
looking so well”) he moves into gnomic generality, stating that “ladies vary; they show the
mind on the countenance […]”. The character here emulates the narrator’s drive towards
contemplative universality so typical of Victorian omniscience. Dr. Corney also feels inspired
to visualize his assertions using mind-telling metaphors, contrasting women’s alleged
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fickleness (“[…] like military flags for a funeral or a gala; one day furled and next day
streaming”) and men’s supposed steadiness (“[…] ship’s figure-heads, about the same for a
storm or a calm”).
In the next passage, Dr. Middleton mimics the narrator’s discourse about a more specific
topic from the novel’s beginning, nationality:
“You know, ladies, we English come of a rough stock. A dose of rough dealing in our youth
does us no harm, braces us. Otherwise we are likely to feel chilly: we grow too fine where
tenuity of stature is necessarily buffeted by gales, namely, in our self-esteem. We are
barbarians, on a forcing soil of wealth, in a conservatory of comfortable security; but still
barbarians. So, you see, we shine at our best when we are plucked out of that, to where hard
blows are given, in a state of war. In a state of war we are at home, our men are high-minded
fellows, Scipios and good legionaries. In the state of peace we do not live in peace: our native
roughness breaks out in unexpected places, under extraordinary aspects — tyrannies,
extravagances, domestic exactions: and if we have not had sharp early training ... within and
without ... the old-fashioned island-instrument to drill into us the civilization of our masters,
the ancients, we show it by running here and there to some excess. […].” (375)
This instance of mind-showing, a character’s speech act, again operates almost entirely in terms
of self-reflective mind-telling in this passage. It is the case of a homodiegetic participant in the
fictional world making statements such as “we English come of a rough stock”. The character
further explicates the cognitive functioning of his fellow countrymen which apparently abides
by the principle of “sharp early training […] the old-fashioned island-instrument to drill us into
the civilization of our masters, the ancients […].” This latter mentioning of ‘the ancients’ again
positions the ‘we’ of this passage, namely English males, as a collective which is not only a
diachronically-evolved group in itself but also stands in relation to other such social minds, in
this case “our masters, the ancients”. As the device of characters’ speech confirms, scenarios of
collective cognition and mentality form a vital dimension in this narrative. This condition is
enhanced by the ways in which the novel thematizes national identities.
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National Identities
Another apposite discursive procedure through which mind-telling reveals that individual
characters are inherently enmeshed with collective constellations registers national affiliations.
This is a general principle which comes in miscellaneous shapes and merges with more specific
rhetorical strategies such as metonymy and general figures such as ‘the hero’ and ‘the femme
fatale’. Mind-telling repeatedly subsumes single protagonists into the larger category of a
national or ethnic group, absorbing his or her unique narrative identity to a certain extent. In
the following instance, Willoughby is declared to execute various such roles on various
occasions:
[…] otherwise, as when mountains crumble adjacent villages are crushed, men of feeling
may at any moment be killed outright by the iniquitous and the callous. But, as an art, it
should be known to those who are for practising an art so beneficent, that circumstances
must lend their aid. Sir Willoughby’s instinct even had sat dull and crushed before his
conversation with Mrs. Mountstuart. She lifted him to one of his ideals of himself. Among
gentlemen he was the English gentleman; with ladies his aim was the Gallican courtier of
any period from Louis Treize to Louis Quinze. (136; emphasis added)
The passage encompasses multiple general figures (“men of feeling”; “the iniquitous”; “the
callous”) and also metaphorical analogies with non-human collectives (“as when mountains
crumble adjacent villages are crushed”). More pertinent, however, is the italicized section at the
end of the quotation. Mind-telling here illuminates the duality of general figures which
Willoughby’s fictional identity harbors while interacting with other collectives. More precisely,
“among gentlemen he was the English gentleman; with ladies his aim was the Gallican courtier
of any period from Louis Treize to Louis Quinze”.
This points to the interesting phenomenon of an intrapersonal multiplicity of roles –
paradoxically, in other words, an intrapersonal collectivity – which one character may
accommodate within himself. Since this section is concerned to identify instances of national
identities, however, it should be highlighted that Willoughby is here declared to exemplify the
categorical types of “the English gentleman” and “the Gallican courtier of any period from
Louis Treize to Louis Quinze”. Having Willoughby act out different national-stereotypical roles
(English and French) functions as an ironical comment on the narrative’s preoccupation with
differentiating national identities. Note also that both of these general figures are explicitly
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geared towards collectivist interaction according to a gender-based partition as “among
gentlemen he was the English gentleman; with ladies his aim was the Gallican courtier […]”.
In another example, the narrator relates that “Willoughby knew his friend Horace’s mood
when the Irish tongue in him threatened to wag” (141). This example intertwines various
mechanisms relevant for social minds investigations. The obvious phrase exhibiting a national
identity is the character’s “Irish tongue”, which, ‘threatening to wag’, clearly transports
components of national(ist) cliché if not prejudice. It also metonymically equates ‘tongue’ with
‘a particular way of speaking’. Even more significantly, however, the individual character’s
Irish tongue is directly related to his mood, thus establishing a link between speech and
mentality. This link merits some attention. Even though it is mind-telling, not mind-showing,
which communicates this link – meaning that the character is not in fact presented as uttering
any speech in this sentence –, the association between (individual) lingo and (national,
collective) mindset is nonetheless explicit. This prompts readers to perceive the schema ‘speech
↔ mind’ in scenarios involving dialogue as a form of verbal interaction. If a character’s mind
is to be correlated, among other things, with what (s)he says, then this clearly has analytical
implications for studies exploring individual as well as social minds. Speech becomes an
‘externalist’ expression of mind, to abide by Palmer’s terminology.
At present, however, the focus is on the ways in which prose narrative ascribes national
memberships to characters and defines them as participating in superordinate mentalities. An
attribution of a national mindset clearly takes place in the case of Willoughby’s friend Horace
above, but additional passages can be singled out to corroborate this observation and explore it
in more detail. One of them is the following:
Sir Willoughby battled with himself to repress a state of temper that put him to marked
disadvantage beside his friend Horace in high spirits. Ordinarily he enjoyed these fits of Irish
of him, which were Horace’s fun and play, at times involuntary, and then they indicated a
recklessness that might embrace mischief. De Craye, as Willoughby had often reminded him,
was properly Norman. The blood of two or three Irish mothers in his line, however, was
enough to dance him, and if his fine profile spoke of the stiffer race, his eyes and the quick
run of the lip in the cheek, and a number of his qualities, were evidence of the maternal
legacy. (142; emphasis added)
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Mind-telling first narrates Horace’s mentality as being temporarily governed by “these fits of
Irish of him”, which seems to entail that the character’s individual identity is influenced by the
collective forces of his national belonging. Moreover, mind-telling qualifies that these
particular spirits involve “recklessness that might embrace mischief”. As above (“Irish
tongue”), it is through mind-telling’s rather expressive noun phrases that these components of
national mentality are proclaimed (“fits of Irish”; “recklessness”; “mischief”).
Accordingly, the conceptual instrument of mind-telling is decidedly useful to explore in
grammatical detail how the narrative operates, in this section and generally. Mind-telling allows
narrative scholars to determine how the narrator openly inserts national attributions (and, in this
case, their stereotypical semantics) into the portrait of the character. Without the narrator’s
explicit discourse about the character’s mind, the internal composition of his mentality would
simply be left unformulated. Without mind-telling, readers would at best receive sufficient
information to surmise the character’s cognitive frame. But particularly such specific data as
national backgrounds could hardly be articulated through the mind-showing mode alone. Mindtelling’s distinct capacities are reconfirmed by the narrative’s negotiation of national identity.
This observation is likewise demonstrated by the second case foregrounded in this quotation,
the character of De Craye. The narrator specifies De Craye’s national ancestry (“the blood of
two or three Irish mothers in his line”) and explains his physiological features in these terms as
well (“his fine profile spoke of the stiffer race, his eyes and the quick run of the lip in the cheek,
and a number of his qualities, were evidence of the maternal legacy”). Thus, the narrative
unmistakably maintains a discourse about the character’s mind and, moreover, his attachment
to collective categories. It is through his “blood”, the narrator tells his readers, that the character
is predisposed towards particular ways of behavior and experience.
A further instance of national identity occurs in this scene:
It had passed unseen by Sir Willoughby. The observer was the one who could also supply
the key of the secret. Miss Dale had found Colonel De Craye in company with Miss
Middleton at her gateway. They were laughing and talking together like friends of old
standing, De Craye as Irish as he could be: and the Irish tongue and gentlemanly manner
are an irresistible challenge to the opening steps of familiarity when accident has broken
the ice. (143; emphasis added)
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The scene presents a social interaction (“they were laughing and talking together”) –
contextualized by a mind-telling simile (“like friends of old standing”) – which again allocates
a character to a national collective (“De Craye as Irish as could be”). Notably, however, the
narrative then seamlessly moves towards gnomic universality as it states that “the Irish tongue
and gentlemanly manner are an irresistible challenge to the opening steps of familiarity when
accident has broken the ice”. Mind-telling thus decodes the individual character’s national
attribute (“Irish”) by pronouncing ostensibly universal capacities of “the Irish tongue and
gentlemanly manner”. These traits also appear in the following scene, in which Clara and De
Craye shared a special chemistry:
“We’ll see,” said the colonel. They chatted like a couple unexpectedly discovering in one
another a common dialect among strangers. Can there be an end to it when those two meet?
They prattle, they fill the minutes, as though they were violently to be torn asunder at a
coming signal, and must have it out while they can; it is a meeting of mountain brooks; not
a colloquy but a chasing, impossible to say which flies, which follows, or what the topic, so
interlinguistic are they and rapidly counterchanging. After their conversation of an hour
before, Lætitia watched Miss Middleton in surprise at her lightness of mind. Clara bathed in
mirth. A boy in a Summer stream shows not heartier refreshment of his whole being. Lætitia
could now understand Vernon’s idea of her wit. And it seemed that she also had Irish blood.
Speaking of Ireland, Miss Middleton said she had cousins there, her only relatives. (144;
emphasis added)
It is only at the end of the passage that nationality enters the scene, reinforcing the earlier
association of Irishness and witty loquacity (“And it seemed that she also had Irish blood”). Yet
the passage is further relevant because it continues the social interaction (from the quotation
above) of a minimal they-unit comprising two characters. The reference to “Irish blood” here
appears as the culminating end point of the preceding event(s), the meeting of the two enamored
minds of De Craye and Clara, who “chatted like a couple unexpectedly discovering in one
another a common dialect among strangers”. Mind-telling aims to capture the unique
atmosphere of their shared sympathy for one another by availing of the simile just quoted (“like
a couple […]”), by further metaphorical expressions (“meeting of mountain brooks”) and by
describing it as “not a colloquy but a chasing, impossible to say which flies, which follows, or
what the topic, so interlinguistic are they and rapidly counter-changeing”.
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Mind-telling’s negotiation of national identities in the novel is not restricted to “Irish blood”,
however. The next situation, though it again involves the “Irish tongue”, also mentions traits of
different national provenance:
And De Craye had an Irish tongue; and he had it under control, so that he could talk good
sense and airy nonsense at discretion. The strongest overboiling of English Puritan contempt
of a gabbler would not stop women from liking it. Evidently Clara did like it, and Willoughby
thundered on her sex. Unto such brainless things as these do we, under the irony of
circumstances, confide our honour! (188; emphasis added)
De Craye’s “Irish tongue”, voicing “airy nonsense”, is here posed to prompt “the strongest
overboiling of English Puritan contempt”, even though the point is that this inimical sentiment
only occurs on the part of male Puritans. The tensions between De Craye and Willoughby derive
from national as well as gender relations, more specifically Willoughby’s envious
dissatisfaction with the fact that Clara responds to De Craye’s “Irish tongue” in such lively
ways. Besides from thus contributing to particular scenes in the plot, what becomes clear,
overall, is that the attribution of national identity places individual characters into collective
groups and their shared dispositions. The significance of these placements is above all a
cognitive one. Individual minds are depicted in terms of social national minds. The next section
looks at Houghton’s historiographical rendition of Victorian social minds.
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6. Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind
Preface
Before raising his voice as a chronicler of the Victorian mind, Houghton cites the arguably most
eminent novelist in nineteenth-century Britain, George Eliot. Placing epigraphs at the beginning
of his chapters is a ploy which Houghton maintains throughout his study. The coincidence that
Eliot employs the same strategy, for instance in Middlemarch (1871-72), marks a suggestive
overlap between these two particular instances of factual and fictional narrative. Houghton’s
initial gesture is more than a scholar’s formal tribute to the corpus of his source material; literary
voices suffuse his narration to an extent reminiscent of Miller’s inclusion of Puritan writing.
Like The New England Mind, The Victorian Frame of Mind emerges as a discourse marked by
heteroglossia as it uses the format of quotation to stage the many voices of others. As a technical
device, as already noted above when discussing Miller, this practice imports into factual
narration the fictional practice of rendering multiple characters’ speech. Conversely, one can
say that fictional narration quotes its characters, citing only a more or less limited range of the
characters’ entire speech uttered during the duration of the fictional plot’s timeline. Factual
narration’s practice of scholarly, i.e. referenced, quotation sharpens narratologists’ awareness
that readers of novels do not listen to everything a given character presumably says during a
given story time, but only to those portions of it that the narrator actually cites.
In fact, all factual and fictional narratives are required to condense into communicable units
events and interactions which, in their de facto experientiality, entail an infinitesimal
complexity which is quite impossible to convey through the medium of text (or any other). Even
simultaneous narration can only capture the tip of a given scenario’s experiential iceberg.
Quoting a subject’s speech act, the narrator certainly renders a definite utterance, strategically
chosen for narrative purposes. At the same time, however, the narrator leaves out a massive
number of other definite utterances as any given narrative involves an immense temporal
compression of the events it recounts. Again, this applies to both factual and fictional narration.
Like the teller of a fictional story, the historian chooses phrases and statements of representative
significance out of a considerably larger corpus of writing by a given ‘source subject’. In both
fictional and historiographical narration the point is that, through the inclusion of voices other
than the narrator’s, a polyphonic and thus interactional dynamics is generated. The placing of a
phrase drawn from Middlemarch at the start of Houghton’s preface illustrates this pointedly –
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just as, in turn, the chapters in Middlemarch are marked by quotations from other literary works.
Both types of polyphony, therefore, encompass intra- as well as intertexual dimensions.
This is consonant with Houghton’s revelation, already cited earlier, that it is “literature in
the broad sense that includes letters and diaries, history, sermons, and social criticism, as well
as poetry and fiction” (Houghton 1957, xv) which serves as his informational database to
portray the past world of Victorian collective consciousness. Explaining that literature, thus
conceived, is the best source material for his purpose, Houghton states that “[T]hat is why I
have made extensive use of quotation. Attitudes are elusive. Try to define them and you lose
their essence, their special color and tone. They have to be apprehended in their concrete and
living formulation” (xv). Using quotations extensively and defining attitudes by showcasing
them in their “living formulation” are precisely the methodological principles that cause the
effect of dramatization ubiquitous in Miller and Houghton. Technically speaking, they are the
same methods used by novelists who stage characters by way of their speech acts, though
factual and fictional narratives differ fundamentally in terms of the referential and ontological
status with which these speech acts are endowed.
Houghton leaves no doubt in the preface that his project abides by a decidedly factual logic
and orientation. It is a genuinely academic activity by means of which he aims to capture the
monolithic and convoluted range of phenomena intimated by that comprehensive label, ‘the
Victorian mind’:
The very attempt to describe a mind, whether of a person or a period, is an attempt to make
it intelligible, and intelligibility is a system of relationships. The general “portraits” of
Victorian England are good in their several ways, but they are limited in range or lacking in
integration. We are still without an extended and rounded synthesis. (xiii)
‘Describing a mind’ in order to make it “intelligible” is a critical activity reflecting the
intentions of a scholar rather than a literary artist. The projected result of “an extended and
rounded synthesis”, however, is perhaps more ambiguous: what immediately springs from this
statement is the question whether such a synthesis can at all be achieved, and by which generic
and methodological means. Houghton’s practice in The Victorian Frame of Mind shows that he
selects the narrative mode as the fitting format to realize this goal. The critical element which
differentiates a historian’s narrative from a fictional narrator’s, however, is that the former
nonetheless comes in the shape of an argumentative discourse which seeks to make assertions,
trace hypotheses and develop lines of argumentation. Fictional narrative, on the contrary,
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establishes a mimetic discourse depicting a possible world and its inhabitants, tracing
characters’ interactions and, overall, telling a story. The fact that one finds tendencies of both
shapes in both formats does not render this fundamental distinction invalid. One must ask,
therefore, to which underlying impulses these different shapes give expression, because it is the
author’s intention according to which ‘narrative’ is employed, as conveyed by distinct narratorfigures.
Houghton’s intention is clearly a scholarly one in that his efforts towards intelligibility and
synthesis eventually aim at “a definition of Victorianism” (xv; emphasis added). Houghton
implements this research objective from the very onset of his work: the contents section is
organized around what he posits as the major categories structuring the Victorian mind:
emotional attitudes, intellectual attitudes and moral attitudes. These categories are further subdivided into phenomena such as anxiety, dogmatism and hypocrisy. Such dissecting is inherent
in all larger narratives, including fictional ones. Yet what Houghton does within these chapters
follows a different ‘intentionality’, one which is peculiar to factual narrative:
I have explored those general ideas and attitudes about life which a Victorian of the middle
and upper classes would have breathed in with the air – the main grounds of hope and
uneasiness which he felt, the modes of thought and behavior he followed, often
spontaneously, the standards of value he held – in a word, the frame of mind in which he
was living and thinking. (xiii-xiv)
Houghton here employs a rhetorical device – “a Victorian of the middle and upper classes” –
which he repeats a number of times in his study and which might be called the ‘general figure’.
It serves as a good transition into analyzing the particular types and strategies Houghton uses
in the narrative process of negotiating the Victorian frame of mind.
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The Victorian Frame of Mind
I. Who
Ideas
Non-human entities constitute a major phenomenon of Houghton’s discourse as ideas appear
as ‘quasi-characters’ (Ricoeur 1984, 197) on the level of the story of this historiographical
narrative. Houghton anthropomorphizes various such entities which, in consequence, take up
quite some space in his discourse. Here is an example:
The commercial spirit was not responsible, however, for the most odious forms of moral
pretension: the unctuous mouthing of pious sentiments and a sanctimonious prudery. Both
must be traced mainly to Puritanism. For when the saintly character became the ideal of
religious life, those who could give a reasonable facsimile thereof possessed a ready means
of gaining enormous respect or of masking a worldly or vicious career. (Houghton 1957,
407-408)
Houghton’s mind-telling denies responsibility to “the commercial spirit” and thus assesses an
abstract quality of mentality in anthropomorphic terms. He goes even further, claiming this
spirit to entail such derivatives as “the unctuous mouthing of pious sentiments and a
sanctimonious prudery”. Revealing that “both must be traced to Puritanism” completes the
impression that the major actors in this scenario are cognitive qualities and ideas.
Houghton’s prose also features the interaction between ideas and other non-human entities.
For example, mind-telling relates at one point that:
[Finally,] the mood of depression and despair, like all intense suffering, could drive the
individual into himself, in lonely or in savage isolation. […] Where the loss of faith was
accompanied […] by the image of Nature ruling all things with blind indifference, another
kind of isolation swept over the Victorians, with an emotional impact more painful than
sadness or bitterness – cosmic isolation and the terror of absolute solitude. (84-85)
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Note how dominant affects are here. Mind-telling endows moods and emotional qualities with
rather powerful agency in this passage, capable to “drive the individual into himself, in lonely
or in savage isolation” and sweeping over the Victorians “with an emotional impact more
painful than sadness or bitterness […]”. The passage portrays the interaction between
personified affective forces and human characters, individual and collective, which is extremely
noteworthy. One might hypothesize that it is precisely the hybrid generic mode of Houghton’s
discourse, blending elements of the fictional and the factual, which generates such narrative
scenarios in the first place. The mind-telling of this stretch of narration fosters not merely the
dramatization of ideas as distinct yet separate agents, but indeed enables the narrative
representation of a direct exchange between ideas and humans.
The next passage similarly personifies two cognitive variables and represents them as
determining the popular mind:
When fear and guilt were making people acutely conscious of lower-class suffering, the role
of the philanthropist took on an importance, even a necessity, which called for the rhetoric
of heroism. (320)
Specifically, two emotions, “fear and guilt” are personified by mind-telling to appear as
independent and active forces with the ability of “making people acutely conscious of lowerclass suffering”. Houghton depicts the consciousness of the collective human protagonist in this
passage, “people”, as entirely subjected to being shaped by the personified collective affects.
Another way in which ideas participate is through collaborating amongst themselves,
forming idea-collectives in the process. For example:
Private judgement and self-education combined, in this age of transition, to produce a
dogmatist of genius in Herbert Spencer. (139)
Puritanism, business, and doubt met together to write the gospel of work. (254)
In the first sentence, the two notions merge forces and execute a joint action as they “produce
a dogmatist of genius in Herbert Spencer”. The individual human is shown to be the result of
an alliance of ideas “in this age of transition”. Mind-telling converts the dominant mode of
fictional narrative, centered around the interactions of individual characters, instead
pronouncing ideas, in cooperation with one another, to “produce” humans in the first place.
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The second sentence even sees three such qualities, “Puritanism, business, and doubt”, bundling
their resources “to write the gospel of work”.
The important condition of a cooperation between ideas is further exemplified by this
passage:
In [this] reaction, the tradition of benevolence reached its peak and added its powerful
influence to that of moral earnestness in promoting Victorian charity and social legislation.
(274)
It should first be noted that Houghton suggests the historical evolution of an idea in this sentence
as “the tradition of benevolence reached its peak”. This increases the sense of a world of ideas
co-existing alongside human affairs and similarly undergoing processes of change, peak periods
and so forth. The two particular ideas in question here, benevolence and moral earnestness, are
furthermore shown to act in concert, ‘adding their powerful influence’ to one another, in order
to propel the qualities of “Victorian charity and social legislation”.
Houghton’s factual narrative again operates in notable difference to fictional ones, such as
The Egoist, by personifying these ideas and making them protagonists. Ideas act and interact
with one another, they merge and multiply, and they exert influence over human individuals
and collectives. Houghton’s mind-telling in these passages is a (hi)story of ideas in the literal
sense and realizes the distinct potentials of factual narrative in ways that differ substantially and
remarkably from fiction.
General Figures
Characteristic of the next device, the ‘general figure’, is that it describes an individual as
vicariously representing a collective mind. These figures may be non-specified individual
minds standing in place of many, potentially all, Victorians. Yet general figures may also be
prominent individuals, such as Victorian intellectuals and artists, whose written reflections are
cited because they can be related to the prevalent mentality during the Victorian era. While the
latter are identified through their proper names (e.g. Mill, Carlyle), the former remain unspecific
as they do not carry proper names. Examples for a ‘general mind’ of unspecified contours are
these:
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Finally, the mood of depression and despair, like all intense suffering, could drive the
individual into himself, in lonely or in savage isolation. (84, emphasis added)
We have to conclude that although the critical spirit was characteristic of the age,
nevertheless what specially distinguished the Victorian was “his insistent attitude of
acceptance, his persistent belief in (but only rare examination of) the credentials of authority,
his innate desire to affirm and conform rather than to reject or to question.” (94; only first
italics [the Victorian] added)
The [Victorians’] deliberate recoil to authority was aided and complemented by a habit of
mind, partly inherited, partly acquired, which made reliance on authority a natural tendency.
For one thing, the average Victorian was much more likely to defer to the opinions of his
“elders and betters” than to question them or think out his own; which is to say that the
tradition of respect for the upper classes survived in England much longer than it did in
France. (102-103; emphasis added)
The unbeliever had the emotions of the believer. (106; emphasis added)
If a man were rich enough not to work, he was to do good works among the poor or serve
his country in public office, local or national. (189; emphasis added)
To be an earnest Christian demanded a tremendous effort to shape the character [i.e. his
own] in the image of Christ. (231; emphasis added)
These examples show that the ‘general figure’ comes in quite varied shapes. On the one hand,
the category encompasses samples of indeed general character, for instance ‘the individual’ and
‘a man’. On the other hand, such denotations as ‘the (average) Victorian’, ‘the unbeliever’ and
‘an earnest Christian’ embody more specific categories. Notably, almost all of these instances
involve affects.
A principle which functions according to the same mechanism, but of slightly more
cognitive contours, is the ‘general mind’. The difference to the ‘general figure’ is that the
‘general mind’ comes in a more detailed shape. Though more distinct, the ‘general mind’
likewise posits a non-unique persona representing a potentially vast number of unique
individuals, thus adding to the devices Houghton employs to build the Victorian frame of mind.
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In the next passage, Houghton discusses the strand of ‘anti-intellectualism’ in the Victorian
period here and particularly refers to the practical world of business:
The minds which made the machines, which organized factories and solved the problems of
supply and distribution – and did so under high competitive pressure – received an indelible
training in practical contrivance. (111)
In minds so constituted, and in lives so immersed in business, what counts is tangible results
– profits, larger plants or firms, personal advancement, professional and social. The test of
value, including that of thought, becomes utility in the narrow sense. (111)
As a consequence, the mind is focused almost entirely on concrete action, especially in a
period of transition demanding particular reforms in social institutions. (111)
The literal minds (“the minds”, “in minds”, “the mind”) in these quotations are versions of
intermixed collective mind-telling and mind-showing. In the first quotation, Houghton
describes collective actions as “the minds […] made machines, […] organized factories and
solved the problems of supply and distribution […]”. In the second quotation, he then employs
mind-telling (“in minds so constituted […] what counts is tangible results […]”) to reveal the
utilitarian value system according to which these minds operate. He then moves on to conclude
in the shape of a gnomic statement reminiscent of omniscient fiction that “[T]he test of value,
including that of thought, becomes utility in the narrow sense”. The third statement, using the
singular expression of ‘the mind’ (read: the general mind), rather than the plural one as above,
captures a permanent disposition as “the mind is focused almost entirely on concrete action”.
These examples demonstrate the general tendency in Houghton’s discourse of
accommodating both mind-showing and mind-telling. While overtly negotiating the Victorian
frame of mind in the manner of a heterodiegetic narrator in fictional prose, Houghton also stages
the individual voices he quotes and the anonymous groups he includes. In other words, he
portrays them in their (speech-) actions. Anonymous collective actors are thus put on the
historiographical stage by means of this central narrative component – the depiction of action
–, making Houghton’s discourse a distinct variety of factual narration. A second example from
the section on the trait of ‘intellectual earnestness’ shows that Houghton uses the device of ‘the
general mind’ repeatedly, including in the shape of mind-showing:
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In the political-economic area problems of the gravest kind – how to alleviate the increasing
misery of the industrial and agricultural workers and to resolve the growing conflict between
masters and men – were defying solution. To intelligent minds this condition was deeply
disturbing, both on personal and on social grounds. They felt it was perilous, for their own
stability and that of society, to sail blindfold and haphazard, without rudder or compass or
chart. (223; emphasis added)
The first italicized phrase decisively illustrates the general mind. Houghton again discourses
about a general group, “intelligent minds”, as he conveys the cognitive-emotional effect
(“deeply disturbing”) generated in them by the repercussions of industrialization. The second
italicized phrase, “they felt”, maintains this distinct subject-matter, but transforms the more
general ‘intelligent minds’ into a seemingly specific they-unit which is dramatized to the extent
that it carries out an internalist action (“felt”). At the same time, however, mind-telling explains
the content of that feeling rather than dramatizing it.
As intimated earlier, Houghton’s discourse is massively polyphonic, pervaded by the quoted
voices of representative individuals. Unlike the general minds and figures just determined, these
individuals are explicitly identified by their proper names and verified by the recorded
documents cited by Houghton. They are mostly intellectuals into whose writing Houghton taps
as literary source material. In contrast to the anonymity of the general figures above, they are
traceable subjects. Many of them, moreover, for example Mill and Carlyle, are themselves
prominent parts of the body of knowledge defining British Victorianism. This allows Houghton
to exploit the representative momentum of their statements for his purposes. It is interesting to
observe how Houghton devises the transition between the respective individual and his or her
wider relevance. As in the following example, this may involve further rhetorical phenomena:
Bertrand Russell tells us that his grandfather, lying on his deathbed in 1869, “heard a loud
noise in the street and thought it was the revolution breaking out.” The incident is symbolic.
For all its solid and imposing strength, Victorian society, particularly in the period before
1850, was shot through, from top to bottom, with the dread of some wild outbreak of the
masses that would overthrow the established order and confiscate private property. The note
of warning sounded in Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), echoes through
Southey’s Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), and rings in tones of
fright through the literature of the forties. Carlyle’s French Revolution (1837) and even
Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities (1859) are tracts for the times. (54-55; emphasis added)
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Bertrand Russell’s grandfather figures as the individual here whose private sentiments gain
collective currency in retrospect. More precisely, it is Houghton’s narrator who fabricates this
connection by declaring the incident to be “symbolic”. The individual voice is cited as evidence
for an omnipresent collective disposition: “Victorian society […] was shot through, from top to
bottom, with the dread of some wild outbreak of the masses […]”. While this principle is
noteworthy in itself on a technical level, Houghton employs the mind-telling mode to convey
the contents of this sentiment (“the dread of some wild outbreak”). Readers learn about the
cognitive predilection (“was shot through […] with the dread of some wild outbreak of the
masses”) of a social mind (”Victorian society”). The individual’s sentiment thus functions as a
representative indicator of the entire Victorian frame of mind: it is under ‘Victorian society’ as
a seemingly homogeneous instance of cognition that the personal utterance quoted in the
beginning is subsumed. To substantiate the latter’s symbolism, Houghton adduces further
expressions of “the note of warning” as formulated by Burke, Southey, Carlyle and Dickens. A
number of individual writers are aggregated to pronounce a general condition.
Another such case of representative individuality occurs at the end of Houghton’s discussion
of Victorian “Optimism”:
In Frederic Harrison’s “Words on the Nineteenth Century” we hear the full voice of
Victorian optimism: “We all feel a-tiptoe with hope and confidence. We are on the threshold
of a great time, even if our time is not great itself. In science, religion, in social organisation,
we all know what great things are in the air. […]”. Because Utopia is now in sight, the
striving is now unwearied. This is the note of ecstatic anticipation which marked the period
after 1850. Though political and economic developments formed a favorable environment,
it was largely scientific theory and scientific invention that together created an atmosphere
of supreme optimism about the present and the future. (32-33; emphasis original)
Similar to the quotation above, an individual’s statement crystallizes a general affect of the
collective Victorian mind: “[I]n Fredric Harrison’s ‘Words on the Nineteenth-Century’ we hear
the full voice of Victorian optimism”. It is yet again the narrator’s distinct mind-telling
discourse which formulates additional contextualization. Specifically, the period after 1850 is
proclaimed to be characterized by “ecstatic anticipation” and “an atmosphere of supreme
optimism about the present and the future”.
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In both cases discussed above, the prevalent principle in fictional narrative gets converted, or
at least fundamentally shifted, as individual humans lose their central significance as the
decisive executors of action and cognition. Instead, collective minds and abstract ideas become
the crucial performers. While in itself this is hardly surprising in a work belonging to the genre
of the history of ideas, it is nonetheless rewarding to examine in detail the precise shapes in
which these narrative agents appear. Mind-telling’s personification of “the full voice of
Victorian optimism”, for instance, aptly displays a fusion of both a collective trait and an idea,
literally giving voice to a collective affect. Similarly, Houghton depicts the quality of “ecstatic
anticipation” as marking the period after 1850 and, by ascribing intentionality to them,
personifies ideas into active cooperators: “[…] it was largely scientific theory and scientific
invention that together created an atmosphere of supreme optimism about the present and the
future”.
Another form of collaboration takes place between these two prominent individuals:
Carlyle and Mill were not reflecting the general outlook in the England of 1830. They were
attempting – and successfully – to form it. They were trying to revive the idea of progress
which had lost its hold on the generation of the twenties, and by doing so, to check the
impotent dismay which the revolutionary changes of the period produced in many minds.
(31)
Rather creatively, Houghton merges Carlyle and Mill into a small social mind, a two-character
team, represented as shaping “the general outlook in the England of 1830”. Two individuals, in
other words, are asserted to have the conscious motivation of exerting an influence on the
Victorian mind together: “[T]hey were attempting – and successfully – to form it”. The two
single figures become amalgamated into a minimal they-unit in order to sway another, maximal
entity. Houghton then specifies his mind-telling about both groups. Carlyle and Mill, “they”,
are shown in an attempt to “revive the idea of progress which had lost its sway on the generation
of the twenties”. Conducting yet another form of abstract action, the activity of reviving the
idea of progress becomes relevant due to the latter’s collectivist implication: it is characteristic
of “the generation of the twenties”. The they-team is also able “to check the impotent dismay
which the revolutionary changes of the period produced in many minds”. The passage
reconfirms a model of (narrative) action that differs substantially from that of fictional narrative.
Two individuals form a minimal group and utilize ideas which in turn concern a maximal
collective. Mind-telling facilitates the rendition of these processes.
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Victorian fiction writers also come to occupy the position of representative individuals.
Appropriating fictional storytelling for the purpose of his factual discourse, Houghton uses
novels (though also non-fictional writing by novelists) as source material for his narrative
history of mind. Houghton understands statements by individual writers as expressions of
general moods and attitudes. He asserts, for example, that:
[…] Dickens was recognized as a major prophet of sympathetic feeling and benevolent
action. As early as 1838 the Edinburgh Review was praising him for “his comprehensive
spirit of humanity” and the “tendency of his writings … to make us practically benevolent –
to excite our sympathy in behalf of the aggrieved and suffering in all classes; and especially
in those who are most removed from observation.” (274-275)
The correspondence between Dickens’s writing and its effect on a collective Victorian audience
prevails in this passage. The passive voice expresses precisely this link (“Dickens was
recognized”) which is specified in terms of its affective significance by means of a mind-telling
phrase (“a major prophet of sympathetic feeling”). Houghton also personifies the Edinburgh
Review as “praising” Dickens for his mind-telling feature of a “comprehensive spirit of
humanity”. The label ‘Dickens’ thus comes to denote a figure which, besides embodying the
individual writer, also designates a matrix of collective affect. The latter aspect derives from
the resonance his work found among his Victorian contemporaries. This impact points to two
crucial and linked extra-textual dimensions of social minds: collective reception and collective
mentality. The first pertains to the basic fact that a great number of readers responded in a
similarly affirmative way to Dickens’s prose. He was received favorably by a large number of
Victorians, recognized and conversed about, became part of the literate Victorian mind. This
would not have been the case, second, if Dickens’s work had not expressed or triggered central,
especially affective, elements of Victorian mentality.
On the following two occasions, Houghton mentions George Eliot as another individual
novelist being expressive of aspects of the Victorian mind:
But George Eliot had a wider object in mind which she shared with many of her
contemporaries in the fifties and sixties, to heal the divisive effect of the sectarian spirit,
especially in the area of religion. (279; emphasis added)
[…] and George Eliot became the outstanding exponent, in the public mind, of the doctrine
of free love. (362; emphasis added)
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Not so much Eliot’s fiction in its own right is at stake here, but indeed the author’s anchorage
in Victorian society and the intention the author pursues in effecting social progress.
Houghton’s factual narration, at any rate, operates on the assumption that the fictional narratives
by Dickens, Eliot and other novelists directly correlate with the historical Victorian mind. These
individual novelists and their work thus count among the general figures.
Major Groups
Though Houghton’s study is peopled with maximal units such as ‘the Victorians’, smaller and
more specific sub-groups can be identified as well. The first and quite lengthy quotation
involves a multiplicity of intertwined strategies of representing various collectives:
For at present the landed aristocracy was not only pursuing a selfish life of pleasure, shooting
pigeons in the hunting season and going gracefully idle in Mayfair during the London season
(the world of the dandies in Regency society in the novels of Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli,
with its gospel of Dilettantism); it was also charging high rents and maintaining the Corn
Laws, at once indifferent to the suffering of the poor and to the lessons of France during
1789-94. In the middle class the gospel of Mammonism, which included a pious belief in
laissez-faire, had only one moral command: to pay the worker the exact sum covenanted for.
That done, the rich mill owner was free to pursue his career of “making money, fame, or
some other figure in the world,” and the worker was free to carry on the single-handed
struggle to keep himself alive without benefit of government aid – which, as Carlyle dryly
remarked, might be freedom “to die by want of food.” The world had thus become a fancy
bazaar to the aristocracy and a warehouse to the middle class, but to neither was it “a mystic
temple and hall of doom,” with resulting obligations and duties. (239-240)
Two major Victorian sub-groups are explicitly focalized here, “the landed aristocracy” and “the
middle class”, which correspond to Houghton’s programmatic agenda of exploring “those
general ideas and attitudes which a Victorian of the middle and upper classes would have
breathed in with the air […]” (xiv). The third unit completing this schema, “the poor”, is
nonetheless overtly alluded to through the general figure of “the worker”.
It is paradoxical that the working class is not mentioned more explicitly as a Victorian subgroup in this passage because it occupies the semantic center position in relation to which both
the aristocracy and the middle class emerge as centripetal forces. The openly evaluative
attributes Houghton ascribes to the latter two – the aristocracy’s “selfish life of pleasure” which
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is “indifferent to the suffering of the poor” as well as “the gospel of Mammonism” implemented
by the “the rich mill owner” in the face of the worker’s “single-handed struggle to keep himself
alive without benefit of government” – assume their pertinence from the discrepancy between
Victorian England’s “two nations”, the rich and the poor, as conceived for instance by Disraeli
in his novel Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845).
Two aspects are especially relevant here. One, by way of tracing these particular sub-groups,
readers gain insights into the inner social structure of that vast monolith, the Victorian mind,
and also learn about the relations and tensions between them. Unsurprisingly in the context of
nineteenth-century industrialism, these relations dominantly concern economic conditions,
especially what Houghton labels “the gospel of Mammonism”, pervading the middle class but
similarly underlying the aristocracy’s “selfish life of pleasure”. Houghton concludes this
passage with a clear instance of factual world-making by narrative means as he pointedly
summarizes that “the world had thus become a fancy bazaar to the aristocracy and a warehouse
to the middle class, but to neither was it “a mystic temple and hall of doom,” with resulting
obligations and duties”. While the explicit world-making is noteworthy in itself, narrativetechnically speaking, it is in relation to the sub-groups and their specific interrelations that this
particular ‘world’ acquires its semantic, above all ideological, point as a “fancy bazaar”. This
latter expression invokes the dimension of Victorian overseas colonialism and discussions
surrounding Edward Said’s study Orientalism (1978).
Second, rather than being specific to nineteenth-century Victorianism, designations such as
‘the aristocracy’, ‘the middle class’ and ‘the poor’ denote typological collectives of diachronic
if not universal applicability. Such labels implicitly encourage diachronic comparison with
similar sub-groups in historical scenarios prior to, and after, the nineteenth century. Upon closer
contemplation, they also point towards further sub-division. “The middle class”, for instance,
consists of further class-related layers, such as ‘lower middle class’ etc. It could also be
classified according to collective units such as professional alignments. What this shows, again,
is that even sub-groups reduce and compress immense experiential complexity into graspable
collective blocks which, as such, appear as centers of cognition, affect and action. It is as
congeries of social minds that these entities feature in Houghton’s history of Victorian ideas.
Two further passages illustrate how Houghton divides the Victorian mind into various
collective part-minds influencing one another. The context is the Victorians’ ‘moral attitude’ of
‘hero worship’ and its various manifestations:
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The condition of the industrial workers inspired a complementary appeal to the upper
classes. Whether Protestant or humanitarian in spirit, the movement to ameliorate the
condition of the masses found the ideals of chivalry directly to the purpose. (319)
In conservative-aristocratic circles, where the dread of bourgeois democracy was strongest,
heroic literature acquired the value of a political symbol. Medieval romance in particular
could be read as the image of a feudal society in striking contrast to the new order that was
pushing it aside, and of an ideal which still might be revived. (325)
The first passage straightforwardly demonstrates the dynamics between “the industrial
workers” and “the upper classes” as it points to “the movement to ameliorate the condition of
the masses” and further reveals this philanthropic impulse as being rooted in the ideologically
charged notion of chivalry. It is the second quotation which then negotiates how the
understanding of heroic literature, more specifically medieval romance, facilitates a particular
sub-group of the Victorian mind (“conservative-aristocratic circles”) to maintain its ideological
value system over and against “the new order that was pushing it aside” (“bourgeois
democracy”). Mind-telling here dramatizes a conflict of ideological positions surfacing once
Victorian sub-groups are viewed in their co- and interrelations. The focus on sub-groups thus
brings to light the internal tensions of the Victorian social mind, pointing to the divisions
contained in it.
The first passage projects an unspecified we-entity as a negative foil against which the
Victorians’ “exalted conception of history” and “hopeful and buoyant energy” are highlighted
by means of mind-telling phrases. It is a negative foil because Houghton suggests that “we” –
presumably he and his twentieth-century contemporaries – “can only envy” Victorian
momentum which “we have never known”. Such a remark manifests not only Houghton’s
attitude but explicitly evaluates qualities of the Victorian frame of mind by clarifying their
diachronic (dis-)continuities. Similarly, the second quotation addresses how collective tastes
evolved across the centuries. Matthew Arnold’s individual antipathy towards realism represents
“Victorian taste in general” as “farthest removed from that of the twentieth century”. The
particular example of “realism as it was growing up in France and Russia”, however, points to
a(nother) problematic aspect of Houghton’s practice. Diachronic (dis-)continuities of the kind
employed here reduce historical complexities into a rather simplistic ‘us vs. them’ schema
which too easily brushes over the existence of heterogeneous pluralities of opinions within a
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given group. The topic of taste is well-suited to demonstrate this as it merges subjective
inclinations and objective conditions.
Unsurprisingly, the major large social mind on the level of Houghton’s historiographical
‘story’ is the they-unit of the Victorians. For obvious reasons, this unit embodies the Victorian
frame of mind most immediately, as for example in the following passage, which establishes a
general affective pattern of their shared mentality:
At the threshold [of the Victorian age] stand two emotional attitudes, in the broad sense of
pleasure-pain responses, which were bound to occur in a period of conscious and radical
change, and which were nourished by many of the same social and intellectual
developments. The Victorians reacted to their age with hope and dismay, optimism and
anxiety. (23; emphasis added)
Houghton uses mind-telling to establish what he identifies as the fundamental cognitive (more
precisely: affective) dialectics during the Victorian “period of conscious and radical change”:
“the Victorians reacted to their age with hope and dismay, optimism and anxiety”. One might
discern that the cognitive dialectics thus constituted operates on at least two levels, an internalist
and an externalist one. First, the tension between the attributes of “hope and dismay, optimism
and anxiety” captures the affective dynamics of the Victorian mind as conceived by Houghton.
These two parameters get personified in the beginning, ‘standing at the threshold’, and are thus
depicted as active participators. Second, in addition to the cognitive contents, there is an
externalist dialectics taking place between the period and the people as “the Victorians reacted
to their age with hope and dismay, with optimism and anxiety”. The Victorians are staged as a
united collective protagonist, a social mind in (re)action, responding to the environment and
spirit of the time, and they do so “[…] with hope and dismay, optimism and anxiety”, as mindtelling further clarifies. The sentence is a suitable instance of the interdependence between
cognition and (re)action, which Palmer labels the ‘thought-action-continuum’ and which, as
seen in this quotation, also applies to collective minds.
In the next passage, Houghton offers further explanation on the functioning of the Victorian
mind:
Social ambitions and social pressures were so characteristic of the time we forget that to
some extent, especially in the area of religion, the Victorians adopted an equivocal position
irrespective of what was proper or prudent. By silence or outward profession they conformed
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to orthodox opinion for what they honestly considered good reasons, – which were
sometimes rationalizations, no doubt, but not always, or entirely. (400)
Mind-telling relates habitual actions to describe the conformist disposition of the Victorian
mind (“the Victorians adopted an equivocal position”; “they conformed to orthodox opinion”)
and explains how this entailed a suspension of moral evaluation (“irrespective of what was
proper and prudent”). Mind-telling furthermore specifies the larger forces effecting these
Victorian habits: “social ambitions and social pressures”. Houghton’s mind-telling offers a
collective psychogram of the Victorian mind. The Victorian they-unit is represented chiefly in
terms of cognition and affect.
Another passage on the Victorians as a large social mind is this:
Although everyone at times pretends to be better than he is, even to himself, the Victorians
were more given to this type of deception [moral pretension] than we are. They lived in a
period of much higher standards of conduct – too high for human nature. As men were
required to support Christianity by church attendance and active charity, and to accept the
moral ideals of earnestness, enthusiasm, and sexual purity, the gap between profession and
practice, or between profession and the genuine character, widened to an unusual extent.
(404-405)
Employing they-narration, Houghton’s mind-telling focuses on a particular (affect-related)
quality, moral pretension, which is in fact the title of the chapter from which the quotation is
taken. His assertion that “the Victorians were more given to this type of deception than we are”
details a cognitive disposition (“were […] given”) which is related comparatively to the weentity Houghton features here. This authorial we also suggests the collective addressee of a
contemporary twentieth-century audience which is implicitly invoked to still grapple with
“moral pretension”. Houghton thus contrasts Victorian mentality with that of his own time,
tracing the historical (dis-)continuities between past and present.
An even more striking way in which Houghton’s mind-telling places the Victorians into a
wider framework is his observation that “they lived in a period of much higher standards of
conduct – too high for human nature”. Especially the last phrase opens the universal perspective
of “human nature” and places the Victorians within that scope. The rest of the passage details
through mind-telling that “the moral ideals of earnestness, enthusiasm, and sexual purity”
became inculcated on “men”. The process by which this comes about is triggered, allegedly, by
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invisible social pressures, intimated through the passive voice, as “men were required to
support […] and to accept […]”. The consequence of these procedures is likewise conveyed
through mind-telling terms: “the gap between profession and practice, or between profession
and the genuine character, widened to an unusual extent”. In sum, the section provides an
instance of how Houghton integrates they-narration into his historiography and that, in the
process, he resorts to mind-telling. His factual narrative thus doubtlessly represents and
negotiates the Victorian social mind.
Houghton repeatedly uses the principle of diachronic contexts to place the Victorians and
their mentality into wider (dis-)continuous developments in the history of ideas.
It has been said that while the eighteenth century was satisfied with what it was, the
nineteenth century was satisfied with what it was becoming. But with the exception of the
working class, the Victorians were very well satisfied indeed with what they had become;
and their faith in future progress was based less on the theories we have been exploring than
on the confident expectation of becoming more of what they were already. (38; emphasis
original)
Houghton makes use of mind-telling to establish more information by means of a curious
mixture of static and dynamic verbs, stating that “the Victorians were very well satisfied indeed
with what they had become”. The dynamics between being and becoming indicate that this
they-narrative about a collective mind accommodates the two general tendencies of (i) its
permanent cognitive architecture and (ii) transitional states and changes transforming that
mentality. Mind-telling is the suitable mode to render these dynamics, further articulating the
Victorians’ “faith in future progress” and “the confident expectation of becoming more of what
they were already”. Houghton hesitates at no point to relate the affective dispositions and
thought processes of the Victorian they-unit through mind-telling, as though he were in full
possession of the factual knowledge about something which by definition defies such certainty:
collective consciousness.
Another example involving diachronic contextualization is this:
Though they could see in retrospect that the ground had been mined by eighteenth-century
rationalism and the revolutionary dogmas of 1789 – and even earlier, it was thought, by the
Reformation appeal to liberty of judgement – the Victorians were utterly unprepared for the
radical crisis in thought and society which burst over England in the thirties and forties. (66)
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Remarkably, Houghton conveys what “they could see in retrospect”, supposedly able to convey
rather comprehensive insights into their collective mind, and again emphasizes a joint
disposition: “the Victorians were utterly unprepared”. The adverb ‘utterly’ is a conspicuous
qualification reflecting the narrator’s role of a knowledgeable, quasi-omniscient figure and his
corresponding mind-telling discourse. Not only can he detail the contents and processes of
Victorian thought, but he furthermore seems capable of specifying the degree and manner of
these procedures with a certainty as though he himself had experienced them. His mind-telling
furthermore personifies the abstract entities of “eighteenth-century rationalism”, “the
revolutionary dogmas of 1789” and “the radical crisis which burst over England in the
[eighteen] thirties and forties”. Houghton’s history of the Victorian mind at this point morphs
into a diachronic drama of ideas.
A final passage places the Victorians into the historical development of the English mind:
A practical bent of mind, deep respect for facts, pragmatic skill in the adaptation of means
to ends, a ready appeal to common sense – and therefore, negatively, an indifference to
abstract speculation and imaginative perception – have always been characteristic of the
English people. What distinguishes the Victorians is that conditions of life in their period
tended to increase this bias, and thus to make anti-intellectualism a conspicuous attitude of
the time. (110)
A nexus between particular cognitive dispositions of the mind of “the English people”, that of
the Victorians, and the impact of the “conditions of life in their period” underlies this mindtelling passage. The enumeration of permanent traits in the beginning (“a practical bent of mind,
deep respect for facts, pragmatic skill in the adaptation of means to ends, a ready appeal to
common sense – and therefore, negatively, an indifference to abstract speculation and
imaginative perception […]”) details aspects of the British mind “which have always been
characteristic of the English people”. The adverb, “always”, yet again betrays a rather untypical
stance on Houghton’s part who, by implication, claims to oversee the entire history of British
collective mentality. He further indicates the dynamics between collective mentality and
material “conditions of life” which “tended to increase this bias”. This provides another
example of historiography’s foregrounding of non-human forces as quasi-characters
participating in human affairs. Similar to abstract ideas such as “eighteenth-century
rationalism” (66), “conditions of [Victorian] life” figure as entities capable of impacting on
human cognition. Mind-telling stages the exchanges between the elements of this nexus.
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II. How
Personification
As a representative of the history of ideas, Houghton unsurprisingly centers his discourse
around notions and concepts. Ideas participate as though they were active forces of their own.
By means of the narrative method of personification, ideas become incarnated to the extent of
being principal actors alongside, and yet expressive of, human collectives. Abstract entities
transform into literal subjects, assuming agency and cognition in the process. This strategy was
already examined in Miller’s The New England Mind but needs to be reconsidered in the light
of Houghton’s actual practice. The ensuing two examples provide a first illustration of how this
principle features in The Victorian Frame of Mind, more specifically in the section on ‘Success’
as an expression of ‘The Commercial Spirit’ which again is classified under the rubric of ‘Moral
Attitudes’:
Social sympathy, indeed, was hardly compatible with the commercial spirit. The cutthroat
competition of the time bred a hard and ruthless selfishness that was arraigned by the
Victorian moralists. (192)
But for all the scathing comments of the Victorian critics, the creed of success, like its
practitioners, rose to the top; and since 1870 – aided, I think, by the steady decline of
religious faith – has stood almost unquestioned, even in intellectual circles. (194)
Brought about by mind-telling, both instances are lively demonstrations of the incarnation of
ideas into quasi-experiential centers of intentionality. It has to be remembered that, as he states
in the preface, Houghton’s declared goal is to ‘describe’ the Victorian mind in order to make it
‘intelligible’. In these quotations, it is undoubtedly through the personification of ideas that he
attempts to achieve this scholarly objective. The fact that Houghton’s historiographical mindtelling discourse de-abstracts ideas such as ‘cutthroat competition’ and ‘the creed of success’
into intentional entities which ‘bred selfishness’ and ‘rose to the top’ is a technical mechanism
noteworthy in itself. It confronts readers with the rudimentary contours of a story. Precisely
without presenting individual characters in action, mind-telling thus nonetheless brings mindshowing effects into play.
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These incipient story silhouettes, furthermore, intimate half-explicit scripts encouraging
interpretive, meaning semantic, recuperation. The first sentence is particularly suggestive since
a ‘cutthroat competition breeding selfishness’ is anything but a descriptive rendition.
Manifesting what resembles the programmatic agenda of literary naturalism – the relentless
struggle for survival and dominance of primeval forces –, this formulation stimulates recipients
towards clarifying its ideological implications. It displays how the formal and the semantic
levels of an expression are inextricably fused. It also invariably betrays the intention of a mind
behind the scenes – Houghton, the author, – who selects his words hardly at random and might
possibly even express unconscious agendas such as a political persuasion.
Many more passages can be cited in which the formal principle of personification involves
concomitants increasing the degree of narrativity in Houghton’s factual prose. The section on
‘Darwinism, Chauvinism, Racism’ further demonstrates these continuities:
But [that] note of brutal violence is largely absent from the controversy of the age, however
combative. Thomas Arnold, Macaulay, Ruskin are entirely free of it. They aimed to defeat
but not to massacre. It was British chauvinism (supported, as we shall see, by elements latent
in Puritanism) which by moments turned men like Kingsley and Froude, Carlyle and Hughes,
into storm-troopers and led the British public to buy thirty-one editions of Creasy’s Fifteen
Decisive Battles of the World between 1852 and 1882 at least partly for the reason given by
Spencer, in order to “revel in accounts of slaughter.” (210-211)
Sadistic brutality of [this] kind is pathological, and not doubt the desire to “smash ’em good”
in Carlyle and Froude as well as Kingsley had personal origins. But nationalism and racism,
sanctioned by Old Testament Puritanism and social Darwinism, created an atmosphere in
which the normal control of the beast in man could be seriously weakened. (213)
These two passages encompass various strategies of representing the Victorian mind and they
poignantly exemplify the interplay between them and the main principle examined here, (the)
personification (of ideas). In the first passage, mind-telling employs the narration of Zeitgeist
and representative individuals before emphasizing the central force at work in this scenario:
British chauvinism. This quality is proclaimed to possess the power of transforming prominent
individual figures (Kingsley, Froude, Carlyle, Hughes) into war-mongers and leading “the
British public” to purchase bellicose books. The passage testifies to the priority which ideas
such as chauvinism gain in Houghton’s discourse: they turn into Victorianism’s major
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protagonists to the extent of inculcating themselves on the collective mind. They appear as
active schemers, deliberately manipulating Victorian collective cognition.
While the first passage formulates no explicit involvement on the author’s part, the second
passage does. Houghton refers to a letter by Charles Kingsley which he has just quoted when
he states that “sadistic brutality of this kind is pathological […]” (213) and thus openly
evaluates the chauvinist “temper of mind” (211). Pertinent to examining the phenomenon of
personification is that four abstract ‘-ism entities’ – “nationalism and racism, sanctioned by Old
Testament Puritanism and social Darwinism” – are depicted as active forces capable, as mindtelling specifies, to “create an atmosphere in which the normal control of the beast in man could
be seriously weakened”. The passage interweaves the synchronic and diachronic temporal
perspectives inherent in these –isms, pointing beyond nineteenth-century Victorianism towards
wider temporal layers and indeed towards gnomic universality.
Another passage, taken from the section on “Earnestness”, similarly invokes wider
frameworks in the history of ideas:
In the background, eighteenth-century rationalism, and in the foreground the passing of
Catholic Emancipation, the sharp struggle over the Reform Bill, and the Liberal attack on
the Church of England combined, in the early thirties, to shake the security of the English
mind. Not only time-honored institutions, but major assumptions in moral and intellectual
matters which had been accepted for centuries were suddenly being questioned. (222)
At least two noteworthy aspects must be highlighted in this passage. First, Houghton uses a
background/foreground schema to convey that various spheres of intellectual history co-exist
“in the early thirties” of the nineteenth century. “Eighteenth-century rationalism”, as a tacit
residue, joins forces with the contemporary dominants surrounding the passing of Catholic
Emancipation, the Reform Bill and the Liberal attack on the Church of England. Together, these
entities emerge as a powerful collective agent able “to shake the security of the English mind”,
disrupting “not only time-honored institutions, but major assumptions in moral and intellectual
matters which had been accepted for centuries […]”. Second, the two tenses of the passive voice
neatly express the schema of two interlocked temporal dimensions, ‘long-winded past’ (“had
been accepted for centuries”) and ‘revolutionary present’ (“were suddenly being questioned”).
Despite the mind-showing effect of dynamic action, these passages are conveyed through mindtelling; the personification of parameters such as “rationalism” takes place on a level of
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narration abstracted from the depiction of a textually-mediated world, a distinct series of events
and flesh-and-blood anthropomorphic characters.
Personification is one of the prevalent means of representing collective mentality in The
Victorian Frame of Mind, as manifested in numerous further scenarios. For example, readers
encounter this passage:
That [this] concern with self-improvement was not limited to Anglicans or Evangelicals calls
attention to a significant fact: the creed of earnestness pushed its way beyond church walls
into the community at large. Its ideals penetrated into the homes – and consciences – of halfbelievers and outright agnostics. This was partly because men retained the ethical fervor of
the childhood belief they had discarded. (238)
It appears to be almost fantastic that Houghton designates as “a significant fact” what so
unambiguously manifests a fabricated personification, namely that “the creed of earnestness
pushed its way beyond church walls into the community at large”. This narrative-technical
principle is put to the service of negotiating ‘the community at large’, including more specific
groups within it, as earnestness and “its ideals penetrated into the homes – and consciences –
of half-believers and outright agnostics”. The passage then reintroduces a human collective as
main actor(s) (“this was partly because men retained the ethical fervor of the childhood belief
they had discarded”), so that it is again in immediate conjunction with other strategies of
representing social minds that personification occurs here. This combination of intellectual
currents thus indicates that personification negotiates the interplay between various ideas, not
merely one.
Another aspect of personification present in Houghton’s discourse is that, rather than
presenting embodied ideas through dynamic actions, it presents static subjects, as this example
on “Sympathy and Benevolence” showcases:
A business society dedicated to the political principle of laissez-faire and the economic
principle that there must be no interference with the iron laws of supply and demand needed
to feel that in spite of appearances its heart was tender. If it was doing little to relieve the
suffering of the poor, at any rate it was feeling very sympathetic. (277)
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‘Society’ is embodied and personified as an intentional center of consciousness to the extent of
being “dedicated” to an economic principle. More significantly, ‘society’ attains the status of
an affective being which “needed to feel that in spite of appearances its heart was tender”. The
emphasis on emotional susceptibility is a poignant climax to end the exemplification of a rich
and protean principle of mind-telling’s portrayal of Victorian collective mentality:
personification.
Contents
The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 repeatedly establishes and further elucidates the
specific psychological contents of the prevalent collective mentality during the Victorian
period, building the ‘frame’ mentioned in the work’s title. A central element of this is a
discourse about affects and cognitive dispositions, as in this section:
The Victorian middle class, as we have seen more than once in this book, was ridden by fear:
fear of radical politics (manhood suffrage as well as socialism) because it threatened the
bourgeois state of 1832; fear of atheism because it might dissolve the moral sanctions on
which society rested; fear of sensuality because it menaced the family. So motivated, it
employed the full force of social stigma and ostracism against any real or supposed deviation
from political, moral, or religious orthodoxy. (398)
The “Victorian middle class”, in itself a heterogeneous range of sub-collectives, attains the
position of the principal character in this passage. The narrator first maintains a mind-telling
discourse, using a static verb to specify a permanent character trait – “the Victorian middle class
[…] was ridden by fear”. The ensuing gesture of identifying different kinds of fear betrays a
scholarly tinge in Houghton’s prose: it is the dissecting mind of a historian which becomes
manifest through this formulation. The passage continues by describing this collective
protagonist in action as “so motivated, it employed the full force of social stigma and ostracism
against any real or supposed deviation from political, amoral, or religious orthodoxy”. The kind
of action described here is not the immediate physical action which mind-showing typically
conveys. The narrative does not evoke a material, spatio-temporally specific world and its
events. Rather, ‘employing the full force of social stigma and ostracism’, the Victorian middle
class conducts the paradox of an abstract action. More precisely, the narrative presents a highly
intriguing phenomenon recurring elsewhere in Houghton’s work, the interaction between
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human collectives and abstract ideas. While in the present case it is the human agent which
‘employs’ social forces, other passages, conversely, present ideas as actively influencing human
collectives. Such scenarios, displaying exchanges between human and abstract entities, both of
them interacting on the same experiential level, are distinguishing elements of Houghton’s nonfictional mind-telling, particularly its use of personification.
What becomes manifest is an idiosyncratic aspect which is more characteristic of
academically-geared types of factual narration, such as the narrative ‘history of mind’ genre,
than of fictional narration. The kind of explanatory differentiation and classification above
defies the purpose of fiction’s world-making which is bent towards concrete, material
immediacy. Shining through Houghton’s depiction of collective mentality in this passage is the
historiographical intention of clarifying the factual causes and reasons for Victorian ‘fear’, even
if by means of dramatization and personification. The persona of the scholar-narrator behind
the mind-telling becomes conjecturable if not visible.
Discussing the phenomenon of Victorian ‘conformity’ in the chapter on “Hypocrisy”,
Houghton offers another such instance of a shared set of temperamental leanings among
Victorians:
No one could be respectable who did not go to church, and for ultrarespectability to the
Church of England. But here, too, habit and training played an important part. The
conservatism of the English temper, its instinctive attachment to custom and tradition, its
love of old associations, reinforced in this period by frightened reaction against radical
innovation, kept many a person repeating the time-honored formulas he had learned in
childhood without any clear awareness that in point of fact he no longer believed them. It is
worth remembering that more than one Victorian was startled to discover that he was an
agnostic. His belief had silently withered away while he had been professing it sincerely
enough but not genuinely. (396-397)
This historiographical narrator seeks to ascertain the interior architecture, or frame, of the
collective Victorian mind and to communicate it to his readers. He aims to reconstruct the
atmosphere of ‘what it was like’ to live in an environment in which “no one could be respectable
who did not go to church”. This attempt decidedly involves mind-telling noun phrases
proclaiming “the conservatism of the British temper, its instinctive attachment to custom and
tradition, its love of old associations, reinforced in this period by a frightened reaction against
radical innovation […]”. It is by means of abstract nominal descriptions that the narrator
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establishes the ingrained impulses, perceptual inclinations and affective propensities of the
Victorian psyche. Though Houghton’s data base for such information is the polyphonic
literature he cites, it is stunning with what degree of certainty he establishes what, strictly, he
cannot know. His statements convey the same air of epistemic definiteness which the
omniscient narrator assumes when relating the individual and collective interiors of ‘his’
fictional subjects.
The passage ends on a mind-telling note of representatively individual contours as “more
than one Victorian was startled to discover that he was an agnostic. His belief had silently
withered away while he had been professing it sincerely enough but not genuinely”. Curiously
oscillating between individuality and collectivity, the general figure of ‘more than one
Victorian’ is portrayed in terms of a cognitive process (“was startled to discover that he was an
agnostic”) common among Victorians. Mind-telling continues by personifying the notion
reflecting this process (“his belief had silently withered away”). A typical sample of Houghton’s
mode of narration, actual (cognitive) actions complement a more abstract negotiation of the
Victorian mentality, all of which are mediated through mind-telling. Furthermore, it is again in
terms of the prevalent and widespread attitudes that the latter cases of apparent individuality
are displayed: though referred to as ‘he’ and thus implying a single figure, it is in a
representative sense applying to numerous fellow Victorians that ‘his’ show of religiosity turns
out to be sanctimonious. The use of the past perfect (progressive) tense (“had silently withered
away while he had been professing”) indicates mind-telling, revealing the temporal layer of
past cognition as reaching into the narrative present, the latter being represented through the
simple past tense (“was startled to discover”). Mind-telling is also evident in the use of
evaluative adverbs (“sincerely enough but not genuinely”) which establish the modality of this
particular cognitive action. Houghton’s attempt to depict Victorian collective psychology in a
dynamic way, reconstructing actual thought procedures and representing them as such,
resembles fictional narration in terms of the temporal structures and in terms of the modal
qualifications by means of which the (collective) actions are depicted. A distinctly ‘factual’
element in Houghton’s narrative history of mind is the prevalence of non-individual and nonhuman character types as collectives and ideas people his historiographical story of the
Victorian mind.
A similar passage which negotiates the Victorian social mind by referring to collective
dispositions occurs in the chapter on “Earnestness”, in the section on ‘Work’.
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The passion for work was sometimes nothing but the desire to numb the sensibility and
suppress anxiety by plunging into some form of activity without reference to any moral
values, however rationalized it might be as the “right path” or a duty or a contribution to
social progress – even as the will of God. The enormous production of the Victorian writers,
far greater than anything we are now accustomed to, volume after volume, scores of reviews
and articles, thousands of letters, is simply astonishing. And in many cases – both the
Arnolds, for example, as well as Kingsley, Mill, and Huxley – extensive literary production
was achieved in addition to a regular job. The explanation lies partly in their optimism –
their confidence in the power of the mind to resolve every problem and of the individual to
influence the course of events regardless of political or economic forces; and in their deep
conviction that a critical age of transition and uneducated democracy required immediate
guidance in many areas. But there was also their frantic need to bury their doubts and
anxieties under the distraction of objective and constant activity. (260-261)
Though it is a particular phenomenon which Houghton foregrounds here – “the enormous
production of the Victorian writers” encompassing individual pens such as Mill’s and Huxley’s
–, it exemplifies a convolute of collective dispositions of wider currency. Houghton’s narrator
reappears as a knowledgeable insider who does not hesitate to make authoritative statements
explaining the Victorians’ “passion for work”, “desire to numb the sensibility”, “confidence in
the power of the mind” and “frantic need to bury their doubts and anxieties”. His mind-telling
discourse thus relates these affects chiefly by means of noun phrases and a ‘there was’
proclamation in the final sentence.
Houghton’s historiographical mind-telling specifies further contents of the Victorian mind.
One of these, the (possibility of a) Victorian collective unconscious, is repeatedly adumbrated
in a way which curiously betrays Houghton’s own perspective. Pertinent are the strategies
involved in quotations such as the following:
As most traditional beliefs and institutions on which stability depends were being questioned
or transformed, the Victorian clung the harder to the oldest of all traditions and stressed its
ordered hierarchy and daily ritual. Here at any rate was something firm to stand on. But this,
I think, was largely unconscious. The conscious association of family life with security took
another form. (344; emphasis added)
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That [Houghton refers to a love letter by a private individual] is the highly conscious analysis
of an acknowledged agnostic. But I wonder if the same psychology was not working on a
less conscious level in the far larger body of Christians who were troubled by religious
doubts. (390; emphasis added)
But many Victorians, consciously or otherwise, were able to quiet their anxious doubts by
finding an angel in the house. (393; emphasis added)
The phrases in which Houghton mentions a possible Victorian unconscious are perhaps best
described as conjectures. Clearly distinguished from the ‘hypothetical factuality’ Miller
indulges in, it is in a probabilistic mode, rather, that Houghton allows himself to speculate on
those realms which are even more elusive than the already quite nebulous areas of collective
consciousness. The fact that he treads on uncertain ground is betrayed by the conspicuous firstperson references (“I think”; “I wonder”) which he inserts into his deliberations. These
references indicate that Houghton assertions do not articulate the crystallized end point of a
reasoning process which involved considering and weighing a body of (textual) evidence.
Rather, they express that such examinations would have to be carried out in the first place in
order to ascertain solid results, even if the latter should amount to the insight that no certainty
can be gained regarding the Victorian collective unconscious. The way in which Houghton’s
discourse unfolds, on the contrary, assumes that the collective unconscious could be handled
by nonchalantly mentioning it, which is clearly problematic. If anything, this practice gives
unflattering insights into Houghton’s methodological self-understanding; it certainly does not
provide genuine insights enhancing the body of historical knowledge.
In fact, such ostensibly ‘useless’ conjectures, which do not deliver scholarly surplus value,
ex negativo foreground the basic condition that factual narration is prototypically bound to a
utilitarian function, meaning that it usually serves a ‘useful’ pragmatic purpose. Fictional
narrative may likewise serve such purposes, but only vicariously, through the effects the
storytelling has on the readers. Measured by scientific standards, in and of itself fiction is
‘useless discourse’. History, as a species of factual narration, is under the obligation to offer
argumentative contributions to scholarly debates, or even present hitherto unrevealed facts. It
is furthermore expected to convey its insights by means of a ratiocinative mode which is not
only meant to be intersubjectively accessible, but to abide by the conventions of scholarly
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communication.48 The conjectures Houghton integrates into his factual mind-telling here lack
the evidential or even referential foundation of textual evidence on which he bases his
mentality-historiographical discourse. His intimations on the Victorian collective unconscious
properly belong to more conversationalist or impressionistic modes of discourse.
A presumably more secure rhetorical strategy which Houghton employs to elucidate the
contents of the Victorians’ shared mentality is that of rendering temporal, i.e. diachronic,
continuities. He repeatedly clarifies Victorian habits of mind by aligning them with other
historical collectives and their mentality. This technique involves retro- and prospective vistas.
Retrospectively, for instance, Houghton seeks to show that:
The Victorians inherited the cult of noble emotions from the Romantics: from the
Rousseauistic faith in the goodness of human nature and the spontaneous flowering of the
moral sentiments, so long as they were uncorrupted by the “evil” influences of civilization
and unrestrained by authoritarian discipline. (Rousseau and Wesley can be thought of as the
immediate fountainheads of the two great streams of Victorian morality.) It was the earlier
Wordsworth, under the influence of Rousseau – the later Wordsworth became more and
more earnest – who carried this morality alive into the Victorian heart, referring its
inspiration to the direct or vicarious experience (the latter through art and poetry) of the
beauty or grandeur of nature and man, and defining its central doctrine: […]. (267)
The schema Houghton assumes here as the underlying model for his reflections appears to be
that of a trans-generational geneticism of collective affect, so that, in the case of the present
example, “the Victorians inherited the cult of noble emotions from the Romantics”.
Representative individuals allegedly assume the function of diachronic transporters in these
processes of continuity: “it was the earlier Wordsworth […] who carried this morality alive into
the Victorian heart”. The overall point of this device is that a transfer of affective dispositions
takes place which here presumably leads to an adoption of core elements of Romantic mentality
by “the Victorian heart”. Another example of the very same device, though concerning a rather
contrary mental trait, occurs when Houghton advances “[…] the social determinism which the
Victorians inherited from eighteenth-century rationalism […]” (336). It is again a personified
48
See also Cohn: “[But] the idea that history is committed to verifiable documentation and that this commitment
is suspended in fiction has survived even the most radical dismantling of the history/fiction distinction” (Cohn
1999, 112-113).
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‘-ism’ entity which is narrativized to the extent of bequeathing a mental heritage to its successor
population.
Yet The Victorian Frame of Mind also contains instances of diachronic prospection which
notably show that Victorian mentality entertains discontinuous relations with subsequent
collectives. More specifically, Houghton draws a parallel between Victorian mentality and his
own post-WWII contemporaries, emphasizing the differences between how people thought and
felt in these two ages. The following three passages illustrate this:
[That] exalted conception of history gave life a meaning and a significance for the Victorians
which we can only envy, and endowed them, for all their anxieties, with a hopeful and
buoyant energy that we have never known. (251)
Even the movement of realism as it was growing up in France and Russia is distasteful to
Arnold because it emphasizes the weakness of man at the expense of his ideal potentialities.
It is here that his taste – and mid-Victorian taste in general – is farthest removed from that
of the twentieth century, though there are some signs at present of a reaction. (302)
It is only by keeping vividly in mind the merging influence of the Puritan revival, the
exaltation of the family, and the acute fear of sex, that an age like ours, which sets no great
value on chastity and views marriage as a problem in adjustment and forbearance between
equals, can tolerate this passage, or avoid finding [king] Arthur more of an insufferable prig
than an ideal man. (372)
The first passage projects an unspecified we-entity as a negative foil against which the
Victorians’ “exalted conception of history” and “hopeful and buoyant energy” are highlighted.
It is a negative foil because Houghton suggests that “we” – presumably referring to himself and
his twentieth-century contemporaries – “can only envy” Victorian momentum which “we have
never known”. Such a remark manifests not only Houghton’s attitude but explicitly evaluates
qualities of the Victorian frame of mind by clarifying their diachronic (dis-)continuities.
Similarly, the second quotation addresses how collective tastes evolved across the centuries.
Matthew Arnold’s individual antipathy towards realism represents “Victorian taste in general”
as “farthest removed from that of the twentieth century”. The particular example of “realism as
it was growing up in France and Russia”, however, points to a problematic aspect of Houghton’s
practice. Diachronic (dis-)continuities of the kind foregrounded by mind-telling reduce
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historical complexities into a rather simplistic ‘us vs. them’ schema which too easily brushes
over the existence of heterogeneous pluralities of opinion(s) within a given group. The topic of
taste is well-suited to demonstrate this as it merges subjective inclinations and objective
conditions. What this testifies is that a fairly high price must be paid for the strategy of
contrasting collectives diachronically – at least in the way Houghton practices it here.
The third passage differs somewhat from the first two in its attempt to ascertain Victorian
collective affects. It is again a discontinuity which is focalized here – the attitude towards sex
and marriage – in terms of two different historical angles, the Victorian and the post-WWII
perspectives. It negotiates the question how these two ages perceive and assess king Arthur’s
relationship with his wife, queen Guinevere, especially regarding the issue of marital disloyalty.
Victorian mentality is again characterized here by a coalescence of various affective qualities
– “the merging influence of the Puritan revival, the exaltation of the family, and the acute fear
of sex” – which mind-telling articulates through this list of noun phrases.
Another strategy, which could be termed ‘space as mind’, deals with the Victorian social
mind in terms of particular spatial formats, stressing the correlations between the two. Though
these scenarios are used in metaphorical as well as strictly referential or denotative ways, the
emphasis on spatiality (and especially space-as-mind) is prevalent in all of these expressions.
For example, there is an entire section on the Victorian “Home, Sweet Home”, integrated into
the chapter on “Love” as one of the “Moral Attitudes”:
In the home [so] conceived, man could recover the humanity he seemed to be losing. Under
the intense pressure of competitive life, he felt more and more like a money-making machine,
or a cog in the vast mechanism of modern business. He was haunted, as Routh has said, by
a specter staring back at him in the mirror, a hard-faced, dwarfish caricature of himself,
unpleasantly like the economic man. His emotions of pity and love seemed to be drying up;
he was losing the sense of relatedness as superiors, inferiors, and equals were becoming
actual or potential enemies. But in the home he might escape from this inhuman world, at
least for part of every day (which was all he wanted). He might feel his heart beating again
in the atmosphere of domestic affection and the binding companionship of a family. (345)
Small wonder the Victorian home was sentimentalized. In the reaction from a heartless
world, the domestic emotions were released too strongly and indulged too eagerly. Indeed,
it may be only by the unabashed display of feeling that one can prove unmistakably to all
the world, himself included, that he has a heart. (346)
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The Victorian home was not only a peaceful, it was a sacred, place. (346)
In the Victorian home swarming with children sex was a secret. It was the skeleton in the
parental chamber. No one mentioned it. […] This conspiracy of silence was partly a mistaken
effort to protect the child, especially the boy, from temptation […], but at bottom it sprang
from a personal feeling of revulsion. For the sexual act was associated by many wives only
with a duty and by most husbands with a necessary if pleasurable yielding to one’s baser
nature: by few, therefore, with an innocent and joyful experience. The silence which first
aroused in the child a vague sense of shame was in fact a reflection of parental shame, and
one suspects that some women, at any rate, would have been happy if the stork had been a
reality. (353)
These quotations construe a heuristic binary model between (1) the domestic sphere as a realm
of safety ‘in here’ and (2) the sphere of competitive business life ‘out there’. This spatial binary,
moreover, entails seemingly clear-cut cognitive semantics. Whereas “a heartless world” of
business forces Victorian “man” to look at his colleagues as potential enemies engaged in a
social-Darwinian struggle for survival and profit, the home provides a haven free from such
competition. Ultimately, therefore, “the Victorian home was not only a peaceful, it was a sacred,
place”. As Houghton primarily describes the Victorian home in terms of the emotional
experience implied by this particular space, he thus adds another facet to his Victorian collective
affect portraiture. Mind-telling imbues and charges these spatial scenarios with affective and
ideological (especially gender-related) semantics, pronouncing them to be sites of collective
mentality. The Victorian home emerges as a cognitive space.
Zeitgeist
The narration of the spirit of the age, as already diagnosed in Hawthorne and Miller, is also
employed by Houghton. It is important to note that this is a means of representation which
implies social minds rather than explicitly referring to them. Complementing the discourse on
human collectives and representative individuals, the narration of the Victorian Zeitgeist is
pervasive and programmatic in Houghton’s book. The preface states in no uncertain terms that
“[A]bove all, the major [Victorian] attitudes have never been interrelated, nor their
simultaneous existence traced to the general character of the age” (xiv). It is this latter
phenomenon, “the general character of the age”, which the term Zeitgeist denotes and which
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stands in immediate connection to the Victorian social mind. For example, Houghton posits
about the Victorian era that “[A]n age in which fundamental conceptions in politics, religion,
and morals have to be re-examined is an age of divided opinion” (162). This description
involves such mind-telling parameters as “fundamental conceptions” and “divided opinion”.
The following passage specifically illustrates the nexus between collective affects and the
character of the age:
To think it strange that the great age of optimism was also an age of anxiety is to overlook
the ambivalent reaction which the main social and intellectual tendencies of the period
provoked. Expanding business, scientific development, the growth of democracy, and the
decline of Christianity were sources of distress as well as of satisfaction. But since optimism
was expressed more often than anxiety (partly because it was more widely felt, and partly
because any pessimistic attitude toward the human situation was considered weak or
unmanly), we are still unaware of the degree to which the Victorian consciousness – and
especially the subconsciousness – was haunted by fear and worry, by guilt and frustration
and loneliness. (54)
The age is portrayed in terms of rife affects (optimism; anxiety) which manifest sentiments
shared by a majority of Victorians. In its narration of Zeitgeist, Houghton’s mind-telling
concentrates on a non-human entity, “the age”, which however gains its relevance from the
social, meaning human, minds it accommodates. Further, the passage uses nominal descriptions
which convey Victorian mentality vicariously (“[…] were sources of distress as well as of
satisfaction”) and the passive voice (“since optimism was expressed more often than anxiety”).
Yet more notable is Houghton’s cautious note towards the end of the passage, remarking
that “we are still unware of the degree to which the Victorian consciousness – and especially
the subconsciousness – was haunted by fear and worry, by guilt and frustration and loneliness”.
Houghton personifies “the Victorian consciousness – and especially the subconsciousness” as
being “haunted” by equally personified affects such as fear and guilt. Achieved through mindtelling, this narrativizing move is noteworthy in itself. What is further remarkable about this
statement is that Houghton’s own practice flatly contradicts it. As repeatedly noted earlier, he
time and again proclaims cognitive contents precisely without asking whether “we are still
unaware of the degree” to which they can be verified or falsified. The crucial circumstance in
Houghton’s factual narration of Victorian Zeitgeist is the prevalence of authoritative mindtelling, not the marginal occurrence of cautious remarks.
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The Zeitgeist is also personified so as to embody a more active instance. The following passage
sketches the impact of the French Revolution on the Victorian mind in the following section on
“Moral Earnestness and the Religious Crisis”:
It is thus clear that the critical character of the age and in particular the fear of revolution,
first in the 1790’s and again from 1819 to 1848, provided an environment which gave the
Christian revival some of its motivation and much of its appeal. When this indirect result is
taken into account, along with its direct effect (illustrated in Carlyle), the social crisis is seen
to have contributed as much, I think, as the religious crisis – perhaps even more – to the
formation of moral earnestness. (242)
It is for the purpose of revealing an explanatory context that Houghton employs Zeitgeist
narration here as “the critical character of the age and in particular the fear of revolution […]
provided an environment which gave the Christian revival some of its motivation and much of
its appeal”. The personified “character of the age” itself is said to ‘provide an environment’,
making it an active force in its own right, articulated by mind-telling. Moreover, that active
force largely coincides with a collective affect, the fear of revolution, which in turn prompts
sentiments of religious and moral earnestness. The Zeitgeist thus comes to be equated with
collective affects and dispositions. Narrative-technically speaking, these qualities become the
main actors on the historiographical stage:
The fact is that an age which knew the Romantic taste, and the Victorian desire, for ideal
aspirations was also an age of transition in which the old ideas were vanishing and new ones
were many and half-formed. Aspiration could not easily find its objective correlative,
whether a great cause to serve or a high character to strive for. It tended to jump from one
aim to another, or to look to a vague humanitarianism, and therefore to become, when the
end proved elusive, an end in itself. Dorothea [Brooke] was “enamoured of intensity and
greatness.” If she yearned to renounce her self in a noble cause, it was really the vision of
playing a great role, and not a vivid sense of the objective, that captured her imagination.
(293)
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The reference to George Eliot’s Middlemarch (Dorothea was “enamoured of intensity and
greatness”) incorporates a particular quotation from a fictional narrative as relevant source
material into Houghton’s factual mode. In itself, this quotation displays perfect analytical
material for mind-telling’s mode of operation, which is why the conceptual section on mindtelling in this study cites precisely this passage about Dorothea Brooke. Yet Houghton indeed
goes further and foregrounds a fictional character’s psychology as representative of the
personified collective traits of the age. The passage dramatizes the Zeitgeist, staging such
coexisting forces as “the Romantic taste, and the Victorian desire, for ideal aspirations”.
Remarkably, Dorothea Brooke is invoked to exemplify these temperamental components of the
Victorian mind: Houghton draws on an individual fictional character to demonstrate the factual
Victorian social mind.
Conclusion
Both narratives contribute to Victorian collective affect portraiture. The Egoist presents a
general interplay between the light-hearted humor of the comic spirit, the main characters’
attempts at love and marriage as governed by Victorian social conventions, and the emotionally
charged force of egoism. Further affective components surface throughout the novel, for
instance when the narrator states in the beginning that “[T]here was an ominously anxious
watch of eyes visible and invisible over the infancy of Willoughby” (Meredith 1979, 7), that
“for all our pride we are a queer people” (8), or that “she [Laetitia] was jealous on behalf of her
sex” (268). The Victorian Frame of Mind is even more pronounced in its emphasis of shared
affects, for example when it personifies emotions: “the mood of depression and despair, like all
intense suffering, could drive the individual into himself, in lonely or in savage isolation”
(Houghton 1957, 84). Portraying such collective affects, Meredith and Houghton negotiate vital
components of nineteenth-century British society.
In terms of how the narratives render collective cognition and affect, the comparative
perspective on The Egoist and The Victorian Frame of Mind reveals a number of phenomena.
(1) On the level of story, collective participants include the two lovers’ intimate minimalism as
well as sub-groups, men and women, the Victorian ‘we’, ideas, general figures, and major
groups. (2) On the level of discourse, the strategies of collective contexts, personification and
metaphor, characters’ speech, national identities, specific contents, and Zeitgeist prevail.
While both of these two narratives employ many these strategies as they portray the Victorian
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social mind(s). Reflecting their participation in the fictional and factual mode, however, the
narratives differ in terms of the following components.
Narrative Components
The Egoist utilizes the narrative mode to enact the dramatic experience of individual and
collective characters, including their mentality, with a special focus on shared affects. Mindtelling’s ample commentary repeatedly frames individual characters in collectivist terms such
as ‘men and women’, and thus establishes a discursive negotiation of Victorian as well as
universal social minds. The Victorian Frame of Mind employs the narrative mode to stage the
writerly voices and forces of mentality emerging from the factual documents Houghton selected
as the referential foundation of his study. Predominantly, however, Houghton’s prose takes the
shape of historiographical, which is to say argumentative, discourse rather than describing
events, settings, plot(s) and character interactions in sustained ways. Hence, the conditions
arising from the comparison between the novel and the history of Victorian mentality do not
reveal a dichotomous contrast but different uses and shapes of the narrative mode.
Addressing the ‘Victorian we’, moreover, Meredith’s novel aligns its fictional narrative with
the factual history of nineteenth-century Britain and thus deals in the same subject-matter as
Houghton. The Egoist and The Victorian Frame of Mind thus share a reference to the same
historical period. Furthermore, both narratives take their reflections beyond these confines as
they voice essentialist insights about the collectives they describe. This manifests a tendency
inherent in both of these narratives towards articulating semantic implications which, however,
are not the focus of this study.
In the case of Meredith’s fictional narrative, both the abundance and overtness of the
narrator’s commentary have been perceived as aesthetic flaws, for instance from an avant-garde
Modernist perspective such as Virginia Woolf’s. But not only is a verbose narrative discourse
a typical characteristic of the generic format of the Victorian novel, it also establishes references
and links to factual reality, including, in the case of The Egoist, the factual social minds of
national and gender collectives. The novel’s emphasis on comedy as a reformist force among
human beings as well as the narrative’s negotiation of national and gender groups are among
the most prominent ways in which this link is expressed.
Houghton’s Victorian Frame of Mind prioritizes collective characters both on the level of
its historiographical plot and discourse. Houghton spells out the affective contents and
dispositions of Victorian mentality in detailed ways. Given this thematic preoccupation of
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Houghton’s narrative history of the Victorian mind, it is in itself unsurprising that mind-telling
is the dominant mode of narration. Only once this instrument is systematically applied to The
Victorian Frame of Mind, however, does the range of Houghton’s rhetorical strategies become
properly visible.
Some of these operations are particularly fascinating. They manifest narrative procedures
which, though they may not be unique to Houghton’s discourse, occur much more dominantly
in factual than fictional narration. First and foremost, this pertains to the extent to which ideas,
concepts and abstract qualities feature as narrative agents in their own right, dominating the
historiographical cast of characters. In The Egoist, and fictional narrative generally, these roles
are largely, though not exclusively, reserved for anthropomorphic individual figures.
Meredith’s novel does feature the idea of the personified comic spirit, but this is an exceptional
phenomenon serving to accentuate the plot rather than to substantially participate in it.
Houghton’s narrative, by contrast, is centred on ideas as intentional agents. The paradoxical
phenomenon of an ‘abstract action’ in The Victorian Frame of Mind, for example, considerably
extends the forms of ‘action’ to be found in fictional narrative. Another example are the
interactions between ideas and human collectives, and those between various ideas. Applied to
(this particular) factual narrative, mind-telling enables narrative scholars to chart these
phenomena, align them with existent narratological research on ‘action’ and other core
parameters of narrative. Such findings thus contribute to developing a poetics of factual
narrative.
Authorial Attitude
As regards The Egoist, Meredith’s narrator imbues his comments on the gender types of ‘men
and women’ with irony, which stimulates readers to assume the critical and even reformist
attitude that the comic spirit embodies. To re-quote from the prelude: “[S]he [Comedy] it is
who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of
rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet
cook” (Meredith 1979, 5). It is thus by means of mind-telling noun phrases denoting affect and
cognition that this attitude is expressed.
Houghton’s attitude towards the Victorians seems, at times, to be marked by respect, and
even admiration, as such comments as the following imply: “[T]hat exalted conception of
history gave life a meaning and a significance for the Victorians which we can only envy, and
endowed them, for all their anxieties, with a hopeful and buoyant energy that we have never
235
known” (Houghton 1957, 251; emphasis added). Such an explicitly affirmative stance on the
author’s part is noteworthy because Houghton is adamant in the preface that his intention is to
“describe” (xiii) the Victorian mind in order to “to make it intelligible” (xiii). The remark about
the Victorians’ “exalted conception of history […] which we can only envy […]” clearly
endorses a trait of the Victorian mind in addition to describing or defining it. Houghton’s own
stance thus becomes manifest.
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7. Conclusion
The study’s results can be articulated in terms of (1) analytical findings, (2) conceptual claims,
and (3) mind-telling data, all of which contribute to investigating the relations between factual
and fictional narrative. A final section (4) suggests directions for future research arising from
the present inquiry.
Analytical Findings
Analytically, the study above all traced the hypothesis that there exist numerous narrative
renditions of the collective experience of social minds in selected examples of fiction and
history. The phenomena gathered in the analytical chapters of this study display ample evidence
that social minds and collective experience indeed feature in multiple ways in the factual and
fictional narratives under scrutiny here, both in terms of collective character types (‘who’) and
in terms of narrative strategies (‘how’) employed to represent them. Given the decidedly
different kinds of intention and reference that factual and fictional narratives give voice to, it is
noteworthy that the types and techniques with which the two modes operate overlap to a
substantial degree. This pertains for instance to various forms of sub-groups on the level of
story and collective focalization on the level of discourse.
Collective Focalization is a crucial parameter to be found both in the factual and fictional
examples of the present corpus. It stands in immediate relation to the narrativization of nonindividual character types, whether in the shape of actual groups or the vicarious representation
of collective mentality by means of prevalent ideas. As Manfred Jahn points out (Jahn 2005b),
focalization is not restricted to the visual perception of a given character but encompasses all
other perceptual capabilities and even cognitive as well as ideological viewpoints. The
phenomenon of collective focalization poignantly shows that, in addition to listing different
types of collective characters, a social minds approach also affects narrative procedures,
techniques and devices. Thus, paying attention to the collective shapes of focalization
contributes to narratology’s ongoing agenda: exploring the full diversity of narrative’s
operations.
Other phenomena, however, manifest narrative components differentiating factual and
fictional narrative, to the extent of the specific generic format of the narrative history of mind
and the two realist novels making up the corpus of this study. A prominent and pervasive
component in Miller’s and Houghton’s factual narratives is the personification of ideas and
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concepts expressing collective mentality. Again, the generic label ‘history of ideas’, of which
the ‘narrative history of mind’ is a sub-genre, indicates the narrativization of notions which
entails that ideas become experiential agents endowed with cognition, agency and
experientiality. Both Miller and Houghton elaborate this device and use it for the purpose of
translating the Puritan and Victorian minds into dynamic narrative shapes. Miller for example
relates about the Puritan mind that “[A]postasy has not demolished the faculties, but put
malignancy into them […]” (Miller 1967, 259); Houghton states that “[T]he cutthroat
competition of the time bred a hard and ruthless selfishness that was arraigned by the Victorian
moralists” (Houghton 1957, 192). As a result, factual narrative here expands the use of such
core narratological categories as ‘character’, ‘action’ and ‘cognition’ beyond the individualist
and anthropomorphic paradigm that prevails in fictional narrative.
Conceptual claims
Deriving from these analytical results, the study also makes conceptual claims. These latter
assertions focus on the relations between factual and fictional narrative, specifically concerning
the representation of social minds. The stress on collective experientiality, in other words, not
only stimulates narratologists to venture into uncharted analytical territory but also carries
narrative-theoretical weight. Since I examine historiographies and novels, these two are taken
to stand in for the overarching categories of factual and fictional narrative. My claims are
therefore to be understood as hypotheses which extrapolate from a minimal corpus of four
narratives claims which, to be properly gauged, would have to be examined by future research
on the basis of a much larger variety of texts. The following statements crystallize the insights
gained in this study.
1. Narrative thrives on the interactional dynamics between individual and collective
experience. The most significant conclusion of this study is that the character types acting out
narrative plots involve collectives which crucially stand in relation to individuals. Palmer’s
introduction of social minds enables narrative scholars to realize that the interactional dynamics
deriving from the bi-polarity between individuals and groups is essential to narrative’s
functioning. Narrative not only depicts solitary subjectivity but also shared experience, and it
moreover portrays the transitions and tensions between these two experiential modes.
Typically, it is the mind-telling mode which articulates these relations. The Scarlet Letter
confronts Hester Prynne’s “rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic” with the Puritan “throng
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of bearded men” and their “iron framework of reasoning”. The Egoist continuously places its
individual characters within typological collectives such as “men and women”. By means of
collective focalization, the narrative moreover establishes early on that “[T]here was an
ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible over the infancy of Willoughby […]”
(Meredith 1979, 7). As narrative histories of mind, and therefore factual narratives, The New
England Mind and The Victorian Frame of Mind are generically geared towards collective
minds but nonetheless integrate representative individual writers. These latter usually serve to
exemplify tendencies of the collective mentality rather than standing in opposition to it. Quoting
the clergyman Samuel Willard, for instance, Miller asserts that “[O]ne illustration from New
England writings will indicate how the reflex was understood in America […]” (Miller 1967,
242). The analysis of the historiographical texts has shown that a social minds approach helps
investigate factual narrative, which leads to my next conceptual assertion.
2. Factual narrative represents and negotiates ‘mind’. This claim refers to the significance
of human cognition, affect and experientiality in historiographical narrative (see e.g.
Collingwood 1946, Berkhofer 1969). It challenges Dorrit Cohn’s argument that it is the
exclusive privilege and differentiating capacity of fictional narrative to provide immediate
access to an-other’s consciousness: “[…] where the knowledge of the inner motives of a
historical figure is concerned, there is a difference in kind, not just in degree, between
historiography and fiction. […] the fact is that the vision into inner reality depends on the
magically unreal optics of fiction” (Cohn 1999, 156-157). My examination of the narrative
history of mind genre as exemplified by Miller and Houghton suggests that factual narrative,
too, depicts minds. Both present historiographical they-narratives detailing collective cognition,
Miller’s rendition of the Puritan unconscious being a particularly striking part of this. Though
the ontological status and referential validity of factual and fictional minds differ, the
dramatization of consciousness is in fact not restricted to fictional narrative. Cohn herself
implies this when she notes that historiographical accounts focus on collective mentality (Cohn
1999, 121). Implicitly elaborating on this observation, Palmer’s contemporary emphasis on
social minds has triggered the altered perspective on which this conceptual claim rests. Again,
to determine the full momentum of this claim, one would have to look at a much wider generic
spectrum of factual narrative(s), especially journalism and life-writing. Particularly, it would
be fascinating to find out whether these latter factual genres render individual minds. Though
my analysis of the narrative history of mind genre shows that, and how, factual narrative
represents cognition, more narratological research is needed to elucidate this claim.
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3. Factual narrative adjusts core narrative parameters. Another outcome of analyzing the
historiographical works in this study is that factual narrative modifies key components such as
character, action and focalization for its purposes. The New England Mind and The Victorian
Frame of Mind literally narrativize the historiographical genre of the ‘history of ideas’ as they
personify abstract notions and collective affects, displaying them as quasi-experiential agents.
Thus extending the shapes of narrative agency and techniques such as focalization, these
histories deploy narrative categories in ways that differ from those used in fictional narrative.
Specifically, these factual narratives move beyond the paradigm of the anthropomorphic
individual as they re-form narrative components in various collectivist and non-human shapes.
4. Factual narrative primarily seeks argumentative explanation, fictional narrative
primarily seeks dramatic rendition. This claim pertains to the effect or function of what might
be called narrative intentionality, i.e. the overall aim which the respective textual configurations
express. It is the case that both explanatory and representative tendencies feature in both factual
and fictional narrative. The texts selected for this study are precisely hybrid in the sense that
the novels contain numerous stretches of diegetic (mind-telling) commentary tending towards
explanation, for instance by means of gnomic statements reaching beyond the confines of the
fictional into the realm of timeless truths. The two histories, in contrast, repeatedly narrativize
their social minds, rendering them in mimetic ways, and the historiographical narrators at times
even assume ‘omniscient’ capacities. Explanation and representation thus surface in both
narrative types in varying degrees. However, the dominant tendencies are that historiographical
narrative seeks to explain and argue, whereas the fictional narrative prioritizes representation.
This observation, too, might be reconsidered in the light of a larger corpus of narratives that
might enable further clarification and sub-division.
5. Fictional narrative negotiates factual insights. Granted the premise that, due to its
verisimilitude, realist fiction contains valid historical references, it can be concluded that, by
narrative means, The Scarlet Letter and The Egoist negotiate insights relevant for the discipline
of intellectual history. The survey of Houghton criticism given in the introductory section has
intimated that, for example, an ideologically-inclined approach such as feminism has
interpreted this fictional narrative in relation to the situation of women during the nineteenth
century. The relevance of The Scarlet Letter for the historical study of seventeenth-century
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Puritanism amounts to the condition that some scholars have viewed Hawthorne as NorthAmerica’s first intellectual historian.
Compared to factual narrative, fictional narrative has more refined capacities to elaborate on
affect, cognition and experientiality, qualities which have been foregrounded for instance by
Collingwood, Berkhofer and Clark as pertinent information for historical study. Fictional
narratives, especially in the realist mode, can thus be seen as formats that negotiate the
collective mentality concomitant with a given period’s Zeitgeist. The way in which
Hawthorne’s novel renders the “throng of bearded men” as characterized by an “iron framework
of reasoning”, for instance, translates the patriarchal and repressive Puritan mindset into the
dramatic immediacy of fictional narrative.
By means of its focus on dramatic rendition, fiction shows the complexity involved in
historical scenarios, especially by drawing on the interactional dynamics between individual
and collective experience. This includes such mind-telling declarations as Hester Prynne’s
“rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic” as an embodied and gendered intervention disrupting
the Puritan leaders’ attempt to install a homogeneous mentality. This also involves the adultery
plot as Hester forms an illicit bond with Arthur, who is the community’s foremost preacher and
therefore a prime spokesman of the Puritan theological contents. The fact that all three
characters involved in the adultery plot – Hester, Arthur (Hester’s adulterous lover), and Roger
(Hester’s legal husband) – emigrated from England to New England relates through a fictional
plot pattern to the observations made recently by the historian Francis J. Bremer:
[…] the first decades of settlement were characterised by an ongoing dialogue over the shape
that the colony’s institutions should take. Defining a community was a challenge for the
colonists. […] The challenge facing the leadership of New England was how to form a single
community from these different ingredients, a challenge magnified as each new influx of
immigrants came from an England that was itself changing […]. (Bremer 2008, 128)
The plot does not negotiate the political and theological minutiae of these conditions, but
nonetheless dramatizes precisely the inner ruptures and instabilities that accompanied the
formation and maintenance of Puritan communities in New England. In this sense, the novel
can be claimed to contribute to negotiating factual insights. But again, this (narratological)
study seeks to identify the narrative means of these concerns, not the validity of the actual
contents.
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Mind-Telling
Mind-telling has proven to be a useful instrument for the purpose of examining the
representation of social minds in history and fiction. All four narratives comprising the corpus
of this study (as well as many other narratives) are pervaded by an explicit discourse articulating
semantic relations that would not become unraveled if the narratives were to operate entirely in
the showing mode. Mind-telling encourages narrative scholars to appreciate the vital
importance of these relations and to recognize the narrative techniques by which they are
articulated. This is relevant for historiographical texts because they inherently lean towards
argumentative discourse more than towards descriptive and dramatic renditions. But the two
fictional narratives likewise contain extensive mind-telling which contextualizes, explicates
and evaluates the novels’ social minds. To indicate the variety of shapes identified in this study,
a few poignant mind-telling phrases from each narrative might be re-quoted here.
1. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter: “the persecuting spirit”; “the verdict of public sentiment”; “the
stings and venomous stabs of public contumely”; “the whole dismal severity of the Puritan code
of law”
2. Miller, The New England Mind: “Puritan piety insisted”; “had Puritans been cloistered
hermits or contemplative sages”; “they [Puritans] had no conscious intention”; “the
temperamental bias behind the thought”; “a hunger of the human spirit and an anxiety of the
soul”
3. Meredith, The Egoist: “those first agents of destruction, besieging relatives”; “we English
have ducal blood in business”; “the difference, the cruel fate, the defencelessness of women”
4. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind: “the commercial spirit was not responsible,
however, for the most odious forms of moral pretension”; “the Victorians reacted to their age
with hope and dismay, optimism and anxiety”
These illustrations chiefly employ mind-telling’s most efficacious and grammatically visible
tool, noun phrases such as “the persecuting spirit”, which convey a cognitive disposition by
placing it before the reader as a notional entity (“spirit”). The present progressive addendum
(“persecuting”) expresses adjectival and evaluative contents which, moreover, link this phrase
242
to those extra-narrative issues (such as the ‘witch-hunt trials’) that intellectual historians might
pursue but which are not the scholarly objective of this study. Mind-telling’s quasi-conceptual
designations thus constitute functional compounds merging (diegetic) explanation and
(mimetic) representation. The specific narratives examined in this study constitute hybrid
formats that, to different degrees, blend diegetic and mimetic modes of narration. For example,
Miller’s use of quotation leans towards mimeticism whereas Hawthorne’s repeated insertion of
explicative and even gnomic passages tends towards diegetic discourse. More precisely, mindtelling nouns integrate the discursive realm of explanation into the mimeticism dominating
(Hawthorne’s and Meredith’s) fictional narrative, while anchoring in factual narrative the
distinct focus on (collective) experientiality and (shared) cognition which (not only in the cases
of Miller and Houghton) entails narrativizing tendencies. Thus, the instrument of mind-telling
facilitates identifying specific ways in which factual and fictional narrative differ in their
narrative operations.
Mind-telling manifests the discursive level, inherent in the narrative mode, on which
cognitive concerns are explicitly named. Mind-telling’s meta-discourse establishes precisely
that narrative layer which, going above and beyond mimetic renditions (‘showing’), allows
scholars to gauge how the ways in which given fictional and factual narratives, such as The
Scarlet Letter and The New England Mind, participate in the interpretive recuperation of, in this
case, the historical phenomenon of North-American Puritan mentality. It is through his mindtelling describing Puritan mentality as being governed “by an iron framework of reasoning”
that Hawthorne can be understood as an intellectual historian; it is through his mind-telling
discourse that Miller, the artist-historian, contributes to historical research while forging an
idiosyncratic mode of factual narrative telling “the story of New England thought”. As indicated
in the theoretical chapter above, however, mind-telling encompasses a variety of linguistic
particulars, not merely noun phrases, to articulate its concerns.
Outlook: Suggestions for Future Research
Since the study has paid close attention to a small number of narratives, its scope is restricted.
There exist multiple points of entry for narrative scholars to further explore the nexus between
collectivity, factuality and narrativity constituting the framework of this study. Future research
might particularly focus on the following two areas.
243
1. Extended corpus. More social minds research is needed to determine the shapes in which
collective experience appears in a wider selection of factual and fictional narratives. Factual
narratives that might be explored include works of history but also life-writing and journalism.
The fictional genres of short fiction and drama likewise promise to offer valuable perspectives
for a more comprehensive narratological study of social minds in narrative. Especially, the
claim that factual narrative represents consciousness might be traced in a more varied spectrum.
2. Diachronic perspective. Further social minds research might assume a diachronic
perspective and might especially focus on pre-modern narrative(s) more extensively than has
been done before. Narratologists have tended to neglect early- and pre-modern texts and have
thus left a vast area uncharted. In addition, a particularly fascinating research agenda might
trace diachronic (dis-)continuities in systematic ways, for instance by comparing social minds
renditions in the novel from the eighteenth century through to contemporary fiction. Such
diachronic research might offer insights into the mutability of the uses and shapes of social
minds representations in factual and fictional narratives in more comprehensive ways than in
this present study.
244
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