Prospectus: Exisitng Scholarship - Draft 1 Complete

Existing Scholarship

A lot of work has been done recently on Victorian popular fiction, but mostly by way of situating it in the Gothic tradition. Work that adopts the genre of the “Victorian Gothic, ” by scholars such as Robert Mighall and Julian Wolfreys, specifically considers what purpose the Gothic mode serves ideologically, politically, psychologically, and socially, when employed in narratives. Very little research has been done, on the other hand, to connect popular fiction, which includes the Victorian Gothic, with “classic” fictional realism, hence the motivation for this project. And so while work previously published on the Victorian Gothic may be useful in a tangential way, the way in which it often segregates the Gothic from the realist precludes such work as a primary critical resource.

For example, Ruth Robbins, in Victorian Gothic: literary and cultural manifestations of the nineteenth century, indicates an awareness of the epistemological issues implicated in realism when she says, “there is the belief that seeing is knowing. This tendency in criticism is intimately related to realist modes of representation” (Robbins 183). Immediately thereafter Robbins turns to say “However, this was not, of course, the only way of thinking about representation in the 19th c.,” thus compartmentalizing the Gothic and realism as two distinct ways of “thinking about representation.” While this study of Victorian literature is very much interested in “the belief that seeing is knowing,” it hopes to discuss such a tenet as a central prerogative of both realist and Gothic fiction.

Additionally, many scholars have, for all Victorian literature regardless of genre, made connections between the scientific discoveries and technological innovations of the period and its literary representations. Most famously, Gillian Beer traces Darwin’s influences on the Victorian novel in Darwin’s Plots: evolutionary narrative in Darwin, Eliot, and nineteenth-century fiction. Specifically thinking of Victorian realism, others have explained realist tendencies in novels as a reaction to or product of new and emerging technologies of the period; one such example is the telegraph, upon which Richard Menke in Telegraphic Realism: Victorian fiction and other information systems focuses. Menke’s work tries “to delineate the deep ways in which new technologies, and the wider understandings that a culture could derive from them, register in literature’s ways of imagining and representing the real” (Menke 3). By framing Victorian culture as one obsessed with the transmission of information, Menke sees the culture as cueing literature to try to comprehensively detail all aspects of real life, thus creating realism.

But once again, this work, in attempting to see Victorian science in Victorian fiction, rarely integrates a variety of genres. Menke, for example, lists several genres from Victorian literature as all having “informational economies,” but readers never get the sense that those economies, while sharing a unified cause in information technology and new media, do not resemble one another in their effects; realism is still unique in its attempt to capture reality and everything else has other business to which to attend. Patrick Brantlinger, as another example, sees science influencing realism and science influencing science fiction as two entirely separate phenomena; to him and many other critics, they were mutually exclusive reactions to the same historical circumstances.

That is not to say that considering realism and the supernatural equally is an entirely new and rebellious concept. Critical debates in studies in Victorian literature have been, for several decades now, advocating for an expansion of the canon to include genres previously segregated from the classic realist novel. The high brow/low brow divide has already been questioned and to a certain extent broken, as evidenced by critical trends towards considering popular fiction in order to construct a more nuanced conception of the Victorian novel as a genre. This dissertation does not, then, set out to simply reiterate that cry of outrage on behalf of the until recently less regarded popular novel, but rather hopes to use that as a starting point in continuing to examine how these popular genres, now that they've been invited to the table, add to critical conversations on the novel, genre, narration, realism, and representation.

There are the Victorians themselves to include in this consideration of genre as well. During the Victorian period realism and sensationalism were at times cast as a binary – some writers, such as Margaret Oliphant, would scorn sensation novels for their morally questionable plots, calling them “improper novels” and allying them with Romantic texts, and these criticisms helped to define realism against sensationalism and other non-realist genres. In many ways this segregation of genres informs how we refer to texts from the period today. Several of the texts at the center of this project have historically been and still are referred to as “scientific romances” or novellas – forms or genres distinctly other than “The Victorian Novel.”

Not all Victorians shared Oliphants sentiments, however. As Thomas Hardy wrote in his literary notebooks, “The division of novels into sensational & anti-sen[sational] [is] a mistake – wh. Arises from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time realistic & sen[sational]. A good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree” (Nemesvari 26). In the spirit of Hardy’s words, one should, instead of organizing Victorian literature by genre - which would imply a placement of certain works in realism and other works in sensationalism, and never the twain shall meet - use genre to place Victorian literature in the context of the ongoing intellectual and aesthetic project writers engaged in during the period, one that was constantly in flux. Caroline Levine’s The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt was a breakthrough text for this notion, both as an investigation of Victorian writers deliberately and critically thinking about realism as well as a work that attempts to breech the classic/popular rift. She compellingly argues for Wilkie Collins, previously considered a sensation novel writer, as “an exemplary Victorian realist” (Levine 43).

Levine constructs her argument by providing an exhaustive and detailed reading of Victorian critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater that calls for a rereading of Gothic and sensation fiction as engaging realism without explicitly attempting mimesis. She claims, for example, that “Victorian writers and readers understood suspenseful narrative as a stimulus to active speculation….a rigorous political and epistemological training, a way of fostering energetic skepticism and uncertainty rather than closure and complacency” (Levine 2). In thinking of how this project will be indebted to Levine’s, one might consider an alternative title to be “The Serious Pleasures of the Supernatural.” I’ll be picking up where Levine has left off; she discusses novels by Bronte, Collins, Dickens, and Eliot, and I will be taking her argument and going one step further into the popular realm with Wells, Doyle, Stevenson, and Stoker.

George Levine, preceding Caroline Levine, is the first critic to argue that Victorians themselves were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today. In The Realistic Imagination, he directly addresses imagined colleagues, saying, “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality” (George Levine 21-20). With this new operating definition of realism, popular novels suddenly become ripe for exploration; I would like to see how they too might “attempt to explore or create a new reality.” Mimesis is certainly still very much a part of realism, but this new conception of it characterizes the movement as a generative and volatile process rather than one exclusively pursuing naïve or unproblematic modes of representation.

Srdjan Smajic’s article “Supernatural Realism,” published in the Spring of 2009 in Novel, may be the most recent addition to this reconsideration and new conception of realism; he even goes so far as to name his first subheading, “realism reloaded” to make clear to readers that his work hopes to destabilize realism as a fictional mode, and avoid the “myopic” (Smajic 1) view of previous scholars looking for a concrete definition. Smajic very carefully catalogues previous conceptions of both realism, the supernatural, and the relationship between the two, and then says

My aim here is not to prpose an improved, more flexible, and capacious definition of realism, though my argument should be understood as both a prolegomenon and an invitation to such a project. More moderately, for the time being, I wish to argue that supernaturalism, as far as the nineteenth-century British novel is concerned, is not disruptive but consistently and overtly constitutive of its realism. Literary realism, I will maintain, is not haunted by supernaturalism as the parasitic or saborteurial harbinger of ideological, epistemological, and ontological disruption but instead openly collaborates with it, everywhere weaving it into its formal properties, thematic concerns, and critical self-reflections. (Smajic 3)

This project will in many ways take up Smajic’s invitation, and carry on the work he begins with Silas Marner, Jane Eyre, and Waverly to include the late Victorian authors under examination here.
Suzanne Keen, in Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation, echoes Smajic’s work in “complicating the traditional opposition of realism and romance” (Keen 1-2) with a new literary term she coins called the “narrative annex,” which she says “draw attention and contribute to the generic diversity of the Victorian novel” by “extending and qualifying the boundaries of representation” (Keen 1-2). Despite what Keen claims her efforts accomplish, though, the notion of the narrative annex still gives primacy to the “dominant mode of the novel,” which she frequently identifies as realism.

As a final note on existing scholarship, the “basic aims and proposed argument” section outlined earlier mentions that film adaptations of the novels in question will also be invoked. One might assume that this would necessitate the involvement of the entire history of adaptation studies and adaptation theory, but such critical history will only arise as it is relevant to the discussion of Victorian realism. Adaptation studies, then, will be acknowledged but not directly engaged, often kept in notes for each of the chapters.