Monday, May 24, 2010

Let's read The Victorian Art of Fiction, ed. Rohan Maitzen

This week’s text will be The Victorian Art of Fiction: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the Novel, Broadview Press, 2009, ed. Rohan Maitzen.  We all know Rohan as the proprietor of Novel Readings, but here we have a book she edited, an anthology of twenty-two Victorian magazine essays on the English novel.  Rohan has supplied footnotes and deftly trimmed the essays.  I was never too curious about what was under those ellipses, which I take as a sign of good trimming.

The authors range from major novelists (Eliot, Trollope, James, Stevenson) to the scintillating A. Nonymous.  The dates cover 1848 to 1884.  The essays are diverse but not comprehensive.  A story emerges, a debate takes place.  Are novels good or bad?  Meaning, novels as a whole – should one waste any time reading novels – and specific novels.  Perhaps Charlotte Brontë is bad for you and George Eliot is good for you.  Not that this debate has entirely ended, but we know which side won.  The Victorian Art of Fiction helped me see the path of the argument.

If novels are immoral, or if reading them is immoral, it is likely because so many are written by ladies.  Or not.  So a subtheme of the book is The Lady Novelist, with George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) and Margaret Oliphant’s “Modern Novelists – Great and Small” (1855), and others, pursuing the idea.  Of course, the deck is stacked, with two not-so-silly lady novelists at the beginnings of their own careers surveying the field, thinking about not what lady novelists should do, but what Eliot and Oliphant should do.

In later essays, George Eliot becomes an exemplar for the seriousness of the novel as an art form, and as a morally useful form.  In the anthology, she becomes the foil for Charlotte Brontë, a writer who made critics nervous.  Are her books good or bad, helpful or harmful?  Emily Brontë is barely mentioned in these essays.  Charlotte is apparently a sufficiently difficult problem.  I’m going to write more about this theme, if for no other reason than to gape at Leslie Stephen’s baffling 1877 attempt on Brontë's books.

The essays often work in pairs.  They are chronological, so Rohan will have to tell us how that worked. George Eliot’s sly “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) is followed by W. R. Greg’s “False Morality of Lady Novelists” (1859), who at first sounds as bad as his title, but improves.  Anthony Trollope’s celebratory, even valedictory, “Novel-Reading” (1879) is followed by John Ruskin’s scathing, hilarious, utterly bonkers “Fiction – Fair and Foul” (1880), which functions in this anthology as the final scream of the “novels rot your brain” argument.  And we end with Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson civilly discussing what the novel can do (anything) and how, exactly, it can do it (now there’s the difficulty), two master craftsmen who could not take the novel more seriously.  They win.

17 comments:

  1. Very much looking forward to baffling Leslie Stephen & bonkers John Ruskin (especially Stephen on Brontë - do you think he influenced Woolf's sometimes-odd opinions on the Brontë sister?). This sounds like a fun way to spend the week. Post on, good sir!

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  2. This sounds like a good book! I like that Charlotte Bronte made critics nervous. I look forward to hearing about what Woolf's father had to say about the Brontes!

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  3. All right then, here we go! Interesting stuff, and obviously looking forward to LS being baffled by the Brontes. I didn't realize, because I didn't look closely, when it was mentioned, that RM's book was 19th century essays, but now it seems like a much more interesting topic. So we'll soon see about the LS choice, but my own recent researches make me wish that his brother James Fitzjames Stephen's (another quiet warning to watch out for that plural, like last time!) Theory of the Novel, which he wrote when he was all of 26, might have been included. Not that I've read it myself. And if the bafflement of LS gets you down, I'd suggest once again perhaps turning to his mountaineering essays at some point.

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  4. This is a good book. Anyone who is serious about the Victorian English novel should take a look. Define "serious" as you like. A few essays are standard (Eliot, H. James), but they are by no means the only interesting ones, although they are the best-written. I learned something new from every one.

    zhiv - Stephen isn't baffled. He knows just what he thinks. I'm baffled by how wrong he is.

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  5. You've prompted me to look up 'Fair and Foul.' I think my favourite moment of Ruskin bonkiana comes along in The Two Paths, where he suggests that steel is morally reprehensible because it refuses to breathe.

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  6. I should probably avoid chiming in repeatedly with this kind of comment, but I had picked out something by James Fitzjames, his 1857 essay on "The Licence of Modern Novelists"--but I had a page limit and eventually it didn't make the cut.

    My favorite bit in the Ruskin piece is the table of deaths from Bleak House: "One by starvation, with pthisis, one by spontaneous combustion..."

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  7. "steel is morally reprehensible" - that's magnificent. I was not planning to read The Two Paths - I think I was wrong.

    No, Rohan, process comments are entirely appropriate. Maybe this is a good place to mention that the short bibliography is also useful, listing other related anthologies and books on the sunject. George Watson's The Literary Critics: A Study of English Descriptive Criticism (1964) is the only one I've read - it's excellent, and surprisingly funny.

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  8. This sounds great. I'm going to be reading a lot more Victorian Lit this summer so maybe I should find this collection. Off to see if my library has it!!

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  9. sadly, it's not at my library. :(

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  10. At all of the university libraries in my state, there are exactly three copies of this book, which just ain't right.

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  11. Amateur Reader, I actually put in an ILL request for this -- it will come from Univ. of Chicago, which is the only copy in Illinois, apparently. At least according to World Cat.

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  12. Re. My favorite bit in the Ruskin piece ...

    I grinned at his description of Poor Miss Finch "in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions." Proust, who loved Ruskin, and translated him, calls him a crank somewhere -- in a letter, I think, although I can't find the source now, and I'm not sure of the word that was being translated into English as "crank" -- but praises him more than he abuses him -- a great prose orator.

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  13. Actually, scratch that. I can't find the letter at all and I'm wondering if I invented it.

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  14. Well, I call Ruskin a crank, so I'm happy to agree with imaginary Proust.

    Just a reminder: Wuthering Expectations is strongly pro-crank. Cranks are a necessary part of the intellectual ecosystem. And if they write as well as Ruskin, so much the better.

    I'll refer interested readers to A. E. Housman's description of Ruskin as a teacher, in which he paints over a Turner in class.

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  15. I'm glad to see AR take a stand on behalf of cranks!

    One of the things I had most on my mind as I worked on these essays was that their authors are thinking about fiction in very different ways than we are used to doing. Stevenson and James "win" because what they do is what we do, more or less--they found or set the terms, James especially. Ruskin is a 'crank' from our point of view partly because he is approaching literature prophetically, morally, as a cultural symptom--not as a text. It seemed wrong, to me, to go back through the 19thC looking for people I could point to (as other editors have done) as "proto-Jamesians." I have a friend and colleague who works on the reception of modernism, and one of the points he has very helpfully made to me about reading earlier criticism is that our question needs to be something like "Why are these people making these particular noises, that seem so strange (or 'bonkers') to me?"

    That said, Ruskin's noises can be exceptionally peculiar, no doubt. But also stylish, as AR says. They matter in part because they are Ruskin's--he knew a thing or two about the relationship between aesthetics and morality.

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  16. I swear, over on the Ruskin post, I was going to say that Ruskin was using fiction as a "symptom" of cultural decline, and then forgot. I swear!

    Your selection of essays really works for this story - the "path to Modernism" is visible, although not through any one essay, but other stories are there as well. The Jamesian conclusion is in no way pre-ordained, or the only possible outcome. And these stories only become visible by reading the essays against each other.

    I'd have to go back to demonstrate this, but I could sometime detect writers sort of straining towards technical or stylistic criticism, groping in the dark for tools that they did not quite have. Yet every essay, every one, contained genuine insights into the novels at hand.

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