due 3 hours 2 pages asap

     

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PART II:
In realism, there is this constant tension between reality and illusion. Just because something seems real doesn’t mean it is real. As Peter Brooks puts it, “Fictions have to lie in order to tell the truth: the must foreshorten, summarize, perspectivize, give an illusion of completeness from fragments.”
Think back to the one of the “realisms” you wrote about from Part I of this assignment (literature, Netflix series, etc.) and analyze how it might “lie in order to tell the truth.” How effective is it in its illusion? Does it use any techniques, such as an “intrusive narrator,” that attempt to bolster the authenticity of the story? In what other ways does it try to establish and insist on its reality?
Interwoven with this analysis, please draw from at least THREE different sources in your required reading lists for Modules 2 & 3, including at least SIX direct quotations combined from these three sources. Make sure that one of these three sources is a work of fiction that we have covered to date in this course and that you compare it (by way of analysis) to your own chosen work of realism from Part 1. Quotations must be properly introduced/integrated into your writing and must be cited and fully referenced according to MLA convention. IMPORTANT: ALL SOURCES LISTED IN YOUR WORKS CITED MUST ALSO APPEAR IN YOUR ESSAY AS AN IN-TEXT CITATION.
In terms of format, you should think of this as a short, well organized essay with intro, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. While your writing should be formal, please continue using the first-person voice that you established in your Realism Profile. The length should be between 500-750 words. 

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PART II:

In realism, there is this constant tension between
reality and illusion. Just because something seems
real doesn’t mean it is real. As Peter Brooks puts
it, “Fictions have to lie in order to tell the truth:
the must foreshorten, summarize, perspectivize,
give an illusion of completeness from fragments.”

Think back to the one of the “realisms” you wrote
about from Part I of this assignment (literature,
Netflix series, etc.) and analyze how it might “lie
in order to tell the truth.” How effective is it in its
illusion? Does it use any techniques, such as an
“intrusive narrator,” that attempt to bolster the
authenticity of the story? In what other ways does
it try to establish and insist on its reality?

Interwoven with this analysis, please draw from at
least THREE different sources in your required
reading lists for Modules 2 & 3, including at least
SIX direct quotations combined from these three
sources. Make sure that one of these three
sources is a work of fiction that we have covered
to date in this course and that you compare it (by
way of analysis) to your own chosen work of
realism from Part 1. Quotations must be properly
introduced/integrated into your writing and must
be cited and fully referenced according to MLA

convention. IMPORTANT: ALL SOURCES LISTED IN
YOUR WORKS CITED MUST ALSO APPEAR IN YOUR
ESSAY AS AN IN-TEXT CITATION.

In terms of format, you should think of this as a
short, well organized essay with intro, body
paragraphs, and a conclusion. While your writing
should be formal, please continue using the
first-person voice that you established in your
Realism Profile. The length should be between
500-750 words.

Length for Part II – Approx 500-750 words

From“Father Goriot,” Scenes from a Parisian Life – Honore de Balzac

Mme. Vauquer (nee de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a

lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin

Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the Maison

Vauquer) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever been breathed against

her respectable establishment; but, at the same time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no

young woman has been under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for

any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of the slenderest. In 1819, however,

the time when this drama opens, there was an almost penniless young girl among Mme.

Vauquer’s boarders.

That word drama has been somewhat discredited of late; it has been overworked and twisted to

strange uses in these days of dolorous literature; but it must do service again here, not because

this story is dramatic in the restricted sense of the word, but because some tears may perhaps be

shed intra et extra muros before it is over.

Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it? It is open to doubt. The only audience who

could appreciate the results of close observation, the careful reproduction of minute detail and

local color, are dwellers between the heights of Montrouge and Montmartre, in a vale of

crumbling stucco watered by streams of black mud, a vale of sorrows which are real and joys too

often hollow; but this audience is so accustomed to terrible sensations, that only some

unimaginable and well-neigh impossible woe could produce any lasting impression there. Now

and again there are tragedies so awful and so grand by reason of the complication of virtues and

vices that bring them about, that egotism and selfishness are forced to pause and are moved to

pity; but the impression that they receive is like a luscious fruit, soon consumed. Civilization,

like the car of Juggernaut, is scarcely stayed perceptibly in its progress by a heart less easy to

break than the others that lie in its course; this also is broken, and Civilization continues on her

course triumphant. And you, too, will do the like; you who with this book in your white hand

will sink back among the cushions of your armchair, and say to yourself, “Perhaps this may

amuse me.” You will read the story of Father Goriot’s secret woes, and, dining thereafter with an

unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of your insensibility upon the writer, and accuse him of

exaggeration, of writing romances. Ah! once for all, this drama is neither a fiction nor a

romance! All is true,—so true, that every one can discern the elements of the tragedy in his own

house, perhaps in his own heart.

The lodging-house is Mme. Vauquer’s own property. It is still standing in the lower end of the

Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the road slopes so sharply down to the Rue de

l’Arbalete, that wheeled traffic seldom passes that way, because it is so stony and steep. This

position is sufficient to account for the silence prevalent in the streets shut in between the dome

of the Pantheon and the dome of the Val-de-Grace, two conspicuous public buildings which give

a yellowish tone to the landscape and darken the whole district that lies beneath the shadow of

their leaden-hued cupolas.

In that district the pavements are clean and dry, there is neither mud nor water in the gutters,

grass grows in the chinks of the walls. The most heedless passer-by feels the depressing

influences of a place where the sound of wheels creates a sensation; there is a grim look about

the houses, a suggestion of a jail about those high garden walls. A Parisian straying into a suburb

apparently composed of lodging-houses and public institutions would see poverty and dullness,

old age lying down to die, and joyous youth condemned to drudgery. It is the ugliest quarter of

Paris, and, it may be added, the least known. But, before all things, the Rue Nueve-Sainte-

Genevieve is like a bronze frame for a picture for which the mind cannot be too well prepared by

the contemplation of sad hues and sober images. Even so, step by step the daylight decreases,

and the cicerone’s droning voice grows hollower as the traveler descends into the Catacombs.

The comparison holds good! Who shall say which is more ghastly, the sight of the bleached

skulls or of dried-up human hearts?

The front of the lodging-house is at right angles to the road, and looks out upon a little garden, so

that you see the side of the house in section, as it were, from the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve.

Beneath the wall of the house front there lies a channel, a fathom wide, paved with cobble-

stones, and beside it runs a graveled walk bordered by geraniums and oleanders and

pomegranates set in great blue and white glazed earthenware pots. Access into the graveled walk

is afforded by a door, above which the words MAISON VAUQUER may be read, and beneath,

in rather smaller letters, “Lodgings for both sexes, etc.”

During the day a glimpse into the garden is easily obtained through a wicket to which a bell is

attached. On the opposite wall, at the further end of the graveled walk, a green marble arch was

painted once upon a time by a local artist, and in this semblance of a shrine a statue representing

Cupid is installed; a Parisian Cupid, so blistered and disfigured that he looks like a candidate for

one of the adjacent hospitals, and might suggest an allegory to lovers of symbolism. The half-

obliterated inscription on the pedestal beneath determines the date of this work of art, for it bears

witness to the widespread enthusiasm felt for Voltaire on his return to Paris in 1777:

“Whoe’er thou art, thy master see;

He is, or was, or ought to be.”

At night the wicket gate is replaced by a solid door. The little garden is no wider than the front of

the house; it is shut in between the wall of the street and the partition wall of the neighboring

house. A mantle of ivy conceals the bricks and attracts the eyes of passers-by to an effect which

is picturesque in Paris, for each of the walls is covered with trellised vines that yield a scanty

dusty crop of fruit, and furnish besides a subject of conversation for Mme. Vauquer and her

lodgers; every year the widow trembles for her vintage.

A straight path beneath the walls on either side of the garden leads to a clump of lime-trees at the

further end of it; line-trees, as Mme. Vauquer persists in calling them, in spite of the fact that she

was a de Conflans, and regardless of repeated corrections from her lodgers.

The central space between the walls is filled with artichokes and rows of pyramid fruit-trees, and

surrounded by a border of lettuce, pot-herbs, and parsley. Under the lime-trees there are a few

green-painted garden seats and a wooden table, and hither, during the dog-days, such of the

lodgers as are rich enough to indulge in a cup of coffee come to take their pleasure, though it is

hot enough to roast eggs even in the shade.

The house itself is three stories high, without counting the attics under the roof. It is built of

rough stone, and covered with the yellowish stucco that gives a mean appearance to almost every

house in Paris. There are five windows in each story in the front of the house; all the blinds

visible through the small square panes are drawn up awry, so that the lines are all at cross

purposes. At the side of the house there are but two windows on each floor, and the lowest of all

are adorned with a heavy iron grating.

Behind the house a yard extends for some twenty feet, a space inhabited by a happy family of

pigs, poultry, and rabbits; the wood-shed is situated on the further side, and on the wall between

the wood-shed and the kitchen window hangs the meat-safe, just above the place where the sink

discharges its greasy streams. The cook sweeps all the refuse out through a little door into the

Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, and frequently cleanses the yard with copious supplies of water,

under pain of pestilence.

The house might have been built on purpose for its present uses. Access is given by a French

window to the first room on the ground floor, a sitting-room which looks out upon the street

through the two barred windows already mentioned. Another door opens out of it into the dining-

room, which is separated from the kitchen by the well of the staircase, the steps being

constructed partly of wood, partly of tiles, which are colored and beeswaxed. Nothing can be

more depressing than the sight of that sitting-room. The furniture is covered with horse hair

woven in alternate dull and glossy stripes. There is a round table in the middle, with a purplish-

red marble top, on which there stands, by way of ornament, the inevitable white china tea-

service, covered with a half-effaced gilt network. The floor is sufficiently uneven, the wainscot

rises to elbow height, and the rest of the wall space is decorated with a varnished paper, on which

the principal scenes from Telemaque are depicted, the various classical personages being

colored. The subject between the two windows is the banquet given by Calypso to the son of

Ulysses, displayed thereon for the admiration of the boarders, and has furnished jokes these forty

years to the young men who show themselves superior to their position by making fun of the

dinners to which poverty condemns them. The hearth is always so clean and neat that it is

evident that a fire is only kindled there on great occasions; the stone chimney-piece is adorned by

a couple of vases filled with faded artificial flowers imprisoned under glass shades, on either side

of a bluish marble clock in the very worst taste.

The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the language, and which should be

called the odeur de pension. The damp atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it

has a stuffy, musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing; after-dinner scents seem to be

mingled in it with smells from the kitchen and scullery and the reek of a hospital. It might be

possible to describe it if some one should discover a process by which to distil from the

atmosphere all the nauseating elements with which it is charged by the catarrhal exhalations of

every individual lodger, young or old. Yet, in spite of these stale horrors, the sitting-room is as

charming and as delicately perfumed as a boudoir, when compared with the adjoining dining-

room.

The paneled walls of that apartment were once painted some color, now a matter of conjecture,

for the surface is incrusted with accumulated layers of grimy deposit, which cover it with

fantastic outlines. A collection of dim-ribbed glass decanters, metal discs with a satin sheen on

them, and piles of blue-edged earthenware plates of Touraine ware cover the sticky surfaces of

the sideboards that line the room. In a corner stands a box containing a set of numbered pigeon-

holes, in which the lodgers’ table napkins, more or less soiled and stained with wine, are kept.

Here you see that indestructible furniture never met with elsewhere, which finds its way into

lodging-houses much as the wrecks of our civilization drift into hospitals for incurables. You

expect in such places as these to find the weather-house whence a Capuchin issues on wet days;

you look to find the execrable engravings which spoil your appetite, framed every one in a black

varnished frame, with a gilt beading round it; you know the sort of tortoise-shell clock-case,

inlaid with brass; the green stove, the Argand lamps, covered with oil and dust, have met your

eyes before. The oilcloth which covers the long table is so greasy that a waggish externe will

write his name on the surface, using his thumb-nail as a style. The chairs are broken-down

invalids; the wretched little hempen mats slip away from under your feet without slipping away

for good; and finally, the foot-warmers are miserable wrecks, hingeless, charred, broken away

about the holes. It would be impossible to give an idea of the old, rotten, shaky, cranky, worm-

eaten, halt, maimed, one-eyed, rickety, and ramshackle condition of the furniture without an

exhaustive description, which would delay the progress of the story to an extent that impatient

people would not pardon. The red tiles of the floor are full of depressions brought about by

scouring and periodical renewings of color. In short, there is no illusory grace left to the poverty

that reigns here; it is dire, parsimonious, concentrated, threadbare poverty; as yet it has not sunk

into the mire, it is only splashed by it, and though not in rags as yet, its clothing is ready to drop

to pieces.

This apartment is in all its glory at seven o’clock in the morning, when Mme. Vauquer’s cat

appears, announcing the near approach of his mistress, and jumps upon the sideboards to sniff at

the milk in the bowls, each protected by a plate, while he purrs his morning greeting to the

world. A moment later the widow shows her face; she is tricked out in a net cap attached to a

false front set on awry, and shuffles into the room in her slipshod fashion. She is an oldish

woman, with a bloated countenance, and a nose like a parrot’s beak set in the middle of it; her fat

little hands (she is as sleek as a church rat) and her shapeless, slouching figure are in keeping

with the room that reeks of misfortune, where hope is reduced to speculate for the meanest

stakes. Mme. Vauquer alone can breathe that tainted air without being disheartened by it. Her

face is as fresh as a frosty morning in autumn; there are wrinkles about the eyes that vary in their

expression from the set smile of a ballet-dancer to the dark, suspicious scowl of a discounter of

bills; in short, she is at once the embodiment and interpretation of her lodging-house, as surely as

her lodging-house implies the existence of its mistress. You can no more imagine the one

without the other, than you can think of a jail without a turnkey. The unwholesome corpulence of

the little woman is produced by the life she leads, just as typhus fever is bred in the tainted air of

a hospital. The very knitted woolen petticoat that she wears beneath a skirt made of an old gown,

with the wadding protruding through the rents in the material, is a sort of epitome of the sitting-

room, the dining-room, and the little garden; it discovers the cook, it foreshadows the lodgers—

the picture of the house is completed by the portrait of its mistress.

Mme. Vauquer at the age of fifty is like all women who “have seen a deal of trouble.” She has

the glassy eyes and innocent air of a trafficker in flesh and blood, who will wax virtuously

indignant to obtain a higher price for her services, but who is quite ready to betray a Georges or a

Pichegru, if a Georges or a Pichegru were in hiding and still to be betrayed, or for any other

expedient that may alleviate her lot. Still, “she is a good woman at bottom,” said the lodgers who

believed that the widow was wholly dependent upon the money that they paid her, and

sympathized when they heard her cough and groan like one of themselves.

What had M. Vauquer been? The lady was never very explicit on this head. How had she lost her

money? “Through trouble,” was her answer. He had treated her badly, had left her nothing but

her eyes to cry over his cruelty, the house she lived in, and the privilege of pitying nobody,

because, so she was wont to say, she herself had been through every possible misfortune.

Sylvie, the stout cook, hearing her mistress’ shuffling footsteps, hastened to serve the lodgers’

breakfasts. Beside those who lived in the house, Mme. Vauquer took boarders who came for

their meals; but these externes usually only came to dinner, for which they paid thirty francs a

month.

At the time when this story begins, the lodging-house contained seven inmates. The best rooms

in the house were on the first story, Mme. Vauquer herself occupying the least important, while

the rest were let to a Mme. Couture, the widow of a commissary-general in the service of the

Republic. With her lived Victorine Taillefer, a schoolgirl, to whom she filled the place of

mother. These two ladies paid eighteen hundred francs a year.

The two sets of rooms on the second floor were respectively occupied by an old man named

Poiret and a man of forty or thereabouts, the wearer of a black wig and dyed whiskers, who gave

out that he was a retired merchant, and was addressed as M. Vautrin. Two of the four rooms on

the third floor were also let—one to an elderly spinster, a Mlle. Michonneau, and the other to a

retired manufacturer of vermicelli, Italian paste and starch, who allowed the others to address

him as “Father Goriot.” The remaining rooms were allotted to various birds of passage, to

impecunious students, who like “Father Goriot” and Mlle. Michonneau, could only muster forty-

five francs a month to pay for their board and lodging. Mme. Vauquer had little desire for

lodgers of this sort; they ate too much bread, and she only took them in default of better.

At that time one of the rooms was tenanted by a law student, a young man from the

neighborhood of Angouleme, one of a large family who pinched and starved themselves to spare

twelve hundred francs a year for him. Misfortune had accustomed Eugene de Rastignac, for that

was his name, to work. He belonged to the number of young men who know as children that

their parents’ hopes are centered on them, and deliberately prepare themselves for a great career,

subordinating their studies from the first to this end, carefully watching the indications of the

course of events, calculating the probable turn that affairs will take, that they may be the first to

profit by them. But for his observant curiosity, and the skill with which he managed to introduce

himself into the salons of Paris, this story would not have been colored by the tones of truth

which it certainly owes to him, for they are entirely due to his penetrating sagacity and desire to

fathom the mysteries of an appalling condition of things, which was concealed as carefully by

the victim as by those who had brought it to pass.

Above the third story there was a garret where the linen was hung to dry, and a couple of attics.

Christophe, the man-of-all-work, slept in one, and Sylvie, the stout cook, in the other. Beside the

seven inmates thus enumerated, taking one year with another, some eight law or medical students

dined in the house, as well as two or three regular comers who lived in the neighborhood. There

were usually eighteen people at dinner, and there was room, if need be, for twenty at Mme.

Vauquer’s table; at breakfast, however, only the seven lodgers appeared. It was almost like a

family party. Every one came down in dressing-gown and slippers, and the conversation usually

turned on anything that had happened the evening before; comments on the dress or appearance

of the dinner contingent were exchanged in friendly confidence.

These seven lodgers were Mme. Vauquer’s spoiled children. Among them she distributed, with

astronomical precision, the exact proportion of respect and attention due to the varying amounts

they paid for their board. One single consideration influenced all these human beings thrown

together by chance. The two second-floor lodgers only paid seventy-two francs a month. Such

prices as these are confined to the Faubourg Saint-Marcel and the district between La Bourbe

and the Salpetriere; and, as might be expected, poverty, more or less apparent, weighed upon

them all, Mme. Couture being the sole exception to the rule.

The dreary surroundings were reflected in the costumes of the inmates of the house; all were

alike threadbare. The color of the men’s coats were problematical; such shoes, in more

fashionable quarters, are only to be seen lying in the gutter; the cuffs and collars were worn and

frayed at the edges; every limp article of clothing looked like the ghost of its former self. The

women’s dresses were faded, old-fashioned, dyed and re-dyed; they wore gloves that were

glazed with hard wear, much-mended lace, dingy ruffles, crumpled muslin fichus. So much for

their clothing; but, for the most part, their frames were solid enough; their constitutions had

weathered the storms of life; their cold, hard faces were worn like coins that have been

withdrawn from circulation, but there were greedy teeth behind the withered lips. Dramas

brought to a close or still in progress are foreshadowed by the sight of such actors as these, not

the dramas that are played before the footlights and against a background of painted canvas, but

dumb dramas of life, frost-bound dramas that sere hearts like fire, dramas that do not end with

the actors’ lives.

Mlle. Michonneau, that elderly young lady, screened her weak eyes from the daylight by a soiled

green silk shade with a rim of brass, an object fit to scare away the Angel of Pity himself. Her

shawl, with its scanty, draggled fringe, might have covered a skeleton, so meagre and angular

was the form beneath it. Yet she must have been pretty and shapely once. What corrosive had

destroyed the feminine outlines? Was it trouble, or vice, or greed? Had she loved too well? Had

she been a second-hand clothes dealer, a frequenter of the backstairs of great houses, or had she

been merely a courtesan? Was she expiating the flaunting triumphs of a youth overcrowded with

pleasures by an old age in which she was shunned by every passer-by? Her vacant gaze sent a

chill through you; her shriveled face seemed like a menace. Her voice was like the shrill, thin

note of the grasshopper sounding from the thicket when winter is at hand. She said that she had

nursed an old gentleman, ill of catarrh of the bladder, and left to die by his children, who thought

that he had nothing left. His bequest to her, a life annuity of a thousand francs, was periodically

disputed by his heirs, who mingled slander with their persecutions. In spite of the ravages of

conflicting passions, her face retained some traces of its former fairness and fineness of tissue,

some vestiges of the physical charms of her youth still survived.

M. Poiret was a sort of automaton. He might be seen any day sailing like a gray shadow along

the walks of the Jardin des Plantes, on his head a shabby cap, a cane with an old yellow ivory

handle in the tips of his thin fingers; the outspread skirts of his threadbare overcoat failed to

conceal his meagre figure; his breeches hung loosely on his shrunken limbs; the thin, blue-

stockinged legs trembled like those of a drunken man; there was a notable breach of continuity

between the dingy white waistcoat and crumpled shirt frills and the cravat twisted about a throat

like a turkey gobbler’s; altogether, his appearance set people wondering whether this outlandish

ghost belonged to the audacious race of the sons of Japhet who flutter about on the Boulevard

Italien. What devouring kind of toil could have so shriveled him? What devouring passions had

darkened that bulbous countenance, which would have seemed outrageous as a caricature? What

had he been? Well, perhaps he had been part of the machinery of justice, a clerk in the office to

which the executioner sends in his accounts,—so much for providing black veils for parricides,

so much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for the knife. Or he might have been a

receiver at the door of a public slaughter-house, or a sub-inspector of nuisances. Indeed, the man

appeared to have been one of the beasts of burden in our great social mill; one of those Parisian

Ratons whom their Bertrands do not even know by sight; a pivot in the obscure machinery that

disposes of misery and things unclean; one of those men, in short, at sight of whom we are

prompted to remark that, “After all, we cannot do without them.”

Stately Paris ignores the existence of these faces bleached by moral or physical suffering; but,

then, Paris is in truth an ocean that no line can plumb. You may survey its surface and describe

it; but no matter how numerous and painstaking the toilers in this sea, there will always be lonely

and unexplored regions in its depths, caverns unknown, flowers and pearls and monsters of the

deep overlooked or forgotten by the divers of literature. The Maison Vauquer is one of these

curious monstrosities.

Two, however, of Mme. Vauquer’s boarders formed a striking contrast to the rest. There was a

sickly pallor, such as is often seen in anaemic girls, in Mlle. Victorine Taillefer’s face; and her

unvarying expression of sadness, like her embarrassed manner and pinched look, was in keeping

with the general wretchedness of the establishment in the Rue Nueve-Saint-Genevieve, which

forms a background to this picture; but her face was young, there was youthfulness in her voice

and elasticity in her movements. This young misfortune was not unlike a shrub, newly planted in

an uncongenial soil, where its leaves have already begun to wither. The outlines of her figure,

revealed by her dress of the simplest and cheapest materials, were also youthful. There was the

same kind of charm about her too slender form, her faintly colored face and light-brown hair,

that modern poets find in mediaeval statuettes; and a sweet expression, a look of Christian

resignation in the dark gray eyes. She was pretty by force of contrast; if she had been happy, she

would have been charming. Happiness is the poetry of woman, as the toilette is her tinsel. If the

delightful excitement of a ball had made the pale face glow with color; if the delights of a

luxurious life had brought the color to the wan cheeks that were slightly hollowed already; if

love had put light into the sad eyes, then Victorine might have ranked among the fairest; but she

lacked the two things which create woman a second time—pretty dresses and love-letters.

A book might have been made of her story. Her father was persuaded that he had sufficient

reason for declining to acknowledge her, and allowed her a bare six hundred francs a year; he

had further taken measures to disinherit his daughter, and had converted all his real estate into

personalty, that he might leave it undivided to his son. Victorine’s mother had died broken-

hearted in Mme. Couture’s house; and the latter, who was a near relation, had taken charge of the

little orphan. Unluckily, the widow of the commissary-general to the armies of the Republic had

nothing in the world but her jointure and her widow’s pension, and some day she might be

obliged to leave the helpless, inexperienced girl to the mercy of the world. The good soul,

therefore, took Victorine to mass every Sunday, and to confession once a fortnight, thinking that,

in any case, she would bring up her ward to be devout. She was right; religion offered a solution

of the problem of the young girl’s future. The poor child loved the father who refused to

acknowledge her. Once every year she tried to see him to deliver her mother’s message of

forgiveness, but every year hitherto she had knocked at that door in vain; her father was

inexorable. Her brother, her only means of communication, had not come to see her for four

years, and had sent her no assistance; yet she prayed to God to unseal her father’s eyes and to

soften her brother’s heart, and no accusations mingled with her prayers. Mme. Couture and

Mme. Vauquer exhausted the vocabulary of abuse, and failed to find words that did justice to the

banker’s iniquitous conduct; but while they heaped execrations on the millionaire, Victorine’s

words were as gentle as the moan of the wounded dove, and affection found expression even in

the cry drawn from her by pain.

From “Betrix,” Scenes from a Private Life – Honore de Balzac

II. THE BARON, HIS WIFE, AND SISTER

Early in the month of May, in the year 1836, the period when this scene opens, the family of

Guenic (we follow henceforth the modern spelling) consisted of Monsieur and Madame du

Guenic, Mademoiselle du Guenic the baron’s elder sister, and an only son, aged twenty-one,

named, after an ancient family usage, Gaudebert-Calyste-Louis. The father’s name was

Gaudebert-Calyste-Charles. Only the last name was ever varied. Saint Gaudebert and Saint

Calyste were forever bound to protect the Guenics.

The Baron du Guenic had started from Guerande the moment that La Vendee and Brittany took

arms; he fought through the war with Charette, with Cathelineau, La Rochejaquelein, d’Elbee,

Bonchamps, and the Prince de Loudon. Before starting he had, with a prudence unique in

revolutionary annals, sold his whole property of every kind to his elder and only sister,

Mademoiselle Zephirine du Guenic. After the death of all those heroes of the West, the baron,

preserved by a miracle from ending as they did, refused to submit to Napoleon. He fought on till

1802, when being at last defeated and almost captured, he returned to Guerande, and from

Guerande went to Croisic, whence he crossed to Ireland, faithful to the ancient Breton hatred for

England.

The people of Guerande feigned utter ignorance of the baron’s existence. In the whole course of

twenty years not a single indiscreet word was ever uttered. Mademoiselle du Guenic received the

rents and sent them to her brother by fishermen. Monsieur du Guenic returned to Guerande in

1813, as quietly and simply as if he had merely passed a season at Nantes. During his stay in

Dublin the old Breton, despite his fifty years, had fallen in love with a charming Irish woman,

daughter of one of the noblest and poorest families of that unhappy kingdom. Fanny O’Brien was

then twenty-one years old. The Baron du Guenic came over to France to obtain the documents

necessary for his marriage, returned to Ireland, and, after about ten months (at the beginning of

1814), brought his wife to Guerande, where she gave him Calyste on the very day that Louis

XVIII. landed at Calais,—a circumstance which explains the young man’s final name of Louis.

The old and loyal Breton was now a man of seventy-three; but his long-continued guerilla

warfare with the Republic, his exile, the perils of his five crossings through a turbulent sea in

open boats, had weighed upon his head, and he looked a hundred; therefore, at no period had the

chief of the house of Guenic been more in keeping with the worn-out grandeur of their dwelling,

built in the days when a court reigned at Guerande.

Monsieur du Guenic was a tall, straight, wiry, lean old man. His oval face was lined with

innumerable wrinkles, which formed a net-work over his cheek-bones and above his eyebrows,

giving to his face a resemblance to those choice old men whom Van Ostade, Rembrandt, Mieris,

and Gerard Dow so loved to paint, in pictures which need a microscope to be fully appreciated.

His countenance might be said to be sunken out of sight beneath those innumerable wrinkles,

produced by a life in the open air and by the habit of watching his country in the full light of the

sun from the rising of that luminary to the sinking of it. Nevertheless, to an observer enough

remained of the imperishable forms of the human face which appealed to the soul, even though

the eye could see no more than a lifeless head. The firm outline of the face, the shape of the

brow, the solemnity of the lines, the rigidity of the nose, the form of the bony structure which

wounds alone had slightly altered,—all were signs of intrepidity without calculation, faith

without reserve, obedience without discussion, fidelity without compromise, love without

inconstancy. In him, the Breton granite was made man.

The baron had no longer any teeth. His lips, once red, now violet, and backed by hard gums only

(with which he ate the bread his wife took care to soften by folding it daily in a damp napkin),

drew inward to the mouth with a sort of grin, which gave him an expression both threatening and

proud. His chin seemed to seek his nose; but in that nose, humped in the middle, lay the signs of

his energy and his Breton resistance. His skin, marbled with red blotches appearing through his

wrinkles, showed a powerfully sanguine temperament, fitted to resist fatigue and to preserve

him, as no doubt it did, from apoplexy. The head was crowned with abundant hair, as white as

silver, which fell in curls upon his shoulders. The face, extinguished, as we have said, in part,

lived through the glitter of the black eyes in their brown orbits, casting thence the last flames of a

generous and loyal soul. The eyebrows and lashes had disappeared; the skin, grown hard, could

not unwrinkle. The difficulty of shaving had obliged the old man to let his beard grow, and the

cut of it was fan-shaped. An artist would have admired beyond all else in this old lion of Brittany

with his powerful shoulders and vigorous chest, the splendid hands of the soldier,—hands like

those du Guesclin must have had, large, broad, hairy; hands that once had clasped the sword

never, like Joan of Arc, to relinquish it until the royal standard floated in the cathedral of

Rheims; hands that were often bloody from the thorns and furze of the Bocage; hands which had

pulled an oar in the Marais to surprise the Blues, or in the offing to signal Georges; the hands of

a guerilla, a cannoneer, a common solder, a leader; hands still white though the Bourbons of the

Elder branch were again in exile. Looking at those hands attentively, one might have seen some

recent marks attesting the fact that the Baron had recently joined MADAME in La Vendee. To-

day that fact may be admitted. These hands were a living commentary on the noble motto to

which no Guenic had proved recreant: Fac!

His forehead attracted attention by the golden tones of the temples, contrasting with the brown

tints of the hard and narrow brow, which the falling off of the hair had somewhat broadened,

giving still more majesty to that noble ruin. The countenance—a little material, perhaps, but how

could it be otherwise?—presented, like all the Breton faces grouped about the baron, a certain

savagery, a stolid calm which resembled the impassibility of the Huguenots; something, one

might say, stupid, due perhaps to the utter repose which follows extreme fatigue, in which the

animal nature alone is visible. Thought was rare. It seemed to be an effort; its seat was in the

heart more than in the head; it led to acts rather than ideas. But, examining that grand old man

with sustained observation, one could penetrate the mystery of this strange contradiction to the

spirit of the century. He had faiths, sentiments, inborn so to speak, which allowed him to

dispense with thought. His duty, life had taught him. Institutions and religion thought for him.

He reserved his mind, he and his kind, for action, not dissipating it on useless things which

occupied the minds of other persons. He drew his thought from his heart like his sword from its

scabbard, holding it aloft in his ermined hand, as on his scutcheon, shining with sincerity. That

secret once penetrated, all is clear. We can comprehend the depth of convictions that are not

thoughts, but living principles,—clear, distinct, downright, and as immaculate as the ermine

itself. We understand that sale made to his sister before the war; which provided for all, and

faced all, death, confiscation, exile. The beauty of the character of these two old people (for the

sister lived only for and by the brother) cannot be understood to its full extent by the right of the

selfish morals, the uncertain aims, and the inconstancy of this our epoch. An archangel, charged

with the duty of penetrating to the inmost recesses of their hearts could not have found one

thought of personal interest. In 1814, when the rector of Guerande suggested to the baron that he

should go to Paris and claim his recompense from the triumphant Bourbons, the old sister, so

saving and miserly for the household, cried out:—

“Oh, fy! does my brother need to hold out his hand like a beggar?”

“It would be thought I served a king from interest,” said the old man. “Besides, it is for him to

remember. Poor king! he must be weary indeed of those who harass him. If he gave them all

France in bits, they still would ask.”

This loyal servant, who had spent his life and means on Louis XVIII., received the rank of

colonel, the cross of Saint-Louis, and a stipend of two thousand francs a year.

“The king did remember!” he said when the news reached him.

No one undeceived him. The gift was really made by the Duc de Feltre. But, as an act of

gratitude to the king, the baron sustained a siege at Guerande against the forces of General

Travot. He refused to surrender the fortress, and when it was absolutely necessary to evacuate it

he escaped into the woods with a band of Chouans, who continued armed until the second

restoration of the Bourbons. Guerande still treasures the memory of that siege.

We must admit that the Baron du Guenic was illiterate as a peasant. He could read, write, and do

some little ciphering; he knew the military art and heraldry, but, excepting always his prayer-

book, he had not read three volumes in the course of his life. His clothing, which is not an

insignificant point, was invariably the same; it consisted of stout shoes, ribbed stockings,

breeches of greenish velveteen, a cloth waistcoat, and a loose coat with a collar, from which

hung the cross of Saint-Louis. A noble serenity now reigned upon that face where, for the last

year or so, sleep, the forerunner of death, seemed to be preparing him for rest eternal. This

constant somnolence, becoming daily more and more frequent, did not alarm either his wife, his

blind sister, or his friends, whose medical knowledge was of the slightest. To them these solemn

pauses of a life without reproach, but very weary, were naturally explained: the baron had done

his duty, that was all.

In this ancient mansion the absorbing interests were the fortunes of the dispossessed Elder

branch. The future of the exiled Bourbons, that of the Catholic religion, the influence of political

innovations on Brittany were the exclusive topics of conversation in the baron’s family. There

was but one personal interest mingled with these most absorbing ones: the attachment of all for

the only son, for Calyste, the heir, the sole hope of the great name of the du Guenics.

The old Vendean, the old Chouan, had, some years previously, a return of his own youth in order

to train his son to those manly exercises which were proper for a gentleman liable to be

summoned at any moment to take arms. No sooner was Calyste sixteen years of age than his

father accompanied him to the marshes and the forest, teaching him through the pleasures of the

chase the rudiments of war, preaching by example, indifferent to fatigue, firm in his saddle, sure

of his shot whatever the game might be,—deer, hare, or a bird on the wing,—intrepid in face of

obstacles, bidding his son follow him into danger as though he had ten other sons to take

Calyste’s place.

So, when the Duchesse de Berry landed in France to conquer back the kingdom for her son, the

father judged it right to take his boy to join her, and put in practice the motto of their ancestors.

The baron started in the dead of night, saying no word to his wife, who might perhaps have

weakened him; taking his son under fire as if to a fete, and Gasselin, his only vassal, who

followed him joyfully. The three men of the family were absent for three months without sending

news of their whereabouts to the baroness, who never read the “Quotidienne” without trembling

from line to line, nor to his old blind sister, heroically erect, whose nerve never faltered for an

instance as she heard that paper read. The three guns hanging to the walls had therefore seen

service recently. The baron, who considered the enterprise useless, left the region before the

affair of La Penissiere, or the house of Guenic would probably have ended in that hecatomb.

When, on a stormy night after parting from MADAME, the father, son, and servant returned to

the house in Guerande, they took their friends and the baroness and old Mademoiselle du Guenic

by surprise, although the latter, by the exercise of senses with which the blind are gifted,

recognized the steps of the three men in the little lane leading to the house. The baron looked

round upon the circle of his anxious friends, who were seated beside the little table lighted by the

antique lamp, and said in a tremulous voice, while Gasselin replaced the three guns and the

sabres in their places, these words of feudal simplicity:—

“The barons did not all do their duty.”

Then, having kissed his wife and sister, he sat down in his old arm-chair and ordered supper to

be brought for his son, for Gasselin, and for himself. Gasselin had thrown himself before Calyste

on one occasion, to protect him, and received the cut of a sabre on his shoulder; but so simple a

matter did it seem that even the women scarcely thanked him. The baron and his guests uttered

neither curses nor complaints of their conquerors. Such silence is a trait of Breton character. In

forty years no one ever heard a word of contumely from the baron’s lips about his adversaries. It

was for them to do their duty as he did his. This utter silence is the surest indication of an

unalterable will.

This last effort, the flash of an energy now waning, had caused the present weakness and

somnolence of the old man. The fresh defeat and exile of the Bourbons, as miraculously driven

out as miraculously re-established, were to him a source of bitter sadness.

About six o’clock on the evening of the day on which this history begins, the baron, who,

according to ancient custom, had finished dining by four o’clock, fell asleep as usual while his

wife was reading to him the “Quotidienne.” His head rested against the back of the arm-chair

which stood beside the fireplace on the garden side.

Near this gnarled trunk of an ancient tree, and in front of the fireplace, the baroness, seated on

one of the antique chairs, presented the type of those adorable women who exist in England,

Scotland, or Ireland only. There alone are born those milk-white creatures with golden hair the

curls of which are wound by the hands of angels, for the light of heaven seems to ripple in their

silken spirals swaying to the breeze. Fanny O’Brien was one of those sylphs,—strong in

tenderness, invincible under misfortune, soft as the music of her voice, pure as the azure of her

eyes, of a delicate, refined beauty, blessed with a skin that was silken to the touch and caressing

to the eye, which neither painter’s brush nor written word can picture. Beautiful still at forty-two

years of age, many a man would have thought it happiness to marry her as she looked at the

splendors of that autumn coloring, redundant in flowers and fruit, refreshed and refreshing with

the dews of heaven.

The baroness held the paper in the dimpled hand, the fingers of which curved slightly backward,

their nails cut square like those of an antique statue. Half lying, without ill-grace or affectation,

in her chair, her feet stretched out to warm them, she was dressed in a gown of black velvet, for

the weather was now becoming chilly. The corsage, rising to the throat, moulded the splendid

contour of the shoulders and the rich bosom which the suckling of her son had not deformed. Her

hair was worn in ringlets, after the English fashion, down her cheeks; the rest was simply twisted

to the crown of her head and held there with a tortoise-shell comb. The color, not undecided in

tone as other blond hair, sparkled to the light like a filagree of burnished gold. The baroness

always braided the short locks curling on the nape of her neck—which are a sign of race. This

tiny braid, concealed in the mass of hair always carefully put up, allowed the eye to follow with

delight the undulating line by which her neck was set upon her shoulders. This little detail will

show the care which she gave to her person; it was her pride to rejoice the eyes of the old baron.

What a charming, delicate attention! When you see a woman displaying in her own home the

coquetry which most women spend on a single sentiment, believe me, that woman is as noble a

mother as she is a wife; she is the joy and the flower of the home; she knows her obligations as a

woman; in her soul, in her tenderness, you will find her outward graces; she is doing good in

secret; she worships, she adores without a calculation of return; she loves her fellows, as she

loves God,—for their own sakes. And so one might fancy that the Virgin of paradise, under

whose care she lived, had rewarded the chaste girlhood and the sacred life of the old man’s wife

by surrounding her with a sort of halo which preserved her beauty from the wrongs of time. The

alterations of that beauty Plato would have glorified as the coming of new graces. Her skin, so

milk-white once, had taken the warm and pearly tones which painters adore. Her broad and

finely modelled brow caught lovingly the light which played on its polished surface. Her eyes, of

a turquoise blue, shone with unequalled sweetness; the soft lashes, and the slightly sunken

temples inspired the spectator with I know not what mute melancholy. The nose, which was

aquiline and thin, recalled the royal origin of the high-born woman. The pure lips, finely cut,

wore happy smiles, brought there by loving-kindness inexhaustible. Her teeth were small and

white; she had gained of late a slight embonpoint, but her delicate hips and slender waist were

none the worse for it. The autumn of her beauty presented a few perennial flowers of her

springtide among the richer blooms of summer. Her arms became more nobly rounded, her

lustrous skin took a finer grain; the outlines of her form gained plenitude. Lastly and best of all,

her open countenance, serene and slightly rosy, the purity of her blue eyes, that a look too eager

might have wounded, expressed illimitable sympathy, the tenderness of angels.

At the other chimney-corner, in an arm-chair, the octogenarian sister, like in all points save

clothes to her brother, sat listening to the reading of the newspaper and knitting stockings, a work

for which sight is needless. Both eyes had cataracts; but she obstinately refused to submit to an

operation, in spite of the entreaties of her sister-in-law. The secret reason of that obstinacy was

known to herself only; she declared it was want of courage; but the truth was that she would not

let her brother spend twenty-five louis for her benefit. That sum would have been so much the

less for the good of the household.

These two old persons brought out in fine relief the beauty of the baroness. Mademoiselle

Zephirine, being deprived of sight, was not aware of the changes which eighty years had wrought

in her features. Her pale, hollow face, to which the fixedness of the white and sightless eyes gave

almost the appearance of death, and three or four solitary and projecting teeth made menacing,

was framed by a little hood of brown printed cotton, quilted like a petticoat, trimmed with a

cotton ruche, and tied beneath the chin by strings which were always a little rusty. She wore a

cotillon, or short skirt of coarse cloth, over a quilted petticoat (a positive mattress, in which were

secreted double louis-d’ors), and pockets sewn to a belt which she unfastened every night and

put on every morning like a garment. Her body was encased in the casaquin of Brittany, a

species of spencer made of the same cloth as the cotillon, adorned with a collarette of many

pleats, the washing of which caused the only dispute she ever had with her sister-in-law,—her

habit being to change it only once a week. From the large wadded sleeves of the casaquin issued

two withered but still vigorous arms, at the ends of which flourished her hands, their brownish-

red color making the white arms look like poplar-wood. These hands, hooked or contracted from

the habit of knitting, might be called a stocking-machine incessantly at work; the phenomenon

would have been had they stopped. From time to time Mademoiselle du Guenic took a long

knitting needle which she kept in the bosom of her gown, and passed it between her hood and her

hair to poke or scratch her white locks. A stranger would have laughed to see the careless manner

in which she thrust back the needle without the slightest fear of wounding herself. She was

straight as a steeple. Her erect and imposing carriage might pass for one of those coquetries of

old age which prove that pride is a necessary passion of life. Her smile was gay. She, too, had

done her duty.

As soon as the baroness saw that her husband was asleep she stopped reading. A ray of sunshine,

stretching from one window to the other, divided by a golden band the atmosphere of that old

room and burnished the now black furniture. The light touched the carvings of the ceiling,

danced on the time-worn chests, spread its shining cloth on the old oak table, enlivening the still,

brown room, as Fanny’s voice cast into the heart of her octogenarian blind sister a music as

luminous and as cheerful as that ray of sunlight. Soon the ray took on the ruddy colors which, by

insensible gradations, sank into the melancholy tones of twilight. The baroness also sank into a

deep meditation, one of those total silences which her sister-in-law had noticed for the last two

weeks, trying to explain them to herself, but making no inquiry. The old woman studied the

causes of this unusual pre-occupation, as blind persons, on whose soul sound lingers like a

divining echo, read books in which the pages are black and the letters white. Mademoiselle

Zephirine, to whom the dark hour now meant nothing, continued to knit, and the silence at last

became so deep that the clicking of her knitting-needles was plainly heard.

“You have dropped the paper, sister, but you are not asleep,” said the old woman, slyly.

At this moment Mariotte came in to light the lamp, which she placed on a square table in front of

the fire; then she fetched her distaff, her ball of thread, and a small stool, on which she seated

herself in the recess of a window and began as usual to spin. Gasselin was still busy about the

offices; he looked to the horses of the baron and Calyste, saw that the stable was in order for the

night, and gave the two fine hunting-dogs their daily meal. The joyful barking of the animals was

the last noise that awakened the echoes slumbering among the darksome walls of the ancient

house. The two dogs and the two horses were the only remaining vestiges of the splendors of its

chivalry. An imaginative man seated on the steps of the portico and letting himself fall into the

poesy of the still living images of that dwelling, might have quivered as he heard the baying of

the hounds and the trampling of the neighing horses.

Gasselin was one of those short, thick, squat little Bretons, with black hair and sun-browned

faces, silent, slow, and obstinate as mules, but always following steadily the path marked out for

them. He was forty-two years old, and had been twenty-five years in the household.

Mademoiselle had hired him when he was fifteen, on hearing of the marriage and probable return

of the baron. This retainer considered himself as part of the family; he had played with Calyste,

he loved the horses and dogs of the house, and talked to them and petted them as though they

were his own. He wore a blue linen jacket with little pockets flapping about his hips, waistcoat

and trousers of the same material at all seasons, blue stockings, and stout hob-nailed shoes.

When it was cold or rainy he put on a goat’s-skin, after the fashion of his country.

Mariotte, who was also over forty, was as a woman what Gasselin was as a man. No team could

be better matched,—same complexion, same figure, same little eyes that were lively and black. It

is difficult to understand why Gasselin and Mariotte had never married; possibly it might have

seemed immoral, they were so like brother and sister. Mariotte’s wages were ninety francs a

year; Gasselin’s, three hundred. But thousands of francs offered to them elsewhere would not

have induced either to leave the Guenic household. Both were under the orders of Mademoiselle,

who, from the time of the war in La Vendee to the period of her brother’s return, had ruled the

house. When she learned that the baron was about to bring home a mistress, she had been moved

to great emotion, believing that she must yield the sceptre of the household and abdicate in favor

of the Baronne du Guenic, whose subject she was now compelled to be.

Mademoiselle Zephirine was therefore agreeably surprised to find in Fanny O’Brien a young

woman born to the highest rank, to whom the petty cares of a poor household were extremely

distasteful,—one who, like other fine souls, would far have preferred to eat plain bread rather

than the choicest food if she had to prepare it for herself; a woman capable of accomplishing all

the duties, even the most painful, of humanity, strong under necessary privations, but without

courage for commonplace avocations. When the baron begged his sister in his wife’s name to

continue in charge of the household, the old maid kissed the baroness like a sister; she made a

daughter of her, she adored her, overjoyed to be left in control of the household, which she

managed rigorously on a system of almost inconceivable economy, which was never relaxed

except for some great occasion, such as the lying-in of her sister, and her nourishment, and all

that concerned Calyste, the worshipped son of the whole household.

Though the two servants were accustomed to this stern regime, and no orders need ever have

been given to them, for the interests of their masters were greater in their minds than their

own,—were their own in fact,—Mademoiselle Zephirine insisted on looking after everything.

Her attention being never distracted, she knew, without going up to verify her knowledge, how

large was the heap of nuts in the barn; and how many oats remained in the bin without plunging

her sinewy arm into the depths of it. She carried at the end of a string fastened to the belt of her

casaquin, a boatswain’s whistle, with which she was wont to summon Mariotte by one, and

Gasselin by two notes.

Gasselin’s greatest happiness was to cultivate the garden and produce fine fruits and vegetables.

He had so little work to do that without this occupation he would certainly have felt lost. After he

had groomed his horses in the morning, he polished the floors and cleaned the rooms on the

ground-floor, then he went to his garden, where weed or damaging insect was never seen.

Sometimes Gasselin was observed motionless, bare-headed, under a burning sun, watching for a

field-mouse or the terrible grub of the cockchafer; then, as soon as it was caught, he would rush

with the joy of a child to show his masters the noxious beast that had occupied his mind for a

week. He took pleasure in going to Croisic on fast-days, to purchase a fish to be had for less

money there than at Guerande.

Thus no household was ever more truly one, more united in interests, more bound together than

this noble family sacredly devoted to its duty. Masters and servants seemed made for one

another. For twenty-five years there had been neither trouble nor discord. The only griefs were

the petty ailments of the little boy, the only terrors were caused by the events of 1814 and those

of 1830. If the same things were invariably done at the same hours, if the food was subjected to

the regularity of times and seasons, this monotony, like that of Nature varied only by alterations

of cloud and rain and sunshine, was sustained by the affection existing in the hearts of all,—the

more fruitful, the more beneficent because it emanated from natural causes.

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9

CHAPTER 1
Realism and Representation

I . W too much reality, moreTHINK WE HAVE A THIRST FOR REALITY HICH IS CURIOUS, SINCE WE HAVE
than we can bear. But that is the lived, experienced reality of the everyday. We thirst for a reality that we
can see, hold up to inspection, understand. “Reality TV” is a strange realization of this paradox: the totally
banal become fascinating because offered as spectacle rather than experience—offered as what we
sometimes call vicarious experience, living in and through the lives of others. That is perhaps the reality
that we want.

More simply, we might ask ourselves: Why do we take pleasure in imitations and reproductions of the
things of our world? Why do we from childhood on like to play with toys that reproduce in miniature the
objects amid which we live? The pleasure that human beings take in scale models of the real—dollhouses,
ships in bottles, lead soldiers, model railroads—must have something to do with the sense these provide of
being able to play with and therefore to master the real world. The scale model—the as themodèle réduit,
French call it—allows us to get both our fingers and our minds around objects otherwise alien and
imposing. Models give us a way to bind and organize the complex and at times overwhelming energies of
the world outside us. Freud suggests that the infant’s play with a spool on a string—thrown out of its crib
and pulled back—presents a basic scenario in mastering reality through play. The anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss speculates that the hobbyist’s building of the scale model figures intellectual process in
general, a way to understand through making. And Friedrich von Schiller long ago argued that art is the
product of a human instinct for play, the by which we create our zone of apparent freedom in aSpieltrieb,
world otherwise constricted by laws and necessities.

Let’s suppose, then, that making models of the things of the world is a function of our desire to play,
and in playing to assert that we master the world, and therefore have a certain freedom in it. For a child to
push around a toy bulldozer is to imitate the work of the adult world, of course, and play with a dollhouse
can imitate the child’s entire environment. But the imitation brings with it the mastery the child otherwise
doesn’t have. Play is a form of repetition of the world with this difference that the world has become
manageable. We are in charge, we control its creatures and things. The mode of “let’s pretend”
immediately transports children into a world of their own making. It is a world that can be wholly vivid
and “real,” though there can be a coexisting consciousness that it is only pretend. And surely that continues
to be true of all forms of adult play, including that form of play we call literature, the creation and
consumption of fictions.

Wallace Stevens suggests that fictions arise from the need to build a space or even a shelter for
ourselves in an alien world. He writes in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction:

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

If the world around us is not our own, more specifically if it is not human but rather a world of other
species and inanimate objects, then the “poem,” the artwork, becomes our counteraction, our attempt to
humanize the world—pursued by an artist as self-aware as Stevens of course in full knowledge that the
attempt is only fictional, carried on in a realm of the as-if. Fictions are what we make up in order to make
believe: the word in its Latin root, means both to make, as in the model builder’s activity,fingere, ficto,
and to make up, to feign. Making in order to make up, to make believe, seems a reasonable description of
literary fictions, and why we write them and read them.Co

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Now, if what I’ve been saying applies to all fictions, in whatever medium, what may be specific to
fictions that explicitly claim to represent the real world—“realist” art and literature—is its desire to be
maximally reproductive of that world it is modeling for play purposes. It claims to offer us a kind of
reduction— —of the world, compacted into a volume that we know can provide, for themodèle réduit
duration of our reading, the sense of a parallel reality that can almost supplant our own. More than most
other fictions, the realist novel provides a sense of play very similar to that given by the scale model. There
is a novel from early in the tradition, Alain-René Le Sage’s (1707), that offers a strikingLe Diable boîteux
image of the similarity. The benevolent devil Asmodée takes the novel’s protagonist, Don Cléofas, up to
the top of the highest tower in Madrid, then removes all the city’s rooftops, to show what is going on in the
rooms exposed ( ). It is very much like playing with a dollhouse or with a toy city. Yet of course it isfig. 1
already a gesture from Honoré de Balzac or Charles Dickens, seeing through the roofs and facades of the
real to the private lives behind and beneath.

Removing housetops in order to see the private lives played out beneath them: the gesture also suggests
how centrally realist literature is attached to the visual, to looking at things, registering their presence in
the world through sight. Certainly realism more than almost any other mode of literature makes sight
paramount—makes it the dominant sense in our understanding of and relation to the world. The relative
dominance and prestige given to the visual in the human grasp of the world reaches back to Greek
philosophy, at least, and after that rarely is challenged in Western culture. Broadly speaking, Western arts
are representational: different styles from the reproductive to the abstract play off the notion of
representation. The claim of “realism” in both painting and literature is in large part that our sense of sight
is the most reliable guide to the world as it most immediately affects us. The claim clearly owes much to
John Locke and the rise of empiricism as a dominant, widely shared kind of thinking about mind and
environment. The visual is not necessarily the end of the story—hearing, smell, touch may ultimately be
just as or more important—but it almost of necessity seems to be the beginning of the story. Realism tends
to deal in “first impressions” of all sorts, and they are impressions on the retina first of all—the way things
look. It is not coincidental that photography comes into being along with realism, with the lens imitating
the retina to reproduce the world. It is on the basis of first impressions that the greatest realists will go on
to far more encompassing and at times visionary visions, ones that attempt to give us not only the world
viewed but as well the world comprehended.

Let’s say that realism is a kind of literature and art committed to a form of play that uses carefully
wrought and detailed toys, ones that attempt as much as possible to reproduce the look and feel of the real
thing. And this kind of fiction becomes in the course of the nineteenth century the standard mode of the
novels we continue to think of as great, as classics. Once a radical gesture, breaking with tradition, realism
becomes so much the expected mode of the novel that even today we tend to think of it as the norm from
which other modes—magical realism, science fiction, fantasy, metafictions—are variants or deviants. That
is, we eventually came to regard the styles of representing the world pioneered by such as Balzac, Dickens,
Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot as standard, what we expected fiction to be. The novel in the airport
newsstand will tend to be written from a repertory of narrative and descriptive tools that come from the
nineteenth-century realists. What they are doing, and their radical pioneering in the novel, has ceased to
astonish us. And yet when you go back to them, they are in fact astonishing, innovators seeking and
finding new and radical ways to come to terms with and convey a reality that itself was constantly
presenting radical new challenges.

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Fig. 1. Engraving of Asmodée and Don Cléofas from Alain-René Le Sage, (Paris, 1707)Le Diable boîteux

Playing with the world seriously—in a form of play governed by rules of modeling, one might say—is
a bold new enterprise for these novelists. They invent the rules as they go along and then refine them to the
point that subsequent generations of novelists can find them codified in writing manuals. One premise of
this serious play is that it includes dolls that are supposed to look and act like people—characters who
ought to be recognizable in terms of not only dress and appearance but also social function and, beyond
that, motive, psychology. Marcel Proust remarks on the genius of the first writer to understand that readers
can be made to experience life through the eyes and mind of a fictional being. Whoever that originating
writer may have been, the realist writers had the genius to understand the importance of making characters
comparable to their supposed readers—situating them in ordinariness, as tokens of our own experience,
though perhaps then moving them through more than ordinary experience, in order to make their
adventures significant, even exemplary. Emma Bovary and Dorothea Brooke, Old Goriot and Nana—such
characters have taken on an imaginative reality in their cultures, they are referred to as if they were real, or
rather, more significant than the merely real, since they sum up and represent more fully certain choices of
ways of being. They offer, in the best possible sense, criticisms of life: instances that lend themselves to
discussion and debate, that pose important questions about our being in the world.

The difference of literary play from play with toys lies in the sign system used for modeling inC
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literature: that is, language. Imitation in literature cannot, in the manner of painting or sculpture or film,
present visual images that are immediately apprehended and decoded by the eye. Its representations are
mediated through language. Language can itself be a thing or event in the world that can be literally
reproduced in literary imitation—as in dialogue, which we can reproduce in the novel—and this gives
what Plato would identify as the only complete form of But this form of reproduction is fairlymimesis.
limited, and even dialogue tends to refer outside itself, to events and settings once again mediated through
representation. Fictions need forms of telling and showing other than —what Plato labels as mimesis

and later writers have called “summary” or “narration” or a variety of other things. Fictions havediegesis,
to lie in order to tell the truth: they must foreshorten, summarize, perspectivize, give an illusion of
completeness from fragments. Henry James said that of all novelists, Balzac pretended hardest. It is how
you pretend that counts.

But here of course is a source of objection to attempts at realist representation: Why bother with such
pretending, especially since we know that language does not coincide with the world? The lesson of much
criticism and theory in the last decades of the twentieth century seemed to suggest that notions of
representation, and especially representation that thinks of itself as an accurate designation of the world,
are naive and deluded. Representation in the realist mode seemed to depend on a faulty understanding of
the linguistic sign, which in fact does not transparently designate the world. Linguistic signs are used to
compensate for the absence of the things they designate—use of a word stands in for the absent referent of
the word, or perhaps creates the illusion that there is a referent for the word where some might doubt this
to be the case (for example, “god” or “soul” or perhaps “honor”). Signs are slippery as well as creative: as
Niccolò Machiavelli noted, language was given to men and women so they could lie. Realist fictions labor
under the burden of accusation that they are lies that don’t know it, lies that naively or mendaciously claim
to believe they are truths. For experimental “new novelists” of the 1960s and after, as for some
post-structuralist critics, the “Balzacian novel” became a kind of whipping boy, an example of blinded and
bourgeois novelizing without any sophisticated critical perspective on sign-systems and on the illusions of
the bourgeois society and its concepts—including the fully rounded and situated “character”—it was
dedicated to representing.

This was, I think, a blinded view of Balzac and the realist tradition in general. But it of course picked
up a very old line of critique of realism, reaching back at least to Plato. If to Plato art is an imitation of an
imitation—that is, of shadows, appearances, rather than true reality—then the art that attempts to be most
faithful to appearances, to surfaces, will be the lowest in value. And for many centuries of European art
and especially literature, imitation of the everyday, of the real in the sense of what we know best, belongs
to low art, and to low style: comedy, farce, certain kinds of satire. Erich Auerbach’s magisterial history of
the representation of reality in Western literature, tells the story of the emergence of a seriousMimesis,
attention to the everyday real. It is not that there haven’t been kinds of realism, and impulses toward
realism, throughout history—see Chaucer, see Rabelais, see Pieter Bruegel the Elder, or American
photorealism of the 1970s. The instinct of realist reproduction may be a constant in the human imagination
(though at times it seems to be wholly dismissed or repressed, as in Byzantine art). What seems to change
with the coming of the modern age—dating that from sometime around the end of the eighteenth century,
with the French Revolution as its great emblematic event, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then the English
Romantic writers as its flag bearers—is a new valuation of ordinary experience and its ordinary settings
and things. This new valuation is of course tied to the rise of the middle classes to cultural influence, and
to the rise of the novel as the preeminent form of modernity. What we see at the dawn of modernity—and
the age of revolutions—is the struggle to emerge of imaginative forms and styles that would do greater
justice to the language of ordinary men (in William Wordsworth’s terms) and to the meaning of
unexceptional human experience.

Keeping a register of what happens every day, Rousseau once described his one novel. This means
finding a certain dignity in the ordinary, as in Wordsworth’s strange cast of peasants. But it can also mean
attention to the ugly, that which doesn’t fit the standard definitions of the beautiful. George Eliot in Adam

famously compares her novel to Dutch genre painting, but even that kind of humble picturesquenessBede
seems too prettified for what such late realists—or “naturalists”—as Emile Zola and George Gissing seek.
Zola proposed that every writer saw life through a certain kind of screen. Whereas the Romantic screen

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gave rosy coloring to what was viewed through it, the Naturalist screen was plainly transparent—yet, Zola
admits, with a certain effect of graying, making more somber what was perceived through it. That is, Zola
recognizes that the realist, in reaction against more idealized forms of art, seeks to show us a
non-beautified world. Or perhaps more aptly: to show us the interest, possibly the beauty, of the
non-beautiful. When the painting of Gustave Courbet first appeared on the Paris art scene, critics notably
found it ugly. (See, for instance, in , Courbet’s , and .)chapter 5 Burial at Ornans, fig. 5 Bathers, fig. 9
“Vive le laid, le laid seul est aimable,” they wrote, in parody of the critic Nicolas Boileau’s famous line in
praise of truth. In their obtuseness, these critics were on to something: the fascination of the
nonconforming, that one finds in our own moment, for instance, in the work of Lucian Freud. This painting
has the almost oxymoronic title of ( ): that it is a portrait makes a strong point, aboutNaked Portrait fig. 2
its individualization, particularization, as opposed to the generalizing and idealizing tradition of the nude.
Consider also Freud’s ( ), with its kind of raw exposure. Freud, like CourbetNaked Man with Rat fig. 3
before him, has claimed he can only paint what he sees; and the act of seeing is itself exposing, relentlessly
stripping bare to a self that is not allowed to hide from the painter’s gaze. Then there is Freud’s repeated
use of the huge model Leigh Bowery, as in determined violation of all the canons of beauty (see , in fig. 36

). Documentation of the modern city, in writing, painting, and photography, will also find achapter 12
fascination in the ugly, as part of our created landscape ( ). The ugly is often used here, as in Zola, as afig. 4
call to attention: look, see. And of course when you do look with the intensity of Lucian Freud, the ugly
ceases to be simply that, to become something full of interest. The discovery of the ugly is part of the
process of disillusioning in which realism deals, but then beyond the loss of illusions something else seems
to loom: something we find in Freud’s painting, or in Flaubert’s later work—the fascination of the banal
and the ugly. We will want to explore further this problematic question of the ugly and what you might call
its mode of existence.

Realism as the ugly stands close to realism as the shocking, that which transgresses the bounds of the
acceptable and the representable. Flaubert and are put on trial in 1857 for outrage toMadame Bovary
public morality; though acquitted, Flaubert is severely reprimanded by the presiding judge for exceeding
the limits permitted to literature, and for proposing a “system” that, applied to art and literature, leads to “a
realism which would be the negation of the beautiful and the good.” Zola translated into English—only
late and cautiously—becomes the target of the National Vigilance Association and the subject of a
parliamentary debate in 1888: “ for the (Mr. Matthews)The Secretary of State Home Department
(Birmingham, E.) said, that it was beyond doubt that there had been of recent years a considerable growth
of evil and pernicious literature, and that its sale took place with more openness than was formerly the
case. The French romantic literature of modern days, of which cheap editions were openly sold in this
country, had reached a lower depth of immorality than had ever before been known.” Zola’s L’Assommoir
and were followed by his novel about peasants, Even though translated in a bowdlerizedNana La Terre.
version, that novel was the last straw for English middle-class morality—the word “bestial” keeps coming
back in the comments—and in that same year, 1888, Zola’s publisher, Henry Vizetelly, was made to
suppress all three novels and promise to publish no more, was fined one hundred pounds, and was then
sent to prison for three months. It is a curious reminder that the British, who had created the worst human
squalor in their industrial cities, could find representation of poverty, misery, and sexuality dangerous.
Being a realist or naturalist was risky business.

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Fig. 2. Lucian Freud, 1972–73, oil on canvas. Tate, London. © Lucian Freud. Photo: Tate Gallery, London / ArtNaked Portrait,
Resource, NY

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Fig. 3. Lucian Freud, 1977–78, oil on canvas. Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. © Lucian FreudNaked Man with Rat,

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Fig. 4. Lucian Freud, 1972, oil on canvas. Private collection. © Lucian Freud. Photo: © Christie’s ImagesFactory in North London,
Inc. 2004

Realism as we know it, as a label we apply to a period and a family of works, very much belongs to the
rise of the novel as a relatively rule-free genre that both appealed to and represented the private lives of the
unexceptional—or rather, found and dramatized the exceptional within the ordinary, creating the heroism
of everyday life. Ian Watt’s story in remains, despite critiques and modifications,The Rise of the Novel
generally accurate: the rise of the novel tracks the rise of the European bourgeoisie, it is tied to a new
phenomenon of middle-class leisure time—especially for women—and a new concern with private lives
and the psychology and morality of individual choices. Tied, too, of course to the expansion of printing,
and the diffusion of multiple copies of the same work that, whether bought or rented from the lending
library, can be read alone, at home, to oneself. Privacy is both the subject and the condition of the novel,
though with this paradox that both subject and condition repose on an invasion of privacy, a promiscuous
broadcast of the private. And tied also to the remarkable increase in literacy, perhaps most dramatically in
France, where in 1820 about 25 percent of the population is literate, then by the 1860s, 65 percent, and by
the end of the century around 90 percent. When Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, in the preface to their
novel (1865), spoke of a “droit au roman”—a right to the novel of all social sectorsGerminie Lacerteux
and classes, including the proletariat—they were demonstrating one logic of the novel and of realism: that
it was inevitably tied to a loosening of hierarchy and a spread of democratized taste.

With the rise of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, we are into the age of Jules Michelet and
Thomas Carlyle, of Karl Marx and John Ruskin, of Charles Darwin and Hippolyte Taine: that is, an age
where history takes on new importance, and learns to be more scientific, and where theories of historyCo

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come to explain how we got to be how we are, and in particular how we evolved from earlier forms to the
present. It is the time of industrial, social, and political revolution, and one of the defining characteristics
of any realist writing is I think a willingness to confront these issues. England develops a recognizable
“industrial novel,” one that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict, and France has its
“roman social,” including popular socialist varieties. Some English novelists address the issue Benjamin
Disraeli, novelist as well as politician, labeled that of “the two nations,” the owners and the dispossessed.
If the Industrial Revolution comes to England far earlier than to France—and more visibly—political
upheaval becomes a French specialty in the nineteenth century: the revolutions (and counterrevolutions)
that punctuate modern French history starting in 1789 and its long aftermath concluding in restoration of
the monarchy in 1815, then 1830, 1848, 1851, 1871—and one could refine on the list. Perhaps because
modern French history is so well demarcated by the rise and overthrow of various regimes, it seems to
have offered particularly grateful territory for the novelist who wanted to be the historian of contemporary
society. Balzac and Zola, for instance, both write their principal works following a revolution that has put
an endstop to the period they are writing about, and this gives them valuable perspective, enables them to
see an epoch in its entirety. And it confronts them with the stark question: To whom does France belong?

The nineteenth century in the Western world is of course a time of massive change, much of it resulting
from the industrial transformation of work and production, the creation of complex heavy machinery, the
coming of the railroad—a true revolution in the experience of space and time—and the formation of the
modern city, bringing with it the perception of glamour, entertainment, the variety and excitement of the
urban crowd—but also the perception of threat from a newly constituted urban proletariat. The population
of Paris doubles during the first half of the century, and similar changes occur in other major cities, even
more dramatically in the new industrial cities such as Manchester. Such rapid urban growth strains the
relations of social groups one to another—it makes class warfare something of a daily experience. It also
makes the city a total environment that writers concerned with the contexts of life must come to terms
with.

The nineteenth century also marks the emergence of the cash nexus as possibly underlying or
representing all social relations. If Old Regime wealth was principally expressed and undergirded by
ownership of land—the feudal, aristocratic model of wealth and of identity—this will be replaced by
money in ways both liberating and terrifying. You inherit land, you make money: and the emergence of the
cash nexus tracks a transition from inherited identity to achieved identity, that of the self-made man, or the
speculator, the capitalist, the gambler—or the destitute genius—all familiar figures in the
nineteenth-century novel. Marx noted that capitalist industrial production typically creates objects that are
transitory, quickly used up and cast aside in the forward movement of progress: “All that is solid melts into
air.” Money represents the fluidity and vaporousness of things in an economy that can swiftly move from
boom to bust and then recycle. Money indeed comes to represent representation itself: a system of signs
for things. It’s no accident that the founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, often compares
language as a system to money: meaning in both systems depends on exchange value, what you get in
return for what you are offering. And the great realist novelists come to understand that words, like
shillings or francs, are part of a circulatory system subject to inflation and deflation, that meanings may be
governed by the linguistic economies and marketplaces of which they are part.

In a direct and literal way, the coming of modern modes of production will transform literature in the
nineteenth century, propelling it toward what the French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve called
“industrial literature.” Sainte-Beuve was reacting in particular to the creation of the theroman-feuilleton,
serial novel running in daily installments on the front page of the newspaper. This was a French invention
from the 1830s and 1840s that then caught on worldwide (and continues in some parts of the world today),
and was an example of fiction financing fact. The serial novel allowed newspapers to reduce their
subscription rates dramatically (there were no singleissue sales at the time) and increase their circulation
three- and fourfold. The novelists who succeeded in the new form learned to segment melodramatic plots
into short episodes with cliff-hanging endings, followed by the sacramental line: “La suite à demain”:
Continued tomorrow. But the serial novel is only the most flamboyant instance of literature in its industrial
transformation, tied to the development of the steam press, cheap paper, the bookseller, and the lending
library. Writers now can attempt to live from sales of their works—and sometimes succeed at it—rather
than from noble or royal patronage. We have the beginnings of an uneasy relation between high cultureC
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18

and the mass market, with the novel hovering ambiguously between: a socially mobile form that can go
popular, in an age of expanding readership, or upscale toward increasingly alienated artistic milieux, or in
rare cases appeal to the whole population.

“The age of property,” E. M. Forster called the nineteenth century, and there is much in these novels
about property of all sorts, there are lots of things, clutter, an apparent fear of emptiness. In Dickens’s

the law clerk Wemmick delivers to young Pip homilies on the importance of “portableGreat Expectations,
property.” To Wemmick, anything of value is potentially portable property. It should not be lost,
squandered, allowed to slip away. It needs to be accumulated, stored in one’s home, considered as one’s
castle (and Wemmick’s home in the Walworth suburb of London, a miniature gimcrack castle, literalizes
the metaphor), turned into wealth. Balzac’s usurer and miser, Gobseck, probably appears in more novels of
the than any other character: he is at the still center of the turning earth, trading inComédie humaine
property, lending money against things. By the end of his life, he can’t get rid of things fast enough: at his
death his house is stuffed with decaying things and rotting produce. At a time of nascent capitalism (which
comes earlier in Britain than in France), there is a fascination with investment, accumulation, wealth—and
of course their collapse in bankruptcy. If wealth and poverty are, very explicitly for these novelists,
questions of money—the ultimate portable property—their overt expression most often is visible in
objects, things, bought and sold as part of one’s declaration of success or failure. Careers are played out
between the gambling house and the pawnshop. The property noted by Forster clutters up many of these
novels, precisely because it tells us so much about those who have accumulated it, in self-definition.
Balzac left us a remarkable unpublished non-novel: the inventory he laboriously wrote of the furnishings in
his newly acquired, overstuffed house in Passy. It is more Balzacian than Balzac.

“Things” will in fact be a main theme in my exploration of the realist vision. Things, first of all,
because they represent the hard materiality that one cannot get around in any non-idealist picture of the
world: things in the sense of the stone that Dr. Johnson kicked in refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s idealism.
You cannot, the realist claims, represent people without taking account of the things that people use and
acquire in order to define themselves—their tools, their furniture, their accessories. These things are indeed
part of the very definition of “character,” of who one is and what one claims to be. The presence of things
in these novels also signals their break from the neoclassical stylistic tradition, which tended to see the
concrete, the particular, the utilitarian as vulgar, lower class, and to find beauty in the generalized and the
noble. The need to include and to represent things will consequently imply a visual inspection of the world
of phenomena and a detailed report on it—a report often in the form of what we call description. The
descriptive is typical—sometimes maddeningly so—of these novels. And the picture of the whole only
emerges—if it does—from the accumulation of things. In fact, to work through the accumulation of things,
of details, of particularities, could be considered nearly definitional of the realist novel. If lyric poetry,
according to the linguist Roman Jakobson, typically uses and best represents itself in the figure of
metaphor, narrative fiction of the realist type uses and represents itself in metonymy, the selected parts that
we must construct sequentially into a whole.

Thing-ism, then, is our subject, in the context of the world looked at. For realism is almost by definition
highly visual, concerned with registering what the world looks like. We tend to believe—and centuries of
philosophical tradition stand behind the belief—that sight is the most objective and impartial of our senses.
Thus any honest accounting for the real, in the sense of the appearances of the world, needs to call upon
visual inspection and inventory. It needs to give a sense of the thereness of the physical world, as in a
still-life painting. In fact, realism as a critical and polemical term comes into the culture, in the early
1850s, to characterize painting—that of Courbet in particular—and then by extension is taken to describe a
literary style. It is a term resolutely attached to the visual, to those works that seek to inventory the
immediate perceptible world. And then: to show that the immediate perceptible world and the systems it
represents and implies constitute constraints on human agents attempting to act in the world, hard edges
against which they rub up. And here we return to the importance of money, of the cash nexus, in realism:
money becomes the representation of representation itself, of the systematic need to acquire things in
self-definition. As Balzac’s usurer Gobseck puts it, money is the lifeblood of modern civilization.

Visual inspection and inventory of the world mean, I noted, a large deployment of description, in what
sometimes seems to us a misplaced faith that verbal pictures of the world are both necessary and sufficient
to creating a sense of place, context, milieu that in turn explain and motivate characters, their actions andC
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19

reflections. To understand how and what people are, and how they have become such, you need to
understand their environment. There is a naturalist or zoological premise in realism, made explicit early on
by Balzac, theorized by Taine in his famous “race, milieu, and moment” as the vectors of human history. It
is what we might call the Bronx Zoo principle: you need to see the animals in their native habitats to
understand them. Their adaptive mechanisms, their character traits, come from the need to hunt on the
plains or seek refuge in the trees—and this applies to industrial Manchester and the ofbeaux quartiers
Paris as well.

We may at this point want to recall Virginia Woolf in her famous essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”
(retitled in one of its versions “Character in Fiction”) on the practice of the novelists she calls “the
Edwardians”: “I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s
character? And they said, ‘Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent.
Ascertain the wages of the shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe
cancer. Describe calico. Describe—’ But I cried, ‘Stop! Stop!’ And I regret to say that I threw that ugly,
that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window.” As readers of Balzac and Dickens we well know
the kind of impatience with description that makes Woolf throw Arnold Bennett out the window—and may
have provoked similar reactions in us. The invasion of narrative by this kind of discourse, what Roland
Barthes would call the “cultural code” of the text—heavy in referential material, in names of places,
people, things, in sociohistorical explanation—constitutes a kind of babble typical of the realist text, what
can often seem most dated about it, least accessible. The descriptive imperative points to the primacy of
the visual in realism, and for Woolf there is a need to go beyond the register of appearances. As Woolf also
says in her essay, Mr. Bennett “is trying to hypnotise us into the belief that, because he has made a house,
there must be a person living there.” She rejects the premise that description of the habitat is the royal way
to understanding persons. With the great modernists—with Woolf and James Joyce and Thomas Mann and
Proust—the conception of character itself has undergone modification, in a inward turn of narrative that
has often been described, perhaps most succinctly by Woolf herself when she says, “On or about
December 1910 human character changed.”

It seems to me that “postmodernism” has allowed us to relax a bit from the Woolfian strictures and that
the history of the world since the high modernist moment has suggested that the inward turn of the
European novel, its overriding concern with the workings of consciousness, had certain limitations—that
the “environmentalism” of the realists matters in trying to understand alien cultures, for instance. We are
perhaps more confused in our aesthetic appreciations than the high modernists, certainly more eclectic. As
postmodernism in architecture may best illustrate, we have come to appreciate decoration, ornament, a
certain elaboration of surfaces, not solely the sleek or stark functionalism of modernism. Our age is once
again intensely visual, nourished on the museum and the media, and attuned to the enduring popular forms
of fiction making—such as melodrama—that the media perpetuate as if they were platonic forms of the
imaginary. And in literary studies, the renewal of an attention to historical and cultural context has made it
possible, and important, to rethink what realism was up to. Behind cultural poetics in literary study stands
the -inspired history of the ordinary and the everyday: for example, the multivolume FrenchAnnales
undertaking, the in which historians invade what had traditionally been theHistory of Private Life,
province of the novelist. Not only do such historians often turn to the novel, especially to Balzac, for their
documentation, but they tend to write as novelists: for instance, the chapter by Alain Corbin in the
nineteenth-century volume of the entitled “Backstage,” which is about everythingHistory of Private Life
ostensibly hidden from sight by bourgeois society: about what the butler knew, or the washerwoman. This
is precisely the world of the great realist novelists.

Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Eliot, Zola, Gissing, James, Woolf, along with Courbet, Edouard Manet,
Gustave Caillebotte: this is essentially the selection I will use to make the case for realism. There are
omissions, of course, and disputed cases: Why have I left off Stendhal, consecrated as the first realist by
Auerbach and possibly my favorite novelist? Too witty and worldly, too uninterested in the descriptive and
the conditions of life, to be a true realist, in my view. I’ve actually sacrificed with more regret such
novelists as Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Arnold Bennett—though they have not held up
as well over time as the ones I’ve chosen. Gissing may appear distinctly of a lower rank than the other
classics I’ve picked—but his claim as the only true English “naturalist” makes him interesting. Since I
have with each writer chosen a single novel, there is further room for contest about the selections made.C
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20

For all its shortcomings, the list has the advantage of including both French and English novels, which I
would see as principally representative of the realist tradition—though a bit later the great Russians make
their claim.

The two national traditions are not the same, in large part because of the greater self-censorship of the
English novel, as of English culture in general. The French novel in the nineteenth century is well into
adultery, casual fornication, prostitution, homosexuality, and all varieties of sexual obsession, tragic or
kinky, at a time when sexual relations could barely be alluded to in the English novel. James, that
American cosmopolitan who nourished himself on French just as much as English fiction, often objected
that the English novel needed to grow up, to come out of its protracted adolescence, to break out of its
“mistrust of any but the most guarded treatment of the great relation between men and women.” The result
of this mistrust, he says, has been “an immense omission in our fiction.” Walter Scott and Dickens, for
instance, represent fiction with “the ‘love-making’ left, as the phrase is, out.” James, writing in 1899—a
decade after Zola had been banned in Britain—believes that things have changed. “The novel is older, and
so are the young”: the young are demanding fiction no longer wholly anodyne. For James, the English
novel has failed to acknowledge sufficiently the elasticity and freedom of the novel form. “There are too
many sources of interest neglected—whole categories of manners, whole corpuscular classes and
provinces, museums of character and condition, unvisited”: the Goncourts’ has beendroit au roman
singularly unused. And James goes on to notice in particular “the revolution taking place in the position
and outlook of women”—with the result that “we may very well yet see the female elbow itself, kept in
increasing activity by the play of the pen, smash with final resonance the window all this time most
superstitiously closed.” Prophetic words—except that James as admirer of Eliot, in particular, surely
appreciated that windows had been broken before, even if not with the fracas of the French novelists. In
fact, James more than anyone sees as well the strengths of the English tradition that may in part derive
from its constraints: the more meditative and indirect approach to “the great relation.” James in any event
may be the best argument in favor of including English and French novelists as both indispensable.
Studying, in this case, a single national tradition would be inadequate.

I think that we postmodernists (as I suppose we inevitably are) have come to appreciate again a certain
eclecticism of styles, in which the realist discourse of things—its interpretation of realism in the
etymological sense of -ism, thing-ism—can again be enjoyed and valued. Of course as we pursue theres
works of such consummate fiction makers as these, we discover that any label such as “realism” is
inadequate and that great literature is precisely that which understands this inadequacy, which sees around
the corner of its own declared aesthetics, sees what may make its house of cards come tumbling down.
Reading these novelists we are ever discovering both what it is like to try to come to terms with the real
within the constraints of language, and how one encounters in the process the limits of realism, and the
limits to representation itself. For these are among the most intelligent, inventive, aware—as well as the
most ambitious—novelists in our history. And they are still—they are more than ever—part of our history,
part of how we understand ourselves.

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84

4

Victorian realism

CA RO L I N E L E V I N E

At i rst glance, realism seems easy to grasp and dei ne. Even the most cas-

ual readers have a strong sense of what feels lifelike to them, and consider

themselves perfectly within their rights to object to implausible plots and

exaggerated characters. Many critics would broadly agree that realist writ-

ers rejected allegory and symbol, romantic and sensational plots, supernat-

ural explanations and idealized characters, and opted instead for the literal,

credible, observable world of lived experience. And yet, no consensus has

ever emerged among scholars about the essential qualities of a realist novel.

Critics have produced a lengthy and various list of dei nitions over the past

half-century, and new scholarly characterizations appear with remarkable

frequency. The year 2008 alone saw two major contributions: Richard

Menke’s Telegraphic Realism , which makes the case for the realist novel

as an expression of crucial shifts in Victorian media, and Daniel Novak’s

Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction , which argues that

Victorian realist writers drew from photography, yet, surprisingly, under-

stood the photograph as a highly constructed, artful form rather than a

transparent window onto the world. 1 Realism has variously been associated

with the ordinary, the middle class, the present, historical consciousness,

industrialization, the city, and the nation; it has been linked to omniscient

narration, free indirect discourse, vernacular dialogue, extended description,

open-ended narrative, the panoramic, and the detail; it has been seen as a

way to explore the interior lives of characters and the exterior movement of

objects; it has been cast as totalizing or particularizing, as naïvely invested

in transparency or as highly self-conscious about the problem of represen-

tation. Realism has also constantly crossed boundaries, claiming English,

French, US, Brazilian, Japanese, Indian, and African traditions – among

others – and spanning centuries, media, and genres.

For scholars of literature, realism is most often associated with nine-

teenth-century i ction, and the lasting inl uence of the Victorian novel has

meant that it has provided a kind of model for later realisms to resist, revive,

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Victorian realism

85

or renew. But even when we coni ne ourselves to the restricted terrain of

the Victorian novel, realism still manages to confound i xed dei nition.

Nineteenth-century realist writers typically declared an interest in conveying

the “truth,” for example, but their characterizations of truth varied widely.

Was the goal transparency, as George Eliot suggests with her metaphor of

the mirror in chapter 17 of Adam Bede ? Was the aim rather plausibility, as

Thackeray implies in Henry Esmond , resisting providential plots in favor of

gradual unfoldings and unplanned outcomes? Should realist writers be striv-

ing for comprehensiveness, as Dickens in creating the vast interconnected

social world of Bleak House aims to do? Or at psychological lifelikeness, as

Trollope tells us in his Autobiography ? Should writers adopt a satirical style

to send up the artii ces of i ction, as in Vanity Fair , or struggle to make an

accurate record of regional and working-class diction, as in Mary Barton ?

To make matters more perplexing still, the particular novels typically clas-

sii ed as realist complicate the term in fascinating and maddening ways:

if George Eliot is a consummate realist, then what are we to make of the

allegorical ending of The Mill on the Floss or the improbable coincidences

tying Daniel to Mordecai in Daniel Deronda ? Dickens may be a realist in

his attempt to capture the social life of the modern city, but his charac-

ters range from the cartoonishly distorted to the impossibly mawkish. As

for Jane Eyre, who has felt to many readers like one of the most power-

fully realistic protagonists in i ction, her plot turns strangely supernatural

at crucial moments. And these are just a few of the most famous examples.

Numerous i ctions in the Victorian period are inclined to mix realist fea-

tures with elements that are typically considered anti-realist: gothic tropes

( Wuthering Heights ), sensational plots ( Great Expectations ), even intrusive

narrators who comment on the artii ces involved in storytelling ( Vanity Fair

and Barchester Towers ). There is no established set of realist characteristics,

it would seem, and no perfectly exemplary texts.

Amanda Claybaugh has recently argued that realism is best understood

as a “syndrome,” a motley assortment of characteristics – “such as contem-

poraneous subject matter, events and characters understood as types, and a

thick description of the social world” – that developed independently but

were imitated so often that eventually they came together to create a recog-

nizable kind of novel. 2 This is a helpful starting point, since it allows us to

think of realism as a set of overlapping features. As in a medical diagnosis,

a text may qualify as realist if it manifests several of the symptoms, but it

does not have to show every one. Armed with the dei nition of realism as a

syndrome, we can see how novelists as different as Dickens and Eliot, the

Bront ë s and Trollope, Gaskell and Thackeray, may all be productively read

as realists.

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C a ro l i n e L e v i n e

86

Scholars have offered three broad explanations for the rise of nineteenth-

century realism that help to show why it has managed to elude clear and sta-

ble dei nitions. The most inl uential of these is articulated by Georg Luk á cs,

who saw novelistic realism as a response to the upheavals of the indus-

trial and political revolutions of the late eighteenth century and the rise of

Napoleon, which prompted a new sense of history on a mass scale. Life no

longer seemed governed by natural processes, and ordinary individuals for

the i rst time had a sense that they were participating in social and political

transformations that shaped both national and world histories. 3 Britain in

particular was a site of rapid change. The industrial revolution thoroughly

transformed the British economy from the late eighteenth to the early nine-

teenth centuries, shifting the nation from a primarily stagnant agricultural

economy to a fast-growing urban one. Vast numbers of people moved off

rural land to i nd work in factories, which clustered in urban areas. London

was the biggest city in the world – the biggest, in fact, that the world had

ever seen – and new urban slums, characterized by i lth, hunger, and dis-

ease, grew at a horrifying rate. Luk á cs argues that realism in the novel was

the struggle to present the forces of historical change and necessity not as

abstractions but as the detailed and tangible experience of ordinary people

caught at specii c moments in history. More recently, Harry Shaw has built

on this account, agreeing with Luk á cs that realist texts share an interest

in the task of understanding individuals in the midst of large-scale histor-

ical processes. And Shaw suggests that the novel offers a surprisingly varied

range of strategies to address this sense of history: a commitment to the

richness of concrete objects that gesture to the material conditions of his-

tory; dynamic plots that reveal processes of “social change and motion”; an

interest in representing historical difference and otherness; and narrators

who call our attention to the ways that consciousness is limited by the spe-

cii city of circumstance. 4

If Luk á cs and Shaw understand the realist novel as a response to pro-

found social and economic upheavals, classic studies of British i ction claim

instead that realism was above all an epistemological project, exploring the

processes by which one could know or grasp the real. For Ian Watt and

George Levine, for example, the realist novel posed a quintessentially mod-

ern set of questions about the nature of reality and our access to it. Watt

points to the widening inl uence of empiricist philosophy, which, beginning

with Descartes, imagines that truth may best be found by the individual,

depending on her own lived experience, independent of tradition. In order

to capture a convincing reality, the novel borrows from this empiricist epis-

temology a focus on individual characters, who rely on the evidence of their

own eyes and ears to gain access to the truths of the world. “Individualist

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Victorian realism

87

and innovating,” the novel is the form that best captures this philosophical

position in literature. 5

For George Levine, the Victorian realist novel rel ected a more plural

intellectual landscape, responding to many currents in a skeptical, seculariz-

ing culture intent on rethinking the beliefs of the past:

a culture whose experience included the Romantic poets, and the philosoph-

ical radicals; Carlyle and Newman attempting to dei ne their faiths; Charles

Lyell telling it that the world revels “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect

of an end”; the Higher Criticism of the Bible from Germany; Hume, Kant,

Goethe, Comte, and Spencer, with their varying systems or antisystems; non-

Euclidean geometry and a new anthropology made possible by a morally

dubious imperialism; John Stuart Mill urging liberty and women’s equality;

Darwin, Huxley, and the agnostics; Tennyson struggling to reimagine faith;

Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, Pater … 6

As secular kinds of knowledge such as empirical science, history, and

anthropology grew increasingly powerful and competed with older spirit-

ual modes, Levine claims that realist i ction self-consciously took part in

a larger “secularizing movement directed against the falsehoods of earlier

imaginations of reality” (11). Since writers were always aware of the limits

of their capacity to tell the truth, the struggle to produce a convincing real-

ism required a constant examination of conventions. This meant not only a

rethinking of familiar techniques of storytelling, but often an unsettling of

conventional wisdom and morality too. Thus realism had to be constantly

exploratory and experimental, refusing to come to rest in settled values,

truths, or conventions.

A third school of thought, less well known than the other two, offers yet

another compelling account of the changing nature of realist i ction. In the

1920s, several Russian formalist critics argued that realism had to shift over

time because what feels realistic changes, depending on the audience. A new

technique or subject matter can strike readers as startlingly, freshly real,

while conventional formulas for presenting the world often start to feel stale

and familiar – revealing themselves as hackneyed artii ces. Roman Jakobson

explained that a feeling of verisimilitude depends on continual innovation:

Everyday language uses a number of euphemisms, including polite formulas,

circumlocutions, allusions, and stock phrases. However, when we want our

speech to be candid, natural, and expressive, we discard the usual polite eti-

quette and call things by their real names. They have a fresh ring, and we feel

that they are “the right words.” But as soon as the name has merged with the

object it designates, we must, conversely, resort to metaphor, allusion, or alle-

gory if we wish a more expressive term. It will sound more impressive, it will

be more striking. To put it in another way, when searching for a word which

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will revitalize an object, we pick a farfetched word, unusual at least in its given

application, a word which is forced into service … The words of yesterday’s

narrative grow stale; now the item is described by features that were yesterday

held to be the least descriptive, the least worth representing, features which

were scarcely noticed … To the followers of a new movement, a description

based on unessential details seems more real than the petrii ed tradition of

their predecessors. 7

Our sense of what is freshly and strikingly real, and what is strangely and

artfully unreal, is radically contingent, depending on the representational

norms that dominate at any given moment. In this account, the realist novel

must unsettle any attempts at a stable dei nition, since each new generation

of writers will want to reject the petrii ed formulas of their precursors.

Whether we understand realism as the product of a rapidly industrializing

modernity, a response to a set of epistemological problems, or an attempt

to startle audiences with the shock of the real, all three of these accounts

put an emphasis on historical change and movement – and see realism as

rejecting above all the static, ossii ed worldviews associated with the past. Is

it any wonder, then, that realism should elude strict dei nitions? It emerges

in all three scholarly traditions as a project constantly alert to the perils of

immobility, and so becomes both an aesthetic of motion – recognizing the

necessity of change – and an aesthetic in motion – perpetually trying to out-

run its own conventions, refusing to i x its own practices and orthodoxies.

Paradoxically, of course, this emphasis on difference suggests that realism

was relatively coherent after all. What realist writers had in common was a

probing, searching, sometimes anxious struggle to register the fact of restless

change. And because what they shared was a desire to mark difference, the

work they produced was destined to take many shapes.

To make sense of this dynamic plurality, this chapter will focus on four

of the main shaping problematics faced by realist writers: subjects, objects,

perspective, and time. On the one hand, these help us to get at character,

description, narration, and plot, the most basic formal building blocks of

the novel. But they also raise historical and philosophical questions – who

counts as a subject? How and why do material things matter? From what

vantage point can one know the real? What causes events to unfold over

time? All four of these socio-formal problems generated new possibilities

as well as new challenges for nineteenth-century writers. We will see how

realist writers negotiated the various difi culties these contending questions

threw up at them, and how the most basic forms and aims of the realist

novel sometimes came into conl ict. And we will see how realism emerges as

a “syndrome,” manifesting a rich range of responses to a world in the midst

of social upheaval, intellectual innovation, and artistic change.

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Realism’s subjects

The term r é alisme i rst emerged in France to describe the work of the painter

Gustave Courbet, who caused a scandal in the 1850s with his starkly unsen-

timental paintings of workers and peasants. If art had long been the domain

of the beautiful and the ideal, suddenly artists were willing to shock audiences

by exploring lives shaped by humdrum, arduous labor in squalid conditions.

Realism became famous for its lowly characters. The novel in Britain had

in fact long been interested in the ordinary individual rather than the epic

hero: we might think of Defoe’s Moll Flanders or Richardson’s Pamela. But

nineteenth-century writers continued to widen the i eld of representation to

capture the truths of prosaic, gritty, and hideous experience. Thanks to the

realists, poor, marginal, and hitherto neglected i gures, such as seamstresses,

pawn-brokers, factory workers, drunks, prostitutes, and beggars came to be

seen not only as serious artistic subject matter, but also subjects in the philo-

sophical sense, sources of knowledge and action in the novel rather than

picturesque or comic objects.

Alex Woloch argues that this new emphasis on democratizing charac-

ter created a problem for the realist novel. On the one hand, writers could

now choose to make absolutely anyone a protagonist, but this egalitarian

impulse runs up against the necessary inequality of the novel form, which

allows only a few characters ever to be fully rounded, while everyone else

is doomed to remain minor. 8 There is no way for the novel to be genuinely

democratic in its characterization. Thus novelists faced a difi cult choice:

which particular characters should they select out to represent from the vast

array of real persons who populated the social landscape?

Some of the most famous realist texts are Bildungsromane , whose pro-

tagonists – Jane Eyre, David Copperi eld, Maggie Tulliver – begin their nar-

ratives as bewildered, yearning, isolated children who cannot make sense of

the social world or of their place within it. Romantic writers such as Jean-

Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Mary Shelley had already begun to

show a serious new interest in childhood. But the realist novel in England

would insistently return to children to consider how one could come to be

a successful, l ourishing individual in the complex new social environment

of industrial Britain. In many cases, the novel focused children of uncertain

class status, whose futures could take shape in multiple ways, to grapple

with the question of how one came to be a proper modern subject.

Jane Eyre is a particularly powerful example. Jane is an orphan who begins

her life in a wealthy propertied household, but is treated as an indigent

dependent. She is not quite on the level of the servants in the novel, but nor

is she a full member of the upper classes. Straddling class lines, she struggles

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C a ro l i n e L e v i n e

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against coni nement and injustice, and on the basis of her quick intelligence,

her refusal to be subjugated, and her i erce integrity, learns to assert herself

as a free subject in the social world. She has seemed to many readers a cred-

ible and deeply sympathetic protagonist: both realistic and unique in her

determination to overcome obstacles to self-assertion and fuli llment. For

feminist critics in the 1970s, she stood for the celebration of female indi-

vidualism in a limiting patriarchal context. 9 Recent critics have tended to

build on this account of Jane Eyre as a consummate individual, but they have

taken a gloomier view of individualism. Asserting the values of self-making,

independence, and hard work, Jane is eventually rewarded for her bourgeois

individualism by being allowed to move into the ranks of the gentry, but

along the way we can see glimpses of the sacrii ces that this upward mobility

entails: wealth made from slave labor in Jamaica and colonial conquest in

Madeira, the death of Bertha Mason Rochester, even the expulsion of Ad è le

from the inner circle of the family at the novel’s close. Gayatri Spivak has

famously made the case that British imperial violence actually required and

depended on exactly the kind of individualism Jane exemplii es so well. 10

This reading points not only to the novel’s powerful ideology, but to

something paradoxical about the genre’s use of character: it is the fact that

Jane feels unique, independent-minded and self-reliant that makes her stand

for a generalizable norm – the reality of the modern self. Thus the realist

Bildungsroman suggests one solution to the problem of which characters the

novel should choose: a single, highly individuated protagonist who distills

the larger complicated and troubling question of what it takes to become a

modern subject. Thus Jane Eyre compels our attention for her singularity,

but it is paradoxically this singularity that makes her stand for the general

phenomenon of modern individualism.

To be sure, the Bildungsroman was by no means the only formal choice for

realist writers interested in capturing the experience of a new social world.

Some sought instead to give a more sweeping, comprehensive view of social

life and widened their i eld of characters to incorporate a range of i gures

from many different walks of life. Often their aims were self-consciously

political and ethical, intending to draw sympathy and sometimes political

action. 11 In one of the classic accounts of realism – chapter 17 of Adam

Bede – George Eliot argues that art should provoke readers to feel sympathy

for a range of characters who are neither beautiful nor heroic because in fact

it is these people who surround us and need us:

These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither

straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and

it is these people – amongst whom your life is passed – that it is needful you

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Victorian realism

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should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsist-

ent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire – for

whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would

not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so

much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work,

that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and

the common green i elds – on the real breathing men and women, who can be

chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered

and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken,

brave justice … In this world there are so many of these common, coarse

people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we

should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out

of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only i t a world

of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always

have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of

commonplace things – men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and

delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. 12

Rather than distracting us with ideal beauty, writers should prompt audi-

ences to recognize the dignity of commonplace lives. For Eliot, this was pri-

marily a moral problem. For other realist writers, such as Elizabeth Gaskell,

it was also crucial to expose social and economic interconnections between

comfortable, middle-class lives and desperately deprived and difi cult ones.

The point was not only to shock audiences with ugly, lowly new content,

then, but to galvanize them into a new understanding of their own place in

a complex social environment.

And yet, thorny new formal questions arose along with the novel’s expan-

sive embrace of the social whole. Should the novelist who seeks to give a

comprehensive or systemic picture of a whole society focus our attention on

a few people we can know well or try to represent many distinctive indi-

viduals? Dickens struggled with these two alternatives in novels he wrote

close together in the 1850s, one in condensed weekly installments over six

months, the other in longer part issues over almost two years. The briefer

Hard Times contains only a few major characters, but these represent a

whole society by acting as representatives of broad social groups: Stephen

Blackpool, the honest worker; James Harthouse, the degenerate aristocrat;

Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian businessman. In an effort to capture a

whole society, Hard Times relies on synecdoche, rendering the social world

through a small number of characters who represent signii cant new types

of social subject.

In the vast expanse of Bleak House , by contrast, Dickens opts for more

than seventy idiosyncratic characters to present the social life of the nation.

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Although these many i gures come from different classes, Dickens seems

less interested in using them as representative types than in showing the

interconnections among far-l ung lives. He traces links from the aristocratic

Sir Leicester Dedlock to Jo the crossing-sweeper by way of philanthropists,

soldiers, dancing masters, doctors, aesthetes, and lawyers. Most of these

i gures are highly peculiar rather than typical, and their social signii cance

derives from the fact that their lives intersect with the lives of others. Esther

herself is at the center of the story not so much because she is a remark-

able person in her own right – as she tells us all too often – but because she

is located at the intersection of a clandestine affair, a vast and sprawling

lawsuit, and a murder investigation. The novel also makes it clear that we

have an obligation to understand these social intersections. Skimpole, for

example, is blameworthy because he refuses to entertain the notion that

he is affecting others through his own patterns of spending and debt, while

Mrs. Jellyby sees herself at the busy hub of a philanthropic network while

egregiously ignoring her family. Even Jo, who clearly typii es urban poverty

and neglected childhood, repeatedly appears in the novel because he is a

point of contact for others: i rst he links a dead man to the law; then he has

evidence relevant to a murder investigation; he also draws efforts at urban

reform; and he is a carrier of disease across class boundaries. The way that

Dickens distills his society, then, is not through a single character or small

group of representative individuals, but through a networked structure of

social relationships. 13

Woloch points to Middlemarch as another unusually complex response

to the problem of inequality among the novel’s characters. With its focus

on the expansion of the franchise, Middlemarch thematizes the question of

the distribution of signii cance among persons, but it also structures what

Woloch calls its “character-space” to pose the same question on the level

of form. That is, Middlemarch refuses to choose between the one and the

many. The novel “can be read in terms of a singular protagonist (Dorothea),

a pair of co-protagonists (including Lydgate), a series of principal characters

(including Mary and Fred, Will, Rosamond, Casaubon, and Bulstrode) or a

manifold group of characters, extending from principals to nearly anonym-

ous i gures who all compete for attention within the narrative web” ( The

One , 3).

With Jane Eyre , Hard Times , Bleak House , and Middlemarch , then, we

can begin to see the range of ways that realist texts approached the problem

of characterization in their struggle to capture a social world. One solution

involved relying on a single individuated i gure whose development traced a

plausible and exemplary path to successful maturity. Here the single central

character allows the novel to distill large-scale social processes. Alternatively,

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Victorian realism

93

a writer could offer a small handful of typical and representative characters

to gesture to whole social groups. A third approach involved multiplying

distinctive characters while drawing attention to processes and paths that

linked them. George Eliot merges all of these in an extraordinarily deli-

cate balance. And she is not the only novelist to combine these strategies:

individuation, representativeness, and interconnection are never mutually

exclusive, and we see all three in many realist texts. The highly individuated

protagonist, as we have seen, is itself a social type, and even Hard Times ,

with its emphasis on representative i gures, traces a painful education for

its atypical Louisa Gradgrind. Rich combinations of individuals, types, and

networks can be found in the period’s most sweeping realist i ctions, such as

Vanity Fair and The Way We Live Now . Thus instead of dei ning a single or

optimal mode of characterization for realism, we can instead acknowledge

the experimental range of ways that the realist novel struggled to represent

ordinary and humble modern subjects enmeshed in complex webs of social

relationship .

Realism’s objects

Realism brought to art not only new subjects but also new objects. The

Victorian novel is notorious for being packed with things – from natural

curiosities to expensive commodities, and everything in between: heirlooms,

outi ts, instruments, fetishes, furniture, gems, exotic species, foodstuffs,

antiquities, and even limbs (like those stuffed into Mr. Venus’s shop in Our

Mutual Friend ). In part, novelists valued things as part of a dense descrip-

tion of the social world, understanding material objects as an integral part of

lived experience. Indeed, objects can often capture social relations as well or

better than subjects: they can circulate as commodities; they can be passed

down through families; they can be lost, hidden, and stolen; they can be

obstacles, instruments, or ends in themselves; their value can be emotional,

economic, symbolic – or all of these.

While theorists have disagreed about the role and purpose of objects

in the nineteenth-century novel, they have tended to agree that they were

essential to the realist enterprise. For Roland Barthes, for example, it does

not matter much which things the novel includes: a barometer in Madame

Bovary creates a “reality effect,” acting as a “useless” detail that in its very

superl uity resists serving narrative meaning and so simply announces the

reality of the world represented by the text. Objects like these say nothing

but “we are the real,” and it is for this reason that the realist novel depends

on them. For Luk á cs, by contrast, the specii city of objects at moments espe-

cially of crisis or tension can capture the experience of living in history:

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things are concrete, particular facts that gesture to larger and more general

systems, “part of the broad living basis of historical events in their intricacy

and complexity.” 14 Well-chosen objects in the novel can distill the experience

of large-scale relations among social groups.

In recent years, scholars have grown increasingly interested in the real-

ist novel’s attentiveness to things. Cynthia Wall, for example, has investi-

gated the growing value granted to objects in the novel from the eighteenth

to the nineteenth century: for the i rst time things, and especially domestic

things, became worthy of lavish description, interrupting narrative in more

and more richly detailed ways. Wall suggests that this change came about

thanks to a growing consumer culture, which concentrated a new attention

on objects; new technologies that enabled new kinds of minute attentiveness

to things – such as the microscope; and a new embrace of empirical forms

of knowledge, which prized particularities as ways of getting at general

truths. 15 The novel often lingered particularly long on the visual appearance

of objects, perhaps rel ecting a Victorian culture that was richly and even

obsessively specular, swarming with exhibitions, panoramas, and optical

toys and instruments. 16

Amy M. King offers an explanation of realism’s prolii c descriptions of

objects that has more to do with values than with new technologies or prac-

tices of consumption. She argues that the novel’s protracted descriptions

drew an ethical justii cation and a set of practices from natural theology,

which imagined that a knowledge of God could be found in the smallest

details of the natural world. This worldview demanded a meticulous obser-

vation of things in nature as an act of reverence, “i nding much in the small

and the quotidian.” King points out that Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village

(1824–32), a twenty-i ve-hundred page text, was enormously popular in the

Victorian period, and it was organized around “a set of descriptive modes

premised upon dilation of detail and delaying narrative drive.” Rather than

understanding realism as a deeply secular project – pace George Levine –

King argues that this reverential relation to objects became a staple of the

Victorian novel, “a residue of the sacred” that found its way into the long

descriptive passages of Adam Bede , Mary Barton , and Trollope’s Barsetshire

series. 17

Unlike Wall and King, who have explored the realist novel’s deliberately

loving attention to things, Elaine Freedgood surprised critics in 2006 by

returning to Barthes’s reality effect. She makes the case that the Victorian

novel is simply too massive to take all of its objects seriously, and she urges

us to linger on precisely those “nonsymbolic” objects which the novel

brushes by: those it packs into its pages as markers of reality but uninter-

esting in themselves, the ones we necessarily dismiss, saying, “oh yes, the

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Victorian realism

95

real, the literal, never mind.” 18 For Freedgood, these articles matter because

they had real histories of production, circulation, and consumption beyond

the pages of the text. Dickens may mention Magwitch’s tobacco only glan-

cingly, for example, but by specifying that it is the “Negro head” variety

three times in the text, he calls up a signii cant reality he never elaborates.

As many Victorians knew, this tobacco was picked in the United States by

slaves, exported to Australia where it was used as currency by colonial set-

tlers exterminating aboriginal peoples, and banned in England between

1842 and 1863. Thus the object, though only mentioned in passing, can

be read as a site where the realist novel “stockpiles” historical information,

compressing into a single thing a vast and terrifying story of world trade,

genocide, and enslavement.

Whether they offered “thick” or “thin” descriptions of objects, lavish-

ing detail on them or compressing and distilling social relations through

them, Victorian realist writers depended on things much more than their

eighteenth-century precursors. They also tended to value them more than

their modernist successors. An interest in the material object is therefore one

of the hallmarks of the realist novel. From Lizzie Eustace’s diamonds to the

dust-heaps of Our Mutual Friend , and from Lucy Snowe’s buried letters to

the checked curtains of Mary Barton , realist i ction is certainly jam-packed

with things. These usually remain shadowy and marginal but always, like

characters in Alex Woloch’s account, have the potential to become prom-

inent, taking on particular meaning and value, as a protagonist does. The

realist novel is thus populated with unrealized possibility. The object world,

like the realm of ordinary people, is simply too crowded to be rendered in

full. And so the realist Victorian novel persistently asks – and invites us to

ask – which objects matter, and why.

Realism’s perspectives

When the novel wants to focus our attention on a subject or an object, it

pushes it into the foreground, inviting us to zoom in. But it can also stand

back, encouraging a stance of distance or detachment. Sometimes it even

asks us to admit a vast panorama, taking in the multiplicity of the city, the

nation, the world. Our relation to subjects and objects in the realist novel

depends very much, in other words, on the vantage points it adopts.

Two major intertwined questions have preoccupied the many critics who

have considered the perspectives of the realist novel. First, if realism tries

to convey a social world, then what are the boundaries of that world? Is it

a small community such as Gaskell’s Cranford? Is it the dense, mysterious,

and plural world of the city, as in the Sherlock Holmes stories? Or does the

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narrative sprawl beyond the nation, like Vanity Fair and Daniel Deronda?

Second, what formal techniques of narration does the novel adopt to convey

social wholes? Does it opt for the i rst-person vantage point of the embed-

ded participant or the bird’s-eye view of omniscience – or some complex

combination of the two? The problem of perspective thus joins content to

form and brings into focus both the social and the epistemological dimen-

sions of realism, asking not only which reality should be conveyed, but also

from what vantage point we can best grasp it. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth

argues that the perspectives made possible by realism marked a profound

epistemological shift, a break from a medieval notion of discontinuous space

and time, which privileged discrete and isolated details, to a new conception

of time and space as “continuous, homogeneous, neutral media … popu-

lated by objects that exhibit certain consistencies of behavior, regardless of

changes in position, which enable us to recognize them as the same.” 19

Politically minded critics over the past few decades have made a differ-

ent kind of perspectival claim, arguing that it is no accident that the novel

and the nation became powerful forms around the turn of the nineteenth

century, and urging us to think of the nation as the novel’s most important

horizon. As Franco Moretti explains:

Some nation-states (notably England/Britain and France) already existed, of

course, long before the rise of the novel. They had a court at the center, a dyn-

asty, a navy, some kind of taxation – but they were hardly integrated systems:

they were still fragmented into several local circuits, where the strictly national

element had not yet affected everyday existence. But towards the end of the

eighteenth century a number of processes come into being (the i nal surge

in rural enclosures; the industrial take-off; vastly improved communications;

the unii cation of the national market; mass conscription) that literally drag

human beings out of the local dimension, and throw them into a much lar-

ger one. Charles Tilley speaks of a new value for this period – “national loy-

alty” – that the state tries to force above and against “local loyalties.” He is

right, I believe, and the clash of old and new loyalty shows also how much of

a problem the nation-state initially was: an unexpected coercion, quite unlike

previous power relations; a wider, more abstract, more enigmatic dominion –

that needed a new symbolic form in order to be understood . 20

Too vast and abstract to be experienced as a single collective, the nation

needed a cultural representation that would allow people to grasp it as

one – and to cherish it. The realist novel provided one solution. In Benedict

Anderson’s famous account, the novel imagines a social world where char-

acters who do not know one another perform actions simultaneously, and so

invite us to think of millions of strangers sharing the experience of “steady,

anonymous, simultaneous activity.” 21 As we see characters moving through

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Victorian realism

97

the “homogeneous empty time” of the nation, we come to conceive of our-

selves too as participants in a shared national life.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South certainly works to forge a newly

coherent sense of the nation. The queenly Margaret Hale moves from the

stable agricultural world of southern England, with its aristocratic heredi-

tary estates, to the industrial north, where factory smoke darkens the sky,

and fortunes are quickly made and lost. Though initially disgusted by the

ugliness, newness, and violence of the north, she comes to celebrate the

industrial economy as dynamic and vigorous, a source of energy for the

nation as a whole. Joining Margaret, an heiress, to the industrialist John

Thornton at the end, Gaskell imagines in them a productive union of mas-

culine and feminine, aristocracy and bourgeoisie, industrial north and agri-

cultural south.

And yet, some critics have argued that the realist novel also persistently

pushes beyond the frame of the bounded nation. For critics like Spivak,

the realist novel’s tendency to think of itself as conveying universal truths

made the novel complicit in imperialism – part of an impulse to force non-

European others into a single set of values and norms – but more recent

theorists have shown the value in moving beyond the nation. Amanda

Anderson, for example, points out that “Nation-forming was at the heart

of the modern agenda, but so was the ideal of cosmopolitanism, which pro-

moted detachment from parochial interests, broad understanding of cultures

beyond one’s own, and a universalism that saw all peoples as belonging to

humanity over and above any individual nation.” 22 In its struggle to convey

social realities, including economic relationships, imperialism, and global

migrations, the realist novel adopted cosmopolitan and globalizing perspec-

tives alongside national ones, sometimes coexisting and sometimes super-

seding or displacing them. Daniel Deronda , with its intersecting “English”

and “Jewish” plots, offers for Anderson one particularly subtle and self-

conscious version of this joining of national and cosmopolitan frames.

Tanya Agathocleous argues that realist writers often adopted a cosmo-

politan perspective when they represented the teeming life of the modern

city. Given its plural and multiethnic populations, its role as the center of

a global empire, and its importance to revolutions in media and technol-

ogy that were transforming transnational commerce and communications,

London was not so much a national center as a “microcosm of the globe,”

a “world city.” Realist writers therefore often deliberately turned to London

as a way to imagine a vast global reality that could not itself be captured.

“If the world as a whole could not be seen, it could be brought before the

mind’s eye through the observation of the city, conceived of as a world in

miniature.” 23

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All of these readings suggest that realism strove to capture a social total-

ity that could not be experienced directly. It is not surprising, therefore,

that realist writers developed techniques of omniscient narration: narrative

perspectives not lodged in any single consciousness but able to move in

and out of multiple spaces and minds and to present connections among

people which they themselves might not be aware of. This form of narration

allowed writers to adopt worldviews that rose above the particularities of

situated experience and knowledge. Thus the novel could apprehend a vast

web of social relations.

But omniscient narration may also have served a consolatory cultural func-

tion in a rapidly secularizing culture; that is, omniscient narration could i ll

the place left by a disappearing God. 24 And perhaps it was this that led some

realist writers to shun omniscient narration, fearing that there was something

troublingly metaphysical, totalizing – unreal – about the disembodied per-

spective. We might think of Pip, David Copperi eld, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe,

Dr. Watson, and Conrad’s Marlow, all i rst-person narrators who guide us

through their worlds without the benei t of super-human knowledge.

The novel’s frequent use of the i rst-person narrator clearly complicates

the problem of realist perspective. On the one hand, in its struggle to capture

social relations, realist i ction strives to give an overarching view, under-

standing particularities as elements that signify within a larger whole. Here

it seeks a detached and synthetic vantage point. On the other hand, realist

texts evince an ongoing skepticism about overarching and totalizing per-

spectives, preferring the more ordinary and familiar techniques of empir-

ical observation and verii cation. In these cases it opts for the limited and

uncertain perspective of the i rst person, corroborating Ian Watt’s inl uential

argument that the realist novel disseminated the principles of philosoph-

ical empiricism, which prized the “individual investigator” gathering evi-

dence about the world through lived experience ( Rise of the Novel , 13).

With narration, then, realist i ction seems to reach a crossroads: should our

knowledge of the realities of the world be sweepingly comprehensive or spe-

cii cally embodied, divinely complete or humanly partial?

What is perhaps most remarkable about the realist novel is the fact that

it often merged these two strikingly different modes of knowledge through

brilliant formal innovations. The i rst and best known of these is a tech-

nique called free indirect discourse, which was famously developed by Jane

Austen and became commonplace in the Victorian novel. Ingeniously, free

indirect discourse combines the narrator’s style of speech, reporting in the

third person, with the speech mannerisms and viewpoint of a specii c char-

acter. In Barchester Towers , for example, Trollope uses free indirect speech

to describe Eleanor Bold’s emotion after Mr. Arabin has proposed to her:

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Victorian realism

99

She idolised, almost worshipped this man who had so meekly begged her par-

don. And he was now her own. Oh, how she wept and cried and laughed, as

the hopes and fears and miseries of the last few weeks passed in remembrance

through her mind.

Mr Slope! That any one should have dared to think that she who had been

chosen by him could possibly have mated herself with Mr Slope! That they

should have dared to tell him, also, and subject her bright happiness to such

a needless risk! 25

The narrator describes Eleanor’s internal monologue in the third person, yet

reports the character’s thoughts in her own shocked words (“Mr Slope!”), and

embeds her temporal vantage point (“now”) within the narrator’s third person

past tense (“Oh, how she wept and cried and laughed…”). Thus the novel sets

up a l ow between the synoptic and the specii c, merging the individual and

omniscient perspectives so intimately that they cannot be prised apart.

A second and more subtle formal innovation in the relationship between

omniscient narrators and particular characters emerges in James Buzard’s

dazzling reading of the nineteenth-century novel in Disorienting Fictions .

Arguing that British writers used the novel to perform a kind of autoethnog-

raphy – apprehending and conveying a specii cally British culture to itself –

Buzard reads the realist narrator as a prototype for the participant-observer

crucial to twentieth-century anthropology. In Mary Barton , for example, the

narrator walks through the industrial city, immersing herself in its life, like a

i eld worker who travels to a remote village. But she also resists representing

a self-contained or isolated proletarian culture, deliberately including her

own social world in the novel as well, as she incorporates “both workers

and bourgeois readers in the newly activated, positive cultural identity of

the nation.” What makes this particularly extraordinary is that the novel

manages to merge the i rst-person experience of the participant with the dis-

tant perspective of the third-person observer. On the one hand, the narrator

is part of the world she describes, a member of the same large community

as the workers; on the other hand, “in relation to a cultural i eld conceived

as an array of more or less incarcerating, view-restricting positions, the nov-

elistic narrator gains authority by traveling outward or upward from, or

comprehensively among, those separate positions in order to grasp their

structural and moral interdependence.” 26 The narrator’s bird’s-eye view is

therefore that of a cultural insider who lays claim to the detached know-

ledge of an outsider as well. She is both a participant in her national culture,

able to share the limited perspective of her characters in the story-space, and

a distanced observer in the novel’s discourse-space, able to connect relevant

details to make sense of the whole. Surprisingly, Buzard argues that this

double position characterizes i rst-person narrators as well as omniscient

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C a ro l i n e L e v i n e

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ones, contending that Jane Eyre the narrator, for example, looks back on her

younger self to explore the child’s narrow and immersed vantage point from

a position that can both share that perspective and detach itself from it .

Many different realist novels experiment with combinations of omnisci-

ence and i rst-person experience by adopting the techniques of free indirect

discourse and the stances of participant-observation, but one realist novel

raises the distance between the omniscient and the i rst-person narrator to

a self-conscious formal principle. Bleak House is unusual in switching back

and forth between an impersonal, detached, ironic, mobile, and know-

ledgeable narrator who speaks in the perpetual present tense, and Esther

Summerson’s situated, immersed, na ï ve, past-tense account. Critics have

interpreted this famously alternating perspective in a compelling range of

ways, from Joseph I. Fradin’s claim that it works as a metaphor for “the

divided modern consciousness,” to Lisa Sternlieb and Alison Case, who

argue for Dickens’s gendering of the two narrators. 27 But for the purposes

of considering Victorian realism, we might conclude that the double nar-

rative perspective of Bleak House is simply the most l agrant of a great

number of realist efforts to bring together the sweeping bird’s-eye view that

takes in the whole social world, and the more lifelike individual struggle

to make sense of experience on the ground, with only partial knowledge

to go by .

Realism’s plots

Subjects, objects, and perspectives are the stuff of many kinds of representa-

tions, including painting and poetry, but the novel is always organized along

a temporal dimension as well. Realist i ction, with its persistent concern with

change, puts at its center the problem of dynamically unfolding relations.

And in fact, Victorian writers were often fascinated by questions of causal-

ity: what sets off events, produces social change, instigates relationships?

Take, for example, the famous scene in Vauxhall Gardens in Vanity Fair ,

where Thackeray invites us to dwell on the question of cause and effect. Jos

Sedley, who is about to propose marriage to Becky Sharp, drinks too much,

and suffers from such a terrible hangover the next day that he l ees London

altogether, breaking off his connection to Becky and changing the course of

all of the protagonists’ lives:

That bowl of rack punch was the cause of all this history. And why not a bowl

of rack punch as well as any other cause? Was not a bowl of prussic acid the

cause of Fair Rosamond’s retiring from the world? Was not a bowl of wine the

cause of the demise of Alexander the Great, or, at least, does not Dr. Lempriere

say so? – so did this bowl of rack punch inl uence the fates of all the principal

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Victorian realism

101

characters in this “Novel without a Hero,” which we are now relating. It inl u-

enced their life, although most of them did not taste a drop of it.

The young ladies did not drink it; Osborne did not like it; and the conse-

quence was that Jos, that fat gourmand , drank up the whole contents of the

bowl … 28

Thackeray isolates a single, minute, commonplace occurrence as the cause

of a shift in the whole web of relationships. And in good realist fashion, he

asks the reader to consider whether the novel’s causal patterns don’t extend

into our own world: “Are not there little chapters in every body’s life, that

seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?” (chapter vi ).

Vanity Fair therefore purports to offer one example of a generalizable and

credible model of cause-and-effect relationships that describes the world

outside the novel as well as the world within.

While narrative time allows realist writers to consider plausible connec-

tions among events, plotting also presents an ongoing challenge for the real-

ist novel. One of the problems with ordinary life, of course, is that it tends

to be monotonous, unexciting – plotless. Imposing a temporal coherence

gives shape to the narrative but runs the risk of feeling distinctly artii cial.

Thus the appeal of narrative form competes with the verisimilitude of its

contents. In New Grub Street , Gissing’s writer Biffen asserts that he is going

to write a novel that will “reproduce” life “without one single impertin-

ent suggestion save that of honest reporting.” The result, he acknowledges,

“will be something unutterably tedious … If it were anything but tedious,

it would be untrue.” 29 More often than not, the realist novel refuses this

kind of tedium, returning again and again to the neat resolutions of the

marriage plot, or the fascinating mysteries of detection, and incorporating

sensational events, sentimental love, and even pivotal coincidences along

the way. The coincidence is in fact startlingly pervasive in realist i ction:

we might think of Lucy Snowe’s awakening in her godmother’s house in a

foreign land, Pip’s rescue at the crucial moment from Orlick’s attempt to

murder him, Thornton’s chance sighting of Margaret Hale bidding a strange

man goodbye at the train station, Phineas Finn’s prevention of a deadly

attack on Robert Kennedy on the street, Dorothea’s happening upon Will

and Rosamond at an indiscreet moment, and many others.

Critics have often leapt to assume that such neat plotlines represent an act

of bad faith, an undermining of realism’s goals of plausibility and verisimili-

tude in favor of successful sales and the most effortless of readerly pleasures.

Marxists in particular have argued that the tidy endings of the Victorian

novel close down the real social injustices and upheavals that have been

glimpsed along the way. “By the device of an ending,” Terry Eagleton writes,

“bourgeois initiative and genteel settlement, sober rationality and romantic

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C a ro l i n e L e v i n e

102

passion, spiritual equality and social distinction, the actively afi rmative and

the patiently deferential self, can be merged into mythical unity.” 30 Thus

narrative closure betrays the goal of verisimilitude in favor of ideologically

soothing conclusions that subtly reinforce the power of the ruling classes,

making it feel natural and inevitable.

But other critics have argued that it is a mistake to focus too heavily on

the novel’s endings. After all, the Victorian novel spent a great deal of time

in its ample middle. Many realist novels were serialized – including Bleak

House , Middlemarch , and Vanity Fair – thus enforcing regular interruptions

in the long middle . I myself have argued that the realist novel frequently

turned to techniques of suspense not to drag readers to a foreordained end-

ing but rather as a way of teaching readers a skeptical approach to the truth

that was borrowed from science. That is, suspenseful narratives hint at hid-

den truths but defer revealing them, keeping us aware of our own ignorance

as we wait for the reality to emerge. As i rst-time readers, we know that facts

are being withheld from us, and we make guesses – is the strange sound

in the attic made by Grace Poole? Does Miss Havisham intend Estella for

Pip? – but our anxiety, doubt, and desire to keep reading remind us that the

truth may be different from anything we have guessed or hoped. Like scien-

tists, then, we learn to make hypotheses and then suspend judgment, as we

wait for the unfolding of events to coni rm or unsettle our expectations. 31

This means that the realist novel deliberately keeps the potential for different

narrative trajectories open, inviting us to consider what Harry Shaw names

“co-plots,” the unrealized potential paths a narrative can take ( Narrating ,

143). The ending, in this context, is not so much a logical or natural result

of narrative unfolding as it is one among many plausible outcomes. Indeed,

realist novels sometimes foreground this fact: Great Expectations , with its

two different conclusions, or Villette , which leaves us suspended, remind

readers that realist narratives do not always end in satisfying closure.

If suspense was used for realist purposes – to teach us a skeptical epistemo-

logical approach to the truths of the world – then perhaps even sensation

i ction may be incorporated into the canon of Victorian realism. Certainly

Wilkie Collins shares Thackeray’s fascination with cause-and-effect rela-

tionships as they unfold in the world beyond the text. Consider, for example,

Count Fosco’s account of statistical probabilities in The Woman in White :

Crimes cause their own detection, do they? And murder will out (another epi-

gram), will it? Ask coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, Lady

Glyde. Ask secretaries of life-assurance companies if that is true, Miss Halcombe.

Read your own public journals. In the few cases that get into the newspapers,

are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered?

Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are not reported, and the

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Victorian realism

103

bodies that are found by the bodies that are not found, and what conclusion do

you come to? This. That there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise

criminals who escape … When the criminal is a brutal, ignorant fool, the police

in nine cases out of ten win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated, highly-

intelligent man, the police in nine cases out of ten lose. If the police win, you gen-

erally hear all about it. If the police lose, you generally hear nothing. 32

In depending on an empirical model general enough to reach beyond the

boundaries of this particular text, the Count implies that the clever criminal’s

ultimate escape is always entirely plausible, even when it does not come to

pass in some particular case. On the one hand, this gesture clearly invites us

to imagine that it is perfectly possible that he might himself escape, thereby

generating a suspense that will haunt the novel right up to the spectacle of his

dead body at the Morgue; but on the other it also suggests that this suspense

may actually operate beyond the limits of this plot, since even when it kills

the Count, the novel’s appeal to statistics compels us to recognize that other

clever criminals may yet escape, in other i ctions and, more frighteningly, in

our own world. Count Fosco thus manages to defamiliarize realist suspense

in the novel: when we feel the doubts and anxieties of information withheld,

we may know that some outcomes are highly probable, but we must also face

the fact that more exceptional eventualities also have a chance, however slim,

of prevailing in any particular case. What suspense teaches us is that even the

most likely, predictable outcomes always compete with more startling, more

improbable ones. And that means that the most sensational coincidences

may in fact be the proper stuff of the realist novel. 33

Victorian plots often trace a character’s path to understanding, as well

as the reader’s. Jane Eyre seeks not only freedom but also knowledge, con-

stantly testing hypotheses against the evidence of her world, while Pip leaps

to assume that his bequest comes from Miss Havisham and must slowly

learn not to impose his assumptions on the real. In these cases, the plot

charts not only events and experiences, but a process of truth-gathering

that, like Thackeray’s account of causality in Vanity Fair and Count Fosco’s

interest in probability, extends beyond the boundaries of the text to con-

sider how we might best acquire a knowledge of the world. And all of these

examples suggest that realist plotting may have been more often a way to

think seriously about causality and knowledge than a device for rushing

headlong to formulaic and predictable endings.

Conclusion

Realism’s plurality did not mean that it was simply a collection of distinct

practices or forms, like items on a menu. The various aims of realism could

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C a ro l i n e L e v i n e

104

compete for priority and even come into difi cult conl ict. The effort to paint

a rich psychological portrait of individuals, for example, existed in tension

with the effort to take a comprehensive view of a whole society. Transparency

collided with the artii ces of narration. Plausibility contended against both

moral purposiveness and narrative excitement. Lavish description of minute

particulars required the close-up; a large social vision called for the pano-

rama. George Levine argues that the stopping of time to describe things in

detail also ran up against the impulse toward plot. 34 Omniscience, itself an

impossible perspective, seemed to offer a kind of knowledge that the partial

individual consciousness could not.

To be sure, these conl icts also prompted some of realism’s most exciting

and inl uential innovations in the novel form. The inclusion of poor, mar-

ginal, and working-class characters allowed novelists to hold to the goal of

plausibility while teaching a moral and social lesson to their readers. Sheer

sordidness may also have allowed some of the delights of unfamiliarity and

adventure to bourgeois readers even while the text kept to the supposedly

humdrum frame of ordinary experience. Free indirect discourse brought

together omniscient and limited i rst-person perspectives to afford both a

large sense of a whole social body, as in historical writing, and the lifelike

uncertainty and limited perspective of the individual, as in empirical science.

It was also a canny device that seemed to suggest a certain transparency,

implying that characters were “highly legible to their narrator even when

they are not directly speaking or acting.” 35 And the suspense plot allowed

writers to craft thrilling plots while making serious arguments for a skep-

tical, secular, scientii c epistemology.

Realism offered no stable or settled response to the upheavals of the social

world but rather a variety of experiments in form and content. It could not

be called a na ï ve project, as novelists engaged in a dynamic, self-rel ective

set of processes, responding to the limitations of prior i ctions in ingenious,

interrogatory, and transformative ways. Nor was it a purist enterprise, seek-

ing to i nd a single resolution to its ongoing questions. When we look for

realism, in the end what we i nd is a complex syndrome of linked, overlap-

ping, and contending aims and forms.

N OT E S

1 Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism (Stanford University Press, 2008); and Daniel
Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge
University Press, 2008).

2 Claybaugh draws the notion of a syndrome from an article in German by Peter
Demetz, “Zur Dei nition des Realismus,” Literatur und Kritik 2 (1967): 333–45.
See Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2007), 44.

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Victorian realism

105

3 Georg Luk á cs, The Historical Novel , trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell
(London: Merlin Press, 1962).

4 Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1999), 165.

5 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 13.
6 George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (Chicago and London: University of

Chicago Press, 1981), 20.
7 Roman Jakobson, “Realism in Art,” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and

Structuralist Views , ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1971), 40–41.

8 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many (Princeton University Press, 2003), 30.
9 See, for example, Adrienne Rich, “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless

Woman,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (New York:
Norton, 1979).

10 Since Europeans dei ned humans as individualized and autonomous, the imperial
project violently and paradoxically sought to “ make the heathen into a human so
that he can be treated as an end in himself.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three
Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 248.

11 For connections between the realist expansive use of character and the political
project of reform, see Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose , 6.

12 George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham (Oxford World’s
Classics, 1996), xvii.

13 For a fuller version of this argument, see Caroline Levine, “Narrative Networks:
Bleak House and the Affordances of Form,” Novel 42 (fall 2009), 517–23.

14 Luk á cs, Historical Novel , 45. See also Luk á cs, “Narrate or Describe,” in Writer
and Critic , ed. Arthur D. Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 110–48.

15 Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformation of Description in the
Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

16 See Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge University
Press, 2000).

17 Amy M. King, “ Natural History and the Novel: Dilatoriness and Length and the
Nineteenth-Century Novel of Everyday Life,” Novel 42 (Fall 2009), 460–68.

18 Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2006), 11.

19 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton
University Press, 1983), 18.

20 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London and New
York: Verso, 1998), 17.

21 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso,
1983), 26.

22 Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the
Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton University Press, 2001), 126.

23 Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination
(Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15.

24 J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame and London:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1968 ).

25 Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857), ed. Robin Gilmour
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), vol. iii , ch. 14.

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C a ro l i n e L e v i n e

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26 James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2005), 47.
27 Joseph I. Fradin, “Will and Society in Bleak House,” in PMLA 81 (March

1966): 95–109; Lisa Sternlieb, The Female Narrator in the British Novel:
Hidden Agendas (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 78; and Alison Case, “Gender
and History in Narrative Theory: The Problem of Retrospective Distance in
David Copperi eld and Bleak House ,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory , ed.
James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005):
312–21.

28 W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847), ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg (New York:
Norton, 1994), ch. vi .

29 George Gissing, New Grub Street (London: Smith, Elder, 1891), ch. i .
30 Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Bront ë s (Houndmills:

Palgrave Macmillan, rev. edn., 2005), 32.
31 Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and

Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press,
2003 ).

32 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), The
Second Epoch, ch. iii .

33 I elaborate this argument more fully in “An Anatomy of Suspense: The Pleasurable,
Critical, Ethical, Erotic Middle of The Woman in White ,” in Narrative Middles ,
ed. Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 2011).

34 George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature
and Science (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 191.

35 Frances Ferguson, “ Emma and the Impact of Form,” MLQ 61 (March
2000), 70.

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https://www.cambridge.org/core