I take it to be uncontroversially true that the 9th-century novel (indeed, more narrowly, the mid–century novel in English), dramatises or brings alive a range of culturally- rich subject–positions. Given this variety, it is surely striking that so many contemporary readers (I am most conscious of them as students) should read the 9thcentury novel as repeatedly telling a triumphant liberal narrative of the individual overcoming constricting social circumstances.
Consider the following peroration, which concludes a student essay recently submitted for a course that I teach on 9th-century literature:
Jane Eyre proved to the world of the 800s that the idea of a woman beating the odds to become independent and successful on her own was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed. Jane goes against the expected type by ‘refusing subservience, disagreeing with her superiors, standing up for her rights, and venturing creative thought.’ With such determination, she is able to emerge victorious over all that has threatened to stand in her way. She is not only successful in terms of wealth and position, but more importantly, in terms of family and love. These two needs which have evaded Jane for so long are finally hers; adding to her victory is her ability to enjoy both without losing her hard-won independence. As Jane was a role model for women in the nineteenth century, she is also a role model for women today. Her legacy lives on in the belief that as long as there are hopes and dreams, nothing is impossible.
The student has taken her quotation from a ‘Critical Evaluation’ in the Masterplots series, and with it possibly some of her other formulations. Nevertheless, I am sure many readers of this newsletter will recognise the attitude represented in this quotation, and not only in essays about Jane Eyre. It also finds widespread formulation in the blurbs on the back of editions of the 9th-century classics (1). What follows is the voice of Bloomsbury in a slightly unfamiliar guise, in the tones of sensible, plain-speaking youth pointing out the error of her ways to a maiden aunt – Harriet Frean, in the novel of that name, written by May Sinclair in 922. Harriet speaks first:
‘I knew a girl once who might have done what you’re doing, only she wouldn’t. She gave the man up rather than hurt her friend. She couldn’t do anything else.’
‘How much was he in love with her?’
‘I don’t know how much. He was never in love with any other woman.’
‘Then she was a fool. A silly fool. Didn’t she think of him?’
‘Didn’t she think?’
‘No. She didn’t. She thought of herself. Of her own moral beauty. She was a selfish fool.’
‘She asked the best and wisest man she knew, and he told her she couldn’t do anything else.’
‘The best and wisest man – oh, Lord!’
‘That was my own father, Mona, Hilton Frean.’
‘Then it was you. You and Uncle Robin and Aunt Prissie.’
Harriet’s face smiled its straight, thin–lipped smile, the worn, grooved chin arrogantly lifted.
‘How could you?’
‘I could because I was brought up not to think of myself before other people.’ (2)
May Sinclair’s impatience with the notion of the ‘moral beauty’ of self–denial is evident here; in her brisk, even utilitarian, analysis it is a mask for vanity, and is anyway self–defeating in terms of the calculus of benefits that accrue to the parties involved. We can note also the role of the father in this: Harriet Frean’s reference to the ‘best and wisest man she knew’ provokes only a snort of derision. Another eminent Victorian gets suitably short shrift.
I use The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, then, as a brief indicator of one phase of our cultural history which has predisposed Bloomsbury’s inheritors to find insupportable the notions of self–sacrifice and self–denial that animate much 19th-century writing – most obviously in the novels of George Eliot, for May Sinclair’s text can readily be understood as a revision of aspects of The Mill on the Floss. The snorting dismissal of Harriet’s father in turn indicates another phase of social and cultural history which has predisposed contemporary readers to wish to insist on the triumphant liberal narrative: popular feminism, in a common-sense, equal-rights version of it. Jane Eyre, it will be recalled, tells the story of ‘a woman beating the odds to become independent and successful on her own’. Harriet Frean’s father stands in for patriarchy just as powerfully as the Reverend Brocklehurst, though he couches his moral blandishments in a very different idiom. The extraordinary success of second-wave feminism since the 970s, and its popular simplification as narratives of heroic women ‘beating the odds’, is undoubtedly the overwhelming social fact which makes that triumphant liberal narrative so plausible and so attractive for contemporary readers. In this apparently feminist version, the heroine of the story is pitched against Victorian patriarchy, in a move which combines Bloomsbury’s rejection of 9th-century moral constrictions with feminist analysis of the gender imbalances that characterise those impositions. It was, after all, women especially who had to do the self-sacrificing, in the light of what, in this account, appears as an ideology of female self-denial and restraint. Feminism, in short, has added to the Bloomsbury caricature of Victorianism (a necessary and progressive misreading in its own time) further specifically masculine identifying brush-strokes.
‘Bloomsbury’s inheritors... find insupportable the notions of self-sacrifice and self-denial that animate much 19thcentury writing’ One disadvantage of this plausible story for the reading of 9th-century literature is that it proposes a reading model which, for all its crudeness, can be made to fit all the texts it confronts: hero/heroine of novel x does/ does not challenge the constrictions of Victorian society; his/her success or failure in doing so provides the only measure for the novel in question. Built into this model are not only unsustainable simplifications of 9th-century literature; it also presupposes a fairly straightforward notion of reader identification, in which the heroine of the novel is seized upon as a role model. This latter aspect of the story points me to the third factor which seems to me to have produced the reading habit which I am trying to specify here: the predominant moral individualism of the contemporary social order, hard to characterise without my own resort to caricature but summed up by the banner slogan of a supermarket chain: ‘Go for it!’ A whole complex social history needs to be sketched in here: the triumph of consumerism, the relative failure of socialism and other projects of the collective life, privatisation – all specific social trends operating with more or less force in differing class, regional and national contexts. Nevertheless, this seems to me to suggest the ground out of which that triumphant liberal narrative has emerged, and it encourages readings which focus on the central individual in a story and make her the focus for special identification.
As I have suggested, I do not think it is appropriate simply to dismiss this narrative, if only because it is certainly possible to find some grounds for it in 9th-century writing itself. I propose instead to seek to complicate it, and then to point to some other models of personal growth and development which are also present in the literature. We can begin by considering the classic statement of 9th-century liberalism, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and then see how far that is supported by Jane Eyre at one of the defining moments of its heroine’s life.
In Mill’s chapter ‘Of Individuality’ in his 859 text, he is keen to give an elevated, not to say strenuous, version of what individuality means, making acknowledgement to von Humboldt, and invoking the whole tradition of bildung in which the growth of the person involves the exercise of all their powers in the most harmonious but also morally testing way possible to them. This entails the personal testing of customary precepts and wisdom: all of human history, in effect, is only to be trusted insofar as it can be proved to be personally valid. This gives the concept of choice in the following passage a particular moral depth and rigour:
The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it. If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person’s own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened, by his adopting it: and if the inducements to an act are not such as are consentaneous to his own feelings and character (where affection, or the rights of others, are not concerned), it is so much done towards rendering his feelings and character inert and torpid, instead of active and energetic (3).
In this passage ‘choice’, the shibboleth of contemporary (21st-century) moral and political sloganising, takes on a rich and demanding resonance. Custom, opinion and received wisdom are possible guides to action, but one can only discover as much in the activity of choosing: this energetic exercise of the faculties is the condition for moral and intellectual growth. While this is a far cry from the inert exercise of ‘choice’ demanded by contemporary consumerism, one can nevertheless see a family resemblance (across several generations) between Mill’s high–minded conception and the liberal paradigm I have been seeking to elucidate.
It is all the more interesting, therefore, that it is exactly this distrust of customary opinion that Jane Eyre (published some ten years before On Liberty), repudiates at one of the crucial moments of choice that she encounters, when she decides not to elope with Rochester though her whole self is crying out for her to do so. He has put the case to her that since she is effectively without family, nobody would be hurt by her living with him outside marriage:
This was true: and while he spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. ‘Oh, comply!’ it said. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?’
Still indomitable was the reply: ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad – as I am now. Laws and principles are not for times when there is no temptation: they are for moments such as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth – so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane – quite insane, with my veins running fire and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations are all I have at this hour to stand by; there I plant my foot’ (4).
This is a moment of renunciation then, framed in an idiom that sounds morally conservative, and which certainly approaches the same set of notions as Mill but to almost exactly opposite effect. Where for Mill received principles are always subject to fundamental challenge, here for Jane they offer the only security when ‘individual convenience’ and the power of desire threaten to radically destabilise her. This is not to say that the novel is wholly inhospitable to an individualist reading; rather, that its self–understanding is rather more complex than the triumphalist version allows.
One way of describing this complexity would be to recognise the differing historical roots that underlie the novel, and which can be glimpsed even within a passage of such short compass as this one. When Jane utters the ‘indomitable’ reply that ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself’, we are surely hearing a secular version of Protestant moral identity that goes back to Bunyan – a kind of individualism with a very different history than Mill’s restatement of Humboldtian bildung, though every bit as strenuous in conception and application. I am not sure that the various emphases and rhetorical climaxes are fully under Charlotte Brontë’s control – that is, I am not arguing that the complexity of the novel is to be resolved in the same way that one would seek to resolve a complex argument advanced in a philosophical treatise such as On Liberty. But it is certainly the case that the genuine assertion of individual self–worth that a passage like this contains, and which the whole book also represents, has to be understood, contra contemporary caricature, as likely to issue in an act of renunciation as of simple personal claiming.
Furthermore, one of the most striking aspects of the novel is that even at its most vehement it includes contrary voices which contradict the simple pleasures of gratified identification that it undoubtedly offers to the reader. After Jane as a child gets her revenge for her humiliation, we are offered Helen Burns to provide a powerful example of humility and self–discipline. So altogether there is plenty in the book to productively complicate the triumphant liberal reading of it with which I began.
Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly to Jane Eyre that one would turn for the novel which most lends itself to that interpretation. This is partly a matter of the romance at the heart of its narrative – that central story of frustrated and then ultimately gratified desire which doubtless makes the mechanisms of readerly identification so powerful. In this respect, it contrasts strongly with The Mill on the Floss, which has a similar commitment to personal fulfilment for its heroine, but finds it impossible to imagine a means by which it can be realised. There is plenty in this novel also which allows it to be read in terms of the liberal paradigm – this time as a story of the defeat of the heroine by narrow social circumstances, patriarchy, etc. But George Eliot is at great pains to articulate a moral position which would supersede the attraction of that liberal romance. In the following passage, for example, she is explaining to Stephen Guest why she cannot renew her relationship with him. It is another moment of renunciation, and invites comparison with the comparable moment in Jane Eyre:
‘O it is difficult – life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; – but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us – the ties that have made others dependent on us – and would cut them in two. If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have been in paradise, and we could always see that one being first towards whom. . . I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes – love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each other. But I see – I feel it is not so now: there are things we must renounce in life – some of us must resign love. Many things are difficult and dark to me – but I see one thing quite clearly – that I must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural – but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I didn’t obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned. Don’t urge me; help me – help me, because I love you.’ (5)
Oddly enough, Maggie’s reasoning here is more Millian than the comparable passage from Jane Eyre – at least insofar as one should take seriously the parenthesis in Mill’s argument where he acknowledges the ‘rights of others’. That is to say, it is certainly possible to argue in the strictest liberal or utilitarian way that any moral dilemma of the kind faced by Maggie Tulliver should be resolved by considering the balance of advantage to all the parties involved. But in fact this is not how the passage reads; instead we can see an anguished movement of feeling as a young woman struggles towards renunciation and towards finding the resources that would aid in that action.
It is possible to see in Maggie’s initial sentiment – ‘it seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling’ – a concession to moral individualism that the whole movement of her statement strains to overcome. This indeed would repeat the pattern of the wider book; in her earlier contentions with Stephen Guest, he puts to her some very plausible Bloomsbury– style arguments for why they should continue with their elopement, which she concedes to be plausible but finally rejects. Here the grounds of the rejection are ultimately not utilitarian; that is, she does not ‘resign love’ because of the damage that it would do to others but because of the intolerable burden such damage would do to other feelings and loyalties which are just as real as desire. In this perspective, there can be no objective calculus of benefit, but a continuous struggle to subordinate one legitimate feeling to another. To imagine that the world might be otherwise is utopian, to pretend that we might be now as Adam and Eve were in paradise and have the first ‘being’ on whom the desiring eye alighted. This conflict is one that George Eliot cannot resolve in The Mill on the Floss; this is why the novel ends with Maggie’s death.
The way that George Eliot conceives her heroine’s progress, then, is profoundly antipathetic to the triumphant liberal narrative of personal assertion, and it is powerful because we are asked to recognise a complexity of feeling in relation to moral choice, and not to simplify matters by awarding desire the power to trump all other feelings. This is to make her position sound too straightforwardly conservative, however; there is no question here but that Maggie’s feeling towards Stephen are legitimate, modest, attractive and sexual. The novel thus provides a point of entry for any reader who seeks the gratifications of romance – but repeatedly prevents their realisation.
Like Jane Eyre, then, The Mill on the Floss is a complex book, whose rhetorical economy leads the reader in different directions. Its ultimate resolutions, however, both at moments like the one I have dwelt on, and in the novel’s ending, challenge the liberal individualism already present in mid- 9th-century culture, and now one of the predominant notes in our own. In fact, it is partly because George Eliot was engaging with something that was current when she was writing, and which has some continuity with our contemporary cultural dispositions, that her novels have the capacity to challenge and provoke in the way that they do.
It is not difficult, of course, for anyone with even a passing knowledge of nineteenth–century literature to show that there is more to it than stories of men and women, but especially women, emerging triumphant over difficulties. The point, however, is not to knock down a straw man, but to ask what continuities and discontinuities there are between mid- 9th-century culture and our own which make this reading at once so plausible and so inadequate. Furthermore, starting from that basis, we can ask what happens when, in actually reading novels and other cultural statements from the ‘Victorian’ past, we find it necessary to complicate or altogether contradict contemporary simplifications. What value does it have, to put the matter crudely, to make this a point of entry for reading the 9th-century novel?
Initially there is an undoubted value in productively complicating contemporary versions of individualism. In attending closely to the actual vocabularies in which Charlotte Brontë and John Stuart Mill articulate their sense of personal growth and self-worth, one can hear powerful and deeply-rooted traditions – of moral individualism and bildung – which I alluded to in a shorthand way by the names of Bunyan and Humboldt. If reading Jane Eyre, together with On Liberty or on its own, can be made to tell another ‘indomitable’ story beyond that triumphant romance, then some gain has certainly been made.
This is the task of making more complex what I assume contemporary readers already find sympathetic or gratifying in the novels that they read. Its matching task is to bring readers to an engagement with moral positions with which we do not assume them to be initially in agreement. A novel like The Mill on the Floss, clearly enough, can provide an emotionally resonant alternative to liberalism. Paradoxically, this ambition for the novel – indeed, this ambition for the literature of the past, that it should provide powerful articulations of historically– specific subjectivities radically different from the present – is itself a liberal one. The main point, one could say, of reading the literature of the past is that it provides powerful alternatives to the tyranny of the present; it reminds us that things might be otherwise. Where for Mill one engaged strenuously with received opinion in order to exercise one’s moral faculties, perhaps one could say that one of the resources upon which one could draw in that battle is ‘received opinion’ in another guise: the literature of a now relatively distant past with which, nevertheless, there are still powerful connections.
Both of these conclusions are founded on a belief in the possibility of sympathetic and attentive readings of novels like the ones I have briefly discussed. Such readings are, in my experience, more common for the 9thcentury novel than perhaps for any other form of literature now recognised as historically distant, precisely because the form provides a point of entry for that simplifying narrative with which I began. I take it that this is a condition of our understanding: we can only recognise the specificity of the historically alien by virtue of some underlying connection to it. Hence my conclusion is not simply to deprecate the triumphant liberal narrative, but to see it as one starting point for a productive engagement with the 9th-century novel – whose end-point, perhaps, would be a return of the form as one of the resources for a critique of the present and its stories with their ambivalent political and cultural charge.
Notes
1. Raymond Williams, ‘The Blomsbury Fraction’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 148-69.
2. May Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (London: Virago, 1980 [1922]), pp. 144-5.
3. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government (London: Dent, 1968, pp. 116-7.
4. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin, 1982 [1847]), p. 344.
5. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin, 1982 [1860]), pp. 570-1.
