MANY-SIDED LIVES: LIBERAL JUDGMENT AND THE REALIST NOVEL
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Date
2017-06-23
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Many-Sided Lives argues that nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot and others train readers in the liberal habit of appreciating thoughtful opposition. Through the systematic juxtaposition of characters who express conflicting attitudes, such novels invite readers to adopt the stance J.S. Mill describes as “many-sidedness.” While recent scholarship has brought welcome attention to exemplary characters in realist fiction who display liberal habits of mind—including disinterestedness and critical distance—this work has said little about the formal techniques used to cultivate such habits. Many-Sided Lives by contrast, argues that formal features of the Victorian novel—and especially its ample character-system—was essential to its promotion of liberal thought. Building on Alex Woloch’s study of major and minor characters in realism, Many-Sided Lives examines Victorian novels that use secondary characters as dialectical interlocutors for protagonists. Four chapters examine conflicting expressions of sincere and theatrical communication in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park; spontaneous and disciplined responses to moral life in George Eliot’s Middlemarch; committed and ironic relations to society in George Gissing’s The Odd Women; and imaginative and rational judgments of behavior in Henry James’s The Ambassadors. Among the surprising conclusions I draw from my close reading of these texts is that the realist novel promotes a distinct sort of liberalism, defined less by its inclusive representation of social voices than by its comparative assessment of their merits. The liberalism of the Victorian novel was at once brave and unorthodox, inviting readers to embrace the challenge of understanding opposing views.
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Keywords
liberalism, judgment, postcritical, critique, character-system, value