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A revitalization of the eld of ethics and literature has recently


gained the attention of scholars in philosophy and literary
studies. Drawing on interdisciplinary work in this eld by a
diverse range of thinkers, including Martha Nussbaum,
Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur, Jil Larson offers new
readings of late Victorian and turn-of-the-century British ction
to show how ethical concepts can transform our understanding of
narratives, just as narratives make possible a valuable, contextualized moral deliberation. Focusing on novels by Thomas Hardy,
Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James,
Larson explores the conjunction of ethics and n-de-siecle history
and culture through a consideration of what narratives from this
period tell us about emotion, reason, and gender, aestheticism,
and such speech acts as promising and lying. This book will be of
interest to scholars of the nineteenth century and modernism, and
all interested in the conjunction of narrative, ethics, and literary
theory.
Jil Larson is Assistant Professor of English at Western
Michigan University. A former managing editor of Victorian
Studies, she has published on Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad,
and ethics and literature. She is currently a member of the
Executive Board of the Centre for the Study of Ethics in Society
at Western Michigan University.

ETHICS AND
NARRATIVE IN THE ENGLISH
NOVEL, 18801914
JIL LARSON
Western Michigan University


The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcn 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
Jill Larson 2004
First published in printed format 2001
ISBN 0-511-03188-2 eBook (Adobe Reader)
ISBN 0-521-79282-7 hardback

For my parents and my friend Jonathan

Contents

Acknowledgments

page viii

1 Ethics and the turn to narrative

2 Victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at the


n-de-siecle

20

3 Emotion, gender, and ethics in ction by Thomas Hardy


and the New Woman writers

44

4 When hope unblooms: chance and moral luck in


A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess

64

5 Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics

93

6 Promises, lies, and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's


Under Western Eyes

114

Afterword

137

Notes

141

Bibliography

165

Index

173

vii

Acknowledgments

My thinking about ethics and literature began in earnest during my


graduate school years at Indiana University, and I would like to
thank Patrick Brantlinger, William Burgan, and especially Donald
Gray for encouraging my work in this new eld while also
deepening my love for Victorian and Edwardian British literature.
I am grateful to Robert Warde for the inspired undergraduate
teaching that set my feet on this path in the rst place.
A faculty research grant from Western Michigan University
helped me begin work on this book, and the intellectual and
emotional generosity of my colleagues helped me see the project
through its many drafts. I thank, in particular, Allen Carey-Webb,
John Cooley, Mike Jayne, Gwen Raaberg, Mark Richardson, Peter
Walker, and Daneen Wardrop for their careful readings. I am
especially grateful to Peter for the shape and direction he gave to
my study of Henry James, and for teaching me about ethics
through his example of grace under pressure. Thanks also to my
brothers and sisters-in-law and to Meg Anderson, Michael
Pritchard, Paul Farber, Susan Hubert, Nancy Eimers, Jaimy
Gordon, Shirley Scott, Arnie Johnston, Michael Recchia, Molly
Lynde Recchia, Gail Graham, Carla Anderson, and all others who
took an interest in the project and helped keep my own interest
keen.
Classroom discussions and more informal conversations with my
students in undergraduate classes and graduate seminars have
inuenced this book in immeasurable ways, and I would like to
thank, in particular, the students in my Hardy and Conrad course
and those who participated in my summer seminar on ethics and
viii

Acknowledgments

ix

narrative. I also thank Rachel Herp, my undergraduate research


assistant, who in addition was a wonderful computer consultant. I
am especially indebted to Jennifer Carpentier, Kristin DeKam, and
Kim Dysinger, graduate students who have become dear to me as
friends; Kristin inuenced nearly all the philosophical aspects of this
book (especially my thinking about Charles Taylor's ideas), Jen
has left her mark on my understanding of ethics and British
aestheticism, and Kim has stimulated my thinking about the
questions I take up in my discussion of moral luck.
I am grateful to Tobin Siebers for reading the manuscript as a
whole at that crucial point when the book was just beginning to
take shape. His perspective was invaluable, as were the incisive
comments and suggestions of Cambridge's readers. I thank the
audiences at the Ethics and Literature conference in Aberystwyth,
Wales and the Victorian Studies conference in Liverpool, England
in 1996 for their responses to my work-in-progress. For permission
to reprint portions of this work that appeared in Conradiana and
Rereading Victorian Fiction, I thank Texas Tech University Press
and Macmillan respectively. I appreciate the encouragement and
patience of my editor at Cambridge, Ray Ryan, who so generously
allowed me the time I needed for revisions.
Finally, I thank those to whom I've dedicated the book: my
parents, whose love and moral depth have sustained me through
good times and bad, and Jonathan Barkow, who has taught me so
much about the ethics and intimacy of reading with another.

chapter 1

Ethics and the turn to narrative

Can the reality of complex moral situations be represented by


means other than those of imaginative literature?
Bernard Williams1

The dilemma cuts two ways. On the one hand, how much of
what is genuinely important to people can be rendered in
universal theories? On the other hand, are stories valuable for
ethics, if no moral is attached?
Tobin Siebers2

I began planning this project in the late 1980s, during the heyday of
critical theory when interdisciplinary studies of literature had
become common and literary critics were writing from theoretical
vantage points developed through work in other elds, especially
history and philosophy. Given my interest in the ethics of ction, I
noticed that the seemingly natural combination of moral philosophy
and literature was virtually non-existent in literary criticism, despite
all the attention to other branches of philosophy. Why? In an essay
published in The Future of Literary Theory (1989), Martha Nussbaum
concedes that to answer this question fully would be a long story,
which ``would include the inuence of Kant's aesthetics; of early
twentieth-century formalism; of the New Criticism. It would
include several prevailing trends in ethical theory as well above
all that of Kantianism and of Utilitarianism, ethical views that in
their different ways were so inhospitable to any possible relation
with imaginative literature that dialogue was cut off from the side
of ethics as well.''3 Like Wayne Booth, who had articulated his
answer to this question a year earlier in The Company We Keep: An
Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),
1

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

Nussbaum also faults the writing that gave ethical criticism ``a bad
name, by its neglect of literary form and its reductive moralizing
manner'' (``Perceptive Equilibrium'' 62). While traditional ethical
criticism was too often essentialist, normative, and blind to the
implications of narrative choices and rhetorical relations both
within a text (between narrator and narratee, for instance) and
outside a text (between readers or listeners and narrators and
implied authors), the formalist correctives to this type of literary
criticism tended to leave ethics behind altogether.4
These reasons drawn from the history of literary studies and
moral philosophy are persuasive, but the neglect of ethical criticism
can also be explained by examining the anxieties that have lingered
in the wake of this history. These anxieties and prejudices are
evident in the way most intellectuals, especially those in English
departments, respond to the word ``moral'' by distancing themselves from it, automatically associating it with censoriousness, lifedenying rigidity, coercion. The expectation of this response is palpable in nearly all of the seminal studies of ethics and literature.
Booth's admirable and ambitious book on the subject, for example,
is marred by a defensiveness of tone, undoubtedly because he
anticipates just such a hostile audience.5 Not surprisingly, Geoffrey
Harpham begins his 1992 study of ethics, language, and literature
with a discussion of ethics as an ``embattled'' concept: ``Ethics often
provokes from other discourses the same resentment and belligerence provoked in the subject by ethical laws or by the conscience.''6
Partially for this reason, ethical theory and literary theory have,
until recently, remained separate discourses. In his Cold War
Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism, Tobin Siebers also alludes to
the reaction typically provoked when these discourses are brought
together, and he too, in a prefatory warning, employs a military
metaphor: ``I ask those readers interested in a less polemical evaluation of the relations among ethics, politics, and literature to consider
my work in Morals and Stories . . . It is less a battle cry than this
effort . . .'' (Cold War xi). Since this battle to gain a hearing for
arguments about ethics and narrative has been fought so ardently
and intelligently by Siebers, Harpham, Booth, Nussbaum, and

Ethics and the turn to narrative

others who have entered the fray either along with them or later,
fortied by their example, my hope is that my own book can build
on their work, not by continuing the battle but (to return to
Nussbaum's gentler metaphor) by participating in what it has made
possible a newly revived dialogue among novelists, literary
theorists, and moral philosophers.
This book has two broad purposes: the rst is to read ethics
through narrative by reecting on ethical concepts or problems as
they take shape in the telling of a story; the second is to further an
argument about late Victorian aesthetics and ethics. This second
purpose makes my project similar to William Scheick's in Fictional
Structure and Ethics: The Turn-of-the-Century English Novel.7 We
share an interest in Hardy and Conrad (a juxtaposition that Scheick
concedes might strike some as odd) and in the ethics of their ction,
particularly their ideas about compassion. My work departs from
Scheick's, however, in the philosophical lenses through which I
read these texts, and, perhaps most importantly, in the literary
historical direction of my overall argument. While his book focuses
on Hardy, Conrad, Wells, and other writers of their generation in
relation to twentieth-century ction (both modernist and contemporary), my study considers late nineteenth-century English
novelists in relation to Victorian culture and the work of those
writing earlier in the century. One reason for this emphasis is my
interest in the turn-of-the-century obsession with the new, which
went hand-in-hand with sometimes deant, but more often
ambivalent efforts to break free of the trammels of the old,
including both mid-Victorian moral culture and novelistic
traditions.8
At the end of the last century there existed a similar desire for a
clean break.9 In late twentieth-century moral philosophy this turn
toward the new has often meant a turn to literature, a move that has
accompanied recent skepticism about foundations, including those
grounded in reason and ahistorical, hypostasized conceptions of
human nature. If nothing else, this interdisciplinary work has
stimulated debate. Because the questions posed by moral philosophers writing about literature have done so much to revitalize the

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

thinking of literary critics writing about ethics, I would like to


consider briey what has motivated this turn to narrative and why
some philosophers resist it just as much as some literary theorists
object to a focus on ethics. Before I attempt to read ethics through
narrative, in other words, it will be useful to explore some of the
arguments for and against such a methodology.
ethics and narrative detail: the example of
feminist philosophy
Among the controversial but inuential philosophers who have
made a case for the ethical value of studying literary texts, Martha
Nussbaum provides a striking example because she has gone so far
as to argue that literature can be read as moral philosophy.
Although it is not accurate to call her work antifoundationalist
(since she makes it clear that principles play a role in ethical
deliberation and that good judgment involves an element of universalizing), one of the main reasons for her turn to narrative is that it
offers the particularity that philosophical discourse lacks. Like the
antifoundationalists, Nussbaum is wary of philosophy's emphasis
on general descriptions. In her view, ``the particular is in some
sense prior to general rules and principles'' (Love's Knowledge 165);
reading a novel, then, can be ``a paradigm of moral activity'' (Love's
Knowledge 148) because long narratives, by denition, unfold
stories rich in complicated details.
This idea becomes especially intriguing in the context of
Victorian ction because one of the reasons novel reading was
thought to be not only less respectable than other forms of literature
but even morally suspect (especially from the perspective of certain
nineteenth-century religious sects) was that ctional details enchant
and seduce and are therefore liable to distract readers from the
moral of the story.10 To locate the ethics of ction in its particularity, however, is to refuse the assumption that the ``moral'' must
reside in a general, normative truth.11
Nussbaum's essays on philosophy and literature have much in
common with work in feminist ethics, one of the elds currently

Ethics and the turn to narrative

developing philosophical ideas through literary texts. Margaret


Urban Walker, for instance, describes an alternative epistemology
for a feminist ethics that will lead to ``questioning barriers between
philosophical, literary, critical, and empirical investigations of
moral life.''12 Like Nussbaum, Walker responds to the regnant
paradigm of moral knowledge by advocating increased attention to
the particular, a ``contextual and narrative'' construction of ethics
(here she is also drawing on the work of Carol Gilligan), and an
awareness of the crucial role of emotion in our ethical lives. Walker
and Nussbaum desire a moral philosophy that accounts for both the
unique and the socially situated, for ``individual embroideries and
idiosyncrasies, as well as the learned codes of expression and
response'' (Walker, ``Moral Understanding'' 167). In other words,
they want a philosophy with historical awareness and a detailed
narrative dimension.13
To say, however, that these two philosophers and this position
represent feminist ethics would be to oversimplify a dynamic,
contested area of inquiry. One of the points of contention hinges on
whether or not rejecting normative philosophy in favor of what has
come to be thought of as postmodern ethics in its resistance to
universalism and its dismantling of philosophical tradition will
lead to positive change for women. Virginia Held, for one, suspects
that it will not, for she fears a corrosive skepticism that distracts
attention from gender; she argues that ``the alternative to a
philosophy which has become a handmaiden of the sciences should
not be a philosophy which becomes a handmaiden to literature.''14
Maintaining a clear distinction between philosophy and literature,
according to Held, offers a safeguard against subjectivism and
relativism by keeping the focus of philosophy on general, shared
understanding; in her view, that will do more to further feminist
moral inquiry than giving in to what she describes as ``literary postmodern fragmentation'' (Feminist Morality 16).15
Nussbaum's privileging of the particular and the literary would
undoubtedly be subject to Held's critique, but she resists, as does
Held, what both writers perceive as counterproductive arguments
in feminist philosophy, such as the idea that reason, as a product of

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

patriarchy, must be replaced with some new mode of thinking that


overturns the old demand for objectivity. Like Held, Nussbaum
questions how these arguments, formulated in the wake of poststructuralist critical theory, further women's progress; in
Nussbaum's view, ``the opposition to women's equality . . . derives
support from the claim that traditional norms of objectivity are
merely a parochial liberal ideology. Women in philosophy have, it
seems, good reasons, both theoretical and urgently practical, to
hold fast to standards of reason and objectivity.''16
What interests me about this debate and others in current moral
philosophy is that they have emerged through interdisciplinary
discussions that are shaking loose formerly stable ideas. As much as
I share Held's goal of transforming culture by developing a feminist
morality, I do not see why literature and postmodern theory must
necessarily be threats to this end. On the contrary, I nd intrinsic
value in the questions that arise once the barrier between ethical
theory and literary theory has fallen regardless of how those
questions are answered. For this reason, I see a distinction between
Nussbaum and Held, similar as their positions are in certain
respects. And this is also why I argue for integration of traditional
philosophical standards with postmodern skepticism about those
standards. Seyla Benhabib develops a similar argument, pointing
out that norms of ``autonomy, choice, and self-determination'' must
be central to social criticism that is helpful to women in their
struggles, but also stressing that it is possible to imagine a
universalism that is attentive to gender, context specic, and interactive rather than legislative what she calls ``a revivied, postEnlightenment universalism'' (Situating the Self 3).
Nussbaum and Benhabib are right that traditional standards of
reason and objectivity do women's causes more good than harm,
but at the same time, the students of subjectivity (including those of
us who read novels and poststructuralist theory) have at least made
everyone more alert to bias masquerading as objectivity by calling
for scrutiny of the assumption that authority be granted to whatever
or whomever claims to be disinterested. And such wariness can
benet women as much as well-reasoned argumentation can

Ethics and the turn to narrative

hence the value of integrating the two. As Alasdair MacIntyre has


pointed out, our way of talking about morality ``is not what it once
was''17 because subjectivism is such an integral part of our culture,
but we appeal to reason in our arguments nonetheless: ``Does this
not suggest that the practice of moral argument in our culture
expresses at least an aspiration to be or to become rational in this
area of our lives?'' (After Virtue 10). And do not certain forms of
subjectivism aspire to a kind of ``objectivity'' by unmasking
pseudo-objectivity?18 Although I admire Nussbaum for rejecting,
rather than simply tolerating, absurd and potentially destructive
extremes (such as the idea that we should seek a form of reasoning
that abandons the rational), I also see reason to value the questioning of philosophical tradition that happens to be one of the
consequences of a turn toward the literary on the part of ethical
thinkers, including Nussbaum herself.
Just as I stress the value of integrating the objective and the
subjective, tradition and the critique of tradition, I also believe in
beneting from the work of very different philosophers such as
Martha Nussbaum and Emmanuel Levinas whose work is not
often included in the same study (or at least not accorded equal
authority). In subsequent chapters I hope it will become apparent
that I seek not to atten out or even to reconcile divergent perspectives in so multivalent and contentious a eld as contemporary
moral philosophy, but rather to demonstrate how and why ideas
that emerge from a variety of philosophical orientations can
illuminate different dimensions of ethics especially ethics during
the Victorian n de siecle, a period passionate about the new and
yet, as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, better than we are at seeing
rival ideas old and new as compatible instead of merely
antagonistic.19
stories, theories, and moral remainders
In light of these complications, rather than speaking of unidirectional inuence, it might be more accurate to say that it is the
cross-fertilization of philosophy and literary theory that has

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

provoked a critique of foundationalist philosophy, which then


fostered a new relationship between ethics and literature. Like
Nussbaum and Walker, Richard Rorty has called for ``a general
turn against theory and toward narrative.''20 He describes a role for
narrative that is at once philosophical and political. What creates
solidarity, he insists, is not metaphysics or religion but detailed
descriptions of other human beings (especially those unlike ``us''),
together with redescriptions of ourselves that include qualities, such
as cruelty, traditionally suppressed in our self-descriptions: ``This
is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the
journalist's report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially,
the novel'' (Contingency xvi). Rorty's readings of Nabokov and
Orwell demonstrate his conviction that ``literary language is, and
always will be, parasitic on ordinary language, and in particular on
ordinary moral language. Further, literary interest will always be
parasitic on moral interest'' (167). Characters in novels are concrete
and socially embedded, and thus they encourage us to reect on our
own choices and actions in relation to theirs.21 Such reection
makes solidarity and ethical/political change more likely than
totalizing theories that attempt to escape contingency and to unify
incommensurable values.
Philosophy is often idealistic in a way stories are not. Ethical
theory attempts to imagine the perfect moral choice because, in
Platonic fashion, it tends to equate the ``perfect'' with the ``good,''
the ``universal'' and unchanging with the ``true.'' By contrast,
narrative, which typically dwells on the particular and unique, more
often imagines loss, regret, and imperfection. That it does so is one
of its points of attraction for many contemporary moral
philosophers, including Nussbaum, Walker, and Rorty. In her
reading of Henry James's The Golden Bowl, Nussbaum describes
the transformation of Maggie Verver's moral idealism into something more contingent. As Nussbaum shows, James's provisional
and contextual ethical sense is conveyed through the very form of
his writing, at the levels both of syntax and of narrative technique.
The complexity, obliquity, and ``sheer difculty of James's later
style'' alert us to ``the incompleteness and inadequacy of our own

Ethics and the turn to narrative

attention'' (Love's Knowledge 144) and thereby underscore the


novel's ethical themes. Through a series of particular experiences
the story the novel tells Maggie comes to embrace a ``new ideal,''
one which, paradoxically, enables her to accept her own imperfections. Nussbaum reads it this way: ``See clearly and with high
intelligence'' (which is also her description of a key ethical imperative of James's ction). This new ideal says to Maggie, ``If love of
your husband requires hurting and lying to Charlotte [your
husband's mistress], then do these cruel things, making the better
choice. But never cease, all the while, to be richly conscious of
Charlotte's pain and to bear, in imagination and feeling, the full
burden of your guilt as the cause of that pain'' (Love's Knowledge
134, 135). Because this point so relies on the full context of
Nussbaum's reading of the novel, out of context it might seem like
merely an argument for something akin to liberal guilt. But the
point is an honest one that often emerges from narrative accounts
of ethical choice: no act, no matter how good, is without its cruelty
and its troubling loose ends, but recognizing this fact can take one
further, ethically, than blinding oneself to another's pain in order to
live more comfortably with one's own moral choice. As Zygmunt
Bauman observes in his delineation of postmodern ethics, morality
is necessarily aporetic: ``virtually every moral impulse, if acted
upon in full, leads to immoral consequences; yet no moral impulse
can implement itself unless the moral actor earnestly strives to
stretch the effort to the limit.''22 Such moral actors tend to remain
dissatised with their choices after they have made them. Narratives
tell the often unsettling but instructive stories of these actors, while
the philosophical position Bauman and Rorty seek to refute with
their antifoundational arguments strives for the very certainty and
rule-governed condence that such stories disallow.
Margaret Urban Walker also resists the view that a correct
verdict can bring closure to a moral problem. Her narrative
paradigm, by contrast, suggests ongoing, continuously revised
understanding. Like Nussbaum, she sees ethical choice and action
not as the solution to the problem but as messy attempts to do
what's right; these choices will almost inevitably leave what she

10

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

calls ``moral remainders,'' ``genuine moral demands that, because


their fulllment conicted with other genuine demands, are `left
over' in episodes of moral choice, and yet are not just nullied''
(``Moral Understanding'' 170). Placing this ``episode'' in the context
of a full story connecting past, present, and future calls attention
to its moral remainders (which, as Nussbaum's example from James
shows, are sometimes people who have been hurt). Narrative also
satises our need to understand ``others,'' ``actual others in a
particular case at hand, and not repeatable instances or replaceable
occupants of a general status'' (Walker, ``Moral Understanding''
167). Again, the pull of narrative for contemporary philosophers is
the corrective it offers to the abstract, totalizing vision of much
traditional ethical theory.
In response to the philosophical contention that we can believe
either in ``the good life for man,'' which is a determinate ideal, or in
rival, incommensurate, mutually exclusive goods, MacIntyre questions the assumptions of contemporary moral philosophy underlying this either/or choice. Like Walker and Nussbaum, MacIntyre
undertakes a critique of these assumptions by appealing to an idea
that has much in common with Walker's conception of moral
remainders: ``By choosing one [of two rival goods] I do nothing to
diminish or derogate from the claim upon me of the other; and
therefore, whatever I do, I shall have left undone what I ought to
have done'' (After Virtue 224). MacIntyre points out that in our
culture of liberal or bureaucratic individualism, the Aristotelian
tradition of the virtues has been lost, and one of the consequences
of that loss is an inability to see that an ethical agent's choice
between rival goods in a tragic situation is not the central ethical
concern that J. L. Austin, R. M. Hare, and others contend it is.
``What this contention is blind to is that there may be better or
worse ways for individuals to live through tragic confrontations of
good with good. And that to know what the good life for man is
may require knowing what are the better and what are the worse
ways of living in and through such situations'' (224). Narratives
help us to imagine what these better and worse ways might be, and
late Victorian ction, because of its skepticism about agency, tends

Ethics and the turn to narrative

11

to encourage ethical assessment that does not center on choice.


Even though the views of Nussbaum and MacIntyre differ considerably in some respects, they are similar, then, not only in their
Aristotelian origin but also in their regard for the narrative context
of ethical life. For MacIntyre, any specic, meaningful account of
the virtues presupposes our ability to see a human life as having
unity and narrative structure. To examine an ethical choice in
isolation from the ways of living through the consequences and
moral remainders of such a choice simply makes no sense to him.
Rorty, an analytical philosopher who does not share MacIntyre's
historicist orientation (and in fact represents the very liberal
individualism that MacIntyre nds so troubling), nonetheless
similarly values a narrative paradigm and turns to literature at least
in part because it keeps us from deceiving ourselves about moral
remainders. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he describes a
gure he calls the ``liberal ironist,'' which is clearly himself and all
others who would be happiest in his utopian, postmetaphysical
culture. His denition of ``liberal'' comes from Judith Shklar's
argument that although cruelty has traditionally not been the worst
of sins in either politics or religion, the liberal hates cruelty more
than any other evil.23 The ``ironist'' element of Rorty's term refers
to this gure's willingness to accept the contingency of his or her
most central beliefs, acknowledging that there is nothing beyond
history and chance that grounds them. Many of the questions of
metaphysicians strike the liberal ironist as pointless:
``Is it right to deliver n innocents over to be tortured to save the lives of m x
n other innocents? If so, what are the correct values of n and m?'' . . .
Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this
sort of question algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort is
still, in his heart, a theologian or metaphysician. He believes in an order
beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence
and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities. (xv)

For antifoundational philosophers like Rorty, as well as for the late


Victorian liberal ironists at the center of my study, story has
replaced moral hierarchy, and human and contextual particularities

12

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

have become more important than the rules and theories that guide
ethical choice.
To grant primacy to narrative and detail is not, however, to
reject principles or even normative morality.24 As Tobin Siebers
has observed, ``we have a moralistic tendency to reject morals just
because they are morals'' (Morals and Stories 41). By appealing to
relevant ethical theory, my analysis of late Victorian ethics seeks to
avoid that tendency, even though the n-de-siecle writers were
themselves among the rst in literary history to succumb to it. A
central thesis of this book is that these writers shaped what they
considered a new ethics by telling traditional stories in a new way,
and the methods and details of those narratives construct alternatives to conventional Victorian morality even as they reveal the
residual hold that such a morality has on late-century writers. And
this brings me once again to the second of the two purposes of my
study, mentioned above: to investigate the connection between
aesthetics and ethics.
imperfectly breaking free: the new ethics and
aesthetics of turn-of-the-century narratives
Referring to Victorian Christianity, the narrator of Olive
Schreiner's novel The Story of an African Farm (1883) says, ``When
a soul breaks free from the arms of a superstition, bits of the claws
and talons break themselves off in him. It is not the work of a day
to squeeze them out.''25 This metaphor of embedded fragments of
claws and talons vividly captures the attitude of Schreiner and
other post-Darwinian writers toward not only the religion but also
the ethics and ideology from which they are breaking free. Her
novel's narrator represents Christian morality as irrational (``a
superstition'') and oppressive (the bird's embrace is not only allencompassing but painful and predatory). But because novelists
tend to be preoccupied with the histories that situate us, Schreiner
also points out through her choice of metaphor that this ``old''
morality will not simply disappear once it is consciously rejected,
for it has already had a dening inuence.

Ethics and the turn to narrative

13

In my next chapter, which considers ethics within both a


Victorian and a more broadly modern, post-Enlightenment context,
I discuss the importance of history and of the n-de-siecle writers'
sense of themselves as transitional. The anxiety about agency
experienced at this historical juncture differs in important ways
from similar anxieties that came before and after, and though it is
impossible to do justice to the complexity of all that contributed to
this difference, there is value in delineating even in broad strokes
the conception of history that informs my thinking about turn-ofthe-century narrative ethics and about the contribution twentiethcentury moral philosophy can make to an analysis of this ethics.
All the writers I am considering in this study, besides emerging
from a particular moral tradition, have also, of course, been
inuenced by a particular novelistic tradition. By reworking
familiar narrative techniques and genres, they do not completely
escape an aesthetics that has been the vehicle for a more conventional morality than the new ethics they are seeking to articulate.
But they make surprising or unsettling aesthetic choices that allow
them to undertake a different sort of ethical inquiry than that of
earlier Victorian writers.26 Hardy, Schreiner, and other late-century
New Woman novelists, for example, in their revisions of traditional
courtship and marriage plots and their transformation of realism,
attempt to displace patriarchal values and assumptions with a new
ethics of gender relations and sexuality. Yet they do so under the
guise of telling realistic stories of relationships between men and
women just like those of their mid-Victorian precursors. Oscar
Wilde, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, develops what I would call a
proto-postmodern ethics by telling, ironically enough, a traditional
fairy-tale or fable-like story with an ostensibly clear moral. But that
morality survives only as the embedded beak and talons in an otherwise ethically elusive and contradictory text. Of all the ction
writers I consider, Joseph Conrad is the most committed to the
ideal of ethical principles. Unlike Hardy's, his novels are full of
identiably good and evil characters, and his narrators and implied
authors rarely shy away from moral judgments. Still, the radical
ways in which Conrad departs from nineteenth-century narrative

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

tradition complicate the principled, clearly dened morality that can


be identied in his texts as a Victorian inheritance. Conrad appropriates traditional genres but then works against their norms both
aesthetically and ethically. In Lord Jim, the romantic sea story/
adventure novel of the sort Jim himself read as a boy becomes, in
Conrad's hands, a narrative that skeptically questions many
traditional moral notions heroism, the effectiveness of a code of
conduct, the value of sympathy by violating the narrative
conventions that typically undergird these ethics. Similarly, Heart of
Darkness inltrates the jingoistic adventure-writing tradition to
construct a critique of imperialism, and Under Western Eyes, the
Conrad novel I focus on in the nal chapter of this study, unfolds as
a spy story in a political context that obliterates the distinctions on
which such a story would seem to hinge: the difference between
``us'' and ``them,'' autocrat and revolutionary. Like the other
writers I consider, then, Conrad develops narratives that are
fascinating hybrids of old and new; Victorian genres and normative
values compete with technical experimentation and searching,
exible modes of ethical inquiry.
In the n-de-siecle texts I examine, I focus on four ethical preoccupations that are all related to what is arguably the keynote of
late Victorian and turn-of-the-century ethics: anxiety about agency.
I delineate these preoccupations as gender and sexual ethics
(chapter 3), moral luck (chapter 4), aestheticized ethics (chapter 5),
and the ethics of speech acts (chapter 6). For the novelists of this
period, a time of cultural upheaval and uncertainty, all of these
concerns are related to questions about personal freedom and
doubts about moral autonomy.
After the following chapter, which paves the way for a reading
of ethics contextualized by intellectual history and cultural politics,
I begin by exploring n-de-siecle ideas about agency in narrative
treatments of sexual ethics. Besides sharing an interest in gender,
sexuality, and power, Hardy and such late-century women writers
as Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand sought to confront and narrate
the problem of cruelty and victimization in a way that would transform Victorian sexual morality. I consider their narrative efforts to

Ethics and the turn to narrative

15

articulate a new, emotionally driven ethics alongside philosophical


discussions of the cognitive dimension of emotion and the debates
surrounding Gilligan's feminist notion of an ethics of care. In interpreting these stories about what the late Victorians called the New
Woman, I am as intrigued by the ethical ambivalence and uncertainties of the texts as I am by their deant critiques of the status
quo. Unlike recent critics who have discussed Hardy's novels in the
context of New Woman ction, however, I am reluctant to attribute
the ethical contradictions of his work to his gender or to describe
him as signicantly less feminist than his female contemporaries. I
argue that Hardy's ethics of love has been misconstrued as patriarchal, conceding that the emotional and passionate nature of his
ethical thinking leaves it vulnerable to just such interpretations.
Schreiner and Grand run the same risk, and their women characters
often slide into cruelty as they unsuccessfully attempt to escape
their culture's paradigm of dominance and submission in relations
between the sexes. Like John Kucich, who concludes his recent
study of Victorian ethics with chapters on Hardy and Grand, I feel
that New Woman writing is best understood within an ethical
context since moral categories were so important to the feminism of
these late-century writers. Unlike Kucich, however, who focuses on
``questions of truthfulness in both personal and aesthetic
domains''27 and in doing so illuminates one dimension of this
ethical context, my treatment of these writers concludes that an
understanding of emotion especially as it inuences rational
choice can shed light on another crucial dimension and lead to a
different assessment of the ethics of this ction. To argue that these
three writers, despite their differences, all sought to develop an
ethics of emotion at odds with Victorian public morality and the
ideology of separate spheres is to question recent judgments
(including Kucich's) about how Hardy's novels might be read
within the context of New Woman ction.
In my fourth chapter I discuss the ethics of Hardy's ction from
a very different perspective, though one even more clearly imbued
with concerns about agency. It is a critical commonplace that the
plots of Hardy's novels are governed by chance, but this important

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

dimension of his narratives is illuminated in a new way when


studied in light of the controversial concept of moral luck, which
has only recently received the attention it deserves. Inuenced by
the work of Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel on this topic, I
make a case for the existence of moral luck as Nagel denes it:
``Where a signicant aspect of what someone does depends on
factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that
respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral
luck.''28 This concept is central to the ethics of Hardy's ction.
Agency, responsibility, and moral assessment become problematic
when luck plays a determining role in our lives, as it so often does
in Hardy's novels. Chapter 3 focuses on moral luck in A Laodicean,
The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. On the
surface A Laodicean seems to be merely a lurid melodrama, but its
controlling metaphor of life as a game in which we must gamble
whether we choose to or not makes it a fascinating text to read
alongside Hardy's more famous novels. Central to all three works
are ideas about time, timing, knowledge, intention, and moral judgment. I argue that Hardy's belief in moral luck complicates his
attraction to Kantian ethics which is opposed to such a concept
because of the primacy for Kant of intentions and agency.
An ethical concern at the heart of late nineteenth-century British
aestheticism also raises the question of agency: is it possible for the
Victorian artist to escape Victorian morality? In the ction of Oscar
Wilde and Henry James, I explore the ethical implications of the
aestheticist desire to refashion the world. Chapter 5 compares
Wilde's strange, Gothic, proto-postmodern, n-de-siecle narrative,
The Picture of Dorian Gray with James's The Ambassadors, an early
modernist novel which, as Jonathan Freedman has pointed out,
offers a response to Wilde's aestheticism in Dorian Gray (Professions
of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Structure
[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990]). I build on Freedman's
comparative study by reading both novels in light of philosophical
ideas about the ethics of self and other, especially as expounded in
the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur. I see the different
styles of aestheticizing ethics in Wilde and James as similar in

Ethics and the turn to narrative

17

emotional self-protectiveness, a strategy that erects a defense


against both suffering and love.
The nal ethical preoccupation in the texts I discuss is lying,
which critics have only recently begun to recognize as central to
Victorian ethics, just as important as the moral earnestness for
which the nineteenth century was famous. This section of my study
benets from John Kucich's The Power of Lies but focuses on
Conrad, a novelist his book mentions only in passing. While
Kucich's approach emphasizes the function of honesty and dishonesty within the dynamics of middle-class Victorian culture, my
own approach considers lying like promising, confessing, and
storytelling itself as a speech act that late-century writers (unlike
most of their Victorian precursors) began to treat with nearly
obsessive self-consciousness. When philosophical literature on promising and lying is juxtaposed with Conrad's Under Western Eyes, a
novel about both, the ethical signicance of particularity, context,
and narrative emerges with unusual clarity. Philosophical reection
on this topic even at its most sophisticated and nuanced seems
unable to do justice to the complexity of the problems and paradoxes that motivate or follow from the promises and lies narratives
imagine. Whereas in my analysis of late-century narratives of
passionate and compassionate love, Hardy's stories about moral
luck, and the aestheticized ethics of Wilde and James, I argue that
ethical theory can provide a framework within which to interpret
the ction, in this chapter I maintain that the novel offers the better
ethical guide, enriching our understanding of the moral philosophy.
Speech acts are dependent on contexts, and the dialogic form of the
novel furnishes these contexts in a way that abstract philosophy
cannot. This nal section of the book, then, offers further evidence
for Nussbaum's claim that ethical inquiry in literature can offer a
viable alternative to the prevailing mode of inquiry in moral
philosophy.
In these nal two chapters, my discussion of Wilde, James, and
Conrad raises a broad question about turn-of-the-century ethics by
examining how such different writers can be equally ambivalent in
their understanding of the relationship between art and morality.

18

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

As dissimilar as Wilde and Conrad are, for example, in their


attitudes toward aesthetics, they start from an oddly similar denition of art. Wilde's deant declaration in the Preface to The Picture
of Dorian Gray that ``All art is quite useless'' sums up Conrad's frustration with the difcult and apparently protless work of writing
novels, which often felt to him like a form of torture. As Anthony
Cascardi explains, ``what Conrad understands by the difculty of
art has roots in the fact that it remains in the end aesthetic, that it is
a sphere of work without apparent purpose or aim and, for Conrad,
without signicant compensation outside that which it can itself
provide'' (``Ethics and Aesthetics'' 21). Wilde embraces the idea of
art's uselessness as a release from the bondage of Victorian
didacticism (which, in fact, neither his novel nor his preface
manage to avoid altogether). Conrad, however, resists aestheticism
despite its attractiveness. As difcult as he found the effort to
believe in truthfulness and art's capacity to achieve an ethical end
by telling the truth about the world, his ction continues to undertake this effort. Virginia Woolf recognized both Conrad's struggle
and his success in the very texture of his prose: ``the beauty of
surface has always a bre of morality within. I seem to see each of
the sentences . . . advancing with resolute bearing and a calm
which they have won in strenuous conict, against the forces of
falsehood, sentimentality, and slovenliness.''29 Conrad's ction
seems very modern in its depiction of lying as virtually inescapable,
and yet Woolf is right that for Conrad falsehood nevertheless
remains the enemy. His protagonists seek to disentangle themselves
from webs of deceit, and Under Western Eyes unlike The Picture
of Dorian Gray never glamorizes lying.
The emotional approach taken by Hardy and the New Woman
writers in their reworking of Victorian ethics is antithetical to the
approach of Wilde, James, and Conrad, who project well-disguised,
elusive narrators and implied authors and guard themselves against
feeling. Conrad does so because of his Kantian distrust of emotion's
potential to undermine reason and ethics, even though throughout
his ction there are vivid instances of emotional bonding. James
does so by ltering his story through a character's consciousness,

Ethics and the turn to narrative

19

which enables a more nuanced, exible form of moral deliberation


than other narrative methods, even as it protects him from divulging any ethical commitments of his own. Wilde does so because as
a homosexual his strongest feelings were banned. Much of Wilde's
most memorable writing startles us through its apparent affront to
reason, but ultimately it appeals to a reader's intellect and aesthetic
sensibility rather than eliciting compassion or other emotional
responses.
These three writers rethink Victorian morality not by turning to
emotion or revising the traditional love plot, but by exploring the
relationship between private and public that has always been so
central to ethics. Wilde's need to lead a double life, despite the
openness signaled by his public amboyance, made him especially
alert to the discrepancy between the ethics he could imagine for his
private life and the public code of morality that made lies necessary.
Conrad, too, coming as he did from a family of political activists,
had a heightened awareness of the public world that demands roles,
contracts, and disguises; his novels show that while individuals can
work to change this world, it has the power to coerce and to strip
away ethical agency.
One of my aims in the chapters that follow is to demonstrate the
centrality of ethics to our understanding of n-de-siecle literature
and culture. Like Kucich and other recent commentators on ethics
and politics, I believe we need to work against ``an oversimplied
sense of how ethics is related to the kinds of political or ideological
concerns that have preoccupied contemporary criticism'' (The
Power of Lies 37). All of the writers I consider were political in their
desire to change what they considered obsolete or oppressive
attitudes, institutions, laws, and moral codes. But the politics of
their texts cannot be construed apart from the ethics, just as the
ethics can only be read through close attention to aesthetic choices.
I also hope to show that such attention to narrative detail and
context can complement the work of moral philosophy, and that the
theories and debates animating contemporary ethics can revitalize
our study of the ethics of ction.

chapter 2

Victorian history and ethics: anxiety about


agency at the n de siecle

Theory is required to support observation, just as much as


observation theory.

Alasdair MacIntyre1

Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality,


turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.

Charles Taylor2

Despite all the emphasis on particularity, context, and narrative in


recent studies of ethics and literature, scholars working in this eld
have directed surprisingly little attention to the question of why an
ethical problem or set of ethical concerns dominates in narratives
written during a given historical period. Such historicizing might be
avoided for the simple reason that identifying the moral preoccupations of an era represents only the beginning for an ethical
critic and immediately begs several questions. My claim, for
instance, that anxiety about agency during the British n de siecle
determines in a variety of ways the ethical sensibility of late
Victorian and turn-of-the-century novels gives rise to a question
about history how are the ethical issues of these novels distinctively different for their time? as well as to a number of theoretical inquiries about the value of understanding ethics as historically
contingent, inquiries that concern the existence of moral absolutes
and the validity of universal claims about virtue.3
Any satisfying answer to these questions would entail a complex
explanation of both the relationship between history and ethics and
the historical and cultural context of Victorian ideas about will,
agency, and determinism, not to mention nineteenth-century conceptions of selfhood. Although all I can do here is begin to explore
20

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

21

a few points that would contribute to such an explanation, doing so


will further disclose my theoretical assumptions and clarify what I
mean when I refer in subsequent chapters to Victorian morality and
n-de-siecle ethics. Because the historical context of the ction I go
on to discuss must be conceived both narrowly (the 1890s) and
broadly (modern), my method in what follows is to investigate the
continuities that make the late nineteenth century seem to be of a
piece with both the Victorian period and the twentieth century as
well as the discontinuities that mark it as distinctively different,
especially in its ethics and its ideas about identity and agency.
Between the Victorians' vigorous efforts to deny anxiety about
agency and the moderns' acceptance of such angst as unavoidable,
the turn-of-the-century writers positioned themselves not only in a
discursive, ethical space that they felt to be new and leading to the
new but also in the midst of paradox. The paradox of at once
accepting uncertainty and instability and developing creative strategies to refuse the despair that seemed to come in the wake of such
acceptance enabled the late Victorian writers to forge a new ethics.
Although this ethics emerges in all its contradictions, details, and
subtleties only in the ction I discuss later, my treatment of it here,
in the context of intellectual and cultural history, sketches its broad
outlines and highlights features of the past and future that help give
it denition.
mill and macintyre: historical peculiarities and
moral convictions
One of the twentieth-century philosophers most attuned to the
historical dimension of ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre, can be said to
have an unlikely Victorian precursor of sorts in John Stuart Mill.
MacIntyre has famously argued that ``every moral philosophy has
some particular sociology as its counterpart'' (After Virtue 225) and
that it makes no sense to speak of virtues apart from the social
order that gives rise to them. He has also sketched a history of
morality that describes the unity and teleology of both the
Aristotelian ethical tradition and that of Aquinas and the Christian

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

Middle Ages, lamenting the disappearance of this belief in telos and


a common human good by the time of the Enlightenment. The
modern liberal state has since become merely an ``arena in which
each individual seeks his or her own private good'' (172). Because
we no longer share moral rst principles, there is no hope for moral
consensus in modern Western society.
If this incoherence of moral standards that MacIntyre identies
and deplores set in during the eighteenth century, then by the early
nineteenth century men and women, J. S. Mill among them, were
already self-consciously talking and writing about it. Ostensibly, of
course, Mill is quite different from MacIntyre, not only as an advocate of liberal individualism but also as a Utilitarian, for in
MacIntyre's view, ``internal goods and external goods are not commensurable with each other'' (198), and this is a distinction that is
alien to the Utilitarians, even to Mill, though he comes closest to
making it (199). Yet, as A. Dwight Culler points out in his discussion of the inuence of the Saint Simonians on both Mill and
Carlyle, Mill, as early as the 1830s, came to see history as a series of
periods that were either ``organic'' (a Saint Simonian term that
designates an age unied by a coherent set of religious or philosophical beliefs) or ``critical'' (the group's term for periods lacking
any overarching authority).4 This vision of the past bears a striking
similarity to MacIntyre's.
Like many Victorians, Mill thought of himself as living in an age
of transition, and as Robert Denoon Cumming has pointed out in
his study of the development of liberal political thought, there is a
correlation ``between the transitional character of Mill's age and the
history of a mind that presses forward through successive phases.''5
Like his other writings, Mill's autobiography, with its emphasis on
stages, attests to the historical structure of his thought and to his
importance as ``the rst noteworthy political thinker in the British
tradition to accord theoretical relevance to history as a progressive
development'' (Cumming, Human Nature and History 369). From
the Saint Simonians Mill learned to take the historicist view6 and to
ask not merely whether an institution or reform or ethical orientation was rational but whether it was ``suitable for a particular

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

23

people at a particular time'' (Culler, Victorian Mirror 55). The antiessentialist strain in MacIntyre's account of the virtues as well as his
nostalgia for a time before the eighteenth century, a time when life
and morality were unied and purposeful, are evident in Mill as
well, though he is somewhat more approving of his own age than
MacIntyre is of modernity:
But the chief benet which I derived at this time [in the 1830s] from the trains
of thought suggested by the St. Simonians and by Comte, was, that I
obtained a clearer conception than ever before of the peculiarities of an era of
transition in opinion, and ceased to mistake the moral and intellectual
characteristics of such an era, for the normal attributes of humanity. I looked
forward, through the present age of loud disputes but generally weak
convictions, to a future which shall unite the best qualities of the critical with
the best qualities of the organic periods; unchecked liberty of thought,
unbounded freedom of individual action in all modes not hurtful to others;
but also, convictions as to what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious,
deeply engraven on the feelings by early education and general unanimity of
sentiment, and so rmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life,
that they shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and
political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others.7

In their moral philosophy, then, both MacIntyre and Mill are alert
to the danger of identifying the ethics of a particular time with ``the
normal attributes of humanity.''8 And because they are both postEnlightenment thinkers (albeit at opposite ends of an historical continuum that stretches from the early nineteenth century to the late
twentieth century), they fear that what once had provided unity and
rm grounding in discussions of ethics has vanished.
Their strongest dissimilarity, however, and what characterizes
them as having been inuenced by different philosophical traditions
and different historical and cultural contexts, emerges in their descriptions of what they nd most dismaying about their respective
societies. For Mill it is slavish and stultifying conformity, whereas
for MacIntyre it is incoherent values and a lack of consensus. This
difference is instructive if we are to follow the lead of both philosophers and acknowledge that something valuable is gained in a discussion of Victorian and n-de-siecle ethics if it is prefaced by an
account of the cultural history of those periods. As Cumming notes,

24

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

for Mill, ``The individual's individuality . . . acquires a certain


general relevance insofar as he represents his particular period in
history'' (Human Nature and History 365), and this subjective representation of history is complexly ethical, conveying as it does both
one's values as shaped by a particular historical moment and one's
resistance to those values. The ethos of the early to mid-Victorian
period that is the subject of Mill's social criticism yields at the n de
siecle to the creative tension between a new ethics of freedom and
an old morality of convictions (the union of different types of historical periods that Mill had predicted) and then in the twentieth
century to the liberal individualism that for MacIntyre dominates an
age ``after virtue,'' a period in which the language of morality persists but in such a fragmented form as to be virtually without substance. As will become clear in my later treatment of MacIntyre's
thesis, I cannot, of course, completely agree with an argument that
impugns the value of contemporary moral philosophy, for work in
this eld has proved stimulating despite its many unresolved
debates to my thinking about the ethical issues I discuss in this
book. I am in complete accord, however, with his claim that ``any
specic account of the virtues presupposes an equally specic
account of the narrative structure and unity of a human life and vice
versa'' (After Virtue 243). Because I believe this to be true and am
also in agreement with Mill's belief in the general relevance both
historical and ethical of an individual's individuality, I am turning
to ctional accounts of human lives as a way to understand how
English n-de-siecle writers specied virtue and construed ethical
problems. And in this chapter I will briey consider ideas about the
structure and unity of the lives of the Victorians themselves since
this intellectual history is important to the ethics of the ction and
vice versa.
mid-victorian faith in the paradox of
self-denying will
Even early in the Victorian period, assumptions about choice and
self-determination were being challenged by industrialism and its

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

25

attendant social changes, by science and its new methods of conceiving order and relating humans to the rest of a diverse world,
and by a class system that insisted upon conformity, whether by
constraining an individual's practical choices (about schooling,
vocation, marriage, etc.) or by promising greater freedom and
status through adherence to middle-class rules and habits. Early in
the century, Victorians met these challenges with a vigorous assertion of will, but beneath this simple attitude lay an ambivalent sense
of self. Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus describes its protagonist,
Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, as a typical nineteenth-century man both
in his spiritual crisis, with its ensuing doubt and despair, and in his
recovery, which paradoxically necessitates a reclaiming of the self
through shifting the focus from self to the larger world of work and
duty to others. The deant self-assertion of the Byronic hero in Romantic literature was much more straightforward than the Victorian
depiction of will as self-mastery, as learning self-denial and one's
place in a complex social network. Carlyle's narrator says of
Teufeldrockh's progress, ``he is now, if not ceasing, yet intermitting
to `eat his own heart'; and clutches round him outwardly on the
NOT-ME for wholesomer food.''9 During this period, the ``not
me'' fed the Victorian self either by shoring it up in its insecurity,
or by signaling, as Carlyle does, the greater likelihood of nding
happiness in duty than in freedom, in an other-directed focus rather
than in introspection.10 John Reed, in his study of Victorian will,
points out that
Carlyle saw the self as a nodule of will ringed round by necessity yet also
described existence as a web of laments endlessly extending. This contradiction epitomizes a central conict in the nineteenth-century perception of
the self as both an independent, willing, even embattled entity, and an
elusive, yielding, self-less medium for transmitting the energy of some divine
or natural power.11

Some Victorians those who chose religion over science as well as


those who managed to reconcile the two emphasized divine
power and the biblical imperative of dying to self. But interestingly
enough, even those who lost their faith and looked to the natural
rather than the supernatural for meaning often developed phil-

26

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

osophies grounded in self-sacrice and perceptions of the self as


simultaneously strong willed and seless.
With his theory of natural supernaturalism, Carlyle exemplies
this willfulness in his refusal to make a choice between the secular
and the divine. As Culler observes, Carlyle's ``quasi-divination of
history'' and ``quasi-secularization of God'' seem contradictory
since one concept is not really assimilable to the other (Victorian
Mirror 73). Yet Carlyle's ideas perfectly reect one aspect of historical reality that, as we have seen, Mill hoped humanity would
outgrow: our need periodically to throw off creeds and convictions
and to replace them with others better adapted to the current age.
The complexities and contradictions in the writings of Carlyle and
other early Victorians are symptomatic of the need that accompanied rapid social changes early in the nineteenth century, the
need for reform the need, to use Carlyle's own metaphor, for new
clothes to replace those that had become worn-out and ill-tting.
The tailoring of this new garment which could be neither traditionally Christian, according to Carlyle, nor strictly Utilitarian involved trial and error.
Still, Carlyle warned against endless intellectual speculation. In
an age of dizzying change and complexity, Victorians experienced
doubt but for the most part refused to dwell in it, or even to proclaim a conviction without then acting on it. ``I must mix myself
with action, lest I wither by despair,'' the speaker of Tennyson's
Locksley Hall resolves, after a jilting by the woman he loves, a rejection that results from his lack of wealth and social status and that
temporarily leaves him feeling robbed of choice and mired in
morbid introspection.12 Matthew Arnold, mindful of what he
described as ``the bewildering confusion of our times,'' deplored
poetry ``in which suffering nds no vent in action; in which a continual state of mental distress is prolonged.''13 This Victorian belief
in the power of the active will is the keynote of Sartor Resartus.
Teufelsdrockh quotes Goethe: ``Doubt of any sort cannot be
removed except by Action''; he describes conviction as worthless
``till it convert itself into Conduct''; and he urges the following
precept: `` `Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,' which thou knowest

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

27

to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer''


(187). In the early to mid-Victorian period, then, a belief in deontological agency enabled what Carlyle triumphantly called the ``Everlasting Yea'' and dispelled much of the confusion that came in the
wake of social change.
This sense of agency conjoined to duty was certainly not identical to what is commonly thought of as freedom. Carlyle's ``Gospel
of Freedom'' acknowledges that, in Teufelsdrockh's words, ``Our
life is compassed round with Necessity'' (178). Focusing on the discourse surrounding industrialism in the rst half of the Victorian
age, Catherine Gallagher investigates the many ways ``freedom''
came to be debated and redened as a concept during this period.
The model of freedom in abolitionist tracts, for example that of a
free, unregulated labor force angered social reformers targeting
the abuses of industrial capitalism. They pointed to workers who
were deprived, by a free market, of their choices about employers,
working conditions, and even because their actions were often
dictated by economic necessity moral behavior. As Gallagher
points out, the social reformer Robert Owen and his followers
strongly advocated a deterministic view of moral development.
Many liberal political economists agreed with Owen, or at least
with his initial premise:
These thinkers essentially redened the concept of freedom by applying it to
action, not to the will, and by contrasting it to external constraint, not to
internal necessity. They argued that the will was the product of the
convergence of various unwilled psychic entities, which were the results of
one's experiences, and was therefore determined, not free. However, if one
acted according to one's will, these thinkers called one's actions `free.'
Liberty, then, was freedom from external constraints and was entirely
reconcilable with strict determinism. (Gallagher, Industrial Reformation 13)

Although he shared with the liberal economists belief in the proposition that the will is not self-determined, Owen did not accept
this denition of free action because he believed that without being
rational an action could not be free. Hence educating workers was a
priority among the reforms for which Owen campaigned. But
average middle-class Victorians, in their acceptance of the status

28

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

quo, their work ethic, and their concern to avoid being paralyzed
by doubt and confusion, seized what they must have seen as their
freedom by acting on a duty determined by others; thus many of
them internalized and lived this redened concept of agency.
In his ambitious study of the sources of modern identity, Charles
Taylor, like MacIntyre, considers ethical questions in relation to
history; because he believes any understanding of the good to be
entwined with an understanding of the self, history with its
changing conceptions of the self is inescapably pertinent to ethics.
Taylor stresses the continuities more so than the discontinuities
between our age and the nineteenth century, titling one of the chapters of Sources of the Self, ``Our Victorian Contemporaries.'' Like
MacIntyre, he marks an important shift at the time of the Enlightenment, which he characterizes not in the traditional way as a loss of
religious faith but rather as a redirecting of the action such faith
enables: ``The Victorian era was in general more pious and more
concerned about the state of religion than was the eighteenth
century. But the faith which emerged from this renewal was signicantly different among other ways, in its intense practical concern
from what had existed before the Enlightenment'' (399). The
simultaneous rise of the middle class and the rise of the novel
during this period can, of course, be related to the new inections
and practical emphasis of this faith, with its strong implications for
ethics and politics. Taylor nds the British anti-slavery movement
particularly revealing as an early example of what has become a
widespread modern recognition of justice as central to the good life,
which in turn gives rise to the phenomenon of citizens' movements
taking shape around a moral issue. And as he points out, it is crucial
not to underestimate the religious leadership in these causes both
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries even if a ``secularizing
slide'' occurred among some of those involved (401).
But if reform was one positive impetus to emerge from this
Victorian Christian or other-directed conception of self, another
was the impetus to submit to external authority, a moral motivation
that provided a comforting sense of security but was less clearly
positive in its consequences. This Victorian ethos undergirds the

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

29

culture of complacency that Mill critiques in On Liberty. And as we


have seen, his own hope, like Owen's, looked toward a future in
which moral convictions were rmly grounded in reason rather
than resting on arbitrary social conventions. What disturbed Mill
about his society, as he observed it from the highest class to the
lowest, was that people seemed to have given up individualized
wishes, peculiarities, and eccentricities of conduct: ``they like in
crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly
done.''14 A Calvinistic conception of humanity, or any other
version of a self-denying ethic (such as the one Carlyle advocates in
Sartor Resartus), struck Mill as all too pervasive in his age, and he
believed in the possibility of agency that did not crush individuality
but fostered its growth through the practice of healthy selfassertion:
In our times, . . . everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded
censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only
themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves what do I
prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would
allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and
thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually
done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still)
what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to
mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to
what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any
inclination, except for what is customary. (Mill, Essays 26465)

Even though Carlyle advocates the very modes of renunciation that


Mill thought to be at the root of the self-censoring tendencies of
Victorian society, Carlyle was himself vibrantly eccentric, as is the
protagonist of Sartor Resartus, who retailors Hamlet's aphorism
when he observes that ``Custom . . . doth make dotards of us all''
(237). Both Carlyle and Mill, then, believe in forms of agency not
constrained by custom and social expectation, and criticize their
society not so much for anxiety about agency or for paralyzed will
as for living unexamined lives governed by habit rather than
thoughtful choice. Carlyle's injunction do your duty but not
mechanically was more incoherent and potentially contradictory
than Mill's urging of individual liberty,15 but both writers limn a

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

society whose freedom did seem to be more external than internal,


more a matter of what legislated duty and social pressure allowed
than of personal choice.
When Carlyle and Mill describe the forces that stultify an individual's potential for unpressured, thoughtful choice, the industrial
image of the steam engine gures this anxiety about enforced conformity in both Sartor Resartus and On Liberty.16 The fear that the
mechanistic model of human nature would replace the organic took
hold, for obvious reasons, during the industrial revolution, and
even though Mill vigorously resists this new model in On Liberty,
he does align himself with the evolutionists in their nineteenthcentury conception of conscience as internal mechanism. And this
makes sense for him because despite the metaphor of the machine,
the new model is more particularist and exible than the old. In his
recent Freudian study of the sources of moral agency, John Deigh
makes the point that throughout the eighteenth century conscience
was believed to be ``an authoritative source of moral knowledge,''
but by the Victorian period it was no longer thought of as knowledge of moral truth but was instead considered an internal mechanism to keep one from giving in to temptation. A newly inuential
Darwinian theory led some Victorians to believe that this
mechanism evolved in social animals with sophisticated mental capacities by producing in them feelings of remorse and regret.17 Mill
agreed with the evolutionary conception of conscience as primarily
biological, psychological, and social rather than epistemological,
and this agreement posed less of a problem for him than for Carlyle
who, unlike Mill, had a religious upbringing and suffered the
typical Victorian spiritual breakdown, which led him to retailor,
rather than altogether relinquish, Christian conceptions of conscience as divinely prompted, as authoritative in an ultimate sense.
Deigh points out that Freud's writings were later to offer a
synthesis of these two conceptions of conscience, retaining the phenomenology of our experiential feeling that the voice of conscience
what Paul Ricoeur refers to as ``the agency that calls''18 issues
an injunction above and beyond us while also incorporating the
modern idea of conscience as a mechanism for maintaining social

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

31

order.19 Freud's later writings, according to Deigh, help us solve


the puzzle that came into being with the new nineteenth-century
evolutionist conception of ethical agency, a conception that emphasized moral feelings and motivations but left behind the comforting
knowledge of moral truths. The Victorians themselves, I would
argue, responded to this puzzle with fear, resisting the new model
of Mill and the evolutionists i.e., conscience as an individual's
internal emotional reaction to a moral situation and self-protectively adhering to an epistemological model of conscience which
undervalued feelings and motivations. These feelings and motivations, however, as the n-de-siecle Victorian novelists would later
attempt to demonstrate through their storytelling, were vitally
important to an ethical life, even though they were often in conict
with absolute moral rules and principles.
late victorian doubts about morality and agency:
improvising a new ethics
As MacIntyre reminds us, ``abstract changes in moral concepts are
always embodied in real, particular events'' (After Virtue 61). Early
in the Victorian period, individuals imagining and enacting their
own sense of agency faced challenges created by industrial, scientic, social, and ideological upheavals. These challenges not only
persisted later in the century but were complicated in a variety of
ways: by greater questioning of once clearly dened gender roles
and assumptions about love and marriage, by post-Darwinian
skepticism about the sovereignty of reason in a world of uncontrolled emotions and events, and by political changes that cast
doubt on the traditional relationship between the public and the
private. I explore the connection between these cultural anxieties
and the ethics of n-de-siecle ction in greater detail in the chapters
to follow, but by way of preface to this analysis, I shall broadly
sketch what I see as the ethos of the late-century which, in counterdistinction to that of the early and mid-Victorian era, is marked not
by a deontological escape from self or a paradoxically strong-willed
refusal of choice but instead by anxious yet exibly ethical

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searching, an openness to the surprising and unusual, and an


ambivalence poised between regard for Victorian morality and
attention to the ethical relevance of that which lies beyond
morality's authority.
Edmund Gosse's memoir, Father and Son (1907), offers a luminous example of the difference between Victorian and late
Victorian/Edwardian ethical assumptions in its retrospective narrative of Gosse's Victorian childhood, which was dominated by
values and paradigms he could never fully accept. At the end of the
book Gosse describes himself as a young man determined to claim
``a human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself ''
(251). Self-fashioning is an ethical concept radically divergent from
the mid-Victorian understanding of the self as determined by
family, social convention, and deontological morality. The focus on
the inner life is also new, a departure from the Victorian ethos of
looking outward to others and dening oneself through vigorous
agency in the world. If the Victorians avoided potentially troubling
conicts by accepting will as determined and embracing action in
and of itself as a safe, understandable form of freedom, then the late
Victorians suspended the need to choose that can arise even when
there is no real possibility of choice; they more courageously
explored freedom and determinism as two extreme, though equally
compelling, truths, allowing the tension its own reality rather than
seeking to resolve it. Terry Eagleton's description of the period
nicely captures the unresolved tension in the late-century conception of agency, a conception characterized by zest for multiplicity in
contrast to the Victorian need to unify, control, and ground: ``The
n de siecle is the age of the subjective and extravagant, of a
complex inwardness and individual deviancy which threaten to
burst the stereotyping moulds of language and convention; but it is
also an era in which, as with the Shavian life-force, we are mere instruments of some ulterior, altogether impersonal evolution''
(Eagleton, ``Flight'' 16). Darwin's inuence is evident here in the
emphasis on diversity, variability, and otherness as well as in the
humility before vast processes beyond human control. As Gillian
Beer reminds us, ``Evolutionary thinking is not a grid; it is a bundle

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

33

of apprehensions.''20 The difference between the mid-Victorian and


late Victorian conceptions of agency can be seen as the difference
between a self that mobilizes strategies of avoidance in the face of
such apprehensions and a self that dwells within the anxiety. Late
Victorian agency, though constrained and compromised in many
ways, is characterized by a freedom made possible, paradoxically,
through honesty about one's own limitations. Such honesty is the
hallmark of Gosse's text.
In Father and Son Gosse simultaneously defends Darwin's theory
of evolution, which his father refused to accept, and tells a story in
which ``complex inwardness'' and ``individual deviancy'' are
triumphant against the rigid law of the father in this case a father
who is at once a careful, precise, taxonomizing naturalist and a minister in the fundamentalist Christian sect known as the Plymouth
Brethren. Gosse's portrait of his father satirizes Victorian insistence
on self-denial and conformist categorizing. Not exactly autobiography, nor biography, nor ction, Father and Son is itself
elusive of category, and its subversion of autobiographic tradition is
something that is acknowledged even by those who emphasize the
work's Victorian tendencies.21
The personal truths of experience, especially if they challenged
normative public morality, were not typically introduced into the
public realm by Victorian autobiographers. In Father and Son,
Gosse makes a clear case for the importance of these personal
truths. Gosse's efforts to resist dogmatism with the greater openness
and even waywardness that he nds in the details of private experience can be read as the beginnings of a new epistemology, one that
implies an ethics no longer wedded to the need for certainty or an
unshakeable foundation. In her study of epistemic responsibility,
Lorraine Code describes intellectual honesty in terms I nd relevant
not only to Gosse's stance but also to Pater's concept of the self in
ux, Hardy's ``series of seemings,'' William James's pragmatism,
Conrad's skepticism, and the resistance to Victorian gender
ideology among the New Woman writers:
Intellectual virtue is, above all, a matter of orientation toward the world,
toward one's knowledge-seeking self, and toward other such selves as part of

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

the world . . . This attitude involves a willingness to let things speak for
themselves, a kind of humility toward the experienced world that curbs any
excessive desire to impose one's cognitive structurings upon it.22

Lacking this humility, Philip Gosse was, according to his son,


``more an attorney than a philosopher,'' more a Victorian selfprotectively fending off doubts than Edmund Gosse himself was,
for the son possessed a capacity for negative capability that he faults
his father for lacking: ``this obstinate persuasion that he alone knew
the mind of God, that he alone could interpret the designs of the
Creator, what did it result from if not from a congenital lack of that
highest modesty which replies `I do not know' even to the questions
which Faith, with menacing nger, insists on having most positively
answered?'' (113). Rather than following his father's lead and
adopting for himself certainties and dogmas to live by, Gosse embraced imaginative literature, especially Shakespeare (Keats's prime
example of the poet of negative capability), allowing art to guide
his thoughts and beliefs in a tentative, exploratory fashion quite
contrary to his father's scientic method. I disagree with Martin
Danahay's claim that in his autobiography Gosse, like Mill, exhibits
a lack of attention to his own subjectivity by focusing on his father.
This claim generally holds true for Mill, the mid-Victorian who
fears and avoids self-scrutiny: ``I neither estimated myself highly or
lowly,'' he admits. ``I did not estimate myself at all'' (quoted in
Danahay, Community of One 153). But by the end of the Victorian
period, the apparent other-directedness of a writer like Gosse is
striking quite a different note from Mill's. Danahay misses this note
when he concludes that Gosse's ``innate and persistent self is merely
a `nut' of resistance, a stubborn refusal to do something rather than
a positive assertion of an alternative existence'' (165). He misses the
self a very un-Victorian self that does not believe in positive
assertions.
Facing religious, philosophical, and ethical questions, latecentury writers were, in a variety of ways, likely to respond, ``I
don't know.'' Their intellectual inquiries were therefore able to
begin not exactly with unbiased empiricism but with honesty about
the relevance of the detailed subjective context within which ideas

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

35

and ethics take shape. The particulars of Gosse's narrative


contribute to our sense of individualized agency, will as complexly
motivated and constrained. Although Gosse shares some of his
father's Victorian habits, even at times his resistance to mainstream
post-Darwinian theories, Darwin's inuence on Father and Son is
apparent nonetheless, if only in Gosse's late Victorian unwillingness
to submit his thinking to categories that will no longer accommodate it. Like Darwin's work, then, Father and Son stresses the connection between adaptation and survival. The acknowledgment of
the need to ``retailor'' began early in the Victorian period with
Carlyle, but too often the new garment was designed to bind an
unruly will rather than to allow room for healthy growth.
The fear and repression that characterized the Victorian
response to threatened agency become, at the end of the century,
a less paralyzing anxiety that allows for risk and opportunity.
William James's observation that ``if a man fears error in a neurotic fashion, it may well prevent him from taking the risks which
would lead him to the truth''23 signals the turn toward a new epistemology and ethics and away from the conservative, defensive
position of the Victorian who clings, often out of fear, to a strict
conception of duty, convention, or world-view. Why reject an
hypothesis, the late-century writers ask, just because we cannot
prove it absolutely?24 The mid-Victorian crisis of faith itself arose
from this neurotic need for certainty, according to James, who
argues in favor of ``any hypothesis . . . live enough to tempt our
will,'' including the hypothesis of God's existence (``Will to
Believe'' 32). While Edmund Gosse asks himself whether there is
a god and answers, ``I don't know,'' his father is not only certain
that God exists, he also claims to know the will of God. Philip
Gosse's Omphalos (1857) provides a near-parody of this Victorian
refusal of doubt. His son describes ``this curious, this obstinate,
this fanatical volume'' (105) as an attempt to tie up all loose ends,
to answer all unanswered questions, ``to bring all the turmoil of
scientic speculations to a close, ing geology into the arms of
Scripture, and make the lion eat grass with the lamb'' (105). The
aplomb with which Philip Gosse develops his theory that God's

36

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

creation ``bore false witness to past processes, which had never


taken place'' (104) is symptomatic of a craving for unity and
certainty that dened the elder Gosse's generation. By contrast,
Edmund Gosse's emphasis on his irreconcilable differences with
his father and his ambivalent feelings of lial love and bitter
resentment aligns him with other n-de-siecle writers whose work
is characterized above all by intellectual honesty, creative tension,
and acute awareness of all that militates against any certainty or
agency pure and simple.
British aestheticism and the literary impressionism that writers
such as Thomas Hardy came to identify with further exemplify a
n-de-siecle emphasis on subjectivity and inward agency in contrast
to Victorian conceptions of freedom as external. The dramatic
monologue ourished in the mid-Victorian work of Tennyson and
Browning because it enabled poetry about subjectivity and eccentric
individuality to wear a mask of objectivity, and more often than
not, especially in Browning, it became a vehicle for a vigorous
sense of agency in the world, even when that agency and the power
that accompanies it are subtly and ironically undermined (as in ``My
Last Duchess'' and ``The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's
Church'').25 For aesthetes such as Pater, living with a late-century
awareness of deterministic necessity did not eliminate a belief in
agency; rather, it drove it from an external, objective realm of realizable goals to the artist's mind, ``removing the arena of freedom to
a world where whatever could be called action was entirely internal'' (Reed, Victorian Will 383). The very arena the mid-Victorian
writers sought to avoid in order not to lose their freedom in morbid
introspection, guilt, and confusion, the late Victorians claimed as
their territory, one no less fraught with anxiety than it was earlier in
the century but no longer a place to ee.
Sheila Berger, J. B. Bullen, H. M. Daleski, and others have
considered how strongly Hardy's techniques as a novelist were
inuenced by Impressionist painting, and noting this inuence is
one way of demonstrating how Hardy, like Pater, locates freedom
in inwardness and individuality rather than in scope for action in
the world which, as I discuss later, is nearly always hampered by

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

37

chance and luck for Hardy's characters. What we selectively see


when we look out at the world is determined by who we are;
describing the Impressionists in a notebook entry of 1886, Hardy
exhibits a quintessential late Victorian fascination with this subjectivity: ``their principle is, as I understand it, that what you carry
away with you from a scene is the true feature to grasp; or in
other words, what appeals to your own individual eye and heart in
particular amid much that does not so appeal, and which you
therefore omit to record.''26 The mid-Victorians minimized
tension and discord by dening and adhering to norms and by dutifully working toward goals. This normative, teleological orientation toward the world shifted at the end of the century for a
complex variety of reasons, and the late Victorians began to nd
pleasure in particularity, especially when set off against a type or
norm, and in piquant contrasts and tensions. Eagleton alludes to
the ``perverse fusion of discipline and exoticism'' during the
period (``Flight'' 19); though he writes about it in relation to
Hopkins and to late-century representations of British imperialism, it is also evident in the aesthetics of Pater and Wilde. Even
Pater's quirky method of writing reveals n-de-siecle values. He
would put together bits of writing on squares of paper as though
working a jigsaw puzzle except without any sense of what it
would all amount to or result in (Culler, Victorian Mirror 381). In
both method and style, Pater suspends judgment and avoids commitment, believing that ``the will remains free as long as it
remains untouched by conscious teleology. To take aim is to lose
direction'' (Culler, Victorian Mirror 381).
Still, the late Victorians did not view themselves as breaking free
from history altogether, as having come from nowhere on the road
to nowhere. In fact, much of their anxiety about agency arose from
cultural narratives about history and our control or lack of control
over the course of events: ideas about heredity and degeneration
(which imbue Hardy's ction, especially Jude the Obscure, the
closest of his works to the contemporary mode of naturalism),
theories of mass culture, and theories of the unconscious. Even
though a mid-Victorian, optimistic belief in progress had eroded

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

considerably by the end of the century, many late Victorian writers


continued to make a claim to cultural authority. James Eli Adams
argues, for example, that British aestheticism appealed to popular,
teleological versions of evolutionary theory to break from conventional moral rules but also to establish continuity in an apparently
fragmented world. The self had become more dominant and
particularized than it was earlier in the century, but it was never a
self in isolation, a stable ego differentiated from all others. The late
Victorians saw it instead as a self that, through heredity, contains
past selves, and through history embodies a collective cultural
legacy.27 Culler speculates about Pater's vision of history, which is
probably not as aptly represented by the mirror (the past as
analogous to the present) as Mill's or Carlyle's views of history are:
``It may be that [Pater] looks down through the clarity of his own
nature into a many-layered past, each layer of which is stained with
the tincture of that through which it is perceived'' (Victorian Mirror
258). This image nicely captures both the aestheticist emphasis on
subjectivity and Hardy's Impressionist account of individualized
modes of perception.
Thus history and agency for the n-de-siecle writers are both
quite complicated: history is at once no longer a matter of progress toward a goal, and yet it is sometimes teleological in its appropriation of evolutionary theory or its fears of degeneration;
autonomy is compromised by ideas about inuence, heredity, and
patriarchy (the strong Victorian father's presence is still palpable),
and yet agency is afrmed, though anxiously, through strategies
of introspection, rebellion, and self-fashioning. These ambivalences and hesitations and the controversies they gave rise to in
late Victorian British culture are characteristic of the end of any
century in its self-consciousness about transition. Before I undertake a reading of the ethics of this period through the particularity
of its narratives, I would like to return to MacIntyre's argument
about ethics after the Victorians and briey consider the ethics of
the twentieth-century n de siecle, which is of course the stained
tincture through which I am studying stories of the nineteenthcentury n de siecle.

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

39

reading the victorians against and within


twentieth-century ethical frameworks
According to Alasdair MacIntyre's argument, the Victorians, like
us, lived in a time ``after virtue'' when ``shared moral rst
principles'' no longer ordered people's lives. In the modern world,
MacIntyre claims, we ``work with fragmented survivals'' of a moral
tradition (After Virtue 257). Although this argument is in many
ways persuasive and recognizably true, it tends to blur important
differences between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well
as differences within the Victorian period of the sort I have been
exploring. As will be clear from my discussion below, this blurring
is almost inevitable because, as signaled in Taylor's reference to
``our Victorian contemporaries,'' the continuities are indeed as
strong as the discontinuities. Still, the fragmentation and relativism
MacIntyre deplores is without a doubt more pervasive in the twentieth century than it was in the nineteenth, and my study focuses on a
turning point by discussing how n-de-siecle ction delineates an
ethics that is continuous with both Victorian morality and
twentieth-century ethical diversity and yet distinctive in its poised
position between the two. Moreover, MacIntyre's argument begs
the question by insisting that beliefs must be coherent, part of a
unied system, to be moral.28 My own argument ies in the face of
this assumption by suggesting that for the late Victorians ethical
insights were born from openness to surprise and willingness to
relinquish a clearly centered, deontological morality for the sake of
a viable, though much more inchoate ethics. Whether or not the
hope these ethical insights inspire remains alive or becomes nearly
extinguished by the late twentieth century is a question that my
reading of ethics in narrative implicitly raises through its theoretical
framework, which tests the practical value of recent ideas in moral
philosophy.
Given his belief in the importance of history for our understanding of ethics, MacIntyre does not underestimate how different
Victorian values are from twentieth-century ethical thinking,
despite our shared post-Enlightenment instability. In fact, both he

40

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

and Taylor most often weave together differences and similarities


when writing about the last century in relation to our own. When
describing the ``linguistic twists and turns'' of moral vocabulary
throughout history, MacIntyre notes that in the Victorian period
`` `immoral' and `vice' become associated . . . with whatever threatens the sanctity of the Victorian marriage . . . and hence acquire in
some circles an exclusively sexual connotation. The society for the
suppression of vice did not have among its interests the suppression
of either injustice or cowardice'' (After Virtue 233). Still, even this
point of difference between the Victorians and the late Victorian/
modern period, when examined from another angle, seems less a
difference than a concern reected in moral vocabulary throughout
our century, albeit with varying inections. The preoccupation
with sexual morality certainly persisted into the late Victorian
period and can be traced through language. For example, the term
``New Hedonist,'' popular in the 1890s, was taken by many to be a
euphemism for ``homosexual'' (Stokes, In the Nineties 26), despite
its apparently more general reference to all who believe pleasure to
be the highest good. And even this broader way of understanding
New Hedonism underscores historical continuity (despite the
``new'') by linking it to ``old'' hedonism and thus, as Culler reminds
us, to mid-Victorian Utilitarianism: ``It was generally accepted in
nineteenth-century England that Utilitarianism was the modern
counterpart of Epicureanism, the `greatest happiness of the greatest
number' being the modern democratic or universalist version of
ancient hedonism'' (Victorian Mirror 264). This is a surprising and
ironic conjunction, especially when one considers that in the 1890s
Oscar Wilde writes in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray,
``All art is quite useless'' to proclaim a New Hedonism that refuses
Victorian Utilitarian ethics. Regardless of this and other n-de-siecle
attempts at a clean break, history is inescapably a narrative, and the
persistence of the past emerges as a theme sometimes implicit,
sometimes explicit in much of the ction I discuss in subsequent
chapters.
The features that distinguish ethics in the modern period include
a self-conscious awareness of one's place in history, which the

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

41

Victorians felt more than people did at any earlier point in history,
and what Taylor describes as ``a set of questions'' that ``make sense
to us . . . and . . . would not have been fully understandable in
earlier epochs'' (Sources of the Self 16). These questions concern the
meaning of life and articulate doubts which, both Taylor and
MacIntyre point out, are quite characteristic of our age. Taylor's
thesis rightly insists that frameworks are inescapable, even in the
twentieth century, and yet they are also inevitably problematic:
This vague term points towards a relatively open disjunction of attitudes.
What is common to them all is the sense that no framework is shared by
everyone, can be taken for granted as the framework tout court, can sink to
the phenomenological status of unquestioned fact. This basic understanding
refracts differently in the stances people take. For some it may mean holding
a denite traditionally dened view with the self-conscious sense of standing
against a major part of one's compatriots. Others may hold the view but with
a pluralist sense that it is one among others, right for us but not necessarily
binding on them. Still others identify with a view but in [a] somewhat
tentative, semi-provisional way . . . This seems to them to come close to
formulating what they believe, or to saying what to them seems to be the
spiritual source they can connect their lives with; but they are aware of their
own uncertainties, of how far they are from being able to recognize a
denitive formulation with ultimate condence. There is always something
tentative in their adhesion, and they may see themselves, as, in a sense,
seeking. (17)

This strikes me as an incisive encapsulation of the character of


twentieth-century beliefs. Although the mid-Victorians began to
feel qualms of uncertainty of the sort described here, they successfully repressed them. Only in the late Victorian period does the
``denitive formulation'' slip beyond reach. And yet what Ian Watt
points out in his study of Conrad in the nineteenth century that
Conrad was at once ``more contemporary and more old-fashioned''
than modern writers such as Joyce, Lawrence, Pound, and Eliot29
I would argue is true of the n-de-siecle writers in general: they
were divided between a yearning for authority, certainty, and even
normative vision, on the one hand, and a commitment to intellectual honesty (with all its questions and doubts), self-fashioning,
and individualism on the other hand, whereas the modernists were

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

less torn, more content with what they considered ``private systems
of order and value'' (Watt, Conrad 32).30 What begins as a dilemma
for the late Victorians, however, often results in a balanced acknowledgment of conicting claims, a refusal of the either/or choice.
The age that Mill looked forward to an age capable of combining
the organic and the critical historical modes, as the Saint Simonians
termed them seems to have been most nearly realized at the end
of his own century. For this reason, Eagleton's contrast of the nde-siecle radicals with those of our century also conveys his greater
admiration for the late Victorians, who embraced ``a set of compatible rather than antagonistic concerns,'' which were ssured in
the latter half of the twentieth century (``Flight'' 12). As will
become clearer in my discussion of New Woman ction, the compatibility of the concerns did not result in a unied political
program among n-de-siecle radicals, but the tensions that existed
then were more creative and fruitful, arguably, than they have since
become. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed a unique
moment of what can perhaps only be understood as paradox: an
anxiety about agency that was neither so disturbing as to call for
repression (as it was for the Victorians) nor so familiar as to be embraced as inevitable (as Taylor's description of modern frameworks
suggests that it is in our own age).
Ultimately, then, MacIntyre's view of morality in the modern
period is more pessimistic than mine, if only because the late
Victorian struggle to imagine agency and shape a more just,
humane ethics was so valiant. Like Charles Taylor, Martha
Nussbaum, and others who mark a revitalization in contemporary
ethical theory (to which MacIntyre's work has certainly contributed
through the challenge it issues), I would argue that although the
possibilities that energized ethics at the end of the last century
faltered for much of the modern period, these possibilities are once
again vibrantly alive.
When writing about contemporary ethical theory in relation to
late Victorian narrative ethics, I sometimes draw on the work of
philosophers clearly at odds with one another, but I am also interested in combining the work of those writing in different traditions

Anxiety about agency at the n-de-siecle

43

or from diverse philosophical orientations in order to create frameworks that are perhaps idiosyncratic to my own twentieth-century
style of meaning-making. Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor,
though their attitudes about ethics in the modern period diverge
sharply in some respects, share a concern to understand ethics in relation to history and narrative because to do so is to create
meaning. As Taylor points out, the modern predicament is a ``loss
of horizon'' or fear that life is meaningless. Hence the need for a
framework, which Taylor denes as ``that in virtue of which we
make sense of our lives spiritually. Not to have a framework is to
fall into a life which is spiritually senseless. The quest is thus always
a quest for sense'' (18). He is in debt to MacIntyre for this analogy
of the quest, and in After Virtue the medieval conception of the
quest is intricately dened as at once teleological for to begin an
ethical quest one must have some idea of ``the good,'' something
beyond a relativistic sense of everything being equally good and
open-ended, for the quest teaches us about the goal. My discussion
of n-de-siecle narrative ethics in relation both to mid-Victorian
morality and to the frameworks and controversies of twentiethcentury moral philosophy enacts its own quest, beginning with the
assumption that the consequences of post-Enlightenment anxiety
about agency change throughout the modern period but concern
for the virtues persists, even as it assumes a variety of new forms
and is sometimes articulated and explored only by those standing
against the dominant currents of their culture.

chapter 3

Emotion, gender, and ethics in ction by


Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

Flirtation, if it can be sustained, is a way of cultivating wishes, of


playing for time. Deferral can make room.

Adam Phillips1

In the ction published in the 1880s and 90s that focuses on the
``New Woman'' or late Victorian feminist, the break from traditional assumptions about women and ethics is sharp but not
denitive. Likewise the rejection of conventional aesthetic choices
often leads these writers not to narrative methods that are wholly
innovative and successful but to strange experiments. In this
transitional literature, written during a period of cultural upheaval,
the exaggerated and the extravagant invade realism, as if to startle
readers out of their complacency.2 Formal innovations enable the
exploration of a new sexual ethics. In keeping with Victorian
novelistic tradition, the New Woman writers tell stories about love
and marriage. But marriage is no longer the goal toward which
everything inevitably tends; it is, instead, an object of the text's
ethical scrutiny. As Teresa Mangum notes in her study of Sarah
Grand and the New Woman novel, ``Promoting the interests of
women, these novels work to remake marriage, a framework
shaping so many women's lives, into a ctional structure and an
institution that would give women power, control, authority,
security, respect, and, most signicantly, agency.''3 As in other latecentury ction, New Women writing betrays an insecurity about
choice and agency, provoked in this case by the political and social
consequences of gender inequity.
The characters in New Woman novels are self-conscious about
the awkwardness of rejecting old beliefs and values when the new
44

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

45

ones are so inchoate. These are the conditions that make agency
problematic. In the words of Waldo's Stranger in Olive Schreiner's
The Story of an African Farm (1883), ``To all who have been born in
the old faith there comes a time of danger, when the old slips from
us, and we have not yet planted our feet on the new'' (135). Evadne,
in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893), notes something
similar when she observes to her husband that he is not to blame for
ruining her life: ``It is not our fault that we form the junction of the
old abuses and the new modes of thought. Some two people must
have met as we have for the benet of others'' (340). In her analysis
of late Victorian feminism in the context of this mid-air, transitional
historical moment, Sally Ledger points out that ``the recurrent
theme of the cultural politics of the n de siecle was instability, and
gender was arguably the most destabilizing category. It is no
coincidence that the New Woman materialized alongside the
decadent and the dandy. Whilst the New Woman was perceived as
a direct threat to classic Victorian denitions of femininity, the
decadent and the dandy undermined the Victorians' valorization of
a robust, muscular brand of British masculinity deemed to be
crucial to the maintenance of the British Empire.''4 Not only were
gender categories destabilized at the end of the century, though;
these new threats to stability were themselves elusive and complex,
difcult to categorize. Both in ction and in the periodical press,
representations of the New Woman were multiple and contradictory. She was sometimes stereotyped as intellectual, masculine, and
asexual, other times as sexually voracious and unable to control her
emotions. She was aligned both with the free love movement and
with the campaign for the reform of marriage laws, which was
characterized by insistence upon monogamy within marriage for
both men and women. Patricia Ingham offers one theory about
why the varied representations of New Women in ction reect an
inevitable reality: ``All escapes or attempts to escape into unmapped
territory are necessarily erratic; where there is no established route,
self-assertion will be idiosyncratic.''5 The confusion within this
effort to redene gender and sexual morality reects confusion and
ideological fragmentation within cultural politics as a whole during

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

this period; the periodical press lumped together the New Women,
the decadents, and the socialists in the 1890s, but the challenges they
posed were, as Ledger argues, ``ultimately too fragmented to form a
coherent ideological programme to that posed by the monolithic
grand narrative of Victorianism'' (``New Woman and the Crisis of
Victorianism'' 41). Still, narrative efforts to tell new stories, to
experiment, to slip from the hold of dominant cultural assumptions
even if only temporarily and imperfectly enabled these n-de-siecle
writers the chance to cultivate wishes and play for time, to irt with
possibilities. And while that is very different from establishing a
sound, ideologically coherent plan for change that would dovetail
with other radical movements, it was what was possible at this point
in history. Drawing on Foucault's idea of a reverse discourse,
Ledger argues that the Victorian periodical press unwittingly
opened a discursive space, through its attacks and ridicule, for
voices in support of the New Woman and her claims.6 If nothing
else, this space for dialogue between dominant and suppressed discourses created room to maneuver and awareness, in the words of
Grand's heroine, of one's position at the junction of old and new.
The painful struggle of Evadne and other characters in New
Woman ction reects the challenge these authors faced when
striving to write honestly about women's experience and to benet
those who would continue this endeavor in the future; such an endeavor, as Patricia Stubbs points out, entailed ``a political as well as
an aesthetic struggle . . . The inoffensive heroine who could shock
no one was a highly political creature, and only the most determined
of writers were prepared to modify, let alone transform her.''7 If the
transitional groping of the New Woman writing mars it aesthetically
and dooms its heroines to frustration, thus weakening its political
impact, the ction nevertheless merits our attention for what it
reveals about the ethical concerns of late Victorian feminism.
emotion, reason, and gender
New woman writing is an emotional literature that afforded its
audience a fresh way of thinking about emotion. As Lyn Pykett em-

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

47

phasizes in her study of the sensation novel and New Woman ction,
``to some of its earliest readers and critics the New Woman writing
simply was feeling; it was an hysterical literature, written (and read)
on the nerves.''8 In addition to being emotionally charged, however,
this ction often takes emotion as its subject, investigating the interplay of feeling and reason in women's choices. As Pykett argues,
many of these writers ``simultaneously celebrate the feminine and/as
feeling, and problematise the conventional association of woman
with feeling'' (174). In that sense, these writers not only represent a
particular historical moment in the making of the modern identity
(to adopt Charles Taylor's phrase), they also anticipate the concerns
of twentieth-century feminists by exploring the relevance of gender
to ideas about subjectivity and agency.
One inuential tradition in philosophical thought views emotions
as irrational, animal, and feminine. Designated unruly and disruptive of ethical deliberation, emotions must be controlled and
educated by reason. Current work in philosophy and cognitive
psychology, however, inuenced by an Aristotelian philosophical
tradition, suggests that far from being merely a hindrance to
responsible thought and action, emotion plays an instrumental role
in ethical decision-making.9 The popularity of Daniel Goleman's
recent book, Emotional Intelligence, results from the promise for
social and ethical change inherent in a better understanding of the
role emotions play in our lives. Goleman identies ``a pressing
moral imperative'' as his impetus for writing a book concerned to
preserve ``the goodness of our communal lives'' from the selshness
and violence currently threatening it.10 Emotional intelligence, as
Goleman denes it, involves not only learning to manage feelings
and control impulses, but also becoming aware of one's own
emotions especially as they relate to beliefs, judgments, and
actions and better attuned to the feelings of others. This new
respect for the ethical value of emotion stems from greater understanding of the complex cognitive dimension of emotion than is
possible if one adheres to the dualistic view that separates reason
and feeling, associating the former with masculinity and power and
the later with femininity and nurturance.

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

The Victorian ideology of separate spheres was, of course,


predicated on this assumed difference between men and women. By
calling attention to the ethical implications of this ideology, New
Woman writing began to redene the role of emotion in the lives of
women while dramatizing in their ction how gender socialization
continued to thwart and isolate even the most rebellious and
progressive of the new heroines. In a sense Carol Gilligan's work
on women's moral development takes up the very questions that
interested the New Woman writers: How differently do men and
women dene moral problems? Is there a new way to speak about
ethics ``in a different voice,'' one that accords as much importance
to emotions, context, and relatedness as to individualistic rights? In
an interdisciplinary forum on Gilligan's work published in Signs in
1986, many of the critics of In a Different Voice misunderstand the
goal of the study, which is not to prove statistically that men and
women are different, or to argue for the value of separate spheres.
Rather, her work seeks to redene morality so that women's
experiences, which have shaped women's psychological development, are not ignored or devalued, as they were in studies by
Lawrence Kohlberg, Erik Erikson, and others. The ``voice''
referred to in her title is ``identied not by gender but by theme.''11
What she is furthering is a different model of ethical deliberation
for men and women both, one that includes emotions, particularly
those of empathy and compassion, instead of rejecting them as
irrational.
Reading Thomas Hardy's late novels, especially Tess of the
d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), in the context of
the ction of the New Woman has been an ongoing project of
Victorianists at least since Penny Boumelha's 1982 study of sexual
ideology in Hardy's novels. One of the most intriguing of the
recent efforts to contextualize Hardy's ction in this fashion occurs
in John Kucich's 1994 book on Victorian ethics, The Power of Lies.
Unlike Kucich and other literary critics who attribute the ethical
contradictions of Hardy's novels to his gender and describe him as
signicantly less feminist than his female contemporaries, I argue
that preconceptions about women, emotions, and ethics have kept

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

49

too many critics from recognizing what Hardy has in common with
such late-century women writers as Olive Schreiner and Sarah
Grand.12
Kucich considers Hardy to be a detached aesthete who
scapegoats women and who distances himself from emotion, sexual
desire, and subjectivity, thereby safeguarding his own moral
position. This reading betrays an assumption not shared by the
narrators and implied authors of Hardy's novels the belief that
emotion and desire interfere with responsible ethical choice. As I
interpret Hardy's ction, one of its central ideas is that reason and
emotion are not truly ``separate spheres.'' Hardy rejects the
totalizing, absolute nature of the Victorian doctrine of separate
spheres, constructing instead a contextual ethics of particularity.
Like Grand and Schreiner, he seeks to forge new denitions of
what can constitute gender identity and sexual morality. In contrast
to earlier Victorian novelists, these writers critique a sexual
ideology that punishes women for acting on their emotions and
desires. Admittedly, however, several features of New Woman
writing tend to obscure this critique or even to render it selfdoubting. For that reason it will be helpful to sort out the various
strands of my argument about this complex body of n-de-siecle
literature.
First, this ction often resists the separate spheres of belief that
women are naturally associated with feeling and men are naturally
associated with reason. These writers question such a stereotype.
But they also seek to redeem the ethical and cognitive potential of
emotion. They associate emotion with women but no longer
diminish women's power by doing so. Second, because a woman's
emotions can make her vulnerable, this ction often contrasts
women whose intellect and education arm them with direct
methods of self-defense to women who rely more exclusively on
emotions and desires that lead them to indirect forms of inuence
and manipulation. What this contrast obscures, however, is the role
played by emotion in the intellectual development of these New
Women, the degree to which feeling and reason are interrelated.
Third, the ction dramatizes a new kind of irtation: unlike the

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

traditional coquette, the late Victorian feminist irts not only to


attract attention and indulge her desires but also to experiment and
learn. This is, admittedly, a controversial claim, and I realize that
by making it I am aligning myself with contemporary critics of the
New Woman who, through sexist misreading, diminished her by
categorizing her as a mere irt. What interests me, however, is the
novelists' appropriation of irtation for their new sexual ethics; by
reinscribing this familiar, often frivolous activity as a trope for
something more radical and signicant, they seem to give readers
what they expect only to disconcert them. Finally, the heroines
rarely escape punishment or emotionally crushing defeat of some
sort, though this could be said to be a mark of the honesty of the
ction, a clear-eyed acknowledgment of all that thwarted even the
most progressive of late-century women.
I argue, then, that in its treatment of emotions and sexual
relationships, Hardy's Jude the Obscure shares both the feminist
concerns of the New Woman writing and its ethically complex
treatment of emotion, reason, and gender. To test the validity of
this argument, I offer a reading of Hardy's novel in the context of
Olive Schreiner's ``The Buddhist Priest's Wife'' and The Story of an
African Farm and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins.
emotion and ethical choice
``The Buddhist Priest's Wife'' tells the story of a New Woman
leaving for India who must say goodbye to the man she loves
without letting him know that she loves him. Like Jude the Obscure,
this story critiques the ideology of separate spheres and the double
standard, even as it demonstrates that in their relationships with
men women may appear powerful when they are actually at the
mercy of inexible patriarchal rules and ingrained assumptions
about gender. The intellect seems more educable than the emotions
and drives; hence, according to Schreiner's heroine, men and
women are most alike intellectually. In keeping with separatespheres imagery, the story's New Woman imagines circular disks
representing the sexes. When it comes to their power to reason,

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

51

men and women are equal, and that half of each disk is identical, a
bright red. But the red shades into different colors, blue in one and
green in the other, when it is a matter of the personal and sexual,
areas in which men and women, according to the heroine, are most
starkly different in their emotions and behavior. True to the values
of most New Woman writing, inuenced as it was by social
Darwinism, the story attributes this difference to ``nature'':13 ``it's
not the man's fault,'' says the heroine, ``it's nature's.''14 But if the
story accepts this as a reality, it also makes it seem cruel and unfair,
for this difference empowers the man and strips the woman of
agency. The ction suggests that in sexual relationships a measure
of power and inuence is granted to the woman who ethically compromises herself through passive manipulation. Schreiner's heroine
refuses to play this game:
If a man loves a woman, he has a right to try to make her love him because
he can do it openly, directly, without bending. There need be no subtlety, no
indirectness. With a woman it's not so; she can take no love that is not laid
openly, simply, at her feet. Nature ordains that she should never show what
she feels; the woman who had told a man she loved him would have put
between them a barrier once and for ever that could not be crossed; and if
she subtly drew him towards her, using the woman's means silence, nesse,
the dropped handkerchief, the surprise visit, the gentle assertion she had not
thought to see him when she had come a long way to meet him, then she
would be damned; she would hold the love, but she would have desecrated it
by subtlety; it would have no value. (92)

Schreiner reveals here how the New Woman differs from the traditional woman: she is ethically more scrupulous, but her capacity for
love is at once her strength and her tragedy, for the depth of her
thwarted emotional longing combined with her intelligence means
that ``in one way she was alone all her life'' (84). Like other New
Women, this heroine nds that she is unable to address both her
intellectual and her emotional needs. Complexly interrelated as
these needs are, Victorian culture nevertheless structures them as
antithetical and mutually exclusive. As Laura Chrisman points out,
the man in Schreiner's story is oblivious of the woman's love for
him and ``all of their intellectual discoursing on the nature of love
develops this irony, together with the irony of the gap between

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

intellectual and emotional expression.''15 In one sense, the story is


about the paradox of this gap, which is unnecessary and hurtful to
women and yet helpful as well, for the division of the intellectual
from the affective provides Victorian women with a defensive
strategy, a way to gain control over their emotions and the men
who have the potential to agitate these emotions.16
Schreiner's heroine is too intelligent to blunder into the trap of
simply acting like a man, directly expressing what she feels and
wants and thereby alienating herself from the more conventional
man she loves, but she is also too emotional, and too deeply in love,
to rest content with being this man's friend. The story is dominated
by its heroine's efforts to intellectualize and rationalize her pain, to
control it through an ability to understand it. Clearly, her emotions
and her attachment to a particular person have led her to her ideas
about gender, sexuality, and ethics, though as she sees it, the intellectual life is apart from emotions; it allows a woman to ``drop her
shackles a little'' (93). In that, it is like death. The story begins and
ends with reference to the heroine's beauty in death. ``Death means
so much more to a woman than a man,'' she says; ``when you knew
you were dying, to look round on the world and feel the bond of
sex that has broken and crushed you all your life gone, nothing but
the human left, no woman any more . . .'' (93). Escaping the
shackles of sex, whether through cogitation or through death, is but
one aspiration of this New Woman.17 An equally strong aspiration
arises from her desire to be loved by the man who hurts her when
he denies her sexuality, when he says, ``You're the only woman
with whom I never realise that she is a woman'' (93). Given the
norms of late Victorian society, once gender difference is overcome
and a man recognizes the humanity of a woman, she no long represents romantic or sexual possibilities for him. The protagonist of
``The Buddhist Priest's Wife'' is thus caught in a double-bind:
wanting this man's love but refusing the assumptions about gender
differences that seem to make it possible.18 The solution is to
emigrate to India, to remove oneself from the culture responsible
for this double-bind. As Chrisman remarks, there is a eugenicist
twist implicit in the story's ending: ``India serves Schreiner,

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

53

arguably, as a repository for evolutionarily overdeveloped women,


who are marked out as being unsuitable wifely and maternal
material. Sexual and familial activity is to be denied them as a
wastage of their resources; they can make the greatest social
contribution through their intellect'' (``Empire, `Race', and
Feminism'' 58). But the ethical import of the story is conveyed
through the woman's emotional pain, masked as it is by her
intellectual defenses. The story encourages us to question why
intellectual women could not also be loving wives and mothers;
thus the story erects gendered antinomies only to deconstruct
them.19 Joyce Avrech Berkman has compared Schreiner to current
poststructuralists in this regard, noting that ``unlike present-day
thinkers, who can marshal a plethora of twentieth-century scientic,
historical, and philosophical evidence for their views on the cultural
construction of gender, class, and race, Schreiner attacked widely
held assumptions about human difference without such scholarly
support.''20
Like Schreiner's story, Jude the Obscure takes as its subject ``the
inseparability of emotional and intellectual aspiration,''21 and again
the characters muse on the possibility of friendship across gender
lines: ``If he could only get over the sense of her sex,'' Jude Fawley
thinks about Sue Bridehead, ``. . . what a comrade she would
make.''22 But like the woman in Schreiner's story, he nds that his
desire makes this impossible. In contrast to his uncomplicated
physical attraction to Arabella, his feelings for Sue include both
intellectual and emotional afnity. In part the connection he feels
with Sue arises from their shared sensitivity, their emotional
response to life, of which Hardy thoroughly approves despite the
pain that accompanies their capacity for love, fellow-feeling, and
empathy. Kucich claims that in Hardy's ction desire and emotionalism, especially as they are associated with women, interfere with
honesty (Power of Lies 228). The trouble with this argument is that
it obscures Hardy's critique of the assumption that rationality, with
its often inexible regard for principle, is superior to emotion and
awareness of multiple perspectives, including those shaped by the
feelings that arise from particular attachments.23

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

The chapter of Jude the Obscure that is key to an understanding


of this dimension of the novel's ethics is the one that focuses on
Richard Phillotson's deliberations about Sue's request for a separation from him. Hardy's belief in the importance of emotion in
ethical decision-making is particularly clear at this pivotal moment
in the narrative. In conversation with Gillingham, Phillotson
explains his decision to release his wife from her marriage vows so
she can live with her lover. His friend attempts to reason with him,
to talk him out of this unconventional decision, but Phillotson
responds, ``I am only a feeler, not a reasoner'' (243). As the chapter
makes clear, however, Phillotson is indeed reasoning, but his
thinking is guided by emotion: by his love for Sue, by his
empathetic responsiveness to her pain (which he metaphorically
alludes to as her ``cries for help'' [241]), and by his intuitive recognition that she and Jude share an ``extraordinary sympathy or similarity'' (241).24 ``I simply am going to act by instinct, and let
principles take care of themselves,'' Phillotson declares. The
implied author leaves us in no doubt that this is a responsible,
compassionate decision.
Kucich argues that ``Hardy's women are regularly aligned with
emotionalism, as opposed to the customary rationality of his men''
(Power of Lies 228), but he begs the question by assuming that
emotion is emotionalism and therefore suspect, and also by
opposing feeling and reason, which, as in this chapter of the novel,
are only apparent opposites. Moreover, Hardy's novel subverts the
separate spheres of ideology by creating men, such as Jude and
Phillotson, who are as tender-hearted and emotional as the female
characters, and women who are intellectuals. Kucich is right that
Sue loses her capacity for moral reasoning by the end of the novel,
as Tess does by the end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, while the male
characters gain philosophical wisdom (230), but it is too often overlooked that Sue, the novel's New Woman, educates both Jude and
Phillotson through her intellectual superiority. Jude describes her
as ``a woman whose intellect was to mine like a star to a benzoline
lamp'' (422). Phillotson admits that ``her intellect sparkles like
diamonds, while [his] smoulders like brown paper'' (241). And

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

55

when he comes up with the radical idea that a woman and her
children could very well be a family without a man, he realizes that
he has ``out-Sued Sue'' in his thinking (243). As John Goode
comments about Sue, comparing her to Jude, ``she does not seek
the City of Light she has it already'' (Thomas Hardy 158). Unfortunately, her intellectual superiority, like that of the heroines of
Grand and Schreiner, creates emotionally traumatizing problems
for her, even as it illuminates the minds of those who come to know
her.
A traditional role for women is to inuence men, and in that
sense Sue is not unlike other Victorian heroines. Where she differs
from them, however, is that her moral inuence is not only as
intellectual as it is emotional: it is thoroughly unconventional. Her
collapse at the end of the novel into guilt-ridden hysteria is a
symptom of her emotional susceptibility. Ironically, though, it is
this very susceptibility that has made her such a sensitive teacher of
radical ideas. After this breakdown, she unsuccessfully attempts to
reverse the ethical education she has provided for Phillotson and
Jude. Only as a force of conventional inuence is Sue ineffectual.
Through his heroine, Hardy subverts the paradigm of traditional
feminine inuence, but inuence remains important to the ethics of
the novel. When Sue tries to persuade Phillotson to release her
from the marriage bond, for example, she seeks to inuence him, as
she has been inuenced, by John Stuart Mill's ideas about liberty.
Mill himself was saved by inuence, as he describes in his Autobiography: following a nervous breakdown, he found medicine in
Wordsworth's poems because they expressed ``thought coloured by
feeling'' (104) and helped him restore balance to his overly analytic
mind, a product of his Utilitarian education. Sue's breakdown
represents a different kind of imbalance: thought distorted by
feeling. Prior to this crisis, though, Sue is not at all the cold and
unsympathetic character that some readers perceive her to be. Her
ideas are imbued with emotion and therefore potently inuential.
Ingham emphasizes the ``fruitful ambiguity'' in Hardy's language
and characterization in this novel, which she considers his most
feminist; what she refers to as the ``kaleidoscope of critical Sue

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

(mis)construing'' (Thomas Hardy 78) is symptomatic of readers


still caught in categorical thinking about gender, not open to the
ambiguity of this kind of emotionalintellectual inuence.
If Sue is ``a harp which the least wind of emotion from another's
heart could make to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own''
( Jude the Obscure 293), if, in other words, she is as susceptible to
the emotions of others as they are to her ideas, then she is
inconstant, as Kucich points out. But Hardy's novel stresses that
constancy is an unrealistic ideal for sexual relationships, and sexuality is a strong component in the complex of forces that doom the
relationship of Jude and Sue. The empathy that moves Sue to shed
tears at the sight of Father Time's tears is what makes her a
sympathetic character (lovingkindness, in Hardy, often counterbalances the misery associated with erotic attraction), despite the
cruelty that results from her vacillations in her relationships with
men. Similarly, her reasons for withholding in sexual relationships
are contradictory and often difcult to understand, but as Ingham
points out, Sue's strength and integrity are evident in her ability to
claim ``her right to say no whatever the reason'' (Thomas Hardy
76). Although it is difcult to generalize about New Women, the
heroines I focus on in the ction of Schreiner, Grand, and Hardy all
attempt to overcome their lack of agency, often at great risk to
themselves and those they love. These attempts result only in
imperfect success and ultimate failure, largely because gendered
paradigms, even by the end of the nineteenth century, were
extremely difcult to resist, but also because Victorian culture did
nothing to encourage the blending and balancing of emotion and
intellect so essential to a responsible ethical life for women and
men, especially in romantic relationships and marriage.
flirtation
Emotion in the ction of Schreiner and Hardy is indeed associated
with women, but it is a vital component of their intellectual and
ethical lives. Jude the Obscure develops another theme prominent in
the ction of late-century women writers: the idea that the New

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

57

Woman's intellect becomes a weapon she turns against men as a


means of defending herself against patriarchal injustice and freeing
herself from constraints. In her relationships this exercise of power
leads the New Woman to become what Hardy calls ``an epicure in
emotions'' (180), usually with cruel consequences for the man or
men in love with her.
Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, like ``The Buddhist Priest's
Wife'' and Jude, poses the question of what it would be like for a
woman to be in a relationship with a man without the complications
of gender and sexuality. Grand's Angelica Hamilton-Wells
employs her cleverness as a child to secure rights equal to those of
her twin brother. She grows up well-educated but restless, without
intellectual challenges. Like Sue's feeling that Jude is her counterpart and Lyndall's bond with Waldo in The Story of an African
Farm, Angelica's twinship with a boy is key to her understanding of
gendered identity.25 As Teresa Mangum notes in her discussion of
the novel, ``Angelica . . . possesses potential for resistance because
she has experienced the formation of gender and the systematic
devaluing of women it enforces rsthand as an opposite sex twin''
(Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 134). When the newly arrived
choir tenor falls in love with her at rst sight, she disguises herself
as her brother and develops a close friendship with him. Later she is
unable to account for her behavior, though she admits to her desire
for excitement and her rebellion against those who would domesticate her. Cross-dressing allows her a luxurious physical freedom;
it also enables a rare sort of intellectual liberty.26 She says to the
tenor, ``I have enjoyed the benet of free intercourse with your
masculine mind undiluted by your masculine prejudices and
proclivities with regard to my sex.''27 The consequences for her are
therefore positive, despite the guilt she suffers after her exposure.
For the tenor, however, the prank has psychologically painful
repercussions, and his experience with Angelica eventually leads to
his death.
Lyndall, the New Woman in The Story of an African Farm,
shares Angelica's yearning for more possibilities than life offers a
woman. Lyndall's mind and imagination help her satisfy this

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emotional hunger. Instead of literal role-playing, she mentally


multiplies herself by participating in forms of life completely unlike
her own transcending time, gender, and race, imagining herself a
medieval monk, a Kafr witch-doctor, and a variety of other selves.
``I like to see it all; I feel it run through me that life belongs to
me; it makes my little life larger; it breaks down the narrow walls
that shut me in'' (182). As both Lyn Pykett and Ann Ardis have
noted, this disruption of stable feminine identity occurs in much of
the New Woman writing and is often reinforced by its unconventional narrative strategies.28 Although selessness was expected of
the traditional Victorian woman, the late-century New Woman
paradoxically seeks to escape self through intellectual and emotional
experiments in self-actualization, even when these experiments are
hurtful to others.
Lyndall's restlessness is evident as well in her relationship with
the man she loves. She explains her feelings for him by stressing his
strength and power, even as she exerts her own power by refusing
to marry him, though she is pregnant with his child, and by
confessing that she became involved with him because ``I like to
experience, I like to try'' (206). This adventurousness, which is at
once calculating and emotionally self-indulgent, is what leads her to
describe herself as having no conscience (176), certainly an unfair
self-assessment, though it is true that she hurts those close to her
through her unconventional choices. She has enough of a conscience to wish she were a better person, to prefer being good to
being loved (201). Schreiner encourages us to recognize Lyndall's
burden of guilt but also to question where the New Woman's
responsibility begins and ends in a patriarchal society that so
circumscribes women's freedom.
In her relationship with Jude, Sue is very much like Angelica
and Lyndall because she too feels emotional restlessness followed
by compunction. Like these other New Women, Sue is ``venturesome with men'' (182). She enjoys tormenting Jude by having him
walk down the aisle with her as practice for her marriage to
Phillotson. She explains that she likes to do interesting things that
``have probably never been done before'' (180). But her pleasure

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

59

evaporates when she realizes that her ``curiosity to hunt up a new


sensation'' causes Jude pain (180). Living with an openness to
possibility, Sue also strives to be responsible and compassionate.
The novel shows us how difcult it is for her to balance concern for
her own needs with her desire to avoid hurting others. The ethical
problems in her life exercise her emotional intelligence, particularly
within late Victorian culture with its confusing mixture of old and
new expectations for women.
All three of the women in these novels evade commitment and
seek to gain emotional satisfaction from their relationships with
men in daring, unpredictable, intellectually self-conscious ways.
Their behavior is understandable but also sadistically irtatious.29
The novels waver between evoking admiration for these New
Women, and the new ethics of possibility that they bring to their
relationships, and judging them for turning their backs on a traditionally feminine ethics of care. In her study of Sarah Grand,
Teresa Mangum deplores ``the critic's power of erasure'' when
quoting Hugh Stuteld, a literary critic for Blackwood's Magazine,
who patronizes Grand's characters in particular and the New
Woman in general. But there is nothing inaccurate in Stuteld's
observations of the complex, irtatious character of this new brand
of literary heroine:
The glory of the women of to-day as portrayed in the sex-problem literature
is her ``complicatedness.'' To be subtle, inscrutable, complex irrational
possibly, but at any rate incomprehensible to puzzle the adoring male, to
make him scratch his head in vexation and wonderment as to what on earth
she will be up to next, this is the ambition of the latter-day heroine.
(quoted in Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 32)

Although I agree with Mangum about the sexist tone of this


commentary, I am not convinced that Stuteld's reading of ``the
political struggles of the New Woman as a new and fairly transparent form of irtation'' is ``a distinctly sexist misreading'' (32).
The irtation in these novels is fascinating because it serves the
political aims of these late-century women, even if only in a
compromised way. Far from being the agents of purposeful change
that Mangum's interpretation makes them, Grand's heroines, like

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Schreiner's and Hardy's, are indeed the ``victims of restless dissatisfaction'' of Stuteld's description, though they are not merely
that. Their restlessness and experiments with new forms of irtation
prompt their agency, which is exploratory and performative rather
than purposeful. They alternate between being victims and
agents.30 This instability is a mark both of their complexity and of
their n-de-siecle predicament.
This ction encourages us to view irtation, traditionally
thought of as ethically suspect (perhaps especially by feminists), in
a new light. In the New Woman novels I consider here, irtation
coincides with the heroines' moments of advantage, power, and
self-fashioning, while the foreclosure of possibility that puts an end
to their intellectual and emotional playfulness and unpredictability
coincides with cultural containment and loss of even limited
agency. Writing about irtation, Adam Phillips asks, ``what does
commitment leave out of the picture that we might want? If our
descriptions of sexuality are tyrannized by various stories of
committed purpose sex as reproduction, sex as heterosexual intercourse, sex as intimacy irtation puts in disarray our sense of an
ending. In irtation you never know whether the beginning of a
story the story of the relationship will be the end; irtation, that
is to say, exploits the idea of surprise'' (On Flirtation xviiixix).
Surprise is sprung on the man by the woman in each of these
novels: Angelica surprises the tenor when he realizes that she is a
woman, not an enchanting boy. By refusing to marry or to make a
commitment, Lyndall surprises the father of her baby, who, she
realizes, will continue to love her as long as she resists his mastery.
And Sue surprises the men in her life at every turn: by marrying
Phillotson as a way of getting back at Jude for concealing his own
marriage, by refusing to sleep with Jude even after leaving her
husband for him, by returning to Phillotson as a penance after the
death of her children. In each novel, the story of the relationship is
shaped not by the man's choice, but by the woman's restless discontent and unwillingness to be the traditional heroine in such a
story.
Although the men are hurt by this new kind of irtation that

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

61

takes away their power, the novels also encourage us to recognize


the positive ethical consequences of a ``irtation that puts in disarray our sense of an ending.'' Temporarily, all three heroines win
for themselves a better kind of love and relationship by avoiding
commitment and imagining and enacting their own agency. The
sexual equality, friendship, and freedom that they achieve in their
relationships with the men they love is short-lived and contingent
on material conditions and circumstances beyond their control. But
this new kind of romantic relationship energizes potential, even if it
is potential that never fully blooms. Thus in New Woman ction,
irtation, a stage of courtship that the respectable, modest Victorian
woman was advised to disdain, ironically enough plays a critical
role in the development of a more feminist sexual ethics.
our sense of an ending
If these experimentally irtatious women characters ``put in disarray
our sense of an ending,'' their stories and the norms of late
Victorian culture eventually manage to contain them. The emotion
that has informed the thinking of these women does indeed become
debilitating in the end, though it is important to see that, depressing
as it is, the punishing plot reveals not the authors' beliefs about
what the New Woman's fate should be, but his or her recognition
of what it most often was.
Both The Story of an African Farm and Jude the Obscure counterpoint the New Woman character with a traditional woman, Em and
Arabella respectively, and in both novels the conventional, respectable woman thrives while Lyndall and Sue suffer, one literally
dying and the other metaphorically dying through self-sacrice.
The Heavenly Twins also focuses primarily on two women, though
as Kucich points out, the counternarratives of Angelica and Evadne
are self-canceling (The Power of Lies 252). They reveal Grand to be
more conservative than Schreiner or Hardy because not only are
both of her heroines punished and subdued by social strictures,
both are redeemed by the superior wisdom of men. The resolutions
of their stories underscore the novel's emphasis on the inter-

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dependence of women's and men's ethics. As Evadne points out in


her criticism of gendered moral education, ``So long as men believe
that women will forgive anything they will do anything'' (92).
Once women's morality changes, men's will too.31 This point is not
canceled when it is reversed: with their greater power and
education, men can do much to help women socially, intellectually,
and ethically. But what is disturbing about Grand's conclusion is
that both Angelica and Evadne cling pathetically to their male
rescuers in contrast to Sue and Lyndall who make choices that
defy the men they love.
The Heavenly Twins begins with a portrait of Evadne as a reader
and thinker but also a loving, warm-hearted person, who fears that
her unusualness as an intellectual woman will have painful
emotional consequences: ``I don't want to despise my fellowcreatures. I would rather share their ignorance and conceit and be
sociable than nd myself isolated even by a very real superiority''
(37). Mangum points up the irony: ``For the intellectual woman
success can only be failure'' (Married, Middlebrow, and Militant
107). Like the heroine of ``The Buddhist Priest's Wife,'' Evadne
nds that for much of her life her fate is to be alone, stranded
because of her difference and her principled stands, including her
refusal to consummate her marriage to her syphilitic husband, with
whom she nevertheless lives because of her father's skill at
exploiting her emotionally.32 Once she promises her husband not to
involve herself publicly in intellectual or political work, Evadne is
left with no outlet for the tremendous energies apparent from the
novel's opening study of her mind and character. By the end of The
Heavenly Twins, the early focus on Evadne's reading has given way
to Dr. Galbraith's narration his reading of her life as a broken
spirit, a woman who has collapsed into hysteria.33 Her state is very
much like that of Sue Bridehead's at the end of Jude the Obscure.
Sue becomes ``creed drunk,'' as Jude describes her, clinging not to a
man but to the religious and moral orthodoxies she had rejected all
her life. Schreiner's heroine similarly turns against herself. After
having lost her baby as Sue loses hers, Lyndall struggles with a
wasting illness and judges herself ``weak'' and ``selsh'' (247); the

Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers

63

``old clear intellect'' (252) resurfaces moments before her death, but
her nal psychological state, like that of the other New Women in
this ction, is marked by desperate yearning.34 Countering the
stereotype of the New Woman as merely an ``intellectualized,
emancipated bundle of nerves'' (Hardy's Preface to the First
Edition of Jude, xxxviii), Grand, Hardy, and Schreiner all depict the
late Victorian feminist as someone who feels as deeply as she thinks
and, in fact, suffers not from mere high-strung nervousness but
from unresolvable moral dilemmas created by gendered cultural
politics and an uneasy transition between old and new denitions of
friendship, love, and marriage.35
The cultural containment of these women that occurs at the end
of each novel reestablishes separate spheres ideology by associating
women with emotion that overwhelms reason. As we have seen,
however, the novels attempt to counter this stereotype while also
acknowledging its destructive power. Schreiner, Grand, and Hardy
delineate a subtle, complex, and ethically promising relationship
between emotion and reason in the lives of these early feminists
only to expose all that militates against this new sense of self: social
ostracism with its attendant guilt and isolation, the fear of causing
pain to loved ones, and perhaps above all the internalized social
norm of the woman as emotional and therefore not capable of
reason or if intellectual then not truly feminine.
Hardy deplored what he described as the cosmic joke that
emotions were allowed to develop in a such a defective world, and
yet he recognized the ethical force of emotion. Too often critics
who stress Hardy's difference from the New Women writers slip
into a twentieth-century version of separate spheres thinking,
characterizing Hardy as on the side of reason, wary of the feminine
and the emotional, even though there is little in his novels to
support such an interpretation. Like Olive Schreiner and Sarah
Grand, Hardy encouraged his readers to rethink conventional ideas
about women and feeling, as difcult as that was during an age just
beginning to understand women's aspirations without fathoming
how they could be realized.

chapter 4

When hope unblooms: chance and moral luck in


A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge,
and Tess

How arrives it joy lies slain,


And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression
of our humanness . . . You play, you win,
you play, you lose. You play.

Thomas Hardy1

Jeanette Winterson2

Essential to any study of the ethics of Hardy's ction is an understanding of chance and luck personied in his poem ``Hap'' as the
``purblind Doomsters'': ``Crass Casualty'' and ``dicing Time.''
Yoking such apparently contradictory concepts as luck and morality
raises difcult, unsettling questions about moral responsibility.
Philosophers who make the unequivocal Kantian claim that ``morality is secure against the luck-sensitive issue of how things chance to
turn out''3 have been challenged in recent years by Bernard
Williams, Thomas Nagel, and others who insist on a place for luck
in our conception of ethics. Attention to the issues involved in this
debate can lead us to a more precise way of thinking about the role
of luck in the ethics of Hardy's ction, just as attention to Hardy's
narratives can provide us with subtler, more detailed examples of
moral luck than those in the philosophical discussions. Hence, while
moral philosophy can help us to read Hardy, such a reading in turn
helps to validate the contested idea of moral luck.
As Virginia Woolf observed about Hardy, he was a writer whose
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Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 65

works, for all their deliberate plotting, convey a sense of freshness


and surprise, as if the best effects of his ction are produced by
chance. Reading his novels, Woolf sensed in them ``a little blur of
unconsciousness,'' a ``margin of the unexpressed'': ``It is as if Hardy
himself were not quite aware of what he did.''4 This is a haunting
description of a quality in Hardy's writing that remained beyond
his conscious control but nonetheless contributed to the ethics of
his ction. In his way of thinking about the world, Hardy stressed
the involuntary and the emotional as mysterious forces that often
get the best of will and conscious agency: ``Events and tendencies
are traced as if they were rivers of voluntary activity, and courses
reasoned out from the circumstances in which natures, religions, or
what-not, have found themselves. But are they not in the main the
outcome of passivity acted upon by unconscious propensity?''5
This skeptical question reveals Woolf 's description to be in accord
with Hardy's own sense that choices and actions, including the act
of writing, are too often misrepresented as completely rational and
controlled. The elements of fortune and luck discoverable in any
chain of events carry implications for the moral assessment of the
outcome of those events. Hardy's narrators make it difcult for us
to disentangle luck and morality, as some ethicists would have us
do, and his novels convey a characteristically late Victorian view of
agency as pressured and compromised. This understanding of
agency implies an ethics that demands choice and responsibility
accompanied by a necessary, though uncomfortable, acceptance of
limited control over events.
moral luck
Nicholas Rescher, who believes that courses of action only apparently acquire moral status that depends on luck, offers several brief
narratives, including the following, to illuminate what philosophers
mean by moral luck:
Consider the case of a bank's night watchman who abandons his post of duty
in order to go to the aid of a child being savagely attacked by a couple of
men. If the incident is ``for real,'' we see the night watchman as a hero.

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However, if the incident is a diversion stage-managed as part of a robbery,


we might well consider the night watchman to have been an irresponsible
dupe. And yet from his point of view, there is no visible difference between
the two cases. How the situation turns out for him is simply a matter of luck
(Rescher, Luck 153).

But the luck of how it turns out has implications for the moral
assessment of his action, as unfair as this seems, given the man's
good intentions in both hypothetical cases. A similar example is
Thomas Nagel's story of the man who runs in to rescue a victim
from a burning building. If, in the course of the rescue attempt, the
man accidentally drops the victim from a window instead of
bringing him out alive, our moral evaluation of him as a hero is
bound to be different even though this difference is contingent
upon luck. ``Where a signicant aspect of what someone does
depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him
in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called
moral luck'' (Nagel, Mortal Questions 26). Kant, who argued for the
primacy of intentions, maintained that there could be no such thing
as morality subject to forces beyond the control of the agent: a will
is good ``only because of its willing'' not ``because of what it effects
or accomplishes or because of its adequacy to achieve some
proposed end'' (quoted in Nagel, Mortal Questions 24). This is a
view that reassures us with its clarity and its bracing emphasis on
our reasoned choices, and, as we shall see, it is a view that appealed
to Hardy in his compassion for those who must choose and act in a
haphazard world not of their own creating. Still, ready as always to
take ``a hard look at the worst,'' Hardy was equally compelled by
the more troubling and ethically complex view that the outcome
determines our understanding of what has been done. As Nagel
notes, the Kantian argument offers an inadequate response to a
basic problem in ethics for which there is no wholly satisfying solution (25). In novels that represent life tentatively, as ``a series of
seemings,'' Hardy views this problem from a multiplicity of angles,
and though his ction doesn't offer us the comfort of a single solution, it implicitly challenges the reasonable but reductive conclusion
that there is no such thing as moral luck.

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 67

Nagel outlines four ways that luck can affect morality (28). The
rst, which he calls ``constitutive luck,'' refers to the kind of person
one is, whether one is born, for example, with or without certain
capacities, inclinations, and talents. The second, ``circumstantial
luck,'' describes the circumstances and problems that occur in a
person's life. The third, ``causal luck,'' is the luck inherent in the
way antecedent circumstances affect choices and agency. The
fourth, ``resultant luck,'' is a term for the way one's actions turn
out.
Martha Nussbaum's claim that moral luck is internal as well as
external is especially relevant to Nagel's rst two categories, and it
has important implications for the novels because Hardy is fascinated by the relationship between destiny and character. As we see
again and again in life as well as in Hardy's ction, misfortune can
be reversed in a minute, but its internal ethical effects its effects
on character often take much longer to heal: ``It takes a long time
to restore to the slave a free person's sense of dignity and selfesteem, for the chronic invalid to learn again the desires and
projects characteristic of the healthy person, for the bereaved
person to form new and fruitful attachments''.6
To cite but one example of internal moral luck in Hardy's
novels, I will turn briey to The Mayor of Casterbridge. Given the
novel's representation of historical as well as personal instability
during the Victorian period, it should come as no surprise that this
example portrays mobility in the British social class system not as a
matter of determination and choice but as difcult to predict,
control, or even trust. Elizabeth-Jane no sooner arrives in Casterbridge with her mother than she nds herself a prominent person,
stepdaughter to the mayor. Yet she doesn't rejoice in her new social
status or advertise it by buying herself ne clothes and knickknacks because her childhood circumstances combined with her
constitutive luck have shaped her fears, desires, and expectations
and thus determined how she responds to this surprising circumstantial luck: ``Her triumph was tempered by circumspection;
she had still that eldmouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite
fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

suffered early from poverty and oppression'' (Mayor of Casterbridge


158). Those who seek to deny the relevance of luck to morality
have argued that we should focus on character and intentions, the
internal rather than the external. But as we have seen, it is a mistake
to assume that this is a realm protected from chance: ``restricting
the domain of moral responsibility to the inner world will not
immunize it to luck'' (Nagel, Mortal Questions 32). Hardy's novels
make this point especially vivid.
Resultant luck, also prominent in Hardy's ction, is a particularly
controversial notion because of its implications for our theories of
justice. Although Nagel resists the dangerously simplied view that
any action can be justied or excused by history, he does maintain
that actual results shape our ethical assessments: ``That these are
genuine moral judgments rather than expressions of temporary
attitude is evident from the fact that one can say in advance how the
moral verdict will depend on the results'' (30; emphasis his). He
illustrates this claim by pointing out that if one negligently leaves a
baby unattended in its bath, we know in advance that if the baby
drowns one is morally culpable, whereas if there is no dire result,
the moral assessment and self-judgment are more likely to be
milder in that case, ``one has merely been careless'' (31). There is,
of course, something unsettling about the notion of responsibility
that is not dependent on human control, but it is true that people
take moral risks everyday, knowing that the outcome of their
choice can make a tremendous difference to what they have done
and to the consequences they will have to live with. In his compassion, Hardy baulks at the idea of assuming responsibility in a
awed, contingent world, where it is virtually impossible to live a
good life or even to act at all without moral danger; his
honesty, though, coupled with his respect for the complex particularity of the stories he tells, keep him from clean, rational propositions of the sort Rescher, for example, makes in his argument
against moral luck: ``If the signicant evaluation at issue results
from luck, then morality does not enter into it. And if it is moral
through being in some way within our responsibility and control,
then it is not a matter of luck'' (Luck 158). Studying Hardy's

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 69

narratives, with their attention to the bizarre twists and turns of life,
shows us that separating morality and luck in this way is not as easy
as it sounds.
Morality is supposed to provide ``a shelter against luck.''7 It is
quite idealistic, though, to assume that human moral assessment can
operate with godlike knowledge of a person's life, character, and
intentions. Too lofty a conception of justice can lead to injustice,
for it sets us up as the sort of judge none of us can possibly be,
given our human limitations. Bernard Williams argues against the
moral resistance to luck on these grounds: ``Atheists say that in
forming ideas of divine judgement we have taken human notions of
justice and projected them onto a mythical gure. But also, and
worse, we have allowed our image of a mythical gure to shape our
understanding of human justice'' (Making Sense 243). Instead of
``purifying'' morality by keeping it safe from luck, Williams proposes that it is more honest and just to realize that our choices and
actions are always subject to forces beyond our control, and if we
are ever to take responsibility, we must do so by considering the
actual consequences of our actions, intended or not.
Margaret Urban Walker similarly claims that there are positive
implications for our ethical lives if we embrace the concept of moral
luck rather than fear it as an unruly contradiction in terms. Those
who deny the existence of moral luck seek to protect what she and
Williams call ``pure agency'': ``Pure agents are free, on their own,
to determine what and how much they may be brought to account
for by determining the intentional acts and commitments they will
undertake, and recognizing the limits to their control beyond
these.''8 The consequences of this view of agency is that if a person
makes a commitment but refuses to take responsibility for the unexpected possibilities that the commitment entails, carefully separating
voluntary agency from luck, there is likely to be greater suffering
for others as well as a loss of integrity for the agent. For example, a
woman may decide to have a child but not be prepared for the bad
luck of caring for an ill and unusually difcult child, or a man may
enter voluntarily into a lighthearted friendship and unexpectedly
nd himself burdened with the responsibility of coping with the

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

grief of a friend who is suddenly also a bereaved husband (``Moral


Luck'' 245). How well we deal with luck is a mark of our goodness.
In a sense, Walker suggests, moral luck brings such virtues as integrity and grace into being: ``If integrity is the capacity required to
deal morally with the impurity of luck-ridden human agency, its
general absence should be a disguring of human life in ways broad
and deep. For the same reason, a way of conceiving agency that
attempts to banish the impurity that gives integrity its point should
produce under examination an alien and disturbing picture of moral
life'' (243).
In Hardy, the characters who accept the impurity of their agency
come closest to achieving wisdom and virtue. Ironically, Tess of the
d'Urbervilles proclaims in its subtitle that Tess is a ``pure woman,''
when actually her impurity and the impurity of her world bring
into being her virtues of compassion and integrity. Hardy is no less
paradoxical when he leads Henchard to recognize that ElizabethJane, his stepdaughter whose morality is so beautiful to him, has
her origins in the impurity and immorality of the wife-sale and the
subsequent illegitimate union of her parents. Henchard is disturbed
by Nature's ``contrarious inconsistencies'' and by the ``odd
sequence'' of events, but Hardy encourages us to see that just as
virtuous intentions can result in disaster, moral luck can follow in
the wake of recklessness and evil.
As judges and guides of judgment, Hardy's narrators are fascinating in their responses to moral impurity. Their perspective
characteristically oscillates from distanced to intimate, and they
themselves are in that sense godlike: at once remote and involved.
But Hardy's narrators rarely assign blame, aware as they are of the
unpredictable messiness and vulnerability implicit in the lives of
even the most rational and ethically scrupulous of his characters.
The very fact that these careful moral deliberators are as likely to
bring about pain and undesirable consequences as are the less aware
and conscientious of Hardy's characters demonstrates his belief that
morality cannot be protected from luck and hazard.
Much has been written about chance in Hardy.9 But these studies
do not directly consider the role played by luck in the ethics of

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 71

Hardy's ction, a topic that merits attention, especially given the


extensive examination the issue of moral luck has recently received
in philosophy. As different as they are in the stories they tell, A
Laodicean (1881), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the
d'Urbervilles (1891) share a concern with the ways that knowledge,
time, and timing all subject to luck affect moral choice and
judgment. Characters' attitudes toward the past are as ethically
signicant as their intentions regarding the future, and their
concern for personal history is amplied thematically by Hardy's
own preoccupations with history conceived more broadly as
ancestry and the past of Wessex. Although one would think the
past would be more stable and determinate than an uncertain future,
in Hardy's ction it is as subject to change, chance, and unpredictability as anything else. The novels suggest that life is like a game
of chance, and therefore suspense, risk, and hope are inevitable for
those who play and even for those who would rather sit on the sidelines and watch. This analogy between life and gambling reveals
that, for time-bound humanity, agency is always impure. Nevertheless the analogy also enables Hardy to explore his characters'
passionate but thwarted desire for control, for pure agency.
In A Laodicean, William Dare, one of the few wholly unsympathetic characters in Hardy, attempts to study and manipulate the
odds as a way of winning the game; his hunger for control and his
determination to plot a future for himself backre, though,
revealing the dangers of the calculating, scientic approach to life
so prevalent in an age when technological progress and faith in
science were supplanting faith in God and his providential plotting
of human lives. More sympathetic characters who take this
approach appear in the other novels: Lucetta Templeman and
Angel Clare both seek power and control as moral agents but pay a
price for underestimating the importance of the unforeseen. All
three novels include episodes that will help us clarify the concept of
moral luck. Perhaps even more important, Hardy's narratives
compel us to practice ethical assessment under the most difcult
conditions. And in that way literature tests and extends the project
begun by moral philosophy.

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the moral melodrama of hardy's gamblers


Coincidence, that hallmark of Victorian ction, can be seen as a
function of luck, contingent on the timing of separate events by a
force beyond human control. As Gillian Beer has pointed out in her
reections on coincidence in George Eliot's ction, readers may
object to coincidences in novels but they are everywhere apparent
in life: ``Coincidence is in large measure a matter of paying attention. We are surrounded continuously by coincidences. We observe
them only when they challenge, conrm, or play into our preoccupations. It is for that reason that the level of coincidence rises
sharply when we fall in love.''10 Moreover, falling in love is a vivid
reminder of contingency two people meet who might not have
met and of all that is beyond our control at a time when we most
care to orchestrate events and the feelings and actions of another. In
Hardy's love stories and his narratives in general, timing is crucial;
his narrators allude to a superhuman presence that has planned
everything perfectly only to botch the plan while putting it into
practice. Because his characters also have plans, dreams, and intentions, they suffer when they experience the ``awryness'' of life: they
are plagued by the sense that either God or cosmic randomness
causes events in their lives to take place at the very moment when
these events would be most likely to interfere with their own wishes
or intentions. Thus they often experience bad timing as bad luck.
The narrator of Tess, for example, reects bitterly on Tess's
inopportune meeting with Alec d'Urberville:
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom
produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for
loving. Nature does not often say ``See!'' to her poor creatures at a time
when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply ``Here'' to a body's cry of
``Where?'' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game . . .
it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the
perfect moment: a missing counterpart wandered independently about the
earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which
maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and
passing strange destinies.11

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 73

This worldview is clearly not in accord with the traditional


religious view that ``God does not play dice with his world''
(Rescher, Luck 122), that ``in everything God works for the good''
(Romans 8:28). The rst two sentences of the passage, however,
suggest a belief in some sort of higher power referred to later in
Tess as ``the President of the Immortals,'' here as ``Nature,'' and in
``Hap'' as ``dicing Time,'' one of the forces of randomness that
govern the universe. Hardy could not accept the existence of a god
who was at once omnipotent and good. In his notebook entry of
February 5, 1898, he jotted a reminder: ``write a prayer, or hymn, to
One not Omnipotent, but hampered; striving for our good, but
unable to achieve it except occasionally.''12 What hampers such a
god if his intentions are good? Luck? Hardy wavers between a
conception of a random world, in which God is a gambler as
subject to chance as his creatures are, and a conception of a world
ruled by a malicious practical joker. As the speaker of ``Hap''
insists, the latter is actually the less disturbing view because at least
then life would make sense and we would have someone to blame.
Hardy exhibits a restless obsession with agency characteristic of
the n de siecle, provocatively attributing tyrannic, uncertain, or
even paralyzed agency to God. By raising these questions about
chance and luck in his novels and poetry, Hardy knew that he was
challenging the views of his religious readers, whose attitudes about
gambling were clear. In their eyes, it was an immoral activity
because, as Rescher explains,
gambling abandons the uses of God-given reason and bases a decision on the
mediation of chance or fate. Indeed, there is something impious about
thinking that there are any `casual' or `chance' occurrences. It is only from
our human point of view that `casual events' exist at all; an omniscient God
keeps track not only of the ights of sparrows but of the toss of a coin as
well. (Luck 121)

Some philosophers and many theologians believe that there is no


such thing as ontologically grounded chance: ``There is merely
epistemic chance, grounded in the imperfections of human
knowledge'' (Rescher, Luck 132). Hardy is more attracted to the

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possibility of a god who is imperfect but compassionate. And he


repeatedly personies Gaming and Chance, granting them an undeniable reality instead of suggesting that they could be explained
away if only we knew more, if only we could see the bigger picture.
Hardy's complex, shifting worldview cannot, of course, be
reduced to the cliche that life is a crap-shoot. Such a reduction does
nothing to account for the beauty inherent in the idiosyncratic yet
elemental and resonant insights of Hardy's ction and poetry. In
The Melodramatic Imagination Peter Brooks offers a useful way to
understand this beauty and intensity through his theory of melodrama,13 a nineteenth-century mode too often misunderstood and
vilied. Focusing primarily on Balzac and Henry James, Brooks
does not include Hardy's novels among his examples, but given
their coincidences, their boldness and aesthetic risks, and above all
their dramatic staging of moral dilemmas, it is easy to see how the
novels correspond to Brooks's denition of this mode of imaginative expression. As a prelude, then, to my discussion of A Laodicean, one of Hardy's more melodramatic works, I will briey
consider what Hardy gains through his creative experiments with
the conventions of melodrama.
Despite Woolf 's praise for the effects Hardy seems to achieve
without full awareness, I agree with Peter Widdowson that Hardy
was well aware of many of his ctional strategies, including bizarre,
anti-realist aspects of his novels which critics are often too quick to
write off to authorial carelessness. Widdowson quotes a telling
passage from Hardy's autobiography to demonstrate this awareness:
Art is a disproportioning (i.e. distorting, throwing out of proportion) of
realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities,
which, if merely copied or reported inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence ``realism'' is not
Art.14

Oscar Wilde makes a similar case against realism in ``The Decay of


Lying,'' and, as I have already argued, New Woman writing was
deliberately anti-realist. This late-century new aesthetic was accompanied by a new ethic. The melodramatic mode, in contrast to

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 75

realism, articulates what Brooks calls the ``moral occult,'' ``the


domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within
and masked by the surface of reality.''15 According to Brooks,
melodrama came into being with the French Revolution and its
aftermath:
This is the epistemological moment which it illustrates and to which it
contributes: the moment that symbolically, and really, marks the nal
liquidation of the traditional sacred and its representative institutions
(Church and Monarch), the shattering of the myth of Christendom, the
dissolution of an organic and hierarchically cohesive society and the invalidation of the literary forms tragedy, comedy of manners that depended on
such a society. (Melodramatic Imagination 115)

Such a characterization may seem extreme, but a melodramatic


imagination such as Hardy's nds truth in extremes because they
satisfy a craving for a bold reinvention of ethics. Hardy's characters
and narrators mourn the erosion of traditions and communities that
had sustained families for generations, and yet the novels neither
succumb to nostalgia nor embrace new utilitarian philosophies and
technological conveniences to replace what has been lost; instead,
they offer a potent, hyperbolically charged vision of an interrelated
past and present to compensate for the lost God-lled universe.
``Melodrama starts from and expresses the anxiety brought by a
frightening new world in which the traditional patterns of moral
order no longer provide the necessary social glue'' (Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination 20). This new, post-Enlightenment world,
from which God had withdrawn, could not be for Hardy nor for
James or George Eliot or Wilde a world without ethics, moral
drama, and spiritual presence of some sort. Melodrama enabled
Hardy to recreate God as a gambler, to speculate about the new
gods of Chance and Luck, to explore ultimate confrontations
between good and evil within a world where so much is uncertain
and mixed, and to do justice to emotional, elemental, and even
spiritual truths that realism blunts or misses altogether.16 There is
thus a paradox at the center of Hardy's need to disproportion
realities in order to tell the truth, and the irony Brooks observes
about melodrama can lead to a deeper appreciation of this form of

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truth-telling in late Victorian ction: to avoid the melodramatic and


the risks this mode entails is ``to oversimplify in the manner of a
Flaubert, to misestimate what life is really about and art is really
for'' (Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination 159). For Hardy, to make
life subject to reason alone, without accounting for chance,
emotion, uncertainty, and all that is beyond agency, is indeed to
misestimate what life is really about and to comfort ourselves with
false security rather than with life's and art's intimations of
forces that transcend what we can know and control.17
Through the melodrama of A Laodicean Hardy develops
gambling as a metaphor more overtly than he does in either of the
other novels, in part because gambling gures in the plot literally
when George Somerset and William Dare meet ``by chance'' at
Monte Carlo. While Dare is a bold risk-taker (as his name
suggests), Somerset is merely an onlooker at the game, unaware
that his courtship of Paula Power, which has sent him across
Europe in search of her, is soon to be temporarily derailed by forces
beyond his control. Hardy's narrator makes us feel the gulf between
Somerset's innocent view of the casino and his own more worldly
perspective: ``As a non-participant in its prot and losses, fevers
and frenzies, it had that strange effect upon his imagination which is
usually exercised over those who behold Chance presented to them
with spectacular piquancy without advancing far enough in its
acquaintance to suffer from its ghastly reprisals and impish tricks,
that strip it of all romance.''18 Dare, despite his cosmopolitan
surface, is just as naive in his condence that his theory of chance
will lead him to certain success. He may eventually win at the
gaming table (``notwithstanding a little in-and-out luck at rst''
[312]), but he loses the larger game of manipulating others to secure
his own respectability and fortune.
Like Father Time in Jude the Obscure, Dare plays a strongly
allegorical role in the novel. He lives in time like the rest of the
characters, but he seems not to age; others nd his appearance to be
disconcertingly boyish because they can not determine what age he
is, or even, at rst glance, whether he is a man or a boy.19 They are
equally uncertain about where he is from, for he enumerates all the

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 77

places he has lived without mentioning a place of origin or a nationality. His role in the novel mimics that of the implied author.20 Like
Hardy himself, Dare attempts to orchestrate the lives of others and
to create characters by ``vamping up a Frankenstein,'' for
example, when endeavoring to make a successful suitor of his
father, Captain De Stancy (Hardy's allusion to Mary Shelley's
novel here alerts us to Dare's illusory sense of control over his
``creature'') (191). Dare's lack of ``moral ballast'' (288), however,
makes him seem very unlike the implied author and beyond the
reach of the narrator's sympathy. But this quality, too, sets him
apart from the other characters and makes him seem larger than
life. Like Chance itself, Dare specializes in ``ghastly reprisals'' and
``impish tricks.''
Although Dare seems to be a one-dimensional gure, a melodramatic villain, his complexity lies in his double role as superhuman personication of Chance and as human victim of events
beyond his control. He is Captain De Stancy's illegitimate son, and
as such he has no place in society, no power, and no recognized,
respected identity. His status is purely a matter of luck. Through
his father, an aristocrat who has lost his fortune, he pursues Paula
(whose last name, signicantly, is Power) for her money. He says
to De Stancy, ``I am what events have made me, and having xed
my mind upon getting you settled in life by this marriage, I put
things in train for it at an immense trouble to myself '' (160). But if
Dare is what events have made him, why does he believe that he
can control events? He carries with him a book called ``Moivre's
Doctrines of Chances,'' which is ``as well-thumbed as the minister's
Bible'' (139) and clearly thought of by Dare as a rival book to live
by. Though he realizes that events have controlled him, his error is
that he nevertheless believes with a certainty he considers ``almost
mathematical'' (286) that he can now make his own luck. Dare is
able to persuade his father to woo Paula because not only does De
Stancy have the constitutive luck of being unusually susceptible to
falling in love, he also has a ``tendency to moral chequer-work''
(209). He is a good person occasionally capable of very black deeds
(``something rare in life,'' as the narrator admits, mischievously

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calling attention to the melodramatic extremes in the story he tells


[208]). Paula's uncle nds out who Dare is and what he is up to, but
Dare is able to blackmail the blackmailer because Abner Power,
like himself, has a shady past and lacks moral ballast. In the end,
though, Dare fails to calculate the role that Charlotte, De Stancy's
sister and a thoroughly good woman, will play in his life. Dare does
not anticipate self-sacricing virtue botching his plans, probably
because, always out for himself, he has no personal attachments or
loyalties. Even though Charlotte herself loves Somerset, she refuses
to let this love or the advice of others prevent her from doing the
right thing. Charlotte realizes that Somerset is the man Paula will
undoubtedly marry if the marriage of convenience does not take
place, and still she tells her friend the truth about the deception
practiced on Paula and Somerset by De Stancy's illegitimate son.
Paula has no idea that Dare is related to her ance in this way, and
so it is even more signicant that Charlotte disabuses her friend
before the wedding rather than afterwards, ignoring those who
urge her to wait. The good in De Stancy's character surfaces at the
last minute, too, so Dr. Frankenstein has not completely controlled
his monster. If Dare is taken by surprise when his plot collapses, it
is also partially because he doesn't understand life as his father
does. In the days before the wedding date, De Stancy's ``mood had
been that of the gambler seasoned in ill-luck, who adopts pessimist
surmises as a safe background to his most sanguine hopes'' (390).
What makes A Laodicean more than merely an entertaining potboiler is Hardy's brooding self-consciousness about the way things
happen. His characters share this self-consciousness by thinking of
themselves as gamblers. Those who calculate the odds and play
their cards carefully, as Dare and Abner Power do, watch their
life's work explode in their faces (a literal experience for Power
who destroys his stock of explosives before returning to England
and has the mixed moral luck of disgurement, which causes him
pain but also affords him a disguise from both his outlaw employers
and from the police). Those who nervously enjoy but doubt the
security of their good fortune as both suitors do when things are
going well, for they understand the perversity of chance prove to

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 79

be wise in their wariness; as the narrator says, quoting Shakespeare,


``when Fortune means to men most good . . . she looks upon them
with a threatening eye'' (123). As for those, like Charlotte, who
observe what seems to be an inevitable course of events but heed a
moral imperative that changes everything they nd themselves
burdened with confusion about their ethical agency and withdraw
from the world and its responsibilities. In a very Hardyan conclusion, Charlotte enters a nunnery, loving both Somerset and
Paula, but from a distance and without any worldly reward for her
love and goodness. Hence, though Charlotte acts with probity and
brings about a happy ending for her friends, she is not able to
secure a loving relationship for herself. In different ways, then, all
the characters in this novel are at the mercy of unpredictable forces.
Their agency is impure and their future is as much beyond their
will as it is indifferent to their wishes.
luck and the presence of the past
Yet to focus almost exclusively on the future and the gambler's or
moral agent's attitude toward it is to ignore the past, a force that is
nearly as crucial to the ethics of this novel as it is to the ethics of
The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess. In her attempt to account for
the popularity of gambling in the nineteenth century, Gillian Beer
considers the phenomenon which had a strong appeal, across all
social classes, despite prohibitions against it in light of evolutionary and thermodynamic theory. ``The new theories unsettled
knowledge of the past and prediction of the future. Instead of constant rediscovery of stable norms the future became irregular,
chancy, peopled by speculative types whose relation to the present
might repeat and extend the scandal of our relation to other earlier
species.''21 Besides being linked to this scandal and to a history that
is never safely contained by conclusions about it, the past is associated with constitutive luck, for instance, since it makes the characters who they are. Dare has the crucial bad luck of illegitimate
birth; his immoral choices spring from this luck, and it is unlikely
that they would be the same without it. In that sense, the Victorians

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were unsettled not only by questions of agency and an uncertain


future, but also by a double-edge anxiety about the past compounded both of regret and of fear that the past is, in some
uncontrollable and threatening sense, still alive.
Sophie Gilmartin's study of ancestry in nineteenth-century
British literature shows how, repeatedly in Hardy's work, ``narrative is built upon a foundation which is palpable, material, layered
with seams of generational and geological history.''22 This perspective on the past in Hardy's ction and poetry is valuable in part
because it illuminates the value the ethics even of memory for
Hardy. To forget is to betray. The active effort to remember to
remain connected to one's personal past, to ancestors, and to
history has for Hardy both moral and aesthetic implications.
Reecting on memory, sense impression, and loss, Hardy wrote in
a journal entry of 1897: ``Today has length, breadth, thickness,
colour, smell, voice. As soon as it becomes yesterday it is a thin
layer among many layers, without substance, colour or articulate
sound'' (quoted in Gilmartin, Ancestry and Narrative 223). But this
elegiac impulse with its aesthetic longing and ethics of constancy
(so visible in the romantic devotion of characters such as Gabriel
Oak, Diggory Venn, Marty South, and Tess herself ) is counterbalanced in Hardy's novels by a very different orientation toward
the past: the need to forget. Only through forgetting and escaping
the weight of ancestry and heredity does agency become available
to Hardy's characters, who often express a concomitant need to
erase past events that hamper forward movement and free choice.
But the past is seductive. Although the lure of the presently unattainable past apparently has nothing to do with moral luck,
Hardy's novels prove otherwise. Luck has shaped his characters'
lives in ways they long to reverse; this longing to ``go back''
imbues the novels not with nostalgia but with a poignant desire for
the impossible, for, in other words, a different past, or a present interpenetrated by a past that is living rather than static or irrevocable. Conversely, Hardy's ction also represents the role of luck in
the desire to escape one's past, to wipe the slate clean. Exploring
both the beauty of the past that seems alive and malleable in the

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 81

present and the nightmare of the inexorable, unlucky past that will
not die, A Laodicean, Tess, and The Mayor of Casterbridge hold out
the possibility of ethical agency only to show how this dazzles and
deludes those who are actually very much at the mercy of time and
luck.
For reasons other than illegitimacy and greed, Paula shares
Dare's desire to be a De Stancy, and her willingness to believe the
worst of Somerset is partially determined by her attitude toward the
past. The novel's ending is not unequivocally happy for Paula
because she remains obsessed with a past she will never have the
past as represented by the historic, romantic De Stancy clan who
once inhabited the castle that her industrialist father's money
enabled her to own and that is reduced to ruins by the end of the
novel. The last words we hear her say to Somerset are ``I wish my
castle wasn't burnt; and I wish you were a De Stancy!'' (431).
Hardy, who was himself fascinated by old families, does not allow
us to dismiss Paula's wish as merely a whim. Some of the most
striking descriptions in the novel capture the strangeness and
beauty of a past that lives on in the present.23 For example, De
Stancy impresses Paula and his sister by entering a portrait of one
of his ancestors; he dons ancestral armor, picks up a sword, and
stands in front of the painting's frame. He asks them what they
think. ``He looked so much like a man of bygone times that neither
of them replied, but remained curiously gazing at him'' (189).
While De Stancy embodies the past, Somerset merely studies it
through his work as an architect; still, whether she wants to or not,
Paula falls in love with Somerset. On one level anyway, we are
encouraged to see this as her bad luck. Pursuing him across Europe
by seeking out places of architectural interest, she enters a street in
Lisieux that transports her to the Middle Ages, especially when she
gazes at a house covered with ancient carved gures ``cloaked with
little cobwebs which waved in the breeze, so that each gure
seemed alive'' (399). An old woman pokes her head out of the
window and Paula witnesses with fascination the blurring of the
line that separates present from past, as she did when saw De
Stancy in the picture frame: the ``old woman's head . . . was so

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nearly the colour of the carvings that she might easily have passed
as a piece with them'' (400). Paula's desire to merge with the past
despite her ties to the modern world is more eccentric, more a
quirky Hardyan dimension of the novel, than the destructive plotting of the illegitimate son so traditional in literature, but the luck
of birth shapes the attitudes and ethical choices of both heroine and
villain.
A Laodicean repeatedly evokes fascination with the persistence of
the past in the present. Most broadly, as Widdowson notes, the
novel's project is ``to examine the mentalite of a contemporary
society in transition between `the ancient and the modern' a
phrase it uses more than once'' (On Thomas Hardy 97). The past is
known and comforting compared to the present, which is dominated by the almost frightening potential of new technology such as
photography and telegraphic communication, both of which play
important roles in Dare's impish tricks. The Mayor of Casterbridge
and Tess are also narratives obsessed with the relation of past and
present, luck and choice. They focus on characters admirably
intending to turn a new leaf, to replace a guilty past with a
redeemed future. This intention proves futile, though, because of
the persistence of the past. Chance and bad timing frustrate good
intentions so that the ethics of these novels is strongly anti-Kantian
despite the narrators' attraction to Kant's idea that the good will
``sparkle[s] like a jewel in its own right'' regardless of how things
turn out.24
In Tess Hardy offers us different models of moral assessment, his
narrator's being the most prominent. Angel Clare, for a time, offers
a rival model to that of the narrator even though by the end he and
the narrator are similarly compassionate to Tess and forgiving of
what the world nds sinful in her behavior. Not surprisingly, given
the ``hard logical deposit'' in the depths of his constitution (237),
Angel initially aligns himself with the censorious, Victorian morality of that world and judges Tess severely for not living up to his
ideal of purity. But later, in a Kantian moment, he revises his judgment: ``Who was the moral man? Still more pertinently, who was
the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 83

only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true
history lay not among things done, but among things willed''
(32829). He has learned that Tess had a child out of wedlock, and
though he hears the story from her, she tells him after their
wedding despite her intention to tell him before. Hardy shows us
Chance actively thwarting this moral intention at every turn (the
most memorable instance being the written confession she puts
under Angel's door only to discover that it accidentally slid under
the rug). I agree with H. M. Daleski that Tess is not merely ``a
hapless victim of forces beyond her control,''25 for at no point does
Hardy make our assessment of responsibility that easy. Still,
Daleski's characterization of Tess as a ``tragic agent'' is apt. As he
points out when discussing the famous instance of the letter under
the rug, there is still time before the wedding for Tess to talk to
Angel after she nds the unopened letter. The tragic dimension of
her choice, as I see it, lies in the power of circumstance to pressure
her to make the choice she would, on one level anyway, rather not
make.26
If she isn't fully responsible for the deception, is she responsible
for her sexual relationship with Alec? Hardy gives us enough
evidence to believe that what happens to her in the Chase Woods is
rape, but he also has Tess continue to live with Alec and say to him,
``My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all'' (83),
suggesting that Alec takes advantage of her in different ways, some
more her responsibility than others. My approach to what has
become an interpretive crux in discussions of the novel, is to
acknowledge that Tess is indeed raped by Alec (she is manipulated,
she is asleep when it happens, the villagers hear a struggle and the
sound of her cries coming from the Chase); after the rape, however,
she yields to Alec's seduction, and she takes responsibility for the
choice to stay with him. The responsibility is not hers alone,
however. When she returns home, Tess poignantly (and uncharacteristically) blames her mother: ``Why didn't you tell me there was
danger in men-folk?'' (87). Joan Durbeyeld, who becomes almost
a procuress in her avidity to get her daughter married, clearly deserves some of the blame, though she too acts with good intentions.

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In his condemnation and then complete exoneration of Tess, Angel


swings from one extreme to the other. By contrast, the narrator
loves Tess and believes in her purity from beginning to end, even
as he calls attention to her impure agency and the circumstances
and consequences that constrain her will.
Are we, as readers, to follow the narrator's lead? In a sense we
do, since most of us nd Tess very easy to love and, as a victim of
bad moral luck, hard to blame. ``Nobody blamed Tess as she
blamed herself '' (38); her self-blame becomes another model of
moral assessment and an important one because Tess is clearly
the most virtuous character in the novel. What makes our ethical
response to her so complicated is that Tess is admirable for taking
responsibility for the consequences of her actions despite their
discordant relationship with her intentions. She blames herself, and
by doing so, paradoxically gives narrator and readers all the more
reason not to blame her. Hardy's novel makes a point about moral
luck similar to Margaret Urban Walker's claim that impure agency
is what makes integrity possible: Tess does not intend or deserve
the consequences that befall her, but she takes responsibility for
them. ``She would pay to the uttermost farthing,'' she thinks before
her confession (``Moral Luck'' 220). At the same time, those readers
who admire Tess for her integrity do not want her to suffer, and it
seems an injustice that she should. In its complex, double ethical
vision, the novel thus offers as a model of moral assessment the
self-judgment of its principled heroine whose morality is not
completely overruled by the generous, compassionate spirit of forgiveness represented by the narrator of her story.
As if to test our capacity to judge mercifully, Hardy makes
Tess's acts more extreme at each stage of her story and more inextricably entangled with events from the past. She goes from killing
a horse (accidentally, while asleep) to killing a man (deliberately
but out of the bewilderment of unreturned, unrewarded love for
another man who would benet from this one's death in other
words, with good intentions and with the pressure of the past upon
the present made visible by Angel's sudden reappearance). She goes
from being raped, to being seduced, to becoming what she vowed

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 85

she would not become: Alec's ``creature.'' Angel realizes that it is


the strength of Tess's love for him that ``extinquish[es] her moral
sense altogether'' (372). As he sees it, her body is now drifting ``in a
direction dissociated from its living will'' (366). For most readers
(and ultimately for Tess herself, who understands that she must
``pay'' for the murder as she has paid for all her choices), Tess must
be judged guilty by the end of the novel, but passing such a judgment is difcult because we know so much about her goodness. We
are like Izz Huett, who cannot speak badly of Tess even if when
there are reasons for doing so: ``the fascination exercised over her
rougher nature by Tess's character compelled her to grace'' (264).
Hardy's representation of Tess similarly compels his readers to
grace.
In her letter to Angel, Tess slips into wishful thinking: ``What
was the past to me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing
altogether'' (325). The trouble is that the past will not die. After
Tess's confession, Angel is quick to suggest that her character is
tainted because of her d'Urberville lineage, and, as Gilmartin
observes, Tess's aversion to studying history ``Because what's the
use of leaning that I am one of a long row only'' is related to her
desire to avoid thinking about her ancestral past and thus ``retain at
least the illusion of individual will'' (Ancestry and Narrative 229).
Her murder of Alec represents a desperate, nal attempt to kill the
past that has prevented a fresh moral start. That, too, backres.
Chance has always prevented Tess's will from being in accord with
her actions. After the murder, Angel says, ``Ah it is my fault.''
And yet Hardy does not allow us to shift the blame that easily.
Angel's musing about Tess's ancestral past ``what obscure strain
in the d'Urberville blood had led to this aberration'' (372) calls
attention to the unfairness of constitutive luck and the determinative
inuence the past can have on present moral choices. But the novel
leaves us neither squarely in the Kantian position of judging Tess
by her good intentions alone (how can we do so as Alec's blood
seeps through the ceiling?) nor prepared to think of her execution
as just. The phrase ``moral sense'' has become ironic in Hardy's
world of chance, for it does not make sense that a woman as gentle,

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loving, and ethically scrupulous as Tess should be punished so persistently. Without completely abandoning normative ethics, then,
the novel leads us to question our assumption that a rational understanding of moral principles can lead us to fair moral assessment. It
does so by making us acutely aware of the powerful and unruly
force of Tess's bad luck.
In the course of his reection on ethics, time, and timing, Hardy
concludes, in both Tess and The Mayor of Casterbridge, that it is
simply not possible to learn from experience.
``By experience,'' says Roger Ascham, ``we nd out a short way by a long
wandering.'' Not seldom that long wandering unts us for further travel, and
of what use is our experience to us then? Tess Durbeyeld's experience was
of this incapacitating kind . . . She and how many more might have
ironically said to God with Saint Augustine, ``Thou hast counselled a better
course than thou hast permitted.'' (Mayor of Casterbridge 103)

Michael Henchard, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, is a much wiser


man by the end of the novel than he is at the beginning, but in all
other respects he is just as badly off ``on the precise standing he
had occupied a quarter of a century before,''27 fallen from his position as mayor, cut off from family, working as a hay-trusser. Even
as a young man Henchard realizes that knowledge most often
comes after all chance of acting on it has passed (75). As an older
man, he knows that even if he were granted the chance, he now has
``the wisdom to do'' but not the ``zest for doing'' (395). Hardy's
bitter commentary on the irony of understanding that comes too
late underscores once again his belief in the importance of timing
a matter of luck and his philosophical perspective on time, knowledge, and moral character.
Like Dare and Tess, Henchard and Lucetta are both unable to
escape their pasts. Henchard, who became intimately involved with
Lucetta when he was ill and she nursed him back to health, decides
to do the right thing to marry her to save her reputation. His
guilty secret that many years earlier he sold his wife to a sailor
has remained a secret, and since it is likely that Susan Henchard is
now dead, he is prepared to make amends to Lucetta rather than
hurt a woman again. But ``behold, Susan appears!'' as Henchard

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 87

puts it when telling the story to Farfrae. Her return, which initiates
moral bad luck for both Henchard and Lucetta, is gured as a
haunting. ``Mrs Henchard was so pale that the boys called her `The
Ghost' '' (153). She is a ghostly reminder of a past that Henchard
had assumed was dead. Newson, the sailor who purchased her from
Henchard and was thought to have drowned at sea, also returns as a
ghost to remind Henchard that there is no such thing as putting the
past behind him.28 After he has lost his business to his rival,
Henchard lingers in the establishment as an ordinary worker, a
shadow of his former managerial self. A freshly painted sign over
the gateway symbolizes the supplanting, the turn of the wheel of
fortune, but it also reminds us that the present does not cancel out
the past: ``A smear of decisive lead-colored paint had been laid on
to obliterate Henchard's name, though its letters dimly loomed
through like ships in a fog. Over these, in fresh white, spread the
name of Farfrae'' (294).29
Initially, it is the bad luck of Susan's return that keeps Lucetta
from the marriage she believes she desires. Later, Susan's death
frees Henchard to marry Lucetta just when she has fallen in love
with Farfrae. Having left her native Jersey to escape her reputation,
once in Casterbridge Lucetta abandons her original plan to marry
the man who could restore that reputation, deciding instead that she
can leave her past behind. ``I won't be a slave to the past I'll love
where I chose,'' she declares to herself (250). In this deant plan to
make her own luck she is, like Dare, only temporarily successful.
Her past and her private life are mercilessly exposed in the most
public fashion during the skimmington ride when her efgy is tied
to Henchard's and paraded through the streets of Casterbridge.
One of the causes of this public humiliation is Lucetta's unwillingness to believe that Jopp, despite his attempt to blackmail her, could
have any control over her life. But if her luck had been different,
this refusal to be blackmailed might have worked in her favor, and
on one level it is ethically admirable to refuse to be manipulated.
And yet because her letters to Henchard chance to get into Jopp's
hands and because Newson, passing through town, loses his way,
ends up in Mixen Lane, and, on a whim, nances the skimmington

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ride, Lucetta's virtuous present life is sabotaged by her guilty past.


If her luck had been better, she would have suffered no moral condemnation. As Henchard warns her, ``it is not by what is, in this
life, but by what appears, that you are judged'' (248). Hardy's
novel simultaneously acknowledges and protests this pragmatic
ethical truth.
merit, desert, and luck: hardy's practical jokers
As John Goode has pointed out, Henchard plans a series of melodramatic catastrophes, which Hardy describes as practical jokes
``the reading of the letters to Farfrae, the humiliation of Lucetta in
the ring, and the self-presentation to the royal personage'' (Thomas
Hardy 92). Not one of these pranks goes as planned. Goode is right
to note that ``awareness disables''; Henchard's feelings for others
get him to stop short. But just as important is what Elizabeth-Jane
calls ``the persistence of the unforeseen'' (441). Chance itself (in
Hardy's world anyway) is a practical joker. As we have seen, Dare,
who suffers from no qualms of conscience, also fails to take control
and to secure his future when playing practical jokes on Somerset
and Paula. The phony telegram and the trick photography designed
to blacken Somerset's character do short-term damage, but Chance
has the last laugh on Dare, as it does on Alec and Henchard. Those
who are daring and deant in Hardy inevitably end up more
pathetic than those, like Elizabeth-Jane, Tess, and Charlotte, who
come to understand the kind of world they live in and to accept
their impure agency with stoic dignity. Dignity is exactly what the
practical joke is designed to undermine, however, and thus Hardy's
wary, self-protective characters are also vulnerable merely in a
different way.30 They too seek control over their lives and refuge
from the cruelty of Chance.
The plot of The Mayor of Casterbridge could be described as a
series of practical jokes beginning with the wife-sale. Henchard
seems to be in charge of this joke on Susan, who asks him before
she leaves with her purchaser just how serious his intention is: `` `A
joke? Of course it is not a joke!' shouted her husband, his resent-

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 89

ment rising at her suggestion'' (78), but even at this point Hardy
makes it clear that Henchard has made a choice to auction off his
wife fully expecting that no one would take him seriously. In his
description of the shifting reaction of the guests in the tent who
began by cheering Henchard on the narrator emphasizes the shift
Henchard undergoes from reckless practical joker to the victim of a
more powerful joker:
Seizing the sailor's arm with her right hand, and mounting the little girl on
her left, she went out of the tent sobbing bitterly.
A stolid look of concern lled the husband's face, as if, after all, he had
not quite anticipated this ending; and some of the guests laughed. (79)

Hardy brilliantly echoes this moment later in the novel when a bull
on the loose chases Elizabeth-Jane and Lucetta. Once the animal
has been punished and secured, Elizabeth-Jane pauses to look at
``the bull, now rather to be pitied with his bleeding nose, having
perhaps rather intended a practical joke than a murder'' (280).
One practical joke leads to another. Susan's revenge on her
husband, though she does not intend it as such, takes the form of a
letter revealing that Elizabeth-Jane is Newson's daughter, not his
own child, who died in infancy. Susan had directed that the letter
not be opened before Elizabeth-Jane's wedding day, but as Mother
Cuxsom predicts, after her death Mrs. Henchard's wishes will count
as nothing (191). Henchard opens the letter just after he tells
Elizabeth-Jane the lie which he believes to be the truth that he
is her father: ``The mockery was, that he should have no sooner
taught a girl to claim the shelter of his paternity than he discovered
her to have no kinship with him'' (197). It is his bad moral luck to
welcome love into his life and to feel the pull of a blood-tie just
before learning that the daughter he loves is not his daughter.31
Even though he would not have reached out to her if he had had
the knowledge of their true relation, he does reach out in a way that
changes Elizabeth-Jane's life, and Hardy suggests that Henchard
would be a better person if he were to take responsibility for his
choice, despite its unintended consequences, especially since it is a
choice that springs from his original decision to sell his wife.
Instead of loving Elizabeth-Jane anyway, or telling her the truth

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about her paternity, or both, Henchard at this point merely rejects


her, focusing on his own victimization by a cosmic practical joker
who reduces all of his plans and hopes to dust and ashes. Longing
for purer agency, he neglects to act in the impure, compromised,
contingent ways that would make him a better man.
But moral luck in this novel, as in Tess, does not always permit
such clear ethical assessment. Even in this case, Henchard's discouragement is understandable since again and again his efforts to
relieve his loneliness are thwarted by life's practical jokes. He
gambles one last time when Newson shows up at his home and,
with Elizabeth-Jane asleep in the next room, Henchard tells him
that his daughter is dead. Clearly, telling this lie is wrong, but
Hardy encourages us to see how what Nagel calls ``resultant luck''
shapes our understanding of the ethics of what Henchard has done.
Even though the lie is impulsive, Henchard tells it expecting to be
challenged, expecting not to get away with it.32 In that sense, it's
almost like a joke. When Newson merely takes the lie for the truth
and leaves town, Henchard's reaction is similar to his disconcerted
dismay after the wife-sale:
Then Henchard, scarcely believing the evidence of his senses, rose from his
seat amazed at what he had done. It had been the impulse of a moment. The
regard he had lately acquired for Elizabeth, the new-sprung hope of his
loneliness that she would be to him a daughter of whom he could feel as
proud as of the actual daughter she still believed herself to be, had been
stimulated by the unexpected coming of Newson to a greedy exclusiveness in
relation to her; so that the sudden prospect of loss had caused him to speak
mad lies like a child, in pure mockery of consequences. He had expected
questions to close in round him, and unmask his fabrications in ve minutes;
yet such questioning had not come. But surely they would come . . . (368)

When Newson does not return, Hardy makes it difcult for us to


know whether we are to dene Henchard's moral luck as good or
bad. In a sense, and from his point of view, it is good: he tells a lie
to secure lial affection and gets away with it. But seen another
way, his moral luck is bad from the beginning: he does not intend to
get away with the lie, and the fact that he does makes his act evil,
for he now has a responsibility he never bargained for with this
``last desperate throw of a gamester'' (402): the power to bring

Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 91

loved ones who believe each other to be dead back to life. Similarly,
when Newson nally does discover the truth and return to Casterbridge, Henchard's moral luck is simultaneously good and bad. It is
bad because, once he is found out, he loses Elizabeth's love and
regard. It is good because when the consequences of his lie turn out
to be less dire, the immorality of the lie itself is palliated. At rst,
Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae do not see it this way; their condemnation of Henchard is unmitigated, even though Newson, ``the
chief sufferer'' and victim of the lie, takes Henchard's side: `` `Well,
'twas not ten words that he said, after all,' Newson pleaded. `And
how could he know that I should be such a simpleton as to believe
him?' '' (392). Although gullible, Newson is not naive. His experience of the world as a seaman, a traveler among ``strange men and
strange moralities'' (391), has led him to be more exible and
accepting as a moral thinker than his principled, provincial
daughter. ``Ha-ha! `twas a good joke, and well carried out, and I
give the man credit for't'' (391). We know more than Newson. The
lie is intended as a sort of joke, but it is not well carried out, for at
no point is Henchard in control of it. As in our judgment of Tess,
luck again makes clear moral assessment of the novel's protagonist
difcult. The narrator presents us with a continuum of views,
ranging from Farfrae's simple ``He ought not to have done it!''
(391) to Newson's `` 'Twas as much my fault as his, poor fellow''
(392). But neither of these judgments seems fair or adequate, as
Elizabeth-Jane comes to realize by the end of the novel when she
compassionately reects ``that neither she nor any human being
deserved less than was given'' and that most people deserve much
more.
The characters in A Laodicean, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and The
Mayor of Casterbridge are all gamblers and impure ethical agents.
This is as true of those who are calculating as it is of those who are
reckless. It is as true of those who relish the game and throw the
dice deantly as it is of those who understand the power of Chance
and would rather not play. In his pessimism, Hardy believed that
much that is good in humanity is not allowed the opportunity to
bloom. A pervasive theme in his novels is that we deserve better.

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Despite Rescher's case against moral luck, on one point he and


Hardy would agree: ``how we deserve to be treated is something
that, in the nal analysis, lies wholly within our power . . . Luck
manages to decouple fate from desert. But no force can decouple
merit from desert'' (Luck 169). Rescher also argues that ``our fate is
not within our power, but our character is'' (169). Here Hardy
would disagree. We can strive to make our moral characters what
we want them to be, but in this realm of life, like all others, too
often hope unblooms. In Nussbaum's words, ``much that I did not
make goes toward making me whatever I shall be praised or
blamed for being'' (``Luck and Ethics'' 78).
Hardy's focus in these novels on the intervention of chance in
our lives signicantly shapes the ethics of his ction. His novels
stress that there is indeed such a thing as moral luck and clarify the
value of acknowledging its existence. If we admit that contingency
shapes who we are and what we do, we are less likely to be arrogant
and controlling; more likely to consider a variety of possible consequences when making a choice and to take responsibility for that
choice even when our resultant luck is bad, even when our intentions were good; and most importantly, given Hardy's ethics of
love and fellow-feeling, acknowledging moral luck will lead us,
perhaps, to judge others with greater compassion.

chapter 5

Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing


ethics

Like the painting of a sorrow,


A face without a heart.

William Shakespeare1

The proximity of the other is the face's meaning, and it means


from the very start in a way that goes beyond those plastic forms
which forever try to cover the face like a mask of their presence
to perception. But always the face shows through these forms.
Prior to any particular expression and beneath all particular
expressions, which cover over and protect with an immediately
adopted face or countenance, there is the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such, that is to say, extreme exposure,
defencelessness, vulnerability itself.
Emmanuel Levinas2

Besides sharing a strong aestheticizing impulse, Oscar Wilde and


Henry James both lampooned Victorian morality to make way for
what Wilde called a New Ethics. The quintessential n-de-siecle
aesthete, Wilde asserts in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891) that ``there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral
book.''3 The novel that follows this preface unfolds in the form of a
fairy tale of sorts and raises moral questions on nearly every page,
and yet established boundaries between the moral and the immoral
do indeed blur and shift. Thus this strange late-century, protopostmodern work ventures an experiment in aestheticizing
morality, in transforming Victorian deontology into an ethics that
provides more scope for beauty and unorthodox choice.
On the surface, James's The Ambassadors (1903), with its
decorous modernist sensibility, seems an unlikely novel to pair
with Wilde's, especially considering how antagonistic toward each
93

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other the two writers were. But as Jonathan Freedman has persuasively argued in his study of James in the context of British
aestheticism, it makes sense to read The Ambassadors as James's
rejoinder to Dorian Gray, for Wilde's novel is, in part, a response
to James's earlier ction and essays: ``what Wilde appropriates
from James, James reappropriates from Wilde in a disguised and
somewhat ironized form. For just as Wilde's aesthete revises the
nature and functions of the Jamesian artist, so Strether's experience in Paris transvalues the claims of Wildean aestheticism.''4
My examination of these two novels builds on Freedman's
comparative analysis by moving beyond his thesis that Wilde's
aestheticism resides in sensations and the body while James's
depends on ``amplitude of consciousness'' (Professions of Taste
199). Reading the novels in light of philosophical ideas about
aestheticism and what Paul Ricoeur calls ``hermeneutics of the
self,'' I see the different styles of aestheticizing ethics in Wilde
and James as similar in emotional self-protectiveness, a strategy
that erects a defense against both suffering and love.
As I suggest throughout this book, the positive ethical potential
of art, particularly narrative art, is tremendous. In this chapter,
though, I explore how an aestheticizing impulse can be evasive of
responsibility and antithetical to ethics. As Terry Eagleton has
noted of the aesthetic, ``any account of this amphibious concept
which either uncritically celebrates or unequivocally denounces it
is . . . likely to overlook its real historical complexity.''5 Late
Victorian British aestheticism was at once a potent source of
transformative energy that challenged mainstream values and an
impotent and idealist retreat from life's difculties during a period
of cultural upheaval. The implied authors of both Dorian Gray
and The Ambassadors, aware of this paradox, are ambivalent
aesthetes because they are held by Victorian morality despite their
desire for freedom. The anxiety about agency that plagued Hardy
and the New Woman writers, then, is just as evident in Wilde
and James. Ideas about uid identity, inuence, and self-delusion
are yoked in both novels to questions about choice and the forces
that constrain agency.

Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics

95

image and concept


With its trope of the portrait that lives and the lovely young man
who never ages or changes, The Picture of Dorian Gray plays with
assumptions about the relation of art and life. Although a very
different sort of novel, The Ambassadors dramatizes similar
concerns, because for Strether literary works and paintings strongly
color his perception of reality and shape his choices.6 Hence, prior
to a discussion of these two novels, I want briey to explore
aesthetic theory, especially that of Emmanuel Levinas, whose work
on the ethical dimension of aesthetics strikes me as especially pertinent to the concerns of these turn-of-the-century narratives. As a
student of Heidegger and Husserl, Levinas brings the perspective
and presuppositions of twentieth-century continental philosophy
into my reading of ethics and narrative, which has thus far been
dominated by the perspectives of Anglo-American moral
philosophy. Some of Levinas's ideas about art and ethics conict
with those introduced earlier as we will see but by including
them I hope to suggest that n-de-siecle narratives can be
illuminated from many angles within this reanimated eld of
philosophy and literature, and to advocate openness to a variety of
ethical frameworks rather than allegiance to one and hostility to
others. More particularly, I read James's The Ambassadors through
Levinas and Ricoeur because the reading of the novel Nussbaum
offers through Kant and Aristotle, as suggestive as it is, fails to
satisfy my ethical questions about Lambert Strether and the novel's
ending and, in fact, seems to distort Strether's character by
idealizing it.7
Moreover, a postmodern ethical theory is, I would argue,
particularly appropriate for Wilde and James, who are among the
most proto-postmodern of n-de-siecle writers. It is easy to see that
Wilde's novel is proto-postmodern in its dissolving of boundaries,
its self-reexivity, and its wily contradictions, but one can also
make a case for a postmodern James. Ross Posnock does so by
calling attention to openness and curiosity in James's novels, to, for
example, ``Strether's internalizing of difference and his dissolving of

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unitary identity,'' and more generally to what he terms James's


``politics of nonidentity,'' a phrase that Posnock admits ``cannot
avoid the paradox of trying to label a strategy dedicated to
disrupting the compulsion to x identity.''8 He goes on to make a
distinction that has signicant implications for our understanding of
art and philosophy: ``Any denition is identication, and identity
logic is our normal mode of thought. By positing a transparent
coincidence between concepts and their objects, this logic tacitly
excludes ambiguity, as the ux of reality is converted into the xity
of concepts.''9 What Posnock and others who celebrate Jamesian
ambiguity tend to overlook, however, is the inherent tendency of
art to confer permanence on the temporal.
We might assume that art, on the one hand especially art that
arises from negative capability and a keen sense of life's complexity
escapes identity logic and captures the ux of reality, while
philosophy, on the other hand, settles for the xity of concepts. As
we have seen, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Margaret
Urban Walker all identify this xity in philosophy and turn to
literature as a way to develop a more supple and nuanced ethics.
Levinas, in ``Reality and its Shadow,'' his most controversial essay
on ethics and aesthetics, challenges this view, and by doing so
offers a corrective to the common tendency to idealize art (a
tendency that was, of course, particularly strong at the end of the
last century). He argues that once art replaces an object with its
image, the image neutralizes the real relationship that a concept
allows. In other words, concepts initiate dialogue and lead to understanding, whereas disinterested artistic vision, with its ``blindness to
concepts,'' focuses on the ineffable and the beauty of completeness
and closure. ``A novel shuts beings up in a fate despite their
freedom,''10 and for Levinas an aestheticizing instinct is thus similar
to the desire to evade ethical responsibility by immobilizing time
and process. For him, art is associated with xity. ``Such a xity is
wholly different from that of concepts, which initiates life, offers
reality to our powers, to truth, opens a dialectic. By its reection in
a narrative, being has a non-dialectical xity, stops dialectics and
time'' (Levinas, ``Reality and Its Shadow'' 139). Criticism, accord-

Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics

97

ing to Levinas, restores vitality, alterity, and ethics to art because it


animates the work's conceptual meanings and initiates discussion of
them. Linda Dowling, in her study of language and decadence in
n-de-siecle British aestheticism, alerts us to exactly what troubles
Levinas about the aesthetic. Dening the Euphuistic ideal of style in
Pater's Marius the Epicurean as an articiality that arrests the
transitive, she points out that the effect of the Pater-like poisonous
book in Dorian Gray, ``both as Dorian himself experiences reading it
and as we see its inuence on his life, is to collapse time: hours pass
unheeded as Dorian reads, and `years' pass as we read of his
reading.''11 This capacity to x and freeze time is part of what makes
the book, and the aestheticism it represents, fatal to those who fall
under its inuence. Levinas would agree with Wilde that in and of
itself, ``all art is quite useless,'' or, as Wilde proclaims earlier in the
Preface to Dorian Gray, ``No artist desires to prove anything.''
While the aphorisms of Wilde's preface celebrate this disengagement, Levinas considers the dark side of aestheticism. Ultimately so
does Wilde's novel.
In his well-known denunciations of realism in ``The Decay of
Lying,'' Wilde insists on the primacy of art, claiming that life
imitates art and not vice versa. But in Dorian Gray such a clear
statement of cause and effect becomes impossible because life and
art in this narrative are so intimately intermingled and interpenetrated. James's aestheticism results in the same effect. If Strether
sees the beautiful afternoon he spends in the French countryside
imitating a Lambinet painting, if he retreats from life to art, soon
enough life reasserts its inuence: Chad and Mme de Vionnet
surprisingly oat into the scene. For Strether the real could be said
to disrupt the aesthetic at this moment, but it is hardly that simple:
the boundaries between the two shift and dissolve. As Posnock
rightly notes, ``To oppose the actual to the vicarious, life to art, and
active to passive is antithetical to the libidinal sublimation of
James's psychic economy'' (The Trial of Curiosity 231). Just as a
person's life becomes a work of art in Dorian Gray, vicarious
pleasure and receptiveness in The Ambassadors what Nussbaum
describes as the value in James of being ``actively passive''12

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blend the real and the imaginative so thoroughly that it becomes


difcult to distinguish the two.
The title of Levinas's essay ``Reality and Its Shadow''
suggests a connection between life and art, but the essay itself
resists the idea of the transparency of images, the mimetic quality of
art, referring instead to the image as an ``allegory of being,'' ``an
ambiguous commerce with reality,'' a shadow, an other (135). It is
not that reality comes rst and casts a shadow that is art, because
for Levinas, ``These are two contemporary possibilities of being''
(136). Wilde's essays and Dorian's and Lord Henry Wotton's comments privileging art over life miss this point in a way that The
Picture of Dorian Gray as a whole does not. The competing claims
of life and aesthetic existence that structure Wilde's novel are also
palpable in The Ambassadors. In Levinas's words, ``discussion over
the primacy of art or of nature does art imitate nature or does
natural beauty imitate art? fails to recognize the simultaneity of
truth and image'' (136). The novels dramatize this simultaneity, and
from it, as Levinas's essay suggests, arise important ethical
questions. I shall consider these questions in the context of
Levinas's ideas about responsibility and of Paul Ricoeur's Levinasinuenced philosophical studies in Oneself as Another. For the
narratives exemplify and animate the philosophy while the
philosophical context enables a fresh reading of the novels in
relation to each other and to British aestheticism in general.
self and other
Attendant upon the aestheticizing impulse in the novels is a desire
for impossible freedom and control on the part of the characters. As
in the New Woman ction and in Hardy's novels, these texts are
pervaded by a late-century spirit of aspiration, a yearning for something other than or beyond oppressive reality. Dorian's regret that
he cannot live in the timeless realm of art is what precipitates his
wish to trade places with the portrait, his desire for control beyond
the range of ordinary human agency. Strether's regret also springs
from a frustration with time: ``There were some things that had to

Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics

99

come in time if they were to come at all. If they did not come in
time they were lost forever.''13 In his mind, time is linear and
relentless. Strether's advice to Little Bilham is to avoid his own
mistake: ``live all you can,'' he urges him (132). Although subject to
many illusions, Strether has forgotten what he calls ``the illusion of
freedom'' (132) because he sees all too clearly how life molds us by
limiting our capacities and opportunities.14 His aesthetic sensibility
lls him with yearning for completion and perfection, and this
longing, in turn, leads him to refashion the world through his
imagination in such a way that real people are left behind, transformed into what he wants and needs them to be. Hence his
aesthetic ideals seduce him away not only from Mrs. Newsome's
rigid Victorian morality, but also from responsibility to others who
live in time, in a awed world, and in selfhood that is complex and
not always malleable to expectations and norms. Levinas's wellknown concept of the face of the other describes an ethical
imperative: a self comes into existence only when it responds to an
other summoning it to responsibility. Both Dorian and Strether
struggle to heed this summons, but a fear of suffering and a desire
for aesthetic consolation leads them to turn away from the face of
the other and its appeal for recognition and compassion.
In his hermeneutics of the self, which he contrasts to Cartesian
philosophies of the cogito, Paul Ricoeur posits an hypothesis which
he calls ``the triad of passivity and, hence, of otherness'' (Oneself as
Another 318; emphasis his). This passivity is experienced in the
body, in intersubjectivity, and in conscience. Ricoeur's three
categories of otherness become clearer and more concrete when
studied in relation to the novels.
First, one is passive in relation to one's own body (what Ricoeur
terms ``the esh''), which can be seen as an other. ``Ontologically,
the esh precedes the distinction between the voluntary and the
involuntary'' (324), meaning that we do not choose our own
bodies, we do not ask to be born, and in fact we do not even
remember being born we are just here. The body is also what
tells us of otherness as we run up against the concreteness of the
world; existing is resisting. The self 's sense of continuity is

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anchored in the body. Despite Freedman's understandable association of the body with the aestheticism of Wilde and consciousness
with the aestheticism of James, the body plays an important role in
the ethics of both novels.15
Not only does Dorian explore his New Hedonism through
physical sensation, he is granted a wish that aestheticizes the body,
making it immune to the effects of time and thereby intensifying
what Ricoeur refers to as the idem or unchanging sense of identity
(contrasted to the ipse, or changing personality). By uttering his
wish, Dorian actively wills a radical passivity or stasis for his body.
Likewise, though less obviously, the body is of vital signicance
in the plot of James's novel. When Chad and Mme de Vionnet drift
into the idyllic Lambinet afternoon, they open Strether's eyes to the
erotic, physical dimension of a relationship he had, with willful
blindness, assumed to be a ``virtuous attachment.'' His ambassadorial mission was to disentangled Mrs. Newsome's son from a
physical affair and to assure his physical return home. Strether's
evasion of the real in favor of the abstract and ideal becomes both
an evasion of responsibility and an evasion of physical and
emotional intimacy. He evades the truth about the erotic life of the
young man he in other ways observes so perceptively because he
evades real connection with others in his own life. Behind this
evasion, ironically, lies a motivation that is ethical as well as aesthetic. He wishes to escape into beauty, but he is also self-protective, wary of moral hazard. As Nussbaum points out, Strether ``is
convinced that loneliness is the condition of luminous perception;
and his fear of intimacy is at the same time a fear for his moral
being'' (Love's Knowledge 189). But in protecting his moral being he
cuts himself off from the broader, richer ethical life he is clearly
yearning for when he responds to the surprise of Paris and of Maria
Gostrey, a woman who lives life rather than triumphing over it as
the women of Woollett do.16 Marcia Ian makes the extremely
suggestive point that for James consciousness is interior and the
unconscious is exterior, associated with the body, with a threatening
intersubjectivity, with an external world of all we would rather not
know about (including death) which nevertheless demands our

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attention.17 Choosing to live in his head, Strether, as Ian puts it,


``accepts his dual role as spectator and spectacle, specically as the
spectator at the spectacle of his own negativity, while others enact
what he will not, namely, intimacy'' (118). His negative morality
comes as recompense for what is sacriced or lost: a messier, more
intersubjective and intimate ethics that can be experienced only in a
fully embodied life of engagement with others. But it is also
important to see that Strether chooses ``the spectacle of his own
negativity,'' and loss is one consequence of this choice.
Ricoeur's second point, that the self is passive in relation to the
other-than-self, also has thematic relevance for both novels. In the
ethical dimension of selfhood as Ricoeur denes it, ``one reserves
for the other the exclusive initiative for assigning responsibility to
the self '' (Oneself as Another 331). This denition counters Husserl's
idea of ``analogical transfer,'' whereby we understand an other in
relation to what is known about the self. Following Levinas,
Ricoeur argues that ``to represent something to oneself is to
assimilate it to oneself, to include it in oneself, and hence to deny its
otherness'' (336). In contrast to Husserl, Levinas posits a radical
dissymmetry between the self and the other. In aestheticizing
ethics, both Dorian and Strether lose sight of this crucial selfother
relation of dissymmetry.
The process is clearer in Dorian's story than in Strether's,
especially by the end when Dorian openly deplores his lost capacity
for love. One of the ethical implications of his wish that his life
become art is that he can see his own face but not the face of the
other. ``I am too much concentrated on myself '' (205), he realizes
too late to escape the terrible symmetry of self and mirrored self
that his wish has called into being. The world narrows down to
himself and his image. Dorian is haunted by these lines from
Hamlet: ``Like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart''
(215). These are Claudius's words to Laertes, designed to spur him
to revenge by charging him with insincere and inadequate grief for
his father, and they are of course ironic since Claudius himself is
capable of only the show of sorrow. Like Claudius, Dorian lives a
lie; when he is not wearing a disguise, he is still masked his ``real''

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face hides his ``true'' face. Unlike a natural face, Dorian's is


inexpressive of the pain he feels, and he is therefore emotionally
isolated from others, all of whom he dupes whether he wants to or
not. The portrait, meanwhile, lives and vividly registers his heartlessness. Dorian's life has become a painting, and though he
formulates a second wish to be good he can never achieve this
aspiration, in part because its motivation is aesthetic, not ethical. ``I
want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous,'' he
admits to Lord Henry, who nds this ``a very charming artistic
basis for ethics'' (97). But because it is not other-regarding, his
impetus is as ineffectual and indeed corrupting as it is charming.
James Eli Adams notes that Herbert Spencer's conception of
evolution offered n-de-siecle writers a new model of subjectivity:
progression toward a self that complexly subsumes all that is
external to it. The model appealed to Pater and Wilde because it
offered ``a quasi-scientic ground for locating all forms of `otherness' within the self '' (Dandies and Desert Saints 221). The Picture
of Dorian Gray and The Ambassadors similarly dramatize this way of
conceptualizing consciousness, insisting on both the aesthetic
benets and the ethical costs.
The dire effects of a self-centered aestheticism are most evident
in Dorian's relationships with women. Dorian falls in love not with
Sibyl Vane the whole person, not with the face (to use Levinas's
trope) that summons him to responsibility, but with Sibyl the
actress.18 He falls in love with her masks, her insincere, performative self the multiple identities she assumes on stage for this self
is merely another version of his own aestheticized and aestheticizing
identity. The real woman, with her imperfections and her suffering,
is an other that only briey ickers into existence for him when he
hears of her death. When she chooses life and love over art, which
leads to Dorian's rejection of her and to her subsequent suicide,
Dorian recognizes this choice in the suffering and guilt he feels
before Lord Henry talks him into aestheticizing Sibyl's death. The
aestheticizing essentially reverses Sibyl's choice of life over art.
Lord Henry says to Dorian, ``I can sympathize with everything,
except suffering . . . I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly,

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too horrible, too distressing'' (39). Keats, one of the most inuential
of Wilde's precursors in British aestheticism, marveled at great art's
capacity for ``making all disagreeables evaporate.'' That
consolatory effect of the conversion of life into art is precisely what
Lord Henry and Dorian rely on to shield themselves from the
ugliness and pain of Dorian's treatment of Sibyl and from the
vulgar reality of her self-destructive response to this treatment.
Wilde makes us feel the chilling lack of compassion in this
aestheticizing even as he leads us to recognize how prone we all are
to distance ourselves from life's ``inartistic'' tragedies. Dorian
heartlessly muses aloud on Sibyl's death, and Lord Henry just as
heartlessly encourages him:
``It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It
has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a
great part, but by which I have not been wounded.''
``It is an interesting question,'' said Lord Henry, who found an exquisite
pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism ``an extremely
interesting question. I fancy that the true explanation is this. It often happens
that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt
us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of
meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us.
They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty
crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply
appeals to our sense of the dramatic effect. Suddenly we nd that we are no
longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both.''
(10001)

This disengagement from the pain of the other, this exploitation of


life's ``elements of beauty,'' exemplies Levinas's mistrust of the
idea that art as consolation can be considered ethical: ``art,
essentially disengaged, constitutes, in a world of initiative and
responsibility, a dimension of evasion'' (``Ethics as First
Philosophy'' 141). Wilde's narrator's stance on the morality of his
characters is also evasive, so contradictory as to be nearly
impossible to pin down.19
In his later relationship with the country girl, Hetty, Dorian
fares no better ethically than he did with Sibyl. He struggles to be

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responsible by breaking off his relationship with the girl, but, as


even Lord Henry can see, Dorian is concerned to do the right
thing, not for Hetty's sake, but for the sake of the beauty of his own
soul. Hetty is merely another casualty of his frantic though
impotent efforts to escape from the cold world of art back to the
real world that summons him to responsibility, genuine ethical
agency, and human connectedness via the disgured, metamorphosing face in the portrait.
Strether, too, severs connections with others, which is ironic
because, as he admits to Miss Barrace, he does not feel that his life
is his own; he says to her, in fact, ``I seem to have a life only for
other people'' (160). Posnock refers to Strether's ``capacity to
impregnate himself with otherness'' (228), a capacity that leads him
to exult in incoherence rather than xed identity. This aesthetic
tendency to escape the perceived limitations of self though
sympathetic identication is not quite the same thing as Dorian's
glorying in roles, disguises and other ways of multiplying the self
through lies. But it is also not as admirable as Posnock makes it
seem. True empathy, paradoxically, involves not ``living for
others'' but recognizing their separateness and allowing them to
live for themselves, feeling with them but not appropriating their
feelings. Strether misses the signicance of Chad's relationship with
Marie de Vionnet because he needs Chad to be someone he is not:
an idealized version of Strether's own younger self. Strether's
aestheticizing of the relationship making it the story of a young
man who lives beautifully, without compromise or human fallibility
distances him from the real Chad, who, as others point out to
Strether, is not as ``good'' as he imagines.20 In ``living for others,''
Strether rewrites their lives so they will live for him. This
pernicious tendency is most evident in the bizarre imperative he
only half-facetiously issues to Mme de Vionnet: ``don't be for me
simply the person I've come to know through my awkward
connexion with Chad . . . Be for me, please, with all your admirable
tact and trust, just whatever I may show you it's a present pleasure
to me to think you'' (307). Marcia Ian notes this denial of genuine
otherness in James's work as a whole, for his ction creates a world

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``homogeneous only because it is . . . constituted by, for and about


the `me,' and thus constitutionally closed to others and even to
otherness per se'' (``Henry James'' 133). The escape into beautiful,
rened consciousness is ultimately an escape from other people.
Strether's rejection of Maria Gostrey at the end of the novel is
also marked by his aestheticizing, idealizing impulse. Having
experienced pain, vulnerability, and helplessness in the loss of his
wife and son, Strether seems determined to regain control by
insulating himself from love and the emotional risks that
accompany intimacy.21 By urging Chad not to forsake Marie de
Vionnet, Strether cuts all ties with the imposing woman from
Woollett, making certain that because of what she will see as his
perverse disobedience Mrs. Newsome will have no inclination to
``patch it up'' with him. The advice also allows him to sever his
connection with Chad. Choosing to leave his Woollett past behind
would be no bad thing for Strether, but he chooses to return to
Woollett after having cut himself off from everyone there. Even
more self-defeating is his choice to leave Maria Gostrey, the woman
who loves him. When Maria hears of his advice to Chad, she says
to Strether, ``Oh . . . you have done it . . . You can't after that
propose '' Strether interrupts her before she can nish her
sentence, which could very well have been ``You can't after that
propose to forsake me after advising him not to forsake her.'' But he
bluntly forestalls and diverts her by putting words in her mouth:
``Propose again to Mrs. Newsome?'' (345), he says, nishing
Maria's sentence for her. Strether goes to see Maria Gostrey
determined to face ``another separation'' (342). Ironically, however,
throughout the interview he keeps the focus on himself or on her as
mirror of himself, effecting the separation by refusing her separateness.
Like the eponymous hero of Conrad's Lord Jim who, in the end,
deserts his bride and sacrices himself for an abstract principle,
Strether turns aside from the real woman who loves him, and
instead embraces a beautiful moral ideal. He says that he must leave
her ``to be right'':

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``That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got
anything for myself.''
She thought. ``But with your wonderful impressions you'll have got a
great deal.'' (34647)

With these words Marie Gostrey implicitly points out to Strether


that he could reap a complex variety of benets from his recent
experience, including the courage to make ethically admirable
choices of the sort Woollett's narrow sense of morality disallows.
But by seeking, like Dorian, to secure the beauty of his own soul
in other words by aestheticizing away the real other-than-self
before him and denying their face-to-face dissymmetry Strether
evades the loving ethical injunction inherent in Maria's objection.
She protests: ``why should you be so dreadfully right?'' His
response presumes, once again, to tell her what she wants: ``That's
the way that if I must go you yourself would be the rst to want
me'' (347). He insists to her that she really does understand because
she is just like him. His aestheticizing tendency leads him not only
to construct an ideal line of behavior for himself, something ``right''
and ``logical'' with no loose ends, but also to assume her complicity
in his plan. To do otherwise would be to acknowledge life's
messiness and the dissymmetry of a relationship that he has decided
is beautifully symmetrical. ``You can't resist me,'' he declares,
triumphantly secure that he has won the argument. There is
obvious ambiguity in Maria's ``I can't indeed resist you'' a
statement that is as much a description of emotional, erotic attraction as it is the concession of an intellectual point. But Strether
ignores this ambiguity. ``Then there we are!'' The novel ends with
a lie, with an ``I'' masquerading as a ``we.''
Hence, as is evident from both narratives, if there is no true
dialectic of self and other because of the aesthetic desire to transcend the human and escape the real, then there is no ``we,'' no
ethical dimension, merely ego, an appropriating ``I.'' As Ricoeur
argues, Husserl's concept of the analogical transfer, ``namely the
admission that the other is not condemned to remain a stranger but
can become my counterpart, that is, someone who, like me, says `I' ''
(Oneself as Another 335; emphasis his) is useful in the gnoseological

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dimension. But the cognitive movement from oneself to an other


must be supplemented by the ethical dimension's inverse movement
both cognitive and emotional (heartfelt rather than heartless)
from an other to oneself. If it is not, what results is a totalizing ego
but no other-regarding ethical self. These narratives of the
aestheticizing life, ending as they do in separation and the isolated
individual, dramatize the consequences of face-to-face encounters
that rely on analogical transfer alone.
In his nal category of the triad of otherness, Ricoeur discusses
the relation of the self to itself through the concept of conscience.
This is, of course, a fundamentally moral concept, but Ricoeur
attempts a denition that clears away preconceptions about ``bad
conscience'' and ``good conscience'' to uncover the mystery and
uncanniness of conscience, the self-and-other within: ``Unlike the
dialogue of the soul with itself, of which Plato speaks, this affection
by another voice presents a remarkable dissymmetry, one that can
be called vertical, between the agency that calls and the self called
upon. It is the vertical nature of the call, equal to its interiority, that
creates the enigma of the phenomenon of conscience'' (342). This is
an aporetic other because we do not know if the source of the
ethical injunction is other people in our lives, ancestors we never
knew who have nonetheless shaped us, God, or merely ``an empty
place'' (355).
In his reections on Kant's discussion of conscience, Tobin
Siebers also stresses the otherness of conscience: ``We experience
the necessity of obeying our conscience `as if ' it were another
person's bidding. The man accused by the court of conscience,
Kant explains, is one and the same person with the judge of the
court'' (Morals and Stories 110). The character-building that comes
from listening to conscience, according to Siebers, takes place in
solitude, apart from others. As true as that may be, communing
with conscience feels like being with another. The expression
commonly uttered by those ready to heed an injunction of
conscience ``I can't live with myself unless . . .'' reveals the
doubleness of the phenomenon and belies theories of a unitary self.
Conscience is central to both novels. In Dorian Gray the portrait

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that bears witness through its physical transformation to Dorian's


moral corruption is of course an emblem of his conscience; it is at
once himself and an other literally external to him. When describing
meeting Dorian for the rst time, Basil Hallward, the painter of the
portrait, tells Lord Henry that the experience was like coming ``face
to face'' with an ``external inuence'' (6). Out of fear he turns
away. Dorian's inuence does indeed prove deadly to him, just as
his and Lord Henry's powers of inuence over Dorian opposite
though they are kill him in the end when the stabs of conscience
becomes too much for him and he retaliates on the painting with a
knife. In his description of this rst encounter of painter and model,
Basil stresses that he turns from Dorian out of fear, not conscience.
Lord Henry tells him this is nonsense: ``Conscience and cowardice
are really the same things, Basil'' (6). Basil's fear stems in part from
a foreboding of the responsibility he will have as the creator of
Dorian's conscience.
Inuence is a fearful thing, the novel stresses, regardless of the
direction it moves from self to other or other to self. Levinas
would say that in the initial face-to-face encounter, Dorian
summons Basil to responsibility. Basil, for all his apparent moral
uprightness, shirks such a summons at rst. Even after he
completes the portrait that Dorian's face seems to compel him to
paint, he senses its power and his responsibility for that power
and wants to destroy it. Later, when Dorian brings the artist
face-to-face with the transformed painting, Basil says, ``I don't
believe it is my picture'' (157), shrinking from responsibility.
Paradoxically, in the beginning the portrait as conscience has a
deleterious inuence on the model, an inuence so bad that Basil's
repeated moral and religious injunctions carry no weight whatsoever with Dorian. As Dorian develops a more complex relationship with the painting, however, it begins to work on him just as
a conscience would, urging him to nd a release from guilt.
Despite his denial of art's ethical potential, Wilde is clearly
intrigued by the capacity of both the portrait and the ``poisoned''
book to have an immoral inuence. Once the portrait exercises a
positive ethical inuence, however, Wilde makes it clear that

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109

though art can corrupt Dorian, it cannot redeem him. Conscience


can torment, as the novel vividly dramatizes, and art can play the
role of conscience, but neither conscience nor art wins ethical
agency for Dorian.
Both inuence and guilt in Wilde's novel stem from sexual
magnetism that is so overpowering as to strip away the agency of
even a man as ostensibly virtuous and self-controlled as Basil.
Attraction to the aesthetic compounds this sense of passivity. The
painting of Dorian reveals more than the artist intends of his homoerotic attraction to his model. When Dorian sits for the portrait, he
is just beginning to fall under the inuence of Lord Henry: ``There
was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are
suddenly awakened'' (20). On his canvas Basil captures this fairytale moment of awakening to romantic love. By doing so he confers
magic on his art that Dorian is later able to activate through his
wish. This active willing is preceded by passivity: Lord Henry's
fascination, Dorian's surrender to inuence, and Basil's state of
artistic inspiration. It is perhaps misleading, however, to separate
the three this way because they are all different dimensions of the
one person, as Wilde himself acknowledged,22 and they all experience fascination, inuence, and aesthetic enthrallment. All three
men are aesthetes seduced by such qualities of art as image and
rhythm that create an aesthetic order of existence where, as Levinas
argues, ``we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or
freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by [the
poetic order]'' (``Reality and Its Shadow'' 132).23 In fact, the term
that aesthetic existence most readily evokes for Levinas is ``magic''
(132). And magic is, of course, the presiding metaphor in Wilde's
novel about art.
Inuence and conscience are just as powerful in James's novel as
they are in Wilde's. As Freedman points out, both narratives focus
on ``the problematic interrelation between sexuality, inuence, and
personal relations . . . In Wilde's novel, as in James's, to put
oneself (as James would say) `in relation' is to open oneself up to
the dynamic interplay of the inuence and counterinuence of
others'' (Professions of Taste 194). The rst thing that strikes

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Strether about Chad when they meet for the rst time in Paris is the
positive inuence Marie de Vionnet has had on his young friend.
This inuence becomes a source of fascination for Strether so
strong as to inuence him, leading him to stray from his original
moral intention to bring Chad home both literally and guratively
(home to New England and its values). Having been brought up on
Puritan morality in Woollett, Strether nds himself plagued by
qualms of conscience throughout his stay in Paris. What troubles
him about the affair of Chad and Mme de Vionnet and his own
complicity in it is the ease with which everything takes place. When
fate fails to administer the ``sternness'' Strether expects, he nds
himself longing for punishment of some sort; he speaks of ``a sense
which the spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the absence
of that somebody was paying something somewhere and
somehow, and that they were at least not all oating together on the
silver stream of impunity'' (317).
Even as conscience is important to him, indeed a part of him,
he gently mocks and dees it as if it were an other. In that way,
and in his ambivalence, he resembles Dorian. Turning against the
portrait, Dorian thinks, ``It had kept him awake at night . . . It
had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He
would destroy it'' (223). In destroying this face, this other
summoning him to responsibility, he destroys himself. In the
Gothic image of reversal with which the novel ends, the artwork
is once again static and perfect, while the real Dorian
``withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage'' is returned to
time and immediately claimed by death. Strether dees conscience
much less melodramatically by urging Chad to continue in his
adulterous affair. Even this deance is equivocal because he
forestalls his own impending affair with Marie Gostrey his own
chance for erotic love and transformative inuence in order to
be ``right.'' How different is that from Mrs. Newsome's need to
be ``straight''? If his conscience is externalized in this imposing
woman from Woollett, then his effort to escape from her is as
compromised as Dorian's effort to free himself from the face of
conscience.

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111

Wilde and James both sympathize with this revolt against the
tyranny of conscience and Victorian morality, but neither is able to
narrate a successful rebellion. The aesthetic impulse, then, in both
its n-de-siecle and its modernist mode, decries traditional ethical
constructions without dismantling them or signicantly diminishing
their inuence.
aesthetics and ethics
Just as their characters nd aesthetic means of evading
responsibility, Wilde and James themselves sidestep didacticism
or even a more subtly identiable ethics through their evasive
narrators, through the lters of their protagonists' minds, and
through the aesthetic detachment afforded by a pastiche of generic
conventions.
Telling Dorian's story as a strange mixture of real and unreal,
novel of manners and Gothic fairy tale, Wilde allows a traditional
moral to take shape, even as he distances himself from it: a xation
on self at the expense of others ends not only in damage to others
but in personal defeat and suffering. This strong moral meaning,
which emerges gradually as the narrative unfolds, is undermined,
however, by Lord Henry's seductive ideas, by the hypnotic appeal
of beauty as Wilde describes it, and ultimately by the preface,
which was written after the completion of the novel and clearly
designed to deconstruct the morality readers would be sure to nd
inherent in the story's tragic ending if nowhere else.
By creating Lambert Strether as a literary man and an
imaginative, metaphorical thinker whose sensibility is steeped in
art, and by focalizing the narration through him, James makes it
difcult for his readers not to see Strether as the representative of a
new, ner ethics emerging from aesthetic values rather than from
moral principles. Like Dorian, though, he has a distorted sense of
himself in relation to others, and ends up not in a loving relationship but in isolation. To call either of these novels love stories
would be misleading, and yet they are both narratives about men
who observe love and who fail at it themselves. As ethically elusive

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as both works are, it is possible to read them as cautionary tales


about the consequences of the very human desire to escape the
human. If art embodies our longing for perfection, then it also
tempts us to risk losing what is valuable about the imperfect real.
Dorian and Strether appeal to art for a protective space where they
are invulnerable to time, suffering, and alterity. But this is a space,
as both men discover, where freedom is illusory and love impossible.
A brief comparison of Wilde and James to Proust, especially
Proust as read by Levinas, will help to clarify what I mean when I
say that the aestheticism of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The
Ambassadors prohibits love. Proust's representation of romantic
love stresses mystery and suffering. In Strether's relationship with
Maria Gostrey, as we have seen, he denies her separateness and
thus her mystery. In Dorian's relationship with Sibyl, he seeks to
avoid suffering by choosing the unreal over the real. By contrast, in
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel's insatiable curiosity about
Albertine, whose otherness makes him long for knowledge, is a
source of jealousy and suffering of all sorts, but it is love because it
is nurtured by a recognition of the other as separate. ``Ontologically
pure, this Eros is not a relation built on a third term, such as tastes,
common interests, or the conaturality of souls, but has a direct
relation to something that both gives and refuses to give itself,
namely to the Other as Other, the mystery'' (Levinas, ``The Other
in Proust'' 164). Levinas equates being responsible with being
hostage to the Other, suggesting that the ``I'' only comes into being
when it is answerable to something other than self. Dorian and
Strether wish for irresponsibility, but this wish brings them neither
freedom nor love, neither ethical agency nor genuine connection
with others.24
It might seem presumptuous for a reader to speak of characters
and implied authors attempting to evade responsibility for the safe
haven of aestheticist art when a reader's own responsibility is so
problematic.25 Adam Newton, in his study of narrative ethics,
describes the responsibility of a story's reader or listener as twofold:
``In part it means learning the paradoxical lesson that `getting'

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113

someone else's story is also a way of losing the person as `real' as


`what he is'; it is a way of appropriating or allegorizing that
endangers both intimacy and ethical duty. At the same time,
however, one's responsibility consists of responding to just this
paradox'' (Narrative Ethics 19). The act of reading a literary
character, of experiencing literary art, is fraught with some of the
very paradoxes and difculties of establishing a just and loving
relationship with another human being, and that is why art's
potential to be ethically instructive is as strong as its potential to
shelter us from the real and the ethical. My reading of Lambert
Strether and Dorian Gray makes no claim to have ``got'' either of
them; much of their complexity and mystery eludes an interpretation that has at times felt too censorious. But I agree with Newton
that as much as it is a reader's responsibility to understand the
dangers of appropriating and allegorizing and to avoid careless
treatment even of ctional people, it is also our responsibility to run
these risks and embrace these paradoxes for the sake of ethical
meaning-making.

chapter 6

Promises, lies, and ethical agency in


Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes

At the moment of my commitment, I either (1) arbitrarily assume


a constancy in my feelings which is not really in my power to
establish, or (2) I accept in advance that I shall have to carry out,
at a given moment, an action which will in no way reect my
state of mind when I do carry it out. In the rst case I am lying
to myself, in the second I consent in advance to lie to someone
else.
Gabriel Marcel1

If, like truth, the lie had but one face, we would be on better
terms. For we would accept as certain the opposite of what the
liar would say. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand
faces and an innite eld.
Michel de Montaigne2

Martha Nussbaum, Tobin Siebers, Robert Coles, Richard Eldridge,


and Wayne Booth, among others, have revitalized the eld of ethics
and literature by investigating how the study of narrative can
uniquely enrich our understanding and teaching of ethical concepts.3 As I have mentioned, Nussbaum has gone so far as to claim
that literature is a form of moral philosophy. An Aristotelian who
takes as her starting point the idea that ethics is the desire to dene
a good life for a human being, Nussbaum values novels as ``texts
which display to us the complexity, the indeterminacy, the sheer
difculty of moral choice . . . If our moral lives are `stories' in
which mystery and risk play a central and a valuable role, then it
may well seem that the `intelligent report' of those lives requires the
abilities and techniques of the teller of stories'' (Love's Knowledge
14142). The formal, generalizing, unemotional style traditionally
adopted by moral philosophy often fails to do justice to the richness
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Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 115

and particularity of our lives. A moral philosopher herself, though


one whose writings cross disciplinary boundaries, Nussbaum does
not, however, reject the philosophical for the literary, but instead
seeks to combine them. Two points central to her work have
informed my thinking about Conrad's novels: rst, contemporary
ethical theory is as important as literary theory for those of us
studying ction; and second, narratives, through their structure,
style, and dialogue, as well as their emphasis on character and
choice, enact a unique form of ethical inquiry for readers attentive
to their particularity. This chapter tests these assumptions through
an analysis of one of Conrad's most ethically problematic novels
while also considering how turn-of-the-century anxiety about
agency is as pervasive in Conrad's ction as in the other narratives
I have discussed.
Under Western Eyes (1911) frustrates efforts to locate its moral
center because one of the novel's most insistent themes that
language itself is suspect denies readers the comfort of a clearly
communicated moral meaning. Lisa Rado represents an inuential
group of critics of the novel when she concludes that ``if there is
any moral to this tale, it is that it is dangerous to look for one.''4
However, recent arguments about Conrad's linguistic pessimism
actually benet an ethical study of Under Western Eyes by
suggesting how this study might appropriately begin with what the
text reveals about the uses of language. The novel's plot turns on
the acts that words enable: conding, promising, self-communing,
betraying, interrogating, lying, confessing, storytelling. Although
all of these speech acts are ethically interconnected, two of them
promising and lying have generated so much discussion within
moral philosophy that it seems important to consider the
transformation such ethical concepts undergo when elaborated
through narrative rather than philosophical discourse. What does
Conrad's rich and complicated story about Russian autocrats, spies,
and revolutionaries have to contribute to an understanding of what
it can mean to make a promise or to tell a lie? This is a question
critics have addressed obliquely, but because the lies that follow
from the novel's crucial act of betrayal are so obvious and dominant

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in the narrative, paradoxically they have received little direct


attention even from critics centrally concerned with ethics.5
Following Andrzej Busza's observation that ``Razumov's tragedy
resides in the fact that he is living in a society which imposes
upon its members extremely difcult moral problems, while
simultaneously confusing their moral bearings,''6 my discussion
of promising and lying will consider how Under Western Eyes
collapses ordinarily bold political distinctions (for example,
between government informant and terrorist, autocrat and
revolutionary) and develops characters who have lost, along with
their moral bearings, their belief in self-determination and ethical
choice. But I am just as interested in how this moral and linguistic
pessimism is related to the unsentimental hope of the novel's
ending, which suggests that there are honest, courageous ways to
use language even within corrupt societies.
I want to begin by considering a denition of promise-making
formulated by Annette Baier, a moral philosopher who is, like
Conrad, wary of atomistic, rule-based morality. An antifoundationalist in philosophy, inuenced by J. L. Austin and ``his relentless
questioning of all easy generalities, his delity to complex facts,''
Baier denes a promise as words that carry the force of ``agreement-based custom'';7 it is Hume's denition of promise-making
that she seeks to clarify and interpret, stressing that our assumption
that morality is a cultural phenomenon is an idea that Hume in his
day needed to champion: ``Today's version of reason . . . is not the
reason Hume tried to dethrone. It is much more like that capacity
to acquire what Hume called `habit,' to learn and operate with
`customs,' `conventions,' and social `artices.' This was a capacity
Hume contrasted with reason'' (Baier, Postures of the Mind 177).
Conrad too saw ``moral law'' not as natural or absolute but as socially determined. A ction about Europeans in Africa, ``An
Outpost of Progress'' (1897), like Heart of Darkness (1899), dramatizes how morality is undermined by ``the negation of the habitual''
(40) that accompanies a change in surroundings. Both novels
suggest that social context makes what we think of as morality possible: in the words of the narrator of ``An Outpost,'' ``The courage,

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 117

the composure, the condence; the emotions and principles; every


great and every insignicant thought belongs not to the individual
but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the
irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of
its police and of its opinion.''8 In a passage deleted from the
manuscript of Heart of Darkness, Marlow reects on how martial
music can make a mild-mannered fellow suddenly feel capable of
murder; all that stands in his way is social custom and the reputation
it confers the fact that there is ``a man next door to call you
names.''9
In her Humean denition of promising Baier stipulates that
every promise is accompanied by the threat of penalty: ``if I can
have you as it were stigmatized, so that others recognize you as
someone not to be trusted, then you have a fairly strong selfinterested reason not to break your promise to me'' (188). Conrad's
sense of the moral power of public opinion to restrain through
language alone is in keeping with this denition. But Under Western
Eyes subjects to skeptical scrutiny the normative dimension of this
idea the assumption, in other words, that ethical penalties are
straightforward, operative, and predictable. I am arguing that in
Under Western Eyes Conrad demonstrates, through his sophisticated
narrative method, that within a particularized political context the
consequences of a broken promise can be much more perverse and
complicated than most philosophical reections on such ethical
commitments would be likely to anticipate. Even a philosophical
discourse as subtle and complex as Baier's fails to do justice to these
complications because it remains abstract, while Under Western
Eyes compels us to pay attention to details. My analysis of these
details follows what I see as the ethical structure of the novel, which
is determined by speech acts and the social contracts they imply:
rst promising, then lying, and nally confessing.
promises
Razumov's story begins with talk of reputation, the concept most
often linked in ethical theory to promising. Ironically, however,

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Razumov's worthy reputation as someone who can be trusted is


responsible for the nightmarish turn his life takes. For Haldin seeks
Razumov out, though he is a virtual stranger, on the basis of what
he has heard and assumed about his fellow student's character.
Haldin, political assassin in hiding, stands leaning against the stove
in the very room Razumov plans to enter to work on the prizewinning essay that will secure his reputation as ``a celebrated old
professor, decorated, possibly a Privy Councillor, one of the glories
of Russia nothing more!''10 With the abrupt intrusion of Haldin
into Razumov's rooms, Conrad underscores the power of the
political to disrupt and control the personal, but he also stresses
how different one's public reputation can be from one's sense of
self. The good reputation Razumov has among the revolutionaries
seems completely out of his control and quite different from the one
he actively strives to attain.11
One of the effects of reading Part One of the novel, then, is that
we begin to question the moral commonplace that conscious
choices earn us the reputation we would wish to have. For very
particular reasons, Razumov wants to be recognized as a good
patriotic citizen; his aspirations are understandable because they are
those of Prince K-'s illegitimate son, who desires attention and
approval but cannot be openly acknowledged by his father. The
political contingencies of Razumov's life, however, confront him
with choices that deny him the future he plots for himself. Thus the
ethical import of the story of Razumov's unwilling political
involvement emerges less from an analysis of his choices than from
attention to the powerful social net that constrains them. ``A man's
real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men,''
Razumov realizes before his encounter with Haldin, but his
modication, ``by reason of respect or natural love'' (63), betrays
his naive optimism at this point. Later he comes to a better understanding of the complex and unruly forces that generate the
reputations we confer on each other.
Staking his life on the reputation of a stranger, Haldin asks
Razumov to secure the means of his escape, but he makes Razumov
a promise: ``I don't see how my passage through your rooms can be

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 119

ever known. If I should be got hold of, I'll know how to keep silent
no matter what they may be pleased to do to me'' (67). Agreeing
to seek out Ziemianitch constitutes Razumov's promise of help:
``You must give me precise directions, and for the rest depend on
me'' (69).12 From the beginning, then, Haldin and Razumov are
locked in a relationship of mutual dependence, a reciprocal agreement to live up to one's word and not to name names (for Haldin,
an important part of Razumov's reputation is reserve).
According to Baier's denition, when we make a promise, ``there
is an immediate exchange of powers to harm, but not of the same
sort of power to the same sort of harm'' (200). This is usually true
in the sense that the person who has extracted a promise has the
power to damage the promisor's reputation, whereas the promisor's
power to harm need not be as dependent on a community that cares
about a person's trustworthiness. In other words, by breaking the
promise, the promisor could compromise the promisee's safety,
endanger lives, etc., whereas the promisee's power to harm is more
often dependent upon the value of reputation. In the story Conrad
tells, however, the matter becomes much more complicated. In this
political context, the power to harm is equalized because each man
promises to protect the other's life from a repressive regime's
ultimate power to harm. Although Haldin has sought out Razumov
to request a promise, the promise he makes in return cancels the
implicit threat to damage reputation with which a promise is conventionally received, especially when we consider that Haldin does
not make his promise contingent on the loyalty of Razumov, whose
trustworthiness is not questioned for a minute.
Arguing with himself and rationalizing his decision, Razumov
breaks his promise only hours later. He turns Haldin in because he
has no desire to be trusted by revolutionary students, but does wish
to earn the trust of the czarist government. The moral rule does not
hold, though, because Razumov commits an act of betrayal only to
win admiration from his uncomprehending fellow students for
being Haldin's accomplice; ironically, breaking a promise
strengthens his reputation among the revolutionaries as much as
keeping it would have done. General T- notices, and later exploits,

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what he calls Razumov's ``great and useful quality of inspiring condence'' (91). Traditionally thought to be a virtue, this quality in
this context robs Razumov of will and agency. It also leaves him
feeling profoundly alone. He condes in Mikulin, ``I begin to think
there is something about me which people don't seem able to make
out'' (129).
In contrast, Haldin keeps his promise but is eventually executed,
earning only martyrdom as his ethical reward. And until his death,
Haldin persists in thinking of his friend as ``magnanimous'' (101),
even when Razumov, after the betrayal, blurts out to Haldin words
that reveal that he is no revolutionary. When Razumov is referred
to obliquely, during the police interrogation of Haldin, as ``the man
. . . on whose information you have been arrested'' (125), Haldin
refuses to name him or to say anything at all about him. It is far
from clear that Conrad encourages us to see this resolve as an act of
heroism. In his mysticism, Haldin has described himself as
inevitably shaped by and shaping a political movement, resigned to
do the ``heavy work'' required of him by the community with
which he identies himself: ``It's you thinkers who are in everlasting
revolt,'' he says to Razumov. ``I am one of the resigned'' (70). Just
as Razumov's sense of agency is illusory, Haldin's political acts are
not necessarily free or individually motivated; in fact, his
resignation to the tide of revolutionary change reveals its obverse
during the interrogation resistance to authority that becomes a
kind of acceptance of coercion as a fact to be endured, a force that
denes one's role and identity.
In The Secret Agent (1906), the Professor speaks of humanity
with contempt because of its slavery to social convention: ``The
terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality counter moves in the same game . . .''13 Haldin
sees himself as a game piece, ``moved to do this reckless like a
butcher . . . scattering death'' (70). His political rhetoric is
occasionally disrupted by pangs of conscience, but, as Busza points
out, both Haldin and Razumov nd their actions motivated by
ideologies that remove them ``from the restraints of an ordinary
formal conscience'' (``Rhetoric and Ideology'' 110). Haldin

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 121

describes his bomb-throwing as a necessary strategy of his side,


which, he contends, will win because it has ``a future . . . a
mission'' (69). He risks his life gladly, knowing that his spirit will
simply migrate to another Russian body and go on warring against
tyranny; otherwise, ``where would be the sense of . . .
martyrdom?'' he muses (69). If during the interrogation Haldin had
broken his promise, lied, and betrayed Razumov (now obviously a
pawn in the government's game), the revolutionary cause would
have been better served. But the Professor's observation about the
power of conventionally dened social roles holds true in this case:
the job of secret police is to interrogate and torture, and the
terrorist's traditional defense and deance is silence. Despite the
teleology of Haldin's political rhetoric, the novel itself suggests that
this game is played out endlessly, futilely repeating cycles of
violence.
In his sense of himself as utterly alone and out of the game,
Razumov resembles the Professor. But social convention snares
Razumov, drawing him into his nation's political life without
mitigating his loneliness. The Professor in his single-minded,
anarchic quest for the perfect detonator seems, by contrast, to be
Conrad's creation of an unreal man who embodies the remote
possibility of escaping the social. Razumov is more painfully real.
His acts of making and breaking a promise implicate him in new
coercive social contracts and carry consequences that doom him to
be perpetually misunderstood. Most painful of all, Razumov
simultaneously feels helpless (no longer in control of his choices or
identity) and guilty. He thinks of Haldin's intrusion as beyond his
control, but he considers his own promise, with its implicit lie, an
act he might have forestalled if only he had known the
consequences: ``You don't know,'' he thinks. ``You welcome the
crazy fate. `Sit down,' you say'' (118). If for Haldin the future is a
foregone conclusion, for Razumov it abruptly changes from the site
of his glorious career to a mineeld he cannot choose not to
navigate. The question Councillor Mikulin asks as Razumov moves
toward the door in the middle of their interview ``Where to?''
is one Razumov cannot answer because he understands that if he

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was ever in control of the direction of his life, he is no longer. The


question underscores Razumov's despair at nding himself caught
in a squeeze between the lawlessness of autocracy and the lawlessness of revolution: ``The feeling that his moral personality was at
the mercy of these lawless forces was so strong that he asked
himself seriously if it were worth while to go on accomplishing the
mental functions of that existence which seemed no longer his
own'' (113). Conrad makes us acutely aware that normative moral
life, which is Razumov's initial aspiration, becomes impossible
within such a political context. After telling the story of the broken
promise that perversely wins Razumov social acceptance of the
wrong kind, Conrad takes us inside Razumov's struggle to regain
his sense of agency and moral personhood.
This struggle seems to begin even before Haldin is apprehended,
during those moments when Razumov tries to convince himself
that once this assassin leaves his room everything will return to
normal. Like Marlow concentrating on the work of repairing his
steamer, Razumov seeks refuge in the ordinary details of daily life,
recognizing in them ``an armour for the soul'' (94). But unlike
Marlow, he is tormented both by his inner life and by the outer
experience that should provide his armor. Under Western Eyes
dramatizes and counterpoints ethics as public (social contracts,
political allegiance, reputation, ideology, etc.) and ethics as private
(conscience, deliberation, self-deception, personal relationships,
etc.). ``Nobody doubts the moral soundness of your action,'' the
Prince assures Razumov, but of course Razumov himself is
tormented by doubt and by the secrets that burden him after the
betrayal. Before entering his rooms with the knowledge that he
must conceal the truth from Haldin, he reminds himself that ``life
goes on as before with its mysterious and secret sides quite out of
sight, as they should be. Life is a public thing'' (95). But Razumov's
tragedy is that his life has become too public no longer his: his
public reputation is what gives rise to his contact with Haldin, his
hope to please public ofcials (his only family) leads to his betrayal,
the police raid on his rooms reenacts Haldin's disruption of his
privacy, and when he feels compelled to agree to work as a spy he

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 123

gives up his intelligence as an independent thinker to serve state


intelligence. Nevertheless, paradoxically, what Razumov nds most
unbearable is an inner voice relentlessly rationalizing and arguing
with itself. Even though he belongs to neither of the groups that
claim him, he must outwardly seem to belong, and the inner voice
obsessively warns him that a truthful self, which is private and
prohibited, is always in danger of leaking out. Ordinarily we think
of conscience as internalized social ethics, but in Razumov's case his
conscience is at odds with the social and political world he
negotiates.
Ostensibly also at odds are the groups constituting the political
world from which he struggles to free himself. During the interview
with Mikulin that leads to his employment by the government,
Razumov beholds in his mind's eye an image of his brain as a gure
being torn asunder on a rack. The thoughts that accompany this
vision, however, return us to the idea that from Razumov's vantage
point revolutionaries and autocrats are more alike than different.
Whereas the ofcials remain suspicious of him even as they are
willing to use him, the revolutionaries ardently embrace him
because their utopian illusions blind them to the qualities in
Razumov that they would rather not see. But while nervously discoursing to Mikulin, who nds it easy to get people to talk,
Razumov confuses the groups that have him on the rack:
With a great ow of words he complained of being totally misunderstood.
Even as he talked with a perception of his own audacity he thought that the
word `misunderstood' was better than the word `mistrusted,' and he repeated
it again with insistence. Suddenly he ceased, being seized with fright before
the attentive immobility of the ofcial. `What am I talking about?' he
thought, eyeing him with a vague gaze. Mistrusted not misunderstood
was the right symbol of these people. Misunderstood was the other kind of
curse. Both had been brought on his head by that fellow Haldin. And his
head ached terribly. He passed his hand over his brow an involuntary
gesture of suffering, which he was too careless to restrain. (121)

As Jeremy Hawthorn has noted about this novel, the characters'


bodies are often more direct and expressive than their words;
gestures reveal, while language tends to distance, conceal, and
deceive.14 But the novel also represents language, despite the malle-

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ability that makes it susceptible to manipulation, as slippery unpredictable and uncontrollable. In the wake of his broken promise
(which he rationalized to himself with carefully chosen words),
Razumov is misunderstood by the revolutionaries, though he
would prefer that they mistrusted him, and mistrusted by the authorities whose trust he had hoped to earn. Although the two groups
are pulling him in opposite directions, to Razumov they appear
identical in many ways, not the least of which is the way they are
both conspiring to make a liar of him.
lies
While Razumov's experiences in Part One of the novel are initiated
by the promise that Haldin exacts from him, and characterized by
Razumov's suddenly keen understanding that life is a ``public
thing,'' the second and third parts of Under Western Eyes represent
Razumov's employment as a double agent, his entry into a social
contract that renders his life too private to be shared. Hence, lies
and deception become the focus of this section of the narrative.
Conrad returns in this novel to the gure he used for lying in Heart
of Darkness: the taste of something rotten. When Sophia Antonovna
says to Razumov, ``You must have bitten something bitter in your
cradle,'' he absently accepts her explanation. But when he adds,
``Only it was much later'' (250), he has traced the source of his life's
bitterness to his broken promise and the lies to Haldin which in
turn necessitated more lying. Razumov proves to be a liar at once
consummate and deeply reluctant.
In his recent Bakhtinian reading of Under Western Eyes, Bruce
Henricksen observes that the narrative method of this novel undermines our ``desire to attribute individual ownership to . . .
words.''15 By making the novel a translation and a narrative rendering of Razumov's notebook and several other documents and interviews, Conrad reminds us of Bakhtin's point that ``every word is
a shared word'' (Henricksen, Nomadic Voices 138). The novel does
stress the transindividual nature of language, but the argument that
Conrad thwarts our efforts to identify who owns particular words

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 125

raises an interesting problem for those of us studying the novel's


thematics of lying. How do we identify Razumov, or anyone else in
the novel, as a liar when it is so difcult to determine which words
are his ``his'' both in the sense of resulting from relatively free
choice and in the sense of his and not someone else's (for example
the language teacher's)? Conrad seems simultaneously to encourage
us to condemn the verbal act of lying and to be skeptical of our
judgment as we wonder whether we are being lied to ourselves
about the agent of deceit. Henricksen's view of the novel's
unanchored language is more optimistic: by afrming ``the
civilizing power of discourse in the face of silence,'' his argument
responds to what he seems to view as an overemphasis on the
novel's moments of coerced speech and writing: ``. . . all language
in the novel is shared language carrying signicance and values that
escape the control of any individual,'' and this dialogism is what
makes freedom possible by disempowering monologic discourse
(138, 149). My own sense is that the novel's ending does offer some
hope of community by afrming just such an ideal of shared
language, but the possibility is realized only when Razumov is able
to gain a measure of ethical agency by escaping from oppressive
social control and what he feels as the coercion to speak lies. That
we as readers often have been left wondering about the ownership
of words makes the moment late in the novel when Razumov
confesses, ``owns up'' to his broken promise and lies, all the more
powerful.
In moral philosophy, a liar is most simply and traditionally
dened as a person who has chosen untrue words for which he or
she then becomes responsible. As much as the speech acts in Under
Western Eyes invite a poststructuralist reading, Conrad's treatment
of lies also raises old-fashioned, pragmatic questions of conscience
and responsibility. In her book on lying, Sissela Bok draws a
distinction between ``the freeloading liar and the liar whose
deception is a strategy for survival in a corrupt society,'' but she
goes on to make the important point that what she calls the ``freeloading liar,'' the liar who is deceitful but expects everyone else to
be honest, is related to the type (like Razumov) who feels coerced

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into lying: once enough persons choose to lie, the rest of their
community will ``feel pressed to lie to survive'' (Lying 25).
Razumov's resentment clearly communicates that sense of
pressure. As if against his will, he nds himself again and again
identied with what he hates. He admits that he despises Haldin
because ``to keep alive a false idea is a greater crime than to kill a
man'' (127). What he means is that he hates the utopian visionary in
Haldin, but the phrase ``to keep alive a false idea'' becomes a
perfect description of Razumov's own purpose in life after his act of
betrayal. By holding back the truth about his visit to Ziemianitch,
Razumov keeps alive for the autocracy, despite its suspicion, the
false idea that he is free of any complicity in Haldin's crime. By
posing as a revolutionary in Geneva, as Haldin's accomplice,
Razumov takes in everyone with his masquerade but is overcome
by self-loathing because he knows that ``to keep alive a false idea''
has become his vocation and supplanted the noble career he chose
for himself. Razumov also reenacts what he thinks of as Haldin's
lesser crime. As many readers have recognized, while Haldin
``kill[s] a man'' by throwing the bomb at Mr. de P , the corrupt
Minister of State, Razumov ``kill[s] a man'' by ngering the political
criminal.
Both before and after Haldin's death, Razumov obsessively
refers to him as a phantom one that is harmless because he can be
walked over, or convenient because he can be blamed as a
``haunting, falsehood-breeding spectre'' (289). But these ways of
characterizing Haldin are of a piece with Razumov's pattern of selfdeception; he repeatedly lies to himself about Haldin as a means of
distancing himself from the man's humanity and evading ethical
deliberation. Taking comfort in his recollection that Haldin
believed in an afterlife, Razumov forgets the nature of that afterlife
as Haldin described it: the migration of the soul of one revolutionary into the body of another. But we might read Razumov's
excruciating internal struggle of the novel's second and third parts
not as a haunting by Haldin but as an uncanny instance of inuence,
of Razumov's character being inhabited and reconstructed by a
migrating revolutionary soul. This is a strong image of coercion,

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 127

though by the end of the novel the blurring of the boundary


between Razumov's character and Haldin's is cast in a more
positive light. The ``phantom'' that ruins Razumov's life later lends
him his courage.16
Razumov resents whatever force it is that seems to compels him
to lie; at war with it is his impulse to tell the truth. At one point, in
conversation with Peter Ivanovitch (who accepts Razumov, in that
resonant Conradian phrase, as ``one of us'' [215]), Razumov declares
his identity with Russia, but then immediately regrets his words:
``That was not the right sort of talk. All sincerity was an imprudence. Yet one could not renounce truth altogether, he thought,
with despair'' (215). In Under Western Eyes, as in his other political
novels, Conrad considers the problem of how and why truthfulness
is incompatible with politics, why honest men (and sometimes
women) nd themselves caught up in lies when they become
entangled in political contexts.
Ironically, the group most honest in its witnessing of tyranny
and unnecessary human suffering is also the group most evidently
mired in dangerous illusions, most likely to lie to itself and to be
taken in by lies. Haldin's initial misreading of Razumov, which is
repeated by the revolutionaries in St. Petersburg and Geneva, does
tremendous harm to Razumov, to Haldin's family, to the revolutionary cause. But, as Hannah Arendt argues in ``Lying in Politics,''
the urgent need to bring about future change is often linked to
denial of present reality: ``the deliberate denial of factual truth the
ability to lie and the capacity to change facts the ability to act
are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source:
imagination.''17 An imaginative writer from a family of political
activists and artists, Conrad must have been acutely aware of this
interconnection.18 In much of his ction, political involvement is
made possible by imaginative activity that occludes clear vision of
facts but enables action. ``Action is consolatory,'' as dened by the
narrator of Nostromo (1904). ``It is the enemy of thought and the
friend of attering illusions.''19
In Under Western Eyes, however, skepticism about those caught
up in revolutionary action (expressed most often through

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Razumov's scorn or the language teacher's disapproval) is in


dialogue with voices defending the revolutionaries for attempting
to combat what Nathalie Haldin calls ``the absolutist lies,'' even if
the process entails countering lies with lies. She attempts to get the
language teacher to recognize what his Western perspective
obscures:
I believe that you hate revolution; you fancy that it's not quite honest. You
belong to a people which has made a bargain with fate and wouldn't like to
be rude to it. But we have made no bargain. It was never offered to us so
much liberty for so much hard cash. You shrink from the idea of revolutionary action for those you think well of as if it were something how shall
I say it not quite decent'' (157).

Through her friendly mockery of the language teacher's decontextual ethics a sort of English drawing-room moral code of
manners, being ``honest'' and ``decent'' by not being rude or raising
objections Nathalie makes it clear that she resents his efforts to
protect her from political involvement. At the same time, Peter
Ivanovitch, the man attempting to lure her into involvement, is a
pseudo-feminist hypocrite and liar, a ``revolutionary'' who is as
much a tyrant as any of the representatives of autocracy. Despite
her innocence, Nathalie understands how ruthless political institutions create networks of cruelty and suffering even among those
who dene themselves against oppression. In a novel that lacks a
clear sense of narrative authority, the epigraph helps us gauge
where the implied author's sympathies lie: ``I would take liberty
from any hand as a hungry man would snatch a piece of bread.''
Conrad quotes Nathalie here, and though much of the novel's satire
is directed against the revolutionaries, her idealism and passionate
urgency are granted respect. Her ``revolutionary faith is expressed
too winningly for us to feel that Conrad is merely indulging her.''20
If Haldin's spirit lives on, perversely and stubbornly, in
Razumov, it nds a more welcoming home in Nathalie, who
envisions a future not only just but merciful: ``Revolutionist and
reactionary, victim and executioner, betrayer and betrayed, they
shall all be pitied together when the light breaks on our black sky at
last. Pitied and forgotten: for without that there can be no union

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 129

and no love'' (327). Razumov's response to these words is ``I hear,''


and their promise of forgiveness helps him to wrest a sense of
agency from his growing belief that he is merely a manipulated
player in a cosmic practical joke, a belief that gains strength after
the news of Ziemianitch's death but develops alongside his desire to
free himself from living a lie.21
Razumov's rst response is relief when he hears that Ziemianitch
has committed suicide and is now assumed to have been Haldin's
betrayer: the safety this error confers on Razumov will free him
from the need to tell any more direct lies. But he also nds that the
story Sophia Antonova passes along has afforded him a ``glimpse
into the utmost depths of self-deception'' (273), and Ziemianitch's
quintessentially Russian slide into mysticism lls him with ``a large
neutral pity'':
This was a comedy of errors. It was as if the devil himself were playing a
game with all of them in turn. First with him, then with Ziemianitch, then
with those revolutionists . . . He interrupted his earnest mental soliloquy
with a jocular thought at his own expense. ``Hallo! I am falling into
mysticism too'' (274).

Razumov, who has prided himself on being sober, clear-eyed, and


as his name suggests rational, nds himself in a situation so
bizarre that at rst he can only make sense of it by subscribing to a
vision of the future that is as fatalistic as the Russian peasants' or as
assured of its providential success as the revolutionaries' or autocrats'. Yet this belief in Providence is only tentative an occasion
for self-mockery. In her reading of the novel, Lisa Rado makes
much of Razumov's ``transcendent vision of his own destiny''
(``Walking Through Phantoms'' 89), but the words she ascribes to
the novel's protagonist are actually Mikulin's: ``I believe rmly in
Providence. Such a confession on the lips of an old hardened ofcial
like me may sound to you funny'' (28384). The latter of these two
sentences (which Rado does not quote) underscores once again
how much the government ofcials resemble the revolutionaries
and how distanced Razumov feels from both groups.
When he hears that Sophia Antonova, whom he thinks of as ``the
respectable enemy,'' the most intelligent of the revolutionaries,

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believes in him, Razumov admits to Nathalie that he is struggling to


resist the temptation of belief in Providence:
Things then are going as well as possible. Everything conspires to . . . Ah!
these conspirators . . . they would get hold of you in no time! You know,
Natalia Victorovna, I have the greatest difculty in saving myself from the
superstition of an active Providence. It's irresistible . . . The alternative, of
course, would be the personal Devil of our simple ancestors. But, if so, he
has overdone it altogether the old Father of Lies our national patron
our domestic god, whom we take with us when we go abroad. He has
overdone it. It seems that I am not simple enough . . . That's it! I ought to
have known . . . And I did know it'' (325).

These words confound and frighten the language teacher, but


Nathalie senses that Razumov is on the brink of confession, that he
is holding something back from her. Ultimately, Razumov is not
simple enough to be taken in by ``the old Father of Lies,'' his country's god or devil; his curse is that he sees a lie as a lie. He realizes
that to say ``I ought to have known'' misses the point by excusing
himself as a dupe, when really even in his self-deception part of
him has seen quite clearly how Ziemianitch and the other self-styled
revolutionary conspirators unwittingly conspired to keep him, the
betrayer, safe. His love for Nathalie and the ideal of a truthful life
that she represents (since there is in her ``no guile, no deception, no
falsehood, no suspicion'' [324]) has made this situation unbearable
for him. Point of view is crucial in any discussion of lying, since the
perspective of the liar is so radically different from that of the
person being lied to. Razumov's scorn for Haldin and the other
political players has made it difcult for him to be anything but selfcentered in his thinking. But when he comes to care about Nathalie,
he nds that he is able to free himself from his culture's cynical
arguments about the diabolical determinism that governs his life
and from his skepticism about the possibility of truth telling. As
Bok notes, ``Both skepticism and determinism have to be bracketed
set aside if moral choice is to retain the signicance for liars that
we, as deceived, know it has in our lives'' (Lying 23). As a skeptical
thinker, Conrad was always mindful of the limits and dangers of
skepticism.22

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 131

In The Unvarnished Truth, David Nyberg takes issue with what


he sees as the standard view in moral philosophy that deception is a
categorical wrong. His more contextual approach to lying stresses a
point that also surfaces in Under Western Eyes: deception is ubiquitous because it is encouraged and rewarded on a social level and
often experienced as fostering emotional well-being on a personal
level. Deceiving is ``publicly condemned,'' Nyberg points out, but
at the same time it is ``privately practiced by almost everybody.''23
Quite unlike Conrad, Nyberg displays a pragmatic readiness to
accept the inevitability of lying and to develop what he believes we
have evaded because of moral philosophy's tendency to overvalue
truth telling: that is, an ethics of deception. ``The central problem is
this: even though we have come to know that life without deception
is not possible, we have not diligently trained ourselves to deceive
thoughtfully and judiciously, charitably, humanely, and with
discretion'' (Varnished Truth 25). What is troubling about Nyberg's
position, and what makes it, in my view, only partly right, is its
rather cynical assumption that most of us would prefer to be
deceived and to deceive, even if we could avoid a life of lies.
Conrad's Razumov makes us vividly aware of reasons to question
this assumption. Although Under Western Eyes dramatizes the pervasiveness of deception, Conrad retains the distinction between
truth telling as virtuous and lying as harmful, both to self and
others.
ethical agency
If three-fourths of the novel undertakes an ethical inquiry into
promising and lying as speech acts, the fourth part concerns
Razumov's choice to confess to those who have been deceived and
face the consequences. In keeping with the novel's constant interplay of the ethical and the political, the private and the public, the
nonverbal and the verbal, Razumov actually confesses twice. His
rst confession takes place during what he considers a private interview with Nathalie (the language teacher is eavesdropping, but
Razumov is oblivious to him until after the confession when he

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

mutters, ``How did this old man come here?'' [328]). In this confession, the truth struggles on his lips (327), but he communicates it
without words, simply by pressing ``a denunciatory nger to his
breast with force'' (328). His second confession is written, a voluble
outpouring and a preliminary to the publicly spoken confession he
makes to the revolutionaries gathered at the Laspara house.
Before considering the signicance and the consequences of these
confessions, it is crucial to notice what a key role the structure of
Under Western Eyes plays in a reader's ethical response to Razumov.
Conrad's narrative method functions to delay his audience's most
severely judgmental response until the fourth and nal part of the
story, so that it coincides with, and is complicated by, Razumov's
self-judgment and confession. Not until this section do we learn, for
example, that Razumov reenacts Haldin's request for help by maliciously asking Madcap Kostia to steal money (which Razumov later
discards) to help him get out of Russia, even though this event
takes place very early in the chronology of the story. Our full sense
of the moral signicance of this act comes through Razumov's own
confession: ``He was a fool, but not a thief. I made him one . . . I
had to conrm myself in my contempt and hate for what I
betrayed'' (331). In the earlier sections of the novel our judgment of
Razumov, for one reason or another, remains tentative. In Part
One, we share to a certain extent his sense of violation and
bewilderment. In Part Two, because the narrator in the background for much of Part One steps forward as the language
teacher ignorant of Razumov's act, motivation, and true identity,
we see Razumov simultaneously through the eyes of an uncomprehending European and in Part Three, through the eyes of the
Russian revolutionaries in Geneva who implicitly trust and admire
him. We are of course aware of the irony in his gift of inspiring
condence, but because there is a gap between Mikulin's question,
``Where to?'', and Razumov's realization that he has little choice
but to cooperate with authority, we have no certain knowledge at
this point that Razumov is a police spy, and even if this fact is
inferred, the reader encountering the novel for the rst time is left
in the dark about motivation. The result of this narrative strategy

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 133

for most readers is probably that they judge Razumov, but also
understand him; for much of the novel readers are in fact made
acutely aware of the moral degradation he undergoes because of the
lies he seems destined to tell. Only in the fourth part are the novel's
readers, along with its characters, fully enlightened about the extent
of Razumov's responsibility and the element of malice in his
motivation.
The act of confession is itself complexly motivated. By having
Razumov engage in the dangerous self-indulgence of telling the
truth to himself by writing in a journal, Conrad makes it clear that
Razumov desires to confess for his own sake, not to make himself
physically secure (Ziemianitch's suicide has done that), but to rid
himself of the sensation that he is suffocating in lies. Still, in his
letter to Nathalie, Razumov describes the confession as yet another
coercion to speak. On the personal level what coerces him is conscience: he heeds a moral imperative. Within the social and political
context the pressure comes from Nathalie from her trust in
Razumov and her belief in her brother's revolutionary cause.
Both Razumov's self-revelation to Nathalie written in his journal
and the language teacher's narration of the events of that night of
confession suggest a mirror-image repetition of the night Haldin
was betrayed. Realizing that ``you don't walk with impunity over a
phantom's breast'' (334), Razumov decides that Haldin is haunting
him not as an insubstantial spirit but as Nathalie she is the soul
destined to carry on her brother's work. She is not merely deluding
herself, however, when she says to Razumov, ``it is in you that we
can nd all that is left of his generous soul'' (321), as ironic as the
words seem in this context. The dead man's presence is nearly
palpable for both of them just before Razumov reveals the truth
they simultaneously recognize Haldin in each other. Remarkably,
Razumov becomes the courageous and generous soul Nathalie
believes him to be, and she exhibits courage and generosity through
condence in him similar to that expressed by her brother. After
lying to Mrs. Haldin by conveying the news of Ziemianitch's
suicide, Razumov comes upon Nathalie suddenly and unexpectedly:
``Her presence in the ante-room was as unforeseen as the apparition

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

of her brother had been'' (318). Appropriately, their conversation


begins with Nathalie's fear that her mother will become unhinged
and begin hallucinating, seeing her son as a phantom. For the rst
time, it occurs to Razumov that he had a choice: ``I might have told
her something true,'' he admits of his interview with Mrs. Haldin,
indirectly beginning his confession to Nathalie and thereby
regaining for himself a measure of ethical agency and political
freedom, even though by this time he is understandably skeptical of
any romantic notion of free will. Agency power to change the
course of his life is still trammeled by others. ``You were
appointed to undo the evil by making me betray myself back into
truth and peace,'' he addresses Nathalie in his journal. ``You! And
you have done it in the same way, too, in which he ruined me: by
forcing upon me your condence'' (331). He recognizes that he
betrayed himself when he betrayed Haldin; only another betrayal of
self this time inauthentic self can release him from his ``prison
of lies'' (334). His vow of revenge was ``I shall steal his sister's soul
from her'' (331), but instead her soul/Haldin's soul is forced upon
him.
In the novel's conclusion, Conrad underscores an identity
between Razumov and Haldin son of autocracy and revolutionary
martyr which was earlier presented only ironically as Razumov's
reluctant pose. Conrad imagistically merges these doubles by
having Razumov deliberately wait until midnight to run down the
stairs of his lodgings just as Haldin did in St. Petersburg and by
leaving us with one nal, sinister repetition of the staircase imagery
that became one of Razumov's xations after gazing at the statue in
the General's room, Spontini's ``The Flight of Youth.'' After
detonating Razumov's eardrums, Nikita and the men who assist
him rush with Razumov ``noiselessly down the staircase'' (339).
Thus Razumov reenacts what Haldin must have experienced when
hustled away to his punishment by the police. Following the public
confession to the revolutionaries, Razumov becomes, like Haldin, a
victim of brutality. This seems to be Conrad's way of vividly representing Razumov's hard-won capacity for empathetic identication.
Razumov is simultaneously punished by both sides in the

Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 135

political struggle (Nikita ``killed yes! in both camps'' [348]). His


words before he is attacked are his most condent assertion of
agency: ``. . . today I made myself free from falsehood, from
remorse independent of every single human being on this earth''
(338). Paradoxically, Razumov's sense that he had been robbed of
independence, enmeshed in the lives of others, coexisted with his
unbearable loneliness. Deaf and crippled, he can no longer deny
what Tekla recognizes immediately: ``He'll need somebody'' (343).
At the end of Under Western Eyes Conrad narrates alternatives to
the novel's earlier suggestion that the political is opposed to the
ethical. Tekla, in her devoted care of Razumov, and Nathalie, in
her ``compassionate labours'' in Russian jails and homes, nd forms
of social involvement that mitigate suffering. From what we hear of
Razumov at the novel's end, we can gather that his relationships
with those around him have changed. In his freed intelligence and
new ability, despite his deafness, to engage in genuine dialogue
with the revolutionaries who visit him, Razumov is no longer
strangled by his own words.24 As Sophia Antonova reports, ``He
talks well'' (347).
Writing about the Aristotelian idea that our ties with others, our
lack of self-sufciency, are not to be transcended but recognized as
a virtue, Martha Nussbaum observes that ``politics is about using
human intelligence to support human neediness'' (Love's Knowledge
373). That seems close to the denition we are left with at the end
of the novel, and it clearly brings together the political and the
ethical, the public and the personal. Razumov's agonized wish to be
``independent of every single human being on this earth'' is like
wishing to be immortal, and Nussbaum seem right to suspect ``that
there is an incoherence lurking somewhere in the wish; that what
we actually love and prize would not survive such translations.
That we may be doomed or fortunate to be human beings simply,
beings for whom the valuable things in life don't come apart so
neatly from the fearful and terrible'' (368). Conrad's novel
heightens our awareness of this truth in the way it shapes our
desires as we read. Through its structure, dramatized choices,
internal monologues, relationships and dialogues, the narrative

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Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 18801914

moves its readers to want Razumov to escape from his claustrophobic prison of lies, even as we are made to understand the risks
that any confession in this political context would entail. We are led
to see the virtue in taking such risks. By satisfying the desires of its
implied readers, the novel's ending entangles the valuable
Razumov's truth-telling and the ethics of care and human
connection that this act enables with the terrible a crippled
neediness that marks as ironic Razumov's desperate wish to
transcend humanity. His insistently nontranscendent life reminds us
that we cannot escape the need for an ethics and politics of some
sort.
The linguistic pessimism inherent in the novel's view of the
psychological traps of modern political life in which listening
becomes a form of espionage, and talking a way to lie, manipulate,
and coerce is relieved by what Avrom Fleishman calls ``an
encouragement to change'' in the novel's nal vision of community
and uncoerced communication (Conrad's Politics 242). The
optimism of the conclusion of Under Western Eyes is qualied but
not deconstructed by the horrible fact of Razumov's physical mutilation and by the association throughout the novel of speech acts
with political pressure and undermined ethical agency. Conrad's
hope for social change was contingent upon recognition of the
importance for both individual and community of keeping promises
and telling the truth, even though his novel reminds us that doing
so will often seem impossibly difcult.

Afterword

English n-de-siecle novels, as I have endeavored to show, are


among the most ethically challenging narratives of the Victorian
period because they were written in a time of cultural transition and
anxiety about ethical agency. In periods of greater cultural stability,
the sort of moral perplexity so evident in these texts vanishes under
a veneer of self-assurance. But the sheer insecurity of the ethical
perspectives of turn-of-the-century narratives, because it disables
the capacity to gloss over all that does not t a neat set of norms,
makes possible an honesty about the difculty, the loose-ends, and
the unresolvable problems of our moral lives.
In the New Woman writing, ction by both men and women
challenged separate spheres ideology through its formal experimentation and its exploration of the capacity of emotion to liberate
moral thinking from gendered rules and norms. Reading this literature in the context of philosophical ideas about emotion, reason,
and gender enables a richer understanding of the importance of
feelings in the lives of late-century intellectual women struggling
with ethical problems. These feelings reveal a cognitive dimension
when studied in relation to ethical choice, and thus the novelists
redeem emotion from the questionable status that Victorian culture
had conferred upon it by associating it with women. As I argue,
however, while Schreiner, Grand, and Hardy reconceptualize the
traditional Victorian heroine, they also vividly represent all that
militates against this woman's new sense of self her social ostracism, her guilt, her failure in romantic relationships. Thus they
imagine a new and ethically promising dynamic of emotion and
reason in the lives of both women and men only to show through
137

138

Afterword

the stories of these early feminists that such a dynamic, though real,
is not yet recognized by a culture still steeped in separate spheres
thinking. My discussion of twentieth-century literary criticism
suggests that some readings of Hardy in the context of New
Woman writing have, unfortunately, been just as susceptible to the
pernicious tendency to associate men with reason and women with
feeling, while undervaluing the ethical potential of emotion.
Anxiety about agency is pervasive in New Woman writing, and
is perhaps most evident in the endings of the texts I examine. In
these endings, the cultural containment of the heroines reestablishes
separate spheres ideology by associating women with emotion that
swamps reason and results in hysteria, nervous breakdown, or
death. As much as these novelists wanted to plot bright futures for
their heroines, their intellectual honesty about the real conditions of
progressive women in late-century English society constrained
their sense of narrative possibilities. In their lives as in their
relationships, the New Women all evince a hopeful, irtatious
desire to defer ``the ending,'' to play for time and equal
opportunities, and this is a mark of their ethical agency even when
the irtation leads to pain and guilt. But their inability to defer the
fate they dread, and their increasing awareness of this inability,
make their stories depressingly grim.
Agency is also at issue in my study of A Laodicean within the
context of two of Hardy's most famous novels. What this context
shows is that the metaphor of the ethical agent as a gambler and
prankster, a trope that is central to A Laodicean, illuminates a
reading of moral luck in Tess and The Mayor of Casterbridge as well.
A contested, elusive concept in philosophical discourse, moral luck
becomes much easier to understand less an abstraction and more a
reality of ordinary life when identied in Hardy's narratives.
Conversely, a better grasp of the philosophical nature of the
phenomenon enables a more precise, nuanced discussion of Hardy's
obvious obsession with fate and chance.
A post-Darwinian freethinker, Hardy was unable to accept the
traditional Christian belief that God does not play dice with his
universe. As he sought to fathom what role ethics could play in a

Afterword

139

world governed by chance and randomness, Hardy became


fascinated by stories of ethical agents whose plans and dreams are
overturned by luck. His novels ask what sort of moral assessment is
most responsible in a world where agency is so often dramatically
even melodramatically compromised.
Ostensibly, the Victorian context is much less important to this
chapter, given its metaphysical concerns, than to the others in this
book. But Hardy's obsession with luck is a quintessentially n-desiecle preoccupation because of the unease about agency that fuels
it. If notions about God and a providential plan no longer construct
an ethical paradigm, then such late-century agnostics as Hardy
were faced with the daunting task of shaping an ethics that
acknowledges luck and the important role it plays in our lives. The
controversy still surrounding moral luck as we move into the
twenty-rst century, like the controversy still surrounding the role
of emotion in ethics, suggests that the intellectual work begun in
the Victorian period has not been satisfactorily completed in our
own age.
Distress about agency manifests itself in at least two other preoccupations of this period: n-de-siecle British aestheticism and
turn-of-the-century fascination with the interrelated speech acts of
promising and lying. As I have endeavored to show through my
discussion of Wilde, James, and Conrad, both of these areas of
concern are marked by the temptation to transcend the human and
embrace the ideal. The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ambassadors,
and Under Western Eyes all expose the dire ethical consequences of
succumbing to this temptation. Wilde and James are relevant
novelists to read in light of the ethical ideas of Emmanuel Levinas
and Paul Ricoeur because their narratives, as I have argued, are all
about the value of acknowledging intersubjective boundaries.
When this acknowledgment does not occur, when to use the
language of Stanley Cavell the desire for knowledge displaces
acknowledgment or recognition of the other, the protagonists nd
themselves cut adrift from the rest of humanity, deprived of the
agency they desire to transcend the merely human but also
deprived of love and relationship.

140

Afterword

When isolated in his prison of lies, Conrad's Razumov also


doubts his capacity for freedom as an ethical agent. He suffers even
more than Dorian and Strether, but unlike them he remains open to
love, able to acknowledge the betrayal of his broken promise by
acknowledging the other, Nathalie, and the difference his truthtelling will make to her. Locked like Dorian in a relationship of self
and mirror-self, self and conscience, he is able to nd release from
solipsism and suffocating lies when he recognizes the interdependence of human existence, no longer proudly bent on transcendence.
Even the ending of Conrad's novel, despite its hopeful vision of
community and release from guilt, offers but a qualied, tentative
belief in agency. The ethics of his ction, like that of Schreiner,
Grand, Hardy, Wilde, and James, is shadowed by n-de-siecle
doubt and perplexity. The very uncertainty of these narratives,
though, becomes their ethics.
As much as these novelists attempt to shape a new ethics by
reimagining narrative aesthetics, they also carry the embedded beak
and talons of what Schreiner gured as the arms of a superstition.
Victorian morality clearly had a residual hold on them, but their
ethical sensibility was capacious and realistic enough to want to
keep the best of the old ethics as they forged the new. Ultimately,
they all recognized the value of traditional morality when purged of
its unrelenting and hurtful idealism and its unquestioned assumptions about gender, emotion, alterity, and agency.

Notes

1 ethics and the turn to narrative


1 Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Harper,
1972), xi.
2 Tobin Siebers, Morals and Stories (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992), 46.
3 Martha Nussbaum, ``Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical
Theory,'' in Ralph Cohen, ed., The Future of Literary Theory (New York:
Routledge, 1989), 62.
4 For an account of this ``straightjacketing of ethics'' by both deconstruction and narrative theory, see Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative
Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapter 2.
5 See, for example, Nussbaum's review essay, revised as ``Reading for
Life'' and included in Love's Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990), chapter 9. In her view Booth's desire to defend himself leads
him to concede too much: ``I think Booth is, at this point, bending over
backwards to answer his real or imagined critics in the literary world,
hastening to reassure them that he is no dogmatist, no stuffy defender of
logic. He should not bend over so far'' (243). Similarly, Siebers wonders
if this tendency leads Booth to retreat from ethics to purely aesthetically
motivated judgments (see Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], 11), though it should be noted
that Booth himself argues against drawing a clear distinction between
ethics and aesthetics.
6 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting it Right: Language, Literature, and
Ethics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 9.
7 William J. Scheick, Fictional Structure and Ethics: The Turn-of-the-Century
English Novel (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990). My
approach is also similar to that of Laurence Lockridge in The Ethics of
Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) a book that
141

142
8

10

11

12

13

Notes to pages 35

focuses on the ethics of particular writers to develop a theory about the


ethics of a particular historical moment.
In his study of the 1890s, John Stokes calls attention to ``the rhetorical
magnetism of the single word `new''' during this nal decade of the
century (In the Nineties [Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1989], 15).
For studies that treat concerns of the Victorian n de siecle in relation to
those of the late twentieth century, see Elaine Showalter's Sexual
Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (New York: Penguin,
1991) and the essays collected in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle, ed.
Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).
Edmund Gosse's childhood, as he describes it in Father and Son (1907),
furnishes a classic example of story deprivation, for in his family the
reading of ction was strictly prohibited. As Plymouth Brethren, his
parents considered both storytelling and novel reading to be sinful
activities. His mother had been a natural storyteller as a girl but successfully repressed this instinct, much to Gosse's dismay. He himself eagerly
devoured ction wherever he could nd it during his boyhood; he
describes reading a sensation novel, for instance, while kneeling on the
bare oor of an attic peering at the pages which had been torn from the
book to line an old trunk (Father and Son [New York: Penguin, 1983], 49,
59).
Siebers argues that ``to emphasize the story as story, giving all weight to
its detail and none to generalization, cuts it loose as an example from
ethical theory'' (Morals and Stories 46). Still, he demonstrates through his
reading of fables in Morals and Stories that morals are often inadequate to
stories. That is Nussbaum's point, too. In a discussion that follows her
reading of The Golden Bowl, she usefully contrasts a generalized moral
``All daughters should treat their fathers as Maggie treats Adam here''
(blunt and inadequate) with what she calls ``a direction of thought and
imagination'' that does justice to the particularity of the scene: ``All
daughters should treat their fathers with the same level of sensitivity to
the father's concrete character and situation, and to the particularities of
their histories, that Maggie displays here'' (Love's Knowledge 16667).
Again, detail and context are crucial.
Margaret Urban Walker, ``Moral Understanding: Alternative `Epistemology' for a Feminist Ethics,'' in Eve Browning Cole and Susan
Coultrap-McQuin, eds., Explorations in Feminist Ethics: Theory and
Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 169.
As early as the 1960s, Iris Murdoch herself a novelist as well as a
philosopher called for a moral philosophy that was more attentive to

Notes to pages 511

14
15

16

17
18

19
20
21

22
23

143

human relationship, particularity, and emotion, all of which she felt had
been compromised by the overly theoretical orientation of contemporary
ethics. In his recent study of moral psychology and moral theory,
Lawrence A. Blum makes the point that, unfortunately, Murdoch's
charge is still true twenty years later. See Murdoch's The Sovereignty of
Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) and Blum's Moral
Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994).
Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and
Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1617.
Seyla Benhabib shares Held's wariness even as she draws from postmodernist ideas in constructing a model of communicative ethics
attentive to issues of gender: ``Postmodernism is an ally with whom
feminism cannot claim identity but only partial and strategic solidarity''
(Situating the Self: Gender, Politics, and Communicative Ethics [New
York: Routledge, 1992], 15). Women would only make a virtue out of
necessity, for instance, if they embraced the postmodern vision of self as
fractured and opaque.
Martha C. Nussbaum, ``Feminists and Philosophy.'' Review of A Mind of
One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, Louise M. Anthony
and Charlotte Witt, eds., in New York Review of Books, 20 October 1994:
60.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1984), 22.
About pseudo-objectivity, or an appeal to an essentialism that might not
even exist, MacIntyre points out that ``when men and women identify
what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too
completely with the cause of some universal principle, they usually
behave worse than they would otherwise do'' (After Virtue 221).
Terry Eagleton, ``The Flight to the Real,'' in Ledger and McCracken,
eds., Cultural Politics 12.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), xvi.
Nussbaum shares Rorty's view of what happens ethically when we read
novels. She makes the further point that for self-examination we need the
sort of emotional distance a narrative can provide: ``A novel, just because
it is not our life, places us in a moral position that is favorable for
perception and it shows us what it would be like to take up that position
in life'' (Love's Knowledge 162).
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 11.
Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1984), 8.

144

Notes to pages 1222

24 Anthony Cascardi has pointed out that even Fredric Jameson, who writes
in The Political Unconscious of the need to get beyond ethics, refers to the
``moral'' of his book (``Always historicize!''): ``The stoic refusal of desire
that we confront in the form of historical necessity does not in the end
eliminate the desire to sublimate or transform necessity into something
more meaningful or valuable, like a `moral''' (``Ethics and Aesthetics in
Joseph Conrad,'' Western Humanities Review 49.1[Spring 1995], 19).
25 Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (New York: Penguin,
1979), 150.
26 Catherine Gallagher shows us that in the early Victorian period, too, a
new theory of morality and culture and a new practice of realism were
born at the same time; see Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of
English Fiction, 18321867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),
xiii.
27 John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 248.
28 Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979), 26.
29 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1962), 312.
2 victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at
the F I N D E S I E C L E
1 MacIntyre, After Virtue 81.
2 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3.
3 These theoretical inquiries into the relationship between history and
ethics, which I address and test through my argument about ethics and
n-de-siecle narratives, are at the heart of the two studies that most
thoroughly inform this chapter: MacIntyre's After Virtue and Taylor's
Sources of the Self. The inquiries are also undertaken via the controversies
among critics in the eld of ethics and literature. Nussbaum, Booth, and
Siebers, as we have seen, have produced seminal studies in this eld, and
yet their largely ahistorical approach is challenged by the theoretical
work of philosophers such as MacIntyre and Taylor and supplemented by
more historically focused works of ethical/literary criticism.
4 See A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1985), chapter 3.
5 Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the
Development of Liberal Political Thought, vol. 2 (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1969), 367.

Notes to pages 225

145

6 Although one phase of Mill's mental history was clearly his replacement
of a theory of human nature with a theory of history, Cumming raises the
question of whether Mill later disavowed his Saint Simonian-inuenced
writings and also points out that despite the undeniable importance Mill
accords the historical approach, ``this most versatile writer never wrote a
single historical work'' (Human Nature and History 361).
7 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1960), 117.
8 Victorian moral philosophers, arguably less susceptible than contemporary
thinkers to this failure to locate their ideas within a particular tradition,
beneted from their absorbing interest in history, which was due in part
to their sense of living in an age of ux. As Culler observes, ``men do not
think deeply about the character of their own age until they are aware
that it differs from the past'' (Victorian Mirror 40), and for the Victorians
this sense of difference was not only acute (as it has been for many in the
twentieth-century), it was new. As Charles Taylor points out, ``the very
picture of history as moral progress, as a `going beyond' our forebears,
which underlies our own sense of superiority, is very much a Victorian
idea'' (Sources of the Self 394). Unlike the Victorians, however, we have
cultivated a tradition in moral philosophy that assumes that it is not a
tradition. Why? Perhaps because a philosophy avowedly constrained by
history is humbler and thus less appealing than one unchecked in its
pursuit of pseudo-scientic rational certainty.
9 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and Selected Prose, introduction by
Herbert Sussman (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1970), 168.
10 In his recent study of nineteenth-century British autobiography, A
Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in NineteenthCentury Britain (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993),
Martin A. Danahay strongly emphasizes and deplores the role of ``not
me'' in Victorian writing about the self. Adapting Foucault's concept of
subjected sovereignty, Danahay claims that in their autobiographies Mill
and Edmund Gosse both overtly advocate individual freedom while
actually depicting ``a form of subjected autonomy'' (148), by which he
means a subjectivity that is dependent on an external constraining force.
For both Mill and Gosse this force was primarily the father, though as I
argue below I think Gosse, a turn-of-the-century writer, chooses the
internal over the external with more determination than his Victorian
predecessor. Gosse does not fully share Mill's mid-Victorian embarrassment with a focus on self, though such a focus is something he defensively
and somewhat guiltily struggles for throughout Father and Son. Gosse's
quintessentially modern delight in eccentricity and the fruits of introspection do not negate his awareness of external sources of authority or his

146

11
12
13
14
15

16

17
18
19

Notes to pages 2531

anxiety about his own autonomy, but they do signal an ambivalent


conception of self and agency much more typical of the n-de-siecle than
of the mid-Victorian period, a distinction Danahay ignores by treating
Gosse as ``a Victorian preserved in amber'' (149).
John Reed, Victorian Will (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1989), 22.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, ``Locksley Hall,'' The Poetical Works of Tennyson
(Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1974), 9094; l. 98.
Matthew Arnold, ``Preface to Poems, 1853,'' Victorian Poetry and Poetics,
2nd ed., ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange (Boston:
Houghton Mifin, 1968), 488.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty in Essays on Politics and Science, Collected
Works, vol. 18, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1977), 265.
As Danahay points out, though, in his Autobiography Mill overtly argues
for the freedom of the individual even as he undercuts that argument by
ceding his own autonomy to external authorities, such as his father, the
ideal of Utilitarian reform, or his wife Harriet Taylor and her powerful
inuence. In some ways his position is as contradictory as Carlyle's and
betrays the extent to which he is a product of the culture he critiques. See
Danahay, Community of One, chapter 5.
Like Carlyle and Mill, George Eliot's mid-Victorian perspective suggests
that the steam-engine, by metonymy, evokes not only the industrial
revolution but all the hectic changes that came in its wake. ``Ingenious
philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is
to create leisure for mankind,'' the narrator of Adam Bede (1859) says.
``Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thoughts to
rush in. Even idleness is eager now . . . '' (514). This eagerness, which
Wordsworth referred to at the very beginning of the nineteenth-century
as the present need for ``gross and violent stimulants'' (144), is ``the
modern standard'' that Eliot's narrator contrasts to ``Fine old Leisure.''
But like Mill, Eliot embraces the new even as she casts a fond look
backward. The tone of this passage in the novel is as gently mocking of
old-fashioned simplicity as it is admonitory about the hazards of life in a
complex, industrial age. See George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York:
Penguin, 1985) and William Wordsworth, ``Preface to Lyrical Ballads
(1802),'' Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. II, 6th ed., ed. M. H.
Abrams, et al. (New York: Norton, 1993), 14052.
John Deigh, The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral Psychology and
Freudian Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), viii.
Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 342.
Charles Taylor argues that ``just as in the case of our conceptions of the

Notes to pages 315

20
21

22
23
24

147

good, our ideas about our moral motivation show a confusing mixture of
the fusion, mutual inuence, and rivalry among the different sources''
(Sources of the Self 412). If Freud does indeed fuse very different ideas
about conscience and ethical agency as Deigh claims, this mixing and
combining is very much in accord with what Taylor sees as the mutual
inuence of belief and unbelief during the Victorian period.
Gillian Beer, ``Evolution of the Novel'' in A. C. Fabian, ed., Evolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 109.
Peter Abbs, for instance, is quite critical of Gosse for his Victorian
tendencies neurotic reserve and hypocrisy, in particular and yet even
he notices something new and un-Victorian in what he calls the ``second
version'' of Father and Son: ``The rst version is written from the wary
Victorian intelligence; it has a shrewd eye to the audience, a concern for
tact and decorum, and has come to believe, like Darwin and Spencer, in
the pure objectivity of Science. The second version is the unsettling
subjective voice of the more honest but dispossessed modern, of authenticity struggling outside communal values and inherited judgements,
ready, at least in principle, to fashion its own inner life'' (Abbs,
Introduction, Father and Son [New York: Penguin, 1983], 14). This
second version feels more dominant to me than what Abbs calls the rst,
especially when Father and Son is juxtaposed to other examples of
Victorian autobiography such as Mill's or biography such as
Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. Like all late Victorians, Gosse
has been shaped by the period of his childhood, and it seems unrealistic to
expect him to be entirely free from its inuence. It seems equally unjust
to minimize all that is not Victorian about his worldview and ethics.
Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility (Hanover, NH: University Press
of New England, 1987), 20.
William James quoted in C. Stephen Evans, Subjectivity and Religious
Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian University Press, 1978), 15253.
In Rational Choice and Moral Agency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), David Schmidtz critiques as contradictory Mill's efforts
to offer a proof for the principle of utility, for Mill himself acknowledges
that rst principles cannot be proven. Late Victorians and Edwardians,
such as Gosse in Father and Son and William James in ``The Will to
Believe'' (The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979]) and Varieties of
Religious Experience (New York: Penguin, 1982), are better able than the
Victorians to relinquish the need for certainty and are thus more postCartesian in their reasoning. And as Schmidtz points out, ``The claim that
we ought to reject what is not indubitably certain is itself a conjecture
about proper scientic methodology, a conjecture that is hardly beyond

148
25

26
27
28

29
30

Notes to pages 3544

reasonable doubt. Therefore, the Cartesian method of hyperbolic doubt


fails to pass its own test'' (215).
In Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984), Carol Christ traces the complex development of the dramatic
monologue form, and sheds light on the uneasiness about potential
egoism felt by Victorian poets such as Browning, who wanted to explore
subjectivity but felt guilty doing so. After the negative critical reception
of his rst published poem, Pauline, written in the Romantic confessional
mode, Browning turned to the more objective dramatic monologue form.
Christ notes that ``in Pauline the guilt which the autonomy of selfconsciousness imposes upon the speaker is extraordinary even for a poem
in this genre'' (18). Browning was able to escape his own guilt by
choosing instead of this genre a dramatic mode that exposes the limitations of self-consciousness and the ego's desire for control. ``Whenever
Browning described the dramatic nature of his poetry, he emphasized that
his poems did not concern himself '' (19). This is reminiscent of Mill's
claim to not ``estimate'' himself. Not surprisingly, Mill criticized Pauline
for what he considered its obsessive focus on both ``self-worship'' and
``self-disgust'' (Christ, Victorian and Modern 18).
Thomas Hardy, notebook entry, 7 December 1886 (Hardy's emphasis) in
The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 1985), 191.
James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian
Masculinity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 220.
Carol Gilligan and others working in the eld of feminist ethics tend to
align this need for a coherent, rational system of moral beliefs with male
socialization and acceptance of a more relational, contingent, and contextual morality with female socialization. In the next chapter I consider
the implications of Victorian separate spheres ideology and feminist
resistance to it for the ethics of n-de-siecle ction.
Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979), 33.
This is a generalization, of course, and does not hold true for all on even
the short list of modernists Watt mentions. T. S. Eliot, for instance, was
far from content with private systems of value, though his work explores
the impoverishment of the lives of those who are.

3 emotion, gender, and ethics in fiction by thomas hardy


and the new woman writers
1 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1994), xix.

Notes to pages 447

149

2 As John Goode notes in his reading of Hardy's New Woman novel, Jude
the Obscure, in Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth (Oxford: Blackwell,
1988), ``again and again the novel breaks out of its frame'' (139),
deploying strategies of illusion-breaking to create something new that
will shake up readers lulled by realism and an attendant acceptance of the
status quo. Lloyd Fernando, in his ``New Women'' in the Late Victorian
Novel (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977),
remarks that ``rarely in the history of the English novel had opinions and
attitudes rendered such service in lieu of art on behalf of a contemporary
movement'' (133), dismissing the ethical content of New Woman novels
as ``opinions and attitudes'' detrimental to the aesthetic quality of the
majority of this late-century ction, though important for its inuence on
George Gissing and Hardy. Fernando, like many of the contemporary
critics of these novels, seems to miss the point of the New Woman
writers' need to refuse old forms, true as it may be that this need did not
always result in a pleasing aesthetic experience for readers. For an
excellent discussion of the complex question of the political effectiveness
of antinarrative strategies in Olive Schreiner's work and, more generally,
that of women and minority cultures, see Janet Galligani Casey's
``Power, Agency, Desire: Olive Schreiner and the Pre-Modern Narrative
Moment,'' Narrative 4.2 (May 1996): 12441.
3 Teresa Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the
New Woman Novel (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998),
16.
4 Sally Ledger, ``The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism,'' in
Ledger and McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics, 22.
5 Patricia Ingham, Thomas Hardy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press International, 1990), 90.
6 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siecle
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 9. Ledger points out,
however, that for New Woman writers the language of the marginal and
the discourse of dominant ideology were equally compromised and
problematic (``The New Woman'' 34). Janet Galligani Casey also stresses
the problems for late Victorian feminists of ``attempting to articulate
one's liminal status through genres that will at once remain faithful to that
liminality and yet project it within the dominant culture'' (``Power,
Agency, Desire'' 131).
7 Patricia Stubbs, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel, 18801920
(Sussex: Harvester, 1979), 25.
8 Lyn Pykett, The `Improper' Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and
the New Woman Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 169.
9 For an instructive description of these traditions and their arguments

150

10
11
12

13

14
15
16

Notes to pages 4752

see chapter 3, ``Rational Emotions,'' of Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic


Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1995),
5378.
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995), xii.
``Forum on In a Different Voice,'' Signs 11.2 (1986), 327.
Gail Cunningham's discussion of Hardy in the context of New Woman
writing is representative of the many critics who describe Hardy's
approach as something other than feminist: ``The areas of interest which
led his novels to converge on the New Woman ction were sexual
morality in general, and a pervading cynicism about marriage. Neither of
these need necessarily imply a specically feminist approach: indeed in
many of his novels Hardy's view of women, and his ideas about sex and
marriage, seem to pull him uncomfortably in different directions'' (Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel [New York: Harper
and Row, 1978], 81). I wonder, though, if Hardy himself is ``uncomfortably'' ambivalent, or if some readers are made uncomfortable by the
challenge his heroines especially Sue Bridehead present to their
assumptions about women and feminism.
Like other New Women writers, Schreiner was inuenced by the evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin, and after an
early crisis of religious faith embraced science, sometimes with ethically
troubling implications, as Sally Ledger demonstrates in her analysis of
Schreiner's ``deployment of eugenic theory in the name of feminism''
(New Woman: Fiction and Feminism 73). Charles Taylor offers a trenchant
discussion of scientism as a constituent of modern culture, emphasizing
that it signals not a loss of faith or a sharp break with mid-Victorian
Christianity for scientism ``itself requires a leap of faith'' so much as
``a new militant moral outlook growing out of the old and taking its place
beside it as a ghting alternative'' (Sources of the Self 404).
Olive Schreiner, ``The Buddhist Priest's Wife,'' in Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siecle, ed. Elaine Showalter (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 92.
Laura Chrisman, ``Empire, `Race,' and Feminism at the Fin-de-Siecle:
The Work of George Egerton and Olive Schreiner,'' in Ledger and
McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics, 57.
Janet Galligani Casey focuses on similar strategies in Schreiner's unnished novel, From Man to Man. For Rebekah, the heroine of this novel,
intellectual pursuits (and writing in particular) afford an eroticized,
highly private refuge. Writing diary entries and letters, full of polemics
and philosophical ruminations as well as highly emotional expressions of
love for her husband, who is unfaithful to her, is for the heroine ``an act
that comes to embody all of the emotional and sexual energy that is

Notes to pages 523

17

18

19

20
21

151

thwarted in her daily existence'' (``Power, Agency, Desire'' 136). Casey's


point is that this private writing distracts Rebekah from public writing,
which is true, but it is also interesting to note how the personal,
traditionally feminine and emotional genres of letter and diary are
intellectualized and made strange, fascinating, even erotically compelling,
in late Victorian feminist writing.
Victorian women poets similarly sought comfort and a sense of agency
and control in intellectual detachment and in imagining their own deaths.
In several of her lyric poems, Christina Rossetti's speaker, for instance,
assures her beloved from beyond the grave that it is now a matter of
indifference to her if he remembers or forgets her. Similarly, Charlotte
Mew seeks what she call the ``inhuman thing'' (quoted in Angela
Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart [Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992], 287), the white
space of ``vision and desolation . . . which turns experience into art''
(Leighton, Victorian Women 287), not only as a retreat from relationships
and the pain of emotional entanglement and rejection in a patriarchal
society, but also as a position of power and invulnerability. In the words
of Angela Leighton, who beautifully draws out this dimension of both
poets' work, ``to miss life itself is to gain, in its place, the free time of the
dream'' (163). Even though the New Woman writers turned more openly
and deantly against Victorian patriarchy, these strategies of ``free time,''
imagination, play, irtation, and indirection are clearly evident in the
lives of all of the late-century heroines I consider.
I agree with Laura Chrisman's assessment of the depressing dead end of
this story and of the ``essentially monologic and isolationist perspective''
of Schreiner's stories in general, despite their experimental combining of
realism and symbolism and their dialogues between men and women. As
Chrisman notes, ``the speech patterns expose the impossibility of social
communication and an integrated feminist identity and collectivity''
(``Empire, `Race,' and Feminism'' 47).
In her discussion of Schreiner's Woman and Labour, Ledger points out
that Schreiner attempted to bring her eugenicist thinking in line with her
feminism: ``The evolutionary arrest of woman, the denial of intellectual
activity and traditionally `masculine' pursuits, would sound a death knell
for human evolution. As mothers of the human race, the evolutionary
development bodily and intellectual of women was, for Schreiner,
crucial'' (New Woman: Fiction and Feminism 24).
Joyce Avrech Berkman, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner:
Beyond South African Colonialism (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 231.
Laura Green, ```Strange [In]difference of Sex': Thomas Hardy, the

152
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23

24

25

26

Notes to pages 537

Victorian Man of Letters, and the Temptations of Androgyny,'' Victorian


Studies 38.4 (Summer 1995), 544.
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (New York: Oxford University Press,
1987), 159.
Sheila Berger stresses Hardy's ``antagonism toward consistency and
rationality'' in her reading of the novelist's reections on his aesthetic
values. For example, Hardy ``appreciates drama in literature because it
`appeal[s] to the emotional reason rather than to the logical reason; for by
their emotions men are acted upon, and act upon others''' (Berger,
Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process [New
York and London: New York University Press, 1990], 4).
In her Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form
(Sussex: Harvester, 1982), Penny Boumelha observes that the similarity
of Jude and Sue marks a change in Hardy's ction: ``There is no sense
that Jude and Sue inhabit different ideological structures as there is in the
cases of Clym and Eustacia, or even Angel and Tess'' (141). Green also
identies this similarity between its male and female protagonists as one
of the features of Jude that make it the most radical of Hardy's novels
(``Strange [In]difference'' 527).
A fascinating dimension of all of the New Woman novels I consider is
the characterization of the New Man. Angelica's twin Diavolo (like
everything else about them, their names are, ironically, more tting if
reversed) supports his sister's feminism and cross-dresses himself even as
he takes his own privileges for granted. Jude and Waldo are tenderhearted men who hate injustice of any sort and are thus sympathetic to
the cause of the women they love. But Jude occasionally utters essentialist, limiting ideas about women (which critics wrongly confound with
Hardy's own ideas), and Waldo is dreamy and often merely bewildered
by Lyndall's political ideas. Most importantly, the men in the novels
demonstrate the tragic reality that cross-gender friendships were not
viable in late Victorian culture. Ledger writes of Waldo and Lyndall,
``theirs is a powerful brother/sister type of relationship, an emotional and
intellectual bond which, like Sue Bridehead and Jude Fawley's, is shown
not to be possible in the world represented by the novel's discourses''
(New Woman: Fiction and Feminism 83). And I think Mangum is right to
question whether Angelica's desire for friendship between men and
women ``on terms unimaginable to the Victorians'' would be perceived as
any more realizable now than it was then (Married, Middlebrow, and
Militant 136).
Sue similarly experiments with cross-dressing when she is compelled to
wear Jude's clothes after a act of rebellion results in a drenching of her
own. As Goode points out in his comparison of Sue and Angelica, ``Sue

Notes to pages 5762

27
28

29

30

31
32

33

153

gets caught between image and utterance. It is the requirement of clothes


and image that she leaps out of '' (Thomas Hardy 158). Goode's excellent
chapter on Jude in his book on Hardy intricately traces Sue's more
complex efforts to leap into a voice; like other critics describing the
tension between old and new in the New Woman ction, Goode notes
that ``the heterodox voice is the voice of the future tied dependently into
the discourse of the present'' (170).
Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1992), 458.
Pykett makes this point in her discussion of George Egerton's ction
(The `Improper' Feminine 173). Ardis observes, more generally, that in
New Woman writing heterogeneity has replaced ``the humanistic model
of integrated selfhood or `character.' A monolithic model of New
Womanliness [is] not . . . substituted for the old model of the `pure
woman''' (New Women 11314).
Green makes the intriguing point that ``linguistic pedantry occurs with
remarkable frequency in moments of irtation or jockeying for position
between male and female characters'' (``Strange [In]difference'' 536). In
Schreiner's novel, too, irtation is as intellectual as it is emotional and
distinctively different from the irtation of the mid-Victorian coquette.
Lyndall's lover says to her, ``I like you when you grow metaphysical and
analytical,'' and she thinks, ``he was trying to turn her own weapons
against her'' (204).
See Scott McCracken, ``Stages of Sand and Blood: The Performance of
Gendered Subjectivity in Olive Schreiner's Colonial Allegories,'' in Alice
Jenkins and Juliet John, eds., Rereading Victorian Fiction (London:
Macmillan, 2000), 14556, for an intriguing argument about New
Woman identities as performances self-consciously played out within a
context (or on a stage) of material conditions that limited agency.
George Bernard Shaw praised Grand for demanding that ``the man shall
come to the woman exactly as moral as he insists that she shall come to
him'' (Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 89).
A. R. Cunningham identies two main types of New Women heroines:
the ``bachelor girl,'' a designation appropriate for Sue, Lyndall, and
Angelica, since this type was thoroughly unconventional in her thinking;
and the New Woman of the ``purity school,'' a designation that ts
Evadne since she is unusually intelligent but not willing to abandon
traditional Victorian moral values and ideals. See A. R. Cunningham,
``The `New Woman Fiction' of the 1890s,'' Victorian Studies 17 (1973):
17686.
Even as a reader, Evadne, like Jude, is an autodidact for whom ``the
reading experience is structured as an alternative to education rather than

154

Notes to pages 624

a means to education'' (Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 103).


Goode's point that Jude raises the question of education as a leading out
and an admission of the obscure to ``the garden of bourgeois order''
(Thomas Hardy 103) is equally relevant to Evadne, whose difculty
acquiring books and isolation in reading them reveal the constraints on
her agency, even as her bold, feminist notes on her reading like Jude's
enthusiasm and freshness of perspective as a young scholar underscore
the advantage of exclusion from the bourgeois order. Unfortunately,
the trajectory of both characters as readers is far from hopeful. Evadne,
for instance, goes from an active, curious critical thinker, to a woman
who reads to escape, to a nonreader whose life is a casebook read by
Dr. Galbraith.
34 See Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 3035, for an account of
how contemporary psychological theories were deployed to silence New
Woman characters and their creators.
35 It would be instructive to compare the dramatic psychological breakdowns of these New Women to the emotional collapse suffered by
heroines of earlier Victorian novels, such as Gwendolen Harleth in
George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (New York: Penguin, 1995). Unlike
Evadne, Gwendolen glories in the superiority that isolates her from
others until that isolation breaks her spirit. Then, like Evadne, she is
overcome by hysteria. Reaching out to Deronda for moral guidance and
advice about how to establish loving connections with others, Gwendolen, unlike Sue and Lyndall, moves hopefully into the future. Eliot's
heroine suffers for her difference, but she is not so different that she
cannot reintegrate herself into society. These New Women are unable to
do so because their efforts to conform lack conviction and authenticity.
They reject gender expectations more rebelliously than even the most
rebellious of earlier Victorian heroines. For a discussion of Eliot's
``emotional intellect'' and her sexual ethics in relation to the Woman
Question, see Fernando, ``New Women'' in the Late Victorian Novel,
chapter 2.
4 chance and moral luck in a laodicean , the mayor of
casterbridge , and tess
1 Thomas Hardy, ``Hap,'' The Complete Poems (New York: Macmillan,
1982), 9.
2 Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (New York: Vintage, 1987), 73.
3 Nicholas Rescher, Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life (New
York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995), 171.
4 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, 1. 258.

Notes to pages 6576

155

5 Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy: 18401928 (1928, 1930;
rprt. London: Macmillan, 1965), 175; emphasis Thomas Hardy's.
6 Martha C. Nussbaum, ``Luck and Ethics,'' in Daniel Stateman, ed., Moral
Luck (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 97.
7 Bernard Williams, Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 241.
8 Margaret Urban Walker, ``Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure
Agency,'' in Daniel Statman, ed., Moral Luck (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1993), 245.
9 These studies include Albert Pettigrew Elliott, Fatalism in the Works of
Thomas Hardy (New York: Russell, 1935); Roy Morrell, Thomas Hardy:
The Will and the Way (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaysia Press,
1965), and Bert G. Hornback, The Metaphor of Chance: Vision and
Technique in the Works of Thomas Hardy (Athens, OH: Ohio University
Press, 1971). For a more recent, though brief, discussion of this issue in
Hardy studies, see Mary Rimmer, ``Club Laws: Chess and the Construction of Gender in A Pair of Blue Eyes,'' in Margaret R. Higonnet, ed., The
Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1993), 20304.
10 Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1986), 12829.
11 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 46.
12 Hardy quoted in Jan Jedrzejewski, Thomas Hardy and the Church (New
York: St. Martin's, 1996), 41.
13 The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1976).
14 Hardy quoted in Peter Widdowson, On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and
Earlier (New York: St. Martin's, 1998), 22829.
15 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1976), 5.
16 In The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century (Austin, TX: University
of Texas Press, 1994), William J. Scheick describes another late-century
ctional mode that offered an alternative to realism romance. The
dynamics of one form of this genre ``the simultaneous intimation and
concealment of some ultimate insight'' (59) reveals it to be akin to
melodrama as Brooks denes it.
17 As Charles Taylor argues, though, even those who advocated rational
freedom in the nineteenth century did so with evangelical fervor,
espousing ``a kind of heroism of unbelief, the deep spiritual satisfaction of
knowing that one has confronted the truth of things, however bleak and
unconsoling'' (Sources of the Self 404). Hardy's melodramatic position

156

18

19

20

21

22

Notes to pages 7680

sometimes strikes this note, but ultimately the romantic depth of his
major novels offers richer emotional satisfaction than the bleak truths and
amorality of ction by Flaubert, Gissing, or the late Victorian naturalists.
Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), 283. Widdowson calls attention to Hardy's self-conscious, sometimes even tongue-in-cheek treatment of chance in A Laodicean, insisting
that ``such `externalized' treatment of coincidence and chance may give us
some clues as to whether or not it is also one of Hardy's involuntary
`aws' in the `major' novels'' (On Thomas Hardy 106). (Clearly,
Widdowson thinks it isn't.) Paralleling resistance to the concept of moral
luck among philosophers is resistance among literary critics to plots
governed by coincidence and chance rather than by choice and so-called
laws of probability.
Both Teresa Mangum and Elaine Showalter discuss Father Time in the
context of childhood deformity most often associated with syphilis but
signifying, more generally, in Showalter words, ``the conicts, lies, and
hypocrisies of the sexual system'' (``Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of
the Fin de Siecle,'' in Ruth Yeazell, ed., Sex, Politics, and Science in the
Nineteenth Century Novel [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986], 108). Father Time is illegitimate in the sense that he is born
after his parents part; Dare is also an illegitimate son. Set apart by their
unusual appearance, they are both melodramatic characters who gesture
toward a dark, enigmatic dimension of life while also embodying Hardy's
criticism of unjust social attitudes and conditions.
In his subtle and penetrating discussion of Hardy's self-consciousness
about his artistry in this novel, Peter Widdowson points out that A
Laodicean was categorized by Hardy as one of his ``Novels of Ingenuity,''
while Dare is identied as ``ingenious'' in his methods of deception. As in
my analysis of the relation of author and character here, Widdowson
associates Dare with Hardy in this way but also goes on to show that
what Hardy is really doing is parodying the deceptions of ctional
realism by parodying Dare and his doctored photographs (On Thomas
Hardy 113). Thus Hardy mischievously merges with his villain only to
distance himself later.
Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 276. Beer also pursues the fascinating question of
how novel readers are gamblers, and in Hardy (she focuses on The Return
of the Native), ``the reader is balked of control, forced to survey the
reassuring expectations with which we habitually people the future'' (294).
Sophie Gilmartin, Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 198.

Notes to pages 818

157

23 In Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard


University Press, 1970), J. Hillis Miller has recognized as one of the
characteristic features of Hardy's work the ``irresistible coercion of
history'' (103).
24 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Ethics, in T. V. Smith
and Marjorie Grene, eds., Berkeley, Hume, and Kant (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1957), 366.
25 H. M. Daleski, Thomas Hardy and Paradoxes of Love (Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 151.
26 For some readers, an ethical reading of Tess's agency is undermined by
Hardy's melodramatic imagination and his presentation of Tess as an
elemental force, captured at Stonehenge to signify her association with
ancient patterns of death and rebirth. This symbolic dimension of the
novel is undeniable, but equally undeniable, in my reading anyway, is
Tess's moral personhood and her convincing reality as a tragic agent.
27 Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (New York: Penguin, 1985),
395.
28 In a passage in The Life pertinent to this point, Hardy writes, ``For my
part, if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it
lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the esh; by which I mean
putting on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts, and taking
their views of surrounding things. To think of life as passing away is a
sadness; to think of it as past is at least tolerable'' (20910). In Hardy,
time passing is a source of pain not because the past disappears but
because we continue to live with it; death seems to be the only thing that
will free us. Tess, for example, despairs because ``bygones would never
be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself '' (299).
29 Gilmartin writes about another palimpsest-like image in Hardy's The
Well-Beloved. Pierston and his original beloved in the Caro line carve
their linked names on a cliff shore, but the sea and the process of time
erase them, and they are written over by the names of their descendants.
Like many other protagonists in Hardy, Pierston unsuccessfully seeks to
recover the agency time robs him of, in his case by loving three
generations of women. But as Gilmartin succinctly observes, ``He can
belong to one generation only, not all three'' (Ancestry and Narrative 233).
Similarly, Henchard's old-fashioned ways are displaced by those of the
younger generation as time does its relentless work in The Mayor of
Casterbridge.
30 Miller describes the ``fundamental spiritual movement'' of Hardy's ction
as the exact opposite of Nietzsche's will to power: Hardy's is the ``will not
to will'' (Thomas Hardy 6). But this form of will, though it does not tempt
fate, provides inadequate protection from misfortune.

158

Notes to pages 8996

31 As Gillian Beer notes, in Hardy ``bad luck is good for story'' (Open Fields
294). Her nal comment about Hardy is interesting in light of Henchard's
self-destructive recklessness, his death-wish, and his desire, expressed in
his will, to be completely forgotten after his death (especially since Hardy
also puts all of these aspects of Henchard's character into question
through the tropes of game-playing and joking): The Return of the Native,
Beer argues, is aligned with ``the new forces that disturb the current of
the 1870s, those of uncertainty and entropy, the cosmic lottery. But
[Hardy] pins it also into that other antique yearning gratied by play: the
longing for disaster, the full but ctive experience of obliteration'' (Open
Fields 294).
32 Bernard Williams's concept of ``agent-regret'' precisely describes what
Henchard feels after several of his crucial moral choices. He is vividly
aware of how he might have acted otherwise if he had known the
outcome of his act. (See Williams, ``Moral Luck'' 42.)
5 oscar wilde and henry james: aestheticizing ethics
1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (New York: Bantam, 1980), 118.
2 Emmanuel Levinas, ``Ethics as First Philosophy,'' in Sean Hand, ed., The
Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 8283.
3 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1981), xxiii.
4 Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990),
16869.
5 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990),
9.
6 In Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts (DeKalb, IL:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), Pierre Walker points out that
Strether, with his tendency to romanticize, supplements his incomplete
knowledge with simplistic literary models such as the morality tale and
the Gothic romance, even as his own story unfolds for us in the more
subtle and complex form of the novel of manners (71).
7 See Nussbaum's discussion of the novel, ``Perceptive Equilibrium:
Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,'' in Love's Knowledge, 16894.
8 Millicent Bell's argument about The Ambassadors shares Posnock's
emphasis on openness and possibility in the novel rather than on the
inevitability that ows from xed identity: ``The telling of The Ambassadors `empties' . . . only certain of Strether's possible adventures from out
the bag of what might be imagined for him yet our sense of his
potentiality allows us to see what these alternatives might be, to see them

Notes to pages 96100

9
10
11
12

13
14

15

16

159

as latent in the narrative'' (Bell, Meaning in Henry James [Cambridge,


MA: Harvard University Press, 1991], 353). The richness of James's
method of storytelling is that it makes us aware of the many narrative
choices available to the author, even as it leads us to consider his
protagonist's need to plot a life that could take any number of different
directions. This implicit resistance to closure and awareness of multiplicity are among the qualities that make James seem postmodern. But as
I shall argue, even Jamesian art seeks refuge from ux through a
protagonist who is not nearly as open to life as he seems.
Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the
Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16.
Emmanuel Levinas, ``Reality and Its Shadow,'' in Sean Hand, ed., The
Levinas Reader, 139.
Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siecle
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 171.
Although Nussbaum's reading of Strether signicantly differs from my
own, I do share her admiration for the more passive, porous, receptive
way of being in the world that Strether cultivates in the process of freeing
himself from the Kantian, active, duty-bound morality represented by
Mrs. Newsome and Woollett. For Nussbaum's discussion of the Jamesian
value of being ``actively passive,'' see Love's Knowledge 176185.
Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (New York:
Norton, 1994), 131.
For an excellent discussion of the questionable ethics of Strether's ``Live
all you can'' speech, see Pierre Walker, Reading Henry James 7677. The
troubling values associated with both ``illusion'' and ``freedom'' such as
a narrow, blinkered view of reality and the desire to escape responsibility
and transgress the boundaries of actual human agency become quite
clear by the end of Strether's story.
Terry Eagleton faults Kantian aesthetics for its inability to represent the
body; what results, he argues, is a non-sensuous aesthetic (Ideology of the
Aesthetic 21). Although my reading of aestheticism in both Wilde and
James stresses the desire to escape the real, the mortal, the limited, and
thus ultimately the physical, Eagleton is right that as a branch of
philosophy aestheticism grounds abstractions in the body: ``The aesthetic
concerns this most gross and palpable dimension of the human, which
post-Cartesian philosophy, in some curious lapse of attention has
somehow managed to overlook. It is thus the rst stirrings of a primitive
materialism of the body's long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny
of the theoretical'' (13).
Nussbaum makes this point, not in relation to Maria Gostrey but in
relation to Marie de Vionnet, though it seems to me to be true of either

160

17
18

19

20

21

Notes to pages 1015

woman since Maria is as in love with Strether as Marie is with Chad: ``We
see that the women of Woollett, unlike Marie de Vionnet in her love of
an irreplaceable particular person, are able to triumph over life and to
avoid becoming its victims. But that's just it: they triumph over life, they
don't live'' (Love's Knowledge 179).
Marcia Ian, ``Henry James and the Spectacle of Loss: Psychoanalytic
Metaphysics'' in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics
at the Fin de Siecle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 116.
It is interesting to note the differences between Wilde and the New
Woman novelists in the ethical treatment of gender and performativity.
Despite his evident love of masks and theatricality, in Dorian Gray Wilde
shows how living aesthetically and falling in love with a work of art or a
performance can become a trap rather than a means to agency.
Free indirect discourse is one of the many techniques the novel's narrator
employs to keep his own views and those of the implied author
hidden. To consider but one example, when the narrator seems to assert
his own views unequivocally, as when he says, ``Is insincerity such a
terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can
multiply our personalities,'' he quickly pulls the reader up short by
beginning the next paragraph, ``Such at any rate, was Dorian Gray's
opinion'' (14243). But my description of this moment in the novel might
not do enough to credit the way language itself carries Wilde perilously
close to self-exposure. As Linda Dowling points out, the ``rhetoric of
secrecy'' in Wilde need not always be related to the secret of his
homosexual life; literary language, Wilde intimates, is dangerous because
of its autonomy, its otherness. It is thus secretive and mysterious by its
very nature. ``This sense of language as possessing an independent life is
everywhere in n de siecle literature,'' and its power is often gured as
seductive and evil (Dowling, Language and Decadence 160).
It is instructive to compare Little Bilham's response to Chad to Strether's
response. The younger man agrees that Chad has changed but compares
him to ``the new edition of an old book that one has been fond of,'' and
then quickly admits that he himself is ``beastly immoral'' to expect Chad
to be only what he wants him to be: ``I'm afraid it would be a funny
world altogether a world with things the way I like them'' (111). He
clearly sorts out what is good for Chad and what is good for himself.
Strether does just the opposite: he sees what he would enjoy a life in
Paris with Marie de Vionnet and then decides that is what Chad must
want, too.
As Freedman points out, Strether and Lord Henry are very much alike in
the vicarious satisfaction they take in ``a compensatory erotic that endows
the contemplator with power over that which he sees, and relieves him of

Notes to pages 10515

22
23
24

25

161

the burden of suffering that can come with more direct involvement''
(Professions of Taste 193). After the death of his wife, Strether eschews
direct involvement, preferring aesthetic detachment, illusion, and selfprotective strategies within his relationships.
``Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks
of me: Dorian what I would like to be in other ages perhaps'' (Oscar
Wilde to Ralph Payne, 12 February 1894).
Another n-de-siecle example of the power of both sexuality and art to
transx is Hardy's short story ``The Fiddler of the Reels.''
Nussbaum's reading of Strether as an admirable, though awed, ethical
agent is perhaps encouraged by the implied author's own alignment with
the ethos of his protagonist. But as Eagleton points out, James is aware of
Strether's evasion of life: ``In the end there was nothing that Henry James
didn't know; but such a supremely beautiful intelligence is hardly
compatible with living, which of course he knew as well. Strether wants
to get out of all that fatiguing complexity with not a drop spilt and his
hands clean, salvaging nothing for himself, pregnant with an enormous,
useless intelligence completely bereft of exchange value'' (``Flight to the
Real'' 20). Aware of his protagonist's evasion, James nevertheless is
himself evasive about the ethics of dodging life in this way.
For discussion of a full range of a reader's responsibilities, see Booth, The
Company We Keep 13442.
6 promises, lies and ethical agency in joseph conrad's
under western eyes

1 Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary (Gloucester,


MA: Peter Smith, 1976), 50.
2 Michel de Montaigne, ``On Liars,'' Essays, quoted in Sissela Bok, Lying:
Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage, 1978), 3.
3 For a variety of views on the interrelationship of literature and moral
philosophy, see especially Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on
Philosophy and Literature; Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1988) and Morals and Stories; Richard
Eldridge, On Moral Personhood (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1989); Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the
Moral Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1989); Wayne Booth, The
Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.
4 For discussion of Conrad's linguistic pessimism and its effects, see Aaron
Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad's Poetics of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985) and Lisa Rado, ``Walking Through
Phantoms: Irony, Skepticism and Razumov's Self-Delusion in Under

162

6
7
8
9
10
11

12

13
14
15
16

Notes to pages 11627

Western Eyes,'' Conradiana 24 (1992): 8399. Like Rado, Eloise Knapp


Hay argues that the novel lacks a moral center, in part because there is no
one in the text to guide our reading of it; see her ``Under Western Eyes
and the Missing Center,'' in David R. Smith, ed., Joseph Conrad's Under
Western Eyes: Beginnings, Revisions, Final Forms (Hamden, CT: Archon,
1991), 12153.
For example, in The Art of Failure: Conrad's Fiction (Boston: Allen &
Unwin, 1986), Suresh Raval demonstrates his claim that criticism is a
form of moral discourse through his precise analysis of the implications
of Razumov's broken pact with Haldin and through his treatment of
Razumov's confession, but he does not discuss the ethical import of lies in
the novel. Similarly, since Steve Ressler is a self-consciously ethical critic,
whose Joseph Conrad: Consciousness and Integrity (New York: New York
University Press, 1988) offers a brilliant and thorough moral analysis of
Razumov's character, it is surprising that he says so little about lying.
Andrzej Busza, ``Rhetoric and Ideology in Conrad's Under Western
Eyes,'' in Norman Sherry, ed., Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration (New
York: Macmillan, 1976), 11112.
Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), xi.
Joseph Conrad, ``An Outpost of Progress,'' in Samuel Hynes, ed., The
Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad (New York: Eccho, 1991), 40.
See Robert Kimbrough's note in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed.
Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988), 3738.
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York: Penguin, 1985), 63.
As Steve Ressler has pointed out, the relation between reputation and
identity is a persistent concern in Conrad. Marlow (in Heart of Darkness),
Jim, and Nostromo, as well as Razumov, nd their characters shaped by
the ironic fact that ``an ascription of inated virtue can have consequences
as grave as unmerited disrepute'' ( Joseph Conrad 102).
As Stanley Cavell has maintained, a promise-like commitment can exist
without the explicit, ritual words ``I promise.'' If too much emphasis is
placed on utterances beginning with those words, we risk taking our
ordinary commitments too lightly. See Cavell, The Claim of Reason
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 298.
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (New York: Penguin, 1986), 94.
See Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological
Commitment (New York: Edward Arnold, 1992), 23659.
Bruce Henricksen, Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 145.
Lisa Rado associates the act of walking through the phantom of Haldin
with Razumov's misguided attempts to make order out of thin air, to

Notes to pages 12731

17
18

19
20

21

22

163

cling to dead Enlightenment ideals (``Walking Through Phantoms'' 85,


86). But it is not clear what this reading of the image of the phantom has
to do with Haldin unless it accepts that he is nothing more than an
abstract representative of chaos; to do so is to repeat Razumov's denial of
the reality of the other and to deny the responsibility that such reality
entails.
Hannah Arendt, ``Lying in Politics,'' in Crises of the Republic (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1969), 5.
In his critical biography of Conrad, John Batchelor discusses the ``terrible
moral stress'' Conrad experienced during the composition of Under
Western Eyes when dredging up painful memories of family and childhood in political exile in Russia. A possible source for the political
betrayal in the novel's plot could be the story of Conrad's Uncle Stefan's
death, told by Tadeusz Bobrowski in The Bobrowski Memoirs. See
Batchelor's The Life of Joseph Conrad (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 1819,
171.
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (New York: Penguin, 1983), 88.
Avrom Fleishman, Conrad's Politics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1967), 239. For discussion of the epigraph and the
strength of Nathalie's character, see also Batchelor, The Life 183; Ressler,
Joseph Conrad 13738; Hay, ``Under Western Eyes'' 133. Rado dissents
from this critical estimate of Nathalie, noting (with some justice) that in
her rejection of Razumov at the end of the novel Nathalie does not live
up to her ideals. See Rado, ``Walking Through Phantoms'' 92, 96.
Thomas J. Cousineau's psychoanalytic reading of Razumov's decision to
confess (``The Ambiguity of Razumov's Confession in Under Western
Eyes,'' Conradiana 18 [1986]: 2740) strikes me as unfairly judgmental of
a very human attraction to the spirit of love and forgiveness that Nathalie
represents. For Cousineau, the novel constructs an impossible choice
between viewing the confession as an act of ``moral independence'' or of
regression to ``an infantile state of peace'' (36). Another way to look at
the confession is to see that despite Razumov's erce desire for independence, he also acknowledges that love is what makes it possible for him to
speak the truth; once he confesses, his condition of need is tragic but not
pathetic. Others care for him, and his life is at last interdependent and his
moral integrity restored.
Mark Wollaeger persuasively demonstrates this point in his Joseph Conrad
and the Fictions of Skepticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990):
``Skepticism may dissolve the grounds for establishing the reality of
others, but in the consequent emptiness anxieties about agency restore the
presence of others in the fear of their malign inuence'' (190). This is an
accurate way of characterizing Razumov's skepticism, though the novel's

164

Notes to pages 1305

ending reestablishes the protagonist's belief in agency through his conviction that Nathalie exerts a positive ethical inuence.
23 David Nyberg, The Varnished Truth: Truth Telling and Deceiving in
Ordinary Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1993), 7.
24 Henricksen nicely captures the paradox: ``Razumov casts off his monologizing deafness; like Oedipus seeing in his blindness, he now converses
in his deafness'' (Nomadic Voices 158).

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Index

Sartor Resartus, 257, 29, 30, 146 n. 15


Casardi, Anthony, 18, 144 n. 24
Casey, Janet Galligani, 149 nn. 2 and 6, 150
n. 16
Cavell, Stanley, 139, 162 n. 12
Chrisman, Laura, 51, 52
Christ, Carol, 148 n. 25
Christian morality, 12, 212, 25, 26, 28, 30,
33, 34, 73, 138
Coles, Robert, 114
Conrad, Joseph, 3, 13, 1719, 33, 41, 115,
139
Heart of Darkness, 14, 116, 117, 122
Lord Jim, 14, 105, 162 n. 11
Nostromo, 127, 162 n. 11
``An Outpost of Progress,'' 116
Secret Agent, The, 1201
Under Western Eyes, 17, 18, 11415, 116,
11736, 140, 161 n. 4, 1623 n. 16, 163
nn. 18, 20, and 21, 162 nn. 5 and 11,
1634 n. 22
Cousineau, Thomas J., 163 n. 21
cross-dressing, 57, 152 n. 26
Culler, A. Dwight, 23, 26, 37, 38, 40, 145
n. 8
Cumming, Robert Denoon, 224, 145
n. 6
Cunningham, Gail, 150 n. 12, 153 n. 32

Abbs, Peter, 147 n. 21


Adams, James Eli, 38, 102
aestheticism, 36, 38 49, 94, 958, 105, 107,
159 n. 15
agency, 10, 1316, 19, 28, 29, 303, 358,
61, 73, 76, 80, 81, 83, 94, 115, 120, 136,
138, 140, 153 n. 30, 157 n. 29, 159
n. 14, 1634 n. 22
alterity, 97, 98111, 140
ancestry, 71, 80, 85; see also heredity
Ardis, Ann, 58, 153 n. 28
Aristotelian ethics, 11, 21, 47, 95, 114, 135
Arnold, Matthew, 26
Austin, J. L., 10, 116
Baier, Annette, 11617, 119
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1245
Batchelor, John, 163 nn. 18 and 20
Bauman, Zygmunt, 9
Beer, Gillian, 32, 72, 79, 156 n. 21, 158
n. 31
Bell, Millicent, 158
Benhabib, Seyla, 6, 143 n. 15
Berger, Sheila, 36, 152 n. 23
Berkman, Joyce Avrech, 53
Blum, Lawrence, 1423 n. 13
Bobrowski, Tadeusz, 163 n. 18
Bok, Sissela, 125
Booth, Wayne, 12, 114, 114 n. 3, 141 n. 5,
161 n. 25
Boumelha, Penny, 48, 152 n. 24
Brooks, Peter, 74, 756
Browning, Robert, 36, 148 n. 25
Bullen, J. B., 36
Busza, Andrzej, 116, 120
Byronic hero, 25

Daleski, H. M., 36, 83


Danahay, Martin, 34, 145 n. 10, 146 n. 15
Darwinism, 12, 32, 33, 51; see also evolution
deconstruction, 141 n. 4
degeneration, 37, 38
Deigh, John, 301
deontological morality, 278, 32, 39, 93
determinism, 20, 25, 27, 36
Dowling, Linda, 97, 160 n. 19

Carlyle, Thomas, 35

173

174
Eagleton, Terry, 7, 32, 42, 94, 159 n. 15,
161 n. 24
Egerton, George, 153 n. 28
Eldridge, Richard, 114
Eliot, George, 72
Adam Bede, 146 n. 16
Daniel Deronda, 154 n. 35
Eliot, T. S., 41, 148 n. 30
epistemology, 31, 33, 75
Erikson, Erik, 48
evolution, 30, 31, 32, 33, 38, 79, 150 n. 13
feminist ethics, 47
Fernando, Lloyd, 149 n. 2, 154 n. 35
Fleishman, Avrom, 136
irtation, 49, 5661
formalism, 12
Foucault, Michel, 46, 145 n. 10
Freedman, Jonathan, 16, 94, 1601 n. 21
Freud, Sigmund, 301, 1467 n. 19
Gallagher, Catherine, 27, 144 n. 26
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 147 n. 21
Gilligan, Carol, 5, 15, 48, 148 n. 28
Gilmartin, Sophie, 80, 85, 157 n. 29
Gissing, George, 149 n. 2
Goleman, Daniel, 47
Goode, John, 55, 149 n. 2, 152 n. 26, 154
n. 33
Gosse, Edmund
Father and Son, 326, 142 n. 10, 145
n. 10, 147 n. 21
Gosse, Philip, 326
Omphalos, 35
Grand, Sarah, 14, 15, 44, 49, 50, 153 n. 31
Heavenly Twins, The, 45, 46, 5761,
613, 152 n. 25
Green, Laura, 153 n. 29
Hardy, Thomas, 3, 13, 15, 18, 33, 368, 48,
49, 63, 645, 66, 912, 152 n. 23,
1556 n. 17, 157 n. 28
Far from the Madding Crowd, 80
``Fiddler of the Reels,'' 161 n. 23
Jude the Obscure, 50, 53, 547, 579,
601, 613, 76, 149 n. 2, 150 n. 12, 152
nn. 24 and 25, 153 nn. 26, 32, and 33,
156 n. 19
Laodicean, A, 16

Index
Mayor of Casterbridge, The, 16, 678, 70,
71, 82, 8691, 158 n. 31
Return of the Native, The, 80, 152 n. 24,
158 n. 31
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 16, 54, 70, 71,
72, 80, 826, 152 n. 24, 157 nn. 26 and
28
Hare, R. M., 10
Harpham, Geoffrey, 12
Hawthorn, Jeremy, 123
Hay, Eloise Knapp, 1612 n. 4, 163 n. 20
``Hedonism, New,'' 40
Heidegger, Martin, 95
Held, Virginia, 5
Henricksen, Bruce, 124, 164 n. 24
heredity, 37, 38
history and ethics, 2043
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 37
Hume, David, 116, 117
Husserl, Edmund, 95, 101, 1067
Ian, Marcia, 100, 104
impressionism, 36, 38
Ingham, Patricia, 45, 55
James, Henry, 89, 16, 18, 93, 139
Ambassadors, The, 16, 934, 956, 978,
99, 1001, 1046, 10910, 11113, 160
n. 20, 1601 n. 21
Golden Bowl, The, 89
James, William, 33, 35, 147 n. 24
Jameson, Fredric, 144 n. 24
Joyce, James, 41
Kant, Immanuel, 1, 16, 66, 95, 107, 159
nn. 12 and 15
Keats, John, 103
negative capability, 96
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 48
Kucich, John, 15, 17, 19, 489, 53, 54
language and ethics, 8, 97, 115, 1235, 136,
151 n. 18, 160 n. 19; see also speech
acts
Lawrence, D. H., 41
Ledger, Sally, 45, 46, 149 n. 6, 150 n. 13
Leighton, Angela, 151 n. 17
Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 93, 958, 99, 103,
108, 109, 112, 139

Index
``liberal ironists,'' 1112; see also Rorty,
Richard
Lockridge, Laurence, 141 n. 7
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 7, 1011, 20, 214, 31,
3943, 143 n. 18, 144 n. 3
Magnum, Teresa, 44, 152 n. 25, 1534
nn. 33 and 34, 156 n. 19
Marcel, Gabriel, 114
McCracken, Scott, 153 n. 30
melodrama, 746, 1556 n. 17, 157 n. 26
Mill, John Stuart, 214, 29, 30, 31, 34, 42,
55, 145 n. 6, 147 n. 24, 148 n. 25
Autobiography, 55, 145 n. 10, 146 n. 15,
147 n. 21
On Liberty, 29, 30
Miller, J. Hillis, 157 nn. 23 and 30
modernism, 41
Montaigne, Michel de, 114
moral luck, 16, 6492
``moral remainders,'' 10, 11; see also
Walker, Margaret Urban
Murdoch, Iris, 1423 n. 13
Nabokov, Vladimir, 8
Nagel, Thomas, 16, 64, 66, 678
naturalism, 37
``New Man,'' 152 n. 25
``New Woman,''15, 18, 33, 42, 4463, 74,
98, 1378, 149 nn. 2 and 6, 150 nn. 12
and 13, 151 n. 17, 152 n. 25, 153 n. 26,
153 nn. 30 and 32, 154 nn. 34 and 35,
160 n. 18
Newton, Adam Zachary, 2, 11213, 141
n. 4
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 157 n. 30
Nussbaum, Martha, 13, 47, 89, 10, 11,
17, 42, 67, 95, 96, 97, 100, 11415, 141
n. 5, 142 n. 11, 143 n. 21, 144 n. 3,
14950 n. 9, 159 nn. 12 and 16, 161
n. 24
Nyberg, David, 131
Orwell, George, 8
Owen, Robert, 27, 29
Pater, Walter, 33, 36, 38
Marius the Epicurean, 97
Phillips, Adam, 44, 60

175
Posnock, Ross, 95, 97, 104
postmodernism and ethics, 5, 9, 13, 93,
95
Pound, Ezra, 41
Proust, Marcel, 112
Pykett, Lyn, 467, 58, 153 n. 28
Rado, Lisa, 115, 129, 162 n. 16, 163 n. 20
Raval, Suresh, 165 n. 5
Reed, John, 25, 36
religious faith, 345
Rescher, Nicholas, 656, 68
Ressler, Steve, 162 nn. 5 and 11, 163 n. 20
Ricoeur, Paul, 16, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101,
106, 107, 139
Rorty, Richard, 8, 1112, 96
Rossetti, Christina, 151 n. 17
Saint-Simonians, 22, 42, 145 n. 6
Scheick, William, 3, 155 n. 16
Schmidtz, David, 1478 n. 24
Schreiner, Olive, 12, 13, 14, 15, 49, 149 n. 2,
150 n. 13, 153 n. 30
``Buddhist Priest's Wife, The,'' 503,
62
From Man to Man, 150 n. 16
Story of an African Farm, 12, 45, 5761,
613, 152 n. 25, 153 n. 32, 154 n. 35
Woman and Labour, 151 n. 19
self-fashioning, 32, 38, 41
sensation novel, 47
separate spheres, 48, 49, 1378
Shakespeare, William
Hamlet, 29, 79, 93, 101
Shklar, Judith, 11
Shaw, George Bernard, 153 n. 31
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein, 77, 78
Showalter, Elaine, 142 n. 9, 156 n. 19
Siebers, Tobin, 1, 12, 107, 114, 141 n. 5, 142
n. 11, 144 n. 3
speech acts, 11617
promising, 11724, 162 n. 12
lying, 12431, 162 n. 5
Spencer, Herbert, 102, 150 n. 13
Stokes, John, 40, 142 n. 8
Stubbs, Patricia, 46
Stuteld, Hugh, 5960
subjectivism, 5, 67, 36

176
Taylor, Charles, 28, 3943, 144 n. 3, 145
n. 8, 1467 n. 19, 150 n. 13, 155 n. 17
Taylor, Harriet, 146 n. 15
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 36
Locksley Hall, 26
Utilitarianism, 1, 26, 40
Walker, Margaret Urban, 5, 8, 910,
6970, 84, 96
Walker, Pierre, 158 n. 6, 159 n. 14
Watt, Ian, 41, 148 n. 30

Index
Wells, H. G., 3
Widdowson, Peter, 74, 156 nn. 18 and 20
Wilde, Oscar, 1719, 93, 139, 161 n. 22
``Decay of Lying, The,'' 74, 97
Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 13, 16, 18,
40, 934, 95, 97, 98, 99104, 10713,
139
Williams, Bernard, 1, 16, 64, 69, 158 n. 32
Winterson, Jeanette, 64
Wollaeger, Mark, 163 n. 22
Woolf, Virginia, 18, 645
Wordsworth, William, 55, 146 n. 16

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