Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
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
Contents
Acknowledgments
page viii
20
44
64
93
114
Afterword
137
Notes
141
Bibliography
165
Index
173
vii
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
ix
chapter 1
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
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
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
10
11
12
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.
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
chapter 2
Alasdair MacIntyre1
Charles Taylor2
21
22
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
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
26
27
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
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
29
30
31
32
33
34
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
35
36
37
38
39
40
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)
42
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
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
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
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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
46
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-
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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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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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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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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58
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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
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``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
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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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.
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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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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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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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
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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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)
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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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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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.
92
chapter 5
William Shakespeare1
94
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.
95
96
97
98
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
100
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
101
102
103
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)
104
105
106
``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)
107
108
109
110
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.
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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113
chapter 6
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
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 115
116
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 117
118
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,
120
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
122
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 123
124
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
126
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
128
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
130
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 131
132
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
134
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 135
136
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
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
140
Afterword
Notes
142
8
10
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12
13
Notes to pages 35
14
15
16
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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
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.
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
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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
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26
27
28
29
30
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
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33
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154
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
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22
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.
157
158
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
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160
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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
22
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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
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7
8
9
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11
12
13
14
15
16
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20
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164
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
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