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Introduction: Two interventions on realism

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2011.571528

1470-1308

Rachel Bowlby,

Joseph Conrad and Literature

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See for instance Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), Pam Morris, Realism (London: Routledge, New Critical Idiom series, 2003), and the chapter on realism in Francis O'Gorman, The Victorian Novel: A Guide to Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). George Levine has written extensively and lucidly on Victorian realism, most recently in Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For an expansion of this argument see Rachel Bowlby, ‘Foreword’, in Matthew Beaumont (ed.), The Concise Companion to Realism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. xi–xviii. See Virginia Woolf, ‘The Lives of the Obscure’ (1925), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, Andrew McNeillie (ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), p. 118. These include, ironically, Richard Edgeworth and Thomas Day, two of the eighteenth-century scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs who in recent years have been revived and celebrated in Jenny Uglow's collective biography of them, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925), David Bradshaw (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford World's Classics, 2000), p. 3. Further references will be given within the main text. As a surname, however, ‘Scrope’ does have a history, and one that may well have impinged upon Woolf through her reading for ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’ (1925), an essay she wrote for The Common Reader at the same time as she was writing Mrs Dalloway. In the fifteenth-century Paston letters, Scrope appears as a persistent but unsuccessful suitor for the hand of Elizabeth Paston (who subsequently marries someone else). See Diane Watt (ed. and trans.), The Paston Women: Selected Letters (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), especially pp. 116–117, letter of Elizabeth Clere to John Paston I, 29 June ?, 1449. In the order of the narrative of Mrs Dalloway, Scrope Purvis appears (and disappears) before either Peter Walsh or Richard Dalloway, who were both Clarissa's suitors, are brought into existence: he is indeed a sort of fleeting and initially prominent candidate for close acquaintance who never quite makes it across the threshold into the main structure of the novel. Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, Andrew McNeillie (ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 421. ‘Character in Fiction’ is the essay known in some of its versions as ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. Some more of the multiple meanings of making up are discussed in Rachel Bowlby, ‘Make Up Your Mind: Scenes from the Psychology of Selling and Shopping’, in Shopping with Freud (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 100–102. Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925), Essays, Vol. 4, p. 160. Ibid, pp. 160–161. Ibid, p. 160. On the figure of the passante see further Rachel Bowlby, ‘Walking, Women and Writing’, in Still Crazy After All These Years (1992; rpt London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–33. In ‘Character in Fiction’, Woolf herself makes the point about real-life reading directly: ‘I have said that people have to acquire a good deal of skill in character-reading’ (Essays, Vol. 3, p. 421), and in the sentence quoted above: ‘it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practised character-reading and had some skill in the art’. See Charles Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863), in Oeuvres comple`tes, Marcel A. Ruff (ed.) (Paris: Seuil, 1968), esp. p. 553: ‘Si une mode, une coupe de vêtement a été légèrement transformée, si les noeuds de rubans, les boucles ont été détrônés par les cocardes, … croyez qu’à une distance énorme son oeil d'aigle l'a déjà deviné'; ‘If a fashion, the cut of a garment, has been slightly transformed, if ribbon ties or buckles have been dethroned by rosettes, you can be sure that his eagle eye has already guessed it at an enormous distance’. For ‘impressions’ see e.g. p. 355. Clarissa herself is fifty-one: ‘She had just broken into her fifty-second year’ (Mrs Dalloway, p. 31). Milly is mentioned, by Lady Bruton, at Clarissa's party, when she has a brief conversation with Peter Walsh: ‘But her house, her servants, her good friend Milly Brush—did he remember her?—were all there only asking to be used if—if they could be of help, in short’ (Mrs Dalloway, p. 155). As with Hugh Whitbread, the remembering of Milly, the secretary euphemistically described as a ‘good friend’, does not go without saying. At 40, Milly is closer in age to Woolf (born in 1882) when she wrote the book in the early 1920s than are the main characters. Nothing is said of there ever having been marital or amorous inclinations for Lady Bruton. At most, the picture of her tomboy childhood with her brothers in Devon functions as a retrospectively confirming prelude to her commanding, quasi-masculine identity. So important has the first half of Chapter 17 been seen to be that it was detached from its novelistic context and published on its own in George J. Becker's seminal anthology, Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 112–116. In his collection, Becker gave the Adam Bede extract the title ‘On Realism’. The word is not used in the chapter by Eliot herself, but in 1858, the year before Adam Bede, Eliot's partner G.H. Lewes had written an influential essay, ‘Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction’, published in the Westminster Review, and the topic, under that name, was at the forefront of critical argument at the time. And in a review in 1856 of Ruskin's Modern Painters, Volume III, Eliot had written: ‘The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality’ (Eliot, Selected Critical Writings, Rosemary Ashton (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford World's Classics, 1992), p. 248). Eliot's writing has always been linked to questions of realism; recently, George Levine subtitled his Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ‘George Eliot and the Art of Realism’. George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), ed. with an Introduction by Stephen Gill (London: Penguin, 1980), Ch. 52, p. 514. Further references to the novel will be given within the main text. I will return to the question of post-time further on. The narrator's position and the novel's play of past and present, death and afterlife, are further complicated here by the fact that at the time of the story dioramas did not yet exist; nor, if they had, would it be likely that Adam would have been to a big enough city to see one, let alone for the experience to have embedded itself with the familiarity that the comparison suggests. Dioramas, invented by Louis Daguerre, began in the 1820s in Paris; they were proto-cinematic shows of changing painterly images, displayed in specialised theatres to audiences that could amount to several hundred people. Anne Friedberg suggestively relates the diorama to ‘the pleasure of immersion in a world not present’, in Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 28. Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marcel A. Ruff (Paris: Seuil, 1968), p. 553. See also Rachel Bowlby, ‘Half Art: Baudelaire's Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, Paragraph, 34:1 (2011): 1–11. Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 149. Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), p. 65. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ (1856), in Selected Critical Writings, p. 298. Richardson's Pamela was first published in 1740 but continued to be reprinted and to appear in new editions for decades afterwards; the final revised edition appeared as late as 1801. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925), David Bradshaw (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford World's Classics, 2000), p. 50. George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893), Patricia Ingham (ed. ) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford World's Classics, 1992), pp. 67–68. McDonagh discusses the way that Adam Bede involves a repression of negative memories, culminating in the removal of Hetty and the restoration of community at the end of the novel. See Child Murder, Ch. 5, especially, pp. 145–153. Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (1856), in Selected Critical Writings, p. 276. See Eliot, ‘Natural History’, p. 276, where ‘bureaucratic’ occurs three times and ‘bureaucracy’ once. Eliot, ‘Silly Novelists’, p. 306. Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, Andrew McNeillie, (ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), p. 160. Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929; London: Granada, 1977), p. 70.