Abstraction and the Subject of Novel Reading: Drifting through Romola
This essay aims to deepen our understanding of the intellectual and affective characteristics of novel reading by examining the tendency of George Eliot's heroines to drift free of the constraints of their own plots. It focuses on Eliot's historical novel (1862-63) and in particular on the...
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Published in | Novel : a forum on fiction Vol. 42; no. 3; pp. 490 - 496 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Providence
Duke University Press
01.09.2009
Duke University Press, NC & IL |
Subjects | |
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Abstract | This essay aims to deepen our understanding of the intellectual and affective characteristics of novel reading by examining the tendency of George Eliot's heroines to drift free of the constraints of their own plots. It focuses on Eliot's historical novel
(1862-63) and in particular on the stylistic and narrative features that make the eponymous heroine of that book seem a visitant in her own story. Noting that the novel insistently figures Romola's abstraction as erotically charged, I argue that this character is Eliot's means of reflecting on the situation of the novel reader, a being contradictorily characterized in Eliot's day and ours as both dilettantish and overinvested, both distracted from and passionately identified with the fiction she absorbs. Although conducted in a different theoretical vocabulary, today's critical discourse on reading resonates with nineteenth-century arguments over whether the novel reader was (erotically) entranced or (intellectually) edified. My claim is that the reader of Eliot is always both, and that implicit in Eliot's method of narrating character is the idea that novel reading offers access to a form of insight through submission. The essay thus engages with the recent affirmations of detachment as a critical value in the work of scholars like Amanda Anderson and David Wayne Thomas; but where these critics have stressed the Victorian ideal of detachment as a goal to be worked at, Eliot's vision of the novel reader as at once detached and erotically passive suggests a more unsettling route to critical insight precisely through the abandonment of will. |
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AbstractList | This essay aims to deepen our understanding of the intellectual and affective characteristics of novel reading by examining the tendency of George Eliot's heroines to drift free of the constraints of their own plots. It focuses on Eliot's historical novel Romola (1862-63) and in particular on the stylistic and narrative features that make the eponymous heroine of that book seem a visitant in her own story. Noting that the novel insistently figures Romola's abstraction as erotically charged, I argue that this character is Eliot's means of reflecting on the situation of the novel reader, a being contradictorily characterized in Eliot's day and ours as both dilettantish and overinvested, both distracted from and passionately identified with the fiction she absorbs. Although conducted in a different theoretical vocabulary, today's critical discourse on reading resonates with nineteenth-century arguments over whether the novel reader was (erotically) entranced or (intellectually) edified. My claim is that the reader of Eliot is always both, and that implicit in Eliot's method of narrating character is the idea that novel reading offers access to a form of insight through submission. The essay thus engages with the recent affirmations of detachment as a critical value in the work of scholars like Amanda Anderson and David Wayne Thomas; but where these critics have stressed the Victorian ideal of detachment as a goal to be worked at, Eliot's vision of the novel reader as at once detached and erotically passive suggests a more unsettling route to critical insight precisely through the abandonment of will. This essay argues that the reader of George Eliot is always both erotically entranced and intellectually edified, and that implicit in her method of making characters is the idea that novel reading offers access to a kind of insight through submission. This point is reached from the premise that Eliot's historical novel "Romola" represents the zero degree of her processes of characterization and thus also a particularly self-conscious portrait of what it means to be a reader of George Eliot. The portrait of the reader that emerges points up some contradictions in current critical portraits of the novel consumer. (Quotes from original text) This essay aims to deepen our understanding of the intellectual and affective characteristics of novel reading by examining the tendency of George Eliot's heroines to drift free of the constraints of their own plots. It focuses on Eliot's historical novel (1862-63) and in particular on the stylistic and narrative features that make the eponymous heroine of that book seem a visitant in her own story. Noting that the novel insistently figures Romola's abstraction as erotically charged, I argue that this character is Eliot's means of reflecting on the situation of the novel reader, a being contradictorily characterized in Eliot's day and ours as both dilettantish and overinvested, both distracted from and passionately identified with the fiction she absorbs. Although conducted in a different theoretical vocabulary, today's critical discourse on reading resonates with nineteenth-century arguments over whether the novel reader was (erotically) entranced or (intellectually) edified. My claim is that the reader of Eliot is always both, and that implicit in Eliot's method of narrating character is the idea that novel reading offers access to a form of insight through submission. The essay thus engages with the recent affirmations of detachment as a critical value in the work of scholars like Amanda Anderson and David Wayne Thomas; but where these critics have stressed the Victorian ideal of detachment as a goal to be worked at, Eliot's vision of the novel reader as at once detached and erotically passive suggests a more unsettling route to critical insight precisely through the abandonment of will. [...] in the work by Audrey Jaffe and Catherine Gallagher I'm referring to, Eliot's method of making characters is all about exemplarity itself. If, as we have seen, Eliot habitually conceives characters against a virtual backdrop of historical figures, frequently drawn from the Renaissance and often from among the ranks of the Catholic saints, it seems significant that Romola, a fifteenth-century Florentine, rubs more than figurative shoulders with Savonarola, Machiavelli, and Piero di Cosimo and at a key moment in the novel finds herself hailed as a living saint by a plague-stricken village. |
Author | Kurnick, David |
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Cites_doi | 10.1525/rep.2005.90.1.61 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208968.001.0001 10.56021/9780801852824 10.1515/9780691213125 10.1515/9780691188065 |
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Copyright | Copyright 2009 NOVEL, INC. Copyright Novel, Inc. Fall 2009 |
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Snippet | This essay aims to deepen our understanding of the intellectual and affective characteristics of novel reading by examining the tendency of George Eliot's... [...] in the work by Audrey Jaffe and Catherine Gallagher I'm referring to, Eliot's method of making characters is all about exemplarity itself. If, as we have... This essay argues that the reader of George Eliot is always both erotically entranced and intellectually edified, and that implicit in her method of making... |
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SubjectTerms | Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-1880) Gallagher, Catherine Heroism Literary characterization Literary characters Literary Criticism Literary Theory Literature and Literary Studies Mathematical extrapolation Narrative modes Narrative plot Narrators Novels Victorians |
Title | Abstraction and the Subject of Novel Reading: Drifting through Romola |
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