Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Victorian fiction aims to move its readers – but we are too often suspicious of its power. Familiarized with the self-conscious practices of post-modernity, readers of the nineteenth-century novel's scenes of high feeling may find them insufficiently self-aware. Three decades of important theoretical debates have made the present moment wary of fiction's power to shape consciousness, to smuggle ideology into feeling, and Philip Davis – one of the few contemporary critics to consider the place of emotion in Victorian fiction – is right to remark that today's readers are more likely to say that they have been ‘manipulated’ than ‘moved’ (Davis 1999: 13). The shift from universalism in Anglo-American literary criticism has deepened suspicion of Victorian fiction's scenes of feeling – the sacrifice of Sydney Carton in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the drowning of Maggie and Tom in Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), the fate of Michael Henchard in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) – because they have been judged as predicated on a naïve assumption of commonality between human beings across time and cultures. To be unselfconsciously affected by a Victorian novel now, from this perspective, is to risk being accused of accepting a simplistic concept of ‘universal human nature’; a notion exposed in modern theoretical debate as contaminated by the power politics of the privileged. ... log in or subscribe to read full text