Featured Download
Speak Like a CEO
This chapter describes ten helpful actions and behaviors that will bring you...
Content provided in partnership with
A modern odyssey: Realism, the masses, and nationalism in George Eliot's Felix Holt
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1996 by Lesjak, Carolyn
The industrial novel occupies a unique place in the context of debates about realism. As Erich Auerbach suggests, the subject matter of the realist novel-the masses or "the common people"-comes into being as a serious subject for literature as part of realism's inexorable logic:
Realism had to embrace the whole reality of contemporary civilization, in which to be sure the bourgeoisie played a dominant role, but in which the masses were beginning to press threateningly ahead as they became ever more conscious of their own function and power. The common people in all its ramifications had to be taken into the subject matter of serious realism. (497)
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Within realism's impulse or dynamic toward the representation of the masses lies the search for the ever more novel or strange, the desire for the discovery of new aesthetic material with which to work. Citing the Goncourts as exemplary of this driven fascination with the common people, Auerbach quotes Edmond de Goncourt himself, who articulates this appeal in terms that strongly echo those of the imperial or colonizing impulse, seeking adventure in foreign places: "the people, the mob, if you will, has for me the attraction of unknown and undiscovered populations, something of the exoticism which travelers go to seek" (498).
For our purposes here what is important are the textual and aesthetic determinants of such an attitude. Auerbach argues that this attitude necessarily excludes from its representation "everything functionally essential, the people's work, its position within modern society, the political, social, and moral ferments which are alive in it and which point to the future" (498, emphasis added). Given this, one may well ask, what then can or does the so-called industrial novel do? If, indeed, the impetus motivating its representational concerns functionally precludes the representation of its supposed subject matter-the working people and their work-what does the industrial novel in fact represent?
Raymond Williams, in his ground-breaking work Culture and Society, reads the industrial novel as a genre defined by its conflicting concerns (99-119). On the one hand, these novels embody a critical response to industrialism, with, in some cases, genuine sympathy for the plight of the working class. On the other hand, in the face of the actual conditions of the working class, they back down from any serious involvement out of fear, opting instead for a backdoor exit of sorts involving either the death or the emigration-to a new world, often the New World-of their politically engaged and potentially militant protagonists.
Williams identifies this ultimate withdrawal, fueled as it is initially out of sympathy, as the determining "structure of feeling" of the industrial novel.
This conflict between concern on the one hand and fear on the other not only determines the internal structure of these novels, but constitutes as well their failure realistically to represent the social conditions of their time. The fear of violence, according to Williams, distorts even the best of intentions: Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, which comes closest for Williams to identifying imaginatively with and hence representing the "lived experience" of the working class, is finally unable to sustain its sympathy for that experience once the threat of violence arises and with it, the potential for that violence to be organized through collective solidarity and struggle. This inability is marked in Gaskell's text by the recourse to conventional sentimental fiction, as the novel's center moves from John Barton and his participation in the workers' union to the love trials of Mary Barton and her journey to exonerate her lover, falsely accused of murder. In other cases, such as that of Dickens's Hard Times, withdrawal takes the form of confused passivity amidst the tangle of complex social forces: Blackpool's "Aw a muddle!" becomes synonymous with Dickens's treatment of the working class in general; a typically adolescent posture in its claim to have "seen through" society while simultaneously rejecting any real engagement in that society, Dickens's work thus figures for Williams more as a symptom than an assessment, realistic or otherwise, of the very confusions of industrial society that it purports to represent. Whatever the actual specifics of each individual novel's resolution-be it that of Alton Locke, North and South, or Felix Holt-the strategy, one of containment, remains essentially the same.' Moreover, as Williams notes in conclusion, it is a strategy or structure of feeling whose provenance is by no means limited to the nineteenth century, but whose legacy remains with us today.
While Williams's argument has great explanatory power, most notably in its identification of the structure motivating the oft-noted murky politics of these novels, Williams's own interpretive politics themselves bear further investigation. In the midst of his critique of Mary Barton we find Williams bemoaning what he sees as Gaskell's shift towards sentimental fiction as a fall of sorts: "[Mary's] indecision between Jem Wilson and 'her gay lover, Harry Carson'; her agony in Wilson's trial; her pursuit and last-minute rescue of the vital witness; the realization of her love for Wilson: all this, the familiar and orthodox plot of the Victorian novel of sentiment, but of little lasting interest" (101). Implicit in this diagnosis is a strict delineation of "industrial" novels as separate from and superior to (if done authentically) merely sentimental fiction which for Williams can be of "little lasting interest." Such a view is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Williams's model has served as an exemplar for subsequent interpretations of the industrial novel. Hence, once categorized as "industrial," a novel is subject to interpretation based on its politics, politics here meaning that which deals with broad social issues properly circumscribed in the public sphere. Within such a framework, a novel such as Mary Barton (or Felix Holt, Sybil, and so on) is either judged a good book by critics sympathetic to its liberal or humanitarian politics or a bad book by those who condemn this self-same liberalism. In either case, the so-called industrial novel is relegated to the "political" camp of literature in contrast to the homier domain of "domestic" or sentimental fiction. And should a novel stray out of the factory and into the home, within a Marxist framework it spells political doom.
