The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism, by S. Pearl Brilmyer

Abstract

The most traditional history of the novel proclaims that the genre progressed inward. Exit the caricatures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, enter the interiority of George Eliot that culminates in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. If only we could map the history of the novel so neatly, replies S. Pearl Brilmyer in her new monograph, The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism. Brilmyer takes John Stuart Mill’s failed science, “ethology,” or “the particular and circumstantial processes through which character takes shape,” as her starting point (1). Although ethology never gained traction in the scientific community, Brilmyer asserts that it has a home in literature, “especially as transformed in the hands of realist authors at the turn of the twentieth century” who cultivate a “narrative science of human nature” (4).Brilmyer claims this narrative science relies on late Victorian writers cultivating a “dynamic materialist” approach to character (16). Character is found not in interiority but in materiality; matter is not inert but dynamic—resulting in “a new characterological paradigm, in which the human being no longer stood above the physical world but rather was a particularly complex knot in a webbed reality” (16–17). Brilmyer’s argument depends on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s conception of “weak theory” to postulate a theory of character based on particular descriptive instances (43). Here, Brilmyer begins to navigate the thorny path of claiming that the novel develops alongside, and even theorizes, the humanistic sciences, that literary character theorizes human character. To her credit, Brilmyer avoids some of the sharper thorns along this path, for example, by sidestepping the anachronistic Object-Oriented Ontologists whose thought might seem dynamic materialist. Instead, Brilmyer references the science and philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Mill, George Henry Lewes, Charles Darwin, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Karl Marx being the most frequent touchstones alongside other important thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.With the exception of chapter 4, which I will turn to shortly, each chapter of The Science of Character analyzes a single author in conjunction with an impressive array of nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific texts; however, it can be difficult to keep track of Brilmyer’s claim about the author. Chapters 1 and 2 both examine George Eliot, while chapters 3 and 5 engage Thomas Hardy and Olive Schreiner, respectively. The introduction and the coda are essential to understanding the general argument and how it complicates the traditional history of the novel. In these chapters, Brilmyer argues that writers from the 1870s to the 1920s replaced interiority as the hallmark of realist character with a new “materialist set of ideals,” namely plasticity, impressibility, spontaneity, impulsivity, relationality, and vitality (6). While it may not be evident how some of these ideals—impulsivity, for instance—are materialist, Brilmyer deftly ties each ideal to nineteenth-century science and philosophy to illuminate its materiality. Chapter 4, for example, argues that the realism of the New Woman novelists—specifically Sarah Grand, George Gissing, George Egerton, and Olive Schreiner—responds to Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will. Brilmyer shows how New Woman novelists like Grand read and discussed Schopenhauer. These New Woman novelists, Brilmyer claims, ultimately engage with his philosophy in their novels “to destabilize the binary opposition between masculine and feminine, which . . . was founded on the assumption of the male subject’s ability to transcend his impulses and the female’s enslavement to hers” (179). Construed this way, impulsivity becomes material, rooted in and inscribed on bodies of different genders. In this context, Brilmyer offers a concept of impulsivity so theorized that it can be challenging to follow the argument about realism alongside the argument about materialism. Schopenhauer’s misogyny receives little attention. Brilmyer devotes a few short paragraphs to Schopenhauer’s “On Women,” concluding that “his female readers found much more to appreciate in his thought than his low estimation of women” (156). Brilmyer implies that Schopenhauer’s misogyny is less important than how New Woman writers use his philosophy, arguing that his theory of the Will questions the agency of all subjects, regardless of sex. Nonetheless, this chapter should prove interesting to any literary critics interested in feminist literature or philosophy, as it is fascinating to watch Brilmyer show how New Woman authors appropriate Schopenhauer’s philosophy for feminist means.Other chapters use the same interdisciplinary method. Chapters 1 and 2 examine Eliot’s Middlemarch and Impressions of Theophrastus Such, respectively. In chapter 1, Brilmyer introduces what she calls Eliot’s “physics of character—a figural characterology that represents human life in terms of its physical limitations and potentials” (45). The chapter has two central claims, which Brilmyer posits as hypotheses: one, “that the plasticity of Eliot’s characters in Middlemarch records the capacity of bodies for relation and thus for change as well”; and two, “that throughout Middlemarch, rigidity signals the apparent autonomy of character, the phenomenal appearance of characters as stable, individuated entities that remain constant throughout time” (45). Following these hypotheses, the characters in Middlemarch do not exhibit consciousness like humans but instead engage readers by expressing emotion via their “dynamic, material forms,” which have an inhuman ability to change shape “in response to the circumstances they encounter” (74). Brilmyer closes this chapter by claiming that Eliot’s descriptive technique in Middlemarch theorizes the capabilities of descriptive language in general, that fiction generates “characters that can be formed and reformed by readers because their natures are soft” (74).Chapter 2 proposes that Impressions of Theophrastus Such “develops a theory of knowledge (and, as such, reading and writing) as sensitive encounter” (76). Brilmyer argues that Impressions uses caricatured sketches of people to examine the extent to which a person’s characteristics and behaviors are accidental or spontaneous (91). The inductive reasoning of Impressions transforms the work from fiction to quasi-observational science, which Brilmyer claims was a central interest of Eliot’s until the end of her career. By using the descriptive to observe the human, Impressions reveals the limits of human perception and critiques humanist ontologies, instead proposing that “all perceptive beings lie on a single ontological plane” (98). Contemporary thinkers might criticize Brilmyer for flattening the difference between epistemology and literary description, but she defends her approach by historicizing: Victorian scientists and philosophers, like William Kingdon Clifford, believed that fiction was a legitimate site for the study of human character (77).Chapter 3 introduces what Brilmyer calls Thomas Hardy’s “aesthetics of surface” to argue that Hardy’s realism inheres in his careful descriptions of the exteriors of bodies and emphasizes their capacities for “slow, iterative” change (107, 105). The primary focus of the chapter is a reading of Hardy’s The Well-Beloved alongside “nineteenth-century theories of heredity,” primarily those of Charles Darwin, to argue that the novel’s critique of idealism extends to a critique of whiteness as an ideal in nineteenth-century science (110). However, the chapter’s best example of Hardy’s “aesthetics of surface” comes from The Return of the Native, as Diggory Venn slowly transforms from red to white. Citing Hardy’s notorious 1912 footnote that, perhaps, disavows the novel’s original ending, Brilmyer reads Venn’s “white fate” as not only a “performative capitulation” to the publishers but also an emblem of Hardy’s loss of faith in novelistic realism. To conform to novelistic convention, Hardy must strip Venn of color, which strips him of the marks of his “unique history and place,” leaving nothing but “a bare outline” (142).The fifth and final chapter before the coda builds on the previous two to argue that the novels of Olive Schreiner employ an “ethological realism,” which theorizes that the description of reality is never ethically neutral and is always entangled “with normative theories about how the world could or should be” (183). This ethological realism contrasts with Victorian psychological realism in that ethological realism focuses not on interiority but on “the objecthood of the observer and relations that give rise to that observer” (218). Truth, then, is found not in autonomous things or subjective thought but in the observable links between things (216). Knowledge, as shown in a reading of From Man to Man, “is generated through embodied, affective experiences,” not through contemplation (201). As a result, Schreiner’s descriptive techniques, Brilmyer argues, diverge from the those of the Victorians and exemplify a distinct literary movement that precedes modernism. This “new realist” movement privileges the exterior over the interior to “do justice to the dynamic materiality of the character of the world—as well as that of the human being doing the describing” (219).Brilmyer shines most when her argument addresses the history of the novel directly. In her clear and incisive coda, she turns to E. M. Forster, among other literary critics, to argue that her materialist set of ideals are most apt to understand realism in the novel at the turn of the twentieth century. “Flatness,” “roundness,” and “depth,” though they are entrenched in how we think and talk about literature, are not terms that writers of this era would have used to describe realistic characters. Instead, authors of this era would be more likely to use the materialist ideals listed above. By making this argument, Brilmyer illuminates the value of an era often forgotten, that which occurs after the peak of Victorianism, but before Modernism. Progress in literary realism does not stop in this era, Brilmyer argues; instead, it turns to the material.