Middleness: Provincial Fiction and the Aesthetics of Dull Life

Abstract

This article argues that the rise of the provincial novel in Britain during the 1860s set loose a radically democratizing aesthetic of everyday discriminations. The article suggests – through examples from the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot – that provincial fiction embodies an aesthetics of what is termed ‘middleness’: a means of reading in which the social, cultural and geographical middle became an object of careful evaluative judgment. The article examines the aesthetic affordances of this form in relation to Sianne Ngai’s exploration of the category of the ‘interesting’. It places this practice of attention to the common and the dull in contrast to Matthew Arnold’s contemporaneous critique of provincialism as the chief weakness at the heart of English culture as it moved towards democracy. If Arnold’s mission in his critical essays was to establish a global standard of taste – collective agreement grounded in the judgement of what was ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’ – then provincial fiction effected another sort of aesthetic community: one that valued the common and the dull.