Satirizing Habits in Victorian Fiction PDF
By:Jennifer Lynn Judge
Published on 2009 by
This dissertation argues for a significant presence of satire within Victorian novels from the 1830s to the 1890s - the very decades in which many influential critics, from the early twentieth century to the present day, discern a marked, general decline in the practice of satire. As early as the eighteenth century, writers valued amiable humour over wit and satire; continuing this trend, countless Victorian writers and critics attempted (in David Worcester's words) to pus[h] satire into the dunce's comer (32). Nevertheless, regardless of their theoretic disavowal of satire, many novelists embraced, in their narrative practice, its mild Horatian, philosophical Menippean, and even stringent Juvenalian possibilities. Charlotte Bronte's words to Elizabeth Gaskell may be applied to many Victorian writers: 'Satirical you are - however; I believe a little more so than you think' (Letters 3: 4 7). Current studies of satire in the Victorian novel tend to restrict themselves to individual analyses of substantially satiric novels such as Martin Chuzzlewit or The Way of All Flesh; more generic assessments are deferred. In terms of broader engagements, Frank Palmeri' s view that satire is a form of writing that disappears underground or into eclipse (Thackeray 770) in the mid-Victorian period, only to emerge in the late decades of the period, is representative. In this dissertation, however, I demonstrate a distinctly Victorian satiric focus on society as the source of moral ills by identifying habit as a dominant, encyclopaedic subject of novelistic satire. The belief that human character is substantially a social creation is exemplified by George Henry Lewes's observation: To understand the Human Mind we must study it under its normal conditions, and these are social conditions (PLMJ 128). As well, inspired by Athena Vrettos's enterprising work on the prevalence of Victorian debates concerning habit and its relevance to psychological realism in terms of Dickens's Dombey and Son, I trace the relations of culturally embedded discourses on habit to the period's novelistic satire. Satirists' preoccupation with habit is strikingly illuminated by Mikhail Bakhtin's social-formalist assessment of the novel's steadfast roots in ancient serio-comical literature and Menippean satire - a dialogic form that defamiliarizes habit. Cultural systems - all the habitual matrices [sosedstva] of things and ideas - are exposed in the menippea through voracious parody of literary and non-literary genres, and through the creation of ... unexpected connections (Dialogic 169). Victorian novelists, I argue, continued the traditions of satire (as an evolving mode or genre) through an engagement with omnipresent theories of habit. Although authoritative nineteenth-century discourses (both of natural science and of moral/social science) implicate habit in the forces of determinism, contradictory theories inveterately identify habit as a locus of moral hope (through habits of sympathy, self-control, free will, and free thought). I examine in detail the confluence of satire and this dual discourse of habit through close readings of canonical Victorian novels. The novels I discuss, from Cranford (1851-53) and Silas Marner (1861) to The Way of All Flesh (written between 1873 and 1884, published 1903) and New Grub Street (1891), demonstrate either Horatian optimism or Juvenalian cynicism with regard to habit as a source for good or illustrations It is a trajectory encapsulated by Edward Bulwer-Lytton's transition from optimism and faith in habits of sympathy in Pelham ( 1828) to his cynicism concerning the assimi1ating powers of habit in The Coming Race (1871). Importantly, Dickens's novels of the 1850s and 60s, which target habit in lines of blood and fire (30) (to borrow James Hannay' s epithet for Juvena1ian satire), foreground the theoretical issues be1eaguering satire's relations with the novel. The satura of Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) is characterized by unrestrained metaphor that targets all forms of institutional (social) and individual (psychological) bad habits. Finally, I investigate misogynist theorizations of both satire and habit, by analyzing the satiric machinery of Charlotte Bronte's Shirley (1849) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72). With satiric irreverence, both novels pose a question that is crucial to historic and Victorian theories concerning female mental inferiority: '[D]o you seriously think all wisdom in the world is lodged in male skulls?''' (Bronte, S 328). Despite the era's ambivalence to satire, which I explore at length, Victorian novelists were profoundly engaged with its literary and social possibilities. Dissociating and dissenting from the habitual matrices of their culture, and engaging with complex moral discourses affirming the familiar fact, the power of habit (Mill, Utilitarianism 10: 238), novelists wrote philosophically probing and culturally critical Menippean, Horatian, and Juvenalian satire.
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