Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Maitzen, Rohan Amanda

Titel

'The Soul of Art': Understanding Victorian Ethical Criticism

Ist Teil von

• English studies in Canada, 2005-06, Vol.31 (2), p.151-185

Ort / Verlag

Edmonton: Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]as early as 1853 Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton had asserted, in a pamphlet appended to his controversial novel Lucretia, that "it is the treatment that ennobles, not the subject": "Art can, with Fielding, weave an epic from adventures with gamekeepers and barbers. Because Victorian critics lacked an established critical terminology or theoretical tradition for this analysis, initially their various methods, priorities, and vocabularies seem merely idiosyncratic, but in fact their discussions consistently address specific problems, aspects, or elements of treatment. Like the other recent ethical critics who favour flexibility and fear dogmatism, Nussbaum champions an ethics that refuses rigid taxonomies of right and wrong. Because as a genre the novel is committed to particulars rather than generalizations or abstractions, to her it exemplifies an alternative moral philosophy-in the right hands, that is. Nussbaum is explicit that "[n]ot all novels are appropriate": she accepts James's view, for instance, that George Eliot's omniscient narrator is "a falsification of our human position" Us).10 The ambiguity and complexity of James's prose, however, matches "the complexity, the indeterminacy, the sheer difficulty of moral choice" in real life (141, original emphasis) and thus becomes her ideal. Because it is hard to imagine two novelists more superficially different than James and Trollope-Trollope's novels, for one thing, are vulnerable to James's famous charge of being "large loose baggy monsters" with little artistic meaning ("Preface" 515), while James in his turn falls afoul of Trollope's decree that the novelist's language "should be so pellucid that the meaning should be rendered without an effort to the reader" (Autobiography 151)-this unexpected convergence between the theoretical ends allegedly served by their novels is thought-provoking.