Realism's Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (review)

Both traditional empiricist conceptions of realism and recent deconstructions of realist fiction as imperialist/orientalist fantasies projected on the outside world often ignore tensions between reality and fantasy within the realist novel itself. In this comparative study, Geoffrey Baker traces these tensions to post-Napoleonic Europe's new world order through an examination of works by Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and Theodor Fontane. Hardly neo-Virgilian celebrants of empire, these authors bear witness to the "modern disenchantment" associated with the loss of mystery and romance in an increasingly "mapped and known world" given over to exploration, empiricism, and "marketization" (194, 7, 84). This "imperialist shrinking of the world," Baker argues, "brings colonial difference into the domestic sphere and allows it to complicate the act of representation" (158).

Colonial difference appears in depictions of the familiar as foreign (as Paris is defamiliarized in the carriage-ride scenes in Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or [77]) and of "the nearness of the colonies to the metropolitan center" (as Ireland is designated "the colonies next door" in Trollope's Phineas Finn [71]). Both scenarios are instances of the "foreigner-in-Europe motif" (3), which takes such forms as the Chinese Mandarin in Le Père Goriot, the Chinese ghost in Fontane's EffiBriest, and the American entrepreneur in Trollope's The Way We Live Now. The motif even figures in the titles of La Fille ("the objectified colonial woman" [93]), La Peau de chagrin (the Eastern talisman), and Phineas Finn (the Irish outsider). Like sand grains in oysters, foreign elements unsettle the apparatus of scientific order and political control in Europe's great urban centers even as they re-enchant the realist narratives in which they appear. Ultimately, however, these irritants/stimulants are put in their place, and either vanish (the magic skin), banish themselves (Phineas Finn), or are killed off (the golden-eyed girl) (107).

In structuring realist works around epistemological (and actual) duels pitting European rationality against foreign fantasy, and in situating these works in the seats of empire—Paris, London, and (belatedly) Berlin—Balzac, Trollope, and Fontane seem to have more in common with each other as writers than with their own compatriots. Thus Flaubert's and Zola's depictions of exoticism in Paris are less captivating and more commercial than Balzac's (84); Dickens's "world has not yet been disenchanted" as Trollope's has, and his London is not as "dangerously cosmopolitan" (129); Gustav Freytag's romantic nostalgia and retreat from "global interconnectedness" sets him apart from Fontane (170-73). Far from rationalizing the irrational or domesticating the foreign, Balzac's, Trollope's, and Fontane's finest writing "seems to generate itself out of figures imported from the cultural margins" (176).

Baker brings an impressive—occasionally excessive—body of scholarship to bear on three works apiece by three authors in a study that is less about the European realist novel in general than about a subset of "problematically 'realist' works" which, in their stark "collision[s] of empiricism and enchantment," are exceptions that illuminate the norm (176, 179). The degree to which other nineteenth-century (and later) works can be shown to fit in (or flesh out) Baker's metanarrative about European realism as a conflicted endeavor to revive and rationalize the colonial and the romantic in an increasingly interconnected but inequitable world is well worth exploring.