The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology by Audrey Jaffe (review)

The word "realism" conjures a range of associations, and although the word "fantasy" often comes up as an opposing term more and more frequently the boundaries of realism have made room for fantasy. For over a century, critics have theorized how and why writers and readers seek reality through fiction, and they have generally found the boundaries of realism to be quite porous. For example, Nancy Armstrong extends boundaries to include such works as Wuthering Heights, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and King Solomon's Mines. She conceives of realism as "the entire problematic in which a shared set of visual codes operated as an abstract standard by which to measure one verbal representation against another" and in her view works generically defined as romance, fantasy, and even literary modernism fall within that "problematic" (10–11). And George Levine has come to include works as disparate as Frankenstein and nineteenth-century science writing, contending that the century's obsession with epistemology and ethics was also an obsession with realism, and thus all of these works fall within that literary mode's history and discourse. And so today, quite often, critical works on Victorian realism attempt to understand better this realist frame of mind. Audrey Jaffe is known for this kind of work, as she interprets both Victorian novels and Victorian culture with a keen but sympathetic eye. In The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology she probes the extent to which Victorian writers, scholars of the Victorian novel, and their respective readers participate in what she calls "realist fantasy" (9).

Jaffe centres the work on literary conventions generally used in realism (such as metonymy, the empirically observable, and tropes of disillusionment and consensus) and some that are unique to particular authors (such as Trollope's building "castles in the air" [68]). She argues that these conventions call attention to the constructedness of reality in the Victorian realist novel while simultaneously disappearing into the reality they help to construct. Here Jaffe finds an intriguing overlap of Victorian conceptions of "epistemological history" and Althusser's later ideological theory (4); she contends that together the novels and the critical tradition have repeatedly recognized—or hailed in Althusserian fashion—a number of features as definitive of realist fiction and thus have worked together to construct "a fantasy of the real" that persists beyond the Victorian period (5). Jaffe draws upon Zizek's conception of ideology as "a fantasy-construction" that supports "our effective, real social relationships and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel" (quoted in Jaffe 151 n1). But Jaffe is not interested in exploring the dimensions of the "real, impossible kernel" itself, also known as the Real. In fact, she finds "something fetish-istic about" dwelling on the Real, as though "the capital 'R' has the power to summon the idea of a realer real" (19). Instead she focuses on how the "fantasy constructions" of Victorian realism present "a coherent system of representation" that became widely accepted as reality (151 n1).

Jaffe's sophisticated readings of novels by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Wilkie Collins chart how literary conventions render complex "realist fantasies." Although these novelists employ a range of conventions to these ends, all of them tend to contribute to the Althusserian interpellation, avante le lettre, of both characters and readers as simultaneously included in and excluded from the world of the novel (2). A salient example of the different implications of this paradoxical hailing is the contrast between Jaffe's chapters on Eliot and Hardy. Both chapters take up sociologist Henri Lefebvre's conception of the simultaneous invitation and prohibition implicit in various thresholds—doors that imply both "come in" and "keep out," windows that say "look but don't touch." In Eliot's Adam Bede, Jaffe contends that by means of the narrator's "touristic direction" of the reader's gaze through various thresholds—inviting us...