Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives

Chapter Nine

143 Chapter Nine Y Ethical Engagements Over Time Reading and Rereading David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights In chapters 7 and 8, respectively, I have shown how up-close and detailed ethical criticism can yield both positive and negative judgments. In this chapter I show how up-close and detailed ethical analysis can yield mixed judgments based on an account of how an auditor’s perceptions of an artwork can change over time. The contents of this chapter also develop the thread of argument introduced in previous chapters, namely, that issues raised by ethical criticism are often profoundly personal. In this chapter I demonstrate that the personal influence stories sometimes exert on ethos is not limited to whatever effects end when the story ends, but are sometimes effects that change every time the story is revisited. Given that the development of an ethos is organic, not mechanistic, it may be the case that while a given story can exert a persistent influence on us, it may not always exert the same influence, especially over long periods of time. How each of us learns from narratives that we encounter many times over many years is a complicated process, one worthy of its own narrative . In what follows, I will explore as case studies my ongoing ethical engagement with two narratives, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. My claim is not that all readers will or 144 s h a p e d b y s t o r i e s should respond to these stories as I have done, but that my experience offers one version of a more general phenomenon with stories that I believe other story lovers will recognize. One’s ongoing interactions with a given story are certainly not a once-and-for-all thing like a brass casting.1 Ongoing interactions with any narrative may mean that an auditor is, at one point in time, especially open to the story’s ethical vision, but that at other points in time he or she may be especially susceptible to misreading that vision or seeing it through a glass darkly. My story illustrates several facets of this general phenomenon, and more. Ethical Vision in David Copperfield and Its Usefulness to Me Many of Dickens’s most passionate readers first discovered him when they were children, but I did not. My personal relationship with David Copperfield began when I discovered Dickens’s novels as a twenty-fouryear -old graduate student at the University of Chicago. In a bright Chicago autumn in a class taught by the great scholar Morton Dauwen Zabel, I discovered the banquet table of Dickens’s novels, and I devoured one after another as rapidly as I could. I strode around my tiny marriedstudent apartment reading to the walls the speeches from different characters , laughing my head off at Vincent Crummles’s story of the circus pony in Nicholas Nickleby, whose mother, says Crummles, “ate apple-pie at a circus for upwards of fourteen years, and went to bed in a nightcap; and, in short, took the low comedy entirely” (286); was brought nearly to tears in Little Dorrit over the sadness of Arthur Clennam’s childhood, which Clennam remembers as “a legion of Sundays, all days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing before him” (30); or raged bitterly with Dickens against the callous neglect of the poor as the narrator of Bleak House responds to Jo’s death with his thunderous denunciation , “Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day” (649). I can just hear the disapproval of some of my readers. “Laughter and tears? How gauche! How naïve! How unprofessional!” Yes, these responses are all gauche, naïve, and unprofessional. I plead guilty on all Ethical Engagements Over Time 145 counts. But I also remain unrepentant on all counts. My responses were naïve and unprofessional because they were not responses I cooked up for the sake of looking good in Zabel’s class or for the sake of teaching my own Dickens classes later. (As for having responses that I might later publish in a book, I would at that time have considered this possibility no more likely than writing the Great American Novel on the back of...