Reading Novels

Appendix 2: Stereotype and Cliché in the Novel

257 Appendix 2: Stereotype and Cliché in the Novel Readers who dislike a novel often justify their criticism by complaining that it is full of clichés, or stereotypical ideas. We should be careful, however , about criticism of this kind. Studies of the discourse of cliché, particularly those by Ruth Amossy, have shown how complex the use of cliché is in the novel, and how muddled attacks on it are.1 We need to describe how cliché and stereotype are used, rather than simply reject them out of hand. The idea of a cliché is itself modern, and derives from the nineteenthcentury world of printing. Printers used to set up books from movable type, but when they had to produce books for a mass market, they started to make molds of whole pages (clichés in French, or stereotypes in English), which could then be used again and again. In the original sense, then, clichés and stereotypes were useful things: the terms only came to have unpleasant connotations because people felt threatened by mass production . Cliché came to mean words, phrases, or ideas that are habitually used by the mass of people. Clichés and stereotypes were identified with shortcuts to communication and with evasion of serious thought. A general attack on the use of clichés is, however, hardly ever convincing . We all constantly pick up and repeat phrases and ideas that are used by others around us: we need to do this in order to communicate. Our languages and our ways of thought are codified, and we cannot escape the repetitions they involve. To criticize the use of cliché in a novel is not usually to give a precise description of a writer’s linguistic habits; rather, it is a way for the critic to show that he or she belongs to a superior intellectual (or social) class. The implication is that the novelist being attacked reading novels 258 belongs to the unintellectual, uneducated mass, to the class of people who are unthinkingly enthralled, and dominated, by cliché. As far as analysis is concerned, it is important first to note that the repetition of fixed phrases and familiar ideas is accorded different values at different times and in different cultures. In premodern culture it was often admired as an endorsement of tradition, community, and unity of feeling . There was nothing wrong with saying what was often thought, or universally acknowledged, especially if one said it in a decorated style. There are still many cultures in the world in which literary skills include such things as chiming in with apposite proverbs, or repeating a complex mixture of traditional and elegant phrases. The use of familiar phrases in Europe starts to change with the rise of industrialism and the breakdown of traditional society. Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen have shown how Romantic “poetic” prose comes to use cliché in a new and interesting way. The poetic language is taken from a traditional public rhetoric, but modern writers want to innovate, to be personal and individual. When used by a writer like Charlotte Brontë, the poeticizing becomes (in a way that is riddled with contradictions) part of an intense and personal “harangue.”2 Realist fiction in the nineteenth century, as we have seen, suspends reference to the real world, but relies nonetheless on our background sense that there is a real world outside the fictions of the novel. Clichés are often used by writers, as Amossy shows, to provide shortcuts between fiction and the real world outside. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, we read how Will Ladislaw, when he had seen Dorothea, “started up as from an electric shock” (chap. 39). Comparisons of love with electric shocks are already familiar by the 1870s, but the narrator goes on to explain that Ladislaw really did feel the shock—and this explanation then moves off into a general explanation of how passion works in the world, and how it is different for men and women. The verisimilitude of the text is reinforced by a little excursion into familiar territory. Stereotypes can work in the same way, introducing characters who are assumed to be familiar in real life: “He was one of those men who . . .” Stereotypes are used to indicate simplified moral categories, and they contribute to the creation of novelistic melodrama: “She was a fallen woman.” “He was a drunken rogue.” As Peter Brooks has shown, this kind of melodrama provides a way of setting up ethical struggles in a world...