Ethical Engagements over Time: Reading and Rereading David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights

There have been many reasons offered for the (re)turn to ethical issues in literary criticism and theory (and, indeed, in the humanities generally) since the late 1980s and early 1990s—for example, the need to get beyond the brilliant but, in the judgment of many, limited insights of deconstruction; or the opportunity to build on the underlying ethical appeals of politically engaged critical approaches such as feminism and critical race theory; or the general move to interdisciplinarity that helped make philosopher Martha Nussbaum's case for narrative as a site for ethical inquiry such an appealing one.

In this essay, however, I want both to advance a different case for the ethical turn in narrative studies and to consider some of its consequences as I reflect on how my ethical relation to two narratives in the British tradition has developed over time. The case is simply that, for multiple reasons, including but not limited to the ones mentioned above, the academy has shown a readiness to acknowledge explicitly what it had often previously acknowledged implicitly—namely, that narratives, like our lives, in general are saturated with ethical considerations. The validity of this assertion rests on the fact that stories constitute one of human beings' primal strategies for organizing into meaningful patterns the otherwise overwhelming data of the world. World-data comes to human beings basically disorganized, self-contradictory, and chaotic. It is useless to us in its raw state. We can only use data when it is patterned, and while human beings employ many strategies for imposing pattern on the world's chaotic data—scientific hypotheses, religious interpretations, social conventions, social science studies, historical analysis, intellectual concepts, philosophical inquiries, and so on—it is stories more than any other strategy—specifically, it is stories' ethical visions—that pattern the world into meaningful shapes.

A story's ethical vision is a particular configuration of rights and wrongs that it puts in motion within a represented human context. The ethical vision of a story operates in the same way that it does in our lives: it is foundational to our sense that we can live a flourishing life, or that we must live with danger, deprivation, discomfort, or injustice. The ethical vision of a story is its power to capture the valences of all those rights and wrongs that operate at the core of our everyday existence. The ethical vision of both persons and stories includes all of those actions, thoughts, motives, and attitudes which we feel that we and others ought to do or ought not to do, and it includes the ethical criteria by which we judge ourselves and others to be good or not good. The core of everyone's everyday existence just is a set of ethical considerations.

This kind of ethical discourse seems not only embarrassing to some people (sounds like Sunday School talk?), but to many academics and professionals it also seems intellectually primitive. That's because it is intellectually primitive. But that doesn't mean it's unimportant. Academic readers and professional critics to whom "intellectually primitive" is as noxious as road kill need to remember that the primal issues in human beings' lives are always the most important issues—and are always unavoidable, in any event. Ethical considerations are primitive elements in our social life the same way that the medulla oblongata is a primitive part of the brain. We don't use the medulla oblongata for doing calculus, but if it isn't doing its job we have no breath or pulse to do calculus with. Ethical considerations have this kind of primal importance for us.

Ethical considerations infiltrate every human interaction not because we don't try hard enough to filter them out but because there is no filtering them out. Depending on how we answer ethical questions about how others are treating us and how we should treat them, nothing less is at stake than the minute-by-minute, overall, everyday quality of our lives. As moral philosopher Robert Louden says,

Moral considerations have ultimate importance not (as many philosophers have argued...