In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel
  • Barry J. Faulk (bio)
Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel, by Jennifer Ruth; pp. viii + 151. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006, $24.95.

Jennifer Ruth's highly readable and timely book makes crucial interventions in several debates: in current disputes over the politics of aesthetics, in post-Foucauldian Victorian studies, and in the historiography of the Victorian professional class. Ruth's study includes readings of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope. I will primarily focus here, however, on her arguments about the politics of the professional raised in the introduction and close of Novel Professions.

Novel Professions has a polemical aim: to counter a still prevalent school of Victorian criticism that harnesses literary interpretation to Michel Foucault's social theory. Foucault decisively linked knowledge production to social domination, and while acknowledging Foucault's insight, Ruth argues persuasively for its limits as a hermeneutic for Victorian culture. She charges Foucauldian critics with displacing their own unease with professionalism onto their predecessors in the professional class. Ruth contends [End Page 111] that the Victorian middle-class was much more ambivalent, and their apologies for a professional class far more conflicted, than some influential critiques of the professions have allowed. In particular, Victorian intellectuals painted a complex notion of the professional ideal of disinterest; they realized that, in Pierre Bourdieu's words, "durable virtues cannot be established on a pure decision of conscience" (qtd. in Ruth 121). The portrait of characters such as Mr Farebrother in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) or William Crimsworth in Brontë's The Professor (1857) further suggest that Victorian novelists knew both that "'disinterest' cannot be pure self-sacrifice without turning into mere dissimulation" and "that the options are not purity versus complicity in the first place" (21).

For Ruth, the mid-Victorian novel presents ample evidence of the capability of its major novelists to historicize; these narratives provide self-reflexive analysis of their author's own shifting position in the new system of industrial labor. In this context, the novelists Ruth studies blur the line between self-interested and disinterested work. In fact, she attributes the relative neglect of two of her central texts, Brontë's The Professor and Trollope's The Three Clerks (1858), to the fact that these writers represent intellectual labor neither as a transcendental activity, nor as mere self-aggrandizement. In Ruth's words, "the former does not attempt to disingenuously distance its proto-professional from the market but rather inserts him into it, and the latter prizes not the alleged purity of its hero but rather his impurity . . . making him a credible professional" (27). Ruth's reading of The Three Clerks relies heavily on Cathy Shuman's argument on the social function of examinations in Victorian society, Pedagogical Economies (2000); it is nonetheless a witty and original treatment of Trollope's philosophy of authorship. Ruth argues that Trollope recognized the new protocols for professional authors, and made claims for his authorial agency that may have seemed diametrically opposed to his contemporary Gustave Flaubert's calls for aesthetic autonomy but were no less canny or aggrandizing. Trollope, as Ruth puts it, "flaunted his submission to preexisting expectations, thereby creating an ironic distance" from the field of cultural production (92). In the case of Brontë's novel, the "ideological obstacles" Brontë faces distinguishing between mental and manual labor in her portrait of Crimsworth's career constitute the novel's chief insight: disinterest "keeps alive our most humane desires" (36).

Ruth's reading of Dickens's David Copperfield (1849–50) counters the now canonical readings by D. A. Miller and Mary Poovey. While Poovey, with her formidable grasp of Victorian capitalism, at times denies Dickens's understanding of market forces, Ruth's reading stresses Dickens's self-awareness of where he's situated in the new division of labor. She notes that David Copperfield reveals Dickens's awareness of being caught between conflicting models of the professional "as mental laborer and mental capitalist" (29). Consequently, the professional ideal that David represents combines two incompatible notions: "time-disciplined...

pdf

Share