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  • Ethics and the English Novel from Austen to Forster
  • Harry E. Shaw
Ethics and the English Novel from Austen to Forster, by Valerie Wainwright; pp. iv + 216. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007, £50.00, $99.95.

We have traveled some distance from Fredric Jameson's summary rejection, in The Political Unconscious (1981), of "ethical criticism" for neglecting history and collective solidarity in favor of the individual psyche. Ethics is back on the critical agenda as [End Page 704] "bourgeois" fades from the phrase "bourgeois individual." a cynical reading would see this as one more ideological erasure and backsliding, but knowingness may miss promise. Now that individualism has lost its taint, might an ethical account of literature work through the individual to the social and back again?

Valerie Wainwright's Ethics and the English Novel from Austen to Forster provides a fresh look at the individualistic side of the problem by drawing on the conceptual arsenal of anglo-american analytical philosophy. Wainwright has three major aims. she argues that an ethics of "personal flourishing" is at work in a series of nineteenthcentury novels (including Mansfield Park [1814], Hard Times [1854], North and South [1855], Middlemarch [187172], and The Return of the Native [1878]), with Howard's End (1910) providing a twentieth-century extension and Bruce Chatwin's Utz (1989) a coda. she identifies a number of Victorian and pre-Victorian figures whose ideas were known to the novelists and whose ethical views, she suggests, helped to define theirs. Finally, she claims that concerns like theirs have recently resurfaced as part of "an influential line of thought . . . within the ethics of modernity" (2). This makes the modern theories useful lenses through which to view the novels, and it makes the novels, which "organize and develop intricate and nuanced discourses on the subject of what makes for admirable or successful lives" (16), rich material for the modern theories.

The ethical discourse Wainwright highlights centers on "eudaimonism," which holds that what matters most ethically is achieving a state of "personal flourishing," instead of, say, performing good actions motivated by the sense of duty so often viewed as the basis of Victorian morality. In such an account, the ethical life involves, as the philosopher alasdair macIntyre puts it, "being well and doing well in being well" (qtd. in Wainwright 3). To be sure, rational agents may come to believe that they themselves cannot truly flourish if their society does not; still, the individualistic focus of such a position is clear enough. Wainwright argues that the novels she discusses embrace eudaimonism but also explore the limitations and quandaries that arise when we make individual flourishing the center of the ethical life.

Intelligence is a keynote of this book, in its execution as well as its subject, and nowhere more than in its choice to discuss two kinds of contextual material, Victorian and modern. The danger in discovering that Victorian novels fit surprisingly well with the latest ethical theories is that the priorities of the modern theories will turn out to have forced the fit, thinning and distorting the novels in the process. The danger in working only with ethical thought coeval with the novels is that ethics will become history. Citing both kinds of material at once promotes balance, and when Wainwright is at her best, balance is what she achieves. Her discussion of North and South grounds that novel in Victorian debates for and against the liberalism of John stuart mill while at the same time defining the novel's ethical stance through the thought of John rawls and Carol Gilligan.

The treatment of Hard Times suggests limitations in Wainwright's approach, though it brings to light a fascinating and unexpected source. Who would have thought that in writing Hard Times Charles dickens was influenced by the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists? Yet Wainwright makes this connection plausible, citing as the link Edward Tagart, a Unitarian minister and friend of Dickens who preached Platonist sermons on the nature of the will commended by Dickens during the period when he was writing that novel. Concepts from the Cambridge Platonists help Wainwright to [End Page 705] define a particular kind of individual well-being as the...

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