Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (review)

Jeannette King. Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. 182 pp. $15.95. "A nihilist," Nietzsche wrote in The Will to Power, "is a man who judges the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist." According to this narrow view, which Nietzsche himself did not hold, human action, suffering, willing have no meaning. The ends of human experience are contained within the bounds of limitless pathos. Although Jeannette King touches on the subject of pathos in Tragedy in the Victorian Novel, the pathos of η I hi I ism is not her exclusive concern. Her primary subject is rather the manner in which George El iot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James represent the Victorian strength of will to lay meaning into a world that is not as it ought to be. While this study is not the overview of "tragedy in the Victorian novel" which the title promises, King's little book is a fine introduction to the subject. As she notes, critics today rarely sense the incongruity of the term "tragic novel." Victorian critics, however, were aware of the "the possible conflict between the ancient concept of tragedy and the relatively new genre of the novel." King wishes to learn what we mean "when we yoke together the two terms," and whether the term tragic novel "possesses any of the formal Implications of the drama from which the term originated" (p. vii). After a brief introduction establishing the critical background to the relationship between tragedy and the novel, King outlines in successive chapters the Victorian view of a tragic philosophy, the implications of the movement from tragedy in drama to tragedy in the novel, the resultant conflicts between realism and tragedy, and the various forms which tragedy takes in the novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. King is at her best in the first three chapters of her study. There she examines the historical relationship between tragedy and the novel, noting that by the mid-nineteenth century a literary transition was taking place: "one dominant mode—tragedy—was giving way to anothei----the novel" (pp. 1-2). As this transition occurred, however, critics still clung to the Aristotelian concepts of the noble, majestic hero, poetic justice, the cathartic ending, and the rejection of low characters. The novelist who chose as the subject of his or her fiction the realistic common man was faced therefore with the problem of finding "compensating factors for the loss of the (symbolic) values that derive from the hero's identification with the fate of his people" (p. 4). Having opted for a realistic hero, the nineteenth-century author could no longer depend on the traditional concepts of hamartia, per i pétela, and anagnorisis to function in his novels In quite the way those concepts functioned in classical and neo-classical tragedy. King argues, however, that in the body of Shakespearean drama Victorian authors did have an alternative to classical versions of tragedy. Borrowing from the Shakespearean emphasis on "tragedy of character," with its focus on realistic, contemporary subjects, nineteenth-century authors could pursue their investigations of the tragic vision. It is character rather than situation which thus becomes the nexus of Victorian tragedy since the Victorians came to believe that "honour can belong to the hero not only by birthright, but by achievement" as well (p. 6). King shows how, in addition to the difficulties of portraying the tragedy of common characters, the nineteenth-century novelist must also face the problem of relating tragedy to everyday experience. "The classicist's demand was for the exceptional, the heroic gesture, the hero in active conflict with the universe," she argues. Matthew Arnold's description of situations which could offer little hope of poetic insight might thus well apply to Victorian tragic novels—"those in which the suffering finds no vent In action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be...