The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (review)

There are some very good reasons to be cheerful about Andrew Miller's book, its doleful title notwithstanding (more about that in due course). The Burdens of Perfection strides fearlessly into areas that many Victorianists have studiously avoided. For one thing, by engaging wholeheartedly with the writings of such figures as Stanley Cavell, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams, the book demonstrates that a turn to moral philosophy has the potential to open up a set of absorbing and rewarding topics for readers of nineteenth-century literature. For another, it dares to speak out loud a thought that, I suspect, passes frequently through the minds of those of us who teach the Victorian novel, but which for many a long year has seemed inadmissible within the dominant tendencies and paradigms of our discipline. Namely, we have a sense that the experience of immersing ourselves in these long works' complex networks of personal interactions has somehow the potential to make us (and our students) better people, but are unwilling to transform this feeling into words: who would want to shoulder the weighty baggage packed into such a statement, and who is not afraid of sounding as preachy as the Victorians themselves? Fortunately, Miller is brave enough to insist upon the importance of being earnest: The Burdens of Perfection argues that analyzing the ethical experience of reading is a necessary response to the literary productions of the era most famously obsessed with ethical questions.

In making the case for the value of conjoining literary studies to moral philosophy, the Introduction to Miller's book includes an attack upon the modes of Victorianist criticism that have taken history as their principal interlocutor; new historicism's interrogation of the ideological operations and investments of nineteenth-century literature comes under particularly heavy fire. This is a puzzling move, not least because Miller happens to be the co-editor of Victorian Studies, a journal which maintains a marked, if not a monolithical, historical bent, and the author of Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative, a work firmly in the new historicist mode. Of course, scholars are at liberty to choose to wear different hats at different times, but it is curious that Miller makes no mention of these two biographical facts, especially in a study that (i) grants us more than usual closeness to its author in his everyday life (at one point he presents himself reclining on the sofa, identifying with Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, and at another, sitting in bed talking to his wife, trying to decide whether to keep on reading) and (ii) concerns itself extensively with the present-tense self's relation to its various past-tense instantiations. But, perhaps more importantly, the rejection of historicist-oriented literary criticism seems odd because The Burdens of Perfection is itself a solidly grounded historical study.

The book's commitment to history makes itself felt most obviously in its focusing only on nineteenth-century texts: novels by Dickens, Eliot, Austen and short stories by James are the favored literary objects, inspiring Miller's liveliest and most appealing critical engagement, but he also works deftly with poetry by Browning and Tennyson and non-fiction prose (here the works of Mill, Arnold, Carlyle and Pater come to the fore). Miller's explanation for his selection policy runs as follows: "perfectionist narratives" — explorations, dramatizations, discussions of how one might become a better person — can be observed within a wide array of texts in many different eras, but works from his chosen period offer especially overt manifestations thereof, and for certain key historical reasons (7-26), in particular, that distinctive feature of the age, the advance of skepticism — here not religious skepticism but rather "what philosophers traditionally call the problem of other minds, the question of whether we can know anything of the inner lives of others" (xii). The characteristic nineteenth-century response to "a culturally general but forceful doubt over the certainty...