"Fiction over Fact: Narrative Ethics in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Eugene Aram"1

According to György Lukács, "it would require a particularly happy accident for all the well-known and attested actions of a familiar historical figure to correspond to the purposes of literature" (168). Edward Bulwer-Lytton believed he had found such a figure in Eugene Aram, an infamous eighteenth-century murderer whose notoriety stemmed from the fact that, during the thirteen years that he escaped detection, he conducted an impressive linguistic study of seven languages. Although Aram was convicted and executed in 1759, the curious story of an ostensibly mild-mannered scholar who murdered a man for money fascinated the public well into the nineteenth century. In narrative terms, the story had a high degree of tellability; or, as Bulwer put it,² "if ever crime be admissible in fiction, I confess that I know of few within that wide history in which it finds its place more set apart and marked out for tragic analysis and delineation" ("A Word to the Public" 343–44). Bulwer's confidence in the story's appeal was confirmed by the widespread popularity of his novel Eugene Aram (1831), which sold out quickly after it appeared, went through multiple editions, and was frequently alluded to throughout the nineteenth century (Tyson 89). The work also provoked an intense critical debate about the ethical implications of basing a novel on the life of a real criminal. After unsuccessfully defending the subject of his novel and its treatment for seventeen years, Bulwer finally mollified his critics by casting Aram as merely an accomplice to the murder in the third, and final, version of the novel—an alteration of immense ethical significance that contradicted the historical record.

Composed of both fictional and historical elements, Eugene Aram offers an interesting example of the limitations to fictionalizing the life of an actual person. This problem has repeatedly surfaced in theoretical debates about the degree to which historical facts can be effectively integrated into fictional works. These arguments tend to emerge in response to borderline genres, such as the historical novel, new journalism, and fictional biography.³ Texts in these categories provoke strong critical responses because blurring the line between history and fiction calls into question the ontological status of that line. Critics and theorists who address this distinction frequently do so by observing that representing actual people in fiction (particularly in a generically ambiguous form) is inherently problematic. For instance, Ina Schabert argues that in fictional biography "the fictional elements destroy the reliability of the text as a source of factual information whereas the factual narrative interferes with the imaginative vision" (13). Naomi Jacobs similarly observes that when historical figures appear in realist fiction there will often be "dismay at the encounter, for the historical character is felt to be of a different order of existence that the fictional character" (21). Offering a more specific example in his reading of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Eric Heyne contends that "Capote's meaning is flawed by his inaccuracies" because "the inventions concern the character of Perry Smith, and his precise motivations are at the thematic and aesthetic heart of the book" (486). The underlying assumption that informs these assertions is that fact and fiction interfere with one another because they belong to different classes of knowledge, but such distinctions only reposition the problem of factual reference at one remove: if such texts tend to be ineffective because they integrate dissimilar communicative modes, what is so problematic about that integration?

Using Eugene Aram and its critical reception as a case study, I argue that the challenge of integrating factual reference with fiction generally has more to do with ethics than accuracy. Further, specific narrative choices that foreground comparative assessments between real-world and narrative ethics account for these problems. As the critical reaction to Eugene Aram reveals, the controversial nature of this novel did not stem from the author's misrepresentation of what was actually known about the criminal's actions, but from narrative choices. Bulwer's use of a nonfictional name forced comparisons between real-world and...