Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel by Jesse Rosenthal (review)

Jesse Rosenthal's Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel is a major contribution to the study of ethics in realist fiction. Grounded in a masterful command of philosophy and literary theory, and argued through careful readings of Victorian novels, it sheds considerable light on a central topic in fiction studies. It will be vigorously discussed and greatly valued in Victorian studies and narrative studies generally.

Rosenthal claims that narrative form and ethics are bound together in the Victorian novel through their parallel origins in intuitionism. Overshadowed in intellectual circles by utilitarianism, intuitionism thrived in Victorian fiction, as Rosenthal demonstrates, and it continues to influence moral philosophy, which has become reliant on its ethically infused narrative structures. Derived from Kantian assumptions of an inborn "moral sense," and explicitly formulated by nineteenth-century thinkers such as William Whewell, Henry Longueville Mansel, and Henry Sidgwick, intuitionism resists any systematizing of ethics (18). It insists, instead, that a correct moral outcome is the one that "feels right" (1). Rosenthal argues that Victorian novels systematically sustain an intuitionist ethics, and that they do so through narrative resolutions that also feel right.

Rosenthal differs from previous scholars by refusing to focus questions of literary ethics on static representations, whether in the shape of explicit moral principles or in "synchronic" figurations of "alterity" meant to inspire sympathy (4, 14). He argues, instead, that ethics in the Victorian novel emerge as a "diachronic" progress, situated in characters, narratives, and readers alike, in which moral resolution is experienced as an intuitively correct plot trajectory (4). For Rosenthal, endings that feel right in narrative terms convey intuitive ethical resolutions, but particular endings do not feel right simply because they conform to general laws of narrative, since such laws can only be theorized as the product of something as nebulous as "literary competence"—in short, as intuition (12). Narrative and ethical intuition thus sustain one another in a closed, nonrational circle.

This inextricability of narrative and ethical intuition clarifies a range of issues in Victorian fiction studies. Most useful, perhaps, is Rosenthal's description of the novelistic devices—suspense, false accusation, character development, humor, implied communal consensus, and so forth—that "echo the intuitionist moral ideas of the nineteenth century" (5). Equally enriching are his discussions of the ways in which novels simultaneously construct a sense of moral and narrative necessity together with the sense that characters, authors, and even readers have a "seeming freedom" (32). Additionally, he provides a clear account of the neglected history of intuitionism, and its central place even in the utilitarianism that sought to oppose it. Rosenthal's method relies heavily upon close reading, and he gives us brilliant analyses of moral necessity in social problem fiction, of humor in novels by Charles Dickens and its tendency to persuade us of a shared (but obscure) moral consensus, and of the ongoing accessibility of the Bildungsroman. He provides especially comprehensive readings of Dickens's David Copperfield (1849–50) and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876).

Any thesis as bold as Rosenthal's will necessarily provoke questions. I wonder, in particular, about the narrowness of his conception of intuition. Rosenthal cares about the ways in which intuitive processes function, not what they are, and his argument, therefore, constitutes an ethical formalism. His emphasis on form is so strict that he believes readers never actually have ethically transformative experiences through fiction, and if they think they do, that impression results only because "formal procedures are used to produce a readerly affect which, even though it is literally a response to tropes, is understood in ethical terms" (31). Yet, he also tells us that narrative intuition in the novel increasingly came to depend on community consensus, which would suggest that ideology, cultural conventions, or perhaps exclusionary social formations had some role in shaping it. Partly because Rosenthal's account leaves unclear exactly what social or historical forces may have conditioned the Victorians' ethical intuitions, his...