Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Isobel Armstrong (review)

Isobel Armstrong’s new book has an important point to make: many nineteenth-century novels question the deep, underlying structures of social life that determine who is and who is not worthy of recognition, respect, legal protection, and communal inclusion. As Armstrong explains, the word “politics” in the title refers to such inquiries into the delimitations of social belonging, without which one’s very humanity remains unacknowledged. Because the novels interrogate those boundaries, Armstrong claims, they expand the “democratic imagination” even when they are overtly skeptical about the political systems that Victorians denominated “democracy.” Indeed, Armstrong urges us to stop concentrating on the explicitly political content in Victorian novels, which has earned their authors a reputation for opposing the expansion of parliamentary representation. When we reduce the politics of novels to their negativity about franchise extension, she warns, we too easily judge them as conservative. As a corrective, she recommends actively “reading for the democratic text[s]” (85), which has little to do with finding images of democratic political procedures or results. Her preliminary move is to choose novels that thematically interrogate the boundaries of social inclusion, mainly through exploring genealogical illegitimacy: Dickens’s Great Expectations, George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, Gaskell’s Ruth, Moore’s Esther Waters, Collins’s No Name, and Austen’s Emma. Armstrong does not identify her choice of texts as the basis on which she can proceed—indeed, she does not discuss her choices at all—but she does successfully demonstrate that these novels “explore and dramatize the prerequisites and conditions for a democratic community, and the problems it generates.”

At first glance it might seem that the book is merely returning our attention from the novel’s wariness about representational politics to its own practice of representing ever larger proportions of society. The form’s expanding social scope in the nineteenth century and its social criticism have always been acknowledged. Indeed, critics became interested in the novelists’ often satirical portrayals of parliamentary reform because they seem incongruous with the genre’s friendliness toward social inclusion. Armstrong is certainly redirecting us back to the novel’s social depictions as the best indications of the form’s political significance, but she has found a strikingly original way of doing so. Instead of celebrating how novels stretched the boundaries of literary representation, she concentrates on how they explored the disorienting experience of inhabiting territories deemed separate from the social altogether. Concentrating on reproduction outside the law, she examines narratives of dispossessed and derelict characters, what she calls “deficit subjects,” who are often (but not always) illegitimate mothers or children. This is an exciting new way of thinking about the social imaginary in these novels, and when the central chapters of the book use this lens, they reveal previously unrecognized aspects of these particular works and also remind us of the many other novels that undertake similar investigations. Armstrong focuses sharply on the kind of space these characters are forced to wander: the “a priori of space,” which is defined by its location outside of established human communities. The characters’ positioning thereby thematizes their embodiment of social liminality. They are consigned to wastelands that mark the boundaries where social inclusion ends, and thus they constitute the state of being outside the law that makes it possible for others to be inside. The “democratic imagination” Armstrong unearths is therefore not a putatively more accurate map of a stratified hierarchy but rather an exploration of the isolated sacrificial figures whose exclusion establishes the very possibility of the social.

In claiming that individuals abandoned outside of the limits are essential to the very idea of a shared community, Armstrong displays her indebtedness to Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. But whereas Agamben theorizes the structural necessity of such abjection, Armstrong expressly insists that it is a remediable economic condition, which the novel challenges by portraying the subjective experience of...