Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel by Elaine Freedgood (review)

Over the course of her career, Elaine Freedgood has given us numerous brilliant books and essays, many of which have become required reading for Victorianists. Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel is also a must-read for anyone interested in Victorian fiction or narrative theory. Like all of Freedgood's work, the book is rigorously theoretical, enlivened with an eye for quirks of material, social, and textual meaning, and full of keen perceptions about a wide range of novels. A luminous provocation, it will spark much discussion and debate.

Freedgood disputes assumptions that the Victorian novel is "integrated, coherent, and conservative," which she regards as dominant in post-1970s Victorian scholarship (ix). Those assumptions, she claims, paradoxically enshrine Victorian fiction as the perfection of the novel form while relegating it to reactionary ideological status. We critics, she contends, have been conditioned to see realism as "a (mostly) sealed off diegesis with an omniscient narrator in an extradiegetic layer and ourselves outside the whole contraption … making realism a more perfect form than it could have ever hoped to be given its early critical reception" (84). She levels several stinging accusations against this critical practice: it fosters the illusion that liberal subjects, in the privacy of their minds, inhabit multiple worlds at once; it views non-Western subjectivity as primitive by comparison; it stigmatizes novels from non-hegemonic traditions as formally deficient; and it demands that we dismiss literary traditions that do not progress neatly from the formal wholeness of realism to metafiction.

The book is essayistic in tone and style. Not slavishly scholastic in its choice of exemplary texts or in the pacing of its argument, it nimbly ranges across ideas, theorists, critics, texts, and social/cultural history (as Freedgood puts it: "my story is selective and full of gaps and omissions" [x]). This approach engenders some over-generalizations. Many will not recognize themselves as lock-step champions of an idealized, coherent realism or their objects of study as "novels we now treat as nearly perfect structures" (14–15). J. Hillis Miller and other prominent critics whom Freedgood castigates would be puzzled to find themselves so described. It will also surprise some Victorianists to hear that they denigrate non-Western narratives against an idealized nineteenth-century realism—although Fredric Jameson and Franco Moretti rightly deserve this critique, as Freedgood shows. The book generally casts too wide a net of complicities (suggesting, for example, that those who speak of "invasive" [91] species indulge "a narrative of indignation" [92] that excludes Indigenous peoples, or that Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton is "ultimately aristocratic" [67]).

But what the book loses in scrupulous discrimination it gains in polemical power and urgency. Its central claims will launch much conversation and hopefully prompt much critical self-examination. Every reader will learn something from this book. Although it may not come as news that the Victorian novel was critically disparaged until the 1970s, for example, Freedgood comprehensively analyzes the reasons for its renaissance (or what she calls its "invention" [5]): the emergence of high narrative theory; the shift in conceptions of realism from mimesis to diegesis; the formal privileging of self-reflexivity; an energized ideological critique of realism as conservative; and newly complex narratological ways of describing formal wholeness. It also may not be news that the Victorian novel is peppered with formal instabilities—not all of us thematize that dissonance to compartmentalize it, as Freedgood suggests—but she adds a powerful analysis of metalepsis as central to such instability. In a series of provocative, razor-sharp discussions, Freedgood illuminates the breaching of one diegetic or ontological level by another in five discreet features of realist fiction: denotation, omniscience, paratext, ontology, and reference. Her "case studies" (xvi) of these features go a long way toward restoring "the full oddness of the nineteenth-century novel" (x). Freedgood demonstrates that Victorian fiction is "riddled with the key features of...