Narrative Guilt and the Victorian Novel

This essay considers the phenomenon of Victorian narrators who express compunction or uneasy conscience about the ways in which they portray characters. In novels by Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, the narrative guilt accompanying the treatment of antagonists reflects the period's contradictory cultural priorities of sociological analysis and melodramatic aesthetics. Where the emerging field of sociology viewed crime as socially contingent—therefore encouraging a systemic account of responsibility—melodramatic aesthetics required villains who could concentrate social responsibility in a single malign figure. The fusing of these political and aesthetic impulses in Victorian realism resulted in a narrative structure both highly dependent on individual culprits and highly ambivalent about scapegoating. This essay proposes that the narrative guilt arising from this impasse, and efforts to redress it through reparative sympathy, contribute to the distinctive affective texture of Victorian realism.