The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (review)

Andrew Miller has written a book that practices what it praises. Its final page singles out a kind of Victorian thought that Miller is concerned both to identify and to continue: “For implicative criticism to be successful, it must stimulate modes of thinking and trains of thought....Being generative (not to the exclusion of, but before, being correct or learned or lucid or reasonable) is the attribute it prizes” (222). Miller could well be describing his own project when he locates in various Victorian writers an “experimental and interrogative preoccupation” that works by “inviting readers into second-person relations with others” (112). Miller throughout strives for what he calls a “generative” and a “perlocutionary” discourse that relies on the reader picking his ideas up, responding to, arguing with, and even completing them.

The Burdens of Perfection is Andrew Miller’s second book: he is the author of Novels Behind Glass as well as editor of Victorian Studies. This new work treats authors ranging from Jane Austen to Henry James (The Ambassadors), with extended accounts of novels by Dickens (Great Expectations and Dombey and Son) and by Eliot (Daniel Deronda); careful accounts of philosophical, political, theological and autobiographical works by Carlyle, Mill, and Newman; and serious consideration to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Browning’s dramatic monologues. While The Burdens of Perfection is openly indebted to Stanley Cavell’s ambitious philosophical account of “moral perfectionism,” Miller is careful throughout to ground his dynamic response to Cavell in central, often canonical Victorian texts.

Miller’s early invocation of Walter Houghton’s half-century-old account of the Victorians as tormented by the problem of skepticism is in fact a kind of touchstone for the book as a whole. Miller makes clear how many latter-day debates first flourish in the Victorian era: he is terrific at staging afresh their worries about the grounding of individual faith, about the relationship between fact and value, and most of all about whether the answers to large questions about fact and about value can be sought in social relations rather than in theological, philosophical, or scientific inquiry. By Miller’s account, it is when such questions seem approachable primarily by way of the social realm that the novel emerges as a master-genre of the age, poised to answer the largest metaphysical questions through an intense scrutiny of the seeming minutiae of romantic love, familial obligation, and community entanglement.

Burdens of Perfection situates itself within an ongoing conversation about what happens when writers begin to think of laying to rest certain kinds of skepticism by turning to the social sphere. The book accordingly unfolds as a self-conscious example of what Miller, aligning himself with thinkers from Carlyle to Raymond Williams, prizes—an evolving conversation that oversteps any one text, that by its vitality (“generative” is a crucial word for Miller) serves as the implicit, and sometimes explicit refutation to the skepticism that doubts all knowledge not only of the world but also of other minds.

The Burdens of Perfection thus asks, in an extremely subtle and complicated way, to be judged on its judgment about Victorian texts. Not only must the reader ask herself whether Miller’s reading rings true, but she must also ask what that ring of truth actually signifies. Miller proposes that the assent his readings generate is the ultimate proof that latter-day readers can be engaged in a large, ongoing, sociable project of intellectual interchange between the living and the dead. At its best Burdens of Perfection does not provide answers and draw conclusions. Rather it reveals Miller himself reaching for a language about how social contact and individual cogitation coexist, trying to make sense of a Victorian impulse to “perfect oneself” by way of examples rather than abstract precepts. Miller persuasively unpacks Walter Pater’s elaborate fantasy of the friendship between Winckelman and Goethe, for example, a fantasy predicated on their never...