Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (review)

Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel, by J. Jeffrey Franklin; pp. vi + 250. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, $37.50, £28.50.

Cultural studies of the nineteenth century often reach one of two by-now-familiar conclusions with respect to the political effects of cultural forms. Victorian novels, for instance, can either consolidate middle-class institutions or challenge them, recuperate the dominant ideology or subvert it. They can be authoritarian or democratic, conservative or populist, produce "good" subjects or "bad" subjects. In Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel, J. Jeffrey Franklin cuts across this political divide to describe the workings of the Victorian novel as contradictory and ambivalent, capable of serving opposed political ends simultaneously. He performs a subtle balancing act between the extremes of recuperation and subversion, yet ultimately, and very convincingly, tips the scales in favor of realism's subversive capacity.

Serious Play tells the story of realism and Victorian culture from the vantage point of the concept of play. It offers a detailed analysis of the function of play in three different spheres of nineteenth-century British culture--gambling, theater, and aesthetic theory--as they figure broadly within the culture and as they are represented in the realist fiction that came to predominate in a marketplace of competing cultural forms and discourses. Integral to each discussion are persuasive readings of eight novels by Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Kingsley. Serious Play also brings into relief the opposition between postmodern theory and nineteenth-century realism. Through notions of play, we see how each category implicates the other as its opposite, but also the way in which the dichotomy ultimately collapses.

Franklin thus formulates this opposition in order to move beyond it. He points out that, at one level, nineteenth-century novels confirm the stereotype of the Victorians as unplayful by scapegoating characters aligned with the play of gambling, theater, and aesthetic theory. But the novels inevitably complicate and contradict this position by engaging in play at other levels and in ways that challenge the postmodernist critique of realism as theoretically naive and ideologically conservative.

The chapter on theater works remarkably well in this respect. Novels of Eliot and Brontë continually juxtapose theatrical characters identified with externality and artifice to authentic characters identified with interiority and realness. The distinction, however, proves impossible to maintain, particularly when we recognize that one of the novel's main vehicles for promoting its own morality, the notion of sympathy, is itself thoroughly theatrical. Through the lens of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which serves as a precedent for Eliot, Franklin conveys the essential theatricality of a process presumably founded on authenticity. Sympathetic identification, he observes, "operates through an effective splitting of the self that occurs as the prerequisite of the ability to identify with the suffering of another. The self is split between a spectating, self-identified part and a vicarious, performing other-identified part" (121).

The chapter on gambling does not make such a clear reversal. It effectively conveys the Victorian reaction against gambling as representative of both chance and the market and analyzes the subtle ways in which the discourse of gambling in Eliot and Trollope filters into the discourses of work, marriage, and other modes of exchange. Gambling, however, and the unmooring of value that it represents, does not finally reflect on the novel's function, as did theatricality, but, more obliquely, on the function of political economy. Gambling in the novel becomes "a signifier for political economy itself as a cultural form" (78), but this assertion is never brought into focus and leaves the novel's anti-play stance intact.

Franklin frames his discussion with an analysis of the history and theory of aesthetic play. He traces a continuity from Immanuel Kant to Jacques Derrida in which play functions as "the gap between an...