Rhetorical and Poetic Aspects of Realistic Fiction in Dickenss and the Bronte Sisters

Best- sellers/Masterpieces

The present course begins with an introduction to fiction as a literary genre and to realism
as an important trend in fiction and focuses upon the comparative quality of the
imagination at work in three Victorian bestsellers, whose status - as masterpieces of
fiction, of realism and as imaginative types - we will set out to prove and explore.

1. Introduction
In the sequence of Charles Dickenss novels as presented in the bio-bibliographical list at
the end of the handbook Contributions. and in the appendix to this course, one can
follow the chronological and typological development of Victorian realistic fiction from
the more conventional picaresque species, in Dickenss first novel, The Posthumous
Papers of the Pickwick Club, to the increasingly original coherence granted to the novels
precisely by their imaginative or poetical substance/construction. This will prove the
point made in the philosophical/theory of literature piece by J.S.Mill, Thoughts on
Poetry and Its Varieties, about how true poetry transforms into inward/emotional truths
the directly observable outward circumstances and the matter-of-fact aspects of human
experience - existence, circumstance and whole environment(s), that make up the so-
called theme of the novels. In following the ways the writers imagination transforms the
theme, one can see the difference between the naked subject-matter of realism and the
more complex, indirect, poetic literary realism. Theoretically speaking, literary realism
employs straight narrative as a medium for conveying the organic relationship between
characters and their stories amalgamated by the imagination which creates solid plot-
threads. Empirically, we can see imagination at work in the rich, intimate and very
concrete connections that the imagination makes between the characters and their stories
in order to weave the plot. Also, we can see how the setting and narrative method or
voice employed communicates the fictional content and in this way complicates the
simple theme. We gain access to the shape of the writers imagination by understanding
the new form given in each novel to universal human experience when it is incorporated
in each particular fictional universe.

2.1. The handling of outward circumstances as an access-way to the plot

In the first place, the different ways in which outward circumstances are
appropriated and transformed literarily in these three Victorian novels still known today
because they are read (not only because they have been made into films) are due to their
protagonists conscience and fate. Fiction gives prominence to people and their good or
ill luck and power or weakness in handling circumstances, or being handled by them,
respectively. We wish to see how the indirect presentation of an ages ethos works in
fiction. First, it can be noticed that what one has already learned about the ethos of the
Victorians as members of an industrialized, capitalistic, utilitarian, puritanical and
imperial nation is incorporated in a sublimated form in all the three novels. Here is how
we can enter the fictional universe of the three books under analysis in this lecture by
referring to common themes or commonplace ideas or outward circumstances that,
according to Mill, will be transformed into poetic, emotional truths.
 One outward circumstance or fact referred to in the three novels is demographical
change, that we know was caused by industrialization. Most of the Victorian writers
recorded this change as a tension between the quiet ways of domestic life and the
consequences of mobility upon peoples lives. The displacement of people from and into
various environments is one factor that shapes the conflicts on which the plots of the
three novels are built. For example, Heathcliff is quite disturbingly brought into the
picture in Wuthering Heights after a business trip to town made by old Mr. Earnshaw, the
father of two children of his own, whose relationship as siblings will become unsettled,
just as the life of the entire household, as a result of Heathcliffs arrival. Similarly, in
Jane Eyre there is no definitive place where the protagonist can settle and be at rest for
long, which causes the form of the plot to resemble the picaresque fragmentariness. But
this is only an appearance, because while she is moved from place to place like a leaf in
the wind, Jane Eyre build up an inner strength that is compelling. There is a deeper kind
of coherence/cohesion that the novel gradually reveals, and this depends on Janes
appropriation of the outward circumstances, which are turned into inner emotional truths
and consequent moral strength. What recommends Jane Eyre to us is the exemplariness
of her conscience, which develops according to an initiatory scenario that makes her rise
in status to become a universal heroine, not just an isolated case-study in the life of a
Victorian domestic outcast. The stages of Jane Eyres admiration plot (cf. Radu
Surdulescus handbook Form, Structure, Structurality in Critical Theory, the chapter on
Structuralist and Pre-Structuralist Narratology, paragraph 3.1, unibuc.ro/educational
resources/e-books/philology) demonstrate what it takes for an individual to triumph even
over the most adverse circumstances, if conscience can use and twist mere fate and win
the world on behalf of virtue. Following what archetypal criticism, and the American
author Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, called the initiatic scenario
of the monomyth, Jane Eyre covers three stages or moments of becoming: the separation
(of the hero from the community), the initation proper (in the menacing circumstances
which confront the hero in the (nether)world of the other) and the return (of the hero in
triumph to lavish boons upon the original community). It is not only the heroine, Jane
Eyre, but the plot that allows us to witness the successful recovery from the adversities of
chance, when the circumstances induced by the diverse settings are turned from adverse
into triumphal in the book; and this demonstrates how far-reaching the fusion of the
narratological components of the fictional text is. In the next section of this lecture we
shall enlarge upon the fusion of the narratological factors, when we dwell upon the
function of the setting in configuring the imaginative, poetic meaning of the novels. For
the time being, suffice it to say that the circumstances of Janes being a poor orphan and
an unwanted child-member of the family at Gateshead, kept outside the Gate, as it were,
will improve her character, just as the outward circumstance of her being sent to the
Lowood institution or school for governesses. Her soul bruised at Gateshead becomes
cured and perfected at Lowood, as in a sanctuary, until it becomes ready for virtuous
independent acting upon circumstances (There is a detailed discussion about this in the
second lecturing module about feminine fiction in Contributions.). By comparison to
Jane Eyre, in Great Expectations, where Pip, the protagonist is very mobile since he is
repeatedly and decisively removed by chance/fate from his natural environment, the
opposite is true: Pip falls a prey to circumstances and is defeated in the worst of ways, in
so far as he changes from a good rural pip (or innocent seed, i.e., a child), loses his
innocence and becomes an alienated grown-up, a spendthrift, an urban non-entity, turning
out as bad as all the people whom money and commonplace circumstances spoil.
(Students are invited to follow the pursuit or intervention of money as an outward
circumstance in practically all the Victorian novels, in Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and
Silas Marner by George Eliot or Hardys novels and to compare the attitude or effect that
money has upon the characters in realistic fiction, by referring to Carlyles complaint
about and indictment of Mammonism, in Past and Present, as part of the Victorian ethos.
THIS IS WHAT THE EXAMINATION MATTER WILL SIMILARLY CONSIST OF: a.
CONNECTIONS AMONG THE IDEAS PRESENTED IN THE OTHER LITERARY
GENRES THAN FICTION, POETRY OR THE ESSAY AND b. DEMONSTRATIONS
ABOUT THE FORMS THAT LITERARY IMAGINATION TAKES. In what follows,
we shall demonstrate further how realistic fiction transfers commonplace ideas into
clusters of universal significance either because it re-enacts archetypal symbolic
scenarios, which give symbolic coherence to the entire narrative (as we saw when
discerning the initiatory monomyth behind Jane Eyres deeds as a perfect woman), or
because it spreads chunks of symbolic/archetypal/mythical meaning that the reader has
the pleasure to discover, like chocolate chips or raisins in the texts pudding.

2.2. Poetic clusters of meaning as ways of giving coherence or creating significance in

the fictional universe

We shall follow the development of some clusters of poetic meaning which

become substantial nodes of significance in an archetypal grid in realistic fiction. They
end up inscribing realistic fiction, which is, in principle, low mimetic literature, as we
read on the first page of Northrop Fryes The Anatomy of Criticism, into the romance
mode of writing literature. This late romantic or romance dimension of realistic fiction as
written in the Victorian age is due to the hermeneutic/symbolic habit of puritans to
interpret outward life inwardly and look for the design of Providence in the world (This
can be seen explicitly, for example, in the interpretation of Edward Rochester as the
tempting serpent in the Thornfield Hall paradise for Jane, and of her consequent
departure from Thornfield Hall as a Biblical exodus in disguise, or in the interpretation of
the entire plot of Wuthering Heights as a cyclical demonstration about the fall of man
from paradise) . As Frye explains in the third essay of the same Anatomy archetypes are
bits of old universal meaning that interpret human experience in intimate connection with
the other levels of a complete, coherent existence in the visible and invisible world alike.
Myths, which interpret human life, give it narrative coherence, in this spirit, while the
chunks of myths, symbols or archetypes, give infinite poetic significance and unity to
life. The return to such meanings is a characteristic of romance literature which haunts
Western literature in Romanticism, too. This goes to prove that the Victorian best-sellers
in realistic fiction were post-romantic in addition to developing the picaresque or
epistolary techniques of 18th century realism.
Practically, by turning to the clusters of romance and to poetic meaning, we
discover a second-order, hermeneutic coherence in fiction that moves to and fro between
the archetypal nuclei of meaning and the otherwise realistic narratives that sociological
criticism focuses upon, as we also did in the earlier comparison in paragraph 2.1. among
the three novels that we analyse here. In some novels, the archetypal lines of force
accompany the characters and narrative thread like poetic correlatives. They are generally
stationed in what narratology calls technically the settings of the novels. For example, in
Wuthering Heights, it is the symbolic settings that oppose the wild to the tame worlds
(houses, people, events and whole environments and their agents) and the plot follows the
oscillation of the characters between the tame, urbanite Thrushcross Grange and the wild,
elemental Wuthering Heights. The reader follows the outsider, Mr. Lockwood who
advances into the heart of romance from Thrushcross Grange to Wuthering Heights as a
disoriented witness (or, technically, as Wayne Booth calls him, in The Rhetoric of Fiction,
an unreliable narrator). Because Mr. Lockwood is the narrator for most of the novel, we
are plunged, in his wake, in a chaos of impressions while we advance towards the heart of
the mystery which envelops the relations between places and generations and characters
ruled over by implacable polarities. The same is true for the marshy, foggy, windy or
simply dark atmosphere in Dickenss later novels, which are somber both in their settings
and in their poetic or realistic truths. In the novels of the women-writers, the archetypal
or symbolic meanings are more easily recognizable, because they are demonstratively
built into the book settings. Just as in Wuthering Heights, in Jane Eyre each station on her
way to perfection has its own symbolic function. Lowood school serves to tame Janes
anger, loneliness and revolt, making her as sweet and wise and readier to become a
Victorian angel in the house than her earlier Byronic self, as a child, would have allowed
her. But her passage through the significantly named Thornfield Hall (lexically consisting
of both thorns and a soothing hillside landscape) denies Jane the chance of turning into an
angel in the house1 as yet because of its deceitful quality as a potential pleasure dome , to
paraphrase Coleridges phrase at the beginning of Kubla Khan. Here Jane does finds pleasure
in her complete fulfilment as a governness with power over the young (Adle), the mature
(Rochester) and the old (Mrs. Fairfax) alike. There are archetypal forces ready to appropriate
Jane when she flees from Thornfield Hall as if pursued by the Erinies, the furies of Greek tragedy.
Only, these are not her own furies, but rather the shared furies of the rabid titans enchained
together at Thornfield Hall: Bertha Mason, the mad woman in the attic and Edward Rochester
filing the scene at the ground-level of romance. After Janes departure in a kind of Biblical exodus,
that take her into the wilderness, Thornfield is actually ruled by disaster and fiery, secret rage. (It
is actually and literally consumed by its fire after Janes departure from the Thornfield Hell).
By contrast to fiery Thornfield, Moor House, Janes next station remains dominated by ice. When
the warmhearted feminine sisterly figures of Mary and Diana Rivers. The remaining brother, the
apostolic parish priest St. John Rivers is a chilling figure as Janes suitor when contrasted to Mr.
Rochester. Just like many a martyr in The Lives of Saints, Jane will be subjected to the test of
ice, after having been subjected to that of fire. It is only at Ferndean that Jane will encounter the
cool shade of the secluded, fulfilled life, like a fern, protected by Rochester, the deans aura.

1
The angel in the house was a phrase coined by Coventry Patmore, to describe the ideal,
submissive Victorian woman as a wife.