Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction Sheila Teahan Michiel Heyns. Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction. New York: Clarendon, 1994. 293 pp. $55.00. Since the early work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, René Girard’s writings on the cultural mechanisms of desire, mimetic rivalry, and triangulation have become invaluable to critics interested in the dynamics of desire and plot. In Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Michiel Heyns examines the implications of Girard’s The Scapegoat (1982; English trans. 1986) for the English realist tradition from Austen to James. The novels treated in depth are Mansfield Park, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Deronda, Lord Jim, and The Golden Bowl, though the discussions of individual texts also range widely among other works by each author. The book opens with a critique of recent views of the realist novel as a “politically suspect form” (2) whose apparent subversive potential turns out to be complicitous with the policing or regulatory power of representation itself. Problematizing critical approaches that would simply conflate narration with surveillance, Heyns seeks instead “to demonstrate both the connectedness and the dissimilarity of the dynamics of novelistic representation and the mechanics of social control” (4). Narrative resistance to ideological closure is not a ruse to be demystified by the critic, but one element of an ongoing dialectic. In an argument reminiscent of D. A. Miller’s Narrative and Its Discontents, Heyns suggests that narrative simultaneously resists “the coercion of closure” and generates pressures that would “void it of those elements impeding the resolution” (5). Such elements are those identified with the Girardian scapegoat. Much as Girard’s scapegoat incarnates a burden of communal guilt and cleanses the community through its own expulsion or sacrifice, so realism’s “narrative requirement of closure demands the exclusion of such characters as threaten the desired equilibrium of the narrative community” (52). [End Page 99] This line of investigation yields important insights into the versions of scapegoating which, in Girard’s phrase, provide the “hidden structural principal” of the novel. Mary Crawford’s expulsion in Mansfield Park “signals the intervention of that ideological form that requires a resolution in terms of easily assimilable values” (82). Heyns’s reading is especially noteworthy for its challenge to the common view of Fanny Price as the novel’s moral center, arguing persuasively that the narrator’s presentation of Fanny is much more critical and ironized than usually recognized. Not only is Fanny a complicitous participant in the theatricals she denounces, but her hyperbolically outraged reaction to Henry Crawford’s elopement (and to Mary’s own insufficiently outraged reaction) reveals her as morally and imaginatively limited, self-righteous, even opportunistic (83). The elopement provides the occasion for Mary’s purging, but produces an equivocal resolution that requires Austen to hold up Fanny’s demonstrated fallibility “as a standard whereby to judge the events of the novel” (84). Dickensian scapegoats are isolated, deracinated, ultimately threatening outcasts who “embody the qualities that his novels cannot afford to sanction, and that are yet central to their conception” (28). Whereas Dickens’s women function as “near-symbolic incarnations of the novel’s overt teleology, foci of its legitimate desires and repositories of its offical [sic] values” (92), his scapegoats figure the dark underthought of this official ideology. Typically associated with the exploitive and manipulative partnerships that organize Dickens’s fictions, these scapegoats—Carker in Dombey and Son, Orlick in Great Expectations, Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend—embody a negative energy that the novels “cannot acknowledge, and that cannot be contained by the idealized partnerships [especially marriage] intended to act as its resolution” (94). Heyns understands Eliot’s realism as structured by a tension between the material and the spiritual, between “the quotidian subjects of realism” (142) and the search for a value system transcending the mere object-world. Despite Eliot’s avowed commitment to represent the commonplace, a “puritanical distrust of the world and its objects” (154) runs from Adam Bede through Daniel Deronda. A version of this contradiction is lived by her heroines, who are charged with the impossible duty of “achieving equality of fulfilment while accepting inequality...