Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel by Jesse Rosenthal

Abstract

Reviewed by: Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel by Jesse Rosenthal Daniel Williams Jesse Rosenthal. Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017. 256 pages. Jesse Rosenthal's brilliant book works from a disarmingly simple query—what does it mean for a novel to "feel right"?—to unfold an intricate account of how a forgotten branch of Victorian ethical philosophy has tacitly shaped our critical practices and canonical preferences, leaving a "moral stamp" (7) on those experiences of novel reading we might designate "morally neutral" (5). Good Form is not a defense of the ethically improving or sympathetically enhancing qualities of reading, nor an application of recent moral philosophy to Victorian novels. It is a formidably inventive, urbane, and compelling work of scholarship that marshals historical and philosophical insight alongside deft close analysis to reimagine key tenets of novel theory. The book's conceptual architecture, laid out in a crisp introduction and expansive first chapter, comprises two movements that could be labeled historical and genealogical. Rosenthal recovers "moral sense" theory or "intuitionism," a philosophical counter-tradition to utilitarianism that has roots in the work of Shaftesbury and Frances Hutcheson, was espoused in the nineteenth century by thinkers like William Whewell, and later influenced Henry Sidgwick. Positing "a faculty that allows us to perceive, or sense, the ethical quality of an action or state of affairs" (18), this theory broadly sides with intuition against induction, the internal and a priori over the external and empirical—although Rosenthal astutely observes that, in difference from utilitarianism's impersonal calculus, it often invokes "a tacit sense of community" (21). These claims are only roughly contextual: moral sense theory is on the same epistemic team as novels that evince "a pointed and explicit denunciation of the principle of utility" (17); like Victorian "moral conceptualizations of narrative form" (5), it concerns intuitive judgments. Alongside this historical recuperation runs a bolder genealogical argument. Victorian understandings of the compulsive experience of narrative—the "ability to engage a reader and mobilize expectation toward a certain state of affairs" (11)—still inflect our notions. When characterizing narrative's "nonrational draw" (14) through the "intuition that only comes with the experience of reading" (13), theorists like Georg Lukács, Roland Barthes, and Peter Brooks rely on figures of seeing, leading, or sensing that Rosenthal cannily traces back to Victorian images for "the seemingly physical nature of narrative experience" (14). In the dual valence of his pithy title, narratological assessments of "good form" as "what feels right" (13) thus disclose an "implicit morality" (11). Narrative's "felt necessity" (13) was, and so remains, one "means of describing the movement from what is to what ought to be" (2). "We cannot understand the formal principles of the novel that we have inherited from the nineteenth century," Rosenthal ventures, "without also understanding the moral principles that have come with them" (2). Moreover, the morality that hews to narrative in "the experience of anticipated, developing, formal satisfaction" (5) targets qualities distinct from [End Page 1356] novelistic ethics in more typical accounts. The former emerges in "diachronic narrative development"; the latter, aiming at sympathy or social awareness, relies on "synchronic description" (4). Here, an asymmetry that supports the argument might have been made more explicit. Rosenthal's examples of ethical readings of literature that contrast the intuitionist inheritance—he mentions pragmatism (Richard Rorty), virtue ethics (Martha Nussbaum), and the ethics of radical alterity (Emmanuel Levinas)—are not utilitarian. By the same token, the anti-utilitarian he instances to show how mechanisms of narrative intuition are deployed in philosophy (Bernard Williams) is not exactly an heir to Shaftesbury or Whewell. The "moral sense" is doubly buried now: its excavation requires the sort of resourceful, precise attention to form that Rosenthal's analyses everywhere display. Good Form's main work aligns these historical and genealogical, moral and formal claims, and the first chapter usefully sketches its method by examining the "shift away from sympathy to a more internally founded ethics" (24) in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854)—examples of that firmly anti-utilitarian genre, the social problem novel. But Rosenthal also floats...