Love Story's Ontology: Species Feeling in New Grub Street

Abstract

Naturalism is an under-acknowledged posthumanism, and George Gissing's New Grub Street helps to reveal its ontologically and formally intricate aesthetics. Posthumanism challenges conventional humanism in insisting on the self as materially embodied, situated, and impinged: the self is not transcendent or etherealized, as in Cartesian philosophy. Gissing's Darwinian fiction often, interestingly, implies the premise of human non-specialness through stories of love and marriage. This essay claims that New Grub Street—with all its attention to writing, the print marketplace, and consumer appeal—metafictionally suggests the popular love story of the marriage plot as a particularly delusive product in that it encourages the false notion of human species distinction. New Grub Street's characters absorb this plot as a pattern for their own lives, which then fools them into thinking that a mere emotion, love, has a grand power to shape their futures, whatever their material circumstances. In other words, Gissing represents the feeling of love as a rhapsodic exaggeration of interiority and of interiority's supposed freedom from embodied conditions. But New Grub Street does not simply satirize its characters' ontological mistake. Rather, it demonstrates naturalism's complicated formal tendency to oscillate between two scales: the macroscale—deep, long species history—and, every bit as important, the microscale, or characters' small, daily, felt sense of their lives. Naturalism holds both versions of reality as equally valid; it is a fundamentally dual, dynamic form of realism, whose aesthetics, moreover, also works dynamically with readers themselves, implicating them, too, in a perplexed account of human being.