Novel Interventions: Science, Pseudo-science, and the Law

Abstract

Novel Interventions: Science, Pseudo-science, and Law Levine, Caroline. 2003. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism & Narrative Doubt. Charlottesville: University ofVirginia Press. $39.50 he. 237 pp.Richardson, Angelique. 2003. Love and Eugenics in Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction & Woman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $70.00 he. 250 pp.Rodensky, Lisa. 2003. The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and Victorian Novel. York: Oxford University Press. $65.00 he. $24.95 sc. 275 pp.It has become commonplace in criticism of Victorian novel that Victorian narrative realism is less an aesthetic activity than an intervention in culture within which it flourished. The novel helped construct culture (or, at very least, put critical pressure on commonsense understanding of culture) more than it merely reflected culture, to paraphrase George Eliot's famous formulation, in defective mirror of mind of novelist. The three books under consideration here all demonstrate Victorian novel's intimate engagement with what we might call extra-literary matters while at same time exploring novel's particular power to influence cultural attitudes (that is, to affect readers' frames of mind and understanding) on such matters.In The Serious Pleasures of Suspense, for instance, Caroline Levine demonstrates how alignment of narrative realism and implicates novel in rigorous political and epistemological training (2). Levine claims to have uncovered a largely forgotten Victorian idea: union of skeptical realist epistemology with suspenseful narrative form (12), or, as she puts it most simply in reference to John Ruskin's notions of realism in Modem Painters, application of the model of scientific experiment to arts (13).Victorian realism, she argues, as it exploits uncertainty required for narrative suspense, requires readers to suspend judgment, to be both skeptical and open to world made available through realism. Such suspension of judgment requires humility, sense of limitations of our own knowledge. Echoing Socratic notion of necessity to that we don't know, Levine writes in one of her glosses on Ruskin, We must learn to doubt our own knowledge, to celebrate our own ignorance. Only when we are humbled may we come to examine social life skeptically and critically (8). The pleasures of suspense then depend on limitations of knowledge, and prospect of those limitations being transcended through new knowledge; what Levine, in quoting Ruskin, refers to as going on to know produces the joy of self-suspension that haunts Victorian knowledge seeking (9). Such formulations move Levine's argument away from scientific epistemology and into philosophical hermeneutics (the philosophy of how we acquire understanding), move about which I will have more to say later.While Levine focuses her readings of Ruskin, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Eliot, Henry James, and Walter Pater (in roughly chronological order) on intersection between scientific method and narrative suspense, Angelique Richardson's Love and Eugenics in Nineteenth Century explores ways in which novelists Sarah Grand and George Egerton, both of whom were associated with idea of New Woman in 189Os, developed line of thought that Richardson calls eugenic feminism (9), and how Mona Caird, also New Woman novelist, reacted against such thought. Richardson reads first two novelists to show how they replaced conventional romance plot with its emphasis on male-centered passion with plot that emphasized female-centered rational reproduction. In order to contextualize (and validate) such reading, she demonstrates how powerfully the political and social were displaced onto biological in late nineteenth century (24). …