Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis, by Alicia Mireles Christoff

Abstract

Reviewed by: Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis by Alicia Mireles Christoff Gregory Tate (bio) Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis, by Alicia Mireles Christoff; pp. xiv + 271. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019, $39.95, $27.95 paper, £30.00, £22.00 paper. The scope of Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis exceeds the remit of its subtitle. Alicia Mireles Christoff writes that her "goal is not to 'apply' psychoanalytic ideas to novels nor to make a one-way historical argument that proves that the novels had a direct impact on later psychoanalytic theory." Instead, she "want[s] to allow the novels and the psychoanalytic texts to mutually illuminate one another" (5). This approach is founded on a key theory of twentieth-century British psychoanalysis: that subjectivity is built on "object relations," mental representations of the other people about whom one thinks, feels, and fantasizes (3). Throughout the book, Christoff deftly shows how the writings of psychoanalysts such as W. R. Bion and D. W. Winnicott can help readers to rethink how they interpret and internalize canonical Victorian novels. But the book's ambitions are broader than this, and its rereadings of the fiction of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are informed by a wide range of theoretical perspectives. Chapter 2, for example, uses José Esteban Muñoz's notion of disidentification to suggest how readers might be moved by Victorian fiction while also remaining alert to issues, particularly concerning race and sexuality, which it habitually occludes. And this example highlights another way in which Novel Relations exceeds the Victorian fiction/British psychoanalysis binary. The book consistently deploys its impressively detailed close readings of its primary texts in the service of two wider projects: the task of undisciplining Victorian studies—which Christoff and her coeditors set out to do in the Spring 2020 issue of this journal—and a comprehensive rethinking of what it means to read and write as a literary scholar. Novel Relations is an important contribution to the presentist mode of criticism that has been prominent in Victorian studies in recent years. Christoff observes that "we have for the most part confined Victorian novels, geographically and temporally, to the single historical context of their scenes of production," and the book does valuable work in diversifying the contexts of Victorian literature by demonstrating how the writings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorists can offer new ways of understanding these novels (2). To undiscipline Victorian studies, to reimagine its "disciplinary boundaries," scholars must be willing to "learn to think and write using a wider range of knowledges [End Page 351] and methodological approaches" (193). Or, as Christoff puts it in her discussion of The Mill on the Floss (1860), "part of the power of the novel is that it allows for us to wish for things that are not there" (107). But the wide-ranging theoretical arguments of Novel Relations are firmly grounded on what is there in the novels. Christoff educes the "formal implications" of object relations theory, showing how the language of Victorian fiction offers a model for the expansion of possible relations both in the minds of readers and in Victorian studies as a field (10). Her detailed analysis of Eliot's representations of reading in The Mill on the Floss in chapter 2, for instance, and her discussion in chapter 4 of the narrator's rapid switches between different explanatory metaphors in Middlemarch (1871–2), skillfully remind us that Victorian fiction is concerned with the forging of relations between individuals and new frameworks of meaning. The work of the critic thus becomes a continuation of that of the text. The titles that Christoff assigns to her discussions of Eliot's novels—"Wishfulness" in chapter 2 and "Aliveness" in chapter 4—helpfully summarize the revivifying and expansive impetus which, she argues, British psychoanalysis can bring to the study of Victorian fiction. In chapter 3, though, which focuses on Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878), the connection between the theory and the fiction is less clearly articulated; this chapter also highlights the limitations of Christoff's presentist focus. Although its title is "Restlessness," the chapter's keyword is "atmosphere...