The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt by Caroline Levine (review)

Abstract

49? Reviews which extensively use devices of foreshadowing, change, and ambiguous chaptertitles . Convincing are the 'paired protagonists' oiHard Times, as well as the detailed discussion of Great Expectations, of the intricate web of coincidence which unexpectedly links characters and situations, and guides, through the coincidental last meeting of Pip and Estella, to their partially happy ending. In the analysis of Bleak House, Friedman again refers to Oliver Twist as a model for plotlines, episodes, and characters; if on the one hand this approach underlines the importance of the juvenile novel, which Dickens keeps resorting to until the end of his life, on the other, the critical risk implied is not to be undervalued. Drawing Bleak House back to the past, instead of forward to the future, means to limit its extraordinary structural and thematic novelty. Even if Tom-all-Alone's undeniably depends on Jacob's Island, its similarities with Manette's St Antoine, with the echoes reproduced in Jasper's East End, are much more intriguing, projected, as they are, into the split structures of A Tale of Two Cities and The Mystery ofEdwin Drood. In Our Mutual Friend Friedman is mainly concerned with the father figure, a favourite theme with Dickens, here exemplified by the symmetrical, complementary, amazingly similar characters of Boffinand Riah. On their childlessness, role-playing, and benevolence depends the structural complexity of the plot, and through their positivity, argues Friedman, Dickens elaborates his own emotions, reviewing the pre? vious critical opinion of his father.This reassuring perspective removes crucial signs of splits and doubles. Even ifsome tensions of the plot are resolved through goodness and disinterestedness, other questions remain unsolved. How should we interpret, for instance, the name the protagonist John Harmon inherits from his father; the relation between identical names and opposing characters; the harmony hinted at in the surname? Dickens's fiction is far too complex to accept the succession of father and son as a simple reversal from bad to good; the more so, if we remember that the name of Dickens's father was also John. In the last section of the book, 'Resolutions and Implications', Friedman signifi? cantly points out the doubtful workings of poetic justice, the unresolved situations, the unredeemed characters; nevertheless, his conclusion again sounds too comforting, in the stress he lays on stories imparting hope, on a moral stance 'favouring honesty and kindness, and attacking deceit and cruelty'. This optimistic outlook I find unsatisfactory ,not only in relation to some of the novels discussed in the book, but above all in relation to the texts excluded from it. George Silverman's Explanation, Sikes and Nancy, Edwin Drood, extreme occurrences of the ambiguity of words, of the erasing of possible happy ends, of extraordinary, undecipherable doublings, leave no doubt as to the obscure way Dickens had chosen for his art. University of Udine Marisa Sestito The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt. By Caro? line Levine. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. 2003. xii + 237pp. ?29.50. ISBN 0-8139-2217-8. Recent criticism of Victorian fiction has made welcome progress in removing the defensive scare quotes from 'realism'. The theoretically informed arguments of such books as Harry Shaw's Narrating Reality have loosened the hold of notions like Barthes's 'classic realist text' or Foucault's panoptic discipline, enabling us to set aside condescending or suspicious assumptions that nineteenth-century realism was hopelessly naive or enthralled to bourgeois ideology and so to appreciate its complex achievements in new ways. Caroline Levine presents her study as a contribution to this reappraisal, contesting the view that narrative suspense creates uncertainty only MLRy 100.2, 2005 491 to reinstate normalizing order, that it represses social anxieties 'in favor of unambiguous disclosures and soothing restorations of the status quo'. Instead, she claims that 'Victorian writers and readers understood suspenseful narrative as a stimulus to active speculation', that 'suspense fiction was all about teaching readers to suspend judgment', and therefore that 'the classic readerly text was [. . .] far more writerly? dynamic, critical, questioning, and indeterminate?than Barthes ever tempts us to imagine' (p. 2). 'At the center of this book', Levine emphasizes, 'is the claim that suspense and realism...