"The Soul of Art": Understanding Victorian Ethical Criticism

Abstract

Introduction In 1845 article called Literature of anonymous writer in British Quarterly Review concludes short history of English novel with some reservations about of Scott's Waverley novels. In particular, he is concerned that crime of duelling is lightly dealt with; and ... is in one instance defended. Further, he regretfully observes, great indulgence is shown to debauched and intemperate habits. The profane language also ... is highly objectionable (542). If, in their carping tone and prescriptive approach, these remarks typify Victorian approach to of fiction, is hardly surprising that participants in much-discussed to in literary theory have not turned back as far as nineteenth century. (1) After all, as editors of recent collection remark, there is any single defining characteristic in ethical turn that marks literary studies, resides in fact that few critics wish to return to dogmatically prescriptive or doctrinaire of reading (Davis and Womack x). If modern ethical critics refer to nineteenth century at all, is only as source of just such rule-oriented, censorious form of reading that contrasts with their various but all allegedly flexible and undogmatic approaches. Tracing origins of this rigid critical tradition to Matthew Arnold, both postmodern ethical critics such as Geoffrey Galt Harpham and humanist critics such as Wayne Booth explicitly distance themselves from Arnold's twentieth-century heirs--F.R. Leavis, Yvor Winters, and Lionel Trilling especially--whom Booth calls hanging judges and against whose hectoring voices and ideological and theoretical commitments (real or perceived) today's ethical critics of all stripes define themselves (Company 49). No doubt this distancing is as much strategic as principled, for as David Latane remarks, [m]any currents in Anglo-American criticism and theory have become energized by dislike of Arnoldian (390), but is this stance with which any overt interest in ethics, as Marshall Gregory observes, is promptly associated: Inside academy, ethical criticism seems immediately to conjure images of Plato packing poets out of his republic, or memory of Matthew Arnold talking about the best that has been thought and said, or mental image of F. R. Leavis intoning on and on about great tradition. (Ethical Criticism 195) Whether or not this contemporary critical prejudice associated with 'traditional humanism' is justified, most ethical critics seem to agree with Kenneth Womack about need to effectively differentiate themselves from if ethical criticism is to succeed as a viable interpretive paradigm (114-15). As key strategy in aid of this project of differentiation, critics insist on distinction between and morality. As John Guillory notes, the concepts of 'morality' and 'ethics' ... are only tenuously distinct in common usage (38), but in this specialized context, ethics is used to refer to broad domain of inquiry--as Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller explain, in typical formulation, an array of possible answers to question, 'how ought human life to be lived?' (52)--while morality and its variants refer to more legalistic notions of duties and rights (Freadman and Miller 52) or, in Guillory's account, simply the choice between right and wrong (38). word 'ethical' may mistakenly suggest project concentrating on quite limited moral standards, Wayne Booth observes early in his landmark 1988 book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, but he is quick to clarify that he is interested in much broader topic, entire range of effects on 'character' or 'person' or 'self.' 'Moral judgments' are only small part of it (8). …