Armstrong 2005

Nancy Armstrong. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism 1719-1900. Columbia UP, 2005.

Overall

• my sense of the book as a whole as having good local readings but that the global claim as not fully supported. Her conception of The Novel is too platonic or idealist, it loses the utility of thinking of the novel as a non-human actor in making claims for an idealized form that doesn't allow for novels like, say, Bleak House, or Cranford with its benign female collectivity
• Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872) contra her displacement narrative of female subjectivity in Ch. 3 - reincorporating bad subjectivity into the social fabric but with a difference, I'd argue.

Introduction

• 3 intervention/thesis: ```this book argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same.```
  • Taylor 2016 pushes back in this when the subject of the novel, as in bleak house, where the subject is not a character but a city
• To produce an individual, novels had to think as if there already were one, that such an individual was not only the narrating subject and source of writing but also the object of narration and referent of writing.
• 4 Novelists had to figure out the rhetorical means of generating dissatisfaction iwth the available social possibilities before they could create a human subject with the restlessness to grow - over time and in successive stages - both more complete as an individual and more worthy in social terms. Novels thus gave tangible form to a desire that set the body on a collison course with limits that the old society had placed on the individual's options for self-fulfillment, transforming the body from an indicator of rank to the container of a unique subjectivity.
• 6 Crusoe, Moll, Pamela, Great Expectations: is this argument really about first person narration in the novel form?
  • no: Waverley and Frankenstein (7)
• The first two decades of the C19 also saw the first attempts at canonizing a tradition of fiction, as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Mudford, and Sir Walter Scott went to work compiling editions of English novels and writing critical introductions to justify their selections.
• 8 Victorian novels made the turn against expressive individualism a mandatory compnent of the subject's growth and development. To create an individual, however, still requires the novel to offer an interiority in excess of the social position that novel is supposed to occupy. In the novels that appear during the second half of the C19, the desire to adjust the dynamic of the community to one's notion of it disrupts the community as a whole. Accordingly, signs of excess have to be disciplined, that is, observed, contained, sublimated, and redirected toward a socially acceptable goal. To become an individual under these circumstances, the subject must still surmount the limits of an assigned social position. This is only hte first step on the path to individuality, however, and a false step at that. In a novel like Dickens's Great Expectations (1860), we find that individualism is by nature aggressive and expresses itself in cruelty toward the very people whom one should cherish.
• 21 ```look up Homer O Brown, Institutions of the Novel 52-82```
• 22 ...After Austen, no novel could claim to offer an accurate view of "nature as she actually exists in the common walks of life" without including gothic elements. Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, Miss Havisham's house in Great Expectations, and the ghosts wandering in Wuthering Heights, Villete, and The Woman in White are obvious cases in point. These novels incorporate anti-individualistic elements of the gothic, as virtually every important Victorian nvoel does, only to naturalize those elements as components in an all-encompassing narrative of growth and development. If, as Freud claims, the apperaance of the uncanny in literature represented the surfacing of so-called primitive thought modes in modern adults who believed they had outgrown them, then Victorian realism implied that one became a modern adult as he or she surmounted such magical thinking. The Victorian novel was in this sense dependent on disruptions of the normative reality. Whenever they recast the subject's accumulation of knowledge as a process of detection, such novels were acknowledging their ties not only to the Enlightenment subject but also to the gothic sensibility.

1

• 27 ...what I call bourgeois morality cannot be considered a value in and of itself so much as a way of reading, assessing, and revising both the prevailing categories of identity and whatever cultural apparatus may authorize them.
• 52 No other medium then available could have reconstituted the imagined relation between individual reader and national readership with the rhetorical dexterity of the novel.... In this way, British fiction replaced self-expression with self-government as the key to social success.

2

• interesting structure for readings: chiasmus of Waverley and Frankenstein, reading Waverley as gothic and Frankenstein as historical/political
• 55 [Etienne Balibar on the modern subject] "If freedom means freedom of the subject, or subjects, is it because there is, in 'subjectivity', an originary source of spontaneity and autonomy, something irreducible to objective constraints and determinations? Or is it not rather because 'freedom' can only be the result and counterpart of liberation, emancipation, becoming free: a trajectory inscribed in the very texture of the individual, with all its contradictions, which starts with subjection and always maintains an inner or outer relation with it?"
• 57 As my reading of Robinson Crusoe sought to demonstrate, the features that prevent an individual from fitting into the given social order are precisely what provide the narrative motor of the novel and the source of its appeal. That affective investment does not change as we move into the early C19. What does change is the moral investment that the novels asks its reader to make in figures of spontaneity and excess.
• 59 In reading Waverley as we would Frankenstein, in other words, I want to assume that the so-called external world serves as the medium of self-expression, so that the world reveals the currents of thought at work in reshaping it.
• 61 ... if C18 novels called the modern individual into being as an independent agent and measure of social change, then C19 novels succeeded in transforming that earlier way of formulating individualism into a force that threatened to disrupt a stable and internally coherent community. Writing at the precise moment of transition, Scott and Shelely demonstrate that what had been most individualistic about the individual was in fact simultaneously irresistible and loathsome: irresistible in that it expanded the range of human potential and loathsome in that htose exceptional qualities necessarily destroyed what was mundane, necessary, normal, comfortable, and right.
• To become fully individuated the British subjet had to possesss some piece of presocial humanity in the form of desires taht exceeded the limits of his or her social position, desires originating at the very core of himself that made it impossible for him to fit in. Moreover, this protagonist had to overcome the limits set by family, class, or nation without either destroying that collectivity or placing himself permanently outside it. Shelley and Scott perform this legerdemain by turning time into space. "Some favorable opportunities [for observing the] contrast [between premodern and modern] have been afforded me," Scott explains, "by the state of society in the northern part of the island at the period of my history, and may serve at once to vary and to illustrate the moral lessons which i would willingly consider as the most important part of my plan."
• 63 [Waverley's emotional register as gothic melancholia] The melancholic individual refuses either to make peace with or to relegate the lost object to the past [therefore Waverley in becoming hybrid incorporates some of that bad subjectivity into a newly expanded and socially legible British individuality]
• 72 [Frankenstein's monster is] at once too much and not enough of an individual to belong to a community that considers the individual its basic unity [he is made up of other individuals and lacks characteristics of individual subjectivity]
• 76 Shelley exposes the flaw in the logic of Kant's cosmopolitan community [in "Perpetual Peace," 1795]: it too depends on a foundational act of exclusion. To imagine a nation that rests on the toleration of difference, one must implicitly exclude those who lack a capacity for tolerance, the religiously committed, the racially prejudiced, anyone who defines him- or herself as pure in opposition to some pollutant.
  • To become fully oneself is to become something in excess of the human in this novel: in effect, a monster. Thus Shelley creates a difference that works within the individual to expose the limit past which he cannot extend itself without cancelling out his membership in the human community.
• 77 Scott extends Englishness into the lowlands of Scotland in order to formulate an imaginary Britishness that could include both nations - provided Highlight culture were eliminated. Shelley, on the other hand, sets out to exceed the limits of the human itself and in that way imagine a transnational republic where virtually any individual could be represented. If in the resolution to Waverley we encounter a community that simltaneously expands and contracts as it embraces modern Britisness and excludse what were the prevailing kindship systems, then we can say that Shelley's novel transforms a pan-European community from an organically coherent whole to one made of many hostile parts that beome coherent only through some monstrous act of violence. Both authors nevertheless set the unexpressed elements of their hero's individuality in opposition to the social roles those heroes must perform. Both pushed the individual beyond the limits of collective identity in order to expand that collective beyond the limits of the historical moment, in the one case, and the species, in the other, so as to include members of another group.

3

• her reading of Vic fiction is overly Foucauldian, and rather selective
• 79 The Victorian novel not only portrayed all women who expresse extreme forms of individualism as extremely unattractive but punished them so harshly as to persuade a readership that the vry excesses that once led to self-fulfillment and the illusion of a more flexible social order now yielded exactly the opposite results
• Elsewhere I have written extensively on the process by which Jane overcame the very qualities responsible for her survival and explain exactly how, in combination with her inheritance, such self-discipline empowered her to tell a story in which she alone set the standard for moral judgment and social behavior. Where C18 heroines from Moll to Elizabeth Bennet stretched the limits of self-epxression, I am suggesting, their Victorian counterparts contracted those limits so as to transform individualistic energy into forms of self-management and containment. The question is, why?
• 80 Thus we find Vic fiction differentiating between what might be called femaleness (aggressive tendencies formerly celebrated as expressive of individualism) and femininity (the domestic virtues anchoring the new ruling-class home). NOvelists use this ddualism within the woman to avoid exposing the rather obvious contradiction within the ruling-class man between the qualities enabling socioeconomic success and those required for paternal authority.
• 83 Victorian fiction uses displacement to accomplish a very different purpose [than Freudian displacement].... Victorian fiction provides a purely symbolic means of resolving a conflict among cultural categories thtat might render their social experience incoherent were a mass readership to confront those conflicts head on. In using displacement to explain how Vic fiction shifts its initial emotional investment from one subject to another, I attribute this mechanism to the individual unconscious nor to some mass anxiety. I prefer to look at the novel as a way of thinking in its own right, the culture's way of maintaining, upgrading, and perpetuating its most basic categories in the face of pressures that changing social conditions bring to bear on them.

Review

• Andrew H. Miller's, Dec 07 MLQ Review
• 582: How Novels Think, a polemic concerning modern liberal subjectivity, claims that the history it tells and the history of the novel are "one and the same": beginning in the early C18, the novel invalidated competing models of the subject and then developed an adaptive and generative set of rhetorical figures for individuality that reproduced itself across British culture. It is thanks to the novel that the individual became the "most basic unit" of modern knowledge formations and the ground of secular morality.
• 583 THe comparative claim that hte novel, and no other discourse, "gave form to the modern individual and continues to defend and update it" goes unproved, because Armstrong's argument itself is not comparative; she does not engage religion or political economy (for instance)

to demonstrate the power and consequence of novelistic discourses[.] 

• • in the way, for ex, that Devin Griffiths' later work would think about the novelistic in Darwin
• 585 Victorian literary criticism has rested complacently with received models of historical change, as if the philosophy of history were irrelevant to its own day-to-day business. But these musing reflections, coming from such different scholars, suggest that in probing the nature of the new, Victorian literary history itself might look to discover it.