Telemachus. The Victorian Novel of Adulthood considers how many novels diagnosed with a lack of plot by contemporary literary scholars appear to be written against the bildungsroman tradition, extending past the coming-of-age story into the realm of having come of age. This is a time when marriage plots may have run their course or when stories of vocational pursuit have petered out, leaving characters in a midlife lull that Henry James labeled, with some irony, “the country of the general lost freshness.”9 Yet as common as such accounts are in Victorian literature, these times of mature struggling and introspection have been largely neglected in literary critical studies. Instead, we tend to think of novels about adulthood and midlife as an eccentric species in the nineteenth century, an aging relative to the more nimble and popular bildungsroman.10 This account of the bildungsroman’s dominance is bolstered by scholarship that upholds the coming-of-age story as the quintessential expression of Victorian nation building, a narrative of historical progression grafted onto a story of individual growth. Our attraction to the bildungsroman has proven so potent that a body of literature devoted to adulthood has been relegated to the sidelines, framed as a marginal subgenre, and ultimately absented from literary critical studies of the Victorian period as well as narrative and novel theories that discuss plot more broadly.
Challenging a longstanding critical love affair with stories of youth, The Victorian Novel of Adulthood proposes that novels about adulthood and midlife demonstrate a model of plot distinct from that of the bildungsroman and, as such, deserve separate consideration in studies of the novel. My goal, however, in discussing fictions of maturity is not simply to define this novelistic subgenre against the bildungsroman as a more dominant genre or to argue over the boundary lines for definitions of the bildungsroman. Numerous studies already exist to those ends.11 Instead, I examine how our emphasis on the novel of youthful formation has shaped and, in many important ways, limited our understanding of, first, the range of experience captured in Victorian fiction and, second, the distinctly gradual plots these fictions exhibit. In shifting our angle of perception and looking at the development of the Victorian novel through another subgenre of literature (namely, works dealing with midlife and adulthood), we can address an alternative, comparatively uneventful kind of storytelling than the one that has been commonly accepted and used as a model for novel studies. This approach requires that we rethink the way that we have framed the bildungsroman in scholarship on Victorian novels as the masterplot for the period and that we instead recognize the widespread representations of adulthood, midlife, and maturity.
This new awareness of the centrality of mature fictions in the nineteenth century, in turn, necessitates a reconsideration of the development of the English novel and the genealogy of Victorian historical consciousness. More than simply addressing the features that compose such fictions, this book argues for an alternative understanding of the development of the British novel that includes the many novels about midlife, showing how they equally constitute our sense of the novel’s growth and defining features: its periods of suspension and its fascination with interiority, its wealth of accumulated daily detail, and its ability to render these details into a progressive, if at times uneventful, whole.
In representing barely perceptible development that unfolds slowly in adulthood, many of the works in this study are well-known for the biting criticism they inspire: Henry James’s accusation that Daniel Deronda is more like a lake than a river in terms of its narrative flow; George Gissing’s diagnosis of Little Dorrit’s “prevalent air of gloom” (a sign that “the hand of the master is plainly weary”); H. G. Wells’s frustration with the way James’s “vast paragraphs sweat and struggle” in “tales of nothingness” about cautious bachelors “going delicately” through life.12 These novels, and many others accused of similar crimes against plot, have something in common: mature protagonists. Rather than depict the tumults of first love, loss, and transgression, they illustrate an adult-onset “arrested development.” As a result, their authors face the unique challenge of accommodating the prolonged inactivity of protagonists in a novel form that demands progression. Subtle narrative developments like these are truly “arrested developments,” as they come to fruition when a character, and potentially a plotline, seems to stop moving. This paradoxical development within stasis is, upon inspection, a vision of the most extremely gradual and inward change imaginable, change that eludes surface recognition, requiring the powers of fictional insight to be uncovered.13
Despite the lack of critical attention given to midlife in Victorian fiction, these gradualist plots of maturity are surprisingly common. For example, a classic bildungsroman by Dickens, David Copperfield, is as much about maturity as it is about youth, for it reveals a process of disillusionment born of adulthood. As the protagonist reflects after his first marriage and success as a writer, “I was happy; but the happiness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I enjoyed. . . . What I missed, I still regarded—I always regarded—as something that had been a dream of my youthful fancy; that was incapable of realization; that I was now discovering to be so, with some natural pain, as all men did.”14 Another archetypal bildungsroman, Jane Eyre, comes to rest in contemplative doldrums as vast and deceptively uniform as the space of the moors where Jane wanders. These suspended stretches on the moors follow the revolutionary rush of first experience, allowing the heroine to perform the work of maturity. Likewise, Ellen Wood’s sensation novel East Lynne, which enthralled nineteenth-century readers with its illicit twists, mires itself for long periods in the complexities of married life and second unions, depicting motherhood and female aging as central concerns.15 And Vanity Fair, a novel driven at the relentless pace of Becky Sharp’s ambition, surpasses the boundaries of the bildungsroman early in its story arc, moving from the school days of Becky, Amelia, Dobbin, and George into accounts of failed marriages and widowhood, visions of second marriages, and an intergenerational chronicle of parental shortcomings. As Dobbin thinks back on the ten years that make up this portion of the novel, he observes, “Long years had passed. . . . He had now passed into the stage of old-fellow-hood. His hair was grizzled, and many a passion and feeling of his youth had grown grey in that interval.”16 The “interval” of graying includes the entire middle of the novel up to its end, and while it occasions some of Thackeray’s sharpest satire, it also includes his greatest overtures toward compassion for his aging central characters.
A Love Affair with the Bildungsroman: Novel Studies and Forgotten Narratives of Midlife
Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, novels dealing with maturity were increasingly considered under a rubric that gives precedence to the coming-of-age story as “the ‘symbolic form’ of modernity,” to quote Franco Moretti’s influential assertion.17 Works as varied as Great Expectations and Little Dorrit have been considered alike in scholarship that not only prioritizes the bildungsroman as a plot model but also goes so far as to cast the genre’s “rise” and “development” as a bildungsroman narrative itself. For example, Mikhail Bakhtin frames the novel’s history as an intergenerational conflict between rebellious youths and staid elders. The novel, presented as a scrappy pugilist, is “the leading hero in the drama of literary development,” and it “fights for its own hegemony in literature; wherever it triumphs, the other older genres go into decline.”18 Georg Lukács likewise casts the novel as a protagonist in a story of formation, saying that the novel expresses the modern dissonance between the individual and his environment or, rather, between a “youthful confidence” and an “outside world . . . [that] will never speak to us in a voice that will clearly tell us our way and determine our goal.”19 In these foundational works of literary theory, the novel comes to occupy a role very similar to that of Pip in Great Expectations or Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black: the position of an upstart, of questionable class distinction, ascending the ranks.
This bias toward the bildungsroman in literary criticism continues today, and a new group of scholars including Jed Esty interestingly extend Moretti’s account of the bildungsroman to address the genre’s colonial, even colonizing reach.20 Indeed, the term bildungsroman has been applied so expansively in recent years as to include novels that imagine, more fully, second
