work for being “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”21 Woolf’s assertion can be taken as an alternative starting point for uncovering a vast counter-tradition to the bildungsroman, one that centers on Victorian literature about “grown-up people” and their gradual plots of development.
To begin thinking about these mature plots requires reexamining our critical bias toward the bildungsroman and identifying how our most gradual models of plotting fell out of current critical discussions. Our existing studies more easily follow what Marianne Hirsch has called the picaresque strain in her discussion of the bildungsroman’s overwhelming appeal in “Defining Bildungsroman as a Genre.”22 For this reason, many critics, notably Peter Brooks, struggle to encompass the introversion that Hirsch links with confessional narratives, instead consigning interiority to the static or suspended aspects of fiction. In discussing E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, Brooks challenges Forster’s dismissal of plot in favor of character, countering that if characters’ “‘secret lives’ are to be narratable, they must in some sense be plotted, display a design and logic.”23 Brooks’s opening volley would seem to suggest an ensuing discussion of plot’s hidden, inward workings, but the quieter parts of characters’ “secret” lives go largely unaccounted for in his study as well. He poses “desire” as a subject through which to discuss internalized action—or rather, those sequential movements that make character “narratable”—though, as his following chapters soon reveal, his real focus is on ambition that manifests itself in observable action. Many of his central case studies in Reading for the Plot are the “desiring machines” (41) of nineteenth-century literature: Pip, Julien Sorel, and Lucien from Lost Illusions, in other words, bildungsroman protagonists. Characters who find themselves less outwardly active or unable to translate desire into visible acts—those hampered by factors including age, temperament, and gender—are less easily discussed in Brooks’s model of plot based on engines, male arousal, and the Freudian death drive. His difficulty in accounting for what he terms the “female” narratives of desire reveals how his larger concept of plot strains to include an array of domestic, middle-aged, or otherwise less overtly “active” fictions. In this sense, his definition of plot does not vary deeply from the one he identifies as problematic in Forster’s earlier work, for both his study and Forster’s rely on a similarly eventful model of plot extrapolated from the bildungsroman—a model that effectively consigns periods of suspension and contemplation to fiction’s other, less temporally focused “aspects,” including character, style, and description.
How, then, should we regard lulls in which introspection displaces outward action? Are scenes of inward growth active or passive? Do they represent a cessation of plot or its most urgent turning points? This question of the relationship between interiority and plot has become a source of some critical impasse. Caserio has noted the challenge of trying to theorize introspective action at all. Invoking D. H. Lawrence’s assertion that George Eliot “started putting all the action inside,” Caserio writes that “[w]e find a novelist like D. H. Lawrence, for example, pointing to George Eliot as the major revisionist of the senses of plot and action because she internalizes action. . . . It is perhaps by the internalization of action, a step that ultimately makes action imponderable or makes it at best an arbitrary and unfixed sign in an unending series of metonymies, that George Eliot most undermines Dickens’s sense of plot” (95). But must action “brought inside” really become “imponderable” in terms of plot?
These places of unseen, inward conversion are often overlooked in studies of plot even as they have been widely accepted as a central feature of realism. Ian Watt long ago noted that realism follows a “more minutely discriminating time-scale,” asserting that before its advent “much of man’s life had tended to be almost unavailable to literary representation merely as a result of its slowness.”24 This ability to capture slow processes is, in Watt’s assessment of temporality in the realist novel, the genre’s hallmark and vital innovation. But in thinking about plot, we find a basic contradiction at work, apparent in George Levine’s later gloss on Thackeray that “plot . . . is not an essential element for realism.”25 This view is echoed, in perhaps less stark terms, by Caserio and Markovits, who turn to character and inaction as central terms for discussing the “slow” parts of realist fiction—posing these stretches of text as comparatively static and devoid of plot. Examination of recent criticism reveals that an understated type of narrative momentum has been overlooked precisely because it has been absorbed into considerations of the plot’s antitheses: character, discourse, style, description, and lyrical suspension, or in other words, aspects of narrative that fall under Gérard Genette’s heading of “discourse,” loosely defined as everything counterposed to “story” in a novel. Amanpal Garcha has tried to reclaim features of “discourse,” notably style and description, as central to perceiving the pleasures of reading the “plotless” parts of fiction, but there is still a need to address what occurs during fallow places in novels.26 As Garcha notes, other pleasures attend reading than the ones identified by latter-day structuralists such as Brooks, but he claims these pleasures for reading style and description alone. He therefore focuses on narrative features that arise when plot, as he defines it, ceases its machinations. One might ask whether plot really stops in this manner, giving way clearly to descriptive or discursive passages. It would seem that, on the contrary, it is during these apparent lulls in “story” that a gradual form of narrative progression is often most rigorously at work.
The question remains: what it is we read for when dramatic plotting subsides into an understated form of narrative development? To address these places of seeming quietude, some of the ground recently ceded to character and discourse might be more usefully discussed in terms of plot. Therefore, rather than eschew “plot” as a central term through which to understand lulls, it is time to consider what kind of plot is at work in many of the uneventful stretches that compose Victorian novels about adulthood and midlife.
Defining Novels of Midlife: Events, Epochs, and “Turning Stretches”
Beginning with the smallest unit of plot, the event, one might ask, what do these gradual plots of adult development look like in terms of events?27 Many of the changes that compose novels of maturity tend toward lengthy representation and are hard to define in our existing critical rhetoric; they evade the tight narrative unit of the “turning point” and, more confoundingly, do not conform to larger attempts at excerption, such as the episode or the chapter. If anything, the drawn-out events in these novels are best captured by a phrase of George Eliot’s in Daniel Deronda when she refers to them as “epochs” within a novel. Looking back on Gwendolen Harleth’s adult maturation over the course of a year, the narrator of Daniel Deronda reflects that there are “differences” that “are manifest in the variable intensity which we call human experience, from the revolutionary rush of change which makes a new inner and outer life, to that quiet recurrence of the familiar, which has no other epochs than those of hunger and the heavens.”28 These swaths of time in which the “quiet recurrence of the familiar” can itself make a “new inner and outer life” offer an entry point for understanding what might be termed the “turning stretches” that compose novels of adult development.
One such example of an “epoch” of slow change can be found, over the span of hundreds of pages, in Middlemarch, a work in which Eliot resists a hasty return to the marriage plot. After Casaubon dies, Dorothea is left to consider his “shining rows of note-books” that stand as “the mute memorial of a forgotten faith.”29
At first she walked into every room, questioning the eighteen months of her married life, and carrying on her thoughts as if they were a speech to be heard by her husband. Then, she lingered in the library, and could not be at rest till she had carefully ranged all the note-books as she imagined that he would wish to see them, in orderly sequence. The pity which had been the restraining compelling motive in her life with him still clung about his image, even while she remonstrated with him in indignant thought and told him that he was unjust. (304)
Despite
