this moment of dutiful remembrance mixed with “indignant thought,” Eliot reveals an internal turn of events for Dorothea, a move from duty to rebellion bound up in her decisive act of writing a note scribbled inside an envelope left for her by Casaubon. “Do you not see now that I could not submit my soul to yours, by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in?—Dorothea?” (304). This note turns the posthumous decree of Casaubon’s will into a correspondence, a dialogue with the dead. Nevertheless, although this rebellious act of writing marks Dorothea’s changing inward course, her plot remains as devoid of outward action as before. Time passes and readers encounter her many months later still “seated with her hands folded on her lap, looking out along the avenue of limes to the distant fields. Every leaf was at rest in the sunshine, the familiar scene was changeless, and seemed to represent the prospect of her life, full of motiveless ease—motiveless, if her own energy could not seek out reasons for ardent action” (335). Casaubon’s death might be expected to return Dorothea to the plot of youthful possibility, but Eliot resists this convention to prioritize a different and much less eventful development for her heroine. In a departure from the typical progression of the bildungsroman, Eliot downplays the idea of the momentous first romance, both by presenting the desiccated figure of Casaubon as the initial leading man and, subsequently, by giving this failed first marriage so little space in the larger story of second chances. In this period between Dorothea’s marriages, the prolonged uneventfulness of her central plotline achieves another kind of development, giving readers a view of her continued maturation after she has already come of age.
Such interludes appear throughout this study in novels and short stories about a cast of middle-aged types in Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction, figures including the miser, the widow, the bachelor, and the spinster. These character types pervade Victorian novels but are often thought of as “ficelles” to the youthful heroes and their plots of adventure. They stand on the margins of the bildungsroman in the same way that, in Austenian ball scenes, characters like Miss Bates, Sir William Lucas, and Mr. Knightley ring the dance floor observing the youthful dancers and helping their courtship plots along, rarely being pulled onto the floor themselves—and then, to memorable effect. They may appear resigned that their participation in the ball is over, but as self-consciously sidelined as these characters may be, their marginal position often becomes the fixation, the very center, of novels that imagine life after the marriage plot. This cast of characters is represented in the central protagonists studied in this book: Silas Marner, who undergoes a period of isolation and hoarding as a miser; Gwendolen Harleth, who experiences penitence as a young widow; Arthur Clennam, with his midlife homecoming and sojourn in the Marshalsea prison; James’s “poor sensitive gentlemen”30 who hesitate their way through hundreds of pages; and the unmarried middle-aged women of modernist fiction, these twentieth-century protagonists offering a more distanced reflection on the Victorian era and its waning marriage plots. The novels that contain these protagonists have been chosen as case studies because they each tend, in exemplary ways, to the “epochs” of slow change that characterize novels of maturity more generally. Although these works are exceptional for their uneventful plotting, they also stand as widely representative of a larger focus in Victorian literature on the imagined lives and emotional growth of middle-aged characters. For every Silas Marner there is a host of Victorian Scrooges and Boffins whose pattern of accretion matches the novel’s own accumulative ends. Gwendolen has an array of sister widows, whose courtship plots range from the demure Eleanor Bold’s remarriage to Madame Madeline Neroni’s more brazen, if prone, flirtations in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers. On his own, Henry James peoples English literature with morose middle-aged bachelors, but his Marchers and Strethers find themselves in the good company of John Jarndyce and a league of avuncular wallflowers. The “old maid,” that varied staple of British and American fiction, at once includes the kindly Miss Bates and the more dynamic and iconoclastic Miss Wade and Rhoda Nunn, appearing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as one of fiction’s most flexible and surprising character types, a vehicle for both narrative experimentation and visions of larger social transformation, as Woolf’s fiction demonstrates. Giving closer study to these protagonists and their fictions of maturity makes it possible to chart a correspondence between middle age and “narrative middles,” uncovering a fuller range of lived experience in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction.
Historical Context and Contents
Why did plots of maturity become more common in the early to mid-nineteenth century? Looking back on an era fascinated by development, G. K. Chesterton questioned why, in the nineteenth century, the “most important event in English history was the event that never happened at all—the English Revolution on the lines of the French Revolution.”31 J. S. Mill framed the period in slightly different terms in The Spirit of the Age, conceiving of his own time in terms of process rather than inaction: “The first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is, that it is an age of transition. Mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones.”32 He concludes, “A man may not be either better or happier at six-and-twenty, than he was at six years of age: but the same jacket which fitted him then, will not fit him now” (53). The metaphor of having “outgrown” the vestments of youth is telling, for it speaks to an emerging national self-conception of being an era past the age of revolutionary fervor, engaged instead in searching for alternative models of change—models that, in novels as in political discourse, attended to newfound maturity as a vital part of British self-identity.
In many ways, the nineteenth-century obsession with conceptualizing gradualism across disciplines emerged just when British subjects began viewing themselves in more-distanced relation to the French Revolution. This new national self-identity coincided with the emergence of middle age as a modern concept in the Victorian period.33 It was an era when, as Walter Pater objected, “the idea of development” seemed to be “invading one by one . . . all the products of the mind.”34 A generation earlier, a sense of youthful revolution infused Wordsworth’s retrospective insistence that to be “alive” at the time of the French Revolution was “bliss” but to be “young” was “very heaven,”35 but discourse in the Victorian period increasingly yielded to a new set of guiding tropes oriented around maturation and uneventful development—economic growth, evolution, geological accretion and erosion, and, in theology, spiritual progress in the afterlife.
Modern critics, however, follow Gillian Beer and George Levine to focus overwhelmingly on only Darwinian evolution and geology as the main culturally available models of radically slow change.36 Yet more than any other discourse, theology offered writers a narrative template for understanding and representing extremely slow development in later life. In contrast to a large body of scholarship focused on Darwinian and geological models of development in Victorian fiction, this study uncovers the presence of another, as yet underexamined, inspiriting zeitgeist that appeared frequently as a metaphor for midlife development: debates about redefining purgatory initiated by Tractarians in Tract 90.
Beginning historically with the start of the Oxford Movement, The Victorian Novel of Adulthood seeks to ground aesthetic claims about plots of maturity in their historical and intellectual contexts. A new focus on mature protagonists in the mid-nineteenth century and early twentieth century corresponds with a period in which redefining the afterlife became a national obsession and source of ongoing controversy. The afterlife was a subject of the highest importance to Victorians, with discussions about purgatory occupying a central position in religious discussions initiated by the Oxford Movement. As Geoffrey Rowell states, eschatology was “discussed more publicly, and perhaps with more vehemence, than in any previous age.”37 If Jonah’s unfolding is obscured by curtains of flesh and the elliptical style of biblical narration, Victorian theologians’ writing on the afterlife sought to illuminate the epistemological gap at his story’s center: the problem of how we can understand and represent inward change. In the Bible, Jonah’s conversion remains hidden, for in the style noted by Erich Auerbach, he enters and exits the leviathan with little intervening text to explain what happens there.38 The transition from man to prophet occurs with a rapidity that verges on simultaneity; the development
