The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca Rainof

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 the less than riveting pace of Dorothea rearranging Casaubon’s books, this is not an entirely uneventful passage. In 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.