Novel

B

Development of Genres

Many categories of the novel became recognizable in the 18th century, although they were rarely self-contained or mutually exclusive. One was the didactic novel, in which theories of education and politics were expressed. Most famous was Émile (1762; trans. 1763) by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A British didactic novel was Caleb Williams (1794), by the political philosopher William Godwin; this work may also be regarded as exhibiting aspects of the Gothic novel, in which the element of horror is created by the use of apparitions, supernatural manifestations, dungeons, tombs, and nature in its more terrifying aspects. The first truly Gothic novel was The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. Later examples are The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe, The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis, and Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) was the first American Gothic novel. The Gothic strain has been potent in fiction ever since.

An enduring sub-genre of the British novel—although uncommon in American fiction—is the comedy of manners, which is concerned with the clash, mirrored in speech and behaviour, between characters formed by particular cultural and social conditions. Perhaps the first such writer was Fanny Burney (Evelina, 1778; Cecilia, 1782), but the great exemplar was Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma, 1816). Her abiding theme is ostensibly that of young women securing, or not securing, husbands; her underlying serious concern is with the attainment of self-knowledge. Such are Austen's wit, irony, and psychological perception, allied with her strict sense of correct social behaviour, that she is the unchallenged genius of the genre.

IV

19th Century: Development of the Modern Novel

Dates for the first appearance of the modern novel must be arbitrary, but two French novelists, Stendhal and Honoré de Balzac, were certainly formative influences.

A

France

The protagonists of Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir (1830; The Red and the Black, 1926) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma, 1925) represented a new kind of hero, the “outsider” at odds with society, fired by new opportunities made possible by the Napoleonic regime; Stendhal is the master psychologist of love, ambition, and the thirst for power. Similarly, Balzac made himself the historian of the France of his time in La Comédie humaine (1831-1848), a sequence of 47 volumes that portrayed a society marked by ruthless ambition and exploitation of technology and finance.

The next generation of French novelists displayed a keen interest in the novel as an art form and as a medium for the quasi-scientific study of society. The aim of Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1857; trans. 1881) and L'Education sentimentale (1869; trans. 1964) was to write about ordinary life with the classical sense of form and precision that characterized the epic and its style. He believed that novelists should exhibit towards their subjects the objectivity of the scientist. In art, Flaubert taught, treatment was all; nothing was intrinsically good or bad but that art made it so. Flaubert's admiration for the scientist was echoed by Émile Zola, who, conceiving the novel as equivalent to a laboratory experiment using real people, analysed the effects of heredity and environment on a French family in Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893; trans. 1885-1907), a series of 20 novels. He seized on the findings of the scientists with a Romantic's fervour.

B

Britain

A prominent characteristic of both the modern novel and the modern spirit is a strong sense of the past. In the 19th century Sir Walter Scott dominated the early British novel. His Waverley novels (1814-1828) exhibit his passion for history. Throughout the 19th century the historical novel was the most reputable form of fiction. In England, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot all attempted to write such novels; Thackeray's Henry Esmond (1852) is in some ways the most successful. Novelists abroad who came under Scott's influence included, in Italy, Alessandro Manzoni, with I promessi sposi (1825-1827; The Betrothed, 1834); in France, Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas père; in Germany, Gustav Freytag; and in the United States, James Fenimore Cooper.

Another ongoing preoccupation for British novelists is the critique of society, using the techniques of dialogue, characterization, and description developed in the 18th-century classics. Dickens comments on Victorian society not so much by means of realism as by his prolific invention of comic characters and situations presented sometimes affectionately, sometimes in fierce contempt, but always with the utmost intensity, articulating his vision of life through such pervasive metaphors as entombment, imprisonment, and rebirth. Dickens is the greatest imaginative English writer after William Shakespeare, and his novels have the sweep of poetic dramas. His contemporaries—Thackeray (1847-1848, Vanity Fair), Eliot (1871-1872, Middlemarch), and Trollope (1857, Barchester Towers)—appear almost conventional by comparison, although they produced remarkably detailed panoramas and pointed analyses of British life at crucial historical moments. Eliot, a writer of great erudition, does considerably more. Her characters contend seriously with life's options; they are thinking beings.

Some Victorians sought refuge from the evils of city and town life in the rural, the pastoral, and the poetic. Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë is an impassioned drama of the conflict of opposed ways of being, symbolized by winter gales and summer sunshine, but for all its lyric intensity the novel is most skilfully constructed and documented. Her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre (1847) astonishes still as the revelation of the mind of a young woman of intellectual and spiritual ardour who knows her worth and demands equality with the man she loves. Poetry makes its appearance in the novels of George Meredith—The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Egoist (1879)—always to express a character's state of mind at a specific moment. It was also a feature of the novels of Thomas Hardy. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) Hardy considers the tragedy of 19th-century humanity, with the best human impulses being defeated by the forces of malevolent fate.

C

The United States

The early American novelists William Gilmore Simms and Nathaniel Hawthorne claimed that their fictions were not novels but romances; according to Hawthorne, conditions of life in America rendered anything like the English novel impossible. The American novel still often tends to the romance and the allegorical, even mythic impulse. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) subtly explores the nature of sin and the Puritan conscience. Extending Hawthorne's symbolic method, Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick (1851), his great poetic drama of the pursuit of the ultimate, in the guise of a whaling story.

In his masterpiece of comic irony, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Mark Twain exposes the viciousness of a complacent society. By demonstrating how expressive native American speech could be, Twain helped establish a uniquely American literary style, further developed by Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage (1895).

Although apparently less certain of social dynamics than the British Victorians, American novelists did not ignore the immense transformation in the social structure during the Gilded Age. Mark Twain's friend William Dean Howells examines the newly rich seeking social respectability in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Bitter indictments of social abuses were written by Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1888), Frank Norris (McTeague, 1899; The Octopus, 1901), and Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, 1900).

The American expatriate Henry James looked to Europe and showed himself to be Flaubert's successor. Taking as a main theme the exploitation of innocence by experience, usually in the form of European exploitation of Americans, as in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902), he transformed his novels into what can almost be called artefacts, so great was his concern for form and shape. His approach to fiction was essentially aesthetic; he sought to give it the intensity of great poetry or painting.