The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

by Andrew H. Miller

Overview

Literary criticism has, in recent decades, rather fled from discussions of moral psychology, and for good reasons, too. Who would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated-portentous, pious, humorless? But in protecting us from such fates, our flight has had its costs, as we have lost the concepts needed to recognize and assess much of what distinguished nineteenth-century British literature. That literature was inescapably ethical in orientation, and to proceed as if it were not ignores a large part of what these texts have to offer, and to that degree makes less reasonable the desire to study them, rather than other documents from the period, or from other periods.

Such are the intuitions that drive The Burdens of Perfection, a study of moral perfectionism in nineteenth-century British culture. Reading the period's essayists (Mill, Arnold, Carlyle), poets (Browning and Tennyson), and especially its novelists (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and James), Andrew H. Miller provides an extensive response to Stanley Cavell's contribution to ethics and philosophy of mind. In the process, Miller offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801446610
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	05/29/2008
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Andrew H. Miller is Professor of English and Director of the Victorian Studies Program at Indiana University and Editor of Victorian Studies. He is the author of Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative.

Table of Contents

Preface     xi
Resisting, Conspiring, Completing: An Introduction     1
Improvement and Moral Perfectionism
Moral Perfectionism in the Winter of 1866-67
Historical Sources
Implicative and Conclusive Criticism
The Narrative of Improvement
Skepticism and Perfectionism I: Mechanization and Desire     35
Standing Before Camelot
Skepticism as Ungoverned Desire: Browning's Duke
Skepticism as Mechanization: Carlyle and Mill
Mr. Dombey Rides Death
Skepticism and Perfectionism II: Weakness of Will     54
Victorian Akrasia
Perspective and Commitment
Hard Times and Akrasia
Daniel Deronda and Second-Person Relations
Orchestrating Perspectives
Mark Tapley's Nausea
Interlude: Critical Free Indirect Discourse     84
Reading Thoughts: Casuistry and Transfiguration     92
Casuistry and the Novel
The Theater of Casuistry: Dramatic Monologues
Exemplary Criticism
The Moral Psychology of Improvement
Perfectly Helpless     123
The Reticulation of Constraint
Sigmund Freud and Richard Simpson
Responsiveness, Knowingness, and John Henry Newman     142
"An Evil Crust Is on Them"
The Violence of Our Denials
Watching and Imitation
Close Reading
The Knowledge of Shame     162
Skepticism and Shame
Three Scenes of Shame
Edith Dombey's Shame
Shame and Being Known
Shame and Great Expectations
Shame and Narration
On Lives Unled     191
Nailed toOurselves
Environments for the Optative
The Jamesian Optative
Afterword     219
Notes     223
Bibliography     235
Index     251

What People are Saying About This

James Eli Adams

The Burdens of Perfection is one of those very rare books that stimulates me to rethink almost everything I know about Victorian literature, and a good deal beyond. In analyzing the nineteenth-century preoccupation with perfectionism, Andrew H. Miller offers a rich, brilliant study of the ethical allure of narration—our appeal to narrative as a means of understanding ourselves, our relations to other people, and what we might become. As he explores the burdens of perfection, Miller offers compelling insights into a broad range of contemporary literary and philosophical reflection, and develops a remarkable and distinctive critical voice of his own.

Stanley Cavell

The passion and the learning throughout Andrew H. Miller's marvelous book constitute a brace of virtues much admired by the Victorians he justly admires. The demonstration that the transcendent novels of the Victorian period precisely confront skepticism with respect to the minds of others serves as a standing rebuke to theories of knowledge in the bulk of what became university philosophy.

Garrett Stewart

Andrew H. Miller's book can't help but seem path-clearing. The Burdens of Perfection is as fresh as it is learned; original in its conception, structure, and emphasis; and notable for the gait and responsiveness of its lucid, meditative prose. Miller's scholarship is seasoned and searching, both assured and bravely speculative, with the readings of fiction often elating in the compressed rightness of their surprise and the exemplarity of their selection.

Regenia Gagnier

In his practice of moral reflection, Andrew H. Miller explicitly reveals what has often been thought but not so well expressed, that literary criticism has returned to ethics. Miller charts this return through philosophers who have not been so visible in our climate of new historicism—Stanley Cavell, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams—and novelists and essayists who have. The results are agitating, like moral improvement.

Editorial Reviews

One of the best books on Victorian writing to have appeared in the last ten years.

Victorian Studies - Philip Davis

Andrew H. Miller makes the compelling, persuasive argument that the moral perfectionism so deeply embedded in nineteenth-century writing, particularly in Victorian fiction, represents not a position adopted by some writers and rejected by others but rather 'a field on which writers arrayed themselves.'.

Choice

Andrew H. Miller makes the compelling, persuasive argument that the moral perfectionism so deeply embedded in nineteenth-century writing, particularly in Victorian fiction, represents not a position adopted by some writers and rejected by others but rather 'a field on which writers arrayed themselves.'.

-- "Choice"

One of the best books on Victorian writing to have appeared in the last ten years.

--Philip Davis "Victorian Studies"

From the Publisher