The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism

by S. Pearl Brilmyer

Overview

The Science of Character makes a bold new claim for the power of the literary by showing how Victorian novelists used fiction to theorize how character forms.
 
In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, “the science of the formation of character.” Although Mill’s proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill’s unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore how traits and behaviors in organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features—shapes, colors, and gestures—come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an individual into a materially determined figuration produced through shifts in the boundaries between the body’s inside and outside. In their hands, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the laws governing physical and affective life. The Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226815787
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/11/2022
Series:	Thinking Literature
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

S. Pearl Brilmyer is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

List of Figures ix

Introduction Ethology, or the Science of Character 1

As Much an External Thing as a Tree or a Rock 14

A Power of Observation Informed by a Living Heart; or, Involuntary, Palpitating 24

Inconsistency and Formlessness 33

Chapter 1 Plasticity, Form, and the Physics of Character in Eliot's Middlemarch 41

Plastic Forms 45

Irregular Solids, Viscous Fluids 60

Chapter 2 Sensing Character in Impressions of Theophrastus Such 75

Theophrastus Who? 79

Descriptive Minutiae 85

To Sketch a Species 88

The Natural History of Human Life 93

After the Human 97

Chapter 3 The Racialization of Surface in Hardy's Sketch of Temperament and Hereditary science 103

The Color of Heredity 110

On the Whiteness of the Ground 117

Accretions of Character 129

Chapter 4 Schopenhauer and the Determination of Women's Character 144

An English Start 151

The Character of the Will 156

Impulsive Aesthetics 168

Chapter 5 The Intimate Pulse of Reality; or, Schreiner's Ethological Realism 180

The Ethics of Nature 189

The Ethics of Description 201

The Ethics of Force 209

Coda Spontaneous Generations of Character between Realism and Modernism 220

Acknowledgments 245

Bibliography 249

Index 275

Editorial Reviews

The Science of Character brilliantly and boldly renews discussions of the late Victorian history of the novel. Brilmyer shows us how figures such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner revised the definition of a realistic character along new, materialist lines. That revision demonstrated literature’s ability to produce insights into the workings of both nature and culture.

Harvard University Deidre Shauna Lynch

Character: a slippery term that can denote either a human-like entity in a literary text or the specific assemblage of traits that makes one person different from others. In this beautifully argued book, S. Pearl Brilmyer refuses to choose between these two possibilities. Instead, she shows how novelists at the end of the nineteenth century enlisted the former in the service of discovering the workings of the latter—how, that is, George Eliot, Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, George Gissing, and Thomas Hardy transformed their aesthetic practice into a science of character. Turning the study of literature and science on its head by demonstrating the degree to which the production of literature was a scientific endeavor for these writers, she also formulates a unified field theory of the late-nineteenth-century novel that recognizes the centrality of women writers and finds in New Woman fiction the key to that novel’s theorization of character and circumstance as inseparable. Bracingly rigorous, intellectually thrilling, exhaustively researched, with far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the novel: The Science of Character is a remarkable achievement.

University of Toronto Cannon Schmitt

Brilmyer’s work marks a new epoch in the study of realism. Developing out of deep historical research and an engagement of the thinking of philosophers, theorists, and scholars of character, Brilmyer reverses dominant understandings of the way late nineteenth-century fiction developed to trace the emergence of an impersonal dynamic materialism that from George Eliot forward reimagined the nature of character itself. This is an extraordinarily original and important contribution, both to the history of realism and the novel and to new theorizing about matter.

Rutgers University George Levine

Brilmyer’s book shows how the realist imperative to adequately describe the relation between characters and their circumstances unwound Victorian Realism from within, as new scientific theories of matter, force, and cellular life led high Victorian realists— such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy—and a subsequent generation of New Woman novelists to press the form to its limits and beyond. A major new study of literary character, The Science of Character is important not least for the way it revises the literary history of Victorian Realism and its ends.

Studies in the Novel

"Brilmyer's book shows how the realist imperative to adequately describe the relation between characters and their circumstances unwound Victorian Realism from within, as new scientific theories of matter, force, and cellular life led high Victorian realists-- such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy--and a subsequent generation of New Woman novelists to press the form to its limits and beyond. A major new study of literary character, The Science of Character is important not least for the way it revises the literary history of Victorian Realism and its ends."-- "Studies in the Novel"

"With an acute ear for the references that give metaphors their edge, as in Eliot's unforgettable image of a squirrel's heartbeat as a figure for that which we cannot bear to know, Brilmyer brings the soaringly evocative back to earth, giving us a new science of literary analysis."-- "Critical Inquiry"

"Character: a slippery term that can denote either a human-like entity in a literary text or the specific assemblage of traits that makes one person different from others. In this beautifully argued book, S. Pearl Brilmyer refuses to choose between these two possibilities. Instead, she shows how novelists at the end of the nineteenth century enlisted the former in the service of discovering the workings of the latter--how, that is, George Eliot, Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, George Gissing, and Thomas Hardy transformed their aesthetic practice into a science of character. Turning the study of literature and science on its head by demonstrating the degree to which the production of literature was a scientific endeavor for these writers, she also formulates a unified field theory of the late-nineteenth-century novel that recognizes the centrality of women writers and finds in New Woman fiction the key to that novel's theorization of character and circumstance as inseparable. Bracingly rigorous, intellectually thrilling, exhaustively researched, with far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the novel: The Science of Character is a remarkable achievement."-- "Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto"

"The Science of Character brilliantly and boldly renews discussions of the late Victorian history of the novel. Brilmyer shows us how figures such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner revised the definition of a realistic character along new, materialist lines. That revision demonstrated literature's ability to produce insights into the workings of both nature and culture."-- "Deidre Shauna Lynch, Harvard University"

"Brilmyer's work marks a new epoch in the study of realism. Developing out of deep historical research and an engagement of the thinking of philosophers, theorists, and scholars of character, Brilmyer reverses dominant understandings of the way late nineteenth-century fiction developed to trace the emergence of an impersonal dynamic materialism that from George Eliot forward reimagined the nature of character itself. This is an extraordinarily original and important contribution, both to the history of realism and the novel and to new theorizing about matter."-- "George Levine, Rutgers University"

"The Science of Character is learned and continuously intelligent, a model of philosophically informed criticism. Brilmyer makes a theoretical advance in the conceptualization of character, realism, and the novel itself. This book provides a rigorous proof of concept for feminist New Materialism, and deepens our understanding of several canonical writers. The Science of Character redraws late-century Victorian literary history."-- "Andrew Miller, Johns Hopkins University"

From the Publisher

"With an acute ear for the references that give metaphors their edge, as in Eliot's unforgettable image of a squirrel’s heartbeat as a figure for that which we cannot bear to know, Brilmyer brings the soaringly evocative back to earth, giving us a new science of literary analysis."

Critical Inquiry

The Science of Character is learned and continuously intelligent, a model of philosophically informed criticism. Brilmyer makes a theoretical advance in the conceptualization of character, realism, and the novel itself. This book provides a rigorous proof of concept for feminist New Materialism, and deepens our understanding of several canonical writers. The Science of Character redraws late-century Victorian literary history.

Johns Hopkins University Andrew Miller