Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism is an important study of the relationships among sciences, novels, and theories of character in the Victorian period, with implications for how we might better understand connections among literature, the sciences, and theory in our own moment. Brilmyer begins The Science of Character by noting that in 1843, John Stuart Mill proposed a new science—"Ethology, or the Science of character" (1)—which would investigate how character was formed through the influence of circumstances and milieu. Brilmyer argues that though this science never emerged in the form that Mill had imagined, it was taken up and developed by a series of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelists, including George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner. These novelists shared a philosophical commitment to what Brilmyer calls "dynamic materialism," which presumes that "reality consists not of static, individuated things but rather forces that generate characters through interactions" (16). Victorian proponents of dynamic materialism drew explicitly on Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy, as well as developments in nineteenth-century sciences, such as "field theory" in physics (which proposed that "objects are not bounded, contained units, as they appear to the naked eye, but rather concatenations of force that produce a sense of solidity" 61). For Victorian novelists committed to dynamic materialism, the point of narrative was not to reveal the workings of subjective interiority but rather to investigate the interplay between individuals and surrounding milieux that produced character.Four chapters in The Science of Character develop key concepts of the Victorian literary investigation of character by pairing these concepts with close readings of individual novels. Chapter one focuses on the importance of the concept of plasticity for Eliot's Middlemarch; chapter two explores the concept of impressions in Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such; chapter three considers the relationship between race and accretion in Hardy's Sketch of Temperament; and chapter five explores what Brilmyer calls the "ethological realism" of Schreiner's posthumously published From Man to Man, or Perhaps Only. Chapter four is different in kind from the other chapters, providing an expansive and deep survey of the reception of Schopenhauer's philosophy in Britain in the nineteenth century, the implications that Victorian feminist authors drew from that philosophy, and the relationship between Victorian feminism and the "New Realism" developed by New Woman novelists of the 1880s and 1890s. In a chapter-length coda, Brilmyer argues that her presentation of the goals of the novelists she considers suggests far less of a divide between Victorian realism and literary modernism than literary critics have generally assumed.As my not especially brief summary of the book's argument underscores, The Science of Character is a complex book with many elements, including Victorian realism; theories of character; animal ethology; Victorian field theory; dynamic materialism; emergentism; concepts of plasticity, impression, and accretion; New Woman novelists; the relationship of theory to literature; and the relationship of literature to the sciences. Happily, the reader of The Science of Character is guided through its complex argument by means of clear and engaging prose. To explain better how the various parts of the book relate to one another, I expand here on three aspects of the book: (1) its philosophical analysis of the implications of the fact that, for the Victorians, many things beyond humans can have character; (2) the relationship of The Science of Character to the Victorian sciences of character that it studies; and (3) the implications of the analyses in The Science of Character for our understanding of what dynamic materialist "literary realism" entails, especially if—as, I think, the book implies—it is in principle opposed to literary plot and narrative.* * *Among the many virtues of Brilmyer's book is its analysis of the philosophical implications of the wide denotation that the term "character" had for the Victorians. Mill's aspirational science of ethology was to have focused on the ways in which real human beings develop individual character. Yet Victorians also understood novels as populated by characters, and the term was equally important in "fields as various as natural history, metaphysics, ethics, and a nascent genetics" (5). In addition, early-to-mid-twentieth-century scientists developed an animal-oriented science of ethology premised on the principle that nonhuman animals had "'characters' which can be understood, often by direct analogy with human character, on the basis of prolonged and sympathetic observations" (199, citing Durant 164).Earlier literary criticism has noted the wide denotation of the term character in the Victorian period, but The Science of Character seeks to reveal why Victorian authors felt that so many things in addition to humans could have a character. Brilmyer argues that for the Victorians whom she studies, character named a process of coming-into-visibility that happens at the level of a body's interaction with its surroundings. This meant both that whatever has a body can have character, and that human character should be understood less in terms of "subjectivity" than of "human objecthood" (12): that is, the ways in which the interactions of human bodies with their environments become visible and sensible to others. Many of the Victorians Brilmyer studies drew on Schopenhauer to support this understanding of character. Schopenhauer argued that reality is, fundamentally, nothing but dynamic force ("Will"), yet Will often appears to accrete itself into objects or bodies. When I view myself—that is, from the "inside"—I am aware primarily of the aspect of willing (which I may misinterpret as agency or "free will"). When I view humans from the outside, though—which is what I necessarily do for everybody but myself—I see what Schopenhauer calls "character Charakter" (21, citing Schopenhauer 1: 126).A shared commitment to this "dynamic materialist" understanding of reality served as the premise for a Victorian literary science of character developed by authors such as Eliot, Hardy, and numerous New Women novelists of the 1880s and 1890s. The belief that character and individuality emerged less as a consequence of subjective decisions or agency than as a consequence of dynamic material forces encouraged these authors, for example, to represent individuals "whose effect on the world is not monumental but rather 'diffusive,'" as Eliot describes Dorothea at the end of Middlemarch (208, citing Eliot 785), and to stress the "representation of the involuntary forces that determine the character of humans and other living beings" (167). The aesthetic strategy of focusing narratives on "the small, the slight, and the seemingly insignificant" and of avoiding distinctions between humans and nonhumans was tied to—and intended to make palpable for the reader—the "belief that the universe is not a collection of static and unrelated parts, but rather 'a pulsating, always interacting whole'" (209, internal citation from Schreiner 181).Brilmyer's approach to Victorian realism produces readings that often run against the grain of what we thought we knew of Victorian novelists and their careers. In place of an Eliot committed to the humanist project of expanding our sympathetic relationships with other humans, we find an Eliot far more interested in the "dynamic material substrate" of subjectivity—namely, character—and so for whom "human life" in a novel such as Middlemarch takes "shape not only through intentions, thought, or speech, but through physical actions and reactions as well" (Brilmyer 42). This means, for example, that "Lydgate's loss of integrity" in Middlemarch should not be understood "in terms of a moral failure," but rather as "an unexpected change in the compound of his character" (53). (Brilmyer contends that we also miss the mark if we think that Eliot was critical of Lydgate's scientific goal of locating the "primitive tissue" 56.) To take another example, where earlier literary critics have often seen Hardy's novel The Well-Beloved as "one of oddest items in the Hardy canon" (108, citing Morton 200), Brilmyer reads this novel instead as the key to understanding the intellectual project that Hardy pursued throughout his corpus. Brilmyer suggests that it allows us to understand, for example, Hardy's late-career shift from novels to poetry: rather than being simply a defensive response to attacks on his novels, this generic shift was more fundamentally the logical extension of Hardy's "abiding formal commitment" (109) to a dynamic materialist understanding of the relationship between fictional characters and plot, a view that is more on display in The Well-Beloved than in his earlier fiction. And where feminist critics have often taken the New Woman novel to task for its "defeatist" (151) approach to female agency, Brilmyer argues instead that New Woman novelists "cultivated a non-subject-centered politics in which character is determined through interactions between impulsive, codetermining bodies" (151) and which has much in common with the science-oriented feminism of scholars such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz.* * *The Victorian novelists whom Brilmyer considers believed that it was possible to create a true science of character by means of fiction. The Science of Character, as I read it, aims neither to critique these scientific aspirations on the part of novelists, nor to reduce them to cultural meanings, but rather to extend that Victorian scientific project. The Science of Character does not employ the post-structural strategy of asking how literary authors produced the "effect" of reality; rather, The Science of Character seeks to understand how literary authors actually increased our knowledge of reality by means of their literary science. This strikes me as an exciting and innovative way of understanding the relationship between science, literature, and literary criticism. Though there are multiple modes of contemporary literary criticism that aim to be scientific—among others, literary Darwinism, the application of cognitive science to literary texts, and fMRI studies of experiences of reading—most of these approaches involve applying the results of an independent science to literary texts. Brilmyer's account, by contrast, suggests that Victorian novelists did not apply the results of an independent science to the writing of novels but instead created their own science by means of their fiction—an effort that is then continued by the literary critic who investigates this science.As Brilmyer notes, the Victorian science of character differed significantly from the scientific aspirations for fiction proposed by French contemporary Émile Zola. Zola famously proposed that the naturalist novelist could make fiction scientific by applying the experimental method developed by the physiologist Claude Bernard: the naturalist novelist first observes some aspect of reality, and then, through the writing of a novel, "introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for" (Zola 8). That the novelist can, like anyone else, observe some aspect of external reality is clear enough; that a fictional plot created by the novelist is anything at all like a controlled scientific experiment was and remains far from clear. For the Victorians whom Brilmyer considers, though, characters in fiction function as a scientific means of investigating reality not because they are emplotted within the controlled experimental situation of the narrative, but rather because the observation of character happens in fiction in the same way that it happens in real life. Since character named for the Victorians the process by which the objecthood of an entity—that is, its visibility—was produced in relationship to its environment, the writing and reading of literature did not occur in some "other" space that mirrored, simulated, or controlled real objects or environments, but rather was one of the ways in which the visibility of objecthood was produced. Hence, "the affective power of the literary text does not induce fantasy; on the contrary, it pulls one back to the textures, densities, and layers of the physical world" (94). Or, to put this another way, Victorians understood human character as "a semiotic system—a set of physical 'marks' interpretable by 'readers,'" which made fiction "the ideal figure for its character's investigation" (77). Literary authors could thus participate fully, and not simply as auxiliaries or imitators, in a science of character.The Victorian science of character thus asks us to understand the term "science" differently than when we speak of nineteenth-century physics or biology as sciences. In this way, The Science of Character reminds us that the term science is a value term that has been (and remains) the site of contest concerning what can legitimately serve as the objects and methods of a science. Brilmyer's book thus shares much with Amanda Jo Goldstein's recent Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life in suggesting that literary critics take past contests over this term seriously, rather than simply accepting contemporary understandings of what can count as a science. The Science of Character underscores this point by noting that the concept of character continued to function within natural sciences as a point of conflict in the twentieth century as animal ethologists sought to include the personal experience of the experimentalist within the animal-oriented natural science of ethology.Brilmyer's approach to the science of character enables her to draw an important distinction among the many contemporary "new materialisms" that we might otherwise be inclined to see as largely consonant with one another. Brilmyer notes that Victorian dynamic materialism shares much with, for example, actor-network theory, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology, for both Victorian dynamic materialists and contemporary new materialists begin "with the presumption of a shared materiality between human beings and the world they describe, encouraging us to recognize the material-semiotic processes that knit together worlds" (12). Yet as Brilmyer observes, new materialists such as Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and Jane Bennett aim to extend agency from humans to everything else, whereas Victorian dynamic materialists instead focused, via "character," on the objecthood of things, including humans. For Brilmyer, this Victorian approach has been extended less in the work of the new materialists than in feminist approaches to the sciences, especially those of Haraway, Barad, and Grosz. Like their Victorian predecessors, none of these feminist authors "give up on the quest for truth" (28)—for example, by contenting themselves with post-structuralist analyses of how the "sense of truth" is produced—but rather each seeks to create a "better account of the world" (28, citing Haraway). This, as I understand it, is also the guiding impulse of The Science of Character.* * *This double approach to realism—realism as both novelistic genre designation and the scientific project of creating what Haraway calls a "better account of the world"—is extraordinarily productive, but also opens up several questions not fully resolved in The Science of Character. Brilmyer's analyses suggest a tension between the project of character-oriented dynamic materialism developed by Eliot, Hardy, and Schreiner, and the form of the realistic novel, or at least a seemingly key element of the realist novel form: namely, plot. While The Science of Character documents the importance of dynamic materialism for Eliot's plot-heavy novel Middlemarch, Brilmyer also stresses that Eliot's approach eventually led her away from plot-driven novels to the "character sketches" of Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Brilmyer also positions Hardy's brief turn to the character sketch in The Well-Beloved as more of a temporary resting place within his more general movement away from prose entirely and to poetry. And Schreiner's From Man to Man—a novel that Brilmyer describes as "weaving together" most of the threads she developed in the book—is described as following "Eliot in guiding realism away from plot-driven narrative" (182). In each case, Brilmyer reads the turn away from plot-driven narrative and toward another genre as the consequence of an author's effort to pursue as fully as possible the implications of dynamic materialism.In the chapters on Eliot and Schreiner, Brilmyer describes this career arc in terms of "maturity." The "most mature expression" of the "New Realist aesthetic emerges in . . . Schreiner's last novel i.e., From Man to Man" (31), for example, while chapter two focuses on Eliot's "mature works" such as Impressions of Theophrastus Such (78). The term "maturity" seems to function primarily as a synonym for "better": that is, these authors' late works are better than their earlier works because truer to the dynamic materialism that underwrote all of their works. But in what way, specifically, are these works truer to dynamic materialism? And what are the implications of the answer to that question for our understanding of our lives and ethics? If I tend to see my life and the lives of others in terms of narratives, is this, at least from the perspective of dynamic materialism, an illusion of sorts? If so, what accounts for that persistent illusion? Or, to turn to novels and reading, if I find the plot-heavy Middlemarch more engaging than the character sketches of Impressions of Theophrastus Such, should I be suspicious of the greater pleasure I take in the former—and if so, on what grounds, precisely?The Science of Character implies that, for the author committed to dynamic materialism, the problem with plot and "significant" characters is that both encourage us to lose sight of the "pulsating, always interacting whole" of reality—hence, the importance of "the small, the slight, and the seemingly insignificant," which do not distract us from, but rather turn us back out toward, that whole. But were the advocates of dynamic materialism primarily interested in illuminating the fact of that whole for us, or developing a (potentially infinite) series of scientific studies of the emergence of character in humans and nonhumans? Brilmyer suggests that Schreiner's From Man to Man sought to balance these tasks, for the novel includes a Schopenhauer-inspired philosophical subsection that is itself interrupted by descriptions of the mundane household tasks within and against which that philosophy was composed. Is this then the "most mature expression" of the New Realist aesthetic because it combines the character sketch with an explicit statement of the philosophy that established the genre of character sketch as scientific? If so, would there be any point in additional character sketches, or would this be the end of the line, so to speak, for that project?If the plot-driven novel is ultimately not particularly compatible with the premises of dynamic materialism and its approach to character, this might then help us to reframe the tension between Brilmyer's interpretations of, for example, Eliot's Middlemarch and previous criticism of the novel. Perhaps Middlemarch was internally divided between the humanist project of expanding human sympathy and the posthumanist project of character sketches based on dynamic materialism; as a consequence, a critic can find both of these dimensions in the novel, depending on what one is seeking. But if this is the case, The Science of Character suggests that we ought to see Middlemarch as more of a failure than a success, at least from the perspective of the philosophy of dynamic materialism.That The Science of Character leaves us with some unanswered questions about the relationships among dynamic materialism, realism, and literary form is decidedly not a critique of the book but simply underscores the importance of its topic and subtlety of its argument. The Science of Character encourages us to break out of our preconceived understandings of what literature, literary criticism, and science are, and to ask: What is literature, exactly, and what can it do? What is a novelistic character, and how does its ontology relate to the characters of human beings, of nonhuman animals, and of other objects? Can literature indeed function as a science in a more than metaphorical sense? These are important—indeed fundamental—questions for literary criticism, and The Science of Character is a significant contribution to this discussion.
Robert Mitchell (Wed,) studied this question.