Storms Over the Novel

Hermione Lee reviews in The New York Review of Books (Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007) several books about books in a very interesting article: 'Storms Over the Novel'. Some of them have been previously present on BrontëBlog:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley
How Novels Work by John Mullan
How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide by John Sutherland
Nation & Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day by Patrick Parrinder
and particularly: The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life by Edward Mendelson. (Read our review)

Edward Mendelson, Columbia professor and Auden expert, in The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life, is more interested in the ethical than the political meanings of the novel. He makes heartfelt, idiosyncratic, and illuminating diagnoses of seven novels by women writers (Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf) as humane lessons in how (or how not) to live a moral life. One example will serve to illustrate his strong, didactic tone. Jane Eyre, Mendelson teaches us, is a story about learning how to believe, as much or more than learning how to act:

Almost everyone she meets tries to tell her what and how to believe—and everyone tells her to believe in different things in a different way—but she must find her beliefs by herself. In Jane Eyre as in life, the right choices are rarely new or surprising, but everyone has to discover anew the ways in which to learn to make those choices; you have to learn for yourself the ways—which are different for everyone—in which you can decide whether something that is not immediately obvious is nonetheless true, and you have to learn for yourself the ways in which you decide how to act on the truths you have chosen.

(...) Most of the authors of the books under review are interested in the duplicity and doubleness of the novel, its acts of disguise, contradiction, and suppression. One of Mendelson's main themes is that novelists often speak in

two contradictory voices in the same book. One, the writer's official voice, expresses views the writer wants to believe but half secretly doubts. The other, unofficial voice expresses views the writer wants to deny but half secretly believes.

So Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein, "officially" endorses the theories of her time "of inherent human goodness," but at the same time, through her story, refutes them as "sentimental and false." Emily Brontë divides herself painfully between a desire for a marriage between the world of human vision and inhuman nature, and a recognition of its impossibility: "the romantic dreamer longs for a home that she is doomed never to find."

Maybe it's a good idea to complement the reading of our review and this review with the author's own thoughts.

Categories: Books