Negative Affect and the Ethics of Narrative

A recent Ph.D. thesis with Brontë-related content:

Negative Affect and the Ethics of Narrative in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy

by Pui Sang Chiu

Advisor: Jan Schramm

University of Cambridge

July 2025

This thesis explores the ethical representation of negative affect in the novels of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy through a study of narrative. Previous scholarship regarded negative emotions in Victorian stories as a sublimated excess to the structure of sympathy. While recent criticism seeks to recuperate a political dimension to ugly feelings, the consensus remains that novels of the canon reject non-cathartic affect: they promote nobler passions at the expense of minor ones. My project challenges this assumption that negative feelings disable the production of major works. I argue that they are neither subservient to the imperative of sympathy, nor exceeding formal control and closure. Rather, their marginality to the didactic discourse spotlights their pervasiveness in the story spaces. Their compression by conventional endings formalises the lived experiences of the many, whose struggle for an ethical middle lies afield from the individual epic. Through the lens of an unsympathetic poetic, I map the site of ugly feelings by asking what does not feel right in the novel. The presentation of narrative compromise as a moral choice betrays a rupture between form and valence; it implicates the reading of moral necessities as a formal tyranny. This asymmetry between storytelling and value-making complicates realism’s claim to authenticity. An aesthetic of the ordinary elevates potentialities in the individual, by also delimiting them to a provincial context. In this framework, petty emotions do not merely serve the lesson of overcoming egoism. Felt by the protagonists and minor characters alike, those sub-moral reactions mark the threshold between heroism and the everyday. While the exemplary individual may triumph over the small social conditions, the common he represents stands in evaluative judgment of that transcendence. Ugliness as a collective standard resists the formative logic of the Bildungsroman. Subtending the complexities of quotidian life, then, is a constellation of the “neighbourly”; an interpersonal horizon occupying the middle distance between fellowship and detachment.

With the three canonical realist novelists, I analyse the compounded nexus between narrative and affective discontent. In Jane Eyre and Villette, I study a passive-aggressiveness in Brontë’s first-person narration. The narrator’s withholding displaces personal meanings from the vicinity of story. As local outbreaks of aggression reveal the boundary of interiority, an emotional intent becomes deflected from the content of expression. For Eliot, I read the affect of blame in conjunction with endings as a mechanism of judgment. From Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss to Middlemarch, the closural impulse towards a retributive justice increasingly yields to a dynamic of lateral distribution. The novel’s capacity for moral deliberation produces negative states of deferral and compromise. Like the first two authors, Hardy registers the torsion between the general and particular and the tonal instability it creates. Together, Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles articulate a dialectic of irony and sincerity, which Jude the Obscure unravels. In embracing lateness, Hardy’s final novel also signals the end of a minor ethics in negative affect.