G41.

3650- Professor Levine

In this course we will be examining the Victorian novel as secular, working out problems
of literary form in relation to social/economic historical context. Although the course is
designed to make an "argument," it is also designed to challenge and question it. The
argument to secularity is in many ways problematic since, despite the obvious movement
of the Victorian intellectual avant garde away from traditional religious beliefs and
institutions, during the period there was an enormous explosion of religious enthusiasm,
and the Victorian novel is full not only of Biblical allusions, but of strenuous piety, and it
is marked by Providential plots, plots whose resolutions somehow (not quite
miraculously) resolve themselves to reward virtue, punish vice, and bring about the
perfect comic ending in which heroine and hero marry. The Victorian novels plays out
the tensions between a secularity based in empiricism and this intense desire for religious
vision.

At the center of the argument is the question of money, which figures as absolutely
central to an extraordinary number of plots, and whose presence, even when the narrative
tries to ignore it, is decisive. We will be reading "money" in relation to Max Weber's
thesis, in The Protestant Ethicand the Spirit of Capitalism, that the qualities that lead to
success in the new capitalist economy are fundamental to rigorous Protestantism and
particularly Calvinism. Simply put, the successful Calvinist capitalist was not in it for the
money but for the virtues required to acquire money: hard work, truthfulness, self-
restraint and self-denial in particular. But in the Victorian novel not only is money not
the overt object of desire, it is almost always the root of all evil, except in Trollope.
Anyone who overtly seeks money, except for the very poor who must have it simply to
survive, is wicked even though most Victorian protagonists are quite well off.

Through a study of selected novels, we will be tracing the way Victorian novels, aspiring
to virtue, if not always piety, handle questions of money and dramatize or challenge
Weber's theory. Part of the argument will be and this is really up for grabs as we go
that Victorian realism's obsessive concern with "truth," a strong Protestant virtue
culturally diffused (consider the Kingsley-Newman debate that produced Apologia pro
vita sua), makes the fundamental structures of its plots incompatible with the virtues they
are partly designed to affirm. The questions of money, Protestant ethic, religious
interpretations of experience, and realism are entangled in fascinating and difficult ways
in novel after novel. Most of the class will be devoted to readings of the novels, selected
from among the following:

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit and/or Great Expectations
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Anthony Trollope, The Warden or The Last Chronicle of Barset
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Dinah Mulock Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman or Olive
William Thackeray, Vanity Fair
George Gissing, New Grub Street
Charlotte Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe
Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders