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Prof. debuts book on Victorian novel through a moral lens

By SARAH Y. KIM | March 9, 2017

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Courtesy of Samantha Seto Professor Jesse Rosenthal discussed his new book about Victorian narratives and morality.

Jesse Rosenthal, assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies for the Hopkins English department, gave a talk on his 2016 book Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel.

In his talk, which happened on Thursday at Barnes & Noble, Rosenthal argued that when reading novels, people of the Victorian era thought about their narrative forms in moral terms.

He began with reflecting on the experience of reading a book that is hard to put down.

“What is that experience?” he asked. “How do you describe that experience of something pulling you along? For the Victorians, this was a huge part of the novelist’s skill. This was a huge part of what actually novels did. What is that pull? How do you describe that force that a novel narrative, moving over time, exerts?”

He also contemplated on readers’ fixation on satisfying endings.

“We’re usually vaguely aware that we’re pleased with a good ending,” he said. “You only realize how much you expected on an ending being satisfying when you get a bad ending. You hear the complaints about the ending of serial TV shows, where people feel like they put all this effort into them and end in the wrong place.”

Rosenthal said that being “pulled along” by a novel and the necessity readers feel for stories to end with everything in its proper place went hand in hand.

“The feeling of being pulled along somehow has to do something with setting things up in a way, that you have some idea where it should change to,” he said. “A conclusion being where things don’t have to change anymore.”

He said that while literary critics, narrative theorists and narratologists work to describe what experiences story structures convey, ultimately these descriptions fall flat.

“It’s sort of weird because it’s one of the main things that people who study the novel study,” he said. “We always talk about narrative and narrative motion and narrative arcs. We’re really bad at saying what it is we mean when we talk about that.”

He said that while being absorbed by a page turner is typically taken for granted, the experience could be explained by the application of what he called metalanguages. He described metalanguages as a way to describe languages through lenses such as historical materialism, linguistics and psychoanalysis.

The metalanguage Victorian readers used, Rosenthal argued, were moral in nature.

“The idea that they used to describe what it felt like to be pulled along, what it felt like to want to see things go into their proper state and not have to change anything more was moral in nature,” he said. “It’s the sense that things as are not as they should be, and you want to move through time to a future in which they are different. That’s what we would call a moral experience.”

Victorians were pulled by the narrative because they wanted to see an ending in which their ethical standards were met.

“The famous philosopher David Hume famously said in ethical discussion, one way or another you always move from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought what is’ to what ‘ought to be,’” Rosenthal said. “Narrative — the experience of narrative — is moving from ‘that is’ to that ‘ought.’”

Rosenthal said that while Victorians may appear as irrelevant “moral upright prudes dressed in eight layers of black woolens even during the hottest months of the year,” this caricaturing has been responsible for preventing us from valuing Victorians’ understanding of the experience of novel reading.

“When you see Victorians talking about morals and books, they were actually saying a lot more about what novel reading felt like,” he said.

He elaborated on his argument by discussing ethical philosophy, and the disagreements between Intuitionists and Utilitarians. He acknowledged that Intuitionism “lost the philosophical battle” and that was problematic because it paved the way for people to form prejudices and to make discriminatory decisions based on their own personal morals. He argued that this trend persisted in the form of corrective narrative.

“I think it’s one of the main things I’m interested in,” he said. “How these ethical ideas live on in ways that we don’t really realize in our sense of what a natural, well developed, realist, satisfying story. Most readers don’t have these terms at their fingertips. If you look at the history of how these things came to eclipse a lot of forms, we see that a lot of moral ideas get built into it.”

He argued that ultimately Victorians may appear to have been moralizers, but in reality they were deeply interested in the form of narratives, more so than modern readers may realize.

“They were actually at the same time talking about the same ideas that literary critics now try to talk about when they look at form, when they look at how novels are put together, how they’re structured — a lot of these seemingly stiff-necked moral arguments containing a lot of formal insights,” Rosenthal said.


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