Styles in Fictional Structure: Studies in the Art of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot

by Karl Kroeber

Overview

With the aid of new analytic techniques, including the computer, Karl Kroeber examines the fictional styles of three consecutive English novelists, presenting an objective and systematic comparison of the stylistic coherence of their work.

Originally published in 1971.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691620589
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1272
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

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Styles in Fictional Structure

The Art of Jane Austen Charlotte Brontë George Eliot

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By Karl Kroeber

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06191-7

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The origin of this book lies, I believe, in a question I asked seminar students several years ago: How can one prove without reference to evidence outside the novels themselves that George Eliot's fiction was written after Charlotte Brontë's? The question and the unsatisfactory answers it provoked started me thinking about how little we understand — indeed, how seldom we try to understand — the aesthetic history of fiction. There are plenty of "histories" of the novel, but the "history" is usually little more than chronological ordering, with the chronology evaluated in terms of the conventions of sociopolitical history.

I have found, furthermore, few attempts to compare and contrast novels by different authors systematically. Most of the best critical studies concentrate upon investigation into the work of a single writer or even into the writing of a single novel. The studies which treat of several authors, or at least several novels, tend to take the form of unconnected analyses, although recently critics such as Donovan and Lodge have endeavored to develop systematically comparative evaluations. A few scholars have done useful work tracing particular traditions, although the traditions are often rather arbitrarily defined. Most arbitrary of all is Dr. F. R. Leavis, who has done more than any other modern critic to stimulate original criticism of fiction. Although I share several of Dr. Leavis' preferences among British novelists, I find his Great Tradition a somewhat intellectually ramshackle façade for the exhibition of his often exciting, usually illuminating, prejudices.

The truth is that little attention has been directed to the possibility of building up an objective, cumulatively rewarding discipline of studies in fictional styles. Most criticism of novels in the past generation or two has been fundamentally, though not always overtly, polemical. The argumentativeness is understandable, because until recently even such significant innovators as Henry James and James Joyce needed to be defended, and vigorous defense provokes counterattacks. By now, however, the arguments have served their purpose. We should be directing our energies not toward debate but toward the definition of intrinsic processes in the history of fiction.

By "intrinsic processes" I mean the strictly aesthetic systems which give coherence to the development of a particular kind of work of art. No one doubts that the arts, especially fiction, reflect the course of social and cultural history. Yet all the arts (as historians of the fine arts have been quickest to recognize) possess a history of their own, a system of continuity and innovation which is to some degree independent of, often surprisingly resistive to, the influence of social transformations. The Greek potters of antiquity persisted in decorating their wares in a consistent fashion throughout centuries of social and political turmoil. To identify the probable date of manufacture of a Greek vase one must understand the history not of politics but of vase decoration. In a word, one must understand style.

In this book I am concerned with fictional style. Unfortunately, if the investigations into novels and novelists have too often been polemically biased, fictional style has simply been ignored. There are a great many studies of literary style and even a substantial number of studies of prose style, but it is difficult to turn up a single modern work which systematically attacks the special problems of fictional styles — although, because the word is modish, there are a damnable number of essays and books about fiction which employ "style" in their titles.

One reason for this omission is that specialists in literary style (or what is sometimes called stylistics) have plainly been daunted by the bulk of most novels. I can testify that work on fictional style is time-consuming, as well as messy and frustrating. Yet my work has taught me one lesson: although novels are written in prose, fictional prose style is quite different from nonfictional prose style. The methods of investigation as well as the results of one kind of study are only rarely of use to the other. To cite a simple, specific difference: an analysis of fictional style which does not take account of the difference between prose that is part of narrative and prose that is part of dialogue will be of limited value; whereas a distinction between narrative and dialogue is usually unimportant in a study of nonfictional prose.

A larger difference has never been adequately clarified. The investigator of nonfictional prose is primarily interested in defining the style of a person: What is, say, Matthew Arnold's style? The investigator of fictional style is primarily interested in defining the style of a work of art: What is, say, the style of Tom Jones? The distinction holds even when, as in this work, all the novels of one or more novelists are being investigated. To an investigator of fictional style, a name, Jane Austen, for example, is a shorthand term for a certain aesthetic unity which relates six particular novels more closely to one another than to other novels; the name itself is of secondary importance. Such an investigator doesn't really care whether or not George Eliot's name was really Mary Ann Evans, or even whether or not George Henry Lewes was the true author and palmed off the novels from Adam Bede to Daniel Deronda as his wife's.

In fine, I have found few guides or models to assist my efforts at understanding fictional style. Lack of such help, however, has encouraged me to innovate. The chapters which follow represent tentative (and, without doubt, sometimes ill-directed ) experiments not only in defining more usefully the fictional styles of three novelists but also in establishing techniques through which it may be possible to create a viable and accumulatively significant humanistic subdiscipline: the history of fictional styles.

Because such a discipline does not now exist, I am able to do no more than propose and test certain methods, indicate the apparent inapplicability of others, and suggest possible results which might be produced by refinements and extensions of my procedures. It is not possible at this time to write a history of fictional style even for the first seventy-five years of the nineteenth century in Britain. As I implied above, critics both of the novel and of style have not yet established principles by which one can objectively and systematically compare and contrast the stylistic coherence of different novels. Until we can do this much we cannot hope to describe usefully the intrinsic processes of change and continuity which constitute the aesthetic history of fiction. In this book, therefore, my principal effort is directed toward developing means for making generally applicable stylistic comparisons and contrasts. I concentrate upon the novels of three authors, but the final value of this concentration will depend on whether or not it opens the way to analogous, but more precise and more penetrating, studies of many other novelists.

Because my area of specialization is the nineteenth century, I originally intended to examine the fiction of Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Henry James. But the bulk of these novelists' fiction made the undertaking appear impossible as a beginning study. The bulk of Jane Austen's, Charlotte Bronte's, and George Eliot's fiction is not so large and is contained within a briefer span of time. If Austen, Bronte, and Eliot are not as important as my original trio, the fact that they are women I reckon as appropriate. It is only with the emergence of fiction that women begin to contribute significantly to literary history. The history of poetry or drama would be little affected if all female writers were disregarded, but the history of fiction would be devastated.

More important, Austen, Brontë, and Eliot form a convenient sequence. Their works do not overlap. Each of the latter novelists read in the fiction of her predecessors, so we can assume some influence of the earlier novelists upon the later. The trio is also attractive for other reasons. The work of all three has been subjected to considerable critical scrutiny. Austen and Eliot, in particular, have attracted excellent criticism and scholarship. I feel free, therefore, to concentrate on stylistic congruences and divergencies.

By including Charlotte Brontë's work I am able to touch upon the possible distinction between "novel" and "romance." This distinction as a tool of modern criticism was popularized by Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism and Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Traditions, both published in 1957. Chase used the distinction as a means of defining what he felt to be the characteristic difference between the main stream of American fiction and the main stream of British fiction. Whether the distinction is truly useful for finer discriminations remains to some degree doubtful. Frye observes that the best reason for discriminating between novels and romances is to encourage recognition of the integrity of a larger classification, "fiction," which subsumes both. Later critics have subdivided both the novel and the romance to the point where the multiplication of categories tends to obscure the clarification introduced by the original distinction. Nonetheless, some discrimination between the novel and the romance may be helpful to an understanding of fictional styles. Interest in the romance has in recent years permitted critics to give attention to writers who had previously been dismissed as minor. The total span of British fiction suggests an oscillation between a tendency toward the romance and a tendency toward the novel. One may justifiably assume that a factor which distinguishes Charlotte Bronte's art from that of Jane Austen and George Eliot is her preference for romance. Although such an abstract distinction is neither the starting point nor the goal of my work, I hope that some of my analyses may contribute to a clarification of this potentially valuable division between basic forms of fiction.

I begin in the following chapter at the opposite pole from such a fundamental contrast with some limited and detailed analyses of vocabulary. Through these I try to illustrate the discouraging, perhaps insuperable, difficulties which attend not merely statistical but also all "objective" studies of fictional style. In Chapters Three and Four, however, I point up inadequacies in prevailing assumptions about "character" and "point of view," two of the principal subjects of "subjective" fictional criticism. The next two chapters return to matters of language. In Chapter Five consideration of Jane Austen's language is oriented toward illustration of the fact that a first-rate novelist evolves: study of a novelist's style ought to be regarded as examination of a changing, rather than a static, phenomenon. Although I recur to this point in Chapter Six, my central purpose there is to elucidate some aspects of fictional imagery which are usually overlooked. In Chapter Seven I deal briefly with the romance-novel distinction, both as a summary of earlier chapters and as a prelude to the final five, which describe my efforts to overcome, simultaneously, some of the obstacles to "objective" analyses discussed in Chapter Two and the inadequacies, for stylistic definitions, of presently available critical methods discussed in Chapters Three through Six. In Chapter Eight I try to validate my hypothesis that the form of any segment of a novel is to a significant degree determined by the total design of the novel as a whole. In Chapter Nine I describe some attempts at systematic analyses of "total designs." Results of these analyses are used in Chapter Ten as the basis for an examination of the stylistic features of limited, arbitrarily selected passages from three novels. In Chapter Eleven I pursue the examination down to the level of sentence-form, focusing on the importance of the structure of narrative-dialogue interaction. The four chapters Eight through Eleven should serve to substantiate a central thesis of my study: in a work of fiction, the most meaningful systematic stylistic comparisons and contrasts are those focused on the patterns of coherence between structural elements on different levels. In the final chapter I summarize my judgments of the three novelists' styles and of the potential rewards to be gained from further systematized studies of fictional structures.

The book will probably appear too long to anyone who reads it all. Even so, I am conscious of much I have omitted. To cite but one small example: my disregard of theories of fiction expounded and debated during the first seventy-five years of the nineteenth century, theories which indubitably influenced novel writing, limits the relevance of some of my observations. As compensation I hope that, all hypotheses and methodologies aside, I convey some of the pleasure I have gained through intensive reading in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot. Whatever my limitations as a critic may be, I am certain that no analysis can ever exhaust the richness of their art.

CHAPTER 2

Words in Fiction

To anyone seeking systematic and relatively objective methods for evaluating intrinsic relationships between works of fiction, the attraction of vocabulary analysis is strong. Words appear to be irreducible units which can be counted accurately and whose organizational patterns can be defined objectively. Unfortunately, there is no necessary relation between the frequency with which a specific word is used and its aesthetic significance. Prepositions, which are useful if one is trying to solve a problem of attribution, occur with great frequency in all novels; but study of "in" or "of" or "to" does not provide much insight into their artistic design. A word used only once may be very significant, or it may be exceedingly trivial. The aesthetic significance of word choice depends upon a patterning of qualities which is not readily identifiable through the discrimination and classification of words as quantities.

If raw frequencies of vocabulary (such as the lists provided by a concordance) are not as helpful as one could wish, it would nevertheless seem possible that preferences for specific groups of words are identifiable and important. But how does one decide upon the proper grouping? The vocabulary of any given piece of writing is largely determined by its subject matter. One wouldn't look for words related to automobiles in nineteenth-century novels, as one might in twentieth-century novels.

Because novels always have characters, it seemed to me a useful cluster would be one of words referring to parts of the body and to bodily movements. I therefore scanned some novels for nouns referring to parts of the body and verbs descriptive of bodily movements. Because there are few concordances or wordlists for novels and novelists, I used a sampling system, analyzing brief passages from different novels. It is not at all improbable, of course, that ten pages from a novel will have special vocabulary characteristics not typical of the novel as a whole (or of the novelist's predominant usage), but a series of such samples should have some validity. Figures so derived will be found in Tables II-1 through II-6 in the Tabulations Appendix. Because I want to do full justice to the possible contrasts and similarities such tabulations may reveal, I include in these tables some material from Dickens' novels, even though his fiction is not within the scope of this study.

Although there is considerable variation between samples from different novels by the same author, the general pattern of Table Il-1 is clear: relatively Jane Austen uses fewer substantives referring to parts of the body than do Eliot, Dickens, or Bronte, and the latter two use relatively more than does Eliot. Verbs follow the same pattern, suggesting that in this case syntactic preferences are of minor importance. That the four novelists together may be part of a larger "nineteenth-century" configuration — part, that is, of a persistent tendency in British fiction — is suggested by analogous figures (Table 11-2) derived from two eighteenth-century and two twentieth-century novels.

Although the counting technique might be used for discovery, these figures verify rather than reveal. Most readers recognize that Jane Austen devotes little attention to physical description or to the narration of physical actions. My figures provide not absolute frequency (obtainable only by analysis of all the works of each novelist, that is, by creation of complete concordances) but relative frequency, that is, one novelist's preference for one word cluster vis-à-vis another's. Such relative frequency becomes more and more valuable as more word clusters are tested.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Acknowledgments, pg. vii
• Contents, pg. ix
• Chapter I. Introduction, pg. 1
• Chapter II. Words in Fiction, pg. 10
• Chapter III. Forms of Characterization, pg. 28
• Chapter IV. Point of View, pg. 43
• Chapter V. Style and Change: Jane Austen, pg. 64
• Chapter VI. Image and Metaphor, pg. 85
• Chapter VII. Novel and Romance, pg. 113
• Chapter VIII. Resolution Scenes, pg. 123
• Chapter IX. The Total Design of Novels, pg. 141
• Chapter X. A Contrast of Passages from Emma, Villette, and Middlemarch, pg. 151
• Chapter XI. Narrative and Dialogue: Large and Small Structures, pg. 166
• Chapter XII. Evaluations, pg. 181
• Bibliographical Appendix, pg. 199
• Appendix of Tabulations, pg. 209
• Index, pg. 289