Poetic Justice in the Novels of George Eliot and William Makepeace Thackeray【翻译】

TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1
Chapter 2 THE REALISTS 67
Chapter 3 THACKERAY'S JUSTICE: IRONY 85
Chapter 4 GEORGE ELIOT'S JUSTICE: EVOLUTION 126
Chapter 5 THACKERAY'S JUSTICE: THE UNMASKING 167
Chapter 6 GEORGE ELIOT'S JUSTICE: THE DIAGRAM 191
Chapter 7 CONCLUSION 223
LIST OF WORKS CITED 229

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
George Eliot caused many a reader of the nineteenth
century to experience pained insights into the ignorance
and irreligion of the times. William Makepeace Thackeray
taught his readers to recognize the Snob within. And
Charles Dickens was venerated for his renderings of a
society founded upon garbage and crime. But readers of
the time were especially loud in begging for cheerfully
reassuring endings to such exposures of their weaknesses.
They--and often the novelists themselves--desired a simple
poetic justice that in the last chapter sweetened the
themes behind the shambling clerks and the neglected
children, the prospering snobs, and the cashiered Saint
Teresas. Poetic justice, a once noble concept of faith
expressed through literature, had lost its high ethical
motives. It had become a way to avoid tragedy rather
a respected mode of tragedy.
Poetic justice I define, following A. C. Bradley,
as the distribution in literature of prosperity or adversity
in exact proportion to a character's merit or
villainy. Rarely has poetic justice been considered an
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imitation of simple earthly reality, but it has often been
argued as realistic in terms of the complexities of a
divine plan that ultimately favors good and that is fairly
represented in literature through a more direct victory
for a simpler good. More commonly, poetic justice has
been seen as part of an ideal, an imitation of what ought
to be rather than what is. By George Eliot*s and
Thackeray's day, however, much of the pious tone had
disappeared in the use of poetic justice, and the concept
was liable to seem absurd as reality and questionable as
ideal. As George Eliot complained in her essay, "The
Morality of Wilhelm Meister," poetic justice is a scheme
by which "rewards and punishments are distributed according
to those notions of justice on which the novel-writer
would have recommended that the world should be governed
if he had been consulted at the creation. "** Thackeray,
in the person of M. A. Titmarsh, understood the satisfaction
that an exactly just ordering in literature gives:
For my part, I heartily pardon the man who
brought Cordelia to life . . . 1 would have
the stomach-pump brought for Romeo in the fifth
act; for Mrs. Macbeth 1 am not in the least
sorry; • • • I would have Mrs. Macduff and all
her little ones come in from the slips, stating
that the account of their murder was a shameful
*The Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New
York, 1963)7 p. 70 3 .
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fabrication of the newspapers, and that they
were all of them perfectly well and hearty.^
For several major novels of the day, Victorian readers
who sympathized with such sentiment, won their plea quite
directly. Novelists on their own were usually willing to
oblige with an ending punishment of all the major villains.
Readers were not able to save the angelic Nell from the
effect of Dickens' fatal plot, although they stormed Dickens
with letters through installment after installment of The Old
Curiosity Shop, and although Dickens was willing to follow
poetic justice so far as to dispose of Quilp. Under
pressure from Bulwer-Lytton and from his public, however,
Dickens did decide to allow a much less innocent but
reformed Pip his "Great Expectations," by granting him
the hand of a reformed Estella, while those tainted with
evil in that novel sink or burn in their iniquity.
The Newcomes. secondly, was marked for change.
Thackeray reluctantly— or so it might appear— submitted
to demands that he rescue Ethel Newcome from loveless
marriage. Her deserving virtue, in a way untypical of
the run of Victorian heroines, appears to consist mainly
of her incisive intelligence, and Thackeray said that he
changed his first ideas of the plot to give her the
2"Jerome Paturot; with Considerations on Novels in
General in a Letter from M. A. Titmarsh," Misc. Essays.
Sketches, and Reviews. Works (New York, 1904), XXX, z2.
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dubious reward of marriage to Clive Newcome• Thackeray was
following the same pattern that had led Dickens a few years
earlier to oblige Agnes Wickfield with David Copperfield,
and he was following the overwhelming desires of his public*
Similarly, George Lewes may have protected George Eliot from
some judgments of outside critics, but he himself convinced
her to unite, in an epilogue to Adam Bede* the two most
morally educable characters, Adam and Dinah, with the age
old rewards of virtue: matrimony, children, and a pastoral
domesticity* For writers as well as for readers, then,
fictional characters became living prisoners to be
reprieved if only ardent petitioning could soften their
obdurate creators* The greatest creators were being
seduced into using the rewards of poetic justice, and they
had already acquiesced for the most part to the expected
punishments •
At the same time, however, the novelists, like the
scientists of the Victorian era, had come to value unemotional
observation of earthly phenomena* The novelists saw
themselves as dealing with everyday reality, with all levels
of society and with all the minglings of virtue and
villainy in the world, and frequently they saw their
observations as having an almost scientific value* And
the best were likely to assign themselves places in their
inarch of progress that the Victorians believed in* Their
contribution, as they saw it, was the novel itself: the
5
novel secured as an artistic and respectable genre and
cleared of the tired conventions of romance and what they
had come to see as a worn-out and unrealistic device, the
distribution of poetic justice.
A telling passage from one of George Eliot's letters
demonstrates the common dilemma in regard to the didactic
pushings that poetic justice had come to represent:
1 think aesthetic teaching is the highest
of all teaching because it deals with life
in its highest complexity. But if it ceases
to be purely aesthetic— if it lapses anywhere
from the picture to the diagram— it becomes
the most offensive of all teaching. 3
She appears to have wanted a novel that would instruct
and yet retain its artistic integrity. Her every novel
shows clear signs of her continuing attempt to fit both
the didactic and the aesthetically pleasing into her work.
And if the sometimes ironic, sometimes conventional
justice he employed in the closing chapters of Henry Esmond,
of The Newcomes. of Philip is any guide, Thackeray's
original desire to teach his readers the nature of reality
became qualified by a growing desire to please them with
the poetic justice he felt to be a moral and artistic
cheat.
3To Frederick Harrison (15 August 1866), The George
Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, 1954), iv,
300.
6
The purpose of this work is to analyze how and why
such contrarieties of purpose came about for Victorian
novelists. Generally, the Victorians inveighed against
the beliefs behind romantic conventions, but, as is
particularly evident in the work of George Eliot and
Thackeray, they were not above using those conventions.
Therefore, I shall concentrate upon Thackeray and George
Eliot, as the greatest Victorian critics of both the
legalistic and the sentimental world-views underlying
poetic justice and as, at the same time, the most
sophisticated users of that novelistic convention. What
1 hope to contribute, then, is a detailed study of the
tensions poetic justice sets off in the novels of George
Eliot and Thackeray, and an assessment of the historical
and critical importance of their partial dependence on
poetic justice.
In my second chapter, 1 shall outline the ways in
which George Eliot and Thackeray directly reacted against
the eighteenth-century philosophy of worldly and literary
justice. 1 shall also examine the arguments both used to
ridicule the convention which that justice had become in
the novels of their day. The succeeding two chapters will
argue that, nevertheless, some use of poetic justice seemed
separately demanded for George Eliot and Thackeray: by
their individual ideas of the workings of good and evil in
the real world, by their definitions of what the novel
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ought to accomplish, and ultimately by their own romantic
sentiments* Finally, my object in the last two chapters
will be to assess the results of each writer's attempt
to disbelieve and still to use poetic justice*
Poetic justice in the drama, as both an ethical and
a literary consideration, has been a concern of mainstream
critics since Plato and Aristotle* No study 1 have found,
however, has explicitly isolated any part of the ongoing
development of the poetic justice concept that 1 outline
in this chapter* The major role poetic justice played in
the formation and development of the novel has usually
been examined only generally in modern discussions of the
novel*
True, many previous discussions of George Eliot or
Thackeray— including those by such men as Henry James,
Anthony Ttollope, and George Saints bury— have examined
the endings of their novels* The ambiguity that is there
when George Eliot's analysis of the inevitable staining
of good with evil is accompanied by her strangely uncompromised
resolutions employing marriage and spiritual
fulfillment for characters defined as good from the
beginning has long been recognized— most valuably, 1
believe, in Bernard Paris' Experiments in Life: George
Eliot's Quest for Values and in U* C* Knoepflmacher's
George Eliot's Early Novels: The Limits of Realism* The
work which nearest approaches a separate analysis of her
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use of the poetic justice tradition is an unpublished 1967
Brandeis University dissertation, "The Novel as Moral
Experiment: George Eliot's Novels," by Liane Norman* Prom
the first, critics have viewed Thackeray, with ever-shifting
emphases, as a "sentimental cynic*" They have long
recognized him as a writer who could invent the open
"slice of life" ending for one novel and distribute— with
apologies— a conventional justice in the next* The most
impressive recent discussions of Thackeray's endings and
his moral tenor, 1 believe, are Geoffrey Tillotson's in
Thackeray the Novelist and James H. Wheatley's in Patterns
of Victorian Fiction*
A* C* Bradley, defining poetic justice in his analysis
of Shakespeare, points out that in the inexactness of most
Shakespearean and classical tragedy, as well as in
poetically just literature, the dramatic pain results
from the action of human beings, and the moral order can
be seen as generally "akin to good and alien from evil*"4
Yet "our everyday legal and moral notions," he says, are
not relevant to the imaginative experience given by tragedy*
We ought not to judge whether Othello, Hamlet, and Lear
merit their fates, their "punishment," so much as lago,
Claudius, and Edmund do, or so little as Desdemona,
^Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet* Othello *
King Lear* Macbetk* 2nd ed*fLondon* 1932), p* 33*
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Ophelia, and Cordelia. Rather, we should think of them as
characters who total more than a judge's sum of the discernible
good or evil within them and who fail only insofar as
they draw or are drawn toward the negative pole of the
universe, the principle of evil that "isolates, disunites,
and tends to annihilate not only its opposite but itself."5
There is a broadly moral order inherently behind most
examples and definitions of dramatic tragedy, but there is
also allowance for excess suffering. Irrational and moving
suffering may arouse both the Aristotelian emotions of pity
and fear, but in doing so, it does not need to carry the
lesson that the first apologists for poetic justice sought
of an ideal justice operating in a world only seemingly
imperfect, where, in divine truth, "Whatever is, is right."
Nor does the moral inexactitude of tragedy come near
simplistic moral lessons that later apologists for poetic
justice sought in defiance of their own visions of reality,
faith, and reason.
Perhaps there has always been a tension in literature
between the imitation of imperfect reality and the
representation of ideal forms, between, in short, realism
and romance. In almost four centuries of English literature,
however, that inevitable tension has amounted to an ongoing
quarrel over the desirability of an exact poetic justice in
5lbld., p. 35.
10
literature* Once poetic justice had been a chief demonstration
of aesthetic teaching in literature for the poet who
would follow Horace in combining the MdulceM and the
“utile**1 For Plato, the first of the great champions of
poetic justice, the worth of poetry was its political
utility, and the fictional defeat of wickedness and
enthronement of virtue was in keeping with eternal
justice; in his view, poetic justice would serve as
incentive for the members of the body politic* Plato
said that in his model Republic, poets and storytellers
would be forced to show eternal justice as operating in
temporal life, for otherwise they would be:
• • • guilty of making the gravest misstatements
when they tell us that wicked men are often
happy, and the good miserable; and that
injustice is profitable when undetected, but
that justice is a man's own loss and another's
gain— these things we shall forbid them to
utter and command them to sing and say the
opposite.6

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