The Sentimental School

Turning a work into a “classic” is always a dangerous move. Mostly because almost all the great works of literature worth remembering were considered dangerous or controversial in their day. But once they’ve been chewed over in countless high school English courses and book reports, they somehow lose that revolutionary flame. We start reading a supposed “classic” with too much mental baggage.

First of all, we accept that if a book is both old and remembered, then no modern writer can match it. We also assume that a classic was always a classic, that the society which first encountered it accepted it as such, and that therefore it must be some sort of conservative celebration of its own time and place. So we tend to lump whole centuries together. The 19th century in particular falls victim to this fate. Zola and Hugo are both bound up together in series with names like “Masterpieces of World Literature,” so we see them just as two old French farts and not as two very different writers with interesting views.
So the process of making classics ends up ignoring an incredibly revolutionary leap which occurred in 19th century literature-the leap from sentimentalism to realism, which really came about thanks to Madame Bovary. And what a revolutionary leap it was! To write about life as we actually experience it and not as some sort of morality tale? It simply had never been done.

You almost have to wonder why no one thought of it sooner, but in truth, someone had probably thought of it, but Realism didn’t catch on prior to Flaubert for two reasons: first, what was the point of writing about “real life” when we experience it every day? Surely literature shouldn’t just reflect what we do, it should teach us valuable lessons. A condescending, pompous attitude, but one which led to the second reason why Realism didn’t catch on: it was seen as dangerous and immoral. Real life, after all, is a nasty thing. It’s about as easy to stuff the events of our daily existence into a morality tale framework as it is to stuff a dog into a Halloween costume. Good is not always rewarded. “Sin” is not always punished. That is the way of things, but nothing could have been more offensive to the pre-Realist mindset (particularly in Victorian England).

And that is why, while Realism caught on in France, it never achieved much of a following in England-at least not for some time. Flaubert published Bovary in 1856, and after that, Realism swept across the continent. We remember Ibsen as the controversial fellow he was, but Tolstoy was also considered a radical Realist in his day. Zola was perhaps the most radical of all, for he brought in a left-wing political component. He was the one who took it upon himself to report straight facts in literature: to remove the moralizing and editorializing and get on with the brutal realities of alcoholism, poverty, working conditions, labor strikes, etc.

But England never really took a shine to it. The Brits really had to wait until Thomas Hardy before someone was willing to tell it like it was-to say, yes, this plowman may be a good person, but that doesn’t mean all of his wildest dreams will come true. Shaw as a critic championed the Realists, but his best work had to wait until the end of the Victorian era. And George Eliot? She was definitely of a more realistic frame of mind. After all, what she was really criticizing in her essay “Silly Lady Novelists” was the sentimental mode of writing. I can think of a few other notable exceptions. For instance, Anne Bronte, despite the highly romanticized writing style of her sisters, was a controversial Realist who wrote stark portrayals of alcoholism, class antagonism, etc. There was also the lesser-known George Gissing. But still, I think it’s safe to say that Victorian England clung longer than most to the old sentimentalism. Britain would have to wait for George Moore and the death of Victoria for naturalism, the most controversial form of Realism, to appear.

British literature held out for so long for two reasons, both of which stemmed from the famed Victorian reserve. First of all, the author was blamed for the behavior of his or her characters. It was therefore his or her duty to mete out punishments and rewards. Adultery had to mean a sudden drowning or a bolt from heaven. Most of all, the Victorians were terrified at the thought of people doing what they wanted to do. For one reason or another, the thought of people decided what they enjoy and pursuing it seemed incredibly dangerous. What? Nora Helmer is leaving her husband? Surely her remorse will drive her to ruin and suicide. Or perhaps she will return in the end, a chastened but virtuous woman once more. If authors let their characters off the hook, they were seen as jail wardens who had let all the convicts escape.

Victorians were also horrified at the reality of human behavior. They preferred to think that everything we do is motivated by a sort of cold, calculated, good-evil analysis. If you were motivated to do something wrong or hurtful or stupid, it was because you had given in to the devil’s temptations, but don’t worry-your remorse will make you a broken person for the rest of your days. And if you did “the right thing,” it meant that you had successfully denied yourself whatever it was you wanted and you could go about your miserable, virtuous way. Here’s Jane Eyre, for instance, on human behavior. Jane is trying to decide whether or not to travel across Europe as the mistress of Mr. Rochester, the man she loves, or to stay put as a village schoolmarm:

“Which is better?- To have surrendered to temptation… to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen asleep on the flowers covering it; wakened in a southern clime, amongst the luxuries of a pleasure villa; to have been now living in France, Mr. Rochester’s mistress; delirious with his love half my time… which is better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool’s paradise-fevered with delirious bliss one hour-suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse the next-or to be a village schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?”

Well, obviously the first one is much better. Any Realist treatment of the situation would allow that Jane might spend her life in “delirious bliss,” without also being destroyed by guilt. But the Victorian treatment won’t allow it. Jane cannot behave as a person, but as a cutout figure in a morality play. Everything she does has to be filtered through the good-evil analysis, which is why the pre-Bovary novels can come across as so morosely sanctimonious.

Now, which writers in particular am I talking about here? Most of the great Victorian novelists had already been published before Madame Bovary came out, including Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, Trollope, Thackeray, the Brontes, and many others. But when we speak about the sentimental, romantic school, we can rule out Thackeray and Trollope, the hard-nosed satirists. What about the others? I don’t mean to portray them as sanctimonious saps-they were in fact brilliant writers. What’s more, most of them were “left-wing” in the sense that they were concerned by social injustice and the stupidities and hypocrisies of society. But they were not “radical.” Orwell makes this point in his essay on Dickens. Certainly they were not interested in revolution, and mostly, they limited their critiques to specific institutions, such as prisons or schools. What’s more, every political doctrine had to be filtered through the good-evil analysis. Here’s Jane Eyre again on human equality: “I had to remind myself daily that [the poor students she teaches] were made of flesh and blood every bit as good as that of the scions of the wealthiest families.” In order to understand the issue, she has to filter it through a pious adage. And even if Jane reminds herself of this daily, she doesn’t seem to put it into practice.

The way she speaks of the students and their families is cloyingly patronizing. She speaks of their “simple gratitude” and delights in seeing them change from “quite torpid… hopelessly dull… heavy-looking, gaping rustics” to “docile, obliging, and amiable pupils.” What she is really praising is their ability to become more like herself. Without education, Jane sees the people around her as utterly vile. She remarks: “It is a well-accepted fact that prejudices find fertile soil in uneducated minds”-an amusing statement considering how prejudiced it is in itself. This after some mean jokes at the expense of the uneducated person in question.

Not that Charlotte Bronte was unfeeling toward the working class. I haven’t read her novel Shirley, but apparently it deals with the Luddite rebellion and is quite pro-worker. But she still seems to feel that things can be fixed only through the study of certain moral “laws.”
Elizabeth Gaskell is better on the class front. In fact, she stands alone among the Victorians for her maturity and genuine sympathy. She portrays “rustics,” for instance, who aren’t on the page simply to be mocked or molded by educated people. Some of her works dealing with poverty and injustice can come off as sentimental, but she was willing to portray poor people with real emotions who might merit the reader’s interest. She also went after the realities of the economic system, instead of simply addressing certain improper “attitudes.” Jane Eyre (and, we can assume, Charlotte Bronte) feels she can right the wrongs of society by memorizing platitudes. Gaskell is much less simplistic, and her works are therefore more interesting. What’s more, she sympathized with working and lower class movements for political and economic rights. The other Victorians tended to hold these at arm’s length.
And Dickens? He is sometimes derided as the most sentimental of them all, but I think he has a realism of his own.

Particularly when he deals with childhood. His characters are outlandish, fantastic caricatures, but when you are a kid that is how the adult world appears. Everything is larger because you are so small. The tiniest accident becomes the greatest tragedy, and petty bullies become the outrageous monsters that appear on Dickens’s pages. No Realist, at least as far as I know, ever wrote so well about the way children see the world, and the way injustices affect them. Also, Dickens is not so pious and moralizing. He doesn’t always propose easy answers to the problems he confronts.

Probably the best way to describe the politics of the pre-Realist school would be “tolerant.” Reade, Gaskell, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and others were “tolerant” of the working and lower classes, and they were intolerant of injustice. But keep in mind that in order to be “tolerant” of something, that thing must be distasteful to begin with. None of the writers, with the exception of Gaskell and poor, overlooked Anne Bronte, truly made an effort to understand the lower class and to see them as real people with real aspirations, real hopes, and real anger. The true rage of undemocratic social structures is missing from their work.

I’ve probably made it sound as though I’m a partisan of the Realists. That’s a bit misleading. In reality, I’ve spent much more time reading the sentimentalists than I have the Realists. I myself have a mawkish streak, and I can understand the drive to moralize even if it grates on me after awhile. I am not at all trying to suggest that the great Victorian novelists should be downplayed in literature courses and such. Far from it. But I do feel that even the best work of these writers is affected for the worse by this sentimentalist, moralizing streak. For instance, I think the best passages in Jane Eyre can be found in the first hundred pages or so of the book-when Jane is still a child. The character hasn’t yet internalized all the necessary pious platitudes, and her behavior therefore seems much more real and convincing.

Once Jane is grown, sure, she has believable emotions and reactions, but the reader has to dig through a pile of Victorian reserve and priggishness to get to them. Here’s the ideal situation: to have seen Dickens, the Brontes, and all the rest plopped down in the Realist era and to have let them write about the very real anger and frustration of their characters-which are clearly there, only buried-in a world which would have let them do it.