The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real ─ Conventions and Ideology

Rather than simply redefine Victorian realism or provide a new canon for it,The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real argues that the real is inevitably, for the Victorian realist novel, an object of desire: what the novel seeks to capture and represent. A novel's construction of the real is therefore inseparable from its fantasy of the real--a formulation the book refers to as "realist fantasy." One way in which this simultaneity manifests itself is that the conventions used by these novels to represent characters' dreams, daydreams, and fantasies overlap with those each novel uses to construct its realism. In new readings of Victorian novels--novels that highlight their own use of realist conventions--(George Eliot'sAdam Bede, Dickens's Oliver Twist; Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridgeand The Return of the Native, Trollope's Orley Farm, and Wilkie Collins'sArmadale) The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real demonstrates how, repeatedly refusing to distinguish the object of knowledge from the object of the desire, these novels invite readers to do the same: to accept their particular fantasy of the real. The book thus shows that realism and fantasy in the Victorian realist novel are not opposed, but rather occupy the same space and are constructed via the same conventions. Revisiting and reconsidering realist novel theory's classic conventions (including metonymy; the use of the arbitrary detail; the representation of everyday life and the idea of disillusionment), it also uncovers and anatomizes realist conventions unique to each text.

Audrey Jaffe is Professor of English at the University of Toronto.