"Experiments in Life": Narrating Relations in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy

<p dir="ltr">The realist novelists of the mid-late nineteenth century inherited their predecessors’ conviction that the individual protagonist was the most fitting vessel for figuring the larger forces (natural, social, historical) which shape our experience of the world. But their mimetic project was complicated by developments in the scale and methods of scientific inquiry. As investigators increasingly supplemented classical empirical methods with more abstract theories and statistical approaches, the individual case or instance—the familiar territory of realist representation—was destabilised as a site for generating knowledge about the world. How did realist novelists negotiate between their accustomed scope and a scope which comprehended new understandings of a “massively distributed reality” (Rosenberg) beyond the reach of the senses?</p><p dir="ltr">This thesis provides two answers, reading two works by novelists writing at the frontiers of British realism: George Eliot’s <i>The Mill on the Floss</i> (1860) and Thomas Hardy’s <i>The Return of the Native</i> (1878). My study is framed by Eliot’s notion of her novels as “experiments in life”: attempts to trace the relations between “individual experience” and the “formula” or law which is supposed to govern that experience. If both novels are committed to the individual scale, they also figure some of the formal and conceptual challenges which emerge from its inability to be neatly integrated into broader structures for understanding reality. My readings are informed by, but not dependent on, notions of a dialogue between Victorian literature and science. Rather than tracing these connections, this thesis gives an account of how these literary experiments with narrative meet or respond to the challenges posed by their intellectual context.</p><p dir="ltr">Chapter 1 intervenes in critical readings that interpret <i>The Mill</i> alongside nineteenth-century geology. It argues that the novel’s flood, interpreted within the novel’s uneven plot structure, formalises a key scalar challenge posed by Charles Lyell’s uniformitarianism: how to negotiate between minute observations (which furnish the basis of historical knowledge) and the uniformity which only emerges at “a long average” (Whewell). Where Sally Shuttleworth influentially argued that the novel is riven by a conflict between incommensurable “models” of geologic history, I draw on revisionist histories of science to interpret the flood as a collision between historical <i>scopes</i>, problematically embodied by the narrator’s suspension between the impulses of memory and history.</p><p dir="ltr">Chapter 2 turns from the individual in time to the individual in space, uniting two impulses in Hardy criticism by attending both to the minutiae of individual encounters between “Character and Environment” and the social and geographical structures that mediate those relationships. In <i>The Return</i>, the “vast sum of conditions” (Eliot) that inflect the individual’s perception of Egdon Heath are folded into focalised descriptions, vexing the boundary between observer and observed. This entanglement is also figured by the novel’s interest in traffic across borders, its complex positioning of its characters across categories like ‘native’ and ‘alien’, and by passages which historicise Egdon Heath as an “unenclosed … wild” in an increasingly enclosed nation. By undermining the binaries it establishes, the novel highlights the open and reciprocal connections between the discrete categories we invent to make sense of a world of essentially continuous relations.</p>