A Magnificent Seven
What do classic English novels have to say about life? Plenty, says a noted
literary scholar. By Edward Mendelson ’66
Anyone who reads a novel for pleasure or instruction takes an interest both
in the closed fictional world of that novel and in the ways the book provides
models or examples of the kinds of life that a reader might or might not
choose to live.
Most novels of the past two centuries that are still worth reading were
written to respond to both these interests. They were not written to be read
objectively or dispassionately, as if by some nonhuman intelligence, and
they can be understood most fully if they are interpreted and understood
from a personal point of view, not only from historical, thematic, or analytical
perspectives.
A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in
a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one
of the central acts of literary understanding.
The novels listed here are arranged chronologically so that the entries
correspond more or less to the sequences of experiences that occur in the
course of life and also to the historical sequence in which the seven novels
were written. Taken as a whole, the list is designed to provide something
on the order of a brief (extremely brief) history of the emotional and moral
life of the past two centuries, an inner biography of the world of thought
and feeling that came into being in the romantic era of the late 18th and
early 19th centuries.
I. Birth: Frankenstein
Mary Shelley gave Frankenstein its unique power by portraying its
grotesque horrors as the consequence of the most familiar and ordinary causes.
The whole moral and emotional content of her book is an extended restatement
of a single sentence by her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, in the first feminist
manifesto written in English, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792):
“A great proportion of the misery that wanders, in hideous forms, around
the world, is allowed to rise from the negligence of parents.”
II. Childhood: Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is a story of passion, but not the passionate
sexual desire that drives adult men and women. Catherine and Heathcliff think
only about each other, yet they are almost indifferent to each other’s
sexual lives. What they want from each other is not the transient and incomplete
satisfaction that adults find in sex, but the total unity that Emily Brontë
portrays as the enclosed province of their childhood, a unity more profound
and comprehensive than anything that ordinary adults can experience.
A Room of Woolf’s Own
Virginia Woolf gets more attention than anyone else in this book, because,
I believe, she thought more deeply than any other English novelist about
the moral and emotional aspects of personal life.
The standard map of modern literature, taught in schools and taken for granted
everywhere, places Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce on the highest slopes, with other
writers arrayed in lesser and outlying positions. This account is based on
the intellectual prejudice, shared by its three heroes, that archetypes are
more real than individuals, that myths are more true than observations, that
a vision of grand patterns matters more than any attempt to integrate the
local particulars of individual lives.
Hidden within this account is a deeper prejudice, which is that the shape
and complexity of a work is the test of its greatness, that a work of art
need not be emotionally moving except to the degree that its structure and
patterns inspire inarticulate awe.
Museums and concert halls and anthologies are filled with the unfortunate
consequences of this assumption, but that does not make it any less mistaken.
When you remember that all the great art of the past seems to have been created
to be moving as well as to be ingenious, and that the same measure of greatness
can still be applied to modern literature, the map of modern literature begins
to look different from the version taught in schools.
Virginia Woolf, who understood human life in terms of its changes through
time, rather than in terms of permanent archetypal states, takes the central
place in modern fiction, as W. H. Auden takes the place in modern poetry,
and Samuel Beckett takes the central place in modern drama.
—Edward Mendelson
III. Growth: Jane Eyre
Charlotte and Emily Brontë had the same two parents, spent most of their
lives in the same isolated Yorkshire parsonage, and received more or less
identical educations. But the two sisters wrote and thought in almost exactly
opposite ways about nature, society, morals, love, sex, and truth. Everything
that Wuthering Heights says about childhood, growth, and adulthood
is contradicted by Jane Eyre.
Despite its fantasies and improbabilities, Jane Eyre offers the
most profound narrative in English fiction of the ways in which erotic and
ethical life are intertwined.
IV. Marriage: Middlemarch
Through her sober realism and urbane maturity, George Eliot insists that
the story she tells is driven by the ordinary realities of daily life, with
all its routines and disappointments and boredom and compromises, with all
its humdrum disorder and its gray interminglings of darkness and light. Beneath
that sober rationality, Middlemarch revels in the wondrous strangeness
of legend and myth.
Middlemarch is, I believe, the greatest English novel, even though,
when I think in terms of George Eliot’s whole career instead of this
single book, she does not seem to me as great a novelist as Charles Dickens
or Virginia Woolf. Part of the book’s greatness is the eloquence with
which it gives voice to two aspects of its author: an intellect that makes
stern judgments on the faults of its characters, and a sympathy that forgives
them for their faults and shares in their wishes. In the greatest moments
of the book, and in the shape of the story as whole, those two aspects do
not conflict, but join in an effort to see truth and feel love simultaneously.
V. Love: Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway is a book about the kind of love that everyone wants
but that no grown-up person seriously expects to give or to get. Peter Walsh
loves Clarissa Dalloway simply and absolutely for herself . . . the unique person
he calls “Clarissa herself.”
Like much of Virginia Woolf’s fiction, Mrs. Dalloway mingles
triumphant satisfaction and elegiac sadness. The book’s triumphant
parts and its elegiac parts depend upon each other, because both elegy and
triumph, in this book, are ways of valuing the personal uniqueness that is
summed up in the idea of
“Clarissa herself.”
VI. Parenthood: To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf rebuked the patriarchal social order in her two political
books, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, and
throughout her essays, diaries, and letters. To the Lighthouse, however,
is not a political or social tract, but a historical and psychological novel. To
the Lighthouse is a family history in which the timeless maternal past
is supplanted by a patriarchal world of change—and a time approaches
somewhat like the one imagined at the end of A Room of One’s Own, when
sexual differences will no longer matter, when neither matriarch nor patriarch
can rule the future.
VII. The Future: Between the Acts
In her earlier books, Virginia Woolf had half ironically and half seriously
evoked the visionary, liberating and unifying powers of the artist. Vision
in Mrs. Dalloway and art in To the Lighthouse revived lost
meaning and joined together things that had been divided. In her final novel
Virginia Woolf takes a more jaundiced view of vision and art, as if she were
preparing herself, without regrets, to abandon both.
Everything comes to an end in Between the Acts, and then, as the
book itself comes to an end, something unknowable begins. Between the
Acts takes an old person’s view of death: the disappearance of
any individual seems less momentous than it might in youth or middle age. “For
us,” an old man in the book tells his sister when she reminisces about
a children’s game, “the game’s over.”
Edward Mendelson ’66, a professor of English at Columbia University,
is the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have
to Say About the Stages of Life (Pantheon Books, 2006), from which this
essay is adapted. Used with permission.
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