The moral psychology of historicism from Thomas Carlyle to Oscar Wilde

This dissertation develops a new perspective on the relationship between literature and ethical discourse in modernity by showing how the concept of virtue was revised by Victorian authors in ways that have shaped contemporary assumptions about the prospects for and value of participating in public life. Building on work by Amanda Anderson and Andrew Miller, I focus on the formal structures of ethical thinking in Victorian literature while reconsidering homologous structures within contemporary criticism. My analysis departs from earlier work by engaging the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics—a tradition exemplified by Aristotle and Plutarch—which defines a virtue as a favorable, cultivated disposition. I argue that several influential authors of the nineteenth century who were conversant with the tradition of virtue ethics urged their readers to develop what I refer to as reflexive virtues. Rather than appealing to practical wisdom, a key term for conventional theories of virtue, these Victorian authors attempt to define dispositions that will guide a person in recognizing what is good relative to their historical situation. Though the Victorians are often dismissed as dogmatically moralistic, I show that some of the major authors of the period turned particular forms of relativism into virtues in ways that resonate with the tendency of literary critics in later eras to have recourse to claims about the praiseworthiness of particular dispositions—in particular, an investment in meeting the demands of one’s historical situation and a stance of cultivated skepticism towards the norms of one’s historical situation. My dissertation’s chapters are arranged historically, taking five authors as case studies. Collectively, they show how reflexive theories of virtue played a crucial role in the co-development of relativism and individualism as dominant ethical positions, and how this history tracks a declining confidence in the possibility that individuals can find a mutually flourishing relationship with their society as a whole. In that sense, my project proposes a history and identifies the formal determinants shaping a condition that we have been too ready to naturalize. My first chapter reads Thomas Carlyle’s writings on what he calls heroes and hero-worship as an attempt to identify the rhetoric adequate to the challenge of the emerging historicist thought that would come to dominate so many elements of nineteenth-century culture. My goal is to recover the surprising nature of the claim that the relationship between one’s psychology and one’s historical situation could become the standard of the good life. My second chapter shows how Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Carlyle’s contemporary, uses the monologue form to subject sympathy to a “double-vision,” thereby finding in her poetic form a means of discerning the challenging interplay between individual psychology and historical circumstance. These early chapters allow me to locate a key element in the work of George Eliot, the subject of my third chapter. In Eliot, who is directly responding to both Carlyle and Barrett Browning, the process of reflexively balancing multiple sympathies becomes a mechanism for accepting the limitations of one’s sociohistorical situation. At the same time, the techniques of narrative retrospect simulate the prospect of actively choosing those limitations as though one were taking up a definite role within history. The final chapter addresses the way Walter Pater’s “self-culture” and Oscar Wilde’s “critical spirit” fuse criticism with fiction to frame their ethical thinking around an individual psyche’s encounter with fragments of history. Where the earlier theories of reflexive virtue attempted to find a felicitous relationship between self and historical situation, these late-century authors find it increasingly difficult to imagine an individual’s flourishing as compatible with the flourishing of a community. They thus make a detached open-endedness into a virtue, much as it has continued to be in the days since they wrote (if less reflexively so). While this project has a doubled historical element in that it looks back to the ways in which an earlier period itself looked to the past, my argument is at every point engaged with recent developments in literary studies. It may be understood, in part, as an attempt to acknowledge and give a history to the still underexplored relationship between historical relativism and moral judgment that shapes so much work done in the field. My hope is that by activating the affinity that exists between reflexive theories of virtue and the background assumptions of contemporary literary criticism—i.e., their shared investment in asserting value claims within a recognized context of contingency—it will become possible to more directly articulate and theorize what we hope to accomplish with the exhortatory moves and moralized methods of argumentation that remain largely implicit in literary criticism.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference