The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca Rainof

      INTRODUCTION

       The Belly of Sheol

      Swallowed whole and trapped in the leviathan’s belly, Jonah spends three days underwater before surfacing to accept his role as God’s prophet. The biblical story of Jonah’s descent has become a favorite example for several literary critics interested in theorizing narrative lulls, for they take the prophet’s most memorable turning point—his three days spent inside a fish—as emblematic of the uneventful in literature, a climax that is itself an anticlimax.

      George Orwell’s interpretation of the story insists that this aquatic journey to the interior “is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought,” and he imagines the leviathan’s stomach as a “womb big enough for an adult,” if ultimately as an unproductive space of gestation. “Short of being dead,” he writes, “it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility.”¹ Yet Orwell misses a crucial detail when he states that Jonah’s marine reckoning stops short of death. The lesson Jonah learns inside the whale, like other famed trips to the realm of shadows—Odysseus’s visit to Hades, Saint Patrick’s quest through purgatory, Dante’s journey from hell to paradise—involves an immersion not solely in viscera but in the realm of death itself: in Sheol.² As the prophet’s prayer proclaims,

      I called to the Lord out of my distress,

      and he answered me;

      out of the belly of Sheol I cried for help,

      and you heard my voice.³

      Addressing novels that resist plot, Robert Caserio usefully seizes upon Orwell’s “Inside the Whale” as providing a model for describing narrative inaction in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.⁴ He finds that to be “inside the whale” is to be immersed in a plot lull or, in his reading of Orwell’s essay, to be the author of works that tend toward these troughs.⁵ The ethical significance of becoming Jonah in the guise of author, character, or reader comes immediately into question in such studies that probe a discomfort with places of seeming lassitude in novels. Do these passages bear witness to contemplation and introspection or to an avoidance of action in the face of an urgent call? This question has characterized the work of scholars such as Anne-Lise François, who interestingly reframes narrative lulls in terms of recessive action rather than passivity, and Stefanie Markovits, who asks, “Can thinking ever be doing?”⁶ Markovits follows in Caserio’s steps in rightly drawing our attention to the “suspect” nature of refusing or failing to act, but in her study “inaction” and “inward action” can be considered jointly, thereby making it difficult to discuss thinking that amounts to doing separately from mental states in which this may not be the case. These less-active mental states could include apathy, complacency, boredom, idleness, and other forms of passivity that figure centrally in Orwell’s “Inside the Whale.”

      A survey of Jonah’s literary-critical fate reveals that when critics invoke this biblical story to discuss narrative lulls another submerged concern also surfaces: how to represent the hidden workings of adult conversion and unseen maturation in novels. The tendency has been to interpret these subtle changes in terms of inaction, stasis, or even regression. Nowhere is this affiliation between lulls and arrested development made clearer than in Orwell’s depiction of Jonah in utero, a grown man crawling back into the womb. But if Jonah’s story gives us a model of narrative lulls, as I contend, it is certainly a more productive one than has previously been set forth by literary critics. To uncover a more productive, and less parodic and static, account of mature conversion requires new attention to the varieties of plots offered by stories of adult growth and development. Instead of framing representations of adult conversion in terms of inaction or passivity, then, this study focuses on a temporal concern: on radical gradualism in Victorian stories of adulthood and midlife.

      Taking another trip “inside the whale,” and into the afterlife that waits there, provides a useful first step in thinking through the ways that authors capture an extreme gradualism that belies the apparent lack of plot in narratives about maturity. To return to the prophet’s example, what exactly can be said to happen to Jonah inside the whale? In invoking Jonah, critics often overlook the reference to Sheol as well as the curious detail that Jonah makes two “descents” (yarad) in rapid succession.⁷ Fleeing from God’s commandment that he preach repentance in Nineveh, Jonah sets sail in the opposite direction, toward Tarshish. En route, he performs his first descent, hiding deep in the ship’s hull and falling asleep, leaving the crew above to struggle against God’s wrath without having knowledge of its source. Eventually, through the casting of lots, Jonah is brought forth, at which point he insists that he be thrown into the sea, where a portable afterlife awaits within the leviathan. He then makes his second descent, this one into the “belly of Sheol.” The difference between Jonah’s two descents provides a crucial turn in his narrative, illustrating his transition from a type of inaction to inward action, his time in Sheol being devoted to prayer and reflection. It becomes a place where the Aristotelian categories of “character” and “action” become difficult to pry apart and where an internalized form of action, not simply inaction, produces a transformed prophet.⁸

      This submerged storytelling model found in Jonah’s narrative is not one readily identified with the bildungsroman, the novel of momentous first transgressions and the transition from youth to adulthood. Instead, the trip to the underworld and into the whale has proven to be one particularly suited to mature protagonists—to travelers resembling Odysseus more than Telemachus. The Victorian Novel of Adulthood considers how many novels diagnosed with a lack of plot by contemporary literary scholars appear to be written against the bildungsroman tradition, extending past the coming-of-age story into the realm of having come of age. This is a time when marriage plots may have run their course or when stories of vocational pursuit have petered out, leaving characters in a midlife lull that Henry James labeled, with some irony, “the country of the general lost freshness.”⁹ Yet as common as such accounts are in Victorian literature, these times of mature struggling and introspection have been largely neglected in literary critical studies. Instead, we tend to think of novels about adulthood and midlife as an eccentric species in the nineteenth century, an aging relative to the more nimble and popular bildungsroman.¹⁰ This account of the bildungsroman’s dominance is bolstered by scholarship that upholds the coming-of-age story as the quintessential expression of Victorian nation building, a narrative of historical progression grafted onto a story of individual growth. Our attraction to the bildungsroman has proven so potent that a body of literature devoted to adulthood has been relegated to the sidelines, framed as a marginal subgenre, and ultimately absented from literary critical studies of the Victorian period as well as narrative and novel theories that discuss plot more broadly.

      Challenging a longstanding critical love affair with stories of youth, The Victorian Novel of Adulthood proposes that novels about adulthood and midlife demonstrate a model