Stylistic Virtue in Nineteenth-Century Fiction.

摘要

To many readers, the Victorian novel is synonymous with moral insight and Victorian criticism with moral philistinism. While the novel remains celebrated for its complex treatment of decision-making and sympathy, the evaluative judgments of Victorian critics have been dismissed as thematically reductive and imprecise. However, this study argues that the virtue terms that pervade Victorian discourse---words like "natural," "manly," "lucid," and "sincere"---invest sentence-level stylistic properties with ethical value because they embody aesthetic character. Rather than focus on the novel's action, characters, or themes, these "stylistic virtues" ascribe moral significance to "literariness" itself.;The first part of this study recovers the defining but hitherto unnoticed influence of virtue theory on nineteenth-century philosophy and criticism. Inspired by Aristotle, key figures such as Hume, Mill, and Green imagined ethics as a kind of aesthetics rooted in the subjective admiration of qualitative excellence; concurrently, the most important Victorian critics---Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde---treated aesthetic properties as embodiments of virtuous ways of being and seeing. The centrality of style within the Aesthetic movement can only be explained as an outgrowth of this conceptual framework: style rose to prominence not, as is commonly argued, as a reaction against the reductive moralism of mid-Victorian criticism, but rather as its logical extension, becoming the locus for the Hellenic values that had been evacuated from mainstream utilitarianism.;In ethical criticism, judgments about style typically reflect claims about a novel's represented action or governing tone. A series of case studies challenges this approach by showing how stylistic virtues convey an aesthetic character that may differ from other kinds of content. Thackeray's conventionalized style is protean and adaptable, finding "grace" in the "humbug" he normally abhorred. The virtues of Trollope's disappearing style ("ease," "lucidity," and "harmony") are only indirectly connected to the goals of morally didactic realism. In contrast, Meredith, derided as difficult or precious, sought a stylistic analogue in "fervidness" for the inevitability of sexual conflict. Taken together, these stylistic virtues offer a bridge between moralism and formalism in the analysis of novelistic prose, emphasizing the distinctiveness of aesthetic appreciation without depriving it of ethical force.