Excerpt Review Of Miller

Dreams of Perfection andrew h. miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008), pp. 278, cloth, $39.95. Anxiety about the impossibility of sympathetic identification—fear that one may not know, much less enter into, the mental state of our fellow beings—drove the Victorians to invent a particular form of moral perfectionism. This Victorian doctrine, which gave an evangelical inflection to the perfectionism of the Enlightenment, was based on the belief that receptivity to exemplary others (including other, better versions of oneself) has the power to overcome skepticism about the existence of other minds. This is the starting point of Andrew H. Miller’s important new book, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Miller’s work makes a major contribution to the study of the connections between moral philosophy and literature during the Victorian period that deserves the attention of Victorianists and of everyone interested in the ethical dimension of literary experience. Miller’s book is refreshingly judicious and generously receptive to a diverse array of critical voices, but these qualities do not prevent it from presenting a forceful argument that seeks to turn away from the dead end of much current discussion of Victorian moral philosophy and literature that can be traced back to the split between deontological and consequentialist ethical theories early in the nineteenth century. The dead end in question tends to take the form of the opposition between critical approaches stressing historical contextualization, on the one hand, and those promoting ideological critique, on the other. As Miller perceptively indicates at the beginning of his study, the terms of this opposition translate the more fundamental moral philosophical divide between the particularist logic of consequentialism and the universalist core of deontology. In Victorian studies today, these positions are reflected in the debate between detractors and proponents of “disinterestedness.” Miller proposes that this controversy overlooks the main contribution of Victorian literature to moral philosophy, namely, its promotion of a mode of ethical reflection that seeks to accommodate both subjective detachment and absorption (103–4). From this peculiar perspective, truly moral action springs neither from disinterestedness nor from sympathy, in the conventional senses of these terms, but from a movement between and negotiation with these poles of reflection. It is not, therefore, a position or a perspective but a movement of thought that provides the basis of genuine ethical deliberation. Miller demonstrates the fundamental importance of such a reflective movement in the leading writers of prose, poetry, and especially narrative fiction during the Victorian period. The first part of the book focuses on how this movement generates narratives of improvement by examining, for example, casuistry in George Eliot’s novels and akrasia (or weakness of the will) in the works of Charles Dickens. The readings of the novels adhere to the reflective movement that they aim to illuminate, as Miller artfully stages himself thinking through the alternatives and questioning his position while taking on board the relevant historical and critical contexts of the works under consideration and engaging in the techniques of free indirect discourse and casuistry in his literary examples. The second part of the book turns to a series of affective conditions that respond to skepticism about the accessibility of other minds (again, including one’s own). These include helplessness in Jane Austen, knowingness in John Henry Newman, shame in Dickens, and, in an especially

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illuminating chapter, the regretful state indicated by what Miller calls the “optative” mode in Dickens and Henry James. The Burdens of Perfection draws on a wide range of Victorian writing, including poems, essays, and novels, and offers insightful interpretations of broader formal and generic structures in the literature of the period, including, for example, how the dramatic monologue in poetry and free indirect discourse in the novel respond to the moral perfectionist imperative to work one’s way out of skepticism. Miller’s book remains deliberately open to an array of critical voices and intellectual currents. He makes good use of not just Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, Neil Hertz, D. A. Miller, and Eve Sedgwick but also Lionel Trilling, Georges Poulet, Maurice Blanchot, and Søren Kierkegaard in ways that make his work stand out from the more parochial forms of nineteenth-century British literary studies. Miller also has a firm grasp of current work in Victorian studies that enables him to offer a valuable critique of the impasse to which most discussion of moral philosophy in the period has been returning. This is where Miller’s most important contribution lies. A key source for the argument made in this book about moral perfectionism derives from the work of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell. In spite of the fact that his work has been preoccupied with the moral philosophical questions that were central to Victorian literary culture, Cavell’s work has had relatively little direct influence on the renewed critical interest in ethical theory in Victorian studies. (For a critique of the conditions that have prevented Cavell’s work from having a greater impact on literary studies in general, see Garrett Stuart.) Miller’s book opens up a path to Cavell’s account of moral perfectionism as elaborated in works such as Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Cavell’s diagnosis of moral perfectionism as a reaction to skepticism provides Miller with a philosophical perspective from which to offer a comprehensive interpretation of Victorian letters. In addition to translating Cavell’s theory into the context of Victorian literature, Miller also persuasively places the American philosopher’s writing in the striking literary critical company of Williams and Sedgwick. Cavell, Williams, and Sedgwick, Miller contends, are linked by their common engagement in a style of intellectual self-display that emerges from the rejection of a skeptical position with respect to the existence of other minds. The Burdens of Perfection, therefore, not only presents a comprehensive, illuminating account of moral perfectionism in Victorian literature, it also forcefully and eloquently makes a case for and seeks to exemplify the viability of this doctrine as an intellectual style and a philosophical way of life today. By doing so, Miller’s book has the merit of generating and inviting questions, rather than simply pretending to answer them, from readers receptive to how his study strives to break out of the reductive terms of the debate between liberalism and its enemies in Victorian studies. For example, Miller demonstrates in some of the best pages in his book that “the powerful attachment to someone who is found (in particular ways) to be exemplary” can be directed toward oneself (xii). One could go further, however, and argue that this is true not only in the restrictive sense of cases responding to the Victorian exhortation that one imitate one’s “best self” (found in the work of John Stuart Mill, Newman, and Matthew Arnold, for instance), but also in the general sense that even when the exemplar seems to be someone else, the imitation is engaged in the end in the reproduction of an integrated, self-consistent subject that elevates its own perfection to a supreme end. Ultimately, then, moral perfectionism may be understood to promote the maintenance of self-consciousness, rather than, say, existence, as a primum principium. The logic of mimetic