The Burdens of Perfection

Andrew H. Miller is Professor of English and Director of the Victorian Studies Program at Indiana University and Editor of Victorian Studies. He is the author of Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative.

Preface Resisting, Conspiring, Completing: An Introduction Improvement and Moral Perfectionism Moral Perfectionism in the Winter of 1866-67 Historical Sources Implicative and Conclusive Criticism Part I. The Narrative of Improvement 1. Skepticism and Perfectionism I: Mechanization and Desire Standing Before Camelot Skepticism as Ungoverned Desire: Browning's Duke Skepticism as Mechanization: Carlyle and Mill Mr. Dombey Rides Death 2. Skepticism and Perfectionism II: Weakness of Will Victorian Akrasia Perspective and Commitment Hard Times and Akrasia Daniel Deronda and Second-Person Relations Orchestrating Perspectives Mark Tapley's Nausea Interlude: Critical Free Indirect Discourse 3. Reading Thoughts: Casuistry and Transfiguration Casuistry and the Novel The Theater of Casuistry: Dramatic Monologues Exemplary Criticism Part II. The Moral Psychology of Improvement 4. Perfectly Helpless The Reticulation of Constraint Sigmund Freud and Richard Simpson 5. Responsiveness, Knowingness, and John Henry Newman "An Evil Crust Is on Them" The Violence of Our Denials Watching and Imitation Close Reading 6. The Knowledge of Shame Skepticism and Shame Three Scenes of Shame Edith Dombey's Shame Shame and Being Known Shame and Great Expectations Shame and Narration 7. On Lives Unled Nailed to Ourselves Environments for the Optative The Jamesian Optative Afterword Notes Bibliography Index

"One of the best books on Victorian writing to have appeared in the last ten years."-Philip Davis, Victorian Studies "Andrew H. Miller makes the compelling, persuasive argument that the moral perfectionism so deeply embedded in nineteenth-century writing, particularly in Victorian fiction, represents not a position adopted by some writers and rejected by others but rather 'a field on which writers arrayed themselves.'"-Choice "The Burdens of Perfection is one of those very rare books that stimulates me to rethink almost everything I know about Victorian literature, and a good deal beyond. In analyzing the nineteenth-century preoccupation with perfectionism, Andrew H. Miller offers a rich, brilliant study of the ethical allure of narration-our appeal to narrative as a means of understanding ourselves, our relations to other people, and what we might become. As he explores the burdens of perfection, Miller offers compelling insights into a broad range of contemporary literary and philosophical reflection, and develops a remarkable and distinctive critical voice of his own."-James Eli Adams, Cornell University "Andrew H. Miller's book can't help but seem path-clearing. The Burdens of Perfection is as fresh as it is learned; original in its conception, structure, and emphasis; and notable for the gait and responsiveness of its lucid, meditative prose. Miller's scholarship is seasoned and searching, both assured and bravely speculative, with the readings of fiction often elating in the compressed rightness of their surprise and the exemplarity of their selection."-Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa "The passion and the learning throughout Andrew H. Miller's marvelous book constitute a brace of virtues much admired by the Victorians he justly admires. The demonstration that the transcendent novels of the Victorian period precisely confront skepticism with respect to the minds of others serves as a standing rebuke to theories of knowledge in the bulk of what became university philosophy."-Stanley Cavell, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, Harvard University "The Burdens of Perfection is both a book about a major, underappreciated phenomenon of modern culture and a recursive meditation on the ethical and interpretive challenges facing literary study today. With exemplary sensitivity, flexibility, and tact, Andrew H. Miller does what he shows the Victorian novel as committed to doing: he explores the frontiers of a 'second-person' relationship to prior 'exemplar' texts and minds. The result is a display of critical casuistry in the best sense. This book is destined to become a bellwether of the recent 'ethical turn' in literary studies."-James Buzard, MIT "In his practice of moral reflection, Andrew H. Miller explicitly reveals what has often been thought but not so well expressed, that literary criticism has returned to ethics. Miller charts this return through philosophers who have not been so visible in our climate of new historicism-Stanley Cavell, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams-and novelists and essayists who have. The results are agitating, like moral improvement."-Regenia Gagnier, University of Exeter "The Burdens of Perfection pioneers future directions in criticism. After reading this book, one can never think of the relations between literature and philosophy the same way again. It will engage a wide audience-not only scholars of nineteenth-century Britain but also all scholars of English, and, beyond that, philosophers, historians, and comparativists."-Laurie Langbauer, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill