Affect and the Victorian Novel

Abstract

This essay argues that the influence of the Victorian novel on the idea and experience of class may be traced to its assimilation of affect and class , or, more specifically, its representation of class as affect, so that essential to the novel’s depiction of class is the visceral effect of its representations and apprehensions. For Victorian novelists and their characters, and by extension their readers, knowledge of class tends to be bodily , instinctive, and immediate. In Victorian fiction class is precisely what “shows”: characters (and readers) are taught to know it when they see, hear, or smell it. Indeed, the representation of class in Victorian novels typically relies on metonymic cues involving sights and smells, and social indicators such as food, manners, clothing, and speech. The indefiniteness that might accompany economic or social definitions in the newly mobile context of Victorian England is settled, in the affective realm, by such cues, and by the intuitive response of characters and by extension readers to them. That is, to ensure that readers understand not only class identity but also its social significance, novels supplement affective cues with demonstrated responses: distress, disgust, and often shame when a middle- or upper-class character encounters (or feels him or herself to be) someone “low,” as well as admiration and perhaps self-revulsion in the presence of a higher-up. While such responses help define characters’ relations to one another, they also function as generalized representations of class’s affective nature, shaping the middle-class identification that is the Victorian novel’s implicit concern. The representation of class as affect in Victorian fiction also enables us to see that affect theory, as defined by Silvan Tomkins and others, is founded on Victorian representations of and ideologies about class distinctions.