The Science of Character makes a bold new claim for the power of the
literary by showing how Victorian novelists used fiction to theorize how
character forms.
In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the
establishment of a new science, "the science of the formation of
character." Although Mill's proposal failed as scientific practice, S.
Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction
of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to
investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill's
unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George
Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore
how traits and behaviors in organisms emerge and develop, and how
aesthetic features--shapes, colors, and gestures--come to take on
cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex.
Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors
transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an
individual into a materially determined figuration produced through
shifts in the boundaries between the body's inside and outside. In their
hands, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense
that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but
in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of
realistic events, the laws governing physical and affective life. The
Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show
how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and
philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920.
