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Fictions of reference: character and language in nineteenth-century British literature

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Fictions of reference: character and language in nineteenth-century British literature

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Fictions of Reference:
Character and Language in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

by

Rebecca Ehrhardt

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2020

Copyright 2020 Rebecca Ehrhardt
ii
Acknowledgements
It gives me great pleasure to express my gratitude formally to all the people who have
helped and supported me in my academic career. In the final weeks of writing this dissertation, I
have looked forward to this part most of all.
Thank you to all my teachers and colleagues at the USC English Department, which has
been a wonderful home for six years. Perhaps the smartest thing I did in graduate school was
finding the right dissertation committee. I have been endlessly grateful for my five committee
members, each of whom has brought unique expertise to this project. I could not have asked for a
better chair than Devin Griffiths, whose unwavering support and expansive imagination have
shaped this project from its very beginnings in a first-year seminar paper. He was always eager
and able to see the broader potential in my ideas – even when I was mired in particulars. I feel
lucky to have worked closely with Emily Anderson, whose guidance has enriched this project at
every turn and every scale, from questions of broad approach to precise matters of style. I turned
often to Meg Russett for her generous yet incisive criticism, which helped me find my way
through many challenging moments in this project. I am grateful to Kate Flint, who recruited me
to USC and has been a steadfast source of wisdom and encouragement ever since. Finally, this
project could not have happened were it not for Robin Jeshion, who welcomed me into her
Philosophy of Language seminar four years ago. I am tremendously grateful for their care,
attention, and mentorship through these years – and, finally, for their continued support when I
chose to follow a new path.
I have been just as fortunate to be part of a nineteenth-century writing group, whose
members have included Brianna Beehler, Michael Bennett, Michael Berlin, Gerald Maa, Anne
Sullivan, and Darby Walters. I owe a particular debt to Brianna, who has given portions of this
iii
project a “final read” on more occasions than I can recall. This group was often the first to
celebrate my successes, the first to commiserate in times of struggle, and – this part I cannot
stress enough – the first to read many of my drafts. They have been fabulous interlocutors and
even better friends. When I think of my time in graduate school, I will think of them.
Many others supported me during my time at USC. My thanks to Kendra Atkin, Michael
Benitez, Sanders Bernstein, Eli Dunn, Dagmar van Engen, Chris Findeisen, Grace Franklin,
Megan Herrold, Teddy Lance, Zach Mann, Ryan McIlvain, Ali Rachel Pearl, Amanda Ruud, and
many others for their wit, their passion, and their friendship. To the USC C19 Anglophone
Collective, and particularly Beatrice Stanford Russell, for providing an invigorating forum for
discussion just in time for my dissertation years. To Susan Green, who has championed my
writing from early on and provided crucial feedback on many article drafts. To the staff of the
USC English Department, particularly Flora Ruiz and Javier Franco, for their patient guidance.
To my colleagues in USC’s Thematic Option Honors Program, led by Rich Edinger and Trisha
Tucker; it has been a privilege to teach and think with them for the past few years. Thank you
also to my students for constantly inspiring me to think about my work in new ways.
This project was made possible by generous grant funding from USC Dornsife, the USC
Graduate Student Government, and the Hovel Summer Travel Fellowship. A portion on
Middlemarch from my last chapter is forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Literature. I thank
Jonathan Grossman and the article’s anonymous readers for their insightful feedback. Several
parts of this project benefited from generous and helpful audiences at conferences hosted by
organizations including The Dickens Society, INCS, MLA, Narrative, NASSR, NAVSA, and
VISAWUS. Thank you also to The Dickens Project, whose members nurtured this project
through lively conversations across multiple summer and winter conferences.
iv
To all the teachers who inspired me as an undergraduate at Columbia University,
including Sarah Cole, Nicholas Dames, Jenny Davidson, Erik Gray, and Edward Mendelson.
And a special thanks to James Eli Adams, who nurtured my early love of British literature and
helped me become the kind of thinker who could one day write a dissertation.
I would never have gotten this far without my family. To my wonderful parents – my
mother Nina, who always thought I could be a writer, and my father Ted, who endeavored to
raise a curious daughter – for their constant love and support. And to my partner and soon-to-be
husband Dean, who is the love of my life and my most treasured interlocutor. He has made the
past few years a joy. Finally, to our dog Watson, and his best friend (Brianna’s dog) Pilot, for
getting me away from my desk once in a while.
Thank you all.

v
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii
List of Tables vi
Abstract vi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Lyric Apostrophe and Reference in William Wordsworth’s Poetry 19
Chapter 2: Referring to No One in Jane Austen’s Novel’s 50
Chapter 3: Reference as Resurrection in In Memoriam and Our Mutual Friend 88
Chapter 4: Reference as Category Creation in Middlemarch and Jude the Obscure 124
Bibliography 170

vi

List of Tables

Table 1: Searchable Instances of Descriptive Categorization in Middlemarch 137

vii
Abstract
Fictions of Reference explores how linguistic experiments in fictional characterization
drive the development of nineteenth-century British poetry and prose. This project makes a new
contribution to a growing critical conversation about the potential of linguistic philosophy to
augment literary critical methods. By putting literary texts in conversation with philosophical
inquiries into description and reference, this project explores how nineteenth-century British
fiction used character description as a venue to experiment with the capacities of fictional
language. Fictions of Reference thus demonstrates how six canonical writers – William
Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy
– understood character description as a linguistic phenomenon that was fundamentally unsettled,
unstable, and malleable. As a result of their dwelling in this linguistic instability, these writers
reimagined literary reference as a form of fiction making. Through these inquiries, this
dissertation contributes a new chapter to the history of fictionality in British literature, and sheds
new light on the capacities of language to imagine subjectivity.

1
Introduction

“I never saw the man whom you describe.”
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Foster-Mother’s Tale” (1798)
1

How is it that language allows us to speak or think of an object that may not exist? My
epigraph, spoken by the Foster-Mother in the first line of Coleridge’s poem, is suggestive of this
strange allowance. Her claim that she “never saw the man” reads as if she might doubt that such
a man exists, while the vagueness of her reference – “the man whom you describe” –
subordinates the man in question to the function of description in the abstract. He will quickly
fade into the background entirely given that the majority of poem (the “tale” of its title) is taken
up by the Foster-Mother’s recounting the short and tragic life of another man. Yet despite all
this, the Foster-Mother and Maria are able to carry on a brief conversation about the supposed
man of the opening line, “whoe’er he be” (4).
In 1905, a century past the publication of Lyrical Ballads, a British philosopher born in
the middle of the Victorian era would articulate a similar problem through a novel methodology.
In “On Denoting,” Bertrand Russell outlines a series of philosophical inquiries around a
description of a person who does not exist: “The present king of France.”
2
This example is a
compelling test-case according to Russell because it seems to contradict our basic instincts about

1
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Foster-Mother’s Tale, A Dramatic Fragment,” in Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ed. Michael Gamer
and Dahlia Porter (Ontario and Buffalo: Broadview, 2008), 73. As the poem’s subtitle suggests,
it was excerpted from Coleridge’s 1797 play Osorio.

2
Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting,” Mind, Vol. 14 No. 56 (October 1905): 479-493, 479.
2
language: we can entertain the phrase insofar as we know the meaning of the words – yet it has
no denotation because France, being a republic, has no king. The theory that Russell develops in
response to this apparent contradiction would inspire a broad range of inquiries about description
and reference in the philosophy of language.
3

What unites these examples from Coleridge and Russell is their interest in how language
enables us to think about things whose existence is either in doubt or fictitious. That Russell’s
formative example concerns a description of a person who does not exist, furthermore,
illuminates the potential connection between fictional character and philosophical inquiries into
reference. There is something about the inherent capacity of language to imagine subjectivity
that places characterization at the center of inquiries into the functions and limitations of
description. This project will put nineteenth-century modes of fictional characterization in
conversation with often twentieth-century linguistic philosophy. My analysis will focus on how
six canonical nineteenth-century British writers (William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Alfred
Tennyson, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy) use characterization to imagine
subjectivities whose existence is in one way or another – like the man Coleridge’s characters
describe or Russell’s king of France – uncertain. For these writers, I will argue, character
description provided a means to experiment with what fictional language can do. The results of
these experiments, and their implications for conceptions of literary character and language in
British literary history, will be the subject of this project.
* * *

3
Russell’s central claim is that descriptions have no fixed meaning “in themselves, but that every
proposition in whose verbal expression they occur has a meaning.” See Russell, 480.
3
In the past several years, a new linguistic turn has been taking shape in literary studies.
Recent works by scholars including Mario Ortiz Robles, Jami Bartlett, Toril Moi, Daniel Wright,
and David Coombs have demonstrated the immense potential of linguistic philosophy to
augment and refine existing literary-critical methodologies.
4
That many of these studies take
nineteenth-century literary texts as their subjects should not surprise us, furthermore, given that
the nineteenth century was a time of intense scholarly debate regarding the nature and origins of
language. While the modern disciplines of linguistics and the philosophy of language would not
begin to coalesce until the turn of the twentieth century, debates concerning the referentiality of
language flourished throughout the long nineteenth century in the field of comparative
philology.
5
Yet part of what these recent studies by critics such as Bartlett and Wright reveal –
by putting arguments from twentieth-century linguistic philosophers in conversation with
nineteenth-century fictions – is that nineteenth-century British writers did things with literary
language that cannot be explained by the methods of their philological contemporaries alone.

4
Ortiz Robles draws on the work of J.L. Austin to argue that the narrative progression of the
realist novel is contingent on the “event” and efficacy of performative utterances. Bartlett reads
the realist novel as a genre that is essentially “about” and made up of references to intentional
objects. Moi argues that literary critics and theorists have chronically misunderstood ordinary
language philosophy, particularly the works of Wittgenstein, and makes a case for its necessity in
modern literary studies. Wright uses linguistic philosophy to explore how and why nineteenth-
century novels use forms of “bad logic” to talk about desire. Coombs turns to nineteenth-century
theories of language to investigate the relationship between reading and perception in literature
and science. See Mario Ortiz Robles, The Novel as Event (Ann Arbor: Michigan University
Press, 2010); Jami Bartlett, Object Lessons: The Novel as a Theory of Reference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2016); Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies
After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017); Daniel
Wright, Bad Logic: Reasoning About Desire in the Victorian Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2018); and David Sweeney Coombs, Reading with the Senses in Victorian
Literature and Science (Charlottesville and London: Virginia University Press, 2019).

5
The history of comparative philology and its disciplinary interests has been well documented,
notably by James Turner’s authoritative and thorough study, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of
the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
4
Philosophical approaches to language offer literary critics a rich array of formal tools and
theoretical models that enable us to understand even familiar patterns of fictional language in
new ways. This project seeks to contribute to this new discourse by investigating the relationship
of characterization to the philosophical category of reference in nineteenth-century British
fiction.
Yet before proceeding, we must consider some methodological obstacles to
understanding reference in literature – namely, that literary scholars and linguistic philosophers
have often had very different ideas about what reference means, and the ways in which it can or
cannot be studied in fiction. In his classic 1892 essay, “On Sense and Reference,” Gottlob Frege
(another founder of modern linguistic philosophy who came of age in the late nineteenth century)
suggests that the study of reference is irrelevant to literature: “it is a matter of indifference to us
whether the name ‘Odysseus,’ for instance, has a referent, so long as we accept the poem as a
work of art. It is the striving for truth that drives us always to advance from the sense to the
referent.”
6
For Frege, to analyze the linguistic construction of fiction, to subject it to “scientific
investigation,” would preclude our taking any aesthetic pleasure in the text. In addition to his
relying on a fanciful assumption that literature ought to be beyond linguistic analysis, Frege’s
implication that the name “Odysseus” might have a sense but no referential function – or,
alternately, that we should regard literature as if this is the case – is simply untenable. Rather, our
very ability to comprehend a work like The Odyssey is predicated on the capacity of names (and
characters) like Odysseus to carry a consistent referential function, such that whenever Homer
speaks of his hero – by his name or any other designator – we can understand the text as

6
Gottlob Frege, “Sense and Reference,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 57, No. 3 (May 1948):
209-230, 215-216.
5
referring to the same fictional entity. Having sense without reference would render literary
narratives incomprehensible.
And yet, we can observe similar lines of thought in modern literary criticism. In
particular, literary scholars have too often relied on a narrow understanding of reference as
limited to historical reference (in the specific, disciplinary sense of historical figures and events
that might feature in textbooks) and literary allusion – that is, to references that refer to real
objects that exist prior to and outside of the text. For example, in Catherine Gallagher’s
influential (and otherwise highly illuminating) study of fictionality, Nobody’s Story, she argues
that literary characters are “non-referential” because they do not refer to real human beings.
7
By
this logic, a character like Napoleon in War and Peace would be referential, but Pierre or
Natasha would not. However, philosophical studies on the ontology of fiction, such as Roman
Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art and Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe, have
demonstrated various ways in which even literary characters based on historical figures must be
understood independently of their real-life counterparts.
8
While I do not mean to imply here that
fiction is categorically unable to refer to historical reality, such a process is far more complex
than it might appear.

7
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the
Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), xix.

8
So Ingarden observes: “one can so justifiably compare objects so represented (e.g., Julius
Ceasar in Shakespeare’s play) with corresponding real objects and demonstrate material
differences between them.” Walton takes this ontological distinction a step further by suggesting:
“It is Tom Sawyer-fictional, and true as well, that the Mississippi River runs alongside the state
of Missouri.” See Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1973), 18; and Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational
Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 42.

6
Moreover, works of literary criticism that take literary reference to be an essentially
historical or metaliterary
9
phenomenon neglect the range of referential functions that operate
within a fictional narrative, and thus perpetuate an arbitrarily narrow conception of referentiality.
This project is indebted to Jami Bartlett’s recent study, Object Lessons: The Novel as a Theory of
Reference, which represents a crucial step towards a more comprehensive understanding of
reference in literary studies. Contending that “reference to objects is what is made by and what
constitutes narrative,” Bartlett’s methodology explores the range of ways in which narrators and
characters refer to (both animate and inanimate) intentional objects within their texts.
10
Although
the notion that language can refer to fictional entities would have been unrecognizable to Frege,
it is of a piece with pivotal twentieth century developments in linguistic philosophy. Works by
philosophers such as Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan have illuminated ways in which language
can refer to things that in some sense do not exist or differ wildly from what a speaker imagines.
The analysis I will pursue here, like Bartlett’s, will be founded on the premise that works of
fiction can, and regularly do, refer to their own creations. However, whereas Object Lessons is
focused on the novel, my project will consider the functions of reference in nineteenth-century
British literature more broadly, and where Bartlett’s framework concerns how novels refer to
objects within their fictional worlds, mine will be interested in what the referentiality of character
description can tell us about the ontological productivity of language in general. This project
defines reference, then, as the process by which words are used to denote non-linguistic objects.
Those objects can include (but are not limited to) material things, historical phenomena, ideas,

9
George Levine, for instance, argues that characterization in the realist novel is mediated by
references to established generic tropes. See Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction
from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

10
Bartlett, 21.
7
characters, and real or imagined human beings, and can be located both within and without the
diegetic confines of a fictional narrative.
I want to emphasize that reference entails a specific relationship between language and
non-linguistic objects in part to distinguish it from the rhetoric of signification, which through
various innovations in twentieth century literary theory, has at times collapsed the boundaries
between, or otherwise conflated, the categories of words and represented objects. Structuralist
and post-structuralist analyses of signification have tended to collapse the distance between the
signifier and the referent. Christopher Prendergast has observed this tendency, for example, in
the methodology of Roland Barthes, whose works provided seminal formulations of signification
for the purposes of literary criticism and theory. Of Barthes’s analysis in “The Reality Effect,”
Prendergast notes: “the words of the text try to perform a kind of disappearing act upon
themselves… the sign effaces itself before its ‘referent’ in order to create an ‘effect’: the illusion
of the presence of the object itself.”
11
More recently, many post-structuralist approaches to
signification have treated non-linguistic objects in the real world as if they are linguistic
signifiers. This method works by employing the signifying capacity of words as a metaphor,
arguing that non-linguistic objects convey meaning in ways that are analogous to how words
convey meaning, and can often generate important historical, political, or cultural insights.
12
At
the same time, however, by collapsing the distance between the symbolic capacities of words

11
Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 70-71.

12
Irene Tucker’s recent study, The Moment of Racial Sight, which argues that racial signifiers
have a history behind their assumed meanings, is an illuminating example of this method’s value.
See Irene Tucker, The Moment of Racial Sight: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012).

8
with that of non-linguistic objects, the prevalence of this methodology in literary scholarship has
inadvertently distorted the principles of Saussurean linguistics from which the rhetoric of
signification was originally derived. As Bartlett and Moi have argued, the present utility of
linguistic philosophy is tied in part to a long-standing tendency of literary theorists to neglect
investigating the referent in favor of the signifier, which has both obscured and diverted attention
away from inquiries into reference.
13
By considering a range of ways in which literary fiction has
the capacity to not only “signify” existing objects but also imagine new ones, this project will
suggest that the ontology of character description allows the novel to fictionalize its own
referents.
* * *
Literary characters are constructed in and by language. This might seem an obvious
point, yet many critical and theoretical approaches to character have not treated it as an
essentially linguistic category – or have in some manner regarded that fact as a negligible
circumstance of its production. More importantly for the purposes of this project, literary
characters are constructed in and by reference, such that a philosophical investigation of that
constitution is crucial to understanding how texts construe them as coherent subjects. In the first
place, every mention of a character in a literary text is itself a reference. That is, any appearance
of the word “Odysseus” in The Odyssey is a reference that refers to the fictional subject known
as Homer’s hero. At the same time, I will argue, the linguistic process of character description
tends to involve a proliferation of references to other things and other subjectivities. As
Raymond Williams observes in Marxism and Literature, characterization often involves various

13
Bartlett 11; Moi 16.
9
allusions to “people like this [or] relations like this.”
14
I am emphasizing the role of reference in
description here because this project is more about the formal mechanisms and productive
potential of characterization than character per se. In this way, my interests are of a piece with
Daniel Hack’s recent suggestion that “character is, in fact, a privileged site… for thinking about
the work of novelistic description and the epistemological puzzles raised by fictional worlds.”
15

This project’s central objective is to offer new ways of understanding the ontology of character
description in nineteenth-century British literature, and the referential possibilities that it both
harnesses and creates. Nonetheless, by analyzing the referential mechanisms that underlie
characterization, my analysis will also have implications for how readers come to understand
particular characters and find them meaningful.
By looking at character description in conversation with the philosophy of language, this
project will deviate from established modes of understanding fictional character in important
ways. An extensive critical tradition has theorized character in the context of plot.
16
This
tradition regards characters as subjects that are progressively endowed with meaning, particularly
through the dimension of plot known as character development – the accumulation of
individuating details and experiences. This is due in part to a critical tradition dating back to
Forester’s distinction between “flat” and “round” characters in Aspects of the Novel that has
understood character primarily through the lens of character development, which has therefore

14
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 209.

15
Daniel Hack, “Fictional Character: Response,” Victorian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Spring
2017): 419-425, 421.

16
For a classic example of this line of thought, see E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New
York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1985); for a more recent one, see Alex Woloch, The One vs.
the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003).
10
biased critical inquiries in favor of genres that maximize plot and character development, like the
nineteenth-century multiplot novel.
17
It is easy to see why literary studies would gravitate
towards round characters. For one thing, this preference reflects the experience of many readers,
who are understandably invested in the kind of round, complex, and developed characters that
populate great English novels. Rounder characters, we might say, make for more interesting
subjects, and therefore have greater potential to help readers see the world around them in more
complex ways. For this reason, many a defense of the importance of teaching and studying
literature in a democratic society adopts a similar logic: engaging with the experiences of
complex characters in literature teaches students to understand real people as they do complex
fictional characters, and thus helps them develop the tools to engage with others with sensitivity,
empathy, and understanding. In turn, the potential of round characters to move readers has
understandably shaped many critical approaches to character that have focused on roundness as
the basis for aesthetic achievement in characterization, or have otherwise sought to understand
the mechanisms that motivate readerly interest in complex characters – or as Blakey Vermeule
asks: “Why do we care about literary characters?”
18

This readerly and critical preference for rounder characters has often translated to an
aesthetic bias towards roundness in criticism. Woloch’s The One Vs. The Many, which offers an
ingenious reading of the relationship between major and minor characters in the nineteenth-
century novel, nonetheless exemplifies this aesthetic bias. For Woloch, the novel has a finite
amount of narrative space, and its “character system” is a matrix of “distributed attention,” such

17
See Forester, Aspects of the Novel.

18
Vermeule, Blakey, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008).
11
that it necessarily allots more attention to certain characters at the expense of others.
19
Flatness,
in this model, is a result of narrative neglect. A few characters rise to the level of protagonists
because they command the most narrative attention, whereas the vast majority of a novel’s
characters remain flat (and thus “minor”) because they are denied enough narrative space to
become complex. This framework relies on a fundamental assumption: that literary character is
always striving for roundness, and that more characters would be round characters if only they
were allowed.
While such arguments working within this aesthetic bias tell us a great deal about certain
kinds of characters and characterization, I want to highlight two forms of inquiry they tend not to
pursue. First, such studies also tend naturally to be biased in favor of literary genres that
maximize plot and character development, like the nineteenth-century multiplot novel.
Analyzing character through linguistic philosophy will allow this project to explore the
referential functions of characterization in poetry as well as prose. This capacity is due to the fact
that linguistic philosophy is intrinsically local in that its methods work by analyzing how
particular utterances communicate or create meaning among language-users, and thus offer an
alternative to methods that privilege prolonged development.
Secondly, approaches that focus on roundness or complexity tend not to consider how
literary fictions can employ the conventions of character description to do things other than
create nuanced, fully rendered characters. Much generative scholarship on character in British
literature has focused (and again, with good reason) on the perceived individuality of fictional

19
Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 14.

12
characters.
20
This will not be one of those studies. On the contrary, one quality that unites the
writers I discuss in this project is that their works tend to exhibit a certain irreverence for the
individuality of their characters, which manifests in various ways in their formal innovations and
their experiments with fictional language. In Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, characters purport to
be representatives of a greater aesthetic charge: the “real language of men.”
21
In Austen’s
courtship plots, characters often figure as replaceable, moving in and out of the same narrative
roles. Tennyson’s attempts to access his lost friend in elegy are complicated by moments that
imagine both Hallam and himself as if they were other people. Dickens deconstructs his
protagonist in Our Mutual Friend, leaving him to live under the guise of two alternate identities
before he can return to his own. Eliot’s prose asks her readers constantly to imagine her
characters as if there were broader categories of people like them. In Hardy, finally, the
conspicuously allegorical Father Time threatens to negate the individuality of all around him.
All these writers construct characters who are, in fundamental yet varying ways, mutable
– subject to myriad things other than themselves. Their formal constitution, and with it our
perceptions of their subjectivity, is open to shaping and alteration by the other characters,
narrative structures, and at times extradiegetic forces that surround them. They tend to lack, in
one way or another, the fierce interiority and individuality of, say, a Charlotte Brontë heroine.
This is not to say that these writers do not create complex, rounded, or compelling characters.

20
For some examples see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2001); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History
of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and How Novels Think: The Limits of
British Individualism from 1719-1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); and
Andrew Miller, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2020).

21
Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 171.
13
Certainly, they do. However, as my readings of characters like John Harmon or Dorothea Brooke
will show, their complexity is coextensive with their linguistic mutability. Most importantly, for
the works featured in this project, this characterological instability is productive – a venue for
formal experimentation.
* * *
Ultimately, by attending to how nineteenth-century fictions experiment with
characterological reference, this project will contribute another chapter to the history of
fictionality in British literature. Scholars of fictionality in the eighteenth century have focused on
the conditions under which novels came to create fictional characters and readers learned to
interact with and appreciate them.
22
This project will expand on those investigations by exploring
how nineteenth-century British writers imagined characterological reference as a form of fiction-
making. The writers featured in this project understood character description as a linguistic
phenomenon that was fundamentally unsettled, unstable, and malleable; their explorations of this
linguistic instability (especially in concert with their tendency to think beyond the individuality
of particular characters) gave rise to a range of referential fictions in nineteenth-century British
literature. In the process of character description, these texts may evoke references to characters
who do not yet exist, references to alternates versions of existing characters, references that
construe dead characters as if they were alive, or references to imagined categories of persons.
Where many scholars have focused on the ontological construction of fictional
characters, then, I will consider how the referential process of characterization enables texts to

22
For influential examples of these inquiries, see Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story and “The Rise of
Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006) 336-363; and William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading
in Britain 1684-1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).
14
fictionalize other subjectivities. At times, I will discuss these referential evocations using the
term fictional-fictional, by which I mean that they are fictions that arise within, or relative to, the
fictional world of the text. My analysis will pay particular attention to the relationships between
these fictional-fictional subjects and their more stable, diegetic counterparts.
23
In what ways, and
to what referents, this project will inquire, do literary texts refer in the process of describing
fictional characters? The chapters that follow will trace a formal history of these referential
fictions in nineteenth-century British literature.
Chapter 1 considers how William Wordsworth’s poetry uses lyric conventions to
experiment with character description. My analysis will focus in particular on apostrophe, a
device that engages in referential fiction-making by speaking to objects as if they were alive. The
majority of this chapter will be dedicated to a pair of poems in Lyrical Ballads (1798) that –
while they have not been typically read as apostrophic – deal with the capacity of the lyric to
animate dead children: “We Are Seven” and “The Thorn.” In “We Are Seven,” Wordsworth
stages a debate about the power of description and its relationship to human life. In the speaker’s
questioning of what might otherwise seem a plain, declarative description – “we are seven” –
their confrontation prompts multiple questions about the referential powers of character
description. Can referring to a person as if they “count” make it so, and under what conditions?
Can one describe the dead in the same manner as one might describe the living? Conversely, in
what ways might the conditions of referring to the dead differ from those of referring to the
living? (My reading of In Memoriam will take up this last question in a different light.) “The
Thorn” tells the story of a woman named Martha Ray and her dead child. Though while it

23
Here and elsewhere, I mean “diegetic” in the classically narratological sense of a character’s
being a creation of a text’s “primary” narrative. See Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology;
Revised Edition (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 20.
15
initially appears that Martha Ray has committed infanticide, the poem gradually suggests that the
child may never have existed. Thus, I will read the child as an experiment in fictional-fictional
characterization. This chapter will conclude with a reading of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” a poem that is more conventionally
associated with lyric apostrophe, which evokes an allegorical child to reflect further on the
relationship between characterization and the lyric. This collection of poems, I will suggest,
show Wordsworth experimenting with the capacity of referential fiction to conjure subjectivity in
lyric poetry.
Chapter 2 focuses on how referential fictions shape character description and, in turn,
compel the courtship plot in Jane Austen’s novels. My analysis will open with a moment in
Austen’s juvenile novel Love and Freindship [sic] (1790) that I argue is representative of the
referential tricks to come in her later career. From there, the chapter will consider how Austen
uses referential fictions in three of her novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice
(1813), and Emma (1816). Austen sets up her courtship plots through vacant references, such as
the reference to a “single man in possession of a good fortune” that begins Pride and Prejudice.
24

In order to marry off her daughters, in this way, Mrs. Bennet must contend not only with other
characters who may not behave as she might want them to, but with the fickle phenomenon of
character description itself, which threatens to refer to marriageable men more readily than it
supplies them. Yet even when Austen’s narrators and characters do refer to a particular diegetic
subject in her novels, they often do so in ways that misrepresent or otherwise obfuscate the
referent in question, which complicates Austen’s use of referential fiction by producing alternate
or inaccurate descriptions of her characters. What would it mean, this chapter will ask, for a

24
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1.
16
sentence of literary narration to fail to refer, or to fail to represent accurately in the act of
referring? Such instances of referential fiction often coincide, furthermore, with Austen’s use of
free indirect discourse. My approach will complicate established narratological approaches to the
device, which have emphasized its capacity to shape and at times disrupt literary narratives
through a conflation of narrator and character, by considering how Austen’s use of free indirect
discourse unsettles the relationship between character description and character.
Chapter 3 will explore how multiple forms of characterological reference coalesce around
and mediate the representation of dead (or presumed dead) subjects – a phenomenon that, I will
argue, is especially suggestive for exploring the ontology of literary reference – in two mid-
century texts: Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) and Charles Dickens’s Our
Mutual Friend (1864-1865). Tennyson’s poem is engaged explicitly in a project of using
language to access the dead. What does it mean, it asks, to describe someone as they are fading
from memory? As he struggles to make sense of his loss, Tennyson’s verse repeatedly draws
attention away from his historical relationship with Hallam and instead dwells on a proliferation
of alternate, imagined characters. While language may not be able to fully reproduce or capture
Hallam, it can bring Tennyson closer to something like him by approximating new forms of
character in the shadows of fading memories. Where “In Memoriam” explores how language can
access the dead through something obliquely resembling fictional characterization, Charles
Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend constructs multiple fictional personas to approximate the death
and eventual resurrection of its hero. This section will focus in particular on the novel’s climactic
chapter, “A Solo and a Duet,” which reveals that the protagonist the novel introduced as John
Rokesmith is actually the presumed-dead John Harmon. This revelation – by complicating the
conditions under which others may refer to Dickens’s protagonist and by which he may refer to
17
himself – sets up a crisis of characterological reference that the remainder of the novel must
work to resolve. Finally, while In Memoriam and Our Mutual Friend work through their
referential problems in different ways, my analysis will illuminate a surprising parallel in their
conclusions. Their treatments of Hallam and Harmon each turn eventually to a very different
linguistic realm to find a sense of closure: the legal language of marriage. Though where for
Tennyson, this turn represents a final resignation to the linguistic limitations of elegy, for
Dickens, the courtship plot is what allows the novel to complete its referential resurrection of
John Harmon.
Chapter 4 will investigate the referential fictions of two realist novels: George Eliot’s
Middlemarch (1871-1872) and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). While many critics
have argued that the realist novel uses particularized characters to refer to preexisting types, this
chapter proposes a model of character description as a referential function that is productive of
categories of persons. My analysis will focus in particular on a device I call descriptive
categorization: a form of rendering character that works by referring to an elaborated category
that it simultaneously defines in the act of description. I will argue that our inclination to
sympathize in Middlemarch is closely linked to the referential capacity of descriptive
categorization to familiarize readers with the types it creates. In this way, Eliot’s rendering of
character teaches her readers – like her characters – to sympathize with others in categorical
terms. For Eliot, I will suggest, the ethics of realism hinges on the ontic instability of character
description, and the referential possibilities that instability affords. However, while descriptive
categorization figures for Eliot as an expansive and morally sympathetic gesture that affirms the
subjectivity of particular characters, in Hardy, the novel’s referential production becomes an
existential threat to its characters. This chapter will culminate in a reading of Jude’s oldest son,
18
Father Time, whom (as his very name suggests) the novel casts in peculiarly archetypal and
categorical terms. The boy’s notorious murder-suicide note, “Done because we are too menny,”
25

represents the tragic end of the novel’s proliferating characterizations, illuminating a nightmarish
vision in which categorizing modes of description collapse individual character from within. If
fictional descriptions and references can create character, Hardy’s novel reveals, they also
contain the means to destroy it.

25
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 325.
19
Chapter 1
Lyric Fictionality and Reference in William Wordsworth’s Poetry
Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) argues famously
for a poetics based on the “real language of men.”
26
It reads as a manifesto extoling not only
“real language” over rhetorical artifice, but realistic representations of character. And yet,
Wordsworth’s poetry (in Lyrical Ballads especially) is replete with moments of character and
characterization that are difficult to square with an aspiration to construct believable fictional
subjects. What, then, can the aesthetic claims of the preface tell us about Wordsworth’s
experiments in poetic characterization in Lyrical Ballads and his philosophical approach to
language more generally? Consider, for instance, a new poem he features in the 1800 edition
titled “A Character; in the antithetical manner.” The poem contains no animate subjects – no
“characters” in the conventional sense – but rather treats Nature as if “he” were a character.
While the poem’s personification of nature would have been a recognizable trope, Wordsworth’s
specific invocation of characterization made his readers suspect he was up to something more.
Perhaps, the poem suggests, a character description might not require a person as character at all.
The notion that a text might contain a character description without a conventional character was
radical, even unbelievable to Wordsworth’s contemporaries, many of whom assumed the
“character” of the poem’s title had to refer obliquely to someone. In his correspondence with
William Godwin, for instance, Coleridge claimed that the true subject of “A Character” was
himself.
27

26
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 171. Line numbers for
poems will be cited in parentheses going forward.

27
Earl Leslie Griggs, “A Note on Wordsworth’s A Character,” Review of English Studies 4, no.
13 (January 1953): 57–63.
20
The poem would appear to be, per Wordsworth’s promises in the 1800 “Preface,” one of
“a very few instances” in which “the Reader will find… personifications of abstract ideas in
these volumes.” Wordsworth does not detail precisely what he means by “personifications of
abstract ideas” (nor why one should avoid this particular form of abstraction over others), though
he does assert that they do not “make any regular or natural part of [the real language of men].”
28

This moment of the preface suggests that Coleridge’s suspicion may have been misguided (an
instance of what modern critics would call paranoid reading) in that the poem was never meant
to refer to a real person but was simply, as it appeared, a personification of nature in the guise of
characterization.
29
How might we reconcile the preface’s apparent distaste for such
“personifications of abstract ideas” with the overt obfuscation of poems like “A Character”?
Despite its supposed exceptionality, I suggest, “A Character” holds a key to the work of fictional
characterization in Wordsworth’s experimental poetics. This chapter will investigate a larger
pattern at work in Lyrical Ballads in which Wordsworth employs character description in the
absence of a conventional characterological referent.
This chapter will argue that Wordsworth experiments with fictions of characterological
reference through apostrophe – a lyric trope that critics have associated with evocations of
subjectivity though not with literary character as such. As a device that speaks its referent into
some kind of being, apostrophe allowed romantic lyric poetry to think about characterization by
other means. In Lyrical Ballads, a volume which is clearly invested in notions of personhood yet
typically lacks complex characters, apostrophe gives us a window into how Wordsworth is

28
Wordsworth, 177.

29
On paranoid reading, see: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative
Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching
Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 123–51.
21
exploring, and alternately pushing against, the margins of poetic character. I will focus in
particular on two poems – “We Are Seven” and “The Thorn” – which, while they have not been
understood traditionally as representative examples of romantic apostrophe, experiment with
something like the capacity of apostrophe to conjure subjects out of seemingly inanimate objects
through their engagements with dead children. Through these poems, Wordsworth works
through the lyric implications of a problem that will later animate key developments in the
philosophy of language: how is it that language can refer to dead people, and what can those
references tell us about the capacity of language to construct subjectivity more generally?
Wordsworth, I will argue, uses this problem to experiment with the fictionalizing potential of
lyric poetry, particularly in relation to underdeveloped or otherwise unstable modes of
characterization. In turn, this chapter will conclude with a reading of the Intimations Ode –
which critics often cite as a quintessential example of the genre that is most strongly associated
with apostrophe – in which I argue that Wordsworth’s earlier experiments in the poetics of dead
children inform the ode’s conception of the relationship between immortality and the lyric.
* * *
One of my aims in this project is that, by looking at character description through
language, and particularly through linguistic philosophy, I can develop new ways of
understanding character in poetry. This goal poses a particular challenge for Romantic poetry.
Wordsworth is at the center of prevailing critical narratives about British Romanticism that tend
to understand romantic texts as revealing more about their authors than the characters they
create. M. H. Abrams’s influential account, The Mirror and the Lamp, locates the historical
genesis of English Romanticism in a shift away from traditionally “mimetic” modes of
representation and towards a foregrounding of “the poet’s natural genius, creative imagination,
22
and emotional spontaneity.”
30
From this perspective, it might seem natural that we ought not pay
much attention to fictional characters in Wordsworth’s poetry insofar as the most interesting
character in it would appear to be the author himself. Such narratives about Romantic authorship
are tied to many influential theories of the lyric, furthermore, in the extent to which such theories
have attended to how lyric poetry expresses subjectivity in language. In their definitive account
of lyric theory, Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins observe that the notion of “the speaker” (an
idea that they note is an invention of lyric theory as such and not lyric poetry) has taken on an
abstract, ahistorical quality: “A fictional person of all times and places, the first person speaker
of the lyric could speak to no one in particular and thus to all of us.”
31
What I want to highlight
here is that even insomuch as prevailing approaches to Romantic poetry have focused on the
subjectivity of real people (namely, the authors of Romantic poetry), lyric theory also points us
to questions about fictional personhood. Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads explore the construction of
fictional persons through reference – a phenomenon which, by foregrounding the relationship
between reference and referent, might also illuminate a path from “the speaker” to the spoken of.
The work Wordsworth does with characterological reference in poems like “We Are
Seven” and “The Thorn” resembles a trope that has typically been associated with Romantic
poetry other than Lyrical Ballads: apostrophe. To some, Wordsworth’s ballads are indeed
antithetical to the device – so writes Jonathan Culler: “Avoiding apostrophe, Wordsworth wrote
lyrical ballads: anecdotes which signify.”
32
Culler argues that “when [apostrophic poems]

30
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 21.

31
Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “General Introduction,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A
Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2014), 5; emphasis added.
32
Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” Diacritics, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Winter, 1977): 59-69, 66.
23
address natural objects they formally will that these particular objects function as subjects,” a
quality which gives rise to what he calls the “apostrophic fiction: that things of earth function as
thous when addressed.”
33
Apostrophe, that is, has a way of bringing life to the inanimate and, in
doing so, it works as a form of fiction-making where critics have not traditionally expected to
find fiction: in the grammar of address. While the infusing of objects with life might be
understood as a central feature of fiction in the abstract, it is the formal self-consciousness of
apostrophe, Culler argues, that allows it to transform object into subject. Yet as it turns out,
apostrophe also allows the poet to conjure a subject even in the absence of a corresponding
object, or even, as Barbara Johnson suggests, to animate the dead (I will return to this shortly).
That Culler evokes the signifying function of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads as evidence
for their eschewing of apostrophe, furthermore, reveals much about how literary theorists have
traditionally understood the relationship between a lyric device like apostrophe and
representational language. Culler is interested in apostrophe as a lyric event, and therefore as
something fundamentally distinct from the representational traffic of signification. Apostrophe,
in this view, is something that does rather than something that means: “what is at issue is not a
predictable relation between a signifier and a signified, a form and its meaning, but the
uncalculable force of an event. Apostrophe is not the representation of an event; if it works it
produces a fictive, discursive event.”
34
However, while the notion of signification as a process by
which a text evokes a real object ontically prior to it would seem intuitively distant from
apostrophe as lyric event, we cannot so easily rule out considerations of reference. Although, as

33
Ibid., 62, 65.
34
Ibid., 68.

24
Culler notes, the “O” in conventional uses of apostrophe functions as a kind of vacant signifier,
the act of apostrophizing often entails a kind of referring for the simple reason that to address
someone by name is necessarily to refer to them.
35
The referential dimension of address is far
from a trivial fact in everyday speech, for instance, where the ways people address one another
have social implications precisely because the words a speaker uses to refer to someone else
imply something about that the referent (the person named) or the speaker’s regard for them.
When poets use apostrophe to address some object – whether animate or inanimate – they
necessarily refer to that object in the process and, more importantly, the ways in which they do
so shape the sense and implications of those references.
I want to suggest, then, that what Culler understands as a departure from signification is
rather where the productive, fictionalizing potential of reference begins. Although Culler’s
analysis does not consider the referential function of apostrophe, it can help us understand how
apostrophe might engage in referential fiction-making. Through its capacity to treat an object as
one might a subject, apostrophe is already an exercise in referential fiction. This point is far more
consequential than the fact that, by virtue of naming, apostrophe is technically a form of
reference. Rather, apostrophe is a device that fictionalizes in the act of referring – in the act of
referring to its object, that is, apostrophe can alter our conception of it.
Here we have already deviated a great deal from the ways in which, since the linguistic
turn, literary theorists have traditionally thought about signification. Where this post-structuralist
approach has regarded the category of the signified as something stable, such that our task as
critics is to attend primarily to the modes and complexities of signification, referential fiction is
about the mutability of the referent. Apostrophe exemplifies the potential for how a text talks

35
Ibid., 63.
25
about an object to shape not only its representation of that object but the object itself. Where
Culler might think of apostrophe and signification as mutually exclusive modes of literary
discourse, it is only by relinquishing the assumption that a text can refer only to objects that are
ontically prior to it that we can appreciate how a device like apostrophe is engaged in
fictionalizing about, and fictionalizing upon, its own referents. In this sense, we can understand
apostrophe’s capacity for referential fiction-making as coextensive with – rather than contrary to
– its status as lyric event. In its capacity as a fictionalizing event, apostrophe is intimately linked
to Wordsworth’s experiments with fictional character. While “A Character” does not contain any
conventional apostrophes, part of what makes “A Character” so peculiar is that it does something
(anthropomorphize nature) that might more typically depend on apostrophe (“O wild west
wind”) by appealing instead to characterization. In other words, Wordsworth evokes character to
enact something like the subjectifying function of apostrophe by other means.
To the extent that apostrophe can make an object seem like a more complex or animate
subject than it might otherwise, attending to the relationship between apostrophe and
characterization can help illuminate what is at stake in Wordsworth’s treatment of his less
developed characters. If novels, that is, can make a subject feel rounded and even lifelike through
the nuances of plot and character development, lyric can make a subject feel more alive through
apostrophe. In “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Barbara Johnson takes Culler’s
argument a step further by theorizing romantic apostrophe explicitly as a mode of bringing to
life: “The fact that apostrophe allows one to animate the inanimate, the dead or the absent
implies that whenever a being is apostrophized, it is thereby automatically animated,
26
anthropomorphized, ‘person-ified’.”
36
For Johnson, the subjectifying function of apostrophe
provides lyric poetry with a formal means to explore questions of birth, death, and reanimation,
which leads her to draw a surprising connection between lyric poetics and the specters of dead
children in contemporary discourses about abortion. By exploring how a collection of twentieth-
century poems about abortion reflect on conventions and tropes of Romantic apostrophe,
Johnson argues that the absence – or rather, the mark of the absence – of dead children has
always been latent in Romanticism. Of the poem “The Mother,” for instance, Johnson argues that
Gwendolyn Brooks is “rewriting the male lyric tradition, textually placing aborted children in the
spot formerly occupied by all the dead, inanimate, or absent entities previously addressed by the
lyric.”
37
Thus, Johnson argues, the tendency of apostrophe to give life also entails a potential to
deny it, such that some cases, “It becomes impossible to tell whether language is what gives life
or what kills.”
38

While Johnson’s essay does not engage directly with Wordsworth, I will argue that his
poetry works through a similar theory, using child characters to explore the dual capacities of
language to affirm and deny subjectivity. To this end, I will now turn to two poems which –
while they have not been understood traditionally as representative examples of romantic
apostrophe – begin to take on apostrophic characteristics, speaking their children into being even
when that being bears a tenuous relationship to linguistic and material fact. “We Are Seven” and
“The Thorn” are linked in Lyrical Ballads both by their thematic interest in accounting for dead

36
Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring,
1986): 28-47, 34.

37
Ibid., 32.

38
Ibid., 34.
27
children and by their proximity in multiple editions of the volume. The 1798 edition places “The
Thorn” two poems after “We Are Seven” (with the brief “Lines Written in Early Spring”
between them), while the 1800 edition switches the order of the poems and bridges this gap,
placing “We Are Seven” directly after “The Thorn.”
Wordsworth’s experimentation with character description shapes “We Are Seven,” which
centers on a debate about the power of description and its relationship to human life. The poem
puts the aspirations of the volume’s preface to the test, moreover, by staging this debate between
a “simple child” (1) and a speaker who seems to have more in common with Wordsworth and his
readers than with the humble subjects of his ballads. In “We Are Seven,” the speaker encounters
an eight-year-old “little cottage girl” (5) who declares that she and her siblings “are seven” and
continues to insist on that fact even as he discovers that two of her siblings are dead and buried
in the church-yard. As Margaret Russett has suggested, the debate over how many the children
“are” centers around a disagreement as to what counts as a coherent self: “he [the speaker]
confronts the relationship between a self and its missing parts, figured as dead siblings.”
39
In the
speaker’s questioning of what might otherwise seem a plain, declarative description (“we are
seven”), furthermore, their confrontation prompts multiple questions about the referential powers
of character description. Can one describe the dead in the same manner as one might describe the
living? Can referring to a person as if they “count” make it so? In one sense, as scholarship by
Frances Ferguson and James Garrett would suggest, the question of counting dead siblings is of a
piece with Wordsworth’s engagement with contemporary anxieties about overpopulation and the

39
Margaret Russett, “Wordsworth’s Gothic Interpreter: De Quincey Personifies ‘We Are
Seven,’” Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Fall, 1991): 345-365, 354.
28
emergence of the British census.
40
I want to focus instead on what the debate about referring to
the dead in “We Are Seven” can teach us about Wordsworth’s poetics of characterization.
After the girl recounts, for several stanzas, the whereabouts of her four living siblings as
well as the deaths of Jane and John, the poem concludes with the speaker’s final attempt to
convince the girl that her methodology is off:
“How many are you then,” said I,
“If they two are in Heaven?”
The little Maiden did reply,
“O Master! We are seven.”

“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!”
‘Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!” (61-69)

In this debate, poetic form is on the girl’s side. The speaker loses credibility when, in a final
moment of exasperation, he deviates from the ballad form. His outburst – “’But they are dead;
those two are dead!’” – stands out as the un-rhymed, extra line in the poem’s conspicuous final
stanza. His formal disruption echoes in the in the stanza’s inverted rhyme scheme: where the
poem thus far has maintained a conventional ABAB rhyming structure, the final four lines read
ABCCB (or, if we were to remove the speaker’s extra line, ABBA). Given the near-reproduction
of two lines of the penultimate stanza into the last (“’they are two in Heaven?”’ becomes “’their
spirits are in heaven!’” and “’O Master! We are seven’” becomes “And said, ‘Nay, we are
seven!’”), it is as if the ballad would have ended naturally with the penultimate stanza, but then
pieced together one more to accommodate the speaker’s protestations.

40
See: Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime (New York: Routledge, 1992), 114-128; and
James M. Garrett, Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008).
29
While to the speaker, their disagreement might seem a matter of semantics (he might
have accepted “we were seven”), the girl’s position speaks to a deeper truth: our lost loved ones
continue to define who we are after their deaths, even as – like fictional characters – they lack
living bodies. The speaker ultimately concludes that his words have no impact on the girl, but
this is not because she lacks an understanding of language. Her refrain – “we are seven” – is
bolstered by a privileged grasp of the referential fiction-making that is central to Wordsworth’s
poetic language – an aspirational poetics that refers to the dead as the living, the formless as
replete with meaning. The girl’s sense of language resembles a poet’s possession of, as
Wordsworth writes in an 1802 addition to his preface, “a disposition to be affected more than
other men by absent things as if they were present.”
41
“We Are Seven” thus takes advantage of
this disposition of poetic language in order to challenge the ontic finality of death. In referring to
Jane and John as if they were present and alive, the girl’s use of language is not only poetic but,
more specifically, apostrophic in the sense that it calls her dead subjects into being. To the extent
that we might think of corpses as inanimate (so the speaker reminds the girl that her dead
siblings are literally buried in the churchyard: “If two are in the church-yard laid, /Then ye are
only five”(35-36)), the girl’s repetition of “we are seven” resembles the capacity of apostrophe to
treat inanimate objects as subjects. From this perspective, then, the girl’s position becomes
somewhat more clear: the act of speaking about her siblings has – on the level of poetic language
– the effect of reanimating them, calling them back to subjecthood.
And yet, the possibility that the girl’s referring to her dead siblings as if they were alive
might be explained by some innate poetic instinct may raise more questions than it answers. As
much as we might dismiss the speaker’s reaction to her as evidence of his lack of sensitivity or

41
Wordsworth, 420.
30
lyric imagination, his insistence reminds us that the girl’s position remains difficult to reconcile
with the conventions of ordinary language. This tension is inherent in Wordsworth’s prefaces to
Lyrical Ballads, after all, which alternately exalt the “real language of men” and work to theorize
the qualities of exceptional practitioners of language. How can we reconcile the girl’s belief with
the still apparent difficulties of how we talk about the dead? And what might the girl’s poetic
instincts tell us about Wordsworth’s understanding of lyric poetics more broadly?
* * *
Notable developments in the philosophy of language have explored the problem of
referring to the dead as a test case for theories of reference. These developments arose out of a
longer history of philosophical debate about what sorts of objects can be denoted by referring
expressions. Many of the philosophers now credited with introducing questions of reference to
the discipline understood reference as a phenomenon signifying an observable or otherwise
tangible object. In his analysis of Bertrand Russell’s foundational work on reference and definite
description, Gareth Evans observes a field-defining assumption he calls Russell’s Principle: “that
in order to be thinking about an object or to make a judgment about an object, one must know
which object is in question… Russell took this Principle to require that someone who was in a
position to think of an object must have a discriminating conception of that object – a conception
which would enable the subject to distinguish that object from all other things.”
42
Evans’s use of
the words “object” and “thing” in describing Russell’s methodology is not accidental, as many
early linguistic philosophers presumed that reference dealt exclusively with physical forms. (This
line of thought is one reason why philosophers have historically struggled to apply their theories

42
Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 65; emphasis
original.

31
of reference to fiction (I will return to this point later).) Given this history, it is natural that
philosophers of language would take particular interest in the same problem that underlies “We
Are Seven”: how can language refer people who are no longer living?
For Gareth Evans, moreover, this question had personal implications. His study, The
Varieties of Reference, was published posthumously after he died of lung cancer at the age of
thirty-four. As Jami Bartlett has suggested, the question of Evans’s own impending death
emerges in his analysis is ways that are at once moving and philosophically provocative.
43
Evans
considers this referential problem, for instance, in his theory of the “Generality Constraint,”
which holds that in order to understand a proposition like “John is happy” we must be able to
conceive of either someone else being happy or John being sad – that is, we must understand
both entities as having more general applications.
44
He later applies this theory to proposition that
“Gareth Evans will die,” and reflects: “It is not wholly inaccurate to say that I grasp such an
eventuality by thinking of myself in the way that I think of others,” suggesting that he might
comprehend the reality of his own death in a way that he comprehends the deaths of others. Yet
he still finds this explanation unsatisfying: “it is of course essential that I am aware that the
person of whom I am thinking is myself.”
45
There is something about the process of reference in
this case that is still unclear or perhaps unknowable. Or as Bartlett writes: “The ‘will die’ and the
‘shall die’ in [such] cases offer some narrative closure for the reader who is holding a

43
Bartlett, 102-121.

44
Evans., 101.

45
Ibid., 210.

32
posthumously published book, but they also reflect the meanings of sentences whose referents
are unstable.”
46

In his Philosophical Investigations, on the other hand, Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that
this concern is overblown:
Let us… discuss this point of the argument: that a word has no meaning if nothing
corresponds to it. – It is important to note that the word “meaning” is being used illicitly
if it is used to signify the thing that “corresponds” to the word. That is to confound the
meaning of a name with the bearer of the name. When Mr. N.N. dies one says that the
bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies. And it would be nonsensical to say
that, for if the name ceased to have meaning it would make no sense to say “Mr. N.N. is
dead.”
47

It is crucial for Wittgenstein’s argument here that he understands “meaning” as a more capacious
category than reference (which does center on the link between a name and its “bearer”) and in
doing so, he evades the implicit counterargument that something about the referential status of a
name must change when its referent ceases to live. Instead, he suggests an intuitive continuity in
the meaning of a name even when its “bearer” dies. This view could be marshalled in defense of
the little cottage girl of “We Are Seven” insofar as references to her siblings do not cease to have
meaning after their deaths. How far might this distinction between the meaning of a word and its
bearer take us?
In the investigations that follow, it is precisely this problem of what it means to talk about
the dead that prompts Wittgenstein to elaborate on his understanding of “meaning.” He asks us to
imagine a language game between two participants, “A” and “B,” wherein the letter “N” has
ceased to have meaning, and thus no longer any signifying power in the game. “But,” he

46
Bartlett, 105.

47
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German text, with a revised English
Translation, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 17;
emphasis original.
33
supposes, “we could also imagine a convention whereby B has to shake his head in reply if A
gives him a sign belonging to a tool [a given letter] that is broken. – In this way the command
‘N’ might be said to be given a place in the language-game even when the tool no longer exists,
and the sign ‘N’ to have meaning.”
48
It is this line of thought that, after working through several
hypothetical interactions between players A and B, leads Wittgenstein to his landmark claim –
which he develops throughout the Investigations – that “the meaning of a word is its use in the
language.”
49
While many literary theorists have read Wittgenstein’s emphasis on “use” as a call
for historicist contextualization, such that meaning is determined by the broader, synchronic
consensus of many language-users, I am here in agreement with Toril Moi’s recent contention in
Revolution of the Ordinary that this reading misses Wittgenstein’s point.
50
What Wittgenstein
means by “use” is not that meaning is synchronic in a Saussurean sense, but that is it local,
individual, and – in a fundamental way – flexible. That is, the meaning of a word can change in
the moment of its use, based on the specific sentence-level context in which it is used.
Wittgenstein’s discussion of use here raises the philosophical question of reference
without committing to a theory of it. Following the climactic declaration that “the meaning of a
word is its use,” he ventures to add: “And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by
pointing to its bearer.”
51
This addition conforms to a traditional philosophical theory of reference
as an ostensive process in which a word corresponds to an observable (point-able) object. This
clarification, however, does not capture all the possibilities at stake in his discussion of Mr.

48
Ibid., 17-18.

49
Ibid., 18; emphasis added.

50
Moi, 55-64.

51
Wittgenstein, 18.
34
N.N.’s death. Wittgenstein’s reasoning is somewhat slippery here, and not only in the sense that
it leaves open the question of how we can account for meaning in the absence of a point-able
bearer. The apparent division between meanings with and without observable bearers does little
to explain the reference to Mr. N.N. at work in “Mr. N.N. is dead,” which is intelligible not
because it points to an observable object, but because it relies on a hearer’s memory of an object
that was only previously observable.
Moreover, the point that the meaning of “Mr. N.N.” does not change even when the
realities surrounding its bearer do change cannot account fully for the implications of referring to
the dead in “We Are Seven.” Rather, it is along these lines that Wordsworth’s understanding of
how fictional language constructs meaning both affirms and diverges from Wittgenstein. For
Wittgenstein, “Mr. N.N. is dead” is a compelling example because “Mr. N.N.” is a name that has
meaning despite no longer having a bearer. In “We Are Seven,” Wordsworth sets up the
philosophical problem with the crucial difference that the names of Jane and John do have
tangible bearers: the corpses in the churchyard. While the speaker and the girl both acknowledge
the presence of the corpses, they disagree on what that fact means for the rules of referring to
them. For the girl, that the nature of the bearers of “Jane” or “John” has changed – that their
bodies are no longer animate – has no impact on her ability to evoke them in the present tense.
Insofar as girl’s references to her siblings are apostrophic, furthermore, “We Are Seven”
imagines not only how references to the dead can retain meaning after their deaths, but also how
language can construct around subjects despite their deaths. Where for philosophers like
Wittgenstein or Evans, death is the key problem for reference because it nullifies the status of the
referent as a point-able object, Wordsworth refigures the problem by exploring how poetic
language can construct meaning in a way that shapes rather than depends on the ontological
35
status of the referent. What this approach nonetheless shares with Wittgenstein, then, is precisely
the sense of language as creating meaning in use. The girl of “We Are Seven” creates new forms
of poetic meaning by speaking of her dead siblings as living, and in doing so, the poem models
an apostrophic form of lyric event through referential fiction.
* * *
Indeed, Wordsworth writes at length in Lyrical Ballads about how language conveys and
creates “meaning” in poetry. In the “Note to The Thorn” he includes in the 1800 edition,
Wordsworth advances a series of claims, which he notes apply to “many other poems in these
volumes,” about the significance of repetition in poetry:
There is a numerous class of readers who imagine that the same words cannot be repeated
without tautology: this is a great error: virtual tautology is much oftener produced by
using different words when the meaning is exactly the same … For the Reader cannot be
too often reminded that Poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings… an
attempt is rarely made to communicate impassioned feelings without something of an
accompanying consciousness of the inadequateness of our own powers, or the
deficiencies of language. During such efforts there will be a craving in the mind, and as
long as it is unsatisfied the Speaker will cling to the same words, or words of the same
character.
52

This note reads as a defense of many of his ballads, particularly those (like “We Are Seven”)
whose characters tend to speak in repeating refrains. His suggestion that “tautology is much
oftener produced by using different words when the meaning is exactly the same” anticipates
Gottlob Frege’s observation in his 1892 essay “On Sense and Reference” (which is often cited as
the beginning of philosophical investigations into reference) that different words can be used to
refer to the same things.
53
Though where Frege extends this observation to the foundational claim

52
Wordsworth, 288; emphasis original.

53
Gottlob Frege, “Sense and Reference,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 57, No. 3 (May, 1948):
209-230.
36
that speakers can refer to the same things in different senses, Wordsworth is more interested in
how the same words can produce different meanings. In this way, his discussion of repetition
shares in some of the sensibilities of Wittgenstein, particularly in how focus on how meaning is
generated through language use. The “real language of men,” for Wordsworth, is a language that
both discovers and communicates meaning through the expression of “impassioned feelings.”
The medium of poetry acts simultaneously as the antidote to and the truest expression of the
inevitable struggle of speakers to communicate despite the “inadequateness of [their] own
powers, or the deficiencies of language.” It is because of the capacity of poetry to dwell in that
linguistic struggle that repetition can be a mode of discovering new meaning, perhaps as a name
might take on new (or retain some familiar) meaning after its bearer’s death. From this
perspective, we can read the girl’s repetition of “we are seven,” not as simple-minded
intractability (as the speaker believes), but as a formal expression of her grieving process. While,
as Wittgenstein suggests, references to her siblings do not lose meaning after their deaths,
Wordsworth’s note prompts us to consider how attempts to capture the dead through language
may yield new meanings.
In “The Thorn,” Wordsworth introduces a new complication to the philosophical problem
of how language may refer to the dead by foregrounding a character whose very existence the
poem calls into question. Like “A Character,” the early movements of “The Thorn” are
preoccupied with reading character into nature. The poem begins with several stanzas consisting
of the speaker describing a conspicuously overgrown and unruly thorn on a mountaintop: “There
is a thorn; it looks so old, / In truth you’d find it hard to say, / How it would ever have been
young.” (1-3) The personified agedness of this thorn takes an even stranger turn when the
speaker begins describing the scene in reference to the proportions of young children. He notes
37
that the thorn is “No higher than a two years’ child” and describes a small mossy rise near the
thorn as “So fresh in all its beauteous dyes… like an infant’s grave in size / As like as like can
be.” (51-53) This simile sounds on the nose because it is, as the poem gradually discloses the
story of a woman, Martha Ray, who commits infanticide and buries her baby in that mossy rise.
She too is characterized by a refrain, as she sits on the mountaintop lamenting repeatedly, “Oh
misery! Oh misery! / Oh woe is me! Oh misery!” (65-66) In this way, “The Thorn” seems to
present a collection of oblique references that yield to deeper meanings as the poem comes to a
conclusion. Problems of reference compound through the poem’s delayed revelation of Martha
Ray’s story. While the speaker does not introduce the child until the thirteenth stanza, the first
twelve stanzas privilege either references to the hill that is “like an infant’s grave” or repetitions
of Martha Ray’s woeful refrain to such an extent that the child’s appearance comes as a
confirmation of our mounting suspicions. As a result, the early movements of the poem enact a
self-conscious unfolding of descriptions: the suspect simile falls away to reveal a union of
oblique reference and horrific referent, such that the revelation of knowledge is simultaneously a
revelation of language. In contrast to “A Character,” which never admits a human referent, in
“The Thorn,” it appears that the object that looks like an infant’s grave turns out to be an infant’s
grave after all.
And yet, Wordsworth gives us many reasons to be skeptical of the poem’s apparent
revelation. He suggests in the “Note to The Thorn” that the poem is intended to “exhibit some of
the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind.”
54
This suggestion has caused many
readers to question the extent to which the speaker’s story about Martha Ray and her infanticide
is true. Most importantly, I will suggest, the poem gives us much reason to question whether

54
Wordsworth, 287.
38
there ever was a child at all. In this way, we can read “The Thorn” as a poem that slowly builds
to a union of reference and characterological referent (as oblique descriptions yield to the
revelation of the dead child in stanza thirteen), only to deconstruct its own referential coherence
thereafter. It is this possibility that provokes Wordsworth’s most substantial questions about
reference and character description. In the fifteenth stanza, the speaker acknowledges the limits
of his knowledge about Martha Ray’s story:
No more I know, I wish I did,
And I would tell it all to you:
For what became of this poor child
There’s none that ever knew:
And if a child was born or no,
There’s no one that could ever tell
And if ‘twas born alive or dead,
There’s no one knows, as I have said (155-163)

Here Wordsworth begins to questions the facts of the story at the center of “The Thorn.” The
progression of questions in this stanza – from the child’s fate (“what became of this poor child”),
to the fact (or fiction) of its birth (“if a child was born or no”), to the final qualifying question in
the case of a birth (“And if ‘twas born alive or dead,/ There’s no one knows”) opens up a range
of possible interpretations. While the final question in this sequence most clearly suggests that
the child may have been stillborn rather than murdered, it is the juxtaposition between “if a child
was born or no” and “if ‘twas born alive or dead” – implying that being born dead is a possibility
distinct from not being born at all – that provokes yet more radical options. What this succession
of questions does not cover is whether a child was ever conceived. Perhaps the child was
miscarried or – indeed – aborted. Or perhaps the child was always a fiction. What would it mean
if the infant – the referent at the center of “The Thorn” – never lived nor died?
Let us return to Wittgenstein’s suggestion that the “meaning” of a name does not change
after its bearer dies. While Wittgenstein still does not account fully for the changing
39
referentiality of a name before and after death, I suggest that this objection does not negate his
point, but rather makes it relevant to the study of fictional language. A reference to a dead person
is not a reference to a physical body (when we hear the name of a dead person, we do not assume
that name refers to their corpse), but rather a reference to a lingering idea of who that person was
in life; such a reference resembles the act of referring to a fictional character in that it denotes an
idea of a person without requiring the presence of a living body. “The Thorn” is a poem that
dwells in this resemblance, walking the line between referring to a dead child and referring to a
child whose entire existence is a fiction – a piece of local mythology. If the child indeed never
existed, “The Thorn” becomes a fiction about a fiction.
Indeed, as the poem progresses, Wordsworth gives us more and more reason to question
the infant’s existence. In the nineteenth stanza, the speaker notes some uncertainty in his
community regarding how, if the infanticide did occur, Martha Ray would have done it:
But what’s the Thorn? And what the pond?
And what the hill of moss to her?
And what the creeping breeze that comes
The little pond to stir?
I cannot tell; but some will say
She hanged her baby on the tree,
Some say she drowned it in the pond,
Which is a little step beyond” (209-216)

The doubled sense of “a little step beyond” in those lines, as referring alternately to a literal step
beyond the thorn and a metaphorical step beyond reason, casts further doubt on the veracity of
this story. By the end of the poem, even the superstitious speaker will question whether Martha
Ray could have committed such a crime: “But kill a new-born infant thus!/ I do not think she
could.” (223-224) Moreover, while “The Thorn” contains a wealth of information about the
child, Wordsworth gives us no indication that the speaker has direct knowledge of the child’s life
or death. Rather, the narrative the speaker constructs about Martha Ray’s pregnancy and
40
subsequent infanticide is made up entirely of hearsay: “Tis said, a child was in her womb,” “Old
Farmer Simpson did maintain, / That in her womb the infant wrought,” “Some say, if to the pond
you go… The shadow of a babe you trace,” “But all do still aver / The little babe is buried there”
(137, 149-150, 225-227, 240-241; emphases added). The speaker seems far more confident in his
construction of Martha Ray’s character, whose existence he introduces as a matter of fact: “she
(her name is Martha Ray) / Gave with a maiden’s true good will / Her company to Stephen Hill”
(116-118).
Yet at the same time, the speaker’s questioning of what the crucial objects of the story –
“the Thorn,” “the pond,” “the hill of moss” – are “to her” is suggestive of a different question
that governs the poem: if the child is a fiction, what does that imply for the poem’s treatment of
its mother? It should be noted in the first place that Martha Ray occupies a curious position in
Wordsworth’s explorations of reference and poetic language, as, unlike most of the characters in
Lyrical Ballads, she does correspond to a historical referent. The Martha Ray of “The Thorn” is
based on a real woman of the same name with a tragic story of her own. The real-life Martha Ray
was the mistress of John Montagu, and the pair had an illegitimate son, Basil Montagu, who
grew up to become Wordsworth’s friend and the father of his ward, Basil Montagu Jr, before
Martha Ray was murdered by another suitor whom she had rejected.
55
In this way, the story of
“The Thorn” seems to invert the outcome of its historical referent, as if Martha Ray had lived but
her child had died. This inversion adds another layer of complexity to the layers of possible
fictions already at work within the poem. At the same time that “The Thorn” structures itself
around the apostrophic possibilities of dead and nonexistent children, it performs a very different
kind of resurrection by imagining a real dead woman as if she were living and grieving.

55
Ibid., 208.
41
Indeed, it is one of the peculiar effects of “The Thorn” that, despite all the doubts
Wordsworth introduces about the child (including whether there ever was one), the poem does a
great deal to characterize the subject adjacent to it (Martha Ray). Similar to how in “We Are
Seven,” our uncertainty regarding the linguistic rules of describing Jane and John did much to
characterize the little girl, we learn much about the fictional Martha Ray of “The Thorn” despite
– and at times because of – our skepticism surrounding her supposed child. Even when their
relation to reality seems most tenuous, these fictional-fictional characters can tell us a great deal
about their more stable counterparts. Wordsworth understood this capacity, and “The Thorn”
emerges as Lyrical Ballads’ most extended experiment in how such referential fictions can shape
characters like Martha Ray.
If we read the poem as an account of the life and death of a fictional-fictional child, we
can see early traces of that narrative’s significance to the character who would be its mother. In
the fourth stanza – before the poem’s explicit introduction of Martha Ray – Wordsworth’s
speaker suggests that “a lady” might have had a hand in constructing its central story:
And close beside this aged thorn,
There is a fresh and lovely sight,
A beauteous heap, a hill of moss,
Just half a foot in height.
All lovely colours there you see,
All colours that were ever seen,
And mossy network too is there,
As if by hand of lady fair
The work had woven been,
And cups, the darlings of the eye.
So deep is their vermilion dye. (34-44)

While this stanza does not make any references to small children in describing the hill, it
expends conspicuous effort to suggest that this “beauteous heap” is no ordinary “hill of moss.”
To account for this extraordinary beauty, the speaker describes an object woven of “vermilion
42
dye[d]” threads in a seemingly impossible range of colors: all… that were ever seen.” Just like
the “two years child” of the previous stanzas, the “lady fair” is, at this point, no more than a
simile, such that the hill is “as if” woven by her. Though just as we will come to suspect the hill
like a child really signifies the dead infant, in hindsight, we may be tempted to see the lady as its
mother. If we read “The Thorn” as an accounting of a community’s belief in a story about a
fictional dead child, this possibility provides one explanation: perhaps Martha Ray fabricated the
story herself. The image is, of course, suggestive of a fabrication in both senses of the word:
what appears a weaving may also be a fiction. Nonetheless, as in other moments of the poem that
walk the line between fictionally real and fictionally fictional character, Wordsworth will not do
away with the ambiguous status of the child entirely. For this image of fabrication is also a
metaphor for motherhood in the sense that we might imagine a real child’s life as being authored
by its mother.
Indeed, it is the conclusion of this fabrication metaphor that will lead to the poem’s
explicit introduction of Martha Ray. The next stanza connects the woven threads to an infant’s
grave directly:
Ah me! What lovely tints are there!
Of olive green and scarlet bright.
In spikes, in branches, and in stars,
Green, red, and pearly white…
So fresh in all its beauteous dyes,
Is like an infant’s grave in size
As like as like can be:
But never, never any where,
An infant’s grave was half so fair. (45-55)

The resulting image is jarring: an infant’s grave composed of beautifully dyed threads. The
additional detail that the dyes are “fresh” is especially grotesque, conjuring images of fresh
graves. Wordsworth nonetheless maintains the boundaries of simile, as the speaker’s assertion
43
that an (actual) infant’s grave was never “half so fair” allows the reader to maintain the
possibility that this simile is no more than a figure of speech. It is in this comparison of relative
fairness, however, that the woven threads seem to collapse under suspicion of wishful thinking,
as if the poem dares us to consider which is more likely: that the mossy rise is a tapestry of the
most beautiful colors ever seen, or that it really might be an infant’s grave. Just a few lines later
in the sixth stanza, it is the suggestion – not the fact – of a dead child that Wordsworth uses to
introduce Martha Ray:
For oft there sits, between the heap
That’s like an infant’s grave in size
And that same pond of which I spoke
A woman in a scarlet cloak (60-64)

In this moment, possibilities of fabricated metaphors and corpse-laden similes give way to the
plain introduction of a living body cloaked in a simple, monotone fabric: “A woman in a scarlet
cloak.” As the continued repetition of “like an infant’s grave in size” reminds us, the ambiguous
ontological status of one character – the infant whose existence we have yet to confirm – can be
a grounding to develop a more tangible one. At the same time, the way in which “The Thorn”
introduces Martha Ray’s existence through the question of her child’s also serves to substantiate
the poem’s suggestion of infanticide and, in time, becomes increasingly difficult to sever from it.
As Barbara Johnson suggests of the mother speaking of her dead child: “It begins to be clear that
the speaker has written herself into a poem she cannot get out of without violence.”
56
Although
Martha Ray’s speech is limited in “The Thorn,” the poem’s implication that she has a role in
weaving the fiction of the child mirrors Johnson’s sense that apostrophe shapes the subjectivity
of the mother through the violence it can enact on her child.

56
Johnson, 34.

44
What is crucial in these early stanzas of “The Thorn,” I suggest, is that the same moments
that Wordsworth uses to set up the climactic revelation of Martha Ray’s dead child serve
simultaneously to set up the poem’s gradual deconstruction of it. As Johnson’s analysis would
suggest, Wordsworth’s evoking a dead child only to deconstruct its existence is quintessentially
romantic, setting us up to – paradoxically – contemplate evidence of its death as evidence of its
life. This simultaneous construction and deconstruction of character, furthermore, is of a piece
with the possibility that Martha Ray is the lady in the fourth stanza – the weaver of the story of
her child. Part of what makes it difficult to say whether the result of Martha Ray’s weaving is a
real dead child or a fictive one is the poem’s attention to the ways in which our construction of
stories about real people resembles that about fictive ones. And as Andrew Miller has argued,
this comingling of real and fictional narrative is especially operative in the wake of a child’s
death, which compels us to contemplate what that child’s life might have been in ways that
parallel the development of fictional characters.
57
In this sense, despite how it might seem
exceptional among Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, “The Thorn” has much to tell us about the “real
language of men.” Regardless of what one might conclude about Martha Ray’s child or lack
thereof, the poem does capture something of how we really conceptualize loss and fictionalize
our lives through language.
As Wordsworth’s note to “The Thorn” reminds us, description is always epistemological:
language is what allows us to express our own feelings and passions, but it also mediates how we
know each other. “We Are Seven” and “The Thorn” are poems about the anxieties of capturing
character through an imperfect medium; and at the same time, for Wordsworth’s speakers (and

57
Andrew Miller, “Lives Unled in Realist Fiction,” Representations Vol. 98 (Spring 2007): 118-
134.
45
his readers), they are calls to understand character through the limitations and abstractions of
language. In the little girl’s repetition of “we are seven” or Martha Ray’s “Oh misery!” we can
imagine characters in search of meaning through their words and, at the same time, speakers who
struggle to understand their poetic objects through the limited capacities of language. In the case
that the story of Martha Ray’s baby is a fiction but she really does lament repeatedly “Oh woe is
me! Oh misery!,” we can read “The Thorn” as a poem about how a community came to imagine
a variety of referential meanings in her words. It is a story, in other words, about how fictions of
reference might shape real lives.
* * *
Wordsworth’s experiments with the poetics of animation and characterization in Lyrical
Ballads, I will suggest, inform his work in one of his most discussed poems: the Intimations Ode.
Wordsworth composes the ode over a period of five years that directly follow the publications of
Lyrical Ballads, beginning in 1802 and publishing it in his 1807 Poems under the simple title
“Ode” (he reprinted the poem with its full title, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood,” in his 1815 Poems). In the Intimations Ode, Wordsworth
takes a different approach to the same question that opens “We Are Seven”: “A simple child…
what should it know of death?” In both poems, the answer to this question has something to do
with the characterizing potential of apostrophe, though where in “We Are Seven” the child’s
knowledge of death has to do with the capacity of reference to reanimate the dead, the child’s
knowledge in the Intimations Ode concerns the relationship between poetic language and
immortality in a broader, more religious register. The ode begins with the speaker describing
how objects in nature – “meadow, grove, and stream” – have lost the “glory and freshness of a
dream,” leading him to lament: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” (1, 5, 9).
46
The speaker goes on to theorize that it is adult life that has dulled his vision, while children
possess an uncorrupted understanding of, and thus an imaginative access to, the immortality of
the soul.
The Intimations Ode thus marries the poetic sensibilities and childlike wisdom of the girl
in “We Are Seven” to his investment in language as life-giving in “The Thorn.” Yet where in
Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth experimented with the capacity of poetic language to construct or
reanimate the life of particular children, this poem is invested in a more abstract construction of
childhood. In the process, the ode departs from the explicit question of how language can
construct or reconstruct dead children of the earlier poems but retains the Ballads’ engagement
with children as ontically unstable characters. The conspicuous flatness of the child at the center
of the Intimations Ode has stood out to readers since Coleridge, who bemoaned the child’s
unbelievability in the Biographia Literaria. Writing in particular of references to the child like
“Mighty prophet,” Coleridge criticizes Wordsworth for imbuing children with an unrealistic
capacity for self-consciousness: “Children at this age give us no such information of
themselves… But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having been the poet’s
meaning; is these mysterious gifts, faculties, and operations, are not accompanied with
consciousness; who else is conscious of them? Or how can it be called the child, if it be no part
of the child’s conscious being?”
58
If Wordsworth seems to neglect developing the child as a
believable, complex character in the ode, it is less because the child is at risk of falling into
linguistic erasure (the existential threat that looms over “We Are Seven” or “The Thorn”) than
because the child’s existence is so clearly allegorical. We can see this function in how

58
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:138-139.
47
Wordsworth constructs the child through the poem’s shifting apostrophes, ranging from
evocations of children as a group (“Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call /Ye to each other
make… The fulness of your bliss, I feel – I feel it all” (36-42)), to a grammatically singular yet
archetypical child (“Mighty prophet! Seer blest! /On whom these truths do rest,” “thou little
child” (114-115, 121), to the greater abstractions that the ode’s recollections of childhood
illuminate (“O joy!” (129)). In this exploration of childhood as a way into a poetics of death,
Wordsworth’s shifting apostrophes serve not to construct a coherent subject but to offer a series
of approximations of one.
Where Lyrical Ballads explores the intertwined poetics of living and dead children and
real and fictional ones, then, the Intimations Ode explores the child as conduit to immortality. As
the ode contemplates life as a movement away from the child’s consciousness of immortality, the
speaker ventures:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star;
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar…
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy…
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day. (58-76)

This conception of birth as “but a sleep and a forgetting” is of a piece with the apostrophic sense
of the child as a figure of the intertwined poetics of life and death. As in “We Are Seven,” this
stanza foregrounds the wisdom of the child, yet it simultaneously figures birth as a beginning of
death. Further developing the ode’s use of sight as a metaphor for divine understanding, the
speaker here imagines life as a kind of progressive blindness: “Shades of the prison-house begin
48
to close.” Thus the “Man” of the stanza’s final couplet sees his childhood vision “fade into the
light of common day.”
This narrative lends new meaning to the epigraph Wordsworth adds to the 1815
publication of the ode, taken from his earlier poem “My Heart Leaps Up” (1807): “The child is
father of the man; /And I could wish my days to be /Bounded each to each by natural piety” (6-
9). The idea that “the child is father of the man” can be read alternately as a reminder that every
man’s father was once a child and, in a twist especially apt in the context of the Intimations Ode,
as a suggestion that every child becomes a man. It is the growing out of childhood, after all, that
seems to be the problem for Wordsworth’s speaker. As Johnson observes in the odes of
Baudelaire and Shelley, the act of apostrophizing interweaves “the fate of a lost child” with “the
speaker’s own former self – and the possibility of… reanimation,” such that apostrophe can
affirm the speaker’s subjectivity through the ode’s prolonged process of address: “Who, in the
final analysis, exists by addressing whom?”
59
In the Intimations Ode then, Wordsworth evokes
the capacity of apostrophe to speak a child into being that underlies “We Are Seven” and “The
Thorn” but directs it ultimately to a different end. In this case, that is, the apostrophe of the child
is not really about the child (hence it remains difficult for us to speak of the child as a coherent
character at all), but about the speaker. The speaker evokes the child-as-abstraction in order to
reconstruct a particular child – his former self. Poetry thus becomes a means to reconstruct a lost
subject – even if, as the ode’s movement away from the apostrophized child in the final stanzas
implies, that reconstruction is ultimately fleeting.
* * *

59
Johnson, 34.
49
Conclusion
The character experiments of Lyrical Ballads illuminate ways in which the “real language
of men” might not always coincide with the poetics of real men – or, indeed, living ones. As the
girl of “We Are Seven” reminds us, the potential to imagine an object as a subject, or to
reanimate the inanimate, underlies lyric poetics. Yet if “We Are Seven” experiments with the
apostrophic possibilities of constructing a subject that might be understood as conflicting with
the material facts of its bearer, “The Thorn” takes this a step further by exploring what lyric can
do when the bearer of a reference may itself be a fiction. What “The Thorn” does that is so
crucial for Wordsworth’s understanding of referential fiction, furthermore, is show us things
about language that are true regardless of whether the referent is real or not. In this, the way in
which the poem’s linguistic experiments with the child actually work to characterize Martha Ray
parallels how the Intimations Ode functions as an extended apostrophe to a diminishing child
that actually works to revive something lost in the speaker’s subjecthood. What Coleridge’s
critique of the ode – that Wordsworth projects his own philosophical powers on the abstracted
child – gets correct is that for Wordsworth, character is a form of fictional projection that does
not necessarily work through tangible objects or coherent subjects. Wordsworth’s referential
fictions theorize ways in which characterization, like apostrophe, can speak life into an object
whose subjecthood is unclear or, alternately, use an elaboration of an unstable referent to
characterize another subject. For Wordsworth, in other words, the fictional possibilities of lyric
poetry are rooted in its capacity to build upon and around unstable forms of characterization.

50
Chapter 2
Referring to No One in Jane Austen’s Novels
Once, after a particularly difficult break-up, a friend gave me a curious piece of advice.
“Take a piece of paper and write down every quality you want in a partner,” she explained with
no hint of irony. “And then before you know it, you’ll find him.”
I reckon Jane Austen might have given me the same advice. Her novels are replete with
descriptions of suitors in language before they appear in body. Sometimes these references are
followed by introductions of new characters, yet at other times they turn out to be wishful
thinking. What they all share is a type of magical thinking that is now a recognizable convention
of romantic comedy: a character (or sometimes a narrator) imagines a suitor who does not
presently exist, as if their imagining will compel the story to provide him. We might think of this
referential move as a form of descriptive plotting ahead of the courtship plot, wherein the act of
referring to a fictional-fictional suitor constitutes an appeal for such a man to materialize in the
diegetic world of the novel. At times, that is, to describe a man in an Austen novel is to call him
into existence.
We can see this pattern beginning to take shape in the short epistolary novel Austen
writes when she is fourteen, Love and Freindship (sic.) (1790), when her heroine recalls a knock
on her family’s door. Laura’s recollection of the knocking, and her near-revelation of its
perpetrator, takes up a conspicuous portion of the narrative – one whole letter of fifteen – in
which she tells her friend’s daughter, Marianne, her life story. Laura’s fifth letter begins:
One Evening in December as my Father, my Mother and myself, were arranged in
social converse round our Fireside, we were on a sudden, greatly astonished, by hearing a
violent knocking on the outward Door of our rustic Cot.
My Father started – ‘What noise is that,’ (said he). ‘It sounds like a loud rapping
at the door’ – (replied my Mother.) ‘It does indeed,’ (cried I.) ‘I am of your opinion;’
51
(said my Father) ‘it certainly does appear to proceed from some uncommon violence
exerted against our unoffending Door.’
‘Yes,’ (exclaimed I) ‘I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for
Admittance.’
‘That is another point’ (replied he;) ‘We must not pretend to determine on what
motive the person may Knock – tho’ that someone does rap at the Door, I am partly
convinced.’
60

The scene proceeds at a comically labored pace. Though her heroine has retrospectively
confirmed that the sound was indeed a “violent knocking on the outward Door,” the exchange
nonetheless begins when the characters are not yet certain of the cause of the noise: “What noise
is that.” Austen then has each of three present characters guess that it might be “a loud rapping at
the door” or, as the father suggests with ironically heightened suspense, “some uncommon
violence exerted against our unoffending Door.” When Laura then makes what would seem a
conservative inference, that “it must be somebody who knocks for Admittance,” her father
reprimands her as one might a young Catherine Morland for “pretend[ing] to determine” the
knocker’s motive. Nonetheless, he owns that he is “partly convinced” that “someone does rap at
the Door.”
Then, they are interrupted by a “2
nd
tremendous rap”:
‘Had we not better go and see who it is?’ (said she), the Servants are out.’ ‘I think
we had,’ (replied I.) ‘Certainly,’ (added my Father) ‘by all means.’ ‘Shall we go now?’
(said my Mother.) ‘The sooner the better,’ (answered he.) ‘Oh! let no time be lost,’ (cried
I.)
A third more violent Rap than ever again assaulted our ears. ‘I am certain there is
somebody knocking at the Door,’ (said my Mother.) ‘I think there must,’ (replied my
Father) ‘I fancy the Servants are returned;’ (said I) ‘I think I hear Mary going to the
Door.’ ‘I’m glad of it’ (cried my Father) ‘for I long to know who it is.’
I was right in my Conjecture…a young Gentleman and his Servant were at the
Door (93-93).

60
Jane Austen, Love and Freindship and Other Youthful Writings (London: Penguin, 2014), 92;
emphasis original.

52
As they hear a second knock, the family’s increasingly urgent desire to learn who is at the door
(“The sooner the better,” “Oh! let no time be lost”) draws further attention to the painstaking
pace of the scene. Beyond such comic effects, moreover, the contrivances of this scene –
particularly the combination of the family’s curiosity and their exaggerated ignorance of the
knocking’s source – creates a scenario wherein Austen’s characters can talk about someone at
length while simultaneously insisting on how little they know about him. Consider how, amidst
the scene’s comic contrivances, Laura and her parents gradually transition from referring to the
sound as a noise to referring to it as a person. We can observe several stages of this process: the
characters refer to the interruption as a “loud rapping” upon hearing the first knock, which
becomes a “who” by the second one, until all parties agree that there “must” be “somebody
knocking at the Door” after the third. As Austen’s characters attempt to deduce the source of the
noise, their speculations continuously insist on there being a characterological referent – a
“somebody” – despite having no confirmation that it is even a person who knocks. That they
neglect to answer the door themselves allows this referential conjecture to continue until a
servant announces a young gentleman at the door. As Laura closes the letter, she continues to
withhold the name or any other identifying details of the knocker, but (lest we think this all an
inconsequential charade) does suggest he will be important to the rest of her story: “My natural
Sensibility had already been greatly affected by the sufferings of the unfortunate Stranger and no
sooner did I first behold him, than I felt that on him the happiness or Misery of my future Life
must depend-” (Ibid.). Though the em dash keeps us in momentary suspense, Laura’s next letter
not only supplies the name of the referent, Lindsay (or Talbot), but reveals that she has buried
the lead: the man at the door would soon be her husband.
53
Given that the majority of the other letters in Love and Freindship narrate the action in a
more outwardly serious tone and at a far more efficient pace, it would be easy to dismiss this
episode as a comic spectacle with little bearing on the novel at large. Perhaps the young Austen
is simply staging a sort of cheap (if entertaining) joke – a farce unfolding in slow motion at the
expense of more consequential narrative development. Yet what if we take this episode of her
juvenilia as the beginning of a series of experiments in referential delay or obfuscation
throughout Austen’s works? That the unidentified referent in Love and Freindship’s fifth letter
was indeed the heroine’s future husband is of a piece with a pattern at work in many of Austen’s
novels: the resolution of her courtship plots often hinge on some kind of delayed revelation of
character. In her later novels (I will focus particularly on Sense and Sensibility, Pride and
Prejudice, and Emma), Austen will develop techniques to manipulate reference in service of the
courtship plot that are more sophisticated, typically less overtly farcical, and could be sustained
for much lengthier portions of a narrative than the type of delayed identification she employs in
Love and Freindship. At times, as with the knocking on the door, Austen uses reference to
imagine a character whom we cannot yet identify. Elsewhere, she uses reference to describe
existing characters in misleading or inaccurate ways – as if they are, in one way or another, other
than they are. She will even find ways to divorce characterological reference from character
entirely, employing vacant references that turn out to refer to no one at all. At times, I will argue,
these techniques work in conjunction with free indirect discourse, which allows Austen’s
discourse to privilege various misrepresentations of her characters. What unites all these
strategies, however, is that they employ unstable modes of reference to delay or obscure the
revelation of character by crafting character descriptions that lack clear relationships to the
characters at hand.
54
In the title of this chapter, I mean to allude to two prior works of scholarship. Firstly, the
philosopher Keith Donnellan’s influential essay, “Speaking of Nothing,” which takes up the
problem of how speakers may think about and refer to things which do not exist.
61
And secondly,
I am alluding to D.A. Miller’s suggestion, in the masterful Jane Austen or the Secret of Style,
that Austen’s art depends on her employment of “No One’s” style.
62
What he means by “No
One” is not only that Austen’s style functions through the distinctly impersonal vantage point of
her narration, but also that it (I am keeping with Miller’s choice of pronoun here) is defined by a
queer, existential alienation from personhood, “seek[ing] to advance a dream that it might
correspond to the plentitude of a Person” – a dream which, he argues, can never be realized.
63

For Miller, moreover, this impossible dream shapes the conditions and limitations of style for all
who wish to practice it. Thus he suggests, No One style accounts for the tendency of Austen’s
heroines to eventually renounce style in order to become more fully themselves, as well as the
disparity between the fictitious events of the author’s novels and her own lived experience:
“Negation has always been the prime mover of Absolute Style, its constant recourse for whatever
ailed the author whose (social, psychological, physical) person it voided.”
64
Style, from this
perspective, is always in tension with the complex realization of character in prose.
In exploring what it might mean to refer to no one in an Austen novel, I want to shift the
attention in such inquires away from the speaker and to the spoken-of. When I attend to a

61
Keith Donnellan, “Speaking of Nothing,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 1 (Jan.,
1974): 3-31.

62
D. A. Miller, Jane Austen or the Secret of Style (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2003), 25.

63
Ibid., 67.

64
Ibid., 45, 76.
55
character’s speech, my analysis will be specifically interested in how they refer to themselves
and other characters. For Miller, the subjectivity-negating force of Austen’s prose is seldom
about the subject as represented but rather whom he calls the figure of the “stylothyte” (she can
be author or character) herself. When he writes of Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennett, he is
less interested in Austen’s characters as represented by their author than in characters insofar as
they attempt to employ their own style within the diegesis of the novel. Yet before characters can
represent themselves in any fashion within their fictional worlds, they must first be constructed
through language. As Jami Bartlett has argued in Object Lessons, characters – like all other
fictional creations – are necessarily constructed by and through references.
65
One who doubts the
power of simply referring to something in an Austen novel, after all, might try mentioning the
slave trade to Sir Thomas Bertram.
66

Reference is the phenomenon that mediates between style and ontology; it allows the
novel to simultaneously represent and construct a fictional object. However, as Austen’s frequent
use of vacant, obscure, or imprecise references reminds us, the process of referring is far from a
transparent one. As the knock on the door of Love and Freindship suggests, a vacant reference is,
in the first place, an opportunity for a character to emerge. But such an opportunity, as we will
see, can easily be derailed. While reference, as Bartlett demonstrates, is essential to the
construction and development of novels, there are also myriad ways it can become unstable or
otherwise unclear. What is radical about Austen’s use of reference is that her fiction mobilizes
wayward references as productive in the service of the courtship plot. Through their various

65
Bartlett, 21.

66
When Fanny Price asks her uncle about the slave trade (in which he is presumably involved) in
Mansfield Park, her inquiry is famously met with silence. See Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
(London: Penguin, 2003).
56
referential fictions, Austen’s novels experiment with the linguistic and narratological conditions
under which referring to a subject can write (or rewrite) them into being. My argument here is
that such references are not antithetical to the construction of her fiction, but actually shape the
courtship plot through interventions in character description.
Furthermore, existing approaches to “empty signifiers” in literary theory do not account
for Austen’s use of unstable or vacant references. As Bartlett and Toril Moi have recently
suggested, the dominant structuralist and post-structuralist rhetoric of signification in literary
theory has actually drawn attention away from investigation of reference, and particularly the
category of the referent.
67
For example, consider how Austen introduces Harriet Smith in Emma:
“Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody. Somebody had placed her, several years
back, at Mrs. Goddard’s school, and somebody had lately raised her from the condition of
scholar to that of parlour-boarder. This was all that was generally known of her history.”
68
It
would be difficult to argue that the description of Harriet Smith as “the natural daughter of
somebody” is an empty signifier. On the contrary, this description signifies Harriet’s
illegitimacy; it is loaded with socially-encoded meaning. The “somebody” of this line, however,
is a vacant reference – vacant because we know nothing (no one) of Harriet’s parentage. Austen
then uses the same “somebody” that referred to Harriet’s mother to refer to whomever placed her
in Mrs Goddard’s school, and then to whomever facilitated her progress to a parlor-boarder. In
each instance, Austen’s narrator refers simultaneously to someone in theory and no one in
particular – as if leaving a space in the discourse should the correct referent arise. The
withholding of a referent, therefore, interrupts the ontological process of fiction-making by

67
Bartlett, 11; Moi, 16.

68
Jane Austen, Emma (London: Penguin, 2015), 23.
57
obscuring our understanding of the fictional world in question, while simultaneously affirming
our desire for that construction by drawing attention to the possibility of a new referent to be
introduced. It is this effect, I will argue, that Austen uses repeatedly to engineer her courtship
plots.
* * *
While the methods of comparative philology would not become a subject of significant
scholarly interest in Britain until a few decades after Austen’s death, the same cannot be said of
inquiries into the ontology of reference. Until the mid-nineteenth century, as James Turner has
shown, English thinking about language was dominated by an “eighteenth-century style of
‘philosophical’ speculation” in the vein of Adam Smith’s “Considerations Concerning the First
Formation of Languages.”
69
Of course, Smith’s contribution, which was published as an
appendix in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), does not share the disciplinary rhetoric of
modern linguistic philosophy. Nonetheless, his treatise conceives of the formation of language as
a natural history of what philosophers now call reference-fixing – or the process of affixing
nouns to non-linguistic objects. Smith’s approach to language, I will suggest, can offer an
instructive point of comparison for understanding the work of reference in Jane Austen’s novels.
“Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Language” was influenced by John
Locke’s pioneering work on language in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
Though, where Locke privileges metaphysical questions about the nature of linguistic

69
James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014), 140.

58
signifiers,
70
what stands out about Smith’s approach is the extent to which his analysis of the
formation of languages depends on utility. That is, he theorizes the ontological development of
language as something driven first and foremost by the need to describe the given world by
fixing references to everyday objects. Smith’s opening paragraph proposes a thought experiment:
Two savages, who had never been taught to speak, but had been bred up remote from the
societies of men, would naturally begin to form that language by which they would
endeavor to make their mutual wants intelligible to each other, by uttering certain sounds,
whenever they meant to denote certain objects. Those objects only which were most
familiar to them, and which they had most frequent occasion to mention, would have
particular names assigned to them.
71

When the savages repeatedly encounter something, they figure they ought to give a name to it.
Thus, Smith posits that the first words would have been nouns with immediate referents – things
found in their everyday lives – which would have allowed the savages to interact with the
material world with newfound efficiency and precision.
As “Formation of Languages” goes on, Smith theorizes about how language would have
become increasingly complex over time. He suggests that nouns must have originally referred to
individual objects, and gradually come to refer to general classes. For example, Smith explains,
if a person who has only known one river, and referred to it by the name “river,” came upon a
second river, “would he not readily have called it a river?”
72
But here, he speculates, early man
must have encountered a problem:
When there was occasion, therefore, to mention any particular object, it often became
necessary to distinguish it from the other objects comprehended under the same general

70
Locke’s model theorizes words as linguistic signifiers that are arbitrarily linked to abstract
ideas or essences: John Locke, “Of Words,” An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(London: Penguin 2004), 363-364, 372-373.

71
Adam Smith, “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages,” Theory of Moral
Sentiments (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), 507.

72
Ibid., 508.
59
name, either, first, by its peculiar qualities; or, secondly, by the peculiar relation which it
stood in to some other things. Hence the necessary origin of two other sets of words, of
which one should express quality; the other, relation.
73

Thus Smith theorizes the invention of additional parts of speech. As nouns became generic, that
is, people would have needed words that “express quality” (adjectives) and words that express
“relation… [relative to] other things” (prepositions). Here again, Smith’s speculations are driven
by utility and pragmatic necessity, yielding a vision in which language developed so that man
could better classify and describe the given world. At the same time, he spends a significant
portion of the remainder of “Formation of Languages” contemplating how these new classes of
words must have required new and heightened forms of abstract thought. He suggests, for
instance, “green and blue would, in all probability, be sooner invented than the words greenness
and blueness,” as the later class “requires a much greater level of abstraction” (that is, on top of
the initial level of abstraction that understanding something as “green” requires one to
understand other things as not green).
74
Conceiving of prepositions, he imagines, would have
posed an even greater challenge since they would have necessitated that a speaker understand a
preposition independently of any object to which it might apply.
75
Yet even as he struggles
through such complications, Smith’s account adheres to a consistent ontological narrative:
language, as well as (in one way or another) each new mode of abstraction that it subsequently
acquired, developed in response to the growing needs of human beings to refer to the objects
populating their worlds.

73
Ibid., 509-510.

74
Ibid., 511-512.

75
Ibid., 516.
60
So, how might such a narrative of reference-fixing relate to contemporary fiction? In her
ingenious study, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century,
Cynthia Sundberg Wall suggests that literary description evolved throughout the long eighteenth
century “to accommodate and then absorb the ornamental into the contextual.”
76
In this, Wall’s
analysis seeks to account for what she argues is a radical shift in British literary history: where
the earliest novels task readers to imaginatively fill in the details of their fictional words, by the
mid nineteenth century, novels tend to take great pains to describe their settings (and particularly
the numerous objects that populate them) for readers. Although she does not specifically engage
with Adam Smith or linguistic philosophy, Wall’s account of the descriptive logic of the
eighteenth-century novel bears a striking similarity to Smith’s approach to the ontology of
language. In novels by the likes of Daniel DeFoe, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson, Wall
observes, “physical objects and structures appear primarily in the immediate service of narrative
action: windows appear when they need to be jumped out of, locks when they need to be locked.
Things come (literally) to hand as the character requires.”
77
By contrast, in the nineteenth century
(the era of the Barthesian “reality effect”
78
), novels were wont to describe their worlds in detail
even when doing so did not serve narrative action. Similar to how Adam Smith imagines that
early man would have found a way to describe an object when and because doing so became
useful to his everyday life, Wall demonstrates that canonical novels through the mid-eighteenth
century tended to describe objects only as they become necessary to their plots. In the

76
Cynthia Sundberg Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the
Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2006), 2.

77
Ibid., 112; emphasis added.

78
Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1989).
61
ontological visions of both Smith’s narrative of linguistic development and the fictional worlds
of his contemporaries, an object becomes relevant to the action and then – out of necessity – it is
rendered in words.
So what of Austen’s work with reference? Behind the farcical effects of the fifth letter of
Love and Freindship, we can see the young novelist beginning to conceive of the ontological
relationship between reference and referent in a different way. If the linguistic landscapes of
Adam Smith and many eighteenth-century novelists were preoccupied with references to the
ready-at-hand, Austen’s fiction is concerned with what happens when one reaches (or refers) and
finds nothing there. That is, while a novelist like Richardson might have named an object when it
appeared, Austen gives us a knock on the door and takes great pains not to identify the character
who is knocking. In this light, we can understand the comedic effect of this scene as a symptom
of its referential delay, and not the other way around. Where for Smith, reference-fixing is the
first step on a long journey to abstraction, Austen supplies an abstract reference first – at times,
in the case of Love and Freindship, a reference that adamantly does not name the relevant object
– and sees how long she can withhold the referent. In Austen’s fiction, that is, manipulating
language by withholding the referent is a means to eschew identification. She likewise does not
share Locke’s approach to language. Where for Locke, all linguistic signifiers are essentially
abstract, and removed from the objects which they arbitrarily signify, for Austen, it is the
abstraction which is artificially constructed: a stand-in for a true referent yet to be revealed. In an
Austen novel, we may always hope for the real referent to walk through the door.
Furthermore, while Wall does gesture to some ways in which Austen’s descriptive
practices do conform to methods of representing domestic space that became popular around the
62
turn of the nineteenth century
79
, her study does not account for Austen’s work with reference.
That is partly to say, of course, that description and reference are not synonymous
80
, and that
Wall’s study focuses primarily on descriptions of things whereas I am interested in character.
Yet this comparison can also illuminate some ways in which Austen deviates from more
conventional uses of fictional language. Austen’s use of characterological reference does not fit
easily into Wall’s models of eighteenth or nineteenth-century descriptive practices; rather than
waiting until a character enters the action she refers to them early, and rather than describing her
referent fully and contextually she builds her plots around abstract, at times vacant, references.
One might object, for instance, that Austen’s manner of withholding characterological
referents is simply of a piece with the tendency of the nineteenth-century novel (particularly in
the service of the inheritance plot
81
) to surprise readers with late revelations of benefactors or
familial connections. However, what distinguishes Austen’s use of referential delay or
obfuscation from this trope is the way in which her novels insist on foregrounding the
unidentified referent (sometimes in comedic proportions). While it takes a careful reader of

79
Wall, 137, 185, 207. Though she also observes some archaic methods in Austen that are more
akin to Defoe or Fielding (178).

80
To say that the precise relationship between description and reference is (and historically has
been) a complex one in linguistic philosophy would be a great understatement. So for our
purposes here, I want to propose a simple analogy: reference is to description as rectangles are to
squares. Not every reference is a description. For example, if we ask “Who is at the door?” and
respond with “Lindsay,” we have referred to someone without saying anything to describe him.
However, every description must contain some kind of reference to point to whatever or
whomever it describes. That is, if we were to say “Lindsay is the heroine’s future husband,” we
are both referring to a person and describing his marital status. It is due to this overlap, though,
that in theories like Smith’s, where description is figured primarily as a means of referring, that
distinction can become more difficult to maintain.

81
For an analysis of role of performative language in the nineteenth-century inheritance plot, see
Ortiz Robles, The Novel as Event.
63
Dickens’s Bleak House to surmise that Esther Summerson may be alluding to someone when she
neglects to refer to Alan Woodcourt by name, for instance, Austen’s narratives tend to insist on
the presence of a referent whose identity we cannot place. Her novels rather flaunt the capacity
of characterological reference to obscure or misrepresent, and thereby separate description from
character.
So why should it matter if a text delays a characterological referent – or, as the case may
be, represents a knock without a person knocking? The significance of Austen’s referential
contrivances is rooted in their capacity to shape the ontological construction, and thus the
narrative development, of her fiction. In The Literary Work of Art, philosopher Roman Ingarden
argues that literary works construct their own ontologies sentence by sentence: “in terms of
constitution the stratum of sentences plays the central role in the literary work.”
82
For Ingarden,
moreover, the epistemological primacy of the sentence as a unit of meaning is a natural feature
of how readers consume literature: “What we see first, what we must fully utilize in both its
content and its form if we are to attain the whole work, are the individual sentences. Moreover,
these cannot be given to us all at once; on the contrary, we must become acquainted with them
and understand them in sequence.”
83
From this perspective, we can understand each sentence of a
work of literature to be a distinct ontological building block, such that the accumulation of
individual sentences amounts to the piece-by-piece construction of a narrative’s fictional world.
Austen’s use of unstable references, I would suggest, is an exception that proves this rule.
Consider, for instance, how many sentences pass in Love and Freindship before Laura and her

82
Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973),
190; emphasis original.

83
Ibid., 147; emphasis original.
64
parents are confident that there is really a person knocking at the door. Her father’s being only
“partially convinced” is suggestive of the ontological tension of the moment: her narrator
attempts to construct a scene wherein she will introduce a central new character, yet Austen’s
persistent use of unstable references question whether there is even a new character to introduce.
In the terms of Ingarden’s model, then, a vacant or otherwise imprecise reference is an
incomplete step – or, as it were, an unstable building block – in a novel’s ontological
construction. As we learn from the fifth letter of Love and Freindship, this mode of reference
allows fictional discourse to continue even in the temporary absence of, or some pertinent details
about, a given referent. And like the phantom knock on the door, an unstable reference is an
incomplete ontological step that tends to draw attention to its own incompleteness.
* * *
The courtship plot is a genre that is preoccupied with vacancies; simply, courtship begins
with a vacancy and marriage fills one. Throughout her career, Austen finds various ways to
involve her characters in the referential vacancies that drive their plots. Consider Marianne
Dashwood, who – as the title of Sense and Sensibility implies – is quickly cast as the excessively
sentimental counterpart to her more pragmatic sister, Elinor. In Marianne’s first lines of dialogue
in the novel, Austen signals the girl’s romantic sensibility through her penchant for referential
fictions. In the novel’s third chapter, Marianne refers to two men who, in one way or another, do
not exist. First, when she and her mother reflect on the suitability of Edward Ferrars as a match
for Elinor, Marianne ventures:
“Edward is very amiable, and I love him tenderly. But yet – he is not the kind of young
man – there is something wanting – his figure is not striking; it has none of that grace
which I should expect in the man who could seriously attach my sister. His eyes want all
that spirit, that fire, which at once announce virtue and intelligence.”
84

84
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Barnes & Noble Classics: New York, 2004), 15.
65

In asserting that there is “something wanting” in Edward as a potential match for her sister,
Marianne articulates his defects by imagining another, more suitable man. What is crucial to
Austen’s referential machinations here is that in order to make this comparison, Marianne must
refer to a hypothetical man who (at least as of yet) does not exist in the diegetic world of the
novel: “the man who,” so she believes, “could seriously attach my sister.” How is it that Sense
and Sensibility can conceive of a character without providing him? Or, how might we distinguish
between a description of a tangible character (an Edward) and a description of a hypothetical one
(a more desirable man)?
To this end, I want to return to Keith Donnellan. In his essay “Reference and Definite
Descriptions,” Donnellan questions what Gareth Evans has described as “[Bertrand] Russell’s
Principle” of definite description: the notion that “someone who was in a position to think of an
object must have a discriminating conception of that object – a conception which would enable
the subject to distinguish that object from all other things.”
85
In other words, in order to describe
and, by extension, refer to something, one must have a specific understanding of what makes that
object unique. Arguing against this principle, Donnellan proposes a distinction between two
types of definite descriptions: referential and attributive. A referential definite description, he
argues, refers to a readily available referent, while an attributive definite description does not
necessitate the availability of a particular referent, but rather attributes a characteristic to
whomever or whatever might fit that description.
86
For example, Donnellan explains, in a murder
trial where the defendant’s guilt is uncertain, to say “the defendant” would be a definite

85
Evans, 65; emphasis original. Evans infers this principle from Russell’s “On Denoting.”

86
Keith Donnellan, “Reference and Definite Descriptions,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 75,
No. 3 (Jul., 1966), pp. 281-304, 285.
66
description because it refers to a particular individual sitting before the court, whereas “the
murderer” would be an attributive description because it refers to whomever committed the
crime, regardless of whether or not it is the defendant.
87
Thus, Donnellan argues, a speaker does
not need to describe a person accurately in order to intelligibly refer to them and – stranger yet –
one can even imagine a person by attribution without thinking of any particular individual. Such
an act of attributive description is itself a form of reference insofar as it theorizes a referent even
if one is not readily available.
In Sense and Sensibility, attributive reference allows Marianne to imagine an alternative
version of Elinor’s courtship plot through a referential vacancy. Her reference to “the man who
could seriously attach my sister” attributes (in contrast to Edward) the characteristics of “that
spirit, that fire, which at once announce virtue and intelligence” to a hypothetical suitor for
Elinor despite the fact that neither she nor Austen’s reader can attach that description to any
available referent. By referring to no one – or, so she hopes, no one yet – Marianne’s attributive
reference asserts a space in Austen’s discourse for some ideal referent to fill. The referential
fiction of this superior suitor thus distills the founding question of Elinor’s courtship plot: is
Edward really the right man?
Marianne’s second vacant reference is less hopeful. As she reflects on what she deems an
uninspired reading of Cowper by Edward, Marianne moves to contemplate her own prospects:
“Mamma, the more I know of the world the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man
whom I can really love. I require so much! He must have all Edward’s virtues, and his person
and manners must ornament his goodness with every possible charm” (15). In this moment,
Marianne refers to a man whose existence she doubts. She again imagines a man in relation to

87
Ibid., 286.
67
Edward, and attributes to him “all Edward’s virtues” as well as an “ornament[al]… charm” of
“person and manners” that her available referent lacks, but laments that she will probably never
find him. Here, we can sense the novel’s ambivalence towards Marianne’s sensibilities: she
fantasizes about an ideal suitor for herself while conceding that the reference to “a man whom
[she] can really love” will most likely prove an empty one. While it might seem easy to dismiss
her romantic imaginings, however, referring to people before they exist – or even to people who
will never exist – is a crucial technique in Austen’s fiction. For Marianne, like (as I will suggest
later) Emma Woodhouse, such adventures in reference are suggestive of, paradoxically, both her
naïve foolishness and a preternatural sensitivity to the linguistic conventions of the novel. When
she speaks of her and her sister’s prospects, Marianne’s fanciful references reflect an implicit
understanding of the capacity of vacant references to incite and shape courtship plots.
Austen makes the stakes of such vacancies even clearer in her next novel. Pride and
Prejudice begins not only with an ostensible “truth” that readily appears to be no truth at all, but
with a conspicuously vacant reference:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good
fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first
entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding
families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their
daughters.
88

Critics have typically approached this problem as one of perspective, such that the novel’s
opening proposition reflects not a universal law but a subjective opinion, presumably that of Mrs.
Bennet. Yet, beyond the question of “universal truth” (or even of subjective belief) Austen’s first
sentence presents us with a generic character description that does not appear to describe anyone

88
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1.
68
in particular – a reference with no clear referent. And the next sentence (despite allowing us to
imagine how such a character might find his way in this fictional world) likewise refrains from
connecting this generic description to a specific individual. Although critics have often figured
free indirect discourse as a conflation of narrator and character, attending to the tenuous
referential status of these lines reveals a strange severing of description and character, of
reference and referent. One might begin, perhaps like Mrs. Bennet herself, to want for “such a
man” on whom to affix Austen’s wayward reference – but so early in the novel, there are no such
men available. While we can perhaps imagine one, that is, we have no evidence as yet that he is
at the door.
With such an unstable opening, how might we proceed?
“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that
Netherfield Park is let at last?”
Mr. Bennet replied that he had not…
“Do you not want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.
This was invitation enough.
“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a
young man of large fortune from the north of England…
“What is his name?”
“Bingley” (Ibid.).

Upon noticing that Austen begins the novel by describing “such a man” with no immediately
clear referent, we might then consider the indirect manner in which she introduces the character
whose worldview dominates her opening paragraphs, Mrs Bennet, as she opens the novel’s
dialogue: “’My dear Mr. Bennet,’ said his lady to him one day.” Here, Austen provides a
similarly generic reference – this time in the form of a kind term, a “lady” – but does allow her
reader to infer that the lady of Mr. Bennet must be Mrs. Bennet, and hence to understand it as
referring to a particular character. Nonetheless, I would suggest, the necessity of our making this
inference, an extra cognitive step that might easily be avoided with a more direct choice of
69
speech tag, further stresses the discursive distance between description and character. For, as
Adam Smith’s theory of linguistic development emphasizes, describing and conceiving of one
referent in relation to another requires a more complex form of abstraction than fixing a
reference in isolation. Within only a few short paragraphs, then, Austen has done much to
unsettle the referential relationship between character descriptions and the characters they may or
may not describe.
The opening sentences of Pride and Prejudice are thus marked by a sustained evasion of
referential connections. To the extent that, as Ingarden’s model suggests, each new sentence of a
text can play a distinct role in a text’s ontological makeup, this evasion disrupts the novel’s
ontological construction in favor of dramatizing the very lack of a particular, discernable
referent. Mrs. Bennet does introduce a young single man, Bingley, who having just obtained
Netherfield Park, might be a suitable referent for the novel’s opening exchange. However, as the
narrator’s mocking suggestion in the novel’s second sentence, “However little known the
feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood,” makes clear (and
Mr. Bennet will point out a few lines later), we have no way of knowing whether he is in fact
such a man “in want of a wife.” Rather, the novel’s first chapter leaves us in suspense as to
whether its opening sentence refers to anyone at all. From the beginning, Austen’s discourse is
engaged in what would seem two contradictory processes: her use of free indirect discourse
allows the novel to continuously produce character descriptions without clear referents, yet the
novel conspicuously dramatizes her characters’ efforts to locate the subjects they imagine. In
order to marry off her daughters, then, Mrs. Bennet must contend not only with other characters
who may not behave as she might want them to, but with the fickle phenomenon of character
description itself, which threatens to refer to marriageable men more readily than it supplies
70
them. What could it mean, we might ask, for a sentence of literary narration to fail to refer, or,
perhaps, to fail to represent accurately in the act of referring?
Donnellan’s framework offers some guidance to this end. In “Reference and Definite
Descriptions,” he demonstrates that a speaker need not describe a referent correctly in order to
successfully refer to it. For example, he offers, say one were to see a man walking in the distance
and ask “Is the man carrying a walking stick the professor of History?” but the man is actually
carrying an umbrella.
89
Despite the false description, he argues, the listener could still understand
the speaker as referring to a particular man in the distance, and answer the question accordingly.
This argument can help us resolve a key complication in the opening passage of Pride and
Prejudice: in the case that Mrs Bennet’s presumption about Bingley is wrong (it is not, but we
have no way of knowing this yet, and the present chapter does more to question her belief than
affirm it), how is it that she can successfully refer to him? While Mrs Bennet certainly cannot be
credited with having a Russellian “discriminating conception” of Bingley (indeed, they have yet
to meet), Mr Bennet can understand that she is referring to him, and they proceed – for the rest of
the chapter, no less – to have a coherent conversation about him, regardless of whether or not he
intends to marry. Nonetheless, because this conversation can go on without any certain
referential connection between the novel’s opening line and Mr. Bingley, we still conclude the
first chapter in search of a referent for its founding description.
Yet we need not simply read Pride and Prejudice’s opening as Mrs. Bennett’s hasty
reference to Bingley; after all, she hopes to find five such single men with good fortunes by the
novel’s close. Taken on its own, rather, we can read the first sentence as an attributive
description. In this light, it attributes the predicate of “be[ing] in want of a wife” to “a single man

89
Donnellan, “Reference and Definite Descriptions,” 295-296.
71
in possession of a good fortune,” whomever he may be, and the second sentence (having shifted
to the third person narrator) questions that attribution. However, to the extent that we can read
these lines as describing the same “young man of large fortune from the north of England” that
appears in the dialogue immediately following, our initial description of a “single man” begins to
look like a referential description of Bingley in the mind of Mrs Bennet. While this might seem a
contradiction, the formally self-conscious irony of free indirect discourse allows the novel’s
original description to figure in both ways. That is: if we focus on the hyperbolic implications of
“truth universally acknowledged” and “must,” we can read Austen’s first sentence as a
referential description ironically credited to Mrs Bennet, yet if we consider that it nonetheless
posits a want on the part of some as yet unidentified man, we can also read it as an attributive
description. In the case that Mrs Bennet is wrong about Bingley, the predicate still might apply to
someone else.
Indeed, Pride and Prejudice often uses attributive descriptions to mediate conflicts of
characterization as well as relationships between characters. When she discovers that Charlotte
Lucas is engaged to Mr. Collins, Elizabeth struggles to reconcile her fondness for the former
with her detest of the latter:
‘were I persuaded that Charlotte had any regard for him, I should only think worse of her
understanding, than I now do of her heart. My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a conceited,
pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know he is, as well as I do; and you must feel,
as well as I do, that the woman who marries him, cannot have a proper way of thinking.
You shall not defend her, though it is Charlotte Lucas’ (105).

Where Donnellan’s examples illustrate how attributive description allows speakers to refer to
people whom (for one reason or another) they cannot identity, Austen’s heroine uses an
attributive description here, “the woman who marries him,” as if “the woman” might be someone
else entirely, even though we know her to be Charlotte. It is only after Elizabeth adds that such
72
an abstraction “cannot have a proper way of thinking” that she identifies the woman who would
marry the “conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man”: “it is Charlotte Lucas.” This
convolution of reference allows Elizabeth to denounce the act of marrying a man like Mr. Collins
in a descriptive mode that keeps her best friend at arm’s length; rather that blaming Charlotte for
what she believes to be a pragmatic concession, she criticizes “the woman” who would accept
Mr. Collins, and laments that such a description has come to refer to her friend. In this manner,
Austen’s use of attributive reference allows the novel – and in this case, her protagonist – to
separate characteristic from character.
* * *
In Austen’s fiction, unstable references can often lead to misrecognitions or
misrepresentations of her characters. In the fourth chapter of Sense and Sensibility’s second
volume, she stages something of a reprisal of Love and Freindship’s prophetic knock on the
door. When the Dashwood sisters arrive in London with Mrs. Jennings, Marianne eagerly
anticipates a visit from John Willoughby:
already had Marianne been disappointed more than once by a rap at a neighboring door,
when a loud one was suddenly heard which could not be mistaken for one at any other
house. Elinor felt secure of its announcing Willoughby’s approach, and Marianne,
starting up, moved towards the door… this could not be bourne many seconds; she
opened the door, advanced a few steps towards the stairs; and after listening half a
minute, returned into the room in all the agitation which a conviction of having heard him
would naturally produce: in the ecstasy of her feelings at that instant she could not help
exclaiming, “Oh, Elinor, it is Willoughby, indeed it is!” and seemed almost ready to
throw herself into his arms, when Colonel Brandon appeared.
It was too great a shock to be bourne with calmness; and she immediately left the
room (131-132).

Although this scene is without the farcical dialogue of the door-knocking scene in Love and
Freindship, it shares several features with its predecessor, including a conspicuously slow pace.
Austen’s narration painstakingly details every moment between the knock “which could not be
73
mistaken” and the revelation of the person who inflicts it, from Marianne’s “starting… towards
the door” to her “few steps towards the stairs” and “listening half a minute.” That Austen’s
narrator notes that this suspense “could not be bourne many seconds” ironically highlights her
withholding of the knocker’s identity. Finally, as with the appearance of Lindsay in Love and
Freindship, the man who knocks in this scene is indeed Marianne’s future husband, Colonel
Brandon. Yet where in Love and Freindship Laura and her family can barely agree that the
sound is indeed a knock (let alone presume an identity of the knocker), Marianne misidentifies
the source of the knock and refers to him incorrectly: “Oh, Elinor, it is Willoughby, indeed it is!”
If the Austenian courtship plot hinges on a search for the correct referent, the knock on
the door suggests that the fateful referent has nearly arrived; he is waiting, literally it so happens,
just outside the door. In the both scenes, however, the heroine somehow lacks the means or the
wisdom to refer to him. It is easy to see how this sort of referential delay can allow a character of
Marianne’s sensibility to indulge her romantic imagination regardless of who is really at the
door. As her seizing upon the knock suggests, what Marianne understood in the beginning of the
novel as a reference to no one (“I shall never see a man whom I can really love”) has become a
vacancy that might be filled by someone; it is her nearly fatal flaw that, in moments like this one,
she endeavors to select her referent prematurely. Just as, after much ado, Austen slowly reveals
Colonel Brandon to be the cause of the knock in this scene, he will emerge as Marianne’s
rightful suitor by the conclusion of the novel (even though, at present, she receives him as a
terrible disappointment). At the close of the present chapter though, she persists in waiting for
the knock of the wrong man, Willoughby: “She sometimes endeavoured for a few minutes to
read; but… she returned to the more interesting employment of walking backwards and forwards
74
across the room, pausing for a moment whenever she came to the window, in hopes of
distinguishing the long-expected rap” (135).
But Austen does not allow Marianne to continue waiting for Willoughby much longer.
For several chapters thereafter, as if to remind her (and the reader) of her misidentification of the
man at the door, the novel will often reintroduce Brandon with the prophetic knock. In the next
chapter, for example, as Marianne and Elinor finish writing their letters, another knock: “a rap
foretold a visitor, and Colonel Brandon was announced” (141). And a few chapters later after the
revelation of Willoughby’s engagement to Miss. Grey, an ailing Marianne is “startled by a rap at
the door” (166). When Elinor, explaining that she thought they were “safe” from visitors, asks
“’Who can this be?”’, Marianne looks out and now identifies the referent with a marked
reluctance: “‘It is Colonel Brandon!’ said she, with vexation. ‘We are never safe from him!’”
(Ibid.; emphasis original). At times it seems, the courtship plot’s correct referent lingers in
Austen’s fiction even when her characters stubbornly deny its presence.
In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Collins’s pursuit of Elizabeth leads to less innocent forms of
referential misrepresentation. The prospect of a romantic mismatch, as with Marianne and
Willoughby, brings forth potential linguistic mismatches of word and meaning, reference and
referent, and character description and character. In the case of Mr. Collins, the danger of
linguistic rupture is exacerbated further by social constraints in the rhetoric of courtship. When
Elizabeth resolutely denies his proposal, he assumes that she actually means to accept him, but
feigns refusal in accordance to “the established custom of [her] sex to reject a man on first
application.” In exasperation, she protests:
‘If what I have hitherto said can appear to you in the form of encouragement, I know not
how to express my refusal in such a way as may convince you of its being one.’
‘You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your refusal of my
addresses is merely words of course’ (83).
75

So to Mr. Collins, Elizabeth’s words fail to signify anything. While she has now made multiple
attempts to convince him of her seriousness, the suggestion that her “refusal of [his]] addresses is
merely words of course” betrays the negating force of his reasoning. In this, the plural “words”
highlights Elizabeth’s predicament: she finds that there is neither the right word nor enough
words to dissuade her suitor – no linguistic expression is sufficient. Beneath the farcical veneer
of Mr. Collins, I believe, we can begin to discern a sense of Richardsonian violence – a latent
threat that, like the tragic Clarissa Harlowe, our heroine’s command of language will fall on deaf
ears, and she will be left unable to resist the wrong man.
In the next chapter, Austen confirms this danger through a return to free indirect
discourse as Mr. Collins reflects on his proposal:
Mr. Collins was not left long to the silent contemplation of his successful love; for Mrs.
Bennet… no sooner saw Elizabeth open the door and with quick step pass her towards
the staircase, then she entered the breakfast-room, and congratulated both him and
herself… Mr. Collins received and returned these felicitations with equal pleasure, and
then proceeded to relate the particulars of their interview, with the result of which he
trusted he had every reason to be satisfied, since the refusal which his cousin had
steadfastly given him would naturally flow from her bashful modesty and the genuine
delicacy of her character (84).

This meeting of Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet is predicated on complimentary misunderstandings:
the former’s belief that Elizabeth’s “no” was indeed a “yes,” and the latter’s belief that her
daughter could not possibly have refused the proposal. Having apparently misinterpreted her
words as being “merely words,” Mr Collins appears steadfast in his belief that Elizabeth would
be such a woman to feign a refusal, and does not hesitate to receive Mrs. Bennet in celebration of
his assumed success. Yet while Austen opens this passage with an ironic nod to his folly – “Mr.
Collins was not left long to the silent contemplation of this successful love” – the passage arrives
at a moment of free indirect discourse to confirm Mr. Collins’s misunderstanding through a clear
76
misrepresentation of Elizabeth’s position: “the refusal which his cousin had steadfastly given
him would naturally flow from her bashful modesty and the genuine delicacy of her character.”
This reference to his cousin is jarring – and narratively threatening – precisely because it
imagines a character who is decidedly not our protagonist. The Elizabeth we have come to know,
that is, would not be readily defined by “bashful modesty” or such an exceptional “delicacy of
character.” Had his rationalization of her refusal been relayed in direct or even indirect discourse,
Mr. Collins’s grave misunderstanding of her character might seem a comical or otherwise
innocuous obstacle on the way to a more fitting match for our heroine. Yet in free indirect
discourse, the assumption and elevation of his perspective allows the novel to make references to
her character that are conspicuously false. As a result, Austen’s readers may find themselves
compelled to defend her protagonist against the referential whims of the novel: “No,” we might
object, “that’s not my Lizzie Bennet.” This capacity of free indirect discourse to destabilize
reference, that is, renders Austen’s characters vulnerable to fictional misrepresentation. And
given that, as Donnellan’s argument suggests, such misrepresentation fails to stop the designs of
Mr. Collins or Mrs. Bennet from referring to her, Lizzie turns to her father to help dismantle this
linguistic trap (thankfully, his generosity is more forthcoming than it might be in a Richardson
novel). If we are to see our Lizzie Bennet rightfully married, as Austen’s narrative demands, she
must navigate her way through such potential failures of reference.
If the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice organize Austen’s courtship plot around a
referential problem, the presence of Mr. Collins in the novel shows us how that plot, and even
the veracity of character description at large, might be derailed by wayward references. Alex
Woloch proposes a model for character in the nineteenth century novel that he calls the
“character system,” in which characters must compete against each other for a finite quality of
77
representational space. In this framework, Elizabeth Bennett is the protagonist of Pride and
Prejudice because – and insofar as – she has claimed more narrative attention and thus become
progressively more complex than the minor characters around her.
90
Attending to the novel’s
referential fictions, however, illuminates how Lizzie must also compete for narrative attention
against alternate representations of herself. While minor characters may threaten her primacy in
the narrative, that is, misrepresenting references may threaten to erase character traits that might
otherwise seem inalienable. In order for Austen to bring the courtship plot to its conclusion, the
novel must represent her characters in their truest forms. It is unsurprising, then, that as the novel
moves closer to the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy – a union that is only possible when
Austen’s characters finally understand each other – we can see a sharp decline in both free
indirect discourse and attributive reference. The success of Austen’s courtship plot, it seems,
depends on finding not only the right man, but the right marriage of reference and character.
While Austen organizes the courtship plot of Pride and Prejudice as a referential
problem, Emma explores how reference can be entangled with plotting to such an extent that one
who misreads reference can fabricate (or, by similar means, overlook) entire plots. From the
beginning of the novel, after all, reference is at the forefront of its eponymous heroine’s errors in
judgment. When Mr Elton is courting Emma, he presents her (in the company of Harriet) with a
charade – itself a ritual that will require her to decipher vague linguistic puzzles. Throughout the
scene, however, Emma interprets the charade and all of Elton’s conduct as if he is courting
Harriet: “The speech was more to Emma than Harriet, which Emma could understand. There was
deep consciousness about him, and he found it easier to meet her eye than her friend’s” (69).

90
Woloch, 47.

78
Here, Emma begins to interpret signs of Elton’s interest in her as evidence of his interest in her
friend. As a result of Austen’s shift to free indirect discourse in the second sentence, moreover,
the discourse privileges an alternate view of the suitor’s character; the Elton Emma imagines is
bashful in his addresses, too self-conscious to look directly at his object, while in reality this is
far from the case. The ending couplet of the charade might seem a more direct reference to
Emma: “Thy ready wit the word will soon supply, /May its approval beam in that soft eye!”
Nonetheless, she again weaves this suggestion into her narrative of his courtship of Harriet,
reflecting: “’Humph – Harriet’s ready wit! All the better. A man must be very much in love
indeed, to describe her so’” (70). This moment of indirect discourse illuminates an additional
layer of referential distortion in Emma’s thoughts. She is evidently aware that if it is referring to
Harriet, the description “thy ready wit” is a generous representation (at best), yet still assumes
the lines do refer to her. And in a further touch of irony, this misattribution leads Emma to
conclude that Elton is “very much in love, indeed, to describe her so” – drawing attention
precisely to the clue she could not decipher. To Emma’s credit, she does subsequently figure out
some portions of the charade, explaining to Harriet that the first two couplets signify “court” and
“ship.” A moment later, however, she reads the line “woman, lovely woman, reigns alone,” and
insists: “’A very proper compliment! – and then follows the application, which I think, my dear
Harriet, you cannot find much difficulty in comprehending. Read it in comfort to yourself. There
can be no doubt of its being written for you and to you’” (71). Thus she concludes by explaining
that a most generic description – “lovely woman” – must refer to Harriet in particular.
This episode is emblematic of Emma’s illusions and, at the same time, her narratorial
power. I speak of her as having some degree of narrative agency not only because of her
substantial allowance of free indirect discourse, but because she is a heroine who is always
79
plotting, and weaving narratives out of her experiences. In this moment, much like in Northanger
Abbey, Austen mocks her heroine’s capacity to distort the evidence before her into the story she
wants to tell (crucially, though, Catherine Morland has no Harriet Smith to believe her). Yet to
see the comedy in this scene as entirely at Emma’s expense would be to overlook what Austen’s
heroine does get right about language and, indeed, courtship plots. For when Emma supposes
(mistakenly as she does) that Elton’s charade suggests a rose-colored view of Harriet, we learn
that she already understands one of the lessons of Pride and Prejudice: essentially, and as Daniel
Wright’s argument in Bad Logic might suggest, that love makes people refer in crazy ways.
Emma’s reaction to the charade plainly betrays her folly – and assures us of more mistakes to
come – while simultaneously showcasing her awareness of the referential distortions that tend to
come with courtship in Austen’s fiction. Thus the novel’s comic irony meets its serious interest
in referential fiction: Emma encounters reference as malleable, and capable of misleading or
misrepresenting, even at the moment when she appears most hopelessly blind to the
misunderstandings she propagates. It is telling, furthermore, that when Mr Elton later makes his
intentions plain, Emma assumes he has made a referential error: “Mr. Elton, the lover of Harriet,
was professing himself her lover. She tried to stop him; but vainly; he would go on… She felt
that half this folly must be drunkenness, and therefore could hope that it might belong only to the
passing hour” (122-123; emphasis original). While we have no evidence that Elton has actually
“profess[ed]” himself to be anything, Emma responds to his addresses through free indirect
discourse as if he has referred to himself incorrectly – as “her lover” rather than “the lover of
Harriet.” Her understanding and her misunderstanding alike are filtered through the malleability
of reference.
* * *
80
There are myriad possibilities between a vacant reference and an overt misrepresentation.
And often, as Austen’s novels and their characters navigate that vast middle ground, they
encounter forms of reference that are abstract, vague, or otherwise obscured. In the first volume
of Sense and Sensibility, Marianne asks Sir John Dashwood to describe Willoughby’s character.
Though Sir John quickly explains that “Upon [his] soul… [he does] not know much about him,”
he does mention that Willoughby danced all through the night last Christmas, and Marianne
responds: “This is what I like; this is what a young man ought to be. Whatever his pursuits, his
eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue” (38). Having
previously constructed an ideal of an acceptable suitor for herself, Marianne now refers to a
particular man who might be one in correspondingly distant, abstract terms. Her declaration of
Willoughby’s virtue is conspicuously impersonal, from her choice of pronoun as she initially
refers to him (“this is what I like”) to the broadly generic quality she goes on to describe:
“Whatever his pursuits…” It is as if she is thinking of the same abstracted referent – “a man
whom I can really love” – both before and after there is a real man available. Given this
abstraction, it ought to come as no surprise that Marianne is persistently unable to discern his
true character.
Yet nowhere is such abstraction a greater threat to understanding than in Emma. Late in
the novel, Mr Knightley worries that he is falling into what by this point is the signature
predicament of its heroine. Having “taken an early dislike to Frank Churchill” (322) and
observed his ostensible courtship of Emma with some skepticism, Knightley begins to surmise
(and correctly) that his interest in her is disingenuous, and notices some suspicious
communications between him and Jane Fairfax. In this moment, he is remarkably close to
uncovering the novel’s covert courtship plot between Frank and Jane – the same one that goes
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undetected by its heroine for so long – but questions his suspicions out of a “wish to escape any
of Emma’s errors of imagination” (Ibid.). Even as he continues to observe signs of the
clandestine courtship, Knightley worries that his suspicions are merely another instance of, like
the line Austen cites from Cowper’s The Task, “myself creating what I saw” (323). Yet, as the
novel continuously prompts us to ask, how has Emma “created what she saw”?
While one can certainly commend Knightley for his perceptive critique of Emma and
self-aware skepticism that he may fall into a similar error, the extent to which he bases his
theories about Frank and Jane on non-verbal interactions (“a look, more than a single look”
(Ibid.)) evinces the disparity between his methods of possible “creation” and our heroine’s
“errors of imagination.” Emma stands out among Austenian heroines for her privileged access –
especially through free indirect discourse – to the novel’s language and discourse. What I am
suggesting here is that Emma’s characteristic errors throughout the novel hinge, in particular, on
misinterpretations and misuses of reference. It is no coincidence, moreover, that the long-
undetected love plot of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax provides the occasion for Knightley’s
reflections.
In the third volume of the novel, when Emma discovers that Harriet is in love with
Knightley, this revelation doubles as a retroactive revelation of a referential misunderstanding.
As Emma discovers that her friend was never in love with Frank Churchill as she believed, the
two realize that they previously mistook each other’s references following Harriet’s encounter
with the gypsies:
“Harriet, I will not affect to be in doubt of your meaning. Your resolution, or
rather your expectation of never marrying, results from an idea that the person whom you
might prefer, would be too greatly your superior in situation to think of you. Is not it so?”
“Oh! Miss Woodhouse, believe me I have not the presumption to suppose… But
it is a pleasure to me to admire him at a distance – and to think of his infinite superiority
to all the rest of the world”…
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“I am not al all surprised at you, Harriet. The service he rendered you was enough
to warm your heart.”
“Service! oh! it was such an inexpressible obligation! – The very recollection of
it, and all that I felt at the time – when I saw him coming – his noble look – and my
wretchedness before. Such a change! In one moment such a change! From perfect misery
to perfect happiness” (320).

Here again, Emma’s perceptiveness belies her errors of reference. After Harriet’s declaration that
she will never marry, Emma correctly surmises that she is not so resolved because she doesn’t
want to marry anyone, but because she is in love with a man ”too greatly [her] superior in
situation” to be a realistic prospect. Yet what both characters do not realize in the moment of this
conversation is that Harriet is referring to Knightley’s volunteering himself to dance with her at
the Westons’ ball, while Emma is referring to Churchill’s rescuing her from the gypsies.
Moreover, the order of events here makes it easy for Austen’s readers to share Emma’s
misinterpretation. Coming, as it does, as a capstone to the gypsy episode, we are left to infer
(quite reasonably) that the heartwarming “service” – the “inexpressible obligation!” – in this
exchange is indeed Churchill’s heroic act. And unlike in, for instance, Emma’s parsing of Elton’s
charade, Austen provides no obvious hints to suggest her heroine may be wrong.
Our inclination to share in Emma’s interpretation is one reason this moment stands out
amongst her numerous misunderstandings. Another reason is the scene’s relative absence of free
indirect discourse, which many critics have linked to our susceptibility to – at times – fall for her
errors. As Rachel Provenzano Oberman has observed: “Emma’s extended and frequent narrated
monologues set the reader up to make some of the same mistakes that Emma does.”
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Yet while
(as I have suggested here) free indirect discourse is often central to this phenomenon, this
exchange between Emma and Harriet reveals how reference can also work independently of free

91
Rachel Provenzano Oberman, “Fused Voices: Narrated Monologue in Jane Austen’s Emma,”
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 64, No. 1 (June 2009): 1-15, 10.
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indirect discourse to facilitate the misunderstandings of characters and readers alike. Where
elsewhere, mistakes of reference might be signaled by plainly inaccurate descriptions, this is a
conversation that turns around references that are vague enough to apply to more than one man.
Having no more precise descriptions of this man than his socioeconomic superiority or “noble
look,” one could readily understand the two friends as referring to either Knightley or Churchill.
And as their references continuously fail to refer precisely or intelligibly, they are able to sustain
a conversation while simultaneously referring to different people (an impressive feat indeed).
This is also a rare occasion in which Emma and Harriet are equally complicit in a
misunderstanding pertaining to the latter’s romantic prospects. Thus, we are inclined to succumb
to Emma’s misunderstanding not because free indirect discourse gives her perspective a false
sense of narratorial authority, but because we too lack the knowledge that the gypsies are a
structural red herring and Austen’s use of reference allows us to fall for it. Like our heroine, we
will have to wait to discover that Churchill’s heroic intervention in fact had no bearing on
Harriet’s preference. The scene ends with Emma suggesting, in an ironic effort to atone for her
error with Mr Elton, “Henceforward I know nothing of the matter. Let no name ever pass our
lips. We were wrong before; we will be cautious now” (321), as if more precise references could
interfere with Harriet’s prospects. But this agreement only solidifies their continued
misunderstanding, as Harriet will later reflect: “’I know we agreed never to name him – but
considering how infinitely superior he is to every body else, I should not have thought it possible
that I could be supposed to mean any other person” (380). For the time being, however, it is their
repeated recourse to vague references in this conversation that allows Austen’s characters to
entertain their own wildly different courtship narratives.
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Furthermore, as the opening of Pride and Prejudice suggests, part of the trouble with
vague references is that they threaten to refer definitively to no one at all. Shortly before the
revelation of their own romantic history, Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax discuss Mr Elton’s
marriage. When they discuss the perils of a “hasty and imprudent attachment” and Jane
knowingly reflects on how such an engagement may lead to lasting “oppression,” Frank deflects
the issue to Emma:
“whenever I marry, I hope somebody will choose my wife for me. Will you? (turning to
Emma.) Will you choose a wife for me? I am sure I should like any body fixed on by
you… Find somebody for me… Adopt her, educate her.”
“And make her like myself.”
“By all means, if you can.”
“Very well. I undertake the commission. You shall have a charming wife.”
“She must be very lively, and have hazle eyes… I shall go abroad for a couple of
years – and when I return, I shall come to you for my wife. Remember.”
Emma was no longer in danger of forgetting… Would not Harriet be the very
creature described? –Hazle eyes excepted, two years more might make her all that he
wished. He might even have Harriet in his thoughts at the moment; who could say?
Referring the education to her seemed to imply it (349-350).

Where to Jane, Frank’s request is a facetious denial of his responsibility to her, the tone-deaf
Emma takes it as a serious opportunity to finally set him up with Harriet. The result is, in some
respects, a reenactment of her mishandling of Elton’s charade. Frank, like Elton earlier, has
outwardly expressed interest in Emma, and his description seems to refer coyly to her –
someone, as he owns, “like [her]self,” who is “very lively” with “hazle eyes.” And one again,
Emma instead fixates upon what she falsely understands to be an opportunity to arrange a
marriage for Harriet, and blatantly disregards evidence to the contrary. As the shift to free
indirect discourse reveals, Emma acknowledges that her guidance could never turn Harriet’s eyes
hazel, yet nevertheless persists in believing that “two years more might make her all that he
wished.” That Emma simultaneously believes that Harriet is already the referent of Frank’s
charge – “Would not Harriet be the very creature described?” – further betrays her contrivances.
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Where with Elton, Emma had mistaken the referent of his charade, the referential
entanglements of this attempted courtship plot are a bit more complex. As we will soon learn
from the revelation of his engagement to Jane, Frank never intends for Emma to find him a wife
of any sort (and Harriet is not really interested in him either). His references to a possible future
wife are purposefully hollow, and so he readily accepts Emma’s suggestions (“By all means, if
you can”) because he does not believe they are really talking about anyone. Here, we can see
Austen’s plot – and, indeed, the divergent plots of her characters – turning behind what initially
appears a vacant reference, a “somebody” for Emma to find to be Frank’s wife. In his
resentment, though, Frank means to refer to no one (or at least no one he has not already found)
and tolerates the illusion of an apparent reference to Emma because he wrongfully assumes that
she knows his courtship of her was a ruse. Yet for her part, Emma interprets his request for
“somebody” as a vacant reference for which she can mold a referent. Frank Churchill, however,
is no Marianne Dashwood – nor even a Mrs. Bennett. He feigns a reference to an ideal spouse
but never hopes to find her, instead constructing an elaborate abstraction that he hopes will never
give way to a person. It is this dynamic that makes Frank the perfect foil for Emma – the heroine
who plots in the shadows of unstable references – and enables his referential abstractions to
entrap her (even late in the novel when we might expect her to know better) in her own
machinations.
* * *
Conclusion
For Austen, plot happens in the spaces between reference and referent. At times, from the
mysterious knocks on the door in Love and Freindship to the opening of Pride and Prejudice,
the want or deferral of a referent can incite a courtship plot. Elsewhere, referential mistakes or
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misrepresentations can signal an undesirable or otherwise ill-advised courtship plot. In many
cases, furthermore, unstable references allow the author to test or provoke her characters, often
encouraging the reader to judge accordingly. Where structuralist approaches to the novel have
emphasized narrative delay as a means to prolong a coming resolution, I am arguing that
Austen’s use of referential delay is the purview of the courtship plot’s foundational problems.
The work of referential fictions in her novels is less about gradual progress towards a resolution,
that is, than it is about imagining the ontological domain, and producing the driving questions, of
the courtship plot from the outset. What we learn from characters like Marianne Dashwood and
Emma Woodhouse is that to play with reference is – for better or worse – to create plot.
This chapter has explored the relationship between two phenomena relating to Austen’s
use of reference that might seem incongruous at first glance: on one hand, a temporarily
suspended referent has the ontological potential to incite plot and intervene in character
description, and on the other, an unstable reference threatens in various ways to undermine
narrative and character should its referent never appear. Part of what I have suggested here is that
these functions are often mutually constitutive. Where for D.A. Miller, the status of a queer “no
one” narrator is defined by an irrevocable alienation from complex personhood, Austen’s
ventures in character description show us again and again how a reference to no one can become
somebody in particular. In other words, the Austenian courtship plot plays tricks of reference to
mark the possibility that a knock on the door really is just a noise and not a person – or that a
man like Bingley does not fit a certain description – in order to create ontological space for the
real referent to arrive. In matters of referential fiction, creation and negation are not always so far
apart; sometimes, it turns out, no one is an opening for someone.
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The close proximity of these referential functions not only tells us a great deal about
Austen’s style and the ontological craft of her fiction, but also tells us something about how she
fits into the broader nineteenth-century history of literary reference. In the ways that Austen’s
narrators and characters tend to manipulate characterological reference, as well as the wide
variety of results they achieve in doing so, we can see reverberations of the character
experiments of Lyrical Ballads. Yet it is in the capacity of her fiction to conjure something from
the void of a vacant reference that Austen’s work looks forward to the Victorians. Where
Austen’s courtship plots invest in the ontological possibilities of referring to no one, Alfred
Tennyson and Charles Dickens will take up the problem of what it means to refer to dead or
presumed dead figures; this too will yield new forms of referential fictions.

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Chapter 3
Reference as Resurrection in In Memoriam and Our Mutual Friend
The first two chapters of this project focused on how two very different Romantic writers
used the mechanisms of character description to explore the capacities of their genres, and of
fictional language more generally. For both writers, these experiments gave rise to formal
innovations that centered on questions of the ontological construction of literary character.
Wordsworth’s lyric poetry uses reference as a means to speak of the dead as the living (in “We
Are Seven”) or create a semblance of a life that never existed (in “The Thorn”). Austen’s novels
create space for new characters by referring to them before they materialize. We might think of
these two romantic approaches to characterological reference as two sides of the same
ontological coin. One refers to dead characters as if they were alive; the other refers to characters
who do not exist yet as a means to call them into being. Reference, in either case, becomes a
means of characterological projection, conjuring figures that aspire to the diegetic coherence and
stability of more fully formed characters.
This chapter will return to the question of what it means to refer to the dead, and to the
ways in which nineteenth-century writers explore the implications of that problem for fictional
language. As I argued in the first chapter of this project, the act of referring to the dead is
inherently parallel to fictional characterization insofar as both entail the representation of a
person through language in the absence of a living body. Though where Wordsworth engages
with this problem as a way to create a semblance of subjectivity in dead or fictional-fictional
characters, the two mid-century texts I will discuss in this chapter – Alfred Tennyson’s In
Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) and Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1964-1865) – experiment
with the capacities of fictional reference as a longer-term project of linguistic resurrection. While
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they go about these experiments in very different ways, both texts are driven by questions of
what it means to talk about the dead and, in particular, the formal affordances of doing so
through literary language.
In Memoriam was written over a period of nearly two decades following the 1833 death
of Tennyson’s close friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. The poem is engaged centrally and explicitly
in the project of using language (I will discuss many moments in which Tennyson meditates on
the capacities of “words”) to access the dead. At times, as Devin Griffiths suggests, Tennyson
treats Hallam as “an author” of the elegy, “us[ing] In Memoriam to collaborate with his friend
long after he died.”
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Yet while the very length and scale of the elegy displays a continued
investment in the potential of poetic language to access the dead, Tennyson expresses doubt
about the capacity of his verse to reach Hallam in a truly meaningful way. This sustained
ambivalence colors Tennyson’s explorations of literary language and its ontological powers
throughout the poem.
Our Mutual Friend revolves around a protagonist, John Harmon, who is presumed dead
by everyone around him yet lives hidden in plain sight under the fictional-fictional aliases Julius
Handford and (as he is known for much of the novel) John Rokesmith. Dickens begins the
novel’s postscript by commenting on how extensively this unconventional character design
shaped his writing: “When I devised this story, I foresaw the likelihood that a class of readers
and commentators would suppose that I was at great pains to conceal exactly what I was at great
pains to suggest: namely, that Mr. John Harmon was not slain, and that Mr. John Rokesmith was

92
Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 131.

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he.”
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He goes on to note that keeping the secret of Harmon’s identity “for a long time
unsuspected, yet always working itself out… was at once the most interesting and the most
difficult part of my design” (ibid.). Following the revelation of Harmon’s survival to Dickens’s
readers in the climactic chapter “A Solo and A Duet,” the novel revolves around the gradual
reconfiguration of its protagonist from John Rokesmith back to John Harmon.
In addition, there are fundamental differences between these two texts that, I suggest,
allow them to yield distinct yet complementary insights into how various modes of referring to
the dead in literary language can construe character. Firstly, one is an extended elegy in verse,
and the other is a realist novel
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. Secondly – and crucially for this project’s focus on the ontology
of character description – these texts arise out of different relations to historical reality: one
centers around the death of a real person, and one centers around the presumed death of a
fictional character. While I am certainly at risk of stating the obvious in pointing out that Hallam
was indeed a real person, I believe his lived relationship to Tennyson matters a great deal for the
latter’s explorations of poetic language. That In Memoriam is an elegy for a lost loved one offers
us particular insight (more than any other work featured in this project) into the relationship
between how we think about real people and how texts use literary language to construct
fictional characters. While Our Mutual Friend, on the other hand, lacks this kind of real-world
immediacy, Dickens uses the conventions of the novel to engineer a linguistic resurrection of his
protagonist.

93
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Penguin, 1997), 798.

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While I will not be discussing what is specifically “realist” about Our Mutual Friend in this
chapter, I would suggest that of his works, it is one that falls (as he says of Bleak House) on “the
romantic side of familiar things.” See Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 2003), 7.
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However, despite their vastly different generic approaches to the problem of referring to
the dead, this chapter will highlight a surprising parallel in the conclusions of these two texts.
While Tennyson and Dickens take distinct approaches to exploring the malleability of fictional
language through the tools of characterization, they each turn eventually to a similar place to find
some sense of closure: the comparatively rigid legal language of marriage. Though where for
Tennyson, the epithalamion that closes In Memoriam acts as a form of consolation for the
continued failures of poetic language to access the dead completely, for Dickens, it is ultimately
the courtship plot that takes on much of the burden of Our Mutual Friend’s characterological
resurrection of John Harmon.
* * *
Elegy and Fictionality in In Memoriam
Scholars of Tennyson’s In Memoriam have long been preoccupied by the question of
whether the poem is actually about Arthur Henry Hallam in particular.
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Dedicated, as the title
implies, to Tennyson’s close friend Arthur Henry Hallam following his tragic death, “In
Memoriam” is famously tied to his personal experience such that it is often read as an extended,
narrative attempt to make sense of Hallam’s loss. And yet, Tennyson’s poem does much to both
obscure and question the ontological coherence of its assumed referent. Following the initials
“A. H. H.” in the title, Tennyson never mentions the name “Hallam” throughout the poem’s 131
sections. He does use his friend’s Christian name all of four times in the poem, although those
instances are at times intermingled with allusions to Arthurian legend, which obscures the
referent by directing the reference “Arthur” towards mythological abstraction and away from the

95
See Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cabridge: Harvard University
Press, 2013), 346-430.
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particularity of the contemporary Hallam (I will return to this later). And as many critics have
noted, some of the revisions Tennyson made to the poem throughout his life involved
substituting the personal pronouns “he” or “his” to impersonal ones. So, we may ask, to whom or
what does In Memoriam refer?
Rather than attempting to settle the question of whether Tennyson is referring to Hallam
in particular in such moments, this chapter will take this conversation in another direction by
exploring how In Memoriam’s anxieties about the ontological prospect of attempting to refer to a
dead men shape both the poem’s generic form and its engagement with language more broadly.
Tennyson’s own interest in contemporary theories of language has been well-documented, and
scholars including Donald Hair, Erik Gray, and Herbert Tucker have illuminated ways in which
he reflects on those debates throughout In Memoriam.
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But why this poem in particular? Part of
what I want to suggest here is that we cannot account for the poem’s engagement with language
without considering the ontological and representational problems inherent to elegy as a form.
Tennyson’s elegy is not an occasion that allows him to reflect on questions pertaining to the
nature of language and its capacity to capture human character, but rather a form that requires
him to do so. What might it mean, the poem must ask, to refer to someone as they are fading
from memory? In turn, I will read In Memoriam as a confrontation with the ontological and
referential conditions of attempting to capture a lost object in verse.
The notion of resurrection through language is of a piece with the cyclical quality that
many readers have observed in the In Memoriam stanza form. The rhyme scheme, as Devin

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See: Erik Gray, “Polyptoton in In Memoriam: Evolution, Speculation, Elegy,” Studies in
English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 55 No. 4 (Autumn 2015): 841-860; and Michelle Geric,
“Reading Maud’s Remains: Tennyson, Geological Processes, and Paleontological
Reconstructions,” Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 42 No. 1 (2014): 59-79.

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Griffiths suggests, “weaves a comparative impulse… [in which] stanzas continuously fall back,
review, and revise their own understanding.”
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The In Memoriam stanza thus encourages
rethinking and rereading, prompting us to connect the ending of each stanza back to its
beginning. It is a metrical form, that is, which propels the poem forward by constantly looking
back. At times, this sense of return mirrors the structure of the poem’s sections, which often
return to a given idea or motif several stanzas after its first appearance. In its cyclical
construction, we can further understand the stanza form as registering the nonlinear affective
experience of grief.
Yet despite the many features of the In Memoriam stanza, Tennyson expresses some
ambivalence about its formal coherence, particularly with respect to his larger linguistic project,
early on in the poem. As the speaker ventures in section V:
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more. (V.1-12)

This section begins by considering language in the abstract – how the very prospect of “put[ting]
into words” one’s grief might entail a dual-propensity to “half reveal / And half conceal.” Yet it
quickly moves on to a rumination on the “measured” quality of language that evokes the poem’s

97
Griffiths, The Age of Analogy, 129.
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strict stanza form. Even as the speaker laments that grieving through poetic language may
amount to a “sad mechanic exercise,” he suggests it may nonetheless offer some conciliatory
relief to those afflicted by tragedy. The third stanza expands on this possibility, imagining words
wrapping around the speaker like weeds or “coarsest clothes,” yet suggests the relief offered by
language may ultimately prove superficial, as if it addresses a mere “outline” of grief.
The self-consciousness of this section anticipates a certain formal critique of In
Memoriam: that its expression of grief is overly mechanical. Charlotte Brontë, for instance,
explains her skepticism of the “measured” quality of Tennyson’s elegy in a letter to Elizabeth
Gaskell: “Many of the feelings expressed, bear, in their utterance the stamp of Truth, yet if
Arthur Hallam had been somewhat nearer Alfred Tennyson – his brother instead of his friend – I
should have distrusted this rhymed and measured and printed monument of grief.”
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Such a
formally regimented response to grief, from Brontë’s perspective, should only have been
possible had their relationship been relatively distant. She does acknowledge that the years
between Hallam’s passing and the publication of In Memoriam might alter its affective qualities:
“What change the lapse of years may work – I do not know – but it seems to me that bitter
sorrow, while recent, does not flow out in verse.”
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Nonetheless, the underlying judgement of
Brontë’s analysis is clear: for one reason or another, the poem reflects a shallow experience of
grief. Such a critique might find support from Thomas Carlyle, who argues in “Signs of the
Times” that rapid industrialization has resulted in a pervasive mechanization of human culture
and character: “Men are grown mechanical… Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on

98
Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: With a Selection of Letters by Family and
Friends, edited by Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

99
Ibid.

95
mechanism, and are of a mechanical character” – an effect that he argues extends to the linguistic
production of literature and philosophy.
100

Yet insomuch as memorializing a loved one through language may be a “sad mechanic
exercise,” Tennyson’s poem reflects a persistent belief that it is also a productive one. Part of the
experience of reading In Memoriam is, indeed, that it demonstrates extraordinary persistence – a
continual reliance on the formal workings of language through years and years of grieving. The
stanza form plays a crucial role in this effect as, even while the speaker regularly expresses
doubts about the capacities of language, the poem’s metrical coherence remains a constant force,
propelling us forward while circling back. The extent to which Tennyson does express such
doubts, furthermore, raises the stakes of the poem’s driving linguistic experiment: how can one
access the dead in words?
In Memoriam reaches perhaps its clearest triumph in this project in section 95, which is
often read as the poem’s climax. Finding himself alone after a night with friends, the speaker
looks through Hallam’s letters:
A hunger seized my heart; I read
Of that glad year which once had been,
In those fallen leaves which kept their green,
The noble letters of the dead.

And strangely on the silence broke
The silent-speaking words, and strange
Was love’s dumb cry defying change
To test his worth; and strangely spoke

The faith, the vigor, bold to dwell
On doubts that drive the coward back,
And keen thro’ wordy snares to track
Suggestion to her inmost cell. (XCV.21-32)

100
Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times,” in A Carlyle Reader, ed. by G. B. Tennyson (Acton,
MA: Copley, 1999), 37.
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These stanzas cycle through multiple imaginings of language. When Tennyson first evokes
Hallam’s letters, they are like fallen leaves. They are dead things which nonetheless have “kept
their green” – an image that simultaneously evokes both the slowness of their dying and their
potential to become new life. Then words are “silent-speaking,” in which the image of the
speaker reading silently to himself is additionally suggestive of the silence of death, and perhaps
of the possibility that Hallam might in some sense be able to engage in language despite his
death. Moments later, he imagines language as producing “wordy snares” that would overcome
cowardice.
In the next stanza, Tennyson articulates an even more explicit vision of poetic language
as a means of communing with the dead:
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch’d me from the past,
And all at once it seem’d at last
The living soul was flash’d on mine (XCV.33-36)

While the words and lines here refer literally to Hallam’s letters, the stanza also figures as a
metonymic representation of In Memoriam’s larger project. In this stanza, that is, the speaker
articulates what the poem has thus far been doing “word by word, and line by line”: attempting
to access a dead man through language. As many commentators have noted, this stanza also
contains one of Tennyson’s more suggestive revisions to the poem, changing “his living soul” to
“the living soul.” This revision is suggestive of Tennyson’s doubts surrounding both the project
of the poem in broad terms (“line by line”) and its referentiality specifically. The earlier
evocation of Hallam’s letters would have us believe “the dead man” refers directly to him, yet
the impersonal pronoun implies that “the living soul” that flashed on the speaker’s might not
belong to Hallam – or perhaps any singular individual – in particular. Thus, what seems a plain
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reference at the outset of the climactic section 95 seems to move away from Hallam and towards
some allegorical (or otherwise abstract) referent.
From early on in the poem, Tennyson’s interest in language seems plainly aligned with
the speaker’s grief, such as in this stanza from section 16:
What words are these have fallen from me?
Can calm despair and wild unrest
Be tenants of a single breast,
Or sorrow such a changeling be? (XVI.1-4)

In this, his inquiry (“What words are these have fallen from me?”) directly reflects the speaker’s
inner turmoil, his struggle to reconcile disparate emotional responses. Yet consider how those
“fallen” words return in section 58:
In those sad words I took farewell.
Like echoes in sepulchral halls,
As drop by drop the water falls
In vaults and catacombs, they fell;

And, falling, idly broke the peace
Of hearts that beat from day to day,
Half conscious of their dying clay,
And those cold crypts where they shall cease. (LVIII.1-8)

Here, the falling words from earlier in the poem seem slowly to morph into dying words. Their
falling “drop by drop” looks forward to the “word by word, and line by line” progression of
section 95 as the speaker’s words fade into “sepulchral halls,” “vaults and catacombs.” The break
between these two stanzas momentarily suspends the falling words (“they fell”) with a
semicolon, then doubles down to continue the fall: “And, falling.”
As this fall continues into the second stanza, moreover, we can see hints of Tennyson’s
reflections on contemporary theories of linguistic change. The years of In Memoriam’s
composition were a time when, as James Turner has shown, comparative philology was rapidly
gaining visibility in the British cultural imagination. The 1830’s and 1840’s saw the birth of new
98
institutions such as The Philological Society of London (where Tennyson’s friend Richard
Chevenix Trench gave the lectures that led to the founding of the OED), as well as the first
appointments of professors working in the new methods of comparative philology in multiple
British universities.
101
Methodologically, the rise of comparative philology for the Victorians
gave rise to new questions regarding the essential relationship of language to human character.
What connects section 58 of In Memoriam to these new methods is its attention to
linguistic change over time (or what Saussure would later call the “diachronic” dimension of
linguistics). To explore this connection, I want to turn briefly to the German philologist
Friederich von Schlegel, whose work was a subject of continued interest for the Cambridge
Apostles. Schlegel theorized language as a kind of historical record, calling it a “storehouse of
tradition” and the “common memory of the human race.”
102
He argues, furthermore, that this
pattern of change is suggestive of the gradual perfectability of humankind. In comparing its
historical development to a painting (which, he explains, must be conceived in a painter’s mind
prior to its material creation), he posits that language “came forth rather at once and in its totality
out of the full inner and living consciousness of man.”
103
Part of what Schlegel means to suggest
in this analogy is that linguistic change is not a result of human agency or intervention, but is
rather an innate and divinely ordained phenomenon that is essential to human life.
Where for comparative philologists like Schlegel, linguistic development was a sign of
the continued, dynamic progress of humankind, moments like section 58 of Tennyson’s elegy

101
Turner, Philology, 140-148, 251-253.

102
Schlegel, Friedrich, the Philosophy of Life; and Philosophy of Language (London: Henry G.
Bohn, 1847), 407.

103
Ibid., 402.
99
share no such faith in a connection between language and life. In a suggestive essay linking
Tennyson’s understanding of language to contemporary geology, Michelle Geric has recently
observed an alienation of words from ideas in Maud such that “language becomes dynamic and
perpetually mutable in the present.” (49) Through the “fallen” words of In Memoriam, then, the
poet conjures a dark vision of this linguistic “mutab[ility] in the present.” In the “sepulchral
halls,” “vaults and catacombs,” and “cold crypts where [words] shall cease,” we find an image
not of language evolving, but of a kind of philological apocalypse.
* * *
Yet we cannot account for Tennyson’s engagement with contemporary theories of
language and its relationship to human life without attending to the ways in which elegy as a
form mediates the ontological conditions of literary description. In this respect, it is no
coincidence that In Memoriam’s interest in language is often intertwined with its reflections on
memory. In section 95, after all, “the dead man touched” the speaker “from the past” insofar as
the written letters help recall the speaker’s memories. Several stanzas later in this section,
Tennyson returns to memory’s relationship to language:
Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Or, even for intellect to reach
Thro’ memory that which I became (XCV.41-44)
104

Here indeed, the speaker finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish the failings of words from
those of memory. Such a conflation, I argue, is suggestive of the formal “affordances” (to borrow

104
For an extensive reading of the line “In matter-moulded forms of speech,” see Donald Hair,
Tennyson’s Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 7-40.

100
a term from Caroline Levine) of elegy as a genre.
105
The capacities of elegy to represent and
refer, that is to say, are constrained by the fallibility and (in this respect) tragic ephemerality of
human memory. In turn, I suggest, we can understand In Memoriam’s engagement with language
as a mediation of two differing perspectives of the relationship between language and
temporality: one concerns the diachronic questions of linguistic change that drive contemporary
philology, and the other involves a personal reckoning with the limitations and capacities of a
form – elegy – that result from the passing of time.
That Tennyson wrote his elegy over a period of nearly two decades following Hallam’s
death only heightens this referential and epistemological burden. This burden necessarily shapes
the speaker’s efforts to memorialize the lost object in verse, as he laments in section 52:
I cannot love thee as I ought,
For love reflects the thing beloved;
My words are only words, and moved
Upon the topmost froth of thought. (LII.1-4)

As the speaker finds in such moments, words have but limited access – confined to a superficial
“froth of thought” – to a progressively diminishing subject. The tautological repetition of “my
words are only words” emphasizes the limited power of language in this context, as if the
capacities of words fade over time along with the speaker’s memories of the “thing beloved.”
In Section 92, Tennyson considers the project of reconstructing the lost Hallam’s
“likeness”:
If any vision should reveal
Thy likeness, I might count it vain
As but the canker of the brain;
Yea, tho’ it spake and made appeal

To chances where our lots were cast

105
See Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2015).
101
Together in the days behind,
I might but say, I hear a wind
Of memory murmuring the past. (XCII.1-8)

As with many moments of In Memoriam, these stanzas register the fallibility of human memory
– “I might count it vain” – while meditating on its constitutive potential. The reference to the lost
object as “thy likeness” is telling here, as memory constructs something like Hallam (as if it were
alive and in possession of language: “it spake and made appeal”) but crucially distinct from him.
In the second stanza’s evocation of “a wind / Of memory murmuring the past,” Tennyson’s use
of “murmuring” is suggestive of the approximative quality of memory, even as – like the lyric –
memory can call a vision into being. The poem’s persistent separation of references to Hallam’s
“likeness” from the man himself reflect its sense of memorializing as a form of fiction-making.
In a pair of sections midway through the poem, 100 and 101, Tennyson confronts more
directly the impossibility of sustaining his memories of Hallam. In the first, as he describes
wandering through a series of generic landscapes, the speaker reflects:
I climb the hill: from end to end
Of all the landscape underneath
I find no place that does not breathe
Some gracious memory of my friend…

But each has pleased a kindred eye,
And each reflects a kindlier day;
And, leaving these, to pass away,
I think once more he seems to die. (C.1-20)

The use of “breathe” here evokes not only the spiritual sense of an afterlife but also the
ephemerality of a passing memory, recalling the “wind / Of memory murmuring the past” of
Section 92. The speaker experiences each moment of recollection as if it affects a new death:
“once more he seems to die.” He reprises this hill metaphor to conclude the next section: “And
year by year our memory fades/ From all the circle of the hills.” (CI.23-24)
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So if, as moments like these suggest, linguistic representation is limited by and thus
beholden to memory, where does that leave In Memoriam’s project? Tennyson uses this
problem, I argue, to explore the ontological boundaries between historical and fictional
characterization. Philosophical approaches to the ontology of fiction have illuminated ways in
which literature tends to fictionalize historical figures. In Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work
of Art, which argues that fictions construct their own ontologies, he points out that one can
readily “compare objects so represented (e.g., Julius Ceasar in Shakespeare’s play) with
corresponding real objects and demonstrate material differences between them.”
106
In Mimesis as
Make-Believe, Kendall Walton takes this point a step further by arguing that fictional
representations of historical objects ought to be understood as ontically distinct from their real
counterparts: “It is Tom Sawyer-fictional, and true as well, that the Mississippi River runs
alongside the state of Missouri. This point would seem to be too obvious to need emphasis. But it
does.”
107
(In English, we like to say our claims are novel but philosophers like to say their claims
are “obvious.”) In essence, Walton is suggesting that even what might seem a transparently
mimetic representation of something or someone in literary fiction has an ontology that is
independent from its existence in real life. This observation is akin to how a television show that
is set in New York does not take place in real New York, but rather takes place on a set that is
constructed anew (and probably in California) for – and as – a fiction. For Walton, the same is
true, albeit in a less literal sense, for all fictional representations of real things and real people.

106
Ingarden, Roman, The Literary Work of Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973),
18.

107
Walton, Kendall, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 42.
103
While this might also seem an obvious point, it has the potential to challenge many
longstanding literary crucial approaches to (among other things) characterological reference and,
in a broader sense, the ontological relationship between fiction and historical reality. Of course, I
don’t think Tennyson would have conceived of literary ontology in quite these terms, but I do
believe it’s useful to think about how this question of the ontic status of literary representations
of real people does and does not account for the ambiguous presence of Arthur Henry Hallam in
In Memoriam. If we think of the poem’s lost object, as Ingarden and Walton suggest, as a
linguistic entity that is ontically independent from Hallam, the project of memorializing him in
verse beings to look like an oblique form of characterization. On the other hand, where literary
critics have often approached this question through characters based on widely recognized
historical figures (perhaps a Napoleon or St Theresa), the act of referring to a lost loved one in
elegy differs in a fundamental way from that of referring to a distant historical figure because it
depends on personal recollection, which (as opposed to scholarly knowledge) inevitably
diminishes over time. As a result, referring to the dead may inevitably cross into the realm of
fiction-making; or, in other words, In Memoriam fictionalizes insofar as it struggles to
remember. It is not that Tennyson is ambivalent about whether or not he wants to refer to
Hallam, but that In Memoriam records a sustained reckoning with the difficulty of doing so in
the shadows of ever-fading memories.
* * *
This fictionalizing effect often finds expression, furthermore, in the poem’s tendency to
imagine alternate versions of both Tennyson and Hallam. This tendency results in a proliferation
of fictionalized characters that mark the limited capacities of literary language to capture
historical personhood while exploring the productive potential of literary reference. We can see
104
this pattern start to take shape in Tennyson’s allusions to King Arthur, which obscure the referent
of “Arthur” in a way that pushes back against attempts to characterize Hallam as a particular
subject. Early in In Memoriam, for instance, Tennyson evokes the ship that carried the King’s
body in speaking of “my lost Arthur”: “Fair ship, that from the Italian shore / Sailest the placid
ocean-plains / With my lost Arthur’s loved remains, / Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er”
(IX.1-4). The significance of King Arthur to Hallam goes beyond their simply sharing a first
name. That King Arthur is a historical figure who has been reconstrued many times over in
legend and literature, rather, is suggestive of the way the poem fictionalizes Tennyson’s Arthur.
King Arthur was (at risk of stating the obvious) a real person – yet he is also a clear example of
one whose story cannot be separated from mythological narrative. The extent to which the
historical King Arthur is inseparably colored by the fictionalized one is of a piece with
Tennyson’s ambivalent and often ambiguous references to his lost friend. National memory, in
this sense, becomes an allegory for personal loss, as if to suggest that memorializing a lost loved
one may not be so far from historical myth; part of his grieving is a call to reflect on that
resemblance.
Where such evocations of King Arthur question the coherence of Hallam as an individual
subject, the poem elsewhere takes this effect a step further by means of epic simile. Tennyson
uses epic simile to imagine Hallam and himself as if they were other people, often rendered as
generic characters. In section 60, the speaker imagines himself in a conventional courtship plot,
as a girl desiring a suitor above her station: “He past, a soul of nobler tone; / My spirit loved and
loves him yet, / Like some poor girl whose heart is set / On one whose rank exceeds her own”
(LX.1-4). Moments later in section 64, he imagines Hallam as an old man looking back on his
life: “Dost thou look back on what hath been, / As some divinely gifted man, / Whose life in low
105
estate began / And on a simple village green” (LXIV.1-4). Both of these similes continue on and
consume their respective sections, with the later returning explicitly to a question of memory:
“Or in the furrow musing stands: / ‘Does my old friend remember me?’” (LXIV.27-28). If In
Memoriam is shaped by an exploration of what it means to refer to someone as they fade from
memory, these sections offer a momentary reprieve from Tennyson’s linguistic impasse, as if it
might be easier to grieve Hallam by referring generically to someone else. Each one expresses an
aspect of Tennyson’s longing for the lost object, who is inaccessible like a socially problematic
love-match or a forgotten memory in old age. Yet at the same time, each simile contributes to the
poem’s fictionalization of Hallam, adding to a proliferation of alternate characterizations.
Shortly after the climactic section 95, Tennyson’s elegy returns to the language of
courtship in section 97:
My love has talk’d with rocks and trees;
He finds on misty mountain-ground
His own vast shadow glory-crown’d;
He sees himself in all he sees.

Two partners of a married life –
I look’d on these and thought of thee
In vastness and in mystery,
And of my spirit as of a wife.

These two – they dwelt with eye on eye,
Their hearts of old have beat in tune,
Their meetings made December June,
Their every parting was to die. (XCVII.1-12)

Thus Tennyson construes his relationship with Hallam in a way that is at once more realized and
more abstract than the unlikely courtship plot of section 60. Observing “partners of a married
life,” he imagines himself in a sort of spiritual marriage – “my spirit as of a wife” – to the lost
object. The repetition of “vastness” here, moving from the “vast shadow” of Hallam in the first
stanza to the “vastness” of the speaker’s imagining in the second, encapsulates the poem’s
106
tendency to progress from description to figuration, and memory to metaphor. In addition to
suggesting something more than platonic in Tennyson’s love for his lost friend (as many readers
have observed), such moments mark the capacity of poetic language to reconceptualize
character. Each new imagining of Hallam contributes to the elegy’s continued fictionalization of
him.
Tennyson’s evocations of marriage culminate eventually in the epithalamion that serves
as In Memoriam’s epilogue. Taking as its subject the 1842 marriage between Tennyson’s sister
Cecelia and Edmund Lushington, the epithalamion is in some ways a rather conventional ending
to a poem that dwells so extensively in longing and despair, as the marriage (and impending
pregnancy) serves as a promise of new life. Yet the epithalamion also provides a final episode in
the poem’s explorations of language. Consider Tennyson’s narration of the couple’s vows:
Their pensive tablets round her head,
And the most living words of life

Breathed in her ear. The ring is on,
The ‘wilt thou’ answer’d, and again
The ‘wilt thou’ ask’d, til out of twain
Her sweet ‘I will’ has made you one.

Now sign your names, which shall be read
Mute symbols of a joyful morn,
By village eyes as yet unborn;
The names are sign’d (51-60).

The overdetermined redundancy of “the most living words of life” – as well as the enjambment
that separates those words from their action (“Breathed in her ear”), as if to identify them first as
an abstract category – announces plainly that this scene will be about a different kind of
language. Where the poem has dealt previously with words that struggle to access the dead in
ways that are alternately wistful and despairing, the conclusion of In Memoriam presents us, for
a moment, with a language of life.
107
This moment is no less philosophically rigorous than the elegy that precedes it. A century
before the works of J. L. Austin, Tennyson’s recounting of his sister’s marriage displays a
prescient understanding of the marriage ceremony as an exchange of speech acts. Wedding
ceremonies are replete with performative language – utterances which in themselves constitute
actions.
108
The epithalamion dramatizes the ceremonial invitations for speech acts, pausing with
each repetition of “wilt thou,” leading to the defining “I will.” Here, the privileged liveliness of
these words seems to come precisely from their illocutionary power; wedding vows are “living”
in that they change the lives of the speakers that utter them. In the next stanza, the signing of
their names is another exchange of speech acts, making the marriage a legal contract as well as a
personal promise. Both of these stanzas, furthermore, begin by making space for their respective
speech acts and then land on their performance (“I will,” “The names are sign’d”) in their final
lines, as if reinterpreting the elegy’s driving stanza form as a cycle of linguistic action.
The definitiveness of performative language in this epithalamion represents a stark
departure from the many times when In Memoriam laments just how woefully inadequate a
means language is to access a lost loved one. Why should expressing one’s love in an attempt to
memorialize the dead be so different from expressing one’s devotion in life? In his 2018
monograph Bad Logic, Daniel Wright turns to linguistic philosophy to explore how and why it is
that nineteenth-century fiction uses forms of faulty reasoning like contradiction or tautology to
talk about desire.
109
While his argument concerns the novel exclusively (and does not discuss
Dickens at length), it does offer a useful point of contrast for this chapter. As Wright’s readings

108
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

109
Daniel Wright, Bad Logic: Reasoning About Desire in the Victorian Novel (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2018).
108
demonstrate, the difficulties of articulating deep emotion test the precision of prose, such that
nineteenth-century writers and their characters tend to get caught up in “bad logic” when they
attempt to express romantic love. Yet if the immense challenge of putting deep feeling into
words points to a foundational source of uncertainty in fictional language, the legal language of
marriage manifests a dimension of linguistic certainty and fixedness for which texts like In
Memoriam and (as we will see shortly) Our Mutual Friend might be otherwise wanting.
The epilogue of In Memoriam is, I would suggest, a bittersweet ending for Tennyson’s
project because it reads as a counterexample to the poem’s sustained – and often sustaining –
explorations of language. The great elegy never quite arrives at a satisfactory solution to the
challenges of describing while forgetting, so it turns instead to a kind of language that embodies
binding action. Marriage vows do not fictionalize character in the ways that referring
continuously to the dead can, but they do cement a fixed relation between characters in a way
that eludes the genre of elegy. For Tennyson, the poem’s epilogue is at once a gesture of
resignation to its failure to reach the dead through words, and a final moment of solace in a more
stable dimension of language. In Our Mutual Friend, as the remainder of this chapter will show,
Dickens will use the conventions of the novel, and the courtship plot in particular, to engineer an
apparent resurrection of his protagonist.
* * *
A Crisis of Reference in Our Mutual Friend
Our Mutual Friend is a novel obsessed with the mutability of character description and,
in particular, the referentiality of names. Characters in seemingly every recess of the novel’s
narrative are constantly finding new ways to refer to themselves and each other – whether by
assumed names, initials, or various idiosyncratic descriptions. As Mr Boffin remarks to the man
109
he believes to be John Rokesmith: “People are always calling other people something.”
110
The
proliferation of characterological references in the novel might have seemed tiresome to John
Stuart Mill, for instance, who lamented in A System of Logic (1843) that language had grown
needlessly elaborate: “mankind have multiplied the varieties unnecessarily, and have imagined
distinctions among things, where there were only distinctions in the manner of naming them.”
111

Dickens’s last completed novel explores the implications of referring to a character by a name as
opposed to a description or pronoun – or, as Our Mutual Friend increasingly inquires, by one
particular name as opposed to another. These questions revolve around the novel’s climactic
chapter, “A Solo and A Duet,” wherein Dickens’s protagonist, known thus far as John
Rokesmith, reveals himself to be the presumed-dead John Harmon. The eventual return of
Dickens’s protagonist to the linguistic subjecthood of “John Harmon” will hinge on a crisis of
characterological reference – a crisis that the novel will conceive through existential questions of
self-reference yet resolve through the linguistic conventions of courtship.
My analysis will focus on the novel’s revelation of John Harmon’s identity, and
particularly on how Dickens mediates that revelation through the interplay of two categories of
words that allow language to refer to specific individuals: pronouns and names. At the outset of
“A Solo and A Duet,” Harmon occupies a strange position with respect to both his own
subjecthood and his relation to the language of the novel at large. He conceives of himself as if
he is, in some sense, already dead: “It is a sensation not experienced by many mortals,” said he,
“to be looking into a churchyard on a wild windy night, and to feel that I no more hold a place

110
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Penguin, 1997), 468.
111
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of
the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1973), 23.
110
among the living than these dead do, and even to know that I lie buried somewhere else, as they
lie buried here.” (360) At the same time, Dickens gives his protagonist a rare opportunity to
participate in his own characterization. Although the majority of Our Mutual Friend takes the
form of third-person narration, Dickens allows Harmon to reveal his own identity in an extended
section of the mode Dorrit Cohn calls “quoted monologue.”
112
Thus, Harmon often pauses and
speaks as if coaching himself through the revelation of his history: “Don’t evade it, John
Harmon; don’t evade it; think it out!” (360). Yet in the very moments when Dickens lets his
protagonist speak, Harmon questions what it means to refer to himself: “I cannot possibly
express it to myself without using the word I. But it was not I. There was no such thing as I,
within my knowledge” (363). He thus recalls the traumatic experience that left him mistaken for
dead as a crisis of self-reference.
In her chapter, “The First Person,” Elizabeth Anscombe theorizes that while third-person
pronouns need not always have an object (as we might speak of a generic “one”), a first-person
reference guarantees its own referent: “’I’ – if it makes a reference, if, that is, its mode of
meaning is that it is supposed to make a reference – is secure against reference-failure. Just
thinking “I…” guarantees not only the existence but the presence of its referent.”
113
More than
the Cartesian “I think therefore I am,” Anscombe notes that the act of thinking or speaking of an
“I” requires a self-consciousness in the literal sense – a consciousness of one’s subjectivity that

112
While this mode is more commonly known as “indirect discourse,” Cohn’s term is especially
fitting here given the confessionary nature of Harmon’s revelation. See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent
Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978), 12-13.

113
G. E. M. Anscombe, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1981), 28.

111
can even, she argues, exist independently of bodily consciousness.
114
In this sense, Harmon’s
monologue hinges on what ought to be a linguistic and philosophical paradox: how can he refer
to himself in the absence of self-consciousness? Though he recognizes the linguistic
impossibility of narrating the episode without making use of the personal pronoun, Harmon is
unable to conceive of any referential connection between “I” and himself. This effect is partly
due to the fact that the “it” to which he refers is indeed not himself but a corpse that will be
mistaken as such (the corpse of one George Radfoot), yet at the same time, he speaks as if there
is no longer a self to speak of: “no such thing as I, within my knowledge.”
What happens, then, in this climactic moment when “I” appears to lose its self-referential
security? A concept from Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity can help us make sense of
Dickens’s shifting references here. In response to a long-standing debate in linguistic philosophy
concerning the relationship of proper names to definite description, Kripke proposes that we can
distinguish between names and descriptions based on their referential “rigidity.” Whereas we can
imagine a definite description as applying to multiple individuals, he argues, a proper name
designates one person in particular: “For example, ‘the President of the U. S. in 1970’ designates
a certain man, Nixon; but someone else (e.g., Humphrey) might have been the President in 1970,
and Nixon might not have; so this designator is not rigid.”
115
Conversely, Kripke explains:
“proper names are rigid designators, for although the man (Nixon) might not have been the
President, it is not the case that he might not have been Nixon (though he might not have been
called ‘Nixon’).”
116
Kripke’s thesis, I will suggest, can illuminate the referential mechanisms that

114
Ibid., 31.
115
Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 49-50.

116
Ibid.
112
underlie John Harmon’s near-death, as well as the complications that drive his apparent
resurrection.
Consider how Harmon refers to himself in recalling the near-death experience that led
him to adopt his aliases:
I dropped down. Lying helpless on the ground, I was turned over by a foot. I was dragged
by the neck into a corner. I heard men speak together. I was turned over by other feet. I
saw a figure like myself lying dressed in my clothes on a bed. What might have been, for
anything I knew, a silence of days, weeks, months, years, was broken by a violent
wrestling of men all over the room. The figure like myself was assailed, and my valise
was in its hand. I was trodden upon and fallen over. I heard a noise of blows, and thought
it was a wood-cutter cutting down a tree. (363)

As Harmon’s lamentation that he could not avoid “using the word I” suggests, the progression of
his monologue is marked by a self-conscious and excessive use of the personal pronoun, which
Dickens emphasizes through Harmon’s anaphoric repetition: “I dropped down,” “I heard,” “I
was turned.” In a flurry of passive verbs – “dragged,” “assailed,” “trodden” – the attackers are
anonymous and apparently indistinguishable in his recollection. At the same time, Dickens
juxtaposes these passive recollections with active verbs of observation – “heard,” “saw,” “knew”
– that nonetheless preserve some sense of a coherent, perceiving self. Harmon then recalls
observing the figure of George Radfoot, whose corpse will subsequently be mistaken for his
own, identifying him only as an uncanny likeness: “a figure like myself.” Yet in this, Dickens
prompts his readers to make a similar misidentification: in the context of Harmon’s increasingly
passive narration and pronominal anxieties, it is easy to lose track of the boundaries between
himself and his vague reference to the “figure like [him]self.”
In this sequence, Harmon’s trauma takes on a Kripkean sense of counterfactual
possibility. The fact that Harmon uses no rigid designators to refer to Radfoot emphasizes the
possibility that the “figure like myself” could have been – indeed, was supposed to be – himself.
113
The very pronoun “I,” in this context, seems to become a flexible designator, such that it
becomes increasingly difficult to separate the actions taken on the assailed “figure” from those
taken on the passive “I.” Similarly, the title of the chapter “A Solo and A Duet” emerges as a
play on Harmon’s referential dilemma. In addition to its clear implication of the chapter’s
division into two parts – Harmon’s monologue (a rare solo) and his subsequent dialogue with
Bella Wilfer (a deflating duet) – the title is suggestive of the conflation of Harmon’s identity
with Radfoot’s. The solo monologue, that is, turns on a revelation of what turns out to be an
existentially threatening duet.
Harmon then goes on to reflect on his name:
I could not have said that my name was John Harmon—I could not have thought it—I
didn’t know it—but when I heard the blows, I thought of the wood-cutter and his axe, and
had some dead idea that I was lying in a forest.
‘This is still correct? Still correct, with the exception that I cannot possibly
express it to myself without using the word I. But it was not I. There was no such thing as
I, within my knowledge.
‘It was only after a downward slide through something like a tube, and then a
great noise and a sparkling and crackling as of fires, that the consciousness came upon
me, “This is John Harmon drowning! John Harmon, struggle for your life. John Harmon,
call on Heaven and save yourself!” I think I cried it out aloud in a great agony, and then a
heavy horrid unintelligible something vanished, and it was I who was struggling there
alone in the water. (363)

Building on the vacillation between passive dissociation and active recollection earlier in the
monologue, our narrator’s insistence that “I could not have said that my name was John
Harmon” is interrupted – “but when I heard” – by a vision of his demise. The analogy “I thought
of the wood-cutter and his axe” reads like a misplaced allusion, as if we ought to know who “the
wood-cutter” is but, like Harmon’s own name, it appears just out of reach. Moreover, the curious
placement of the modifier “dead” in his “some dead idea that I was lying in a forest” renders it
unclear what exactly he imagines would happen with the wood-cutter and the axe. Are we meant
to conjure images of Harmon lying dead in a Forest? Or perhaps it’s the idea, the moment of
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narration itself that lies dead – presumably in want of some more stable articulation. In this case,
the analogy turns out to be no more tangible than the vague recollections of action.
As he moves on to clarify that his narration was “correct, with the exception” that he was
somehow no longer himself, Harmon’s crisis of self-reference begins to look like a nightmarish
perversion of Kripke’s thesis. Recalling his climactic encounter with Radfoot in a sequence
markedly devoid of rigid designators, as if both men could have been someone else, Dickens’s
protagonist appears to be left with no linguistic claim on his own subjecthood. Furthermore, his
narration becomes so overwhelmed by referential instability that his very name seems to lose the
rigidity that, as Kripke’s model suggest, the designator “John Harmon” ought to possess. The
name remains, yet it ceases to refer to himself: “I could not have said that my name was John
Harmon.” Apparently, that is, “John Harmon” designates someone, but it is no longer our
protagonist. When he reaches the river, the “consciousness” that “John Harmon” was drowning
“came upon” the soloist passively like a divine revelation. He then addresses the name as if it
refers to a subject other than himself: “John Harmon, struggle for your life. John Harmon, call on
Heaven and save yourself!” Given the extent to which this monologue has already unsettled the
referential function of pronouns, even when he recognizes that “it was I who was struggling there
alone in the water,” it is unclear whether he recognizes himself as “John Harmon.”
Even when he finds his way out of the Thames, his fate in language remains unclear. The
ensuing turns of the Harmon monologue recall a series of attempts to identify himself in various
venues of public or institutional language:
“I examined the newspapers every day for tidings that I was missing, but saw none.
Going out that night to walk… I found a crowd assembled round a placard posted at
Whitehall. It described myself, John Harmon, as found dead and mutilated in the river
under circumstances of strong suspicion, described my dress, described the papers in my
pockets, and stated where I was lying for recognition…
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“That night I almost gave up my mystery, though I suspected no one, could offer
no information, knew absolutely nothing save that the murdered man was not I, but
Radfoot. Next day while I hesitated, and next day while I hesitated, it seemed as if the
whole country were determined to have me dead. The Inquest declared me dead, the
Government proclaimed me dead; I could not listen at my fireside for five minutes to the
outer noises, but it was borne into my ears that I was dead. (365-366)

What Dickens accomplishes here is a portrait of character subordinated to character description.
As he examines the placard at Whitehall, Harmon is conscious – above all else – that the referent
in question is himself: “It described myself… described my dress… my pockets.” In these
moments, even what might otherwise appear as ordinary, procedural language becomes another
mark of referential crisis – a test of paradoxical self-identification. The placard’s mention of his
death occurring “under circumstances of strong suspicion” adds to the dissonance of the police
investigation, as if the mystery to be solved concerned how the death occurred and not whose
death it was.
Nonetheless, in the second paragraph, Harmon arrives at a moment of clarity that
emerges in contrast to the slippery references that mediate his earlier account of Radfoot’s death,
as he “knew absolutely nothing save that the murdered man was not I.” Yet again, even in this
moment he is confronted with a series of confirmations of his death in legal and institutional
language – “the Inquest… the Government… the whole country.” As Dickens confronts his
protagonist with the relentlessly paradoxical status of his life, as if he is alive in body yet dead in
language (“it was borne into my ears that I was dead”), this passage only further confirms the
novel’s subordination of character to the malleability of characterological reference.
Where Andrew Miller has suggested that realist character hinges on the optative state of
being uniquely oneself – “being me as opposed to, say, being you”
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– Our Mutual Friend’s

117
Andrew Miller, “Lives Unled in Realist Fiction,” Representations Vol. 98 (Spring 2007): 118-
134, 118.
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experiments in character description dramatize its protagonist’s lack of such a consciousness. In
the absence of a distinct sense of self, he is left to somehow reconstruct an identity from the ruins
of various failed modes of self-reference. The hidden origin story of John Harmon, it turns out,
doubles as the origin of the novel’s driving referential problem – and indeed, it is impossible to
separate the two. Moreover, this problem is far from resolved in the revelation of “A Solo and a
Duet.” As he works his way through his past trauma, the narrating protagonist continues to
regard the designator “John Harmon” as if it is separate from himself, and can be substituted
with other names: “So John Harmon died, and Julius Handford disappeared, and John Rokesmith
was born… In that intent John Rokesmith will preserve, as his duty is… John Harmon is dead.
Should John Harmon come to life?” (366) For the time being, our protagonist will answer this
last question in the negative, as Dickens’s third person-narrator will confirm to close the chapter:
“John Rokesmith… went down to his room, and buried John Harmon many additional fathoms
deep” (372). Yet regardless of who – the incognito Harmon or the third-person narrator – evokes
these names, such moments tell us much about their narrative power. Both Dickens’s protagonist
and his narrator refer to John Harmon as if the name has agency and consequence quite unlike
that of John Rokesmith. In a novel where characterological references have such power to shape
Dickens’s subjects and their trajectories, we are left waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Dickens’s narrator opens the “Duet” portion of the chapter in a way that makes explicit
Harmon’s duel-ontological status: “So deeply engaged had the living-dead man been, in thus
communing with himself, that he had regarded neither the wind nor the way” (367). Despite
Rokesmith’s decision to leave “John Harmon” buried for the time being, the journey of self-
revelation turned self-denial that is the Harmon monologue leaves conspicuous marks on his duet
with Bella Wilfer. Consider the irony, for instance, in Dickens’s juxtaposition between these
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characters when Bella asks John to listen to what she has to say: “You know how I am situated
here, sir, and you know how I am situated at home. I must speak to you for myself, since there is
no one about me whom I could ask to do so” (369). Bella’s commentary on “how [she is]
situated” throws into relief how deeply and elaborately unsettled her “living-dead” interlocutor is
at this moment. Likewise, her principled determination to speak “for herself” may prompt us to
question what it might mean for Harmon to speak for himself when the referential status of his
character is in question. Their duet is punctuated, furthermore, by interjections of the thoughts of
“the late John Harmon,” who possesses an uncanny ability to command indirect discourse from
beyond the grave (“The late John Harmon would have thought it rather a contemptuous and lofty
work of repudiation,” “The late John Harmon could have borne a good deal” (369, 371)).
Nonetheless, following this chapter, “the late John Harmon” will fade into silence, mimicking
the apparent linguistic erasure of his name.
* * *
Even though our protagonist does make it out alive in body, the novel will find that a
death in language necessitates a linguistic resurrection. And the two-part structure of “A Solo
and a Duet” foreshadows how Dickens will engineer such a thing: through the courtship plot of
John “Rokesmith” and Bella Wilfer. For theirs is a courtship that breaks with the conventions of
the nineteenth-century realist novel in the way that it concludes, not with the marriage of John
and Bella, but with “their taking possession of their rightful name” (759). In the linguistic
experiments of Our Mutual Friend, then, Dickens tasks the Harmon-Wilfer courtship plot with
an unusual project: if the revelation of “A Solo and a Duet” leaves the novel to deal with a
“living-dead” protagonist, it is the courtship plot that will bear the burden of undoing Harmon’s
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ontological and linguistic erasure, such that its final resolution will function simultaneously as
the novel’s reunion of reference and character.
This reorientation of the novel’s experiments in characterological reference is clear from
the beginning of John and Bella’s courtship. When they get engaged, Dickens makes a show of
Bella and her father calling his protagonist by the wrong name:
“My dear Bella,” replied the cherub, still pathetically scared, “and my dear John
Rokesmith, if you will allow me so to call you—”
“Yes do, Pa, do!” urged Bella. “I allow you, and my will is his law. Isn’t it – dear
John Rokesmith?”
There was an engaging shyness in Bella, coupled with an engaging tenderness of
love and confidence and pride, in thus first calling him by name (593; emphasis original)

Here the affirmative repetition – by both Dickens’s characters and his narrator – of the name
John Rokesmith betrays the unfulfilled status of the novel’s courtship plot. Bella’s interrupting
her father – “Yes do, Pa, do!” – only draws further attention to the irony of this moment, as our
knowledge of Harmon’s secret undermines the confident, pronounced agency of her speech (“I
allow it”). And in a turn that harkens back the erasure of “John Harmon” from legal and
institutional language in “A Solo and a Duet,” Bella’s legal metaphors (“his will is my law”)
highlight the legal precarity of their union. What moments like this throw into relief is the sense
of referential illegitimacy surrounding the name of Dickens’s protagonist following the
revelation of the climactic Harmon monologue, after which readers spend in excess of 400 pages
remaining in Our Mutual Friend with the knowledge that “John Rokesmith” does not refer to the
character that the novel’s other characters believe it does. Insofar as it becomes the instrument of
the novel’s concealment of John Harmon, the very name “John Rokesmith” becomes both an
obstruction of reference and a referential fiction within the world of the novel. As Ortiz Robles
suggests, “the secret remains secret by interrupting the referential relay that connects a subject
with its predicate even as it relies on this structure of reference to maintain its secrecy” (63).
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Precisely by drawing attention to the intimacy of Bella’s ostensibly “calling him by name” for
the first time, then, Dickens does not less us miss the sense of illegitimacy surrounding his
protagonist’s status, and thus his engagement as well.
The drama of John’s keeping his identity hidden from his intended informs the novel’s
dealings with characterological reference in more ways than one. Consider a similar moment of
tension a few chapters later, when Bella sits John down for his first “curtain lecture”:
“Now, sir! To begin at the beginning. What is your name?”
A question more decidedly rushing at the secret he was keeping from her, could
not have astounded him. But he kept his countenance and his secret, and answered, “John
Rokesmith, my dear.”
“Good boy! Who gave you that name?”
With a returning suspicion that something might have betrayed him to her, he
answered, interrogatively, “My godfathers and my godmothers, dear love?” (670)

Here Bella’s ignorance takes on an ironically comic tone, as she inadvertently praises him for
keeping his secret from her. The line of questioning that threatens him so – “What is your
name?... Who gave you that name?” – is one of several references in the novel to the Catechism
of the Book of Common Prayer. The Catechism reminds us that in marriage, he will give her his
name; yet what Bella does not realize is that what name he gives, as well as what it might mean
for him to give a name like “Rokesmith,” have yet to be determined.
Beneath the humor of scenes like this one, we can see the novel gradually working to
reconfigure the problem of characterological reference that is John Harmon from an ontological
conundrum (“the living-dead man”) to one of legal legibility and legitimacy. Insofar as marriage
was, in a legal and contractual sense, an absorption of a woman into her husband’s assets – and
his family name – the novel’s gambit of hiding John Rokesmith’s real identity casts doubt on
what it might mean for him to acquire a wife. For as long as the reader knows of Harmon’s
existence and Bella does not, we must question whether it is possible for a man living under a
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fictional identity to enter into such a legal arrangement. Thus the romantic overtones of their
courtship plot – particularly in Bella’s continual insistence that she wants John despite his lack of
money – belie the extent to which Rokesmith is a problematic suitor for a heroine in a realist
novel precisely because it is unclear whether he can really own anything. Where, in the very first
scene of the novel, Gaffer Hexam observes that a dead man cannot own any money (“’Has a
dead man any use for. Money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a
dead man belong to? ‘Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can
money be a corpse’s?’” (16)), Dickens’s handling of the relationship between Bella and John
Rokesmith prompts another version of Gaffer’s original line of questioning: can a “living-dead”
man own a wife?
Faced with the linguistically untenable nature of a marriage involving one John
Rokesmith, Dickens prolongs the courtship plot. As their romance progresses towards the end of
Our Mutual Friend, the man known as John Rokesmith construes his continued withholding of
his real identity from his fiancé as a “trial” (another nod by Dickens to the legal precarity of their
union) of her. The chapter “Effect is Given to the Dolls’ Dressmaker’s Discovery,” which comes
two chapters before the one in which John Harmon’s identity is finally revealed to his wife,
begins suggestively with the narrator making multiple references to “Mrs. John Rokesmith.”
Moments later, her husband explains:
“Bella, my life,” said John Rokesmith, touching her cheek, with a grave smile, as
she cast down her eyes and pouted again; “look at me. I want to speak to you.”
“In earnest, Blue Beard of the secret chamber?” asked Bella, clearing her pretty
face.
“In earnest. And I confess to the secret chamber. Don’t you remember that you
asked me not to declare what I thought of your higher qualities until you had been tried?”
“Yes, John dear. And I fully meant it, and I fully mean it.”
“The time will come, my darling – I am no prophet, but I say so, – when you will
be tried. The time will come, I think, when you will undergo a trial through which you
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will never pass quite triumphantly for me, unless you can put perfect faith in me.” (726;
emphasis original)

Perhaps suspecting this conversation will pertain to John’s secret, Bella refers to him as “Blue
Beard of the secret chamber” – the folktale monster who hides his murders of past wives – which
reminds us once again that his real last name is unavailable to her (as if one patriarchal tradition
would replace another). At this point in Our Mutual Friend, the linguistic instability of the John
Harmon plot has been subsumed almost entirely into the momentum and conventions of the
courtship plot, such that the novel frames the impending revelation of his identity as a test of its
heroine’s “perfect” devotion.
Dickens gives us no real reason to doubt that Bella will indeed “pass quite triumphantly”
in this trial, just as her reference to “John dear” will hold true even when he becomes – or rather
reemerges as – John Harmon. Such references signify a clear departure from those earlier
moments when she made a point of calling him “John Rokesmith.” When Bella reflects on her
trial later in the chapter, Dickens likewise omits both surnames from her thoughts (“came the
questions into Bella’s mind again: What could be in the depths of that mystery of John’s?” – or
moments later in free indirect discourse, “Her passing through the trial was to make the man she
loved with all her heart, triumphant” (732)). Over the next two chapters, and through the
appearances of several supporting characters, Bella gradually learns the truth of her husband’s
history.
It is at this point that we learn that, in addition to secret of Harmon’s identity prolonging
the courtship plot, the courtship plot has prolonged the fiction of “John Rokesmith.” Thus our
protagonist explains that his withholding his identity was part of Bella’s “trial”: “It was John
Harmon’s turn then – John Harmon now for good, and John Rokesmith for nevermore – to plead
with her (quite unnecessarily) in behalf of his deception, and to tell her, over and over again, that
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it had been prolonged by her own winning graces in her supposed station of life” (757). These
concluding moments of their courtship plot reveal how dramatically its progression has
reconstrued the dynamics of Harmon’s death in language as the novel’s central problem. Where
once, in “A Solo and A Duet,” Dickens’s protagonist was overwhelmed by evidence of his
apparent death to such an extent that he was unsure of how to refer to himself, the courtship plot
ends with an illusion of Harmon being in control of the novel’s discourse. Far from the
desperate, living-dead man of the middle of the novel, it now appears as if Harmon engineers the
linguistic reconstruction of his own character through his courtship of Bella.
The chapter that follows the revelation of John’s real name to his wife, “Checkmate to the
Friendly Move,” opens with a more formal conclusion of the courtship plot: “Mr. and Mrs. John
Harmon had so timed their taking possession of their rightful name and their London house, that
the event befell on the very day when the last wagon-load of the last Mound was driven out at
the gates of Boffin’s Bower” (759). Dickens thus returns to the question of a name as a form of
property – something they can possess like a house in London. That the emergence of “Mr. and
Mrs. John Harmon” reads like a speech act in a wedding ceremony, furthermore, confirms the
novel’s prior suggestions that their marriage had been somehow illegitimate without that
“rightful name.” The definitiveness of this pronouncement, as with the performative movements
of In Memoriam’s epithalamion, is a far cry from the linguistic precarity of Julius Handford or
John Rokesmith.
And yet, it is the instability of those designations that allows Our Mutual Friend to
restore “John Harmon” gradually to linguistic and characterological coherence. Throughout
Harmon’s journey, both his existential struggles and his moments of apparent mastery over the
novel’s discourse are testaments to the essential mutability of character description and fictional
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reference. If, as Anscombe suggests at the end of her essay on the first person, our difficulties in
theorizing self-reference result from the “(deeply rooted) grammatical illusion of a subject,”
fiction deals in the productive potential of that illusion. While the darker moments of Harmon’s
journey dwell in the capacities of language to obscure or negate subjecthood, Dickens’s fiction
imagines that it might also provide the means to reconstruct a character lost.
* * *
Conclusion
In In Memoriam and Our Mutual Friend, Tennyson and Dickens experiment with the
mechanisms of character description by imagining their subjects as if they were other people.
Both texts utilize the instability of fictional language in ways that tend to multiply their
descriptions of individual characters. Each, in its own way, centers around a working through of
multiple articulations of the same subjects – many Hallams, many Tennysons, perhaps three
Harmons. In crucial moments of both texts, the malleability of characterological reference is a
lifeline, driving Tennyson’s efforts to reach his lost friend or enabling Dickens’s protagonist to
find his way out of a predicament that feels – and reads in public declarations – like death. Even
as In Memoriam and Our Mutual Friend move in their conclusions to more stable forms of
language, it is their engagement with referential fiction-making that drives their sustained
explorations of character and fictional language. The final chapter of this project will explore a
late-Victorian twist on the proliferating references of Tennyson and Dickens. In the novels of
George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I will suggest, character description becomes a means to
produce new categories of persons.

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Chapter 4
Reference as Category Creation in Middlemarch and Jude the Obscure
The question of how literary texts can fictionalize their own referents is at the heart of
Victorian realism. The genre’s fictionality, as this chapter will suggest, relies on a peculiarly
paradoxical relation between its methods and its products: that realism must imagine new things
– new characters or new stories – while nonetheless making them appear recognizable or familiar
to readers. This paradox is emblematic of a broader problem that has recently emerged at the
forefront of realist scholarship. While critics have traditionally conceptualized realism as a form
whose ontology draws upon what already exists (as a character might be built on a type), such
approaches have not adequately theorized fiction’s capacity to generate new senses of the real.
Audrey Jaffe has recently argued for understanding realism as a form of fantasy, such that “every
realist novel has to construct its realism from the ground up.”
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How is it then, that realism can
construct something familiar by imagining something new?
This chapter will take this question in a new direction by refiguring the relationship of
character and reference in two novels: George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872) and Thomas
Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). My analysis will focus in particular on a unique mode of
imagining literary character that I call descriptive categorization: a form of rendering character
that works by referring to an elaborated category that it simultaneously defines in the act of
description. By reading characterization in Middlemarch and Jude the Obscure as a linguistic
function that produces categories, this chapter will consider how realism is mediated by its
capacity to imagine new referents (rather than mobilize familiar ones) in the process of fiction

118
Audrey Jaffe, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016), 24.
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making. For Eliot, I will suggest, descriptive categorization plays a crucial role in the ethical
implications of realist prose, prompting her characters and readers alike to sympathize with
others in categorical ways. For Hardy, however, the novel’s production of categories becomes an
existential problem, threatening to negate the subjectivity of his characters.
* * *
“One of Those” Characters in Middlemarch
George Eliot created no literary types. She drew with the hand of a master living,
breathing men and women; but they are individual not generic. They are too complex and
self-conscious, and lack too much the unity of conception, the simplicity of presentation
which makes a character take rank as a true type.
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So writes Eliza Lynn Linton in an 1885 retrospective of the novelist’s life and works.
This comment on Eliot’s characters anticipates what many scholars have considered a hallmark
achievement of the realist novel: its distinguishing capacity to represent particularized, individual
subjects.
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This lens has often been applied to Dorothea Brooke, whom critics have regarded as
characterized by a seemingly destined propensity to eschew the typical or average.
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Yet while
Linton’s summation takes such complex characters to be antithetical to types, a modern critical
tradition has suggested that realist characters are born from preexisting types – or, alternately,

119
Eliza Lynn Linton, “George Eliot,” Temple Bar 73 (1885): 512–524, 514.

120
For a formative example of this line of thought, which understands character as rooted in a
post-Enlightenment desire to represent the individual human consciousness, see Ian Watt, The
Rise of the Novel.

121
See Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian,” Representations, Vol. 90, No.
1 (Spring 2005): 61-74, 69-70; and Audrey Jaffe, The Affective Life of the Average Man: The
Victorian Novel and the Stock Market Graph (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 24.

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that they serve as a vehicle for critique of their generic predecessors.
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It is curious then, that
Middlemarch (which is so often heralded as the quintessential realist novel) begins with the
articulation of what such accounts of realism might call a contradiction in terms: a new type. For
as soon as we know anything about Miss Brooke, we know that she is of a kind – not only in the
sense that she might be a “later-born Theresa” – but that she is of “that kind of beauty which
seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”
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What, we might ask, has the novel to gain from
creating a type (a “kind” of beauties) when it already has a familiar one (St Theresas) available?
While it might seem commonplace for a novel to begin by commenting on a heroine’s
beauty – Emma Woodhouse is “handsome” before she is anything else
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– Eliot does something
more complex here than answer the question that opens Daniel Deronda: “Was she beautiful or
not beautiful?”
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In asserting that Dorothea was “that kind of beauty,” Eliot’s narrator articulates
an elaborate description that is at once specific in the sense of something “thrown into relief” and
abstract in its referential claim. For just as we know nothing in particular thus far about Miss
Brooke, we know nothing in particular about the apparent referent – “that kind of beauty” – with
which she is introduced. Though the novel, having only just begun, has taken no pains to
establish the character of such beauties, Eliot introduces the category with a definite article (“that
kind”) as if it is one with which the reader ought to already be familiar. We might think of the
readerly experience of continuing to engage with the novel’s discourse following this reference

122
For central examples of these approaches, see Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism
(New York: Howard Fertig, 2002); and George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English
Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

123
George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, 2003), 4, 7.

124
Austen, Emma, 3.

125
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin, 2003), 7.
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as something akin to laughing at a joke one doesn’t quite understand. (The reader laughs, as it
were, and the narrator moves on.) In this, “that kind of beauty… which seems to be thrown into
relief by poor dress” takes on a peculiarly tautological quality whereby the reader cannot know
the quality of Dorothea’s beauty without the implied category and cannot know the category
without the introduction of the character.
In such cases, description is not a reference to a stable type, but rather, the generation of a
new categorical referent. Consider a similar example: in an account of Tertius Lydgate’s past, the
narrator describes the fallen Laure as having “that sort of beauty which carries a sweet
matronliness even in youth” (151). It is not the question of beauty per se that I will pursue here,
as such references represent but a few of many types that characterization generates in
Middlemarch. Instead, I want to explore how the referential instability of such character
descriptions mediates the ontological claims of Eliot’s fiction. For the more one tries to conceive
of precisely what “kinds” or “sorts” of beauty she evokes in these references, the more unstable
they appear. Through this instability, furthermore, Middlemarch’s categories tend to elude the
logic and conventions of generic tropes.
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Eliot’s approach to realist character, I will argue, is
less interested in permitting readers to think about specific categories than in teaching them to
think in terms of categories. Each category is imagined in the act of description, and then –
unlike Laure or Dorothea – seems to disappear from our view; the narrator apparently never
finds reason to mention them again. By attending to the mutability of characterological reference
in Middlemarch, my argument will be of a piece with new readings by Daniel Wright and

126
Significant scholarly attention has been devoted to the question of how characterization can
employ references to pre-exiting literary conventions (for two examples, see Levine and
Raymond Williams in the passage I cite later on). Without discounting these theories, however, I
believe they do not account fully for the production of types in novelistic realism.

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Jonathan Farina, which have illuminated ways in which varying forms of vagueness and
referential obfuscation mediate the language of Eliot’s novels.
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I will explore how she
mobilizes the mutability of character description to produce new referential categories and, with
them, new senses of the real.
By considering philosophical inquiries into the relationship between familiarity and
definite description, furthermore, I will argue that our inclination to sympathize with characters
in Middlemarch is closely linked to the referential capacity of descriptive categorization to
familiarize readers with the types it creates.
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In turn, I will consider how the proliferation of
descriptive categorization throughout Middlemarch, along with its characteristic claim to
familiarity, shapes the formal and ethical relationship of characterization to the novel at large.
For Eliot, the ethics of realism hinges on the ontic instability of character description. The
novel’s referential production of types, I will suggest, utilizes this instability in a way that binds
Eliot’s formal approach to character with the moral didacticism of her realism. Beyond its
diegetic tendency to inform the moral maturation of particular characters, descriptive
categorization models a way of understanding human character that transcends the space of the
novel, and thereby cultivates categorical forms of engagement and understanding in readers.
* * *

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Wright suggests that “Eliot advocates for vagueness only insofar as it is a real dimension of
language – a problem with which we must reckon, and which the novel must be able to capture,
if we are to have a full understanding and a full picture of erotic life and its ethical force.” Farina
traces a pattern of referential indeterminacy in the speech of characters including Mr. Brooke and
Dorothea, which he attributes to a “reluctance to translate experience into meaning.” See Wright,
Bad Logic, 109; and Jonathan Farina, Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-
Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 156-157.

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Part of the utility of linguistic philosophy to literary studies, I would suggest, is that it allows
us to theorize about how readers might understand fictional language with increased precision.
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The productive capacity of character description in Middlemarch defies many existing
formulations of realism. In his landmark Studies in European Realism, Lukacs argues that realist
character is essentially mediated by the type: “a particular synthesis which organically binds
together the general and the particular both in characters and situations.”
129
Yet in order to
ascertain the relationship between characters and types in a novel like Middlemarch, it is worth
pausing here to consider what we mean when we talk about a “type”: what is it exactly, and how
may it function as a referent in prose? Historicist and ideological approaches to realist character,
like those of Catherine Gallagher and Raymond Williams
130
, have not focused on the ontological
stability of the referent. As a result, such interpretations have regarded character as derived from
types that are ontically preexistent to the novel, and disproportionately privileged questions
about how individual characters arise from typical referents. This chapter approaches this
problem from the other direction, focusing on how character description generates categorical
referents. Thus, where Andrew Miller has drawn attention to moments when realist characters
are marked by the optative condition of not being someone else (“being me as opposed to, say,
being you”), I argue that Middlemarch continuously poses a different question: what if there
were others like this character?
131

Aaron Kunin has proposed a model of character – for which he credits seventeenth
century character books – as “a formal device that collects every example of a kind of person.”
132

129
Lukacs, 6.

130
See Gallagher and Williams.

131
Miller, “Lives Unled in Realist Fiction,” 118.

132
Aaron Kunin, “Characters Lounge,” Modern Language Quarterly 70:3 (Fall 2009), 291-317,
291.

130
In contrast, descriptive categorization does not gather or “collect,” but rather produces its own
referential categories. When her narrator suggests that Dorothea had “that kind of beauty,” the
category of beauties Eliot evokes is theorized and evidenced by the description itself – it does not
refer to a category that is necessarily observable elsewhere in the novel or in some known,
external reality. Rather, it is an essentially generative narrative phenomenon. Sarah Allison has
recently attributed the proposition of a type of beauty in Middlemarch’s first line to Eliot’s
tendency to weave extradiegetic moral commentary into the novel by virtue of relative clauses.
133

Yet while this is an instructive observation about Eliot’s sentence structure, it does not account
for the relationship between the type and the character at hand, nor does it account for how the
referential instability of “that kind of beauty” impacts the novel’s discourse. There is something,
rather, about the descriptive articulation of the character that allows the novel to produce a kind.
To move towards an understanding of how Eliot’s use of characterization is productive of
types, I will be employing a distinction from linguistic philosophy between ostensive and
descriptive reference. While Robin Jeshion has recently applied these terms to the practices and
conditions of naming, or reference-fixing, this distinction can also help illuminate how a novel
like Middlemarch conceives of and talks about categories.
134
An ostensive reference refers to

133
Sarah Allison, “Discerning Syntax: George Eliot’s Relative Clauses,” ELH 81 (2014): 1275–
1297, 1275.

134
See Robin Jeshion, “Descriptive Descriptive Names,” in Descriptions and Beyond, ed. by
Marga Reimer and Anne Bezuidenhout (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 591-613.
Descriptive categorization does not fit precisely within Jeshion’s framework because the types it
articulates are unstable, whereas “reference fixing” entails solidifying a reference by affixing it
with a name. From a linguistic perspective, a category cannot be given a proper name, but it can
be given a “category term.” If the opening line of the novel were followed by a suggestion that
“we might call Miss Brooke a relief-beauty,” we could call “relief-beauty” a category term; yet
Eliot consistently does nothing of this sort. That descriptive categorization theorizes without
assigning and fixing category terms, however, is crucial to the ephemeral quality it takes on in
her prose.
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something whose existence is empirically demonstrable, and tangible in historical reality. In the
novel, ostensive references often evoke historical facts and figures – such as the 1832 Reform
Bill or John Milton. A descriptive reference, by contrast, refers to something theoretical, which
has yet to come into existence or whose existence has yet to be confirmed (such as Neptune,
which was named before it was sighted, or a building yet to be built). To summarize: ostensive
references capture something ontically stable and straightforwardly observable, while descriptive
references approximate something theoretical, which is in one sense or another, unstable or
uncertain. What is crucial about descriptive reference, then, is that it is linguistically and
epistemologically productive. By articulating new ways of thinking and talking about abstract
objects or ideas, such references allow us to conceive of those objects as if they were more
concrete; that is, descriptive references approximate, and thereby tend to fictionalize, the
abstract. The descriptive reference “Jack the Ripper,” for example, allowed the Victorians to
imagine a character responsible for the horrific murders in Whitechapel – even in the absence of
a particular suspect.
In its capacity to imagine categories, descriptive categorization is a specific form of
descriptive reference. To be clear, I am not claiming that Eliot uses this linguistic device to
produce new characteristics – it does not refer to types of beauty that are new ontological
phenomena in themselves (though crucially, it may refer to types the reader has yet to
conceptualize in particular). What it does produce, however, is a new sense of that characteristic
as constituting a type. Descriptive categorization occurs at precisely the moment when the text
implies a plurality; it captures the linguistic movement from a description of a particular
character to a categorizing assertion that by virtue of possessing a certain quality, like a specific
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kind of beauty, that character is representative of a newly elaborated type. That is, descriptive
categorization utilizes the occasion of character description to theorize an abstract category.
Yet in assuming the ontic stability of the referent, notable accounts of realist fiction have
not adequately considered the prevalence and function of descriptive reference in the genre’s
construction, and thus have overestimated the importance of ostensive reference. Catherine
Gallagher’s landmark essay, “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian,” argues that the subjectivity of
characters in the realist novel is predicated on their deviation from the types to which they refer.
Questioning the notion that “the novel as a form asserts… the ontological priority of the general
over the particular,” Gallagher suggests that the ontic primacy of St Theresa in the beginning of
the novel sets a standard of referential power and coherence to which Middlemarch’s fictional
persons and types must aspire, and ultimately transcend.
135
Throughout the novel, she argues,
Dorothea Brooke passes through a series of failed categorizations until she becomes “troped out”
and emerges from the (ostensive) shadow of Theresas to figure as her own category:
Dorotheas.
136
While this is a suggestive reading of Eliot’s protagonist, however, Gallagher’s
argument extends this model of Dorothea’s relationship with the novel’s founding ostensive type
to realism as a whole in a way that obscures the crucial ontological and narrative distinctions
between ostensive and descriptive reference.
Consider, for example, the narrator’s association of Mr Brooke with a category of
“glutinously indefinite minds [who nonetheless] enclose some hard grains of habit” (8). While I
would classify this description as an example of descriptive categorization, Gallagher treats it as
an exception that proves the rule of realism’s ostensive preference, suggesting that because Mr

135
Gallagher, 62.

136
Ibid., 69.
133
Brooke lacks an ostensive categorical referent, or “what we might call a stock type, the narrator
needs to classify him under an unusual category.” In this, moreover, Gallagher reads the
contradictory nature of Eliot’s description of those “indefinite minds” as an example of what she
argues is the novel’s tendency to immediately deconstruct the referential validity of its “unusual”
types (I will return to this claim later). In turn, she argues: “Mr. Brooke’s species – careless
people who are habitually careful about some things – doesn’t really seem to do much referential
work,” but rather “[adheres] to a formal demand of the novel.”
137
While Gallagher does not
specify how common such descriptions might be in Middlemarch, my argument recasts what she
considers the novel’s need to resort to “unusual” categories (which invariably fail by the Theresa
standard) as a broader pattern of descriptive – rather than ostensively aspiring – categorization.
In light of the fictionalizing and epistemologically productive modes of descriptive reference,
Eliot’s use of descriptive categorization constitutes a distinct form of linguistic production that
cannot be explained by, and indeed does more than submit to, the formal structure of the novel.
The sustained production of categories throughout the novel, rather, manifests distinct forms of
referential and narratological power.
Instances of descriptive categorization in Middlemarch tend to conform to certain
linguistic constructions, which thus lend themselves to searchable terms. Table 1 tracks Eliot’s
use of descriptive categorization throughout the novel using a series of bigrams and trigrams:
“one of those,” “one of the,” “one of them,” “one of these,” “the kind,” “that kind,” “the sort,”
and “that sort.”
138
Through these terms, we can discern a total of 63 searchable instances of

137
Ibid., 64.

138
For a discussion of Honore de Balzac’s use of “un de ces” (“one of those”), see Cohn,
Transparent Minds, 24. As Farina has shown, Mr Brooke has a tendency to use the phrases “that
kind of thing” and “that sort of thing” in his musings, “taxonomical postures implying that the
134
descriptive categorization in Middlemarch.
139
(However, because the referential function of
descriptive categorization does not in itself require these particular constructions, these results do
not represent the entirety of the novel’s uses of the device.) Before considering specific
examples, it is worth noting that these bigrams and trigrams occupy different grammatical
positions, and thus have different aesthetic effects in a sentence: “one of…” introduces a generic
noun, like “men,” that directly evokes a category, while “sort” and “kind” introduce qualities or
characteristics, like “beauty,” that imply a category. All of these terms, though, use definite
articles (“those,” “that,” “the,” “them,” or “these”), which allows the categories they generate to
seem natural and familiar to readers.

ostensible disparate and spontaneous thoughts and impressions preceding them are actually
cogent.” See Farina, “Middlemarch and ‘that Sort of Thing,’” Romanticism and Victorianism,
“Materiality and Memory,” No. 53 (2009), 140. While these utterances typically do not coincide
with descriptive categorization, they do represent another component of the complex network of
reference in Eliot’s prose.

139
I compiled this data through a series of digital searches. I counted examples that employ one
of the aforementioned bigrams and trigrams (while examples without one of those exist, they are
not represented in this figure), and describe a character by referencing an elaborative category
that is defined in the process of description. To this end, I have excluded two types of results that
might superficially resemble descriptive categorization. Firstly, this excludes moments in which
a category is invoked to form a superlative description, in the vein of “one of the most,” as these
say more about the character they describe than the category they implicate, such as: “Lydgate
was one of the most conceited, unpleasant fellows it had ever been [Young Plymdale’s] ill-
fortune to meet” (271). Secondly, this excludes moments that gesture towards groups or
characters within the novel and therefore are actually ostensive references, like: “this affair of his
marriage with Miss Brooke touched [Casaubon] more nearly than it did any one of the persons
who have hitherto shown their disapproval of it” (85).

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Table 1. Searchable Instances of Descriptive Categorization in Middlemarch
Book Bk. 1 Bk. 2 Bk. 3 Bk. 4 Bk. 5 Bk. 6 Bk. 7 Bk. 8 Total
one of those/the/them/these 2 4 5 5 7 5 0 2 30
the/that kind 4 2 0 0 1 1 1 2 11
the/that sort 5 7 0 2 2 0 5 1 22
Total 11 13 5 7 10 6 6 5 63

Most often, descriptive categorization in Middlemarch takes a form of the “one of…”
construction, with “one of those” being the dominant form. It is significant (if not surprising) that
many of these examples are concentrated in the novel’s first two books, which are tasked with
introducing and developing its central characters. There is also a notable rise in Book 5, which
introduces key new characters and complications pertaining to the shifting fortunes of Dorothea
and Lydgate. When Caleb Garth runs into Bulstrode, for instance, he exclaims that Raffles is
“’like one of those men one sees about after the races’” (522). In such fluctuations, descriptive
categorization tends to coincide with the introduction of new characters or plots, as well as with
key developments in familiar ones, which allows the novel to continuously suggest general
frames of reference for even its most curious or eccentric characters.
As in Caleb Garth’s impression of Raffles, Eliot often employs descriptive categorization
to articulate how particular characters understand themselves and each other. In Book 2, the
narrator casts the young Tertius Lydgate as “one of the rarer lads who early get a decided bent
and make up their minds that there is something particular in life which they would like to do for
its own sake, and not because their fathers did it” (143). Here, while describing those “rarer lads”
like Lydgate, Eliot simultaneously imagines a second, implicit, category: those (presumably
more common) lads who do something “because their fathers did it.” This kind of negative
description, which posits a category in opposition to the character at hand, is a common form of
136
descriptive categorization in Middlemarch. As the narrator describes Rosamond in opposition to
a category of young women: “[she was] not one of those helpless girls who betray themselves
unawares, and whose behavior is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of… grace and
propriety” (268). Such a use of negative description heightens the imaginative claim of
descriptive categorization, asking readers to make sense of the category of “those helpless girls”
even when the novel gives us no apparent example of one of them. Indeed, the early stages of the
Lydgate-Rosamond plot make regular use of both positive and negative forms of descriptive
categorization – especially in the course of their courtship, as the narrator remarks on the young
lady’s composure, “Rosamond could say the right thing; for she was clever with that sort of
cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous” (159).
While instances of descriptive categorization reflecting the narrator’s views often signal
great sympathy for their subjects, those reflecting characters’ perspectives can have rather the
opposite effect, exposing varying forms of sympathetic or moral immaturity. When Dorothea
calls on the Lydgates in the beginning of Book 5, the narrator explains, “To Rosamond she was
one of those county divinities not mixing with Middlemarch mortality, whose slightest marks of
manner or appearance were worthy of her study” (432). Similarly (in a suggestion that grows
increasingly ironic in hindsight as we spend more time with Nicholas Bulstrode), Harriet
Bulstrode “believed that her husband was one of those men whose memoirs should be written
when they died” (348). In such moments, descriptive categorization is indicative of a lack of
sympathetic and moral vision, as both Vincy women seem to have superficial understandings
even of those they admire. These instances of descriptive categorization tell us far more about
the characters of Rosamond and Harriet than they do about Dorothea or Nicholas Bulstrode.
137
Beyond such momentary failures of sympathetic understanding, descriptive
categorization mediates the moral trajectory of one of Eliot’s protagonists. In a lengthy
meditation on Lydgate’s vocational aspirations, the narrator reflects:
For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course
determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a
good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The
story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is
hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid
toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves… Nothing in the world
more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it
unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them… or
perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.
Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures. (144-145)

Though descriptive categorization often takes place in a single sentence, the category of “those
failures” here encapsulates a series of elaborative descriptions in the preceding paragraph.
Initially, Eliot frames “those failures” as a descriptive category within a broader one: “in the
multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for
them… there is always a good number.” Whereas Gallagher’s argument might suggest that this
turn to “a good number” signals a deconstruction of the type, it is precisely those men, who
“once meant to shape their own deed and alter the world a little,” whom the novel proceeds to
categorize in increasing detail. As the narrator outlines a categorical narrative of their lives, a
“story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross,” those
men do not deviate from the type, but rather conform to a more particularized one. It is only the
representational coherence of that (in this case, extensively) elaborated category that allows
Eliot’s narrator to refer to those men collectively as “those failures,” and to voice Lydgate’s
determination to avoid becoming “one of” them.
The great irony of this passage, of course, is that the category of “those failures” Lydgate
now resists will be the same one in which he will find himself by the end of the novel: “he
138
always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do” (835). And
indeed, the narrator’s dual speculations of that category’s “coming to be shapen” seem to work in
tandem throughout Lydgate’s narrative: the “ardor and generous… toil” of his medical career
will fade “imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves” (apparently despite his not having
inherited that passion from his father), and the “vibrations from a woman's glance” that initially
charm his marriage to Rosamond will fade away into the barely perceptible, yet tragic failures of
sympathy and understanding that wear on them both. As the narrator proclaims, “Nothing in the
world more subtle than the process of their gradual change!” Ultimately, it is Lydgate’s lack of
appreciation for those complex movements and sounds – especially the categorical ones – which
are embedded in other lives, that seems to blind him to the minute vibrations that will shape his
own. Far from an existential struggle to depart from the type, Lydgate’s narrative reveals that he
was gravely mistaken for believing himself to be in competition with “the multitude” at all. The
lesson he must learn, then, is not so much how to avoid becoming part of that category (as the
younger Lydgate believed), but that the experience of being “one of those” is a far more
complicated one than it might appear. It seems he – and, perhaps, we – ought to have
sympathized more with those “failures” in the first place.
* * *
Descriptive categorization shapes Middlemarch’s narrative on the levels of both story and
discourse, informing the social and moral experiences of particular characters while defining the
epistemological and ontological conditions by which we come to know them. Yet in order to
more fully understand the importance of descriptive categorization to Eliot’s realism, we must
account for a seemingly paradoxical feature of its use: despite the essentially imaginative nature
of descriptive categorization, Eliot’s novel refers to the categories it produces as if they should
139
be recognizable, effectively treating readers as if they are already in the know. Our inclination to
accept the referential validity of a category is contingent on the linguistic capacity of descriptive
categorization to provoke a sense of familiarity in readers. This sense of familiarity allows
Middlemarch to construct and utilize what I argue are two related paradoxes that mediate
readerly sympathy and engagement with the novel: that Eliot’s characters can be both generic
and exceptional, and that the novel can assume familiarity on the part of her readers regardless of
whether that assumption is justified by their own knowledge and experience.
So how does Eliot’s language of category production manage such an epistemological
contradiction, assuming a form of categorical social knowledge in the moment of its conception?
In “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” philosopher David Lewis suggests that speakers can
change the rules of a language game in conversation through what he calls “accommodation.”
While in a game like baseball, he explains, there is no possibility that a player can change the
rules by taking first base after three balls instead of four, language works differently:
“conversational score does tend to evolve in such a way as is required in order to make whatever
occurs count as correct play.”
140
While (needless to say) conversations between people generally
operate under very different conditions than interactions between texts and readers, Lewis’s
claim about the malleability of “correct play” can help account for what I argue is an essential
cognitive assumption that descriptive categorization provokes. Although one may arrive at the
novel with no significant sense of a category of beauties whose “beauty… seemed to be thrown
into relief by poor dress,” if we are to understand this referent as a meaningful one and continue
engaging with the discourse, we must first accommodate that such a category exists. Or as Jaffe

140
David Lewis, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 8:3
(1979: June), 339-359, 347.

140
argues, “Realist representation takes as given the structures it puts in place.”
141
This discursive
accommodation allows Eliot’s readers to understand categorical references as if they are familiar
conventions, and thereby shapes how Eliot’s readers make sense of, and come to sympathize
with, her characters.
Moreover, I will suggest, the way in which descriptive categorization provokes a sense of
familiarity in readers enables the novel to cast certain characters as simultaneously categorical
and rare. When Caleb Garth’s decision to invest in the irresponsible yet well-intentioned Fred
Vincy leaves his family predictably struggling with debt, the narrator nonetheless sympathizes
with his generosity, “He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to
others” (232). Shortly thereafter, the narrator continues, “[he] was one of those precious men
within his own district whom everybody would choose to work for them, because he did his
work well, charged very little, and often declined to charge at all. It is no wonder, then, that the
Garths were poor, and ‘lived in a small way.’ However, they did not mind it” (251). Here, Caleb
is cast as part of a broader collective that might be recognizable in communities outside of
Middlemarch: “one of those precious men within his own district whom everybody would
choose.” This description then outlines the folly of the financial habits of “those precious men”
who are apparently all the more popular (if also more vulnerable) for charging little if at all. And
yet, the narrator appears far less interested in how the Garths came to “[live] in a small way” –
“it is no wonder” – than in accounting for Caleb’s generosity and his family’s humble
contentment: “however, they did not mind it.” In this way, Eliot extols Caleb’s particular virtues
while simultaneously framing him as representative of a category. This effect is a possibility

141
Jaffe, Dreams of the Real, 24.
141
that’s distinctly shaped by descriptive categorization, as the narrator’s evocation of the category,
“one of those,” quickly gives way (but is not forgotten) to a meditation on individual virtue.
Furthermore, both of these instances of descriptive categorization entail two distinct
propositions: that Caleb Garth was of a category – “one of those” – and that men such as those
are, respectively, “rare” and “precious.” Thus, the novel produces categories while casting them
as exceptional; it generalizes Caleb and simultaneously particularizes the types with which he
may be identified. In this case, we might question why a category is needed at all. While these
simultaneous propositions might seem contradictory, however, both are essential to
characterization in the novel insofar as their convergence through descriptive categorization
allows us to understand figures like the Garths as both common and worthy of our interest. This
duality is of a piece with Rae Greiner’s suggestion that “Sympathy operates on both sides of the
general/particular equation, for particularization is but one part of the imaginative work
needed.”
142
To support similarly simultaneous claims to generalization and particularization,
Middlemarch prompts its readers to accommodate that a given category exists before they can
understand its relevance to the general or the particular. The rareness of categories like “those
men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others” only heightens this epistemological
burden of descriptive categorization because, for each particularizing detail the narrator
introduces (each specific financial habit of “those precious men”) it becomes increasingly
unlikely that readers will be able to understand that category as recognizable in their own
experience. We sympathize with Caleb Garth in this moment both because he is “one of those”
and because he is “rare,” yet it is only after we accept such a category as a coherent referent that

142
Rae Greiner, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2012) 48.
142
we can understand their relative rareness. Descriptive categorization, then, prompts readers to
accommodate a general category – to go along, that is, with a referential fiction – as a
precondition to appreciating its particular features.
Middlemarch’s exclusive reliance on definite description in descriptive categorization,
furthermore, augments this process of accommodation by making a given category appear
subjectively familiar to readers. A substantial body of work in linguistic philosophy known as
the “Familiarity Theory of Definiteness,”
143
which holds that definite description inherently
connotes familiarity with a referent, can help illuminate the discursive appeal of Eliot’s use of
descriptive categorization. That is to say, a reference to “that kind of beauty” assumes familiarity
on the part of the reader in a way that, to make a seemingly minimal substitution, “a kind of
beauty” would not. In contrast to the patterns of definite description I have charted thus far, Eliot
almost never uses the terms “a kind” or “a sort” to refer to categories of persons.
144
In the rare
case when she does, it is typically an ostensive reference that the text need not categorize
because it is already understood as a type, such as when Mrs Cadwallader describes Will
Ladislaw as “a sort of Byronic hero” (380).
Although the choice of a definite article in descriptive categorization might seem a
negligible one, the novel does provide us with an early counter-example that illustrates its
suggestive potential. Consider this use of “a sort” in Middlemarch’s first chapter that – save for

143
For the origin of this term, see John A. Hawkins, Definiteness and Indefiniteness: A Study in
Reference and Grammaticality Prediction (New Jersey and Croom Helm, London: Humanities
Press, 1978). See also Irene Heim, “File Change Semantics and the Familiarity Theory of
Definiteness,” 1983, Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings, ed. Paul H Portner and Barbara
H Partee, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2008, 227.

144
A cursory search (not limited to descriptions depicting categories of human beings) for “a
kind” and “a sort” in the novel turns up 12 instances of the former and 65 of the later – though
these are most often used to refer to objects, actions, or emotions.
143
its use of indefinite description – closely resembles descriptive categorization: when the narrator
notes that Dorothea “retained very childlike ideas about marriage,” and shortly thereafter
remarks, “The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father,
and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it” (10; emphasis added). Here, in a clear shift
to free indirect discourse, the indefinite description betrays just how peculiar (and worrisome)
Dorothea’s idea of a husband who could be so fatherly must be. In the vein of the Familiarity
Theory, Eliot’s reference to “a sort of father” emphasizes how very unfamiliar the category
ought to appear, as the indefinite article “a” betrays the propositional and, here, fantastical nature
of her young protagonist’s idea. It seems that the category of husbands Dorothea imagines is one
that we should not entertain as a valid referent, and indeed are prompted to question a great deal.
While this assumption of familiarity represents a particular imaginative act that
descriptive categorization fosters, no such process is necessary for readers to make sense of
ostensive references. When a text refers to an ostensive category, such as when Eliot aligns
Dorothea Brooke with a category of Saint Theresas, the reader’s ability to understand something
about our protagonist from such references is simply a matter of knowing or not knowing
something about Saint Theresa. By contrast, when Dorothea is aligned with a category
articulated in the act of description, “that kind of beauty which seemed to be thrown into relief
by poor dress,” the reader’s ability to understand the reference is not contingent on any kind of
specialized knowledge (for while there might be differences of opinion as to what constitutes,
say, poor dress, there is no reason to expect much confusion here regarding the semantic content
of these words). If, in ostensive forms of characterization, the reader is prompted to imagine an
association between Dorothea and Theresas, descriptive categorization provokes what I would
suggest is a far more substantial cognitive leap: in order to continue participating in the language
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game, in the terms of Lewis’s metaphor, the reader must accommodate the category as if it were
already understood. Through these imaginative processes, Eliot sets up her readers to understand
her character in the context of categories that feels familiar – “that kind of beauty,” or “those
precious men” – and, moreover, to take greater interest in them as a result. In turn, descriptive
categorization creates an imaginative space in which general and particular modes of sympathy
reinforce each other. Rather than relying on ostensive knowledge, it fosters a kind of sympathetic
knowledge in readers that is functional while inevitably remaining somewhat illusory. In this
capacity to continuously amend the referential rules of Middlemarch’s discourse, descriptive
categorization manufactures a sense of familiarity regardless of a reader’s subjective experience.
* * *
Thus far, my analysis has focused on the nature and function of descriptive categorization
in Middlemarch’s narrative, and how the categories it generates come to feel meaningful to
readers. This section, then, will consider how the proliferation of categories that George Eliot’s
discourse produces impacts the relationship of character description to the novel form.
Descriptive categorization has a tendency to draw attention away from the diegetic space of the
novel, and – furthering its reliance on feigned familiarity – gesture momentarily to the reader’s
own experience. Its generative referential construction, moreover, fosters a crucial narratological
distance between Middlemarch’s characters and the categories with which they are momentarily
associated, such that the diegetic development of individual characters remains essentially
separate from the novel’s production of categories. As a result, descriptive categorization
functions as a peculiarly unstable and ephemeral narrative device, which radically transcends the
particular characters and events that make up the novel’s plot.
145
What might it mean for a mode of fictional characterization to transcend the novel? At
the conclusion of Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams gestures towards some such
possibilities:
It cannot be assumed… the normal ‘creative’ process is the movement away from
‘known’ persons. On the contrary, it is at least as common for a character to be ‘created’
from other (literary) characters, or from known social types… ‘Creation’ of character is
then in effect a kind of tagging: name, sex, occupation, physical types… often the
activation of a known model. But then it must not be supposed that individuation is the
sole intention of characterization… The detailed and substantial performance of a known
model of ‘people like this, relations like this,’ is in fact the real achievement of most
serious novels and plays. Yet there is evidently also a mode beyond reproductive
performance. There can be new articulations, new formations of ‘character’ and
‘relationship’”
145

He begins by broadening the scope of ostensive reference beyond that of “’known’ persons”
while framing all such references as the “activation of a known model.” In contrast, he goes on
to postulate a form of characterization that creates “new formations” rather than reproductions.
Descriptive categorization is one such “mode beyond reproductive performance.” It is crucial
here that, for Williams, the need to let go of our assumptions of “individuation [as] the sole
intention of characterization” is a prerequisite for imagining the possibility of a non-ostensive
mode of character-creation, beyond the representation of the known. This point is of a piece with
Eliot’s approach to character, which relies precisely on such a movement away from
individuation as a means to generate new referents. Though where Williams discusses “tagging”
primarily in the context of representing the known, the key formal innovation of descriptive
categorization as a referential device is that it reconstitutes tagging (of “kinds” and “sorts”) as a
generative process.

145
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 208-
209; William’s emphasis.
146
Beyond its characteristic claim to familiarity, then, the “tagged” appearance of
descriptive categorization allows the novel to explicitly draw attention away from the characters
at hand by referring to categories that purport to be identifiable beyond its pages. Consider that,
for a narrative set some four decades in the past, Middlemarch finds many moments to talk about
the present. Descriptive categorization thus allows Eliot’s narrator to bridge the gap between its
diegesis and its readers by appealing explicitly to their shared experience.
146
When Rosamond’s
music teacher, for example, is characterized as “one of those excellent musicians here and there
to be found in our provinces” (161), “our provinces” refers not to the historical, fictional setting
of the novel, but to the imagined experience of the reader. Thus in such examples, the implicit
option inherent in descriptive categorization as a form – that the reader might identify others for
whom the referent applies – becomes a direct invitation.
To elucidate the implications of such an appeal to Eliot’s readers, a description of Mary
Garth in Book 4 (which is also a notable non-searchable example of descriptive categorization) is
worth considering at length:
If you want to know more particularly how Mary looked, ten to one you will see a face
like hers in the crowded street tomorrow, if you are there on the watch: she will not be
among those daughters of Zion who are haughty, and walk with stretched-out necks and
wanton eyes, mincing as they go: let all those pass, and fix your eyes on some small
plump brownish person of firm but quiet carriage, who looks about her, but does not
suppose that anybody is looking at her. If she has a broad face and square brow, well-
marked eyebrows and curly dark hair… take that ordinary but not disagreeable person for
a portrait of Mary Garth (407-408).

146
As Allison suggests of the novel’s opening reference to “that kind of beauty”: “This sentence
shifts from the narrativizing past tense to a universalizing present.” See Allison, 1275.
147
Here, the narrator describes Mary through the production of two types: one figured in contrast to
her (“those daughters of Zion who are haughty…”
147
) and one like her (“some small plump
brownish person of firm but quiet carriage…”). Eliot’s narrator then instructs her readers to
navigate and identify both those types on their own, to “let those [daughters of Zion] pass” and –
with “ten to one” odds – find a face like Mary Garth’s. Moreover, the narrator’s appeal suggests
that observing other faces like Mary’s will allow readers to learn more about the living
individuals around them from developing an intimate knowledge of the character and learn more
about the character in the process: “If you want to know more particularly how Mary looked….”
In this, a particular character like Mary Garth becomes inextricably connected to the generalized
types and categories the novel produces. Even while repeatedly emphasizing her commonness,
the narrator simultaneously draws attention to, and celebrates, various marks of her individuality,
her “broad face and square brow.” And as with the novel’s treatment of her father, this attention
to Mary Garth’s particularities within the context of categorical production appears a thoroughly
sympathetic, even affectionate gesture for the narrator.
In this description of Mary, I would suggest, Eliot tips her hand. The elaborative and
expansive construction of descriptive categorization in Middlemarch shapes the relationship
between characterization and the novel form by enabling the categories it produces to transcend
the development of the plot. Moments like the above meditation on “face[s] like Mary Garth’s”
do far more to appeal to the reader’s own sense of reality than they do to develop a particular
character. Due to this tendency to transcend the immediacies of the text, descriptive
categorization cannot be accounted for by models like Woloch’s “character system,” which

147
While the word “Zion” alone is an ostensive referent, I nonetheless class this sentence as an
example of descriptive categorization due to its elaborated description, “who are haughty, and
walk with stretched-out necks and wanton eyes” (to which “Zion” is subordinated).
148
argues that character is shaped by the limited attention and representational space of the novel
form.
148
(14). Although I will not deny that the representational space of the novel is inevitably
limited, I do argue that the extradiegetic referentiality of descriptive categorization allows it to
evade such restrictions. While Middlemarch has what Woloch calls a “character system,” insofar
as it has a finite amount of narrative attention to distribute to its diegetic subjects, the categories
it produces are external to that system. Unlike the individual characters whose articulation gives
them rise, the novel’s types claim neither significant representational space in the novel nor
particular relation to each other. We could not, that is to say, understand the work of descriptive
categorization as creating any sort of metaphysical or extradiegetic cast of types.
For while the novel produces and indeed tags descriptive categories, it does not seem to
encourage us to internalize those tags. As the very necessity of a quantitative model here
suggests, there are simply too many categories in Middlemarch for us to keep track of in the
process of reading. Despite what its ubiquitous presence might suggest, moreover, instances of
descriptive categorization are typically extraneous to advancing the novel’s plot. We do not
actually need to consider Caleb Garth as representative of a category to understand – or even be
moved by – his unfortunate vulnerability to the whims of Fred Vincy. Even in cases in which
descriptive categorization illuminates something of crucial importance to a given character’s
prospects – such as Lydgate’s naïve dismissal of “those failures” – the categories it creates
remain essentially separate from the process of character development. While the novel’s
production of “the multitude of middle-aged men” may be occasioned by a specific moment in
the young Lydgate’s narrative, that multitude does not proceed to change, learn, or grow as he
does. Descriptive categorization is an essentially ephemeral narrative device, allowing the

148
Woloch, The One vs. The Many, 14.
149
categories it posits to fade from view (never to be mentioned again) almost as quickly as they are
conceived; they refuse to accumulate, readily relinquishing the stage to the novel’s major and
minor characters alike. Eliot’s characters, that is, may claim our attention, yet the types she
articulates in the process of describing those characters are not bound by the particular events of
the novel’s plot.
Middlemarch’s way of appealing directly to how readers engage with their worlds,
furthermore, complicates this chapter’s early distinction between ostensive and descriptive
reference. In the first place, readerly address is a device that blurs the line between descriptive
and ostensive reference. Part of what is so ontologically generative about descriptive references
is that they carry the potential to become ostensive (a descriptive reference to a building yet to be
built, for instance, becomes ostensive once its construction is complete). Readerly address tends
to conform to a similar progression for the simple reason that the very production of a novel
seeks to transform a hypothetical (descriptive) reader into a real (ostensive) one. In the time of an
author’s writing, the reader is a descriptive referent yet to be realized. In the hands of a reader,
however, the novel’s addresses conform more closely to the contours of ostensive reference,
relying on the fiction that the novel is speaking to that reader directly.
Eliot’s use of descriptive categorization, moreover, plays on this very slippage between
descriptive and ostensive reference. For despite the ephemerality of descriptive categories,
Middlemarch’s continued production of them encourages readers to think in categorical ways
about real people. In this way, the ethical import of descriptive categorization – it’s way of
allowing the novel’s discourse to gesture beyond particular characters or plots – is intimately tied
to its formal instability. The novel’s approach to character, that is, endows its descriptive
referentiality with ostensive applications. In Eliot’s realism, descriptive references can engender
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ostensive modes of sympathetic understanding, just as a reference to a “face like Mary Garth’s”
might lead a reader to identify such a person – perhaps, as our narrator suggests, on a crowded
street offstage.
* * *
George Eliot’s approach to characterization throughout Middlemarch creates a rhetorical
space in which the representation of particular characters produces and encourages general
understandings of human behavior. Within this space, categorical thought at the expense or
exclusion of understanding becomes a symptom of the “moral stupidity” (211) that various
characters must outgrow. For Eliot, moreover, general and particular modes of sympathy are not
discrete categories. Descriptive categorization can provoke us – however momentarily – to
understand even the most distinctive heroines in categorical fashion. At the same time, the
narrator can prompt us to attend to or sympathize with those who, like the Garths, may appear
typical in nonetheless particular ways. Descriptive categorization, therefore, is at the center of
the novel’s oft-discussed moral didacticism, teaching characters and readers alike to conceive of
others in categorical terms.
Furthermore, I have suggested, the referential instability and ephemeral nature of
descriptive categorization in Middlemarch’s discourse have key implications for understanding
the relationship of realist character to the novel at large. Eliot’s discourse models an
epistemological and ethical mode of thinking categorically; it encourages us to attend to the
fictional lives of particular characters while, at the same time, engendering a sense that those
characters are connected to others within and without the novel through a seemingly endless
proliferation of categorical formations. This sense allows the novel to increasingly particularize
the narratives of individual characters while still repeatedly casting them in various typical or
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general terms, to the effect that characters from our eccentric heroine to the humble Caleb Garth
can be construed as simultaneously categorical and rare. By the end of the novel, the
simultaneity of particularization and general production has indeed been so established that
Eliot’s narrator can refer momentarily to her heroine as if she were an ostensive category,
“Dorotheas,” while nonetheless reflecting on the lessons of Dorothea’s particular narrative
(838). For as the work of descriptive categorization in Middlemarch suggests, the emergence of a
category – whether Dorotheas or Theresas – as a stable, ostensive referent can be understood
only in relation to a seemingly limitless array of unstable categories (which may never be affixed
to or contained by proper names). Eliot’s generative referentiality, then, presents an alternative to
traditional understandings of character as a strictly singular, individualized form that is endowed
with meaning in proportion to its development through the plot. Rather, we can understand
characterization as a series of passing impressions of familiarity – typically rendered in no more
or less than the moment of a sentence; it is the plurality of those impressions, each claiming
association with some tangential collective, that we call Tertius Lydgate or Dorothea Brooke.
Let us return, then, to the character of that “incalculably diffusive” heroine (838). In a
March 1873 review of Middlemarch, Henry James writes of Eliot’s rendering of Miss Brooke:
“She exhales a sort of aroma of spiritual sweetness, and we believe in her as in a woman we
might providentially meet some fine day when we should find ourselves doubting of the
immortality of the soul. By what unerring mechanism this effect is produced – whether by fine
strokes or broad ones, by description or by narration, we can hardly say; it is certainly the great
achievement of the book.”
149
(354). Here indeed, the way in which James imagines we might find

149
Henry James, unsigned review, Galaxy, Vol. XV (March 1873): 424-428, reprinted in George
Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. David Carroll (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited,
1971), 354.
152
a woman with the “spiritual sweetness” of Dorothea is remarkably akin to the way Eliot
imagines we might encounter a “small plump brownish person” like Mary Garth in “the crowded
streets tomorrow.” In his reflections, moreover, James poses an essential question of our
protagonist: what “mechanism… whether by fine strokes or broad ones, by description or
narration” produces the unique effect of Dorothea Brooke? The work of descriptive
categorization in Middlemarch, I would argue, is that “unerring mechanism” to which he
gestures but feels we can hardly explain. For as James’s sensitive reading suggests, we may not
feel as if we fully know Dorothea herself, but we may feel that we know someone like her. It is
the unique achievement of George Eliot’s approach to representing character that, through the
fine and broad strokes of descriptive categorization, this effect is no less satisfying.
***
The Characterological Collapse of Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) features a notoriously gruesome climax: a
juvenile murder-suicide in which Jude Fawley’s oldest son, known as Father Time, claims the
lives of his two younger siblings and his own. The note Father Time leaves for his parents
features a curious misspelling: “Done because we are too menny.”
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To put aside, for a moment,
Father Time’s horrific act itself, what can we make of the novel’s misspelling of “many”? While
the note might seem a relatively innocuous display of the child’s relative lack of education and
social capital, Hardy’s “menny” also plays on a slippage between two related – yet distinct –
generic descriptors of human beings: the singular “man” and the plural “men.” Insofar as we can
understand “menny” as a phonetic alternative to “many,” this error seems to do little to alter the

150
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 325.
153
semantic meaning of the word. Yet on the page (or on the note), Father Time’s misspelling takes
“many,” a word that already suggests a plurality, and imbues it with one that refers to a generic
category, “men”; “menny,” that is, appears doubly plural. Thus, by combining “many” and
“men,” the boy’s note – not unlike the scattered bodies of the murder-suicide – flaunts an
unnecessary redundancy, as if to draw attention to the categorical force of the boy’s physical and
linguistic act. Furthermore, I will suggest, this misspelling metonymically signals a broader
discourse at work in the novel that progressively collapses individual characters into generic
categories – a process in which Father Time functions as the defining agent.
My analysis will focus in particular on how Jude the Obscure construes – and,
eventually, dismantles – character through its continued use of two formal devices: kind terms
and descriptive categorization. Hardy’s use of descriptive categorization resembles Eliot’s as, for
example, the narrator says early in the novel of Jude: “he was the sort of man who was born to
ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all
was well with him again” (11). What is crucial about Hardy’s use of such categorizing gestures
in Jude the Obscure is that, rather than merely serving to characterize, the novel’s use of
categorical language progressively poses an existential threat to the subjectivity of individual
characters. Although Jude and Sue try desperately to assert their own particularities, they
gradually find themselves ensnared in a representational network of categorical language that
affects equally categorical narratives and experiences. Eventually, that is, Hardy’s characters
become overwhelmed by the categories to which they refer. Gallagher’s model of realist
character is again helpful to us here – particularly her claim that the subjectivity of characters in
the realist novel is predicated on their ability to deviate from the types to which they refer.
151
For

151
Gallagher, 71-72.
154
while Dorothea Brooke is able to finally escape the shadow of what Gallagher frames as
Middlemarch’s founding type, St Theresa’s, Jude the Obscure’s characters are not so lucky.
Instead, Hardy’s characters eventually become overwhelmed by the categories to which they
refer, seeming to collapse under the weight of the very linguistic mechanisms that bring them
into being. I will read this destructive pattern of categorical language, then, as engendering a
kind of categorization plot that culminates in the short, tragic life of Father Time. In light of
Hardy’s categorizing discourse, the novel’s climactic murder-suicide emerges as a tableau of
excessive categorization that ultimately reveals the negating effects of a categorization plot gone
awry.
Jude the Obscure’s exploration of categories begins with its frequent use of kind terms.
The novel’s opening paragraphs describe a succession of individuals in abstract, categorical
language:
The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.
The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart…
The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the sight
of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when the new school-
teacher would have arrived and settled in, and everything would be smooth again.
The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were
standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlor before the instrument…
A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the packing,
joined the group of men… (3)

These opening movements introduce an assortment of figures through kind terms – the
schoolmaster, the miller, the rector, the new school-teacher, the blacksmith, the farm bailiff –
with very few identifying characteristics other than one’s being from Cresscombe and one
“dislike[ing] the sight of changes.” In contrast, for example, consider the opening paragraph of
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886):
One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached
one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were
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approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They
were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated
on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a
disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now.
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Whereas in the earlier novel, the narrator goes on to describe the family of three he introduces in
the first sentence in great detail through several paragraphs, in Jude, far from dwelling in
detailed description, Hardy proceeds through kind terms in quick succession and indeed tells us
quite little about their referents. As with descriptive categorization, this curious lack of
description is compounded by a consistent use of the definite article to introduce the first several
kind terms, almost as if the reader ought to understand something about, or already be somehow
familiar with, “the blacksmith” or “the farm bailiff.”
And yet, while kind terms do often connote singular individuals, by not specifying any
particular person (and notably, Hardy withholds his characters’ names for the first few
paragraphs of Jude) they may refer to a seemingly limitless number of possible individuals. That
is, the apparently definite reference to “the blacksmith,” while certainly a more particularizing
kind term than some alternatives, nonetheless can conceivably stand for a theoretically infinite
number of unique individual blacksmiths. Moreover, Hardy does not turn to the indefinite mode
of characterization foregrounded in The Mayor of Casterbridge (“a young man and woman, the
latter carrying a child”) until he introduces his protagonist, “a little boy of eleven,” who is soon
identified as Jude. Hardy’s use of kind terms, then, engenders an imaginative landscape of
abstract types, often casting human characters in almost allegorical terms. Such a thoroughly
categorical beginning, in which categorical descriptions both stand in for, and precede, specific
characters, sets an important precedent for the remainder of the novel, almost as if challenging its

152
Hardy, Thomas, The Mayor of Casterbridge (New York: New American Library, 1962), 11.

156
characters to emerge as particular personalities from the kind terms that introduce them. Indeed,
the presence of kind terms will continue to mediate Hardy’s characterization in key moments
throughout the novel, often infringing on the unique subjectivity of its characters, or casting them
in narratives that are not their own.
While Hardy’s penchant for kind terms might seem a relatively harmless rhetorical
flourish, the categorical framing of Jude the Obscure crucially informs the progress of its
individual characters. Long before tragic deaths of Jude and Sue’s children, Hardy’s characters
display the symptoms of an existence plagued by categorical understandings of human beings in
their internalization of kind terms. Kind terms, that is, operate not only in the narrator’s
extradiegetic descriptive language, but in the ways characters think and speak about their own
circumstances. Following an impulsive kiss at the railway station, Sue reflects:
Meanwhile Sue, after parting from him earlier in the day, had gone along to the
station, with tears in her eyes for having run back and let him kiss her. Jude ought not to
have pretended that he was not a lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act
unconventionally, if not wrongly…
“I have been too weak, I think!” she jerked out as she pranced on, shaking down
tear-drops now and then. “It was burning, like a lover's—oh, it was!” (210)

Similar to the gossiping voices of the other students at her training school, the question of
whether or not Jude is a “lover” appears to dominate Sue’s considerations of the incident.
Curiously, she seems to regard the status of a lover not as a description of his regard for her or
role in their relationship, but as some essential, defining manifestation of Jude’s character – an
apparently fixed identity that ought not to be reflected in his behavior. Thus Hardy voices Sue’s
apprehension through free indirect discourse: “Jude ought not to have pretended that he was not
a lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act unconventionally,” then gives way to her
own utterance: “It was burning, like a lover's—oh, it was!”, she seems to internalize the
157
framework of kind terms that is so prominent in the novel’s descriptive language. Already, we
can sense Sue losing her sense of Jude’s particularity in kinds.
As Hardy’s characters take seriously the language of kind terms, they also come to take
on active roles in their own characterization through descriptive categorization. When Jude and
Sue come upon a piano in beginning of “At Shaston,” they reflect on a piece Sue learned at her
training school:
She, like him, was evidently touched—to her own surprise—by the recalled air; and
when she had finished, and he moved his hand towards hers, it met his own half-way.
Jude grasped it—just as he had done before her marriage.
“It is odd,” she said, in a voice quite changed, “that I should care about that air;
because—”
“Because what?”
“I am not that sort—quite.”
“Not easily moved?”
“I didn't quite mean that.”
“Oh, but you are one of that sort, for you are just like me at heart!”
“But not at head.”
She played on and suddenly turned round; and by an unpremeditated instinct each
clasped the other's hand again. (194)

While Sue continues to resist any definitive statement on what she means by her being “not
[quite] that sort,” their shared dialogue nonetheless formulates and implicates a category of
persons who, “at heart,” are easily moved to caring about airs. In this moment, when every
movement (even a grasp of her hand) and utterance seems to carry added significance in
accordance with their recent marriage, Sue’s resistance insists on her discomfort with their
present situation. She is reluctant not only to accept Jude’s assertion that she may belong to a
category, but to describe herself in any sort of positive language – on the contrary, her every
remark is negating: “I am not that sort,” “I didn’t quite mean that,” “but not at head.” Jude, in
contrast, appears confident both in proposing the category – notably, it is he who is willing to
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articulate the characteristic she denies – in identifying the two of them as such: “but you are one
of that sort, for you are just like me at heart!”
Indeed, Sue’s character is marked throughout the novel by her resistance to
categorization. In the first place, she and Jude both have apparently inherited some genetic
aversion to the conventional courses of marriage and children. As he and Sue discuss the
possibility of marriage, Jude recalls some advice from his great aunt: “it was always impressed
upon me that I ought not to marry—that I belonged to an odd and peculiar family—the wrong
breed for marriage” (161). While this precedent certainly figures as a grim omen for the couple
and their children, Sue is especially insistent on her own peculiarity. When she comments on the
oddness of Jude’s calling her “a creature of civilization,” she explains with a sense of defiant
abstraction: “Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it.” Shortly
thereafter, as Jude questions the “queer[ness]” of Sue’s reading habits, she explains: “My life has
been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor
of their books” (141). Sue’s impulse to negate and deny Jude’s categorizing descriptions, then, is
representative of her persistent attempts to construe herself as somehow beyond categorization.
While he tends to react to their misfortune or unhappiness with assertions of categorical
deviation from a norm, Sue seems to experience any sort of categorization as an essential threat
to her subjecthood. In the ways in which Jude – for all his deep sympathy and patience towards
her – tends to participate in in this typical language she finds so oppressive, he becomes
complicit in the categorizing frameworks that mark the personal, social, and even extradiegetic
conditions of their lives. Even when his categorizing impulses seem to arise out of sympathy or
naïve idealization (not long after he meets Sue, the narrator remarks: “To be sure she was almost
159
an ideality to him still” (92)), Jude’s participation as such is suggestive of the hopelessness of
their union and their ultimately futile resistance to what is apparently a family curse.
The specter of the Fawleys’ ominous family history serves as a key point of reference for
the novel’s categorization plot because it signals an essential connection between cyclical
patterns of human history and categorical representations of human character. Furthermore, this
imaginative proximity between the personal experiences of Hardy’s characters and historical
overtures – or what, according to Beer’s model, would represent the first and third levels of plot
in his novels, respectively – often finds expression in a conflation of personal narratives with
allegorical or historical ones. In “At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere,” the night before Jude and Sue
are to be married (a ceremony they will ultimately choose not to undergo, thus cementing their
social alienation), the elderly widow Mrs Edlin tells the couple the story of a former Fawley
marriage that resulted in a dead child, a mad wife, and an executed husband. In the morning, Sue
says to Jude:
“How horrid that story was last night! It spoilt my thoughts of to-day. It makes me feel as
if a tragic doom overhung our family, as it did the house of Atreus.”
“Or the house of Jeroboam,” said the quondam theologian.
“Yes. And it seems awful temerity in us two to go marrying! I am going to vow to
you in the same words I vowed in to my other husband, and you to me in the same as you
used to your other wife; regardless of the deterrent lesson we were taught by those
experiments!” (273)

Thus, Hardy’s characters describe the “tragic doom” of their predecessors in mythological and
historical references: “’as it did the house of Atreus,’” “’Or the house of Jeroboam.’” In Jude’s
allusion to the Israeli king, moreover, the name Jeroboam can be translated to “let the people
increase,” which is suggestive of the proposition facing the Fawleys despite their apparently
hereditary penchant for misfortune. Sue then speaks of the “awful temerity” of their impending
marriage, linking the fates of these distant figures to the ritual repetition of the ceremony: “I am
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going to vow to you in the same words I vowed in to my other husband, and you to me in the
same as you used to your other wife” – as if their identical utterances will lead to identical fates.
Gillian Beer, considering the influence of Darwinian models of chance and change on
Hardy, suggests that his novels “insist on repetition as a basic organization for all experience
within the natural order.”
153
It would seem that any possibility of “chance and change” then, as
Sue’s lamentations suggest, is subject to the repetitive, categorical force of those same words
uttered by her and Jude to their previous spouses, and by (we can assume) their hapless
ancestors. I suggest, furthermore, that Hardy uses categorical language – and descriptive
categorization especially – to link the historical repetition of human experience that Beer
discusses to a corresponding repetition of human character. Notably, as the prospects of a happy
conclusion to Jude and Sue’s courtship grow increasingly distant, Hardy’s characters often turn
to categorical descriptions to account for their suffering. When they watch another couple get
married before them, Jude reflects: “The intention of the contract is good, and right for many, no
doubt; but in our case it may defeat its own ends because we are the queer sort of people we
are—folk in whom domestic ties of a forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness”
(276). Here, the category Jude’s description produces is construed as exceptional, distinguishing
him and Sue from “many,” but a category nonetheless, explaining that the pair should not be
married because they are “the queer sort of people… in whom domestic ties of a forced kind
snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness.”
Notably, in this example and others, Hardy’s use of descriptive categorization has a
rather curious effect in that the “sort of people” connoting Jude and Sue sketches a broader type

153
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth
Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 229.
161
that might transcend the scope of the novel, while simultaneously purporting to apply to no other
characters within it. Where for Eliot, descriptive categorization is an expansive and thoroughly
sympathetic gesture, inviting the reader to sympathize with others within and without the novel,
in Jude the Obscure, it marks the peculiarly doomed fates of Hardy’s protagonists. Sue’s
response to Jude’s explanation, in an oft-discussed adaptation of a line
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from Percy Shelley’s
1818 poem “The Revolt of Islam,” suggests of the other couple’s future descendants: “They will
see weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as ‘Shapes like our own selves
hideously multiplied,’ and will be afraid to reproduce them” (276). In this, the novel’s fixation
on categorical representations of character leads to a vision in which “weltering humanity”
suffers from a proliferation of “hideously multiplied” ancestors. Needless to say, this casts a
rather ominous light on the prospects of Jude and Sue’s own children.
* * *
While Hardy’s characterization of many of the novel’s key figures vacillates between
particular and categorical modes of representation, his rendering of Father Time – whose murder
of his younger siblings and suicide mark the gruesome climax of the tragic narrative of his
parents – is overwhelmingly and, moreover, unsustainably categorical. Many critics have
regarded Jude’s morbid child as an unbelievably flat character, or rather, as a somewhat
embarrassingly clumsy plot device. Harold Bloom, for instance, suggests of the novel’s cast:
“Alone among Hardy’s novels, Jude the Obscure has three strong figures, all triumphs of
representation: Sue, Jude, Arabella. Unfortunately, it also has little Father Time, Hardy’s most

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The original line reads: “All shapes like mine own self, hideously multiplied.”

162
memorable disaster in representation.”
155
While, as Bloom identifies, the boy displays little of the
kind of realism to which characters like Jude or Arabella seem to aspire, others have suggested
that Father Time is never meant to resemble an individual human being at all. This apparent
movement away from the theoretical tradition of individualized mimetic representation, then, has
led some critics to read the child as essentially representative of all children, thus casting the
murder-suicide as a tragic antidote to the growing burden of children in the already
claustrophobic world of Hardy’s characters.
And yet, as I have argued thus far, Father Time is far from the only character that the
novel imagines in categorical terms. Rather, through the languages of kinds and descriptive
categorization, Hardy treats many of his characters in the context of, and at times as
representative of, larger groups. Instead, I will suggest that Father Time’s short life figures as a
narrative of excessive categorization, which metonymically illustrates the ethical and existential
dangers of the novel’s categorizing motifs. Early on, Hardy describes the child in starkly
different terms than he does Sue or Jude. Where the narrator regularly remarks on Jude and
(especially) Sue’s particularities, Father Time is construed in conspicuously allegorical terms:
“He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his real self showed through
crevices. A ground-swell from ancient years of night seemed now and then to lift the child in this
his morning-life, when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic of Time, and appeared
not to care about what it saw” (266). In a suggestion far from a mimetic exercise in rendering a
believable child, Father Time’s “real self” only points to those abstract, and most universal of
forces – time and age – which shape his existence. Furthermore, as his passivity to the “ground-

155
Harold Bloom, Thomas Hardy: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views (New York: Infobase
Publishing, 2010), 3.
163
swell from ancient years” suggests, the boy seems curiously devoid of ego, apparently content to
be defined by whatever else (from metaphysical forces to other characters) surrounds him.
Hardy casts Father Time’s own perspective, too, as exclusively categorical: “The boy
seemed to have begun with the generals of life, and never to have concerned himself with the
particulars. To him the houses, the willows, the obscure fields beyond, were apparently regarded
not as brick residences, pollards, meadows; but as human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation,
and the wide dark world” (267). A character whose rendering consistently eschews
particularities, Father Time seems only capable of understanding the world around him in
categorical terms. Where others would see unique instances, he only sees abstract kinds:
dwellings instead of houses, vegetation instead of willow trees, and a “wide dark world” in place
of “obscure fields.” By his very nature, then, Father Time seems to negate any manifestation or
semblance of particularity.
Can we be so surprised then, when the novel’s strangely categorical son produces the
climactic note: “Done because we are too menny”? It is worth considering, at this juncture, that
the concept of “the many/menny” is an evolving one in Jude, and Hardy makes numerous
references to it throughout the narrative, such as in a reference to Robert Browning’s “By the
Fireside” (1855) upon Jude’s reflections on the knowledge contained in Christminster: “How the
world is made for each of us!... /And each of the many helps to recruit /The life of the race by a
general plan” (76). Yet while Browning’s poem seems to construe “the many” quite broadly as
“the life of the race,” the connotations of “the menny” in Father Time’s suicide note are not so
clear. Beyond Jude and Sue’s three children, some critics have interpreted “menny” as referring
to children in a general sense, as if it were: “we (children at large) are too menny.” Sally
Shuttleworth has read the murder-suicide as a response to contemporary medical debates about
164
child suicide.
156
Aaron Matz has recently argued that Hardy not only explores the disturbing
possibility of child suicide, but that the negating force of Father Time’s act represents a radical
challenge to the conventional procreative plot that shapes, and regularly prevails in, so many
nineteenth century novels.
157

Thus we are back to the earlier question: to whom, and indeed, to how many, does the
suicide note refer? In addition to the broader social contexts of Jude the Obscure, “the menny”
has crucial implications within its narrative. From the moment the child assumes Jude’s name –
another sign of his strange lack of ego – Father Time functions as a double of Hardy’s
protagonist. Marjorie Garson argues that Father Time is: “the little clone Sue and Jude have both
desired, a parodic epitome of both the authors of his being – both Jude and Hardy… Little Father
Time is less Jude’s child than his dwarfish double.”
158
But while Jude imagines his son might one
day fulfill the scholarly ambitions that eluded him, Father Time seems to lack enough of a sense
of his own interiority and desires to independently embrace his father’s passion. To the extent
that the young Jude is a shrinking double of his father, though, his two (nearly three) younger
siblings appear even more spectral. As Matz argues of the novel’s peculiar collection of
offspring: “Jude’s children with Sue are never allowed to speak, nor are they given any
particularity at all – not even names. In a sense, there are hardly any children in this novel in the

156
Sally Shuttleworth, “’Done because we are too menny’: Little Father Time and Child Suicide
in Late Victorian Culture,” Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, ed. by Phillip Mallett
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 133-155.

157
Aaron Matz, “Hardy and the vanity of Procreation,” Victorian Studies 57, no. 1 (Autumn
2014): 7-32.

158
Marjorie Garson, Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991), 176.

165
first place: Little Father Time is more like a dialectical phantom.”
159
Having no names or
individual characteristics to speak of, the children seem to figure predominantly as extra bodies
that Hardy’s more particularized protagonists must struggle to accommodate. In turn, the strange
combination of Father Time’s blindingly categorical thought, passive nature, and profound lack
of individuality gives way to a horrific disregard for his siblings’ lives and his own in the murder
suicide that appears to have been – apparently all too easily – inspired by Sue’s reflections on the
hopelessness of procreation.
Indeed, as the novel’s earlier reference to Shelley’s verse – “Shapes like our own selves
hideously multiplied” – suggests, Jude’s children seem to figure as increasingly spectral and
abstract reflections of himself. As such, “the menny” of Father Time’s note also suggests too
many Judes. Beyond the challenge of accommodating a family of five and soon to be six in one
apartment (the obstacle that leads to Sue’s fateful conversation with the boy), it is hard to
imagine that, in a world wherein the adult Jude has already suffered so greatly, his young
doubles could fare much better. The presence of Father Time – an agent of both categorization
and crude repetition who speaks for all the novel’s children – appears to give rise to a category of
increasingly abstract shadows of Jude, only to negate him in unfathomable fashion. As a result,
the image of the three dead children on adjacent closet walls produces a particularly grotesque
kind of funhouse mirror image of Hardy’s protagonist, which pictures Jude surrounded by
increasingly distant and distorted reflections of himself. Rather than an existentially negating
effect that expands outward from the characters at hand, then, the excessively categorizing force
of Father Time negates characters by collapsing them into themselves or others – not unlike the
way that the boy’s vision collapses trees into vegetation.

159
Matz, 24.
166
This negating effect has important implications for the pasts and futures alike of Hardy’s
characters. Andrew Miller argues that realist fiction is centrally shaped by what he calls the
“optative mood,” which defines characters in reference to imagined, counterfactual lives –
“being this person as opposed to being that person.”
160
Considering texts by Charles Dickens and
Henry James, Miller suggests that the optative mood is particularly important for understanding
the role of children in realist fiction: “The presence of a child encourages the thought that the
future might be different; the presence of a dead child forces the thought that the past could have
been different.”
161
In Jude the Obscure (and certainly, Hardy’s is a different brand of realism
than that of Dickens or James), Father Time and the children reveal only the distortion of Jude’s
counterfactual lives; their effect is neither hopeful nor nostalgic. Far from a past life that could
have been – like the scholarly aspirations once left behind in Christminster – or a future that
could yet be, Father Time collapses Jude’s character with such violence as to suggest that such
possibilities were never really his to begin with.
* * *
Ultimately, it is suggestive of the dominance of Hardy’s categorization plot that his
characters increasingly turn to categorical representations of character to account for their grave
misfortunes. When Sue fears she had provoked Father Time’s murder-suicide, Jude suggests:
“It was in his nature to do it. The Doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst
us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life.
They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist
them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live. He's an
advanced man, the Doctor: but he can give no consolation to—”
…The boy's face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that little shape
had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which had darkened the first union of

160
Miller, “Lives Unled in Realist Fiction,” 118.

161
Ibid., 123.
167
Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point,
their focus, their expression in a single term. (326)

Following the proposition that “it was in his nature,” Jude’s summary of the doctor’s account of
Father Time’s final act occasions another example of descriptive categorization, claiming his son
as one of those “boys of a sort unknown in the last generation.” His descriptions of these boys,
“springing up among us” and “seem[ing] to see all [life’s] terrors before they are old enough to
have staying power to resist them,” purports to cast Father Time’s character in the context of a
category so general that is becomes, in fact, explanatory for his behavior. Here then, in the
context of the categorical constructions that have shaped the novel’s plot thus far, Hardy’s use of
descriptive categorization figures as a rather ironic reversal, accounting for that most exceptional
of events as if it will (or has already) become entirely ordinary.
In turn, when Hardy’s narrator moves to describe the dead child’s face, the effect Father
Time’s character has had of collapsing the proliferating Jude onto himself manifests in full view
upon that “little shape.” Thus, he is pictured as a surface on which all the faults of his father’s
narrative, all the “inauspiciousness and shadow” are revealed – the “nodal point” that comprises
the faults of his predecessors, and that distorted category of Jude’s that once flourished in the
novel. Finally, the description of Father Time’s face as a representation of the “accidents,
mistakes, fears, errors” of the failed relationship of Hardy’s protagonists is emblematic both of
the stark denial of hope for future generations inherent in the novel’s tragic climax, and of the
categorically negating effect the murder-suicide has on Jude the Obscure’s characters at large.
The result is an ever-collapsing state of character in which our hero is categorically “too menny”
– yet never a coherent one.
* * *
Conclusion
168
If George Eliot may be considered an exemplary realist novelist, this classification is
surely owing in part to how much her novels purport to tell readers about their real lives. More
specifically, they purport to teach us something about real people. In the chapter “In Which the
Story Pauses a Little” of Adam Bede (1859), which is often read as a realist manifesto of sorts,
Eliot suggests that the practice of rendering “a faithful account of men and things as they have
mirrored themselves in my mind” ought to provide the means to understand ordinary people:
“These fellow-mortals, ever one, must be accepted as they are… it is these more or less ugly,
stupid inconsistent people, whose movements or goodness you should be able to admire – for
whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.”
162
Middlemarch realizes
these aims and, in doing so, stands as a testament to how referential fictions can mediate our
understanding of real things and real lives.
Given the extent to which Middlemarch’s production of categories is coextensive with
the sympathetic didacticism of Eliot’s realism, what is striking about Hardy’s use of descriptive
categorization in Jude the Obscure is that he employs the formal moves of his predecessor to
dramatically different effects. In this project’s introduction, I suggested that the works featured
in it share a certain irreverence for the individuality of their characters. For these nineteenth-
century writers, the porous subjectivity of their characters plays a crucial role in facilitating the
referential productivity of their words and, in turn, the formal experimentation of their fictions.
Considering Hardy’s use of descriptive categorization in the context of Eliot’s can help us parse
how Jude the Obscure is at once an inheritor of this tradition and a stark departure from it.
Where for Eliot, descriptive categorization is expansive, Hardy’s novel turns the productive force
of descriptive categorization inward on his characters. And where earlier chapters in this project

162
George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Penguin, 2008), 193-194.
169
featured texts that engage with referential fictions to bring their characters into being or even
reanimate the dead, Jude the Obscure’s referential production becomes inextricably tied to the
deconstruction of its individual subjects. Hardy’s characters are the only ones who seem to feel
the novel’s disinterest in their individuality as a harbinger of their impending tragic fates. As
Father Time’s presence suggests, their struggle to define and protect their own individuality is,
indeed, a matter of life and death.
In this way, we can understand Jude the Obscure as a hinge between realism and
modernism, bringing nineteenth-century style to bear on a modernist anxiety about the coherence
of individual subjecthood. To look back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, furthermore,
Father Time’s “we are too menny” can be read as a response to Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven.”
In the way Hardy’s discourse transforms referential fiction-making into a vehicle of death, we
can see something of what Barbara Johnson (in an argument that traces a lineage between
Romanticism and twentieth-century poetry) suggests of apostrophe: “It becomes impossible to
tell whether language is what gives life or what kills.”
163
Perhaps Hardy’s novel recognizes a
similar possibility: that the dual capacities of fictional language to give life and take it away were
latent in nineteenth-century character description all along.

163
Johnson, 34.
170
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Creator Ehrhardt, Rebecca (author)

Core Title Fictions of reference: character and language in nineteenth-century British literature

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 08/02/2020

Defense Date 06/01/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag British literature,Character,OAI-PMH Harvest,philosophy of language,romanticism,victorian literature

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Advisor Griffiths, Devin (committee chair), Anderson, Emily (committee member), Flint, Kate (committee member), Jeshion, Robin (committee member), Russett, Margaret (committee member)

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA