| Readers of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel who expect a love story become notoriously upset when deprived of one. Horrified that Samuel Richardson seemed bent on keeping the hero and the heroine apart, a favorite correspondent threatened to boycott Clarissa if it ended without a wedding. Devotees of Jane Austen find it so curious that their beloved courtship novelist never married, that they regularly fantasize about pairing her off, even with her own creations, like Mr. Darcy and Captain Wentworth. Seething that Daniel Deronda married the wrong woman, a reviewer of George Eliot's novel reported homicidal feelings toward the offending character, who inspired "a nerve-current through [his] hands.";What is at stake in such vehement protests against these unaccountable subjects and the authors who made them? How does disaffection bear on our account of the novel as a genre and of novel-reading and novel-criticism as cultural practices? If gross disappointment is as much a part of the experience of fiction as gratification, then "the rise of the novel"---largely understood as mapping out human subjectivity through plots of desire---must work in other ways. Parsing the genre's variety of bad feelings (indifference, hostility, ambition, and ambivalence), my study addresses this other work of the novel, which features a rattling illegibility of character, as well as the violence that such a state induces.;Failures of Feeling proposes a loose genealogy of "problem" subjects from Clarissa Harlowe and Jane Austen in the eighteenth century to David Copperfield and Gwendolen Harleth in the nineteenth. Their problem, I argue, is a distinctive nonresponsiveness, a refusal to produce or return feelings. Such affective failure, so pronounced along the trajectory of the novel's "rise" (with its attendant narrative about the emergence of the liberal subject), challenges the critical conception of the genre as a medium of sympathetic identification, whereby reading is premised on entering into characters' feelings and subjectivity consolidates around the legibility of emotions. Characters who cannot or will not generate the feelings demanded of them (in stories oriented towards, but not restricted to, conjugality) upset the terms of subjectivity offered by the novel and its ontological design of investigating feelings.;Recalcitrant, impermeable, and unmovable subjects disturb or make irrelevant the plots of desire they also inspire. Thus, the novel openly suspects and bungles its own practices of emotional manipulation, risking---if not courting---pervasive displeasure. Critical discussion, focused on either the sympathetic thrust of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century marriage plot or the discovery and futility of bad feelings in modernism, has missed the tide of dysphoria always looming in the most canonical, pre-twentieth-century British fiction, an unavoidable countervalence to its sociable, psychological tendencies. Failures of feeling---flagrant, inscrutable defections from relationality, interiority, and narrative---test normative operations of reading.;In joining the conversation about bad feelings in literature, my study aims to recuperate a sense of agency in disaffection, to emphasize and restore the efficacy of certain forms of intransigence that make the rules of cultural feeling visible, at the risk of hijacking the whole operation of producing emotions. In turning to the alienation that obtains in novels and in novel-reading, to cases where sympathy is refused and feelings cannot be accommodated or reciprocated, I argue that the novel strains the lexicon for articulating subjectivity, triggering a kind of narrative autism, a disquieting inability to read subjects or recognize emotions. Failures of feeling attest to the novel's greatest ethical claim to make known the terms of social recognition and validation and to make space, however fragmentary and residual, for other kinds of living. |
