| Critics of mid-nineteenth-century novels tend to ignore the era's psychology and its central position in the culture, hence they do not fully understand the novels. English-language psychology up of 1860 consisted to specific paradigms (associationism, mental faculties), explanatory strategies (primacy of consciousness, immateriality of mind, sanctity of soul), and interpretive strategies (analogy, orthogenesis, unity). Physiognomy, phrenology, and mesmerism were popular topics but were not widely accepted because they implied materialism and determinism. Psychologists such as Stewart, Upham, and Bain saw their discipline as the fundamental human science, relating characteristics of human nature to Divine Nature. A moral and rational more than an empirical science, it satisfied the culture's need for a theory of human nature but was not equally satisfying for Hawthorne, Bronte, Dickens, and Melville. Hawthorne accepted the psychology fully, and its rational components limited his grasp of human development and variety; his major romances all relate the same few "truths of the human heart." Bronte's approach was more empirical. Her four novels can be read as increasingly sophisticated dramatizations of the processes of perception and the formative influence of passions on identity, especially on the identity of Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. Dickens' psychological metaphysics (most fully presented in Our Mutual Friend) was based on the analogical relationship of mental to physical laws. His portrayal of continuous development, discontinuous changes of heart, and the unconscious, in Oliver Twist, Dombey, Copperfield, and Pip, departed increasingly from the established psychology. His women, notably Esther Summerson, reflect that psychology's limited understanding of women. Melville attacked the psychology because it was based on rational and intuitive interpretations of experience rather than on critical attention to the details of experience. In Typee, Redburn, Moby-Dick, and Pierre he explored the darker human experiences (insanity, monomania) and analyzed as a subjective mental event the impulse to find transcendent meaning in external phenomena. |
