Making Connections: Network Analysis, the Bildungsroman and the World of The Absentee

ABSTRACT

In the late eighteenth century, European novelists discovered youth. Writers like Goethe, Austen and Scott developed a new genre, the Bildungsroman, in which young, enthusiastic protagonists explore the world, develop themselves and find a place to remain. This, at least, has been a popular argument in modern criticism. Recently, however, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have brought it into question. Studying a number of British and American novels, they show that an alternative genre, the ‘network novel’, arose in the period, which ‘disrupted’ the image of an organic, domestic world that lay at the heart of the ‘domestic novel’ (their term for the classical Bildungsroman). Here, I propose that the ‘network novel’ and the ‘domestic novel’ can actually be seen as two distinct but interrelated aspects of the Bildungsroman. To demonstrate this, I use Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812) as a case study, utilising Franco Moretti’s innovative digital technique, ‘character network analysis’, to analyse its structure.

KEYWORDS:

• Character network analysis
• Bildungsroman
• Maria Edgeworth
• The Absentee (1812)
• digital humanities
• long eighteenth century

Notes

1. Maria Edgeworth, Helen: A Tale, Vol. 1 (London: Ricard Bentley, 1834), 277–78.

2. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 488.

3. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), v.

4. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener, ‘Introduction,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, eds. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1.

5. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, 1987, trans. Sbragia, Albert, Second Edition (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 4.

6. Susanne Howe, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen: Apprentices to Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 10. Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 9–13. Thomas L. Jeffers, Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3–4.

7. Karl Morgenstern, ‘Zur Geschichte Des Bildungsromans (1824),’ in Zur Geschichte Des Deutschen Bildungsromans, ed. Rolf Selbmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschafltiche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 86.

8. Rolf Selbmann, ‘Einleitung,’ in Zur Geschichte Des Deutschen Bildungsromans, ed. Rolf Selbmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschafltiche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 16. Fritz Martini, ‘Der Bildungsroman. Zur Geschichte Des Wortes Und Der Theorie (1961),’ in Zur Geschichte Des Deutschen Bildungsromans, ed. Rolf Selbmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschafltiche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 260.

9. Mitzi Myers, ‘The Dilemmas of Gender as Double-Voiced Narrative; or, Maria Edgeworth Mothers the Bildungsroman,’ in The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century, Studies in Lit., 1500–1800, 3 vol, ed. Robert W. Uphaus (East Lansing: Colleagues, 1988), 67–96. Mitzi Myers, ‘Quixotes, Orphans, and Subjectivity: Maria Edgeworth’s Georgian Heroinism and the (En)Gendering of Young Adult Fiction,’ The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature 13:1 (1989): 21–40.

10. Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750–1850 (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1999), 114–37. Moretti, Way of the World, 12.

11. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

12. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. ‘The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction,’ in A Companion to the English Novel, eds. Stephen Arata et al. (Chichester: Blackwell, 2015), 306–20.

13. The novel was published as volumes five and six of Tales of Fashionable Life (1809–1812). All references will be to this first edition.

14. Maria Edgeworth, Tales of Fashionable Life, 6 vols (London: Joseph Johnson, 1809–12), 5: 391.

15. Kara M. Ryan, ‘Justice, Citizenship, and the Question of Feminine Subjectivity: Reading the Absentee as a Historical Novel,’ in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth, ed. Julie Nash (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 190.

16. Marilyn Butler, ‘Irish Culture and Scottish Enlightenment: Maria Edgeworth’s Histories of the Future,’ in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, eds. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 172.

17. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin, 1963), 132–43.

18. Franco Moretti, ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis,’ New Left Review 68: (2011): 80–102. Franco Moretti, ‘“Operationalizing”: Or, the Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory,’ New Left Review 84 (2013): 103–19. Sociologists had previously experimented with literary applications of network analysis, but Moretti, to my knowledge, was the first literary critic to do so. For sociologists, see R. Alberich, J. Miro-Julia and F Rosselló, ‘Marvel Universe Looks Almost Like a Real Social Network,’ arXiv.org (2002). Web, 13 June 2015 <https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0202174v1>; James Stiller, Daniel Nettle and Robin IM Dunbar, ‘The Small World of Shakespeare’s Plays,’ Human Nature 14:4 (2003): 397–408.

19. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Second Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 143.

20. Alex Woloch, The One Vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 13–14.

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23. Uri Margolin, ‘Character,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 68–69. John Frow, Character and Person (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17–21.

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26. Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005), chapt. 1.

27. E. W. Dijkstra, ‘A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs,’ Numerische Mathematik 1:1 (1959): 269–71.

28. Martin Swales, ‘Unverwirklichte Totalität. Bermerkungen Zum Deutschen Bildungsroman (1977),’ in Zur Geschichte Des Deutschen Bildungsroman, ed. Rolf Selbmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschafltiche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 417.

29. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: Penguin, 2009), 157–59.

30. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, 1 vol (London: Penguin, 1990), 163–77.

31. W. J. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 135.

32. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 23.