The Spatialisation of Character

Ethology, phrenology, sociology, Owenism, immanentism, transcendentalism: all became important topics around the same time and all tried to explain the nature and formation of personal character more or less scientifically. Character thus became a vital object of multidisciplinary knowledge in postwar Britain. It was anatomised, taxonomised, naturalised in new ways. Its temporal dimension, of course, could never be realised in these new discourses as it was in certain kinds of narrative fiction. Realistic novels examined networks of individual characters that seemed to live, move and change over time. The new disciplines, at best, could infer how passing time influenced character in an abstract sense but could not so easily represent that influence. What is interesting is that other discourses coinciding with these new knowledges – multigeneric mixtures of narrative fiction, cultural commentary and journalism – were also interested in character in a more abstract sense (in a less concrete or ‘living’ sense of the sort we find in novels). I view these discourses as part of a general diversion from the tendency of realistic novels to dramatise character ‘development’. Realist fiction ‘flourishes in narrative amplitude, where character has “space” to be presented as unfolding over time’. It fetishises the concept of ethological ‘development’, a concept that Clifford Siskin argues was invented – or least elevated and consolidated – by the aesthetic experiments of early Romantic authors.

A lot of reform-era writing tends to minimise or even ignore character's temporal dimension. From one perspective, such writing ‘dissolves the tensions between plot and character … that are the mandatory signs of personal depth; it circumvents the reconciliations of the individual and the social that signal character development’. Both real and fictional characters become spatialised in postwar British literary culture. As to the real ones, the ‘new sub-genre’ of the ‘literary portrait’ began to flourish in the 1820s. Higgins observes that ‘[m]ost of the literary magazines of the early nineteenth century contained series of portraits of authors’: ‘articles’ that discussed ‘their subject's intellectual characteristics’, ‘life history, personal character and appearance (some included actual portraits)’.