Victorian Literature and the Romance of Being Good

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

If you know anything about the Victorians, you probably think of them as uptight and judgmental. That was certainly how the people who became their children and grandchildren saw them. But their preoccupation with correct moral behavior was for them the pursuit of heroic ideals. They dreamed of grand actions undertaken out of commitment to noble principles and the common good. This class will involve the intensive reading of four Victorian works that express Victorian longings for a goodness big and glamorous enough to be almost mythic. We'll read two narrative poems: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, about a woman's formation into a poet and Alfred Lord Tennyson's Victorian adaptation of Arthurian legends Idylls of the King. We'll also read two Victorian novels, Charles Dickens's Bleak House and George Eliot's Middlemarch, which associate the romance of doing good with the romance of the marriage plot. We'll also sample from a wide variety of Victorian economic, political and scientific thought that complicated the Victorians' longing for goodness. Along the way we'll confront the same questions the Victorians did: What are your obligations to your community? Should only local injustice matter to you? Does the definition of goodness depend on historical context? When is commitment to ideals a form of integrity and when is it fanaticism? Is the world simply too complex for individual goodness to matter?