engleski

Emancipatory Ideas as a Narrative Constant in George Meredith's "Rhoda Fleming"

The paper explores Meredith's ethical judgement as part of his novelistic innovation of presupposing characters to the plot. The novel thrives on the centrality of the narrator's reflections on the fickleness of human endeavour in search of individual freedom. Pursuing his diegetic impulse, Meredith diverts from the forwarding narration of the generic Victorian novel to sustain a narrative vein of character(ethos)across the boundaries of their class or gender designations. The ethical quandaries of his protagonists add to their subjective valence and determine the intersubjective relations in the novel. Through perception of his characters' social personae as sources of contingent "bad faith", Meredith seeks to foreground their spiritual desolation and allows discourse to triumph over story. The selfhood-emancipating ideas of pride and passion of his Rhoda and Dahlia Fleming and Margaret Lovell face imminent subjection to custom and duty. Again and again, Meredith resorts to ethical considerations of his characters' genuine and virtual trajectories, touching on the obscurities of the precarious Victorian self. The novel genre here features a mutation in which the stylistic properties of the social, regional and psychological novel have been employed. Delineation of the character's hubris is instrumental to rendering a tragedy in the narrative that bears a comparison with George Eliot's novel concept, or Thomas Hardy's fictional realm of tragic private worlds. Constituent to the indirect presentation of the protagonists' self-recognition in a "delirium of anguish" are the instances of Rhoda Fleming and Robert Eccles' highly-charged turn-taking as well as ironic displays of the Victorian male's propensity toward the conceptualisation of women's nature in Edward Blancove's epistles to his cousin Algernon. The "fluctuating intellect and eloquence" of Meredith's creation Edward stands in sheer contrast with the inexorable will and implacability of Rhoda Fleming, whose aspect of the local "citoyenne Corday" significantly undermines her traits of a "consummate woman bred in English yeomanry".

Victorian novel, George Meredith, character, ethos, ethical quandaries, discourse, story

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