The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real

Abstract

Abstract The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real argues that Victorian novelistic realism is a product of the Victorians’ overarching desire, both cultural and ideological, for the real. What the book calls “realist fantasy” describes the way in which the conventions used to represent characters’ dreams, daydreams, and fantasies also shape the more general and generalized fantasy that constitutes each particular novel’s imagining of the real. In readings of George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, Trollope’s Orley Farm, and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, the book demonstrates that realism and fantasy in these novels are not opposed, but rather occupy the same space and are constructed via the same conventions. Refusing to distinguish their objects of knowledge from their objects of desire, the novels invite readers to do the same. The book’s contention that Victorian fiction builds on a general nineteenth-century desire for the real draws on the way the structure of Victorian ideologies—about, for example, domesticity, character, gender, nationality, and the possibility of objectivity—support the Althusserian and Lacanian account of ideology as an “imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence,” with the term “imaginary” defined not as an escape from the real but rather as the real, insofar as that is the name given to the institutions and structures that invest ideology with the substance and solidity the Victorians prized.

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