Eventfulness in British Fiction

Peter Hühn
Eventfulness in British Fiction

Narratologia
Contributions to Narrative Theory
Edited by
Fotis Jannidis, Matı́as Martı́nez, John Pier
Wolf Schmid (executive editor)
Editorial Board
Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik
José Ángel Garcı́a Landa, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn
Andreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister
Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan
Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel
Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert
18
De Gruyter
Peter Hühn
Eventfulness in British Fiction
With contributions by
Markus Kempf, Katrin Kroll and Jette K. Wulf
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-021364-5
e-ISBN 978-3-11-021365-2
ISSN 1612-8427
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hühn, Peter, 1939⫺

Eventfulness in British fiction / by Peter Hühn ; with contribu-
tions by Markus Kempf, Katrin Kroll and Jette K. Wulf.
p. cm. ⫺ (Narratologia. Contributions to narrative theory ; 18)
ISBN 978-3-11-021364-5 (alk. paper)
1. English fiction ⫺ History and criticism. 2. English fiction ⫺
Stories, plots, etc. 3. Events (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Fic-
tion ⫺ Stories, plots, etc. 5. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title.
PR830.P53H85 2010
8231.00924⫺dc22
2010001376
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
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Preface
This book describes a framework for the definition of the narratological
term “event”, its specific dependence on the historical, socio-cultural and
literary context, and its central function in the organization and the mean-
ing of plot in narrative fiction. A series of analyses of individual British
novels, tales and short stories demonstrates in detail how this concept can
be put into practice for a specific contextual interpretation of the event-
fulness of these texts. The adjective “British” is used here as a geographi-
cal rather than a political term referring to literature in English written in
the British Isles through the centuries.
The book is the result of work carried out under the leadership of
Wolf Schmid and me in Sub-Project P11 “Ereignis und Ereignishaftigkeit
in der englischen und russischen Literatur aus kulturhistorischer Perspek-
tive” [“Event and eventfulness in English and Russian literature from the
perspective of cultural history”] within the Hamburg Research Group
“Narratology” established at the University of Hamburg by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) on 1 April 2001.
Work on Sub-Project P11 was funded from 1 April 2004 to 31 March
2007. Markus Kempf and Anja Burghardt participated as research assis-
tants, Jette Wulf, Katrin Kroll and Tatjana Hahn as student assistants. I
should like to thank them all for their help. Markus Kempf prepared four
of the studies presented in this book. Katrin Kroll and Jette Wulf also
both contributed one study each. For the translation of two analyses and
the correction of several others I thank Alexander Starritt. I also thank
Carola Goldmann for correcting some analyses and for the thorough final
check of the entire book.
Peter Hühn
Contents
Introduction
PETER HÜHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN

Geoffrey Chaucer: “The Miller’s Tale” (ca. 1390–1400)
PETER HÜHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Aphra Behn: Oroonoko (1688)

PETER HÜHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
18TH CENTURY
Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders (1722)
KATRIN KROLL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740)

PETER HÜHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Henry Fielding. Tom Jones (1749)

MARKUS KEMPF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
PREMODERN AND MODERNIST

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (1861)
PETER HÜHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Thomas Hardy: “On the Western Circuit” (1891)

MARKUS KEMPF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
VIII Contents
Henry James: “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)

JETTE K. W U L F . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
James Joyce: “Grace” (1914)

PETER HÜHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Joseph Conrad: The Shadow-Line (1917)

PETER HÜHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Virginia Woolf: “An Unwritten Novel” (1921)

PETER HÜHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
D. H. Lawrence: “Fanny and Annie” (1921)

MARKUS KEMPF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Katherine Mansfield: “At the Bay” (1922)

PETER HÜHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
CONTEMPORARY
John Fowles: “The Enigma” (1974)
PETER H Ü H N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Graham Swift: Last Orders (1996)

MARKUS KEMPF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Conclusion
PETER H Ü H N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
1 Introduction
Peter Hühn
1. Defining Narrativity: Temporality, Eventfulness, Tellability
Narrating as a communicative act combines two dimensions – the dimen-

sions of sequentiality and mediation, i.e. the temporal sequence of hap-
penings in the story world on the one hand and, on the other, the trans-
mission of this sequence via a semiotic medium 1 (spoken or written
language in literary texts, the combination of picture, sound and spoken
dialogue in film or the actions and utterances of live characters, i.e. actors,
on a stage in drama). In addition to the choice of a particular medium,
mediation also comprises such phenomena as the standpoint, perspective
and normative attitude of a presenter (a narrator) and the selection, pres-
entation and arrangement of incidents (which convey an underlying, im-
plicit perspective, commonly called the implied or abstract author). These
two dimensions seem to be inherent – in various ways – in the binary
opposition (and their three-level or four-level extensions) underlying the
majority of narratological models such as histoire/récit, story/discourse,
fabula/syuzhet, story/text. 2 Of these two dimensions, the temporal se-
quentiality alone is specific to narrativity. This is because all modes of
communication and all types of discourse (argumentation, description,
explanation as much as narration) necessarily presuppose some form of
mediation and perspectivizing, in that they are transmitted in a given me-
dium and presented from a particular position. Narratives, however, are
distinguished from other text-types by the inherent temporal organization
of what is mediated and communicated. 3
Two basic types of narration can be differentiated, each with a specific
function. The most general type of narrative, tentatively termed “process
narration”, is defined by a reference to a mere change of state or a succes-
_____________
1 This is basically the definition adopted, e.g., by Prince (2008: 19): “an object is a narrative if
it is taken to be the logically consistent representation of at least two asynchronous events
that do not presuppose or imply each other”.
2 See e.g. Genette (1980), Chatman (1990), Tomashevsky (1965), Rimmon-Kenan (2002),
Abbott (2002). For a critical overview of these narrative parameters and a useful discussion
of their theoretical difficulties and problems cf. Pier (2003).
3 See e.g. Sternberg (2001: 115f.) and, generally, Sternberg (1990; 1992).
2 Peter Hühn
sion of such changes. This type is employed as a descriptive, informative,

often explanatory way of tracing and communicating developments, proc-
esses or changes without necessarily raising expectations of interesting,
surprising or unpredictable turns or deviations. Process narration seems to
be used, inter alia, in the natural sciences, in historiography, in lawsuits, in
diaries, travelogues, in sports casting, but also (for planning purposes) in
informative genres such as recipes, instruction manuals and itineraries 4 or,
prospectively, in weather reports.
The second – more specific – narrative text-type requires something
more crucial in addition to mere succession and change: an unexpected,
exceptional or new turn in the sequential dimension, some surprising
“point”, some significant departure from the established course of inci-
dents, what Bruner succinctly refers to in his formula: “canonicity and
breach”. 5 Recipients expect some such decisive change or turn, and a
narrative lacking this kind of “point” will elicit the bored question “So
what?” dreaded by every storyteller. Such decisive crucial turns will here
be called “events” and accordingly this narrative text-type may be distin-
guished as “eventful narration”, as opposed to process narration. Such a
crucial “point” generally functions as the raison d’être of a narrative, con-
stituting its “tellability” or “noteworthiness”. 6 This obviously also applies
to jokes, anecdotes, gossip and everyday conversational storytelling about
personal experiences and likewise, more emphatically, to the great variety
of literary narratives extending from highly schematised popular genres
(including detective, crime and spy fiction as well as love and adventure
stories) to novels belonging to the literary canon, short stories and bal-
lads 7 , and, moreover, to drama and poetry. 8 Thus, tellability (and, ulti-
_____________
4 These genres might be called proto-narrative. To become fully narrative a link with the
attribution to a character is required.
5 Bruner (1991: 11–13).
6 Cf. Pratt’s (1977: 136, 144ff.) application of this notion to literary texts. Cf. Prince (2003:
97, 83; 2008: 2325). Fludernik (2003b: 245–46) refers to the dynamics between narrativity
and tellability or point, drawing on Labov and other discourse analysts. Though based on
her specific concept of natural narratology and experientiality, her notion that events
(“points”) do not constitute narrativity in themselves but only through their emotional and
evaluative overload can be linked to the approach adopted here for a description of event-
fulness.
7 The basic requirement of a “point” for narratives has been most extensively discussed by
scholars analysing everyday or “natural” storytelling: cf. Labov & Waletzky (1967), Labov
(1972); Ochs & Capps (2001); Prince (1983). Pratt (1977: 51ff., 136, 144ff.) discusses this
point by applying Grice’s maxims to literature, especially to novels: she analyses the “dis-
play text” (i.e. the thematisation of the unusual), tracing the similarity between novels and
natural narratives in this respect to the notions of the detachability of the display text and
its susceptibility to elaboration.
8 Cf. Hühn & Kiefer (2005).
Introduction 3
mately, narrativity) can be said to depend on eventfulness. That is not to

say that other features of the narrative text (including the particular choice
and rendering of characters, incidents and setting, the specific style, use of
wit and irony, etc.) do not also contribute to its tellability, with the occur-
rence of at least one event, however, remaining indispensable in all cases.9
The conception of narrativity inherent in the concept outlined above
combines the two senses differentiated by Prince (1999: 43f.; 2008), Stern-
berg (2001) and Herman (2002: 100ff.) in the opposition of binary narra-
tivehood and gradational narrativeness: eventfulness as the differentiating
criterion of narrativity is both a binary category (a text is either narrative
or not narrative, i.e. either features or does not feature events) and a scalar
category (texts can be more or less narrative and thus rank higher or lower
on the scale of eventfulness). 10
Furthermore, this additional requirement of eventfulness is context-
sensitive 11 and consequently culturally as well as genre-specific, and his-
torically variable. The context-sensitivity of eventfulness is a complex
phenomenon that comprises the following aspects and must be specified
with that in mind when analyzed with reference to actual narratives: the
relevance – to the event – of the social and cultural setting depicted in the
text; the relation of the event to social and cultural or literary phenomena
outside the text; and the status of such an event within the contemporary
world (whether common, rare or new). One particularly important type of
context consists of other literary texts, which may serve as a frame of
reference for the constitution of eventfulness in a narrative. 12
_____________
9 Cf. the general overview of dimensions and aspects of tellability provided by Ryan (2005:
589–94) and Prince (2008: 2325).
10 These two senses can be distinguished as an extensional and an intensional definition of
narrativity – see Prince (2008: 20).
11 Cf. Prince (1983), who discusses message and point as part of narrative pragmatics. He
links the term “point” (pointless vs. pointed) to the phenomenon of relevance and stresses
its context-dependence under two aspects: for the text and for the receiver. The need for a
reconstruction of the context for the receiver is due to the fact that literary texts are not
closely tied to the context of their production (534). Polanyi (1979: 209) seeks to answer
the question “What do Americans tell stories about?”, using point (the noteworthy, the
narratable, the interesting) as the main focus. The point of narrative, she argues, emerges
from context reference, which is dependent on narrative or event structure (time), descrip-
tive structure (material) and, most importantly, evaluative structure. She further distin-
guishes between the culturally interesting (with the broadest appeal, to the entire culture),
the socially interesting (appeal to a group) and the personally interesting, noting that the in-
teresting (in America) can be equated with the odd or the unexpected, the violation of a
norm (211–12), although it is highly variable from a cultural perspective.
12 For an (earlier) summary of the approach outlined in this introduction, see Hühn (2008).
For a general, comprehensive overview of aspects of event and eventfulness, see Hühn
(2009).
4 Peter Hühn
2. Modelling Eventfulness:
Schema Theory and Lotman’s Concept of Sujet
As for the definition of eventfulness, those narratological models that

posit change as an additional constituent of narrativity 13 tend to be too
general and lacking in specificity to account for the structure and status of
what constitutes a change. 14 Further specifications are required with re-
spect, in particular, to what counts as a decisive change and whether the
measure of decisiveness can be determined on a purely textual basis.
The most elaborate proposal so far for a definition of eventfulness is
Schmid’s (2003) list of seven criteria. 15 Schmid names two absolute or
necessary preconditions: reality and resultativity, i.e. changes must actually
occur and they must be complete in order to qualify as events. These ab-
solute criteria allow, however, for complex and qualified forms of textual
realisation. Thus the mental act of wishing or dreaming as such may prove
eventful under certain circumstances, even without the actual achievement
of what is being wished or dreamt of. And a text may narrate just the be-
ginning or the preparation of an eventful change and break off without
actually presenting the completed event itself. Schmid adds five relative or
gradational criteria: relevance, unpredictability, persistence, irreversibility
and non-iterativity, i.e. changes can be more or less relevant, unpredict-
able, persistent, irreversible and singular, and their degree of eventfulness
will vary accordingly. The relative significance of these five criteria for the
measure of eventfulness is largely conditioned by the context, that is, de-
pendent on the historical period and on socio-cultural phenomena as well
as the literary genre and the individual features of the author’s entire oeu-
vre. Here, too, a fairly wide spectrum of textual manifestations is possible.
Under certain circumstances, the repetition of a change may even raise the
level of eventfulness instead of lowering it, e.g. winning in a game of
chance. And there are genres in which certain events are predictable in
principle but not in the concrete shape they take, e.g., the initiation of a
young protagonist into his or her destined role in a fairy tale or the solu-
tion of a mysterious case in a detective novel or the final catastrophe in a
tragedy.
To supplement and contextualise such a definition of eventfulness, an
analytical approach will be elaborated which combines two concepts of
_____________
13 E.g. Greimas (1987); Bremond (1973); Todorov (1977); Sternberg (2001).
14 For an overview of different types of event in the sense of change, see Herman (2005:
151–52). Such a notion of event as (mere) change has to be clearly distinguished from the
more specific concept of event proposed in the present article: event as a decisive and un-
expected change.
15 See also Schmid (2005), 20–22.
Introduction 5
modelling sequentiality in narrative texts: cognitivist schema theory and

Lotman’s semiotic model of the artistic text. Both concepts stress the
semantic dimension of eventfulness as well as its correlation to textual and
extratextual order and value systems, 16 thereby allowing for a precise ex-
plication of the relation of event to context.
Schema theory 17 enables us to show how recipients make sense of
narratives, as of any other kind of text, 18 by drawing on their knowledge
of the world as determined by cognitive structures and semantic patterns
that already exist in their minds and are, consequently, already meaningful.
These operations are fundamentally the same as those routinely employed
by people in ordinary real-life situations. In fact, these cognitive structures
constitute a link between experience and understanding in the actual
world and in fiction. Two broad types of such patterns may be distin-
guished: firstly, static schemata or frames, i.e. situational or thematic con-
texts into which a text is placed so as to be understood; and secondly, with
particular importance for narratives and their plots, dynamic schemata or
scripts, i.e. sequential or procedural patterns which underlie or organise a
course of action or a succession of incidents. While frames are used to
determine the thematic or situational relevance of what is happening (e.g.
a love relationship between a man and a woman), scripts describe the
abstract structures of stereotypical sequences of actions (e.g. the typical
steps of conventional courtship) to which plots in a novel may refer.
Frames and scripts are mutually correlated (as in the examples of love and
courtship procedure) 19 . Schemata may be based on references to two dif-
ferent types of context: either to general experience and the knowledge of
the real world (extratextual references to phenomena such as merchant
shipping and the careers of ship’s officers and captains) 20 and to literature
_____________
16 Cf. Pratt (1977: 72–73), who stresses the context-dependence of relevance, pointedness
and thus, by implication, eventfulness, although she does not use the term, referring in-
stead to Labov’s notion of the “unspoken permanent agenda”; cf. also Culler’s (1975:
113ff., 140ff.) and Bruner’s (1991: 14–17) extensive and precise discussions of the context-
sensitivity of narrative meaning and that of genre.
17 Cf. e.g. Schank & Abelson (1977); Schank (1990); Herman (2002); Cook (1994). Schank &
Abelson make a useful distinction between scripts, stereotypical sequences of actions or in-
cidents of a situational, personal or instrumental kind; plans, procedures of achieving goals,
conducted by actors; and themes, similar to what is normally called a [thematic] frame –
the situational context of a person’s behaviour. Cf. Goffman’s (1986: 10–11) specification:
“I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of or-
ganization which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in
them: frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to iden-
tify.”
18 The same goes for authors in the act of producing the text.
19 Cf. the analysis of Richardson’s Pamela in the present volume (63î73).
20 Cf. the analysis of Conrad’s The Shadow-Line in the present volume (133î44).
6 Peter Hühn
and the other arts (intertextual references 21 to literary models such as the
detective’s search for the solution of a mystery) 22 . Furthermore, there are
intratextual scripts which are established in the course of the work in
question itself (such as the chain of illusory triumphs over illusion in
Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).
A narrative text that conforms closely to a schema is, however, not
noteworthy and therefore not eventful, since such a text only reproduces
what is already known and expected. Eventfulness thus involves departure
from a schematic pattern or script activated in the text. 23 Moreover, de-
parture from an established pattern may vary in degree by dint of being
more or less unexpected or exceptional, so that the concept of eventful-
ness is necessarily gradational. 24 Also to be taken into account are two
important conceptual consequences entailed in cognitivist theory. Sche-
mata (frames and scripts) are not inherent in textual structures in any on-
tological sense but must be inferred by the reader (and the literary critic)
from specific cues or signals in the text, activated in his or her mind on
the basis of his or her knowledge of the world, and correlated to the nar-
rative. 25 In addition, relevant schemata will vary both diachronically and
synchronically, the analysis of eventfulness thus involving identification
and specification of those schemata that can be shown to be culturally,
historically and generically germane: what counts as an event will thus
have to be assessed with reference to the context in terms of genre, 26
culture, social group, historical period and author. For texts from a remote
period and from a foreign culture, the relevant context in terms of world
knowledge has to be reconstructed carefully. Furthermore, since the actual
relevance of schemata and the status of events depend on the conscious-
ness of a perceiving subject for whom a schema is relevant and, conse-
quently, to whom an incident appears to be eventful, eventfulness will
vary in relation to the entity or level in the textual setup (protago-
nist/character, narrator, author or reader). Thus, a development may be
eventful for the protagonist or one of the other characters but not for the
_____________
21 Cf. Pier (2004).
22 Cf. the analysis of Fowles’s “The Enigma” in the present volume (175î84).
23 See Herman (2002: 85–86).
24 Cf. Herman’s (2002: 86, 91, 100ff.) scalar definition of “narrativity” in contrast to the
binary category of “narrativehood”. Schmid (2003) also conceives of eventfulness as a gra-
dational category.
25 See Herman (2002: 91, 95–96): the text cues recipients to activate certain kinds of world
knowledge. See also Todorov (1977) and Barthes (1977).
26 Herman (2002: 105) describes genres as script-based macrodesigns; Pratt (1977: 86) speaks
about genres in terms of communicative conventions and felicity conditions. See also
Schaeffer (1989).
Introduction 7
narrator and the reader or vice versa, as in James Joyce’s short story
“Grace”. 27
The cognitivist description of eventfulness and tellability may be sup-
plemented by Lotman’s concept of sujet, which is centrally based on the
notion of the event. 28 Lotman, too, construes eventfulness as a departure
or deviation from a norm, the violation of an established order. He de-
scribes the basic normative order typically underlying a narrative text as a
“semantic field”, using metaphorically spatial terms. This semantic field is
sub-divided into two sub-fields (or sub-sets) by a boundary (or border) 29
which separates the scope of a particular set of features, norms and values
from the domain of a different order with opposite norms. In Samuel
Richardson’s novel Pamela 30 , for instance, the semantic field can be iden-
tified as the hierarchical structure of society split into the two sub-fields of
the lower (working) class and the aristocracy, which are defined by a con-
comitant set of contrastive features and norms: low vs. high status, poor
vs. rich, being required to work vs. enjoying a leisured existence, depend-
ent vs. independent (etc.). People belong to their respective class on ac-
count of their birth and origin. Crossing the boundary is normally impos-
sible or prohibited for the figures within this sub-field, and, if it occurs,
brought about by the protagonist (who thereby becomes a mobile figure),
this fact is something noteworthy or significant in itself and constitutes an
“event”. In Richardson’s novel, the servant-girl Pamela is finally married
by an aristocrat (on account of her superior morality and exemplary social
graces), thereby crossing the boundary between the two sub-fields, which
counts as highly eventful because practically exluded by the prevailing
social order. The elaboration of the semantic field and its binary subdivi-
sion is always culturally and historically specific î in this example condi-
tioned by the context of the contemporary class-structure in Britain. Like
Schmid, Lotman also defines events in gradational terms, since the extent
of “resistance” a boundary puts up to being crossed (i.e. its degree of in-
violability) conditions the degree of eventfulness.
Although the terms of “field”, “boundary” and “boundary crossing”
are not meant primarily spatially, but serve as metaphors for the modelling
of abstract normative orders (although changes and events in literary texts
do often manifest themselves in spatial form), Lotman’s terminology
tends to suggest arrangements that are too simple and too concrete. For a
more flexible and differentiated application of this approach, one must
take into account that these norms may be situated on various levels and
_____________
27 Cf. the analysis of Joyce’s “Grace” in the present volume (125î32).
28 Lotman (1977: esp. 23340); cf. Shukman (1977).
29 These two terms are used as synonyms in the following analyses.
30 See the analysis in this volume (63î73).
8 Peter Hühn
adopt diverse forms such as different social ranks, development stages,

concepts of morality or mental attitudes, or more generally: different cog-
nitive structures, value systems or world views. Since these normative
orders are constituted by binary oppositions, they can be described in
pairs of opposites: middle classes vs. aristocracy, immature youth vs. ma-
ture adulthood, rationality vs. insanity, ignorance vs. insight etc. The tran-
sition from one state (“sub-field”) to another often occurs not abruptly
but in a long drawn-out process of gradual change.
These categories enable the analyst to explicate the relation between
the narrative text and its social or cultural context(s), determining the
relevance and semantic significance of the narrated change. Lotman’s
model allows for the conceptualisation of successive and progressive
events, but also of regressive events. The protagonist may become immo-
bile in the new sub-field or progress further, in which case the semantic
field is re-defined, the previous second sub-field changing into a new first
sub-field, which in turn is delimited by another boundary that the pro-
tagonist, if he or she remains mobile, may cross and so forth and so on.
But it is also possible for the protagonist, having crossed the boundary, to
retrace his or her steps, as it were, re-entering the old first field and revok-
ing or cancelling the event. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations 31 may
serve as an illustrative example of successive and reversed eventful move-
ments together with a re-definition of the semantic field. The protagonist
Pip goes through three stages in the course of the novel: first, the rise
from a blacksmith’s apprentice to the position of gentleman, a positive
event within a socially defined field (social status); second, the cancellation
of this rise (because morally discredited), a negative event within the same
field; third, the re-definition of the semantic field in moral terms and Pip’s
eventful development into a responsible and caring person capable of
sympathy for others.
The two approaches – the cognitivist and the semantic – complement
each other in that schema theory offers a rigorous conceptualisation of the
sequential coherence of actions, happenings and incidents, while Lotman
provides a clear description both of the semantic framework and of the
decisive turn within the sequential dimension as well as a more explicit
definition of the status of the event in cultural and historical terms. Sys-
tematic research into the cultural and historical development of what
counts as an event has so far been lacking. 32
_____________
31 See the analysis in the present volume (87î103).
32 The need for just such a research programme into diachronic and synchronic variability is
mentioned by Herman (2002: 107–13; see also 86) and Fludernik (2003a).
Introduction 9
3. Types of Eventfulness
Events and the sequences in which they occur are usually ascribed to a
figure, either an agent or a patient, i.e. to a character who actively initiates
or passively undergoes a change. The decisive change can also occur in a
collective, a group of people (as the ship’s crew in Conrad’s The Nigger of
the ‘Narcissus’) or in the physical or social setting of a story (as the national
rebellion in Conrad’s Nostromo), but change of this kind will normally
have a subsequent impact in the form of changing fortunes, relations,
emotions and attitudes in one or more individuals. The causes of change
are an important issue: Individual changes can be caused by physical, so-
cial, interpersonal or psychological actions or occurrences (such as a flash
of revelation, epiphany or crisis). These individual sequences form differ-
ent storylines (or plotlines), which – in a long story or a novel – usually
interact and combine to produce the complex overall plot of the text.
Three types of event can be distinguished, 33 according to the level of
the narrative text on which the figure is located and on which the decisive
turn or deviation takes place or, more precisely, to which it is ascribed: 34
(a) events in the happenings or story-world events situated at the level of
histoire or story, within the narrated incidents, with the protagonist as
agent or patient (as, for instance, in Richardson’s Pamela, where the
change of the heroine’s social and marital status constitutes the event;
prototypical examples are fairy tales with the hero or heroine convention-
ally undergoing an eventful change); (b) presentation events, located at the
level of récit or discourse, with the narrator as protagonist who typically
experiences a change in his or her attitude or consciousness, constituting a
story of narration 35 (as, for instance, in Virginia Woolf’s “An Unwritten
Novel”, 36 where the narrator radically changes her concept of making
sense of other people by inventing stories about them; another example is
John le Carré’s The Russia House and the narrator’s eventful change of
attitude – in the course of his narration – from committed spy to critic of
the secret service); (c) reception events, located at the level of reading, with
the reader as agent; this type refers to cases where neither the protagonist
nor the narrator is able or willing to undergo a decisive change, which the
composition of the text (i.e. the implied author), however, signals as nec-
essary or desirable and which the (ideal) reader is meant to perform vi-
_____________
33 See Hühn & Kiefer (2005: 246î51).
34 Stories and events do not exist in the world. Rather, they are constituted by the mediation
through discourse in the first place. But the text can ascribe them either to the story-world
or to the discourse level or else delegate them to the level of reception.
35 Cf. Schmid (1982; 2005: 18, 268f.).
10 Peter Hühn
cariously in his or her own consciousness 37 (as, for instance, in the short
stories of Joyce’s Dubliners 38 , where characters invariably fail to achieve
the eventful escape from the paralysing atmosphere of the city, an event
the reader is induced to perform in his or her mind instead; examples of a
different genre are jokes, which specifically require the reader to make the
necessary connections and discover the point).
4. Eventfulness in British Fiction:

The Selection of Texts and Arrangement of the Analyses
This new approach to the plot analysis of narrative fiction from the aspect
of eventfulness as constitutive of narrative tellability is explored in fifteen
British novels, tales or short stories, i.e. examples taken from the corpus
of narrative fiction written in the British Isles. These analyses have a two-
fold aim: first, to investigate the form, place and (degree of) realization of
events within the narrative setup of the texts and, second, to determine
the relevant contexts (and their types) on which the eventfulness in each
case depends, and to trace changes (or continuities) of this context-
dependence through the course of history. The historical range of the
texts selected stretches from the late Middle Ages to the end of the 20th
century with a special focus on the transition from 19th-century Realism to
20th-century Modernism (Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James,
James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, D. H.
Lawrence). This period is especially focused on because it is during these
decades that the notion of eventfulness, which still seemed largely intact
during the 18th century, was variously problematized and eroded. For the
sake of contrast, a small number of texts from different periods are
grouped around this focus: two texts from the early stages of English
fiction (Geoffrey Chaucer of the 14th, Aphra Behn of the 17th century) and
three novelists from the 18th century (Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson,
Henry Fielding) precede the transitional period around the turn of the 20th
century and two examples from the end of the last century (John Fowles,
Graham Swift) follow it. Most of the authors chosen belong to the canon
of English/British fiction.
The primary aim of the essays that follow is to demonstrate the
method of applying the analysis of eventfulness to texts of different struc-
_____________
37 Of course, readers are always meant to re-create the eventful change mediated by a text in
their consciousness. But, in the case of reception events, the text refrains from narrating
the event so that readers are required to complete the eventful development in their minds
in direct contrast to what is narrated. Whether they actually do so is another matter.
38 See the analysis of “Grace” in the present volume (125î32).
Introduction 11
tures and from different periods and illustrate the benefits of this ap-
proach for an understanding of the plot-structure of these texts and its
dependence on various context features. They are intended as models of
how the approach outlined in this introduction could be put into practice,
and not to provide comprehensive interpretations on the basis of a de-
tailed discussion of previous assessments; references to criticism have
therefore been restricted to selected representative works.
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12 Peter Hühn
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LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN
2 Geoffrey Chaucer: “The Miller’s Tale”
from The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1390–1400)
Peter Hühn
1. Plot Structure: The Interlinking of Plotlines
The story in Chaucer’s verse tale, or, more accurately, fabliau 1 “The
Miller’s Tale” 2 encompasses four characters: three men (the carpenter
John, the student Nicholas and the parish clerk Absolon) and one woman
(John’s wife Alisoun), along with their actions. These actions are pre-
sented in the shape of three interwoven, event-containing plotlines, and
each of these plotlines is in fact constituted through the relation of occur-
rences (in the form of both actively initiated and passively experienced
incidents) to one of the three men as a protagonist. In contrast, Alisoun
does not underpin an eventful plot sequence. The three plotlines, each
related to one of the men, are constructed as analogous and competing in
that they are all – although in different ways – directed at Alisoun, so that
the woman represents the narrative object and, as such, merely reacts,
developing no narrative strand of her own.
The interweaving of the three plotlines is effected in the way they are
actionally and thus also chronologically correlated and embedded. The
base story is concerned with the carpenter and his emotional and intellec-
tual state, particularly his obsessive love for Alisoun, and the behaviour it
determines. In keeping with the conventions of the genre of the fabliau,
the characters are not complexly psychologized in the modern sense, but
are rather defined by a few attributes of personality and status. Thus the
carpenter is characterized as rich, old and jealous, good-tempered and
gullible. Decisive for the plot is first and foremost that he is governed by
his affects, namely by his excessive love for Alisoun, and that he does not
allow himself to be guided by reason or insight. Because of this, he is,
despite his age, tempted into marrying the pretty and sensual eighteen-
year-old Alisoun. This is, as the narrator explains at the outset (322732),
a mistake caused by a lack of insight and one which violates the relevant
code (the principle of equality as a basis for marriage). This comment
_____________
1 On the characteristics of the “fabliau” genre, as well as on the partial deviation of “The
Miller’s Tale” from these, see below, ch. 3.
2 Text quoted from Robinson (1966: 4855). Translations from Hill (2007: 6474).
18 Peter Hühn
makes the appropriate interpretative schemata explicit from the beginning.

The frame established for John’s story is not primarily love, but rather the
problem of blindness and insight, of affect and reason (3221ff.):
He knew nat Catoun, for his wit was rude,
That bad man sholde wedde his simylitude.
Men sholde wedden after hire estaat,
For youthe and elde is often at debaat (322730) 3 ;
the narrator also explicitly formulates the script in a metaphorical para-
phrase: a transgression of this sort necessarily brings with it punishment in
the form of suffering: “sith that he was fallen in the snare, / He moste
endure, as oother folk, his care” (3231f.) 4 .
This behaviour of the carpenter’s not only facilitates, but indeed ulti-
mately provokes the development of a second plotline, the affair between
Nicholas and Alisoun. Nicholas is introduced as an experienced, clever
and discreet paramour: “Of deerne love he koude and of solas; / And
thereto he was sleigh and ful privee” (3200f.). 5 And, encouraged by spatial
proximity (as a lodger in the house) as well as Alisoun’s erotic attractive-
ness and sensuality (“likerous ye”, 32446 , cf. 3345), Nicholas flirts with
her, attempts to seduce her and swiftly wins – partly because she is sensu-
ally unfulfilled – her willingness, in principle, to reciprocate his advances:
“she hir love him graunted atte laste” (3290) 7 ; “this was his desir and hire
also” (3407) 8 . The plotline introduced in this way is thus framed as a love
affair which must be concealed and orientates itself on the sequential
schema of courtship and seduction with the goal of secret, extra-marital
sexual gratification as the desired event. This gratification, because it is
conventional and predictable in the fabliau context, ranks relatively low on
the scale of eventfulness. However, the realization of the script, or, to use
Lotman’s categories, the crossing of the border through the embedding
into the carpenter’s plotline, is faced with a particular obstacle: just as the
marriage of the old carpenter with a “wild young” woman (3225) facili-
tates the initiation of the affair, so his obsessive jealousy (3224) hinders
the affair’s fulfilment and makes specific labours and precautions neces-
sary in the reaching of that goal, namely secrecy (“deerne”, 3297)9 and an
_____________
3 “He knew not Cato (for his wit was rude), / Who bade men wed in some similitude; / Men
ought to mate with those of like condition, / For youth and age are oft in opposition”.
4 “since he had fallen in the snare, / He must endure, like other men, his care”.
5 “Skilled both in mirth and secret love he was; / And he was sly and subtle as could be”.
6 “wanton eye”.
7 “She granted him the love he asked at last”.
8 “For this was his desire and hers as well”.
9 “secret, discreet”.
Geoffrey Chaucer: “The Miller’s Tale” 19
ingenious ruse (“a wyle / This sely jalous housbonde to bigyle”, 3403f.) 10 .
The resultant difficulty of crossing the border and the strategy employed
by Nicholas to overcome it (predicting a flood, procuring and separately
hanging up kneading troughs) increase the eventfulness of the night they
spend together when it is finally realized, especially by means of the elabo-
ration of the joke with which the carpenter is deceived: “Withouten
wordes mo they goon to bedde / Ther as the carpenter is wont to lye”
(3650f.) 11 . With that, the love story, as it initially appears, reaches its suc-
cessful climax and is concluded.
The story of Nicholas’ courtship and seduction of Alisoun is then
contrasted with a rival’s – Absolon’s – courtship of Alisoun, introducing a
third plotline. The frame, erotic love, mirrors that of Nicholas’ story. The
script (courtship and the striving for gratification) is structurally similar in
both, though with characteristic cultural differences. Where Nicholas, in
his seduction techniques, is aggressive and unambiguously sexually inter-
ested (“and prively he caughte hire by the queynte”, 3275)12 , Absolon
orientates himself towards the cultivated form of the script of courtly
love, albeit in a highly, even grotesquely coarsened manner, with parodic
implications: he courts his beloved with guitar music and singing, inter
alia below her bedroom window (3352ff.), reacts to her indifference with
stylised heartache (“this joly Absolon / So woweth hire that hym is wo
bigon. / He waketh al the nyght and al the day”, 3372f.; 13 also 3658) and
finally requests the favour of a kiss (3680, 3714ff.). The parodic compo-
nents of his reference to this script reveal themselves in exaggerations and
inappropriateness; for example, that he pays court in the same way to all
the women in his vicinity, that he, during collection in church, does not
accept donations from women on principle (3349ff.), that he sometimes
courts Alisoun via middlemen and with gifts (of money) (3378ff.) and that
he places excessive importance on his fashionably elegant exterior and his
fine manners (“he was somdeel squaymous / Of farting, and of speche
daungerous”, 3337f.) 14 . As with Nicholas, the interweaving of plotlines
determines the difficulty in crossing the border and in the realization of
the event: the rivalry with the luckier Nicholas prevents Absolon’s suc-
cess: “She loveth so this hende Nicholas / That Absolon may blowe the
_____________
10 “a subtle plot … This simple, jealous husband to deceive”.
11 “And with no further word they went to bed, / There where the carpenter was wont to
be”.
12 “And caught her stealthily between the thighs”.
13 “this jolly Absalon / So wooeth her, that she is woe-begone. He neither sleeps by night nor
yet by day”.
14 “the man was far from daring / In breaking wind, and in his speech was sparing”.
20 Peter Hühn
bukkes horn” (3386f.) 15 . The contrast between the two competing plot-
lines, especially regarding the differences in the difficulty of crossing the
border, is underlined by the direct synchronisation (again with a slight
chronological staggering) of Nicholas’ success and Absolon’s failure: Ab-
solon undertakes a renewed, optimistic attempt at courtship on, of all
nights, Nicholas and Alisoun’s eventful night of passion. As a result of
this coincidence, the previous failure of his courtship worsens (clearly
because of a mischievousness caused by the sexual gratification of the
happy lovers) to become an explicit rejection (3709ff.) and subsequently a
humiliating duping by Alisoun (a kiss on her naked bottom, the so-called
“misdirected kiss”, 3720ff.).
This drastic prevention of the border crossing and denial of the event-
ful fulfilment of Absolon’s love plot produces in him an abrupt change in
frame and script, with the occurrence of a contrary positive event of a
different type: his fervent loving, not just for Alisoun but in general, is
completely extinguished (“Of paramours he sette nat a kers”, 3756)16 , and
he is healed 17 (“For he was heeled of his maladie”, 3757) 18 ; that is, he
suddenly gains insight into the falseness of his previous conduct and is
henceforth capable of assessing things correctly. 19 Absolon’s plotline is
thus framed in a new way and its polarity re-directed – from the erotic to a
cognitive dimension – and, in this respect, brought to an eventful conclu-
sion. This conclusion has the practical consequence that Absolon’s hard-
won insight turns him into a well-suited means, for his part, of punishing
false behaviour in others. This punishment is subjectively motivated as
revenge for the ignominy suffered (3746ff.) and this motivation is indeed
portrayed as problematic, in that he is even willing to sell his soul to Satan
for it (3750). 20 However, the motivation for an act of punishment clearly
must be separated from its function – in the sense of an overarching gov-
erning principle, so to speak – in the sanctioning of wrong behaviour.
While Alisoun’s trick appears to be justified, since she wants to take re-
_____________
15 “it is Nicholas she loves, indeed, And Absalon may go and blow the horn”. Compare the
generalised explanation with a proverb in 3392f.
16 “He rated love not worth a piece of cress”.
17 Calabrese (1994) points to Ovid as the source for the mechanisms appearing here for
curing passionate love (recognition of drastic female physicality).
18 “He was clean purged of all his malady”.
19 The assumption of a cure is suggested by the narrator’s use of the term “maladie”, though
Absolon’s reaction of hysterical repugnance tends not to communicate the impression of
sobering insight. Cf. also Walker (2002: 78), who sees in Absolon a manifestation of child-
ishly immature ideas about female sexuality, as fostered in the context of the Marian cult
(89ff.).
20 Cf. Novelli (1968) on details of the conversion as well as Walker (2002) on the problemati-
zation of the cure aspect.
venge for her harassment by Absolon and, objectively, the punishment

prompts his cure, Nicholas’ plan to repeat and enhance Alisoun’s success-
ful prank is in itself the expression of a wrong and punishable attitude: his
purpose is motivated by pure Schadenfreude and is indicative of his pre-
sumptuousness and his flagrant misjudgement of another person. As a
result of precisely this misjudgement, he exposes himself to punishment
by means of a trick similar to that which he had intended to play on an-
other: Absolon provokes the re-enactment of Alisoun’s trick (presenting
the bottom for a kiss), Nicholas falls for it and is punished with a blow to
the bottom from a red hot ploughshare (3810).
Hence, in the second plotline, Nicholas’ love affair, a re-directed se-
quel takes place, after the successful conclusion of the love story: Nicholas
makes himself guilty of wrong behaviour, in his blinded assessment of his
own abilities and those of others (ultimately comparable with Absolon),
and is appropriately punished for it. However, unlike in the Absolon plot-
line, that does not entail the discarding of the love story, but, on the other
hand, nor does the punishment lead to insight and a change in his behav-
iour. His mental reaction is not reported, but only his (and Alisoun’s)
pragmatic behaviour in response to the situation in the wake of his pun-
ishment, namely that they declare the carpenter mad and thereby prevent
the exposure of their trick, thus enabling them to protect themselves from
discovery:
for whan he [the carpenter] spak, he was anon bore doun
With hende Nicholas and Alisoun.
They tolden every man that he was wood … (3831ff.)21
This means that this love story is not, like Absolon’s, subject to a change
in frame and script, but rather that an element (Nicholas’ punishment) is
added, though this belatedly reduces the eventful fulfilment of the love
story. However, its importance in the entire plot constellation of “The
Miller’s Tale” lies primarily in its function in the base story. Just as Abso-
lon, after his punishment and cure, functions as a means of punishment in
the story of Nicholas and Alisoun, so, after Nicholas’ punishment, the two
of them function as a means of punishment in the story of the carpenter.
After the conclusion of both of these embedded plotlines, the base
story of John the carpenter is eventually taken up again from the begin-
ning, continued under the influence of the events of the other two stories,
and brought to an end. A consequence of the eventful cure and insight of
Absolon, the blow (actually intended for Alisoun) to Nicholas’ naked
bottom with the red hot ploughshare triggers a chain reaction which con-
_____________
21 “For hardly had he spoke, when Alisoun / And Nicholas both talked him down at once, /
Telling all those who came that he was mad”.
22 Peter Hühn
stitutes a negative event in the carpenter’s narrative line: Nicholas’ cry of

pain, calling for water, is interpreted by the carpenter as an indication of
the flood, as a result of which he cuts the rope holding the kneading
trough, crashes to the ground, breaking his arm and causing a public gath-
ering of his neighbours. In this public sphere created by the accident, he is
unable to assert his factually accurate explanation of the fall, but is, on the
contrary, forced to suffer, in addition to his physical injury (the broken
arm), the experience of being declared of unsound mind and made the
object of the crowd’s ridicule: “But stonde he moste unto his owene
harm” (3830) 22 , “The folk gan laughen at his fantasye … / And turned al
his harm into a jape” (3840ff.) 23 and “he was holde wood in al the toun”
(3846) 24 . The carpenter, however, draws no conclusions whatsoever from
these experiences: even with hindsight, he does not understand the aim of
Nicholas’ deception, does not see that his original fear, of being made a
“cokewold” (3226) 25 , has indeed been realized, and does not recognise
that he himself is to blame for everything that has befallen him, as a result
of his wrong conduct (marrying a young woman at his age, folly, great
gullibility). Since he does not perceive these mistakes, it is impossible for
him to draw any conclusions from them and change his behaviour. It is
for this reason – in regard of both this level and the level of events – that
a latent negative event, as it were, is introduced into the carpenter’s plot-
line, the significance and gravity of which he himself does not see. But the
reader, due to his widened perspective, is placed in a position so as to
understand the connections, that is, to connect cause and effect and thus
undergo a process of realization to gain – in the place of the carpenter –
the relevant insight, in the sense of a reception event.
Over and above that, the whole story of the duping and humiliation of
the carpenter functions on an over-arching level as an element in a differ-
ent plot. In the context of the plot of, and during the interaction on, the
pilgrimage to Canterbury, this tale serves the narrator, the miller, as a dis-
paraging sideswipe at his travelling companion the “reeve” (bailiff), a car-
penter by profession, during the dispute between the two which is put
into practice in the prologue of this tale (31363166, Robinson 1966:
478) and in the reeve’s subsequent prologue (38593920, Robinson
1966: 55), as well as in the latter’s tale itself, in which a miller is duped and
humiliated in similar fashion. The act of narration can be characterised as
eventful on this level, in the sense of a presentation event, though with a
relatively small degree of eventfulness, which, in the subsequent tale of the
_____________
22 “But he must still digest his accident”.
23 “Everyone laughed at this strange fantasy ... / And made his injury a kind of joke”.
24 “They thought him crazy all about the town”.
25 “cuckold”.
reeve – because it is expected as an opposing re-enactment – becomes

even smaller.
2. The Ethical and Didactic Context: The Role of Reason
The development and eventfulness of the stories in “The Miller’s Tale”

may be examined in reference to two differing contemporary contexts and
have a different significance in each – firstly, the general ethical and didac-
tic function of literature in the Middle Ages and, secondly, the particular,
primarily entertainment-oriented genre conventions of the fabliau. 26
Reference to the ethical implications and their didactic mediation, of
which, according to prevailing opinion, the function of literature in the
Middle Ages consisted, 27 has already been made in different ways in this
analysis. Correspondingly, the successful or unsuccessful processes of
realization within the narrative can be placed inside the parameters of a
particular model of the world and of humanity, as well as the principles of
conduct derived from this model, both of which may be reconstructed in
the following way. The text repeatedly differentiates, in various forms and
from varying perspectives, between wrong and correct conduct (though
without offering a simple formula for it). For instance, the narrator ex-
pressly points out the principle of compatibility of spouses (3227ff.) and,
above all, to the harmfulness of affect and illusion: “which a greet thyng is
affeccioun! / Men may dyen of ymaginacioun, / So depe may impressioun
be take” (3611ff.) 28 . These attitudes are harmful because they prevent
recognition of the true state of affairs, orientation on clear judgement and
guidance by reason. This shows itself first and foremost in the way that
the carpenter’s obsessive concern about his wife blinds him to Nicholas’
deceit. Affects also have an equally negative effect in that the carpenter
allows himself to be lured into the trap by Nicholas’ flattery (notifying him
exclusively of the prediction: 3405; comparing him to Noah: 3534ff.).
_____________
26 Patterson (1990) applies a different context for these as well as all other Canterbury Tales, a
late-medieval class conflict between the peasantry on one side and the aristocrats as well as
the Church on the other, along with Chaucer’s ambivalent attitude to these two factions.
Accordingly, he allocates the characters to these classes, the miller and the carpenter to the
peasantry, Absolon to the Church, and then associates the farming class with the “natural
law”, which, in his opinion, manifests itself in Alisoun’s being as well as in the elegant plot
solution. This contextualisation seems very forced: neither the interpretation of the carpen-
ter (and the miller) as representatives of the peasants, nor the use of the language of the
natural as applied to agriculture are convincing.
27 Cf. Cooper (1991: 100f.), and Mitchell (2004: esp. 79ff.).
28 “What a power may lie in perturbation! / A man may die of his imagination, / So deep is
the impression it may take!”.
24 Peter Hühn
The decisive value of reason as a guiding authority in this model of

behaviour emerges clearly from the variously articulated criticisms of
madness (“woodnesse”, 345229 ; “madde”, 3557ff. 30 ; “vanytee / fantasye”,
3835 31 ; “wood”, 3848 32 ). The accusation, finally repeated by all, that the
carpenter is insane, does not apply literally, but certainly in the deeper
sense of the word, for he has not allowed himself to be guided by reason:
“The man is wood, me leeve brother” (3848) 33 . This also applies to his
gullible faith in Nicholas’ prediction of a flood (3516f.), shortly after he
had fundamentally condemned any such belief (“Men sholde not knowe
Goddes pryvetee”, 344960, esp. 3454 34 ). This passage implies, as the
central element of the underlying philosophy, a norm of human self-
restraint and self-denial before the omnipotence of God. It is for this
reason that the attempt to read the future is condemned. Man should
instead rely on his reason. The carpenter flagrantly violates these princi-
ples when he unhesitatingly takes up Nicholas’ contrary invitation: “Thou
mayst nat werken after thyn owene heed” (3528)35 . The correct principles
are thus variously formulated in the text in passing, usually not as an invi-
tation or a criticism, but indirectly, in the comments of the characters, so
that, for example, the carpenter does not act in accordance with correctly
recognised principles, or Nicholas turns those principles around in order
to mislead the carpenter. The characters as well as the reader must each
equally make use of their reason to guide the correct application of the
principles.
In accordance with this ethical and didactic context, the various
frames of the two plotlines, the one sexual love, the other insight and
morality, are hierarchically arranged and the particular events within “The
Miller’s Tale” along with them. From this perspective, the erotic dimen-
sion serves as material for the higher-ranking cognitive-moral level, as a
medium in which the validity of the normative principles is manifested.
However, reason should not be understood merely as the guideline for
human conduct, but also as representing, over and above that – as one can
infer from the way the events unfold – the governing principle in the de-
picted world. 36 The mechanisms of reprisal for false conduct by the three
_____________
29 “madness”.
30 “be mad”.
31 “folly”, “delusion”.
32 “mad”.
33 “The man is mad, no doubt, dear brother”.
34 “Men should know nothing of God's privacy”.
35 “Thou canst not hope to work by thine own head”.
36 Farrell (1989: 776) points to central passages in Boece, Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’
popular text De consolatione philosophiae, which explain that God’s reason (“devyne re-
men, namely that their actions, guided by affect and not reason, contrib-
ute, obliquely and without their knowledge, to their punishment, establish
a form of poetic justice behind the backs of the characters.
3. The Genre-Specific Context: The Conventions of the Fabliau
“The Miller’s Tale” can basically be assigned to the genre of the fabliau (or
fablel), the genre, practised in the 13th and 14th centuries, particularly in
northern France, of the merry, frivolous and coarsely realistic verse tale,
using a sharp wit to lampoon the behaviour of stylised characters or
classes, mostly with an emphatically amoral tone and a tendency to sub-
version regarding the established moral and social order, especially in the
presentation of the gratification, with relish, of officially unaccepted urges
such as sexuality. 37 These specific features of the genre essentially deter-
mine the concrete burlesque circumstances of the plotlines in “The
Miller’s Tale”, i.e. the entirety of the erotic motifs used, the cunning of
the tricks and pranks, and the coarsely frivolous comedy of punishment. 38
As a result of this second contextual frame of reference, the conventions
of the genre, it initially appears that the hierarchical relation of the levels
of morality and eroticism has been inverted. This is because the genre-
specific comedy of this arrangement of themes has, by nature, the ten-
dency to undermine the relevance and seriousness of the cognitive-moral
dimension of eventfulness. 39 This shows itself, for instance, in the way the
central principles of human self-denial, particularly in the prohibition of
the investigation of God’s secret resolutions (“pryvetee”, 3454), are
coarsely attenuated by the incorporation of the same word into completely
different, ignoble contexts: for example when, in the prologue, God’s
secret is offhandedly equated with that of a wife (“An housbonde shal nat
been inquisityf / Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf”, 3163f.40 ), 41 or
_____________
soun” [“divine reason”], IV.P6.61-63, Robinson 1966: 368) rules over the world: “O thow
Fadir, … that governeth this world by perdurable resoun” (III.M9.1-3, Robinson 1966:
350).
37 On Chaucer’s use of the conventions of the fabliau cf. e.g. Muscatine (1957), Cooper
(1991: 95ff.), Cooke (1978: 176184).
38 Cf. David (1976), 95ff., who sees a connection here with native traditions (of “festive
comedy”) and the carnivalesque (following Bakhtin).
39 Cf., by contrast, Cooke (1978: 183), who sees no contradiction here, but rather emphasises
the aesthetically satisfying balance of the denouement, which he does not see as moral.
Cooper (1991: 101ff.) and Kolve (1984: 160, 214f.) emphasise the removal of a moral sense
by the genre context of the fabliau. Kolve (1984: 158ff.) justifies these amoral tendencies
by the dominance of natural elements, the youthfulness of the characters and the playful-
ness of the piece.
40 “A husband should respect, upon his life, / The privacy of God and of his wife”.
26 Peter Hühn
when the carpenter’s report to Alisoun about Nicholas’ prediction of the

flood, and her far superior secret understanding are formulated with pre-
cisely this word:
to his wyf he tolde his pryvetee,
And she was war, and knew it bet than he,
What al the queynte cast was for to seye. (3603ff.)42
The partial undermining of the ethical code, despite it being – as shown –
clearly cited at various points, by moments of amoral burlesque also in-
cludes the furious personal motivation of Absolon’s revenge for his hu-
miliation. A further attenuation of the serious and didactic meaning un-
folds from the parodic intertextual resonance of “The Miller’s Tale” with
the preceding “Knight’s Tale”, with its conventional courtly love theme,
which is parodied by both the not at all courtly seducer Nicholas and the
grotesquely soulful, feminine figure of the courtly lover, Absolon. 43
This tendency to undermine the seriousness of the tale with burlesque
is, however, revoked in that “The Miller’s Tale” deviates in a decisive way
from central characteristics of the fabliau. 44 The subversive, anarchic
moments of the genre result primarily from the favouring of the private,
the gratification of private, individual wishes and urges, typically in the
form that the protagonists, with the help of their cleverness and ingenuity,
realize their personal desire for sex, money or revenge (etc.), and contrive
to dupe or cheat others, entailing the unpunished violation of moral
norms (Farrell 1989: 777). In “The Miller’s Tale”, this conventional fea-
ture applies only to Alisoun’s revenge for Absolon’s harassment. The
punishments of Nicholas and of the carpenter, which follow as the plot
unfolds, happen unintentionally, as it were, not as the result of a directly
intended action, not as the satisfaction of a private desire, but rather come
_____________
41 The comic, subversive tendency is strengthened by an obscene secondary meaning of the
word “pryvetee” in Middle English: as well as a secret, a secret plan or goal or private con-
cerns, the word can also denote the sexual organs. See Oxford English Dictionary, “privity”
(earliest record 1375).
42 “And told his wife of all this secrecy. / She knew it well; and knew far more than he /
What all this curious tale betokeneth”.
43 This parodic reference has often been noted; for example, by Muscatine (1957: 222ff.),
Cooper (1991: 103ff.), David (1976: 95f.) and, with particular sophistication, by Rigby
(1996: 46ff.). The text itself indirectly signals this reversal when, after the knight’s tale, the
miller, with drunken brazenness, seizes control of the conversation and, although it is not
his turn according to the order of social station, introduces his story with the following jus-
tification: “a noble tale …, / With which I wol now quite the Knyghtes tale” – “a noble
tale ... / With which to pay the Knight off for his tale” (31267, Robinson 1966: 47).
44 On the following, compare Farrell (1989), who brings out, precisely and convincingly,
“privacy” as an implication of the French fabliau, and the consistent deviation from it in
“The Miller’s Tale” in the sense of a manifestation of the divinely sanctioned principle of
reason.
about due to the interlinking of circumstances, behind the backs of the

characters. The punishment thus establishes some form of poetic justice
(Farrell 1989: 783ff.): in the (almost completely) passive formulation of
the result of these developments (385054), there is an absence of any
kind of reference to intentional individual activity, to an initiator. As Far-
rell (1989: 780ff.) points out, this sudden change in the plot development
from the favouring of the private to the super-individual establishment of
a plot is mirrored in the appearance of the word “pryvely” / “pryvetee”,
which is repeatedly used in the planning and initiation of Nicholas’ and
Absolon’s narrative strands, and, in the final instance, to characterize
Nicholas’ intended re-enactment of Alisoun’s trick, the presentation of his
naked bottom (3802), a secret, private prank, which no longer succeeds.
Within this modified genre-specific context of the conventions of the
fabliau, the serious, moral-oriented eventfulness henceforth shows itself in
the comically unexpected reversal of the narrative, in the surprisingly dras-
tic duping of the characters, in whom particular errors of conduct are
satirically mocked and accordingly punished. It is possible to recognise the
fundamental appropriateness of the punishments for irrational conduct
which violates the rule of moderation, of self-denial and of prudentia (for
the three men, in any case), despite its grotesque escalation.45 What must
be added to the principles of human action guided by reason is that the
cultural and intellectual-historical contextual dimension of the eventful-
ness consists in this reference to the normative order. That only the three
men are punished, but not Alisoun, appears to restrict the fairness of the
denouement, 46 but can perhaps be explained in that Alisoun, unlike the
three men, does not, for her part, act intentionally, does not initiate a nar-
rative line and thus does not make herself guilty of irrational conduct, but
is rather the object of the others’ behaviour, in that she does nothing but
react.
What is significant about this conclusion is that the violation of sexual
morality as such is clearly not, in any instance, what is punished, but rather
the violations of the rule of reason, and that this punishment is not im-
posed by a transcendent authority, but appears suddenly and spontane-
ously as a result of the interlinking of (false) actions. It is a matter of an
immanent dynamic mechanism, without any (even verbal) recourse to
God. When “Goddes pryvetee” is mentioned (3454, 3558), these are just
clichéd formulas, which the characters employ in their interaction as a sign
_____________
45 Kolve (1984: 215f.) briefly points out this self-regulating, immanent order.
46 Her amoral sensuality (as it is underlined by the accumulation of animal and plant meta-
phors in her desciption, 3233ff.) is even, in a sense, given acceptance and reward by the
plot.
28 Peter Hühn
of their naiveté (the carpenter) or their cunning (Nicholas). 47 The com-

plete absence of a religious basis for the social norms becomes especially
striking in light of the continuous accumulation of religious motifs in the
concrete surroundings of the narrative: 48 Nicholas plays a religious song
(3216), Alisoun goes to church tarted up (3307ff.), Absolon is a parish
clerk (3312f.) and “censes” (i.e. burns incense before) all the women on
religious festival days (3339ff.), mystery plays about Noah (3518, 3560)
and Herod (3386) are alluded to etc. It is possible to interpret these two
features – the emphasis on the principle of reason and the immanent
autonomy of the punishment mechanism – as indicators of a modern
tendency: Neither does God intervene in the happenings, nor is the tale
concerned with Christian norms, not even with sexual morality. In this
sense, “The Miller’s Tale” can be read as a tale that limits itself exclusively
to the concrete, worldly living conditions of humanity and discards the
governing religious code. 49
But because of the coupling of these two oppositional contexts, “The
Miller’s Tale” exhibits a complex event structure full of suspense. This is
because the relationship between the ethical-cognitive narrative problem
and the anarchic, lust- and comedy-oriented sequence of events is, in prin-
ciple, contradictory in so far as the genre-specific context of the fabliau
tends to coarsely attenuate the tale’s didactic implications. The effect of
the comedy is indeed, through the deviation of “The Miller’s Tale” from
the conventions of the genre, particularly in the last part, turned around so
that it supports the poetic justice establishing itself behind the conscious-
ness and intentions of the characters, as well as the system of actions
guided by reason, which forms its basis. However, a tension does remain
between the serious normativeness and the burlesque humour. 50
Concerning the form of the eventfulness, the positive or negative
changes in the characters (i.e. the three men) can be classified as events in
the happenings. But the eventful inversion, the sudden reversal, is meant
to enter into the reader’s consciousness in two ways. Firstly, the tale and
its humour are oriented on the amusement of the reader (or listener) by
the characters as they are duped and their conduct mocked. Secondly, it is
only the reader who can trace back the appropriateness of the punishment
to its cause, the irrational conduct of the characters; they themselves are
_____________
47 Cf. Rigby (1996: 48), who points out that religious interpretative paradigms of characters
(Nicholas and Alisoun) are described as “fantasie” and “vanytee” (3835).
48 Cf. Pearsall (1986: 130).
49 Cf. Rigby (1996: 46f.).
50 This ambivalence is described by Rigby (1994: 28) with the Bakhtinian category of double-
voiced discourse, especially in reference to the relationship between “The Miller’s Tale”
and “The Knight’s Tale”.
incapable of recognising this connection (least of all the carpenter, nor

Absolon, who does not know whom he has struck or why). In this sense,
in this tale it is a matter of reception events, and actually the special form
of the reception event in which the sudden change to laughter or Schaden-
freude expresses itself in close connection with moral insight.
Translated by Alexander Starritt
References
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Hill, Frank Ernest (2007). Chaucer. The Complete Canterbury Tales in the Translation
by Frank Ernest Hill (London: Arcturus).
————
Arner, Timothy D. (2005). “No Joke: Transcendent Laughter in the Teseida and the
Miller’s Tale”, in Studies in Philology, 102: 14358.
Calabrese, Michael (1994). “The Lover’s Cure in Ovid’s Remedia Amoris and Chau-
cer’s Miller’s Tale“, in Modern Language Notes, 32: 13î18.
Cooke, Thomas D. (1978). The Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux: A Study of Their
Comic Climax (Columbia & London: Univ. of Missouri Pr.)
Cooper, Helen (21991). The Canterbury Tales. Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford:
Oxford UP).
David, Alfred (1976). The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry (Bloom-
ington: Indiana UP).
Farrell, Thomas J. (1989). “Privacy and the Boundaries of Fabliau in the Miller’s
Tale”, in English Literary History, 56: 77395.
Kolve, V. A. (1984). Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury
Tales (London: Edward Arnold).
Mitchell, J. Allan (2004). Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Cam-
bridge: Brewer).
Muscatine, Charles (1957). Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: Univ. of Cali-
fornia Pr.).
Novelli, Cornelius (1968). “Absolon’s ‘freend so deere’: A Pivotal Point in the Miller’s
Tale”, in Neophilologus, 52: 659.
Patterson, Lee (1990). “‘No Man His Reson Herde’: Peasant Consciousness, Chau-
cer’s Miller, and the Structure of the Canterbury Tales”, in Lee Patterson, ed. Lit-
erary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530 (Berkeley: Univ. of Califor-
nia Pr.), 11355.
Pearsall, Derek (1986). “The Canterbury Tales II: Comedy”, in The Cambridge Chau-
cer Companion, ed. Piero Boitani & Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge UP),
12542.
30 Peter Hühn
Rigby, S. H. (1996). Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender (Manchester:

Manchester UP)
Walker, Greg (2002). “Rough Girls and Squeamish Boys: The Trouble with Absolon
in The Miller’s Tale”, in Elaine Treharne, ed. Writing Gender and Genre in Medie-
val Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts (Cambridge: Brewer),
6191.
3 Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave:
A True History (1688)
Peter Hühn
Aphra Behn’s tale Oroonoko 1 is, in many respects, shaped by the interfer-
ence of differing, partly contradictory, ideologies, normative systems, tra-
ditions and genres, especially that of heroic romance and a tendency to
realism, of an aristocratic code of honour and bourgeois acquisitiveness,
of a conservative adherence to social hierarchy and a progressive desire
for mobility and liberalism, of public, collective values and individualist,
private attitudes. 2 This internal contradictoriness is evident in the struc-
ture and course of the narrated story, with the discrepant superimposition
of a range of heterogeneous discourses onto a traditional script. 3 These
consist, on the whole, of possible references to contexts outside the work,
which constitute its specific meaning, on the one hand an intertextual
reference to a traditional genre (the script for the plot), and, on the other,
references to social or political normative and action systems within Eng-
lish society at the time (the varying discourses). As a result of the interac-
tion of these discourses, the eventfulness of the narrated story presents
itself in an ambivalent manner unusual for the period. The ambivalent
status of the event and the problem of its meaning are also decisively de-
termined by the way they are conveyed, through the attitudes, values and
commentaries of the narrator, who vouches emphatically for the truth of
the narrated happenings, but who is simultaneously (and opaquely) linked
closely to a number of these contradictory discourses.
_____________
1 Edition used: Behn (1992: 73141).
2 See e.g. the listing of various aspects by Holmesland (2001); cf. also Ferguson (1994:
155ff.).
3 The term discourse will be used – provisionally and somewhat formulaically – in the fol-
lowing to denote a system of meanings, orders and norms, which is largely coherent in it-
self, and which determines the perception, interpretation and assessment of a socio-cultural
environment as well as the practical behaviour of the characters within it, i.e. connecting
language and behaviour. Discourses of this sort are established in contemporary (for the
author) extratextual reality – as those parts or segments of a period’s or society’s doxa that
apply to particular social domains – and form, in this sense, the context of the work, which
is to be reconstructed and consulted to facilitate a (historically) appropriate understanding.
The manifold literature on Oroonoko denotes these structures with various terms, such as
code, discourse, ideology, narrative.
32 Peter Hühn
1. The Intertextual Script
The script underpinning the tale can be reconstructed as the classical plot
paradigm of the heroic romance’s love story, as it is found in the Greek
novels of late antiquity, in the French novels of the 17th century 4 , which
were also popular in contemporary England, as well as in the pastoral
novel 5 and also in English Renaissance drama. 6 In its basic elements, this
model concerns itself with the development of the love of an ideal couple
(or multiple couples), against resistance and through perils, until their
unification and marriage are finally achieved. Despite numerous variations,
the following three phases are prototypical of this romance script: firstly,
the original encounter of the lovers and genesis of their love; secondly, the
extended middle section, consisting of separation, threats, ensnarement
and, in general, the obstruction of their relationship, in which they prove
and preserve themselves with their steadfastness and their loyalty in their
love; thirdly, their eventual re-unification after the overcoming of all ob-
stacles. The dynamism of this script is produced by the conflict between
the passionate desire of the lovers to be united in marriage and the oppos-
ing circumstances of the world around them, which thwart this desire over
and again (in the form of coincidences, rivalries, envy, revenge etc.). The
lovers are physically, morally and socially outstanding representatives of
their gender and station: he brave and strong, she virtuous and steadfast,
both beautiful in their own way, both displaying perfect conduct and an
exemplary and also moral disposition. The ideals they embody are differ-
entiated by gender and are of an explicitly aristocratic nature. This is par-
ticularly evident in the characteristics represented by the man: chivalrous
courage and political capacity to rule as well as social dexterity, but also in
the dignity, grace, modesty and refinement of the woman. These ideal
characteristics, motivated by the strength and purity of their love for one
another, make it possible for them to overcome all obstacles and to with-
stand all attacks. The script clearly relates to a particular social and cul-
_____________
4 As well as, incidentally, in the German Baroque novel.
5 Examples – Greek: Heliodorus’ Aethiopica (3rd century AD), Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and
Clitophon (3rd century AD); French: Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamène ou le grand Cyrus
(164953) and Clélie, histoire romaine (165460), Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (160727), La
Calprenède’s Cléopâtre (164758); English: Emanuel Ford’s The Most Pleasant History of
Ornatus and Artesia (1598?, 1634), George Mackenzie’s Aretina; or, The Serious Romance
(1660), Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery’s Parthenissa (1654î76) as well as Thomas Lodge’s
Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie (1590), the material for Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
6 Examples: Shakespeare’s As You Like It with a positive and Romeo and Juliet with a nega-
tive outcome. Brown’s reference to the “Herculean hero” and the aristocratic coterie thea-
tre, inter alia with the conflict between love and politics (188ff.), does not seem particularly
convincing, since he restricts his discussion to the figure of the hero.
Aphra Behn: Oroonoko 33
tural-historical context – the aristocracy, whose values and self-image are

being ideally presented, upheld and celebrated as well as a high sensibility
to love.
The romance is a genre of variation and represents what Lotman calls
the “aesthetics of identity”, 7 i.e. the event (the fulfilment of their love) is,
in principle, expected; only when it will occur and how it will actually be
reached are left open. Described with the help of Lotman’s sujet catego-
ries, the script of the romantic love story exhibits the following abstract
structures. The two semantic sub-fields are distinguished by the difference
in the status of the realisation of the protagonists’ love and, connected
with that, their relation to their social environment: separation vs. unifica-
tion, non-fulfilment vs. fulfilment of their love, alienation from their envi-
ronment vs. recognition of the ancestral social role of the aristocrat and,
with that, often disruption of the hierarchical order vs. its re-
establishment. The position of the two protagonists in the first field is
unstable as a result of their nascent love, which has not yet been fulfilled
and marks the present situation as inadequate and in need of change, plac-
ing them in opposition to their present environment. The border consists
of the manifold hindrances, resistances and delays that stand in the way of
fulfilment. The extended variation and intensification of such obstacles
defines the difficulty in crossing the border and accordingly raises (albeit
quantitatively) the degree of eventfulness. The crossing of the border is
reached as a result of the lovers’ incorruptible steadfastness in their love
against ensnarement and temptation (particularly for the women) and of
the active overcoming of adverse obstacles (particularly by the men).
Once the unification (and marriage) – and, accompanying that, the recog-
nition of the protagonists in their ancestral high stations and roles by the
rest of the community – has eventually been concluded, integration into
the second field has been completed and the situation is stable.
2. The Script and the Realistic Settings
Oroonoko confronts this script with various social and economic struc-
tures, as well as corresponding normative systems, 8 by placing it in two
real geographical areas – the west African country Coramantien (the Gold
Coast, now Ghana) and the West Indian (at the time still English, and
shortly thereafter Dutch) colony of Surinam (now Suriname). As a result,
_____________
7 Lotman (1977). Lotman contrasts the aesthetics of identity and the aesthetics of opposi-
tion.
8 Cf. the clear distinction between these areas in Rosenthal (2004: 152f.).
34 Peter Hühn
the conversion of this script into a plotline is considerably complicated.

These settings present realistic elements in a way that, in the 18th century,
would become constitutive of the novel, in contrast to the fantastic, ideal-
ising romance. 9 The realistic quality of the happenings and the setting is
underlined throughout by the narrator – from the subtitle (“A True His-
tory”), through the numerous authentications of her own account by
means of her role as eyewitness and on the basis of her personal acquaint-
ance with the protagonist (75ff. et passim), to the thematizing of the writ-
ing process itself (108, 140f.). 10 The realistically portrayed living condi-
tions, value systems and balances of power in these two areas are
ultimately what cause the plot to deviate from the ideal script paradigm
(see below).
Coramantien is a feudal society with both an autocratic king at its peak
and a military nobility that has to protect the continued existence of the
country as well as affirm its power in the constant wars with its
neighbours, and which gains honour and secures its affluence by selling
prisoners of war into slavery. The central values of this nobility are rank
and power, for which high birth is a pre-requisite, and which are granted
based on bravery and quality of military leadership, and which are expres-
sed in honour, self-esteem and recognition by the community. The king is
positioned at the top, furnished with near absolute power and, in practice,
not subject to the law. It is a strictly hierarchical society, based on uncon-
ditional loyalty to superiors and on power over those lower down, which
shows itself symptomatically in the “divine homage” (109) paid to Prince
Oroonoko by the Africans whom he himself had sold into slavery (105,
109).
In contrast, Surinam is characterised by two different social structures.
On the one hand, at the highest, political, level, a hierarchical system pre-
vails, in which the colony is ruled by England and ultimately by the Eng-
lish king, who controls the administration via the governor. Aristocratic
norms apply, which are similar to those in Coramantien, though less abso-
lutist. On the other hand, the existence of that society is economically
based on large-scale agriculture (sugar production on plantations) and on
trade (including with the products of the indigenous Indians), which is
based on the bourgeois values of acquisitiveness and profit, in a system of
mercantile capitalism. 11 Alongside these two dominating systems and
political and economic discourses, a moral code of liberalism and human-
_____________
9 The contrast between novel and romance is then also poetologically reflected and dis-
cussed, e.g. by William Congreve and Clara Reeve.
10 Cf. the description of the combination of the structures of romance and realistic novel in
Holmesland (2001: 60f.).
11 Cf. Brown (1999: 191ff.).
ity operates in Surinam, which aims at the selfless recognition and protec-
tion of man in his humanity. This code is often at odds with the society’s
political and economic values, but is not supported by everyone (and,
crucially, not by those in power).
The (realistic) element binding the two areas together, albeit with
characteristic differences between them, is slavery and the slave trade, i.e.
the systematic use of people as objects, as commodities and capital
goods. 12 Whereas slaves in Coramantien – as prisoners of war who have
been sold – represent booty and trophies from heroic, quasi-national hos-
tilities, and augment the honour of the victors, 13 i.e. principally function in
the aristocratic discourse, 14 in Surinam they serve primarily in the mercan-
tile discourse as an economic factor (a workforce) and as items of trade
that are bought according to need and cost. 15 In practice, the connection
between these two areas is established by slave traders, as exemplified by
the English captain who buys slaves in Coramantien and sells them in
Surinam, abiding by no moral norms whatsoever as he does so. Thus he
unscrupulously takes his trading partner, Oroonoko, captive as he tarries
on the ship, flagrantly breaking his word and enslaving him too. Slavery is
legal in both countries, though in Surinam it comes into conflict with the
moral discourse in certain circumstances, albeit only in cases of socially
high-ranking, educated slaves such as Oroonoko, “the royal slave”. Here
the aristocratic discourse again exerts influence through its value system,
which stems from England in the form of Royalist ideology and which
had asserted its validity in the conflicts of the civil war between Royalists
and Parliamentarians, with the eventual victory of the former in the Resto-
ration, and which interferes with other discourses in the trading and plan-
tation society of the colony. Its basis is adherence to the social hierarchy,
with the absolute authority and power of the king (cf. the allusions to
Charles I and Charles II, 80 and 115). This value system is now applied to
Oroonoko.
_____________
12 Cf. the precise description in Rosenthal (2004: 152) and Lipking (2004).
13 The practice of slavery reflects the hierarchical social structure of Coramantien: only the
ordinary prisoners of war are sold into slavery; those of higher rank buy their freedom
(78f.).
14 Whereby the sale, as a commercial act, actually constitutes a contradiction of the feudal
principles, though it is not perceived as such.
15 Whereby the contradictory socio-political discourse is also involved here, in so far as the
planters are aristocrats and in that the Stuart kings also participate in the slave trade (see
below).
36 Peter Hühn
3. Script and Novel: Positive and Negative Eventfulness
In the traditional novels based on the heroic-galant script, the eventfulness

consists in the crossing of the border leading to the re-unification of the
lovers. This border-crossing is foreseeable, as with all genres of variation,
because it conforms to the script, but it is heightened in degree by long
delays and constant threats to its conclusion. This is a positive event, con-
forming to the script, brought about by reciprocal fidelity as well as resis-
tance and vigour in the face of hostile forces. In Oroonoko, the lovers –
predominantly as a result of the power relationships and living conditions
in the realistically portrayed settings – do not succeed, despite short-lived
unification and a temporary approach to their goal, in permanently and
conclusively overcoming the resistance and obstacles they face. In fact, in
the end, both die in extremely gruesome ways: Oroonoko kills his lover to
prevent her falling into the hands of their enemies and being raped and,
shortly thereafter, is himself executed in inhumane fashion. This denoue-
ment signifies a radical departure from the script and thus constitutes a
negative event 16 with a very high degree of eventfulness, 17 in that not only
does the positive crossing of the border fail, but the protagonists are also
physically and mentally destroyed. The significance of this event is nega-
tive: the norms of the aristocratic social order and the high value of ideal
individualistic love are not confirmed, but succumb to stronger forces of a
different nature.
What this failure is based upon and what it means depend on the par-
ticular geographical, historical and cultural localisation of the scripts, and
the discourses associated with it as a result. The reference to precisely this
aristocratic love script as well as, to an even higher degree, to its coupling
with particular discourses, constitutes the cultural-historical and social-
historical (extratextual) context of the novel. The following sub-chapters
will first sketch the unfolding of the love plot in correlation with the ro-
mance script and, subsequently, examine the impact of the geographical
areas and their normative systems on the development of the plot.
4. Characters, Plot and Events in Oroonoko
The two protagonists are portrayed as the ideal male and female embodi-
ments of exemplary characteristics (79ff.). Oroonoko is distinguished by
_____________
16 As an example of a different event construction, cf. Visconsi (2002), who reads this turn of
events allegorically as the (anticipated) triumph of barbarism over civilisation in England.
17 The positive or negative event bound up with this script is, incidentally, not primarily
mental (as in later centuries), but manifests itself entirely physically and socially.
his high birth (“prince” and the grandson of the king, thus “royal”), high-
est military leadership qualities and bravery (commander in chief after the
death of the old general), by his great beauty, sense of honour, magnanim-
ity, love of justice, extensive education and perfect manners (including the
European languages, taught by a French tutor), and combines martial
toughness and competence with fine sensibilities and an ability to love
(“as capable of love, as ’twas possible for a brave and galant man to be”,
81). As such, he represents the ideal of a universally educated and talented
aristocrat, something akin to the “uomo universale” of the Renaissance:
capable even of reigning well, and of governing as wisely, had a great soul, as
politic maxims, and was as sensible of power as any prince civilized in the most
refined schools of humanity and learning, or the most illustrious courts (81).
As the narrator emphasises, these are all core European values, so that
Oroonoko corresponds entirely to the image of the ideal English aristo-
crat, whereby his black skin colour signifies a merely superficial difference
(80f.). 18 Imoinda represents (equally conforming to European – again,
gender-specific – norms) the precise female ideal counterpart, with the
characteristics of high social station (daughter of the old general) and of
beauty, “modesty”, “softness” and ability to love as well as perfect man-
ners (“sweetness of her words and behaviour”, 82): “she was female to the
noble male; the beautiful black Venus, to our young Mars” (81). Their
initial encounters trigger spontaneous affection and love on both sides
and swiftly lead to marriage vows, which conform to European norms of
a permanent exclusive relationship (in contrast to African polygamy, 83).
This marriage needs only to be physically consummated after the obliga-
tory prior notification of the king.
It is at this point that the resistance and obstacles set in. The king, de-
spite being old and impotent (he is over 100), desires and claims Imoinda
for himself, and takes her into his harem, albeit a break with moral con-
ventions (the protected validity of an extant marriage, 85, 86), but also a
sign of his absolute power, superior to all other rights, according to the
absolute hierarchical structure. This prerogative signifies their separation,
but does not yet preclude a later honourable unification, as Imoinda’s
“virgin honour” (94) remains intact. After this, the lovers are brought
together twice more, albeit each time in strictly limited and restrictive
circumstances, which, although they make the physical consummation of
their love possible, deny them the recognition of their love as well as of
their personal rights and their social status. On the first occasion, they
_____________
18 Cf. Brown (1999: 186ff.). In contrast, Gallagher (1996) makes the black skin the central
interpretative moment of the text in terms of three references (authorship, kingship, com-
modification), which seems to me to amount to an over-interpretation.
38 Peter Hühn
meet secretly in the king’s harem and consummate their love and their
marriage (94). This unification is, however, limited to that moment, must
be hidden and leads, because it is discovered, to a significant intensifica-
tion of their separation – a sign of the extreme inclemency of the first
field for their love: the king, now regarding Imoinda as “polluted” (96),
sells her into slavery while Oroonoko believes that she has been sentenced
to death as a punishment.
On the second occasion, they unexpectedly encounter one another
some time later by chance in Surinam (111ff.), to where both have been
sold independently of one another – Imoinda as a result of repudiation by
the king, and Oroonoko after having been kidnapped through the under-
handed betrayal of the English slave trader to whom he had sold his pris-
oners of war. Due to the generosity and liberalism of Trefry, the adminis-
trator of the governor’s estate, the lovers – as slaves, renamed Caesar and
Clemene and thus robbed of their original identity – are able to marry and
lead a normal marriage in relatively pleasant living conditions (113) and
are expecting a child. They are also promised that they will soon be freed.
However, the lovers perceive their unification as incomplete (113), as they
are denied their freedom, the recognition of the social position to which
they are entitled and even their identity (in the allocation of new, foreign
names). The lack of social recognition injures particularly Oroonoko in his
aristocratic self-image (“his large soul, which was still panting after more
renowned action” (114), in his identity based on his heroic achievements
and honour: “he accused himself for having suffered slavery for so long”
(ibid.). They are painfully aware of the constraints of captivity, particularly
in light of the imminent birth of their child, since this enslaved existence
will extend into all subsequent generations of the family: “he was the last
of his great race. This new accident [Imoinda’s pregnancy] made him
more impatient of liberty” (113), “Imoinda […] did nothing but sigh and
weep for the captivity of her lord, herself, and the infant yet unborn”
(125). The promised manumission is a long time coming and eventually
becomes untrustworthy. The actual crossing into the second sub-field,
however much it already seems partially realised and despite the promise
that it will be completed in the near future, effectively does not take place.
The narrator and other well-meaning people attempt to distract
Oroonoko from what he is missing and from the unsatisfying situation
with conversation and opportunities for replacement sporting activities
(“diversions”, 115; “diverted”, 125). But these attempts ultimately trigger
his decision to become active himself and force the crossing of the border
– by means of a militarily organised escape with other slaves (125ff.).
The plan to cross the border actively does not only aim to serve the
realisation of their love in freedom, in the self-determination of the indi-
vidual with social recognition of his high station, but its methods also
involve Oroonoko’s aristocratic identity as a successful military leader and
heroic fighter. After initial successes (a rousing speech, departure and
combat with the white militia) the descent into defeat and catastrophe
begins, often interrupted, but always taken up again: when the whites use
whips, the traditional means of punishing slaves, against Oroonoko’s fol-
lowers, they desert him and surrender (129f.). He, too, eventually surren-
ders under the promise of a general pardon (131f.), which, however, is
immediately broken by the deputy governor of the colony, Byam, who has
Oroonoko captured and whipped – a further link in the chain of his be-
trayals by whites, from which he has ultimately learnt nothing. That
Oroonoko, despite his bad experiences of betrayal and breach of trust, is
repeatedly taken in by false promises is a symptom of tactical-cognitive
deficits in his character, but must also, over and above that, be assessed as
an indication of weakness in the aristocratic code based on honour and
trust, 19 particularly when in confrontation with such different discourses
as the unscrupulous profit motive of mercantilism. Oroonoko’s reaction
to this extremely destructive humiliation is an act of desperation, revenge
on Byam, which, however, also fails (135ff.). In light of the hopelessness
of a positive change to his and Imoinda’s situation, he plans his revenge as
a heroic act, recovering his honour by the commitment and sacrifice of his
own life as well as that of Imoinda. He kills her first to prevent her being
raped but is then unable to summon the physical strength to carry out his
revenge. As a further sign of his disintegration, he mutilates himself as he
is discovered. His eventual execution after having been restored to health
is staged, to his absolute humiliation and destruction, as an intensifying
fragmentation of his physical integrity (hacking off of his limbs, his nose
and ears etc.). 20 In this state of deepest degradation and violation, he dem-
onstrates stoic steadfastness and strength in that he gives no sign that he is
in pain and smokes a pipe until the end.
Despite the fact that Oroonoko retains his composure during his
gruesome humiliating death and demonstrates in passive suffering the
strength that he would otherwise employ in martial activity, the end of the
plot is a story of radical failure. Not only does the actively pursued posi-
tive border crossing fail, but a return to the status quo ante is no longer
_____________
19 Both the large relevance of honour and trust as aristocratic values, as well as of their ex-
pected validity among the whites and in the colony, is indicated in Oroonoko’s declaration
as he leaves the slave ship of the treacherous captain: “let us […] see if we can meet with
more honour and honesty in the next world we shall touch upon” (106). Cf. also 107, 114,
127.
20 Gallagher’s (1996) thesis that Oroonoko, as a result of this self-fragmentation, becomes, in
line with the two bodies theory of kings, “all the more singularly immortal” (253) is diffi-
cult to follow through.
40 Peter Hühn
possible – the lovers experience a negative border crossing into absolute

annihilation. This is the central event of the tale – instead of a transition to
the condition of their love’s eventual fulfilment, both characters, and their
love, are extinguished. That Oroonoko feels forced to kill his wife and
that he is then incapable of carrying out his revenge signal the depth of
this failure and the magnitude of his strategic collapse in the face of these
enemies. However, it is more than the mere backfiring of a plot. Over and
above that, the way the plot develops attests to the destruction of the ideal
of Oroonoko’s personality – in the killing of his wife as well as in his fail-
ing force and strength of will and even before that in his absolute, ulti-
mately helpless obsession with thoughts of revenge, the corruption of the
structure of his personality reveals itself, a self-destructive compulsion that
must be understood as the consequence of external influences and distor-
tions.
The particular structure of the negative event can now be defined
more precisely. It is not a question of the mere non-attainment of the
desired goal, but rather of a fundamental failure that comprises the prem-
ises of his personality as well his values (love and the superiority of the
aristocracy) and then destroys and disavows them. 21 All that remains is a
last heroic, stoical gesture of defiance (smoking the pipe). It must be
added that the failure and disavowing of the aristocratic value system
through its association with Africans functions largely as a way of superfi-
cially distancing the relevance to England. 22 Therein lies a central function
of black skin colour, as a means of disguise (“bating his colour”, 81).
The next question that presents itself is what are the reasons of this
fundamental failure and, with that, the meaning of the event. In order to
answer this question, the geographical and social embedding of the script,
and – determined by that – the confrontation of the feudal, aristocratic
order and value systems with the mercantile capitalism of the modern
world, 23 must now be examined in greater detail, as well as the medium,
the personal attitude and depictive intention of the narrator; two aspects
that, admittedly, are difficult to separate, since the narrator simultaneously
appears as an active figure in the narrated world.
_____________
21 A different construction of this event can be found in Ortiz (2002), who – by mixing the
levels of plot development and the narrator’s control – investigates the narrative position
between imperialist authority and its undermining (particularly at the end).
22 For a different interpretation, cf. Gallagher (1996).
23 Cf. Holmesland (2001: 70f. as well as 65 and 67).
5. The Problematization of the Event
The social hierarchy of the aristocratic discourse varies in validity between

the areas and societies of Africa and the West Indies, with corresponding
consequences for the possibility of realising the script in the unfolding of
the plot. In Coramantien, the protagonists’ love comes into conflict with
the practical reality of the hierarchical value system, and they become its
victims: the king’s privileges and code of honour are the cause of
Imoinda’s “confiscation” and subsequent enslavement. That Oroonoko is
also enslaved is the consequence of an unscrupulous trading attitude in
conjunction with European colonialism. The institution of slavery is
common to both areas but with differing functions within different dis-
courses. In Coramantien, slavery is associated with aristocratic principles
(slaves are booty in heroic battles that increase honour); in Surinam, with
mercantile purposes (slaves are commodities and means of production
that increase profit). Independent of these varying social functions, slavery
transforms people from the subjects of their actions into objects. In that
the two protagonists are enslaved, they lose their power over themselves
and the autonomy of their actions, and, with that, the possibility of striv-
ing directly for a happy re-unification in the spirit of the love script. When
they act with this intention still, they offend against established power
structures and expose themselves to punishment and further restriction of
their freedom of movement, and even to the loss of their lives.
In total, three complexly interlaced systems, made up of principles of
values and conduct, have an effect on the situation of the protagonists,
which can be formulaically designated as the mercantile, moral and aristo-
cratic discourses (and which represent the most important extratextual
references to tendencies and forces in contemporary English colonial
society at the end of the 17th century). As slaves who have been bought
and paid for, Oroonoko and Imoinda are, for the colonists in Surinam,
primarily an investment, a factor of production in the economic process,
and, in this respect, their value depends on their deployability and avail-
ability, from which arises a fundamental interest in suppressing every form
of independence or insubordination.
In opposition to that stands the moral discourse, the liberal, humane
convictions of some whites, who attempt to support Oroonoko and
Imoinda and to further the development of the love plot towards becom-
ing a positive event. Trefry and the narrator, in particular, provide the
lovers with the freedom to lead their marital life (after Trefry had brought
them together in the first place), promise them their freedom and return
to their homeland, care for Oroonoko later when he is injured, and stand,
in principle, on his side against the brutal, repressive forces represented by
42 Peter Hühn
deputy governor Byam (134). Trefry even abstains – for moral, humane
reasons – from bending Imoinda to his will, though he desires her. How-
ever, the efficacy of the moral discourse is clearly qualified. Trefry gives
his promise of manumission only half-heartedly and does not seriously
pursue it; he, together with Byam, convinces Oroonoko to surrender, and
thus supports, through his gullibility, Oroonoko’s betrayal and subsequent
punishment (129, 131); in the end, he allows himself to be duped by Byam
so that the latter can illegally seize and execute Oroonoko. The narrator
shares the others’ fear of mutiny and an uprising of the slaves (132), flees
and is not present at the execution. This conduct, however, does not only
indicate that the liberal, humane forces are comparatively weak and inef-
fective, but rather that, without determined resistance, they, to some ex-
tent, can be misused or even secretly share the attitudes of the governing
power in the colony in its interest in control over the slaves. 24 This inter-
pretation is strengthened by the fact that even the liberal whites are, as
colonists, beneficiaries of an economic system based on slavery and are in
no way opposed to slavery in general (but merely, as an exception, lend
their support to educated, aristocratic slaves, i.e. those of equal station 25 ).
As a result of her passionate endorsement of colonialism (115) and sup-
port for the Stuarts, the narrator reveals herself to be particularly com-
promised in this regard, since the Stuart kings were actively involved in
the slave trade and profited from it. 26
These tendencies interact with the effect of the aristocratic discourse –
which, despite differences of degree, connects the African country with
the West Indian colony (as well as, ultimately, the English motherland) –
on Oroonoko’s role as a slave and his reaction to slavery. 27 Thus,
Oroonoko and Imoinda are treated with respect by well-meaning liberals
such as Trefry and the narrator, separated from the other slaves and re-
lieved of work duties (108f.), since they are of equal station to the Euro-
pean aristocrats. In this respect, the moral discourse is applied only in
accordance with the aristocratic discourse. Oroonoko’s understanding of
himself, even in slavery, is also based on just such a fundamental social
distinction between the classes. As a result, he feels nothing in common
with the other slaves and can contemptuously explain and criticise the
flight of his followers in the escape attempt in terms of their inborn slave
nature (“he was ashamed of what he had done, in endeavouring to make
those free, who were by nature slaves“, 130). Accordingly, he sees no
contradiction between his own current complaints about his enslavement
_____________
24 Cf. Ferguson (1999: 217), with reference to the conduct of the narrator at the end.
25 Cf. Ferguson (1994: 177ff.; 1999: 218).
26 Cf. Lipking (2004: 173f., 179).
27 Cf. Brown (1999: 195f.).
and the fact that he himself had previously sold free people into slavery,
who were actually brought to Surinam with him, and that he encounters
slaves previously sold by him, whom he allows to revere him as a great
man (109). That he sees no contradiction in this as a result of his self-
definition as aristocratic becomes even more apparent when he promises
to pay for his freedom from slavery with a great number of slaves (113).28
On the basis of this view of social hierarchy, the narrator produces, in
her presentation of the happenings, an analogy between the execution of
Oroonoko and that of Charles I, 29 which Oroonoko himself had men-
tioned with abhorrence at the beginning:
he had heard of the late Civil Wars in England and the deplorable death of our
great monarch, and would discourse of it with all the sense, and abhorrence of
the injustice imaginable (80).
Seen from this perspective, characteristics of the aristocratic martyr are
implicitly attributed to Oroonoko. It is also ultimately to this discourse
that the motive out of which the narrator has written the present report
belongs: for the glorification of this great man and for the safekeeping of
his renown (108, 140f.), both also pre-eminently aristocratic values.
The practical validity and moral justification of the aristocratic con-
cept of social hierarchy are, however, called into question by a series of
examples of failure by the authorities and of the misuse of power for base
human desires. 30 In Coramantien, this pertains to the old king, who uses
his autocratic power in contempt of the rules protecting marriage in order
to satisfy his lust, his jealousy and his vanity; in Surinam, this applies to
Byam, who, entirely without scruple, unrestrainedly, underhandedly and
brutally exploits his power to satisfy his aggression and desire for revenge
(128f.), but it also pertains ultimately to the governor himself, who,
through his absence and his lack of control over his deputy, neglects his
duties. The cases of misuse of autocratic power contribute directly to the
failure of the love plot. As mentioned above, the breaches of promise can
be viewed as dishonourable and unaristocratic, and one can judge the fact
that Oroonoko repeatedly falls victim to them as a sign of his rigid adher-
ence to aristocratic principles, despite his contradictory experiences, and
as strategic and political deficits as a result of this.
This tendency is strengthened in another respect by further examples
of human misconduct and deficient morality, namely by the countless
cases of betrayal and breaches of promise to Oroonoko by the Europeans
_____________
28 Cf. Lipking (2004: 172) and Holmesland (2001: 68).
29 Brown (1999) sees here – over-subtly – an allegory of the end of the kingship system as a
result of the victory of mercantile capitalism (197ff.), Visconsi (2002), in even more general
terms, the return of barbarism.
30 Cf. Rosenthal (2004: 158ff.).
44 Peter Hühn
– massively and perfidiously by the English slave trader (underhanded

capture and enslavement, 102, as well as breach of the promise to set him
free upon reaching Surinam, 103, 106), less deliberatedly by Trefry, and
also by the narrator (also by not giving him his promised freedom, 112,
113, 114), and, again, underhandedly by Byam with the support of Trefry
(131). These cases reveal the corruption of the Europeans, and specifically
the Christian Europeans (as emerges from the dispute between Oroonoko
and the English captain about misdeeds and the relationship to God,
103ff.). Also corrupt, though, are some representatives of the African
country (the king and several of his advisors). All these cases contribute,
together with the forms of misuse of authority discussed, to the failure of
the script development and to the negative event.
The implicit criticism of the moral corruption of, particularly, the
European, but also (though not so strongly) the African authorities is
contrasted with, and distinguished by, the opposing image of the native
Indians, who live without malice or dissimulation in a paradise-like natural
state, in a golden age (75ff., 115f.). 31
On balance, the effect of the different discourses and norms of con-
duct on the development of the plot is that, in their interactions, they tend
to obscure the meaning of the negative event. That a (negative) event is at
hand is indisputable, but what it means is problematized. The failure of
the heroic script as such, particularly when bound up with the hero’s stra-
tegic deficits and his disintegration and degeneration at his death, implies
on the one hand the decay of aristocratic values, which the royalist narra-
tor, on the other, defiantly defends, and which she still sees realised in the
stoic behaviour of the dying Oroonoko. 32 But her exemplification of these
values by associating Oroonoko’s execution with that of Charles I reveals
the narrator’s suspicion that these values are faced with ruin. This belief is
supported by the numerous examples of corruption of the authorities. On
the other hand, the gruesome death of Oroonoko appears as the victory
of the opposition, the mercantile spirit, though again in a corrupt form,
strengthened by general human selfishness and unscrupulousness, so that
the impression cannot be given that the aristocratic discourse is being
displaced by an honest, sustainable counter-discourse in the form of the
bourgeois principle of acquisition and profit. A further possible value
system, that of a liberal, humane morality, has also shown itself to be inef-
fective and corrupted. As a result, the negative event is characterised by
_____________
31 Though this is partially restricted later, when grotesque details about them are reported,
such as the rituals of self-mutilation in the competition for military leadership positions
(124). Cf. Rosenthal (2004: 162).
32 Ferguson (1994) sees, primarily, a victory for the narrator as author here, in the competi-
tion with Imoinda for Oroonoko’s body.
the heterogeneity and contradictoriness of its implications and conveys, as

a whole, the image of an ending and ruin with no prospect of a fresh start,
particularly for the aristocratic and moral value systems. The eventfulness
as the constitution of meaning is thus not suspended (because even the
undermining of positive elements of meaning is meaningful), but exten-
sively problematized.
The eventfulness is perceived differently by different entities in the
novel. For Byam and most of the other settlers, Oroonoko’s execution is a
positive event, the putting down of a revolt and the averting of a threat to
their existence. For Oroonoko, his death represents the fundamental fail-
ure of his entire value order, the extent of which he appreciates at least
partially, since he realises the failure of his revenge as a last furious gesture
of resistance to his humiliation (smoking the pipe should also be inter-
preted as a further last gesture of self-assertion). For the narrator, the
death of Oroonoko appears to be – as mentioned – ambivalent: negative
as the unjust killing of a great man and as the revealed dominance of the
absolutised mercantile principle against the aristocratic value order, posi-
tive as the heroic-tragic affirmation in failure of the values he represents.
Though the narrative perspective attempts to determine the attitude of the
reader in the positive regard, he can however – on the basis of his second-
order observation – see through the motives and intentions of the narra-
tor (e.g. her latent complicity with Oroonoko’s enemies in her fear of a
slave revolt, 132) and, as a result of that, the eventfulness must be per-
ceived as even more problematic.
Translated by Alexander Starritt
References
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Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 1992), 73-141.
————
Brown, Laura (1999). “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves”,
in Janet Todd, ed. Aphra Behn. New Casebooks (London: Macmillan), 180î208.
Ferguson, Margaret (1994). “News from the New World: Miscegenous Romance in
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter”, in The Production of English
Renaissance Culture, ed. David L. Miller, Sharon O’Dair, Harold Weber (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1994), 15189.
46 Peter Hühn
Ferguson, Margaret (1999). “Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra
Behn’s Oroonoko”, in Janet Todd, ed. Aphra Behn. New Casebooks (London:
Macmillan, 1999), 209î33.
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Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 23558.
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Novel”, in English Literary History 68: 5779.
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Hughes & Janet Todd, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (Cam-
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Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter”, in English Literary History 69: 673î701.
18TH CENTURY
4 Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders (1722)
Katrin Kroll
Defoe’s novel The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders 1
presents the life of the eponymous heroine which covers about 70 years
and which she herself tells retrospectively and chronologically. The story
can roughly be summed up as follows: Moll is the daughter of a convicted
criminal in London’s famous prison Newgate. Soon after her birth she is
abandoned because her mother is deported to the American colonies. She
spends a short time with relatives, later with gypsies and finally comes to
live most of her childhood in an orphanage. At fourteen, she becomes the
housemaid of a wealthy family and after some time the mistress of their
eldest son. Later she marries five times and between the third and the
fourth marriage, she works as a high-class prostitute, until her main occu-
pation becomes theft and robbery. Moll is already 48 by then. At 60, she
returns to Newgate – this time as a convicted criminal. She almost faces
capital punishment, which is then reduced to deportation to the American
colonies. In America, Moll attains freedom, builds up a plantation with her
fourth husband, who was deported along with her, and finally returns to
England as a rich lady at the age of 70. If we want to find out whether this
story contains events and, if so, what constitutes them, there are two
frames which promise to be interesting: first, the socio-economic, frame
which refers to Moll’s outer development, and second, the moral-religious
frame, which helps to assert the inner development Moll does or does not
undergo.
1. The Socio-Economic Frame
The socio-economic frame is clearly linked to an event on the story level,

namely the social and economic success Moll achieves after her deporta-
tion to Virginia. Consequently, the act of crossing the border between the
two sub-fields can be described as a social advancement. The opposition
that corresponds with it is that of ‘low social position’ vs. ‘high social
position’. ‘Financial situation’, ‘property’ and ‘social esteem’ are the most
_____________
1 Edition used: Defoe (1989).
50 Katrin Kroll
significant categories indicating Moll’s social position throughout the

novel. At the same time, however, the term ‘social advancement’ seems
too imprecise for Moll’s development. It can rather be understood as a
process of acquiring a secure place within society. Therefore, the opposi-
tions ‘without’ vs. ‘within’, ‘having no position’ vs. ‘having a position’ and
also ‘insecurity’ vs. ‘security’ characterize the two sub-fields more ade-
quately. 2
An analysis of the main qualities of the first sub-field makes this more
evident. Before her deportation to Virginia, Moll’s life is marked by insta-
bility and change. The numerous transformations which her financial
situation and social status undergo again and again prevent her from
reaching a permanent and stable position. This state of instability begins
right after her birth: born in prison and left by her mother soon after her
birth, young Moll lives in numerous different homes and has various peo-
ple that provide for her. She starts off at the lowest possible social posi-
tion – without financial means, without social esteem or property. She
depends on relatives who take care of her during the first years of her life.
At the age of three, she leaves them in order to roam about with a gang of
gypsies – a group of people that typically do not belong to a certain place,
neither in a spatial nor in a social sense. 3 Having spent some time in an
orphanage, where she naturally has to depend on the benevolence and
money of others, she works as a housemaid for about three years. After
she quits the job, Moll’s social and financial situation takes various turns.
During most of the stages of her adult life, Moll is closely connected to
the social rank of her husbands: her first spouse is the younger son of her
employer, a gentleman. Next, she marries a textile tradesman, who be-
comes bankrupt, then a well-to-do plantation owner in Virginia and after
that a seemingly rich gentleman, who turns out to be penniless. What
follows is a short time in which she works as a prostitute until she marries
her fourth husband, a bank clerk. After his death, Moll turns to illegal
means and earns her living as a criminal – and finally arrives where her life
began, in prison. This change of husbands and “professions” corresponds
with permanent fluctuations of Moll’s financial situation. She is not able to
keep a certain social and financial status (let alone acquire property), and,
consequently, the first sub-field cannot be identified with a particularly
low social position which would then be transformed into a high social
position, but with not having an established place in society at all.
_____________
2 Cf. also Hühn (2001: 337ff.).
3 Interestingly, it remains obscure how that comes about – whether the gypsies kidnap her or
whether she readily and freely joins them.
Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders 51
Still, if we look at things from Moll’s perspective, it is quite obviously

not her goal to attain just any permanent place in society but to reach a
preferably high position – the first sub-field comprises Moll’s failing at-
tempts to become a member of middle-class society. Even as an eight-
year-old girl, Moll utters the wish to become a gentlewoman 4 (cf. 48). At
first her concept of “gentlewoman” is still quite modest – a gentlewoman
is simply someone who earns her money by her “Fingers Ends” (48), i.e.
through needlework instead of working as a housemaid. However,
through her contact to the mayor’s family that starts inviting her to their
house, she soon begins to feel that being rich has a number of other con-
veniences in store. Hence, her concept of “gentility” changes: “I had such
a Taste of Genteel living at the Ladies House, that I was not so easie in
my old Quarters as I us’d to be, and I thought it was fine to be a Gentle-
woman for I had quite other Notions of a Gentlewoman now than I had
before” (53). From this moment, Moll strives to become a gentlewoman
in its true meaning (respectively to live accordingly) – her intentions go far
beyond simply averting starvation. 5 Particularly with her second husband,
Moll leads a life of luxury (cf. 105) – which they actually cannot afford –
and she marries her fourth husband mainly because of “the glittering
show of a great Estate, and of fine Things” (199), which he promises her.
She also keeps a maid whenever possible (cf. 183, 210, 286) and when she
explains her reasons for leaving London and going to Northern England,
she very poignantly sums up what she expects from life: “I found I could
not live here under a Houndred Pound a Year, unless I kept no Company,
no Servant, made no Appearance, and buried myself in Privacy” (183).
Moll does not choose a life of work to attain her goals – she realises her-
self that she could have made a living by needlework (cf. 263) – , but ex-
presses her affinity to the life of a gentlewoman: as a housemaid or seam-
stress her life would have been arduous, have left little leisure time and
surely not have provided her with riches but only with essentials.
The second sub-field which Moll reaches towards the end of the novel
is, in contrast with the first sub-field, a stable and secure position within
middle-class society. In America, Moll succeeds in building up a large
plantation. She employs numerous servants and workers (according to her
estimation, she buys land which can be worked by 5060 people, cf. 415)
_____________
4 By the term “gentlewoman” I do not refer to its original meaning, i.e. being part of the
aristocracy but to its more general sense of holding a high social position, being well-off,
and, above all, not having to work. Accordingly, the term can be applied to aristocrats as
well as parts of the middle class. The term has been used with this meaning since the end
of the 16th century, cf. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “gentlewoman” 4a. The concept of
“gentleman” has, of course, to be interpreted analogously.
5 Even if this is what she often claims, cf. 126, 182, 256, 258.
52 Katrin Kroll
and is at last able to live quite luxuriously (cf. 424). When she returns to
England she brings at least £1,000 6 with her. As Moll herself says about
her and Jemy’s situation in America, they live “in very considerable Cir-
cumstances” (426). Moll’s wish of becoming a gentlewoman has finally
come true – she attains financial wealth, becomes a landowner and enjoys
social respect. This situation has to be understood as permanent and final,
which is implied in the fact that the novel ends thus and gives the reader
no reason for doubts. A significant change in Moll’s situation is improb-
able – as Moll herself assumes (cf. 415) – because the fortune she accumu-
lated seems more than enough to finance her remaining years (in the
meantime she has turned 70).
The crucial question that remains is how and through what forces the
crossing of the boundary is facilitated. Clearly, Moll herself actively works
on achieving her aims – by two sometimes overlapping schemes. Her first
strategy is to gain wealth by an advantageous marriage (cf. 99f., 103f., 126,
196 199, 241). This procedure is a relatively conventional strategy – and a
legal one. However, almost from the beginning this strategy is undermined
by a second one which finally prevails. In order to become a gentlewoman
she more and more resorts to morally doubtful and even criminal means
a course of action to which the protagonist’s name already alludes. At
Defoe’s time, a number of famous female criminals were named “Moll”:
Moll Pines, Moll Hawkins, Mary Firth (who is mentioned in the novel and
was better known as Moll Cut-Purse, cf. 266) and, above all, Moll King.
The latter seems to be the main model for the fictional Moll Flanders –
Moll Cut-Purse was a known pickpocket arrested in 1718 and then de-
ported to America. Furthermore, the surname ‘Flanders’ is suggestive, too:
in England women from Flanders had been particularly popular as prosti-
tutes since the middle ages. 7 Consequently, it is no surprise that until she
is convicted a number of elements of her life fit into a particular social
script: the course of lives of contemporary criminals. 8 Even while she still
primarily follows the marriage scheme, first signs of this script manifest
themselves in as much as Moll deludes all of her husbands, except the
_____________
6 During the nine years she spends in Virginia – apart from her and Jemy’s starting capital of
about £600 (cf. 392), which they invest in goods – the plantation she inherits from her
mother yields about £100 a year, her own plantation earns her £300 in its eighth year.
7 Cf. Blewitt (1989: 4). Apart from that, the name, of course, refers to a kind of cloth (“Flan-
ders Lace”, 275) which Moll, among other things, steals in the novel and which signifies,
thereby, criminal activities.
8 One reason why Defoe knows his topic so well is, among others, that he spent some time
in prison, which, apart from Moll Flanders, is evident in the biographies of criminals and es-
says on this topic he wrote, e.g. The History and Remarkable Life of John Sheppard (1724),
The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild (1725), An
Effectual Scheme for the Immediate Preventing of Street-Robberies (1728).
second spouse, in one way or the other: 9 she deceives her first husband
with regard to her virginity and attracts her third and fourth husband by
pretending to be rich. The time in which she works as a prostitute (be-
tween her third and fourth spouse) is a more direct anticipation of her
later career as a criminal. Moreover, since she is never divorced from her
second husband (and, by the way, the fourth) – which would have been
difficult to achieve at the time –, she lives in bi- or rather polygamy for
many years. Finally, Moll falls into a criminal life after her fifth husband
dies and a new one is not available. She becomes a thief of various kinds
now, especially a shoplift and pickpocket, which were typical female forms
of crime at that time, 10 and again works as a prostitute for a short period.
Both strategies, however, do not lead to the crossing of the boundary:
Moll does not control her life; it is more as if things happened to her.
Furthermore, there are several forces and circumstances which make the
boundary resistant to her attempts of crossing it. Above all, the society she
lives in is characterized by rigid class barriers – there is no character in the
novel that rises in society without making (criminal) detours on their way.
Second, Moll’s world or rather the society she lives in is marked by its
deviousness. Throughout the novel, Moll is subdued by numerous decep-
tions which make it difficult for her to see through the motives of others,
to assess the consequences of her own actions, and, hence, to act success-
fully. 11 A striking example of this is the failure of Moll’s marriage strategy.
Her first lover behaves as if he wanted to marry her but at no time intends
to do so; the second pretends to be a gentleman but is in fact bankrupt. 12
What contributes to foiling Moll’s crossing of the boundary are unlucky
incidents which she cannot control. At various moments, Moll thinks that
she has reached the second sub-field of wealth and social esteem, which,
however, turns out to be a misapprehension: her first husband, the young
gentleman, dies an early death, just as her happy life with her fifth hus-
band ends, when he dies. Unlucky circumstances and – unintended – de-
ception finally come together in her marriage with her third husband, a
wealthy plantation owner in Virginia, who turns out to be her half-
brother. But the reason for the difficulty of crossing the border is not only
grounded in bad luck and a rigid society but also in Moll herself, i.e. her
lack of reasonable judgement and her questionable choice of means. In
the case of her second husband Moll lets herself be easily deceived and
does not inspect the bridegroom’s financial circumstances thoroughly (cf.
_____________
9 Cf. Arnold (1985: 217).
10 Cf. McLynn (1991: 93).
11 Cf. Hühn (2001: 337f.).
12 What has to be mentioned, though, is that Moll pretends to be rich, too, i.e. has started to
resort to deception as a means as well.
54 Katrin Kroll
199). Her fourth marriage with Jemy is ruined as much by herself as by

him – had she at least been honest regarding her (non-existing) fortune,
this marriage, which turns out to be a financial catastrophe, would not
have taken place at all. Moll’s criminal activities lead her even further away
from her actual goal: Although she succeeds in accumulating money dur-
ing her life as a thief, she is still far away from being a gentlewoman be-
cause she lacks the social recognition which would be necessary in order
to be a member of the middle class. Her criminal actions finally lead to
her imprisonment and the death sentence. At this moment, Moll is further
away from her aims than ever before. To sum up: with regard to the posi-
tive event within the social frame of Moll’s actions, these have been coun-
terproductive so far – with the execution at hand, they even seem to steer
towards a negative event.
The crossing of the border in a narrower sense – Moll’s way out of
prison to the well-off position she finally reaches – is not effected by her
behaviour, or at least only to a very small degree. The main conditions for
the event to happen are that the execution of the death sentence is first
postponed and then transformed into deportation. Both measurements
are only partly promoted by her actions – the actual decisions that facili-
tate these happy turns are beyond her control. The positive development
of Moll’s situation is furthermore promoted by the following circum-
stances, which are not within her control either: In prison she accidentally
meets her fourth husband, Jemy, who succeeds in being pardoned and
deported, too, so that – in the end – Moll does not have to build up her
new life in Virginia all on her own. Furthermore, she is supported, firstly,
by the captain, who helps to free her for money, secondly, by her son in
Virginia, who supports her with money from her dead mother’s plantation
and, finally, by a Quaker from the neighbourhood. Moll’s own contribu-
tions to her success are her statements of repentance which make the
chaplain support her cause, the fact that she owns money which she in-
vests in goods for her future life and the resolve with which she builds up
the plantation. Finally, the function of the plantation itself is not to be
underestimated with regard to Moll’s final wealth and security – it is prop-
erty which guarantees Moll, for the first time in her life, a stable income.
In as much as the strong resistance of the boundary that mirrors the
rigid class barriers in England at the beginning of the 18th century, Moll’s
crossing of the boundary signifies a relatively high eventfulness within its
social context, or, to put it differently, from the perspective of contempo-
rary readers. What makes the event additionally exceptional within the
historical context is the fact that Moll’s deportation turns into financial
success. Thereby the original social function of deportation – punishment
(cf. 383) and social proscription (cf. 391, 393) – is circumvented: what was
intended to be a social fall turns in the novel into a social rise. The fact
alone that her sentence is turned into deportation is not unusual since
deportations were common practice at Defoe’s time. 13 However, a de-
ported person would hardly have the chance to become a respected mem-
ber of middle-class society. Most of them became workers or even slaves
at the plantations and did not have any opportunity to save large sums of
money; many of them returned to England as soon as possible but only to
become criminals again. 14
Moll’s fate also turns out to be highly eventful when seen in an inter-
textual context – against the backcloth of contemporary criminal biogra-
phies, a genre to which I will return later in more detail. This genre was
widely known and accepted at Defoe’s time; the texts followed a number
of conventions so that we can suppose that contemporary readers must
have had specific expectations towards texts of this genre. The plot of
Moll Flanders, however, significantly deviates from the script established
in this genre, mainly because the actual cause for and integral part of
criminal biographies does not occur in it: the delinquent’s execution.
Quite in contrast to the laws of the genre, Moll not only survives but even
becomes rich in the end. 15
The only aspect which might be seen as limiting the degree of event-
fulness is the fact that not only Moll but also Jemy and her mother un-
dergo a similar development. Both of them are deported too, and then
become socially and economically successful as farmers. Consequently, we
have to say that for these two – although the novel does not focus on
their fates – the two sub-fields are obviously constituted like Moll’s and
they too, cross a boundary in the novel.
2. Eventfulness within the Moral-Religious Frame and the Relation

between the Two Frames
The crucial question that remains is whether the change in Moll’s outward
situation corresponds to an inner change, i.e. whether the social rise is
connected to a transformation of Moll’s moral and religious views and
_____________
13 Cf. McLynn (1991: 277, 285ff.). After the number of deported criminals had sunk between
1685 and 1718 due to the resistance of American settlers, deportations became more fre-
quent again with the Transportation Act of 1718.
14 Cf. McLynn (1991: 289).
15 Moll’s assertion that a lot of readers would have preferred a “compleat Tragedy, as it was
very likely to have been” (369) seems to allude to this prominent deviation from the script.
56 Katrin Kroll
behaviour. 16 In the following, it will become clear that the answer to the
question of whether the moral-religious frame contains an event or not,
depends on the respective narrative level – on whether we adopt the per-
spective of the protagonist, the empirical author, the contemporary reader
or a modern reader.
For Moll, the protagonist and narrator, there definitely is an event: she
vehemently claims to have undergone a decisive inner change by referring
to the script of conversion. According to her, the conversion comes about
while she is in prison – this is where and when the moment of crossing
the boundary would have to be located. If we follow her train of thought,
her inner change begins when she first sees Jemy in prison. Her compas-
sion for him and the notion of being responsible for his fate trigger feel-
ings of guilt and remorse in her (cf. 356ff.). She ends her reflections on
Jemy with “in a word, I was perfectly chang’d, and become another Body”
(357). However, this short résumé does not seem to refer to actual inner
change but to the fact that Moll’s mind and spirit are no longer in a state
of resignation (cf. 355) and are woken to new life. She does not feel true
repentance at this point (cf. 358). But when she is waiting for the death
sentence to be carried out, she starts seeing a chaplain under whose influ-
ence the said conversion is brought about:
It was now that for the first time I felt any real signs of Repentance; I now began
to look back upon my past Life with abhorrence, [...]. The word Eternity repre-
sented itself with all its incomprehensible Additions, and I had such extended
Notions of it, that I know not how to express them […]. With these Reflections
came in, of mere Course, severe Reproaches of my own Mind for my wretched
Behaviour in my past Life; that I had forfeited all hope of any Happiness in the
Eternity that I was now going to enter into […]. (364f.)
The evaluations Moll uses (“wretched”, “abhorrence”) clearly demonstrate
her realisation that her past deeds were morally reprehensible and that her
feelings of repentance have a Christian dimension. This becomes espe-
cially evident when she calls into play the concept of “eternity”. Through-
out the novel, there are further indications of Moll’s inner change: she
frequently declares her repentance (cf. 266, 268, 421, 427) and often ap-
pears as an overt narrator retrospectively condemning her behaviour be-
fore her imprisonment (cf. 64, 67f., 168, 177, 415, 420f., 427), emphasising
the moral lesson which the reader can learn from her story (cf. 62, 179,
243, 369, 409). In addition, her newly-won belief in providence as the
_____________
16 This question has been frequently and controversially discussed in the secondary literature.
Blewett (1989) e.g. assumes a fundamental change, while Suarez (1997) and Caton (1997)
deny the change and Faller (1993) considers it ambiguous. Often, the problem of Moll’s
change is connected with the question of which position the abstract or even real author
takes, cf. the overview in Goetsch (1980: 271ff.).
shaping force of her life seems to verify her inner change: Moll states that
her transgressions as well as the unlucky coincidences in her life (before
her conversion) have to be ascribed to the “Devil in my Bosom” (199, cf.
also 254, 263, 268) or were brought about by an “invisible Hand” (251, cf.
also 44, 138, 154, 213, 268, 336). Similarly, she attributes the happy turns
to a “merciful Providence” (369, cf. also 408, 420, 421). If we follow
Moll’s interpretations and statements, the first sub-field of the semantic
field is marked by moral corruption and, along with it, a lack of belief and
conduct according to Christian values. In contrast, the second sub-field
has to be constructed as a morally and religiously stainless life marked by
repentance and by obeying God’s commands.
On second glance, however, Moll’s crossing of the border within the
moral-religious frame appears doubtful. From a modern perspective it is
disconcerting that even after her conversion Moll so strongly pursues
material goals. While still in prison Moll realises that material goods are
unimportant:
how gross, how absurd did every pleasant thing look? I mean, that we had
counted pleasant before; especially when I reflected that these sordid Trifles were
the things for which we forfeited eternal Felicity (364f.)
but her actions show that material interests remain the guiding force for
her decisions: her preparations for the journey to America predominantly
consist in settling her financial affairs and in providing herself with goods
for her life in Virginia and devices supposed to make the trip more agree-
able (cf. 389, 393). Consequently, Moll and Jemy pass the journey itself
quite conveniently if not luxuriously. Apart from furniture which Moll
buys only for the crossing (cf. 389), she and Jemy reside in a comfortable
passenger cabin, eat at the captain’s table and provide themselves with
“several Necessities” such as
Brandy, Sugar, Lemons etc. to make Punch, and Treat our Benefactor, the Cap-
tain; and abundance of things for eating and drinking in the Voyage; also a larger
Bed, and Bedding proportion’d to it; so that in a Word, we resolv’d to want for
nothing in the Voyage (397f.).
After arriving in the colonies, Moll devotes all her actions to building up a
profitable plantation – with success, as we know. This behaviour implies
that Moll still has not given up her main aim in life: becoming a gentle-
woman. 17 Even when she meets her son again her main concern in her
dealings with him is to secure her inheritance, the estate of her mother (cf.
410f.). That Moll has not given up her economic view of life also mani-
fests itself in the résumés which she as the narrator makes at the end of
_____________
17 Cf. also the luxury articles she has others send her from England so that Jemy, who has
less means than she, can look like a gentleman again (424).
58 Katrin Kroll
each phase in her life: these résumés have a predominantly financial focus,
they are balances in the true sense of the word (cf. 102, 107f., 156, 180,
253, 392, 426).
However, if we take into account the historical-cultural context of
Calvinism it soon becomes obvious why Moll’s continuing economic per-
spective on life would not have contradicted her proclaimed conversion in
the eyes of contemporary readers and Calvinist Defoe. 18th-century Cal-
vinism does not see a conflict between material striving on the one hand
and belief and morality on the other. The frames ‘religion’ and ‘economy’
are not conceptualised as opposites, on the contrary: in their continuous
striving for certainty of their salvation Calvinists used to interpret eco-
nomic success as a sign of God’s saving grace and of being among the
chosen ones. 18 Consequently, Moll perfectly fulfils the script of the rueful
penitent in the specific historically and culturally determined form of a
Calvinistic story of conversion, so that for the empirical author Defoe and
contemporary readers Moll’s story would have constituted a moral-
religious event. From their perspective, the relation between the two
frames can be constructed as a causal one: the inner, moral-religious
change would have been seen as prerequisite of the later economic and
social rise – only after she repents, turns to God and strives for social
advancement with legal means can Moll succeed.
A modern reader or a reader who does not share the Calvinist world
view, however, will have difficulties in finding Moll’s continuing material
striving in accordance with a conversion. Especially the fact that Moll
does not offer any compensation for her deeds, but, on the contrary,
keeps her hauls and builds her future life upon them is hard to reconcile
with a moral-religious change. Consequently, Moll’s assertion that she
wants to begin her new life on a “new Foundation” (383) can be under-
stood as highly ironic.
However, even if we neglect the problem of Moll’s pursuit of profit,
the text contains other indications that leave room for doubts whether
Moll’s repentance continues after the described moment in prison and
whether she fundamentally changes. Firstly, there are the statements of
the fictive editor. With regard to Moll’s life, he explicitly speaks of two
contrasting phases of her life, a “criminal Part” and a “penitent Part” (38),
but at the same time he mentions that it was necessary to polish up the
manuscript: “the Copy which came first to Hand, having been written in
Language more like one still in Newgate, than one grown Penitent and
Humble, as she afterwards pretends to be” (37). At the end of the preface,
he furthermore assumes that towards the end of her life, Moll has been
_____________
18 Cf. Arnold (1985: 52).
“not so extraordinary a Penitent” (42) as while in prison. Thereby, he

questions the depth and permanence of her conversion. 19
Secondly, these doubts are heightened by other aspects of Moll’s be-
haviour after her supposed change. By avoiding the punishment of work-
ing on a plantation she circumvents one important aspect of repentance,
i.e. atonement. The fact that she strongly plays down her crimes in front
of Jemy (cf. 376f.) and lies to her son when it comes to her past and her
present circumstances (cf. 418, 426) does not speak in favour of a moral
change of the protagonist either.
Finally, we have to discuss the evaluations and comments which the –
seemingly reformed – narrator Moll gives. These very often do not com-
ply with what we would expect of a reformed sinner: Moll frequently un-
dermines the scheme of interpretation which she has tried to establish by
contrasting the unmistakably negative evaluations of her past deeds with
positive assessments and attempts to portray herself as a victim rather
than as a perpetrator. A prominent example of this is the way she de-
scribes the time when she was the mistress of the mayor’s son in Colches-
ter: she sees herself as “a very sober, modest and virtous young Woman”
(57) and her lover as solely responsible for what happened – as a seducer
who deceived her (cf. 57, 61). In a similar way, she blames others for hav-
ing married her half-brother, although it was she who deliberately tried to
attract him by pretending to be rich (cf. 123). Moll draws the same pas-
sive, victim-like picture of herself when it comes to her fourth marriage.
She depicts herself as “a Bag of Money, or a Jewel dropt on the Highway,
which is a Prey to the next Comer” (182) and makes others responsible
for her husband’s deception (cf. 201, 207). That these assessments are
euphemisms and that Moll is not an innocent victim is quite obvious. For
instance, a conversation between her and the mayor’s son reveals that
Moll is much less naïve to male wiles of seduction than she pretends to be
(cf. 73). Thereby, she indirectly and unintentionally questions the role of
the victim she ascribed to herself. When it comes to her third marriage it
turns out that Moll is, again, less naïve and much more responsible for the
way things develop than she maintains – she uses trickery in order to help
the Captain’s Lady to a husband (cf. 119ff.) and with one of her lovers she
plays “as an Angler does with a Trout” (cf. 195). Finally, what may strike
readers as inconsistent is the fact that Moll condemns her past actions as
often as she describes her own and others’ criminal practices in an almost
admiring way. In her opinion, a fellow criminal, for instance, steals
_____________
19 Another aspect worth mentioning is whether the chaplain’s fears, which he expresses
strikingly often that Moll could soon fall back into her old ways and his urgent admoni-
tions that she should remain repentant (cf. 368, 370, 371, 372, 386) do not additionally
raise doubts in the reader regarding Moll’s character.
60 Katrin Kroll
watches “so dexteriously that no Woman ever arriv’d to the Perfection of

that Art, so as to do it like her“ (cf. 266). She describes her own crimes
similarly: “I grew the greatest Artist of my time, and work’d myself out of
every Danger with such Dexterity, […]” (280, cf. also 311). The fact that
Moll frequently tries to minimize her own guilt or even describes her past
actions in a self-admiring way leaves room for concluding that deep inside
she is not as convinced of her own guilt and wickedness as she pretends.20
Consequently, especially from a modern perspective, there are reasons
not to speak of an event on the moral-religious level. Moll’s attempt to
divide her life into two opposite halves can be interpreted as a stylisation
that is consistent with fictive reality only in a limited way. If we assume
that there is no event within the moral-religious frame, Moll must be
called an unreliable narrator and the relation between the two frames ap-
pears in a different light too: from this point of view, Moll excessive striv-
ing for wealth is one of the main reasons why we must deny her a deeper
moral-religious change – Moll does not change because material motives
continue to dominate her actions and her morals. However, since the text
leaves room for modern readings as well as the perspectives of the pro-
tagonist and narrator Moll, the empirical author Defoe and the historical
reader, we have to conclude that on the level of the abstract author, Moll’s
change remains ambivalent. What becomes evident, though, is that the
contradictions which modern readers perceive do not stem from Defoe’s
artistic deficiencies – as some critics assume21 – but from differences in
18th-century and modern world views.
However, no matter how we assess Moll’s change, it is noteworthy
that the script of conversion is not only implicitly activated by the text,
but quite openly referred to by Moll as the valid interpretation of her life
story – which brings up the question: why does Moll cling to this script?
What function does this attempt to interpret her life along the script of
conversion have? On the one hand, this reference surely allows Moll to
see her life not as a chaotic mayhem but as an orderly, meaningful and
goal-directed whole. Particularly the idea that the positive turn her life
takes could be a sign of God’s interference can be understood as a wish
for coherence, because in retrospect it seems to give her life a direction
and meaning. However, by splitting her life in two contrasting halves, it
does not only become understandable in a neutral sense: behind this, we
can see Moll’s wish to draw a positive picture of her present self, a picture
_____________
20 Moll’s statements about the moral status of others are often contradictory as well and
hence suggest that she does not hold strong moral views. A striking example of this is
when she calls her fence and landlady “my good old Governess” (279) on the one hand
and a “wicked Creature” (ibid.) on the other.
21 Cf. Watt (1974: 98f., 118).
in which she can believe. Hence, Moll’s reference to the script of conver-
sion also has the function to create identity. And there is one more aspect
to it: by interpreting her life as a story of conversion Moll also gains assur-
ance of her spiritual salvation, i.e. of a positive future after her death. 22
Finally, in correspondence with the ambivalence of Moll’s inner
change, the novel activates two diverging scripts belonging to the con-
temporary genre of criminal biographies mentioned before. This genre has
two main forms, picaresque biographies – which foreground the adven-
turous and, partly, the fantastic, which have an episodic structure, glorify
the protagonists and primarily intend to entertain the reader – and the
predominantly religiously oriented biographies. 23 The latter are dominated
by their devotional function: they denounce the delinquent’s crimes and
focus on his final turning to God. Typically both variations manipulate or
at least stylise the facts in order to produce the effect they aim at. 24 Taking
into account the mentioned discrepancies, Moll’s interpretation of the
story can be seen as an attempt to write a spiritual criminal biography,
which is, however, undermined by the ambiguity of her inner change.
Apart from the fact that the missing execution and Moll’s final wealth are
deviations from both genres, the novel contains numerous elements
which do not fit into the script of the spiritual criminal biography: the way
Moll’s life before her imprisonment is rendered in a rather episodic way
and the admiration she sometimes expresses for her deeds and adventures
are features which Moll Flanders shares with the picaresque criminal biog-
raphy. One could argue that by this deviation from the script of the spiri-
tual criminal biography, the moment of stylisation is laid bare as a consti-
tutive mechanism of the genre and its devotional function. If we follow
this line of thought, the novel even seems to possess a meta-fictional qual-
ity (which, though, does not constitute another event, to be more specific:
a presentation event). Still, in a very subtle way the reference to the said
genres highlights the (potential) events in the happenings and, at the same
time, their ambiguous relation to the literary as well as the cultural-
historical context.
_____________
22 Cf. also Hühn (2001: 338f.).
23 Cf. Faller (1993: 4ff.), Gladfelder (2001: 33), Arnold (1985: 70ff.) and Bell (2004: 409). This
connects Moll Flanders, of course, to genres akin to the criminal biography, i.e. the pica-
resque novel, the confessional novel and the Puritan spiritual autobiography.
24 Cf. Faller (1993: 22), Arnold (1985: 95).
62 Katrin Kroll
References
Defoe, Daniel (1989). The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (Lon-
don: Penguin Classics).
————
Arnold, Christof K. (1985). Wicked Lives. Funktion und Wandel der Verbrecher-
biographie im England des 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: Winter).
Bell, Ian A. (2004 [1985]). “Moll Flanders, Crime and Comfort”, in Moll Flanders, ed.
Albert J. Rivero (2004). London: Norton. (Reprint of: Ian A. Bell: Defoe’s Fiction.
Totowa: Barnes & Noble 1985, 115î52), 403–36.
Blewitt, David (1989). “Introduction”, in Defoe, Daniel (1989). The Fortunes and
Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (London: Penguin Classics), 1î24.
Caton, Lou (1997). “Doing the Right Thing with Moll Flanders: A ‘Reasonable’ Dif-
ference between the Picara and the Penitent”, in College Language Association
Journal 40: 508î16.
Faller, Lincoln B. (1993). Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP).
Gladfelder, Hal (2001). Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England:
Beyond the Law (Baltimore etc.: Johns Hopkins UP).
Goetsch, Paul (1980). “Defoes ‘Moll Flanders’ und der Leser”, in Germanisch-
Romanische Monatsschrift 30: 271î88.
Hühn, Peter (2001). “The Precarious Autopoiesis of Modern Selves: Daniel Defoe’s
Moll Flanders and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves”, in European Journal of English
Studies 5: 335î48.
McLynn, Frank (1991). Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (Ox-
ford: Oxford UP).
Suarez, Michael F. (1997). “The Shortest Way to Heaven? Moll Flanders’ Repentance
Reconsidered”, in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern
Era 3: 3î28.
Watt, Ian (1974 [1957]). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding
(London: Chatto & Windus).
5 Samuel Richardson: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
(1740)
Peter Hühn
On one level, Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela 1 can be de-

scribed as a story of love and marriage, tracing the relation between Pam-
ela Andrews and Mr B., from their first acquaintance through a protracted
period of various, mostly violent, forms of “courtship”, conflicts of uni-
lateral desire and virtuous rejection, confusions and clarifications of their
mutual declaration of love, their eventual wedding and the beginnings of
their married life. But the primary emphasis rests less on the emotional
and subjective side of their emergingt love relationship than on the nature
of the obstacles separating the couple and making the way to their ulti-
mate union long, difficult and problematic: their divergent social origins
and moral attitudes. 2
1. The Social Order and the Two Conventional Scripts for Love Stories
The “semantic field” or overall context is defined primarily in social terms

and is sub-divided hierarchically by a strict class boundary into the
wealthy, leisured aristocracy, represented by Mr B. and his family (his
mother Lady B., recently deceased, and his sister, Lady Davers), on the
one hand, and, on the other, the working (bourgeois) class, represented by
the servants – among them fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews and her
poor, hard-working parents, but also by the housekeeper, Mrs Jervis, and
the clergyman, Mr Williams. 3 This social order is characterized by strict
stability and inflexibility: people are born into their respective classes and
stay in them throughout their lives. Thus all characters in the world of the
novel are immobile figures insofar as their positions are firmly and un-
questionably fixed in their respective sub-fields. Only Pamela’s place in
_____________
1 Page references, to Richardson (2001), are cited in the text.
2 For a general historical contextualization of the love topic, cf. Watt (1963). For a general
overview of the novel, see Kinkead-Weekes (1973) and esp. Doody (1974: 14î78).
3 Although there are also social differences among these positions, they are not separated by
a strict impermeable boundary and appear insignificant from the perspective of the aristoc-
racy.
64 Peter Hühn
the lower-class sub-field turns out to be unstable and insecure from the
start. This is due to two aspects of her situation, both connected with her
sex and age: her role as an unprotected servant girl in an aristocratic family
after her benevolent maternal mistress’s (Lady B.’s) death and her being a
sexually attractive, nubile young woman. As far as her relations with the
opposite sex are concerned, two scripts are available to Pamela (according
both to social norms and literary conventions): marrying someone from
her own class or being seduced by a member of the aristocratic class. 4
Whereas the first alternative is apt to complete and consolidate her social
integration in the first sub-field, the second option, while seeming to per-
mit the crossing of the boundary into the higher, aristocratic sub-field,
would eventually result in her moral and social degradation and cause her
to be expelled from her original social position into a morally inferior
second sub-field (she would be “ruined”, as the usual phrase puts it). This
change would entail a re-definition of the structure of the semantic field in
primarily moral terms (albeit with social consequences).
In the course of the novel’s development, these two alternative scripts
are actually presented to Pamela as practical possibilities, in the form of
two different plotlines. The main plotline is constituted by Mr B., the
libertine son of her former mistress, attempting to subject her to the sec-
ond (seduction) script, by persistently and perfidiously trying to seduce
her, against her strong and virtuous resistance, by flattery, the use or threat
of force and, ultimately and most elaborately, by tempting her with the
promise of an established position in aristocratic circles as his kept mis-
tress, with the prospect of marriage sometime in the future. At one point
in this plot progression, she is offered marriage by a member of her own
class, Mr Williams, 5 in accordance with the first script, as a means of
warding off the threat to her moral integrity and securing a safe and firm
position for her in the first sub-field.
With respect to the second alternative, the seduction plotline and the
concomitant prospect or illusion of a boundary crossing, the novel pro-
vides explicit definitions of the boundary from either side, as it were, cor-
roborating the rigorous separation of the two sub-fields. At the very be-
ginning of the novel, Pamela’s parents, warning her against Mr B.’s
designs, specify the constitutive norms of the lower-class sub-field, in
opposition to the corrupt standards of the aristocracy, as moral integrity
_____________
4 These two scripts actually underlie the plot patterns of two types of the female love novel
prevalent at the time: the courtship novel and the seduction/rape tale. See Doody (1974:
18ff.).
5 Though Mr Williams’s position as a clergyman is somewhat higher up the social scale than
that of the servant girl Pamela, the society of the novel clearly places them in the same
class, far beneath the aristocracy.
Samuel Richardson: Pamela 65
and religious strictness: honesty, goodness, hard work, virtue, piety and
trust in God and his Providence. Virtue is considered superior to wealth
and even to life:
“we had rather see you all cover’d with Rags, and even follow you to the Church-
yard, than have it said, a Child of ours preferr’d any worldly Conveniencies to her
virtue” (14).
With reference to a flattering gift by Mr B. to Pamela, her father admon-
ishes her:
“Arm yourself, my dear Child, for the worst; and resolve to lose your Life sooner
than your Virtue. […] what signify the Delights that arise from a few paltry fine
Cloaths, in Comparison with a good Conscience?”,
adding, “It is Virtue and Goodness only, that make the true Beauty” (20).
While the parents thus define the boundary from below, Lady Davers
demarcates it from above later in the novel, again with direct reference to
Pamela’s person and position, when her brother contemplates taking her
as either a mistress or a wife. She admonishes her brother in a letter:
“ruining a poor Wench that my Mother lov’d, and who really was a very good
girl; […] of this you may be asham’d; […] it would be very wicked in you to ruin
the Wench […]. So that I beg you will restore her to her Parents, and give her
100 £ or so, to make her happy in some honest Fellow of her own Degree”;
but marrying her would be “utterly inexcusable”, a gross violation of the
superior state of the noble and old family tradition:
“ours is no up-start Family; but as ancient as the best in the Kingdom; and for
several Hundreds of Years, it has never been known that the Heirs of it have dis-
graced themselves by unequal Matches; […] [a] handsome Gentleman as you are
in your Person; so happy in the Gifts of your Mind, that every body courts your
Company; and possess’d of such a noble and clear Estate; and very rich in Money
besides, left you by the best of Fathers and Mothers, with such ancient Blood in
your Veins, untainted! for you to throw yourself thus, is intolerable” (257).
Because of their literary and social conventionality, the practical reali-
zation of either of these two scripts would not rank high on the scale of
eventfulness. Marrying Mr Williams, on the one hand, would merely con-
firm and perpetuate Pamela’s original membership, by birth, of the first
sub-field, corroborate the existing order and thus prove not at all eventful,
which is highlighted by the explicit advocacy of such a marriage by the
two staunch defenders of the inviolable boundary between the fields men-
tioned above: Pamela’s father (159f.) and Lady Davers (cf. 257). If Pamela
were to succumb to seduction, on the other hand, this would ultimately
lead to her moral and social debasement, thereby undermining her place in
the first field and relegating her to an altogether inferior position. This
course of action would constitute a negative event, but one of a relatively
66 Peter Hühn
low degree on account of its common occurrence, both in literature and in

life. 6
2. Pamela’s Eventful Crossing of the Class Boundary
For a variety of reasons, however, Pamela refuses to follow either of the

two conventional scripts. 7 The seduction script is resolutely and persis-
tently rejected by her on purely moral grounds in spite of her unconscious
but growing love for Mr B., even after she gradually becomes aware of it:
“O good sir […] O my Heart will burst […] but, on my bended Knees, I beg you,
Sir, to let me go tomorrow, as I design’d! And don’t offer to tempt a poor Crea-
ture, whose whole Will would be to do yours, if my Virtue and my Duty would
permit” (84). 8
She declines Mr Williams’s marriage proposal because of her latent,
though strong, attachment to her “master” (as the reader may gather from
her behaviour), although she explicitly states as her reason for refusal that
she has no plans to marry yet:
“There is not the Man living, that I desire to marry; if I can but keep myself hon-
est, it is all my Desire; and to be a Comfort and Assistance to my poor Parents, if
it should be my happy Lot to be so, is the very Top of my Ambition” (143).
Pamela’s rejection of the two conventional scripts and concomitant
roles eventually enables her to cross the normally impassable rigid class
boundary, i.e. to marry Mr B. and thereby move into the superior field of
_____________
6 The novel does, in fact, contain a detailed reference to such a plotline with the usual devel-
opment, in the figure and history of Sally Godfrey, introduced towards the end of the
novel by Lady Davers in an attempt to belatedly disrupt the marriage agreement between
Mr B. and Pamela (431f., 478ff., 501). Although Sally Godfrey comes from a “good” fam-
ily, her fate is basically that of seduction and rejection by the adolescent Mr B., with the
concomitant moral corruption and fall. That Pamela’s life might have followed a similar
course is explicitly articulated by Mr B. himself, when he describes his original designs on
her as intending “to make my Pamela change her Name, without either Act of Parliament
or Wedlock, and be Sally Godfrey the Second” (486). That the customary dire conse-
quences are avoided is due to his bad conscience and his benevolence (he provides for her
and their child etc.: 478ff.). Cf. the analysis of the ideological implications of the specific
narrative treatment of this alternative plotline by Rivero (2001).
7 Doody (1974: 35î78) reads Pamela as a pastoral comedy, thus relating the plot-structure of
the novel to a particular generic script: “It is a comedy, a story of love’s vicissitudes which
ends happily: ultimately a wedding is celebrated by which the right partners are united, and
the social order enriched. It is not a simple comedy because of its darker, more disturbing
elements” (35). This can be accepted as a plausible historical reading. The present narra-
tological analysis is not to be understood as an alternative interpretation to such an ap-
proach but rather as the explication of the underlying abstract structure of the novel’s plot,
even if read as a pastoral comedy.
8 See also Pamela’s rigorously outspoken rejection of Mr B.’s “proposals” (2001: 188ff.).
the aristocracy – an event prepared over a long period of time and finally
brought about largely as a result of decisive changes in Mr B.’s attitude: a
conception of love for Pamela (83); offer of cohabitation with a vague
prospect of marriage after a test year (191f.); recognition from her journal
and letters of her unselfish loving attachment to him in spite of his brutal
and deceitful behaviour (250f.); and finally, unreserved declaration of love
and proposal of marriage (259ff., esp. 270) as well as acknowledgement of
her moral superiority as a model for his own life (269ff.):
“let me tell my sweet Girl, that, after having been long lost by the boisterous
Winds of a more culpable Passion, I have now conquer’d it, and am not so much
the Victim of your Love, all charming as you are, as of your Virtue; and therefore
I may more boldly promise for myself, having so stable a Foundation for my Af-
fection; which, should this outward Beauty fail, will increase with your Virtue,
and shine forth the brighter, as that is more illustriously display’d, by the aug-
mented Opportunities which the Condition you are now entering into, will afford
you” (341).
In the final analysis, the crossing of the boundary is essentially effected by
the overriding of social with moral norms. 9
Although Pamela’s transition from the first to the second semantic
sub-field, i.e. from the lower to the higher social status, is ultimately
achieved with the brief, but legally and religiously binding, ceremony of
the wedding in the chapel (344ff.), the boundary is crossed not as a sud-
den or random occurrence, but as an integral part of a protracted process
which, in addition to the preliminary psychological and moral changes,
includes the customary wedding preparations and especially the long
drawn-out efforts to overcome various serious obstacles resulting from
family and social circumstances, such as Lady Davers’s hostile opposition
(415ff.) and the neighbouring gentry’s reservations or outright antago-
nism. 10 Nor is the achievement definitive and final: the two-volume sequel
of the novel published a year later (1741) reveals that Pamela’s position in
the second sub-field is not yet secure, but must be earned and further
confirmed through her exemplary behaviour. All these difficulties testify
to the inherent strength and stability of the subdivision of the semantic
field and the firm resistance of the boundary to transgression. Therefore,
the fundamental transformation of Pamela’s social status represents a very
_____________
9 Cf. Morton (1971), who ascribes the decisive movement of the plot to the spiritual regen-
eration of Mr B. and other characters through the effect of Pamela’s virtue. He locates in
the novel “two planes of action, the vertical plane of the social scale and the horizontal
plane of spiritual regeneration; and their intersection comes at the point of B’s repentance”
(256).
10 Mai (1986), in his detailed formal analysis of the structure of plot-development, distin-
guishes two successive conflicts which postpone the final resolution: the threat to Pamela’s
virtue and the hostility of society, both of almost equal length.
68 Peter Hühn
high degree of eventfulness, since it constitutes a grave violation of the

hierarchical social norms in favour of emotional and moral values as well
as a radical deviation from both the seduction script and the conventional
marriage script. Deviation from the conventional marriage script is strik-
ingly highlighted by the fact that Mr B. chooses Mr Williams, whose mar-
riage proposal to Pamela could have resulted in Pamela’s integration into
the first sub-field, to officiate at the wedding ceremony (309ff., 344ff.).
Pamela’s social elevation and marriage into the aristocracy constitutes
an event on the level of the happenings in that the protagonist’s (social)
position in the world depicted in the novel has decisively changed. That
this change clearly counts as eventful is acknowledged by the protagonist
herself as well as by other inhabitants of the novel’s world, e.g. by Lady
Davers and the neighbouring gentry, whose initial rejection or condemna-
tion and subsequent acceptance of Pamela’s advancement function as an
internal indicator of eventfulness. Thus the event is collectively established
and recognized as a social fact in the world of the novel, not merely as a
changed attitude or consciousness. Richardson’s Pamela represents an
almost prototypical, straightforward example of eventfulness, the basic
structure of which resembles that of fairy tales (such as Cinderella) but is
made more complex by the social, moral and religious dimensions of the
change, which are constituted through the specific historical and cultural
context within which the love plot is placed. Furthermore, the plot-
development of Pamela is also prototypical in that the novel possesses a
homogeneous structure with respect to eventfulness, i.e. its eventfulness is
endorsed by the novel as a whole and on all of its various narrative levels
such as those of character, narrator, implied author, author and reader. 11
3. The Modality of the Event and the Degree of Eventfulness
What is socially and culturally significant about the specific modalities of

Pamela’s eventful transgression of the boundary is her seeming passivity
and lack of ambition. 12 She does not actively aspire to such an elevation,
but is granted it as a reward for her active efforts in another respect,
namely, her unwavering rejection of Mr B.’s advances and her moral ex-
_____________
11 For an example of a heterogeneously structured story in which a change counts as an event
only on some, but not on all, levels, see the analysis of Joyce’s “Grace” in the present vol-
ume, pp. 125î32.
12 Brown (1993) has shown how Richardson preserves Pamela’s artlessness and innocence,
while at the same time indicating to the perceptive reader the underlying drift of the plot-
development î through ‘speaking pictures’ (emblems, tropes, allusions etc.): “The presence
of the ‘speaking picture’ permits us, as secondary readers, to break free of the narrators’
subjective reportage” (130).
emplariness in connection with an underlying intuitive confidence in Mr

B.’s fundamental goodness. And even after his proposal of marriage and
the subsequent preparations for her firm establishment in the second field
as his wife, Pamela continues to stress her humbleness, unworthiness and
inferiority, habitually addressing her husband as “Sir” and calling him “my
Master” in her letters and in her diary. Moreover, she never refers to her
social elevation in terms of her own achievement or merit but invariably
ascribes it to God’s Providence (cf. e.g. 274f., 332, 345f.).13 In keeping
with her persistently reactive nature, she discovers and acknowledges her
love for Mr B. only after he has first declared his love to her (270).14
Although Pamela’s crossing of the normally impassable boundary
through her marriage clearly constitutes a “revolutionary” event, it is es-
sential to realize that the subdivision of the semantic field into two differ-
ent classes remains completely intact. 15 Her social ascent is presented as
absolutely singular and exceptional, not at all as a model to be imitated.
The references later in the novel to Sally Godfrey also serve to underline
this singularity. Nor does this event signal a weakening of class divisions.
On the contrary, the novel, especially in its latter part, employs various
means to corroborate the validity of such distinctions and to stress the
exclusivity, as well as the stability, of the aristocratic world. One important
factor is Pamela’s own attitude, of which there are two aspects. On the
one hand, even before entering this world as a wife, she possesses all the
appropriate aristocratic skills (in manners, language, writing, dancing,
dressing etc.), mostly acquired in the service of her former mistress, so
that she fits perfectly well into the social life of aristocratic families.16
Even her fastidious sense of sexual virtue has to be considered less a
lower-class than an upper-class female trait. 17 In both respects, she is fun-
damentally different from all other servants in the novel. On the other
hand, Pamela unmistakably acknowledges and endorses social distinctions
and values through her humble and respectful behaviour, as mentioned
above. Moreover, through the beneficial effect of her virtue and goodness
_____________
13 For a comprehensive description of the relevance of Providence for the world order in the
novel and its religious foundation, see Fortuna (1980).
14 For the significance of the underlying concept of woman’s role in love, cf. Watt (1963:
160ff.).
15 Cf. Flint (1989: 505). Koretsky (1983) also stresses that Pamela’s very exceptionality argues
against her being an example of social advancement (e.g. 53).
16 In addition, the social status of her family is curiously raised towards the end of the novel
so as to enhance her affinity with the aristocratic sub-field. Cf. Flint (1989: 506f.).
17 Cf. Bowen (1999: 267, 269, 272). What was new and provocative was attributing such an
attitude to a servant-girl. Cf. Watt (1963: 172).
70 Peter Hühn
on Mr B., his sister and others, she can even be seen as improving and
strengthening the cultural superiority of the aristocratic order.18
4. The Historical Context of Eventfulness: the Evidence

of Contemporary Reactions
The high degree of eventfulness represented by this marriage in violation

of the rules is demonstrated by contemporary reactions to Pamela. 19 Sa-
tirical and polemical attacks on the novel, such as Henry Fielding’s Apol-
ogy for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741) and Eliza Haywood’s Anti-
Pamela: or Feign’d Innocence Detected (1742), question the protagonist’s
artlessness, naivety and passivity and accuse her of hypocrisy, scheming
and manipulation. 20 Thus radically discrediting her on a moral level, 21 they
seek to invalidate, as well as reduce in degree, the eventfulness of Pamela’s
marriage and social elevation by ascribing its success to dissimulation and
deceit and, therefore, to design. This ascription of motives is calculated to
re-define the structure of the event: to denigrate it as the disreputable
result of a low, cunning stratagem instead of a reward for moral strength.
The marriage would still be considered an event but an immoral one.
These hostile reactions to Pamela are clearly formulated from an upper-
class position (Fielding was an aristocrat) and thus indirectly testify to the
context-dependence of the event in the novel. 22 Something similar goes
for positive reactions to Richardson’s novel, such as its many imitations
and continuations (e.g. John Kelly’s Pamela’s Conduct in High Life
[1741]), 23 which, tellingly, often give the heroine an aristocratic birth (ini-
_____________
18 The relation between social and moral norms has been variously interpreted, e.g. as incom-
patible tendencies by Flint (1989). However, since the class boundary is unmistakably cor-
roborated despite Pamela’s rise, one can argue that the moral reformation of the aristo-
cratic family of the B.s through the influence of her essentially bourgeois values does not
so much symbolize the rise of the middle class as strengthen the superiority and legitimacy
of the aristocracy.
19 For a detailed overview of contemporary reactions, see Keymer & Sabor (2005).
20 Cf. Keymer & Sabor (2005: 83ff.).
21 Cf. Bowen (1999: 258ff.) and Doody (1974: 71ff.). One underlying motive seems to have
been the anxiety that Pamela might encourage female servants’ sauciness or even their aspi-
rations of upward mobility.
22 “[Pamela] overthrew classical literary decorum in making a low, ungrammatical female its
heroine; it overthrew social barriers in presenting a misalliance as not only possible but in
given circumstances desirable. […] Shamela shows what a revolutionary book Pamela could
seem. Richardson’s novel affronted the old Etonian in Fielding, and he registered the reac-
tion of the Establishment” (Doody 1974: 74).
23 Cf. Doody (1974: 74ff.).
tially unknown, but revealed later on). 24 As a result, the high degree of
eventfulness of Pamela’s marriage is considerably reduced, apparently
because this radical deviation from the established social order was felt to
be unacceptable – another indirect indication of the dependence of the
event on the class context.
That such a marriage across the class-divide is both highly exception-
al 25 and of profound relevance becomes particularly apparent through
reference to the historical context, i.e. the social, cultural and religious
conditions and practices in force at the time the novel was written. Central
contextual features are, firstly, the hierarchical class system in Britain and
its practically impermeable boundary between the lower (the working and
the middle) classes and the aristocracy; secondly, the ethical emphasis on
which the middle class bases its dignity and self-respect, the norms of
honesty, working for one’s living and, especially with regard to women,
sexual “virtue”, in contradistinction to the aristocratic values of rank,
wealth, leisure, pleasure and, with particular respect to men, loose sexual
morals; and thirdly, the ban on female initiative in pursuing love and mar-
riage and the repression of female self-awareness with regard to feelings
towards men, which delimits the agency of women as protagonists, con-
fining their scope of action to reactivity and submissiveness. In addition,
the notion of divine Providence guiding human destiny functions as an
important overarching schema, 26 especially for Pamela, since it shifts (or
projects) the agency denied to women onto a superior, benevolent power
and thus religiously sanctions her violation of social boundaries: in the
end, she can “acknowledge, with thankful Humility, the blessed Provi-
dence, which has so visibly conducted me thro’ the dangerous Paths I
have trod, to this happy Moment” (274). It is only retrospectively that
Pamela is able to recognise the religious consistency of her eventful social
transformation, which, in the final analysis, may be identified as a partly
secularised version of the puritanical conversion-and-redemption script
and is thus specifically dependent on the cultural and historical context of
Richardson’s novel. 27
The novel certainly contains numerous indicators of these contextual
norms and values. For instance, Lady Davers’s letter to her brother for-
_____________
24 For a detailed discussion of Kelly’s novel, see Keymer & Sabor (2005: 66ff., esp. 77f.).
25 Cf. Bowen (1999: 261).
26 For an overview of the relevance of this theological notion for Richardson and his time, cf.
Fortuna (1980).
27 In addition, one can read the novel in yet another, political context, as Dussinger (2001)
has suggested, by construing an analogy between, on the one hand, Pamela’s letter-writing
as a means of articulating as well as fortifying her moral self-confidence and Mr B.’s at-
tempts at getting hold of these letters and controlling their effect on others and, on the
other, the “ferocious print wars” between opposition and government at the time.
72 Peter Hühn
bids him to marry Pamela on account of the unbridgeable hierarchical

distance between the two families (257), and Mr Andrews states that he
would not “own” his daughter if she were “dishonest,” i.e. had allowed
herself to be seduced (292). In fact, these two characters generally act as a
mouthpiece for endorsing the values and principles separating the two
social fields, with Mr B.’s sister trumpeting the social superiority and ex-
clusivity of the aristocracy and Pamela’s father representing middle-class
moral integrity and ideological self-assuredness (cf. also 13f., 20, 52, 37).
In spite of such indications within the text, however, eventfulness is, ulti-
mately, not a textual property, but has to be inferred and constituted by
readers by relating the textual cues to their knowledge of the period. Al-
though the text can thus be seen to provide appropriate cues, readers may
miss the point of the event, and in particular they may fail to appreciate
the relevance and difficulty of the transition if they are ignorant of the
contemporary social and ideological context of the novel or if they apply
an inappropriate frame of reference.
Richardson’s type of eventful plot structure – the social elevation of
the heroine to the upper classes through marriage, as a result of her moral
exemplariness – subsequently contributed to the formation of a new liter-
ary convention based on a social and psychological script for later novels.
Examples ranging from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) to William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
(1848), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) and George Eliot’s
Middlemarch (1871/72) reveal growing difficulties, however, due to the
proliferation of obstacles on the part of the protagonists and/or of society
and to the social circumstances that affect the actual possibility of eventful
transformation, until they prevent transformation altogether.
References
Richardson, Samuel (2001). Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer & Alice
Wakely (Oxford: Oxford UP) [text based on the first edition of 1740].
————
Bowen, Scarlett (1999). “‘A Sawce-box and Boldface Indeed’: Refiguring the Female
Servant in the Pamela-Antipamela Debate”, in Studies in Eighteenth-Century
Culture 28: 257î86.
Brown, Murray L. (1993). “Learning to Read Richardson: Pamela, ‘Speaking Pictures,’
and the Visual Hermeneutic”, in Studies in the Novel, 25 (2): 129î51.
Doody, Margaret Anne (1974). A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel
Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon).
Dussinger, John A. (2001 [1999]). “‘Ciceronian Eloquence’: The Politics of Virtue in
Richardson’s Pamela”, in Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel
Richardson,
ed. D. Blewett (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Pr.), 27î51.
Flint, Christopher (1989). “The Anxiety of Affluence: Family and Class (Dis)order in
Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded”, in Studies in English Literature 1500 – 1900, 29:
489-514.
Fortuna, James Louis Jr. (1980). ‘The Unsearchable Wisdom of God’: A Study of
Providence in Richardson’s ‘Pamela’ (Gainesville: Univ. Presses of Florida).
Keymer, Thomas & Peter Sabor (2005). ‘Pamela’ in the Marketplace: Literary
Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Kinkhead-Weekes, Mark (1973). Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (London:
Methuen).
Koretsky, Allen C. (1983). “Poverty, Wealth, and Virtue: Richardson’s Social Outlook
in Pamela”, in English Studies in Canada, 9 (1): 36î56.
Mai, Hans-Peter (1986). Samuel Richardsons “Pamela”: Charakter, Rhetorik und
Erzählstruktur (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner).
Morton, Donald E. (1971). “Theme and Structure in Pamela”, in Studies in the Novel,
3: 242î57.
Rivero, Albert J. (2001 [1993]). “The Place of Sally Godfrey in Richardson’s Pamela”,
in Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson, ed. D. Blewett
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Pr.), 52î72.
Watt, Ian (1963 [1957]). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and
Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
6 Henry Fielding: The History of Tom Jones,
a Foundling (1749)
Markus Kempf
Henry Fielding’s great neo-classical novel Tom Jones 1 published in 1749 is

a rich, multifaceted, complex and very long text with a large cast of char-
acters, an intricate plot comprising a vast number of episodes and some
embedded tales, numerous intertextual references and frequent meta-
narrative comments. In accordance with the semantic focus on eventful-
ness in the present project, the following analysis will rigorously concen-
trate on the main stages in the life and development of the protagonist, as
the basic plotline of the novel, under three aspects: the sequential struc-
ture of Tom Jones’s story, the form and relevance of his border crossing
and the contemporary cultural context, by which this crossing is defined
as an event. 2
1. The Two-Part Plot-Structure of the Novel
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones narrates the eponymous protagonist’s life

from the moment he is found as an abandoned baby and adopted by
Squire Allworthy up to the disclosure of his parentage and his marriage,
that is to say, until he enters adulthood and finds his rightful position in
society. 3 This period of twenty-one years is subdivided into two sections,
_____________
1 Citations (identified by page number as well as book and chapter) refer to Fielding (1985).
2 For a general overview and discussion of the plot, cf. Crane (1995: 683–99).
3 The following analysis will restrict itself to reconstructing the plot as the (model) life story
of a young man within the specific social context of contemporary England, as a kind of
Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel. There have also been various attempts at quasi-
allegorical readings of Tom Jones; see, e.g., the political approach of Wang (1997: 89–134),
who reads the novel as a story about choosing the rightful ruler for the government of the
state, and the psycho-analytical approach of Boheemen (1987: 44–100), who reads the
novel as a “family romance”. Stevenson (2005) provides a more historical type of focus
stressing connections between Tom Jones’s plotline and the lives of two contemporary
personages, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Richard Savage. Yet another, more formal and nar-
ratologically interesting, approach is offered by Brown (1997: 86–110), who draws on the
structure of rhetorical tropes (metaphors, metonymies etc.) as a basis, on the one hand, for
associating the text with the political situation in England and, on the other hand, for re-
constructing the mechanism underlying the proliferation of episodes.
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones 75
the second of which is again subdivided into two shorter phases. The first
section (books I–VI) covers Tom Jones’s formative years up to the age of
21 at Allworthy’s country seat Paradise Hall. The second – decisive – sec-
tion starts with Tom’s banishment from Paradise Hall owing to his own
acts of indiscretion and the intrigue of Blifil, Squire Allworthy’s nephew,
against him. This narrative section, which covers only a few days, presents
the protagonist’s adventures, first, on the road and in country inns on his
way to London (books VII–XII) and, subsequently, within the aristocratic
society of the capital (books XIII–XVIII). 4
In semantic respects, the two-part plot-structure is centrally condi-
tioned by the fact that Tom crosses the same boundary twice. The plot
starts with an unmerited, passive, premature crossing of the (social)
boundary: Tom, as a foundling, an illegitimate baby of presumably socially
low descent, is graciously adopted into the aristocratic family of Squire
Allworthy, a social elevation which is later reversed (when he is banished
by the squire). But in the end – having acquired moral maturity through
his experiences in the country and the metropolis, discovered his true
identity and married Sophia – he crosses the boundary again and this time
for good. Thus, Tom’s plotline consists of the repetition of a specific
eventful movement, failing the first time, succeeding at the second at-
tempt.
The semantic field and the final boundary crossing, in Lotman’s
terms, are essentially defined by oppositions in three respects: lower class
vs. aristocracy 5 (regarding Tom’s position in society), desire vs. fulfilment
(in his relation to Sophia), immaturity, naivity, impulsiveness, credulity,
carelessness vs. maturity, world knowledge, self-discipline, prudence (with
regard to his mind, attitude and behaviour). Accordingly, Tom’s plotline is
framed in three ways: social status, love, cognitive and moral psychology.
These three frames are interrelated and partly mutually dependent, as is
shown, e.g., by the play with the multiple meanings of the name “Sophia”,
which refers to the person of the concrete woman as object of Tom’s love
as well as to his personal wisdom and maturity. In the last analysis, how-
ever, the frames are arranged hierarchically with the moral-cognitive as-
pect claiming a position of relative priority. Tom’s cognitive and moral
improvement functions both as a precondition for his marriage to Sophia
and as a justification and confirmation of his (eventually revealed) aristo-
cratic rank.
_____________
4 Watt (1963: 288f.) points to the neat subdivision of the novel into three compositional
groups of six chapters each.
5 Although it turns out in the end that this social opposition does not actually apply to Tom
after all on account of his concealed aristocratic birth, the class difference serves an impor-
tant function for the plot-development in large parts of the novel.
76 Markus Kempf
Various difficulties and obstacles hamper Tom’s border crossing and

thereby raise the degree of the eventfulness. These obstacles consist, on
the one hand, in the numerous intrigues by antagonists (above all by Blifil,
but also by his tutors Thwackum and Square) and, on the other hand, in
Tom’s impulsiveness, naivity and lack of experience (he is “nobody’s en-
emy but his own” 6 ) as well as in the comedy-like entanglements, misun-
derstandings and coincidences 7 . Typically, Tom commits an indiscretion,
which is then discovered and the discovery results in his immediate or
eventual embarrassment, often brought about and exploited by one of his
adversaries. 8 In the following, I will first discuss the initial phase of the
plot, which presents Tom’s precarious position in the second – aristocratic
– sub-field after his early, premature crossing of the boundary and then
analyse in more detail the crucial second phase of the plot.
1.1 The First Plot-Phase: Tom’s Precarious Position

in the Second Semantic Sub-field
As mentioned above, the novel sets in with the event, at its very begin-
ning, of the protagonist’s rise into the upper class in spite of his alleged
socially and morally dubious descent. Although Tom is supposed to be the
illegitimate child of the schoolmaster Partridge and his maidservant Jenny
Jones, Squire Allworthy adopts him, gives him his own Christian name
and the surname of the presumed mother and brings him up together with
Blifil, the son of his widowed sister Bridget, who lives with him in Para-
dise Hall. During this first phase, Tom’s personality is characterised by
two traits primarily: on the one hand, he possesses a benevolent, good-
natured and compassionate disposition and, on the other hand, he is in-
clined to act impulsively and imprudently; besides, his is a passionate na-
ture and he is careless in questions of sexual morality. Although, since
their early youth, there has been a mutual attraction between him and
Sophia, 9 the daughter of Squire Western, Allworthy’s neighbour, Tom
indulges in a sexual affair with the seductive and devious Molly Seagram –
for a while it even looks as if he were the father of her child. Because of
his ambivalent and immature behaviour Tom violates the expectations and
moral standards of his environment, so that he is vulnerable to attacks and
his position in the second field becomes increasingly insecure.
_____________
6 Fielding (1985: 130 / IV, 5).
7 For a description of the role of “Fortune” in producing the difficulties Tom has to face,
see Crane (1995: 686ff.).
8 For a structural analysis of these episodes, see Crane (1995: 696).
9 The final mutual recognition of their love is narrated in Fielding (1985: 187ff. / V, 6).
Tom’s direct adversary is Allworthy’s hypocritical, mendacious and

avaricious nephew Blifil, who sees Tom as a rival for Allworthy’s inheri-
tance and envies him his close relationship with Sophia, the heir of the
neighbouring estate, which he desires for himself. Blifil makes repeated
attempts – by means of slander, lies and manipulations – to disrupt Tom’s
good relationship with Allworthy and thus weaken his position within the
family, attempts which range from the exaggerated accusation against
Black George for poaching on Squire Western’s estate 10 and the incident
concerning Sophia’s bird 11 , to the final intrigue after Allworthy’s recovery
from his illness 12 . These intrigues are increasingly effective on account of
Allworthy’s one character flaw, his credulity and over-confidence in his
ability to judge other people. During this first phase several other charac-
ters, besides Blifil, oppose Tom, above all the two tutors, the parson
Thwackum and the philosopher Square, who in satirical-grotesque exag-
geration represent the bigoted pious religion and the no less hypocritical
deistic philosophy, respectively. Their hostility towards Tom, like that of
Blifil, results from their envy of his prospects for Allworthy’s inheritance.
Eventually, even Squire Western becomes Tom’s adversary. Although
initially a close friend because of their common passion for hunting, at the
end of the first part, his acquisitive greed for Allworthy’s estate induces
him to attempt to force Sophia into a marriage with the future heir Blifil
against her inclination and as a result to break with Tom completely,
whom he sees as Blifil’s rival.
But despite all these adversaries it is ultimately Tom himself, his im-
maturity and inability to act prudently, who causes his expulsion from
Paradise Hall, i.e. his relapse into the first semantic sub-field. This fall
stands in paradoxical contrast to the general development of the first
phase, which shows a gradual improvement of Tom’s reputation with
other characters, i.e. a strengthening of his place in the second semantic
sub-field. However, with a striking faux pas he undoes this positive devel-
opment in the end. This is the episode of Allworthy’s unexpectated recov-
ery from illness, which fills Tom with so much joy that he indulges in
excessive drinking, during which he allows himself to get involved with
Molly Seagram again and, in addition, is provoked into a fight with Blifil
and Thwackum. These acts of indiscretion inadvertently offer Blifil a wel-
come opportunity to denigrate Tom’s character in the eyes of Squire All-
worthy, who believes the slander and, as a consequence, banishes and
disowns him at last. It is significant that immediately before this incident,
_____________
10 Fielding (1985: 116ff. / III, 10).
11 Fielding (1985: 124ff. / IV, 3).
12 Fielding (1985: 249ff. / VI, 10 & 11).
78 Markus Kempf
Allworthy had addressed Tom explicitly about his central weakness of

character, namely his imprudence, impulsiveness and rashness, admonish-
ing him to overcome these:
‘I am convinced, my child, that you have much goodness, generosity and honour
in your temper; if you will add prudence and religion to these, you must be
happy: for the three former qualities, I admit, make you worthy of happiness, but
they are the latter only which will put you in possession of it.’13
1.2 The Second Plot-Phase: Tom’s Moral Development
His banishment from Paradise Hall initiates the second phase of Tom’s
development, which comprises only a few days. On the road, in country
inns and in the metropolis, he is involved in numerous adventures and
entanglements, which cannot be reconstructed here in detail. In the man-
ner of comedy plots Tom’s path repeatedly crosses Sophia’s, who – ac-
companied by her maid – flees to a relative in London, her cousin Lady
Bellaston, to escape the forced marriage with Blifil, whom she loathes,
pursued by her father. In the course of this flight Tom saves a traveling
lady from being raped and then gets involved with her himself. 14 When
Sophia learns about his infidelity, she is disappointed and turns away from
him. 15 The final phase is set in London, where Tom has followed Sophia
and where both are exposed to further seductions and intrigues, particu-
larly by the ageing Lady Bellaston and her libertine friend Lord Fellamar.
While Squire Western saves Sophia from being raped by Lord Fellamar, 16
Tom is arrested for duelling 17 and sentenced to death on the basis of evi-
dence manipulated by Blifil. He is saved at the last minute by Allworthy,
who at long last has seen through Blifil’s machinations. 18 He disowns him
and remorsefully receives Tom back into the family. 19 At the same time
Tom’s identity and descent are clarified:20 He turns out to be the illegiti-
mate son of Allworthy’s sister Bridget (before her marriage to Captain
Blifil and the birth of her legitimate son) and is therefore Blifil’s half-
brother. Sophia and Tom are reconciled and marry.
_____________
13 Fielding (1985: 195; V, 7).
14 Fielding (1985: 400ff. / IX, 2 ff.).
15 Fielding (1985: 439ff. / X, 5).
16 Fielding (1985: 657ff. / XV, 5).
17 Fielding (1985: 725ff. / XVI, 10).
18 Fielding (1985: 781ff. / XVIII, 6f.).
19 Fielding (1985: 795ff. /XVIII, 9f.).
20 Fielding (1985: 788ff. / XVIII, 8).
The second part of the plot shows Tom’s successful development of a

mature personality, the refining and consolidation of his innate benevo-
lence through the acquisition of insight into human nature and knowledge
of the world in a society largely dominated by egoism, play-acting, immor-
ality and disorder. Tom goes through a process of socialization and indi-
viduation in the course of which he gathers experiences in all relevant
social spheres: in the country, on the road and in the city. Through his
experiences and adventures, which finally lead him to the brink of total
failure, he ultimately acquires the “prudence” which Allworthy had de-
manded of him at the end of the first part, i.e. he learns to understand
himself and discipline his “animal spirits”, his passionate sensuality. He
describes this eventful transformation to Allworthy in the following
words:
‘Alas, sir, I have not been punished more than I have deserved; and it shall be the
whole business of my future life to deserve that happiness you now bestow on
me; for believe me, my dear uncle, my punishment hath not been thrown away
upon me: though I have been a great, I am not a hardened sinner; I thank
Heaven I have had time to reflect on my past life, where, though I cannot charge
myself with any gross villainy, yet I can discern follies and vices too sufficient to
repent and to be ashamed of; follies which have been attended with dreadful con-
sequences to myself, and have brought me to the brink of destruction.’21
In his answer Allworthy stresses again the importance of “prudence” 22 :
‘I am rejoiced, my dear child, […] to hear you talk thus sensibly; for as I am con-
vinced hypocrisy […] was never among your faults, so I can readily believe all
you say. You now see, Tom, to what dangers imprudence alone may subject vir-
tue (for virtue, I am convinced, you love in a great degree). Prudence is indeed
the duty which we owe to ourselves; and if we will be so much our own enemies
as to neglect it, we are not to wonder if the world is deficient in discharging their
duty to us; for when a man lays the foundation of his own ruin, others will, I am
afraid, be too apt to build upon it.’ 23
2. Form, Significance and Context of the Event
The concept underlying the event in Fielding’s Tom Jones and its context
can best be assessed in contrast to another 18th-century novel, Richard-
son’s Pamela of 1740. 24 In Tom Jones, Fielding endorses a moral code
_____________
21 Fielding (1985: 802 / XVIII, 10).
22 Gooding (2001: 31–35) questions the positive quality of “prudence”, pointing to its nega-
tive representation in Blifil and the Man of the Hill. But even though prudence can be per-
verted, in Tom’s case it appears as a valuable and necessary corrective.
23 Fielding (1985: 802f. / XVIII, 10).
24 See the analysis of Pamela in the present volume (63î73).
80 Markus Kempf
which is based on reason and the principles of enlightenment and which,

contrary to Richardson, allows for a sympathetic attitude towards sexuality
and does not react to human weaknesses with severity and condemnation
but mockingly, humourously and leniently. And in clear contrast to Pam-
ela, Fielding’s novel presents the religiously, specifically puritanically de-
fined concept of morality in the unambiguously negative shape of the
bigoted hypocrite Blifil. With equally unambiguous clarity the opposite
extreme is rejected, ruthless, aristocratic immorality, as practised by Lady
Bellaston and Lord Fellamar.
The difference between the concepts of eventfulness in Tom Jones and
Pamela appears to be closely linked to the different social backgrounds of
the authors. 25 Fielding comes from an aristocratic family (on his father’s
side, his mother’s family was middle class), whereas Richardson is of so-
cially low origins (his father was a craftsman). In the beginning, it is true,
the protagonists in both novels seem comparable in their low social status:
Pamela is a servant girl, Tom is alleged to be the son of a maidservant. But
while Pamela rises into the aristocracy only at the end of a long sequence
of tests, as it were, through the eventful marriage with Mr. B., Tom is
adopted into Allworthy’s aristocratic family already at the beginning of his
life. And it is only at the end that the disclosure of his true parentage fi-
nally transforms him in reality into what so far he had only seemed to be
on account of the generous reception by Allworthy: a gentleman.
In the final analysis, Fielding still adheres to the traditional hierarchi-
cal principle of birth as the basis of identity, demanding, however, that
this position be justified by learning and practising an enlightened reason-
able moral standard of behaviour. That is to say, Tom’s aristocratic de-
scent alone is no longer sufficient justification for his privileged social
position and the happy fulfilment of his love; both have to be merited by
the adoption of a specific mental and moral attitude. The protagonist’s
eventfully enlightened transformation thus couples the aristocratic con-
cept of identity (based on descent) with middle-class principles of moral-
ity, rejecting, however, their puritanical version, as is apparent in the toler-
ant attitude towards sexuality. Tom’s adversary Blifil, though of socially
equal status, fails doubly in moral terms and is, therefore, expelled at the
end of the novel: he adopts the wrong (puritanical) attitude and besides he
practises this attitude merely as hypocritical play-acting for selfish pur-
poses.
As indicated above, the aim of a cognitive-moral refinement is linked
to the pursuit of the love fulfilment in the marriage with a socially appro-
priate partner. With regard to Tom and Sophia’s love, which is constantly
_____________
25 See Watt (1963: 281f.).
obstructed by a hostile environment and continuously has to prove itself

in its stability and strength against seductions and attacks, the novel is
related to the structure of the romance (and the ancient Greek novel).26
On the whole, the plot-development in Tom Jones follows a circular
course. 27 Tom has to lose a good position to gain a better one. He must
leave the unearned security of the existence of a gentleman, expose him-
self to the dangers of the road, the dissipations of the city and risk com-
plete failure in order to be able to take his inherited position by right, that
is to say, on account of his cognitive and moral maturity. Thus acquiring
knowledge of the world and of human nature as well as a standard of
behaviour firmly guided by reason is the precondition for a return to the
point of departure on a higher level.
The structure of this development resembles that of the “happy fall”
(felix culpa), as a kind of abstract script, which occurs also in other 18th-
century novels such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders 28 .
Tom’s expulsion and the ensuing entanglements turn out to be the pre-
condition for the uncovering of his identity. The name of Allworthy’s
country seat (“Paradise Hall”) as well as an occasional comparison of Tom
with Adam 29 allude to the Christian history of salvation, the expulsion
from paradise and the eventual return. 30 The fact that life moves towards
the disclosure of a pre-existing but long hidden state represents a secular-
ised form of divine Providence, the notion that God benevolently directs
man’s existence with his invisible hand. 31 In this respect Fielding’s novel is
informed by the optimistic concept of the superpersonally sanctioned
coherence and positive eventfulness of individual lives.
In spite of the aristocratic orientation of the character constellation,
Fielding presents this eventful development as a generally valid model.
This claim of general validity is indicated not only by the common name
of Tom Jones but also by the emphasis on the natural and typically human
_____________
26 Cf. Grimm (2005: 31ff.). See also Black (2008), who locates Tom Jones as a love story
within the generic tradition of the romance, between (mythic) epic and (realistic) novel, but
combining features of both.
27 Cf., e.g., Boheemen (1997: 47).
29 Fielding (1985: 267 / VII, 2).
30 Cf. Boheemen’s (1997: 52ff.) discussion of the intertextual reference to the Genesis.
31 The term “Providence” occurs frequently in the novel. Interestingly, it is not used, how-
ever, by the narrator himself in his own voice, but only in the utterances of one or the
other of the characters (Partridge, Tom, the Man of the Hill: 358 and 362 / VIII, 10; 387 /
VIII, 14; 535 / XII, 8; once even Blifil: 731 / XVII, 2) or in a quotation (264 / VII, 1; also
769 / XVIII, 3). Although the narrator thus does not explicitly endorse the trust in the di-
vine direction of affairs, the characters do – and rightly so, as it turns out. – Cf. also Dam-
rosch (1987), who describes the difference between the plot-development in Tom Jones and
the puritanically inspired providential fiction of, e.g., Richardson and Defoe.
82 Markus Kempf
in Tom’s acts and attitudes. Tom does not possess an exceptional person-
ality nor a distinct individuality; and – unlike Pamela – the interior, psy-
chological dimension of his character is largely left aside. 32 The concept of
life and eventfulness in Tom Jones is largely defined by the neo-classical,
enlightened notions of a stable public (and hierarchical) order of society,
the universality of human nature and the rationality of moral norms. 33 The
advocacy of a renewed, enlightened stability has to be seen against the
background of “an atmosphere where social and moral demarcations were
subtle and uncertain in ways that reflect the amorphous state of [Field-
ing’s] changing world” 34 .
These contextual references to an enlightened, rational, publically ori-
ented concept of human behaviour also determine the narrative mediation
of the plot. Fielding does not offer a subjective self-presentation of a life
either in retrospect (as, e.g., in Defoe’s first-person narratives) or in its
actual ongoing performance (as, e.g., in Richardson’s epistolary novels): in
both cases the protagonist-as-narrator tends to treat his own standpoint
and standard of value as absolute. Instead, Fielding objectifies the narra-
tive through the critical distance of an omniscient extradiegetic narrator.
For every narrative about oneself is subjectively limited and unavoidably
biased by one’s own standpoint, as is also stressed by the narrator:
[…] for let a man be never so honest, the account of his own conduct will, in
spite of himself, be so very favourable, that his vices will come purified through
his lips, and like foul liquors well strained, will leave all their foulness behind. For
tho’ the facts themselves may appear, yet so different will be the motives, circum-
stances, and consequences, when a man tells his own story, and when his enemy
tells it, that we scarce can recognize the facts to be one and the same. 35 .
Through this distanced perspective the behaviour of the protagonist and
the other characters is permanently judged and exposed in their limitation
and blindness towards oneself and others from a superordinate reasonable
point of view, but less by means of explicit criticism than indirectly
through irony. This narrative technique obliges the reader constantly to
examine whether the actions and moral attitudes of the hero and the other
characters are in accordance with the general values and norms. This as-
serted objectivity of reasonable judgement is another contextual reference
_____________
32 This view, which is a consensus of Fielding critics, is rejected by Chibka (2008). It is true,
as Chibka demonstrates, that the reader is often informed about the mental activities of the
characters, their knowledge, thoughts and emotions, but these are typically only stated and
summarised rather than shown.
33 Cf. Watt (1963: 282ff.). In the last analysis, these concepts are endorsed by the novel
despite the pervasive irony – pointed out e.g. by Hudson (2007) – which seems to ques-
tion all fixed values and norms.
34 Hudson (2007: 90f.).
35 Fielding (1985: 340f. / VIII, 5).
of Fielding’s novel, the adherence to the classicist concept of development

and eventfulness.
Edited and translated by Peter Hühn
References
Fielding, Henry (1985). The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (London: Penguin
Classics).
————
Black, Scott (2008). “The Adventures of Love in Tom Jones”, in Henry Fielding In Our
Time: Papers Presented at the Tercentenary Conference, ed. J. A. Downie (Newcas-
tle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 27–50.
Boheemen, Christine van (1987). The Novel as Family Romance: Language, Gender,
and Authority from Fielding to Joyce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP).
Brown, Homer Obed (1997). Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr.).
Chibka, Robert L. (2008). “Henry Fielding, Mentalist: Ins and Outs of Narration in
Tom Jones”, in Henry Fielding In Our Time: Papers Presented at the Tercentenary
Conference, ed. J. A. Downie (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Pub-
lishing), 81–112.
Crane, R. S. (1995 [1950]). “The Plot of Tom Jones”, reprinted in Henry Fielding, Tom
Jones: The Authorative Text, Contemporary Reactions, Criticism, ed. S. Baker (New
York & London: Norton), 677–99.
Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. (1987 [1985]). “Tom Jones and the Farewell to Providential
Fiction”, reprinted in Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones”, ed. H. Bloom (New York:
Chelsea), 104–23.
Gooding, Richard (2001). “Romance, History, and the Ideology of Form in Tom
Jones”, in The CEA Critic, 63: 3: 23– 38.
Grimm, Reinhold (2005). Fielding’s “Tom Jones” and the European Novel since An-
tiquity (Frankfurt/Main etc.: Peter Lang).
Hudson, Nicholas (2007). “Tom Jones”, in The Cambridge Companion to Henry Field-
ing, ed. C. Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 80–93.
Stevenson, John Allen (2005). The Real History of Tom Jones (New York & Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Wang, Jennie (1997). Novelistic Love in the Platonic Tradition: Fielding, Faulkner and
the Postmodernists (London etc.: Rowman & Littlefield).
Watt, Ian (1963 [1957]). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Field-
ing (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
PREMODERN AND MODERNIST
7 Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (1861)
Peter Hühn
Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations 1 is made up of several story-

lines (or plotlines) and events linked to different characters and concate-
nated in a complex arrangement. 2 The complexity of this concatenation is
caused by two circumstances: on the one hand, by the number of charac-
ters with storylines of their own (primarily Pip, Miss Havisham and Mag-
witch, but also Estella, Herbert and Compeyson) and, on the other, by
their specific mode of mediation, i.e. Pip’s subjective and subjectively
limited perspective, as part of his autodiegetic life story, which conditions
the degree of the presence or visibility of the individual stories. While the
progress of Pip’s own life is told by Pip himself and can thus be directly
watched and followed by the reader, the stories of the other characters, in
particular Compeyson, Magwitch and Miss Havisham, are in large part
hidden from Pip (and the reader), since they happened in the past and in
remote locations and manifest themselves to Pip only in their conse-
quences and in the reactions of others. It is only at the end that they be-
come fully visible. The arrangement of the individual stories is further
complicated by the fact that they are organized in a chronological and
causal hierarchy, as it were. The oldest stories are those of Magwitch and
Miss Havisham, both of which are interrupted by Compeyson’s activities
and both of which, in turn, influence the lives of Pip and Estella. The
reader’s perspective is determined by the autodiegetic presentation of
Pip’s story. That his life is influenced or even directed by the other stories,
i.e. from the outside, remains obscure for a long time and can only be
understood at the end of the novel. For this analysis, it seems best to fol-
low the hierarchical order of the stories, that is, to start with Pip’s life
story and then proceed with a reconstruction of the stories which influ-
ence it.
_____________
1 Page references, to Dickens (1985), are cited in the text.
2 For a reconstruction of the arrangement of storylines on a psychoanalytical basis, cf.
Brooks (1984). For an overview of the life stories and their historical setting, cf. Paroissien
(2000).
88 Peter Hühn
1. The Story of Pip’s Ascent: Initial Situation and Expectations
Pip’s story is presented directly: he himself tells his life story chronologi-
cally and retrospectively. But this presentation is explicitly structured with
respect to its eventful turns by an editor, as is apparent in the subdivision
of the 59 chapters into three phases of almost equal length (19 or 20 chap-
ters each) and especially in the sentences concluding the first two phases,
in which Pip the narrator is referred to in the third person: “This is the
end of the first [second, resp.] stage of Pip’s expectations.” 3 These con-
clusions to each phase constitute significant, eventful turning-points in
Pip’s development. The first phase, i.e. chapters 1 to 19, is marked, as
already indicated in the title, by the anticipation of a social elevation from
the lower classes to the status of gentleman. This is to be seen within the
context of traditional British class society, with the still strict separation
between the lower, working population (the labourers, craftsmen, servants
and employees) on the one hand and the affluent and therefore leisured
upper class of the aristocracy on the other. 4 This division of society, with a
boundary between the two sections, also functions as the semantic field
underlying the happenings in the first part of the novel. What had
changed since the previous century 5 was a greater “permeability” of the
boundary and increased social mobility for individuals, a sign of the evolv-
ing modernization of society. 6 Belonging to the upper class, though still
highly restrictive, was no longer based exclusively on birth, on being de-
scended from an aristocratic family, but could also be achieved by the
acquisition of wealth and the purchase of land (by “self-made men”), as
exemplified by the rise of successful entrepreneurs and businessmen since
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (famous examples are Peel,
Disraeli, and Gladstone).
It is through reference to the hierarchical stratification of society as
the relevant context that the schemata of Pip’s life story can be deter-
mined. Social status, i.e. belonging to a particular social class as a central
point of reference for one’s identity, provides the frame for the plot, while
_____________
3 At the end of ch. 19 (188) and 39 (342), resp.
4 According to Cannadine (2000: ch.s 2 and 3), the 18th and 19th centuries were generally
characterized by a pervasive, acute awareness of the rigid stratification of the British soci-
ety. Furthermore, see Gilmour (1981) for an account of the general social situation (115)
as well as for a description of the conditions in Great Expectations (10546). Herbst (1990:
119f.) uses the reference to the socio-historical context for a primarily moralistic interpreta-
tion.
5 Cf. the analyses, in the present volume, of Defoe’s Moll Flanders (49–62) and Richardson’s
Pamela (63î73).
6 Cf. Checkland (1964: 281324, esp. 289ff.), also Gilmour (1981). For a general account of
the process of modernization, see Luhmann (1993).
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations 89
moving upwards in society, especially into the class of the wealthy, who
on account of their wealth are entitled and able to lead a life of leisure and
pleasure, i.e. the position of a gentleman, serves as the script. The script
thus consists in a programme for crossing the social boundary in the se-
mantic field. Since this crossing is expected here, the degree of eventful-
ness is not very high, in any case considerably lower than in Richardson’s
Pamela, where such a script did not yet exist. The wording of the title
suggests a further specification of the script: what is envisaged is not ele-
vation through personal effort and active achievement, but the passive
acceptance of such privileges; for example, by inheritance or adoption.
The pattern inherent in this script is thus ultimately still aristocratic, the
expectation of an inheritance due from one’s parents or family. To pin-
point the internal contradiction underlying this script: to be able to orient
oneself on this script presupposes the growing modern mobility in society,
while its content is still pre-modern and traditional, i.e. the reference to
social status (the status of gentleman) as granted and not earned. In addi-
tion, a gender-specific male aspect distinguishes Pip from Pamela: social
elevation is not effected by marriage into an aristocratic family.
Pip’s life story begins with the description of his family background,
social status and living conditions, together with the emergence of his
“expectations”, i.e. of the script of social ascent as the guideline for his
life. His initial situation, on the one hand, places Pip clearly inside the first
semantic sub-field, the lower-class working population: he is an orphan
growing up in a small-town environment and in the poor household of his
brother-in-law, the good-natured and warm-hearted, but uneducated,
blacksmith Joe Gargery, and his wife, Pip’s care-worn and heartless sister,
practically playing the role of an evil stepmother. On the other hand, his
position is relatively unstable and unfixed, which shows the potential for
positive or negative development. Owing to the death of his parents (the
novel starts with a scene in the graveyard where Pip the child is trying to
decipher the inscriptions on their tombstones), Pip lacks a firm family
basis for social integration: his brother-in-law and sister provide only a
weak substitute, the former on account of his childlike (albeit good-
natured) disposition, the latter because of her attitude of brusque rejec-
tion, which gives him the feeling of not being welcome and being “nater-
ally wicious” (i.e. “naturally vicious”, 57, see also 46, 54). Psychologically,
his position is further undermined by the need to conceal his enforced
support of the fugitive convict Magwitch (whom he encounters, tellingly,
in the same initial scene in which he verifies the death of his parents).
These circumstances induce in Pip a separate interiority and a mental dis-
tance to his environment, which is ambivalent in that it can lead either to
criminal behaviour or to intellectual independence (cf. 38ff., 54f., 74).
90 Peter Hühn
These various factors contribute to Pip’s potential mobility in the first

sub-field. 7
The instability and potential mobility of Pip’s position is further in-
creased, when – negotiated by Joe’s uncle Pumblechook, but ultimately
due to coincidence – he is employed by Miss Havisham as a playmate for
Estella. Firstly, this employment strengthens Pip’s inclination towards
secretiveness and thus towards mental isolation from his environment, in
that he refrains from imparting his experience of this new, higher world to
his relatives (95ff., 124). Secondly, Estella’s cold social arrogance and her
open contempt make him painfully aware of his own inferiority in posi-
tion, behaviour and dress, i.e. of his lower-class status: “he is a common
labouring-boy” (89) and “what coarse hands he has! And what thick
boots” (90) – a humiliation which is deeply painful (“I was so humiliated,
hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry”, 92) but which he accepts as justi-
fied (94, 99), thereby increasing the distance to his relatives and also to Joe
(101). And thirdly, Estella’s disdain awakens in him an intense desire to
rise socially: “I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her
account” (156; generally 154ff.). Moreover, induced by certain remarks of
his relatives (82, 98, 124f.), Pip begins to attribute to Miss Havisham con-
crete plans for his social advancement (“the architect of my fortunes”,
125) – erroneously, as it turns out. 8 At this point, the script on which Pip
bases his future development in life takes concrete shape with respect to
the crossing of the boundary into the second sub-field: elevation to the
position of a wealthy, well-dressed and well-educated gentleman, without
the need to work and provided with a socially appropriate wife. However,
winning the spouse would not be the cause for the elevation (as with
Pamela) but its consequence, reward and confirmation. Estella functions
as Pip’s essential point of reference for his desired identity as a gentleman
within the second sub-field (257).9
There is another – conventional – script that serves as a realistic alter-
native to this desired and expected entry into the superior second sub-
field: the continued existence in, and ultimate integration into, the first
sub-field on the basis of working to earn one’s living. This script is not
merely mentioned but is already put into practice: Pip trains as a black-
smith, in accordance with the custom of taking over the calling of his
substitute-father Joe, and is connected with a woman appropriate to this
_____________
7 Cf. Herbst (1990: 125ff.), who describes Pip’s “estrangement”, “alienation”, and “psychic
split” during his childhood, interpreting these as the motivating forces for his desire to rise
in society.
8 Barfoot (1976) analyzes the way in which the novel employs images of seeing to convey
Pip’s habits of perception and projection when picturing his propitious expectations.
9 Cf. Herbst (1990: 129).
social class, Biddy. Pip is officially apprenticed to Joe, with Miss Havisham
providing the requisite apprenticeship premium (126, 127ff., 132f.); and
Biddy appears to be a socially as well as psychologically suitable spouse for
Pip: as an orphan, she is in a similar situation (74), she is obviously in love
with him – as he might be with her, were it not for his overriding fixation
on social advancement (154 ff., cf. also 186). In a long conversation with
Biddy (154–160), Pip explicitly lays out the opposition and rivalry between
the two scripts, the integration into the first sub-field as an alternative to
crossing over to the second, with respect to position and choice of
spouse, but also his determination to opt for the second script.
As indicated in this passage, the two alternative scripts and aims do
not appear neutrally side by side, but are contradictorily judged by pro-
tagonist and implied author. While Pip decidedly opts for advancement
and change, rejecting integration into the first sub-field as humiliating, this
option is criticized indirectly by the implied author through the clearly
negative characterization of Estella’s coldly arrogant behaviour (as repre-
sentative of the second sub-field) as well as more or less directly through
the emotionally and morally unambiguously positive, warm-hearted role-
models Joe and Biddy (as significant representatives of the first sub-
field): 10 Joe advocates “common” moral rectitude and openness as op-
posed to ambitious striving for higher (“oncommon”) education (100f);
Biddy is quite outspoken in advising Pip against aspiring to the status of a
gentleman: “Oh, I wouldn’t, if I was you! […] I don’t think it would an-
swer” (154) and “don’t you think you are happier as you are?” (155). The
second sub-field, as imagined by him, is, moreover, discredited by the
attitude of condescension and haughtiness which Pip, anticipating his
future gentleman-status, adopts towards Joe’s simplicity, of which he is
ashamed (101, 134 ff.), as well as towards Biddy, when he tells her that he
regrets not being able to fall in love with her instead of Estella (158f.).
Yet, in spite of opting for social advancement, Pip does not find it easy to
solve the conflict between the two scripts, as indicated by intermittent
doubts and insights:
[…] having states and seasons when I was clear that Biddy was immeasurably bet-
ter than Estella, and that the plain honest working life to which I was born, had
nothing in it to be ashamed of, but offered me sufficient means of self-respect
and happiness. (159, cf. also 157)
This clear expression emphasizes the positive alternative (favoured by the
implied author) to the scenario of advancement once again, immediately
before the “great expectations” are actually fulfilled. This ambivalent
_____________
10 Cf. Landau (2005), who – on the basis of a Marxian approach – analyses the novel’s im-
plicit critique of the gentleman-status as an existence exempt from the need to work.
92 Peter Hühn
evaluation of the alternative script does not raise the expected event in its
degree of eventfulness, but renders its status problematic.
This phase of Pip’s life story is finally closed by the actual announce-
ment of the event, when Jaggers, a lawyer from London, informs Pip that
an unnamed benefactor has bequeathed him a fortune and will have him
educated as a gentleman:
it is the desire of the present possessor of that property, that [Pip] be immediately
removed from his present sphere of life and from this place, and be brought up
as a gentleman – in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations. (165)
In this formulation, the eventfulness of the movement into the second
sub-field is described with unusual clarity as a radical social as well as spa-
tial boundary crossing, which is here announced and prepared for in prac-
tical terms.
Before that crossing is put into practice, however, within the last two
chapters (chapters 18 and 19) of this first phase of Pip’s story, the implic-
itly negative qualifications (by the implied author) of the imminent event-
ful change become more pronounced, especially in Pip’s behaviour to-
wards Joe and Biddy. That Pip attributes enviousness of his good fortune
to Biddy (170) and feels ashamed of Joe’s lack of education and good
manners (175ff., 185) betrays his new snobbishness, his sense of being
superior to his plain lower-class relatives and acquaintances. A more sub-
tle critique of this crossing is implied when it is characterized as a dream
come true (165) and associated with a fairy tale (184f.), since this implicitly
undermines his sudden stroke of luck as illusory. That Pip secretly (and
erroneously) ascribes his good fortune to Miss Havisham (165, 184f.)
contributes to the sense of wishful thinking in connection with this immi-
nent change in his life, since he interprets this as the confirmation and
continuation of the great plans which he had ascribed to her from the very
beginning (82, 98, 124f.) – in blatant contradiction to her real intentions as
had been indicated earlier (89, 123) and will become plain later.
2. The Story of Pip’s Ascent: Life in the Second Sub-Field
The second of the three parts of Great Expectations (chapters 20 to 39)

advances Pip’s life story to two diametrically opposed events in direct
succession, a positive and a negative one – first, the actual realization of
the social ascent, as longed for during the first part and finally announced
in the form of a gift by an unnamed benefactor, and, second, the disclo-
sure of this benefactor’s identity, which, in retrospect, makes the accep-
tance of the gift impossible for Pip. The later negative event is, paradoxi-
cally, both the consequence and the precondition of the positive event.
The (first) positive event, the promotion to the position of a gentleman, is

reduced in its degree as well as in its moral value in the course of the sec-
ond part. After the money has been provided, Pip’s new position is put
into practice by way of the (belated) socialization befitting his new rank
and of the improvement of his practical living conditions: he moves into
an apartment of his own in London, buys suitable clothes, is trained in the
appropriate manners, employs a servant, joins a club, is exempted from
work and vocational training, but also gets into the concomitant bad hab-
its of running up debts and arrogantly looking down on people from the
lower classes, especially on poor relatives. However, all these privileges are
ultimately just preparations for the real event, namely assuming complete
control over the disposal of his money, which he will be granted only on
his 21th birthday. Until then, Jaggers and his secretary Wemmick supervise
his development and the use of his money. Thus the crossing of the
boundary appears as a long drawn-out process, with the final moment of
its legal completion (304ff.) lacking the quality of a spectacular change.
This is not only due to the fact that that moment is entirely foreseeable
but also because Pip has, in practice, been living as a gentleman in this
second sub-field all along, so that little changes at this particular point in
time apart from the granting of full financial independence.
But, in addition to being reduced in degree, the eventfulness of be-
coming a gentleman is also seriously affected in its substance by its insuf-
ficient implementation: Pip’s instructor Matthew Pocket is blatantly in-
competent, as shown by the hopelessly chaotic condition of his own
family, which he is unable to educate; the servant employed by Pip lacks a
real function and tends to be overbearing (and is ironically called the
“avenger”, 240f.); club-life is preposterous and absurd, dominated, more-
over, by vulgar and brutal Drummle, who loves to humiliate Pip; in the
final analysis, his way of life is aimless and wasteful. The eventfulness of
Pip’s advancement is undermined further by his failure to win the pas-
sionately desired, socially suitable woman, Estella, whom he associates
with high rank and wealth (256ff., 288ff.). This failure is exacerbated by
two circumstances: Pip is given to understand that this frustration of his
desire was planned by Miss Havisham (318ff.); and he has to witness how
the hated Drummle appears as his rival for Estella’s favour and is, in fact,
finally successful (326ff.). How far the present reality falls short of Pip’s
expectations is glaringly and sarcastically highlighted when one compares
his illusory daydreaming about his advancement, during a later visit to his
home-town, with the actual circumstances:
[Miss Havisham] had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it
could not fail to be her intention to bring us together. She reserved it for me to
94 Peter Hühn
restore the desolate house […] in short, do all the shining deeds of the young
Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. (253)
More serious, however, is the moral discredit that Pip’s behaviour brings
upon his desire to rise in society, which continues and corroborates the
critical implications from the end of the first part (see above). One impor-
tant indicator of implied criticism is Pip’s condescension to both Joe and
Biddy as well as his feeling ashamed of Joe’s low rank and lack of educa-
tion (208f., 240f., 265, 267, 301ff.), an arrogant form of behaviour which
even he himself is later critical of and feels guilty about. In addition, Pip
accuses Biddy of envy and of lacking the proper gratitude for his contin-
ued contact with her and Joe despite his own social elevation (302, 304, cf.
176), an attitude, the open arrogance of which he is unwilling to acknowl-
edge, even with hindsight as retrospective narrator.
In another respect, his friend Herbert functions as a central instance
and standard of criticism. By calling Pip “Handel”, in allusion to Händel’s
song of the “harmonious blacksmith” (202), he subtly points out to him
how inadequate his behaviour is for a gentleman. Herbert defines a gen-
tleman on the basis of his inner moral qualities and not, as Pip does, in
social and financial terms: “no man who was not a true gentleman at
heart, ever was [...] a true gentleman in manner” (204). Furthermore, Her-
bert’s own behaviour represents a practical (and critical) counter-script to
Pip’s exclusively external conception of social elevation: he is not ambi-
tious for the sake of mere success and, though of aristocratic (if impover-
ished) origin, he marries a woman (Clara) not befitting his rank, because
he loves her, in opposition to the class-conscious demands of his family
(272f.).
The critique of this script and the concomitant notion of eventfulness
is thus consistently conveyed through various channels, mainly through
the implied author’s evaluative perspective, which is implicit in plot-
development, characterization and character constellation, 11 but also
through Herbert’s figural point of view, that is to say, predominantly from
outside Pip the narrator’s consciousness and attitude. But a corresponding
tendency also expressses itself, as mentioned above, in sporadic feelings of
guilt and self-accusations on the part of Pip the adult. This critique finally
culminates in his conscious, if partly suppressed, negative assessment of
this script, when he admits to being unhappy and having chosen the
wrong way of life:
As I had become accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to no-
tice their effect upon myself and those around me. Their influence on my own
character, I disguised from my recognition as much as possible, but I knew very
_____________
11 Cf. Landau (2005).
well that it was not all good. I lived in a state of chronic uneasiness respecting my
behaviour to Joe. My conscience was not by any means comfortable about Biddy.
When I woke up in the night […] I used to think […] that I should have been
happier and better, if I had never seen Miss Havisham’s face, and had risen to
manhood content to be partners with Joe in the honest old forge. (291)
What is clearly revealed here, as well as in other passages, is Pip’s split
attitude between the emotional attachment to the conventional script of
his social origins and the ambitious fascination with the more highly val-
ued, seductive advancement script.
At this point, the social and historical context in which the desire for
advancement and its critique are situated can be specified more clearly.
This is the tension between, on the one hand, the traditional structures of
society in which rank, calling and identity are determined by origin and
family and, on the other, the possibility and, indeed, the necessity of mo-
bility and activity for the individual, as increasingly brought about by the
process of modernization, frequently motivated by the desire to improve
one’s personal situation and social status. 12 The novel does not view these
divergent tendencies neutrally, but implicitly critizes and devalues the
desire for social advancement in moral terms (see above). This critique is
corroborated by the following features of Pip’s development: his complete
passivity in rising to gentleman status (he does not earn it through
achievement or exemplary behaviour), his fixation on such mere externals
of the elevated position as enjoyment of leisure and pleasure as well as
prestige (he treats the lower ranks with arrogance and recognizes only
claims and privileges but no duties or responsibilities), and finally the
provenance of the property from a criminal, which signifies (at least in this
case) that social advancement is contaminated by criminality (though
Magwitch came by the money through honest work and legal inheritance).
3. The Unexpected Negative Event and the Re-Structuring of the Fields
This practical erosion and moral discrediting of the first positive event
during the second phase of Pip’s life story now provides the background
against which the new, suddenly erupting and totally unexpected negative
event acquires a high degree of eventfulness. In the presentation of the
story, this event is specifically announced beforehand by the narrating self:
“a great event in my life, the turning point of my life” (318), whereas for
the experiencing self this turning point is totally unexpected. It is only in
retrospect that the narrating self is able to understand its almost fatal in-
evitability and predetermination, as referred to by Pip immediately before
_____________
12 Cf. Gilmour (1981).
96 Peter Hühn
the beginning of the last chapter of this second part of the novel: “the
event that had impended over me“ and “all the work […] that tended to
that end, had been accomplished; and in an instant the blow was struck,
and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me” (330). This fatal inevi-
tability is caused by the concatenation of various storylines (see below).
Magwitch’s disclosure to Pip that he intends to make him into a gen-
tleman in gratitude for his support during the escape from the convict
ship completely destroys this gift and thereby Pip’s reliance on the ad-
vancement script. This is because the money, though earned through hon-
est work, is sullied by association with a convict, aggravated by the fact
that Magwitch’s presence in England is illegal, since he is serving a sen-
tence of deportation, and would, if discovered, face the death penalty.
This disclosure opens Pip’s eyes to his true situation and produces in him
a new moral self-awareness, which has far-reaching consequences for the
structure of the semantic field as a frame for behaviour, orientation and
understanding. Pip can no longer follow his old aim of social advance-
ment, for its link with a criminal has definitively undermined the value of
his “expectations”. In other words, the disclosure of the real provenance
of the money given to support his gentleman-status from a member of the
lower classes (and a criminal at that) destroys the justification of these very
class differences. 13 But Pip cannot return to the first sub-field and resume
the alternative course in life (apprenticeship at Joe’s) at the point where he
had abandoned it in favour of becoming a gentleman (341). That is to say,
neither the quasi-modern advancement script (enabled by the increasing
mobility resulting from the modernization of society, but still based on
pre-modern hierarchical concepts of identity and evaluation) nor the tradi-
tional script (conservative orientation on family and class origins) are ulti-
mately viable for Pip. His previous behaviour (especially towards Joe and
Biddy) is irreversible. As a consequence, Pip is now forced to re-structure
his system of values and his world-view. This re-orientation underlies the
developments in the third part of the novel (chapters 40 to 49).
What happens at the end of the second and in the course of the third
part amounts to a re-definition of the former second as a new first sub-
field and the corresponding conceptualization of a new second sub-field. 14
In the new first (i.e. the former second) sub-field, Pip’s existence as a
gentleman, as is particularly clear in retrospect, turned out to be unstable,
unhappy and unfulfilled right from the very beginning. And the first, posi-
tive event is then ultimately annulled by the negative event of Magwitch’s
_____________
13 See Gilmour (1981: 141) and Landau (2005).
14 Gold (1972: 243) describes the three phases of Pip’s development concisely but unspecifi-
cally with the religious terms “Birth”, “Fall” and “Redemption”, a sequence which he sees
foreshadowed as early as the initial chapter.
disclosure, which expels Pip from the second sub-field and initiates a de-
velopment, towards a new second sub-field, the definition of which begins
to emerge only slowly. In contrast to the first two events, both of which
were given (by the same person, Magwitch) to a passive Pip without any
effort on his part, he is now obliged to become active himself. The first
step is the conscious renunciation of the great expectations, which Pip
puts into practice without hesitation in financial terms: he refuses to ac-
cept any more money from Magwitch, and from Miss Havisham, for that
matter (409, 421). He retains, however, his emotional attachment to
Estella, a relic of his former wishful thinking about the second sub-field,
which she symbolically embodied for him from the very beginning (257).
Although he loses her to Drummle (another similarly discrediting repre-
sentative of this old second field), he still defines his identity in an almost
Petrarchist manner through his unhappy love for her (378).
Pip’s eventful re-orientation manifests itself in two ways: he renounces
his former attitudes in economic-vocational and in psychological-moral
terms. 15 In other words, the frame for the meaning of the happenings, i.e.
the relevance of the changes in Pip’s behaviour and the results of his ac-
tions, is re-defined – as a shift from passive membership of a (higher)
class to active achievement and, in conjunction with that, from a class-
bound sense of personal superiority to an attitude of caring sympathy and
moral responsibility for others. Instead of relying on gifts from others, Pip
now begins to earn his living through work (albeit initially prompted from
the outside, i.e. following Herbert’s advice), namely as, firstly, an employee
in Herbert’s firm (459f.), then as his representative abroad and, finally, as
his partner (488f., 492), which supplies him with a good income, though
not with a fortune. Thus he replaces an aristocratic, leisure-based ideal
with a markedly middle-class, achievement-oriented concept, which is also
clearly distinct from the career as a craftsman (blacksmith) originally in-
tended for him and does in fact constitute a moderate rise in society. The
other aspect of Pip’s re-orientation concerns his attitude towards other
people, which, since his elevation to the position of gentleman, had related
almost exclusively to their social, class-specific status, not to them as per-
sons and human beings in their own right. This shows particularly in his
condescension to, and distancing of himself from, Biddy and Joe, and later
also Magwitch, in whose case the low social rank is exacerbated by the
stain of the condemned criminal (352ff.). Now Pip recognizes his moral
responsibility for Magwitch (induced, again, by Herbert, 359), tries to
_____________
15 Newey (2004: 18589) describes this development in the sense of a “developmental
novel”, as a process of moral maturing, gaining of insight and overcoming mistakes.
98 Peter Hühn
secure his rescue, accompanies him on his escape (428ff.) and finally feels
deep sympathy and gratitude:
my repugnance to him had all melted away, and in the hunted wounded shackled
creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man who had meant to be my
benefactor, and who had felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously, towards
me with great constancy […] I only saw in him a much better man than I had
been to Joe. (456 f.)
At the very end, during the proceedings in court and Magwitch’s convic-
tion, Pip openly attests his loyalty to him by holding his hand (466ff.), and
he eases Magwitch’s death by revealing to him that his daughter Estella is
alive (469ff.).
An important stage in Pip’s development of sympathy and under-
standing for other people is his clandestine, generous financial support for
Herbert, which has already begun during his aristocratic phase (314, 317f.)
and continues in the third part (408f., 427f.). A comparable shift to hu-
mane moral maturity occurs in his relations with Miss Havisham – from
sympathetic understanding to forgiveness for the suffering she has in-
flicted on him (408415). Pip’s behaviour towards Joe and Biddy is now
marked by humility, feelings of guilt and an awareness of his own mis-
takes. In the end, he even wants to marry Biddy but is not angry that she
prefers Joe, sincerely wishing them happiness (487ff.). The second sub-
field, which Pip enters by slow degrees after the de-stabilization of his
position in the world of “great expectations”, is defined by emotional
sympathy, human solidarity and social equality as well as the determination
to earn his livelihood by work and personal achievement – a decidedly
middle-class and non-aristocratic concept. It is only with respect to Estella
that Pip clings to his original great expectations. But she, too, has been
humanized through suffering (“I have been bent and broken, but – I hope
– into a better shape”, 493), and in the end Pip even envisages their ulti-
mate coming together in the future: “I saw no shadow of another parting
from here” (ibid.).
Entering the adult middle-class existence secured by work and regu-
lated by interpersonal norms of solidarity and sympathy 16 , as such, did not
possess a high degree of eventfulness in the 19th century. But here the
degree is considerably – and deliberately – heightened by the fact that this
development presents itself as a deviation from the (failed and morally
discredited) aristocratic way of life. In the novel, the pattern of a middle-
_____________
16 Using a psycho-analytical approach, Brooks (1984) interprets this last phase of Pip’s devel-
opment as a liberation from plot, in the sense of a disillusionment. From the perspective of
the present study, the analysis of plot-constructions on the basis of schema theory, Pip’s
final development can plausibly be described as the realization of a specific (bourgeois)
script.
class life story as a model (and as a script for living) is represented primar-
ily by Herbert and Clara (e.g. 389, 459f., 489), but also – later – by Joe and
Biddy (though on a socially lower level). Both life-stories serve as a foil or
contrast to Pip’s precarious, problematic development: Herbert (together
with Clara) functions as an ideal and a model, all the more so when one
considers that he follows the bourgeois script despite possessing aristo-
cratic status; and Joe and Biddy represent the lower-class alternative which
had been offered to Pip but was rejected. Because Herbert’s difficulties
are merely of a practical and psychological nature (he lacks seed capital
and needs a little “push”), his life story appears less eventful than Pip’s,
who has to overcome the strong internal resistance of ethical and ideo-
logical identity concepts (his pompous fixation on aristocratic values).
However, Pip’s attainment of a mature, responsible, successful mid-
dle-class existence is a qualified one, both economically and morally. On
the one hand, he is not granted the opportunity to realize this life in Eng-
land and with a family of his own, but only abroad and as a bachelor
(489) 17 – and he is unable to overcome his ideologically contaminated
obsession with Estella. On the other hand, Pip’s moral reformation is not
complete. Although he feels deep sympathy for Magwitch and recognizes
his goodness, Pip retains relics of moral self-righteousness and presump-
tuousness towards him, as is betrayed in an allusion to the biblical parable
of the pharisee and the publican (Luke 18: 1014), which he misquotes
revealingly, when he says “O Lord, be merciful to him, a sinner!” (470)
instead of “God be merciful to me a sinner” (emphasis added). 18 The end
of the novel thus presents a qualified positive eventfulness.
4. Pip’s Event Story in Conjunction with other Storylines
The course of Pip’s life, with all its eventful turns, is largely determined by
two storylines, which start before his childhood and remain hidden in the
background during the first phase of his development. 19 These are the
life-stories of Miss Havisham and Abel Magwitch, both of which are seri-
ously interrupted and ultimately destroyed by negative events, caused in
both cases by the same person: Compeyson, an unscrupulous, brutal and
cold-blooded criminal of aristocratic origin and education – yet another
indication given by the implied author of how morally discredited the
aristocratic rank is. Compeyson enters Miss Havisham’s life as her fiancé,
_____________
17 Cf. Herbst (1990: 137f.).
18 See Newey (2004: 194f.).
19 Cf. Brooks (1984), who reconstructs the configuration of the two open and the two re-
pressed plots, analyzing the various processes of reading and decyphering.
100 Peter Hühn
but then seizes hold of part of her fortune with the help of her corrupt
(drunkard) brother, fails to appear at their wedding and disappears with
the money – a seriously traumatic event for her, destroying her vitality and
practically arresting her life and its development, which she expresses
symbolically by wearing her wedding dress and preserving the room deco-
ration of the wedding day. In Magwitch’s case, Compeyson acts as his
instigator and partner in numerous joint criminal activities, frequently
betraying and taking advantage of him. In the end, when they are arrested
and taken to court, Compeyson manages to secure a mitigation of the
penalty for himself and a heavier sentence for Magwitch (deportation for
life) by shifting the blame – on account of his status as a gentleman – onto
his socially inferior associate, Magwitch (361ff.). In addition, Compeyson
also seems to be partly responsible for the breakup of Magwitch’s family
and the loss of his beloved daughter (Estella), together with her mother
(418f.). In both cases, the negative events cause the interruption and seri-
ous blockage of their lives’ development. In Miss Havisham’s case, the
eventful transition to fulfilled adulthood as a woman is arrested: the non-
occurence of the (planned and expected) positive event constitutes a nega-
tive one of a high degree. In Magwitch’s case, a continued life in freedom
in his native country and the emotional fulfilment of his roles as father
and husband are withheld from him, which, because of his criminal past,
may rank somewhat lower on the scale of (negative) eventfulness.
Both Compeyson’s victims design compensatory plots to overcome
the negative events and make up for their destructive effects, and both
utilize a child for this, i.e. they project the blocked positive development
onto a young substitute figure and this figure’s development, manipulating
(“plotting”) it by means of money. 20 Miss Havisham uses Estella as an
invulnerable, vengeful substitute for herself: she trains her to be an unfeel-
ing, seductive lady, attracting men and making them unhappy. Magwitch
uses Pip (in gratitude for the help with his escape) in two respects – as a
child-substitute for his lost daughter and as a positive substitute figure for
himself: he has Pip educated as a gentleman so that he will be spared his
own negative experience on account of his low rank, and so that he may
be able to lead a fulfilled life. 21 So the motives differ in moral terms. While
Miss Havisham uses Estella merely as a means for translating hatred and
revenge into action (against men), Magwitch’s motives of gratitude and
(transposed) love refer to Pip as object. That is to say, Miss Havisham
intends – by way of compensation for the negative event in her life caused
_____________
20 For an analysis of the destructive effects of “plotting” people’s lives, cf. Barfoot (1976),
also Hara (1986).
21 Cf. Gold’s (1972: 246f.) description of the mechanisms of compensation employed by
Magwitch and Miss Havisham in contrast to the secret strategy of support for Herbert.
by a man – to repeat the negative event by inflicting a similar, equally

painful experience on other men. Magwitch, however, plans to compen-
sate for his own negative event by enabling Pip to avoid it and experience
a positive event. But for both children these manipulations prove destruc-
tive because they are “plotted” from the outside and prevent them from
freely and independently directing the course of their own lives. Pip’s
situation is further aggravated by the fact that he, of all people, becomes
the victim of Miss Havisham’s revenge via Estella’s seduction, because
this coincidence (together with his benefactor’s criminal past) then thwarts
the positive event of the great expectations planned for him. Thus the
various storylines – Pip’s on the one hand and Miss Havisham’s and
Magwitch’s on the other – are centrally connected by means of their event
structures, i.e. the prevention of events. Another element of their inter-
connection is the fact revealed only towards the end, that Estella is Mag-
witch’s lost daughter. Here, further aspects of the interrelation of stories
come to light: in the final analysis, Compeyson – by way of Miss Hav-
isham’s compensatory use of Estella – indirectly affects even Pip’s life.
The protagonists of both these storylines make their exit at the end by
dying, and the manipulated children, by now grown up, can slowly begin
to free themselves from the effects of their manipulation. This applies to
Estella to a lesser degree, as she continues to play the role she was trained
for, but is humanized later on and may in the end be heading for a better
future with Pip; this applies more particularly to Pip, who rigorously re-
nounces the aristocratic ideal as well as rejects the money given him, and
starts to lead an alternative middle-class life. Both, however, retain ele-
ments of their former aristocratic identity: in Estella’s case, her unemo-
tional aloofness and her seductive appearance, in Pip’s, his inability to rid
himself of his obsession with Estella.
5. The Context of the Events in Great Expectations
The staggered events of Great Expectations and their reversals and shifts
in the course of the plot-development are to be understood, as indicated
above, in reference to the context of the British class hierarchy and its
socio-historical changes from the 18th to the 19th century, which is gener-
ally relevant to large sections of English fiction at the time: that is, the
traditionally strict separation between the lower and middle classes, de-
fined by the need to work for a living, and a privileged upper class, enti-
tled to a life of leisure, good living and self-cultivation. This hierarchy was
subject to change in two respects. Socially, it became possible, to a certain
extent, to cross the strict class boundaries (for wealthy middle-class entre-
102 Peter Hühn
preneurs, for instance); and, ideologically, aristocratic privileges and forms

of behaviour increasingly were exposed to moral criticism from the posi-
tion (and the standards) of the expanding middle-classes. 22 Great Expecta-
tions represents a historically later phase than Defoe’s and Richardson’s
novels 23 . In Moll Flanders and Pamela, the traditional class society and its
internal divisions are still largely intact; the prestige and attraction of the
aristocracy are as yet completely unchallenged. Crossing the boundary
from beneath is the great exception and therefore highly eventful. Such an
elevation in society is only justified and made possible by an exemplary
moral and religious achievement on the part of the individual and when
sanctioned by divine “Providence”: by puritanically motivated gainful
employment (also with criminal methods of which she subsequently re-
pents) in the case of Moll Flanders and by marriage as a result of exem-
plary (middle-class) morality and the perfect embodiment of aristocratic
manners in the case of Pamela. Both cases can be understood as manifes-
tations of divine grace.
In Great Expectations, the reference to the social context is more com-
plex than in those two novels. 24 At first, the aristocracy still seems to pos-
sess its traditionally high prestige, and being accepted into it would there-
fore count as an event – for Pip as well as (presumably) for the reader. But
this superiority is variously eroded before and, especially, after the (appar-
ent) crossing of the boundary, primarily for the reader at first; later – and
hesitantly – also for Pip. The apparently positive event of the social ad-
vancement is then annulled by its complete deconstruction in conse-
quence of Magwitch’s appearance, and the now destroyed semantic sub-
field then functions as the point of departure for the re-construction of
this field and the re-constitution of eventfulness: moral reformation and
humanization as well as the basing of existence on personal achievement,
on work. In abstract terms, the aspiration to an aristocratic ideal is super-
seded by the middle-class concept of economic and moral achievement,
the attainment of which gains a specifically heightened status against the
foil of the failed aristocratic alternative. Thus, the novel can be seen to
morally and ideologically 25 discredit the traditional class structure of soci-
ety dominated by the aristocracy, and use this as background for the pres-
entation of a new middle-class-based model of eventful development and
achievement, which is particularly highlighted by comparison (with the
successful ideal examples of Herbert/Clara and, to a certain extent,
_____________
22 Cf. e.g. Checkland (1964: 281324).
23 See above pp. 45î58 and pp. 59î69.
24 For a general description of this complexity, cf. Gilmour (1981: 10546).
25 Cf. Landau (2005).
Joe/Biddy) and contrast (with the failed examples of Miss Havisham and
Magwitch).
References
Dickens, Charles (1985). Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (Harmondsworth:

Penguin).
————
Barfoot, C. C. (1976). „Great Expectations: The Perception of Fate“, in Dutch Quar-
terly Review of Anglo-American Letters, 6: 2î33.
Brooks, Peter (1984). “Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great
Expectations”, in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard UP), 11342.
Checkland, S. G. (1964). The Rise of Industrial Society in England 1815Ŧ1885 (London:
Longman).
Gilmour, Robin (1981). The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel. (London:
George Allen & Unwin).
Gold, Joseph (1972). Charles Dickens: Radical Moralist (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minne-
sota Pr.).
Hara, Eiichi (1986). “Stories Present and Absent in Great Expectations”, in English
Literary History, 53: 593î614.
Herbst, Beth F. (1990). The Dickens Hero: Self and Alienation in the Dickens World
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
Landau, Aaron (2005). “Great Expectations, Romance, and Capital”, in Dickens Studies
Annual, 35: 15777
Luhmann, Niklas (1993). “Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus”, Gesellschafts-
struktur und Semantik, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), 149–258.
Newey, Vincent (2004). The Scriptures of Charles Dickens: Novels of Ideology, Novels of
Self (Aldershot: Ashgate).
Paroissien, David (2000). “The Sequence of Events in Pip’s Narrative”, in The Com-
panion to ‘Great Expectations’ (Mountfield: Helm Information), 42334.
8 Thomas Hardy: “On the Western Circuit” (1891)
Markus Kempf
Thomas Hardy’s short story “On the Western Circuit” 1 is set in the (fic-
tive) idyllic provincial town of Melchester in south-west England, in a
typical Victorian middle-class environment. The narrative traces the tragic
development of the (erotic) relationship between one man and two
women: the young London lawyer (barrister) Charles Bradford Raye, who
practises in the south and south-west of England and regularly does his
rounds of the courts “on the Western Circuit”, intelligent 30-year-old Mrs
Edith Harnham, who is married to a rich wine-merchant, and the pretty
but naïve country-girl Anna, whom Mrs Harnham has taken into her
household to train as a servant.
1. The Combination of Two Scripts: Love Story and Tragedy
Hardy’s short story interlaces two scripts in a particularly complex way.

On an abstract level, the first sequence pattern consists of the conven-
tional schema of the development of a love story between a young man
from the city (Charles) and an inexperienced lower-class girl from the
country (Anna). Depending on position and perspective, this overall
schema takes two opposed specific forms: on the one hand, a non-
committal temporary summer affair 2 and, on the other, a serious romantic
love-relationship eventually resulting in marriage. At first, Charles plans to
follow the first schema, but, later on, certain circumstances change and
lead him to invest deeper and more lasting feelings in the relationship and
eventually even to marry Anna. The second schema is in Anna’s interest.
At first, her expectations in this respect remain unexpressed, but in the
course of time she seems to become aware of her desire.
The overall love script is realised in three successive phases: In the
first phase, Charles and Anna meet by chance and fall in love, in the sec-
_____________
1 Edition used: Hardy (1977).
2 This particular form can be described as a milder, romanticised variant of the traditional
seduction script, the seduction of a lower-class girl by an aristocrat, as activated by
Richardson in Pamela and, by the way, also used by Hardy in his novel Tess of the
D’Urbervilles, which appeared in the same year as “On the Western Circuit”.
Thomas Hardy: “On the Western Circuit” 105
ond, they get to know each other by exchanging letters and reveal their
feelings for each other, and in the third, they overcome all doubts and
agree to get married. This plot-development is characterised by a positive
conventional event: the desire of the lovers is fulfilled by their union in
marriage.
This “positive” sequence pattern is interlaced with a second, “nega-
tive” schema, ancient tragedy. 3 This script radically and paradoxically al-
ters the love story script; it transforms the positive development towards
the desired union of a young couple into a catastrophic story of an unde-
sired, “wrong” marriage but only in the perception of the narra-
tor/reader as well as Edith and, at the very end, Charles; not, however, in
the perception of Anna. The coupling of the two schemata is hierarchical,
inasmuch as Charles and Anna’s love story serves as concrete subject mat-
ter and medium for the tragedy script, which is located at a higher level of
abstraction. On this superordinate level, the tragedy script prescribes the
ultimate outcome of the plot the protagonist’s failure and, in addition,
provides a number of additional genre-specific elements and features.
These include the increased occurrence of coincidences, which propel the
plot into unforeseen and adverse directions, as well as the presentation of
blindness and misjudgement (hamartia). In the context of the present
analysis of eventfulness, another feature specific to tragedies is of particu-
lar relevance: anagnorisis, the tragic hero’s sudden recognition of the true
state of affairs a feature that Hardy takes up in his tale as well.
The fatal entanglement leading to the love story’s failure is effected by
the character constellation that underlies the plot-development. In the
manner of an experimental design, as it were, Anna’s position in the love
constellation Anna / Charles is duplicated by the introduction of the fig-
ure of Edith, thereby successively transforming a two-person relationship
(Charles, Anna) into a triangular relationship (Charles, Anna, Edith).
Within this setup, Edith initially acts as a helpmate for Anna. Since Anna
is illiterate, Edith at her request and in her name secretly writes her
letters to Charles in order to facilitate and stabilize the love between them.
Subsequently, however, it is precisely because of this well-meaning assis-
tance that Edith increasingly becomes Anna’s rival and finally takes over
her position altogether, without treacherously having intended this and
without Charles or Anna being aware of it. On account of writing and
reading these letters she inadvertently falls in love with Charles and he
with her, unaware of the real identity of his correspondent. Only on the
wedding day does Charles discover that he had corresponded with Edith
all along and that she is really the one he loves. On the other side of the
_____________
3 For this script, cf. e.g. Frye (1957: 20623).
106 Markus Kempf
relationship, Edith, too, realizes only on the wedding day what catastro-
phic consequences her interference in this relationship has had. Anna is
the only character who does not understand the true situation – not even
at the very end. For her, the wedding is the fulfilment of her greatest wish.
The process that leads to this tragic result is triggered and propelled
both by the individual psychological dispositions of the characters (which
in turn are conditioned by the contemporary social context) and by a
chain of coincidences. In the following, I will first analyse the causes of
the love story’s tragic failure, and then discuss the technique of mediation
and finally the problem of eventfulness. The degree and quality of event-
fulness in this story are largely dependent on the position and perspective
of the instances concerned and differ considerably. 4
2. The Tragic Failure of the Love Story: Causes and Development
In order to understand the specific course of the story, it is necessary to

analyse the dispositions and previous experiences of the protagonists.
Most of these aspects are conveyed by the heterodiegetic narrator within
the very first section of the tale by means of evaluative comments, explicit
and implicit characterizations of the protagonists and external analepses.
Charles, the young barrister from London, is a rather unconventional
representative of his social class and profession, as the narrator points out
(85). He apparently lacks such typically middle-class masculine disposi-
tions such as ambition, materialism and rationality, but is characterized
instead by a high degree of sensibility and sensuality as well as romantic
ideals of love. He expresses a dislike for artificiality and unnaturalness
with regard to women as well as his flat and therefore suffers under the
alienating living conditions in London (88, 93). However, in this romantic-
idealistic attitude of his, Charles is ambivalent and self-contradictory. As
revealed by his reactions to the letters of Edith/Anna, he sets great store
by educated and cultured women, i.e. specific qualities which clearly con-
form to middle-class values and norms and therefore are anything but
“natural” and “pristine”.
_____________
4 Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit” has received little critical attention. Ray (1997: esp.
20117) concentrates on the tale’s genesis and editorial history. This is also the main con-
cern of Page (1974: 7584), who then briefly sketches the content. Only Plotz (1996) in-
terprets the story in detail, primarily discussing the difference between illusion and reality
as well as the incursion of modernity into rural England, a prominent theme in Hardy’s
novels and short stories. Plotz sees both themes metonymically presented in the round-
about scene at the beginning of the tale. This passage shows, he argues, that Hardy consid-
ers modern technology the main cause for the indivdual’s loss of control and reality.
Anna, less complex than Charles, is of lower-class origin, uneducated

and without any financial means, but distinguished by her youthfulness,
beauty, spontaneity and naturalness. Through these features she provides
an ideal projection screen for Charles’s illusory romantic ideals: he calls
her “a fascinating child of nature” (93).
In contrast to Anna, Edith, like Charles, possesses middle-class status;
she is older and more experienced than Anna (and Charles, 91), not beau-
tiful, but well-educated and of a subtle mind (89). One of her dominant
traits is her unfulfilled longing for love. As the text indicates, this emo-
tional lack is caused by certain social-cultural factors, namely contempo-
rary middle-class marriage practices and the prevalent Victorian image of
women. In the past, Edith had been influenced by the restrictive Victorian
maxim according to which “a bad marriage with its aversions is better
than free womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure” to such an
extent that she had consented to marry a much older, unloved wine-
merchant “to find afterwards that she had made a mistake” (97). Edith is
thus a perfect example of a Victorian woman trapped in a state of unful-
filled sensuality on account of social constrictions. It is obviously in com-
pensation for this lack of love that Edith has invited Anna to live in her
house in Melchester, takes care of her, trains her as a servant and generally
feels responsible for her education.
Under these differing conditions on the part of the three protagonists
the plot develops a fatal dynamic of its own. As pointed out above,
Charles and Anna’s love story can be subdivided into three phases: per-
sonal meetings, correspondence, marriage. Even during the first phase, a
number of coincidences prevent the normal course of the love script and
initiate a tragical entanglement. A crucial factor is an incident that occurs
in the crowded scene on the fairground: Charles accidentally grabs Edith’s
hand instead of Anna’s (90). This coincidence immediately awakens
Edith’s longing, which from then on subliminally determines her behav-
iour. As a direct consequence of this incident, Edith is now incapable,
contrary to her own principles, of forbidding Anna all further contact with
Charles and thus terminating the affair at its very beginning (91), since this
would mean that she could not see him anymore either. Because of this
coincidence, she is drawn into a paradoxical double-bind situation: 5 On
the one hand, her motherly sense of duty obliges her to assist Anna in her
relations with Charles; on the other hand, a powerful sensual desire for
Charles has now arisen in her, which she cannot admit neither to herself
nor to Anna, since it has to be rejected as highly reprehensible on moral
_____________
5 For a description of the structure of double-bind situations, see Watzlawick, Beavin &
Jackson (1967).
108 Markus Kempf
grounds. Thus, from now on, all her actions with regard to Charles and
Anna are ambiguous and doubly motivated: on the surface, by unselfish
assistance to Anna; in reality, by selfish gratification of her own desires.
This is Edith’s tragic conflict.
During the second phase of the love story, the correspondence be-
tween the lovers, the paradoxical situation spins out of control more and
more. On the female side of the correspondence, one can observe a grow-
ing shift from Anna (and her decreasing contributions) to Edith, whose
unconscious longings and needs gain in intensity and momentum. In con-
crete terms, this process manifests itself in the fact that Edith writes the
letters on her own more frequently, thereby increasingly taking over
Anna’s position. This development is facilitated on the one hand by
Anna’s blindness, naivity and passivity, on the other by the occurrence of
coincidences. Another decisive factor is Edith’s inability to understand
and control her own urges and to assess the consequences of her actions.
This phase is further divided into two sub-phases by the disclosure of
Anna’s pregnancy. During the first sub-phase, which lasts for several
weeks (96), Edith and Anna read and write the letters together (although
Anna’s contribution in formulating them is marginal). This established and
mutually agreed-on procedure is then given a new direction by a coinci-
dence. A new letter arrives from Charles, while Anna is absent. Encour-
aged by this opportunity and driven by her unfulfilled longing, Edith an-
swers the letter “on her own responsibility” (97) for the first time. This
new development is complicated by Anna’s return the next day and the
disclosure of her pregnancy a result of the rendezvous between Charles
and Anna in the first phase of their love story: Charles threatens to break
off their relationship. As this would be unacceptable both to pregnant
Anna and to infatuated Edith, the latter devises a strategy “to keep the
young man’s romantic interest in [Anna] alive” (98). For this purpose, she
rejects Anna’s rash impulse to write him a reproachful letter and com-
poses a cautious message instead, in which she expresses understanding
for his distress and anxiety about the pregnancy (98). This mature and
generous gesture so impresses Charles that he falls in love with Anna
more deeply and resumes contact with her.
It is highly ironic that Edith’s intervention makes it possible for the fa-
tal course of the affair to continue beyond its impending premature termi-
nation only to lead to an even greater catastrophe in the end. During the
following second sub-phase of this plot’s correspondence section, the
displacement of Anna by Edith is facilitated even further, because Anna is
compelled to leave Melchester for the time being and to go back to her
family in the country when Mr Harnham learns about her pregnancy, and
has to entirely entrust the continuation of the correspondence with
Charles to Edith. Because of this change of the situation ironically en-

forced by her husband Edith is enabled to indulge her secret longings in
her letters to Charles without any inhibitions and for a very long time
(four months, 100). This practically completes the process of dissociation,
which had begun with Edith’s singular secret act immediately before the
disclosure of the pregnancy. The effect of the new situation on Edith and
the further consequences are summed up by the narrator in the following
manner:
Throughout this correspondence, carried on in the girl’s absence, the high-strung
Edith Harnham lived in the ecstasy of fancy; the vicarious intimacy engendered
such a flow of passionateness as was never exceeded. For conscience’ sake Edith
at first sent on each of his letters to Anna, and even rough copies of her replies;
but later on these so-called copies were much abridged, and many letters on both
sides were not sent on at all. (100)
As for Charles, the correspondence brings about a change in the impor-
tance he attaches to his relationship with Anna. If initially he had consid-
ered this relationship merely an insignificant adventure (“a piece of ro-
mantic folly”, 102), he now contemplates marrying her. Ironically, this
change of attitude is brought about by the regard he has for Anna’s high
degree of education, which he infers from her good writing skills. This
appreciation of education contradicts his notions of spontaneity and natu-
ralness and, in the last analysis, reveals an adherence to a conventional
middle-class system of values (cf. his critical self-assessment, at the end, as
a “fastidious urban” person, 105). It is equally ironic in this context that
Charles is unaware of how perfectly the illiterate country-girl Anna con-
forms to his original ideal of a “fascinating child of nature”.
During the love story’s third phase – marriage the happenings are
heading for their tragic culmination. After having exchanged letters for
several months, Edith eventually realizes that, through her paradoxical
behaviour, she has aroused Charles emotionally and driven him to the
verge of disaster. But by now it is too late for a return to the status quo
ante. Edith’s attempt to persuade Anna to tell Charles, prior to their wed-
ding, the truth about her illiteracy fails, because Edith for her part cannot
confess to Anna the truth about her own love for Charles and the way she
had continued the correspondence (101).
Thus, the true state of affairs is revealed only after the wedding
(103ff.). When, on the wedding day, Charles happens to notice that Anna
is unable to write, he abruptly realizes that it was Edith with whom he had
corresponded all along and that it is her he really loves. It is now too late,
however, to establish an open relation between them and to change the
situation. What is left to them is only a final kiss and the resigned accep-
tance of the disastrous results which the tragic entanglements have
110 Markus Kempf
brought about (105): for Charles marriage with the “wrong” woman and
for Edith the awareness of having wronged her foster child Anna and
Charles as well as her husband. The consequences seem to be the most
dire for Edith, considering that she is already “punished” by her unhappy
marriage. The only character who fails to understand the situation even
now is Anna. Ironically, she mistakes Charles’s composure at the end as
an indication that he has accepted her inability to read and write. She re-
mains completely ignorant of the love that had arisen between her mater-
nal friend and her newly wedded husband.
3. Mediation Technique and Degrees of Eventfulness
In addition to the reconstruction of the plot development, the technique

of its mediation has to be analysed for a precise assessment of the short
story’s eventfulness. The plot is presented by an (omniscient) hetero-
diegetic narrator, who structures the happenings by means of comments,
summaries as well as proleptic and analeptic insertions. One particularly
effective device is the shifting internal focalization: the narrator oscillates
between the perspectives of the three characters. The narrator most fre-
quently chooses Edith’s point of view, which is due to the fact that she
has the deepest insight of all the characters. These alternating perspectives
provide the reader with a broader overview of the motives, actions and
reactions of the characters than they themselves possess and enable
him/her to observe how the characters’ blindness is caused by the dis-
crepancy between their ignorant actions and the fateful outcome. The
reader’s superior knowledge is assured from the beginning when the nar-
rator proleptically hints at the disastrous outcome in the very first sen-
tence (85) and again shortly afterwards (88), thereby drawing the reader’s
attention to the tragic course of the happenings.
The discrepant awareness of the various narrative instances narra-
tor/reader, characters also entails differences both in what is perceived
as an event and in the degree of eventfulness. The result of the develop-
ment is most dramatic for Charles, whose eventful transformation takes
the form of an anagnorisis typical of the genre of tragedy, that is to say, it
consists in the sudden recognition of previously hidden connections, in
the abrupt painful realization of a “wrong” marriage and the negative
social effects of an uneducated wife on his professional career. Since
Charles does not actively cross a boundary to a new form of existence (in
terms of Lotman’s sujet model), but passively undergoes an eventful trans-
formation, the event has to be described as depending on a sudden shift
of the boundary itself. At the end of the plot, the semantic fields are sud-
denly redefined and re-arranged from the opposition of love longing vs.
love fulfilment, discontentment vs. happiness to that of illusion vs. reality,
and expectation vs. disappointment. The world is fundamentally changed
for Charles, after he has seen through the true state of affairs.
No such radical reversal occurs in Edith’s case: she now becomes fully
aware what consequences her behaviour has had on the others, which
makes her suffer severely. But in the last analysis this is only a minor
change on an emotional level. She does not gain such a totally new insight
into the whole situation as Charles does.
From Anna’s perspective, the question of eventfulness appears in a to-
tally different light. As can be gathered from her misreading of Charles’s
reaction at the end, she assumes that the disclosure of her illiteracy has no
negative consequences for their relationship. For her the marriage consti-
tutes a genuinely positive event, the fulfilment of her love and, inciden-
tally, her elevation to a higher social rank. This view is severely qualified,
however, by the perspectives of the two other characters.
The readers, finally, like Edith, will not be as surprised by the negative
event as Charles, since they had been apprised of the coming catastrophe
from the very beginning and because their superior point of view had
allowed them to follow its development in detail. As a result, the degree of
eventfulness is not very high from this perspective.
4. References to the Context and the Status of a Reception Event
The plot and eventfulness of the short story refer to two contemporary
contexts, a general and a concrete one. As for the general context, the
presentation of the characters as blind, powerless and prone to illusion is a
reflection of the widespread contemporary loss of belief in the subject’s
autonomy as a consequence of the erosion of optimistic religious and
philosophical concepts in the course of the process of modernization. The
fictional world of Hardy’s story does not include a superior divine power
(such as God’s Providence in 18th-century novels) 6 that directs the hap-
penings towards a positive and happy conclusion in accordance with a
benevolent plan of salvation; nor does it refer to the Enlightenment ideals
of reason and rationality or the 19th-century trust in progress. On the con-
trary, all characters are shown to be driven by their unconscious urges and
longings, and their interactions are governed by the modern and at the
same time very archaic principle of chance and coincidence. Hardy’s pro-
_____________
6 Cf. the analyses of Defoe’s, Richardson’s and Fielding’s novels in the present volume, pp.
49î62, 63î73 and 74î83, resp.
112 Markus Kempf
tagonists are powerless and propelled like the people on the roundabout
in the first scene of the story. As Hardy shows also in his novels (e.g. The
Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure), these
modern intrusions of contingency and destruction invade a traditonal rural
idyll, convert it into an anti-idyll and make the reader painfully aware of
the detrimental effects of social change. 7 Thematically this short story
shows analogies to Hardy’s poem “The Convergence of the Twain”
(1912), which describes the sinking of the Titanic an emblem of the
modern individual’s claim to absolute autonomy for itself on the basis of
technological masterpieces as the result of the fatal workings of a (secu-
lar) “Imminent Will”.
By way of reference to a more concrete context, the story can more-
over be viewed as a critique of the obsolete Victorian concepts of mar-
riage and women; this, too, is a topic which Hardy repeatedly takes up in
his work. 8 In the last analysis, the tragic entanglement of the story is
largely due to Edith’s unfulfilled sensuality, which is conditioned by the
unhappy marriage forced on her by traditional social expectations and
norms. She wrongs both Charles and Anna by her behaviour only because
she herself had first been a victim of the repressive Victorian middle-class
feminity- and marriage-discourses. The fact that this is the ultimate cause
of the disaster eludes the characters’ consciousness: up to the end, Charles
is unaware that Edith is trapped in an unhappy relationship, and naïve
Anna assumes that the Harnhams’ marriage is a happy one (102). Even
Edith does not recognize the social causes of her own psychological prob-
lems. When, at the end, she sums up the tragic conflict with the following
words: “‘I have ruined [Charles], because I would not deal treacherously
towards [Anna]!’” (106), she misses the real social causes of the disas-
ter. The narrator, too, is rather vague in this respect. At one point he does
discuss the social background of Edith’s unfulfilled sensuality (97), but
ultimately, he does not seem to consider this the main motivation behind
the tragic development of the story. Thus it is then left to the readers to
extract the implicit critique of the contemporary gender- and marriage-
discourses and draw their conclusions for the interpretation of the plot. In
this sense, it could be said that the text constitutes a reception event.
Within the generic frame of the tragedy a potential change of the reader’s
consciousness regarding the gender- and marriage-problem could then be
called the catharsis triggered by the catastrophe.
Translated by Peter Hühn

_____________
7 Cf. Plotz (1996: 370 ff.).
8 For a brief reference to this context, see Page (1974: 82f.).
References
Hardy, Thomas (1977). “On the Western Circuit”, in F. B. Pinion, ed. The New Wessex
Edition of the Stories of Thomas Hardy. Vol. Two: Life’s Little Ironies and A
Changed Man (London: Macmillan), 85106.
————
Frye, Northrop (1957). The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton
UP).
Page, Norma (1974). “Hardy’s Short Sories: A Reconsideration”, in Studies in Short
Fiction, 11: 75-84.
Plotz, John (1996). “Motion in Slickness: Spectacle and Circulation in Thomas
Hardy’s ‘On the Western Circuit’”, in Studies in Short Fiction, 33: 36986.
Ray, Martin (1997). Thomas Hardy. A Textual Study of the Short Stories (Alderhot:
Ashgate).
Watzlawick, Paul, Janet H. Beavin & Don Jackson (1967). Pragmatics of Human
Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes
(New York: Norton).
9 Henry James: “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)
Jette K. Wulf
“The Beast in the Jungle” 1 by Henry James tells the story of James
Marcher, who is obsessed with the idea that a decisive event will occur at
some point in the future and thereby determine the meaning of his life.
The nature of this event is entirely unclear to him, yet he is spending his
days in apprehension of it and leading a secluded life withdrawn from
society. This obsession is described in the context of his relationship with
May Bartram, his only friend and confidante, and it is only towards the
end of the story that John Marcher realises – too late – how closely the
meaning of his life and the friendship with May Bartram are actually con-
nected. For only after her death does it dawn on him that precisely by
spending his life waiting for the turning point, he has missed the opportu-
nity of creating a meaningful, fulfilled existence.
1. The Beast and the Script for Marcher’s Life
The story’s main script is connected to what is illustrated by the beast in

the jungle – an image both mentioned throughout the text and, of course,
referred to in the title. John Marcher uses the image of the beast to illus-
trate the feelings he has: It is his deep conviction that something extraor-
dinary will happen to him at some point in his life. Even though he has no
clear idea of the form or way in which this something will occur, his life is
dictated by “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange”
(309), the apprehension of the life-changing event that is waiting for him
like a beast hidden in the jungle, watching him, ready for attack: “The
definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature” (313). He is – at
least initially – also convinced that he will recognise the beast once it
charges, even though it might at that point be too late for him to prepare
himself accordingly.
The image of the beast instantly evokes a sense of apprehension; yet,
interestingly, it is not so much the fear of the possible danger that he is
worrying about (in spite of not knowing whether the consequences will be
_____________
1 Citations refer to the following edition: James (2003).
Henry James: “The Beast in the Jungle” 115
disastrous or harmless). Instead, the sense of foreboding is connected with

his deep conviction that he is singled out, that it is this coming event
which makes his life (and thus himself) special, “altering everything, strik-
ing at the root of all my world” (309). In other words, it is the coming
event which will create coherence and give meaning to his life, and this
constitutes the underlying frame. It is significant for “The Beast in the
Jungle” that the meaning, the frame, of the event is explicitly being dis-
cussed inside the story by the characters. Thus, May early on suggests
“love” as a possible frame, which Marcher, however, summarily – and
tragically, as it turns out – rejects (309f.), for at this point (and for most of
the story) his desire is characterized by the wish to be unique and differ-
ent, in other words to separate himself from others, not to be closely con-
nected to somebody else. 2 The script within this frame can be described,
in abstract terms, as the need (and search) for coherence in one’s life 3 as
well as the understanding of, or wish for, the uniqueness of one’s own self
and identity. Even though the desire to be special and to lead a purposeful
life are not necessarily restricted to a certain historical background, the
script as it is developed in “The Beast in the Jungle” is influenced by the
Puritan notion of (divine) Providence, albeit in a secularised form, as indi-
cated by the frequent references to the “lap of the gods” (314, 317, 329)
and “the secret of the gods” (323). It is crucial that Marcher’s behaviour is
not dominated by the fear of what might happen. Marcher does not ago-
nise over his fate (and the beast waiting for him) – “the beast to jump
out” is simply “his inevitable topic” (317); he is merely vexed by the fact
that he does not know what it will look like and that he cannot (or does
not know how to) prepare himself for it. He is waiting for its appearance
in the secular form of the divine election: a decisive turning point that will
happen to him and change his consciousness, and all he can do is try to
read the signs that are given.
_____________
2 Sedgwick (1994) suggests a different type of love frame – homosexuality, which, however,
is based less on the text than on the writer’s biographical psychology. Even though many
critics refer to Sedgwick’s analysis, it has also been criticized, e.g. by Novick (1999: 8), who
argues that the “evident absence of heterosexual passion in the tale” does not necessarily
point to “repressed homosexual impulses”, or Tambling (2000: 171), who admits that
“Sedgwick’s reading has become largely hegemonic”, yet does “not see that she illuminates
The Beast in the Jungle, except perversely, by writing another text which the critic wishes
James had written”.
3 This need for coherence is thematized at the very beginning of the story with terms such as
“continuation” (304), “missing link” (305), “small possible germs […] to sprout after so
many years” (306), “what she brought out […] supplied the link” (307). As Pippin (2000:
98, 100) points out, these continuities are already established in the first scene,. mostly by
May. In Tambling’s (2000: 170f.) opinion, Marcher’s incapability of establishing such a
continuity (or even finding the beginning of their narrative) again characterizes him as a
modern subject (see also below).
116 Jette K. Wulf
Despite these Puritan aspects, however, the script lacks all religious
connotations – there are no references to the Christian God nor to any
kind of reward or after-life. Ultimately, the script for his life is (uncon-
sciously) chosen by Marcher himself 4 but he views it as something given
and imposed by fate (“One’s in the hands of one’s law”, 317), and as a
consequence, he rejects other scripts offered by and established in the
society around him (such as marrying his companion). In his attempt to
prepare for the arrival of the beast, he turns away from society and opts –
so as not to miss the moment when it comes – for a secluded life charac-
terised by inactivity and waiting. Therein lies the script he develops for
himself in order to make the best possible use of the opportunity that his
life presents for him. However, it is precisely because of its inherent inac-
tivity and negativity that this script of waiting for the great event entails
the risk of utter failure (“he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he
was to fail of”, 339) as this way of life effectively keeps him from seizing
any opportunity at all and finding himself, instead, “gazing at [...] the
sounded void of his life” (339). 5 Even if the script itself might not be
bound to a certain historical context, the difficulties that are thematized in
connection with it are decidedly modern (see below).
Nevertheless, it is only at the very end of the story that Marcher be-
gins to question his course of action (or rather inaction). For the most
part, he does not show the slightest doubt regarding his perception of his
life and his decisions. The failure that is, unbeknown to him, inherent in
the script is therefore closely related to Marcher’s personality and his lack
of insight, most of all regarding himself. The narrator of the story is het-
erodiegetic, and with the exception of a single paragraph (where May Bar-
tram is focalized from within and it is for once not Marcher’s perception
of her that is narrated) 6 , the text oscillates between focalizing Marcher
from within and from without, 7 thereby bringing out the discrepancy
between his self-perception and his personality as seen from the outside.8
_____________
4 Cf. e.g. Pippin (2000: 94f.), who describes Marcher’s underlying disposition towards culti-
vating the personal myth of the beast as egotism, narcissism and fear of life.
5 Smith (1994: 228f.) describes this paradox dynamic as a kind of “overdrive”: “the more we
are excited by the promise of a grand design, the more likely we are to be panicked into
missing the story altogether”.
6 James (2003: 315).
7 The act of narration is played down, yet it is thematised, even if the signs are scarce, as are
explicit comments or judgements about the protagonists.
8 For the problem of observation and perspective, see Segal (1969). The story comprises
several observation constellations: May observes Marcher, Marcher observes May observ-
ing him, both are aware of how they are observed by society, and the reader, finally, ob-
serves the whole setup. Heyns (1997: 114î19) argues that May Bartram’s ability to step
back and observe others (including the knowledge she thereby gains and the judgment she
can make) put her into a more powerful position than most critics give her credit for.
This discrepancy and the contradictions involved become apparent in his

rapport with society. By dedicating his life to waiting for the beast and by
not sharing this secret with other people (for fear of rejection, of being
misunderstood or even ridiculed), he also rejects other scripts that are
established in this society. This rejection goes along with his idea of him-
self as being different and special, an idea which greatly appeals to him. 9
Yet as he yearns to be special, he turns out to be not as independent of
society in general and its opinion of him as he claims to be, a fact which is
proven by the numerous references to Marcher’s condescending attitude
towards society (“the stupid world”, 315; “society was, luckily, unintelli-
gent”, 316). The split between his public persona and his inner self thus is
not achieved as easily as he would have liked: “a long act of dissimulation
[...] he wore a mask painted with social simper” (315), but it is ultimately
successful, as May tells him: “Our habit saves you […] because it makes
you, after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men” (316). He
does not merely want to be special, he also wants to be regarded as spe-
cial; and with this need, he does of course rely on the very society he
wishes to separate himself from as if he did not need it. Marcher evades
this conflict by using his script as an excuse: he is entirely convinced that –
if it were not for the beast which forced him to lead the life he does – he
would be perfectly capable of leading a life that would be successful by
society’s standards. In order to keep up the justification for his identity
and the existence he has chosen, Marcher finds another relationship more
important than that to society: the friendship with May Bartram.
2. Marcher’s Relationship with May Bartram
May Bartram is Marcher’s only companion with whom he shares his secret
as well as his life in waiting, and she is the only one who knows what he
considers his true self and his abilities:
he knew each of the things of importance he was insidiously kept from doing,
but she could add up the amount they made, understand how much, with a
lighter weight on his spirit, he might have done, and thereby establish how, clever
as he was, he fell short. (315)
“The Beast in the Jungle” also tells the story of their relationship, as it
begins with their (re)acquaintance and ends after her death. 10 While May
_____________
9 See e.g.: “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange”, “a larger conception of
singularity for him”, James (2003: 309, 314 resp.).
10 Heyns (1997) argues that “The Beast in the Jungle” includes two narratives, the (primary)
story of Marcher’s egotism and May’s secondary plot of female desire. Her secondary plot
118 Jette K. Wulf
Bartram and the friendship with her seem at first rather insignificant to
Marcher, they turn out to be crucial both for him and for the reader’s
understanding of him, for the event of the story and for illustrating his
personality and self-centredness. For the most part, he regards himself and
his project not only as the centre of his own existence but of hers as well.
It is stressed again and again that he does not want to allow himself to
indulge in selfishness, that he is careful to keep a balance between himself
and May Bartram, yet his behaviour demonstrates quite the opposite. His
view of the relationship with May Bartram is above all characterized as
useful and profitable to him (a fact he himself realises towards the end of
the story). The reader learns surprisingly little about her life apart from the
fact that she is waiting with Marcher (and one is led to believe that there
actually might not be much more than that), yet this is mainly due to the
fact that Marcher himself (as the main object of focalization) reduces his
perception of her to those aspects related to him, a definite sign of his
self-centredness. Even when he learns of her fatal illness and begins to
realize her imminent death, his major concern is the fear that she might
not live to learn the nature of the event that will occur to him. This
asymmetrical constellation changes only during their final conversations,
as he realizes that she knows more, and one might argue that at the very
end he begins to respect her attitude towards life (posthumously) instead
of seeing nothing but the service she has rendered him. 11
At the beginning of the story, John Marcher and May Bartram meet
on an afternoon in October at Weatherend, a country house in England.
He is among the visitors, while she is obviously related to the owners and
– as she is financially less well off – allowed to stay with them. It turns out
that they actually met before – a fact that he does not remember right
away, unlike her who has a perfect recollection of the origins of their ac-
quaintance. They first met in Naples ten years before (she – a young
woman at the age of twenty – travelling with her mother and her brother,
he with common friends) and visited Pompeii together. His initial fears
that there might have been some sort of romantic feelings between them
are soon dispersed. 12 However, it turns out that their meeting was of
much greater significance, since – as he learns to his utmost surprise – he
had shared his greatest secret with her by telling her about the beast.
(Since she is the only other person in the world who knows about this, it
_____________
is, of course, closely related to the secondary frame (love) for the meaning and relevance of
the “beast”.
11 Even then, however, he is still more concerned with what he himself had missed than with
what it must have meant to her.
12 This is a first indication of the problem of defining the frame of the story and the signifi-
cance of the event (see above).
is somewhat strange that he does not recall telling her, but this might be
explained as yet another sign of his self-centredness.) The fact that he
confided in her – and that she is very sensitive in her inquiry about it –
immediately (re)establishes a connecting sense of familiarity between
them, a “missing link” (305), which is sealed by her quick decision to wait
with him.
The second and third parts of the story summarise the process of their
waiting together – she has inherited some money from her aunt, and even
though she is still far from rich, it allows her to set up a small house in
London. Their ensuing lives are characterized by a quiet and uneventful
stability. Even though the reason for their waiting is raised in their con-
versation, the topic has lost some of its urgent threat making way for a
sense of acceptance. There are only two signs that this is about to change:
firstly, Marcher gets the impression that May Bartram knows more about
the nature of the beast than he does (“it had come up to him then that she
‘knew’ something”, 320); and secondly, there is the first reference to her
declining health and her fatal illness, “a deep disorder in the blood” (321).
The implication of both facts alarms him (“he felt somehow the shadow
of a change and the chill of a shock”, 321), yet at this point this does not
penetrate the core of his identity: he still clings to “the consciousness in
him that there was nothing she could ‘know’, after all, better than he did.
She had no source of knowledge that he hadn’t equally”, and he dreads
“losing her by some catastrophe – some catastrophe that yet wouldn’t at
all be the catastrophe” (321). His understanding both of his life’s script
and of their relationship – including the subordinate position he ascribes
to her – is still intact.
This changes, however, with their two final conversations (parts IV
and V), in which May Bartram confesses that she does indeed know more,
yet (initially) refuses to share any details of her knowledge with him and
insists that it is better for him to be spared this insight. She only admits
that the beast has already come, that what he has been waiting for has
already happened – “the door’s open” (328) and “You’ve nothing to wait
for more. It has come” (330).
He thus concludes that his fate lies in the fact that nothing is going to
happen in his life, a fact he seemingly learns to accept. Following her
death, he is hurt by society’s non-acknowledgement of their relationship
and the status it had for both of them – having refused to form any kind
of relationship socially accepted or established, he has also lost any chance
of being perceived as someone bereaved of a loved one (“his lack [...] of
producible claim. [...] in the view of society, he had not been markedly
bereaved”, 333). Leaving London for travelling in Asia, he learns to cher-
ish the past they shared and to derive joy from his memories. However,
120 Jette K. Wulf
only after he has returned home (and more precisely to her grave) does he
realize that he has never actually known any passion or deep feelings in his
life (“No passion had ever touched him”, 338), and the realization of the
opportunities he has missed – above all that his friend did actually love
him and that with her he might have shared passion and feelings (“she was
what he had missed”, 339) – causes him to break down.
The opening scene, the meeting at Weatherend, already mirrors the
constellation of the relationship between Marcher and Bartram as it is
developed throughout the following parts. It is she who perfectly recalls
every detail of their first encounter (and has been thinking about it since),
whereas he – even as the memories are coming back to him – mixes them
all up (which does not keep him from regarding himself as superior to
her). In this scene, his behaviour is described as “in his haste to make
everything right he had got most things rather wrong” (305) – a statement
which may serve as a brilliant meta-comment on his story as a whole.
Initially, he considers her inferior and of little importance to him (“He was
satisfied [...] that this young lady might roughly have ranked in the house
as a poor relation; satisfied also that she was [...] a part of the establish-
ment – almost a working, a remunerated part”, 304); but, almost imper-
ceptibly, their positions are changing, and it turns out that she is in fact
superior to him in what might be referred to as ‘knowledge’ or ‘insight’
(even though the extent to which he sees through his initial misconception
is open to discussion).
This point leads to the question of the semantic fields which are estab-
lished in the story. They can be described in two respects, which are
closely linked with each other: on the one hand, as ‘ignorance’ vs. ‘knowl-
edge’/‘insight’, on the other, as ‘lack’ vs. ‘fulfilment’ and ‘aloofness’ vs.
‘commitment’. At the beginning, both Marcher and Bartram are in the
first sub-field: they share the conviction that the beast will come and agree
to spend their lives waiting to learn about its nature, i.e. to cross the bor-
der. During the following years, particularly as she falls ill, the conviction
grows in him that she has gained a knowledge which she keeps secret
from him: “I’m only afraid of ignorance now – I’m not afraid of knowl-
edge” (326). Even when she admits that this is the case – that what they
have been waiting for has indeed happened – she refuses to tell him more
about it and insists that he keep himself from wanting to know. In other
words, she has already transgressed the border into the other sub-field of
knowledge (i.e., about the nature of the beast), whereas he – aware that
she has entered the new sub-field – is forced to stay behind. He then
leaves her with the understanding that his fate – the decisive event in his
life – may lie exactly in the fact that nothing will ever happen:
The change from his old sense to his new was absolute and final: what was to
happen had absolutely and finally happened that he was as little able to know a
fear for his future as to know a hope; so absent in short was any question of any-
thing still to come. (334)
This insight, however, is not sufficient – at this point, it does not evoke
any emotions but a stale disappointment (at the fact that, after all, he
might not be as special as he believed himself to be); it does not (yet)
cause him painful regret or sorrow to realise how much he has missed out
on (not so much because the opportunity did not present itself as pre-
cisely because he did not act). Only later does he recognise “something he
had utterly, insanely missed [...] He had seen outside of his life, not learned
it within” (338). This semantic dimension of ignorance vs. knowledge of
what is important in life is closely linked to the practice of living itself, the
semantic sub-fields of aloofness and lack vs. (emotional) commitment and
fulfilment. One can assume that May Bartram gains her knowledge as her
life comes to a close without fulfilment; and it is this position, too, that
allows her to evaluate her life (as well as that of Marcher) and draw a con-
clusion. The tragedy that constitutes the event thus lies in the full aware-
ness that one has wasted one’s own life – at a point where it is already
impossible to change that, because for Marcher, the chance is lost forever
with May Bartram’s death.
3. Events and Eventfulness
“The Beast in the Jungle” presents two events for the protagonist, one
after the other, in accordance with the two dimensions of the semantic
field outlined above. 13 With respect to the opposition ignorance vs.
knowledge Marcher undergoes an eventful (cognitive) change immediately
after May Bartram’s death (towards the end of part V), when he recog-
nises that the long-awaited event may have consisted in the fact that noth-
ing has happened and nothing will happen, in the absence of an eventful
transformation (as quoted above). But this is not the last stage in
Marcher’s development. So far, the focus has mainly been on the act of
recognition and not so much on the relevance and meaning of what is
recognised. This finally happens more than a year after May Bartram’s
death, after Marcher’s return from a long journey, when he observes a
fellow-mourner in the graveyard. He suddenly understands that he has
irrevocably wasted his life by leading a withdrawn existence and avoiding
_____________
13 Cf. Heyns (1997: 119f.), who – somewhat similarly – distinguishes two “leaps” of the beast
– Marcher’s unawareness of what has happened (nothing) during his penultimate visit to
May and the dramatic recognition on May’s grave.
122 Jette K. Wulf
all kinds of emotional involvement. By waiting for the unfolding of his

self-created script, he has negated all other scripts which might have been
realised, 14 especially establishing an intimate, unselfish love relationship
with another human being as the basis and content of a meaningful exis-
tence. 15
Where should this event be ranked on the scale of eventfulness? How
surprising is it for the reader? And how does this event relate to those of
other stories by Henry James? For Marcher, the event consists in a sudden
and shattering revelation: in a rather melodramatic climax, he sees “the
Jungle of his life and [...] the lurking Beast” (340) and collapses on May
Bartram’s tomb. For the reader, however, the insight is less surprising and
therefore less eventful. Particularly the way in which Marcher is presented
to the reader – self-centred and even conceited to such an exaggerated
extent that the tone of the narration verges on irony – shows that there is
a huge discrepancy between his self-image and his actual self as it is per-
ceived by others, especially May, and this again prepares the reader for the
fact that Marcher misses a decisive point. A number of images are alluded
to again and again as the narrative proceeds. The repetitions add to the
sense of foreboding, apprehension and suspense, yet they are interspersed
with hints at what Marcher does not see. For instance, May Bartram al-
ready raises the question of love and passion during their first conversa-
tion (309f.); the suspicion that he misses something is mentioned in the
third part: “it was failure not to be anything” (323) and immediately before
her death: “It seemed to him he should be most lost if his history should
prove all a platitude” (327). This again creates the impression that
Marcher’s life fails not so much because his answer is so difficult to find,
but because he is too blind to see it – which adds to the tragedy of the
event as a whole.
Even though the presentation of Marcher’s blindness and final recog-
nition may seem exaggerated, the underlying theme is not ridiculed. Ulti-
mately, Marcher’s apprehension of the beast, i.e. the problems of leading a
fulfilled and meaningful life as well as, on a higher level, of narrating an
eventful life story point to personal experience under the conditions of
_____________
14 Bell (1991) argues that a story with a negative result, lacking an event, is also a story: “The
story disproves the idea that negativity can be maintained. It suggests that there is always a
story, that in not writing one one writes another” (272).
15 In terms of this final event, Marcher does not follow May Bartram, as the semantic sub-
fields connected with this ultimate realisation can be described less in terms of ‘ignorance’
vs. ‘knowledge’, but of ‘aloofness’ vs. ‘emotional involvement’, and one might argue that,
unlike Marcher, May Bartram has never been aloof – otherwise she would not have spent
her life waiting with him as she did.
modernity. These modern aspects 16 include the threatening emptiness and

meaninglessness of existence, the lack of reliable orientation because of
the absence of an overarching meaning system (such as a religion) but also
the self-intransparency, the self-delusion of the individual, the inability to
understand one’s own drives and anxieties.
“The Beast in the Jungle” and its overall structure – the definition of
the semantic fields, the constellation of the character, their developments
and transformations – show similarities with other stories by Henry James.
The story’s focus lies on the protagonist’s obsession with getting to know
a secret or solving some kind of mystery. Usually another character pos-
sesses the knowledge the protagonist is yearning for – yet refuses to share
the insight or dies before being able (or willing) to do so, thus making the
situation all the more vexing for the protagonist. In many cases of what
Rimmon calls James’s “enigma narratives” (1977) the title of the story
alludes to the mystery – either directly (as in “The Aspern Papers” or
“The Lesson of the Master”) or to the image which represents it in the
story (cf. “The Turn of the Screw”, “The Figure in the Carpet” or “The
Beast in the Jungle”). All these stories revolve around the solution of the
mystery (its revelation usually constitutes the event) and the endeavours of
the protagonist to solve the mystery (usually with dramatic consequences)
and recognise the event as an event, and they vary in the extent to which
the reader is enabled to see more than the characters.
References
James, Henry (2003). “The Beast in the Jungle”, in Tales of Henry James, ed. C. Wege-
lin & H. B. Wonham (New York: Norton), 303–40.
————
Bell, Millicent (1991). “The Inaccessible Future: ‘The Beast in the Jungle’”, in Meaning
in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 262–74.
Heyns, Michiel W. (1997). “The double narrative of ‘The Beast in the Jungle’: ethical
plot, ironic plot, and the play of power”, in Enacting History in Henry James: Nar-
rative, Power, and Ethics, ed. Gert Buelens (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 109–25.
Novick, Sheldon M. (1999). “Introduction”, in Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire,
ed. J. R. Bradley (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan), 1–23.
_____________
16 See Pippin (2000). Bell (1991: 262) identifies the sterile, static condition of waiting as
specifically modern, as in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Tambling (2000: 170f.) also de-
scribes the “fate of nothing happening” as “a modern condition” and refers to Marcher’s
life as “the representative fate of ‘the man of his time’”.
124 Jette K. Wulf
Pippin, Robert B. (2000). Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP).
Rimmon, Shlomith (1977). The Concept of Ambiguity – the Example of James (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Pr.).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1994 [1986]). “The Beast in the Closet”, in Henry James: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. B. Yeazell (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall),
154–70.
Segal, Ora (1969). The Lucid Reflector: The Observer in Henry James’ Fiction (New
Haven etc.: Yale UP).
Smith, Virginia Llewelyn (1994). Henry James and the Real Thing (Houndmills, Basing-
stoke: Macmillan).
Tambling, Jeremy (2000). “The Haunted Man: The Beast in the Jungle”, in Henry James
(Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan), 163–78.
10 James Joyce: “Grace” (1914)
Peter Hühn
1. The Plot and its Normative Context: the Dominant Script
The plot of James Joyce’s “Grace” 1 , from his collection of short stories
Dubliners, concerns the spiritual, moral and social rehabilitation (through
the benevolent intervention of his friends) of Tom Kernan, a middle-class
businessman fallen into disrepute as a result of keeping bad company and
drinking excessively. Although the semantic field in “Grace” is ultimately
based on social norms, its division into sub-fields is constructed not so
much as a clear hierarchy of two social classes (as is, e.g., the hierarchy of
the middle and the upper class in Richardson’s Pamela), but rather as the
opposition of exclusion and inclusion with respect to one class alone, the
middle class, i.e. between being “outside” (in the sense of “beneath”) and
“inside” the middle class. The boundary between these sub-fields is de-
fined primarily by social and economic criteria such as financial solidity
(lacking vs. possessing a reliable income as a businessman or a senior civil
servant), reputation (disreputableness vs. respectableness) and integration
(being isolated and rejected vs. being accepted and supported by friends).
In addition, the boundary is symptomatically determined according to
moral and religious categories in the form of undisciplined behaviour vs.
moral integrity, dissolution vs. righteousness, reli-gious indifference vs.
devout Catholicism. With respect to Kernan’s changing state, this opposi-
tion is illustrated in spatial terms as the contrast between lavatory and pub
on the one hand and bedroom (in a bourgeois home) (144ff.) and church
(157ff.) on the other.
All in all, Kernan travels a double trajectory with two events, of sorts:
first, a sequence of degeneration, set mainly before the beginning of the
text, which ends in the negative event of an ultimate decline; secondly, a
sequence of restoration î narrated in the course of “Grace” î with the
implication of the equivalent positive event, the cancellation of the previ-
ous fall. The text opens with the final stage of the first sequence, the
completion of Kernan’s prior downward movement from the higher to
the lower sub-field, his fall from the status of middle-class respectability,
_____________
1 Joyce (1977: 13859); page references cited hereafter in the text.
126 Peter Hühn
literally a drunken fall down the stairs of a pub into the lavatory and onto
the filthy lavatory floor in a state of unconsciousness, which even arouses
the suspicion of the police (13839). What the short story then goes on to
narrate in detail is the process of Kernan’s return to a state of “grace”, his
new rise and re-entry into respectable middle-class society – an upward
movement deliberately engineered by his friends as Kernan’s conspicuous
crossing back over a boundary and his public re-admittance into the
community of respectable businessmen and devout Catholics, in the form
of a religious retreat organised by the Jesuits. Thus the general frame of
the story can be identified as social, the social status of the protagonist as
well as all other figures and the social significance of the happenings. The
specific movement, however, conforms to a religious script, the schema of
penitence and redemption, “making him turn over a new leaf”, “making a
new man of him” (143), and generally giving him a fresh start after his
drunken fall. The title “Grace” is to be read as an allusion to this script –
the hope for God finally granting redemption to the penitent sinner.
In practical terms, Kernan’s friends base his planned process of (so-
cial) rehabilitation on the ritual (religious) script of the “retreat”, which
devout Catholics should regularly take part in for spiritual re-adjustment
and the cleansing of their sins and which involves, as they colloquially put
it, “owning up” and “washing the pot” (cf. 149–50). Though Kernan’s
transformation does not involve deviating from this positive script but
conforming to it, this conformity nevertheless does qualify as eventful
within the implied social and religious context (Catholic Ireland) because
of its adherence to central (Christian) schemata of self-improvement and
renewal against the powerful threat of the negative script of sinful decline
and degeneration. One can ascribe a relatively high degree of eventfulness
to this change because of the spiritual significance attached to the return
of a repenting sinner to the fold. 2 The specific context within which this
transformation through repentance figures as eventful is clearly referred to
in the verbal utterances of Kernan’s friends when they talk about confess-
ing their sins (“owning up”, 149–50), making Kernan “a good holy pious
and God-fearing Roman Catholic”, and renouncing “the devil […], not
forgetting his works and pomps” (156). The purported transformation is
underscored in particular by the priest, Father Purdon, at the conclusion
of the church “retreat”, in his sermon on the parable of the unjust stew-
ard, 3 which he ends by voicing the repentant sinner’s trust in God’s for-
_____________
2 Cf. the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15: 11–32. This story of the son who, after
squandering his inheritance abroad, returns home repentant and is joyfully welcomed by
his father, is meant to illustrate God’s grace and loving forgiveness and always functions as
a powerful script for Christians.
3 Luke 16: 1–13.
James Joyce: “Grace” 127
giveness: “[… ] I have looked into my accounts. I find this wrong and this
wrong. But, with God’s grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my
accounts” (159). The text of this parable and Father Purdon’s interpretive
rendering of it in his sermon represent a variation and corroboration of
the script of repentance and redemption, which the friends have deliber-
ately functionalised as their strategy for restoring Kernan.
Thus, for Tom Kernan and his friends as well as, by implication, the
community as a whole, the story ends with the public and therefore so-
cially valid act of Kernan re-crossing the boundary into the second sub-
field of Dublin’s respectable middle-class society – a completed positive
event clearly understood as a reversal of the negative fall at the beginning.
2. Subversions of Eventfulness
Throughout this development, however, the text offers a number of cues

to the reader that are apt to undermine the eventfulness – behind the
characters’ backs, as it were. Firstly, the moral and social superiority of the
second sub-field as represented by Tom Kernan’s eminent friends is in-
validated by the fact that they all are revealed to be troubled by disreputa-
ble circumstances and financial problems which they are unwilling or un-
able to alter and which they try to conceal: Mr Power’s “inexplicable
debts” (142), Mr Cunningham’s “unpresentable” wife, who is an “incur-
able drunkard” (145), Mr M’Coy’s clumsy habit of trying to remedy his
precarious financial situation by borrowing and pawning (147). Mr Fogarty
had “failed in business in a licenced house in the city” and now runs a
small shop (152). Furthermore, the congregation during the retreat is
shown to include Kernan’s disreputable and disloyal drinking companion,
the shady moneylender Harford (158). 4
Secondly, the solemn claim of spiritual and moral transformation is
subverted by the pervasive evidence of the friends’ and Kernan’s and also
the priest’s fundamental worldliness and lack of genuine religious atti-
tudes. For Mrs Kernan, for instance, a belief in the banshee and in the
Holy Ghost are equivalent (145); the friends’ discussion about the history
of the church, the popes and papal infallibility is shallow, boastful and full
of ridiculous distortions (150ff.). 5 Kernan’s facetious wording of his rejec-
tion of a religious ritual betrays the superficiality of his participation in the
retreat (“No, damn it all, […] I’ll do the job right enough. I’ll do the re-
treat business and confession, and […] all that business. But […] no can-
_____________
4 See Norris (2003: 203f.).
5 Cf., e.g., Kain (1969: 145f.) and Zwierlein (2003: 87f.).
128 Peter Hühn
dles! No, damn it all, I bar the candles!”, 157). His use of words like “job”
and “business” for the religious activities anticipates the commercial tenor
of Father Purdon’s sermon. The priest is praised for his worldly attitude
(“He’s a man of the world like ourselves”, 151), and his sermon does, in
fact, endorse predominantly and exclusively secular values, something
which is revealed by the choice of the parable of the unjust steward as his
reference text, with its employment of money, commercial success and
even fraud as metaphors of redemption (158–59). 6 The extent to which
the isolation of certain of this notoriously difficult passage’s commercial
images from their broader context leads to a serious falsification of the
general drift of the parable shows in the fact that Christ’s concluding,
unambiguous sentence is omitted:
“No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the
other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God
and mammon.” 7
Moreover, this association or even equation of spiritual and commercial
values both in the priest’s sermon and in the businessmen’s attitude im-
plies Calvinist rather than Catholic tendencies 8 and thus, ironically, further
undermines the validity of the supposed religious transformation. 9
Thirdly, the entirely superficial quality of Kernan’s change is under-
lined by the pointedly non-religious, colloquial use of the word “grace”
throughout the story. 10 Instead of expressing his desire for God’s loving
forgiveness and his own spiritual salvation, this term primarily refers to his
newly cleaned hat. In accordance with Kernan’s maxim from his former
state of respectability before his fall (“By the grace of these two articles of
clothing [i.e. a silk hat and a pair of gaiters], he said, a man could always
pass muster”, 142), his recovery is reductively reflected in the material
transformation of his silk hat from its dirty and battered condition on the
lavatory floor at the beginning (138–39) to its “rehabilitated” appearance
at the end (158). When the priest finally mentions the term “grace” in his
sermon (“with God’s grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my
accounts”, 159), it is reduced almost to a colloquial expression, and be-
_____________
6 Norris (2003: 204) points out that the parable “functions as both mirror and moral model
for these men who survive commercial failure by shrewdly manipulating loans, debts, fa-
vors, bribes, and other exchange transactions”.
7 Luke 16: 13. Cf. Schneider (1982: 54) and esp. Zwierlein (2003: 90). For a detailed discus-
sion of the complex meaning of this parable, cf. Schneider (1997: 27179).
8 This aspect of Protestantism seems to be more significant in this context than the tenden-
cies of Protestant liberalism and gentlemanliness which Hodgkins (1995) detects in the
story.
9 Another technique of subverting the seriousness of Kernan’s conversion, as Zwierlein
(2003: 8693) has argued, is the pervasive parody of the Jesuit spiritual exercises.
10 Cf. Schneider (1982: 55).
sides, the phrase has been contaminated by its pervasive association with
something so quotidian as elegant outward appearance and rings entirely
hollow. The sarcastic implication of reductiveness also applies to the title
of the short story and thus calls into question the eventful plot-
development as a whole. 11
And fourthly, the succession of the three spatial stations in Kernan’s
reformation – from falling down in the pub lavatory via the recovery in
his bedroom to the reception into the community of the retreat – can be
read as an intertextual allusion to the script of Dante’s Divina Comme-
dia: 12 the ascent from inferno via purgatorio to paradiso – a further ironi-
cal subversion of the seriousness of Kernan’s reform. 13
3. Context and Eventfulness
When combined, these various signals suggest to the reader 14 that the
superior values of the second sub-field (in opposition to the first), on
which Kernan’s planned rehabilitation is meant to rely for its eventfulness
– moral integrity, religious seriousness, social respectability, financial solid-
ity – are no longer intact and do not really still exist among the community
which he is about to re-enter. The friends’ dialogues in the course of their
plot and the information about the characters provided by the narrator
reveal these values to be generally eroded by commercialism, hypocrisy,
corruption and superficiality. In reality, Kernan does not cross a boundary
at all, but basically stays within the same sub-field in which he first appears
as fallen, merely undergoing a change in degree and altering his outward
appearance. The text of the short story invalidates the connection of the
projected change to the context that makes it possible, a religiously seri-
ous, morally upright and economically sound middle-class society, activat-
ing instead a different kind of context: the petty-bourgeois, bigoted, self-
_____________
11 This technique of surreptitiously undermining the serious meaning of the happenings
through the ironic use of style and allusion or innuendo is pervasive in “Grace”, as Kain
(1969) has shown in detail.
12 This is from Stanislaus Joyce’s (1958: 225) interpretation of “Grace”, which has been
accepted by numerous critics, e.g. Kain (1969: 146ff.).
13 Although this intertextual allusion conforms to the same basic structure as the underlying
penitence-and-redemption script, it gains a decidedly ridiculous effect by coupling Dante’s
grand cosmological design with the trivial and sordid places of contemporary city life.
14 Cf. Schneider (1997: 268), who stresses the cognitive discrepancy between characters and
reader as a pervasive technique of Dubliners: “Joyce uses the satirical strategy of letting the
characters expose themselves, and challenges the reader to form his or her own judgment”.
See also Leonard (2006: 97f.). Norris (2003: 207ff.) attributes complicity with “worldliness
and bourgeois snobbery” to narrator and text, thus missing Joyce’s indirect, ironic tech-
nique of criticism.
130 Peter Hühn
conceited urban society of Dublin at the turn of the century, as Joyce sees
it. 15 The short story builds up the expectation and notion of a decisive
event only to unmask it as superficial and hollow: in this kind of society,
no eventful change is possible. 16
“Grace” thus refers to two contexts, i.e. concepts of the contempo-
rary social order, and accordingly features eventfulness at two levels: on
the one hand, the diegetic level of the characters and their consciousness,
with their reliance on the notion of a consolidated, vital middle-class
community and its moral as well as financial integrity and, on the other,
the extradiegetic level of the narrator together with, by implication, the
reader, for whom the middle class in Dublin is characterised by stagna-
tion, paralysis and corruption, by the hollowness of its morality and reli-
gion. That Kernan’s eventful change is “plotted” by the friends within the
story (“[Kernan] was quite unconscious that he was the victim of a plot”,
144, cf. 145) essentially undermines its relevance. Kernan remains com-
pletely passive (“a victim”), even facetiously rejecting part of the role pre-
pared for him (“barring the candles”). The detailed narration of the
friends’ plotting allows the reader to see through Kernan’s intended
change and recognise it as manipulation, which qualifies it as superficial
and relative. To the characters – both Kernan and his friends – the event
seems valid; for the narrator and the reader, however, nothing really takes
place.
4. The Problem of Eventfulness
Eventfulness must be conceived of not as an absolute, but as a relative

quality – relative not only to the context(s), but also to the central point of
reference within the narrative set-up, whether this point of reference is
ascribed to character, narrator, author or reader. While Richardson’s Pam-
ela, for instance, possesses a homogeneous structure, since its eventful-
ness is endorsed by the novel as a whole and on all of its various narrative
levels, “Grace” turns out to be heterogeneous: the status of the event
established on one level is surreptitiously subverted on others, which may
be taken as a sign of the short story’s modernity and its place in modernist
_____________
15 Cf. Schneider (1982: 25ff.) and Leonard (2006: 92ff.) for a general reference to Joyce’s
severely critical assessment of the paralysing situation in Ireland, which underlies the whole
of Dubliners. Prominent sources for this reconstruction are, e.g., Joyce’s letters in connec-
tion with the publication of Dubliners (see below) and his essay “Ireland, Island of Saints
and Sages” of 1907: see Mason & Ellmann (1959: 15394, esp. 172ff.).
16 This kind of stagnation is generally characteristic of Dublin and Ireland in the entire collec-
tion of Dubliners, symbolically foreshadowed by the word “paralysis” on the opening page
of the first short story, “The Sisters” (1977: 7).
literature. Just as eventfulness is not a textual property but depends on

appropriate contextual correlations, so the non-occurrence of an event in
“Grace” has to be interpreted with reference to the relevant context (the
stagnant state of middle-class society and the stifling role of Catholicism
in contemporary Ireland, in Joyce’s critical assessment). Clues in the text,
as pointed out above, help to direct the reader’s attention. Whereas, in the
prototypical example of Richardson’s novel, the event is located primarily
on the level of the happenings, as an event in the happenings, in Joyce’s
short story, it has to be ascribed to the level of the implied authorial
meaning and is, consequently, on the level of reception – a reception
event. The reader is meant to recognise the failure of the event to actually
occur with respect to the protagonist of the story and to perform it vicari-
ously in his or her own mind, as it were, i.e. to mentally overcome the
paralysing stagnation in the social situation depicted and acknowledge the
need for a fundamental change, for an eventful transformation. 17 Inciden-
tally, Joyce stated this aim explicitly in the letters to his publisher, Grant
Richards, when defending the exact wording of his stories (which he calls
“my chapter of the moral history of my country”) against moral censor-
ship: “I fight to retain them [the exact words of the original composition]
because I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly
the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual
liberation of my country.” 18 And: “I seriously believe that you will retard
the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from
having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-
glass.” 19 Thus, “Grace” ultimately does, in fact, refer to an event, although
the eventful transformation remains a virtual one as far as the narrative
world of the text is concerned. 20
_____________
17 Leonard (2006: 97f.) gives a general description of the severe cognitive limitations of the
protagonists in Dubliners, which the reader is meant to overcome in his or her mind.
18 Gilbert (1957: 62f.): letter dated 20 May 1906.
19 Gilbert (1957: 64): letter dated 23 June 1906.
20 The other possible events in this kind of stagnant society seem to be total collapse (as in
the short story “Eveline”) or total rejection through emigration and exile (as envisaged in
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man).
132 Peter Hühn
References
Joyce, James (1977 [1914]) “Grace”, in Dubliners, ed. with notes by Robert Scholes
(Frogmore & St. Albans: Triad / Panther), 138–59.
————
Gilbert, Stuart, ed. (1957). Letters of James Joyce (London: Faber & Faber).
Hodgkins, Hope Howell (1995). “‘Just a little … spiritual matter’: Joyce’s ‘Grace’ and
the Modern Protestant Gentleman”, in Studies in Short Fiction, 32: 42334.
Joyce, Stanislaus (1958). My Brother’s Keeper, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber &
Faber).
Kain, Richard M. (1969). “Grace”, in Clive Hart, ed. James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’: Critical
Essays (London: Faber & Faber), 13452.
Leonard, Garry (2006 [1990]). “Dubliners”, in The Cambridge Companion to James
Joyce,
ed. D. Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 87102.
Mason, Ellsworth & Richard Ellmann, eds. (1959). The Critical Writings of James Joyce
(London: Faber & Faber).
Norris, Margot (2003). “Setting Critical Accounts Aright in ‘Grace’”, in Suspicious
Readings of Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr.), 197215.
Schneider, Ulrich (1982). James Joyce “Dubliners” (München: Fink / UTB).
– (1997). “Cruxes and Grace Notes: A Hermeneutic Approach to ‘Grace’”, in New
Perspectives on ‘Dubliners’, ed. Mary Power & Ulrich Schneider (Amsterdam &
Atlanta: Rodopi), 26793.
Zwierlein, Anne-Julia (2003). “‘Chuck Loyola’: James Joyces Exorzismus der Ejercicios
Espirituales in ‘Grace’, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man und Ulysses”, in Ar-
cadia, 38: 7798.
11 Joseph Conrad: The Shadow-Line: A Confession
(1917)
Peter Hühn
1. The Structure and Segmentation of the Story
The unnamed protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s tale The Shadow-Line 1 nar-

rates the decisive event of his life – taking over his first command as a
captain of a sailing ship – focusing exclusively on the development and
ultimate completion of this event, omitting all that went before and came
after. The tale presents this eventful change – both literally and meta-
phorically – as a boundary crossing, as indicated by the title and again at
the beginning of the text (3). Crossing this boundary is achieved in the
end, but only after extreme difficulties and long delays have been over-
come. The happenings are mediated by the protagonist himself, in the first
person, in the form of an autodiegetic retrospective narrative, as a “con-
fession” (as the subtitle suggests). This focus is significant because the
event is conditioned specifically by the protagonist’s shifting cognitive and
active attitude to the situation and the changes to it, i.e. by his understand-
ing of what is happening and his active or passive involvement in it, which
is conveyed by the doubled temporal perspective in the process of narra-
tion. The retrospectivity of the autodiegetic narrative position consistently
contrasts the limited view of the youthful, experiencing self with the later
comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the older, narrating self.
This double perspective highlights the fact that although the protagonist,
even in the course of living through the happenings, was generally aware
of the meaning of the changes, it is only with the (psychological and tem-
poral) distance of retrospection that he is fully able to recognise their
eventful relevance.
The concrete happenings can be reconstructed as follows. In a sudden
life crisis, overcome with deep feelings of “boredom”, “weariness” and
“dissatisfaction” (4), the youthful narrator abruptly, and without clear rea-
sons, resigns as chief mate of a steamship in Singapore. While waiting at
the Officers’ Home for an opportunity to return to England, he happens
to learn – in a roundabout way and particularly through the mediation of
_____________
1 Page references, to Conrad (1950), are cited in the text.
134 Peter Hühn
Captain Giles (a retired, knowledgeable sailor) – of the vacant command

of a sailing ship, whose previous captain had died and which is to be taken
back to England from Bangkok. The narrator signs the contract for the
command and travels to Bangkok. The ensuing passage of the sailing ship,
under his command as captain, from Bangkok southwards through the
Gulf of Thailand is severely hindered by a persistent calm and by the ill-
ness of the crew. Through his own ceaseless personal efforts, assisted by
the willing but extremely weakened crew, and at long last driven by a
breeze that sets in after seventeen days at sea, the narrator ultimately suc-
ceeds in getting the ship to Bangkok, where he obtains medical care for
his men, before he can set off for England with a fresh crew.
2. The Difficulty of Crossing the Boundary
In his narration, the narrator explicitly structures and semanticises these

happenings as eventful by means of the concepts of the boundary and
boundary crossing, i.e. as a decisive change for him, as the result of over-
coming strong opposition. On the level of navigation, the boundary is
described in spatial terms, figuratively with the word “shadow-line” (title,
3, 37) and geographically – according to the superstitious opinion of the
first mate Burns – with the exact calculation of the position of the previ-
ous captain’s sea grave at “latitude 8°20Ȩ North” (82, 86, 118). And indeed,
the course of the happenings does finally and definitively turn around at
this location, something marked by Burns’s provocative laugh, the re-
lighting of the binnacle lamp and the awakening of a breeze (119ff.): “The
barrier of awful stillness which had encompassed us for so many days as
though we had been accursed was broken” (121). This is merely an exter-
nal indication: the crossing of the boundary does not occur at one isolated
point in time but is stretched out as an eventful process across the entire
text 2 ; temporally, from the moment of leaving the steamer in Singapore to
the final arrival of the sailing ship at this very place, and spatially in sailing
through the Gulf of Thailand from Bangkok to Singapore 3 .
This extreme extension of the act of boundary crossing is caused by
the accumulation of practical difficulties in the course of the happenings.
The story consists of a series of obstacles and the successive efforts on the
part of the protagonist to overcome them. Even before the challenge of
_____________
2 Cf. Watt’s (2000: 156ff.) comments on the expression “shadow-line”.
3 The harbour, which is not named, where the narrator resigns at the beginning of the narra-
tive, is identical with Singapore, the staging post for the sailing ship on her way to England.
This is made clear by the reference to Captain Ellis and Captain Giles after the arrival in
this harbour at the end (130ff.).
Joseph Conrad: The Shadow-Line 135
taking the ship through the Gulf can be confronted, a first obstacle occurs
in the form of an intrigue to prevent the narrator from taking command
of the sailing ship in the first place (17ff.). The Chief Steward of the Har-
bour Office tries to conceal the offer of the command from the protago-
nist in favour of a rival, Hamilton. In spite of increasingly clear signals, the
protagonist does not realize that this opportunity is available. It is only
after Captain Giles has brought the offer and the intrigue to his attention
that he finally understands (28, cf. 37f.) and becomes active, forcing the
Chief Steward to give up the information, then contacting the Harbour
Office and signing the contract. A further complex of difficulties arises
when the narrator takes command on board the ship (52ff.): the initially
hostile attitude of Burns (who himself had aspired to the captain’s posi-
tion), the incompetence of the second mate and especially the malaria
infection of the crew. This means that the captain is also forced to take on
the tasks of the two mates and even, partly, of the crew, staying on deck
practically all the time, until he is completely exhausted. The malaria epi-
demic turns out to be more serious still when the protagonist discovers
after a few days that the old captain had secretly sold the entire stock of
quinine, which makes the medical treatment of the men during the voyage
impossible. The third form of resistance encountered by the protagonist is
the prolonged calm (78ff.) that badly delays the progress of the ship. And,
fourthly, the old captain presents another serious obstacle to the progress
and the success of the voyage in addition to selling the stock of quinine:
the curse on the ship and the magical blockage, as it were, of the passage
across the latitude of his sea grave (86), asserted and conveyed by Burns’s
superstitious fear and mad ramblings. In a more abstract and symbolic
sense, the difficulty associated with the old captain consists in the unpro-
fessional and partly even criminal behaviour of the protagonist’s immedi-
ate predecessor, which proves a severe burden on the successor in the
performance of his duties as master of the ship.
Overcoming these successive obstacles is made possible in practical
terms by the protagonist’s seamanship, his leadership qualities, his per-
sonal commitment, his physical stamina and his persistence, in combina-
tion with the support by others (especially Captain Giles), the willingness
of the crew, the loyalty of Ransome the cook and Burns’s laugh at the
decisive moment, as well as by the traditional solidarity in emergency
situations at sea, as experienced on arrival in Singapore. It is obviously
essential for the success of their undertaking that individual competence
and unreserved personal dedication are still reliant on the assistance of
others, the community, as expressed in the epigraph: “worthy of my undy-
ing regard”, which refers to the willing cooperation of the crew in spite of
their incapacity through illness.
136 Peter Hühn
3. Frames, Scripts and Semantic Fields
The fact that the (intermediate) destination of the voyage – Singapore – is

identical with the original point of departure emphasises the ultimately
non-spatial quality of the decisive change and its relevance to the course
of the protagonist’s life: he arrives at a point where he had been before,
but changed, as another person. It is only from his position as a narrating
self looking back at this past phase of his life that he is able to define and
sum up the fundamental transformation in abstract terms. The narrator’s
introductory remarks imply specific schemata for the meaning of the en-
suing sequence of happenings, which stress from the very start that the
tale is to be read not as a sea and adventure story but in a universalising or
symbolic sense as a story of initiation, coming of age and proving oneself
in the transition from youth to adulthood. 4 The frame (“the period of
life”, 3) and the script (individual development from youthful dependence
to adult independence) are named more or less explicitly at the beginning
in the form of a travel metaphor: “One goes on [...] till one perceives
ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth [...] must
be left behind” (3). This process of growing up is presented as the indi-
vidual manifestation of a universal human experience: “It is the charm of
universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal
sensation – a bit of one’s own” (3) and is thus valid for man in general
(“all mankind had streamed that way”, 3). This process of maturing and
initiation involves, as shown by the subsequent development, the casting
off of naïve illusions and the gaining of experience in the real world, in-
cluding its malice and wickedness, for instance in the Chief Steward’s
intrigue and the old captain’s corruption, an educational process that Cap-
tain Giles thematises at the end (131f.).5
The special frame for the individual development is essentially defined
in terms of a profession, that of the sailor. This frame is connected with
the script of the professional career, the promotion from lower to higher
positions. The protagonist gives up the subordinate post of a first officer
on a steamship and takes over the position of a captain on a sailing ship,
_____________
4 For a detailed description of this aspect, cf. Hawthorn (1985: vii ff.), see also Goonetilleke
(1990: 121), Watt (2000: 156, 163, 166). This generalising aspect is also expressed in Con-
rad’s dedication to his son: “To Borys and all others who like himself have crossed in early
youth the shadow-line of their generation”. For a counter-position, see Guerard (1958:
29î33), who psychoanalytically interprets the happenings as a night-journey into the self.
5 The few critics who discuss this tale at all describe the process of initiation, growing up and
taking on the “first command” more or less sweepingly in general, sometimes symbolic,
terms, e.g. Boyle (1965: 14353); Schwarz (1982: 823); Hampson (1996: 14142); Peters
(2006: 10910). In his detailed analysis, Nüstedt (1998: 25873) draws a close analogy be-
tween the protagonist’s development and the structure of anthropological initiation rites.
thus rising to the highest stage of his professional career. This rank does
not only require particular leadership qualities but also considerably raises
the technical demands on his professional competence: sailing vessels are
more difficult to navigate because of their greater dependence on external
factors (weather, crew); in addition, they represent a very traditional, a
more archaic and, as it were, purer type of the profession. The rise from a
subordinate position to the leading role as prescribed by the career script
occurs in two steps: first, formally taking on the position of a captain and,
second, practically and actively proving one’s qualification for this task.
While the protagonist owes the occupation of this post mainly to the ef-
forts of others (esp. Captain Giles), performing the requisite duties consti-
tutes an active achievement on his part. Professionally as well as person-
ally, the actual phase of crossing the boundary consists – as it does very
often in Conrad’s work – of a test as the central point of the script 6 . The
narrator must prove both his nautical competence and his moral strength,
i.e. his ability to direct the crew and the navigation of the ship as well as
his physical and psychological stability, his moral integrity, his understand-
ing and sense of responsibility for others, a challenge of which he is
acutely aware: “the time was approaching for me to behold my command
and to prove my worth in the ultimate test of my profession” (48, cf. 41).
The narrator does pass this test in the end and the story accordingly pre-
sents a successful positive boundary crosssing in the form of personal and
professional accomplishment.
The achievement of professional self-confirmation is also to be seen
in another, more specific frame of reference, that of personal identity 7 .
The narrator defines himself essentially through his professional role and a
strict code of professional ethics:
I discovered how much of a seaman I was, in heart, in mind, and, as it were,
physically – a man exclusively of sea and ships; the sea the only world that
counted, and the ships the test of manliness, of temperament, of courage, and fi-
delity – and of love. (40)
The formation of his identity is accompanied by a high degree of self-
awareness (55). When, in a conversation about the former captain, Burns
mentions the profession they share, the narrator reflects: “He and I were
sailors. That was a claim, for I had no other family” (70). As stressed in
the quotation above, this is a markedly masculine concept of identity
(“test of manliness”). The gender-specific dimension of his conception of
identity is repeatedly thematised by the narrator; for example, when he
describes his relation to his ship as that between lover and beloved: “I was
_____________
6 Cf. Watt (2000: 167) and Hawthorn (1985: xii).
7 Cf. Hawthorn (1985: xii).
138 Peter Hühn
like a lover looking forward to a meeting” (46, cf. 49). Although this iden-
tity has to prove itself in the struggle against the non-human, mostly hos-
tile environment of the sea, it is essentially constituted in the social dimen-
sion: meeting the expectations of others, not only as role-model and
leader with regard to the community of the crew (see 52ff., 63f., 109), but
also specifically as a link in the chain of former captains. The narrator
consciously continues the chain of his predecessors (“a succession of
men”, 52) and expressly sees himself as an heir of something like a dy-
nasty, with the concomitant demands on his bearing:
[...] myself [...] this latest representative of what for all intents and purposes was a
dynasty; continuous not in blood, indeed, but in its experience, in its training, in
its conception of duty, and in the blessed simplicity of its traditional point of
view on life. (53)
On account of the explicit reference to tradition and the adherence to
conventional values and standards, this is an emphatically pre-modern
concept, which is underlined, moreover, by the political comparisons
(with monarchy and aristocracy) in the description of the captain’s posi-
tion: “In that community [i.e. the crew] I stood, like a king in his country,
in a class all by myself. I mean an hereditary king, not a mere elected head
of a state” (62). The narrator is in no doubt, however, that this privilege
has to be earned by achievement and justified by competence.
Lotman’s plot model and his concept of the semantic field provide a
means of relating the eventfulness of these changes in the narrator’s pro-
fessional career and his personal identity to the historical context, and of
specifying their relevance in philosophical terms and in regard to the his-
tory of mentalities. The two phases of the progression in the narrator’s
life, with respect both to his profession and to his identity, can be de-
scribed as an opposition between two sub-fields in the following terms:
youthful vs. adult, immature vs. mature (as to personal development and
education: 3î5, 47), dependent vs. independent, not fully responsible vs.
fully responsible (as to professional competence and position: 28, 33f.,
40f., 44, 63f.), self-orientated vs. community-orientated (as to interper-
sonal relations and morality: 40, 63f.), unstable vs. stable (as to personality
status: 109). These various juxtapositions represent binary pairs of values,
norms and standards of behaviour that share the underlying common
abstract opposition of imperfect vs. perfect or incomplete vs. complete.
This opposition of semantic sub-fields manifests itself in the protago-
nist’s (changing) practical behaviour in relation to the norms of his envi-
ronment. The development starts with his spontaneous dissociation (by
resigning) from his previous connections (“I had never […] felt more
detached from all earthly goings on”, 19) and his resultant mobility in the
first sub-field, obviously out of youthful dissatisfaction and impulsiveness
(“the green sickness of late youth”, 5; “rebellious discontent”, 8), and it

ends with the newly gained stability of his new professional role and his
integration into the genealogy of his predecessors. The protagonist’s spe-
cific movement between the two sub-fields thus defined is embedded –
on a higher, mental level – in a fundamental transformation of his world-
view and his existence, from a severe life crisis to its ultimate resolution.
The story starts off with his rash, rationally unmotivated act of leaving his
ship in Singapore (4), a symptom of a severe dissatisfaction with his pre-
sent situation and of an acute sense of universal futility and void: “every-
thing was gone – glamour, flavour, interest, contentment – everything”
(5), “[t]he past eighteen months […] appeared a dreary, prosaic waste of
days. […] there was no truth to be got out of them” (7). His situation is
marked by a pervasive sense of emptiness and absence: he lacks personal
ties, aims, incentives; he is an outsider encountering nothing but criticism
and incomprehension from others (6, 8, 14). And in the subsequent
course of the happenings, especially during the passage through the Gulf
on board his ship, the protagonist is confronted over and again with the
experience of emptiness, nothingness, and chaos, with the impression of a
meaningless, threatening, hostile world. He talks about “the enigmatic
tranquillity of the immense forces of the world” (76), interprets “the stress
of adversity” as “purposeful malevolence” (86f.) and perceives “an effect
of inconceivable terror and of inexpressible mystery”, “that sense of final-
ity” and “a foretaste of annihilation” (108) – experiences which, in an
ironic reference to the biblical story of God’s creation of the world, he
declares as typical of human existence in general: “the formidable Work of
the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden”
(97). This feeling of profound despair vis-à-vis the incomprehensibility
and immovability of the world is alluded to in the epigraph, the closing
lines from a sonnet by Charles Baudelaire: “D’autres fois, calme plat,
grand miroir / De mon désespoir” (3) 8 .
The protagonist’s sequence of actions, his transition into a second
sub-field, consists in proving his mental ability to withstand this funda-
mental threat to, and questioning of, his personal existence, and to defend
himself against it. Herein lies the philosophical dimension of the eventful
change and definition of the sub-fields. In a crucial sense, professional
self-confirmation and competence, i.e. the work ethic and the fulfilment
of one’s duties, are set against the threatening void and chaos, against the
_____________
8 The quotation is from “La musique”, Les Fleurs du Mal, Spleen et Idéal LXIX. The poem
describes the variable impressions when listening to music in the form of an extended sea-
voyage allegory, tracing especially the sudden change from smooth sailing propelled by
wind to the despair at a calm, which the speaker experiences as a mirror of his own self, of
his self-consciousness.
140 Peter Hühn
danger of despair. 9 When he first lays eyes on the ship, the narrator de-
clares: “That feeling of life-emptiness which had made me so restless for
the last few months lost its bitter plausibility, its evil influence, dissolved
in a flow of joyous emotion” (49). During the desperate struggle against
the adversities of the voyage, he realizes: “The seaman’s instinct alone
survived whole in my moral dissolution” (109). And a helmsman’s unper-
turbed act of steering the ship is described as “a symbol of mankind's
claim to the direction of its own fate” (76). Very significant in this respect
is the formulation the narrator uses when he first perceives the chance of
obtaining a command: “[…] as soon as I had convinced myself that this
stale, unprofitable world of my discontent contained such a thing as a
command to be seized, I recovered my powers of locomotion” (28). The
allusion to Hamlet (I, 2: 133î37) in this phrase refers to profound nihilis-
tic despair as a constitutive feature of the first sub-field, which the pro-
tagonist opposes by actively accepting the professional challenge, thereby
establishing a second sub-field. 10
4. Contextual References and the Degree of Eventfulness
The setting as such, i.e. sea and ship, implies a general contextual refer-
ence in that the navy, as well as the merchant navy, as in Conrad’s tale,
possessed a consistently special significance for English national identity
up to the beginning of the 20th century (and beyond) 11 , which enhances
the quasi-symbolic relevance of the happenings and the eventfulness. In
addition, the setting of a sailing ship surrounded by the sea intensifies the
degree of eventful self-confirmation inasmuch as this situation is apt to
increase the challenge to human faculties as well as the risk of failure with
serious consequences for one’s existence.
References to specific contexts of The Shadow-Line are to be seen, on
the one hand, in the conception of the inherent meaninglessness of the
world and, on the other, in the emphatic counter-position of professional-
ism, the work ethic and a strong sense of duty; more particularly, the Brit-
ish maritime code. 12 The sceptical view of a world without a meaningful
order and without God, the pessimistic notion of the powerlessness of
_____________
9 Cf. Hawthorn (1985: xviii ff.).
10 As Hawthorn (1985: xi) points out, the tale contains further allusions to Hamlet, which
reflect the protagonist’s situation somewhat like an – intertextual – script: perception of
malice in the world, the pressure of responsibility, stagnation and despair. In contrast to
Hamlet, the story of Conrad’s protagonist has a positive ending.
11 Cf. Goonetilekke (1990: 94f.).
12 Cf. Schwarz (1982: 84ff.).
man’s will and rationality, which is generally typical of Conrad, can be

linked to certain philosophical and ideological tendencies around the turn
of the (19th) century, the early modernist period in literary history 13 (esp.
Thomas Hardy and George Gissing). The high work ethic as a norm pro-
viding stability and identity draws on certain traditions in English Protes-
tantism, which are clearly secularised in Conrad. Since the dynamic of the
plot development results from the opposition between these two conflict-
ing tendencies or forces (the individual vs. the environment), the event-
fulness of this story can be determined with reference to these contexts in
the history of mentalities. The sceptical, nihilistic world view counts as
modern, likewise the counter-measure of defiantly stabilising the self,
relying on professional competence and insisting on personal identity. 14
But the explicit definition of this identity on the basis of an integration
into an older tradition and the orientation on an inherited code are pre-
modern, which is corroborated here by the decision to opt for a sailing
ship as opposed to steamships and the use of aristocratic terms for the
description of the captain’s position, as well as by the belief in moral in-
tegrity and the possibility of eventful self-confirmation against the forces
of chaos. 15
The degree of eventfulness of the progression from adolescence to
adulthood is normally not very high, as it is expected and normal. In The
Shadow-Line, however, this degree is considerably raised by the accumula-
tion of difficulties. On the level of the plot, it is further increased by
counter-plots that seek to prevent the protagonist from crossing the
boundary. Apart from the Chief Steward, this goes particularly for the
figure and the behaviour of the old captain, the protagonist’s predecessor,
who functions, in several respects, as an obstacle to the crossing: practi-
cally, through the theft and sale of the quinine; symbolically and psycho-
logically by implying the latent danger of failure and degeneration (cf.
107). He represents the protagonist’s threatening counter-image, which
reveals the inherent corruptibility both of maritime professionalism and of
moral integrity: constantly playing the violin and violating his duty, ne-
glecting the care of his crew and endangering their lives with risky and
destructive orders, selling the quinine, finally even cursing ship and crew.
The other figures, too, highlight the structure of the action sequence by
contrast or analogy. 16 Burns parallels the narrator’s development in his
gradual physical and mental recovery. At the same time, he functions as a
negative mirror-image for the protagonist, as a first mate in the protago-
_____________
13 Cf. Watt (2000: 3ff.), Miller (1965: 27ff. and passim) and Miller (1963: 1î16).
14 Graham (1996: 215ff.).
15 Cf. Graham (1996: 204f.).
16 Cf. Schwarz (1982: 90ff.).
142 Peter Hühn
nist’s former position and also as a (failed) rival for the captain’s post on
account of his physical weakness, jealousy and irrationality. Ransome, too,
mirrors the narrator’s course of action, positively in his admirable compe-
tence, conscientiousness and loyalty, negatively in his weakness (his heart
condition): at the end he reprises the act of resignation with which the
narrator’s further development had set in. But, in Ransome’s case, this
departure is for good. Captain Giles is a helper and a mentor figure, both
initiating the protagonist’s development and acting as a standard of
judgement for its ultimate completion (131f.).
For a further specification of the particular form of the boundary
crossing in The Shadow-Line, it is finally necessary to point to the con-
spicuous mixture of active and passive aspects of the protagonist’s partici-
pation in these changes. On the one hand, this achievement is ultimately
due to his competence, persistence, integrity and stamina, that is to say, to
his intentional action. But on the other hand, the tale (i.e. the implied
author) provides strong evidence of the limitation of the protagonist’s
active control and the impact of non-rational and non-conscious forces
and factors. He is only partly aware of the motives for his own behaviour;
moreover, the impulses for his development frequently come from the
outside, and in some instances, especially at the beginning, he proves un-
able to assess situations correctly or to recognise the opportunity for, or
necessity of, action: he leaves his position as first officer impulsively,
without explanation; he does not see through the Steward’s intrigue
against him, so that Captain Giles has to draw his attention to both the
offer of a command and to his aspirations (17ff.); he forces the informa-
tion out of the Steward spontaneously and without a clear plan (25). He
refers to notions of miracle and destiny in connection with obtaining his
first command: “that day of miracles” (35), “the feeling of wonder î as if
I had been specially destined for that ship I did not know, by some power
higher than the prosaic agencies of the commercial world” (36). Further-
more, the magic blockage of the ship’s passage by the old captain, super-
stitiously conjured up by Burns, as well as its equally magic resolution
through his provocative laugh are to be considered further examples of
the superior power of circumstances and of the world overruling human
will. Even though he rejects Burns’s superstitious beliefs as foolish and
denies the existence of supernatural influences (86), the protagonist sees
himself at the mercy of forces beyond his control in view of the inexplica-
ble obstruction of the ship’s movement: “I felt on my face the breath of
unknown powers that shape our destinies” (62). He uses such notions not
only in a negative, but later also in a positive sense:
By the exercising virtue of Mr. Burns's awful laugh, the malicious spectre had
been laid, the evil spell broken, the curse removed. We were now in the hands of
a kind and energetic Providence. (125)
With the term “Providence”, the narrator draws on the traditional Calvin-
istic concept of God foreseeing and thus predetermining men’s lives, of
men’s utter dependence on God’s grace.
Man is not presented as master and director of his own destiny – he
appears to react rather than act. Yet without his persistent and competent
actions, the eventful crossing would not have been achieved. In the face
of a world without meaning and order, reason proves to be an imperfect
but nonetheless indispensible instrument for understanding and ordering
one’s living circumstances as well as for recognising one’s own motives
and directing one’s life. One example is the negligence in checking the
medicine chest: the narrator could not see the necessity of a careful in-
spection, which he reproaches himself for later, though he is acquitted by
Burns (95). The protagonist’s limited cognitive and practical power over
his life is pervasively thematised in the text, as mentioned above, by the
double perspective of the experiencing self (e.g. in the literal quotations
from his diary) and the later narrating self. 17 It is only retrospectively that
the protagonist is fully able to understand himself and constitute the co-
herence of his life. Herein can finally be seen the function of narration in
The Shadow-Line: the (narrative) look back at a decisive phase of his life
(“a confession”) serves the narrator as a definition of his identity. He nar-
rates how he became the person he now is. He defines his individual iden-
tity on the basis of this eventful change.
References
Conrad, Joseph (1950). The Shadow-Line: A Confession. Within the Tides (London:
Dent).
————
Boyle, Ted E. (1965). Symbol and Meaning in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (London
etc.: Mouton).
Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. (1990). Joseph Conrad: Beyond Culture and Background
(London: Macmillan).
Graham, Kenneth (1996). “Conrad and Modernism”, in J. H. Stape, ed. The Cam-
bridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 20322.
Guerard, Albert J. (1958). Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
_____________
17 Cf. Schwarz (1982: 89).
144 Peter Hühn
Hampson, Robert (1996). “The late novels”, in J. H. Stape, ed. The Cambridge Com-
panion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 140î59.
Hawthorn, Jeremy (1985). “Introduction”, in Joseph Conrad. The Shadow-Line, ed. J.
Hawthorn (Oxford: Oxford UP), viiîxxv.
Knowles, Owen & Gene M. Moore (2000). Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad
(Oxford: Oxford UP).
Miller, J. Hillis (1963). The Disappearance of God; Five Nineteenth-Century Writers
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP).
– (1965). Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP).
Nüstedt, Holger (1998). Joseph Conrads Seegeschichten: Variationen des anthropologi-
schen Initiationskonzepts (Frankfurt/Main etc.: Lang).
Peters, John G. (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP).
Schwarz, Daniel R. (1982). Conrad: The Later Phase (London: Macmillan).
Watt, Ian (2000). Essays on Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
12 Virginia Woolf: “An Unwritten Novel” (1921)
Peter Hühn
1. The Arrangement of Stories
In Virginia Woolf's short story, “An Unwritten Novel” 1 , the narrator 2

presents an account of a train journey in June 1919 3 , apparently from
London through Surrey and Sussex to Eastbourne, in the course of which
she becomes interested in and observes a fellow passenger in her com-
partment, an elderly woman, whom she arbitrarily names Minnie Marsh,
imagining her life story and spinning out its details. 4 The text thus com-
bines two stories situated on different levels: the narrator tells one (in-
vented, fictitious) story about a real character (real in the story world) and
at the same time, by doing so, performatively enacts another one – the on-
going act of narrating the invented story, an act which functions as a story
in its own right, with the narrator herself as a protagonist. The arrange-
ment of these stories – more precisely, the mediation of the story of narra-
tion – undergoes a significant change, however, in the course of the text.
At the beginning, the act of narration is reported in the past tense, as a
factual anecdotal experience the narrator had in the past. But, in the
course of this presentation, the tense very soon slides from past to pre-
sent, 5 so that, during the second (major) part of the text, the impression is
_____________
1 References are to the following edition: Woolf (1962). This story was first published in
1921.
2 There is a somewhat hidden reference to the female sex of the narrator towards the very
end of the text. After having helped the fellow passenger with her luggage onto the plat-
form, the narrator is addressed as “ma’am” by her: “I’ll wait by my bag, ma’am, that’s saf-
est. He said he’d meet me ... Oh, there he is! That’s my son.” (26).
3 This date is indicated by the news items in the Times quoted by the narrator: “Peace be-
tween Germany and the Allied Powers was yesterday officially ushered in at Paris – Signor
Nitti, the Italian Prime Minister [...]” (14). Since Nitti was the Italian Prime Minister from
June 23, 1919 to May 21, 1920, this item can only refer to the signing of the peace treaty on
June 26 1919 and not to the opening of the peace talks on January 18, 1919.
4 It goes without saying that this is a clear case of unreliability on the part of the narrator.
See, e.g. Fox (1973: 76). This fact as such is less relevant, however, than the motivation,
structure and presentation of unreliable narration within the narrative setup of the short
story.
5 The shift occurs at the bottom of p. 16.
146 Peter Hühn
created that the telling of the story is simultaneous not only with the re-
ported happenings but also with reporting the act of telling. In the first
part of the short story one can distinguish three narrative levels. The ex-
tradiegetic narrator recollects and narrates her train-journey, during which
she herself as a mental narrator (on the diegetic level) invented a story,
which, as such, is situated on the hypodiegetic level. In the second –
longer – part, these three levels are reduced to two. Seemingly without
mediation, the narrator (extradiegetic level) enacts the creative invention
of the story, which is then to be considered as the diegetic level. So, while
it is clear that, throughout the text, the overall (extradiegetic) narrator is
making up and telling her story (the “unwritten novel”) mentally, to her-
self alone, the mode of communicating this mental process changes. What
begins as a conventional retrospective narrative turns into the imagination
of an on-going mental process, thus foregrounding the process of narra-
tive invention. This text is essentially modernist in that the operation as
well as, by implication, the motivation of inventing and narrating a story
are self-reflectively thematized (at the extradiegetic level); specifically, in
respect of the tension and interaction between reality and fiction, between
life and imagination. Both storylines, the life story ascribed to the fellow
passenger and the process of narrative imagination during the train jour-
ney, feature eventful turns and rely on specific frames and scripts.
2. The Structure of the Invented Story
The narrator’s account of the train journey (the extradiegetic story of nar-
ration) is focused entirely on making up a story about the fellow passenger
in her compartment and ascribing it to her, 6 situated – as described above
– first at the hypodiegetic, then at the diegetic level. The narrative process
is triggered by the “expression of unhappiness” (14) on the face of the
“poor woman”, something which immediately attracts the narrator’s atten-
tion, because she takes this expression to reveal a deep knowledge of the
fundamental nature of “life”, apparently disappointment, sorrow and suf-
fering, what she terms “human destiny”, a painful experience people have
gained (“learnt”) in the course of their lives and which they usually try to
conceal. This woman, however, or so the narrator imagines, refuses to
conceal such knowledge, unreservedly communicating it to the narrator,
who is able to understand because she shares the knowledge: “She seemed
_____________
6 This is an example of what Virginia Woolf has called “character-reading” in her essay “Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, which she considers central to novel writing. See Woolf (1950).
Virginia Woolf: “An Unwritten Novel” 147
to [...] say to me: ‘If only you knew!’. [...] ‘But I do know,’ I answered si-
lently” (14). So the narrator senses a silent rapport, spontaneously estab-
lished between herself and the fellow passenger, which even penetrates
her attempts to protect herself against it behind the newspaper she is read-
ing: “The Times was no protection against such sorrow as hers. [...] She
pierced through my shield” (15). What the narrator refers to in this way
forms the abstract structure of a general script, which, she assumes, un-
derlies all life stories and which is defined by the event of a negative de-
velopment, an experience of disappointment, disillusionment and failure,
consisting of the basic transition from innocence to experience and result-
ing in unhappiness. The cognitive outcome of having undergone this ex-
perience is the appropriate knowledge about life’s bitter reality, a knowl-
edge which, according to the narrator, all people share.
On the basis of this abstract script, the narrator then proceeds to re-
construct the woman’s life story, using her desultory and inconclusive
utterances about a brother and a sister-in-law in Eastbourne to extrapo-
late, in a highly speculative manner, a biographical tale with a catastrophe
or failure as the central event, the evidence of which she deduces specifi-
cally from the characteristic twitch of the woman’s arm scratching a spot
on her back: “Her twitch alone denied all hope, discounted all illusion”
(15). To fill in the gaps and the circumstantial details of this story, the
narrator furthermore relies on certain conventional frames and scripts
taken from realist fiction. She first names the characters (Minnie Marsh,
her brother John and sister-in-law Hilda, their children Bob and Barbara)
and imagines the scene of Minnie’s arrival at her brother’s house and the
uneasy atmosphere between her and Hilda, her withdrawal into the guest
room to pray to God and, later, her walk along the beach. She then takes
the woman’s gesture of rubbing a stain from the compartment window (“a
stain of sin”, 18) as her cue to speculate on the kind of “crime” Minnie
has committed (“I have my choice of crimes”, ibid.), rejecting the possibil-
ity of a “sex”-related deed (as out of character) and opting for making her
responsible for a serious accident that happened to her baby brother
twenty years ago (who was scalded because she came home late, having
lingered over the display in a fashion shop), for which she tries to do pen-
ance by praying: “your crime was cheap, only the retribution solemn; for
now the church door opens, the hard wooden pew receives her” (19).
This tragic construction is only briefly disrupted by an incongruent, trivial,
mundane remark on the part of the woman about the price of eggs (20),
which temporarily induces the narrator to give up her event-based story-
line (20). The tragic event-schema, however, is so powerful that the narra-
tor quickly integrates the incongruent remark and initiates a new turn in
the story by introducing commercial travellers in the household (“behind
148 Peter Hühn
the ferns”, 21), specifically one James Moggridge, who “takes his meals
with the Marshes” (22), something considered a necessity “if the story’s to
go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as stories
should” (21). No clear and consistent plot development emerges but some
unhappy entanglements between Moggridge and Minnie (and possibly
Hilda) are hinted at rather vaguely, as well as painful problems in the
Moggridge household and Moggridge’s ultimate disappearance, which,
again, are taken as evidence of “life’s fault”: “Life imposes her laws; life
blocks the way; life’s behind the fern; life’s the tyrant” (22). The emphasis
is then again on Minnie’s tragic situation, her humiliation by Hilda, her
suffering and profound unhappiness (“It’s the spirit wailing its destiny”,
24), finally heading for another severe, crucial turn: “Here’s the crisis!
Heaven be with you! Down she goes. Courage, courage! Face it, be it!”
(25).
In these variously renewed attempts at constructing a story and ascrib-
ing it to the woman passenger, the narrator obstinately clings to the basic
script with its eventful tragic turn, fleshing it out with (situational) frames
and scripts taken from recent realist fiction, 7 especially from domestic set-
tings and family arrangements with internal tensions in conventional mid-
dle-class households. These socially specific schemata are indicated by the
reference to ferns and aspidistras (21), the emblematic plants of (petty-)
bourgeois houses, to the motif of aged spinster aunts, to suppressed ten-
sions between family members, especially problems with dependent rela-
tives, to commercial travellers as a typically middle-class vocation. The
eventfulness of these tragic turns is of a low degree since the narrator
considers such experience as universal, expecting to see evidence of it in
every adult person and trying to find repeated instances of it in Minnie’s
life.
When, at the terminus in Eastbourne, the elderly woman is met by her
son and they walk down the street side by side (“mysterious figures”, 26),
the imposed narrative schema is radically disproved, a painful realization
for the narrator: “I am confounded”, which she at first refuses to ac-
knowledge (“Surely, Minnie, you know better! A strange young man …
Stop!”, ibid.), because her world-view and her identity were apparently
based on this schema: “my world is done for! [...] What do I know?” [...]
Who am I? Life’s bare as bone” (ibid.). This sudden final disruption of the
tragic turns in the invented story possesses a high degree of eventfulness
for the narrator because of the radical deviation from her customary ex-
pectations. She may be given to fantasizing about the lives of other peo-
_____________
7 Cf. Engler (1987: 400f., 404ff.); Lojo Rodríguez (2002: 75, 78).
ple, but there is no indication that such a subversion of her fantasies is a

repeated experience.
3. The Story of Telling the Invented Story
The process of inventing and narrating this story about the woman pas-
senger (a real person within the story world) constitutes – as mentioned
above – another story (on the extradiegetic level). But this superordinate
story is only partly narrated in the narrow sense, i.e. mediated by a narra-
tor in the past tense; for the most part, it is performed directly through the
utterances of the protagonist in the present tense. From the very begin-
ning, the transition from narrative mediation to performative enactment is
made almost imperceptible by the extensive use of quoted impressions,
speculations and mental exclamations. 8 This story also features an event-
ful change, but one of a different kind and within a different frame.
Whereas the invented story complies to the (pre-conceived) script of a
universal pattern of life-experience as invariably resulting in disappoint-
ment or failure, thus ranking relatively low on the scale of eventfulness,
the performed story becomes highly eventful through the sudden (unex-
pected) disruption of the life-story attributed to the woman in the com-
partment. The two stories differ first of all in their frames. While the in-
vented story is thematically framed as dealing with the nature and ex-
perience of “life” (a term prominently introduced at the very beginning of
the text 9 ), the theme of the superordinate story concerns the relation be-
tween (narrative) fiction and real life or, more generally, the aesthetic con-
cept of fictional narration, in other words, the novel (as also indicated by
the title “An Unwritten Novel”). Within this frame, the narrator changes
her orientation in the course of her reflections and mental utterances,
namely from a pre-conceived script, which is that of certain conventional
types of realist fiction 10 , towards a focus on factual, ordinary life, as ob-
served experientially. Thus, though this may seem a shift from an eventful
type of narrative to an uneventful one in one respect, from a (convention-
ally) spectacular script with extraordinary happenings to ordinary, every-
day life, that change of orientation, in itself, constitutes an event on a
_____________
8 The shift ultimately begins with “Hilda’s the sister-in-law [...]” (16), because from this
paragraph onwards the present tense is used exclusively.
9 “Life’s what you see in people’s eyes; life’s what they learn, and, having learnt it, never [...]
cease to be aware of – what? That life’s like that, it seems” (14).
10 See footnote 7.
150 Peter Hühn
higher level, an eventful break with an inappropriate conventional notion

of life, something which ranks high on the scale of eventfulness.
This superordinate story of narration, both before and after the break,
is given definite shape by two opposing and conflicting tendencies that
highlight certain aspects of its creation, mediation and status. Firstly, it is
made quite obvious from the start, and intermittently during the rest of
the train journey, that the narrator-protagonist speculatively invents the
story about her fellow passenger and freely ascribes it to her. 11 This pro-
jective quality of the story is underlined by a number of metafictional
remarks she makes about its formation and progress, e.g. “But this we’ll
skip” (17), “I have my choice of crimes” [i.e. for Minnie] (18) and “[...] if
the story’s to go on gathering richness and rotundity [...]” (21). The arbi-
trary, inventive status is further stressed by a number of contradictions
and grotesque, ironic or parodic features introduced into the narrative.
One of these contradictions concerns the date of the train journey. Al-
though the early quotation of a news item from the Times provides a very
precise date, namely June 27, 1919, the day after the signing of the Ver-
sailles peace treaty with Germany (14) 12 , the narrator soon afterwards
claims to have forgotten what time of year it was (“the time of year, which
was, I forget now, early or late”, 15) only to mention the “winter’s land-
scape” (16) a little later. The comparison of God to the bearded South
African President Kruger (of Transvaal) is grotesque and openly playful:
More like President Kruger than Prince Albert – that’s the best I can do for him
[Minnie’s God]; and I see him on a chair, in the black frock – coat […] I can
manage a cloud or two for him to sit on […] (18).
When the woman peels an egg, the narrator describes the broken eggshell
as “fragments of a map” and takes off on a wild flight of fantasy:
I wish I could piece them together! If you only would sit still. She’s moved her
knees – the map’s in bits again. Down the slopes of the Andes and white blocks
of marble got bounding and hurtling, crushing to death a whole troop of Spanish
muleteers, with their convoy – Drake’s booty, gold and silver. But to return –
[…] (21).
And the imaginative creation of the character Moggridge is highlighted by
the drastically physical assemblage of the parts of his body:
I come irresistibly to lodge myself somewhere on the firm flesh, in the robust
spine, where I can penetrate or find foothold on the person, in the soul, of Mog-
gridge the man. The enormous stability of the fabric; the spine tough as whale-
bone, straight as oaktree; the ribs radiating branches; the flesh taut tarpaulin; the
_____________
11 For a description of various aspects of this tendency, cf. Engler (1987: 399ff., 406f.), also
Dölle (1971: 61î68).
12 See footnote 3.
red hollows; the suck and regurgitation of the heart; while from above meat falls
in brown cubes and beer gushes to be churned to blood again – and so we reach
the eyes. (22f.)
Secondly, in direct contrast to such indications of fictionality, there are
pervasive suggestions of the independent reality of character and story,
mainly in the form that the narrator does not know everything about the
character but has to guess and ascertain, and that she is not wholly in con-
trol of the development, and that the course of the happenings assumes a
reality and a dynamic of its own. 13 On several occasions, she peers at the
woman she calls Minnie in order to find out (“read correctly”) facts about
her life as if about an independent reality. So she says at the beginning: “I
read her message, deciphered her secret, reading it beneath her gaze” (16);
later, she tries to identify the kind of crime she committed (18) but then
corrects herself, allegedly realizing that there was no crime (20). When
Minnie’s life story seems to run on a particular track, a casual utterance of
hers suddenly leads the development in a completely different direction:
That’s what always happens! I was heading her over the waterfall, straight for
madness, when like a flock of dream sheep, she turns t’other way and runs be-
tween my fingers. (20)
Later, the narrator seems forced to acknowledge the commercial travellers
(“the figures behind the ferns”) as part of the story: “There I’ve hidden
them all this time in the hope that somehow they’d disappear, or better
still emerge, as indeed they must [...]”, 21). Towards the end of the train
journey, the narrator sees the moment of crisis approaching, narrating
Minnie’s imminent encounter with her hostile sister-in-law in urgent, seri-
ous tones:
Here’s the crisis! Heaven be with you! Down she goes. Courage, courage! Face it,
be it! For God’s sake don’t wait on the mat now! […] I’m on your side. Speak!
Confront her, confound her soul! (25)
The resistance of the happenings to the narrator’s conscious attempts at
controlling the story proves particularly strong at the end of the train
journey, when the woman is met by her son and the narrator desperately,
but unsuccessfully, tries to reject this turn of events. This resistance to
control not only tends to background the extent of creative projectiveness
and arbitrary speculation on the part of the narrator but also enhances the
degree of eventfulness of the final debunking of the invented story.
These two opposing tendencies serve to make the invented story am-
bivalent, endow it with emotional and existential urgency and, at the same
time, expose its artificiality and constructedness. In addition, there is a
_____________
13 Cf. Engler (1987: 404f.); Bouton (2004: 177, 179).
152 Peter Hühn
pervasive psychological force at work that strengthens the impression of

seriousness and existential relevance partially inherent in the story: the
personal motivation on the part of the narrator, 14 who obviously empa-
thizes with the elderly woman or, rather, projects her own personality and
disposition onto her, apparently a profound unhappiness as well as experi-
ence of disappointment and failure (presumably also in sexual terms),
something she sweepingly subsumes into the term “life”.15 This is re-
vealed from the very start, when she identifies the experience and attitude
in the other passengers’ eyes as “life” (“Life’s what you see in people’s
eyes”, 14), claiming a similar knowledge for herself (“‘But I do know,’ I
answered silently”, 14). Later, she imitates a compulsive gesture of the
woman, interpreting it as the attempt to remove a guilty stain: “she had
communicated, shared her secret, passed her poison” and “I read her
message, deciphered her secret, reading it beneath her gaze” (16). And in
the end she sums up this affinity: “I’ve read you right – I’m with you
now” (25). The pervasive communicative attitude of addressing the
woman and ascribing all observations and speculations directly to her also
seems indicative of the strong emotional affinity which she perceives with
her. 16
These tendencies shape and modify the invented story up to its event-
ful collapse at the moment of arrival, when the waiting son radically dis-
proves its suitability. This eventful turn suggests a hidden second meaning
in the title: the novelistic invention of Minnie’s life story becomes “un-
written” in the course of the text. In the final analysis, the superordinate
story shares one important feature with the invented story: the moment of
disillusionment, thus bringing the two levels closer together and possibly
undermining the newly found reality. Furthermore, the narrator knows as
little about the woman as a mother and her son as she previously knew
about her as a solitary passenger. Although she does not spin out another
story (yet), her approach is emphatic and projective, too, when she calls
them adorable and mysterious, seeing them as representative of their type
(“mothers and sons”, 26, in the plural) and following a “ritual”, “the an-
cient antics” (26). In this way, the narrator draws on a traditional pattern
_____________
14 Cf. Engler (1987: 398f.).
15 Fox (1973) sees the indirect self-revelation of the narrator’s personality (the “hidden pro-
tagonist”) as the main point of the story, thereby missing, however, its subservient function
for the complex narrative setup of “An Unwritten Novel”.
16 With Luhmann’s (1998: 4650) concept of observation, this focus on the narrator’s in-
vented story can be described as second-order observation: the story becomes contingent
and its structure, driving force, and meaning – including its eventfulness – can be traced
back to personal dispositions and desires on the part of the narrator (rather than to the
“factuality” of the story).
for interpreting the figures and endowing them with meaning. A different
meaning is now constructed and also projected onto the figures.
4. Levels and Forms of Eventfulness
Virginia Woolf’s “An Unwritten Novel” features two different types and
degrees of eventfulness and arranges them in a hierarchical relationship to
one another. The lower (the hypodiegetic) level, that of the invented story
or “unwritten novel” as spun out by the narrator, presents an event in the
happenings, which is based on a specific script claimed to be universally
valid for all life-experiences (“life”), with an inherent negative turn in the
form of guilt or disappointment, disillusionment, failure and profound
unhappiness. Since the event is supposed to occur necessarily in the
course of people’s lives, it is expected and thus ranks relatively low on the
scale of eventfulness. As the setting, the characters and the circumstances
of this story suggest, the frame of this script and the context of this event
is realistic or, perhaps more precisely, naturalistic fiction, 17 which, with a
strong emphasis on surface realism and a preference for certain conven-
tional tragic or comic plots, shows people to be determined by their social
origins and outward living conditions, their psychological dispositions and
narrow, bourgeois family relations. The aesthetic convention defining this
context assumes that such a picture of life and living is representative of
contemporary social reality. The title “An Unwritten Novel” refers to this
novelistic pattern and it is shown to be so strong that it determines the
narrator’s perception of even her everyday surroundings. The context of
the eventfulness can thus be identified as the conventions of the novel
after the turn of the century, as Virginia Woolf sees them, dominated by
writers like Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy. 18
The invented story basically conforms to this convention, although
certain parodic, contradictory or grotesque features, as pointed out above,
foreground the story itself and produce a distancing, subtly disruptive
effect. The same context functions as a background for the story of narra-
tion on the higher level and its eventfulness, but, this time, the develop-
ment radically deviates from the script in rejecting it altogether. The devia-
_____________
17 Cf. Engler (1987: 400, 403, 407ff.).
18 See Virginia Woolf’s essays “Modern Fiction” (1919), in Woolf (1950), and “Mr. Bennett
and Mrs. Brown” (1924), in Woolf (1993), where she argues for the centrality of character in
the “modern” concept of the novel, focusing on experience, impressions, feelings, the spirit,
which she declares closer to life and sees represented, for example, by James Joyce, D. H.
Lawrence and E. M. Forster.
154 Peter Hühn
tion is twofold: instead of the expected negative event, consisting of crisis

and catastrophe, a situation apparently of happiness and fulfilment is now
presented (not frustrated and humiliated spinsterhood and loneliness, but
fulfilled and possibly happy motherhood); and, instead of eventful
changes in a life’s development, ordinary, everyday life, devoid of eventful
turns. This is a presentation event, with a relatively high degree of event-
fulness. What the two storylines and events have in common is the general
focus on life, the emphatic claim to be concerned with the fundamentals
of living existence. At its core, the event in the story of narration consists
in the total rejection of a literary conception of life in favour of the actual-
ity of lived experience, which is concomitant with a shift from conven-
tionally eventful change to the uneventful ordinariness of life. Accord-
ingly, the short story ends with the wholehearted acceptance of what is
presented as ordinary life. 19
But this is not the last word, the final position of the text. It is sug-
gested by the wording and the emotional intensity (“adorable”, “it’s you I
embrace”, 26) of the narrator’s description of the departing pair, mother
and son, that – in spite of the fundamental difference from literary con-
vention – there are also some important similarities. The utterances are,
again, addressed to the protagonists; the narrator is as intensely emotion-
ally attached to the characters as before; she knows as little about the
woman as a mother as she did about her as a spinster. Now, however, she
is aware of this lack of knowledge (“mysterious figures”, “unknown fig-
ures”, 26). And, importantly, the literary or aesthetic quality is, as it were,
foregrounded, when she speaks of falling on her knees and refers to the
“ritual, the ancient antics” she is going through (26): it is not just the neu-
tral presentation of ordinary life but its emphatic, quasi-religious staging.
Thus, it is ultimately made clear that this is not a case of literature (literary
convention) being replaced with raw life as such, but one literary concept
with another, 20 a traditional with a modern or modernist one. 21 Since the
narrator does not seem to realize this, the reader’s insight into the basic
continuity of literary features from one concept to the other one may be
called a reception event.
_____________
19 Cf. Joubert (1999), who reads this short story as “the ordinary stuff of the modernist ex-
perimentation with metafictional iconicity” (149) and sees in the collapse of the invented
story the “unwriting” of narrative knowledge, the “parody of craftsmanship” and the “ir-
ruption of the Real” (150f.), i.e. no more than the debunking of literary conventionality.
20 This point is indicated by Lojo Rodríguez (2002: 79).
21 “An Unwritten Novel” is usually seen in close association with the beginning of Virginia
Woolf’s modernist phase of writing, starting with Jacob’s Room (1922). Cf. Engler (1987:
393f.).
References
Woolf, Virginia (1962 [1944]). “An Unwritten Novel”, in A Haunted House and Other
Short Stories (London: Hogarth Press), 14-26.
– (1950). “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays
(London: Hogarth Press), 90î111.
– (1993). “Modern Fiction”, in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays.
Vol. II (London: Penguin), 5î12.
————
Bouton, Reine Dugas (2004). “Woolf and Welty, Readers and Writers, Writing and
Unwriting”, in Literature and the Writer, ed. Michael J. Meyer (Amsterdam:
Rodopi), 175î90.
Dölle, Erika (1971). Experiment und Tradition in der Prosa Virginia Woolfs (München:
Fink).
Engler, Bernd (1987). “Virginia Woolfs ‘An Unwritten Novel’: Realistische Erzähl-
konventionen und innovative Ästhetik”, in Anglia, 105: 390î413.
Fox, Stephen D. (1973). “‘An Unwritten Novel’ and a Hidden Protagonist”, in
Virginia Woolf Quarterly, 1 (4): 69î77.
Joubert, Claire (1999). “Literary Unknowing: Virginia Woolf’s Essays in Fiction”, in
Theory and Literary Creation / Théorie et création littéraire, ed. by / texts
présentés par Jean-Pierre Durix (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires), 145î59.
Lojo Rodriguez, Laura Maria (2001). “Parody and metafiction: Virginia Woolf’s ‘An
Unwritten Novel’”, in Links and Letters, 8: 71-81.
Luhmann, Niklas (1998). Observations on Modernity, tr. W. Whobrey (Stanford:
Stanford UP).
13 D. H. Lawrence: “Fanny and Annie” (1921)
Markus Kempf
D. H. Lawrence’s short story “Fanny and Annie” 1 narrates the return of

the 30-year-old Fanny to the lower-class environment of her parents’
home after an absence of 12 years in order to marry her first love, the
foundry worker Harry Goodall. The event structure of the story is consti-
tuted by the succession of the protagonist’s two life plans or scripts. In the
course of her life, the protagonist’s attitude changes radically: from social
and cultural aspirations to orientation focus on love and sexuality, which
now provides the basis for her decision to marry Harry. In concrete terms:
after the disappointment of her original aspirations regarding social ad-
vancement, Fanny is compelled to return to her geographical, social and
personal roots, a necessity which runs counter to all her desires but which
she finally comes to acknowledge as having been the right solution all
along. Thus, the story presents first a failed, then a successful border
crossing.
The heterodiegetic narrator focuses predominantly on the process and
the completion of the protagonist’s second, successful crossing of the
social border, while her past history is only briefly summarized and her
future life after the present decision entirely omitted. The event consists in
Fanny’s change of attitude and her consent to a marriage with Harry, a
decision taken spontaneously and impulsively against strong internal and
external obstacles and not as the result of rational deliberations. This is an
event in the happenings, i.e. the crucial change of state occurs on the
diegetic level, first and foremost in the protagonist’s mind but with signifi-
cant consequences for her outward social situation. 2
_____________
1 Edition used: Lawrence (1972: 45872).

2 There are only a few critical studies of this particular short story by Lawrence. The studies
by Widmer (1962: 125 ff.) and Secor (1969: 395 ff.) are both rather short and only address
some aspects of the story. While Widmer judges Fanny’s decision in favour of marrying
Harry negatively in the sense of a fatalistic return to the social and moral ignorance of the
working class (cf. 126), Secor interprets the specific style of the story as an implication of
the exact opposite, namely not the acceptance of the personal fate but the emancipation
from it.
D. H. Lawrence: “Fanny and Annie” 157
1. Fanny’s Change of Attitude: from Social Aspirations

to the Orientation on Love and Sexuality
Fanny’s original life plan can be reconstructed from her past history as
summarized at the beginning of the narrative. The frame can be defined as
an individual’s social position and identity within the class-system and the
corresponding script as social advancement. Fanny bases her life plan on
success and ascent, i.e. on social and cultural values and ideals; and she
strives to escape from the frustrating narrow living conditions of the
lower class and to lead a fulfilled and happier life. Inspired by the example
of her successful and ambitious cousin Luther, with whom she had been
in love as a young girl, she breaks out of her parents’ lower-class environ-
ment at the age of 18 to seek a fulfilling middle-class life in different sur-
roundings. This biographical plan if successfully put into practice
would be considered as highly eventful, since the class boundary between
the lower and the middle classes was still largely impermeable at the be-
ginning of the 20th century, especially for women, even though not to the
same extent as in the 18th and 19th centuries. The degree of eventfulness is
somewhat reduced, however, in as much as she attempts to reach this aim
not through personal achievement, e.g. by having a professional career,
but conventionally by means of a partnership (with Luther).
As the narrator reports in an analepsis, Luther later left her and died.
Relationships with other men from a similar social background did not
succeed either and in terms of a career she was only able to reach the low
position of a “lady’s maid” (459), so that her attempt at a new life in a
middle-class environment ended in failure, that is to say, the boundary
between the semantic fields of the lower and the middle class proved im-
possible for her to cross.
In this situation, Fanny considers returning to her home town and
marrying Harry as the only way to a secure existence. Initially, she finds
this unacceptable for several reasons. On account of her long absence she
now defines her identity on the basis of middle-class norms and values
and accordingly feels out of place in her old environment: “she had be-
come a stranger” (460). Further obstacles to a happy marriage are the
social and cultural differences caused by their differing biographies. While
Fanny sets great store by education, achievement and thrift, Harry lives
for the moment, does not save any money and lacks ambition (cf. e.g.
462ff.); in contrast to her, he still speaks the regional and class-specific
dialect (cf. 464f.); she dresses elegantly and is appreciative of good man-
ners, comfort and beauty, whereas he appears common, inconsiderate and
ungainly (cf. 462ff.).
158 Markus Kempf
All in all, Fanny perceives her return and the prospect of marrying a
worker as a failure of her original career plans, as a disillusioning relapse
into the paralysing conditions of her past:
What a come-down! What a come-down! She could not take it with her usual
bright cheerfulness. She knew it all too well. It is easy to bear up against the un-
usual, but the deadly familiarity of an old stale past! (460).
Moreover, a cautionary example of such an option is introduced in the
form of Fanny’s aunt Lizzie, who married a socially and intellectually infe-
rior, violent man and therefore leads an unhappy life. Aunt Lizzie tells
Fanny in no uncertain terms that she considers marrying Harry a gross
error: “I don’t think he’s good enough for you” (461).
Against this background, however, a contrary tendency is introduced
that eventually results in the eventful ending: Fanny’s spontaneous and
instinctive decision to marry Harry and, in conjunction with this, her re-
integration into the family structure and social organization of the working
class (cf. her concluding request to Harry’s mother to be accepted into her
home). This contrary tendency rests on a re-definition of the relevant
schemata, a new frame: focusing on the sensual dimension of human exis-
tence, especially sexuality and sexually fulfilled love; and relying on the
corresponding script: the process of striving for the experience of sexual
love and finding the appropriate lover. 3 The specific coupling of social
and erotic schemata in Fanny’s chosen path represents the exact reversal
of the script of Pamela’s career in Richardson’s novel: 4 While Pamela
achieves her social rise from the lower class to the aristocracy by means of
virtue and puritanical sexual abstinence, Fanny moves exactly in the oppo-
site direction, returning to the lower class and entering a relationship
which is essentially based on sexuality. Lawrence stresses both the struc-
tural analogy and the directional difference between these two female life
stories by giving Fanny the same occupation as Pamela (“lady’s maid”,
459) as the point of departure for her development.
As for Fanny’s change of attitude, the reader can follow the course of
her growing awareness of erotic longings which culminates in the decision
to give in to her powerful physical attraction to Harry and live in a sexu-
ally fulfilled marriage with him. 5 This decision is not the result of a ra-
tional deliberation process but a pre-rational instinctive change of her
consciousness. This new frame of sensuality and sexuality replaces the
_____________
3 Cf. Secor (1969: 396f.).

4 This intertextual reference was not necessarily deliberately intended by Lawrence. - Cf. the
detailed analysis of Richardson’s Pamela on pp. 63î73 of the present volume.
5 Cf. Widmer (1962: 125).
previous frame of social status, which has governed Fanny’s past history;
that is to say, she defines her identity increasingly through the reference to
a new set of values: her focus shifts from success, social recognition and
high status (“culture”) to sensuality, physicality and sexuality (“nature”). 6
As a consequence, the subdivision of the semantic field into “working
class” vs. “middle class”, which had structured the plot so far, is now
superseded by the new oppositions “sexually unfulfilled” vs. “sexually
fulfilled”, “alienated” vs. “authentic”, “unhappy” vs. “happy”. After
Fanny’s change of attitude, the working class, previously devalued as
backward and paralysing, is now upgraded by its association with sensual-
ity, physicality and vitality.
At the beginning of the text the sexual frame is merely implied but
then becomes increasingly more explicit: the story stages the liberation of
Fanny’s sexuality from its latency. In the opening scene, Fanny’s arrival at
the station, her hidden erotic longings are obliquely expressed in her de-
scription of Harry’s face with fire images, which carry archaic sexual con-
notations and present him almost as a mythic archetype of sexuality:
“Flame-lurid his face”, “[h]is eternal face flame-lit now!” (458). These
images are possibly also to be taken as an indication of the physicality,
experientiality and vitality of the industrial working world (Harry works in
a foundry).
Another indication of the latent presence of the sexual dimension in
the past is the fact that Fanny returns to her origins at all and contem-
plates marrying Harry. At first the story seems to suggest that Fanny’s
escape from the working class has simply failed and no other solution is
available. This does not explain, however, why she had stayed in contact
with Harry all through the 12 years, apparently repeatedly encouraging his
hope of an eventual relationship: “She was a lady’s maid, thirty years old,
come back to marry her first-love, a foundry worker: after having kept him
dangling, off and on, for a dozen years.” (459, emphasis added). Obviously
the protagonist is attracted to Harry from a latent deep desire but cannot
consciously admit this to herself.
Subsequently, the motivation behind Fanny’s actions, her passion for
Harry, becomes clearer: first in her description of his warm and likeable
character (“But women always liked him. There was something of a
mother’s lad about him – something warm and playful and really sensi-
tive”, 462); then in her appreciation of his unselfishness, his charming
ways, his sensibility as well as his habit of making women feel superior (cf.
_____________
6 For the general relevance of the difference between “nature” and “culture” in Lawrence’s
work, see Burns (1980).
160 Markus Kempf
462); and finally in her open admission that she cannot resist his sexual
attractiveness:
Because there was about him a physical attraction which she really hated, but
which she could not escape from. He was the first man who had ever kissed her.
And his kisses, even while she rebelled from them, had lived in her blood and
sent roots down into her soul. After all this time she had to come back to them.
And her soul groaned, for she felt dragged down, dragged down to earth, as a
bird which some dog has got down in the dust. She knew her life would be un-
happy. She knew that what she was doing was fatal. Yet it was her doom. She had
to come back to him. (465f.)
Ah, she despised him! But there he stood up in the choir gallery like Balaam’s ass
in front of her, and she could not get beyond him. A certain winsomeness also
about him. A certain physical winsomeness, and as if his flesh were new and
lovely to touch. The thorn of desire rankled bitterly in her heart. (466)
At that time Fanny’s feelings for Harry are still ambivalent. On the one
hand, his sexual attractiveness appears to her as a fate which will interfere
with the free development of her personality and generally prove disas-
trous for her (see especially the dog/bird comparison). On the other, she
allows for the possibility that she may be mistaken in her negative assess-
ment. This is conveyed by the allusion to the biblical story of Balaam’s ass
(Numbers 2224). In this story the prophet Balaam sets out contrary to
God’s express command on a journey to preach against Israel and is
thrice saved by his donkey, who sees more than he does (God’s angel
blocking his way and threatening to kill him). Associating Harry with the
animal implies Fanny’s belief that he will protect her against dangers she is
unable to see and guide her in the right direction, even though she at first
considers her response to his sensuality a mistake and despises him for his
sensual nature.
The protagonist’s change of attitude is advanced by two decisive inci-
dents. The first incident occurs in the episode when Fanny listens to
Harry singing in church (466f.). This passage highlights the aspects of
emotionality, sensuality and the pre-rational that are crucial to Fanny’s
development. Harry’s singing, because it is received directly through the
senses, affects Fanny as an unfeigned and therefore more authentic form
of communication which touches her profoundly: “it was effective and
moving” (466). The text of the song Harry sings, a well-known harvest
hymn, carries additional significance for Fanny’s development and her
relation with Harry:
Come, ye thankful people, come,
Raise the song of harvest-home.
All is safely gathered in
Ere the winter storms begin. (465)
With its metaphors of nature, fertility and sexuality the hymn also refers to
the completion of partnership and love between Fanny and Harry. On the
whole, Lawrence is extremely critical of puritanical Protestantism with its
depreciation of sensuality and appreciation of achievement because of its
detrimental effect on the posssibility of leading an erotically fulfilled au-
thentic life. It is therefore highly ironic that Lawrence uses Christian holi-
days, songs and rituals here (the harvest festival) to convey his emphati-
cally anti-puritanical conviction.
Fanny’s change of attitude is completed only after the second incident,
which occurs in front of the church when Harry is accused by Mrs Nixon
of having made her daughter Annie pregnant. The central importance of
Annie, who never actually appears in the story and features merely in the
narratives of others, is stressed by the mention of her name in the title.
The fact that their names are phonetically both similar and dissimilar mir-
rors the correspondence and difference in their situations. On the one
hand, Annie presents a kind of model for Fanny since she openly and self-
confidently lives out her sexuality (see Harry’s remark on Annie’s various
affairs and her retort). On the other, Annie is a rival for Harry’s favour
and thus forces Fanny to come to a quick and definitive decision: despite
the scandal in the church she accompanies Harry home out of “obstinacy”
(470). Annie practically functions as a catalyst for Fanny’s development in
that she has a strong impact on the pre-rational dimension of her person-
ality without being affected herself. After a last rebellion (cf. 470) Fanny’s
internal development is finally completed, when she addresses Mrs
Goodall as “Mother” and thereby signals her willingness to marry Harry.
The overall plot of “Fanny and Annie” possesses a circular structure:
The story stages the “homecoming” of a protagonist that has gone astray
to her original (instinctive-sexual) needs and to her first lover, who can
fulfill these needs. 7 That this is the story of a woman’s return to her ar-
chaic-instinctive nature is indicated early on, when the narrator character-
izes Fanny as “a passionate woman”, as “a woman to be afraid of. So
proud, so inwardly violent! She came of a violent race” (460f.). In retro-
spect, such characterizations serve as early indications that Fanny had
always had a disposition towards passion, emotion, and sexuality but had
been blind to this, her true inward nature, because of her illusory orienta-
tion on the cultural ideal of social advancement, which through the name
of its representative within the story, Luther, is clearly associated with
_____________
7 For the tradition, the function as well as the relevance of this kind of plot-structure to
Romanticism and D. H. Lawrence, see Abrams (1973: 253î331).
162 Markus Kempf
Protestantism. By her return, Fanny becomes the person she had been all
along.
The high value of naturalness, sexuality and fertility in “Fanny and
Annie” is further underlined by Lawrence through the temporal setting of
Fanny’s eventful border crossing, at the time of the harvest festival.
2. Formal Aspects and Context
The perspectival techniques chosen for the mediation of Fanny’s devel-

opment enable the reader to trace her mental processes but at times re-
duce their comprehensibility. The story is mediated by an impersonal het-
erodiegetic narrator, frequently (though not exclusively) through Fanny’s
internal focalization. Towards the end the text shifts more and more from
the mode of telling to that of showing, that is to say, from the direct repre-
sentation of Fanny’s thoughts and perceptions to the scenic rendering of
the conversations of the characters (at which Fanny is not always present).
This has the effect that, for the most part, the reader can closely follow
the protagonist’s cognitive-emotional development but is restricted to a
merely external view at the end when it would be essential to understand
the determining factors of her decision process. This technique ensures
that the concluding event comes as a surprise, but at the same time it
makes Fanny’s decision appear abrupt and (seemingly) unmotivated. This
abruptness results from the fact that Fanny’s final decision is made spon-
taneously and on the basis of a “gut feeling”, not rationally after a long
process of reflection and deliberation. In the end the protagonist acts and
decides again in accordance with her emotions and instincts. She has re-
gained her authenticity.
The degree of eventfulness can be described as high, both from an in-
ternal and an external perspective. Within the text the obstacles to a cross-
ing of the border are emphasised: Fanny’s initial middle-class aspirations,
her aversion to Harry’s conventional proletarianism, her identification
with central middle-class norms, aunt Lizzie’s cautionary example all this
precludes a decision in favour of marriage.
From the external perspective the text has to be assigned a particularly
high degree of eventfulness because it presents the sexual self-discovery of
a woman (as is typical of Lawrence’s work), which radically runs counter
to the puritanical sexual morals as well as, generally, the image of woman
in early-20th-century British society. The discrepancy between Fanny’s per-
sonal norms and the external social norms (which, however, are thema-
tised within the text) is brought out most clearly by the fact that she fi-
nally decides to marry Harry only when (and because) he is suspected of
having made another woman pregnant. With her decision to return to the
working class and her emphatically anti-puritanical attitude to sexuality
Lawrence presents Fanny as the exact opposite of Richardson’s Pamela,
whose social elevation to the aristocracy is coupled with an emphatic ori-
entation on a puritanical sexual code.
Generally speaking, the emphasis on sexuality, fertility and nature
sharply contrasts with the growing impact of technology, science, com-
mercialism and the accelerating process of modernization on the individ-
ual, developments which Lawrence was very critical of, because they were
prone to destroy the vital basis of human life. In “Fanny and Annie” as in
his other short stories, in his novels and poems, he counters these tenden-
cies with fulfilled sensuality in a partnership, intensity of experience and
vitalism.
Translated by Peter Hühn
References
Lawrence, D. H. (1972). The Complete Short Stories. Vol. II (London: Heinemann),

458–72.
————
Abrams, M. H. (1973). Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Roman-
tic Literature (New York: Norton).
Burns, Aidan (1980). Nature and Culture in D. H. Lawrence (Totowa, NJ etc: Barnes
& Noble).
Secor, Robert (1969). “Language and Movement in ‘Fanny and Annie’”, in Studies in
Short Fiction, 6: 395400.
Widmer, Kingsley (1962). The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence’s Shorter Fiction (Seat-
tle: Univ. of Washington Pr.).
14 Katherine Mansfield: “At the Bay” (1922)
Peter Hühn
1. The Eventless Daily Life Structured by Rudimentary Frames

and Scripts
Katherine Mansfield’s short story “At the Bay” 1 presents a variety of hap-
penings during one single summer day that take place among a number of
holiday makers at a seaside resort (presumably in New Zealand, as indi-
cated e.g. by plant names) from a shifting perspective. 2 The characters
mainly consist of members of three families: Stanley and Linda Burnell
with their children (Isabel, Kezia, Lottie), Linda’s sister Beryl and their
mother Mrs Fairfield, Jonathan Trout married to another Fairfield daugh-
ter (with his children) 3 as well as Harry Kember and his wife. This text
differs from all others in this volume in that it seems to lack the two fun-
damental features of any successful narrative with respect to sequentiality:
coherence and eventfulness, for the individual incidents refer to a large
number of characters and appear to be basically unconnected with each
other as well as trivial and inconclusive in themselves and in their combi-
nation. In both respects “At the Bay” demonstrates characteristics of
modernist tendencies, especially in the short story, 4 in particular the rejec-
tion of conventional fictional plots with their emphasis on outstanding or
decisive events, as they were traditionally associated not only with novels
but also – and specifically – with tales and novellas. 5
_____________
1 The page numbers of the quotations refer to the following edition: Mansfield (1981:
20545).
2 Cf. e.g. the brief interpretations of this story under the gender aspect and with respect to
the life-death opposition, resp., in Fulbrook (1986: 10614) and Hankin (1983: 222î34).
3 These families, especially the Burnells, figure also in other Mansfield stories, e.g. “Prelude”
(1922) and “The Doll’s House” (1923).
4 For modernist vs. conventional tendencies in the history of the short story in Britain, cf.
specifically e.g. Bayley (1988: 182f.), Head (1992:109î38), Korte (2003: 103ff., 127ff.), Löf-
fler & Späth (2005: 10ff.).
5 Cf., e.g., Ganzmann (1985: 1ff., 252ff. and passim), van Gunsteren (1990: passim); Boddy
(1988: 169); Beachcroft (1968: 177f.); Halter (1972: 56f.); Kaplan (1991: 1ff.), Mergenthal
(2005: 190î206). This tendency is usually attributed to the influence of, or compared with
a similar concept in, Chekhov.
Katherine Mansfield: “At the Bay” 165
A closer look, however, reveals that the categories of schema theory

are applicable after all, albeit in a more formal or abstract manner. The
overall (situational) frame is everyday life, specifically that of relatively
well-to-do middle-class families under the special conditions of a summer
vacation. This means that the routine necessities and strictures of work for
the adults and of school for the children are temporarily suspended (with
the exception of Stanley Burnell, who has to go to his office in the city)
and that the activities of the day are on principle unrestrained by such
rigorous restrictions and can be oriented (more or less freely) towards
leisure, relaxation and pleasure. As it turns out, however, most of the
characters experience the personal difficulties (with themselves or with
others) which apparently preoccupy them also in their normal daily lives
even under these less restrictive conditions. In other words, the seemingly
transient or casual concrete incidents of this uneventfully normal day at
the bay are – in addition to the overall schema of everyday life – framed
thematically by the narrator or the characters themselves as being indica-
tive of their psychological disposition and their pervasive, fundamental
problems in life.
None of the incidents recounted here are exceptional or amount to
momentous changes and turns with significant consequences. Neverthe-
less, the temporal sequence of their occurrence and of the characters’
experiences is based on two types of rudimentary script, which are em-
ployed on the one hand by the narrator, who is relatively overt in mediat-
ing the happenings through external focalization, and on the other by
some of the characters through internal focalization. First, on an obvious,
concrete level, the happenings span one full day, from before sunrise until
after sunset. Thus the incidents are arranged chronologically, i.e. they are
specifically marked by the particular time of day at which they occur. In
addition to its basic structure of chronology, this script is defined by a
kind of cyclical movement (in the trajectory of the sun and, as a conse-
quence, in the changing quality and intensity of light): rise and fall, in-
crease and decrease, beginning and ending. Second, at a higher level of
abstraction, the episodic experiences of the characters conform to, and are
structured by, one of two related but at the same time opposed recurrent
sequence patterns, which function as abstract scripts: either the transition
from desire to frustration, from expectation to disappointment or the
somewhat inverse transition from restriction to liberation. These patterns
represent not so much pre-existing extratextual scripts, but intratextual
schemata established within and by the story itself through their recur-
rence in the course of the happenings.
166 Peter Hühn
2. Charging the Everyday with Heightened Significance
To structure the heterogeneous sequence of the happenings and heighten

the significance of everyday and trivial incidents, the narrator on the one
hand, and certain central characters on the other, implicitly charge these in
different respects with additional levels of meaning by associating them
with recurrent patterns of relevant change. In this manner a form of
eventfulness, albeit on a lower, inconspicuous level, is constituted. In a
general sense and more or less overtly the narrator thematizes the overall
script of the progression of the day. This script not only serves to bring all
incidents into a temporal order, but by employing specific metaphors and
comparisons or imaginative associations for representing (narrating and
describing) the progress of the day the narrator extends the significance of
the concrete changes beyond their mere chronology. The effect is the
implication of “deeper” human meanings ascribed to the purely natural,
factual development, without, however, indicating any particular uniform
significance (positive, negative or otherwise), thus primarily sensitizing the
reader to additional semantic dimensions in the everyday experiences of
the characters. This is achieved most clearly in the first section (205–207)
through overt, externally focalized mediation, and less frequently so in
later passages. Heavy semantic implications are inherent in metaphors like
“smothered”, “had fallen”, “drenched” (205), “something immense came
into view”, “the sun was rising” (206), “The sun beat down, beat down hot
and fiery on the fine sand” (224), “the day had faded; the gorgeous sunset
had blazed and died” (234), “those beams of light […] remind you that up
there sits Jehovah, the jealous God, the Almighty, Whose eye is upon you,
ever watchful, never weary. You remember that at His coming the whole
earth will shake into one ruined graveyard […]” (238), “A cloud, small
serene, floated across the moon. In that moment of darkness the sea
sounded deep, troubled. Then the cloud sailed away, and the sound of the
sea was a vague murmur, as though it waked out of a dark dream” (245). 6
Through these metaphorical overtones, the general drift of the sequence
from the rise to the decline and fall of a glorious day is made semantically
ambivalent by already associating the beginning with latent destruction.
While this script is situated on the discourse level overtly projected by
the extradiegetic narrator, who, at the same time, acts as the explicit me-
diator of the story, other scripts can be seen to structure the experiences
of the characters during this day on the histoire level within the story-
world through internal focalization. This applies especially to the main
_____________
6 Emphases in these passages added.

adult characters Stanley, Jonathan, Linda and Beryl. Two such patterns
can be distinguished, a negative and a positive one. The general negative
pattern to which a number of episodic experiences conform is defined by
the transition from expectation to disappointment, from contentment to
disillusionment or by the thwarting of desire. This applies, first of all, to
the two men, Stanley and Jonathan: Stanley’s ambition to be the first man
to swim in the morning is defeated by Jonathan having come before him
(“He’d ruined Stanley’s bathe”, 209); and, in turn, Jonathan’s careless,
reckless enjoyment of swimming is ruined, too, by staying in too long (“he
too felt his bathe was spoilt”, ibid.); subsequently, Stanley’s imperious
demand for sympathy, recognition and service from Linda, his wife, and
Beryl, his sister in law, is not met adequately in his opinion (210î13).
During a later talk with Linda, Jonathan silently voices to himself his con-
stant disappointment with himself and with life in general: “He was always
full of new ideas, schemes, plans. But nothing came of it all” (237); he
feels imprisoned because of his own doing (“I’m like an insect that’s flown
into a room of its own accord”, 227); he attributes all this to an inherent
constitutional weakness of his (“No stamina. No anchor. No guiding
principle […]”, 238); and sees himself as too old to attempt any change
(239). Equally serious and existential are the frustrating experiences in life
for the two women. Linda feels disappointed in almost all respects and on
a fundamental level: everything beautiful î like flowers î is “wasted”,
“Life” sweeps her away (221), her love for Stanley is frustrated because he
has changed so much (222), she “dread[s] having children” and does not
love them (222î23), which she recognizes as “her real grudge against life”
(222).
The presentation of Beryl’s frustration is even more elaborate as well
as extended. In her case, the desire is clearly characterized as erotic. Early
on in the story, her longing for erotic fulfilment and for a lover is aroused
by her acquaintance with the unconventional, “wicked”, lascivious Mrs
Kember (217î20), who makes Beryl aware of her physical beauty (“what a
little beauty you are”, “it’s a sin for you to wear clothes”, 219, 220) and
tells her: “I believe in pretty girls having a good time”, “Enjoy yourself”
(220). Late at night, Beryl’s desire is intensely aroused, presumably the
after-effect of Mrs Kember’s insinuations during this conversation, and
triggers the vivid wishful hallucination of an erotic scene with her imagi-
nary lover (“Her arms were round his neck; he held her”, 241), which
though she is aware of its imaginary status activates an acute, sharp long-
ing in her: “She wants a lover” and a reckless intention to reach for fulfil-
ment, encouraging herself: “Don’t be a prude, my dear. You enjoy your-
self while you’re young” (242). But when the practical gratification of her
desire is suddenly offered to her in the person of Mrs Kember’s husband,
168 Peter Hühn
Harry Kember, who invites her for a walk clearly intending to seduce her,
she is frightened and finally shies away in spite of herself (244î45).
This abstract negative script of frustration and disappointment is con-
trasted in other passages by the positive recurrent sequence pattern of
liberation, the transition from restriction or coercion to freedom. But this
contrast occurs only in a few instances and even there, the sense of free-
dom does not last. The first instance comes after Stanley has left for work
(210–13). Since he had bossed around, suppressed and criticised the
women and children, his departure is experienced by them (and the ser-
vant girl Alice) with relief and as a general release and licence to enjoy
themselves: “There was no man to disturb them; the whole perfect day
was theirs” and “The little girls ran into the paddock like chickens let out
of a coop” (213). But in all cases, the freedom is either not used and en-
joyed or ultimately voluntarily given up. Linda makes no use of the glori-
ous day whatsoever, doing “nothing” (220f.), reflecting on her wasted life,
on Stanley’s change from the man she had originally seen in him, and on
her “dread of having children” (222). Beryl spending the day with Mrs
Kember on the beach is both aroused in her own dormant desire and
repelled by that woman’s cold and lascivious attitude (“poisoned”), which
she closely associates with that of her husband’s (217–20), an experience
which is repeated and intensified at the very end. The children play at
being animals thus freeing themselves from their normal regulated (hu-
man) existence within the family but this means constant suppression and
reprimands for Lottie, who because of her age is not yet fully able to par-
ticipate in the game. In the end, some children long to be taken back into
the ordered protective familiy environment (“Why doesn’t somebody
come and call us”, 235) and all are clearly aware of the dominating exis-
tence of their families, to which they are finally brought back (231–35).
Although it is obvious that their freedom was only temporary and limited,
they still did experience some liberation while their outing lasted. Such
willing return to the familiar restrictions is even more pronounced in the
case of Alice, the servant girl, who sets out full of joy for a free afternoon
with Mrs Stubbs, the shop-keeper. When Mrs Stubbs praises her freedom
after her husband’s death (“freedom’s best”, 231), Alice becomes con-
scious of her own ingrained dependence on restrictions: “Freedom! Alice
gave a loud, silly little titter. She felt awkward. Her mind flew back to her
own kitching [sic]. Ever so queer! She wanted to be back in it again” (231).
Mrs Stubbs is the only person in the story who really experiences a sense
of freedom, even though the liberation is something mainly remembered
(if still acutely felt and enjoyed in the present) and here primarily serves to
offset Alice’s inability to be free even temporarily.
So, the general drift of all changes ultimately turns out to be toward
frustration, disappointment, disillusionment, stagnation and loss of vital-
ity, no matter what script they first appear to be based on, negative or
positive. This negative outcome is contrasted, emphasized and thus ex-
acerbated by happening under the most beneficial conditions imaginable
for happiness, joy and freedom î a metereologically perfect summer day
during the vacation at the sea away from the strictures of work and every-
day routines at home.
3. The Problem of Eventfulness
Katherine Mansfield’s “At the Bay” as a whole can be seen as problema-

tising – without outright rejecting î the notion of (literary) eventfulness
specifically with respect to everyday life, i.e. not so much under the per-
spective of literariness as that of a “realistic” rendering of the experience
of contemporary (as it were) “ordinary” people. The initial overall impres-
sion of the heterogeneity, triviality and inconclusiveness of the happenings
in the story could be modified and partially corrected by the above close
analysis of the sequential arrangement of incidents and their mediation. As
has been shown the apparent incoherence is interspersed with parallel
episodic structures and charged with human significance both by the nar-
rator’s mediating technique and the characters’ concrete experiences. But
the crucial question is whether these parallel changes can be said to reach
the level of eventfulness. The story thus radicalizes the question as to
what kinds or degrees of change qualify as eventful, and what exactly fea-
tures of eventfulness are. On the one hand, nothing much actually hap-
pens in the course of the day: What is reported primarily concerns the
habitual attitudes of the characters. These experiences are a re-entactment
of reflections and emotions; they have been preoccupied frequently be-
fore, and they do not substantially and practically change their lives at
these moments. In this respect, the changes are not momentous and
therefore not eventful. No character crosses a boundary. On the other
hand, the episodic experiences, especially Linda’s disappointment and
disillusionment and Beryl’s frustration of her desire, are indicative of their
existential conditions and problems, which are most acutely brought out
under these special circumstances of the vacation. Although no changes
occur, the characters’ problems are thematized and foregrounded for
them; they presumably become more acutely aware of these, a fact that
emphasizes their relevance. This implies a reduced degree of eventfulness
– the symptomatic episodic experience indicating what problems they
170 Peter Hühn
face, in what way they are affected in their experiences by their living con-
ditions.
The context can be identified as the ordinary living circumstances of
ordinary (relatively well-to-do) middle-class people at the beginning of the
20th century in a western society, which is regulated by strict sexual moral-
ity (see Beryl’s dilemma and Mrs Kember’s reputation), clear class divi-
sions (see Alice’s position and Jonathan’s problems) and a general ten-
dency of moral and social repression (apparent in Linda’s, Beryl’s and
Jonathan’s frustrations), depriving people of the unhampered fulfilment of
their needs and longings. This moral and social context leads to tensions
for some of the characters, which shape their personal experiences under
everyday conditions, albeit in the exceptional holiday situation of tempo-
rary exemption from work and everyday routine. The contrast between
the adults and the children reveals that the repression is imposed on peo-
ple through the process of socialization: children are less affected by it,
but their behaviour already shows the beginnings of this tendency (see the
treatment of Lottie and the overall awareness of adult control). The story
thus demonstrates, in the form of an episodic narrative, how ordinary
people under everyday circumstances do undergo eventful changes of
sorts, which in their degree are geared to the ordinariness of consolidated
middle-class society: this is the level at which events do occur in everyday
life. Under holiday conditions, these events are further reduced in inten-
sity in that the characters experience these changes in an episodic form
(Beryl, Stanley, Jonathan) or as a growing awareness of a general existen-
tial situation (Linda). The fact that these changes are all negative in ten-
dency (frustration, deprivation, disillusionment) seems to be indicative of
the social living conditions in connection with personal dispositions.
Among these instances of minor eventful change, Beryl is accorded a
special status, both in the positioning within the sequence of the episodes
in which she figures (see especially the emphatic placing of the final scene
at the very end of the text) and in the special structuring of the happen-
ings (the thematic progressive development in two phases, the meeting
with Mrs Kember and later with Mr Kember). Whereas the characters in
the other instances (Stanley, Jonathan, Linda) experience moments of
disappointments or disillusionments mainly within their consciousness,
Beryl is actually brought into the situation of a possible transgression of a
boundary. This potential movement is foreshadowed by the morning
meeting with Mrs Harry Kember on the beach and her arousal of Beryl’s
latent and unrequited sensual desire in spite of Beryl’s superficially un-
pleasant reaction to her (“Beryl felt that she was being poisoned by this
cold woman, but she longed to hear. But oh, how strange, how horrible!”,
220). A further indication of Beryl’s aroused sensual longing is that she –
wrongly, as it turns out î ascribes the intention of a coarse erotic adven-

ture to Alice’s outing (“She supposed Alice had picked up some horrible
common larrikin and they’d go off into the bush together”, 228). The
night then heightens this desire into the solitary hallucination of a passion-
ate embrace (241î243) and the longing cry: “Oh why doesn’t ‘he’ come
soon?”, 243), when the sudden appearance of Harry Kember and his ad-
vances to her (invitation for a walk) do in fact offer her the possibility of
fulfilment, albeit of a decidedly immoral kind (with a married man). Tak-
ing this opportunity and accepting this invitation would have counted as
the transgression of a boundary. Because of the concomitant violation of
the strict moral norms, this transgression would have constituted a rela-
tively high degree of eventfulness in moral and social terms, albeit a nega-
tive one, whereas on the other hand the conventionality of the seduction
plot (by a notorious womanizer, apparently) would have reduced its de-
gree. Beryl’s final rejection of the opportunity, despite her ambivalence
(“she longed to go!” vs. “now she was here she was terrified”, 244), func-
tions as a failure to cross the boundary from the field of unrequited desire
to its gratification. Morally (and rationally), this refusal to transgress has to
be interpreted as the avoidance of a mistake, the obedience to the norms,
the rejection of a change for the worse, the preservation of personal self-
control and therefore as fundamentally positive (in the eyes of the con-
temporary society). In other respects, however, namely in terms of plot-
ting, development, experience, fulfilment and, ultimately, tellability the
refusal (out of timidity, fear and a lack of energy) to transgress the bound-
ary has to be seen in a negative light, as a corroboration of the stagnation
and repression of vitality as features of society, a confirmation of its sen-
sual and social restrictive character as experienced by the other characters
as well, though not so emphatically.
Thus the critique of conventional eventfulness as expressed by Mans-
field’s “At the Bay” appears in two forms: as reduced and momentary
changes (of a negative kind) and as the refusal to undergo more decisive
changes (though of a distinctly negative kind). With this respect to stagna-
tion, Mansfield’s story bears a clear relationship to Joyce’s “Grace”.
172 Peter Hühn
References
Mansfield, Katherine (1981). The Collected Stories (London: Penguin), 205–45.

————
Bayley, John (1988). The Short Story: Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen (Brighton: Har-
vester).
Beachcroft, T. O. (1968). The Modest Art: A Survey of the Short Story (London: Oxford
UP).
Boddy, Gillian (1988). Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer (Ringwood,
Victoria: Penguin Australia).
Fulbrook, Kate (1986). Katherine Mansfield (Bristol: Harvester).
Ganzmann, Jochen (1985). Vorbereitung der Moderne: Aspekte erzählerischer Gestaltung
in den Kurzgeschichten von James Joyce und Katherine Mansfield (Phil. Diss. Mar-
burg).
Halter, Peter (1972). Katherine Mansfield und die Kurzgeschichte: Zur Entwicklung und
Struktur einer Erzählform (Bern: Francke).
Hankin, C. A. (1983). Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories (London:
Macmillan).
Head, Dominic (1992). The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Korte, Barbara (2003). The Short Story in Britain: A Historical Sketch and Anthology
(Tübingen/Basel: Francke).
Löffler, Arno & Eberhard Späth, eds. (2005). Geschichte der englischen Kurzgeschichte
(Tübingen/Basel: Francke).
Kaplan, Sidney J. (1991). Katherine Mansfield and the Origin of Modernist Fiction
(Ithaca: Cornell UP).
Mergenthal, Silvia (2005). “Die Kurzgeschichten von Virginia Woolf und Katherine
Mansfield”, in Arno Löffler & Eberhard Späth, eds. (2005). Geschichte der eng-
lischen Kurzgeschichte (Tübingen/Basel: Francke), 190î206.
Späth, Eberhard (2005). “Der Beitrag der Gattungstheorie zur Geschichte der Kurz-
geschichte”, in Arno Löffler & Eberhard Späth, eds. Geschichte der englischen
Kurzgeschichte (Tübingen/Basel: Francke), 11î22.
van Gunsteren, Julia (1990). Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (Amster-
dam: Rodopi).
CONTEMPORARY
15 John Fowles: “The Enigma” (1974)
Peter Hühn
1. The Basic Plotline: The Detective-Fiction Frame
The basic plotline, or script, underlying the happenings in John Fowles’s

“The Enigma” is that of mystery fiction, specifically of the detective
story. 1 Typically, the fundamental structure inherent in a detective plot is
made up of a sequence of the following elements: the occurrence of a
crime, normally a murder, whose perpetrator (often together with his or
her motives and the exact circumstances of the criminal act) remains hid-
den and mysterious for a long time, and, ultimately, the final clarification
and solution of the mystery by a detective, either a member of the police
force or a private investigator. The detective is the protagonist, who solves
the mystery through his or her superior intellectual, rational capacity and
intuition, thus crossing the border from the semantic field of ignorance to
that of knowledge, which constitutes the central event of this genre. As a
consequence, the solution of the criminal mystery converts mystery, dis-
order and threat into clarity, order and security. The mainly cognitive
eventfulness of this genre is enhanced, on the part of the author, by inten-
sifying (cognitive and/or physical) resistance to detection and choosing
unlikely, unexpected figures as the criminal, thus making the crossing of
the border more difficult. One specific (social and psychological) function
of this generic plot-schema consists in containing and eliminating social
and moral deviance, i.e. subjecting criminal forces in society to the supe-
rior power of the state’s security and justice system, thus reassuring read-
ers anxious about threats to their existence. Detective or mystery fiction,
as a more or less clearly defined genre, is based on this particular kind of
eventfulness, and habitual readers demand the repeated reassuring experi-
ence of the eventful solution after a protracted phase of mystery and un-
certainty. For this very reason, detective fiction has become a favoured
target of postmodernist criticism and subversion, because the power of
_____________
1 This very obvious generic reference has been noted by all critics, e.g. McSweeney (1983),
Broich (1990); Eriksson (1995), Martínez (1996), Schäfer (1998).
176 Peter Hühn
rationality to constrain divergence and create a stable order is no longer

credible. 2
Fowles’s (long) short story openly begins as a mystery plot, which is
clearly indicated by both the title “Enigma” and by the epigraph taken
from Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching: “Who can become muddy and yet, settling,
slowly become limpid?” (189) 3 . The plot immediately and explicitly opens
with a mystery, stressing its extraordinariness: “When John Marcus Field-
ing disappeared, he […] contravened all social and statistical probability”
(191). Two successive attempts are made to solve this mystery: the first
mainly by Mrs Fielding together with the police (191î201), the second,
when these efforts have failed to come up with any results, by one po-
liceman alone, a Special Branch sergeant named Michael Jennings, who
goes over the same ground again but also explores new avenues (201ff.).
At the outset of his investigation, Jennings draws up a list of possible and
less probable solutions (203î4), evidence of the methodical approach
typically adopted. This is a heterogeneous list enumerating various poten-
tial happenings, mainly suicide, murder or disappearance along with vari-
ous motives, especially for voluntary disappearance, such as illicit love,
religious crisis, homosexuality, paranoia, a ghost from the past, dissatisfac-
tion with his present life. For an extremely long time, Jennings is unable to
find any solid new clues. What emerges from various interviews with em-
ployees, family members, colleagues, acquaintances and friends is that
Fielding was a very ordinary man, in specifically social terms, embodying
the norms and characteristics of the English upper class î “a model of his
kind” (191), wealthy and quite successful in business as well as in politics
(he is a lawyer, serves on the board of several companies, owns a country
house and a farm, is a Conservative MP) with an ideally happy family life
(a son, Peter, and two daughters).
Jennings comes across only a few very vague suggestions of a possible
dissatisfaction with the defining conventionality of Fielding’s life and
work. The secretary mentions: “He did drive himself very hard” (206); a
Labour MP feels that he was “just bored. With the whole bloody shoot.
[…] He just wanted out” (210). Then there is the odd fact that he entered
the British Museum and left his briefcase there, never to retrieve it (198).
But all this does not amount to anything substantial, so that î after the
completion of interviews with all the people even remotely concerned or
connected î the mystery of the “vanishing trick” (217) remains unre-
solved, i.e. the conventionally expected event has not occurred. Thus, up
_____________
2 Cf. Broich (1990: 187). See also Tani (1984).

3 Page numbers refer to the following edition: Fowles (1975: 189–244).
John Fowles: “The Enigma” 177
to this point (221), the short story presents an eventless tale, leaving the
readers’ expectations disappointingly unfulfilled.
2. Novelistic Plotting: The Literary Frame
There is one last interviewee left, Peter’s girlfriend, Isobel Dodgson, who
has just returned from a trip abroad. The interview with her (221î44)
does not offer a solution within the detective schema either but, instead,
tentatively and hypothetically establishes a new frame on a different level,
thereby constituting a surprising, new kind of event. Multiple changes
occur in connection with their meeting for the interview (221): Jennings
falls in love with Isobel; their talk is informal and soon becomes more and
more personal; they go for a walk and sit in a park etc. Above all, both are
remarkably free from social conventions, are more alive than all the others
(221). Isobel is a “literary” person, a graduate in English literature, a writer
(working on a novel) and employed by a publisher. Together they try to
reconstruct Fielding’s attitude or mood, coming to the conclusion that he
felt somehow trapped, disillusioned with the extremely conventional kind
of life he was leading, feeling a lack of other experiences and, in general,
freedom (224, 230), a feeling Jennings himself shares (232). This conclu-
sion is based on certain suggestive indications mentioned previously. Iso-
bel, drawing on her own experiences of composing a novel, finally comes
up with the suggestion that they might all be figures in a novel written by
someone outside: “Nothing is real. All is fiction” (234), and:
“Let’s pretend everything to do with the Fieldings, even you and me sitting here
now, is in a novel. A detective story. Yes? Somewhere there’s someone writing
us, all about us.” (234)
As a consequence, the generic plot-structure, which the short story so far
has failed to conform to, is thematized:
“A story has to have an ending. You can’t have a mystery without a solution. If
you’re the writer you have to think of something.” (234)
This is a clearly metafictional remark, foregrounding the fictionality of the
present story and laying bare the literary devices of the plot. 4 Here, this
_____________
4 That metafictional elements are pervasive in “The Enigma”, not only in this discussion of
plot-structures but also, e.g., in the literary allusions to famous writers in the names of
Fielding and Dodgson (i.e. Lewis Carroll), has been commented on by most critics, cf.
Schäfer (1998: 187ff.), Martínez (1996: 132ff.). Broich (1990: 184ff.) interprets the metafic-
tional elements as an indication of the postmodernist way of writing in this short story. In
the present context, metafictionality, as such, is less relevant than its effect on the eventful-
ness of the short story.
178 Peter Hühn
metafictional reference has a specific function for the event-structure of

the short story: the detective-fiction pattern is explicitly looked at from a
different angle, on the basis of a different premise.
If Fielding as well as Isobel and Jennings are figures in a (regular) de-
tective story, his unexplained disappearance is not an enigma to be solved
but, as such, may have to be understood as the solution, the very event
itself. But the question is: in what sense? Led by Isobel’s expertise as a
professional writer, they first discuss a possible practical explanation for
Fielding’s disappearance, namely, that he indeed met Isobel in the British
Museum and she agreed to hide him somewhere, only to dismiss this solu-
tion in the end as inappropriate in literary, i.e. generic terms (because it
would be out of character and lack the required clues)5 and suggest a more
fitting one. When Jennings asks, “So our writer would have to tear this
ending up?”, Isobel replies, “If he’s got a better” (236) and proceeds to
advance a more fitting version of the ending:
[Isobel:] “Doesn’t that [forgetting to plant the conventionally required leads] sug-
gest something about the central character? You know, in books, they do have a
sort of life of their own. [...] His main character has walked out on him. So all
he’s left with is the character’s determination to have it that way. High and dry.
Without a decent ending.”
The sergeant smiled down. “Except writers can write it any way they like.”
“You mean detective stories have to end with everything explained? Part of the
rules?”
“The unreality.”
“Then if our story disobeys the unreal literary rules, that might mean it’s actually
truer to life?” She bit her lips again. “Leaving aside the fact that it has happened.
So it must be true, anyway. […] So all our writer could really do is find a convinc-
ing reason why this main character had forced him to commit the terrible literary
crime of not sticking to the rules?” (236f.)
This suggested solution is paradoxical: violating the conventional literary
expectation of the eventful clarification of the mystery is, in turn, eventful
insofar as the fictive and fictional character suddenly becomes a “real”
person acting independently of the author’s will. He becomes real on ac-
count of the very fact of not succumbing to the author’s conventionally
superior power of shaping and manipulating everything in his novel. 6 By
his disappearance, Fielding has crossed the boundary between the seman-
tic sub-fields of determination and dependence to freedom and independ-
ence. This would be a new event type, arguably a special case of a media-
_____________
5 Besides, this solution would again have conformed to the detective conventions after all, as
Martínez (1996: 135) remarks.
6 He also becomes “immortal”: “The one thing people never forget is the unsolved. Nothing
lasts like mystery” (234).
tion event, in the sense that a literary character refuses to be mediated in

and through the text. More precisely, this type could be called a metaleptic
event, according to Genette’s (1980) notion of metalepsis as a transgres-
sion of narrative levels (234î37). The character Fielding is said to be mov-
ing from the (textual) discourse-level to the (extratextual) story î or his-
toire î level, in this case into the “real” world outside the novel, a
transgression presented as the decisive, albeit hypothetical, turning-point
in the plot. This seems to be a more daring (and rarer) form of narrative
transgression than the usual cases of “intrusion by the extradiegetic narra-
tor into the diegetic universe […] or the inverse” (234f.). Narrative trans-
gressions are always paradoxical. In this case, the paradoxical nature is
highlighted by the fact that the metaleptic explanation is given by a fic-
tional character and in a decidedly literary text. So literary means are em-
ployed to transcend the literary fictional world.
3. Social Determination: The Social Frame
What seems to be lacking so far to make this solution entirely plausible

(again paradoxically, within literary fiction) is a “convincing reason”,
which Isobel then goes on to supply:
“There was an author in his life. In a way. Not a man. A system, a view of things?
Something that had written him. Had really made him just a character in a book.”
(237)
The historical and social context, Fielding’s determination by his class, his
ideology, his political, familial and personal situation, 7 as an equivalent to
a writer’s power over his characters, is then sketched in a summary enu-
meration of the relevant aspects, from his perfect manners, morality and
dress to the exemplary performance of his private and public roles. In this
way, the literary frame is interpreted as a metaphor for a social frame,
conveying the themes and concerns of social realism. 8 What this social
context comprises in concrete terms has been spelled out from the very
beginning of the short story, starting with the description of his social
type:
he was a man who, if there were an -arium of living human stereotypes, would
have done very well as a model of his kind: the successful City man who is also a
country land-owner and (in all but name) village squire. (191)
_____________
7 Cf. Martínez (1996: 130ff.).

8 Cf. Broich (1990: 186).
180 Peter Hühn
Thus, his self is very strictly defined with reference to political and class-
specific norms:
“Tories take success so seriously. They define it so exactly. So there is no escape.
It has to be position. Status. Title. Money. And the outlets at the top are so re-
stricted. You have to be prime minister. Or a great lawyer. A multi-millionaire.
It’s that or failure.” (238)
But since he is not outstandingly successful in his various activities (he is
not even very good in court), he feels doubly imprisoned, by the conven-
tions and by his relatively mediocre position according to the conventional
standards, a feeling which Isobel metaphorically reconstructs in literary,
novelistic terms:
“He feels more and more like this minor character in a book. Even his son de-
spises him. So he’s a zombie. Just a high-class cog in a phony machine. From be-
ing very privileged and very successful he feels himself very absurd and very
failed.” (239)
The solution to this predicament, Isobel suggests, would be “walking
out”:
“The one thing people never forget is the unsolved. Nothing lasts like a mystery.
[…] On condition that it stays that way. If he’s traced, found, then it all crumbles
again. He is back in a story being written. A nervous breakdown. A nutcase.
Whatever.” (239)
In practical terms, that would mean Fielding had killed himself in order to
escape the stifling, suffocating restrictions of both the novel and society.
Isobel then speculates about the actual method employed, suggesting that
he drowned himself in the pond on his estate, which the family (or possi-
bly the police) refuses to have dredged, the mystery thus indeed remaining
unresolved. As a result, Fielding’s disappearance is defined as doubly
eventful, within the literary, novelistic as well as within the social frame,
transgressing into the field of social und existential freedom, constituting
an event which ranks higher on the scale of eventfulness than if the mys-
tery had been clarified in the style of detective fiction. The degree of
eventfulness, it can be argued, is enhanced even further by its paradoxical
nature: Fielding escapes from suffocating conditions to life and freedom
by killing himself in the fictional world, through suicide (which works in
literary, though not in practical terms). And Isobel plays the role of an
Agatha Christie in devising this surprising non-solution solution (241), i.e.
she successfully outwits the ingenuity of detective fiction with its own
techniques. In addition, the eventfulness is protected and enhanced by the
undecidedness and undecidability of the form his escape took.
Fowles’s short story thus begins by denying the occurrence of a con-
ventional event in the happenings only in order to offer a metaleptic type
of event instead, in accordance with the double re-framing of the happen-
ings. By shifting the frame from the detective plot to that of literary and
social conditioning, Fielding’s vanishing trick becomes an act of self-
liberation and self-fulfilment in another world, which constitutes a radi-
cally new kind of event (with a paradoxical twist, however, inasmuch as he
has to kill himself in the literary world to achieve this aim of a freer way of
life). By framing the happenings as the literary plot of a novel (which in-
deed they are, the novel or, rather, short story “The Enigma” written by
John Fowles), the vanishing trick can be understood as a metaleptic event
transgressing narrative levels. Isobel and, to an even greater degree, Field-
ing (in Isobel’s speculative reconstruction) discover themselves as created
figures in a fictional and social “text” and manage to liberate themselves,
Isobel by self-consciously reflecting on this state of affairs and, moreover,
by being comparatively alive and free from conventions in the first place;
Fielding î more radically so î by escaping altogether, vanishing from the
realm of fictionality into life outside fiction. He thus refuses to be medi-
ated in a novel and determined by society any longer. Of course, this, too,
is not only highly paradoxical but also very clever in that the writer (John
Fowles) invents and writes this possibility as a new twist to the relation
between fiction and reality and as a violation, and, at the same time, as a
surprisingly unexpected fulfilment of the generic script of mystery fiction.
In other words: he uses a postmodernist metafictional device to convey
primarily social and psychological problems characteristic of the mode of
realist fiction. 9 In this manner, the writer proves himself to be a very in-
genious plotter of events î devising a metaleptic mediation event with a
vengeance.
4. Transcending Determination through Love: The Erotic Frame
However, the short story does not end at this point but closes with a fur-
ther (and final) twist, establishing a new frame and adding another event.
This shift to the erotic frame, the preparation of a love story, 10 had been
implied from the first encounter between Jennings and Isobel (221ff.),
though the initiative starts with him and his being attracted to her: “He
fell for her at once” (221). It is equally important for this new develop-
ment that he recognises in her an uncorrupted, authentic quality of being
alive which sets her apart from all the others, who are subject to social
_____________
9 Cf. Broich (1990: 186).

10 The shift to the love story is mentioned, e.g., by Martínez (1996: 130ff.) and Schäfer (1998:
187f.).
182 Peter Hühn
conventions, even if they actively rebel against these, like Peter Fielding.
Jennings immediately notices this quality about her: “He had an immediate
impression of someone alive, where everyone else had been dead, or play-
ing dead; of someone who lived in the present, not the past […]” (222).
The continuation of their relationship is then provoked by her when she –
banteringly – asks him to help her with the police technicalities of a detec-
tive novel she is currently writing, for which she invites him to a meal, to
be cooked by herself. What ultimately follows is the consummation of
their love for each other, 11 the proper, predictable event within the newly
established love-story frame, which, for this reason, does not rank very
high on the scale of eventfulness. In this particular context, however, the
eventful gratification of their mutual desire is meant to function as some-
thing else, too – as indicated in the slightly enigmatic closing paragraphs:
[…] he was not, by the time that first tomorrow had closed, the meal been eaten,
the Sauvignan drunk, the kissing come, the barefooted cook finally and gently
persuaded to stand and be deprived of a different but equally pleasing long dress
(and proven, as suspected, quite defenceless underneath, though hardly an inno-
cent victim in what followed), inclined to blame John Marcus Fielding for any-
thing at all.
The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can
diminish or demean – indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out. (244)
What seems to be implied here is that intense love (“pragmatisms of
flesh”) may be an alternative way out of social and also literary restric-
tions. This, too, is paradoxical, of course, as is already expressed by the
postulated identification of pragmatism with poetry, i.e. of the concrete
sensual (and sexual) experience and its literary, fictional rendering, which
is said to be of no lesser or inferior efficacy (“no enigma […] can diminish
or demean”) than the enigma chosen as a way out by Fielding. On the
contrary, love (“flesh”) is said to constitute “them”, namely “the poetries”.
That is to say that love imbues the literary renderings with physical inten-
sity and as such provides a way out, imaginatively: “then walk out”,
namely from the fictional and social confinement. Thus the event of final
sexual consummation is not only considered the conventional generic
completion of the love story but, by its very physical and pragmatic quality
– through its powerful imaginative rendering (“poetries”) – it also func-
tions as an intense experience effectively outside social and literary con-
ventions. 12 This love scene appears, at first glance, to be a conventional
_____________
11 Schäfer (1998: 192) points out that the seduction is ironically rendered in the terms of
detective fiction.
12 Martínez (1996: 130) argues that Isobel î like women generally in Fowles î represents
“warmth”, “reality”, “creativity”, “authenticity” and “freedom” as against social and literary
event in the happenings, with the figures of Jennings and Isobel as pro-
tagonists. Here, however, a specific interpretive twist is î or rather is
meant to be î added, namely that the event transports them out of the
fictional and socially normative world onto another plane, into another
dimension, in its different setup also a metaleptic event of sorts. This
claim, spelled out in the closing paragraph, is self-contradictory (and, pos-
sibly, not completely convincing). It shares with the preceding metaleptic
event the (paradoxical) feature of literary devices attempting to transcend
literature and its artificiality and reach towards lived human reality and
experientiality. But it differs from Fielding’s supposed disappearance and
absence through death by stressing the physicality, vitality and presence of
the love experience, thereby enhancing the degree as well as the value of
its eventfulness.
Thus the short story rejects one (conventional) type of event and insti-
tutes, suddenly and unexpectedly, two alternative and contrasting metalep-
tic events – transcending the diegetic level towards the “reality” level of
the histoire, the happenings in the “extra-literary” world, through the un-
resolved, mysterious vanishing trick, in literary terms, and through death
or intense love-making in social terms.
At this point, the historical and social dimension of the context can be
grasped and its two main aspects defined. Firstly, the early seventies were
the period of highly ideology-critical tendencies in certain intellectual sec-
tions of society in Britain (as in other European countries), which attacked
the debilitating power of conventional bourgeois norms, i.e. the so-called
establishment. This criticism is given symbolic and satirical expression in
the implication that Fielding disappears into the British Museum as an
obsolete social model, as it were. 13 Secondly, this was also the period of
widespread dissatisfaction with realistic, mimetic narration and of a post-
modernist fashion for playing with, and subverting, straightforward narra-
tion and narrative closure, the stability of social or artistic order, the supe-
rior power of reason and the belief in ultimate truth. 14
_____________
conventionality. Eriksson (1995: 164ff.) describes the constellation of detective fiction and
love romance as the opposition of death and life, love signifying the celebration of life, fer-
tility and growth. Schäfer (1998: 192) speaks about a reality beyond literary self–
consciousness.
13 Cf. Schäfer (1998: 187ff.).
14 Martínez (1996: 137) mentions the “general decentering tendency of postmodernism”,
which frees “both author and reader from the oppressive ties of a more unitary and totaliz-
ing tradition”. Cf. also Broich’s (1990: 185f.) description of the postmodernist features in
this story.
184 Peter Hühn
References
Fowles, John (1975). “The Enigma”, in The Ebony Tower (Progmore: Panther), 189–
244.
————
Broich, Ulrich (1990). “John Fowles, ‘The Enigma’ and the Contemporary British
Short Story”, in Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and Brit-
ish Fiction Ŧ Presented to Helmut Bonheim, ed. R. Nischik & B. Korte (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann), 179î89.
Eriksson, Bo H. T. (1995). The “Structuring Forces” of Detection: The Cases of C. P.
Snow and John Fowles (Uppsala: Studia Anglistica Upsaliensis 93).
Genette, Gérard (1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, tr. J. E. Lewin
(Ithaca: Cornell UP).
McSweeney, Kerry (1983). Four Contemporary Novelists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore,
John Fowles, V. S. Naipaul (Kingston: McGill/Queen’s UP).
Martínez, María Jesús (1996). “Astarte’s Game: Variations in John Fowles’s ‘The
Enigma’”, in Twentieth Century Literature, 42: 124î44.
Schäfer, Karl Kunibert (1998). “‘The Enigma’ – John Fowles’s Metafiction”, in D.
Gohrbrandt & B. v. Lutz, eds. Seeing and Saying: Self–Referentiality in British and
American Literature (Frankfurt/Main etc.: Peter Lang), 185–93.
Tani, Stefano (1984). The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to
Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Il-
linois UP).
16 Graham Swift: Last Orders (1996)
Markus Kempf
1. Mediation Technique and Temporal Levels
Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders 1 possesses a complex narrative struc-

ture on account of its specific technique of mediation. There is no extra-
diegetic narrator, who might evaluate and structure the happenings from a
superior and retrospective point of view. Instead, the actions are mediated
“dramatically” through the direct quotation of the seven characters’ indi-
vidual recollections and the concatenation of these.
The novel narrates the car journey, on Monday, 2 April 1990 (272), of
four men from a pub in Bermondsey, London, to Margate, a seaside resort
on the coast of Kent, as well as the simultaneous activities of a woman in
London. The four men are the insurance clerk Ray “Lucky” Johnson, the
undertaker Victor (Vic) Turner, the grocer Lenny Tate and the used-car
dealer Vince Dodd (né Pritchett). Lenny, Vic and Ray are in their late
sixties, Vince is 45. They embark on this journey in compliance with the
final request of the family butcher Jack Dodds, the three older men’s
friend and Vince’s adoptive father, to have his ashes scattered off the end
of a pier in Margate. The deceased’s wife Amy does not accompany the
men, because she visits her severely retarded 50-year-old daughter June in
a care home in London, as is her custom every Monday and Thursday.
The novel is subdivided into 75 chapters, presented from the perspec-
tives of the various characters. 2 This specific mediation technique obliges
the reader to be particularly active, not only in grasping the overall mean-
ing of the novel but also, more basically, in reconstructing the chronologi-
cal order and the interconnections within the happenings. As far as the
general setup is concerned, two time and plot levels may be distinguished,
_____________
1 Edition used: Swift (1996).

2 58 chapters are headed by the names of the respective characters who “narrate” them: Ray
is assigned 22 chapters, Vince 12, Lenny and Vic 8 each and Amy 6. Vince’s wife Mandy
and the deceased Jack narrate one chapter each. The remaining 17 chapters bear the names
of the places the four men pass on their journey (e.g. “Bermondsey”, “Gravesend”,
“Rochester”, “Canterbury”, “Margate”). These “geographical” chapters are presented from
Ray’s perspective, too, which makes him the dominating mediating instance of the novel
with 39 chapters altogether.
186 Markus Kempf
which interact with each other. Firstly, there is the level of the present, the
utterances performed chronologically and simultaneously, as it were, with
the reading process, in the succession of the individual chapters in the
book, describing the ongoing journey of the four men from London to
Margate as well as Amy’s visit to her daughter and her subsequent bus ride
home. These happenings are situated on the extradiegetic level, 3 which in
this novel represents the first or basic narrative 4 . Secondly, the recollec-
tions of the various characters constitute the dimension of the past, on the
diegetic level, in ever increasing detail as the novel progresses: the com-
plex interrelations among the characters, their former experiences, friend-
ships, affairs, quarrels etc. This diegetic level, which is organised
anachronically by means of numerous external subjective analepses,
stretches back to the time immediately before World War II. 5
2. The Scripts on the Extradiegetic and the Diegetic Levels
The following analysis will concentrate on the storylines of Amy, Ray and
Jack, since these are central to the event dimension of the novel. 6 The
novel couples two schemata, an erotic and a moral frame and two con-
comitant scripts: on the one hand, the realistic, romance-like story of Amy
and Ray’s love, which after having been frustrated for decades may
now be fulfilled at long last; on the other, the sequence of personal guilt
followed by atonement or redemption. Both schemata are closely linked
with each other. The atonement script concerns the three protagonists,
since they all have incurred guilt in various ways through their past ac-
tions: Amy and Ray have wronged Jack by their former love affair, Jack
has wronged Amy by his rejection of their mentally retarded daughter
June. The second sub-field in each case (fulfilment and atonement or re-
demption, resp.) is heightened in its positive value by the opposed theme
of disease and death (Jack, June).
It is a significant feature of the plot of Last Orders that the final union
of the lovers does not actually occur, yet the text implies its possibility or
_____________
3 Strictly speaking, the extradiegetic level comprises only the characters’ attitudes and their
changes as they express themselves directly in their utterances within the individual chap-
ters. The ongoing journey as such is narrated and therefore situated on a diegetical level,
though synchronised with the utterances.
4 Genette (1980: 22831).
5 For a general interpretation of the novel, see e.g. Cooper (2002), Weidle (2006) and Shaffer
(2006: 195211).
6 See e.g. Weidle (2006: 135).
Graham Swift: Last Orders 187
probability in the future. Instead of narrating the great event, the novel
focuses on two preliminary events, changes of attitude in Amy and Ray.
These two transformations take place in the course of the first narrative
(i.e. on 2 April 1990) and represent the prerequisites for their future un-
ion. In Lotman’s terms the plot development can be described as follows.
Inside the first superordinate sub-field (desire and guilt, resp.) the novel
establishes two separate, subordinate individual semantic fields, one for
Amy and one for Ray. Within these separate fields each of the two charac-
ters move across a personal boundary, which then enables them to cross
jointly into the second superordinate sub-field (union and fulfilment,
atonement). Amy’s and Ray’s personal changes are brought about by
Jack’s funeral, which confronts both of them with death and mortality and
forces them to re-consider their past experiences, attitudes and decisions
and to re-interpret and revise them. Amy’s and Ray’s transformations
occur simultaneously in London and Margate at the novel’s dramatic cli-
max: immediately before the scattering of Jack’s ashes into the North Sea.
3. The Plot-Development of Last Orders
The anachronic-elliptical mediation technique of Last Orders obliges the

reader actively to assemble the protagonists’ story from the recollections
of the various characters. In order to clarify the complex connections I
shall first reconstruct the diegetic level, i.e. the chronological order and
semantic coherence of Amy’s and Ray’s past lives up to the beginning of
the first narrative, and then focus on the eventful performative develop-
ments which both undergo in their mental interaction with this very past
on 2 April 1990, that is to say, their respective “stories of narration” on
the extradiegetic level. Omitting their childhood and adolescence, the
novel concentrates on three (more or less) isolated phases within the
adulthood of the protagonists.
3.1. Plot-Phases on the Diegetic Level
3.1.1. Phase 1: The Early Married Lives of Amy and Ray
The first phase concerns the beginning of the marriages of Amy and Ray
as well as the circumstances under which Jack and Ray first meet. The
genesis of Amy and Jack’s marriage is tragical and fatal. They meet acci-
dentally while hop-picking on Wick’s Farm in Co. Kent in August 1938
(23438). Although Amy is not particularly attracted to Jack, she gives
188 Markus Kempf
herself to him one day out of a youthful feeling of freedom and erotic
desire (237). This caprice results in an unwanted pregnancy, which leads to
marriage. Nine months later, in June 1939, June is born, who turns out to
be severely mentally handicapped (42). One year later, Amy and Jack go
on a belated honeymoon trip to Margate (252ff., 267). During their stay
there, Jack’s refusal to accept June’s disability becomes apparent for the
first time. Soon afterwards war is declared. On account of his domestic
problems and in order to escape from his domineering father who had
forced him, against his wishes, to enter his butcher’s business Jack vol-
unteers and is posted to Africa (42).
In 1944, while Jack is still in the army, Amy finds the orphaned baby
Vince Pritchett after an air raid and adopts him (42). Her motive is to find
a healthy “substitute child” (after June’s birth she cannot have any more
children) to pacify Jack and save their marriage (240).
Ray’s early life is described in less detail. He is the son of a scrap metal
merchant and trains as an insurance clerk. He, too, joins the army and is
posted to Africa, where he meets Jack, who, like him, comes from Ber-
mondsey. During his service in Africa two important incidents happen:
Ray saves Jack’s life and Jack shows him Amy’s photo, which impresses
him deeply (89, 170, 172). After the war Ray marries Carol Dixon and has
a daughter with her, Sue. As certain remarks by Ray indicate, his marriage
like Amy’s is not founded on true love but comes about spontane-
ously out of a caprice (cf. 39).
3.1.2. Phase 2: Amy’s and Ray’s Affair in the Sixties
The second phase starts years later in the mid-sixties and comprises vari-
ous incidents and circumstances that lead to the love affair between Amy
and Ray. Both their marriages, which from the outset had lacked firm
foundations, now enter a state of severe crisis. For Ray, things change
rapidly. First, his only daughter Sue informs him that she intends to emi-
grate with her boyfriend to his native Australia, marry him and build up a
livelihood with him. Though at first sceptical about this plan, Ray finally
gives his consent and even supplies her with the money for the journey
(out of the winnings from a horse-racing bet). At the same time, possibly
out of envy of her daughter’s new prospects in life, his wife Carol tells
him that she is dissatisfied with their marriage. In order to avert the
threatened separation Ray desperately tries to change his life: he gives up
his passion for betting and buys a camper to offer Carol more entertain-
ment through frequent short trips. But all to no avail. When her father
dies, Carol leaves Ray and starts a new life with another man.
In the meantime, Amy’s married situation has deteriorated, too. Her

original plan to resolve the conflict with Jack about June by adopting
Vince fails in every respect. This has to do with Jack’s constant quarrels
with Vince about his future career. Like his father, who had forced Jack to
enter the family business as a butcher (he himself had wanted to be a doc-
tor), he now tries the same with Vince, initially with success: Vince starts
training as a butcher. But after a while the adoptive son begins to resist.
When, in addition, Lenny’s daughter Sally becomes pregnant by him,
Vince flees and joins the army.
With Vince’s compensatory function thus removed, Amy and Jack are
again directly confronted with the smouldering family conflict about June,
which now breaks out into the open. Jack’s rejection of his daughter is
extreme. He tries to exclude her completely from his life. Although he
tolerates Amy’s twice weekly visits of June in her nursing home, he never
accompanies her. Instead of critically reflecting on his own attitude, he
tries to convince Amy of the futility of her visits. Jack’s rejection of June
increasingly alienates Amy, since his attitude compels her to choose be-
tween her roles of wife and mother, a dilemma she solves by opting for
the latter, without, however, leaving Jack (174).
In this situation Ray seizes his opportunity (170). When, in April 1966,
Ray offers to drive Amy to June’s home in his new camper, she accepts.
His considerate and gentle behaviour, also towards June, wins her over; an
erotic affair develops, which Ray experiences as a new beginning of life:
It was a bright breezy day in April. It was like this day, with Jack’s ashes. I felt,
Life can change, it can, even when you think it can’t anymore. (174)
In retrospect, it is obvious that their love fulfilment is premature at that
point in time and cannot constitute an irreversible event yet. On the one
hand, Amy is still married to Jack and therefore both morally and practi-
cally restricted in her mobility. On the other, at this very moment Vince
suddenly returns to London after a long absence, which heightens the risk
of an exposure of their affair. The main reason, however, why the affair
fails after a few weeks, is Amy’s excessive fixation on June. It is true that,
because of Ray, she temporarily overcomes her one-sided self-definition
as a mother, which is revealed by the fact that during the affair she ne-
glects her visits of June. But in the end this self-concept prevails again:
She said, ‘We ought to stop this, I ought to start seeing June again’, looking like a
nun who’d done a bunk from convent. She said, ‘I can’t not see June’. (283)
As a consequence, both characters fall back into the first semantic field
and become passive and “immobile” once more: Amy keeps visiting June
and adjusts to her unsatisfactory family situation. Ray settles for a life as a
bachelor and indulges his passion for betting. To a certain extent, his
situation even deteriorates: he breaks off the contact with his daughter
190 Markus Kempf
Sue. The stagnation and emptiness of his life is indirectly revealed by him
on Vince’s 40th birthday, when he remarks to his friends that their local
pub has never moved, although it is called “The Coach and Horses” (6).
3.2. The Plot-Development on the Extradiegetic Level:

Amy and Ray’s Transformations
It is only in the third phase, immediately before the beginning of the first
narrative, that the situation starts to change. Jack reaches the end of his
career and dreams of selling his butcher’s shop in order to buy a house in
Margate. At the end of his life he wants to return to its beginning and
attempt a new start with Amy in Margate. Although Jack does not admit it
to himself, it is clear that this wish is unrealistic: on the one hand, Amy
remains “fixated” on June and for that reason is not prepared to move
away from London; on the other hand, the proceeds from selling the shop
will not be enough to pay off the debts he has incurred because of years
of bad business and a loan he had taken out. Jack’s unrealistic plans for
the future are definitively shattered when he is diagnosed with stomach
cancer. When it dawns on him that he has to die he becomes acutely
aware of Amy’s extremely precarious financial situation on account of his
debts (£20,000). To solve this problem before his death, he devises a very
risky plan. He borrows £1,000 from Vince without giving any reason and
asks Ray to place a bet for that money on an outsider at very long odds.
Miraculously, Ray wins the bet and receives £33,000. As Jack dies before
Ray can inform him about the winnings and Vince is ignorant of Jack’s
plan, Ray is the only person who knows about the money. Ray does not
tell Amy about the winnings nor about the problem of the debts, though
he had spoken to her thrice between Jack’s death and the present journey
to Margate.
This is the point of departure for the basic narrative of Last Orders, on
the extradiegetic level. Within the stories of narration of these two charac-
ters, the novel now performs their renewed border crossing from the first
field of petrified self-concepts and ingrained patterns of behaviour to the
second field of activity, vitality and change.
Amy is the first to undergo a transformation. In the course of this
day’s confrontation with the past she realises that she has become as petri-
fied in her role as mother as Jack has in his vocational role as a butcher
enforced on him by his father:
This is where I belong, upstairs on this bus. […] I chose June not him. I watched
him set solid into Jack Dodds the butcher, Jack Dodds, high-class butcher, have a
bit of mince, missis, have a bit of chuck, because he couldn’t choose June too,
couldn’t choose what was his, it was all he had to do, and I thought I’m the one
who can still change. I did, once. But when he looked at me then, like he was
looking at someone I wasn’t, I knew I was stuck in a mould of my own. (228f.)
A little later she radically breaks with her old life:
What I’m trying to say is Goodbye June. Goodbye Jack. They seem like one and
the same thing. We’ve got to make our own lives now without each other, we’ve
got to go our different ways. I’ve got to think of my own future. It was some-
thing Ray said, about how much I was short.
You remember Ray, Uncle Ray? He and I came to visit you once, that summer I
missed those Thursdays.
I’ve got to be my own woman now. But I couldn’t have just stopped coming
without saying it to your face: Goodbye June. (278)
In parallel with Amy, Ray also undergoes a development on this journey,
exemplified by his changing plans what to do with the betting winnings,
which no one knows about. He oscillates between two alternatives: em-
bezzle the money and spend it on himself alone in his old age or tell Amy
about it and consider the money a symbol and the financial basis for a
joint new start (Cf. 13, 128, 134, 200, 207, 251, 282ff). Initially, he inclines
towards the first alternative, as is apparent from the lie he tells Vince at
the war memorial that he does not know anything about the £1,000
(134f.). A little later he still intends to keep the money and finance a trip
to his daughter in Australia (207). But when he reflects on his own past
life and becomes aware of his enduring love for Amy, he realises the rele-
vance of the money for the two of them, the opportunity it provides for a
fulfilled joint future:
Or maybe I should just give her the money, straight, clean. Here you are, Ame,
it’s thirty thousand, it’s to see you right. Don’t thank me, thank Jack and a horse.
Except then I can’t see how I couldn’t tell her. That it was sort of meant like a
sign, like a permit, like a blessing on the two of us, to carry on where we left it
off. (283)
At this time Ray is still afraid of telling Amy about his plans for her (for
that reason, apparently, he completely conceals the existence of the
money). So far, he has only had the negative experience of the failing af-
fair with Amy in the sixties and does not know that she has dissociated
herself both from Jack and June in the course of this day, the two main
causes why the relationship had failed in the past. What he lacks is the
courage to try his luck as light-heartedly as in the sixties, even at the risk
of failure (cf. 282f.). But in the end he does find this courage, decides
against lying and in favour of truthfulness and resolutely gives up his life
as a bachelor, as is emphasised when he tells Vince the truth about the
money and thus completes his personal transformation:
192 Markus Kempf
I grab his [Vince’s] arm, pulling it, squeezing it, and as I draw up close to him I
say, ‘I’ve got your thousand. I’ll give you back your thousand. I’ll explain.’ (290)
Although the text does not narrate the eventful ending of the love story,
the external and moral preconditions are now clearly favourable for Amy
and Ray’s union. 7 Both are no longer trapped in their marriages; both
have overcome their greatest problems and dissociated themselves from
their old lives. The £33,000 allow them to pay off the debts and finance
their new beginning together. The winnings also function as a compensa-
tion for Ray’s burden of guilt that he had incurred as Jack’s friend through
his affair with his wife. In addition, Ray inadvertently proves a “true fa-
ther” to Vince, for, by returning the loan of the £1,000, he enables him to
solve his present financial problems independently of his dubious business
partner Hussein (165ff.), thus “saving” Vince for a third time 8 . And fi-
nally: When Ray, acting as Vince’s true father, “saves” him from an Arab
of all people and thus symbolically repeats the saving of Jack during the
war in North Africa, his new paternal position paradoxically represents a
belated restitution of Jack’s failed fatherhood and thus of his entire exis-
tence. In this manner the new love relationship is morally sanctioned and
Jack acquires the status, as it were, of a secular martyr and saviour: He dies
for the “sinful love” of others, thereby redeeming them. 9
In retrospect, the reader recognises the peculiar teleological develop-
ment of Amy and Ray’s love and perceives, moreover, that they together
with Vince (and possibly with Sue, too) form the “true” family. Although
the unification has not been performed yet, the ending makes everything
coherent, legitimises the entire development and indicates the complete
replacement of the old by the new, the false by the true, the hidden by the
open and the bad by the good. This result has not been brought about by
anyone deliberately, and the characters are predominantly unaware of its
significance it just happened. This development is the direct opposite of
a tragic catastrophe it is pure luck and perfect happiness.
_____________
7 See Mecklenburg (2000: 174).

8 The two earlier occasions were procuring money for Sally’s abortion and selling the scrap
yard, thereby enabling Vince to set himself up as a car dealer, in fulfilment of his career as-
piration.
9 Thus Ray’s prayer at the end of the novel has been fulfilled: “[…] I hold up the jar, shaking
it, like I should chuck it out to sea too, a message in a bottle, Jack Arthur Dodds, save our
souls […].” (294).
4. The Other Characters:

Analogies with and Contrasts to Amy and Ray’s Transformations
The relevance of Amy and Ray’s transformations is further underscored

by their contrast to the other characters, who all remain static. 10 It is true
that Jack plans a new beginning in Margate for his marriage but unlike
Amy and Ray he is unable and unwilling to change himself as a prerequi-
site, especially concerning his attitude towards June and Vince, as well as
with respect to his self-delusion about the “dream job” as a butcher. He
has learnt nothing from his past and missed the chance to change in the
sense of becoming his “true, authentic self”, which is highlighted by the
fact that the only chapter headed with his name is narrated not by him,
but by his father. His transformation takes place only after his death, as
mentioned, in his change of status from a normal human being to a secu-
lar martyr. 11
Vince is constructed as the exact reverse of Jack. He repeats the lat-
ter’s life but without the negative consequences: He, too, makes a woman
pregnant and then flees to the army but the child is aborted and he can
return and start again from the beginning; he, too, is urged by his father to
enter the butcher’s business but he resists and can pursue his preferred
career. Accordingly, his problem is not self-renunciation because of un-
critical compliance with others’ expectations but, on the contrary, his ob-
session with the ideal of complete independence and mobility. As an or-
phan and outsider he attempts to base his identity on absolute autonomy
but is constantly being entangled in complicated and morally dubious
stories (Sally and Kathy), from which he has to be saved by Ray, which
inadvertently reveals the purely illusory quality of his self-concept. His
wife Mandy’s attitude is similar. When she flees from her mother and her
stepfather’s home at the age of 17, she seems vehemently to reject her
family roots but in reality remains firmly bound to her past through her
sentimental, idealising attachment to her father, who left them long ago.
In their orientation towards the illusory and one-sided ideals of autonomy,
mobility and the future Vince and Mandy represent the modern genera-
tion of sons and daughters within the novel.
Lenny is primarily marked by his cognitive limitations. Although dis-
satisfied with his personal situation (unloved job, financial problems, his
daughter’s failed marriage and prostitution), he is incapable of rationally
_____________
10 For a different assessment, see Mecklenburg (2000: 180).

11 Cf. the brief, isolated reference by Wheeler (1999: 78) and Shaffer (2006: 204): “Jack’s
death is figured in ultimately life-affirming terms”.
194 Markus Kempf
conducting his life and improving his circumstances owing to his low
intelligence and eruptive emotionality. Still seeing himself as the “danger-
ous boxer” Gunner Tate makes him a laughing stock.
Within the circle of contrastive characters, June presents the most ex-
treme example of stasis. Because of her mental disability she has no mem-
ory, so that she lacks the elementary human capacity of learning from her
past and developing her personality she permanently stays the same. But
unlike the other characters she cannot be made responsible for this.
Victor does not develop either. But in contrast to all other characters,
he alone need not change. From the beginning he is depicted as a harmo-
nious, balanced, dignified personality. In contrast to Jack, he enters his
father’s business as an undertaker out of his free will and never regrets this
decision. His marriage is based on love. He has a cordial relationship with
his two sons both will continue the family business. As he is perma-
nently concerned with death, transitoriness and remembrance, he lives in
total harmony with the world and with himself. In this respect he embod-
ies the author’s ideal concept within the world of the text. His maxim
“You shouldn’t judge” may be taken as an invitation to the reader to as-
sess the characters’ unsolved problems within the context of the history of
their lives, instead of judging them in the sense of moral condemnation. 12
Amy and Ray’s eventful transformation is not only foregrounded by
the immobility of the other characters, but it is also prefigured and paral-
leled by the embedded stories of Carol (Ray’s wife) and Andy (Sue’s Aus-
tralian boyfriend). Like the two protagonists, Carol begins a new life only
after someone’s death (that of her father) and this beginning also concerns
a new love relationship. In a different way Andy follows a similar schema:
He, too, can begin his new life with Sue only after having come to terms
with the English roots of his Australian family, that is to say, with his own
past. Thus Last Orders presents two more events among the minor char-
acters.
5. Intertextual and Historical Contexts and the Reception Event
In addition to such intratextual relations, Amy and Ray’s developments

are further structured and intensified in their general significance through
intertextual references to several British and American texts. The novel
alludes to these intertexts only implicitly by way of motifs, analogies in
theme and setting or narrative technique. These references lie above or
_____________
12 Cf. Weidle (2006: 136).

outside the consciousness of the characters, and it is the task of the reader
to notice and interpret them. In contrast to openly postmodernist novels,
which typically thematize intertextuality through their (extradiegetic) nar-
rators in order to emphasise the fictionality and constructedness of char-
acters, plot and setting and question conventional concepts of reality, Last
Orders does not flaunt its pervasive intertextual allusions, the more so as
an extradiegetic narrator is absent. For this reason, intertextuality does not
serve here to undermine the reality effect of the happenings, i.e. the cogni-
tive processes of the characters, but to charge them with additional alle-
gorical-philosophical dimensions of meaning.
A central intertext for Last Orders is William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay
Dying of 1930. The most obvious analogy between the two novels con-
cerns the multi-perspectivism of their mediation technique. Like Last Or-
ders, As I Lay Dying presents the happenings performatively through the
interior monologues of the various characters, whose names head the
respective chapters. 13 Of more semantic relevance, however, are the
analogies (and differences) in regard to thematic aspects and to the plot.
Faulkner’s novel narrates the journey of Anse Bundren with his sons
Cash, Vardaman, Darl and Jewel, his daughter Dewey Dell as well as the
dead body of his deceased wife Addie to Jefferson to bury her there
among her “people” in compliance with her last wish. On this journey the
family meets with numerous obstacles and difficulties, such as a flood-
swollen river they have to cross, a fire in the barn where they are put up,
Cash’s serious injury and Darl’s mental derangement. After a strenuous
nine days full of privations they reach Jefferson and bury Addie.
Anse Bundren is portrayed as false, lazy, greedy and extremely egocen-
tric. He claims to be unable to work for health reasons and has his chil-
dren and Jewel (who is not his son) work their farm. He has no sense of
responsibility and despises, deceives and exploits his family for his own
selfish aims. He merely plays the role of the mourning widower who seeks
to fulfil his wife’s last wish. His real purpose for the journey to Jefferson is
to get a set of new teeth and remarry. Shortly after the funeral he appears
well-groomed and accompanied by a woman whom he presents to his
children with the sentence (which closes the book): “Meet Mrs Bundren”.
The extensive analogies, combined with significant differences, be-
tween the two novels serve to highlight the specific eventful plot structure
of Last Orders. The basic narrative in both cases concerns a quest-like
pilgrimage to a burial site for the funeral of a dead person, but while
_____________
13 The similarities extend to such details as that both novels include a chapter that consists of
only one sentence and another one that is spoken by a dead person.
196 Markus Kempf
Faulkner stresses the ulterior motives of most participants, their mutual

tensions and animosities and their separateness from each other, Swift
describes the shared emotional attachment of the group members to the
deceased and his relevance to their lives. And in contrast with Anse, who
does not undergo any significant change (exemplifiying modernist scepti-
cism of eventfulness), Swift emphasises the capacity of his protagonists
for development and transformation. The confrontation with death in-
duces Ray and Amy unlike Anse to reflect on their personal past, re-
consider their habitual attitudes and re-orient themselves. The marriage
motif that is explicitly and implicitly taken up at the end of both novels is
of completely different significance. Since Anse has not changed and will
not change in future, his new marriage is no more than a repetition of the
bad old state of affairs. Swift, however, implicitly presents Amy and Ray’s
possible marriage as a symbol of change, renewal and happiness.
Two further important intertexts for Swift’s novel are Geoffrey Chau-
cer’s The Canterbury Tales (ca. 13901400) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land (1922). The Canterbury Tales shares the motif of the journey or pil-
grimage with Last Orders, also the temporal setting, April, and the destina-
tion (Canterbury Cathedral, which in Chaucer’s fragment is never reached,
in Swift’s novel functions only as a “stopover”) as well as an inn or pub as
a starting point (Chaucer’s “Tabard Inn”, Swift’s “Coach and Horses”).
The significance of Eliot’s The Waste Land is threefold: a similar thematic
focus on stagnation vs. change, love, meaning of life and remembrance;
the shared motif of a failing new start in a love relationship; and the sea-
side town of Margate associated with this motif. Margate was Jack’s sym-
bol for the renewal of his love relationship with Amy, which failed be-
cause of his unwillingness to change and his pre-mature death. The posi-
tive connotation of Margate is also the reason for his wish to be buried
there. In its third section (“The Fire Sermon”), The Waste Land contains a
passage promising the new beginning of a relationship associated with
Margate:
‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised “a new start.”
I made no comment. What should I resent?’
‘On Margate Sands.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect

Nothing.’ (V. 296305) 14
These two intertexts have the function of confronting the philosophical
concept of human life underlying Last Orders with two different (religious
and secular, resp.) concepts from earlier periods, the late Middle Ages and
Modernism, thereby further specifying the eventful plot-development in
its significance. While Chaucer’s text places Last Orders against the hori-
zon of a meaningful and divinely guaranteed universal order with a plan of
salvation promising eternal bliss in heaven as a reward for a morally ex-
emplary life on earth, 15 the allusion to The Waste Land associates Swift’s
novel with the pessimistic modernist notion of a fragmented, chaotic
world without Christian transcendence, without hope for salvation, trans-
formation and fulfilment. As the overall plot of Last Orders shows, Swift
combines both concepts. Thus, he takes the element of hope from Chau-
cer’s Christian world view, shifting it into the secular sphere in the sense
of the general possibility of change and blissful happiness on earth and
divesting it of all aspects of religious spirituality and sexual abstinence.16
From Eliot he takes up, on the one hand, the open ending and, on the
other, the modern experience of contingency and immanence, without,
however, going as far as depicting the world and human life as irredeema-
bly fragmented and totally paralysed.
The result is a differentiated and balanced picture of man’s existence.
Life is neither guided by a divine instance nor is it controlled by man
alone. Instead, man is continuously confronted with coincidences and
calamities, which because of his cognitive limitation he is unable to fore-
see and avert. It is possibly due to this experience that he tends to cling to
certain patterns of behaviour and decisions and reject change. On the
other hand, he has the gift of memory and remembrance, which enables
him, especially when confronted with his own mortality, to review and re-
interpret his past and thereby change himself. Moreover, as Ray’s skilful
operations in horse betting and (symbolically) in his profession as an in-
surance agent demonstrate, to a certain extent, man is able to plan and
direct his earthly luck by means of rationality and intelligence.17
_____________
14 Eliot (1973: 74).

15 In this context it is insignificant that this traditional concept is already partly undermined
by Chaucer.
16 The purely secular quality of this hope is also stressed by the earthy working-class language
and humour.
17 “People think I’m Lucky Johnson and it’s all done by sixth sense, and sometimes it is,
sometimes a flutter’s a flutter. But the reason why I’m quids-in, just about, with the nags,
and Jack Dodds and Lenny Tate won’t ever be, is because everyone wants to believe in
198 Markus Kempf
The coupling of these aspects results in a neo-humanistic concept,

which defines human dignity on the basis of man’s conflict between his
earthly imperfection and transitoriness on the one hand and his heroic,
partly successful, partly failing, revolts against these, on the other, which is
also implied by the epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial: “But
man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave” 18
[emphasis added]. In other words: The realisation of a fulfilled existence is
a game of chance, but man can, and ought to, achieve this fulfilment
through remembrance and action, as long as he lives and in spite of the
risk of failure. The point in life is to make good use of all possible oppor-
tunities, as Jack’s father phrases it in terms of his trade: “Whole art of
butchery’s in avoiding wastage” (285).
Against the background of this philosophical dimension of meaning as
established through Chaucer’s and Eliot’s intertexts, Ray, Victor and Jack
can be said to acquire a quasi-allegorical status: Ray stands for the realistic
hope of fulfilled happiness, Victor for the positive acceptance of death as
an integral part of life, Jack for the perishable quality of the flesh.
Swift’s specific mediation technique in Last Orders places the reader in
a potentially superordinate position above every single character, who is
unavoidably enclosed within his or her separate subjective consciousness.
No one in the novel has such a comprehensive view of all the characters
and their minds. From this position the reader has to reconstruct the
complex individual plotlines and their meaning on the basis of the charac-
ters’ separate recollections and reflections, the anachronic-elliptical pres-
entation of past and present incidents and the various intertextual allu-
sions. As far as Amy and Ray’s plotline is concerned, it is only the reader
who is aware of the decisive changes in both their attitudes which make
their eventful union possible and probable in the future. Since the event
does not actually occur in the course of the happenings and can as yet be
anticipated only in the reader’s consciousness, the novel may be said to
present a reception event.
As to the historical context of plot and eventfulness, Last Orders is
clearly set against the pervasive postmodernist tendencies of the final dec-
ades of the 20th century and the concomitant erosion of traditional cer-
tainties and stabilities, with special regard to principles of morality and
_____________
hunch bets, and it may look like luck but it’s ninety-per-cent careful clerking, its ninety-per-
cent doing your sums. I aint worked in that insurance office for nothing. People think it’s
horses from heaven, answering your prayers, but it’s learning how to beat the bookie, and
if you want to beat the book-keeper, keep a book” (231). Cf. also the chapter “Ray’s Rules”
(202).
18 The quotation also contains a critical remark on human pretensions in certain burial cus-
toms.
concepts of reality. 19 In a moral respect, 20 the novel endorses a concept of

behaviour which is based on responsibility, love and care for others, 21
rational self-determination and readiness to act in combination with the
self-awareness of one’s needs and wishes as well as one’s limitations and
mistakes. An important aspect is the problem of guilt and the necessity of
atonement, to make up for the damage or suffering inflicted on other
people, as centrally exemplified by Jack’s death, which inadvertently,
behind his back, as it were enables Amy and Ray to live their love.
Though ultimately derived from Christian principles, the morality en-
dorsed by the plot is purely secular and humanistic. In a literary respect,
the novel emphatically generates a reality effect 22 , the impression that one
is directly witnessing people’s thoughts and actions in a socially and cul-
turally specific, recognisable world (a middle- and lower-class milieu in
London and South England). This effect is pervasively created by the
setting, the vernacular used by the characters in their soliloquies, the im-
pression of seemingly unmediated on-going processes in the minds of
people, the absence of a visible narrator and mediator. The realistic repre-
sentation of characters and setting as deliberately, artificially manipulated
is played down. The numerous intertextual allusions are subliminal. They
are not utilised, as is the case in overtly postmodernist novels, to fore-
ground the literary nature of the text and distance the reader.
However, even though the structure of the novel does not openly
draw attention to the literary, manipulated, constructed quality of the story
world, the knowledgeable reader may, of course, notice all the devices,
which like the intertextuality are latently present, and accordingly read the
novel (as in this analysis) as an artifice. Seen in this light, Last Orders may
be classified as an example of what Linda Hutcheon (1980: 31ff., 71ff.)
calls “covert narcissism”, i.e. implicit self-referentiality.
Edited and translated by Peter Hühn
_____________
19 The historical position of the novel is defined by several critics as a general tension be-
tween traditional and (post-)modern tendencies, such as the opposition between moralist
attitudes and their metafictional erosion in Weidle (2006: 128, 138ff.), a paradoxical synthe-
sis between unity and diversity in Hartung-Brückner (parts 1 and 3), a new humanism vs.
postmodern carelessness and emotional atrophy in Widdowson (2001: 212, 218).
20 Cf. Wheeler (1999: 65f.); Mecklenburg (2000: 115f., 174, 180f.).
21 However, this ovrall positive impression is slightly undermined by the fact that Amy seems
to be abandoning June, her disabled and totally helpless daughter.
22 Cf. Barthes (1989).
200 Markus Kempf
References
Swift, Graham (1996). Last Orders (London: Picador).

Eliot, T. S. (1973). Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber).
————
Barthes, Roland (1989). The Rustle of Language, tr. R. Howard (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Pr.).
Cooper, Pamela (2002). Graham Swift’s ‘Last Orders’: A Reader’s Guide (New York &
London: Continuum).
Genette, Gérard (1980 [1972]). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, tr. J. E. Lewin
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP).
Hartung-Brückner, Heike (n.d.). “History and ‘Englishness’ in Graham Swift’s Last
Orders”, Pt. 1: The Question of Value: Paradoxes of History and Contem-
poraneity; Pt. 2: The Uses of History in Swift’s Works; Pt. 3: (Re)Constructions
of History and (De)Constructions of “Englishness”. Postimperial and Post-
colonial Literature in English. No Date. 6 October 2009
(www.postcolonialweb.org/uk/gswift/lastorders/hhb1[2,3].html)
Hutcheon, Linda (1980). Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (New York
& London: Methuen).
Mecklenburg, Susanne (2000). Martin Amis und Graham Swift: Erfolg durch boden-
losen Moralismus im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman (Heidelberg: Winter).
Shaffer, Brian W. (2006). Reading the Novel in England 19502000 (Malden, MA &
Oxford: Blackwell), 195211.
Weidle, Roland (2006). “Humanistische Utopie oder historiographische Metafiktion?
Graham Swifts Last Orders (1996)”, in Cool Britannia: Literarische Selbst-verge-
wisserungen vor der Jahrtausendwende, ed. N. Greiner & R. Weidle (Trier:
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag), 12745.
Wheeler, Wendy (1999). “Melancholic Modernity and Contemporary Grief: The
Novels of Graham Swift”, in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and
Theories of the Present, ed. R. Luckhurst & P. Marks (Harlow: Longman), 6379.
Widdowson, Peter (2001). “The Novels of Graham Swift”, in Literature in Context,
ed. R. Rylance & J. Simons (Basingstoke: Palgrave), 20924.
17 Conclusion
Peter Hühn
The preceding plot analyses have shown that the selected English novels
and tales from the late Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century all com-
prise an event, a decisive turning point, as the central feature of their nar-
rative sequence or plot-development, which constitutes their tellability,
demonstrating at the same time that this event may take a wide variety of
forms, including the failure, erosion, reversal or lack of an eventful turn,
e.g. in the shape of a negative event, which in itself then counts as signifi-
cant and, in a different way, eventful. The form and meaning of the re-
spective eventfulness will now be discussed from the following perspec-
tives: (1) the thematic dimension of the event: the prototypical eventful-
ness of the fairy tale as reference pattern, (2) the prototypical events and
their variations through the combination with schemata, (3) the contextu-
alization of eventfulness, (4) the localization of events within the dimen-
sions of the narrative setup.
1. Prototypical Eventfulness: The Fairy Tale
For the purpose of describing, assessing and analysing the variability of

events in fiction it is useful to draw on prototype theory and employ a
prototypical example of eventful plot-structure as a general frame of ref-
erence. The (folk or) fairy tale 1 may serve as such a prototype of eventful
narration, on account of the simple archaic structure both in its plot-
development and turning points and in its presentation and mediation. 2
“Cinderella”, because of its long history and world-wide dissemination, is
a suitable example. Its main features are as follows. With respect to medi-
acy, a fairy tale has a heterodiegetic narrator who does not appear as an
individual; the narrative act is not thematized; the abstract (implied) au-
_____________
1 For a recent overview of research on the fairy tale, cf. e.g. Pöge-Alder ( 2007).
2 Cf. Hühn & Kiefer (2005: 23435). Wolf (2002: 35–37, 43-53) has employed the fairy tale as
a prototype of fictional literary narration for the purposes of a comparison with narration in
other media, using “Bluebeard” as an example.
202 Peter Hühn
thor is (ideologically) congruent with the narrator; external focalization is

used; narration is retrospective throughout; and the event is located within
the dimension of the happenings. With respect to sequentiality, the course
of the happenings is markedly eventful; the happenings and the event
have a physical, social status (i.e. they are not essentially located in a hu-
man mind); and central conventional frames and scripts are activated (e.g.
the progressive course of an individual’s life as a general frame, the act of
proving oneself in a series of tests followed by a reward as a script). In
concrete thematic terms primarily two frames are activated and combined:
love and marriage (the relation to the other sex) and social position (ac-
quiring the appropriate social role, position, and, often, occupation, typi-
cally connected with an elevation in social status, or, sometimes, the re-
gaining of an inherited but denied high rank). The events consist in find-
ing and gaining a suitable sexual partner in marriage on the one hand and,
often in conjunction with that, gaining a prestigious high social position
(e.g. king or queen). These two events, usually interrelated, are frequently
connected with another basic eventful change – the transition from an
adolescent to an adult status and the achievement of an independent, ma-
ture, full life. In this sense the prototypical fairy tale features a positive
event (“a happy ending”). The frames and events therefore concern the
fundamental dimensions of the existence of an individual in a socially
specific context, in other words, they refer to the extratextual conditions
and needs of human life in general, with possibly transcultural and
transhistorical validity: forming an essential emotional attachment and
social nucleus (also as a basis for procreation) and securing an economi-
cally and socially stable position in the collective. For the reader the degree
of eventfulness is not very high since the prototypical fairy tale custom-
arily ends with the successful double transition, which is therefore to be
expected; but the protagonist perceives the change as highly eventful since
in the concrete constellation he or she is confronted with seemingly in-
surmountable obstacles and succeeds only through supernatural assistance
and/or on account of his/her own superior worth. 3
_____________
3 For a summary of the basic plot structure of a great many fairy tales, cf. e.g. Propp (1968),
who reconstructs the plot of fairy tales as a sequence of functions; Holbek (1987: 410î34),
who subdivides the syntagmatic structure of fairy tales into five moves; Ashliman (2004:
4144, 4549), who distinguishes a three-step development (separation/departure, initiation,
return to society) and refers to the two aims of “upward mobility” and courtship/marriage;
and Freund (2005: 88î90, 93î95), who describes the hero’s/heroine’s search for his/her
true self and the general movement from lack and loss to fulfilment and redemption.
Conclusion 203
Turning to this prototype as a heuristic (but not normative) point of

reference makes it possible to give a clear outline of forms of eventfulness
in narrative fiction. A survey of the novels and tales analysed above re-
veals that almost all of these texts activate at least one of the two funda-
mental frames featuring the respective event relevant to the fairy tale,
albeit in culturally and socially as well as historically specific contexts:
finding a suitable sexual partner and gaining an appropriate position in
society. The great majority combine both frames and events in various
constellations and different degrees of realization, including forms of fail-
ure. Some of the texts concentrate on only one of these plotlines. The
specific structure and development of these events in the individual texts
is produced by the combination with other frames and scripts and it is
through these variable combinations that the historical and cultural con-
text-dependence of the eventfulness in the stories and novels is condi-
tioned.
2. The Two Prototypical Events and Their Variations:

The Combination of Schemata
In the following, the shape and type of eventfulness in the selected texts
will be reconstructed, on a high level of abstraction, against the back-
ground of the prototype and with regard to modifying factors (especially
frames and scripts) as indicators of the respective socio-cultural contexts.
To be sure, these analyses will not do justice to the overall complexity and
semantic richness of these texts in reference to setting, characterization,
style and perspective, but it is proposed that the tellability in as much as it
rests on the central eventful plot-development is essentially captured in
these schematic reconstructions. Remarks on the degree of eventfulness
included in the following overview are to be understood in relation to the
system of norms presupposed and implied by the novels or tales in ques-
tion within their respective contemporary cultural and social contexts. The
degree will be different for readers with normative positions deviating
from that of the texts and, especially, for readers of a later period and/or
from a different cultural or social background.
A first group of texts Richardson’s Pamela, Defoe’s Moll Flanders,
Fielding’s Tom Jones from the 18th century and (with a characteristic rever-
sion) Lawrence’s “Fanny and Annie” from the 20th century combine
these two prototypical events in various ways, structurally comparable to
the fairy tale. Richardson’s Pamela wins her suitor and, through marriage
with him, a high (aristocratic) status. Defoe’s Moll finally reaches a
wealthy, respected position in society, together with her favourite husband
204 Peter Hühn
Jemy. These two novels combine the social or socio-economic ascent in

different forms with a moral-religious frame, thereby enabling, justifiying
and sanctioning it. Pamela’s exemplary sexual morality and Moll’s contrite
religious repentance and conversion are presented as reasons or justi-
fications for their socio-economic advancement, in each case (allegedly)
sanctioned by divine providence, which, however, is also subject to doubt
and suspicion: Both protagonists are liable to be accused of hypocrisy
(depending on whether the moral attitude is accepted as genuine or seen
through as a means to ulterior purposes a problem of consciousness).
Whereas in Richardson the social elevation is intimately linked to the love
plot, Defoe adds it as a corroborative secondary reward. The degree of
eventfulness is high in both cases, primarily because of the strong resis-
tance of the boundary (i.e. the rigidity of the class division), and, further-
more, because of the deviation from the available scripts (the conven-
tional stories of aristocrats seducing and “ruining” lower-class girls and
the protagonist’s execution as the standard ending of criminal biographies,
respectively).
Fielding and Lawrence provide something like an aristocratic and a
working-class counterpart to these two middle-class plots of social ad-
vancement. Fielding’s Tom Jones is enabled to perform the eventful
boundary crossing to the high social standing as the squire’s heir and the
husband of his equally aristocratic beloved Sophia on account of the
maturation of his humane morality as well as his exercise of prudence and
acquisition of world knowledge. Since it turns out that he is in fact of
aristocratic birth, he thus becomes what he already is, but he has to earn
and thereby justify his elevated position through the appropriate moral
conduct and cognitive attitude. The high degree of eventfulness is here
not determined by a crossing of the class-boundary (which does not occur
after all) but by the energy and perfidy of Tom’s enemies as well as his
own immature and imprudent impulsiveness. In Lawrence’s story, Fanny’s
(long-delayed) love-fulfilment with Harry is directly linked to the return to
her working-class origins (after having risen to middle-class respectability),
the emphatic reversal, as it were, of Richardson’s and Defoe’s scheme of
social ascent. Fanny’s social descent to her former working-class suitor is
rendered as a positive event, essentially brought about by a changed men-
tal and emotional attitude, the rejection of puritanic sublimation and the
emphasis on sensual passion and fulfilled sexuality as the basis of the love
relationship. The emphatic reversal of the established conventional script
of middle-class morality and middle-class notions of social success consti-
tutes a high degree of eventfulness.
These four successful examples of near-prototypical eventfulness can
be compared and contrasted with two cases of failure in both plotlines,
Conclusion 205
one from the 19th, the other from the 17th century Dickens and Behn. In
several respects, Dickens’s Great Expectations discredits and revises Pam-
ela’s and Moll’s rise by a contrary coupling with the moral frame: The
socially superior status of a gentleman is first devalued and then defini-
tively contaminated morally, namely through Pip’s reprehensible attitude
and behaviour (arrogance, condescension, superficiality) and finally
through the criminal association of the origin of his wealth. The expected
gift of advancement into the aristocracy is abruptly cancelled and later re-
placed with a moderate rise to a middle-class position, earned through
active work and justified by a new moral sense of sympathy and solidarity,
but with the love-fulfilment denied, at least for the time being. The disap-
pointment of these two great expectations ranks higher on the scale of
eventfulness than the final moderate success, which in turn, on the other
hand, is heightened in its value by the ascription of moral maturation and
active personal achievement to Pip’s development. In Behn’s Oroonoko,
the eventful movement, usually expected within the aristocratic romance
convention, of the noble couple Oroonoko and Imoinda across the bor-
der towards fulfilment and superior social status in freedom fails com-
pletely and blatantly (in their enslavement and eventual brutal deaths).
This is brought about mainly by two adverse factors: the ruthless domi-
nance in the colony of mercantile capitalism (which overrules moral con-
cerns, turns the couple into commodities as slaves and eliminates them
when perceived as threats to the political system), the internal weakness of
the aristocratic code of honour and trust (which does not reckon with
deceit and betrayal) and Oroonoko’s aristocratic inability to adjust to his
new European environment (and learn from his experience). The degree
of eventfulness (albeit of a negative direction) is very high on account
both of the radical deviation from the romance code and the violation of
aristocratic values and moral norms.
Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit” presents a structurally different
variation of the failure of the prototypical plot. While for Anna’s (limited)
consciousness the marriage signifies the fulfilment of her love as well as
social advancement, Charles is abruptly disillusioned in both respects,
discovering that he had fallen in love with Edith through Anna as well as
realizing that Anna on account of her simple-mindedness and illiteracy
will mean a social impairment for him. This perverse outcome is brought
about by the interference of two conventional scripts for sex-relations:
Charles’s courting of Anna had started off as a quasi-aristocratic superfi-
cial love affair (the enjoyment of a socially inferior country-girl) but was
then turned into an emotionally and intellectually profound interest in her,
when in their epistolary communication Anna’s simple mind is replaced
with Edith’s more refined, perceptive and stimulating spirit. And Edith’s
206 Peter Hühn
attitude in turn is motivated by her unfulfilled desire for love because she
is trapped in a purely conventional marriage, which induces her to pro-
mote (vicariously) Anna’s prototypical love plot. Direction and degree of
eventfulness differ according to perspective: moderate and positive for
Anna, high and negative for Charles (likewise for Edith), low (because
announced beforehand) and negative for the reader.
Numerous texts deviate more extensively from the prototype by con-
centrating on only one of the two plotlines, either love (Swift, Fowles,
Chaucer, James, Mansfield) or social position (Conrad, Joyce).
Swift’s main plotline in Last Orders is Ray’s and Amy’s love-story,
structured as a realistic version of the romance-script. After a first abortive
attempt at fulfilment in the past as a clandestine affair, then blocked, how-
ever, by moral norms, the present happenings prepare the ground for an
imminent crossing of the boundary in the near future, envisaging even the
establishment of a family complete with children (Vince, Sue). The driving
force of this development is not so much the lovers’ conscious intentions
and plans, as the inadvertently shifting circumstances, especially changes
in their attitudes and allegiances, sanctioned by Jack’s death as a kind of
symbolic sacrifice. Ray’s and Amy’s coming union has to be considered as
highly eventful, not only on account of the many obstacles in the past but
also because the lovers cannot as yet foresee this eventual fulfilment (only
the readers can do so as a result of their superior perspective). The con-
text is the emphasis on the value of life and living fulfilment against the
background of disease, mortality and death. In “Enigma”, Fowles ends his
story of uncovering Fielding’s disappearance as the attempted escape from
literary and social restrictions through death by presenting an alternative
positive way in the intense passionateness of love-fulfilment, which is
therefore highly eventful but also profoundly paradoxical because both are
literary and social nonetheless. Chaucer, in “The Miller’s Tale”, narrates
three differing sex-relationships, all focused on the same woman (Ali-
soun), contrasting the successful consummation of a clandestine purely
sexual love affair (Nicholas) with two failing or unsuccessful relationships:
romantic courtship (Absalon) and conventional marriage (with John),
which because of the lack of passion induces the woman to seek gratifica-
tion elsewhere (comparable to Hardy). However, this consummation, a
one-time event, does not count as a permanent border crossing and is
marred, moreover, by the male lover’s subsequent humiliation by punish-
ment for overreaching himself. These successful completions of love-plots
can be contrasted with two examples of failure. James’s “The Beast in the
Jungle” traces the drawn-out process of the male protagonist (John
Marcher) missing the potential happy love-fulfilment (with May Bartram)
on account of extreme self-centredness. Mansfield’s “At the Bay” contains
Conclusion 207
an episode of erotic disappointment, Beryl shying away from a possible

sordid love-affair, which is structurally congruent with numerous other
frustrating experiences which occur on this day.
Whereas in these cases the main emphasis is on the protagonist’s love
relationship, two stories feature changes exclusively in terms of occupa-
tion and social position, one successfully, the other unsuccessfully. Con-
rad’s narrator in The Shadow-Line eventfully succeeds in proving his com-
petence for the captaincy, the leadership of the ship’s community, while
Joyce’s “Grace” narrates the disillusionment (for the reader, though not
for Kernan and the other characters) of a hollow rehabilitation of social
respectability, making the non-achievement of eventful change the point
of the story.
Finally, a couple of texts – Woolf’s “An Unwritten Novel”, Fowles’s
“The Enigma” – establish a different kind of frame altogether, a literary,
metanarrative or metafictional frame, i.e. the main emphasis here is laid
not so much on the concrete incidents on the level of the happenings as
on the type and selection of happenings as such and their reality status as
well as the function and power of the narrator. This new frame implies a
rejection of conventional literary plots involving suspicion and critique of
events as decisive changes. Eventfulness is being problematized in other
novels and tales, too, but generally as a result of adverse or disad-
vantageous (social) circumstances in the story world (Behn, Dickens,
Hardy, Joyce) or of (psychological) failings on the part of characters
(James). Woolf and Fowles imply a more fundamental, meta-level or con-
ceptual reason for avoiding events. They present different ways of turning
away from (positive or negative) eventful plot-developments, but in doing
so, paradoxically (and inadvertently) introduce an event of a different
kind: transgressing narrative levels. Woolf’s narrator performs the re-
placement of an out-moded, conventionally eventful plot of a negative
turn with a more “real”, ordinary one, devoid of spectacular events as in
itself eventful (a presentation event). Fowles’s story shows a comparable
escape from literary (and social) confinement, transcending conventional
eventfulness, towards more vitality and freedom, which as such is eventful
on a higher level. In both cases, this shift ultimately constitutes a basically
literary move in its own right. One can add, by way of a less radical exam-
ple of rejecting conventionally evenful plot-structures, Mansfield’s “At the
Bay”, where a coherent sequence leading to (or crucially failing to lead to)
a decisive, vital change is replaced with a more or less unconnected series
of unspectacular, everyday, inconclusive incidents.
In varying degrees, the final event, whether of a successful or an un-
successful type, comprises both a factual change in the protagonist’s exis-
tence (in terms of his or her social position or personal relationships) and,
208 Peter Hühn
in addition, a cognitive or mental development (in terms of a new con-

sciousness of, or a new insight into, his or her situation). In numerous,
mostly later and especially modernist texts, this cognitive dimension of
insight and consciousness seems to gain significance and become more
prominent: Pip’s sudden revelation about the true background of his ex-
pectations in Dickens, Charles’s sudden disillusionment about the real
identity of his beloved in Hardy, the reader’s (if not Kernan’s) insight into
the superficiality of the latter’s social rehabilitation in Joyce, John
Marcher’s final realization of the missed opportunity of a happy love ful-
filment in James, the narrator’s sudden realization of the pure fictionality
of her ordinary-life-based story-telling in Woolf, the characters’ discovery
of their own fictional status in Fowles or the reader’s superior view en-
abling them to anticipate the lovers’ final union in Swift. In a way, these
texts superimpose an additional superordinate frame consciousness and
knowledge on the two prototypical schemata.
3. The Contextualization of Eventfulness: An Overview
The individual analyses have indicated the specific ways in which the
eventfulness of changes (or their failure) in the texts is dependent on con-
textual factors, i.e. social and cultural phenomena, more precisely: on cer-
tain social, moral, religious or ideological discourses at the time of writing.
The following general overview will provide a brief, short-hand summary
of the various types of contextual reference.
The most frequent and most basic reference concerns the class struc-
ture of Britain, the strict division between the middle and upper and be-
tween the lower and middle classes, which has become somewhat less
rigid since the 19th century. This social division (especially between the
two upper layers of society) forms the context in one way or another of
eight texts: Behn, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Dickens, Hardy, Joyce and
Lawrence. All these novels or stories are focused either on the successful
or the eventually failing attempt to cross the boundary between two
classes, predominantly upwards, but in one case, Lawrence, downwards
(as a provocative reversal of the conventional trend). The actual plot-
development with respect to the eventful change of the social position
(frequently linked to the question of love-fulfilment) or its failure is then
largely determined by the influence of, and correlation with, a psychologi-
cal or ideological frame, the factor of moral, religious or ideological atti-
tudes, on the part of the protagonist and/or other characters. In some
cases, the moral or religious attitude enables and/or sanctions the border
crossing: Pamela’s insistence on chastity in Richardson, Moll’s penitent
Conclusion 209
conversion in Defoe, Tom’s acquisition of prudence, world knowledge

and sympathy in Fielding and Fanny’s liberation of her vitality and sexual
sensuality in Lawrence. In others, it counteracts and prevents the decisive
change: Pip’s discrediting of the gentleman’s status on the one hand and
his rejection of the wealth for moral reasons on the other in Dickens, the
commercialist values and the politically repressive spirit of the English in
Behn and the general hollowness of morality and of moral reformation in
Joyce. In Hardy, the inadvertent fatal interaction of various psychological
attitudes leads to a perverse situation: illusory fulfilment (for Anna) and
tragic disappointment (for Charles, in a different way also for Edith). In
addition, in some cases the plot-development is believed by the characters
to be sanctioned and steered by a transcendent power: benevolent provi-
dence in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and, by implication, malicious fate in
Hardy (also, incidentally, in Conrad).
These moral and ideological attitudes are themselves indicative of spe-
cific historical discourses: the strict sexual morality and the puritanical
religiosity in the self-concept of the middle classes (Defoe, Richardson),
the enlightened neoclassicist ideology of sections of the aristocracy (Field-
ing) during the 18th century, the growing ruthless (middle-class) commer-
cialism and the internal weakening of the aristocracy in the context of the
Civil War (Behn), the growing middle-class criticism of aristocratic privi-
leges in mid-19th-century Britain (Dickens), the vitalist tendency and criti-
cism of commercialism and technological rationality, associated with the
middle class, in the early 20th century (Lawrence), the hollowness of mid-
dle-class respectability together with general stagnation in Ireland (Joyce),
the growing pessimism during the 19th century about man’s ability to
shape his own existence and the wide-spread notion of a meaningless or
even malevolent universe, the reverse or rejection, as it were, of the for-
mer belief in divine providence (Hardy, also Conrad).
Four of the remaining novels and short-stories – Conrad, Chaucer,
James and Swift – rely on diverse contextual references without connec-
tion to the social stratification in Britain. The late 19th-century pessimistic
notion of a meaningless or hostile universe underlies Conrad, too, some-
what similarly to Hardy, but is consciously countered by a strong work
ethic and the active concept of professionalism, which has religious roots
in Puritanism but is then secularized. The contexts in Chaucer comprise
the medieval moral code that behaviour should be guided by reason, su-
perimposed upon the anarchic, lust-oriented genre of the fabliau. James
refers to the contemporary interest in psychology, the insight into the
often irrational workings of human consciousness and the unconscious,
the discovery of the power of unacknowledged selfish drives. Swift’s plot
210 Peter Hühn
is partly based on the originally Christian concept of sacrifice and atone-

ment vicariously redeeming personal guilt and error.
The last three texts – Mansfield, Woolf and Fowles – share a literary
frame and variously refer, as their context, to the 19th-convention, still
prevalent in the 20th century, of realistic, eventful fiction, rejecting or seri-
ously undermining it, in favour either of depicting unspectacular, everyday
life and inconclusive ordinary occurrences (Mansfield, Woolf) or of meta-
fictionally debunking the author’s power (Fowles, also Woolf). In addi-
tion, Fowles draws on the contemporary critique, prevalent since the
1960s, of the oppressive control of the individual by society, in particular
by the “establishment”. Within this context of the (post)modernist ero-
sion of traditional stabilities Swift’s novel adopts an emphatic counterposi-
tion in terms of morality and social realism.
Although it has proved difficult to systematize the contexts to which
these narratives from various periods and (partly) different generic tradi-
tions refer and which condition the eventfulness of the individual plot-
developments, mainly two tendencies have become apparent: the perva-
sive relevance of the stratification of society (in Britain) together with a
widerspread desire for a change of the social position and the impact of
moral or religious and generally ideological codes and norms guiding peo-
ple’s behaviour and ways of seeing themselves. The latter especially ac-
count for the variation in plot-development and eventfulness.
The selection of the texts for this project was specifically focused on
the transition from 19th-century Realism to early-20th-century Modernism
because it was assumed that during this period the notion of eventfulness
became particularly problematical, especially if viewed against the back-
ground of the 18th century and its tendency of having novels end in event-
ful changes. This assumption has indeed been confirmed by the detailed
analyses (see the chapters on Dickens, Hardy, James, Joyce, Conrad,
Mansfield, Woolf and Lawrence). Although the selected texts cannot claim
to be representative of the period, they allow some tentative remarks
about the historical variability of eventfulness.
Only two texts Conrad and Lawrence’s present an unambiguously
positive event in the happenings, both mobilizing uncorrupted, as it were,
non-modern values against corroding modern tendencies: traditional pro-
fessionalism and heroic self-reliance in Conrad, sexuality, vitalism and
working-class solidarity in Lawrence. Most of the other texts demonstrate
the interference of psychological and cognitive factors, specifically differ-
ent forms and degrees of the limitation and distortion of consciousness
and perception, which block the occurrence of positive eventful changes
and produce negative developments instead: the corruption and hollow-
ness of social values in Dickens and Joyce, the negative psychological
Conclusion 211
effects of social conventions (marriage practices) together with the fatal

perversity of circumstances in Hardy and the power of egotistical self-
centredness in James. And two texts Mansfield and Woolf preclude
the occurrence of events altogether, because they are not true to everyday
life. As was mentioned above, these factors are conditioned by certain
contemporary tendencies, in broad terms: the growing critical awareness
of the corruptibility of social norms and the growing insight into the
complexity, unreliability and self-intransparency of the human mind.
4. The Localization of Events
Events, as decisive changes of state, are always linked to a person and

usually occur within a plotline. They may be located, however, on differ-
ent levels of the narrative setup: events in the happenings (placed within the
story which is being narrated and linked to the protagonist), presentation
events (situated on the level of the mediation of the story with the narrator
as the figure who undergoes a change) or reception events (with the reader
as the person intended to change his consciousness or attitude, when the
story clearly indicates that the protagonist, or the narrator, ought to
change but does not).
The most pervasive type among the 15 texts analysed here is the event
in the happenings, in conformity with the prototype. But there is also one
example of a presentation event, in Woolf’s “An Unwritten Novel”, where
the narrator herself undergoes an abrupt change in the course of narrating,
altering the kind of story she is telling together with her conviction of
what should be told. The distribution of these two types of event differs
markedly from the situation in poetry, 4 where clear examples of com-
pleted events in the happenings are rare and presentation events much
more numerous. Another difference between narration in poetry and
prose fiction concerns the degree of completion of the plotline and the
realization (or non-realization) of the event. Whereas all the examples of
prose fiction (with one solitary exception) follow the plot-development up
to the successful event or its failure (and beyond), poems frequently break
off the narrative before, sometimes immediately before, the event, utilising
narration as a means of negotiating, or preparing for, a crucial transition.
Among the novels and stories it is only Swift’s Last Orders that does not
actually narrate the eventful change (Ray’s and Amy’s union), rendering its
completion, however, as foreseeable in the future. The prototype of
_____________
4 See Hühn & Kiefer (2005: 24651).

212 Peter Hühn
eventfulness appears to be much more representative of prose narrative

than of narrating in poetry. This seems to have to do with the different
functions of narration in the two genres. While narrative fiction, broadly
speaking, is usually above all interested in presenting and mediating a
story, poems, on account of the preponderance of subjective perspectives
(speakers tell something about themselves), frequently functionalize the
act of narrating to cope with their own problems of living, changing or
adjusting etc.
In a number of cases – Joyce, Chaucer, Hardy, Swift – the texts pre-
sent reception events, where the reader is meant to gain an essential in-
sight or reach a comprehensive understanding which the protagonist in
the story is unwilling and/or unable to achieve. Thus, Joyce’s readers are
meant to see through the hollowness of Kernan’s social rehabilitation as
well as respectability in general and possibly change their own moral and
mental attitude. In Chaucer the reader is enabled to laugh about the char-
acters’ self-induced mishaps as well as understand and criticize their cogni-
tive and moral mistakes and recognize the appropriateness of their pun-
ishments, while the limitation of their faculty of reason prevents them
from drawing these conclusions themselves. In Hardy, all characters, even
Charles, have limited views of the resultant situation and their mutual
contributions to it. Only the reader recognizes the full extent of the fatal
interaction of their various conscious intentions and unconscious desires.
The individual limitations are even more extensive and radical in Swift,
where only the reader gains a superior, comprehensive insight into the
interactions and tensions between incalculable chance and human will,
transitoriness and hope, mortality and vitality, failure and luck, and can
foresee and vicariously experience the final union of the lovers eventually
brought about as a result of these interactions.
Besides, there is one text with a different – unique – type of event. In
Fowles the eventful change consists in a transgression of boundaries be-
tween narrative levels, what might be called a metaleptic event. Both
Fielding and Jennings together with Isobel are alleged to have escaped
from the level of fiction (discours) into existential reality (histoire), a para-
doxical claim which can be described as a postmodernist, metafictional
strategy, self-consciously flaunting the inescapable fictionality of narrative
literature and at the same time expressing the desire to reach out to extra-
literary reality.
Conclusion 213
References
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Perspective (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia).
Hühn, Peter & Jens Kiefer (2005). The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies
in English Poetry from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, tr. A. Matthews
(Berlin & New York: de Gruyter).
Pöge-Alder, Kathrin (2007). Märchenforschung: Theorien, Methoden, Interpretationen
(Tübingen: Narr).
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(Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag), 23104.

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Peter Hühn

Eventfulness in British Fiction

Eventfulness in British Fiction

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hühn, Peter, 1939⫺

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

쑔 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York

LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN

Aphra Behn: Oroonoko (1688)

Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740)

Henry Fielding. Tom Jones (1749)

PREMODERN AND MODERNIST

Thomas Hardy: “On the Western Circuit” (1891)

Henry James: “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)

James Joyce: “Grace” (1914)

Joseph Conrad: The Shadow-Line (1917)

Virginia Woolf: “An Unwritten Novel” (1921)

D. H. Lawrence: “Fanny and Annie” (1921)

Katherine Mansfield: “At the Bay” (1922)

Graham Swift: Last Orders (1996)

1. Defining Narrativity: Temporality, Eventfulness, Tellability

Narrating as a communicative act combines two dimensions – the dimen-

sion of such changes. This type is employed as a descriptive, informative,

mately, narrativity) can be said to depend on eventfulness. That is not to

As for the definition of eventfulness, those narratological models that

modelling sequentiality in narrative texts: cognitivist schema theory and

adopt diverse forms such as different social ranks, development stages,

4. Eventfulness in British Fiction:

Abbott, H. Porter (2002). The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge:

Schmid, Wolf (1982). “Die narrativen Ebenen ‘Geschehen’, ‘Geschichte’, ‘Erzählung’

1. Plot Structure: The Interlinking of Plotlines

makes the appropriate interpretative schemata explicit from the beginning.

venge for her harassment by Absolon and, objectively, the punishment

stitutes a negative event in the carpenter’s narrative line: Nicholas’ cry of

reeve – because it is expected as an opposing re-enactment – becomes

2. The Ethical and Didactic Context: The Role of Reason

The development and eventfulness of the stories in “The Miller’s Tale”

The decisive value of reason as a guiding authority in this model of

3. The Genre-Specific Context: The Conventions of the Fabliau

when the carpenter’s report to Alisoun about Nicholas’ prediction of the

about due to the interlinking of circumstances, behind the backs of the

of their naiveté (the carpenter) or their cunning (Nicholas). 47 The com-

incapable of recognising this connection (least of all the carpenter, nor

Translated by Alexander Starritt

Rigby, S. H. (1996). Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender (Manchester:

1. The Intertextual Script

tural-historical context – the aristocracy, whose values and self-image are

2. The Script and the Realistic Settings

the conversion of this script into a plotline is considerably complicated.

3. Script and Novel: Positive and Negative Eventfulness

In the traditional novels based on the heroic-galant script, the eventfulness

4. Characters, Plot and Events in Oroonoko

possible – the lovers experience a negative border crossing into absolute

5. The Problematization of the Event

The social hierarchy of the aristocratic discourse varies in validity between

– massively and perfidiously by the English slave trader (underhanded

the heterogeneity and contradictoriness of its implications and conveys, as

Translated by Alexander Starritt

1. The Socio-Economic Frame

The socio-economic frame is clearly linked to an event on the story level,

significant categories indicating Moll’s social position throughout the

Still, if we look at things from Moll’s perspective, it is quite obviously

199). Her fourth marriage with Jemy is ruined as much by herself as by

Charles to Edith. Because of this change of the situation ironically en-