Dreams of Perfection

andrew h. miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century

British Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008), pp. 278, cloth, $39.95.

Anxiety about the impossibility of sympathetic identification—fear that one may not know,
much less enter into, the mental state of our fellow beings—drove the Victorians to invent
a particular form of moral perfectionism. This Victorian doctrine, which gave an evan-
gelical inflection to the perfectionism of the Enlightenment, was based on the belief that
receptivity to exemplary others (including other, better versions of oneself) has the power
to overcome skepticism about the existence of other minds. This is the starting point of
Andrew H. Miller’s important new book, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in
Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Miller’s work makes a major contribution to the study
of the connections between moral philosophy and literature during the Victorian period
that deserves the attention of Victorianists and of everyone interested in the ethical dimen-
sion of literary experience.
Miller’s book is refreshingly judicious and generously receptive to a diverse array of
critical voices, but these qualities do not prevent it from presenting a forceful argument
that seeks to turn away from the dead end of much current discussion of Victorian moral
philosophy and literature that can be traced back to the split between deontological and
consequentialist ethical theories early in the nineteenth century. The dead end in question
tends to take the form of the opposition between critical approaches stressing historical
contextualization, on the one hand, and those promoting ideological critique, on the other.
As Miller perceptively indicates at the beginning of his study, the terms of this opposition
translate the more fundamental moral philosophical divide between the particularist logic
of consequentialism and the universalist core of deontology. In Victorian studies today,
these positions are reflected in the debate between detractors and proponents of “disinter-
estedness.” Miller proposes that this controversy overlooks the main contribution of Vic-
torian literature to moral philosophy, namely, its promotion of a mode of ethical reflection
that seeks to accommodate both subjective detachment and absorption (103–4). From this
peculiar perspective, truly moral action springs neither from disinterestedness nor from
sympathy, in the conventional senses of these terms, but from a movement between and
negotiation with these poles of reflection. It is not, therefore, a position or a perspective but
a movement of thought that provides the basis of genuine ethical deliberation.
Miller demonstrates the fundamental importance of such a reflective movement in
the leading writers of prose, poetry, and especially narrative fiction during the Victorian
period. The first part of the book focuses on how this movement generates narratives of
improvement by examining, for example, casuistry in George Eliot’s novels and akrasia (or
weakness of the will) in the works of Charles Dickens. The readings of the novels adhere
to the reflective movement that they aim to illuminate, as Miller artfully stages himself
thinking through the alternatives and questioning his position while taking on board the
relevant historical and critical contexts of the works under consideration and engaging in
the techniques of free indirect discourse and casuistry in his literary examples. The second
part of the book turns to a series of affective conditions that respond to skepticism about
the accessibility of other minds (again, including one’s own). These include helplessness in
Jane Austen, knowingness in John Henry Newman, shame in Dickens, and, in an especially
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illuminating chapter, the regretful state indicated by what Miller calls the “optative” mode
in Dickens and Henry James.
The Burdens of Perfection draws on a wide range of Victorian writing, including poems,
essays, and novels, and offers insightful interpretations of broader formal and generic
structures in the literature of the period, including, for example, how the dramatic mono-
logue in poetry and free indirect discourse in the novel respond to the moral perfectionist
imperative to work one’s way out of skepticism. Miller’s book remains deliberately open to
an array of critical voices and intellectual currents. He makes good use of not just Michel
Foucault, Raymond Williams, Neil Hertz, D. A. Miller, and Eve Sedgwick but also Lio-
nel Trilling, Georges Poulet, Maurice Blanchot, and Søren Kierkegaard in ways that make
his work stand out from the more parochial forms of nineteenth-century British literary
studies. Miller also has a firm grasp of current work in Victorian studies that enables him
to offer a valuable critique of the impasse to which most discussion of moral philosophy in
the period has been returning. This is where Miller’s most important contribution lies.
A key source for the argument made in this book about moral perfectionism derives
from the work of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell. In spite of the fact that his work
has been preoccupied with the moral philosophical questions that were central to Victorian
literary culture, Cavell’s work has had relatively little direct influence on the renewed criti-
cal interest in ethical theory in Victorian studies. (For a critique of the conditions that have
prevented Cavell’s work from having a greater impact on literary studies in general, see
Garrett Stuart.) Miller’s book opens up a path to Cavell’s account of moral perfectionism
as elaborated in works such as Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Cavell’s diagnosis of
moral perfectionism as a reaction to skepticism provides Miller with a philosophical per-
spective from which to offer a comprehensive interpretation of Victorian letters. In addition
to translating Cavell’s theory into the context of Victorian literature, Miller also persua-
sively places the American philosopher’s writing in the striking literary critical company
of Williams and Sedgwick. Cavell, Williams, and Sedgwick, Miller contends, are linked
by their common engagement in a style of intellectual self-display that emerges from the
rejection of a skeptical position with respect to the existence of other minds.
The Burdens of Perfection, therefore, not only presents a comprehensive, illuminating
account of moral perfectionism in Victorian literature, it also forcefully and eloquently
makes a case for and seeks to exemplify the viability of this doctrine as an intellectual style
and a philosophical way of life today. By doing so, Miller’s book has the merit of generat-
ing and inviting questions, rather than simply pretending to answer them, from readers
receptive to how his study strives to break out of the reductive terms of the debate between
liberalism and its enemies in Victorian studies. For example, Miller demonstrates in some
of the best pages in his book that “the powerful attachment to someone who is found (in
particular ways) to be exemplary” can be directed toward oneself (xii). One could go fur-
ther, however, and argue that this is true not only in the restrictive sense of cases respond-
ing to the Victorian exhortation that one imitate one’s “best self” (found in the work of John
Stuart Mill, Newman, and Matthew Arnold, for instance), but also in the general sense that
even when the exemplar seems to be someone else, the imitation is engaged in the end in
the reproduction of an integrated, self-consistent subject that elevates its own perfection
to a supreme end.
Ultimately, then, moral perfectionism may be understood to promote the maintenance of
self-consciousness, rather than, say, existence, as a primum principium. The logic of mimetic