Narrative and Its Nonevents: The Unwritten Plots That Shaped Victorian Realism by Carra Glatt (review)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Narrative and Its Nonevents: The Unwritten Plots That Shaped Victorian Realism by Carra Glatt
• Priyanka Anne Jacob

GLATT, CARRA. Narrative and Its Nonevents: The Unwritten Plots That Shaped Victorian Realism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2022. 232 pp. $95.00 cloth; $39.50 paper; $39.50 e-book.

The pages of the Victorian novel are strewn with half-expressed desires and waylaid intentions. As a narrative progresses, it leaves in its wake a number of other, possible, outcomes. Those abandoned plots lurk in the complex form of the novel. In Narrative and Its Nonevents: The Unwritten Plots That Shaped Victorian Realism, Carra Glatt demonstrates how these unfulfilled possibilities trail and disrupt the central tale. The Victorian novel, Glatt tells us, “contains within itself the specter of its own discarded alternatives” (50).

Glatt’s book joins recent work shining light on the non-dominant elements of the Victorian novel: its lengthy middles, stray impulses, and narrative antinomies. Glatt takes a narratological approach, highlighting the “unwritten plots” that lie in tension with a novel’s main plot. She focuses especially on endings: examining, for instance, the sense that Pip and Estella ought to part, which shadows the veiled implication that they will marry; or how Hardy’s sidelined character Marty is granted not a marriage plot but, at least, the final words of The Woodlanders. Glatt articulates three models for how “the Victorian novel is created out of an interaction between its written and unwritten plots” (7): the shadow plot, the proxy narrative, and the “hypothetically realist” plot. In a thoughtful epilogue, she also offers a glimpse into how realism itself has become an underplot in contemporary fiction.

Nineteenth-century realism channels and “demote[s]” the persistent influence of romance into the shadow plot (44). Glatt’s first chapter provides an exhaustive literary history of realism. It is difficult, Glatt points out, to locate a Victorian text strictly in the realist mode, without debts to Gothic, romance, sensation, reform, urban, or other literary conventions. The “hybridity of Victorian form” (17) expands the range of paths a story might take, including “highly melodramatic and sensational ones” (20). Yet, these “radical” options will ultimately be rerouted, as realist novels trend toward the “condition of plausibility” (20). Glatt defines realism not by its concrete descriptiveness, representation of ordinary life, or rejection of romance. Realism is for Glatt a particular relationship to narrative possibility: what at first feels like an open field of possibilities narrows into a limited path of compromise. More than a narrative tendency, this is a worldview. As the stories of Victorian realism unfold, characters find their options constricted by forces beyond their control. They settle for curtailed lives only after the novel has invoked and then [End Page 210] suppressed narrative paths associated with other generic conventions and other social possibilities.

In the case of the proxy narrative, a novel buries its unsayable, dangerous energies in an underplot. The reader is asked to navigate between “the scene as written, and a phantom scene that everything surrounding it suggests should have been” (79). Glatt grounds this chapter in sensation fiction, which invokes Gothic tropes and sexual scandals only to turn, in the end, toward “the taming work of the marriage and inheritance plots” (100). Those affective meanings and ghost plots linger on, powerful though “never allowed fully to materialize” (86). It is for this reason, Glatt suggests, that a secret in a sensation novel is so rarely satisfying once revealed: it works “not as a carrier of content, but as a mechanism of form,” “the site of a series of unwritten plots” the novel cannot explicitly tell (99–100). Understanding the proxy narrative can help us resolve seeming dissonances in Victorian fiction. Glatt’s chapter on Henry James uses the proxy narrative as a key to James’s late work, in which there is always a gap between what is being said and what the text means, the unmentioned import of every utterance flickering ghostlike around the words on the page.

The final chapter puts forth the “hypothetically realist” plot in which a text gestures toward an as-yet-unrealized future. By moving attention to superfluous figures “who conspicuously fail...