Victoria Falls

Near the end of Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends, our twenty-one-year-old narrator, Frances, reads George Eliot in a gynecologist's waiting room: "I sat there tapping my pen against the front cover of Middlemarch, which I had to read for a class on the English novel. The cover depicted a sad-eyed lady from Victorian times doing something with flowers. I doubted Victorian women actually touched flowers as often as art from the period suggested they did."1 Such a cheeky moment of novel-within-a-novel self-consciousness is perhaps what leads critics, as Rooney herself reported, to identify her works as modern updates of the Victorian novel. Claire Jarvis shrewdly explains how we can draw "a shaky but unmistakable line to Rooney from Frances Burney and Jane Austen through George Eliot and the Brontës, to Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen, to Barbara Pym and Rumer Godden." And Jane Hu generally concurs, admiring in Rooney's work an unsettling of readerly expectations, such that Victorian novels can look different read in light of Rooney's updating of them. Like Frances, we contemporary readers should be wiser than those who judge Middlemarch by its cover.

Yet the challenge of this scene is that while Frances is right to object to the cover of Middlemarch, she objects for the wrong reason. On no one's reading is Middlemarch a story of a woman with flowers, but neither on many straight-forward readings is it the story of a woman, an assumption Frances's objection leaves intact. Its heroine, Dorothea Brooke, surely is a woman, and the novel's preface promises the story of a modern-day (i.e. Victorian) St. Teresa; but, significantly, Middlemarch ranks among Victorian social problem novels — poverty, geography, ambition, idealism, and political reform shape and swirl around the choices that individuals like Dorothea can and cannot make. (Dorothea is also not alone in this regard, as Middlemarch is a multi-plot novel, covering the lives of many others.)  Middlemarch tells a story in which a woman's character is tested, but those tests involve circumstance as much if not more than psychology. By contrast, in Conversations, Frances's character is tested chiefly by herself (in and by her fantasies, her desires, her projections, her relationships, her youth and ignorance). The result is an exquisite psychological portrait, but it's hardly a social problem novel.

Of course, two different novels will be different, and no one has claimed that Conversations with Friends is or is meant to be a reprise of Middlemarch. But what I'm pointing to is the possibility that, in fact, Rooney and Eliot don't really share a project. Social problems figure into Rooney's fictional worlds only obliquely. Her second novel, Normal People, is framed around a relationship between two teenagers from different social classes, but those differences are struck from the story a little more than halfway through when, at university, both rather abruptly win scholarships that evenly and without further comment subsidize the novel's later scenes on summer holiday along the Adriatic coast. In Conversations, social problems show up explicitly in just one scene where, perhaps not coincidentally, we get one of the only conversations among the principal friends that the novel's title promises:

We often had political discussions, in which we all shared similar positions but expressed ourselves differently. Bobbi, for example, was insurrectionist, while Melissa, from a grim pessimism, tended to favor the rule of law. Nick and I fell somewhere between the two of them, more comfortable with critique than endorsement. We talked one night about the endemic racism of the criminal justice system in the US, the videos of police brutality that we had all seen without ever seeking them out, and what it meant for us as white people to say they were "difficult to watch," which we all agreed they were although we couldn't fix on one exact meaning for this difficulty. There was one particular video of a black teenage girl in a bathing suit crying for her mother while a white police officer knelt on her back, which Nick said made him feel so physically ill he couldn't finish watching it.

I realize that's indulgent, he said. But I also thought, what good even comes of me finishing it? Which is depressing in itself. (231)

It's difficult not to read this scene as a kind of parody, for what takes over the discussion of structural racism is how individuals feel about it, which is exactly, and ironically, not the point of structures. When those same individuals recognize their feelings overshadowing the problem they mean to be discussing, they zoom out again and wonder without resolution what it means for them to feel overshadowing feelings about structures they're protected from. This conversation telescopes real social problems into abstract representations, with the result that actual problems feel far away. In the scene, the point of these friends discussing social problems is not to solve them but to solve something about themselves: the paragraph is framed as an example of how these characters are working out their interpersonal dynamics, in relation to one another, in the privacy of a friend's home.

This containment of social problems by personal concerns is remarkably similar to how Rooney treats female masochism, a theme in both Conversations and Normal People, exclusively depicted as a subjective position, and, moreover, a subjective position born of self-loathing, desperation, or pain. Neither novel even begins to imagine masochism as something that could reach in the direction of shared or social space — toward the kinds of community, play, or exploration that one could find, for example, in leather bars or BDSM clubs. The BDSM scene that Marianne pursues with a Swedish stranger in Normal People unravels, totally, because she can bear the pain of whipping far more readily than of being told she is loved. This novel has no interest in what a BDSM scene actually looks like (what makes it work, how and where a woman might find her pleasure); instead, the novel has exclusive interest in BDSM as a window into its heroine's distressed state of mind. Speaking as a reader who generally admires Rooney's otherwise intricate explorations of sex and relationships, this psychological-to-the-exclusion-of-the-social tendency in her portraits of female masochism points to a surprisingly erotophobic conclusion: masochism is just how women internalize their pain. Not only can this not be true, acting like it is also means we've left the social (and, arguably, formal) project of the Victorian very far behind.

These examples of racism and masochism as personal experiences, rather than social conditions, are part of what I mean when I say that Rooney's supposed update of the Victorian novel entails a narrowing of the scope and accomplishment of the Victorian novel's project, away from the wide worlds of social connection and complex historical causation (as in Eliot, but also Dickens, Trollope, Collins), and toward the psychological states of characters too inexperienced to really understand themselves. Rooney is keenly aware of that lack of understanding, which is what makes Conversations, in particular, such a superbly incisive psychological novel. But to take it for something other than that would be, I think, to mistake it.

I've been making the case that Rooney transforms Victorian social problems into contemporary personal ones, but if other critics think that in so doing, Rooney nonetheless sustains something of the project of the Victorian novel, our disagreement might properly be placed at the feet of the Victorian novel. After all, the social problems of a text like Middlemarch aren't exactly optional to its plot, but neither are they necessarily what readers are or have ever been reading Middlemarch to find. Some of us care quite a bit about what Dorothea or Rosamond go through, as women, never mind the context. Some of us might defensibly think that Middlemarch is a novel that encourages us to prioritize such character-driven or psychological readings. The ultimate problem here may not be that Rooney's novels are too narrow in scope, but that the social project of the Victorian novel already was.

One of the Victorian novel's most glaring limitations is the exceptional consistency with which even its social problems — to say nothing of its authors, characters, and plots — fall unmistakably into our contemporary category of "white people's stories." If literary critics writing in our present moment can claim that Conversations with Friends and Normal People are updates or extensions of the Victorian novel, the issue I'm having boils down to a concern with what we critics think an update or extension of the Victorian novel's project can and should look like, and whether it takes more to align it with our moment than passing references to texting or Facebook. Rooney's novels are, I have said, misrecognized when framed in these critical terms, even though (I hope it's clear) they are very excellent novels on their own terms. Nonetheless, my own wish is that, if critics seek to promote art that returns to the Victorian novel, we might do so by advocating for the unrealized aspect of that project's commitments to justice.

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Jordan Alexander Stein teaches in the English Department and Comparative Literature Program at Fordham University.  He is the author most recently of When Novels Were Books (Harvard 2020).

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