Victorian Psychology and the Novel

Abstract

Over the last three decades, literary critics have evinced growing interest in nineteenth-century psychology and its reciprocal relationship with the Victorian novel. The resulting body of interdisciplinary scholarship has yielded insight into how early and mid-Victorian psychological movements (moral management, associationism, evolutionary psychology, and so forth) left their mark on realist authors like George Eliot and writers of sensation fiction such as Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon. But these scholarly works have dealt less comprehensively with the psychological significance of late Victorian genres like the romance and neo-Gothic novel. Moreover, literary critics are only beginning to explore the ways in which psychology subtly shaded into physiology during the late Victorian era. This materialist shift was felt most strongly after 1870, when cerebral localization experiments by David Ferrier, John Hughlings Jackson, and other neurologists linked specific emotions, faculties, and movements to discrete areas of the brain. These experiments suggested that human behavior amounted to the sum of various neurochemical impulses, a conclusion that raised hackles because it threatened cherished notions of the soul, will, and individual identity. Literary scholars have only recently discussed the ways in which late Victorian novels engaged with these unsettling neurological discoveries. Based on the early promise of these discussions, we might expect to see more work on Victorian brains than Victorian psyches in future literary criticism.