Imaginative Geographies in Scott and Austen

Abstract

Howmuch realism inheres in the realist tradition?One oddity of novel history is that neither Walter Scott nor Jane Austen, classically seen as foundational to the nineteenth-century realist tradition, seem all that interested in writing realistic novels. In a recent monograph, Elaine Freedgood illustrates how Victorian realism is riven with contradiction because the granular reality effects of realistmodes, like denotation and reference, frequently break down (23–41). Reading Scott’s and Austen’s wilderness spaces formally suggests that realism’s unevenness derives from theRomantic novel’s geographic narrative aesthetics. As the Romantic novel attempts to represent and historicize the spaces in which social life occurs, elaborations of woodland and mountainous geographies that connect towns and cities and are both forms of infrastructure and the aesthetic surround show how social life becomes increasingly regulated and subject to systems of control, while at once plot action slows to a crawl. Consequently, even as the novel becomes increasingly conscious of its generic historicity, its own temporalities fragment, and its narrative spaces become—to use a geographer’s term of art—unevenly developed. This is no accident. The “Western” novel’s “radical formal change” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Freedgood’s account, depended on keeping British and French traditions ascendant by ascribing peripheral status to non-Anglo-European forms, especially colonial literature (134–40). Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorizations of novelistic chronotopes and the polyphonic novel are veritable catalogs of the ways the novel, in its aspirations to realism, deviates spatially and temporally frommimesis. The histories of the Romantic novel