2 - Cultivated Resemblance: Imitation and Education in the Novel

Summary

IN THE REMAINDER OF PART 1, I want to discuss some of these permutations in more detail, to show not simply how literature was influenced by the scientific and pedagogical paradigm shifts going on around it but how literature explored the possibilities inherent in these shifts more minutely and deeply than the biological or theoretical texts were capable of doing. By engaging in the same discourse about dynamic development and the cultivation of new forms, literary texts, particularly the novel, also actively participate in the paradigm shifts that produced the biological move from preformation to epigenesis. In striking ways, using both plot arcs and formal devices, authors depict intergenerational misunderstandings and disagreements about likeness or obedience as most acute in biological relationships, whereas foster parents or surrogate parental figures often appear more attuned to more modern notions of individuality and development. Furthermore, I will argue that the novel itself—to a greater or lesser extent depending on the sophistication of the individual texts—motivates a parallel process of development in its readers. Although the novels I treat range from canonical to the so-called trivial and vary widely in their linguistic quality, complexity, and prescriptive or imaginative didacticism, they all involve their readers in thinking about questions of family resemblance and difference, of filial duty and individual self-formation.

The generational divide between biological parents and children often takes the form of a failure on the part of the parents to recognize or understand something about their own offspring. This failure points to a problem of visibility that is, in fact, new for the novel in the later parts of the eighteenth century. In earlier narrative types, bringing up children took the form of providing them with a series of rules; the success of the educational program is then proven by a child's successful passage through the trials of the outside world (or contradicted by his or her failure). The protagonist must learn merely to behave as his or her parents have behaved, and the text can simply show whether or not this is the case.