Sickly Scholars and Healthy Novels: The Classical Scholar in Victorian Fiction

Abstract

This paper argues that major nineteenth-century British novelists promote the novel as the dominant national literary form, in direct competition with classical forms, such as the epic. Because of this agenda, some novelists castrate, cripple, or dehumanize the figure of the scholar of antiquity, as a way of symbolically rejecting ancient genres. The primary focus is on two novels of faith and doubt by women novelists: George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' (1872-3), and Mary Augusta Ward's 'Robert Elsmere' (1888), novels which make great capital out of presenting and taming sickly, deathly, impotent, and sinister classicists.