Our Perfectionisms, Ourselves
by Mia Chen
Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Cornell UP, 2008)
It would be difficult to imagine anybody better positioned to understand how much of a burden perfectionism can be than the typical graduate student. She spends countless hours agonizing over a cover letter for a job she doesn’t want to have to accept; a seminar paper that should have been turned in over a year ago; an outfit for her first class teaching slack-jawed, apathetic students; an email to a professor who may or may not ignore it; and, need it be said, that ungainly instrument of torture she hesitates to call a dissertation. Of course she knows better. Of course she should listen to the appeals of her remaining supporters and her own sanity and just send it off already, but the questions eat away inside her: What more do I need to have read? Is this too much? Too little? Should I sleep on it, let it sit for a while? What can I do to make this better? Exhausted by these questions, she wonders why she must continue with her perfectionism — only to note that perfectionism is what got her into grad school in the first place. The grad student experiences perfectionism as a source of anxiety, despair, shame, humor, pain, and, ultimately, gratitude: not just one burden, but many.
Andrew H. Miller’s The Burdens of Perfection has little in the way of direct advice for our poor perfectionist, at least on the surface. Shielded by layers of hard-won cynicism, she probably least fears the perfectionism which Miller takes as his subject: moral perfectionism, the desire not to do better, but to be better.
Miller specializes in Victorian literature, a period filled with perfectionist longings of all sorts. From Samuel Smiles, who coined the phrase “self-help” in his book of that name, to Charles Dickens, whose archetypal Ebenezer Scrooge still undergoes his regrettable change of heart every December, to George Eliot, whose novel Middlemarch monumentalized the era’s earnest devotion to gradual individual and collective progress, Victorians from all walks of life fed the era’s insatiable demand for the belief that a better self, a better world was possible, and attainable. The subject certainly merits attention, but Victorianists are perhaps as likely to turn their noses at moral perfectionism as cynical grad students.
Miller notes right at the outset that literary critics have “rather fled from discussions of moral psychology”: “[W]ho would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated — portentous, pious, humorless?” Victorianist work of the past ten years has tended to favor instead, he observes, either a historicist model, situating literary works within a more finely grained historical context, or an ideological critique, analyzing a text’s ideological dimensions and ramifications. Critics have eschewed the moral and ethical in favor of the social and the political.
Instead of following these well-trodden critical paths — with which he is undoubtedly familiar as co-editor of Victorian Studies—Miller offers an idiosyncratic, intricate, and expansive map of Victorian mental life. Mental life seems the right phrase. He twice quotes the Victorian philosopher F. D. Maurice: “The thought of one person, if it is really his, calls forth the thought of another, to resist it, conspire with it, or to complete it.” (Miller’s own thoughts extensively conspire with Stanley Cavell, whose book Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome deals with moral perfectionism in western philosophy.) “Maurice is addressing not so much moral choices,” Miller explains, “but a prior matter, the entry into moral deliberation and intellectual reflection itself, the advent of conscious thinking, mine, now, freshly achieved.” The book’s richness lies in its ability to call forth this intellectual reflection; it stirs the reader into thinking about himself, about how he relates to himself, about how closely his self is involved in the reading of a novel.
In fact, it is often easy while thinking these thoughts to forget that The Burdens of Perfection is about perfection and its burdens. It is less an anatomy of moral perfectionism than a constellation of ideas strikingly juxtaposed to it. The first two chapters, for example, discuss a pervasive, general skepticism as the basis of perfectionism. Fair enough: skepticism, as life in grad school teaches us, is perhaps the primary means by which perfectionism burdens the mind. From there, though, Miller moves to “allegories of mechanized identity.” Miller draws together an impressive range of thinkers who imagined, and feared, human-like automata, or rather, automata-like humans: William James, Robert Browning, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, all of whom Miller suggests are responding to the philosophical skepticism of Descartes and Spinoza. William James envisions a proto-Turing test, in which an “automatic sweetheart… absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden… perform[s] all the feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her.” Mill, on the other hand, argues that one who is unable to control his impulses acts mechanically, “has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character.” The end result of this skepticism regarding the nature of human life is a deep sense of isolation, a sense that communication, even if possible, is pointless. The chapter closes powerfully with a reading of Dickens’ celebrated comparison of life’s inexorable motion towards death to a journey on that characteristically Victorian mode of transportation, the railroad train:
Dickens invites the thought that our mortality is a train within which we ride. The conditions of such travel require that the things near to hand, which we can almost touch, fly from us; while those that seem not to fly from us but to stay within our view are at a deceitful distance. Either way, with things near or far, our mortality expresses itself in the sense that the things among which we find ourselves in this life elude our grasp. Skepticism has been rendered metaphysical, sending its trunk lines across the world.
And what has any of this to do with moral perfectionism? One must flip back a few pages to find this sentence: “It is as if the fantasy of human perfectibility brought with it, or responded to (perhaps with mechanical regularity), the threat of mechanization.” Moral perfectionism has something to do with — or simply is—mechanization, but Miller makes no attempt to give a more precise answer. In the introduction, he characterizes his work as “implicative” rather than “conclusive,” the latter referring to the arguments offered by historicist or ideological approaches. The Burdens of Perfection allows room for further reflection, indeed makes the under-determination of its argument paramount.
Miller’s main point concerning moral perfectionism is that it follows a trajectory. The extreme skepticism involved in perfectionism doesn’t so much become resolved as recathected, shifted into a second-person relationship, a close bond to some exemplary other, paradigmatically — in the marriage plots of the Victorian novel — a spouse. This second-person relation between the moral perfectionist and the one he admires arises from an impasse between third-person and first-person points of view. Drawing on the work of Richard Moran, author of Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (2001), Miller points out that the third-person omniscient narration most often found in Victorian fiction enables a very particular relationship to oneself: “eyeing myself as if I were someone unfamiliar, I can entertain, assess, develop, contradict, neglect, woefully misunderstand, underappreciate, and be bemused by my ideas and beliefs and emotions as I can those of a stranger.” To adopt this disembodied perspective, though, has the effect of divorcing oneself from one’s own intentions. The first-person perspective, on the other hand, may be more conducive to formulating intentions regarding oneself, but restricts knowledge of external circumstances and realities. If this oscillation between third and first person, between objectivity and subjectivity, carried out within one person’s mind leads to “weakness of will” — as our typical graduate student can attest to — reciprocal second-person relations with an admired individual offer a way out. Hence the weight Victorians, both real and fictional, placed on intimate friendships, revered teachers, a desired, idolized mate. We, sadly, are more likely to move in the other direction, as fleeting discussions with trusted mentors and colleagues give way to hours spent alone in front of a computer screen.
A more standard book of literary criticism would proceed to illustrate perfectionism’s trajectory through a series of close readings of texts, chronologically arranged. Miller instead divides the book into seven chapters on mechanization and desire, weakness of will, casuistry, helplessness, knowingness, shame, and lives unled. The list gives some idea of the book’s wide-ranging scope. Each chapter unites a variety of texts, authors, and genres, along with a number of contemporary Anglo-American philosophers not often heard from in literary criticism. Texts discussed in one chapter reappear in another for a second, a third look (Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda recur most frequently). Particularly striking are the chapters on helplessness and lives unled. Miller begins “Perfectly Helpless” by noting the tendency for Jane Austen’s critics to claim how difficult it is to write about her novels, so subtle are their effects. From critical helplessness, Miller moves to readerly helplessness, a common enough experience, albeit one most critics would be helpless to analyze. He cites Victorian novelist Margaret Oliphant on Austen, who describes feeling “a certain soft despair of any one human creature ever doing any good to another… a sense that nothing is to be done but to look on, to say perhaps now and then a softening word, to make the best of it practically and theoretically, to smile and hold up one’s hands and wonder why human creatures should be such fools.” Austen’s characters, helpless to act otherwise, break through the constraints of social convention and external circumstance, magnifying this readerly helplessness. And yet, this helplessness before the book in front of me is in some way a helplessness before myself, the life I have lived. “In assembling the characters of a novel in my mind,” Miller writes, “my intimacy with them is more like an intimacy with myself, or with some aspect of myself, than it is with another, with someone over there.” Readerly helplessness ultimately stems from a strongly felt inability to alter an irrevocable past, a past which has been “perfected,” in the sense of completed, finished, whether it is the past portrayed in novels or remembered in life. Of this inability “we need to be reminded”: “In such moments, as I only stand and wait, the novel allows me to understand my difference from others as a version of my difference from my past.”
Miller further explores this experience of one’s past self as achingly other in the book’s final chapter, “On Lives Unled.” A comment of Eve Kosofky Sedgwick which Miller quotes serves to link perfectionism’s concern for the future with a deeply textured relationship to the past: “Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.” (Sedgwick, after Cavell, is Miller’s most frequent source of critical inspiration.) Unled lives – the subject of Miller’s current project – are all the lives one could have led but didn’t, or one particular life among these. For the perfectionist, these lives can be held particularly closely, mourned for particularly plangently. Miller builds on Sedgwick’s influential reading of Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” arguing that unled lives, like the closet Sedgwick deconstructs, are part of a “set of conditioning, historically specific pressures, social and psychological, that situate characters within a determinate identity characterized by the longing to inhabit apparently unattainable identities.” Marcher, the story’s protagonist, longs for the life he could have led, and feels the poignancy of its unattainability all the more deeply as he can no longer fully remember it: “The lost stuff of consciousness became thus for him as a strayed or stolen child to an unappeasable father.” To this moment Miller conjoins the premise of Charles Lamb’s strange, elegiac essay “The Dream-Children.” “Forgetting the past,” he writes, “is understood to be like losing a child one never had. A hard thought to bring home emotionally, this amounts to saying that forgetting your past is like the sudden feeling you might have on awakening, after a long reverie in which you have been surrounded by all that children can represent for you: you recognize your childless reality and try desperately to recapture the promise of your dream.”
Thoughts hard to bring home emotionally: these are what The Burdens of Perfection aims at evoking, and excels at achieving. Actual alleviation of perfectionism’s weight, though, is a less likely result, especially since the book is liable to leave one more puzzled by perfectionism than before. Yet, like the characters who redirect their energies towards another character in a second-person relationship, the perfectionist you or I are likely to be may derive sustenance from a renewed attention to ourselves, or hitherto only dimly apprehended aspects of ourselves. Miller’s book is profoundly, generously, and generatively self-indulgent — not in the sense of “oversharing,” but in its unashamed sense that one’s self can always be a source of unexpected interest. If all this sounds like an apolitical repudiation of the much-needed politically conscious criticism of the past two or three decades, something distinguishes this from much of the work from the so-called ethical turn in literary criticism. Paradoxically, I believe it stems from Miller’s refusal to assimilate his ethical project to politically desirable ends, a characteristic of recent ethical criticism (on this, see Dorothy J. Hale’s “Aesthetics and the New Ethics” in this May’s PMLA); instead of showing the ethically desirable outcomes of novel reading, Miller focuses on how novel reading foregrounds the intricate process of ethical deliberation itself, noting that the outcome may not necessarily be positive. Adorno’s position that radically avant-garde, politically ambiguous art offers a truer critique of late capitalism than explicitly political art seems apposite. Philip Davis, reviewing The Burdens of Perfection for Victorian Studies called it “one of the best books on Victorian writing to appear in the last ten years.” High praise, although it follows the less flattering remark that while Miller asks his audience to read the book like a novel, it doesn’t read like one. Indeed, few would approach Miller’s book with the same disposition they bring to novels (nor with the same disposition they bring to most scholarly books), but, as with the best novels, one gets the sense that upon a first reading, one will only be able to absorb a small portion of its wisdom, that this will be a book worth returning to over the next ten years and beyond.
