Why a book on literary character? Readers use literary character to make the fictive "real." Much college-level teaching depends on character analyses, and undergraduates learn to analyze literary characters --the Wife of Bath, Robinson Crusoe, Kurtz--and account for them. Such accounting, although productive, remains embedded in assumed ideas about the meanings of figural art. Elizabeth Fowler's book takes a phenomenological, reader-response-oriented approach to investigate the seeming transparency of "character." "Character" depends on our readerly participation in a phenomenon of recognition. Can we, via a new theory, understand the reader's participation in the creation and understanding of character? Literary character is both familiar and strange: seemingly transparent, attached to a phenomenological "real," yet evanescent and ghost-like. Even as we note differences between Crusoe and Chaucer's Alisoun, we detect a kind of multiplicity in them both. Authors use literary characters to seduce us into making representation into reality. How do literary characters seduce readers? What makes this seductive process so effective? What can ramifications of the process tell us about literary meaning? How do the reading process and the recognition of character work not just literarily, but historically and socially?
These are the complex questions Elizabeth Fowler addresses in her book. Obviously a perennial issue in literary studies, literary character gets a new treatment in her hands. She argues that accounting for character has previously taken the shape of inquiry into techniques of representing consciousness or subjectivity, engineering plot, proposing ideas, transmitting literary genres, or fueling the market for books (3). Fowler takes a different tack to analyze "the human figure in words" (3). She connects readerly recognition to intellectual, institutional, and political currents that provide the fabric of social life. She wants to account for readers' integration of literary figuration into what we call "character," and to grapple with authors' manipulation of characters' appeal. She limits her purview to late medieval and early modern English literature and treats four canonical authors: Chaucer, Langland, Skelton, and Spenser. By limiting her analysis to the figural art of canonical authors from the late medieval to early modern, Fowler uses familiar works to enrich our understanding of the medieval/early modern divide. She broadens literary history by treating political, psychological, economic, and aesthetic concerns in her analysis. Her method is "a formal analysis that opens immediately and necessarily onto historical and political analysis" (247).
Formalism and close reading activate Fowler's analysis. She then "thickens" her readers' ideas about literary character by directing their attention to what can be called a new kind of reader-response criticism. She links historical institutions and poetry through an array of intellectually-oriented discursive practices, primarily habituation, social bonding, the creation of historical time, and the shaping of a polity. For Fowler, reader-response is an intellectual exercise that entails ideas about embodiment and concepts of the body in space. In other words, Fowler grapples with perhaps the most slippery of ideas: what makes for, or allows, a reader to recognize character, and what are the stakes involved in that recognition? Fowler understands character--the "human figure in words" (3)--as operating in law, theology, economics, and political philosophy. Her book, a relatively compact volume at 263 pages, is thick in its density of reference, in part because she hopes her readers will include not only literary critics but "historians, feminists, legal theorists, theologians, moral and political philosophers, [and] historians of art" (245). She analyzes intention, agency, value, and dominion in the realms of marriage doctrine, economic thought, feminism, moral philosophy, and jurisprudence. The scope and ambition of Fowler's study fills out reader-response criticism with an investigation of politically-inflected discursive habits and understandings that shape the reading process. Fowler claims that literary texts, embedded as they are in a network of other discursive practices, habituate readers to recognize social persons, her name for intricate networks of legal, institutional, political, constitutional, intellectual, and psychological structures that provide meaning to a literary text's characters. "Social persons are like genres: they are abstract conventions that never actually 'appear' in any pure form, but are implied referents by which characters are understood" (17)
Because she deals with readers' experiences, Fowler uses her concept of social person to develop claims for readerly interiority. Interiority comes from habituation, what Bourdieu calls the habitus. Readers are habituated to recognize a text's social persons. But the process is not a simple internalization. Rather, a text's social persons are multiple, and tensions among them likewise produce meaning. Readers and their ideas about characters rely on recognizing multiple social persons as the process of recognition shifts among registers: ethics, polity, intention, history. She resists any hierarchy in her methodological approach. As the human figure appears in the fictions of law, economy, and polity, so literary characters partake of these other fictions. At the same time, however, literature makes its own characters into special, ever-relational cases. Furthermore, Fowler attaches the complexity she outlines for literary character, as opposed to other kinds of character, to an ethic that resists hierarchy and authoritarianism. Using Bourdieu's idea of habitus, Fowler outlines the way social persons reciprocally habituate readers to a reading practice and thus to a polity's patterning. Thus Fowler has created a hermeneutic circle of reading that incorporates both literary character and human being in a multiply-defined, sensitive and contingent figural art.
Fowler's goal is to account for "the consequences of readerly cognition and experience" (30) in a theoretical fashion. Her book's Introduction sets up her paradigms of inquiry via two of Chaucer's characters, the Knight and the Prioress, who exemplify historically- and politically-figured social persons. Among the Knight's social persons are the mercenary soldier, the crusader, the triumphator of Roman statuary, the "mayde," and the pilgrim; for the Prioress, the nun and the lady. Fowler delineates the tensions among particularities of these social persons and their "fleshly expression" (15) to demonstrate the claims figural art makes over its readers. Simultaneously contestatory and seductive, social persons guide a reader's understanding while, in their multiplicity, they jostle readerly complacency. Social persons fashion and reflect a complex socio-politico-literary landscape.
Fowler stays with Chaucer in Chapter One of her book, "Character and the Habituation of the Reader: The Pardoner's Thought Experiment." She takes the Pardoner as foundationally explanatory for readerly habituation. She reads the Pardoner's penitential background as habituating readers to an ideology of interiority. Fowler reads the Pardoner's "boiling will" (39) in relation to the canon law's dicta regarding intention and penance, both of which involve the invocation of person and interiority. Thus the social persons of law provide the impetus for the Pardoner. At the same time, the Pardoner's interiority ultimately becomes the definition of the reading self: bounded, penitent, shaped by text. But the Pardoner is more: his forceful characterization brings into view authorial intention that in turn compensates for the paradoxical loss of author at the heart of literary endeavor. Fowler then takes her point about the subtle figuration of authorial voice to help explain Chaucer's Retraction. Literary in composition and intent, the Retraction reveals a new alignment between the interpretation of literature and the interpretation of self and other. The "inherently socializing" (27) nature of social person thus transforms the confessional topos into literature, making an ethical case for the value of speech act, simile, iconography, genre, apostrophe, paradox, and character. Social person becomes literary person.
Chapter Two, "Persons in the Creation of Social Bonds: Agency and Civil Death in Piers Plowman," treats Mede and Liberum Arbitrium in Piers Plowman, aiming at the intersection of moral agency with being and cognition. In this chapter, economic thought and morality form the basis for analysis, and Fowler brings a new perspective on the marriage debt and exchange, enriching the investigation she began in her 1995 Speculum article. Her analysis of "coverture," a legal concept that removes women from the eyes of the law, leads her to assert Langland's careful distinction between will and agency in order for social persons, masculine and feminine, to matter both theologically and socially. Furthermore, the concept of intention affects the social persons of Mede and Liberum Arbitrium in their ability to measure and their subsequent attention to wages. These economic, social, and legal strata remain relational, never absolute, in Fowler's reading, and her handling of Langland's complex allegory certifies the dynamism of the poem's figural art.
In Chapter Three, "The Temporality of Social Persons: Value in 'The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge,'" Fowler explains that other critics have taken the portrait of Elynour Rummynge in John Skelton's poem as first and foremost realistic: her character produces, they argue, a "literal" portrait, misogynistic as it is, of a brewster. Fowler, remembering her own dictum that readers "think first and picture second," sees in Elynour's character the primacy of learned discursive traditions. Economic thought and clerical antifeminism "tinker" with the "machinery of personification" (136). Social persons involved with measure, markets, and property invoke the literary character of Elynour Rummynge whose instability and unclarity hide the factors of exchange that challenge simple antifeminism. Instead, because the character activates more social forms than simply the "realistic," the figure of Elynour Rummynge indicts the rapacious mercantilism infecting the polity.
Not surprisingly, Fowler's fourth chapter, "Architechtonic Person and the Grounds of the Polity in The Faerie Queene," concerns Spenser, on whom she has published previously. This penultimate chapter (Fowler concludes with a brief afterword that she suspects readers will turn to first) offers the book's most complex investigation into character, treating the marriage of Thames and Medway in Book IV of The Fairie Queene, as well as the character Mutabilitie found in Spenser's two posthumously-published cantos of that same name. Indeed, the book's fourth chapter demonstrates the extraordinary challenge of reading Spenser, whose protean text uses "social forms in distress" (188). One might guess that reading Spenser was in fact the genesis of Fowler's theory of social persons: she may have wished to construct a way into Spenser's labyrinthine, tumultuous and challenging epic poem, and the concept of the political, social, legal, economic, and aesthetic social person provided it. Fowler is sensitive to the fact that Spenser is writing an allegory, and not a treatise. Still, most suggestively, she uses a treatise on nationalism, Thomas Smith's De republica Anglorum (1562-5) to read the deep history of social persons and their effect on the polity Spenser's poem evokes. Fowler sees Spenser using social persons to connect reader, polity, and social categories with a "dangerous intensity" (191).
Fowler proves herself one of her generation's most adept readers. Her subtle and multi-leveled investigation of the reading process makes the Geertzian "thick" into the poetically rich. In one respect, the book forgets reader friendliness: there is no bibliography, which complicates a reader's reading what Fowler has read. But the absence of a bibliography presents no insurmountable difficulty. Rather, Literary Character provides its reader a consistently challenging reading experience that will deepen appreciation of the subtleties energized by Fowler's "process of deliberation" (31): habituation, social bonds, historical time, and polity. Literary Character does not treat character as a problem to be solved. Rather, it is a book that, in the diction of psychological criticism, analyzes the "signifying chain" (81) of law, theology, economics, and political philosophy that links figural art--and indeed, literature itself--with meaning.