Carolyn Lesjak. Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3835-2. Price: $22.95.

Carolyn Lesjak’s Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel is a provocative, insightful, and sometimes frustrating analysis of the labor/pleasure problematic in the British novel. Lesjak’s central theme is the alienation of work under modern capitalism, its consequent textual marginalization, and its opposition to pleasure. She reveals the subtle presence of this problematic in the realism of Gaskell, Dickens, and Eliot, and finds in the utopian thinking of William Morris and Oscar Wilde “possible models of a radically ‘other’ social life in which labor and pleasure would be reinvented” (2). Drawing on neo-Marxist and Frankfurt School theorists, she participates in the recently-renewed literary analysis of class relations, including but also moving beyond bourgeois culture in her treatment of these two key terms. Beginning with the recognition that representations of actual work and workplaces are apparently absent from realist novels, she argues that in fact they exert a shadowy but persistent pressure throughout the period. Her introduction proposes a symptomatic interpretation of this pressure, placing it in the context of anxieties about the contradictions of capitalism and about working class resistance. It also cogently insists on the value of the term “pleasure” as denoting an active, social project, in contrast to the intrapsychic and predominantly sexual meaning implied by “desire.” Her emphatic opening up of these terms signals her wish to intervene dramatically in our understanding of Victorian literary history. Working Fictions does not quite fulfill the promise of the introduction, partly because its genealogy is rather selective (Great Expectations and Daniel Deronda represent the whole of the genre of the bildungsroman, for example) and partly because its ambitious reach sometimes leaves behind labor and especially pleasure in any concrete form, dissolving them in broad generalizations about capitalism and global economies. At its best, however, Working Fictions offers significant and sometimes brilliant re-interpretations of familiar novels that reveal the constructedness and historical contingency of our assumptions about labor and pleasure. In this respect, it substantially enlarges our understanding of Victorian fiction. The first section of Working Fictions focuses on the industrial novel, represented by Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Eliot’s Felix Holt. In Lesjak’s analysis, both novels delegitimize working-class aggression, neglecting the structural inequities of industrialization to focus on more manageable issues. Mary Barton focuses on domestic space rather than factories and on consumption rather than production, while the valorization of culture in Felix Holt disqualifies working people from self-determination. As Lesjak trenchantly observes, “Since the ultimate basis for political judgment rests on cultural capital, neither work nor the workplace are necessary sites for political claims to representation” (73). While this observation is not wholly original (Catherine Gallagher and Ruth Yeazell made similar claims in their foundational work on the industrial novel), they are enriched by the detail of her reading and her unearthing of the traces of a proletarian public sphere, which hints at the possibility of the meaningful working-class action that the novels explicitly discredit. Lesjak insists that the labor/pleasure problematic remains a presence, if an indirect one, after the waning of the industrial novel, and so shifts her focus to the bildungsroman as a genre of modernity in section two. In Dickens’s Great Expectations and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Lesjak pursues the development of capitalism in a global context. Her reading of Great Expectations takes up Magwitch’s role in revealing the dirty money that drives not only his own story but the British Empire’s, analyzing the ways in which all characters attempt to conceal bodily evidence of work and so exempt themselves from this corruption. In this new historical moment, bourgeois work rests on the same …