The Moralist Critic and the Student Activist: A Reconsideration

Abstract

A prominent right-wing truism holds that there is something ‘Victorian’ about the aesthetic judgment of rising generations of the left; that, in the words of Coddling of the American Mind co-author Greg Lukianoff, campus activists echo ‘the thinking of the old Victorian censors.’ Without accepting these terms, I suggest that resistance to this discourse should spur Victorianists to reconsider certain habitual scholarly dismissals made on uncomfortably parallel grounds. For those of us who take seriously contemporary activists’ critiques, what might it mean to take seriously the Victorian moral criticism to which those critiques are persistently compared? In a cultural moment of hyper-alertness to what’s problematic about art, might we be able to better appreciate the conceptual work of certain much-maligned nineteenth-century strategies of aesthetic evaluation? Through presentist, methodologically-oriented readings of Lady Eastlake’s 1848 infamous attack on Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review and F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition, I argue that a “moralist” method links nineteenth-century critics, scholarly Victorianists, and cultural activists, and that scholarly repression of this moralism opens the field up to right-wing cooptation and reactionary thought.