THE DOMINANT THEME
THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, by lan Watt; Chatto and Windus, English price 25/-. "| HE novel is without doubt the most popular reading-matter of the great majority of readers. If they were asked why they prefer the novel to other kinds of literature, most people would probably say that the novel gives them plot and suspense. Others would say the novel gives them ‘character.’ Most novel readers would agree (perhaps after some prodding) that the novel gives them a picture of life. But how much of life? In the great majority of novels, "life" is something very restricted. It does not include work, or politics, or business-the staple of what the daily .ewspaper sets before us. To most novelists, "life" is a period of a few years or days or months when a man and a woman meet, court, and marry.. Love is the novelist’s dominant theme, There are, of course, plenty of other human motives that provide plots for literature. Hamlet is a story of revenge. He loved Ophelia — but that hardly matters. Macbeth is a story of ambition, He loved his wife-but that is not part of the drama, Why should drama and the epic and the long poem have such a wide range of themes and the novelist’s choice be so limited? Mr Watt, in this first-rate book, provides the answer by studying the beginnings of the novel. He sees it (in the hands of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding) as emerging at a period when for women matriage was becoming increasingly an action of free choice. The "patriarchal" family (in which she had a status quite apart from that given by her husband) was giving way to the "conjugal" family, in which her whole happiness, economic and emotional, depended on her personal choice of a mate. "Who will I marry? Will I be happy? Will I better myself?" does indeed provide the theme for Clarissa, and Elizabeth Bennett, and Jane Eyre, and Becky Sharp, and even for Molly Bloom. The novel has expanded in topic since the 18th century, but this is still its major motif. I do not think I have met a better book on the novel. It is a classic of closely argued scholarship and illuminating criticism and can be strongly recommended both for the student and for the general reader.
Ian A.
Gordon
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19571018.2.19.6
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 949, 18 October 1957, Page 14
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393THE DOMINANT THEME New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 949, 18 October 1957, Page 14
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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