Andrew Miller. The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8014-4661-0. Price: US$39.95

Andrew Miller has written an engaging book about moral perfectionism in Victorian literature while also raising some provocative questions about the uses and aspirations of literary criticism. Miller describes his work as “moral psychology” (xi) and certainly he is at his best when tracking the emotional intricacies that follow from an ethics that relies more heavily on situational relations to others than to set rules. Future-oriented, and hence particularly suited to narrative, perfectionism projects alternative selves—and always ponders those alternatives and sometimes even acts to realize them. This “moral project of self-cultivation” requires “attentive and scrupulous self-reflection” (99). Miller insists that selves can be spurred to such self-reflection only through an encounter with an other, “a second-order relation with this character as his deliberations, his accommodations of perspective, are presented to me as mine” (102). Novels—or Robert Browning’s novelistic dramatic monologues—are technically well suited, with the use of free indirect discourse, privileged access to characters’ inner thoughts, and foils to pull readers toward the imagination of alternative selves. The urge to perfect oneself and the means to improvement must be carefully taught—and novels are the teaching machine. Miller makes some tentative claims about moral perfectionism being typically or widely Victorian, but he doesn’t push these very hard, sticking instead to close readings of canonical authors (Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Henry James, and John Henry Newman are the main players) from whom it would be perilous to make wider cultural generalizations. Wisely, he avoids comments on Victorian moralism or earnestness. More surprisingly, he inoculates his discussions of improvement from any non-moral content. Yet, if only to dispute the argument, Miller should consider the possibility that perfectionism is the bourgeois drive for self-improvement, linked (as in Great Expectations) to issues of social climbing and self-creation in societies supposedly open to talent, but transposed to a moral key. To imitate in hopes of eventually consorting with one’s betters is not always, or even primarily, a moral undertaking. Miller’s own exemplar as a literary critic is Stanley Cavell, whose ideas he liberally uses and whose manner at times infects Miller’s own voice. Following Cavell, Miller strives to connect perfectionism’s preference for personal relationships to skepticism, particularly to that version of skepticism that worries about my ability to know others’ minds and others’ inability to understand me. I must admit that I find this connection strained and unconvincing. Moral behavior is publicly displayed; exemplars are rarely chosen because we have access to their deliberations. Yes, learning more about the inner lives of these exemplars can be enlightening, but I don’t see how an anxiety about the possibility of gaining such knowledge would motivate the perfectionist’s imitative impulse in the first place. Miller would have been better served by turning to a figure who, save for one brief reference, is surprisingly absent from his book: Immanuel Kant. The third Critique takes up precisely the issues Miller pursues, albeit in an aesthetic rather than moral register. How do we understand—or create—instances of beauty (Kant asks) in the absence of any rule by which to recognize or produce them? Only examples, Kant tells us, can do the job. Plus, Kant struggles with the problem of “communicability” in ways clearly germane to Miller’s concern with skepticism. Since examples are singular, how do the lessons or messages they convey carry over to other instances? Miller quotes approvingly Alexander Gelley’s assertion that “the rhetorical force of examples is to impose on the audience or interlocutor an obligation to judge” (102), where judgment is understood less as a decision about right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, than a question …