Cultural Determinism: The Emergence of the Statistical 'Real' in the 19th Century
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Speaker: Genie Babb, PhD, SUNY Plattsburgh
Roland Barthes and others have identified the realistic detail as the hallmark of realism as it emerged in the nineteenth century, signaling “a break between the ancient mode of verisimilitude and modern realism” (“The Reality Effect” 147). Barthes writes “in the ideology of our time, obsessive reference to the ‘concrete’” bespeaks “what is rhetorically demanded of the human sciences, of literature, of behavior” (146). This association of the real with the concrete particular is not the whole historical picture, however. The validity of the individual as marker of truth was increasingly challenged in the nineteenth century by a radically different sense of the real that came from statistical thinking and the law of large numbers. While certain “demographic regularities,” such as the ratios of male to female births, had been observed since the early eighteenth century, these regularities had been ascribed to a benevolent Providence. However, in the early nineteenth century, other regularities began to be noticed that could in no way be attributed to Providence, from the banal fact that “the number of dead letters in the Paris was constant from year to year” to the shocking fact of the “uniformity of murder, theft, and suicide” rates (Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820-1900 , p. 51). This relationship between the societal aggregate and the individual person was a cause of consternation for many Victorians because it seemed to undermine notions of agency and free will. But it also gave rise to a powerful mechanism for stereotyping as can be found in the work of Henry Thomas Buckle (1857-61). This paper will examine Daniel Deronda to show how George Eliot responded to the “statistical real” in the portrayal of her Jewish characters.