N a r r a t i v e1 0 1seen as tragic. They are to be swept out of the way so that others
may find their own fulfilment unimpeded.
Lawrence may be wrong about Tolstoy and tragedy, but he is
right to see that authors quite often rig their narratives to suit their
fictional purposes. Just when Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of
George Eliot’s Middlemarch, seems trapped in a loveless marriage
with a withered old pedant, the novel itself steps in and polishes
him off with a fatal heart attack. The modern form of Providence,
in other words, is known as fiction. Jane Eyre is anxious to marry its
heroine off to Rochester, who is already married; so it topples his
mad wife off a blazing rooftop to her death. If characters them-
selves are reluctant to commit murder, the narrative itself may
always step in and oblige. Narratives are like hired assassins, ready
to do the dirty work that their characters may flinch from. David
Copperfield’s childish, rather vacant- headed wife Dora is clearly an
unsuitable partner for him, and so is obviously not going to make
it to the end of the novel. She is as doomed as the domineering
businessman who rides roughshod over his fellow characters at the
start of a detective story, and who is clearly going to end up with a
knife in his guts.
A story may step in to save the day with a timely legacy, the
arrival of an eligible bachelor in the district, or the discovery of a
long- lost, seriously rich relative. It is the task of realist narratives of
this kind to grant the virtuous their reward and the villains their
comeuppance. They must rectify the blunders of reality. Sometimes,
as in the work of Henry Fielding, this is done with an ironic sense
of its artifice. In real life, a novel may slyly intimate, the hero would
probably have been hanged; but since this is fiction it is obligatory
to hand him an adoring wife and a sizeable landed estate. If he
himself is shown actively working for such things, this will diminish