The Enlightenment and Its Legacy in Victorian Fiction

Abstract

The Enlightenment movement of the Eighteenth century was second to none in bringing the powers of reason into use in the name of science, progress and civilization; yet hardly could the Victorians find in the Enlightenment a perfect programme for the troubling world. In fact, all sorts of rational judgment that aspire to provide absolute truth tend to remain something to be ever further articulated, understood and complemented. This being so, to know that one’s own knowledge is nothing short of false projections is a first step to, if any, genuine enlightenment. Through a case study of selected Victorian novels, which were vehicles for registering such Enlightenment ideals as education and equality, this paper aims to explore implications that the Enlightenment assumed for poor people, women and non-Europeans. It argues that, with a willingness to understand the idea of the critical use of reason, Enlightenment thinking should have taken a self-reflexive action to introduce fractures into imperialist masculine ideologies that were evidently bolstered by a sense of sexual, racial, class superiority. This paper presents an effort to suggest a way of overcoming the innate limitations of the Enlightenment which was white male-only logocentric affairs.