Realism and Parable in Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe

Critics writing in the vein of the “ethical turn” in literary studies have fruitfully explored the ethics of reading, including how narratives construct ethical relationships with readers. Andrew Miller’s provocative and important The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literatureuncovers the ways the realist novel’s exploration of epistemology and perspective serves an ethical aim. The Victorians saw ethical action as following from one’s perception and interpretation of people and situations, so the novel’s experiments in thirdperson and second-person perspectives contributed to the formation of ethical consciousness. In this view, the novel became a sort of therapy for the ethically problematic paralysis of the will that followed from the Victorian period’s generalized skepticism about what one can know of others, the world, and even oneself. The principal component of this therapy is perfectionism, or self-improvement by the imitation of an exemplary other. For Miller, Victorian novels are characteristically perlocutionary: “successful only if [they] prompt a response” (17). Curiously, the criticism of the ethical turn has not yet addressed itself to the narrative subgenre of parable. Miller suggests that perfectionism, the