The Fleetwood Half-orphan Asylum. Ideas in Fiction, or Fiction of Ideas?

Abstract

In its creative and critical components, this study examines the intersection between philosophy, literary theory and analysis, and creative writing. It examines and then illustrates how philosophically engaged fiction – often called the novel of ideas – engages with the ideas it presents. Can – indeed, must – ideas inhabit works of literature, as critics like Mary McCarthy suggest? Or are philosophy and fiction at best uncomfortable housemates, as the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch and others assert? First, the creative project – The Fleetwood Half-Orphan Asylum – is a novel that sets off to explore a situation in which pragmatist philosophy challenges idealism. Much of it is set in a time – early twentieth century – when philosophical verities in general were threatened, setting ontology in confusing, complex, and uncertain directions. The process of writing, however, led to exploration of other philosophical stances. Second, the thesis examines literary theory and analysis of categories of fiction and then the specific category of the novel of ideas. To do so, it uses lenses drawn from three facets of psychology: heuristics and biases in cognitive psychology, the dilemma of exploitation and exploration in development psychology, and frame analysis from social psychology. Writing the creative component began as an attempt to explore how orphanages undertook care at a time when complex ideas based in pragmatist philosophy were challenging established norms. As the writing proceeded – that is, as the story unfolds – other philosophical discussions came into play. That process and the ideas that exploration uncovered, form the bridge between the novel and the critical essay of the thesis. The critical component discusses the dichotomies writers face as they situate their novels in the publishing landscape. Examining in greater detail one dichotomy – philosophically versus psychologically oriented writing – it then identifies that the term novel of ideas is used theoretical to describe at least two quite distinct roles for philosophy in fiction: enactment of well understood ideas, or exploration of confusing ones. It then shows analytically how that boundary blurs in two contemporary novels. With its discussion of issues in philosophy and the challenges to its role in literature in general and fiction in particular, Chapter 5 of the critical component integrates the critical and creative themes the thesis, viewed as a whole, addresses.