The Novel as Carrier of Cultural Values: Kica Kolbe’s The Gavrilov Women

Abstract

Insofar as a novel is an invented world, every novel contains an implicit set of values that can be derived by the novel’s reader. The realist psychological novel, perfected in the nineteenth century by such masters as Lev Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert, presents a world as if seen through the eyes of a normal, contemporary human being. The novel’s implied reader is a member of the same world as that of the novel’s characters and narrator and therefore shares a woridview and a set of values with those characters. To be sure, as many critics have pointed out especially in recent years, the normality of the worldview of both the characters and implied reader of the nineteenth-century novel is in fact not at all neutral, although the conventions of realism serve to mask this. In fact, the narrator, characters, and implied reader share and mirror the prejudices of the society in which the novels were written and set — they are for the most part upper to upper-middle class (depending on the society in which the novel was written), heterosexual, white, nominally Christian, psychologically stable, well rooted in society, and soforth. At the same time, by taking advantage of the expectations of readers, the novel can serve to reinforce or to undermine the values of its society (or sometimes do both simultaneously).