The One Vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel

Accordingly, in Woloch's account of Pride and Prejudice, Austen's project is one of showing how Elizabeth Bennett's emergence as the protagonist comes at the expense of her sisters, each of whom starts the novel as a potential co-heroine only to be gradually transformed into a minor character whom Elizabeth can judge and thereby demonstrate her title to narrative centrality. All of this is to say that while I don't doubt the presence of the "rigorous homologies" that Woloch has uncovered, his commitment to a broadly Marxian social history makes it hard to figure out how we get from the general categories of "capitalism" and "the nineteenth-century novel" to the particulars of Great Expectations, except by the rather unsatisfying expedient of critical fiat.