George Eliot's sympathies

George Eliot's sympathies

George Eliot by Samuel Lawrence, 1860

Book Details

Royce Mahawatte

GEORGE ELIOT AND THE GOTHIC NOVEL

288pp. University of Wales Press. £80.
978 0 7083 2576 6

Margaret Harris, editor

GEORGE ELIOT IN CONTEXT

365pp. Cambridge University Press. £65 (US $110).
978 0 521 76408 7

Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, editors

A COMPANION TO GEORGE ELIOT

542pp. Wiley-Blackwell. £120.
978 0 470 65599 3

The seemingly endless range of topics on which Eliot had something to say – and those on which she remained silent

ALEXANDRA LAWRIE

When University College London finally admitted female students to full degree status in 1878, George Eliot wrote to her friend, the leading feminist activist Barbara Bodichon, "no doubt you are rejoicing too that London University has opened all its degrees to women". Eliot's public support for contemporary educational reforms, however, was decidedly more muted, and in general she was unwilling to embroil herself in the complex set of issues termed the "Woman Question", preferring instead to focus on her own career as author and intellectual. As Laura Green writes in her detailed and informative chapter on Eliot, gender and sexuality, in A Companion to George Eliot, she "tended to emphasize not her connections to women's activism but her exceptionality as a woman and an artist, and the extent to which this exceptionality exempted her from certain kinds of political involvement".

Critics in each of the three books under review make various attempts to explain Eliot's apparent conservatism on issues one might logically expect her to have supported – justifying, explaining, or accusing her in turn. Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi in George Eliot in Context, for instance, goes so far as to suggest that Eliot's "circumvention of feminist collectivity" lays her open to the charge of "misogyny", while Elizabeth Gargano's chapter, which looks specifically at Eliot's views on education, cites her as a champion of school reform who remained sceptical about the current arrangement of standardized rote learning. Eliot, Gargano argues, advocated a "more authentic self-education": a personalized pedagogy "directed by the goals and talents of the individual learner" rather than geared towards passing an endless series of examinations. Eliot's assessment of university education was also complex: when her male protagonists are sent to university, she offers an unflattering portrait of lacklustre teaching and wasted expense, yet her female characters, excluded from higher education altogether, are in a much worse position.

While Eliot refused to comment publicly on this type of issue, she offered money to help establish Girton College, and continued to provide advice and encouragement to activist friends such as Bodichon, Emily Davies and Clementia Taylor. It therefore seems rather unjust that Eliot's decisions regarding her private life should have separated her from many leading feminists of the day; her unmarried partnership with George Henry Lewes was deemed scandalous, and female acquaintances were anxious that their own respectability (and the success of their political campaign) would be jeopardized if they were seen to be associating with her. Although this hardline stance softened during the 1870s, and male friends, less constrained by questions of propriety, had been regularly dropping by since the couple's return from Germany in 1855, Eliot presumably felt herself to be simultaneously at the centre of things, as one of the leading intellectuals of the day, yet also curiously cut off from London society. Her relationship with Lewes horrified her brother, too, causing a rift that remained unresolved until her marriage to John Cross just months before her death in 1880. In fact, Eliot's unorthodox views had caused consternation among her relations before: her decision to abandon the family's Evangelicalism in 1842 (at the age of twenty-two) angered her brother and incensed her father, although he and his daughter managed to reach a partial conciliation, and she kept house for him until his death in 1849.

The tricky question of Eliot's position on female education also concerns Royce Mahawatte: he notes, in George Eliot and the Gothic Novel, that "Eliot's comments on the 'Woman Question' reveal a diffidence about the subject, but also an essentialist approach to reforming an education system that was far from able to provide adequate learning for men". Elsewhere, Mahawatte's book offers some intriguing insights into issues of genre, gender and inheritance, with the emphasis on Eliot's incorporation of Gothic tropes in her realist fiction. The book contains impressive close reading, and sophisticated rendering of the relevant literary and philosophical contexts. These virtues are obscured by a prose style that would have been improved immeasurably by an exigent editor. Mahawatte's argument proves all too difficult to follow, often at the level of individual sentences: "While the reviewer highlights the fatal flood which startles Maggie; Auerbach's comment employs a critical fluidity that, pre-empting the work of Patrick Brantlinger and later Gothic studies, jumps between fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the sensationalism of the 1860s". Grammatical peculiarities dog the prose throughout, becoming increasingly wearisome; and Mahawatte gives us sentences crammed with so many different ideas that they are rendered practically impenetrable: "The final book of Middlemarch sets up a competition between healing strategies; and Dorothea's role as a human panacea is an invitation for the Evangelical heroine to return to the text in order to qualify a scientific epistemology that has become prejudice". Regrettably, here the intriguing topic of Eliot's connection to the Gothic is obscured.

George Eliot in Context can't be accused of the same; this sprightly, witty and engaging volume consists of thirty-six short, concise chapters on practically every aspect of Eliot's life, times and writing – from theatre to music, money, interiors, metropolitanism and the law. Joanne Shattock's chapter on "Publishers and publication", for example, offers a factual, clearly laid-out discussion of Eliot's personal and financial relations with John Blackwood (to whom she was introduced by Lewes) and John Chapman, the owner of the Westminster Review (which she edited for two years in the early 1850s, putting her in contact with many of the day's intellectual lights). Shattock also gives us the details of Eliot's temporary switch from Blackwood to Smith, Elder in 1862 following a "magnificent offer" of £10,000 to publish Romola in the CornhillMagazine in sixteen monthly parts. Blackwood's response to Eliot's abandonment was generous – he wrote to her that "it would destroy my pleasure in business if I knew any friend was publishing with me when he thought he could do better for himself by going elsewhere", and this "well-judged response", according to Shattock, helped to bring Eliot back into the Blackwood fold with Felix Holt, the Radical in 1866.

Other gems abound in this Cambridge volume: in the section on genre, for instance, we are alerted to Eliot's possible "lingering suspicion of novels as a lower form of art than poetry", which explains why she continued working in a form "that seemed unsuited to her particular talents". Elsewhere, Margaret Harris offers an enlightening path through the various biographies of Eliot that have appeared since her death, beginning with the first, written by her husband John Cross (more than twenty years her junior). Harris notes that Cross's biography of 1885 (not unexpectedly) "plays down personal relationships, especially that with Lewes, and – unsurprisingly – contains no indication of its subject's intense relationships with John Chapman and Herbert Spencer, nor of her friendships with women". Harris gives us further pause for thought in a subsequent chapter on Eliot's posthumous reputation, inviting us to consider exactly why it is that Eliot's legacy has taken such a markedly different shape from that of other canonical nineteenth-century novelists – Dickens and Austen being the most obvious examples. Aside from a successful television adaptation of Middlemarch in the mid-1990s, and a film of Silas Marner in 1985, starring Ben Kingsley, there have been relatively few reworkings of the novels, at least when compared with the seemingly endless adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations. Harris suggests that the omniscient narration in Eliot's novels makes them difficult to translate to the screen, while the author's lack of connection to a particular place or region (such as Hardy's Wessex, or Austen's Bath) might also be a contributing factor – although Harris does point out that both Coventry and Eliot's birthplace of Nuneaton marked the centenary of her birth in 1919. While the "heritage industry" seems largely to have ignored Eliot, academic interest remains strong: her novels continue to appear on university syllabuses; new monographs, edited collections and critical guides are published year on year; she has specialist journals devoted entirely to her work; and the University of London hosts an annual conference on a different Eliot novel each year. Still, when the Bank of England was casting around for a suitable woman to grace the new £10 note, it was Austen who got the gig.

Easily the most intriguing chapter here also happens to be the one least directly focused on Eliot and her novels: barely literary criticism at all, Judith Flanders's section on etiquette outlines Victorian rules surrounding the wedding cards dispatched after a marriage. These were sent out by the bridesmaids the day after the ceremony as a way of announcing the wedding, and presented an opportunity for the bride to reflect on her "new social status" and weed out the less reputable among her circle of acquaintances. Those who didn't receive a card could consider the friendship over; if a card arrived but without any return address, the recipient would understand they were not being invited to pay a visit; cards with an address indicated one should make arrangements to call on the bride. Visiting cards, meanwhile, had to follow a particular format: a woman's card had her name printed in the centre and her address at the bottom left; a man's would have his title and last name in the centre, his home address at the bottom left, and club on the right; when a daughter was accompanying her mother on a visit, this was signalled by folding down the right-hand corner of the mother's card.

There was a well-rehearsed ritual for formal dinner parties, too, with precedence at the table denoted by seating position: "the most prominent man sat on his hostess's right, the next in rank on her left, while the same took place for women next to the host; this continued down to the middle of the table, where the least significant guests were seated". The actual meals (at least until the 1860s) were served in a series of "removes", and the emphasis here was on abundance – the first round of dishes placed on the table might be large tureens of soup, fish and a series of side dishes that guests would pass around; these were then taken away to make room for "a joint of meat and a fowl . . . placed at the head and foot, with corner and side-dishes of vegetables, starches and further hashed or stewed foods", followed by "a sweet and a savoury dish for the head and foot of the table, and corner and side-dishes of more savoury dishes as well as jellies, trifles and sweet dishes". At the more opulent dinner parties there was more to come: "cheese, celery and radishes, before 'dessert' (meaning fruit and nuts) followed". This is, of course, very different to the way we structure meals today, but Flanders explains that "No one was expected to eat, or even taste, every dish: the point of service à la française was to offer choice", and "One guide to correct behaviour warned that the fanciest dinner should last only two hours, which shows that the guests were not steadily chomping their way through twenty-odd dishes". By the 1880s, "service à la russe" (a series of courses resembling our present-day system) had become the norm.

On an altogether different tack, Josie Billington's study of families and kinship introduces us to one of the overarching contexts of Eliot's oeuvre: Eliot's translation of The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach in 1854, which had a profound influence on her personal philosophy. Put simply, Feuerbach's governing thesis was that God existed as a projection of human hopes and desires still to be achieved; ostensibly religious and moral virtues were in fact rooted in mankind, not a supernatural deity, and the "task for the secular world", as Billington explains, "was to see that, as human nature was its highest value, so the love of humans for one another must be its first and highest law". Eliot had come to the realization that her intellect could no longer accept the concept of a transcendental God, and Feuerbach's work allowed her to find a compromise between these intellectual doubts and her long-term emotional ties to Christianity. The spiritual nourishment hitherto offered by traditional religion could instead be fulfilled by a "religion of humanity" – less rigid than that of Auguste Comte, but sharing the belief that acts of fellowship contribute towards the collective lot of the community. We see this played out in the novels: Dorothea Brooke begins Middlemarch as a modern-day St Teresa, understanding her role in life to be one of subordination, and seeing in Mr Casaubon a patriarchal figure to whom she can submit. This is revealed to be increasingly unacceptable as the narrative develops: her attitude of self-sacrifice has been adopted so strongly that it verges on the egotistical, and she is re-educated out of "martyrdom" and "self-mortification", learning instead to adapt her Christian piety into something more like sympathetic social relations.

Speaking more broadly, Eliot's characters time after time are called on to recognize the importance of "community", and she deploys the metaphor of a "web" to denote the ideal mutual interaction. We might think here of Silas Marner – when Silas loses his gold and finds himself instead with a baby to look after, it is the sympathy and kindness of his neighbours that draws him out of his studied isolation. The Byronic Will Ladislaw, meanwhile, enters the town of Middlemarch with a desire to be self-determining, yet this is qualified by the allowance given to him by Casaubon. He must learn to see himself as part of the community, negotiating and refashioning his desire for autonomy in a context where fellowship and community are central; later, his egotistical energies are redirected towards the common good. Dr Lydgate, in the same novel, seems to lack that quality of "indefiniteness" that Eliot endorses as a sign of being able to compromise in this way. Yet the irony here is that although he is incapable of seeing the web of life as one of mutual dependence with the potential to benefit all, his scientific research on human tissue depends on the interconnectedness of ostensibly separate entities: "living bodies, fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally; but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues, out of which the various organs – brain, heart, lungs, and so on – are compacted . . .".

Eliot's depiction of Lydgate also demonstrates her facility with scientific terminology, the focus of Melissa Raines's chapter on language. As Raines notes, the emphasis Eliot places on the social web is apparent at the stylistic level – the author's use of parataxis renders some of her sentences frustratingly complex, yet she also manages to find common ground between seemingly discrete ideas or concepts. This coherent though convoluted style is, for Raines, related to Eliot's understanding that emotion is connected to physical pain, as she uses a "language of the nerves" to convey a character's physiological perception of passion or anger: "The words must become the nerves that are the basis for the thought, and so the syntax must become a complex neuro-physiological journey that maps the thought-process within a character's mind".

A Companion to George Eliot feels like an altogether heftier, more serious-minded endeavour. The collection begins with chapters on Eliot's major fiction, her critical writing, her particular brand of narrative realism, correspondence with female American writers and contemporary reception, before some heavy-hitting sections on Eliot's deeply cosmopolitan intellectual philosophy. Jill L. Matus, for instance, explores Eliot's critical engagements with Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte and T. H. Huxley, while Isobel Armstrong unravels the "formative" impact of Spinoza on Eliot's writings, an influence that did not, we are shown, simply dissipate after the (Lewes-led) withdrawal of her translation of the Ethics from the publisher Bohn in 1856, following a dispute over terms. In fact, traces of Spinoza's philosophy are as much perceptible in Eliot's rendering of sympathy and emotion as is the work of Feuerbach, Comte, David Friedrich Strauss or Spencer.

It is a brave soul indeed who takes on Eliot's poetic endeavours, a sentiment reiterated in the first sentence of Herbert F. Tucker's chapter: "Nobody appreciates George Eliot's poetry. It's a shame, but it's a fact". Nevertheless, his chapter exemplifies the best that this type of volume can achieve, in terms of furnishing specialist critics with the textual space to expound at length on hitherto neglected areas of literature. Indeed, he suggests that the lacuna represented by Eliot's poetic endeavours can be turned to the critic's advantage: her place in the canon is such that aesthetic value judgements on her fiction are now practically inconceivable "except as a stunt or joke", yet "With the author's unappreciated poetry . . . it is another story: the fact that nobody adores or analyzes it opens a rare opportunity, within the negligently received canon of a writer indubitably canonical, to appreciate Eliot's writing as if for the first time, and with consequences for the larger oeuvre that look, from here, intriguingly hard to predict".

Tucker's meticulous close reading ("Steadied on either side with metered stateliness, the rhythm all but crumbles in line 3 into a trochee, an iamb, and then a caesura-spavined anapest . . .") is suitably persuasive – Eliot's "interleaving diction" putting him in mind of Shakespeare or Milton, and her "linguistic curiosity" redolent of Samuel Johnson. Tucker uses this compelling analysis of Eliot's poetry to make an altogether larger point about academic specialism, a regrettable narrowing down of critical factions whereby "specialists in fiction are, ipso facto and in their own professional judgment, disqualified to hold opinions about poetry". He acknowledges ruefully that "Readers caught in that snare will presumably skip this chapter anyway, which can by definition address nothing they acknowledge a stake in".

There is in each of these critical companions a marked overuse, or repetition, of certain pronouncements that shine light on Eliot's ethics or rationale. I lost count, for instance, of the times contributors quoted the remark (made by Eliot in a letter to her friend Frederic Harrison outlining the educational possibilities of literature) that "if it [aesthetic teaching] ceases to be purely aesthetic – if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram – it becomes the most offensive of all teaching". Eliot's review essay "The Natural History of German Life" (1856) understandably also makes several appearances. There she laid out her social and artistic principles regarding portrayals of the lower classes, urging writers to emulate the German sociologist W. H. von Riehl in depicting rural life realistically, so that knowledge of one's "fellow-men" might provoke the "extension of our sympathies". The essay affords a constructive point of reference for discussions of genre, historiography, landscape, law, the visual arts, finance, politics, religion and race. The absorbing, seemingly endless range of topics on which Eliot had something to say, and that in turn say something about her, testifies not so much to the resourcefulness of critics as to the curiosity, sympathy and intellectual virtuosity of the author. These companions do good work in offering a pathway through some of the major topics, although the richness of Eliot's oeuvre is such that discussion shows no sign of abating just yet.