Modernizing George Eliot

Front matter

The Writer as Artist, Intellectual,

Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic

K.M. Newton

Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction 1 1 Eliots Critique of Darwinism 7 Eliot and the Byronic 27 Eliot and Moral Philosophy: Kant and The Mill on the Floss 41 The Role of the Narrator in Eliot’s Fiction, Especially Middlemarch 52 Prototypes and Symbolism in Middlemarch 69 Anticipations of Modernism in Eliot’s Fiction 79 Realism and Romance: Allusion and Intertextuality in Daniel Deronda 93 8 Circumcision, Realism and Irony in Daniel Deronda 114 9 Formal Experiment and Ideological Critique: Silas Marner and ‘Victorian Values’ 125 10 The Post-Colonial Critique of Eliot: Is Edward Said Right about Daniel Deronda? 138 11 Eliot and Racism: How Should One Read ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’? 149 12 Eliot and Derrida: An Elective Affinity? 161 13 The Role of Luck in the Art, Ethics and Politics of Daniel Deronda 179

NIA On BW N

Introduction

T™ study will argue that George Eliot stands virtually alone among British writers since Milton in aspiring not only to be a literary artist at the highest level but also to be an intellectual of the first rank who could engage through the medium of literature with the most significant cultural, ethical and political issues of her time. Most of these issues, such as Darwinism, colonialism and racism, the problem of moral choice in the absence of any metaphysical grounding for it, still play an important role in contemporary debates in the twenty-first century, which makes Eliot perhaps the most significant Victorian writer at the present time. Her primary aim was to embody her intellectual interests and concerns within her novels without compromising artistic integrity, thus unifying intellectual thought and art. I hope to show that this ambition was to a considerable degree successfully realized, largely through the adoption of innovatory literary methods that anticipate those developed later by modernist writers.

Although Eliot’s canonic status has been securely established since at least the middle of the twentieth century — and the numerous books and articles that continue to be written about her work indicate that academic interest in it shows no sign of diminishing - more than most canonic writers she has been subject to a wide range of critical questioning. A recent commentator on Eliot’s ‘critical heritage’, Kathleen Blake, has remarked, ‘I had not thought to find so much critical depreciation.”! Her reputation suffered greatly following the end of the Victorian era when she was identified with what were seen as the excesses of Victorian moralism and high seriousness, and for some commentators, especially those outside academia, this remains a critical issue and is seen as compromising the artistic credibility of her work. It has been suggested that this perception of ‘high seriousness — perhaps solemnity ... can help account for the way in which modernist artists rejected her’.? Although Virginia Woolf famously described Middlemarch as ‘the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’, her admiration for Eliot as an artist was very qualified, and she placed little emphasis on anticipations of modernism in her fiction. The New Critics, with their formalist principles, showed little interest in Victorian fiction before the emergence of Henry James, for whom form, or more exactly a particular conception of form, was the most important aspect of serious fiction. They would have noted James’s famous or notorious comment on Middlemarch, that it was ‘a treasure house of detail’ but ‘an indifferent whole’. Mark Schorer, one of the first critics to apply New Critical principles to the study of fiction, noticed the intricacy of Middlemarch’s construction but still found it wanting in relation to Jamesian criteria: ‘The dramatic structure is not very taut, yet one feels, on finishing the book, that this is a superbly constructed work ... What makes it so is thematic rather than dramatic unity.”

Critical perceptions were significantly changed by the publication of Gordon S. Haight’s edition of Eliot’s letters, seven volumes appearing in the mid-1950s and a further two volumes in 1978. This was a major scholarly resource and has underlain the great number of critical books and articles on her work that have been published in the latter half of the twentieth century, continuing into the twenty-first century. However, F. R. Leavis’s study The Great Tradition, first published in 1948, in which Eliot, together with James and Conrad, was elevated to the highest rank of English novelists, is generally acknowledged as a major turning point in regard to Eliot’s reputation. Leavis claimed that the moral dimension of her fiction was fully reconcilable with the highest artistic integrity, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s well-received studies by Barbara Hardy and W. J. Harvey defended the form of Eliot’s fiction against Jamesian influenced objections.* Thus Eliot’s status as a major novelist was fairly firmly established. This is not to say that all critical worries over form were fully allayed, for certain aspects of her novels still attracted negative criticism, such as the dominance of the ‘omniscient narrator’ or what was seen as an unresolved tension between a commitment to realism and an idealism that affected both the representation of character and plots which have been accused of imposing a moral structure on the world. Leavis was particularly critical of the Jewish part of Daniel Deronda, which for him was flawed in terms of its characterization and plot, making the novel for him an artistic failure even though he judged the English part as among Eliot’s greatest literary achievements, and this has led to Daniel Deronda generating more critical debate than any of Eliot’s other novels.

With the emergence of structuralism and post-structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s, Eliot’s fiction again came under scrutiny, but the emphasis switched from form in the Jamesian sense to language. Her fiction was singled out as exemplifying the ‘classic realist text’ by certain British critics influenced by Roland Barthes’ critique of realism.’ It was argued that whereas Eliot’s modernist successors radically interrogated the relationship between language and the phenomenal world, the fundamental assumption of the realist tradition of the novel to which Eliot was seen as belonging assumed that language passively reflected the world. The language of realism was thus complicit in maintaining the dominant ideology rather than questioning or undermining it. This view of Eliot had links with Marxist criticism, which saw her fiction as reinforcing bourgeois ideology.’ This book will question the view that the language of Eliot’s fiction operates in such terms, and it will be argued in particular that there are significant anticipations of modernism in her work, especially in Daniel Deronda.

The shift in criticism from the emphasis on form or language towards history and politics that took place in the later decades of the twentieth century, with feminist criticism, new historicism and post-colonial criticism becoming increasingly dominant, led to an increased scrutiny of the politics of Eliot’s work. Many feminist critics saw Eliot as at best half-hearted about feminism and its political aims, and thus failing to provide in her fiction the hope and inspiration that many feminists saw as politically necessary.

INTRODUCTION 3

Post-colonial-influenced criticism was particularly critical of Eliot and argued strongly that her writing was supportive of imperialism and colonialism, with Daniel Deronda and the final chapter of Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, being the major focus of this claim.

Eliot has, of course, been defended against these attacks, but in this book a more radical position is adopted, namely that Eliot was a much more ambitious and experimental writer than critics have generally realized and more than any of her Victorian contemporaries anticipates significant aspects of writing in the twentieth and indeed twenty-first century in regard to both art and ideas. The final essays in particular explore links between her mode of thinking and that of Jacques Derrida, especially in relation to the ethical and political tendency of the later Derrida. If these Derridean affinities are taken into account, what many previous critics have seen as contradictions or incoherences in her work or in her thought can be seen as mainly derived from reading her as a writer who, in her approach to art, her philosophical outlook and her ideology, predominantly reflects her Victorian context. This book argues that Eliot’s work cannot be contained within that Victorian frame, that her ambition as an artist and the complexity and range of her thinking in regard to philosophy, ethics and politics make her perhaps the only Victorian writer who can be seen as a fully modern figure. Indeed if the term ‘modern’ is extended beyond the twentieth into the twenty-first century, Eliot as artist and thinker in some respects even moves beyond most of her ‘modernist’ successors. This can be seen in the relevance of her work to recent theoretical discussion in which there has been particular emphasis on such concepts as identity, nationalism, colonialism and cosmopolitanism,’ all of which are central concerns of her writing, especially in Daniel Deronda, which is why it is discussed at length in several chapters of this study.

The study has three main sections. The first section focuses on Eliot as an intellectual. Though critics have admired her intellectual scope she has seldom been seen an original thinker but generally as someone who borrows from a range of sources without making a significant contribution of her own. I shall try to refute this view. Eliot as an intellectual was a product of the dominance of German thought in the nineteenth century, and she deserves to be seen in that European context. The books she translated from German, Strauss’s The Life of Jesus and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, were among the most influential written in the nineteenth century, and Eliot’s familiarity with German and European intellectual developments generally is evident to anyone who has read her essays and letters. Arguably European modernism, as distinct from its Anglo-American form, had its beginnings within German Romanticism, especially Jena Romanticism in which literature and philosophy were to a considerable extent imbricated, which made it significantly different from Anglo-American modernism. Writers and critics associated with the latter seem to have been largely ignorant of the European origins of modernism, especially the radical innovations of Jena Romanticism at both the level of literary practice and theory.'° They tended to see twentieth-century literary modernism as a radical departure from Victorian writing, perceiving the latter as comparatively unsophisticated, especially at a formal level. Such a view did not take into account sufficiently Victorian writers whose intellectual and philosophical roots were deeply European, notably Eliot whose knowledge of and interest in nineteenth-century German literature, thought and culture from Goethe onwards was probably unsurpassed by anyone, except possibly Carlyle.

Asan intellectual she belongs, in my view, among the ranks of the major European figures, and I support this in the first three chapters by considering her intellectual contribution in three significant areas of cultural debate and controversy, where her analysis and power of critique were especially acute: Darwinism, the Byronic and Kantian moral philosophy. Eliot stands apart from many of her contemporary intellectuals by being almost as knowledgeable about science as she was about philosophy, psychology and sociology, and this gives her treatment of Darwinism particular authority. Darwinian theory permeates her writing and she was both thoroughly acquainted with it at the scientific level and cognisant of its subversive potential at a cultural level. I shall suggest that her critique of Darwinism is more powerful than that of any of her contemporaries. One distinctive feature of it is that it does not deny the validity of Darwinism on the grounds that a theory with such dangerous implications cannot or, at least, should not be true.

The Byronic, like Darwinism, also permeates her writing. Byron’s sceptical view of the world, his elevation of the ego and rejection of limits or boundaries, inspired an alternative Romantic tradition, particularly in Europe, that was prepared to take scepticism, egotism and irony to an extreme. Though Eliot had no respect for Byron as a man, she was thoroughly acquainted with his work and was not unsympathetic to all aspects of the Byronic, being for example an enthusiast for the work of another writer associated with irony, Heinrich Heine (Eliot in her essay on Heine remarks that he had been ‘proclaimed ... as the Byron of Germany”!') who is associated with ‘Romantic irony’, a type of irony first developed by Friedrich Schlegel, one of the main figures within Jena Romanticism. But the combination of egotism and scepticism that was inspired by Byron and influenced the thought of writers like Schopenhauer and Stirner needed to be confronted at an intellectual level. Like Darwinism, the Byronic is viewed critically throughout most of her writing, but her most sustained critique is in her dramatic poem of ideas, The Spanish Gypsy, a work which deserves critical analysis though it has been largely neglected. Eliot’s critical treatment of the Byronic in its various aspects — emphasis on the ego, pessimism about life, the belief that values can be created purely on an individual basis — is the more powerful because, as with her critique of Darwinism, it is genuinely critical and does not invoke metaphysical ideas or an absolutist moral position.

Eliot is of course generally associated with moralism. But can she be legitimately seen as a moral philosopher, that is, as someone who does not only have moral views but is aware of philosophical argument and whose engagement with ethics is governed by a defensible philosophical perspective? Few previous critics have taken Eliot seriously as a moral philosopher and there

INTRODUCTION 5 has been much criticism of her as being merely moralistic. This is especially the case in discussion of moral dilemmas such as that which confronts Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss after she in effect elopes with Stephen Guest. Though this episode is one of the most humanly powerful episodes in the novel I try to show that philosophy cannot be left out of account since Kant’s moral philosophy underlies the debates between Maggie and Stephen. Eliot has great respect for Kant’s ethical philosophy but she does not merely apply it passively. She engages with Kant on her own terms with her own ideas and deserves to be considered as a moral philosopher in her own right.

This raises a question that is often posed in regard to Eliot: does her intellectuality diminish her power as an artist? As I have suggested above, this is not a problem in a German literary and cultural context, but Anglo-American critics have tended to be unconvinced by her attempt to combine the two and in practice have often concentrated on one or the other: ‘not until we learn to deal with her simultaneously in these two roles will we be able to do full justice to her work.’!* She was as devoted to literature as art as she was to the play of ideas. For her the highest art fused the intellectual and the artistic, and this is what she tries to emulate in her fiction. In the chapters following the discussion of her in which the main focus is on her as writer/intellectual, I shift the emphasis to artistic aspects of her writing — narration, symbolism, formal experiment, radical allusiveness — and argue that in certain respects she anticipates twentieth-century modernism, self-consciously drawing on myth, particularly Jewish myth and mysticism in Daniel Deronda, as well as incorporating and adapting various elements from texts by her major predecessors. This may be seen as an anticipation of Joyce’s use of Homer’s Odyssey as the basis for the narrative structure of Ulysses, while at the same time, like Joyce, not abandoning realism at the level of ‘story’. The creation of layered literary texts in which a realist representation of life interacts with myth, symbolism and allusion anticipates not only Joyce but also T. S. Eliot, and she would have been sympathetic to his aim of fusing thought and feeling in literature. Middlemarch, Silas Marner and especially Daniel Deronda are discussed in that context.

If, as I argue, Eliot’s commitment was to the integration of intellectuality and art with formal experiment being central to that commitment, then this may provide a different critical perspective from the negative critique that emerged in the late twentieth century in which the critical climate was one in which literary interpretation, cultural theory and political issues tended to merge. Indeed Eliot is a particularly significant figure in this context, since for her art should not avoid engagement with the major cultural issues of its time, and the fact that such issues as imperialism, colonialism, racism, cosmopolitanism play a significant part in Eliot’s writing has led to interpretations of her work in which the dominant focus has been political. A negative critique of Eliot was initiated by Edward Said in his brief discussion of her in his book Orientalism, which he later elaborated on in his essay, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims’, which saw her work as supporting Western imperialism and colonialism. This led to a considerable number of post-colonial critiques of her, generally going much further than Said. These readings are called into question in the chapters on Said’s critique of Daniel Deronda, and post-colonial critics’ claims that both that novel and especially ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ support racism, where it is argued that such critiques do not take sufficient account of the literary sophistication of Eliot’s discourse.

In Chapter 12, Eliot’s relation to the political and ethical is further explored. Like Derrida she is distrustful of conceptual oppositions, and I discuss connections between their modes of thinking that enable her to be defended against accusations of contradiction, particularly on the part of political critics who align her with conservative thought. Chapter 13 brings together the various aspects of this study in a further analysis of her most ambitious novel, Daniel Deronda, through looking at the role of luck, which affects all elements of the novel, influencing its form and being central to its philosophical, political and ethical themes, Eliot’s intellectual power being again confirmed by her anticipation of Bernard Williams’s concept of moral luck. These interact with the narrative and psychological treatment of the characters at the level of realism, so that the force of the novel’s human dimension is undiminished while at the same time its significance is enlarged.

I have not directly discussed Eliot as a woman writer or in relation to feminist issues, but there is a feminist undercurrent to my argument. Feminist critics have tended to be at best grudging in their admiration of Eliot. Her seeming reluctance to commit herself explicitly to feminist causes in her own time and what is seen as her failure in her writing to provide direct inspiration to modern feminists struggling to achieve equality have provoked much criticism. She has often been contrasted unfavourably with a writer like Charlotte Bronté, who creates characters with whom women readers can identify: ‘heroines [who] are exemplars of female assertion’.'? She can be defended against these attacks on the grounds that her realist aesthetic is not reconcilable with creating any kind of exemplar for non-literary reasons, and I shall argue that even those characters who are almost always seen as exemplars in her fiction, notably Daniel Deronda, are misinterpreted as such. Eliot’s feminism lies deeper than creating female exemplars or bolstering the morale of feminist activists.' The term ‘woman writer’ would probably have been problematic for her. Her ambition was to be both a thinker and artist of the highest standard irrespective of gender, which involved taking the novel into new territory through literary innovation and experiment as well as intellectually confronting the major issues of her era like Darwinism or the ethical and political implications of materialist thinking, such as Bentham’s form of utilitarianism. Yet she was, of course, a woman writer and she would have been well aware that no woman writer had been seen as comparable to figures such as Dante, Milton’ or Goethe, writers she particularly admired and who combined art, intellectuality and engagement with their own times in such a way as to resonate also with future times. Eliot’s main contribution to feminism was not only to aspire to that but also to achieve it, as this study will try to show, and thus prove that a woman writer can be equal at every level with even the greatest male writers.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection was the most explosive idea to emerge in the modern era. Not only did it undermine fundamentally such powerful justifications for religious belief as the argument from design, but secular or humanist alternatives to religion were equally threatened since the human species was no longer privileged and was the product of a struggle for existence that not only had no ethical dimension but also such a dimension would have been positively disadvantageous in that struggle. Also concepts of order that shape human thought and perception such as purpose or proportionality in the relation between cause and effect were called into question by Darwinian theory. Darwinism was of course roundly condemned from many different points of view and that continues, but most of the attacks on it have been along the lines that it could not be true because if it were life would be meaningless or there would be no justification for morality.! Even defenders of it, such as Social Darwinists, could do so only by projecting teleology onto the theory and rejecting the idea that chance played a significant role in which species survive, the ‘fittest’ being identified with the best and so deserving to thrive in the struggle for existence.

Although it is well known that George Eliot read Darwin’s Origin of Species almost as soon as it was published, it has been claimed that Darwinism was not a major influence on her mind and work. Morse Peckham writes that ‘there is no indication that the Origin disturbed Tennyson ... or Newman, or George Eliot’.? W. J. Harvey argues that Darwin had little effect on her: ‘If The Origin of Species had by itself any effect on her creative imagination, it cannot have been much greater than that of the recapitulation theory — the effect of sharpening and pointing a few specific images.’ He thinks Herbert Spencer a more important influence: ‘All the external evidence, in fact, points to Spencer rather than Darwin as the prime intellectual influence concerning ideas on Evolution.” In contrast I shall argue not only that Darwinism plays a significant role in her fiction but that she is possibly Darwinism’s most cogent and intellectually sophisticated critic. Her critique is of especial interest because, while clearly aware that the theory could be interpreted in socially and ethically subversive ways, she had no serious doubt about its validity in scientific terms, so that unlike virtually all commentators on Darwinism in the Victorian period her critique of it does not attack or condemn Darwin’s theory in itself.

Although Eliot’s letter to Barbara Bodichon on Darwin has often been quoted, it is worth quoting again because it tells one so much about her attitude to natural selection:

We have been reading Darwin’s book on the ‘Origin of Species’ just now: it makes an epoch, as the expression of his thorough adhesion, after long years of study, to the Doctrine of Development — and not the adhesion of an anonym like the author of the ‘Vestiges’, but of a long-celebrated naturalist. The book is ill-written and sadly wanting in illustrative facts - of which he has collected a vast number, but reserves them for a future book of which this smaller one is the avant-courier. This will prevent the work from becoming popular, as the ‘Vestiges’ did, but it will have a great effect in the scientific world, causing a thorough and open discussion of a question about which people have hitherto felt timid. So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty! But to me the Development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a teeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes.‘

The tone of this letter indicates neither surprise nor enthusiasm. Eliot was obviously familiar with Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and would almost certainly have read Spencer’s article of 1852, ‘The Development Hypothesis’, published in The Leader, which had suggested that species were not immutable. Though there is no indication that she had any doubts about Darwin’s theory, her criticism of his style and arrangement of facts may suggest a lack of positive response, but it should be noted that T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s main defender and supporter, also criticized its organization.° The reference to mystery need not be taken to mean that she did not really grasp the implications of the theory or preferred a metaphysical interpretation of evolution but rather as a sign that she believed that any human explanation of evolution cannot in itself explain the mystery of existence. But that this should be her immediate response again reinforces the impression that she was not an enthusiast or an advocate of the theory, like Huxley, but neither is there any indication that was she an opponent of it.

There are not a great many explicit references to Darwin and natural selection in her writings, but those there are all suggest acceptance but a distrust of the implications that could and were being drawn from it, especially as applied to the human realm. Ina letter to publisher George Smith she remarks that ‘natural selection is not always good, and depends (see Darwin) on many caprices of very foolish animals’ (Letters, IV, 377). A passage in Daniel Deronda applies natural selection to the choice of marriage partner:

It was impossible to be jealous of Juliet Fenn, a girl as middling as mid-day market in everything but her archery and her plainness, in which last she was noticeably like her father: underhung and with receding brow resembling that of the more intelligent fishes. (Surely, considering the importance which is given to such an accident in female offspring, marriageable men, or what the new English calls ‘intending bridegrooms, should look at themselves dispassionately in the glass, since their natural selection of a mate prettier than themselves is not certain to bar the effect of their own ugliness.)°

This passage suggests Eliot understood Darwin well enough but allows her narrator to view natural selection in an ironical spirit.

The clearest indication of a critical perspective on the implications of natural selection is to be found in a chapter of Impressions of Theophrastus Such called ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’. This chapter attacks the view of the narrator’s friend Trost that machines will soon be able to do a great deal of the work of human beings. The narrator objects:

Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?’

Looking forward to an era of automation, the narrator argues that if machines can take over some of humanity’s functions, there is no reason why they should not take over all if they were designed to be without humanity’s disadvantages. Machines might ultimately become self-reproductive and thus, by natural selection, supplant human beings:

This last stage having been reached, either by man’s contrivance or as an unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must drive men altogether out of the field. (ITS, 141)

Human beings will have no call to use their energies since machines will do everything, and so all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. (ITS, 141)

Thus by natural selection humanity will eventually disappear leaving only machines:

Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied by a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted existences do before the fittest — i.e., the existence composed of the most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who — if our consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection — who shall say that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what we call inorganic combinations ... Thus the planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence. (ITS, 141-2)

The conception of evolution which underlies this vision, one perhaps more appreciated by a modern reader than by a Victorian, is Darwinian and not metaphysical. It shows how Eliot’s mind transcends the limitations of her own era and conceptualizes scientific possibilities in the future that have been much discussed and debated in recent decades. Eliot accepts Darwin’s view that there is no purpose or necessary progress in evolution: it is simply a matter of adapting best to the world in order to survive and reproduce. She also accepts that the process of natural selection could eliminate humanity as a species and human values from the world. The fittest are not the best, but only those best able to adapt. If natural selection could be applied by analogy to the social medium, and human beings began to think of society in such terms, might not the ‘worst’ prove more capable of adapting and surviving than the ‘best’? This is, I think, a question posed when Darwinism is most obviously an implied presence in her fiction, and it is probably what most disquieted her about the possible consequences of Darwinism. Though the theory may be valid in scientific terms, it could have damaging social applications and effects, and this is apparent in the critique of characters in several of her novels who try to live their lives in implicitly Darwinian terms.