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THE SCIENTIFIC AESTHETIC AND FEMALE AGENCY IN THE NOVELS
OF GEORGE ELIOT
by
Tara Kay Kelly
submitted to the
Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences
in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in
Literature
Chair:
Dr. Jonathan JKrelfeerg
pAmj.lin‘a
Dr. Richard Sha
______
Dean of the School or College
A / ? ? £
Date
1996
The American University
Washington, D.C. 20016
1 ^ 0
\E
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRAE
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UMI Number: 1383633
C o p y r i g h t 1 9 9 7 b y
K e l l y , T a r a K ay
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THE SCIENTIFIC AESTHETIC AND FEMALE AGENCY IN THE NOVELS
OF GEORGE ELIOT
by
Tara Kay Kelly
ABSTRACT
My thesis examines George Eliot’s heroines within the context of her developing
scientific realist aesthetic. Critics have approached Eliot’s work with an interest in her
scientific content and narrative structure or they have employed feminist criticism in
order to understand the struggles of her heroines. But, there is no adequate discussion of
the gender assumptions underlying Eliot’s medical, scientific perspective and the
subsequent impact on her narrative.
While Eliot’s early work is indebted to a scientific method and technique that
reduces her heroines to saints or sirens, her scientific aesthetic grows to accommodate her
more mature heroines. Using historicism and a postmodern, feminist framework, I argue
that Eliot must challenge scientific objectivity and the subject-object relationship
embedded in androcentric, Victorian sciences to fully explore the inner richness and
complexity of her heroines.
ii
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
..............................................................................................................................
ii
1.GEORGE ELIOT IN THE CONTEXT OF VICTORIAN SCIENCE
.............................
1
2. HETTY AS SIGN: DUELING AESTHETICS IN ADAM BEDE
...............................
24
3. RETURNING THE GAZE: MAGGIE’S FIGHT FOR AGENCY IN THE MILL ON
THE FLOSS.
.................................................................................................................
44
4. DOROTHEA’S AESTHETIC: REDEFINING THE BOUNDARIES OF REALISM
IN MIDDLEMARCH
..................................................................................................
65
WORKS CITED
................................................................................................................
91
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2
may be confused and the connection between a highly evolved society and complex art
form questionable, Spencer's gesture of linking aesthetics and science can be seen as
representative of the way in which Victorians came to think of the study of the arts. No
longer was beauty exclusively a matter o f the heart; it was a matter o f the head or the
intellect and to be studied systematically. The very structure of Ruskin’s Modem Painters
with its elaborate divisions, headings, and classifications suggests something new about
the way Victorians evaluated art. This something new was that the study of beauty would
itself be looked upon as a science.
The connection between life sciences and art can be traced back to classical times.
Long before science became a profession, Aristotle's Poetics asked writers to take the
natural world as a model for making a work of art ordered, harmonious and proportional
as are living organisms. Yet, the growth o f the natural and social sciences and the
influence o f positivism and scientific naturalism in Victorian England led authors to use
nature not only as a model for art, but to employ concepts and methods drawn from
science to guide and evaluate art. The construction of a more ‘scientific’ aesthetic can be
seen within the context of the larger movement of scientific naturalism which drew its fire
from T.H. Huxley’s belief that England had created a “new Nature begotten by science
upon fact” that accounted for the wealth and well-being of its citizens. (1894,1:51.).
Victorian naturalists like Lewes drew loosely from Mill’s System of Logic, but the roots
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of their movement can be located in the empirical philosophy of the Enlightenment. Lewes
lays particular stress on empirical data, rejecting the subjective methods of knowing—
religion and metaphysics— for the “vigilant verification” offered by the objective method.
(1871, 1: xxxix).1 We can see the influence of scientific naturalism in the emerging
aesthetic of John Ruskin and in the movement which was the offshoot of the theories laid
down in his Modem Painters—the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ruskin and the P.R.B.
called for a revolution in the art world when they rejected the aesthetic of the Royal
Academy and Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses and turned to nature for their art lessons.2
To the extent that they valued observation over artistic concepts of form, perspective and
It is interesting to note that there was no agreement as to what constituted “scientific
method” in the Victorian period, and that the scientific naturalists were far from scientific
themselves. In “Victorian Scientific Naturalism,” Frank Miller Turner writes, “In
subscribing to this particular standpoint, the advocates of scientific naturalism chose
among alternative views of the scientific method. Various studies of the last twenty-five
years have revealed one crucial fact about Victorian science-namely, that there was little
agreement among the scientists themselves as to what exactly constituted the method of
science...In describing their own view of the truth, [scientific naturalists] had chosen
empiricism over idealism, objectivity over any mode of subjectivity, and most significantly
the logic of Mill over WhewelT (55, Darwin to Einstein: Historical Studies on Science
and Belief!
Eliot was, of course, aware o f the Pre-Raphaelite movement and praised P.R.B. artists for
attention to natural detail. In her letter from Ilfracombe in 1856, Eliot filters the landscape
through her new knowledge o f Ruskin’s’s Modem Painters. After reading Ruskin’s’s third
volume, she writes, “Almost every yard of these banks is a ‘Hunt’ picture...I never before
longed so much to know the names of things... The desire is part of the tendency
constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of
distinct, vivid ideas” (Letters, II, 250-51)
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light, the Pre-Raphaelites approached their art in the manner of natural scientists and took
pleasure in precise vision and the precise brush stroke. Insofar as this vision conflicted
with convention, the Pre-Raphaelites were received critically. Critics objected to their
working the whole of canvas with equal detail, refusing to subordinate the background to
the central subject. And, unsympathetic viewers found fault with their method of lighting,
as Pre-Raphaelites refused to accept artistic convention and work from the dark edges of a
canvas to a light center in order to emphasize the subject (Hilton 1970, 57). In response
to these objections, Pre-Raphaelites said that they simply painted what they saw.
Upon viewing Rossetti's The Girlhood o f M ary Virgin, H unt’s The Hireling
Shepherd or Millais' Ophelia, we might argue that these artists did not achieve
verisimilitude, but each canvas reveals a shared method and technique that left nothing to
chance. First, the outline of the painting would be drawn on the canvas. The artist would
paint the initial design over in film of white, which would later be worked off with a dry
brush to reveal the design. He could then paint the design in, with small brushes and
meticulous care (Hilton 1970, 57). Guiding this somewhat rigid methodology and
attention to each niggling detail was the Pre-Raphaelite belief in progress and evolution.
For Pre-Raphaelite artists, truth in representation depended on faithful observation of
nature as she evolved. In an article that originally appeared in The Germ. "The Purpose
and Tendency of Early Italian Art," Frederic George Stephens (1850) asks,
If we are not to depart from established principles, how are we to advance at all?
Are we to remain still? Remember, no thing remains still; that which does not
advance fells backward. That this movement is an advance, and that it is of nature
herself, is shown by its going nearer to truth in every object produced, and by its
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being guided by the very principles the ancient painters followed, as soon as they
attained the mere power of representing an object faithfully. These principles are
now revived, not from them, through their example, but from nature herself (1850,
59).
Then, Pre-Raphaelites did not value scientific method in itself, but, like Lewes, saw
it essential to accept the scientific world view and the rigors of its methodology if art were
to remain relevant and resonant in the future. Instead of setting art against science as an
opposing truth, Pre-Raphaelites like Stephens argued that exactitude and scientific method
were necessary tools in the search for moral and unsullied truth. In fact, for Stephens, the
artist/scientist embarks on a spiritual quest where precision becomes his ultimate guide and
weapon in his search for the truth:
The sciences have become almost exact within the present century . . .
And how has this been done but by bringing greater knowledge to bear on
a wide range of experiment; by being precise in the search after truth. If
this adherence to fact, to experiment and not to theory . . . has added
much to the knowledge of the man in science; why may it not greatly assist
the moral purposes o f the Arts? Truth in every particular ought to be the
aim of the artist. Admit no untruth: let the priest’s garment be cleaned
(1850, 61).
Then, while the themes of the P.R.B. may have been derived from the middle ages and
their search for morality in art quintessentially Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite techniques were
self-consciously modem.
While Victorian artists spoke of art in scientific terms, scientific popularizers began
to enter the debate on aesthetics in order to clarify and legitimize the mission of scientists.
Like artists, early champions o f a scientific world view saw benefit to linking science and
art. For science to become accepted, it would not be sufficient to tell the truth, but to
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reveal the truth as aesthetically pleasing. Herbert Spencer defined the aesthetic urge as art
impulse connected with play, but, nevertheless, saw aesthetics as a legitimate field for
scientific inquiry. And, even Darwin took up the issue of beauty in the Descent of Man.
claiming that beauty is culturally specific although we can define beauty in the language of
variation and adaption (1936, 607). One of the more interesting claims about the
relevance of art to science was made by T.H. Huxley. Huxley disagreed with those who
saw scientific education and artistic education as incompatible. Rather, he suggested that
art and science ran on a parallel course insofar as each required a precise knowledge of the
natural world. He recommends that the scientific man be educated in reading and writing
drawing and aesthetics—and advocates the later two studies because they give greater
appreciation of the real. Huxley writes, "I should make it absolutely necessary for
everybody... to learn how to draw...l do not think its value can be exaggerated, because it
gives you the means of training the young in attention and accuracy" (1990, 184).
Moreover, Huxley views the mechanics of the natural world in processes that can be
analyzed in terms of aesthetics. In discussing the theories of evolution, Huxley describes
the process as “cosmopoetic" (1990, 51).
In a certain sense, it is natural that the paths of aesthetics and science should
intersect in this period as both take a similar subject of study. If we consult the OED
definition of aesthetics, we see that it derives from the Greek term which pertains to the
study of things perceptible to the senses. In the 19th century, this meaning takes
precedence over the commonplace definition that suggests merely a study of tastes, good
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7
and bad. This is not to say that Victorians were particularly comfortable with an
aesthetics so closely connected with the sensual world and the body. While Spencer
postulated the "play impulse," and made a full belly a condition for lofty art, Ruskin was
eager to suppress any urges that may have been confused with animal instinct and was
quick to differentiate between instinctual response to an object o f beauty and intellectual
response. In Modem Painters. Ruskin tries to disassociate aesthetics from sensual
perception:
Now the term ‘aesthesis’ properly signifies mere sensual perception of the outward
qualities and necessary effects of bodies; in which sense only...it should always be
used. But I wholly deny that the impressions of beauty are in any way sensual; they
are neither sensual or intellectual, but moral...For we do indeed see constantly that
men having naturally acute perceptions of the beautiful, yet not receiving it with
a pure heart, nor into their hearts at all, never comprehend it, nor receive good
from it, but make it a mere minister to their desires, and accompaniment and
seasoning of lower sensual pleasures, until all their emotions take the same earthly
stamp, and the sense of beauty sinks into the servant of lust (1987, Volume II, Part
m , 191-192).
In order to prevent this slide into base sensuality, Ruskin suggests the cultivation of a
detached mind. In a discussion regarding the beauty in nature, he stresses that the beholder
must be godlike-out of himself, yet above his subject:
In all cases we are to beware of such opinions as seem in any way referable to
human pride, or even to the grateful or pernicious influence of things upon
ourselves; and to cast the mind free, and out of ourselves, humbly, and yet always
in that noble position of pause above the other visible creatures, nearer God than
they, which we authoritatively hold, thence looking down upon them (1987,
Volume III, Part III, 225)
Then, while Ruskin was content to study the natural world after the ways of the scientist,
his attitude toward nature is mixed. Like Stephens, Ruskin envisions the scientific method
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as one that will produce both truth and purity, and rein in the animalistic in nature and
man. In this way, Ruskin's scientific aesthetic requires both a humble submission to
nature—not unlike that required by the draftsman who trains his eyes to see accurately—
and the drive to purify and shape the sensuous world in accordance with Victorian
sensibilities.
This peculiarly Victorian desire to define nature and articulate her parts while
resisting nature as a whole and natural impulses had consequences for the way in which
women were represented in medical discourse and art. For example, despite the progress
made in the biological sciences, anatomy, physiology and psychology during the
nineteenth-century, this knowledge, filtered through the grid of Victorian culture, lead to
new distortions of the body, the female body in particular, and anxiety over the dangers
posed by unregulated natural impulses. In the case of gynecology, a science in its infancy
during the Victorian period, investigation of the female body was guided by the ideology
of sexual complementarity it ultimately perpetuated and resulted in a more total and
systematic method for regulating bodies, instead o f increased sexual freedom or greater
openness regarding sexuality.3 While today we might argue that increased study and
funding in the area of women's health is critical to achieving better care, these initial steps
3
Foucault, in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, suggests that discourses on human
sexuality during this period were “feeble” and “irrational” (54). He writes, “The learned
discourse on sex that was pronounced in the nineteenth century was imbued with age-old
delusions, but also with systemic blindness: a refusal to see and to understand, but
further..a refusal concerning the very thing that was brought to light and whose
formulation was urgently solicited” (55).
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toward carving out a separate woman’s health agenda did not lead to more enlightened
medical practices. While these narratives did shed light on previously ignored aspects of
women’s physical experiences, numerous critics have pointed out that these narratives also
acted as fodder for the myths of feminine illness, hysteria, and dysfunctional sexuality.
Too often, investigation o f the physical nature of women led to medical practices informed
by the notion of an “essential” feminine nature that must be enforced or corrected.
For example, in “Scenes of an Indelicate Character: The Medical ‘Treatment’ of
Women,” Mary Poovey argues that the chloroform debate of the later half of the
nineteenth-century was constructed around historically-specific assumptions about
women. For the medical men who debated chloroform, "hysteria is simultaneously the
norm of the female body taken to its logical extreme and a medical category that
effectively defines this norm as inherently abnormal. This representation provides an
image of woman as always lacking and needing control” (1988, 147). Victorian medical
men used anesthesia, Poovey argued, to render the female body silent and gain control
over the child birthing procedure. The silencing enabled each side of the chloroform
debate-general practitioners and consultants—to dictate their own particular medical
program. In each case, Poovey writes, “Chloroform transfers to the doctor the knowledge
of pain as it renders the women's body as merely a sign, which he can read more
accurately than she can” (1988, 141). If we return to the Pre-Raphaelite artists, then, we
may recognize the same process of representation or misrepresentation transforming the
female body on canvas. By accepting the contradictory notions of woman as both angel
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and temptress, Pre-Raphaelite painters, like medical men who used images of the sexually
uncontrolled hysteric to argue the case for and against chloroform, revealed more about
their own desire and anxiety than that of their subjects. The lives of P.R.B. models, like
Elizabeth Siddall and Annie Miller, have become obscured and mythologized under the
burden o f the artists’ vision. Looking at Elizabeth Siddall’s own self-portrait—her hair
swept up and in a respectable, black mourning gown—we realize that even her beauty was
a myth.4 Of course, the artist always transforms his subject, but the Pre-Raphaelites
literally drained the vitality out of their models. In Rossetti's portraits of Siddall^ Beata
Beatrix, Pandora, Bocca Baciata, she appears transfixed in a death-like state. Edward
Burne-Jones’ women—as beautiful and animated as ivory columns—look universally
drugged.s While it is true that each painter sees with a penetrating eye and paints with a
In Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (New York: Routledge, 1993), Deborah
Cherry writes of Rossetti’s depiction of Siddall, “...they are not about the historical
individual Elizabeth Siddall, not do they depict her particular appearance. It is possible to
identify similar features and devices in Rossetti’s drawings of various female models, all of
which encode femininity as delicacy and dependency through the reiteration of supine
poses, drooping head, lowered eyes...The drawings were thus sites for the redefinition of
femininity in the social order of sexual differences in which woman as visual sign was
appropriated for the masculine gaze” (85).
The drugged look of Elizabeth Siddall was unfortunately not coincidental. Siddall spent
her life addicted to laudanum, an opiate derivative in liquid form used primarily by women
to dull pain, and ease depression and hunger. In The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (New
York: St. Martins, 1985), Jan Marsh writes of Beata Beatrix, “The pose and expression of
the figure, who is represented as in a trance at the moment of passing from earth to
heaven, strongly suggests those of an addict who is feeling the immediate effects of a
fix...This aspect of Beata Beatrix, forcibly apparent to those working in the field of
narcotic addiction, has never hitherto been remarked, despite the recognized significance
of the white poppy, from which opium derives, that is placed in Beatrice’s hand by the
dove” (216).
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methodical brush stroke—we see every tendril of hair with the same clarity as each blade of
grass—the overall effect of the technique is to subdue the life of the model with rigidity of
form. The technique that renders the outer shell in intimate detail obscures the internal
narrative that illuminates the subject from within and makes her vital and individual.
Therefore, the strange dreamy appearance and vacant stares of Rossetti and Hunt models
do not result from the artist’s departure from scientific observation—although they do
signal a departure from seeing reality unadorned. Instead, the effects of the finished
canvas can be attributed to the P.R.B.’s implicit acceptance of sexual complementarity and
the gendered seeing that enforces the dichotomies of male/female, active/passive, and
body/mind, rooted in Victorian scientific observation. The painter’s look that turns live
bodies to languid limbs is the artist's anaesthesia that lays the model out to our inspection.
This pictorial anatomy occurs only at the expense of feminine vitality.
Although I argue that the scientific-aesthetic of Pre-Raphaelite art, taking its cue
from Victorian medicine, turns the female body into a sign, I do not mean to imply that
perfect representation exists, or that we can, if we strip off culture, recover the body, real
and unmediated. Postmodern critics have made persuasive arguments about the cultural
construction of gender, sex and the body that must be reckoned with if we are to address
the role culture plays in shaping historical narratives of the female body. Thomas Laqueur
issues this warning in Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud:
Sex, like being human, is contextual. Attempts to isolate it from its discursive,
socially determined milieu are doomed to failure as the philosophe's search for a
truly wild child or the modem anthropologist's efforts to filter out the cultural so
as to leave the residue of essential humanity (1990, 16).
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While my thesis assumes that the body cannot be separated from culture, there is a clear
danger for feminists in accepting the notion that there are no better ways to represent the
female body, only different ways. While distorted fictions of the female body have fueled
reader misunderstanding, ignorance and, even, anger, these same fictions in medicine have
justified and continue to justify medical practices that deny women of their autonomy,
pleasure, sexual organs, fertility and, in some cases, their lives. While Laqueur does not
think that a “more objective, richer, progressive, or even more feminist science would
produce a truer picture of sexual difference” (1990, 22), history shows otherwise. The
popular health movement launched by second-wave feminists of this century encouraged
women to learn and speak about their own bodies, producing narratives that undermined
essentialist arguments of female frailty and illness, and challenged a sexuality and medicine
based on these misconceptions. While Laqueur is certainly right in stating that political
questions regarding the nature of women will always obscure and color biological findings
(1990, 22), feminist critics must preserve a definition of the body that allows us to
privilege one narrative over another and locate androcentric biases in science. In
“Feminism, Postmodernism and Gender Skepticism,” Susan Bordo frames the solution to
the dilemma of postmodernism as such:
Most of our institutions have barely begun to absorb the message of modernist
social criticism; surely, it is to soon to let them off the hook via postmodern
heterogeneity and instability. This is not to say that the struggle for institutional
transformation will be served by univocal, fixed conceptions of social identity and
location. Rather, we need to reserve practical spaces for both generalist critique
and attention to complexity and nuance. We need to be pragmatic, not
theoretically pure (1990, 153).
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“spots of commonness.” In exposing the underside of Lydgate’s relationship with
Rosamond and Dorothea’s disenchantment with Casaubon, Eliot rejects the scientific and
academic knowing represented by these characters as riddled with blind-spots and
prejudices and suggests the possibility a more holistic approach toward knowing
represented by Dorothea’s epiphany in Chapter 80.6 Neither spectator or spectacle
Dorothea becomes part o f the landscape she views, and unlike Ruskin’s ideal spectator,
she is one with her subject: “Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt
the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She
was part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her
luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining” (1956,
578).
Eliot’s critique of scientific epistemology resonates with contemporary feminist
critics of science who call for a feminist epistemology that allows for a different
relationship between subject and object and insist that knowledge be grounded in the
This argument will be more fully fleshed out in Chapter 4, but here it is important to
recognize that Dorothea is initially interested in Casaubon because she believes him to
have a privileged perspective: “Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a
standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly” (47). She becomes
disillusioned when she recognizes that Casaubon and the knowledge he represents are all
too human: “Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been
easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise
and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is n o
longer reflection but feeling... that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights
and shadows must always fall with a certain difference” (157). The recognition of
Casaubon’s subjectivity, then, becomes a turning point for Dorothea.
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social context of the knower. In Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking From
Women's Lives. Sandra Harding summarizes one component of the feminist critique of
science:
The observer and the observed are in the same casual scientific plane. An
outpouring of recent studies in every area of the social studies of the science forces
the recognition that all scientific knowledge is always, in every respect, socially
situated. Neither knowers nor the knowledge they produce are or could be
impartial, disinterested, value-neutral, Archimedean. The challenge is to articulate
how it is that knowledge has a socially situated character denied to it by the
conventional view, and to work through the transformations that this conception
of knowledge requires of conventional notions such as objectivity, relativism,
rationality and reflexivity (1991, 11-12).
The effort to transcend conventional approaches and redefine the knower’s relationship to
the subject can be seen in the work of women scientists like Barbara McClintock. In What
Can She Know?: Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Lorraine Code
discusses McClintock’s work in relation to transforming the subject-object relationship:
She is guided by a conviction that it is possible to weaken presumed boundaries
between subject and object... Her commitment to constructing a reciprocal subject-
object relationship is at odds with a belief that things are best known from an
appropriately objective distance. McClintock speaks of her need to “listen to the
material,” declaring that she knows every plant intimately and finds it “a great
pleasure to know them”...However one describes the feeling—whether in terms of
friendship, intuition or sympathy~it is antithetical to the distanced, autonomous
position of ideal ethical and epistemological objectivity and continuous with the
discourses of friendship, relationship and interdependence” (1991, 152).
In Middlemarch. Eliot values this ability to “listen to the material” rather than imprison it
in our own frameworks.7 While Eliot does not explicitly define this way of knowing as
Nevertheless, Eliot suggests that this listening might drive us to madness. Eliot’s
memorable passage in Middlemarch warns that “If we had a keen vision and feeling for all
ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat,
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female, her critique o f dominant ways of knowing is important to feminists in that it
suggests a rejection of masculine ways of thinking that masquerade as objective, scientific
and authoritative, and posits a reciprocal relationship between subject and object.
The notion that ways of knowing are not gender-neutral certainly informed Eliot’s
critics. Her contemporary reviewers took note of her interest in scientific method in
Scenes from a Clerical Life, and, not surprisingly her frank portrayal of physiology in
Adam Bede and The Mill of the Floss allowed her to be mistaken for a scientific man of
letters. After the publication of Middlemarch. Blackwood wrote to her of the amazement
of a medical man upon reading her portrait of Lydgate. The writer was astonished that
Eliot had so little knowledge of the medical profession. Too often, though, this
commitment to rigorous, scientific observation set Eliot at odds with restrictive Victorian
gender roles and stodgy male reviewers. To reveal the physical world in both its ugliness
and grandeur required a frankness and strength Victorian England typically discouraged in
its women. There is no doubt that Eliot's use of medical material was seen as a liability for
a woman writer. In a letter to Eliot, Blackwood urges her to soften her depiction of Mrs.
Pullet’s dropsy suggesting that this treatment would be acceptable in a Dickens’ novel, but
too “graphic” for Eliot as a woman writer (1990, 259). On another occasion, in a letter to
Lewes, Blackwood writes of Scenes of a Clerical Life. “I daresay it would have been no
use, but I wish I had pressed George Eliot more to curtail or indicate more delicately the
Delirium Tremens scene. It is too naked and the shudder which one turns from the picture
and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (144).
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is too much akin with disgust” (1990, 394). The words delicate and naked suggest that
Eliot's realism can be compared to a fictional undressing of the body that, whether
described in medical terminology or not, must be judged within the context o f Victorian
social and sexual mores. Certainly, no mode of representation is politically neutral, but
Eliot's realism, insofar as it is engaged in its project of unveiling and revealing, was
perceived by Eliot’s critics as sexually transgressive or, at least, not the appropriate mode
of representation for a Victorian lady.
While some contemporary critics argued that Eliot’s use of medical knowledge
was shocking or used simply for effect, Eliot's rigorous and meticulous detailing of bodies,
illness and the profession was, in part, the result of her unflinching commitment to realism.
In “Notes on Form,” Eliot's very definition of proper artistic form is scientific: “The
highest Form, then, is the highest organism, that is to say, the most varied group of
relations bound together in a wholeness which again has the most varied relations with all
other phenomenon” (1990, 232). This interest in duplicating the symmetry and wholeness
of nature helped form the foundation for Eliot's credo of realism. Like the P.R.B., Eliot's
interest in the natural world was coupled with interest in scientific observation. No doubt,
she shared Stephens’ optimism that scientific accuracy and methodology could further the
artist’s attempt to communicate moral truths persuasively. Along these lines, she lists
Ruskin as a great inspiration along with his notion that truth is “to be attained by a humble
and faithful study of nature” (1990, 368). For Eliot as for Ruskin, form and realistic
representation were never posited as an end but mean. Like T.H. Huxley and other
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18
scientific naturalists, Eliot and Ruskin saw the scientific quest as a moral quest. In
Chapter 17 of Adam Bede. Eliot writes, “I want a great deal of those feelings for my
everyday fellow-men, especially for those very few in the foreground of those great
multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch” (1962, 176). Then, Eliot
emphasizes the need for accurate, precise detailing of the physical and social world in
order to open her reader's mind and heart to a greater knowledge and empathy for others.8
While Eliot did not openly identified herself as rebelling against the status quo, she
gradually became aware of the limitations her narrative and aesthetic imposed on her
characters. With each subsequent attempt to tell her heroine’s story fully, Eliot pushed
back the boundaries of realism in order that she might tell the truth as she saw it. This
questioning would ultimately lead Eliot to the real and inspiring portrait of Dorothea, but
9
A straightforward and, no doubt, simplistic definition of realism can be found in the
Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. Third Edition: “The term realism is used to describe
literature that attempts to depict life in an entirely objective manner, without idealization
or glamour, and without didactic or moral ends.” Needless to say, few work of fiction
would qualify as realist under this definition. In the Realistic Imagination: English Fiction
from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly. George Levine argues that serious Victorian realists
universally rejected “naive realism”—simple faith in the correspondence between word and
thing (12). Instead, Levine argues, realists take upon themselves a special role as
mediator, and assume self-consciously a moral burden that takes a special form: their
responsibility is to a reality that seems ‘unnameable,’ but it is also to an audience that
requires to be weaned or freed from the misnaming literatures past and current. The quest
for words beyond words is deeply moral, suggesting the need to reorganize experience
and reinvest it with value for a new audience from a new base of economic power” (12).
Still, Eliot’s definition of realism in Chapter 17 o f Adam Bede includes the necessity of
portraying things unadorned and not touching up the world with a “tasteful pencil” (170).
Yet, behind Eliot’s own interventions on behalf o f characters like Mr. Irwine and Mr.
Casaubon is the recognition that this mode of representation is not, in itself, sufficient to
arouse our sympathy and may even repulse us.
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characterizations of Hetty Sorrel, Rosamond Vincy, and Gwendolyn Harleth remain to
perpetuate Victorian stereotypes of femininity as trivial, ornamental and, even dangerous.
Critics often attempt to explain the treatment of these Eliot heroines with autobiographical
data-mention of Eliot's insecurity over her own physical flaws— and argue that Eliot's
realism—particularly in the case of Hetty Sorrel—was flawed by her emotionalism. While
Eliot's attacks on traditional femininity in “Silly Novels by Silly Lady Novelists” certainly
seem colored by her personal concerns, her fictional portraits are anything but emotional.
On the contrary, it is Eliot’s lack of emotionalism and sympathy that mars her portraits. As
Eliot’s contemporary, Edith Simcox, notes, Rosamond's faults are detailed with the
scientific certainty of a psychologist or social scientist:
Rosamond can be honest for once at a little expense, but she can no more change
her character than her complexion or color of her eyes, or than she can unmake the
whole series of circumstances which have made her life less negatively innocent
than Celia's (Haight 1965, 145).
This same point can be made by looking at the portrayals of Dorothea and Maggie
that succeed—succeed, that is, in portraying the complexities of womanhood. In these
instances, Eliot drops the mask of objective observer and gives these characters her
sympathy. Critics have often argued that Eliot's immaturity is present in her portraits of
Maggie and Dorothea and the novels in which they appear suffer because they reveal too
much of the author herself. Still, it has just as often been argued that the “indefiniteness”
surrounding Eliot's portrayal of Dorothea is what gives it its particular beauty or flavor;
W.D. Howell's makes the point that it is Dorothea's very elusiveness that distinguishes her
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20
from the "type" that is Rosamond:
Outlines, I have called these sketches of Dorothea, and perhaps she is never more
than outlined. The inferior nature can be fully shown, because it is of a material
which can be palpably handled without loss or hurt; but in the superior nature there
is something elusive that escapes or perishes under the touch, and leaves the
exhaustive study a dumb image and not a speaking likeness. Rosamond Vincy can
be decanted to the dregs, and be only more and more Rosamond; but if you pour
all Dorothea her essence flies from you in a vital aroma (Haight 1965, 88).
And, here is Eliot's particular problem in finding a mode of representation that
complements her themes o f women seeking freedom and an outlet for expression: If more
than a sketchy “outline” leaves Dorothea a dumb image—and here we might remember the
anaesthetized P.R.B. beauties—how can Eliot's dedication to the scientific aesthetic, to
uncovering the real with the precision of the Flemish painter, be sustained? We can only
answer that Eliot is divided in this regard, showing the devastating effects of the scientific
aesthetic in the instance of Hetty, who appears little more than a docile body, and a
significantly lighter touch in Dorothea’s case, where feminine autonomy is thematized.
Nevertheless, Hetty and Rosamond can be seen as Eliot’s most transgressive
characters, and are interesting because they refuse to be contained by the reductive
narratives that Eliot constructs around them. Rosamond rebels against Lydgate’s reading
of her as docile body and uncovers the brute need to control and suppress nature that lies
beneath Lydgate’s so-called scientific view of women. Even Hetty escapes the frame of
Eliot's story, having sex, becoming pregnant and killing her child off the page. Although
the male discourse that dominates the novel turns Hetty into a sign, she is ultimately
unreadable by both her male admirers and Eliot's readers. No doubt, Hetty’s inability to
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21
be read is a hollow victory, and later Eliot heroines struggle consciously against narratives
that threatened to close off their possibilities. Not surprisingly, none succeed fully in
constructing narratives to rival those false ones threatening to define them. For Maggie,
the struggle for self-definition ends in self-abnegation and death. And, even in
Middlemarch. Eliot is unable to give us the story of womanly desire embodied and driving
her own narrative through the boundaries of conventional romantic fictions. To explain
this, we must begin by admitting that Eliot is a child of her time. Still, to suggest that she
was imprisoned by Victorian conventions, narrative or otherwise, is inadequate. The
Prelude of Middlemarch suggests that Eliot did not accidentally fall into Victorian
stereotypes and narratives; instead, she confesses the difficulty of constructing narratives:
Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life... Many Theresas have
been bom who found for themselves no epic lives ... with dim lights and tangled
circumstances they to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement, but after
all to common eyes their struggle seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness ...
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient
indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women;
if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count to
three and no more, the social lot of woman might be treated with scientific
certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are
really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of woman's
coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse (1956, 4).
While the passage concerns itself with the social restrictions on latter-day Theresas, Eliot
is simultaneously framing these question with regard to fiction: The later day Theresa
struggles not merely for freedom, but form—if not an epic life, a narrative that turns the
material of her life into a narrative that represents it accurately. The narratives Eliot
rejects are the romance--“favorite love stories in prose and verse”—and the reductive
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22
scientific tracts becoming commonplace in the Victorian England. Instead, she holds open
the possibility of a form that would preserve woman’s “indefiniteness” and not reduce her
difference to “sameness.” In this sense, Eliot is well aware that she must steer between
these two poles of scientific certitude and romance or, the epistemology that they
represent, rigid rationalism and idealistic emotionalism, in constructing this narrative.
The issue, then, of representation is not one that lies dormant in Eliot. Giving
form to that which has so long been invisible-namely, female desire~is not merely a moral
question in Middlemarch but an artistic question for both writer and reader: That is, how
may we avoid the traps of science and romance and face women's desire squarely? Eliot
problematizes representation in the Prelude to Middlemarch when she defines women’s
lives as narratives both created and constructed. The discussion surrounding Theresa’s
epic life works not only to expose the heart of Dorothea’s problem but to present Eliot’s
narrative dilemma. The dilemma is that narrative structures are crucial to giving life to
women's experience, but these “stories” are often the very thing that reduces or distances
her experience for herself and the reader. While Theresa’s desire found form in religious
life, Eliot recognizes that the contemporary woman has no channel for self-expression;
moreover, there is no plot, no “epic life” that she may step into in order to make sense of
her struggles. Her story is merely “inconsistency and formlessness” and often goes untold
or misunderstood. She may adopt the plot of the scheming woman as Rosamond does, or
like Dorothea strive for a form that would both be true to the self and still remain truthful
and honest in the more conventional sense. Eliot tries to circumvent the difficulties
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inherent in this task by envisioning a form that would spring straight from the body itself,
yet be free from the corrupting taint of the self s egoism. In furthering the Theresa
parallel, the narrator says of Dorothea: “She did not want to deck herself with knowledge-
-to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action; and if she had written a
book she must have done it as Saint Theresa did under the command of an authority that
restrained her conscience” (1956, 64). Did Eliot strive to write such a novel? Perhaps
not, but in Dorothea we see Eliot’s own difficulty with finding a form that was appropriate
to tell her heroine’s story. If the story is to be accurate in more than its bare facts, it must
penetrate the core of heroine and illuminate her soul and body in a way that is not
reductive. Yet, while such deep, intimate body knowledge is necessary if we are to know
our heroine~the nerves and blood that feed her action—to burrow behind words, tropes
and form to the thing itself is futile barring, of course, divine revelation. Then, the
problematic nature of representation that contemporary critics grapple with in this period
of historical interpretation is Eliot’s issue as well: Can the body and desire disrupt
traditional narratives of love and romance or does representation necessarily enwrap the
body in a cultural coding and render desire impotent in the prison of artistic form? For
this reason, the following chapters are written with both an eye to these contemporary
critical questions and Eliot's own texts.
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CHAPTER TWO
HETTY AS SIGN: DUELING AESTHETICS IN ADAM BEDE
In Modem Painters. Ruskin insists on the morality of artistic vision. Urging young
painters to “go to Nature in ail singleness of heart...having no other thoughts but how best
to penetrate her meaning” (1987, Volume I: Part
n,
178), he cautions against viewing
nature mechanistically, arguing that it must be seen always as an end, not as a means:
The moment we begin to look upon any creature as subordinate to some purpose
out of itself some of the sense of organic beauty is lost...Thus, when we are told
that the leaves of a plant are occupied in decomposing carbonic acid, and preparing
oxygen for us, we begin to look upon it with some such indifference as upon a
gasometer. It has become a machine; some of our sense of its happiness is gone;
its emenation of inherent life is no longer pure (1987, Volume H: Part HI, 223).
Nevertheless, Ruskin’s effort to make aesthetic judgments objective and universal and
purge aesthetics of subjectivity and sensuality, leads him to view art with a rational
detachment that contradicts his ethics. Arguing that beauty is not simply in the eye of the
beholder, Ruskin writes that we must struggle to find what is “common to all works of
God,” and, in doing so, “divest every object of that which makes it accidently or
temporarily pleasant, and to strip it of bare distinctive qualities, until we arrive at those
which it has in common with all other beautiful things” (1987, Volume II: Part EH, 198).
Ruskin seems unaware that the abstracting, and penetrative gaze that strips things bare
and renders them abstractions is at odds with the moral vision that would see each thing as
an end in itself. The objective gaze is by necessity amoral, not empathetic. We see this
24
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25
when Ruskin, calling Turner’s Slave Ship “the noblest sea that Turner ever has painted,
and, if so, the noblest ever painted by man” (1987, Volume I: Part
n,
158), makes no
mention of the subject of the painting—a slaver throwing slaves overboard, the sea strewn
with corpses. Looking past the human tragedy, with an eye toward the universal or
abstract, Ruskin writes,
It’s daring conception, ideal in the highest sense of the word, is based on the purest
truth, and wrought out with the concentrated knowledge of life; its color is
absolutely perfect, not one false of morbid hue in any part or line... and the whole
picture dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions—the power,
majesty and deathfulness of the open, illimitable sea (1987, Volume I: Part n, 160).
The detached stance from which Ruskin renders his aesthetic judment serves to turn
suffering into the sublime.9
In Adam Bede. Eliot insists on the individuality of her characters as she attempts to
forge a “fibre of sympathy” (1962, 176) between the Active and real worlds, but she too
turns suffering into art when she adopts a similar aesthetic stance. With a similar gesture
to Ruskin and with like language, Eliot stops the action in Adam Bede to allow her
narrator to comment on Hetty Sorrel’s tragedy. To the reader puzzled by Hetty’s
headlong rush into disaster, the narrator explains:
g
It’s interesting to note that Ruskin sees the intelligence of Turner aligned with Francis
Bacon. In Volume HI, Part IV of Modem Painters. Ruskin writes, “Turner, the first great
landscape-painter, must take his place in the history of nations corresponding in art
accurately to Bacon in philosophy—Bacon, having first opened the study of the laws of the
material world” (409). Pages later, Ruskin goes on to note that there is a “science in the
aspect of things” (424), and declares, “Turner must eventually be named always with
Bacon, the master of the science of essence” (424).
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to the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist
role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance
coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-
looked-at-ness (1989, 19).
Surely, Eliot is, to a certain extent, consciously positioning Hetty as a creation o f the male
gaze. But, at the same time Eliot exposes Hetty as a projection of male fantasy, misread
and misinterpreted by the eyes of desire, she is unable or unwilling to free her from the
passive and gendered role she must play in this drama of spectatorship.
Although Eliot lauds Ruskin for his theory of realism in her review of Modem
Painters (1858) calling it a theory that would “remould our life” (1990, 368) Eliot wrestles
with Ruskin’s aesthetic throughout Adam Bede. Perhaps, Eliot’s first point of departure
from Ruskin is her insistence on an artistic observer who is truthful, but still rooted in a
social context that informs his vision. For Eliot, art must be informed by a social context if
it is to achieve its purpose of “extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the
bounds o f our personal lot” (1990, 110). She was not concerned with an abstract beauty
or truth, but a representation that connected her readers to the joys and suffering of
others. Because Eliot’s aesthetic was rooted in a social context—the social context of her
characters and the world of her readers—she was more interested in the particular social
relationships that informed a picture or a work of fiction. The particulars of a painting
were not to be stripped away in the pursuit of an idealized truth, but must be understood if
the picture was to have meaning. For instance, in “The Natural History o f German Life”
(1856), Eliot argues that the lack of “concrete knowledge” of the peasantry led to
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misrepresentation in English art:
How little the real characteristics of the working class are known to those who are
outside o f them, how little their natural history has been studied, is sufficiently
disclosed by our Art as well as by our social and political theories. Where, in our
picture exhibitions, shall we find a group of true peasantry? What English artist
even attempts to rival in truthfulness such studies o f popular life as the pictures of
Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one o f the greatest painters of the
pre-eminently realistic school, while, in his picture of ‘The Hireling Shepherd,’ he
gave us a landscape of marvelous truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the
foreground who were not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of
our chimney ornaments (1990, 108).
Too often, Eliot argues, the falsification of reality we see in Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd
results when the painter sees life at a distance. She describes a hypothetical scene of
haymakers and remarks that the observer from afar might pronounce the scene as
‘smiling,’ but upon coming closer will see the nuances o f a scene that show the
interactions between the thresher and countrymen as less than ideal (1990, 109-110). To
Eliot, the distanced perspective is more than flawed; representation is amoral when it does
not take into account the nuances o f social relationship that define a people:
This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation which gives rise
to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for mankind to know is,
not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on
the labourer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences that do act on
him. We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental
peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his
suspicious selfishness(1990, 111).
Eliot’s interest in the social context that informs the knower-known relationship
puts her at odds with the objective observer model that Ruskin constructs to preserve the
rationality, and purity of aesthetic judgment in Modem Painters. The witness on the stand
that Eliot uses to represent her ideal narrator in Adam Bede, is very different from the
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29
ideal of the surgeon/artist Ruskin imagines in Modem Painters. Ruskin describes the
artist/surgeon as methodical and detached~the model of the rational male:10
Nothing good can be done without intense feeling: but it must be feeling so
crushed that the work is set about with mechanical steadiness, absolutely
untroubled, as a surgeon—not without pity, but conquering it and putting it aside—
begins an operation...It follows, also, that no vain or selfish person can possibly
paint, in the noble sense of the word. Vanity and selfishness are troublous, eager,
anxious, petulant:—painting can only be done in calm of mind...You may resolve
to think of your picture only; but if you have been fretted before beginning, no
manly or clear grasp of it will be possible for you (1987, Volume V: Part Vm,
517).
No doubt, Eliot’s narrator feels pity but does not necessarily “conquer” it, as witnessed by
the long interruption that serves the dual purposes of fleshing out her aesthetic and
defending Mr. Irwine. In Chapter 17, Eliot insists on an author who not detached—like
Ruskin’s surgeon beginning an operation, but conscious o f his own humanity and the
:o
In Modem Painters. Ruskin does not discuss the gender o f the observer, but does use
adjectives that describe the artist as “manly.” The artist is described as a “general” and a
“soldier” (Volume V: Part Vm, 517), and his gaze is described as “piercing,” “possession-
taking” and “plunging” (Volume II: Part m , 256). Much like Bacon, Ruskin defines
nature as a secret to be unlocked, and the artist is advised that he must “walk” with nature
and find out how “best to penetrate her meaning” (Volume I: Part n, 178). Later, Ruskin
portrays nature as a shy beauty, and warns the artist who attempts to seduce her, “ Nature
never unveils her beauty to such a gaze. She keeps whatever she has done best, close
sealed, until it is regarded with reverence” (Volume III: Part IV, 319). The sexualized
imagery Ruskin uses to describe the dynamic between spectator and spectacle is not
accidental, but points out the gendered thinking that infects his aesthetic. For Ruskin, the
man is always the active, creative force, while woman exists to complement him. In
Sesames and Lilies (1867), Ruskin writes of men and women, “Now their separate
characters are these. The man’s power is active, progressive and defensive. He is
eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer. His intellect is for invention and
speculation. But the woman’s intellect is not for invention or creation but sweet ordering,
arrangement and decision. Her great function is praise” fWorks of John Ruskin. Library
Edition, vol. XVm, 1905, p. 122).
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30
humanity of his subjects. To serve this end, Eliot roots her narrator in a body with emotion
and sensation, and constructs him as part of the fictional world she creates. As narrator,
Eliot pictures herself among her subjects and in relationship with them:
I can’t afford to give my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of
those feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground
of the great multitude, whose feces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have
to make way with kindly courtesy...It is more needful that I should have a fibre of
sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar with
a vilely-assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf
and green feathers;—more needful that my heart should swell with loving
admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same
hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish...than at the deeds of heroes
whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or by the sublimest abstract of all
clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist (1962,177).
At the same time Eliot calls for an engaged narrator, she is aware of the dangers posed to
narrative by a narrator who is present in the Active world and creates relationships with his
subjects. She creates the restraining fiction of witness/narrator in order to limit the
distortions of the mind’s ‘mirror’:11
The mirror is doubtlessly defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the
reflection feint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I
can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience
on oath (1962, 173).
Eliot does not strip her narrator of humanity or human feelings, but attempts to restrain his
Although Ruskin begins by defining the mind as a mirror, he ultimately defines man’s
intelligence more actively, as a sun. Ruskin writes, “Therefore it is that all the power of
nature depends on the subjection to the human soul. Man in the sun of the world; more
than the real sun” (Volume V: Part IX, 524). While Eliot’s metaphor of author as witness
attempts to limit the generative powers of the artist, Ruskin image of man as sun in
relation to his subject makes him into a god who watches over nature, while bending her
to his will.
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31
subjectivity and make him both part and apart from the ‘testimony’ he gives.
The balancing act that Eliot constructs for her narrator is ultimately too fragile to
maintain. She is over analytical, and deterministic when she draws too rigid a line between
herself and her subject, then becomes lost in sentimentality and fictions of an idealized
peasantry as she oversteps the boundaries set by her realism. Both tendencies have been
remarked upon by Eliot’s critics, leading to two divergent views of her method. W.C
Brownell (1901), faults Eliot for her lack of “creative imagination” and accuses her of
setting characters in motion like a scientist setting rats running in a maze. For Brownell,
Eliot’s characterization suffered at the hands of her scientific method:
Nothing could be more systematically synthetic than the patient way in which,
having arrived, deductively, no doubt, from the suggestions of observation, at the
idea of a character, and then analytically inducing the traits which belong to it,
George Eliot puts these together in an orderly demonstration of the validity of her
original theorem (Haight 1965, 173).
Significantly, Brownell uses two of Eliot’s female characters, Deronda’s mother and
Gwendolen Harlelth, to make the case that her characters are too often “imperfectly
exteriorized”:
And not only is Gwendolen ineffectively presented: she is incompletely realized as
an individual, in virtue of her creator’s absorption in her own personality as a
significant moral trait, but you are more interested in the trait than in the
personality; the personality is more elusive, not quite varied enough; what else
does she do, think, feel, say, besides explicitly exhibit egoism? one asks. Like every
other character of her extraordinary creator, she is thoroughly in character. She is
conceived and exhibited with an absolutely informing consistency, and with a
strictness unusual even in psychological fiction (Haight 1965, 173).
In direct opposition to Brownell, F.R. Leavis (1948) faults Eliot for being sentimental and
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32
too emotionally engaged with her characters. Leavis attributes Eliot’s lack of sufficient
distance between herself and subject to immaturity, and argues that youthful experience
must be mediated by a mature artist, ‘placed’ or distanced by a more objective intelligence
if characterization is to work. With regard to Eliot’s characterization of Maggie, Leavis
writes,
One's criticism is that it is done too purely from the inside. Maggie’s
emotional and spiritual stresses, her exaltations and renunciations, exhibit,
naturally, all the marks of immaturity...There is nothing against George Eliot
presenting this immaturity with tender sympathy; but we ask, and ought to
ask, of a great novelist something more...To understand immaturity would be
to ‘place’ it, with however subtle an implication, by relating it to mature
experience. But when George Eliot touches on these given intensities of
Maggie's inner life the vibration comes directly and simply from the novelist
(Haight 1965, 242).12
While Leavis writes almost fifty years after Brownell, their different interpretations cannot
simply be attributed to the periods in which they write. Instead, these critics uncover the
uneven results of Eliot’s effort to find a method that would capture the exterior and
interior of her character—a perspective that would be both ‘from the inside,’ to use
Leavis’s terminology, and from the outside.
While Brownell and Leavis do not focus particular attention on Adam Bede, this
novel illustrates Eliot’s inability to strike a suitable balance between narrator as impartial
Leavis’s reading of Eliot is marred by his inability to see her as a mature artist
experimenting with different modes of representation. Instead of seeing Eliot’s method as
flawed, Leavis insists on seeing Eliot as a passionate schoolgirl, swept along in the tide of
passion with Maggie. Leavis writes, “Obviously there is a large lack of self-knowledge in
Maggie~a very natural one, but shared, more remarkably, by George Eliot...And it is quite
plain that George Eliot shares to the full the sense o f Stephen’s irresistibleness—the
vibration establishes it beyond a doubt” (Haight, 243).
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33
judge and narrator as sympathetic participant. At times, the narrator of Adam Bede is
sentimental in a way that is not duplicated in later Eliot novels. He does not hesitate to
linger over the rustic charms of Hayslope or wax poetic over Adam’s nobility. We only
see hints of the irony that infuses that later, more biting portrait of rural life, The Mill on
the Floss. There are no Lydgates or Bulstrode’s, or even a Fred Vincy. In fact, Eliot does
not examine either male protagonist. She excuses Adam for what she portrays as natural
desire for a beautiful woman and paints Arthur’s dalliance as innocent pleasure-seeking.
Casting a blind eye to their base motives, she includes herself among those who have been
guilty of a similar crime of desire. Assuming a boys-will-be-boys attitude, Eliot’s narrator
exclaims, “How pretty the little puss looks in that odd dress! It would be the easiest folly
in the world to fall in love with her” (1962, 148). In a similar way, Eliot convinces us of
Mr. lrwine’s good qualities by admitting her own enthusiasm for an old gentleman “who
spoke the worst English” (1962, 180) and chastises “that lofty order of minds who pant
after the ideal” (1962, 180). This attitude may be noble, but we might wonder why Eliot’s
sympathy for human foibles did not extend to her treatment of Hetty. While Eliot portrays
herself in relationship to Arthur and Mr. Irwine, Hetty is always seen as a thing apart.
Eliot reduces her to set of physical attributes, refusing to recognize her humaneness. To
the reader, Hetty appears throughout the novel as a series of reflections. Not surprisingly,
her central scene is acted out in her mirror and not in the prison or on the scaffold. Eliot’s
efforts at framing Hetty are designed to distance the reader, and limit our sympathy and
understanding. Objectifying Hetty as the storm tossed vessel and the chirping canary, Eliot
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places a barrier between the reader interested in understanding Hetty's motives:13
You will never understand women's natures if you are so excessively rational. Try
rather to divest yourself of all your rational prejudices, as much as if you were
studying the psychology of a canary bird, and only watch the movements of this
pretty round creature as she turns her head to one side with an unconscious smile
at the earrings nestled in the little box (1962, 244).
Here Eliot reveals a double-standard. The reader is instructed to divest himself of
“rational prejudices,” and, instead, watch Hetty’s troubles with the detached calm of an
aesthete. Denying Hetty’s humanity and turning her into a pretty picture, Eliot retreats
from her effort to represent reality in a way that extends the bonds of sympathy between
human beings.
No doubt, Eliot treats Hetty differently because she is a beautiful and sensual
woman. This is not to say, as other critics reductively have, that Eliot was jealous.
Instead, Eliot capitalizes on Hetty’s beauty and uses it as an opportunity to analyze the
dynamics of seeing, the pitfalls o f scientific realism, and the hypocrisy of the disinterested
aesthetic experience. Here, we might remember Brownell’s criticism of Eliot’s
inadequately ‘exteriorized’ female characters. Like Gwendolen or Deronda’s mother,
Critics that were contemporary to Eliot recognized Hetty’s vagueness, but were willing to
assume, in Eneas Sweetland Dallas’s (1859) words, that she was “drawn to the life”
(Haight, 5). Dallas writes of Hetty, “She, perhaps, might be accepted as a fair example of
the truth of Pope’s very unjust saying, ‘Most women have no characters at all.’ Not that
she is unreal—she is drawn to the life; but she is one of those who are so very much less
than they seem to be, whose most significant acts mean so little, that it is not easy to fix
upon any central principle in their nature, any strong point, or thought, or word, or act,
which belongs to them” (Haight, 5). As for Henry James (1866), he is inclined to find
Hetty’s lack of true character charming: “Of all of George Eliot’s female figures she is the
least ambitious and, on the whole I think, the most successful” (Haight, 50).
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Hetty is Eliot’s experiment, an exercise, not a flesh and blood heroine. Nevertheless, she is
an experiment that maps the way for Eliot's later heroines. Although Hetty seems like an
altogether different species from Dorothea, she shares with Dorothea the inability to find
form or story. Both experiences exist below, in Hetty’s case, or beyond, in Dorothea’s
case, words and structures of representation. The obvious difference between the two
heroines is that Dorothea attempts to soar above the restricting narratives society offers,
while Hetty falls low and far astray of traditional narratives. Yet, their stories thematize
the difficulty with finding forms that represent female experience adequately. In a passage
that seems to foreshadow Dorothea's comment on fashioning her own narrative in
Middlemarch. the narrator remarks of Hetty:
Hetty had never read a novel; if she had ever seen one, I think the words would
have been too hard for her: how then could she find a shape for her expectations?
They were as formless as the sweet languid odors of the garden at the Chase
(1956, 134).
While Eliot does find a form that does not do violence to Dorothea’s indefiniteness, she
does not struggle to do the same for Hetty. If Hetty cannot find a form for her
expectations, Eliot cannot find form for Hetty’s story. Significantly, the sexual encounter
between Hetty and Arthur, the murder of Hetty’s child and Hetty’s exile—the defining
moments of her story—fall through the cracks of Eliot’s narrative and take place off the
page. At these critical junctures, Hetty’s story is told by others and her experience is
filtered through their prejudices. In the same way that Wuthering Heights frames
Catherine Eamshaw’s love for Heathcliff in the narrow parameters set by Nellie, Hetty is
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forced to fit into the frame fashioned by Eliot’s male narrator. While Hetty is certainly no
Catherine, she deserves a voice that speaks to her experience, even if this experience
seems trivial. Since Eliot denies her this, Hetty’s story remains fragmentary and, in critical
junctures in the narrative, we are forced to read between the lines. Her character is always
a mystery, and so, in some ways, is the novel. Hetty’s tragedy is resolved too abruptly to
be completely satisfying or meaningful. This is not to say that Hetty's story lacks content.
Another author may have told us Hetty’s simple story honestly, without the intrusion of
aesthetic discussions. Instead, Eliot uses Hetty as an example of the way in which art is
misrepresented and misread, ignoring the moral and psychological implications of Hetty’s
stoiy.
From the beginning of the noveL, Hetty is seen in a way that does not permit us to
see beneath the pretty exterior Eliot details. She is caught in the narrative gaze and the
voyeuristic stance from which she is observed turns her into spectacle. When describing
Hetty performing the mundane chore of butter churning, the narrator observes:
And they are the prettiest attitudes and movements into which a pretty girl is
thrown in churning butter-tossing movements that give a charming curve to the
neck, and a sideward inclination o f the round neck ... which cannot at all be
effected without a great play of the pouting mouth and dark eyes (1962, 87).
No doubt, Hetty is skilled at playing herself in the mirror, but her performance is largely
unconscious. Unlike Eliot’s more active characters—namely Rosamond and Gwendolen—
who construct romances of their lives, Hetty is largely passive. As for romance, Eliot
writes, Hetty: “knew no romances, and had only a feeble share of the feelings which are
the source of romance, so that well-read ladies may find it difficult to understand her state
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37
of mind” (1962, 357). She may know her effect on men and long to have Arthur make her
a lady, but she takes little pride in her individual beauty. If Eliot shows sympathy to Hetty
it is only by observing that: “The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own
beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passions vibrating in return” (1962,
147). Although Eliot means for this to be true in general, it is particularly true for Hetty
whose very identity is constructed by the male gaze. She is little more than the creation of
her admirers. Her beauty does not derive from any particular feature—a distinctive mole, a
slightly skewed smile. Instead, she is shaped and reshaped by male desire. As Arthur
looks into Hetty’s eyes, he does not see Hetty, but his own desires and the desires of
“foregone generations” reflected back to him:
Hetty’s look did not really mean so much as he thought: it was only the sign of a
struggle between the desire for him to notice her, and the dread that she should
betray the desire to others. But Hetty’s free had a language that transcended her
feelings. There are faces which nature charges with a meaning and pathos not
belonging to the single human soul that flutters beneath them, but speaking the joys
and sorrows of foregone generations—eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless
has been and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes...just as a national
language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it (1962, 277).
Later, Eliot returns to Arthur’s ‘misreading’ of Hetty, and excuses his foolishness. No
doubt, Hetty is “soft,” and “pliant,” and Arthur “can make her whatever he likes (1962,
148), but Eliot warns:
Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious, but we don’t know all the
intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract
the very opposite of her real meaning (1962, 149).
Instead of deciphering the language of Hetty, Eliot keeps Hetty tightly framed.
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Rather than becoming more herself Hetty masquerades in various female identities,
content to remake herself endlessly. In “The Two Bed-Chambers,” Hetty makes herself
into a picture of Lydia Donnithome imagining Arthur as her “invisible spectator” (1962,
147) In like manner, she attempts to become the focus of attention of the Poyser home by
donning Dinah's Methodist garb (1962, 222). We might see Hetty’s transformations as
efforts to actively construct her own identity, but in the context of Eliot’s narrative,
Hetty’s impulse is always perverse. She makes herself over as a mere copy—a “ghost” in
the words of Mr. Poyser (1962, 223). In The Flesh Made Word. Helena Michie reads the
bed-chamber scene as one in which Hetty internalizes the male gaze that defines her:
The sinister effects o f Arthur’s painting metaphor becomes clearer as the novel
progresses and Hetty is led to internalize his conception of her; in the two famous
bedroom scenes...she frames herself, with the aid of a series of props, in her
blotchy bedroom mirror. Hetty’s enactments of her pictures before the dark mirror
attest both to the impossibility of her visions and to her powerlessness to create
(1987, 110-111).
The one time Hetty acts on “impulse of gaiety”(1962, 217) to transform herself with a
single red rose, Adam rebukes her:
That’s like the ladies in the pictures at the Chase; they’ve mostly got flowers or
feathers or gold things I’ their hair, but somehow I don’t like to see ‘em: they
always put me I’ the mind o’ the painted women outside the shadows at
Treddles’on fair ( 1962, 217)
Hetty’s attempt at framing her own experience, Michie notes, is interpreted as sexual
trespass. Nevertheless, Hetty, even on brink of suicide remains a painted woman. The
narrator tells us that Hetty’s face “even in her most self-conscious moments” (1962, 369)
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generates this reading. Regardless of her intentions, what emerges from Adam Bede is an
examination of the aesthetics that pits male spectator against female spectacle.
John Berger analyzes the dynamic of specatorship in patriarchal culture in the
following way: “Men act and woman appear. Men look at women. Women watch
themselves being looked at” (1980, 47). The dialogue in Adam Bede that examines the
issue of beauty serves well to illustrate this dynamic. Women are read and molded, while
men read and mold. Woman's beauty is exquisite music, while men's beauty is simply
rugged handsomeness. While Paxton is correct in noting that Eliot is skeptical of
Spencerian notions that root women’s essential nature in her biological role, Eliot realizes
that such essentialist narratives are inevitable as long as men alone write women’s stories.
Moreover, Eliot finds that the narratives that declare women soft, pliant, majestic and,
above all, beautiful, are created by the dynamic of spectatorship Berger describes.
Without the power to create her own narrative, Hetty and others like her are resigned to
live out stories that are constructed for them-those o f vanity, beauty, or maternity. This
limits the number of stories Eliot can tell about women without upsetting the male gaze.
As soon as Hetty becomes embodied within the context of a narrative shaped by the male
gaze, she loses agency. Note that Hetty is defined as the epitome of sensual womanhood,
but she is utterly passionless. Within the context of Eliot’s story, she is passive, and if she
desires, she does so off the page. Like a Rossetti, or Burne-Jones portrait, Hetty’s
passion is a mere projection of masculine desire. She has all the external characteristics
that suggest sensual womanhood, but lacks the internal mechanisms that make a woman a
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spirited and sexual self.
As a result, the heroine realized like Hetty—with much descriptive detail but little
psychological realism—will always be passive. Eliot is often accused of painting scenes so
encumbered with detail that they seem more like still lives than scenes from real lives. For
the heroine who desires, such detail is not merely an impediment, it is fatal. By
representing Hetty as a body with “eyelids as delicate as petals” and “long dark eyelashes
like the stamen of the flower,” Eliot refuses to rise to the challenge of representing
embodied, womanly desire. All representation transforms bodies. In fact, Lori Lefkovitz
(1987) argues, that transforming the body into an object of art is a way of making it
meaningful. Likewise, artistic representation renders the body visible and situates that
body, but also subjects it to controls and places it in a hierarchical relationship to the
spectator. In Adam Bede this means that the dynamic o f spectatorship creates the
conditions for bringing female desire to light, while continuing to perpetuate sexual
stereotypes and hindering a more accurate representation of female desires. For this
reason, Dinah emerges as the real heroine in Adam Bede. Corpse-like, spiritual and
disembodied—Dinah is afforded a certain freedom that Hetty is not. While Dinah
ultimately gives up her voice and her calling for Adam, her lack of physicality gives her
freedom from narratives constructed for women on the basis of biological difference. Her
otherworldliness prevents her from being read or misread like Hetty, but she remains a
mystery. The narrator writes of Hetty: “Dinah was a riddle to her” (1962, 139).
Unfortunately, she is also a riddle to the reader. Neither mode of representation alone,
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that privileging objective experience or that privileging subjective experience, allows us to
fully sympathize with our heroine’s struggle.
This does not make Adam Bede a failure. Eliot comes a long way in forging her
own aesthetic by calling into question the objective and scientific artist that Ruskin
imagines in Modem Painters and implicitly critiquing his aesthetic which seeks to distance
itself from the sensual world. While Ruskin rejects the assumption that art is an appeal to
“animal feelings” and argues that desire must be restrained in the process of rendering
artistic judgment, Eliot suggests that romantic love and love of artistic beauty are both
paths to the sublime. Moreover, Eliot shows that emotions, not ideas, allow us to
appreciate beauty:
I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like Hetty, of whose
inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature
and not out of any inconsistent weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought
on by exquisite music (1962, 340).
The danger Ruskin sees in emotion is seen by Eliot as a strength~a prerequisite, in fact,
for the aesthetic experience Eliot describes here. The observer who strips the aesthetic
object of its particularity and assumes the gaze of the aesthete as opposed to that of the
lover has more a chance of erring than he would otherwise: “The noblest nature sees the
most of this impersonal expression in beauty, and for this reason, the noblest nature is
often the most blinded to the character of the one woman’s soul that beauty clothes”
(1962, 341). For this reason, objectivity often backfires by divorcing the part from the
whole and the body from the soul. Looking through particulars to the ideal, we fool
ourselves into believing that we see something that is not there. In this way, Eliot
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undermines the notion that the rational, scientific mind can know nature or woman.
Objectivity is another attempt to disguise desire—a desire for the ideal.
Then, with Hetty Sorrel, Eliot answers the difficulties posed by Ruskin's slave ship
Abstract notions of beauty serve the ideological function of casting off responsibility for
human tragedies we cannot understand. She writes,
Perhaps water-nixies, and such lovely things without souls, have these little round
holes in their ears by nature, ready to hang jewels in. And Hetty must be one of
them: it is too painful to think that she is a woman, with a woman's destiny before
her—spinning in young ignorance a light web of folly and vain hopes which may
one day close round her ... changing all at once her fluttering, trivial butterfly
sensations into a life of deep human anguish (1962, 245).
Indeed, we see this prophecy realized in Adam Bede. We also witness this transformation
on a grander scale as the focus of Eliot's attention shifts from Hetty as aesthetic object in
Adam Bede, to the fully-realized character of Maggie who struggles to find an outlet for
her ambitions and desires in The Mill on the Floss. In Maggie's narrow life, we see an
empathetic portrayal—the telling of a full-fledged tragedy—instead of mere spectacle.
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CHAPTER THREE
RETURNING THE GAZE: MAGGIE’S FIGHT FOR AGENCY IN THE MILL
ON THE FLOSS
In The Heroine's Text. Nancy Miller (1980) argues that the female Bildungstroman
has a distinct structure and identifies the tendency of women’s narratives to move toward
two distinct poles: the euphoric and the dysphoric. The Mill on the Floss, which
culminates in the cataclysmic flood that destroys its heroine, has received specific attention
from feminist narratologists as an example of the dysphoric narrative. We could dispute
this classification and, as previous critics, debate whether Eliot's ending is a bleak defeat
for our heroine or a celebration of her final, mystical union, but we should first ask how
Eliot’s aesthetic contributes to the destruction of her vital and self-aware heroine.
Although Miller is silent on the subject, it is important to see that Maggie's struggle is
primarily the struggle of embodiment — a struggle that is a driving force in the female
Bildungtroman. Unlike the hero, the heroine attains maturity and integration through her
body. Male novels of ambition—if they end happily—conclude with the hero's successful
integration into public society. The heroine’s successful entry into society is synonymous
with her integration into the private sphere and into the public sphere only as a mother or
a wife. Eliot recognizes this implicitly. For Maggie, knowledge is won at the expense of
sex, her position in society and ultimately her physical body, but Eliot continues the
44
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struggle to portray Maggie as a subject present to and directing her own desire. For this
reason, Maggie is more fully realized than Hetty, and more vital than Dinah. She
resonates with contemporary Eliot readers in a way that her other heroines do not. For
these readers in particular, Maggie is no abstraction and her struggle is all too familiar. In
her, Eliot gives voice to the interior dialogue of a thinking woman, accurately portraying
the difficulties in attaining spiritual, physical and intellectual integration in a patriarchal
society.
Before examining Maggie’s individual struggle to achieve this integration, it would
be useful to understand why women’s narratives often must confront the heroine’s identity
as a body. We might be practical and argue that women authors must travel in more
confined spaces, and the body is the most available of these spaces. But, this is only
partially true. In turning to the body, women authors write not only about what is
available in their world but what is most important. Here, we might remember the battle
cry of Simone de Beauvior in the Second Sex: “One is not bom, but rather, becomes a
woman” (1974, 301). In “Variation on Sex and Gender,” Judith Butler fleshes out de
Beauviofs thesis:
That one is not bom, but becomes a woman does not imply that this becoming
‘traverses a path from disembodied freedom to cultural embodiment. Indeed, one
is one's body from the start and only thereafter becomes one's gender, The
movement from sex to gender is internal to embodied life, a sculpting o f the
original body into a cultural form (1987, 131).
If women's narratives mimic, expose and critique this socialization process, the
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writer’s attention most naturally rests where gender first makes its mark. Moreover, if
women are defined by their biology, the heroine’s journey toward subjectivity often results
in a new relationship to the body that delimits them. In “Who Is This Pain?: Scarring,
Disfigurement, and the Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend,” Helena
Michie argues that Dickens’s Esther comes to her self-identity through illness:
Like the female self in Wittig, Esther must enter the text through the scarring of
her body; she moves from figure to body through disfigurement. Esther's illness
becomes, an announcement o f self; her narrative which has, up to the point of
illness been coyly balanced between assertions of unimportance and the consistent
assertion of her body and its concerns as narrative interruptions, becomes the
narrative of her own interior and physical life (1989, 203).
In The Mill on the Floss. Maggie's tomboy nature, and her vigor, physicalness and
outspokenness in the early chapters of the novel, make her a very different character from
Esther, but reflections of the body and representation of bodily desires remain important
motifs in Maggie’s narrative. Not only do physical descriptions of Maggie serve to mark
her progress from a wild, gypsy child to a self-restrained adult woman, but Maggie, like
Esther, retreats from the flesh to mark a critical juncture in the narrative. Like Esther,
Maggie refuses the responsibility of her body when she refuses to meet her image in the
mirror. Simultaneously, Maggie renounces the desiring “I” that moves the plot forward
through the first half of the novel. With Maggie's renunciation of agency, Eliot is unable
to sustain the rich exploration of interiority that marks the beginning of the novel.
While the examples of Maggie and Esther could support a larger claim for
women’s narrative as stories of a heroine ‘becoming her body,’ it is important to
understand Maggie’s struggle for embodiment against the backdrop of specific nineteenth-
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century notions of women, and women’s bodies. This is essential, since the body, and the
female body in particular, becomes increasingly scrutinized during the nineteenth-century
as sexuality is reconceived, or, to use Thomas Laqueur’s language, invented. Laqueur
argues that as sexual difference changed the way in which bodies were seen,
The natural body itself became the gold standard o f social discourse, the bodies of
women—the perennial other—thus became the battleground for redefining the
ancient, intimate, fundamental, social relation: that of woman to man. Women’s
bodies in their corporeal scientifically accessible concreteness, in the very nature
of their bones, nerves and, most important, reproductive organs, came to bear an
enormous new weight o f meaning (1990, 150)
We see this battle over the redefinition of sexual relationship placing and defining Eliot’s
heroines in the world and informing their relationships to their own bodies. Maggie
confronts the shame and wonder of her sexuality only after she internalizes stereotypes
that reduce women to her biological functions. Before Maggie is old enough to consider
what it means to be a women, Mr. Snelling pronounces judgment on the mental capacity
of girls, saying, “They can pick up a little of everything, I dare say...They’ve got a great
deal of superficial cleverness, but they couldn’t go far into anything. They’re quick and
shallow” (1965, 163). Victorian medical theories, which linked the brain and reproductive
system and put women in the thrall of their uterus, supported judgments like Mr.
Snelling’s. In For Her Own Good. Ehrenreich and English argue that such medical
theories were reactions to the suffrage movement and the advancement o f women’s
education:
Nineteenth-century gynecology became absorbed in the combat between the brain
and the uterus for dominion over the female persona. It was as if the Woman
Question were being fought out on the dissecting table: on the one hand, the
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brain—aggressive and calculating-bearing the standard of sexual rationalism; on
the other hand, the uterus, bearing the standard o f sexual romanticism—moistly
receptive, nurturing, still governed by the ancient tempo of the moon and tides
(1978, 126).
This does not mean that Eliot sees Maggie’s struggle as a struggle against
Victorian biological reductionism per se. Although some have argued otherwise, The Mill
on the Floss is not a tract that argues for more enlightened thinking about women and
advocates their inclusion in public society. To use today’s terminology, Eliot is far from a
liberal feminist. Instead, Eliot’s struggle for her heroine’s embodiment is a natural
outgrowth of her realism and a necessity for the moral response she seeks to evoke. This
moral response hinges on the connection between her reader and a fully-fleshed, complex
heroine and empathy for her struggles. To those who complain of the ‘oppressive
narrowness’ of the novel, Eliot's narrator says,
In natural science, I have understood, there is n oth in g petty to the mind that has
a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of
human conditions. It is surely the same with the observations of human life.
This passage echoes Eliot’s statement on realism in Adam Bede: knowledge and
understanding of the subject comes first thorough empirical investigation that mimics that
of the natural scientist. In The Mill on the Floss, the real necessitates a more complete
examination of female desire. While Hetty’s desire is closeted in Adam Bede. Eliot is
prepared to deal more frankly with Maggie’s emotions. This made The Mill on the Floss
more difficult for Victorian critics to read. Although Adam Bede’s descriptions were
quaint and instructive, many recoiled as Eliot used the same realistic techniques to expose
female interiority in The Mill on the Floss. In an 1860 unsigned review in the Saturday
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Review, the reviewer writes of the love-scene between Maggie and Stephen:
There is nothing wrong with writing about such an act, and it is the sort of thing
that does sometimes happen in real life, but we cannot think that the conflict of
sensation and principle raised in a man's mind by gazing at a woman's arm is a
theme that a female novelist can touch on without leaving behind a feeling of
hesitation, if not repulsion ... There are emotions over which we ought to throw
a veil over (Haight 1965, 119).
Unlike F.R. Leavis, who accuses Eliot of writing herself as Maggie and the Stephen-
Maggie scene as wish fulfillment (Haight 1965,242-3), the Saturday Review writer goes
beyond ad hominem attacks to question realism as a gender-neutral tool. Under the
shroud of anonymity, the author forwards an assumption about realism that is often
implicit in critical writings but not addressed directly: Realism is the domain of men. The
undercurrent in this review suggests that women may be capable and accurate in their
technique, but that realism becomes distasteful when women turn the tables and
investigate matters men would rather keep secret. The tools of realism give Eliot power—
power over men.
When Eliot turns her gaze to her male subject, exposing his desire, her male critics
become increasingly uncomfortable. This may be why the character of Stephen Guest is a
thorn in the side of male critics. To these critics, Stephen is more than a poorly developed
character and a vulgarian. Reviewers are filled with a rage against him that seems in excess
of his crimes. And, it is not Steven Guest himself under attack, but passion and its frank
portrayal by a ‘lady’ author. In the Guardian, the reviewer compliments Eliot on the
representation of this “picture o f passion gradually stealing like a frightful and incurable
poison.” Still, he worries about Eliot being corrupted: “We still hold that there are
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temptations which it is of itself a temptation to scrutinize to closely” (Haight 1965, 131).
Likewise, Dublin University Magazine decries the portrayal of coarse “animal feelings”
and questions the “lengthened treatment of a mystery so full of doubt and danger, by an
Englishwoman writing for both sexes” (Haight 1965, 150). Without doubt, though,
Swinburne far exceeds other critics in his hate for Stephen. According to Swinburne, the
passion between Stephen and Maggie is a disease that,
defaces and degrades the very crown and flower of George Eliot's wonderful and
most noble work; no rent or splash on the raiment, no speck or scar on the skin of
it, but a cancer at the very bosom, a gangrene on the very flesh... The book is not
the same before or after it. No washing or trimming, no pruning or purging, could
eradicate or efface it; it could only be removable by amputation and remediable
cautery (Haight 1965,128).
If we leave Swinburne’s own excesses aside, the review is intriguing when we consider the
extended use of the disease metaphor that links Eliot’s objectionable method with medical
epistemology. Like the writer in the Guardian who suggests that Eliot accurately
diagnoses the disease—or tracks the poison—Swinburne does not dispute Eliot’s skill but
objects to her brutal exposure of the body’s deepest secrets. With her study of Stephen
she enacts an anatomy of male desire, and her male critics shy away from the spectacle.
Ultimately, Swinburne argues that such a representation is gender specific: “the man never
lived...who could have done such a thing as this” (Haight 1965, 165).
These reviews should be read within the context of the politics of spectatorship
spurred by the restructuring of sexuality. If we consider the importance of looking in the
profound revisioning of the body and restructuring of sexuality taking place in the
nineteenth century, we must also recognize the significance of who does this looking.
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Women who turned their gaze on men did not only threaten their own sexual purity, but
threatened to undermine male interpretive authority in society, medicine and the arts. In
the visual arts, where painting and sculpture depends on visual authority over one’s
subject, the attempt to deny and undermine women’s artistic vision can be seen in the
campaign to exclude women from the study of the nude. In the Old Mistress: Women. Art
and Ideology. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock argue that women’s inability to study
human anatomy from the nude allowed women and their art to be marginalized:
For almost 300 years from the Renaissance to the hey-day of the academies in
the nineteenth century, the nude human figure was the basis of the most highly
regarded forms of painting and sculpture—what the academic theorists of art
described as ‘history painting’ and placed at the top o f the hierarchy of artistic
genres. The simple fact of women’s exclusion from studying the nude
constrained many of them to practice exclusively in the genres of portraiture
and still life, genres considered, within the Academic canon of art, less
significant...The notion that women should be kept from anatomy studies and
the nude model was so tenacious that in 1886, Thomas Eakins, teaching at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which did train many women and had
instituted an experimental female life class in the 1870s was dismissed after a
public outcry when he removed the loin-cloth from a male model in an anatomy
class before a mixed audience (1981, 35).
Certainly, Victorian women chafed at their exclusion from life classes and the academic art
world—the Royal Academy of Art remained exclusively male throughout the nineteenth
century14. In the 1840s, egalitarian feminists met at cooperative art classes and organized
In the Old Mistress. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock note that the English Royal
Academy had two female founding members, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser in
1768, but continued to exclude women from its schools and privileges for the next 100
years.(28) In nineteenth century Britain, the exclusion of women artists from the Academy
and the protest against this exclusion must be read in relationship to the emergence o f the
professions. In Painting Women. Deborah Cherry defines professionalism as “a new
identity in nineteenth-century Britain” (9) and argues that, “Women who worked as artists
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their campaign against the Royal Academy by circulating a public petition for women’s
admission to Royal Academy Schools (Cherry 1993, 56). Part of the battle for women’s
inclusion to the academy was fought on the canvas, where male artists continued to deny
women’s identity as artists by painting women in passive, sexualized poses that denied
their agency. In Women and Art. Whitney Chadwick argues that the transformation of
women from producers of art to spectacle is practically a leit-motif in the history of art
and is particularly pronounced in nineteenth-century painting. Chadwick cites the case of
Robusti, the daughter of the Venetian painter Tinteretto and artist in her own right, who
was portrayed by nineteenth-century painters Leon Cogniet (1840) and Philip Jeanron
(1857) as a “tubercular heroine passively expiring as she stimulated her father to new
creative heights” (1990, 19). The result of this transformation, Chadwick argues, was that
the artist is “displaced from being a producer and becomes instead a sign for male
creativity” (1990, 19).
In medicine, where male experts were defining their new profession against the
‘unscientific’ and ‘dangerous’ practices of healers and midwives, women’s interpretative
authority was also seen as suspect. American physician Sir William Osier, an important
figure in the redefinition of medicine during the nineteenth century,15 preached that nurses
challenged the exclusivity of masculine claims to professionalism: neither their location in
the profession of art nor their activities in a capitalist economy coincided with that of
bourgeois men” (9).
In For Her Own Good. Ehrenreich and English recognize the importance of Osier as such:
“The aspirations—and achievements of regular medicine can be summarized in the figure of
one man: Sir William Osier. He not only played a role in the medical-reform movement; to
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should practice “silence and self-control”:
Things medical and gruesome have a singular attraction for
many people, and in the easy days of convalescence a facile-tongued nurse may be
lead on to tell of “moving incidents” in ward of theater, and once untied, that
unruly member is not apt to cease wagging with simple narration o f events. To
talk o f diseases is a sort of Arabian Night's Entertainment to which no discreet
nurse will lend her talent (1932, 94).
The anxiety over retaining medical authority that led Osier to demand women’s silence
also informed the debate over new technologies like the speculum—a technology that
would literally allow women to turn a mirror upon themselves and offer their own
diagnosis. In The Science of Woman. Omelia Moscucci notes that the uproar over the
speculum in the early nineteenth-centuiy was not about retaining the virginity of the
patient (1989, 115). Instead, the speculum sparked debate over who would be in control—
the woman herself or her doctor— and what happened when this technology fell into the
‘wrong hands.’ Doctors worried that women would use the knowledge provided by the
speculum and gain an unhealthy, unladylike familiarity with their bodies. Moscucci cites
the case of physiologist Marshall Hall, who argued that women had been made hysterical
by the use of the instrument. Hysteria, in this case, is described by Hall as such: “I have
known them [women] to speak of the womb and of the uterine organs with a familiarity
that was once unknown, and which, I trust, will ere long be obsolete” (1989, 116). Of
course, what Hall described is knowledge, not hysteria. Like other medical technologies,
the speculum was disturbing because it had the capacity to give women knowledge of her
body and perhaps, ultimately, authorship of the narrative of her own body. It is for this
thousands of admirers, he was the g o a l of it” (91).
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reason that Luce Irigaray uses the speculum to explain the complex dynamics of women's
self-knowing and appropriates the speculum as a tool and metaphor that could be enlisted
to reveal women's multifaceted identity, or "concavity." Irigaray notes that the speculum
could be seen simply as another technology of domination:
Woman, having been misinterpreted, forgotten, variously frozen in showcases,
rolled-up in metaphors, buried beneath figures, raised up on different idealities
would not be the object to be investigated (1985, 144).
But, she says,
This is not to say one should avoid mirrors, but multiply interpretations ...
perhaps through this specular surface which sustains discourse is found not
the void of nothingness but the dazzle of multifaceted speleology (1985, 143).
Ironically, the woman who uses the speculum for this purpose is, in a sense, using the
master's tools to dismantle his house. She appropriates the instrument that is most
blatantly a tool o f medical penetration and uses it to undercut the dominant discourse of
gender complementarity with the possibility of multiple sexual identities.
In one sense, then, Eliot's realism works as a scalpel or a speculum. She begins to
explore female subjectivity with an honesty and intensity that undermines narrative
authority and the medical-scientific models that underpin this authority. At the same time,
Eliot is aware of the limitations of using clinical methodology to explore subjectivity. In
Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth -Century Fiction Lawrence Rothfield argues
that Eliot's contribution to medical realism is precisely this:
That Eliot acknowledges the epistemological superiority of the
clinicoanatomical gaze is clear enough—she even theorizes her own practice as a
matter of analyzing webs of organic relations—but she never makes the medical
view of the embodied self an absolute principle of authorial representation in the
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way Flaubert does. On the contrary, Eliot’s major innovation is to contextualize
and historicize, for the first time in the realist novel, the clinical epistemology to
which she-as a realist—must remain committed (89).
So, while Eliot's method is transgressive insofar as it leads her to name previously hidden
desires, it is also true that her method, insofar as it challenges her to historicize and
contextualize, makes it difficult for Eliot to depict Maggie’s life as anything but limited.
Although Eliot struggles to define Maggie actively, and we see her constructing her own
alternate narratives to challenge those in power, Eliot ultimately denies Maggie’s agency.
We see Maggie desiring and, as the reader, even feel her desire, but in her critical
encounter with Stephen Guest, the desiring gaze is turned back on her and defines her. As
she becomes objectified by Stephen’s desire, Maggie is denied the ability to be author of
her own story. Instead, she is paralyzed, unable to name her own desire and is obscured by
a narrative that makes her a mystery to both the reader and the town of St. Oggs. In this
sense, she becomes like Tinteretto’s daughter, her generative powers are washed over as
she is transformed from spectator and shaper of her on reality to spectacle. Like Philip,
who only has a picture to remind him of the old Maggie, the reader is left with a Maggie
who is a mere copy of her childhood self.
Appropriately, Eliot's search for an adequate form and narrative perspective leads
her to thematize the issue of narrative form in The Mill on the Floss. As Eliot struggles to
find an appropriate vehicle for telling Maggie's story, weaving together autobiography,
realism and the fantastical, Maggie is trying to find a narrative of her own. Starting at
childhood, Maggie is fascinated with stories, not only because they represent the hook
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learning1 that is off-limits to her, but because they allow her room for self-expression and
self-reflection. It is not the story of Defoe's History of a Devil itself that attracts Maggie,
but the story that she herself has constructed from looking at the pictures. The scenario
she constructs shows a perverse interest in a particular kind of narrative dilemma—one
where the heroine's possibilities are limited and she cannot help but lose. Maggie
interprets the picture by commenting:
0, I'll tell you what it means. It's a dreadful picture, isn't it? But I can't help
but looking at it. The old woman in the water is a witch—they've put her in
to find out whether she's a witch or no, and if she swims she's a witch, and if
she's drowned-and killed you know—she's innocent, and not a witch, but only
a poor silly old woman. But what good would it do her then, you know,
when she is drowned (1965, 23).
Of course, we could say the same thing for Maggie: she remains innocent, but it does her
no good. While the question she asks is a relevant one, her interest in the narrative is
dismissed quickly by the men. Mr. Riley advises her to find “prettier books” (1965, 24).
Fortunately for the reader, Maggie refuses to follow this advice and her continued
dissatisfaction with existing narratives and the insistence that she not be defined by such
narratives continues to typify her struggle. In the Red Deeps, when she meets with Philip,
she rejects pretty surfaces altogether and longs for something real and deep. Like
Dorothea, Maggie has a strong need to find linkages in her life and make it whole; She is a
“creature full of eager, passionate longings ... yearning for something that would lin k
together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life and give her soul a sense of
home in it” (1965, 205). She is drawn to books not because they will help gain her entry
to a man's world, but because narrative's unifying force will help her gain perspective on
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her own world:
she wanted some key that would enable her to understand and in
understanding endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart.
If she had been taught real learning and wisdom, such as great men knew, she
thought she should have held the secret of life (1965, 301).
She soon finds that tradition plots are inadequate to reveal the “secrets of life.” She rejects
Philip’s Corinne in the Red Deeps because she is,
determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all
the happiness. I should begin to have a prejudice against them. If you could give
me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the
balance. I want to avenge Rebecca, and Flora Macivor, and Minna, and all the rest
of the dark unhappy ones (1965, 349).
This passage has more than passing significance in Maggie’s story. It is no accident that
she sees the heroine’s body as a significant determining factor in her destiny. Not only
does she hit upon the obvious, but she unconsciously recognizes that the narratives that
delimit her own experience take shape around her physicalness. Throughout The Mill on
the Floss. Maggie is Medusa with the ringlet hair, the gypsy queen, and the Neoclassical
goddess with swept-up hair and serene features. In refusing to see herself in the mirror,
she attempts to reject these types and undermine the narratives that logically follow.
This is possible only as long as Maggie remains asexual and disembodied. When
she allows herself to desire, she again becomes objectified. Like Dinah, Maggie escapes
many of the limitations experienced as a gendered body. She is afforded the possibility o f
a rich internal life and escapes the objectification that makes Hetty a cipher and a pawn for
Eliot to move mechanically through the narrative. But, while she might be able to avoid
mirrors, Maggie cannot avoid the eyes of the men who love her. Philip clearly values
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Maggie for her intellect, artistic sentiment and energy, but loves her only as she is
mediated through his art. In the Red Deeps, Philip uncovers a miniature portrait of
Maggie, and reveals, to Maggie's surprise, a Maggie that no longer exists. The surprise of
seeing herself through another’s eyes reminds Maggie that escaping mirrors is impossible.
Eliot writes,
She turned her face away from him and took some steps, looking straight
before her in silence as if she were adjusting her consciousness to this new
idea. Girls are so accustomed to think of dress as the main ground of vanity
that in abstaining from the looking-glass Maggie had thought more of
abandoning all care for adornment that in renouncing the contemplation of her
face. Comparing herself with elegant, wealthy young ladies, it had not
occurred to her that she could produce any effect with her person (1965,
316).
Ultimately, it is the im age of Maggie that Philip clings to and it is poignant that this is all
he is left with. In his final letter to Maggie, Philip admits that his passion was colored with
egotism:
Perhaps I feel about you as the artist does about the scene over which his soul
has brooded with love; he would tremble to see it confided to other hands; he
would never believe that it could bear for another all the meaning and beauty
it bears for him (1965, 526).
Stephen is more obvious in his objectification of Maggie. This is not to say that Maggie
does not desire Stephen or that he does not respond to something that is tier's and tier's
alone, but that Eliot does not allow us to understand this desire as Maggie experiences it.
Certainly, it is Maggie's passion that leads her to betray Lucy. The connection between
Stephen and Maggie is blatantly sexual. But, Maggie cannot be an actor in the liaison.
She is swept away-caught up in a plot that does not originate from her own desires. In A
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Literature of Their Own. Elaine Showalter notes the alien influence that seems to come
over Maggie, and attributes it Maggie's own lack of vocabulary:
When Maggie does feel sexually attracted to a man, she has no vocabulary for
her emotions and must define her physical excitement as ‘love’; she must
pretend that Stephen Guest has kidnaped her and that she is helplessly drifting
away, when it obvious that they are colluding in the elopement. Even after
her awakening in the boat, when she makes the decision to resist Stephen,
Maggie cannot move toward a purposeful construction of her life (1977, 128).
It is important to note, though, that Maggie does not attempt to deceive others
into believing that she was kidnaped. While Showalter is correct in saying that Maggie is
missing a ‘vocabulary’ with which to write her experience, the fact is that Maggie makes
no meaningful interpretation of the event because she is simply not present as a self-
reflective subject. We must extend Showaltefs reading to note that Eliot also lacks a
vocabulary that would allow Maggie to be present to her own desire and active in creating
her story with Stephen. Eliot draws the shades on Maggie's complex interior and as a
result she appears hollowed out—a mere statue. This can be seen more clearly in a
previous scene where Stephen finds Maggie alone at the dance and “showers kisses” on
her arm. It is instructive to notice that what happens to Maggie corresponds with a shift
in the narrator's perspective:
Stephen was mute; he was incapable of putting a sentence together, and
Maggie bent her arm a little upward toward the half-opened rose that
attracted her. Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? The
unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all
the varied gently lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest,
almost imperceptible nicks in firm softness (1965, 463).
One line into this description, Maggie leaves her body as the narrator scans Maggie
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lasciviously, fetishing the disembodied arm. At this point, we see culture intervene in
representation as Eliot exposes the difficulty in working with a romantic narrative and
language that is logically linked with certain historically specific assumptions about
gender. In The Flesh Made Word. Helena Michie argues that synecdochal description
Eliot uses in detailing Maggie's arm is
a rhetorical trick that distracts the reader from tenor to vehicle, from the
‘realities’ of the female bodily experience to a more seductive abstraction
...The hand or the arm that comes to stand for the unnameable body parts at
once introduces the larger body parts by implication and focusses the reader's
attention on the disembodied fragments (1987, 86-7).
As Michie notes, this is not to say that perfect representation is possible, but to recognize
“an aggravated and deeply political instance of culture intervening between a subject and
its representation” (1987, 84). Then, while the episode with Stephen suggests Maggie's
need for an integrating self, Eliot's inability to escape the culturally specific gaze of the
narrator-voyeur fragments Maggie and forces her back into the dynamic of
spectacle/spectator.
This considered, Maggie's childhood vitality is repressed as she turns to denounce
the natural world and the climax of the book is her erasure. While many critics have
commented at length on the flood that ends The Mill on the Floss. Virginia Woolfs
commentary on Eliot is intriguing because it assumes that bodily decay is the price women
must pay for knowledge. Woolf says of Eliot: "With every obstacle against her—sex,
health and convention—she sought more and more knowledge and more and more freedom
until the body weighted with its double burden sank worn out" (1925, 675-6). Earlier in
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this same passage, Woolf alludes to the Edenic myth casting Eliot as the Eve who must
reach beyond “the sanctuary and pluck for herself the strange bright fruits of art and
knowledge” (1925, 189). With this twist on the Edenic narrative, then, Woolf continues
to accept the notion that women's knowledge is gained at the expense of her sex and that
her journey toward freedom necessitates emotional and physical suffering. The
punishment for Eve's curiosity is not the pain of childbirth, but annihilation. While Woolfs
myth is colored by her own experience and may not be accurate where it concerns Eliot,
Maggie and Tom's expulsion from the sanctuary of childhood, Maggie's fall and rebellion,
and her eventual drowning reenacts the scenario that W oolf lays down for Eliot. As the
narrative progresses, it is Maggie that sinks under the 'double burden' as her search for
knowledge and spiritual transcendence depletes her physical vigor. When her initial
enthusiasm for Latin and geometry are dismissed by Mr. Snelling as a woman's initial
quickness and superficiality, Maggie finds out that it is her gender that restricts her
knowledge. After this, she loses instinctual pleasure in her female body and gives up her
tomboy pleasures. She takes the shears to her hair, refuses to take pleasure in music and
literature, and shuns her own image in the mirror.
This is not to say that Maggie wishes to become a boy; instead, she hopes to reject
the burden of embodiment in its entirety. Moreover, it is not enough for Eliot to criticize
the academic system that excludes women; she questions the value of the system in its
entirety when Maggie looks beyond the knowledge of objects and figures and seeks a
knowledge fuller and deeper. Eliot recognizes, though, that the search for the form
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beneath the form is futile. Even when Maggie sits with her mother, absorbed in her own
private drama, she becomes the only "bit of furniture now on which she could bestow her
anxiety and pride" (1965, 309). Her mother’s attention to her is harmless, but Eliot uses
the incident to point out that we cannot help but meet the mirror of other people's eyes
and be drawn into the web of their narratives. On another level, Maggie cannot remain
hidden because her inner joy becomes manifest on h e r physical self. Eliot writes,
That new inward life of hers, notwithstanding some volcanic upheavings of
imprisoned passions, yet shown out in her face with a tender soft light that
mingled itself as added loveliness with the gradually enriched colour and
outline of her blossoming youth (1965, 309).
Clearly, Eliot is describing Maggie's sexual maturing in this passage, which becomes a
reality that intrudes itself gracelessly on Maggie's story despite her complete lack of
understanding. For Maggie, sexual desire and passion continually reemerge as part of
herself as yet to be developed, but her perception of her desire is too subtle and
incomplete for her to integrate them into her life. As Philip says in the Red Deeps, these
passions suggest something integral to human existence that cannot be adequately spoken
about in our language: “I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our
understandings can make no complete inventory” (1965, 320). Although Maggie
understands Philip immediately, she is afraid that such stores will be a Pandora's box for
her, opening her up to infinite wanting and desire. She refuses any pleasure Philip might
have to offer her by remarking, "It would make me in love with this world again ... it
would make me long to see and know many things; it would make me long for a full life"
(1965, 321). While the repressed need for union and passion Maggie felt as a child
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resurfaces as Stephen serenades her, Maggie again confronts the impossibility of achieving
completeness. Although, Maggie does not literally sink with this burden, her death can be
seen as a direct result of living in a society that prevents the harmonious union of physical
and spiritual existence.
It isn't enough, though, to call attention to the Fall imagery in The Mill on the
Floss and the implications for Maggie without seeing how Victorian notions of sexual
difference color Maggie's outcome. Eliot is very specific in defining the dilemma:
Maggie's desire simply cannot be reconciled within the parameters of St. Oggs society.
Without expanding her narrative to include the fantastic and the utopian, Maggie cannot
‘fit’ into the narrative in the same way she cannot ‘fit’ into society. In Intellectual Women
and Victorian Patriarchy. Deirdre David uses Maggie to make larger claims about Eliot's
treatment o f her heroines:
In Eliot's writings about woman's mind and male culture, the topos where
coherence is achieved does, indeed, exist outside history, outside time: there,
woman possesses universal, atemporal, and inherent characteristics making
her immune from stifling, subjugating restraints of male dominated culture and
society (1987, 163).
Insofar as Maggie exists outside of time she also exists outside of narrative. When
Maggie refuses to elope with Stephen, the townspeople of St. Oggs are left without a
familiar narrative to make sense out o f her story. Eliot tells us that it is not the fact of
Stephen’s elopement with Maggie that shocked the town, but the fact that the elopement
was aborted in midstream with no explanation. If Stephen and Maggie had married, St.
Ogg's would have replied, "What a marriage for a girl like Tulliver—quite romantic" (1965,
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513). Eventually, society would accept her. But, Maggie's return from the liaison can
only be judged by the results, Eliot writes. With no intervening narrative to make sense
out of Maggie's refusal of Stephen, St. Ogg's can only make up its own stories to explain
the unusual outcome. Similarly, Maggie fails to meet reader's expectations. She
stubbornly resists both Stephen and Philip after her reputation is already ruined, but makes
no attempt to reinterpret her action to the town in a way that would clear her name. Her
actions are inexplicable within the context of conventional romance plots, but fall short of
our expectations for a heroine of a feminist novel of resistance. U.C. Knoepflmacher gives
voice to this sense of frustration when he argues that the last half of The Mill on the Floss
falls flat in the crucial places and Maggie is only a shadow of her former self:
Such speeches belong to a thesis-novel. They ought to come from a
ventriloquist's puppet and not by the rounded human beings whose growth we
have observed. George Eliot has dropped all indirection She glosses Maggie's
willingness to be lead by Stephen in the boat with a laconic statement,
•Memory was excluded,' as if an explicit stage direction could substitute for
what the reader ought to feel through his own experience. Yet Maggie must
be readied to play out her role as victim or martyr (1968, 207).
But, Maggie is destined to play neither victim or martyr. Eliot resists such a
reading or any other plot that would allow us any interpretation of Maggie's actions.
Unsubstantial throughout the second half of the book, Maggie simply fails to exist. It is at
this critical juncture that Eliot's technique fails. While the flood occurs to enact a unity
that the strictures of realism will not permit, this unity is won at the expense of Maggie.
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CHAPTER FOUR
DOROTHEA’S AESTHETIC: REDEFINING THE BOUNDARIES OF
REALISM IN M ID D L EM A RC H
The pier-glass parable that opens Chapter 27 o f Middlemarch reflects Eliot’s
continuing and evolving interest in the ego’s tendency to interfere with and distort
representation. Eliot writes,
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly
furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant
little feet. Your pier glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed
by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions;
but place now against it a lighted candle as centre o f illumination, and lo! the
scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles
round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere
impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a
concentric arrangement...These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and
the candle is the egoism of any person now absent (1956, 195).
Although the parable is used in this context to frame Rosamond’s actions, it is clearly
meaningful for all the residents o f Middlemarch and has consequences for the narrator
Eliot constructs to tell her story. If the egotism of the observer orders the chaos of reality
into a flattering illusion, then Eliot’s narrator must either rein in the egoism that distorts
narrative while remaining in sympathy with the characters or admit to his/her own
subjectivity and the fallibility of the narrative. Eliot chooses the former option in
attempting to create a disembodied narrator who remains detached from the social context
65
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and the private desires that shape decision-making. While the pier-glass metaphor calls
scientific knowledge into question-after all, Eliot implies, the “serene light of science ”
that has the power to transform ugly furniture is not very different from the light of
egoism that illuminates the pier-glass—Eliot draws on the objective observer/scientist as a
model to construct this narrator. The consequences of adopting a stance in the narrative
that is debunked or, at the very least, weakened in the fictional world ofMiddlemarch has
significant repercussions. For, even as Eliot exposes the will to power and domination that
lies beneath Lydgate’s “scientific” view of women, she allows her own controlling
impulse to pin down Middlemarch as a specimen before the probing eye of her narrator
and, in doing so, limits our ability to respond to her characters with full understanding.16
Part of the difficulty Eliot has in using the objective narrator to her benefit is due
to the fact that the Baconian science informing her narrative depends upon a dominating,
Eliot’s critics have remarked on this quality in Middlemarch. In “George Eliot” (1947)
V.S. Pritchett writes, “I see that I have been writing about Middlemarch as though it was
a piece of engineering. What about the life, the humor, the pleasure (...There is no real
madness in George Eliot...Hysteria, the effects of the exorbitant straining of their wills, the
Victorians did, alas, too often achieve. George Eliot somehow escapes it. She is too level
headed. One pictures her, in life, moralizing instead o f making a scene. There is no
hysteria in M iddlem arch', perhaps there is no depths because there is too much
determination” (214, A Century of George Eliot Criticism V In “George Eliot in
Middlemarch” (1958) Quentin Anderson writes, “George Eliot is present as the only fully
realized individual in her book...Those who like Middlemarch take pleasure in the writer’s
judiciousness. They are far more tempted to invest themselves with her sensibility than
they are to identify themselves with that of any of her characters (183, George Eliot:
Middlemarch. London: Macmillian. Of the deterministic quality he sees in Middlemarch.
Arnold Kettle writes, “Society in this novel is presented to us as ‘there’; that it is part of a
historical process in suggested intellectually only. And because the Middlemarch world is a
given, static reality, the characters of the novel must be seen at its mercy” (161,
“Middlemarch,” (1951) in George Eliot: Middlemarch!
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aggressive, and penetrating gaze. Eliot’s entries in A Writer’s Notebook reveal that the
pier-glass metaphor is a meditation on and extension o f a passage from Francis Bacon's
Novum Organum: "And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving
rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature
with it" (77). By adopting this conception of the mind as a polluting force, Eliot
simultaneously adopts a set of dichotomies—subject/object, man/nature,
subjectivity/objectivity—that pit subject against object and ultimately limit the effectiveness
of her narrative. While this dichotomous thinking informs the structure of Eliot’s
narrative, we must understand that Eliot herself consciously struggled to imagine a way of
knowing that would be passive in that the mind would simply receive impressions, and
active in that it would penetrate to the core of the thing to be known. Eliot is sincere in
attempting to find a middle ground between passive, receptive knowing and active,
shaping knowing. Certainly, Eliot's narrator, who arranges his observations to offer us an
objective picture of social life, largely succeeds in maintaining the passive role of observer
while offering a humane and incisive critique ofMiddlemarch. Nevertheless, Eliot does not
succeed completely in overcoming the subject/object dichotomy that threatens to turn her
narrative project to a science experiment. In Chapter 40, Eliot introduces a scene at Caleb
Garth's breakfast table, with this: "It is often necessary to change our place and examine a
particular mixture or group at some distance from the point where the movement we are
interested in was set up" (1965, 292). This passage acts to distance the reader from the
scene and characters and to distance the author from her fiction. In refashioning herself as
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a scientist, Eliot masks her generative powers as an artist and appears as an innocent
spectator waiting for an explosion. The reader, who is typically encouraged by Eliot to
remain empathetic, waits blamelessly along with her in the wings. With this sleight of
hand, author and reader are able to lose their consciousness of themselves as moral agents.
Eliot's revisioning of author as observer, then, is not a politically or morally neutral move.
The narrator that initially seems only to reflect back the image ofMiddlemarch, does, in
truth, lord over his kingdom with an omnipresent gaze. Eliot’s model requires that she be
not merely detached, but "above" her characters to escape the taint of subjectivity.
Though Eliot may wish to distant herself from the "colossi" of Fielding and disappear
behind the screen of an impersonal narrator, the role she plays as fictional anatomist is just
as invasive as Fielding’s. In comparison to the intellectually controlled and tightly plotted
Middlemarch. Tom Jones is a spontaneous, rambling slice of life despite its one
dimensional characterizations.
As we might imagine, the dualisms inherent in Baconian science are hardly gender-
neutral. The series of dichotomies it generates—subject/object, man/nature and even
objective-subjective-have historically been framed in the language of gender with
masculine intelligence being understood as the force that penetrates a passive and unruly
feminized nature. The language of sexuality and gender is not coincidental, but reflects
society’s deeply-held assumptions about the nature of women. In The Death of Nature.
Carolyn Merchant argues that the scientific method that was bom of Baconian science is
based on the assumption of a nature that must be restrained and dominated if it is to give
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up its secrets to man. Merchant, quoting from Bacon’s writing, argues that from this
context sprang a scientific method necessarily brutal and sexualized:
The new method of interrogation was not through abstract notions, but through
the instruction of the understanding “that it may in very truth dissect nature.” The
instruments of the mind supply suggestions, those of the hand give motion and aid
the work. “By the art and hand of man,” nature can be “forced out of her natural
state and squeezed and molded.” In this way, “human knowledge and human
power meet as one.” Here, in bold sexual imagery, is the key feature of modem
experimental method—constraint of nature in the laboratory, dissection by hand and
mind, and the penetration of hidden secrets—language still used today in praising
a scientist’s “hard fact,” “penetrating mind,” or the “thrust of his argument” (1983,
171).
This “phallic psychology,”as it has been called by Bruno Bettelheim, infected the new
science of the nineteenth-century and worked along with the ideology of gender
complementarity to pathologize the female body.17 In For Her Own Good. Barbara
Ehrenreich and Deirdre English argue that this gendered gaze that defined women as
Other was significant in that it denied women any existence apart from men. In the terms
set down by Eliot’s Prelude, a woman viewed through such a lens is formless, without
story:
The morbidity of nineteenth-century tastes in female beauty reveals the hostility
which never lies too far below the surface of sexual romanticism. To be sure, the
romantic spirit puts woman on a pedestal and ascribes to her every tender virtue
Aesthetics was also informed by this phallic psychology. Ruskin describes his penetrative
imagination in the same way that Bacon describes the scientific method: “Such is always
the mode in which the highest imaginative faculty seizes its materials. It never stops at
crusts or ashes, outward images o f any kind; it ploughs them all aside, and plunges them
into the very central fiery heart...There is no reasoning in it; it works not by algebra, nor
by integral calculus; it is a piercing, pholas-like mind’s tongue, that works and tastes into
the very rock heart; no matter what the subject be submitted to it, substance or spirit; all is
divided asunder, joint and marrow IModem Painters. Section II, Chapter III, p. 255).
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absent from the market. But carried to an extreme the demand that woman be a
negation of a man’s world left almost nothing for women to actually be: if men are
busy, she is idle; if men are rough, she is gentle, if men are strong, she is frail; if
men are rational, she is irrational; and so on (1978, 109).
The scientific gaze of Victorian medicine that objectifies women, then, is sexualized and
impacts women disproportionately. Victorian science is not, as some have argued,
motivated by a gender-neutral drive toward power/knowledge that renders a ll patient's
bodies equally docile. Women are not simply one among many "others" marginalized by
science, but the first and primaiy Other. This is because the mid-nineteenth century
scientific and aesthetic impulse to objectify women springs from deeply ingrained cultural
beliefs about female nature and nature itself.
This being said, Eliot continues to remain committed to scientific objectivity in the
abstract, while showing the damaging consequences of ignoring the context in which
knowledge is formed and the subjectivity of the subject and object o f knowledge. The
pier-glass parable is countered by the metaphor that compares Bichat’s mind to a “gas
light” illuminating the walk: “And, the conceptions wrought out by Bichat, with his
detailed study o f the different tissues, acted necessarily on medical questions as the turning
of gas-light would act on a dim, oil-lit street showing new connections and hitherto hidden
facts o f structure which must be taken into account in considering the symptoms of
maladies and the action of medicaments”(1965, 110). In this metaphor, the same light that
creates flattering illusion of the pier-glass manages to illuminate the road to scientific
discovery and circumvent the ego’s distortions. The light, though, inevitably becomes
dimmer as the many variables of embodied human existence come into play. When
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scientific and academic inquiry is thematized in the story of Lydgate, the “scientific”
perspective Lydgate takes into relation to Rosamond does not allow him to see her
duplicity. Both Lydgate and Casaubon attempt to purge irrationality from their lives by
employing a rigorous methodology or system that leaves them blind to the world around
them and particularly helpless in the less scientific affairs of the human heart. Lydgate's
inability to see Rosamond accurately and contain her unruliness can be understood as a
critique of the scientific method instead o f a mere symptom of his “spots of commonness.”
When we read Lydgate's failures as a critique of scientific method, we see Eliot’s
recognition of the unbridgeable gulf between abstract scientific models and the everyday
practice of the historically-situated scientific practitioner.
Lydgate’s relationship with Rosamond exposes the underside of the scientific
attitude bom of Bacon. In this sense, Rosamond is an advance on Hetty, and Eliot’s
depiction of the Lydgate-Rosamond relationship investigates and challenges the scientific-
aesthetic that renders Hetty immobilized in Adam Bede. Nevertheless, Eliot is short
sighted in portraying Rosamond as simply vain and scheming. If we read the dynamic
between Rosamond and Lydgate as illustrative of the subject-object relationship of
scientific objectivism, Rosamond's defiance against the role Lydgate assigns to her is
positive. Her refusal to submit to his power stands as a metaphor for the rebellion of the
docile, feminine body and reveals the instability of the objective male spectator. This is
not to say that Rosamond is without flaws; Eliot is quick to convince us o f them.
Unfortunately, Eliot acts too quickly to reduce Rosamond's energy to selfishness. This
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isn't accidental. Feminine desire, the physical, lusty and romantic desire of Rosamond,
stands opposed to the spiritual yearnings o f Dorothea and threatens the predominant way
of knowing in the novel. In a very real way, Lydgate's failure with Rosamond calls into
question the entire notion that science can isolate the subject, fix its fluidity and render it
knowable. In Adam Bede. Hetty's pink lip and blushed cheek are misread by Arthur and
Adam as signs of her angelic simplicity. In Middlemarch. Lydgate is seduced by a similar
misreading or misdiagnoses, but it is all the more ironic considering his vow to view
women in only a “scientific” light.
Rather than depict Lydgate's misjudgment of Rosamond as another case where
emotion overwhelms good sense, Eliot shows Lydgate accumulating and sifting through
data as he assesses his growing love for Rosamond. Like a doctor diagnosing a disease,
Lydgate diagnoses his growing love for Rosamond using physical clues and the powers of
induction—complete with the if, then language of logical propositions:
Certainly, if Ming in love had been at all in question, it would have been quite safe
with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just the kind of intelligence one
would desire in a woman — polished, refined, docile, lending itself to finish in all
the delicacies of life, and enshrined in a body which expressed this with a force of
demonstration that excluded the need for other evidence (1965, 121).
Reducing the body to a sign or symptom of Rosamond's inner nature, Lydgate's method
ignores the fact that the body is infused and directed by consciousness. The body that
Lydgate reads as a sign is described by Eliot as a complex stage-prop in Rosamond's
theatrics: “Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that
she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress o f parts that entered into a
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physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be
precisely her own” (1965, 87). While we may fault Rosamond for her theatricality, we
should also find blame with Lydgate's method since it leaves him blind to duplicity, and
does not allow him to understand another self as subject. Lydgate falls prey to those
uncertainties of the human personality that cannot be weighed or measured because he
reads the body and its gestures as manifestations of character and ignores the
consciousness that infuses the body and directs those gestures. Like those who believe
that there is “one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count to three
and no more” (1965, 4), Lydgate fails to realize what Eliot calls in her Prelude woman's
“indefiniteness.”
While Lydgate attempts to understand his wife from the perspective of the
objective scientist, his method turns her into an object that does not allow him to see the
real Rosamond, only an image that flatters his ego . Neither his method or his self-
absorbed love can accept the possibility that Rosamond might act independently, return his
gaze, and fashion her own interpretation o f events. Lydgate is shocked into the awareness
of Rosamond’s subjectivity late in the novel and, even then, he holds on to the illusion of
his superiority: “He wished to excuse everything in her if he could-but it was inevitable
that in that excusing mood he should think of her as if she were an animal of another and
feebler species” (1965, 489). In this way, Lydgate’s disillusionment is less a loss of love,
than a loss of the illusion of mastery. Lydgate’s image of himself as benevolent,
paternalistic doctor and husband and his perception of Rosamond as weak gives meaning
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to his marriage: “He held her waist with one hand and laid the other gently on both of hers
for this rather abrupt man had much tenderness in his manners toward women, seeming to
have always present in his imagination the weakness of their frames and the delicate poise
of their health in both body and mind” (1965, 474). Although Lydgate persists in the
belief that Rosamond is frail --perhaps for the sake of his own sanity—when she rebels
against him he rages at his impotence. His loss of mastery effects not only his ability to be
the husband he desires, but threatens the dominance of his medical and rational point-of-
view. When Rosamond rides her horse in defiance of Lydgate's orders and refuses his
diagnosis when she miscarries, she flouts his authority not only as a husband, but as a
doctor. She refuses to accept Lydgate’s reading of the symptoms brought on by riding
and constructs her own interpretations of the events-rational or not-challenging the
doctor’s exclusive authority over questions of physiology.
What is interesting in Eliot’s treatment of this small scene is her focus on Lydgate's
crumbling illusion rather than Rosamond’s arrogance in diagnosing her own symptoms.
When Rosamond chooses her own interpretation of the accident over Lydgate's, he is not
upset over her ignorance per se, but her autonomy and his lack of power and narrative
authority : “There was gathering in him an amazed sense of his powerlessness over
Rosamond. His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had
imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on every practical
question” (1965, 427). Lydgate’s powerlessness has implications beyond his relationship
with Rosamond. With it comes the growing awareness that scientific rationalism has not
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provided him with immunity from the emotional excess he was determined to purge when
his infatuation with Madame Laure, the actress he meets in Paris, ended unhappily (1965,
115). Again, Lydgate becomes powerless to control the emotional and sensual world he
fought to suppress. Once the mask of professional demeanor drops, Lydgate's irrational
and animalistic will to power surfaces: “Since no reasoning he could apply to Rosamond
seemed likely to conquer her assent, he wanted to smash and grind some object on which
at least he could produce an impression, or else to tell her brutally that he was master and
she must obey” (1965, 483).
If Lydgate's romantic difficulties can be read as a cautionary tale on scientific
arrogance, the story must have some implication for Eliot's narrative method.
Rosamond’s rebellion challenges the master-slave relationship that is the building block of
scientific objectivism and Eliot’s novel and offers a critique. Still, the fact remains that
Eliot has little sympathy for Rosamond’s desire to escape from under Lydgate’s thumb to
write her own narrative. Eliot’s refusal to recognize Rosamond’s resistance as resistance
leads to a tension in Middlemarch. On one hand, Eliot exposes the desire for domination
beneath Lydgate’s rational calm. On the other hand, Eliot continues to defend the
dominant narrative of scientific realism against the encroaching subjectivity Rosamond
represents. Eliot and her readers might argue that Rosamond’s resistance is too trivial to
warrant examination and that her character and story lack the gravity and complexity of
Casaubon’s or Bulstrode’s. But, it would be a mistake not to go further in trying to
understand Eliot's attitude toward Rosamond, just as it would be a mistake to read
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Lydgate's interpretation o f Rosamond as th e interpretation. The “story” o f Rosamond
that Eliot and Lydgate construct is not objective and authoritative, but based on profound
self-interest. While Lydgate's belief in his infallible rationality does not allow him to see
Rosamond for what she is, Eliot frames Rosamond’s resistance as vanity in an effort to
isolate and marginalize flamboyance, melodrama, and feminine theatricality from her own
narrative. Rosamond represents for Eliot the dangers posed by female romances in
general and the stories of authors satirized in “Silly Novels by Silly Lady Novelists” in
particular. In a sense, Rosamond, with her education at Mrs. Lemon's, her dislike for
vulgar slang, and her wish to fashion romances staged around baronets, is the equivalent
to the silly lady novelist. It is her penchant for spectacle, rhetoric, and ornament over
content, that makes her a special subject for attack. Eliot writes in “Silly Novels by Silly
Lady Novelists,”
Her knowledge remains an acquisition, instead of passing into culture; instead of
being subdued into modesty and simplicity by a larger acquaintance with thought
and fact, she has a feverish consciousness of her attainments; she keeps a sort of
mental pocket-mirror, and is continually looking in it at her own intellectuality
(1990, 155).
Eliot doesn't criticize the vanity of the female author on the grounds that vanity, in both
women and men, is abhorrent. Instead, she argues that this particular vanity-stealing
center stage at a soiree while “catechizing” and writing clunky descriptions that slow our
reading— results in self-conscious drama instead of unobtrusive prose built upon solid
observation. For Eliot,
A really cultured women, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and less
obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinion in
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something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she
flatters herself that she commands a complete view o f men and things, but makes
it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself (1990,
156).
In essence, the woman of culture is not a spectacle but a spectator who sees but is not
seen.
While W.J. Harvey is partially right when he says that Rosamond’s dramatic
tendencies serve as a metaphor for the “self-deluding, dream-spinning narcissistic type of
egotism” (Swinden 1972, 123) that Eliot explores in Daniel Deronda with Gwendolyn, I
would argue that Eliot's treatment of Rosamond can further be explained as an anxiety
over theatricality and the potential spectacle of the female author. When she put pen to
paper, Eliot like other “lady novelists,” negotiated the difficulties posed by society’s
perception of women authors by attempting to transcend or, at least, work through the
perceived limitations of a woman's body. For Eliot, the attempt to transcend the female
body was also bom from the anxiety over the spectacle of female authorship. To
understand this, we might remember Eliot's scenario of the female novelist in “Silly Novels
by Silly Lady Novelists.” The learned male spectator passes the ultimate judgement on the
authoress:
When men see girls wasting their time in consultations about bonnets and ball
dresses ... they can hardly help saying, “For Heaven's sake, let girls be better
educated”...But after a few hours reading of her books, they are likely enough to
say, “After all, when a woman gets some knowledge, see what she makes of it”
(1990, 155).
No doubt, Eliot wants to exclude herself from the company of the silly lady novelists and
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counts herself among the few of her sex who observe but are not observed. Nevertheless,
try as she might, Eliot and her work remained both a spectacle and specimen in Victorian
England seen through the same cultural, scientific and aesthetic assumptions that informed
her own discussion of silly lady novelists. In her article on “Physiology, Phrenology and
Patriarchy: The Construction of George Eliot,” Kristin Brady notes that aesthetic
judgments about Eliot’s work and her person were rife with assumptions concerning
sexual difference:
It was in this climate of thinking that George Eliot’s character, life, and writing
were first constructed by her contemporaries, who attempted, in various ways, to
define her according to their own preconceived notions about sexual
difference...The tendency was either to insist on Eliot’s essential femininity or to
see her as a freak of nature, a monstrous anomaly in whom feminine and masculine
traits waged a destructive conflict. In both cases, moreover, there was a general
preoccupation with Eliot’s female body, the site of her potentially hysterical uterus
and the sign of her problematic position in the symbolic order (1992,203).
In much the same way that Eliot writes of silly lady novelists, Arnold Bennet says of Eliot
and her writing: “It is transparently feminine-feminine in its lack of restraint, its
wordiness, and the utter absence of feeling for form which characterizes it” (Haight 1965,
210). Despite Eliot's interest in remaining less obtrusive by seeing rather than being seen,
the inescapable fact of her female body made her susceptible to the very generalizations
about women authors—the notion that woman want for restraint and indulge in fictional
excess—that she disassociates herself from in “Silly Lady Novelists.” It is no wonder, then,
that Rosamond takes so much abuse in Middlemarch. She is a woman bound by the myth
of sexual difference, who not only refuses to suppress the sensual self that gives rise to her
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status as an aesthetic object, but revels in it. She is precisely what Eliot wants not to be.
The reading that attributes Lydgate's downfall to Rosamond’s contaminating force,
then, is dominant because Eliot herself steers the narrative in this direction to serve her
own purposes. Her technique works and Rosamond continues to be seen as the infamous
“other woman” and a point of reference from which to assess Dorothea and perhaps even
Eliot. R.H. Hutton refers to Eliot’s portrait of Rosamond as a “pendant or companion
picture” (Swinden 1972, 80) to her depiction of Dorothea. Careful reading of the
narrative shows Hutton’s theory as reductive. Eliot is careful to integrate the narratives of
Rosamond and Dorothea and, ultimately, their stories revolve around the same concerns
of agency and self-definition. Still, Eliot does give support to the reading of Rosamond as
Other. If we consider the last image of Rosamond as basil, she appears no longer the
monster of Lydgate’s creation, but something alien that leeches on and takes hold of him.
If we read Eliot’s characterization of Rosamond as an outgrowth of her anxiety of
irrationality and theatricality, this reading of her as the contaminating “other” becomes
intriguing. If Eliot is successful in portraying Rosamond as the contaminating force of the
rational, scientific narrative, she can leave certain assumption of her own narrative
unquestioned and call attention away from the theatrical and melodramatic in her own
narrative. Rosamond becomes more than a “companion piece” to the portrait of Dorothea,
she represents a form of narrative both ornamental and secondary—defined by excess,
desire and femininity—that Eliot vilifies in order to purge these tendencies from her own
narrative. When we reach the thunder-claps and the romantic union of Will and Dorothea
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that ends Middlemarch, it is only because Eliot has been so successful at defining herself
against the silly lady writers and the secret dramas o f Rosamond that we ignore the
similarity between this ending and the endings of those novels Eliot derides. We are
hardly tempted to class Middlemarch in the “mind and millinery species” of novel, despite
its strong family resemblance.
* *
In The Flesh Made Word. Helena Michie discusses Dorothea’s “resistance to
framing.” In the beginning of Middlemarch. we see this attempt at reframing most clearly
as Dorothea, like Rosamond, resists dominant narratives using the language of painting,
sculpture and poetry to express her dissatisfaction. In the opening paragraph of
Middlemarch. Dorothea appears “framed,” and Michie asks us to pay attention to the
shifting of this frame as the novel continues:
The opening paragraph itself acts as a frame through which we must look at
Dorothea and any subsequent clues about her appearance. Framed rhetorically by
a system of metatropes and personally by a society that fails to interpret her
correctly, she becomes a repository of canonical virtues, perhaps her own
physicality a “key to all mythologies ” To understand the language that is Dorothea
is to understand the novel in which she appears as text (1987, 104).
Despite this, Michie argues that Dorothea implicitly recognizes the “violence” o f framing
when she speaks of pictures as a “language” she cannot understand (Eliot 1965, 58). We
see this when Dorothea admits frustration that she cannot directly access the beauty of
painting:
At first when I enter a room where the walls are covered with frescoes, or with
rare pictures, I feel a kind of awe-like a child present at great ceremonies where
there are grand robes and processions... But when I begin to examine the pictures
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one by one, the life goes out of them, or else is something violent and strange to
me. It must be my own dulness. I am seeing so much at once, and not
understanding half of it. That makes one feel stupid. It is painful to be told that
anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine—something like being
blind, while people talk of the sky (1965, 153).
Dorothea’s wish for direct experience is expressed as insecurity, and suspicion of her own
“dulness” or “blindness.” Unfortunately, it is this insecurity that keeps Dorothea blind by
driving her to an unhappy marriage with Casaubon. Instead of finding alternate ways of
knowing that would further her quest for unmediated knowledge or beauty, Dorothea
becomes convinced that she will gain access to a privileged perspective by becoming
Casaubon’s wife. Implicit in her conviction is a belief that this masculine, objective
perspective will allow her to rise above her own imperfections and see reality more clearly:
These provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her to a standing-ground from
which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her
own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance..Perhaps even Hebrew might
be necessary—at least the alphabet and a few roots-in order to arrive at the core
of things (1965, 47).
Needless to say, Casaubon or the masculine knowledge he represents does not
provide Dorothea with such a standing-ground. She does, though, achieve a perspective
on Casaubon that is less than flattering. Casaubon recognizes this when he suspects that
his new wife views him as would a “malignant spy” (1965, 149) instead of surveying him
with the “uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird” (1965, 149). For Eliot, though,
Dorothea emerges from stupidity only when she gives up the foolish notion of accessing a
higher truth through Casaubon and, instead, recognizes him as a separate self, immersed
in his own subjectivity:
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We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our
supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet
it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Casaubon,
and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that
distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling...that he had an equivalent
centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain
difference (1965, 157).
Certainly, Eliot means for us to recognize Dorothea’s self-absorption, but she also calls
our attention to Casaubon as a self, experiencing reality with a “certain difference.” In
doing so, Eliot questions that there is a “standing-ground” of male knowledge, or any
other language or tool that men may use to see the world more objectively. Instead,
Casaubon is driven by egotism, more so than is Dorothea herself and is unable to step
outside his philosophy and directly experience the world. Eliot writes,
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to
be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be fully liberated from a small
hungry, shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never
to have our consciously rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought,
the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and
uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted (1965, 207).
Dorothea, though, is not destined to remain mere spectator of life, although Will
and Naumann attempt to reduce her to spectacle. Michie argues that the philosophical
argument of the pair in Chapter 19 succeeds in framing her in a “system of signs”
meaningful to them—poetry and visual art. For Michie, the end result is that,
The power of reforming and reshaping is denied to Dorothea, who must herself be
formed and shaped. Compared constantly through figures of text and painting to
canonical “originals,” Dorothea is a faded copy, her body, a carefully framed
reproduction that must be “channeled” into a series of extended metaphors (1987,
105).
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While it is true that Will and Naumann attempt to discuss Dorothea as sign, she does not
accommodate this reading. Even the men recognize her as a contrast to the marble figure-
breathing and blooming” (1965, 140), and Will goes as far as to rebel against painting’s
tendency to reify the living, changing woman beneath the painted surfaces:
Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague . After all,
the hue seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.
I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere
coloured superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference
in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment (1965, 142).
Perhaps most important is Eliot’s recognition of Dorothea’s own subjectivity in these
scenes with Will and Naumann. Eliot allows Dorothea her own private thoughts as she
remains oblivious to the men’s stares in the hall of statues. Unlike Maggie, Dorothea does
not turn to stone under male desire, she remains present for the first time to her own
desire which hits her like an “electric shock” (1965, 144) and later becomes lost in her
own “self-absorbed discontent” (1965, 151). Instead of bowing down before Will’s
judgments, Dorothea attempts to create an aesthetic of her own—an aesthetic that links
beauty with social responsibility. For Dorothea, art is always viewed within the social
context and the artist must look with an eye to relieve suffering:
“I suppose I am dull about many things,” said Dorothea, simply. “I should like to
make things beautiful-I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense
of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world,
pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most
people are shut out from it” (1965, 163).
Even as Will accuses her of a “fanaticism of sympathy” (1965, 163), Dorothea’s insistence
on an aesthetic with social conscience finally leads her to develop her own “language” of
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art and develop an appreciation for pictures. For instance, the miniature that hangs in
Dorothea’s boudoir takes on greater meaning to her as she learns of Aunt Julia and her
disinheritance. While the face initially appears only “peculiar” to Dorothea (1965, 55), the
miniature eventually comes alive as Dorothea learns Aunt Julia’s story:
She had been so used to struggle for and to find resolve in looking along the
avenue toward the arch of western light that the vision itself had gained a
communicating power. Even the pale stag seemed to have reminding glances and
to mean mutely, “Yes, we know.” And the group o f delicately-touched miniatures
had made an audience as of beings no longer disturbed about their only earthly lot,
but still humanely interested. Especially the mysterious “Aunt Julia” about whom
Dorothea had never found it easy to question her husband. And now, since her
conversation with Will, many fresh images had gathered round that Aunt Julia who
was Will’s grandmother; the presence of that delicate miniature, so like a living
face that she knew, helping to concentrate her feelings (1965, 272).
This description shows that while Dorothea brings the miniature to life with her own
sympathy and concerns, the picture itself acts on Dorothea and allows her to understand
her own feelings. The relationship between se-er and seen is a relationship and is informed
by a social context. Knowledge is no longer a secret to be wrestled from nature; instead,
familiarity and empathy lead Dorothea to a way of looking that opens up the channel of
communication between subject and object.
We see Dorothea’s aesthetic operating most clearly in Chapter 79 when she enters
into mystic state that enables her to feel a vivid and profound connection with the world
around her:
On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her
baby, in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog.
Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the
world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part
of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her
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luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining
(1965, 578).
In one sense, we can see Dorothea’s experience within the context of St. Theresa’s
passion, because her experience of wholeness is the culmination of her wish to feel reality
and God’s grandeur directly. Earlier Dorothea expresses this desire as a relationship with
knowledge akin to that achieved by Theresa:
She did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves
and blood that fed her action; and if she had written a book she must have done it
as Saint Theresa did, under the command o f an authority that constrained her
conscience (1965, 64).
Initially, Dorothea looks to Casaubon reasoning that “learned men kept the only oil” of
knowledge (1965, 64), but after finding out that Casaubon is all too human, Dorothea
attempts to form her own relationship to knowledge. Unlike Dinah in Adam Bede, she
does not transcend or renounce bodily desire, but accesses knowledge through the body,
and—like Theresa—through physical suffering:
In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes o f solitude have looked on for
ages in the spiritual struggle of man—she besought hardness and coldness and
aching weariness to bring her relief from the mysterious incorporeal might of her
anguish: she lay on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her; while the
grand woman’s frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child
(1965, 576).
In this way, Dorothea both lives her body, in physical suffering and desire, but transcends
her existence as mere body. In fact, Dorothea blurs the traditional dichotomies of
mind/body, subjective/objective and subject/object as she becomes present to a reality as
neither spectator or spectacle. In becoming part of the “palpitating life” she beholds,
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Dorothea also strains at the limitations of gender by upsetting binary thinking and
transcending the dominating, gendered gaze. This becomes evident when Dorothea replays
the earlier scene with Rosamond and looks for varying interpretations of that scene,
examining her own motives (1965, 577). By contextualizing, Dorothea is able to escape a
vision of Rosamond as Other, and recognizes that her life is “bound up with another
woman’s life” (1965, 577). By looking on with sympathy, Dorothea not only opens up the
possibility of multiple interpretations, but choice. She asks herself:
What should I do—how should I act now, this very day, if I could clutch my
own pain, and compel to silence, and think of those three? (1965, 577)
Finally, we see Dorothea constructing her life as a choice, and Eliot envisioning her
heroine as a moral agent fully alive to this possibility.
Unfortunately, Eliot does not allow Dorothea to continue to act on the basis on
her newfound connection with the world, and she is instead swallowed up in a traditional,
and unsatisfying marriage plot.18 Eliot hints that Dorothea is denied control over her
13
The fact that readers have found Dorothea’s marriage unsatisfying cannot simply be
attributed to overzealous feminist critics, as Gertrude Himmelfarb argues in “George Eliot
For Grown-Ups.” (American Scholar. 23/94, Volume 63, no. 4, p.577-581).While
Himmelfarb is right in suggesting that Eliot, who did not fight for educational reform or
suffrage, was no “feminist in the modem sense” (580), she did value female autonomy and
thematized it in her novels. Also, while Eliot may not be a feminist in the modem sense,
she may indeed be a feminist in the postmodern sense. Like many postmodern critics, she
urges a radical critique of knowledge and knowing that upsets the assumptions of
androcentric, binary thinking. While Himmelfarb may feel perfectly satisfied with
Dorothea’s marriage, critics who are anything but radical feminists have expressed
dissatisfaction with Dorothea’s marriage to Will. In an essay entitled “George Eliot”
published in Comhill Magazine in 1881, Leslie Stephen writes, “Had M iddlem arch been
intended for a cutting satire upon the aspirations of young ladies, who wish to learn Latin
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87
narrative because this is realistic within the context of an “imperfect social state” (612).
Dorothea must settle for a humdrum, if not noble, life:
For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly
determined by what lies outside of it. A new Theresa would hardly have the
opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will
spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of her brother’s burial: the medium
in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people
with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of
which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we
know (1965, 612).
This deterministic explanation, though, seems forced—as does Will and Dorothea’s
marriage—on an otherwise wise and complex novel that critiques reductive and
deterministic narratives and provides powerful counter narratives. Perhaps, a better
explanation for the ending of Middlemarch lies in the understanding that Eliot undermines
the assumptions of the scientific realism that frames her novel and is not yet willing to
rethink her approach so thoroughly. In The Realistic Imagination. George Levine argues
that Eliot threatens the strictures of realism with her characters’ selflessness. Her effort to
dismantle the stable, ego/self, to transcend egotism and achieve objectivity allows her to
fulfill the requirements o f scientific realism, but, paradoxically, the characters that remain
are passive and make the action necessary to drive a realist plot impossible. After
and Greek when they ought to be nursing babies and supporting hospitals, these
developments of affairs would have been in perfect congruity with the design. As it is, we
are left with the feeling that aspirations o f this kind scarcely deserve a better fate than they
meet, and that Dorothea was all the better for getting the romantic aspirations out of her
head” (147). As for Will, Stephen finds him “conspicuously unworthy o f the attentions of
a Saint Theresa” (147) (Collected in A Century of George Eliot Criticism. Ed. Gordon S.
Haight. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.)
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discussing Lydgate’s failures, Levine concludes:
Ironically, then Dorothea is the better scientist, and the contrast between her
success and Lydgate’s failure raises directly a central aesthetic problem that arises
from the aspiration toward selflessness. The Victorian realist, we have seen, puts
primary emphasis on character; and the shift of emphasis from character is part of
a whole transformation away from realism (1981,271).
While this explanation is useful, Levine does not adequately address gender as a
factor in Eliot’s changing perception o f character or address the feminist implications of
Dorothea’s ‘science.’ Instead, Levine argues that Daniel Deronda is the culmination of
Eliot’s exploration of selflessness, and should be read as her most fully-developed
exploration of man’s relationship to reality in the modem world:
Deronda in his passive state has a large vision of relations, an almost scientific
world view, but he lacks the energy to act, a “character”...Putting his personality
outside of himself like a landscape has the effect of making the landscape into the
shape o f his feelings. It is either selflessness, or, shifting our own vantage point,
solipsism. The novel, by realistically describing the “invisible history” (p.202) and
“unapparent relations” and fusing the material and the ideal, knowledge and
feeling, self and other, becomes what we may for shorthand convenience call
“romance.” The complexity of reality as George Eliot imagines it makes for a
reality unimaginable in traditional realistic forms (1981, 272).
Without mentioning gender, Levine goes on to class Will Ladislaw, Philip Wakem and
Deronda as unique in that they are “capable of an openness and complexity that almost
paralyzes” (1981, 273). Certainly, Dorothea too falls into this category, for, despite her
striving, she is ultimately passive. We cannot help but think that Levine does not think it
worthwhile to comment on similar traits in Eliot’s heroines because passivity has
traditionally been synonymous with femininity. Instead, what is extraordinary for Levine is
that Eliot’s male characters act like women. Unlike Adam Bede or Felix Holt, who remain
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moral agents and represent Eliot’s “active characters” for Levine (1981, 272), Wakem,
Ladislaw and Deronda, “are skeptical, directionless, and unable to define themselves
except in a relationship to a woman who provides a motive for action” (1981, 273). In
short, Eliot’s men become interesting when they begin to relate to the world like women.
By ignoring the gendered assumptions that inform his reading, Levine misses
Eliot’s more interesting analyses of Dorothea’s way of knowing. For Dorothea, the task of
achieving selflessness and maturity is simultaneous with her movement toward selfhood
which takes place in the context of her unfolding sexuality. Dorothea’s recognition of her
own subjectivity becomes necessary if she is to shed the ‘selflessness’ that simply obscures
egotism and see herself as a moral agent contextualized in a narrative and world that
informs her decisions. Remember, Dorothea’s epiphany leads her to situate herself as party
to the confusion over Will and Rosamond and to choose her actions. This is why we find it
particularly frustrating and paradoxical that the experience that allows Dorothea to
recognize herself as an embodied woman~the flowering that she experiences awakens her
both to her sexual longing and her connection to the larger world—culminates in a period
of intense religious ecstasy followed by a hasty and vague ending. While Deronda’s
vagueness makes him a continual outsider who leaves society to create a new community,
Dorothea’s absorption into a marriage plot is more vexing because the resolution of her
story must be imagined within the confines of a society whose conventions we know.
Nevertheless, Dorothea resists the passive and feminized response to the world Deronda
suggests in insisting on an aesthetic that is grounded in the social context-love and labor—
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90
and allows moral agency and choice. Dorothea’s plot offers a counter to Levine’s reading
of Deronda insofar as it calls into question the feasibility of selflessness and the political
neutrality of objectivity, while imagining a knowledge that depends on a relational or
reciprocal relationship between subject and object. In this way, we might see the aesthetic
that allows Dorothea to see herself as integrated into the social context as the more
profound response to a modem world becoming increasingly mechanistic and reductive
under the scientific gaze.
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