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Sample Chapter Contents Acknowledgements vii General Editors’ Preface ix Introduction: NAHEM YOUSAF and ANDREW MAUNDER 1 1. The Mill on the Floss, the Critics, and the Bildungsroman SUSAN FRAIMAN 31 2. The Two Rhetorics: George Eliot’s Bestiary J. HILLIS MILLER 57 3. The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss JOSÉ ANGEL GARCÍA LANDA 73 4. Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss MARY JACOBUS 83 5. Nationhood, Adulthood, and the Ruptures of Bildung: Arresting Development in The Mill on the Floss JOSHUA D. ESTY 101 6. Narcissistic Rage in The Mill on the Floss PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE 122 7. ‘Light enough to trusten by’: Structure and Experience in Silas Marner TERENCE DAWSON 143 8. The Miser’s Two Bodies: Silas Marner and the Sexual Possibilities of the Commodity JEFF NUNOKAWA 163 v vi CONTENTS 9. ‘A report of unknown objects’: Silas Marner JIM REILLY 188 10. Silas Marner: A Divided Eden SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH 204 Further Reading 225 Notes on Contributors 228 Index 230 Introduction NAHEM YOUSAF and ANDREW MAUNDER I The rise, fall and resurgence of George Eliot’s literary reputation represents many of the changes and fluctuations in literary taste that have taken place over the last 150 years. In her own day Eliot was widely regarded as an iconic sage, a sibyl, and moral teacher – roles which she herself seemed to take very seriously.1 Through her work, the English novel was seen to reach new heights of social and philo- sophical concern. Justin McCarthy described the reading public’s adulation of Eliot as ‘a kind of cult, a kind of worship’.2 Yet in the years following her death, attacks on a morality that came to be regarded as quintessentially Victorian rapidly displaced Eliot as a lit- erary idol and she was transformed into a figure of ridicule: ‘Pallas with prejudices and a corset’, as W. E. Henley labelled her in 1895.3 The publication, in 1885, of John Cross’s George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals had intensified this emerging picture of a stern moralist and respectable daughter of middle England who ruled over the realm of English literature as majesti- cally as Queen Victoria did her own Empire.4 With Cross’s careful expurgation of any details of his wife’s life that could be regarded as scandalous or simply improper, it became very easy to see Eliot as ‘oppressively great’,5 too out of date and too pompous to speak meaningfully to a modern sensibility.6 Indeed, in 1906, Edmund Gosse referred to her cruelly as a ‘ludicrous pythoness’.7 Later, in 1919, he returned to the subject, remembering her as 1 2 INTRODUCTION a large, thickset sibil [sic], dreamy and immobile, whose massive fea- tures, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bor- dered by a hat, always in the height of the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the headgear had something pathetic and provincial about it.8 Although one wonders how trustworthy Gosse’s recollections are, his intentions seem clear enough. He sought to make Eliot look foolish and grotesque, and does so by making fun of her transgres- sion of two fiercely protected boundaries: class and gender.9 Gosse thus singles out her bizarre headgear, which he presents as a frivo- lous attempt on the part of a less than attractive woman to appear à la mode. By emphasising the enormity of Eliot and her hat, Gosse presents her as vulgar, lacking in subtlety, and obsessed by triviali- ties. As an intellectual with working-class origins (her father, Robert Evans, was a land-agent), Gosse’s constructed Eliot cannot possibly have mastered the intricacies of good taste and refinement of dress. Even when decked out in the height of Parisian fashion, Eliot’s provinciality is, for Gosse, all too evident. Eliot’s hat is also, of course, a covering for what was often viewed as a masculine brain and Gosse’s attack is demonstrative of his inability to accept a woman of intellect. He is unable to fault her either as a scholar or an artist and therefore attempts to contain her by deriding her appearance and depicting her as a social outsider. In contrast, and although renowned for her own snobbery, Virginia Woolf was able to appreciate Eliot’s achievements as an artist without dwelling on her class origins and depicting her as a ‘counter-jumper’. Woolf published her important centennial essay ‘George Eliot’ in the Times Literary Supplement in November 1919, a time when it was all too clear that Eliot was no longer in favour. Articles in periodicals refer- ring to her work had become few and far between, and those that existed were often derogatory and condescending. She was, as Woolf noted, ‘one of the butts for youth to laugh at’, yet, she added, ‘They do not find what they seek and we cannot wonder’. Woolf admired Eliot’s brilliance and originality, describing Middlemarch as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’.10 It is interesting to speculate as to why Eliot was so little regarded by the beginning of the twentieth century. In a very obvious sense, the decline and subsequent revival of interest in Eliot’s work are indicative of the kinds of shifts and changes in taste and understand- INTRODUCTION 3 ing that Hans Robert Jauss details in his important Toward an Aesthetics of Reception (1982). Jauss would argue that the lack of interest in Eliot at the beginning of the twentieth century can be attributed to a change in the ‘horizon of expectations’ and an ‘altered aesthetic norm’ that causes ‘the audience [to] experience formerly successful works as outmoded and [to] withdraw its appre- ciation’.11 Yet, it is also apparent that Eliot was a frustrating figure simply because she was very difficult to pigeonhole. Amongst women writers there was resentment at and envy of what was regarded as Eliot’s tendency to hold herself too far above the fray. In particular, her presentation of herself as superior, not so much in what she said but in her bodily movements, was disliked, as were her gestures and assumption that she was different from others. Eliza Lynn Linton, one of many contemporaries for whom the Eliot cult provoked gall coupled with admiration, deemed her fellow nov- elist (whom Linton had known in the early 1850s as plain Marian Evans) ‘artificial, posée, pretentious, real … interpenetrated head and heel, inside and out, with the sense of her importance as the great novelist and profound thinker of her generation’.12 For the succeeding generation of ‘New Women’ writers in the 1880s and 1890s Eliot was seen to fall too short of their radical gestures (just as she did for many feminist critics in the 1970s). Such impatience is exemplified in The Woman Who Did (1895), when Grant Allen’s Herminia Barton declares in a typically impassioned moment: ‘When George Eliot chose to pass her life with Lewes on terms of equal freedom, she defied the man-made law – but still, there was his wife to prevent the possibility of a legalised union. As soon as Lewes was dead, George Eliot showed she had no principle involved, by marrying another man.’13 Elsewhere, the belittling of Eliot’s physical appearance combined with the sense of her as what Jane Gallop would term a ‘phallic mother’, whose influence must be shaken off, lay behind a good many reactions.14 At the same time, Eliot’s lifestyle (in spite of her best efforts, referring to G. H. Lewes as her ‘husband’ and styling herself ‘Mrs Lewes’), intellect, and work were simply too unconventional to allow her to be slotted in with the other mid-Victorians. This difficulty in categorising Eliot is perhaps why Virginia Woolf felt she was such an ‘attractive charac- ter’ and why she was enthusiastic about her work. In spite of Woolf’s admiration, it was F. R. Leavis in the journal Scrutiny, and later in The Great Tradition (1947), who made the most passionate response to Eliot’s novels and, convinced of their 4 INTRODUCTION relevance to contemporary society, began the project of rehabilitat- ing Eliot. For Leavis and the Scrutiny group, writing in the after- math of World War II and searching for literary works that could be used to resist what they saw as the debilitating influence of modern commercial and media culture, Eliot was a peculiarly fortifying and wholesome writer whose novels embodied the possibility of a moral art, ‘significant in terms of that human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life’.15 Although it is now fashion- able to disparage Leavis, a critic whose readings of Eliot are based on a narrow and ‘literary’ analysis of British society, his views were extremely influential in the development of the study of English lit- erature in British universities, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, however, the celebration of Eliot as a mainstay of liberal individualism, whose strengths were her social and psychological realism and her skill in creating character, has gradually been broken up and a multiplicity of readings of her work have come into play. New interpretations have resulted from a range of twentieth- century critical developments: the resurgence of Marxist criticism as a mode of intellectual inquiry; deconstruction, taking its cue from the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida; and a revived interest in the intellectual contexts of Eliot’s fiction.
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