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“The Natural History of My Inward Self”: Sensing Character in George Eliot’S Impressions of Theophrastus Such S

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“The Natural History of My Inward Self”: Sensing Character in George Eliot’S Impressions of Theophrastus Such S 129.1 ] “The Natural History of My Inward Self”: Sensing Character in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such s. pearl brilmyer Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human be- ing? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his ap- pearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances. We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language. —George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (160) ILL NOT A TINY spECK VERY CLOSE TO OUR VISION BLOT Out “ the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by Wwhich we see the blot?” asks the narrator of Middle- march (1874). Indeed it will, comes the answer, and in this regard there is “no speck so troublesome as self” (392). Metaphors of sen- sory failure in Eliot seem to capture the self- absorption of characters who discount empirical knowledge in favor of their own straitened worldviews. In Middlemarch Casaubon’s shortsightedness is tied to his egocentric attempts to “understand the higher inward life” (21). Dorothea, who marries Casaubon in an effort to attain this kind of understanding, is correspondingly “unable to see” the right con- clusion (29), can “never see what is quite plain” (34), “does not see things” (52), and is “no judge” of visual art, which is composed in “a language [she does] not understand” (73). When Eliot describes obstacles to sensation, however, she does more than provide a critique of egoism in which the corrective is sympathetic exchange. More basically, Eliot’s fascination with the S. PEARL BRILMYER is a PhD candidate limits of perception points to an issue of increasing philosophical in comparative literature at the Univer- sity of Texas, Austin, where she is com- concern in her late work: that each being’s faculties illuminate but pleting a dissertation about problems a sliver of the world, leaving vast swaths of the universe dark and of description and characterization in unfelt. What would it feel like to step outside the human subject, to turn- of- the- twentieth-century litera- look on the world with an extrahuman range of faculties? “[I] t would ture, science, and philosophy. be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we © 2014 s. pearl brilmyer PMLA 129.1 (2014), published by the Modern Language Association of America 35 36 Sensing Character in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such [ PMLA should die of that roar which lies on the other motivation” that ground the modern notion side of silence” (Middlemarch 182). To have “a of character. If we can distill a literary eth- keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human ics in Eliot’s final work, I argue, it is an eth- life,” the narrator of Middlemarch suggests in ics, to cite Love’s distinction, “grounded in this oft- cited passage, would be to sense what documentation and description, rather than a human being cannot sense, to feel more empathy and witness” (375). As we shall see, than the human body allows one to feel (182).1 Eliot’s naturalistic investment in describing This essay proceeds from a literal inter- people in terms of the characterological traits pretation of this fantastical line, tracking they share with nonhuman animals calls into from here Eliot’s interest in literature as a question the human exceptionalism of novel- mode of enhanced sensation.2 This interest, as istic modes of characterization. Rather than we shall see, would culminate in her last pub- craft characters as uniquely psychological be- lished work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such ings, her sketches put them on the same plane (1879), a text much neglected in Eliot scholar- as other creatures; like fish, sea lions, or even ship.3 Although typically dismissed as inac- microscopic vorticellae, human beings are cessible and overly allusive, this collection of conditioned by bodily frameworks and ha- character sketches and philosophical essays bitual responses that allow them to sense and provides important insights into Eliot’s con- experience some things and not others. cern with the limits of human perception and Second, by taking inspiration from Love’s the relation of this problematic to her devel- postulation that literature might account for oping realist aesthetic. To have “a keen vision the variation and complexity of life, as well as and feeling of all ordinary human life,” Eliot for its richness and depth, I highlight Eliot’s implies in her final work, entails treating the interest in literature not only as a medium human being not as a subject to which the au- for intersubjective understanding but also thor has special access but as a new kind of as an amplificatory technology, a tool for the sensible object—a dense and complex mate- sensation of manifold realities. “How many rial body like any other. conceptions & fashions of life have existed to The Eliot delineated by this essay might which our understanding & sympathy have appear strange to readers familiar with por- no clue!” Eliot writes in a notebook dated traits of Eliot as a psychological novelist to the 1870s (qtd. in Collins 390).4 Her task whose “sympathetic ethics” rests on a deep or in Impressions is not to penetrate the depths humanistic approach to character. Eliot has of the human psyche but rather to sketch a long been read in support of the claim that vast characterological landscape, to put hu- literature inspires moral action by portraying manity into perspective by zooming out un- characters as “containing a rich inner life,” the til the human being appears as a speck in an hidden contents of which are essential to “de- array of sensitive life- forms. Situating Eliot’s fining a creature as fully human” (Nussbaum 1879 sketches and essays in a longer history 90). While I admit Eliot’s concern with the of the character sketch, a history beginning value and agency of human beings, my read- with the ancient Greek naturalist and sketch ing of her late- career sketches pushes against writer Theophrastus of Eresus, I show how the humanist interpretation of Eliot in two the observation- based methodology Eliot ways. First, I suggest that her late- career turn develops in her mature work draws on her to the typological tradition of the character longtime interest in the practice of natural sketch asserts a critical distance from what history. In aligning Impressions with the de- Heather Love calls “the traditional humanist scriptive traditions of natural history and the categories of experience, consciousness, and character sketch, I argue, Eliot puts pressure 129.1 S. Pearl Brilmyer 37 ] on the modern association of character with to record aspects of human character that individual human psychology. impress themselves upon the senses. These sketches thus inhabit the latter side of a dis- tinction Eliot once made between “‘psycho- Theophrastus Who? logical’ novels (very excellent things in their Impressions of Theophrastus Such chronicles way)” and works that provide “genuine de- the attempts of a curmudgeonly London scription of external nature . flowing from bachelor named Theophrastus to catalog spontaneous observation” (Rev. 288). In Im- and describe members of the human genus pressions persons are not uniquely conscious in order to better understand the species to or willful subjects but dense material forma- which he belongs. Eliot’s Theophrastus calls tions, nonhuman organisms such as touch- his project “the natural history of my in- wood or vorticella—namesakes of characters ward self,” a phrase that brings into strange I unpack as the essay unfolds. harmony the expansive, outward- oriented In rendering character sensible, of course, practice of natural- historical description Impressions risks the biological essentialism of and the inward- oriented quest for self- Victorian pseudosciences that sought to cor- knowledge characteristic of novelistic nar- relate physical traits with moral or psycho- rative (104). This character- narrator’s path to logical ones. Physiognomy and phrenology, self- knowledge leads, however, not inward to for instance, like other nineteenth- century the self but rather outward; it entails describ- epistemologies that linked the visible with the ing the members of one’s own species to dis- invisible, imagined one could read surfaces cern “the figure the human genus makes in for their deep, characterological meaning. the specimen which I myself furnish” (104). Unlike such discourses of character, however, Amassing descriptions of various unpercep- Impressions stays on the surface of the body, tive and unsympathetic human beings, many implying that the feel of a person’s character of whom are writers like him, Theophrastus is significant and deserves to be examined. tries to illuminate that which escapes his In his first chapter Theophrastus makes clear embodied awareness: the form of the species his disdain for physiognomic logic. Although of which he is but an instance. Through his he believes that “direct perceptive judgment sketches we meet characters such as Touch- is not to be argued against,” he critiques the wood, whose touchy temper repeatedly in- tendency of observers to make correlations terrupts his quest for knowledge (56–62); between a person’s “physical points” and Merman, a comparative historian who drives “mental” ones: “With all the increasing un- his career into the ground by forgoing histor- certainty which modern progress has thrown ical accuracy to maintain his pride (28–40); over the relations of mind and body, it seems and Spike, the “political molecule” who, hav- tolerably clear that wit cannot be seated in the ing none of his own opinions, votes always upper lip, and that the balance of the haunches unwaveringly for “Progress” (63–66). in walking has nothing to do with the subtle Attentive to the prominent and distinc- discrimination of ideas” (7).
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