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Secularity, Alterity, and Subjectivity in George Eliot's Novels

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Secularity, Alterity, and Subjectivity in George Eliot's Novels THE POLITICS OF SYMPATHY: SECULARITY, ALTERITY, AND SUBJECTIVITY IN GEORGE ELIOT’S NOVELS Seung-Pon Koo, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS December 2009 APPROVED: Scott Simpkins, Major Professor David Holdeman, Committee Member and Chair of the Department of English John G. Peters, Committee Member Michael Monticino, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Koo, Seung-Pon. The Politics of Sympathy: Secularity, Alterity, and Subjectivity in George Eliot’s Novels. Doctor of Philosophy (English), December 2009, 215 pp., 240 titles. This study examines the practical and political implications of sympathy as a mode of achieving the intercommunicative relationship between the self and the other, emphasizing the significance of subjective agency not simply guided by the imperative category of morality but mainly enacted by a hybrid of discourses through the interaction between the two entities. Scenes of Clerical Life, Eliot’s first fictional narrative on illuminating the intertwining relation of religion to secular conditions of life, reveals that the essence of religion is the practice of love between the self and the other derived from sympathy and invoked by their dialogic discourses of confession which enable them to foster the communality, on the grounds that the alterity implicated in the narrative of the other summons and re-historicizes the narrative of the subject’s traumatic event in the past. Romola, Eliot’s historical novel, highlights the performativity of subject which, on the one hand, locates Romola outside the social frame of domination and appropriation as a way of challenging the universalizing discourses of morality and duty sanctioned by the patriarchal ideology of norms, religion, and marriage. On the other hand, the heroine re-engages herself inside the social structure as a response to other’s need for help by substantiating her compassion for others in action. Felix Holt, the Radical, Eliot’s political and indus trial novel, investigates the limits of moral discourse and instrumental reason. Esther employs her strategy of hybridizing her aesthetic and moral tastes in order to debilitate masculine desires for moral inculcation and material calculation. Esther reinvigorates her subjectivity by simultaneously internalizing and externalizing a hybrid of tastes. In effect, the empowerment of her subjectivity is designed not only to provide others with substantial help from the promptings of her sympathy for them, but also to fulfill her romantic plot of marriage. Copyright 2009 by Seung-Pon Koo ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION: HISTORICIZING SYMPATHY….................................................................1 Chapter 1. GEORGE ELIOT’S SECULAR CRITICISM: SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE A. Sympathizing Community: “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”........................................................................................................19 B. Pulse of the Other: “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story”………………….……………………….37 C. A Dynamic of Confessional Sympathy: “Janet’s Repentance”………..........................49 2. A PURSUIT OF LIMINALITY AND THE PRACTICE OF SYMPATHY: ROMOLA……………................................75 3. THE LIMITS OF CULTURAL SELF-FASHIONING AND THE SUBVERSIVE ENACTMENT OF SYMPAHTY AS A HYBRID OF TASTES: FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL…….........................121 CONCLUSION…………………………………….…………………………………...............163 NOTES……….…………………………………………………………………………………170 WORKS CITED………………….…………………………………………………………….195 iii INTRODUCTION: HISTORICIZING SYMPAHTY Sympathy is a key to understanding George Eliot’s writing. Rather than simplifying or absolutely generalizing Eliot’s works of art, this statement emphasizes the significance of sympathy as an essential term of generating diverse and multiple interpretations of her novels. Eliot’s idea of sympathy serves as a prism through which the complex and delicate nuances of her fiction are illuminated in a wide spectrum of a variety of disciplinary fields such as history, sociology, science, politics, religion, philosophy, psychology, and music.1 As her correspondence to Sara Sophia Hennell in 1843 suggests, Eliot’s attention to “the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union” is the foundation of her idea of sympathy to vitalize the human relationship between the self and the other in society (Letters 1: 162). Her insistence upon the importance of enlarging sympathy as an ethical proposition of human solidarity and love is corroborated through her dramatization of human relationship—the interdependence between the self and the other—from Scenes of Clerical Life to Daniel Deronda. Indeed, this emphasis on sympathy raises general important questions: how would it be possible to create the universal bond of human solidarity between the self and the other? Does Eliot’s idea of sympathy only conform to the conventional notion of sympathy with reference to the emotional response of the self to the other’s scene of sympathy? Does Eliot suggest any political implication bound up with the ethical question of the necessity of enlarging the self’s compassion for the other? And how does Eliot’s idea of sympathy involve the necessity of examining the reality of life, the condition of reality, and the discursive systems of signification that determine all kinds of human relationships? The literary realism in the Victorian period, as George Levine has pointed out in The Realistic Imagination, can be characterized as the attempt to “embrace the reality that stretched 1 beyond the reach of language” (12). In the case of Eliot’s works of art, the reality that cannot be grasped by the referential system of language embraces the existence of the other, the condition of life under which the self constitutes its relationship with the other, or the underlying logic of social systems which determines the individual’s modes of life. Eliot invites the reader to pay particular attention to the alterity that is suppressed by the symbolic system of signification designed to legitimize the transparent homogeneity of the self immune from the infiltration of the otherness. The importance of listening to the voice of the other, or the necessity of turning to the other side of silence in history is highlighted in the ending of Middlemarch. The narrator tells the reader that although “there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside” (824-25), we are indebted to commonplace others whose unheard agonies and sacrifices had motivated the improvement of human welfare in history: “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (825).2 The encounter between the self and the other in the world signifies the rendezvous of the representation of histories that the self and the other embody in their lives. Eliot asks us to acknowledge the unfamiliar in our ordinary and familiar circumstances. The seemingly unfamiliar and extraordinary scenes of suffering that Eliot portrays in her fiction mostly contain the tragedies of our ordinary fellow human beings who are either blind to their own flaws or restrained by the symbolic systems of social discourses, such as norms, religion, and law. The subject’s perception of the other’s scene of suffering brings the subject home to the familiar scene that it experienced in the past. The emotional sympathy connects the self and the other with the commonality of sufferings that they are experiencing or had undergone, whereas the 2 practical sympathy enables Eliot’s characters—the awakened and self-reflective subjects— simultaneously to call into question the underlying presuppositions that the symbolic systems of society force the individuals to follow, and to articulate their self-manifestation through the active agency of endeavoring to provide substantial help to others. The relationship between the subject and the other constituted by a bond of fellow feeling leads the subject to become an ethical subject of conscience which both inwardly enables it to reflect its own weakness and blindness, and outwardly empowers its resistance to the authority and legitimacy of religious, social, and political ideologies. Ethics is, as Simon Critchley has pointed out, “anarchic meta- politics” as “the continual questioning from below of any attempt to impose order from above” (13). What Eliot’s fiction suggests, however, is that the ethical subject goes beyond its skeptical awareness of the patriarchal structure of domination and appropriation toward the practical mode of subjective agency for fulfilling its ethical responsibility for satisfying the urgent need of the other in society. Thus the ethical subjects in Eliot’s novels simultaneously embody their political consciousness of anarchic rebellion against the symbolic status quo, and demonstrate their practical consciousness of constructive amelioration for the betterment of society which starts from their immediate attention to the need of their neighbors. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues in The Dialogic Imagination, the novel is a genre of narrative that constitutes a hybrid of different discourses: “the novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another,
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