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George Eliot and Greek Tragedy P.E University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln The George Eliot Review English, Department of 1991 George Eliot and Greek Tragedy P.E. Easterling Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Easterling, P.E., "George Eliot and Greek Tragedy" (1991). The George Eliot Review. 235. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger/235 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in The George Eliot Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. P. E. Easterling GEORGE ELIOT AND GREEK TRAGEDY [This article was first published in Arion, Spring, 1991] A quotation from Romola in S. H. Butcher's essay on Sophoc1es (1891)1 first led me to George Eliot as a reader of Greek tragedy: Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our will: nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness. (Ch. 16) The intensity of the language used here matches that of the Aeschylean contexts that must have been Eliot's ultimate model;2 it implies a close imaginative contact which can per­ haps help to enrich our own reading of the plays. And it finds many echoes in the whole range of the novels: even the much less allusive and less self-consciously learned Silas Mamer contains a striking passage which also meditates on the theme of action and responsibility and similarly seems to draw some of its power from Aeschylus. This oCcurs in the account of Godfrey Cass' s past: A movement of compunction, helped by those small indefinable influences which every personal relation exerts on a pliant nature, had urged him into a secret marriage, which was a blight on his life. It was an ugly story of low passion, delusion, and waking from delusion, which needs not to be dragged from the privacy of Godfrey's bitter memory. He had long known that the delusion was partly due to a trap laid for him by Dunstan, who saw in his brother's degrading marriage the means of gratifying at once his jeal­ ous hate and his cupidity. And if Godfrey could have felt himself simply a victim, the iron bit that destiny had put into his mouth would have chafed him less intolerably.... But he had something else [i.e., as well as Dunstan's cunning] to curse--his own vicious folly, which now seemed as mad and unaccountable to him as almost all our follies and vices do when their promptings have long passed away. (Ch. 3) This looks unmistakably reminiscent of Agamemnon, both in its use of the image of the iron bit and in the reference to vicious folly,3 but it is extremely discreet: the bit, after all, is a very suitable metaphor to use in relation to the son of a country squire, and when the imagery is developed in a later paragraph there is nothing Aeschylean about it: Instead of keeping fast hold of the strong silken rope by which Nancy would have drawn him safe to the green banks where it was easy to step firmly, he had let himself be dragged back into mud and slime, in which it was useless to struggle. But the Aeschylean echo gives extra weight to the whole passage. 56 It is worth taking a more extensive range of samples, to test what seems to be the clear implication that for George Eliot Greek tragedy offered a deep, rich, and varied source of inspiration. This is not a new idea, of course, but the particular nature of her response deserves closer attention than writers have tended to give it. There is plenty of evidence that she made a serious study of the texts: from the mid-1850s onward there are notes in her journal and references in letters and the Notebooks to her reading of particular plays and of Aristotle's Poetics, and she published an article on the Antigone in 1855.4 But even without this explicit external evidence we should be in no doubt, merely from a reading of the novels themselves, that her knowledge and interest were considerable.5 For a start, there are specific quotations, which draw the reader's attention inescapably to the ancient texts. In Romola, for example, chapter 11 ('Tito's Dilemma') includes the follow­ ing sentence: 'It is good', sing the old Eumenides, in Aeschylus, 'that fear should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom-good that men should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else, how should they learn to revere the right?' This is an interesting passage which deserves more comment, but for the moment all I want to note is that the translation is very free, more of a paraphrase than a close render­ ing of Eumenides 517-25, and most likely to be Eliot's own work. In Felix Holt, the chap­ ter (48) in which Harold asks his mother if Jermyn is his father has a motto from Agamemnon (1563-4): 'Tis law as stedfast as the throne of Zeus­ Our days are heritors of days gone by. Again a very free rendering, like the versions in chapter 42 of two passages from Sophocles, which stand as mottoes at the head of the crucial scene in which Jermyn announces to Mrs. Transome that Harold must be told his identity. The longer of the two is a quotation from Ajax (520-4) on the importance of gratitude, which Eliot refers to in a later letter as 'those words of Ajax which I put into English'. 6 This habit of quotation is by no means a feature just of the later novels: Adam Bede even has a couple of words from Aeschylus in the original Greek, txniprotOC; eproc; from Choephori 599-600, which MT. Irwine translates for Arthur as, 'unloving love' (ch. 22), a significant phrase for our under­ standing of the whole novel. 7 Besides the quotations there are many other kinds of authorial hints, suggesting in a hard­ ly less pointed way that the stories and characters are serious and significant enough to stand comparison with the Greek tragic paradigms. There is a well-known and often quot­ ed example in the Author's Introduction to Felix Holt: For there is seldom any wrong-doing which dOes not carry with it some downfall of blindly-climbing hopes, some hard entail of suffering, some 57 quickly-satiated desire that survives, with the life in death of old paralytic vice, to see itself cursed by its woeful progeny-some tragic mark of kin­ ship in one brief life to the far-stretching life that went before, and to the life that is to come after, such as has raised the pity and terror of men ever since they began to discern between will and destiny.8 This is solemn and explicit, but the hints are often lighter and more ironic, though in their contexts just as telling, as in chapter 43 of Felix Halt when Harold is playfully describing hims~lf to Esther: 'A woman would not find me a tragic hero.' '0, no! She must dress for genteel comedy-such as your mother once described to me-where the most thrilling event is the drawing of a hand­ some cheque.' Sometimes the use of names will clinch the allusion, though this is very far from suggest­ ing a simple one-to-one correspondence between the character in the novel and a tragic prototype. So in Felix Halt, where Mrs. Transome has been seen by critics as a Clytemnestra,9 there are suggestions in the text of other figures: in chapter 39 she is a 'Hecltba-like woman', and in chapter 42 she is by implication Medea to Jermyn's Jason: The fortunate Jason, as we know from Euripides, piously thanked the god­ dess [Aphrodite], and saw clearly that he was not at all obliged to Medea: Jermyn was perhaps not aware of the precedent, but thought out his own freedom from obligation and the indebtedness of others towards him with a native faculty not inferior to Jason's. The Medea story has other manifestations: as J. Wiesenfarth has shown, the episode of Lydia. Glasher and the diamonds in Daniel Deronda has echoes of Euripides' play.IO Lydia sends the diamonds to Gwendolen on her wedding day as Medea sent the poisoned robe and Crown to Creon's daughter; Grandcourt is killed by a blow from the boom of his yacht as Jason, according to Medea's prophecy, would be hit by a beam from the Argo (chs.30 and 44). In Adam Bede there is a more oblique reference to the stricken princess: It is too painful to think that she [Hetty] is a woman, with a woman's des­ tiny before her-a woman spinning in young ignorance a light web of folly and vain hopes which may one day close round her and press upon her, a rancorous poisoned garment, changing all at once her fluttering, trivial but­ terfly sensations into a life of deep human anguish. (Ch. 22) But the notion of the creator being destroyed by her own creation is closer to Deianira in Trachiniae than to the princess in Medea, and there is already a hint of Sophocles' play in chapter 13 (,Evening in the wood'), when Hetty's feelings about her encounter with 58 Arthur are described: It was as if she had been wooed by a river-god, who might at any time take her to his wondrous halls below a watery heaven.
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